History > 2011 > USA > International (XIX)

A protester clashes with riot police at Tahrir Square in Cairo November 19, 2011.

Riot police on Saturday cleared the square of protesters

who had camped overnight after a rally of some 50,000 people, mainly Islamists,

pressed Egypt's military rulers to transfer power swiftly to a civilian government.

Around 100 protesters had stayed in the square,

where police pulled down tents

and confiscated chairs and banners they had set up,

Reuters' witnesses said.

Some minor scuffles occurred.

Mohamed Abd El-Ghany/Reuters

Boston Globe > Big Picture

Egypt erupts with fresh protests        November 21, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/11/egypt_erupts_with_fresh_protes.html

Insight:

Funds and refiners ponder oil Armageddon,

war on Iran

Wed, Nov 30 2011
Reuters
By Jonathan Leff and Judy Hua

(Reuters) - Oil consuming nations, hedge funds and big oil refineries are quietly preparing for a Doomsday scenario: An attack on Iran that would halt oil supplies from OPEC's second-largest producer.

Most political analysts and oil traders say the probability of military action is low, but they caution the risks of such an event have risen as the West and Israel grow increasingly alarmed by signs that Tehran is building nuclear weapons.

That has Chinese refiners drawing up new contingency plans, hedge funds taking out options on $170 crude, and energy experts scrambling to determine how a disruption in Iran's oil supply -- however remote the possibility -- would impact world markets.

With production of about 3.5 million barrels per day, Iran supplies 2.5 percent of the world's oil.

"I think the market has paid too little attention to the possibility of an attack on Iran. It's still an unlikely event, but more likely than oil traders have been expecting," says Bob McNally, once a White House energy advisor and now head of consultancy Rapidan Group.

Rising tensions were clear this week as Iranian protesters stormed two British diplomatic missions in Tehran in response to sanctions, smashing windows and burning the British flag.

The attacks prompted condemnation from London, Washington and the United Nations. Iran warned of "instability in global security."

While traders in Europe prepare for a possible EU boycott of imports from Iran, mounting evidence elsewhere points to long-odds preparation for an even more severe outcome.

In Beijing, the foreign ministry has asked at least one major Iranian crude oil importer to review its contingency planning in case Iranian shipments stop.

In India, refiners are leafing through an unpublished report produced in March to look at fall-back options in the event of a major disruption.

And the International Energy Agency, the club of industrialized nations founded after the Arab oil embargo that coordinated the release of emergency oil stocks during Libya's civil war, last week circulated to member countries an updated four-page factsheet detailing Iran's oil industry and trade.

The document, not made public but obtained by Reuters, lists the vital statistics of Iran's oil sector, including destinations by country. Two-thirds of its exports are shipped to China, India, Japan and South Korea; a fifth goes to the European Union.

Hedge funds, particularly those with a global macro-economic bias, have taken note, and are buying deep out-of-the-money call options that could pay off big if prices surge, senior market sources at two major banks said.

Open interest in $130 and $150 December 2012 options for U.S. crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) rose by over 20 percent last week. Interest in the $170 call more than doubled to over 11,000 lots, or 11 million barrels. Still more traded over-the-counter, sources say.

McNally says that oil prices could surge as high as $175 a barrel if the Strait of Hormuz -- conduit for a fifth of the world's oil supply, including all of Iran's exports -- is shut in.

 

IAEA CITES "CREDIBLE" INFORMATION

This month's speculation of an attack on Iran is the most intense since 2007, when reports showing that Iran had not halted uranium enrichment work fuelled speculation that President George W. Bush could launch some kind of action during his last year in office. Those fears helped fuel a 36 percent rise in oil prices in the second half of the year.

The latest anxiety was set off by the International Atomic Energy Agency's November 8 report citing "credible" information that Iran had worked on designing an atomic bomb. A new round of sanctions followed, including the possibility that Europe could follow the United States in banning imports.

That alone would roil markets, but ultimately would likely just drive discounted crude sales to other consumers like China.

A more alarming -- if more remote -- possibility would be an attack by Israel, which has grown increasingly alarmed by the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on November 19 that it was a matter of months, not years, before it would be too late to stop Tehran.

In that context, every tremor has been unnerving for markets. Some experts say an explosion at an Iranian military base earlier in the month was the work of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. An unusually large tender by Israel's main electricity supplier to buy distillate fuel raised eyebrows, although it was blamed on a shortage of natural gas imports.

 

REFINERS BRACE

No country has more reason to be concerned than China, which now gets one-tenth of its crude imports from Iran. Shipments have risen a third this year to 547,000 barrels per day as other countries including Japan reduce their dependence. Sinopec, Asia's top refiner, is the world's largest Iranian crude buyer.

The Foreign Ministry and the National Development and Reform Commission, which effectively oversees the oil sector, have asked companies that import the crude to prepare contingency plans for a major disruption in supply, a source with a state-owned company told Reuters.

The precautionary measure preceded the latest geopolitical angst and is broadly in line with Beijing's growing concern over its dependence on imported energy. Earlier this year it issued a notice for firms to prepare for disruptions from Yemen.

But the focus has sharpened recently, the source said.

"The plan is not particularly for the tension this time, but it seems the government is paying exceptionally great attention to it this time," said the source on condition of anonymity.

In India, which gets 12 percent of its imports from Iran, refiners had a potential preview of coming events when the country's central bank scrapped a clearing house system last December, forcing refiners to scramble to arrange other means of payment in order to keep crude shipments flowing.

That incident -- in addition to the Arab Spring uprising and the Japanese earthquake -- prompted the government to document a brief but broad strategy for handling major disruptions.

The document, which has not been reported in detail, says that India could sustain fuel supplies to the market in the event of an import stoppage for about 30 days thanks to domestic storage, and would turn to unconventional and heavier imported crude as a fall-back.

It also urged the country's state-owned refiners to work on developing domestic storage facilities for major OPEC suppliers, consider hiring supertankers to use as floating storage and to sign term deals to price crude on a delivered basis, a copy of the document seen by Reuters shows.

The government has not tasked refiners with additional preparations this month, industry sources say. And in any event, there's not much they could do.

"If they cut supplies we will be left with no option than to buy from the spot market or from other Middle East suppliers," said a senior official with state-run MRPL, Iran's top India client.

To be sure, there's only so much any refiner can do. The gap left by Iran will trigger a frenzy of buying on the spot market for substitute barrels, likely leading the IEA to release emergency reserves, as it did following the civil war in Libya, or other countries like Saudi Arabia to step into the breach.

"We probably need to do this ASAP but are putting our heads in the sand so far," said one oil trader in Europe.

For refiners like Italy's Eni and Hellenic Petroleum, the most pressing issue is not necessarily an unexpected outage but an import boycott imposed by their government. France has won limited support for such an embargo, but faces resistance from some nations that fear it could inflict more economic damage.

CHEAP PUNTS

Unlike in 2007, there's not yet much evidence that a significant geopolitical risk premium is being factored into prices.

European benchmark Brent crude oil has rallied 4 percent in the past two days, partly due to accelerating discussion of a Europen boycott as well as Tuesday's unrest in Tehran, during which protesters stormed two British diplomatic compounds.

But it is also down 4 percent since the IAEA's November 8 report. Analysts say that it's impossible to extract any Iran-specific pricing from a host of other recently supportive factors, including new hope to end Europe's debt crisis, strong global distillate demand and upbeat U.S. consumer data.

"I don't think there's very much evidence (of an Iran premium)," says Ed Morse, global head of commodities research at Citigroup and a former State Department energy policy adviser.

And he does not see an attack as likely: "I think it's a low probability event. Maybe higher than a year ago, but still low."

But that is not stopping some from looking ahead. Oil prices would likely spike to at least $140 a barrel if Israel attacked Iran, according to the most benign of four scenarios put forward this week by Greg Sharenow, a portfolio manager at bond house PIMCO and a former Goldman Sachs oil trader.

He refused to predict a limit for prices under the most extreme "Doomsday" scenario in which disruptions spread beyond Iran and the Straits of Hormuz is blocked.

With that in mind, hedge funds are buying cheap options in a punt on an extreme outage. For about $1,500 per contract, a buyer can get the right to deliver a December 2012 futures contract at $150 a barrel; even if prices do not rise that high, the value of the options contract could increase tenfold.

The spark of demand for upside price protection this month is an abrupt reversal from most of this year, when the bias was toward puts that would hedge the risk of economic calamity.

"The kind of put skew we were seeing in the last three to six months was remarkable with people preparing for disaster - the Planet of the Apes trade, another massive market crash," says Chris Thorpe, executive director of global energy derivatives at INTL FC Stone.

"Only in the last three or four weeks has there been increased call buying."

Options remain relatively costly compared to earlier in the year, with implied volatility -- a measure of option cost -- of 43 percent above this year's average of just below 35 percent, the CBOE Oil Volatility index shows.

But nonetheless it's clear that for some funds the potential upside of violence in Iran means that interest is increasing.

Says Thorpe: "It's at the back of people's minds."

 

(Additional reporting by Joshua Schneyer in New York, Nidhi Verma in New Delhi, Chen Aizhu in Beijing, Meeyoung Choo in Seoul, Osamu Tsukimori in Tokyo, Florence Tan and Francis Kan in Singapore, Dmitri Zhdannikov and Emma Farge in London; Editing by Manash Goswami)

    Insight: Funds and refiners ponder oil Armageddon, war on Iran, R, 30.11.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/30/us-iran-oil-idUSTRE7AT0LB20111130

The Arab Awakening and Israel

November 29, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Israel is facing the biggest erosion of its strategic environment since its founding. It is alienated from its longtime ally Turkey. Its archenemy Iran is suspected of developing a nuclear bomb. The two strongest states on its border — Syria and Egypt — are being convulsed by revolutions. The two weakest states on its border — Gaza and Lebanon — are controlled by Hamas and Hezbollah.

It was in this context that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went before the Knesset last Wednesday and argued that the Arab awakening was moving the Arab world “backward” and turning into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave.” Ceding territory to the Palestinians was unwise at such a time, he said: “We can’t know who will end up with any piece of territory we give up.”

Netanyahu added: “In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we’re facing a new era of liberalism and progress. They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don’t see where things are heading.” But, he told the Knesset, events had proved him correct. Netanyahu reportedly said that when he cautioned President Obama and other Western leaders against backing the uprising against Egypt’s then-president, Hosni Mubarak, he was told that he didn’t understand reality: “I ask today, who here didn’t understand reality?”

Netanyahu’s analysis of the dangers facing Israel is valid, and things could still get worse. What is wrong is Netanyahu’s diagnosis of how it happened and his prescription of what to do about it — and those blind spots could also be very dangerous for Israel.

Diagnosis: From the very start, Israeli officials have insisted that Obama helped to push Mubarak out rather than saving him. Nonsense. The Arab dictators were pushed out by their people; there was no saving them. In fact, Mubarak had three decades to gradually open up Egyptian politics and save himself. And what did he do? Last year, he held the most-rigged election in Egyptian history. His party won 209 out of 211 seats. It is amazing that the uprising didn’t happen sooner.

Israel’s fear of Islamists taking power all around it cannot be dismissed. But it is such a live possibility precisely because of the last 50 years of Arab dictatorship, in which only Islamists were allowed to organize in mosques while no independent, secular, democratic parties were allowed to develop in the political arena. This has given Muslim parties an early leg up. Arab dictators were convenient for Israel and the Islamists — but deadly for Arab development and education. Now that the lid has come off, the transition will be rocky. But, it was inevitable, and the new politics is just beginning: Islamists will now have to compete with legitimate secular parties.

Netanyahu’s prescription is to do nothing. I understand Israel not ceding territory in this uncertain period to a divided Palestinian movement. What I can’t understand is doing nothing. Israel has an Arab awakening in its own backyard in the person of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority. He’s been the most radical Arab leader of all. He is the first Palestinian leader to say: judge me on my performance in improving my peoples’ lives, not on my rhetoric. His focus has been on building institutions — including what Israelis admit is a security force that has helped to keep Israel peaceful — so Palestinians will be ready for a two-state solution. Instead of rewarding him, Israel has been withholding $100 million in Palestinian tax revenues that Fayyad needs — in punishment for the Palestinians pressing for a state at the U.N. — to pay the security forces that help to protect Israel. That is crazy.

Israel’s best defense is to strengthen Fayyadism — including giving Palestinian security services more areas of responsibility to increase their legitimacy and make clear that they are not the permanent custodians of Israel’s occupation. This would not only help stabilize Israel’s own backyard — and prevent another uprising that would spread like wildfire to the Arab world without the old dictators to hold it back — but would lay the foundation for a two-state solution and for better relations with the Arab peoples. Remember, those Arab peoples are going to have a lot more say in how they are ruled and with whom they have peace. In that context, Israel will be so much better off if it is seen as strengthening responsible and democratic Palestinian leaders.

This is such a delicate moment. It requires wise, farsighted Israeli leadership. The Arab awakening is coinciding with the last hopes for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli rightists will be tempted to do nothing, to insist the time is not right for risk-taking — and never will be — so Israel needs to occupy the West Bank and its Palestinians forever. That could be the greatest danger of all for Israel: to wake up one day and discover that, in response to the messy and turbulent Arab democratic awakening, the Jewish state sacrificed its own democratic character.

    The Arab Awakening and Israel, NYT, 29.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/opinion/israel-and-the-arab-awakening.html

After Second Day of Voting in Egypt,

Islamists Offer Challenge to Generals

November 29, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Poised to dominate Egypt’s first parliamentary elections since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party laid down a new challenge to the authority of Egypt’s interim military rulers on Tuesday, even before polls had closed on the second day of voting.

In an interview, Essam el-Erian, a leader of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, argued that the unexpectedly high turnout for the parliamentary elections indicated a popular demand for more civilian control.

Although a top general on the ruling military council said as recently as last weekend that the council would continue to choose the prime minister even after Parliament was formed, Mr. Erian argued that the turnout showed that voters wanted the new Parliament’s majority, and not the generals, to have that power, just as in other parliamentary systems.

“Millions of Egyptians voted because they wanted a strong, democratic Parliament,” Mr. Erian said.

“Any government has to have a vote of confidence from the Parliament,” he added. “That is a basic principle, even if it is not written into the law.”

His assertion is an early signal that the Brotherhood intends to use the seats it may gain in Parliament to push to limit military rule, even though it declined to join its liberal rivals in several days of street protests last week aimed at the same goal.

The Brotherhood’s position is the latest twist in a battle between the military council that took over after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster and those demanding the handover of power to civilians. The prime minister has served at the pleasure of the military council since Mr. Mubarak’s exit, and the military’s latest appointment, Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri, has made it clear that he, too, reports to the generals.

Also at stake in the tug of war between the generals and their critics over choosing the prime minister is influence over the drafting of a new constitution.

The generals have already attempted to put their own stamp on the document, moving to provide themselves with permanent political powers and protection from civilian scrutiny. But the Brotherhood, the Islamist group that is Egypt’s strongest political force, also wants to exert its influence through Parliament.

With its party positioned to dominate the elections, the Brotherhood stayed on the sidelines of a wave of protests against military rule last week, in part for fear the tumult could upset the vote.

Mr. Erian made his comments in an interview in the Freedom and Justice Party’s dingy headquarters in Cairo, where he had gathered with other party leaders to await news from the polls and an atmosphere of barely checked celebration prevailed.

Voting continued to go smoothly Tuesday, defying predictions of chaos and violence. Though ballot boxes were left overnight in the polling places, there were no reports of sabotage Tuesday. State-run news organizations reported estimates that turnout was above 70 percent.

The chance to cast a free vote appeared to drain some of the energy and crowds from a protest in Tahrir Square, where clashes between protesters and street vendors broke out Tuesday night. Witnesses reported gunshots and a few gasoline bombs, though it was unclear if anyone was hurt.

Election observers marveled that in the middle of what had seemed last week to be a second revolution, the country had suddenly quieted down enough to open the polls.

“There is a distinct possibility that you will have a representative Parliament, and I would have said something different a few days ago,” said Les Campbell, regional director for the National Democratic Institute, one of a half-dozen international groups allowed for the first time to monitor Egyptian voting.

The voting on Monday and Tuesday took place in nine of Egypt’s 27 governorates and included the major cities of Cairo and Alexandria. The results of a few races between individual candidates could be released by Wednesday. Others will go to runoff votes next week.

Full results for the lower house will not be announced until January, after two more rounds of voting in different regions of the country. Voting for the upper house will take place between January and March.

Scott Mastic of the International Republican Institute, another election observer, said much remained uncertain, including how the transportation and counting of the first ballots will be handled.

Election monitors have also raised questions about how the disclosure of a few results might influence later voting, or even create false expectations that could cast doubts about the final results.

Still, Mr. Mastic said, given Egypt’s history of fraudulent polls and dismal expectations for these elections, the vote so far has been “historic.”

Mayy el Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo,

and Liam Stack from Alexandria, Egypt.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2011

An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Gen. Ibrahim Nassouhy, a member of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in Egypt.

    After Second Day of Voting in Egypt, Islamists Offer Challenge to Generals, NYT, 29.11.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/world/middleeast/voting-in-historic-egyptian-elections-enters-second-day.html

Doctrine of Silence

November 28, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — The Obama administration has a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of silence. A radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation.

I approve of the shift even as it makes me uneasy. One day, I suspect, there may be payback for this policy and this silence. President Obama has gone undercover.

You have to figure that one day somebody sitting in Tehran or Islamabad or Sana is going to wake up and say: “Hey, this guy Obama, he went to war in our country but just forgot to mention the fact. Should we perhaps go to war in his?”

In Iran, a big explosion at a military base near Tehran recently killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a central figure in the country’s long-range missile program. Nuclear scientists have perished in the streets of Tehran. The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc with the Iranian nuclear facilities.

It would take tremendous naïveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.

Simmering Pakistani anger over a wave of drone attacks authorized by Obama has erupted into outright rage with the death of at least 25 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO attack on two military outposts near the Afghan border.

The Pakistani government has ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to end drone operations it runs from a base in western Pakistan within 15 days. Drone attacks have become the coin of Obama’s realm. They have killed twice as many suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members as were ever imprisoned in Guantánamo.

One such drone attack, of course, killed an American citizen, the Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen a few weeks ago.

The U.S. government says precious little about these new ways of fighting enemies. But the strategic volte-face is clear: America has decided that conventional wars of uncertain outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan that may, according to a Brown University study, end up costing at least $3.7 trillion are a bad way to fight terrorists and that far cheaper, more precise tools for eliminating enemies are preferable — even if the legality of those killings is debatable.

The American case for legality rests on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force act, which allows the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against persons, organization or nations linked to the 9/11 attack, and on various interpretations of the right to self-defense under international law.

But killing an American citizen raises particular constitutional concerns; just how legal the drone attacks are remains a vexed question. And Iran had no part in 9/11.

In general, it’s hard to resist the impression of a tilt toward the extrajudicial in U.S. foreign policy — a kind of “Likudization” of the approach to dealing with enemies. Israel has never hesitated to kill foes with blood on their hands wherever they are.

This is a development about which no American can feel entirely comfortable.

So why do I approve of all this? Because the alternative — the immense cost in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s war on terror — was so appalling. In just the same way, the results of a conventional bombing war against Iran would be appalling, whether undertaken by Israel, the United States or a combination of the two.

Political choices often have to be made between two unappealing options. Obama has done just that. He has gone covert — and made the right call.

So why am I uneasy? Because these legally borderline, undercover options — cyberwar, drone killings, executions and strange explosions at military bases — invite repayment in kind, undermine the American commitment to the rule of law, and make allies uneasy.

Obama could have done more in the realm of explanation. Of course he does not want to say much about secret operations. Still, as the U.S. military prepares to depart from Iraq (leaving a handful of embassy guards), and the war in Afghanistan enters its last act, he owes the American people, U.S. allies and the world a speech that sets out why America will not again embark on this kind of inconclusive war and has instead adopted a new doctrine that has replaced fighting terror with killing terrorists. (He might also explain why Guantánamo is still open.)

Just because it’s impossible to talk about some operations undertaken within this doctrine does not mean the entire doctrine can remain cloaked in silence.

Foreign policy has been Obama’s strongest suit. He deserves great credit for killing Osama bin Laden, acting for the liberation of Libya, getting behind the Arab quest for freedom, winding down the war in Iraq, dealing repeated blows to Al Qaeda and restoring America’s battered image.

But the doctrine of silence is a failing with links to his overarching failure on the economy: it betrays a presidential reticence, coolness and aloofness that leave Americans uncomfortable.
 

    Doctrine of Silence, NYT, 28.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/opinion/cohen-doctrine-of-silence.html

In Fog of War, Rift Widens Between U.S. and Pakistan

November 27, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — The NATO air attack that killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers over the weekend reflected a fundamental truth about American-Pakistani relations when it comes to securing the unruly border with Afghanistan: the tactics of war can easily undercut the broader strategy that leaders of both countries say they share.

The murky details complicated matters even more, with Pakistani officials saying the attack on two Pakistani border posts was unprovoked and Afghan officials asserting that Afghan and American commandos called in airstrikes after coming under fire from Pakistani territory. NATO has promised an investigation.

The reaction inside Pakistan nonetheless followed a now-familiar pattern of anger and tit-for-tat retaliation. So did the American response of regret laced with frustration and suspicion. Each side’s actions reflected a deepening distrust that gets harder to repair with each clash.

The question now, as one senior American official put it on Sunday, is “what kind of resilience is left” in a relationship that has sunk to new lows time after time this year — with the arrest in January of a C.I.A. officer, Raymond Davis, the killing of Osama bin Laden in May and the deaths of so many Pakistani soldiers.

In each of those cases, Pakistan had reason to feel that the United States had violated its sovereignty. Even if circumstances on the ground justified the American actions, they have nonetheless made it difficult to sustain political support inside Pakistan for the strategic cooperation that both countries acknowledge is vital to winning the war in Afghanistan. “Imagine how we would feel if it had been 24 American soldiers killed by Pakistani forces at this moment,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, said on “Fox News Sunday.” The rift is one result of the United States’ two-pronged strategy in Afghanistan, which relies on both negotiating and fighting to end the war.

The latest breach in relations came only five weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton led a senior American delegation to Pakistan to deliver a blunt warning to the country’s leaders to intensify pressure on extremists carrying out attacks into Afghanistan, while at the same time urging them to help bring more moderate members of the Taliban to the negotiating table.

Mrs. Clinton called the administration’s approach “fight, talk, build,” meaning the United States and its allies would continue to attack militants in Afghanistan and beyond, seek peace talks with those willing to join a political process and build closer economic ties across the region. All are essential to any hope of peace and stability in Afghanistan, and all rely on Pakistan. That has forced the two countries into a strategic alliance whose tactics seem to strain it over and over again.

Mrs. Clinton’s diplomacy — bolstered by Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. — appeared to smooth out the roughest edges in relations, according to officials from both countries.

Recognizing that heightened military activity along the mountainous border with Afghanistan increases the risks of deadly mistakes, American and Pakistani forces have in recent weeks tried to improve their coordination. That cooperation had been largely suspended after the killing of Bin Laden, which President Obama ordered without informing the Pakistani authorities.

Just last Friday, Pakistan’s military commander, Army Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, met Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, in Rawalpindi to discuss “measures concerning coordination, communication and procedures” between the Pakistan Army, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and the Afghan Army, “aimed at enhancing border control on both sides,” according to a statement by the Pakistani military.

“Then you have an incident that takes us back to where we were before her visit,” said Vali Nasr, a former deputy to the administration’s regional envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, and now a professor at Tufts University.

The problem, Mr. Nasr said, is that the United States effectively has not one but two strategies for winning the war in Afghanistan.

While the State Department and the White House believe that only a negotiated political solution will end the war, American military and intelligence commanders believe that they must maximize pressure on the Taliban before the American military withdrawal begins in earnest before 2014. The military strategy has led to the intensified fighting in eastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan, increasing tensions. A major offensive last month involving 11,000 NATO troops and 25,000 Afghan fighters in seven provinces of eastern Afghanistan killed or captured hundreds of extremists, many of them using Pakistan as a base.

In recent months American forces have complained that they have taken mortar and rocket fire from positions in Pakistani territory, as officials said they did early Saturday in the Mohmand region, just north of the Khyber Pass, prompting American troops to call in airstrikes. “It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog,” Mr. Nasr said. When they respond forcefully along the border, “U.S. commanders on the ground are deciding U.S.-Pakistan policy.”

As the Pakistani public and press seethed over the latest attack, the country’s leaders closed supply routes to Afghanistan that NATO relies on, as they have at least twice before, and ordered the C.I.A. to vacate a base it has used to launch drone strikes.

It is unclear how long the Pakistanis will keep the supply routes closed, and whether the promised investigation might help assuage the anger over the deaths of Pakistani soldiers.

On one level, it does not matter whether the strikes are justified as self-defense or acknowledged as a catastrophic error, though if an investigation shows that the Pakistani soldiers were complicit in attacking the NATO-Afghanistan forces across the border, the tensions could worsen further.

The damage to the American strategy has been done, and the question is how long it will take for officials from both countries to resume cooperation where it is in their interest to do so.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he would respond in such a situation, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., President Obama’s former ambassador to China who is now seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said, “I would recognize exactly what the U.S.-Pakistani relationship has become, which is merely a transactional relationship.” He said that American aid to Pakistan should be contingent on keeping the supply lines to Afghanistan open and continuing counterterrorism cooperation.

“And I think our expectations have to be very, very low in terms of what we can get out of the relationship,” he said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

    In Fog of War, Rift Widens Between U.S. and Pakistan, NYT, 27.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/world/asia/pakistan-and-united-states-bitter-allies-in-fog-of-war.html

Arab League Approves Sanctions Against Syria

November 27, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI and NEIL MacFARQUHAR

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Arab League approved tough economic sanctions against Syria on Sunday to press it to end its violent crackdown against antigovernment protesters, an unprecedented step against an Arab country.

The sanctions —including a travel ban against Syrian officials and politicians, a halt to all dealings with the Syrian central bank and the cessation of Arab-financed projects in Syria — will be another blow to the Syrian economy, which is already suffering from sanctions by the European Union and the United States.

The Arab League, meeting outside Cairo, approved the sanctions after Syria said it would not admit Arab civilian and military observers to oversee a peace agreement intended to end the bloodshed.

Syria had accepted the peace agreement on Nov. 2, promising to to end a military crackdown that, according to the United Nations, has killed more than 3,500 people since March. But the violence has continued unabated, and the monitors were proposed as a last-ditch effort to save the plan and give Syria another opportunity to comply.

“The position of the people, and the Arab position, is that we must end this situation urgently,” the Qatari foreign minister, Hamad bin Jassem, said after announcing the vote, which was supported by 19 of the League’s 22 countries. “It has been almost a year that the Syrian people have been killed.”

