By Ali Gharib and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 29 2010 (IPS)

The leaked reports sent by U.S. officials abroad to Washington reveal a treacherous playing field for the United States in the Middle East.

For U.S. President Barack Obama, the now-revealed symphony of war cries could pose challenges to his stated policies toward Iran, which so far have focused on averting a war over Iran’s nuclear programme by attempting to engage Tehran at the negotiating table while simultaneously pressuring the Islamic Republic with unilateral and multilateral diplomatic and economic sanctions.

The U.S., along with the four other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, will meet with a senior Iranian diplomat for the first time in more than a year next week in Geneva, it was announced Monday.

The cables, drawn from diplomatic meetings in the region between 2006 and early 2010, recorded comments hostile to Iran by high-ranking Arab officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Yemen.

In 2009, for instance, Mohammed bin Zayed, a crown prince of UAE’s Abu Dhabi, called Iranian President Ahmadinejad “Hitler” and warned against “appeasement”, the latter in the words of the U.S. note-taker.

Separately, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. reportedly “recalled the King’s frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program” in an Apr. 17, 2008 meeting with U.S. diplomats.

“He told you to cut off the head of the snake,” Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir told U.S. diplomats, according to a cable sent to the State Department three days later.

Neo-conservatives and other war hawks, including those in power in Israel, have responded to those comments with barely concealed glee.

“[T]he most interesting thing to come from the latest WikiLeaks round is Arab world leaders’ being forced to come out of the diplomatic closet and declare Iran’s regime the number one enemy in the Middle East,” wrote Benjamin Weinthal, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, on the website of the National Review.

“In the Israeli media, defense analysts are concluding that the leaked comments vindicate Israel’s longstanding position on the need for swift and powerful action against Iran’s out-of-control regime,” Weinthal continued.

“The corollary to this is that Arab leaders very generally will not speak to Americans – though they will speak to others – about their fear of Israel,” Chas Freeman, a former diplomat who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told IPS. “So the fact that Israel doesn’t feature in these conversations says nothing other than the Arabs are tactfully obsequious.”

Jennifer Rubin of Commentary magazine used a quip from bin Zayed to declare that “linkage” – the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process helps U.S. interests in the Middle East – was “nonsense”. She said the peace process was a “distraction” and that “Obama frittered away two years that could have been spent cementing an Israeli-Arab alliance against Tehran.”

The pressure to attack Iran from Israeli and U.S. hawks and now, publicly for the first time, Arab officials will force Obama to make “some tough decisions” in “a region on the verge of a major war”, National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi, currently a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center here, wrote in an e-mail to Politico’s Laura Rozen.

“The cables reveal that even though Obama came in with a strong vision for engagement, that vision has since inauguration day 2009 been compromised for several reasons, including opposition from some Arab states, France and Israel as well as the actions of Tehran,” wrote Parsi. “The choice now is between trying diplomacy in earnest or prepare for the confrontation that inevitably will come if the current trajectory of tensions prevail.”

Gary Sick, an Iran expert and Columbia University professor who served on the National Security Council for three presidents, expanded on a separate point by Parsi, writing on his blog that the Obama administration created a self- fulfilling prophecy by telling allies early on that negotiations with Iran would falter.

“The U.S. undertook its engagement strategy with Iran with the clear conviction that it would fail,” wrote Sick. “At the same time, it was preparing (and disseminating in private) an alternative pressure strategy. This is the most serious indictment of all.”

“Iran could hardly have been unaware of all this, so the chance that they would respond favorably – even before the contested election in June 2009 and the brutal crackdown that followed – was essentially zero,” he continued. “The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.”

But Freeman, the former U.S. diplomat, thought that the lessons and effects of the Wikileaks document dump were not as significant and represented normal diplomatic dialogue.

“It’s never been a secret that the Gulf Arabs are deeply concerned by Iran’s growth in power and influence in the region, much of which was made possible by various U.S. policies (in Iraq, Syria, the occupied territories, and Lebanon),” he told IPS.

“But I think it’s easy to misread these expressions. If you say ‘cut off the head of the snake,’ or if you say ‘not dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue is more dangerous than dealing with it,’ what you’re saying, in my experience with rulers in the Gulf, is that you look to the U.S. to solve problems that you have no idea how to deal with but which bother you,” Freeman said.

“Does that mean that you’re endorsing military strikes? Despite the vivid language, I’d say it doesn’t. What is says is there’s a problem and we look to you (as a superpower) to handle it,” he said.

Excerpt:

A group of U.S. experts ranging from former top diplomats to non-proliferation specialists is praising the recent deal brokered by Brazil and Turkey on Iran’s nuclear programme as a potential “first step” towards ratcheting down tensions between the West and the Islamic Republic.

After stalling and eventually rejecting a Western proposal in October to ship most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) out of Iran in exchange for more highly-enriched fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), Iran agreed last month with the leaders of Brazil and Turkey to send the same quantity of its LEU stockpile to Turkey to be held in escrow pending delivery of fuel rods for the research facility.

However, the breakthrough got a tepid response in Washington, where the administration of President Barack Obama is trying to move a new round of sanctions through the United Nations Security Council.

But the latest statement from the Iran experts and non- proliferation hands, released here Tuesday, said the new deal should not be dismissed so quickly by world powers and the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“Iran’s agreement to export a large portion of its LEU outside of its borders for up to a year is worthy of consideration,” said the statement, which also noted that certain shortcomings of the deal would still have to be addressed.

“If enacted, this proposal would begin the process of addressing a major – but not the only – aspect of the strained relationship between Iran and the international community, and would represent a first step in halting Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapons capability,” it said.

Amb. Thomas Pickering, a long-time Foreign Service officer with posts including Israel, Jordan and the U.N., signed the document, which was organised by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Former U.N. chief weapons inspector David Kay, Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, and NIAC president Trita Parsi, among others, also signed.

The fuel swap deal, brokered personally by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an in Tehran last month, mirrors the proposal put forward last October by the “P5+1” – the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany – by providing for the shipment of 1,200 kg of Iranian LEU to Turkey to be held in “escrow” in return for fuel rods to power the TRR, which provides isotopes for medical use.

Tuesday’s statement called Iranian approval of the proposal a “significant concession” because the Iranian ‘escrow’ deposit would come in a single batch and be held outside Iranian territory – the two conditions the Iranians balked at after initially accepting the deal last fall.

“[The U.S.] should’ve looked much more closely at the deal instead of simply regarding it as unsatisfactory, which it may have been in certain elements,” said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University, who said he concurs with the gist of the NIAC statement.

In its response to the deal, the U.S. complained that it failed to secure Iran’s agreement to end its enrichment of uranium to 20 percent – the higher level of enrichment needed for its TRR programme. Tehran began enriching at that level after the October proposal fell through.

Brazil subsequently leaked an Apr. 20 letter from Obama to da Silva. “For us, Iran’s agreement to transfer 1,200 kg of Iran’s [LEU] out of the country would build confidence and reduce regional tensions by substantially reducing Iran’s LEU stockpile,” said the letter, making no mention of U.S. concerns about the TRR enrichment programme.

“I would urge Brazil to impress upon Iran the opportunity presented by this offer to ‘escrow’ its uranium in Turkey while the nuclear fuel is being produced,” Obama wrote in the letter.

But U.S. officials told Politico’s Laura Rozen that the demand to halt 20-percent enrichment was made clear in phone calls to Brazilian officials.

The fuel swap “is simply a confidence-building measure”, an official told Rozen. “This deal is separate from the basic factors which have brought this issue to the Security Council.”

“To say that [Brazil and Turkey] acted rashly or on their own when this first came out was a mistake,” Sick, who held the Iran portfolio at the National Security Council in the 1970s and 1980s, told IPS. “[The U.S.] should have looked at it as a potential opportunity.”

Sick recalled his own involvement in negotiating the release of U.S. hostages from Iran following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. He said the mediation of a mid-level power, Algeria, was critical to success.

Likewise today, Brazil and Turkey’s non-aligned status helped to revive the previously-dead fuel swap arrangement in an effort to ratchet down tensions.

Both countries also hold temporary seats on the U.N. Security Council, where the Obama administration proposed a new draft sanctions resolution only a day after the Brazil- Turkey deal was announced.

When introducing the draft resolution, Washington asserted that it had the support of the veto-holding five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council, namely Russia, China, France, and Britain, as well as the U.S. itself.

The experts’ statement was addressed to the P5 + 1, which is participating in negotiations, and the “so-called Vienna Group (Russia, France, the United States, and the IAEA)”.

The statement called for further consideration of the Brazil-Turkey deal rather than endorsing it, and made no mention of the sanctions resolution at the U.N.

But Robert Naiman, the policy director at Just Foreign Policy, said that running the sanctions track and the Brazil-Turkey deal in tandem might prove problematic.

“The whole point of the exercise of the Brazilian-Turkey deal was an alternative path,” Naiman told IPS. “This was the last chance before the sanctions path.”

Naiman noted that “no one could say it was a surprise” if the Iranians walk away from the Brazil-Turkey deal upon the passage of further sanctions.

Though the Iranian government has not yet officially done so, former Iranian nuclear negotiator and current parliament speaker Ali Larijani said last week that the latest agreement and sanctions are mutually exclusive.

“If the Americans want to seek adventure, whether in the U.N. Security Council or in Congress, all the efforts of Turkey and Brazil will be in vain and this path will be abandoned,” he said, according to Reuters.

