Just a reminder to all readers to check out my/our new blog, "Fair Policy, Fair Discussion", which now has five or six posts that are quick takes on what we've been doing on our CNI study tour ("political pilgrimage") around the Middle/Near East.
We've now had all the meetings and [...]
In some countries, mine included, today is remembered as "Veterans' Day" or "Armistice Day." Juan Cole sensibly wrote earlier today that "The most patriotic way to honor future veterans of foreign wars is not to create any unnecessarily."
Fellow "Wahoo" and good friend Barin Kayaoglu, writing in the
The BBC this morning carries a curious item about Iran moving its capital city away from Tehran. It's not a particularly new idea, and a geo-physical argument exists to support such a dramatic change.
Yet recent political earthquakes may also be involved in the calculation. The article buys into the [...]
MTV (Music Television) "University" has selected Simin Behbahani, "the poet who never sold her soul or her pen," to be its second poet laureate.
For a visually challenged 82-years-young Iranian, how cool is that?
Beginning Monday, Nov. 2nd Behbahani's poems will be featured on MTV-U in a' [...]
For the foreseeable future I'll be doing all or most of my Middle East-related blogging over at the new blog I've launched on behalf of the CNI Foundation. It's called Fair Policy, Fair Discussion.
As veteran bloggers will probably recognize, at present FPFD uses a very standard Wordpress template. I [...]
Michael Goldfarb, who was the deputy communications director for John McCain's campaign, worked for a while in that temple of neoconservative organizing, the Project for a New American Century, and is a kind of scuzzy attack-dog for the pro-settler hard right, has now decided to come after-- poor' [...]
Well, it's been quite the mindshift transplant for me the past couple of days, getting my head around budgets, HR policies, management structures, etc in my speedily assumed new job as Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
When I say "national interest", I mean-- as readers of [...]
So, Obama's Justice Department has finally decided to play some degree of hardball with Israel?
Back in May, Obama's Justice Department decided to back down on the indictment against AIPAC's Steve Rosen.
Last month, Obama's special peace envoy, George Mitchell, apparently decided to back down on pushing Netanyahu for "the" [...]
This is a huge question in Afghanistan. It was earlier a huge question in Iraq-- but it turned out that Nuri al-Maliki had a wily (and previusly unrecognized) understanding of this question.
Does Abu Mazen understand it? Good question...
(Note: John Locke may have been a racist, an investor in the transatlantic [...]
J Street's big inaugural conference starts next Sunday evening... And at lunchtime on Monday, Oct. 26, there'll be a great affiliated event: a panel discussion involving a large number of pro-peace bloggers, including yours truly.
All JWN readers who are at the conference, come along! Blogs have played a large role' [...]
The Harris School for Public Policy at the University of Chicago presumably thought it was quite "normal" and appropriate-- perhaps, even a boon for fundraising!-- to invite former Israeli p.m. Ehud Olmert to give a lecture.
Olmert, however, is not just any old former prime minister. He was also the prime [...]
The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva today endorsed the report of the Goldstone Commission that identified probable war crimes and and crimes against humanity committed by Israel and by some Palestinian armed groups during last winter's Israeli assault on Gaza.
That report from AFP tells us that,
25 of [...]
Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty is a relic of the Cold War that in the mid-1990s got rebranded by Tom Dine (as you can read in my Nation piece) as a very serious lever of US soft power in the Muslim world.
What RFE/RL does is technically termed "surrogate broadcasting." [...]
Reidar Visser has a new report up on his blog, that summarizes the latest revelations about Galbraith and Kurdish oil made in today's Dagens Næringsliv, from Oslo.
DN (and from them, Reidar) have reproduced a document attesting that the Connecticut-registered company in which Galbraith has, I believe, a half-share did [...]
The NYT today carried a substantial article about the dispute over oil rights between the Iraqi central government and the Kurdish regional government, including many mentions of the oil lease for the KRG's Tawke field held by the Norwegian company DNO-- and they managed to do that without making' [...]
Leila Abu-Saba was one of the first great American bloggers for Palestinian rights and Arab-Israeli peace. Since early 2004, she used her blog Dove's Eye View to explore many dimensions of her Lebanese-American heritage, her family life, Lebanese politics, peace issues, identity issues, and from time to time the [...]
Turkey's adroit and visionary foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, and the government he's a part of, have taken two intriguing moves in recent days:
1. They canceled an invitation to Israel to take part in five-party air force exercises in eastern Anatolia-- and Davutoglu spelled out to CNN that this [...]
Mondoweiss today gives us a Youtube clip of Tony Blair dodging a tough question from a University of Buffalo student about the Goldstone report.
The student, Nick Kabat, asked Blair why the US and Israel should be allowed to get away with blocking the Goldstone Report, how (as the "Quartet"'s' [...]
Reidar Visser informs us today that the independent-minded US "free-lance diplomat" Peter Galbraith reportedly, from 2004 through 2008, held a five-percent share in the production-sharing agreement concluded between the small Norwegian private oil company DNO and the Kurdish Regional Government.
Galbraith, a longtime supporter of Kurdish (and before that Croatian) [...]
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today that it's awarding the 2009 Nobel peace prize to Barack Obama.
The announcement says the award is being given,
for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for [...]
It's good to put yourself into the shoes of others from time to time. For a while now, I've been trying to imagine the conversations that the Central Committee of the Chinese Committee Party doubtless hold from time to time about the various overseas adventures (!) of the US military.
I'm' [...]
Charismatic British-Israeli peacenik Daniel Levy made a remarkable presentation this morning, at a big conference on US-Israeli relations organized by the extremely rightwing, pro-Israeli think-tank, the Hudson Institute.
Luckily Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress's Wonk Room was there to video and verbally describe the highlights for the [...]
Kudos to Christopher Flavelle of ProPublica for his article about the case of Kuwaiti citizen Fouad Mahmoud al-Rabiah. Rabiah's been held at Gitmo since 2002-- and finally, last month, received a judgment of 'Habeas Corpus' from US District Court for the District of Columbia Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
'Habeas Corpus' is Latin [...]
Eight years ago today, the US-- with the help of non-trivial allies like Russia, Iran, and India-- launched its invasion of Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter (though not before) the UN gave a sort of retroactive imprimatur of approval to the invasion. Then in March 2002, the Security Council created the United [...]
Haaretz has had two interesting stories in recent weeks detailing attempts by Jewish Israeli peace activists to stimulate discussion and reconsideration among their compatriots regarding their views of 'the Other'.
One of these stories was about a project jointly undertaken by Israeli conceptual artist Mushon Zer-Aviv worked and the [...]
Iran's ongoing internal "chess match," the intense controversy over Iran's presidential elections and the aftermath, is not only "not over," it's getting profoundly interesting. The charges & counter-charges continue to fly, with both sides dredging up extraordinary heavyweights, figuratively and literally, to their cause. A few mind-boggling examples:
Those notables who [...]
Just two months ago, Abu Mazen's western backers (and bank-rollers) were lauding the non-trivial achievement he racked up by being able to convene a selected list of invitees to the Fateh General Conference. In the weeks since then, his political standing in the Palestinian street has taken four nosedives:
1.' [...]
Somebody calling him/herself variously "Steve Bronfman", "Edward Newhouse", and even "A. Jew" has been engaging in pathetic sock-puppetry here, desperately trying to create the impression that there are a number of different commenters here who all share his/her point of view. Persistent commenter Titus/Titan/etc has also engaged in this form [...]
Mahmoud Abbas, who wears the three hats as head of Fateh, president of the interim PA, and head of the PLO, has now "ordered an enquiry" into how it was that the PLO's rep in Geneva agreed to defer the UN system's further consideration of the Goldstone report.
So who [...]
What happens to someone when he lives in, and imbibes the air of, the Washington bubble for so darn' long that he completely forgets what the real world looks like? Well, read Jackson Diehl's piece in Sunday's waPo, and you can get some idea.
The guy has completely lost touch' [...]
A glance at the Maan News website today shows Palestinian society rising up to urge strong endorsement of the Goldstone Report's recommendations, and criticizing Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO for blocking/delaying that action.
The most searing report comes from Gaza:
Families of Gaza war victims voiced their disappointment with the [...]
While Israeli PM Netanyahu has been trying to downplay the importance of the Goldstone report, denigrate its principal author, and generally discredit the UN Rights Council's whole venture of commissioning it, acknowledgment of the report's real importance has come from unlikely source: the hawkish American-Israeli commentator Yossi Klein Halevi.
Back in [...]
The first stage in the Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange deal related to long-held Israeli POW Gilad Shalit took place today, with the exchange of 19 Palestinian women prisoners for a two-minute video of Shalit, that showed him apparently well, and well treated.
This exchange is a 'first payment' by each side on [...]
It's here. Also archived here.
One bottom line is here:
In 2003, Russia and China were unable (both in strictly military terms, and in terms of global power equations) to block the invasion of Iraq. But since 2003, Russia has stabilised its internal governance considerably from the chaotic state' [...]
As a US citizen, I have to say I think it is completely wrong for our president to use public resources to support the bid of his hometown, Chicago, to host the 2016 Olympics. He's especially wrong to do this because, before he intervened, the main contender was Brazil.
The US [...]
Okay, it's still way too early for any celebrations. But just as the US announces the acceleration of its troop withdrawal from Iraq, the careful analyst Reidar Visser has had three intriguing posts on his blog (1, 2, 3) that bring us modestly good political news' [...]
China's 1.3 billion citizens have today been celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic.
Of course, much remains to be done to ensure that China's people can enjoy all the rights to which they're entitled. But the founding of the PRC brought to an end' [...]
Michael Posner, who's the US's Assistant secretary of State for Human Rights, Democratization, etc, spoke about the Goldstone Report at the UN Human Rights Council today. He called on Israel, as well as Hamas, to,
utilize appropriate domestic [judicial] review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on [...]
Peter Martin had a very informative article in Saturday's Toronto Globe & Mail about the rapid emergence of a new kind of religio-nationalists in Israel.
They even, he says, have a new name: "Hardal"-- a cross between "haredi" (an ultra-orthodox Jewish believer) and Mafdal, Israel's longstanding National Religious Party.
The piece [...]
I've been thinking, based on many conversations over past years, about what constitutes the heart of the "independence" that Palestinian supporters of a two-state solution judge it is, that their independent state has to have.
Very evidently, no independent Palestinian state that emerges from anything like the current diplomatic arrangements or' [...]
There have been positive signals coming out of the Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks between Fateh and Hamas.
Al-Quds al-Arabi tells us that Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal, who met with Egyptian intel chief Omar Suleiman yesterday, signaled his agreement to the main compromise (on voting rules) being proposed by the Egyptians-- and [...]
There's a rapidly growing discussion here in the US about "what to do in Afghanistan." Some of it is thoughtful, well-informed, and serious. Like this piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in today's WaPo, which argues that the two best options look to be "Go all-in, or fold."
(Actually, that's only [...]
As the Obama administration prepares for next Thursday's important P5+1 meeting with Iran, the prospects for mounting a successful sanctions campaign against Iran are being seriously undermined by the actions of the Israeli government and government-backed Jewish extremists in Jerusalem.
Today, Israeli police battled Muslim worshippers in the Haram al-Sharif' [...]
Finally, he said it!
Just as I and some others have been urging him to do for some time now, today Pres. Obama said this about getting a final Israeli-Palestinian peace:
It's not just critical for the Israelis and the Palestinians; it's critical for the world. It is [...]
I've been thinking more about the timing of the WaPo's publication of Woodward's bombshell and the accompanying materials this morning.
It seems clear to me Woodward must have had the text of the McChrystal Assessment for a number of days. His colleagues had the time to do some good follow-up' [...]
The Canadian-Israeli management guru Bernard Avishai has published a paean to Salam Fayyad in the current issue of Harper's magazine.
This raised for me, yet again, a question that I've thought about a lot over the past year: Does Salam Fayyad have a chance of ending up like Nuri al-Maliki, [...]
For many years now, successive US administrations have been vigorously trying to persuade as many Arab countries as possible—especially those that are still in a state of war with Israel—to undertake “confidence building measures” in a purported attempt to “entice” Israel into being more forthcoming in the peace diplomacy…
Now, an episode involving the respected Lebanese [...]
