A little comment(ary)...

Happy Anniversary, Israel
Since its inception, Israel has battled enemies attacking it militarily. Now, nearing its 60th year of existence, the nation must fight the mendacity of a PR-savvy Hamas.
By PERRY B. NEWMAN
Portland Press Herald

On May 8, 2008, the modern state of Israel will celebrate its 60th anniversary, an event marking the establishment of a democratic and prosperous nation that has throughout its history been prepared to live in peace with its neighbors.

But such is the nature of modern communications and our open society, that the leader of the radical Islamic group Hamas, which controls Gaza and which nearly all nations regard as a terrorist group, can publish an Op-Ed piece in Sunday papers around the world, denouncing Israel and United States' policies that support Israel. It's an Op-Ed piece that cloaks Hamas' extremist intentions in language calibrated to offer the appearance of moderation.

The history of modern Israel begins with the passage in 1947 of General Assembly Resolution 181 by the United Nations General Assembly. While many critics of Israel focus on the creation of the Jewish state by an act of the United Nations, in fact that seminal U.N. vote established not merely Israel, but two countries, one Jewish and one Arab, living side by side on land that had previously been administered by Great Britain.

Resolution 181 empowered citizens in the inchoate Arab and Jewish states to vote, authorized each state to form militias to preserve internal order and protect the integrity of their borders, guaranteed civil, political and religious freedom to all citizens, provided freedom of movement for all citizens within their respective states, and afforded access to Jerusalem, subject to security considerations.

On May 14, 1948, when, pursuant to the administrative processes outlined in the Resolution, Israel declared its independence, its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared, "We extend the hand of peace and good-neighborliness to all the States around us and to their people, and we call upon them to cooperate in mutual helpfulness with the independent Jewish nation in its Land. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East."

On May 15, 1948, however, the armies of four Arab states neighboring Israel -- Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq -- having been on the losing side of the U.N. vote, attacked the fledgling state. Confident of an imminent victory, they had inflamed the local population of what was to be the Arab state contemplated in Resolution 181 and encouraged them to leave their homes and fields, assuring them that once the battle was won, they could return to the land they considered "Palestine."

As everyone knows, however, things did not go precisely according to plan. Somehow the Israelis repelled the attackers and established dominion over the land.

Defeated militarily, misled and ill-advised by the leaders of neighboring Arab states, then, it is no wonder that on the very day that modern Israelis celebrate their state, millions of Palestinians bemoan the "Naqba" or catastrophe that befell them.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=185249&ac=Insight


Michael Fisher/Staff Photo Illustration

Worldviews in Need of Merger
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post

Chris Matthews, in a look of revelation not seen since the late DeMille did biblical epics, said the other day that he is beginning to think a Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton ticket makes sense. Maybe so. But I have an even better ticket in mind: Obama-McCain. That way we might get a sensible foreign policy.

As it is now, the two probable presidential nominees have outlined a foreign policy that sort of goes like this: Obama will talk to anyone while John McCain will talk to no one. I would guess that both would love to amend their positions but are mortally afraid of appearing reasonable. Obama represents a constituency that holds that much of the world's troubles are caused by the United States and can be rectified by a president who is alert to cultural nuance and can be a keen listener. This is the world according to Oprah Winfrey.

McCain, on the other hand, is seeking the support of a constituency that thinks the United States is always the innocent party and would show weakness by even acknowledging the existence of, not to mention the occasional justifiable grievance of, certain entities -- particularly Hamas, Hezbollah and the entire country of Iran. This is the world according to an ostrich.

I attribute Obama's predicament to inexperience and a certain worrisome naivete. When he said he would personally negotiate with Iran (if he were president), he might not have realized exactly what he was saying.

McCain, though, knows exactly what he himself is saying -- and how wrong he is -- because he once said pretty close to the opposite. In 2006, McCain was interviewed by James P. Rubin, a former Clinton administration official then slumming as a journalist. Rubin asked McCain whether American diplomats should continue to work with the Palestinian government in the Gaza Strip if -- as had just become the case -- "Hamas is now in charge." McCain essentially said yes.

"They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them," he told Rubin. "It's a new reality in the Middle East." I have truncated McCain's quote, but it is -- I avow and attest -- an accurate reflection of what he said.

After Rubin's recent recounting of his McCain interview in a Post op-ed, the McCain camp went berserk. It called Rubin a liar and said he had taken the quote out of context. In one sense, he had: In 2006, McCain was not an official presidential candidate. Now he is.

McCain's campaign then supplied a piece of the interview that Rubin had left out. Here it is: "I think part of the relationship is going to be dictated by how Hamas acts, not how the United States acts." Well, duh. Not only is that obvious, it materially changes nothing. What's missing is a McCain oath to never, ever talk to Hamas until it is, in essence, no longer Hamas. It's clear that McCain was once guilty of sensible flexibility. Until he secures his GOP base, this could be dangerous. Someone could mistake him for a moderate.

