This Much I believe, Morocco

When I wrote “Iran ‘Secondhand Network In Morocco,” I commended the government’s response to an outside threat. Some misconstrued my statement as an expression of approval of the government’s overboard security measures against the Moroccan Shiite. I clearly stated in my article that I hoped the Moroccan government’s secret service had a comprehensively developed and well-balanced counterintelligence plan to address the issue. I agree with those who assessed Morocco’s current unfocused security operation against the Shiite as amateurish. It is most certainly conducive of grave human rights violations.

I stand against such actions.

According to multiple media reports, Moroccan and otherwise, the Shiite Moroccan citizens detained by the police were questioned on their association with Iranian officials/intelligence and involvement in proselytizing. I am not aware of any Moroccan being imprisoned solely for embracing the Shiite ideology. I do not, nor will I ever, condone police suppression of Moroccans solely based on their denomination, be it Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or any other religion or belief.

My assessment was not emotional, nor was it based on frivolous information. To me, having lived in the Middle East and studied Iran’s modern history for years, the Iranian intelligence threat to the unity of Morocco as a society is all too real. It strives on the complacency and generousness the Moroccan people are so famous for. Examples abound of how Iran drove a wedge between segments of societies in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and the Gulf countries. Iran’s intelligence modus operandi focuses on sectarian stigmatization and uses the Shiite population to foment discord within the permissive society that ensconces its sympathizers to influence the government’s decision-making process. Undoubtedly you would agree this is an apocalyptic scenario in Morocco where, if faced with a threat to its fundamental monarchic rule, the government will carry out an all-encompassing repressive campaign not just against the Shiite population, but all Moroccans. Should all Moroccans bear the brunt of the government’s wrath because a handful of Moroccan Shiite ideologists, unconcerned about the welfare of the majority and dissatisfied with Sunni doctrines, decided to sway the balance of power by aiding and abating a foreign intelligence service?

I think not.

It is a matter of national security and unity. The government has an obligation to protect the unity of Morocco from outside influences that bode ill. While I encourage action-driven political debates – a cornerstone to a democratic system, I decry those who abuse it and obtrude themselves on a people; while I denounce the government’s oppressive means in dealing with citizens opposing its policies, I strongly condemn those Moroccans who allow a foreign government with malign intent to inject sectarian divisiveness within our ranks as a society, to weaken the sacred and unifying fabric that makes up our Moroccan values, to compromise the integrity and security of our families. We may be inflicted with poverty and illiteracy; our politicians may be lacking integrity; our government may be insensitive to our pressing needs; we, nonetheless, should uphold our national unity and combat civil discord at all cost. I strongly believe that unchecked Iranian influences in Morocco will be prejudicial to the society. Whatever political, economic, and social divergence the opposition political parties or private citizens have with the government should be resolved in ways uninfluenced by outside pernicious entities.

This much I believe, and I stand by it.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

RAF Delegation At Luke

Furthering U.S. – Moroccan military cooperation, a delegation from the Royal Moroccan Air Force is touring Luke Air Force Base, the U.S. Air Force’s only active-duty F-16 Fighting Falcon training wing. Located west of Phoenix, Arizona, the base is home to the 56^th Fighter Wing. It is the world’s largest fighter wing with 180 aircraft, 27 squadrons, four tenant units, and over 6000 civilian and military personnel.

Morocco, which will soon receive a squadron of F-16 from Lockheed Martin (read related story here), is building an air force base specifically designed to support F-16 operations. The Moroccan delegation, led by Colonel M’hamed Saufi, was welcomed by General Kurt F. Neubauer, Luke’s commanding general. Members of the delegation are receiving field instructions on the mission support and maintenance of F-16 and the organizational elements involved in the base operations of a fighter wing – civil engineers and fire department, communications, logistics readiness, security forces, and base services. The Moroccan delegation is also visiting 162^nd Fighter Wing, Arizona Air National Guard, where Moroccan F-16 combat pilots and crew chiefs receive training.

This is not the first time personnel from Luke Air Force Base interact with Moroccans. In May of 2007, thirty-seven members of Luke’s 944^th Medical Squadron visited Guelmim during the joint U.S. – Moroccan exercise known as African Lion. The medical team assisted over 3,746 patients in six different sites in the area of Guelmime in six days.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Iran ‘Secondhand Network In Morocco

Moroccan authorities are conducting an aggressive country-wide campaign against Shi’a ideology. Over the weekend, a number of individuals, all Moroccan citizens, suspected to be Shi’a adherents have been arrested and “soft” interrogated; their homes were searched and documents believed to be Shi’a propaganda were confiscated. The authorities are trying to determine if these individuals have affiliations with the Iranian intelligence security elements.

Morocco’s Investigations should cover those who had known associations with Saddam’s Iraqi Intelligence Services (IIS) as well. Much like Baghdad’s museums in the power vacuum that resulted from the U.S. invasion in 2003, media sources reported that Iraqi Mukhabarat offices were looted; large quantities of documents went missing from the IIS Special Operations (14^th) Directorate in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. It is believed that Iranian intelligence operatives were able to whisk the documents into Iran. The intelligence documents consisted of reports on and from sources of the IIS in Arab countries. I am speculating that Iran is blackmailing those sources and using them to fulfill its own agenda. The use by the Iranian intelligence of the Iraqi school in Rabat as a shiite propaganda platform indicates how far reaching their operations are.

The Moroccan government’s actions to counter the dissentious Iranian threat are commendable. I hope the Moroccan internal security service has a proactive counterintelligence plan to address the issue that is not limited to reactive and cursory investigations.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Countering The Iranian Threat

The recent political rift between Morocco and Iran was long overdue. Morocco ‘stand, far from being reactive, is deliberate and pragmatic. It was based on clear indicators as to Iran’s malign intent vis-à-vis Morocco. Unlike other Arab nations, especially Middle Eastern ones which, by virtue of their geographic proximity to Iran, are compelled to deal with it, Morocco can afford to forgo relations with the Islamic republic. This is not the first time the two countries have an axe to grind with each other; in 1981, Tehran ceased its diplomatic relations with Rabat for hosting the deposed Iranian shah. It took a decade for relations to thaw.

The past few years saw an expansion in economic cooperation between the two countries; Morocco’s strategic geographic location provided Iran with a launching pad to European markets; still, trade between Morocco and Iran did not surpass $20 million; chump change in both countries’ international trade revenues.

Some Analysts speculated that Morocco severed its diplomatic relations with Iran in response to the latter’s irredentist claim against its neighbor Bahrain. The Moroccan government did send a missive to Bahrain reemphasizing its solidarity with the government of King Hamad bin Issa Al-Khalifa. The move angered Tehran which summoned the Moroccan chargé d’affaire to forcefully express its disapprobation.

Other analysts contend that Morocco is being used as a proxy by Saudi Arabia and other Arab Sunni Gulf countries to weaken Iran’s influence in Arab countries. Saudi Arabia has been competing with Iran for strategic leadership in the Gulf. Adherents to the Shiite ideology in Saudi Arabia constitute 20 per cent of the population and are a powerful influencing element for Iran. In February 2009, thousands of Saudi Shiites protested what they labeled discriminatory and anti-Shiite actions by the Saudi government. Such demonstrations were unprecedented in the Saudi kingdom. Saudi intelligence believes the demonstrations were fomented by Iran.

Morocco’s foreign minister, Taib Fassi Fihri, presented yet another explanation to Morocco’s cessation of its diplomatic relations with Iran. He stated that Iranian officials and their missionaries have been actively proselytizing in Morocco using cultural activities as a cover. Their campaign to spread the Shiite ideology reached beyond Morocco’s borders to target Moroccan immigrants in Europe. Morocco considers such activities undermining to its religious fundamentals and interfering with its internal affairs. Iranian foreign minister Monouchehr Mottaki denied the accusation and called Morocco’s reaction a setback to Muslim unity and erosive to Palestinian support.

Taib Fassi Fihri ‘statement is euphemism for what Moroccan intelligence services labeled Iran’s offensive counterintelligence and Human intelligence operations to recruit sources and establish a clandestine operating base to advance its agenda in the region by threatening and intimidating the Moroccan government.