He said the sanctions took effect immediately, and that the resolution called for the United Nations Security Council to adopt similar measures.

Syria and its supporters denounced the sanctions as an attempt by outsiders to break up the country.

“In the war against Syria, the economic will take the place of the limited possibility of military intervention,” said Michel Samaha, a former Lebanese information minister. the sanctions, he said, aim “to deconstruct Syria, not to reform Syria.”

In a letter to the league on Saturday, Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, accused the organization of seeking to turn the Syrian crisis into an international one.

Mr. Samaha and others said they expected the impact of the sanctions to be limited, in large part because Syria’s largest trading partners will not join them.

Economists estimate that about 50 percent of Syrian trade is with the Arab world, but the largest chunk of that is with its immediate neighbors, including Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan.

Lebanon voted against the sanctions, and Iraq abstained. Both countries said they would not enforce the sanctions, while Jordan has issued mixed signals.

Hoshar Zubairy, the Iraqi foreign minister, was quoted in local press reports as saying implementing the sanctions is a “sovereign” decision left up to each country. Given the volume of trade and the estimated two million Iraqi refugees accepted by Syria, it would not take part, he said.

Analysts noted that Iraq has increasingly aligned its regional policies with Iran, but Mr. Zubairy denies that Iran has direct sway over Baghdad.

Iran and Russia are also expected to provide aid to Syria to make up for lost government revenues.

Still, existing sanctions have already taken a toll. Syria’s two most vital sectors, tourism and oil, have ground to a halt in recent months.

Arab League finance ministers, who drafted the sanctions on Saturday, had also proposed the suspension of commercial flights to Syria from Arab countries. That measure was not approved by the foreign ministers on Sunday and was still being studied by the group, officials said.

The immediate impact of the sanctions is likely to be at least as much psychological as economic. Syria has long portrayed itself as the “beating heart of Arabism” and it is the one country where anyone with a passport from an Arab nation could enter without a visa. Now that Arab world appears to be rejecting it.

“No trade with the Arabs would hurt more than any sanctions thus far,” said an Arab expert with ties to Damascus, who asked not to be identified. “But it is really all part of the battle for legitimacy.”

In Syria, people worried that the sanctions would mostly hurt the poor and the middle class, further decreasing their income, while the interests of the business class and the elite would remain protected.

“I think it is time the world realized that economic sanctions are not affecting anyone but the Syrian people,” said a 23-year-old Damascus resident who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal. “Those who couldn’t afford buying bread, now can’t afford even smelling bread.”

Others hoped that the sanctions would push the business class and the elite in Syria’s two biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, to participate in the opposition against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The upper class has so far remained largely quiet since the uprising began in March.

Violence in Syria continued throughout the weekend and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition rights group operating in exile, reported clashes between army defectors and security forces loyal to the government in northwestern and central Syria. At least 10 people were killed Sunday across the country, the group reported.

The group said that at least 27 civilians had been killed Saturday, most of them in the central city of Homs, where clashes between the army and defectors have been quite regular. In addition, 15 army defectors and 12 soldiers and security personnel during an attack on a military vehicle in northwestern Syria, the group said.

Mr. Jassem, the Qatari foreign minister, said the goal of the sanctions was stopping such killing, and to try to do so without foreign military intervention.

“All the work we are doing is to avoid foreign intervention,” he said. “But if the international community does not take us seriously in this then I cannot guarantee that there will be no foreign interference."

 

Liam Stack contributed reporting from Cairo.

    Arab League Approves Sanctions Against Syria, NYT, 27.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/world/middleeast/arab-league-prepares-to-vote-on-syrian-sanctions.html

Israel’s Other Occupation

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By GERSHOM GORENBERG

Jerusalem

“CLEARLY, there’s a war here, sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,” the yeshiva student said. “It’s not a war with guns. It’s a war of light against darkness.”

We were sitting in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Acre in Israel. The war he described was another front in the struggle he knew from growing up in a settlement in the northern West Bank, or Samaria: the daily contest between Jews and Palestinians for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The explicit reason that his yeshiva had been established in Acre was to serve as a bridgehead in that struggle, just as West Bank settlements are built to bolster the Jewish hold on land there.

Israeli politicians and pundits labeled the Oct. 3 burning of a mosque in Tuba Zangaria, an Arab community in northern Israel, and the subsequent desecration of Arab graves in Jaffa as a sudden escalation. But they were mistaken.

For several years, extremist West Bank settlers have conducted a campaign of low-level violence against their Palestinian neighbors — destroying property, vandalizing mosques and occasionally injuring people. Such “price tag” attacks, intended to intimidate Palestinians and make Israeli leaders pay a price for enforcing the law against settlers, have become part of the routine of conflict in occupied territory.

Now that conflict is coming home. The words "price tag" spray-painted in Hebrew on the wall of a burned mosque inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders transformed Israel’s Arab citizens into targets and tore at the all-too-delicate fabric of a shared democracy.

Indeed, the mosque burning represented the violent, visible edge of a larger change: the ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society.

The agents of this change include veterans of West Bank settlements seeking to establish a presence in shared Jewish-Arab cities in Israel and politicians backing a wave of legislation intended to reduce the rights of Arab citizens.

JEWS began settling in occupied territory weeks after the Israeli conquest of 1967. The strategy of settlement was born before Israeli independence in 1948, when Jews and Arabs fought for ethnic dominance over all of British-ruled Palestine. By settling the land, Jews sought to set the borders of the future Jewish state, one acre at a time. Post-1967 settlers, though they saw themselves as a vanguard, were really re-enacting the past, reviving an ethnic wrestling match — this time backed by an existing Jewish state.

Now, the attitudes and methods of West Bank settlement are inevitably leaking back across a border that Israel does not even show on its maps.

In 1996, the former Israeli chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu and his son Shmuel Eliyahu established a project to place “core groups” of their followers in depressed Jewish towns. The Eliyahus assigned their first core group to Acre.

Their goal was to bolster religious education and build faith-based charities. The elder Eliyahu, now deceased, was a pre-eminent teacher of the pro-settlement religious right. His son recently gained notoriety for issuing a religious ruling forbidding Jews to rent or sell real estate to non-Jews anywhere in Israel.

The group’s rabbi, Nachshon Cohen, was an alumnus of a yeshiva in the Palestinian city of Hebron. The reason to start the religious project in Acre was “the demographic problem,” Rabbi Cohen explained to me. The mixed city had about 45,000 residents. But Jews were leaving because “people didn’t want to live next to Arabs.” The energy of the new core group, Rabbi Cohen hoped, would keep the town Jewish.

A key part of the settlement project in Acre was the establishment of a hesder yeshiva — a seminary mixing religious study and army service. It, too, would help draw Jews who were both “ideological” and “on a high socio-economic level” into the town, the yeshiva’s director, Boaz Amir, told me. While moving back into Israel and speaking of helping poor Israelis, the settlers were reimporting the message of Jewish-Arab struggle. It was gentrification with a hard ethnonationalist edge.

Acre is just one of the mixed Jewish-Arab cities that religious nationalists have set out to “save.” The Acre core group has grown to 110 families, roughly one percent of the town’s population. Drawing this number of potential settlers to live inside Israel has an insignificant effect on settlement growth in the West Bank.

Yet it broadcasts a message that Israel’s Arab citizens are strangers and opponents rather than members of a shared polity. Rabbi Yossi Stern, the yeshiva’s dean, described the transformation of Acre’s Wolfson neighborhood — a set of Soviet-style apartment blocks built in the 1960s — from a Jewish to a majority-Arab area as “a national sin.” He argued forcefully that Jews should move back into such shifting areas. For Arabs and Jews “to be in the same neighborhood, in the same building ... that’s not good,” Rabbi Stern said. Coexistence was clearly not his goal.

Segregation, though, is intrinsically a denial of rights. The countryside throughout the Galilee region of northern Israel is dotted with a form of segregated exurb, the “community settlement.” In each of these exclusive communities, a membership committee vets prospective residents before they can buy homes.

The concept, born in the mid-1970s, originally allowed West Bank settlers to ensure that their neighbors shared their “ideological-social background,” including the same shade of religious commitment. The Likud government that came to power in 1977 applied the model to create Jewish-only bedroom communities in the Galilee and in the Negev.

In 1995, Adel and Iman Ka’adan, an Israeli Arab couple, tried to buy a lot in the community settlement of Katzir. As educated professionals eager to live in a place with good schools for their daughters, they fit the community’s profile. But as Arabs they were ineligible. Their legal battle led to an Israeli Supreme Court decision in 2000 that rejected discrimination against Arab citizens, stressing, “equality is one of the foundational principles of the State of Israel.”

Katzir’s membership committee proceeded to turn the Ka’adans down again on the grounds that they would not fit in socially. It took five more years in court before they were they allowed to buy land there. But last April, the legislature overrode the judiciary, when the Knesset passed a law authorizing community settlements in the Galilee and Negev to reject candidates who did not fit their “social-cultural fabric.” The new law may not hurt the Ka’adans, but other Israeli Arabs will not be able to benefit from their Supreme Court victory.

That law is not an isolated incident. In its current term, the Knesset has sought to turn parliamentary power against democratic principles and Israel’s Arab minority. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party has led the offensive, but other legislators have joined it. Members of Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party co-wrote the community settlements law.

Another law makes it illegal to call for consumer boycotts of products from settlements. Other bills would require loyalty oaths to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to its flag and national anthem. They may never pass but they serve as political theater, labeling the Arab minority as disloyal.

Israel’s courts, human rights groups and large parts of the public have fought back, seeking to preserve the principle of equality and the fragile sense of a shared society. The problem they face is that Israel remains tied to the West Bank and the settlement enterprise. And the ethnic struggle cannot be kept on one side of an unmarked border.

If and when Israel finally leaves the West Bank quagmire behind, it will face a further challenge: the settlers need to be brought home. But allowing them to apply their ideology inside Israel, or to transplant whole communities from the West Bank to the Galilee, will only make the situation worse in Israel proper.

The reason for Israel to reach a two-state solution and withdraw from the West Bank is not only to reach peace with the Palestinians living in what is now occupied territory. It is to ensure that Israel itself remains a democracy — one with a Jewish majority and a guarantee of equality for its Arab minority.

Israel does not need to bring the war from Samaria home. It needs to leave that war in the past.

Gershom Gorenberg is an Israeli journalist and historian

and the author of “The Unmaking of Israel.”

    Israel’s Other Occupation, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/israels-other-occupation.html

NATO Raids Kill Pakistan Troops, Raising Tensions

November 26, 2011
The New York Times
By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani officials said Saturday that NATO aircraft had killed at least 25 soldiers in strikes against two military posts at the northwestern border with Afghanistan, and the country’s supreme army commander called it an unprovoked act of aggression, in a new flashpoint in tensions between the United States and Pakistan.

Officials in both countries called for investigations, and the Pakistani government said it had closed the main border crossing in the region, at Torkham, blocking NATO supplies from entering Afghanistan. And Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani cut short a vacation, returning to Islamabad, the capital, and calling a meeting of his cabinet’s defense committee.

In Washington, American officials were scrambling to assess what happened and weigh the implications on a relationship that took a sharp turn for the worse after the United States military helicopter raid that killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad in May, and have degraded since then.

“It seem quite extraordinary that we’d just nail these posts the way they say we did,” said one senior American official who was in close touch American and NATO officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan early Saturday. “Whether they were going after people or whether there was some firing from the Afghan side of the border, then the Pakistan side, we just don’t know. It’s real murky right now. Clearly, something went very wrong.”

The American ambassador in Islamabad, Cameron Munter, called an emergency meeting and expressed regret over the Pakistani casualties. And Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, offered condolences to families of the dead and promised an investigation. “This incident has my highest personal attention and my commitment to thoroughly investigate it to determine the facts,” he said in a statement.

The strikes, which Pakistani officials said involved both helicopters and fighter jets, took place overnight at two military posts in Salala, a village near the border with Kunar Province in Afghanistan. At least 40 soldiers were deployed at the posts, which according to Pakistani officials were established to repulse cross-border attacks by Afghan militants and the Taliban.

Such attacks have been at the heart of an increasingly hostile relationship between Pakistani and American officials. The Americans accuse Pakistani forces of not doing enough to stop factions of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that are taking shelter in Pakistan from crossing over to attack American forces in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, repeated American drone strikes against militants in the northwester tribal regions, and the raid on Bin Laden, have enraged Pakistani officials over breaches in the country’s sovereignty.

In a statement, the Pakistani military said that its top commander, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, praised troops at the border checkpoints for responding “in self defense to NATO/ISAF’s aggression with all available weapons,” though there was no confirmation by NATO or American officials of return fire. The statement went on to say that General Kayani had “directed that all necessary steps be under taken for an effective response to this irresponsible act.”

President Asif Ali Zardari also strongly condemned the airstrikes, saying that he had lodged strong protests against NATO and the international military force in Afghanistan.

Barrister Masood Kausar, the governor of northwestern Kyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, called the attacks “unprovoked and highly condemnable” while talking to AAJ TV, a private news network.

“This incident is highly regrettable and condemnable. We think there is no justification,” Mr. Kausar said. “This is not a small incident. It is being taken very seriously.”

Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier and analyst based in Peshawar, said the matter should be taken to the United Nations Security Council. Mr. Shah said Americans wanted to make Pakistan a scapegoat after facing failure in Afghanistan.

The border crossing closed at Torkham runs through the Khyber Pass and is the main crossing to Afghanistan from Pakistan. It is used by NATO to ship supplies into Afghanistan.

The episode also comes just a little more than a year after coalition helicopters killed three Pakistani security guards in a series of strikes. Pakistan responded by temporarily closing the border crossing at Torkham.

A similar attack occurred in June of 2008 and killed 11 soldiers belonging to a paramilitary force called the Frontier Corps, prompting the Pakistani government to temporarily halt shipment of NATO supplies to Afghanistan.

The border episode comes a day after General Kayani met in Rawalpindi with General Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan. The two generals had “discussed measures concerning coordination, communication and procedures between the Pakistan Army, I.S.A.F. and Afghan Army, aimed at enhancing border control on both sides,” according to a statement by the Pakistani military.

The border strikes will further aggravate the widespread anti-American sentiment in the country, said analysts here.

“Even if the U.S. thinks Pakistan is an unreliable and undependable ally, how does it think such an incident will go down with public opinion in Pakistan?” asked Omar R. Quraishi, the opinion editor at the Karachi-based English-language daily The Express Tribune.

“U.S. is funding civil society initiatives to the tune of millions of dollars but attacks like this won’t help. The U.S. should take more care,” Mr. Quraishi said.

Imran Khan, an opposition politician who has recently seen a surge in his public support, urged the Pakistani government to break its military alliance with the United States.

“The time has come to leave America’s war,” Mr. Khan thundered while speaking at a political rally in Shujaabad in Punjab province Saturday evening.

“The attack was carried by those for whom we have destroyed our own country,” he added, referring to United States and a popular perception here that Pakistan has suffered economically and in terms of human lives because of its partnership with the United States.

 

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan;

Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    NATO Raids Kill Pakistan Troops, Raising Tensions, NYT, 26.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/world/asia/pakistan-says-nato-helicopters-kill-dozens-of-soldiers.html

For U.S., Risks in Pressing Egypt to Speed Civilian Rule

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Ever since tens of thousands of protesters converged on Tahrir Square in Cairo for the first Day of Revolution exactly 10 months ago, the Obama administration has struggled to strike the right balance between democracy and stability. In the early morning hours on Friday, President Obama came out on the side of the Arab street, issuing a call for the Egyptian military to quickly hand over power to a civilian, democratically elected government.

In so doing, the president opened up a litany of risks, exposing a fault line between the United States and the Egyptian military which, perhaps more than any other entity in the region, has for 30 years served as the bulwark protecting a critical American concern in the Middle East: the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

In explicitly warning the military to swiftly begin a “full transfer of power” to a civilian government in a “just and inclusive manner,” the White House served notice that the army in Egypt would continue to receive the Obama administration’s support only if it, in turn, supported a real democratic transition.

The statement, issued at 3:03 a.m. in Washington, was timed to greet the news of the military’s selection of a new prime minister in Egypt and to get in front of protests in Cairo that drew hundreds of thousands, the largest turnout of a tumultuous week. It signaled, foreign policy experts said, the beginning of a shift in how the United States deals with a fast-changing Arab region and tries to preserve the Egypt-Israel peace accord.

“What we’re now doing is saying to the military that if you think you’re going to maintain military power, we’re not going to support that,” said Martin S. Indyk, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and the former United States ambassador to Israel. “We want you to play the role of midwife to democracy, not the role of military junta.”

But the strategy “is a high-risk one, because the ones who benefit most from it are the people who don’t necessarily have our best interests in mind — the Islamists — who might not be as wedded to the peace treaty as the military,” Mr. Indyk said. “We are essentially coming down on the side of democracy.”

The strategy risks straining Washington’s deep ties with Egypt’s military, as well as a potential backlash in Egypt if the United States, which is not popular from a long history of supporting the former president, Hosni Mubarak, is seen to be meddling. But administration officials were apparently judging that the bigger risk may be to the Egyptian public, which will need to be won over if Egypt becomes fully democratic, as the administration says it hopes.

The Obama administration appears now to be openly hedging its bets, trying to position the United States in such a way that regardless of who comes out on top — the army or the protesters — it will still maintain some credibility, and ability, to influence the government and ensure a level of stability in Egypt, and to continue to uphold the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal, which the United States views as central to stability in the region as a whole.

Obama administration officials said Friday that the United States would continue to work closely with the Egyptian military, which still receives more than $1.3 billion a year in American aid. But American diplomats said that there had been increasing concern over how the military had handled the latest demonstrations, and in particular over the tactics of the security forces in confrontations with protesters this week that killed at least 41 civilians and injured more than 1,000.

Senior officials at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon have been on the phone with their Egyptian counterparts urging restraint; Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta called the army field marshal, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, late Wednesday night to express “just how fundamental the United States believes the matter of responding to the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people” is, one senior official said on Friday, speaking on grounds of anonymity. Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador to Egypt, has also been in talks with Egyptian officials.

Administration officials have also been talking to Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, the second in command and American military favorite, who is viewed as a potential successor to Field Marshal Tantawi and perhaps more amenable to making a swift change to democracy.

The announcement late Thursday over state media that the army generals planned to name a 78-year-old former Mubarak lieutenant, Kamal el-Ganzoury — a bureaucrat who is viewed as serving the military council — as the new prime minister spurred a flurry of e-mails and telephone calls on Thanksgiving Day among officials at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.

“The United States strongly believes that the new Egyptian government must be empowered with real authority immediately,” the White House statement said. “Most importantly,” it added, “we believe that the full transfer of power to a civilian government must take place in a just and inclusive manner that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people, as soon as possible.”

The statement was intended to put a marker in the sand, one administration official said.

“At this moment of increased tension on the ground, it’s important that we get as specific as possible so that everybody understands what’s been agreed to and what constitutes the next steps,” said a second senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity on Friday. “We’re focused on a full transition to a new civilian government on the timeline that’s been announced. Let’s make sure we’re keeping our eyes on that target.”

The official added that “while this isn’t a value judgment” about the appointment of Mr. Ganzoury, “we want to make sure the new prime minister is consistent with our goals for the transition of power.” Specifically, the administration wants a civilian to have authority over the Ministry of the Interior and policing in general, and issues like the planning of elections.

Foreign policy experts said the statement, which came from the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was a significant, if risky, escalation of the international pressure on the generals, particularly given that the military is the most powerful institution in Egypt and a crucial supporter of the United States in a country where anti-American sentiment and Islamist political movements are surging.

For more than 30 years, the United States has viewed the Egyptian military as the safeguard of the Camp David peace accord that was signed by Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1979. When President Obama broke with Mr. Mubarak this year, administration officials at the same time sought assurances that the Egyptian military would guide the transition to democracy and continue to uphold the treaty.

Since then, Egyptian democracy advocates and the country’s opposing political parties, including the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, have mostly indicated that they, too, would continue to uphold the treaty, albeit with some possible modifications, like the number of troops in the Sinai.

But there remains uncertainty over whether a new civilian Egyptian government will be as wedded to the treaty as the Egyptian military has been, which is why the administration has trod so carefully in Egypt. At the same time, the United States has also taken pains to build relations with Egypt’s new political leaders.

Of all of the countries undergoing tumult in the Middle East this year, there is none more central to American interests than Egypt. The United States can afford to maintain a low profile in Syria, where America has had little influence for decades; it can stick by the royal family in Bahrain, where the United States Fifth Fleet is based but which is not seen as pivotal to influence the region.

But Egypt is different. “In terms of the weight of any single country, Egypt outweighs them all,” said Rob Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group. “The reason why is because of its size, its population, the historical role its played in influencing Arab public opinion, and, of course, from the U.S. point of view, because of its peace agreement with Israel.”

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.

    For U.S., Risks in Pressing Egypt to Speed Civilian Rule, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/world/middleeast/us-urges-egypt-to-let-civilians-govern-quickly.html

White House Urges Egypt’s Military to Yield Power

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — The White House on Friday threw its weight behind Egypt’s resurgent protest movement, urging for the first time the handover of power by the interim military rulers in the Obama administration’s most public effort yet to steer Egypt toward democracy.

The White House released the statement supporting the transfer of power to a civilian government “as soon as possible” as tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into Tahrir Square for what may be the biggest display of anger in a week of protests against the military’s intention to retain power even after parliamentary elections that are scheduled to begin on Monday. On Thursday, the ruling council announcing that it would appoint a 77-year-old former prime minister, Kamel el-Ganzoury, as the caretaker prime minister of a new government to serve under the generals, despite near-universal public criticism of his selection and demands for of a more empowered civilian government accountable to the public.

“The United States strongly believes that the new Egyptian government must be empowered with real authority immediately,” the White House said in a statement.

“Most importantly, we believe that the full transfer of power to a civilian government must take place in a just and inclusive manner that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Egyptian people, as soon as possible.”

The statement was a significant escalation of the international pressure on the generals because the United States is among the Egyptian military’s closest allies and biggest benefactors, contributing more than $1.3 billion a year in aid.

But speaking out against the military could be a risky bet for White House if the transition to democracy moves out of the hands of the military to less predictable civilian control.

The military is the most powerful institution in Egypt and a key supporter of the United States in a country where anti-American sentiment and Islamist political movements are surging.

Since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has held itself up as the sole guardian of Egypt’s stability against chaos and radicalism.

Until recently the United States had publicly endorsed its plans to guide a slow transition to civilian democracy in 2013 or later.

But the military council began spelling out plans to carve out permanent political powers and protection from civilian oversight under the next constitution. Those efforts exploded after the government used force to clear a small protest camp from Tahrir Square last Saturday, amid mounting unrest across the country.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton first referred obliquely to United States’ displeasure with the military’s power grab about two weeks ago.

Since then, the military escalated its tactics in confrontations that killed at least 38 civilians and injured more than 2,000.

As huge crowds of demonstrators gathered in Tahrir Square on Friday, state television reported that the generals had appointed a politician from the Mubarak era head a new cabinet, potentially hardening the lines between the interim military rulers and protesters demanding their exit.

At the same time, the Obama administration urged the generals to transfer power immediately to a civilian government “empowered with real authority.”

The developments reinforced fears of a prolonged standoff after the generals vowed on Thursday to forge ahead with parliamentary elections despite a week of violence that is certain to tarnish the vote.

Government news organizations reported on Thursday that at least one political party — the Social Democrats, perhaps the best established of the liberal parties founded in the burst of hope after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak nine months ago — would boycott the elections as a sham intended to prop up military rule.

By day’s end on Thursday, the Muslim Brotherhood also appeared to distance itself from the military council. The powerful Islamist group stands to gain the most from early elections and for the moment had stepped to the sidelines of the protests.

As clashes with the security police stopped for the first time this week, the crowd in Tahrir Square grew larger on Thursday than the day before, reaching tens of thousands.

The generals were unmoved. “Egypt is not Tahrir Square,” Maj. Gen. Mukhtar el-Mallah, a member of the military council, declared early Thursday at a news conference. The generals claimed an open-ended mandate to hold power long after Monday’s parliamentary vote. “We will not relinquish power because of a slogan-chanting crowd.”

The declaration, after six days of violent confrontation in the capital and around the country, shifted the political struggle to a new and murkier phase.

Fulfilling a promise made in negotiations with political parties earlier in the week, the military pulled back the security forces who had battled protesters and constructed a concrete wall bisecting the street where most of the clashes had taken place.

The generals, meanwhile, issued an unusual apology for the deaths of at least 38 people during the week of unrest and the injuries of more than 2,000. But even as they hailed the dead as “martyrs,” the generals also appeared to justify killing them as criminals who had attacked the Interior Ministry. And they denied — despite the statements of many witnesses, doctors and even the health ministry — that security forces had fired live ammunition or birdshot in their clashes with protesters, further inflaming anger.

“The police are very committed to self-control, but I can’t give orders to anyone not to defend themselves,” General Mallah said.

But the council made clear in its news conference on Thursday that it was not ready to surrender any power, and the choice of Mr. Ganzoury appeared to show the generals’ preference for a prime minister who would serve in a subordinate role, as Mr. Ganzoury did under Mr. Mubarak.

 

Mayy el Sheikh and Dina Salah Amer contributed reporting from Cairo,

and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    White House Urges Egypt’s Military to Yield Power, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/world/middleeast/egypt-military-and-protesters-standoff-in-tahrir-square.html

Egypt Military and Protesters Dig In for a Long Standoff

November 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Egypt’s interim military rulers and the masses of protesters demanding their exit dug in Thursday for a prolonged standoff as the generals vowed to forge ahead with parliamentary elections despite a week of violence that is certain to tarnish the vote.

State news organizations reported that at least one political party — the Social Democrats, perhaps the best established of the liberal parties founded in the burst of hope after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak nine months ago — would boycott the elections as a sham intended to prop up military rule.

By day’s end, even the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful Islamist group that stands to gain the most from early elections and that for the moment had stepped to the sidelines of the protests, appeared to distance itself from the military council.

As clashes with the security police stopped for the first time this week, the crowd in Tahrir Square grew larger on Thursday than the day before, reaching tens of thousands, and a broad spectrum of civilian leaders — excluding the Brotherhood — joined calls for a “million man march” on Friday.

The generals were unmoved. “Egypt is not Tahrir Square,” Maj. Gen. Mukhtar el-Mallah, a member of the military council, declared early Thursday at a news conference, claiming an open-ended mandate to hold power long after Monday’s parliamentary vote. “We will not relinquish power because of a slogan-chanting crowd.”

The declaration, after six days of violent confrontation in the capital and around the country, shifted the political struggle to a new and murkier phase.

Fulfilling a promise made in negotiations with political parties earlier in the week, the military pulled back the security forces who had battled protesters and constructed a concrete wall bisecting the street where most of the clashes had taken place.

