من البحصاص الى دمشق.. عنف واسئلة بفظاعة الدماء المهروقة!

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الارهاب الاصولي بعبع لزوم العدة الانتخابية ام خطر داهم يطرق ابوابا كثيرة؟
من البحصاص الى دمشق.. عنف واسئلة بفظاعة الدماء المهروقة!
شاكر العبسي معتقل في احد السجون السورية منذ شهرين!

ينشر في "الاسبوع العربي" في 13/10/2008

http://www.arabweek.com.lb/2557/liban1.pdf

اعتاد الرأي العام على اخبار الاحداث الامنية والتفجيرات المتنقلة في لبنان التي، في كل مرة، ترمي الى تشويه اجواء التصالح والانفراج على الساحة السياسية، تلك الساحة التي عانت وتعاني حقد المتضررين واجرامهم وسعيهم الى رسم صورة قاتمة للمستقبل، لا ترتوي الا بالعنف وبدماء الابرياء. ولكن البارز هو المتغير، بعدما امتدت بقعة العنف الى العاصمة السورية حيث "الامن ممسوك". وفيما بات الهدف من وراء استمرار التفجيرات في لبنان واضحا، تتنوع الآراء حول تحديد خلفيات واهداف الانتكاسات الامنية المفاجئة في سوريا رابطة الموضوع تارة بالمسار الذي يسلكه النظام نحو المفاوضات والسلام، وتارة اخرى بمسائل سياسية داخلية واقليمية معقدة، ذهب البعض الى ربطها بتهريب "الارهابيين الاصوليين" من شمال لبنان الى سوريا.
إستدعى اتهام الرئيس السوري بشار الأسد لبنان عموما وطرابلس خصوصا بإيواء الإرهاب، تزامناً مع حملة دعائية سورية لتحميل لبنان مسؤولية تفجير دمشق، ردودا كثيرة اكدت أنه "إذا كان ثمة إرهاب، فيكون منبعه النظام تحديدا، متحدثة عن نوايا سورية مبيتة في اتهام طرابلس خصوصا بالارهاب، لا يجوز السكوت عنها".
في هذا السياق، يرى بعض المراقبين والمتابعين للوضع السياسي "ان القيادة السورية تفتش عن أي سبب لتعطيل المسار المطلوب لتطبيع العلاقات بين لبنان وسوريا ووضع النتائج المعلنة لزيارة رئيس الجمهورية العماد ميشال سليمان لدمشق، موضع التطبيق، خصوصا لجهة المباشرة في اقامة العلاقات الديبلوماسية وتحديد الاجراءات المتعلقة بترسيم الحدود، لا سيما بعدما ذكرت وكالة الانباء السورية الرسمية "سانا" ان التفجير الذي وقع في دمشق نتج من هجوم انتحاري نفذه "ارهابي على علاقة بتنظيم تكفيري جرى توقيف بعض أفراده سابقا"، موضحة ان السيارة التي استخدمت في التفجير "دخلت من دولة عربية مجاورة"، في اشارة الى احتمال دخولها من الاراضي اللبنانية.
ويعتبر هؤلاء المراقبون ان كلام الاسد يحمل تهديدا صريحا ومباشرا لسيادة لبنان ولمنطقة الشمال خصوصا، وقد يكون خطوة تمهيدية ترمي الى جس نبض المجتمع الدولي والاوروبي بالتحديد حول امكان اعادة تمركز القوات السورية في لبنان هذه المرة عبر البوابة الشمالية "لحماية امن سوريا واستقرارها من التمدد الاصولي والارهابي النابع من شمال لبنان والذي يصدر الى دمشق لزعزعة امنها الممسوك"، رابطين هذه المسألة بخطوة نشر وحدات عسكرية من النخبة عند الحدود الشمالية مع لبنان وما تحمله من دلالات على امكان تنفيذ اي اختراق داخل الاراضي اللبنانية.
استجلاب العطف؟
وفي وقت اعادت متفجرة البحصاص جنوب طرابلس، التي استهدفت الجيش اللبناني، هاجس التفجيرات والاغتيالات الى الواجهة، تزامنا مع كثرة التقارير التي تلقتها جهة لبنانية رسمية رفيعة في الآونة الاخيرة عن تحرك مشبوه لخلايا ارهابية واصولية تنشط في اكثر من بؤرة بين الشمال والجنوب وعند تخوم عدد من المخيمات الفلسطينية، مبرزة اهمية توحيد الجهود للانصراف الى "تجفيف هذه البؤر عبر اطلاق يد المؤسستين العسكرية والامنية لمعالجة جذرية لهذه الظواهر قبل استفحالها وتحولها "نهر بارد" ثانيا يتخطى تهديده الامن القومي للبنان"، يرى ديبلوماسي غربي رفيع في بيروت ان "استهداف الجيش في محطتين لا تفصل بينهما اكثر من 6 اسابيع (في اشارة الى التفجير في 13 آب / اغسطس الفائت) يعبّر عن تطور المواجهة بين المؤسسة العسكرية والارهاب الاصولي التكفيري الى أكثر من مخيم نهر البارد، وتاليا لا بد من الانصراف الى تصليب هذه المؤسسة وتسليحها تسليحا جيدا كي تملك اولا وقبل كل شيئ قوة الردع التحوطي التي من شأنها ان تجعل هذه الجماعات الاصولية تحسب الف حساب قبل استنساخ نهر بارد جديد".
ويربط بين نشر دمشق 12 الآف جندي منذ اسبوعين عند الحدود الشمالية مع لبنان وبين تنامي المعلومات والمعطيات عن خطر الارهاب الاصولي، "وهو امر ناقشه الرئيس الفرنسي نيكولا ساركوزي مع الاسد في القمة الثنائية بينهما ومن ثم في القمة الرباعية القطرية – الفرنسية – التركية – السورية.
واعتبر الديبلوماسي، في تحليل معمّق للاحداث، ان "نشر هذا العدد الكبير من الجنود يتخطى مسألة منع تجارة البضائع المهربة الى اجراءات سورية صارمة لضبط الحدود ومنع انتقال الجماعات المتطرفة بين البلدين بمعرفة وبمباركة اوروبية وبغض طرف اميركي".
ويلفت الى ان الانتشار العسكري ارتبط مباشرة بتحولين رئيسين في سياسة دمشق:
-اولهما، القمة الرباعية السورية – القطرية- الفرنسية – التركية والتي كانت مراقبة الحدود وضبط التهريب (اسلحة وبضائع) من ضمن المطالب التي ضمّنتها الترويكا الاوروبية في كتابها الذي رفعته في 22 تموز (يوليو) الفائت الى وزير الخارجية السوري وليد المعلم (سبق ان نشرت "الاسبوع العربي" ترجمة لنصه الحرفي)، في اطار دعوة كل من لبنان وسوريا الى بدء تطبيع العلاقات بينهما.
-وثانيهما، مستلزمات التفاوض السوري - الاسرائيلي غير المباشر.
ويكشف الديبلوماسي اياه ان نشر الفرق السورية العسكرية سبقه اقفال دمشق 6 مكاتب عائدة الى منظمات الرفض الفلسطيني العشر وتحضير المناخ لابعاد رئيس المكتب السياسي لحركة "حماس" خالد مشعل الى احدى العواصم العربية – الافريقية، مشيرا في هذا الصدد الى ان "دمشق تحاول عبر سياستها الراهنة استجلاب واستدرار عطف المجتمع الدولي تجاهها عبر تنفيذ ما طلب منها من التزامات، وعبر الايحاء من جهة أخرى بانّها عرضة لخطر الاصولية والتطرف الآتي اليها عبر الحدود الشمالية مع لبنان، وتاليا رد التهمة التي وجهها اليها افرقاء قوى الرابع عشر من آذار (مارس) بأنها تدعم التطرف وتصدّر الارهاب الى لبنان لزعزعة امنه واستقراره ومنع قيام الدولة القوية والقادرة استكمالا لمسيرة الاستقلال منذ العام 2005".
العبسي في سوريا!
وفيما يرى احد اقطاب هذه القوى في سياسة سوريا تجاه لبنان والمجتمع الدولي نوعا من التذاكي "بتصوير نفسها الضحية بدل الجلاد، اي انها اصبحت ضحية للتطرف الآتي اليها من لبنان"، يفيد تقرير وارد من دمشق أنّ قائد تنظيم "فتح الاسلام" الارهابي شاكر العبسي معتقل في احد السجون السورية، في دليل على انّ النظام السوري الذي اطلق قبل اعوام العبسي قبل انهاء مدة اعتقاله في احد السجون السورية واتاح له فرصة الهرب الى الى لبنان للتخلص منه من دون النظر في طلب القضاء الاردني استردااده لمحاكمته في اغتيال احد الديبلوماسيين الاميركيين في عمّان، عاد ولجأ الى الاراضي السورية، التي وبحسب قطب الرابع عشر من آذار (مارس) "كانت ولا تزال معقلا لهذه الخلايا".وينتظر ان تراسل الجهات اللبنانية المختصة نظيرتها السورية لتتأكد من صحة هذا التقرير ولتطلب اطلاعها على مزيد من التفاصيل، خصوصا ان مصدره غير بعيد من النظام الحاكم.وكان التقرير المعني قد ذكر ان "عناصر المخابرات الجوية السورية استطاعت قبل شهرين تقريبا إلقاء القبض على العبسي في محلة المليحة وهي منطقة شعبية تقع جنوب دمشق، بعدما كان قد فر من مخيم "نهر البارد" عقب المعركة بين الجيش اللبناني والتنظيم. ولجأ العبسي إلى منطقة المليحة، حيث قطن أحد المنزل، وجرت عملية مداهمة كبيرة للمنطقة أدت في النهاية إلى اعتقاله".وذكر التقرير اياه أن "خلية إرهابية مؤلفة من خمس انتحاريين كانت تنوي تفجير نفسها في ملعب العباسيين في دمشق في خلال إحدى مباريات كرة القدم قبل شهر تقريبا، في رد على اعتقال العبسي، لكن القوى الأمنية السورية احبطت المحاولة".
قمقم الاصولية .. من ادوات الصراع
في المقلب الآخر، يعتبر قيادي في قوى المعارضة ان "ثمة تشابها وربما تماثلا في تفجيري طرابلس ودمشق، لجهة ان العقل المخطط واحد والمجرم واحد"، لافتا الى ان "الاصولية باتت الجامع الاكبر بين كل التوتيرات الامنية التي تشهدها المنطقة، وليس لبنان وسوريا وحدهما". ويتحدث عن "مخطط لابقاء خطوط التماس حية في ذاكرة اللبنانيين ووجدانهم بهدف الحفاظ على الحد الادنى من التوتر في انتظار حلول خطة تفجير ما سياسي او امني".
ويشير الى ان "القمقم الاصولي فُتح بهدف جعله اداة من ادوات الصراع السياسي في لبنان، بحيث يوظف في الانتخابات النيابية المقبلة، بهدف تخويف اللبنانيين عموما والمسيحيين خصوصا وجعلهم اسرى امنهم".
ويعتبر ان "التطاول الارهابي على المؤسسة العسكرية اقترن بتطاول سياسي ومعنوي عليها في مجلس النواب (الجلسة العامة التي خصصت لاقررا اقتراحقانون الانتخاب)، بعدما صدّ ائتلاف الموالاة محاولة منح العسكريين من مختلف الاجهزة الامنية والعسكرية حقهم الطبيعي والمشروع والذي لا نقاش فيه بالاقتراع في الانتخابات، وكان من شأن هذا الاقتراح لو مَرّ ان يكون سابقة في الجمهوريتين الاولى والثانية".
في المقابل، يرى مصدر قيادي في الموالاة ان "ما رسمه النظام السوري يسلك دربه حرفا بحرف تماما كما هو على الورق، من التوتيرات المتنقلة بين المناطق الحامية الى التدخل المباشر للرئيس السوري بشار الاسد اولا في تحديد الفائز في الانتخابات النيابية، وثانيا في تحديده ما يشبه دفتر شروط سوري لاستدراج عروض اوروبية وربما اميركية تحت عنوان التدخل في لبنان لاجثتاث الظواهر الاصولية، لما هذا العنوان من تأثير في العقل والباطن الاوروبيين". ويقول ان "المقاول اياه يسعى الى اشعال الحريق ليطرح نفسه على الاوروبيين الاطفائي الوحيد القادر عن اهماد النار، تماما كما حصل في العام 1975، لكن مع فارق الرجل والخبرة والظروف الدولية والموقف الاميركي – الدولي".

