Posted on 12/17/2006 4:03:30 PM PST by DAVEY CROCKETT
Ahmadinejad in Delirium
Ahmadinejad in Delirium
AN: "The people of the world are asking us to emancipate them"
http://emruz.info/ShowItem.aspx?ID=4535&p=1
One of the symptoms of totalitarian ideology is temporary disorder of
the
totalitarians' mental faculties. AN has shown a number of these
symptoms
in his two years of holding office (I do not believe that Iran's
political
system is a totalitarian one, but AN's ideology is totalitarian).
According to AN, the president office has been receiving thousands of
letters from other countries' citizens every day asking Iran to
emancipate
them. Tens of thousands per day add up to tens of millions of letters
per
year. It is impossible for Iranian postal service to deliver this
volume
of letters to the president's office in Pasture Street. It is also
impossible for his staff to deal with them. AN does not really know
what
"tens of thousands per day" mean or he lies. Who in the world, other
than
people who are in fevers, disturbances of consciousness, or
intoxication,
could equate thousands of people (this should be the number for the
whole
year) with the people of the world? Somebody should remind him that the
population of earth is about six billions.
Most of the characteristics of mental disorder, i.e., excitement,
delusions, and hallucinations, can be observed in AN. He got excited
when
he was exposed to the projectors of the UN auditorium; he thought that
angels were coming down for him. He looks at himself as the savior of
the
world, an official who is not able to feed his own people; according to
his vice president, 4.5 million people in Iran have an income of 30
dollars per month and are only able to have bread and yoghourt as their
food: http://emruz.info/ShowItem.aspx?ID=4506&p=1. This government pays
hundreds of millions of dollars to the people (Hamas) who mourn for
Saddam
who killed, gassed and crippled hundreds of thousands of Iranians.
AN has a distorted sense of reality and his ideological view is pushing
him to distort reality on a daily basis. According to his
administration,
inflation is fiction, foreign threats are nonsense and psychological
warfare (http://www.roozonline.com/archives/2007/01/001425.php) and
dissidence is delusion. Torture and solitary confinement is to heal
dissidents of the regime.
Khamenei wished for a president who was able to kiss his hand in
public;
only a socially and politically retarded person as president was able
to
do that.
Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran over Turkey - paper
http://www.thenewanatolian.com/tna-20813.html
Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran over Turkey - paper
The New Anatolian / Ankara
08 January 2007
Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment
facilities with tactical nuclear weapons and
three possible routes to Iran have been mapped out including one over
Turkey, the Sunday Times said.
Citing what it said were several Israeli military sources, the paper
said two Israeli air force squadrons had been training to blow up an
enrichment plant in Natanz using low-yield nuclear "bunker busters". Two
other sites, a heavy water plant at Arak and a uranium conversion plant
at Isfahan, would be targeted with conventional bombs, the Sunday Times
said.
On the claim that one of the possible routes of Israeli attack will be
over Turkey, there was no immediate reaction from the Turkish
authorities on Sunday.
Turkey is the only majority-Muslim nation that has strategic political
and military relations with Israel. Tel Aviv and Ankara signed two
strategic agreements, on defense industry cooperation and military
cooperation, in 1996, and they have been holding critical annual meetings,
especially on regional threats analysis, since that date.
Turkish Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Ergin Saygun held key talks
with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv late last month on the recent
developments in Middle East and the threat of the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction in the region.
Turkey also has close relations with neighboring Iran, and several
high-level visits recently increased trust among Ankara and Tehran. But
still Turkey expresses concern about Iran's Shahab missiles and their
ranges as well as the possibility of Iran's using its nuclear capacity in
weapons. Ankara says that Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy
but opposes its acquisition of atomic weapons, saying this would spark
an arms race across the region.
The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously last month to slap
sanctions on Iran to try to stop uranium enrichment that Western powers fear
could lead to making bombs. Tehran insists its plans are peaceful and
says it will continue enrichment. Israel has refused to rule out
pre-emptive military action against Iran along the lines of its 1981 air strike
against an atomic reactor in Iraq, although many analysts believe
Iran's nuclear facilities are too much for Israel to take on alone.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said on Sunday it would not
respond to the claim of the British newspaper. "We don't respond to
publications in the Sunday Times," said Miri Eisin, Olmert's spokeswoman.
Israeli Minister of Strategic Threats Avigdor Lieberman also declined
to comment on the report.
But Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said, "The focus of the
Israeli activity today is to give full support to diplomatic actions and the
expeditious and full implementation of Security Council resolution
1737. If diplomacy succeeds, the problem can be solved peaceably."
In Tehran, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told
a news conference that the newspaper report "will make clear to the
world public opinion that the Zionist regime (Israel) is the main menace
to global peace and the region". He said "any measure against Iran will
not be left without a response and the invader will regret its act
immediately."
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped
off the map" and Israel has said it will not allow Iran to acquire a
bomb. The Sunday Times quoted sources as saying a nuclear strike would
only be used if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene. Disclosure of the plans could be intended to
put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, the paper added.
It said the Israeli plan envisaged conventional laser-guided bombs
opening "tunnels" into the targets. Nuclear warheads would then be used
fired into the plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce
radioactive fallout. Israeli pilots have flown to Gibraltar in recent weeks
to train for the 2,000 mile (3,200 km) round-trip to the Iranian
targets, the Sunday Times said, and three possible routes to Iran have been
mapped out including one over Turkey.
Air force squadrons based at Hatzerim in the Negev desert and Tel Nof,
south of Tel Aviv, have trained to use Israel's tactical nuclear
weapons on the mission. The preparations have been overseen by Major General
Eliezer Shkedi, commander of the Israeli air force. Sources close to
the Pentagon told the British daily that the United States was highly
unlikely to give approval for tactical nuclear weapons to be used. One
source said Israel would have to seek approval "after the event", as it
did when it crippled Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak with airstrikes in
1981.
Scientists have calculated that although contamination from the
bunker-busters could be limited, tons of radioactive uranium compounds would
be released.
The Israelis believe that Iran's retaliation would be constrained by
fear of a second strike if it were to launch its Shehab-3 ballistic
missiles at Israel.
However, American experts warned of repercussions, including widespread
protests that could destabilize parts of the Islamic world friendly to
the West.
Colonel Sam Gardiner, a Pentagon adviser, said Iran could try to close
the Strait of Hormuz, the route for 20% of the world's oil.
Some sources in Washington said they doubted if Israel would have the
nerve to attack Iran. However, Dr Ephraim Sneh, the deputy Israeli
defense minister, said last month: "The time is approaching when Israel and
the international community will have to decide whether to take
military action against Iran."
08 January 2007
The future of insecurity in Rio
Rio’s organized criminal factions have attacked various points through out the city. While Brazil’s president has called the events acts of terrorism, it is unclear if more police mean increased security.
