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LIBYA’S CIVIL WAR: In my latest piece in the Politico, I argue that the U.S. should strategically threaten force to discourage Qadhafi’s ongoing crackdown:
The White House would not likely deploy troops on Libyan soil, but it can use U.S. naval power to enforce a no-fly zone and to ensure the safe passage of humanitarian aid to areas that have been nearly impossible to reach. This is also a bit of psychological warfare, of course. The mere threat of U.S. firepower will not be lost on Qadhafi, who remembers the air strikes President Reagan ordered in response to Libya’s bombing of a Berlin discotheque bombing in 1986. That bombing raid killed Qadhafi’s adopted daughter.
The threat of force, coupled with U.S. sanctions that froze Qadhafi’s assets in America, and U.N. sanctions that bar his family from traveling, has put the Libyan leader in a corner.
More here.
Judith Miller describes how Qadhafi’s son Saif used money to fool Western journalists, academics and government officials into thinking he was a liberal reformer:
In retrospect, none of us should have been surprised by Saif’s sudden transformation last week. He had long been designated as the kinder, gentler face of his father’s ugly regime. Yes, he had helped the Bulgarian nurses, but only after they had been tortured mercilessly during their first few years in jail. Yes, he had pushed for greater openness and debate in Libya, but at least twice renounced politics in convenient fits of pique. Yes, he may have pressed his father to compensate the families of Pan Am 103 victims. But he also played a major role in securing the 2009 release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombing, who was ostensibly dying of cancer but is still alive. It was Saif who accompanied Megrahi home to Libya on a private jet and boasted in an interview after their return, as the Guardian reported, that the release had been linked to lucrative business deals.
More here.
LIBYAN WHITEWASH, CONT’D: In American academia and the media, the casualties of Qadhafi’s PR campaign continue to climb, giving me rare occasion to quote David Corn:
In February 2007 Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr., who developed the concept of “soft power,” [1] visited Libya and sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat [2] for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing “direct democracy.” Nye noted that “there is no doubt that” the Libyan autocrat “acts differently on the world stage today than he did in decades past. And the fact that he took so much time to discuss ideas—including soft power—with a visiting professor suggests that he is actively seeking a new strategy.” The article struck a hopeful tone: that there was a new Qaddafi. It also noted that Nye had gone to Libya “at the invitation of the Monitor Group, a consulting company that is helping Libya open itself to the global economy.”
Nye did not disclose all. He had actually traveled to Tripoli as a paid consultant of the Monitor Group (a relationship he disclosed in an email to Mother Jones), and the firm was working under a $3 million-per-year contract [3] with Libya. Monitor, a Boston-based consulting firm with ties to the Harvard Business School, had been retained, according to internal documents obtained by a Libyan dissident group, not to promote economic development, but “to enhance the profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi.” So The New Republic published an article sympathetic to Qaddafi that had been written by a prominent American intellectual paid by a firm that was being compensated by Libya to burnish the dictator’s image.
Presumably, Nye was sharing his independently derived view of Qaddafi. Yet a source familiar with the Harvard professor’s original submission to the magazine notes, “It took considerable prodding from editors to get him to reluctantly acknowledge the regime’s very well-known dark side.” And Franklin Foer, then the editor of the magazine, says, “If we had known that he was consulting for a firm paid by the government, we wouldn’t have run the piece.” (After an inquiry by Mother Jones, The New Republic added a disclaimer to the Nye story acknowledging the details of Nye’s relationship with Monitor.)
More here.
