History > 2011 > USA > International (XX)

A World in Denial

of What It Knows

December 31, 2011
The New York Times
By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

Bath, England

COULD there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.”

He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns... there are known unknowns ... there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns.”

What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow.”

Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State. Ireland merely happened to offer an extreme case, where “everyone knew.” They just chose to forget that they knew — about the way that Irish banks ran wild, how easy credit fueled a monstrous explosion of property prices and speculative house-building. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, “The boom is getting boomier,” preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust.

Beginning in 2008, the skies were lighted up by financial conflagrations, from Lehman Brothers to the Royal Bank of Scotland. These were dramatic enough — but were they unforeseeable or unknowable? What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea? An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it.

Or recall how we were taken into the Iraq war. That was the origin of Mr. Rumsfeld’s curious words 10 years ago. When he murmured about “things we do not know we don’t know,” he was touching on the unconventional weapons that Saddam Hussein might — or might not — have held.

In a sense, Mr. Rumsfeld was more right than he realized. Those of us who opposed the war may be asked to this day whether we knew what weaponry Iraq possessed, to which the answer is that of course we didn’t. Nor, as it transpired, did President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld or Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

But that was the wrong question. It should have been not “what weaponry does Saddam Hussein possess?” but “Is Saddam Hussein’s weaponry, whatever it may be, the real reason for the war, or is it a pretext confected after a decision for war had already been taken?” The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it.

Then there was another unknown known: the likely consequences of an invasion. Shortly before it began, Mr. Blair met President Jacques Chirac of France. As well as reiterating his opposition to the coming war, Mr. Chirac offered the prime minister specific warnings. Mr. Blair and his friends in Washington seemed to think that they would be welcomed with open arms in Iraq, Mr. Chirac said, but that they shouldn’t count on it. It was foolish to think of creating a modern democracy in an artificial country with a divided society like Iraq. And Mr. Chirac asked whether Mr. Blair realized that, by invading Iraq, they might yet precipitate a civil war.

This has been described in a BBC documentary by someone present, Sir Stephen Wall, a Foreign Office man then attached to Downing Street. As the British team was leaving, Mr. Blair turned and said, “Poor old Jacques, he just doesn’t get it,” to which Sir Stephen now adds dryly that he turned out to get it rather better than “we” did.

At that time, Mr. Chirac was reviled in America, and his career has just ended in disgrace, with a court conviction for embezzlement. But who was right about Iraq? All the calamities that followed the invasion were not only foreseeable, they were foreseen. And yet for Mr. Blair, as well as Washington, they were unknown knowns.

One more such, bitter as it is to say so when many people have been ruined, was the Bernard L. Madoff fraud. For years, his investors gratefully and unquestioningly accepted returns that were strictly incredible. Loud warning voices sounded. Harry Markopolos, a former investment officer, exhaustively back-analyzed Mr. Madoff’s supposed figures by computer. He spent nearly nine years repeatedly trying to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that these figures were not merely incredible but mathematically impossible. And still the S.E.C. chose to unknow it. Leos Janacek wrote a harrowing opera called “The Makropulos Affair”; Peter Gelb at the Met should commission someone to write “The Markopolos Affair” as a fable for our times.

In a very different kind of scandal, not everyone at Penn State, and certainly not every fan, knew what had happened in the showers. But quite enough was known by people who could have acted. They chose instead to unknow. And so to another classic unknown known, the euro. The recent summit in Brussels turned into a silly melodrama, with a British prime minister, David Cameron this time, once more playing the pantomime villain. But Mr. Cameron was right, if for the wrong reasons, to oppose the European Union’s latest frantic (and doomed) plan to prop up the euro.

If truth be told (but it so rarely is!), the euro cannot work and could never have worked. That is, a single currency embracing countries as diverse in social culture, productivity, work practices and taxation as Germany and Greece, or the Netherlands and Portugal, is economically impossible without much closer fiscal and financial union — which is politically impossible. Anyone could have known that at the time the euro was introduced, but for the rulers of the European Union it was their very own unknown known.

“The Cloud of Unknowing” is a medieval classic of mystical writing, and unknowing still hangs over us. It will be a happier new year if we can dispel some of that cloud, try to unknow less, and know a little more.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of “The Controversy of Zion,”

“The Strange Death of Tory England” and “Yo, Blair!”

    A World in Denial of What It Knows, NYT, 31.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/unknown-knowns-avoiding-the-truth.html

Egypt’s Obstructionist Generals

December 30, 2011
The New York Times

Egypt’s military council continues to demonstrate its utter contempt for the citizens who risked their lives to end President Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian rule. In the latest outrage, security forces on Thursday shut down three American-financed democracy-building groups in Cairo and as many as six other nonprofit organizations. Armed with automatic weapons, troops provided no warrants and, in some cases, detained the groups’ employees for hours. They confiscated computers and files and sealed the doors when they left.

The three American groups are all well known and respected. Two of them, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, have ties to the main American political parties. They were authorized by the Egyptian government to monitor the country’s first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, set to resume next week. The third group, Freedom House, just finished its application for official recognition three days ago.

Egypt’s Islamist parties, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, have honed their organizational skills over the years and won a majority in the first rounds of parliamentary voting. But the country’s liberal and secular activists, the heart of the revolution, still need a lot of help to learn the skills to develop political parties, train poll workers and get out the vote.

The raids go against the military council’s promise to allow free and fair elections. They are part of a desperate attempt to intimidate the opposition and cover up the council’s many failures by invoking the canard of “foreign” meddling in Egypt’s unrest.

Egyptians continue to protest because the army has made clear its determination to cling to political power indefinitely — and control lucrative chunks of the economy — no matter how many civilians it has to arrest or kill.

The Obama administration has spoken out firmly against the raids, and, on Friday, it said the Egyptian government had agreed to stop harassing the democracy groups and return their property. The administration needs to keep pressing that message and make clear that if such abuses continue at least some of the $1.3 billion in annual American military aid will be withheld. The European Union should also review its assistance.

Egypt’s generals claim that they are protecting their country. The truth is they are only interested in protecting their own power and perks. Their continued repression is the real threat to Egypt’s stability and its future.

    Egypt’s Obstructionist Generals, NYT, 30.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/opinion/egypts-obstructionist-generals.html

This Revolution Isn’t Being Televised

December 30, 2011
The New York Times
By JON B. ALTERMAN

Washington

THE Egyptian revolution did not happen last winter. It is happening now. And it is not taking place in Tahrir Square, but in towns and villages throughout the country.

Although protests and violent military responses in central Cairo have seized world attention, they involve only a small fraction of Egyptians. Much more important are the millions who voted this month in a rolling election process that will continue into January, setting the stage for a negotiation between newly elected officials and Egypt’s military rulers over the country’s political future. We must focus our attention on its outcome and, perhaps counterintuitively, try to ensure an ambiguous result so that no side is left empty-handed.

In February, the picture looked very different. The youthful energy of Egypt’s revolutionaries captivated audiences and furthered the view that educated and tolerant people across the region were poised to seize power from brutal dictators. As the Arab Spring wore on, it became clear that not as much had changed in Egypt as many had thought. Army officers in suits had ruled Egypt since the 1950s. They were still in command, albeit now in uniform. Many Egyptians bristled, and thousands protested the army’s ongoing rule and the slow pace of reform.

A core of activists still come to Tahrir Square, but the real game is farther afield, where Islamist parties have mobilized tens of thousands to get out the vote and monitor polling stations.

For Americans, it is hard to imagine that religious parties could win almost 70 percent of the Egyptian vote. But I served as an official election observer earlier this month, and it is hard for me to imagine how they could not. Islamists have grasped that the game has moved beyond protests to the mechanics of elections, and their supporters are motivated, organized and energetic. By contrast, the secular liberal parties are virtually absent from the countryside. Judging from posters, billboards, bumper stickers and banners, the two major Islamist parties have the field almost to themselves.

Although Egypt’s rising Islamist politicians are seeking to take power from the military, the army has generally supported the political process by guarding polling stations and maintaining order. But the army’s legitimacy is now fading due to its brutal treatment of protesters. While it had initially approached the elections with professionalism and fairness, raids on civil society and democracy groups in recent days represent a real departure. As the army’s image declines, high voter turnout and strong poll results are enhancing Islamists’ legitimacy.

This is but a prelude to the real battle, which will come in the spring as a new Parliament is seated, constitutional revisions begin and a presidential election campaign kicks off. Egypt is also likely to be running low on foreign exchange reserves, tempting the government to devalue the pound and spur inflation.

Elected politicians and the army will both be working to set the rules by which Egypt will be governed. Each side is likely to take things to the brink, reminding the other of its strengths and ensuring that it gets the best deal.

Many in Israel and America, and even some in Egypt, fear that the elections will produce an Islamist-led government that will tear up the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, turn hostile to the United States, openly support Hamas and transform Egypt into a theocracy that oppresses women, Christians and secular Muslims. They see little prospect for more liberal voices to prevail, and view military dictatorship as a preferable outcome.

American interests, however, call for a different outcome, one that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other. And with lopsided early election results, it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs.

Our instinct is to search for the clarity we saw in last winter’s televised celebrations. However, what Egyptians, and Americans, need is something murkier — not a victory, but an accommodation.

Jon B. Alterman is director of the Middle East program

at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    This Revolution Isn’t Being Televised, NYT, 30.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/opinion/egypts-real-revolution.html

With $30 Billion Arms Deal, U.S. Bolsters Saudi Ties

December 29, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

HONOLULU — Fortifying one of its key allies in the Persian Gulf, the Obama administration announced a weapons deal with Saudi Arabia on Thursday, saying it had agreed to sell F-15 fighter jets valued at nearly $30 billion to the Royal Saudi Air Force.

The agreement, and the administration’s parallel plans to press ahead with a nearly $11 billion arms deal for Iraq, despite rising political tensions there, is dramatic evidence of its determination to project American military influence in an oil-rich region shadowed by a threat from Iran.

Though the White House said the deal had not been accelerated to respond to threats by Iranian officials in recent days to shut off the Strait of Hormuz, its timing is laden with significance, as tensions with Iran have deepened and the United States has withdrawn its last soldiers from Iraq.

“This sale will send a strong message to countries in the region that the United States is committed to stability in the gulf and the broader Middle East,” said Andrew J. Shapiro, the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs. “It will enhance Saudi Arabia’s ability to deter and defend against external threats to its sovereignty.”

The agreement also suggests that the United States and Saudi Arabia have moved beyond a bitter falling-out over the uprisings in the Arab world. Though the two countries continue to differ on how to handle the popular revolts in the region, American and Saudi officials said, the disagreement has not fractured a strategic alliance based on a common concern over Iran.

Saudi Arabia is a longtime foe of Iran, with relations souring further last fall after the United States broke up what it said was an Iranian-backed plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Iran has denied the accusations.

“When you look at the size of this package, what does it tell you about U.S.-Saudi relations?” said a senior Saudi official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “It says it’s very strong and very solid. Any disagreements from time to time don’t affect the core relationship.”

The weapons package is remarkable, both for its size and for its technical sophistication. Under the terms of the $29.4 billion agreement signed on Dec. 24, Saudi Arabia will get 84 new F-15SA jets, manufactured by Boeing, and upgrades to 70 F-15s in the Saudi fleet with new munitions and spare parts. It will also get help with training, logistics and maintenance.

The new F-15s, which will be delivered in 2015, are among the most capable and versatile fighter jets in the world, Pentagon officials said. They will come with the latest air-to-air missiles and precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, enabling them to strike ships and radar facilities day or night and in any weather.

Though Mr. Shapiro and other officials said the planes were intended to help Saudi Arabia protect its sovereignty, military analysts said they would be effective against Iranian planes and ships anywhere in the Persian Gulf. They are part of a 10-year, $60 billion weapons package for Saudi Arabia that was approved last year by Congress.

At the time, there was a vigorous debate, with some lawmakers arguing that such a huge arms package would threaten the military position of Israel. Mr. Shapiro, speaking at a State Department briefing, said the administration was satisfied that the sale of the F-15s would not diminish “Israel’s qualitative military edge.”

The White House portrayed the arms sale as part of a concerted effort to shore up its relationship with Saudi Arabia. President Obama has made several telephone calls to King Abdullah, a senior official said; the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, traveled twice to the Saudi capital, Riyadh; and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. led a high-level delegation to the funeral of Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz in October.

Early this year, the Saudis were furious when Mr. Obama withdrew support for Egypt’s embattled president, Hosni Mubarak, after he faced massive protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Later, it was the White House’s turn to be upset, when Saudi tanks rolled into neighboring Bahrain to help quash a mainly Shiite rebellion against that kingdom’s Sunni monarchy.

Yet Saudi Arabia and the United States continue to cooperate in areas like counterterrorism. In recent weeks, the two have worked to resolve the crisis in Yemen, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh has formally agreed to cede power in a Saudi-brokered agreement and has applied for a visa to travel to the United States for medical treatment.

“The agreement reinforces the strong and enduring relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia,” Joshua R. Earnest, the White House’s deputy press secretary, said in a statement issued in Hawaii, where Mr. Obama is on vacation.

With the United States pulling out of Iraq, the administration has been eager to demonstrate that it will remain a presence in the region. It is proceeding with weapons sales to Iraq, despite fears that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki may abandon his American-backed power-sharing government in favor of a Shiite-dominated state.

The administration has weighed stationing combat troops in Kuwait in case of a military confrontation with Iran or a collapse in security in Iraq. It is also seeking to expand military ties with other gulf countries, including Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

“I see this more in the longer-term effort by the administration to signal that even with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the U.S. is still committed to the defense of its allies in the gulf and to the containment of Iran,” said F. Gregory Gause III, an expert on Saudi affairs at the University of Vermont.

The weapons deal, Mr. Gause said, also illustrated that the two countries could put aside their differences and focus on larger strategic priorities. “After some tension-filled months this year over Egypt and Bahrain, both sides have agreed to disagree on that, and agree on their common interests,” he said.

 

Mark Landler reported from Honolulu,

and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

    With $30 Billion Arms Deal, U.S. Bolsters Saudi Ties, NYT, 29.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/world/middleeast/
    with-30-billion-arms-deal-united-states-bolsters-ties-to-saudi-arabia.html

Iran and the Strait

December 29, 2011
The New York Times

Iran’s threat to shut the Strait of Hormuz — one-fifth of the world’s oil trade passes through there — if the United States and Europe press ahead with new sanctions is unacceptable. The Obama administration is right to signal, in deliberately moderated ways, that Washington will not back off if Tehran ever attempts to carry it out.

