Saudis Endorse New U.S. Strategy for Iraq

NEWYORK TIMES

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 16 — Saudi Arabia endorsed the goals of President Bush’s new strategy for Iraq today. But in carefully worded comments, the Saudi foreign minister indicated deep concern about whether the Shiite-led government in Baghdad can halt sectarian violence and protect Sunni interests.

“We agree fully with the goals set by the new strategy, which in our view are the goals that — if implemented — would solve the problems that face Iraq,” said Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister.

During a joint news conference here with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the prince said he could not comment on specifics of the plan, which Bush administration officials acknowledge is built around support for the current Iraqi government of Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite political leader.

Saudi Arabia is a predominantly Sunni state. Ms. Rice met late on Monday with King Abdullah and other officials at a hunting lodge in the desert outside the capital, after arriving from Egypt.

Although Prince Saud’s endorsement of Mr. Bush’s new Iraq plan was lukewarm at best, the prince declined to be drawn into a discussion of potential Saudi actions in the event that Iraq slides into full-blown sectarian civil war.

“Why speculate on such dire consequences? Why not speculate on the positive side?” he said, urging unity among Iraq’s Shiites, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, the main groups in its population. “I cannot for the life of me concede that a country like that would commit suicide, given the goodwill and the desire of all to help in this.”

Ms. Rice announced in Egypt on Monday that she intends to call together Israeli and Palestinian leaders within the next month for what she described as a high-level but informal three-way meeting, in hopes of giving new impetus to moribund peace efforts.

That announcement was the one tangible development to emerge from her visit to Israel and the Palestinian areas earlier on her Middle East trip. She held talks with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Sunday and with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel early Monday before moving on to Egypt.

“I will soon meet with Prime Minister Olmert and with President Abbas to have discussions about the broad issues on the horizon, so that we can work on the road map to try and accelerate the road map and to move to the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Ms. Rice said, referring to the stalled peace plan for the region.

Both men have been weakened politically lately. Mr. Olmert’s approval ratings are dropping after what many viewed as the clumsy military offensive during the summer to counter Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon. As for Mr. Abbas, he has been battling for his political survival since the militant group Hamas swept to power a year ago and took control of the Palestinian legislature away from his Fatah allies.

Ms. Rice was pressed on Monday to cite any cause for optimism in resolving an Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has defied both Republican and Democratic administrations — and at a time when the region is roiled with conflict.

“Before we say that this is going to end in frustration, let’s be glad that after six years and a long time that the parties want to engage in an informal set of discussions about the future between them,” Ms. Rice said.

Ms. Rice is now trying to rally support among America’s Sunni Arab allies in the region for President Bush’s new military and diplomatic strategy in Iraq. The Gulf states are next on her itinerary.

While Ms. Rice and her senior aides said there was no quid pro quo, Arab governments want to show their populations that some progress is being made in resolving Palestinian grievances before they endorse the Bush administration’s new efforts in Iraq, let alone offer concrete support for them.

Ms. Rice spoke several times of how the two sides could discuss a “political horizon” to energize their peace efforts. The Palestinians have used this phrase on occasion to emphasize the need for some sort of timetable for achieving statehood.

American and Israeli officials declined to define what might be viewed on this distant “political horizon.” But the new language seems to be an effort to cast talks on the future course of Israeli-Palestinian relations in a hopeful light even before the two sides fulfill specific, intermediate steps required by the internationally agreed “road map” framework to resolve their disputes.

The road map is a 2003 plan backed by the United Nations, Russia, the United States and the European Union that lays out sequential steps to be carried out by Israelis and Palestinians on the way to reaching a final political settlement. Neither side has met its obligations under the plan, which stalled immediately after it was introduced.

In the first phase, Israel is to freeze settlement activity and the Palestinians are to break up militant groups. But on Monday, the Israeli government published plans to build 44 additional homes in Maale Adumim, the largest West Bank settlement, just east of Jerusalem.

Officials for all three governments to be involved in the informal meeting said those broader discussions to energize their peace efforts would not be allowed to replace the international “road map” agreement.

“I am very clear that the one thing that you do not want to do is to try to rush to formal negotiations before things are fully prepared, before people are fully prepared,” Ms. Rice said. “But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be progress as we’re moving along.”

There was no immediate decision about when or where the three-way meeting would take place, or what the agenda might be.

David Baker, an official in the Israeli prime minister’s office, said Mr. Olmert and Ms. Rice “spoke about ways to generate momentum between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Ms. Rice’s subsequent meetings here with President Hosni Mubarak and his senior aides were held along the Nile, not far from the ancient temple complex of Luxor. The ruins date to the greatest era of the pharaohs, but their delicately carved walls and heroic statues have been reshaped over the centuries by designs of other conquering powers — including empires that likewise have fallen to history, including those of Alexander the Great and Rome.

