Mideast Media Sampler 11/04/2011

From DG:

1) How'd he get the job?

One item that intrigued me in Who lost Iraq? by Charles Krauthammer is this:

Three years, two abject failures. The first was the administration’s inability, at the height of American post-surge power, to broker a centrist nationalist coalition governed by the major blocs — one predominantly Shiite (Maliki’s), one predominantly Sunni (Ayad Allawi’s), one Kurdish — that among them won a large majority (69 percent) of seats in the 2010 election. 

Vice President Biden was given the job. He failed utterly. The government ended up effectively being run by a narrow sectarian coalition where the balance of power is held by the relatively small (12 percent) Iranian-client Sadr faction.

I have no idea what the chances of success were, but was Vice President Biden the right person for the job? In 2006 he famously advocated dividing Iraq into three separate regions.

Iraq's new government of national unity will not stop the deterioration. Iraqis have had three such governments in the last three years, each with Sunnis in key posts, without noticeable effect. The alternative path out of this terrible trap has five elements.  

The first is to establish three largely autonomous regions with a viable central government in Baghdad. The Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions would each be responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security. The central government would control border defense, foreign affairs and oil revenues. Baghdad would become a federal zone, while densely populated areas of mixed populations would receive both multisectarian and international police protection.
Decentralization is hardly as radical as it may seem: the Iraqi Constitution, in fact, already provides for a federal structure and a procedure for provinces to combine into regional governments. 

If he believed that a weak central government was a good idea, maybe he wasn't the best choice to encourage broad based ruling coalition.

Later Krauthammer writes:

The Obama proposal was an unmistakable signal of unseriousness. It became clear that he simply wanted out, leaving any Iraqi foolish enough to maintain a pro-American orientation exposed to Iranian influence, now unopposed and potentially lethal. Message received. Just this past week, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurds — for two decades the staunchest of U.S. allies — visited Tehran to bend a knee to both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

It didn’t have to be this way. Our friends did not have to be left out in the cold to seek Iranian protection. Three years and a won war had given Obama the opportunity to establish a lasting strategic alliance with the Arab world’s second most important power.

Brett McGuirk who reprsented the United States in talks with Iraq disagrees in Not an end but a beginning in Iraq.

To be sure, Iran retains great influence in Baghdad. But so do we. Over the course of our talks this summer, the Iraqi government quietly dismantled Iranian-backed militia groups in Maysan province, on the Iranian border. It sent messages to Tehran that any attack on U.S. forces would be considered an attack on the Iraqi state. It completedthe purchase of 18 F-16s, becoming the world’s ninth-largest purchaser of U.S. military equipment — and the fourth-largest in the region behind Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These are the building blocks of a real defense partnership, and they do not require the basing of U.S. troops. 

If former allies are paying tribute to Iran, that tells the true story.


2) No veto necessary?


It is now being reported that France and England will abstain from the statehood vote at the UN Security Council. This means:

The U.N. Security Council is set to meet November 11 to discuss a report about whether or not to admit a Palestinian state as a member of the international organization. The membership bid has been controversial, with Israel among those opposed. 

Diplomats have said it appears unlikely the Palestinians will succeed in their bid, given that the United States -- one of five permanent security council members -- has warned it will veto the attempt.
However, a veto may not be necessary if a minimum of nine nations -- out of 15 on the U.N. council -- don't support the Palestinians' bid.

Remember the poeple saying that the United States would be more isolated by vetoing the resolution? That might not be necessary. And in fact the Palestinians mayhave overreached.

Palestinian officials said Thursday that after obtaining membership to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization this week, they will concentrate on gaining full U.N. membership and not seek to join any other U.N. agency.
...

The Palestinians’ UNESCO membership, won in a vote by the world body Monday, caused the U.S. to stop funding the international organization based.  U.S. law bars Washington from giving money to any U.N. body that grants state status to the Palestinian territories.

Israel's measures against the Palestinian Authority after the UNESCO vote included accelerating settlement construction and freezing tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.

The PA needs its foreign aid. My guess is that that's the main reason it isn't pursuing further memberships.


3) Not news or maybe it is

 Jerusalem Paletinians would prefer to live in Israel (via Daily Alert)

New research reveals that 42% of the Palestinians who reside in Jerusalem would try to move to Israel if their neighborhood became part of a new Palestinian state. 39% say they would prefer Israeli to Palestinian citizenship. 

The common understanding that Arabs are being driven from Jerusalem is false: Since 1967, the Palestinian population has more than quadrupled from 70,000 to 288,000. During the same period, the city’s Israeli population has roughly doubled from 250,000 to 500,000. 

The view that Arabs cannot build in Jerusalem is also false: Only 24% of east Jerusalem Palestinians say they are dissatisfied with “the ease or difficulty of obtaining building permits.”

In a sense this isn't news - polls regularly show that Palestinians in Jerusalem would prefer to live under Israeli sovereignty. But the news is that this percentage is down, a lot. In 2008, Daniel Pipes wrote:

Indeed, Olmert's musings prompted some belligerent responses. As the title of a Globe and Mail news item puts it, "Some Palestinians prefer life in Israel: In East Jerusalem, residents say they would fight a handover to Abbas regime." The article offers the example of Nabil Gheit, who, with two stints in Israeli prisons and posters of "the martyr Saddam Hussein" over the cash register in his store, would be expected to cheer the prospect of parts of eastern Jerusalem coming under PA control. 

