By OMAR RADWAN
Courtesy Middle East Monitor

Palestinian Prisoners’ Day was observed on April 17th with a series of events and functions across the West Bank and Gaza. Its commemoration this year stressed how important the issue of the prisoners held by Israel is for Palestinians, even though this matter is almost completely ignored by the rest of the world. There are currently more than 7,000 Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli jails. Israel would like the world to believe that their imprisonment is justified; that they have been convicted of crimes under due process and are a threat to Israel’s security. When speaking of them Israel often refers to them as “having Israeli blood on their hands”.

However, this is far from the case. When a Palestinian prisoner is arrested, he is kept in custody and interrogated by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security organisation. Shin Bet officers abuse Palestinian prisoners as a matter of course in order to extract confessions.

Detainees are kept in isolation, deprived of sleep, threatened, deceived and denied contact with their families. They are usually also denied access to a lawyer until they agree to sign confessions. These confessions are later used to condemn them to lengthy jail terms. Many Palestinians in Israel’s jails have not been convicted of any crime at all; they are held under “administrative detention”. This is prolonged detention of a prisoner without charge or trial or judicial review. While it is sanctioned under international law, it is only meant to be used under the most extreme circumstances; strict conditions have to be met before it is used. Israel has abused this provision consistently, using it to lock up thousands of Palestinian prisoners without charge over the 44 years it has occupied the West Bank and Gaza. At the beginning of 2011 there were 207 prisoners held under administrative detention. They included Kifah Qutaish, a 38 year old female prisoner suffering from a rare condition known as Reynaud’s Syndrome, which is similar to gangrene. She was arrested in August 2010, kept in solitary confinement, and subjected to physical and psychological torture. Her condition has worsened because of this and because her medical needs were neglected. No reason has been given for her imprisonment. She was expecting to be released on 5th April and was looking forward to seeing her young son and daughter when she received news that her “administrative detention” had been extended for the third time. Again, no reason has been given and no due legal process has taken place.

Kifah is only one of thousands of Palestinians who have been subjected to mistreatment in Israeli jails. Palestinian prisoners are tortured routinely, their most basic rights are denied, and they often have to endure solitary confinement; there are reports that some prisoners have been held in solitary confinement for over five years. According to the Public Committee against Torture in Israel and the Israeli Human Rights Organisation B’Tselem, the methods of torture include “slapping, kicking, threats, verbal abuse and humiliation, bending the body in extremely painful positions, intentional tightening of the handcuffs, stepping on manacles, application of pressure to different parts of the body, choking and other forms of violence and humiliation (pulling out hair, spitting etc.), exposure to extreme heat and cold, and continuous exposure to artificial light.” Thousands of parents, children, and spouses have been separated from their loved ones after being incarcerated by Israel without a fair trial.

The Zionist state of Israel has been in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. Over this period it has at one time or another arrested over 650,000 Palestinians – more than 20% of the total population of the West Bank or Gaza. The entire occupation is illegal under international law, as is Israel’s policy of transferring detainees from the occupied territories to prisons in its own territory and of course, its torture and maltreatment of detainees. However, the pressure it has faced from the international community over this issue has been insignificant at best and non-existent at worst. In the meantime, the international community has been preoccupied with the only Israeli prisoner in Palestinian custody, Gilad Shalit, the soldier captured by Hamas in 2006. The European Union has participated directly in efforts to secure his release and his case is well known and publicised throughout the world. He has been made an honorary citizen of Paris, New Orleans and Miami, and his continued detention by Hamas is even given as a justification for the siege of Gaza. President Nicholas Sarkozy of France has become personally involved in Shalit’s case, meeting with his family and condemning Shalit’s imprisonment in the strongest possible terms. French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie was mobbed by an angry crowd in Gaza when she met with Shalit’s family and ignored the issue of Palestinian prisoners. It is a little known fact that it is Israeli intransigence which has kept Shalit in captivity for so long. Hamas has declared its willingness to release him if Israel releases 1,000 of the Palestinian prisoners it is holding, including all the women and all of the children. But Israel refuses to release some of the prisoners that Hamas has asked for in exchange for Shalit, including Marwan Barghouthi, a key leader of the Palestinian intifada which broke out in 2000.

Israel would like the world to believe that Marwan Barghouthi is a murderer but his real crime is leading an effective campaign against Israel’s military occupation between 2000 and 2002. Most of the Palestinians Israel is holding are either totally innocent and do not know why they are being held, or they are only there because they have taken part in resistance activities against the Israeli occupation. Armed resistance to occupation is a right enshrined in international law; Palestinian resistance is, however, often entirely non-violent civil protest and completely peaceful. Israel’s definition of security, its eternal justification for holding Palestinian prisoners, is so broad that it doesn’t even give the Palestinians the most basic rights of free speech and free association. As one Israeli observer noted, were such measures to be applied to the Israeli public, half of the governing Likud party would be in jail.

It is time for the international community to stand up to Israel’s illegal and unjustified detention of thousands of Palestinians. The world quite rightly took note of and protested about the detention of Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa, and the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. The Palestinians in Israeli jails are there for the same reason that these leaders were imprisoned in their respective countries; they too refuse to live under tyranny and oppression. Why, then, should Palestinians be less deserving of the world’s support for their freedom?

By DR. HANAN CHEHATA
Courtesy Middle East Monitor

The first anniversary of Israel’s horrific assault on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is fast approaching. As most people will remember, nine peace activists were killed by Israeli commandos when the soldiers boarded the Mavi Marmara in international waters. The ship was carrying hundreds of international humanitarians and peace activists en route to break Israel’s siege of Gaza. The flotilla, of which the Marmara was a part, was nowhere near Israel’s territorial waters and, therefore, had every right to be there. Nevertheless, Israeli troops were ordered to surround the ship with helicopters and navy vessels, board the ship and open fire indiscriminately on the people standing on deck. According to the Head of the Israel Defence Force’s Southern Command, the commandos would have had no option but to open fire on civilians due to the “air-drop” boarding tactic used. Apart from the nine activists who were gunned down in cold blood, more than fifty people were wounded. The survivors were then basically kidnapped, subjected to abuse, taken to Israel against their will and held illegally in Israeli prison cells. This act of unjustifiable brutality was heavily condemned in the United Nations Human Rights Council Report which is so graphic and explosive that it reads like a thriller; the facts are beyond belief.

It’s almost a year later and history looks set to repeat itself if the world does not sit up and take notice. Another flotilla is due to set sail for Gaza in May and it is vital for it to do so. Despite the eyes of the world focusing on Gaza last May, the siege has still not been lifted. After being virtually imprisoned by Israel for over 4 years, 1.5 million Palestinians are still trapped in Gaza (over half of them children) in what British Prime Minister David Cameron – a good friend of Israel   referred to as a “prison camp.” It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Palestinians to leave Gaza, and deaths are reported regularly when patients are not allowed to leave the Strip for treatment elsewhere. Similarly, few people are allowed into Gaza, with politicians, charity workers, journalists, Palestinians and non-Palestinians denied access by Israel, and the border with Egypt only now starting to be open a little more often, but still on an extremely limited basis, following the overthrow of Israel’s buddy Hosni Mubarak.

While Israeli authorities, the jailers of Gaza, argue that they have “eased” the siege since the massacre last May and that there is therefore no need for another “humanitarian mission”, this is completely misleading and, indeed, beside the point. While it is true that Israel, as a result of extremely bad publicity and international pressure, has now eased the siege slightly by letting in small amounts of chocolate, crisps, pasta, jam and other common household items that were forbidden in the past, there are still plenty of items which are banned from entry into Gaza; exports are even more limited. Items which are still banned include basic building materials such as cement, wooden beams, thermal insulation materials and so on which are vital in order to rebuild the thousands of homes, hospitals, schools and factories that were destroyed and damaged during Israel’s assault on Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead” in the winter of 2008-9.

In addition, the latest flotilla is about more than taking in humanitarian and medical aid; it is about breaking the siege itself, in all of its forms, including restrictions on the free movement of people. Nowhere else in the world are people herded into such a small strip of land and denied the right to leave or to have people visit them. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet and the only place in the world to endure such a barbaric medieval-style siege. It remains almost completely isolated from the outside world and the flotilla activists hope to bring some normalisation to the situation by visiting the territory.

