History > 2012 > USA > International (II)

A girl, wounded on Feb. 5 sits next to her mother in Baba Amro,

a neighbourhood of Homs on Feb. 6. Syrian forces bombarded Homs on Monday,

killing 50 people in a sustained assault on several districts of the city

which has become a center of armed opposition to President Bashar Assad,

the Syrian National Council opposition group said.

Photograph: Reuters/handout

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Syria fighting continues

February 8, 2012

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/02/syria_fighting_continues.html

Israeli Airstrikes Kill Militants in Gaza

March 9, 2012
The New York Times
By FARES AKRAM and ISABEL KERSHNER

GAZA — Israeli airstrikes killed up to 10 Palestinians, most of them militants, in the Gaza Strip on Friday and early Saturday, and militants fired barrages of rockets at southern Israel in the worst cross-border fighting in months.

Web sites affiliated with Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza, reported early Saturday that the death toll in the Palestinian enclave had risen to 10.

The first airstrike, which killed a leader of a Palestinian militant group and his assistant, came soon after Gaza militants fired two rockets into southern Israel, causing no injuries or damage, but the military said that it was timed to thwart a terrorist strike that the militants were planning against Israelis from across the border in Egypt.

In the hours after the first strike, at least 20 rockets were fired at Israeli territory. Three civilians were wounded, one seriously, according to the police and emergency services. Israel Radio reported that they were Thai workers. Two rockets were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome antirocket missile defense system, one crashed into a village near the Israeli port city of Ashdod, damaging a house, while others landed in open areas or the sea.

Palestinian residents of Gaza said they heard the distinctive sound of longer-range Grad rockets being launched from within built-up areas of Gaza City.

As a result of the sudden escalation, the Israeli authorities called for the cancellation of all outdoor public activities in southern Israel that were scheduled for Saturday.

The militant leader who was killed, Zuhair al-Qissi, was the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committees, the group that Israel holds responsible for the deadly attack last August from across the border with Egypt in which eight Israelis were killed.

The P.R.C. came into being after the start of the second uprising, or intifada. It was founded by a group of militants who split with older factions like Hamas, Fatah and the Islamic Jihad. The group maintains good relations with Hamas and joined it to seize an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in a cross-border raid in 2006. Mr. Shalit was released last year in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Hours after the first airstrike, Israeli aircraft struck in eastern Gaza City, killing three other militants. Witnesses said they were on a hilly area near the security fence between Gaza and Israel and were apparently preparing to fire rockets at Israeli communities around Gaza.

The two militants were members of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, the group said in a statement.

The Israeli military said that it had targeted two squads as they prepared to fire rockets into Israel. Other airstrikes followed in response to rocket attacks.

Friday’s strikes came after months of relative calm. The Israeli military said that it “does not seek an escalation in the region,” but that it was ready to defend Israeli citizens and would “respond with strength and determination” against any terrorist activity. The military added that the strike against the militants was intended to disrupt a planned attack that was to be launched from the Sinai Peninsula in the coming days.

Israel has recently strengthened its fortifications along its long and porous western border, warning of an increased threat of terrorist attacks planned in Gaza and executed by way of the loosely policed Sinai Peninsula.

Mr. Qissi was appointed as leader of the P.R.C. after Israel killed his predecessor, Awad al-Nirab, and five other militants with an airstrike on a house in southern Gaza immediately after the August attack. The Israeli military said that Mr. Qissi had also been involved in planning that attack.

In January, Mr. Qissi had been reported killed, but another militant died in that episode.

Mr. Qissi’s assistant was Mahmoud Hnani, a senior militant who came from the West Bank and settled in Gaza more than four years ago, the P.R.C. said in a statement.

The two men were traveling in a car when they were hit. Yasmeen Nabeeh, a resident of the southern Gaza City neighborhood of Tal al-Hawa, said she heard a powerful blast and, from her window, saw a blue Volkswagen car burning on the street. A spokesman for an ambulance service said that a bystander was seriously wounded in the bombing.

Mr. Hnani masterminded attacks against Israelis during the second Palestinian uprising that broke out in 2000. The Israeli military said that he had been involved in sending a suicide bomber into Israel. Mr. Hnani spent six years in an Israeli prison and then traveled to Jordan and Egypt. From there he entered Gaza and married Mr. Qissi’s daughter, according to members of the P.R.C.

After the first Israeli strike on Friday, a spokesman for the P.R.C. known as Abu Mujahed said that his group was no longer committed to the shaky cease-fire with Israel that has been largely observed by Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza.

“The response to this crime is open,” Abu Mujahed told reporters.

Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 10, 2012

The Times learned of the error when Mr. al-Qissi was reported killed on Friday in an Israeli airstrike. A brief report about his death is on Page A5. And more information can be found at nytimes.com/foreign.

    Israeli Airstrikes Kill Militants in Gaza, NYT, 9.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/world/middleeast/israeli-airstrike-kills-a-militant-leader-in-gaza.html

Top Pentagon Officials

Stress Risks in Syria

March 7, 2012
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and RICK GLADSTONE

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s top two officials said Wednesday that President Obama had asked for preliminary military options to respond to the increasingly violent Syria conflict, but they emphasized the risks and said that the administration still believed that diplomatic and economic pressure was the best way to protect Syrians from the Assad government’s repression.

The appraisal by Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, in Senate testimony, reflected increased concern about the year-old uprising in Syria, in which more than 7,500 people have been killed, according to United Nations estimates. Their comments also reflected the politicization of the Syria conflict in the United States during a presidential election year. Mr. Obama, who ended the war in Iraq and is moving to do the same in Afghanistan, has expressed reluctance to enter a new military conflict and characterized statements by his Republican adversaries as hawkish.

General Dempsey and Mr. Panetta spoke two days after Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who lost to Mr. Obama in 2008, became the first senator to call for American airstrikes on Syria as “the only realistic way” to stop what he called a slaughter there. Both General Dempsey and Mr. Panetta faced sharp questions during their testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee from Mr. McCain, who is the panel’s ranking Republican.

Their exchanges came as the conflict in Syria took some striking new turns. The United Nations’ top relief official, Valerie Amos, visited the ravaged Syrian city of Homs — the first inspection there by an independent outside observer since President Bashar al-Assad ordered a military assault of the city’s armed resistance more than a month ago. Syrian activist groups reported ominous signs on Wednesday that Mr. Assad’s forces would now direct their campaign northward to Idlib Province, where the Free Syrian Army, a group composed mostly of army defectors, is challenging his authority.

General Dempsey told senators that the options under review included humanitarian airlifts, naval monitoring, aerial surveillance of the Syrian military and the establishment of a no-fly zone. Specifically, he said that “the president of the United States, through the national security staff, has asked us to begin the commander’s estimate,” a term for an initial assessment of a situation and potential courses of military action.

Mr. Panetta, who spoke alongside General Dempsey, told the committee that military review was in the earliest stages. “We have not done the detailed planning because we are waiting for the direction of the president to do that,” he said. Modern commanders in chief have routinely asked for military options during foreign crises, and the Pentagon as part of its daily business draws up contingency plans for a wide range of potential conflicts.

Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey spent much time explaining the difficulties of military action. Mr. Panetta said intervention could expedite a civil war in the country and make an explosive situation worse. He said bluntly that the Obama administration recognized “that there are limitations of military force, especially with U.S. boots on the ground.” He added that “it doesn’t make sense” for the United States to act alone, without a coalition of allies, as was the case in Libya.

Ms. Amos, the United Nations under secretary general and emergency relief coordinator, arrived in Syria for a two-day visit to assess the country’s relief needs. She accompanied a team from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent into the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, which had suffered enormous destruction and where activists have reported hundreds of civilian deaths.

She made no statement about what she observed, but a spokeswoman at the United Nations, Amanda Pitt, said that Ms. Amos had told her via telephone that the neighborhood was “pretty devastated,” largely devoid of people and punctuated by occasional gunfire.

“She wanted to go to Homs and Baba Amr to try and get a sense for herself of the impact of the fighting — and of the lack of humanitarian access — and to get there as soon as possible,” Ms. Pitt said in an e-mail. She said Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem of Syria, her host, had told Ms. Amos that she “would be able to go wherever she wanted.”

The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency made no mention of Ms. Amos’s visit to Homs, but reported her arrival in Syria earlier on Wednesday and quoted Mr. Moallem as saying that the government was trying to respond to emergency civilian needs “despite the burdens it faces because of the unfair sanctions imposed by some Arab and Western countries on Syria.”

Accounts of torture and deprivation in Homs, conveyed by fleeing civilians, have been denounced as enemy propaganda by the government of Mr. Assad, who has belittled the mass demonstrations against him and insisted that his forces have been battling foreign-backed terrorism. While China and Russia, his biggest foreign supporters, have defeated attempts by the United Nations Security Council to condemn Mr. Assad and hold him accountable, fractures have surfaced.

On Monday, Russia’s prime minister and president-elect, Vladimir V. Putin, reaffirmed his support for Mr. Assad but said he did not know how much longer Mr. Assad’s government would last. On Wednesday, China announced it was withdrawing most of its workers from Syria, reflecting what appeared to be declining confidence in Mr. Assad’s powers of governance.

Syria’s deputy oil minister, Abdo Hussameldin, announced his defection on a YouTube video, Reuters reported early Thursday, which would make him first high-ranking civilian official to abandon the Assad government since the uprising began.

The authenticity of the video, which was filmed at an undisclosed location, could not be confirmed.

“I Abdo Hussameldin, deputy oil and mineral wealth minister in Syria, announce my defection from the regime, resignation from my position and withdrawal from the Baath Party. I join the revolution of this dignified people,” Mr. Hussameldin says in the video, which was uploaded Wednesday and seen early on Thursday.

“I say to this regime: you have inflicted on those who you claim are your people a whole year of sorrow and sadness, denying them basic life and humanity and driving Syria to the edge of the abyss,” he says, adding that the country’s economy is “near collapse.”

Mr. Assad appointed Mr. Hussameldin, 58, to his position through a presidential decree in 2009.

Wearing a suit and tie, Mr. Hussameldin looked relaxed as he stared directly into the camera in a tight head and shoulders shot, appearing to read from a prepared statement on his lap as he sat on a dark gray chair against a yellow background.

”I have been in government for 33 years,” he said. “I did not want to end my career serving the crimes of this regime. I have preferred to do what is right although I know that this regime will burn my house and persecute my family.”

Public defections have remained rare among the civilian branches of the state, which Mr. Assad’s opponents attribute to the tight control of the secret police and the fear of retribution against families of any would-be defectors.

In late August, the attorney general of Hama Province, Mohammad al-Bakkour, declared in a YouTube video that he had resigned in protest against the suppression of street demonstrations and the storming of the city of Hama by tanks, according to Reuters. Mr. Bakkour has not been heard from since and some opposition sources say the video was made under pressure from rebels.



Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar, Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times from Beirut, Lebanon, Edward Wong from Beijing, and Alan Cowell from London.

    Top Pentagon Officials Stress Risks in Syria, NYT, 7.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/world/middleeast/un-official-scheduled-to-arrive-in-syria.html

Obama Scolds G.O.P. Critics of Iran Policy

March 6, 2012
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday forcefully rebuked Republicans on the presidential campaign trail and in Congress for “beating the drums of war” in criticizing his efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program, underscoring how squarely the national security issue had entered the election-year debate.

Mr. Obama’s comments, in which he suggested without naming Iraq that the United States had only recently gone to war “wrapped up in politics,” came in a televised news conference. The White House scheduled it on a day when leading Republicans were addressing an influential pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as Aipac, at its annual conference.

There, the two leading Republican presidential candidates, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, assailed Mr. Obama’s foreign policy as ineffective and weak in their appeals to the group. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, called for Congress to authorize the use of force against Iran.

The president was withering in his retort. “Those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities,” Mr. Obama said. “They’re not commander in chief. When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war” — for those who go into combat, for national security and for the economy. “This is not a game,” he added. “And there’s nothing casual about it.”

“If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so, and they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be,” he said.

While the debate over Iran is unlikely to overshadow the economy as the predominant election issue, the heated back-and-forth this week — and the international tension over suspicions that Iran may seek to build nuclear weapons — ensure that it is now a part of the presidential contest.

The spark was the Aipac meeting, where members of both parties sought to show their support for Israel, especially against the potential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Mr. Obama spoke on Sunday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addressed the conference on Monday night after meeting earlier with Mr. Obama at the White House. The president, in his speech to Aipac, said military force was one option on the table for dealing with Iran. At the White House, Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Obama that he had not made a decision on an Israeli strike, officials said, though he expressed deep skepticism that the president’s strategy of diplomatic and economic sanctions would force Iran to change course.

In his speech to Aipac, Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, accused Mr. Obama of allowing Iran “another appeasement, another delay, another opportunity for them to go forward while we talk.” When he addressed the group, Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said, “The only thing respected by thugs and tyrants is our resolve, backed by our power and our readiness to use it.”

For a president who inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has spent three years trying to wind them down, the talk of war plainly rankled. Mr. Obama’s early opposition to the Bush administration’s war against Iraq helped him to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 over Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had voted to authorize force against Iraq as a senator, and he seemed to recall the period in drawing parallels to the current debate on Iran.

Citing the costs in lives lost or forever changed at his news conference, Mr. Obama said: “Sometimes we bear that cost, but we think it through. We don’t play politics with it. When we have in the past — when we haven’t thought it through and it gets wrapped up in politics — we make mistakes. And typically it’s not the folks who are popping off who pay the price.”

The politics aside, Mr. Obama struck a markedly more circumspect note on Iran a day after he expressed solidarity with Mr. Netanyahu. He reiterated at the news conference the need for time to allow diplomacy and sanctions to work, and rejected suggestions that Iran was so close to a nuclear weapon that the situation needed to be resolved “in the next week or two weeks or month or two months.”

The president added that sanctions were starting to squeeze Iran’s oil industry and central bank, and would intensify in coming months. He said that Iran was now signaling that it wanted to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program, and he emphasized the risks of what he called premature military action.

“It’s also not just an issue of consequences for Israel if action is taken prematurely,” he said. “There are consequences to the United States as well.” As a friend of Israel, he said, it is the job of the United States “to make sure that we provide honest and unvarnished advice.”

Finally, Mr. Obama made clear that when he said the United States “has Israel’s back” — a phrase he used in his speech on Sunday and in the Oval Office with Mr. Netanyahu — it should not be interpreted to mean that he was giving Israel any kind of go-ahead for a pre-emptive strike on Iran.

His statement, Mr. Obama said, was a more general expression of American support for an ally, like Britain or Japan. “It was not a military doctrine that we were laying out for any particular military action,” he said.

Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials attached great importance to Mr. Obama’s statement, on Sunday and at the White House, that Israel had a sovereign right to defend itself.

It was one of four remarks the president made that Israeli officials said they thought had drawn the United States closer to Israel in recent days. The others were Mr. Obama’s vow to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, his rejection of a policy aimed at containing a nuclear-armed Iran and his explicit reference to military force as an option on the table.

Mr. Netanyahu, in his address to Aipac on Monday, appeared comfortable with the results of his meeting with the president, even as he rejected warnings voiced by Mr. Obama and others that a strike on Iran could unleash even more dangerous consequences for Israel and the United States.

“It’s about time we start talking about the cost of not stopping Iran,” said Mr. Netanyahu, at one point holding up copies of letters from 1944, in which the War Department, the precursor of what is now the Defense Department, rebuffed an appeal by the World Jewish Congress to bomb Auschwitz because, the American officials said, it might drive Nazi Germany to even more “vindictive action.”

    Obama Scolds G.O.P. Critics of Iran Policy, NYT, 6.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/world/middleeast/obama-rebukes-gop-critics-of-his-iran-policy.html

Israel’s Best Friend

March 6, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The only question I have when it comes to President Obama and Israel is whether he is the most pro-Israel president in history or just one of the most.

Why? Because the question of whether Israel has the need and the right to pre-emptively attack Iran as it develops a nuclear potential is one of the most hotly contested issues on the world stage today. It is also an issue fraught with danger for Israel and American Jews, neither of whom want to be accused of dragging America into a war, especially one that could weaken an already frail world economy.

In that context, President Obama, in his interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and in his address to Aipac, the pro-Israel lobby, offered the greatest support for Israel that any president could at this time: He redefined the Iran issue. He said — rightly — that it was not simply about Israel’s security, but about U.S. national security and global security.

Obama did this by making clear that allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons and then “containing” it — the way the U.S. contained the Soviet Union — was not a viable option, because if Iran acquires a nuclear bomb, all the states around it would seek to acquire one as well. This would not only lead to a nuclear Middle East, but it would likely prompt other countries to hedge their commitments to the global Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The global nuclear black market would then come alive and we would see the dawning of a more dangerous world.

“Preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon isn’t just in the interest of Israel, it is profoundly in the security interests of the United States,” the president told The Atlantic. “If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, this would run completely contrary to my policies of nonproliferation. The risks of an Iranian nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorist organizations are profound. ... It would also provide Iran the additional capability to sponsor and protect its proxies in carrying out terrorist attacks, because they are less fearful of retaliation. ... If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I won’t name the countries, but there are probably four or five countries in the Middle East who say, ‘We are going to start a program, and we will have nuclear weapons.’ And at that point, the prospect for miscalculation in a region that has that many tensions and fissures is profound. You essentially then duplicate the challenges of India and Pakistan fivefold or tenfold.” In sum, the president added, “The dangers of an Iran getting nuclear weapons that then leads to a free-for-all in the Middle East is something that I think would be very dangerous for the world.”

Every Israeli and friend of Israel should be thankful to the president for framing the Iran issue this way. It is important strategically for Israel, because it makes clear that dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat was not Israel’s problem alone. And it is important politically, because this decision about whether to attack Iran is coinciding with the U.S. election. The last thing Israel or American friends of Israel — Jewish and Christian — want is to give their enemies a chance to claim that Israel is using its political clout to embroil America in a war that is not in its interest.

That could easily happen because backing for Israel today has never been more politicized. In recent years, Republicans have tried to make support for Israel a wedge issue that would enable them to garner a higher percentage of Jewish votes and campaign contributions, which traditionally have swung overwhelmingly Democratic. This has led to an arms race with the Democrats over who is more pro-Israel — and over-the-top declarations, like Newt Gingrich’s that the Palestinians “are an invented people.”

And it could easily happen because money in politics has never been more important for running campaigns, and the Israel lobby — both its Jewish and evangelical Christian wings — has never been more influential, because of its ability to direct campaign contributions to supportive candidates.

As such, no one should want domestic electoral politics mixed up with the Iran decision, which is why it was so important that the president redefined the Iran problem as a global proliferation threat and grounded his decision-making in American realism, not politics.

Reports from the Aipac convention this week indicated that those advocating military action were getting the loudest cheers. I’d invite all those cheering to think about all the unintended and unanticipated consequences of the Iraq war or Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. That’s not a reason for paralysis. It’s a reason to heed Obama’s call to give diplomacy and biting sanctions a chance to work, while keeping the threat of force on the table.

If it comes to war, let it be because the ayatollahs were ready to sacrifice their whole economy to get a nuke and, therefore, America — the only country that can truly take down Iran’s nuclear program — had to act to protect the global system, not just Israel. I respect that this is a deadly serious issue for Israel — which has the right to act on its own — but President Obama has built a solid strategic and political case for letting America take the lead.

    Israel’s Best Friend, NYT, 6.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/opinion/friedman-israels-best-friend.html

Iran, Israel and the United States

March 5, 2012
The New York Times

President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel share responsibility for the strains in their relationship. But there should be no doubt about Mr. Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security. When he warns that an Israeli attack on Iran could backfire, and that “there is still a window” for diplomacy, he is speaking for American and Israeli interests.

Iran’s nuclear appetites are undeniable, as is its malign intent toward Israel, toward America, toward its Arab neighbors and its own people. Israel’s threats of unilateral action have finally focused the world’s attention on the danger. Still, there must be no illusions about what it would take to seriously damage Iran’s nuclear complex, the high costs and the limited returns.

This would not be a “surgical” strike like the Israeli attack in 1981 that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, or the 2007 Israeli strike on an unfinished reactor in Syria. Iran has multiple facilities, and the crucial ones are buried or “hardened.” Pentagon analysts estimate that even a sustained Israeli air campaign would set back the program by only a few years, drive it further underground and possibly unleash a wider war.

It would also cast the Iranian government as the victim in the eyes of an otherwise alienated Iranian public. It would tear apart the international coalition and undermine an increasingly tough sanctions regime, making it even easier for Iran to rebuild its program.

Israelis have every right to be fearful and frustrated. For too long the world ignored Iran’s misdeeds and shrugged off Israel’s alarms. But while President George W. Bush blustered and made no progress, Mr. Obama — with a sharp nudge from Israel and Congress — has had increasing success rallying the international community to isolate and punish Tehran.

Mitt Romney’s claim that “if Barack Obama gets re-elected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon” is purely cynical; his own prescription for “crippling sanctions” and “military options” barely differs from Mr. Obama’s policy. The president’s offer to negotiate with Tehran has made it easier to persuade others to ratchet up the pressure.

We don’t know if there is any mix of sanctions and diplomacy that can persuade the mullahs to abandon their nuclear ambitions. American officials are right not to overpromise. Iran is feeling the bite from stiff restrictions on its banking system, and the pressure and pain should rise significantly in coming months as the European Union imposes an embargo on Iranian oil imports.

Tehran’s recent offer to return to the negotiations is almost certainly another feint, but must be tested.

What if sanctions and diplomacy are not enough?

Mr. Obama has long said that all options are on the table. In recent days his language has become more pointed — urged on, undoubtedly, by Israel’s threats to act alone.

Last week he told The Atlantic, “when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.” In a speech on Sunday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he declared that his policy is not to contain Iran, it is “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

The United States military is far more capable of doing serious damage to Iran’s facilities than the Israeli military, but the cost would still be high, with many of the same dangers and uncertainties.

Mr. Obama is right that military action should only be the last resort, but Israel should not doubt this president’s mettle. Neither should Iran.

    Iran, Israel and the United States, NYT, 5.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/opinion/iran-israel-and-the-united-states.html

Obama Presses Netanyahu to Resist Strikes on Iran

March 5, 2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — With Israel warning of a possible military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, President Obama urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday to give diplomacy and economic sanctions a chance to work before resorting to military action.

The meeting, held in a charged atmosphere of election-year politics and a deepening confrontation with Tehran, was nevertheless “friendly, straightforward, and serious,” a White House official said. But it did not resolve basic differences between the two leaders over how to deal with the Iranian threat.

Mr. Netanyahu, the official said, reiterated that Israel had not made a decision on striking Iran, but he expressed deep skepticism that international pressure would persuade Iran’s leaders to forsake the development of nuclear weapons. Mr. Netanyahu, according to the official, argued that the West should not reopen talks with Iran until it agreed to a verifiable suspension of its uranium enrichment activities — a condition the White House says would doom talks before they began.

Speaking later on Monday to an influential pro-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Mr. Netanyahu said, “We waited for diplomacy to work; we’ve waited for sanctions to work; none of us can afford to wait much longer.”

Mr. Obama, the official said, had maintained during their Oval Office meeting that the European Union’s impending oil sanctions and the blacklisting of Iran’s central bank could yet force Tehran back to the bargaining table — not necessarily eliminating the nuclear threat but pushing back the timetable for the development of a weapon.

“We do believe there is still a window that allows for a diplomatic resolution to this issue,” the president said as Mr. Netanyahu sat next to him before the start of their three hours of talks.

Both leaders agreed to try to tamp down the heated debate about Iran in their countries, officials said. Mr. Obama said the talk of war was driving up oil prices and undermining the effect of the sanctions on Iran. Mr. Netanyahu expressed frustration that statements by American officials about the negative effects of military action could send a message of weakness to Tehran.

Keeping a measured tone may be challenging, however. At the Aipac conference under way in Washington, speakers have delivered fervent calls for tougher action on Iran.

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, used his speech to lay out conditions under which he would introduce a bill in the Senate authorizing the use of military force against Iran. “We have now reached the point where the current administration’s policies, however well-intentioned, are simply not enough,” the Kentucky Republican said. An Aipac official noted that this idea originated with Mr. McConnell, not with Aipac.

When Mr. Obama spoke to the group on Sunday, he articulated many themes that he and Mr. Netanyahu discussed the following day in their meeting. Despite their sometimes acrimonious relationship over the Middle East peace process, Israeli and American officials said the two leaders were in sync about the need to stop Iran from joining the ranks of nuclear states.

“My policy here is not going to be one of containment,” Mr. Obama said before the meeting on Monday. “My policy is prevention of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.” He added, “When I say all options are on the table, I mean it.”

Mr. Netanyahu, noting that Iran’s leaders vilify the United States as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan,” said there was no difference between the two countries. “We are you, and you are us,” he said. “We are together.”

The prime minister thanked Mr. Obama for affirming, in his speech on Sunday, that “when it comes to security, Israel has the right, the sovereign right to make its own decisions.”

An American official said the president was trying to avoid the perception that he was publicly pressuring the Israeli leader, though supporters of Israeli interpreted it as a signal that the United States recognized Israel’s right to make its own decision on military action. Whether Israel could, in fact, carry out an effective strike on Iran without American support is unclear.

“My supreme responsibility as prime minister of Israel is to ensure that Israel remains the master of its fate,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Israeli officials said they were gratified by the president’s explicit reference to military force as an option, his rejection of a containment policy and his reaffirmation of Israel’s right to make decisions on its national security.

Still, beneath the tableau of shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity, the differences in their views were on display in their statements before the meeting. Mr. Netanyahu said nothing about diplomacy and the sanctions that Mr. Obama has advocated. And while the president repeated his vow that “all options are on the table” to halt Iran’s pursuit of a weapon, he did not explicitly mention military force, as he had on Sunday.

Nor has the president embraced another crucial Israeli demand: that military action come before Iran acquires the capability to manufacture a bomb, as opposed to before it actually builds one. The two men did not close the gap on this issue, the official said, though he added that Mr. Netanyahu did not press Mr. Obama on it.

Mr. Netanyahu also did not push Mr. Obama to lay down sharper “red lines,” or conditions, that would prompt American action, as had been rumored last week, Israeli and American officials said.

Indeed, in his speech to Aipac, Mr. Netanyahu did not speak of preventing Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability, only a nuclear weapon itself. “For the sake of our prosperity, for the sake of security, for the sake of our children, Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons,” he said.

As he has in previous speeches, Mr. Netanyahu dwelled on the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. Tehran, he said, was the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, trying in the past year to murder the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Iran, he said, plotted to destroy the state of Israel “every day, each day, relentlessly.”

Israeli officials seemed most gratified with Mr. Obama’s explicit refusal to follow a policy of containing a nuclear-armed Iran. The president said Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would ignite an arms race in the Middle East, raise the specter of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, and allow Iran to behave with impunity in the region.

The mood in the Oval Office was somber and businesslike, as it usually is in meetings between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu. But the chemistry was better than it had been in previous meetings, officials said.

In their last Oval Office encounter, in May 2011, Mr. Netanyahu summarily rejected a proposal by the president to revive moribund peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. With a stone-faced Mr. Obama sitting next to him, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would not pursue a “peace based on illusions.”

This time, the peace process barely figured in the discussions.

    Obama Presses Netanyahu to Resist Strikes on Iran, NYT, 5.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/middleeast/obama-cites-window-for-diplomacy-on-iran-bomb.html

U.S. Backers of Israel Pressure Obama Over Policy on Iran

March 3, 2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — On the eve of a crucial visit to the White House by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, that country’s most powerful American advocates are mounting an extraordinary public campaign to pressure President Obama into hardening American policy toward Iran over its nuclear program.

From the corridors of Congress to a gathering of nearly 14,000 American Jews and other supporters of Israel here this weekend, Mr. Obama is being buffeted by demands that the United States be more aggressive toward Iran and more forthright in supporting Israel in its own confrontation with Tehran.

While defenders of Israel rally every year at the meeting of the pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, this year’s gathering has been supercharged by a convergence of election-year politics, a deepening nuclear showdown and the often-fraught relationship between the president and the Israeli prime minister.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu will both speak to the group, known as Aipac, as will the three leading Republican presidential candidates, who will appear via satellite from the campaign trail on the morning of Super Tuesday. Republicans have seized on Iran’s nuclear ambitions to accuse Mr. Obama of being weak in backing a staunch ally and in confronting a bitter foe.

The pressure from an often-hostile Congress is also mounting. A group of influential senators, fresh from a meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem, has called on Mr. Obama to lay down sharper criteria, known as “red lines,” about when to act against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“We’re saying to the administration, ‘You’ve got a problem; let’s fix it, let’s get back on message,’ ” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who took part in the meeting with Mr. Netanyahu and said the Israeli leader vented frustration at what he viewed as mixed messages from Washington.

“It’s not just about the Jewish vote and 2012,” Mr. Graham added. “It’s about reassuring people who want to avoid war that the United States will do what’s necessary.”

To give teeth to the deterrent threat against Iran, Israel and its backers want Mr. Obama to stop urging restraint on Israel and to be more explicit about the circumstances under which the United States itself would carry out a strike.

