Mid-East Meets Midwest

In the last 50 years, numerous presidents have called on Israel to stop its expansion activities.  Israel has consequently ignored this request.  To date, the Obama administration has been significantly more vocal that its predecessors about this demand.

This change has not gone unnoticed by Israel’s Arab neighbors.  But the Tehran Times took another look at the issue of Israeli settlements Tuesday, criticizing the role of individual Americans and organizations funding  this activity.

The Times reports:

This support is currently undermining the United States efforts to restart the peace negotiations. In addition to its diplomatic efforts to stop the settlements, the Obama administration must also stop the flow of American financial support for the settlement activities.

The American individuals and organizations that support the settlement activities must ask themselves: is what they are doing good for their fellow Americans? The Obama administration has correctly recognized that continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is harmful to the U.S. interests in the Middle East and indirectly contributes to terrorism.

Those Americans who support the settlement activities under current circumstances are indirectly contributing to the promotion of terrorism against the United States and should think about the consequences of their behavior for the safety and security of their country.

Some of the U.S. Congressmen who vowed “not in my backyard” during debates regarding where to send Guantánamo detainees after the facility is shuttered are in for an unpleasant surprise. According to the Associated Press, the Obama administration is “looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists” in America’s heartland.

A state prison in Michigan and the 134-year-old military penitentiary in Kansas are both on the short list of locations for the site.  If chosen, the facility would hold the 229 suspected terrorists from Guantánamo prison. Read more…

A senior military adviser in Iraq, issued an internal memo urging the US to significantly speed up its pullout from Iraq.  In this memo leaked to the New York Times, Col. Timothy Reese pushes for the U.S. to simply “declare victory” and have announce that all troops will be out of the nation by August 2010.

Bluntly, Col. Reese says keeping US troops in Iraq “isn’t yielding benefits commensurate with the effort and is now generating its own opposition.” He asserts that America has overstayed it’s welcome, saying, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Read more…

One month ago today, celebrations filled the streets of Baghdad as Iraqis marked “National Sovereignty Day,” commemorating the official withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities.  But in Kirkuk, just 150 miles north of Baghdad, the cheers and high spirits were replaced with screams and panic when a car bomb exploded in a crowded market, killing at least 34 people.

This incident caused me to take a step back and ask, ‘Is Iraq ready to stand on its own two feet?’

Over the last six years American troops, advisers and diplomats have been working to establish a stable Iraq, combating violence, training Iraqi soldiers and police, and planting the seeds of democracy for the first time in Iraq’s history.  What more can the United States do to help this war torn nation?

Perhaps the answer is to stop helping. Read more…

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama administration is looking to overhaul the way America interrogates terror suspects.

The new plan would call for a small team of professionals, from both spy services and law-enforcement agencies, to be used for “high-value” detainees. Under this new system the CIA would get the boot, no longer running the show like the last eight years. However, the Journal’s source did not specify who might be in charge of this new program.

One of the team’s first tasks would be to form a new set of interrogation methods drawing from scientific and academic studies, a notable break from the brutality permitted by the Bush administration. These new non-coercive procedures may differ from the 19 permitted in the Army Field Manual (lawmakers’ and human rights groups’ golden standard of interrogation) to include providing rewards for information and playing on a detainee’s anxiety or other emotions.

The interrogation unit would include people assigned to research, master and conduct non-coercive interrogations. The team would most likely be drawn agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CIA and Pentagon.

If adopted, the new interrogation team would signify an attempt by the Obama administration to wipe the slate clean of the counterterrorism issues that have plagued the CIA and Justice Department since a U.S. network of secret prisons was exposed in 2005.

But don’t get your hopes up just yet. There could still be some similarities to the approach of the Bush administration. For starters, the team’s efforts will still focus more on gathering intelligence than on assembling evidence for use in a criminal trial. (Because all of those studies saying interrogation leads to unreliable evidence are wrong. Oh, and all of those people who were acquitted by a military tribunal because of insufficient evidence… well, that was just bad luck. Keep on doing what you’re doing!)

For the full story: U.S. Weighs Special Team of Terrorism Interrogators

While President Obama’s visit to Ghana was well recieved by the local population, it is easy to say that his approach toward Africa is very different than that of the Middle East.   Compared to his June speech in Cairo, Obama’s address in Accra, the capital of Ghana, this weekend was harsh to say the least.  Unlike the showers of accolades Obama rained on Muslims in the Arab world, Saturday’s speech to Africans became a lecture on local repression, corruption, brutality, good governance and accountability.

