In Iraqi Town, Trainees Are Also Suspects

U.S. Troops Wary After Incidents Suggest Betrayal
By Jonathan Finer, Washington Post Foreign Service
Washington Post
April 29, 2006

HAWIJAH, Iraq -- After midnight on a bare stretch of highway near this ramshackle town last week, Staff Sgt. Jason Hoover saw what looked like a fishing line strung across the road and ordered his Humvee to a screeching halt.

The cord was connected to an old, Russian artillery shell half-buried in the earthen shoulder and rigged to activate with a firm tug. Hoover traced its path nearly a half-mile though a plowed field, over another highway, and across a canal, where he found four Iraqi infrastructure policemen who were supposed to be guarding an oil pipeline. They said they had no idea what the cord was doing there.

"There's two kinds of Iraqis here, the ones who help us and the ones who shoot us, and there's an awful lot of 'em doing both," said Hoover, 26, of Newark, Ohio. "Is it frustrating? Yes, it's frustrating. But we can't just stop working with them."

The incident is a window on the mixed results of U.S. efforts to train Iraqi forces. American troops trying to tame the restive northern town of Hawijah have done what has proven impossible in many Sunni Arab enclaves: raised a security force from local volunteers. More than 1,500 Iraqi soldiers and 2,000 policemen patrol the area, virtually all of them drawn from the city and the pastoral hamlets that surround it.

But in a town where the local population is hostile to the American presence in Iraq, U.S. soldiers have developed a deep distrust of their Iraqi counterparts following a slew of incidents that suggest the troops they are training are cooperating with their enemies.

The top local Iraqi army commander here was sent to Abu Ghraib prison in November, accused of tipping off insurgents about the routes taken by American convoys, said Lt. Col. Marc Hutson, commander of a Hawijah-based battalion of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division. The city's police chief was also fired and briefly arrested in January for refusing to go after armed groups.

Earlier this month, a U.S. sniper team caught 14 policemen placing roadside bombs in the nearby town of Riyadh. More than 60 other police officers are named on a watch list of suspected insurgent collaborators, according to U.S. military policemen who train them. And last week a raging fire erupted from a sabotaged oil pipeline 50 feet from a police checkpoint, covering the sky with a blanket of black smoke.

A city of about 40,000, Hawijah is nestled in the verdant pastures that straddle the Zab River, about 175 miles north of Baghdad. Its streets are pockmarked with craters from roadside bombs and lined with canals of pungent, green sewage. Graffiti on walls and sidewalks hails the exploits of the group known as Hawijah's Heroes, the local insurgents whose videotaped attacks on U.S. troops are bestsellers in the city's markets.

Its residents, virtually all of them Sunnis, were once ubiquitous in the upper ranks of Saddam Hussein's army and Baath Party. But they have grown frustrated at their decline in status since the U.S. invasion that swept Hussein from power, especially at the hands of ethnic Kurds who now dominate politics in the provincial capital, Kirkuk. U.S. commanders estimate unemployment here at nearly 90 percent.

Anger and malaise have driven a relentless insurgency that is mostly homegrown -- few foreign fighters have been found here -- and has inflicted more than its share of violence on American troops.

Since the 1st Brigade Combat team arrived six months ago to police the Kirkuk region, 11 of its soldiers have been killed. Ten were assigned to the battalion based in Hawijah. At least 64 of the battalion's soldiers have been wounded, nearly 1 in 10 stationed here. And Hutson, the battalion commander, has had his convoy struck by roadside bombs 10 times, including six times on his own Humvee, a remarkable number for a senior officer.

"In some places they hide the fact that they don't like you. They don't hide it here," said Hutson, who stops by his base's medical station periodically for a shot of Toradol to soothe a shoulder injured when his vehicle flipped during one of the attacks.

American commanders have long maintained that strengthening Iraq's police and army is the key to securing the country and the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces. The performance of the Hawijah-based troops has improved in recent months to the point where they occasionally lead operations to confront insurgents and no longer flee firefights the way they once did, said the U.S. officers who train them. The best evidence, the argument goes, is that the insurgents now turn their guns on their fellow Iraqis.

"It sounds strange, but more police have been killed lately, which means some of them are finally doing their job," one U.S. officer here said.

But efforts to transfer more responsibility to the Iraqi forces are mired in doubts about their loyalties.

"It's like the Chicago police department in the 1920s, so infested with mobsters that even the good ones are corrupt because they don't want to get killed," said Staff Sgt. Ryan Horton, 28, a military policeman from Dallas who works closely with the Iraqi police. "They all live in the community with the terrorists, and so do their families. They are very, very intimidated."

Horton said he gives Iraqi officers just minutes' notice when bringing them on a mission, and never tells them exactly where they will be going to prevent them from tipping off insurgents. "I've seen them laughing when we come back in with a vehicle destroyed by a bomb," he said. "I've seen them stand 10 feet away and do nothing but watch when we are in the middle of a firefight."

Over sweet tea in a grubby police station at the center of Hawijah last week, the station commander, Maj. Ghazey Ahmed Khalif, assured Horton and his team that things were quiet in town that day. But when Horton asked some Iraqi officers to accompany him on a drive through town, Khalif discreetly whispered something into a translator's ear.

"All of a sudden he remembers he got a tip about an IED," said Horton, using the military acronym for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. "If we hadn't asked his guys to come, put them at risk, no way he tells us about that."

Soldiers working with the Iraqi army here report similar problems. Iraqi soldiers have been reprimanded for selling their government-issued ammunition in local gun markets and for hocking their boots, only to turn up for duty in leather loafers.

Before a highway patrol to search for roadside bombs last week, an Iraqi unit accompanying U.S. soldiers refused to ride in American Humvees, which provide far better protection from bomb attacks than the unarmored pickup trucks normally used by Iraqi forces.

Shaking his head and staring at the ground, Sgt. Ghazi Esa Muhammad, 25, explained that a local cleric had decreed that Iraqis killed in an "occupier vehicle" would not go to heaven.

"Tell your guys, if they refuse to ride in the Humvees, they will go to jail for 10 days. It's not a choice," said Lt. Aaron Tapalman, 23, the patrol leader. "They want to be able to claim they are not associated with us," said Tapalman, after the Iraqi sergeant relented and told his men to mount up.

About an hour later, the patrol came across a white bag on the roadside that Tapalman suspected might contain a bomb. When he asked some Iraqi soldiers to move it off the road, their commander balked, saying it wasn't his job.

"It is your job to protect the people," Tapalman said, increasingly exasperated. "I can go and move it myself, and you know what? I will, but don't you think your people should see you doing that kind of stuff. Someday we're not going to be here anymore."

The Iraqi soldier declined again, apologetically, and drove away.

While maintaining that their troops are improving, Iraqi commanders acknowledge that their charges' loyalties are often divided at best.

"There is sensitivity among the soldiers about the occupation," said Lt. Col. Abdul Rahman Sekran, 42, the executive officer of the 1st battalion, 4th Iraqi Army division. Located just east of Hawijah, its orchard-ringed compound once belonged to Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majeed, dubbed "Chemical Ali" for ordering gas attacks that killed thousands of Kurds in the 1980s.

"Remember," Sekran explained when asked about accusations that some of his men undermine efforts to provide security, "there is another organization working the streets, the terrorists, giving them bad information."

Ill will runs in both directions. After U.S. forces detained some police a few weeks ago, other officers posted a large white banner on a well-traveled bridge downtown. Written in both Arabic and English, the English one read: "Al-Hawijah police reject to accompany the coalition forces in the mutual patrol in Al-Hawijah becaus police is existed to protect people and not to protect coalition soldiers."

Local political leaders have also bridled at American calls for cooperation in improving the security situation. Hawijah-area representatives recently launched a boycott of the provincial council in Kirkuk.

Addressing a roomful of mayors and council members last week, Col. David R. Gray, the 1st Brigade Combat Team commander, announced he had agreed to fund 15 reconstruction projects worth nearly $3 million. But establishing a secure enough environment to execute them, he said, was partly the residents' responsibility.

"Many of you told me the attacks are the work of foreigners," said Gray, 48, of Herscher, Ill. "Gentlemen, my conclusion is that the problem is not foreigners, but a problem within your tribes. And if the problem is within your tribes, the solution lies with all of you in this room."

When the colonel quickly left for another meeting, the room erupted in anger.

"Always, the Arabs are accused of being part of the terrorists," said Sami al-Assi, a local tribal leader, tapping his finger against the podium for emphasis as his colleagues nodded their approval.

"All you do is come over to our area and arrest the police and soldiers," said Ruhan Sayyid, the meeting's chairman. "How are they going to fight the insurgents if that's how they are treated?" Hutson, serving as Gray's proxy after his departure, warned, "If I have a report of a policeman who's in the wrong line of work, who's acting as an insurgent, I will arrest him."

Gray and Hutson said they had considered bringing to Hawijah an Iraqi army battalion from Kirkuk, where security forces are composed primarily of Kurds. The move, they acknowledge, would be intensely provocative for a population already furious about Kurds' intention to bring more territory under the control of their semiautonomous northern region.

