How Israeli Plot to Kill Saddam Became a ‘Training Accident’
By Richard H. Curtiss, Arab News 1/2/2004
WASHINGTON, 2 January 2004 — What has long been called a “training accident” has finally been revealed in Israel. The tale begins with an unbelievable botch-up which the Israelis never fully described.
Let’s start from the beginning. The Israelis wanted to be involved in the war on Iraq in 1991. The United States desperately wanted to keep Israel out of the war because it might so anger all of the other Arabs that the carefully crafted coalition would quickly unravel.
Meanwhile, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein began firing missiles at both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Day after day the United States warned Israel to stay out of the war despite Iraqi provocations.
The Israelis did not become involved and in fact only two Israelis, one Saudi, and 30 Americans were killed despite the fact that more than 39 missiles were fired from Baghdad.
The Israelis, however, thirsted for revenge, and set out to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The plot was an ingenious one. But, as usual, with the Israelis too clever by half.
New Year resolutions
By Hani Shukrallah, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 1 - 7 January 2004
2003 has been described as the worst year in modern Arab history by some pundits -- on a par with, or even worse than, the two prime catastrophic events that have largely shaped the contemporary Arab world: the Nakba of 1948 and the equally crushing defeat of the Arabs at Israeli hands in June 1967. Yet as the year drew to a close, such assertions -- made in the heat of the fall of Baghdad, the seat of the Abbassids, and birthplace of the glorious reign of Haroun Al- Rashid -- appear to have lost much of their force. The anti-climatic capture of Saddam Hussein and the somewhat comic confessions of Muaamar Gaddafi, coming within a week of each other in December 2003, seemed to point to an alternative perspective on the year's drama. Rather than being measured against 1948 and 1967, it would be more useful perhaps to see 2003 as underlining the fact that, strange as it may seem, contemporary Arabs continue to harvest the bitter fruit of their two "founding" catastrophes -- indeed, continue to replay them in forms which are ever more absurd, if not as immediately devastating.
Nowhere else in a post-colonial Third World is the psychological and intellectual legacy of colonial domination as manifestly alive or as compelling as it is in today's Arab region. Nearly half a century after independence, the nationalist zeal of the 1930s and 1940s seems to sustain the fervor of its vigorous youth. This is no inherent cultural or religious trait, of the facile "why do they hate us?"-type formulae. Rather, it is the perfidies and ravages of the colonial world that have managed to survive in this region long after their demise everywhere else. After all, the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1914 [1917 - Ed.], yet the process of Palestinian dispossession continues, unabated, to this day.
There is, nevertheless, something terribly wrong about a nationalistic zeal that has long passed its dotage. Stagnant, easily reneged upon, but rarely subjected to a serious critique, pan-Arab nationalism has been in a state of decay so protracted as to produce something akin to the "living dead" of horror fiction. In different ways, Saddam, Gaddafi, and even Osama Bin Laden have all provided testimony to a pan-Arab nationalism in extreme putrefaction.
Eighteen Months to Disaster
By Amahl Bishara, Arabic Media Internet Network 12/31/2003
The soldiers, helmeted and armed, opened the wide yellow gate just about on schedule, and the family passed through the opening in the fence that now separates their house from the rest of the West Bank town of Jayyous . The gate closed. The soldiers rode off in their jeep. A British volunteer from the World Council of Churches recorded exactly when the gate opened and closed. We started to walk up towards town, on a pretty green path running through an olive orchard. Some boys picked up a handful of bullets, remnants of recent Israeli army shootings. The fence was behind us, not visible, but all around.
These were not always the rhythms of daily life in the agricultural village of Jayyous , where nearly every family has land now located on the other side of the fence. In the last year and a half, Jayyous' 2,800 people have seen their lives changed with the singular abruptness of a physical barrier placed between them and their livelihoods: greenhouses, orchards, and grazing lands. That barrier, near Jayyous, is a chain-link fence, topped with electrical monitors, flanked by military roads on either side, and adorned by coils of barbed wire winding in chest-high triplicate through the countryside. The first phase of the barrier – in some places a wall, and in some a fence – is 145 kilometers long. When completed, the barrier will be four times this length
Abdul-Latif Khaled, a hydrologist with the Palestinian Hydrology Group and a regional coordinator of the Apartheid Wall Campaign ( www.stopthewall.org ), chronicled for me recent local history. It is offered here to illustrate how doors – or really gates – are closing in the West Bank today. Jayyous is just one of 51 communities directly affected in terms of land confiscation or access by the first phase of the barrier.