Iran’s hegemonic ambition has been robust since the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in December 1979. Undeniably, the new theocratic government was supported by millions of disgruntled Iranians who regarded the Shah as a pampered puppet of the United States. Because of its radical ideology that called – and to a certain extent still does – for the overthrow of capitalism and American influence in the Middle East, Khomeiny’s regime found his oil and gas rich neighbors rather apprehensive. The fledgeling Shiite fundamentalist government engaged in aggressive intelligence operations in the Gulf countries; it was driven by a single requirement: survival. Saddam’s war against Iran was largely financed by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The United States provided tremendous logistical and intelligence support. The strategic aim was to deflect Iran’s exporting of its ideology to neighboring countries and to deplete its economic and military resources, thus making it less of an influence on the balance of power not just in the region, but worldwide. The Middle Eastern countries rely heavily on U.S. support to keep Iran at bay. U.S. Navy’s 5^th Fleet in Bahrain, CENTCOM’s prepositioning bases in Qatar, and USAFCENT’s bases in Oman and United Arab Emirates constitute a powerful deterrent to Iran’s regional political and military ambitions.

Iran’s foreign agenda has weakened its economy; inflation exceeds twenty-five percent; forty percent of Iranians under thirty years of age are unemployed; the country imports forty percent of it domestic oil consumption; the business sector is heavily subsidized. Despite its current social and economic woes, Iran remains a serious contender in the international scene. So much so that The U.S. is now realizing that peace in Iraq will not be achieved without the active cooperation of Iran. Iranian influence on the dynamics of Iraqi politics is such that most Iraqi powerbrokers are believed to be on the payroll of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). In April, 2003, when U.S. forces entered Iraq, Iran had an established sprawling network of intelligence agents and thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Force (IRGC-QF) operatives standing by to unleash havoc across Iraq by training, advising, supplying, and directing Shiite groups. The tactical sophistication of Iraqi Shiite led insurgency operations and the advanced and effective weaponry they used, such as the devastating Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) and the Misagh-1 MANPADS, were trademarked in Iran. Iran’s covert operations in Iraq were not intended solely against the United States; they conducted countless assassinations and bombings against Iraqi political groups they deemed unresponsive to their scheme. In southern Lebanon and Palestine, Hezbollah and Hamas surged as a resistance force to reckon with. Their armed wings, the Islamic Resistance and Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, have been trained and equipped by IRGC-QF and their political leaderships mostly advised and financed by the MOIS. They drive a wedge in the region’s political mosaic and blatantly echo Iran’s political rhetoric and advocate its agenda. The potency of Iran’s radicalism and subversiveness became undisputable during the July 2006 war and the January 2009 Israeli attacks on Hamas.

Iran’s recent assertive PR campaign against Israel propelled it as a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause in the Arab street. The Arab governments’ abject failure to adequately address Israel’s murderous attacks against Gaza boosted Iran’s popularity not only among Shiite Arabs, but Sunni ones as well. To maximize on its popularity and the anti-Israeli sentiment permeating the Arab and Muslim world, Iranian diplomatic missions stepped-up their activities in Arab countries, including Morocco. Using Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza as templates, the Iranian mission in Morocco uses proxies to provide social services, operate regular schools, hawzas, and hospitals, and provide financial assistance to small businesses and farmers. It establishes Iranian financial institutions claiming to enhance trade between the two countries. It provides Arab youths academic opportunities in Iranian universities. In fact, the Iranian social, educational, and financial programs are far from being philanthropic. They are covers for a well structured counterintelligence human intelligence operational cycle Iran has tested time and again in many other countries. It uses them to imbue the population with its brand of insurrectionist Shiite ideology; once the population is indoctrinated, Iran establishes operating bases that will provide safe houses, training camps, weapons, transportation, and finances; it creates front companies and associations; it starts spotting and assessing for sources in key official position and political parties to influence the government’s decision-making process. Once it takes hold, it would be difficult to deter Iranian influence and stop its meddling in Moroccan politics. A hezbollah or Hamas-like organization inside Morocco would be a deleterious threat to Moroccan sovereignty and divisive to its social fabric.

Albeit necessary, Morocco’s uncompromising strategy in countering the Iranian threat to Morocco’s national unity might backfire by pushing Iranian operatives and their Moroccan backers underground making them far more challenging to expose and neutralize. Iranian intelligence could also redirect its support to Polisario and work in concert with the group to weaken Morocco’s territorial integrity.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

AFRICOM: Plowing Ahead

Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward appeared before the Armed Services Committee March 18, 2009 to discuss AFRICOM’s challenges in promoting stability and security in Africa. AFRICOM’s efforts are driven by national level requirements with an endstate to degrade and eliminate transnational and local security threats – Islamic extremism – and minimize Chinese, Russian, and Iranian influences in the continent. The acomplishment of its mission depends on enhancing the capabilities of African nations and increasing their dependence on U.S. military hardware and systems, operational advisory, and intelligence sharing through military-to-military engagements, US sponsored civilian programs, and clandestine anti-terrorism operations.

Rep. Vic Snyder (D-AR), a member of the committee, inquired about the role of AFRICOM in the enduring conflicts in Africa, specifically the Ethiopian/Eritrean border conflict and the dispute between Morocco and Polisario. Gen. Ward tap danced in such an expert fashion the late Gregory Hines would have been proud.

Gen. Ward: As it comes to the role that we play, the command, the military role, you know, where there are political agreements that talk to, one, creating stability, that talk to, two, the need to create a force, a security force, that would in fact help the legitimate government of a nation provide that control or that stability, where there is a lack of training, a lack of equipment, a lack of interoperability, a lack of working effectively to some degree with its neighbors where, again, there is the political will to do so, and the determination is made that we in fact can play a role in increasing the capacity to address those deficiencies, that’s where we as a command, a military command, come in to take a role, to increase the capacity of those nations to do such.

Morocco hardly considers Polisario a “neighbor.” It is worth noting here that the US government does not recognize Moroccan sovereignty over what it terms “Western Sahara.” AFRICOM’s perspective becomes more evidently discordant when we know that U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Africa (MARFORAF) annually conducts a bi-lateral exercise – AFRICAN LION – with the Moroccan military in southern Morocco.

According to news reports, the U.S. and Morocco were discussing the establishment of an AFRICOM base in southern Morocco. Both AFRICOM and Morocco deny such discussions ever took place. During his testimony, Gen Ward revisited the issue stating that AFRICOM headquarters will remain in Stuttgart, Germany until 2014. Its current location provides the stability and focus necessary to develop its standard operating procedures (SOPs), doctrines, and directives, expand its operations in the continent, refine its posture, and strengthen its relationship with its African partners. In the meanwhile, its operations are supported by forward operational sites such as Ascension Island, 1000 miles west of Africa and Camp Lemonier in Djibouti; Several other sites such as EUCOM’s Army Southern European Task Force in nearby Vicenza, Italy, CENTCOM’s prepositioning bases in Qatar, and NAVCENT’s 5th fleet in Bahrain provide logistical support.

CIMIC procedures course in Agadir, Morocco

AFRICOM’s Foreign Military Financing program spent $18.7 million in fiscal year 2008. A large chunk of it, according to Gen. Ward, went to Tunisia and Morocco. The program’s strategic goal is to increase the interoperability between the U.S. and these countries’ hardware systems and enhance asset capabilities in bi-lateral operations. Other AFRICOM programs Morocco will stand to benefit from in 2009 is PHOENIX EXPRESS, a naval exercise spearheaded by U.S. Naval Forces, Africa (NAVAF) and involving not just African navies, but European ones as well. Morocco’s participation in the program will improve its maritime interdiction capabilities and, hopefully, allow it to cauterize the worsening hemorrhaging of illegal immigrants and drugs from Morocco’s northern shores.

A major divergence in AFRICOM’s mission, in my opinion, is its insistence to support established governments in sustaining political stability whilst advocating democracy. There is a consensus among observers of Africa ‘strategic affairs that the majority of African governments have not been empowered by a popular support. The elections most African governments organize and AFRICOM vaunts before congress and through its Operation Objective Voice (OOV) are spurious.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

For Life Alone

There are snippets of conversations that cling to your memory insusceptible to the effacing effect of time. I will never forget one such a conversation I had with some American friends twenty years ago. We were having dinner and talking about Morocco when one of them asked: “are people in Morocco still living in caves?” I took umbrage at what I perceived as his supercilious and downright racist attitude. I snapped back explaining that we live in houses, wear clothes, drive cars, watch television, go to schools much like Americans do. My anger must have seeped through my face and vibrated through my voice; the subject was quickly dropped.

It’s only a few years ago that I discovered that indeed, twenty years ago, whole families in Morocco lived in caves; today, many more still do. It’s a reality most Moroccan city dwellers were unaware of. It is an aspect of our country our political leadership and officials never mentioned in their florid speeches and our news media never depicted in their self-serving articles and television programs.