A show of American naval force kept the strait open to oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. A Fifth Fleet spokeswoman usefully reminded Iran this week that the Navy always stands “ready to counter malevolent actions to ensure freedom of navigation.” Oil markets reacted calmly, at least for now, with no price spikes.

Whether or not Tehran is bluffing (or trying to drive up oil prices), Washington will not back down and Europe should not. More than five years after the United Nations Security Council ordered it to stop, Iran is still enriching uranium and mastering other technologies that would allow it to build a nuclear weapon. According to the latest report from United Nations inspectors, Iran has created computer models of nuclear explosions, conducted experiments on nuclear triggers and completed advanced research on a warhead that could be delivered by a medium-range missile.

Eighteen months have passed since the last round of Security Council sanctions. American calls to tighten the economic screws by, for example, concentrating on Iran’s petrochemical industry have been stymied by Russia and China. Europe, however, has been increasingly willing to impose its own investment restrictions. And Iran’s latest threat is a clear sign of its growing economic desperation.

The new sanctions Tehran hopes to fend off are a United States law that would penalize foreign companies that do business with Iran’s central bank — which they must do to buy Iranian oil — and a tough new round of punishments, possibly including an oil embargo, now being considered by the European Union.

We strongly support applying maximum economic pressure to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But we think Washington penalizing foreign companies for engaging in otherwise lawful commerce with Iran is not the right way to go about it and could backfire, alienating European allies at a time when they are preparing to impose their own stronger sanctions. President Obama can limit the damage by making full use of a waiver, which allows him to block the penalties if they would threaten national security or cause oil prices to soar.

Europe must also find the best way to increase pressure on Iran’s government. We are not sure how a full-scale oil embargo would affect the global economy, but, before proceeding, the European Union should carefully weigh the consequences. Meanwhile, it should expand its list of targeted Iranian companies, officials and government entities. And both Europe and Washington should mount a new push on Russia and China to agree to toughened United Nations sanctions.

Tehran’s latest threat to block global oil shipping should leave no doubt about its recklessness and its contempt for international law. This is not a government any country should want to see acquire nuclear weapons.

    Iran and the Strait, NYT, 29.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/iran-and-the-strait.html

Egypt Raids Offices of Nonprofits, 3 Backed by U.S.

December 29, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN LEE MYERS

CAIRO — Security forces shut down three American-financed democracy-building groups and as many as six other nonprofit organizations on Thursday, in a crackdown that signaled a new low in relations between Washington and Egypt’s military rulers.

Two of the organizations, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, had been formally authorized by the Egyptian government to monitor the parliamentary elections set to resume next week. Critics said the surprise raids contradicted the military’s pledge to hold a fair and transparent vote.

The other American-financed pro-democracy group whose offices were closed, the advocacy group Freedom House, had completed its application for official recognition just three days ago. An American group that helps train Egyptian journalists was among the other nonprofit groups raided.

Human rights activists said security forces barging into the offices of respected international organizations was unprecedented, even under the police state of President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted this year.

The raids are the latest and most forceful effort yet by the country’s ruling generals to crack down on perceived sources of criticism amid rising calls from Egyptian politicians and protesters and some Western leaders for the military to hand over power to a civilian government. Those calls were punctuated by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s expression of outrage last week over the military’s beating and stripping of female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

On Thursday, a State Department spokeswoman announced that it was “deeply concerned” by the raids.

“Suffice it to say we don’t think that this action is justified,” the spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said. “We want to see the harassment end,” she added, calling the raids “inconsistent with the bilateral cooperation we’ve had over many years.”

Another senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that in private channels, the United States had sent an even stronger message: “This crosses a line.”

“It’s triggered by ongoing concerns about control,” the official added, as the ruling military council confronted the mounting pressure to hand over power.

Others called the raids a major challenge to Washington’s policy toward Egypt, which receives $1.3 billion a year in American military aid.

“It is a major escalation in the Egyptian government’s crackdown on civil society organizations, and it is unprecedented in its attack on international organizations like Freedom House, which is funded in large part by the United States government,” said Charles Dunne, director of Middle East and North Africa Programs at the organization, which advocates democratic reforms. “The military council is saying we are happy to take your $1.3 billion a year, but we are not happy when you do things like defending human rights and supporting democracy.”

The state news media said that the raids were part of an investigation into what it described as illegal foreign financing.

Contingents of soldiers and security officers armed with automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests burst into the offices of the nonprofit organizations at roughly the same time Thursday, around 1 p.m.

The officers provided no warrants or explanations, according to officials at several of the groups. They detained the groups’ employees inside for more than five hours in some places. The security forces collected stacks of binders and files, confiscated computers, and sealed the doors as they left.

At the National Democratic Institute’s office in Cairo, armed men in uniforms and plain clothes could be seen through a locked gate slicing open boxes of files stacked in a garage.

“Nobody understands what’s going on,” said Belal Mostafa Gooda, an Egyptian employee of the National Democratic Institute, in a furtive phone call from inside its locked gate during the raid. “We can’t move inside or go outside,” he said, adding, “They’re searching all the papers and files and all laptops, and we don’t know what will happen.”

The National Democratic Institute receives United States government financing, promotes democracy abroad and says it is loosely affiliated with the Democratic Party. The International Republican Institute also receives government money, and is affiliated with some prominent Republicans.

The raids hit at least one German democracy-building group. The security forces also struck the Egyptian Budgetary and Human Rights Observatory, which studies the military and its spending. The officers also shut down an organization that argues for judicial independence.

Egyptian human rights groups are almost completely dependent on foreign financing because the hostility of the Mubarak government scared away Egyptian donors, and many received considerable support from the European Union as well as the United States.

But Egypt’s military rulers began railing against the dangers of foreign financing to Egyptian sovereignty around the time last spring that the United States said it would allocate $65 million to help foster electoral democracy here. Although the United States is Egypt’s most important benefactor, its policies in the region are also very unpopular here, making it an easy target.

Egyptian state news media have made it clear since the military-led government began investigating allegations of improper financing months ago that its principal target was money from the United States; in the most notable instance, a state-owned magazine greeted the new American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, a few months ago with a cartoon cover depicting her holding wads of burning cash in the middle of Tahrir Square. “Ambassador from Hell,” read the caption.

As new clashes have broken out between the military police and protesters challenging military rule — more than 80 have died since October — the generals have often warned that there are “hidden hands” trying to stir up trouble or “bring down the state.” They have increasingly suggested that those hidden hands could be foreign-financed.

In a television interview last month, Maj. Gen. Mamdouh Shaheen suggested several times that the investigation into foreign financing of nongovernment organizations would shed light on the unnamed instigators who he said were behind the protests and clashes in the streets.

“There are hidden hands playing in the country,” he said. “We tell the Egyptian people, and the Egyptian people are smart, that there are people who are trying to demolish the country.”

Most human rights and democracy groups in Egypt already operate in a legal twilight because of Mubarak-era laws allowing only nongovernment organizations licensed by the government. Before and after his ouster, the Egyptian government has seldom granted such licenses to genuinely independent organizations.

“We are in the same gray zone everybody else is,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher with Human Rights Watch here, a group that was not raided. “We are not licensed and we can be shut down and jailed and all of that, but we keep the authorities informed.” After the revolution, she said, most such groups expected their lot to improve: “I don’t think anybody expected there would be a new crackdown.”

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo,

and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo.

    Egypt Raids Offices of Nonprofits, 3 Backed by U.S., NYT, 29.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/world/middleeast/egypts-forces-raid-offices-of-us-and-other-civil-groups.html

U.S. Embraces Low-Key Plan as Turmoil in Iraq Deepens

December 24, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — As Iraq erupted in recent days, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in constant phone contact with the leaders of the country’s dueling sects. He called the Shiite prime minister and the Sunni speaker of the Parliament on Tuesday, and the Kurdish leader on Thursday, urging them to try to resolve the political crisis.

And for the United States, that is where the American intervention in Iraq officially stops.

Sectarian violence and political turmoil in Iraq escalated within days of the United States military’s withdrawal, but officials said in interviews that President Obama had no intention of sending troops back into the country, even if it devolved into civil war.

The United States, without troops on the ground or any direct influence over Iraq’s affairs, has lost much of its leverage there. And so the latest crisis, a descent into sectarian distrust and hostility that was punctuated by a bombing in Baghdad on Thursday that killed more than 60 people, is being treated in much the same way that the United States would treat any diplomatic emergency abroad.

Mr. Obama, his aides said, is adamant that the United States will not send troops back to Iraq. At Fort Bragg, N.C., on Dec. 14, he told returning troops that he had left Iraq in the hands of the Iraqi people, and in private conversations at the White House, he has told aides that the United States gave Iraqis an opportunity; what they do with that opportunity is up to them.

Though the president has been heralding the end of the Iraq war as a victory, and a fulfillment of his campaign promise to bring American troops home, the sudden crisis could quickly become a political problem for Mr. Obama, foreign policy experts said.

“Right now, Iraq, along with getting Osama bin Laden, succeeding in Libya, and restoring the U.S. reputation in the world, is a clear plus for Obama,” said David Rothkopf, a former official in the administration of Bill Clinton and a national security expert. “He kept his promise and got out. But the story could turn on him very rapidly.”

For instance, Mr. Rothkopf and other national security experts said, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq is swiftly adopting policies that are setting off deep divisions among Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites. If Iraq fragments, if Iran starts to assert more visible influence or if a civil war breaks out, “the president could be blamed,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “He would be remembered not for leaving Iraq but for how he left it.”

Already, Mr. Obama is coming under political fire. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that Mr. Obama’s decision to pull American troops out had “unraveled.” Appearing on CBS News on Thursday, Mr. McCain said that “we are paying a very heavy price in Baghdad because of our failure to have a residual force there,” adding that while he was disturbed by what had happened in the past week, he was not surprised.

Administration officials, for their part, countered that it was hard to see how American troops could have prevented either the political crisis or the coordinated attacks in Iraq.

“These crises before happened when there were tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq, and they all got resolved, but resolved by Iraqis through the political process,” said Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser. “The test will be whether, with our diplomatic help, they continue to use politics to overcome their differences, pursue power sharing and get to a better place.”

So far, the administration is maintaining a hands-off stance in public, even as Mr. Biden has privately exhorted Iraqi officials to mend their differences. Several Obama administration officials have been on the phone all week imploring Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi officials to quickly work through the charges and countercharges swirling around Mr. Maliki’s accusation that the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, enlisted personal bodyguards to run a death squad.

Aides said that Mr. Biden talked to Mr. Maliki; Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni political leader; and Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader. He urged the men to organize a meeting of Iraq’s top political leaders, from Mr. Maliki on down, conveying the message that “you all need to stop hurling accusations at each other through the media and actually sit together and work through your competing concerns,” a senior administration official said. That official, like several others, agreed to discuss internal administration thinking only on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

American officials say they believe that Mr. Talabani is the best person to convene such a meeting, because he is respected by the most Iraqis.

Mr. Biden is not the only high-ranking American official who is actively involved in discussions with Iraqi officials. David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. who formerly served as the top commander in Iraq, traveled to Baghdad recently for talks with his Iraqi counterparts.

Beyond that, Obama administration officials have conveyed to Mr. Maliki that the American economic, security and diplomatic relationship with Iraq will be “colored” by the extent to which Mr. Maliki can hold together a coalition government that includes Sunnis and Kurds, one administration official said.

Even without a military presence in Iraq, the United States maintains at least some leverage over Iraqi officials. Iraq wants to purchase F-16 warplanes from the United States, for example, and the Obama administration has been trying to help the government forge better relations with its Sunni Arab neighbors, like the United Arab Emirates, which recently sent its defense chief to Baghdad to talk about how the Iraqis could participate in regional exercises.

Pentagon officials and military officers had hoped a deal could be struck with the Iraqi government to keep at least several thousand American combat troops and trainers in Iraq after Dec. 31. But domestic politics in Iraq made that impossible, and the outcome also fit with Mr. Obama’s narrative of a full withdrawal from a war he vowed to end.

Even plans quietly drawn up for the continued deployment of counterterrorism commandos were just as quietly pulled off the table, to make sure that Mr. Obama’s pledge to reduce American combat forces to zero would be met, according to senior administration officials.

The only American military personnel remaining in Iraq today are the fewer than 200 members of an Office of Security Cooperation that operates within the American Embassy to coordinate military relations between Washington and Baghdad, particularly arms sales.

The United States has about 40,000 service members remaining throughout the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region, including a ground combat unit that was one of the last out of Iraq — and remains, at least temporarily, just across the border in Kuwait. Significant numbers of long-range strike aircraft also are on call aboard aircraft carriers and at bases in the region.

As the responsibility for nurturing bilateral relations shifts to the State Department, the responsibility for security assistance moves to the C.I.A., which operates in Iraq under a separate authority, independent of the military.

Although the United States military is unlikely to return to Iraq, it is possible that military counterterrorism personnel could return, if approved by the president, under C.I.A. authority, just as an elite team of Navy commandos carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden under C.I.A. command.

The C.I.A. historically has operated its own strike teams, and it also has the authority to hire indigenous operatives to participate in its counterterrorism missions.

“As the U.S. military has drawn down to zero in terms of combat troops, the U.S. intelligence community has not done the same,” a senior administration official said. “Intelligence cooperation remains very important to the U.S.-Iraqi relationship.”

The official acknowledged a risk punctuated by the recent unrest. “There are serious counterterrorism issues that confront Iraq,” the official said. “And we don’t want to let go of the very solid relationships we have built over the years to share information of importance to both countries.”

Even if the unrest rose to levels approaching civil war, American officials said, it was unlikely that Mr. Obama would allow the American military to return.

“There is a strong sense that we need to let events in Iraq play out,” said one senior administration official. “There is not a great deal of appetite for re-engagement. We are not going to reinvade Iraq.”

    U.S. Embraces Low-Key Plan as Turmoil in Iraq Deepens, NYT, 24.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/world/middleeast/us-loses-leverage-in-iraq-now-that-troops-are-out.html

Egypt’s Military Masters

December 20, 2011
The New York Times

Five days of violent clashes between Egyptian soldiers and protesters have produced appalling images of cruelty and abuse — including a video showing soldiers stripping the abaya off a woman on the ground to reveal her blue bra as one raises a boot to stomp on her.