The generals, meanwhile, issued an unusual apology for the deaths of at least 38 people during the week of unrest and the injuries of more than 2,000. But even as they hailed the dead as “martyrs,” the generals also appeared to justify killing them as criminals who had attacked the Interior Ministry. And they denied — despite the statements of many witnesses, doctors and even the health ministry — that security forces had fired live ammunition or birdshot in their clashes with protesters, further inflaming anger.

“The police are very committed to self-control, but I can’t give orders to anyone not to defend themselves,” General Mallah said.

Then, late in the day, the generals announced over the state news media that they would name a 77-year-old former Mubarak lieutenant, Kamel el-Ganzoury, as their new prime minister, though many Egyptians mocked him as “a dinosaur.”

The appointment of Mr. Ganzoury follows the resignation this week of the previous prime minister, in capitulation to street protesters’ demands. The last prime minister was a functionary serving the military council, and the demonstrators, as well as most civilian parties, are now calling for the council to hand over real authority to a successor.

But the council made clear in its news conference on Thursday that it was not ready to surrender any power, and the choice of Mr. Ganzoury appeared to show the generals’ preference for a prime minister who would serve in a subordinate role, as Mr. Ganzoury did under Mr. Mubarak. Several others also reportedly turned the post down.

The selection of Mr. Ganzoury may also have provoked the Muslim Brotherhood, the one major political force that had agreed to a deal with the military council for it to retain full power until early elections. As prime minister in the late 1990s, Mr. Ganzoury presided over the incarceration or torture of scores of Islamists who now lead the movement.

In a statement released shortly after Mr. Ganzoury’s name was floated, the Brotherhood’s new Freedom and Justice Party pointedly declared that the next prime minister “must enjoy general national consensus and popular acceptance and have to stand at one distance from all political forces.” The group said that its leaders had not met with the council on Thursday, meaning they had not been consulted.

The Brotherhood had already issued a statement appearing to back away from its previous embrace of an agreement with the military council for it to hold power until after an accelerated constitutional ratification and presidential vote by the end of June.

A Brotherhood spokesman had previously said it would not join the street protests demanding the immediate transfer of power because it had agreed with the council on a timetable that all should accept.

But the group was pilloried for appearing to trade its support to the council in exchange for holding elections on a favorable timetable, and it faced internal divisions on the issue as well.

The group responded Thursday in an extraordinarily defensive statement that it had declined to join the protests only because it feared its presence could provoke more violence, not because of a political calculus.

“Our decision has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by some,” the group said. “They harshly criticized and slandered the Muslim Brotherhood.”

It added, “Had we been out to secure our own interests and reap popularity on the political street, going down to Tahrir Square would have been just the way to do that. But we refrained from rash action,” calling the demonstrators “purely patriotic youths and sincere citizens.”

In the square, many argued Thursday that the military’s ability to end the violence at its discretion — a provision of its agreement with the Brotherhood — suggested that the generals might have deliberately tolerated it for days. “If they had done this the first day, there would not have been any martyrs or injuries,” said Mohamed Salem, 25, watching a crane erect the wall of cement blocks across the side street that had become the central battleground between protesters and the security police.

Although the military said that the security police were merely defending the Interior Ministry from attack, the fighting had always centered on that one block leading to the square, while other more direct routes to the ministry remained open, supporting the assertions of many protesters that the security forces were deliberately provoking the violence to destabilize the elections.

A flawed or disputed election, the argument runs, would undercut liberal hopes that the new Parliament could become an effective counterweight to the power of the ruling officers’ council during the rest of the transition.

But the protesters, emboldened by the end of the fighting, said they were as determined as ever to stay in the square until the military council and its chief, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, left power. “Oh, Field Marshal, Oh, Field Marshal, legitimacy comes from Tahrir,” they chanted.

With the flames of garbage fires lighted during the fighting the night before still smoldering in the morning, some said competition among candidates now seemed irrelevant to the more pressing struggle against the military. “Elections don’t matter for me anymore, because now there is blood,” said Samer Saad Ali, 37, an accountant who vowed to stay until Mr. Tantawi left power.

Then, at around 4:30 p.m., the same debate about the election suddenly broke out in clusters around the square. In each, a lone voice tried to convince those around him that it was time to go home, to focus on the vote, as others passed out fliers with a similar message nearby.

Though it appeared to be an organized campaign to empty the square, its true sponsor — some suggested the military council, others pointed at the Brotherhood or another conservative religious group — was not clear.

But in any case, the crowd only grew. “You can’t trust the Field Marshal with the square; how can you trust him with elections?” argued Adel Fawzy Tawfiq, 47, a butcher. Mr. Tantawi “is betting on the ‘silent majority,’ ” he added. “He never learned the lesson of Mubarak.”

Others, though, said they intended to stay to protest and turn out to vote, no matter how flawed the tally. “The Egyptian people, through their representatives, will be able to stand up to anyone,” said Reda Bassiouni, a 48-year-old lawyer As he walked the square, he held hands with his small son, whom he had brought along “to see the history,” he said.

May el Sheik and Dina Salah Amer contributed reporting from Cairo.

    Egypt Military and Protesters Dig In for a Long Standoff, NYT, 24.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/world/middleeast/generals-in-egypt-offer-apology-for-violent-clashes.html

Chaos Builds in the Streets of Cairo as a Truce Fails

November 23, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

CAIRO — The outskirts of Tahrir Square, the iconic landmark of Egypt’s revolution, plunged into chaos on Wednesday, after attempts by the Egyptian military, religious clerics and doctors failed to stanch a fifth day of fighting that has posed the greatest crisis to the country since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February.

The fighting in darkened streets, suffused with tear gas and eerily illuminated by the flashing lights of police cars and the floodlights of armored personnel carriers, seemed to stand as a metaphor for a political transition that has careened into deep uncertainty just days before elections that were supposed to anchor the shift from military to civilian rule.

The military that seized power with Mr. Mubarak’s fall rebuffed protesters’ demands to surrender authority this week, and the political elite has seemed paralyzed or defensive over the unrest. The discontent in Tahrir Square has broadened from demands for the generals to cede control and anger over bloodshed into dissatisfaction with a transition that has delivered precious little since the uprising’s heady days in February.

“This is a revolution of the hungry!” declared Amr Ali Mohammed, a 23-year-old protester taking a break from the battle with the police. “Egyptians have had enough.”

The sense of uncertainty that prevailed in Egypt echoed some of the most anxious days of the uprising that began in January against Mr. Mubarak’s nearly 30 years of rule. Though life went on in much of the capital, the protests demonstrated a resilience they had lacked for months, and episodes of dissent have erupted in other parts of the country, including Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city. Neither politicians nor the military seemed ready to embrace a drastic step that many insisted was needed to end the unrest.

By nightfall, crowds rivaled their size on past days, anchored by a demand that has become the anthem since the crisis began: the fall of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the de facto leader and longtime colleague of Mr. Mubarak. In the square’s side streets, youths fought the police to the backdrop of unending ambulance sirens.

“If he leaves it like this and stays silent, it will be a disaster,” said Suleiman Mahmoud, as he stood in a street that looked like a symbol for urban distress — pools of stagnant water strewn with rocks, shattered glass, trash and fallen tree branches. “He’ll pay the price, and the country will pay the price. Stubbornness is not a solution.”

With political leaders tentative, and signs that the military was unable to exert control over the police, other voices emerged in the country on Wednesday, demanding some kind of action. Most important was the grand imam of Al Azhar, an institution that is a prominent seat of religious scholarship long co-opted by the government but now seeking a more independent role.

The grand imam, Sheik Ahmed al-Tayyeb, called on the police not to fire on protesters, “no matter what the reason.” He urged protesters to restrain themselves and demanded that the military, whose relations with the Interior Ministry and its loathed police forces have long been strained, do everything it could to prevent more clashes.

“Al Azhar reminds everybody that dialogue stained with blood is doomed, and its fruit will be bitter in the throats of everyone,” the cleric’s statement said.

His warnings were echoed abroad, in a sign of growing international concern over the crisis in the Arab world’s most populous country. The French Foreign Ministry condemned what it called “the excessive use of force against demonstrators,” and Navi Pillay, the United Nations human rights chief, called for an independent investigation into the bloodshed, which has left 38 people dead and hundreds wounded since it began Saturday.

A sentiment pronounced often here has become a refrain of sorts in moments of crisis: a foreign hand. With parliamentary elections scheduled to begin on Monday, the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful and well-organized Islamic movement in Egypt, suggested in a statement on Wednesday that “there has been a plan to create chaos,” and Field Marshal Tantawi made the same contention in an address to the country on Tuesday night.

Even some onlookers at Wednesday’s events in the square struggled to make sense of the turn of events.

“It is in someone’s interest to benefit from the delay of elections, I just don’t know who it is,” said Marwa Hussein, 18, a student who visited the square for the first time on Wednesday. “Someone is benefiting from this chaos. We just don’t know who.”

The protests began on Friday, and violence followed on Saturday.

At times, the crowds in Tahrir Square have seemed determined to recapture the spirit of February, when hundreds of thousands converged in downtown Cairo to press their demand for Mr. Mubarak’s fall, to the backdrop of songs by Abdel-Halim Hafez, a revered Egyptian singer. It was a moment of unity that contrasted with the current state of Egyptian politics, which fragmented soon after the military seized control, and with a widespread sense that the generals, with their opaque decision making, have horribly mismanaged the transition.

But Wednesday had a more martial feel, evident at the square’s entrance. “Take care of yourself, captain,” said a vendor selling surgical masks for an Egyptian pound (about 17 cents). On broad avenues cordoned off to evacuate the wounded, youths sought to maintain order among crowds, as motorcycles carrying as many as four sped by.

“Clear the way!” men shouted.

The square was suffused with chants, sirens that blared through the night, vendors hawking food, flags and scarves. At a cafe, men with goggles and gas masks sat along the sidewalk, sipping tea and smoking water pipes. “Live free, stay in the square,” read the graffiti nearby.

“This is only going to end when the military turns over power,” said Dr. Mohammed Gilal, 28, who was treating patients in a makeshift clinic, where volunteers carted in canisters of oxygen and nurses treated wheezing protesters overwhelmed by gas. Dr. Gilal said he had seen hundreds of wounded since he arrived Sunday. “I’m not leaving unless they kill me with my colleagues. We’re not going to accept any more talk.”

Some activists joked that the anger was so widespread and deep among the protesters that their chants should be, “The people want the fall of the coming president.”

By afternoon, the military tried to separate the protesters from the police, and they were joined by doctors and clerics from Al Azhar, in their distinct gray robes and white and red caps. The truce lasted about 90 minutes before a crack was heard behind a building. Crowds surged, then moments later, a round of tear gas canisters was fired.

Protesters seemed especially enraged that it had been fired as some of them prayed, and it was unclear whether the military was exercising authority over the police. A prominent cleric, Mazhar Shahin, whose mosque is in the square, blamed the police.

“Ambush,” someone cried.

“The government withdrew and said ‘O.K., we have withdrawn,’ so we all went up to see it,” said Islam Mohammed, 18, his head and forearm bandaged. “We were praying, and they attacked us in the middle of the prayer. ”

Clashes escalated through the night, and the Ministry of Health said 500 people were injured in just two hours. Bonfires cast a glow down darkened streets, where protesters retreated from tear gas, stumbling over the debris of their days of melees.

“The turning point is coming soon,” said Mostafa Helmy, a 55-year-old engineer.

 

Liam Stack and Dina Salah Amer contributed reporting.

    Chaos Builds in the Streets of Cairo as a Truce Fails, NYT, 23.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/world/middleeast/egypt-protesters-and-police-clash-for-fifth-day.html

Russia Elevates Warning

About U.S. Missile Defense Shield Plan

November 23, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

MOSCOW — Russia will deploy its own missiles and could withdraw from the New Start nuclear arms reduction treaty if the United States moves forward with its plans for a missile-defense system in Europe, President Dmitri A. Medvedev warned on Wednesday.

“I have set the task to the Armed Forces to develop measures for disabling missile-defense data and control systems,” Mr. Medvedev said.

He said new Russian strategic ballistic missiles “will be equipped with advanced missile defense penetration systems and new highly effective warheads” and he reiterated Russia’s warning that it would deploy tactical missiles to the western enclave of Kalingrad, which borders Poland.

But it was Mr. Medvedev’s comments about the New Start strategic arms control treaty, put into effect earlier this year, that suggested a darkening tone in what has been a steady drumbeat of warnings out of Moscow in recent days over the plans for a missile-defense system based in Europe.

“In the case of unfavorable development of the situation, Russia reserves the right to discontinue further steps in the field of disarmament and arms control,” Mr. Medvedev said in a televised address from his residence just outside Moscow.

“Given the intrinsic link between strategic offensive and defensive arms, conditions for our withdrawal from the New Start treaty could also arise,” he said.

Several times in his address, Mr. Medvedev reiterated his call for further negotiations between Russia and the United States, but such talks seem unlikely to change the strongly held views on each side.

At issue is the Europe-based system being developed by the United States that it says would defend against a potential missile attack by Iran. The United States has reached agreements to place 24 interceptor missiles in Romania, as well as a sophisticated radar system in Turkey.

Russia believes that system could be used against its intercontinental ballistic missiles and has demanded assurance in writing that this would not be the case. The United States has said it will not agree to any restrictions on its missile defense efforts.

Mr. Medvedev raised the issue directly with President Obama earlier this month at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Hawaii. After those face-to-face talks, Mr. Medvedev said, “Our positions remain far apart.”

Since then, he and other Russian officials have made a steady stream of public statements warning of the consequences of a failure by the two sides to reach some accommodation.

American officials insist that the missile-defense system is not directed against Russia. Mr. Obama ordered a major redesign of plans he inherited from his predecessor, George W. Bush, opting to move the system closer to Iran and to build it faster. Mr. Bush had favored placing interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic.

Mr. Medvedev in his remarks said there was still room for negotiation, but he accused the United States and NATO of being unwilling to consider Russia’s point of view. “They are not going, at least as of today, to take into consideration our concerns about the architecture of the European missile defense system,” he said, “They are saying, ‘this is not against you, don’t worry.’ They are trying to calm us down.”

But in what was clearly a reference to the United States Congress, Mr. Medvedev said there were reasons not to trust the assurances from the Obama administration. “Legislators in some countries openly state,” he said, “This is against you.”

    Russia Elevates Warning About U.S. Missile Defense Shield Plan, NYT, 23.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/world/europe/russia-elevates-warning-about-us-missile-defense-shield-plan.html

The Old Order Stifles the Birth of a New Egypt

November 22, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

CAIRO — If the demonstrations that culminated in February were an uprising against President Hosni Mubarak, the revolt today is against his legacy.

“This is the real revolution,” said Mohammed Aitman, helping at a first-aid clinic in a turbulent, roiling and, at times, ecstatic Tahrir Square.

The vestiges of Mr. Mubarak’s order — the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, or fragmented liberals and leftists — seem ill prepared to navigate the transition from his rule. It is an altogether more difficult reckoning that has echoed in the Arab revolts in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain.

The strategy that for so long successfully repressed public anger and sapped people’s will to rebel was no longer working. As a result, it is not at all clear what path Egypt will find to go forward. The authorities hoped that the protesters would exhaust themselves and go home, but they have not. The military tried violence, but it has not worked. It has tried limited concessions, but they did not work. And it has blamed foreigners for inciting the violence, and that did not work.

This may foreshadow a dangerous and prolonged period of unrest in Egypt, as the spectacular show of discontent on Tuesday in Tahrir Square demonstrates that there is no existing institution to channel their frustrations.

The military appears largely oblivious to the scale of the protests, and Islamist parties are single-mindedly pursuing their political goals as they predict a healthy showing in the coming elections. No leader, of any ideological bent, has emerged to channel the discontent once again spilling into the streets.

“Today, it is a failure of the political class,” said Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, a political analyst at Dar al-Hikma, a research center in Cairo. “People feel betrayed.”

One of the lasting accomplishments of so many Arab autocrats, some of them still in power, was their ability to co-opt, eviscerate or abolish the institutions that could guide the transition in their absence, as they played on social divisions to prolong their rule.

Ferociously oppressed for so long, Syria’s opposition has struggled to articulate a vision that inspires confidence in the country’s minorities. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s relentless destruction of Libyan institutions has left a country whose regions sometimes act like their own city-states and where tribe serves as the primary social structure. Bahrain’s monarchy stoked sectarian divisions so effectively that a once-cosmopolitan society may be too polarized to reconcile.

Egypt’s version of an autocrat’s legacy was on display Tuesday, as a military accustomed to decades of privilege refused to surrender real power, for now, and a political class cowed by years of authoritarianism — the Muslim Brotherhood being the most prominent example — seemed opportunistic, defensive or unimaginative.

To many in the square, politicians were either putting their parochial interests first or proving unable to deliver a vision that could stem the worst crisis facing Egypt since Mr. Mubarak was toppled on Feb. 11. The anger was so great that a Brotherhood politician was driven from a square by a crowd that, as in January, feels determined but leaderless.

“What we’re still dealing with is the system of Mubarak,” said Mustafa Tobgi, a 56-year-old government employee. “They’re all graduates of Mubarak’s school.”

Tahrir Square, a site iconic for the protests that overthrew Mr. Mubarak, was often a desperate tableau in past days, as youths battled with the police. Those fights became a sideshow on Tuesday to a far more jubilant and festive spectacle, whose numbers rivaled some of the biggest protests in the 18-day uprising against Mr. Mubarak.

“Leave,” people chanted Tuesday, as they did back then.

The breadth of the protesters’ demands — effectively an immediate end to military rule — and the military’s refusal, reiterated Tuesday, to surrender power until next year suggested that the discontent would persist. Suspicions ran so deep in the square on Tuesday that nothing short of a dramatic step seemed possible to stanch the protesters’ determination, or end the clashes that have left at least 29 people dead.

“The gap between the military and the protesters is so large now as to be almost impossible to close,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center, who is visiting Cairo. “That’s the problem. The maximum of what the military can offer doesn’t meet the minimum of what the protesters are demanding.”

It is remarkable how little the elections figured into conversations in the square. They are set for Monday, but no one was debating platforms, or candidates or parties.

But those elections appear paramount to the Brotherhood and other Islamists, who could secure their greatest electoral power in Egyptian history when the vote begins. Analysts say the group is haunted by the experience of elections in Algeria in 1991, when the military stepped in to forestall an almost certain Islamist victory. That led to a civil war that roiled Algeria for nearly a decade, killing as many as 200,000 people.

So far, the Brotherhood has effectively sided with the military, in an alliance of two of Egypt’s most venerable institutions. Though trying to hedge its bets, the Brotherhood has remained largely absent from Tahrir Square, insisting that most Egyptians are not behind the protests. Some analysts have drawn parallels to the Brotherhood’s decision to join the uprising in January only after it had reached a critical mass.

“They are again late to the show or absent completely,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation in New York.

In the square, the object of the crowd’s ire was not only the country’s de facto ruler — Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the 76-year-old army chief who served as Mr. Mubarak’s defense minister for two decades — but also the entire military leadership that, by most accounts, has made a mess of a transition that it originally said would last six months.

“Stay steadfast!” protesters shouted. A banner nearby said: “Save Egypt from the military and thieves. Surrendering power to civilians is the demand of all Egyptians.”

“The revolution that happened in February, however beautiful it was, left us with a coup,” said Afifi Ahmed, a 52-year-old chemist, who joined the protest. “Tantawi was never persuaded there was a revolution. All he wants to do is renovate the old system.”

A popular Egyptian novel, “Utopia,” set in a future Cairo, quotes a character explaining an uprising. “As the saying goes, ‘The rock endured many blows, but only shattered at the 50th.’ It’s not the 50th blow that did that, but all the previous ones.” The sentiment was often pronounced in a square where the protesters’ numbers surged through the day.

The scenes were sometimes grim. Men on motorcycles careered through crowds, honking their horns, as they headed to the clashes with the police. Youths caught their breath on the curbs. Some were bandaged; the eyes of others were bloodshot from tear gas. “You’re a coward, Field Marshal,” protesters chanted. “We won’t leave the square.”

Asked if he was worried about the unrest, Ihab Hosni, a 27-year-old software engineer, wearing a surgical mask to fend off the tear gas, shook his head.

“I would be worried more if I didn’t see the people here,” he replied.

But some analysts suggested that streets filled with the discontented could prove a permanent feature, as politicians dwell on debates over Islamic law rather than popular concerns like security, the economy and corruption, and the military remains entrenched in a narrative less and less shared: that it is the savior of the revolution.

“If we have to go through another revolution and another revolution and another revolution, so be it,” Mr. Hosni said. “No one really knows how this will end.”

    The Old Order Stifles the Birth of a New Egypt, NYT, 22.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/world/middleeast/vestiges-of-hosni-mubaraks-order-stifle-birth-of-new-egypt.html

Bahrain Said to Use Excessive Force and Torture in Protests

November 22, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) — The head of a special commission that investigated Bahrain's unrest said Wednesday that authorities used torture and excessive force against detainees arrested in crackdowns on the largest Arab Spring uprising in the Gulf.

Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni — making the first official comments on report's findings — also said there was no evidence of Iranian links to Bahrain's Shiite-led protests in a clear rebuke Gulf leaders who accuse Tehran of playing a role in the 10-month-old showdown in the Western-allied kingdom.

The study, which was authorized by Bahrain's Sunni rulers in a bid to ease tensions, marks the most comprehensive document on security force actions during any of the revolts that have flared across the Arab world this year.

Bahrain's Sunni government promised "no immunity" for anyone suspected of abuses and said it would propose creating a permanent human rights watchdog commission.

"All those who have broken the law or ignored lawful orders and instructions will be held accountable," said a government statement, which says the report acknowledges that the "systematic practice of mistreatment" ended shortly after martial law was repealed on June 1.

Bassiouni's summary — read at a news conference attended by Bahrain's king — confirmed expectations that the report would be highly critical of officials in the strategic kingdom, which is the home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. The full text of the report, which focuses on the period between Feb. 14 and March 30, was expected to be released later Wednesday.

Bahrain's Shiites comprise about 70 percent of the island nation's 525,000 citizens, but have complained of widespread discrimination such as being blocked from top government or military posts.

The report cast a harsh light on the tactics used against demonstrators and already noted in rights groups allegations: widespread arrests, purges from workplaces and universities, destruction of Shiite mosques and jail house abuses.

At least 35 people have been killed in violence related to the uprising, including several members of the security forces.

"A number of detainees were tortured ... which proved there was a deliberate practice by some," said Bassiouni.

Investigators, however, "did not discover any role of the Iranian Islamic Republic." The finding is a sharp contrast to claims by Bahrain's leaders and Gulf allies that Shiite power Iran was linked to the protests.

Earlier this month, Bahraini authorities said they arrested five suspected members of an Iranian terror cell that plotted high-profile attacks, including the Saudi Embassy in the capital Manama.

"You found real shortcomings from some government institutions," Bahrain's king, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, told Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born professor of international criminal law and a former member of U.N. human rights panels.

"Some might ask why we asked a commission from outside the country ... Our answer is: Any government that has an honest desire for reform and progress should be aware of the benefit of objective, constructive criticism."

Just hours earlier, street battles broke out after a 44-year-old man died when his car crashed into a house earlier in the day. Protesters say he swerved to avoid security vehicles. Bahrain's government said it has opened an investigation.

Although Bahrain's bloodshed and chaos is small in comparison with the huge upheavals across the Arab world — including renewed protests in Egypt — the island's conflict resonates from Tehran to Washington.

Bahrain is a critical U.S. ally and Washington has taken a cautious line because of what's at stake: urging Bahrain's leaders to open more dialogue with the opposition, but avoiding too much public pressure.

Some U.S. lawmakers have shown signs of growing impatience with Bahrain's rulers. A $53 million arms deal with Bahrain is on hold until the upcoming report is examined.

For Gulf leaders, led by powerful Saudi Arabia, Bahrain is seen as a firewall to keep pro-reform protests from spreading further across the region. Gulf rulers have rallied behind the kingdom's embattled monarchy and sent in military reinforcements during the height of the crackdowns.

Bahrain is also viewed as a front-line fight against Iranian influence. The Sunni Arab monarchy and influential sheiks consider any significant gains by Bahrain's Shiites as a beachhead for Shiite powerhouse Iran, which has called the Saudi-led military units in Bahrain an "occupation force."

The fissures in Bahrain are not new. For decades, Shiites have pushed for a greater voice.

Following the start of the Arab Spring, Shiite-led protesters began occupying a square in the capital Manama in February — just days after crowds in Cairo's Tahrir Square celebrated the downfall of Hosni Mubarak.

Weeks later, security forces stormed Manama's Pearl Square, tore down the landmark six-pronged monument at its center and imposed martial law. Hundreds of activists, political leaders and Shiite professionals such as lawyers, doctors, nurses and athletes were jailed and tried on anti-state crimes behind closed doors in a special security court that was set up during emergency rule.

Three protesters have been sentenced to death and several prominent opposition leaders were sentenced to life in prison.

Bahrain's rulers have offered some concessions, including giving more powers to parliament and opening up a so-called "national dialogue" on reforms. But authorities have rebuffed a key protest demand for the monarchy to give up control of top government posts and share privileges.

    Bahrain Said to Use Excessive Force and Torture in Protests, NYT, 22.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/11/22/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Bahrain.html

Yemen’s Leader Is Reported to Accept Yielding His Powers

November 23, 2011
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and LAURA KASINOF

SANA, Yemen — After months of street protests calling for his resignation, President Ali Abdullah Saleh traveled to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday to sign an agreement that would require him to immediately transfer his powers to his vice president, a move that could pave the way for an end to Mr. Saleh’s 33-year rule.

Under the deal, Mr. Saleh would retain his title until new elections in three months and receive immunity from prosecution. But it remained to be seen whether Mr. Saleh, who has backed out of signing such an agreement on several previous occasions, would actually follow through. It was also unclear when, and if, the president intended to return to Yemen.

Within hours of the announcement, what seemed to be artillery fire echoed in the city.

Yemeni political analysts and Western diplomats said they had reason to hope that this time would be different.

His opponents and Yemen’s foreign allies, including the United States, have put increasing pressure on Mr. Saleh to sign a deal, warning that the country, stalled by protests and wracked by successive rounds of bloody factional fighting, is on the brink of collapse. The fighting has crippled the country’s already sputtering economy and the central government is rapidly losing what little control it had of outlying provinces.

Mr. Saleh was also facing the threat of international sanctions. “There was no more room for him to maneuver,” said Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst and the head of a nonpartisan group that campaigns for democracy.

The sanctions, he said “would end up suffocating his regime and even maybe put him behind bars.”

But few people thought the agreement would signal the end of Mr. Saleh’s political ambitions. “He figures the rest of the maneuvering can be kept for after the signing,” Mr. Iryani said.