Freedom Flotilla 2 is thus the latest and largest attempt to break the siege on Gaza. It will set sail in May to commemorate the first anniversary of the Mavi Marmara’s fatal voyage; Britain 2 Gaza is the UK partner in this mission. It is being brought together by 5 British campaign groups: Friends of Al-Aqsa, the British Muslim Initiative, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Stop the War Coalition and the Palestinian Forum of Britain (PFB). This humanitarian mission will be made up of similar initiatives from around 20 countries, including Canada, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the USA.

Israel is now doing everything it can to see that this mission fails even before it has left port. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to “act firmly” using “force” against the flotilla in May. He has also asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to help him stop the Freedom Flotilla from setting sail. To his credit, Mr. Ban responded by telling Netanyahu that the siege should be lifted.

Despite massive pressure, threats of violence and ultimatums against individual flotilla members and the organisations involved, Freedom Flotilla 2 is determined to set sail in May. There is a strong determination to help free the people of Gaza from the illegal shackles that Israel has placed on them and which the rest of the world has apathetically allowed to stay in place. Worldwide public opinion may be that the siege is illegal and most people may even be opposed to the immoral siege, but Israel pays no heed to world opinion and continues to breach international law and UN Resolutions on a daily basis. The general public has little choice but to attempt to break the siege as part of a voluntary humanitarian initiative.

This will be the largest seaborne mission to attempt to reach Gaza since the siege began in 2007. Israel’s claim that the flotilla is “Islamist” is ridiculous given that it is being supported by Muslim, Christian and Jewish peace groups. It has the backing of people and organisations from all walks of life, including politicians, academics (such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein) and NGOs.

The Britain 2 Gaza initiative can be followed via its Facebook page, which will be updated with all of the latest information as and when it is available.

Palestinian factions agree to form interim government and fix general election date following talks in Cairo.

Fatah, the Palestinian political organisation, has reached an agreement with its rival Hamas on forming an interim government and fixing a date for a general election, Egyptian intelligence has said.

In February, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and a member of Fatah, called for presidential and legislative elections before September, in a move which was rejected by Hamas at the time.

“The consultations resulted in full understandings over all points of discussions, including setting up an interim agreement with specific tasks and to set a date for election,” Egyptian intelligence said in a statement on Wednesday.

The deal, which took many officials by surprise, was thrashed out in Egypt and followed a series of secret meetings.

“The two sides signed initial letters on an agreement. All points of differences have been overcome,” Taher Al-Nono, a Hamas government spokesman in Gaza, told the Reuters news agency.

He said that Cairo would shortly invite both sides to a signing ceremony.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Gaza, Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, said: I think we are optimistic because … there is [an] official agreement between Hamas and Fatah, and I think we now have [an] impressive jump to the Palestinian unity.

“Maybe it does not come as one shock because I think it came as a fruit for long talks and discussion.

“I think that today we became very close to this agreement, we have finished some points. It is like [an] outline draft and I think it will be a good beginning.

“Maybe after that we will start how we can implement this agreement to be translated and practised on the ground.”

‘Geopolitical situation’

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, said: “It is important news … the geopolitical situation wasn’t exactly helpful [to reconciliation] and then we went through six months of upheavals, certainly sweeping through Egypt.

“At the end, you could say that President Abbas has lost his patron in Egypt, which is President Mubarak, and Hamas is more on less facing almost similar trouble now, with Bashar Al-Assad [Syria's president] facing his own trouble in Damascus.

Saree Makdisi, a Palestinian scholar at the University of California, discusses Fatah-Hamas reconciliation accord

“So with the US keeping a distance, Israel not delivering the goods on the peace process and the settlements, it was time for Palestinians to come together and agree on what they basically agreed on almost a year and a half ago.”

Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said on Wednesday that Abbas could not hope to forge a peace deal with Israel if he pursued a reconciliation accord with Hamas.

“The Palestinian Authority must choose either peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. There is no possibility for peace with both,” he said.

The US is reviewing further reports on details of the reconciliation and while it supports Palestinian reconciliation, Hamas remains “a terrorist organisation which targets civilians”, Tommy Vietor, US National Security Council spokesman, said.

“To play a constructive role in achieving peace, any Palestinian government must accept the Quartet principles and renounce violence, abide by past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

Hamas does not recognise Israel as a state.

‘Bitter split’

Fatah holds power in the occupied West Bank while Hamas, which won the last parliamentary election in 2006, routed Abbas’ forces in 2007 to seize control of the Gaza Strip.

Rawya Rageh, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Cairo, said: “This effectively will be ending a bitter split that Palestinians have been witnessing since 2007.

“There is an announcement expected in the next few hours to reveal the details of the agreement.”

Rageh said the deal was expected to be signed next week and would be attended by Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who is based in Damascus.

Nicole Johnston, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Gaza, said: “One of the main civil society groups here is calling on all Palestinian factions to head down to the main square in Gaza City, that’s the square of the unknown soldier, to begin the celebrations.

“It seems certainly in Gaza that there’s a need for some good news. It’s been a pretty rough month here in a lot of respects, an escalation of violence with Israel, the kidnapping and murder of a foreigner.

“So really, this kind of news … is call for celebration.”

Wednesday’s accord was first reported by Egypt’s intelligence service, which brokered the talks.

In a statement carried by the Egyptian state news agency MENA, the intelligence service said the deal was agreed by a Hamas delegation led by Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of the group’s politburo, and Fatah central committee member Azzam al-Ahmad.

Al-Ahmad and Abu Marzouk said the agreement covered all points of contention, including forming a transitional government, security arrangements and the restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to allow Hamas to join it.

Speaking on Egyptian state television, al-Ahmad said a general election would take place within a year.

Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior member of Hamas, said all prisoners with a non-criminal background would be released.

(Courtesy Al Jazeera English)

By Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly

How the revolutions spreading across the Middle East may well mark the beginning of the end for American global power.

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.

Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal “subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.

Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer — and thanks to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring,” this is now so much clearer — is that both were Washington’s chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.

Why, half a century later, would Washington betray its stated democratic principles by backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to replace him, at least initially with his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a man best known for running Cairo’s torture chambers (and lending them out to Washington)? The answer again: because both were reliable subordinates who had long served Washington’s interests well in this key Arab state.

Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, democratic protests are threatening to sweep away subordinate elites crucial to the wielding of American power. Of course, all modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control — and for most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and set their own agendas was also the moment when it became clear that imperial collapse was in the cards.

If the “velvet revolutions” that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the Soviet empire, then the “jasmine revolutions” now spreading across the Middle East may well mark the beginning of the end for American global power.

Putting the Military in Charge

To understand the importance of local elites, look back to the Cold War’s early days when a desperate White House was searching for something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In December 1954, the National Security Council (NSC) met in the White House to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces of change then sweeping the globe.

Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European empires that had guaranteed global order for more than a century were giving way to 100 new nations, many — as Washington saw it — susceptible to “communist subversion.” In Latin America, there were stirrings of leftist opposition to the region’s growing urban poverty and rural landlessness.

After a review of the “threats” facing the U.S. in Latin America, influential Treasury Secretary George Humphrey informed his NSC colleagues that they should “stop talking so much about democracy” and instead “support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American.” At that moment with a flash of strategic insight, Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe that Humphrey was, in effect, saying, “They’re OK if they’re our s.o.b.’s.”

It was a moment to remember, for the President of the United States had just articulated with crystalline clarity the system of global dominion that Washington would implement for the next 50 years — setting aside democratic principles for a tough realpolitik policy of backing any reliable leader willing to support the U.S., thereby building a worldwide network of national (and often nationalist) leaders who would, in a pinch, put Washington’s needs above local ones.

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would favor military autocrats in Latin America, aristocrats across the Middle East, and a mixture of democrats and dictators in Asia. In 1958, military coups in Thailand and Iraq suddenly put the spotlight on Third World militaries as forces to be reckoned with. It was then that the Eisenhower administration decided to bring foreign military leaders to the U.S. for further “training” to facilitate “the ‘management’ of the forces of change released by the development” of these emerging nations. Henceforth, Washington would pour military aid into the cultivation of the armed forces of allies and potential allies worldwide, while “training missions” would be used to create crucial ties between the U.S. military and the officer corps in country after country — or where subordinate elites did not seem subordinate enough, help identify alternative leaders.