شاكر العبسي معتقل في سوريا؟

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علم ان الجهات اللبنانية المختصة تدقق في تقرير وارد من دمشق يفيد ان قائد تنظيم "فتح الاسلام" الارهابي شاكر العبسي معتقل في احد السجون السورية.
وينتظر ان تراسل الجهات اللبنانية المختصة نظيرتها السورية في هذا الشأن لتتأكد من صحة هذا التقرير ولتطلب اطلاعها على مزيد من التفاصيل، خصوصا ان مصدر هذا التقرير قريب من النظام الحاكم.
وكان التقرير المعني قد ذكر ان "عناصر المخابرات الجوية السورية استطاعت قبل شهرين تقريبا إلقاء القبض على العبسي في محلة المليحة وهي منطقة شعبية تقع جنوب دمشق، بعدما كان قد فر من مخيم نهر البارد عقب المعركة بين الجيش اللبناني والتنظيم. ولجأ العبسي إلى منطقة المليحة، حيث قطن أحد المنزل، وجرت عملية مداهمة كبيرة للمنطقة أدت في النهاية إلى اعتقاله".
وذكر التقرير اياه أن "خلية إرهابية مؤلفة من خمس انتحاريين كانت تنوي تفجير نفسها في ملعب العباسيين في دمشق في خلال إحدى مباريات كرة القدم قبل شهر تقريبا، في رد على اعتقال العبسي، لكن القوى الأمنية السورية احبطت المحاولة".

IRAQ: Is Kurdish-Arab "Honeymoon" Over

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Inter Press Service

Analysis by Mohammed A. Salih

COLUMBIA, Missouri, Sep 30 (IPS) - Tensions between Kurds and the Iraqi government over disputed territory have heightened recently, raising fears that they might lead to ethnic clashes between Kurds and Arabs at a time when the war-torn country is slowly recovering from years of sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Arabs.

Last month, the Iraqi Army deployed units to areas under Kurdish control in volatile northern Diyala Province, as part of its "Operation Good Tidings" to expand government authority over the area.

The centre of the controversial move was Khanaqin, 140 kilometres northeast of Baghdad. It is a small, largely Kurdish town that has oil reserves and is close to the Iranian border. Kurdish Peshmarga troops left their bases in the nearby districts of Jalawla, Saadiya and Qara Tapa in northern Diyala after receiving warnings from the Iraqi Army.

In a hasty face-saving move, Iraqi and Kurdish officials tentatively agreed that neither Peshmarga nor Iraqi troops should go to the town. But to the Kurds' advantage, the local predominantly Kurdish police force will be in charge of security.

Kurds see the deployment as a test of their power and believe if they withdraw from Khanaqin, the Iraqi Army will chase them out of other strategic contested locations in and around oil-rich Kirkuk and Mosul in northern Iraq.

"The current problem is over borders, because they [the Iraqi government] believe the borders of Kurdistan should be where the former ousted regime [of President Saddam Hussein] decided on," said Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq's northern Kurdistan region, in a meeting with Kurdish journalists on Sep. 28.

"From now on, if Iraq sends its forces to somewhere in disputed areas, then we will dispatch our forces to the same spot as well. If they send one brigade, we will send two," Barzani said.

His remarks raised the current tensions to a new level, signaling that Kurds will not shy away from fighting the army of the very government whose president is Kurdish, as well as some key ministers.

Last month, Sheikh Homam al-Hamudi, a Shia Arab who heads the Iraqi Parliament's foreign relations committee, warned Kurds on behalf of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that "any [Kurdish] Peshmarga who violates the blue line will be chased out by the [Iraqi] security forces."

The blue line refers to the official border between areas under Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) jurisdiction and the rest of Iraq. KRG runs the three northern provinces of Arbil, Sulaimaniya and Dohuk and has no official jurisdiction over Khanaqin, Kirkuk and Nineveh province, home to the city of Mosul.

In the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kurds gained unprecedented power and recognition in the country's politics and their relations with Baghdad went through an exceptional period of apparent friendship.

Kurds consider Khanaqin, Kirkuk and towns around Mosul as part of their historic homeland. Under Hussein, tens of thousands of Kurds were expelled from those areas and replaced by Arab settlers from the central and southern parts of the country. Now Arabs charge Kurds with a reverse campaign. Ethnic claims of ownership among Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans -- people of Turkish origin -- have turned those areas into potentially explosive flashpoints.

The recent developments marked the advent of a new era in Iraq's post-war politics and a sign, as Kurdish media sometimes say, that the "honeymoon" between Kurds and the Iraqi government is over.

For the first time, the Shia-led government of Maliki is militarily challenging Kurds who are partners in his coalition government. Since the overthrow of Hussein, Shias and Kurds have given the appearance of a political alliance. When several Shia, Sunni and secular groups withdrew from Maliki's government in 2006, it was Kurds who propped up his cabinet by staying and backing him.

But as the security situation in the country has improved over the past year, Maliki's confidence appears to have grown in parallel. That has meant that he now finds himself in a position to take on old friends, typical of Iraqi politics notorious for short-lived and often self-serving political alliances.

The recent moves by the Iraqi Army sent shockwaves among Kurds, reviving images of the bitter history of their relations with various central governments in Baghdad. Kurds have been at war with all virtually governments since the establishment of Iraq in 1921 up to 2003.

The worst experience was with Hussein, who in 1980s conducted large-scale massacres of Kurds, killing tens of thousands. Last April, the Iraqi Parliament unanimously recognised those massacres as "genocide".

"I think, unfortunately this was an alarm bell as far as we are concerned...Baghdad again followed the practice that when it is weak, it keeps silent toward us, but as soon as it gets powerful, starts to threaten us," Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the KRG and Massoud's nephew, told Voice of America last week. "We thought in the new Iraq, an Iraq that is rebuilt on a new basis, this issue is over."

In response to what many Iraqi Arabs see as Kurdish encroachment on the authority and powers of the central government, Maliki issued a clear warning, saying that Iraq needs a "strong central government".

"We do not want the central government, as some think, to become just a process of collecting and producing wealth," the London-based pan-Arab daily of al-Hayat quoted Maliki as saying in mid-September.

Distrust between the two sides runs so deep that recently, as the news broke of Iraq's plans to buy advanced military equipment like F-16 jets from the United States, the speaker of the Kurdish Parliament, Adnan Mufti, said that U.S. should insist on guarantees from the Iraqi government that it will not use those weapons against the civilian population as in the past.

Hussein frequently used the army to crush his political opponents, notably Shias and Kurds.

Arab parties charge that Kurds are getting a disproportionate share of the Iraqi budget -- 17 percent -- and that they are over-represented in the federal government institutions in Baghdad.

Observers believe Kurds' position in Iraqi politics is weakening as sectarian Shia-Sunni violence has decreased and Arabs of both sects act more in unison on some key issues, especially those related to Kurds. Pressures from regional powers, especially Turkey, have also had an impact in undermining Kurdish influence in Iraq.