Recently, grim images of poverty akin to the middle ages flashed on the screens of our national television and the pages of our written media. Such unusually unreserved veraciousness is induced not by the establishment’s belief the citizens have an indubitable right to the information; the investigative reporting of foreign news outlets combined with the government’s failed attempts to restrict satellite television and the internet – Morocco is a signatory of the Arab Satellite Broadcasting Charter – and the Moroccans’ voracious curiosity to learn about their country forced the release of information that was previously buttered in exclusivity.

In today’s dynamic geopolitical and global environment where poverty is considered a bearing ground for religious extremism, terrorism, prostitution, and drug trafficking, the government has discovered that the disclosure of Morocco’s “old poverty” generates unforeseen funds from wary Western intelligence agencies concerned that throngs of poverty-stricken Moroccans would march into their cities strapped in suicide vests. So far, Morocco has received over four billion dirhams in European subsidies. This year, additional European Union investments will aim at healthcare and education reform, water system purification, and transportation in rural areas. These projects will have extensive European oversight to ensure their successful achievement.

However, uncovering such realities outside of ordained channels throws government officials into a tizzy. The antiquated and backward looking political mentality of the Moroccan government sees such a pandemic reality as undermining to their “democratization and developmental” agenda. It castigates private citizens and Moroccan human right associations for criticizing its discrepant rhetoric, but it has no compunction justifying its profligate spending in ostentatious projects such as a twenty kilometers long tramway network in Rabat and a twenty-eight kilometers long one in Casablanca as necessary. This is while citizens outside Rabat and Casablanca, lacking the most basic services, are dying; services the government is obligated to provide, but fails to do so.

One has to wonder how such a cradle of civilization from which the Moors launched into Visigothic Hispania in 711 CE, thus introducing a Medieval Europe to science, medicine, philosophy, and literature, failed to retain some of that enlightenment and prosperity. One has to wonder why modernity – not civilization – founders once it transcends city limits.

While frolicking tourists sunbathe on beaches and dine in swanky resorts, while a few thousand elite Moroccans are living high on the hog, millions of malnourished, destitute, and sallow Moroccans in remote rural areas scratch the dirt for survival and take shelter in dwellings so sparsely furnished and poorly built that they look like caves. In this post-apocalyptic diorama, they sleep swallowed in whatever clothes and blankets they own to avoid freezing to death; they cook in tin cans; their women bleed to death giving birth; their children die of diseases the modern world thought eradicated; their men are despondent; weather permitting, they trek over xeric dirt roads and down jarring mountain slopes for countless hours and miles to reach a paved road. They share this country with us, but they live a different reality. The only sign of a government they see in their regions is a tattered flag whipped by the wind; the last time they saw a qaid must have been when the government was collecting “voluntary” donations for the eponymous Hassan II mosque.

The question is still ringing in my ears like a bad case of tinnitus. But at least now I have an answer.

Yes! Much like troglodytes, we are still living in caves.

But let us not succumb into hopelessness. All is not lost. The anti-poverty national Initiative for Human Development (INDH), a large-scale development project launched in May 18, 2005 and designed to provide the basic infrastructure to millions of Moroccans to alleviate poverty, marginalization, and social exclusion in response to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is already bearing fruit. The poverty rate is nose-diving like a famished Jaeger. People are getting richer by the minute. And by people I mean Prime Minister Abbas El Fassi, High Commissioner for Planning Ahmed Lahlimi Alami, Minister of Social Development Nouzha Skelli, and their ilk. If you haven’t seen anything from INDH yet, do not worry. They will soon send you an email with a claimant number for your jackpot, your ticket out of poverty. It might take a while for them to get to you; INDH is giving each and every Moroccan the individual attention they deserve no matter how far-flung your cave may be.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

The Lingering Legacy Of Hassan II

When diluvial rains and heavy snows battered most of Morocco for weeks, the howling winds blew the cover on the fraudulent activities of government officials. Their nostrums dissolved transforming the already dreary and treacherous landscapes of rural Morocco into a death trap for many. While our politicians warmly spent quality time with their families in swanky homes surrounded by manicured front lawns and blossoming roses, Moroccans were treading water and trudging through mud to survive the collapse of their abodes. Government officials tracked the catastrophe with the nonchalance of a cracked up whore at the end of her busy night. It took the King ruining his $1,500.00 custom made Roberto Cavalli designer shoes and conducting a sudden visit to Ain Tawajtat near Fez to snap government officials out of their unwholesome inertia. It is one more indication that sustains the analysis there are two political mindsets operating in Morocco today.

King Mohammed VI, regarded as the poor people’s monarch, aspires to modernize and democratize Morocco. Since he ascended to the throne in July of 1999, he has been an energetic advocate of social and political reforms that paint Morocco as a progressive and secular Muslim country more mindful of human rights and tolerant of political dissent. Such an outlook puts him in a stark contrast with the modus operandi of his late father, Hassan II, whose 38 years-long autocratic style stifled opposition and widened the chasm between the government and the citizenry.

Despite the King ‘spirited efforts, the changes have been emerging at a snail’s pace; degenerating social services, spiraling unemployment rates, and growing illiteracy numbers remain intractable problems. The worsening poverty, represented by sprawling squalid and vermin infested shantytowns in the outskirts of all Moroccan cities, unschooled teenagers high on solvents marauding the streets for an opportune hustle, and beggars with toddlers in tow rapid firing a litany of complaints at passersby their extended arms soliciting alms, has been in recent years a fertile recruiting environment for radical Islamic groups; Official Islamic political parties, supported by a large segment of the population, surged as a force to reckon with in the Parliament.

The King’s democratization agenda comes with one self-evident provision; dissolving the legislature and dismissing the government remains his unadulterated authority. The preservation of the monarchy as an ineluctable ruling platform in Morocco is a top priority. In that, he is assisted by the secret services of foreign governments such the United States and France. Since 1956, the monarchy has been equated to stability by foreign governments having a vested interest in Morocco ‘strategic role in the region.

Despite the fact that King Mohammed VI has placed young reform-minded technocrats within the current government, the majority of government officials are party to an entrenched and nepotic old guard led by the Prime Minister, Mr. Abbas El Fassi. The opaque and graft-ridden government is a perennial thread extending the deeply ingrained political intolerance that characterized the reign of Hassan II. It maintains, if not widens, the extensive divide between it and the grass roots. Its old-timers claim to have snatched Morocco’s independence from France while in fact they were relishing the comforts of French schools and returned just in time to fill key government positions in the late fifties and early sixties. While over fifty percent of the Moroccan population is under twenty-five years of age, illiterate and unemployed, the elite’s children are receiving the best education American and European schools could offer, putting them on the right track to take over Morocco’s affairs for generations to come. The old guard consorts with prominent Moroccan businessmen to exert a monopolistic domination not only on the Moroccan economy, but the political decision-making process as well. While democracy is widely viewed as integral to the Moroccan political landscape of Rabat and other large cities today, it remains mostly theoretical in most of the country, especially rural areas where tradition is deeply rooted, access to advocacy groups is restricted, and international oversight is non-existent. Those who complain are stigmatized and even persecuted. Such an environment did much to exacerbate the political and economic quandary in which Moroccans are mired; the government has unabashedly forsaken the common man, and the common man, for self-preservation, has resorted to corruption, drug cropping, prostitution, and illegal immigration. The old guard’s lack of accountability is flagrant and unchecked – unless the king intervenes that is.

The people’s access to the king is tightly controlled by the old guard, but the king’s access to the people is unhindered. Often, unannounced, Mohammed VI would visit a commune. Such visits would offer a glimpse at how government officials isolate and intimidate the citizenry while plundering the country’s riches. Schools are not being constructed; roads are not being paved; basic services are not being provided. Such royal visits to destitute locations of the kingdom leave the government scampering around like frightened chickens. The king’s micromanagement of some projects results in a rapid governmental response, and as if by magic, an improved work ethics.

It was indeed a gracious gesture for Mohammed VI to step into the mud and stand, albeit for a brief moment, where his homeless, sodden, and freezing citizens slosh on a daily basis. I am afraid the glimmer of hope his visit ignited into the hearts of his servants disappeared the moment he left them in the hands of his government officials.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Israel’s Mighty Monkey Wrench

 

“Offensive, discriminatory, and unacceptable” is how the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations described the United Arab Emirates’ denying Shahar Peer, an Israeli tennis player, a visa to participate in a profitable women’s tennis tournament in Dubai. It called for the Women’s tennis association to boycott future tournaments in UAE. It also called for the Association of Tennis Professionals to cancel the ATP tournament scheduled this week in Dubai if UAE bars Israeli tennis player Andy Ram from participating.

 

Of course, Andy Ram not only got a visa to enter UAE, but special security measures are enacted to provide him a buffer from pestilent protestors incensed by Israel’s appalling attacks on defenseless Palestinian civilians.