"It would be a disaster," said Sekran, the Iraqi army battalion executive officer. "The population would refuse this with violence, and it would cause a civil war."

Other U.S. officers said a better path is withdrawing all outside troops and leaving the city to the local security forces. "Sometimes I think we just give them something to shoot at. When we leave, all that might just go away," Tapalman said. "But then they'd be in charge."

Few Willing To Suggest Rumsfeld Successor

By Robert Burns
Associated Press
Boston.com
April 29, 2006

WASHINGTON --In all the recent talk about whether Donald H. Rumsfeld should quit running the Pentagon, little has been said about successors who might be better able to complete the U.S. military mission in Iraq.

When lawmakers and others are pressed, the names that come up most often include several current and former members of the Senate. Some say a member of Congress taking the defense secretary's job would improve an oft-cited Rumsfeld shortcoming -- impatience with the legislative branch and a reluctance to consult fully with its members.

A current or former lawmaker might also do a better job of communicating with the public -- a key factor in an election year in which party control of Congress will be up for grabs.

Even a supporter, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, calls Rumsfeld "not overly communicative."

Names sometimes mentioned include Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., a former Navy secretary; Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.; and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga.

With President Bush's strongly worded public support, it appears Rumsfeld will remain at the Pentagon, where after more than five years in the job he is one of the longest-serving defense secretaries in history.

When his critics attack Rumsfeld, they generally focus on blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq. A resilient insurgency has taken nearly 2,400 American lives since the 2003 invasion, far more than expected, and Iraqis have struggled mightily to create a stable government and provide their own security.

But the critics have said little about who might do better at this stage, which the Bush administration has labeled a year of transition from U.S. to Iraqi control, with the hope of beginning to withdraw some American forces.

"America deserves a secretary of defense who has the vision to implement a policy in Iraq that is worthy of the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., one of Rumsfeld's harshest critics.

Jon Soltz, a veteran of the Iraq war and director of a political action committee for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said his group is neutral on the question of whether Rumsfeld should go or stay.

"What's more important than identifying a possible successor is that those of us who have been on the ground in Iraq, have served in the war on terror in Afghanistan, know that there needs to be a fresh start," Soltz said.

He rejected the administration's emphasis on "staying the course" in Iraq and said fresh ideas are urgently needed.

Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said he has little doubt that Rumsfeld will remain at the Pentagon for some time, despite the unpopularity of the Iraq war and criticism of his management style. He called Lieberman one of the few Democrats who would accept the job and who could get along with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

There is recent precedent for having a member of the opposing political party at the head of the Pentagon. William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine, served as defense secretary throughout President Clinton's second term.

Clinton's first defense secretary was Democrat Les Aspin, a former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who stepped down after one year in the aftermath of U.S. intervention in Somalia.

O'Hanlon also mentioned Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as another possibility. "But I'm not sure even he would take it under these circumstances," O'Hanlon said.

Of the several retired generals who have stepped forward to urge Rumsfeld's sacking, none has proposed a specific replacement. Asked about the qualities he'd like to see in a replacement, retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who has called Rumsfeld dismissive and arrogant, offered a rather broad prescription for success.

"My point is that we need a new senior leader in the Department of Defense to lead us through the rest of the war on terrorism, a leader whose track record in strategic decisions is not so dismal and who understands leadership," Batiste wrote in an e-mail exchange last week. "For sure, we must complete what we started in Iraq and our service men and women deserve the best leadership."

Many lawmakers from both parties were mum when pressed for possible replacements for Rumsfeld, perhaps seeing little point in advancing a candidate for a job that may not be vacant.

"I'm not going to speculate on who would be a good secretary of defense," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and a longtime critic of Rumsfeld.

Asked about Lieberman's qualifications, she said, "Senator Lieberman would be wonderful in a whole variety of posts, but I hope he stays" in the Senate.

Signs Show Jihadists Looking Beyond Iraq

There are some indications foreign fighters will adopt a more regional focus, official says
By Katherine Shrader
Associated Press
April 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence officials say they are seeing early signs that jihadist fighters who came to Iraq to contest the U.S.-led coalition are looking beyond Iraq's borders to spread a radical, violent agenda.

American analysts are trying to understand a web of complex political, cultural and economic issues contributing to the instability in Iraq, said the senior officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity Friday because of the sensitive positions they occupy.

Feeding other groups

When asked about the extent to which Sunni Muslim jihadists in Iraq are feeding other groups in the region, one official said the primary link between the global jihadist movement and the Iraq insurgency was believed to be rhetorical.

The official said authorities cannot rule out that some of the foreign fighters — who came to fight for al-Qaida's leader there, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — will adopt a more regional focus.

"We are seeing indications," said the official, who declined to elaborate and cautioned that the signs are on a small scale now.

U.S. intelligence is trying to understand how local Muslim groups become more radical and plot attacks with little or no contact with a central al-Qaida organization in Iraq or Afghanistan.

More violent since 2003

That appears to have been the case with this week's resort attacks in Dahab, Egypt, as well as the 2004 Madrid train bombings and last year's London transit attacks.

By a number of measures, the region has become more violent since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A State Department report on terrorism Friday tallied a dramatic increase in terror attacks in Iraq last year, where about 3,500 of the world's more than 11,000 attacks took place.

A wider focus for al-Zarqawi, who is intent on overthrowing the government in his home country of Jordan, comes as no surprise.

But his organization has launched only limited attacks beyond Iraq, claiming responsibility for three outside Iraq's borders last year — most notably, the suicide attacks on three Jordanian hotels that killed 60.

The decision to use Iraqi bombers in that assault was no accident, said one of the senior officials.

Where America Leads ...

Editorial
The New York Times
April 29, 2006

Tomorrow thousands of Americans are expected to show up on the Washington Mall to call for action to stop the carnage that has killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the Darfur region of Sudan. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in Abuja, Nigeria, the long-running peace talks between the government of Sudan and the Darfur rebels are scheduled to expire.

We dearly hope that the rally will send a strong message to the African Union, the sponsor of the talks, as well as to the government of Sudan and countries that have been giving cover to Sudan — like China, Russia and some Arab nations — that the world won't tolerate what is clearly genocide.

Arab militias that call themselves the janjaweed and are backed by Sudan's government continue to raid villages in Darfur, and now villages across the border in Chad as well. Not satisfied with the number of murders and rapes of men, women and children — a vast majority of them Muslim — in their ethnic cleansing campaign, the janjaweed are attempting to eliminate entire African tribes from the countryside.

The best possible solution would be for the Sudanese government and the rebels to agree to the peace treaty draft that mediators at the Abuja talks handed to them on Tuesday. Osama bin Laden's recent tape accusing the United States of plotting to dispatch "Crusader" troops to Darfur to steal its oil wealth under the pretext of peacekeeping underscores the risks that would come with sending in a United Nations or NATO peacekeeping force against the wishes of the government of Sudan.

But the African Union force that is currently on the ground is pitifully inadequate, as the ongoing carnage shows. So it is incumbent on China and the Arab world to join the Bush administration in pressuring the Sudanese government to sign onto the peace deal and allow the U.N. troops. The deadline for talks can be extended. Obviously, the troops shouldn't be American; that would just play into nationalistic concerns in Sudan. But troops from Muslim countries, particularly Pakistan and Morocco, could be used as part of a peacekeeping force.

If the world applies enough pressure, Sudan will back down. Tomorrow could be an important moment. We just wish there were rallies in Beijing, Cairo and Riyadh.

US Jews leading Darfur rally planning

GAL BECKERMAN
THE JERUSALEM POST
Apr. 27, 2006

Thousands of people will be marching this Sunday in Washington, DC under a banner that carries a simple two-word demand: "Save Darfur."

This is the name of the coalition organizing the rally, the first public action of its size intended to focus attention to the past three years of mass killing and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Sudanese government against the ethnically black farmers living in the Western region of Darfur. By most accounts, over 200,000 people have been massacred and two million displaced in a campaign that the US government and the United Nations two years ago decided to term genocide.

The rally, and the coalition that is organizing it, is hoping to pierce the consciousness of Americans and pressure the Bush administration into taking a more active line to end the conflict and help the refugees of the violence - most of whom are living in degrading conditions in neighboring Chad.

For this effort, the coalition has recruited major celebrities like George Clooney and Elie Wiesel to speak to those assembled. Though recent reports have indicated that the turnout might be lower than expected, organizers, while refusing to give a concrete number, believe it will be in "the tens of thousands."

Little known, however, is that the coalition, which has presented itself as "an alliance of over 130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian, and human rights organization" was actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community.

And even now, days before the rally, that coalition is heavily weighted with a politically and religiously diverse collection of local and national Jewish groups.

A collection of local Jewish bodies, including the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, United Jewish Communities, UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, sponsored the largest and most expensive ad for the rally, a full-page in The New York Times on April 15.

Though there are other major religious organizations, like the United States Conference on Catholic Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals, both of which have giant constituencies that number in the millions, these groups have not done the kind of extensive grassroots outreach that will produce numbers.

Instead, the Jewish Community Relations Council, a national organization with local branches that coordinate communal activity all over America, has put on a massive effort to bus people to Washington on Sunday. Dozens of buses will be coming from Philadelphia and Cleveland. Yeshiva University alone, in upper Manhattan, has chartered eight buses.

Besides the Jewish origins and character of the rally - a fact the organizers consistently played down in conversations with The Jerusalem Post - the other striking aspect of the coalition is the noted absence of major African-American groups like the NAACP or the larger Africa lobby groups like Africa Action. When asked to comment, representatives of both groups insisted they were publicizing the rally but had not become part of the coalition or signed the Unity Statement declaring Save Darfur's objectives.

The coalition's roots go back to the spring of 2004 following a genocide alert, the first ever of its kind, issued by the United States Holocaust Museum. An emergency meeting was coordinated by the American Jewish World Service, an organization that serves as a kind of Jewish Peace Corps as well as an advocacy group for a variety of humanitarian and human rights issues.

At the meeting, which was attended by numerous American Jewish organizations and a few other religious groups, it was decided that a coalition would be formed based on a statement of shared principles.

After a year of programming that involved raising awareness about the genocide, the coalition came up with the idea for a rally in Washington. Planning began in the fall of 2005.
David Rubenstein, the director or "coordinator," as he prefers it, of the coalition says that, given that the groups who started the coalition were Jewish, "it's not surprising that they had the numbers of more Jewish organizations in their rolodexes."

He says that the Jewish community has been "extraordinarily responsive and are really providing the building for this thing," and yet he insists that the coalition has worked "very, very hard to be inclusive, to make sure there are people beyond the usual suspects."

This is a sentiment echoed by Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service and one-time Manhattan borough president and Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City. The world service and Messinger personally have been at the forefront of planning for the rally. Much of the Jewish turnout has been a result of her lobbying efforts.

She thinks the strong Jewish response has to do with the memories of Rwanda. "The Jewish community has probably had a higher level of lingering guilt over Rwanda than the average person," Messinger says. "And now learning about another genocide, I think people are beginning to understand that we are close to making a mockery of the words 'Never Again.'"

Still, there are critics who say the heavy Jewish involvement might have deterred some other groups from joining.

The fact that the aggressors in Darfur are Arab Muslims - though it should be said that the victims are also mostly Muslim - and are supported by a regime in Khartoum that is backed by the Arab League has made some people question the true motives of some of the Jewish organizations involved in the rally.

Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, April 27, 2006

NATO To Intensify Its Role In Sudan's Darfur Region

Rice presses U.N., others to aid mission
By Nicholas Kralev
The Washington Times
April 28, 2006

SOFIA, Bulgaria -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that NATO leaders have agreed to take on a more "robust" role in Sudan's Darfur region and urged other international bodies to prepare the way.

NATO diplomats said that earlier disagreements among the allies over involvement in Darfur had been resolved, but impediments remained, such as the Sudanese government's objection to a U.N. peacekeeping mission.

"Everybody recognizes that the [African Union] mission, while it has been successful thus far, is not robust enough to deal with the continued violence in Darfur and, particularly, problems that are emerging in western Darfur given the situation and problems on the border with Chad," Miss Rice said.

In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "An unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States is posed by the persistence of violence in Sudan's Darfur region, particularly against civilians."

Miss Rice, speaking to reporters after a meeting of the 26 NATO foreign ministers in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, said that "NATO is ready to work" with the United Nations and the African Union (AU) "to try to bring about that more robust mission."

"There are certain kinds of support that are needed by [the AU] mission and that will be needed by the U.N. mission, and I would hope that everyone would put aside whatever constraints there are, so that we can respond to what is a really quite difficult humanitarian and security situation in Darfur," she said.

NATO currently provides limited assistance for the AU with transportation of troops, but U.S. officials said the alliance could help with logistics, communications, intelligence and other areas, while stopping short of intervening on the ground.

A senior U.S. official said that NATO would be "enabling collaborative efforts" of other international players and cannot do much before they make the first steps.

"We have to be able to get into Sudan," the official said, alluding to Sudan's refusal to let U.N. peacekeepers in.

Hedi Annabi, U.N. assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping, said yesterday that, even though Sudan is not in favor of a U.N. takeover from the AU, it is willing to discuss how the world organization could help if a peace deal is reached to end the conflict.

The 7,000 AU troops in Darfur are poorly equipped and have not been able to stop the violence that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and forced more than 2 million to leave their homes.

The AU Peace and Security Council has agreed in principle to hand over peacekeeping to the United Nations after its mandate ends Sept. 30, but the full union must give final approval.

On Tuesday, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution imposing sanctions on individuals deemed at least partly responsible for the Darfur crisis.

Sudan has supported Janjaweed militias, which are massacring innocents in response to a revolt by two militias in its western region.

As part of the resolution's implementation, President Bush yesterday issued an executive order freezing the assets of such individuals.

"These sanctions are aimed at those responsible for heinous actions being committed in Darfur," Mr. McClellan said.

"The United States will continue to work with its international partners to provide humanitarian assistance, support human rights and bring peace to Darfur."

The crisis has forced Chad to seal its border with Darfur, which is threatening food deliveries to 400,000 displaced people.

War Game Exposed Rumsfeld's Incompetence

By Joe Galloway
Salt Lake Tribune
April 28, 2006

WASHINGTON - Of those generals who have stepped forward to criticize Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his conduct of the Iraq war, none has pointed out the mistakes of a man who admits no error with more specificity than retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper.

Van Riper is widely respected as a military thinker who emerged from combat in Vietnam determined to help get to the bottom of what went wrong there and why and how it should be fixed.

Van Riper, who commanded both the Marine War College at Quantico, Va., and the prestigious National War College in Washington before retiring in 1997, told an interviewer in October 2004 that the military got the lessons all wrong after World War II and that mistake resulted in two disasters - Korea and Vietnam.

''My great fear is we're off to something very similar to what happened after World War II, that is getting it completely wrong again,'' the general said of the course in Iraq.

The general made it clear he is no antiwar crusader. ''We have to stay,'' he said of Iraq this week. ''We have to finish it, but let's do it right.''

Van Riper told Knight Ridder that in looking at Rumsfeld's leadership he found three particular areas of inability and incompetence.

First, he said, if any battalion commander under him had created so ''poor a climate of leadership'' and the ''bullying'' that goes on in the Pentagon under Rumsfeld, he would order an investigation and relieve that commander.

''Even more than that I focus on (his) incompetence when it comes to preparing American military forces for the future,'' Van Riper said. ''His idea of transformation turns on empty buzz words. There's none of the scholarship and doctrinal examination that has to go on before you begin changing the force.''

Third, he said, under Rumsfeld there's been no oversight of military acquisition.

''Mr. Rumsfeld has failed 360 degrees in the job. He is incompetent,'' Van Riper concluded. ''Any military man who made the mistakes he has made, tactically and strategically, would be relieved on the spot.''

One event that shocked Van Riper occurred in 2002, when he was asked, as he had been before, to play the commander of an enemy Red Force in a huge, $250 million three-week war game titled Millennium Challenge 2002. It was widely advertised as the best kind of such exercises - a free-play unscripted test of some of the Pentagon's and Rumsfeld's fondest ideas and theories.

Though fictional names were applied, it involved a crisis moving toward war in the Persian Gulf and in actuality was a barely veiled test of an invasion of Iran.

In the computer-controlled game, a flotilla of Navy warships and Marine amphibious warfare ships steamed into the Persian Gulf for what Van Riper assumed would be a pre-emptive strike against the country he was defending.

Van Riper resolved to strike first and unconventionally using fast patrol boats and converted pleasure boats fitted with ship-to-ship missiles as well as first generation shore-launched anti-ship cruise missiles. He packed small boats and small propeller aircraft with explosives for one mass wave of suicide attacks against the Blue fleet. Last, the general shut down all radio traffic and sent commands by motorcycle messengers, beyond the reach of the code-breakers.

At the appointed hour he sent hundreds of missiles screaming into the fleet, and dozens of kamikaze boats and planes plunging into the Navy ships in a simultaneous sneak attack that overwhelmed the Navy's much-vaunted defenses based on its Aegis cruisers and their radar-controlled Gatling guns.

When the figurative smoke cleared it was found that the Red Forces had sunk 16 Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier. Thousands of Marines and sailors were dead.

The referees stopped the game, which is normal when a victory is won so early. Van Riper assumed that the Blue Force would draw new, better plans and the free play war games would resume.

Instead he learned that the war game was now following a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory: He was ordered to turn on all his anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed and he was told his forces would not be allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.

The Pentagon has never explained. It classified Van Riper's 21-page report criticizing the results and conduct of the rest of the exercise, along with the report of another DOD observer. Pentagon officials have not released Joint Forces Command's own report on the exercise.

Van Riper walked out and didn't come back. He was furious that the war game had turned from an honest, open free play test of America's war-fighting capabilities into a rigidly controlled and scripted exercise meant to end in an overwhelming American victory.

Joe Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder.

Blowback in Africa

By RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN
Op-Ed Contributor
The New York Times
April 28, 2006

EVER since Chad gained independence 46 years ago, it has been a world-class model of political dysfunction. In the 1970's, Chad's president, François Tombalbaye, compelled civil servants to renounce Western customs, undergo a tribal initiation rite known as yondo and profess belief in a nationalist creed he called Chaditude. He was executed in 1975. In the 1980's, a rebel leader named Hissène Habré led an army to the presidential palace and seized power. He became known as the "African Pinochet" and murderously pursued opponents for nearly a decade.

In 1990, Mr. Habré was chased out by an armed faction led by Chad's current president, Idriss Déby. Now Mr. Déby is facing his own rebellion.

Americans might dismiss this numbing cycle of coups as esoteric history belonging to a troubled and distant country. They shouldn't. The C.I.A. armed Mr. Habré for years, and since 2003, the United States military has been training and equipping Mr. Déby's army, making his fight to stay in office our fight, too.

Last year, Chad took part in a vast, international military exercise organized by the United States — the largest exercise of its kind in Africa since World War II, according to the Defense Department. This summer, American forces will continue to advise Chadian soldiers, and Congress is expected to allocate $500 million for a five-year program to train and equip several Saharan armies — including Mr. Déby's.

The military hopes these initiatives will help contain the threat of terrorism by bringing order to the Great Desert and its borderlands. For centuries, the Sahara has been a lawless realm, and with millions of Muslims living across the region in isolated communities, counterterrorism officials fear that Islamic militants may seek sanctuary there.

But dispensing military aid to Chad now — with Mr. Déby fighting hundreds of rebels backed by Sudan — seems reckless. It puts American military equipment and expertise in the hands of a desperate dictator. Worse still, it risks pouring additional fuel into the human furnace of Darfur, and it may well come to impede the careful diplomatic work required to solve that crisis.

So far, American officials have made much of Sudanese assistance to the rebels, framing the recent conflict in Chad as an outgrowth of the tragedy in Darfur. There is some truth to this. But the violence in Chad also has its own political narrative. During his 16 years in power, Mr. Déby has ruled Chad brutally. His security forces have committed torture, rapes, summary executions and mass killings.

Mr. Déby is a member of the Zaghawa — a northern tribe making up roughly 5 percent of Chad's population — and last year the State Department described his regime as a Zaghawa oligarchy shielded by a security and intelligence apparatus that violates human rights with impunity. In 2004, Mr. Déby altered Chad's Constitution to grant himself another term in office. Elections are scheduled for next Wednesday. There is little likelihood they will be fair.

Only one compelling argument exists for giving Chad military aid, and it follows from the logic of lesser evils. Many of the refugees fleeing Darfur are Zaghawa, and Mr. Déby has taken them in. If his regime collapses, tens of thousands of people will once again be at the mercy of Sudan's janjaweed marauders, and the genocide may spread.

This argument, though, is complicated by another unsettling development. In recent months, scores of Chadian soldiers have defected to the rebel militias. If the defections continue, they raise the horrific possibility that American military equipment and expertise could end up going to men aligned with the janjaweed. In that case, our military assistance to Chad, far from containing political anarchy, would only add to it.

Raffi Khatchadourian traveled to Chad in 2005 for the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

Melee in Cairo Reveals Stress in Government

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The New York Times
April 28, 2006

CAIRO, April 27 — Thousands of riot police officers sealed off access to the High Court on Thursday, beating and arresting protesters who had turned out to support two judges facing a disciplinary panel because they had accused the government of election fraud.

The huge show of force, appearing larger even than what was deployed in the Sinai after four bombings there this week, seemed to signal that President Hosni Mubarak's government had reached a breaking point over shows of dissent.

The focus was a relatively small demonstration over the treatment of the two judges and in support of more than 80 others who had been staging a sit-in for more than a week at the stately old Judges Club to demand an independent judiciary.

The persistent demands by the group, who represent thousands of judges across the country, has united a wide swath of political opposition and has sparked new life in a reform movement that had withered after the presidential election in September.

Since then the government has increasingly retrenched from a position of generally allowing more political freedom.

By Thursday, after days of dealing with the attacks in the Sinai and low-intensity clashes between the police and protesters in Cairo, the government seemed overwhelmed.

Around 8 a.m., massive green troop carriers rumbled into the center of the city and deployed more than 3,000 troops, a number that swelled to about 10,000 by midday, according to witnesses and videotapes.

The army of riot officers pressed in with long wooden poles and body-length shields to seal off the judges from a relatively small group of supporters on the street. Eyewitnesses said at least 50 demonstrators were arrested, though there was no way to verify that.

The police also arrested a journalist for the television network Al Jazeera who had reported — incorrectly — that an insurgent attack on the police had spread into the previously calm delta region, a report that instantly caused a tumult in the capital.

The network retracted the report, but the government held the newsman, saying he was guilty of "spreading confusion."

The demonstrators had gathered especially to support Mahmoud Mekky and Hesham Bastawisi, the two judges brought before the disciplinary panel because they had accused the government and other judges of forgery in connection with the last parliamentary elections. Their case was postponed for two weeks while the panel considered several defense motions.

The authorities also lifted the judicial immunity of seven judges who had complained about fraud in past elections, paving the way for those judges to be questioned by the police.

"I am so happy that they are doing this to us, because it proved that they are the ones that people want to try, not us," Judge Bastawisi said Thursday after his appearance in court. "It is not us that are going to court, but it is the ruling regime, and they already got the verdict from the people."

In a Labor Day speech on Thursday to workers gathered in a conference hall in Cairo, President Mubarak portrayed the dispute with the judges as an intramural matter, not involving the government.

"I tell the judges who make up Egypt's proud judiciary that you are the guardian of justice and protector of the law," he said. "I hope you reach among yourselves a just conclusion that preserves the high interest of the homeland and improves what we are already seeking: an independent judiciary, as well as your prestigious status in our hearts."

But the president's words did little to soften the government's treatment of the protesters.

"It is an indicator the system is breaking down," said Rajia Amran, a lawyer who turned out Thursday to support the judges and described their cause as "the last bastion of freedom in this country."

"They are panicking; they are in the dark and don't know what to do."

Youssef Rashwan, a technician in an iron and steel factory, said he came out "to support the judges in their honorable stance."

"Look how the regime treats the civil peaceful opposition," he said. "No wonder that people blow themselves up. There is no way to go because the security treats all opposition the same way, just oppression."

There are 9,000 judges in Egypt, and an estimated 7,000 have joined forces to press the government for a new law that, they argue, will allow them to be independent.

Those leading the fight, including some of Egypt's most senior jurists, have been pressing the government since 1991 to ensure that judges are free from government pressure.

They say the minister of justice, who is appointed by President Mubarak, can threaten, intimidate and punish those who challenge the will of the government — an accusation that government officials deny.

But the tension reached a new level about a year ago when the judges began demanding that they have the sole right to monitor elections. They complain that even though judges watch polling sites, government appointees tally votes.

"It is enough that for the past 52 years, we have been carrying the liability of rigging the elections in this country," Zakariya Ahmed Abdel Aziz, chairman of the Judges Club, said at a meeting in August.

Ghada Shahbandar, leader of an electoral monitoring group, said: "We can not aspire to have reform without an independent judiciary. It is the first and most important block in the reform process."

After the parliamentary elections ended in December, a group of judges leveled accusations of forgery and fraud, and for that they were chosen for discipline and investigation. The move was approved by senior members of a judicial panel at the recommendation of the minister of justice, officials said.

Mahmoud al-Khudeiry, head of the Judges Club in Alexandria, was one of the seven who had his judicial immunity lifted and is now facing the prospect of police interrogation.

He has served on the bench for 43 years and said he had not seen such antagonism between the bench and the executive since the 1960's, when Nasser staged what is known as the Judges' Massacre by firing jurists who did not bend to his pressure.

"We don't know how it will end or where it will end," Mr. Khudeiry said Monday, as he greeted supporters who came to the Judges Club. "All we know is, we insist on our demands and we persist in our way until we achieve our demands."

Abeer Allam and Mandi Fahmy contributed reporting for this article.

The United States of Israel?

Breaking the Last Taboo
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent (UK)
April 27, 2006

Stephen Walt towers over me as we walk in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot Street, a big man who needs to be big right now (he's one of two authors of an academic paper on the influence of America's Jewish lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view, is of no interest to him. "John and I have deliberately avoided the television shows because we don't think we can discuss these important issues in 10 minutes. It would become 'J' and 'S', the personalities who wrote about the lobby - and we want to open the way to serious discussion about this, to encourage a broader discussion of the forces shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East."

"John" is John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a 50-year-old tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The two men have caused one of the most extraordinary political storms over the Middle East in recent American history by stating what to many non-Americans is obvious: that the US has been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel, that Israel is a liability in the "war on terror", that the biggest Israeli lobby group, Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is in fact the agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress - so much so that US policy towards Israel is not debated there - and that the lobby monitors and condemns academics who are critical of Israel.

"Anyone who criticises Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy," the authors have written, "...stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism ... Anti-Semitism is something no-one wants to be accused of." This is strong stuff in a country where - to quote the late Edward Said - the "last taboo" (now that anyone can talk about blacks, gays and lesbians) is any serious discussion of America's relationship with Israel.

Walt is already the author of an elegantly written account of the resistance to US world political dominance, a work that includes more than 50 pages of references. Indeed, those who have read his Taming Political Power: The Global Response to US Primacy will note that the Israeli lobby gets a thumping in this earlier volume because Aipac "has repeatedly targeted members of Congress whom it deemed insufficiently friendly to Israel and helped drive them from office, often by channelling money to their opponents."

But how many people in America are putting their own heads above the parapet, now that Mearsheimer and Walt have launched a missile that would fall to the ground unexploded in any other country but which is detonating here at high speed? Not a lot. For a while, the mainstream US press and television - as pro-Israeli, biased and gutless as the two academics infer them to be - did not know whether to report on their conclusions (originally written for The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors apparently took fright, and subsequently reprinted in the London Review of Books in slightly truncated form) or to remain submissively silent. The New York Times, for example, only got round to covering the affair in depth well over two weeks after the report's publication, and then buried its article in the education section on page 19. The academic essay, according to the paper's headline, had created a "debate" about the lobby's influence.

They can say that again. Dore Gold, a former ambassador to the UN, who now heads an Israeli lobby group, kicked off by unwittingly proving that the Mearsheimer-Walt theory of "anti-Semitism" abuse is correct. "I believe," he said, "that anti-Semitism may be partly defined as asserting a Jewish conspiracy for doing the same thing non-Jews engage in." Congressman Eliot Engel of New York said that the study itself was "anti-Semitic" and deserved the American public's contempt.

Walt has no time for this argument. "We are not saying there is a conspiracy, or a cabal. The Israeli lobby has every right to carry on its work - all Americans like to lobby. What we are saying is that this lobby has a negative influence on US national interests and that this should be discussed. There are vexing problems out in the Middle East and we need to be able to discuss them openly. The Hamas government, for example - how do we deal with this? There may not be complete solutions, but we have to try and have all the information available."

Walt doesn't exactly admit to being shocked by some of the responses to his work - it's all part of his desire to keep "discourse" in the academic arena, I suspect, though it probably won't work. But no-one could be anything but angered by his Harvard colleague, Alan Dershowitz, who announced that the two scholars recycled accusations that "would be seized on by bigots to promote their anti-Semitic agendas". The two are preparing a reply to Dershowitz's 45-page attack, but could probably have done without praise from the white supremacist and ex-Ku Klux Klan head David Duke - adulation which allowed newspapers to lump the name of Duke with the names of Mearsheimer and Walt. "Of Israel, Harvard and David Duke," ran the Washington Post's reprehensible headline.

The Wall Street Journal, ever Israel's friend in the American press, took an even weirder line on the case. "As Ex-Lobbyists of Pro-Israel Group Face Court, Article Queries Sway on Mideast Policy" its headline proclaimed to astonished readers. Neither Mearsheimer nor Walt had mentioned the trial of two Aipac lobbyists - due to begin next month - who are charged under the Espionage Act with receiving and disseminating classified information provided by a former Pentagon Middle East analyst. The defence team for Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman has indicated that it may call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to the stand.

Almost a third of the Journal's report is taken up with the Rosen-Weissman trial, adding that the indictment details how the two men "allegedly sought to promote a hawkish US policy toward Iran by trading favours with a number of senior US officials. Lawrence Franklin, the former Pentagon official, has pleaded guilty to misusing classified information. Mr Franklin was charged with orally passing on information about a draft National Security Council paper on Iran to the two lobbyists... as well as other classified information. Mr Franklin was sentenced in December to nearly 13 years in prison..."

The Wall Street Journal report goes on to say that lawyers and "many Jewish leaders" - who are not identified - "say the actions of the former Aipac employees were no different from how thousands of Washington lobbyists work. They say the indictment marks the first time in US history that American citizens... have been charged with receiving and disseminating state secrets in conversations." The paper goes on to say that "several members of Congress have expressed concern about the case since it broke in 2004, fearing that the Justice Department may be targeting pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as Aipac. These officials (sic) say they're eager to see the legal process run its course, but are concerned about the lack of transparency in the case."

As far as Dershowitz is concerned, it isn't hard for me to sympathise with the terrible pair. He it was who shouted abuse at me during an Irish radio interview when I said that we had to ask the question "Why?" after the 11 September 2001 international crimes against humanity. I was a "dangerous man", Dershowitz shouted over the air, adding that to be "anti-American" - my thought-crime for asking the "Why?" question - was the same as being anti-Semitic. I must, however, also acknowledge another interest. Twelve years ago, one of the Israeli lobby groups that Mearsheimer and Walt fingers prevented any second showing of a film series on Muslims in which I participated for Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel - by stating that my "claim" that Israel was building large Jewish settlements on Arab land was "an egregious falsehood". I was, according to another Israeli support group, "a Henry Higgins with fangs", who was "drooling venom into the living rooms of America."

Such nonsense continues to this day. In Australia to launch my new book on the Middle East, for instance, I repeatedly stated that Israel - contrary to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists - was not responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Yet the Australian Jewish News claimed that I "stopped just millimetres short of suggesting that Israel was the cause of the 9/11 attacks. The audience reportedly (and predictably) showered him in accolades."

This was untrue. There was no applause and no accolades and I never stopped "millimetres" short of accusing Israel of these crimes against humanity. The story in the Australian Jewish News is a lie.

So I have to say that - from my own humble experience - Mearsheimer and Walt have a point. And for a man who says he has not been to Israel for 20 years - or Egypt, though he says he had a "great time" in both countries - Walt rightly doesn't claim any on-the-ground expertise. "I've never flown into Afghanistan on a rickety plane, or stood at a checkpoint and seen a bus coming and not known if there is a suicide bomber aboard," he says.

Noam Chomsky, America's foremost moral philosopher and linguistics academic - so critical of Israel that he does not even have a regular newspaper column - does travel widely in the region and acknowledges the ruthlessness of the Israeli lobby. But he suggests that American corporate business has more to do with US policy in the Middle East than Israel's supporters - proving, I suppose, that the Left in the United States has an infinite capacity for fratricide. Walt doesn't say he's on the left, but he and Mearsheimer objected to the invasion of Iraq, a once lonely stand that now appears to be as politically acceptable as they hope - rather forlornly - that discussion of the Israeli lobby will become.

Walt sits in a Malaysian restaurant with me, patiently (though I can hear the irritation in his voice) explaining that the conspiracy theories about him are nonsense. His stepping down as dean of the Kennedy School was a decision taken before the publication of his report, he says. No one is throwing him out. The much-publicised Harvard disclaimer of ownership to the essay - far from being a gesture of fear and criticism by the university as his would-be supporters have claimed - was mainly drafted by Walt himself, since Mearsheimer, a friend as well as colleague, was a Chicago scholar, not a Harvard don.

But something surely has to give.

Across the United States, there is growing evidence that the Israeli and neo-conservative lobbies are acquiring ever greater power. The cancellation by a New York theatre company of My Name is Rachel Corrie - a play based on the writings of the young American girl crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003 - has deeply shocked liberal Jewish Americans, not least because it was Jewish American complaints that got the performance pulled.

"How can the West condemn the Islamic world for not accepting Mohamed cartoons," Philip Weiss asked in The Nation, "when a Western writer who speaks out on behalf of Palestinians is silenced? And why is it that Europe and Israel itself have a healthier debate over Palestinian human rights than we can have here?" Corrie died trying to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home. Enemies of the play falsely claim that she was trying to stop the Israelis from collapsing a tunnel used to smuggle weapons. Hateful e-mails were written about Corrie. Weiss quotes one that reads: "Rachel Corrie won't get 72 virgins but she got what she wanted."

Saree Makdisi - a close relative of the late Edward Said - has revealed how a right-wing website is offering cash for University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) students who report on the political leanings of their professors, especially their views on the Middle East. Those in need of dirty money at UCLA should be aware that class notes, handouts and illicit recordings of lectures will now receive a bounty of $100. "I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory 'profile'," Makdisi says, "...not for what I have said in my classes on English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake - my academic speciality, which the website avoids mentioning - but rather for what I have written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics."

Mearsheimer and Walt include a study of such tactics in their report. "In September 2002," they write, "Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (www.campus-watch.org) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel... the website still invites students to report 'anti-Israel' activity."

Perhaps the most incendiary paragraph in the essay - albeit one whose contents have been confirmed in the Israeli press - discusses Israel's pressure on the United States to invade Iraq. "Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programmes," the two academics write, quoting a retired Israeli general as saying: "Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq's non-conventional capabilities."

Walt says he might take a year's sabbatical - though he doesn't want to get typecast as a "lobby" critic - because he needs a rest after his recent administrative post. There will be Israeli lobbyists, no doubt, who would he happy if he made that sabbatical a permanent one. I somehow doubt he will.

Neocons Squander Their Only Victory

by Ted Rall
April 27, 2006

Abandon the tactic of terrorism and work within the system, the United States and its Western allies have long urged armed resistance groups. Lay down your weapons and pick up a megaphone. Campaign for public office and, if the people you claim to represent agree with your ideas, you'll win power peacefully. Then, whether or not they share your values, the world will recognize your movement as legitimate and will treat you accordingly.

In the Muslim world, the focus of American-led democratization efforts since 9/11, Republican neoconservatives have repeatedly used a Sunni boycott of Iraqi elections as a cautionary tale: you'll be shut out if you don't participate.

Hamas, formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, got the message. After two decades of suicide bombings and guerilla warfare against Israel the Palestinian group, founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, was exhausted. In 2004 Israel assassinated four of Hamas' top officials, including 67-year-old founder Sheikh Ahmed Ishmail Yassin--whose paralysis had confined him to a wheelchair. Hamas boycotted the January 2005 Palestinian presidential election held to replace Yassir Arafat only to see its political enemy Mahmoud Abbas take power.

Frustrated that they were no closer to their goal of an independent Palestinian state than they had been in 1987, Hamas' leaders changed course. They declared a unilateral ceasefire, or tahdiyah (Arabic for "period of calm") in March 2005. They ran candidates in municipal elections. Some won. Encouraged by their success in working within a democratic process developed at the behest of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, Hamas ran a full slate of candidates for the Palestinian Authority Legislative Council. Palestinians liked what they saw and heard from Hamas. In January 2006 Hamas won 76 out of 132 seats in the Council, becoming the majority party in a race with a turnout of over 80 percent.

Celebrating their sweeping victory, Hamas officials promised not to cave in to American and Israeli demands that the group disarm and recognize Israel's right to exist. Despite their clear mandate, however, Hamas indicated that they were willing to make concessions. The tahdiyah remained in effect, and the party's leaders said they were ready to start peace talks with Israel. "Negotiation is not a taboo," said Mahmoud Zahar, a major Hamas figure.

The Bushies might have lost Afghanistan and Iraq, but they got exactly what they wanted in Palestine: democratic elections, a peaceful transfer of power, a radical Islamist group ready to disavow terrorism and transform itself into a parliamentary political party, a majority party willing to work with Israel and her allies. It was a staggering victory for the neoconservative agenda, a golden opportunity to co-opt one of the most prominent organizations of militant Muslims in the world, and proof positive that democracy prevails over terrorism.

And the neocons hated it.

U.S. state-controlled media reacted to Hamas' victory with dismay. "[It] can hardly be considered good news," editorialized The Wall Street Journal. "If your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace, and we're interested in peace," said George W. Bush (shortly after going to war against two countries and sponsoring coups in several others). He ordered a stop to American aid and froze Palestinian bank accounts. Elections, it seems, are only good when you like who wins.

"It's not possible," asserted Hamas spokesman Farhat Asaad, "for the U.S. and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy." He underestimated our capacity for hypocrisy.

On February 13, The New York Times reported that "The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats. The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election...[They] say Hamas will be given a choice: recognize Israel's right to exist, forswear violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements--as called for by the United Nations and the West--or face isolation and collapse."

In the end, they were never offered that choice.

Israel, which collects $50 million per month in customs taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority on $1 billion in Palestinian goods sold to Israel and $2 billion in Israeli products sold to Palestine, reacted to Hamas' win by pocketing the Palestinians' money. "I have no intention of approving the transfer of money which will be used for terrorism," barked Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. But customs taxes aren't aid. The money belongs to the Palestinians. Israel isn't cutting off a "transfer of money" to the new Hamas-led government, a line repeated throughout mainstream media accounts. They're stealing it.

Three months later, reports USA Today, the Palestinian Authority is broke. "The loss of revenue has paralyzed Palestinian government institutions, left salaries unpaid and deepened poverty...unemployment could jump to 40 percent this year from about 30 percent now, and that two-thirds of Palestinians will live under the poverty line, compared with a little over 40 percent in 2005." If this keeps up, the Occupied Territories will collapse into an anarchy that will make Israel long for the intifada.

On his latest taped statement, Osama bin Laden capitalizes on the diplomatic and economic isolation of the Palestinian Authority. "[The West's] opposition to Hamas has confirmed that it is a Crusader-Zionist war against Muslims," he said. "They are determined to continue with their Crusader campaigns against our nation, to occupy our countries, to plunder our resources, and to enslave us." It's hard to argue with his assessment. If Israel's American-backed theft of Palestinian customs revenues isn't plunder, what is?

Once again, the geniuses who run United States foreign policy have transformed a glorious opportunity to gain an ally into total disaster. Rejected by the West whose democratic game it played and won, the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority has been shoved into the arms of America's enemies. Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia---financiers of right-wing madrassas and the 9/11 attacks--have agreed to help the Authority make payroll for its 140,000 government employees.

Defining Democracy Down

Bush’s meddling in foreign elections undercuts his stated principles.
By James Bovard
The American Conservative
April 24, 2006 Issue

George W. Bush has been more emphatic about spreading democracy than any president since Woodrow Wilson. Yet Bush’s policies have subverted elected governments, corrupted foreign elections, and tainted democracy itself. For most of the American media, however, Bush’s pretensions on democracy remain sacrosanct.

When Bush took office in 2001, the U.S. already had a long history of meddling abroad in the name of foreign “self-determination.” The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a government agency created in 1983, had been involved in election-manipulation scandals in Panama, Nicaragua, Slovakia, and elsewhere. But the Bush team sharply ratcheted up both spending and the brazenness of U.S. interventions. The United States is currently spending more than a billion dollars a year on democracy promotion.

In 2001, NED quadrupled its aid to Venezuelan opponents of elected president Hugo Chavez, and NED heavily funded some organizations involved in a bloody military coup that temporarily removed Chavez from power in April 2002. After Chavez retook control, NED and the State Department responded by pouring even more money into groups seeking his ouster.

The International Republican Institute, one of the largest NED grant recipients, played a key role both in the Chavez coup and also in the overthrow of Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In February 2004, an array of NED-aided groups and individuals helped spur an uprising that left 100 people dead and toppled Aristide. Brian Dean Curran, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, warned Washington that the International Republican Institute’s actions “risked us being accused of attempting to destabilize the government.”

The U.S. pulled out all the stops to help our favored candidate win a “free and fair” election in 2004 in the Ukraine. In the two years prior to the election, the United States spent over $65 million “to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders and helping to underwrite exit polls indicating he won a disputed runoff election,” according to the Associated Press. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) complained that “much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and … millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.” Yet with boundless hypocrisy, Bush had proclaimed that “any [Ukrainian] election ... ought to be free from any foreign influence.”

Though Bush perennially invokes spreading democracy to justify the invasion of Iraq, suppressing democracy was one of the first orders of business for the U.S. occupation authorities. Three and a half months after the fall of Baghdad, military commanders “ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders,” the Washington Post reported. Many Iraqis were outraged to see Saddam’s former henchmen placed back in power over them.

U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer feared that the chaos that followed Saddam’s fall would not be conducive to electing positive thinkers: “In a postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections, the people who are rejectionists tend to win.” And the U.S. military presence would likely be one of the first things freely elected Iraqis would have rejected.

The early suppression of popular government helped turn many Iraqis against the U.S. occupation. But, as Noah Feldman, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s law advisor, explained in November 2003, “If you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected.” The repeated delays of elections were partly the result of the Bush administration’s lack of enthusiasm for Iraqi self-rule—as well as its fear that pro-Iran Shi’ites would win an honest election. The Bush administration only agreed to hold elections after Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, the most powerful religious leader in Iraq, sent his followers into the streets demanding an opportunity to vote.

After it quickly became clear that pro-American parties would be clobbered, Bush authorized covert aid to Iraqi parties and politicians. However, when senior members of Congress were briefed on the plan, they vehemently objected. Bush canceled the formal plan but delivered covert aid, using back channels and undercover operators that could be kept secret from Congress as well as the American public. Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker last July, “the White House promulgated a highly classified Presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the C.I.A. to provide money and other support covertly to political candidates in certain countries who, in the Administration’s view, were seeking to spread democracy.”

The elections that were eventually held on Jan. 30, 2005, had more in common with a Soviet–era Eastern Bloc election than with a New England town meeting. In the weeks before the vote, the U.S. military carried out Operation Founding Fathers. In Samarra, the get-out-and-vote message was broadcast from loudspeakers at the same time American troops, leaping out of Bradley fighting vehicles, raided and searched people’s homes.

U.S. military convoys rolled through Mosul neighborhoods shortly after sunrise on Election Day “with speakers blaring messages urging everyone to vote,” Newsday reported. Soldiers also passed out thousands of sample ballots. Carina Perelli, the top UN election official, condemned the role of U.S. troops.

Bush proclaimed on the day of the vote that the elections were a “resounding success” and that “the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East.” The American media largely parroted the official line. But pro-U.S. candidates were crushed at the polls as pro-Iranian parties took the prize.

According to Bush, democracy automatically brings peace. But the various elections and the U.S.-imposed timetables for a constitution in Iraq may have intensified religious conflicts and boosted the risk of civil war. The insurgency has mushroomed despite several national elections.

The brazenness of the U.S. military role in the January 2005 Iraqi election did not dissuade Bush from revealing a new standard for the purity of Middle East elections. On March 8, 2005, Bush declared, “All Syrian military and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair.” The fact that Bush’s comment evoked scant ridicule was testament to the docility of the American media and public.

Last year, to provide another bragging point for its “democracy in the Middle East” campaign, the Bush team decided it was time for the Palestinians to have an election. The Israelis grudgingly agreed. When it became clear that Hamas would pose a serious challenge to the ruling Fatah party, the Bush administration rushed a $2 million program to allow the Palestinian Authority to launch 30 popular new projects just before the election this past January. Palestinians equated the Palestinian Authority with the Fatah party. The Washington Post reported that the last-minute spending binge included, “a street-cleaning campaign, distributing free food and water to Palestinians at border crossings, donating computers to community centers and sponsoring a national youth soccer tournament.” Some of the projects were announced at Fatah campaign rallies. A U.S. Agency for International Development progress report noted: “The plan is to have events running every day of the coming week, beginning 13 January, such that there is a constant stream of announcements and public outreach about positive happenings all over Palestinian areas in the critical week before the elections.” Arabic newspapers were saturated with U.S.-paid ads hyping the generosity of the Palestinian Authority. The U.S. government role in financing the projects and the newspaper ads was kept secret from the Palestinian people. But despite the finagling, Hamas swept the election. Fatah lost in part because of its legendary reputation for corruption—of which the covert U.S. government windfall was simply one more example.

Team Bush carries on undeterred, continuing to cast elections as sacred events that automatically confer vast blessings upon a nation. Yet last June, Bush effectively urged Iranians not to vote, deriding their pending presidential election for ignoring “the basic requirements of democracy.” Bush declared that the elections would be “sadly consistent with this oppressive record” of the Iranian government. U.S.-financed television and radio stations, broadcasting in Farsi, also effectively urged a boycott of the election.

The U.S. government’s actions contributed to the defeat of Mohammad Khatami, a comparatively moderate reformer, and the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fire-breathing hardliner. Ahmadinejad’s subsequent comments on Israel, the Holocaust, and other subjects sound almost Hollywood-scripted to help Washington persuade other nations that the Iranian government and its nuclear program must be suppressed at any cost.

In February, the Bush administration announced it was seeking $75 million in “emergency” funding to promote democracy in Iran. (The U.S. government was already spending $15 million or more, along with unknown amounts of covert spending to destabilize the government.) The new funds would be dabbled out for expanded TV broadcasts, scholarships for Iranians to study in America, and the fostering of independent media. This last goal is a hoot, considering the uproar over the ongoing U.S. program bribing “independent” Iraqi newspapers to publish articles praising U.S. military operations.

The administration’s efforts seem geared far more to domestic strutting than to the survival of Iranian democrats. The profusion of U.S. money makes it far easier for the Iranian government to tar all reformers as fifth columnists and traitors. Iranian human-rights activist Emad Baghi bitterly complained, “We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush.” Vahid Pourostad, editor of the pro-reform National Trust newspaper, told the Washington Post that whenever the U.S. “came and supported an idea publicly, the public has done the opposite.”

It is unclear whether the Bush administration honestly wants to advance democracy in Iran or whether it is merely creating another pretext to start bombing. If the Iranian regime responds to Bush’s brazen intervention by rounding up reformers, further repressing free speech, acting even more paranoid, it may help Bush sway Americans on the need to bomb Iran in the name of democracy.

Thomas Carothers, director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy and Rule of Law Project, warns that Bush policies are creating a “democracy backlash” around the globe. The U.S. has gone from being a “shining city on the hill” to championing barbaric practices that civilized nations have long condemned. While many Americans seem to pay attention only to Bush’s idealistic invocations, foreigners are not as gullible.

The administration seems to have learned nothing from its democracy debacles of the last four years. But perhaps the rhetoric has all been a ruse. Perhaps invoking “democracy” is simply a smokescreen in pursuit of the neoconservative goal of “benevolent global hegemony.”

James Bovard is the author of the just-published Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.

NASA consults on space station amenable to Jewish astronauts

NASA is looking into making its international space station amenable to Torah-observant astronauts.

The space agency is planning to consult rabbis on issues such as determining the station’s position so Jews know where to face while praying; making kosher food available; and observing Shabbat in space, according to Yediot Achronot’s Ynet Web site.

The space station is expected to host astronauts from other countries, and efforts have been made to include Israelis.

Similar questions arose when Israeli astronaut Col. Ilan Ramon went to space.

Ramon brought kosher food with him and is said to have kept Shabbat.

Projected Iraq War Costs Soar

Total Spending Is Likely to More Than Double, Analysis Finds
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post
Thursday, April 27, 2006; A16

The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.

The analysis, distributed to some members of Congress on Tuesday night, provides the most official cost estimate yet of a war whose price tag will rise by nearly 17 percent this year. Just last week, independent defense analysts looking only at Defense Department costs put the total at least $7 billion below the CRS figure.

Once the war spending bill is passed, military and diplomatic costs will have reached $101.8 billion this fiscal year, up from $87.3 billion in 2005, $77.3 billion in 2004 and $51 billion in 2003, the year of the invasion, congressional analysts said. Even if a gradual troop withdrawal begins this year, war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to rise by an additional $371 billion during the phaseout, the report said, citing a Congressional Budget Office study. When factoring in costs of the war in Afghanistan, the $811 billion total for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted $549 billion cost of the Vietnam War.

"The costs are exceeding even the worst-case scenarios," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

Such cost estimates may be producing sticker shock on Capitol Hill. This year, the wars will consume nearly as much money as the departments of Education, Justice and Homeland Security combined, a total that is more than a quarter of this year's projected budget deficit. Yesterday, as the Senate debated a $106.5 billion bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and ongoing hurricane relief, 59 senators voted to divert $1.9 billion from President Bush's war-funding request to pay for new border patrol agents, aircraft and some fencing at border crossings widely used by illegal immigrants.

When some Democrats said the move would take money from needed combat funds, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the bill's sponsor, called the criticism "pure poppycock."

In another challenge to Bush, the Senate moved, in a veto-proof 72 to 26 vote, to shelve an amendment that would have struck spending on all items -- from farm drought assistance to a $700 million measure to move a Mississippi railroad away from the Gulf Coast -- not requested by the administration. The White House has threatened to veto the bill if it much exceeds the $92.2 billion Bush requested in February.

Because of the controversy surrounding the railroad funding, the Senate held a separate vote, 49 to 48, to retain the funding, which critics have singled out as a non-emergency. But advocates of the project, including Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran and Sen. Trent Lott, both Mississippi Republicans, defended it as part of a vital economic development effort along the Gulf Coast.

"It's built on marshes and on sand," Lott said of the railroad, displaying on the Senate floor enlarged photos of the tracks, which run along the coastline. "It will not stand."

But for a bill devoted largely to funding the war, the cost of the Iraq conflict so far has played little part in a political debate focused mainly on energy prices, immigration and pork-barrel spending.

Defense specialist Amy Belasco, the CRS study's author, stressed that the price tag is only an estimate because the Defense Department has declined to break out the cost of Iraqi operations from the larger $435 billion cost of what the administration has labeled the global war on terrorism. That larger cost applies to military, diplomatic and foreign aid operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, enhanced security efforts begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and related medical costs of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"Although DOD has a financial system that tracks funds for each operation once they are obligated -- as pay or contractual costs -- DOD has not sent Congress the semiannual reports with cumulative and current obligations for [Iraq] and [Afghanistan], or estimates for the next year, or for the next five years that are required by statute," the CRS noted.

The report goes on to outline a series of "key war cost questions" for Congress to pursue and "major unknowns" that CRS has not been able to answer: How much has Congress appropriated for each theater of war? How much has the Pentagon obligated for each mission per month? What will future costs be? How much will it cost to repair and replace equipment? And how can Congress receive accurate information on past and future troop levels?

Such questions are highly unusual for a congressional research agency report, congressional budget aides said yesterday, and they point to growing frustration in Congress with a Pentagon that has held war-cost information close to the vest.

Lt. Col. Brian Maka, a spokesman for the Defense Department's comptroller, said the Pentagon will study the report before commenting on it.

The report details how operations, maintenance and procurement costs have surged from $50 billion in 2004 to $88 billion this year, citing rising expenditures for body armor, oil and gasoline; equipment maintenance; and training and equipping Afghan and Iraqi security forces.

"These factors, however, are not enough to explain a 50-percent increase of over $20 billion in operating costs," the report states.

War-related investment costs have more than tripled since 2003, from $7 billion to $24 billion, as money has been spent on armored vehicles, radios, sensors and night-vision goggles, as well as on equipment for reorganized Army and Marine Corps units.

"These reasons are not sufficient, however, to explain the level of increases," the report states again.

Other analysts are also scratching their heads. Michael E. O'Hanlon, a defense budget expert at the Brookings Institution, suggested that the military may be slightly padding its request for fear that Congress will be less giving on future emergency spending bills.

"I don't think these guys would make things up, but there is an assumption in the military that these supplementals might dry up, and if there are things that might be considered even Iraq-related, they should get them funded right now," he said.

Of the total war spending, the CRS analysis found $4 billion that could not be tracked. It did identify $2.5 billion diverted from other spending authorizations in 2001 and 2002 to prepare for the invasion.

That discovery helped push the CRS cost estimate higher than estimates from independent budget analysts. The CRS total also includes expenditures on foreign aid and diplomacy not counted in the military cost tallies by groups such as the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Is the US Waging Israel's Wars?