In February, the army enhanced its standing by refusing to fire on demonstrators when President Hosni Mubarak was ousted. Now it is inspiring rage and threatening Egypt’s transition to democracy. On Tuesday, in an extraordinary display, thousands of women gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to express outrage over the army’s treatment of women and to protest against continued military rule.

The generals who form the ruling military council are proving that they will do whatever it takes — including killing protesters and detaining thousands — to protect their authority and control of lucrative chunks of the economy. They have repeatedly shown that they are determined to hold on to power even after a new Parliament — still in the process of being elected — is seated next year.

On Monday, Gen. Adel Emara of the ruling council denied that soldiers were responsible for any violence and claimed the protesters were engaged in a plot “to destroy the state.” Blaming protesters is unconvincing in the face of shocking images of the military’s conduct. If the military rulers were interested in justice, they would have started an independent investigation into all acts of violence, whether military or civilian.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke forcefully this week against the street attacks on women, noting, correctly, that “this systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people.”

The Obama administration needs to keep pressing the generals to move expeditiously to civilian rule. If the army continues to attack the Egyptian people, the administration will have no choice but to reduce its $2 billion in annual aid — two-thirds of it going to Egypt’s military — to show that it will not enable such behavior.

The army mishandled Egypt’s transition from the start, including refusing financial help from the International Monetary Fund for its deteriorating economy. But the Islamist parties that won big in the early rounds of parliamentary voting and the liberals that have done poorly in the voting also made mistakes. There are huge challenges ahead, including writing a constitution and coping with a looming and serious economic crisis exacerbated by the political turmoil. But the most pressing issue is ensuring that power moves from the army to elected civilian leaders.

    Egypt’s Military Masters, NYT, 20.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/opinion/egypts-military-masters.html

Mass March by Cairo Women

in Protest Over Abuse by Soldiers

December 20, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Several thousand women demanding the end of military rule marched through downtown Cairo on Tuesday evening in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

“Drag me, strip me, my brothers’ blood will cover me!” they chanted. “Where is the field marshal?” they demanded of the top military officer, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. “The girls of Egypt are here.”

Historians called the event the biggest women’s demonstration in modern Egyptian history, the most significant since a 1919 march against British colonialism inaugurated women’s activism here, and a rarity in the Arab world. It also added a new and unexpected wave of protesters opposing the ruling military council’s efforts to retain power and its tactics for suppressing public discontent.

The protest’s scale stunned even feminists here. In Egypt’s stiffly patriarchal culture, previous attempts to organize women’s events in Tahrir Square during this year’s protests almost always fizzled or, in one case in March, ended in the physical harassment of a small group of women by a larger crowd of men.

“It was amazing the number of women that came out from all over the place,” said Zeinab Abul-Magd, a historian who has studied women’s activism here. “I expected fewer than 300.”

The march abruptly pushed women to the center of Egyptian political life after they had been left out almost completely. Although women stood at the forefront of the initial revolt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak 10 months ago, few had prominent roles in the various revolutionary coalitions formed in the uprising’s aftermath. Almost no women have won seats in the early rounds of parliamentary elections. And the continuing demonstrations against military rule have often degenerated into battles in which young men and the security police hurl rocks at each other.

On the fifth day of clashes that have killed at least 14 people, many women in the march said they hoped their demonstration would undercut the military council’s efforts to portray demonstrators as little more than hooligans, vandals and arsonists. “This will show those who stay home that we are not thugs,” said Fadwa Khaled, 25, a computer engineer.

The women’s demand for a voice in political life appeared to run counter to the recent election victories of conservative Islamists. But the march was hardly dominated by secular liberals. It contained a broad spectrum of Egyptian women, including homemakers demonstrating for the first time and young mothers carrying babies, with a majority in traditional Muslim head scarves and a few in face-covering veils. And their chants mixed calls for women’s empowerment with others demanding more “gallantry” from Egyptian men.

Egypt’s military rulers came under fire from international human rights groups soon after they took power in February for performing invasive, pseudo-medical “virginity tests” on several women detained after a protest in March. But in Egypt’s conservative culture, few of the women subjected to that humiliation have come forward to criticize the generals publicly.

The spark for the march on Tuesday came over the weekend, when hundreds of military police officers in riot gear repeatedly stormed Tahrir Square, indiscriminately beating anyone they could catch. Videos showed more than one instance in which officers grabbed and stripped female demonstrators, tearing off their Muslim head scarves. And in the most infamous case caught on video, a half-dozen soldiers beat a supine woman with batons and ripped off her abaya to reveal a blue bra. Then one of them kicked her in the chest.

Recalling that event at a news conference Tuesday, the woman’s friend Hassan Shahin said he had told the soldiers: “I’m a journalist, and this is a girl. Wait, I’ll take her away from here.” But, he said, “nobody listened, and one of them jumped on me, and they started beating me with batons.”

No doubt fearful of the stigma that would come with her public humiliation, the victim has declined to step forward publicly, so some activists now refer to her only as “blue bra girl.” The photos of her beating and disrobing, however, have quickly circulated on the Internet and have been broadcast by television stations around the world.

In Washington on Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the recent events in Egypt “shocking.”

“Women are being beaten and humiliated in the same streets where they risked their lives for the revolution only a few short months ago,” Mrs. Clinton said.

“Women are being attacked, stripped and beaten in the streets,” she added, arguing that what she called the systematic degradation of Egyptian women “disgraces the state and its uniform.”

As recently as Tuesday morning, however, many activists here said that because relatively few Egyptians have access to the Internet, read independent newspapers or watch independent satellite television news, the blue bra video was far more widely familiar in the United States than in Egypt.

“Four blocks from here, no one knows about this,” said Aalam Wassef, a blogger and an activist, at a meeting Tuesday morning in which activists announced a plan to set up screens in cities and towns around the country where people could see that video and others that contradict the generals’ version of events. (Other scenes include security forces hurling rocks and gasoline bombs, military police officers firing rifles and handguns and protesters bloodied by bullets.)

Some men who had seen the images questioned why the woman had been in the square, suggesting that her husband or father should have kept her at home. Other men have argued that she must have wanted the exposure because she wore fancy lingerie, or they have said she should have worn more clothes under her abaya.

But the woman’s ordeal began to receive new attention on Monday when Gen. Adel Emara, a member of the ruling military council, acknowledged what had happened during a news conference on state television. General Emara argued that the scene had been taken out of context and that the broader circumstances would explain what happened.

At the same news conference, a veteran female journalist who reports on the military stood up to ask the general for an apology to Egyptian women. “Or the next revolution will be a women’s revolution for real,” the journalist warned. The general tried to interrupt her — he said the military had learned of a new plan to attack the Parliament — and then he brushed off her request.

Many Egyptian women said later that they were outraged by his response.

When core activists called for a march Tuesday evening to protest the military’s treatment of women — organizers on Twitter used the hash tag “#BlueBra” — few could have expected the magnitude of the response.

The crowd seemed to grow at each step as the women marched, calling up to the apartment buildings lining the streets to urge others to join them. “Come down, come down,” they shouted in an echo of the protests that led to Mr. Mubarak’s ouster in February.

“If you don’t leave your house today to confront the militias of Tantawi, you will leave your house tomorrow so they can rape your daughter,” one sign declared.

“I am here because of our girls who were stripped in the street,” said Sohir Mahmoud, 50, a homemaker who said she was demonstrating for the first time.

“Men are not going to cover your flesh, so we will,” she told a younger woman. “We have to come down and call for our rights. Nobody is going to call for our rights for us.”

Along the sidewalks beside the march, some men came out to gawk and stare. Others chanted along with the women, “Freedom, freedom.”

“I came so that girls are not stripped in the streets again,” said Afa Helal, 67, who was also demonstrating for the first time, “and because my daughters are always going to Tahrir. The army is supposed to protect the girls, not strip them!”

Mayy el-Sheik contributed reporting.

    Mass March by Cairo Women in Protest Over Abuse by Soldiers, NYT, 20.12.2011?
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/world/middleeast/
    violence-enters-5th-day-as-egyptian-general-blames-protesters.html

In Kim’s Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure

December 19, 2011
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By MARK LANDLER and CHOE SANG-HUN

WASHINGTON — Kim Jong-il, the enigmatic North Korean leader, died on a train at 8:30 a.m. Saturday in his country. Forty-eight hours later, officials in South Korea still did not know anything about it — to say nothing of Washington, where the State Department acknowledged “press reporting” of Mr. Kim’s death well after North Korean state media had already announced it.

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea. Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist. The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.

As the United States and its allies confront a perilous leadership transition in North Korea — a failed state with nuclear weapons — the closed nature of the country will greatly complicate their calculations. With little information about Mr. Kim’s son and successor, Kim Jong-un, and even less insight into the palace intrigue in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, much of their response will necessarily be guesswork.

“We have clear plans about what to do if North Korea attacks, but not if the North Korean regime unravels,” said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser in the Bush administration. “Every time you do these scenarios, one of the first objectives is trying to find out what’s going on inside North Korea.”

In many countries, that would involve intercepting phone calls between government officials or peering down from spy satellites. And indeed, American spy planes and satellites scan the country. Highly sensitive antennas along the border between South and North Korea pick up electronic signals. South Korean intelligence officials interview thousands of North Koreans who defect to the South each year.

And yet remarkably little is known about the inner workings of the North Korean government. Pyongyang, officials said, keeps sensitive information limited to a small circle of officials, who do not talk.

“This is a society that thrives on its opaqueness,” said Christopher R. Hill, a former special envoy who negotiated with the North over its nuclear program. “It is very complex. To understand the leadership structure requires going way back into Korean culture to understand Confucian principles.”

On Monday, the Obama administration held urgent consultations with allies but said little publicly about Mr. Kim’s death. Senior officials acknowledged they were largely bystanders, watching the drama unfold in the North and hoping that it does not lead to acts of aggression against South Korea.

None of the situations envisioned by American officials for North Korea are comforting. Some current and former officials assume that Kim Jong-un is too young and untested to step confidently into his father’s shoes. Some speculate that the younger Mr. Kim might serve in a kind of regency, in which the real power would be wielded by military officials like Jang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law and confidant, who is 65.

Such an arrangement would do little to relieve the suffering of the North Korean people or defuse the tension over its nuclear ambitions. But it would be preferable to an open struggle for power in the country.

“A bad scenario is that they go through a smooth transition, and the people keep starving and they continue to develop nuclear weapons,” said Jeffrey A. Bader, a former Asia adviser to President Obama. “The unstable transition, in which no one is in charge, and in which control of their nuclear program becomes even more opaque, is even worse.”

As failures go, the Central Intelligence Agency’s inability to pick up hints of Mr. Kim’s death was comparatively minor. But as one former agency official, speaking on condition of anonymity about classified matters, pointed out: “What’s worst about our intel is our failure to penetrate deep into the existing leadership. We get defectors, but their information is often old. We get midlevel people, but they often don’t know what’s happening in the inner circle.”

The worst intelligence failure, by far, came in the middle of the Iraq war. North Korea was building a nuclear reactor in Syria, based on the design of its own reactor at Yongbyon. North Korean officials traveled regularly to the site.

Yet the United States was ignorant about it until Meir Dagan, then the head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, visited President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and dropped photographs of the reactor on his coffee table. It was destroyed by Israel in an airstrike in 2007 after the United States turned down Israeli requests to carry out the strike.

While the C.I.A. long suspected that North Korea was working on a second pathway to a bomb — uranium enrichment — it never found the facilities. Then, last year, a Stanford University scientist was given a tour of a plant, in the middle of the Yongbyon complex, which American satellites monitor constantly. It is not clear why satellite surveillance failed to detect construction on a large scale at the complex.

The failure to pick up signs of turmoil are especially disconcerting for people in South Korea. The South’s capital, Seoul, is only 35 miles from the North Korean border, and the military is on constant alert for a surprise attack.

Yet in the 51 hours from the apparent time of Mr. Kim’s death until the official announcement of it, South Korean officials appeared to detect nothing unusual.

During that time, President Lee Myung-bak traveled to Tokyo, met with the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, returned home and was honored at a party for his 70th birthday.

At 10 a.m. local time on Monday, even as North Korean media reported that there would be a “special announcement” at noon, South Korean officials shrugged when asked whether something was afoot. The last time Pyongyang gave advance warning of a special announcement was in 1994, when they reported the death of Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Il-sung, who also died of a heart failure. (South Korea was caught completely off guard by the elder Mr. Kim’s death, which was not disclosed for 22 hours.)

“ ‘Oh, my God!’ was the first word that came to my mind when I saw the North Korean anchorwoman’s black dress and mournful look,” said a government official who monitored the North Korean announcement.

“This shows a big loophole in our intelligence-gathering network on North Korea,” Kwon Seon-taek, an opposition South Korean lawmaker, told reporters.

Kwon Young-se, a ruling party legislator and head of the intelligence committee at the National Assembly, said the National Intelligence Service, the main government spy agency, appeared to have been caught off guard by the North Korean announcement. “We will hold them responsible,” he said.

Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul, South Korea.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

    In Kim’s Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure, NYT, 19.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/world/asia/in-detecting-kim-jong-il-death-a-gobal-intelligence-failure.html

Iranian TV Airs Video It Claims Is of U.S. Spy

December 18, 2011
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Iranian state television broadcast video images on Sunday of a man who it said was a captured American spy sent to infiltrate Iran’s intelligence services.

The video report, also posted online, identifies the man as Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an Iranian-American from Arizona, apparently in his late 20s. In the video, the man says he joined the United States Army after graduating from high school in 2001, served in Iraq and received training in languages and espionage.

He said he was sent to Iran by the Central Intelligence Agency to try to gain the trust of the Iranian authorities by handing over information, some misleading and some accurate. If his first mission was successful, he said he was told, there would be more missions.

The claims in the video could not immediately be verified. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the matter on Sunday.

The Iranian Intelligence Ministry told reporters in Tehran that its agents spotted the man at Bagram Air Base, a major site for American-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, The Associated Press reported. The ministry said its agents kept track of him as he entered the country in August and arrested him when he tried to carry out his mission.

Iranian television reports showed a card written in English that identified the bearer as an “army contractor,” , The Associated Press reported.