 

Wait a minute! The governments of the whole world (the U.S. excluded), outraged and crying foul, did not stymie Israel’s murderous assault on the Gaza Strip and its killing of hundreds of children, but it took a group of American Jews, bristled that two mediocre Israeli tennis players could not swing their tennis balls in front of Arab spectators, calling for the cancelation of a derisory tennis tournament for UAE to shamelessly yield.

 

It would be naïve to believe that UAE was worried about a vainglorious sports event when it acquiesced. The Emirs are solicitous about the “123″ nuclear cooperation accord former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed with her UAE counterpart Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zaid Al-Nahyan on January 15, 2009. The treaty, which will allow UAE to build a nuclear reactor for civilian energy production, needs congressional approval to become a law. Congressional approval will not be forthcoming without Israel’s blessing.

 

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

 

The Appeal Of “Taken”… Kill A Moslem

 

At the behest of friends, I went to see “Taken” this weekend. The movie ranked second in the top box office list with a total of 20.3 million dollars. To me, that is a good indicator the American audience loved it.  I saw the trailers, but I was not expecting more than a mindless action movie.

I walked into the showroom holding my cup of a double Americano – which as I always do, snuck in. The place was packed. A couple of seats were spared at the two very front rows. I wasn’t gonna watch the movie with the tip of my nose touching the projection screen. Instead, I walked up the side stairs and sat on the red carpeted floor just as the movie started.

The storyline is mundane. A CIA operative with “a very special set of skills”, played by Liam Neeson, devoted his career  to being what he labeled “a preventer,” making sure America’s enemies were eliminated. His service to his country had a steep price; his wife divorced him taking his daughter away from him. Guilt-ridden for neglecting his daughter’s needs while chasing terrorists around the globe protecting the US, he retires and settles in Los Angeles where she now lives with her millionaire step-father and mother.

The daughter, who is seventeen, decides to go on a trip to Europe with a friend. He is reluctant to approve it because his CIA experience taught him anywhere outside the US is dangerous. But he relents. Lo and behold, the daughter and her friend are kidnapped in Paris by a sex trafficking ring. The ex-CIA dotting father then flies to Paris, traces his daughter’s kidnappers in a record time, picking up hot leads faster than a hooker could wash her crack and sell it again. He drops bodies left and right. He even gets to torture one of the kidnappers and shoot the wife of a former intelligence “buddy” to get the information he needs. He kicks ass and takes names and finally saves his daughter and returns with her to LA where he is celebrated as a hero by not just his ex-wife, but her husband too. I was left wondering why the CIA is not sending agents like him to Afghanistan. This guy could have found Ossama Ben Laden in a couple of hours.

As I said earlier, a blood drenched, revenge driven B movie with all the explosions and car chases to keep you on the edge of your seat gawping.

I was gravely mistaken.  

This movie was much more than that. It had a message to the younger generation. That is why, despite the lurid violence, it was rated PG13. I became more sensitive to the underlying message as our hero charges on in Paris behind the scent of his daughter. The first indicator came when he and his buddies from the agency reminisce about an operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah? How is this relevant to the story? Later on in Paris, our hero locates, at Rue Du Paradis (how symbolic), a group of Albanians who allegedly are his daughter’s kidnappers. They all had on their hands tattoos of a crescent and a star, a symbol generally regarded as Islamic nowadays. Our cowboy kills the evil Moslem men faster than Bob Munden draws his weapon; he saves one for torturing CIA style.

Then, he follows his leads until he finds his daughter being auctioned like a slave. The auction was run by a rich French businessman who gets wacked too. This part of the movie would have been more a propos in 2002 and 2003 when congress changed the names of French fries and French toast to freedom fries and freedom toast.

And guess who buys the kidnapped virgins? A fat, pompous, and cowardly Moslem Arab.

The audience cheered our hero on throughout the movie with applause, words of encouragement, and finally a good cheer when he shot the fat, pompous, and cowardly Moslem Arab as he hid behind the whimpering all American teenager.

The 93-minute movie got an 8 out of 10 rating on IMDb Its message is loud and clear: the enemy is Islam and whatever the US does to protect itself, no matter how unlawful it is, is justified.

In 2007, I saw another movie that tackled the theme of sex trade with more intensity and realism. It was “Trade.” It tells the story of a 13-year-old Mexican girl who was kidnapped by a sex trade ring in Mexico City and sold to pedophiles in … the US. “Trade” was based on the New York Times Magazine article “The Girls Next Door” by Peter Landesman who chronicled the operations of sex trafficking rings in American suburbia. The American audience was not as receptive of it as it is of “Taken.”

“Trade” could have been a tremendous success if the sex traders were Moslem and the protagonist killed a dozen Arab looking men to save the 13-year-old victim. Don’t you think?

 

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

 

The Moroccan Katrina

 

The dams are overflowing. More than 150 000 acres are flooded. Thousands of homes are destroyed leaving the residents stranded in the wet and frigid weather battling hypothermia. The death toll is high. Piling snow blocked a number of national roads isolating cities and villages from the rest of the country. Since this is the official report, we know the reality is much worse.

 

In urban areas, the local authorities struggle to help the population with the meager heavy equipment they can muster. Some of the equipment comes from private construction companies in the area. Their efforts to beat the next flood and provide assistance to the next family whose house tumbled like a sand castle seems futile. Destitute people are stuffed into tattered tents in throngs. Regional governments are ill-prepared for the levels of rain and snow dumped on their locations. The government has nothing to show for the eight million dollars it claims to have spent on twenty-four flood protection projects between 2002 and 2007. Once more, the population bears the brunt of the toll.

 

The government is not lagging, though. With the best interest of the population at heart, it signed a nature conservancy cooperation agreement with Spain to safeguard the Moroccan national wildlife environment along its Mediterranean shores. The cooperation will aim at providing a sustainable expense of unbroken forests and lakes where migratory birds can congregate and other animals can roam unperturbed. The budget for the ecological projects is in excess of four million dollars.

 

Considering we suffer from a surfeit of social and economic problems that have lately been exacerbated by the inclement weather, this move is highly incongruous.

 

I never suspected we have a strong green lobby in the government able to influence national priorities and convince our concerned policy-makers animals are worth more than the welfare of their constituency.

 

Needless to say, Moroccan migrants crossing the Mediterranean in search for a better life and those whose homes have been destroyed and their fields flooded because of the downpour will not benefit from the nature conservancy projects. I am sure they are already enjoying their excessively eco-friendly environments.

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

 

Israel vs. Hamas: Unfinished Business

 

The ceasefire Israel and Hamas reluctantly committed to on Jan. 18 was broken today as Rockets fired from Gaza shelled southern Israel and fighter jets targeted a metal foundry allegedly used as weapons factory in Rafah. A pro-Fatah militant group claimed responsibility on the pre-dawn rocket attack on Israel. This new round of hostilities brings to a halt a short-lived truce, aggravates an already horrendous situation, and threatening a precarious peace.

 

The disproportionate military responses to Palestinian militants’ attacks garnered a large popular support base for the Olmert’s government from the security wary Israeli population. It will certainly maximize on it in the upcoming Feb. 10 election.

 

I don’t understand why Palestinian militants, Hamas and Fatah, pursue a course of action that clearly enhances Israel‘s regional security posture and advances the policies of its government. The last Israeli offensive was a clear indicator that the risks Hamas takes in its abortive rocket attacks far outweigh the gains. In fact, Hamas and Fatah’s ill-advised policies have had no political, social, or economic gains; the lives of ordinary Palestinians have been significantly degraded because of the Palestinian leadership ‘short-sightedness.

 

In his interview to Al Arabiya, President Obama states “the United States will sustain an active commitment toward reaching the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security,” while his Middle East envoy, self-proclaimed Arab American George Mitchell, was in Jerusalem on Wednesday to assure Israel that Obama’s administration is primarily committed to its security and its legitimate right to self-defense.

 

I am certain of this: there will never be peace between Israel or any current or future Palestinian government. Neither Israel nor the Palestinian leadership will prosper in a peaceful co-existence. Other power brokers such as Syria, Iran, and the United States polarize the conflict further. War is the money-maker.

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

 

A Thank You Note To Bush, Cheney, Rice, And Rumsfeld

Dear former President Bush, former VP Cheney, former Secretary of State Rice, and former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the world should be thankful to you for the following:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twenty-Two Noble Bondmen

 

AP photo by Hussein Malla

 

They scurried about pusillanimously like fattened experimental mice in the laboratory of US foreign policy. They feigned a modicum of concern and commiseration for the Palestinian plight and outrage and condemnation against Israel’s deliberate killing of Palestinian civilians. They projected a semblance of effort and seemed incapable of result-driven action. They are avatars of what’s considered to be the worst in world diplomacy. But their propagandist national news outlets saturated the airwaves with reports the Arab leaders were fully engaged in securing a sustainable cease-fire with Israel and a lasting reprieve for the Palestinian children; they showed footage of them in their flowing robes and expensive tailored suits making phone calls to Condoleezza Rice and Bush; they aired press-conferences with them at the United Nations where, for once, they succeeded in convincing the Security Council to pass a resolution that provided Israel with enhanced security assurances and yet, subsequently, proved to be as politically impotent as they are; when, at long last, they convened emergency summits in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, they pounded the podium while delivering bombastically disparaging and accusatory rhetoric against each other. Entrenched in their crippling tribalistic politics and personal rifts with each other, they refused to attend meetings and shunned consensus. After yet another inconsequential Arab summit in Kuwait, Amr Moussa, the secretary-General of the League of Arab States, gloomily confided to a group of journalists: “the boat is sinking.”

 

When, at 0200 on the 18^th of January, no thanks to the Arab governments, Israel, finally and in time for the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44^th United States president, declared a unilateral cease-fire, thousands of Hamas supporters, waving green banners, thronged the streets of Gaza cities to celebrate what they perceived as a “victory.” Much of Gaza’s infrastructure was destroyed; reconstruction is estimated to cost 2 billion dollars. Over 1,300 Palestinians died while Israel lost 9 soldiers and four civilians. Hamas rocket attacks against southern Israeli cities subsided and most smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt caved in from Israeli bunker-buster missiles. Militarily, the Israeli offensive was a deafening defeat of Hamas.

 

Politically, and in the long term, Hamas stands to gain. Fatah’s grassroots support in Gaza and the West Bank was tremendously eroded; disillusioned by the “moderate” Arab regimes, Hamas will turn exclusively to Syria and Iran. Such scenario is far from promoting peace in the region. I am convinced that achieving an enduring peace never was, nor will it ever be, an aspiration to Hamas or Israel.

 

The existence of Hamas as a legitimate government serves a paramount Israeli strategic goal in that it intensifies the Arab leaders’ fear of growing subversive movements with Islamist tendencies reckoned a clear and present danger to their undemocratic regimes. Such fear widens the political chasm between Arab governments and prevents consensus on the Palestinian issue.

 

Intelligence and military support to protect themselves from Islamist movements and other perceived threats to their governance is one of the major reasons prodding Arab governments to grovel before the United States and serve its bid for a powerful Israel in the region. In an interview with Associated Press journalist Matthew Lee, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that despite Bush’s unpopularity in the Middle East, “Arab leaders showered his diplomat with jewelry last year.” King Abdullah of Jordan offered her a $47,000 emerald and diamond necklace; his wife, a Palestinian, gave Rice a $5,000 jewelry box. Not to be outdone, King Abdulla of Saudi Arabia gave her gem-encrusted baubles worth $316,000, a diamond necklace with matching earrings, a bracelet and a ring worth $165,000, and a flower petal necklace worth $170,000. Others underhandedly made their ports, airfields, and bases at the disposal of US military forces and allowed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) use of their prisons and interrogators. Such sinister cooperation is not new; there are reports and eyewitness accounts that, to protect the late King Hassan II of Morocco, the CIA was instrumental in the disappearance of the Moroccan resistance leader Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965 and the dubious death of Ahmed Dlimi in 1983. Its ongoing involvement in the protection of despotic Arab regimes is well-documented by journalists and researchers.

 

In his inaugural address, President Obama warned that “those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent … are on the wrong side of history.” How many Arab governments today cling to power through means other than corruption, deceit, and the silencing of dissent?

 

None.

 

Such statement should be taken with a grain of salt. It is doubtful it signals a major shift in the foreign policy doctrine of the United States. In fact, the absence of viable political alternatives make a continued US support to Arab repressive regimes imperative to its interests and Israeli national security.

 

The recent massacre of Gazans was a needling reminder Arab Leaders serve interests other than those beneficial to their own people. It left the non-resuscitatable 2002 Arab peace initiative stretched on a cold steel gurney in a morgue in Gaza. The cause of death: the Arab leaders’ sycophancy to the United States, their inveterate subjugation of their people, and their political witlessness.

 

The Palestinian people, who carry, not a weapon, but the burden of decades of failed negotiations and policies, whose ramshackle homes are constantly commandeered by Hamas and bombed by the Israelis, who refuse to leave or are forced to stay, who bury their decapitated babies, their dreams, and their hopes, whom do they turn to?

 

 Not Hamas, Fatah, the Arab governments, the League of Arab States, or the United States. Certainly not Israel.

 

I recommend that all Palestinian families in Gaza and the West Bank adopt puppies and kittens – a dozen per family. They have a better chance to mobilize the international community (especially the Europeans and Americans) and secure a prompt cease-fire from Israel if represented by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) International whose latest operation, dubbed Operation Baghdad Pups, rescuing abandoned pets in Iraq is a tremendous success.

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

 

Libya’s Coming Of Age

 

The newly credentialed United States Ambassador to Tripoli, Gene Cretz, wasted no time in engaging the Libyan government in possible military cooperation in an attempt to secure the burgeoning Libyan arms market for US weapons manufacturers. The United Nations, doing the United States’ bidding, and the European Union implemented arms embargoes that came close to eradicating the Libyan domestic defense industry sparing only a skeletal state owned industry. The lifting of the embargoes in September of 2002 and 2003 respectively allowed the Libyan government to legalize multinational involvement in the sector. The Libyan government, in desperate need to reinvigorate its non-existent domestic defense industry and to upgrade its aging military inventory, has been in low-level negotiations with several international defense companies eager to establish themselves in the country. In October 2008, it signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Pentagon.  

In June 2006, the Bush administration repealed Libya’s designation as a terrorism sponsoring state.  It had finally decided Qadhafi had abandoned his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and accepted liability for the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub and the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Since then, the political and economic relations between the two countries have been growing attracting the international investors of the defense sector who have been encouraged by such a less restrictive economic environment.

According to the State Department’s annual terrorism report, released April 30, 2008, Libya has been actively supporting European and American counter-terrorism efforts in the region. Its involvement in international counter-terrorism operations was compelled by Al-Qaeda’s alliance with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and Al-Zwahiri’s 2003 audio taped scolding of Qadhafi for pandering to the United States and terminating his support to terrorism; Al-Zawahiri also called for the toppling of Qadhafi whom he described as an “enemy of Islam.”

The United States military assistance to Libya will be spearheaded by AFRICOM. In the short term, Libyan military officers will benefit from the US International Military Education and Training Program while US military personnel train Libyan soldiers on infantry weapon systems and tactics and provide them with class II military equipment such as night vision goggles to enhance their border security.

Qadhafi, drawing a valuable lesson from Saddam’s demise in 2003 and tired of the perfunctory approach of the Arab leaders to Pan-Arab nationalism, has decided to align himself with the US, a country that attempted to assassinate him in 1986 and which he once labeled the leader of imperialism and capitalism, thus worming himself into a strategic powerbroker position in the Arab world. I find such alignment ironic.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

The Mendacity Of Hope

 

George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC News program “This Week,” interviewed President-elect Barak Obama on his foreign policy plans for the Middle East. Mr. Obama reiterated his intention to engage Iran in a direct dialogue that will emphasize respect and translucency. He explained that his foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran will be clearly demarcated from the superciliousness and deprecation that has characterized the relations between George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The objective of his agenda will be to improve relations; such improvement can only be attained if Tehran halts its nuclear program that the United States and Israel define as hostile.

 

On the current fighting in Gaza, Mr. Obama promised that immediately after his inauguration, his foreign policy team will commit to advancing the Middle East peace process between Israel and Palestine. Such comment should bring a sigh of relief and stoke the hopes of Arab officials and non-officials who, a week earlier, voiced deep consternation that the President-elect ‘silence was a nod and a wink to a doubtful Israel conveying his unadulterated support for its “right” to exist. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised the Arab and Moslem world to break away from the heavy handed and coercive tactics of the Bush administration and promote a positive approach that will foster a peaceful environment in the Middle East. Mr. Obama’s aides revealed that the president-elect will elaborate on his new positive approach in a speech he will give in a yet to be known Arab country within the first one hundred days of his presidency. 