Rozen reported Wednesday that a vote was pushed back until at least next week and a State Department spokesman said the deadline was Jun. 21.

Naiman suggested, as the experts’ statement counsels, that the U.S. use this as an opportunity to address the issues raised in the initial U.S. response to the Brazilian-Turkey deal: capping enrichment at five percent and the future of negotiations between Iran and the P5+1. The experts’ statement added that “protecting human rights in Iran” can also be raised.

The U.S. also expressed concern that, while the original deal meant Iran was shipping out 80 percent of its LEU stockpile, enrichment during the intermittent seven months meant that the Brazil-Turkey deal only removed half of Iran’s LEU.

An IAEA report released Monday said Iran has 2,400 kg of LEU, enough for potential nuclear weapons. But Naiman noted that “if you do nothing, then next month they’re going to enrich more uranium”.

Larijani stated Wednesday that Iran intends to continue enrichment even if sanctions are passed.

In a surprisingly swift move on Thursday night that could have wide-ranging implications, the U.S. Senate passed a bill containing broad unilateral sanctions to punish foreign companies that export gasoline to Iran or help expand its domestic refinery capabilities.

The voice vote came at the eleventh hour before the chamber recessed so legislators could go home to campaign. The bill cannot come before the president to be signed into law until a conference procedure combines it with a similar House bill, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), passed in October.

The Senate move reveals an administration losing control of even its own party in foreign policy dealings, as U.S. President Barack Obama has tried to maintain engagement with Iran aimed at curbing its nuclear programme, which the Islamic Republic insists is for peaceful purposes.

Along with scores of Democrats, who favoured the bill over the administration’s objections, the effort was supported by Iran hawks including Republican co-sponsor John Kyl and neoconservative independent Joe Lieberman, and was characterised by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a shot at Obama.

“If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must,” McConnell said.

The administration had raised its issues with the bill in a December letter from Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg to Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, complaining that the bill limited the president’s flexibility.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also made late December comments urging caution in applying broad sanctions that might harm and alienate the struggling Iranian opposition movement, asking instead for sanctions that targeted Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), thought to be responsible for crackdowns against opposition demonstrators.

The contents of the bill require the president to impose the wide-ranging sanctions, restraining the traditional presidential foreign policy waiver to a line-by-line exemption that forces Obama to spend political capital.

However, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – beset by a host of political problems from slow economic recovery to stalled health care reform – made it clear that he intended to pursue the bill, the administration dropped its public opposition, perhaps hoping that it could change the bill with amendments or in conference.

But a compromise scuttled amendments in Thursday night’s brief deliberations.

In a dramatic twist reported by ForeignPolicy.com, Republican Senator John McCain tried to introduce an amendment to the bill that would name, shame and sanction specific Iranian human rights violators – a theme that echoes the administration calls for more targeted sanctions.

But McCain dropped his amendments at the behest of Sen. Lieberman. The leadership of both parties was apparently concerned that if amendments were introduced, the process would be slowed and the bill might not come to a vote in time.

And Patrick Disney, the assistant policy director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which supports engagement, said that even in conference, it will be difficult to remove the language that binds Obama’s hands.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they expedited the conference,” he told IPS. “I don’t know if they’ll be able to take that part out because it’s the main central architecture of the bills.”

The rushed vote with almost no debate came a week before France, which supports sanctions on Iran, is to take the presidency of the United Nations Security Council from China, which has balked at punishing Iran as negotiations are ongoing. Passing the bill as the administration negotiated with the Security Council was viewed as diplomatically problematic.

But Richard Sawaya, the president of USA*Engage, a group that opposes unilateral sanctions, told IPS that passing the bill before or during Security Council negotiations was “a distinction without a difference.”

Another aspect of the Dodd bill raising eyebrows is the codification into law of an embargo against Iran imposed by Pres. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Dodd bill requires Congress to approve the lifting of the embargo.

Disney of NIAC said that the bill, rather than giving the president more tools for negotiating with Iran, virtually takes the embargo off the table as a U.S. bargaining chip.

“This means that no president can lift the embargo without certifying to Congress that Iran has met a laundry list of demands that no president in his right mind will certify,” Disney told IPS.

“All of the things that this bill sought to do, the president had the power to do already,” he said. “By Congress passing these bills, it removed the president’s ability to walk things back without Congress.”

One of the prime dangers of pursuing such draconian sanctions is that, while Obama’s tentative year-end deadline for negotiations to bear fruit has passed, a slow-paced back and forth between Iranians and the multilateral team including the U.S. is still evolving.

The U.S. has not even responded to the latest Iranian counter-offer for a uranium swap proposal.

The situation is also complicated by the resilient Iranian opposition, which has maintained its struggle against Iran’s hard-line leadership after alleged widespread voter fraud in the June election that re-installed Mahmood Ahmadinejad as Iran’s president.

While the Obama administration has taken a considerably more cautious tone since June – and especially in the subsequent months, as the opposition has refused to cower in the face of a brutal crackdown – hard-liners in Congress appear to be deaf to the fluid realities on the ground in the Islamic Republic.

“I would think the first rule is the physician’s rule, which is ‘do no harm,'” said Sawaya of USA*Engage.

Furthermore, “crippling sanctions,” as broad-based gas sanctions are often called, is a potential checklist item on a path to military confrontation with Iran. But some think imposing and enforcing the sanctions themselves could be tantamount to war.

“Even half of the people that proposed (gas sanctions) say the only way to really impose that is a naval blockade,” said Sawaya. “Well, that’s an act of war!”

In a statement Friday, Debra DeLee, president of Americans for Peace Now, urged that the bill be modified when members of the House and Senate meet to reconcile their respective versions of the legislation.

“The House-Senate conference offers the last chance for Congress to do the right thing here: to amend this bill to make it consistent with a rational approach to Iran, with the national interests of the United States, and with the multilateral approach that is being pursued by the president of the United States,” she said.

By Danielle Kurtzleben and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Jul 20 2009 (IPS)

Governmental corruption and the refusal to cooperate with U.S. counter-drug efforts are worsening a ballooning drug trafficking problem in Venezuela, according to a new report by the investigative office of the U.S. Congress.

The report, released Monday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), may further fray long-tense relations between the two countries which had appeared to improve modestly since the inauguration six months ago of President Barack Obama.

The report says that gains from the U.S.’s six-billion-dollar Plan Colombia counternarcotics programme are being undermined by Caracas’s “permissive environment” for Colombian insurgent groups, notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a left-wing guerrilla group that supports itself in part through drug production and trafficking.

“According to U.S. officials, a high level of corruption within the Venezuelan government, military, and other law enforcement and security forces contributes to the permissive environment,” said the report.

Venezuela’s 2,000-km-long border with Colombia has long been a preferred route for Colombian drug runners. But shipments of cocaine from Colombia to Venezuela skyrocketed from 60 metric tonnes in 2004 to 260 metric tonnes in 2007, said the GAO.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denied the GAO’s findings as they were leaked to various press outlets over the past several days, calling the study a smear and accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy because drug trafficking is fuelled by U.S. demand.

“This is a tough issue for the U.S. to lecture Latin America about because the U.S. hasn’t done its part,” said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a think tank here. “It’s both demand, and it’s a failure of law enforcement here, too. The U.S. also deserves to be criticised.”

In the past, the U.S. and Venezuela have cooperated in anti-drug efforts, but as the relationship deteriorated, cooperation fell off, culminating in Chavez’s 2005 expulsion of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials from Venezuela, accusing them of espionage.

Chavez said that Venezuelan anti-narcotics efforts have continued without the U.S. But the GAO report claimed that Venezuelan security forces are known to take bribes in exchange for facilitating drug shipments or, upon seizing drugs, either returning them to the traffickers or keeping them.

“[The U.S. State Department] reports that members of the special counternarcotics units of the National Guard and the Federal Investigative Police often facilitate or are themselves involved in drug trafficking,” said the report. “In addition, although the Venezuelan government reports that it seizes cocaine and incinerates it, some may be taken by Venezuelan officials or returned to drug traffickers.”

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2009 World Drug Report, seizures of cocaine in Venezuela dropped from 58 metric tonnes in 2005 to fewer than 32 metric tonnes in 2007.

Perhaps the strongest charge made by the report is that Venezuela provides a “lifeline” to the FARC and other groups.

“By allowing illegal armed groups to elude capture and by providing material support, Venezuela has extended a lifeline to Colombian illegal armed groups, and their continued existence endangers Colombian security gains achieved with U.S. assistance, according to U.S. and Colombian government officials,” the report asserts.

“For any government to support a group like the FARC is very serious,” Shifter told IPS. “Being involved in the drug trade is something that is of concern, but it’s not limited to Venezuela. Support for the FARC has more serious political and strategic considerations.”

“The findings of this report have heightened my concern that Venezuela’s failure to cooperate with the United States on drug interdiction is related to corruption in that country’s government,” said Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee who commissioned the GAO report.

Tensions between Washington and Caracas came to a head in September 2008, when Venezuela expelled the U.S. ambassador, accusing him of spying. The U.S. followed suit by expelling the Venezuelan ambassador.

U.S.-Venezuela relations have since softened; Chavez applauded Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and the two leaders greeted each other warmly at the April Summit of the Americas.

Ambassadors in both countries were reinstated in June.