Ms. Rice’s schedule did not allow time for a visit to the site, though.

Joining Ms. Rice and Mr. Mubarak at a news conference in Luxor on Monday, the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, acknowledged that his nation shared a regional interest in stabilizing Iraq, and he expressed support for the new Bush strategy.

“We are supportive of that plan, because we are hopeful that that plan would lead to, ensure, the stability, the unity and the cohesion of the Iraqi government,” he said.

Obama Takes First Step Toward Running in ‘08

NY TIMES

WASHINGTON – Senator Barack Obama took his first step into the Democratic presidential race today by opening an exploratory committee to raise money and begin building a campaign designed “to change our politics.” He said he would make a formal declaration Feb. 10 in Illinois.

“Running for the presidency is a profound decision – a decision no one should make on the basis of media hype or personal ambition alone,” Mr. Obama said in a video address e-mailed to his supporters. “So before I committed myself and my family to this race, I wanted to be sure that this was right for us and, more importantly, right for the country.”

Mr. Obama disclosed his decision on his Web site and was not planning to make other statements today. Instead, he was making a series of telephone calls to key Democratic leaders in Iowa, New Hampshire and other states with early contests on the party’s 2008 nominating calendar.

Mr. Obama, 45, was elected to the Senate two years ago. He becomes the fifth Democrat to enter the race, joining Senators Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut as well as former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Tom Vilsack, who stepped down this month as governor of Iowa.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is expected to join the Democratic field soon and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said he would make his decision known by the end of the month. Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts also is weighing another run.

By now, the rapid trajectory of Mr. Obama is a well-established tale, rising from law professor to state senator to U.S. senator in less than a decade. He is the only African-American serving in the U.S. Senate and could be the only black presidential candidate this year.

But the next phase of his political development presents an even more intriguing storyline – as well as inviting closer scrutiny – as he discovers whether it is a blessing or curse to embark on a presidential race carrying the expectations of a country that is searching for something new and different.

In his video statement today, Mr. Obama presented himself as a fresh face – and voice – for Democrats. The message was crafted in blue-sky optimism, but did not delve into specific details for the challenges facing all candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign. Aides said the announcement speech next month would outline more specifics.

“For the next several weeks,” Mr. Obama said in the video, “I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about the challenges we face as a nation, the opportunities that lie before us, and the role that a presidential campaign might play in bringing our country together.”

Even before Mr. Obama opened an exploratory committee, his flirtations at a presidential bid changed the contours of the 2008 campaign. Senators Evan Bayh of Indiana and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin were among those to fold their cards, fearful that what had been seen as a wide-open fight for the nomination suddenly seemed like nothing of the kind.

But for all of his anointment as a beacon of hope for Democrats, it remains an open question whether he can turn a boomlet into a movement. Privately, even longtime friends wonder if he can meet such lofty expectations, which have elevated him beyond a politician’s normal realm, thanks to his celebrity, ambition and biography.

Mr. Obama intends to open his presidential campaign headquarters in Chicago, which also would provide a key fund-raising base. As he made his decision, he convened a series of private meetings with longtime advisers and friends, ensuring that he had their support before entering the toughest political race of his life.

After one of the meetings, Abner Mikva, a White House chief counsel in the Clinton administration and a longtime friend of Mr. Obama’s, was asked to assess the senator’s biggest challenge in a presidential race. He didn’t hesitate.

“First off, there is Hillary Rodham Clinton. And that’s not going to be easy to handle,” Mr. Mikva said in an interview last month. “He says he’s not going to run against her, which is fine, but if they are the two front-runners, it’s going to be awfully hard not to. He needs to work on managing Hillary’s head start without antagonizing her supporters and shore up the notion that this is something more than just hype.”

In the field of prospective Democratic hopefuls, Mr. Obama stands apart from Mrs. Clinton and some candidates because of his unwavering opposition to the Iraq war. But he has declined to say whether he supports the current liberal position of blocking funding for sending more troops to Iraq.

And in his statement today, he did not dwell on Iraq, saying only: “We’re still mired in a tragic and costly war that should have never been waged.”

Donna Marsh O'Connor Begs the Media to Re-Examine 9/11

This is a clip from a press conference where Donna Marsh O'Connor, a mother who lost her daughter in the south tower on 9/11, pleads with the media to re-examine 9/11 and ask the real questions. She is asking all of us to give this press conference exposure.

After watching this, I'm not feeling very patient. I wish people would examine their illusions, and stop believing whatever makes them feel good. Sometimes things make you feel bad, and they should! 95% of the people don't care enough about human life to stand up for it! That SHOULD make you feel bad! Just goes to show you their dehumanization schemes work. They're fucking brilliant...

