Mideast Media Sampler 05/15/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Targeted Killings

Like his colleague Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin looks into the law in support of targeted killings.

To my knowledge, hardly any serious commentators claim that the targeted killing of enemy military commanders such as Yamamoto and Heydrich is either illegal or immoral. With the possible exception of Justice John Paul Stevens (who questioned the morality of the Yamamoto attack, but not its legality), everyone understands that individual military officers are legitimate targets.
A capable high-ranking officer is a military asset in much the same way as an individual anonymous mass of low-ranking soldiers. In Heydrich’s case, there is the complicating factor that, as one of the architects of the Holocaust, he was an even greater criminal than Bin Laden. However, this was not the reason why he was targeted for assassination by the Allies (who in early 1942 did not yet know of his crucial role in the Holocaust). And Admiral Yamamoto was not guilty of committing any atrocities; the US targeted him simply because he was a more effective commander than his likely replacements. 

What is true of uniformed officers surely also applies to leaders of terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. The latter, too, represent enemy military assets that we can legitimately target in wartime. If anything, targeting terrorist leaders is more defensible than targeting individual uniformed officers. Unlike uniformed soldiers, terrorist leaders openly target civilians and don’t even pretend to obey the laws of war.

Despite this, use of the term "extajudicial assassination" (or "killing")  by Israel's critics and enemies has put Israel on the defensive.


2) Was it Obama?

The other day I quoted a Thomas Friedman op-ed, Obama on Obama from shortly before the President's Cairo speech two years ago. I noted that towards the end Friedman gave President Obama credit for encouraging freedom in the Arab world.

I think that’s right. An Egyptian friend remarked to me: Do not underestimate what seeds can get planted when American leaders don’t just propagate their values, but visibly live them. Mr. Obama will be speaking at Cairo University. When young Arabs and Muslims see an American president who looks like them, has a name like theirs, has Muslims in his family and comes into their world and speaks the truth, it will be empowering and disturbing at the same time. People will be asking: “Why is this guy who looks like everyone on the street here the head of the free world and we can’t even touch freedom?” You never know where that goes. 

I dismissed this as wishful thinking on Friedman's part, but it appears that he wasn't alone. After the speech, Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Young Iranians show inspiring determination to achieve similar gains in their own country. Scholars maintain that societies that manage to have four or more consecutive elections will usually achieve an irreversible democratic transition. Without direct visible foreign intervention, Turkey, Lebanon and Kuwait may have such a transition well under way. The fear that Islamists might somehow impede the process has not yet been realized. Leaders of competing Islamic forces in both Lebanon and Kuwait have conceded defeat. That includes the much-demonized Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. 

Along with the dimming influence of Islamists, President Barack Obama's Cairo speech seems to have energized the democratic spirit in the Middle East. In Lebanon and Iran, voters turned out in record numbers. In his speech, Mr. Obama cited the imperative of upholding minority rights, singling out the Christian Maronites of Lebanon and the Copts of Egypt. He also emphasized the rights of women to education and full inclusion in public life. At least in the case of Lebanon, both Maronites and women responded by voting at an unprecedented rate (60%).

Later on Ibrahim shows a lack of concern for Islamists:

Regardless of the gains of the Middle Eastern moderates, Islamists will continue to be an integral part of the region's political landscape. But they should neither be pathologically feared nor cavalierly excluded. Rather, they should be actively engaged and encouraged to evolve into Muslim democratic parties akin to the Christian Democrats in Europe. By implicitly recognizing Hamas, President Obama may be leaning in this direction.

What he is referring to is the President insistence that members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood attend his speech. About the President's rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood at that time, Anna Mahjar-Barducci observed:

A jumble of interpretations was given by Egyptian columnists. However, most of them were convinced that, at the root of the problem, was the fact that the Obama administration had invited ten members of the parliamentary block of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend Obama’s speech. Furthermore, the Egyptian daily Al-Masri El-Youm, the very day of Obama’s visit, wrote that a delegation of the Muslim Brotherhood had met the American president in Washington a few weeks earlier. So, while the Brotherhood’s website, www.ikhwanonline.com, wrote that Obama’s invitation was an obligation, officials close to the Egyptian government might have preferred a tougher stance vis-à-vis the Brotherhood. 

In fact, in the last few months, the Muslim Brotherhood have aligned themselves more and more to Iran, and have even started a rapprochement with Shiite Islam. Also, a Hezbollah terror cell, that was supposed to carry out terrorist attacks in Egypt in order to destabilize that regime, was arrested a couple of months ago, and Egyptian officials have accused Iran of being behind this plot. Consequently, relations between the Egyptian Government and the Muslim Brotherhood have further deteriorated. To make things worse, the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, in an interview to the Saudi daily Al-Hayat, completely ignored Iran’s intent to destabilize Egypt.

Needless to say, the Muslim Brotherhood saw the invitation as vindication as noted on its own website.

