Syria: Who’s Afraid of the UN Observer Mission? Wednesday, May 2 2012 

Arab Awakening and Media and Middle East and Syria and United Nations , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 12:13 pm

By Sharmine Narwani

There is a lot of noise coming out of different quarters about the “imminent collapse” of the UN observer mission in Syria. “Dead on arrival,” says one American commentator. “Failure to uphold truce,” accused the White House and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, pointing fingers at the Syrian government.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe warned the international community – just one day after the Mission Protocol was signed – to “prepare for the possible failure” of peace efforts. The very same day, his US counterpart Hilary Clinton enthused: “We need to start moving very vigorously in the Security Council for a Chapter 7 sanctions resolution,” which allows for UN resolutions to be militarily enforced.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was more specific about their concerns. They’re worried about the “non-objective results it might issue.”

Non-objective results? This sounds all too familiar. Usher in the discourse surrounding the Arab League observer mission in December/January, and you will find the exact doom-and-gloom rhetoric from more or less the same cast of characters, this time headed by Western-allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Ironically, it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia who vigorously championed the Arab League Mission until Syria decided to participate. The moment it became clear that monitors would enter Syrian hotspots and report back their observations, those two countries started counter-spinning aggressively against the investigative mission, eventually scuttling it altogether.

Next came their demands to “upgrade” to an “international” observer group led by the United Nations. But now that the Syrian government has agreed to the terms of the UN mission, the negative rhetoric – from the same geopolitical bloc of nations/allies – is once more threatening to cast doubt on the mission and its ability to positively impact events in Syria. (more…)

 

Rupert Murdoch and Hezbollah’s “Scuds” Saturday, Jul 23 2011 

Foreign Affairs and Hezbollah and Israel and Lebanon and Media and Middle East , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 1:50 pm

By Sharmine Narwani

You would think Rupert Murdoch had enough troubles on his hands. You might even imagine that the evidence of illegal doings hemorrhaging from his now-defunct News of the World tabloid would urge him – at least temporarily – to slam the brakes on journalistic hackery throughout his media empire.

Instead, last Friday, Murdoch’s UK flagship paper, The Times of London, published a highly implausible piece alleging that Syria has transferred Scuds to Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah – and quoting only the anonymous and increasingly ubiquitous “western sources,” “intelligence sources” and “Israeli sources” that seem to accompany all Middle East news items guaranteed to eventually be debunked by history.

This story is already dead in the water, attesting to its fundamental lack of credibility. The United Nations Security Council would be passing a resolution right about now if the article had any legs to it – especially in light of its trigger-happy readiness to churn out resolutions on Syria and Lebanon in recent years.

But the question remains – why do Murdoch and others with editorial agendas manage to get away with planting propaganda pieces disguised as news?

I have not linked to the Times article because it is behind a pay wall, but these are the highlights of the piece by Richard Beeston, Nicholas Blanford and Sheera Frenkel entitled “Assad Builds Secret “Missile City” As He Arms Hezbollah With Long-Range Scuds:”

With the help of experts from Iran and North Korea, Damascus is pressing ahead with its development of sophisticated missiles at a secret site nicknamed “missile city” built into Jebel Taqsis, a mountain near the opposition stronghold of Hama…The missile programme is allegedly run by the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in Damascus, an organisation that is already on a US sanctions list….The Times reported last year that Hezbollah had taken delivery of two advanced Scud-D surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 700km (430 miles). Since then the Syrians have handed over eight more of the ballistic weapons, which have been assembled with the help of North Korean experts…

The article then goes on to claim:

Sources close to Hezbollah told The Times that the flow of weapons entering the Bekaa Valley from Syria accelerated in March when protests erupted against the Assad regime. One Hezbollah fighter joked that the scale of the arms shipments into Lebanon was so great that “we don’t know where to put it all”. Another said it was only a contingency measure. “We can send it all back when things calm down in Syria” he said.

Sources, Sources, Sources
I can tell you with near certainty that an actual “Hezbollah fighter” would not be caught dead talking about the group’s alleged weapons with a reporter. In the course of my research, I have met at length with an array of Hezbollah officials, including their former southern chief Sheikh Nabil Kaouk. The group never provides information about their military capabilities, weapons systems, troop numbers or whereabouts unless publically stated by their officials, and that, usually, as a pre-emptive decision to further a deterrence stance.

Information about Hezbollah’s military capabilities are on a need to know basis only, and it is doubtful that even the organization’s most prominent public figures in Lebanon – the non-military faces of the group – know anything of value about weapons caches or positions, let alone a mere “fighter” or “sources close to Hezbollah.”