Iran frequently accuses the United States, other Western powers and Israel of spying, and it periodically announces that it has captured or executed people it says are spies. Usually few details are provided, and the assertions cannot be verified.

    Iranian TV Airs Video It Claims Is of U.S. Spy, NYT, 18.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/middleeast/iran-shows-video-of-a-man-accused-of-being-a-us-spy.html

Repressing Democracy, With American Arms

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

SITRA, Bahrain

WHEN President Obama decides soon whether to approve a $53 million arms sale to our close but despotic ally Bahrain, he must weigh the fact that America has a major naval base here and that Bahrain is a moderate, modernizing bulwark against Iran.

Yet he should also understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.

Ali grew up here in Sitra, a collection of poor villages far from the gleaming bank towers of Bahrain’s skyline. Almost every day pro-democracy protests still bubble up in Sitra, and even when they are completely peaceful they are crushed with a barrage of American-made tear gas.

People here admire much about America and welcomed me into their homes, but there is also anger that the tear gas shells that they sweep off the streets each morning are made by a Pennsylvania company, NonLethal Technologies. It is a private company that declined to comment, but the American government grants it a license for these exports — and every shell fired undermines our image.

In August, Ali joined one of the protests. A policeman fired a shell at Ali from less than 15 feet away, according to the account of the family and human-rights groups. The shell apparently hit the boy in the back of the neck, and he died almost immediately, a couple of minutes’ walk from his home.

The government claims that the bruise was “inconsistent” with a blow from a tear gas grenade. Frankly, I’ve seen the Bahrain authorities lie so much that I don’t credit their denial.

Jawad al-Sheikh, Ali’s father, says that at the hospital, the government tried to force him to sign papers saying Ali had not been killed by the police.

King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has recently distanced himself from the killings and torture, while pledging that Bahrain will reform. There have indeed been modest signs of improvement, and a member of the royal family, Saqer al-Khalifa, told me that progress will now be accelerated.

Yet despite the lofty rhetoric, the police have continued to persecute Ali’s family. For starters, riot policemen fired tear gas at the boy’s funeral, villagers say.

The police summoned Jawad for interrogation, most recently this month. He fears he will be fired from his job in the Ministry of Electricity.

Skirmishes break out almost daily in the neighborhood, with the police firing tear gas for offenses as trivial as honking to the tune of “Down, Down, Hamad.” Disproportionately often, those tear gas shells seem aimed at Ali’s house. Once, Jawad says, a shell was fired into the house through the front door. A couple of weeks ago, riot policemen barged into the house and ripped photos of Ali from the wall, said the boy’s mother, Maryam Abdulla.

“They’re worried about their throne,” she added, “so they want us to live in fear.”

Mourners regularly leave flowers and photos of Ali on his grave, which is in a vacant lot near the home. Perhaps because some messages call him a martyr, the riot police come regularly and smash the pictures and throw away the flowers. The family has not purchased a headstone yet, for fear that the police will destroy it.

The repression is ubiquitous. Consider Zainab al-Khawaja, 28, whose husband and father are both in prison and have been tortured for pro-democracy activities, according to human rights reports. Police officers have threatened to cut off Khawaja’s tongue, she told me, and they broke her father’s heart by falsely telling him that she had been shipped to Saudi Arabia to be raped and tortured. She braved the risks by talking to me about this last week — before she was arrested too.

Khawaja earned her college degree in Wisconsin. She has read deeply of Gandhi and of Gene Sharp, an American scholar who writes about how to use nonviolent protest to overthrow dictators. She was sitting peacefully protesting in a traffic circle when the police attacked her. First they fired tear gas grenades next to her, and then handcuffed her and dragged her away — sometimes slapping and hitting her as video cameras rolled. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights says that she was beaten more at the police station.

Khawaja is tough as nails, and when we walked alongside demonstrations together, she seemed unbothered by tear gas that left me blinded and coughing. But she worried about her 2-year-old daughter, Jude. And one time as we were driving back from visiting a family whose baby had just died, possibly because so much tear gas had been fired in the neighborhood, Khawaja began crying. “I think I’m losing it,” she said. “It all just gets to me.”

Since the government has now silenced her by putting her in jail, I’ll give her the last word. I asked her a few days before her arrest about the proposed American arms sale to Bahrain.

“At least don’t sell them arms,” she pleaded. “When Obama sells arms to dictators repressing people seeking democracy, he ruins the reputation of America. It’s never in America’s interest to turn a whole people against it.”

    Repressing Democracy, With American Arms, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/kristof-repressing-democracy-with-american-arms.html

Libya’s Civilian Toll From Strikes,

Denied by NATO

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS and ERIC SCHMITT

TRIPOLI, Libya — NATO’s seven-month air campaign in Libya, hailed by the alliance and many Libyans for blunting a lethal crackdown by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and helping to push him from power, came with an unrecognized toll: scores of civilian casualties the alliance has long refused to acknowledge or investigate.

By NATO’s telling during the war, and in statements since sorties ended on Oct. 31, the alliance-led operation was nearly flawless — a model air war that used high technology, meticulous planning and restraint to protect civilians from Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, which was the alliance’s mandate.

“We have carried out this operation very carefully, without confirmed civilian casualties,” the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said in November.

But an on-the-ground examination by The New York Times of airstrike sites across Libya — including interviews with survivors, doctors and witnesses, and the collection of munitions remnants, medical reports, death certificates and photographs — found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. The victims, including at least 29 women or children, often had been asleep in homes when the ordnance hit.

In all, at least 40 civilians, and perhaps more than 70, were killed by NATO at these sites, available evidence suggests. While that total is not high compared with other conflicts in which Western powers have relied heavily on air power, and less than the exaggerated accounts circulated by the Qaddafi government, it is also not a complete accounting. Survivors and doctors working for the anti-Qaddafi interim authorities point to dozens more civilians wounded in these and other strikes, and they referred reporters to other sites where civilian casualties were suspected.

Two weeks after being provided a 27-page memorandum from The Times containing extensive details of nine separate attacks in which evidence indicated that allied planes had killed or wounded unintended victims, NATO modified its stance.

“From what you have gathered on the ground, it appears that innocent civilians may have been killed or injured, despite all the care and precision,” said Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO headquarters in Brussels. “We deeply regret any loss of life.”

She added that NATO was in regular contact with the new Libyan government and that “we stand ready to work with the Libyan authorities to do what they feel is right.”

NATO, however, deferred the responsibility of initiating any inquiry to Libya’s interim authorities, whose survival and climb to power were made possible largely by the airstrike campaign. So far, Libyan leaders have expressed no interest in examining NATO’s mistakes.

The failure to thoroughly assess the civilian toll reduces the chances that allied forces, which are relying ever more heavily on air power rather than risking ground troops in overseas conflicts, will examine their Libyan experience to minimize collateral deaths elsewhere. Allied commanders have been ordered to submit a lessons-learned report to NATO headquarters in February. NATO’s incuriosity about the many lethal accidents raises questions about how thorough that review will be.

NATO’s experience in Libya also reveals an attitude that initially prevailed in Afghanistan. There, NATO forces, led by the United States, tightened the rules of engagement for airstrikes and insisted on better targeting to reduce civilian deaths only after repeatedly ignoring or disputing accounts of airstrikes that left many civilians dead.

In Libya, NATO’s inattention to its unintended victims has also left many wounded civilians with little aid in the aftermath of the country’s still-chaotic change in leadership.

These victims include a boy blasted by debris in his face and right eye, a woman whose left leg was amputated, another whose foot and leg wounds left her disabled, a North Korean doctor whose left foot was crushed and his wife, who suffered a fractured skull.

The Times’s investigation included visits to more than 25 sites, including in Tripoli, Surman, Mizdah, Zlitan, Ga’a, Majer, Ajdabiya, Misurata, Surt, Brega and Sabratha and near Benghazi. More than 150 targets — bunkers, buildings or vehicles — were hit at these places.

NATO warplanes flew thousands of sorties that dropped 7,700 bombs or missiles; because The Times did not examine sites in several cities and towns where the air campaign was active, the casualty estimate could be low.

There are indications that the alliance took many steps to avoid harming civilians, and often did not damage civilian infrastructure useful to Colonel Qaddafi’s military. Elements of two American-led air campaigns in Iraq, in 1991 and 2003, appear to have been avoided, including attacks on electrical grids.

Such steps spared civilians certain hardships and risks that accompanied previous Western air-to-ground operations. NATO also said that allied forces did not use cluster munitions or ordnance containing depleted uranium, both of which pose health and environmental risks, in Libya at any time.

The alliance’s fixed-wing aircraft dropped only laser- or satellite-guided weapons, said Col. Gregory Julian, a NATO spokesman; no so-called dumb bombs were used.

While the overwhelming preponderance of strikes seemed to have hit their targets without killing noncombatants, many factors contributed to a run of fatal mistakes. These included a technically faulty bomb, poor or dated intelligence and the near absence of experienced military personnel on the ground who could help direct airstrikes.

The alliance’s apparent presumption that residences thought to harbor pro-Qaddafi forces were not occupied by civilians repeatedly proved mistaken, the evidence suggests, posing a reminder to advocates of air power that no war is cost- or error-free.

The investigation also found significant damage to civilian infrastructure from certain attacks for which a rationale was not evident or risks to civilians were clear. These included strikes on warehouses that current anti-Qaddafi guards said contained only food, or near businesses or homes that were destroyed, including an attack on a munitions bunker beside a neighborhood that caused a large secondary explosion, scattering warheads and toxic rocket fuel.

NATO has also not yet provided data to Libyans on the locations or types of unexploded ordnance from its strikes. At least two large weapons were present at sites visited by The Times. “This information is urgently needed,” said Dr. Ali Yahwya, chief surgeon at the Zlitan hospital.

Moreover, the scouring of one strike site found remnants of NATO munitions in a ruined building that an alliance spokesman explicitly said NATO did not attack.

That mistake — a pair of strikes — killed 12 anti-Qaddafi fighters and nearly killed a civilian ambulance crew aiding wounded men. It underscored NATO’s sometimes tenuous grasp of battle lines and raised questions about the forthrightness and accuracy of the alliance’s public-relations campaign.

The second strike pointed to a tactic that survivors at several sites recounted: warplanes restriking targets minutes after a first attack, a practice that imperiled, and sometimes killed, civilians rushing to the wounded.

Pressed about the dangers posed to noncombatants by such attacks, NATO said it would reconsider the tactic’s rationale in its internal campaign review. “That’s a valid point to take into consideration in future operations,” Colonel Julian said.

That statement is a shift in the alliance’s stance. NATO’s response to allegations of mistaken attacks had long been carefully worded denials and insistence that its operations were devised and supervised with exceptional care. Faced with credible allegations that it killed civilians, the alliance said it had neither the capacity for nor intention of investigating and often repeated that disputed strikes were sound.

The alliance maintained this position even after two independent Western organizations — Human Rights Watch and the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or Civic — met privately with NATO officials and shared field research about mistakes, including, in some cases, victims’ names and the dates and locations where they died.

Organizations researching civilian deaths in Libya said that the alliance’s resistance to making itself accountable and acknowledging mistakes amounted to poor public policy. “It’s crystal clear that civilians died in NATO strikes,” said Fred Abrahams, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But this whole campaign is shrouded by an atmosphere of impunity” and by NATO’s and the Libyan authorities’ mutually congratulatory statements.

Mr. Abrahams added that the matter went beyond the need to assist civilians harmed by airstrikes, though he said that was important. At issue, he said, was “who is going to lose their lives in the next campaign because these errors and mistakes went unexamined, and no one learned from them?”

Human Rights Watch and Civic also noted that the alliance’s stance on civilian casualties it caused in Libya was at odds with its practices for so-called collateral damage in Afghanistan. There, public anger and political tension over fatal mistakes led NATO to adopt policies for investigating actions that caused civilian harm, including guidelines for expressing condolences and making small payments to victims or their families.

“You would think, and I did think, that all of the lessons learned from Afghanistan would have been transferred to Libya,” said Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of Civic, which helped NATO devise its practices for Afghanistan. “But many of them didn’t.”

Choosing Targets

When foreign militaries began attacking Libya’s loyalists on March 19, the United States military, more experienced than NATO at directing large operations, coordinated the campaign. On March 31, the Americans transferred command to NATO.

Seven months later, the alliance had destroyed more than 5,900 military targets by means of roughly 9,700 strike sorties, according to its data, helping to dismantle the pro-Qaddafi military and militias. Warplanes from France, Britain, the United States, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Canada dropped ordnance. Two non-NATO nations, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, participated on a small scale.

France carried out about a third of all strike sorties, Britain 21 percent and the United States 19 percent, according to data from each nation.

The attacks fell under two broad categories. So-called deliberate strikes were directed against fixed targets, like buildings or air-defense systems. These targets were selected and assigned to pilots before aircraft took off.

Deliberate strikes were planned to minimize risks to civilians, NATO said. In Naples, Italy, intelligence analysts and targeting specialists vetted proposed targets and compiled lists, which were sent to an operations center near Bologna, where targets were matched to specific aircraft and weapons.

For some targets, like command bunkers, NATO said, it conducted long periods of surveillance first. Drones or other aircraft chronicled the daily routines at the sites, known as “patterns of life,” until commanders felt confident that each target was valid.

Other considerations then came into play. Targeting specialists chose, for example, the angle of attack and time of day thought to pose the least risk to civilians. They would also consider questions of ordnance. These included the size and type of bomb, and its fuze.

Some fuzes briefly delay detonation of a bomb’s high-explosive charge. This can allow ordnance to penetrate concrete and explode in an underground tunnel or bunker, or, alternately, to burrow into sand before exploding — reducing the blast wave, shrapnel and risk to people and property nearby.

(NATO could also choose inert bombs, made of concrete, that can collapse buildings or shatter tanks with kinetic energy rather than an explosion. NATO said such weapons were used fewer than 10 times in the war.)

Many early strikes were planned missions. But about two-thirds of all strikes, and most of the attacks late in the war, were another sort: dynamic strikes.

Dynamic strikes were against targets of opportunity. Crews on aerial patrols would spot or be told of a potential target, like suspected military vehicles. Then, if cleared by controllers in Awacs aircraft, they would attack.

NATO said dynamic missions, too, were guided by practices meant to limit risks. On Oct. 24, Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard of Canada, the operation’s commander, described a philosophy beyond careful target vetting or using only guided weapons: restraint. “Only when we had a clear shot would we take it,” he said.