When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, the Central Intelligence Agency went to work, promoting coups that would install reliable military successors –replacing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who tried to nationalize his country’s oil, with General Fazlollah Zahedi (and then the young Shah) in 1953; President Sukarno with General Suharto in Indonesia during the next decade; and of course President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, to name just three such moments.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Washington’s trust in the militaries of its client states would only grow. The U.S. was, for example, lavishing $1.3 billion in aid on Egypt’s military annually, but investing only $250 million a year in the country’s economic development. As a result, when demonstrations rocked the regime in Cairo last January, as the New York Times reported, “a 30-year investment paid off as American generals… and intelligence officers quietly called… friends they had trained with,” successfully urging the army’s support for a “peaceful transition” to, yes indeed, military rule.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s, followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances, U.S. weapons systems, CIA support for local security, a safe American haven for their capital, and special favors for their elites, including access to educational institutions in the U.S. or Department of Defense overseas schools for their children.

In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summed up this record thusly: “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

How It Used to Work

America is by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves (as America would later rule the skies), but when it came to the ground, like empires past it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could a small island nation of just 40 million with an army of only 99,000 men rule a global empire of some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all humanity?

From 1850 to 1950, Britain controlled its formal colonies through an extraordinary array of local allies — from Fiji island chiefs and Malay sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. Simultaneously, through subordinate elites Britain reigned over an even larger “informal empire” that encompassed emperors (from Beijing to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok to Cairo), and presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At its peak in 1880, Britain’s informal empire in Latin America, the Middle East, and China was larger, in population, than its formal colonial holdings in India and Africa. Its entire global empire, encompassing nearly half of humanity, rested on these slender ties of cooperation to loyal local elites.

Following four centuries of relentless imperial expansion, however, Europe’s five major overseas empires were suddenly erased from the globe in a quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 and 1974, the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires faded fast from Asia and Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more than half of today’s sovereign states. In searching for an explanation for this sudden, sweeping change, most scholars agree with British imperial historian Ronald Robinson who famously argued that “when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators,” their power began to fade.

During the Cold War that coincided with this era of rapid decolonization, the world’s two superpowers turned to the same methods regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of newly independent states. The Soviet Union’s KGB and its surrogates like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania enforced political conformity among the 14 Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe and challenged the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third World. Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of presidents, autocrats, and dictators on four continents, employing coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control and, when necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.

In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of local elites proved a complex matter indeed. Many of them were driven by conflicting loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, which meant that they had to be monitored closely. So critical were these subordinate elites, and so troublesome were their insubordinate iterations, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.

Given the rise of its system of global control in a post-World War II age of independence, Washington had little choice but to work not simply with surrogates or puppets, but with allies who — admittedly from weaker positions — still sought to maximize what they saw as their nations’ interests (as well as their own). Even at the height of American global power in the 1950s, when its dominance was relatively unquestioned, Washington was forced into hard bargaining with the likes of the Philippines’ Raymond Magsaysay, South Korean autocrat Syngman Rhee, and South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.

In South Korea during the 1960s, for instance, General Park Chung Hee, then president, bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of U.S. development dollars, which helped spark the country’s economic “miracle.” In the process, Washington paid up, but got what it most wanted: 50,000 of those tough Korean troops as guns-for-hire helpers in its unpopular war in Vietnam.

Post-Cold War World

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending the Cold War, Moscow quickly lost its satellite states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as once-loyal Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of empire. For Washington, the “victor” and soon to be the “sole superpower” on planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far slower pace.

Over the next two decades, globalization fostered a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency of developing economies on any single state, however imperial. With its capacity for controlling elites receding, Washington has faced ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising tide of economic nationalism in Latin America.

As U.S. power and influence declined, Washington’s attempts to control its subordinate elites began to fail, often spectacularly — including its efforts to topple bête noire Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in a badly bungled 2002 coup, to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia from Russia’s orbit in 2008, and to oust nemesis Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian elections. Where a CIA coup or covert cash once sufficed to defeat an antagonist, the Bush administration needed a massive invasion to topple just one troublesome dictator, Saddam Hussein. Even then, it found its plans for subsequent regime change in Syria and Iran blocked when these states instead aided a devastating insurgency against U.S. forces inside Iraq.

Similarly, despite the infusions of billions of dollars in foreign aid, Washington has found it nearly impossible to control the Afghan president it installed in power, Hamid Karzai, who memorably summed up his fractious relationship with Washington to American envoys this way: “If you’re looking for a stooge and calling a stooge a partner, no. If you’re looking for a partner, yes.”

Then, late in 2010, WikiLeaks began distributing those thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables that offer uncensored insights into Washington’s weakening control over the system of surrogate power that it had built up for 50 years. In reading these documents, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn of Haaretz could see “the fall of the American empire, the decline of a superpower that ruled the world by the dint of its military and economic supremacy.” No longer, he added, are “American ambassadors… received in world capitals as ‘high commissioners’… [instead they are] tired bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening wearily to their hosts’ talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state.”

Indeed, what the WikiLeaks documents show is a State Department struggling to manage an unruly global system of increasingly insubordinate elites by any means possible — via intrigue to collect needed information and intelligence, friendly acts meant to coax compliance, threats to coerce cooperation, and billions of dollars in misspent aid to court influence. In early 2009, for instance, the State Department instructed its embassies worldwide to play imperial police by collecting comprehensive data on local leaders, including “email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans.” Showing its need, like some colonial governor, for incriminating information on the locals, the State Department also pressed its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging in an Islamic society, about the kingdom’s crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?”

With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, U.S. diplomats seemed to empower themselves for dominance by dismissing “the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East and Balkans,” or by knowing the weaknesses of their subordinate elites, notably Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s “voluptuous blonde” nurse, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zadari’s morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud’s $52 million in stolen funds.

As its influence declines, however, Washington is finding many of its chosen local allies either increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant, particularly in the strategic Middle East. In mid-2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia reported that “President Ben Ali… and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people,” relying “on the police for control,” while “corruption in the inner circle is growing” and “the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.” Even so, the U.S. envoy could only recommend that Washington “dial back the public criticism” and instead rely only on “frequent high-level private candor” — a policy that failed to produce any reforms before demonstrations toppled the regime just 18 months later.

Similarly, in late 2008 the American Embassy in Cairo feared that “Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts… are being suffocated.” However, as the embassy admitted, “we would not like to contemplate complications for U.S. regional interests should the U.S.-Egyptian bond be seriously weakened.” When Mubarak visited Washington a few months later, the Embassy urged the White House “to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership.” And so in June 2009, just 18 months before the Egyptian president’s downfall, President Obama hailed this useful dictator as “a stalwart ally… a force for stability and good in the region.”

As the crisis in Cairo’s Tahrir Square unfolded, respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that Washington was pushing “the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.” After 40 years of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he said, “a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.”

Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping away an empire, the decline of a great power is often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In addition to the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down to something not so far short of defeat, the nation’s capital is now writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm is losing its creditworthiness, and longtime allies are forging economic and even military ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now add the possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.

For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. That system once facilitated the extension of American influence worldwide with a surprising efficiency and (relatively speaking) an economy of force. Now, however, those loyal allies increasingly look like an empire of failed or insubordinate states. Make no mistake: the degradation of, or ending of, half a century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the rocks.

(Courtesy Tomdispatch.com, Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly)

By Richard Falk
Ever since it first struck the raw nerve of Israeli political consciousness, I thought it misleading to associate the Goldstone Report so exclusively with its chair, Judge Richard Goldstone. After all, despite his deserved prominence as an international jurist, he was the least substantively qualified of the four members of the mission.

Part of the intensely hostile Israeli reaction undoubtedly had to do with the sense that Goldstone – a devoted Zionist – had been guilty of betrayal. Perhaps even the betrayal of ‘a blood libel,’ because he seemed to be elevating his fidelity to the ‘law’ above tribal loyalties; he should never have been mixed up with such a suspect entity as the UN Human Rights Council in the first place.

What should be observed – and what stands out over time – is the degree of importance that even the extremist Israeli leadership attaches to avoiding stains on its reputation as a law-abiding political actor. This seems true even when the assessing organisation is the UN Human Rights Council, which Israel, as well as the US government, never misses a chance to denounce and defame.

Implicit in their fury is a silent acknowledgement that the UN is a major site of struggle in the ongoing war of legitimacy being fought against Palestinian claims of self-determination.

