October 26, 2010

Iran, Syria, Russia and Venezuela Alliance

Hugo Chávez Embraces Iran and Syria, Wins Russian Support for Nuclear Program

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is in the midst of one of his world tours, making friends with US enemies and getting support for his country's nascent nuclear program.

By Sara Miller Llana, Christian Science Monitor
October 22, 2010

Yesterday he was in Syria. Wednesday he was in Iran. That was after visiting Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Now he is off to Libya and Portugal.

And all within 10 days.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's world tours, often to countries with constrained or outright hostile ties to the United States, are nothing new. He says plainly that their intention is, in part, to counter American “imperialism.”

Yet if this latest global foray does not surprise analysts or rattle geopolitics, some say it could actually damage Mr. Chávez at home. It comes after legislative elections in Venezuela that saw his political party lose seats to the opposition. While Chávez still commands impressive popularity at home, problems such as inflation and crime have loosened a presidential grip that once seemed iron-tight.
“Chávez is an extremely well-traveled Latin America president,” says Larry Birns, the director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, but he adds that it might not work in his favor even though many say such trips help distract from problems at home. “When you have a deeply fractured society ... you spend as much time as possible at home.... He should be working to administer effectively his revolution.”
'The new world order'

In Damascus on Thursday, Chávez signed several economic agreements, including a deal to supply Syria with up to 1 million tons of diesel fuel annually. He said that he and Syrian President Bashar Assad are building ties "to accelerate the fall of [American] imperialist hegemony and the birth of the new world of equilibrium and peace."

The previous day in Tehran, Chávez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said they also were committed to forming a “new world order.” The two were also reported to have signed a series of deals to promote industrial cooperation. In Russia, Chávez secured a deal that will help the South American nation build its first nuclear power plant.

The US has largely dismissed this trip – even though the nuclear plant deal has raised some eyebrows in Washington.

Standing with Iran
"I should use the opportunity to condemn those military threats that are being made against Iran," Chávez said at a joint news conference with Mr. Ahmadinejad in Tehran on Wednesday, before flying to Damascus. "We know that they will never be able to restrict the Islamic revolution in whatever way.... We will always stand together, we will not only resist, we will also stand victorious beside one another."
Ahmadinejad, for his part, said Iran and Venezuela were part of a revolutionary front "stretching all the way to East Asia" from Latin America.
"If one day, my brother Mr. Chávez and I and a few other people were once alone in the world, today we have a long line of revolutionary officials and people standing alongside each other," Ahmadinejad said, according to Reuters.

uch statements are largely seen as an attempt by Iran to show that it is not isolated, despite a push by Washington for tougher sanctions against Iran's nuclear activities. The US fears Iran is seeking to develop a nuclear bomb, though Iran insists it merely wants a peaceful nuclear energy program.

Can US allow a nuclear Venezuela?

Chávez is saying the same, after firming up plans with Russia to build a nuclear power plant. He would not be alone in the region. Many countries, including Brazil, have been using nuclear power for decades.

The US did not take issue with the news, but some observers say it should. Ray Walser, a Latin America analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says that there is a fissure between security hawks, like himself, and those who say the US need not panic.
“The White House says, we will just tell Mr. Chávez to act responsibly,” says Mr. Walser. “But responsible does not seem to be part of the words in the character description of Mr. Chávez.”

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Opinion: Why Israeli Settlement Construction Must Stop

By Nabeel Shaath, Christian Science Monitor
October 25, 2010

Israel's refusal to freeze construction undermines the entire peace process. And peace must succeed. There are no viable alternatives – for Israelis, Palestinians, or the region.

After more than two decades of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, we are at a turning point in the history of the region. As a Palestinian negotiator for over 20 years, I see that tough decisions have to be made. The stakes are too high – not just for the Palestinian people, but for the entire region’s stability.

Since Palestinians first made our historic compromise calling for a two-state solution 22 years ago, we have entered numerous negotiations processes with the hope of finally achieving a comprehensive end to our conflict. But Israel’s continued settlement enterprise will defeat any prospects for real peace between Palestinians and Israelis. By refusing to extend the expired moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel sends a clear message that it is not serious about negotiations. And this message fundamentally undermines the peace process.

Palestinians cannot negotiate at any cost. Coming to the table without a halt in settlement construction undercuts our government's credibility with the Palestinian people and may give ground to extremists who are against the peace process. Instability in the occupied Palestinian territory is bad for the region, and it’s bad for Israel.

Call for settlement freeze not new

Our call for a settlement freeze is not new. Under international law and previous agreements, including the “Roadmap to Peace,” which was endorsed by the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations, Israel is obliged to freeze construction in occupied Palestinian territory, including that for natural growth.

Of course, we know that peace requires compromise. In the 1993 Oslo accords, Palestinians made the very painful decision to recognize the state of Israel and its right to exist over 78 percent of our historic homeland, taken from us by Israel in 1948. Since that time, we have focused our efforts on gaining our independence through the establishment of a state on the remaining 22 percent.

But peace also requires fairness and equality. As President Yasser Arafat often said, we are not looking for an agreement that solves only some of our issues, but one that provides Palestinians and Israelis with a just agreement that leads to lasting peace between us.

For years, the path for Palestinian freedom and statehood has been obstructed by Israel’s continuing policy of occupying and colonizing Palestinian territory. Israel has done this through the implementation of its so-called “facts on the ground” policy: the imposition of a settlement enterprise designed to unilaterally annex Palestinian land, water, and natural resources.

Settlement towns cut deep into Palestinian territory, dividing Palestinian land into distinct and isolated areas (“Bantustans”). Further, Israel has developed an infrastructure to support these settlements, including Israeli-only roads and an illegal wall built on our land that de-facto segregates Palestinians from Palestinians, farmers from their farms, and students from their schools.

Negotiations as guise for settlement activity

As a member of the Palestinian negotiations team for over 20 years, I have often witnessed the negotiations process succeed in making progress, leading to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and West Bank cities in 1994 to 1996, providing both Israel and the Palestinian authority with security, stability, recognition, and economic growth. But I have also seen the process turned into a public relations campaign, whereby Israeli politicians repeat the word “peace” over and over, while their actions in settlement building actually worsen the situation on the ground.

Historically, Israel has used every negotiation process as a guise for ramping up settlement activity. Since the signing of the Oslo Agreement in 1993, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory and East Jerusalem has increased considerably, far exceeding even natural growth rates in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territory. In fact, it has more than doubled, numbering more than half a million illegal settlers today. This is not only a serious threat to Palestinians, but an insult to the very credibility of the peace process.

Currently, Israeli settlement construction is moving at a pace that is much faster than it was prior to the freeze, which ended this September. We also know now, that hundreds of violations were committed during the freeze.

Participation in negotiations cannot be motivated by a cynical and politically opportunistic blame-game. It must sincerely and steadfastly aim to achieve justice and regional peace. Israel’s feigned commitments to peace while disregarding international law burns in the hearts of Palestinians.

Make Israel respect international law

People skeptical of the peace process will say that Israel does not have any incentive to respect international law. But here is where the international community must play a critical role.

As a Palestinian, I appreciate the support and efforts of the Obama administration to reactivate the Middle East peace process and to finally bring an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land through the creation of an independent Palestinian state. But for the peace process to work, the international community must provide real incentives and disincentives – such as banning the import of products produced in illegal settlements – for Israel to respect international law.

To show its commitment to a two-state solution, Israel, as a first step, must preserve the possibility of two states by freezing all building in settlements, including in occupied East Jerusalem. Only then can the negotiating teams decide how settlements within the Palestinian territory will be dismantled.

Peace is possible

As a negotiator, I firmly believe that peace is possible. Two thirds of the Palestinians support negotiations with Israel, and the majority of both Israelis and Palestinians back a two-state solution. It is clear that both peoples see there is no alternative to a negotiated peace, that war will not provide any solution, and that the status quo is untenable, and in fact very dangerous.

We were able to reach agreements with all the governments of Israel up until the Camp David summit in 2000, including agreements signed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself from the years 1996 through 1998. The roles played by President George H. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker and President Bill Clinton and Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher were quite helpful in reaching these agreements.

The leadership of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Arafat played a crucial role. This success can be repeated, if Israel decides that peace is more important than a land grab.