Colonel Julian, the spokesman, said there were hundreds of instances when pilots could have released ordnance but because of concerns for civilians they held fire. Col. Alain Pelletier, commander of seven Canadian CF-18 fighters that flew 946 strike sorties, said Canada installed a special computer software modification in its planes that allowed pilots to assess the likely blast radius around an intended target and to call off strikes if the technology warned they posed too great a risk to civilians.

Colonel Julian also said that NATO broadcast radio messages and that it dropped millions of leaflets to warn Libyans to stay away from likely military targets, a practice Libyan citizens across much of the country confirmed.

A Blow to the Rebels

Civilians were killed by NATO within days of the alliance’s intervention, the available evidence shows, beginning with one of the uglier mistakes of the air war: the pummeling of a secret rebel armored convoy that was advancing through the desert toward the Qaddafi forces’ eastern front lines.

Having survived the first wave of air-to-ground attacks, the loyalists were taking steps to avoid attracting NATO bombs. They moved in smaller formations and sometimes set aside armored vehicles in favor of pickup trucks resembling those that rebels drove. Pilots suddenly had fewer targets.

On April 7, as the rebel armor lined up on a hill about 20 miles from Brega, NATO aircraft struck. In a series of attacks, laser-guided bombs stopped the formation, destroyed the rebels’ armor and scattered the anti-Qaddafi fighters, killing several of them, survivors said.

The attack continued as civilians, including ambulance crews, tried to converge on the craters and flames to aid the wounded. Three shepherds were among them.

As the shepherds approached over the sand, a bomb slammed in again, said one of them, Abdul Rahman Ali Suleiman Sudani. The blast knocked them over, he said. His two cousins were hit.

One, he said, was cut in half; the other had a gaping chest wound. Both died. Mr. Sudani and other relatives returned to the wreckage later and retrieved the remains for burial in Kufra. The men had died, he said, trying to help.

“We called their families in Sudan and told them, ‘Your sons, they have passed away,’ ” he said.

Colonel Julian declined to discuss this episode but said that each time NATO aircraft returned to strike again was a distinct event and a distinct decision, and that it was not a general practice for NATO to “double tap” its targets.

This practice was reported several times by survivors at separate attacks and cited to explain why some civilians opted not to help at strike sites or bolted in fear soon after they did.

Colonel Julian said the tactic was likely to be included in NATO’s internal review of the air campaign.

An Errant Strike

NATO’s planning or restraint did not protect the family of Ali Mukhar al-Gharari when his home was shattered in June by a phenomenon as old as air-to-ground war: errant ordnance.

A retiree in Tripoli, Mr. Gharari owned a three-story house he shared with his adult children and their families. Late on June 19 a bomb struck it squarely, collapsing the front side. The rubble buried a courtyard apartment, the family said, where Karima, Mr. Gharari’s adult daughter, lived with her husband and two children, Jomana, 2, and Khaled, 7 months.

All four were killed, as was another of Mr. Gharari’s adult children, Faruj, who was blasted from his second-floor bed to the rubble below, two of his brothers said. Eight other family members were wounded, one seriously.

The Qaddafi government, given to exaggeration, claimed that nine civilians died in the airstrike, including a rescue worker electrocuted while clearing rubble. These deaths have not been independently corroborated. There has been no dispute about the Gharari deaths.

Initially, NATO almost acknowledged its mistake. “A military missile site was the intended target,” an alliance statement said soon after. “There may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties.”

Then it backtracked. Kristele Younes, director of field operations for Civic, the victims’ group, examined the site and delivered her findings to NATO. She met a cold response. “They said, ‘We have no confirmed reports of civilian casualties,’ ” Ms. Younes said.

The reason, she said, was that the alliance had created its own definition for “confirmed”: only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed. But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations, its casualty tally by definition could not budge — from zero.

“The position was absurd,” Ms. Younes said. “But they made it very clear: there was no appetite within NATO to look at these incidents.”

The position left the Gharari family disoriented, and in social jeopardy. Another of Mr. Gharari’s sons, Mohammed, said the family supported the revolution. But since NATO’s attack, other Libyans have labeled the family pro-Qaddafi. If NATO attacked the Ghararis’ home, the street logic went, the alliance must have had a reason.

Mohammed al-Gharari said he would accept an apology from NATO. He said he could even accept the mistake. “If this was an error from their control room, I will not say anything harsh, because that was our destiny,” he said.

But he asked that NATO lift the dishonor from the family and set the record straight. “NATO should tell the truth,” he said. “They should tell what happened, so everyone knows our family is innocent.”

A ‘Horrible Mistake’

In the hours before his wife and two of their sons were killed, on Aug. 4, Mustafa Naji al-Morabit thought he had taken adequate precautions.

When Colonel Qaddafi’s officers began meeting at a home next door in Zlitan, he moved his family. That was in July. The adjacent property, Mr. Morabit and his neighbors said, was owned by a loyalist doctor who hosted commanders who organized the local front.

About a month later, as rebels pressed near, the officers fled, Mr. Morabit said. He and his family returned home on Aug. 2, assuming that the danger had passed.

Calamity struck two days later. A bomb roared down in the early morning quiet and slammed into their concrete home, causing its front to buckle.

Mr. Morabit’s wife, Eptisam Ali al-Barbar, died of a crushed skull. Two of their three sons — Mohammed, 6, and Moataz, 3 — were killed, too. Three toes on the left foot of Fatima Umar Mansour, Mr. Morabit’s mother, were severed. Her lower left leg was snapped.

“We were just in our homes at night,” she said, showing the swollen leg.

The destruction of their home showed that even with careful standards for target selection, mistakes occurred. Not only did NATO hit the wrong building, survivors and neighbors said, but it also hit it more than two days late.

Mr. Morabit added a sorrowful detail. He suspected that the bomb was made of concrete; there seemed to be no fire or explosion when it struck, he said. NATO may have tried to minimize damage, he added, but the would-be benefits of its caution were lost. “I want to know why,” he said. “NATO said they are so organized, that they are specialists. So why? Why this horrible mistake?”

It is not clear whether the mistake was made by the pilot or those who selected the target. NATO declined to answer questions about the strike.

On Aug. 8, four days after destroying the Morabit home, NATO hit buildings occupied by civilians again, this time in Majer, according to survivors, doctors and independent investigators. The strikes were NATO’s bloodiest known accidents in the war.

The attack began with a series of 500-pound laser-guided bombs, called GBU-12s, ordnance remnants suggest. The first house, owned by Ali Hamid Gafez, 61, was crowded with Mr. Gafez’s relatives, who had been dislocated by the war, he and his neighbors said.

The bomb destroyed the second floor and much of the first. Five women and seven children were killed; several more people were wounded, including Mr. Gafez’s wife, whose her lower left leg had to be amputated, the doctor who performed the procedure said.

Minutes later, NATO aircraft attacked two buildings in a second compound, owned by brothers in the Jarud family. Four people were killed, the family said.

Several minutes after the first strikes, as neighbors rushed to dig for victims, another bomb struck. The blast killed 18 civilians, both families said.

The death toll has been a source of confusion. The Qaddafi government said 85 civilians died. That claim does not seem to be credible. With the Qaddafi propaganda machine now gone, an official list of dead, issued by the new government, includes 35 victims, among them the late-term fetus of a fatally wounded woman the Gafez family said went into labor as she died.

The Zlitan hospital confirmed 34 deaths. Five doctors there also told of treating dozens of wounded people, including many women and children.

All 16 beds in the intensive-care unit were filled with severely wounded civilians, doctors said. Dr. Ahmad Thoboot, the hospital’s co-director, said none of the victims, alive or dead, were in uniform. “There is no doubt,” he said. “This is not fabricated. Civilians were killed.”

Descriptions of the wounds underscored the difference between mistakes with typical ground-to-ground arms and the unforgiving nature of mistakes with 500-pound bombs, which create blast waves of an entirely different order.

Dr. Mustafa Ekhial, a surgeon, said the wounds caused by NATO’s bombs were far worse than those the staff had treated for months. “We have to tell the truth,” he said. “What we saw that night was completely different.”

In previous statements, NATO said it watched the homes carefully before attacking and saw “military staging areas.” It also said that it reviewed the strikes and that claims of civilian casualties were not corroborated by “available factual information.” When asked what this information was, the alliance did not provide it.

Mr. Gafez issued a challenge. An independent review of all prestrike surveillance video, he said, would prove NATO wrong. Only civilians were there, he said, and he demanded that the alliance release the video.

Ms. Younes said the dispute missed an essential point. Under NATO’s targeting guidelines and in keeping with practices the alliance has repeatedly insisted that it followed, she said, if civilians were present, aircraft should not have attacked.

The initial findings on the Majer strikes, part of the United Nations’ investigation into actions by all sides in Libya that harmed civilians, have raised questions about the legality of the attack under international humanitarian law, according to an official familiar with the investigation.

 

Homes as Targets

NATO’s strikes in Majer, one of five known attacks on apparently occupied residences, suggested a pattern. When residential targets were presumed to be used by loyalist forces, civilians were sometimes present — suggesting holes in NATO’s “pattern of life” reviews and other forms of vetting.

Airstrikes on June 20 in Surman leveled homes owned by Maj. Gen. El-Khweldi el-Hamedi, a longtime confidant of Colonel Qaddafi and a member of his Revolutionary Council. NATO has said the family compound was used as command center.

The family’s account, partly confirmed by rebels, claimed that the strikes killed 13 civilians and wounded six more. Local anti-Qaddafi fighters corroborated the deaths of four of those killed — one of the general’s daughters-in-law and three of her children.

General Hamedi was wounded and has taken refuge in Morocco, said his son Khaled. Khaled has filed a lawsuit against NATO, claiming that the attack was a crime. He said that he and his family were victims of rebel “fabrications,” which attracted NATO bombs.

On Sept. 25, a smaller but similar attack destroyed the residence of Brig. Gen. Musbah Diyab in Surt, neighbors and his family members said.

General Diyab, a distant cousin of Colonel Qaddafi, was killed. So were seven women and children who crowded into his home as rebels besieged the defenses of some of the Qaddafi loyalists’ last holdouts, witnesses said.

By this time, tables in Libya had turned. The remaining loyalists held almost no territory. They were a dwindling, disorganized lot. It was the anti-Qaddafi forces who endangered civilians they suspected of having sympathies for the dying government, residents of Surt said.

On a recent afternoon, Mahmoud Zarog Massoud, his hand swollen with an infection from a wound, wandered the broken shell of a seven-story apartment building in Surt, which was struck in mid-September. His apartment furniture had been blown about by the blast.

He approached the kitchen, where, he said, he and his wife had just broken their Ramadan fast when ordnance hit. “We were not thinking NATO would attack our home,” he said.

Judging by the damage and munitions’ remains, a bomb with a delayed fuze struck another wing of the building, burrowed into another apartment and exploded, blasting walls outward. Debris flew across the courtyard and through his kitchen’s balcony door.

His wife, Aisha Abdujodil, was killed, both her arms severed, he said. Bloodstains still marked the floor and walls.

Provided written questions, NATO declined to comment on the three strikes on homes in Surman and Surt.

 

C. J. Chivers reported from Libya,

and Eric Schmitt from Washington, Brussels and Naples, Italy.

    Libya’s Civilian Toll From Strikes, Denied by NATO, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/scores-of-unintended-casualties-in-nato-war-in-libya.html

Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing

December 13, 2011
The New York Times
By JO BECKER

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Last February, the Obama administration accused one of Lebanon’s famously secretive banks of laundering money for an international cocaine ring with ties to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

Now, in the wake of the bank’s exposure and arranged sale, its ledgers have been opened to reveal deeper secrets: a glimpse at the clandestine methods that Hezbollah — a terrorist organization in American eyes that has evolved into Lebanon’s pre-eminent military and political power — uses to finance its operations. The books offer evidence of an intricate global money-laundering apparatus that, with the bank as its hub, appeared to let Hezbollah move huge sums of money into the legitimate financial system, despite sanctions aimed at cutting off its economic lifeblood.

At the same time, the investigation that led the United States to the bank, the Lebanese Canadian Bank, provides new insights into the murky sources of Hezbollah’s money. While law enforcement agencies around the world have long believed that Hezbollah is a passive beneficiary of contributions from loyalists abroad involved in drug trafficking and a grab bag of other criminal enterprises, intelligence from several countries points to the direct involvement of high-level Hezbollah officials in the South American cocaine trade.

One agent involved in the investigation compared Hezbollah to the Mafia, saying, “They operate like the Gambinos on steroids.”

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in Virginia announced the indictment of the man at the center of the Lebanese Canadian Bank case, charging that he had trafficked drugs and laundered money not only for Colombian cartels, but also for the murderous Mexican gang Los Zetas.

The revelations about Hezbollah and the Lebanese Canadian Bank reflect the changing political and military dynamics of Lebanon and the Middle East. American intelligence analysts believe that for years Hezbollah received as much as $200 million annually from its primary patron, Iran, along with additional aid from Syria. But that support has diminished, the analysts say, as Iran’s economy buckles under international sanctions over its nuclear program and Syria’s government battles rising popular unrest.

Yet, if anything, Hezbollah’s financial needs have grown alongside its increasing legitimacy here, as it seeks to rebuild after its 2006 war with Israel and expand its portfolio of political and social service activities. The result, analysts believe, has been a deeper reliance on criminal enterprises — especially the South American cocaine trade — and on a mechanism to move its ill-gotten cash around the world.

“The ability of terror groups like Hezbollah to tap into the worldwide criminal funding streams is the new post-9/11 challenge,” said Derek Maltz, the Drug Enforcement Administration official who oversaw the agency’s investigation into the Lebanese Canadian Bank.

In that inquiry, American Treasury officials said senior bank managers had assisted a handful of account holders in running a scheme to wash drug money by mixing it with the proceeds of used cars bought in the United States and sold in Africa. A cut of the profits, officials said, went to Hezbollah, a link the organization disputes.

The officials have refused to disclose their evidence for that allegation. But the outlines of a broader laundering network, and the degree to which Hezbollah’s business had come to suffuse the bank’s operations, emerged in recent months as the bank’s untainted assets were being sold, with American blessings, to a Beirut-based partner of the French banking giant Société Générale.