Specifically, Israeli officials are demanding that Iran agree to halt all its enrichment of uranium in the country, and that the suspension be verified by United Nations inspectors, before the West resumes negotiations with Tehran on its nuclear program.

The White House has rejected that demand, Israeli and American officials said on Friday, arguing that Iran would never agree to a blanket ban upfront, and to insist on it would doom negotiations before they even began. The administration insists that Mr. Obama will stick to his policy, which is focused on using economic sanctions to force the Iranian government to give up its nuclear ambitions, with military action as a last resort.

Despite the position of the Israelis and Aipac, the American intelligence agencies continue to say that there is no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to pursue a nuclear weapon. Recent assessments by American spy agencies have reaffirmed intelligence findings in 2007 and 2010 that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

In his tone, at least, Mr. Obama is working to reassure Israel. In an interview published on Friday, Mr. Obama reiterated his pledge to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — with force, if necessary — and ruled out a policy of accepting but seeking to contain a nuclear-armed Iran. The Israeli government, he said, recognizes that “as president of the United States, I don’t bluff.”

The White House’s choice of interviewer — Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the magazine The Atlantic — was carefully calculated. Mr. Goldberg is closely read among Jews in America; in 2010, he wrote an article exploring the situations under which Israel would attack Iran.

American Jews are anything but monolithic. More dovish groups, like J Street, are trying to make a case against a pre-emptive Israeli strike. But for the next few days, Aipac will set the tone for an intense debate over the Iranian nuclear threat.

Mr. Obama will not lay down new red lines on Iran, even if he discusses them with Mr. Netanyahu, administration officials said. And he is not ready to accept a central part of Israel’s strategic calculation: that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be warranted to stop it from gaining the capability to build a nuclear weapon, rather than later, to stop it from actually manufacturing one.

In the interview, Mr. Obama warned Israel of the consequences of a strike and said that it would delay but not prevent Iran from acquiring a weapon. He also said he did not know how the American public would react.

Israel’s supporters said they believed that a majority of Americans would support an Israeli military strike against Iran. But polling data paints a murkier picture: while close to 50 percent of Americans say in several polls that they would support Israel, a slightly larger number say they would stay neutral. In some surveys, there is strong support for continuing diplomacy.

Supporters of Israel argue that in the American news media, Iran’s nuclear program has been wrongly framed as Israel’s problem, rather than as a threat to the security of the whole world.

“This is about the devastating impact on U.S. and Western security of a nuclear-armed Iran bent on bullying the region into submission,” said Josh Block, a former spokesman for Aipac.

Turnout for this year’s Aipac conference is expected to surpass all previous records. And the roster of speakers attests to the group’s drawing power. In addition to Mr. Obama, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta will speak, as will Congressional leaders including Senator Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s Republican leader, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House.

On Tuesday, the screens in the Washington convention center will light up with the Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who are likely to fault Mr. Obama as not doing enough to prevent Iran from getting a weapon.

“Aipac is the spearhead of the pro-Israel community’s efforts to move the American government’s red lines closer to Israel’s red lines,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former American envoy to Israel.

Officials at Aipac declined to comment about the conference or their strategy. But Mr. Block and other former Aipac officials said that, as in previous years, the group would blanket Capitol Hill with its members — all of whom will carry a message about the Iranian nuclear threat.

They will be pushing on an open door. Democrats and Republicans, divided on so much, are remarkably united in supporting Israel and in ratcheting up pressure on Iran. The Senate voted 100 to 0 last year to pass legislation isolating Iran’s central bank, over the objections of the White House.

There are four bills in the House and Senate that call for tougher action against Iran or closer military cooperation between Israel and the United States. Mr. Graham is one of 32 Republican and Democratic sponsors of a resolution that calls on the president to reject a policy of containing Iran.

“The Senate can’t agree to cross the street,” Mr. Graham said. “Iran has done more to bring us together than anything in the world.”

To counter Aipac’s message, J Street has circulated a video on Capitol Hill, highlighting American and Israeli military experts who have voiced doubts about the efficacy of a strike on Iran.

“We are saying there needs to be time for enhanced sanctions and diplomacy to work,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street. “We’re trying to calm down the drumbeat of war.”

 

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

    U.S. Backers of Israel Pressure Obama Over Policy on Iran, NYT, 3.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/world/middleeast/israels-backers-in-aipac-press-obama-to-harden-iran-policy.html

Bearing Witness in Syria: A War Reporter’s Last Days

March 3, 2012
The New York Times
By TYLER HICKS

It was damp and cold as Anthony Shadid and I crossed in darkness over the barbed-wire fence that separated Turkey from Syria last month. We were also crossing from peace into war, into the bloodiest conflict of the Arab Spring, exploding just up the rocky and sparsely wooded mountain we had to climb once inside.

The smugglers waiting for us had horses, though we learned they were not for us. They were to carry ammunition and supplies to the Free Syrian Army. That is the armed opposition group, made up largely of defectors from President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal army, we had come to interview, photograph and try to understand.

The ammunition seemed evidence of the risk we were taking — a risk we did not shoulder lightly. Anthony, who passionately documented the eruptions in the Arab world from Iraq to Libya for The New York Times, felt it was essential that journalists get into Syria, where about 7,000 people have been killed, largely out of the world’s view. We had spent months planning to stay safe.

It turned out the real danger was not the weapons but possibly the horses. Anthony was allergic. He did not know how badly.

He had a terrible allergic attack that first night after we crossed over the barbed wire. He had another attack a week later, as horses led us out of Syria, just 45 minutes from safety. He died during that attack, at only 43, his wife and nearly 2-year-old son waiting for him in Turkey.

He did not write his articles from our eventful week of reporting and shooting pictures in Syria; his notes, taken obsessively, are barely decipherable. But he would have wanted a record of this final trip, some hint of the questions we sought to answer: Who were these fighters, and did they have any chance of beating the Syrian government? How were they armed and organized? Was the conflict, as in Iraq, worsening sectarian tensions? Just who supported whom?

Unlike Anthony, I do not speak Arabic. I’m a photographer who was most interested in capturing images from an expanding war zone. But I will do my best to convey a sense of what Syria, on edge, was like — in a week that invigorated Anthony as a reporter and witness. He could not wait to get back to write.

Getting the News

Syrian tanks blocked the roads leading in and out of the towns scattered across Idlib Province, a center for the insurgents, and we were surprised by how close we had to pass them on the drive into town. “This is really threading the needle,” Anthony said as we navigated a small, unguarded road that the insurgents considered safe. The men driving us described passable roads as “clean.”

Our journey in took us to a group of men who would be our guides in Syria. They call themselves activists, and unlike the fighters, they’re the civilian side of the revolution. They, too, are risking their lives to tell the world what is happening to their country.

Almost all of them have been jailed and tortured. One showed the marks on his legs where he had been tortured with electricity. Another had scars on his wrists from being tightly bound for so long in a cell. None have seen their families for months, and they routinely change where they sleep as a safety measure.

It was clear that they understood the importance of having Anthony there. Foreign journalists are valuable for getting news out of Syria and into a wider world that might be able to help them (though that wider world seems uncertain about how to do so). His Arabic allowed him to speak directly to people without the buffer of an interpreter. As always, he conveyed a genuine interest that made people open up to him; everyone was equal, no story insignificant.

Most fighters we met had recently defected from the Syrian Army, some just days earlier. I was surprised by how open they were. Only rarely would one cover his face or ask that I not take a picture. Most proudly displayed their military ID cards, holding them up like trophies. They said they defected because they refused to obey orders to kill their own people. Anthony and I talked often about what would happen if this struggle did not go their way. As defectors, capture would mean certain death.

There have been many reports of jihadis or other foreign fighters flowing into Syria, as if it were the next Afghanistan or Iraq. That is the story the Assad government has used as a justification for cracking down so violently. We saw no evidence of that in Idlib — only Syrians.

Anthony was not a thrill seeker, but he understood that the truth had to be found at the source. This is a war, and barracks interviews could not replace the firsthand accounts of battle. A battle came to us unexpectedly while making a routine stop at a base during an otherwise quiet day in Saraqib, in northwestern Syria.

Several dozen insurgent Free Syrian Army fighters rushed to gather all the weapons they could scrounge from their small compound. “They’re going on an attack,” Anthony told me. My reaction was mixed; I wanted the pictures to tell the story but felt uneasy about what was clearly going to be an uneven fight.

They were moving fast to get into place after learning that a column of tanks would be passing on the highway on their way to fortify the city of Idlib. We had to make a quick decision, and we agreed that we would go with them. The fighters were hugely outgunned for the battle ahead; firing an AK-47 rifle against an armored tank would amount to throwing a handful of stones at a Mack truck. They told Anthony that they would try to hit one of the tanks with a homemade bomb, their most effective weapon, already set in the road. Then they planned to attack the disabled convoy with their rifles.

The fighters, most in everyday clothes, some still wearing the uniforms that were issued to them in the Syrian Army before they had defected, waited hidden along a small street next to the highway. A single row of houses, some built from cinder block, others from stone, was the only concealment separating the fighters from the highway. A fighter warned us to stay behind the old stone houses because they would withstand a tank round better than cheap cinder block.

A small number of civilians trickled from their homes to discover the fighters preparing to launch an attack from their neighborhood. It was clear from their body language that they were not accustomed to seeing fighters there, but they took it as a sign to relocate to safer ground.

A distant rumble was the only sign that announced the approach of the tanks. Two tanks passed before the fighters detonated the bomb. The large explosion, missing its target, was the cue for the others to engage with their rifles, and the quiet neighborhood erupted into gunfire. The more cautious fired their rifles around the corners of houses, while others took turns to shoot more effectively from the exposed alleyways before retreating for cover.

A call went out to stop firing. The fighters said they received a message that a soldier from one of the tanks wanted to defect and join them. There had been stories of similar brazen, risky defections in the past, so the request was not out of the question. One fighter told Anthony that a tank had pointedly turned its gun away from the attack, and in a show of support, a soldier raised his hand from the turret to display the “victory” sign. More fighting interrupted the hope for spontaneous recruits, and three civilians were wounded when a bomb hit a house farther in town.

The attack ended as abruptly as it had begun, and when the fighters returned to their base, I drove with Anthony to a makeshift office that had been set up by the activists. The activists suggested that we keep a low profile because of how exposed we had been in town that day. Informants would be keeping an eye out for us, they said, and there was no reason to push it. We were offered dark Arabic coffee, and we accepted enthusiastically. Anthony not only loved his coffee, he also needed it.

Making a Connection

That evening I read a book while Anthony walked down the street to interview some fighters we had been with that day. A while later an activist returned to tell me that Anthony wanted me to follow him and to bring my cameras. I arrived back at the base where we had seen them prepare their weapons, and as is the custom I took off my shoes before entering. There I found a carpeted room full of the fighters, now familiar to us, singing and playing traditional music, some clapping as one sang.

Directly across from me, amid cigarette smoke and sitting among them, was Anthony with a huge smile on his face. This was exactly the kind of connection that made him most happy as a reporter; his great warmth and intelligence were part of what made him the most important journalist covering the Arab world.

He put his arms out and said gleefully, “Tyler, look at this!” I found a seat next to him. Always wanting to share the experience, he told me that when they started singing he immediately sent for me. They served a dessert of sweet cheese, doused in a sticky syrup. They ad-libbed to incorporate us into the lyrics of one of their songs, thanking us for coming to Syria to witness their struggle.

What did we learn? The Free Syrian Army is much more organized than the rebel fighters in Libya. Because of the growing number of defectors, there’s a stock of able, trained soldiers and officers mounting in Syria. As the attack on the tanks showed, they don’t yet have the weapons to put up a realistic fight.

Their strength lies inside the towns. The regular Syrian Army, which has proved to be unreliable and already stretched thin, is reluctant to storm the towns and consolidate control. What it can do, and what the population fears most, is indiscriminately shell the towns and cities — as has been happening fearsomely in Homs to the south. While effective, the tactic is increasing condemnation against the Assad government, which is accused of disregarding completely the lives of women, children and other noncombatants.

Life goes on in these towns despite the violence there. For most people, the only safe way to drive out of town is to use their knowledge of the area to traverse the back roads in the countryside. Free Syrian Army fighters claim to completely own those roads, but when pressed, they admit that no one really knows for certain where the Syrian Army is at a given time. Most shops in the towns are open, and people are on the street.

But the problems are deeper than those that first meet the eye. The hospitals and clinics are barely functioning and have almost no supplies. Some patients have to recover in homes and in secrecy. Power cuts are constant, and there is a serious shortage of fuel. The people living here will suffer more as time goes on.

There are mixed emotions among the civilians living in these towns. Most say they favor the revolution and want Mr. Assad out of power. While hundreds of people gather daily to protest in some towns, with Friday gatherings for prayers swelling into the thousands, their rally to the cause is bittersweet. People know that the fighters, and the revolt, will draw the army to them, and some are not shy about saying they do not want to invite a crisis to their doorstep. They know what happened in Homs. The images on Arabic news channels are a constant stream of bloody scenes. They also know that they are probably next on the list as the Syrian Army tries to crush the rebellion.

The Road Home

Anthony was eager to get back to Turkey. Our work was done, and there was no need to prolong the risk. But there were at least two more worries before we could feel safe. The first was reaching the top of the mountain that led back to Turkey.

The more direct route, which we had taken on the way in, was no longer safe because the Shabeeha, armed thugs loyal to the Assad government, had set up a checkpoint there. We had to take a much longer patchwork of back roads that were not entirely familiar to the men driving us. They told us that without us they might be able to talk their way out of an encounter, but with foreigners in the car we would be in serious trouble. I could feel Anthony’s tension, which I shared, when our car stopped and turned around to find a different road.

“This is the worst,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over these checkpoints,” Anthony replied, referring to our capture at a checkpoint in Libya 11 months earlier. A gunfight had erupted then, killing our 21-year-old driver and ending with four Times journalists held for nearly a week by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces.

We felt huge relief when we finally reached the mountain. In an hour we would be across, and soon after that, celebrating a successful reporting trip back across the border.

But there was the second worry: Because of Anthony’s bad allergic reaction to the horses on the way in, we had often discussed whether there should be horses on the way out — and what we would do if there were. And now two smugglers were waiting for us, again with their horses.

Anthony’s health had been good during the week and he prepared himself for the trip down with antihistamines and a supply of inhalers. He had a black and white kaffiyeh covering his face to filter the air, the same one he had worn around his neck throughout the assignment. He told the young men he wouldn’t ride a horse and to walk ahead with them at a distance.

“Should we walk in front of the horses?” I asked Anthony.

“No, they need to guide us,” he said.

The pace down was faster and easier than coming up a week earlier, and this time our bags were carried by horses instead of on our backs. But then I could hear that Anthony’s breathing became strained, and within a mile he was asking to rest. He will get through this as he did on the much more strenuous hike in, I thought, and with one of my arms around his waist, and the other holding his forearm, we continued to walk.

Soon after, Anthony stopped and leaned against a large boulder, and unlike the first time, when he had merely labored for breath, now he collapsed onto the ground. I called out his name, but he was already unconscious and his breathing had stopped completely. I performed CPR for half an hour while begging the smugglers to find a doctor. I hoped for a miracle. Turkey was now out of the question, and backtracking would only return us to a remote border village. Finally, a small covered truck drove quietly within sight of us and we carried Anthony, whose death I could still not come to terms with, into the back, where I climbed in with him.

I urged the driver to hurry and we finally arrived in a small town at what looked like a medical clinic. I rushed inside and found a doctor. He checked Anthony’s vital signs and confirmed that he was dead. He said he was sorry.

The doctor spoke to me in English. “I’ve taken a huge risk helping you already,” he told me. I understood. Since the beginning of the conflict, many doctors have been arrested, tortured and killed for helping wounded fighters or opponents of the Assad government, and a foreign journalist was not an exception. I thanked him for his help, and then left with Anthony’s body and the smugglers.

They took me to a farmhouse on a dirt road. Negotiation and money finally got us back to the mountain where we had started. Anthony was secured to one of the same horses for the journey down. I walked in front of him, in shock, as we neared the Turkish border.

We carried Anthony’s body from the horse, back across the same barbed wire, and passed him to another group of men waiting hidden on the other side. Now inside Turkey, we joined more men who took us to a fire department where the Turkish police were called. Anthony’s body was out of Syria, but the sadness for his family, friends and colleagues had only begun.

Just a few hours before he died, some activists asked to videotape an interview with him. Those are now the last images of him. In Arabic, he cheerfully commented on how busy the activists against the Assad government were in all walks of life — public services, media and, of course, security.

“Do you expect the regime will fall?” the interviewer asked him.

“I think it will,” he said. “But I think it will take a long time.”

    Bearing Witness in Syria: A War Reporter’s Last Days, NYT, 3.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/world/middleeast/bearing-witness-in-syria-a-war-reporters-last-days.html

Crushing Homs

March 2, 2012
The New York Times

After a month of merciless bombardment, the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria have taken Homs, the main rebel stronghold. Many of the brave residents have fled the city or been killed, adding to a death toll now estimated at more than 7,500 since the unrest began.

There is no doubt that Mr. Assad will keep on killing. The international community must keep stepping up the pressure for him to go.

On Thursday, there seemed to be some progress when the government told the Red Cross it could deliver food and medical supplies to the besieged Baba Amr neighborhood. On Friday, authorities blocked a relief convoy without explanation. There were unconfirmed reports that security forces were conducting house-to-house searches and summary executions.

The situation is so horrifying that even Russia and China — two of Assad’s main enablers — are beginning to express doubts. After vetoing two anti-Assad initiatives at the United Nations Security Council, on Thursday they joined the rest of the Council in approving a statement demanding immediate access for humanitarian workers. In an interview published on Friday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia claimed “we have no special relationship with Syria.”

His cynicism knows no limits. Russia is a main arms supplier to the regime (along with Iran, which knows no shame at all) and is clearly eager to preserve access for its navy to the Syrian port of Tartus. The Times reported on Friday that Russia and Iran are both helping Mr. Assad replenish his foreign reserves that have been badly squeezed by the instability and international sanctions.

If Russia and China really want to preserve their influence in the region, they need to stop handing the Syrian dictator economic, military and diplomatic lifelines. The only way to repair their reputations is to end their complicity. The only way to end the killing is for Mr. Assad to go. Moscow and Beijing need to use all of their leverage to make that happen.

The United States, Europe, the Arab League and Turkey need to make that case to China and Russia every chance they have. And they need to keep tightening their own sanctions. At some point, the Syrian military and business elites will decide that backing the dictator is a losing proposition. The United States and its allies also need to use all of their influence and coaching to help the opposition form a credible, multiethnic government, one that will respect all Syrians.

Washington and many others have rightly ruled out military intervention, fearing that it could unleash an even bloodier civil war and possibly spread beyond Syria’s borders. Some gulf states are talking about arming the rebel forces, also a risky proposition. The United States and its allies should consider providing the rebels with communications equipment, intelligence and nonlethal training.

Mr. Assad must go. And the world must keep pushing until he does.

    Crushing Homs, NYT, 2.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/opinion/crushing-homs.html

Syria Blocks Red Cross Aid to Rebel Enclave in Homs

March 2, 2012
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian authorities on Friday blocked without explanation an officially sanctioned Red Cross convoy laden with food and medical supplies from entering a devastated neighborhood in the central city of Homs, one day after the army overwhelmed the main rebel stronghold there after a brutal monthlong siege.

There were unconfirmed reports that Syrian security forces were conducting house-to-house searches and summary executions in the neighborhood, Baba Amr, while the convoy of seven Red Cross trucks was parked at the edge of the neighborhood, where military sentries refused to grant it entry despite official approval 24 hours earlier.

It was unclear why the Syrian military had blocked the convoy. But the convoy organizers said officials had told them that the Baba Amr neighborhood was still not safe. There was possibly a legitimate concern about mines and other booby traps, organizers said, but they were not given a precise reason.

The Red Cross angrily rebuked the Syrian government in a statement that reflected the growing international frustration with delays on funneling help to civilians whose lives have been upended by the uprising in Syria, which is now nearly a year old.

“It is unacceptable that people who have been in need of emergency assistance for weeks have still not received any help,” Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a statement from its headquarters in Geneva.

He said the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society, which together had sent the convoy to Homs in the morning, waited all day to enter Baba Amr. “We are staying in Homs tonight in the hope of entering Baba Amr in the very near future,” Mr. Kellenberger said. “In addition, many families have fled Baba Amr, and we will help them as soon as we possibly can.”

He said the “humanitarian situation was very serious then, and it is worse now.”

The convoy’s arrival in Homs came as at least 12 people, including children, were killed in an apparent rocket or mortar attack by the Syrian Army on antigovernment protesters in Rastan, another central Syrian city roiled by the uprising. Graphic video posted online showed hundreds of people protesting, then fleeing in panic at the rocket explosion, which sent body parts flying.

If it succeeds in entering Baba Amr, the relief convoy will give international officials an opportunity to make a detailed assessment of the fighting there since dissident forces withdrew on Thursday. The retreat set the stage for elite government soldiers to turn their attention, and superior firepower, to other insurgent redoubts farther north, despite the increasing international pressure for a cease-fire.

The seven-truck convoy was the fourth in the last two weeks sent by the Red Cross to Homs in conjunction with the Red Crescent Society, which has 10 distribution points across the city. But the violence in Baba Amr had prevented the establishment of one there.

There were only sketchy details of what was actually needed because communications were so poor, organizers said. “We don’t have any concrete information about what is going on inside,” said Hicham Hassan, a Red Cross spokesman.

Friday has traditionally been the day for mass protests across the country, and they even took place in some Homs neighborhoods despite the violence. With all the talk by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others of providing arms to the opposition, demonstrators chose the collective name this week of “The Friday of Equipping the Free Syrian Army.”

A heavy security presence in central Damascus kept the city completely shut down, with no buses or other mass transportation vehicles allowed downtown. Similar restrictions were imposed on the suburbs, but several demonstrations erupted that were quickly dispersed by government thugs, the shabeeha, witnesses said.

“The Assad regime wants to frighten us by making big massacre in Baba Amr,” said Subhi, 24, a protester in the suburb of Midan who gave only one name because of fear of retribution. “I want to say to Bashar, if you kill more, we will demonstrate more. We will not return to our homes after a year of uprising. “

In more distant suburbs like Saqba, hundreds managed to gather to demonstrate, and an activist reached by telephone in Aleppo said numerous small protests had been scattered around the city, Syria’s largest. He said the security services had gathered around mosques to prevent any demonstrations and that four tanks were deployed on the main highway leading into Aleppo from the north.

France, meanwhile, became the latest Western nation to close its embassy in Damascus in a gesture of protest directed at President Bashar al-Assad.

The fighting in Syria has spurred deep international division, with China and Russia vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution, promoted by Arab and Western nations, that called on Mr. Assad to step aside.

There were new signs on Friday, however, that even Russia’s patience with Mr. Assad was wearing thin. In an interview with six foreign newspapers in Moscow, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia distanced himself somewhat from Mr. Assad, refusing to answer the question of whether he could survive as a leader.

“I don’t know. I can’t make this kind of assessment,” he said. “It is perfectly obvious that there are serious domestic problems. The reforms that were proposed obviously should have been implemented long ago. I don’t know whether Syrian society — the government forces and the opposition — can come to an agreement, find some consensus that is acceptable to everyone, but that would have been the best solution.

“The first thing that we should do now is to end the armed conflict and bloodletting,” he said, accusing the West of siding with the Syrian opposition against Mr. Assad.

Two French journalists who had been smuggled out of Baba Amr on Thursday as resistance collapsed, Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and the photographer William Daniels, were flown out of Beirut on Friday and returned home.

Ms. Bouvier was wounded in the attack last week that killed Marie Colvin, an American war correspondent working for The Sunday Times of London, and the French photographer Rémi Ochlik. The bodies of Ms. Colvin and Mr. Ochlik have been turned over to the Red Cross and the Red Crescent and were taken to a Damascus hospital, where they will be stored awaiting repatriation, said Mr. Hassan, the Red Cross spokesman.

Neil MacFarquhar reported from Beirut, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times from Beirut; an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria; J. David Goodman and Rick Gladstone from New York; Maïa de la Baume from Villacoublay, France; Ellen Barry from Moscow; and Paul Geitner from Brussels.

    Syria Blocks Red Cross Aid to Rebel Enclave in Homs, NYT, 2.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/world/middleeast/syria-rebels-are-forced-from-homs-stronghold.html

Chain of Avoidable Errors Cited in Koran Burning

March 2, 2012
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — American and Afghan officials investigating the Koran-burning episode that has brought relations between the countries to a new low say that the destruction could have been headed off at several points along a chain of mishaps, poor judgments and ignored procedures, according to interviews over the past week.

Even as Americans have raced to ease Afghan outrage over the burning, releasing information on Friday that American service members could face disciplinary action, accounts from more than a dozen Americans and Afghans involved in investigating the incineration laid out a complex string of events that will do little to assuage an Afghan public that in some quarters has called for deaths to avenge the sacrilege.

The crisis over the burning, carried out by American soldiers near the detention center in Parwan on Feb. 20, brought a short-term halt to cooperation between the Americans and Afghans and has complicated almost every aspect of planning and negotiation for a military withdrawal. The burning touched off nationwide rioting and the increased targeting of American troops, leaving at least 29 Afghans and 6 American soldiers dead in the past week.

On Friday, an American official close to a joint Afghan-American investigation into the episode noted that the final report would call for disciplinary review for at least six people involved in the Koran burning, including American military “leaders” and an American interpreter. Afghans familiar with the case described the interpreter as an Afghan-American.

The same day, the pre-eminent body of Afghan religious leaders, the Ulema Council, which conducted its own inquiry, demanded that the United States immediately hand over prison operations to the Afghan government and publicly punish those involved in the Koran burning. There is also a formal United States military inquiry.

The responses highlighted continuing and deep differences between American and Afghan concepts of justice: American officials insist that no deliberate insult was intended and that the military justice system and apologies should suffice, while the Afghan religious leaders demand that public identification and punishment of the offenders is the only path to soothe the outrage of Afghans over what they see as an unforgivable desecration of God’s words.

“There are some crimes that cannot be forgiven, but that need to be punished,” said Maulavi Khaliq Dad, a member of the Ulema Council. “This is not any book; this is the book of the whole Muslim nation, and if a few people are punished, America will not be destroyed. But if that doesn’t happen, it will create animosity and enmity between America and the Muslim world.”

Some officials found the current case particularly troubling because it followed more than 10 years at war in the Muslim world, in which outrage over even the rumor of American defacement of Korans has caused previous crises in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigations.

An American military official familiar with the joint investigation somberly described the burning as a “tragedy,” but rejected any suggestion that it was intentional. He said that the joint commission of three senior Afghan security officials and an American military officer was convinced that the military personnel involved in making the decision to get rid of the Korans and those who carried out the order did not set out to defile the Muslim holy book.

“There was no maliciousness, there was no deliberateness, there was not an intentional disrespect of Islam,” he said.

At the very least, the accounts of the Americans and the Afghans involved in the investigation offer a parable of the dire consequences of carelessness about Afghan values, despite the cultural training required for most American service members serving in Afghanistan.

The account begins about a week before the burning, when officers at the detention center in Parwan became worried that detainees were secretly communicating through notes scribbled in library books, possibly to plot an attack.

“There was a suspicion that this was being used as a means to communicate, internal and external,” said the American military official familiar with the investigation, adding that the fear was that the detainees might “organize.”

Two Afghan-American interpreters were assigned to sift through the library’s books and set aside those that had writing that might constitute a security risk, said Maulavi Dad and other members of the Ulema Council team who visited the detention center and were briefed by the military.

By the time the interpreters were finished, 1,652 books were stacked on the floor and tables for removal, including some Korans, many other religious or scholarly texts, and a number of secular works, including novels and poetry.

Whether the inscriptions were a security risk is a matter of debate. Members of the Ulema Council doubted that the writings were anything other than personal notations, and American military officials and Afghan security officials were unsure because so many books were involved that they had not been able to review them all.

“We saw some notes on the margins of the books in which some of the detainees had written memories of their imprisonment, their name, their father’s name, location and the place where they were arrested,” said Qazi Nazir Ahmad Hanifi, a member of Parliament from Herat who is a mullah and was on the Ulema’s investigating team.

He and others said that in some of the books, including Korans, words were occasionally written in the margins, translations of difficult Arabic words into Pashto or Dari. “These had nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activities,” he said.

The American military official did not go into details, but said only that “we overly rely around here on linguists,” the military term for interpreters and translators. “None of the U.S. soldiers can read this.”

But the linguists were responsible only for the sorting of the books, not for the decision to burn them. It was in asking why the books were not simply stored that one of several faulty decisions became apparent, the official said.

“You have separated a huge number of books — it will come out 1,652,” he said, “and those that are in charge say, ‘We don’t have the storage capacity; this is sensitive material.’ ”

“So the decision is ‘We are going to burn these books,’ ” he continued. “It is part of their procedures to do that, but there’s a process in place that that is the last thing. Things should be retained for a while, but in this case they don’t.”