Last February, when the Turkish army launched an incursion into the remote mountainous areas of Iraqi Kurdistan in search of Kurdish guerillas, the Iraqi government merely issued a few statements. And as the U.S. seeks to stabilise Iraq, it is pressuring Kurds to make concessions to Shia and Sunni Arabs.

All this means Kurdish leaders face tough times ahead, especially as major disputes between Baghdad and the KRG over oil, territory and budgets remain unsettled.

Given the potential dangerous course that events in this regard may take, what has happened so far could be the calm before the real storm.

U.S.: Brief Talks with Syria Spur Speculation

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Inter Press Service

By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Sep 30 (IPS) -A series of meetings between U.S. and Syrian diplomats, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her counterpart, Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, at the United Nations over the past week is stirring speculation that Washington may at last be moving toward engaging Damascus.Instead of focusing on specific issues of special interest to the U.S. -- mainly Washington's demands that Syria crack down hard against the infiltration of Sunni extremists into Iraq and stop supplying Hezbollah in Lebanon -- the discussions also reportedly covered other topics as well, notably Damascus's appeals for Washington to involve directly itself in a burgeoning peace process between Syria and Israel. Both Damascus and Tel Aviv have called for U.S. engagement as a way of furthering year-old indirect talks that have been mediated by the Turkish government. While Rice has publicly blessed the process, hawks within the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney's office and a deputy national security adviser in charge of the Middle East, Elliott Abrams, have opposed any additional involvement. "Nothing is a breakthrough, and I'm not sure that there will be," Rice, who met with Moallem on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York Friday, told Bloomberg TV Monday. "But it's time to talk about some of the changes that are taking place in the Middle East." While the Rice-Moallem contact reportedly lasted only 10 minutes, her chief regional deputy, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch, met with the Syrian official in a longer meeting Monday, according to the Wall Street Journal which suggested that the talks portended a "potential thaw" between Washington and Damascus. ''I consider this a good progress in the American position," Moallem told the Journal in a reference to his meeting with Rice. "The atmosphere was positive. We decided to continue this dialogue." Still, some observers voiced scepticism that the meetings signaled a major shift in Washington's willingness to seriously engage Damascus in the nearly four months before Pres. Bush leaves office. "It's clearly time for a re-think of [Syria] policy, and I think Rice and others in the administration are trying to shepherd it forward," said Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma who publishes the widely read www.syriacomment.com blog. "Rice is definitely open to it -- and the whole Department of Defence has been kicking for this for a long time -- but she can't get it past the White House." He noted that Bush himself had referred to Syria as a ''sponsor of terrorism'' in his speech to the General Assembly just last week. As with Iran and North Korea, the split between administration hawks and realists over Syria is a familiar one. While Rice's predecessor, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, argued for engaging with Damascus both before and after the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the hawks -- then led by Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld -- favoured a policy of ''regime change'' against the government President Bashir al-Assad. Amid charges that Syria was facilitating the smuggling of Sunni extremists into Iraq, Washington's hostility toward Damascus grew steadily after the invasion and climaxed after the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri which the U.S. blamed on Syria. The administration, which offered strong support to the subsequent "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, withdrew its ambassador from Damascus as part of a much more comprehensive effort to weaken and isolate Assad. During the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah the following year, Abrams, presumably with Cheney's backing, reportedly assured Israeli policymakers that Washington would have no objection to their expanding hostilities into Syrian territory. Rumsfeld's resignation in November 2006 and his replacement by the more realist Robert Gates -- not to mention the stunning deterioration in Washington's regional's position resulting from the war's outcome, the routing of Fatah by Syria-backed Hamas in Gaza, and the growing sectarian violence In Iraq -- tilted the balance of power within the administration. Over the strenuous objections of neo-conservatives and other hawks, Rice invited Syria to take part in last November's Annapolis Summit that launched the formal resumption of direct talks between Israel and the Palestine Authority (PA). It was shortly after the meeting that Turkey began mediating indirect peace talks between Damascus and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, reportedly centred around the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in exchange for Syria's agreement to normalise ties and cut its links to Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. While, according to virtually all accounts, those talks made major progress, they have been suspended since early September pending the formation or election of a new Israeli government. Olmert, who last week resigned as head of the ruling Kadima Party due to a corruption scandal, is currently serving as a caretaker. In addition, Damascus has long insisted that a final peace accord could be reached only if Washington strongly endorsed the deal and normalised ties, something that the White House, despite the urging from the State Department and several former senior U.S. diplomats -- including the ex-head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) -- has so far ruled out. Meanwhile, however, Washington's efforts to isolate Syria have eroded significantly in recent months. Hezbollah's victory over pro-western forces in Beirut last spring followed by the Doha Accord that gave pro-Syrian forces there a virtual veto over major policy decisions marked a major political defeat for Washington's Lebanon policy. At the same time, the replacement of French President Jacques Chirac, Washington's closest ally in isolating Assad, by Nicolas Sarkozy dealt another major blow. In July, Sarkozy became the first West European leader to host Assad -- at the annual Bastille Day celebration, no less -- since Hariri's death. Sarkozy followed that up with a visit to Damascus earlier this month where he offered to co-sponsor Israeli-Syrian peace talks when they resume. At the same time, Assad announced several moves seemingly designed to appease Washington; among them, sending ambassadors to both Lebanon and Iraq. Whether the past week's meetings suggest that the balance of power within the administration has shifted should become clearer in the coming weeks, particularly if Washington sends an ambassador or senior-ranking official to Damascus, as has long been urged by Syria. According to Landis, the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, pressed the White House last December to go there himself but was rebuffed. Now head of U.S. Central Command and a White House favourite, Petraeus could decide to renew his request which, if granted, would likely be seen as evidence of serious shift. Saturday's car-bombing that killed some 17 people in Damascus itself could bolster the Pentagon's longstanding case that greater intelligence cooperation with Syria could serve the interests of both countries. Most analysts have pointed to Sunni extremists, possibly tied to al Qaeda, as the most likely perpetrators. "With its Lebanon policy a shambles and its efforts to isolate Syria defied by France, Turkey, and Israel itself, it really doesn't make sense for the White House to continue stiffing the Syrians," said Landis. "It's really just pure stubbornness at this point."

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration

Al Qaeda and the Tale of Two Battlespaces

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Stratfor

October 1, 2008
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

Over the last year or so, a lot of debate has arisen over the physical strength of al Qaeda. Some experts and government officials believe that the al Qaeda organization is now stronger than at any time since the 9/11 attacks, while others believe the core organization has lost much of its leadership and operational capability over the past seven years. The wide disparity between these two assessments may appear somewhat confusing, but a significant amount of the difference between the two can be found in the fundamental way in which al Qaeda is defined as an entity.