The Prophecy of Oded Yinon
By LINDA S. HEARD
CounterPunch
April 25, 2006

Many throughout the Muslim world and beyond are asking this question: What are the real reasons behind the US invasion of Iraq and its wish to overthrow the governments of Syria and Iran?

For all their grandiose posturing, in truth, Iraq, Syria and Iran have never posed a direct threat to the US mainland. Put simply, they're too far away from the neighbourhood. So why would the US be willing to expend so many human lives and so much treasury on changing the regimes of countries it doesn't like?

Theories abound. At the top of the list is America's quest for oil, a shrinking, non-renewable resource. But, in reality, the US gets very little of its oil from the Middle East and the Gulf. Most comes from South America and Africa.

Another theory revolves around the petrodollar monopoly, which both Iraq and Iran have sought to disband by trading their oil in Euros. There may be something in this one but it doesn't explain why Syria is in the firing line.

The US says it wishes to export 'democracy' to the region but its reaction towards the Shiite government in Iraq, led by the Dawa Pasrty that has close ties with Iran, and the way that the democratically-elected new Hamas-led Palestinian government has been isolated, hardly lends credence to this. Democracy will not bring US-friendly governments, which is what the Bush administration really seeks.

A premise, which many in the Arab world believe, should also be dissected. Is the US manipulating and remoulding the area so that Israel can remain the only regional superpower in perpetuity?

This is not as fanciful as one might imagine on first glance. Read the following strangely prophetic segment from an article published in 1982 by the World Zionist Organisation's publication Kivunim and penned by Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist with links to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Yinon's strategy was based on this premise. In order to survive Israel must become an imperial regional power and must also ensure the break-up of all Arab countries so that the region may be carved up into small ineffectual states unequipped to stand up to Israeli military might. Here's what he had to say on Iraq:

"The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target on the Eastern frontIraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.

"An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon.

"In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and Shiite areas in the South will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."

Sound familiar?

Now let's focus on the reality, 24 years on.

The eight-year long Iran-Iraq War that ended in 1988 was responsible for over a million casualties but did not result in Yinon's desired break-up. Iraq still stood as a strong homogenous entity.

Iraq was, however, severely weakened in 1991 as a result of the Gulf War brought about by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Still, the country remained unified.

It took the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation to destabilize Iraq and split the country on sectarian lines. Indeed, its new constitution is drawn around a loose federation with partial autonomy for the northern Kurds and the southern Shiites, and the country is now rife with sectarian, religious and ethnic strife. Some say "civil war".

Turning to Syria, until the March 2003 invasion of Iraq Syria under President Bashar Al-Assad enjoyed reasonably good relations with the West. We should also remember that Syria fought alongside the US-led allies during the Gulf War. Syria also voted, albeit reluctantly, for the UN resolution that oiled the invasion, and was a strong partner in the so-called 'War on Terror'.

Then, lo and behold, Syria could do no right. Suddenly, it was accused to all kinds of 'crimes' from hiding Iraq's mythical weapons of mass destruction, harbouring insurgents and terrorists, and allowing the free passage of fighters and arms into Iraq.

Heavy pressure was then put on to Damascus to end its de facto occupation of Lebanon following the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and, now the Syrian government is being investigated by the UN, accused of involvement.

Today the US is actively engaged in weakening the Al-Assad government and is supporting opposition parties. If it is successful, experts predict that Syria, like Iraq, will fall victim to sectarianism and internecine conflict.

Lebanon, which had been recovering from a long civil war and an Israeli occupation, and was on the point of finding some semblance of unity, is also in danger of being destabilized with parties lining up into pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian confederations.

Yinon described the Arab-Muslim world as a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners and arbitrarily divided into states, all made up of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another.

He then goes on to bemoan Israel's relinquishment of the Sinai to Egypt under the Camp David Peace Treaty due to that area's reserves of oil, gas and other natural resources.

"Regaining the Sinai Peninsula is, therefore, a political priority, which is obstructed by Camp David" he writes. "And we will have to act in order to return the situation to the status quo which existed in Sinai prior to Sadat's visit and the mistaken peace agreement signed with him in March 1979."

Yinon then predicts that if Egypt is divided and torn apart, some other Arab countries will cease to exist in their present forms and a Christian Coptic state would be founded in Upper Egypt. Presently there are growing problems between Egypt's Muslims and Copts, perceived by some hard line Egyptian Muslims as being more loyal to the US than their own country. This has resulted in open clashes often with resultant deaths.

Apart from Muslim-Copt divisions, Yinon was wrong in his calculations concerning Egypt. He believed Cairo would break the peace treaty with Israel giving the Israelis the opportunity to drive their tanks straight back into the Sinai and other coveted areas. However, the Egyptian government under the ever pragmatic President Hosni Mubarak has stuck to the letter of the treaty and has become an important US ally over the years.

Yinon's solution to the ongoing Israel-Palestine problem was to herd the Palestinians across the Jordan River and label Jordan a Palestinian state.

He rejected the land for peace principle, saying, "It is not possible to go on living in this country in the present situation without separating the two nations, the Arabs to Jordan and the Jews to the areas west of the river.

Genuine co-existence and peace will reign over the land only when the Arabs understand that without Jewish rule between the Jordan and the sea they will have neither existence nor security - a nation of their own and security will be theirs only in Jordan."

Yinon, and others of like mind must once again be disappointed. Jordan gave up any thoughts of Pan-Arabism long before the demise of King Hussein and his son King Abdullah is now America's staunchest Arab ally in the region. With a two-thirds Palestinian majority in his country, Abdullah has chosen self-preservation by hanging on to US coattails.

The idea of packing 4.5 million Palestinians across the Jordan is no longer being openly touted, although this option was on the table in 2002 according to an article by Professor van Creveld in Britain's Daily Telegraph.

A then Gallup poll showed that 44 per cent of Jewish Israelis favoured the expulsion of Palestinians across the River Jordan.

Professor Creveld believed Ariel Sharon favoured this plan too. Sharon was quoted in his article as emphasizing Jordan's Palestinian majority and referring to it as the Palestinian state. "The inference that the Palestinians should go there is clear," wrote Creveld.

If you feel the idea that the US would put itself on the line for the sake of Israel is far-fetched, then it is worth remembering the words of the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who claimed in his book that the Israeli government was, in fact, responsible for the design of American policy in the Middle East after the 1967 'Six Day War'.

Yinon's essay does not focus on Iran, but let's look at comparatively recent statements coming out of Israel on this subject.

During a visit to Washington in November 2003 two years before the US government turned its fire on Iran - the Israeli Minister of Defence Shaul Mofaz told US officials that "under no circumstances would Israel be able to abide by nuclear weapons in Iranian possession.

During the same month, Meir Dagan, Director of the Mossad, told a parliamentary committee that Iran posed an "existential threat" to Israel, assuring members that Israel could deal with this threat.

Last year, the rhetoric out of Israel was ratcheted up with the Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom telling the press that "the idea that this tyranny of Iran will hold a nuclear bomb is a nightmare, not only for us but also for the whole world."

Israel's Prime Minister designate Ehud Olmert is continuing the tradition of hyping the Iran threat, assisted, it must be said, by fiery rhetoric coming out of Tehran's reckless leader Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

An article in the Daily Telegraph dated February 18 headed "America would back Israel attack on Iran" clearly indicates that it is Israel leading the charge against Iran.

The article quotes George W. Bush as saying,

"Clearly, if I was the leader of Israel and I'd listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs that regarded the security of my country, I'd be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon as well. And in that Israel is our ally, and in that we've made a very strong commitment to support Israel, we will support Israel if her security is threatened."

A year later and the US government is no longer portraying Iran's purported nuclear ambitions as a threat to Israel, but a threat to the United States. In this way the case against Iran and the possible repercussions emanating from that, can be sold to the American people. Suddenly Israel's concerns have become theirs. Interestingly, more than 55 per cent of the US public say they would back strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, according to a recent poll.

As the columnist Doug Ireland writes in his expose "The Real AIPAC Spy Ring Story It was all about Iran",

"Bush's slip-of-the-tongue that revealed his real intentions was front-page news in Le Monde and other European dailies but received little attention in the States-side major media."

Justin Raimondo wrote in September last year,

"This case has received relatively little publicity in relation to its importance. It isn't just the fact that, for the first time in recent memory, Israel's powerful lobby has been humbled. What is going on here is the exposure of Israel's underground army in the US covert legions of propagandists and outright spies, whose job it is to not only make the case for Israel but to bend American policy to suit Israel's needs) and in the process, penetrate closely-held US secrets."

Back to the question of whether the US is, indeed, waging wars on behalf of Israel. In short, we can't be certain and we may never know since the Bush White House has sealed its private tapes and papers for 100 years.

There is one thing that we do know. Oded Yinon's 1982 "Zionist Plan for the Middle East" is in large part taking shape. Is this pure coincidence? Was Yinon a gifted psychic? Perhaps! Alternatively, we in the West are victims of a long-held agenda not of our making and without doubt not in our interests.

Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle Eastern affairs based in Cairo.