The president’s surprise trip to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, had been rumored for days but was not announced beforehand. It came after several days of intense negotiations between opposition politicians and the president’s representatives, brokered by a visiting United Nations envoy.

Yemeni opposition leaders, who would join members of Mr. Saleh’s party in a new unity government, were scheduled to fly to Riyadh later on Wednesday for the signing of the agreement, which was brokered by several Persian Gulf states.

Even with such an accord, formidable challenges remained. Youth activists have said the agreement and in particular the immunity clauses would not satisfy thousands of demonstrators still camped in city squares throughout the country, demanding trials for Mr. Saleh and members of his government in connection with the killings of scores of demonstrators.

The youth activists framed the agreement as a deal between political elites, rather than a step forward for their revolt. April Longley Alley, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group who studies Yemen, said that while the agreement facilitated the exit of Mr. Saleh, “Yemenis from across the political spectrum are looking for much broader and deeper political change.”

Previous agreements have been derailed by violence in Sana, the capital, between government forces, and defecting army units and tribal fighters loyal to Mr. Saleh’s rivals. There were reports on Wednesday of sporadic shelling in Hasaba, a district in northern Sana.

The military remains divided between supporters of the Saleh family and loyalists of a powerful commander, Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar. General Ahmar, once a close ally of the president and frequently called the second most powerful man in the country, announced his support for the antigovernment protest movement in March. His heavily armed troops have controlled a large portion of the northern half of Sana.

General Ahmar, who has repeatedly said he that he is willing to leave the country if Mr. Saleh will, did not immediately release a statement reacting to the news of a possible agreement.

Yassin Saeed Noman, a socialist politician and the leader of Yemen’s opposition coalition, said the agreement, if signed, would not quickly pull the country from its malaise but added that he remained optimistic.

“If there is a willingness from the government, it will end the crisis,” Mr. Noman said.

Kareem Fahim reported from Sana, and Laura Kasinof from Greencastle, Pa.

    Yemen’s Leader Is Reported to Accept Yielding His Powers, NYT, 23.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/world/middleeast/yemen-saleh-transfer-power-deal-saudi-arabia.html

United States and Its Allies Expand Sanctions on Iran

November 21, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — The United States and its allies are rolling out a new set of sanctions against Iran on Monday, with the country’s central bank and petrochemical industry as targets. The move tightened the vise on Tehran after a United Nations report on its nuclear activities, but demonstrated the continued limitations to international pressure.

The Treasury Department will name the Central Bank of Iran as a “primary money laundering concern” on Monday, an administration official said — a symbolically important step, but one that is short of formal sanctions, which would probably be resisted by China and other Asian countries that import oil from Iran.

The United States will also impose sanctions on a range of companies that are involved in supporting Iran’s nuclear industry, as well as on its petrochemical industry — expanding existing measures that aim to weaken the Iranian regime by depriving it of its ability to refine gasoline and export crude oil.

Earlier on Monday, Britain announced that it would cut all ties with Iran’s financial sector, declaring that Iranian banks play a role in financing its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Leaders of the European Union will meet on Thursday and are expected to approve similar measures then, diplomats said.

“We have consistently made clear that until Iran engages meaningfully, it will find itself under increasing pressure,” said the British foreign secretary, William Hague. “The swift and decisive action today, coordinated with key international partners, is a strong signal of determination to intensify this pressure.”

Taken together, the steps deepen the isolation of Iran, which has been under pressure since the International Atomic Energy Agency published evidence on Nov. 8 that Iran has continued to work on a nuclear weapon and delivery system.

But the Obama administration’s decision not to sanction the central bank reveals the obstacles Washington faces in applying draconian measures that could cripple Iran’s economy. Under American law, a formal designation would require the United States to cut off access to any foreign institution that continued to do business with the bank.

China, Japan, and other countries use the central bank to process transactions from their purchases of Iranian oil, in part because most of Iran’s major commercial banks are already subject to sanctions. They would be likely to resist an order to stop dealing with the central bank, which would put the Obama administration in an untenable position, since the United States could not sever its ties with Chinese or Japanese banks.

Mr. Obama could request a waiver to exempt such institutions from the ban, but experts on sanctions said that such a waiver would undermine the credibility of the United States. The White House has been under pressure from Republicans to designate the central bank, and has worked to forestall such legislation.

The administration has telegraphed its intention to seek further sanctions on Iran since the publication of the nuclear agency’s report. The White House pushed the agency to be as detailed as possible in its evidence of Iran’s nuclear activities, as a way of building international support for sanctions. But Russia and China both pushed back, with Russia arguing that diplomacy is still the best course.

For its part, Iran reacted angrily to the agency’s report, and renewed its display of displeasure on Monday by staying away from a gathering of 97 countries at the Vienna headquarters of the atomic energy agency, which was called to discuss nuclear issues related to the Middle East. Tehran says its nuclear program is solely for peaceful, civilian purposes.

Yukiya Amano, the agency’s director general, said he hoped the two-day meeting, which unusually includes both Israel and Arab states, would “promote dialogue on a nuclear weapon-free zone” in the region. While there is a widespread assumption that Israel is now the only Middle Eastern country with nuclear arms, Israel has never confirmed that suspicion.

Iran has accused Mr. Amano of pro-Western bias and of failing to address Israel’s presumed atomic arsenal. While no clear result is expected from the Middle Eastern discussion, it was billed as having potential symbolic importance, and Iran had accepted an invitation to attend.

“It is my earnest hope that your discussion will be creative and constructive, moving beyond simply re-stating long-established positions,” Mr. Amano told participants on Monday. “I hope it will nurture fresh thinking, creative thinking, on the possible relevance of the experience of the five existing nuclear weapon-free zones to the Middle East.”

But Syrian representatives reached for more traditional arguments, saying Israel’s undeclared and unconfirmed nuclear capability posed a “grave and serious threat,” The Associated Press reported. Along with Iran, Syria ranks among Israel’s most virulent regional adversaries. Other Arab states at the meeting were more measured in the tone of their speeches.

Administration officials have said that Iran’s economy is suffering badly because of existing sanctions against it over the nuclear issue, and that its oil industry is unable to refine enough gasoline to spare having to import any.

Analysts said the latest measures would intensify that pressure, but warned that changing Iran’s behavior would require patience.

“We’re trying to do two things: Stress the Iranian economy as a means of impacting the Iranian decision-makers’ attitude, and using sanctions and other tools to slow the nuclear program,” said Ray Takeyh, an expert on Iran at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s a long-term proposition.”

 

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.

    United States and Its Allies Expand Sanctions on Iran, NYT, 21.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/world/middleeast/iran-stays-away-from-nuclear-talks.html

King of Jordan in West Bank Ahead of Hamas Talks

November 21, 2011
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER

RAMALLAH, West Bank — King Abdullah II of Jordan visited the Palestinian West Bank for the first time in a decade on Monday and conferred with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority as both men begin risky reconciliation efforts with the Islamists of Hamas.

Mr. Abbas is due to hold power-sharing talks with Khaled Meshal of Hamas this week in Cairo to try to put an end to a four-year-old bitter division within the Palestinian movement. Mr. Meshal, who is based in the Syrian capital of Damascus and has been barred from official visits to Jordan since 1999, has been invited there next week.

As popular upheavals across the Middle East grant Islamist parties more influence, both Mr. Abbas and the king are being pressed to soften their policies toward Hamas. Meanwhile, strong American and Israeli opposition to the reconciliation with Hamas and their Muslim Brotherhood colleagues creates difficult counterforces and the risk of a cut in American aid.

Mr. Abbas makes his second home in the Jordanian capital of Amman and meets there frequently with the king, so the monarch’s trip here — a quick helicopter ride — was not about finding an opportunity to get together. It was about sending a set of messages — to the Palestinians, the Israelis and to his domestic audience.

To the Palestinians, King Abdullah was asserting that Mr. Abbas remains the central figure in Palestinian politics, and any talk of reconciliation with Hamas is not aimed at supplanting him.

“One reason for the visit is to assure us that relations with Hamas don’t replace relations with us,” Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said in an interview. She was at President Abbas’s office to help welcome the king to Ramallah.

To Israel, the king was eager to make clear that he would vigorously oppose the occasional talk there of Jordan as the alternative homeland of the Palestinians. And to Jordanians, the message was that when Mr. Meshal visits next week, it should not be misinterpreted.

“Bringing Hamas now to Jordan could be like dropping a boulder in a calm lake,” noted Amer Sabaileh, a Jordanian political analyst in Amman. “I’m referring here to the Palestinian refugee camps that have been quiet during Jordan’s troubles in recent months. The king’s visit is a message to everyone that Khaled Meshal’s visit will be under the umbrella of Palestinian reconciliation and the Palestinian Authority,” not a gesture to the local Muslim Brotherhood.

Neither King Abdullah nor Mr. Abbas spoke to journalists during the visit. Instead, they sent their foreign ministers, Nasser Judeh of Jordan and Riad al-Malki of the Palestinian Authority, to a news conference. The ministers spoke about the “blessed” visit and the “historic” opportunity but offered few specifics about its timing, meaning or content.

Mr. Judeh said anyone who thought Jordan could replace Palestine was mistaken.

Some on the Israeli right who want to hold onto the West Bank have long argued this. They note that more than half the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinian and say there is no need for another state for them.

But Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself a man of the right, made a point recently of shooting down this argument. “Jordan is a stabilizing element in the region in comparison to what is happening in other nations,” Mr. Lieberman said during a discussion at the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, responding to recent reports about discussions of Jordan as Palestine inside the government.

“Discussion about Jordan as a Palestinian state is against Israeli interests and against reality,” he went on. “Saying Jordan is Palestine opposes international borders as well as the peace accord we signed with them.”

At Monday’s news conference, Mr. Judeh, the Jordanian foreign minister, added that the king believed strongly in Palestinian reconciliation and that the ultimate aim was a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which could be achieved only through direct negotiations. He implied that while Israeli settlements were illegal, they could be stopped through negotiations to establish clear borders.

The Palestinians say they will not enter negotiations until settlement construction, both in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, stops.

American officials continue to try to find a way around this to bring the two back to the table. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns met on Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Monday as part of that effort. The prime minister’s office offered no other details and declined to comment on King Abdullah’s visit to Ramallah.

 

Ranya Kadri contributed reporting from Amman, Jordan.

    King of Jordan in West Bank Ahead of Hamas Talks, NYT, 21.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/world/middleeast/king-of-jordan-visits-the-palestinian-west-bank.html

How China Can Defeat America

November 20, 2011
The New York Times
By YAN XUETONG

Beijing

WITH China’s growing influence over the global economy, and its increasing ability to project military power, competition between the United States and China is inevitable. Leaders of both countries assert optimistically that the competition can be managed without clashes that threaten the global order.

Most academic analysts are not so sanguine. If history is any guide, China’s rise does indeed pose a challenge to America. Rising powers seek to gain more authority in the global system, and declining powers rarely go down without a fight. And given the differences between the Chinese and American political systems, pessimists might believe that there is an even higher likelihood of war.

I am a political realist. Western analysts have labeled my political views “hawkish,” and the truth is that I have never overvalued the importance of morality in international relations. But realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might. In fact, morality can play a key role in shaping international competition between political powers — and separating the winners from the losers.

I came to this conclusion from studying ancient Chinese political theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius. They were writing in the pre-Qin period, before China was unified as an empire more than 2,000 years ago — a world in which small countries were competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage.

It was perhaps the greatest period for Chinese thought, and several schools competed for ideological supremacy and political influence. They converged on one crucial insight: The key to international influence was political power, and the central attribute of political power was morally informed leadership. Rulers who acted in accordance with moral norms whenever possible tended to win the race for leadership over the long term.

China was unified by the ruthless king of Qin in 221 B.C., but his short-lived rule was not nearly as successful as that of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, who drew on a mixture of legalistic realism and Confucian “soft power” to rule the country for over 50 years, from 140 B.C. until 86 B.C.

According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi, there were three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny. Humane authority won the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad. Tyranny — based on military force — inevitably created enemies. Hegemonic powers lay in between: they did not cheat the people at home or cheat allies abroad. But they were frequently indifferent to moral concerns and often used violence against non-allies. The philosophers generally agreed that humane authority would win in any competition with hegemony or tyranny.

Such theories may seem far removed from our own day, but there are striking parallels. Indeed, Henry Kissinger once told me that he believed that ancient Chinese thought was more likely than any foreign ideology to become the dominant intellectual force behind Chinese foreign policy.

The fragmentation of the pre-Qin era resembles the global divisions of our times, and the prescriptions provided by political theorists from that era are directly relevant today — namely that states relying on military or economic power without concern for morally informed leadership are bound to fail.

Unfortunately, such views are not so influential in this age of economic determinism, even if governments often pay lip service to them. The Chinese government claims that the political leadership of the Communist Party is the basis of China’s economic miracle, but it often acts as though competition with the United States will be played out on the economic field alone. And in America, politicians regularly attribute progress, but never failure, to their own leadership.

Both governments must understand that political leadership, rather than throwing money at problems, will determine who wins the race for global supremacy.

Many people wrongly believe that China can improve its foreign relations only by significantly increasing economic aid. But it’s hard to buy affection; such “friendship” does not stand the test of difficult times.

How, then, can China win people’s hearts across the world? According to ancient Chinese philosophers, it must start at home. Humane authority begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.

This means China must shift its priorities away from economic development to establishing a harmonious society free of today’s huge gaps between rich and poor. It needs to replace money worship with traditional morality and weed out political corruption in favor of social justice and fairness.

In other countries, China must display humane authority in order to compete with the United States, which remains the world’s pre-eminent hegemonic power. Military strength underpins hegemony and helps to explain why the United States has so many allies. President Obama has made strategic mistakes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but his actions also demonstrate that Washington is capable of leading three foreign wars simultaneously. By contrast, China’s army has not been involved in any war since 1984, with Vietnam, and very few of its high-ranking officers, let alone its soldiers, have any battlefield experience.

America enjoys much better relations with the rest of the world than China in terms of both quantity and quality. America has more than 50 formal military allies, while China has none. North Korea and Pakistan are only quasi-allies of China. The former established a formal alliance with China in 1961, but there have been no joint military maneuvers and no arms sales for decades. China and Pakistan have substantial military cooperation, but they have no formal military alliance binding them together.

To shape a friendly international environment for its rise, Beijing needs to develop more high-quality diplomatic and military relationships than Washington. No leading power is able to have friendly relations with every country in the world, thus the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.

China must also recognize that it is a rising power and assume the responsibilities that come with that status. For example, when it comes to providing protection for weaker powers, as the United States has done in Europe and the Persian Gulf, China needs to create additional regional security arrangements with surrounding countries according to the model of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — a regional forum that includes China, Russia and several central Asian countries.

And politically, China should draw on its tradition of meritocracy. Top government officials should be chosen according to their virtue and wisdom, and not simply technical and administrative ability. China should also open up and choose officials from across the world who meet its standards, so as to improve its governance.

The Tang dynasty — which lasted from the 7th century to the 10th and was perhaps China’s most glorious period — employed a great number of foreigners as high-ranking officials. China should do the same today and compete with America to attract talented immigrants.

OVER the next decade, China’s new leaders will be drawn from a generation that experienced the hardships of the Cultural Revolution. They are resolute and will most likely value political principles more than material benefits. These leaders must play a larger role on the world stage and offer more security protection and economic support to less powerful countries.

This will mean competing with the United States politically, economically and technologically. Such competition may cause diplomatic tensions, but there is little danger of military clashes.

That’s because future Chinese-American competition will differ from that between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Neither China nor America needs proxy wars to protect its strategic interests or to gain access to natural resources and technology.

China’s quest to enhance its world leadership status and America’s effort to maintain its present position is a zero-sum game. It is the battle for people’s hearts and minds that will determine who eventually prevails. And, as China’s ancient philosophers predicted, the country that displays more humane authority will win.

 

Yan Xuetong, the author of “Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power,” is a professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. This essay was translated by Zhaowen Wu and David Liu from the Chinese.

    How China Can Defeat America, NYT, 20.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/opinion/how-china-can-defeat-america.html

Violent Protests in Egypt Pit Thousands Against Police

November 19, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and LIAM STACK

CAIRO — A police action to roust a few hundred protesters out of Tahrir Square on Saturday instead drew thousands of people from across Egyptian society into the streets, where they battled riot police officers for hours in the most violent manifestation yet of growing anger at the military-led interim government.

In a battle reminiscent of the clashes that led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak nine months ago, a mass of protesters converged on Tahrir Square, fled before an onslaught of riot police officers firing tear gas and rubber bullets, and then surged back to retake and hold the square through the early hours of Sunday.

State media reported that more than 650 people had been injured, including 40 riot police officers, and at least one civilian was killed.

Coming a day after a huge Islamist demonstration and just more than a week before the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, the outpouring of anger was the strongest rebuke yet with the military’s attempts to grant itself permanent governmental powers. And it was a reuniting of Islamist and liberal protest movements that had drifted apart since the early days of the uprising.

This time, instead of chanting for the fall of Mr. Mubarak, the demonstrators were chanting for the fall of the ruling military council that initially presented itself as the revolution’s savior.

“The generals said to us, ‘We are your partners,’ and we believed them,” said Tarek Saaed, 55, a construction safety supervisor who used a cane to walk among the boisterous crowds in the square. “Then the next day we find out they are partners with Mubarak,” he added, calling the day a turning point for Egypt.

The crowd only grew as state news media reported that the military said it would step back from a blueprint it had laid out this month for a lasting political role under the new constitution. Many of the protesters, and some outside observers, argued that the confrontation marked a significant setback to the military.

“The military council now feels that the political street will not accept that the military is going to hold the power for a long time,” argued Mahmoud Shokry, a former Egyptian ambassador and veteran political insider. “I think the military is going to reconsider the situation once more.”

After pledging to turn over power to civilians by September, the military has postponed the handover until after the ratification of a constitution and election of a president, sometime in 2013 or later. Then this month the military-led government put in writing a set of ground rules for a next constitution that would have given the military authority to intervene in civilian politics while protecting it from civilian oversight — setting off a firestorm.

“An extremely big mistake,” Mr. Shokry said.

Opposition to those guidelines brought the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group, back to the streets in force Friday as part of a rally tens of thousands of Islamists and a smaller contingent of liberals calling for an end to military rule.

In response, the military-led interim government announced Saturday morning that its constitutional guidelines would no longer be binding, only advisory. The government also revised the rules to say that the only role of the armed forces was protecting the country and “preserving its unity,” rather than the broader writ to guard Egypt’s “constitutional legitimacy.” Many, especially Islamists, believed the phrase had granted the authority to intervene at will in the civilian government.

In another bid to placate the protesters, the revisions also explicitly place the military under civilian government. “Like other state institutions,” the new text declares, the military should “abide by the constitutional and legislative regulations.”

“The president of the republic is the supreme commander of the armed forces and the minister of defense is the general commander of the armed forces,” the revised declaration said.

Still though, the military has not agreed to cede power once a Parliament is elected, or while the constitution is being drafted. Nor has it backed away from its right to set other nominating procedures for the constitutional drafting committee or to impose other rules on the final text.

Later Saturday morning, riot police officers moved into the square to eject a relative handful of protesters who had camped there overnight, including some relatives of those injured in the uprising against Mr. Mubarak and demanding compensation.

News reports of brutality by the riot police, however, brought out hundreds and then thousands of others vowing to defend Tahrir Square, the iconic center of Egyptian revolution and the Arab Spring. “The people want to bring down the field marshal,” they chanted. “Down with military rule!”

Unlike at many of the street protests here, young women in Western as well as Islamic dress and older people joined the throngs of young men, just as they did during the uprising. “We saw that people were being attacked and we came down to help,” said Huda Ouda, a 30-year-old secretary, pulling her red veil across her face as mask against tear gas. “We are completely against the military ruling this country,” she added, accusing the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of “playing a dirty game” by promoting chaos to create a pretext for holding power.

Ahmed Tamer, 37, from the neighborhood of Shubra, said: “The army still has us by the neck and they don’t want to let go.”

Protesters invading the square threw rocks at police vehicles, and by midday had captured a police truck. Rioters danced on the roof and passed out handcuffs, shields and other gear.

Others smashed the sidewalk into rocks to hurl at the police, or threw Molotov cocktails. Vehicles were set ablaze, fires were lit on the sidewalks, and late at night a bank caught fire. Plumes of black smoke from a burning police truck wafted through the white clouds of tear gas that floated along the Nile.

Retreating riot police officers fired nonlethal weapons from their trucks to try to push back the crowd. Clashes broke out throughout downtown Cairo and lasted for hours. An especially pitched battle lasted until well after midnight on the street leading from Tahrir Square to the Interior Ministry, and it was there that a police vehicle charged through the tear gas into a crowd of protesters.

Around 6 p.m., the police appeared to have retaken the square. But as the battle continued, the Muslim Brotherhood called on its members to return to the square, as did the liberal April 6 Movement. An organized group of hard-core soccer fans — experienced veterans of clashes with police, and since the revolution a regular element of street protests here — joined as well, and by about 7 p.m. the police had retreated again from the square as battles continued for several hours on the side streets.

Many worried that the strife was a ploy to disrupt the elections, now scheduled to begin Nov. 28. “This is exactly what the army wants,” said Mohamed Suleiman, 22, emerging from a government building to find chaos. “It is all a plan. I am afraid they will see this now and say the elections are impossible.”

The military’s plans for the constitution have been a major subject of debate on television talk shows here since the guidelines first emerged. Many protesters appeared well versed in the principles at stake. And their anger was undiminished by signs Saturday morning that the military-led government was beginning to offer concessions.

“It was our mistake to leave the square and allow the military to take over in the first place,” said Moktar Hussein, a 57-year-old radiologist and supporter of the new Social Democratic Party who was mingling in the liberated square after dark.

Naglia Nassar, a lawyer standing nearby, said she had been reluctantly willing to tolerate the military’s constitutional guidelines before she saw the rough treatment of the protesters and decided to come to the square. “If that is the way they are going to run us,” she said, “they have to be held accountable.”

Mayy el Sheikh, Dina Amer and Amina Ismail contributed reporting.

    Violent Protests in Egypt Pit Thousands Against Police, NYT, 19.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/middleeast/
    violence-erupts-in-cairo-as-egypts-military-cedes-political-ground.html

Sectarian Strife in City Bodes Ill for All of Syria

November 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A harrowing sectarian war has spread across the Syrian city of Homs this month, with supporters and opponents of the government blamed for beheadings, rival gangs carrying out tit-for-tat kidnappings, minorities fleeing for their native villages, and taxi drivers too fearful of drive-by shootings to ply the streets.

As it descends into sectarian hatred, Homs has emerged as a chilling window on what civil war in Syria could look like, just as some of Syria’s closest allies say the country appears to be heading in that direction. A spokesman for the Syrian opposition last week called the killings and kidnappings on both sides “a perilous threat to the revolution.” An American official called the strife in Homs “reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia,” where the very term “ethnic cleansing” originated in the 1990s.

“Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen sectarian attacks on the rise, and really ugly sectarian attacks,” the Obama administration official said in Washington. The longer President Bashar al-Assad “stays in power, what you see in Homs, you’ll see across Syria.”

Since the start of the uprising eight months ago, Homs has emerged as a pivot in the greatest challenge to the 11-year rule of Mr. Assad. Some of the earliest protests erupted there, and defectors soon sought refuge in rebellious neighborhoods. This month, government security forces tried to retake the city, in a bloody crackdown that continues.

Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, has a sectarian mix that mirrors the nation. The majority is Sunni Muslim, with sizable minorities of Christians and Alawites, a heterodox Muslim sect from which Mr. Assad draws much of his top leadership. Though some Alawites support the uprising, and some Sunnis still back the government, both communities have overwhelmingly gathered on opposite sides in the revolt.

Here it is not so much a fight between armed defectors and government security forces, or protesters defying a crackdown. Rather, the struggle in Homs has dragged the communities themselves into a battle that residents fear, even as they accuse the government of trying to incite it as a way to divide and rule the diverse country.

Fear has become so pronounced that, residents say, Alawites wear Christian crosses to avoid being abducted or killed when passing through the most restive Sunni neighborhoods, where garbage has piled up in a sign of the city’s dysfunction.

“It is so sad that we reached this point,” said a Syrian priest who lives in Lebanon but maintains close relations with people in Homs, in particular the Christian community.

In past weeks, Homs was buckling under a relentless crackdown as the government tried to reimpose control over the city. Dozens were killed, but the American official said the Obama administration believed the government withdrew some forces in accordance with an Arab League plan to end the violence. Residents offered a different version. Several said the government had repainted tanks and armored vehicles blue and redeployed them as a police force carrying out the same operations.

“The regime wants to say to the Arab observers that the police are confronting protesters, not the army or security men,” said Abu Hassan, a 40-year-old activist there.

On Friday, Syria tentatively agreed to an Arab League proposal to send more than 500 monitors to oversee the faltering plan, though in a request that could undo the initiative, the secretary general of the Arab League, Nabil el-Araby, said Syria had asked for amendments.

But even as the death toll has dropped in Homs in recent days, the sectarian strife seems to have gathered a relentless momentum that has defied the attempts of both Sunni and Alawite residents to stanch it. One prominent Sunni activist, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, used the term shabeeha — an Arabic word that refers to government paramilitaries — to describe the situation evolving inside Homs.

“There are shabeeha on both sides now,” he said.

He blamed the government for fomenting the sectarian tension, but added, “I feel disgusted at what’s happening in Syria, and I am afraid of what might happen next.”

Mohammed Saleh is a 54-year-old Alawite in Homs. A communist, he was a political prisoner for 12 years and was released in 2000. In an interview, he said that insurgents stopped a minivan carrying factory employees last Sunday, asked the Christians and Sunnis to leave and then kidnapped 17 Alawites. Enraged, the families of the Alawites went into the streets, randomly kidnapping Sunnis after demanding their identification.

“They know your sect by your family name,” he said.

Families on both sides asked him to mediate, Mr. Saleh said, and after days of negotiations, sometimes through calls to Syrian expatriates, he secured the release of all 36 people kidnapped in the episode at 4 a.m. Friday. He said many were still missing in other kidnappings.

“I’m against the regime,” he said. But, he added: “Now I am being critical of some of the revolutionaries. We are against the regime and we want it to fall, but the revolutionaries need to present a better and more beautiful alternative. And if the opposition is going to be similar to the regime, it’s going to be dangerous.”

Mr. Saleh is not alone in trying to stop the tide. Others, Sunni and Alawite, have joined him in a group in Homs called the Popular Solidarity Committee, which has sought to defuse tension. Fadwa Suleiman, an Alawite actress from Aleppo, visited Homs on Nov. 11 in a gesture of solidarity with protesters in the besieged city.

