Failing Islamic States - 2011

[a_majoor]

Part 2 of 2:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/09/25/report-from-the-middle-east-part-one/

For American presidents, a thriving peace process is good domestic and international politics.  This is one reason every US president sooner or later tries to get some kind of negotiation going, even though bringing Israelis and Palestinians together makes cat herding look easy.

Ever since the original peace process collapsed in 1999-2000 when President Clinton bet — and lost — the ranch on getting the final deal done while he was in the White House, the US has struggled to replace the old peace process with something new.  So far, nothing durable has emerged, but Plan B has had some success.  Under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the US and the EU have poured billions of dollars and a great deal of effort in helping the Palestinians build stronger institutions and a healthier economy on the West Bank.

The concept was that this policy would have two benefits.  First, by creating strong and credible institutions (including Palestinian security forces), the US and our EU associates can help Israel develop confidence that a Palestinian government exists which can carry out the terms of a peace treaty, suppressing violent Palestinian movements that will inevitably seek to torpedo peace.  Second, by developing the economy, universities and civil society, the US can promote the emergence of a sophisticated and modern thinking Palestinian national intelligentsia and business class who will prefer peace to war.

These efforts have made a real difference.  The Palestinian Authority was once a resistance movement; these days it is an emerging government, though often not a very transparent or effective one.  I hear from both Israelis and Americans who are familiar with these matters that the US-trained security forces are good at what they do and getting better, and that cooperation between them and their Israeli counterparts is pretty professional.

As a result of all this work, we seem to be edging closer to a situation in which the Palestinian Authority might, if it could assert authority over both Gaza and the West Bank, become what compromise-minded Israelis say they want: a credible partner for peace.

But it is not still not clear that any Palestinian government could say out loud what sophisticated Palestinians have known for years: the right of return is dead, and compensation is the best that can be hoped for.  When I visited Ramallah (the West Bank boom town and de facto capital city) in 2010, signs in English and Arabic all over the city proclaimed the PA’s determination to fight for the right of return.  Those signs had been taken down this time, but I don’t think the idea is dead in people’s hearts.

Palestinian capacity is growing, but to some degree that increased political and social capacity makes Palestinians more frustrated rather than less.  The more educated, sophisticated and experienced people are, the less willing they are to put up with fundamentally unacceptable political restraints.  The Palestinians by and large are better educated than almost any other Arab nationality, but they have less control over their lives than most — and the fact that their overlords are foreign rather than homegrown does not make the lack of autonomy easier to bear.

The US has been hoisted on its own petard here; the civil society that we help to build makes Palestinians less patient rather than more patient — and forces their leaders to pay closer attention to public opinion than in the past.  This makes it fundamentally harder to build a peace process that can move the ball down the field toward the ultimate (if distant) goal of peace while managing the day-to-day conflict in ways that reduce tension and make life better for people on both sides.  It also ensures that Palestinians aren’t particularly grateful for America’s financial help.

Each of the last three US presidents made poor decisions that have made this tangle worse.  President Clinton had good intentions and many accomplishments to his credit, but his final, foolhardy rush to peace in the closing months and days of his administration was perhaps the worst decision made by any US president on this issue since the controversy began.  His goal should have been to shore up a faltering peace process rather than pushing it to a premature climax.  The failure of his peacemaking effort was predictable and expensive, and the absence of a legitimate peace process has been a serious problem in the region ever since.

President George W. Bush inherited a bad situation and made it worse.  On the one hand, he inflamed Arab and world opinion by a confrontational approach on a range of issues and serial failures in both the development and presentation of policy alienated friends and antagonized enemies.  His record was not entirely bleak; he managed to nudge the Israelis back toward some kind of negotiating posture and his strengthening of Palestinian institutions and the promotion of a strong West Bank economic miracle helped to reduce tension.  Nevertheless, the US agenda was in worse shape when he left office than when he first took the oath.

President Obama added his own contribution to the record of failed US initiatives.  While I personally agree with him that an extendable settlement freeze would greatly simplify the task of getting a good peace negotiation going, in the real world to make that demand was to lose all initiative on the issue — and to miss the opportunity to get the Israelis to make less dramatic but quite useful concessions in its place.  He has allowed Prime Minister Netanyahu to outmaneuver him diplomatically and in US politics more than once.  The US president’s optimistic speeches about building bridges to the Muslim world fell hollow and flat after he linked that effort to progress on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute which his own errors placed out of reach.

In fairness to President Obama, this has never been an easy issue for the United States and his two predecessors both left the situation in worse shape than they found it.  But not even the President can believe at this point that his peace initiatives have had much success.

It’s doubtful at this point if the President can get much done before the 2012 election.  Palestinians don’t much like negotiating during US election years as they believe that Israel’s political popularity in the US makes itself felt most strongly then.  (One reason President Clinton’s peace blitz was ill-timed in 2000: his wife was running for the Senate in New York and Palestinians believed he would not force Israel to make difficult concessions while his wife was running in a state where the Jewish vote is so important and while his vice president Al Gore was in a tough race against George W. Bush.  After the election, Clinton was a lame duck and the Palestinians had little confidence that he could deliver on any promises he made.)

There are no magic solutions to this problem, but as long as the US has interests in the Middle East we must keep coming back to it.  Over the next few months, I hope the Obama administration — and the Republican foreign policy strategists who hope to return to power after 2012 — think carefully about how to manage this difficult process a little better.  After more than a decade of failure and retreat, it is time for a deep and searching review of the assumptions and ideas that have brought so little joy to us or to the parties involved.

 

[a_majoor]

Sad to condiser our enemies are actually so small really, yet we seem unwilling to do what is required:

http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2011/10/04/victory-could-be-ours-if-only-we-want-it/?print=1

Victory Could Be Ours, If Only We Want It
Posted By Michael Ledeen On October 4, 2011 @ 1:38 pm In Uncategorized | 24 Comments

In the real war, our major enemies are the evil regimes in Iran and Syria, and both are hollow and wobbling, needing only one good push to go over.

Syrian soldiers are defecting in significant numbers, while brave, peaceful demonstrators continue to fill the streets despite the likelihood of arrest, torture, and death. The regime is unleashing mass slaughter, as army troops fire blindly into the crowds from a safe distance, a sure sign that Assad has lost control, despite massive Iranian assistance.

In Iran, the war of all against all at the highest levels of the regime continues unabated.  The latest tumult revolves around the theft of billions of dollars from the major banks, and it is accompanied by strikes at bazaars and factories, explosions in pipelines and refineries, and open warfare along the borders with the Kurds, where, despite the regime’s usual disinformation campaign, Iranian casualties have been significant.  Somehow the Kurds are being armed, and they are notoriously good fighters.

The defeat of Assad and Khamenei would be a world-changing event, pulling the plug on the ominous strategic alliance that runs from Tehran and Damascus to countries quite close to us, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. It would weaken Putin’s ability to sponsor dangerous mischief in the Middle East and our own hemisphere. And it would deprive the terror network of safe havens, funding, weapons,  logistics, and intelligence, along with the sort of documentation they need (think false passports) to travel safely.

In Iran, the opposition is overwhelmingly pro-Western, and eminently worthy of our support (once again, for those tuning in late, I’m talking about political, technological, and financial support, not military anything), while in Syria we should steer away from those many characters linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist crowd. But there are plenty of good democrats fighting against Assad. Having dithered so long, we are now facing some nasty scenarios, and it may well be that the Free Syrian Army — the defectors from the regular armed forces — will need some sort of military assistance.