 

What most Arab observers fail to note is that Mr. Obama has already plotted his foreign policy azimuth, or rather it has been plotted for him; it does not digress from the current administration’s stance. Last July, when he was visiting the Israeli town of Sderot, Obama sanctioned Israel’s military interventions against the Palestinians when he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I am going to do everything in my power to stop that.” He, however, lacked the fortitude of character to reverse the perspective and say what he would do if somebody, for years, cut off the water and electricity to his house, where his daughters slept at night, walled the doors and windows, clogged the sewers, restricted the flow of food and medicine, while constantly fumigating and blasting earsplitting sirens. On December 29, Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, quoted Obama ‘statement in justifying Israel’s grievous assault on the Palestinian civilians. Mr. Obama, much like his predecessors, feels that Israel is vindicated in its genocidal and racist killing campaign against the Palestinians; he feels that if Israel’s highly uncalibrated sense of threat requires the extermination of the Palestinian population with its babies, women, and elderly, so be it. To that end, the United States, a founding sponsor of and a contracting party to the Nuremberg Charter and the Genocide Convention, as well as the United Nations Charter, finances, arms, and politically supports Israel’s murdering of the Palestinians. The United States’ foreign policy has historically spurned the Rule of Law in foreign relations when it comes to endorsing Israel’s ascendancy in the region.

 

Obama’s message on his campaign trail might have been “Hope,” but it is not hope for the Middle Eastern Arab nations. The peace process his foreign policy team intends to jumpstart is in fact a war process by means of which Israel will expand its supremacy over its Arab neighbors and Iran. It is high time the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Moslems stop believing that he is their redeemer.    

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

     

Roadkills On The “Road Map” For Peace

 

The murderous Israeli onslaught of Gazans continues unabated and with impunity as Israel unleashed thousands of its ground troops to foray further into the densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip killing hundreds of civilians most of whom are children, women, and non-combatant men. Hamas commanders have elected to engage the incursive Israeli forces employing Guerrilla warfare. Conventional force on force attacks on the well-equipped and better supported Israeli ground forces would have been suicidal. Instead, Hamas fighters dissolved into the Strip ’straggling cities sporadically attacking Israeli forces with anti-tank missiles and mortars; their tactics, so far, resulted in the killing of eight Israeli soldier, far less than what Israeli strategists predicted. The Israeli show of force is yielding limited results; Hamas’ mortar attacks on southern Israeli cities, albeit drastically reduced, remain a threat. Israeli military commanders are tempted to push deeper into Palestinian cities, but they are concerned that close quarter urban skirmishes will result in a higher casualty rate not among the Palestinian civilians, but the Israeli forces.

The targeting list of the Israeli army seems to be quite inclusive. Private dwellings, markets, mosques, shelters, and hospitals have been shelled just as frequently as known government and military installations. Ambulance drivers have been sniped; International relief organizations and medical personnel have been denied entry into Gaza to provide a much needed humanitarian assistance to the growing number of affected civilians. A United Nations school in the Jabaliya refugee camp sheltering mostly children, women and the elderly was shelled killing forty people. Israeli officials accused Hamas of firing missiles from the school. The accusation was categorically denied by the director of Gazan operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, John Ging.

There are no safe havens

in Gaza;

there is

no food,

no water,

no relief.

On most faces,

there is no hope;

only a raging grief

peers through the mask

of resignation;

only the wailing of the bereaved

could be heard at night

over the barking of the guns.

Only the stench of decaying bodies

under reddened concrete slabs

covers the cordite.

 

The international community’s intense efforts to broker a cease-fire were stymied by the unwillingness of Israel and the Bush administration to commit to a cessation of hostilities with Hamas remaining in power. Hamas’ leadership, bound by its 1988 charter, pledged to continue its missile attacks on Israel and its weapons smuggling operations from Egypt.

On Thursday 8^th, 2008, the Arab nations, led by Libya, a revolving non-permanent member of the Security Council, were able to garner enough votes at the United Nations to guarantee a Security Council binding resolution for an immediate cease-fire that offers the Gazans a respite and alleviates from their horrendous suffering. The resolution was approved with a vote of 14 – 0, with the US, uncharacteristically, abstaining. The US initially objected to the resolution citing its failure to address Israel’s concerns about Hamas’ weapons smuggling and missile attacks. The unequivocal support the Bush administration smothered Israel with allowed anti-US hardliners such as Iran to gain popularity while alienating pro-US Arab governments which are now seen as enablers of Israel.

The Security Council’s favorable vote on an Arab proposed resolution that was not vetoed by the US is a clear indicator the said resolution offers Israel a strategic lead and will be detrimental to the Palestinians in their future peace negotiations. The resolution, far from condemning Israel’s criminal massacre of non-combatant Palestinians in flagrant violation of international laws, gives it a diktat to inflict, with reinforced confidence and without fear of international incrimination, more violence on Gaza when the latter is deemed a security threat to the Jewish state. Considering Hamas’ radical 1988 charter, the symptomatically reckless and short-sighted policies of its leadership, Israel’s proclivity to excessive violence, and the bubbling militancy of the Palestinian population that Israel did much to exacerbate, it will only be months, if not weeks, before the butchery carries on. It is clear that Israel’s “road map” for peace is paved with Palestinian bodies.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

On Killing Palestinian Civilians

  

It is difficult today to find reports on the polarizing Palestinian/Israeli issue unladed of hyperbole; debating the conflict hardly ever occurs without damaging irrational emotional eruptions. It is analogous to navigating a minefield. Facts have been doctored; histories rewritten; irreparable mistakes of strategic heft made by not just the Palestinian and Israeli politicians, but the US and Arab governments as well. In the midst of this whirlpool of arguments and counterarguments, facts and fallacies, through the smoke screen of political folderol, there seems to be a consensus emerging: Palestinian civilians are being exterminated on a daily basis; their children and babies are dying from bombs, diseases, malnutrition, and forced illiteracy; their minds are being stuffed like a thanksgiving turkey with jaundiced ideologies; their despondent fathers are ripe for the picking by radical fringes and political dogmatists.

Who is to blame?

Most are quick to point the finger at the Israeli government. They are, after all, still pounding the Gazan population with state-of-the-art “bunker buster” high-precision GBU-39 missiles freshly acquired from the US government. The missiles, developed by a Boeing subsidiary and which carry more wallop than the heavier and less accurate bombs used against Hezbollah in 2006, reportedly penetrated at least 35 inches of steel-reinforced concrete in US tests. Israel is testing them on Gazans not so much because their houses are 35 inches steel-reinforced concrete thick, but because their minds are impervious to the idea that democratically electing a religiously radical group opposed to the existence of the Israeli state is unacceptable.

Some analysts believe the Islamic Resistance Movement – Harakat Al Mukawama Al Islamiya (HAMAS), an offshoot of the Egyptian Islamic Brotherhood was created in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdelaziz Al-Rantisi, and Mohammed Taha, to counter-balance the nationalistic Harakat Al-Tahrir Al-Watani Al-Falastini (Fatah). Fatah leadership believes the establishment of Hamas was not without the help of the Egyptian Mokhabarat and the Israeli Mossad. The Islamic organization quickly ingratiated itself with the destitute Palestinians by engaging in extensive social programs which a corrupt and fractured Palestinian Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat and saturated by Fatah bureaucrats whose allegiance was shady lacked. While Fatah was funded by the Madrid Quartet, the sources of Hamas funds remain untracked.

In the January 25, 2006 parliamentary election, an Iranian supported Hamas won the majority in the Palestinian parliament and effectively took control of all cabinet positions while Fatah was relegated to the opposition.

I observed the Palestinian Parliamentary election of 2006 with the same skepticism through which I look at all elections in the Arab World. The keystone of a democratic election is access to viable political options. The Palestinians’ choices were limited: an aging Fatah party that has done nothing but exacerbate the issue since its inception in 1954; a Hamas that is radical and undemocratic, but that has filled a social services void since 1987; Al Mustaqbal Party, a splinter group of Fatah formed on December 14, 2005, and whose founder and leader, Marwan Al-Barghouti, is serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail. How can we possibly talk of a democratic election within a tumultuous society whose psyche is ravaged by war, a society collectively enduring an upheaval caused by a chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome?

Hamas’ often inaccurate mortar and Fajr-3 rocket volleys into Israel cannot possibly be misconstrued as resistance. Despite their 45 kilometer range allowing it to reach Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and even the outskirts of Beersheba, the Iranian-made third generation Katyusha rockets  yield low casualty rates and cause no more damage than a stable fly on a Shire horse. Hamas’ irrational military actions have nothing more than a symbolic value. Militarily, they require minimal containment from Israel; strategically, they are inconsequential to it.

