January 15th, 2007 — Israel, Middle East war
Ha’aretz is reporting a peace deal between Syria and Israel. This is stunning if true. Believe it if you dare. Here are some portions:
In a series of secret meetings in Europe between September 2004 and July 2006, Syrians and Israelis formulated understandings for a peace agreement between Israel and Syria.
An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.
As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967.
According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.
By far the most sensational claims in this report have to do with Syria’s reasoning when it sought this deal with Israel:
The Syrian representative in the talks, Ibrahim (Abe) Suleiman, an American citizen, had visited Jerusalem and delivered a message to senior officials at the Foreign Ministry regarding the Syrian wish for an agreement with Israel. The Syrians also asked for help in improving their relations with the United States, and particularly in lifting the American embargo on Syria.
For his part, the European mediator stressed that the Syrian leadership is concerned that the loss of petroleum revenues will lead to an economic crash in the country and could consequently undermine the stability of the Assad regime. …
It also emerged that one of the Syrian messages to Israel had to do with the ties between Damascus and Tehran. In the message, the Alawi regime - the Assad family being members of the Alawi minority - asserts that it considers itself to be an integral part of the Sunni world and that it objects to the Shi’a theocratic regime, and is particularly opposed to Iran’s policy in Iraq. A senior Syrian official stressed that a peace agreement with Israel will enable Syria to distance itself from Iran.
If this is even partly true, it means that Sunni-Shia split is for real. The timing of this announcement (leak?) cannot possibly be a coincidence.
I gotta also say that some of these terms sound ludicrous:
According to Geoffrey Aronson, an American from the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, who was involved in the talks, an agreement under American auspices would call for Syria to ensure that Hezbollah would limit itself to being solely a political party.
He also told Haaretz that Khaled Meshal, Hamas’ political bureau chief, based in Damascus, would have to leave the Syrian capital.
Syria would also exercise its influence for a solution to the conflict in Iraq, through an agreement between Shi’a leader Muqtada Sadr and the Sunni leadership, and in addition, it would contribute to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the refugee problem.
It sounds like the Americans want to dump blame and responsibility for absolutely everything in the Middle East on Assad. Utterly ridiculous. And totally wild!
January 15th, 2007 — America at war, counterterrorism, foreign policy, global culture war, propaganda
Apparently, Kevin Drum believes pro-war hawks have been so completely discredited that after we leave Iraq, the United States will have a “non-war-based foreign policy”:
I agree completely with [Pam] Hess about one thing: there are national security questions involved here, and I wish the national media would spend more time seriously talking about them. The big one is: once we leave Iraq — as we will — and decide that invading other countries is not generally the right way to fight jihadist terrorism, what strategy will take its place? Conservatives really, really don’t want to talk about what a non-war-based foreign policy would look like, and it seems to scare off all but the hardiest mainstream pundits too. It just seems so dovish, doesn’t it? But it’s time to start anyway.
Knock yourself out, Mr. Drum! And then brush up on 4G war: it’s all the rage.
By the way, this guy explains it right, but he comes to the wrong conclusion.
[G]uerrilla wars are fought in the moral sphere. This means that the side that can hold together its moral cohesion the longest, while simultaneously fragmenting its opponents, will come out the winner ….
So far so good.
From this grain of truth, the US government/military reached (primarily due to hindsight bias re:Vietnam) the conclusion that moral conflicts are won through propaganda.
Well…partly
In other words, the side with the better propaganda machine wins the war.
Um, no.
The side with the better propaganda wins the war.
We are failing on that score so far, and the solution is not, as blogger John Robb suggests, to end the propaganda campaign and become utterly transparent. That is beyond ludicrous, particularly when the enemy is so skillful at propaganda.
The solution is better counterpropaganda—subtle and utterly opaque counterpropaganda. It will happen, and much of it will come from the culture rather than from the heavy-handed unskillful hand of government. For now, the culture is lagging behind. It is shedding its 30-year-old skin. It hasn’t caught up to the reality of 21st-century war. That will change.