Absolute Power

The real reason the Bush administration won't back down on Guantanamo.

slate



Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous terrorist, long after it has become perfectly clear that he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day?

Why is the United States still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, long after years of interrogation and abuse have established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they have been held out to be?

And why is President Bush still issuing grandiose and provocative signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive branch holds the power to open mail as it sees fit?

Willing to give the benefit of the doubt, I once believed the common thread here was presidential blindness—an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the president to believe that these futile little measures are somehow integral to combating terrorism. That this is some piece of self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is just a chump and Guantanamo merely a holding pen for a jumble of innocent and half-guilty wretches.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn't really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

Two scrupulously reported pieces on the Padilla case are illuminating. On Jan. 3, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio interviewed Mark Corallo, spokesman for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, about the behind-the-scenes decision-making in the Padilla case—a case that's lolled through the federal courts for years. According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla's case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004, the Bush administration's sole concern was preserving its constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants. "Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose," she reports, which is why Padilla was hauled back to the lower courts. Her sources further confirmed that "key players in the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office insisted that the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved."

Deborah Sontag's excellent New York Times story on Padilla on Jan. 4 makes the same point: He was moved from military custody to criminal court only as "a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court." So this is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla's dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they'd already won.

This need to preserve newly won legal ground also explains the continued operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the camp that—according to Donald Rumsfeld in 2002—houses only "the worst of the worst." Now that over half of them have been released (apparently, the best of the worst) and even though only about 80 of the rest will ever see trials, the camp remains open. Why? Civil-rights groups worldwide and even close U.S. allies like Germany, Denmark, and England clamor for its closure. And as the ever-vigilant Nat Hentoff points out, new studies reveal that only a small fraction of the detainees there are even connected to al-Qaida—according to the Defense Department's own best data.

But Guantanamo stays open for the same reason Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration is unable to retreat from that position without ceding ground. In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees. And having gone nose-to-nose with the Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts for these "enemies," courts guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot just call off the trials.

The endgame in the war on terror isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the line on hard-fought claims to absolutely limitless presidential authority.

Enter these signing statements. The most recent of the all-but-meaningless postscripts Bush tacks onto legislation gives him the power to "authorize a search of mail in an emergency" to ''protect human life and safety" and "for foreign intelligence collection." There is some debate about whether the president has that power already, but it misses the point. The purpose of these signing statements is simply to plant a flag on the moon—one more way for the president to stake out the furthest corners in his field of constitutional dreams.

Last spring, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer profiled David Addington, Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff and legal adviser. Addington's worldview in brief: A single-minded devotion to something called the New Paradigm, a constitutional theory of virtually limitless executive power, wherein "the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it," Mayer describes.

Insiders in the Bush administration told Mayer that Addington and Cheney had been "laying the groundwork" for a vast expansion of presidential power long before 9/11. In 2002, the vice president told ABC News that the presidency was "weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years." Rebuilding that presidency has been their sole goal for decades.

The image of Addington scrutinizing "every bill before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power," as Mayer puts it, can be amusing—like the mother of the bride obsessing over a tricky seating chart. But this zeal to restore an all-powerful presidency traps the Bush administration in its own worst legal sinkholes. This newfound authority—to maintain a disastrous Guantanamo, to stage rights-free tribunals and hold detainees forever—is the kind of power Nixon only dreamed about. It cannot be let go.

In a heartbreaking letter from Guantanamo this week, published in the Los Angeles Times, prisoner Jumah Al Dossari writes: "The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed." I fear he is wrong. The destruction of Al Dossari, Jose Padilla, Zacarias Moussaoui, and some of our most basic civil liberties was never a purpose or a goal—it was a mere byproduct. The true purpose is more abstract and more tragic: To establish a clunky post-Watergate dream of an imperial presidency, whatever the human cost may be.

Somalia: Ethiopia Rides The Tiger

blackstar news

The Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, must have been studying the magnificent successes of the U.S. preemptive invasion of Iraq and Israel's recent foray into Lebanon.

He has clearly decided to emulate them. His argument is exactly that which was given by George W. Bush and Ehud Olmert. We must attack our neighbor because we have to keep Islamic terrorists from pursuing their jihad and attacking us.

In each case, the invader was sure of his military superiority and of the fact that the majority of the population would hail the attackers as liberators. Zenawi asserts he is cooperating in the U.S. worldwide struggle against terrorism. And indeed, the United States has offered not only its intelligence support but has sent in both its air force and units of special troops to assist the Ethiopians.

Still, each local situation is a bit different. And it is worth reviewing the recent history of what is called the Horn of Africa, in which countries have switched geopolitical sides with some ease in the last forty years. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Ethiopia was a symbol of African resistance to European imperialism. The Ethiopians defeated the Italian colonial troops at Adowa in 1896 and the country remained independent. When Italy tried again in 1935, Emperor Haile Selassie went to the League of Nations and pleaded for collective security against the invasion. He received no help.