Sometime on Monday, Feb. 20, the books were transported by a work detail of several soldiers to the truck that would ultimately take them to the incinerator. That posed another missed opportunity.

As the books lay in boxes waiting to be piled in the truck, some Afghan Army soldiers saw them and recognized them as religious books, and they became worried, Maulavi Dad said. They asked where the books were being taken and were told by soldiers that the books were destined for storage. Worried that Korans might be among the books and that something wrong might happen to them, the Afghan soldiers reported to their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Safiullah, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name.

The American military official corroborated that account and said the problem was that by the time the Afghan officer relayed the concerns to his American counterpart, who came to check the truck, the vehicle and its cargo were already on the way to the incinerator.

Both Afghan and American officials believed that the three soldiers driving the holy books to their destination had little or no understanding of what they were carrying. “For those three soldiers, this was nothing more than a work detail,” one military official said.

Just minutes later, when the work detail began to heave the books into the flames, an Afghan laborer standing nearby offered to help. But when he drew close, he realized what was happening and began to scream.

For him and others it was a nightmare come to life. “One of my friends called to me, ‘The Americans are burning our holy books,’ and we rushed over there,” said Mohammed Zafar, 24, who has worked for five years as a laborer near the gate.

As the Afghan laborers tried to extinguish the flames with their water bottles, at least one laborer plunged into the smoldering ashes to retrieve the books, Mr. Zafar said.

The Americans immediately stopped, but not before at least four books had been badly burned, according to a notice from the presidential palace shortly afterward.

What should have happened was far different, Maulavi Dad said. He gently lifted up his Koran, a beautifully bound one with dark blue ornamentation, and described the religiously approved way one would dispose of it if it were damaged or too old to use.

“We have two suggestions: You can cover it with a clean cloth and bury it on holy ground, a shrine or a graveyard, a place where people don’t walk,” he said.

“Or you can wrap it and place it in the sea, the river, in flowing water.”

He added, “You see, we believe the earth and the water are the two cleanest elements on the planet, and since we give great value to holy books and papers, this is where we bury them.”

Graham Bowley and an employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

    Chain of Avoidable Errors Cited in Koran Burning, NYT, 2.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/world/asia/
    5-soldiers-are-said-to-face-punishment-in-koran-burning-in-afghanistan.html

Starving Iran Won’t Free It

March 2, 2012
The New York Times
By HOOMAN MAJD

THERE’S an old saying, attributed to the British Foreign Office in colonial days: “Keep the Persians hungry, and the Arabs fat.” For the British — then the stewards of Persian destiny — that was the formula for maintaining calm; it still is for Saudi Arabian leaders, who simply distribute large amounts of cash to their citizens at the first sign of unrest at their doorstep.

But in the case of Iran, neither America nor Britain seems to be observing the old dictum. Keeping the Persians hungry was a guarantee that they wouldn’t rise up against their masters. Today, the fervent wish of the West appears to be that they do exactly that. Except that the West is doing everything in its power to keep the Iranians hungry — even hungrier than they might ordinarily be under the corrupt and incompetent administration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It is no surprise that the March 2 election — Iran’s first national poll since the disputed one of 2009 — was held without any excitement on the part of middle-class voters or the participation of liberals opposed to the regime. Such candidates have been systematically eliminated from the political scene, accused of being Western stooges or traitors.

Western sanctions, once “targeted” and now blanket, are turning into a form of collective punishment. They are designed, we are told, to force the Islamic government to return to the nuclear negotiating table. Western politicians also seem to believe that punishing the Iranian people might lead them to blame their own government for their misery and take it upon themselves to force a change in the regime’s behavior, or even a change in the regime itself. But as the old British maxim recognized, deprivation in Iran is a recipe for the status quo.

Iran’s government and its people have never been isolationists. But as sanctions take their toll on the livelihoods of Iranians who want to continue to do business and communicate with the outside world, their energy to question their government’s policies and to agitate for change is waning. That means far fewer opportunities to promote American values and win minds, if not hearts (which we’ve had but are now in danger of losing).

Over the past year, while I was living in Tehran, I witnessed a faltering economy and a population hungry not just for protein but for change. Businesses that are closing or laying off workers for lack of commerce or new opportunities affect everyone from the office tea boy to the middle manager whose salary, if he or she still has it, might no longer be sufficient to feed a family.

The change that most Iranians are hungry for is economic, and while they are consumed with the struggle to make ends meet, work second and third jobs, and in some cases send their children into the streets to beg or sell knickknacks, they are less concerned with their secondary hunger: political change.

In Iran, political change cannot be brought about by coercion, sanctions or exiles and their enablers, despite what American politicians might think. Instead, it will come slowly — too slowly for an American election cycle, to be sure. And it will come only after Iranians are no longer hungry and the government has no excuses left, including national security, to deny the people’s civil rights.

Only when Iran’s educated, sophisticated and talented people “get fat” will they confront their leaders and demand their right to pursue a happiness beyond life and the satiated stomach. Allowing Iran to function normally in the economic sphere would empower ordinary Iranians more than the government and eliminate from its narrative the one mantra it knows resonates with all Iranians: that the West wants to dictate to Iran.

Iranians do not take kindly to being dictated to. It reminds a proud people of their nation’s weakness in the face of greater powers. Iranians will neither blame their own government for the effects of sanctions simply because we tell them to, nor will they overthrow the ayatollahs, however much we prod them to.

But with a strong economy, the middle class will return to a more influential political role in society. After all, it was most visible during the reformist years when relations with the West, political and economic, were at their best and when the government, under virtually no foreign threats, found it hard to completely ignore their demands.

Indeed, it was that same middle class, still well fed even after four years of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rule, that rose up in 2009, demanding their civil rights. And it is what’s left of that middle class that continues to protest human and civil rights abuses today.

The ever more stringent sanctions imposed on Iran may be “biting,” but they are also stifling voices for change — voices that simply cannot be heard at a time when the population is threatened with an economic chokehold or, worse, with being bombed.

Sanctions will neither change the regime’s behavior nor ignite a Persian Spring — not as long as the Persians are hungry, and scared.

 

Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American journalist,

is the author of “The Ayatollah Begs to Differ” and “The Ayatollahs’ Democracy.”

    Starving Iran Won’t Free It, NYT, 2.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/opinion/starving-iran-wont-free-it.html

Only Crippling Sanctions Will Stop Iran

March 2, 2012
The New York Times
By EMANUELE OTTOLENGHI

Brussels

IMAGINE two men planning for years to escape from a high-security mental institution that is surrounded by 100 walls. On the night of their escape, they reach the 99th wall, and one asks the other, “Are you tired yet?”

“Yes,” says the second one. And so they go back to their cells.

Are Iran’s leaders that crazy?

In the current standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, Western policy is guided by a key assumption: Iran’s decision makers are rational actors, and their calculations about their nuclear program are driven by cost-benefit analyses. By gradually increasing the costs of Iran’s nuclear pursuit, Western decision makers believe, Tehran will eventually concede.

They are only half right. Western expectations that Iran will behave rationally and agree to a compromise under the increasing pressure of sanctions ignore Iran’s perspective on the costs already incurred, the price of completing the journey and the advantages of turning back. For Iran, it is far more rational at this point to accelerate the program and reject any agreement the West would be prepared to sign.

Historical precedents demonstrate that Iran’s decision makers are not impervious to cost-benefit analysis. One such instance was the decision, by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to agree to a cease-fire with Iraq in the summer of 1988.

Ayatollah Khomeini had previously refused to entertain such a possibility — for him, defeating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a religious duty. Yet he was able to reverse the religious imperative to avoid greater damage. But he could have made that calculus in 1982, when, two years into the bloody conflict, Iran had managed to reconquer all Iranian territory that Iraq had initially captured following its surprise attack in September 1980.

Iran’s leaders knew their army was woefully unprepared and underequipped to conduct a war of conquest against a vastly superior Iraqi Army. But they chose to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of young lives in pointless trench warfare reminiscent of World War I because they understood that under the cover of conflict they could consolidate the still fragile government and defeat all residual opposition to Islamic rule — a rational choice at the time.

Ayatollah Khomeini ended the war when it became clear that the front was collapsing and discontent was undermining his rule. In short, letting the war go on was rational in 1982, and so was ending it in 1988; the difference was half a million dead and the fact that Iran was on its knees.

Paranoia played a part as well. The accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner over the Persian Gulf by an American warship convinced Iran’s leaders that the United States was prepared to commit any evil in order to guarantee Iran’s defeat. That tragic episode was not intentional. Yet, in Iranian leaders’ paranoid worldview, it was evidence that America was prepared to commit murder on a grand scale to defeat their country. Their paranoia was then, and remains now, integral to their cost-benefit analysis.

The Iran-Iraq war was not the only instance when Iran’s leaders made the right choice after exhausting all other alternatives. In 1997, the Iranian regime realized that murdering its exiled opponents abroad was counterproductive. But Iran reversed itself only after its direct responsibility in a chain of brazen murders across Europe could no longer be denied.

After a German court indicted Iranian hit men and Iran’s then intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian, for a 1992 massacre at a Berlin restaurant, European countries withdrew ambassadors from Tehran and severed diplomatic relations. Iran, again, was on its knees. Only then did a sensible decision occur.

What lessons can one learn from these precedents?

In their long and labyrinthine path to nuclear weapons, Iran’s leaders have gone as far as the men who reached the 99th wall. No matter how hard, painful and difficult the last jump may be, it is but a stroll compared with the arduous journey undertaken by Iran in its nearly 30-year pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Why, then, should anyone expect Iran to renounce its aspirations now, when the goal appears within reach? And why would the prospect of some economic hardship alone persuade Iran to turn around, when the end of its journey is in sight?

As tough as the current sanctions against Iran are, they will work only if Iran is brought to its knees once again. The pain inflicted must be far greater for the country to see backtracking as preferable. Iran is a rational actor; and it cannot be dissuaded at this point, barring extreme measures.

If Western nations wish to avoid a military confrontation in the Persian Gulf and prevent a nuclear Iran, they must adopt crippling sanctions that will bring Iran’s economy to the brink of collapse. That means a complete United Nations-imposed oil embargo enforced by a naval blockade, as well as total diplomatic isolation. And they must warn Iran that if it tries to jump the last wall, the West is willing and capable of inflicting devastating harm.

Otherwise, Iran’s leaders will rationally conclude that it is better to make a run for their money rather than stop at the last wall and pull back.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,

is the author of “The Pasdaran: Inside Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

    Only Crippling Sanctions Will Stop Iran, NYT, 2.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/opinion/only-crippling-sanctions-will-stop-iran.html

Israel’s Last Chance to Strike Iran

February 29, 2012
The New York Times
By AMOS YADLIN

Tel Aviv

ON July 7, 1981, I was one of eight Israeli fighter pilots who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. As we sat in the briefing room listening to the army chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, before starting our planes’ engines, I recalled a conversation a week earlier when he’d asked us to voice any concerns about our mission.

We told him about the risks we foresaw: running out of fuel, Iraqi retaliation, how a strike could harm our relationship with America, and the limited impact a successful mission might have — perhaps delaying Iraq’s nuclear quest by only a few years. Listening to today’s debates about Iran, we hear the same arguments and face the same difficulties, even though we understand it is not 1981.

Shortly after we destroyed Osirak, the Israeli defense attaché in Washington was called into the Pentagon. He was expecting a rebuke. Instead, he was faced with a single question: How did you do it? The United States military had assumed that the F-16 aircraft they had provided to Israel had neither the range nor the ordnance to attack Iraq successfully. The mistake then, as now, was to underestimate Israel’s military ingenuity.

We had simply maximized fuel efficiency and used experienced pilots, trained specifically for this mission. We ejected our external fuel tanks en route to Iraq and then attacked the reactor with pinpoint accuracy from so close and such a low altitude that our unguided bombs were as accurate and effective as precision-guided munitions.

Today, Israel sees the prospect of a nuclear Iran that calls for our annihilation as an existential threat. An Israeli strike against Iran would be a last resort, if all else failed to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program. That moment of decision will occur when Iran is on the verge of shielding its nuclear facilities from a successful attack — what Israel’s leaders have called the “zone of immunity.”

Some experts oppose an attack because they claim that even a successful strike would, at best, delay Iran’s nuclear program for only a short time. But their analysis is faulty. Today, almost any industrialized country can produce a nuclear weapon in four to five years — hence any successful strike would achieve a delay of only a few years.

What matters more is the campaign after the attack. When we were briefed before the Osirak raid, we were told that a successful mission would delay the Iraqi nuclear program for only three to five years. But history told a different story.

After the Osirak attack and the destruction of the Syrian reactor in 2007, the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs were never fully resumed. This could be the outcome in Iran, too, if military action is followed by tough sanctions, stricter international inspections and an embargo on the sale of nuclear components to Tehran. Iran, like Iraq and Syria before it, will have to recognize that the precedent for military action has been set, and can be repeated.

Others claim that an attack on the Iranian nuclear program would destabilize the region. But a nuclear Iran could lead to far worse: a regional nuclear arms race without a red phone to defuse an escalating crisis, Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf, more confident Iranian surrogates like Hezbollah and the threat of nuclear materials’ being transferred to terrorist organizations.

Ensuring that Iran does not go nuclear is the best guarantee for long-term regional stability. A nonnuclear Iran would be infinitely easier to contain than an Iran with nuclear weapons.

President Obama has said America will “use all elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.” Israel takes him at his word.

The problem, however, is one of time. Israel doesn’t have the safety of distance, nor do we have the United States Air Force’s advanced fleet of bombers and fighters. America could carry out an extensive air campaign using stealth technology and huge amounts of ammunition, dropping enormous payloads that are capable of hitting targets and penetrating to depths far beyond what Israel’s arsenal can achieve.

This gives America more time than Israel in determining when the moment of decision has finally been reached. And as that moment draws closer, differing timetables are becoming a source of tension.

On Monday, Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are to meet in Washington. Of all their encounters, this could be the most critical. Asking Israel’s leaders to abide by America’s timetable, and hence allowing Israel’s window of opportunity to be closed, is to make Washington a de facto proxy for Israel’s security — a tremendous leap of faith for Israelis faced with a looming Iranian bomb. It doesn’t help when American officials warn Israel against acting without clarifying what America intends to do once its own red lines are crossed.

Mr. Obama will therefore have to shift the Israeli defense establishment’s thinking from a focus on the “zone of immunity” to a “zone of trust.” What is needed is an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity — and all other options have failed to halt Tehran’s nuclear quest — Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so.

I hope Mr. Obama will make this clear. If he does not, Israeli leaders may well choose to act while they still can.

Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence,

is the director of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies.

    Israel’s Last Chance to Strike Iran, NYT, 29.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/opinion/israels-last-chance-to-strike-iran.html

Syria’s Sectarian Fears Keep Region on Edge

February 28, 2012
The New York Times
By TIM ARANGO

NAJAF, Iraq — Abu Ali fled his life as a Shiite cleric and student in Homs, the besieged Syrian city at the center of an increasingly bloody uprising, but it was not the government he feared.

It was the rebels, who he said killed three of his cousins in December and dumped a body in the family garbage bin.

“I can’t be in Homs because I will get killed there,” he said from this religious city in Iraq where he has taken refuge. “Not just me, but all Shiites.”

Like his fellow Shiites in Iraq, Abu Ali, who used his nickname to protect his family back in Syria, said he regards the Syrian rebels as terrorists, not freedom fighters, underscoring one of the complexities of a bloody civil conflict that has persisted as diplomatic efforts have failed. In spite of President Bashar al-Assad’s willingness to unleash a professional military on a civilian population, with lethal results, Mr. Assad retains some support at home and abroad from allies, including religious and ethnic minorities who for decades relied on the police state for protection from sectarian aggression.

“What the government is doing is trying to protect the people,” Abu Ali said, echoing the Assad government’s propaganda. “They are targeting terrorist groups in the area.”

The insurrection in Syria, led by the country’s Sunni majority in opposition to a government dominated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiism, is increasingly unpredictable and dangerous because it is aggravating sectarian tensions beyond its borders in a region already shaken by religious and ethnic divisions.

For many in the region, the fight in Syria is less about liberating a people under dictatorship than it is about power and self-interest. Syria is drawing in sectarian forces from its neighbors, and threatening to spill its conflict into a wider conflagration. There have already been sparks in neighboring Lebanon, where Sunnis and Alawites have skirmished.

And here in Iraq, where Shiites are a majority, the events across the border have put the nation on edge while hardening a sectarian schism. As Abu Ali discovered, Iraq’s Shiites are now lined up on the side of a Baathist dictatorship in Syria, less than a decade after the American invasion of Iraq toppled the rule of Saddam Hussein and his own Baath Party, which for decades had repressed and brutalized the Shiites.

“This is difficult,” said Sheik Ali Nujafi, the son of one of Najaf’s top clerics and his chief spokesman, of the Shiite support for Mr. Assad. “But what is worse is what would come next.”

The paradox, of Shiites supporting a Baathist dictator next door, has laid bare a tenet of the old power structure that for so long helped preserve the Middle East’s strongmen. Minorities often remained loyal and pliant and in exchange were given room to carve out communities, even if they were more broadly discriminated against.

As dictators have fallen in neighboring countries, religious and ethnic identities and alliances have only hardened, while notions of citizenship remain slow to take hold. The fighting in Syria has exacerbated that, as Shiites worry that a takeover of Syria by its Sunni majority would herald not only a new sectarian war but actually the apocalypse.

People here say that is not hyperbole, but a perception based in faith. Some Shiites here see the burgeoning civil war in Syria as the ominous start to the fulfillment of a Shiite prophecy that presages the end of time. According to Shiite lore, Sufyani — a devil-like, apocryphal figure in Islam — gathers an army in Syria and after conquering that land turns his wrath on Iraq’s Shiites.

“Among these stories we get from the Prophet and his family is that Sufyani will come out and will start to kill the believers in Syria, and then come to Iraq, where there will be many killings and massacres,” Mr. Nujafi said.

He said events in Syria were “similar but not completely the same” as the story of Sufyani. With an easy grasp of history, he recalled the siege of Najaf and the sacking of Karbala, another holy city to the north, in the early 1800s by radically orthodox Sunni Muslims, an invasion that raised the same apocalyptic fears Shiites have now.

In Hilla, another Shiite town north of here, Mohammed Tawfiq al-Rubaie, the representative for Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most widely followed Shiite religious leader in Iraq, said, “We wish for the survival of Bashar al-Assad, but the prophecies of the Shiite books expect him to be killed.”

Mr. Rubaie explained what Shiites believe would happen if the Assad government were toppled by Sunnis: “We expect that the blood would run heavy in Iraq if they held power in Syria, because they think that Shiites are infidels and our lives, our money and our women are permissible for them to take, and that killing us is one of the requirements to enter paradise.”

As Western and Arab governments consider actions to stop the bloodshed — options that have been explored include more aggressive diplomacy, arming the rebels or military intervention — those discussions have been encumbered by a lack of cohesion among the Syrian opposition, evidence that some of the rebels may be affiliated with Al Qaeda and credible reports of sectarian killings.

At the core of the unity problem is an issue of sectarian identification. Sunni radicals with the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group that includes the local branch of Al Qaeda, have urged fighters to go to Syria, which makes it harder for the West to embrace the opposition. Recently the group released a statement on its Web site calling for new violence against Shiites here in Iraq, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors the communications of jihadist groups.

Syria’s minorities have the example of Iraq in considering their own future, should the Assad government fall: Assyrian Christians, Yazidis and others were brutally persecuted by insurgents. In Egypt, where a similar paradigm was toppled with the long-serving dictator Hosni Mubarak, Christians have experienced more sectarian violence, increasing political marginalization and a growing link between Islamic identity and citizenship.

“Christians are all saying that Syria risks becoming the new Iraq, a country divided among ethnic and religious lines where there is no place for Christians,” said the Rev. Bernardo Cervellera, the editor in chief of AsiaNews, a Catholic news agency. Syria, while not a democracy, “at least protects them,” he said.

Abu Ali recalled hearing anti-Shiite slogans chanted in Homs by rebels in opposition to Syria’s alliance with Iran, which, like Iraq, is a majority-Shiite state in a region that is predominantly Sunni. He heard calls for “Christians to go to Beirut,” and “Alawites to the grave.”

In Najaf on a recent Sunday, Abu Ali sat on a couch in the office of a local religious leader who had taken him in. Outside, chickens roamed the narrow streets lined by flat-roofed concrete homes, jostling for space with women covered in black abayas and security men who guarded the office with assault rifles.

At the main checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, a billboard hailed Najaf, where millions come each year to visit the Imam Ali Shrine, as this year’s “capital of Islamic culture.”

On this day, Syria was holding a vote on a new constitution, an effort at reform by the Assad government that much of the international community regarded as a farce, but that Abu Ali believed was a step in good faith to stop the violence.

“Of course, the government needs to reform, and there needs to be more freedom and more rights,” he said. “The government is trying to make reforms, but no one is listening.”

But his fear, he said, is that Syria is heading down the same bloody path that Iraq followed after the American invasion.

“In the neighborhoods that are Sunni, they are kicking out Shiites and using their homes as bases and for the storing of weapons,” he said.

He added, “There’s real terror among the Shiites there.”

Reporting was contributed by Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Duraid Adnan

and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Hilla, Iraq, and Najaf,

and Yasir Ghazi from Baghdad.

    Syria’s Sectarian Fears Keep Region on Edge, NYT, 28.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/world/middleeast/syria-crisis-highlights-paradoxes-of-assad-support.html

U.S. Sees Iran Attacks as Likely if Israel Strikes

February 29, 2012
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER, HELENE COOPER and ETHAN BRONNER

WASHINGTON — American officials who have assessed the likely Iranian responses to any attack by Israel on its nuclear program believe that Iran would retaliate by launching missiles on Israel and terrorist-style attacks on United States civilian and military personnel overseas.

While a missile retaliation against Israel would be virtually certain, according to these assessments, Iran would also be likely to try to calibrate its response against American targets so as not to give the United States a rationale for taking military action that could permanently cripple Tehran’s nuclear program. “The Iranians have been pretty good masters of escalation control,” said Gen. James E. Cartwright, now retired, who as the top officer at Strategic Command and as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff participated in war games involving both deterrence and retaliation on potential adversaries like Iran.

The Iranian targets, General Cartwright and other American analysts believe, would include petroleum infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, and American troops in Afghanistan, where Iran has been accused of shipping explosives to local insurgent forces.

Both American and Israeli officials who discussed current thinking on the potential ramifications of an Israeli attack believe that the last thing Iran would want is a full-scale war on its territory. Their analysis, however, also includes the broad caveat that it is impossible to know the internal thinking of the senior leadership in Tehran, and is informed by the awareness that even the most detailed war games cannot predict how nations and their leaders will react in the heat of conflict. Yet such assessments are not just intellectual exercises. Any conclusions on how the Iranians will react to an attack will help determine whether the Israelis launch a strike — and what the American position will be if they do.

While evidence suggests that Iran continues to make progress toward a nuclear weapons program, American intelligence officials believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. But the possibility that Israel will launch a pre-emptive strike has become a focus of American policy makers and is expected to be a primary topic when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel meets with President Obama at the White House on Monday.

In November, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said any Iranian retaliation for an Israeli attack would be “bearable,” and his government’s estimate that Iran is engaging in a bluff has been a key element in the heightened expectations that Israel is considering a strike. But Iran’s highly compartmentalized security services, analysts caution, may operate in semi-rogue fashion, following goals that seem irrational to planners in Washington. American experts, for example, are still puzzled by a suspected Iranian plot last year to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

“Once military strikes and counterstrikes begin, you are on the tiger’s back,” said Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration national security official who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And when on the tiger’s back, you cannot always pick the place to dismount.”

If Israel did attack, officials said, Iran would be foolhardy, even suicidal, to invite an overpowering retaliation by directly attacking United States military targets — by, for example, unleashing its missiles at American bases on the territory of Persian Gulf allies. “The balance the Iranians will try to strike is doing damage that is sufficiently significant, but just short of what it would take for America to invade,” said General Cartwright, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

A former Israeli official said the best way to think about retaliation against Israel was through a formula he called “1991 plus 2006 plus Buenos Aires times 3 or 5.” The reference was to three instances in the last two decades when Israel came under attack: the Scud missiles sent by Saddam Hussein into Israel in 1991 during the first gulf war; the 3,000 rockets fired at Israel by Hezbollah during their 2006 war; and the attacks on the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish center in Argentina in the early 1990s. Those attacks each killed 100 to 200 people, wounded scores more and caused several billion dollars of property damage. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the north had to be evacuated from their homes to bomb shelters or further south during the 2006 war.

But there is a broad Israeli assessment that Iran’s response to an attack would be limited.

“If Iran is struck surgically, it will react — no doubt,” said the former Israeli official, echoing Mr. Barak’s comments last year. “But that reaction will be calculated and in proportion to its capabilities. Iran will not set the Middle East on fire.”

“Is 40 missiles on Tel Aviv nice?” the official asked, summing up the Israeli calculus. “No. But it’s better than a nuclear Iran.”

By contrast, administration, military and intelligence officials say Iran would most likely choose anonymous, indirect attacks against nations it views as supporting Israeli policy, in the hope of offering Tehran at least public deniability. Iran also might try to block, even temporarily, the Strait of Hormuz to further unsettle oil markets.

An increase in car bombs set off against civilian targets in world capitals would also be possible. And Iran would almost certainly smuggle high-powered explosives across its border into Afghanistan, where they could be planted along roadways and set off by surrogate forces to kill and maim American and NATO troops — much as it did in Iraq during the peak of violence there. But Iran’s primary goal would be quickly rebuilding — and probably accelerating — its nuclear program, and thus, according to these assessments, it would be likely to try to avoid inviting a punishing second wave of attacks by the United States.

Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said Iran would “have to retaliate visibly against Israel to protect its image at home and in the region.” Along a second line of reprisals, Iran also “would try and keep the United States busy by escalating tensions in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

In 2009, the Brookings Institution held a simulation to assess Day 2 of an Israeli attack on Iran, casting former government officials, diplomats and regional experts in the roles of American, Israeli and Iranian officials. Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, played Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The faux Iranian leadership had to “calibrate their response with great precision,” he said. “If they respond too little, they could lose face, and if they respond too much, they could lose their heads.”

During the simulation, Iran also fired missiles at Israeli military and nuclear targets, and unleashed Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants to fire rockets at population centers in Israel, with a goal to create an atmosphere of terror among Israelis. In the simulation, Iran also activated terrorist cells in Europe, which bombed public transportation and killed civilians.

Mr. Sadjadpour said that one thing the exercise demonstrated was how quickly things would deteriorate, adding that “as for long-term consequences, it’s way too murky to say anything but this: It will be ugly.”

Thom Shanker and Helene Cooper reported from Washington,

and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

    U.S. Sees Iran Attacks as Likely if Israel Strikes, NYT, 29.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/world/middleeast/us-sees-iran-attacks-as-likely-if-israel-strikes.html

Yemen Gets New Leader as Struggle Ends Calmly

February 24, 2012
The New York Times
By LAURA KASINOF

SANA, Yemen — Vice President Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi will be sworn in as president of Yemen on Saturday morning in front of Parliament after it was announced Friday that he had won the country’s single-candidate election with 99.6 percent of the vote.

The election, held across Yemen on Tuesday, was intended as an exit route for President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an autocrat who had agreed to step down after more than three decades in power and a year of antigovernment demonstrations calling for his removal. Mr. Saleh agreed to an internationally brokered accord last November that stipulated how the presidency would be transferred to Mr. Hadi. Tuesday’s elections were the culmination of that accord, which also granted Mr. Saleh immunity from prosecution for such things as turning his security forces on unarmed protesters calling for democracy before he agreed last year to relinquish power. Dozens were killed, and some in the military sided with the opposition.

While Mr. Hadi was the only candidate on the ballot, voter turnout was higher than all sides had anticipated.

A campaign over the past week to encourage Yemenis to vote — partly financed by foreign countries — included pro-election commercials starring famous local actors on Yemen television stations and billboards in Sana.

Mr. Saleh, who had been in the United States receiving medical treatment, “returned to his private residence in Sana, not the presidential palace,” early Saturday morning, said Mohammed Albasaha, a spokesman for the Yemen Embassy in Washington. He left the United States a few days ago for the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, according to a Yemeni diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to press.

Yemen’s Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum announced Friday evening that Mr. Hadi had won the election with 99.6 percent of the vote. A total of 6,651,166 Yemenis voted for Mr. Hadi and 15,974 voted against, by writing “No” in the box next to a photo of Mr. Hadi on the white ballot sheet, according to Nadia al-Sakkaf, the editor in chief of the English-language Yemen Times newspaper, who is helping to organize information about the election for Western news media.

Nearly 9,000 ballots were deemed invalid when, for example, some antigovernment protesters wrote statements like “the revolution continues” on their ballot sheets, apparently unwilling to vote for Mr. Hadi because he came from within Mr. Saleh’s inner circle.

