Euroblogger

Ballots and Boycotts
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In trying to think through whether we should press ahead with elections in Iraq or not, I have found it useful to go back and dig out my basic rules for Middle East reporting, which I have developed and adapted over 25 years of writing from that region.

Rule 1 Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over by the time the next morning's paper is out.

Rule 2 Never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person who is supposed to be doing the conceding. If I had a dime for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasir Arafat, I would be a wealthy man today.

Rule 3 The Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure that they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.

Rule 4 In the Middle East, if you can't explain something with a conspiracy theory, then don't try to explain it at all - people there won't believe it.

Rule 5 In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away - unless the coast is completely clear.

Rule 6 The most oft-used phrase of Mideast moderates is: "We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it's too late. It's all your fault for being so stupid."

Rule 7 In Middle East politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, "How can I compromise?" And the minute it becomes strong, it will tell you, "Why should I compromise?"

Rule 8 What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in Arabic, in Hebrew or in any other local language. Anything said in English doesn't count.

It is on the basis of these rules that I totally disagree with those who argue that the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections should be postponed. Their main argument is that an Iraqi election that ensconces the Shiite majority in power, without any participation of the Sunni minority, will sow the seeds of civil war.

That is probably true - but we are already in a civil war in Iraq. That civil war was started by the Sunni Baathists, and their Islamist fascist allies from around the region, the minute the U.S. toppled Saddam. And they started that war not because they felt the Iraqi elections were going to be rigged, but because they knew they weren't going to be rigged.

They started the war not to get their fair share of Iraqi power, but in hopes of retaining their unfair share. Under Saddam, Iraq's Sunni minority, with only 20 percent of the population, ruled everyone. These fascist insurgents have never given politics a chance to work in Iraq because they don't want it to work. That's why they have never issued a list of demands. They don't want people to see what they are really after, which is continued minority rule, Saddamism without Saddam. If that was my politics, I'd be wearing a ski mask over my head, too.

The notion that delaying the elections for a few months would somehow give time for the "Sunni moderates" to persuade the extremists to come around is dead wrong - literally. Any delay would simply embolden the guys with the guns to kill more Iraqi police officers and to intimidate more Sunnis. It could only convince them that with just a little more violence, they could scuttle the whole project of rebuilding Iraq.

There is only one thing that will enable the Sunni moderates in Iraq to win the debate, and that is when the fascist insurgents are forced to confront the fact that their tactics have not only failed to prevent the elections, but have also dug the Sunnis of Iraq into an even deeper hole.

By boycotting the elections, not only will they lose their unfair share of the old Iraq, they will also have failed to claim even their fair share of the new Iraq. The moderate argument among the Sunnis can prevail only when the tactics of their extremists have proved utterly bankrupt.

For all these reasons, the least bad option right now for the U.S. is to forge ahead with the elections - unless the Iraqi Shiites ask for a postponement - and focus all of America's energies not on appeasing the fascist insurgents, but on moderating the Shiites and Kurds, who are sure to dominate the voting.

Despite my seventh rule, we have a much greater chance of producing a decent outcome in Iraq by appealing to the self-interest of the Kurds and the Shiites to be magnanimous in victory, than we do of getting the fascist insurgents to be magnanimous in defeat.

Character Is Destiny
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON — What's the secret to long-run success?

For a person, it's useful to have the smarts, look great, be lucky and exude charisma. All that is not enough.

For a political party, it helps to have good organization, articulate candidates and pollsters to discern a popular set of issues. Not enough.

For a nation, success can seem assured by natural resources, free enterprise, a culture of compassion and a free press. It can still go under.

For a person, a party and a nation, the element essential to success is character, a word that grew out of the Greek for "to mark, to engrave."

We can see that mark on individuals under stress: Lincoln, taking on the bloody burden of conflict to uphold majority rule. Or engraved in the unknown brain scientists of today, who break beyond the necessary treatment of mental suffering to the artificial enhancement of the human mind - and debate in their own minds if and when it is ethical to "play God."

Such men and women shape their character in life's personal decisions, weighing the warmth of loyalty against the cool of independence. They choose careers to gain the power to do good, or to build and support family, or to fulfill artistic talents - but forge character in sacrifices made in choosing one path over another.

We also see the mark of character, or lack of it, in political parties. The Republican Party today is characterized by a mission to defeat terror while exporting freedom abroad, and a policy to restrain taxes while increasing social spending at home.

