JERUSALEM—Suddenly, my city feels again like a war zone. Since the suicide bombings ended in 2005, life in Jerusalem has been for the most part relatively calm. The worst disruptions have been the traffic jams resulting from construction of a light rail, just like in a normal city. But now, again, there are clusters of helmeted border police near the gates of the Old City, black smoke from burning tires in the Arab village across from my porch, young men marching with green Islamist flags toward my neighborhood, ambulances parked at strategic places ready for this city's ultimate nightmare.
The return of menace to Jerusalem is not because a mid-level bureaucrat announced stage four of a seven-stage process in the eventual construction of 1,600 apartments in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood in northeast Jerusalem. Such announcements and building projects have become so routine over the years that Palestinians have scarcely responded, let alone violently. In negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, the permanence of Ramat Shlomo, and other Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, has been a given. Ramat Shlomo, located between the Jewish neighborhoods of French Hill and Ramot, will remain within the boundaries of Israeli Jerusalem according to every peace plan. Unlike the small Jewish enclaves inserted into Arab neighborhoods, on which Israelis are strongly divided, building in the established Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem defines the national consensus.
Why, then, the outbreak of violence now? Why Hamas's "day of rage" over Jerusalem and the Palestinian Authority's call to gather on the Temple Mount to "save" the Dome of the Rock from non-existent plans to build the Third Temple? Why the sudden outrage over rebuilding a synagogue, destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948, in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, when dozens of synagogues and yeshivas have been built in the quarter without incident?
The answer lies not in Jerusalem but in Washington. By placing the issue of building in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem at the center of the peace process, President Obama has inadvertently challenged the Palestinians to do no less.
Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama's insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly.
Obama is directly responsible for one of the most absurd turns in the history of Middle East negotiations. Though Palestinian leaders negotiated with Israeli governments that built extensively in the West Bank, they now refused to sit down with the first Israeli government to actually agree to a suspension of building. Obama's demand for a building freeze in Jerusalem led to a freeze in negotiations.
Finally, after intensive efforts, the administration produced the pathetic achievement of "proximity talks"—setting Palestinian-Israeli negotiations back a generation, to the time when Palestinian leaders refused to sit at the same table with Israelis.
That Obama could be guilty of such amateurishness was perhaps forgivable because he was, after all, an amateur. But he has now taken his failed policy and intensified it. By demanding that Israel stop building in Ramat Shlomo and elsewhere in East Jerusalem—and placing that demand at the center of American-Israeli relations—he's ensured that the Palestinians won't show up even to proximity talks. This is no longer amateurishness; it is pique disguised as policy.
Initially, when the announcement about building in Ramat Shlomo was made, Israelis shared Vice President Biden's humiliation and were outraged at their government's incompetence. The widespread sense here was that Netanyahu deserved the administration's condemnation, not because of what he did but because of what he didn't do: He failed to convey to all parts of his government the need for caution during Biden's visit, symptomatic of his chaotic style of governing generally.
But not even the opposition accused Netanyahu of a deliberate provocation. These are not the days of Yitzhak Shamir, the former Israeli prime minister who used to greet a visit from Secretary of State James Baker with an announcement of the creation of another West Bank settlement. Netanyahu has placed the need for strategic cooperation with the U.S. on the Iranian threat ahead of the right-wing political agenda. That's why he included the Labor Party into his coalition, and why he accepted a two-state solution—an historic achievement that set the Likud, however reluctantly, within the mainstream consensus supporting Palestinian statehood. The last thing Netanyahu wanted was to embarrass Biden during his goodwill visit and trigger a clash with Obama over an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood.
Nor is it likely that there was a deliberate provocation from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which runs the interior ministry that oversees building procedures. Shas, which supports peace talks and territorial compromise, is not a nationalist party. Its interest is providing housing for its constituents, like the future residents of Ramat Shlomo; provoking international incidents is not its style.
Finally, the very ordinariness of the building procedure—the fact that construction in Jewish East Jerusalem is considered by Israelis routine—is perhaps the best proof that there was no intentional ambush of Biden. Apparently no one in the interior ministry could imagine that a long-term plan over Ramat Shlomo would sabotage a state visit.
In turning an incident into a crisis, Obama has convinced many Israelis that he was merely seeking a pretext to pick a fight with Israel. Netanyahu was inadvertently shabby; Obama, deliberately so.
According to a banner headline in the newspaper Ma'ariv, senior Likud officials believe that Obama's goal is to topple the Netanyahu government, by encouraging those in the Labor Party who want to quit the coalition.
The popular assumption is that Obama is seeking to prove his resolve as a leader by getting tough with Israel. Given his ineffectiveness against Iran and his tendency to violate his own self-imposed deadlines for sanctions, the Israeli public is not likely to be impressed. Indeed, Israelis' initial anger at Netanyahu has turned to anger against Obama. According to an Israel Radio poll on March 16, 62 percent of Israelis blame the Obama administration for the crisis, while 20 percent blame Netanyahu. (Another 17 percent blame Shas leader Eli Yishai.)