These decisions will have to be made by people who know more about the actual battlefield than you or I, but they should be made within a narrow context:  what is the best way to bring down Assad and Khamenei? Despite decades of bad policy, the fates have delivered our enemies to us. They are waiting for a swift kick, or a decisive thrust from our side. One will get you ten the tyrants have already made plans for life in exile.

How did this happen, without anyone seeming to notice? I think it is because we are not permitted to tell the truth about the war: we defeated al-Qaeda, Iran and Syria in Iraq, and the consequences of that defeat have been very serious for our enemies. They preached that Allah had blessed their jihad, and when they were beaten, it raised terrible questions to which they have no truthful answers. But the truth is quite obvious to the would-be enemy fighters, who know that the promise of victory was not fulfilled on the Middle East’s major battlefield, and whatever your view of the Afghan fighting, nobody I respect really believes that we are being beaten by the Taliban.

We’re right on the edge of an historic watershed, in which our totalitarian enemies can be driven into history’s bin of losers. It is time for us to declare victory and then impose our will on our enemies by giving their oppressed people  the opportunity to free themselves from the bloody tyrants.

It’s up to our leaders to demonstrate they have the will to win. Win a real war, not just a political poll.  And by the way, if our current leaders were to do that, they’d do a lot better in the polls.

Faster, please.

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[a_majoor]

Arab spring descends into chaos:

http://pajamasmedia.com/spengler/2011/10/10/egypt-descends-into-chaos/?print=1

Egypt descends into chaos

Posted By David P. Goldman On October 10, 2011 @ 2:30 am In Uncategorized | 34 Comments

Sunday’s massacre of protesting Copts is heartbreaking; from the initial reports, several thousand Christians marched to protest the military government’s blind eye towards Muslim violence when they were “were attacked by thugs carrying swords and clubs,” according to one Copt. The Egyptian government says that the Christian protesters began firing live ammunition at soldiers. That stretches credibility.

Meanwhile, according to today’s summary of the Egyptian press:

    The state-owned [newspaper]  Al-Dostour reports on an “insane” increase in the prices of commodities and services that has left citizens “screaming,” presumably in despair. In its report, Al-Dostour claims that the “current state of lawlessness has left merchants and businesses with no supervision,” giving them free reign to raise prices without fear of repercussion. After a string of powerful metaphors depicting consumers as helpless prey in the grips of some fiercer yet unspecified predator, the report turns into an onslaught of numbers and percentages – food products up 80 percent since January of this year, LE7 for a kilo of sugar and LE13.75 for a liter of vegetable oil, 50 percent increase in the price of flour and LE22 for a kilo of duck meat, and on and on. LE9 for a kilo of humus, too.

No-one appears in charge. Central bank foreign exchange reserves are down to just $19 billion, or four months’ imports, the Financial Times reported last week. “After negotiating a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the military council decided to scrap it, partly on fears of popular criticism – the IMF has a negative reputation in Egypt because of its association with harsh structural adjustment programmes. In addition, only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far.”

Egypt literally will run out of food. It imports half its caloric consumption, mainly wheat (although Egyptians eat less wheat than Iranians, Moroccans, Canadians, Turks and Russians). Egypt spends $5.5 billion a year on food subsidies. Its social solidarity minister wants to change the system (which subsidizes some people who can afford to pay more than the penny a loaf the government charges), but seems deeply confused. “‘We need to change consumer habits so that we are not consuming so much bread. In Mexico, for example, they rely more on potatoes. Why can’t we start shifting toward that?’said Saad Nassar, adviser to the agriculture minister.” Mr. Nassar seems unaware that Mexicans eat more corn than wheat or potatoes. This discussion would be comical if not for the fact that Egypt is about to run out of money to pay for any sort of food.

It does not appear to be a source of comfort that the Egyptian army is in charge. This is an institution whose Golden Rule is: “Don’t report bad news up the chain of command.” One recalls the June 1967 debacle, when President Nasser and his top generals had no idea how badly they had been beaten until days after the events because no-one in the field would tell them.

I have been warning since Feb. 2 that the so-called Arab Spring represented the terminal convulsions of  a doomed society. It seems eons since The Weekly Standard complained last April about “grudging” support for Arab democracy, arguing that “the Arab Spring deserves to be greeted with enthusiasm and support.” The Arabs might even be an inspiration to us: “Helping the Arab Spring through to fruition might contribute to an American Spring, one of renewed pride in our country and confidence in the cause of liberty.”

Meanwhile, we can’t punish Pakistan for sponsoring an attack on America’s embassy in Kabul because we supposedly need Pakistan to help us stabilize Afghanistan. And Nouri Maliki, the leader of the supposed Iraqi democracy we spent a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives to put in place, is backing the Assad regime in alliance with Iran. We can’t attack Iran to neutralize its nuclear weapons program because that might destabilize Iraq (which seems an odd concern given that Iraq is an Iranian ally).

The problem is the faulty premise that American ingenuity, blood, and treasure could stabilize the Muslim world by building democracy. That premise is exploding in every single theater one cares to mention: Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Stability is a mirage in the Muslim world. Instability, though, can benefit American security interests, and under certain conditions we should actively destabilize hostile entities rather than attempt to stabilize them.

That’s why I wrote How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too).
(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified image from Shutterstock.com)

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[a_majoor]

"Arab Spring" turns very cold indeed:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blogs/copts-will-fight_595803.html?nopager=1

The Copts Will Fight
But they won’t win.
Lee Smith
October 12, 2011 5:29 PM

This past Sunday night, the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak took another wrong turn when the same army once believed to be “hand in hand” with the people killed 27 Coptic Christians in Cairo and wounded hundreds of others. The Copts were marching toward Egyptian state television in the Maspero area to demand that the ruling authorities fulfill their obligations to the Christian minority. After the marchers were stoned by Muslim bystanders during their march, state security and the military attempted to put down the demonstration. When the authorities started to beat the protesters, the Copts fought back. The police opened fire, killing several Copts as others were crushed when soldiers turned their military vehicles into the crowds, leaving a trail of unspeakable gore in their wake.

This most recent expression of violence against the Copts will resonate for some time to come—not least because it appears that some local Muslim bystanders cheered on the army while others took an active role in the violence. (Here’s a video of a soldier who boasts of having shot a Copt in the chest and is cheered on by a crowd.) Egyptian state television called on “loyal Egyptians”—i.e. Muslims—to come to the streets to protect the army from the Copts, which evidently did draw many, including Salafists, to the incident.

Sunday night’s bloodshed is further evidence that, even if the army was the agent of violence, anti-Copt sentiment is widespread. The Sunday march was preceded by a smaller demonstration last week when Copts protested an attack on a church in Edfu, almost 500 miles south of the Egyptian capital, and demanded that the Muslim gangs responsible for the destruction of the church be brought to justice. The army and security forces beat Copt protesters when they marched last week, too, as this video shows. Perhaps what’s most noteworthy in this clip is that after the first few blows the officer in charge, in a red beret, seems to be trying to stop his troops from striking further. At one point the officer even hits one of the soldiers. This suggests that while Egypt’s ruling body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, is intent on keeping the streets quiet and free of Copt activists, it is unlikely they ordered the army to kill civilians. Rather, it seems that individual soldiers acted on their own.

“There’s this idea that Egypt’s army is a professional force,” says Samuel Tadros, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, and a senior partner at the Cairo-based Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth. “This is a mistake.”

We’re sitting in a café in Georgetown along with a colleague of his from EULY, Mina Rezkalla, visiting from Cairo whose family lives in the Shubra district where Sunday’s march originated. Two of Rezkalla’s friends were killed, including a young man recently engaged to be married. He shows me the engagement photo of his friend and his fiancée, and then another of the same woman sobbing over her fiancé’s mutilated corpse.