Lugar, a moderate Republican who, among other things, has called for moving toward normalising relations with Cuba, had asked the GAO to determine whether Venezuela was “in the process of becoming a narco-state, heavily dependent (on) and beholden to the international trade in illegal drugs”.

“The report’s findings require, at a minimum, a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Venezuela,” Lugar said late last week when the GAO’s findings first became known.

“President Chavez has recently approved the re-establishment of our respective ambassadors. I hope he sees this as an opportunity to further dialogue in areas of common interest, but also in matters of sharp differences,” Lugar added.

The recent agreement to return ambassadors marked the latest step in a gradual détente between Caracas and Washington since Obama became president. But tensions seem to be on the rise again, particularly in the wake of the ongoing political crisis over the coup d’etat against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

While both Obama and Chavez have called for Zelaya’s re-instatement, Chavez’s call for more aggressive actions as well as his charges that U.S. government agencies were behind the coup itself and his strong scepticism of the mediation undertaken by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias have clearly irritated Washington.

It is in that context that the latest report is expected to be seized on by anti-Chavez forces here, led by hard-liners in the Cuban-American community, such as Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and former Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Otto Reich, who gave strong backing to the coup attempt against Chavez and who has also spoken out against Zelaya, depicting him as a puppet of the Venezuelan leader.

That characterization of Zelaya during the Honduran crisis has been used as well by prominent neo-conservative commentators in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard who see “Chavismo” as the greatest threat Washington faces in the Americas and who have also played up Chavez’s alleged friendship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The latest edition of the Standard, for example, features a cover photo of an embrace between Zelaya and Chavez entitled “Comrades in Arms” and sub-titled “On Hugo Chavez’s Honduran Adventure”.

Adam Isaacson, a Latin America specialist at the Centre for International Policy, said that the report should be of concern to Venezuela itself.

“Venezuela has this rapidly growing problem, and won’t even deal with the DEA,” he told IPS. “Venezuela should be worried as well. If you have that amount of cocaine going through the country, you’re risking ending up like Mexico, with powerful organised crime and violence. No leader wants violence.”

Rather than siding outright with narco-traffickers, it’s likely that Venezuela doesn’t have the internal security capacity to deal with the problem, Isaacson said, noting that despite large oil revenues, Chavez has not properly addressed public safety.

“You’ve seen it happen in Colombia, Mexico and Central America. A country not set up to combat the money of crime and narco-trafficking just gets steamrolled by it. That could be what you’re seeing in Venezuela.”

*Jim Lobe contributed to this story.

Excerpt:

While mass demonstrations in Iran are dwindling – with large gatherings and the opposition appearing largely paralysed by the authorities’ crackdown – the crisis there is causing a return to prominence for groups of Iranians living in the West: the exiles who have long advocated regime change in Iran, sometimes by armed means.

Experts with intimate knowledge of Iranian reformist politics say that the involvement of these exiles, who are sometimes reviled by ordinary Iranians, and the promotion of these figures and their open desire for regime change are damaging to the goals of demonstrators.

“Having these [anti-regime] opposition at the time talking about Iran has brought about enormous hardships on the ground,” said Asieh Mir, an Iranian scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace who works on democracy issues and participated in the reformist governments of the early 2000s.

Mir says that Iranian state-run news has been carrying Western news outlets’ interviews with anti-regime exiles. “This kind of media coverage and inviting the opposition is harming the movement,” he told IPS.

The Iranian authorities, led by harsh statements from its top theocratic and political figures – Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei and the election’s ostensible winner President Mahmoud Amhadinejad, respectively – have repeatedly asserted that foreign meddlers support the protests against the government.

The leader of the opposition in Iran and the loser of the disputed election, Mir Hossein Moussavi, has repeatedly said that he in no way seeks the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

On the contrary, Moussavi, a player in the early republic and the revolution, says that the crowds of Iranians are rallying for a return “to the pure principles of the Islamic Revolution.”

The stated ultimate goal of the rallies and demonstrations, which united varying segments of Iranian society, was to annul the election results and hold a free and fair poll – a far cry from overthrowing Iran’s unique mix of Islamic theocracy and republicanism.

Not all Iranian exiles are so forward about their desire for regime change, but these groups stand out in their attempts to claim the mantle of leadership to the masses of Iranians on the streets of Iran, though most of the groups and figures lack legitimacy there.

Among the leaders of these disparate groups of anti-regime exiles are Reza Pahlavi, the suburban Washington-based son of the last Shah, and Maryam Rajavi, leader of the controversial French-based Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MEK).

These figures have had their views amplified by appearances in mainstream U.S. and Western media – a fact that the Iranian government has seized upon to discredit Iran’s demonstrators.

State-run media in Iran is replaying clips of interviews and speeches by Rajavi and Pahlavi in an attempt to tie demonstrators to the anti-regime figures and cast their aspirations as an attempt to destabilise Iran from within.

The government has accused protesters and foreign governments of colluding to foment a “colour revolution”, the allegedly U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed popular uprisings that reshaped Eastern Europe and which hawks in the U.S. have long advocated for Iran.

But the MEK and Pahlavi are both in situations where U.S. backing is unlikely. Pahlavi, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, denied any support from the U.S. government: “I don’t rely on any sources other than my own compatriots,” he said, calling his alleged ties the CIA and groups trying to destabilise Iran “absolutely and unequivocally false”.

But Pahlavi, a symbol of the Shah, a dictator whose secret police was known for brutal repression, including disappearances, holds more sway with the monarchist exile communities abroad than with Iranians in Iran.

Pahlavi dismissed the leader of protests, Moussavi, as a “prescreen[ed]” candidate who could therefore “not be a true representative of the nation”.

In the sometimes combative Times interview, Pahlavi claims he maintains ties to “all sorts of groups that are committed to a secular, democratic alternative to the current regime.”

But asked about his father’s rule, Pahlavi said he left “this judgment to history” – a view unlikely to be taken by most Iranians who tend to have long political memories, evidenced by the continuing resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overthrew a democratically-elected government and re-installed the autocratic Shah.

Pahlavi also recently gave an interview to the MSNBC news channel and made a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

Despite his proclaimed eschewing of U.S. government support, at the Press Club Pahlavi urged the U.S. and the international community to intervene and help demonstrators, which experts, including Iranian dissidents, contend will discredit Iranian-based opposition to the point of ruin.

“I have seldom seen nonviolent movements for change succeed without international assistance,” he said. “Let’s not have the regime in Iran define what is interference and what is not.”

Since 1997, the U.S. considers the MEK a terrorist group because of its assassinations of six U.S. citizens.

But more important than being spurned by the U.S., the MEK, a cultish Islamist Marxist group, is incredibly unpopular in Iran because it sided with Iraq in the bloody and traumatic Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Likely due to both the infeasibility of the MEK as a popular force for change in Iran and the ‘terrorist’ stigma attached to it, Rajavi and her group have gotten less mainstream media attention in the U.S. But commentators, most prominently U.S. neoconservatives, have published endorsements of the MEK in smaller and foreign publications.

A longtime proponent of U.S. covert support and funding for the MEK, Raymond Tanter, of the so-called ‘Israel lobby’ think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and the president of the pro-regime change Iran Policy Committee (IPC), wrote an opinion piece for the Jerusalem Post where he encouraged the U.S. and Israel to give broad support to MEK and its umbrella organisation, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

Fellow neoconservative Daniel Pipes, who had stated his support for the hardliner Ahmadinejad in the elections, also wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post where he voiced support for a regime change plan that “takes advantage” of the MEK, calling for their prompt removal from U.S. list of terror groups. Pipes said he attended a June 20 NCRI summit outside Paris.

Projecting MEK views onto dissent within the Islamic Republic, Pipes said that during her speech, Rajavi called for regime change: “Like the street protesters, she also called for the demise of the Khomeinist regime.”

Iranian state media has been publishing clips and pictures of Rajavi wearing a green headscarf in an attempt to tie her to the protests by her use of the colour – the same as Moussavi’s campaign and featured prominently in the protests. Notably, however, green is also the colour of Islam.

This segment of exile views, however, seems not to have penetrated the Barack Obama administration. In the New York Times on Sunday, David Sanger quoted a U.S. official who grasped some of the nuances of the positions of opposition within Iran.

“The students in Tiananmen wanted real democracy, the Poles wanted regime change, but the Iranians might be looking for something in between,” the unnamed official told Sanger, noting that further radicalisation, if it occurs, will likely be because of the actions of the regime itself.

*Danielle Kurtzleben contributed to this story.

By Katie Mattern and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Jun 24 2009 (IPS)

After informing the Syrian embassy in Washington on Tuesday night, the U.S. State Department announced on Wednesday that President Barack Obama will be sending an ambassador to Damascus for the first time since 2005.

The move follows the renewal of sanctions on Syria in May, which many thought were an obstacle to new ties to Damascus as part of the bold regional engagement Obama had promised during the presidential campaigns.

Officials informed the Syrian ambassador to the U.S., Imad Moustapha, and the Foreign Ministry in Damascus on Tuesday night, the State Department confirmed on Wednesday.

Ahmed Salkini, a spokesperson for the Syrian embassy in Washington, told IPS that they were unofficially informed of the decision but had yet to receive an official or written communiqué.

“[W]e’re prepared to move forward with Syria to advance our interests through direct and continuing dialogue,” said State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly at a briefing Wednesday. “[W]e continue to have concerns about Syria’s role in this region. And we think one way to address those concerns is to have an ambassador in Damascus.”