The disparity between the two forces is evident and a comparison would be redundant; Israel’s retaliation is dramatically disproportionate and has historically being consistently so. Hamas is well aware the Mossad and Aman, the Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence, know every nook and cranny of the Gaza Strip. Thanks mostly to their Palestinian informants, the Israelis have successfully been collecting on the locations of Hamas’ weapons caches, troop garrisons, and the political and military leadership residences and safe houses; they have been monitoring their communications and garroting their supply lines. Their objective, according to Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon, is to topple Hamas. Israel’s aversion to Hamas is shared by some neighboring Arab nations such as Jordan and Egypt.

International reactions to Israel’s aggression varied in intensity and substance. Hosni Mubarak, as he was meeting with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, sought to extend the truce between Israel and Hamas and lodged a formal complaint with Israel’s ambassador. But he also closed the border with Gaza blocking the only exit to safety. While anti-Israel demonstrations broke out in all the Arab capitals, the pro-US Arab governments scrambled to mount an adequate political response. Morocco’s government for instance, in order not to alienate itself from the uproar permeating the Arab street, cancelled a previously scheduled visit by Livni, while the Jordanian Foreign Minister met with her in Washington. As Israel’s attack on Gaza started, Libya welcomed Gene Cretz, a career US diplomat whose previous postings included Tel Aviv to Tripoli as the first US Ambassador to be posted in Libya in three decades. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who recently stated that the Bush administration’s efforts have laid a strong foundation upon which a lasting peace between the Palestinian and Israeli governments could flourish, condemned Hamas’s attacks on Israel and called for a “durable and sustainable” truce, but no immediate cease-fire. The Arab League held an inconsequential urgent meeting. The UN Security Council strongly condemned Israel’s excessive use of military force, but remains shackled by the US veto.

The support the US is providing to the Israeli operation is staggering. In addition to the unconditional veto and the “bunker buster’ missiles, the Pentagon deployed 120 US military personnel to Israel from EUCOM to provide weapon systems technical support; it is also providing Israel with 28,000 light anti-tank (LAW) tube launchers for its land forces and helping upgrade its defense forces’ Patriot anti-aircraft missiles.

The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party publically condemned the attack, but relish Israel’s aggression on a rival political party they would like to see disappear.

Hamas has no compunction using the civilian population as shields to their weapons caches and leadership and launching their mortars and missiles from heavily populated areas such as the Jabaliya well aware that Israeli anti-battery radars will lock on the point of origin of the launch and engage with suppressive anti-battery fire.

Undoubtedly, Israel is slaughtering the Palestinians, but Hamas is walking them to the slaughter house. The UN condamns; the US vetoes; the Iranians arm; the Arab governments shake Israeli hands in the back alleys of international politics while at home they deflect from their defectiveness by indulging their citizens to demonstrate against Israel – a healthy stress reliever; the Islamists collect donations to build more mosques in Gaza and recruit more suicide bombers; Palestinian children die.

Whose blame?

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Harold Pinter: Curtain Down

After a protracted bout with cancer, the theatre iconoclast and 2005 Nobel Prize for literature winner Harold Pinter died December 24^th, 2008. Pinter was known not just as a playwright, but as an actor, theatre director, and a political activist. Since the 1950’s when he broke into the theatre business as a repertory actor using the stage name David Baron, Pinter wrote twenty-nine stage plays, twenty-six screen plays, and a substantial body of poetry, fiction, and essays. He also directed almost 50 stage, television and film productions. He is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. Pinter left instructions for his funeral; at his behest, actor and close friend Michael Gambon read from “No Man’s land” which Pinter wrote in 1974.

“And so I say to you, tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.”

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009

Bring Them Home, But Not For War

Three to four million people are estimated to converge in Washington, D.C. on January 20^th, 2009 to witness the momentous inauguration of Barak Hussein Obama as the 44^th US president. Inauguration tickets, which are provided to members of the Senate and House of Representatives for free, are being snatched like hot dogs at a Nathan’s international July Fourth eating contest. Entertainment and sports event brokers are selling them for thousands of dollars. The swearing-in will last less than five minutes; people are willing to make their way on foot through closed-off roads and blocked bridges, around security barricades, in temperatures forecasted in the 30’s Fahrenheit, and stand for hours around the National Mall platform, west of the capitol to hear the words: I Barack Hussein Obama Do Solemnly Swear… Preparations for the event are underway full-throttle. The inaugural platform on the west steps of the Capitol is being constructed and decorated; Aretha Franklin will be singing and Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist Gabriela Montero and clarinetist Anthony McGill will perform a piece newly composed by John Williams, who is famous for the soundtracks of “Star Wars” and Jaws;”  the streets of downtown DC are being beautified, and the National Mall will be open; it will have mounted big screen television sets for the millions of people that are going to crowd its standing-room-only areas.

For many, the swearing-in as president of an African-American is a true token of a democracy that is constantly evolving and reflective of a people that have embraced the miscellaneousness of their society.

To the Secret Service, upon whom the onus for the inauguration security falls, and the Department of Homeland Security officials, it is a nightmare that warrants operational planning, coordination and deconfliction, and asset mobilization akin to preparing for a war.

And with the help of Northern Command (NorthCom), a war is what Mark Sullivan, Director of the US Secret Service, and Judge Michael Chertoff, Director of the Department of Homeland Security, have been preparing for. NorthCom is a unified combatant command that was activated on October 1, 2002.  In a post 9/11 environment, the Bush administration gave it broad responsibility to respond to catastrophic emergencies and to protect and defend, in conjunction with local, state, and federal civilian authorities, US states, Hawaii and Puerto Rico excluded. For the upcoming inauguration, it is mobilizing 11,500 troops to provide direct support to the Secret Service and Homeland Security’s efforts to defend the D.C. area against any possible civil disturbance or terrorist attack on the president-elect and the president, government officials and installations, and the attendees.

According to US Air Force General Victor E. Renuart Jr., Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, the customary tight air defenses over D.C. will see an increase in the number of patrols; the military contingent will include Army and Air Force engineer units, medical units, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear explosive (CBRNE) attack experts and the Marine Corps Chemical, Biological Initial Reaction Force, a Navy weather team, and members of the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency; over 4,000 troops will provide security at the National mall and around Washington; their mission will be limited to crowd management (a politically correct, civilian oriented appellation for riot control.)

The security element of Northern Command will be 3^rd Infantry Division, 1^st Brigade Combat Team of Fort Stewart, which was put under its command on October 1^st, 2008. 3ID, 1BCT recently returned from Iraq where it had conducted combat missions for a cumulative time of 35 months since the beginning of the war. This is not the first time a military unit is being used domestically; in 2005, in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Louisiana and Mississippi, the DoD deployed active-duty military units to support rescue missions; in May of 1992, an ad hoc Joint Task Force comprised of California Army National Guards, 7^th Infantry Division from Fort Ord, and 1^st Marine Force from Camp Pendleton, effectively controlled Los Angeles and suppressed the riots caused by the Rodney King verdict.

In a departure from its standard operating procedures (SOP), the Department of Defense is dedicating 3ID, 1BCT to NorthCom for one year. Chief of NorthCom future operations, Army Col. Louis Vogler, stated that each year a new military brigade will be ordered to directly support NorthCom in the conduct of what the DoD refers to as operations other than War (OOTW). These units will be known as CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF. They will conduct specialized domestic operations and will train on the domestic use of newly fielded lethal and non-lethal modular packages designed specifically for a war zone and tested in Iraq.

Civil liberties advocates are concerned that the public is blind to the gravity of the matter. They argue that such close collaboration between the military and law enforcement agencies could be damaging to the constitutional principles upon which our democracy was founded. They contend that the DoD’s Delphic doctrine on the use of active-duty combat elements in domestic missions may lead to the violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus and the 1807 Insurrection acts which restrict the use of the military for law enforcement missions. Rep. Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat and the House Armed Services Committee Chairman, stated that the security measure is viable because “It means you’re training America’s Army to meet all possible contingencies.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is preparing to challenge the Bush administration’s new domestic security measures on the appropriateness of assigning a combat military unit focused on counterinsurgency to face-off US citizens in a possible demonstration; the situation could have devastating consequences; ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with the Department of Justice and the Pentagon recently asking for records relating to the domestic assignment of active military forces to the Northern Command.

During the annual National Homeland Defense and Security Symposium in Colorado Springs, General Renuart Jr. admitted Northern Command has regularly assisted with law enforcement activities in the past. ACLU is trying to ascertain whether the assistance provided by NothCom  was within constitutional limits. “It seems to be an incremental approach where the military is being used for narrow missions, but then more and more types of narrow missions until they all combine into one overarching mission,” said Mile German, National Security Counsel for ACLU’s legislative office in Washington, D.C.