“The officers are professional,” says Tadros, “and there are professional units, like Special Forces, but these people were regular conscripts.” Every Egyptian male, unless he is the family’s only son, is required to serve in the military, which means that the army draws from a 90 percent Muslim majority across the general population that is typically hostile to Copts. “The soldiers are acting just like they would back in their village if they got into a fight with Copts,” says Tadros. “These officers have lost control of their soldiers.”

In the aftermath of Sunday’s bloodbath, the White House issued a statement from President Obama urging “restraint on all sides” and lamenting the "tragic loss of life among demonstrators and security forces." It seems the president was basing his erroneous assumption on early charges made by the Egyptian media that security and military personnel had been killed as well as Copt civilians, claims Egyptian officials retracted Monday. Only Copts were killed.

And yet despite their losses, it is difficult to imagine that Egypt’s ancient Christian community is about to recede into the shadows. Sunday’s events are proof not only of the army’s brutality and much of the majority Muslim community’s hatred of their non-Muslim neighbors, but also of a now-mobilized minority’s courage and pride. This Coptic awakening has been several decades in the making.

“If the Kurds are the Middle East’s most neglected minority,” says Tadros, “the Copts are the loneliest.” The Copts are proud of the fact that in spite of the Arab conquests and other violent encroachments on their community they did not fall like other long-forgotten and long-gone regional minorities. And in contrast to other surviving minority groups, like Lebanon’s Maronite and Druze sects, the Copts lacked influence abroad, which is to say they have been relatively separated from Western Christendom. They received little help, or even friendship, from London during Britain’s 72-year-long occupation of Egypt, and have been able to count on little support from Washington over the years, despite a substantial number of Coptic immigrants scattered throughout the United States.

Still, the international community’s indifference hardly spares Copts the contempt and suspicion of many of their Muslim compatriots, while the country’s elite ignores Muslims’ open hatred of Christians and instead blames Israel for Egypt’s sectarian strife. (Here, the “moderate” Islamist candidate for president Abdel Moneim al-Fotouh says Zionists were behind Sunday’s events.) One popular iteration of this conspiracy theory holds that former head of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin openly bragged about Israel’s success in “promoting sectarian tension” in Egypt. It seems this bogus narrative first appeared on an Arab Israeli website, where Hezbollah picked it up before it hit the mainstream of Egypt’s Muslim community. Of course, Yadlin never said anything of the sort. “It’s total nonsense,” he told me in Washington, where he is a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “What Israel wants, and what I want, is a stable and democratic Egypt that will contribute to the peace and betterment of the greater Middle East.”

The fate of the Arab Spring shows just how difficult this is going to be. What we’ve seen revealed over the last eight months are the numerous sectarian tensions that are usually obscured by the world's focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict. But now the banner of Arab resistance under which for instance all Syrians once rallied is no longer relevant in a state where the ruling Alawite minority slaughters the majority Sunni opposition—with the support of Syrian minorities, including the Christians. In Bahrain, the Sunni government targets its Shia population, and in Lebanon and Iraq, the Shiites and the Sunnis are only for the time being deterred from going at each other’s throats, again. The Arabs may have no peace with Israel; but neither do the various sects and ethnicities (Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, etc.) commonly rolled into one and described by the blanket term “Arab” have peace with each other.

Tadros argues that even as Copts served in Egypt’s wars against the Jewish state, the community never had an issue with Israel. “Arab nationalism was an ideology that many Orthodox Christians from Syria and Lebanon pushed,” he says, “but not the Copts.”

For most of the last century, the community was politically quiescent, at least until 1977 when the Coptic Pope, Shenouda, opposed President Anwar Sadat’s plan to incorporate more aspects of sharia into the Egyptian constitution in order to placate his growing Islamist problem. Shortly before Sadat’s first trip to meet the recently elected Ronald Reagan, scores of Copts were massacred in Cairo in June 1981 by Islamists as well as local residents while the police did little to stop the slaughter (Copts claim 181 were killed while Egyptian authorities say the casualty figures are much lower). For the Egyptian leader, his visit to Washington was overshadowed by the large numbers of Copts demanding justice for their slain relatives. Fearing that Shenouda was getting too powerful, and accusing him of attempting to create an independent Christian state in Egypt, Sadat had him put under house arrest, and announced that the state no longer recognized Shenouda as pope. Even as most of Sadat’s other political adversaries were forgiven by the new Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in the wake of Sadat’s murder at the hands of Islamists, Shenouda was held in a monastery until January 1985.

For more than 15 years, Tadros explains, “the pope was quiet and there were no clashes with the government, even as there were several massacres of Copts that the Mubarak regime did little to prevent. But from the Copts’ perspective, it was wise to side with a government that was taking on the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri.” Even worse was Omar Abd el-Rahman—the so-called “Blind Sheikh” now being held in an American prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center attack—who published a fatwa declaring that it was licit to rob and kill Copts. The 1997 massacre at Luxor, where Islamists killed 62 people, 58 of them foreign tourists, effectively brought an end to the jihadist insurgency as the Mubarak regime showed the militants no mercy in the aftermath of an attack that brought the Egyptian economy to a standstill.

Tadros and Rezkalla explain that the Coptic community saw the post-insurgency period as an opportunity to promote their community’s interests. The years 2001-2010 were crucial in forging a new identity among the Copts. Aside from a demonstration in front of the headquarters of a tabloid that had published scurrilous rumors about the clergy, there were few public protests. But there was plenty of political action on church grounds and within the churches themselves, led by several young priests. They published a magazine distributed in churches, The Theban Legion—named after 6,000 Coptic legionnaires of the Roman army stationed in Thebes who were martyred in the third century for refusing to offer the emperor a sacrifice. The clergy also started a group for young activists called “Kimi.” Rezkalla writes the word out for me in the Coptic alphabet and says that it refers to the fertile mud brought forth by the Nile. “It’s how the pharaohs used to refer to Egypt,” says Tadros—“Kimi.”

In November 2010 the Copts first came into open conflict with the security forces when they protested against the local government in Giza for suspending building of a new church. “It was also the first time the Copts refused a direct order coming from the pope,” says Rezkalla. However, Tadros allows it might have been a clever political move on Shenouda’s part in order to increase his own leverage with the Mubarak regime. “He might have been saying, ‘you see how they ignore me, so you have to give me some concessions I can show them.'" These were not the fatalistic Copts of old. Instead, they carried crosses and shouted slogans—“Raise your head up high, you are a Copt.”

About the January 25 uprising that eventually toppled Mubarak, the Coptic community was wary, understanding that for all Mubarak’s faults he had put down an Islamist insurgency in the '80s and '90s that specifically targeted Copts. Nonetheless, explains Tadros, many of the younger Copts were hopeful after Mubarak stepped down, at least until they realized that everyone’s demands were being met—especially those of the Islamists, and the revolutionaries—except the Copts. Indeed, no one was even held responsible for vicious attacks on the community, like the 2011 New Year’s Eve burning of a church in Alexandria.

So where do the Copts go from here? Their status and that of other regional Christian communities suggests that the Muslim fundamentalists had it right—first the Saturday people will go and then the Sunday people. The difference is that the Jews have their own state—along with an army, a nuclear weapon and a thriving economy based on the IT sector. There is no Christian refuge in the Middle East, not even Lebanon where the Maronites have seen their power evaporate so quickly that the part of the community which follows Michel Aoun seems not understand that his alliance with Hezbollah is in reality a suicide pact.