“[T]his is part of a natural evolution of our reengagement with Syria,” he added.

“It’s in our interests to have an ambassador in Syria,” a senior administration official told CNN. “We have been having more and more discussions, and we need to have someone there to engage.”

The move is seen as part of Obama’s plan to improve relations with the Middle East in general and Syria, in particular, which the U.S. hopes to draw away from its alliance with Iran.

Syria is often thought as a key player in regional peace. Syria maintains ties with Iran and plays a role in the Palestinian armed resistance.

“Mitchell came away with his magical word that Syria plays an ‘integral’ role in regional peace, and that was very important for Syria to hear,” said Oklahoma University professor Joshua Landis, who authors the widely-read Syria Comment blog and returned from a trip to Syria on Tuesday.

“[T]his decision reflects the administration’s recognition of the important role Syria plays in the region,” Kelly said at Wednesday press briefing. “And of course, we hope that they will continue to play such a constructive role to promote peace and stability in the region.”

But prospects for Israeli-Syrian peace remain dim as long as right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to compromise on giving up the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized in 1967’s Six Day War, though Netanyahu said he is willing to talk in other areas.

“Everyone wants to show that they’re willing to talk,” said Landis. “The ultimate goal for Syria is getting out from under these sanctions that they’ve been under for 30 years now. That means making a deal with Israel because a lot of these sanctions are connected to Syria’s enmity with Israel.”

Syria diplomacy had been moving slowly, and some commentators suspected that the renewed sanctions in May and the little attention paid to Syria recently might have indicated that the U.S. was less determined to renew ties.

“Everything was on hold for the Lebanese elections which turned out very well for the U.S.,” Landis told IPS. An anti-Syrian coalition won the election in Lebanon, holding onto a delicate majority.

Lebanon had been caught in a “tug of war” between Syria and U.S., Landis said. “Now the status quo has been reaffirmed and I think that means that this tug of war can be put to rest. That means that Syria and the U.S. can move on and deal with other situations,” including Palestinian issues and the situation in Iraq, he said.

U.S. ambassador to Syria Margaret Scobey was withdrawn from Damascus by former President George W. Bush in 2005 after the assassination of then-Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Washington accused Syria of playing a role in the killing, which Syria staunchly denies. A U.N. investigation into the attack that killed Hariri and 22 others is ongoing.

George Mitchell, the U.S. envoy for Middle East peace, visited Syria two weeks ago and met with President Bashar al-Assad. Mitchell was the highest level official to visit Damascus in four years.

Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, a former Bush ambassador to Lebanon, and National Security Council official Daniel Shapiro have also made two visits to Syria.

Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell was also in the region previous to Mitchell’s trip to assess the security situation in Damascus. The U.S. has expressed interest in building a new embassy there, though Kelley denied on Wednesday that any decisions had been made.

“It’s a reflection of Syria being a pivotal country in terms of achieving a comprehensive peace in the region,” one senior official told the New York Times. “There is a lot of work to do in the region for which Syria can play a role. For that, it helps to have a fully staffed embassy.”

“He [Obama] is doing the right thing,” Landis wrote. “Indeed, this should have been done long ago… The Bush administration’s policy of conquering Iraq while telling its neighbours that they were next in line for regime-change was bad. Syria and Iran had little choice but to fan the flames of the Iraq insurgency in the hopes of sinking Washington’s regional plans which were inimical to their interests.”

Mitchell called his discussions with President al-Assad “serious and productive” and discussed Obama’s plan for regional peace laid out in his Cairo speech earlier this month. According to CNN’s report, Mitchell also stressed the importance of peace between Syria and Israel, and Lebanon and Israel.

The U.S. is also said to be interested in using Syria’s influence with Hamas, whose senior political leadership, including the head of the organisation’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, resides in Damascus.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) was also recently in the region, including Damascus, meeting with Hamas officials. While in Syria, he also met with Assad. IPS reported that Carter briefed Mitchell on his findings.

Earlier this year, Moustapha said that there had been indications that the U.S. would be willing to engage Syria even if the heads of these groups, which are viewed as terrorist groups by the U.S., were not kicked out of Damascus.

Syria itself is listed as a state sponsor of terror, and Kelly said he was unaware of any discussions about removing the country from that list.

Bush had criticised Syria for allowing terrorists to move freely into Iraq. These terrorists had been accused of contributing to the insurgency within Iraq.

Officials have said that Syria has promised to try to stem the flow of these foreigners into Iraq. A U.S. military contingent had also visited the country to discuss this issue.

“I know that they have played a positive role in addressing some of our very real concerns about foreign fighters crossing from Syria [into Iraq],” Kelly said at the State Department.

The U.S. has yet to pick a new ambassador for Syria. The appointee would have to be approved by both the U.S. Senate and the Syrian government.

Excerpt:

By Khody Akhavi and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Jun 23 2009 (IPS)

Facing a growing chorus of Republican criticism to speak out more forcefully on Iran’s disputed election results, the U.S. president made his harshest statement yet Tuesday, condemning Iran’s leadership for its violent crackdown on protesters.

Barack Obama told a White House news conference that the U.S. and international community was “appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings, and imprisonments over the past few days.”

Obama also called on Iran to accept the “universal right to assembly and free speech” if it wanted to be respected by the international community.

The president’s sharp language came on the same day Republicans in the U.S. Congress succeeded in adding a measure to a budget bill which would cut off U.S. loan guarantees for some companies doing business with Iran.

The amendment, introduced by Mark Kirk, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, made its way into a 2010 House appropriations bill which provides funding for the U.S. State Department and its foreign operations.

The efforts by Kirk, who is close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential organisation among pro-Israel lobby groups in Washington, could draw the Congress deeper into the debate over how to respond to post-election violence in Iran.

But how to engage Iran and under what terms appear to be issues the Obama administration wants debated exclusively within the White House and State Department.

On Tuesday, Obama maintained that his administration had been consistent on its statement with regards to Iran. But he also re-iterated that the U.S. did not want to be viewed as meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

Obama also called long-running allegations by the Iranian government of U.S. and foreign interference “patently false and absurd”.

“They are an obvious attempt to distract people from what is truly taking place within Iran’s borders,” he said.

“This tired strategy of using old tension to scapegoat other countries won’t work anymore in Iran. This is not about the United States and the West; this is about the people in Iran, and the future that they – and only they – will choose,” he added.

Obama’s comments came as Iran’s Guardian Council, which vets election results, rejected opposition demands Tuesday for a rerun of the presidential race. Iran’s official state news agency also quoted a senior judiciary official as saying a special court has been established to try detained protesters.

Iran also expelled two British diplomats, in the wake of harsh statements made by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at last week’s Friday prayers, where he described Britain’s government as “most evil”.

In response, the British expelled two Iranian diplomats. It has also announced it has frozen around one billion pounds (1.64 billion dollars) in Iranian government assets.

Khamenei also warned protesters of consequences should the protests continue in the capital and across the country. Eleven days of demonstrations and street violence in the wake of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election at the polls has brought about unprecedented opposition and a very public split within the country’s clerical establishment.

There were reports that members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Basij paramilitary group, and other security forces have been deployed in the streets and major squares of Tehran, in order to quell protests and stop any public gatherings.

On Tuesday, Obama described the events in Iran as “profound”, but said he would not discuss possible consequences for the country’s leadership because “we don’t know yet how this will play out.”

“I know everyone here is on the 24 hour news cycle,” he said to the reporters in the room. “I’m not.”

When asked whether this stronger language was in response to Republican leaders’ criticism that the president was being too timid, Obama said, “frankly, a lot of [Iranians] aren’t paying attention to what is being said on Capitol Hill.”

Obama’s approach to crisis has also drawn praise from some former George W. Bush administration officials.

“I believe that Obama has handled this crisis superbly,” said Nicholas Burns, who was undersecretary of state for political affairs under Bush.

“[Obama’s] statements became progressively stronger with events,” he said during a forum at the Washington-based Carnegie endowment for International Peace Tuesday, adding that criticism of Obama amounted to a “right-wing partisan attack”.

Obama said the U.S. would continue to advance its national security interests, and would not be used as a tool to be exploited by other countries.

But what happens in the Congress could potentially undermine Obama’s efforts to engage Iran over its disputed nuclear programme, which the U.S. and its allies suspect is aimed at producing weapons. Iran says its programme is for peaceful purposes.

The House of Representatives and Senate overwhelmingly adopted separate and symbolic resolutions last week supporting protesters in Iran. But the amendment introduced by Kirk, and which made its way into a House appropriations bill, would block the U.S. Export-Import Bank from extending loan guarantees to companies that supply refined petrol to Iran. “While the practical impact of this amendment is likely to be negligible, its approval now would give the government of Iran a new tool to use in its efforts to suppress dissent in Iran,” said Jim Fine, of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Washington- based peace lobby group. “The government of Iran will portray the amendment as punitive new sanctions aimed directly at the Iranian people and fresh evidence of hostile U.S. intent justifying tighter government control,” said Fine in a statement released Tuesday.

In a Congressional Quarterly report, Kirk was quoted as saying, “Our amendment is a go because AIPAC supports it,” referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which backs the measure.

But some analysts say the legislation, which is a long way from actually being implemented, only hurts the opposition movement in Tehran and bolsters Khamenei and his allies.

“What you’re doing is helping the forces that we actually oppose,” said Keith Weissman, an expert on Iranian-American affairs, who also used to work for AIPAC.