One of the article’s authors Nicholas Blanford – Beirut correspondent for The Times – in his well-received 2009 book Killing Mr. Lebanon doesn’t even manage to get past the first few pages without referring to Hezbollah’s legendary “veil of secrecy.”

In this, Blanford is spot on. The idea that a Hezbollah fighter – whose very life depends on the element of surprise in any battle with Israel – would reveal information about weapons to a journalist, of all people, is akin to suggesting that a veteran Navy Seal soused to the gills in a bar in Faluja would wax poetic about the “secret” location of a sophisticated new cache of American arms to a bunch of bearded strangers.

What galls most, however, is that the Times article provides not a single on-the-record source on news of this significance. I understand fully that journalists are sometimes faced with publishing pieces with no source on record – that is the nature of the information business, where many sources will not risk jobs, careers and lives to lend their names to a story. But usually the rule of thumb is to use anonymous information when it is not evidently self-serving.

To publish a piece that maligns Western foes Syria and Hezbollah using exclusively Western and Israeli diplomatic and intelligence sources cannot reasonably be viewed as much more than propaganda. The quotes by a “Hezbollah fighter” and “sources close to Hezbollah” excepted, of course. Those strain credulity for anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the highly-disciplined and tight-lipped organization.

As a consequence, the Times article reads like an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) press release, and there have been plenty of those detailing unprovable or patently false Hezbollah-weapons stories over the years. (more…)

 

Kill the “Peace Game” Saturday, Jan 8 2011 

Foreign Affairs and Israel and Middle East and Palestine and peace process and US Foreign Policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 9:12 pm

The Palestine-Israel conflict is no pesky regional skirmish. This century-long battle over territory threatens to draw the entire global community into its bowels if it is not dealt with soon, and the only way out of the current paralysis is to kill the “peace process” once and for all.

There is no other way to end our dependence on the “process” – hoping that another tweak here or there might be the one to produce a breakthrough. No it won’t, and we need to destroy this addiction in order to think straight for a change.

Some realities to consider:

Nineteen years of a drawn out “peace process” has seen the establishment and institutionalization of a “peace industry” so gargantuan and far-reaching that it makes the United Nations look like a nimble start-up operation.

From Madrid to Oslo to Annapolis to the Quartet, we are hampered by agreements, roadmaps and conditions that create a thicket of red tape and limit our maneuverability. Layer upon layer of superficial “process” obscures the path forward. Which is why we are standing quite still.

Playing Games with Peace

Even the participants are fake. The Palestinian “Authority” – well – has none. We squeezed out the elected body and inserted our own players. When we throw eve-of-peace-talks ceremonies at the White House, we invite Egypt and Jordan, who have absolutely nothing of substance to contribute. And we studiously ignore all the parties that count – Hamas and Syria are fundamentally unavoidable in any settlement.

Welcome to the Middle East Peace Game – in which we get to choose the players, make up the rules and set the time table.

Excluded from The Game is anything remotely resembling an actual solution, or any meaningful negotiation around the contentious core issues. We don’t want this game to end. Like NATO and the other Cold War games we set up – we are not sure exactly how to dismantle them and have long since forgotten the end goal. The goal, it seems, is to simply stay in “play.”

So here we are at the start of 2011, entering the 20th year of the “Peace Process.” The reality of establishing two states died years before the idea did – just around the time we realized that Israel had used the peace process to sneak in half a million Jewish settlers into the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, thereby ending the land-for-peace basis of any lasting agreement.

Bad Assumptions = Bad Results
Established by the Oslo Agreement to allow Palestinians to begin a process of self-governance, the Palestinian Authority (PA) instead turned out to be a nifty way to remove Israeli troops from the daily grind of confrontation, whilst quite brilliantly allowing Palestinians to administer their own occupation.

And we threw money at our handpicked Palestinian leadership – creating graft, corruption and a sense of entitlement the likes of which has not been seen since the CEO of Halliburton became Vice President of the United States. In the process, we cordoned off the “opposition” into a hellhole called Gaza, and sought to destroy them by punishing an entire civilian population.