SUCKERING SILVIO: While the Obama administration continues goosing Europe to take a harder line toward Tripoli, the Italian government has improbably emerged as Qaddafi’s greatest champion:
In each of my three conversations with Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi throughout the 1990s, one theme prevailed: the Libyan leader's contempt for my country. Listening to his verbose condemnation of Italian colonialism was the price I paid to ask my own questions -- no matter the supposed topic of the interview. In one encounter, in the middle of the night under a tent in the Sirte desert, he bemoaned Libya's exploitation at Italian hands; at noon near the sand dunes just outside Tripoli, he blamed his country's troubles on Rome. Now, with his regime on edge, he is again blaming outsiders for Libya's ills. The protests, he said in a Feb. 22 address, were sparked by malevolent foreigners who were giving the demonstrators drugs. He accused the Italians -- along with the Americans -- of having delivered shoulder-launched rocket-propelled grenades to the rebel forces.
Given all this, you might find it odd -- as I still do -- that Qaddafi's closest European ally is, or was until very recently, none other than the Italian government. During his four decades of rule, the colonel managed to convince Italian leaders not only that their country owed Libya a historical debt, but that Rome couldn't do without Tripoli's help on everything from terrorism to immigration to oil. He extracted huge concessions from Rome and won huge economic windfalls for cronies including Farhat Bengdara, governor of the Central Bank of Libya, who became vice chairman of UniCredit, the biggest Italian bank, in 2009. Perhaps most significantly, he convinced Italy to be an evangelist for Libya's reintegration into the world community. The result is an absurdly asymmetrical relationship between the two countries; Qaddafi was always the winner.
More here.
THE NEW MIDDLE EAST: FDD Senior Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht explains how the U.S. should promote democracy in the Middle East:
The administration may well play an inconsistent game, trying to support democracy seriously in Egypt but less seriously elsewhere. This will be a big mistake, inviting the contempt of Arabs and the collapse of U.S. democracy promotion everywhere. We need a consistent rule: The United States endorses one form of government—the one it chooses for itself, representative government—and it applauds this everywhere. The Khalifa family in Bahrain and the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan should be under no illusions about where America’s heart and wallet are. We most certainly are in favor of orderly change, which is why the Khalifas and Hashemites should start now to transfer political power gradually to the Shia in Bahrain and the Palestinians in Jordan. They may possibly save their monarchies by doing so (and save us a fairly good friend on the East Bank of the Jordan River and the anchorage of the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf). We really don’t want to see the Saudi armed forces rolling across the Gulf causeway to crush democratic protests in Bahrain. If we wanted to create a situation that Iran could exploit, that would be it. If we wanted to ignite sectarian strife throughout the region, that would be how to do it.
The United States has an enormous role to play midwifing democracy throughout the Middle East. And President Obama, if he could realize this despite his profound unease at becoming the successor to the freedom-promoting George W. Bush, might go down in history as America’s great third world president—the man who permanently buried our dependency on despots throughout the Middle East.
More here.
Bret Stephens asks: Is there an Arab George Washington?
Yet until technology recasts human nature, human nature will be what it always has been. And human nature abhors a leadership vacuum. When revolutions are successful, it’s not that they have no “papas”; it’s that they have good papas. So it was with Washington, or with Mandela—men of hard-earned and unmatched moral authority, steeped in the right values, who not only could defeat their adversaries but rein in the tempers of their own followers.
What happens when revolutions don’t have such leaders? The French Revolution is Exhibit A. Exhibit B might be Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution of 2005, which took place following the assassination of the charismatic former premier Rafik Hariri. Millions of Lebanese poured into Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square on March 14 to demand the end of Syrian occupation. The Syrians obliged. Elections gave pro-Western groups clear majorities in parliament. The country seemed settled on a better course.
More here.
FDD Senior Fellow Emanuele Ottolenghi writes:
Whatever the outcome of the current season of Arab discontent, one should not forget that the Arab order of things — pillage the state, lie to the people, deflect responsibility and pay lip service to Palestine — has ultimately destroyed civil society. This is an ill omen for those who now wish for a speedy transition to democracy. The wasteland created by tyranny left only one political force organised enough to exploit the current situation: the Muslim Brotherhood, a body dedicated not to establishing Egypt as the beacon of democracy in the Arab world but to introducing a politically subversive and subverted form of Islam.