The violence itself still pales before the government’s crackdown, which the United Nations says has killed more than 3,500 people. But in a dozen interviews with residents in Homs, people spoke of the city’s fabric being torn apart. Paramilitaries on both sides have burned houses and shops, they say. Alawite residents have been forced to flee to their native villages. Kidnappings, many of them random, have accelerated. Numbers are impossible to gauge, but scores have been abducted. Residents say some captives are used as bargaining chips, but not always.

“My cousin was kidnapped, and he was a civilian Alawite,” said a dissident activist from the Alawite neighborhood of Al Zahra in Homs, where locales are often largely segregated by sect. “He was found killed and his head was chopped off.”

The activist, who gave a pseudonym, Abu Ali, said his relatives text message each other with the license plate of the taxis they take. They call each other when they arrive. He said his brother, a taxi driver, no longer dares to take to the streets.

Another Sunni activist in Homs played down the strife, saying Alawites were kidnapped only in retaliation and denying that insurgents had beheaded anyone. Like others, he insisted that the violence was minimal compared with the ferocity of the government’s crackdown.

Christians in Homs seem to have tried to stay neutral, an admittedly difficult task.

“We’d rather emigrate than hold weapons and be part of a civil war,” said a Christian in a telephone interview who gave his name as Hisham and whose mother-in-law had already fled Homs.

He blamed the government for the greatest share of violence. But he accused Sunni insurgents of killing Alawites to drive them from the city’s three predominantly Alawite neighborhoods, where support for Mr. Assad runs strongest.

“There is no room for us, or for the educated Sunnis, in a civil war,” said his wife, who gave her name as Hiyam, also speaking by telephone. “A civil war means emigrating.”

Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

    Sectarian Strife in City Bodes Ill for All of Syria, NYT, 19.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/middleeast/in-homs-syria-sectarian-battles-stir-fears-of-civil-war.html

Qaddafi’s Son Seif al-Islam, Said to Be Captured in Libya

November 19, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Libya’s transitional government said Saturday that its fighters had captured Seif al-Islam el Qaddafi, the fugitive son and one-time heir apparent to ousted Libyan leader Col. Muammar el Qaddafi.

The younger Qaddafi’s capture, if confirmed, would mean that the last remaining figure who might have rallied loyalists of the old government was in custody.

“We have arrested Seif al-Islam Gaddafi in the Obari area,” Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagy told Reuters.

Once a prominent advocate of changing his father’s Libya, Seif al-Islam had begun to assume his father’s hard-line stance against the rebels and the uprising as the crisis dragged on. In June, the International Criminal Court in The Hague called him Libya’s “de facto prime minister” and issued an arrest warrant for him, his father and the country’s chief of intelligence.

As of Saturday night in Libya, foreign journalists had not yet seen the younger Mr. Qaddafi in custody. In August, the provisional government that took power after Colonel Qaddafi’s fall had announced that it had captured Seif al-Islam only to backtrack after he appeared walking the streets of Tripoli.

And last month the provisional leaders announced that fighters had captured Colonel Qaddafi alive only to announced soon after that he had died — evidently killed while in their custody.

According to media reports, Self al-Islam was captured in the southern desert region of the country, apparently attempting to escape across the border into one of Libya’s African neighbors as some of his less prominent siblings have done. He was said to have been captured by fighters from the Western mountain city of Zintan, and in the fractious world of post-Qaddafi Libyan politics, the success of the fighters in detaining him is likely to bolster their claim to more power in the next provisional government.

Like most of the local Libyan militias who brought down Colonel Qaddafi, however, the Zintan fighters have made clear that they report to their own local leaders, not the provisional government, and it remains to be seen whether the fighters who captured Seif al-Islam will turn him over to the International Criminal Court as the provisional government has promised or exact their own revenge instead.

Reuters reported that Bashir Thaelba, a Zintan field commander, had said that Seif al-Islam would be held in Zintan until there was a government to hand him over to. A government is expected to form soon.

“The rebels of Zintan announce that Seif al-Islam Gaddafi has been arrested along with three of his aides today,” Mr. Thaelba said in remarks on Libyan television. “We hope at this historical moment that the future of Libya will be bright.”

For years Seif al-Islam cultivated as image at home and abroad as the face of change in Qaddafi’s Libya. An international playboy in his youth, he went on to earn a doctoral degree at the London School of Economics. He wrote a thesis on the importance of democracy and civil society groups, although accusations later emerged that it had been ghost written by consultants working for his father’s government.

He publicly championed the cause of modernizing and liberalizing his father’s Libya, including loosening the tight restrictions on political speech, opening up free enterprise and adopting a constitution. In the staged drama that passed for public political life under Colonel Qaddafi, Seif al-Islam was often portrayed as standing up to the authoritarian old guard around his father, who seemed to push back against his ideas. Some Libyans who hoped for a freer future had pinned their hopes on him.

Western consultants say Seif al-Islam managed to parlay partial control of Libya’s oil assets and investments to induce Western business and governments to ease Libya’s isolation under his father, and his success helped him emerge as the heir apparent among his father’s many children. His brother Muatassim, who served as Libya’s national security adviser, was always considered a rival.

But as the revolt against his father’s rule broke out in late February, it was Seif al-Islam who delivered the Qaddafi government’s first public response, warning in a long and rambling speech that the government would crush the “rats” who challenged his father’s rule. Libya, he said, would slide into civil war. To opponents of the government, the son now sounded very much like his father.

During the rebellion and NATO bombing campaign against the government, Seif al-Islam was said to propose a truce to the Western governments based on the idea that he would lead a transition to electoral democracy and away from his father’s rule. But in public interviews he always insisted that his father should retain a prominent figurehead role, which he sometimes compared to the Queen of England. The Western powers never warmed to the idea.

In his last interview — in early August, less than three weeks before he fled as rebels took Tripoli — Seif al-Islam appeared a changed man, nervous and agitated, wearing a newly grown beard and fingering prayer beads. He had always been a religious Muslim, he said, though his previous image was decidedly secular.

Casting aside any pretense of negotiating peace with the rebels of the West, Seif al-Islam said in the interview that his father’s government was negotiating a secret deal with a faction of Islamists among the rebels. Together, he said, Qaddafi loyalists and Islamist rebels would turn on the liberals among the rebels, who would be killed or driven into exile, and Libya would become an Islamic state relying on the Qoran instead of a Constitution.

“Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?” He added, chuckling, “It is a funny story.”

Libyan Islamists denied the report immediately. Officials of his father’s government denied it the next day. And at least one person close to the Qaddafi family later said that Seif al-Islam appeared to be losing his grip.

    Qaddafi’s Son Seif al-Islam, Said to Be Captured in Libya, NYT, 19.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/africa/gaddafi-son-captured-seif-al-islam-qaddafi-libya.html

Don’t Give Up on Sanctions

November 18, 2011
The New York Times
By REUEL MARC GERECHT and MARK DUBOWITZ

Washington

THE release last week of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on Iran’s progressing nuclear program has to make one wonder whether more than 30 years of sanctions have helped to thwart — or even stall — the country’s nuclear designs. There is no evidence to suggest that economic coercion has ever made Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, rethink the risks-versus-rewards calculus for developing atomic weapons. And the truly crippling sanctions that might have more of an effect would never be accepted by Western politicians, who are fearful of higher oil costs and of being seen as too harsh on the Iranian people.

But giving up on sanctions is not the answer. Instead, we have to make sanctions smarter, more mutually reinforcing.

The sale of oil — about 2.3 million barrels are exported every day — accounts for more than 50 percent of Iran’s national budget. Under current American law, the importation of Iranian oil is prohibited, but gasoline refined from Iranian petroleum is not. Sanctions obviously need to hit this industry harder. But they must also avoid causing a significant increase in petroleum prices. If the United States were to impose an international embargo on Iranian crude, the price would skyrocket, providing Ayatollah Khamenei with a windfall profit. Tehran could simply sell less oil and make more money, while American consumers would suffer. When unrest in Libya took its 1.3 million barrels per day of crude off the market, Americans saw a spike in oil prices.

But effective energy sanctions don’t have to raise oil prices; they can actually do the opposite. Washington just has to learn how to leverage greed.

We should bar from operating in the United States any European and most Asian energy companies that deal in Iranian oil and work with the Iranian central bank, Revolutionary Guards or National Oil Company. At the same time, however, we should allow companies from countries that have little interest in Iran’s nuclear program, or its pro-democracy Green Movement, and that are willing to risk their access to American markets — mainly Chinese companies — to continue buying Iranian crude in whatever quantity they desire.

This would reduce the number of buyers of Iranian petroleum, without reducing the quantity of oil on the market. With fewer buyers to compete with, the Chinese companies would have significant negotiating leverage with which to extract discounts from Tehran. The government could lose out on tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue, loosening its hold on power.

This approach may seem distasteful to some, because it does, in a sense, reward bad Chinese behavior. But the objective of sanctions is to cause real economic pain in Tehran, not to make Americans feel moral. It would also, admittedly, be a hassle for many of our allies, but the short-term diplomatic trauma would not overwhelm Washington. And most important, markets would react in a rational way.

The Obama administration is obviously worried that more robust sanctions could shut down the export of oil and spook the markets. But support for such measures is rising in Congress. A powerful bipartisan coalition has developed in the House demanding an investigation of the Iranian central bank to “expeditiously determine” whether it’s been involved in aiding terrorist activities or the development and proliferation of unconventional weapons. Severe sanctions against the bank would immediately follow.

But such sanctions need to be targeted correctly. If we selectively prohibited oil transactions among those companies we could influence, while not enforcing sanctions against Chinese energy firms, energy traders would quickly sense that only the number of purchasers had changed, while the quantity of oil on the market remained the same. And the Obama administration just might ride into the 2012 elections with the Islamic Republic in turmoil.

Iran hawks should not view sanctions as a pusillanimous cop-out. Like President Obama’s failed attempt at diplomatic engagement, sanctions are an unavoidable and necessary prelude to any more forceful action to stop Ayatollah Khamenei’s nuclear ambitions. America may be in for a long cold-war struggle in which sanctions will play a critical role in weakening Tehran. And the Islamic Republic hardly has the resources of the Soviet Union. This time, sanctions might actually, sooner rather than later, put our enemy on his knees.

 

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Mark Dubowitz is the executive director and head
of its Iran Energy Project.

    Don’t Give Up on Sanctions, NYT, 18.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/opinion/dont-give-up-on-sanctions-against-iran.html

Obama and Chinese Prime Minister Meet After a Tense Week

November 19, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — President Obama and China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, held an unscheduled meeting on Saturday at the end of an Asian forum, following a week when the United States made it clear that it was re-engaging fully in the region and not willing to cede influence in Asia to a rising China.

While the meeting in Indonesia touched on delicate topics — the United States’ demands for currency reform and China’s festering territorial disputes with its neighbors — the most notable aspect of the meeting was that it happened after bold diplomatic moves that startled Chinese leaders.

Earlier in his trip to Asia, Mr. Obama announced that the United States would station 2,500 Marines in Australia, and on Friday he said he would send Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Myanmar after years of mostly shunning that country’s leadership.

After what he described as a “very short” meeting, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, played down the notion of substantial differences between the governments, saying that “we have a very complicated and quite substantial relationship with China across the board.”

The session apparently came at the request of China, which was seeking to expand on informal discussions the two leaders had at a dinner Friday.

Although Chinese leaders issued a series of stern warnings throughout the week that the United States was trying to destabilize the region, the response to Washington’s more assertive stance has been relatively muted. That is a change from the past when such moves would have generated more critical statements and sometimes blistering commentaries in the state-run media.

Bonnie Glaser, a senior fellow in China studies at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, attributed the Chinese response to possible confusion over Mr. Obama’s intentions as he approaches a difficult presidential election.

“They’re probably not too sure how much of it to attribute to the political campaign, and how much to attribute to a shift in U.S. strategy,” Ms. Glaser said.

Whether the meeting on Saturday closed gaps between the sides on currency or the territorial disputes was unclear.

The United States and other Western nations have complained regularly that China’s currency has been artificially undervalued, giving Chinese exporters an unfair price advantage in competition for exports.

But Chinese state television stated that Mr. Wen reiterated the country’s position that it already had made significant progress in adjusting the value of its currency, and would continue to do so at its own pace.

Mr. Donilon said the two leaders had touched on the territorial dispute over islands in the South China Sea, which has been a focus of Asian concern — and Chinese anger — after growing confrontations between Beijing and other governments in the region.

China’s increasingly aggressive efforts to exert territorial claims over potentially mineral-rich parts of the South China Sea are one reason a number of smaller Asian countries have asked the United States to reassert its stake in the region in the last year. A number of countries, led by the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brunei have varying claims on territory that China also covets.

The United States has offered in the past to mediate the disputes, which was greeted with bitterness in Beijing, where leaders saw it as interference.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters on Air Force One said China had been forced to confront the issue during a final summit meeting with Asian leaders in Indonesia.

That official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that officials of 16 of 18 nations there had expressed concerns about maritime security in the region.

He said Mr. Wen at first seemed “maybe a little bit grouchy” about the confrontation, then made less assertive comments than Chinese leaders had previously.

That official noted that Mr. Wen did not repeat past demands that territorial disputes be resolved only in one-on-one negotiations between China and its neighbors, which would give China an advantage because of its relative size and power. But a report in Xinhua, the official government news agency, said Mr. Wen reiterated China’s stance, which he said was “clear and consistent,” suggesting his omission may not indicate any movement.

On Friday, Mr. Wen had pushed back against the United States, saying that “outside forces should not, under any pretext” interfere in a regional fight over the control of the sea.

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting from Air Force One.

    Obama and Chinese Prime Minister Meet After a Tense Week, NYT, 19.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/asia/wen-jiabao-chinese-leader-shows-flexibility-after-meeting-obama.html

Obama’s Trip Emphasizes Role of Pacific Rim

November 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

BALI, Indonesia — President Obama discussed maritime security, nuclear nonproliferation and disaster aid at an Asian summit meeting on Friday, but just his presence on this resort island telegraphed his main message: that the United States is turning its focus to the booming Asia-Pacific region after a decade of preoccupation with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Calling the region critical to economic growth and national security, he said, “I want everyone to know from the outset, my administration is committed to strengthening our ties with each country individually but also with the region’s institutions.”

The American focus on Asia has been raising tensions with an ever more powerful China, which has been increasingly assertive in the region. On Saturday morning Mr. Obama held a previously unscheduled meeting with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China. Administration officials said Mr. Obama and Mr. Wen talked briefly on Friday night at a dinner for the gathered leaders and agreed to meet the next morning. Earlier on Friday, Mr. Wen had pushed back against the United States, saying that “outside forces should not, under any pretext” interfere in a regional fight over the control of the South China Sea.

Mr. Obama spoke Friday at the opening of the annual meeting of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which does not include China. Before that session, he met separately with the leaders of India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

On Saturday, Mr. Obama became the first American president to participate at the larger East Asia Summit meeting, which does include China as well as Russia, India and Japan, before he was scheduled to return to Washington after eight days of Pacific Rim diplomacy.

During their Saturday meeting, Mr. Obama and Mr. Wen focused on economic issues, according to Thomas E. Donilon, the president’s national security adviser, who added that, “It was a good engagement.” Mr. Obama pressed the same points about China’s currency policy that he made with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Hawaii.

“It was important, I think, to continue that conversation, because, as you know, Premier Wen is the principal economic manager in China,” Mr. Donilon said. “They briefly talked about the South China Sea and the East Asia Summit at the end of that — because it was a short meeting.”

The summit meeting on Friday was eclipsed by news of a diplomatic opening between the United States and Myanmar now that its military has loosened its chokehold on freedoms there. Mr. Obama said that he was sending Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Myanmar, also known as Burma, to test its government’s sincerity about democratic reforms and human rights.

The countries along the South China Sea have been especially eager for the United States to increase its presence in the region as a check on China’s ambitions.

Mr. Obama’s trip has been something of a balancing act in which he is trying to meld geopolitics and domestic concerns.

Up to the time of his departure from Washington, there was speculation that Mr. Obama would skip the Indonesia trip, given the political risks of being away from the United States during a time of high unemployment and discontent over the economy.

Against that backdrop, Mr. Obama has sought throughout his travels from Hawaii — where he played host to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation free trade forum — to Australia and Indonesia to describe his trip in terms of its potential to create American jobs by expanding exports.

To that end, he attended a signing ceremony at which representatives of Boeing and Lion Air, Indonesia’s largest private airline, signed a deal for Lion Air to buy 230 aircraft, an agreement worth $22 billion at current list prices.

Mr. Obama said the deal was “a remarkable example of the trade investment and commercial opportunities that exist in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Mr. Obama said his administration and the United States Export-Import Bank “were critical in facilitating this deal,” which he estimated would result in more than 100,000 American jobs over a period of years.

Domestic politics also had a bit role in Mr. Obama’s meetings with Asian leaders, including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia. With Mr. Yudhoyono, Mr. Obama announced the transfer and upgrade of 24 excess F-16 fighters to the Indonesian Air Force, reflecting, he said, a commitment to the region’s security, and an expansion of Peace Corps volunteers and exchanges for education and environmental programs.

In remarks at his separate sessions with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India and the president of the Philippines, Benigno S. Aquino III, Mr. Obama praised the contributions of Indian-Americans and Filipino-Americans to the United States.

After the meeting, Mr. Singh turned to Mr. Obama and called it “a privilege” to have the Obama administration so “deeply invested in ensuring that India makes a success of its historic journey” to establish a more open society. He added that cooperation on civilian nuclear programs, disaster response and maritime security “unite us in our quest of a world free from the threat of war, want and exploitation.”

In Mr. Obama’s meeting with Mr. Aquino, he commended the Filipino president “for his leadership, for his reform efforts.” Mr. Aquino said, “We look forward, in these turbulent times of ours, to really further strengthen our relationship.”

 

Ian Johnson contributed reporting from Beijing.

    Obama’s Trip Emphasizes Role of Pacific Rim, NYT, 18.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/world/asia/obamas-trip-sends-message-to-asian-leaders.html

Decline of American Exceptionalism

November 18, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

Is America exceptional among nations? Are we, as a country and a people and a culture, set apart and better than others? Are we, indeed, the “shining city upon a hill” that Ronald Reagan described? Are we “chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world” as George W. Bush said?

This year, for the first time, most Americans did not say yes.

According to a report issued on Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, when Americans were asked if they agreed with the statement “our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others,” only 49 percent agreed. That’s down from 60 percent in 2002, the first time that Pew asked the question.

Perhaps even more striking was that, among young people (those ages 18 to 29), the percentage of Americans who believed that their culture was superior was lower than young citizens of Germany, Spain and Britain.

Even if you put aside the somewhat loaded terminology of cultural superiority, Americans simply don’t seem to feel very positive about America at the moment. A Time Magazine/Abt SRBI poll conducted last month found that 71 percent of Americans believed that our position in the world has been on the decline in the past few years.

And an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey conducted earlier this month found that most Americans believed that we aren’t simply going through tough times as a nation but are at “the start of a longer-term decline where the U.S. is no longer the leading country in the world.”

We are settling into a dangerous national pessimism. We must answer the big questions. Was our nation’s greatness about having God or having grit? Is exceptionalism an anointing or an ethos? If the answers are grit and ethos, then we must work to recapture them. We must work our way out of these doldrums. We must learn our way out. We must innovate our way out.

We have to stop snuggling up to nostalgia, acknowledge that we have allowed a mighty country to be brought low and set a course to restitution. And that course is through hard work and tough choices. You choose greatness; it doesn’t choose you.

And that means that we must invest in our future. We must invest in our crumbling infrastructure. We must invest in the industries of the future. We must invest in a generation of foundering and forgotten children. We must invest in education. Cut-and-grow is ruinous mythology.

We must look out at the world with clear eyes and sober minds and do the difficult work as we’ve done time and time again. That’s how a city shines upon a hill.

    Decline of American Exceptionalism, NYT, 18.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/opinion/blow-decline-of-american-exceptionalism.html

Armed Groups Are on Rise in Syria, as Are Civil War Fears

November 17, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI

BEIRUT, Lebanon — For the second day in a row, deserters from the Syrian Army carried out attacks on symbols of the Assad government’s centers of power, targeting the youth offices of the ruling Baath Party on Thursday after firing rocket-propelled grenades on a military intelligence base on Wednesday, activists said.

The attacks, along with fraying relations among Syria’s religious communities, growing international pressure and a relentless crackdown, prompted Russia, Syria’s closest ally, to say that the country was moving closer to a civil war.

The attacks may have been more symbolic than effective, but could mark the increased ability of a growing number of defectors to publicize their exploits. Attacks on government installations — in the southern town of Dara’a and the central city of Homs, for instance — have been reported since the start of the uprising.

The attacks themselves paled before the bloodiest episodes of Syria’s last uprising in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, insurgents stormed the office of the Aleppo Artillery School, killing 32 cadets. It was unclear whether anyone was killed or wounded in these attacks, but the constituency of armed strikes and the bold choice of targets has heightened the profile of Syria’s armed insurgency.

The Syrian government did not mention either attack, which activists reported, citing the accounts of local residents. But even without a firm picture of any damage, the attacks were, at a minimum, indicative of determination on the part of military defectors in the face of a crackdown that the United Nations says has killed more than 3,500 people.

Army desertions — which have been reported since the start of the uprising and may now number in the thousands — have yet to undermine the unity of Syria’s military. But the continued flow increases the pool of recruits for the armed defector groups. And some analysts said the defections might be increasing as Syria’s last remaining allies peel away, including the Arab League, which has threatened to suspend Syria’s membership in coming days if it does not abide by its call to stop the killing.

“It’s a huge boost to whoever wants to stand against the regime, both on a military level and on the level of civilians,” said Hussein Shobokshi, a columnist with Asharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper published in London. “This regime has expired, and the move will set the round for further defections, civilian protests and maybe even military intervention. It will also allow the international community to take further action like creating safe haven or no-fly zones.”

There is no unified opposition driving events in Syria. Many of the leaders calling for the downfall of the government have voiced concerns over the attacks and warned that they could lead to internal strife, similar to what happened in Syria’s neighbors Lebanon and Iraq.

“I am opposed to internal fighting; the people of one country should not kill each other,” said Fayez Sara, an influential opposition figure in Damascus. “The operations against government forces should stop.”

On Thursday, the civilian toll continued to mount. The Local Coordination Committees, an opposition group, said at least 19 people had been killed across Syria, including four army defectors, seven civilians and two minors.

In Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said that the international community should call on all sides in Syria to stop the bloodshed. “There are more and more weapons that are being smuggled in from neighboring countries,” Mr. Lavrov said. “Today I saw a television report about some new so-called rebel Free Syrian Army organizing an attack on the government building, on the building belonging to Syria’s armed forces.”

“This was quite similar to a true civil war,” he added.

In Turkey, once Syria’s ally and now a sharp critic, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the lack of effective action against the Damascus government, questioning whether international players were ignoring the bloodshed because the country offered no precious resources.

“Syria might not be generating the level of reactions seen in Libya because it does not have that much petrol,” Mr. Erdogan said in a televised speech at the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Summit in Istanbul. “However, I would like you to know that those who are killed in Syria are as human and living souls as those who died in Libya.”

At the United Nations, Germany, France and Britain were circulating a draft General Assembly resolution endorsing the Arab League-brokered peace plan calling on Syria to halt all violence and withdraw armed forces from civilian areas, moving to further quarantine Syria internationally as well as in the Arab world. Several Arab countries expressed interest in helping to sponsor the measure, the German mission said in a statement.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group operating in exile, said that armed fighters believed to be members of the Syrian Free Army launched an attack with rocket-propelled grenades on a building housing the youth offices for the Baath Party in the city of Maarat al-Noaman in the northwestern province of Idlib. The group said clashes ensued between the fighters and security forces who were outside the building.

Abo Moayed, an activist from Idlib who said that he was in contact with fighters, said that the attack was launched after receiving signals from soldiers inside the building. “Around 250 fighters participated in this attack. And after the attack, 60 soldiers who were in the building defected and left the town.”

There was no way to independently verify his account.

The attack on the intelligence installation, in the Harasta suburb of Damascus, was one of several clashes claimed Wednesday by the Free Syrian Army. But at the time, the Local Coordination Committees said the attack was most probably an act of vengeance by protesters who were imprisoned and interrogated there. Another group said only two rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the building, and there was no apparent damage.

Omar Idlibi, an activist with the Local Coordination Committees, said that at least two dozen soldiers had left their ranks in the city of Hama on Thursday.

In October, the Security Council failed to pass a toothless resolution condemning the violence, in the face of a rare veto by both Russia and China. A nonbinding General Assembly resolution in support of the Arab League demands would carry even less weight.

But since all 193 member states can vote, the outcome would reflect global opinion. Syria, already embarrassed that its Arab credentials are being questioned, has also long put stock in the General Assembly as reflecting international legal opinion over issues important to it, particularly the return of the Golan Heights by Israel.

“We hope it will show Assad just how isolated he is,” Peter Wittig, Germany’s representative to the United Nations, said in a statement.

Hwaida Saad and Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Beirut, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

    Armed Groups Are on Rise in Syria, as Are Civil War Fears, NYT, 17.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/world/middleeast/armed-attacks-on-syrian-sites-appear-to-rise.html

Group in U.S. Hoped for Big Payday in Offer to Help Qaddafi

November 17, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and PENN BULLOCK

WASHINGTON — To a colorful group of Americans — the Washington terrorism expert, the veteran C.I.A. officer, the Republican operative, the Kansas City lawyer — the Libyan gambit last March looked like a rare business opportunity.

Even as NATO bombed Libya, the Americans offered to make Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi their client — and charge him a hefty consulting fee. Their price: a $10 million retainer before beginning negotiations with Colonel Qaddafi’s representatives.

“The fees and payments set forth in this contract are MINIMUM NON-REFUNDABLE FEES,” said the draft contract, with capital letters for emphasis. “The fees are an inducement for the ATTORNEYS AND ADVISORS to take the case and nothing else.”

Neil C. Livingstone, 65, the terrorism specialist and consultant, said he helped put together the deal after hearing that one of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, was interested in an exit strategy for the family. But he and his partners were not going to work for free, Mr. Livingstone said.

“We were not an eleemosynary organization,” he said.

Mr. Livingstone, a television commentator and prolific author who moved home to Montana this year to try a run for governor, said he had long been a vocal critic of Colonel Qaddafi and was briefly jailed by his government on a visit to Libya in the 1970s. The goal of the consulting deal, he insisted, was not to save Colonel Qaddafi but to prevent a bloodbath in Libya by creating a quick way out for the ruler and his family.

“The idea was to find them an Arabic-speaking sanctuary and let them keep some money, in return for getting out,” he said. The consultants promised to help free billions of dollars in blocked Libyan assets by steering the government into compliance with United Nations resolutions.

But the Americans did not get the Treasury Department license they needed to accept payment from Libya, which was then subject to sanctions. Colonel Qaddafi was ousted from Tripoli in August by rebel forces backed by NATO airstrikes, and was captured and killed Oct. 20.