Of course, a money-laundering operation does not just come out and identify itself. But auditors brought in to scrub the books discovered nearly 200 accounts that were suspicious for their links to Hezbollah and their classic signs of money laundering.

In all, hundreds of millions of dollars a year sloshed through the accounts, held mainly by Shiite Muslim businessmen in the drug-smuggling nations of West Africa, many of them known Hezbollah supporters, trading in everything from rough-cut diamonds to cosmetics and frozen chicken, according to people with knowledge of the matter in the United States and Europe. The companies appeared to be serving as fronts for Hezbollah to move all sorts of dubious funds, on its own behalf or for others.

The system allowed Hezbollah to hide not only the sources of its wealth, but also its involvement in a range of business enterprises. One case involved perhaps the richest land deal in Lebanon’s history, the $240 million purchase late last year of more than 740 pristine acres overlooking the Mediterranean in the religiously diverse Chouf region.

The seller was a jet-set Christian jeweler, Robert Mouawad, whose clientele runs from Saudi royalty to Hollywood royalty. The buyer, at least on paper, was a Shiite diamond dealer, Nazem Said Ahmad.

In fact, according to people knowledgeable about Beirut real estate, the development corporation’s major investor was a relative of a former Hezbollah commander, Ali Tajeddine. The investor, in turn, received money that flowed through the bank from companies the United States has since designated as Hezbollah fronts, and from dealers implicated in the trade in so-called conflict diamonds and minerals, the Americans and Europeans with knowledge of the matter said. The Lebanese Canadian Bank provided a crucial loan.

And the deal fit a pattern, highly controversial in this religiously combustible land, in which entities tied to Hezbollah have been buying up militarily strategic pieces of property in largely Christian areas, helping the movement quietly fortify its geopolitical hegemony.

In a recent interview at his home in Taybeh, just north of the border with Israel — or as the signs here say, “Palestine” — Hezbollah’s chief political strategist and a member of Parliament, Ali Fayyad, denied that his organization was behind the Chouf purchase or other, similar land deals. He dismissed the American drug-trafficking allegations as politically motivated “propaganda,” adding, “We have no relationship to the Lebanese Canadian Bank.” The United States, he said, was simply persecuting innocent Shiite businessmen as a way “to punish us because we won our battle with Israel.”

For the United States, taking down the bank was part of a long-running strategy of deploying financial weapons to fight terrorism. This account of the serpentine, six-year inquiry and what has since been revealed is based on interviews with government, law enforcement and banking officials across three continents, as well as intelligence reports and police and corporate records.

As the case traveled up the administration’s chain of command beginning in the fall of 2010, some officials proposed leaving the Hezbollah link unsaid. They argued that simply blacklisting the bank would disrupt the network while insulating the United States from suspicions of playing politics, especially amid American alarm about ebbing influence in the Middle East. But the prevailing view was that the case offered what one official called “a great opportunity to dirty up Hezbollah” by pointing out the hypocrisy of the “Party of God” profiting from criminal activity.

Certainly the United States had ample cause to want to dirty up Hezbollah, Iran’s armed proxy and a persistent irritant to American interests in a chronically troubled region. (Just last week, in fact, Hezbollah’s long-running feud with the Central Intelligence Agency heated up when the organization broadcast what it said were the names of 10 American spies who had worked in recent years at the embassy in Beirut. )

The time was ripe, too, for taking on Hezbollah — a moment that crystallized its ascent but also its vulnerability. Just weeks before, Hezbollah’s political wing had played Lebanese kingmaker, engineering the fall of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, an American ally, and installing its own choice in his stead. At the same time, though, a United Nations tribunal was preparing to indict Hezbollah members in a spectacular bombing that killed Mr. Hariri’s father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in 2005.

John O. Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism adviser, recalled the debate in a recent interview. “I thought that if Hezbollah was involved in the drug trade,” he said, “let’s make sure that gets out.”

A State Within a State

Founded three decades ago as a guerrilla force aimed at the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has never before had such a prominent place in the country’s official politics. Yet much of its power, and its ability to operate with some impunity, derives from elsewhere: from its status as a state within the Lebanese state.

Its militia is considerably stronger than the national army. Its social service agencies perform many of the functions of government, and it controls the international airport and the smuggling routes along the Syrian border, as well as the budgets of the government agencies charged with policing them.

In an interview, the chief of Lebanese customs’ drug and money-laundering unit, Lt. Col. Joseph N. Skaf, described a Sisyphean task: Passengers are allowed to bring in unlimited amounts of cash without declaring it. He has only 12 officers to search for drugs, and scanners at the airport and seaport do not work. “My hands are tied,” he said.

That this sliver of a country would be a crossroads for all manner of trade owes much to the flourishing of a worldwide diaspora; more Lebanese live abroad than at home. Through criminal elements in these émigré communities, Hezbollah has gained a deepening foothold in the cocaine business, according to an assessment by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described in a leaked 2009 State Department cable.

From a trafficking standpoint, the émigrés were in the right places at the right time. As demand increased in Europe and the Middle East, the cartels began plying new routes — from Colombia, Venezuela and the lawless frontier where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet, to West African countries like Benin and Gambia. From there, drugs moved north through Portugal or Spain, or east via Syria and Lebanon.

According to Lebanon’s drug enforcement chief, Col. Adel Mashmoushi, one path into the country was aboard a weekly Iranian-operated flight from Venezuela to Damascus and then over the border. Several American officials confirmed that, emphasizing that such an operation would be impossible without Hezbollah’s involvement.

In South America and in Europe, prosecutors began noticing Lebanese Shiite middlemen working for the cartels. But the strongest evidence of an expanding Hezbollah role in the drug trade, that it was not just the passive recipient of tainted money, comes from the two investigations that ultimately led to the Lebanese Canadian Bank.

The trail began with a man known as Taliban, overheard on Colombian wiretaps of a Medellín cartel, La Oficina de Envigado. Actually, he was a Lebanese transplant, Chekri Mahmoud Harb, and in June 2007, he met in Bogotá with an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration and sketched out his route.

Cocaine was shipped by sea to Port Aqaba, Jordan, then smuggled into Syria. After Mr. Harb bragged that he could deliver 950 kilos into Lebanon within hours, the undercover agent casually remarked that he must have Hezbollah connections. Mr. Harb smiled and nodded, the agent reported.

(Jordanian officials, after extensive surveillance, later told the D.E.A. that the Syrian leg of the shipment was coordinated by a Syrian intelligence officer assigned as a liaison to Hezbollah. From there, multiple sources reported, Hezbollah operatives charged a tax to guarantee shipments into Lebanon.)

Soon the cartel was giving the agent money to launder: $20 million in all. But before Mr. Harb could reveal the entire scheme and identify his Hezbollah contacts, the operation broke down: The C.I.A., initially skeptical of a Hezbollah link, now wanted in on the case. On the eve of a planned meeting in Jordan, it forced the undercover agent to postpone. His quarry spooked. In the end, Mr. Harb was convicted on federal drug trafficking and money-laundering charges, but the window into the organization’s heart had slammed shut.

It was “like having a girl you love break up with you,” one agent said later, adding, “We lost everything.”

A New Target

Actually they had not. Before long, a new target emerged.

A call had come in to a wiretapped phone tied to Mr. Harb and the cartel. The caller had arranged for cocaine proceeds to be picked up at a Paris hotel and laundered back to Colombia. The meeting turned out to be a sting.

“He says, ‘I just lost a million euros in France,’ ” recalled one of the agents listening in. “The way he talked — no one loses a million euros and is so nonchalant about it. Usually, there are bodies in the street.”

Agents had known that there was a major money launderer whose phone sat in Lebanon. Now they had a name: Ayman Joumaa, formerly of Medellín, now owner of the Caesars Park Hotel in Beirut. He was a Sunni Muslim, but cellphones seized at the Paris hotel linked him to Shiites in Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, according to Interpol records.

He was also known to Israeli intelligence. Israeli intercepts showed him in contact with a member of Hezbollah’s “1,800 Unit,” alleged to coordinate attacks inside Israel. Mr. Joumaa’s contact, in turn, worked for a senior operative who the Israelis believed handled Hezbollah’s drug operations.

His name was Abu Abdallah, and he had popped up in the Harb wiretaps, too: At one point, as Mr. Harb was complaining about “the sons of whores I owe money to,” a relative from his hometown warned that the “people of Abu Abdallah, the people we do not dare have problems or fight with,” were looking for him, wanting money.

Eventually an American team dispatched to look into Mr. Joumaa’s activities uncovered the used-car operation. Cars bought in United States were sold in Africa, with cash proceeds flown into Beirut and deposited into three money-exchange houses, one owned by Mr. Joumaa’s family and another down the street from his hotel. The exchanges then deposited the money, the ostensible proceeds of a booming auto trade, into the Lebanese Canadian Bank, so named because it was once a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada Middle East.

But the numbers did not add up. The car lots in the United States, many owned by Lebanese émigrés and one linked to a separate Hezbollah weapons-smuggling scheme, were not moving nearly enough merchandise to account for all that cash, American officials said. What was really going on, they concluded, was that European drug proceeds were being intermingled with the car-sale cash to make it appear legitimate.

Hezbollah received its cut either from the exchange houses, or via the bank itself, according to the D.E.A. And the Treasury Department concluded that Iran also used the bank to avoid sanctions, with Hezbollah’s envoy to Tehran serving as go-between.

In Washington, after a long debate over when to act and what to make public, the administration decided to invoke a rarely used provision of the Patriot Act. Since the bank had been found to be of “primary money-laundering concern,” the Treasury Department could turn it into an international pariah by forbidding American financial institutions to deal with it. President Obama was briefed, and on Feb. 10, Treasury officials pulled the trigger.

As for Mr. Joumaa, the indictment announced Tuesday goes beyond the Europe-based operation outlined in the Lebanese Canadian Bank case. It charges him with coordinating shipments of Colombian cocaine to Los Zetas in Mexico for sale in the United States, and laundering the proceeds.

Whether he will ever face trial is an open question. The United States has no extradition treaty with Lebanon, and Mr. Joumaa’s whereabouts are unknown. He did not respond to several messages left at his hotel by The New York Times. Around Beirut, rumors abound.

Growing Skepticism

The Americans had identified only a handful of drug-tainted accounts at the Lebanese Canadian Bank. The search for further trouble began over the summer, after the Société Générale de Banque au Liban, or S.G.B.L., agreed to buy the bank’s assets.

As part of its own agreement with Treasury officials, Lebanon’s Central Bank set up a process to scrub the books. But compliance officers at S.G.B.L.’s French partner, Société Générale, were skeptical of the Central Bank’s choice of investigators. One of them, the local affiliate of the international auditing firm Deloitte, had presumably missed the drug-related accounts the first time around, when it served as the Lebanese Canadian Bank’s outside auditor.

And, according to people knowledgeable about Lebanese banking, the central bank’s on-the-ground representative had been recommended to that post by Hezbollah.

As an extra step, to reassure wary international banks, the chairman of S.G.B.L., Antoun Sehnaoui, commissioned a parallel audit, with the help of Société Générale’s chief money-laundering compliance officer. And to make sure that his bank did not run afoul of Treasury officials by inadvertently taking on dirty assets, he also hired a consultant intimately familiar with the Patriot Act provision used to take the bank down: John Ashcroft, the former attorney general whose Justice Department wrote the law.

Identifying suspicious accounts is not a subjective business. Banks rely on internationally recognized standards and software that contains certain triggers.

For the assets of the Lebanese Canadian Bank, the process worked this way, according to the Americans and Europeans knowledgeable about the case:

Initially, the auditors looked only at records for the past year. As they began combing through thousands of accounts, they looked for customers with known links to Hezbollah. They also looked for telltale patterns: repeated deposits of vast amounts of cash, huge wire transfers broken into smaller transactions and transfers between companies in such wildly incongruous lines of business that they made sense only as fronts to camouflage the true origin of the funds.

Each type of red flag was assigned a point value. An account with 1 or 2 points on a scale to 10 was likely to survive. One with 8 or 9 cried out for further scrutiny. Ultimately, the auditors were left with nearly 200 accounts that appeared to add up to a giant money-laundering operation, with Hezbollah smack in the middle, according to American officials. Complex webs of transactions featured the same companies over and over again, most of them owned by Shiite businessmen, many known Hezbollah supporters. Some have since been identified as Hezbollah fronts.

At the center of many of these webs were companies trading in diamonds, which experts say are fast replacing more traditional money-laundering vehicles because they are easy to transport and are generally traded for cash. Large transactions leave no paper trail, and values can be altered through bogus transactions. A number of these dealers had been implicated in the buying of “conflict diamonds” and other minerals used to finance civil wars and human-rights abuses in Africa.

In some cases, money moved in amounts — tens of millions of dollars at a clip — that made no sense, given the business models and potential sales of the companies involved.

“It’s like these guys no one had ever heard of became the most successful multimillionaires overnight,” said one person with knowledge of the investigation. “It’s Hezbollah’s money.”

Mr. Sehnaoui closed the deal in September. He declined to discuss details, but said: “We bought certain assets of the Lebanese Canadian Bank, and only the clean ones. We did not take any even slightly questionable clients.”

Lawyers for Mr. Ashcroft’s firm said all the problematic accounts had been excised, even though it meant losing nearly $30 million a year in interest and fees. “As current and potential problems have been uncovered, he has not hesitated to act,” Mr. Ashcroft said of his client.

From the Treasury Department’s perspective, the case is a victory, albeit an incremental one, in the battle against terrorism financing. Lebanon’s Central Bank showed that it was willing to shut down the Lebanese Canadian Bank and sell it to a “responsible owner,” said Daniel L. Glaser, assistant Treasury secretary for terrorism financing. An important avenue to Hezbollah has been blocked.

Still, Treasury officials have no illusions that their work here is done. From the beginning, the blacklisting was also intended as a wider warning to a banking industry that, with secrecy to rival the Swiss, forms the backbone of Lebanon’s economy: henceforth, other bankers did business with Hezbollah at their peril.

“What the Central Bank hasn’t fully demonstrated, and the jury is still out, is whether they will use this as a launching pad to ensure that these illicit actors aren’t migrating elsewhere,” Mr. Glaser said.

The signs are not terribly encouraging. The Central Bank governor, Riad Salameh, cut short an interview when asked about the aftermath of the American action, calling it an “old story.” As for those nearly 200 suspect accounts, Mr. Salameh would only say that he does not involve himself in such commercial questions.