“Because of the unrest and the uncertainty, why do you want to make the job of the authorities and the regime easier,” he said.

“Dialogue and rapprochement are concepts that mean very little today,” he added.

Excerpt:

By Jared Levy and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Jun 5 2009 (IPS)

After emerging from a political crisis last year, the Lebanese people will head to the polls Jun. 7 to determine the composition of the new parliament. A variety of foreign powers, including the U.S., will be watching closely, waiting for the electoral results before they determine their policies towards the new government.

The outcome is especially important because many analysts view the elections through the lens of the struggle between U.S. and Iranian regional hegemonic aspirations.

No one is sure whether the Saad al-Hariri’s Western-backed March 14 alliance will retain its parliamentary majority, or whether the balance of power will shift to the Iranian-backed March 8 movement, led by the Shi’a militant group Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement of Maronite Christian Michael Aoun.

An agreement after Hezbollah took the Sunni Arab neighbourhoods of Beirut by force a year ago strengthened Hezbollah’s opposition, granting their coalition veto power over actions of the government. Now the group is looking to expand its power and perhaps take the helm of government.

The U.S. has designated Hezbollah, an armed Shia group that also serves as a social organisation and political party for much of Lebanon’s Shia population, a terrorist group

Asked by National Public Radio on Monday whether the U.S. would recognise electoral gains by Hezbollah, U.S. President Barack Obama stumbled through an answer which indicated that he was waiting to see what happened in the election.

“Well, look, if at some point – Lebanon is a member of the United Nations – if at some point they are elected as a head of state, or a head of state is elected in Lebanon that is a member of that organisation, then that would raise these issues. That hasn’t happened yet,” he said.

While the U.S. currently supports Lebanon under a government in which Hezbollah is in opposition, a government there led by the group and its allies might draw concern in Washington, where support for Hezbollah’s adversary Israel and antipathy towards the group’s patron, Iran, run deep.

The elections, however unpredictable, do retain the typical character of Lebanese politics: several regional and international players have a stake in the process.

The list of countries deeply interested in the elections goes beyond the usual Mideast regional players – Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – and into the realm of international powers such as the U.S., France and Russia.

The Obama administration deemed the Lebanese election important enough to dispatch Vice President Joe Biden to Beirut last week – the first time in 25 years that a sitting U.S. president or vice president has visited Lebanon.

Biden said that he hadn’t come to back any specific Lebanese party, but he later remarked that the U.S. “will evaluate the shape of our assistance programmes based on the composition of the new government.”

“When there is an American embrace, it almost always backfires, particularly in the Middle East,” said the National Democratic Institute’s (NDI) Les Campbell, at a panel hosted by the Washington-based Aspen Institute.

At the same panel, Middle East analyst and al-Hayat correspondent Raghida Dergham referenced the involvement of outside players in Lebanon, calling the country a laboratory where regional power struggles are carried out between countries like Iran, Syria and Israel.

In addition to the struggle between external powers, Dergham said the stakes were even higher for Lebanon itself.

“If Hezbollah wins, the fabric of society may change. The meaning of ‘the state’ may change,” she said, though she insisted she wasn’t predicting a Hezbollah victory. She said she feared another violent conflict with Israel, which fought a 34-day war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.

“I’m afraid the Netanyahu government wants to shield themselves from a peace process, and Lebanon might be the platform to do that if Hezbollah wins,” she said.

The U.S. has not telegraphed how it would react to a Hezbollah win, but experts have made some predictions.

“If Hezbollah and its allies win a majority and they lead the next government, at that point we will see the Obama administration pull back in the level of what aid it provides militarily,” said Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) fellow Mohammad Bazzi during a press call. “We may see a continuation in training, but there will be a pullback in arms [aid].”

Indeed, when another Islamic “resistance” group, Hamas, won Palestinian Authority (PA) elections, it was largely frozen out by the West, including the U.S., which withdrew or diverted some 400 million dollars of aid to the PA.

The U.S. has been supporting the Lebanese military, which is widely viewed as a unifying national institution, with the intention of bolstering it. The army, however, has neither the mandate nor the ability to carry U.N. resolution 1771, which calls for the disarmament of all Lebanese militias.

It is unlikely Hezbollah will opt to form a government on its own. Rather, to make the new government more palatable – both within Lebanon and abroad – a coalition with elements of the March 14th movement is likely.

Despite Hariri’s publicly saying he will not join a government led by the March 8th coalition – Hezbollah and its allies – NDI’s Campbell believes that, regardless of which side emerges from the election with more seats, “there will likely be a unity government.”

Campbell sees claims to the contrary by March 14th leaders as an effort to impress the importance of turnout upon their constituents.

Hezbollah’s coalition already includes Aoun, who, despite aligning himself with Hezbollah, has some sharply divergent political goals. Such allies, whose support would be needed for a March 8th victory, would likely moderate Hezbollah’s agenda.

Pointing to a likely national unity government, the close U.S. relationship with Lebanese president and former army general Michel Suleiman, and the fact that leading the government would make Hezbollah accountable to the public, Financial Times columnist Roula Khalaf argued that the U.S. should support whomever emerges from the elections.

“[A]t a time when President Barack Obama is on a mission to improve America’s battered image in the Muslim world… it would be a mistake to punish voters for making what the U.S. considered to be the wrong choice,” Khalaf wrote.

“At a time when the U.S. is trying to engage Syria and Iran,” Khalaf continued, “it can surely find justification for respecting the choice of Lebanese voters, even if it finds the outcome of the elections disagreeable.”

Indeed, the U.S. special envoy for Mideast peace, former Senator George Mitchell, will visit the region next week. Though the State Department would not confirm his itinerary, there is speculation that Mitchell’s trip will include his first visit to Syria as special envoy.

In her blog at Foreign Policy, Laura Rozen revealed that Mitchell will make a stop in Lebanon in the period immediately following the election.

Last month, the German newspaper Der Spiegel wrote a bombshell article which asserted that leaks from an investigation into the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri – Saad’s father – reveal that Hezbollah was involved.

Some commentators, including politicians from both sides of the Lebanese political spectrum, have debated the veracity of the Der Spiegel article – some noting its timing just before the elections.

Excerpt:

By Ali Gharib and Jared Levy
WASHINGTON, Jun 4 2009 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s historic speech in Cairo Thursday elicited broad approval from around the U.S., with the notable exception of the neoconservative right.

Obama’s speech itself was largely uncontroversial. Broad in scope and thin on policy specifics, Obama frankly acknowledged a troubled history that has manifested itself in today’s anti-Western Muslim extremism.

But rather than focus on divergences, Obama proposed a “new beginning” between the U.S. and Muslim world by engagement based on “mutual interest and mutual respect”, garnishing his speech with an Arab phrases and references to peaceful coexistence in religious texts including the Koran.

The reactions of much of the U.S. pundit class were overwhelmingly positive – acknowledging that Obama tackled prickly subjects in the relationship between Muslims around the world and U.S. foreign policy goals.

“Obama acknowledged room for disagreement and contestation and showed that he understands and respects alternative views even when he does not share them,” wrote the scholar Stephen Walt on his ‘Foreign Policy’ blog. “Yet there are also clear limits to his tolerance: the speech included a forthright rejection of violence… and a clear statement of the American commitment to basic human rights.”

“[H]e has committed himself to a set of principles and policies in front of the entire world,” concluded Walt. “Now he needs to follow up words with deeds. And so do his listeners.”

Obama broke down his speech into sections, addressing “violent extremism”; the Israeli-Arab conflict; nuclear weapons; democracy; religious freedom; women’s rights; and “development and opportunity”.

Former Israeli negotiator and New America Foundation fellow Daniel Levy noted that, in addition to the breadth of subjects addressed, “this speech should perhaps be remembered as much for what was not said.”

Obama didn’t praise the autocratic Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (long a darling of the U.S. for his allegiance), nor discuss the “purple finger version of democratisation”, nor make mention of “the traditional American condescension toward the Palestinian narrative”, wrote Levy on his blog, ‘Prospects for Peace’.

“But perhaps most remarkably of all, the words ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’ did not pass the president’s lips,” he wrote. “Here was a leader and a team around him smart enough to acknowledge that certain words have become too tainted, too laden with baggage, their use has become counter-productive, today the Global War on Terror framing was truly laid to rest.”

Muslim- and Arab-American groups praised Obama’s speech for its nuance and scope.

“It was a full agenda, making clear how deep a hole we’re in,” Arab-American Institute president James Zogby told the USA Today newspaper.

“This was a speech that was light years away from the hateful rhetoric of the [former President George W.] Bush years,” wrote a Palestinian-American Michigan State professor, Rossina Hassoun, in an account published on a blog.

“I actually heard an American president admit that the U.S. had overthrown a legally elected government in Iran. I actually heard an American president acknowledging the suffering and dislocation of the Palestinian people. I heard an American president deny the inevitability of the clash of civilizations,” she wrote.

The sharpest divergences in U.S. reaction came on issues regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

It was one area of the speech where Obama offered a few specifics, reiterating his call to end settlements by noting that the U.S. “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” and calling for Palestinians to focus on their own development.

Obama referred to “Palestine”, an uncommon reference to a state that remains only an aspiration.

The pro-Israeli far right-wing of U.S. commentators roundly blasted the speech in disparate ways such as ridiculing it for naiveté and simply denouncing it as “awful”, as former New York Sun journalist Ira Stoll labeled his post on the blog of the neoconservative magazine Commentary.