In the last year, the administration has not once publicly condemned the Palestinians for lack of good faith—even though the Palestinian Authority media has, for example, been waging a months-long campaign denying the Jews' historic roots in Jerusalem. Just after Biden left Ramallah, Palestinian officials held a ceremony naming a square in the city after a terrorist responsible for the massacre of 38 Israeli civilians. (To its credit, yesterday, the administration did condemn the Palestinian Authority for inciting violence in Jerusalem.)
Obama's one-sided public pressure against Israel could intensify the atmosphere of "open season" against Israel internationally. Indeed, the European Union has reaffirmed it is linking improved economic relations with Israel to the resumption of the peace process—as if it's Israel rather than the Palestinians that has refused to come to the table.
If the administration's main tactical error in Middle East negotiating was emphasizing building in Jerusalem, its main strategic error was assuming that a two-state solution was within easy reach. Shortly after Obama took office, Rahm Emanuel was quoted in the Israeli press insisting that a Palestinian state would be created within Obama's first term. Instead, a year later, we are in the era of suspended proximity talks. Now the administration is demanding that Israel negotiate over final status issues in proximity talks as a way of convincing the Palestinians to agree to those talks--as if Israelis would agree to discuss the future of Jerusalem when Palestinian leaders refuse to even sit with them.
To insist on the imminent possibility of a two-state solution requires amnesia. Biden's plea to Israelis to consider a withdrawal to an approximation of the 1967 borders in exchange for peace ignored the fact that Israel made that offer twice in the last decade: first, when Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted the Clinton Proposals of December 2000, and then more recently when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert renewed the offer to Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas, says Olmert, never replied.
The reason for Palestinian rejection of a two-state solution is because a deal would require Palestinians to confine the return of the descendants of the 1948 refugees to Palestine rather than to Israel. That would prevent a two-state solution from devolving into a bi-national, one-state solution. Israel's insistence on survival remains the obstacle to peace.
To achieve eventual peace, the international community needs to pressure Palestinian leaders to forgo their claim to Haifa and Jaffa and confine their people's right of return to a future Palestinian state—just as the Jews will need to forgo their claim to Hebron and Bethlehem and confine their people's right of return to the state of Israel. That is the only possible deal: conceding my right of return to Greater Israel in exchange for your right of return to Greater Palestine. A majority of Israelis—along with the political system—has accepted that principle. On the Palestinian side, the political system has rejected it.
In the absence of Palestinian willingness to compromise on the right of return, negotiations should not focus on a two-state solution but on more limited goals.
There have been positive signs of change on the Palestinian side in the last few years. The rise of Hamas has created panic within Fatah, and the result is, for the first time, genuine security cooperation with Israel. Also, the emergence of Salam Fayyad as Palestinian prime minister marks a shift from ideological to pragmatic leadership (though Fayyad still lacks a power base). Finally, the West Bank economy is growing, thanks in part to Israel's removal of dozens of roadblocks. The goal of negotiations at this point in the conflict should be to encourage those trends.
But by focusing on building in Jerusalem, Obama has undermined that possibility too. To the fictitious notion of a peace process, Obama has now added the fiction of an intransigent Israel blocking the peace process.
The administration, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Yedito Aharonot, is making an even more insidious accusation against Israel. During his visit, wrote Yediot Aharanot, Biden told Israeli leaders that their policies are endangering American lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. The report has been denied in the White House. Whether or not the remark was made, what is clear today in Jerusalem is that Obama's recklessness is endangering Israeli--and Palestinian--lives. As I listen to police sirens outside my window, Obama's political intifada against Netanyahu seems to be turning into a third intifada over Jerusalem.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and a contributing editor of The New Republic.
“Let’s talk about why you plan to kill me.” It was March 1987, and Milt Bearden was sitting in a spare interview room at the Islamabad headquarters of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Bearden was then the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, serving as the link between Washington and the U.S.-funded Afghan rebels bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had come to see the mujahedin’s most lethal warlord, a radical Islamist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. No other Afghan leader had received more money from the United States than Hekmatyar, yet he showed his Western patrons precious little gratitude. He claimed to despise the United States as much as the Soviet Union, and, while visiting the United Nations two years earlier, he had refused an invitation to meet Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office. Now Bearden was hearing grumbling from Washington about why the United States was financing an anti-American zealot known for splashing acid in the faces of unveiled women. He decided it was time to confront a man he considered “the darkest” of the Afghan warlords. And Hekmatyar was convinced he’d come to snuff him.