Ethiopia then became the symbol of Africa throughout the Black world. The colors of its flag became the colors of Africa. And at the end of the Second World War, Ethiopian independence was restored. In the difficult genesis of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, Haile Selassie used his prestige to play a key role as intermediary between differing African states. The OAU established its headquarters in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. But if Ethiopia served this symbolic role throughout Africa, it also had an oppressive and aristocratic state machinery. And when acute famines began to plague the country in the 1970s, internal discontent
mounted rapidly.

In 1974, an army officer, Mengistu Haile Mariam, led a revolution against the "feudal" monarchy and established a military government which soon proclaimed itself Marxist-Leninist. Before Mengistu, relations between the United States and Ethiopia had been warm. Ethiopia's neighbor, Somalia, had strained relations with the United States. It also had a military government under Siad Barre. However, it called itself "scientific socialist" and had fairly close relations with the Soviet Union, offering it a naval base.

After the 1974 coup, when Mengistu proclaimed his government Marxist-Leninist, the Soviet Union dumped Somalia and embraced the larger and more important Ethiopia. So the United States embraced Somalia in turn, and took over the naval base. To understand what happened next, a few words of ethnic analysis of the two countries is needed. Ethiopia is an ancient Christian kingdom, long dominated by Amhara aristocrats. There is another large Christian group, the Tigre, who speak a different language. There are two other quite large groups -- the Oromo (half of whom are Muslim) and the Muslim Somalis. In addition, at the end of the Second World War, Ethiopia absorbed the coastal Italian colony of Eritrea. Under Haile Selassie, only the Amhara counted, and Eritrea was waging a war for its independence. Without Eritrea, Ethiopia is landlocked.

Somalia was quite different. There had been two colonies -- Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland. Italian Somaliland became independent in 1960 in the course of liquidating Italian colonies, and British Somaliland was added onto it. In the 1960s, when ethnic conflicts began to plague many African states, it was commonly said that the one African country that would never know ethnic conflict was Somalia, since almost everyone in the country was ethnically Somali, spoke Somali, and was a Moslem.

People in both countries chafed under the respective dictatorships. And when the Cold War ended, neither government could survive. Both Mengistu and Barre were overthrown in 1991. What replaced Mengistu was a Tigre liberation movement, which at first spoke a “Maoist” nationalist language. As a way of distinguishing itself from the Mengistu regime, it acceded to Eritrea's independence, only to regret this later. Christian, if not Amhara, dominance soon became the major theme and Oromo and Somali uprisings began. Human rights activists do not consider Zenawi’s government much better than Mengistu’s.

In Somalia, the "perfect" ethnic state fell apart, as Somali clans began to fight each other for power. After 1991, the United States began to embrace the new leader of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, who abandoned his “Maoism” altogether. Somalia was left out in the cold.

When the United States sent in troops on a “humanitarian” mission to quell disorders the United States got the brutal drubbing we now call "Blackhawk down," and it withdrew its troops. A long multi-sided civil war continued. In 2006, a group called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took over the capital, Mogadishu, and expelled the feuding clan leaders, restoring relative peace for the first time in more than a decade.

The United States saw the UIC as a replica of the Taliban and allied to Al-Qaeda. So did Zenawi. So Ethiopia decided to invade, oust the UIC, and prop up the powerless central government that had existed on paper since 2004 but had been unable even to enter the capital city.

There we went again. Of course, Ethiopia (with the United States) has won the first round. The UIC has abandoned Mogadishu. But the Somalis aren’t welcoming the Ethiopians as liberators. The clan leaders are fighting each other again, and Mogadishu is again in turmoil. The Ethiopia government is facing troubles not only in Somalia but now increasingly at home as well.

As Israel had to withdraw from Lebanon, and as the United States is going to have to do in Iraq, so Ethiopia will have to pull back soon from Somalia. The situation within Somalia will not have been improved because of its preventive attack. Preventive attacks are always a potential boomerang. Either one wins overwhelmingly or one loses badly.

Report: Israel and Syria had secret talks

AP

JERUSALEM A new report about secret peace talks in the Middle East.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (hah-ah-REHTS') says Israeli and Syrian representatives quietly held two years of talks on a framework for peace before last summer's war in Lebanon.

The report doesn't identify its sources. Officially, Israel says it isn't aware of any meetings, while Syria calls the report "absolutely baseless."

But an Israeli official who doesn't want to be named says there were unofficial talks that the government didn't sanction.

Official peace talks between Israel and Syria broke down in 2000 amid disagreements over an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, a strategic plateau overlooking northern Israel.