Privately, he has played down the findings to the Treasury Department, attributing much of the suspicious activity to peculiarities in the way business is done in Africa. Those accounts he did deem problematic, he told the Americans, have been referred to Lebanon’s general prosecutor. But the prosecutor refused to comment, and his deputy, who handles money-laundering inquiries, said last week that he had received nothing.

In fact, as Treasury officials acknowledge, on Mr. Salameh’s watch, most of the accounts were simply transferred to several other Lebanese banks.

    Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing, NYT, 13.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/world/middleeast/beirut-bank-seen-as-a-hub-of-hezbollahs-financing.html

Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home

December 7, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

CAIRO

If you want to understand the Islamic forces that are gaining strength in Egypt and scaring people here and abroad, let me tell you about my dinner in the home of Muslim Brotherhood activists.

First, meet my hostess: Sondos Asem, a 24-year-old woman who is pretty much the opposite of the stereotypical bearded Brotherhood activist. Sondos is a middle-class graduate of the American University in Cairo, where I studied in the early 1980s (“that’s before I was born,” she said wonderingly, making me feel particularly decrepit).

She speaks perfect English, is writing a master’s thesis on social media, and helps run the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb.

The Muslim Brotherhood has emerged as the dominant political party in parliamentary voting because of people like Sondos and her family. My interviews with supporters suggest that the Brotherhood is far more complex than the caricature that scares many Americans.

Sondos rails at the Western presumption that the Muslim Brotherhood would oppress women. She notes that her own mother, Manal Abul Hassan, is one of many female Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidates running for Parliament.

“It’s a big misconception that the Muslim Brotherhood marginalizes women,” Sondos said. “Fifty percent of the Brotherhood are women.”

I told Sondos that Westerners are fearful partly because they have watched the authorities oppress women in the name of Islam in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan.

“I don’t think Egypt can ever be compared to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Afghanistan,” she replied. “We, as Egyptians, are religiously very moderate.” A much better model for Egypt, she said, is Turkey, where an Islamic party is presiding over an economic boom.

I asked about female circumcision, also called female genital mutilation, which is inflicted on the overwhelming majority of girls in Egypt. It is particularly common in conservative religious households and, to its credit, the Mubarak government made some effort to stop the practice. Many worry that a more democratic government won’t challenge a practice that has broad support.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is against the brutal practice of female circumcision,” Sondos said bluntly. She insisted that women over all would benefit from Brotherhood policies that focus on the poor: “We believe that a solution of women’s problems in Egyptian society is to solve the real causes, which are illiteracy, poverty and lack of education.”

I asked skeptically about alcohol, peace with Israel, and the veil. Sondos, who wears a hijab, insisted that the Brotherhood wasn’t considering any changes in these areas and that its priority is simply jobs.

“Egyptians are now concerned about economic conditions,” she said. “They want to reform their economic system and to have jobs. They want to eliminate corruption.” Noting that alcohol supports the tourism industry, she added: “I don’t think any upcoming government will focus on banning anything.”

I told her that I would feel more reassured if some of my liberal Egyptian friends were not so wary of the Brotherhood. Some warn that the Brotherhood may be soothing today but that it has a violent and intolerant streak — and is utterly inexperienced in managing a modern economy.

Sondos looked exasperated. “We embrace moderate Islam,” she said. “We are not the ultra-conservatives that people in the West envision.”

I heard similar reassurances from other Brotherhood figures I interviewed, and I’m not sure what to think. But opinions vary, and I’m struck by the optimism I heard in some secular quarters: from Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, an 80-year-old leftist who is a hero of Egyptian feminism, and from Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is passionate about education.

Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister and Arab League secretary general who is a front-runner in the race for president, was similarly optimistic. He told me that whatever unfolds, Egypt will continue to seek good relations with the United States and will unquestionably stand by its peace treaty with Israel.

“You cannot conduct an adventurous foreign policy when you rebuild a country,” he said. “We must have the best of relations with the United States.”

When I raised American concerns that Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood and the more extremist Salafis might replicate Iran, he was dismissive: “The experience of Iran will not be repeated in Egypt.”

I think he’s right. Revolutions are often messy, and it took Americans seven years from their victory in the American Revolution at Yorktown to get a ratified Constitution. Indonesia, after its 1998 revolution, felt very much like Egypt does today. It endured upheavals from a fundamentalist Islamic current, yet it pulled through.

So a bit of nervousness is fine, but let’s not overdo the hand-wringing — or lose perspective. What’s historic in Egypt today is not so much the rise of any one party as the apparent slow emergence of democracy in the heart of the Arab world.

    Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home, NYT, 7.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/opinion/kristof-joining-a-dinner-in-a-muslim-brotherhood-home.html

Sharp Spate of Killings Traumatizes a Syrian City

December 6, 2011
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In one of the worst episodes of sectarian carnage in Syria since the uprising began nine months ago, dozens of corpses were recovered from the streets of Homs this week, some of them dismembered, decapitated and bearing signs of torture, activists and residents said Tuesday.

Most of the bloodshed occurred Monday, as Homs, a central Syrian city, was convulsed by kidnappings, random shootings and tit-for-tat killings, activists said. In the worst episode, 36 bodies were dumped in a square in a neighborhood that sits along a fault line between the city’s Sunni Muslim majority and its Alawite minority, said Mohammed Saleh, a 54-year-old activist there who has tried to stanch the growing sectarian tension.

“What happened yesterday is a massive crime,” he said by phone. “I am in pain, so much pain. I was getting a call every minute telling me that someone new got killed.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in London, called it “one of the deadliest days since the start of the Syrian Revolution.”

Rumors swirled through Homs, the country’s third-largest city, over whom to blame. Mr. Saleh and another activist blamed the government for inciting the tension, and said it was hewing to what its opponents see as a longstanding policy to divide and rule. But both said parties on each side, whether for the sake of revenge or incitement, shared a role in the strife.

Residents described themselves as terrified by the seemingly random nature of the violence. Some said they feared to leave their houses after 3 p.m. Others talked of persistent gunfire in a city that has borne the brunt of the government’s crackdown on the uprising.

“It is crazy in Homs,” said a 28-year-old housewife, speaking by phone, who refused to give her name for fear of reprisals. “I don’t know what to say. I feel that all doors are shut and there’s not a trace of hope or light at the end of the tunnel anymore.”

Near the Lebanese border, Homs, like the rest of Syria, has a Sunni Muslim majority. But four neighborhoods have a majority of Alawites, a heterodox Muslim sect from which President Bashar al-Assad draws much of his leadership. Long discriminated against and still poor even by Syria’s standards, the minority represents the bulk of security forces, which have led the crackdown against the uprising. The city also has a Christian minority, which has generally remained on the sidelines of the deepening conflict.

Time and again, the city has manifested new tendencies within the uprising. It has drawn armed defectors to havens within Homs, and they and allied fighters have fought security forces with growing tenacity. Though less pronounced than in the countryside, sectarian tension has mounted, and reports of vendettas have grown since last month.

The problem has become so dire in recent weeks that opposition groups like the Syrian National Council and the Local Coordination Committees have called for restraint by their own supporters, fearing that the problem could spiral out of control.

“We call on the families and relatives of people kidnapped not to be drawn into acts of revenge, which will cost them and their families and pose great dangers to the whole community,” the Local Coordination Committees said in a statement last month.

Monday’s bloodshed appeared the worst so far.

Mr. Saleh, in an account confirmed by an opposition group, said 32 bodies were delivered to the National Hospital in Homs on Monday morning. Kidnappings and killings continued through the day, and Mr. Saleh and other activists said 11 more people had been killed. By nightfall, the 36 bodies were dumped in the square in Al Zahra, an Alawite neighborhood, he said. Several residents said the killings grew worse after a report on Monday that Syria had agreed, with conditions, to accept the entry of monitors from the Arab League.

“There’s chaos, random killing and many killed unintentionally,” Mr. Saleh said.

The accounts from Homs came against a backdrop of rising pressure on the Syrian government, which finds itself more isolated than at perhaps any time in the four decades the Assad family has ruled the country. Leaders with the Syrian National Council met for the first time on Tuesday with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the highest-level contact the United States has made with the Syrian opposition.

In Cairo, the secretary general of the Arab League, Nabil al-Araby, warned that Syria might face more steps beyond the sanctions imposed last month by the league. “The pressure is going on until the killing stops,” he said in an interview.

He said that an Arab League committee was weighing unspecified further actions, but that he hoped the current penalties would be enough “to change the course” there. “We hope this crisis will end soon and the Syrian people will have a voice in deciding their own future,” he said.

After a six-week absence, the American ambassador, Robert S. Ford, returned to Damascus. The State Department withdrew Mr. Ford over what it described as threats to his safety after his high-profile visits to Syrian cities and meetings with dissidents.

In Homs, the kidnappings have seemed to terrify people the most, given their random nature. Armed men, both loyal to the government and opposed to it, have hijacked minivans, and some taxis have stopped driving in Homs for fear of trouble.

The tension has made it even more difficult for activists trying to bridge the sectarian divide. Mr. Saleh is a Communist and an Alawite and has tried to act as a mediator. The actress Fadwa Suleiman, also an Alawite, has traveled there in solidarity with the protests. But in an interview on Tuesday, she was grim about what was ahead.

“It reminds me of Iraq,” she said.

She said Alawites who were not necessarily pro-government were afraid to leave their homes or express any dissent. Other activists say the Syrian government has been especially harsh with opponents from minorities, which in the most general terms have remained aligned with Mr. Assad out of fear of the chaos that might follow his fall.

She called Homs “fertile ground for the regime to do its dirty plans.”

“If they want to play the sectarian game here, they can,” she said. “If they want to play the militant Islamist game here, they can. They can play all kinds of games in Homs.”

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and a New York Times employee from Beirut, Steven Lee Myers from Geneva, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

    Sharp Spate of Killings Traumatizes a Syrian City, NYT, 6.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/world/middleeast/large-scale-killings-reported-in-restive-syria-city.html

Wal-Mart Debate Rages in India

December 5, 2011
The New York Times
By VIKAS BAJAJ

JALANDHAR, India — For multinational merchants like Wal-Mart, it seemed to be the long-awaited opportunity to jump into India with both feet. But on Monday that moment appeared to be delayed once again.

Late last month, as part of a push to modernize his nation’s notoriously inefficient retail economy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that for the first time big foreign companies like Wal-Mart and the British company Tesco could open retail stores in India.

Until now, foreign companies have been restricted to serving only as wholesalers in India. That has already helped create more modern distribution networks, often while generating better prices for farmers and other producers, and giving customers better deals, too.

But expanding the foreign presence to retailing has been seen as the necessary next step for modernists like Mr. Singh, who has been urging the move for years. Praise for his announcement came from India’s corporations and some of its 175 million farmers, who see the move as part of a wave of changes that might help jolt a slowing economy.

And opponents — representing the 34 million people who work in retail and wholesale businesses, as well as left-leaning politicians — were just as loud.

On Monday, leaders of two opposition parties said Mr. Singh’s finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, had agreed to a delay. Mr. Mukherjee is expected to make a statement in Parliament on Wednesday.

All of this places Wal-Mart in a position hardly new to the company: at the center of a raging debate that pits the multinational giant from Bentonville, Ark., against local mom-and-pop businesses.

For more than a year, Wal-Mart has been operating a wholesale outlet in this northern city known for its fertile farms and hearty food. Local businessmen like Ravi Mahajan, whose family has had a wholesale general store in the narrow alleys of the Imam Nasir market for 40 years, say their sales have been cut in half as their customers — retail shopkeepers — stock up at Wal-Mart.

If the government eventually lets foreign firms expand beyond wholesaling to open retail stores, Mr. Mahajan said, many of his retail customers would be forced out of business, while squeezing out traders like himself who have long served as the crucial middleman in Indian commerce.

“We’ll be destroyed,” Mr. Mahajan said last week, minutes after he and dozens of other traders burned an effigy with a bloated belly and a crudely drawn face, meant to represent multinational marauders.

But Indian business is far from united in opposing foreign retailers.

Farmers like Avtar Singh Sidhu, who sells potatoes to PepsiCo for its Lays chips and has sold baby corn and other vegetables to Wal-Mart’s local partner, the Indian conglomerate Bharti, argues that foreign retailers will be a boon to India’s struggling agricultural sector. The multinationals, he said, will buy directly from farmers and pay better prices than local wholesalers.

Already, he said, PepsiCo is offering 6 rupees per kilo (or 11 cents) for his potatoes, while local traders offer only 3 rupees (6 cents). “We need more competition,” Mr. Sidhu said.

Policy makers are looking for ways to stimulate economic growth, which fell to an annual pace of 6.9 percent in the three months that ended in September. It was the first time India’s growth rate had fallen below 7 percent in two years.

The announcement by Mr. Singh’s administration on Nov. 24 called for allowing foreign companies like Wal-Mart to team up with Indian partners to open retail stores in metropolitan areas with more than one million people. Jalandhar has 2.1 million people.

The plan ran counter to the views of many politicians who say a slower approach is needed to protect indigenous firms and the rural poor.

But Mr. Singh and his backers have argued that foreign retailers could help reduce chronically high food inflation — which has run around 10 percent for the last year, on top of 20 percent increases the year before. The retail proposal, proponents say, could improve the lot of the more than a half billion Indians still tied to the land, by improving the supply system from farms to consumers. An estimated one-third of some types of vegetables and fruits rot before ever reaching retail shelves.

Speaking of the Nov. 24 announcement, an adviser to Mr. Singh, Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago, said, “This is a bold move, and I think this is a necessary move.”

At present, barely 6 percent of India’s $470 billion in retail sales takes place in organized retail stores, according to Technopak, a Indian consulting firm. The rest takes place in small shops. By contrast, organized retail makes up more than 20 percent of sales in China and 36 percent in Brazil — the two emerging economies to which India most frequently compares itself. (The figure is 85 percent in the United States.)

For decades, Indian regulations and the country’s weak infrastructure have favored small shopkeepers. Foreigners, since 1997, have been allowed to participate only in wholesale trading — a segment in which indigenous operators have historically thrived.

In some cases, the government has granted these traders monopolies. Many Indian states, for instance, require farmers and retailers to sell and buy fruits and vegetables only through wholesale markets controlled by committees of traders.

But Wal-Mart’s experience here in the state of Punjab, one of India’s richest and long the country’s bread basket, provides a glimpse at what could lie ahead for the Indian retail sector.