Remove Israel’s WMD threat
By Julie Flint, Daily Star 1/3/2004
Much changed on the ground in the Middle East in 2003. Saddam Hussein was overthrown and it seemed possible, if not altogether certain, that the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) with which he once threatened Israel had been reduced to an empty boast by a decade of UN inspections. Iran signed a protocol giving UN inspectors the right to conduct snap inspections of its nuclear facilities. And Libya announced it would give up hitherto unacknowledged work on its WMDs.
On the other side of the Arab-Israeli divide, however, it was business as usual for Israel and for its Western friends. Within three days of the concessions by Iran and Libya, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, eschewing the language of compromise or conciliation, warned that Israel would take military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities if the need arose. No payback for Iranian moderates there. None of the world leaders urging disarmament on Arab states saw fit to recall that Israel has between 200 and 500 nuclear weapons of its own, ranging from “city busters” to “mini-nukes,” or an offensive chemical weapons program with production capability for mustard and nerve agents, an offensive biological weapons research program with production capability, and sophisticated delivery systems.
With the exception of two token visits in the 1960s, Israel’s nuclear site at Dimona in the Negev Desert has never been opened to international inspection. Even members of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, are denied access. The Israeli Institute for Biological Research at Nes Ziona, home of Israel’s chemical and biological warfare program, is erased from aerial survey photographs and maps.
In the prairies of Isra-bluff
By Gideon Samet, Ha'aretz 1/2/2004
As the dogs bark, the covered wagons of Israeli officialdom wind their way confidently through the prairies of Isra-bluff. No one knows exactly where they are heading, but they assure us that they know. If the dogs would only have patience, and most importantly, quit barking, peace and security would appear on the horizon. That's the way practically every important issue is handled in this country. But now the convoy is returning to one of the bogus back-roads it knows best - the one that pretends to lead to negotiations with Syria. Things are going to be lively. They already are. After all, pulling back from the Golan Heights isn't even an option.
What a waste of time to rehash the whole business of whether it's worth our while to pull back, and up to where. What does it matter what the Mossad operative and the Syrian agent said at that secret meeting on board a yacht on the Black Sea? Don't we already know enough about the workings of the Bluff and Bluster Office and Fib Headquarters when it comes to an accord on the Golan? If Rabin and Barak didn't do it, why waste the gorgeous weather to sit and sweat when we are bound to crash into another wall of deception erected by Sharon?
Even so, maybe the Israeli public, Sharon's voluntary victims, should have a look at the latest round of tricks performed by Israel's master of painful concessions. He is sending MK Magali Wahaba to talks in Damascus. Sending him? Well, not really. The Prime Minister's Office denies it. But the plot is thickening: Wahaba hasn't jumped on the denial bandwagon. These are "sensitive matters," as he puts it.
2003: A year of US and Israeli defiance of International Law - Part 1/2
By Laurie King-Irani, Electronic Intifada 1/2/2004
In attempting to sum up the key trends of 2003 in the Middle East in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, it is difficult to decide which, among a wide array of demoralizing events, was the defining news story of the year. Closer analysis reveals prevailing trends that have a global as well as a regional significance. Perhaps the most disturbing trend of the past year was the ongoing erosion of multilateral frameworks of decision-making and diplomacy in the Middle East, from Gaza to Baghdad, and the ominous marginalization of International Humanitarian Law (1) by the world's hegemonic power, the United States, and its client Israel.
US and Israeli actions in 2003 set new and dangerous precedents for the successful violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and United Nations resolutions, not to mention the UN charter itself, over which the US and the UK ran roughshod by launching a pre-emptive war on Iraq in March. Meanwhile, both the Likud and the Labor parties accelerated the construction of an imposing apartheid wall, supposedly meant to ensure security by separating Israelis from Palestinians, but in effect establishing new "facts on the ground" by altering borders and boundaries to encompass and illegally incorporate large swaths of Palestinian towns, orchards, farms, marketplaces, and roads throughout the West Bank.
2003: A year of Israeli and US defiance of International Law - 2/2
By Laurie King-Irani, Electronic Intifada 1/2/2004
Top-down pressures: A narrowing of options -- The primary catalyst for external, top-down pressures opposing Belgium's Universal Jurisdiction law was the March 2003 filing of a case in Brussels by Iraqis who accused former President George H.W. Bush and other members of his administration with war crimes stemming from the deaths of 400 Iraqi civilians incinerated when a US missile penetrated a Baghdad bomb shelter in January of 1991. Overnight, US officials, past and present, began panicking over the possibility that they could be in the dock in Belgium.