In an opinion piece featured in Forbes, Anne Bayefsky addressed this contrast:

Before the Muslim world Obama donned the role of apologist-in-chief. Over and over again his examples of shortfalls in the protection of rights and freedoms were American: the “prison at Guantanamo Bay,” “rules on charitable giving [that] have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation,” impediments to the “choice” of Muslim women to shroud their bodies.

Christian Africa was to be treated to no such self-flagellation. In a rare tongue-lashing for Africans from any American president, he chastised: “It’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict … But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy … or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants … tribalism and patronage and nepotism … and … corruption.”

He might equally have said to the Arab and Muslim world: “It’s easy to scapegoat Israel and blame your problems on the presence of Jews–albeit on a fraction of 1% of the territory inhabited by the Arab world–but Israel is not responsible for poverty, illiteracy, torture, trafficking, slavery and oppression rampant across your countries.” But he did not.

There’s no doubt that the history behind the Arab-Israeli conflict is shrouded in “he said, she said’s” and each side tells the story a little differently.  But as President Obama and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair look to foster a lasting peace between Israelis, Palestinians and the neighboring Arab nations within the next two years, finding a starting point may be one of the biggest struggles.

The Obama administration seems to be pointing to 1967 (The Six Day War) as the root of the conflict, while the Israeli government and soon-to-be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continually hark back to the events of 1948 (The Arab-Israeli War) as the base of the problem.

Because of these views, Obama has placed Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank at the heart of his campaign for a lasting peace in the region, insisting that Israel immediately stop all settlement activity.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu contends that settlements are a peripheral issue, being used to divert attention from the real problems of the Middle East.  In his view, the problems stem from the events of 1948, when the Jewish state was founded by the United Nations, only to be immediately plunged into war with surrounding Arab nations.

“Even before Israel controlled the West Bank and Gaza, the animosity toward Israel nonetheless existed,” said Dore Gold, ex-Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and now an adviser to Netanyahu in an interview with the Toronto Star. “There were no settlements before 1967.”

Therefore from the perspective of Netanyahu, the fundamental problem is the failure of most Arab countries to accept Israel’s existence (the exceptions being Egypt and Jordan).

This understanding partly explains Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinian leaders acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state before they can sit down to find a lasting peace.

For those interested in learning more about the history behind the Arab-Israeli conflict, I recommend Palestine and the Arab Israeli Conflict by Charles Smith. I found this book to be a fair, objective look at the history of the conflict and the attempts toward achieving peace.

Tuesday a representative of the Obama administration said that the U.S. could continue to detain non-U.S. citizens in facilities like Gitmo, even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by an American military commission.

The Defense Department’s chief lawyer, Jeh Johnson, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would have to make based on their estimates of whether or not the accused posed a future threat.

But why should there be a different standard for Americans than non-U.S. citizens?  Hundreds of criminals who were probably guilty as sin have been acquitted only to return to society and harm others.  If a military commission cannot find enough evidence to convict an individual of terrorism charges, why should the American government be allowed continue to hold these people when any other justice system could not?

And it is safe to say that the Obama administration (or any other administration for that matter) would not stand by while another country implemented an equivalent policy.  Just weeks ago, injustices toward former Northwestern University student Roxanna Saberi topped the U.S. diplomatic agenda because she was being unfairly detained.  And she was found guilty in a court of law.  Admittedly, the court system of Iran does not have the same tradition of justice that its American counterpart has.  But Iran found Saberi to be a threat, just as the American government finds these Gitmo detainees to be threats.

If we are just going to hold these people anyway, maybe the American government should lose the pretenses of justice and skip the trial all together.  Either way, the standard of the American justice system is not being upheld.

Full Wall Street Journal article: Detainees, even if acquitted, might not go free

With the so-far successful withdrawal of American troops from select Iraqi cities and Vice-President Joe Biden’s trip to Iraq topping the week’s headlines, it may appear that Obama has Iraq under control. But experts are warning Obama that taking his eyes off Iraq could jeopardize American relations with the whole region and earn him an unflattering comparison with George W. Bush.

BBC News reports:

[The Obama] administration has… shifted a considerable amount of its attention further east – many have described the conflict in Afghanistan as “Obama’s war”.

But in light of the recent uptick in violence in Iraq, there were growing concerns that the new president risked making the same mistake as his predecessor, albeit in reverse.

George W Bush was criticised for not paying enough attention to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban and while he tried to fix Iraq, al-Qaeda regained strength both in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Barack Obama cannot afford to lose Iraq,” warned Kenneth Pollack recently.

Mr Pollack, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, added that there was a feeling that the administration’s policy on Iraq was adrift.

He said the regional consequences of instability in Iraq would undermine whatever else Washington was trying to achieve in the Middle East, from peace between Israelis and Arabs to dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Click here to see full article: Has Obama taken his eye off Iraq?