    Yemen Gets New Leader as Struggle Ends Calmly, NYT, 24.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/yemen-to-get-a-new-president-abed-rabu-mansour-hadi.html

Syria’s Horrors

February 24, 2012
The New York Times

More than 5,000 Syrians have died from President Bashar al-Assad’s butchery. The international community finally has a sense of urgency, but it has yet to come up with a strategy to end the killing. It needs to try harder.

There should be no illusions. This is an incredibly difficult problem. Most countries, the United States included, have rightly ruled out military intervention. Mr. Assad is determined to resist, no matter what the cost. The Syrian Army is far stronger and better armed than that of Libya’s under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. There is legitimate fear that a foreign intervention would unleash an even bloodier civil war and possibly spread beyond Syria’s borders.

The only hope is that the Syrian people are determined to resist and Mr. Assad’s isolation is growing. At a meeting in Tunis on Friday, more than 60 governments and organizations agreed to intensify diplomatic and economic pressure on the Syrian leader and vowed to find ways to support opposition forces trying to depose him.

On Monday, the European Union plans to freeze the assets of Syria’s central bank. The meeting called on all nations to impose additional sanctions, including travel bans on all of Mr. Assad’s cronies and a wider embargo on purchases of Syrian oil. But Syria still has far too many powerful protectors.

Russia and China have blocked any action at the United Nations Security Council. Russia and Iran are selling arms to Syria. The United States and Europe need to use all of their powers of persuasion and shaming to get Moscow and Beijing to cut all ties. Iran is obviously a lost cause.

At the meeting, countries also pledged millions of dollars worth of food and medicine to help people in Syria’s besieged cities. Officials suggested the aid could be distributed from border areas in Turkey, Jordan and, possibly, Lebanon. Mr. Assad is unlikely to let that happen.

Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, has been under a fierce government bombardment for three weeks. Scores of people have been killed in the shelling, and desperate residents are facing severe shortages of food and medical supplies. It is time for the United States and others to take a serious look at proposals by Turkey and others to create humanitarian corridors linking besieged communities to neighboring countries or safe zones along those borders. Both would require air cover and would be risky.

The meeting also called for the creation of a joint Arab League-United Nations peacekeeping force to be deployed if a cease-fire is reached. Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, has been appointed to pursue that solution. There is no sign whatsoever that Mr. Assad will cooperate.

The worsening violence — and the mismatch between the 200,000-member Syrian Army and ragtag rebel forces — has accelerated calls, especially from the gulf states, to arm the opposition. Some countries are already quietly doing that. The United States this week opened the door to the possibility. At a minimum, Washington and its allies should consider providing communications equipment, intelligence and military training.

This will amount to little if the opposition — divided along ethnic and sectarian lines — fails to unite and offer a credible vision of a post-Assad future in which the rights of all Syrians will be respected. The leader of one group, the Syrian National Council, offered encouraging words on Friday, but there is a very long way to go. The United States and its allies will have to work hard to help them get there. The horrors and the death toll keep mounting.

    Syria’s Horrors, NYT, 24.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/opinion/syrias-horrors.html

How to Halt the Butchery in Syria

February 23, 2012
The New York Times
By ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER

Princeton, N.J.

FOREIGN military intervention in Syria offers the best hope for curtailing a long, bloody and destabilizing civil war. The mantra of those opposed to intervention is “Syria is not Libya.” In fact, Syria is far more strategically located than Libya, and a lengthy civil war there would be much more dangerous to our interests. America has a major stake in helping Syria’s neighbors stop the killing.

Simply arming the opposition, in many ways the easiest option, would bring about exactly the scenario the world should fear most: a proxy war that would spill into Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan and fracture Syria along sectarian lines. It could also allow Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to gain a foothold in Syria and perhaps gain access to chemical and biological weapons.

There is an alternative. The Friends of Syria, some 70 countries scheduled to meet in Tunis today, should establish “no-kill zones” now to protect all Syrians regardless of creed, ethnicity or political allegiance. The Free Syrian Army, a growing force of defectors from the government’s army, would set up these no-kill zones near the Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders. Each zone should be established as close to the border as possible to allow the creation of short humanitarian corridors for the Red Cross and other groups to bring food, water and medicine in and take wounded patients out. The zones would be managed by already active civilian committees.

Establishing these zones would require nations like Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to arm the opposition soldiers with anti-tank, countersniper and portable antiaircraft weapons. Special forces from countries like Qatar, Turkey and possibly Britain and France could offer tactical and strategic advice to the Free Syrian Army forces. Sending them in is logistically and politically feasible; some may be there already.

Crucially, these special forces would control the flow of intelligence regarding the government’s troop movements and lines of communication to allow opposition troops to cordon off population centers and rid them of snipers. Once Syrian government forces were killed, captured or allowed to defect without reprisal, attention would turn to defending and expanding the no-kill zones.

This next step would require intelligence focused on tank and aircraft movements, the placement of artillery batteries and communications lines among Syrian government forces. The goal would be to weaken and isolate government units charged with attacking particular towns; this would allow opposition forces to negotiate directly with army officers on truces within each zone, which could then expand into a regional, and ultimately national, truce.

The key condition for all such assistance, inside or outside Syria, is that it be used defensively — only to stop attacks by the Syrian military or to clear out government forces that dare to attack the no-kill zones. Although keeping intervention limited is always hard, international assistance could be curtailed if the Free Syrian Army took the offensive. The absolute priority within no-kill zones would be public safety and humanitarian aid; revenge attacks would not be tolerated.

Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, is increasingly depending on government-sponsored gangs and on shelling cities with heavy artillery rather than overrunning them with troops, precisely because he is concerned about the loyalty of soldiers forced to shoot their fellow citizens at point-blank range. If government troops entered no-kill zones they would have to face their former comrades. Placing them in this situation, and presenting the option to defect, would show just how many members of Syria’s army — estimated at 300,000 men — were actually willing to fight for Mr. Assad.

Turkey and the Arab League should also help opposition forces inside Syria more actively through the use of remotely piloted helicopters, either for delivery of cargo and weapons — as America has used them in Afghanistan — or to attack Syrian air defenses and mortars in order to protect the no-kill zones.

Turkey is rightfully cautious about deploying its ground forces, an act that Mr. Assad could use as grounds to declare war and retaliate. But Turkey has some of its own drones, and Arab League countries could quickly lease others.

As in Libya, the international community should not act without the approval and the invitation of the countries in the region that are most directly affected by Mr. Assad’s war on his own people. Thus it is up to the Arab League and Turkey to adopt a plan of action. If Russia and China were willing to abstain rather than exercise another massacre-enabling veto, then the Arab League could go back to the United Nations Security Council for approval. If not, then Turkey and the Arab League should act, on their own authority and that of the other 13 members of the Security Council and 137 members of the General Assembly who voted last week to condemn Mr. Assad’s brutality.

The power of the Syrian protesters over the past 11 months has arisen from their determination to face down bullets with chants, signs and their own bodies. The international community can draw on the power of nonviolence and create zones of peace in what are now zones of death. The Syrians have the ability to make that happen; the rest of the world must give them the means to do it.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton,

was director of policy planning at the State Department from 2009 to 2011.

    How to Halt the Butchery in Syria, NYT, 23.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/how-to-halt-the-butchery-in-syria.html

Ghastly Images Flow From Shattered Syrian City

February 22, 2012
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

CAIRO — During a terrifying two minutes on Wednesday morning, 11 rockets slammed into a single apartment building in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, the city in Syria that has been besieged by government forces for 19 days.

When the barrage stopped, the surviving occupants stampeded down the building’s narrow concrete staircase, hoping to escape to the street. Then suddenly the bombardment resumed. More rockets splattered masonry and scattered shrapnel, blowing holes in walls and staircases, and leaving a trail of the dead and the dying from the fifth floor on down.

At least 22 bodies, including that of 6-year-old Mohammad Yahia al-Wees, were recovered from the scene, according to accounts and videos compiled by activists. And on the stairwell of the ground floor, 10 yards from the door and possible safety, amid the rubble, lay two foreign journalists, Marie Colvin, a veteran war correspondent, and Rémi Ochlik, a noted photojournalist. Both had been killed. They were among the few outsiders able to reach Homs, taking great personal risks and defying a government determined to hide its repression from the world. In the end, they died trying to reveal what was happening there.

As hundreds of homemade videos pouring out of Homs have made clear, the bombardment of the apartment building was just one episode in the Syrian Army’s daily and sustained assault on the city. Heavy weaponry has been used to devastating effect against civilian neighborhoods that have virtually no defense, beyond a few army defectors and lightly armed activists.

One video distributed Wednesday shows a group of men laid out on blankets, their grisly wounds as visible as the anguish on the faces of onlookers. Another captures doctors lamenting their lack of supplies as they treat the wounded. Buildings are so pockmarked that they seem to be on the verge of collapse. The scenes are accompanied by eerie audio with cries of despair, explosions and activists’ commentary about the scenes before them.

“This is the first YouTube war,” said Rami Jarrah, co-director of the Activists News Association, a Cairo-based group that collects information from inside Syria and distributes it.

Ms. Colvin’s last article, published in The Sunday Times of London just days before her death, began by describing what the rebels called “a widows’ basement,” a cramped room under a factory where women and children huddled while the men went out to forage or fight — and often did not return.

“The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense,” Ms. Colvin wrote. “The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one.”

Activists inside Syria described how the wounded had fewer places to go. Al Hikma Hospital was destroyed by shelling in the first days of the government siege of Homs, said Sami Ibrahim of the Syrian Network of Human Rights, contacted by Skype from Homs. Two field clinics hidden in homes were destroyed as well, he said.

With everyday life suspended, schools and businesses were said to be closed, and water and electricity were off more than on. People rarely ventured out unless absolutely necessary, activists said, and the bombardment made it too dangerous to hunt thoroughly for the dead.

The deaths of the foreign journalists became yet another subject of videotaped missives to the world. “This is the American journalist Marie Colvin and this is the French journalist Rémi Ochlik,” said Khaled Abu Salah, the spokesman for the Revolution Leadership Council of Homs, as he addressed a cellphone camera while pointing at their bodies.

Three days earlier, Ms. Colvin had quoted Mr. Salah in an article in her newspaper. Now, he had turned citizen journalist and was reporting her death. Within an hour, his video report would be posted on YouTube, and then picked up by networks around the world. “They were killed because of the random shelling of the Baba Amr neighborhood,” Mr. Salah said, angrily shaking the forefinger of his one good hand at the camera; his other hand, wounded by shrapnel, was bandaged. “This is a call for rescue to save the remaining residents while they are still alive.”

He finished his report in 51 seconds, and then fled, lest the bombardment resume.

The crackdown by the government of President Bashar al-Assad has succeeded in keeping most foreign journalists out of Syria since protests began last March 15, but a raw version of events is still finding its way out. The United Nations said it had documented 5,400 deaths as of January, when it was no longer able to safely gather information. Unofficial tallies indicate that hundreds more have died in Homs over the past three weeks. While unconfirmed, the activists’ accounts are often the only window into events inside Syria.

“Bashar al-Assad shut off the Internet and cut us off from the world,” said Abu Jaffar, a Homs activist, who helped dig out bodies from the apartment building, and then videotaped the effort and posted the results. “So he has made every Syrian into a journalist.”

Mr. Jaffar and several of his fellow activists were interviewed by means of Skype, over a computer they powered with a car battery, using a portable Inmarsat satellite transmitter set up to provide a WiFi hotspot in the corner of the city where they were hiding. Activists said they were raising money overseas to pay for the transmitters and the satellite time.

The apartment building where Ms. Colvin died was targeted, Mr. Jaffar and other activists asserted, because it housed the activists’ media center. The satellite transmitters on the roof had probably been spotted by Syrian reconnaissance aircraft, they said.

The dead were found in and around that center, and the activists were uploading videos of every body and disseminating details about the victims.

In Cairo, the Activists News Association said that according to unconfirmed reports, 60 bodies had been found in the building by late Wednesday. Many wounded people were taken to a clandestine clinic, they said.

The day before, the association documented 104 deaths around Syria, at least 46 of them in Homs, mostly in that one neighborhood. “That was a bad day,” said Mr. Jarrah, the association’s co-director. “But there have been worse days.”

The group is one of several helping Syria’s volunteer journalists get the word out, organizing their video postings, compiling videos of the dead and spreading that information by Twitter and Facebook, but also to mainstream journalists. Mr. Jarrah estimated that 80 percent of the videos of violence inside Syria that were broadcast on mainstream news organizations like Al Jazeera and the BBC originated from amateur videographers.

The result has been a stunningly vivid picture, delivered sometimes on live feeds or at least in real time, of life inside Homs, which has emerged as the fractured epicenter of the uprising against the government.

Since Feb. 4, government forces have fired shells daily at three Sunni Arab neighborhoods, particularly Baba Amr. By Wednesday, videographers were showing images of armored personnel carriers on the edge of the city, and they were warning that a ground invasion was likely to follow the rocket and artillery barrages of recent weeks.

Ms. Colvin, 56, a decorated correspondent who wore an eye patch after being hit by shrapnel in 2001 in Sri Lanka, and Mr. Ochlik, 28, a French freelancer who won a World Press Photo award for his work in Libya last year, were not the first journalists to die covering the carnage in Homs. Only the day before, a well-known Homs-based video blogger, Rami al-Sayyed, was killed, and his body, apparently riddled by shrapnel, was displayed in videos posted quickly online, with friends kissing his face fervently to show their respect.

Since November, four other foreign journalists have died covering Homs. Less than a week ago, a New York Times correspondent, Anthony Shadid, died, apparently from an asthma attack, while on a clandestine trip inside northern Syria.

All those documenting the conflict face risks. “On calls with Rami I often heard shells whizzing by,” said Shakeeb al-Jabri, writing on the Syrian activists’ Web site Al Ayyam.

On Tuesday, Mr. Sayyed had a live feed running of the shelling of Homs, then in its 18th straight day. At 11 a.m., it suddenly went dead. Later, videos of Mr. Sayyed’s body were posted, too.

By Wednesday, 104 YouTube videos of deaths from Tuesday’s violence had been posted, their links cataloged by Mr. Jarrah’s activists. Many of the more telling ones were quickly rebroadcast on satellite television networks, including images of a wounded father who crawled over to his son on the floor of a makeshift clinic, hugging him and crying, “Why did they kill you?”

And then he turns to the camera and says, “Oh humans, oh world, look, what could he have done?”

Mr. Ibrahim said that activists had the names of 22 people killed in and around the media center on Wednesday, and were filming videos of those whose bodies had been recovered, but they feared many more were still in the rubble of the five-story building. “It is too dangerous now,” he said. “If you want to lose your life just try to go there.”

Some of the videos from Homs are too painful or graphic to watch, like one from the city’s National Hospital, where activists came across a victim bearing evidence of torture. On his body, written in Arabic with a marker pen, is “Anonymous, Number 348.” The narrator reads that and adds, “This means there are at least 348 anonymous persons in the hospital.”

Numerous citizen videos made at the remaining field clinic in Baba Amr show the two doctors delivering a running commentary about their victims, and particularly the lack of medical supplies. “She needs to be transported to a hospital immediately,” says one, identified only as Dr. Ali. He points to the makeshift cast on his patient’s leg, which is in traction with a water bottle and string as the counterweight. “This was done in a primitive way, but it was all we had.”

By Thursday, the road Ms. Colvin and Mr. Ochlik had used to reach Homs had been closed off by the Syrian Army, Omar Shakir, an activist, said from Homs. “There is no way to transfer their bodies,” he said. “We don’t have morgues to keep the bodies, or ice, no electricity. After 24 hours, we will be obliged to bury them in Homs.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo,

and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.

    Ghastly Images Flow From Shattered Syrian City, NYT, 22.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/middleeast/ghastly-images-flow-from-shattered-city-of-homs-syria.html

Tunisia, Egypt Islamists Signal Bigger Religion Role

February 22, 2012
The New York Times
By REUTERS

PARIS (Reuters)- After months of reassuring secularist critics, Islamist politicians in Tunisia and Egypt have begun to lay down markers about how Muslim their states should be -- and first signs show they want more religion than previously admitted.

Islamist parties swept the first free elections in both countries in recent months after campaigns that stressed their readiness to work with the secularists they struggled with in the Arab Spring revolts against decades-long dictatorships.

With political deadlines looming, the Tunisian coalition led by the reformist Islamist Ennahda party and the head of Egypt's influential Muslim Brotherhood both made statements this week revealing a stronger emphasis on Islam in government.

Popular List, an Ennahda coalition member tasked with writing Tunisia's new constitution, announced on Monday its draft called Islam "the principle source of legislation" -- a phrase denoting laws based on the sharia moral and legal code.

On Tuesday, Egyptian Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie said his group wanted a president with "an Islamic background." That term is vague, but not as vague as the conciliatory "consensus candidate" talk heard from most parties until now.

Secularists in both countries warned voters against trusting the Islamists and these subtle changes could have come straight from a secularist playbook on how Islamists would gradually insert more religion into the political and legal systems.

TAKING GHANNOUCHI AT HIS WORD

Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi, a leading reformist Muslim thinker during his years in London exile, reassured secularists last year by agreeing with them that the first article of Tunisia's constitution should remain unchanged.

The article, which said Tunisia's language was Arabic and religion Islam, was "just a description of reality ... without any legal implications, he told Reuters in November. "There will be no other references to religion in the constitution."

In the draft constitution, Islam is described as Tunisia's religion "and the principal source of its legislation."

"Using Islamic sharia as a principle source of legislation will guarantee freedom, justice, social equality, consultation, human rights and the dignity of all its people, men and women," it says.

Mentioning sharia means all laws must be consistent with Islam, a condition found in many constitutions in Muslim countries. This can be interpreted broadly, or strictly if those vetting the legislation impose a narrow reading of Islam.

Reaction in Tunis to the draft has been muted so far because Ghannouchi is planning a news conference on Thursday where he will probably have to declare Ennahda's position on it.

Hachmi Hamdi, who supported Ennahda before forming Popular List, said the draft was more Islamic than expected because "the public that voted for us is a conservative public that wants sharia as the principle source of the constitution."

EGYPTIAN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has decided not to present its own candidate for the presidential election due in June and argued until now that it wanted a candidate acceptable to all.

Even Emad Abdel Ghaffour, head of the leading Salafi Islamist Nour Party, told this to Reuters two weeks ago. He said the sharia mention in Egypt's constitution should be retained without being tightened, as more hardline Salafis have urged.

But Badie told the daily newspaper of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party on Tuesday that "the candidate must have an Islamic background."

"It's clear now the Brotherhood are willing to throw their weight into the ring ...to support someone who is in line with Islamic values and is sympathetic to Islamic law," said Shadi Hamid, an expert on Islamist groups based at the Brookings Doha Center. "That will have major implications for the race."

Badie's comments seemed to rule out Brotherhood support for Amr Moussa, a former Egyptian foreign minister and Arab League secretary general seen as one of the frontrunners.

Lying between the two countries, Libya is also transforming its political system after ousting Muammar Gaddafi but has not yet held elections or begun work on a new constitution.

The chairman of the ruling National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalal, has said Tripoli would take sharia as the source for its laws. Hundreds of Libyan Muslim Brothers and Salafists rallied last month to demand sharia law.

(Reporting By Tom Heneghan)

    Tunisia, Egypt Islamists Signal Bigger Religion Role, NYT, 22.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/02/22/world/africa/22reuters-islamists-politics.html

2 Journalists Are Among the Dead in Syrian Shelling

February 22, 2012
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND and ALAN COWELL

CAIRO — Syrian security forces shelled the central city of Homs on Wednesday, the 19th day of a bombardment that activists say has claimed the lives of hundreds of trapped civilians in one of the deadliest campaigns in nearly a year of violent repression by the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Among the 20 people that activist groups reported killed, two were Western journalists, the veteran American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who had been working for The Sunday Times of London, and a young French photographer, Rémi Ochlik. The two had been working in a makeshift media center that was destroyed in the assault, raising suspicions that Syrian security forces might have identified its location by tracing satellite signals. Experts say that such tracking is possible with sophisticated equipment.

Activists, civilian journalists and foreign correspondents who have snuck into Syria have infuriated the authorities and foiled the government’s efforts to control the coverage of clashes, which have claimed thousands of Syrian lives in the last year and which Mr. Assad portrays as caused by an armed insurgency.

Quoting a witness reached from neighboring Jordan, Reuters said the two journalists died after shells hit the house in which they were staying and a rocket hit them when they were trying to escape.

Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation and the owner of The Sunday Times, saluted Ms. Colvin as “one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of her generation,” and said in an e-mail to the paper’s staff she “was a victim of a shell attack by the Syrian Army on a building that had been turned into an impromptu press center by the rebels.

“Our photographer, Paul Conroy, was with her and is believed to have been injured,” he said. “We are doing all we can in the face of shelling and sniper fire to get him to safety and to recover Marie’s body.”

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain paid tribute to Ms. Colvin on Wednesday, saying her death was a reminder of the perils facing reporters covering “dreadful events” in Syria. A longtime war correspondent, she lost an eye covering the Sri Lankan civil war and wore a distinctive black eye patch.

Video posted online showed what appeared to be the foreign journalists’ bodies lying face down in rubble. Three other Western journalists were injured in the attack, activists said. The French prime minister, François Fillon, indentified one as Edith Bouvier, a 31-year-old freelancer for the daily newspaper, Le Figaro. Video on YouTube showed her and Mr. Conroy, a British freelance photographer who had been working with Ms. Colvin, lying in what appeared to be a makeshift clinic with bandages on their legs.

A day earlier, a well-known video blogger in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baba Amr, Rami el-Sayed, was killed. Other citizen journalists in Homs have been killed recently in what activists interpret as part of a deliberate campaign to choke off news of the opposition.

The Syrian authorities rarely grant visas for foreign reporters to enter the country and seek to control those who are given permission to do so. Those controls have combined to make the Syrian revolt difficult to observe firsthand and reporters who do so run great risks of being caught in fighting, often in isolated pockets of rebel resistance.

Last week, Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died of an apparent asthma attack in Syria on Thursday after spending nearly a week reporting covertly in the northern area of Idlib, near the Turkish border.

Another activist group said that 27 young men had been killed the day before in that area. Reuters cited a statement from the Syrian Network for Human Rights as saying that most of the men, who were civilians, had been shot in the head or chest on Tuesday in several villages: Idita, Iblin and Balshon in Idlib province near the border with Turkey.

“Military forces chased civilians in these villages, arrested them and killed them without hesitation,” Reuters quoted the organization said in a statement. “They concentrated on male youths and whoever did not manage to escape was to be killed.”

Overall, the United Nations stopped tallying the death toll in the 11-month uprising after it passed 5,400 in January, because it could no longer verify the numbers. Efforts by the Arab League and United Nations to stem the violence have so far had little traction, with Syria’s remaining allies — China, Iran and Russia — continuing to stand by it.

But the latest deaths of journalists, on top of the agonizing civilian toll, focused a new wave of international revulsion and anger on Mr. Assad and the Syria government. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said the killings showed that “enough is enough, this regime must go. There is no reason why Syrians should not have the right to live their lives, to freely choose their destiny.”

The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé also said in a statement that he had called on the Syrian government to order an immediate halt to the attacks on Homs and to respect its “humanitarian obligations.” He also said he was asking the French ambassador in Damascus to urge the Syrian authorities to open a secure access route into Homs to help victims of the bombardment with the support of the Red Cross.

According to his Web site, Mr. Ochlik, in his late 20s, had covered wars and upheaval in Haiti, Congo and the Middle East. Ms. Colvin, 55, was a veteran of many conflicts from the Middle East to Chechnya and from the Balkans to Iraq and Sri Lanka. Both had won awards for their work.

Jon Snow, an anchor for Channel 4 News in Britain, which interviewed Ms. Colvin from Homs on Tuesday evening, called her “the most courageous journalist I ever knew and a wonderful reporter and writer.”

She was also interviewed by the BBC, recounting how she had watched a child die in Homs. “ I watched a little baby die today,” she said. “Absolutely horrific, just a 2-year-old.”

In an article published on Feb. 19 in The Sunday Times, Ms. Colvin described how she entered Homs “on a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.”

“Arriving in the darkened city in the early hours, I was met by a welcoming party keen for foreign journalists to reveal the city’s plight to the world,” she wrote. “So desperate were they that they bundled me into an open truck and drove at speed with the headlights on, everyone standing in the back shouting Allahu akbar — God is the greatest. Inevitably, the Syrian army opened fire.

“When everyone had calmed down I was driven in a small car, its lights off, along dark empty streets, the danger palpable. As we passed an open stretch of road, a Syrian Army unit fired on the car again with machine guns and launched a rocket-propelled grenade.” “The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one.”

Ms. Colvin left Beirut, Lebanon, for Syria on Feb. 14, according to Neil MacFarquhar, a New York Times correspondent she dined with the night before her departure. Over dinner, she said: “I cannot remember any story where the security situation was potentially this bad, except maybe Chechnya.”

“Before I was apprehensive, but now I’m restless,” Mr. MacFarquhar recalled her saying, once details of her journey had been finalized. “I just want to get in there and get it over with and get out.”

Ms. Colvin was raised on Long Island but had been based in England for many years. In a speech in 2010, Britain’s Press Association news agency reported, she spoke of the work of combat reporters, saying, “Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice.”

“We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?”

She added: “Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.”

Other journalists who have been killed in Syria include a freelance cameraman, Ferzat Jarban, who was found dead in early November. Another freelance cameraman, Basil al-Sayed, died at the end of December. A French television reporter, Gilles Jacquier, died in January during a government-sponsored trip to Homs, and Mazhar Tayyara, a freelance reporter for Agence France-Presse, The Guardian and other publications, died in Homs in early February.

Rod Nordland reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London. Neil MacFarquhar and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Fares Akram from Gaza, John F. Burns from London, and Steven Erlanger, Maïa de la Baume and Scott Sayare from Paris.

    2 Journalists Are Among the Dead in Syrian Shelling, NYT, 22.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/middleeast/marie-colvin-and-remi-ochlik-journalists-killed-in-syria.html

Koran Burning in NATO Error Incites Afghans for 2nd Day

February 22, 2012
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — Armed with rocks, bricks, pistols and wooden sticks, protesters angry over the burning of Korans at the largest American base in Afghanistan this week took to the streets in sometimes lethal demonstrations in a half dozen provinces Wednesday that left at least seven dead and many more wounded.

The fury did not appear likely to abate any time soon. Members of the Afghan Parliament called on Afghans to take up arms against the American military, and Western officials said they feared that conservative mullahs might urge people to violence at the weekly Friday prayer, when a large number of people go to mosque.

“Americans are invaders and jihad against Americans is an obligation,” said Abdul Sattar Khawisi, a member of Parliament from Parwan Province’s Ghorband District, where at least four demonstrators where killed in confrontations with police on Wednesday.

“I am calling upon all the mullahs and the ulema to urge the people from the pulpit to wage jihad against American,” he said as he stood with about 20 other members of Parliament.

President Hamid Karzai is scheduled to address both houses on Parliament on Thursday morning.

With the mood tense across the capital, where roads were closed and the American Embassy along with most other diplomatic missions were locked down, Mr. Karzai made his first public statement on the incident strongly condemning the burning and setting up an ad hoc committee of mullahs and senior religious figures to investigate it.

He said that the preliminary investigation showed that “American soldiers had burned four copies of the Holy Koran.” It was not clear if other copies were damaged but not actually burnt. Earlier reports from elders who visited Bagram Airbase on Tuesday and saw the Korans was that between 10 and 15 were damaged to varying degrees.

Aware that the episode could damage American efforts here which are at a crucial stage in negotiating a strategic partnership agreement with the Afghans and attempting to pave the way for peace negotiations, American diplomats and military officials met with President Hamid Karzai and spoke to senior Afghan government and religious figures in an attempt to tamp down the anger, said Mark Thornburg, the acting spokesman for the American Embassy.

Among those who met with Mr. Karzai were American ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, Gen. John R. Allen and Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. They apologized and offered full cooperation with the Afghan government in its investigation into what led to the burning of the Korans.

Throughout the morning the highway to Jalalabad from central Kabul was closed by a crowd numbering several hundred and sometimes swelling even larger. They set tires alight and burned check posts and a government minibus as they surged towards Camp Phoenix, the NATO military base that faces the road. Many hefted rocks, throwing them at passing SUVs as well as Afghan police and American military vehicles. SUVs are often driven by people from foreign organizations.

Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road as well as some of those who thronged the Parliament, made the same point: this is not the first time that the Americans have violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and an apology is not enough.

“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead, and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring both to an incident in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent incident of civilian casualties in Kapisa Province in which eight young men, many of them teenagers were killed in an airstrike.

“They always admit their mistakes, they burn our Koran and then they apologize, you can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology,” he said.

The injuries suffered by protesters came mostly in confrontations with Afghan police and Army units who were trying to contain the violence and in some cases prevent assaults on NATO bases by angry mobs.

In the eastern city of Jalalabad, where one person was killed and 10 injured, protesters said that both Afghan army soldiers and NATO troops had fired on the crowd. Six NATO fuel trucks parked near the base were also set on fire, said Ahmadzia Abdul Zai, the spokesman for the provincial governor.

