The next few weeks promise to be monumental ones in Iraq’s modern history, a fact only underlined after the inter-sectarian retaliation last week following the destruction of the Imam Ali al-Hadi (AS) mosque in Samarra. With the December election completed, Iraqi leaders must now focus on making decisions that will determine not only how the country is run for the next four years, but what Iraq will look like in the longer term and whether it can avoid disintegrating into a bloody civil war.
Whether Iraq’s political leaders, led by Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim Jaafari, are up to the task is unclear. They have managed an 18-month transition according to schedule, but much of the credit for that must go to American and British officials. Moreover, process has consistently trumped outcome as the key measure of success for leaders in Washington and London desperate to show that their Iraqi efforts are producing results.
The costs of this political expediency will become clearer as Iraqis go about the business of choosing a new government and reviewing key areas of their recently ratified Constitution. With the transition over and no prospect of a new round of elections in a few months, the stakes are now higher. Political parties are playing for keeps, knowing that what is before them is nothing less than an opportunity to shape the Iraqi polity and economy to their advantage.
If Iraq is to be able to shake off instability, its new leaders will need to achieve two objectives. First, they must work out a formula for genuine national reconciliation that gives all of Iraq’s different groups (ideological groups, as well as ethnic and sectarian ones) a stake in the country’s future. Second, they must create a functioning state that can meet the expectations of the population.
Precedent does not bode well on either score. That Iraq lacks its own Nelson Mandela is an understatement. Political leaders have consistently adopted a zero-sum approach to political bargaining, viewing compromise as a last resort. While the United States called the shots it could insist on reaching consensus among the different groups, as it did in negotiating the Transitional Administrative Law. Left to their own devices, Iraqi leaders have been less harmonious. The Shiite-led United Iraq Alliance and Kurdish Alliance have reached workable arrangements, but only by agreeing to disagree.
Kurdish leaders are content to go along with the Shiite insistence on majority rule and more Islam in government as long as it does not apply to their region. And both groups have been willing to let representatives of the Arab Sunni community into government just so long as they acquiesce to a status quo that threatens to marginalize their interests in the long term.
This is a long way from the national compact laid out in the Bush administration’s National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.
The alternative is an escalation of internecine violence into a full blown civil war and the eventual fragmentation of Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines. Such an outcome is not an historical inevitability as some have argued. Even now, beyond the Kurdish regions, a strong sense of Iraqi identity exists. Politics have certainly become based more on sect and ethnicity, as the recent elections demonstrated, but part of this was a natural response to the effective dismantling of the state after April 2003. Lacking national institutions to provide security and services, local populations have been vulnerable to armed sectarian and ethnic parties that have stepped in to fill the vacuum.
CARNEGIE
ENDOWMENT.ORG

Saudi security men and rescuers are deployed around the oil processing plant of the state oil giant Aramco in Abqaiq in the oil-rich Eastern Province, Feb. 24. (AFP File Photo)

In the high-intensity wake-up call department, this was as shrill as it gets. The aborted terror attack against Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil production and refining complex last week was followed by police action where five suspected Saudi terrorists were killed and one was captured. We must not get so fixated on energy and terror that we forget the third critical element in this equation: discontented young men who pursue political deviance and violence. The important events at Abqaiq represent the intersection of three critical Middle Eastern and global phenomena:
First, the continuing, expanding threat of both homegrown Arab and exported terrorism, partly exacerbated by America’s military and political presence in this region; Second, Arab societies’ and governing regimes’ search for the right combination of police capabilities and political, social and economic reforms that can counter their own youth’s desperate attraction to terrorism; And third, an increasingly tight global energy market vulnerable to disruptions due to natural phenomena (hurricanes) or political attacks.
The Abqaiq attack happened as I was reading through a fact-filled and illuminating new book titled “National Security in Saudi Arabia: Threats, Responses and Challenges,“ by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and Nawaf Obaid, a Riyadh-based Saudi author and national security consultant.
They make important points, especially in view of last week’s attack. The most important are that while Saudi Arabia no longer faces a major threat from Iraq, “the kingdom’s most urgent security threats no longer consist of hostile military forces; these threats have been replaced by the threat of Islamic extremism and terrorism ... [Other regional and global security] factors interact with a longer-term set of threats to Saudi stability that are largely economic and demographic but that may well be more important than any combination of outside military threats and the threat of Islamic extremism and terrorism.“
The world rightly worries that indigenous Arab terrorism may disrupt energy flows and sharply increase prices again.
The Saudi security establishment has made a late but significant adjustment in the past three years to fighting domestic threats. Improved counterterrorism strategies, intelligence capabilities, and internal security forces are showing results in incidents like the failed attack at Abqaiq. Cordesman and Obaid are correct to note that improved security measures around energy facilities “have significantly lessened the probability of any major attacks being carried out successfully.“
They note that while conventional military and police forces address new challenges and adjust to changing realities, “Saudi security also requires a broad process of continuing evolutionary reform of the kingdom’s political, economic and social systems, not just reform of the Saudi military, internal security and intelligence services. The health of the Saudi economy and coming to grips with the kingdom’s problems with education, Saudization, youth employment and demographics are the true keys to security.“
They explicitly identify another key to security as “a level of political progress that expands the role ordinary Saudis can play in government and in making further reductions in sources of social unrest like corruption.
Cordesman and Obaid note the many changes that have taken place in Saudi Arabia in recent years. They acknowledge the need for greater speed in some cases, while arguing that lasting change can only reflect indigenous values and a pace of reform that has the consent of the citizenry. Their work and thoughts take on added significance in view of the Abqaiq attack. Their linkage of security with political, social and economic reforms is a vital message that applies to the entire Arab world.
Rami G. Khouri
AGENCEGLOBAL.COM

