Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

tags coretta_scott_king_funeral, george_bush, hillary_clinton

The big Mideast news tonight is that the Palestinian people have conducted one of the most free, open and democratic elections in the entire Arab world. Palestinians made history. A million of them decided…well, we’re not really sure what they decided. But after hours of uncertainty in which a narrow Fatah victory was projected, it now appears that Hamas has won a sweeping victory, possibly winning as many as 70 out of 132 seats in the new assemby.

This would be a stunning upset over Fatah, thus dislodging the latter as the dominant political force in Palestinian society. While it’s too soon to write off Fatah–this outcome probably means the passing of the guard from an old generation of semi-fossilized veterans of Palestinian resistance to a younger generation represented by Marwan Barghouti and those yet to emerge from the ranks of Hamas.

Initial exit polls reported by CNN (46-40% Fatah), Haaretz (58-53 seats) and others said that Fatah won by a whisker. The NY Times reported:

Khalil Shikaki showed Fatah winning 42 percent of the national vote and Hamas 35 percent, with a margin of sampling error of 2 percentage points.

Another such survey from Birzeit University indicated that Fatah would get 46 percent of the vote to Hamas’s 39 percent.

However Haaretz, after initially predicting a Fatah victory, appears to have changed course:

The first of the final results in the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council indicated Thursday that Hamas has captured most of the major constituencies in the West Bank and Gaza, making it likely that the group would also win a parliamentary majority.

An exit poll released Wednesday night had indicated that Fatah won 58 seats in the elections, followed closely by Hamas with 53 seats.

In the same Haaretz article, Hamas representatives claim to have won 70 seats out of 132 in the assembly which would mean quite a sweeping victory for them. The Palestinian Election Commission has delayed announcement of official results by ten hours without giving any reason. So it appears things will be in confusion for some while.

But while democracy has triumphed in the Mideast, which should make folks like George Bush happy, the results will drive crazy those western nations which are attempting to forge a consensus for peace. An outright Hamas victory which leads to a Hamas-dominated government will make many western political leaders stomp up and down denouncing Hamas as a terror organization with which it is impossible to do business. You see their darling, Fatah, made a hash out of the election campaign (with Israel providing much help to Hamas along the way). So the beau who was supposed to get the girl appears to have lost her to the upstart suitor, Hamas.

Several outcomes are possible:

1. Hamas could form the next government solely from its own ranks.

2. Hamas, considering the uncharted political territory it is navigating with its possible victory, will find discretion the better part of valor and ask Fatah to join a power-sharing national unity government with the latter as junior partner.

UPDATE:

The BBC is now reporting that the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, has submitted his resignation:

“I am going to present my resignation to President Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] and Hamas should form the [new] government,” Mr Qurei told journalists, according to AFP news agency.

But one must keep in mind that Qurei announced last month that he would not run in the elections because Abbas had capitulated to Barghouti and shut the Old Guard out of Fatah’s election lists. So Qurei’s announcement may be a sour grapes attempt to hasten Fatah’s departure from government. Additionally, there is no love lost between Qurei and Abbas, so I wouldn’t view Qurei’s statements as authoritative.

At any rate, it’s going to be a wild and woolly ride for the coming weeks before we find out which direction things go.

I would counsel the U.S., Israeli and European governments not to get too lathered up at this point by Hamas’ remarkable success. If you throw down your markers too early you may make statements regarding Hamas you will live to regret. For example, if Olmert or Bush say they will never negotiate with Hamas in any way shape or form, they will live to eat their words. In the 1970s, Israeli governments routinely declared they would never negotiate with the PLO (I was once stoned at a Jerusalem demonstration in 1972 which advocated this position). Guess what they did? Right, they negotiated with the PLO.

And if Hamas has indeed won this election and continues to play a major role in Palestinian electoral politics over the coming months and years, then these governments will have to negotiate with Hamas. There will simply be no choice.

George Bush’s latest statements on Hamas in a Wall Street Journal interview have been somewhat nuanced (though the WSJ interviewer had better prognostication skills than the president):

Bush: Hamas must…reject and get rid of their platform that says the destruction of Israel. You can’t be a peaceful democratic political party, yet part of your platform is to destroy your neighbor.

WSJ: Well, but does that complicate things? I mean, they’re almost certain to win –

Bush: Yes, it complicates things. Absolutely. A political party that says I’m going to destroy my neighbor complicates things. And we’ll see how the elections go. You’re prejudging the elections.

WSJ: Well, I know.

Bush: Well, you shouldn’t do that.

WSJ: Although, it’s pretty conventional –

Bush: Well, I don’t know what — who knows what the government is going to look like. My only point is that you can’t have members of — a political party, in order to be viable, is one that professes peace, in my judgment, in order that it will keep the peace. And so you’re getting a sense of how I’m going to deal with Hamas if they end up in positions of responsibility. And the answer is not until you renounce your desire to destroy Israel will we deal with you.