So focused were we on establishing players and rules, not for one honest second did we drill down on the core issues required to resolve this most divisive conflict. These were: 1) determining the borders of Palestine and Israel; 2) determining the status of East Jerusalem 3) determining the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees; 4) determination of sovereignty issues – water and air space rights; security…

The Peace Process Industry instead created a thousand other issues to be addressed first: who is in charge of guarding the grove of olive trees below that hill, around the corner from Abol Abed’s house? Who is going to ride in the second car when the PA president visits a town in Sector C? Who is going to collect taxes from the Palestinian worker building a gazebo for a Jewish settler family in illegally confiscated land? And other such numbing minutae. (more…)

 

Netanyahu’s ‘Shame’ And The Fiction He Weaves Monday, Jan 4 2010 

Gaza War and Human Rights and Israel and Politics and United Nations , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 5:32 pm

Almost a week after the UN General Assembly speeches by various heads of state, where one statement after another was dissected and laid bare by the thousands of reporters and analysts covering the annual plenary session, one speech has almost universally been ignored. And something rankles.

“Have you no shame,” thundered Benjamin Netanyahu to the throngs of senior diplomats, heads of state and assorted dignitaries watching the Israeli prime minister admonish those who remained in the room when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered his speech a day earlier.

Shame, indeed. This, from the leader of a nation that has a pitiful human rights record, standing accused by a United Nations body for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. A country that has an illicit stash of weapons of mass destruction which it refuses to subject to international scrutiny of any sort. A state whose very existence seems possible only through the systemic persecution of the non-Jewish population under its protection.

Break down Netanyahu’s speech and you have more fiction than fact, albeit fiction that has very adeptly been spun by successive Israeli governments into the lexicon of our political language.

“For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks,” accused Netanyahu, before the very audience he scorned in his speech.

Fact: Between 2005 and 2007, Palestinian groups in Gaza fired about 2,700 rockets into Israel. Israel fired more than 14,600 artillery shells into Gaza during this same period, a statistic Israeli government officials always seem to omit.

But the essence of Netanyahu’s fiction remains that Palestinians, and specifically the resistance group Hamas, are the ones who initiate armed conflict.

In a far-reaching and exhaustive study of the issue, MIT Scientist Nancy Kanwisher tracked the entire timeline of killings of Palestinians and Israelis by the other between September 2000 and October 2008. In an article right here on the Huffington Post, she draws some telling conclusions about ceasefires, lulls in conflict, and resumption of hostilities between the two sides:

“It is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern — in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause — becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.”

Kanwisher’s data goes on to contest the assumption popular with American and Israeli politicians that Hamas broke the ceasefire leading up to Israel’s brutal December 2008 Gaza onslaught:

“The ceasefire was remarkably effective: after it began in June 2008, the rate of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza dropped to almost zero, and stayed there for four straight months…what happened to end this striking period of peace? On November 4th, Israel killed a Palestinian, an event that was followed by a volley of mortars fired from Gaza. Immediately after that, an Israeli air strike killed six more Palestinians. Then a massive barrage of rockets was unleashed, leading to the end of the ceasefire.”

But Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu was just getting started, and with all the righteous indignation he could muster, proclaimed: “In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza.”

Oh. The withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated territories in the world, had become an impoverished hell-hole that nobody wanted to deal with – or that daily confrontations with Palestinian resistance groups and, well, school kids hurling rocks, had taken a toll on the battered Israeli Defense Forces. “Disengagement” from Gaza achieved several other objectives too. It reduced the growing non-Jewish demographic problem for Israel, and freed up resources to focus on carving up the West Bank and significantly increasing the population of Jewish settlers there.

But again, the devil is in the details. Lost in the media euphoria over Israeli troops rolling out of occupied Palestinian territory, a vital fact was overlooked: the occupation of Gaza never actually ended. According to the United Nations, the US State Department, Amnesty International and a whole slew of other NGOs, Israel is the occupying power in the Gaza Strip. It “retains sole control of Gaza’s airspace and territorial waters and does not allow any movement of people or goods in or out of Gaza via air or sea,” says Amnesty International. And we have seen how often and easily the IDF tanks roll in and out at will.

Back at the General Assembly podium, Netanyahu’s fiction-spinning tirade was reaching a fevered pitch – the crux of his message, the thing that Israel most fears. Understand now, that the Jewish state’s raison d’etre has always been based on the mass persecution and genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany – the nation was a gift, so to speak, to the victims who deserved a break. So what would happen if, even for an instant, the entire international community catches a view of Israel outside the parameters of victimhood, an image, if shattered, that could undermine its very premise as a safe haven for the persecuted?

Never say. Netanyahu’s two-fold mission at the UN last Thursday was firstly to whip up animosity against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his alleged nuclear weaponization program, and secondly, to neutralize the damaging effects of the Goldstone Report on Israel’s three-week military adventure into the Gaza Strip earlier this year.