“What an awful speech,” Stoll blurted at the beginning of his post, going on to lament the positioning of millions of stateless “Palestinian Arabs as the victims.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) complained, rather incredibly, that “Obama struck a balanced tone with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that’s what was wrong with this speech.”

“American policy should not be balanced,” continued the RJC release, deriding Palestinians as “those who either engage in [terror] or are too weak to prevent it.”

Other mainstream Jewish groups took more balanced lines, often praising parts of the speech and complaining about others.

The chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, Alan Solow, who supported Obama, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that the speech was “one that was quite positive,” though he hoped for tougher rhetoric on Iran.

MJ Rosenberg, the head of policy analysis at the pro-peace Israel Policy Forum (IPF), wrote on the Talking Points Memo Café site that Obama’s speech was a landmark in the relationship between Islam and West.

“Not only did the speech specifically reject western (and American) colonialism, its entire tone was the antithesis of colonial,” wrote Rosenberg. “This is a profoundly different American voice, one that will do much to advance American goals rather than to sabotage them.”

IPF, in a statement, “strongly applaud[ed] President Obama’s historic, bold and wide-ranging speech,” and was “heartened” by Obama’s robust efforts towards the two-state solution.

On the website of the National Review Online, neoconservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin asserted that “Obama studiously avoids the word democracy.”

But Obama introduced a discussion of democracy as one of the six topics he directly addressed at length. In fact, as he launched into the discussion, Obama used the very word that Rubin accused him of dodging: “The fourth issue that I will address is democracy.”

Obama then used the word itself three more times, and, for good measure, once described the word by its definition: “A government of the people and by the people.”

He also went on, in addition to using the word, to give a nuanced view of democracy. He dispelled what was a common criticism of the Bush administration that it conflated institutions of democracy with elections.

“[E]lections alone do not make true democracy,” he said, noting the importance of maintaining a democratic mandate, minority rights, “confidence in the rule of law,” transparency, justice, and basic freedoms.

Excerpt:

By Ali Gharib and Jared Levy
WASHINGTON, Jun 3 2009 (IPS)

In his most widely anticipated speech to date, U.S. President Barack Obama will reach out directly to the Muslim world Thursday morning at Cairo University.

The address will set out an approach – likely broad, but at times with specific concrete goals – designed to ease the concerns of many of the globe’s 1.4 billion Muslims, many of whom view the U.S. and its foreign policy negatively. But his attempt is fraught with stumbling blocks.

On Monday, Obama told the French television channel ‘Canal Plus’ that he intends to “create a better dialogue” by “provid[ing] a framework, a speech of how I think we can remake relations between the United States and countries in the Muslim world.”

In the interview he also spoke of a knowledge deficit about Islam in the U.S. and the West, and said that “we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.”

Obama intends to distance himself from the policies of his predecessor, the wildly unpopular George W. Bush, and present a new image to the Muslim and Arab worlds.

Speaking to the BBC on Monday, however, Obama flatly denied that his speech would be an apology for U.S. policies of the past, including the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – the latter which Obama is significantly escalating – and U.S. detention and interrogation policies in those countries as well as the military’s Guantanamo Bay facility.

Obama, born to a Muslim father, is expected to lay out U.S positions that would put a more friendly face on the U.S.-led “war on terror,” which was perceived by many Muslims as an assault on their faith.

He also is expected to reiterate recent calls for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and discuss some concrete measures for accomplishing it.

But already, the choice to deliver the speech in Egypt, the largest Arab country and an undemocratic U.S. ally, has brought some controversy.

Confronted by the BBC, Obama refused to call Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak an “authoritarian”, saying he rejects such labels, but acknowledged “criticisms of the manner in which politics operates in Egypt”.

Egyptians, for their part, are sceptical of the U.S. change of course under Obama, but his ratings are considerably better than Bush, according to a survey of Egyptians by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a website of the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

Thirty-nine percent of Egyptians have faith that Obama will make sound decisions about U.S. foreign policy, and 46 percent view the U.S. favourably, compared with 27 percent under Bush.

But Obama faces even more daunting polling numbers on other questions. Sixty-seven percent of Egyptians think the U.S. has a negative impact on the globe and three-quarters think the U.S. is trying to weaken and divide the Muslim world. Four of five Egyptians think the U.S. is out to dominate Middle Eastern oil, and the same number think the U.S. is trying to impose its culture on Muslim countries.

PIPA notes that these views are largely unchanged from polling in 2008 and that Obama is seen as harbouring the same goals as the U.S. in general.

With Egypt’s oppressive politics and human rights violations and its standing as a close U.S. ally, many Egyptians see the U.S. as unsupportive of democracy. Four in 10 respondents thought that the U.S. does not support democracy in the Muslim world.

“We are… alarmed by signals that the Obama’s administration’s support for democracy may have waned,” wrote Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour in the New York Times on Wednesday, noting that democracy funding for Egypt had gone down.

“We don’t expect Mr. Obama to bring progress to Egypt,” he wrote. “But we expect him to demand freedom for all and to restate his conviction that oppressive regimes march on the wrong side of history.”

Some fear that no matter what Obama says, his association with dictators like Mubarak will hinder his outreach.

A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counter-terrorism official, Michal Scheuer, said on Al Jazeera English television that standing hand-in-hand with Mubarak was a better recruitment tool for global Muslim terrorism than pictures of abuse of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

Many pundits are urging the president to speak out forcefully in favor of democracy – the sort of rhetoric for which Bush’s so-called ‘freedom agenda’ was known.

“Although there are many expectations for this speech, one that Mr. Obama hopefully will disappoint is the expectation that he will walk away from what President George W. Bush called ‘the freedom agenda,'” wrote neoconservative American Enterprise Institute scholar and former Bush-era defence official Paul Wolfowitz in the Wall Street Journal. “That would be a great mistake for the U.S. and for the Muslim world.”

“The freedom agenda” was the name Bush gave to his democracy promotion programmes, which were widely discredited by the war in Iraq, U.S. detention policies, Bush’s continued support of authoritarian allies, and his repudiation of elections won by opponents of U.S. policy, such as the militant group Hamas’s victory in Palestinian Authority elections.

Egypt has its own Hamas-connected Islamist dissidents – most notably, the Muslim Brotherhood – whom Mubarak has cracked down on since the “Arab Spring” of 2005 when reform movements were gaining strength around the Arab world.

“The president should make clear that the U.S. does not believe that democracy can be imposed by force,” wrote Wolfowitz, who had a strong hand in the drive to the war on Iraq, itself intended to bring freedom and democracy to the “heart of the Middle East.”

Journalist and policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars Robin Wright also said that the people of the Muslim world – as opposed to their ruling regimes – do want to hear about democracy promotion.

“They want Obama to address issues of good government,” she said at a recent Wilson Centre panel on Obama’s trip. “They want him to deal with democratisation, but not ram it down their throat.”

Neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations scholar and former Bush democracy promotion adviser on the National Security Council Elliott Abrams was even more explicit that Obama should put the onus on the Muslim world to reform, writing in the Wall Street Journal about “the need for Muslim societies to open up so that every citizen can contribute his and especially her talents.”

“Political, social and gender limitations are preventing these societies and the people in them from realizing their God-given abilities,” wrote Abrams. “He should declare our complete belief in political freedom, democracy and equality of all citizens and of men and women.”

But not everyone believes that calling for sweeping changes in the Muslim world makes for the best outreach.

“I would argue that what he needs to do is address an issue which resonates with the Arab and Muslim world,” wrote Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. adviser on Mideast peace and a scholar at the Wilson Centre. “I would argue that issue is the Palestinian issue. He doesn’t have to lay down a peace plan, but he has to be a breaker of icons.”

Indeed, Obama is widely expected to use at least part of his speech to show support for the two-state solution, reiterating recent calls for concrete steps towards peace. Obama is currently engaged in a clash with the Israeli government over ending all settlement construction.

But at the Wilson Centre forum, Miller went farther, saying that Obama needed to do more than just talk.

“It is only a speech,” he said. “Words matter in this part of the world. Deeds matter more. There is an expectation (in the Muslim world) that he’s actually going to be able to deliver something.”

Excerpt:

By Danielle Kurtzleben and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, May 12 2009 (IPS)

Interest in reducing the harm caused by diarrheal diseases has waned among the global health and aid communities, said two new reports released Tuesday in Washington.

The reduced attention is disproportionate to the great harm done by the illness, particularly in developing countries.

Though diarrhea and related health problems remain the second leading cause of mortality among children under five, both reports said that resources to combat the preventable disease have fallen off and need to be reasserted as priorities.

The report “Diarrheal Disease: Solutions to Defeat a Global Killer”, released by PATH, a health advocacy and aid group, speaks broadly about increasing resources to prevent and treat diarrhea, while “Fatal Neglect: How Health Systems are Failing to Comprehensibly Address Child Mortality”, a report from WaterAid, focuses on the need for better sanitation and clean water to prevent the diseases.

Diarrhea can cause a whole host of other problems, notes the executive summary of the PATH report.

“Diarrhea causes more illnesses than any other ailment,” the report says. “Children who survive persistent diarrhea are likely to suffer from malnutrition, stunted growth, and learning difficulties.”