Putting words into actions

Palestinians have once again entered this peace process in good faith. But there is little sense in negotiating the end of occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state while Israel continues to build and reinforce its settlement enterprise. Internal Israeli politics cannot impose the standards for peace. It is time to stop thinking of “creative ways” towards a “more tolerable” occupation and make the tough decisions needed to end it.

The United States and the rest of the international community must transfer their words into actions and take a firm stance to bring the parties closer to peace. As time runs short and prospects for peace are fading, only bold actions and positions can bring the change needed to end this protracted conflict.

Peace must succeed. There are no other viable alternatives. Israel must realize this. And for the sake of stability in the region and global security, the international community must see this, too.

Dr. Nabeel Shaath is a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s negotiations team. He has been involved in negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis for more than 20 years, including as chief negotiator of the Gaza-Jericho agreement in 1994. He also leads Fatah’s International Relations Commission and is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

October 24, 2010

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The Peace Process between Israel and the Palestinians October 2010

Right Side News
October 23, 2010

The Construction Moratorium and Relaunching the Negotiations
  1. The moratorium on construction in the settlements continues to be an issue. Interviewed by Israeli Channel 1 TV, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said that the demand for a building freeze in the settlements was not a precondition for negotiations but a Palestinian and international demand. It was also, he said, a standing Israeli commitment, from the time of the first contacts between Palestinians and Israel when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. He claimed that the American administration promised that Israel would stop building in the settlements, and based on that promise the Palestinians had entered into direct negotiations in September (Israel Channel 1 TV, October 17, 2010).

  2. Mahmoud Abbas also claimed that American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that all offers would be off the table if the Israeli government did not agree to freeze construction, but according to Mahmoud Abbas, Benyamin Netanyahu was being intransigent because he would "fear for his government" if the freeze continued. Mahmoud Abbas added that in any case there would not be a new intifada in any case, and that if an agreement were reached, the Palestinians were ready to "end the conflict [and] end their historical claims" (Israel Channel 1 TV, October 17 2010).

  3. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said in his speech at the opening of the winter Knesset session that he would agree to a construction moratorium if the Palestinians recognized Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. Following his remarks, Yasser Abd Rabbo, secretary of the PLO's Executive Committee, said that the Palestinian Authority was prepared to recognize a map based on the 1967 borders, and to recognize Israel "as it calls itself, according to international law." He did not relate to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state (Agence France-Presse, October 13; Haaretz, October 14, 2010).

  4. Yasser Abd Rabbo's remarks were strongly criticized by both Fatah and Hamas:

    Nabil Shaath, senior Fatah figure, claimed that the remarks did not represent the Palestinian position, which "is not prepared to pay the price of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state" (xinhuanet.com website, October 13, 2010).

    Hamas and other terrorist organizations denounced Yasser Abd Rabbo's remarks (Hamas' Palestine-info website, October 16, 2010). Mustafa al-Sawaf, former editor of the Hamas organ Felesteen, claimed that the problem of "people who begin to waive rights which don't belong to them" should be solved by reestablishing "popular courts." In such courts, he said, "sentencing must be done on the spot and the sentence is carried out immediately" (Felesteen, October 16, 2010).

The Northern Front | Iranian President Visits Lebanon

Right Side News
October 23, 2010

Iranian President Ahmadinejad visited Lebanon on October 13 and 14. He met with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, Lebanese Prime Minister Sa'ad Hariri, and the chairman of the Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri. They signed documents and memoranda of understandings dealing with cooperation on various issues (Fars News Agency, Iran, October 13, 2010). Ahmadinejad participated in a rally in Beirut attended by thousands of Lebanese who waved Iranian flags and signs bearing his picture.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech broadcast on a giant screen. Nasrallah called Ahmadinejad "the bulwark of the resistance." He denied claims that Iran had "an Iranian plan" and was contributing to "a regional civil war," and said that "what Iran is doing in our region is fulfilling a divine duty," and that it was in fact preventing civil war. He added that Iran aspired to have the land of Palestine returned to its true owners "from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river," and for the Palestinian refugees to return to it (Al-Manar TV, October 13, 2010).

Ahmadinejad gave a speech in Lebanon in which he strongly denounced Israel and the United States. He called Lebanon "the school of the resistance" and again called (as he had in the UN) for the appointment of an independent committee to investigate the events of September 11, which he claimed were planned to provide the United States with an excuse to intervene in the Middle East. He suggested that the UN prove its worth and recognize the "Palestinian rights," and claimed that time was running out for Israel (nowlebanon.com website, October 13, 2010).

October 14, 2010, Hassan Nasrallah presents Ahmadinejad with a rifle claimed to have been taken from an IDF soldier during the Second Lebanon War (dailystar.com.lb website, October 16, 2010)On his second day in Lebanon Ahmadinejad visited south Lebanon, including the town of Bint Jbeil. He delivered a speech there in which he praised the "Lebanese resistance" (i.e., Hezbollah). He said the "Zionists have no choice but to surrender to the nations of the region and return to their original homes," i.e., to leave the State of Israel (Fars News Agency, Iran, October 14, 2010). He then met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and went back to Iran (Al-Manar TV, October 14, 2010).

October 20, 2010

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Israeli Settlers Building 544 New Homes After Building Ban Lifted

Associated Press
October 20, 2010

Israeli settlers have begun building new homes at an extraordinary pace since the government lifted its moratorium on West Bank housing starts — almost 550 in three weeks, more than four times faster than the last two years.

And many homes are going up in areas that under practically any peace scenario would become part of a Palestinian state, a trend that could doom U.S.-brokered peace talks.

According to an Associated Press count, ground has been broken on 544 new West Bank homes since Sept. 26, when Israel lifted its 10-month freeze on most new settlement building.

The survey, while not comprehensive, marks the most extensive effort yet to quantify the construction. It was based on visits to 16 of the West Bank's more than 120 settlements as well as phone calls to more than four dozen settlements and interviews with construction workers and mayors.
"This figure is alarming and is another indicator that Israel is not serious about the peace process, which is supposed to be about ending the occupation," said Ghassan Khatib, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' self-rule government in the West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played down the new construction, saying it "has no real effect on the map of a possible (peace) agreement."

However, the renewed settlement construction has jeopardized peace talks relaunched only last month, with the Palestinians threatening to walk away if the freeze is not extended. And it could make the daunting task of partitioning the land even more difficult.

The building spurt of the past three weeks compares to average annual housing starts of about 2,000 in recent years, including just under 1,900 in 2009 and just over 2,100 in 2008, according to government figures. That is a rate of about 115 in three weeks, making the current pace more than four times faster.

The actual number is likely higher. When officials provided a range, the AP used the lowest figure. And it did not include 133 apartments a contractor said he was building in three settlements, because he did not say how many were already started.

The Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now estimates there have been more than 600 housing starts and plans to release its own detailed report next week.

Much of the building activity witnessed by the AP involved leveling ground, and some settler leaders argue it is premature to define that as housing starts.

Asked about the AP count, a spokeswoman for the settler group Yesha Council said:
"I prefer not to get into the numbers game because it's misleading."
About two-thirds of post-freeze work is preliminary and could be halted if the freeze is renewed, said the spokeswoman, Aliza Herbst.

Still, the scale of the construction is likely to harden Palestinian demands that a settlement freeze be reimposed as a condition for proceeding with the talks. Efforts by the United States to coax Israel into another building slowdown have so far failed.

In crisscrossing the West Bank, an AP team saw bulldozers and jackhammers tearing into rocky slopes in a number of locations.

One of the new building sites is in Karmei Tzur, a settlement with about 135 families located on the "Palestinian side" of the planned route of Israel's West Bank separation barrier, seen by some in Israel as the basis for drawing Israel's future border.

On Monday, jackhammers pulverized rocks on a barren slope as trucks carted off debris and heavy machinery drilled holes in preparation for pouring foundations. A woman answering the phone at the settlement's main office said 56 new apartments were being built.

A drive through Kiryat Arba, home to more than 7,000 Israelis, revealed two construction sites, for a total of at least 22 apartments, according to Palestinian laborers. And in the settlement of Revava, bulldozers were seen leveling ground along a slope. A contractor at the site said his company is building 83 apartments there.

In Kiryat Arba, Revava and many other settlements visited by the AP, officials declined comment on construction. In two places, armed guards denied reporters entry.

Other settlement officials were more forthcoming.

Avi Roe, who heads the Binyamin regional council, which represents about one-third of the West Bank settlements, said he is aware of at least 200 housing starts in his area.