Such a sharply defined character has led to electoral success and control of the White House, the Congress, state legislatures and the Supreme Court. Though George W. Bush is not an overwhelmingly beloved leader, he won a clear majority because most swing voters felt he resolutely stood for what he believed in. Their votes for character had coattails.

The G.O.P. personality will split in a couple of years, as all huge majorities do in America. Idealistic neocons will be challenged by plodding, pragmatic paleocons, who, by fuzzing the party's present character, will someday lead it down the road to defeat.

If I were starting out in politics or its commentary today, I'd become a Democrat. That's because the party now is six disconsolate characters in search of an author.

Adlai Stevenson called 1952 Republicans "out of patience, out of sorts and out of office." That tight shoe now fits liberals, who have been drifting toward isolationism abroad and fiscal conservatism at home, which for Democrats is out of character. The spirit of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson is needed to return the party to ideological consistency: interventionist at home and abroad.

Although opportunism is often cited as the opposite of character, not so in politics: this is the opportune time for the Democratic minority to take advantage of its bantamweight agility and "stand for something."

What of a nation's character - does it presage long-run success? In northern Iraq, the Kurdish "nation" is self-defended, democratic and prosperous, its success based on the fiercely independent nature of Muslim Kurds.

The British historian D. W. Brogan wrote 60 years ago that the unique achievement of Americans to form a continental nation - without sacrificing liberty or efficiency - led to the temper of the pioneer, the gambler and the booster: "the religion of economic and political optimism."

History has shown that U.S. optimism has not been misplaced. But what of reports of global griping at America's superpower arrogance - at our government's triumphalism? Has our character been warped by victories in three world wars?

Call me a chauvinist unilateralist, but I believe America's human and economic sacrifices for the advance of freedom abroad show our personal, political and national character to be stronger and better than ever. This moral advance will be more widely appreciated as an Islamic version of democracy takes root. (What's triumphalism without a triumph?)

It is that growing strength of national character - more than our individual genius or political leadership or military power - that ensures the future success of America and brightens the light of liberty's torch.

SEVERE BRAIN DAMAGE in Italy:

"Arrivando qui dalla proibizionista e oscurantista California, a Pechino ho finalmente scoperto cos'è la tolleranza, la flessibilità, il rispetto degli altri".
Federico Rampini, La Repubblica January 10th 2005

Circle Squared
Iran, Iraq, Syria.



Last week, Alhurra — an Arabic-language television station that is funded by our government — broadcast a taped interview with a terrorist named Moayad Ahmed Yasseen, the leader of Jaish Muhammad (Muhammad's Army). He was captured nearly two months ago in Fallujah during the liberation of the city.


Yasseen had been a colonel in Saddam's Army, so he was a fighter of some importance. He told Alhurra that two other former Iraqi military officers belonging to his group were sent "to Iran in April or May, where they met a number of Iranian intelligence officials." He said they also met with Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and were provided with money, weapons, "and, as far as I know, even car bombs" for Jaish Muhammad.

Yasseen also said he was told by Saddam himself, after the liberation of Iraq in the spring of 2003, to cross into Syria and meet with a Syrian intelligence officer to ask for money and weapons.

So here we have a high-ranking member of the "insurgency," a textbook case of the sort of Saddam loyalist said to compose the bulk of those fighting against the Coalition. And what does he tell us? He tells us that he has been working closely with Iran and Syria, and that this close working relationship was directed by Saddam. Moreover, his organization, Jaish Muhammad, is an ally of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, himself a longtime resident of Tehran.

In other words, while there are certainly plenty of Saddam loyalists among the terrorists fighting against us, they are receiving support from Damascus and Tehran. Yasseen's testimony is one of the first bits of intelligence from the Fallujah campaign to reach the public. If we had truly investigative journalists out there, they would be all over this story, which is only one of many that came out of Fallujah. About a month ago, a letter from an Army officer who had fought in Fallujah circulated on the net, and, like Yasseen's tape, it helps dispel some of the myths clouding our strategic vision.

"In Fallujah," we learn, "the enemy had a military-type planning system...Some of the fighters were wearing body armor and Kevlar, just like we do. Soldiers took fire from heavy machine guns (.50 cal) and came across the dead bodies of fighters from Chechnya, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Afghanistan, and so on. No, this was not just a city of pi**ed off Iraqis, mad at the Coalition for forcing Saddam out of power. It was a city full of people from all over the Middle East whose sole mission in life was to kill Americans. Problem for them is that they were in the wrong city in November 2004."