Hekmatyar, then about 40, fingered a strand of agate prayer beads. He had been summoned by the ISI, which served as the conduit for U.S. aid to the Afghan rebels. He has a long thin face, dark eyes, and a long beard, and is typically clad in a black turban and robes. His appearance has been described as feline, but the façade is misleading. As Bearden would later recall in his memoir, The Main Enemy, Hekmatyar “thought nothing of ordering an execution for a slight breach of party discipline.” On this day, he was sullen, and the two men squabbled about Hekmatyar’s reputation for brutality, which the warlord alternately denied and dismissed as unimportant. Then Hekmatyar cut to the chase: “I know what you’re planning to do,” he said. “You’re armed. I can see that.” Bearden opened his jacket to show that he wasn’t carrying a gun. (Although he was--in the small of his back.) He asked Hekmatyar why the CIA would want to eliminate its most valuable anti-Soviet fighter. Because, Hekmatyar replied, the United States understood that the Soviets were already done for. Hekmatyar had now defeated one superpower, and the Americans feared what he might do to them. Addressing Hekmatyar by the title he had acquired from Kabul University, Bearden said: “I think the engineer flatters himself.”
Only prematurely. Fifteen years later, in May 2002, a CIA-operated aerial drone circling near Kabul shot a Hellfire anti-tank missile at a convoy on the ground. The explosion killed several men, but failed to claim its target: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. By then, the Afghan warlord was on Washington’s most-wanted list as a leader of the post-2001 Afghan insurgency. But, eight years later, circumstances have changed once again. The United States is now considering whether it’s time to stop trying to kill Hekmatyar and start negotiating with him--a choice that could have crucial implications for Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan.
The United States is not fighting one enemy in Afghanistan. While the media often equate “insurgency” with “Taliban,” there are, in fact, three major insurgent groups. The biggest is the Quetta Shura Taliban. Led by the famous one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar, this group is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta and fights mainly in the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Another is the Haqqani network, run by the father-and-son team of Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani from Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas. The Haqqanis and their Al Qaeda allies sow chaos in Afghanistan’s east and were likely behind the double-agent suicide bomb at a CIA base near Khost this winter.
Then there is Hekmatyar. His beard now half gray, he is again tormenting foreign infidels. His Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin--which translates roughly as “Gulbuddin’s Islamic Party,” shorthanded as HIG by the U.S. military--may be the smallest of the three insurgent wings, but it is “no less lethal” than the others, as the American commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, recently put it. That was clear last October 3, when over 150 insurgents overwhelmed a remote outpost in Nuristan Province, killing eight American soldiers and wounding 24. Hekmatyar is believed to have aided and perhaps organized the attack--just the latest ominous sign of what one senior U.S. military official in Kabul calls his increasing activity in the provinces north and east of Kabul. But, while Hekmatyar shares his fellow insurgents’ rhetoric about defeating the Americans, he is not as doctrinaire. A lifelong deal-maker, he cares most about one thing: power. “He wants to ensure he has a role in the government,” says the military official.
A thirst for power has driven Hekmatyar for more than 30 years. Indeed, he once nearly ruled Afghanistan. Born to a Pashtun family, he attended a military high school and then Kabul University’s prestigious College of Engineering. But he gave up his studies to join Kabul’s Islamic youth movement, which vehemently opposed the Soviet-backed communists then taking over Afghanistan’s government. In 1972, Hekmatyar murdered a Maoist student, an act that landed him in prison for two years. After his release, he sought refuge in Pakistan, where he founded Hezb-e-Islami in 1975 and developed ties with the ISI. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan was in a high Islamist phase and felt deeply threatened by the godless communists on its border. Hekmatyar became the ISI’s chief proxy warrior against the Soviets--with the help of what would eventually be some $600 million in U.S. aid.
He proved a brutally effective warrior. “To the Soviets,” writes George Crile in Charlie Wilson’s War, “he was the bogeyman behind the most unspeakable torture of their captured soldiers. Invariably his name was invoked with new arrivals to keep them from wandering off base unaccompanied, lest they fall into the hands of this depraved fanatic whose specialty, they claimed, was skinning infidels alive.” More effective than such terror, however, was his men’s use of U.S. Stinger missiles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers to destroy countless Soviet tanks and helicopters.
After the Soviets completed their withdrawal in 1989, Hekmatyar expected to rule the country. But so did other mujahedin leaders, and vicious fighting ensued. From 1992 to 1994, the Afghan capital became a battleground as Hekmatyar, still in possession of a U.S.-supplied arsenal, wantonly shelled the city. “He was sitting in the suburbs of Kabul, and he was sending rockets, regardless of where they would land. Thousands of Afghans died,” says Ali Jalali, who served as Afghanistan’s interior minister from 2003 to 2005. (In a strange historical footnote, one rocket struck a compound where Hamid Karzai was being held captive by political rivals, allowing him to escape and then flee the country.) “We have already had one and a half million martyrs,” Hekmatyar remorselessly explained in 1992. “We are ready to offer as many to establish a true Islamic republic.” But the Afghan people disagreed. Hekmatyar’s brutality marginalized him, and he was no match for the anti-warlord Taliban movement. Unable to hold his ground militarily when the Taliban stormed Kabul in 1996, Hekmatyar fled to Iran.