Another 344 housing starts were confirmed by AP visits to settlements and interviews with mayors, construction workers and other officials.

Netanyahu imposed the settlement curbs last November in a bid to draw the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Netanyahu, who leads a hard-line coalition dominated by pro-settler parties, has said the slowdown was a one-time gesture.

The Obama administration has been trying to persuade Israel to extend the freeze and is expected to step up the effort after next month's midterm elections. Washington has floated the idea of a one-time two-month extension, during which Israelis and Palestinians would be asked to reach agreement on the future borders of a Palestinian state.

The Palestinians insist on a freeze for the duration of negotiations, saying two months is unrealistic to reach a border deal.

Nearly 300,000 settlers now live in the West Bank, along with 2.2 million Palestinians. Settlers have covered the territory — captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem — with an increasingly intricate web of established communities and nearly 100 unauthorized hilltop outposts.

Despite the recent building spate, settlement leaders complain that approval for the largest construction projects is being held up. The Yediot Ahronot daily reported this week that construction of more than 3,700 apartments awaits the signature of Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who has final say in the West Bank.
"I'm pessimistic about the near future," said Benny Kashriel, mayor of Maaleh Adumim, a settlement of 33,000 near Jerusalem. He said he hasn't been able to start new construction since the end of the moratorium.

Iran and Venezuela Alliance

Iran, Venezuela Leaders Seek 'New World Order'

Associated Press
October 20, 2010

The leaders of Iran and Venezuela hailed what they called their strong strategic relationship on Wednesday, saying they are united in efforts to establish a "new world order" that will eliminate Western dominance over global affairs.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and visiting Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez, watched as officials from both countries signed 11 agreements promoting cooperation in areas including oil, natural gas, textiles, trade and public housing.

Among the agreements, Venezuela's state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA said the South American country was forming a joint shipping venture with Iran to aid in delivering Venezuelan crude oil to Europe and Asia. It said in a statement that the agreement for a joint venture also would help supply Iran "due to its limited refining capacity."

Both presidents denounced U.S. "imperialism" and said their opponents will not be able to impede cooperation between Iran and Venezuela.

Iran's state TV quoted both Ahmadinejad and Chavez as calling their relationship a "strategic alliance" that would eliminate the current global order.
"Iran and Venezuela are united to establish a new world order based on humanity and justice," Ahmadinejad said, repeating his predictions that those who today seek "world domination are on the verge of collapse."
Chavez said this is a time of "great threats" that make its necessary to swiftly "consolidate strategic alliances in political, economic, technological, energy and social areas," according to the state-run Venezuelan News Agency.

Details of the latest accords were not released, and Chavez said some agreements went beyond those put on paper. He said a Venezuelan delegation will soon travel to Iran to follow up on the agreements.

Iran has become the closest Middle East ally to Chavez's government as the left-leaning leader has sought to build international alliances to counter what he sees as U.S. economic and political dominance.
"Imperialism has entered a decisive phase of decline and ... is headed, like elephants, to its graveyard," Chavez said, according to the Venezuelan state news agency.
Chavez has staunchly defended Iran's nuclear energy program, siding with Tehran by insisting it is for peaceful uses and not for nuclear bombs.

U.S. officials have worried Iran may be using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to develop atomic weapons. Four rounds of U.N. sanctions, as well as broader severe U.S. and European Union sanctions have not persuaded Tehran to halt the program.

Chavez also has plans to develop a nuclear energy program in Venezuela and last week signed an agreement for Russia to help build a reactor.

Without mentioning the countries' nuclear ambitions, Chavez said his government demands respect for Iran's sovereignty and that "those who think they are most powerful and want to impose their will on the world respect Iran."

Chavez's trip to Iran was his ninth as president. Before coming to Tehran, he made stops in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Later Wednesday, Chavez arrived in Syria, and is due to travel next to Libya and Portugal.

Iran and Venezuela both belong to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. In recent years, the two oil-producing countries have also set up joint ventures to produce cars, tractors and bicycles in the South American country.

October 14, 2010

Israeli-Lebanese Conflict

Ahmadinejad Receives Hero's Welcome in Lebanon

"The Zionist regime will continue its downfall and no power can save it because of the resistance in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey, Iran and the rest of the region", he vowed. - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

AFP
October 14, 2010

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received a hero's welcome on his first official visit to Lebanon, where he hailed the country's resistance against Israeli "aggression."

And on Thursday he was due to defy his international critics by touring villages in the south of the country, just a few kilometres (miles) from the Israeli border that were destroyed during the 2006 conflict.

Ahmadinejad was showered with rice and rose petals Wednesday by tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters who lined the streets and waved Iranian flags as his motorcade made its way from the airport to the presidential palace.

He can also expect a hero's welcome in southern Lebanon Thursday, where Iran has been a major donor in reconstruction following the month-long 2006 war.

The two-day trip is viewed as a boost for the Shiite militant Hezbollah. Members of Lebanon's pro-Western parliamentary majority however have criticised it as a bid to turn the country into "an Iranian base on the Mediterranean."

In Washington, the White House described the official visit as "provocative", while Israeli officials said it marked Lebanon's transformation into an "extremist state."
"We reject any efforts to destabilise or inflame tensions within Lebanon," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday in Kosovo.

"We would hope that no visitor would do anything or say anything that would give cause to greater tension or instability in that country."
At a press conference with Lebanese counterpart Michel Sleiman, Ahmadinejad hailed Lebanon's resistance against the "Zionist regime" and offered his country's backing toward that end.
"We fully support the resistance of the Lebanese people against the Zionist regime and we want full liberation of occupied territory in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine," he said.

"As long as (Israeli) aggression exists in the region, we will not see stability," he added.
A beaming Ahmadinejad later appeared at a rally in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburb of Beirut. He waved to a rapturous crowd of tens of thousands before taking his seat next to the militant party's deputy commander Naim Qassem.

Chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," Hezbollah supporters turned out en masse to welcome Ahmadinejad, whose country is a major financial, military and ideological supporter of their militant Shiite group.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, whose party fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006, on Wednesday echoed Iran's call for Israel to disappear.
"President Ahmadinejad is right when he says Israel is illegitimate and should cease to exist," Nasrallah told the ecstatic crowd via video link.
Ahmadinejad, who has called Israel a "tumour" and has denied the Holocaust, repeated at the rally assertions that the Jewish state's downfall was inevitable.
"The Zionist regime will continue its downfall and no power can save it because of the resistance in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey, Iran and the rest of the region", he vowed.
The rally was held at an outdoor stadium where Iranian flags and photos of Ahmadinejad were hoisted alongside two life-sized pictures of overturned Israeli Merkava tanks.
"Iran is the heartbeat of the resistance," said Hussein Khawi, 50, who was at the rally. "Israel won't dare come near south Lebanon anymore."
Ahmadinejad's first visit since his election in 2005 highlights the clout Iran wields in Lebanon through Hezbollah, but it comes at a sensitive time in politically turbulent Lebanon.

Hezbollah is locked in a standoff with Sunni Prime Minister Saad Hariri over unconfirmed reports that a UN-backed tribunal is set to indict members of the Shiite militant group over the 2005 assassination of his father, ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.

Tensions over the tribunal have grown steadily in recent weeks, raising fears of renewed sectarian violence and the collapse of Lebanon's hard-won national unity government.

At the Beirut rally, Ahmadinejad made a passing remark defending Hezbollah.
"In Lebanon, a friend and patriot was viciously assassinated," he said in reference to Rafiq Hariri.
Western countries "are trying to sow sedition and conflict... by manipulating the media to accuse our friends (Hezbollah) and fulfill their aims in the region," he added.

October 13, 2010

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

A New Israeli Settlement Freeze? What's Behind Netanyahu's Offer

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered a new Israeli settlement freeze, as ally Obama eagerly seeks progress toward peace before US elections next month.

By Joshua Mitnick, Christian Science Monitor
October 12, 2010

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revived a previous offer Monday, saying he would support a new settlement freeze if Palestinians would recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

The offer is consistent with a demand Mr. Netanyahu made when he first endorsed a Palestinian state a year ago. But Israeli analysts and former diplomats disagree as to what the prime minister, who acknowledged that the offer had already been turned down in private negotiations with Palestinians, sought to achieve by raising the issue in parliament's opening day of winter session Monday.