As I left my office this evening I saw with apprehension three sinister dark helicopter gunships patrolling low over Islamabad. I wondered who they were protecting. Then I realised that a murderer, in fact a mass murderer, will be in town tomorrow (the article was published on March 1). But the helicopters were not there to protect the people of Islamabad from this murderer but they were there to protect the murderer from the wrath of the people of the world.
Tomorrow the most hated man in the world will be in town and will be welcomed by our President. Mush and Bush make a fine pair. Before Bush left Washington he said that he would ask Musharraf to close down terrorist camps in Pakistan. I wonder if our general will ask Bush to close down the biggest terror camp of them all, Guantanomo, where the terrorists are the US Army personnel who perform torture on the inmates. But why should he? He is after all implicated in these crimes against humanity. He and his Foreign Minister proudly proclaim that they are in the frontlines of the war against terror and that they have handed over more than 700 suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists to the US which incarcerates them illegally without trial and without recourse to any legal system in Guantanomo.
By their own words they admit that they have done illegal actions; midnight arrests of Pakistanis and foreigners and bundling into secret CIA flights without due process of law in front of Pakistani courts.
So how can they protest? They are themselves complicit in these crimes against humanity, let alone the violation of the Pakistani constitution and Pakistani laws. But when did violation of the constitution or the law ever matter to the various generals who have run the country? Why should our good general protest about people illegally locked away in far Guantanomo?
We have our own mini-Guantanomos right here in our own backyard. We have our own illegalities. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan hundreds of Pakistanis have disappeared in the last few years. They have been picked up by intelligence agencies and never heard of again. Are they being tortured? Are they dead? No answers are forthcoming. In the name of fighting Al-Qaeda Pakistani villages have been bombed not only by the Pakistan army but by the US and many Pakistani civilians, including women and children, have been killed.
Tomorrow there will be in Islamabad a man whose hands are covered in the blood of the innocents massacred in Afghanistan, in Rafah, Jenin, Jabaliya, Gaza, Najaf, Fallujah, Samarrah, etc. The killing in Iraq continues. Not content with creating chaos in Iraq with a daily death toll of more than a hundred, Bush is now intent on attacking Iran. He is not only a murderer but a pyrotechnician. Nero does not hold a candle to him Nero was content to see Rome burn but this madman wants to see the whole of the Middle East burn.
Arundhati Roy in an excellent article in the Guardian today (1 March) said that Bush is not welcome in India. Equally he is not welcome in Pakistan. If it wasn’t for the complete security blockade of Islamabad and if there was democracy (that so much abused concept) and freedom of assembly in Pakistan, Bush would be welcomed by demonstrations against his policies in the US and worldwide.
Faheem Hussain, a Pakistani physicist
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