The report also notes that the benefits of addressing diarrhea don’t only create a health-oriented imperative to act on them, but an economic one as well. PATH points to sub-Saharan Africa where 12 percent of health budgets go to treating water-borne diseases and to a World Bank estimate that diarrhea and associated illness “cost low-income governments up to nine percent of their annual gross domestic products (GDP).”

Both reports put a strong focus on sanitation and hygiene, as their lack is among the leading causes of transmission of bacteria and viruses that cause diarrhea. The press conference releasing the reports put a strong focus on forming comprehensive prevention and treatment programmes.

What troubles both reports is that attention was focused on fighting diarrheal diseases in the 1980s and 1990s, but has since fallen off, despite the fact that the sicknesses have remained major killers.

“[O]ver the last decade, momentum has slowed, with declines in research and funding commitments and competing global health priorities,” said the PATH report.

The report speculates that because raising awareness and funding were so successful in earlier decades – “including a reduction of mortality rates by almost 50 percent” – many may have “considered the issue ‘solved’.”

“The perceived lack of urgency and taboo nature of the illness may have also contributed to the current low level of awareness surrounding the issue,” says the report.

The WaterAid report also focuses, with much sharper language, on how the lack of attention on diarrhea is a “symptom of a wider problem: the failure of the aid system to respond adequately to evidence.”

“First, the aid system needs to respond better to the disease burden by targeting resources at where that burden is greatest,” says the WaterAid report, “including diarrhea caused by poor sanitation.”

The report points to child mortality for those under five years old as a “‘golden indicator’ of [a country’s] development.”

It goes on to say that when taking into account adult deaths, funding for HIV/AIDS is balanced, but when considering child deaths, the large resources for fighting the disease are disproportionate.

“[F]inancing for the diseases that kill children currently bears little relation to the number of child deaths caused by those diseases,” says the WaterAid report.

However, the report repeatedly makes disclaimers that it is not aimed at sparking a funding battle between the priorities.

“The conclusion that diarrhea is a neglected does not imply that the targeting of resources to address it should come at the expense of vital investments in tacking malaria of HIV and AIDS,” it says. “Furthermore, this is not an attempt to detract from the huge adult morbidity and mortality burden of these diseases, which must be addressed.”

But it does say that disproportionality needs to be addressed at a national level, citing Madagascar and Rwanda where HIV rates are relatively low, but where HIV/AIDS got five times more funding than sanitation in 2004 –2006 (Madagascar) and three quarters of health-related donor assistance (Rwanda).

“However, it is not a matter of choosing between on disease and another, and different diseases are not in competition for financing,” says the report. “At issue is the ability of the aid system, and national health sectors, to deliver resources at targets and volumes proportionate to needs at the national level.”

“National health challenges rather than global causes need to inform the allocation of aid,” it said.

One of the points of both the WaterAid and PATH reports, which was cited at the press conference releasing the reports, is that relatively cheap fixes already exist to head off diarrheal diseases.

“We have the lifesaving, cost-effective prevention and treatment interventions at hand to stop the second-leading killer of children worldwide,” said the PATH report.

“We are actually not waiting for the next technological breakthrough. We know what works right now,” said John Wecker, the director of the Immunisation Solutions Programme at PATH.

Wecker said that getting countries to prioritise their own national health systems towards diseases that aren’t on the list of well-funded global causes can be troublesome.

“HIV/AIDS is their priority because that’s where the money is,” he said.

But despite the insistence that there is no “competition for financing”, the strains of the global financial crisis have caused U.S. President Barack Obama to scale back some of the ambitious plans for foreign aid on which he campaigned.

The announced budget for Obama’s Global Health Initiative last week left many AIDS activists critical of the lack of a significant boost in funding.

An article in the New York Times pointed to one of Obama’s health advisors, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Obama chief of staff Rahm, as a possible source for the notion of flatlining of resources directed at the effective but nearly bankrupt Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and other HIV/AIDS-oriented projects, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

“The plan appears to closely reflect the thinking of Dr. Emanuel,” wrote Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the Times, referring to a 2008 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association co-authored by Emanuel which “argued for a broader global public health approach.”

“By extending funds to simple but more deadly diseases, such as respiratory illnesses and diarrheal illnesses, the U.S. government could save more lives – especially young lives – at substantially lower cost,” wrote Emanuel.

Excerpt:

By Marina Litvinsky and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2009 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s pick for his new drug czar signals a radical shift from the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, by focusing on treatment for drug offenders rather than jail time.

On Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden announced the nomination of R. Gil Kerlikowske, the chief of police in the northwestern city of Seattle, for the post of director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), as the drug czar is formally known.

“[N]ever has it been more important to have a national drug control strategy guided by sound principles of public safety and public health,” said Obama in a statement announcing the appointment.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kerlikowske, a 36-year police veteran, will emphasise preventing drug use in the U.S. over combating the supply of illegal drugs from foreign countries.

“The success of our efforts to reduce the flow of drugs is largely dependent on our ability to reduce demand for them,” Kerlikowske said in a ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Unlike in previous administrations, the position of drug control director will not be a Cabinet position, intended to give Biden a larger role on the issue, an administration official told the Washington Post.

Biden is a more than two-decade veteran of the drug war and helped to set up the current ONDCP structure in the 1980s.

The war on drugs was declared by President Richard Nixon almost 40 years ago. After being enthusiastically carried out since then, analysts say attention and funding to the drug problem waned after the attacks of 9/11.

The Obama administration’s promotion of treatment and outreach comes as a sharp departure from the policies of the Bush administration. Under Bush, money to international programmes doubled, while funding for prevention and treatment fell by one quarter, John Carnevale, an economist who worked at the Office of Drug Control Policy under three presidents, told the Washington Post.

The change in focus comes at a time when many say the U.S.’s war on drugs has failed.

In New York, the state assembly is moving to dismantle a set of drug laws dating to the 1970s that are among the most draconian in the country, with mandatory penalties for drug possession and sale equivalent to second-degree murder.

“I can’t think of a criminal justice strategy that has been more unsuccessful than the Rockefeller drug laws,” New York Governor David Patterson noted in January.

Critics also point to the continued narco-violence in Mexico, where gangland-style executions and kidnappings have plagued the border region with the U.S.

In mid-February, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy issued a report, “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift,” calling for a review of U.S. prohibitionist strategy, which it says has major deficiencies. The report also examined the benefits and drawbacks of the harm reduction strategy followed by the European Union, with a key recommendation to treat addicts as patients in the public health system.

Seattle has been at the forefront of harm reduction drug reform while Kerlikowske was at the helm of the police department, said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), a non-profit group.

“Kerlikowske actually lived in the real world,” said St. Pierre, praising the appointment. Former Bush drug czar John P. Walters, on the other hand, “was a moral zealot” and “couldn’t say the word harm reduction.”

Kerlikowske is seen as sympathetic to these policies partly because he has faced issues of drug use both in professional and personal capacities.

“Our nation’s drug problem is one of human suffering,” said Kerlikowske at a ceremony announcing his appointment. “[A]s a police officer but also in my own family, I have experienced the effects that drugs can have.”

Kerlikowske’s stepson, Jeffrey Kerlikowske, 39, has been arrested several times in the past on drug charges.

Obama himself has admitted to past drug use, saying that as a young man he smoked marijuana: “I inhaled frequently…that was the point,” said Obama, in contrast to Pres. Bill Clinton’s campaign statement that he had tried, but not inhaled, marijuana.

Obama also wrote in his book that he used “a little blow [cocaine] when [he] could afford it.” It was a candid admission in light of Bush’s refusal to discuss what, according to many accounts, was his regular cocaine use as a young man.

Understanding that regular people use drugs and focusing on domestic demand, however, will not solve all the ills wrought by drugs and the drug trade, especially internationally.

“Even with the best policy in place, the impact on reduction of demand is going to take a long time,” said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy and director of the Andean programme at the Inter-American Dialogue. “This is no solution to the immediate crisis in countries like Mexico.”

He added that the “drug war formula has failed, but that doesn’t mean that [new policy should] ignore [the global] side of it.”

It is not clear specifically what sort of balance the Obama administration will strike between international and domestic drug issues.

Obama, has however, won praise from drug groups both for his appointment of Kerlikowske and his early steps towards reforming drug policy.

Late last month, Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that the administration would be following through on a campaign promise to end federal raids on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries.

Pot has been a legal form of medical treatment in California since 1996, but Bush instituted a policy of having the Drug Enforcement Agency raid the stores that provided marijuana to patients because the drug remains illegal under federal laws.

Excerpt:

Announcing his choices for top intelligence positions on Friday, President-elect Barack Obama was lauded by some for breaking strongly with the policies of the outgoing Pres. George W. Bush administration, while other observers offered sharp criticisms.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of good intelligence in the 21st century,” Obama said at the press conference where he made the official announcements. “Good intelligence is not a luxury, it is a necessity.”

The picks, for some critics, represent mixed messages on Obama’s view of the intelligence community, but there may be more going on than some of the superficial criticisms acknowledge.

The choice of former Pres. Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Leon Panetta to head up the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drew criticism in some circles for appointing an “outsider” to run an agency that is notoriously protective of its bureaucracy, but others praised the choice as a strong player who can reform the troubled agency.

Then naval Admiral Dennis Blair (Ret.) was chosen to be the Director of National Intelligence, raising concerns about the militarisation of intelligence that Obama had campaigned against.

In a rather surprising move, former interim-CIA Counter-Terrorism Centre (CTC) chief John Brennan was picked to be a top advisor to the president on terrorism issues.