Many analysts supportive of the view that al Qaeda has strengthened tend to lump the entire jihadist world into one monolithic, hierarchical organization. Others, like Stratfor, who claim al Qaeda’s abilities have been degraded over the years, define the group as a small vanguard organization and only one piece of the larger jihadist pie. From Stratfor’s point of view, al Qaeda has evolved into three different — and distinct — entities. These different faces of al Qaeda include:

The core vanguard group: Often referred to by Stratfor as the al Qaeda core, al Qaeda prime or the al Qaeda apex leadership, this group is composed of Osama bin Laden and his close trusted associates. These are highly skilled, professional practitioners of propaganda, militant training and terrorism operations. This is the group behind the 9/11 attacks.
Al Qaeda franchises: These include such groups as al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Although professing allegiance to bin Laden, they are independent militant groups that remain separate from the core and, as we saw in the 2005 letter from al Qaeda core leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, there can be a great deal of tension and disagreement between them and the al Qaeda core. These regional franchises vary in size, level of professionalism and operational capability.
The broader grassroots jihadist movement: This group includes individuals and small cells inspired by al Qaeda but who, in most cases, have no contact with the core leadership.
Stratfor’s Current Assessment of al Qaeda
We believe, as we did last summer, that the core al Qaeda group has weakened and no longer poses the strategic threat to the U.S. homeland that it did prior to 9/11. However, this does not mean it is incapable of re-emerging under less pressured circumstances.

On the franchise level, some groups — such as AQIM, the Yemen franchises and the franchises in Pakistan and Afghanistan — have gained momentum over the past few years. Others — such as those in Iraq, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the Sinai Peninsula and Morocco — have lost steam. In our estimation, this ebb and flow has resulted in a constant threat on the franchise level, though the severity has migrated geographically as groups wax and wane in specific regions. The franchises have done little to expand their operations outside of their regions of interest and to conduct attacks against the “far enemy” — that is, attacks in the United States or Europe.

At the grassroots level, homegrown jihadists have posed a fairly consistent, though lower-level, threat. In the past, we have said that these jihadists think globally, but act locally. While there are far more grassroots jihadists than there are militants in the al Qaeda franchises and vastly more than in the small al Qaeda core, the grassroots jihadists tend to be highly motivated, but poorly equipped to conduct sophisticated terror attacks.

Beyond the Physical Battlefield
We believe that any realistic analysis of al Qaeda’s strength must assess more than a basic head count of militants willing and able to conduct attacks. As we have noted previously, there are two battlespaces in the war against jihadism: the physical and the ideological. Although the campaign against al Qaeda has caused the core group to become essentially marginalized in the physical battlespace, the core has undertaken great effort to remain engaged in the ideological battlespace.

In many ways, the ideological battlespace is more important than the physical battlespace in the war against jihadism, and in the jihadists’ war against the rest of the world. It is far easier to kill people than it is to kill ideologies. We have recently seen this in the resurgence of Bolivarian Revolution ideology in South America, despite the fact that Simon Bolivar, Karl Marx and Ernesto “Che” Guevara are long dead and buried. Ideology is the decisive factor that allows jihadists to recruit new fighters and gather funding for militant and propaganda operations. As long as the jihadists can recruit new militants, they can compensate for the losses they suffer on the physical battlefield. When they lose that ability, their struggle dies on the vine. Because of this, al Qaeda fears fatwas more than weapons. Weapons can kill people — but fatwas can kill the ideology that motivates people to fight and finance.

We are not the only ones who believe the ideological battlespace is critical. A video released earlier this month by al Qaeda mouthpiece As-Sahab entitled “The Word is the Word of Swords,” one of al Qaeda’s leading religious authorities, Abu Yahya al-Libi emphasized this point from within the network.

In the video, al-Libi said the jihadist battle “is not waged solely at the military and economic level, but is waged first and foremost at the level of doctrine.” He also said that his followers are in a war against an enemy that “targets all strongholds of Islam and invades the minds and ideas in the same way it invades lands and dares to destroy beliefs and meddle with the sacred things in the same way it dares to spill blood.”

Interestingly, although the video recording is dedicated to detailing the preparations for the attack on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, the bulk of the 64-minute video addresses the ideological war against al Qaeda and how “true Islam” has been undermined by leaders such as King Abdullah and the Saudi religious establishment.

In an ironic twist, the progress of the combatants is easier to assess in the ideological rather than physical battlespace — largely because most militants plotting terror attacks attempt to stay invisible until they launch their operations, while the ideological battle is for the most part conducted in plain sight.

One such visible indication on the ideological battlefield was a book written by al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, which was released in March. The book — known as “The Exoneration” — is a long response to a book written by Sayyed Imam al-Sharif. Also known as Dr. Fadl, al-Sharif is an imprisoned Egyptian radical and a founder (with al-Zawahiri) of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Published in 2007, al-Sharif’s book, “Rationalizing Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World,” provides theological arguments that counter many of the core jihadist teachings. Included among those teachings is the concept of takfir, or the practice of declaring a Muslim to be an unbeliever in order to justify an attack against him. Al-Sharif also spoke out against killing non-Muslims in Muslim countries and attacking members of other Muslim sects.

Al-Sharif was a significant player in the development of the jihadist theology that shaped the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and eventually, through al-Zawahiri and other EIJ members who became influential members of al Qaeda, al-Sharif’s concepts became instrumental in shaping the ideology of jihadism as promulgated by al Qaeda. One of his books, “The Essentials of Making Ready for Jihad,” was reportedly required reading for all new jihadist recruits at al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The renunciation of jihadist ideology by such a pivotal figure was a significant threat — one serious enough to spur al-Zawahiri’s refutation.

The Saudi ulema or Muslim scholars and former jihadist ideologues are not the only people assailing the ideology of jihadism. Of course, Western figures, such as Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders have been highly critical of jihadism. But these outsiders have little ability to sway Muslim opinion on the street — a critical objective in fighting the ideological battle. In recent years, however, we have seen more Muslim figures speak out against jihadism, which they believe is a perversion of Islam. However, criticism is not without danger. Figures such as Egyptian political analyst Diaa Rashwan have been threatened with death because of their criticism of al Qaeda and jihadist ideology.