January 15th, 2007 — aside
My inner European is Spanish:
Your Inner European is Spanish!
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Energetic and lively.
You bring the party with you!
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(via Norm Geras)
January 15th, 2007 — global culture war, globalization, media
Plumpness and voluptuousness used to be considered not only signs of beauty in Brazil but also signs of status. Now all that is changing, reports the New York Times, and international standards of impossible-to-attain beauty—beamed across the globe via satellite TV—are wreaking havoc:
Brazil may well be the most body-conscious society in the world, but that body has always been Brazil’s confident own — not a North American or European one.
For women here that has meant having a little more flesh, distributed differently to emphasize the bottom over the top, the contours of a guitar rather than an hourglass, and most certainly not a twig. Anorexia, though long associated with wealthier industrialized countries, was an affliction all but unheard-of here.
But that was before the incursions of the Barbie aesthetic, celebrity models, satellite television and medical makeovers made it clear just how far some imported notions of beauty, desirability and health have encroached on Brazilian ideals once considered inviolate.
And now that six young Brazilian women have died of anorexia in a relatively short time, everyone is anxious and upset. Some critics accuse dark international forces of imposing their standards on poor little Brazil, but surely the truth is more interesting than that.
One academic comes through, suggesting that it’s a kind of rebellion against tyranny:
Ms. del Priore, the historian, pointed to other fundamental changes, which she said have led to a rebellion against machismo and the patriarchal structure that she believes persists here.
“This abrupt shift is a feminine decision that reflects changing roles” as women move out of the home and into the workplace, she said. “Men are still resisting and clearly prefer the rounder, fleshier type. But women want to be free and powerful, and one way to reject submission is to adopt these international standards that have nothing to do with Brazilian society.”
Interesting.
January 15th, 2007 — aside
Adulterer sued for divorce:
Friedman and Ahmadinejad. Passionate kiss Photo: AFP
Moshe Aryeh Friedman, a senior Neturei Karta member, who passionately kissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will now be forced to look for a woman who will agree to kiss him, as his wife has decided to leave him following his participation in the Holocaust denial conference which took place in Tehran about a month ago.
January 15th, 2007 — Middle East war, Sunni v. Shia, war
The Sandmonkey has his ear to the ground, and he’s hearing a strong anti-Shia rumble. He thinks the Egyptian people are being prepared for war:
I am not really sure who is behind it, whether it is the government, the sunni wahabi islamists forces, or both working together, but it is bearing fruit. Between state sponserd tabloids like Rose al Yousef writing story after story of Iran’s and the Shia’s rsising influence in the region, to popular islamic televangelist Khlaed Al Gindy going on the egptian state-sponserd TV show “el beit beitak” or on the Privately owned Orbit’s “Cairo Today” attacking the shia and calling them infidels and more dangerous than the zionists, to that lawyer who took over the Podium at the meeting of “the nationalistic forces summit to oppose Saddam’s execution” who gave the now infamous speech on how with Saddam’s death we egyptians should become very weary of Iran since it is the one who pushed for his execution, and that the sunni arab world is now facing a Zionist american Iranian conspiracy that aims to tear apart the middle-east. Redicilous, yes, but it seems to be working. Public sentiments regarding the shia have been changing ever since Sadam’s execution, with more people being vocally anti-Shia and the discussions taking place in egyptian private Universities, if they are any indication, seem to be supporting this premise. It’s hard to count how many times I’ve heard people at the AUC or the MSA speaking about how big giant infidels the Shia are and how they have always worked against Islam from the begining, and now, a friend of mine who goes to MIU, was telling me yesterday how she had to face like an angry group of her friends (all technically better educated and well traveld) who were telling her that 1) The Kurds are Shia and 2) All Shia are infidels and 3) They are worse and more dangerous than the zionists as far as Egypt is concerned. The future of Egypt, the fruit of egyptian private education. I weep for the future of this country. Anyway..
January 15th, 2007 — liberal opinion, media, parlor games
If there are a couple of thousand people in the United States who care about this matter that is of such deep concern to Radar magazine and to the
HuffPo, which is spreading the word, I’d be surprised.
Nevertheless, here’s a link to the so-called progressives’
hit list:
From radaronline.com
January 15th, 2007 — America at war, how we live now, information war, liberal opinion, media
I can’t believe I’m posting about this, but everyone’s kvelling and schvitzing over where to position themselves on Iraq is just too amusing to ignore. I’ll start with Mickey Kaus, and I note only that it’s a rare day when Mickey gives Howie Kurtz a nod, as he does here:
Logic says we should be able to separate support for the war from support for or opposition to the surge, as H. Kurtz has noted. But politics seems to often dictate surge-bashing as a sort of emotional and political make-up call for failure to oppose the decision to go to war in the first place.
The link to “H. Kurtz” takes you to Glenn Reynolds, who’s got a bunch of other links to reactions to Pam Hess’s appearance on Reliable Sources yesterday, which I wrote about here.
I hope Hess’s appeal to reason gets through. I fear it won’t, but I hope it will.
January 15th, 2007 — America at war, media criticism
Good news for a change, according to the Boston Globe, which reports that “anti-Americanism is more varied and less widespread than you may think,” citing a new book [Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Cornell University Press)] by international relations scholars Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, who posit that “anti-Americanism is not a single, unitary phenomenon.”
Whew, that’s a relief!
Well, I’m not sure if it will make Rachel Sklar, over at Eat the Press, feel better—she’s a little queasy after reading in Newsweek that “we’re going to be hit again.” I’m kinda surprised that she actually believed that line of Cheney’s rather than the one usually delievers, when he says that the enemy is determined to hit us again. And I guess she didn’t read this most cogent summary of the challenges we face from two very different kinds of Islamist extremism. Oh well.
Back to the good news now. It seems that there are four different “strains” of anti-Americanism, some more worrisome than others:
The first, liberal anti-Americanism, appears in democracies like France or England. Here opposition to American policies often involves the charge that the United States is being hypocritical by not living up to its professed values and ideals — values its critics share. …
The second strain, social anti-Americanism, comes from critics of the United States who are staunch supporters of the social welfare state, and thus oppose American economic policy because it promotes laissez-faire ideals and erodes welfare state protections….
More dangerous, according to the editors, are the two remaining strains. Sovereign-nationalist anti-Americanism, which may be found in parts of Latin America and Asia, involves opposition to American geopolitical and cultural dominance on the grounds that they are threats to national identity and strategic interests, as can be seen in Chinese saber-rattling over Taiwan. Radical anti-Americanism, meanwhile, of the kind typically associated with Islamic fundamentalism, holds, according to Katzenstein and Keohane, that “America’s identity” must be “transformed, either from within or without.”
Interesting sociological perspective.
January 15th, 2007 — America at war, Middle East war
Racy Reuters reports:
Come to think of it, this is something of a clusterfuck. Everyone and his brother has been saying lately that “solving” the Israeli-Palestinian issue is of paramount importance, as I noted here, on January 4:
[E]very outlet used the tired old Israeli-on-Palestinian violence to frame their story of the day—the only story they know how to tell about the Middle East. Meanwhile, they are avoiding the troubling, disturbing story behind the story: the fact that Palestinian society seems to be disintegrating.
And every day a new political wiseman solemnly intones that the key to peace is to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue (one way or the other).*** It is to laugh!
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***I’m going to start a list:
King Abdullah of Jordan
Tony Blair and the rest of Britain
Kofi Annan
Jim Baker and the ISG
Condi Rice and the State Department
all the Arab countries
the new Secretary-General of the United Nations
Hezbollah
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran
Hamas
Fatah
Jimmy Carter
the editor-in-chief of Al Jazeera
Have I left anyone out?