This assessment was embarrassingly confirmed by the US senate’s reaction to the Goldstone retreat. The senate unanimously passed a resolution on April 14 calling on the UN “to reflect the author’s repudiation of the Goldstone report’s central findings, rescind the report, and reconsider further council actions with respect to its findings.” It also called on the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, “to do all in his power to redress the damage to Israel’s reputation.”

This ill-informed and inflammatory wording is quite extraordinary, starting with the reference to Goldstone as ‘the author’ of the report, thereby overlooking the reality that it was a joint effort. His input was probably the smallest, and the other authors have reaffirmed their support for the entire report.

What is revealed by this senate initiative is the degree of partisanship now present in official Washington, which should – at the very least – lead the Palestinian Authority to seek venues for future negotiations with Israel other than those provided by the US government.

It is probably true that, if Goldstone had not been so vilified for his association with the report, it would have experienced the same fate as thousands of other well-documented UN reports on controversial issues. By lending his name to the fact-finding mission and its outcome, Goldstone became the lightning rod – and the target of vicious attacks.

But he was also heralded at the time by fair-minded persons around the world for his integrity in the face of such hostile fire. In this regard, Goldstone became the sacrificial scarecrow; he failed in his appointed role of keeping the birds of prey at a safe distance.

Studies and Israel’s premeditation

There is a double irony present: Goldstone was partly selected to head this sensitive undertaking because, as a known supporter of Israel, he would make it harder for Israel to complain about bias. Yet – precisely because of the difficulty Goldstone’s credibility posed for Israel’s propaganda machine – the level of attack on him reached hysterical heights, and exerted such intense pressure that he eventually retreated.

Two other aspects of the situation are often neglected or misstated. First of all, several other respected international studies had already confirmed most of the conclusions reached before the Goldstone Report was released in September 2009. Other prior reports highlighting the international law issues were published by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Al Haq, and especially the comprehensive report of an earlier detailed and authoritative fact-finding team. The team was composed of internationally respected international law experts under the leadership of John Dugard, a leading South African jurist and former UN special rapporteur for Occupied Palestine; its work was carried out on behalf of the Arab League.

Against such a background, in a substantive sense, the Goldstone Report did not say anything that had not already been established by a community of NGOs, journalists, UN humanitarian workers and civilians who were on the scene during the attacks. Such an overwhelming and informed consensus is what makes mockery of the effort by the US state department and the senate to repudiate the report.

The second element that should be kept in mind, but is rarely ever acknowledged even by those who stand 100 per cent behind the report, is that it was not – as the media claimed – unduly critical of Israel. On the contrary, in my view, the report was one-sided – but to the benefit of Israel.

Let me mention several evidences of leaning toward Israel: the report proceeds on the basis of Israel’s right to self-defense. It does not bother to decide whether, in a situation of continuing occupation, a claim of self-defense is available under international humanitarian law. Furthermore, the report did not examine whether the factual conditions prior to the attacks supported even modest Israeli security claims – considering that a truce had been working until Israel provocatively broke it on November 4, 2008 by conducting a lethal attack within Gaza.

Beyond this, the claimed security justification seemed artificially fashioned to serve as a rationalisation for an aggressive and unlawful all-out military assault against Gaza. The assault sought to destroy Hamas; induce the return of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit; and punish Gazans for voting for Hamas back in 2006.

In addition, there was evidence that the Israeli army had been planning Operation Cast Lead for six months prior to launching the attack on December 27, 2008. There were a variety of justifications aside from securing southern Israel: striking at Gaza before Obama took office; influencing – in Kadima’s favor – the Israeli domestic elections that were about to take place; restoring confidence in the army after its failures in the Lebanon war of 2006; and sending a message to Iran that Israel would not hesitate to use overwhelming force whenever its interests dictated.

Mortalities and scars of war

The Goldstone Report did appropriately emphasise the severe Israeli departures from the law of war by attacking with disproportionate and indiscriminate force against a crowded, mainly urbanised society. But it failed to emphasise a distinctive feature of the attacks: that Israel denied the civilian population of Gaza the option to leave the war zone and become refugees, at least temporarily.

To keep civilians – especially children, the elderly, and the disabled – so confined leaves permanent psychic wounds, as has been reported by many post-attack studies and residents of Gaza. Aside from the psychiatric casualty, the casualty figures that count the dead and the wounded must also be considered: part of the public horror of Operation Cast Lead resulted from the 100:1 ratio of war dead, a measure which further casts light on the defenseless of the Gazan population. At the same time, it dramatically understated the real losses to the Palestinians.

If the psychologically damaged are added to the Palestinian total and the friendly-fire victims are subtracted from the Israeli side, reducing their total deaths from thirteen to six or seven, the ratio becomes more grotesquely one-sided.

In view of this one-sidedness, together with Israel’s initiation of the attacks and its role as the occupying power, the report gave excessive emphasis to Hamas violations of international humanitarian law, which should have been noted, but not treated (as was the case) as virtually symmetrical with those of Israel.

As has been pointed out in the media, including by Goldstone, his retraction was limited to the admittedly important issue of whether Israel intentionally targeted civilians as a matter of policy. Even this limited retraction is unconvincing because it rests so heavily on Israel’s self-investigations, which the post-Goldstone UN fact-finding mission jointly headed by an American judge, Mary McGowan Davis and the Swedish judge, Lennart Aspergen, found in their recent report failed to meet international standards. As mentioned previously, the retraction by Goldstone was also seriously undermined by the joint statement of the three other members of the Goldstone mission who publically reaffirmed the report in its totality.

Only half satirically, I would think that the Goldstone Report might be better rechristened now as the Chinkin Report or blandly become known as the ‘Report on Israeli and Hamas War Crimes during Operation Cast Lead.’

Whatever the name, the main allegations have been confirmed over and over again, and it is now up to the governments making up the UN General Assembly and Security Council to show the world whether international criminal accountability and the International Criminal Court is exclusively reserved for sub-Saharan African wrongdoing!

Goldstone defined

Many have asked whether the Goldstone retraction will doom the future of the report. In my view, rather than performing a funeral rite, Goldstone miscalculated; he has given the report a second life. It may still languish in the UN system, thanks to the geopolitical leverage being exerted by the United States to ensure that Israeli impunity is safeguarded once more. But this new controversy surrounding the report has provided civil society with renewed energy to push harder on the legitimacy agenda which is animating the growing Palestinian solidarity movement.

Never before has the Goldstone Report received such affirming attention even from American mainstream sources. Astonishingly, even the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen chided Goldstone for trying belatedly to distance himself from the report, going so far as to suggest that he is responsible for a new verb: ‘to Goldstone’.

“Its meaning: to make a finding, and then partially retract it for uncertain motive.” Cohen’s formal definition – “to ‘Goldstone’: (Colloq.) To sow confusion, hide a secret, create havoc.”

History has funny ways of reversing expectations. Just as most of the world was ready to forget the allegations against Israel from the ghastly 2008-09 attacks on Gaza and move on, Richard Goldstone inadvertently wakes us all up to a remembrance of those morbid events, and in the process, does irreparable damage to his own reputation.

It is up to persons of conscience to seize this opportunity, and press hard for a more even handed approach to the application of the rule of law in world politics. There is much righteous talk these days at the UN and elsewhere about the ‘responsibility to protect,’ contending that the Qaddafi threats directed at Libyan civilians justified a No Fly Zone and a full-fledged military intervention from the air undertaken with UN blessings and NATO bombs and missiles. But, not even a whisper of support was provided for the still beleaguered people of Gaza with a No Fly Zone, despite a debilitating unlawful blockade that has lasted almost four years – a severe form of collective punishment that directly violates Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

This blockade continues to block the entry of building materials needed in Gaza to recover from the devastation caused more than two years ago.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008).

He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

(Courtesy Al Jazeera English)

By M K Bhadrakumar

Twice during the past week senior United States officials have let it be known that the Barack Obama administration has chosen to adopt a highly selective approach to the ferment in the Middle East.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couched the message in appropriate diplomatic idiom in Washington last Tuesday in a speech at a gala dinner celebrating the US-Islamic World Forum before an audience of dignitaries from the Middle East including

the foreign ministers of Qatar and Jordan and the secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Conference.

Clinton acknowledged that the ”long Arab winter has begun to thaw” and after many decades, a ”real opportunity for lasting change” has appeared before the Arab people. It, in turn, raises ‘’significant questions” but it is not for the US to provide all the answers. ”In fact, here in Washington we’re struggling to thrash out answers to our own difficult political and economic questions,” she said.