Commentary by Sam Logan for ISN Security Watch (08/01/07)
Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva focused on security during the inauguration speech of his second term of office on 1 January. Speaking directly to Rio de Janeiro state governor Sergio Cabral, who was standing in the crowd, Lula said, “What has happened in Rio de Janeiro is not common crime, it is terrorism, and it needs to be fought with strong police and the strong hand of the Brazilian state.”
Later that day during his own inaugural speech, Cabral made security a central theme, announcing he would not hesitate to ask for federal help. During a phone conversation two days later, Lula told Cabral that the federal government was prepared to support him with national police and military soldiers, if necessary, to combat crime in the city of Rio de Janeiro, according to the Brazilian daily O Globo.
The events that sparked such strong discourse from one of the region’s leftist leaders began early in the morning on 28 December. Masked gunmen carried out attacks on fire and police stations, including attacks on police personnel, pinpointing specific areas of the city. The attackers also seized and burned city buses. After 24 hours of seemingly random violence, some 25 Brazilians had been killed. Seven had been burned alive inside a blazing bus.
Observers claimed leaders of the city’s organized criminal factions organized the attacks just days before Cabral’s 1 January inauguration to send him a message: They were still a strong force to be respected. But the relationship between Rio’s criminals and the city and state political leaders runs much deeper than a show of bravado.
Since the mid-1980s, Rio’s criminal factions have traded guns and drugs along the currents of an underground world where power matters more that life. The city’s shantytowns, or favelas, evolved from communities of impoverished families to well-defended fiefdoms.
Heavy handed policies, a zero-tolerance anti-drug campaign, and military-like incursions into favela communities dominated the 1990s as leaders in Rio worked to contain the city’s security problems. They did not much care what happened inside the favelas as long as the insecurity did not spread into the street, especially the rich communities in the tourist area in the southern zone.
As the 90s stretched into the new millennium, a strong focus on gathering intelligence through cell phone tapping and the use of special operation troops, called the Battalion of Special Operations, helped whittle away at the power of the city’s organized criminal factions. By December, 2005 the state security secretary, Marcelo Itagiba, announced that all the city’s major criminal leaders had either been killed or captured. What he did not announce was that the captured leaders still wielded power while behind bars.
Many of these same leaders orchestrated the events of 28 December, only a year and some weeks after Itagiba made his public announcement.
Rio’s security forces managed to weaken organized criminal factions to make just enough room for another group of opportunists to enter the scene. As of last week, various groups of well-organized militias had taken control of some 92 favelas and 17 neighborhoods, according to Rio-based daily O Globo.
These militias, made up of off-duty policemen and retired cops, claim to offer security to the residents of the communities they “protect.” Yet, unlike the public security forces, the militias charge a tax, which amounts to thinly veiled extortion.
As much as 60 percent of the businesses in these areas are charged up to five percent of revenue. They range from some of the largest companies in the state to small food stands. Individual home owners must also pay some five reales (US$ 2.50) a month, which is a considerable sum for poor individuals that earn that much a day.
The presence of these militias grew from some 42 communities in 2005 to the present number.
Their existence is a nuisance to the organized criminal factions that over time have watched their turf exchange hands from allied groups to corrupt cops. Their frustration was the catalyst for the attack on various police points around the city.
The events that Brazil’s president called terrorism were directed at the men that form the growing numbers of paramilitary groups. These men have splintered the rule of law by taking justice into their own hands. They have undermined the contract between citizen and state by extorting the very people that many of them have sworn to protect.
Rio is besieged by organized crime, various bands of militia groups, and the city’s military police. Soon, there will be a fourth variable - elite policemen sent from the federal government, and perhaps a fifth - military soldiers - also brought in to help secure the city streets. Already, Cabral has asked for a minimum of 7,000 national police. The government may deliver before 9 January.
Sam Logan is an investigative journalist who has reported on security, energy, politics, economics, organized crime, terrorism and black markets in Latin America since 1999. He is the Latin American correspondent for ISN Security Watch.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).
Printed from http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=17087
Online version provided by the International Relations and Security Network
A public service run by the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich © 1996-2004
08 January 2007
After Islamists defeat, Somalia in catch-22
With an apparently facile victory achieved over the Council of Somalia Islamic Courts, the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government faces a more difficult challenge in establishing a functioning government in Somalia.
By Simon Roughneen for ISN Security Watch (08/01/07)
After a blitzkrieg campaign launched Christmas Eve involving an estimated 15,000 Ethiopian troops backed by tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has established itself in Mogadishu, after spending most of its precarious and ineffective existence thus far in the western town of Baidoa.
The quick defeat of the Islamists has averted fears of a Somali vortex pulling the Horn of Africa into a regional war. But in its place, a long-running guerrilla campaign and renewed insecurity are likely. Princeton Lyman, Africa Program Director at the Council on Foreign Relations, told ISN Security Watch, “I expect a good deal of instability and warlord-type of activity for awhile at least.”
Ethiopian and TFG troops much assert control rapidly, before Islamists regroup or are rearmed by the Hawiye, as a means of curbing renewed warlord chaos. The Ethiopian presence may radicalize a greater proportion of Somali Muslims. The early signs are not propitious with recent fighting in Mogadishu between unidentified gunmen and Ethiopian soldiers. A TFG deadline for weapons to be handed in was ignored by secular warlords and Islamists. And while the latter suffered a comprehensive defeat in the face of one of Africa’s largest standing armies, 3000 CSIC fighters have reportedly melted into Mogadishu's civilian population. With warlords reasserting their presence across the city through the use of roadblocks and renewed extortion and intimidation of the civilian population, the Somali capital is a tinderbox.
Throughout early 2006, the CSIC conducted a 6-month campaign to assert control over Mogadishu’s hitherto rampant warlords, who had carved Mogadishu into fiefdoms resulting in a state of violent anarchy. The Islamists then sought to bring all of Somalia under its control, leading the country on a collision course with the TFG and the Ethiopians. Peace talks between the two sides were held in Khartoum, but were breached by the Islamist advance and the Ethiopian presence at Baidoa.
Stephen Morrison, Africa Program Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, told ISN Security Watch that the Ethiopians and the International Somali Contact Group have a “brief window to press the TFG to enlarge its support and credibility by co-opting moderate Islamist elements and others.” Hardliners in the CSIC have been defeated, for now, and the CSIC was as much a business-sponsored and clan-based entity was it was a religious-ideological one.
However, the TFG must rein in its own warlord allies and persuade them not to carve up Mogadishu and the rest of Somalia into fiefdoms. The TFG must prioritize the powerful Hawiye clan of which President Abdullahi Yusuf is a member. The Hawiye provided the backbone of the CSIC, but are not ideologically-committed to an Islamist state in Somalia, and may be persuaded to consent to TFG rule if co-opted into government. The CSIC set a mid-December deadline for the Ethiopian troops to withdraw, but when it became apparent that the stability brought about by the CSIC was to be jeopardized by the Ethiopian desire to fight, the Hawiye curtailed the CSIC weapons supply.