Selected by the UN High Commission for Human Rights to conduct an investigation into “Operation Cast Lead,” Israel’s code name for the Gaza War, Richard Goldstone was ideal for the role in part because he is a Jew, an acknowledged Zionist, and importantly, the well-respected former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. In other words, beyond reproach.

In a September 15 press release introducing his 574-page report, Justice Goldstone concluded that “Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.”

Netanyahu at the UN: “Faced with such a clear case of aggressor and victim, who did the UN Human Rights Council decide to condemn? Israel.“

He fails to mention that given ample opportunity to participate in the investigation, his government not only refused, but also denied the Mission access to both Israel and the West Bank for interviews related to the inquiry. Palestinian authorities in both the West Bank and Gaza cooperated.

The damning parts of the report undermine entirely Israel’s assertions to the international community about its conflict with Gaza, Palestinians and Hamas. It states that “in the lead up to Israel’s assault on Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade amounting to collective punishment and carried out a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation of the Gaza Strip.” So much for disengagement.

“Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way,” claims Netanyahu.

But Goldstone’s Mission found instead “that the following grave breaches of the
Fourth Geneva Convention were committed by Israeli forces in Gaza: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

The Report continues: “The repeated failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians appears to the Mission to have been the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers, as described by some of them, and not the result of occasional lapses.” Furthermore, “There were almost no mistakes made according to the Government of Israel. It is in these circumstances that the Mission concludes that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

Yet with no hint of embarrassment whatsoever, Netanyahu insisted, “”Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians – Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes against the rocket launchers.”

Ah, yes. Human shields. During the carnage, our media and our politicians belted out the Israeli propaganda line that “barbaric” Hamas was using its own population as human shields. Instead, it turns out “the Mission investigated several incidents in which Israeli armed forces used local Palestinian residents to enter houses which might be booby trapped or harbour enemy combatants (this practice, known in the West Bank as “neighbour procedure”, was called “Johnnie procedure” during the military operations in Gaza).”

And so on and so forth.

Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel once before – from 1996 to 1999 – has had a history of scandal plague him in office, even an indictment for which he was later acquitted. Former Clinton White House Spokesman Joe Lockhart, in his book “The Truth About Camp David” calls the Israeli prime minister, “one of the most obnoxious individuals you’re going to come into – just a liar and a cheat. He could open his mouth and you could have no confidence that anything that came out of it was the truth.”

Netanyahu replaced former PM Ehud Olmert, who was brought down by corruption allegations, and indicted on three charges this past August. And that, just a month before former Israeli President Moshe Katsav’s trial for rape and other sex crimes got underway.

The apple is rotten at its core. The international community must turn the cries of “shame” back on Israel and its human rights record. And the US administration, which stands so staunchly behind Israel at every turn, must play fair with the Goldstone Report if it is to maintain any credibility in the Middle East as it attempts to launch yet another round of peace talks.

First published: October 1, 2009

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Lights, Camera, Action: Why the Iranian Nuclear Drama Took Center Stage Last Week Monday, Jan 4 2010 

Nuclear , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 5:11 pm

Prepping for some nuclear razzle-dazzle

The news cycle on the Iran nuclear story never seems to end. It is one sound bite after another. On Friday, we had to endure a pre-announcement (read drum-roll) that there would be a formal announcement by US President Barak Obama, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minster Gordon Brown on the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear enrichment facility under construction near Qom. This, just a day after the UN Security Council meeting where all three took a bash at Iran’s nuclear program before passing a resolution on global denuclearization. And that, following two days of relentless UN General Assembly speeches by various heads of state blasting Iran’s nuclear agenda.

As the news leaked out, we learned that the US had known about this facility for years, while other news sources claimed that French, British and American officials have worked all summer on presenting a disclosure of this secret underground facility to the IAEA — the international agency that oversees and maintains compliance on the nuclear activities of member states — this week.

They must have been furious to learn that Iran, of its own volition, beat them to the punch in a letter to the IAEA last Monday, alerting the agency that “a new pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction in the country,” according to a statement released by the IAEA on Friday. “The Agency also understands from Iran that no nuclear material has been introduced into the facility,” it continued.

Fact: The current rate of inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities is an inspector’s visit every other week. It is by far the most heavily enforced inspections regime in IAEA history. Approximately half of these visits are unannounced.