Following a long-winded appreciation of the “Arab revolt”, Clinton hit the nail on its head: ”We understand that a one-sized-fits-all approach doesn’t make sense in such a diverse region at such a fluid time. As I have said before, the United States has specific relationships with countries in the region. We have a decades-long friendship with Bahrain that we expect to continue long into the future … Going forward, the United States will be guided by careful consideration of all circumstances on the ground and by our consistent values and interests.”

Two days later, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates picked up where Clinton left off. At the ground-breaking ceremony of the national library honoring George Washington in Virginia last Thursday, Gates dipped into the oldest annals of America’s young history to underline that US has always pursued a selective approach to democratic aspirations and values of other peoples.

When George Washington was confronted with the consequences of the French revolution, he didn’t allow himself to be swayed by the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity but instead weighed in the terribly dangerous prospect of the possible ‘’spread of violent French radicalism to our shores”, the negative consequences of estrangement from the British in terms of disruptions in the ”lives of ordinary Americans by impeding trade” and the ”fragility of America’s position at that time”. Therefore, he adopted a neutrality policy toward France and chose to make a peace treaty with Britain although he was accused of doublespeak, sellout, et al.

Gates acknowledged that the US always ‘’struggled” with ideals while doing business with terrible autocrats. So, what matters today is that ”many of the [Arab] regimes affected have been longstanding, close allies of the United States, ones we continue to work with as critical partners in the face of common security challenges like al-Qaeda and Iran.”

Is the democracy project so terribly important? Gates had an answer: ”An underlying theme of American history going back to Washington is that we are compelled to defend our security and our interests in ways that in the long run lead to the democratic values and institutions … When we discuss openly our desire for democratic values to take hold across the globe, we are describing a world that may be many years or decades off.”

Significantly, Gates was speaking after a tour of the Persian Gulf region against a complex backdrop of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Bahrain to crush the lively democracy movement, frictions in the relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, a jump in oil prices into triple digits and signs that Riyadh might consider expanding its mammoth US$60 billion deal to buy arms from the US.

At any rate, coming out of a 90-minute meeting with the Saudi King Abdullah, Gates said he saw ”evidence” of Iranian meddling in Bahrain. Gates’s visit was followed up within a week by a trip to Riyadh by the US National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon, who handed a letter from Obama to Abdullah. All indications are that a deal has been stuck whereby the Obama administration will not queer the pitch for the autocratic Persian Gulf rulers by dabbling in the democracy project in the region.

On the contrary, Washington will allow Saudi Arabia to have a free hand to tackle the movements for democratic reforms in the region and forestall any regime changes in the region. Accordingly, the Saudis are moving on three different tracks. First, they have done everything possible to portray the democracy movement in Bahrain, which has serious potential to overthrow the regime in Manama and trigger a domino effect, in starkly sectarian terms as an issue of Shi’ite empowerment. The Saudi calculation by stoking up the latent fires of sectarian prejudices in the Sunni mind is to somehow prevent a unified, pan-Arab democracy movement from taking shape.

Second, Saudis are giving a coloring that that the democracy movements in the Persian Gulf are in actuality a manifestation of Iranian meddling in the internal affairs of the Sunni states in the region. The Iranian bogey comes naturally to the Saudis for rallying the Sunni states in the region under its leadership as well as for striking sympathetic chords in influential Washington lobbies (although the Obama administration has been so far inclined to view the protests as essentially home-grown movements that arose out of genuine local problems accumulating through decades of authoritarian misrule).

The Saudi ploy is working. During a visit to Manama early March, Gates himself had urged the al-Khalifa family to swiftly undertake political and social reform. By early April he is a changed man who claims he senses an Iranian hand behind the protests.

Third, and potentially quite tricky, is the Saudi propensity to see the case in both Bahrain and Yemen as open-and-shut. The intervention in Bahrain is taking a violent turn with every possibility that it will radicalize the opposition and possibly force it – or at least elements within it – to resort to insurgent attacks. A Bahraini variant of Lebanon’s Hezbollah seems to be in the making.

The Saudis have also waded into the Yemeni tribal politics and are dictating the contours of the transfer of power from President Ali Abdullah Saleh, ignoring the potency of Yemeni nationalism, which resents Saudi hegemony. Again, Saudis propagate that Iran is fueling the Houthi rebellion in north Yemen. (Western observers rule out any extensive ties between Iran on the one side and the Houthis or the Bahraini Shi’ites.)

What are the Saudi calculations? A longstanding objective of the Saudi national security strategy remains, namely, to exercise its quasi-hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) served this purpose for decades. But the GCC dispensation can easily unravel in today’s uncertain circumstances if there is regime change in any of the member states. Riyadh has mooted the idea of the GCC transforming into a “Gulf Confederation” with a common and unified foreign, security and defense policies – under Saudi leadership, of course, under the garb of collective security.

In military terms, this would facilitate the creation of joint armed forces under a unified command with a rapid reaction force that could act in any of the GCC states. In other words, Saudi Arabia hopes to assume the role of the provider of security for the GCC territories.

Riyadh felt disillusioned by the US’ ”abandonment” of Hosni Mubarak and quite obviously, in the Saudi estimation, there was no real inevitability about Mubarak’s exit if only Washington had stood by him. The behavior of post-Mubarak Egypt also adds to a sense of isolation in Riyadh. Significant shifts have begun appearing in Egypt’s regional policies already. Cairo is moving toward establishing diplomatic relations with Iran (broken off since the Islamic Revolution in 1979); Cairo ignored US and Israeli protests and allowed for the first time two Iranian warships to pass through the Suez Canal; Cairo is allowing Hamas leaders in Gaza to use Cairo airport as a transit point for travel to and from Damascus; Cairo is mellowing toward the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

What hits Riyadh most is that Cairo will be disengaging from any containment strategy toward Iran and may gravitate toward the nascent strategic axis involving Syria, Turkey and Iran. Egypt is swimming toward mainstream Arab politics, whereas Saudi Arabia never had much fondness for pan-Arabism.

This growing sense of isolation prompted the Saudi leadership to invoke its ultimate reserves of influence in Washington – the Pentagon. The promise Abdullah made to Gates – that Saudi arms purchases from the US this year will exceed the $60 billion deal (which is already the biggest in US history) – changes the entire complexion of Persian Gulf security from the American perspective. Obama interprets arms sales to foreign countries as the means to create jobs at home. And if the Gulf Confederation idea takes hold, the sky is the limit for lucrative arms deals since a joint military will be created by the petrodollar states involving land, air and naval forces.

The speeches by Clinton and Gates suggest that the Saudis have succeeded in making Obama reassess the Arab spring in the Persian Gulf region. Obama is never short on resonant words. Still, presenting with conviction his (revised) vision of the New Middle East in the major policy speech he is expected to make isn’t going to be easy.

(Courtesy Asia Times Online)

By Pepe Escobar

At the sixth al-Jazeera forum in Doha in mid-March, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu gave a remarkable speech. He argued that the great 2011 Arab revolt was “necessary in order to restore the natural flow of history”. According to him, “abnormalities” had to be corrected; the carving-up strategy of colonialism (which, for instance, severed historical links between Damascus and Baghdad); and the Cold War (which, for instance, made enemies out of Turkey and Syria). The time had come, he said, when an ordinary Arab can change history.

Davutoglu also stressed that the Middle Eastern masses – “who want respect and dignity” – must be heard. He emphasized the need of transparency, accountability, human rights, the rule of law, and that “the territorial integrity of our countries and the region must be protected” – referring specifically to Libya and Yemen.

Then there was the Leaders of Change summit in Istanbul, also in mid-March. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described Turkey as “a democratic social state based on social justice”. He also did not mince words when criticizing the West for not really supporting the great 2011 Arab revolt – or at least procrastinating; and he warned about the temptation of invading Libya as the US invaded Iraq. If there were any regime change in Libya, it should come from within, not via foreign intervention.

Erdogan also had time to destroy the failed concepts of end of history, clash of civilizations and the war on terror, while Davutoglu chastised the West for believing that “Arab societies didn’t deserve democracy, and needed authoritarian regimes to preserve the status quo and prevent Islamic radicalism”. Their conclusion: what’s going on in the Middle East today holds out the promise of showing the way towards a “global, political, economic and cultural new order”.