As Cairo’s season of discontent carries its message to the far corners of the region, the Arab masses are ready to seize their destiny. In the Arab spring of nations we may find that the tyrants’ excuse — choose us or the extremists — will haunt us long after the ballot box has issued its verdict.
More here.
IRAN’S NEXT MOVE: Karim Sadjadpour is optimistic that the Mullahs lack the credibility necessary to win their neighbors’ hearts and minds.
It has been said about authoritarian regimes that while they rule their collapse appears inconceivable, but after they’ve fallen their demise appears to have been inevitable. In the short term Tehran’s oil largesse and religious pretensions have seemingly created for it deeper, if not wider, popular support than many Arab regimes.
But the regime’s curiously heavy-handed response to resilient pro-democracy protests — including the recent disappearance of opposition leaders Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi — betrays its anxiety about the 21st-century viability of an economically floundering, gender-apartheid state led by a “supreme leader” who purports to be the prophet’s representative on Earth.
Tehran publicly cheered the fall of Egyptian and Tunisian regimes undone by corruption, economic stagnation and repression. Do its rulers not know that Iran — according to Transparency International, Freedom House and the World Bank — ranks worse than Tunisia and Egypt in all three categories?
A saying often attributed to Lenin best captures the sorts of tectonic shifts taking place in today’s Middle East. “Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen.”
The uprisings may not all end happily. As history has shown time and again — notably in Iran in 1979 — minorities that are organized and willing to use violence can establish reigns of terror over unorganized or passive majorities. Whatever ensues, however, the Arab risings have revealed that Iran’s revolutionary ideology has not only been rendered bankrupt at home, but it has also lost the war of ideas among its neighbors.
More here.
Caroline Glick is more pessimistic. She predicts that all Middle Eastern uprisings will fail as long as
the Iranian regime remains in power, it will be that much harder for the Egyptians to build an open democracy or for the Saudis to open the kingdom to liberal voices and influences. The same is true of almost every country in the region. Iran is the primary regional engine of war, terror, nuclear proliferation and instability. As long as the regime survives, it will be difficult for liberal forces in the region to gain strength and influence.
On February 24, the mullahs reportedly arrested opposition leaders Mir Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi along with their wives. It took the Obama administration several days to even acknowledge the arrests, let alone denounce them.
In the face of massive regime violence, Iran’s anti-regime protesters are out in force in cities throughout the country demanding their freedom and a new regime. And yet, aside from paying lip service to their bravery, neither the US nor any other government has come forward to help them. No one has supplied Iran’s embattled revolutionaries with proxy servers after the regime brought down their Internet communications networks. No one has given them arms.
No one has demanded that Iran be thrown out of all UN bodies pending the regime’s release of the Mousavis and Karroubis and the thousands of political prisoners being tortured in the mullah’s jails. No one has stepped up to fund around-the-clock anti-regime broadcasts into Iran to help regime opponents organize and coordinate their operations. Certainly no one has discussed instituting a no-fly zone over Iran to protect the protesters.
With steeply rising oil prices and the real prospect of al-Qaida taking over Yemen, Iranian proxies taking over Bahrain, and the Muslim Brotherhood controlling Egypt, some Americans are recognizing that not all revolutions are Washingtonian.
But there is a high likelihood that an Iranian revolution would be. At a minimum, a democratic Iran would be far less dangerous to the region and the world than the current regime.
The Iranians are right. We are moving into a new Middle East. And if the mullahs aren’t overthrown, the New Middle East will be a very dark and dangerous place.
More here.
AWLAKI’S E-MAILS: Director of FDD’s Center for Law and Counterterrorism, Thomas Joscelyn examines newly released e-mails between Anwar al-Awlaki and a British Airways computer expert convicted on terrorism-related charges:
According to the Daily Mail (U.K.), Karim had also “previously admitted five charges relating to terrorist fundraising and offering himself as a jihadi fighter to take on U.K. and U.S. troops in Afghanistan.”