Per the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), member states have the right to enrich uranium. Iran signed onto the treaty the year it became open for signature, in 1968, a year after the United States provided Iran with its first nuclear plant, and two years before the NPT came into force. In 2002, it became known that Iran was pursuing a nuclear enrichment program, which it acknowledged in 2003, and subsequently opened its doors to the IAEA to place these facilities under the required safeguards.

But, after enduring years of scrutiny, Iran started complaining that the cycle of questions never ends. In a letter to the Agency’s board of governors on June 17, 2009, the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the IAEA argued:

“After six years of the most robust and intrusive inspection in the history of the Agency, and in spite of the continuous declaration of the Director General (of the IAEA, Mohammad El Baradei) in over 20 reports to the Board of Governors, that there is no evidence of diversion of nuclear materials and activities to prohibited purposes (i.e., weaponization), the issue is still on the agenda. The simple question is: why?”

He goes on to allege that the issue of Iran’s nuclear program remains on the table because of the political motivations of a few nations, who would like to turn the Agency into a “watchdog, with maximum intrusiveness in safeguards in order to interfere in the national security…of Member States, under the pretext of proliferation.”

To be fair, while the IAEA’s exhaustive inspections have found no evidence that the Iranians are diverting nuclear technology or materials to a weapons program, Iran has not helped its own case. It continues to be less than transparent about its activities, perhaps in part because it does not expect a fair hearing, but also undoubtedly because the impression that it may be developing nuclear weapons capability doesn’t exactly harm its deterrence position vis-a-vis regional and foreign foes.

But back to the events of Friday. The endless days of orchestrated sound bites on Iran’s nuclear intentions were frankly overkill by week’s end. The indignant Security Council trio, who displayed dismay and shock at the revelation of this new enrichment facility, were surely shamed by the news that they had been sitting on this nugget of information for years, and had spent the summer secretively trying to maximize its impact on the IAEA.

Surely if Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was actually the imminent threat that is so often alleged, these nations would have immediately alerted the agency responsible for safeguards and inspections?

This cannot sit well with the IAEA, which spent the early part of September defending the conclusions of its last report on Iran, which again, confirmed the non-diversion of the country’s nuclear enrichment program. Agency head El Baradei went out of his way to dispute claims by several countries, including France and Israel, that the report results were cooked, saying that these accusations “are politically motivated and baseless.”

So what’s with the relentless scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear intentions? Let me go out on a limb here: Iran, which is a major oil producing state in a strategically important region, has a very independent foreign policy stance on issues that are of concern to the United States and many of its allies. They don’t like that. Israel, the US’s main regional ally, needs to keep itself relevant to Western powers now that the Cold War is well and truly over, divert attention from it’s own covert nuclear weapons stash, and avoid accountability for its failure to address the Palestinian issue. It needs a big old bogeyman. Enter Iran, the convenient scary kid on the block. Iran isn’t exactly an angel — it has powered up its anti-Israel rhetoric to stay relevant on the Arab and Muslim Street. These two blocs clash, and they seek continuously to curb the other’s influence.

The bluster, threats and sound bites we have heard this past week were nothing more than an effort to create maximum pressure on Iran as the October 1 meeting between the Islamic Republic and the group of five permanent Security Council members plus Germany draws near — a meeting where the group of Western nations hopes to secure compromises on Iran’s nuclear program. It was political posturing in technicolor — live footage beamed to millions of TV screens across the globe — using the annual UN General Assembly Plenary Session as a stage, and counting on the thousands of gathered reporters as the playwrights of this unfolding drama.

When Iran sits down with the US to discuss nuclear and other issues in October, it will not likely budge on the state’s “inalienable right” to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Energy independence is a vital issue of national security for any country, and Iranians are unified on this subject, particularly as the years of living under foreign sanctions regimes has left the country mistrustful about depending on imports. Iran also enjoys the support of much of the developing world on the nuclear enrichment issue, where it has taken time to build coalitions through shared visions and the offering of financial and humanitarian assistance.

And talks of double-standards are playing throughout much of this bloc of nations, particularly after the United States and its Western allies voted against a September 18 IAEA resolution that called for Israel to join the NPT and subject its nuclear facilities to the same oversight as other countries.

But the events of this past week have upped the ante, and the US and its allies will be hard-pressed to back down from the line in the sand drawn on Friday. So, sadly, sanctions it may be — to the detriment of common sense and constructive engagement. Memories of another misguided WMD pogrom in neighboring Iraq not too long ago are surfacing. And yet the drama continues.

First published September 26, 2009, Huffington Post

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