The day was hardest in many respects for the police, who sympathized with the emotions of the protesters but understood that it was their job to try to protect the public, property and the NATO installations. While some observers said they seemed reluctant to intervene at other times their confrontations resulted in casualties.

General Mohammed Ayoub Salangi, the Kabul police chief attempted to sum up the challenge after he was pelted with rocks when he went out to visit his forces on Jalalabad road of both sympathizing with the protesters cause and trying to control the situation.

“I do not blame people for throwing rocks at us, because this is their right to protest their anger about dishonoring our holy Koran and the police are their sons and their servants.”

Sangar Rahimi, Sharifullah Sahak, and Jawad Sukhanyar

contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan,

and a New York Times employee from Jalalabad.

    Koran Burning in NATO Error Incites Afghans for 2nd Day, NYT, 22.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/asia/koran-burning-in-afghanistan-prompts-second-day-of-protests.html

Egypt’s Step Backward

February 21, 2012
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Sadly, the transitional government in Egypt today appears determined to shoot itself in both feet.

On Sunday, it will put on trial 43 people, including at least 16 U.S. citizens, for allegedly bringing unregistered funds into Egypt to promote democracy without a license. Egypt has every right to control international organizations operating within its borders. But the truth is that when these democracy groups filed their registration papers years ago under the autocracy of Hosni Mubarak, they were informed that the papers were in order and that approval was pending. The fact that now — after Mubarak has been deposed by a revolution — these groups are being threatened with jail terms for promoting democracy without a license is a very disturbing sign. It tells you how incomplete the “revolution” in Egypt has been and how vigorously the counter-revolutionary forces are fighting back.

This sordid business makes one weep and wonder how Egypt will ever turn the corner. Egypt is running out of foreign reserves, its currency is falling, inflation is rising and unemployment is rampant. Yet the priority of a few retrograde Mubarak holdovers is to put on trial staffers from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are allied with the two main U.S. political parties, as well as from Freedom House and some European groups. Their crime was trying to teach Egypt’s young democrats how to monitor elections and start parties to engage in the very democratic processes that the Egyptian Army set up after Mubarak’s fall. Thousands of Egyptians had participated in their seminars in recent years.

What is this really about? This case has been trumped up by Egypt’s minister of planning and international cooperation, Fayza Abul Naga, an old Mubarak crony. Abul Naga personifies the worst tendency in Egypt over the last 50 years — the tendency that helps to explain why Egypt has fallen so far behind its peers: South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brazil, India and China. It is the tendency to look for dignity in all the wrong places — to look for dignity not by building up the capacity of Egypt’s talented young people so they can thrive in the 21st century — with better schools, better institutions, export industries and more accountable government. No, it is the tendency to go for dignity on the cheap “by standing up to the foreigners.”

That is Abul Naga’s game. As a former Mubarak adviser put it to me: “Abul Naga is where she is today because for six years she was resisting the economic and political reforms” in alliance with the military. “Both she and the military were against opening up the Egyptian economy.” Both she and the military, having opposed the revolution, are now looking to save themselves by playing the nationalist card.

Egypt today has only two predators: poverty and illiteracy. After 30 years of Mubarak rule and some $50 billion in U.S. aid, 33 percent of men and 56 percent of women in Egypt still can’t read or write. That is a travesty. But that apparently does not keep Abul Naga up at night.

What is her priority? Is it to end illiteracy? Is it to articulate a new vision about how Egypt can engage with the world and thrive in the 21st century? Is it to create a positive climate for foreign investors to create jobs desperately needed by young Egyptians? No, it’s to fall back on that golden oldie — that all of Egypt’s problems are the fault of outsiders who want to destabilize Egypt. So let’s jail some Western democracy consultants. That will restore Egypt’s dignity.

The Times reported from Cairo that the prosecutor’s dossier assembled against the democracy workers — bolstered by Abul Naga’s testimony — accused these democracy groups of working “in coordination with the C.I.A.,” serving “U.S. and Israeli interests” and inciting “religious tensions between Muslims and Copts.” Their goal, according to the dossier, was: “Bringing down the ruling regime in Egypt, no matter what it is,” while “pandering to the U.S. Congress, Jewish lobbyists and American public opinion.”

Amazing. What Abul Naga is saying to all those young Egyptians who marched, protested and died in Tahrir Square in order to gain a voice in their own future is: “You were just the instruments of the C.I.A., the U.S. Congress, Israel and the Jewish lobby. They are the real forces behind the Egyptian revolution — not brave Egyptians with a will of their own.”

Not surprisingly, some members of the U.S. Congress are talking about cutting off the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. gives Egypt’s army if these Americans are actually thrown in prison. Hold off on that. We have to be patient and see this for what, one hopes, it really is: Fayza’s last dance. It is elements of the old regime playing the last cards they have to both undermine the true democratic forces in Egypt and to save themselves by posing as protectors of Egypt’s honor.

Egyptians deserve better than this crowd, which is squandering Egypt’s dwindling resources at a critical time and diverting attention from the real challenge facing the country: giving Egypt’s young people what they so clearly hunger for — a real voice in their own future and the educational tools they need to succeed in the modern world. That’s where lasting dignity comes from.

    Egypt’s Step Backward, NYT, 21.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/opinion/friedman-fayzas-last-dance.html

Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine

February 21, 2012
The New York Times
By MUSTAFA BARGHOUTHI

Ramallah, West Bank

OVER the past 64 years, Palestinians have tried armed struggle; we have tried negotiations; and we have tried peace conferences. Yet all we have seen is more Israeli settlements, more loss of lives and resources, and the emergence of a horrifying system of segregation.

Khader Adnan, a Palestinian held in an Israeli prison, pursued a different path. Despite his alleged affiliation with the militant group Islamic Jihad, he waged a peaceful hunger strike to shake loose the consciences of people in Israel and around the world. Mr. Adnan chose to go unfed for more than nine weeks and came close to death. He endured for 66 days before ending his hunger strike on Tuesday in exchange for an Israeli agreement to release him as early as April 17.

Mr. Adnan has certainly achieved an individual victory. But it was also a broader triumph — unifying Palestinians and highlighting the power of nonviolent protest. Indeed, all Palestinians who seek an independent state and an end to the Israeli occupation would be wise to avoid violence and embrace the example of peaceful resistance.

Mr. Adnan was not alone in his plight. More than 300 Palestinians are currently held in “administrative detention.” No charges have been brought against them; they must contend with secret evidence; and they do not get their day in military court.

Britain’s practices in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s were not so different from Israel’s today — and they elicited a similarly rebellious spirit from the subjugated population. In 1981, Bobby Sands, an imprisoned member of the Irish Republican Army, died 66 days after beginning a hunger strike to protest Britain’s treatment of political prisoners. Mr. Sands was elected to Parliament during his strike; nine other hunger strikers died before the end of 1981; and their cases drew worldwide attention to the plight of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland.

Just as Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, unsympathetically dismissed Mr. Sands as a “convicted criminal,” Israeli officials have accused Mr. Adnan of being an active member of Islamic Jihad. But if this is the case, Israel should prove it in court.

Mr. Adnan’s actions over the past nine weeks demonstrated that he was willing to give his life — nonviolently and selflessly — to advance Palestinian freedom. Others must now show similar courage.

What is needed is a Palestinian version of the Arab revolutions that have swept the region: a mass movement demanding freedom, dignity, a just peace, real democracy and the right to self-determination. We must take the initiative, practice self-reliance and pursue a form of nonviolent struggle that we can sustain without depending on others to make decisions for us or in our place.

In the last several years, Palestinians have organized peaceful protests against the concrete and wire “separation barrier” that pens us into what are best described as bantustans. We have sought to mobilize popular resistance to this wall by following in the nonviolent traditions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi — and we remain determined to sustain peaceful protest even when violently attacked.

Using these techniques, we have already succeeded in pressuring the Israeli government to reroute the wall in villages like Jayyous and Bilin and helped hundreds of Palestinians get their land back from settlers or the Israeli Army.

Our movement is not intended to delegitimize Israel, as the Israeli government claims. It is, instead, a movement to delegitimize the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which we believe is the last surviving apartheid system in the world. It is a movement that could free Palestinians from nearly 45 years of occupation and Israelis from being part of the last colonial-settler system of our time.

I remember the days when some political leaders of the largest Palestinian political parties, Al Fatah and Hamas, laughed at our nonviolent struggle, which they saw as soft and ineffective. But the turning point came in the summer of 2008, when we managed to break the Israeli naval siege of Gaza with small boats. Suddenly, I saw great respect in the eyes of the same leaders who had doubted the power of nonviolence but finally recognized its potential.

The power of nonviolence is that it gives Palestinians of all ages and walks of life the tools to challenge those subjugating us. And thousands of peace activists from around the world have joined our movement. In demonstrations in East Jerusalem, Silwan and Hebron we are also being joined by a new and younger Israeli peace movement that categorically rejects Israeli occupation.

Unfortunately, continuing Israeli settlement activity could soon lead us to the point of no return. Indeed, if we do not soon achieve a genuinely independent Palestinian state, we will be forced to press instead for a single democratic state with equal rights and responsibilities for both Palestinians and Israelis.

We are not sure how long it will take before our nonviolent struggle achieves its goal. But we are sure of one thing: it will succeed, and Palestinians will one day be free.

Mustafa Barghouthi, a doctor and member of the Palestinian Parliament, is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative, a political party.

    Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine, NYT, 21.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/opinion/peaceful-protest-can-free-palestine.html

Palestinian on Hunger Strike

to Be Freed Without Court Ruling

February 21, 2012
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — A Palestinian who fasted for 66 days to protest his detention without charge ended his hunger strike on Tuesday after the Israeli authorities agreed to release him in mid-April, if no major new evidence is brought against him.

In making the deal, Israel averted the possibility of widespread unrest that many expected if the detainee, a 33-year-old member of Islamic Jihad, had died, as medical experts had determined was an imminent danger. More important, it forestalled an emergency hearing at the High Court of Justice that could have set off a broader review of Israeli military courts’ practice of administrative detention, which has been used against thousands of Palestinians over time.

Palestinian rights activists and other supporters of the detainee, Khader Adnan, insisted that the outcome remained a victory, though the case had failed to force any fundamental change in Israeli policy.

“In the end Khader’s life was saved and his message, raising awareness about administrative detention, got out to the world,” said Shawan Jabarin, director of Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Mr. Jabarin added that Mr. Adnan was “a hero, a champion,” and compared him to Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican Army member who died in 1981 after an equally long hunger strike.

Qadura Fares, the president of the nongovernmental Palestinian Prisoners Society based in Ramallah, said that in any case, the issue of administrative detention had come to the Israeli High Court a number of times in the past and that the judges had always accepted the arguments of the Israeli security establishment.

“We have been in that movie several times before,” said Mr. Fares, who was involved in the negotiations for the deal, communicating with the Israelis through Mr. Adnan’s lawyer.

The court had scheduled an emergency hearing for Tuesday in the case of Mr. Adnan after his condition was judged critical, but the sides canceled the petition after the deal was signed by Mr. Adnan’s lawyer, Jawad Boulus, and a lawyer for the state prosecution.

The Israeli Justice Ministry said in a statement that the deal had been reached after Mr. Adnan’s case was brought before Israel’s attorney general, attesting to the concern at the highest levels of the Israeli government about Mr. Adnan’s fate and the potential consequences. The Palestinian Authority minister of prisoner affairs, Issa Qaraqe, told the Palestinian news agency Maan that the Palestinians had asked Jordan to intervene to help save Mr. Adnan.

Palestinians have been holding demonstrations in support of Mr. Adnan throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian prisoners refused meals on Tuesday in solidarity.

The issue of administrative detention touches many Palestinian families. Israel has used the measure over the decades for periods ranging from a few months to several years. About 310 administrative detainees are in Israeli jails, down from more than 800 in January 2008.

The father of two young girls, Mr. Adnan has worked as a baker, but is also known as a leader of Islamic Jihad, an extremist organization that has carried out suicide bombings and fired rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. He has been detained several times before, mostly by Israel but also by the Palestinian Authority.

Mr. Adnan began his hunger strike on Dec. 18, a day after he was taken from his village, Arraba, in the northern West Bank, and it lasted longer than any other Palestinian hunger strike. A medical report prepared last week by an Israeli-accredited doctor on behalf of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and filed along with the petition to the High Court, stated that Mr. Adnan was “in immediate danger of death” and that “a fast in excess of 70 days does not permit survival.”

Israel defends its use of administrative detention as necessary for national security, and says it is used when a case is based on informants or intelligence material that cannot be revealed. Critics say the secret evidence makes it impossible for administrative detainees or their lawyers to mount a proper defense.

Administrative detention orders can be issued for a maximum period of six months, but can be renewed indefinitely. Mr. Adnan was issued a four-month detention order on Jan. 8, and it was confirmed by a military judge a month later. A first appeal was rejected on Feb. 13.

Under the terms of the deal, Mr. Adnan will be released on April 17 instead of May 8. The three-week reduction is to take into account the time that Mr. Adnan spent in interrogation after his arrest.

Israel has pledged not to renew his detention if there is no new, weighty evidence against him.

Mr. Adnan is hospitalized in northern Israel. A physician visited him after the deal was reached and confirmed that he had ended his hunger strike, Physicians for Human Rights said.

An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called the deal over Mr. Adnan “a workable arrangement” since ultimately he will be almost completing his four-month term of detention.

“We faced a dilemma,” the official said. “On the one hand we did not want any harm to come to him, or the wider danger in that. On the other hand it is not healthy to set a precedent that every time a Palestinian terrorist goes on hunger strike, he gets a get-out-of-jail-free pass.”

    Palestinian on Hunger Strike to Be Freed Without Court Ruling, NYT, 21.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/world/middleeast/palestinian-on-hunger-strike-to-be-freed-without-court-ruling.html

Nuclear Inspectors Say Their Mission to Iran Has Failed

February 21, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and ALAN COWELL

A visit by international nuclear inspectors to Iran ended in failure Tuesday. Tehran not only blocked access to a site the inspectors believe could have been used for tests on how to produce a nuclear weapon, they reported, but it also refused to agree to a process for resolving questions about other “possible military dimensions” to its nuclear program.

The announcement came in a terse press release from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations agency, which said its inspection team had left the country. The agency is expected to release its latest report on the status of Iran’s program in the next week.

The inspectors’ previous visit to Iran ended several weeks ago with no agreement other than to meet this week.

Iran’s refusal to deal with the inspectors’ questions is likely to increase tension, at a moment of heightened sanctions and after the assassination of nuclear scientists in Iran and suspected retaliation against Israeli diplomats. Iran struck an increasingly bellicose tone on Tuesday, with an Iranian official warning that the country would take pre-emptive action against perceived foes if it felt its national interests were threatened. The country also laid down new conditions for oil sales.

Iran also indicated in recent days, however, that it was willing to resume negotiations over its nuclear program, but it was unclear under what terms.

In the statement Tuesday, the nuclear agency said its team had “requested access to the military site at Parchin,” where there was evidence of a facility that could be used in weapons-related testing. “Iran did not grant permission for this visit to take place,” the statement said. In the past, Iran had said the team of inspectors could visit any nuclear-related location, but it has recently maintained that Parchin was a military base and off limits.

Access to the Parchin site may prove a litmus test of whether Iran will ever allow the kind of intrusive inspections that most Western officials say are necessary to establish whether Iran has conducted research on “weaponization.” The last report by the agency said Iran had gone beyond theoretical studies about how to detonate a nuclear device, building a large containment vessel at its Parchin military base for testing the feasibility of explosive compression. It called such tests “strong indicators of possible weapon development.”

The I.A.E.A. statement also said Iran and the agency could not agree “on a document facilitating the clarification of unresolved issues in connection with Iran’s nuclear program, particularly those relating to possible military dimensions.”

The director general of the agency, Yukiya Amano, said in the statement that “it is disappointing that Iran did not accept our request to visit Parchin during the first or second meetings,” insisting his group had “engaged in a constructive spirit.”

The latest warnings from Iran on Tuesday included a further extension of a dispute with the European Union over an oil embargo due to come into force on July 1, with Iran outlining what were termed conditions for future sales to European customers. Iran said Sunday that it had cut off sales to Britain and France, and warned Monday that it might extend the ban to other members of the 27-nation European Union.

Growing tensions over Iran’s nuclear program have provoked speculation that Israel may be contemplating a military strike against nuclear facilities, which Iran says are for peaceful purposes but which the West suspects are inching toward the capability to produce weapons.

Without mentioning Israel directly, Mohammad Hejazi, the deputy armed forces head, said Tuesday, “Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions.”

Divisions in Iran’s leadership make it hard to interpret the government’s intentions, but the statement showed a new level of aggressiveness.

    Nuclear Inspectors Say Their Mission to Iran Has Failed, NYT, 21.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/world/middleeast/iran-says-un-weapons-inspectors-wont-visit-nuclear-sites.html

In Din Over Iran, Rattling Sabers Echo

February 21, 2012
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The United States has now endured what by some measures is the longest period of war in its history, with more than 6,300 American troops killed and 46,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ultimate costs estimated at $3 trillion. Both wars lasted far longer than predicted. The outcomes seem disappointing and uncertain.

So why is there already a new whiff of gunpowder in the air?

Talk of war over Iran’s nuclear program has reached a strident pitch in recent weeks, as Israel has escalated threats of a possible strike, the oratory of American politicians has become more bellicose and Iran has responded for the most part defiantly. With Israel and Iran exchanging accusations of assassination plots, some analysts see a danger of blundering into a war that would inevitably involve the United States.

Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable, igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb. Yet there is one significant difference: by contrast with 2003, when the Bush administration portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat, Obama administration officials and intelligence professionals seem eager to calm the feverish language.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a CNN interview on Sunday that the United States had advised Israel that a strike now would be “destabilizing,” adding that Iran had not yet decided whether to build a weapon. And American officials are weighing an Iranian offer to renew nuclear talks as a stream of threats from Tehran continued on Tuesday and international nuclear inspectors reported their mission to Iran had failed.

Still, unforeseen events can create their own momentum. Graham Allison, a leading expert on nuclear strategy at Harvard University, has long compared the evolving conflict over Iran’s nuclear program to a “slow-motion Cuban missile crisis,” in which each side has only murky intelligence, tempers run high and there is the danger of a devastating outcome.

“As a student of history, I’m certainly conscious that when you have heated politics and incomplete control of events, it’s possible to stumble into a war,” Mr. Allison said. Watching Iran, Israel and the United States, he said, “you can see the parties, slowly but almost inexorably, moving to a collision.”

Another critical difference from the prewar discussion in 2003 is the central role of Israel, which views the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon as a threat to its very existence and has warned that Iran’s nuclear facilities may soon be buried too deep for foreign bombers to reach.

Israel’s stance has played out politically in the United States. With the notable exception of Representative Ron Paul of Texas, Republican presidential candidates have kept up a competition in threatening Iran and portraying themselves as protectors of Israel. A bipartisan group of senators on Tuesday released a letter to President Obama saying that new talks could prove a “dangerous distraction,” allowing Iran to buy time to move closer to developing a weapon.

Despite a decade of war, most Americans seem to endorse the politicians’ martial spirit. In a Pew Research Center poll this month, 58 percent of those surveyed said the United States should use military force, if necessary, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Only 30 percent said no.

“I find it puzzling,” said Richard K. Betts of Columbia University, who has studied security threats since the cold war. “You’d think there would be an instinctive reason to hold back after two bloody noses in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

In the same survey, 75 percent of respondents said that Mr. Obama was withdrawing troops from Afghanistan at the right pace or not quickly enough, a finding in keeping with many indications of war weariness.

Micah Zenko, who studies conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees an old pattern. “It’s true throughout history: there’s always the belief that the next war will go much better than the last war,” he said.

Faced with an intractable security challenge, both politicians and ordinary people “want to ‘do something,’ ” Mr. Zenko said. “And nothing ‘does something’ like military force.”

Yet it is the military and intelligence establishment that has quietly sought to counter politicians’ bold language about Iran’s nuclear program, which the Iranians contend is solely for peaceful purposes. At a hearing last week, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pressed James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.

“Do you have doubt about the Iranians’ intention when it comes to making a nuclear weapon?” Mr. Graham asked.

“I do,” Mr. Clapper replied.

“You doubt whether or not they’re trying to create a nuclear bomb?” Mr. Graham persisted.

“I think they are keeping themselves in a position to make that decision,” Mr. Clapper replied. “But there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time,” he added, apparently a reference to specific steps to prepare a nuclear device. Haunting such discussions is the memory of the Iraq war. The intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, which was one of the Bush administration’s main rationales for the invasion, proved to be devastatingly wrong. And the news media, including The New York Times, which ultimately apologized to readers for some of its coverage of claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, are again under scrutiny by critics wary of exaggerated threats.

Both the ombudsman of The Washington Post and the public editor of The New York Times in his online blog have scolded their newspapers since December for overstating the current evidence against Iran in particular headlines and stories. Amid the daily drumbeat about a possible war, the hazard of an assassination or a bombing setting off a conflict inadvertently worries some analysts. After a series of killings of Iranian scientists widely believed to be the work of Israel, Israeli diplomats in three countries were the targets last week of bombs suspected to have been planted by Iranians.

In October, an Iranian American was charged in what American authorities assert was an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, possibly by bombing a Washington restaurant. Mr. Clapper, the intelligence director, told Congress in January that the accusation demonstrated that Iranian officials “are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”

An actual Iranian attack inside the United States — possibly following an Israeli strike on Iran — would inevitably result in calls for an American military retaliation.

Peter Feaver of Duke University, who has long studied public opinion about war and worked in the administration of President George W. Bush, said the Obama administration’s policy was now “in the exact middle of American public opinion on Iran” — taking a hard line against a nuclear-armed Iran, yet opposing military action for now and escalating sanctions. But as the November election approaches, Mr. Feaver said, inflammatory oratory is likely to increase, even if it is unsuited to a problem as complicated as Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“This is the standard danger of talking about foreign policy crises in a campaign,” he said. “If you try to explain a complex position, you sound hopelessly vague.”

    In Din Over Iran, Rattling Sabers Echo, NYT, 21.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/world/middleeast/in-din-over-iran-echoes-of-iraq-war-news-analysis.html

Dossier Details Egypt’s Case Against Democracy Groups

February 20, 2012
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — The Egyptian prosecution’s summary of the case against at least 16 Americans and others from five democracy and human rights groups focuses largely on the testimony of their accusers, with evidence primarily limited to proof that their organizations used American and other foreign funds for payrolls and rent.

The prosecution’s dossier also shows leaps of logic in a case that has imperiled a decades-old alliance with Washington and threatened Egypt with the loss of $1.5 billion in aid. The case, for example, cites documents seized in December from one group, the International Republican Institute, that included Wikipedia maps of Egypt showing the country divided into four parts. While Egypt is typically described as comprising four regions — upper and lower Egypt, greater Cairo and the Suez Canal and Sinai region — the prosecution suggested that the maps showed a plan to dismember the country.

The summary, compiled by the Office of the Investigating Judge of Egypt’s Ministry of Justice, sets the stage for the group trial, scheduled to begin on Sunday. A copy was given to The New York Times by a person close to the investigation on the condition of anonymity because of legal restrictions.

The primary force behind the prosecution is a holdover from the Mubarak era, Fayza Abul Naga, who has continued to press the case against the democracy groups, despite opposition from military rulers worried about losing American aid, most of which goes to the armed forces. She is foremost among the 13 accusing witnesses, most of them also formerly officials under President Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled a year ago. Some are underlings of Ms. Abul Naga, who as minister of planning and international cooperation is in charge of dealing with foreign aid.

Ms. Abul Naga’s central accusation is that the groups were unregistered under Egyptian law, and that the American groups were receiving about $150 million in aid diverted from the larger American aid package to Egypt. They are the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute — which have ties to Congressional party leaders — Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists. The fifth group, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, is German, and receives money from that government.

More than 40 defendants have been indicted on charges of illegal activity by foreign agents, and face penalties of up to five years in jail. Three of the six accused Americans who are still in Egypt have taken refuge in the American Embassy, including Sam LaHood of the Republican Institute. He is the son of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Democratization has been a goal of the Obama administration in Egypt, and the case against the Americans has infuriated many in Congress and the administration.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, the chairman of the board of the International Republican Institute, arrived Monday in Cairo, where he met with the military leader Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and other officials and came away with assurances of a speedy resolution to the case. “We’re not making threats,” Mr. McCain said. “There’s plenty of time to make threats.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who was part of the McCain delegation, was sharply critical of the case. “As an American, I’m offended that people would say things about these organizations,” Mr. Graham said, calling the charges “ridiculous.”

“The person who brought this forward I think has an agenda that’s not helpful,” he said.

Senator Graham also praised the moderation of the Muslim Brotherhood officials the delegation had met and said they were sympathetic to the plight of those facing prosecution under laws enacted under the Mubarak government.

But a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose party dominates Parliament after recent elections, warned the United States against trying to interfere in Egypt’s judicial process. “Would America allow any foreign agenda or country to interfere in its affairs like this?” asked the spokesman, Mahmoud Ghuzlan. “Then why should America expect Egypt to accept this kind of interference without an investigation or a trial?”

Ms. Abul Naga’s testimony, bolstered by the other witnesses, details the activities of the groups, mostly training political parties in how to organize, raise money, deal with the news media and the like, but it also ranges into far broader accusations of illicit activity.

The prosecution’s dossier reiterated accusations that the groups “worked in coordination with the C.I.A.,” served “U.S. and Israeli interests,” and incited “religious tensions between Muslims and Copts.” Their goal, according to the testimony in the dossier, is “bringing down the ruling regime in Egypt, no matter what it is,” while “pandering to the U.S. Congress, Jewish lobbyists and American public opinion.”

Ms. Abul Naga is quoted as saying, “Conducting such activities is a blatant challenge to Egyptian sovereignty and serves ulterior motives that gravely harm Egypt and its national security.” She described the Republican Institute as “far-right leaning” and Freedom House as “founded by the Jewish lobbyists.” She portrayed the groups as having fomented insurgencies elsewhere, saying at one point that their activities “cannot be viewed in isolation from the secession of Christian South Sudan from the predominantly Muslim north.”

Despite Ms. Abul Naga’s association with the ousted government, her charges and the legal case have generally struck a responsive chord among many elements of the new Egyptian political scene. Al Azhar, the leading Sunni Islamic institute in Egypt, and a fundamentalist Salafist sheik, Mohammad Hassan, formed a group with the goal of raising up to $2 billion to replace any lost American aid. Three days ago, the military-appointed Egyptian cabinet voted to support the effort, the Fund for Dignity and Pride, and many prominent Egyptians have pledged support. The fund has so far raised $10 million.

In addition to the Americans who are charged, the defendants include 14 Egyptians, 3 Serbs, 2 Lebanese, 2 Germans, a Palestinian, a Jordanian and a Norwegian, according to the state-owned newspaper Al Ahram. Varying semiofficial accounts have put the number of Americans charged from 16 to 20.

Some of the accused have remained in Egypt voluntarily. Nancy Okail, an Egyptian citizen with British residency who is the head of Freedom House here, was abroad when she learned of the charges against her (via Twitter, she said), but she chose to return with her 3-year-old twin daughters.

“We know that legally they don’t have anything against us, but this is about the xenophobia that they have been instigating for months and months now to show there is a foreign plot to ruin the country,” Ms. Okail said. “I don’t know who’s instigating it, if it’s Fayza Abul Naga or she’s just a front for someone else.”

Ms. Abul Naga was not immediately available for comment, according to her media coordinator, an Egyptian Army general, Bahgat el-Shirbini.

 

Rod Nordland reported from Cairo, and David. D. Kirkpatrick from Beirut, Lebanon.

Mayy El Sheikh and Liam Stack contributed reporting from Cairo.

    Dossier Details Egypt’s Case Against Democracy Groups, NYT, 20.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/world/middleeast/
    egypt-relying-on-accusatory-testimony-against-foreign-groups.html

Frustrated Protesters Fill Streets in Syrian Capital

February 18, 2012
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hundreds and hundreds of antigovernment protesters braved scattered gunfire from Syrian soldiers to march through a middle-class neighborhood in Damascus on Saturday, the biggest demonstration witnessed close to the heart of the capital since the country’s uprising started 11 months ago.

The neighborhood, Mezze, skirts the hill on which the sprawling white presidential palace sits, and as row upon row of demonstrators walked along, wrapped tightly in heavy coats amid a snowstorm, more than a few expressed the wish that President Bashar al-Assad could hear them.

“I hope President Assad opens the window of his office and sees how Damascenes are shouting against him and his regime,” said Usama, 22, a university student from the neighborhood, giving only his first name out of fear of retribution. “The regime thought we were asleep, but it doesn’t know that when we wake up his regime will be gone.”

The relative calm of Damascus, as well as Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, throughout the uprising has been cited repeatedly by the Assad government to buttress its argument that it enjoys wide support in Syria. Officials maintain that the demonstrations and unrest in rebellious cities like Homs, Hama and Dara’a, all sites of brutal government crackdowns, are the work of foreign infiltrators.