The invitations for Thursday`s speech came not from the US embassy, but from the sheikh of al-Azhar university, one of Egypt"s most prestigious centres of Islamic learning. The university is jointly hosting the landmark Obama speech. "The invitation came from Egyptian institutions, not the US administration," said Mohammed al-Katatni, head of the Muslim Brotherhood`s parliamentary bloc. "I expect to hear reassurances to the Muslim and Arab world, and I expect that he will push the democratic agenda." "The president"s speech is intended to do damage control for the image of US foreign policy following the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and years of blind US support for Israel," al-Katatni added. "I think the US government is trying to send a message to the Egyptian government that it will deal with us on the same level as it deals with them, that it considers us as important," said Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, who has won awards from international human rights organisations for videos depicting police abuse he has posted on his website, Misrdigital.com. 

Now President Mubarak is gone and the Muslim Brotherhood is poised to gain power.

Lally Weymouth recently interview Essam El-Errian a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Weymouth asks him good questions, though she doesn't follow up much. The way he evades is a reason he has been called "moderate." How does Dr. El-Erian describe his organization's approach to the United States|?

Your leader, Mohammed Badie, said Arab and Muslim regimes are betraying their people by failing to confront Muslims’ real enemies — not only Israel but also the U.S. Is this your opinion?  

No. We never talk about America as an enemy. Of course you can have a strategy which since [Henry] Kissinger’s visit to Sadat gives optimum support to Israel. America needs to catch the moment. If you don’t review and revise your strategy for the region, you can lose this region. 

The head of the Muslim Brotherhood said governments have no right to stop their people from fighting the United States, and those who do are ignoring Allah’s call to wage jihad.  

That is against occupying troops, against occupation. That is a human right. Yesterday [Afghan President] Karzai went to the press to say you killed bin Laden in Pakistan and you are killing innocent people in Afghanistan. That is Karzai, your man. And now you create chaos in Iraq and you hand Iraq to Iran. 

The idea is to resist foreign troops?  

On Sunday after killing bin Laden, we called on America to start deploying their troops out of Afghanistan and out of Iraq. . . . When Obama was elected, he said he was going to withdraw from Iraq. This is a proper moment if he is going to win the next election.

Note how carefully he says this. America is not our enemy, but what it is doing is against our interests. There is a later answer, which I'm not sure is a slip or not.

So could a woman run for office? Of course, if the people elected it.

"[I]t?" shouldn't that be "her?"


3) After his agreement to merge with Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas asked that his action not have any consequences.

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority beseeched a group of visiting American Jews on Sunday to urge Congress not to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid as a result of his recent unity agreement with Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza. 

This is, as the AP describes it, an "embarrassment."

In Gaza, Fayyad’s Hamas counterpart, Ismail Haniyeh, told thousands of Muslim worshippers during a dawn sermon that Palestinians mark the occasion “with great hope of bringing to an end the Zionist project in Palestine.” 

Haniyeh’s reference to Israel’s destruction could prove embarrassing for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who recently reconciled with Hamas after a four-year split and is trying to market the Islamic militants to the international community as an acceptable political partner.

Well Abbas has been doing his best spinning to claim that partnering with Hamas isn't so important. We have to see if Abbas even bothers to condemn Haniyeh's statement.

And the merger brings up another question pointed out in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post.

The May 10 editorial “Egypt’s change of tack” expressed hope that the new Egyptian government can help free kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held captive in the Gaza Strip by Hamas for nearly five years. While any assistance that Egypt can provide would be appreciated, it bears emphasis that in the aftermath of the Fatah-Hamas power-sharing agreement, responsibility for securing Mr. Shalit’s freedom rests squarely with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas wishes to escape political and diplomatic consequences for his temporary alliance of convenience with Hamas. It's important to remind people that he demonstrated his contempt for peace with Israel by doing so.


4) An Estonian model?

Jackson Diehl interviews Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the President of Estonia on the likelihood that successes of Eastern Europe will be repeated in the Middle East.

What did this tiny Baltic country do right? First, says Ilves, it created a parliamentary rather than a presidential system; every former communist country with a strong president has become an autocracy. Next, it was aggressive in privatizing its economy, but did so in a way that prevented oligarchs from gaining control over swaths of industry, as in neighboring Russia. 

Estonia has a low flat tax and a robust free press, which have headed off the endemic corruption of other new democracies. Finally, Ilves says, it has benefited from an electoral system based on proportional representation — which has preserved minority parties and deterred the winner-takes-all mentality that has polarized countries such as Hungary. 

“What we’ve learned,” says Ilves, “is the democracy is not just about building institutions, but building the right institutions.” Which raises the question: Can the lessons from the last wave of anti-authoritarian revolution be shared with this one? 

So far, sadly, the answer seems to be no. Ilves talks about assembling the most successful reformers from around Eastern Europe and dispatching them to Cairo and Tunis — but the Arab revolutionaries haven’t shown much interest. Worried about the perception of Western tutelage, they’ve been telling European diplomats to send tourists and investors, but not political specialists.

I never used to be a fan of Diehl. I think he was a pretty awful correspondent from Israel. And later, while he promoted freedom in the Arab world, he seemed unconcerned with the prevalent antisemitism even among the reformers. However lately he's been showing skepticism towards the Arab spring. Unlike many in the MSM, Diehl does not take it for granted that the revolutions will have positive endings.

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