But while the Ethiopians remain in the country in large numbers, it is difficult to envisage the TFG acquiring the legitimacy needed to govern or to persuade even its own warlords to disarm at the behest of a foreign power. UN Security Council Resolution 1725, passed 6 December, may have been a trigger for conflict, given that the CSIC regarded the proposed African Union (AU) peacekeeping force as a US proxy occupation, but the politics and logistics of peace enforcement mean that the Ethiopians must withdraw soon – within weeks according to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi – but some effective armed force must be present to attempt to disarm secular warlords and allow humanitarian aid to reach civilians and ensure that Islamists do not revive.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has agreed to send a 1000-strong detachment of peacekeepers as part of the proposed AU force, and Nigeria has made positive noises on deployment without any official commitment. However, the AU force must be deployed quickly to enable the Ethiopians to leave. Given the ineffective AU presence in Darfur, it remains unclear how a similar deployment could work in an even more volatile context in urban Mogadishu. The Center for Strategic and International Studies' Morrison said that a UN force was necessary. It may be seen by Somalis as less partial than a force comprised of Ethiopian allies such as Uganda.
While fears of guerrilla attacks persist, the CSIC's combination of battlefield bravado and military naivety meant they suffered heavy losses after engaging one of Africa’s biggest armies in pitched battles. According to Lyman, “It is too early to be certain about the capacity of the Islamists to launch a guerrilla war or to carry out terrorist attacks. They lost many in the fighting and some of their adherents gave up and went home. "Others, however, have escaped to the hills and probably to Kenya. My guess is that they will seek to take advantage of anti-Ethiopian feeling to build up cadres to carry out such attacks. Thus, how long Ethiopian troops remain in Somalia will be a factor,” he told ISN Security Watch.
Al-Qaida second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri released a statement calling on the CSIC to resist the TFG and the Ethiopians, and an Islamist youth-party militant section, the Shabaab, has stated that it would maintain resistance. Despite a UN report outlining a steady flow of foreign arms to the CSIC, they appeared poorly-equipped when fighting the Ethiopians, and there has been little evidence that foreign jihadists took to the field alongside the Somali Islamists.
Kenya, and to a greater extent Ethiopia, have ethnic Somali populations. Kenya’s closing of its border has entrapped hundreds of Islamists in a marshy region in southern Somalia, where TFG and Ethiopian troops are closing in. Ethiopia intervened in Somalia in the 1990s, destroying the al-Ittihad Islamists there. Somali dissidents in the Oromo region have launched sporadic attacks on Ethiopian troops in recent years, while still-unexplained car bombs occurred in Addis Ababa last year.
Ethiopia sought to destroy the CSIC as it made irredentist claims on ethnic Somali regions of Ethiopia and had US backing in ending the short reign of an organization that sheltered three suspects in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. It is unclear whether many Eritrean casualties were incurred. Asmara’s secular regime provided training and arms to the Islamists in an attempt to open a proxy second front in its unresolved conflict with Ethiopia, which remains frozen since a disputed 2000 peace agreement.
Financial assistance as part of a sustained political engagement with Somalia is crucial to the TFGs prospects. During the formation of the TFG, the US donated just US$250,000 to maintaining that political process. However the US funded some of the secular Mogadishu warlords, who lost out to the Islamists in early 2006. Ironically, these are some of the same warlords which fought US troops in the early 1990s and have thrived amid Somalian anarchy ever since. The US has just announced over US$30 million in funding for the TFG, perhaps suggesting a more consistent and less-opaque policy toward the country.
Somalia will likely remain mired in factional fighting. Stability means having the capacity to control warlords - as the CSIC did during 2006 - and co-opt pragmatists in the CSIC. However, the unpopular Ethiopian garrisons are the chief source of the TFGs military capacity. Without quickly replacing Ethiopian troops with a multinational force, in tandem with providing the TFG with resources to build its own capacity, Yusuf will not bring about a restoration of effective sovereignty in Somalia, while the region’s western-allied nations may now be vulnerable to random terrorist attacks.
Simon Roughneen is a senior analyst and correspondent for ISN Security Watch and worked in Africa in 2003 and 2006.
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Online version provided by the International Relations and Security Network
A public service run by the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich © 1996-2004
08 January 2007
FTAs: US, PRC and Taiwan participation
The international law of free trade areas/agreements (FTAs) reflects a simple liberal logic of international economic relations. The pursuit of FTAs, however, often falls short of these legal and economic ideals and reflects more complex political calculations. This is true for proposed FTAs in East Asia, specifically those involving the region’s two key political actors, the People’s Republic of China and the United States. FTAs that might include Taiwan (for the US) or exclude Taiwan (for the PRC) provide distinctive variations on this theme.
By Jacques deLisle for FPRI (08/01/07)
The basic economic ideas underlying the international law governing FTAs are rooted in the concept of comparative advantage. The efficiency gains offered by economic specialization consistent with comparative advantage can only be reaped fully in a world without the artificial barriers to international trade created by protectionist national laws.
Almost all states have imposed significant restrictions on trade, but many states are willing to remove most barriers with some of their trading partners, and most would be willing to remove or reduce some barriers toward some trading partners (provided they are free not to do so with others).
Given that a global free-trade regime is unattainable, what achievable option should a liberal international economic regime’s rules tolerate? The World Trade Organization (WTO) opts primarily for a most favored nation (MFN) or normal trading relations (NTR) rule that requires a state not to discriminate among its trading partners, thereby according each trading partner treatment no worse than the most generous terms it provides to any other partner.
This is consistent with the idea that such a regime is likely to come closer to the idealized liberal and efficient order than would a regime in which each state negotiates a bilateral arrangement with each of its trading partners. The plausible claim is that the series of discrete agreements including some especially liberal and some especially illiberal arrangements would, in the end, be dominated by the latter.
The WTO regime allows a major “carve out” from its MFN/NTR principle: FTAs. In simplified terms, the FTA exception allows two or more member states to remove substantially all trade barriers among themselves while maintaining their less liberal structure of MFN/NTR-conforming laws regulating trade with all other WTO members. This is based on the assumption that true FTAs are likely to produce significant net gains in trade liberalization - that the radical lowering of restrictions on trade among FTA members will stimulate trade and specialization along the lines of comparative advantage among the FTA members, and that this will outweigh any marginal liberalization that might have been foregone among FTA members and other WTO member states. The basic trade-off is the same as that underlying WTO’s embrace of the MFN/NTR norm. But it is claimed that the balance is likely to come out the other way in the special circumstances of an FTA.
Increasingly, the economic argument for FTAs and trade liberalization has become bound up with issues of investment. Capital-exporting countries’ firms go abroad to establish facilities to produce goods and services for consumption in their home markets or in third-country markets. Such a strategy benefits from, and may depend on, low barriers to exports from the host country. Through rules limiting protectionist Trade-Related Investment Measures and through terms in individual members’ protocols of accession (including China’s), the WTO has begun to provide mechanisms to support such liberalization of investment restrictions.
These liberal principles of global economic efficiency and welfare are often honored in the breach and fail to account for the content of real-world FTAs and the motivations behind them.
The Politics of US FTAs with East Asia
The US has been among the most zealous proponents of trade liberalization and a frequent participant in FTAs. Washington was the largest moving force behind the WTO, and after the EU, NAFTA is arguably the most important FTA today. Recent years have brought several initiatives that have established, are working toward, or advocate FTAs with key trading partners in East Asia, including Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan.
Several related factors do much to explain the US interest in FTAs. They suggest that Washington is likely to continue to support some FTAs in East Asia, although not without controversies and limitations.
First, FTAs often serve American national economic interests and, more importantly, are seen by US policymakers as doing so. As the world’s largest economy and the developed world’s most dynamic economy, the US can expect to reap a large share of the gains from a more open international economy. Such benefits make it worthwhile for the US to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of supporting a liberal order.
FTAs offer a means of getting some benefits of a liberal order at lesser costs. This can make FTAs attractive partial substitutes and complements for the US’ broader pursuit of a liberal international economic order. Because the costs of underwriting a liberal order often include being relatively open even when the hegemonic power’s trading partners are less so, the “level playing field” of an FTA and the easier monitoring of cheating that FTAs may provide can be especially attractive.
Given the importance of East Asian economies in American trade, they make particularly promising FTA partners. The largest cluster of countries outside of the Americas with which Washington has been negotiating FTAs is in East Asia. The relative openness of many of the region’s economies means there is less distance to be traveled between the status quo ante and an FTA. Given the size of the US economy and trade sectors compared to those of its East Asian partners other than Japan and China, the US is often in the position to enjoy the advantages of a favorable imbalance of power in negotiating FTAs. And given the US’s importance as an export market for many East Asian states, regional governments have good reason to seek liberal trading relations with the US.
While such arrangements, again, must in principle take the form of true FTAs if they are to be more liberal than the rules governing relations with all WTO members, they do not do so in practice. This allows the US’s real-world FTAs to include features addressing perceived threats to US interests that more thoroughgoing liberalization would pose.
Second, the US remains generally committed to maintaining liberal foreign trade laws and regulations. A state that favors an internationally open economy and maintains correspondingly liberal trading laws will try to insist that its trading partners limit their use of illiberal or mercantilist measures. Absent such pressures, the liberal state’s trade law regime is likely to prove unsustainable politically, due to the perceived costs to the national interest or the harms to particular economic sectors of allowing other states’ “cheating” and “free-riding.”
The pursuit of reciprocity by a state favoring a liberal order fits the WTO’s basic MFN/NTR rule, but the WTO’s structure for FTAs - in its imperfect practice - may be more rigorously reciprocal and easier to monitor by virtue of its simplicity, as well as more liberal. Again, the pro-liberal order state is most likely to pursue FTAs with important trading partners that have complementary economies and liberal regimes. To the extent that FTAs asymmetrically reduce barriers imposed by one partner, the greater beneficiary or deficit state has additional reasons to favor an FTA. Here too, East Asian states often fit this bill for the United States.
To be sure, US trade liberalism has been far from pure. Protectionist sentiment in Congress and among vocal vulnerable constituencies appears to be on the rise in a period of chronic trade deficits and controversies over outsourcing and in the wake of Democratic gains in the midterm elections The “fast track” authority that facilitated recent trade liberalizing agreements is soon to expire. More generally, there is little reason to think that FTAs are not scarce goods in US politics or that the US is on an inexorable march toward numerous FTAs.
Still, in practice, the international regime for FTAs has left the US free to accommodate protectionist pressures by inserting illiberal and asymmetrically favorable terms into FTA agreements. FTA arrangements that so depart, sometimes to considerable degrees, from WTO ideals generally have escaped significant challenge. The more powerful party in FTA negotiations thus can hope to exploit its advantage and get something perhaps “better” than the level playing field that a true free-trade requirement would impose and better than the relatively leveling effect or, worse yet, free-riding and cheating by other parties that the multilateralizing WTO process often tolerates. The US-side costs of FTAs are thus less extreme than a simple reading of the WTO’s standard of removing “substantially all” barriers to trade.
Third, interest group politics often supports FTAs (or at least liberalization) with East Asian partners. This point is illustrated by comparison to the US’s decision in 2000 to support WTO membership for the PRC and to grant China permanent normal trading relations (PNTR). Pushing against PNTR was organized labor, which was worried about losing jobs due to increased imports of Chinese goods and services produced with low labor costs. On the same side were NGOs and politicians critical of China’s human rights record and seeking to preserve the leverage previously provided by the annual review of Beijing’s human rights record in conjunction with renewal of China’s MFN privileges. Those interest groups and their allies, however, could not overcome formidable business interests and proponents of liberal trade and improved Sino-American relations that pushed in the opposite direction.
The price of PNTR’s passage included the US’ retention of its ability to impose protectionist measures against Chinese exports and the establishment of new commissions to monitor China’s human rights record and PRC behavior more broadly. It was clear from the beginning that industry groups would undertake and would press executive branch agencies to monitor China’s compliance with its WTO commitments. The chronic bilateral trade imbalance, along with high-profile contemplated PRC acquisitions of well-known US companies, have fostered US pressure on China to revalue its currency and spawned congressional consideration of punitive tariffs on Chinese goods. Intellectual property rights protection remains a chronic issue.
Some of the same types of interest group alignments greet FTAs or potential FTAs with East Asian partners. In some respects, these face hurdles that may be greater than those that China PNTR/WTO overcame. Other things being equal, an FTA agreement is more likely to draw earnest opposition from affected groups than would lesser trade liberalization or (as occurred with China) merely making an unconditional commitment to a status quo of standard trade barriers. And the US jobs and industries imperiled by FTAs with more advanced industrialized East Asian countries are ones that are higher-end than those immediately imperiled by the PRC’s WTO entry and arguably are more central to American national economic interests.
Indeed, the fear of damage to the high-tech sector has become a prominent argument against free trade and trade liberalization agreements. Still, US FTAs with relatively developed East Asian states have been moving forward largely because: labor and other free trade opponents have lesser stakes in the outcomes and lessened influence in Washington (despite Democrats’ gains in the 2006 elections); prospective East Asian FTA partners do not provide a focal point for political opposition akin to China’s unsavory image as an unfair trader and repressive political regime; and the collapse of the Doha Round of global trade talks has shifted trade-liberalizers’ focus from WTO universalism toward FTAs.
Fourth, FTAs can serve as an economic instrument in the pursuit of security goals that loom large in US foreign policy, especially in the post-9/11 world and in the face of rising Chinese power. They can be means for strengthening economic relations that can create greater coincidence of overall interests and in turn greater security cooperation or strategic alignment.
This fits both the US-ROK proposed FTA and the stalled US-ROC FTA. US proponents of the Taiwan FTA have asserted that the FTA has a major political and security dimension, affirming US support for Taiwan’s continued autonomy. Taiwanese advocates have made parallel arguments and stressed the importance of a US-Taiwan FTA for safeguarding Taiwan’s democracy as well as its ability to endure the consequences of China’s effort to marginalize Taiwan.
Finally, this political dimension of US FTA possibilities in East Asia also has a defensive aspect. Whatever otherwise might be FTAs’ contributions to enhancing US relations with East Asian states, they also can serve as a counter to China’s mounting drive to establish FTAs - and, in turn, political influence - with many of the same states, as well as China’s broader drive to accumulate political influence in the region, sometimes in ways that pointedly exclude the United States.
China and the Politics of FTAs with East Asia
For China, as for the US, there are several powerful reasons for pursuing FTAs and integration in a liberal international economic order, and for being wary of FTAs and other liberalization measures. These reasons are largely political and not rooted in the simple liberal economic logic of the WTO’s international law of FTAs.
First, a broadly liberal international trading order that includes China serves the national economic interests defined by reform-era Chinese leaders. For nearly thirty years, economic development has been the predominant goal, supported by international economic openness. Beijing has pursued a Chinese variation of the East Asian development strategy of export-led growth and specialization according to evolving comparative economic advantage. In the Chinese version, foreign investment, particularly in export-oriented sectors that benefit from low trade barriers abroad, has played a central role.
Second, and contrarily, PRC ideology and practice have stopped well short of establishing significant FTAs or providing much support for trade liberalization beyond the extant international norms. China’s few departures from mainstream positions have consisted mostly of tepid support for a developing countries’ agenda that has included moderately illiberal elements.
Also, like the US, China is in a position to reap the gains of selective and asymmetrical illiberalism that can come to the more dominant trading partner and larger economy in bilateral or limited multilateral negotiations that result in the well-short-of-free-trade FTAs that are becoming common features on the international economic and legal landscape. The most developed Chinese FTA pursuit to date, the ASEAN-China FTA (ACFTA) partners China with mostly much smaller states and will build primarily on bilateral deals between China and the ASEAN members.
In addition, the WTO regime and China’s political and regulatory structure permit sneaky protectionism. The WTO’s formidable formal dispute resolution mechanisms and the diffuse multilateral politics of challenging non-compliance are relatively effective when trade barriers are not embodied in national laws and policies but take forms that are prominent on the list of complaints about Chinese practices: local protectionism; shadowy collaboration between local authorities and government-linked enterprises; business decisions that based on considerations other than price and quality; poor implementation of WTO-mandated laws; opaque subsidies to state-owned companies; trade-affecting foreign investment rules and their application to specific projects; and an exchange rate policy that confers trade advantages.
Third, China’s uneven and ambivalent approach to trade liberalization can be partly explained in terms interest group politics with Chinese characteristics. The PRC’s sharply expanded engagement with the increasingly liberal international trade order has delivered unevenly distributed benefits within China. The well-known story is one of support for trade liberalization from the “winners” - central and southern coastal provinces, internationally competitive sectors, ministries associated with those sectors and with foreign trade and investment, and elite leaders. It was former Shanghai chief Jiang Zemin who, as president and general secretary, led China through its accession to the WTO, closer economic integration with Hong Kong and Taiwan, the genesis of the ACFTA proposal, and the adoption of the “three represents” policy to embrace the rising, largely coastal urban entrepreneurs. Many initial or emergent winners continue to face a bright future, often one that would be enhanced by greater access to foreign markets through FTAs and other means.
On the other side of the story, pressures against liberalization come from the “losers” - inland and northeastern provinces, unreconstructed state enterprises, inefficient industrial sectors, ministries associated with them, and an increasingly restive laid-off or poorly paid collection of factory workers, dispossessed farmers (their land-use rights often lost to development projects), and rural-to-urban economic migrants. Newly vulnerable sectors include banking and financial services, agriculture, intellectual property-pirating enterprises and telecommunications and other sectors that have been the object of specific WTO-related liberalization commitments. Concern about or demands from these sources might yield concrete, trade-undermining moves - including abandonment of some FTA initiatives - consistent with the Hu Jintao leadership’s so-far largely rhetorical shift to concern for the less well-off and an emphasis on equity and “human development.”
Fourth and finally, whenever China has engaged the question of FTAs, political considerations have loomed large. The ACFTA initiative, envisioned as a decade-long project, aims not just to increase economic ties between China and Southeast Asia states, but also thereby to raise China’s political influence in an area that is vital to its ambitions to be a major power in the region. Even early ACFTA discussions have afforded Beijing important opportunities to sell its doctrine of China’s “peaceful rise” and emphasis on benign economic cooperation to its wary neighbors. China’s ACFTA gambit also offers a means to counter American and Japanese influence in the region and to anticipate the political gains that Washington and Tokyo have begun to seek through their stepped-up pursuit of FTAs with regional states.
Beijing’s ACFTA strategy may be less promising or fruitful than it appears. The political gains are front-loaded while the economic costs for China are yet to accrue. The PRC has already been reaping some of the diplomatic benefits from its reassurance, engagement, and economics-over-politics tactics. But, with the details of FTAs still in the works and their implementation still further off, it remains an unsettled question how much China will be willing to open its economy to the threats that strongly trade-liberalizing FTAs will pose.
The appeal to China of a Japan-Korea-China FTA or a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) FTA (SCOFTA) is broadly parallel to that of the ACFTA but a good deal harder to achieve. With Japan and Korea already among China’s key trading and investment partners, an FTA would have significant economic potential - and peril. With deepened economic ties, China could reasonably hope for increased political influence, accelerating what critics fear could be an asymmetric economic interdependence-driven Finlandization of Japan and Korea. While any such trilateral FTA remains speculative, Beijing’s efforts can press back against the tightening of the US-Japan security relationship and capitalize on recently increased anti-Americanism in South Korea. US consideration of an FTA with Korea provides an additional, defensive or responsive element to PRC reasons for floating an FTA that includes the ROK.
A SCOFTA remains a less serious pursuit. Its economic appeal for China is relatively straightforward if relatively modest. But even talk of it could enhance the economic leg of the broader diplomatic effort of China to build cooperation among central and northern Asian mainland states to check US hegemony.
The most political aspect of Beijing’s approach to FTAs has lain elsewhere. As in so many areas of China’s foreign policy, the most volatile politics involve Taiwan.
US FTAs Including Taiwan, and PRC FTAs Excluding Taiwan
Taiwan is, on economic grounds, an obvious FTA candidate for the US It has a relatively open economy, one that has moved far from its protectionist and illiberal past, one that has done much to satisfy US requirements of support for liberal trade rules, and one that has seemingly bridgeable gaps to what an FTA in practice would require. Taiwan also has the high trade to GDP ratios that make it disproportionately important as a trading entity and thus a more significant FTA prospect. It is a major trading partner for both China and the US As with FTAs generally, membership in FTAs with major trading partners would expand trade among the partners and increase each partner’s total trade and gains from trade. While these economic effects likely would not be large in a US-Taiwan FTA, that does not distinguish it from many others that are on the table. Indeed, estimates of the economic benefits of a US-Taiwan FTA place it near the top of the list of contemplated US FTAs. The greater economic gains for Taiwan, however, could lie in second-order effects, with other regional states entering into FTAs with Taiwan if the US were to break the pattern of Taiwan’s exclusion from such arrangements.
Any given FTA, of course, would also skew Taiwan’s trade toward its FTA partners. A US-Taiwan FTA is expected to produce more trade diversion than trade creation. An ACFTA excluding Taiwan likely would divert ASEAN states’ trade from Taiwan to the PRC. It would also encourage substitution of ASEAN-produced goods for some of China’s imports from Taiwan, cutting into the growth of cross-Strait trade that has become important to Taiwan. A Japan-Korea-China FTA or SCOFTA would have broadly parallel effects.
For Taiwan, even the economic is fraught with security implications. The great concern for Taiwan of a Taiwan-excluding ACFTA is that it will increase economic dependence and promote political ties between the ASEAN states and China just the way Beijing apparently seeks. Already unsupportive of Taipei on issues of Taiwan’s autonomy and international status, China’s ACFTA partners would be even more reluctant to roil relations with the PRC. Taipei’s real fear is that an ACFTA would be another potent tool in Beijing’s diplomatic kit for marginalizing the ROC. Much the same would apply if the PRC’s notion of a China-Japan-Korea FTA were to go forward. The potential political loss for Taiwan would be especially great in the case of Japan, which remains the principal regional state that has the will and the capacity to work to balance China and that has recently articulated an interest in Taiwan’s security. A SCOFTA would be less significant, given the SCO states’ more limited economic relations with and lack of diplomatic support for Taiwan.
The politics of a US-Taiwan FTA are simpler fare. For Taiwan, US willingness to enter into an FTA would be an affirmation of the broader US commitment to Taiwan. President Chen and others have phrased it as such. So too have congressional supporters of a US-Taiwan FTA. While it formally implies nothing about statehood or state-like status, Taiwan’s status as a partner or even partner candidate in an FTA would imply standing with the US akin to that of Canada, Mexico, Singapore and Korea. Chinese sources have made this basic argument, suggesting that an FTA would be a step along the road to Taiwan independence. Moreover, Taiwanese sources and American supporters have played the democracy and human rights card, linking a US-Taiwan FTA to support for those values, as they are embodied in Taiwan - and thereby invoking principles that also are relevant to claiming state- or state-like status.
For precisely such reasons, Beijing does not welcome the prospect and has been no less chilly to the prospect of a US-Taiwan FTA than it was to the more easily deterred prospects of a Japan-Taiwan or Singapore-Taiwan FTA. Partly because much of Washington does not want such diplomatic frictions with Beijing, the Taiwan FTA faces an uphill fight. The steepness of the climb is increased by the waning of the influence of the Taiwan caucus and Taiwan lobbying in Congress and by the increasing tendency in Washington to regard Taiwan as a subordinate issue in the broader universe of US-PRC relations.
Here, the problem is largely structural, reflecting the rising relative power and importance of China. But some of the tactics of Taiwan and its friends in Washington have contributed to the problem. The argument that a Taiwan-US FTA is purely about trade and economics inevitably sounds disingenuous. Because there is undeniably a component that is political and that does have implications for Taiwan’s international status, there is an understandable temptation to engage in arguments that make claims about security commitments and recognition of Taiwan’s democracy. Indeed, it may be almost necessary to do so, given Taiwan’s economic unimportance relative to the PRC and given that Beijing has politicized the issue. But once these political elements are on the table, the politically useful claim that an FTA is really just about economic interests and principles becomes unsustainable.
There are, of course, genuine international economic issues and domestic interest group concerns for the US with a Taiwan FTA. But what remains most distinctive about a possible US FTA with Taiwan is that, like all matters involving Taiwan, it is deeply entangled with the politics of the Sino-American bilateral relationship and the politics of Taiwan’s international status as a state or state-like entity.
FTAs and politics
The pursuit of FTAs that include or exclude Taiwan differs in degree, but not in kind, from what we see in other existing or prospective FTAs involving the US, China, Taiwan or others. In all of them, states’ international and domestic political interests play a central role in determining whether to seek or accept and FTA and with what terms. While adopted and contemplated FTAs in the region generally do move toward the economic liberal ideals that underpin the economic arguments and the international law of FTAs, they do so unevenly and imperfectly, in large part in reflection of calculations of political interest and exercises of political power.
Reprinted with permission from Foreign Policy Research Institute. Copyright (c) 2006 Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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08 January 2007
Afghan border dispute affects security
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz paid a visit to Kabul on 4 January to discuss Islamabad's decision to fence and mine parts of their mutual border, among other issues. His host, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, restated his country's "very clear" opposition to such a move, saying it "will not prevent terrorist activities, but will divide peoples and tribes."
By Amin Tarzi for RFE/RL (08/01/07)
A Pakistani military spokesman more than three years ago that his country was installing border reinforcements at strategic points to prevent remnants of al-Qaida and Taliban forces from crossing into Afghanistan.
Told of Afghan media reports suggesting the fence would go ahead without so much as informing Kabul, the spokesman responded bluntly that "Pakistan does not need the permission from any other country to take security measures on [its] border specifically aimed at countering the scourge of terror."
Demarcate first, plan later
At a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice two years later, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf divulged a plan to construct the border fence. Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri said at the time that Islamabad's plan was aimed at undermining claims that Pakistan was not doing enough to curb cross-border terrorism. An Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman responded to Musharraf's plan by saying that Kabul and Islamabad needed to demarcate the border under international law before there could be any discussion of a barrier.
When Islamabad recently announced its intention to implement the plan to partially fence and mine the border, Afghan reaction was negative based on three factors.
The first was Afghanistan's legacy as one of the most mined countries on the globe, noting that new mines would inevitably kill and maim innocent people. The second was the assertion that fences and mines would separate Pashtun tribes living astride the border.
The third was the argument that the problem of terrorism lies not simply along the border area, but rather with those who finance, equip, and train the terrorists - and in Kabul's eyes, Pakistan has proved to be a primary source of support for those seeking to destabilize Afghanistan.
While the official Pakistani response to Kabul's objections has been diplomatic, Pakistani commentators have been less subtle. In an editorial on 28 December, the Islamabad-based daily The News wrote that "if anything, Pakistan's plan to mine and fence the frontier is a response to the shrill propaganda from Kabul that Islamabad is 'not doing enough' to stop the entry of terrorists across the border into Afghanistan."
The daily argued that "if it doesn't like the plan, the Karzai government ought to come up with an effective solution." "At the same time," the paper said, "it should try harder to seal the cross-border routes of terrorists and saboteurs into Pakistan." That last point refers to longstanding charges by Islamabad that Afghanistan is allowing its territory to be used by Indian agents and New Delhi-supported subversive elements, especially in Balochistan Province.
The initial point raised by the The News presents a tough challenge for Kabul, and it gets to the crux not only of the issue of Pakistan's alleged desire to destabilize the Karzai administration, but also of why Afghanistan has so adamantly opposed any formal demarcation of the boundary.
As the editorial suggests, Islamabad has raised the issue of fencing and mining the border largely as a political countermeasure to charges that Pakistan has failed to prevent cross-border movement by terrorists. If that were the case, one might expect Kabul to welcome such a measure; if terrorists are trained in Pakistan, then barriers to their entry should be viewed as a step in the right direction, even if such a move does not appear to have been made in good faith.
But for Kabul, neither the current cross-border activities nor the stability of Afghanistan would appear to trump the issue of the status of the border - referred to by the Afghan side as the "Durand Line" after the foreign secretary of British India who set it out.
Historical problem
The history of the Durand Line goes back to the Treaty of Gandumak, signed in May 1879 between British Major Louis Cavagnari and Afghan Amir Mohammad Yaqub Khan during the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1879-80. According to provisions of the Gandumak agreement, the British were to maintain a military and diplomatic presence in Afghanistan and control its foreign policy. Also, Britain was granted jurisdictional control of the three strategically significant frontier districts of Kurram, Sibi and Pishin.
When the Gandumak plan failed to achieve peace, however the British opted to leave Afghanistan while ensuring that it remained a buffer state between their own Indian empire and the Russian empire in Central Asia.
When Abd al-Rahman became amir in 1880, Afghanistan's boundaries were not demarcated. The British sought at the time to keep the Russians out of - and the amir inside - a geographically defined Afghanistan.
Article 4 of the Durand Agreement states that the "frontier line will hereafter be laid down in detail and demarcated, wherever this may be practicable and desirable, by Joint British and Afghan Commissioners, whose object will be to arrive by mutual understanding at a boundary which shall adhere with the greatest possible exactness" to the agreed map, and "have due regard to the existing local rights of villages adjoining the frontier."
So while the agreement set the limits of the territories of Afghanistan and British India on paper, the entire border was not actually demarcated at that time.
The issue of the Durand Line became thornier after 1947, when British India was split into two independent states: India and Pakistan. Afghanistan - deep into its own search for identity and the formation of a nationalistic agenda - called for the right of self-determination for ethnic Pashtuns inhabiting the region between the Durand Line and the Indus River.
This became known, at least in Kabul, as the "Pashtunistan" policy, and it effectively alienated Afghanistan from its new neighbor, Pakistan. On official Afghan maps at the time, the country's boundary with Pakistan was marked as disputed.
The issue of "Pashtunistan" has brought Afghanistan and Pakistan to the brink of war on more than one occasion, and it has drained Afghanistan's economy and cost it political capital.
For Pakistan, the existence of two hostile neighbors - Afghanistan and India - became a source of great concern. Although Kabul eventually opted to stay out of all the Indo-Pakistani wars, the possibility of having to fight simultaneously on two fronts has prompted Pakistan to try to muscle the weaker of those threats, Afghanistan, continuously over the years.
Opportunity missed
Arguably, Islamabad's golden chance to reduce the real or perceived Afghan threat came when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Although Pakistan was initially viewed as the next step in the Soviet march toward the "warm waters" of the Indian Ocean, the Soviets got bogged down in Afghanistan. That occurred with the help of mainly Pakistan-based resistance groups.
Finally, Islamabad could envisage a friendly post-Soviet Afghanistan, if not its own satellite state. The quest for an Islamabad-friendly government in Kabul manifested itself in the person of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other resistance leaders, all the way to the formation of the Taliban in 1994.
The state-run Kabul daily Anis, reflecting a long-held view of Afghan governments, commented recently that "the Durand border has been one of Pakistan's most basic concerns since its establishment."
The paper went on to argue that "the British Empire imposed the border [on] Abd al-Rahman Khan 114 years ago and [said that] in doing so, it cut off part of the Afghan territory and added it to British India." Anis accused Pakistan of knowingly "acting against an absolute right of the Afghans" and vowed that "one day when Afghans are mighty, they will surely reclaim that part of their territory."
Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have suffered from mutual misjudgments over the past five decades. Kabul and Islamabad are playing an old hand that has already been overplayed, and the result threatens to hearten terrorists and their allies on both sides of the border.
Unfortunately, international terrorism will reap the benefits until Pakistan accepts Afghanistan as a sovereign state - one not subservient to Islamabad's demands - and Kabul begins to concentrate on events inside its own borders.
Copyright (c) 20067RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC 20036. Funded by the US Congress.
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20 December 2006
Colombian scandal shows all sides
As political allies come forward with evidence of cooperation with paramilitaries, the strengths of democratic institutions is revealed, but so is the president’s weakening position.
By Sam Logan for ISN Security Watch (20/12/2006)
As more Colombian politicians come forward with personal accounts of back room dealings with the country’s paramilitary forces, questions concerning the depth of corruption in politics commingle with concern that the Colombian military might somehow be involved in the scandal.
Close ties between the Colombian military and paramilitary leaders have long been suspected by human rights groups and other NGOs working in Colombia. Within Colombia, these links have been universally accepted yet categorically denied.
Meanwhile, the country's media and Supreme Court press forward in seeking the truth behind the connections between the political class and paramilitary leaders. As the Supreme Court calls witness after witness, it is building a critical mass of evidence against corrupt politicians. At the same time, others are leaking tips about certain individuals to the Colombian press, which could point out new leads for federal prosecutors. The result is a massive process of rooting-out corruption that may extend beyond the political class into the upper ranks of military commanders.
This so-called “political cleansing” has forced Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to walk a thin line between political destruction and survival.