That recognition, among other reasons, is why the Copts will never come to a similar accommodation with Egypt’s Islamist groups. Nor on the other hand can they expect much success in their continued efforts to defend themselves. They have neither the numbers to protect themselves against the 90 percent Muslim majority, nor the geography. There are no mountains for the Copts to hide among, like the Kurds, Druze, Maronites, and Alawites, nor are there sufficiently large enough concentrations of Copts to make the sort of lasting self-defense that might turn into self-determination plausible. To be sure, as we saw on Sunday, the Copts will fight, but as we also witnessed, they won’t win.

 

[57Chevy]

                                      Shared with provisions of The Copyright Act

Canada warns citizens to leave Syria immediately as UN assails regime
Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times 14 Oct
http://www.montrealgazette.com/Canada+warns+citizens+leave+Syria/5553135/story.html#ixzz1ansg9OvQ

BEIRUT — Canada's Foreign Affairs Department upgraded its warning on Syria Friday, advising any citizens currently in the protest-racked country to leave as soon as possible.

"Canadians in Syria should leave now by commercial means while these are still available," the government said in an updated statement on its website.

"Canadians who remain in the country despite this warning should be aware that the Government of Canada's ability to provide consular assistance may be extremely limited due to restrictions imposed by the Syrian Government."

Canada was already warning against all travel to Syria.

Canada's move came as the United Nations' top human rights official assailed the Syrian government Friday for a campaign of "ruthless repression and killings" and called for the international community to take steps to prevent the Middle East nation from plunging into civil war.

A statement issued in Geneva by Navi Pillay, UN high commissioner for human rights, essentially backed claims by antigovernment activists who say Syrian authorities have routinely attacked protesters without provocation. In contrast, the administration of President Bashar Assad has blamed the violence on terrorists armed from abroad seeking to overthrow the government.

Pillay's comments appeared to be the toughest to date from the United Nations, where a resolution condemning Syria's response to more than six months of protests failed to pass the Security Council earlier this month.

The Assad government faces a hardening of attitudes against it on many fronts. European countries and the United States have imposed economic sanctions. Turkey, Syria's longtime ally, has harshly criticized Assad's handling of the unrest and is also planning to impose economic penalties against its neighbour.

"Since the start of the uprising in Syria, the government has consistently used excessive force to crush peaceful protests," Pillay said. "Sniping from rooftops and indiscriminate use of force against peaceful protesters — including the use of live ammunition and the shelling of residential neighbourhoods — have become routine occurrences in Syrian cities."

The result has been "a devastatingly remorseless toll of human lives," said Pillay, a South African judge, who also expressed fears that the conflict was becoming increasingly militarized.

"As more members of the military refuse to attack civilians and change sides, the crisis is already showing worrying signs of descending into armed struggle," she said.

The death toll in Syria since antigovernment protests erupted in March has now topped 3,000, including at least 187 children, Pillay said, adding that more than 100 people have died in the past 10 days.

Thousands more, she added, have been "arrested, detained, forcibly disappeared and tortured," while family members both inside and outside Syria "have been targeted for harassment, intimidation, threats and beatings."

Antigovernment activists said at least 12 people were killed Friday in attacks by security forces at various sites in Syria. There was no immediate response from the government.

The jurist called on the international community to "take protective action in a collective and decisive manner, before the continued ruthless repression and killings drive the country into a full-blown civil war." But her spokesman said it was up to other governments and the Security Council to decide exactly what that meant.

In August, Pillay said she had found "credible evidence" of crimes against humanity in Syria and urged the Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court for possible prosecution.

It remains unclear whether the Security Council will take any action.

 

[cupper]

Well, there go my vacation plans.

I knew I should have gone with the refundable ticket and cancellation insurance. ;D

 

[a_majoor]

The Bush Doctrine continues to be the American plan for the Middle East:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/10/20/farewell-to-the-great-loon/

Farewell To The Great Loon
Walter Russell Mead

Africa’s King of Kings, the Sword of Islam, the Guide of the People and the Great Loon of Libya is gone.  The crowds kicked his lifeless body through the streets of his hometown.  Those who trusted in him and who aided and abetted his crimes, are scattered to the four winds — the lucky ones.  The others are dead or in jail.  In the anarchy of the new Libya, the families of his allies are huddled in their homes, fearful that each day will bring  revenge from those the Great Loon and his henchmen tortured, murdered and dispossessed.

History will not shed any tears over the Loon, and neither will I.  He was an example of the worst type of ruler history sometimes throws up: an empowered, murderous, psychopathic clown.  He was a sick joke; it is a measure of the moral and political degradation of “third worldism” that his fellow thugs like Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez and dictators and kleptocrats without number considered him a member of the club, ignored his flagrant sins, and prostituted the name of justice by hailing him as a progressive, revolutionary leader who was making our world a better place.

There is a lot of scum in this world that calls itself cream; we live in an era when the most vicious evil, hatred and oppression portrays itself as an angel of light — and finds plenty of deluded ideologues, hate-crazed ‘resistance’ movements, and plain old fashioned thugs willing to further the deception.

The Great Loon wrecked his country in the service of his twisted ambitions and an incoherent philosophy; he believed the flatterers and toadies who told him that he was wise.  His relations and his allies pillaged the country. He persecuted the innocent, oppressed the poor, slandered the just.

Sadly, he deserved the death he received — just as Saddam Hussein deserved the humiliation and mockery of his last moments on earth.  Forty years of comfortable prison in the Hague would not have been just recompense for his crimes; for a man whose vanity and ambition turned a country into a concentration camp, death is a just sentence, however served.

I am glad he is gone, and I am glad that the United States shares in the honor of his fall. We should not forget to remember and thank the brave Americans who did their part to bring him down — and worked so hard to make the military strikes as effective as possible while bringing as little collateral damage to civilians as they could.  I can think of a list of other vain, vicious and delusional tyrants who deserve the same fate — though that does not mean that I want American forces to move to the next target on my list. An over-zealous quest for universal justice is likely to end in tears — and not the happy kind.

Had the Loon been willing to leave power peacefully six months ago, I would have favored making an agreement to give him immunity and a dignified though not lavish exile in some quiet part of the world.  When trying to get rid of a truly evil ruler, getting him out quickly is often more important than punishing him for his crimes.  I would rather prevent someone from committing 1,000 new murders than punish him for 1,000 he has already committed.  The first duty of justice must usually be to the living, and the restoration of freedom and security to the citizens of a country before more can be tortured and killed is the first thing to get done. There can come a time when the fire must burn itself out and the head of the dictator be kicked through the streets, but on the whole giving thugs a last chance to step aside is likely to do more good than harm.

There is one conclusion we ought to draw from the inglorious end of the Great Loon: the Bush agenda in the Middle East is alive and well.  The United States is, as Bush and Cheney so forcefully announced, a revolutionary power in the Middle East no longer seeking to prop up the status quo at any cost.  (The Saudi exemption still holds.)  Regime change remains on the table; the military forces of the United States stand ready to take out thugs whose viciousness has become insupportable, or who align themselves against the vital interests of this country.  We would prefer not to do this at all; if something must be done we would rather do it under the aegis of the UN, but we will do it with less prestigious blessings if we must.  Where possible, we do it with allies, and we would rather support and promote from behind the scenes than to bear all the burdens and costs on our own, but when American presidents say that “all options are on the table”, they mean exactly what they say.

This does not mean that Presidents Bush and Obama are less moderate and less law abiding than their predecessors.  Their policies changed in part because the region had changed: the dictators who once brought stability at the price of repression could no longer deliver.  Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen: the old rulers could still kill but they could no longer rule.