He was far from finished. After the United States ousted the Taliban in 2001, Hekmatyar was not invited to join the Karzai government, and he resentfully called for a new jihad. Iran expelled him soon after, and he quickly rejoined the fight. Hekmatyar linked up with Al Qaeda--he claims to have helped Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora--and, in 2002, took credit for an attempt to kill Karzai. He also likely renewed his ties with the ISI, which, at minimum, has allowed HIG unhindered use of the Shamshatoo refugee camp southeast of Peshawar as a logistics and recruiting hub.
Though his profile has waxed and waned during the war, Hekmatyar has recently re-emerged with a vengeance. He takes credit for a 2008 attack on a military parade that nearly killed Karzai and is also thought to be responsible for an August 2008 ambush near Kabul that left ten French soldiers dead and some of the bodies reportedly mutilated. And then, there was the vicious attack in Nuristan. Most ominously, perhaps, Hekmatyar has found common ground with his old Taliban rivals. As the Afghanistan-based academic Sippi Moghaddam writes in the compilation Decoding the New Taliban, the employment of Hekmatyar’s network “is of tremendous advantage to the Taliban in their activities in the northeast.”
Obama administration officials don’t expect to crush the Afghan insurgency militarily. The current U.S. surge aims to turn the momentum of the war and then attempt a political “reconciliation” with elements of the insurgency. The effort will be aimed primarily at low-level combatants and local leaders who fight more for money and parochial reasons than for grand ideology. Senior insurgent leaders, like the Haqqanis and top Quetta Shura Taliban members, are probably just too fanatical to deal with. But Hekmatyar is another story. During the Afghan civil war, he was notorious for casually shifting allegiances, even if it meant allying with blood rivals. “This is a man who has switched sides his whole life,” says the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel, who led the Obama administration’s first Afghanistan review.
Hekmatyar has flirted with peace talks for years, but it’s clear that both sides have a keener interest than before. “It’s gotten considerably more serious than it was even a year ago,” says Candace Rondeaux, a Kabul-based analyst for The International Crisis Group. Even though the State Department has officially designates Hekmatyar a wanted terrorist, last April, a Hekmatyar emissary met with an aide to Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In January, Hekmatyar’s son attended unofficial reconciliation talks in the Maldives with a group of Afghan legislators.
A deal with Hekmatyar could give Obama’s prospects in Afghanistan a huge boost. Even now, American troops are hard-pressed to pacify southern Afghanistan, and the United States can ill afford to see the north slip any further into chaos. Disarming Hekmatyar’s fighters, sometimes estimated to number in the thousands, would be a major strategic boost. And, if a hardened anti-American warlord like Hekmatyar were to renounce violence, that could set an example for his Pashtun admirers throughout the region.
What does he want? Hekmatyar insists that foreign troops must leave Afghanistan within 18 months. But he may be flexible if it means getting a taste of power. It helps that Hekmatyar already has a toe in politics: HIG’s nonviolent political arm--which claims not to take cues from Hekmatyar, though few believe it--already holds 19 of 246 seats in the Afghan parliament, and the country’s economic minister is a member. Hekmatyar recently asserted that 70 percent of Afghans support his party. That’s doubtful; but the claim was a sign that the warlord may still cling to his dream of ruling Afghanistan. (A case in point: Last year, a reputed plan that would have granted Hekmatyar’s party more control of the government but exiled him to Saudi Arabia for three years went nowhere.) It also helps that, after 30 years of fighting, Hekmatyar may simply be tiring of jihad. “I have dedicated my whole life to struggle,” he wrote in a spring 2008 letter to Karzai offering to talk, “but I am old.”
Still, cutting a deal with Hekmatyar that grants him legitimized power could amount to a horrendous moral compromise. The Afghan people remember well the blood on Hekmatyar’s hands. “In the urban part of the civil society, it will be like a bomb that will destroy the image of the government,” says Riccardo Redaelli, an Italian academic who studies Afghan politics. Nor is empowering a man who advocates strict Islamic law likely to play well in the United States. “Hekmatyar is a pretty difficult character to sell to the American people,” says Riedel.
But these are desperate times. Hamid Karzai is embattled, paranoid, and desperate to shore up his political base. Barack Obama, meanwhile, seems less interested in the political composition of Afghanistan than in reducing violence to a level that will allow for a U.S. withdrawal. “At the end of the day, we’ll take what we can get,” says Riedel. The engineer was right to flatter himself.
Michael Crowley is a senior editor of The New Republic.
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What were two members of a violent Basque separatist group doing with 11 members of Colombia's narco-Marxist insurgency in a remote corner of southwestern Venezuela in August 2007? According to a blockbuster indictment handed down by a Spanish judge last week, they were participating in a kind of intercontinental terrorist training camp held under the aegis of the Venezuelan military.
More specifically, the two members of ETA, or "Basque Homeland and Freedom," were teaching the rebels from FARC, or "Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia," how to use plastic explosives and urban guerrilla tactics, such as rigging cell phones to work as bomb fuses. This unlikely alliance between FARC, a peasant-based Marxist movement financed by a massive drug-trafficking operation, and ETA, a nationalist group that specializes in shooting Spanish policemen, civil servants, and local politicians in the back of the head, dates back as far as 1993. According to the indictment, beginning in 2000, ETA plotted with FARC to murder a range of leading Colombian political figures when they traveled to Spain, including sitting president Alvaro Uribe.
But it's Venezuela's alleged involvement with two of the Spanish-speaking world's most notorious terror groups that has set off a political firestorm in Spain, where the center-left government enjoys a close relationship with the Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chávez. The indictment, which is the culmination of several years of investigation by Spanish and Colombian police, claims that Chavez's soldiers and a military intelligence officer escorted the FARC members to their August 2007 training site. What's more, among the seven FARC and six ETA members charged with conspiracy to murder and holding explosives in collaboration with a terrorist group is Arturo Cubillas Fontán, a longtime ETA leader who emigrated to Venezuela in 1989. According to El Pais, he works as head of security for Venezuela's ministry of Agriculture. (Venezuelan government sources have refused to clarify his position.) And his wife has worked in a variety of public roles throughout the Chavez administration including, currently, as head of public relations for the Agriculture ministry.
By exposing a possible link between the Chávez government and an international terror conspiracy, the indictment is a particularly hot potato in the lap of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose warm relations with Venezuela's strong man have yielded invaluable commercial advantages for Spanish multinationals. As U.S.-Venezuelan ties have worsened over the past ten years, Spanish firms have swarmed to do business in Venezuela. Today, 55 percent of Venezuela's third-largest bank is owned by Spain's sprawling BBVA bank; the country's leading mobile phone network is owned by Telefónica, Spain's privatized telecoms giant; the largest of its new electric power plants are being built by Spanish energy companies Iberdrola and Elecnor; and some of its biggest new oil contracts are going to Spanish oil giant Repsol.
Additionally, in a quirk of timing, the Venezuelan Navy received the first of four military patrol ships from Spanish shipbuilder Navantia just one day after the ETA-FARC indictment was handed down. In effect, Spain is now selling military hardware to a country whose government allegedly sponsors a terrorist group plotting aggression against the Spanish state.
No issue is as politically sensitive in Spain as Basque terrorism, so it's hardly surprising that opposition conservatives have wasted no time slamming the Zapatero government. Jorge Moragas, foreign affairs spokesman for the conservative People’s Party, decried the “excessive closeness between” Venezuela and Spain, and the party’s secretary general has called on Zapatero to consider breaking diplomatic relations with Venezuela.
But such a move would likely spur Venezuela to expropriate Spanish investments, which would freeze the profits of Madrid's multinationals (we're talking billions of euros) in Caracas. It wouldn’t be the first time Chávez has muscled his international business partners: Two years ago, his government shut down most commerce with Colombia over Uribe’s allegation that Venezuela was funding Marxist guerillas, and launched a wave of expropriations against its neighbor that continues to this day. In other words, Chávez has leverage with Spain, he knows it, and he's not afraid to use it.
This might explain why Madrid has treaded so carefully on the indictment crisis. Zapatero has mildly said he would seek “explanations” from the Venezuelan government and proceed accordingly. But even that formulation drew an angry response from the bombastic Chávez. He blustered in a recent speech, "I don’t have to explain anything, not to Zapatero or anyone!”
In response, Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, hurried to note that Spanish authorities were merely seeking “information” in the case, not “explanations.” But this deference left Zapatero's government exposed to fire on the domestic front. Conservative leader Mariano Rajoy called his country's virtual apology to Chávez “absolutely grotesque.”
This paints a vivid picture of the political corner Zapatero’s government has backed itself into: Protect Spanish investment in Venezuela, and you’re soft on ETA, but make a principled stand, and you put hundreds of Spanish jobs at risk. Signs so far indicate the government will swallow hard and continue to placate Venezuela. But what happens if, next week (or next month, or next year), a high-profile Colombian public figure takes a trip to Spain and gets shot in the back of the head?
Francisco Toro blogs about Venezuela in the Chávez era at Caracas Chronicles.
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Sunday is election day in Iraq—the second national parliamentary vote since the American-led invasion in 2003. U.S. officials maintained this week that Obama’s plan to withdraw all American combat troops by September 1st is still on track, but that’s almost certainly untrue if the elections don’t go smoothly. On the whole, there are reasons to hope that Iraq is finally getting on its feet: violence levels are way down—attacks have dropped from an average of 220 per day in 2007 to less than 20 a day over the last six months—and the political alliances that have formed don’t fall neatly along ethnic and religious lines. Yet there are also serious concerns that, just like in 2005, the elections could heighten sectarian tensions and send the country back towards violence and anarchy. The top American military commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, has already drawn up a contingency plan to keep certain brigades in Iraq past the deadline if the need arises. So what should we be on the lookout for on Sunday? Here’s a breakdown of the election’s biggest players, along with some of the toughest hurdles that will have to be cleared in order to solidify Iraq’s democratic status and enable a successful U.S. drawdown in the fall.
Key Players
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki—The current Prime Minister of Iraq, Maliki is seeking a second term. After getting off to a shaky start, the PM’s popularity has been buoyed by the decrease in violence and uptick in commercial activity in Iraq over the last two years. He leads the State of Law Coalition, which includes 40 smaller parties that span Iraq’s ethnic and religious spectrum but remains dominated by Dawa, his own largely Shiite party.
His pitch: Caught between the competing influences of Iran and the United States, Maliki decided last year to break away from his more conservative Shiite allies who ran with him in 2005. He is now attempting to walk a tightrope by fashioning a largely secular, nationalist message about improved Iraqi security and good governance that nonetheless affirms the Shiite identity of his base.
Ibrahim al-Jaafari—Iraq’s first democratically chosen Prime Minister in 2005, Jaafari was replaced (in part due to American prodding) by Maliki as head of the governing Dawa party in 2006. Jaafari is a Shiite physician who had lived in exile for decades before returning to Iraq after the invasion. He is now Maliki’s bitter rival and a leading candidate of the conservative Iraqi National Alliance.
His pitch: Jaafari’s split with Maliki pushed him into the arms of an openly religious Shiite alliance that also includes Ahmed Chalabi and the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, both of whom possess ties to Iran. (Another leading candidate, Hakim al-Zamili, is widely accused of having run death squads during the height of Iraq’s sectarian violence.) In recent weeks they’ve demagogued the de-Baathification ruling and played up fears of Sunni violence in an attempt to rally the country’s Shiite majority to their side.
Ayad Allawi—Elected unanimously by the Governing Council to become the first interim prime minister of Iraq, Allawi, a Shiite, is attempting a political rebirth by once again vying for the top position. A former Baath party member, Allawi broke with the party in the 1970s and was forced into exile in England. This time around, Allawi has teamed up with Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi to form Iraqiya, a Sunni-Shiite coalition.
His pitch: Like Maliki, Allawi has campaigned on the promise of improved security. Unlike him, he’s garnered significant Sunni buy-in and called for Iraqi reintegration into the Arab world. His recent visit to Saudi Arabia underscored that message but also riled some wary Shiites. Despite the disqualification of many of its candidates—including the popular Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlaq—for alleged Baath party ties, Allawi’s Iraqiya has emerged as a serious contender in Sunday’s election.
Reasons for Pessimism
The Row Over De-Baathification—The Maliki government’s January decision to disqualify about 500 candidates for alleged Baath party ties has provoked a wave of suspicion and outrage throughout the country, especially in Sunni-dominated provinces. Ahmed Chalabi, who sits on the commission that made the call, has maintained that he’s simply upholding the constitution’s ban on all members of Saddam Hussein’s former party from electoral politics. Yet many Iraqis, along with nervous American officials, argue the statute is being exploited by the Shiite-dominated government for political gain. Several of the disqualified candidates were standing members of Parliament who had run without incident in the 2005 elections, making the sudden announcement all the more dubious. So far, most affected candidates have fought the ruling in the courts and not the streets, but with only one in five blacklisted candidates ultimately successful in overturning their disqualification, it’s become a lighting rod issue among opponents of the government, who view it as a symbol of widespread corruption.
The Question of Legitimacy—The recent disqualifications, coupled with what an American intelligence briefing paper described as the “continued, pervasive, and biased targeting by the Iraqi Security Force” of Sunnis, has raised the specter of another Sunni boycott. This is a bone-chilling possibility for most Iraqis who seek to avoid a scenario like the one in 2005, when widespread boycotts helped delegitimize the elections and accelerated the country’s slide towards civil war. This time around, most Sunnis seem prepared to vote, but that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily be willing to accept the outcome. Ayad Allawi has already spoken out about the possibility of electoral “irregularities,” threatening to boycott parliament if he feels the elections were fixed. What’s more, General Odierno has publicly criticized the close ties between the Iranian regime and Ahmed Chalabi, the man largely responsible for the disqualifications. Hardly in need of an excuse to cry foul about Iranian influence, many Sunni parties have latched onto the general’s words, stoking paranoia and the possibility of post-election violence. “In the West, when your right is robbed, you go to the courts,” warned Anbar province First Deputy Governor Hikmat Jasim Zaidan. “But in Iraq, it's different—when your right is robbed, [you] resort to violence.”
The Problem of What Comes Next—While polling in Iraq is notoriously unreliable, surveys taken by Iraqi political groups and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad suggest that Maliki’s State of Law coalition will capture 30 percent of seats, while Allawi’s Iraqiya will win 22 percent and the conservative Shiite Iraqi National Alliance will pick up 17 percent. This means that even if elections go off without a hitch and all sides accept them as legitimate, there’s still the uncertain task of forming a government. This could be made all the more difficult if Maliki’s party indeed captures the most seats and is tasked with assembling a governing coalition, as neither of the other two leading parties say they are willing to stomach his renomination as prime minister. In 2005, the Kurds were able to play kingmaker by aligning with Maliki’s party to form a majority coalition. But with a divided Shiite base in 2010, even support from the Kurdish parties may not be enough to push him over the required threshold. That makes a rapprochement between the two Shiite-dominated parties the greatest likelihood, but attaching himself to the hard-line religious establishment that he’s been trying to buck could alienate Iraq’s minorities and do serious damage to Maliki’s centrist image.
Jesse Zwick is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
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Is the Green Movement finished? That is what the Iranian government wants the world to believe. And it has recently been trumpeting a few pieces of evidence to make its case.
First came a statement by Mir Hossein Mousavi on New Year’s Eve, which offered five conditions for ending the current impasse. But because it did not directly repeat Mousavi’s oft-quoted notion that the June elections were rigged, Kayhan and Rajanews—the two news outlets closest to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad—tried to claim the statement as a major victory for the regime.
Images of African immigrants rioting in the streets of a small southern Italian city, throwing rocks, blocking roads, and breaking store and car windows, briefly exposed a shocking reality: the existence of Italy’s growing migrant-labor population, mostly Africans, an estimated 20,000 of them working under inhuman conditions, living in abandoned buildings or improvised structures without heat or working toilets, sleeping four (even five) to a mattress while laboring off the books for about $30 a day.
Last month marked a turning point in the United States-Iraq relationship. American influence is waning, while Iraq is taking steps to get on its feet economically. We suffered no combat deaths in December, and continue to reduce our presence, expecting to withdraw all combat troops by August. And Iraq concluded a major round of production deals with oil companies.
“Think of our new village here as the home of Jesus Christ, not the scene of a disaster,” the Reverend Joseph Lejeune told the smashed souls in a tent city in Port-au-Prince. “Life is not disaster. Life is joy! You don’t have food? Nourish yourself with the Lord. You don’t have water? Drink in the spirit.” One of the aftershocks in Haiti has been the revelation that belief may be immune to experience. The survivors are praying to the author of the destruction. Their metaphysics is their shelter, and I would not deny them their metaphysics as I would not deny them a bed. Yet this is very unVoltairean. Was not God buried in this rubble, as He was buried in all the rubble that preceded it? What happened in Haiti ought to bring philosophy back, except that nothing can bring philosophy back. In an intellectual universe that consists mainly in position-taking, everyone comes away from the enormity with a tingle of validation. The complacence of the theists is matched by the complacence of the atheists. The cocktail-party Karamazovs shake their fists at the live feeds and gleefully pounce on the latest confirmation of their belief in the cruelty of the deity that does not exist. In their scorn for the religious explanation of evil they omit to explain it themselves, except perhaps to extol “lucidity,” which is of course not the beginning of the answer but the beginning of the question. There is nothing analytical or heroic about knowing the facts. And to regard all this suffering as meaningless seems indecent. One can always adopt the standpoint of the cosmos, and in this way detach oneself from the pain and the perplexity, but then one cannot call oneself a humanist. Watching the charnel scenes in Haiti, I wonder, without much mental satisfaction, whether in such circumstances it may not be the highest achievement of the spirit to be stuck. For the relation of belief to experience is a complicated matter, and not only in a catastrophe. It is as foolish to assert that God does not exist because I am unhappy as it is to assert that God does exist because I am happy. In the ruins of Haiti, I do not see how one can be nourished by the presence of the Lord and I do not see how one can be nourished by the absence of the Lord. The earthquake leaves the metaphysical problem where it found it.
But the ruins of Haiti may provoke another crisis of another faith. Many commentators rightly noted that the magnitude of the devastation was owed not only to natural causes but also to human causes--to the country’s history of social, political, and economic abjection. Harrowing poverty, corrupt government, broken institutions, shabby infrastructure: those are not divine injustices, they are human ones. (In one of the more notorious sections of his Theodicy, the supreme masterpiece of the justificatory mind, Leibniz remarked that “one single Caligula, one Nero, has caused more evil than an earthquake.”) And America’s interventions, even when they have been for a right end, have often been shifting and thoughtless, a discouraging saga of unintended consequences. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the Obama administration and other governments and the NGOs and the international relief agencies are saying that this time it will be different. The magnanimity of American and other donors, public and private, has certainly been remarkable. The charitable energy, the pulse of compassion, is everywhere. And in one of the greatest hours in the history of human benevolence, as the angels of rescue and relief do their work, there emerged a kind of humanitarian happy talk. “There are great reasons to hope,” Bill Clinton and George W. Bush wrote. “We have a chance to do things better than we once did. … At our best, we can help Haiti become its best.” Ban Ki-Moon observed that “the disaster in Haiti shows once again that even amid the worst devastation, there is always hope,” and cited the millennial goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2015. Bernard Kouchner declaimed that “stubbornly and fearlessly, we must reach toward hope. … The sad truth is that when everything has been destroyed, anything becomes possible.”
I know, I know. What else were they going to say? But something is amiss with this notion of policy as theodicy. For it may well be that anything is not possible. Haiti, like everywhere else, is thick with its past, and it will take more than “a very successful donors conference” (Hillary Clinton’s reassuring example on January 15) or the “development of clean energy” (one of Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s prescriptions on January 17) to break its grip. Hope, like fear, is an easily exploitable emotion; and the disappointment of hope is not significantly different from despair. I am not sure what interests are served by talk of transformation, except the interests of cynics. The Red Cross has my money, but not because I expect to see a new Haiti. I do not. I also do not expect to see a lasting American commitment after the bodies are buried. I would like one, of course; but what I would like is not what counts. What counts is what we know about the inconstancy of men and the intractability of the world. That knowledge does not teach quietism, not at all; but we must learn to distinguish between meliorative action and millennial action. The struggle against suffering should take place soberly, grimly, with what the poet called a heart for any fate, because it sets out from the prior actuality of suffering. It is born disabused, or it is a misunderstanding.
I recognize the risk in such an intuition. In demanding too little of the world, we may become complicit with it. Fatalism is always, almost as a matter of definition, self-fulfilling. And yet intelligence must not be blinded by its tears. Tragedy cannot be adequately met with the confidence and the cheerfulness of Leibniz and Bono. This time it will be different. Looking at Haiti, why would anyone not believe it, and why would anyone believe it? We cut our deliverances to the scale of our disasters, but it is never measure for measure: we cannot overtake what the world has done to us, what we have done to ourselves. It is just not the case that the less you believe in God, the more you believe in man. It may be impossible to believe in them both. The short-lived nature of ethical alertness is one of the most rudimentary facts of individual and collective life. So let us quicken to the intervals between our indifferences, because whether or not God exists, we do, and much of the time--though not now, as the planes clog the runways in Port-au-Prince--we are terrible.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.
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The tragic earthquake in Haiti is not the first misfortune to befall our Caribbean neighbor. From slave revolts to military coups to armed U.S. intervention, the country has suffered countless natural and man-made misfortunes since it gained independence. From the TNR archives, read the best of our Haitian coverage:
"Island of Disenchantment" by Charles Lane (9/29/1997) Haiti's slow slide into chaos.
“Commander in Chief” by the Editors (10/10/1994) President Clinton’s first real military intervention.
“Love and Haiti” by Amy Wilentz (7/4/1993) Can Aristide come home now?
“Who’s Killing Haiti?” by Andrew Sullivan (2/1/1988) A democracy expires.
“Slaves and Slaughter” by David S. Landes (3/10/1986) Haiti's horrible history.
(Click here to read Brad Plumer on why the Haiti quake has been so destructive.)
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Otherwise-obscure central bankers spent an unprecedented amount of time in the global limelight last year. As the crisis brought down not only banking behemoths, but also macroeconomic axioms, the expansionary measures enacted by the Fed’s Ben Bernanke, the European Central Bank’s Jean-Claude Trichet, and the Bank of England’s Mervyn King have been credited, at least for now, with preventing a second coming of the Great Depression. And for that they have been hailed: Bernanke is both Time’s Person of the Year and Foreign Policy’s top global thinker, while Trichet wields tangible power in an otherwise diffuse EU and King has expressed ideas that are likely to influence future financial architecture more than those emanating from 10 Downing Street. But an epic battle unleashed last week between the Argentine government and its central bank is an apt reminder that the most challenging times for central bankers may lay not in the recent past, but in a more problematic future.
The Green Movement is a revolt against theocracy. Most of its adherents are young Iranians with little or no religious motivation. Yet, an iconic figure of the revolt was the nation’s highest-ranking cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri; and, last month, Ashura, a holy day celebrating martyrdom, occasioned some of the movement’s most massive protests.
Perhaps the fact that the movement has acquired a Shia veneer shouldn’t be terribly surprising. During the past century, no social movement in Iran has succeeded without draping itself in religion or without a strong Shia contingent in its leadership.
On May 20, 2006, Ibrahim Gambari, the gregarious UN under-secretary general for political affairs, met with leaders of Burma’s military junta and their most famous political prisoner, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. It was Gambari’s first trip to Burma, and the first time in two years that the country’s secretive rulers had granted a UN official such high-level access. Gambari’s optimism was palpable: “They want to open up another chapter of relationship with the international community,” the seasoned Nigerian diplomat said in a press conference on May 24. But three days later, only a week after meeting with Gambari, the junta extended Suu Kyi’s house arrest by a year. Suddenly, Gambari’s optimism was his humiliation. “People thought he had fallen for their line,” says Mark Farmaner, director of Campaign for Burma UK. “He was completely suckered.”