Suddenly, Belgium's Universal Jurisdiction legislation was threatened not simply with modification, but cancellation. The threat came not from Belgian civil society or Belgian parliamentarians, but rather, from another state, one that proceeded, paradoxically, to interfere in Belgium's sovereignty on the pretext of protecting its own. The US government feared that even a modified law with filtering mechanisms and a clearly delimited scope might still lead to the arrest and prosecution of US military officials attending NATO meetings in Brussels. In early June 2003, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Brussels to "teach Belgium a lesson," in his own words. Rumsfeld threatened that the US would relocate NATO headquarters to Warsaw unless Belgium's newly elected Parliament rescinded the country's progressive anti-atrocity legislation. Combined with back-channel pressures exerted by the US Chamber of Commerce and some major US corporations involved with NATO, Rumsfeld's threat produced immediate results: the newly elected Belgian parliament, as its first order of business, complied with US desires by annulling the 1993 and 1999 law.
Questions about disengagement
By Ze'ev Schiff, Ha'aretz 1/2/2004
No one in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) understood exactly what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon meant by Israeli "disengagement" from the Palestinian territories if no progress on their part is forthcoming in connection with the "road map" and if the terrorism continues. Since Sharon delivered his speech in Herzliya two weeks ago, the IDF has not received even fragments of orders, and the prime minister's intention remains vague. The army doesn't know, for example, what Sharon meant when he spoke about the possibility of moving settlements. So the decision in the army is to wait and do nothing, not even preliminary staff work. Another internal decision is that in any event the IDF must not be involved in recommendations or decisions about which settlements to move or to evacuate. In the meantime, though, the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Ya'alon, has taken a step of his own by stating that the evacuation of the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip, will be a prize to terrorism. No one in the political-security establishment is capable of drawing the prime minister's disengagement map or of elucidating its main points. Even the experts on the territories are engaged in guesswork. It's possible that Sharon has a plan, but if so, he is keeping it very close to his chest at this stage. It's clear that disengagement is in essence a unilateral action. Sharon's remarks also suggest that such an action would constitute punishment of the Palestinians as well as a warning.
Unilateral Separation Between Israel and Palestine
By Elias H. Tuma, Arabic Media Internet Network 1/1/2004
On Thursday, December 11, 2003, Mr. Ariel Sharon, delivered a speech in Herzelia in which he unveiled his "Unilateral Separation" Plan from the Palestinians, if the Palestinians "still continue to disregard their part in implementing the 'Road Map' within a few months." The Separation plan would include redeployment of Israel's military forces along "new security line" that would minimize the number of Israelis in "the heart of the Palestinian population." Mr. Sharon invited the Palestinians to "abandon the path of terror and move together toward peace." Since then he has indicated that the Palestinians would end up with less territory under this plan than they would through a negotiated peace and the Road Map. At face value, Mr. Sharon's statements may be considered conciliatory. However, no one would doubt that Mr. Sharon has his priorities well established. He would try to acquire as much Palestinian land as he could. He would try to maximize the security of Israelis and Jews wherever they may be. And he would try to realize these objectives at minimum cost, especially in life and limb of Israelis. By now Mr. Sharon seems to have recognized that military action against the Palestinians will not deliver those objectives. He also seems to be convinced that the Palestinians will not achieve their goals of statehood and independence within the internationally recognized borders by force, violence, or terror.
It is apparent that Mr. Sharon is ready to abandon the idea of peace with the Palestinians and settle for an end of violence and for more security by unilateral separation from them. The separation would be implemented by completing the Separation Fence on a unilaterally designated line inside Palestinian territory at various distances from the Green Line or the pre-June 1967 boundaries. The new separation boundary, as presently visualized, would net Israel another 15% of the Palestinian territory. Mr. Sharon is not offering the Palestinians any inducements to comply with the Road Map, not even an initiative of compliance by Israel as an example. He, instead, is giving them a warning that if they do not comply soon, they will once more be on the losing side, especially in territorial terms, as they have experienced in the past. The fact is that the Unilateral Separation plan offers Israel extra benefits, compared with the Road Map, but Mr. Sharon is ready to pay lip service to the Road Map to peace for international consumption, especially for the people and government of the United States (US).
The furore over Tariq Ramadan
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, Al-Ahram Weekly on-line 1 - 7 January 2004
The French daily Le Monde devoted the main story on the front page of its 23 December issue to Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Islamic activist and grandson, on his mother's side, of Muslim Brothers founder Hassan El-Banna.