I was reading this account from Reuters of the way that Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, today tried to sideline and bury the important report of the Goldstone Commission.
Firstly, she brushed aside the report's recommendation that the Security Council should remain actively involved in the follow-up [...]
Excellent analysis, as usual, from Reidar Visser on Biden's latest trip to Iraq.
Noting that this is Biden's second visit to Iraq as Vice-President, Visser writes,
If anything, what these visits have demonstrated twice is that US leverage is quickly disappearing from Iraq. Biden today informed the press that no [...]
Ehud Barak to Yediot Aharonoth:
"I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel."
Barak said "Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existential threat," although he did add that he viewed Iran as a challenge to the whole world.
(HT:' [...]
The NYT's John Schwartz reported last night that Human Rights Watch has decided to suspend the controversial military analyst Marc Garlasco with full pay, pending an investigation into his engagement with the hobby of collecting Nazi-era military memorabilia.
I think this is the right thing to do. Wish they'd done' [...]
The Goldstone Commission, appointed in April by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that were committed during last winter's Gaza war, has now presented its findings to the Council.
Regarding actions undertaken by the armed forces of [...]
Netanyahu just loves to poke his finger in America's eye... again, and again, and again...
Today, with Pres. Obama's peace envoy George Mitchell still in Israel, Netanyahu bluntly told a key Knesset committee that "there will not be a complete freeze on settlement building and that building in Jerusalem will" [...]
Another Ramadan, another set of soap operas in the Arab world (along with new seasons of old-established favorites like "Bab al-Hara.")
From Beirut, the "Land and People" blog's Zayd gives us a quick critique of this year's crop of soap operas, that he gathered in that center of Lebanese urban [...]
The usually well-informed Akiva Eldar has an important piece in today's Haaretz, reporting this:
Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will resume next month on the basis of an understanding that the establishment of a Palestinian state will be officially announced in two years.
Palestinian and European Union sources told [...]
Amira Hass had a searing report in Thursday's Haaretz. It's about the killing and slow death during last winter's Gaza war of Ahmed Samouni, age 4, and his father Atiyeh.
Amira, a secular saint from Israel, interviewed Ahmed's mother Zeinat in May in a Gaza City neighborhood.
Here's what Hass wrote [...]
His own defense of his actions is here.
He writes,
Now I've achieved some blogosphere fame, not for the hours I've spent sifting through the detritus of war, visiting hospitals, interviewing victims and witnesses and soldiers, but for my hobby (unusual and disturbing to some, I realize) of collecting Second [...]
I realize I promised to put something on the blog about the presentation that Rob Malley made during Thursday's discussion of Hussein Ibish's latest anti-one-state screed. Let me convey just the main points here.
Rob started off by noting that all the attempts to get a two-state outcome that have [...]
On September 12, 2001, as US military planners started examining the options they had t counter-attach against Al-Qaeda and its hosts in Afghanistan, they and their colleagues in the State Department rapidly realized that if they wanted to actually topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan they'd need the help of' [...]
Some friends have made the point, a propos of what I wrote here yesterday, that the Iron Cross is not a specifically Nazi insignia, but a longterm insignia of the German military. Thanks for that clarification.
They also make the completely correct point that it's important to distinguish between' [...]
Actually, perhaps trending pretty rapidly toward the truly catastrophic?
Joshua Fost of Registan blogged earlier today that "Ghazni Province is falling to the Taliban." (Map and basic info on Ghazni are here.)
Later in Foust's post, he seems to backtrack a bit, writing,
There’s no way to know if that’s' [...]
There is a huge commotion in the blogosphere about the fact that Marc Garlasco, the senior military affairs specialist at Human Rights Watch, has long sustained a hobby of collecting and writing about Nazi memorabilia.
I've thought this over lot since I first learned about it yesterday. Is collecting and
This morning I dropped by the Woodrow Wilson Center, a serious think-tank here in Washington DC that's headed by the near-iconic Lee Hamilton. They had a panel discussion that had been convened to help a man called Hussein Ibish launch a book he has just published, titled What's [...]