We killed more than a thousand terrorists in Fallujah, and nearly an equal number surrendered, many of whom provided our military with useful information. Presumably Yasseen's information has been exploited before letting the Syrians and Iranians know that he has told us all about them.

Perhaps these revelations will help outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell get on the right side of history before he rejoins civil society. Last September, in an interview with the Washington Times, he said "I don't think there's any doubt that the Iranians are involved and are providing support (for the terrorists in Iraq). How much and how influential their support is, I can't be sure and it's hard to get a good read on it."

Perhaps now he's got a better read. But of course, he chose not to know many things about Iran. He insisted that the Bush administration shut down a channel to a source of information about Iran, even though he knew that the source was reliable, and that information from that source — information concerning Iranian support for anti-American terrorists — had saved American lives in Afghanistan. Had the flow of information continued, we might have had a better picture of our enemies' intentions and capacities. And such a picture might have convinced Powell that Iran was not, as his deputy Richard Armitage put it, "a democracy," but a bloodthirsty tyranny that delights in killing Americans, Iraqis, and its own citizens.

Yet, in his final weeks in office, Secretary Powell has unfortunately continued to chant his mantra, "we are not working for regime change in Iran," as if he were proud of it. He, and his colleagues at State, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the CIA, should be ashamed. The mullahs are active supporters of terrorism all over the world, including Iraq, and we cannot expect to win this war so long as they remain in power.

Let's hope that Dr. Rice is paying close attention to the Yasseen confession, and the many others that will help her realize that there is no escape from the regional war in which we are engaged.

Faster, please.

THE REAL " INCREDIBLES "

Cuba restablece los contactos oficiales con la Unión Europea





AGENCIAS

La Habana.-- El gobierno de Cuba ha anunciado el restablecimiento de los "contactos oficiales" con la representación de la Unión Europea (UE) en La Habana y con el resto de los países miembros del bloque comunitario con los que permanecían "congelados".

El ministro de Exteriores cubano Felipe Pérez Roque ha anunciado que su gobierno ha tomado esta decisión "atendiendo a las solicitudes respetuosas" recibidas en la última semana de los gobiernos de Luxemburgo, actual presidente de la UE, España y Bélgica.

La semana pasada Cuba anunció la reanudación de sus contactos diplomáticos un grupo de países europeos, a los que se suman a partir de hoy los Países Bajos, Eslovaquia, Polonia, la República Checa y la delegación de la Comisión Europea en La Habana.

"A partir de este momento, Cuba restablece los contactos oficiales a nivel del gobierno con todos los países de la Unión Europea" con representación en la isla, ha dicho Pérez Roque en una breve declaración a la prensa.

Esta situación, ha agregado, es resultado de la decisión del Comité de América Latina de la Unión Europea de "rectificar las decisiones que había adoptado sobre Cuba en junio de 2003", cuando la UE aprobó un paquete de sanciones políticas contra el régimen cubano en protesta por la ejecución de tres secuestradores y las altas condenas impuestas a 75 disidentes.

The Disenchanted American
Are we growing world-weary?



There is a new strange mood of acceptance among Americans about the world beyond our shores. Of course, we are not becoming naïve isolationists of 1930s vintage, who believe that we are safe by ourselves inside fortress America — not after September 11. Nor do citizens deny that America has military and moral obligations to stay engaged abroad — at least for a while yet. Certainly the United States is not mired in a Vietnam-era depression and stagflation and thus ready to wallow in Carteresque malaise. Indeed, if anything Americans remain muscular and are more defiant than ever.

Instead, there is a new sort of resignation rising in the country, as the United States sheds its naiveté that grew up in the aftermath of the Cold War. Clintonism may have assumed that terrorism was but a police matter, that the military could be slashed and used for domestic social reform by fiat, that our de facto neutrals were truly our friends, and that the end of the old smash-mouth history was at hand. The chaotic events following the demise of the Soviet Union, the mass murder on September 11, and the new strain of deductive anti-Americanism abroad cured most of all that.

Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well — the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear. Americans know all that — and yet they grasp that their own vigilance and military sacrifices have earned them spite rather than gratitude. And they are ever so slowly learning not much to care anymore.

In fact, an American consensus is growing that envy and hatred of the United States, coupled with utopian and pacifistic rhetoric, disguise an even more depressing fact: Outside our shores there is a growing barbarism with no other sheriff in sight. Any cinema student of the American Western can fathom why the frightened townspeople — huddled in their churches and shuttered schools — almost hated the lone marshal as much as they did the six-shooting outlaw gang rampaging in their streets. After all, the holed-up 'good' citizens were always angry that the lawman had shamed them, worried that he might make dangerous demands on their insular lives, confused about whether they would have to accommodate themselves either to savagery or civilization in their town's future, and, above all, assured that they could libel and slur the tin star in a way that would earn a bullet from the lawbreaker. It was precisely that paradox between impotent high-sounding rhetoric and blunt-speaking, roughshod courage that lay at the heart of the classic Western from Shane and High Noon to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Magnificent Seven.

The U.N., NATO, or the EU: These are now the town criers of the civilized world who preach about "the law" and then seek asylum in their closed shops and barred stores when the nuclear Daltons or terrorist Clantons run roughshod over the town. In our own contemporary ongoing drama, China, Russia, and India watch bemused as the United States tries to hunt down the psychopathic killers while Western elites ankle-bite and hector its efforts. I suppose the Russians, Chinese, and Indians know that Islamists understand all too well that blowing up two skyscrapers in Moscow, Shanghai, or Delhi would guarantee that their Middle Eastern patrons might end up in cinders.

So an entire mythology has grown up to accommodate this false world of ours — sadly never more evident than during the recent tsunami disaster, a tragedy that has juxtaposed rhetoric with reality in a way that becomes each day more surreal. The wealthy Gulf States pledge very little of their vast petrol-dollar reserves — swollen from last year's jacked-up gasoline prices — to aid the ravaged homelands of their Islamic nannies, drivers, and janitors. Indeed, Muslim charities advertise to their donors that their aid goes to fellow Muslims — as if a dying Buddhist or Christian is less deserving of the Muslim Street's aid. In defense, officials argue that the ostracism of "charities" that funded suicide killers to the tune of $150 million has hampered their humanitarian efforts at scraping up a fifth of that sum. But then blowing apart Americans or Jews is always a higher priority than saving innocent Muslim children.

So even in death and misery, the world's pathologies remain — as Israel is disinvited to help the dying as the most benevolent United States, which freed Afghanistan and toppled Saddam, is supposedly under scrutiny to "regain" its stature for its "crimes" of jailing a mass murderer and sponsoring elections in his place. Last year alone the United States gave more direct money to Egypt and Jordan than what the entire billion-person Muslim world has given for the dead in Indonesia.

China, flush with billions in trade surplus, first offers a few million to its immediate Asian neighbors before increasing its contributions in the wake of massive gifts from Japan and the United States. Peking's gesture was what the usually harsh New York Times magnanimously called "slightly belated." In this weird sort of global high-stakes charity poker, no one asks why tiny Taiwan out-gives one billion mainlanders or why Japan proves about the most generous of all — worried the answer might suggest that postwar democratic republics, resurrected and nourished by the United States and now deeply entrenched in the Western liberal tradition of democracy, capitalism, and humanitarianism, are more civil societies than the Islamic theocracies, socialist republics, and authoritarian autocracies of the once-romanticized third world.

In the first days of the disaster, a Norwegian U.N. bureaucrat snidely implied that the United States was "stingy" even though private companies in the United States, well apart from American individuals, foundations, and the government, each year alone give more aggregate foreign aid than does his entire tiny country. Apparently the crime against America is not that it gives too little to those who need it, but that it gives too little to those who wish to administer it all. When the terrible wave hit, Kofi Annan was escaping the conundrum of the Oil-for-Food scandal by skiing at Jackson Hole, so naturally George Bush down in 'ole Crawford Texas was the global media's obvious insensitive leader — "on vacation" as it were, while millions perished.

The U.S. military is habitually slurred even though it possesses the world's only lift and sea assets that could substantially aid in the ongoing disasters in Indonesia and Thailand. Blamed for having too high a profile in removing the Taliban and Saddam, it is now abused for having too meek a presence in Southeast Asia. No doubt America should have "preempted" the wave and acted in a more "unilateral" fashion. Meanwhile we await the arrival of the Charles De Gaulle and its massive fleet of life-saving choppers that can ferry ample amounts of Saudi, Chinese, and Cuban materiel to the dying — emissaries all of U.N. and EU multilateralism.

All this hypocrisy has desensitized Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative. We will finish the job in Iraq, nursemaid democratic Afghanistan through its birthpangs, and continue to ensure that bandits and criminal states stay off the world's streets. But what is new is that the disenchanted American is becoming savvy and developing a long memory — and so we all fear the day is coming when he casts aside the badge, rides the buckboard out of town, and leaves such sanctimonious folk to themselves.

Remapping the Middle East, Maybe
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
After Saddam Hussein seized neighboring Kuwait in 1990, the historian David Fromkin published an essay in the Smithsonian journal recalling how the modern Middle East was formed, in which he wrote: "In 1922, Churchill succeeded in mapping out the Arab Middle East along lines suitable to the needs of the British civilian and military administrations. T. E. Lawrence ["Lawrence of Arabia"] would later brag that he, Churchill and a few others had designed the modern Middle East over dinner. Seventy years later ... the question is whether the peoples of the Middle East are willing or able to continue living with that design."

That same question is still on the table today - but even more so. What is happening right now in Iraq, Israel and Palestine is a new Churchillian moment. The contours and contents of these core Middle East regions are up for grabs, only this time these contours are not being redrawn by an imperial pen from above - and will not be. This time they are being shaped by three civilian conflicts bubbling up from below - among Palestinians, Israelis and Iraqis. As the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi puts it, "Three volcanoes are erupting at the same time. Lava is pouring out of each of them, and we are all waiting to see how it cools and into what forms."

Like the recent tsunami, this sort of tectonic movement of geopolitical plates happens only once a century. This is a remarkable political moment that you don't want to miss or see go badly. But that's what's scary; when borders and states emerge from volcanic activity, anything can happen. What all three of these cases have in common is that they pit theocratic, fascist and messianic forces on one side, claiming to be acting on the will of God or in the name of the primordial aspirations of "the nation," against more moderate, tolerant, democratizing majorities.

In Israel the theocratic-nationalist settler movement has already begun to make its move. Last Thursday, four battalion commanders and 30 other officers, all residents of West Bank Jewish settlements, published a statement in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, declaring that they would not obey any orders to evacuate Jewish enclaves in Gaza or the West Bank. This is an open rebuke of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet-approved plan to withdraw all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza and a small part of the West Bank.

The Israeli daily Haaretz also reported that the main council of West Bank and Gaza rabbis issued a statement Thursday urging all Israeli soldiers to openly defy the state and declare their opposition to the disengagement plan, saying: "The order to dismantle settlements goes against the laws of the Torah and human morality. One should not assist this act." The Haaretz columnist Akiva Eldar reported that thousands of Jewish zealots - and Christians, too - are waiting in the United States for the call to join the struggle alongside the settlers in Gaza.

Sound familiar? It should. The week before, the Muslim militant group Ansar al-Sunna in Iraq called for all Iraqi Muslims to boycott Iraq's voting booths, decrying them as "centers of atheism," and added the warning that "the Mujahedeen will be attacking polling stations." Hamas and Islamic Jihad are boycotting today's Palestinian election, just as the main Sunni political movement in Iraq, the Iraqi Islamic Party, has vowed to do there. Osama bin Laden, for his part, declared that the laws of Iraq are "infidel" laws, and "therefore everyone who participates in this election will be considered infidels."

I do not believe that these militant messianists can actually win in Iraq, Israel or Palestine, but they can prevent the majorities in each country from forging any new pragmatic, tolerant power-sharing arrangements - and in the case of Israelis and Palestinians, new borders. Mr. Sharon is the strongest prime minister Israel could have right now, but even he is having problems pulling off this self-amputation of the Gaza Strip.

The contours of the Middle East in the 21st century are at stake here, much as they were in 1922. If the pragmatic forces can dominate in Israel, Iraq and Palestine, it will establish positive examples that will give others in the region the incentive and confidence to try to emulate them. If all three remain roiling volcanoes, slowly devouring themselves, the social contract among Jews that the state of Israel was built upon will start to come unstuck, and Iraq and Palestine will be held up as exhibits A and B for the case that in the Arab world, states can only be stabilized by despotism, never democracy.