The most remarkable details about Karim’s terror plotting have emerged from computer files that were recovered from his laptop, but not without great effort. The U.K. press is reporting that Karim used some of the “most sophisticated” encryption tools authorities there have ever seen to mask his communications with various nefarious personalities, including Awlaki. The Daily Mail reports that investigators found that Karim used a “Russian doll system,” which “hid his terrorist plotting behind at least eight layers of disguise and encryption.” …
U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly said that Awlaki has played an increasingly “operational” role inside al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In a declaration submitted to the court in connection with the CCR/ACLU lawsuit, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper explained that Awlaki was involved in “preparing” Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab for his attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day 2009. After Abdulmutallab swore allegiance to the emir of AQAP, Clapper reported, he “received instructions from [Awlaki]” shortly thereafter “to detonate an explosive device aboard a U.S. airplane over U.S. airspace.”
This is all too believable since Awlaki’s emails with Karim show that he was exploring the same type of operation with the British Airways worker just weeks after Abdulmutallab failed to kill hundreds of people. By Awlaki’s own admission, Abdulmutallab was one of his “students.”
More here.
AL QAEDA WAITS: Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, explains how al-Qaeda will exploit strategic opportunities presented by the revolts in the Middle East:
Bin Laden and his peers are counting on the fact that the uprisings’ secular, pro-democracy Facebookers and tweeters - so beloved of reality-averse Western journalists and politicians - are a thin veneer across a deeply pious Arab world. They are confident that these revolts are not about democratic change but about who, in societies where peaceful transfers of power are rare, will fill the vacuum left by the dictators and consolidate power. These men also know that the answer to that question will ultimately come out of the barrel of a Kalashnikov, of which they have many, along with the old tyrants’ weapons stockpiles, on which they are now feasting.
More here.
TWO AIRMEN KILLED BY A GERMAN TERRORIST: Bill Roggio reports:
A “devout Muslim” man shot and killed two US airmen today at an airport terminal in Frankfurt, Germany. The gunman, who appears to be named Arid Uka and was born in either Kosovo or Germany, boarded a bus that carried a group of airmen who had just arrived at the airport to be transported to Ramstein Air Base, and then were to be deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan.
More here.
TIE A YELLOW RIBBON: Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post writes about Lt. Gen. John Kelly, who lost a son to the war in Afghanistan, and says the U.S. public is largely unaware of the military’s sacrifice.
More here.
SOMALI PIRATES: In his latest column, FDD President Cliff May asks how America’s Navy will respond to recent aggressions of Somali pirates:
Today, American ships are again under siege by pirates off the African coast. This time, however, the buccaneers are setting sail from Somalia rather than from the territories that are now Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Today, the U.S. has the greatest navy the world has ever seen. But the debate is exactly what it was more than 200 years ago: Do we have the will to fight? Or would we prefer to submit to blackmail – to pay tribute to sea dogs?
Just last week, Somali pirates seized a vessel that was being sailed around the world by two American couples who were stopping along the way to donate Bibles to far-flung churches and schools. As American naval officials attempted to negotiate their release, all four were murdered.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded by saying the Obama administration was “deeply saddened and very upset…” She called the murders a “deplorable act” that underscored the need for increased international cooperation. “We’ve got to have a more effective approach to maintaining security on the seas, in the ocean lanes, that are so essential to commerce and travel.” Ya think?
More here.
PAKISTANI INTOLERANCE: Nick Cohen explores the blanket of political correctness covering up militant Islam in Pakistan:
The Islamist murders first of Salmaan Taseer and then of Shahbaz Bhatti show that what tiny scruples blood-soaked men possessed vanished long ago. The best way to describe the terror which is reducing Pakistani liberals to silence is to enumerate what the assassins did not allege. They did not say that Taseer and Bhatti must die because they were apostates – or, to put that “crime” in plain language, because they were adults who decided they no longer believed in the Muslim god. Taseer had not renounced Islam. Bhatti could not renounce it as he was the bravest Christian in Pakistan, who campaigned for equal rights for persecuted minorities with the dignity and physical courage of a modern Martin Luther King.