Some see it as an effort to deflect Palestinian portrayals of Israel as the obstructionist party, especially with Netanyahu's ally President Obama eager to see the peace talks restarted before November elections. The prime minister may also be trying to reassure some of his constituents, who have felt he's betrayed them in the face of Palestinian demands.

But Netanyahu's decision to raise recognition again now instead of leaving it for the final stages of talks has stoked fresh uncertainty about his sincerity in negotiating a two-state solution.
"[Netanyahu] knows it’s a non-starter,'' says Yossi Alpher, a former peace process adviser to the Israeli government and the co-editor of the opinion forum Bitterlemons.org. "[The Palestinians] are prepared to end the conflict, but for them to accept Israel as a Jewish state is for them to negate their whole narrative.''
What Palestinian recognition would mean

Israelis see Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland as confirmation that their neighbors accept Israel's legitimacy. But it’s a taboo for the Palestinian leadership on several levels, particularly because recognition could be seen as giving up Palestinian refugees' claims to homes and property inside Israel that they lost in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

In addition, Palestinians consider recognizing Israel's Jewish character as compromising the rights of Israeli Arabs, a growing minority who make up 20 percent of Israel's population.

Netanyahu said Monday that such a move would build confidence and "open up a new horizon of hope and trust among broad sections of the Israeli public.''

While he said the recognition request is not a precondition for negotiations, Palestinians were quick to reiterate their rejection. A spokesman for Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, criticized Israel's demand as "a new obstacle.''

Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations under Netanyahu, said that the prime minister is responding to what he sees as Palestinians front-loading the peace process with divisive issues that should be part of the negotiations rather than a precondition.
"Israel is essentially saying that if we are going to abide by these new rules of putting the substance of the negotiations ahead of time, why can't Israel do the same thing?'' he said. "Either they will do it, or they are going to drop the notion that you have to have preconditions for negotiation.''
An attempt to shift blame?

Critics of Netanyahu have suggested that move is a tactic to shift the blame onto the Palestinians for the recent stall in negotiations. The Palestinians have refused to engage Israel in direct talks after Netanyahu allowed a 10-month moratorium on housing starts in the West Bank to expire.
"The agreements that Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan made no mention of those countries’ obligation to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jews,'' wrote columnist Shimon Shiffer, in the daily Yediot Ahronot newspaper.
One can draw the simple conclusion that Netanyahu is searching for any possible trick to push the Palestinians into the position of being rejectionists, which most likely will isolate Israel, place it in a vortex of blame-laying by the international community and will cast it in the world as a racist country.

A spokesman for the prime minister rejected that interpretation, arguing that it is unfair that only Israel faces pressure for concessions. For negotiations to succeed, the both Israel and the Palestinians must show flexibility.

Netanyahu's mysterious maneuvers

Though the demand appears to be a deal-breaker, analyst Mr. Alpher said that it may be one of a series of gestures to members of his right-wing coalition ahead of new concessions by Netanyahu in the negotiations.

The prime minister's offer could be interpreted as the first public indication that he's mulling a new settlement freeze, adding to the mystery of his maneuvering. On Monday, he told members of his Likud party that the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are not Israel's highest interest.

Says Alpher, "It's very possible that even he doesn't know where he's going.''

Israeli-Lebanese Conflict

A Divided Lebanon Waits for Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

By Nicholas Blanford, The Christian Science Monitor
October 12, 2010

The chatter of families and the smell of grilled lamb and chicken from barbecues wafts through a newly built tourist park perched on a windy hilltop overlooking Lebanon's border with Israel.

This park, in an area occupied by Israeli troops until 10 years ago and pounded during the 2006 Hezbollah war with Israel, is a sign to many Lebanese of the revitalization of the south. But it's a symbol to others, particularly Israel, of what they fear most: an Iranian outpost on the border.

The development was paid for by Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is due to arrive in Lebanon tomorrow to cement his relationship with Hezbollah, the Shiite political party and militia that is Israel's principal enemy in its northern neighbor.

Mr. Ahmadinejad will attend a rally Thursday in the nearby town of Bint Jbeil and briefly visit this park with its horseback rides, paintball arena, palm-thatched dining areas, and small-scale model of Jerusalem’s golden-domed Al-Aqsa mosque – topped with an Iranian flag. Southern Lebanese supporters of Hezbollah are eagerly looking forward to Ahmadinejad’s visit to this hilltop village, a key battleground in the 2006 war.
“This place means the same to Ahmadinejad as it does to us,” says Mohammed Hussein, taking a break from cooking lamb kebabs. “This place is a symbol of sacrifice and freedom.”
Other Lebanese, however, express misgivings about the imminent arrival of the outspoken Iranian president, fearing his stage-hogging antics will provoke friction along the perennially tense Lebanon-Israel border and potentially aggravate already strained ties between Lebanon’s Shias and Sunnis. On Tuesday, an open letter signed by 250 politicians, civil society activists, journalists, doctors, and teachers called on Ahmadinejad to stop meddling in Lebanese affairs and end its military and financial backing for Hezbollah.

Front line?
“One group in Lebanon draws its power from you… and has wielded it over another group and the state,” the letter said. "Your talk of ‘changing the face of the region starting with Lebanon’ … and ‘wiping Israel off the map through the force of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon'… gives the impression that your visit is that of a high commander to his front line,” the letter added.
Hezbollah has requested its supporters turn out en masse to greet Ahmadinejad when he arrives Wednesday on what will be his first visit to Lebanon since taking office in 2005. Iranian and Lebanese flags line the highway linking Beirut’s city center to the airport alongside portraits of a smiling Ahmadinejad inscribed with “welcome” in Arabic and Farsi.

Hezbollah follows Iran’s religious system and is the recipient of large quantities of financial and military aid from the Islamic Republic.

Ahmadinejad’s visit will be a welcome morale booster for Hezbollah at a time of rising tensions in Lebanon over an investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister who died in a truck bombing in February 2005.

Although Syria was widely blamed for Mr. Hariri’s death, there is increasing speculation that the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which is handling the investigation and any subsequent legal proceedings, has uncovered evidence implicating Hezbollah in the assassination.

Hezbollah has denied any involvement, insisting that Israel killed Hariri. The tribunal is thought to be preparing to issue its first indictments against individual members of Hezbollah before the end of the year.

Syrian room

With the spotlight on Hezbollah, Syria has been given some breathing space, allowing it to patch up relations with Arab states like Saudi Arabia and regain some of the influence in Lebanon it lost in the wake of Hariri’s death. The United States also has stepped up its diplomatic engagement with Syria, hoping to revive peace talks with Israel and to gradually wean Damascus from Tehran’s tight embrace.

Saudi Arabia has played a role in the same process by encouraging Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister and son of the slain Rafik, to reconcile with the Syrian leadership. Saad Hariri has met several times in recent months with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom he once blamed for ordering his father’s murder. Last month, he publicly exonerated Syria in a newspaper interview, saying his past accusations were “political."

Some analysts believe Syria is maneuvering for advantage by playing off its strategic alliance with Iran against Saudi and US efforts to win Mr. Assad to their side.

Still, Syria needs Hezbollah, the most powerful political force in Lebanon, to help project its influence in its tiny neighbor, and the three-decade alliance between Damascus and Tehran shows no sign of unraveling.

“If Syria is reshuffling its cards, it has to take into account Hezbollah as much as Iran,” says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, an authority on Hezbollah. “They are not equal in terms of power, but they [Hezbollah and Iran] benefit Syria in different ways and the alliance between them is extremely important.”
'Axis of resistance'

In a sign that the alliance remains intact, Assad visited Ahmadinejad in Tehran on Oct. 2 and both pledged to expand the “axis of resistance,” the informal union of nations and militant groups opposed to Israeli and US ambitions in the Middle East.

“Policymakers in Washington at first thought Assad’s comments in Tehran were an exaggeration by the Iranian media,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syria analyst at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “but the Syrians have confirmed Assad’s words, which… demonstrate the ‘axis of resistance’ seems stronger than ever.”
The prospect of indictments against Hezbollah has roiled Lebanon's sectarian waters, particularly between Shias and Sunnis, which inevitably has affected Ahmadinejad’s high profile visit to Lebanon.

Last week, in Tripoli in north Lebanon, posters of the Iranian president were erected with a X across his face and the message: “You are not welcome in Lebanon.” On Monday, Lebanese media reported that the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, a Sunni Al Qaeda affiliate, issued a warning that “the whole of Lebanon will tremble if Ahmadinejad sets foot in Lebanon.”

Last month, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades released a televised documentary attacking Hezbollah and the Shiite sect in general (adherents of Al Qaeda's chauvinistic brand of Islam deem Shiites to be apostates).

The slickly produced program, titled “The Oppressed Sect,” referring to Sunnis, features scenes from Lebanon’s 16-year civil war of Shiite militiamen attacking Palestinians and more recent footage of Hezbollah fighters with Sunni captives during clashes in May 2008. The hour-long documentary was compiled in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon.

But this isn't the case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility last year for firing a pair of rockets into Israel from south Lebanon. United Nations peacekeepers patrolling the southern border are wary of a repeat attack to coincide with the Iranian president’s visit to south Lebanon.
“The Israelis would not be able to resist firing back into Lebanon knowing Ahmadinejad is in the district,” says one UN officer, who asked that his name not be used.

October 11, 2010

War Against Anglo Saxon Imperialism

Surprise -- The Very Dark Side of U.S. History

By Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry, AlterNet
October 8, 2010

Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the "good guys" spreading "democracy" and "liberty" around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake or an aberration.

In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a "mistake" nor an "aberration" but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the "dark side."

There is a dark -- seldom acknowledged -- thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic.

This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the "war on terror" over the last decade.

The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.

Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.

But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, "low-intensity" conflict and "counter-terrorism."

Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of "total war" -- which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.

In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South's will to fight and its ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederate complaints of rape and murder of civilians.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Col. John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry were employing their own terror tactics to pacify Cheyennes. A scout named John Smith later described the attack at Sand Creek, Colorado, on unsuspecting Indians at a peaceful encampment:
"They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word." [U.S. Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., "The Chivington Massacre," Reports of the Committees.]
Though Smith's objectivity was challenged at the time, today even defenders of the Sand Creek raid concede that most women and children there were killed and mutilated. [See Lt. Col. William R. Dunn, I Stand by Sand Creek.]

Yet, in the 1860s, many whites in Colorado saw the slaughter as the only realistic way to bring peace, just as Sherman viewed his "march to the sea" as necessary to force the South's surrender.

The brutal tactics in the West also helped clear the way for the transcontinental railroad, built fortunes for favored businessmen and consolidated Republican political power for more than six decades, until the Great Depression of the 1930s. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Indian Genocide and Republican Power."]

Four years after the Civil War, Sherman became commanding general of the Army and incorporated the Indian pacification strategies -- as well as his own tactics -- into U.S. military doctrine. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who had led Indian wars in the Missouri territory, succeeded Sherman in 1883 and further entrenched those strategies as policy. [See Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide.]

By the end of the 19th Century, the Native American warriors had been vanquished, but the Army's winning strategies lived on.

Imperial America

When the United States claimed the Philippines as a prize in the Spanish-American War, Filipino insurgents resisted. In 1900, the U.S. commander, Gen. J. Franklin Bell, consciously modeled his brutal counterinsurgency campaign after the Indian wars and Sherman's "march to the sea."

Bell believed that by punishing the wealthier Filipinos through destruction of their homes -- much as Sherman had done in the South -- they would be coerced into helping convince their countrymen to submit.

Learning from the Indian wars, he also isolated the guerrillas by forcing Filipinos into tightly controlled zones where schools were built and other social amenities were provided.
"The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas was herded into concentration camps," wrote historian Stuart Creighton Miller. "Bell's main target was the wealthier and better-educated classes. … Adding insult to injury, Bell made these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country homes." [See Miller's "Benevolent Assimilation."]
For those outside the protected areas, there was terror. A supportive news correspondent described one scene in which American soldiers killed "men, women, children … from lads of 10 and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog. …
"Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to 'make them talk,' have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses."
Defending the tactics, the correspondent noted that "it is not civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality." [Philadelphia Ledger, Nov. 19, 1900]

In 1901, anti-imperialists in Congress exposed and denounced Bell's brutal tactics. Nevertheless, Bell's strategies won military acclaim as a refined method of pacification.

In a 1973 book, one pro-Bell military historian, John Morgan Gates, termed reports of U.S. atrocities "exaggerated" and hailed Bell's "excellent understanding of the role of benevolence in pacification."

Gates recalled that Bell's campaign in Batanga was regarded by military strategists as "pacification in its most perfected form." [See Gates's Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902.]

Spreading the Word

At the turn of the century, the methodology of pacification was a hot topic among the European colonial powers, too. From Namibia to Indochina, Europeans struggled to subdue local populations.

Often outright slaughter proved effective, as the Germans demonstrated with massacres of the Herrero tribe in Namibia from 1904-1907. But military strategists often compared notes about more subtle techniques of targeted terror mixed with demonstrations of benevolence.

Counterinsurgency strategies were back in vogue after World War II as many subjugated people demanded independence from colonial rule and Washington worried about the expansion of communism. In the 1950s, the Huk rebellion against U.S. dominance made the Philippines again the laboratory, with Bell's earlier lessons clearly remembered.

"The campaign against the Huk movement in the Philippines … greatly resembled the American campaign of almost 50 years earlier," historian Gates observed. "The American approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied one."
But the war against the Huks had some new wrinkles, particularly the modern concept of psychological warfare or psy-war.

Under the pioneering strategies of the CIA's Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, psy-war was a new spin to the old game of breaking the will of a target population. The idea was to analyze the psychological weaknesses of a people and develop "themes" that could induce actions favorable to those carrying out the operation.

While psy-war included propaganda and disinformation, it also relied on terror tactics of a demonstrative nature. An Army psy-war pamphlet, drawing on Lansdale's experience in the Philippines, advocated "exemplary criminal violence -- the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies," according to Michael McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.

In his memoirs, Lansdale boasted of one legendary psy-war trick used against the Huks who were considered superstitious and fearful of a vampire-like creature called an asuang.
"The psy-war squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks," Lansdale wrote. "When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man on the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail.

"When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed the asuang had got him." [See Lansdale's In the Midst of Wars.]

The Huk rebellion also saw the refinement of free-fire zones, a technique used effectively by Bell's forces a half-century earlier. In the 1950s, special squadrons were assigned to do the dirty work.
"The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy," explained one pro-U.S. Filipino colonel. "Almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano's Nenita Unit. [See Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines.]
On to Vietnam

The successful suppression of the Huks led the war's architects to share their lessons elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Valeriano went on to co-author an important American textbook on counterinsurgency and to serve as part of the American pacification effort in Vietnam with Lansdale.

Following the Philippine model, Vietnamese were crowded into "strategic hamlets"; "free-fire zones" were declared with homes and crops destroyed; and the Phoenix program eliminated thousands of suspected Viet Cong cadre.

The ruthless strategies were absorbed and accepted even by widely respected military figures, such as Gen. Colin Powell who served two tours in Vietnam and endorsed the routine practice of murdering Vietnamese males as a necessary part of the counterinsurgency effort.
"I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male," Powell wrote in his much-lauded memoir, My American Journey. "If a helo [a U.S. helicopter] spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.

"Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."
In 1965, the U.S. intelligence community formalized its hard-learned counterinsurgency lessons by commissioning a top-secret program called Project X. Based at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, the project drew from field experience and developed teaching plans to "provide intelligence training to friendly foreign countries," according to a Pentagon history prepared in 1991 and released in 1997.

Called "a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations," Project X "was first used by the U.S. Intelligence School on Okinawa to train Vietnamese and, presumably, other foreign nationals," the history stated.

Linda Matthews of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Division recalled that in 1967-68, some of the Project X training material was prepared by officers connected to the Phoenix program. "She suggested the possibility that some offending material from the Phoenix program may have found its way into the Project X materials at that time," the Pentagon report said.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to U.S. military assistance groups working with "friendly foreign countries." By the mid-1970s, the Project X material was going to armies all over the world.

In its 1992 review, the Pentagon acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents.

But disclosure of the full story was blocked near the end of the first Bush administration when senior Pentagon officials working for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Living Dangerously

By the mid-1960s, some of the U.S. counterinsurgency lessons had reached Indonesia, too. The U.S. military training was surreptitious because Washington viewed the country's neutralist leader Sukarno as politically suspect. The training was permitted only to give the United States influence within the Indonesian military which was considered more reliable.

The covert U.S. aid and training was mostly innocuous-sounding "civic action," which is generally thought to mean building roads, staffing health clinics and performing other "hearts-and-minds" activities with civilians. But "civic action" also provided cover in Indonesia, as in the Philippines and Vietnam, for psy-war.

The secret U.S.-Indonesian military connections paid off for Washington when a political crisis erupted, threatening Sukarno's government.

To counter Indonesia's powerful Communist Party, known as the PKI, the army's Red Berets organized the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. So many bodies were dumped into the rivers of East Java that they ran red with blood.

In a classic psy-war tactic, the bloated carcasses also served as a political warning to villages down river.
"To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes," wrote eyewitness Pipit Rochijat. "And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew." [See Rochijat's "Am I PKI or Non-PKI?" Indonesia, Oct. 1985.]
Some historians have attributed the grotesque violence to a crazed army which engaged in "unplanned brutality" or "mass hysteria" leading ultimately to the slaughter of some half million Indonesians, many of Chinese descent.

But the recurring tactic of putting bodies on gruesome display fits as well with the military doctrines of psy-war, a word that one of the leading military killers used in un-translated form in one order demanding elimination of the PKI.

Sarwo Edhie, chief of the political para-commando battalion known as the Red Berets, warned that the communist opposition "should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psy-war." [See The Revolt of the G30S/PKI and Its Suppression, translated by Robert Cribb in The Indonesian Killings.]

Sarwo Edhie had been identified as a CIA contact when he served at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia. [See Pacific, May-June 1968.]

US Media Sympathy

Elite U.S. reaction to the horrific slaughter was muted and has remained ambivalent ever since. The Johnson administration denied any responsibility for the massacres, but New York Times columnist James Reston spoke for many opinion leaders when he approvingly termed the bloody developments in Indonesia "a gleam of light in Asia."

The American denials of involvement held until 1990 when U.S. diplomats admitted to a reporter that they had aided the Indonesian army by supplying lists of suspected communists.
"It really was a big help to the army," embassy officer Robert Martens told Kathy Kadane of States News Service. "I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."
Martens had headed the U.S. team that compiled the death lists.

Kadane's story provoked a telling response from Washington Post senior editorial writer Stephen S. Rosenfeld. He accepted the fact that American officials had assisted "this fearsome slaughter," but then justified the killings.

Rosenfeld argued that the massacre "was and still is widely regarded as the grim but earned fate of a conspiratorial revolutionary party that represented the same communist juggernaut that was on the march in Vietnam."

In a column entitled, "Indonesia 1965: The Year of Living Cynically?" Rosenfeld reasoned that "either the army would get the communists or the communists would get the army, it was thought: Indonesia was a domino, and the PKI's demise kept it [Indonesia] standing in the free world. …
"Though the means were grievously tainted, we -- the fastidious among us as well as the hard-headed and cynical -- can be said to have enjoyed the fruits in the geopolitical stability of that important part of Asia, in the revolution that never happened." [Washington Post, July 13, 1990]
The fruit tasted far more bitter to the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, however. In 1975, the army of Indonesia's new dictator, Gen. Suharto, invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. When the East Timorese resisted, the Indonesian army returned to its gruesome bag of tricks, engaging in virtual genocide against the population.

A Catholic missionary provided an eyewitness account of one search-and-destroy mission in East Timor in 1981.
"We saw with our own eyes the massacre of the people who were surrendering: all dead, even women and children, even the littlest ones. … Not even pregnant women were spared: they were cut open. …. They did what they had done to small children the previous year, grabbing them by the legs and smashing their heads against rocks. …

"The comments of Indonesian officers reveal the moral character of this army: 'We did the same thing [in 1965] in Java, in Borneo, in the Celebes, in Irian Jaya, and it worked." [See A. Barbedo de Magalhaes, East Timor: Land of Hope.]
The references to the success of the 1965 slaughter were not unusual. In Timor: A People Betrayed, author James Dunn noted that "on the Indonesian side, there have been many reports that many soldiers viewed their operation as a further phase in the ongoing campaign to suppress communism that had followed the events of September 1965."

Classic psy-war and pacification strategies were followed to the hilt in East Timor. The Indonesians put on display corpses and the heads of their victims. Timorese also were herded into government-controlled camps before permanent relocation in "resettlement villages" far from their original homes.
"The problem is that people are forced to live in the settlements and are not allowed to travel outside," said Msgr. Costa Lopes, apostolic administrator of Dili. "This is the main reason why people cannot grow enough food." [See John G. Taylor, Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor.]
Public Revulsion

Through television in the 1960-70s, the Vietnam War finally brought the horrors of counterinsurgency home to millions of Americans. They watched as U.S. troops torched villages and forced distraught old women to leave ancestral homes.

Camera crews caught on film brutal interrogation of Viet Cong suspects, the execution of one young VC officer, and the bombing of children with napalm.

In effect, the Vietnam War was the first time Americans got to witness the pacification strategies that had evolved secretly as national security policy since the 19th Century. As a result, millions of Americans protested the war's conduct and Congress belatedly compelled an end to U.S. participation in 1974.

But the psy-war doctrinal debates were not resolved by the Vietnam War. Counterinsurgency advocates regrouped in the 1980s behind President Ronald Reagan, who mounted a spirited defense of the Vietnamese intervention and reaffirmed U.S. resolve to employ similar tactics against leftist forces especially in Central America. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Guatemala: A Test Tube for Repression."]

Reagan also added an important new component to the mix. Recognizing how graphic images and honest reporting from the war zone had undercut public support for the counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Reagan authorized an aggressive domestic "public diplomacy" operation which practiced what was called "perception management" -- in effect, intimidating journalists to ensure that only sanitized information would reach the American people.

Reporters who disclosed atrocities by U.S.-trained forces, such as the El Mozote massacre by El Salvador's Atlacatl battalion in 1981, came under harsh criticism and saw their careers damaged.

Some Reagan operatives were not shy about their defense of political terror as a necessity of the Cold War. Neil Livingstone, a counter-terrorism consultant to the National Security Council, called death squads "an extremely effective tool, however odious, in combatting terrorism and revolutionary challenges." [See McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.]

When Democrats in Congress objected to excesses of Reagan's interventions in Central America, the administration responded with more public relations and political pressure, questioning the patriotism of the critics. For instance, Reagan's United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick accused anyone who took note of U.S.-backed war crimes of "blaming America first."

Many Democrats in Congress and journalists in the Washington press corps buckled under the attacks, giving the Reagan administration much freer rein to carry out brutal "death squad" strategies in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

What is clear from these experiences in Indonesia, Vietnam, Central America and elsewhere is that the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality embraced by counterinsurgency specialists.

Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. But sometimes the two competing visions - of a just America and a ruthless one - clash in the open, as they did in Vietnam.

Or the dark side of U.S. security policy is thrown into the light by unauthorized leaks, such as the photos of abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or by revelations about waterboarding and other torture authorized by George W. Bush's White House as part of the "war on terror."

Only then does the public get a glimpse of the grim reality, the bloody and brutal tactics that have been deemed "necessary" for more than two centuries in the defense of the purported "national interests."

Peter Dale Scott is an author and poet whose books have focused on “deep politics,” the intersection of economics, criminality and national security. (For more, go to http://www.peterdalescott.net/) Robert Parry is a veteran Washington investigative journalist. (For his books, go to http://www.neckdeepbook.com)

October 10, 2010

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Israeli Cabinet Passes Loyalty Bill, Arabs Angry

Associated Press
October 10, 2010

Israel's Cabinet approved a bill on Sunday that would require new non-Jewish citizens to pledge a loyalty oath to a "Jewish and democratic" state, language that triggered charges of racism from Arab lawmakers who see it as undermining the rights of the country's Arab minority.

The measure was largely symbolic, since few non-Jews apply for Israeli citizenship. Nevertheless, it infuriated the Arab minority and stoked tensions with Palestinians at a time when fledgling peace talks are deadlocked over Israel's refusal to extend a moratorium on new building in West Bank Jewish settlements.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the bill reflected the essence of Israel at a time when he said many in the world are trying to blur the connection between the Jewish people and their homeland.
"The state of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people and is a democratic state in which all its citizens — Jews and non-Jews — enjoy full equal rights," he said. "Whoever wants to join us has to recognize us."
Ahmad Tibi, an Arab lawmaker, called the move a provocation.
"Its purpose is to solidify the inferior status of Arabs by law," he said. "Netanyahu and his government are limiting the sphere of democracy in Israel and deepening the prejudice against its Arab minority."
Unlike their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel's Arabs are citizens, with the right to vote, travel freely and collect generous social benefits. But they have long suffered from discrimination and second-class status. Arabs make up roughly one-fifth of Israel's 7 million people.

