Category Archives: Middle East

Who wants peace in the Middle East?

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BOTH Israelis and Palestinians have too much to lose if the Middle East problems that separate them are solved. Neither is interested in a solution for that would lessen the attention that is paid to them.

Israel receives $3b of aid from the US every year. If there were peace in the Mideast, that aid would fall away – after all when a country is at peace with its neighbours, why does it need such large amounts of aid? The Palestinians are in the same boat – if they were not at loggerheads with Israel who would pay them much attention?

Egypt has little interest in backing anything other than US plans. The US gives the country $1.3b in aid every year, second only to Israel. Why would Egypt, despite having Muslim fundamentalists being at the helm, want to put this money in jeopardy?

Down the years, there have been countless rounds of so-called peace talks. But if nothing has come of them, it is primarily because of the factors listed above. Additionally, there is the religion factor – some aspects of the Middle East imbroglio are not negotiable because of their emotional nature.

Jerusalem is a city that is sacred to both Judaism and Islam. Neither side will countenance the other taking command of this city. Even if peace talks make progress, they will stumble when they come to the question of this city.

Perhaps hopes were highest in 1993 when Norwegian brokers managed to put in place the so-called Oslo accord. But 19 years have gone by and there is nothing to show for it.

And there will not be any more to show than has been so far. There are too many vested interests who have a stake in the current game for any change to occur.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow: Al Qaeda has won

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Today marks 11 years since Al Qaeda flew planes into the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and made the US aware that it was not safe on its own soil. Sad to say, the US has used the attacks down the years to curtail freedoms for its own residents.

All kinds of ridiculous curbs have been put in place; fear has been used time and again to restrict the lives of ordinary citizens, with the government all the while claiming to be doing so in the cause of freedom.

With the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the US has been claiming that it has emerged victorious over the attackers. But is that really the case?

Bin Laden’s stated goal behind the attacks was to hit the US economy in such a way that it would lose its clout. In that, Al Qaeda has succeeded to a remarkable extent.

After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the US economy tanked as money flowed out of the country. In order to push things along, interest rates were lowered and a flood of cheap money hit the streets. This money was used to build up a housing boom, much of it being loans to people who could not afford them.

The US also undertook an invasion of Iraq, a foolish move that began bankrupting the country. Billions have been spent in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, both missions mounted in reaction to the 2001 attacks.

Seven years after the attacks, the global financial crisis manifested itself, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The US is now technically bankrupt. It has a national debt close to $US16 trillion.

So who has the better claim to being the victor?

Thomas Friedman, fraud supreme

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WHAT does one call a writer who pretends that the life experiences of others are his own, and passes them off as such? A fraud? A poser? A plagiarist? I have not been able to find le mot juste.

Lest there is any mystery over whom one is referring to, I am talking about the diplomatic editor of the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman.

Friedman has been ridiculed by journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, and rightly so, for his ridiculous use of language and his incoherent writings which appear in what is apparently the greatest newspaper in the US. (That tells us why newspapers are closing down rapidly in that country.)

I’ve always felt that Friedman is an average reporter but a nothing writer. He cannot think straight and comes up with the daftest analogies and ideas to try and convey some meaning about complex situations. He fails, miserably. Maybe, as Taibbi puts it so eloquently, his editors are drinking rubbing alcohol.

But this kind of intellectual dishonesty aside, I never suspected that Friedman was also making up the anecdotes that go into his reporting. That was until I read this great piece by the late Alexander Cockburn.

Cockburn writes of a time in 1984 when his younger brother, Patrick, was in Beirut as the Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times. Friedman was doing the same job, for the New York Times.

One day, the pair returned to the Commodore Hotel, the place where most foreign journalists were staying, after a bloody day in the field – Lebanon was in the midst of a civil war. Friedman went upstairs to write his copy, Patrick found his way to the bar and sat down with a glass of whisky.

A little while later, a Shia gunamn entered the bar and proceeded to smash all the bottles in the premises. He did not spot Patrick, who was, according to Alexander, left with two conclusions: one, that “journalists drinking Scotch were unlikely to be viewed with fondness by the fundamentalist gunman”, and secondly, “he was drinking the last Scotch likely to be consumed in the Commodore for quite a while”.

According to Alexander, when Friedman descended later, Patrick told him about the incident. A few days later, it duly figured in one of Friedman’s despatches. But by the time Friedman wrote his first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, in 1989, the incident had morphed into something that happened to Friedman! I checked it – you can find Friedman’s deceit on page 225 of the book as published by Fontana Press. “My first glimpse of Beirut’s real bottom came at the Commodore Hotel bar on February 7, 1984… I was enjoying a ‘quiet’ lunch in the Commodore restaurant that day when…”

Alexander put it down to Friedman’s monumental conceit. He is probably right.

But this is also fraud, pure and simple. It follows in the great American tradition of stealing and then calling something your own.

Money does tend to blur the perspective of many

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One can understand Matthew Ricketson’s despair over the criticism levelled at the report of the media inquiry of which he was part; after all, one never likes to see one’s work, especially when it is so high-profile, being regarded as the output of a government toady.

(Ricketson, a journalism academic, assisted a retired judge, Ray Finkelstein, in conducting an inquiry into the media in Australia recently.)

But then, Ricketson has only himself to blame. If he thought that news organisations would take kindly to the idea of oversight by the government, then his connection with journalism in the field is obviously rather tenuous.

As an aside, it is curious that though Ricketson expressed a wish to see the media industry reporting on itself without spin, the good professor himself was rather reluctant to tell readers that he was paid, and handsomely too, for his labours alongside Justice Finkelstein. A day before his outpouring which is linked to in the first paragraph of this piece, there were reports that he had received $2500 per day, or a total of $175,000, for assisting Justice Finkelstein. That’s much more than a year’s salary for most journalists who work in the newsrooms of the bigger newspapers in this country.

After receiving wages like these – Justice Finkelstein received $308,000 or $4400 per day – if the public were to judge the recipient as wanting to please, even a little, his paymaster, then that public would surely have to be forgiven. As with all humans, the tendency to avoid biting the hand that feeds us exists within our beings. It is part of human nature.

Consultants, analysts, call them what one wishes, always make sure to avoid annoying those who provide them with handsome commissions – else the danger of missing out when the next chance arises is very real.

No reflection on Ricketson or the good judge – they are human too. Thus, if either of them were to say they were not influenced by the commissioning authority, one would have to take that with a pinch of salt. Not to say that this happened consciously; it happens subconsciously to all members of the human race. We avoid conflict whenever possible.

It is surprising that someone who has been a journalist can ever condone a solution to a media problem which involves the government. Perhaps, apart from the influence of the commissioning authority, one can put that down to the individual never having lived in a country where government has more than a passing involvement in running the media.

From a personal point of view, I find the suggestion of a government-funded overseer abhorrent. My thinking may well be influenced by having witnessed government excesses towards the media during the 26-month emergency promulgated by the late Indira Gandhi in India between 1975 and 1977 – at a time when I was still in university – and also having actually felt the clammy hand of the government censor when I was chief sub-editor of the Khaleej Times in Dubai in the 1990s, at a time when that august publication was the biggest English-language daily in the Middle East.

The obvious argument put forward by those pushing for government funding of a regulatory body is that a situation such as those described above could never eventuate in Australia. Given the extent to which the government already tries to twist its version of truth before it reaches the media here, and the extent to which politicians try to influence what appears in print or is broadcast, by fair means or foul, I would much rather err on the side of caution.

The Australian Press Council may be a poor alternative but, after some beefing up, it is a much better solution than giving the government the ability to twist arms. The powers-that-be are already trying to scare the hell out of people as much as possible by bringing in more and more oppressive laws, the latest being the proposed two-year data retention legislation.

To actually hand the power of regulation of the one entity that can bring the government to heel to that same government would be rather foolish, to put it mildly. Do we really want to put the cat in charge of looking after the canaries?

Afghanistan: lies and damn lies. No statistics

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THIRTY-TWO Australians have died needlessly in Afghanistan. All of them were young, in their 20s and 30s, and have left young families behind. If there was some point to their dying, if they had sacrificed their lives for a worthy cause, then at least their loved ones would have some means of consoling themselves.

But that isn’t the case. They have died for nothing. They have died because one man’s vanity led to him thinking that he could do better than the old Soviet Union, the British Empire and even the much reviled Genghis Khan.

That one man is George Dubya Bush.

When the US sent troops into Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 in order to wreak havoc on Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a justified reaction. Had the US smashed the al-Qaeda network and exited the country in six months, all would have been well.

But that wasn’t the case. The US and its allies decided that they would stay and try to indulge in nation-building. The long-term motive was to obtain mining concessions in Afghanistan and to try and build a pipeline through Central Asia for an alternative supply of gas. (That, incidentally, hasn’t worked. All the concessions, bar one, went to China and India; Canda was granted one.)

There has been some curious muddle-headed thinking by many in the Western camp; people like David Kilcullen have concluded that if the Afghans were given all the Western accoutrements of development, they would suddenly fall in love with their Western invaders. Kilcullen has a ridiculous hypothesis that the Taliban, who were ruling Afghanistan when the West invaded, has to draw on ordinary citizens for support and that these citizens can be weaned away by improvements in local conditions. Exactly how he came to this conclusion is unknown.

Things haven’t worked out that way. Had Bush asked someone to read the history books and find out what had happened to nations that tried to subjugate the Afghans, he might have found out that it was a mission that would end in failure. (Bush himself cannot read.)

But nobody among all the Western nations, Australia included, bothered to read up on the history of Afgnanistan and note that no invader has ever managed to get the better of the Afghans.

Now Australia has moved up its date of departure. Late next year, the Australian Labor Party will have to face an election which it will find very difficult to win; the Afghan involvement should not be present as an election issue.

For the US, something similar exists; Barack Obama goes to an election later in 2012 and if Afghanistan is an issue, it will not be helpful to him. So the American pullout will continue apace.

In the end, the Taliban will come back to power within six months of the West pulling out. The same Taliban which was ruling when the US invaded.

In the interim, the US, other NATO countries and Australia will tell their citizens any number of lies to quell the queries from the media. But in the end, it all amounts to nothing.

Once the troops have left Afghanistan it will all be back to square one.

The revolution is on hold

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MONTHS after the governments of both Egypt and Tunisia were toppled, protests continue apace in Yemen and Syria but there is no end in sight, one way or the other. In Libya, on the other hand, it seems to be the end of the road for Muammar Gaddafi.

In Syria and Yemen, the governments are hanging on because the US has been unable to provide military aid through its proxies; an attempt by the US to pass a resolution in the UN Security Council against Syria was vetoed by both Russia and China. The same two countries have connections to Yemen, Russia from the old days when there were two countries, North and South Yemen, the latter friendly to the old USSR. That the US has been unable to get Russia and China on-side is an indication of how much the US has lost its clout as a superpower.

Yemen is more likely to fall to protesters, given that its economic clout is less; Syria buys a sizeable amount of arms from both Russia and China and hence is more valuable as a client. Bashar Al-Assad is likely to survive.

Bahrain has quietened down, once the protesters realised that there was no chance that the US would support them. Being home to the US Fifth Fleet, it is a centre of stragegic importance. More than anything else, Saudi Arabia is the country that calls the tune in Bahrain and since it is still of importance as an oil supplier to the US – not to mention the private deals the al-Saud princes have will US politicians – its writ runs in Bahrain.

But despite the ousting of Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, there is no guarantee that anything like western democracy will come to Egypt and Tunisia. A gang of Mubarak cronies is now running Egypt and has been hailed as a force for stability by the US. The government in Egypt will always have to be one with which Israel is comfortable and that is the one factor that will determine who gets the backing of the US.

Tunisia heads to the polls on October 23 and indications are that Islamists will figure prominently among the winners. The transitional prime minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, is 84 and no certainty to continue. Whatever eventuates, the Western world has to be willing to accept the outcome. Meddling in these regions and rejecting the choice of the people will not go down well.

Why was the US attacked on September 11, 2001?

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THIS weekend will mark 10 years since the World Trade Centre was brought down by Islamic fundamentalists in a spectacular attack that changed life in the US. But till today, we have had no answer to the question why.

The Middle East correspondent of The Independent, Robert Fisk, tells of an incident shortly after the attacks, when he was interviewed along with Alan Dershowitz, the well-known US lawyer. Fisk, like any good journalist, raised the question of why the attacks had taken place; as he explained it, even in the case of a small robbery, the first thing the police try to find out is possible motive.

In response, Dershowitz called him a dangerous man, anti-American and anti-Semitic. Exactly why he did that is open to question.

Why did 19 young Muslims volunteer to end their lives by staging an attack of this nature? While there are conspiracy theories aplenty on the internet as to the how of the operation, the book Masterminds of Terror offers the authentic account, straight from the mouths of the planners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Journalists Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding published this tome in 2003 but then ignorance is rampant and people continue to attribute the attacks to everyone from the Mossad to the US government.

But the why is equally important. American policy in the Middle East has, for ages, been slanted in favour of Israel. For a long time, Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab, had no choice but to accept the repeated humiliations to which the US subjected them. In this light, the fact that some among them hit back is no surprise.

The main problem in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian question. A deal was signed as far back as 1993 for a two-state solution but it is still to be implemented in full. The main reason for this is the fact that Israel does not want the conflict to end – if it did, its importance would decline and correspondingly its ability to influence US policy. It is much better to always be in the news as a country that is being attacked by Arabs; that way it is easy to generate sympathy from the world at large.

There are other issues in the Middle East. The US is willing to deal with any kind of dictator as long as he does their bidding. Talk of democracy is very selective. Young people in the Arab world are fed up with the double standard. Is it any wonder that the more determined and idealistic among them choose to join fringe groups that use killing as a tactic?

The US has learnt nothing from the attacks. The same kind of arrogance that it exhibited in the past is still seen in its dealing with other countries. The level of hatred that people around the world have for the US has grown by leaps and bounds as news emerges of the way innocent Muslims are kidnapped and tortured in bases around the world. And this feeling of hatred is not confined to the Muslim world; it is evident in Western countries equally.

The adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out to be disasters in terms of image-building and also empire-building. But the US continues to muddle on, antagonising people left, right and centre.

As the song Where have all the flowers gone asks, When will they ever learn?

Is Hersh right or wrong?

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THE well-respected American investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has come under a lot of fire from conservatives recently after he published an article in the New Yorker, saying that there was no conclusive evidence that Iran was making any moves towards building a nuclear bomb.

Hersh is a legendary figure in journalistic circles; he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and, more recently, was responsible for exposing the abuse by American forces in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some of the criticism came from the Wall Street Journal which was very careful to avoid citing Hersh’s credentials but, instead, concentrated on pointing out where he had gone wrong in the past. For an investigative report, getting it right 50 percent of the time is better than most and Hersh is far better than that.

The WSJ piece, written by a cantankerous gent named Bret Stephens (partial article here; the skinflints at WSJ charge for rubbish like this) dwells heavily on what Hersh has got wrong in the last four or five years. It does not give the reader any idea about the major triumphs that this intrepid man, one of the few newspapermen in the US with even a shred of integrity after the Iraq invasion of 2003, has recorded.

Other criticisms dwell on Hersh’s characterisation of the Iraq invasion as a “mistake”; this is correct as the march to control Saddam’s oil was a deliberately planned mission by Dubya and his cronies. The possibility that Sy indulging in sarcasm appears to have escaped people.Hersh, more than anyone else, knows the background of what led up to the Iraq invasion.

If Hersh is right in pointing out that Iran is nowhere near a nuclear weapon, then a huge amount of the fear factor that is being drummed up by Israel and its cohorts in the US dissipates immediately. Even Israelis, such as the former Mossad chief, Meir Dragan, have gone on the record, saying that Iran poses no danger at the moment.

But if the fear that hangs over the Middle East is lifted, then it becomes difficult for Israel to continue to get the support it does in the US. Support which translates into lobbying muscle, aid and diplomatic support. Hence anybody who writes an article like Hersh did will be targeted.

Obama angers Israel – and conveniently forgets that Saudi Arabia exists

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SOON after he came to office in 2009, US President Barack Obama made a trip to Cairo and gave a stirring speech at Cairo University. Obama is probably the best speaker in world politics and can soar to heights of great rhetoric; the effect of his Cairo speech was probably magnified by the fact that he was a few months into his four-year term and hopes were high that he would live up to the promises he had made while campaigning for the presidency.

A little less than two years later, with a great deal of cynicism over what Obama has turned out to be, he gave a second address today, focused on the Middle East, this time from the White House. And in so doing, he may well have ensured that he loses the presidential election in 2012.

The speech was apparently meant to give an official American stance on the incidents that have taken place in the Middle East since last December – the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the ongoing struggle for freedom in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and smaller agitations in other countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The killing of Osama bin Laden would have guaranteed Obama re-election had he not opened his big mouth about Israel’s borders. But he chose to do precisely this and, in so doing, may well have lost the backing of the powerful Israeli lobby that can decide who rises or falls in American politics.

George Bush Senior was the last US president to feel the power of this lobby after he withheld loan guarantees from Israel in order to force the country to attend peace talks in Madrid in 1991; he lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton.

Obama’s mistake was to backtrack on US policy; it is well-known that the US backs a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians based on the ceasefire lines of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. This stance ensures that Israel retains control of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip which it can then use as bargaining chips. Jerusalem is the main obstacle. (The so-called peace process over the last 20 years has given the Gaza Strip and about 20 percent of the West Bank to Palestinian control.)

But in his speech today, Obama said a two-state settlement between Israel and the Palestinians would be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war. At that time, Jordan was occupying the West Bank and Egypt held the Gaza Strip. And Israel was not in control of Jerusalem.

Obama has a chance to fall on his knees and grovel and reverse his stance – he is due to speak to the biggest and most powerful Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, soon. But if he does repeat his comments there, then you can bid goodbye to the chances of a Democrat being in the White House for the next four years.

Predictably, Obama came down in support of Arab countries where the people have decided to fight for freedom. But his gestures to help these nations – involving the IMF and the World Bank – means that the process that was gone through in South America to make the nations of that continent servants of the US will be re-enacted all over again.

As expected, Obama did not dare to say a word about Saudi Arabia. There have been several low-key protests in the kingdom and women have threatened to drive en masse in protest against the ludicrous rule that prevents them from doing so. But Obama seemed unaware of this.

He mentioned the repression in Bahrain and even went to the extent of saying that Shia mosques should not be destroyed by the Sunni rulers but he did not chide Saudi Arabia for leading troops into Bahrain and playing a leading role in savagely quelling the popular protests.

The US treads carefully when it comes to Saudi Arabia. There is no better example to illustrate this than the events of 9/11; despite the fact that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked the US were Saudis, Washington did nothing to protest. Instead, it helped several members of the bin Laden family and royals from the Saudi clan to leave the US immediately after the attacks, at a time when air traffic was grounded.

The name of the game is oil. The Saudis are still the biggest producers and the country with the largest remaining reserves. If explorations in Iraq do turn up more reserves as some have predicted, then a future US president may criticise Saudi Arabia in public.

For the moment, Obama is as beholden to the Saudis as Dubya. He is conscious that the US still consumes 25 percent of the world’s petroleum and is up to its tits in debt.

Bin Laden’s death: the old American habit of lying is back

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THE US of A sure knows how to screw up things. For them, the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by American forces was an act that would have guaranteed a lot of good karma right across the world.

The problem is, they tried to embellish the tale of his death with unnecessary lies. There’s a simple rule about lies – much in the same way that cadavers float to the surface, lies generally get exposed. The only variable is their shelf life.

It hasn’t taken long for the Americans’ lies to be exposed. For one, bin Laden was unarmed when he was killed. The Americans said he had fired back at them when they entered the room in which he was; now it turns out that both bin Laden and one of his wives were in that room, both were unarmed and the woman rushed towards the Americans and they shot her in the foot. This is straight from the White House, courtesy its spokesman Jay Carney.

Bin Laden was then killed in cold blood. The Americans lied when they said they could not have taken him alive. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Afghanistan knows that the Americans did not want to capture him alive and put him on trial – a lot of what he would have said in a courtroom would have been pretty damaging to the CIA.

Another lie the Americans told was about bin Laden using the woman in the room as a human shield – turns out he did no such thing. The Americans shot the woman in the foot when she ran towards them as they entered the room. Bin Laden did not grab her and hold her in front of him as a shield. An attempt to paint him as a coward failed. Why did they try to do so?

There are other lies that are being exposed: CIA veteran Bob Baer, speaking to the BBC, pointed out that it would have been impossible for the type of helicopters used in the raid to kill bin Laden to operate in the area without being noticed as they make an awful racket (he exaggerated to get his point across, saying that they could have been heard in Karachi, more than 1500 kms away).

Baer also pointed out that it would have been impossible for the helicopters to enter Pakistani airspace without being spotted on radar; given that Pakistan shares a border with two countries it distrusts – India and Afghanistan – it is on the alert round the clock. The Pakistanis were in on the whole thing – nothing else explains this.

Baer was also adamant that the raid could not have happened without Pakistani troops being present – though, he said, they would have stayed outside the premises as they did not want to be involved in the killing.

It is inconceivable that the Pakistan armed forces were not aware that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad which is about 122 kilometres from the Pakistan capital, Islamabad. Abbottabad is also home to the Pakistan Military Academy and Baer made the point that it was impossible for a foreigner to be in the area without gossip spreading about his or her reason for being there.

It is well known that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence has a soft spot for extremists. The agency was provided with billions of dollars by the Americans during the war against the Soviets and it channelled the funds to the various militias in Afghanistan, with the lion’s share going to the Pashtun groups; Pashtuns are present in Pakistan in large numbers, hence the bias.

The ISI is close to the Afghan Taliban and also the local version, the Pakistan Taliban. There are plenty of sympathisers within ISI ranks, men who want to see Pakistan become a fundamentalist Islamic state.

To believe that a unit like this was unaware of the presence of bin Laden in Abbottabad is like asking one to believe that the moon is made of cheese.

This constant changing of the story has led to one thing – the proliferation of conspiracy theories on the internet.

There have been conspiracy theories aplenty about the September 11 attacks despite the fact that the two masterminds, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al-Shibh, spoke to journalist Yosri Fouda of Al-Jazeera and detailed the plot.

Fouda, along with Nick Fielding of the Times, wrote a book titled Masterminds of Terror in 2003 detailing the modus operandi of the attacks but this has not quelled the conspiracy theorists. You can’t get closer to the plot than by reading this book.

There are already plenty of conspiracy theories on the internet about bin Laden’s death. I hope it doesn’t turn out that the Americans got the wrong man!