Nor did their assassins claim that their targets had committed the capital crime of blasphemy. Taseer and Bhatti had not said that the Koran, like the Talmud and the New Testament, was the work of men not god. They did not denounce Muhammad’s morality or offer any criticism of his life and teaching. If you wanted to reduce the whirling, brilliant narrative of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to a single sentence, you could say that it was in part a “blasphemous” account of the early history of Islam. Taseer and Bhatti attempted nothing so brave. They confined themselves to making the modest point that Pakistan’s death penalty for blasphemy was excessive and barbaric, and that was enough to condemn them. Their killers murdered them for the previously unknown crime of advocating law reform: blew them away for the new offence of blaspheming against blasphemy.
More here.
WHITEWASHING TERROR: John Podhoretz writes:
Once again, The New York Times is carrying water for a terrorist -- in this case, Lori Berenson, who openly acknowledges she was a “collaborator” with one of the two groups that plunged Peru into what may have been the worst terrorist maelstrom the world has ever seen.
To read the huge article running in the coming Sunday Times Magazine, now available online, you might actually mistake Berenson for a holy innocent -- a good and noble person who made a few dumb mistakes out of an excess of ideological zeal for which she was compelled to pay with nearly two decades of her life.
More here.
WIKILEAKS PROSECUTION: The Army filed 22 new counts against PFC Bradley Manning, who is suspected of giving information to WikiLeaks.
More here.
--Jonathan Schanzer
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
"During his four decades of rule, the colonel managed to convince Italian leaders not only that their country owed Libya a historical debt, but that Rome couldn't do without Tripoli's help on everything from terrorism to immigration to oil. He extracted huge concessions from Rome and won huge economic windfalls for cronies including Farhat Bengdara, governor of the Central Bank of Libya, who became vice chairman of UniCredit, the biggest Italian bank, in 2009. Perhaps most significantly, he convinced Italy to be an evangelist for Libya's reintegration into the world community. The result is an absurdly asymmetrical relationship between the two countries; Qaddafi was always the winner."
(3/3/2011) Maurizio Molinari, Foreign Policy
"President Obama devoted only six sentences to the war in Afghanistan in his State of the Union address in January. The 25-second standing ovation that lawmakers lavished on the troops lasted almost as long as the president's war remarks."
(3/2/2011) Greg Jaffe, Washington Post
"Iranian petrodollars are used to finance radicals — Khaled Meshaal in Syria, Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and Moktada al-Sadr in Iraq, to name a few — who feed off popular humiliation. As an Arab Shiite friend once complained to me, “Iran wants to fight America and Israel down to the last Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi.” . . .
The Arab uprisings of 2011 will also, of course, have their effect on Iran internally. Iranian democracy advocates have long taken solace in the belief that they were ahead of their Arab neighbors, who would one day too have to undergo the intolerance and heartaches of Islamist rule. The largely secular nature of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have bruised the Iranian ego: were they the only ones naïve enough to succumb to the false promise of an Islamic utopia?"
(3/5/2011) Karim Sadjadpour, New York Times
IN THE MEDIA
The Wave Continues
03/7/2011, Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Weekly Standard
It is still striking, two months into the Great Arab Rebellion, how timorously many Westerners greet the region-wide uprising. Recognizing that democratic aspirations may be only a small factor in all the tumult, many would prefer to focus on the particulars of the revolts—the Shiite-Sunni split in Bahrain, the Palestinian-Jordanian tension in the Hashemite Kingdom, the outrageous corruption in Tunisia.
Jean-Jacques Jihad
03/5/2011, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review Online
The one thing that absolutely could not be tolerated was true freedom, the liberty of the individual. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “social compact” would otherwise be “an empty formula.”