In addition to the previously discussed video, As-Sahab has released two other lengthy videos this month. The first, to commemorate the 9/11 anniversary, was called “The Harvest of Seven Years of Crusades.” The second, called “True Imam,” was released Sept. 29. Essentially, it was a tirade against the government of Pakistan and a tribute to Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was killed in the July 2007 storming of the Red Mosque in Islamabad by the Pakistani military.

Overlap
Sometimes, things that emerge in the ideological battlespace can provide indications of important developments in the physical battlespace.

For example, one of the As-Sahab videos featured clips of Mustafa abu al-Yazid (aka Sheikh Said al-Masri). An Egyptian al Qaeda military commander, al-Yazid had reportedly been killed in an Aug. 8 operation in Bajaur. But since al-Yazid makes reference in the video to the Aug. 18 resignation of former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, he obviously was not killed 10 days earlier.

Two others noticeably absent from these three videos were Osama bin Laden and Adam Gadahn. Bin Laden, who has not been heard from since a May 18 audio message, is once again rumored to be dead. Gadahn may also be dead, according to rumors that he was killed in a January airstrike in Pakistan’s North Waziristan agency in which senior al Qaeda military commander Abu Laith al-Libi was killed. Gadahn, who has appeared in several al Qaeda video messages since emerging on the scene in 2004, has been conspicuously absent from the organization’s propaganda since the January strike.

Typically, al Qaeda has been fairly forthcoming in “declaring the martyrdom” of fallen commanders like al-Libi. The death of a central figure such as bin Laden, however, could be seen as severely detrimental to the jihadist world’s morale. Therefore, the group could be motivated to conceal his death. If bin Laden is still alive, however, we anticipate a message from him by the U.S. presidential elections Nov. 4, given his appearance before the 2004 presidential elections.

It would be somewhat out of character, however, for al Qaeda to avoid publicizing the death of a lesser figure such as Gadahn. With all the rumors circulating about jihadists seeking to use European-looking operatives in attacks against the West, one wonders if the silence regarding the American-born jihadist’s fate is designed to keep U.S. authorities in suspense — or if it is a real indication that Gadahn is alive and has left his post in the ideological battlespace in order to go operational on the physical battlefield.

Of course, the fate of these individuals, even a central figure such as bin Laden, is not nearly as important as the fate of the ideology. And we will continue to focus on the ideological battlefield for significant developments there.

One place that needs to be watched carefully is Pakistan, where events like the Red Mosque operation and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto have potentially sown the seeds for a ripe ideological harvest for both sides. It will be important to watch and see if the Marriott bombing will, as some claimed, prove to be a watershed event that marks a change in public opinion capable of rallying popular support against the jihadist ideology in Pakistan.

The Political Nature of the Economic Crisis

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Stratfor

September 30, 2008
By George Friedman

Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo referred to their discipline as “political economy.” Smith’s great work, “The Wealth of Nations,” was written by the man who held the chair in moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. This did not seem odd at the time and is not odd now. Economics is not a freestanding discipline, regardless of how it is regarded today. It is a discipline that can only be understood when linked to politics, since the wealth of a nation rests on both these foundations, and it can best be understood by someone who approaches it from a moral standpoint, since economics makes significant assumptions about both human nature and proper behavior.

The modern penchant to regard economics as a discrete science parallels the belief that economics is a distinct sphere of existence — at its best when it is divorced from political and even moral considerations. Our view has always been that the economy can only be understood and forecast in the context of politics, and that the desire to separate the two derives from a moral teaching that Smith would not embrace. Smith understood that the word “economy” without the adjective “political” did not describe reality. We need to bear Smith in mind when we try to understand the current crisis.

Societies have two sorts of financial crises. The first sort is so large it overwhelms a society’s ability to overcome it, and the society sinks deeper into dysfunction and poverty. In the second sort, the society has the resources to manage the situation — albeit at a collective price. Societies that can manage the crisis have two broad strategies. The first strategy is to allow the market to solve the problem over time. The second strategy is to have the state organize the resources of society to speed up the resolution. The market solution is more efficient over time, producing better outcomes and disciplining financial decision-making in the long run. But the market solution can create massive collateral damage, such as high unemployment, on the way to the superior resolution. The state-organized resolution creates inequities by not sufficiently punishing poor economic decisions, and creates long-term inefficiencies that are costly. But it has the virtue of being quicker and mitigating collateral damage.

Three Views of the Financial Crisis
There is a first group that argues the current financial crisis already has outstripped available social resources, so that there is no market or state solution. This group asserts that the imbalances created in the financial markets are so vast that the market solution must consist of an extended period of depression. Any attempt by the state to appropriate social resources to solve the financial imbalance not only will be ineffective, it will prolong the crisis even further, although perhaps buying some minor alleviation up front. The thinking goes that the financial crisis has been building for years and the economy can no longer be protected from it, and that therefore an extended period of discipline and austerity — beginning with severe economic dislocations — is inevitable. This is not a majority view, but it is widespread; it opposes governmen t action on the grounds that the government will make a terrible situation worse.

A second group argues that the financial crisis has not outstripped the ability of society — organized by the state — to manage, but that it has outstripped the market’s ability to manage it. The financial markets have been the problem, according to this view, and have created a massive liquidity crisis. The economy — as distinct from the financial markets — is relatively sound, but if the liquidity crisis is left unsolved, it will begin to affect the economy as a whole. Since the financial markets are unable to solve the problem in a time frame that will not dramatically affect the economy, the state must mobilize resources to impose a solution on the financial markets, introducing liquidity as the preface to any further solutions. This group believes, like the first group, that the financial crisis could have profound economic ramifications. But the second group also believes it is possible to contain the consequences. This is the view of th e Bush administration, the congressional leadership, the Federal Reserve Board and most economic leaders.

There is a third group that argues that the state mobilization of resources to save the financial system is in fact an attempt to save financial institutions, including many of those whose imprudence and avarice caused the current crisis. This group divides in two. The first subgroup agrees the current financial crisis could have profound economic consequences, but believes a solution exists that would bring liquidity to the financial markets without rescuing the culpable. The second subgroup argues that the threat to the economic system is overblown, and that the financial crisis will correct itself without major state intervention but with some limited implementation of new regulations.

The first group thus views the situation as beyond salvation, and certainly rejects any political solution as incapable of addressing the issues from the standpoint of magnitude or competence. This group is out of the political game by its own rules, since for it the situation is beyond the ability of politics to make a difference — except perhaps to make the situation worse.

The second group represents the establishment consensus, which is that the markets cannot solve the problem but the federal government can — provided it acts quickly and decisively enough.