Ehud Olmert’s response according to AFP, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a far more emphatic ‘nyet:’

But Israel’s acting leader Ehud Olmert said the Jewish state would not allow Hamas, responsible for dozens of suicide bombings over the past five years, to become part of the Palestinian Authority.

“Israel cannot allow Hamas to become part of the Palestinian Authority in its current form,” Olmert said.

One has to ask…how can Israel prevent such an outcome? Particularly if, as Hamas operatives claim, they won as many as 70 seats in the 132-seat assembly? Does Olmert think he can somehow put the genie back in the bottle?

It will also be interesting to watch how Hamas responds to this astonishing outcome. Either the ‘realists’ will come to the fore and continue the process of engagement with electoral politics begun with this campaign (thereby sidelining Hamas’ militant-rejectionist wing); or the election will prove to be a temporary sideline after which Hamas will return to its normative terror-focused agenda. If neither the realists or the militants win this battle, then Hamas may collapse into two (or more) fractious factions.

Finally, I am concerned that a Hamas victory will turn Ehud Olmert away from the promising signals he was sending prior to the elections about being willing to open final-status talks with Palestinians leading to two independent states. He had also stated his willingness to evacuate further West Bank settlements as part of this process. I worry that Hamas’ success will cause Olmert to return to Sharon’s unilateral approach, which can at most win interim successes but not lead to a comprehensive settlement of the conflict. Likud will now be nipping at his heels, excoriating him at every turn if he does not toe the anti-Hamas line with sufficient fervor.

tags abbas, fatah, george_bush, hamas, palestinian_elections

Bush tried his best today to change the subject on the NSA spying scandal. He’s like the Energizer Bunny. If he tried to get his message across unpersuasively and unconvincingly he just changes the rationale a bit and comes back with more baloney. So the new baloney is–the domestic spying program wasn’t that at all. It was a “terrorist surveillance” program.

This is rich in light of the New York Times recent story quoting FBI and other intelligence sources as saying that of the hundreds or thousands of leads developed by NSA through this program, no source could remember a single one that flushed out a terror suspect. In other words, this is how many terrorists were “surveilled” and discovered by the program: zero, zip nada, nuthin’. Bush claims that Iyman Faris’ alleged plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches (I always love writing that phrase because the concept itself is so preposterous–and keep in mind that Faris himself abandoned the plan telling his Al Qaeda connections that it was unlikely to succeed). But the Times story raised questions about whether the NSA wiretapping played a significant role in the case:

By the administration’s account, the NSA eavesdropping helped lead investigators to Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and friend of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Faris spoke of toppling the Brooklyn Bridge by taking a torch to its suspension cables, but concluded that it would not work. He is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison.

But as in the London fertilizer bomb case, some officials with direct knowledge of the Faris case dispute that the N.S.A. information played a significant role.

Given Bush’s fraudulent and deceitful campaign to gin up support for the war in Iraq, would you prefer to believe him or the “officials with direct knowledge of the Faris case” referenced above? Keep in mind that these are probably senior FBI intelligence officials who are directly refuting their president and vice-president.

Here’s the kicker, though, of Bush’s speech (NPR story–audio) today at Kansas State University:

I’m mindful of civil liberties–so I had all kinds a lawyers review the process. We briefed members of United States Congress, one of whom was Senator Pat Roberts, about this program. You know it’s amazing to me people will say to me: “You know he’s just breakin’ the law.” If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefin’ Congress?

I do understand that at a Bush event in Kansas his threshold of credibility is going to be pretty low. He’s not going to feel he needs to do a whole helluva lot to persuade his audience of his argument. But even at Kansas State, the ones he used were outrageously pathetic. Vetting the NSA with “all kinds of” government lawyers guarantees–what? That you’ve received a full, candid and unbiased legal opinion? Horsecrap.

And his last sentence really takes the cake. Because Dick Cheney snarled at a few members of Congress for a few minutes at a so-called briefing without revealing any significant information about the NSA program–that’s consulting Congress? We all know from those briefed themselves (some of whom complained to Cheney directly) that they felt they could make no judgments about the program based on the paltry information provided by Cheney and his spooks. I view those briefings as a form of plausible deniability. They had them precisely in the event of this type of scandal erupting so they could defend themselves by saying they did the right thing. When in reality, the briefing was an empty shell.

Try again, Mr. President/Energizer Bunny. This attempt fell flat on its face.

tags dick_cheney, domestic_spying, george_bush, iyman_faris, kansas_state_university, nsa_spying, terrorist_surveillance

A hat tip to Neocons Will Ban Me at Daily Kos for this alarming UPI story: U.S. prepares Iran strike. German journalists have noted visits by high-ranking U.S. national security officials to NATO countries, especially Turkey, which allegedly involved discussions of possible upcoming U.S. air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities:

The Bush administration is preparing its NATO allies for a possible military strike against suspected nuclear sites in Iran in the New Year, according to German media reports, reinforcing similar earlier suggestions in the Turkish media.

The Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel this week quoted “NATO intelligence sources” who claimed that the NATO allies had been informed that the United States is currently investigating all possibilities of bringing the mullah-led regime into line, including military options…

[Further,] the respected German weekly Der Spiegel notes “What is new here is that Washington appears to be dispatching high-level officials to prepare its allies for a possible attack rather than merely implying the possibility as it has repeatedly done during the past year.”

The German news agency DDP cited “Western security sources” to claim that CIA Director Porter Goss asked Turkey’s premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets. Goss, who visited Ankara and met Erdogan on Dec. 12, was also reported to have to have asked for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation.

The DDP report added that Goss had delivered to the Turkish prime minister and his security aides a series of dossiers, one on the latest status of Iran’s nuclear development and another containing intelligence on new links between Iran and al-Qaida…

In a December 23 report, the DDP agency quoted an anonymous but “high-ranking German military official” telling their reporter: “I would be very surprised if the Americans, in the mid-term, didn’t take advantage of the opportunity delivered by Tehran [via bellicose statements by the Iranian president]. The Americans have to attack Iran before the country can develop nuclear weapons. After that would be too late.”

The DDP report also said that several friendly Arab governments, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Pakistan, had also been informed in general terms that the Pentagon was preparing contingency plans, including “the option of air strikes,” in the event of the new Iranian government precipitating a crisis…

…German media speculation about the supposed U.S. plans has been fueled by a number of high-profile visits to Turkey this month, including trips by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, by the CIA’s Porter Goss and by the FBI Director Robert Mueller, who also delivered U.S. intelligence reports on Iranian backing for PKK operations aimed against Turkey. There have also been some significant Turkish visits to Washington, as reported by Der Spiegel.

“Two weeks ago, Yasar Buyukanit, the commander of the Turkish army and probable future chief of staff of the country’s armed forces, flew to Washington. After the visit he made a statement that relations between the Turkish army and the American army were once again on an excellent footing,” Der Spiegel reported Friday.

“Buyukanit’s warm and fuzzy words, contrasted greatly with his past statements that if the United States and the Kurds in northern Iraq proved incapable of containing the PKK in the Kurd-dominated northern part of the country and preventing it from attacking Turkey, Buyukanit would march into northern Iraq himself,” the German weekly added.

The CIA Director’s Dec. 12 call on the Turkish prime minister last[ed] for over an hour, far longer than customary for a mere courtesy call, and followed an even longer meeting with senior staff of MIT, Turkish intelligence. The Turkish Daily Cumhuriyet reported on December 13: “Goss also asked Ankara to be ready for a possible U.S. air operation against Iran and Syria.”

Der Spiegel noted Friday that the latest high-level visitor to the Turkish premier was NATO Secretary-General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer. This is not unusual, since Turkey is a member of NATO, but the coincidence of these various trips prompted Spiegel to comment “the number of American and NATO security officials heading to Ankara has increased dramatically.”

Hmmm. I note that “Western security sources” are the informants for some of these reports. Now, who could that be? Perhaps the U.S. itself trying to frighten the Iranian mullahs into compliance with U.S. wishes regarding its nuclear buildup? The article points to this possibility:

Other NATO sources have told United Press International that “all this may be mood music, a way to step up the diplomatic pressure on Tehran.”

It is possible that leaks from NATO and German security sources are part of a ploy to convince the Iranian government that the Americans and their NATO allies are in dead earnest when they say a nuclear-armed Iran would not be tolerated, and that Iran had better start negotiating seriously.

The most paranoiac among us talk about Bush as a military adventurist, as someone who would relish the idea of punching the ayatollahs in the nose while also diverting attention from his innumerable domestic woes. I try to keep my paranoia in check as much as possible. But this report really lets loose the reins of wild speculation. Can Bush really be seriously contemplating something like this in the wake of the abject failure of his Iraq war policy? Does he really want to risk turning the Arab view of the U.S. from a slow boil to a raging torrent of hatred? And has he allowed the wild-eyed, bloodthirsty Michael Ledeen (”Now is the time for Iranian liberation”) and AIPAC to assume control of his Iran policy? These two have been (along with Israel) advocating military action against Iran. But until now one didn’t know that they “owned” our Iran policy.