While the new bill would not force Arab citizens to profess their loyalty, a non-Jewish spouse of any Israeli would have to take the oath in order to receive citizenship.

Israel's Interior Ministry said several thousand people would be affected by the measure, while Adalah, an Arab advocacy group, said the number was about 25,000. The bill presumably would not affect Jewish newcomers, who automatically receive citizenship under Israel's "Law of Return."

Roni Schocken, spokesman for the Abraham Fund, a group that promotes coexistence between Israeli Jews and Arabs, said the new legislation added to what is becoming a "terrifying" atmosphere for Arabs. Efforts are under way in parliament, for instance, to punish groups that mourn the "Nakba," or catastrophe, the term Palestinians use to describe the suffering caused by Israel's founding.
"It conveys a very strong message that Arabs are second-rate citizens," Schocken said.
The bill — which must pass a wider parliamentary vote to become law — easily passed in the cabinet by a 22-8 margin. Only a handful of ministers, mostly from the centrist Labor Party, opposed it.

It was backed by Yisrael Beitenu, a hard-line nationalist party whose leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, openly questioned the loyalty of Israel's Arabs during last year's election campaign. The issue helped propel his party to a strong third place in parliamentary elections.

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni of the centrist Kadima Party criticized the measure Sunday, saying it "doesn't contribute anything" to preserving Israel's existence "as a Jewish state with equality for all."

Many Israeli Arabs openly identify with the Palestinians, and in recent years, a small number of Israeli Arabs have been charged with spying for Israel's Arab enemies.

In the most controversial proposal, Lieberman called for all citizens, including Arabs, to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish state and wanted anyone refusing to do so to be stripped of citizenship. That measure, widely seen as anti-Arab, was struck down by a ministerial committee last year.
"Obviously this is not the end of the issue of loyalty in return for citizenship, but this is a highly important step," Lieberman said of Sunday's vote.
The vote came during an impasse in Mideast peacemaking. Just a month after they began, talks between Israelis and the Palestinians have become deadlocked over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank.

Palestinians say they will not resume negotiations unless Israel extends a 10-month-old slowdown on new housing construction, which ended in late September.

Netanyahu has rejected an extension, but is considering compromises to keep the talks alive. Over the weekend, the Arab League gave the U.S., which has been mediating talks, another month to resolve the deadlock.

Under heavy international pressure, Netanyahu has been sounding out key Cabinet ministers but does not appear to have a majority for extending the building restrictions.

Lieberman has been a vocal critic of extending the settlement curbs. Netanyahu's decision to bring the loyalty bill to a Cabinet vote may be a way to soften Lieberman's opposition to extending the slowdown, though officials have denied there is any connection.

October 8, 2010

Israel, the U.S. and the Arab World

New Face, Same Imperialism

By Tariq Ali, The Age
October 6, 2010

After all the hope and hype, Obama's foreign policy mirrors the ugliness of the Bush years.

The election to the presidency of a mixed-race Democrat, vowing to heal America's wounds at home and restore its reputation abroad, was greeted with a wave of ideological euphoria not seen since the days of Kennedy. The shameful interlude of Republican swagger and criminality was over. George Bush and Dick Cheney had broken the continuity of a multilateral American leadership that had served the country well throughout the Cold War and after. Barack Obama would now restore it.

Rarely has self-interested mythology — or well-meaning gullibility — been more quickly exposed. There was no fundamental break in foreign policy between the Bush and Obama regimes. The strategic goals and imperatives of the US imperium remain the same, as do its principal theatres and means of operation.

Obama's line towards Israel would be manifest even before he took office. On December 27, 2008, the Israeli Defence Forces launched an all-out air and ground assault on the population of Gaza. Bombing, burning, killing continued without interruption for 22 days, during which time the president-elect uttered not a syllable of reproof. By pre-arrangement, Tel Aviv called off its blitz a few hours before his inauguration on January 20, 2009, not to spoil the party.

Once installed, Obama called, like every US president, for peace between the two suffering peoples of the Holy Land, and again, like every predecessor, for Palestinians to recognise Israel and for Israel to stop its settlements in the territories it seized in 1967. Within a week of the President's speech in Cairo pledging opposition to further settlements, the governing Netanyahu coalition was extending Jewish properties in East Jerusalem with impunity.

However, war-zones further east have the first call on imperial attention. In 2002, on his way up the political ladder as a low-profile state senator in Illinois, Obama opposed the attack on Iraq; it was politically inexpensive to do so. By the time he was elected President, his first act was to maintain Bush's Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, long-time CIA functionary and veteran of the Iran-Contra affair, in the Pentagon. A cruder and more demonstrative signal of political continuity could hardly have been conceived.

Before his election, Obama promised a withdrawal of all US ''combat'' troops from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office, that is, by May 2010 — with a safety clause that the pledge could be ''refined'' in the light of events. It promptly was.

There persists the uneasy thought that the Iraqi resistance, capable of inflicting such damage on the US military machine only yesterday, might just be biding its time after its heavy losses and the defection of an important segment, and could still visit havoc on the collaborators tomorrow, should the US pull out altogether. To ensure against any such danger, Washington has put down markers in the modern equivalents — vastly larger and more hideous — of the Crusader fortresses of old.

As for Iran, schemes for a grand reconciliation between the two states had to be set aside. The calculation was upset by political polarisation in Iran itself. For Obama, the opportunity for ideological posturing was too great to resist. In a peerless display of sanctimony, he lamented with moist-eyed grief the death of a demonstrator killed in Tehran on the same day his drones wiped out 60 villagers, most of them women and children, in Pakistan.

The Democratic administration has now reverted to the line of its predecessor, attempting to corral Russia and China — European acquiescence can be taken for granted — into an economic blockade of Iran, in the hope of so strangling the country that the Supreme Leader will either be overthrown or obliged to come to terms.

From Palestine through Iraq to Iran, Obama has acted as just another steward of the US empire, pursuing the same aims as his predecessors, with the same means but with a more emollient rhetoric. In Afghanistan, he has gone further, widening the front of imperial aggression with a major escalation of violence, both technological and territorial.

When he took office, Afghanistan had already been occupied by US and satellite forces for more than seven years. During his election campaign, Obama — determined to outdo Bush in prosecuting a ''just war'' — pledged more troops and fire-power to crush the Afghan resistance, and more ground intrusions and drone attacks in Pakistan to burn out support for it across the border. This is one promise he has kept.

In what The New York Times delicately described as a ''statistic that the White House has not advertised'', it has informed its readers that ''since Mr Obama came to office, the Central Intelligence Agency has mounted more Predator drone strikes into Pakistan than during Mr Bush's eight years in office''.

Desperate to claim victory in a self-chosen ''just war'', Obama has dispatched a still larger expeditionary force, expanding the war to a neighbouring country where the enemy is suspected of finding succour. It was announced that Pakistan and Afghanistan would henceforward be treated as an integrated war-zone: ''Afpak''.

If a textbook illustration were needed of the continuity of American foreign policy across administrations, and the futility of so many soft-headed attempts to treat the Bush-Cheney years as exceptional rather than essentially conventional, Obama's conduct has provided it. From one end of the Middle East to the other, the only significant material change he has brought is a further escalation of the War on Terror — or ''Evil'', as he prefers to call it — with Yemen now being seen as the next target.

Still, it would be a mistake to think that nothing has changed. No administration is exactly like any other, and each president leaves a stamp on his own. Substantively, vanishingly little of US imperial dominion has altered under Obama. But propagandistically, there has been a significant upgrade. In Cairo, at West Point, at Oslo, the world has been treated to one uplifting homily after another, to describe America's glowing mission in the world, and modest avowal of awe and sense of responsibility in carrying it forward.

Cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it.

Tariq Ali is a London-based historian, writer and political campaigner who is in Australia to deliver the 2010 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Adelaide University. He will be speaking in Melbourne tonight at the Melbourne City Conference Centre.