Two years ago, the company started opening Indian wholesale stores called Best Price, that can sell only to retailers, hotels, restaurants and other businesses. The stores are owned jointly by Wal-Mart and Bharti in a partnership that has four wholesale stores in Punjab, among its 15 total in the country.

Raj Jain, president of Wal-Mart India, said that the partners were now expanding in India’s south and west and that Wal-Mart and Bharti had begun discussing plans for a new retail strategy that, he said, would be announced in the “next few months.” But it will depend on what government officials say on Wednesday to Parliament.

Wal-Mart, which does not disclose its revenue in India, had about 4,000 employees in the country as of August. The Jalandhar store, which opened in August 2010, looks and feels like Wal-Mart’s American outlets, with broad aisles stacked high with merchandise.

Rajat Agarwal, who runs his family’s grocery store on a busy market street nearby, said he had come to rely on Best Price because it almost always had the products he sold at his store. Often, he said, traditional wholesalers run out of the most popular brands like Sunsilk shampoo and Aashirvad wheat flour.

Prices also tend to be consistent at Best Price, in contrast to the constant jockeying by the local wholesalers who offer deep discounts when they have too much supply and then push up prices when they are running low.

And yet, Mr. Agarwal complains that the Best Price store has also effectively become a competitor. That is because anybody with a valid business registration can buy from it, and the store has 50,000 member-customers. As a result, in addition to buying supplies for their businesses, many people end up doing their household shopping there, too.

Loading a large consignment of supplies at Best Price one day last week, Mr. Agarwal complained, “This is not a wholesale store.” Instead of being able to buy single items, as at a retail store, he said they should be required to buy wholesale quantities. “They should have to buy six or 12,” he said.

Sumit Gupta, the Best Price store’s manager, said there was little he could do to prevent its members from buying whatever they wanted, as long as they could show that they were registered business owners. The company stocks individual packets of many things, he said, because small retailers demand the option to buy in small quantities.

For now, Mr. Agarwal straddles two commercial worlds.

The morning after stocking up at Best Price, his own shop, Kwality Super Store, was buzzing with customers. Mr. Agarwal and his father, Anil, stood behind the counter. As in most Indian stores, there was no cash register. Mr. Agarwal asked customers to call out the items they were buying, and he hand-tallied the totals on small slips of paper.

One customer, Bhupinder Singh, bought tea, soap, lentils and other supplies. He said he frequented Mr. Agarwal’s shop — but also the Easy Day retail outlet that Bharti has opened down the street.

Easy Day often has prices of up to 10 percent less on packaged goods like biscuits. But he sells the milk from his dairy to the Agarwals, and the family offers him credit on his groceries or offsets his purchases against what it owes him for milk.

Which store he visits, he said, “depends on how I feel that day.”

    Wal-Mart Debate Rages in India, NYT, 5.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/business/global/wal-mart-hears-a-familiar-complaint-in-india.html

Come Home to Israel

December 5, 2011
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — When Israeli actions seem arrogant or insulting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is capable of rapid action to repair the damage — provided those offended are American Jews.

That is the lesson of the brouhaha over a now-aborted Israeli advertising campaign intended to shame Israeli expatriates in the United States into returning home by suggesting that America is no place for real Jews and that Diaspora life leads to loss of Jewish identity. The Jewish Federations of North America called the ads “outrageous and insulting.”

Cheesy would be a better word. A typical video was a cloying play on how the Hebrew “Abba” can morph to “Daddy” for an Israeli kid overdosing on the U.S.A. The campaign, unsurprisingly, was hatched in a ministry headed by an ultranationalist from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s party. Equally unsurprisingly, Netanyahu nixed it as soon as he heard of the outcry. “We are very attentive to the sensitivities of the American Jewish community,” explained his spokesman, Mark Regev.

That’s right: The one true existential threat to Israel is loss of U.S. support — which will never happen, but still.

I have several reactions to this little saga. The first is that I know several Israeli expatriates or would-be expatriates and their feelings are consistent. They are troubled by the illiberal drift of Israeli politics, the growth of a harsh nationalism, the increasing influence of the ultrareligious, the endlessness of the “situation,” and the tension inherent in a status quo that will one day threaten either Israel’s Jewishness or its democracy.

They have left or seek to leave because they don’t want all that and no longer believe there is going to be significant change. The ads play to Israeli patriotism, but it’s not patriotism that expatriates lack. It’s hope that their Israel can be salvaged and a two-state peace achieved.

My second reaction is that if Netanyahu could show a fraction of the nimbleness evident when American Jews are offended in instances where Turks are offended (by the killing of their citizens in international waters), or where President Barack Obama is offended (by ongoing settlement expansion in the West Bank against his express request), or where Egyptians are offended (by Israel’s dismissal of their democratic aspirations), then Israel would be in a better, less isolated place today.

That’s what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta means when he tells Israel to “reach out and mend fences” with Turkey and Egypt and engage in “strong diplomacy” rather than pursue policies that have “seen Israel’s isolation from its traditional security partners in the region grow.” As Panetta said, Israel needs to “get to the damn table” with the Palestinians. That, of course, does not depend entirely on Israel but equally will not be achieved through Israeli high-handedness, a trademark of Netanyahu’s administration.

The old Middle East of Israel’s cozy military-to-military relationships with the likes of Turkey and Egypt is gone. A new Middle East where Israel must deal people-to-people is being born. For a democracy this should ultimately be encouraging: People, including Arabs, with control of their lives tend to be focused on improving those lives rather than seeking conflict. The rise of Islamic parties opposed to despotism and adjusting painfully to modernity is cause for caution, yes, but not for manipulative Israeli dismissiveness.

My third reaction is that it’s all very well for the Jewish Federations of North America to find the ads insulting, but I’d be pleased if they could reserve a little of their outrage for times when Israeli insensitivity or arrogance takes more violent form — as is frequently the case with Palestinians in the West Bank.

Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist, visited Hebron recently and published a piece called “This Is Israel? Not the One I Love” in London’s Jewish Chronicle. He wrote of Hebron:

“A map shows purple roads where no Palestinian cars are permitted, yellow roads where no Palestinian shops are allowed to open and red roads where no Palestinians are even allowed to walk.”

He added, “I watched an old man, a bag of cement on his shoulder, ascend a steep bypass staircase because his feet were forbidden from going any farther along the road. Those unlucky enough to live on a red road have had their front doors sealed: They have to leave their own houses by a back door and climb out via a ladder. All this has made life so impossible that an estimated 42 percent of the families who once lived in this central part of town have now moved out.”

Israelis walk on streets full of vile anti-Arab graffiti and shuttered Arab stores daubed with Stars of David. “To see that cherished symbol used to spit in the eye of a population hounded out of their homes is chilling,” Freedland writes.

This is happening behind the wall-barrier-fence. It is the result of an untenable status quo involving the corrosive dominion of one people over another.

Here’s a suggestion for an ad campaign that might fly: A smiling Netanyahu shaking hands with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, beside the slogan: Come home to peace.

Forgive me for dreaming.

 

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.

    Come Home to Israel, NYT, 5.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/opinion/cohen-come-home-to-israel.html

Egypt’s Vote Puts Emphasis on Split Over Religious Rule

December 3, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — To Sheik Abdel Moneim el-Shahat, the Muslim Brotherhood’s call to apply only the broad principles of Islamic law allows too much freedom.

Sheik Shahat is a leader of the ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis, whose coalition of parties is running second behind the Brotherhood party in the early returns of Egypt’s parliamentary elections. He and his allies are demanding strict prohibitions against interest-bearing loans, alcohol and “fornication,” with traditional Islamic corporal punishment like stoning for adultery.

“I want to say: citizenship restricted by Islamic Shariah, freedom restricted by Islamic Shariah, equality restricted by Islamic Shariah,” he said in a public debate. “Shariah is obligatory, not just the principles — freedom and justice and all that.”

The unexpected electoral success of the Salafis — reported to have won about 25 percent of the votes in the first round of the elections, second only to the roughly 40 percent for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party — is terrifying Egyptian liberals and troubling the West. But their new clout is also presenting a challenge to the Muslim Brotherhood, in part by plunging it into a polarizing Islamist-against-Islamist debate over the application of Islamic law in Egypt’s promised democracy, a debate the Brotherhood had worked hard to avoid.

“The Salafis want to have that conversation right now, and the Brotherhood doesn’t,” said Shadi Hamid, a researcher with the Brookings Doha Center, a Brookings Institution project in Qatar. “The Brotherhood is not interested in talking about Islamic law right now because they have other priorities that are more important. But the Salafis are going to insist on putting religion in the forefront of the debate, and that will be very difficult for the Brotherhood to ignore.”

The Brotherhood, the venerable group that virtually invented the Islamist movement eight decades ago, is at its core a middle-class missionary institution, led not by religious scholars but by doctors, lawyers and professionals. It has long sought to move Egypt toward a more orthodox Islamic society from the bottom up, one person and family at a time. After a long struggle in the shadows of the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, its leaders have sought to avoid potentially divisive conversations about the details of Islamic law that might set off alarms about an Islamist takeover. But their evasiveness on the subject has played into long-term suspicions of even fellow Islamists that they are too concerned with their own power.

The Salafis are political newcomers, directed by religious leaders who favor long beards in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad. Many frown on the mixing of the sexes, refusing to shake hands with women let alone condoning any sort of political activity by them. Although their parties are required to include female candidates, they usually print pictures of flowers instead of the women’s faces on campaign posters. And while the Salafis’ ideology strikes many Egyptians as extreme and anachronistic, their sheiks command built-in networks of devoted followers, and even voters who disagree with their puritanical doctrine often credit the Salafis with integrity and authenticity.

After the first election results last week, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party quickly declared that it had no plans to form any coalition with the Salafis, with some members already ending months of restrained silence by striking back. In an interview after the vote, for example, Dina Zakaria, a spokeswoman for the party, derided the Salafis’ prohibition on women in leadership roles and their refusal to print the faces of their female candidates.

“We don’t hold stagnant positions,” she said, insisting that the Brotherhood’s party favored an evolving understanding of Islam that supported the right of women to choose their own roles. (At campaign rallies, women from the party sometimes underscore the point by saying Muhammad even enlisted women in combat.)

Such debates, however, threaten to knock the Brotherhood off the fine line it has attempted to walk.

In public statements, the party’s leaders have preferred to focus on broader themes of Islamic identity and the bread-and-butter questions that are the more urgent concerns of voters. On the campaign trail, the Brotherhood sometimes even seems to appeal to both sides from the same podium — sounding like Salafis themselves one minute but avowing moderation the next.

“To give your vote for Islamists is a religious issue,” an Islamic scholar, Sayed Abdel Karim, declared at a campaign rally in Giza, across the Nile from Cairo, calling for “the rule of God, not the rule of the people.”

“The revival of Islamic spirit in the region is a direct threat to Israel and the future of the Western civilization, Europe and the U.S.,” he said, asserting that “the enemy media” were already saying that “those who love Jews, the United States and Europe should make every effort to keep the Islamic spirit dormant. Look at the conspiracy!”

But moments later, the main speaker and the top candidate on his party’s list, Essam el-Erian, declared that the party believed only in nonsectarian citizenship for all, that Christians and Muslims should enjoy equal rights as “sons of the nation” in the eyes of a neutral state and that the next constitution should protect free expression. And he pledged warm relations with any nation that respected Egypt’s “independence and culture.”

(Brotherhood leaders have said they support retaining the 1979 Camp David peace treaty with Israel, with some possible modifications, while the Salafis have sometimes talked of putting it to a national referendum.)

“The garrison of religion in Egypt has special characteristics,” Mr. Erian said, “tolerance and moderation.”

Leaders of the Brotherhood’s party have endorsed public commitments to protect individual rights. And its platform strikes a consistent theme of eschewing the quick prod of legal coercion in favor of encouraging private endeavors toward gradual change. Unlike the Salafis, it has not proposed to regulate the content of arts or entertainment, women’s work or dress, or even the religious content of public education. In fact, the party’s platform calls for smaller government to limit corruption and liberalize the economy.

Instead the party proposes to nudge Egyptian society by the power of example. In culture, it would encourage “self-censorship” by asking artists and writers to sign a voluntary “code of ethics.” The government, meanwhile, would support music, films and other arts that extol religious and family values.

For social welfare, the party seeks to institutionalize the obligatory Islamic charitable contribution, known as Zakat, by collecting a mandatory 2.5 percent income tax from all Muslims, which the government would then pass to regulated Islamic charities. It would encourage these Islamic charities to set up their own religious schools and hospitals. And to encourage women to accept traditional gender roles, it would promote family values in entertainment while subsidizing community centers for matchmaking and marriage counseling.

“Do you find anything saying that our party is going to impose any kind of law on the moral side?” challenged Mr. Erian, who is running for Parliament in Giza.

Every major party here — liberal or Islamist — supports retaining the clause in the Constitution stipulating that Islam is the source of Egyptian law. But competing Islamist parties offer conflicting ideas about “activating” the clause.

The most liberal — like the former Brotherhood members in the Center Party and the presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, both breakaways from the Brotherhood — advocate essentially secular-liberal states, arguing that government should not get involved in interpreting Islam.

The Salafis, on the other hand, often favor the idea that a specialized council of religious scholars should advise the Parliament or review its legislation to ensure compliance with Islamic law.

The Brotherhood debated similar ideas as recently as a few years ago.

This year, however, the Freedom and Justice Party has sought a middle approach. Its platform calls for Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court to rule on compliance with Shariah. But that stance is essentially without consequence because the court already had that power under Mr. Mubarak, and the judiciary is a bastion of liberalism whose views of Islamic law are highly flexible, to say the least.

“Religious scholars’ guardianship over political life is completely unacceptable,” Mohamed Beltagy, another leader of the Brotherhood’s party, said in an interview. “Nobody could speak in the name of the heavens or the name of religion. We don’t accept tyranny in the name of religion any more than we accept tyranny in the name of the military.”

His party’s position, he argued, was in reality no different from the Center Party’s, though he acknowledged that his view was considered “debatable” within the Brotherhood.

 

Mayy el Sheikh and Amina Ismail contributed reporting.

    Egypt’s Vote Puts Emphasis on Split Over Religious Rule, NYT, 3.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/world/middleeast/egypts-vote-propels-islamic-law-into-spotlight.html