When will this end???
BBC:
Israel says it is pushing ahead with delayed plans to build almost 500 more homes for Jewish settlers in Jerusalem.
The project is for the Pisgat Zeev settlement in annexed East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
The announcement comes two days after Israel said [...]
When election results are strongly disputed from within the community they were held in, this represents--obviously-- a deep crisis of power and legitimacy within that community.
That's the case in Iran today, more than three months after their disputed election. It was also the case in the US in November-December 2004, [...]
The Israeli human-rights group B'tselem today released its final report on the death toll in Gaza from the highly asymmetrical fighting of last December-January.
Their figures differ a little from those released yesterday by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
PCHR put the complete death toll among Gazans at' [...]
Steve Clemons tells us today that
Afghanistan, like Iraq, is sending the impression to the rest of the world that America is at a "limit" point in its military and power capabilities.
Well, duh.
He goes on to say,
Limits are very, very, very bad in the great power game [...]
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has now published (PDF, in Arabic) its final tally of the human cost of last winter's Israeli assault on Gaza.
The English version is expected to be out next week.
The report is titled "Targeted Civilians". The Palestine News Network today published a [...]
The negotiations for a prisoner-exchange agreement between Hamas and Israel seem to have entered a new, more productive phase, with the news-- first reported by Xinhua-- that Norwegian officials have now joined German officials in nailing down the details of the prisoner swap.
As reported by Xinhua from Gaza, the [...]
I realize I'm coming into the Israel-linked organ-trafficking story late. But my old editors at the CSM always stressed the value of working assiduously at a story to get it done as well as possible rather than rushing in under the illusion you can write a satisfactory "first draft of'" [...]
Jonathan Cook had a great piece in The National yesterday, in which he pulled together from exemplary Israeli sources the history of serious problems at Israel's government institute of forensics at Abu Kabir, near Jaffa.
He made the important point that the Swedish journo Donald Bostrom who wrote about the [...]
The statement the White House issued yesterday in response to Netanyahu's announcement that he would unleash the construction of hundreds of additional settler housing units before he considered submitting to any possible freeze on additional construction was weak and pathetic:
We regret the reports of Israel's plans to approve [...]
Someone called Artemy Kalinovsky has just published a thoughtful essay at the AfPak Channel arguing that, for precedents for many of the dilemmas the US military faces in Afghanistan, we should look no further afield than to the Red Army's experiences in Afghanistan a quarter-century ago.
I have a lot [...]
The wise and well-informed analyst of Iraq affairs Reidar Visser has responded to the pleadings of the masses (well mine, anyway) and created a blog, Iraq and Gulf Analysis, on which he's posting his shorter research notes as well as links to his longer analytical pieces.
Mainly, this past week, [...]
The compendiously smart and well-informed blogger Profco has a lot of great background about Israeli-Norwegian relations over at TPM Cafe today.
S/he wrote it, of course, in light of Norway's recent decision to divest itself of previous investments in the company Elbit, which produces electronics for Israel's illegal Wall.
Profco [...]
Lang makes some important points here about the distortion of what should be a rational, nationwide discussion about the US military's massive and troubled engagement in Afghanistan.
He writes,
The interests of the reigning generals, the neocons and the Brothers of the Order of Counterinsurgency at CNAS are coming together [...]
Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen today announced that the country's $400 billion-strong sovereign wealth fund, the Oil Fund, has divested itself of all investments in the large Elbit company, based on Elbit's involvement in the building and maintenance of the illegal Wall built by Israel deep inside the occupied West [...]
I've been reading the blog entries that Palestinian-American writer and activist Nehad Khader has been posting about her first-time visit back to her grandparents' homeplaces (here, etc.)
Amazing, heartfelt writing. (HT: Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.)
Nehad writes:
I have never felt a more bizarre sensation for intense saddness and simultaneous ecstacy. [...]
The Israeli government today released nine of the 32 Hamas-affiliated legislators, elected in June 2006, whom it had been holding since June 2006.
International law completely prohibits the detention of any persons when they're captured solely to be held as hostages. But the basic criminality of the action-- in the' [...]