October 5, 2010

War Against Anglo Saxon Imperialism

Times Square Bomber Sentenced, Warns of More Attacks

Associated Press
October 5, 2010

The Pakistani immigrant who tried to detonate a car bomb on a busy Saturday night in Times Square accepted a life sentence with a smirk Tuesday and warned that Americans can expect more bloodshed at the hands of Muslims.
"Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun," 31-year-old Faisal Shahzad told a federal judge. "Consider me the first droplet of the blood that will follow."
His punishment for building the propane-and-gasoline bomb and driving it into the heart of the city in an SUV last May was a foregone conclusion, since the charges to which he pleaded guilty carried a mandatory life sentence, which under federal rules will keep him behind bars until he dies.

But the former budget analyst from Connecticut used the courtroom appearance to rail against the U.S., saying the country will continue to pay for occupying Muslim countries.
"We are only Muslims trying to defend our religion, people, homes and land, but if you call us terrorists, then we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you until you leave our lands and people at peace," he told U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum.
Shahzad — brought into the courtroom in handcuffs, and wearing a long beard and white skullcap — had instructed his attorney not to speak, and Cedarbaum told prosecutors she didn't need to hear from them.

That left the two free to spar over his reasoning for giving up his comfortable life in America to train in Pakistan and carry out an attack authorities say could have killed an untold number of pedestrians.
"You appear to be someone who was capable of education, and I do hope you will spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Quran wants you to kill lots of people," Cedarbaum said.
Shahzad responded that the "Quran gives us the right to defend. And that's all I'm doing."



Reuters/Jane Rosenburg/Files

The judge cut him off at one point to ask if he had sworn allegiance to the U.S. when he became a citizen last year.
"I did swear, but I did not mean it," Shahzad said.
In his address to the court, he said Osama bin Laden "will be known as no less than Saladin of the 21st-century crusade" — a reference to the Muslim hero of the Crusades. He also said:
"If I'm given 1,000 lives, I will sacrifice them all."
Shahzad smirked when the judge imposed the sentence. Asked if he had any final words, he said,
"I'm happy with the deal that God has given me."
Afterward, the head of the FBI's New York office, Janice K. Fedarcyk, cited evidence that Shahzad hoped to strike more than once.
"Shahzad built a mobile weapon of mass destruction and hoped and intended that it would kill large numbers of innocent people and planned to do it again two weeks later," Fedarcyk said in a statement. "The sentence imposed today means Shahzad will never pose that threat again."
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called Shahzad a "remorseless terrorist who betrayed his adopted country."
"We have to be concerned about homegrown terrorists given recent events. We're working as hard as we can to make sure we don't have another event like that," Bharara said.
Calling himself a Muslim soldier, Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts. He said the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen.

For greatest impact, he chose a crowded a section of Times Square by studying an online streaming video of the so-called Crossroads of the World, prosecutors said.

On May 1, he lit the fuse of his crude bomb packed in a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, then walked away, pausing to listen for the explosion that never came, court papers said. A street vendor spotted smoke coming from the SUV and alerted police, who quickly cleared the area.

The bomb attempt set off an intense investigation that culminated two days later with investigators plucking Shahzad off a Dubai-bound plane at a New York airport.

Prosecutors introduced a dramatic videotape of an FBI-staged explosion in a Pennsylvania field that they said demonstrated how deadly Shahzad's bomb could have been.

The FBI's car bomb — a 1993 Pathfinder fitted with 250 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel, three 25-pound propane tanks and two five-gallon gasoline canisters — blew up with a force that ripped the sport utility vehicle in half.

The explosion caused a giant fireball that overturned and shredded four other cars parked nearby, obliterated about a dozen dummies and shot fiery debris hundreds of feet in all directions.

October 4, 2010

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Arsonists Torch Mosque in West Bank Village

The Associated Press
October 4, 2010

Arsonists torched a mosque in a Palestinian village in the West Bank on Monday, scrawling "revenge" on a wall in Hebrew and charring copies of the Muslim holy book in a blaze that threatened to stoke new tensions over deadlocked Mideast peacemaking.

Palestinians suspect hardline Jewish settlers set the fire in the village of Beit Fajjar. The lead Palestinian negotiator said the fire reflected the significance Jewish West Bank settlements have in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Peacemaking has stalled just a month after a new round of talks was launched in Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under heavy international pressure to extend recently expired restrictions on settlement construction.

The Palestinians have said they cannot continue peace talks if settlement building resumes. But Netanyahu, facing heavy pressure within his pro-settlement governing coalition, has refused to extend the restrictions.

White House envoy George Mitchell has been shuttling across the region over the past week in hopes of brokering a compromise, but so far has not been able to find a solution.

Netanyahu has sounded out political allies about the possibility of renewing the restrictions in exchange for U.S. sweeteners.

At the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting Monday, Netanyahu said Israel was "in intense diplomatic negotiations with the American administration to find a solution to allow the talks to continue" but didn't tip his hand about possible U.S. benefits.

Israeli media have published unconfirmed reports that American mediators offered Netanyahu a package of far-reaching incentives in return for agreeing to a 60-day extension, including new weaponry.

According to the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, the U.S. also promised to support an Israeli demand to leave troops along the eastern border of a future Palestinian state after a peace agreement, a demand the Palestinians have said they will not accept.

There was no claim of responsibility for Monday's mosque burning, but suspicions fell on extremist Jewish settlers. A tiny minority of hardline Jews often damage Palestinian property in what they call the "price tag" policy — meant to frighten Palestinians or to express outrage over the Israeli government's slowdown on settlement construction.

The fire left a layer of soot on the beautiful, stone-built mosque.
"A mosque must be burned" was scrawled in Hebrew on an inside wall, and "Revenge" was written on another wall.
Inside the mosque, a neat row of Muslim holy books, the Quran, were charred, and the carpet was blackened.

The village is ringed by Jewish settlements, and both Palestinian residents and a settler leader acknowledged that relations are tense.

Dozens of grim-faced residents milled around as blue-clad Israeli police and khaki-uniformed soldiers tried to maintain order.
"Only somebody who doesn't fear God would do this," said resident Ayman Taqatqa. "We won't allow people to offend our religion. We'll defend it with our lives."
He and other residents said they saw a car pull up to the mosque before dawn. Two men then rushed inside, while another two stood guard outside and two men stayed in the car, they said.

Taqatqa said he saw a small blaze and began yelling for his neighbors to come. He said they waited for the men to leave before putting out the blaze, fearing they were armed Jewish settlers. Palestinian residents complain that Israeli police do little to protect them.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said they were looking into the incident.

It was the third mosque burning in the past year, following incidents last December and March.

The attack is likely to make U.S. efforts to revive peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators more difficult. Palestinian negotiators say they cannot build a state that includes the West Bank while Israel continues to expand Jewish settlements on the land they claim.

October 3, 2010

Iran

Ahmadinejad: U.S. Leaders Should Be 'Buried'

Associated Press
October 3, 2010

Iran's president Sunday called for U.S. leaders to be "buried" in response to what he says are American threats of military attack against Tehran's nuclear program.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is known for brash rhetoric in addressing the West, but in a speech Sunday he went a step further using a deeply offensive insult in response to U.S. statements that the military option against Iran is still on the table.
"May the undertaker bury you, your table and your body, which has soiled the world," he said using language in Iran reserved for hated enemies.
Several top U.S. officials including Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff have said in recent months that the military option remains on the table and there is a plan to attack Iran, although a military strike has been described as a bad idea.

The crowd of military men and clerics in the town of Hashtgerd just west of the capital chuckled at the president's insult and applauded.

The speech was broadcast by both state television and the official English-language Press TV, but the latter glossed over the insult in the simultaneous translation.

Ahmadinejad's remarks come in sharp contrast to ones he made to Al-Jazeera Arabic news channel in August in which he offered the U.S. Iran's friendship.

In Sunday's speech, Ahmadinejad also questioned once more who was behind the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. and said they gave Washington a pretext for seeking to dominate the region and plunder its oil wealth.

During his speech in front of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he said a majority of people in the U.S. and around the world believe the American government staged the attacks, drawing a strong rebuke from President Barack Obama.

Ahmadinejad often resorts to provocative statements to lash out enemies. He has already compared the power of Iran's enemies to a "mosquito," saying Iran deals with the West over its nuclear activities from a position of power and he has likened the United States to a "farm animal trapped in a quagmire" in Afghanistan.

Iran also condemned the latest U.S. sanctions slapped on eight Iranian officials Wednesday, saying they show American interference in Tehran's domestic affairs.

Washington this week imposed travel and financial sanctions on the eight Iranians, accusing them of taking part in human rights abuses during the turmoil following Iran's June 2009 presidential election.
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