As for Obama, he's coming off as McCain's mirror opposite -- just dying to talk to anyone McCain won't. This, too, is a mistake, because when a president sits down with an antagonistic foreign leader, doing so can only be to settle what has already been settled. Negotiations can be a dangerous business, especially when one negotiator has a free and rambunctious press to goad him into compromises while the other is covered by suitably intimidated sycophants.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/26/AR2008052601739.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

A Deal At Hand In Iraq
By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post

U.S. and Iraqi negotiators are days away from agreeing on an "aspirational" date for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraq. Barack Obama and John McCain will find language in the accord to allow each to take credit on the campaign trail for shaping that outcome.

But the big political winner from this slimmed-down, vague agreement on U.S. forces will be Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- whom the Bush administration seriously considered pushing out of office last year but has learned to accommodate.

Something surprising is happening to the once rigid, self-centered George W. Bush presidency. The administration is adjusting policy to reflect the changing political landscape of the United States -- and of Iraq, where Maliki has emerged as the center of gravity in Shiite politics as other leaders fail physically and politically.

Bush's desire for an enhanced legacy and a smooth transition in Washington seems to have overcome his instinctive insistence on deciding everything on his own principles and needs. Bush's diplomacy in its twilight months reflects world politics as it never did before.

In finally sending a senior State Department official to Geneva last month for nuclear talks with Iran, Bush simultaneously deprived the Iranians of an excuse not to pursue negotiations and reduced the saliency of Obama's campaign pledge to talk to Tehran.

About the same time, Bush reluctantly decided to allow U.S. negotiators to set specific timetables for withdrawing combat units from Iraq -- as Obama has demanded -- as long as they also obtained references to the withdrawals being based on battlefield conditions, as McCain and U.S. commanders want.

The deliberate ambiguity allows Maliki to maintain some of the future flexibility that his own security forces want while claiming immediate political credit for getting Washington to agree to get combat troops out of Iraqi cities and towns on a fixed schedule.

The Iraqis' first draft mentioned 12 months, I am told, and then shifted to 16 months. That, intentionally or otherwise, coincided with Obama's plan, as Maliki indicated in public, and was therefore anathema to the administration. A text of the final draft being circulated this month showed the withdrawal period as "TBD" (to be determined) after Bush and Maliki failed to agree to a timetable in a telephone conversation on July 30.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702897.html?wpisrc=newsletter

When China Starved
By Anne Applebaum
The Washington Post

Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, "ancient soldiers" marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremonies showed you China as China wants you to see it.

But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come -- and of how odd its transformation continues to be -- switch off the Olympics. Instead, spend a few minutes contemplating the existence of a new book: the first proper history of China's Great Famine, a catastrophe partly engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong.

"I call this book Tombstone," the author, Yang Jisheng, writes in the opening paragraph. "It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book."

"Tombstone" has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world (I first learned of it recently in California, from an excited Australian historian). Based on a decade's worth of interviews and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, "Tombstone" -- in two volumes and 1,100 pages -- establishes beyond any doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialization -- Mao's "Great Leap Forward" -- was an utter disaster.

A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in recorded history. "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses," one witness told Yang. "Then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people."

So thorough is his documentation, apparently, that some are already calling Yang "China's Solzhenitsyn," in honor of the Russian dissident -- who died last week -- who probably did the most to expose the crimes of Stalin. But the comparison is not quite right. Yang is not a dissident but a longtime Communist Party member. For more than three decades, he was a reporter for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. As a result, he had access to party documents that no one else has ever had.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR2008081102015.html?wpisrc=newsletter

A Quiet Deal With Pakistan
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post

Pakistan is publicly complaining about U.S. airstrikes. But the country's new chief of intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, visited Washington last week for talks with America's top military and spy chiefs, and everyone seemed to come away smiling.

They could pat themselves on the back, for starters, for the assassination of Khalid Habib, al-Qaeda's deputy chief of operations. According to Pakistani officials, he was killed on Oct. 16 by a Predator strike in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan. Habib, reckoned by some to be the No. 4 leader in al-Qaeda, was involved in recruiting operatives for future terrorist attacks against the United States.

The hit on Habib attests to the growing cooperation -- in secret -- between the United States and Pakistan in the high-stakes war along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, which U.S. intelligence officials regard as the crucial front in the war on terrorism.

The CIA had been gunning for Habib for several years, including a January 2006 Predator attack that produced false reports that he had been killed. The agency has needed better human intelligence on the ground, and improved liaison with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, may help.

Behind the stepped-up Predator missions in recent weeks is a secret understanding between the United States and Pakistan about the use of these drones. Given Pakistani sensitivities about American meddling, this accord has been shielded in the deniable world of intelligence activities. Officially, the Pakistanis oppose any violation of their airspace, and the Pakistani defense minister issued a public protest yesterday about the Predator raids. But that's not the whole story.

The secret accord was set after the September visit to Washington by Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari. It provided new mechanics for coordination of Predator attacks and a jointly approved list of high-value targets. Behind the agreement was a recognition by the Zardari government, and by Pakistan's new military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, that the imminent threat to Pakistan's security comes from Islamic terrorists rather than from arch-rival India.

The approved target list includes, in addition to al-Qaeda operatives, some Afghan warlords who were once sheltered by the ISI, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Haqqani family network and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. Also on the target list is Baitullah Mehsud, often described as the leader of the Pakistani Taliban.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/03/AR2008110302638.html?wpisrc=newsletter