That argument will be much harder to sustain if mainstream, middle-class districts of the capital like Mezze begin rising up to demonstrate, as it did on Saturday. The march was prompted by the deaths of three men at a smaller protest a day earlier. Several marchers said it was one thing to deploy tanks in provincial cities to fight antigovernment protesters, but it would be impossible to say that foreign armed gangs had penetrated an area close to the presidential palace.

“If the rallies have reached Damascus and are big enough, we will no longer need an armed revolution,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain.

Some demonstrators carried palm fronds, spotted on videos of the event posted on YouTube, to indicate their peaceful intent.

The observatory said a Damascus demonstrator was killed by gunfire from the security forces, which also used sound grenades and tear gas in a vain attempt to disperse the march. Around Syria, at least 14 other people were also reported killed on Saturday.

Ten soldiers killed in antigovernment violence around the country were buried on Saturday, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported.

In Mezze, dozens of demonstrators were also arrested, as security forces chased them into alleyways and searched houses, according to witnesses and activists.

The Mezze neighborhood houses important government and private offices, including the Ministry of Information and the cellphone company MTN, as well as many foreign missions. The Iranian mission, with its distinctive Persian blue tile exterior, was a focus of demonstrators’ ire.

“This is the embassy of the armed gangs,” said one voice on camera in a video posted on YouTube, mocking the boilerplate accusations the Syrian government has issued against demonstrators. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is believed to have trained the Syrian security forces in crowd control, and many Syrians believe that Iranian troops are helping as well.

“We are demonstrating here, very close to Iran’s embassy, to say to the Iranians, ‘Look, we are peaceful protesters who want democracy, dignity and freedom,’ ” said Fadi, a 24-year-old protester interviewed in Mezze on Friday.

During a smaller demonstration after the Friday Prayer sermon at the largest neighborhood mosque, three men were shot dead by security forces, and it was their funeral that prompted Saturday’s outpouring.

Some activists burned posters of Mr. Assad and chanted for him to step down. The demonstration started small outside the main mosque around 10:30 a.m. Saturday, but it gradually swelled as more and more men and women from the neighborhood joined in, witnesses and activists said. In other parts of the country, women have all but disappeared from demonstrations as violence has intensified.

The government put on a show of force on Saturday that included security cars and military trucks filled with soldiers. But it avoided rolling out the tanks as it has in other cities. That would be interpreted as a sign of weakness in the capital, and particularly in Mezze, a residential neighborhood in the shadows of the palace that is heavily populated with Alawites, the minority sect to which Mr. Assad belongs and that dominates some of the most elite Syrian security forces.

It was hard to independently authenticate the videos uploaded to YouTube, and the Syrian government severely restricts access to the country by foreign journalists and other independent observers.

The videos showed a dense sea of protesters in central Mezze. Some of those participating said they were driven to act by the escalating violence around the country; too many people were dying in places like Homs for Damascenes to sit home and do nothing, they said.

Not far from where the demonstration and crackdown played out, Mr. Assad was meeting with Zhai Jun, China’s vice foreign minister, the Syrian Arab News Agency reported. Mr. Zhai was sent to the Middle East to explain China’s position in rejecting a United Nations Security Council resolution on Feb. 4 that was aimed at diminishing bloodshed in Syria.

Mr. Zhai endorsed what Mr. Assad has promised in terms of political reforms, centered at the moment on a referendum on Feb. 26 for a new constitution that would establish a multiparty political system.

“China supports the reform process being carried out in Syria and the important steps taken in this regard,” the news agency quoted Mr. Zhai as saying, calling for a halt to violence from all sides because “only under stable conditions, Syria could make comprehensive political reforms.”

Mr. Assad’s call for the referendum has raised the question of how a nationwide vote could be held at a time when many areas see daily battles between Syrian troops and rebel soldiers. The opposition has opposed the referendum.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut,

and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.

    Frustrated Protesters Fill Streets in Syrian Capital NYT, 18.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/world/middleeast/syrian-protesters-fill-streets-of-damascus.html

Europe’s Failed Course

February 17, 2012
The New York Times

Struggling euro-zone economies like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy cannot cut their way back to growth. Demanding rigid austerity from them as the price of European support has lengthened and deepened their recessions. It has made their debts harder, not easier, to pay off.

This is not an issue of philosophical debate. The numbers are in.

As The Times’s Landon Thomas Jr. reported this week, Portugal has met every demand from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. It has cut wages and pensions, slashed public spending and raised taxes. Those steps have deepened its recession, making it even less able to repay its debts. When it received a bailout last May, Portugal’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product was 107 percent. By next year, it is expected to rise to 118 percent. That ratio will continue to rise so long as the economy shrinks. That is, indeed, the very definition of a vicious circle.

Meanwhile, shrinking demand and fears of a contagious collapse keep pushing more European countries toward the danger zone of unsustainable debt.

Why are Europe’s leaders so determined to deny reality? Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, in particular, seem unable to admit that they got this wrong. They are still captivated by the illogical but seductive notion that every country can emulate Germany’s export-driven model without the decades of public investment and artificially low exchange rates that are crucial to Germany’s success.

Mrs. Merkel also seems determined to pander to the prejudices of German voters who believe that suffering is the only way to purge Greece and other southern European countries of their profligate ways.

There’s no question that Greece has behaved inexcusably, spending more than it could afford, failing to collect taxes from some of its richest citizens and fudging its books. And while we sympathize with Greek protests against excessive austerity, we have no patience with politicians who continue to drag their feet over pro-growth reforms and privatizations. But the cure is neither collective punishment nor induced recession. Europe must be willing to help Greece grow out of its problems — on the condition that Greek politicians finally commit themselves to market reforms.

Under strong pressure from international investors, euro-zone leaders have recently adjusted some of their policies. Europe’s central bank has injected much needed liquidity into the Continent’s banking system. Plans are finally under way to add money to a chronically underfinanced European Union bailout fund. But until they abandon the mistaken belief that austerity is the way to debt relief, even those steps won’t be enough.

With Greece rapidly approaching the day (probably next month) when it can no longer pay government salaries and foreign creditors, Europe still has not released needed bailout money. It is not clear whether Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy and others are playing chicken with Athens or think they could withstand Greece defaulting and leaving the euro zone. The risks are enormous.

At a minimum, a Greek default would send damaging aftershocks rippling through government finances and banks across Europe. The ideal and the practice of a united Europe would suffer a major blow. Those are high prices for all of Europe to pay for clinging to a failed idea.

    Europe’s Failed Course, NYT, 17.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/opinion/europes-failed-course-on-the-economy.html

Anthony Shadid, Reporter in the Middle East, Dies at 43

February 16, 2012
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX

Anthony Shadid, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who died on Thursday at 43, had long been passionately interested in the Middle East, first because of his Lebanese-American heritage and later because of what he saw there firsthand.

Mr. Shadid spent most of his professional life covering the region, as a reporter first with The Associated Press; then The Boston Globe; then with The Washington Post, for which he won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2010; and afterward with The New York Times. At his death, from what appeared to be an asthma attack, he was on assignment for The Times in Syria.

Mr. Shadid’s hiring by The Times at the end of 2009 was widely considered a coup for the newspaper, for he had been esteemed throughout his career as an intrepid reporter, a keen observer, an insightful analyst and a lyrical stylist. Much of his work centered on ordinary people who had been forced to pay an extraordinary price for living in the region — or belonging to the religion, ethnic group or social class — that they did.

He was known most recently to Times readers for his clear-eyed coverage of the Arab Spring. For his reporting on that sea change sweeping the region — which included dispatches from Lebanon and Egypt — The Times nominated him, along with a team of his colleagues, for the 2012 Pulitzer in international reporting. (The awards are announced in April.)

In its citation accompanying the nomination, The Times wrote:

“Steeped in Arab political history but also in its culture, Shadid recognized early on that along with the despots, old habits of fear, passivity and despair were being toppled. He brought a poet’s voice, a deep empathy for the ordinary person and an unmatched authority to his passionate dispatches.”

Mr. Shadid’s work entailed great peril. In 2002, as a correspondent for The Globe, he was shot in the shoulder while reporting in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Last March, Mr. Shadid and three other Times journalists — Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks — were kidnapped in Libya by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces. They were held for six days and beaten before being released.

Later that year, as the Syrian authorities denounced him for his coverage and as his family was being stalked by Syrian agents in Lebanon, Mr. Shadid nonetheless stole across the border to interview Syrian protesters who had defied bullets and torture to return to the streets.

“He had such a profound and sophisticated understanding of the region,” Martin Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe, for whom Mr. Shadid worked during his tenure there, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “More than anything, his effort to connect foreign coverage with real people on the ground, and to understand their lives, is what made his work so special. It wasn’t just a matter of diplomacy: it was a matter of people, and how their lives were so dramatically affected by world events.”

Mr. Shadid was born in Oklahoma City on Sept. 26, 1968, the son of Rhonda and Buddy Shadid. The younger Mr. Shadid, who became fluent in Arabic only as an adult, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. He later joined The Associated Press, reporting from Cairo, before moving to The Globe in 2001. He was with The Washington Post from 2003 until 2009.

Mr. Shadid joined The Times on Dec. 31, 2009, as Baghdad bureau chief, and became the newspaper’s bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, last year.

His first marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, the journalist Nada Bakri; their son, Malik; a daughter, Laila, from his first marriage; his parents; a sister, Shannon, of Denver; and a brother, Damon, of Seattle.

He was the author of three books, “Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam” (2001); “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War” (2005); and “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East,” to be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In a front-page article for The Times last year, Mr. Shadid, reporting from Tunisia amid the Arab Spring, displayed his singular combination of authority, acumen and style.

“The idealism of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where the power of the street revealed the frailty of authority, revived an Arab world anticipating change,” he wrote. “But Libya’s unfinished revolution, as inspiring as it is unsettling, illustrates how perilous that change has become as it unfolds in this phase of the Arab Spring.

“Though the rebels’ flag has gone up in Tripoli,” he continued, “their leadership is fractured and opaque; the intentions and influence of Islamists in their ranks are uncertain; Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remains at large in a flight reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s; and foreigners have been involved in the fight in the kind of intervention that has long been toxic to the Arab world.” He added, “Not to mention, of course, that a lot of young men have a lot of guns.”

    Anthony Shadid, Reporter in the Middle East, Dies at 43, NYT, 16.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-reporter-in-the-middle-east-dies-at-43.html

Egyptian Official Vexes Ruling Generals and U.S.

by Pressing Investigation

February 14, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — She is a holdover from the Mubarak era, a friend of the former first lady and the driving force behind the indictment of 16 Americans in a criminal investigation that threatens to undermine the decades-old alliance between Egypt and the United States.

Now Fayza Abul Naga, 61, is defying even Egypt’s military rulers.

With $1.5 billion in annual American aid hanging in the balance, Egypt’s top military officer and de facto chief executive is asking Ms. Abul Naga to moderate her tone. But she has become more caustic than ever, issuing her own warnings for Washington to back off. If the United States is not careful, she says, it may push Egypt closer to Iran.

“Every country has pressure cards in the political field,” she said this week, according to the state newspaper Al Ahram. “Egypt is no exception.”

When Ms. Abul Naga, the minister of planning and international cooperation, requested the investigation into foreign financing of nonprofit groups here, she was widely perceived as a mere agent of the ruling generals. At least two of the generals even hinted that the investigation might reveal the “foreign hands” they blamed for stirring up street protests. But as her case has escalated, officials in Cairo and Washington say she has been acting independently to exploit an emerging power vacuum as the military council’s power erodes.

Now the supposedly all-powerful generals appear afraid of a backlash if they interfere in her campaign, which has tapped into a deep reservoir of anti-American sentiment.

Over the weekend, Egypt’s military ruler, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, publicly called for strengthening relations with the United States and, according to news agency reports, privately urged Ms. Abul Naga and other cabinet officials to moderate their tone. But this week Ms. Abul Naga unloaded as never before.

On Tuesday, state media reported that she had told prosecutors in closed-door testimony in October that the United States had poured money into federally financed nonprofits that promote political organizing — the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House — in an effort to sow chaos, thwart the development of a strong and democratic Egypt and turn the revolution to the interests of the United States and Israel.

The Republican Institute served the “right wing” agenda of its namesake party, she charged, while the Freedom House was a tool of the “Jewish lobby.”

With her vocal support, the case has only gained momentum. In addition to the indictments, the prosecuting judges have issued a travel ban trapping more than a half-dozen Americans in Egypt. Three, including the son of the secretary of transportation, have sought shelter at the American Embassy for fear of arrest.

Although Ms. Abul Naga’s comments this week only aggravated the tensions between the United States and Egypt, it was unclear who might intercede.

With a transfer of power to a civilian president promised within just four months, almost everyone in the Egyptian government, including the 19 members of the ruling military council, appears preoccupied with his or her own personal fate after the generals leave power, American and Egyptian officials say. Some have reason to fear that they could face trials for corruption or charges related to the crackdowns, as former President Hosni Mubarak and many of his lieutenants already have. But others are eager to preserve their positions, buttress their institutions or seek elected offices in the new government.

Ms. Abul Naga declined repeated requests for comment.

“This is a country of separate islands now,” said Mohamed Anwar el-Sadat, the nephew of former President Anwar el-Sadat and a newly elected lawmaker who recently called Ms. Abul Naga to testify before a parliamentary committee. “The Foreign Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the Parliament, the generals of the military council — everyone is his own island.”

The ruling generals were “surprised” by the actions against the American groups, Mr. Sadat said, recounting what he said were conversations with top military officials. “They had not been informed, and they believed the timing was wrong,” he said. “But she knows that Tantawi is only in charge while the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is there. His time is over, so her time is over.”

Signs abound that the military’s authority is fading fast. Civilian judges have for the first time begun to rule against the military council. The police hesitate to use force or even take action for fear of retribution, and earlier this month their diffidence contributed the deaths of more than 70 soccer fans in a riot in Port Said, a parliamentary inquiry found.

Lawmakers, in turn, are moving to dismiss the interior minister, but no one yet knows whether Parliament or the military can claim that power. The Muslim Brotherhood, whose party dominates Parliament, abandoned its policy of avoiding confrontation with the military to call for the dissolution of the entire military-appointed cabinet — including Ms. Abul Naga — to make room for it to form a coalition government. But it is unclear whether even a new cabinet can last more than four months, beyond the promised vote for president.

“Power is in a very fluid state right now,” one American diplomat said, speaking anonymously under diplomatic protocol. “American pressure scares them less than the mob in the street demanding the execution of Tantawi.”

The diplomat added, “It means society is really coming apart at the seams.”

Already many here say that Ms. Abul Naga’s campaign against the Americans has made her all but untouchable — if not potentially electable — in the next stage of Egypt’s transition. “She is a hero,” Mr. Sadat said archly.

Ms. Abul Naga’s leading role in the crackdown is surprising, some old friends say, because she spent many happy years in the West. She speaks fondly of living in New York as one of the closest aides to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the secretary general of the United Nations, who recruited her from the Egyptian foreign service. She later worked for years in Geneva, as Egypt’s representative to the United Nations office there, and to the Human Rights Council.

She was also aware that as recently as 2010 Egypt had pledged to the council to liberalize the strict regulations of nonprofit groups that are now being used to prosecute the Americans — a commitment that American officials say led them to believe that the rules were effectively dead after the ouster of Mr. Mubarak.

But Ms. Abul Naga always stood out for her round-the-clock work habits, deft political skills and personal ambition. “I always told her, ‘When you become foreign minister of Egypt, don’t forget to appoint me your spokesman,’ ” said Ahmad Fawzy, an Egyptian friend of Ms. Abul Naga from the United Nations.

Mr. Mubarak always considered Egypt’s reliance on American aid “a humiliation,” American diplomats wrote in a cable disclosed by WikiLeaks. And Ms. Abul Naga was his chief negotiator in years of battles to stretch and control the American aid money.

Married to a diplomat now serving as Egypt’s ambassador to Japan, Ms. Abul Naga often spent time with a circle of female friends she shared with the former president’s wife, Suzanne, her friends and former officials say.

After Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, Ms. Abul Naga was one of the only cabinet members to retain a post. She even expanded it, adding economic planning as well. Her dual role means that as Ms. Abul Naga defends the crackdown on foreign financing of Egyptian nonprofits she is also in charge of asking the West for billions more in aid to help stabilize the Egyptian economy. Sometimes she does both at the same news conference.

It reminded Mr. Sadat, the lawmaker, of an old Egyptian proverb. “I beg you for charity,” he said, “but I’m your master.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

    Egyptian Official Vexes Ruling Generals and U.S. by Pressing Investigation, NYT, 14.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/world/middleeast/fayza-abul-naga-presses-inquiry-against-us-in-egypt.html

Iran Is Ready to Talk

February 14, 2012
The New York Times
By DENNIS B. ROSS

Washington

SPECULATION about an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities is rife, but there is little discussion about whether diplomacy can still succeed, precluding the need for military action.

Many experts doubt that Tehran would ever accept a deal that uses intrusive inspections and denies or limits uranium enrichment to halt any advances toward a nuclear weapons capability, while still permitting the development of civilian nuclear power. But before we assume that diplomacy can’t work, it is worth considering that Iranians are now facing crippling pressure and that their leaders have in the past altered their behavior in response to such pressure. Notwithstanding all their bluster, there are signs that Tehran is now looking for a way out.

Much has changed in the last three years. In January 2009, Iran was spreading its influence throughout the Middle East, and Arab leaders were reluctant to criticize Iran in public lest they trigger a coercive Iranian reaction. Similarly, Iran’s government wasn’t facing significant economic pressures; Iranians had simply adjusted to the incremental sanctions they were then facing.

Today, Iran is more isolated than ever. The regional balance of power is shifting against Tehran, in no small part because of its ongoing support for the beleaguered government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Assad regime is failing, and in time, Iran will lose its only state ally in the Arab world and its conduit for arming the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iran’s Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and even the United Nations General Assembly, no longer hesitate to criticize Tehran. Gone is the fear of Iranian intimidation, as the Saudis demonstrated by immediately promising to fill the gap and meet Europe’s needs when the European Union announced its decision to boycott the purchase of Iran’s oil. Even after Iran denounced the Saudi move as a hostile act, the Saudis did not back off.

Iran cannot do business with or obtain credit from any reputable international bank, nor can it easily insure its ships or find energy investors. According to Iran’s oil ministry, the energy sector needs more than $100 billion in investments to revitalize its aging infrastructure; it now faces a severe shortfall.

New American penalties on Iran’s central bank and those doing business with it have helped trigger an enormous currency devaluation. In the last six weeks, the Iranian rial has declined dramatically against the dollar, adding to the economic woes Iran is now confronting.

Grain is sitting on ships that won’t unload their cargoes in Iranian ports because suppliers haven’t been paid; Iranian oil is being stored on tankers as Iran’s buyers demand discounts to purchase it; and even those countries that continue to do business with Iran are not paying in dollars. India plans to buy 45 percent of its oil from Iran using rupees, meaning that Iran will be forced to buy Indian goods that it may not want or need.

The Obama administration initially sought genuine engagement with Iran, but it understood that if Iran’s leaders rebuffed such efforts, America would have to apply unprecedented pressure to halt Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Beginning in 2010, Washington worked methodically to impose political, diplomatic, economic and security pressure, making clear that the cost of noncompliance would continue to rise while still leaving the Iranians a way out. This strategy took into account how Iranian leaders had adjusted their behavior in the past to escape major pressure — from ending the war with Iraq in 1988 to stopping the assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1990s to suspending uranium enrichment in 2003.

The Obama administration has now created a situation in which diplomacy has a chance to succeed. It remains an open question whether it will.

Israel worries that it could lose its military option, and it may be reluctant to wait for diplomacy to bear fruit. That said, Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have consistently called for “crippling sanctions,” reflecting a belief that Iran’s behavior could be changed with sufficient pressure. The fact that crippling sanctions have finally been applied means that Israel is more likely to give these sanctions and the related diplomatic offensive a chance to work. And it should.

Still, it is unclear whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose regime depends so heavily on hostility to America, is willing to make a deal on the nuclear issue. Nonetheless, Iran is now signaling that it is interested in diplomacy. Its foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, has declared that Iran will resume talks with the five permanent members of the Security Council and the Germans. He recently said that Iran would discuss Russia’s step-by-step proposal to defuse the nuclear standoff, which Iran refused to entertain when a variation of it was first broached last year.

Now, with Iran feeling the pressure, its leaders suddenly seem prepared to talk. Of course, Iran’s government might try to draw out talks while pursuing their nuclear program. But if that is their strategy, they will face even more onerous pressures, when a planned European boycott of their oil begins on July 1.

Moreover, given Mr. Obama’s stated determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Iran’s leaders may actually be making the use of force against their nuclear facilities more likely by playing for time.

Iran can have civilian nuclear power, but it must not have nuclear weapons. Ultimately, Ayatollah Khamenei will have to decide what poses a greater threat to his rule: ending his quest for nuclear weapons or stubbornly pursuing them as crippling economic pressures mount.

With Iran reeling from sanctions, the proper environment now exists for diplomacy to work. The next few months will determine whether it succeeds.

Dennis B. Ross, a former State Department and National Security Council official,

was a special assistant to President Obama for the Middle East, Afghanistan

and South Asia from 2009 to 2011.

    Iran Is Ready to Talk, NYT, 14.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/opinion/give-diplomacy-with-iran-a-chance.html

Europe v. World

February 14, 2012
The New York Times
By EDWIN M. TRUMAN

Washington

FOR the third time in a century, a bitter conflict fueled by historic grievances has erupted in Europe, with the United States looking from afar and hoping not to get involved. Of course, this is not being fought on the battlefields but in the arcane arenas of international finance. But as in World War I, which President Woodrow Wilson once dismissed as “a drunken brawl,” and in World War II, which America formally stayed out of until Pearl Harbor, the crisis over the euro will require further American involvement — whether we like it or not.

Currently, the United States is discouraging the International Monetary Fund and its non-European members from promising additional financial assistance to Europe.

The American posture is understandable and, at one level, sensible. With our own debt and deficit problems, we and other countries can be forgiven for feeling that it not up to us to extricate Europe from its mistakes and excesses. President Obama, facing a tough re-election fight, is hardly in a position to offer financial aid to Europe. Just as Washington wants Europe to do more to enhance its political and military security, so is it appropriate to demand that Europe do more on its own with respect to its economic and financial security.

But policy passivity risks exacerbating the European crisis and its macroeconomic effects. The United States must show more leadership. First, it must be bolder and more public in setting conditions on Europe’s loan programs. Then, if Europe finally responds convincingly, the United States should rally the rest of the world in a supporting role.

For two years, Europe has dithered over creating a financial firewall to prevent the financial meltdown’s spreading from Greece. Little has come of the discussions. Europe now needs a financial safety net to rescue itself from a self-made conflagration that threatens itself and the rest of the world.

As a measure of the consternation outside of Europe, the economic forecasts released recently by the I.M.F. projected global growth this year at 1.2 percentage points lower than last spring, a deterioration that is largely attributable to mismanagement of the euro crisis. No region of the world has been spared. The loss in global output amounts to $1 trillion.

Two months ago, European leaders asked the I.M.F. and the rest of the world for help, while pledging to make their own financial contribution, channeled through the I.M.F. The United States does not need to put up money, but it has been slow to respond positively. It is time for Washington to insist that I.M.F. assistance be accompanied by conditions on economic and financial policies in the euro area. There should be conditions attached not just to programs to support Greece, Ireland, Portugal and potentially Italy and Spain but also to euro-area policies more broadly because this is a euro-area crisis.

Four conditions are appropriate.

First, countries that can — that is, those where the ratio of government debt to gross domestic product is 90 percent or less — should reverse their projected budget tightening in 2012 and 2013. Those countries are Austria, Finland, France, Slovenia — and, above all, Germany.

Second, the European Central Bank should lower its refinancing rate to 0.25 percent from 1 percent — an action that it has resisted because of an unjustified fear of inflation.

Third, euro-area authorities should set aside at least $1 trillion for a European financial safety net — a far larger amount than what has been publicly discussed so far — to persuade markets to stop betting against debt markets of solvent countries.

Fourth, new loans from the euro area, channeled through the I.M.F back to the euro area, should not be repaid until all existing I.M.F. loans to euro-area countries have been entirely repaid. A change in this treatment is necessary before China, the Persian Gulf countries and other potential contributors are comfortable with throwing a lifeline to a region more prosperous than their own countries.

If these four conditions are met, then the United States should drop its tacit opposition to a proposal by Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the I.M.F. and a former French finance minister, to raise $500 billion to support Europe and actively encourage those countries with the political and financial capacity to participate in the I.M.F. component of a European financial safety net.

Ironically, the I.M.F. will be turning to these emerging markets and developing countries for help just as the euro debt crisis has delayed the timetable for long-promised increases in voting power for those nations at the I.M.F. Given the economic and financial damage inflicted by Europe on the rest of the world, the United States must insist that these promises be strengthened, and speedily fulfilled.

 

Edwin M. Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, was director of international finance at the Federal Reserve Board from 1977 to 1998 and assistant secretary of the Treasury for international affairs from 1998 to 2001. He served as a counselor to the Treasury secretary in 2009.

    Europe v. World, NYT, 14.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/opinion/europe-v-world.html

The Enablers

February 14, 2012
The New York Times

China, Russia and India see themselves as global leaders. So why have they been enabling two dangerous regimes, Syria and Iran, to continue on destructive paths?

On Tuesday, President Bashar al-Assad showed again his willingness to use brutal force to crush the pro-democracy opposition. He brushed aside stinging criticism by Navi Pillay, the top United Nations human rights official, and resumed the shelling of the city of Homs. The government has barred independent reporting for most of the yearlong unrest, but activists said rockets and tank shells had pummeled the city.

The violence has gotten worse in the 11 days since Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution, sponsored by the Arab League, calling for a peaceful transfer of power. India was on the right side that day, voting for the resolution. But, for months, it had worked to block action. The resolution was no panacea, but, if it had passed, it would have sent a compelling message of international solidarity against Mr. Assad and the elites who keep him in power.

Many Syrian deaths later, China may be reconsidering its stance. As an oil-hungry nation, it could not have failed to hear the rebuke issued to China and Russia on Friday by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for opposing the resolution. “We are going through scary days and unfortunately what happened at the United Nations is absolutely regrettable,” he said.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China, speaking at a European-China summit meeting in Beijing, said, “What is most urgent and pressing now is to prevent war and chaos” in Syria. There is no evidence Russia has had similar second thoughts, but China is showing renewed interest in working with the Arab League. Beijing’s shift could shame Moscow into reconsidering its support for Mr. Assad, and approving United Nations action, including sanctions.

China and India are also hampering the effort to ratchet up sanctions on Iran even as penalties imposed by the Security Council, the United States and the European Union appear to be affecting Iran’s economy and politics. (The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is expected to announce on Wednesday that a new uranium enrichment plant is fully operational.)

China cut its purchases of Iranian oil this year and secured alternative supplies from Russia and Saudi Arabia. But it is still a major purchaser. India is also still buying and is now Iran’s biggest oil customer. Because of American sanctions, these deals are not as lucrative as they could be for Iran.

The two countries’ need for oil is real, but they should take full advantage of Saudi Arabia’s offer to ramp up production to offset any losses from Iran. The International Energy Agency says there is enough oil supply worldwide to prevent a price shock from an embargo.

We do not know if sanctions can force Iran to give up its nuclear program or force it to negotiate a compromise deal. But the international community is finally at a moment when serious sanctions are in place and beginning to bite. Iran is finding it hard to pay for food imports and has resorted to bartering. It’s time for Russia, China and India (which desperately wants a Security Council seat) to meet the test of leadership.

That means all three need to work to find ways to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions. For Russia and China, it means standing against Mr. Assad’s siege on his people.

    The Enablers, NYT, 14.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/opinion/the-enablers.html

Syria Resumes Heavy Shelling of Homs

February 14, 2012
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Life has become increasingly unbearable in Homs, a city under fierce bombardment by the Syrian government, with residents recounting days of deprivation, rockets and tank shells exploding around them and efforts to bribe government soldiers to escape during lulls in the fighting.

A young woman who fled the city, Syria’s third-largest, for Beirut spoke on Tuesday of the hellish experience that she and others had endured, trapped in their dwellings without heat while desperately awaiting breaks in the military offensive to forage for food or try to escape.

The Syrian government pressed its campaign against rebellious cities across the country on Tuesday, with residents of the central city of Homs describing the renewed shelling there as particularly harsh.

Activists in Homs said that during the most intense periods of shelling, starting around first light on Tuesday, rockets and tank shells whistled into the embattled Baba Amr neighborhood as often as every two minutes.

“The idea of safety doesn’t exist anymore in Baba Amr,” Omar Shakir, an activist in the neighborhood reached via Skype, said as explosions erupted in the background. “Scary is all that exists.”

Videos uploaded to YouTube’s syriapioneer channel showed gray and black smoke leaping high overhead as shells crashed into buildings, while the staccato outbursts of machine guns sounded incessantly. Activists described it as the heaviest shelling in five days in an assault that began on Feb. 4.