Additionally, the balance of military power has been steadily shifting in favor of the United States.  This runs counter to all the loose talk about inevitable, inexorable US decline: a close look at the facts on the ground suggests that the US has considerably more power to impose its agenda on most “third world” countries than it did twenty years ago.  This is partly because such countries can no longer realistically claim the protection of a rival superpower, but it is also because the American military is a much more formidable machine than it used to be.  Our weapons are much smarter and much more devastatingly effective, and our professional military has blossomed into the most effective force in the history of the human race.  We can still be made to take casualties in asymmetrical combat situations, and no amount of military power can overcome the absence of strategy, but between the battlefield advantages our high tech weapons and new methods of training and combat planning have given us, the revolution in force projection, and the range of cultural, diplomatic, humanitarian and developmental capacities our military has acquired in the last twenty years, America’s unprecedented military power has changed the way the world works.

This power is not a magic omnipotence pill; there are many things we cannot do.  But the days when a third world tyrant could rely on conventional weapons to deter American intervention are gone.  The US military swatted Saddam’s army, rated as one of the world’s better forces, like so many flies in the first Gulf War, and by the time of the second our conventional superiority was even greater.  The Libyan intervention was done with the back of our hand, so to speak; President Obama and his top commanders did not interrupt their efforts in the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia to provide the backup for NATO’s attacks.

This power does not work as well in asymmetrical settings, but in general we are back to the kind of military superiority that European forces enjoyed over non-European rulers in Victorian times.  Reinforcing that power is the fact that no other great power has the force projection capacities, or even the military resources overall, to come to the aid of a Libya or a Saddam.  Drone strike diplomacy is not all that different from gunboat diplomacy, and until and unless the military balance changes, the US is going to have more options for dealing with “bad guys” than we have had for many years.

We should use that power with care and restraint, and we have seen plenty of recent situations where overwhelming military power created new and vexing problems on the ground.  Just because we have an excellent hammer does not mean that every problem on earth is a nail.

Nevertheless, the disempowering of tyrants is a fact of our time, and I for one am glad.

 

[57Chevy]

                                Shared with provisions of The Copyright Act

Heavy clashes in Yemen as thousands of anti-Saleh protesters take to the streets in Sanaa
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/yemen/8885512/Heavy-clashes-in-Yemen-as-thousands-of-anti-Saleh-protesters-take-to-the-streets-in-Sanaa.html

video at link

Witnesses and medical staff say at least 17 people were killed and 30 people injured when President Ali Abdullah Saleh's Republican Guards shelled some districts in Taiz, Yemen's third largest city, which has been a hotbed of anti-Saleh protests.

Opposition tribal fighters, using automatic rifles and shoulder-held rocket launchers, killed two soldiers and wounded seven, according to Yemen's Defence Ministry.

The violence comes a day after United Nations (UN) envoy Jamal Benomar began a new mission to push President Ali Abdullah Saleh to quit under a Gulf peace plan. The plan calls for Mr Saleh to hand power to his deputy, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who will oversee the formation of a national unity government ahead of an early presidential election.

In the capital Sanaa, tens of thousands of anti-Saleh protesters attended prayers on a main road. Some demanded the president be tried for what they called his crimes against the Yemeni people.

"We say (to the international community) - no immunity for murder. Ali Abdullah Saleh and his regime are shedding the blood of Yemenis in all the provinces. Any immunity or guarantee to those criminals is rejected, rejected, rejected," said protester Fouad Dohabah.
                              _______________________________________

Abd al-Rahman Mansur al-Hadi (Wikipedia)
Major General Abd al-Rahman Mansur al-Hadi; born 1945 is a Yemeni politician who has been the Vice President of Yemen since 3 October 1994. Between 4 June and 23 September 2011 he was the acting president of Yemen, when Ali Abdullah Saleh left for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, after being wounded in an attack on the presidential palace during the 2011 Yemeni uprising.

Early life

He was born in 1945 in Abyan.[1] His name can also be spelled Abd Rabu Mansur Hadi, Abdo Rabo Mansour Hadi, Abdulrab Mansur al-Hadi, Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi, Abd Rabbah Mansour Hadi or Abdurabu Mansour Hadi, among other variations.

He joined the Army of South Yemen in 1970 and became a Major General in early 1990.

Political career

He became Vice President of Yemen after Ali Salim al-Beidh resigned and lost the civil war. Al-Hadi was appointed by President Ali Abdullah Saleh as Vice President on 3 October 1994. Before his appointment as Vice President, he was briefly the Minister of Defense.
                              _________________________________________

Photo: Afro-Arab summit Oct 2010

 

[57Chevy]

                                      Shared with provisions of The Copyright Act

Saleh says will hand Yemen to army if he quits
20 Nov, 2011
http://www.haveeru.com.mv/world/38785
SANAA, Nov 20, 2011 (AFP) - Yemen's embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh said on Saturday he would hand the country over to the military if he were to step down as demanded by the opposition.

"We... are ready to make sacrifices for the country. But you will always be there, even if we step down," Saleh told loyalist troops, in statements carried by the official Saba news agency.

The news agency said Saleh made the remarks during an inspection of the Republican Guards, an elite army corps led by Saleh's son Ahmed.

Saleh, who has been in power in Sanaa since 1978, has come under mounting domestic and international pressure to step down in line with a Gulf-brokered peace blueprint.

Saleh has welcomed the plan but has yet to formally endorse it.

His remarks came ahead of a UN Security Council meeting due on Monday to discuss Saleh's refusal to hand over power under the Gulf plan in return for immunity from prosecution.

The council unanimously passed Resolution 2014 on October 21 condemning attacks on demonstrators by Saleh's forces and strongly backing the Gulf Cooperation Council plan.

Several hundred demonstrators have been killed in Yemen since anti-government protests broke out in late January.
                            ____________________________________________________

http://yemenpost.net/Detail123456789.aspx?ID=3&SubID=4361&MainCat=3
20 Nov, 2011
A mass march was stage today throughout Sana'a departing from "Change Square" as protesters wanted to decry the GCC immunity clause.
Banners were held high for the World to see as Yemenis people join up together demanding that their president be judged for his crimes.
Men and women from all classes gathered today as they stood for Justice, forgetting for a day their petty arguments and social prejudices; realizing that Yemen was truly at a crossroads and that in order to go forward people needed closure, people needed to feel that their loved ones would not die another death by being ignored.
"We are not calling for revenge but Justice. We need our dead to be at peace, we need to heal and for that we need Saleh to pay and stand trial", said a young woman activist.
Calls for a refusal of the GCC proposal is growing louder across Yemen. From its southern shores to its northern mountains, Yemenis now refused to let go. After 11 long months of waiting, after 11 long months of being the target of the regime's guns, Yemenis are saying no more.
Yemen might have taken a while to come out from its apathy but we are now witnessing the rise of a nation which is fully aware of its right, which better yet is clamoring for its right as it knows it should, as it knows it deserves.
Taiz
In the southern city of Taix which has been dubbed the Yemeni Benghasi as similarities between the 2 revolutionary towns are hard to miss, saw similar protests and similar demands.
                          ____________________________________________________


immunity from prosecution ?  :facepalm:

 

[a_majoor]

As Saudi Arabia's ability to generate oil wealth declines, the ability to divert unrest at home with cash subsidies and influence foreign powers through bribery and proxies will also decline:

http://www.financialpost.com/news/Saudis+face+waning+power+North+America/5747443/story.html

Saudis face waning power in North America

Yadullah Hussain, Financial Post · Nov. 22, 2011 | Last Updated: Nov. 22, 2011 3:10 AM ET

While the green movement naively harbours hopes it will be able to shut down unconventional oil and gas development, in Saudi Arabia they are already contemplating a time when North American fossil fuel will replace their oil.