I want to make clear that the current Iranian government is something I have no use for whatsoever. Their president’s recent statements denying the Holocaust and suggesting that Israel be “moved” to Europe beggar belief. I also feel that Iran IS a potential nuclear threat which must be dealt with. But again we have the same problem we had before the Iraq war. The U.S. has turned to the UN to try to resolve this conflict. But since it has never overtly supported the UN initiative, it may turn around whenever it wishes (as it did with the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq) and say: “We tried and it didn’t work. Now our only choice is war.” And of course as we know with the runup to the Iraq war, Bush’s support for a UN effort to avert war was a sham all along. He wanted war and he got it while claiming that he “gave peace a chance” (fat chance).

It’s deja vu all over again. And what a horrible deja vu this would be. More shock and awe except this time over the skies of Iran. And what does Bush think the outcome of all this will be? Even if he succeeds in destroying Iran’s nuclear capability (which the Iranians have been doing their best to prevent by separating their facilities widely), he will turn Iran from a potentially angry enemy into a virulently angry enemy. Israel has felt the sting of Iran through it’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah. Imagine many Hezbollahs unleashed to target Americans throughout the world? Right now the Iraqi insurgents only have the capacity to hurt Americans in Iraq. But if we drag Iran into a similar death spiral with us then we could have a much more serious terrorist enemy, one with an entire government apparatus and international reach behind it.

Who’d have thought that after Bush’s abject failure in Iraq we’d have to once again gear up the anti-war movement to avert another Bush Mideast adventure? It’s so deeply sad and discouraging. But perhaps one slight silver lining is that Congress may take the idea of impeachment that much more seriously since an unpopular president prosecuting an increasingly unpopular war seems eager to get us into another one. Somebody’s got to stand up to this menace. I know Congress’ record on this score has been abysmal. But if some Republicans start getting worried about Bush’ penchant for military escapades and start making noises about their dissatisfaction (and interest in exploring appointment of a special prosecutor, for example), then perhaps Bush and Cheney might be brought up short. I know it’s a long-shot. But who else can stop him? The world can’t, even the American people can’t (since we can’t vote him our in three years). Someone’s got to do it.

tags aipac, ayatollahs, george_bush, iran, michael_ledeen, nuclear_weapons, u.s._mideast_policy

The ACLU ran a hard-hitting ad in the New York Times on December 22nd which noted the similarities between Nixon’s illegal wiretaps against alleged domestic “terrorists” and Bush’s warrantless NSA snooping against U.S. citizen he deems “terrorists.” The group calls for Attorney General Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate these charges. Give your congressmember a call to tell them that you support not only Congressional hearings, but appointment of a special prosecutor and impeachment if it comes to that.

tags aclu, george_bush, impeachment, nsa, special_prosecutor, spying_scandal

Martin Garbus has been covering the legal/constitutional angle of the NSA scandal for Huffington Post. While he is a well-known First Amendment attorney, he is not the most elegant or thorough writer in the world (one wishes the HP staff would edit him a bit). But so far there are not many constitutional lawyers saying much about impeachment so he fills a useful niche in the political debate. He came up with an arresting tidbit in tonight's HP column: ...The public shall also learn about the FISA judges’ misuse of the FISA courts and their warrants. The courts were created to permit eavesdropping and electronic surveillance, not physical break-ins. The facts will show that the Bush administration, with the ...

I wonder if one year ago (or however long ago the NY Times agreed to a request from the Bush Administration to mothball the Lichtblau-Risen story about NSA spying) Eric Lichtblau could've pictured himself one day well on the way to earning his first Pulitzer Prize. In fact, if I were on the Pulitzer Committee I'd just close down the category for Best Series because it's got to go to this intrepid reporting team which first uncovered the scandal that will rock the Bush Administration perhaps till the end of its final term. (cartoon: Nick Anderson) In today's Times, Lichtblau amplifies on a report from Salon.com published December ...

Salon carries a story about the only person who may currently have standing to challenge the constitutionality of Bush's executive spying order. He's Iyman Faris and he's not a pretty picture either as a plaintiff or human being. But he has several very important things going for him in terms of providing legal standing to strike back at George Bush's usurpation of civil liberties in federal court. First, he is one of the only individuals whom government officials explicitly admitted was a victim of the NSA's wholesale spying operation. Second, it would appear likely that some of the intelligence gathered about him came from these NSA intercepts and was used against him at trial. ...

In The Nation, Jonathan Schell publishes The Hidden State Steps Forward, a cogent blueprint for what he describes as an "embryonic" Bush dictatorship: (source: Salon.com) Bush's choice [to admit and defiantly defend his executive order] marks a watershed in the evolution of his Administration. Previously when it was caught engaging in disgraceful, illegal or merely mistaken or incompetent behavior, he would simply deny it. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction!" "We do not torture!" However, further developments in the torture matter revealed a shift. Even as he denied the existence of torture, he and his officials began to defend his right to order it. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, ...

Here's another example of Bush, Hayden, et al. talking out their behinds about the NSA spying program. This from today's NYT: A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say... Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone ...