Sunday, February 28, 2010

(Indian Prime Minister Manmohan) Singh allays Arab concern - Arab Times

http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article23074.ece

Arab news


Singh allays Arab concern

By ARAB NEWS
Published: Feb 27, 2010 12:45 AM Updated: Feb 27, 2010 4:57 PM
JEDDAH: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said that Arab concern about growing Indo-Israeli defense cooperation is "misplaced."
Last year it was reported that Israel had replaced Russia as India's top supplier of defense equipment. The Indian premier was speaking in a special interview prior to his visit to the Kingdom. He arrives Saturday at the head of one of the most important Indian delegations to visit the Kingdom in years.
"Our relationship with no single country is at the expense of our relations with any other country," he said.
As to India's support for Palestine, it was "an article of faith for us," he added.
"Our solidarity with the people of Palestine predates our independence," he said. "India supports a peaceful solution that would result in a sovereign, independent, viable and united state of Palestine living within secure and recognized borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, side by side at peace with Israel."
The Arab Peace Plan, the Quartet road map and the various UN Security Council resolutions on the issue were firmly supported by India. He recently confirmed this to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during the latter's visit to Delhi a fortnight ago.
The relationship with Saudi Arabia was of prime importance for India, the premier said. Trade was of particular importance. Following the visit of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah in January 2006 — a visit the Indian premier called a "landmark event" — the two countries have made "considerable" progress in strengthening their relationship, he said. "There have been regular high-level ministerial exchanges as well as intensified interaction among the business community, academia and other sections of society," he explained.
The India-Saudi Arabia Joint Commission that met in November drew up "ambitious" plans, he said, pointing out that trade between the two countries is worth over SR95 billion and that Saudi Arabia is India's fourth largest trading partner. He also pointed to the number of joint ventures involving Indian investors in the Kingdom. This stood at over 500 and was worth over SR7.5 billion. India was equally looking hopefully to greater Saudi investment in the opposite direction, he added.
He hoped his visit would provide ample opportunity for "interacting with the members of the business community in Saudi Arabia and inviting them to be a partner in India's rapid socioeconomic transformation through major infrastructure, energy, industry and services related projects."
The visit would, he revealed, result in several cooperation agreements in economic, cultural, scientific, technological and information technology fields. "I am confident these will further enrich our close relations," he said.
As both countries rapidly modernize, greater cooperation makes sense, he declared.  Both have a "huge stake" in each other's success, and to that extent the relationship is of "strategic importance".
"I would like to see a much greater integration of our economies, higher flow of trade and investment, better connectivity and freer flow of ideas and people," Singh declared.
An important aspect of his visit would be political cooperation, particularly regional security, he said. India and Saudi Arabia "belong to the same extended neighborhood," he explained. "In the Delhi Declaration, we had pledged to work together not just for our bilateral benefit, but also to promote peace, stability and security in the region and the world."
He believed that India and Saudi Arabia had a particular responsibility to ensure peace in the area. "We are witnessing significant geopolitical developments, which will directly impact on the peace and stability in the region," he said. "All these issues need to be addressed through sustained efforts."
Singh said he would talk about regional issues with King Abdullah, and "discuss how we can work together to address the complex issues at hand."
For him terrorism remains "the single biggest threat to peace, stability and to our progress." He indicated a need for closer cooperation to confront it at regional level. All GCC countries, he said, shared India's concerns on extremism and terrorism. In particular, India rejected the idea that "any religion or cause" could be used to justify violence against innocent people.
"We have institutionalized our cooperation with the Gulf countries by putting in place various security cooperation agreements, including extradition treaties," Singh said.
But much more needs to be done, he added. "Given the fact that today extremist and terrorist activities straddle South Asia and West Asia and constitute a grave threat to our peoples, I agree that the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) and GCC anti-terrorism efforts should be more effectively coordinated."
Sounding a somber but encouraging note on relations with Pakistan, the Indian prime minister said that terrorism was the "primary" issue. "We seek a peaceful and normal relationship with Pakistan," he said. "In that quest we have consistently sought to engage those in Pakistan who are ready to work with us. There is no alternative to dialogue to resolve the issues that divide us."
Taking a conciliatory view, he made it clear that he saw Pakistan as a victim of terrorism too. "As a neighbor, we cannot remain immune to the rise of extremism and terrorism in Pakistan, or on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Extremism and terrorism are major threats not only to India, but also to Pakistan, and all its other neighbors," he said.
It was in the region's collective interest that "we resolutely oppose, resist and overcome terrorism and all those who nurture, sustain and give sanctuary to terrorists and extremist elements."
On the Kashmir issue in particular, he said that India was ready to discuss "all issues" with Islamabad "in an atmosphere free from terrorism" — a statement that could be seen as a precondition. 
The Indian prime minister welcomed King Abdullah's inter-faith initiative and indicated he saw a role for India, which valued "the principles of peaceful coexistence and harmony among nations".  India would, he said, work with all like-minded countries to create a "just and equitable international order that is conducive to meeting the challenges of poverty, illiteracy and hunger."
Indians, he said, well understood and supported the concept of inter-faith dialogue. "The knowledge of religious beliefs and practices of other people is important in itself and can foster greater understanding and tolerance," he said. "We have experience of this in our own country."
Islam is, he said, "an integral part of India's democratic and secular fabric.  Muslims in India are part of our national mosaic and have enriched our society."
Speaking about the welfare of the 1.7 million Indians living and working in the Kingdom, he said it was a matter of "high priority" for his government. The Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs had, he said,  "worked tirelessly" for the welfare of the Indian community in hand with governments in the Gulf. Arrangements had been put in place to help Indians facing problems, including a 24-hour helpline, temporary shelters, counseling centers and improved community welfare offices at the embassy in Riyadh and the consulate-general in Jeddah.
He indicated, however, that more would have to be done. "We are in the process of reforming our own procedures, including better regulation of the recruitment process."
There are reports of a new Indian initiative planned on this in the next few weeks.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

CAN THERE BE ANY MORE CONVINCING PROOF OF HIGH-HANDED DISCRIMINATION AGAINST INDIAN MUSLIMS BY THE SECULAR CONGRESS LED INDIAN GOVERNMENT?



CAN THERE BE ANY MORE CONVINCING PROOF OF HIGH-HANDED DISCRIMINATION AGAINST INDIAN MUSLIMS BY THE SECULAR CONGRESS LED INDIAN GOVERNMENT?




Rs 4,500 cr for Dalit welfare, Rs 2,600 cr for Muslims


Manoj C G , J.P. YadavTags : dalit welfaremuslimsunion budgetindiaPosted: Saturday , Feb 27, 2010 at 0144 hrs
New Delhi:
The Congress’s ongoing drive to win back Dalits and Muslims, evident in general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s visits to Dalit homes and Digvijay Singh’s visit to Azamgarh, found a reflection in the Budget proposals on Friday with an increased allocation of 80 per cent for the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry and 50 per cent for the Minority Affairs Ministry.
Plan allocation for the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry, which mainly deals with the welfare of SCs, increased from last year’s Rs 2,500 crore to Rs 4,500 crore while for the Minority Affairs Ministry, which is concerned more with Muslim welfare, the figure rose from Rs 1,740 crore to Rs 2,600 crore. For Bundelkhand, an additional allocation of Rs 1,200 crore was made.
The total plan allocation under different heads meant for the welfare of the SCs increased from Rs 1,788 crore last year to Rs 3,142 crore. Allocation for post-matric scholarship for SC students was more than doubled from Rs 818 crore to Rs 1,675 crore. Though the Ministry also deals with the welfare of OBCs, a small portion of the total allocation is earmarked for the section. That too, however, saw a jump from Rs 218 crore to Rs 413 crore.
Pradhanmantri Adarsh Gram Yojna, the scheme for integrated development of SC-dominated villages in the country, was allocated Rs 388 crore compared to Rs 98 crore in the last Budget. The scheme announced in the last Budget would be taken up as a pilot project in some states, and Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress is eyeing to regain power, figures prominently.
Similarly, for pre-matric scholarships for minorities, the allocation was more than doubled, with the government earmarking Rs 400 crore under this head in comparison to Rs 176.99 crore allocated in the last Budget. Post-matric scholarships and merit-cum-means scholarships saw considerable increase too, with allocation under post-matric scholarships going up to Rs 234 crore from Rs 132 crore. Multi-Sectoral Development Programme for Minorities being implemented in 90 minority-concentrated districts of the country, too, saw a significant jump from Rs 873 crore to Rs 1,223 crore.
“With the much-needed enhancement in allocation, we will now be able to carry out revision in the rates of post-matric scholarships for SCs and OBCs,” said Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Mukul Wasnik.
Asked if the enhanced allocation would help the Congress woo the “Dalit-Muslim” votebank, he said: “The Congress has always been committed to the empowerment of the deprived sections. The enhanced allocation reaffirms our commitment to the deprived sections.”

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

AIMMM REJECTS BJP PRESIDENT’S SUGGESSION ON BABRI MASJID


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: syed shahabuddin <syedshahabuddinexmp@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 5:42 PM
Subject: Press Statement


ALL INDIA MUSLIM MAJLIS-E-MUSHAWARAT
[Umbrella body of the Indian Muslim organisations]
D-250, Abul Fazal Enclave, Jamia Nagar, New Delhi-110025 India
Tel.: 011-26946780 Fax: 011-26947346

AIMMM REJECTS BJP PRESIDENT’S SUGGESSION ON BABRI MASJID
DEMADS BJP/VHP COMMIT THEMSELVES TO ACCEPT FINAL JUDICIAL VERDICT


New Delhi: 23 February, 2010, Mr. Syed Shahabuddin, President of All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, has issued the following statement;

‘The All lndia Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM) has taken note of the views of Shri Nitin Gadk`ari, the President of the BJP, on the Babari Masjid Question as well as his appeal to the Muslim community ‘to facilitate the construction of the proposed Ram Temple on the Babari Masjid site’.

Shri. Gadkari being new to the job does not appear to be familiar or conversant with the developments since 1986. Since 1986, and even after 1992, there were several rounds of negotiations with the RJB Movement, the last at the highest level of the Shankaracharya, and all those negotiations failed because the Hindu side insisted on taking the Babari Masjid site and building a Mandir thereon and rejected several compromises offered by the Muslim side, including the construction of Mandir with Ram Chamber as the base next to the Babari Masjid. His suggestion is not new. The VHP and the BJP have both offered to build a ‘magnificent masjid outside Ayodhya’ if the Muslim community surrenders the Babari Masjid & its site. Since then, in total defiance of the law, the BJP organized ‘Kar Seva’, demolished the Babari Masjid and built a makeshift temple covering most of the Masjid.

The Supreme Court ruled in October, 1994 that the Special Bench of the Allahabad High Court should resume hearings on title to the Babari Masjid site & also laid down a road map for the construction of both a Masjid and a Mandir near each other within the Acquired Area. The title suit hearing is nearing completion. The Muslim community at various levels has reiterated its willingness to accept the final judicial verdict, whatever it be. Unfortunately, no leader of the BJP or VHP or the Ramjanmabhumi Nyas has made a parallel commitment to the rule of Law.

The AIMMM would also like to inform Shri Gadkari that according to the tenets of Islam it is the site consecrated for worship which constitutes the essential Masjid and not the structure. Therefore, even after the Demolition the Masjid continues to exist. Also, the Muslim community has repeatedly rejected any substitute for the Babari Masjid.

The AIMMM considers that the Gadkari proposal is meaningless because national interest demands that both sides await the final judicial verdict and accept it without any murmur.’
_________________________________________________________________________________

Saturday, February 20, 2010

The Thackerays' primitive charisma By Aakar Patel - LIVEMINT, Mumbai

AAKAR PATEL, A GUJARATI, HAS COME OUT WITH A VERY INFORMATIVE AND INCISIVE ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICS OF SHIV SENA AND ITS REAL IMPACT ON THE CITY OF MUMBAI AND THE STATE OF MAHARASHTRA. IT BRINGS OUT THE ROLE DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES HAVE CHALKED OUT IN THIS MOST COSMOPOLITAN OF ALL INDIAN CITIES. IT FURTHER POINTS TOWARDS THE NEW AREAS OF DEVELOPMENTS THAT HAS BEEN NEGLECTED BY SOME COMMUNITIES AT THEIR OWN LOSSES.




  • Posted: Fri, Feb 19 2010. 9:37 PM IST
  • Culture


The Thackerays’ primitive charisma


The Senas have nothing constructive to offer Marathis. So what’s their appeal? The Mumbai Marathi, better at renaming things than building something himself, is disinherited from his city, and the Thackerays give him an illusory sense of power


By AAKAR PATEL

Politicians respond to constituencies. Their positions are deliberate.
What is the Thackerays’ constituency? Mumbai’s Marathis, whom the Thackerays speak for.
The cast: (clockwise from top left) Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray (AFP) and his estranged nephew Raj (Rajnish Kakade / Hindustan Times), founder of MNS, together control 42% of Mumbai’s votes (Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint); and north Indian taxi drivers have had to bear the brunt of their hate campaigns. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.
The cast: (clockwise from top left) Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray (AFP) and his estranged nephew Raj (Rajnish Kakade / Hindustan Times), founder of MNS, together control 42% of Mumbai’s votes (Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint); and north Indian taxi drivers have had to bear the brunt of their hate campaigns. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.







Congress does not represent Marathis in Mumbai, and they have surrendered this space politically to the Thackerays. This can be seen in their organizational structure (www.mumbairegionalcongress.org).
Neither the Mumbai regional Congress committee’s president Kripashankar Singh nor its treasurer Amarjit Singh is Marathi.


Of Mumbai Congress’ 18 vice-presidents, 12 are not Marathi. Of its 19 general secretaries, 13 are not Marathi. Of its 13 secretaries, eight are not Marathi. Of its seven executive members, none is Marathi.
Of Congress’s seven members of Parliament from Mumbai, six are not Marathi.


Of its 17 MLAs, 12 are not Marathi. Of its two housing board chairmen, neither is Marathi.
This surrender hasn’t come because Congress does not want Marathi votes, but because it cannot get them. Congress is inclusive by nature and cannot offer Mumbai’s Marathi what the Thackerays can, which is anger and resentment.


When Raj Thackeray left his uncle and launched his party it was inclusive, because he initially read the Mumbai Marathi wrongly. His flag makes space for the green of Muslims and the blue of Dalits. Marathis didn’t find that inclusiveness appealing and his party struggled. But after his calibrated violence against migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in which people were killed by his boys, Raj demonstrated his nastiness and Marathis gave him their approval and their vote. Between Raj (24%) and Uddhav (18%), the Thackerays control 42% of Mumbai’s vote, which corresponds to the city’s Marathi population. In the last election, not one opposition seat in the island city of South Mumbai went to Shiv Sena. They all went to Raj after his violence, and that is the reason why Uddhav is currently acting the way he is. The more unhinged the message, the more appealing it is to the Marathi.


Elected to power in 1995, Shiv Sena renamed Bombay. This began the series which has gifted us Chennai, Kolkata and Bengaluru. The Indian’s renaming of his cities is thought to be a positive assertion of identity, but it is actually negritude. Shiv Sena’s renaming did not stop there. It renamed Victoria Terminus (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and Prince of Wales Museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangharalaya). Why is the Marathi angry with the British, who gave him his fine city?
The answer is that he isn’t. Those things were renamed because the British are gone and cannot defend themselves. Their property was available for the Marathi to stamp his ownership upon.

So the question is: Why does Mumbai’s Marathi want to assert himself? The answer is that he is disinherited from his city.


Of the 30 companies in Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex, the number of those owned by Marathis is zero. Of the 50 on the National Stock Exchange’s Nifty, the number owned by Marathis is zero. The Marathi is quite good at renaming things others built, but at building them himself he’s less able.
Three-fourths of India’s capital transactions happen in Mumbai but the participation of Marathis in this activity is irrelevant. There is a reason for this. If we observe Marathi society we notice the total absence of mercantile castes. Into this space the British imported the multi-religious trading community of Surat—Vohra, Khoja, Luhana, Memon, Jain, Parsi and Vaniya. They control the economy of Mumbai and its capital markets, and occupy the city’s best real estate.


Lower down, space opened up for others with enterprise, like the Bhaiyya, Bihari and Sikh taxi drivers of Mumbai. They are actually very good at their trade, hard-working and honest. Against them, the Marathi displays his valour and, like all Indians, he can be quite brave in a mob.


Face value: (clockwise from top left) Members of a fan club gather outside a multiplex screening of My Name is Khan (Shirish Shete / PTI); the film’s lead actor Shah Rukh Khan returns to the city after the world premiere of the movie (Punit Paranjpe / Reuters); Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray at an exhibition of cartoons by his father (Santosh Hirlekar / PTI); and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi rides a suburban train on 5 February. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.
Face value: (clockwise from top left) Members of a fan club gather outside a multiplex screening of My Name is Khan (Shirish Shete / PTI); the film’s lead actor Shah Rukh Khan returns to the city after the world premiere of the movie (Punit Paranjpe / Reuters); Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray at an exhibition of cartoons by his father (Santosh Hirlekar / PTI); and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi rides a suburban train on 5 February. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.



The second big industry in Mumbai is media, especially Bollywood. Bollywood is dominated on the trade side by Punjabis and Sindhis, on the talent side by Punjabis and Urdu-speakers. The participation of Marathis is not of consequence. In some ways it is negative.


If we think about it, popular entertainment can only be produced on the cusp of immorality. Bollywood liberalizes India through its content which slowly pushes that cusp outward. Bollywood is based in Mumbai because it is India’s most liberal city. But the Marathi peasants who now control the state respond to their constituency in the village, which is illiterate and moral. As home minister, R.R. Patil banned this city’s unique dance bars where young women entertained men. Such acts pull the cusp inward.
The Marathi isn’t bothered about My Name is Khan being released, and by itself the matter is irrelevant, but he’s impressed by Thackeray’s ability to make Shah Rukh Khan grovel and to disrupt Bollywood’s business. It reassures him that Marathis control Mumbai.


Shiv Sena’s issues are always those where they can demonstrate to Marathis their ability to block events—we won’t allow Australian players, we won’t allow Valentine’s Day, we won’t let Pakistanis come in and so on. Shiv Sena has nothing constructive to offer Marathis, nor is it expected: Someone else will do all that.



All these events blocked eventually come to pass anyway, because the control is cosmetic, and it wilts when the state decides to apply rule of law. But that moment of theatre—when the media exhibits anguish—produces the spotlight that nourishes the Thackerays. This is the pattern to Shiv Sena’s actions.


It might appear that these actions are irrational, but the Thackerays’ method is cold and reasoned to squeeze out advantage. Witness the discipline of Raj. He works his strategy with great care. On national television he speaks Marathi no matter what language he is questioned in. The Marathi loves this because it reflects his defiance.


There is a second reason why the Thackerays are compelled to make a nuisance of themselves every so often. Unlike other parties, Shiv Sena has a physical presence in neighbourhoods. These offices, run by local toughs, are self-funded, meaning that they approach businesses and residents for “donations”. This activity can be smooth only so long as Shiv Sena radiates menace. The party is not effective if it isn’t feared, and the grass roots reminds the leadership of this.


The Marathi pattern of resentment we have observed is visible elsewhere in time.


India’s nationalist debate a century ago was dominated by the Marathis: Tilak, Gokhale, Agarkar and Ranade. All four were Chitpavan Brahmins, whose members are fair-skinned and unique for their light eyes (like cricketer Ajit Agarkar and model Aditi Govitrikar).


Going against the current noise about Marathi in schools, Chitpavans actually demanded to be educated in English. By 1911—100 years ago—Chitpavans were 63% literate and 19% literate in English. This gave them the edge over other Indians.
All four were on the most influential body in western India of the time, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. But English education had not exorcized the native instinct. There they unleashed their pettiness on each other. Agarkar and Tilak fought over leadership. Tilak was forced out in 1890 after quarrels over social status and money. Gokhale took his place but was opposed by Tilak who said the job required 2 hours of work daily and so it couldn’t be done by a college principal. Ranade was attacked in Tilak’s newspapers and Gokhale quit in 1895 because he couldn’t work with Tilak’s friends. A jealous Tilak sabotaged the Congress session held in Pune the same year.


When the Gujaratis—Jinnah and Gandhi—entered Congress, they immediately eclipsed the Marathis, because they had the trader’s instinct towards compromise. The Marathi Brahmin’s energy was then channelled into resentment, this time against Muslims.
RSS, founded in 1925, is actually a deeply Marathi organization. Hindutva author Savarkar, RSS founder Hedgewar, the great Golwalkar, his successor Deoras and current sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat are all Marathi Brahmins.


Marathi resentment cuts down its own heroes. The first was Shivaji. Marathi Brahmins refused to crown him though he controlled dozens of forts in the Konkan. This was because he was a peasant from the cultivator caste and not a Kshatriya. He had to invent an ancestry, perform penance and bring in a Brahmin from Kashi before he could crown himself in 1674, with the title Chhatrapati, meaning leader of Kshatriyas.



The second was Ambedkar. A first-rate mind, he is seen by Marathis for his caste. The term “Ambedkarite” refers purely to the Dalit movement. Educated in America unlike Jinnah and Gandhi, he absorbed the pragmatism of John Dewey at Columbia. Ambedkar was methodical, unemotional and persuasive in all that he wrote. Europeans would classify him as an Aristotelian, against the Platonism of Gandhi. When the merchants of Mumbai voted for the city to join Gujarat during the reorganization of states, Ambedkar wrote a response that skewered their claims with finality. He did this without being parochial. He was above his caste, above his community.


Mumbai’s Marathis should be proud to own Ambedkar’s message of a universal civilization, but they cleave to the primitive charisma of the Thackerays instead.


Aakar Patel’s book on the changing world of Indian servants will be published by Random House India in 2011.


Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com

Mossad's licence to kill By Gordon Thomas - The Telegraph, UK



"The issue projected by world media and EU member states is not the morality or immorality of political assassination, but the gory details of whodunit. It exposes the conspiracy of the Western countries to collectively support violence at all levels when dealing with the Muslim world."


Ghulam Muhammed @ Facebook

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/7254807/Mossads-licence-to-kill.html


Mossad's licence to kill

The killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh bears the hallmarks of the ruthless Israeli intelligence service. One of the leading chroniclers of the agency gives a unique insight into its methods.

 
A scene from Steven Spielberg's film 'Munich' - Mossad's license to kill
Hit squad: Mossad assassins escape after killing one of the terrorists involved in the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in a scene from Steven Spielberg's film 'Munich' Photo: KAREN BALLARD

The Mossad assassins could have felt only satisfaction when the news broke that they had succeeded in killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas military commander, in Dubai last month.
The Israeli government's refusal to comment on the death has once more gained worldwide publicity for Mossad, its feared intelligence service. Its ruthless assassinations were made famous by the film Munich, which detailed Mossad's attacks on the terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Long ago, the agency had established that silence is the most effective way to spread terror among its Arab enemies.
In the past year, al-Mabhouh had moved to the top of Mossad's list of targets, each of which must be legally approved under guidelines laid down over half a century ago by Meir Amit, the most innovative and ruthless director-general of the service. Born in Tiberius, King Herod's favourite city, Amit had established the rules for assassination.
"There will be no killing of political leaders, however extreme they are. They must be dealt with politically. There will be no killing of a terrorist's family unless they are also directly implicated in terrorism. Each execution must be sanctioned by the incumbent prime minister. Any execution is therefore state-sponsored, the ultimate judicial sanction of the law. The executioner is no different from the state-appointed hangman or any other lawfully-appointed executioner."
I first met Amit in 2001 and through him, I talked to the spies of Mossad, thekatsas, and finally, to the assassins, the kidon, who take their name from the Hebrew word for bayonet. They helped me write the only book approved by Mossad, Gideon's Spies. Amit said the book "tells like it was – and like it is".
Amit showed me a copy of those rules at our first meeting. After two years of training in the Mossad academy at Herzlia near Tel Aviv, each recruit to thekidon is given a copy.
The killing in Dubai is a classic example of how Mossad goes about its work. Al-Mabhouh's 11 assassins had been chosen from the 48 current kidon, six of whom are women.
It has yet to be established how al-Mabhouh was killed, but kidon's preference is strangling with wire, a well-placed car bomb, an electric shock or one of the poisons created by Mossad scientists at their headquarters in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The plan to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had been finalised in a small conference room next to the office of Meir Dagan, who has run Mossad for the past eight years. The 10th director-general, Dagan has a reputation as a man who would not hesitate to walk into a nameless Arab alley with no more than a handgun in his pocket.
Only he knows how many times he has asked a prime minister for legal permission to kill a terrorist who could not be brought to trial in an Israeli court, along with the kidon to whom he shows the legally stamped document, the licence to kill.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's name had been on such a document, which would have been signed by Benyamin Netanyahu. That, like every aspect of a kidon operation, would be firmly denied by a government spokesman, were he to be asked. This has not stopped Dubai's police chief, Lt-General Tamin, from fulminating against the Israeli prime minister.
Two years ago this week, Dagan sent a team of kidon to Damascus to assassinate Imad Mughniyeh. His Mossad file included details of organising the kidnapping of Terry Waite and the bombing of the US Marine base near Beirut airport, killing 241 people. The United States had placed a £12.5 million bounty on his head. Dagan just wanted him dead.
Mossad psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, psychoanalysts and profilers – collectively known as the "specialists" – were told to decide the best way to kill Mughniyeh.
They concluded that he would be among the guests of honour at the Iranian Cultural Centre celebrations in 2008 for the celebration of the Khomeini Revolution. The team rigged a car-bomb in the headrest of the Mitsubishi Pajero they discovered Mughniyeh had rented, to be detonated by a mobile phone. As Mughniyeh arrived outside the Culture Centre at precisely 7pm on February 12, the blast blew his head off.
At Mughniyeh's funeral in Beirut, his mother, Um-Imad, sat among a sea of black chadors, a sombre old woman, who wailed that her son had planned to visit her on the day after he died. She cried out she had no photograph to remember him by. Two days later she received a packet. Inside was his photograph. It had been posted in Haifa.
The list of kidon assassinations is long and stretches far beyond the Arab world. In their base deep in the Negev Desert – the sand broken only by a distant view of Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona – the kidon practise with a variety of handguns, learn how to conceal bombs, administer a lethal injection in a crowd and make a killing look accidental.
They review famous assassinations – the shooting of John F Kennedy, for example – and study the faces and habits of potential targets whose details are stored on their highly restricted computers. There, too, are thousands of constantly updated street plans downloaded from Google Earth.
Mossad is one of the world's smallest intelligence services. But it has a back-up system no other outfit can match. The system is known as sayanim, a derivative of the Hebrew word lesayeah, meaning to help.
There are tens of thousands of these "helpers". Each has been carefully recruited, sometimes by katsas, Mossad's field agents. Others have been asked to become helpers by other members of the secret group.
Created by Meir Amit, the role of the sayanim is a striking example of the cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. In practical terms, a sayan who runs a car rental agency will provide a kidon with a vehicle on a no-questions basis. An estate agent sayan will provide a building for surveillance. A bank manager sayan will provide funds at any time of day or night, and a sayandoctor provides medical assistance.
Any of these helpers could have been involved in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Mossad has recently expanded its network of sayanim into Arab countries.
sayan doctor in the West Bank provided details of the homoeopathic concoction Yasser Arafat used to drink. When he died in 2004, his personal physician, Dr al-Kurdi, said "poisoning is a strong possibility in this case".There have been reports that more than a dozen terrorists have died from poisoning in the past five years,.
Within the global intelligence community, respect for Mossad grew following thekidon assassination of Dr Gerald Bull, the Canadian scientist who was probably the world's greatest expert on gun-barrel ballistics. Israel had made several attempts to buy his expertise. Each time, Bull had made clear his dislike for the Jewish state.
Instead he had offered his services to Saddam Hussein, to build a super-gun capable of launching shells containing nuclear, chemical or biological warheads directly from Iraq into Israel. Saddam had ordered three of the weapons at a cost of $20 million. Bull was retained as a consultant for a fee of $1 million.
On the afternoon of March 20, 1990, the sanction to kill Bull was given by the then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Nahum Admoni, the head of Mossad, sent a three-man team to Brussels, where Bull lived in a luxury apartment block. Each kidon carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket.
When the 61-year-old Bull answered the doorbell of his home, he was shot five times in the head and the neck, each kidon firing their 7.65 pistol in turn, leaving Bull dead on his doorstep. An hour later they were out of the country on a flight to Tel Aviv.
Within hours, Mossad's own department of psychological warfare had arranged with sayanim in the European media to leak stories that Bull had been shot by Saddam's hit squad because he had planned to renege on their deal.
The same tactics had been placed on stand-by on October 24, 1995, for the assassination of Fathi Shkaki who, like Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, had reached the top of Mossad's target list as a result of his terrorist attacks.
Two kidon – code-named Gil and Ran – had left Tel Aviv on separate flights. Ran flew to Athens, Gil to Rome. At each airport they collected new British passports from a local sayan. The two men arrived in Malta on a late-afternoon flight and checked into the Diplomat Hotel overlooking Valetta harbour.
That evening, a sayan delivered a motorcycle to Ran. He told hotel staff that he planned to use it to tour the island. At the same time, a freighter that had sailed the previous day from Haifa bound for Italy radioed to the Maltese harbour authorities that it had developed engine trouble. While it was fixed, it would drop anchor off the island. On board the boat was a small team of Mossad communications technicians. They established a link with a radio in Gil's suitcase.
Shkaki had arrived by ferry from Tripoli, Libya, where he had been discussing with Colonel Gadaffi what Mossad was convinced was a terrorist attack. The two kidon waited for him to stroll along the waterfront. Ran and Gil drove up on the motorcycle and Gil shot Fathi Shkaki six times in the head. It had become a kidon signature.
When the police came to search Shkaki's bedroom they found a "Do not disturb" sign on his door – a signature that was repeated in last month's Dubai killing.
Gordon Thomas is the author of 'Gideon's Spies'.

First Malaysian women to be caned make statements - AFP

First Malaysian women to be caned make statements

KUALA LUMPUR — The first Malaysian women to be caned under Islamic law for having illicit sex have reportedly said they regretted their actions and welcomed the punishment.

The three women, whose identities were not revealed, gave the first account of the caning which took place earlier this month, drawing condemnation from human rights activists and applause from some Muslim groups.

"On the day I was caned, I was scared but, at the same time, I knew I deserved it and was willing to take the punishment," said one of the women, a 25-year-old who went by the name of "Ayu".

She told the New Straits Times that the punishment -- administered while they were fully clothed and by a female prison officer wielding a thin rattan cane -- did not hurt.

"Those out there who are having sex before marriage should really consider the consequences and not only think about momentary pleasure," she told the daily.

The three women said they turned themselves in to religious authorities after being wracked by guilt over having pre-marital sex.

"Ayu" has a one-year-old daughter with her boyfriend, who she plans to marry, and the other two women also gave birth out of wedlock.

Human rights campaigners, who were stunned by the caning of the three women which had not been foreshadowed by authorities, were sceptical over the comments published in several Malaysian newspapers.
"These three women are just normal people who have been surrounded by all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo and pressured into agreeing to be caned," one activist told AFP, declining to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Islamic authorities triggered uproar last year when they sentenced mother-of-two Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno to six strokes of the cane after she was caught drinking beer in a hotel nightclub.

Her case, which was to have been the first time a woman was caned under Islamic law in Malaysia, is still under review after she was given a last-minute reprieve amid intense media coverage.

Malaysia's Bar Council has said it was "shocking" that the caning of the three women went ahead while the Kartika case was unresolved.

Legal commentators have said that the Islamic courts -- which operate in parallel to the civil system in Malaysia -- are becoming increasingly confident, threatening Malaysia's status as a secular nation.

The Sharia courts have been clamping down on rarely enforced religious laws that apply to Muslim Malays who dominate the population -- including a ban alcohol and sex between unmarried couples.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved

Friday, February 19, 2010

In search of monsters to destroy - By Pankaj Mishra - The Guardian. UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/unitedstates.militarism


In search of monsters to destroy

 

'Fiasco', 'The Forever War', 'Descent into Chaos' - the titles of recent books capture the consensus on the US entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pankaj Mishra asks whether a new president will change the crazy logic of American militarism



·                                 Pankaj Mishra
·                                  
o                                                        Pankaj Mishra
o                                                        The Guardian, Saturday 4 October 2008
o                                                        Article history
American troops at Camp Bucca in Iraq
American troops at Camp Bucca in Iraq. Photograph: David Furst/AFP

We are winning in Iraq, John McCain declared in the presidential debate last week, "and we will come home with victory and with honour." This may sound like some perfunctory keep-the-pecker-up stuff from a former military man. But the Republican candidate, who believes that the "surge" has succeeded in Iraq, also possesses the fanatical conviction that heavier bombing and more ground troops could have saved the United States from disgrace in Vietnam.
On the same occasion, Barack Obama, who seems more aware of the costs of American honour to the American economy, claimed he would divert troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and, if necessary, order them to assault "safe havens" for terrorists in Pakistan's wild west. Both candidates sought the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, the co-alchemist, with Richard Nixon, of the "peace with honour" formula in Vietnam, which turned out to include the destruction of neighbouring Cambodia.
An ominously similar escalation of the "war on terror" has ensured that the next American president will receive a septic chalice from George Bush in January 2009. In July, Bush sanctioned raids into Pakistan, pre-empting Obama's tough-sounding strategy of widening the war in Afghanistan, where resurgent Taliban this year account for Nato's highest death toll since 2001. Pakistan's army chief vowed to defend his country "at all costs", and his soldiers now clash with US troops almost daily. Obscured by the American economy's slow-motion train wreck, the war on terror has already stumbled into its most treacherous phase with the invasion of fiercely nationalistic and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Most of the recent disasters of geopolitical machismo could have been foretold. In late 2003, when the occupation of Iraq was beginning to go badly wrong, the American journalist Dexter Filkins came across a village called Abu Hishma in the Sunni triangle. Rubble-strewn and "encased in razor wire", Abu Hishma resembled, Filkins writes in The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (Bodley Head), "a town in the West Bank". Its terrified residents told him about the local American commander Nathan Sassaman, who bulldozed homes and called in air strikes, and who was fond of proclaiming that "there is no God - I am god here".
Sassaman sounds like something out of Conrad, the white man in the tropics driven to lunacy by absolute power and extreme isolation. But, according to Filkins, he is a bright man, even the "embodiment of the best that America could offer" in his desire to bring democracy to Iraqis. A serious reader of history and anthropology, Sassaman, along with fellow officers, is very impressed by a book entitled The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai, a Hungarian-Israeli-American academic. Apparently, it makes clear that the "only thing" the denizens of the Middle East "understand is force - force, pride and saving face", and Sassaman believes that, "with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects ... we can convince these people that we are here to help them".
Filkins doesn't mention that The Arab Mind, originally published in 1973, was the bible of neocon commentators in Washington and New York cheerleading the Bush administration's audacious venture: what Condoleezza Rice in the new book by Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 (Simon & Schuster), describes as shifting the "epicentre of American power" from Europe, where it had rested since the second world war, to the Middle East. Widely read in the US military, The Arab Mind later inspired the modus operandi of the jailers of Abu Ghraib.
More surprisingly, respectable intellectuals, journalists and academics echoed its generalisations. Among these people was the historian Bernard Lewis, who assured Dick Cheney, one of his most devoted readers, that "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force". The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (who is on Sassaman's reading list) exhorted the US to act "just a little bit crazy", since "the more frightened our enemies are today, the fewer we will have to fight tomorrow". Accordingly, Richard Armitage, assistant secretary of state and a relative moderate among the Bush administration's hawks, told Pakistani diplomats that the US would bomb their country "back to the stone age" if it did not withdraw its support for the Taliban.
The idea that the natives would recognise superior firepower when they saw it seemed to be validated by Pakistani acquiescence, followed by the Taliban's swift capitulation. Iraq was logically the next setting for shock-and-awe tactics - Donald Rumsfeld was complaining even before the aerial bombing of the Taliban had finished that Afghanistan had run out of targets. The Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein had to be disarmed to make the Middle East safe for democracy. But invading Iraq was also an image-making exercise - what Hannah Arendt, commenting on the absence of clear military goals in America's previous war of choice in Vietnam, described as the attempt by "a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth'".
Busy unleashing his awesome firepower on Iraq, Rumsfeld had no idea what to do after his streamlined army reached Baghdad, apart from letting stuff happen. Wiser in Battle, the memoir of the US lieutenant general Ricardo Sanchez (HarperCollins), reveals that, as the Iraqi resistance unexpectedly intensified, the defeat in Vietnam began to prey on Bush's mind, unravelling his syntax as he harangued his commanders in Iraq:
Kick ass! ... We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal ... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!
Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, describes in his book Fiasco (Penguin) how, after a mob ambushed and killed four American military contractors in Falluja, the commanders were ordered to "go in and clobber". Citing strategic and logistical reasons, the military chiefs pleaded for restraint, but they were overruled by the White House: the destruction of Falluja was as essential to the image-making exercise as the carpet-bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia.
The geopolitical consequences as well as the "collateral" damage of the exhibition of US might are succinctly outlined by the titles of recent books - The Forever War, Fiasco and Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos (Allen Lane). Rashid is clearly the most despairing among the journalists accompanying the march of folly, even though, as a Pakistani long accustomed to the pretensions and limits of US power in south Asia, he didn't start off with many illusions. His previous book described how a combination of selfish motives and reckless actions by the US facilitated the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Outsiders like me," he writes in Descent into Chaos, "found it remarkable that a US president could live in such an unreal world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning - all of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public."
The habitual deceivers are often, in the end, the most deceived. According to Rashid, Pervez Musharraf's regime in Pakistan may have pulled off one of the biggest swindles in recent history by persuading the Bush administration to part with $10bn in exchange for mostly empty promises of support for its "war on terror". Most Pakistanis feel a mix of contempt and distrust for the US, which abandoned their country after enlisting it in a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Confronted with a choice between regressing to the stone age and meeting crazy Uncle Sam's demands, Musharraf's regime adopted a policy of dissembling that the then foreign minister outlined as "First say yes, and later say but". Since 9/11, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's rogue spy agency, which has long considered Afghanistan as its backyard, has continued to provide sanctuary and military support for the Taliban while occasionally arresting some al-Qaida militants to appease Washington. Mullah Omar and the original Afghan Taliban Shura, Rashid claims, are serenely resident in Pakistan's borderlands, along with "a plethora of Asian and Arab terrorist groups who are now expanding their reach into Europe and the United States".
"I'm not," Bush said soon after 9/11, "going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." Hitting camels in the butt may have been more useful than disbursing $70m in bribes to warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom Rashid revealed in his previous book to be fond of driving tanks over his opponents. The US coaxed many of Afghanistan's old villains out of retirement to defeat the Taliban with minimum use of US troops, and then lost interest in the country.
Rashid believes that the US could have done more to help "nation-building" in Afghanistan or at least prop up Hamid Karzai, who last week was reduced to plaintively asking Mullah Omar to return to Afghanistan for the sake of "peace". But as Tariq Ali bluntly clarifies in his new book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Simon & Schuster), the post-9/11 project of "nation-building" in Afghanistan, which prioritised western interests over all others, was always doomed. It was "a top-down process", trying to create "an army constituted not to defend the nation but to impose order on its own people, on behalf of outside powers; a civil administration that will have no control over planning, health, education etc, all of which will be run by NGOs, whose employees will be far better paid than the locals, and answerable not to the population but to their overseas sponsors; and a government whose foreign policy is identical to Washington's."
American bombing raids, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, further unite fractious Afghans against foreign usurpers. Tariq Ali correctly prescribes scepticism against strategists and journalists who blame Pakistan for increasing attacks on western forces in Afghanistan while disregarding the fact that "many Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of Nato and the behaviour of its troops that they will support any opposition."
In Pakistan, too, public anger against the US is fuelled largely by the "knowledge that Washington has backed every military dictator who has squatted on top of the country". Contemptuously dismissing the alarmist cliché that jihadis are very close to getting their grubby fingers on the country's nuclear button, Ali points to the deep and persistent unpopularity of religious parties in Pakistan. The jihadis would only get that far, he asserts, if "the army wanted them to", which is virtually impossible unless, as may be beginning to happen now, American assaults on the country's hard-won sovereignty causes deep ideological ruptures within the country's strongest institution.
Filkins doesn't set out any future trajectory for the venture in Iraq. He reported from the country for the New York Times, but the first-person narrator of The Forever War is less a journalist than an existential hero, eloquent with the pathos of Sisyphean striving, impotence and failure. Composed in short, often lyrical, sections, Filkins's book often seems aimed at literary posterity, where it would join such modern classics of war literature as Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine and Michael Herr's Dispatches
Unlike the war in Vietnam, which exercised some of the keenest literary sensibilities in America (Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag), the entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced, so far at least, a meagre crop of quality journalism. The Forever War, which generally eschews historical overviews and extended analysis, succeeds more than most recent books in making cinematically vivid and imaginatively coherent the many places of horror and bewilderment that Americans have stumbled into during the "war on terror". This is what it is like - its brief confessions of doubt, confusion, panic and weariness seem to say - for an American young man witnessing the terrible violence of places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
Filkins has the exasperation of the well-travelled and atrocity-hardened journalist with his sheltered compatriots back home. The attack on the twin towers in New York makes him think that "I was back in the third world ... My countrymen are going to think this is the end of the world, the worst thing that ever happened. In the third world this sort of thing happens every day." After the cyclone in Orissa, Filkins writes, "the dead were piled so high and for so long that the dogs couldn't eat any more". But as he strives to share with us the cruelty and tragedy of the world outside the west, he inadvertently reveals his historical innocence as well as hinting at a wider incomprehension of the postcolonial world and the decolonised mind.
"Do Americans imagine," Jonathan Schell once wrote, "that the people of the world, having overthrown the territorial empires, are ready to bend the knee to an American overlord in the 21st?" Even at his most tormented, Filkins doesn't really ask this crucial question, though he cannot help but be aware of the Iraqi people's eagerness to see the back of their "liberators" - to "tell the Americans what they want to hear and they will go away, and we can carry on the way we want". In a brilliantly paced account of Falluja, Filkins describes Iraqi children recoiling from American candy as if it were "radioactive" and remarks that the city "was like that from the start, even before the big battle in November 2004. Anything the Americans tried there turned to dust." This may convey well to an American audience the frustration of their do-gooding representatives in Iraq who alternate bombs with candy. But Filkins would have advanced a greater appreciation of national or tribal feeling in Iraq if he had explained that residents of Falluja were equally intransigent in 1920, when the British imperial army had to destroy the city in order to save it.
As perplexed as the British once were about Iraq ("so complex, its ways so labyrinthine"), Filkins writes with obvious fascination about Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi expatriate who managed to deceive some of the shrewdest politicians and journalists in America. In many ways, Chalabi, a chronic conspirator with mysterious allies in Iran, vindicates John Quincy Adams's warning to his young nation in 1821 against European-style imperialist adventures: by going "abroad", Adams wrote, "in search of monsters to destroy", America would "involve herself beyond the power of extraction in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition". But Chalabi, for Filkins, embodies Iraq's vexations rather than American blundering. "When I looked," he writes, "into Chalabi's eyes and saw the mirrors and doors closing, I knew that I was seeing not just the essence of the man but of the country to which he'd returned. L'etat c'est lui. Chalabi was Iraq."
Whatever may be said about this amiable fraud, he was certainly not Iraq - the country he had barely set foot in for more than 40 years before the US invasion. Though easily the most original and intense American book yet on the war in Iraq, The Forever War is far from matching the stupendous achievement of Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, which expresses more resonantly the American reporter's angst while ruthlessly investigating specific national flaws - racism, cold war paranoia, belief in technology - that entrapped the US in Vietnam. By abandoning the tasks of analysis and introspection, Filkins's book makes us suspect that the "forever war" might make a new generation of can-do Americans weary, but not wiser.
"I'd gotten caught up," he writes at one point, "in the trappings and the pronouncements of officialdom, Iraqi and American." It is an admirably honest confession, but not one that the best US journalists covering their country's last big war would have made. Arriving in Vietnam in the early 1960s to report what was then a covert US operation, Homer Bigart, David Halberstam, Charley Mohr and Sheehan spent only a few weeks in the fog of official bluster. Their boldness was especially remarkable because the US media in the 1950s had largely shared a consensus about the dangers of communism with the White House and State Department, which regarded even newspapers such as the New York Times as extensions of foreign policy.
Ignoring the adversarial standard set by Halberstam and Sheehan, many US journalists and commentators in the post-cold-war era have been too eager to uphold their government's claims. It is not clear if Filkins was one of the liberal interventionists with a naive faith in the Bush administration's promise to promote democracy through war. Certainly his frequent laments about the inept handling of the invasion and occupation of Iraq do not lead him to conclude that an intrinsically bad idea could have been handled much differently. He can also permit himself the belief that "perhaps in the hideous present some larger good was being born".
This has the unfortunate echo of Condoleezza Rice's assertion, as Israel devastated Lebanon in 2006, that we were witnessing the "birth pangs of a new Middle East": that is, the Lebanese, bombed into a revolt against Hizbullah, would make their country safe for pro-Israeli and pro-American democracy. Totalitarian regimes and terrorist groups commonly use violence as a means to large-scale political engineering; it is more remarkable when democratic countries such as Israel and America do so, usually in flagrant disregard of the lessons of contemporary history. In A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Lawrence Freedman describes in detail the awful results - the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees, the rise of Hizbullah - of Israel's previous attempt in 1982 to redraw the map of the Middle East by assaulting Lebanon.
It is one thing for a small country with a perennial existential crisis to believe that, as the Israeli general Moshe Dayan once put it, "it was in our power to set a high price on our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army or the Arab governments to think it worth paying". But how did the US let its foreign policy become hostage to a strategy of pre-emptive war and brutal retaliation? "How," Freedman asks, "had the United States gotten itself in this position, entangled in the confusing and often violent geopolitics of the Middle East and beset by enemies on all sides."
This is a bigger story than anyone can tell in one book, and the 600 pages of A Choice of Enemies cover only US foreign policy decisions from 1979, with the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Freedman is forced to skim some important details of the relationship between the US and Israel, whose continuing expansion into the occupied West Bank is probably the greatest source of the so-called Arab rage. The State Department in 1948 argued passionately against supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. The Eisenhower administration, which saw Israel as an irritant, undermining the US alliance with anti-Soviet regimes in the Middle East, ensured that the joint Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt would fail. John F Kennedy sent feelers to Egypt's fiercely anti-Zionist president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Lyndon B Johnson was the first US president to manipulate foreign policy in order to bolster Jewish-American support for the Democratic party; but even he was not able to build his "special relationship" with Israel without encountering strong opposition from American diplomats.
"I could not believe what I was hearing," Jimmy Carter wrote in his diary after Menachem Begin confided in him his desire to reduce Palestinians on the West Bank to a minority. Even Ronald Reagan, who believed that God fixed the Middle East as the site of Armageddon, stuck to a cold war policy of close relations with reliably anti-Soviet and oil-rich Arab regimes. Friendly to Saudi Arabia, Bush Sr was actively hostile to Israeli expansionism. His secretary of state, James Baker, had only blunt wisdom ("Forswear annexation. Stop settlement activity. Reach out to Palestinians as neighbours who deserve political rights") to impart to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying outfit for Israel, to which even Obama must now genuflect.
Israel played a very small role in the blunders US administrations made in the late 1970s: to support the Shah of Iran long after his rule became widely despised and unsustainable, and, more fatefully, to mobilise a global Islamic jihad against Soviet communism. Trying to turn Afghanistan, as Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, exulted, into the "Soviet Union's own Vietnam", the CIA chose Pakistan as a logistical base for its anti-communist jihad. It funnelled money and arms to the ISI, which in turn passed on some of them to its own Islamist protégés (some of whom are now fighting US and Nato troops in Afghanistan). Radicals from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and other Arab countries flocked to Pakistan to contribute to the holy war against atheistic communism. Freedman's statistics are a grim reminder of how the blowback from this first global jihad wrecked Pakistan long before it crashed into the west on September 11 2001. Pakistan, which had 900 religious schools in 1971, had "about 8,000 official and as many as 25,000 unregistered madrassas" by 1988.
But if US officials noticed their indirect sponsorship of radical Islam, they did not care. As Freedman writes, "the Reagan administration associated terrorism with leftist, secular groups linked to nationalist movements, whether the Irish, Basques or Palestinians ... Arab militants coming to support the jihad were seen at most as the equivalent of the idealists of the 1930s who joined the International Brigades during the Spanish civil war."
Freedman recalls, too, some of the other political machinations that have come to haunt present generations: US support for Iraq in the latter's long war against Iran, which emboldened Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s, and the deliberate indifference to the victims of Iraq's chemical warfare. At least in these and other cynical moves, the US could claim the sanction of realpolitik. Great powers often have to make unpleasant choices to protect their interests; they have also been known occasionally to thrash (Reagan in Grenada, Putin in Georgia) a pesky neighbour or two. What is startlingly new is the Bush administration's experiment of intimidating entire peoples as well as governments in the Middle East into accepting America's worldwide hegemony.
Seven years on, hundreds of thousands are dead, and millions of refugees on the move, while the US seems only to have boosted its old enemies in Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon, and created formidable new ones in Iraq and Pakistan. In The War Within, Woodward shows the US president slipping deeper into his own world. "We're killin' 'em! We're killin' 'em all!" But not even the Bush administration, which has proved ready to do unspeakable things to its perceived enemies, can kill them all. It can continue to stage elaborate shock-and-awe spectacles, but if, as is increasingly evident, the target audience refuses to be impressed by them, they are rendered utterly futile - even dangerously counterproductive. "Force," as James Baldwin pointed out in the early 1970s during the US bombing of Indochina, "does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for instance, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness; even the panic of his adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience."
Apparently routed by heavy B-52 bombing in 2001, the Taliban are resurgent, straining the military resources of the US and Nato in Afghanistan to the limit. In Iraq the strategy based on overwhelming force has proved to be a catastrophic failure, and had to be replaced by General David Petraeus's new counter-insurgency doctrine that emphasises political over military tactics. Nevertheless, McCain pledges "victory" in Iraq, whatever that takes, including a 100-year-long military presence in the country; threatening Russia, he also seems ready to bomb Iran. Obama, though keen to withdraw troops from Iraq, upholds the complacently bipartisan consensus about Afghanistan. But more US troops in the Pashtun heartland may merely underscore the lesson learned at a terrible cost by the British army in 1839-42 and 1878-80, and the Soviet army in 1979-89. "A troop increase," Rory Stewart recently reiterated in Time magazine, "is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining." The violation of Pakistan's sovereignty threatens to be the most calamitous of recent US misadventures.
A gracious acceptance of the limits of US firepower may not be forthcoming from the next administration, which will face the hard choice to get out or fight on. Indeed, failure may make it even more determined to maintain the pride of US arms and the image of the mightiest power on earth. The prospect of humiliation in Vietnam was what prompted Nixon's devastation of Cambodia, setting the stage for the genocidal Pol Pot. As Hannah Arendt wrote, "when all signs pointed to defeat", the goal was "no longer one of avoiding humiliating defeat but of finding ways and means to avoid admitting it and 'save face'."
Could smashing up Iran or invading Pakistan become the face-saving formula for the exponents of "shock and awe"? Certainly, they see US force impressing the Persian and the Pakistani mind as it apparently has the Arab mind. And such is the crazy logic of a wounded militarism that, notwithstanding its battered economy, the US may soon be embattled on many more fronts in what is already its most damaging war.