Evidently it is difficult to scrub off the sticker that is glued onto the front window. That’s why when a new car from Germany or South Korea or the United States rolls onto the packed streets of Gaza or Ramallah, it generally has the big label with thick, red Hebrew letters forming the word “Checked“ stuck on its windshield for several months.
The label is a mark of the special customs and security checks conducted at the Israeli seaports of Ashdod or Haifa, which serve as the main entrances for most of the foreign goods bound for the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians import all sorts of products: water pumps from Sweden, bulldozers and boxes of corn flakes from the United States, plastic toys from China, washing machines from France and cheese from Denmark--and virtually all of them reach their destinations only after they’ve been through Israeli port authorities and Israeli security checks.
At the ports, Palestinian importers are required to pay the Israeli authorities the value-added tax of 17%, as well as whatever custom taxes are due on goods that come in on their way to the West Bank or Gaza. These transactions (along with direct Palestinian transactions with Israeli firms and merchants) last year yielded revenues of $711 million.
But whose revenues are they?
To judge by the actions of the Israeli Cabinet, the money belongs to Israel. The Cabinet announced that it was going to withhold Palestinian tax and customs revenues, at least for the moment, as a response to Hamas’ electoral victory. Until the money is released--if it is released--the Israeli treasury will earn the interest.
But it’s not supposed to work this way. According to the Oslo accords (and by any standards of common sense and basic justice), the revenues should serve the people who ultimately buy the goods. These tax receipts are not donations of goodwill from Israel; they are not charity.
Since 1994, these revenues, transferred each month from the Israeli Ministry of Finance, have made up a critical portion of the Palestinian Authority budget. When Israel briefly stopped transferring the revenues in 2001, pressure from the EU and other countries--including the U.S.--forced Israel to reverse its decision. Unfortunately, after the Hamas victory, such pressure seems unlikely.
Last year, the $711 million constituted almost two-thirds of the Palestinian Authority’s revenues. (Only $383 million was collected in income and sales taxes within the West Bank and Gaza.) Even with all those revenues, there was still an $800-million shortfall in the Authority’s $1.9-billion budget.
The Palestinian Authority cannot compensate for the “lost“--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “stolen“--tax revenues.
Its Ministry of Health, for example, has been unable to pay its contractors for hospital food, equipment or medicine for three months, and is $22 million in debt. Now, with Israel hijacking an additional $50 million or so each month, the ministry will not be able to pay the salaries of its 13,000 employees. The same is true with the approximately 40,000 employees of the Ministry of Education.
In the Palestinian territories, 35% of residents between the ages of 20 and 24 were unemployed during the third quarter of 2005. About 43% live below the World Bank’s poverty line, and 15% live in deep poverty--which means, according to the World Bank, that they are unable to meet subsistence needs.
By taking their meager--but undoubtedly their own--revenues, Israel does not punish Hamas or persuade it to change its positions. It simply gives the Palestinians another reason to regard Israel as an aggressive and repressive occupying power.
HAARETZ.COM

British historian David Irving appears in court in Vienna, Austria, with handcuffs, Feb. 20. (AFP File Photo)

I think as I please
And this gives me
pleasure.
My conscience decrees,
This right I must
treasure.
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator,
No man can deny

- Die gedanken sind frei.
(Sixteenth-century German peasant song revived as a protest anthem against the Nazi regime)

Last Monday’s news that an Austrian court has sentenced crackpot British historian David Irving to three years’ imprisonment for having denied the Holocaust seventeen years ago should have alarmed free speech advocates--particularly at a time when Muslims are being lectured as to the freedom of expression that should be afforded cartoonists. In the event, however, a lack of noticeable outcry has exposed a longstanding double standard in the West about who is entitled to free speech and why.
To be sure, Nazi propaganda is an extremely sensitive issue in Hitler’s birth country, which for the most part endorsed the madman’s vision of the Third Reich. But the repression of the free marketplace of ideas is an endorsement of tyranny rather than its repudiation. And it is not just Austria, and Germany itself, that have banned the views of Holocaust deniers: Eight other European states have joined in.
Muslims outraged by the cartoons that have appeared widely in the European media thus have the right to question the conflicting standards of what is considered worthy of censorship.
The muted response of the Western media to the Irving decision is difficult to fathom. Not much has been reported on this case and what has appeared often assumes that this severe limit to free speech is obviously justified.
For example, a BBC report over the weekend concluded with this ominous paragraph: “In a letter to the BBC from his prison cell, Mr. Irving said some of his views on the gas chambers had changed--but he also expressed opinions which would be challenged by mainstream historians.“
Since when has it been accepted as a crime to challenge mainstream historians, even when, as in this case, the challenge is without foundation? Should a deeply wrongheaded view, even one motivated by vile malice as Irving’s critics claim motivates him, lead to incarceration? The case made for criminalizing speech in the West is usually based on the concept that it is not OK to yell fire in a crowded theater--or incite violence.
The argument for jailing Irving is that denying the Holocaust is equivalent to stoking the fires of anti-Semitic violence. “Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism dressed up as intellectual debate. It should be regarded as such and treated as such,“ stated the head of the UK’s Holocaust Educational Trust, by way of defending the Austrian verdict.
But by that standard, the artists who drew the cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) should also be arrested, as well as their editors and publishers. Critics of the Danish newspaper that commissioned Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) cartoons claim that its editorial slant is anti-Muslim and that they were attempting a deliberate provocation. So should the paper’s editors be prosecuted? After all, people have died protesting these inflammatory comics. Will Austria and the other nations that ban anti-Semitic books now ban expressions judged by Muslims to be unacceptably hostile to their religion?
TRUTHDIG.COM