The third group spoke Sept. 29, when a coalition of Democrats and Republicans defeated the establishment proposal. For a myriad of reasons, some contradictory, this group opposed the bailout. The reasons ranged from moral outrage at protecting the interests of the perpetrators of this crisis to distrust of a plan implemented by this presidential administration, from distrust of the amount of power ceded the Treasury Department of any administration to a feeling the problem could be managed. It was a diverse group that focused on one premise — namely, that delay would not lead to economic catastrophe.

From Economic to Political Problem
The problem ceased to be an economic problem months ago. More precisely, the economic problem has transformed into a political problem. Ever since the collapse of Bear Stearns, the primary actor in the drama has been the federal government and the Federal Reserve, with its powers increasing as the nature of potential market outcomes became more and more unsettling. At a certain point, the size of the problem outstripped the legislated resources of the Treasury and the Fed, so they went to Congress for more power and money. This time, they were blocked.

It is useful to reflect on the nature of the crisis. It is a tale that can be as complicated as you wish to make it, but it is in essence simple and elegant. As interest rates declined in recent years, investors — particularly conservative ones — sought to increase their return without giving up safety and liquidity. They wanted something for nothing, and the market obliged. They were given instruments ultimately based on mortgages on private homes. They therefore had a very real asset base — a house — and therefore had collateral. The value of homes historically had risen, and therefore the value of the assets appeared secured. Financial instruments of increasing complexity eventually were devised, which were bought by conservative investors. In due course, these instruments were bought by less conservative investors, who used them as collateral for borrowing money. They used this money to buy other instruments in a pyramiding scheme that rested on one premise: the existence of houses whose value remained stable or grew.

Unfortunately, housing prices declined. A period of uncertainty about the value of the paper based on home mortgages followed. People claimed to be confused as to what the real value of the paper was. In fact, they were not so much confused as deceptive. They didn’t want to reveal that the value of the paper had declined dramatically. At a certain point, the facts could no longer be hidden, and vast amounts of value evaporated — taking with them not only the vast pyramids of those who first created the instruments and then borrowed heavily against them, but also the more conservative investors trying to put their money in a secure space while squeezing out a few extra points of interest. The decline in housing prices triggered massive losses of money in the financial markets, as well as reluctance to lend based on uncertainty of values. The resu lt was a liquidity crisis, which simply meant that a lot of people had gone broke and that those who still had money weren’t lending it — certainly not to financial institutions.

The S&L Precedent
Such financial meltdowns based on shifts in real estate prices are not new. In the 1970s, regulations on savings and loans (S&Ls) had changed. Previously, S&Ls had been limited to lending in the consumer market, primarily in mortgages for homes. But the regulations shifted, and they became allowed to invest more broadly. The assets of these small banks, of which there were thousands, were attractive in that they were a pool of cash available for investment. The S&Ls subsequently went into commercial real estate, sometimes with their old management, sometimes with new management who had bought them, as their depositors no longer held them.

The infusion of money from the S&Ls drove up the price of commercial real estate, which the institutions regarded as stable and conservative investments, not unlike private homes. They did not take into account that their presence in the market was driving up the price of commercial real estate irrationally, however, or that commercial real estate prices fluctuate dramatically. As commercial real estate values started to fall, the assets of the S&Ls contracted until most failed. An entire sector of the financial system simply imploded, crushing shareholders and threatening a massive liquidity crisis. By the late 1980s, the entire sector had melted down, and in 1989 the federal government intervened.

The federal government intervened in that crisis as it had in several crises large and small since 1929. Using the resources at its disposal, the federal government took over failed S&Ls and their real estate investments, creating the Resolution Trust Corp. (RTC). The amount of assets acquired was about $394 billion dollars in 1989 — or 6.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) — making it larger than the $700 billion dollars — or 5 percent of GDP — being discussed now. Rather than flooding the markets with foreclosed commercial property, creating havoc in the market and further destroying assets, the RTC held the commercial properties off the market, maintaining their price artificially. They then sold off the foreclosed properties in a multiyear sequence that recovered much of what had been spent acquiring the properties. More important, it prevented the decline in commercial real estate from accelerating and creating liquidity crises throug hout the entire economy.

Many of those involved in S&Ls were ruined. Others managed to use the RTC system to recover real estate and to profit. Still others came in from the outside and used the RTC system to build fortunes. The RTC is not something to use as moral lesson for your children. But the RTC managed to prevent the transformation of a financial crisis into an economic meltdown. It disrupted market operations by introducing large amounts of federal money to bring liquidity to the system, then used the ability of the federal government — not shared by individuals — to hold on to properties. The disruption of the market’s normal operations was designed to avoid a market outcome. By holding on to the assets, the federal government was able to create an artificial market in real estate, one in which supply was constrained by the government to manage the value of commercial real estate. It did not work perfectly — far from it. But it managed to avoid the most feared outcome, which was a depression.

There have been many other federal interventions in the markets, such as the bailout of Chrysler in the 1970s or the intervention into failed Third World bonds in the 1980s. Political interventions in the American (or global) marketplace are hardly novel. They are used to control the consequences of bad decisions in the marketplace. Though they introduce inefficiencies and frequently reward foolish decisions, they achieve a single end: limiting the economic consequences of these decisions on the economy as a whole. Good idea or not, these interventions are institutionalized in American economic life and culture. The ability of Americans to be shocked at the thought of bailouts is interesting, since they are not all that rare, as judged historically.

The RTC showed the ability of federal resources — using taxpayer dollars — to control financial processes. In the end, the S&L story was simply one of bad decisions resulting in a shortage of dollars. On top of a vast economy, the U.S. government can mobilize large amounts of dollars as needed. It therefore can redefine the market for money. It did so in 1989 during the S&L crisis, and there was a general acceptance it would do so again Sept. 29.

The RTC Model and the Road Ahead
As discussed above, the first group argues the current crisis is so large that it is beyond the federal government’s ability to redefine. More precisely, it would argue that the attempt at intervention would unleash other consequences — such as weakening dollars and inflation — meaning the cure would be worse than the disease. That may be the case this time, but it is difficult to see why the consequences of this bailout would be profoundly different from the RTC bailout — namely, a normal recession that would probably happen anyway.

The debate between the political leadership and those opposing its plan is more interesting. The fundamental difference between the RTC and the current bailout was institutional. Congress created a semi-independent agency operating under guidelines to administer the S&L bailout. The proposal that was defeated Sept. 29 would have given the secretary of the Treasury extraordinary personal powers to dispense the money. Some also argued that the return on the federal investment was unclear, whereas in the RTC case it was fairly clear. In the end, all of this turned on the question of urgency. The establishment group argued that time was running out and the financial crisis was about to morph into an economic crisis. Those voting against the proposal argued there was enough time to have a more defined solution.

There was obviously a more direct political dimension to all this. Elections are just more than a month a way, and the seat of every U.S. representative is in contest. The public is deeply distrustful of the establishment, and particularly of the idea that the people who caused the crisis might benefit from the bailout. The congressional opponents of the plan needed to demonstrate sensitivity to public opinion. Having done so, if they force a redefinition of the bailout plan, an additional 13 votes can likely be found to pass the measure.

But the key issue is this: Are the resources of the United States sufficient to redefine financial markets in such a way as to manage the outcome of this crisis, or has the crisis become so large that even the resources of a $14 trillion economy mobilized by the state can’t do the job? If the latter is true, then all other discussions are irrelevant. Events will take their course, and nothing can be done. But if that is not true, that means that politics defines the crisis, as it has other crisis. In that case, the federal government can marshal the resources needed to redefine the markets and the key decision-makers are not on Wall Street, but in Washington. Thus, when the chips are down, the state trumps the markets.

All of this may not be desirable, efficient or wise, but as an empirical fact, it is the way American society works and has worked for a long time. We are seeing a case study in it — including the possibility the state will refuse to act, creating an interesting and profound situation. This would allow the market alone to define the outcome of the crisis. This has not been allowed in extreme crises in 75 years, and we suspect this tradition of intervention will not be broken now. The federal government will act in due course, and an institutional resolution taking power from the Treasury and placing it in the equivalent of the RTC will emerge. The question is how much time remains before massive damage is done to the economy.

The Smash of Civilizations

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Baltimore Chronicle

Chalmers Johnson
25/8/2008

In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi people. At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by patrimony was exactly that – Iraqi oil. In their "joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."1 In this, they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future "clash of civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.
There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq – the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad's museum – or been forgotten more quickly in this country.
Teaching the Iraqis About the Untidiness of History
In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as "the cradle of civilization," with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, "It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing."2 No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia – different names for the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call "Iraq," using the old Arab term for the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: "between the [Tigris and Eurphrates] rivers").3 Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24).
The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq's cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity."4 Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.
In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote: "The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended."5 Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference – even the glee – shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."6 Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that "Freedom's untidy. … Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."7
The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan's ancient capital of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, "All gone, all gone. All gone in two days."8
A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Park and Angela M.H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what was in the museum before the catastrophe, where those objects had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered. The editors and authors have dedicated a portion of the royalties from this book to the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum's John Curtis reported that at least half of the 40 most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000 items looted from the museum's showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.9 Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been confiscated in the United States.10 Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.
The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of "Nimrud gold," excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.11
The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Mلrquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucciَn de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.12 Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.13
The Burger King of Ur
Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned that the looting of all 13 national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales.14 Given the richness of Iraq's past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.
In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected."15 Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some 60 New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.16 Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.
The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush's administration accepted the convention's rules and abided by a "no-fire target list" of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.17 UNESCO and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush's administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.
Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner – the civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased – sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of 16 institutions that "merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets." The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures" and that "looters should be arrested/detained." First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it was "inexcusable" that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.18
As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, "Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events."19 American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112–2095 B.C. and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century B.C.), the Marines spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its walls.20 The military then made the monument "off limits" to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.
Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. On Oct. 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. It "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] … Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home."21
The great British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed: "There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments. … It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them."22
The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum's authority on Iraq's many archaeological sites, reported on a visit in December 2004 that he saw "cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate" and a "2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles."23 Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick façade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.24 The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, "Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the 6h century B.C., collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great]."25
And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of Western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq's antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.
President Bush's supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on terrorism as a "clash of civilizations." But the civilization we are in the process of destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage. It is also part of the world's patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental 3rd century A.D. Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value, and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.

NOTES
1- American Embassy, London, "Visit of President Bush to Northern Ireland, April 7–8, 2003."
2- William R. Polk, "Introduction," Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic, "Spotlight on Iraq's Plundered Past," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005.
3- David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989, 2001), p. 450.
4- George Bush's address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on "toward Freedom TV," April 10, 2003.
5- Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40.
6- See Frank Rich, "And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting,'" New York Times, April 27, 2003.
7- Robert Scheer, "It's U.S. Policy that's 'Untidy,'" Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2003; reprinted in "Books in Flames," TomDispatch, April 15, 2003.
8- John F. Burns, "Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures," New York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), "The Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace," History News Network, April 14, 2003.
9- Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209–210.
10- Mark Wilkinson, "Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage," Reuters, June 29, 2005.
11- Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212–13; Louise Jury, "At Least 8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced," Independent, May 24, 2005; Stephen Fidler, "'The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like Vandalism, but Organized Crime May Be Behind It,'" Financial Times, May 23, 2003; Rod Liddle, "The Day of the Jackals," Spectator, April 19, 2003.
12- Humberto Mلrquez, "Iraq Invasion the 'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 1258,'"Antiwar.com, Feb. 16, 2005.
13- Robert Fisk, "Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad," Independent, April 15, 2003.
14- Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10.
15- Guy Gugliotta, "Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to Save Iraq's Historic Artifacts," Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire Gibson, "Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report on the Looting of Museums, Archives, and Sites," International Foundation for Art Research.
16- Rod Little, op. cit..; Oliver Burkeman, "Ancient Archive Lost in Baghdad Blaze," Guardian, April 15, 2003.
17- See James A. R. Nafziger, Art Loss in Iraq: Protection of Cultural Heritage in Time of War and Its Aftermath, International Foundation for Art Research.
18- Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy, and Gaby Hinsliff, "U.S. Army Was Told to Protect Looted Museum," Observer, April 20, 2003; Frank Rich, op. cit.; Paul Martin, "Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures," Washington Times, April 20, 2003.
19- Said Arjomand, "Under the Eyes of U.S. Forces and This Happened?," History News Network, April 14, 2003.
20- Ed Vulliamy, "Troops 'Vandalize' Ancient City of Ur," Observer, May 18, 2003; Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 18, 35; Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 99, fig. 25.
21- Tallil Air Base, GlobalSecurity.org,.
22- Max Mallowan, Mallowan's Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), p. 61.
23- Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, "Babylon Wrecked by War," Guardian, January 15, 2005.
24- Owen Bowcott, "Archaeologists Fight to Save Iraqi Sites," June 20, 2005.
25- Zainab Bahrani, "The Fall of Babylon," in Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 214.