The city lacks electricity and cellphone service, and land lines fade erratically. Facebook pages overflow with requests from relatives abroad asking people inside Syria to check on their loved ones.

The young woman who fled, a 19-year-old student who asked not to be named because her parents were still in Homs, arrived in Beirut on Tuesday. She said that troops allowed civilians to escape on Saturday and Sunday and that people bribed soldiers to ferry them out of the Inshaat neighborhood on tanks or to clear roadways for them to drive their cars out.

She described a city where “all roads were closed, and even if they weren’t, the shelling makes it impossible for you to go anywhere.”

Government services have collapsed, she said, and high, stinking piles of garbage rot on many corners or emit rancid smoke — having been ignited by fighters inside the city for camouflage against government snipers.

Residents have grown to fear the two main hospitals, she said, because the doctors still reporting to work tend to be government sympathizers. Some even carry guns as they make their rounds.

But she detailed a kind of symbiotic cease-fire that had developed between the young army recruits deployed at some neighborhood checkpoints, the font of many defections. The soldiers get food and a certain degree of safety, while residents feel they can run short errands unmolested or occasionally escape entirely.

Residents live in multiple layers of clothing and ration their use of kerosene for heat and hot water. On relatively quiet days, the food stores open, and people rush to buy canned food and flashlights. Simple things like Pepsi have become a luxury item, she said, while hallways in many homes are now stacked with bags of rice and sugar.

“They are anticipating a long siege,” the student said.

Civilians in the Inshaat neighborhood felt more vulnerable because there was no one to protect them, while most of the soldiers from the Free Syrian Army — the name adopted by all local militias — were in Baba Amr. A couple of neighborhoods nearby asked the antigovernment militia members not to come in at all so they could remain safe havens where the wounded, women and children could seek shelter.

In Baba Amr, Mr. Shakir, the activist, estimated that 60 percent of the buildings had suffered too much damage to be habitable. The neighborhood was hit by occasional mortar shells overnight, he said, with the heavier tank and other rounds coming at daylight.

“We are under full siege. It is horrible here,” Mr. Shakir said. “I have not tasted bread for the past five days.”

The Syrian government says that it is attacking foreign-inspired terrorist gangs in Baba Amr, and that the fires are tires set alight to make it seem as if the buildings are burning. Syria has severely limited access by members of the foreign media to the country, so claims about the fighting in Homs were impossible to verify independently.

Aside from Homs, activists said the government was assaulting neighborhoods from the outskirts of Aleppo in the north to the area around Idlib — where there is a concentration of defecting soldiers — down to the suburbs of Damascus and the southern city of Deraa, where the uprising first started last March.

After antigovernment protesters blocked the main highway just outside Aleppo toward Turkey with burning tires, the government moved in tanks that clashed with defecting soldiers, said a statement from the Local Coordinating Committees.

It said dozens of people died on Tuesday, the toll including what it said were two victims of torture at the hands of the security services, whose bodies were dumped in public.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, said five government troops died and nine were wounded in a gunfight with defecting soldiers near Hama. It had no other details.

The official news agency reported that 13 members of the security services were buried on Tuesday.

But with diplomacy stalled, the renewed onslaught seemed to confirm the accusation by Navi Pillay, the top United Nations human rights official, who told the General Assembly on Monday that the Syrian authorities were interpreting the repeated international failure to end the violence as a green light to escalate deadly attacks on its political opponents with indiscriminate brutality and “overwhelming force.”

Syria’s Foreign Ministry responded by sending Ms. Pillay a letter emphasizing its “absolute rejection” of her claims, reported SANA, the official news agency. “The ministry pointed out that the commissioner has been turned into a tool in the hands of some countries targeting Syria and ignoring the terrorist crimes committed by the armed groups,” it said.

Syria has repeatedly denied requests by the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council, which works closely with Ms. Pillay, to send a fact-finding mission to Syria. The United Nations stopped tallying the death toll in the 11-month uprising after it passed 5,400 in January, because it could no longer verify the numbers.

Ms. Pillay said at least 300 people were killed in Homs just in 10 days.

At the United Nations General Assembly, Egypt took the lead in circulating the draft text of a nonbinding resolution endorsing Arab League efforts to halt the violence and begin a political transition toward democracy. A copy of the latest draft basically echoed the resolution negotiated in the Security Council that Russia and China vetoed in early February.

It also called on Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, to appoint a special envoy to the conflict to underscore the importance of trying to reach a peaceful settlement.

On Tuesday, China, which with Russia vetoed an Arab and Western plan to urge President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, said it had taken new soundings in the region, sending a Foreign Ministry envoy, Li Huaxin, to Cairo for what were called “frank and useful” talks with Nabil al-Araby, the head of the Arab League, news reports said.

Mr. Araby has been canvassing support for a joint Arab League-United Nations peace-keeping force in Syria, but the Damascus authorities have rejected the idea outright and Russia has spoken dismissively of it.

In Cairo, Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of prestigious Al Azhar College of Islamic Studies, called for urgent Arab action to stop the violence. "I call on the human conscience to stop this hellish killing machine that works to shed blood,” he said, according to The Associated Press. He added, “The international conscience must be awoken in China and Russia.”

Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times

contributed reporting from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Syria Resumes Heavy Shelling of Homs, NYT, 14.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/world/middleeast/syrian-tanks-resume-shelling-despite-un-rebuke.html

Israel Says Iran Is Behind Bombs

February 13, 2012
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Tensions between Israel and Iran rose sharply on Monday when bombers struck at Israeli Embassy personnel in the capitals of India and Georgia. Israel accused the Tehran government of being behind the attacks, which Iran denied.

The wife of an Israeli defense envoy to New Delhi was hurt along with several other people when her car was destroyed by an explosive device placed on it by a motorcyclist at a red light. In Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, a similar device was discovered on the car of a local staff member of the Israeli Embassy, but was defused by the police.

Both resembled attacks that have killed five of Iran’s nuclear scientists in recent years, most recently last month. Iran has attributed the assassinations to Israeli agents and has vowed to take revenge. The scientists’ assassinations — along with sabotage of Iran’s nuclear program through cyberwarfare and faulty parts — are aimed at delaying what the West believes is Iran’s drive to build a nuclear weapon.

If actually carried out by Iran, the attacks would be another indication that the leadership in Tehran was willing to reach beyond its borders against its enemies and expand its attacks to civilians. The United States has charged that Iran was behind a plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador on American soil, and Israel has said that Iran has planned to attack its citizens in various countries, but that those plots were stopped.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contended that Monday’s attacks fit that pattern.

“In recent months, we have witnessed several attempts to attack Israeli citizens and Jews in several countries, including Azerbaijan, Thailand and others,” he said. “In each instance, we succeeded in foiling the attacks in cooperation with local authorities. Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, were behind all of these attempted attacks.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry rejected Israel’s accusations on Monday. A spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said, “Israel has bombed its embassies in New Delhi and Tbilisi to tarnish Iran’s friendly ties with the host countries,” adding, “Israel perpetrated the terrorist actions to launch psychological warfare against Iran.”

Iran has defended its nuclear program as peaceful and has defiantly pursued uranium enrichment through years of international pressure and sanctions. Israel’s increasingly urgent warnings on the need to halt Iran’s nuclear progress, before it gets much closer to being able to build a bomb, have prompted concerns that Israel might unilaterally mount a military strike — and have added to the implacable enmity between the two.

Iran’s oil and banking industries are suffering from sanctions implemented by the United States and Europe to pressure the country to back off its nuclear program. Iranian leaders have vowed to fight back through shutting the vital Strait of Hormuz and through military strikes on countries that are used as launching pads for attacks on it.

Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, a spokesman for Iran’s Joint Armed Forces Staff, said recently that “the enemies of the Iranian nation, especially the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime, have to be held responsible for their activities.”

Iranian leaders have called Israel a tumor that must be removed, and Iran arms and finances Hezbollah and Hamas, which are founded on the principle that Israel has no right to exist.

On Monday, Israeli officials said there was enough evidence from the scenes in Georgia and India to say that the bombs were the work of Iranian agents.

“Iran’s fingerprints are all over this,” one official said after emerging from high-level meetings in Jerusalem, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Some American Jewish leaders have expressed concern that synagogues and American Jewish centers could be targets in the increased tensions. In 1994, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 people. The authorities there have accused Iranian diplomats of being behind that attack.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist group with close ties to Iran, has promised to take revenge for the killing of its top commander, Imad Mugniyah, four years ago this week. Mr. Mugniyah had been sought by the United States in terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Americans in the 1980s.

Israel held him responsible for Hezbollah military operations in southern Lebanon from the mid-1990s. Israel is widely thought to have killed him with a powerful bomb in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Israeli analysts said the attacks on Monday were insignificant enough that the Israeli government would not feel driven to counterattack.

“Clearly Israel is not going to attack Iran over this,” Yoram Schweitzer, director of a terrorism project at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said by telephone. “The effect of this specific attack does not necessitate a harsh Israeli response other than condemnation.”

Michael Herzog, a retired brigadier general who is an international fellow in Israel with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, agreed. “There is no need to respond,” he said in a telephone interview. “What is at stake in Israel’s calculations about Iran is much bigger than this.”

The attack in New Delhi took place less than a mile from the residence of the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

In a news conference Monday night, Delhi’s police commissioner, B. K. Gupta, said a witness “saw a person on a motorcycle sticking some kind of device on the back of the car.” As the motorcycle moved away, “a mild blast took place in the back of the car,” he said.

The injured woman was Tal Yehoshua Koren, who is married to an Israeli defense official at the embassy and also works there. She was on her way to pick up her children at the American Embassy school. The car’s driver, Manoj Sharma, was also wounded. Two occupants of a nearby car were also hurt.

Ms. Yehoshua Koren underwent spinal surgery, according to Dr. Deep Makkar of Primus Super Specialty Hospital, in New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave.

Shrapnel “penetrated her spine and her liver,” Dr. Makkar said, adding that she could face neurological injuries. The other three victims were admitted to a nearby hospital with minor injuries.

“India very strongly condemns such an unfortunate incident,” said S. M. Krishna, India’s minister of external affairs, who also called Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister. “It will be fully investigated and the culprit will be brought to justice.”

India has resisted American and European pressure to curtail trade with Iran because it relies heavily on Iranian oil.

Israeli diplomats have been on high alert since Pakistan-based militants attacked in the city of Mumbai in 2008, killing more than 160 people, including 6 people in a Chabad Jewish community center.

Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Michael Schwirtz from Moscow, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar from New Delhi, Alan Cowell from London, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Israel Says Iran Is Behind Bombs, NYT, 13.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/world/middleeast/israeli-embassy-officials-attacked-in-india-and-georgia.html

U.S. and Israel Split on Speed of Iran Threat

February 8, 2012
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — Amid mounting tensions over whether Israel will carry out a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and Israel remain at odds over a fundamental question: whether Iran’s crucial nuclear facilities are about to become impregnable.

Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, coined the phrase “zone of immunity” to define the circumstances under which Israel would judge it could no longer hold off from an attack because Iran’s effort to produce a bomb would be invulnerable to any strike. But judging when that moment will arrive has set off an intense debate with the Obama administration, whose officials counter that there are other ways to make Iran vulnerable.

Senior Israeli officials, including the foreign minister and leader of the Mossad, have traveled to Washington in recent weeks to make the case that this point is fast approaching. American officials have made reciprocal visits to Jerusalem, arguing that Israel and the West have more time and should allow sanctions and covert actions to deter Iran’s plans.

The Americans have also used the discussions to test their belief, based on a series of public statements by Israeli officials, that an Israeli strike against Iran could come as early as spring, according to an official familiar with the discussions.

President Obama tried to defuse arguments for military action in a telephone call last month with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the substance of which was confirmed by an Obama administration official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the conversation. While the two men have had an often contentious relationship over Middle East diplomacy, American officials emerged from that exchange persuaded that Mr. Netanyahu was willing to give economic sanctions and other steps time to work.

The difference of opinion over Iran’s nuclear “immunity” is critical because it plays into not just the timing — or bluffing — about a possible military strike, but the calculations about how deeply and quickly sanctions against Iran must bite. If the Israeli argument is right, the question of how fast the Iranians can assemble a weapon becomes less important than whether there is any way to stop them.

“ ‘Zone of immunity’ is an ill-defined term,” said a senior Obama administration official, expressing frustration that the Israelis are looking at the problem too narrowly, given the many kinds of pressure being placed on Tehran and the increasing evidence that far tougher sanctions are having an effect.

The Israelis have zeroed in on Iran’s plan to put much of its uranium enrichment near Qum in an underground facility beneath so many layers of granite that even the Pentagon acknowledges it would be out of the reach of its best bunker-busting bombs. Once enrichment activities are under way at Qum, the Israelis argue, Iran could throw out United Nations inspectors and produce bomb-grade fuel without fear the facility would be destroyed.

At its core, the official said, the argument the Israelis make is that once the Iranians get an “impregnable breakout capability” — that is, a place that is protected from a military strike — “it makes no difference whether it will take Iran six months or a year or five years” to fabricate a nuclear weapon, he said.

The Americans have a very different view, according to a second senior official who has discussed the concept with Israelis. He said “there are many other options” to slow Iran’s march to a completed weapon, like shutting off Iran’s oil revenues, taking out facilities that supply centrifuge parts or singling out installations where the Iranians would turn the fuel into a weapon.

Administration officials cite this more complex picture in pressing the Israelis to give the latest sanctions a chance to inflict enough pain on the Iranian leadership to force it back to the negotiating table, or to make the decision that the nuclear program is not worth the cost.

Iran’s currency has plunged, they note; its oil is piling up in storage tanks because it cannot find buyers, and there is growing evidence of fissures among the country’s leadership.

After a period of doubt about Israel’s intentions at the end of last year, administration officials said the two sides were now communicating better. Mr. Obama, they said, reflected that when he said in an interview on Sunday with NBC News, “I don’t think that Israel has made a decision on what they need to do.”

This is not the first time that the Israelis have invented a phrase that suggests a hard deadline before an attack. At the end of the Bush administration, they said they could not allow Iran to go past “the point of no return.” That phrase was also ill-defined, but seemed to suggest that once Iran had the know-how and the basic materials to make a bomb, it would be inevitable.

While nuclear experts believe Iran now has enough uranium to fuel four or more weapons, it would have to enrich it to bomb-grade levels, which would take months. Beyond that, Iran would have to produce a warhead that could fit atop an Iranian missile — a process that could take one to three years, most experts say.

Still, Mr. Barak’s theory of “immunity” has gained a lot of attention in recent weeks, complicating a debate charged with bellicose language — in Israel and Iran and among Republicans on the presidential campaign trail, where Mitt Romney and other candidates have pledged Israel full support in any military confrontation with Iran.

Disputes between the United States and Israel are inevitable, according to experts, given the radically different stakes of a nuclear Iran for a distant superpower and for a neighbor whose very existence the leaders in Tehran have pledged to eradicate.

“No end of consultations can remove that asymmetry,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

Next month, Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to visit Washington to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israeli lobbying group, to whom he and other Israeli leaders have regularly spoken about Iran’s “existential threat.” The White House has not yet announced whether Mr. Netanyahu will meet with Mr. Obama, though officials say it is likely.

Officials said that for all the friction between the United States and Israel over issues like Jewish settlements in the West Bank, it had not spilled over into the dialogue over Iran, in part because Mr. Obama has ordered it “walled off” from politics.

Administration officials also noted a distinction in the tone of Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu, who does not publicly favor the phrase “zone of immunity.” This week, an American official noted, Mr. Netanyahu declared that on the topic of Iran, officials should just “shut up.”

“I think that’s good advice,” the American official said.

    U.S. and Israel Split on Speed of Iran Threat, NYT, 8.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/world/middleeast/us-and-israel-split-over-how-to-deter-iran.html

In Syria, We Need to Bargain With the Devil

February 6, 2012
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS NOE

Beirut

ALMOST one year after anti-government protests began in Syria, a disaster of enormous moral and strategic proportions is fast approaching. Full-scale civil war is now likely. And a multifront, conventional and possibly unconventional war ignited by events in the Levant is also increasingly plausible.

However, many in the West, in some Arab governments and even in the Syrian opposition still think a “controlled collapse” of Bashar al-Assad’s government is possible.

According to this view, increasing pressure from all around will, at some point, fracture the government and its supporters both at home and abroad. Any resulting death and destruction, as well as regional blowback, will be within acceptable limits.

Unfortunately, there are at least three problems that make a controlled collapse unlikely.

First, the Assad government, which still enjoys substantial support from the army, the elite and other segments of the population, may be able to prolong its bloody denouement, with help from outsiders. Russia, which sees Syria as an indispensable strategic asset, joined China on Saturday in vetoing a United Nations resolution against the Assad government.

Iran has staked its own vital interests on Mr. Assad’s regime, which is a crucial conduit for Tehran’s support for the militant Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah in their common struggle against Israel.

Second, the violence from any drawn-out collapse will most likely exceed the limits of moral or strategic acceptability for the West and its allies — not to mention the Syrian people. Sectarian conflicts that divide the Shiite and other minority communities from the majority Sunni population will accelerate, compounding tensions in neighboring Lebanon, where Sunni fighters are now staging attacks into Syria, and also in Iraq, where sectarian violence has sharply increased in recent weeks.

Third, the resulting movement of refugees will add yet another destabilizing element to a humanitarian crisis. After all, Syria already hosts millions of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees who are likely to experience further anguish and loss.

Far from controlled collapse, a likelier scenario is a bloody last-ditch effort by Mr. Assad, Iran and Hezbollah to save the Syrian government, which they have the means to do.

These “axis of resistance” forces would most likely project their formidable military power — which includes chemical weapons in the case of Syria — against their enemies in a fight for their collective existence. Conveniently for all three of them, there are multiple ways Israel could be goaded into a major conflict without it seeming as if Mr. Assad or Hezbollah were responsible, in the eyes of their supporters. Indeed, a lone rocket attack from southern Lebanon that kills a large number of Israeli civilians is a distinct possibility.

To counter this dangerous situation responsibly, the United States and its allies would have to be willing to plan for and then swiftly implement a wide pre-emptive military strike. In even the best-case scenario, this would mean holding large chunks of Lebanese and Syrian territory with ground forces.

Adequate pre-emptive planning and action, though, seems extremely unlikely given the political and financial constraints faced by Western countries at the moment, not to mention the repercussions a major war in the Middle East would have for Western interests.

It is not enough, then, to blame Russian and Chinese vetoes at the Security Council or even the murderous Assad regime for the danger that is gripping the region right now — even if they deserve much of the blame.

Instead, Washington should adopt a realistic, albeit distasteful, strategy that seeks to steadily defuse the conflict rather than watch it explode in everyone’s face. And that means dealing with Mr. Assad.

MR. ASSAD is a brutally repressive and dangerous leader who is responsible for most of the death and destruction that has plagued Syria in recent months, but the consequences of pushing Iran, Syria and Hezbollah beyond their red lines will most likely be far worse.

America must therefore dispense with the inconsistent maxim that bargaining is morally prohibited when a leader is deemed to have gone beyond the pale — especially when bargaining could actually mitigate future fallout, while eventually securing one’s interests and values.

The main reason for making a deal with Mr. Assad right now — even one where he is initially offered more carrots than sticks — is precisely that a Western-led process that steadily undermines his ability and desire to use violence would stabilize a quickly deteriorating regional situation, gradually opening up Syria’s political system and reducing repression over time.

Thankfully, America and its allies are far more powerful than Syria, which means they possess the tools and flexibility to see such a strategy of pre-emptive concessions through to a successful conclusion.

The broad coalition currently facing Mr. Assad would first have to publicly lay out a grand bargain that retreats from the position of demanding that he step down immediately.

In exchange, a robust and competent contingent of Arab and United Nations monitors should promptly fan out across the country in order to verify the army’s pullback of heavy weaponry and the steady release of political prisoners. They would provide a permanent presence, and citizens could approach them to register complaints about violence committed by any side.

A national reconciliation conference outside of Syria should then be convened under Arab League and United Nations auspices. This would lay the groundwork for writing a new constitution and holding multiparty, supervised parliamentary elections later this year — as Mr. Assad himself recently proposed — and presidential elections in 2013. The reconciliation conference should also begin an investigation into the violence of the past year.

Three incentives could make the deal extremely difficult for Mr. Assad to reject.

First, America and its allies should call on the Free Syrian Army and other insurgents to suspend their operations. This would entail working with neighboring countries like Turkey and Jordan to create internationally supervised, weapons-free safe zones for the fighters, their families and others who feared retribution.

Second, the United States and the European Union would relax sanctions based on the government’s adherence to the deal and would set up an international conference of donors to support the material needs of the Syrian people.

Finally, so that it is not tarred as a Western plot, any deal would have to include a serious American-led effort to broker the return to Syria of the Golan Heights, which Israel has controlled since 1967.

Although there appears to be little political will for such an approach in Israel at the moment — the government sees no need to make concessions to Mr. Assad’s weak, teetering government — expending American political capital on a more promising peace process makes sense. Unlike the now defunct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, talks with Syria could actually succeed (they broke down over a few hundred meters of land in 2000). Achieving an Israeli-Syrian deal could truly isolate the intransigent Iran-Hezbollah axis at a critical moment in the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program.

This benefit, together with the prospect of normalized ties between Israel and Syria, might prove attractive to members of Israel’s security establishment who have long viewed a deal with Syria as both politically doable and strategically vital.

For its part, the badly shaken government in Damascus might find this a propitious moment to accept a deal as a way back from the abyss, even if this would most likely mean Mr. Assad’s eventual exit in the future. And if Mr. Assad rejects it, such a patently unreasonable move might actually offer the best hope yet of splitting his government and controlling the resulting collapse.

Admittedly, the prospects of successfully orchestrating such a deal now are far less promising than they were early last year.

But the realization that die-hard elements in Damascus, Beirut and Tehran could unleash great regional destruction should prompt a long overdue discussion about putting forward a credible and comprehensive bargain.

Negotiations now, rather than war later, could lead to a far better outcome for all parties — even if that means Syrians’ aspirations for freedom might be met much later than anyone would like.

 

Nicholas Noe is a contributing writer for Bloomberg View
and the editor of “Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.”

    In Syria, We Need to Bargain With the Devil, NYT, 6.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/opinion/in-syria-we-need-to-bargain-with-the-devil.html

U.S. Embassy in Syria Closes as Violence Flares

February 6, 2012
The New York Times
By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The United States closed its embassy in Syria on Monday and withdrew its staff in the face of escalating mayhem for which American officials blamed the Syrian government’s unbridled repression of an 11-month-old uprising.

The move was another dramatic moment in a week full of them, as the confrontation in Syria turned even more violent and more unpredictable. Diplomatic efforts have largely collapsed, save for a Russian delegation visiting Damascus on Tuesday, and both the Syrian government and its opposition have signaled that each believes that the grinding conflict will be resolved only through force of arms.

For weeks, Western embassies have reduced their staffs, and on Monday Britain also recalled its ambassador for consultations. Echoing a cascade of diplomatic invective, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, described the mounting violence as yet more evidence that President Bashar al-Assad must surrender power.

“This is a doomed regime as well as a murdering regime,” he told the House of Commons. “There is no way it can recover its credibility internationally.”

Though the government has pressed forward with a crackdown in the suburbs of the capital, Damascus, and in a rugged northern region around the town of Idlib, the city of Homs has witnessed the most pronounced violence. Opposition groups said government forces again shelled the city, despite international condemnations of a similar attack on Friday and Saturday that they said killed more than 200 people.

Another grim toll was reported Monday in the city, Syria’s third largest. The Local Coordination Committees, an opposition group that seeks to document the violence, said government forces killed 47 people in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, especially Baba Amr and Khalidya. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number at 43. There was no way to independently confirm either number.

“The situation is so miserable,” said a 40-year-old man who gave his name as Ahmed. “Gunfire is falling like rain, and all the stores are closed. We keep hearing unbelievably loud explosions that shake the windows every half-hour.”

Explosions could be heard over the phone when speaking with residents in Homs. Videos smuggled out showed a chaotic scene at a clinic, as people rushed past doctors and staff members, shouting “Oh God!” In one video, said to document the scene, blood smeared the sidewalk. Another showed bloodied corpses.

The government has flatly denied the tolls quoted by opposition groups. On Saturday, it said Homs was quiet. State-run news media placed blame for the violence Monday on “armed terrorist groups” firing mortars within Homs. In a statement, the Interior Ministry said that it was seeking “to restore security and stability to Homs,” and that six members of the security forces and “scores of terrorists” had been killed.

Clearly laying the blame on Syria’s president, the State Department said in a statement that the United States had “suspended operations of our embassy in Damascus,” and that Ambassador Robert S. Ford and all American personnel had left the country. It said the closing reflected “serious concerns that our embassy is not protected from armed attack.”

“The deteriorating security situation that led to the suspension of our diplomatic operations makes clear once more the dangerous path Assad has chosen and the regime’s inability to fully control Syria,” said a spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland. American officials said the embassy staff had relocated temporarily to neighboring Jordan.

The announcement said Ambassador Ford would “continue his work and engagement with the Syrian people as head of our Syria team in Washington.”

It stopped short of a formal break in diplomatic relations with Syria, but was considered a strong signal that Obama administration officials believe there is nothing left to talk about with Mr. Assad. Though more isolated than at any time in the four decades since Mr. Assad’s family took power, the government was emboldened by the vetoes of Russia and China on Saturday of a United Nations Security Council resolution backed by Western and Arab states supporting a plan to end the bloodshed. The vetoes appeared to end, for the moment, any concerted diplomatic efforts.

Instead, countries traded barbs. Mr. Hague called the vetoes “a betrayal of the Syrian people.” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was scornful of the criticism, saying it was “perhaps on the verge of hysterical.” In China, a commentary in the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily argued that the chaos that followed the toppling of governments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya proved that forced leadership changes only made matters worse. “Simply backing one side and beating down the other, seemingly helpful, will in fact only sow seeds of future disasters,” said the article, signed Zhong Sheng, an often-used pseudonym that can be read to mean “China’s voice.”

Throughout the uprising, Homs, near the Lebanese border in western Syria, has served as a barometer of the shifting dynamics. Demonstrations erupted there in the beginning last March, forging a vibrant culture of protest that has taken hold across the country. It has also seen mounting sectarian strife — pitting a Sunni Muslim majority against minority Alawites, a heterodox sect that provides much of the leadership of Mr. Assad’s government. Lawlessness has mounted, as have vendettas in a city strewn with trash and suffering shortages of food and electricity.

Defectors and their armed allies control some neighborhoods, and the army has resorted to shelling that residents call indiscriminate. Many residents have lamented the violence and hardship, though the opposition to Mr. Assad seems to have broad support among the city’s Sunnis.

“We are not hiding in shelters, we are home,” said a resident of the neighborhood of Inshaat who gave his name as Omar. “My friends share lots of these feelings, I guess. They stay in rooms far from the street, and they sleep in living rooms and kitchens.”

He predicted more bloodshed.

“What is going to happen is more killing and more brutality, this I am sure of. He will not leave unless we kick him out by force,” he said of Mr. Assad. “Protests are necessary but not enough. I see no other choice. Negotiation, sharing, politics are useless with such a regime. He came to power by force and won’t leave it in any other way.”

While peaceful protests continue, the sense of a gathering armed confrontation is growing, even in citadels of the regime’s support, like Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city. As with the capital’s suburbs, fighting has mounted in Aleppo, near the Turkish border.

“All the young guys are getting armed, even university students,” said Ammar, a 21-year-old university student there, reached by phone. “I told them don’t, but they said, ‘There is no free army to protect us, so we need to protect ourselves on our own.’ ”

Government forces have kept up a campaign to retake Damascus’ suburbs and the northern region around Idlib. The state-run news agency said gunmen had killed three officers and captured others at a checkpoint in Jabal al-Zawiyah, near Idlib, a rugged region also near the Turkish border. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported that insurgents had killed 3 officers and 19 soldiers.

Reporting was contributed by Steven Lee Myers from Washington, Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times from Beirut, John F. Burns from London, Michael Schwirtz from Moscow, Michael Wines from Beijing, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    U.S. Embassy in Syria Closes as Violence Flares, NYT, 6.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/world/middleeast/violence-in-syria-continues-after-diplomacy-fails.html

19 Americans in Egypt Face Trial in Inquiry Over Funding

February 5, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — The Egyptian authorities have referred 19 Americans and two dozen others to face criminal trials, the state media reported Sunday. The move is part of a politically charged investigation into the foreign financing of nonprofit groups that has shaken the 30-year alliance between the United States and Egypt.

The referral flies in the face of increasingly urgent warnings to Egypt’s military rulers from the Obama administration and senior Congressional leaders that the investigation could jeopardize $1.5 billion in American aid expected this year.

Before the money can be released, Congress requires that the State Department certify that Egypt is making progress toward democracy, including respecting the independence of civil groups. The administration and State Department officials have said the investigation represents a failure to meet those criteria.

Among the Americans referred to trial is Sam LaHood, the leader in Egypt of the International Republican Institute. He is the son of Ray LaHood, the United States secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois.