The Le Monde article leads with the question "Who is Tariq Ramadan?" and then goes on to identify him as the central figure of Islam in France today, even though he is a Swiss national. With a population of seven million, the Muslims in France have become the second largest religious community in the country, after the Catholics and before the Protestants. Ramadan was thrust into the limelight following his recent participation in a meeting organised by the European Social Forum (ESF) and his heated debate on television with French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Tariq Ramadan says he is not part of the Muslim Brothers. He has even said that he differed with his grandfather over a number of issues related to Islamic teachings. But whether he likes it or not, his importance lies in the fact that he belongs concomitantly to two discordant identities, an Islamic identity due to his family ties and a European identity due to his upbringing in Switzerland. In the context of the radical changes now underway in the entire world system, the potential for clashes between the two facets of his dual identity has never been higher. Indeed, Ramadan's thinking and behaviour are, to a considerable extent, a product of the constant tug of war between these two facets and the problematics this raises.
1973 and 2003: why things must finally change
Editorial, Daily Star 1/3/2004
Thursday’s declassified British intelligence files reporting that the United States had seriously contemplated militarily seizing Arab oil fields in 1973 raises important issues about the past and the present, in view of the fact the British, American and other troops now occupy and are remaking Iraq.
At the most simple level, it seems that little has changed since 1973 in the United States’ use of military force unilaterally to secure objectives in the Arab world. Washington’s security policy remains defined by the attitude that American rights are more important than the rights of other sovereign states that Washington uses its armed forces and covert operations capabilities to change regimes and grab what it likes around the world in order to serve the interests of the American people. This would be understandable in a world of jungle values. But our world has moved in the opposite direction during the last three decades.
Within the US and globally, the trend since the early 1970s has been toward a heightened appreciation of human rights as both a national lodestar of public policy and also as a core factor in foreign policy formulation. The end of the Cold War and the global spread of democracy contrast sharply with the apparently unchanging American tradition of using one’s army as a routine policy instrument in Middle Eastern lands.
Arabs Must Stop Dwelling in the Past
By Said Ghazali, Palestine Chronicle 1/2/2004
EAST JERUSALEM - The inability of Arab leaders to draw the right lessons from Saddam’s rise and collapse — after all, he was one of the Arab dictators himself — leads me to contemplate the sterility of their regimes.
Although Saddam’s intolerance and brutality was well known in the West, it came as news to millions in the Muslim world who had been deluded by the regime’s pan-Arab slogans, which described him as the knight of the Arabs. But Iraqis, as well as the citizens of the other 21 Arab countries, have long yearned for freedom, democracy, progress, and modernization.
The American soldiers, even with their sophisticated weapons, cannot achieve this goal by force. Democracy is the product of social, economic and political change. But the American occupation could help to shed light on the Arab world’s own weaknesses.
After more than five decades of living under the Arab regime system, we have reaped only wars, occupations, poverty, corruption and oppression. The 300 million Arabs, from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean, have no rights, no freedom, and no hope. Their regimes are too often corrupt and defensive. And the ordinary Arab is too often oversensitive, paranoid and irrational.
US opts for a failed Israeli strategy
By Sudha Ramachandran, Asia Times 12/25/2003
BANGALORE - With the Iraqi insurgency intensifying and United States casualties mounting by the day, the US is turning to its good friend Israel for inspiration and lessons. Increasingly, the tactics being adopted by the US occupation forces in Iraq appear to be modeled on those used by Israel in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
Media reports reveal that Washington has been consulting Israel on how best to quell the insurgency and consolidate its occupation of Iraq. Seymour Hersh writes in The New Yorker that the Pentagon has sought "active and secret help" from the Israelis.
"According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq," writes Hersh. Another report in The New York Times says that senior American officials have gone to Israel to learn from the latter's urban counter-insurgency warfare strategy.
....While cooperation with Israel in an intelligence network will help the Americans' military campaign, copying a failed Israeli strategy to crush resistance makes little sense.
A peace-seeking country
By Doron Rosenblum, Ha'aretz 12/31/2003
Mazal tov! This is the fourth time in the past two weeks that President Assad has made overtures to Israel about opening negotiations with no prior conditions. Nu?... So?...
Negotiations! For peace! With no prior conditions!
Big deal. Now he's suddenly smartened up, when the Americans are pressing him and his pal Saddam isn't in power anymore. Thanks very much! No favors, please! Israel is a peace-seeking country, but the motives of the other side are also important to us. How do we know what his intentions and motives are? Maybe he's not serious? Maybe he's after a one-night stand? Just a quickie?
What difference does it make what his motives are? Syria has always upheld agreements, and as a peace-seeking country, isn't it worth Israel's while to ... To Israel as a peace-seeking country it's clear that this is not the time, and that this is not true peace we desire. "We will not rush to make peace with Syria in order to get the American pressure and the economic sanctions lifted," as Sharon said. And besides, as the Polish women say in their jokes, Why should he get enjoyment? Why in the world should he get peace-schmeace? No, this is not the time. Not when "Syria has become a remote village where the leaders are fighting for their rule," as Netanyahu said. It's not serious. Go away. Come again another day.
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