Now the confidential documents describing the proposed deal have surfaced on the Internet, offering a glimpse of how some saw lucrative possibilities in the power struggle that would end Colonel Qaddafi’s erratic reign. A Facebook page called WikiLeaks Libya has made public scores of documents apparently found in Libyan government offices after the Qaddafi government fell.

The papers contained a shock for the Americans: a three-page letter addressed to Colonel Qaddafi on April 17 by another partner in the proposed deal, a Belgian named Dirk Borgers. Rather than suggesting a way out of power, Mr. Borgers offered the Libyan dictator the lobbying services of what he called the “American Action Group” to outmaneuver the rebels and win United States government support.

Noting that the rebels’ Transitional National Council was gaining control of Libyan assets abroad, and attaching a registration form showing that the rebels had engaged their own lobbyists, Mr. Borgers said it was time for Colonel Qaddafi to fight back with his own Washington representatives.

“Our group of Libyan sympathizers is extremely worried about this and we would like to help to block the actions of your international enemies and to support a normal working relationship with the United States Government,” the letter said. “Therefore it is absolutely required to speak officially and with one strong voice with the American Government.”

Mr. Borgers ended the letter with the words “Your Obedient Servants,” signing his own name and adding those of the four Americans.

The letter is especially awkward for Mr. Livingstone — described by Mr. Borgers in the proposal as the “recognized best American anti-terrorism expert” — who closed his Washington consulting firm in April to plan his campaign for governor.

But Mr. Livingstone said that he had never seen the letter before this week and that it distorted his intentions. “That doesn’t reflect our view at all,” Mr. Livingstone said. “Our whole goal was to get the Qaddafis out of there as fast as possible.”

Another member of the proposed American team, Marty Martin, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who led the agency’s Qaeda department from 2002 to 2004, said he, too, was chagrined to see Mr. Borgers’s letter this week.

“We were not there to be lobbyists for Qaddafi,” said Mr. Martin, who retired from the C.I.A. in 2007. “I was not told anything about that letter.”

The other American partners were Neil S. Alpert, who had worked for the Republican National Committee and the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Randell K. Wood, a Kansas City, Mo., lawyer who has represented Libyan officials and organizations since the 1980s. (Neither Mr. Alpert nor Mr. Wood responded to requests for comment.)

Mr. Borgers, reached at his home in Belgium, dismissed his former partners’ complaints about his letter to Colonel Qaddafi — though he said he “might not” have shared its text with them.

“Let’s not argue about semantics,” he said. He was in Tripoli at the time, he said, watching the chaos and violence escalate, and he thought Colonel Qaddafi should remain in power at least until an election could be held.

Mr. Borgers said he, too, wanted to “stop the butchering,” but he offered a positive spin on Colonel Qaddafi’s record.

“I don’t think he was that brutal a dictator,” Mr. Borgers said. “He created a country out of nothing over 42 years. He created a very good lifestyle for the people.”

Of the $10 million fee the group sought, Mr. Borgers said, “The aim was not to make money.” On the other hand, he added, “If you want to put up a serious operation in Washington, I think you need at least $10 million.”

Mr. Borgers, who said he was a project engineer who had worked on infrastructure projects in many countries, was told by Libyan officials a week after sending his letter to Colonel Qaddafi that the proposal had been rejected. He said he had no idea if the leader saw it.

The documents on the aborted deal are not the first with an American angle to surface in post-Qaddafi Libya. In September, journalists and human rights advocates made public correspondence between Libyan intelligence and the C.I.A., including discussion of the rendition of terrorist suspects to Libya.

Seven months after the $10 million deal that was not to be, Colonel Qaddafi is dead. His son Seif is believed to be in hiding, possibly in Mali or Niger. Mr. Livingstone is focused on the problems of Montana, not Libya. Mr. Borgers, 68, said he was “trying to retire,” though he said he just might entertain international business opportunities if they arose.

But the wheels of the Washington bureaucracy grind slowly. A Treasury Department spokeswoman, who would speak of confidential licensing matters only on the condition of anonymity, said the group’s application to accept millions from the vanquished Qaddafi government “is still pending.”

 

Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Penn Bullock from New York. Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

    Group in U.S. Hoped for Big Payday in Offer to Help Qaddafi, NYT, 17.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/world/africa/us-group-offered-to-aid-qaddafi-documents-show.html

Clinton Set to Visit Myanmar as Obama Cites Progress

November 17, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS FULLER

BANGKOK — Citing “flickers of progress” in Myanmar’s political climate, President Obama announced Friday that he was sending Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on a visit next month, the first by a secretary of state in more than 50 years.

The decision was announced in Bali, Indonesia, where nations from Southeast Asia were meeting on Friday with leaders from across the Pacific Rim, including the United States, China and Japan.

“For decades Americans have been deeply concerned about the denial of basic human rights for the Burmese people,” Mr. Obama said. “The persecution of democratic reformers, the brutality shown toward ethnic minorities and the concentration of power in the hands of a few military leaders has challenged our conscience and isolated Burma from the United States and much of the world.”

But he added that “after years of darkness, we’ve seen flickers of progress in these last several weeks” as the president and Parliament in Myanmar have taken steps toward reform.

“Of course there’s far more to be done,” Mr. Obama said.

The decision to send Mrs. Clinton came as Myanmar took another step away from its diplomatic isolation on Thursday when its neighbors agreed to let the country, which had been run for decades by the military, take on the chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2014.

Myanmar has long coveted the rotating chairmanship of the organization, known as Asean. The country renounced its turn in 2006 in the face of foreign pressure over human rights abuses.

“It’s not about the past, it’s about the future, what leaders are doing now,” the Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, told reporters in Bali about the chairmanship. “We’re trying to ensure the process of change continues.”

Myanmar inaugurated a new civilian system this year after decades of military rule. The new government, led by a former general, Thein Sein, has freed a number of political prisoners, taken steps to liberalize the nation’s heavily state-controlled economy and made overtures to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel laureate who was released from house arrest last year.

In a telephone conversation flying from Australia to Indonesia, Mr. Obama sought assurances from Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi before approving the visit and she “confirmed that she supports American engagement to move this process forward,” Mr. Obama said.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party won elections in 1990, but the result was ignored by the military. Her party, the National League for Democracy, has said it will decide on Friday whether to rejoin the political system after having been de-listed as a party by the junta.

    Clinton Set to Visit Myanmar as Obama Cites Progress, NYT, 17.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/world/asia/myanmar-will-lead-asean-group.html

A U.S. Marine Base for Australia Irritates China

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

CANBERRA, Australia — President Obama announced Wednesday that the United States planned to deploy 2,500 Marines in Australia to shore up alliances in Asia, but the move prompted a sharp response from Beijing, which accused Mr. Obama of escalating military tensions in the region.

The agreement with Australia amounts to the first long-term expansion of the American military’s presence in the Pacific since the end of the Vietnam War. It comes despite budget cuts facing the Pentagon and an increasingly worried reaction from Chinese leaders, who have argued that the United States is seeking to encircle China militarily and economically.

“It may not be quite appropriate to intensify and expand military alliances and may not be in the interest of countries within this region,” Liu Weimin, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in response to the announcement by Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia.

In an address to the Australian Parliament on Thursday morning, Mr. Obama said he had “made a deliberate and strategic decision — as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future.”

The president said the moves were not intended to isolate China, but they were an unmistakable sign that the United States had grown warier of its intentions.

China has invested heavily in military modernization and has begun to deploy long-range aircraft and a more able deep-sea naval force, and it has asserted territorial claims to disputed islands that would give it broad sway over oil and gas rights in the East and South China Seas.

While the new military commitment is relatively modest, Mr. Obama has promoted it as the cornerstone of a strategy to confront more directly the challenge posed by China’s rapid advance as an economic and military power. He has also made some progress in creating a new Pacific free-trade zone that would give America’s free-market allies in the region some trading privileges that do not immediately extend to China.

Mr. Obama described the deployment as responding to the wishes of democratic allies in the region, from Japan to India. Some allies have expressed concerns that the United States, facing war fatigue and a slackened economy, will cede its leadership role to China.

The president said budget-cutting in Washington — and the inevitable squeeze on military spending — would not inhibit his ability to follow through. Defense cuts “will not — I repeat, will not — come at the expense of the Asia-Pacific,” he said.

Some analysts in China and elsewhere say they fear that the moves could backfire, risking a cold war-style standoff with China.

“I don’t think they’re going to be very happy,” said Mark Valencia, a Hawaii-based senior researcher at the National Bureau of Asian Research, who said the new policy was months in the making. “I’m not optimistic in the long run as to how this is going to wind up.”

The president is to fly north across the continent to Darwin, a frontier port and military outpost across the Timor Sea from Indonesia, which will be the center of operations for the coming deployment. The first 200 to 250 Marines will arrive next year, with forces rotating in and out and eventually building up to 2,500, the two leaders said.

The United States will not build new bases on the continent, but will use Australian facilities instead. Mr. Obama said that Marines would rotate through for joint training and exercises with Australians, and the American Air Force would have increased access to airfields in the nation’s Northern Territory.

“We’re going to be in a position to more effectively strengthen the security of both of our nations and this region,” he said.

The United States has had military bases and large forces in Japan and South Korea, in the north Pacific, since the end of World War II, but its presence in Southeast Asia was greatly diminished in the early 1990s with the closing of major bases in the Philippines, at Clark Field and Subic Bay. The new arrangement with Australia will restore a substantial American footprint near the South China Sea, a major commercial route — including for American exports — that has been roiled by China’s disputed claims of control.

The United States and other Pacific Rim nations are also negotiating to create a free-trade bloc, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that would not initially include China, the world’s largest exporter and producer of manufactured goods.

The tentative trade agreement was a topic over the weekend in Honolulu, where Mr. Obama hosted the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and it will be discussed again later this week when he becomes the first American president to participate in the East Asia Summit meeting, on the Indonesian island of Bali.

For China, the week’s developments could suggest both an economic and a military encirclement. Top leaders did not immediately comment on Mr. Obama’s speech, but Mr. Liu, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, emphasized that it was the United States, not China, seeking to use military power to influence events in Asia.

The Global Times, a state-run news organization known for its nationalist and bellicose commentaries, issued a stronger reaction in an editorial, saying that Australia should be cautious about allowing the United States to use bases there to “harm China” and that it risked getting “caught in the cross-fire.”

Analysts say that Chinese leaders have been caught off guard by what they view as an American campaign to stir up discontent in the region. China may have miscalculated in recent years by restating longstanding territorial claims that would give it broad sway over development rights in the South China Sea, they say. But they argue that Beijing has not sought to project military power far beyond its shores, and has repeatedly proposed to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations.

The United States portrays itself as responding to a new Chinese assertiveness in the region that has alarmed core American allies. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote a recent article in Foreign Policy laying out an expansive case for American involvement in Asia, and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta characterized China’s military development as lacking transparency and criticized its assertiveness in the regional waters.

Mr. Obama reached out to China even as he announced the new troop deployment. “The notion that we fear China is mistaken; the notion that we are looking to exclude China is mistaken,” he said.

The president said that China would be welcomed into the new trade pact if Beijing was willing to meet the free-trade standards for membership. But such standards would require China to let its currency rise in value, to better protect foreign producers’ intellectual property rights and to limit or end subsidies to state-owned companies, all of which would require a major overhaul of China’s economic development strategy.

Mr. Obama canceled two previous planned trips to Australia because of domestic demands; he recalled Wednesday at a state dinner that he had visited the country twice as a boy, when his mother was working in Indonesia on development programs.

This time, as president, Mr. Obama arrived at Parliament House to a 21-gun salute and, once inside, to the enthusiastic greeting of Australians crowding the galleries of the vast marble entrance hall.

The two countries have been allies for decades, and cooperated closely in World War II, when there were several dozen American air and naval bases and army camps in the country and Australian combat troops served under American command.

Another purpose of Mr. Obama’s visit is to celebrate those ties. “The United States has no stronger ally,” Mr. Obama said.

Australians fought alongside Americans in every war of the 20th century, and more recently have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan has become increasingly unpopular here, though, and most Australians want their troops to come home immediately.

 

Michael Wines contributed reporting from Beijing.

    A U.S. Marine Base for Australia Irritates China, NYT, 16.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/world/asia/obama-and-gillard-expand-us-australia-military-ties.html

Death Toll Mounts in Syria, Along With Outside Pressure

November 15, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI and RICK GLADSTONE

BEIRUT, Lebanon — As foreign pressure intensified on the Syrian government on Tuesday, rights activists said that the death toll from violent clashes there on Monday was much higher than first reported. They estimated that 50 to 71 people were killed, including 34 soldiers in clashes with army defectors.

The total nearly matched the 72 deaths on April 22, the bloodiest day of the Syria uprising so far.

The scope and severity of the latest violence came to light as the Syria government announced it had released 1,180 prisoners, in what appeared to be an effort to show flexibility and sincerity only hours before the Arab League was set to suspend Syria as punishment for President Bashar al-Assad’s repression of dissent. A terse annoucement of the prisoner release by the official news agency, Sana, said only that the freed prisoners had been “involved in recent events” and had not committed murder.

Representatives of the Russian government and the Arab League met with political opponents of Mr. Assad, while Turkey, once a close ally of Syria, threatened to cut off its supply of electric power to the country unless the violence against civilian protesters is stopped.

Rights groups based their death toll, raised from an initial report of 28, on telephone interviews and messages from witnesses in Syria, which has severely restricted outside press coverage. The new figures make Monday the deadliest day in the country since Oct. 29, when 40 people were killed.

The eight-month-old uprising in Syria, one of the most strategically important countries in the Middle East, has become a focal point in the Arab Spring revolutions this year that have so far toppled autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Exasperated with Mr. Assad’s intransigence, the normally placid Arab League voted last weekend to suspend Syria from membership, and on Monday the King of Jordan called on him to relinquish power, the first leader of one of Syria’s Arab neighbors to go that far.

On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry of Russia, which has been one of Mr. Assad’s steadiest remaining allies, met with emissaries of the Syrian National Council, an opposition group. The group failed to gain Russia’s support for anything more than a dialogue with Mr. Assad, participants said.

“We didn’t succeed in changing the Russian position,” said Samir Nachar, a member of the Syrian National Council. “We want to negotiate the steps of how to change the regime, and that’s not acceptable for the Russians.”

Nonetheless, the meeting itself was still an important sign of Russia’s impatience with the direction of the Syrian conflict.

At the Cairo headquarters of the Arab League, which voted to suspend Syria membership as of Wednesday, the group held meetings with other representatives of the Syrian National Council and asked them to devise plans for a transition of power, Reuters reported. The agency quoted Abdel Basset Sedah, a council executive, as saying that a conference to discuss details of a transition would be announced soon.

In Turkey, whose relations with Syria have been badly strained by Mr. Assad’s repression of the uprising, the government threatened to sever power lines to Syria as a punishment, Turkish news media reported. “Right now we are supplying electricity there,” the energy minister, Taner Yildiz, told reporters in Ankara. “If this course continues, we may have to review all of these decisions.”

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who has publicly expressed anger with Mr. Assad several times, said that Turkey no longer has confidence in Mr. Assad’s regime. In remarks to members of his party that were reported in the Turkish media, Mr. Erdogan said he hoped that Syria, “now on a knife-edge, does not enter this road of no return, which leads to the edge of the abyss.”

Mr. Assad’s foreign minister reacted angrily on Monday to the Arab League suspension of Syria, calling it “an extremely dangerous step,” He also apologized for a spree of attacks on foreign embassies in Syria by pro-Assad loyalists outraged over the Arab League move.

The foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, speaking at a televised news conference in Damascus, reiterated Syria’s contention that it had complied with the terms of a proposed Arab League peace plan by withdrawing its armed troops from urban areas, releasing political prisoners and offering pardons to militants.

But rights activists in Syria, as well as a majority of Arab League members, have said Syria had failed to comply with the peace plan, pointing to the new violence in Syria since it agreed to the accord on Nov. 2.

The United Nations said this month that at least 3,500 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising started in March. The government disputes the death toll and has blamed the unrest on armed groups which it says have killed more than 1,100 soldiers and police officers.

 

Nada Bakri reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Death Toll Mounts in Syria, Along With Outside Pressure, NYT, 15.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/world/middleeast/death-toll-mounts-in-syria-along-with-outside-pressure.html

Contain and Constrain Iran

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. He reckoned Iranians were too divided by their year-old revolution to offer much riposte. Wrong: Iranians were galvanized, the last internal opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocracy was quashed, and Iran stood as one to face the enemy.

There’s no need to look much further to know how Tehran would respond if Israel or the United States bombed Iran in an attempt to halt its nuclear program. An Iranian society that today is a combustible mix of depression, division and dysfunction — overseen by a Brezhnevian supreme leader at loggerheads with his erratic president — would unite in fury.

This, in the cautionary words of U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, could have “unintended consequences.” Among them: a lifeline for the weakened Islamic Republic that would lock it in for a generation; a sharp rise in American dead in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan; direct or indirect (through Hezbollah) retaliation against Israel; a wave of radicalization just when jihadist ideology seems tired and the Arab Spring stands at a delicate juncture; a blow to the global economy from soaring oil prices; a revival of Iran’s sagging regional appeal as it becomes yet another Muslim country to face Western bombs; increased terrorism; and a subsequent Iranian race for a nuclear weapon fired by resentments as indelible as those left by the C.I.A. coup that ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.

This is not an appealing proposition. But nor of course is a nuclear Iran. And there’s the rub.

Like a bad movie, the Iranian nuclear crisis keeps returning. We’re now at the sequel of the sequel of the sequel. Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and leading security strategist, has compared it to a “Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.”

As they have for many years now, Israeli leaders are warning that the time to avert a military strike is running out; Republican presidential candidates strain for more all-out bellicosity toward Tehran; Iran continues its puzzling decades-long crabwalk toward some military-nuclear threshold; and the International Atomic Energy Agency finds credible evidence of work on a deliverable bomb.

Even in slow motion, this is no game for amateurs. Loony schemes like the Orwellian “Iran Threat Reduction Act” before Congress that would make contact with Iranian officials illegal only foment a dangerous jingoism.

I see four key elements. First, Iran is not fiddling around with nuclear triggers and high-precision detonators because it wants to generate electricity. It seeks a military-nuclear capability common to its region (Israel, Pakistan, India and Russia).

Second, its halting progress toward this goal, far slower than Pakistan’s, relates not only to effective countermeasures (Stuxnet, dead scientists) but also to a deep-seated inertia and ambiguity; Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is the “guardian of the revolution” and as such in a conservative business where he will be judged on the Islamic Republic’s survival. The nuclear program is nationalistic glue for a fragile society even if it goes nowhere.

Third, Iran, shaken by the 2009 uprising, a young nation with a stale revolutionary regime, is uneasy: a feverish demand for hard currency has pushed the unofficial dollar rate way above the official one, prices for staples are soaring, a huge banking scandal has underscored rampant corruption, and the tensions between the Islamic Republic’s divine superstructure (Khamenei) and its (fraudulently) elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are virulent.

Fourth, the big loser from the Arab Spring has been Iran because the uprisings are about accountability and representation, which is precisely what the Iranian Revolution denied its authors after promising freedom. Nobody finds inspiration in the Iranian model.

In short, the leaders of the Islamic Republic — but emphatically not the Iranian people — are the West’s enemy, and Iran seeks nuclear weapons capability. But the country is hesitant and divided; and it does not want war. Khamenei is aging; how he would be replaced is unclear. Another presidential election in a couple of years will again reveal the Islamic Republic’s paralyzing contradictions.

These circumstances give the United States and Israel room for effective action, so long as they resist a rash military strike. The aim should be to increase Iran’s internal divisions, not unite it in furious resolve.

In 1946, when he wrote the “Long Telegram” that birthed the policy of containment, George Kennan observed a Soviet Union that was also an ideological enemy of the West, but overstretched and economically weak. He judged, correctly, that it could be contained through firmness, as it was even after developing a bomb.

Iran, more unpredictable than the Soviet Union, can be stopped short of a bomb through measures short of military action. What is needed is a contain-and-constrain policy. Contain Iran through beefed-up Israeli and Gulf defenses, a process underway. Constrain it to circle in its current nuclear ambiguity through covert undermining (Stuxnet 2.0, etc.), tough measures to block its access to hard currency, and, as a last resort, a “quarantine” similar to John Kennedy’s interdiction of shipping to Cuba during the missile crisis.

How you judge patience depends on how you judge time. Time is not on the Islamic Republic’s side.

    Contain and Constrain Iran, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/opinion/cohen-contain-and-constrain-iran.html

Qatar Wields an Outsize Influence in Arab Politics

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

DOHA, Qatar — Qatar is smaller than Connecticut, and its native population, at 225,000, wouldn’t fill Cairo’s bigger neighborhoods. But for a country that inspires equal parts irritation and admiration, here is its résumé, so far, in the Arab revolts: It has proved decisive in isolating Syria’s leader, helped topple Libya’s, offered itself as a mediator in Yemen and counts Tunisia’s most powerful figure as a friend.

This thumb-shaped spit of sand on the Persian Gulf has emerged as the most dynamic Arab country in the tumult realigning the region. Its intentions remain murky to its neighbors and even allies — some say Qatar has a Napoleon complex, others say it has an Islamist agenda. But its clout is a lesson in what can be gained with some of the world’s largest gas reserves, the region’s most influential news network in Al Jazeera, an array of contacts (many with an Islamist bent), and policy-making in an absolute monarchy vested in the hands of one man, its emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.

Qatar has become a vital counterpoint in an Arab world where traditional powers are roiled by revolution, ossified by aging leaderships, or still reeling from civil war, and where the United States is increasingly viewed as a power in decline.

“Do they fill a void? Yes,” said Bassma Koudmani, a Syrian opposition leader who credited the Qataris with a key role in the Arab League’s startling decision Saturday to suspend Syria and isolate a government at the pivot of the region’s relations. “They are filling a space and a role that is not being taken up by other countries.”

Flanked by the region’s biggest rivals, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Qatar has always played an outsize role in the gulf, but never to this degree. It hosts a sprawling American air base, but some American officials are suspicious of its recent backing of Islamist leaders, particularly in the war in Libya.

Angry at its role in driving the Arab League vote, Syrian officials have called it a lackey of American and Israeli interests. On Monday, Syria declared that it would boycott next month’s Arab Games in Doha.

But for all the contradictions in its policies — and there are many — Qatar is advancing a decisive shift in Arab politics that many in the West have yet to embrace: a Middle East dominated by mainstream Islamist parties brought to power in a region that is more democratic, more conservative and more tumultuous.

“Qatar is a country without ideology,” said Talal Atrissi, a Lebanese political analyst and commentator. “They know that the Islamists are the new power in the Arab world. This alliance will lay the foundation for a base of influence across the region.”

Not everyone is pleased.

“Who is Qatar?” Abdel-Rahman Shalgham, Libya’s ambassador to the United Nations, asked sharply this month on the Arabic channel of a German satellite station.

Syrian officials have asked that question as the crisis deepens between two once-friendly countries. Personal sentiments seem to figure heavily in Qatar’s policy, as with Libya, where the emir’s wife, Sheika Mozah, spent time as a child. The country long served as an intermediary with Syria, and it invested heavily in an economy that President Bashar al-Assad sought to modernize. But diplomats and analysts say SheikHamad felt rebuffed by Mr. Assad in April, soon after the uprising in Syria began.

Some view Qatar’s policy in Syria through a sectarian lens, supporting as it does a predominantly Sunni Muslim revolt. (It also backed Saudi Arabia’s intervention in neighboring Bahrain to help quell Shiite Muslim protests.) Others see it more opportunistically, offering Qatar a way to realign a Middle East in which Syria has often played off competing powers — Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and actors in Lebanon.

“Syria is such a crucial pivot point in the Middle East,” said Salman Shaikh, the director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. “Syria would just be too tempting a target not to be involved in from the outside, and I’m sure the Qataris will be.”

Ambition dominates Doha, whose frenzied skyline suggests medieval Baghdad crossed with “Blade Runner.” Qatar’s economy offers indicators in superlatives: the world’s highest growth rate and highest per capita income. Its emir, a towering man whose girth was ridiculed by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, has sought to reconcile what could be considered irreconcilable.

Yusuf Qaradawi, an influential Egyptian Islamist figure, calls it home. So did Ali Sallabi, a prominent Libyan Islamist. Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s leader, has a residence here, and speculation is rife that the Taliban in Afghanistan may open an office. American schools and companies, situated in the most modern of complexes, are also based here.

“Bring them here, give them money and it will work out,” Hamid al-Ansari, a newspaper editor, said of Qatar’s style, only half in jest.

Money proved instrumental in Qatar’s role in Libya this year. Diplomats say hundreds of millions were funneled to the opposition, often through channels Qatar had cultivated with expatriates here, in particular Mr. Sallabi and Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the head of the Tripoli Military Council who once led an Islamist insurgency in Libya. A Libyan opposition channel was set up in Doha. Qatar dispatched Western-trained advisers, who helped finance, train and arm Libyan rebels.

But Qatar’s seeming favoritism of Islamists there provoked the ire of more secular-minded figures. Qatari officials are dismissive of the charges, but others suggest Sheik Hamad, who overthrew his father in 1995, has an affinity for Islamist figures who echo the conservative gulf states far more than ostensibly secular figures like Syria’s president, Mr. Assad.

“Historically speaking, dealing with those people is better than dealing with Qaddafi or Assad,” Mr. Ansari said. “We believe religion is important, they believe it.”

Maintaining channels with an array of forces has proven a cornerstone of Qatar’s policy. It hosts two American bases, with more than 13,000 personnel; in Lebanon, the emir was welcomed as a hero by Hezbollah’s supporters last year for helping rebuild towns Israel destroyed in 2006.

Unlike Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar enjoys close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, in its various incarnations in Libya, Syria and Egypt, as well as with figures like Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the Tunisian Islamist, all of whom are almost certain to play a crucial role in the next generation of Arab politics.

But it also has what might be described as the Qatari equivalent of soft power: the influence of Al Jazeera, which the emir founded and finances, and which more and more reflects Qatari foreign policy; ties with Mr. Qaradawi, who has his own network of prominent Islamists in the region; and the emir’s own knack for involving Qatar in conflicts as far-flung as Afghanistan and the Darfur region of Sudan.

Most recently, Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, departed in what some journalists there saw as part of Qatar’s determination to appease countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, both long irritated by Al Jazeera’s reporting.

American diplomatic cables in 2009, released by WikiLeaks, claim that Qatar has occasionally offered Al Jazeera’s coverage as a bargaining tool. A senior journalist there said while no order was given, the network’s reporting on Syria changed sharply in April.

“We could feel the change in atmosphere,” the journalist said.