The International Republican Institute and its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, are independent nonprofit groups, with close ties to the Congressional leadership, that promote democracy in countries around the world.

The two groups are the highest-profile targets of the investigation, which has been accompanied by a drumbeat of anti-American language from Egypt’s military-led government suggesting that Washington has been paying to stir up unrest in the Egyptian streets.

Two other American groups backed in part by American government money, Freedom House and a journalism institute, are also part of the investigation, along with several Egyptian organizations that rely on foreign financing.

The 43 people referred to trial have been charged with violating restrictions on the foreign financing of nonprofit groups.

The prosecution relies on laws left over from the authoritarian government of former President Hosni Mubarak that have in effect kept virtually every independent civil organization here in a kind of legal twilight, its workers subject to arrest at any time.

The laws require all civil groups to register for a government license that, in practice, is almost never granted to a genuinely independent group that might criticize the government or its policies. Given the legal and political risks, the laws have the added effect of virtually eliminating domestic donations to support such groups.

The laws also require that any foreign financing to Egyptian nonprofit groups flow only through a government ministry and only to licensed groups. Because of the paucity of domestic financing, foreign funds, mainly from the United States and Europe, have been the mainstay of human rights groups here.

Although neither the National Democratic Institute nor the National Republican Institute has received a license from the Egyptian government, both were formally invited here as official observers of the recent parliamentary elections.

Both groups are barred by United States law from partisan activity in the countries where they operate. In Latin America, the groups have sometimes been accused of violating those rules, collaborating with American intelligence agencies or otherwise attempting to influence internal politics.

In Egypt, they have operated for years under the constant surveillance of the secret police and have been pressured by the American government not to upset the alliance with Egypt. Their work here has been mainly to teach the nonpartisan nuts and bolts of politics, which they have done for groups across the political spectrum.

Egyptian activists said the staffs of the two groups seemed to fear any association with groups that actively opposed either the Mr. Mubarak’s government or the military council that has ruled the country since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.

Under Mr. Mubarak, the government tolerated some independent rights groups, including the National Democratic Institute. The group’s staff members said they kept the Egyptian intelligence services well informed of their activities in order to avoid conflict or arrest. But they remained legally vulnerable.

Many groups assumed that after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, the generals who took power would repeal the restrictions on civil society groups as part of the new era of freedom, just as the generals have revoked restrictions on independent labor unions and political parties. Instead, the military-led government has applied the law with new force.

In December, the Egyptian riot police raided the offices of as many as nine nonprofit groups, including the four American organizations, as part of its investigation into foreign financing. The police confiscated money, computers and files and shut down the groups’ operations. A month later, the authorities imposed a travel ban on at least six Americans and several Europeans who were under scrutiny in the investigation.

The 43 suspects on charged Sunday have also been barred from leaving the country, The Associated Press reported.

The State Department acknowledged last week that its embassy in Cairo had given shelter to three people who worked for the groups and feared arrest. But on Sunday some of the people referred for trial said that the Egyptian police had not yet come to arrest them.

    19 Americans in Egypt Face Trial in Inquiry Over Funding, NYT, 5.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/middleeast/egypt-will-try-19-americans-on-criminal-charges.html

Deadly Attack on Syrian City Adds to Push for U.N. to Act

February 4, 2012
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ANTHONY SHADID

UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria ended in acrimony and a veto by Russia and China on Saturday, hours after the Syrian military attacked the ravaged city of Homs in what opposition leaders described as the bloodiest government assault in the nearly 11-month-old uprising.

The Security Council voted 13 to 2 in favor of a resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria, but the measure was blocked by Russia and China, who opposed what they saw as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty.

Pressure mounted on the Security Council to act as Syrian opposition leaders said more than 200 people were killed in the attack in Homs, and the White House accused Syria of having “murdered hundreds of Syrian citizens, including women and children.”

While the casualties were impossible to confirm, and were denied by Syria, reports of the bloodshed drew widespread international condemnation, and moved the Security Council toward a vote on an Arab League peace plan, despite new objections by Russia.

President Obama condemned what he called “the Syrian government’s unspeakable assault against the people of Homs,” saying in a statement that President Bashar al-Assad “has no right to lead Syria, and has lost all legitimacy with his people and the international community.”

The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said, “The massacre in Homs is a crime against humanity, and those responsible will have to answer for it.”

Protests broke out Saturday at Syrian embassies around the world, including in Egypt, Germany, Greece and Kuwait, and Tunisia expelled Syria’s ambassador there.

Security Council members met Saturday morning to try to resolve disagreements with Russia, Syria’s main ally, which had promised to veto any resolution that could open the way to foreign military intervention or insist on Mr. Assad’s removal.

But the resolution’s sponsors pushed the measure to a vote anyway, virtually daring Russia to exercise its veto and risk mounting international opprobrium for preventing action to stanch the escalating death toll in Syria. In the end, both Russia and China exercised vetoes.

Arab and Western ambassadors said they had compromised enough to meet the demands of Russia and other skeptics. The resolution that was defeated said that the Council “fully supports” the Arab League plan, which calls for Mr. Assad to cede power to his vice president and a unity government to lead Syria to democratic elections. But specific references to Mr. Assad’s ceding power and calls for a voluntary arms embargo and sanctions had been deleted from the Security Council resolution, and language barring outside military intervention was added.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Moscow still had two objections to the latest revised resolution: that it did not place sufficient blame for the violence on the opposition, and that it unrealistically demanded that the government withdraw its military forces back to their barracks.

He told a security conference in Munich that adopting the current resolution would risk “taking sides in a civil war.” In a television interview quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency, he said that ignoring Russia’s objections would result in “another scandal.”

But Security Council members, citing the killings in Homs, pointedly disagreed.

“The scandal is not to act,” Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to the United Nations, said. “The scandal would be failure to act.”

There were contradictory reports on the violence from Homs, which has been largely inaccessible to journalists and difficult to reach by phone. But videos smuggled out of the city and reports by opposition activists described a harrowing barrage of mortar shells and gunfire that left hundreds more wounded in the city.

“It’s an unprecedented attack,” said Mohammed Saleh, an opposition activist from Homs who recently fled to a nearby town to escape the mounting strife.

The Syrian National Council, which has sought to act as an umbrella group for the opposition, said more than 260 people had been killed. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the toll in Khaldiya and the other Homs neighborhoods was 217. Both groups, along with other activists, said hundreds were wounded, though again, there was no specific number.

One opposition activist said the Syrian military suffered casualties, too.

“It’s a real massacre in every sense of the word,” said a resident in Khaldiya, who gave his name as Abu Jihad. “I saw bodies of women and children lying on roads, beheaded. It’s horrible and inhuman. It was a long night helping people get to hospitals.”

The attack began, activists said, after Syrian Army defectors attacked two military checkpoints and captured soldiers. One activist put the number of abducted soldiers at 13, another 19. They suggested that enraged commanders then ordered the assault, which lasted from about 9 p.m. Friday to 1 a.m. Saturday, focusing on Khaldiya. Five other neighborhoods were also assaulted.

At one point, a resident said, people left the top floors of apartment buildings, fearful that shelling they described as random would wreck their homes. Another resident, reached by phone on Saturday, said people had huddled in the dark, going without water and electricity, and that checkpoints had proliferated around neighborhoods.

“After this, no one in the world can blame us for fighting, even if we have to use kitchen knives,” said a 40-year-old Homs resident who gave his name as Abu Omar.

As it has since the uprising started, the Syrian government accused the news media and activists of fantastically exaggerating the toll. In a report Saturday by the Syrian state news agency, SANA, it complained of “frenetic media campaigns against Syria disseminating false information about Syria Army shelling of civilians in different blamed Arab satellite channels for inflaming the strife in different Syrian governorates.”

The agency, citing its correspondents across the country, declared that “life is normal in the Damascus countryside, Hama and Homs.”

Homs, near the border with Lebanon in western Syria, has proved an epicenter of the uprising, one of the bloodiest of the Arab world’s revolts. The city mirrors Syria’s own diversity, with a Sunni Muslim majority that has backed the uprising. But at least three neighborhoods are populated largely by Alawites, a heterodox strain of Islam that provides much of the leadership of Mr. Assad’s government.

In past months, sectarian strife there has dangerously mounted, offering a grim window on what a broader civil war could look like in Syria. Though protests started peacefully, defectors have begun operating checkpoints, and tit-for-tat kidnappings and killings have paralyzed parts of Homs, where something as simple as the choice of a television news station can belie a person’s loyalty. Some activists have tried to bridge the sectarian divide, but even they fear the violence may overwhelm those attempts.

“The army has weapons, and the people have weapons,” one opposition activist said on condition of anonymity, recounting Saturday’s bloodshed. “Syria is finished for me. It is a civil war, and nothing will save us anymore.”

After daybreak on Saturday, the town began burying its dead and a relative calm prevailed. At one funeral for 20 people, a resident said, armed defectors offered protection. The military tried to seal off some neighborhoods, and armed men drawn from the civilian population guarded their own streets, residents said.

As reports of the mounting toll were carried by Twitter and Facebook, protests gathered at Syrian missions in the Middle East and Europe. As many as 100 demonstrators stormed the Syrian Embassy in Cairo at about 3 a.m. Saturday, tearing its iron gate off its hinges, burning parts of the first floor and demolishing much of the ambassador’s office. By the morning, the floors were littered with broken glass, furniture that had been torn apart or burned and the detritus of office equipment.

It was the second time in two weeks that protesters had breached the embassy, but the previous attack destroyed not much more than framed pictures of Mr. Assad.

Ammar Arsan, the embassy’s media counselor, said he saw no connection between the events in Homs and what he called “the terrorist attack” on the Cairo mission. “The Syrian Army is conducting an operation against terrorist groups in Hama and Homs,” he said. “This is a crime. Nothing in the whole world justifies this.”

The simultaneous attacks on Syrian embassies in Berlin, Kuwait, Amman, Cairo and elsewhere, he said, were evidence of a coordinated assault by Syria’s enemies.

Anthony Shadid reported from Beirut, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations. Reporting was contributed by Nada Bakri and Hwaida Saad from Beirut,
David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Steven Erlanger from Munich
and Michael S Schwirtz from Moscow.

    Deadly Attack on Syrian City Adds to Push for U.N. to Act, NYT, 4.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/world/middleeast/syria-homs-death-toll-said-to-rise.html

Can Egypt Avoid Pakistan’s Fate?

February 3, 2012
The New York Times
By MICHELE DUNNE and SHUJA NAWAZ

Washington

ONE year after the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military is closing down civil society organizations and trying to manipulate the constitution-writing process to serve its narrow interests. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, where the military has also held sway for more than half the country’s existence — for much of that time, with America’s blessing — a new civil-military crisis is brewing.

For the United States, the parallels are clear and painful. Egypt and Pakistan are populous Muslim-majority nations in conflict-ridden regions, and both have long been allies and recipients of extensive military and economic aid.

Historically, American aid tapers off in Pakistan whenever civilians come to power. And in Egypt, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both resisted pressure from Congress to cut aid to Mr. Mubarak despite his repression of peaceful dissidents.

It is no wonder that both Egyptians and Pakistanis express more anger than appreciation toward the United States. They have seen Washington turn a blind eye to human-rights abuses and antidemocratic practices because of a desire to pursue regional objectives — Israeli security in the case of Egypt, and fighting Al Qaeda in the case of Pakistan.

The question now is whether the United States will, a year after the Egyptian revolution, stand by and allow the Pakistani model of military dominance and a hobbled civilian government to be replicated on the Nile.

Pakistan and Egypt each have powerful intelligence and internal security agencies that have acquired extra-legal powers they will not relinquish easily. Pakistan’s history of fomenting insurgencies in neighboring countries has caused serious problems for the United States. And Egypt’s internal security forces have been accused of involvement in domestic terrorist attacks and sectarian violence. (However, Washington has long seen Egypt’s military as a stabilizing force that keeps the peace with Israel.)

The danger is that in the future, without accountability to elected civilian authorities, the Egyptian military and security services will seek to increase their power by manipulating Islamic extremist organizations in volatile and strategically sensitive areas like the Sinai Peninsula.

Despite the security forces’ constant meddling in politics, Pakistan at least has a Constitution that establishes civilian supremacy over the military. Alarmingly, Egypt’s army is seeking even greater influence than what Pakistan’s top brass now enjoys: an explicit political role, and freedom from civilian oversight enshrined in law.

Egypt’s army was once considered heroic for siding with peaceful demonstrators against Mr. Mubarak, but it has badly mishandled the country in the past year. The riot at a soccer match on Wednesday that killed around 70 people underscored the leadership’s failure to undertake badly needed police reform and restore security. The economy is teetering, peaceful demonstrators have been tried in military courts, anti-Christian violence has spiked and ministers appointed by the military have hounded civil society groups that advocate government accountability, budget transparency, human rights and free elections.

A dismayed Congress has attached conditions to future military assistance to Egypt (now $1.3 billion a year), requiring the Obama administration to certify that the military government is maintaining peace with Israel, allowing a transition to civilian rule and protecting basic freedoms — or to waive the conditions on national security grounds — if it wants to keep aid flowing.

The Egyptian military is clearly not meeting at least two of those three conditions right now. Consequently, the Obama administration should not certify compliance, nor should it invoke the national security waiver by arguing that Egyptian-Israeli peace is paramount and that Egypt’s military is the only bulwark against Islamist domination of the country — because both of these arguments are deeply flawed.

First, hardly anyone in Egypt favors war with Israel, and a freeze or suspension of American aid would not change that. Second, continuing support to an Egyptian military that is bent on hobbling a liberal civil society would only strengthen Islamist domination. Islamist groups won some 70 percent of seats in the recent parliamentary elections, but they will now face tremendous pressure to solve the deep economic and political problems that caused the revolution.

In Egypt, as in Pakistan, the ultimate solution is a peaceful transfer of power to elected, accountable civilians and the removal of the military’s overt and covert influence from the political scene. At a minimum, Egypt should establish the clear supremacy of the civilian government over the military and allow an unfettered civil society to flourish.

Washington should suspend military assistance to Egypt until those conditions are met. Taking that difficult step now could help Egypt avoid decades of the violence, terrorism and cloak-and-dagger politics that continue to plague Pakistan.

Michele Dunne, a former White House and State Department official, and Shuja Nawaz, the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” are the directors of the Middle East and South Asia centers, respectively, at The Atlantic Council.

    Can Egypt Avoid Pakistan’s Fate?, NYT, 3.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/opinion/can-egypt-avoid-pakistans-fate.html

In Clashes With Police,

Egyptians Unleash Fury Over Soccer Riot Deaths

February 2, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — The police in several Egyptian cities on Thursday night battled with thousands of die-hard soccer fans angry at the military-led government’s failure to prevent dozens of deaths at a soccer riot in Port Said the previous night.

In Suez, two protesters were wounded by birdshot and two others by live ammunition, the Health Ministry said, while in Cairo more than 600 were injured by tear gas and stampeding crowds.

The fans, known as ultras, began their demonstration in the capital by directing their fury in part at the Port Said club’s supporters, who attacked a visiting Cairo club, Al Ahly, on Wednesday night. But by the time their march reached the barbed-wire barriers protecting the Interior Ministry, the soccer rivalries were forgotten in a battle against their shared enemy, the police.

Rumors that the police had deliberately abetted the violence at the match on Wednesday circulated through the crowd but were impossible to confirm. Protesters charged that the police had neglected to search fans for weapons, or had opened gates for the Port Said fans while closing them on the Cairo contingent or had turned out the lights to give the home fans cover.

About 70 people were killed in the riot on Wednesday.

Many protesters said they believed that the Interior Ministry meant to retaliate against the Cairo soccer fans because of their leading role in several violent battles with the police at protests over the past three months. At nationally televised games, the ultras have also picked up the habit of chanting for the ouster of the military rulers who took over from President Hosni Mubarak, piercing the walls set up by the generals, who jealously guard their public image.

“The military is taking revenge on us,” said Tarek Adel, 24.

Egypt’s newly elected Parliament, called into an emergency session to address the crisis related to the riot, sent a fact-finding committee to Port Said to investigate the Interior Ministry’s role in the violence, with orders to report back by next week.

Essam el-Erian, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood bloc that leads Parliament, presented the signatures of 120 lawmakers who demanded that charges be filed against the interior minister, and Parliament assigned a panel to question him.

Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the ruling military council and the de facto chief executive, called for three days of national mourning.

He also accepted the resignation of the governor of Port Said. The government suspended the district’s director of security and the chief of its detective unit, and by the end of the night the state media reported that both men had been detained by the police.

The Interior Ministry said it had interrogated more than 50 people suspected of instigating the clashes, including a dozen minors.

The bodies of 52 people killed in Port Said were taken to a Cairo morgue before they were released for burial here, suggesting that most of the victims were on the side of the Cairo team.

News reports indicated that many of those killed in the fighting were teenagers or younger, and at least one victim in the Cairo morgue appeared to be younger than 10.

Groups of ultras organized around rival clubs began appearing in Egypt within the past decade. Although rival fans often clashed, all shared a common culture of obscene chants, special firecrackers and instruments, and a violent hatred of the police who usually try to control them. Some paint vulgar insults to the police on walls around Cairo.

In the year since the uprising against Mr. Mubarak, the ultras have increasingly found that political demonstrations are good for practicing their second favorite sport, fighting with police officers. They played an especially pivotal role in the defense of Tahrir Square against Mubarak supporters in the so-called Battle of the Camels a year ago Thursday. They also led an attack on the Israeli Embassy that grew out of a demonstration in September.

Increasingly politicized, they have recently expanded their repertory to include chants demanding the end of military rule, calling for the death of Field Marshal Tantawi or making lewd insults about the mothers of the ruling generals.

In the aftermath of the deaths in Port Said, the rival groups of ultras around Cairo’s two most popular teams, Al Ahly and Zamalek, marched together in a rare moment of solidarity, with each of their banners on the same pole as an Egyptian flag.

At first some of their chants denounced the Port Said fans. But as the march progressed they sang mostly about the ruling generals. “Ultras Al Ahly will execute Tantawi,” they chanted, and “They killed the free ultras because they took the side of the revolutionaries.”

And as they crossed Tahrir Square toward the Interior Ministry, their chants grew more aggressive: “We either avenge them or die like them.”

By nightfall, thousands of ultras filled the downtown district around the ministry, drumming, chanting and eventually setting garbage and tires on fire. Some of those present said they were not soccer fans but activists who had come out in political solidarity against the ruling military council, which they also blamed for allowing the violence.

The soccer fans hurled obscenities at the row of riot police officers stationed behind a barbed-wire barrier in front of the Interior Ministry, and around dusk began dismantling the barrier. A row of demonstrators formed in front of the ultras to try to separate them from the riot police.

While some tried to calm the crowd, others egged each other on. “If you are scared, you can go home” was a common refrain. “They kill us or we kill them,” one person shouted.

Around 6:30 p.m., the ultras began dragging a large metal gate toward the front line. The police suddenly ran back in retreat.

The tear gas began just as the retreating officers reached the ministry, and at midnight the crowds were still surging forward and retreating back through narrow side streets. People with motorcycles carted away the injured, some of whom appeared too young to shave.

“They’re very stupid,” one demonstrator said of Egypt’s military rulers. “They turned the biggest fan base in the country against them.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

    In Clashes With Police, Egyptians Unleash Fury Over Soccer Riot Deaths, NYT, 2.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/world/middleeast/egypt-mourns-lethal-soccer-riot-and-many-blame-military.html

Envisioning a Deal With Iran

February 2, 2012
The New York Times
By WILLIAM H. LUERS and THOMAS R. PICKERING

“IF you deal in camels, make the doors high,” an Afghan proverb cautions. As the dangers mount in the confrontation between the United States and Iran, both sides will have to raise the doors high for diplomacy to work, and to avoid conflict.

A diplomatic strategy must begin with the United States’ setting its priorities and then defining a practical path to achieve them. To achieve its top priorities, it will have to learn what Iran needs. Since the United States will not get total surrender from Iran, it must decide what it can put on the table to assure that both sides can reach a deal that will be durable.

American leaders have been masterly at diplomatic strategies — “building high doors” — to make deals. Franklin D. Roosevelt opened relations with the Soviet Union in 1933 to balance the ascendance of menacing forces in Germany and Japan. He was acting for geopolitical reasons, and in spite of his objection to Communism. Richard M. Nixon opened relations with China to enhance American leverage in dealing with the Soviet Union. He re-framed — but did not give up on — the American commitment to Taiwan to accomplish his objective. In each case, the presidents were acting against the advice of most of their close advisers.

In our own time, President Obama’s initial instincts on Iran were correct: only he can lead the United States to agreements with Iran that advance American national interests.

The first question is how to get such diplomacy started, and on that, Nixon’s strategy toward China is instructive.

Before traveling to Beijing in 1972, Nixon outlined on his ubiquitous yellow pad three analytical pillars of his strategy: What do they want, what do we want and what do we both want? The Chinese, he continued, wanted to “build up their world credentials,” to recover control of Taiwan and to get the United States out of Asia, while the United States wanted to succeed in Indochina, establish communication “to restrain Chinese expansion in Asia” and, in the future, “reduce threat of confrontation by China Super Power.” The United States and China both wanted “to reduce danger of confrontation and conflict, a more stable Asia, a restraint on U.S.S.R.”

In the Shanghai Communiqué, issued at the culmination of the meeting in Beijing, the continuing differences were highlighted, but both sides agreed to expand the common ground between them.

In developing a diplomatic strategy toward Iran, President Obama might respond to Nixon’s three questions as follows: Iran wants recognition of its revolution; an accepted role in its region; a nuclear program; the departure of the United States from the Middle East; and the lifting of sanctions. The United States wants Iran not to have nuclear weapons; security for Israel; a democratic evolution of Arab countries; the end of terrorism; and world access to the region’s oil and gas. Both Iran and the United States want stability in the region — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan; the end of terrorism from Al Qaeda and the Taliban; the reincorporation of Iran into the international community; and no war.

With those assumptions as a skeleton, the shape of a final agreement with Iran is imaginable. The United States would agree to full recognition and respect for the Islamic Republic, and Iran would agree to regional cooperation with the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both sides would agree to address the full range of bilateral disputes.

The International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council could accept an Iranian civil nuclear program in return for Iran’s agreeing to grant inspectors full access to that program to assure that Iran did not build a nuclear weapon. Once international agencies had full access to Iran’s nuclear program, there could be a progressive reduction of the Security Council’s sanctions that are now in effect. Iran would agree to cease making threats against Israel, and the United States would agree to support efforts toward achieving a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

It would be important to make arrangements for Israel’s security; the exact shape of those measures would have to be worked out in the negotiations. An agreement in which there would be full access to Iran’s nuclear program, with a monitored limitation of 5 percent enrichment, would offer Israel additional reasons for confidence in the deal.

Both sides would agree to cooperate in reducing the influence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; in combating drug trafficking; and in keeping open the routes through which energy flows to the world from the Persian Gulf. Both sides would agree that while wide differences between the two nations remained, those differences must be resolved peacefully.

The China analogy for American-Iranian relations falls short in some areas. The most important is that Mao was ready for an American approach, while Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not. Instead, he is convinced that the United States will not work with Iran until his regime is gone.

For Iran’s leadership, the notion that the United States is bent on overthrowing its rulers is rooted in historical experience: the United States did overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, supported the Shah afterward, supported Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in the 1980s, and now backs increasing efforts to weaken and isolate Iran.

Reducing the malign influence of this legacy on the thinking of Ayatollah Khamenei will be essential to achieving any deal. Simply “keeping the door open to diplomacy” will not be sufficient. So the Iranian leader must be approached directly, but discreetly, by someone he trusts who conveys assurances from President Obama that covert operations and public pressure have been demonstrably reduced. The interlocutor might be a leader from a country in the region, enlisted when the American president felt the time was right.

Ayatollah Khamenei will have to be convinced by actions, not just messages. Just as Nixon halted covert action in Tibet before approaching China, a similar signal will be needed with Iran.

There is no guarantee that diplomacy will succeed. But that is also true of war. And only diplomacy can offer Iran’s current rulers a stake in building a secure future without a nuclear bomb. Only diplomacy can achieve America’s major objectives while avoiding the mistakes committed in Iraq or Vietnam.

William H. Luers, a career diplomat, served as United States ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Venezuela, and was president of the United Nations Association from 1999 to 2009. Thomas R. Pickering, an under secretary of state for political affairs in the Clinton administration, served as United States ambassador to Russia, Israel, Jordan and the United Nations.

    Envisioning a Deal With Iran, NYT, 2.2.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/envisioning-a-deal-with-iran.html

Why We Shouldn’t Attack Syria (Yet)

February 2, 2012
The New York Times
By ROBERT A. PAPE

Chicago

AS the death toll in Syria has climbed to perhaps 7,000, proponents of humanitarian intervention are asking, quite reasonably, why the West does not intervene as it did in Libya last year. Not only was Libya’s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, ousted with relatively few Western casualties, but the NATO campaign also set a precedent for successful humanitarian intervention.

In the 63 years since the United Nations adopted a genocide convention in the wake of the Holocaust, world leaders have failed to prevent the deaths of millions, from Biafra and Cambodia to Rwanda and Darfur — not just because they have lacked the political will to intervene, but also because of the norm of genocide itself. By setting the bar for intervention so high — unmistakable evidence of clear intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group — the international community has stuck itself in a Catch-22: by the time it is clear that genocide is occurring, it is often too late to stop it.

A new standard for humanitarian intervention is needed. If a continuing government-sponsored campaign of mass homicide — in which thousands have died and many thousands more are likely to die — is occurring, a coalition of countries, sanctioned by major international and regional institutions, should intervene to stop it, as long as they have a viable plan, with minimal risk of casualties for the interveners.

The recent war in Libya was a case in point. When large parts of Libya broke away from Colonel Qaddafi’s rule, he retaliated with tanks, air power and artillery against heavily populated urban areas. His loyalists promised “rivers of blood.” The signs of impending state-sponsored mass murder were clear.

For weeks, the United States and other nations appeared paralyzed, unclear whether Colonel Qaddafi’s brutality would reach the level of genocide, while Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary, fretted about the open-ended costs in the “ouster of a Middle Eastern leader” and the fallout from attacking “yet another Muslim country.”

But rather than seeking regime change to prevent genocide, President Obama focused on the narrower objective of preventing “a humanitarian catastrophe” and explicitly ruled out foreign-imposed regime change.

These more modest, pragmatic goals sidestepped Mr. Gates’s objections and reflect the emerging new standard for humanitarian intervention. The United States took the lead, but initially only to halt the mass-homicide campaign. And it rightly set goals that would not require an ambitious military commitment.

Libya was a success — and it was as low-risk as any United States military mission of the past 20 years. Colonel Qaddafi’s threat to civilians rested on his ability to direct heavy concentrations of weapons against rebel-controlled populated areas and to cut off supplies into ports; NATO airpower could blunt both tactics.

Within weeks, the threat to eastern Libya was minimized, giving the rebel movement breathing space to gain cohesion and battlefield experience and eventually defeat Colonel Qaddafi’s small and increasingly unpopular army.

In the past few decades, the United States and other countries have successfully intervened for humanitarian purposes on three other occasions — in 1991, to stop Saddam Hussein’s attempted massacre of the Kurds in northern Iraq after the gulf war, and to protect first Bosnians, in 1993, and then Kosovars, in 1999, from the Serbs’ attempts at ethnic cleansing. All three humanitarian interventions occurred after thousands of people had been killed and exponentially more people had been injured or displaced. And all three were successful and saved thousands of lives.

None of these cases, nor the war in Libya, amounted to true genocide, where hundreds of thousands were already dead at the time of intervention. Most important, none could become a genocide because intervention stopped the killing at an earlier stage.

Limited military force to stop campaigns of state-sanctioned homicide is more pragmatic than waiting for irrefutable evidence of “genocide.” It will not work in every case, but it will save large numbers of lives. It also promotes restraint in cases where humanitarian intervention would be high-risk or used as a pretext for imperial designs.

As the world’s sole military superpower, the United States will be at the center of many future debates over humanitarian action. Rather than hewing to the old standard of intervening only after genocide has been proved, the emerging new standard would allow for meaningful and low-risk military action before the killing gets out of control.

Syria is, I admit, a tough case. It is a borderline example of a government’s engaging in mass killings of its citizens. The main obstacle to intervention is the absence of a viable, low-casualty military solution. Unlike Libya, where much of the coastal core of the population lived under rebel control, the opposition to Syria’s dictatorial president, Bashar al-Assad, has not achieved sustained control of any major population area. So air power alone would probably not be sufficient to blunt the Assad loyalists entrenched in cities, and a heavy ground campaign would probably face stiff and bloody resistance.

If a large region broke away from the regime en masse, international humanitarian intervention could well become viable. Until then, sadly, Syria is not another Libya. A mass-homicide campaign is under way there, but a means to stop it without unacceptable loss of life is not yet available.

Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

    Why We Shouldn’t Attack Syria (Yet), NYT, 2.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/why-we-shouldnt-attack-syria-yet.html