Looking past the din of protesters, state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco is resigned to the fact that its influence will wane because of the massive unconventional fossil-fuel development underway in North America. As such, Saudi Arabia has no plans to raise its production output to 15 million barrels per day from 12 million, said Khalid Al-Falih, the powerful chief executive of Aramco.

"There is a new emphasis in the industry on unconventional liquids, and shale gas technologies are also being applied to shale oil," Al-Falih, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco, warned a domestic audience in a speech in Riyadh Monday.

"Some are even talking about an era of 'energy independence' for the Americas, based on the immense conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon resources located there. While that might be stretching the point, it is clear that the abundance of resources and the more 'balanced' geographical distribution of unconventionals have reduced the much-hyped concerns over 'energy security', which once served as the undercurrent driving energy policies and dominated the global energy debate."

Aramco is the powerful state entity that manages the Kingdom's nine million barrel-plus oil output. Saudi Arabia has long dominated oil markets by leveraging its spare oil capacity and, as the OPEC kingpin, striking a delicate balance between the interests of oil consumers and the exporter group.

But the oil chief's remarks reveal Saudi fears that the market dynamics are changing and its dominance over energy markets is under threat by new unconventional finds.

OPEC estimated in a recent report that global reserves of tight oil could be as high as 300 billion barrels, above Saudi Arabia's conventional reserves of 260 billion barrels, which are currrently seen as the second-largest in the world after Venezuela.

Global output of non-conventional oil is set to rise 3.4 million bpd by 2015, still dominated by oil sands, to 5.8 million bpd by 2025 and to 8.4 million bpd by 2035, when tight oil would be playing a much bigger role. By 2035, the United States and Canada will still be dominating unconventional oil production with 6.6 million bpd, the group forecasts.

Last year, even as the world consumed nearly 30 billion barrels of oil, not only was the industry able to replace this production but global petroleum reserves actually increased by nearly seven billion barrels, as companies increasingly turned toward higher risk areas, Al-Falih noted.

Clearly, the Kingdom is preparing for new market realities as the discussion on energy has changed from scarcity to abundance, particularly due to the new finds that can be produced feasibly and economically.

In the past, Saudi Arabia, along with its OPEC allies, could drive prices down by opening the taps to ensure unconventional fossil fuels remained firmly buried in the ground. But most analysts now expect oil prices to remain high, at least over the medium term, thanks to tight supplies and continued demand from emerging markets. That's great news for Canadian oil sands developers, which need prices around US$60 to US$70 per barrel to make their business models economically feasible.

Saudi Arabia's own break-even oil price has also risen sharply in the past few years, making it less likely to pursue a strategy of lower prices. The Institute of International Finance estimates that Saudi Arabia's break-even price has shot up US$20 over the past year to US$88, in part due to a generous spending package of US$130-billion announced this year to keep domestic unrest at bay.

The Saudis now find themselves between a shale rock and a hard place: While high crude prices mean the Saudis can maintain their excessive domestic subsidies for citizens, in the long run that means the world is developing new sources, making it less dependent on Saudi oil.

Although the Saudis have vigorously fought the Ethical Oil ads, which paint them in a negative light, they already know their oil is less welcome in the Americas - Saudi oil made up a mere 9.3% of U.S. oil imports last year, down from 11.2% five years ago, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

But while Saudis would be cheering on the green groups with 'No KXL' signs, they don't hold out much hope for renewable energies either. Calling them 'green bubbles,' Al-Falih says governments should stop focusing on unproven and expensive energy mix, as there is frankly no appetite for massive investments in expensive, ill thought-out energy policies and pet projects.

"The confluence of four new realities - increasing supplies of oil and gas, the failure of alternatives to gain traction, the inability of economies to foot the bill for expensive energy agendas, and shifting environmental priorities - have turned the terms of the global energy dialogue upside down. Therefore, we must recast our discussion in light of actual conditions rather than wishful thinking," the pragmatic chief said.

Somebody should explain this wishful thinking to the green movement.

yhussain@nationalpost.com

 

[a_majoor]

Two of the largest and most influential states in the Islamic crescent look like they are going to fail:

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/22/egypt-and-turkey-middle-east-basket-cases/?print=1

Egypt and Turkey: Middle East Basket Cases
Posted By David P. Goldman On November 22, 2011 @ 6:03 am In Uncategorized | 101 Comments

The mainstream media has finally picked up the story I’ve been telling since February about Egypt’s impending economic collapse. The country is nearly out of money. Under the headline, “The Egyptian pound has a distressed future,” the Financial Times reported Nov. 16, just before the last days’ slaughter on Tahrir Square, “Investors are betting against the Egyptian pound, expressing their belief that it is soon to take a dive through the futures market while the spot market is held up by Egyptian government support. The pound’s twelve-month non-deliverable forwards (NDFs) weakened 2.8 per cent on Wednesday on fears that Egypt’s reserves, which are being used to support the currency, might be reaching critical levels. The spot market, in contrast, held steady – but for how long?”

Reuters reports:

CAIRO Nov 22 (Reuters) – Egypt’s pound fell to its weakest against the dollar since January 2005 on Tuesday as mass protests against army rule prompted the cabinet to tender its resignation and threw polls into doubt, giving a fresh jolt to a shaky business climate.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) has sought to defend the currency during the nine turbulent months since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, but now traders said the pound could soon break through 6 to the dollar as investors run for cover.

They said demand for dollars among local companies and individuals had grown with the street clashes that have left 36 people dead since Saturday. Voting in the three-phase poll for the lower house of parliament is due to start on Nov. 28.

Egypt’s stock market is in free-fall, down 50% since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. What’s interesting is that Turkey’s stock market isn’t far behind.

The economic crisis overwhelming the Middle East stretches from Libya all the way through to Turkey. The problems are of a different order, to be sure. As I reported earlier, Egypt’s spendable foreign exchange reserves are down to just $13 billion and falling daily as the central bank buys its own unwanted currency from the market in order to postpone the inevitable collapse in the change rate. Why not just devalue? The probable answer is that the generals and their civilian front men are moving as much money as they can out of the country before Egypt goes bankrupt. Last month the generals fired all the private-sector board members of the central bank, as I reported at Asia Times Online. Everything that can be sold abroad for cash is being sold. Al-Ahram reported Nov. 19 that there is no enforcement of the ban on rice exports, because controls have simply broken down. Egypt subsidizes rice at a fraction of the world market price, so traders have an incentive to sell it overseas. Not only the country’s capacity to buy food in the future, but its existing stocks of food are disappearing. And Egypt imports half its caloric consumption.

No wonder the country is blowing up. An out-of-control kleptocracy is frantically trying to close on townhouses in Chelsea and apartments in the 16th arrondissement before the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves run out. What will ensue, will be horrifying.

Turkey is in no danger of starvation, to be sure, but it faces a severe economic setback: Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s Islamist prime minister, spurred the country’s banks to lend huge amounts to consumers in advance of last June’s national elections. Bank lending rose by 40% in 2010 and by another 40% in 2011, and Turks bought consumer goods from abroad, running up a balance of payments deficit exceeding 10% of GDP (the same level as Greece). Most of that is financed by short-term debt. Turkey won’t go bankrupt — it’s overall debt levels are manageable — but its economy will have to shrink by a good 5% to staunch the bleeding. That will deflate the neo-Ottoman balloon that Erdogan has been floating, and make it much harder to suppress Turkish grievances in the impoverished Eastern corner of the country.