    Qatar Wields an Outsize Influence in Arab Politics, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/world/middleeast/qatar-presses-decisive-shift-in-arab-politics.html

King of Jordan Calls for Syria’s Leader to Step Down

November 14, 2011
The New York Times
By NADA BAKRI

BEIRUT, Lebanon —King Abdullah of Jordan added his voice Monday to the growing pressure on the president of Syria to relinquish power, becoming the first Arab leader on Syria’s doorstep to call for a change in government in that country in order to end the increasingly bloody political uprising there.

The Jordanian monarch’s remarks, made in an interview with the BBC, came as Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, was still smarting from the Arab League’s unexpectedly strong rebuke over the weekend with its decision to suspend that country’s membership. Syria also faced additional sanctions imposed Monday by the European Union.

“I believe, if I were in his shoes, I would step down,” King Abdullah told the BBC. “If Bashar has the interest of his country, he would step down, but he would also create an ability to reach out and start a new phase of Syrian political life.”

Other countries in the region with historically close to ties to Syria, notably Turkey and Iran, have warned Mr. Assad he should take steps to satisfy the demands of protesters in the eight-month-old uprising, which has now become a focal point in the Arab Spring revolts that have felled autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. But the publicly aired comments about Mr. Assad by King Abdullah — who has faced some Arab Spring protests in his own country — went beyond what others have said.

Earlier Monday, Mr. Assad’s foreign minister said the Arab League suspension was “an extremely dangerous step.” But he also apologized for a spree of attacks on foreign embassies in Syria by pro-Assad loyalists outraged over the Arab League move.

The minister, Walid al-Moallem, speaking at a televised press conference in Damascus, reiterated Syria’s contention that it had complied with the terms of a proposed Arab League peace plan by withdrawing its armed troops from urban areas, releasing political prisoners and offering pardons to militants.

But rights activists in Syria — as well as a majority of Arab League members — have said Syria has failed to comply with the peace plan, pointing to new violence in Syria since it agreed to the plan on Nov. 2. Activists said that more than 240 people were killed from the day the plan was announced until last week.

The majority of the deaths were in Homs, a restive city in central Syria that was subjected to a major military assault days after the peace initiative was announced.

The United Nations said this month that at least 3,500 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising started in March. The government disputed the death toll and blamed the unrest on armed groups who the government said have killed more than 1,100 soldiers and police officers.

Mr. Moallem also played down any prospects of an international military intervention in Syria, like the NATO-led campaign against Libya that helped topple the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in August.

“The Libyan scenario will not be repeated,” Mr. Moallem said, adding that Western and Arab countries know that the cost to confront the Syrian military would be high. He also said that he was confident that Russia and China would continue to oppose any resolutions against Syria in the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China vetoed a decision in October against Syria in the United Nations.

Mr. Moallem said he regretted the attacks on the embassies and consulates of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and France by angry demonstrators that took place in Damascus and other cities on Saturday, shortly after the Arab League announced the suspension decision.

“As for attacks on foreign embassies, as the foreign minister I apologize for these aggressions,” he said.

Mr. Moallem said that his government was organizing a national dialogue with opposition figures and other members of the Syrian society, who are represented by neither the government nor the opposition.

Syria called Sunday for an emergency Arab League summit to discuss the political unrest and invited officials to visit the country before the suspension decision goes into effect on Wednesday, to oversee the implementation of the Arab peace plan. Whether such an emergency summit would be convened had not been decided by late Monday.

In Cairo, Nabil el-Araby, the secretary-general of the Arab League, said that he had forwarded Syria’s request for an emergency summit to other members. He also said he was moving forward with a tentative plan to protect civilians in Syria by deploying observers around the country from at least 16 Arab human rights organizations who had all volunteered to participate.

The tentative plan is to deploy 400 or 500 observers, Mr. Araby said in a brief interview, and that he hoped to finalize the proposal to present to a meeting of Arab League foreign ministers, who are to meet in Rabat on Wednesday. Whether Syria would even allow these observers into the country is not clear, especially if the Rabat meeting confirms Syria’s suspension from the league, as expected.

The European Union, meanwhile, sought to intensify pressure on Syria, imposing additional sanctions against some of the country’s citizens and restricting investment.

But foreign ministers meeting in Brussels said there were no plans to take military action against Mr. Assad’s government in Damascus similar to the campaign that led to the overthrow and death of Colonel Qaddafi.

“This is a different situation from Libya,” said William Hague, the British foreign secretary. “There is no United Nations Security Council resolution, and Syria is a much more complex situation.”

On Monday, foreign ministers agreed to freeze the assets of 18 Syrians and ban them from traveling to the European Union. The move brings the total number of Syrians affected by the restrictions to 74.

The ministers also stopped the European Investment Bank, a lender with a major focus on overseas development, from giving Syria additional loan payments and they halted other activities by the bank in Syria.

”It’s very important in the European Union that we consider additional measures to add to the pressure on the Assad regime to stop the unacceptable violence against the people of Syria,” said Mr. Hague.

The E.U. said it would keep the funds of 19 companies and institutions in Syria frozen. A European embargo on Syrian oil already devastated that sector, reducing oil production by as much as 75 percent. Syria’s oil exports represented anywhere from 15 percent to 35 percent of the state budget, and more than 90 percent of those exports went to Europe.

 

James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels,

and Neil MacFarquhar from Cairo.

    King of Jordan Calls for Syria’s Leader to Step Down, NYT, 14.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/world/middleeast/syria-calls-suspension-from-arab-league-a-dangerous-move.html

Obama’s Influential Mideast Envoy to Resign

November 10, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Dennis B. Ross, a seasoned diplomat who has been one of President Obama’s most influential advisers on Iran and the Middle East, announced Thursday that he would leave the White House, at a time when Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are frozen and tensions over Iran are flaring up anew.

Mr. Ross, who disclosed his departure at a lunch with Jewish leaders, said he promised his wife that he would leave the government after two years. He joined the State Department in February 2009 as a senior adviser on Iran before moving to the National Security Council that June.

“Even by Middle Eastern terms, when you say two years and you’re heading into four, that’s a stretch,” Mr. Ross said in an interview.

His resignation, six months after that of Mr. Obama’s special envoy, George J. Mitchell, leaves the White House with a much-diminished bench on the Middle East, symbolizing how much the peace process has faded since the president proclaimed it would be one of his chief foreign policy goals.

In another part of Mr. Ross’s portfolio, the United States is trying to rally support for new sanctions in the wake of a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency asserting that Iran has continued work on a nuclear weapon. Mr. Ross is one of the architects of the pressure campaign against Iran.

“We have done everything we can to recruit and retain Dennis in the government,” said Thomas E. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser. “He is one of those rare individuals who has global reach.”

A Middle East adviser to five presidents, Mr. Ross, 62, is known for his painstaking approach to diplomacy and longstanding ties to Israeli leaders, which made him a behind-the-scenes interlocutor with Israel but also stood in stark contrast to the bolder instincts and the more distant approach of his boss.

But Mr. Ross’s departure, effective in December, is not a result of disputes over policy, several officials said. He helped formulate Mr. Obama’s most recent proposal to revive peace talks, under which the Israelis and the Palestinians would negotiate the contours of a Palestinian state using the prevailing borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, adjusted to account for Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Mr. Obama’s proposal failed to break the deadlock, and in September, the Palestinian Authority petitioned the United Nations for membership, against the objections of the United States. In his final months on the job, Mr. Ross made several trips to the West Bank to try to persuade the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, not to go ahead with his campaign.

With President Obama heading into an election year, Middle East experts said there was little incentive for him to thrust himself back into the process. The Republican candidates, sensing an opportunity to make inroads among Jewish voters, have made much of their staunch support for Israel and criticized Mr. Obama for what they characterize as lack of support for a close ally.

“The peace process, the issue Dennis really cares about, has a closed-for-the-season sign on it,” said Aaron David Miller, a former peace negotiator who worked with Mr. Ross in the Clinton administration. “No wonder he’s leaving.”

Mr. Obama’s relations with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have often been rocky, a perception reinforced last week by reports of a private conversation between Mr. Obama and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in which Mr. Sarkozy described Mr. Netanyahu as a “liar,” and Mr. Obama appeared to sympathize.

“You’re tired of him — what about me? I have to deal with him every day,” Mr. Obama replied, according to most accounts of the exchange, which was picked up by microphones and overheard by journalists.

Still, the administration has tightened military cooperation with Israel, a process in which Mr. Ross has been closely involved. He traveled regularly to Israel, meeting with top security advisers to Mr. Netanyahu, like Yitzhak Molcho, whom he has known for decades.

Mr. Ross also played a role in fashioning the American response to the upheaval in Arab countries, where the White House often found itself balancing strategic interests — and authoritarian rulers with whom it had long alliances — with a desire to back the democratic aspirations of young Arab protesters.

Mr. Ross, who has written several books on diplomacy, said he planned to return to his perch at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and pick up his pen. Despite leaving yet another administration without a Middle East peace agreement, Mr. Ross insisted his hopes were not dead.

“Neither one of them can wish each other away,” he said of the Israelis and Palestinians. “They have to live together, there’s no other option, and the only way they can live with each other is a two-state solution.”

    Obama’s Influential Mideast Envoy to Resign, NYT, 10.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/us/politics/obamas-influential-mideast-envoy-to-resign.html

Ahead of Vote, Egypt’s Parties and Skepticism Are Growing

November 9, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

CAIRO — At the rally kicking off his campaign for Parliament, Basem Kamel, a core member of the youthful council that helped spur the end of the Mubarak government, wrestled with his stump speech calling for civilian rule.

“We don’t want to return to the Islam of the Middle Ages,” said Mr. Kamel, his shaved head and white suit setting him apart in Sharabiyya, an impoverished northern Cairo neighborhood in his campaign district. “I don’t want the Islam that preaches I am right and everyone else is an infidel.”

The official campaign for Egypt’s first parliamentary elections since President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February has started slowly, coinciding with a weeklong break marking the year’s main Muslim holiday.

But the campaign’s contours have been known for months, namely how a group of upstart, mostly liberal parties will challenge the well-organized juggernaut of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as remnants of the old government’s political machine. The question shadowing the election is whether a robust enough Parliament will emerge to fulfill an elusive goal of the revolution: challenging the military’s 60-year grip on power.

Given that the young organizers who first summoned protesters to Tahrir Square pulled off a miraculous feat — chasing a president of nearly 30 years from office in 18 days — they were expected to play a leading role in what came next.

Reality proved different. Initially, the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces appeared interested in consulting with the youth coalition. But the youths broke off the meetings after a violent April crackdown on demonstrators.

“We decided it was better to try to establish ourselves on the street than to talk to the military council,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, a 32-year-old surgeon who is now building his own liberal party, The Awareness Party, and is sitting out these elections.

“The military wanted us for decoration,” he said. “They used us as a source of information, an indicator of the mood on the street, of how the youth will react — but it was not an interactive experience.”

Although they still meet, the 17 or so core members of the Revolution Youth Coalition splintered among factions much like the entire Egyptian political spectrum. Some, including the young members of the Muslim Brotherhood, started parties of their own. Some were absorbed into older groups as mummified political parties struggled to their feet. Some thrived as media stars.

“They were all beggars before the revolution,” said Mohamed Salah, an acerbic columnist for the pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper, summarizing a common perception. “Now half of them are TV talk-show hosts while the other half appear on their shows as paid guests, while the rest of the population cannot find money to buy food.”

About six of the original members hope to translate their role into a parliamentary seat in the three-stage elections that run through Jan. 10. But they face pronounced skepticism.

“We don’t care about them, they are just like Mubarak, all they want is money,” groused one heavily veiled woman dismissively just before Mr. Kamel rose to speak. Her main concern was the pervading sense of instability: “We just want things to go back the way they were.”

Mr. Kamel is running for the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, among the strongest liberal groups with its mix of Muslims and Coptic Christians, which argues seriously that Egypt might emulate Sweden. The rally played on nostalgia for better days by not starting with the current martial national anthem, but a more romantic version from the 1920s with lines like “I am an Egyptian built by those who built the everlasting pyramids.”

Mr. Kamel noted in an interview that he could not run as a revolutionary. (The 42-year-old architect was pushing the youth envelope, but because Mr. Mubarak was 82, people half his age were deemed youthful.)

“They know that we were somehow pioneers in this, but now is not the time to say that,” he explained. “I have to speak about the new constitution, about education, health care and the environment.”

Still, his speech referred to those halcyon days.

“In the square we were one hand in the revolution and no one asked if the other prayed or was a believer or not,” Mr. Kamel said. “The current regime wants to divide us so we are weak and can be easily ruled.”

He kept repeating the need for a “civilian” state, or “madani” in Arabic, because the religious portray the word “almani” or “secular” as something Western and immoral.

After the rally, potential voters found that Mr. Kamel came off as more earnest than electric, wishing that he had offered specific prescriptions for solving this nation’s complicated social and economic problems.

Egypt’s basic election math goes something like this: Among up to 50 million voters, 20 to 30 percent are believed to be supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist factions and are sure to vote. Less than 20 percent, the elite and the Coptic Christian minority, are likely to be committed to civilian rule and are also eager to vote.

Hence the challenge is to win over the roughly 50 percent of undecided voters — not least in getting them to vote. Attempts to form unified slates derailed, with, by rough count, 14 liberal organizations and 8 Islamist parties fielding candidates. Standing out among more than 6,000 candidates for 498 seats is difficult.

“The only difference between the liberals is that one has curly black hair and the other is bald,” Mr. Salah deadpanned. Despite the splintering of the Islamist parties into factions, analysts estimate that the Muslim Brotherhood still commands a hefty 70 percent or so of the Islamist vote. Given its widespread penetration and organization into individual neighborhoods through clinics and social services, it will likely do well, particularly if turnout is low. In Tunis last month, the main Islamic faction took more than 40 percent while the strongest liberal group followed with 30 percent.

The effort to convince voters that the stakes are high has been hobbled by the fact that the powers of this next Parliament remain increasingly vague as the military council has said it plans to preserve ultimate authority for at least another year.

Almost the entire political spectrum was outraged anew last week by proposals floated by the caretaker government meant to guide the process of writing a new constitution. It had been expected that the new Parliament would choose the next cabinet and a 100-member council to write a new constitution, paving the way for presidential elections in a year.

But the ruling military council seems determined to dilute that. First, nothing obliges it to pick the next ministers from the winners. Second, the proposed constitutional guidelines suggest that the generals will pick 80 members of the council, leaving just 20 from the new Parliament, and put the military outside civilian oversight.

The Muslim Brotherhood in particular cried foul, accusing the military of trying to stymie the organization’s anticipated strong role in shaping the next constitution.

In their attacks on the military council, both the Brotherhood and liberal candidates like Mr. Kamel try gingerly to draw a line between the ruling generals and the armed forces themselves, which remain broadly popular as Egypt’s last stable pillar.

“The regime has still not changed, the revolution is still not complete,” Mr. Kamel said in his speech. “Every Egyptian has a role now, it might be a small or large one but nevertheless it’s a role and each Egyptian must take it.”

 

Dina Saleh Amer and Heba Afify contributed reporting.

    Ahead of Vote, Egypt’s Parties and Skepticism Are Growing, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/world/middleeast/ahead-of-egypts-elections-parties-and-skepticism-grow.html

Israeli Minister Stresses Military Readiness

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — With rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear program fanning Iranian fury toward Israel, Ehud Barak, the Israeli minister of defense, said that if the country was forced into a war, the casualties on the home front would not likely amount to more than 500, if that many, and that the state of Israel would not be destroyed.

Mr. Barak’s comments, on Israel Radio, were at least superficially aimed at reassuring an public already nervous after a flurry of speculation in domestic and international news media about possible plans for military action to halt Iran’s nuclear program and the potentially disastrous consequences. But they could just as easily serve as a warning that if given no choice, Israel would not be afraid to act to prevent a nuclear threat from Iran.

There was no immediate official Israeli response following Wednesday’s publication of a critical, long-awaited report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that presented credible evidence that Iran has been working toward a nuclear weapon. But Mr. Barak had already said that the report was not likely to hold any surprises because the intelligence agencies of the major countries have known for a long time what the report was expected to contain.

Iran’s Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics, Brig.-Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said Tuesday that the Iranian armed forces were in full combat readiness and would give a “crushing response to those daring to attack the country,” according to the country’s official Islamic Republic News Agency. The Fars news agency reported on its English-language site that an Iranian lawmaker had warned, “Iranian militaries will fight with the Zionist soldiers in Tel Aviv streets” if Israel were to launch a military strike on Iran.

Mr. Barak said that Israel was “the strongest country in the region.”

Referring to recent reports in the Israeli news media that he and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were pressing the Israeli cabinet to agree to military action and may already have privately decided on one, Mr. Barak said that Israel “has not yet decided on any action but the panic-sowing is at a peak.”

The “delusionary description” of the two leaders in a closed room “leading the whole country into an escapade” was “groundless” and “divorced from reality,” he added.

“I say to you with responsibility,” he continued, “let’s say we get into a war against our will. There will not be 100,000 dead, or 10,000 dead or 1000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”

While there would be no way of avoiding a certain amount of damage on the home front, he said, alluding to widespread fears of rockets and missiles raining down on Israel from Gaza and Lebanon as part of any retaliation, there would not even be 500 dead if everyone stayed in their homes.

Some analysts here have interpreted both the media storm and the lack of clear responses by Israeli officials as a means for Israel to pressure the rest of the world into taking action to prevent a nuclear Iran.

“The public debate and the statements are a way of saying: hold us back lest we go crazy,” said Rafi Eitan, a former senior Mossad official and former minister, speaking on Israel Radio after Mr. Barak.

Mr. Barak said that the atomic agency report could provide what may be “the last chance for coordinated, lethal international sanctions that would force Iran to stop.”

The problem, he said, was that he did not think there was the international will for that.

    Israeli Minister Stresses Military Readiness, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/world/middleeast/israeli-minister-ehud-barak-stresses-military-readiness.html

U.N. Agency Says Iran Data Points to A-Bomb Work

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way.

The long-awaited report, released by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday, represents the strongest judgment the agency has issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. The findings, drawn from evidence of far greater scope and depth than the agency has previously made public, have already rekindled a debate among the Western allies and Israel about whether increased diplomatic pressure, sanctions, sabotage or military action could stop Iran’s program.

Knowing that their findings would be compared with the flawed Iraq intelligence that preceded the 2003 invasion — and has complicated American moves on Iran — the inspectors devoted a section of the report to “credibility of information.” The information was from more than 10 countries and from independent sources, they said; some was backed up by interviews with foreigners who had helped Iran.

The report laid out the case that Iran had moved far beyond the blackboard to create computer models of nuclear explosions in 2008 and 2009 and conducted experiments on nuclear triggers. It said the simulations focused on how shock waves from conventional explosives could compress the spherical fuel at the core of a nuclear device, which starts the chain reaction that ends in nuclear explosion.

The report also said Iran went beyond such theoretical studies to build a large containment vessel at its Parchin military base, starting in 2000, for testing the feasibility of such explosive compression. It called such tests “strong indicators of possible weapon development.”

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003, but found significant recent work, though conducted in a less coordinated manner.

The report does not claim that Iran has mastered all the necessary technologies, or estimate how long it would take for Iran to be able to produce a nuclear weapon. Inspectors do not point to a single weapons lab, or provide evidence of a fully constructed nuclear weapon. Instead, the report describes roughly a dozen different projects that countries that have built nuclear weapons — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India and Pakistan — all had to grapple with, in some form. An I.A.E.A. report last May listed five fewer categories of such technical information.

The inspectors’ report cited:

¶ Documents suggesting that Iran “was working on a project to secure a source of uranium suitable for use in an undisclosed enrichment program” to make bomb fuel.

¶ Evidence that Iran “had been provided with nuclear explosive design information.”

¶ Information that it worked on experiments with conventional explosives to compress metal into an incredibly dense mass suitable to start a chain reaction.

¶ Documentation of “at least 14 progressive design iterations” for a missile warhead to deliver an atomic warhead to a distant target.

The report was produced under Yukiya Amano, a former Japanese diplomat who has run the I.A.E.A. for nearly two years, and addressed to the agency’s board of governors and the United Nations Security Council. In it, Mr. Amano said that inspectors had amassed “over a thousand pages” of documents, presumably leaked out of Iran. He said they showed “research, development and testing activities” on technologies that would be useful in designing a nuclear weapon.

He said “a number of individuals” involved in Iran’s activities had provided information described as “consistent” with the intelligence from “more than 10” other countries, which it did not name, including some demonstrating Iranian “manufacturing techniques for certain high explosive components.”

A senior Obama administration official briefing reporters on Tuesday pointed to the I.A.E.A.’s evidence of work on detonation systems, including a special type of spherical initiation system that implodes a nuclear core with tremendous precision. “It’s a very telltale sign of nuclear weapons work,” he said.

Iran quickly rejected the report’s findings. “The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency is unbalanced, unprofessional and politically motivated,” Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s representative to the I.A.E.A., was quoted as saying by the country’s official Islamic Republic News Agency.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said the United Nations agency should instead investigate the United States nuclear arsenal. “If the agency is after the truth, why has it not released any report on the U.S. atomic bombs concealed in 1,000 of its military bases?” Mr. Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Fars news agency. Iranian officials have said the evidence is fabricated, and some have warned that any attempt by the West to stop its program, by any means, could invite retaliation.

Mr. Amano said the agency had “tried without success to engage Iran in discussions about the information.” But he said that “Iran continued to conceal nuclear activities,” including its effort to construct a secret enrichment facility near Qum.

Iran told the nuclear agency about that facility days before President Obama and European leaders reported its existence two years ago, and Iran has recently said it is moving some of its nuclear activity to that underground facility, at a well-defended military base.

The I.A.E.A. report’s detailed revelations are a fascinating role reversal from 2003, when the United States and Britain claimed Iraq was seeking to rekindle its nuclear program. In that case, the agency warned that the Bush administration’s case was weak and that some of the evidence was forged. Now, it is the normally cautious agency that is taking the lead, arguing that years of study had led it to the conclusion that, despite Iran’s denials, the country engaged in an active program to design nuclear warheads, among other technologies.

“The level of detail is unbelievable,” said a Western diplomat familiar with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing the agency’s internal assessment of the report. “The report describes virtually all the steps to make a nuclear warhead and the progress Iran has achieved in each of those steps. It reads like a menu.”

The new evidence came as no surprise to the Obama administration, which has possessed some of this intelligence for years, but moved carefully in adding pressure on Iran, mindful of the loss of credibility the United States suffered over faulty intelligence on Iraq’s weapons efforts.

Now the United States faces a new set of difficult choices. Years of sanctions have hurt Iran, but the report makes clear that those sanctions have not forced it to reconsider its program. Efforts to sabotage the Iranian effort have reached back a decade, most recently with a computer worm called Stuxnet, which appears to have been a joint covert action by Israel and the United States. It is not mentioned in the report, but experts say it slowed Iran’s enrichment of uranium. But production rates have since recovered.

While Israel has talked about military action, both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that an airstrike would not slow the program much, and that it would drive it further underground.

But there are many theories about whether Israel’s latest discussions of military strikes are intended to focus the West on new pressure and sanctions, or are leading up to military action.

The section of the report dealing with the credibility of the evidence described how early information it had obtained — while the report does not say so, some came from a laptop slipped out of the country by an Iranian scientist — was corroborated by later interviews with foreigners who helped Iran.

The report cited “a wide variety of independent sources,” including the agency’s own investigations. That appeared to be part of an effort to anticipate the critique that the agency was recycling information from the C.I.A. or Israel’s Mossad.

The report also describes how Iran has altered, every few years, the bureaucracy that runs the military side of the weapons program. It described what is essentially a nuclear version of three-card monte, in which scientists are hidden in organizations with names like “Section for Advanced Development Applications and Technologies” and at universities around Tehran. But the overall leadership of the program is the Ministry of Defense.

Much of the program was run by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who is also a professor in Tehran; he went underground after several Iranian scientists were assassinated. Iran has never allowed him, or his colleagues, to be interviewed by inspectors.

 

Steven Lee Myers and Rick Gladstone contributed reporting.

    U.N. Agency Says Iran Data Points to A-Bomb Work, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/world/un-details-case-that-iran-is-at-work-on-nuclear-device.html

America’s Deadly Dynamics With Iran

November 5, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

COMMUTING to work in Tehran is never easy, but it is particularly nerve-racking these days for the scientists of Shahid Beheshti University. It was a little less than a year ago when one of them, Majid Shahriari, and his wife were stuck in traffic at 7:40 a.m. and a motorcycle pulled up alongside the car. There was a faint “click” as a magnet attached to the driver’s side door. The huge explosion came a few seconds later, killing him and injuring his wife.

On the other side of town, 20 minutes later, a nearly identical attack played out against Mr. Shahriari’s colleague Fereydoon Abbasi, a nuclear scientist and longtime member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Perhaps because of his military training, Mr. Abbasi recognized what was happening, and pulled himself and his wife out the door just before his car turned into a fireball. Iran has charged that Israel was behind the attacks — and many outsiders believe the “sticky bombs” are the hallmarks of a Mossad hit.

Perhaps to make a point, Mr. Abbasi, now recovered from his injuries, has been made the director of Iran’s atomic energy program. He travels the world offering assurances that Iran’s interest in nuclear weapons is peaceful.

Even for the Iranian scientists who get to work safely, life isn’t a lot easier. A confidential study circulating through America’s national laboratories estimates that the Stuxnet computer worm — the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed against another country’s infrastructure — slowed Iran’s nuclear progress by one to two years. Now it has run its course. But there is no reason to believe the attacks are over.

Iran may be the most challenging test of the Obama administration’s focus on new, cheap technologies that could avoid expensive boots on the ground; drones are the most obvious, cyberweapons the least discussed. It does not quite add up to a new Obama Doctrine, but the methods are defining a new era of nearly constant confrontation and containment. Drones are part of a tactic to keep America’s adversaries off balance and preoccupied with defending themselves. And in the past two and a half years, they have been used more aggressively than ever. There are now five or six secret American drone bases around the world. Some recently discovered new computer worms suggest that a new, improved Stuxnet 2.0 may be in the works for Iran.

“There were a lot of mistakes made the first time,” said an American official, avoiding any acknowledgment that the United States played a role in the cyber attack on Iran. “This was a first-generation product. Think of Edison’s initial light bulbs, or the Apple II.”

Not surprisingly, the Iranians are refusing to sit back and take it — which is one reason many believe the long shadow war with Iran is about to ramp up dramatically. At the White House and the C.I.A., officials say the recently disclosed Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States — by blowing up a tony Georgetown restaurant frequented by senators, lobbyists and journalists — was just the tip of the iceberg. American intelligence officials now believe that the death of a Saudi diplomat in Pakistan earlier this year was an assassination. And they see evidence of other plots by the Quds Force, the most elite Iranian military unit, from Yemen to Latin America.