Now that’s the kind of talk when you want to position yourself as a regional leader and the ultimate bridge between East and West. Erdogan already held the moral high ground among the Arab world’s masses; he had explicitly called, from the beginning, for president Hosni Mubarak to step down in Egypt. Soon everyone from Casablanca to Muscat was talking about the Turkish model as the blueprint for the new Arab world. But then came Libya.

Turkey had billions of dollars invested in Libya, not to mention over 20,000 workers (evacuated in a matter of days). Ankara also clearly saw how the West was making a major power play for a possible new Libya. From inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Turkey forcefully condemned United Nations resolution 1973 while being at the forefront of sending humanitarian help. And all this while Turkish business already prepared their return to Libya.

These moves spell out a very skillful diplomatic game – to say the least. The question, thus, is inevitable; what is Turkey really up to?

Full power ahead

Before 2050, Turkey will be the third European power and the ninth world power – with more people than Germany, a first-class army, and a capability to display plenty of soft power via its good universities, a strong and diverse economy, technical know-how and the ruling party’s ability to “sell” its brand of democratic Islam.
Soon Turkey may become a full-time member of the hot BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Last year, at a summit in Brasilia, the coming of “BRICTS” was seriously discussed.

No wonder eyebrows have been seriously raised. Western misconception, fueled by centuries of historical baggage, fears Erdogan of the Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) party as a neo-Ottoman sultan – and aspiring caliph – leading an informal empire ranging from the Eastern Mediterranean to Western China, from the Balkans to the Middle East (and he might even – God forbid – go for the reconquista of Jerusalem …)

Even before the great 2011 Arab revolt, the US State Department’s eyebrows had been particularly affected. One of the WikiLeaks cablegate’s most explosive revelations was the labeling of Erdogan as unreliable and even “anti-American” – as he is a practicing Muslim cultivating serious and political ties with Iran, not to mention being too independent from Washington in all regional matters, from Iraq to Central Asia.

President Barack Obama was forced to place a courtesy call to Erdogan last December. In other times, that call would subtly imply that any Turkish president who really supports the US should not fear a military coup. But these are multi-polar times … If only the State Department had bothered to understand the sophisticated Turkish take on a region the Sublime Porte (the palace entrance to the chief minister of the Ottoman Empire) dominated for half a millennium.

Go East, young Turk

The point was never that America is losing Turkey – or that Erdogan is a neo-Ottoman caliph (whatever that means …) The point is to understand what Turkey’s strategic depth is all about. It’s all in a book: Stratejik Derinlik: Turkiye’nin Uluslararasi Konumu (Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position), published in Istanbul in 2001 by Ahmet Davutoglu, then a professor of international relations at the University of Marmara, now Turkey’s foreign minister.

Davutoglu hails from Konya, in the south central steppes of Anatolia, where the great 13th century Sufi poet Rumi is buried (Rumi, by the way, was an Afghan, born in Balkh, although “Rumi” means literally “Anatolian”). Konya also happens to be the heart of the AKP party. But much more than expressing the worldview of a new political/religious elite from Anatolia and cities in the Black Sea defying the traditional, secular elites of Istanbul and Ankara, the book by the “neo-Ottoman Kissinger” is an organic expose of current Ankara geopolitics.

Davutoglu places Turkey at the center of three concentric circles. 1) Balkans, Black Sea basin, Caucasus. 2) Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. 3) Persian Gulf, Africa and Central Asia. Thus he places Turkey as the privileged gateway for accessing the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

In the former bipolar world, Ankara was a passive actor – a mere weaponized arm of the US/NATO. Now Turkey is a key player in the Middle East; as Davutoglu puts it, “this is our home”. As influence areas go, Turkey may claim no less than eight: Balkans, Black Sea, Caucasus, Caspian, Turkic Central Asia, Persian Gulf, Middle East and Mediterranean.

Many may not know – although the Pentagon does – that Muslims control no less than eight strategic bottlenecks for global naval traffic: Dardanelles, Bosphorus, Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca, Sonda and Lombok, plus the condominium in Gibraltar.

To put this all in perspective Davutoglu even comes up with a formula: neo-Ottomanism + pan-Turkism + Islam = Great Turkey.

Neo-Ottomanism links to Arab lands but also the Balkans; pan-Turkism links to Central Asia; and Islam links to the whole dar-al-Islam, the lands of Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia. This is what Russian strategists would call the “near abroad”. So as much as Germany is the central and autonomous power in Europe, Davutoglu stresses that Turkey performs the same role further east. It’s all based on cultural and economic vectors – soft power, not weapons.

There are doubts about strategic depth. But the key point is that, in economic terms, Turkey would love nothing better than to become the new China. For this to happen, it’s essential to configure Anatolia as the ultimate Pipelineistan strategic crossroads for the export of Russian, Caspian-Central Asian, Iraqi and Iranian oil and gas to Europe.

That’s exactly where Turkey meets its top trade partner, Germany. But it may be a long and winding road ahead. A Transatlantic Trends 2010 poll revealed that only 38% of Turks and 23% of Europeans believe Turkey will ever be accepted into the European Union (EU). This does not mean that Turkey has given up on Europe; it’s now applying a different strategy.

Crucially, Davutoglu ranks the partnership between Turkey and Iran as equivalent to France and Germany. It’s under this marker that should be analyzed the link between Ankara and Brasilia at the UN Security Council last year against Washington, London and Paris over the ultra-strategic Iranian nuclear dossier.

Davutoglu’s circle in Ankara is very much aware that the Orientalist-named Middle East has been for over half a millennium the privileged arena of an Ottoman-Safavid rivalry.

Syria – close to Iran – is a critical case. Ankara has been advising Damascus to reform – and fast. In the words of Turkish President Abdullah Gul, “There can be no closed regime on the Mediterranean coast. [President Bashar] Assad is aware of this, too … We are sharing our experiences with him and we do not want chaos in Syria.”

At the same time, Ankara knows very well the House of Saud is freaking out with the increasingly closer relationship between Ankara and Tehran. Yet it helps that Gul lived in Jeddah for many years and knows how the Saudis think. Plus the fact that the Ottomans knew everything one needed to know about the power of sectarianism in the Middle East. A firm realpolitik signal is that Ankara did not oppose the Saudi invasion of Bahrain (well, just a little).

An explosive neighborhood

Now momentarily buried by all the turbulence related to the great 2011 Arab revolt, a crucial regional fact is that Ankara now sees Tehran as the golden door to Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. This means certified extra turbulence ahead for Washington, Jerusalem and US Arab client states, as Turkey has become a forceful, inescapable actor in both the Iranian and the Palestinian question (no wonder after the Mavi Marmara episode Erdogan became informally known as “the King of Gaza”).

A sound Davutoglu maxim though is “zero problems with the neighbors”. And what a dodgy neighborhood that is. In Turkey, there are more Azeris than in Azerbaijan; more Armenians than in Armenia; more Albanians than in Albania and Kosovo; more Bosnians than in Bosnia; and more Kurds than in Iraqi Kurdistan. These are all potential powder kegs.

For example, Ankara is very active economically in Iraqi Kurdistan – but at the same time there are ample suspicions that the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli Mossad may be behind renewed Kurdish attacks against Turkish forces in southeast Anatolia.

Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, is awash with Turkish clothes and beer (while in Shi’ite Basra, in southern Iraq made in Iran Saipa and Peugeot cars rule and Iranian pilgrims make the economy of Karbala and Najaf turn). Turkey is a top investor in hotels, real estate, industry and energy in Iraqi Kurdistan; 55% of total foreign investment, including Turkish oil company TPAO, which is developing two Iraqi gas fields. Turkey and Iran fiercely compete for greater influence in Baghdad.

The Russians are coming

As I noted in previous Pipelineistan stories, Turkey also has to play a finely balanced game involving its Caucasian neighbors – while it simply cannot afford to antagonize Russia.

In a nutshell, former Cold War enemies Turkey and Russia are trying, together, to find a way to manage the Caucasus and Central Asia – but with their sights also set on the Middle East and the Balkans. This complex evolution implies limiting US expansion and controlling radical Islam, everything subordinated to Pipelineistan. For Washington it’s hard to stomach that Russia and Turkey are now strategic partners.