The White House maintains the administration’s aggressive counterterrorism efforts have prevented more bloodshed at home. Bush’s homeland security advisor Kenneth L. Wainstein highlighted the USA Patriot Act, intelligence and homeland security reorganizations, and the removal of legal barriers to cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement agents as important steps to stymieing terrorist plans to attack the US.

The military’s involvement in the suppression of civil dissent is outlined in a master military contingency action plan known as the United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2. The Plan is code named “Operation Garden Plot” and gives the military total authority to crack down on any civil disturbance by a resistance group, religious organization, or other persons considered to be non-conformist. Annex A, section B of Operation Garden Plot defines civil “Disruptive Elements” as tax protesters, militia groups, religious cults, and general anti-government dissenters; it allows for the use of deadly force against any extremist or dissident perpetrating any and all forms of civil disorder. The plan was initially uncovered by journalist Ron Ridenhour who summarized his findings in “Garden Plot and the New Action Army.” In conjunction with the US Civil Disturbance Plan, the military has conducted, on numerous occasions, readiness exercises known as Rex 84 to test its ability to detain and relocate at the state and national levels large numbers of American citizens in case of major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity and functionality of government and/or resource mobilization. Under the Bush administration’s policies, such detentions could be indefinite and enmeshed in judicial folderol. In anticipation of judicial obstacles in the event of a major civil disobedience quelling, the Center for Law and Military Operations (CLAMO) published in August 2001 – prior to 9/11 – the legal rationale for domestic military operations in a doctrine titled: “Domestic Operational Law Handbook for Judge Advocates.” According to its author, the document offers a “greater understanding of the legal issues” involved in “domestic support operations.”  

Although the government constantly stated that there are no eminent security threats during the upcoming presidential inauguration, thousands of anti-Bush protesters are scheduled to demonstrate. The potential of an attack against Barak Obama from extreme right activists is anticipated. Other demonstrators, disenfranchised with the current economic situation and the government “’slap on the wrist” approach against the supercilious Wall Street financial firms will use the inaugural event to voice their discontent. The dedication to domestic operations in support of law enforcement of an active-duty military combat unit that has regarded the civilian population in Iraq and Afghanistan as enemy is a potential threat to US civil liberties. The threat is compounded when such use is subsumed in an implemented Operation Garden Plot.

Needless to say, the election of Barak Hussein Obama to the Presidency of one of the greatest democracies in the world might have inhibited tyrannical elements within the government that have found in the Bush administration the right environment to bud. The dismantlement of such undemocratic systems that have germinated within the government needs to be one of The Obama administration’s priorities. Failure to do so would be, to quote Malcolm X, a serious case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

A. T. B. Copyright © 2008

From The Shoe Bomber To The Shoe Thrower: Bush’s Foreign Policy 101

 

When Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi reporter for the Cairo-based network Al Baghdadia Television, during a press conference in Baghdad, hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, he nicely wrapped up the war in Iraq for the departing president, as if he were saying: you are as contemptible as Saddam Hussein. We all remember the images broadcast around the world from Al Ferdaous Circle in Baghdad in April of 2003, when the statue of Saddam was toppled by the US Marines and a euphoric Iraqi crowd trampled it and slapped its face with shoes as it was being dragged around the place; Bush hailed it as an irrevocable sign the Iraqi people supported his invasion. Today, the Iraqi people, democratic by Bush’s standards, send an irrevocable message to Bush that they despise him. Understandable, from a society that bears gaping wounds inflicted by five years of a raging war that left thousands of its children dead, thousands more displaced because of sectarianism, and the reminder hopelessly mired in misery and shackled by fear.

 

After 9/11, Bush pledged to wage a war against terrorism. As a political strategy, it was a folly; a government can not wage an open war against a concept as elusive as terrorism. The governments of the European Union, which have been battling internal and international terrorism for decades, advised the American administration the issue is to be approached as a criminal act and should be left to law enforcement agencies to deal with.

 

Led by the testosterone over-charged Texan George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, a masculine Condoleezza Rice with balls bigger than a squirrel’s, and others, the American government’s plan of action, predictably, resembled the script of a “B” Western movie in which, subsequent to an Indian stealing a horse from a ranch, a posse gallops to the nearest Indian village kills its inhabitants, children and all, and ransacks their tepees leaving behind a landscape of burning ruins.

 

Bush’s attack on the Taliban was based on a grave underestimation of their combat stamina; his baseless invasion of Iraq was planned on uncorroborated intelligence that some would argue was deliberately falsified to give credence to and garner support for the operation; his ordered covert and clandestine actions in Somalia and elsewhere in the Arab world, resulted in a metastasis of terrorism that is proving to be strategically deleterious to many a government.

 

To the international community, Bush’s message was simple: We would like to see you as democratic, peaceful-seeking, and prosperous peoples as we are. I remember in March of 2005, as sectarian violence spiraled out of control in Iraq and the Taliban resurged with more gusto in Afghanistan, Bush stood before a military crowd at the National Defense University at Fort McNair and unusually volubly stated: “It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors. It should be clear the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance kindled in free societies … We are also determined to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

 

From this perspective, it is then easy to see the reason behind the boisterous drive of the Bush administration. The Taliban and the Saddam regimes were indeed radical, undemocratic, and disrespectful of their citizens and neighbors. But so are all the other Arab countries. With tacit support from the bush administration, the Arab governments straddled the war on terror like nuns on bicycles joyously riding through the cobbled streets of a provincial town; they are unbridled in their oppression against their own people much like the Bush administration felt no compunction in bolstering its executive powers and redefining democracy to allow for the effective outsourcing of tyranny. While Bush and other officials from his administration glowingly spoke of justice, their undemocratic policies and initiatives encouraged human rights abuses by precipitating the kidnapping of Moslems and Arabs from around the world, their rendering to Arab countries such as Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan to be torturously interrogated, and their detention unindicted indefinitely. The Bush administration’s chauvinism created a golden opportunity for undemocratic countries to surface their repressive methods as legitimate defense mechanisms against an opposition that allegedly threatens the established governance, even if that opposition stands in fact for a popular outcry against an unwieldy, insensitive, and unapproachable system which efficiently deflects all accountability and scrutiny from the policymakers and often absolves the unchallenged, unpopular leadership, a leadership that associates itself with patriotism and regards dissent as unpatriotic.

 

If not fighting terrorism and spreading democracy, what, then, is the true motivation behind the Bush administration’s foreign policy?

 

The creation of an international weapons market and the saturation of that market with US made weaponry. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are showcases for US military hardware.

 

According to a recently published report from The New American Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute, profits from US arms trade reached $32 billion in 2007, surpassing the revenues reported for 2001, when Bush took over the presidency, by three folds. The US arms trade market expanded from 123 states and territories to 174. The report stated that more than half of the developing countries the US supplies with weapons are undemocratic and/or engage in flagrant human rights abuses. The top 13 countries are: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Colombia, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia. Sales to these countries totaled over $16.2 billion in 2006 and 2007. Moreover, 20 of the 27 nations engaged in major armed conflict have been receiving weapons from the US. William D. Hartung, the lead author of the report, concluded: “The United States cannot demand respect for human rights and arm human rights abusers at the same time.”

 

Exactly Mr. Muntadar Al-Zaidi’s point.

 

And who is Mr. Al-Zaidi? A messenger from the Iraqi and the Arab streets who on a daily basis feels the gnawing effect of Bush ‘string of failed initiatives. A man whose hatred for Bush could not be detected by the Iraqi security officials and Secret Service personnel who screened him before entering the press conference. A man who if he had time to reach out and grab the next guy’s shoes to through at Bush, he would have done so. The Shoe Thrower and a couple of notches above Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber.

 

While lobbing his shoes at Bush like a major league baseball pitcher, Al-Zaidi yelled: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

 

Making light of the incident, Bush stated:” “I don’t know what the guy’s cause is…”

We all do. ‘Cause he hates you, Mr. President. You can’t make people love you when all you sowed in their backyards are death and destruction.

 

Bush’s war against terrorism and advocacy of Democracy amounts to nothing more than a sales pitch. His deeply flawed foreign policies undermine democracies, inhibit peace, and encourage human rights abuses. His pseudo-philanthropic US funded anti-AIDS program in Africa, championed by his wife Laura Bush, for instance, is nothing more than an attention-grabber to set the stage for AFRICOM, the US arms sales representative for Africa, to pitch the real deal. It is a strategic race between the US and China to acquire African nations as clients. The US is engaged in similar races in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

 

Here is a cultural/security suggestion Mr. President, hold your future press conferences in Moslem countries in mosques; shoes are not allowed past the entrance.

 

A. T. B. Copyright © 2008