“The Saudi plot was clumsy, and we got lucky,” another American official who has reviewed the intelligence carefully said recently. “But we are seeing increasingly sophisticated Iranian activity like it, all around the world.” Much of this resembles the worst days of the cold war, when Americans and Soviets were plotting against each other — and killing each other — in a now hazy attempt to preserve an upper hand. But Iran is no superpower. And there are reasons to wonder whether, in the end, this shadow war is simply going to delay the inevitable: an Iranian bomb or, more likely, an Iranian capability to assemble a fairly crude weapon in a matter of weeks or months.

For understandable reasons, this is a question no one in the Obama administration will answer publicly. To admit that Iran may ultimately get a weapon is to admit failure; both George W. Bush and Barack Obama vowed they would never let Iran achieve nuclear arms capability, much less a bomb. Israelis have long argued that if Iran got too close, that could justify attacking Iran’s nuclear sites. Reports in Israel last week suggested that such a pre-emptive attack is once again being debated.

The worries focus on renewed hints from top Israeli officials that they will act unilaterally — even over American objections — if they judge that Iran is getting too close to a bomb. (It is worth noting that they have made similar noises every year since 2005, save for a brief hiatus when Stuxnet — which appears to have been a joint project of American and Israeli intelligence — was doing its work.)

To many members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — and, by the accounts of his former colleagues, to the Israeli leader himself — the Iran problem is 1939 all over again, an “existential threat.”

“WHEN Bibi talks about an existential threat,” one senior Israeli official said of Mr. Netanyahu recently, “he means the kind of threat the United States believed it faced when you believed the Nazis could get the bomb.”

Israelis worry that as Iran feels more isolated by sanctions and more threatened by the Arab Spring, which has not exactly broken Tehran’s way, it may view racing for a bomb as the only way to restore itself to its position as the most influential power in the Middle East. The fate of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi may strengthen that impulse.

“One should ask: would Europe have intervened in Libya if Qaddafi had possessed nuclear weapons?” the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, said on army radio last week, referring to the Libyan leader’s decision to give up his program in 2003. “Would the U.S. have toppled Saddam Hussein if he had nuclear weapons?”

To many in the Obama administration, though, the Iranian threat seems more akin to 1949, when the Soviets tested their first nuclear device. That brought many confrontations that veered toward catastrophe, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis. But ultimately the Soviets were contained. Inside the Pentagon and the National Security Council, there is a lot of work — all of it unacknowledged — about what a parallel containment strategy for Iran might look like.

The early elements of it are obvious: the antimissile batteries that the United States has spent billions of dollars installing on the territory of Arab allies, and a new Pentagon plan to put more ships and antimissile batteries into the Persian Gulf, in cooperation with six Arab states led by Saudi Arabia. It was the Saudi king who famously advised American diplomats in the cables revealed by WikiLeaks last year that the only Iran strategy that would work was one that “cut off the head of the snake.”

The big hitch in these containment strategies is that they are completely useless if Iran ever slips a bomb, or even some of its newly minted uranium fuel, to a proxy — Hezbollah, Hamas or some other terrorist group — raising the problem of ascertaining a bomb’s return address. When the Obama administration ran some tabletop exercises soon after coming to office, it was shocked to discover that the science of nuclear forensics was nowhere near as good in practice as it was on television dramas. So if a bomb went off in some American city, or in Riyadh or Tel Aviv, it could be weeks or months before it was ever identified as Iranian. Even then, confidence in the conclusion, officials say, might be too low for the president to order retaliation.

The wisdom of a containment strategy has also taken a hit since the revelation of the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador. Emerging from a classified briefing on the plot, a member of Congress said what struck him was that “this thing could have gotten Iran into a war, and yet we don’t know who ordered it.” There is increasing talk that it could have been a rogue element within the Quds Force. If so, what does that say about whether the Iranian leadership has as good a hand on the throttle of Iran’s nuclear research program as Washington has long assumed?

That issue may well come to a head this week after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog that has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with Iran’s nuclear establishment for a decade now, issues what may be one of its toughest reports ever.

IF the leaks are an accurate predictor of the final product, the report will describe in detail the evidence the I.A.E.A. has amassed suggesting that Iran has conducted tests on nuclear trigger devices, wrestled with designs that can miniaturize a nuclear device into the small confines of a warhead, and conducted abstruse experiments to spark a nuclear reaction. Most likely, the agency will stop short of accusing Iran of running a bomb program; instead, it will use the evidence to demand answers that it has long been refused about what it delicately calls “possible military dimensions” of the nuclear program.

Much of the work on those “possible military dimensions” is done, the I.A.E.A. believes, by scientists who have day jobs at Iran’s major universities, including one just across the street from what is believed to be the nuclear project’s administrative center. Among the scientists was Mr. Abbasi, the survivor of last November’s bomb attack, who was named in 2007 to the United Nations’ list of Iranian scientists subject to travel bans and economic sanctions because they were believed to be central to the bomb-development effort.

Mr. Abbasi, according to people familiar with the I.A.E.A.’s investigation, worked on calculations on increasing the yield of nuclear explosions, among other problems in manufacturing a weapon. He was a key scientist in the Iranian covert nuclear weapons program headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an academic and strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. For the past decade, Mr. Fakhrizadeh has run programs — with names like “Project 110” and “Project 5,” they seem right out of a James Bond movie — that the West believes are a shell game hiding weapons work. Suspicions have been heightened by Iran’s refusal to allow him or his colleagues to be interviewed by the United Nations’ nuclear inspection teams. And since last year’s attacks — and another this past summer — Mr. Fakhrizadeh has gone completely underground.

No one expects the United Nations’ revelations of the evidence to prompt more action against Iran. Most governments have had access to this evidence for a while. The Iranians will say it is all fabrication, and because the agency will not reveal its sources, that charge could stick. The Chinese and the Russians have already protested to the I.A.E.A. head, Yukiya Amano, that revealing the evidence will harden Iran’s position. They oppose any new sanctions.

While the Obama administration may act unilaterally to shut down transactions with Iran’s central bank, officials concede that the only economic step that could give the mullahs pause would be a ban on Iranian oil exports. With oil already hovering around $93 a barrel, no one in the administration is willing to risk a step that could send prices soaring and, in the worst case, cause a confrontation at sea over a blockade.

For all the talk about how “all options are on the table,” Washington says a military strike isn’t worth the risk of war; the Israelis say there may be no other choice. But they have said “this is the last chance” every year since 2005.

All of which raises the question: how much more delay can be bought with a covert campaign of assassination, cyberattacks and sabotage?

Some more, but probably not much. It has taken the Iranians 20 years so far to get their nuclear act together — far longer than it took the United States and the Soviets in the ’40s, the Chinese and the Israelis in the ’60s, the Indians in the ’70s, and the Pakistanis and the North Koreans in more recent times. The problem is partly that they were scammed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani who sold them his country’s discards.

The assassination and the sabotage have taken a psychological toll, making scientists wonder if every trip to work may be their last, every line of code the beginning of a new round of destruction. Stuxnet was devilishly ingenious: it infected millions of computers, but did damage only when the code was transferred to special controllers that run centrifuges, which spin at supersonic speed when enriching uranium. When operators looked at their screens, everything looked normal. But downstairs in the plant, the centrifuges suddenly spun out of control and exploded, like small bombs. It took months for the Iranians to figure out what had happened.

But now the element of surprise is gone. The Iranians are digging their plants deeper underground, and enriching uranium at purities that will make it easier to race for a bomb. When Barack Obama was sworn into office, they had enough fuel on hand to produce a single weapon; today, by the I.A.E.A.’s own inventory, they have enough for at least four. And as the Quds Force has shown, sabotage and assassination is a two-way game, which may ratchet up one confrontation just as Americans have been exhausted by two others.

 

David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times.

    America’s Deadly Dynamics With Iran, NYT, 5.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/sunday-review/the-secret-war-with-iran.html

Exclusive-Pakistan Ties With U.S., India Improving-Minister

November 5, 2011
The New York Times
By REUTERS

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's most troubled foreign relationships have improved in recent months, its top diplomat said on Saturday, pointing to upcoming trade talks with New Delhi and broad agreement on regional security goals with Washington as evidence.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, in an exclusive interview with Reuters, said negotiations to normalise trade with India would allow progress on other issues between the two nuclear-armed South Asian rivals.

"I think it's broadly agreed that we need to make some simultaneous progress on these issues," she said.

Trade has long been tied to political issues between the neighbours, who have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947.

The hope is that an increase in trade will feed into wider trust between the two countries and help them resolve major flashpoints, like the disputed Kashmir region, although a solution to this problem has proved intractable for decades.

"But there has been a great improvement in the environment," she said. "I think we can move forward."

She strongly denied that Pakistan was not committed to finalising Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status for India, as alleged by an unnamed Indian government official on Friday, who said Islamabad was "backtracking" on the issue in the face of domestic opposition.

"There is absolutely no question of backtracking of cabinet approval of trade normalisation with India," she said. "I want to completely dismiss any indication that there's any retraction on what we said."

Pakistan announced it would upgrade India to a most favoured nation on Wednesday, a move that would help normalise commercial ties by ending heavy restrictions on what India is allowed to export across the border.

Wednesday's announcement was trumpeted on both sides as a milestone in improving relations shattered by attacks by Pakistan-based militants in Mumbai in 2008. Formal peace talks, known as the "composite dialogue," resumed in February.

Khar said the two countries' commerce secretaries would meet in mid-November to hammer out the details of the trade agreement, but that there was no lack of commitment to the agreement itself.

"The cabinet very clearly gave them a way forward, which is trade normalisation with India," she said.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani also rejected the charges of backtracking in comments to reporters in Lahore on Saturday.

Less than one percent of India's merchandise exports are sold to Pakistan, in terms of dollar value, but in September a joint statement pledged to double bilateral trade flows within three years to about $6 billion (3 billion pounds).

Lasting peace between the two countries is seen as key to stability in the South Asian region and to helping a troubled transition in Afghanistan as NATO-led forces plan their military withdrawal from that country in 2014.

Khar said relations with the United States were also on the mend, with "a complete convergence of stated interests" on Afghanistan.

"Nothing would make us happier than a strong government in Afghanistan," she said. "I look at the last few weeks, and relations with the U.S. have been generally positive. It's basically the operational details to agree on."

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan have been pressing Pakistan for years to tackle the Haqqani network, a powerful insurgent group which says it owes allegiance to the Afghan Taliban, but has traditionally been seen as close to Pakistan's spy agency.

Pakistan denies supporting the Haqqani network and attributes its lack of action against the group to the fact that its army is already overstretched fighting Pakistani Taliban militants and others.

At an Istanbul conference in early November focussing on stabilising Afghanistan, a senior U.S. official said that Pakistani action against the Haqqani network did not necessarily need to be military.

Instead it would include "ensuring that intelligence doesn't go to the Haqqani network" and "that they don't benefit from financial resources or flow of finances."

 

(Additional reporting by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Ed Lane)

    Exclusive-Pakistan Ties With U.S., India Improving-Minister, NYT, 5.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/11/05/world/asia/international-us-pakistan-relations.html

At Least 12 Die in Syria Despite Deal to Halt Violence

November 3, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian forces killed at least 12 people in the restive city of Homs on Thursday, opposition activists said, a day after the Arab League brokered a plan to halt violence and convene talks between the government and the opposition in two weeks.

Though neither the government nor the disparate Syrian opposition seemed willing to condemn the deal in its infancy, the bloodshed and recriminations apparently augured a difficult path ahead for a government that has relied almost exclusively on violence to crush the uprising and an opposition that has yet to forcefully exert itself.

“We were hoping the violence might stop after the authorities agreed to the initiative, but the scene is still unbearable,” said Mohammed Saleh, a resident of Homs. “The bloodshed hasn’t stopped, and the army and security forces haven’t left the streets.”

A city in central Syria near the Lebanese border, Homs has become one of the most violent locales in the country, with a spate of seemingly sectarian killings this week and, on Thursday, a continuing crackdown by Syrian troops on some of the neighborhoods that have proven the most defiant in the eight-month uprising.

Opposition activists said that Syrian forces killed at least 12 people in several neighborhoods in Homs and that gunfire was heard through the morning. Other residents reported a buildup of armed forces in a city home to a contingent of army defectors who have taken up arms.

Other protests were reported in Dara’a, the southern town where the uprising began, as well as the restive suburbs of Damascus and the northwestern province of Idlib, where armed clashes have occurred between the Syrian Army and defectors. Activists said security forces, at times shooting in the air, forcefully broke up some of the protests.

The precise circumstances of the deaths in Homs were unclear, but residents there said little had changed in the 24 hours since Syria agreed to the Arab League’s plan for the government to remove all tanks and armored vehicles from the streets of restive cities and towns, to halt violence aimed at protesters, and to release political prisoners, estimated to be around 70,000 by the Arab League. Once those steps were taken, the league said it would then initiate a dialogue with the opposition at its headquarters in Cairo, setting that for two weeks hence.

The plan set no timetable beyond that for Syria to withdraw its forces.

Any optimism over the plan was subdued. The United States and Britain say they still believe that President Bashar al-Assad should heed the demands of protesters and step down, and the European Union called on Syria to “provide the space and security for opposition groups.” Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, the Qatari foreign minister who announced the agreement in Cairo on Wednesday, said the league would await steps being carried out on the ground.

Opposition figures were grim, suggesting that the government accepted the plan as a ploy to buy time as it sought to end the uprising by force.

“Nothing has changed,” said Iyad Shurbaji, a Syrian journalist in Damascus and a critic of the government. “Excessive violence has increased, tanks are still in the streets and not even one barricade has been removed.” He added: “The regime has no intention of carrying out the initiative. It is trying to buy time, betting on time to crush the uprising in attempt to create new facts on the ground, then negotiate from a strong position.”

Mediation has so far failed to blunt either the uprising or the crackdown, one of the most ferocious against any of the revolts that have swept the Arab world this year. The failure of neighboring Turkey was the most spectacular. After six hours of talks in August, including a one-on-one meeting between Turkey’s foreign minister and Mr. Assad, Turkish officials thought they had a deal, only to accuse Mr. Assad later of lying to them. Since then, Turkey has aggressively courted the exiled Syrian opposition.

Across the region, the Arab League effort, led by the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, was seen as perhaps the last opportunity to stave off more international pressure on Syria, especially at a time when more protesters have urged armed opposition against Mr. Assad’s government and fears have grown over an exacerbation of latent sectarian tensions.

Both sides suggested they were calling the other’s bluff.

“The truth will emerge, and it will become clear who really believes in dialogue and who fills the satellite TV screens with their screams calling for further killings, knowing nothing of dialogue,” Mustafa al-Miqdad wrote Thursday in Al Thawra newspaper, a mouthpiece of the Syrian government.

That sentiment was echoed across the divide.

“This regime won’t start real dialogue,” said Warid Haddad, a Syrian opposition figure. “It’s still in a position of strength, dealing with people as if they are property.”

The Free Syrian Army, an armed group that claims to have organized defectors and carried out attacks on the military, said in a statement that it would halt its operations if the government did. Though its real abilities remain unclear, it warned that if the government persisted in the crackdown, “We will be obliged to protect the protesters.”

For months now, both sides have sought to prove their strength in the streets.

In successive weeks, the government has organized mass rallies, in which tens of thousands have turned out in towns like Latakia, Hasaka, Raqa, Deir al-Zour, as well as the capital, Damascus, and Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. Though encouraged by the state, the protests have underlined the support that Mr. Assad’s leadership still enjoys, particularly among minorities and the middle class and the elite in Damascus and Aleppo.

Thousands and perhaps more turned out on Thursday in Tartus, on the Mediterranean coast, to show, in the words of the official Syrian news agency SANA, “that Syria will remain strong and steadfast in the face of conspiracy through the unity of its people.”

Yet again, Friday may emerge as the clearest insight into the potential of the Arab League’s mediation. The Local Coordination Committees, a group that helps organize and document demonstrations, called for mass protests on Friday to test the government’s sincerity. The day has traditionally served as the opposition’s time to demonstrate its strength in the streets, and the death toll has often risen into the dozens.

“May tomorrow, Friday, be the day where all streets and squares become platforms for demonstrations,” the group said in a statement.

 

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

    At Least 12 Die in Syria Despite Deal to Halt Violence, NYT, 3.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/world/middleeast/7-killed-in-syria-despite-deal-to-halt-violence.html

Euphoria Turns to Discontent as Egypt’s Revolution Stalls

November 1, 2011
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

GIZA, Egypt — Lurching around the Great Pyramids on a camel was part of the trip-of-a-lifetime experience that Farag Abu Ghaneima once touted dozens of times a day, but he recently sold three of his five camels to the butcher.

Tourists who flocked here by the millions annually now dribble through so sporadically that his two horse buggies sit unused many days and only 3 of 15 employees remain around the family stable and perfume shop.

“We can barely earn enough to feed ourselves, much less the horses and camels,” said Mr. Abu Ghaneima, pointing out the articulated rib cages and jutting hip bones of animals idling around a pretty little green square in his village, a stone’s throw from the Sphinx. “The revolution was beautiful, but nobody imagined the consequences.”

More than eight months after President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, the euphoria of Egypt’s political spring has surrendered to a season of discontent. There is widespread gloom that Egypt is again stagnating, its economy heading toward a cliff, while the caretaker government refuses or fails to act.

Tourism, a buttress of the economy upon which an estimated 15 million people depend, remains in a tailspin. Frequent strikes over pay and worker rights further erode long-battered government services from transportation to hospitals.

Mass demonstrations that have descended into sectarian riots, like the one on Oct. 9 that ended with 27 people dead after a harsh military response, have left the public uneasy that anarchy lurks.

Parliamentary elections, scheduled to start Nov. 28 and entailing three rounds ending Jan. 10, were meant to bring a sense of achievement and distill the uprising into a fairer, less corrupt political and economic system. But as campaigning begins in earnest this week, the proliferation of more than 55 parties and about 6,600 candidates for 498 seats in the People’s Assembly inspires mostly confusion.

“The picture has become so muddled that we don’t know where we’re going — this is the problem,” said Rami Essam, the young heartthrob bard of the revolution, answering questions between guitar songs in Tahrir Square, where lackluster demonstrations still come together on most Fridays.

“Freedom!” he sang about the unrealized demands of the revolution.

“Ignored,” the crowd responded in Arabic.

“Civilian rule! — Ignored! — Counterrevolutionaries! — Ignored!”

Arrested on the square last March, Mr. Essam posted pictures online of the heavy gashes and bruises he said had been inflicted by soldiers who detained him.

He tweaks protest anthems that targeted the Mubarak government to denounce the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. “We have not realized any of our demands, and all of our dreams are gone,” he said.

On the economic front, Egypt’s most important sources of income remain steady, with tourism the notable exception. The other pillars of the economy — gas and oil sales; Suez Canal revenues and remittances from workers abroad — are either stable or growing, according to Central Bank figures.

But those sources of income have accomplished little more than propping up an ailing economy. Over all, economic activity came to a standstill for months, with growth expected to tumble to under 2 percent this year from a robust 7 percent in 2010. Official unemployment rates rose to at least 12 percent from 9 percent. Foreign investment is negligible.

The revolutionary tumult hit tourism hardest. Nearly 15 million tourists visited Egypt in 2010, a record, but numbers were off by 42 percent through September of this year, said Amr Elezabi, the chairman of the Egyptian Tourism Authority, with about $3 billion lost. Whenever the numbers of tourists begin to edge up, they inevitably collapse again after periodic riots.

Desperate to reverse the trend, the tourism authority even test-marketed the uprising. “People were happy for us about what happened, but they said, ‘Don’t talk to us about the revolution,’ ” Mr. Elezabi said. “You cannot sell Egypt through Tahrir Square.”

Part of the blame for Egypt’s economic malaise, though, rests with the caretaker cabinet, which reports to the ruling military council. The ministers, mindful that several businessmen who served in the Mubarak government sit in jail on corruption convictions, are reluctant to sign off on new projects.

“The normal red tape got redder,” said Hisham A. Fahmy, the chief executive of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which groups elite multinational and Egyptian companies.

Nearly every conversation navigates into politics, with the basic theme being why there has been so little concrete change in Egypt, especially when compared with the tectonic shifts right next door in Libya and Tunisia, where uprisings also ousted long-serving dictators. The answers run along two main tacks.

The ruling generals and their supporters argue that repeated demonstrations and strikes by unrepresentative activists are undermining all attempts to restore stability and the economy. State television even commissioned a tune about it. The key lyric translates roughly as, “Even if you have demands, put the interests of the country first.”

Activists accuse the generals of resurrecting the Mubarak playbook to stay in power. The military deploys draconian measures to silence critics, they say, banning strikes and singling out individual critics like Alaa Abdel Fattah, a renowned blogger jailed by a military prosecutor this week for a 15-day sentence on incitement charges.

The surprise appearance recently of posters of the military’s top officer, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, and the slogan “Egypt Above All” fueled widespread suspicions that the generals want him to be the fifth military president in a row since the armed forces seized Egypt’s government in 1952. Presidential elections are likely to be at least a year away.

The generals denied any connection to the campaign, but activists recognize that toppling Mr. Mubarak turned out to be the easy part and that they should have pushed harder for sweeping change while they had momentum.

“Most of those who took part in the revolution were satisfied with the fall of Mubarak,” said Dr. Mona Mina, a soft-spoken Coptic pediatrician who helped lead physicians nationwide in a work stoppage over deteriorating medical services. “They celebrated and left Tahrir before they had established an authority from among them to monitor the transformations demanded by the revolution.”

The revolutionary spirit lives, but resonates less.

“We are ready to live on dates and water for our freedom!” proclaimed Mohamed Sabr, a 30-year-old engineer protesting in Tahrir Square last Friday.

“If you want water and dates, fine, eat that yourself,” rejoined Tareq Ali, 36, an export manager for a cheese company.

“Feloul!” shot back Mr. Sabr, a popular slur basically meaning “counterrevolutionary remnant.”

 

Heba Afify contributed reporting.

    Euphoria Turns to Discontent as Egypt’s Revolution Stalls, NYT, 1.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/world/middleeast/egypts-tourism-suffers-as-its-revolution-stalls.html

A Silver Lining to America’s Waning Influence

November 1, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Hu Jintao of China will arrive in Cannes, France, this week pondering a plea from Europe for tens of billions of dollars to help the continent get out of its debt crisis. And President Obama will arrive with a smile, some hearty handshakes, and his own plea: that Greece get its act together and that Europe fix its economic ills, which he has called one of the biggest drags on the United States’ own ailing economy.

The two contrasting appearances at the Group of 20 economic meeting are a stark example of waning American influence. Without the spare cash that Mr. Hu has at his disposal — and the power that can come with it — Mr. Obama has struggled to cajole his own allies into taking the steps he believes are necessary to lift the global economy.

Yet the relative decline of the United States as an international force also comes with a silver lining. For decades, the United States has been the global rescuer of last resort. It is a role that has brought significant costs, both financial and human.

The last few months may well end up being an inflection point, in which the United States, though easily still the world’s leading power, no longer has quite the responsibility or the burden it once did. The pattern has been evident in the Arab Spring, with the American military playing mostly a supporting role in Libya, and now in the European financial crisis, with Asian money coming to aid the Europeans.

“Why would the United States want to have influence over a train wreck?” said George Friedman, the chief executive of Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company. “If the Chinese want to provide $150 billion bailing out European banks, more power to them.”

In many ways, the situation is a natural evolution of the campaign promises made by Mr. Obama in 2008, when he vowed to turn away from the Bush administration’s more unilateral approach.

As president, Mr. Obama is now overseeing the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and has emphasized multilateral diplomacy in all its messy forms. He refused to consider American intervention in Libya until the United Nations approved a resolution supporting it, and then he stepped back and allowed France and Britain to take the lead though American military help remained essential.

Mr. Obama’s critics have decried the decline in American clout and said his approach exacerbated it, by forfeiting claims on American exceptionalism. Mr. Obama’s backers say that he is simply acknowledging reality and developing a clear-eyed strategy for what the United States can and cannot do and that he ultimately may prove right in diagnosing Europe’s economic problems and its need to take difficult steps to fix them.

“Obama has clearly made a premeditated move away from the unilateralism of the Bush years, and he’s done it because it’s the right way to conduct foreign policy, but has also done it because America’s leverage has been diminished,” said David J. Rothkopf, a Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration and the author of “Running the World,” a book about the National Security Council. “We can’t write checks the way that we once could; we can’t deploy troops in the way that we once did.”

But, Mr. Rothkopf argues, “we are in this situation of feeling overexposed and overburdened precisely because we had such an appetite before for unilateralism and triumphalism.”

For instance, he said, the staggering costs of the war in Iraq — which the United States largely bore alone — contributed to the very same national debt and budget deficit that now prevent the United States from stepping in financially to help Europe.

Of course, in an election year, the last thing that Mr. Obama wants to be seen as doing is putting forward the idea that the United States is no longer influential, or that there is no longer any such thing as American exceptionalism.

“This is a place that parents all over the world want to send their kids to university,” said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, during a briefing with reporters at the White House on Monday. “We’re the center of innovation. We have a great network of alliances around the world that no other country has. I’m struck, in the G20 and the other forums that we’re involved in, I’m struck by the degree which other countries very much look to the U.S. for leadership, thought leadership and leadership on action, to ensure a way to resolve global problems.”

Arriving in Cannes on Thursday, Mr. Obama will be trying to balance providing that leadership while not taking on any of the additional burden — particularly financial — that such leadership often requires.

Whatever Democrats and Republicans may say about the United States’ role in the world, it is clearly changing.

Over the last two days, American officials have watched, largely powerless, as the Greek government has threatened to undo the Europe-designed, Asia-financed deal to restructure Greece’s debts.

On Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, all but shrugged when reporters asked him what the United States planned to do about the call by the Greek prime minister’s surprise call for a popular referendum on a new debt deal with his country’s foreign lenders, a referendum that could throw Europe into even deeper turmoil.

“It is a European problem that needs to be addressed,” Mr. Carney said, “and they have the capacity to do it.”

The breakdown is a clear contrast to the 1990s, when the United States pushed through multibillion-dollar rescue packages for both Mexico and Asia, let alone the period after World War II, when the United States instituted the Marshall Plan.

But for all the acceptance that the United States will no longer be the world’s policeman and financier, the emerging strategy carries risks.

China, for instance, is bound to try to extract concessions from Europe for any aid, and the United States could end up losing Europe as an ally in pressuring China to take important economic steps of its own, like allowing its currency to float on the open market, which both European and American policy makers want.

And while the political appetite for myriad military adventures overseas might be on the wane in Washington, the American military remains the world’s most formidable, and the most likely to be called on to back American allies like Israel, Japan and South Korea.

    A Silver Lining to America’s Waning Influence, NYT, 1.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/us/americas-waning-influence-has-a-silver-lining.html