Moscow needs Turkey to pump out energy to Europe and the Middle East while also thwarting the Western obsession of building Pipelineistan bypassing Russia. After all, Russia wants to monopolize European energy markets, Eurasian producers and supply routes. No wonder this is bound to cause a lot of tremendous problems for the Turkey-Russia strategic partnership.
Ankara knows that Moscow knows it carries a lot of leverage with Europe as a key natural gas transit country. Brussels desperately wants the troubled Nabucco pipeline – which should link Erzurum to Vienna. Moscow for its part wants the South Stream pipeline via Bulgaria. A possible solution would be Nabucco carrying Turkmen gas that would arrive in Turkey via Russia; but, the Europeans and Americans object, that is no diversification at all.

Russia is already Turkey’s number one trade partner; 70% of its exports are in energy, 20.5% in metals and 3% in chemical products. Russia represents 25% of the foreign market for Turkish construction companies. Turkey is a tourist Mecca for Russians (no visa is necessary). A $20 billion made in Russia nuclear power station – already ratified by the Turkish parliament – will be built in Turkey, to be completed by 2019.

All this is now possible because pan-Turkism – the push to agglomerate the Turkic world from the Adriatic to the Wall of China, all the rage during the 1990s – is over. It was after the 2008 Russo-Georgian-Ossetian war that everything crucially changed. Moscow won. Georgia kissed goodbye to NATO. And Ankara got the message.

The new configuration does make a lot of sense. In energy terms, Turkey depends on Russia for almost 80% (Gazprom supplies 63% of its gas and 29% of its oil). In 1997, they signed a deal for Blue Stream – Pipelineistan crossing the Black Sea and arriving in Samsun in Turkey; the Western arm arrives from Bulgaria. Now there’s even room for a Blue Stream-2, a gas pipeline linking Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus and maybe Israel.

Relax and float downstream

But the really juicy Turkey-Russia game is South Stream. From the Russian port of Beregovaja, South Stream crosses Turkish territorial waters in the Black Sea to the Bulgarian terminal of Varna, and beyond to Italy and Austria.

Well, it was a juicy game until Moscow started toying with the idea of replacing South Stream with a trans-Black Sea liquefied natural gas (LNG) project. What this proves is how volatile is the Turkey-Russia energy relationship.

On a (shaky) parallel track, Ankara is also on board the alternative – the ever-elusive Nabucco. Nabucco is crucial not only because of its huge projected capacity, but because it involves extremely complex negotiations to sign deals with Turkmenistan, Iran or Iraq that could potentially turn everything upside down in Pipelineistan.

So now it’s no secret that Ankara dreams of regional cooperation and improving relations with Europe under the matrix of energy. Iran for its part wants to export more gas via Turkey – not only out of its own, giant South Pars field but bringing Turkmen gas as well.

Call it a permanent fixture of the New Great Game in Eurasia: Ankara playing alongside Tehran to provide Europe with Iranian and Turkmen gas. Both have serious geopolitical affinities. Both are fighting Kurdish separatism. Erdogan and Ahmadinejad know only too well that the only alternative to the US-supported Caucasian corridor to get natural gas to Europe is Iran – which is linked not only to the Turkmen side of the Caspian but also to the huge Turkmen Daulatabad fields (near Mashhad in Iran) and their connection to Erzurum.

What will it take for Washington to face the fact that Tehran holds an unparalleled geopolitical role for Ankara? As a Caspian nation, Iran facilitates the transport of Turkmen gas to the European networks without having to solve the ultra-complex juridical status of the Caspian itself (is it a sea? Or is it a lake?) Bottom line: if Turkey does not court Iran it will lose the bandwagon of Turkmen gas flowing to Europe; and that would mean Europe being even more dependent on Russia.

By positioning Turkey as the ultimate energy bridge between East and West, Davutoglu acted like a Vegas high roller; if you’re not a source you’ve got to find a way to become a player. Turkey imports no less than 93% of its oil and 97% of its gas. 55% of the imported gas is used to generate – very expensive – electricity.

The energy offer is there: from Russia, the Caspian, and the Middle East. And the demand is also there: from the European Union (EU) and from world markets via the Mediterranean. No less than 72% of the world’s hydrocarbons are lying nearby. Is it any wonder that Ankara is having dreams over “strategic synergies”?

Where’s my energy drink?

The key political question, once again, is that Turkey’s new delicate positioning entails serious friction with traditional allies – the US, the EU and Israel – as it gets closer and closer to Russia, Iran and Syria, and as it asserts a leadership role (and is viewed as a model) across the fast-evolving Middle East.

Yet energy – not ideology – is the key. The Turkey-Brazil mediation last year over Iranian uranium enrichment; the good commercial relations with the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq; the good relationship with Azerbaijan involving agreements about the Shah Deniz gas field. All these developments are subordinated to an overarching theme: energy.

In this high-stakes game, some European governments are more skillful players than others. If you think former US president Bill Clinton was the king of triangulation, you haven’t seen Italian Prime Minister Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi yet. The triangular Pipelineistan relationship between Italy, Turkey and Russia is now a classic. At the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul last year, Berlusconi, Erdogan and Medvedev retreated to a key trilateral meeting just to talk Pipelineistan.

A Gazprom board member told the Roman daily La Repubblica that in exchange for Gazprom’s expansion in Europe, Prime Minister Valdimir Putin opened to Berlusconi and the Italian ENI energy giant the exploitation of Caspian gas in Kazakhstan (ENI will particularly relish this now as it runs the risk of being shut down in the “new” Libya, with or without Muammar Gaddafi).

Turkey now wants to develop Pipelineistan not only along an east-west axis but a north-south as well; this means a complex web of relations with no less than nine countries – Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. Even before the great 2011 Arab revolt, serious negotiations were ongoing regarding an Arab Pipelineistan that could link Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad. This would do more to unify and develop the new Middle East than any “peace process”, “regime change” or, for that matter, peaceful uprising.

Yet a serious storm in the horizon may throw this Pipelineistan chapter on the rocks; it’s the US missile shield project, in fact a triad of missile shields to be deployed in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The great 2011 Arab revolt may have pushed the issue to the background, but it has not disappeared.

Washington has blamed Iran as the rationale for installing a NATO-controlled missile shield in Europe. Healthy cynicism would instead point to an European shield actually aimed at Russia and an Asian shield aimed at China. But then there’s the possibility of a NATO missile shield installed in Turkey – which would be aimed against Iran, and in a lesser measure, Syria. No wonder this Pentagon/NATO gambit, discussed last year at the NATO summit in Brussels, immersed Ankara in serious political turmoil.

Years after Davutoglu’s book, a look at the official Turkish energy strategy, published a year ago by the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, reveals that transport of energy and gas is the pillar of five strategic themes. The new Turkish foreign policy does seem to be based on very realistic assessments around the key theme of energy. Whichever way we look at it, it’s a complex maze of geopolitics and public and private investments. It may take much more than a missile shield to smash this strategy to pieces.

The fact is that Turkey’s polycentric roles – as an energy bridge between East and West, as a model for the new Arab world, as a key player in the New Great Game in Eurasia – are now more crucial than ever. Sultans of swing – indeed.

(Courtesy Asia Times Online)

By: Ghassan Michel Rubeiz

Authorized, decisive international intervention in Libya is urgent.

At the start of the Libyan uprising, demonstrators armed with freedom symbols faced soldiers armed with bullets.  By cruelly suppressing its society, the Libyan regime has forfeited its legitimate sovereignty.  As diplomats debate ending Gaddahfi’s rule, he is left free to murder the people demanding change.

The reaction of the US administration to events in Libya has been inconsistent. President Obama chose his words carefully when he said that Gaddahfi must leave office for the good of his people.  But in a matter of days, as the ruthless Colonel made territorial gains in fighting back the rebels, Obama sounded hesitant to expedite Gaddahfi‘s departure.  He said the “cost” for the removal of this despot may be too high for the US.

Leaving Libya in the background this week, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton visits Cairo and Tunis to promote “freedom and democracy”. She has softly rebuked Saudi Arabia for sending soldiers to defend the rulers of Bahrain and called for “restraint” from both sides. Libya’s rapid advance in crushing the revolution does not seem to alarm the US.  Washington coldly figures that as troubles in Bahrain escalate, Libya could wait for more convenient and risk free intervention.