Not so. As mukhtar of Ras Khamis, near Shuafat, Gheit dreads the PA and says he and others would fight a handover. "If there was a referendum here, no one would vote to join the Palestinian Authority. … There would be another intifada to defend ourselves from the PA." 

Two polls released last week, from Keevoon Research, Strategy & Communications and the Arabic-language newspaper As-Sennara, survey representative samples of adult Israeli Arabs on the issue of joining the PA, and they corroborate what Gheit says. Asked, "Would you prefer to be a citizen of Israel or of a new Palestinian state?" 62 percent want to remain Israeli citizens and 14 percent want to join a future Palestinian state. Asked, "Do you support transferring the Triangle [an Arab-dominated area in northern Israel] to the Palestinian Authority?" 78 percent oppose the idea and 18 percent support it.

On the face of it, a decrease of 62%  to 42% of those who wish to remain Israeli citizens is pretty significant. If the methodologies are consistent, it could mean that now more Palestinians are viewing the Palestinian Authority as a viable government than they did nearly four years ago.


For more on Palestinains who view Israel favorably see here.


4) Why no attack is imminent


Barry Rubin explains why most of the "reporting" about Israel's readiness to attack Iran is little more than unfounded speculation:

What’s impressive here to me is the sloppiness of the response. There have been few good analyses on the points raised above. Don’t journalists know how to read newspapers and don’t they remember some key points that have come out in the past? And where is a serious analysis of the factors leading Israel not to attack Iran. 

Okay, I’ll list some: 

–An attack would not stop Iran’s program but only delay it while guaranteeing that Tehran would be in a state of war with Israel and far more likely to use nuclear weapons. 

–There’s no sense in hitting Iran unless it is on the verge of obtaining deliverable nuclear weapons (a situation that would offer some different targets from those available today). 

–Israel has gone for the kind of strategy used by the United States in the Cold War. It is building up both missile and plane forces that would simultaneously provide an effective attack on Iranian facilities and launchers plus the most effective possible defense against Iranian attack. 

–Keep in mind two key points: Iran is far less likely to attack Israel with nuclear weapons than many people in the West think (I’ll explain that another time) and Iran needs a fair number of simultaneous firings to launch a serious attack (easier to detect if being planned and requiring far more than one or two nuclear weapons). 

–Israel simply cannot depend on U.S. or European support for such an operation and for weathering the dangerous aftermath.

5) Lying in Libya

C. J. Chivers, a former Marine, who now reports for the New York Times explainsPropaganda in a Time of War. In an impressive piece of reporting - drawing on his knowledge and experience - Chivers explains how he figured out how a doctor working for the Libyan rebels was lying. In the end, Chivers concludes:

But there are lessons here. The first is that this is what trying to cover the battlefield sometimes can feel like. To cover war is often to wander a thicket of lies. And opportunists are ever trying to confuse you further. War is like any other form of politics: Many people out there do not speak to journalists, they try to speak through journalists. The distinction is important. One nongovernment worker who was similarly frustrated described how the anti-Qaddafi forces’ spokesmen in the Transitional National Council, Libya’s new de facto authority, often did not especially care about the truth during the conflict. But they did seem to care about publicly sparring with Moussa Ibrahim, the Qaddafi government’s top spokesman, who they saw as a bitter rival in the contest for the daily public discussion about the war. 

For much of this year, a public win for the anti-Qaddafi forces was in one-upping the regime propaganda with propaganda of their own, each false assertion standing to be reproduced in a he-said-she-said wrap-up that fed the daily cycles of news. Again and again the anti-Qaddafi forces made claims that later proved not just wrong, but baldly untrue. Think, for one line of these falsehoods, how many times opposition officials in Benghazi, their capital, said that the oil city of Brega had fallen, and that rebels had it under their control, when in fact the Qaddafi soldiers there remained entrenched, and the rebels – disorganized, poorly led and often prone to pell-mell retreats — were still feeling their way clumsily down the road. 

The second lesson is that this type of presentation often does not work, and can backfire. The doctor’s emergency-room performance might seem rational to advocates of war by any means. It is certainly a war-time staple. Demonizing the enemy, framing his actions as outrageous or even illegal, casting him as a special menace – these are familiar, if risky, lines of public reasoning, especially when they rely on false “facts.” In almost every war, there are examples writ large or writ small. In the short term, circulating falsehoods and exaggerating or concocting evidence might feel like a smart shortcut for those seeking support for their cause. But in the long term, wartime statements that evaporate under scrutiny are corrosive, and can harm those who craft them. In Libya, they undermined the credibility of the transitional council and many of its supporters, like this doctor, who instead of reaping some benefit or marshaling sympathy for the anti-Qaddafi cause demonstrated that even doctors could not always been relied upon, and that the dead were mere tools.

I don't often read Chivers' reporting and he's correct here. But there's an unwritten premise here that reporters are faithfully recording what really happened. Too often though sources will speak "through" the reporter because they know the reporter will credulously propagate their viewpoint.

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