Brennan was considered a lead contender for the top CIA slot until he withdrew his name because of expected difficulties during confirmation hearings due to his closeness to George Tenet, the former CIA chief who is widely blamed for harsh interrogations and politicising intelligence in the run up to the Iraq invasion.

It’s the very repudiation of those interrogation techniques and the practice of “cherry-picking” intelligence that is being celebrated by some Bush critics.

At the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman weighed in with his excitement not for the picks, but rather for the thinking that Obama said they represented.

“More important than anything [the appointees] said at their rollout this morning…were two things President-elect Barack Obama said that directly repudiate the intelligence regime of the previous administration,” wrote Ackerman, citing Obama’s stated opposition to fixed intelligence and “torture and interrogations”.

Obama commented that Washington had learned “tough lessons” from the Bush era.

“[W]e must insist on assessments grounded solely in the facts,” he said, “and not seek information to suit any ideological agenda.”

Hinting at torture and harsh interrogations, issues on which Obama’s opposition to the permissive Bush policies is well documented, he said, “We must adhere to our values as vigilantly as we protect our safety, with no exceptions.”

But his sternness in these declarations and his pick of Brennan as a key adviser left some critics wondering.

“It’s a puzzle to me why Obama has relied so much on Tenet’s cronies,” said Melvin Goodman, a fellow at the Centre for International Policy and a longtime CIA veteran, citing Brennan’s close working relationship with Tenet. “I’m still surprised that he has this special relationship with Brennan.”

Indeed, it was Brennan’s support of harsh techniques, notably excluding waterboarding, and extraordinary renditions that caused groups of liberal bloggers to “scuttle” his nomination, though some insist that Brennan merely knew that he would face a tough confirmation battle.

Brennan also used to run a consulting firm called Analysis Corp. that dealt with advising the government and private business on dealings in violent parts of Asia, South America and Africa.

The firm was purchased by a British-based contractor, Global Strategies, which has appeared in the news for problems with its hired soldiers in the Middle East. Obama’s transition team reportedly vetted any connections between Brennan and the parent company and found no improprieties on Brennan’s part.

But Brennan was known to be a close adviser to Obama and will also, according to an unsourced report in the Washington Post, act as a Middle East adviser.

Brennan has some controversial views on Iran, in particular, that jibe with Obama’s campaign views on a new approach to diplomacy with the major U.S. adversary.

In an academic article in July, Brennan called for softening the U.S. rhetoric against Iran and for the Iranian-backed Shia group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to be brought into the fold as a legitimate Lebanese political actor.

But Brennan, because his role is not subject to confirmation, will likely not be the subject of a heated political fight. That distinction will probably go to Panetta, who has found scores of detractors and supporters already.

Notably, incoming Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein criticised Obama’s choice by calling publicly for “an intelligence professional”, potentially creating a hurdle for Panetta’s confirmation. But since that time, Feinstein has met with Panetta and softened her criticisms.

However, her call echoed some criticisms from the CIA, where outsides are viewed with scepticism.

One supporter said that criticisms in the press may be overblown and differentiated between clandestine operations, where Panetta may be “seen as a liberal” (in a disparaging sense), and the analytical part of the CIA, where Panetta is likely to get a better reception.

“Even in the [clandestine] operations directorate you have people that are opposed to enhanced interrogation techniques and renditions and that sort of thing,” Goodman said, emphasising that neither the CIA nor any division within it is a monolith.

Goodman also reads further into the trio of picks as a unit. He doesn’t know Panetta, but called him “tough-minded” and said he has a “great deal of integrity”.

“This is an impressive guy – the kind that the CIA hasn’t had in 30 years,” he told IPS. “This is an outstanding appointment.”

Furthermore, Goodman has strong views on the organisation of intelligence, such as his disdain for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position, which he thinks centralises intelligence too much, stifling intelligence. He hopes that the selection of Blair, someone without notable intelligence-specific acumen, to DNI may herald a reorganisation of the intelligence structure created hastily under Bush.

“I think Panetta is so strong that Obama may be trying to enhance the CIA and reduce the visibility of the DNI position,” he told IPS. “Panetta is much too savvy a political operative to be reporting to someone such as Blair.”

Recently opened in wide release in the United States, Ari Folman’s new animated documentary detailing Israeli involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre sheds new light on the Israeli side of that conflict, as well as the one unfolding today.

“Waltz With Bashir”, already an award-winning documentary and the official Israeli submission for best foreign language film to the U.S. Academy Awards, gives the perspective of Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers and their involvement in the events in West Beirut in 1982.

It’s a harrowing tale of post-traumatic stress disorder. And while the events of Sabra and Shatila are distinctly different than the current situation in Gaza, there are lessons to be learned from a quarter-century ago.

The film opens with pack of 26 snarling dogs running down a street. They collect below a balcony with a lone figure smoking – Folman’s friend and fellow IDF veteran, Boaz Rein-Buskila.

Cut to a bar in Israel in 2006. Folman is chatting with Rein-Buskila over drinks. The conversation and the nightmare shown moments before are rendered in dark and brooding animated sequences.

The viewer quickly learns the modus operandi of Folman’s creative documentary: audio interviews are animated, as are the recollections and flashbacks described. (All the interviews are real, though Beiz-Buskila and another of Folman’s friends elected to have theirs re-voiced.)

Rein-Buskila connects his nightmare to another animated memory from his participation in the Israeli occupation of West Beirut in 1982, where he was assigned to shoot barking neighbourhood dogs as Israeli troops silently moved into Lebanese villages under the cover of night.

Listening to his friend, Folman realises that he remembers nothing about the events, and Rein-Buskila only remembers in bits. Driving back from the meeting, however, Folman has his first flashback of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, though he even can’t be sure if the visions are real flashbacks or hallucinations.

Named for the West Beirut Palestinian refugee camps where the slaughter took place, the Sabra and Shatila massacre saw the occupying Israeli forces surround and seal off the camps before allowing Phalangist militias through their checkpoints.

Most versions say that hundreds, if not thousands, of refugees were murdered by the Phalangists, who may have been exacting misplaced revenge for the assassination of the Maronite Lebanese President Bashir Gamayel. (The film takes its name from a scene of Folman’s IDF pal spinning around in circles blindly firing a machine gun, while surrounded by Gamayel posters.)

Public outrage led the Israeli government to form the Kahan Commission. The report found Israel bore “indirect responsibility” and personally blamed and called for the removal of, among others, then-Israeli Defence Minister and later-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is portrayed in an unflattering light in the film.

According to the report, while Israelis did not carry out the killings themselves, the choice to allow Phalangists into the camps was clearly too risky given the recent political atmosphere surrounding the loss of their leader.

But Folman and his buddies remember little of it. They all have bits and pieces, but, for the most part, the memories of Sabra and Shatila have been repressed. The film then turns into a journey to put the memories, or some semblance of them, together again.

Folman begins to reconstruct his entry into Lebanon; the wild shooting from the backs of tanks while aiming at no one in particular and everyone around at the same time.

But again and again, Folman returns to his flashback of Sabra and Shatila. He doesn’t know what happened, and he’s not even sure if his memories are real or hallucinations.

He and several fellow soldiers are bathing nude in the Mediterranean at night. They emerge from the water looking Zombie-like with sunken eyes and slumped shoulders, and get slowly dressed and walk away from the sea with their guns.

In front of them are the slums, completely lit up by flares fired by the Israelis. Later, the same flares would be used to place blame for the massacres on the IDF, which illuminated the camps for the Phalangists.

The director sets out to interview more friends from the IDF, sees a psychologist, a professor who specialises in post-traumatic stress, and gets hold of a video reporter who was there on the scene.

None of the pictures the audience gets from any of the sources is complete, but together they provide a portrait of the Israeli side of the events – although only the Israeli side. That’s because the film is more about remembering the events surrounding those atrocities rather than the massacres themselves.

Finally, after searching, Folman does create a composite picture. And, eventually, a real picture as well. In a Wizard of Oz-like moment, the drab animation suddenly gives way to real video from the checkpoints surrounding the camps.

It happens just at the end of the film: as Folman and his fellow nude-bathers approach the camp, they round a corner and are – suddenly in real video – in front of a crowd of screaming and grieving Palestinian women.

Because of the events of recent weeks, comparisons are inevitable between the film and the current crisis. Gaza has been reduced to a glorified refugee camp, and again the Palestinian camp is under siege by the IDF.

Video of IDF tanks readying for the ground assault on Gaza aired on Al Jazeera English last Friday are eerily similar to reconstituted images of the siege of Sabra and Shatila as shown in Waltz.

The notion of going in on the ground to root out fighters from one group was done in Sabra and Shatila as well – the goal is to wipe out Hamas “terrorists” now, and then it was the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, though in that case it was Phalangists aided and abetted by Israel rather than the IDF. Nonetheless, the result of that assault doesn’t bode well for the similar one today.

But Folman’s perspective is still an enlightening one.

It serves two functions for observers of the ongoing conflict today: one is a fair reckoning of history and the other is showing a rarely divulged side of Israeli scars of their own acts within that history.

The film lends credibility to calls from pro-peace Jewish and Israeli groups who insist that this latest assault is not only bad for Palestinians, but also bad for Israel.

Watching “Waltz With Bashir”, one wonders whether today’s 19-year old IDF soldiers will be dealing with post-traumatic stress in 25 years as they try to piece together their memories of the Gaza invasion of 2009.