Obama's Backward Budget Priorities
03/4/2011, Rebeccah Heinrichs, The Hill
Most Americans first learned of the Patriot anti-missile system during the Gulf War. The picture was harrowing: rockets blazed across the sky toward U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia and Israeli cities, where families huddled in their basements and bomb shelters.
What About Iran?
03/3/2011, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, The Wall Street Journal
While the world focuses on Libya's popular uprising and Moammar Gadhafi's murderous response, Iran has also—far from the international spotlight—been ratcheting up its repression. In the last few days, Tehran has moved to arrest the two leading figures of Iran's opposition, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, and has reportedly transferred them from house arrest to a political prison run by the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
'Human Rights Watch Should Have Been Keeping Tabs on Libya'
03/3/2011, Benjamin Weinthal, The Jerusalem Post
Fast-moving events in Libya have catapulted the scandal-plagued Middle East and North African Division (MENA) of Human Rights Watch into a new controversy for its failure over the years to diligently investigate human rights violations in Libya.
Open? J-Street Turns into Cul-de-Sac
03/3/2011, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, The Jewish Chronicle
Is J-Street"so open-minded about what constitutes support for Israel that its brains have fallen out"? These are the words of Rep Gary Ackerman. Mr Ackerman was one of a handful of US Members of Congress who used to support J-Street.
The Battle for Libya: Implications for Africa
03/3/2011, Dr. J. Peter Pham, World Defense Review
As battle lines crisscross between the rebels marching west to overthrow him and loyal military units taking the offensive against rebel-held towns in the eastern Libya, Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi's fight for survival is being generally viewed through the optic of the shifting sands of Middle Eastern politics through which most media outlets have been reporting the story.
The Middle East Protest Movements: Each With a Story, All With Uncertainty
03/3/2011, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, Jurist
Across the Middle East, protest movements are taking hold. While each draws inspiration from the examples of Egypt and Tunisia, each country has a story of its own. In Iran, for example, the world may be witnessing a repeat of the demonstrations that rocked the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of the rigged elections of June 12, 2009.
The Pirates of Somalia
03/3/2011, Clifford D. May, Scripps Howard News Service
Not long after achieving independence, the United States faced its first foreign threat: pirates off the coast of Africa seizing American merchant ships. As Michael Oren recounts in Power, Faith and Fantasy, his sweeping history of America’s involvement in the Middle East, beginning in 1784, American vessels were abducted, their crews enslaved and held for ransom.
Libya's Makeover
03/2/2011, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review Online
‘The relationship has been moving in a good direction for a number of years now, and I think tonight does mark a new phase,” said Condoleezza Rice. President Bush’s secretary of state was taking time out from inventing the 70 percent of Palestinians who just want to live side-by-side in peace with the Zionist entity in order to reinvent Moammar Qaddafi.
Fox News.com Live
03/3/2011, Rebeccah Heinrichs, Fox News Channel
Qaddafi promises a fight. How should the U.S. react?
Midday News
03/2/2011, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, CBN News
What scenarios are likely to occur in Libya?
Fox 5 Morning News
03/7/2011, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, Fox 5 News
The crisis in Libya.
The John Batchelor Show
03/6/2011, Claudia Rosett, Syndicated
The crisis in Libya.
The Roy Green Show
03/5/2011, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, Syndicated
The crisis in Libya.
The Tommy Schnurmacher Show
03/4/2011, Philip Carl Salzman, CJAD - Montreal
The crisis in Libya.
The John Batchelor Show
03/4/2011, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, WABC - New York
The political turmoil in Egypt and Libya.
Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg
03/3/2011, Dr. Michael Ledeen, WGN - Chicago
The political turmoil in the Middle East.
The John Batchelor Show
03/3/2011, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, WABC - New York
The crisis in Libya.
The Grandy Group
03/1/2011, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, WMAL - Washington
The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.
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