There is no center of power, no reorientation, no neo-Ottoman empire, no Shi’ite crescent, no Arab Spring, no coherent description of what is occurring in the Middle East. There is only catastrophic social breakdown, civil unrest, despair and violence. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, they will be used. We cannot fix the Middle East. We can only protect ourselves from the fallout, starting with acquisition of WMD by a terrorist state. The last sentence of my book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) quotes Virgil’s warning to Dante in Canto III of the Inferno: Non ragionam da lor, ma guarda e pasa. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving.

Article printed from Spengler: http://pjmedia.com/spengler

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/22/egypt-and-turkey-middle-east-basket-cases/

 

[57Chevy]

Quote from article above;
"The last sentence of my book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) quotes Virgil’s warning to Dante in Canto III of the Inferno: Non ragionam da lor, ma guarda e pasa. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving."

should read;
Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa (Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on.)
which is not the warning.
Actually,
It is not until the beginning of canto 3 that Dante finally enters hell-- at least its outer region--by passing through a gateway. The inscription above this gate--ending with the famous warning to ("Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.")
"abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Just saying.


from The Literature Network for anyone interested in the english translated version
(Inferno) Canto III
http://www.online-literature.com/dante/inferno/3/

 

[a_majoor]

Pakistan is essentially a failed state already:

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/28/what-do-we-do-about-pakistans-nukes/?print=1

What Do We Do about Pakistan’s Nukes?

Posted By David P. Goldman On November 28, 2011 @ 5:01 am In Uncategorized | 58 Comments

If Pakistani border posts fired on NATO troops before they called in last week’s air strike, the simplest inference is that Pakistan provoked the whole incident in order to wrong-foot the United States. This seems to be Pakistan’s answer to American charges that its intelligence services helped set up the Sept. 13 attack on our Kabul embassy by the al-Haqqani network, as outgoing JCS Chief Michael Mullen charged on Sept. 22.

How does Pakistan get away with it?

In this morning’s “Spengler” column at Asia TImes Online, I observe that Pakistan has successfully deployed the “Blazing Saddles” defense against the United States: take yourself hostage and point a gun at your own head. “One step closer and the [N-word] gets it!,” the black sheriff tells a prospective lynch mob in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic. Much as I admire Rick Santorum, his notion that we must be Pakistan’s friend because Pakistan has nuclear weapons is the wrong way to look at it. On the contrary, the U.S. should call the bluff, and threaten Pakistan with dismemberment and state failure in the event that it fails to control the terrorists who infest its military and intelligence services. It is a win-win proposition.

As I wrote:

    If America puts a figurative gun to the head of the Pakistani government and orders it to extirpate the radical Islamists in the military, two outcomes are possible. One is that Islamabad will succeed. The second is that it will fail, and the country will degenerate into chaos. That is the scenario the American policy is supposed to avoid at all costs, but it is hard to see why America would be worse off. If the elements of Pakistani intelligence that foster terrorism cannot be suppressed, it is clear that they are using resources of the central government to support terrorism. In the worst case, they will continue to foster terrorism, but without the resources of the central government. From America’s vantage point, a disorderly collapse of Pakistan into a failed state is a better outcome than a strong central government that sponsors terrorism. At worst, a prolonged civil conflict between American-backed elements of the Pakistani military and Islamist radicals would leave the radicals weaker than they are now.

Pakistan’s congenital incapacity to be a “friend” of the United States stems from the fact that it is an artificial state in constant danger of fragmenting into ethnic components, and America’s objectives in Afghanistan exacerbate its problems. We have painted ourselves into a corner:

    America’s misguided attempt to stabilize Afghanistan allows Islamabad to blackmail the United States by threatening to promote instability. If the United States accepts Afghan instability as a permanent condition and uses its in-country capability to wear down its enemies in a standing civil war, it can turn the tables by threatening to export the instability to Pakistan. Pakistan has been truncated before, when it lost Bangladesh. It could happen again. The object is not to dismember Pakistan, but rather to persuade Islamabad to behave. If this seems harsh, it is worth recalling that Washington has done this sort of thing before. The Reagan administration did its best to prolong the Iran-Iraq war.

As for the nukes: in the worst case, send in U.S. forces and take them away. That’s not as far-fetched as it might sound, as Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder report in the December issue of The Atlantic. China’s presence in Pakistan complicates matters, but the Chinese have more to lose from Pakistani terrorism than we do (Pakistan’s intelligence services are training Muslim Uyghur separatists for infiltration into China’s Xinjiang province next door).

Article printed from Spengler: http://pjmedia.com/spengler

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/28/what-do-we-do-about-pakistans-nukes/

 

[Edward Campbell]

We would do well to remember that Pakistan is China's client. Sending US troops - against a well trained, well equipped army - to "take away" Pakistan's nuclear weapons might not be the smartest move.

 

[a_majoor]

Probably not, but things are getting to a point that literally every possibility should be on the table for examination. The current situation is clearly unstable and set to collapse into some new and probably worse configuration...

 

[Edward Campbell]

The solution to the Pakistan problem - to America's Pakistan problem, anyway - comes in 2014 when we leave Afghanistan to its poor, wretched fate, to the tender mercies of Pakistan, India, Iran and China.

Then, after 2014, Pakistan will return to being a pawn - a pawn with a pretty good army - in the in the India-China competition for regional dominance.
 

 

[57Chevy]

Agreed, attempting to take away the Pakistani nukes would certainly be a bad move.

The current situation is unstable but it may not necessarily completely collapse. Although tensions
are pretty much strained.

From The Christian Science Monitor and shared with provisions of The Copyright Act

After NATO strike, can US-Pakistan relations be patched up one more time?
Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer 28 Nov
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2011/1128/After-NATO-strike-can-US-Pakistan-relations-be-patched-up-one-more-time-VIDEO

Pakistan announced it was closing its borders permanently to the transport of NATO supplies into Afghanistan. The move was one more retaliatory measure in a long-troubled relationship.

Washington

As Pakistanis burned American flags over NATO airstrikes on Saturday that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, the government in Islamabad announced a full review of US-Pakistan relations – signaling a new low in a relationship that already appeared to be at the breaking point earlier this year.

At the same time, the crisis showed signs of taking on regional dimensions, with China weighing in on the side of Pakistan in an apparent tweak of the United States.

Pakistan said on Monday it was closing its borders permanently to the transport of NATO supplies into Afghanistan after the weekend’s deadly airstrikes on a Pakistani border outpost. The measure promised hardship for US and allied military operations, but it also had a familiar ring, as one more retaliatory measure in a long-troubled relationship.

Twice already this year – in May, when US special forces launched a raid into Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, and a few months before that, when Pakistan arrested a CIA officer in the killings of two Pakistanis – relations between the two wary partners were described by some policymakers in both capitals as nearing a divorce.

Each time, the relationship was revived to some degree by high-level visits and an unvarnished taking-stock of mutual interests. But now, the weekend strike was the deadliest on Pakistani forces in the decade-long Afghan war. And a range of Western and Pakistani military and civilian officials are questioning how long repair will take, or whether it will be possible at all.

Pakistan’s relations with the US and NATO will not be “business as usual” after Saturday’s deadly strikes by helicopter gunship, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said in interviews Monday.

NATO officials promised to conduct a full investigation of the weekend incident, but on Monday the attack and its diplomatic aftershocks showed signs of reaching new regional dimensions, with China uncharacteristically wading into the fray.

“China is deeply shocked by these events,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said in a televised statement Monday. “China believes that Pakistan’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity should be respected and the incident should be thoroughly investigated and be handled properly.”