America’s fear for the eventual tumbling of the Saudi ally factors highly in every US action in the region.  The implication of a rapid fall of Libya terrifies many in Washington. Not as purported, the coolness of Washington to intervention in Libya seems like a matter of conflict of interest rather than a lesson learned from the Iraq war. For many American policy hawks, the Iraq war was worth its heavy cost; but when it comes to desperate Libyan nation even authorized international intervention sounds risky for those same hawks.

Libya’s revolution is at risk of failure. The Libyan army is heading east for a decisive battle with the rebels. A bloody battle is expected in Benghazi. The army has the capacity to kill while the rebels have only the will to overcome injustice.

Given the lack of symmetry in power, the Benghazi confrontation may soon turn into a massacre.  The crushed rebellion would leave Libya with tens of thousands of innocent victims, a destroyed infrastructure, a demoralized nation, an angry region and a world community in a state of collective guilt.

A failure in Libya’s bid for freedom is not only a tragedy for a single nation; it is a reversal for the cause of freedom in the entire region.  Despite their heroism, the rebel’s failure in Libya sends a comforting message to the Arab despots: bloody force works in suppressing opposition. Defeating the freedom fighters reinstates people’s fear of the ruler, the root cause of political stagnation in the Middle East.

Regardless of who wins the Benghazi battle, at the end of the day, the Libyan regime is fated for self destruction. As Gaddahfi’s rule is soaked in crime, deep in theft of national resources, accountable for massacres, and despised at home and abroad, it is doomed.

While it is difficult to imagine the Libyan regime surviving for long, when the eventual change in regime occurs, how the rebels come to power is important.  In a state which has subdued its opposition for so long, cosmetic transfer of power should not replace genuine reform achieved by an empowered and proud opposition.

The wavering international community must not wait for a massacre to justify authorized, decisive intervention.  Gaddahfi must be forced to step down sooner rather than later.

By Stuart Littlewood – London

The European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG) has issued a press release to remind everyone that what promises to be the largest flotilla yet, comprising 15 ships carrying passengers from 12 European states as well as Latin America, Africa, Asia, Canada and the United States, is due to sail for Gaza in late May.

Passengers will include hundreds of peace advocates, including parliamentarians and human rights activists, and representatives of more than 40 media institutions.

Campaign organisers say that Israel has responded by threatening to once again use deadly force to stop the flotilla, including snipers and attack dogs. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Israeli Defense Forces chief-of-staff Gabi Ashkenazi has warned that “if the IDF is faced with a similar situation in the future, there may be no alternative to deploying snipers to minimize troop casualties.”

The Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF will deploy attack dogs from its Oketz canine units.

The release says Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, is summoning foreign diplomats to Jerusalem to urge them to work with Israel to stop the flotilla from taking place. According to the Irish Times, he justified his call for co-operation by claiming the flotilla would violate international law.

“There is nothing in international law that supports Israel’s four-year-long blockade of Gaza, or its attacks on humanitarian shipments in international waters,” says the campaigners’ spokesman Rami Abdo.

Funny how HMS Cumberland and HMS York magically appeared in the Mediterranean during the Libyan crisis to protect the victims of Qaddafi. HMS York unloaded tons of medical supplies and other humanitarian aid for the Benghazi Medical Centre. Where were these ships when British nationals on the Mavi Marmara and the Dignity and other vessels were being assaulted in international waters and terrorized by Israeli thugs, abducted and thrown in their stinking jails?

Why weren’t they bringing life-saving aid to Gaza’s hospitals after Israel’s indiscriminate ‘Cast Lead’ blitzkrieg on innocent civilians?

Israel still bombs, strafes and blockades Palestinians in Gaza with impunity on a daily basis, so when the Libyan crisis dies down can we expect to see HMS York load up with more supplies and sail for the Gaza Strip, along with the rest of the NATO fleet, where the humanitarian crisis continues unabated?

I have asked my MP to find out what the British Government is planning to do to safeguard British subjects (and indeed the other humanitarians) sailing with this latest flotilla on its peaceful mission to Gaza. Do ministers agree, I wanted to know, that the Cumberland and York should be made available to escort the mercy mission and protect it from Israeli psychopaths, who have amply demonstrated their eagerness to resort to lethal force and total lack of civilised restraint?

Of course, one letter isn’t enough. A thousand may not be enough. Let’s hit all MPs and MEPs in Europe with an avalanche demanding that they discover their backbone and do the right and honourable thing by the Palestinians in Gaza.

Tomorrow 40 foreign ministers from all over descend on London for a summit chaired by William Hague to:

• Strengthen and broaden the international community’s commitment to implementing UNSCRs 1970 and 1973 [a no-fly zone and another jolly bombing-fest].

• Reaffirm the importance of urgent humanitarian assistance…

• Call for a political process which helps create the conditions in which the people of Libya can chose their own future.

What a pity they aren’t as passionately committed to UN Resolutions 194, 242 and all the other solemn pronouncements that they signed up to but Israel still defies.

It’s certainly a busy week in London. On Wednesday the Chatham House think-tank. aka the Royal Institute of International Affairs, holds a conference on the theme ‘Sixty Years of British-Israeli Diplomatic Relations’. One of the agenda items asks ‘Are we there yet? 60 years of bilateral relations and the search for common ground’.

President of the delinquent entity, Shimon Peres, is attending and Hague will be there to deliver a keynote speech and no doubt stand guard over Mr Peres to ensure he is not slapped with a universal jurisdiction arrest warrant.

(Courtesy Palestine Chronicle)

By Tanya Kepler

The Israeli Knesset passed the “Citizenship Law” on Monday (28 March) enabling courts to revoke the Israeli citizenship of individuals convicted of treason, aiding the enemy in a time of war or having committed an act of terror against the state.

The bill, which was sponsored by Knesset Members David Rotem and Robert Ilatov of the extreme right-wing Zionist party Israel Beiteinu, passed with a vote of 37 to 11.

“Any normal state would have legislated this bill years ago,” said Rotem shortly after the bill passed. “I thank all of the legislators, who have sent a message tonight that citizenship and loyalty go hand in hand. There is no citizenship without loyalty.”

According to the bill, only people with dual citizenship could be stripped of their Israeli citizenship entirely. Someone without dual citizenship could still lose his Israeli citizenship, but would be granted status equivalent to what Israel grants foreign workers, reported the Israeli news daily Haaretz.

“Anyone who betrays the state and carries out acts of terror must know – citizenship and loyalty go together,” said Rotem. “There is no citizenship without loyalty.”

Opponents of the bill, including MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), cited the fact that the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security agency) opposed the legislation. The Shin Bet initially supported the bill, but changed its opinion and announced that it believed the current laws offered sufficient recourse against such offenders, according to the Jerusalem Post.

“An absurd situation has been created in which the Shin Bet has to rein in the Knesset,” said Horowitz. “In light of the Shin Bet’s position, it is impossible to hide behind the security excuse for this law.”

“The real plan behind the bill is to create an air of fear and threat among the Arab population, as other bills sponsored by the same Knesset faction do,” Horowitz added.

“We have seen a series of bills that create delegitimization of Arabs in Israel as citizens,” he continued, adding that he “found it hard to believe that this law will be used in the case of Jewish terrorists.”

Also on Monday, the Knesset approved a bill to strip the benefits of former MK Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who was a member of the Knesset representing the National Democratic Assembly party from 1996 to 2007, when he resigned.

Bishara was accused of providing Lebanon’s Hizbullah with information on strategic locations in Israel that should be attacked with rockets during the 2006 Lebanon War. He has not been found guilty of the charges but because he resigned from the Knesset, Bishara lost his parliamentary immunity. He is currently in exile in Jordan.

Following the passing of the bill, Bishara will no longer receive parliamentary benefits, including his pension, which was around NIS 7,228 per month.

Bishara is not the only Palestinian member of Knesset that has been attacked. In July 2010, the Knesset voted to strip of MK Hanin Zoabi of key parliamentary privileges as punishment for her involvement in the Freedom Flotilla aid convoy, in which nine international activists were killed by Israeli naval forces, dozens wounded and hundreds detained and deported.

The Israeli government deemed her participation in the flotilla an act of aggression. As a result, she no longer has the privilege to exit the country, the privilege to carry a diplomatic passport, and the privilege to have the Knesset cover litigation fees of an MK if he or she is put on trial.

In addition to revoking her privileges, Interior Minister Eli Yishai went so far as to ask Attorney General Yehuda Weinsten to take away Zoabi’s citizenship as well.

(Courtesy Alternative Information Center)