The Chinese and Pakistani foreign ministers also held a lengthy telephone conversation on the incident, according to their offices.

Some Pakistani media announced that the government would refuse to take part in reconciliation efforts with the Afghan Taliban, but Mr. Gilani insisted that decision had not yet been made. The US is especially keen to see Pakistan involved in those efforts, since it does not believe reconciliation in Afghanistan can advance without Pakistan’s support.

Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik did announce that the closing of border crossings to NATO supply convoys would be permanent. The closure posed an immediate logistical problem, with NATO convoys and their supplies already starting to stack up inside Pakistan.

On the other hand, less than half of the supplies used by US and NATO forces in Afghanistan enter from Pakistan. That’s because the history of tit-for-tat relations between the US and Pakistan had led the US to diversify its supply routes into Afghanistan away from a heavy dependence on Pakistan.

The result is that, while still troublesome, the border closure today constitutes less of a chokehold, as a growing slice of supplies enter Afghanistan through the so-called northern route from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Some analysts of US-Pakistan relations say they assume the two countries will paper over their differences once again. But they also say this incident is likely to reinforce Pakistan’s determination to stick to its own interests to the detriment of a US it believes is set on pulling up stakes in the region anyway.

“Even if – as seems most likely – Pakistan does reopen its supply routes to the US and [international forces in Afghanistan], relations will remain so tense that new incidents and crises in US and Pakistani relations are inevitable,” says Anthony Cordesman, in comments Monday on the Center for Strategic and International Studies website. “This will undermine the already uncertain chances the US can actually achieve any stable benefits from the war after 2014 – either in Afghanistan or Pakistan.”

More broadly, the NATO airstrikes may have opened the way to new rivalries in the region. Opening a northern supply route into Afghanistan required Russian approval, a process that took some time as Moscow weighed the pros and cons of aiding NATO’s, and in particular America’s, presence in Afghanistan.

Russia ultimately decided it had no interest in seeing Afghanistan sink back into instability or even renewed Taliban rule. But China’s motivations in taking a public stance on Saturday’s attack appear to be more focused on Pakistan – and on US involvement there and in Asia more broadly.

China’s comments followed on the heels of President Obama’s extended trip to Asia, which was widely interpreted in Beijing as part of a US effort to reassert its interests in the region and to contain China.

For its part, Pakistan has repeatedly brandished its relations with China as a potential alternative to its ties with Washington. When the US signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Pakistan’s archrival India, for example, some Pakistanis warned that their country could turn to Beijing if Washington did not offer Pakistan a similar deal.

 

[a_majoor]

The "Arab Spring" turns very cold indeed:

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/11/30/flash-what-me-pessimistic-egyptian-election-outcome-is-worse-than-i-expected/?print=1

Flash: What, Me Pessimistic? Egyptian Election Outcome is Worse Than I Expected
Posted By Barry Rubin On November 30, 2011 @ 7:54 pm In Uncategorized | 61 Comments

Since last February I have predicted that the Muslim Brotherhood would win elections in Egypt. People have thought me very pessimistic. Now the votes are starting to come in, and … it’s much worse than I thought. My prediction that the Brotherhood and the other Islamists would gain a slight majority seems to have been fulfilled, and then some. According to most reports, the Brotherhood is scoring at just below 40 percent all by itself.

The results are worse than expected for two reasons:

First: the votes we now have come from the most urban areas of the country.

If there are Facebook sophisticates, they’re going to be in Cairo and Alexandria. If the moderates do that bad in the big cities, what’s going to happen in the villages up the Nile? If the fascist party came in first in some European countries’ Social Democratic districts, you know you are in trouble.

The Brotherhood came in first in Cairo and Alexandria. Think about that. Of course there are millions of migrants from rural areas in those places, but that’s also where the middle class, such as it is, lives.

Second: the moderate parties didn’t even come in second — they came in third, or close to it.

The Salafists — people who are even more radical than the Muslim Brotherhood — came in second. That they did that well is a surprise. That they did that well without bumping the Brotherhood down a notch is really shocking.

Estimates for the Justice Party, the Facebook kids of January, are getting 5 to 10 percent. Even together with the other two main moderate parties, that means the liberals won’t be able to block anything. Already the Brotherhood is tasting blood and talking about pressing the army junta to accelerate the turnover of power.

It’s hard to see, though, that there can be any such transfer of power. The voting is far from finished and will be going on for about three months more, followed by a presidential election. And yes: the results so far suggest that the Islamists will also win the presidency.

That’s when the fun really starts. President Barack Obama is going to face a challenge he is incapable of meeting, since he doesn’t even understand what’s going on. He’s like a man who has been told that a ferocious lion is really a playful kitten and then tries to feed it by hand.

Or, to switch metaphors in the middle of a stream of thought, perhaps Dr. Frankenstein is a more apt image:

“When younger,” said he, “I believed myself destined for some great enterprise. … I could not rank myself with the herd of common projectors. But this thought, which supported me in the commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. All my speculations and hopes are as nothing; and, like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell.” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

For the purposes of this election, Egypt has been divided into three sections, and each section will have a second round. I predict the moderates will fail to work together, and that the Islamists will thus end up  getting an even higher proportion of the seats in parliament.

The Wall Street Journal correspondent is saying that the Salafists will push the Brotherhood further to the “right,” and that’s a very sensible point. Why should the Brotherhood even pretend to be moderate when the people have spoken and they want Sharia with cherries on top?

So the Islamists won and the election was fair. Should we feel good that democracy has functioned and that the people are getting what they want?

Or should we feel bad that the people want a repressive dictatorship, the repression of women, the suppression of Christians, conflict with Israel, hatred of the West, and the freezing of Egyptian society into a straitjacket that can only lead to continued poverty and increasing suffering?

As the vote count becomes clearer, I’ll be refining my analysis, but now we know: this is what (Egyptian) democracy looks like.

—————

(Also read Michael Totten: “Watch Out.”)

Article printed from Rubin Reports: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/11/30/flash-what-me-pessimistic-egyptian-election-outcome-is-worse-than-i-expected/

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Agreed, attempting to take away the Pakistani nukes would certainly be a bad move.

You don't have to send any troops in to take away any warheads/nuclear weapons. I'm willing to bet that the Americans (and Brits) probably know the location of the Pakistani nuclear weapon storage facilities are located. If the situation in Pakistan went bad, really, really bad, all the Americans have to do is send aircraft and take out the storage facilities using conventional bombs, or, if they want to be really sure, tactical nuclear weapons.

 

[57Chevy]

If the situation in Pakistan went bad, really, really bad

You mean like in the event of War.
Which would then be construed as an attack on China.

Responding to reports that China has asked the US to respect Pakistan’s sovereignty in the aftermath of the Bin Laden operation, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu used a May 19 press briefing to state Beijing’s categorical demand that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan must be respected.”

According to Pakistani diplomatic sources cited by the Times of India, China has “warned in unequivocal terms that any attack on Pakistan would be construed as an attack on China.” This ultimatum was reportedly delivered at the May 9 China-US strategic dialogue and economic talks in Washington, where the Chinese delegation was led by Vice Prime Minister Wang Qishan and State Councilor Dai Bingguo
.
Chinese warnings are implicitly backed up by that nation’s nuclear missiles, including an estimated 66 ICBMs, some capable of striking the United States, plus 118 intermediate-range missiles, 36 submarine-launched missiles, and numerous shorter-range systems.
Full article from Eu Times and shared with provisions of The Copyright act (dated 22 May 2011)
China warns US against war with Pakistan
http://www.eutimes.net/2011/05/china-warns-us-against-war-with-pakistan/