Uribe had previously promised to deconstruct Colombia’s traditional political class, saying that more transparency was needed. He also wanted to democratize politics in Colombia, which was limited to individuals with land holdings or social clout. Until now, many were not sure how the president would achieve those goals. The political cleansing, however, may end the careers of many politicians and help Uribe to fulfill an important campaign promise.
The military question
Reports from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) decry direct ties between the Colombian military and Colombia’s paramilitary organizations.
In February of 2000, an HRW publication entitled “The Ties That Bind: Colombia and Military-Paramilitary Links” documented direct connections between the Third Brigade of the Colombian Army and a paramilitary group called the Calima Block, which had formed in the country’s southwest.
Many informants, who presumably would have good knowledge of such connections, were interviewed for the report. Six years later, other reports have corroborated this information, even after the Calima Block has disarmed with little to no recognition of close ties between this paramilitary group and the Colombian military.
This HRW publication and others have documented a history of close relationships between Colombia’s military commanders and the leaders of paramilitary units. From the mid-1990s until just a few years ago, paramilitary violence was clearly out of control, largely because there was very little resistance to the paramilitary commanders’ reign over their turf. Once the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had been pushed out of a region, the Colombian military did little to secure the area - an arrangement many believe was made between mid-level military commanders and paramilitary leaders.
Many of the mid-level commanders who allegedly colluded with paramilitary leaders in the mid-90s have since been promoted. As commanders of Colombia’s military forces, the possibility that they have colluded with an organization the US government considers a terrorist group casts a shadow over the future of US military aid to Colombia.
“These guys were in the field and were critical to what was going on as the paramilitaries became the only anti-guerrilla strategy that was working,” Adam Isacson, Director of Programs with the Center for International Policy, told ISN Security Watch in a recent phone call.
“A big question we should be asking now is: where were the current heads of the Colombian armed forces working in the second half of the 90s when the paramilitaries were [rapidly] taking over new territories with the help of drug traffickers?” he said.
The political fallout
The process of political cleansing currently being pushed forward by Colombia’s Supreme Court and media has created a nationwide sensation.
“This is probably the most serious crisis that President Uribe has faced,” Michael Shifter, Vice President of Policy with the Inter-American Dialogue, told ISN Security Watch.
“It is crucial to take control, take the initiative and clean out the political system,” he argued. Shifter pointed out that Uribe has to get in front of the scandal and move past a reactive stance.
“So far he’s been reactive and defensive, and ultimately, if it continues this way it will undermine his authority, which has been his greatest strength,” Shifter said.
Links between paramilitary figures and politicians are unacceptable for Colombians and the international community. As Colombia’s Supreme Court continues its investigation, it is likely the judicial body will continue to uncover evidence that if made public could severely undermine Uribe’s presidency.
Publicizing damning evidence separates the Colombian press from many other media in the rest of Latin America. Leaks to the press, published on the front page of Colombian daily El Tiempo, often create follow-ups in full view of the public.
The current scandal began to gather momentum after evidence found on the laptop and in the database of paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, also known as Jorge 40, delivered proof of direct ties between the paramilitary leader and Colombian politicians who had met with him for political support.
Another laptop, one used by a paramilitary leader known as Adolfo Paz, or Don Berna, has also been seized. So far, evidence on this computer has not been made public. But many find it hard to believe there is not a long list of military leaders and politicians very close to Uribe yet to be brought to light for paramilitary collusion.
Time will tell
For over four decades, Colombians have lived the reality of an ongoing civil war between the FARC and the country’s armed forces. At times, the conflict has been one of low intensity, at other times it has been extremely violent. From the 1960s, when the FARC began operations, until the mid-1990s, there was little progress in subduing the violence short of the brutal effectiveness of paramilitary groups. However, their brutality led to international infamy, forcing anyone who had colluded with paramilitary leaders to deny any involvement.
The denial of politicians’ and military commanders’ involvement with paramilitary groups notorious for human rights atrocities and drug trafficking has lasted for many years. For this reason alone, many claim, Colombia’s current political scandal is good for the country, even if it is painful.
“If you are doing things that are illegal, incorrect morally or even inconvenient politically, you have to deny all that,” Jorge Restrepo, Director with Colombia’s Conflict Analysis Resource Center, told ISN Security Watch.
“What [we’re seeing] now is the extent of the participation of society in a conflict we didn’t want to label as a civil war,” he added.
“It is opening up in front of our eyes. From 1997 until 2002 it was truly a situation of serious war. It was not a low-intensity conflict, and we [Colombians] were the first ones trying to deny that it existed,” Restrepo said.
He also pointed out that the perseverance of Colombia’s institutions, particularly the judicial system, was fundamental to the current process as well as where it would take Colombians into the future.
Colombia’s paramilitary groups appeared in 1997 as bands of men formed together to defend themselves from what many perceived at the time as a growing problem with the FARC. Nearly a decade later, paramilitary groups have evolved beyond groups of armed individuals into astute political actors, mafia-like warlords and cunning drug traffickers.
Colombia’s political scandal has shown a high level of integration between paramilitaries and the country's political class. Time will tell if the same level of integration can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt between paramilitaries and the Colombian military.
Yet two points are already clear, experts agree. First, Colombia’s democratic institutions, despite years of civil war, still function. This fact should keep well with anyone worried about the future of Colombia’s democracy. Second, president Uribe has lost a significant amount of credibility and authority. His ability to deal with this situation, moving into 2007, will be a test.
Sam Logan is an investigative journalist who has reported on security, energy, politics, economics, organized crime, terrorism and black markets in Latin America since 1999. He is the Latin American correspondent for ISN Security Watch.
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14 December 2006
Balancing Venezuelan-Iranian relations
Some argue that Iran uses Venezuela to further its geopolitical goal of undermining US power, but others say the relationship is more balanced than many thought.
By Sam Logan for ISN Security Watch (14/12/06)
With presidential elections behind him, many observers believe that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will start his quest to create a New World Order, one where the US is in a weakened position economically and diplomatically, if not also militarily, to influence other countries around the world. The Islamic Republic of Iran appears to be the country most aligned with Chavez’s global plans to undermine US power in the world.
Looking beyond close economic and diplomatic ties, it appears that Iran’s leaders see Venezuela as an important geopolitical part of their own plans to undermine US power. However, some experts argue that the relationship between these countries is more evenly balanced than at first glance.
There are clear indications, experts say, that Venezuela and Iran have been working together to further their common foreign policy goals.
The two countries have formed an alliance within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to counterbalance what they view as a powerful and influential partnership between the US and Saudi Arabia.
In addition, Venezuela’s support of an Iranian nuclear energy program is part of a larger strategic alliance that creates a gravitational center around which other countries can orbit in opposition to US hegemony. Venezuela’s partnership with Iran moves the country a little closer to acceptance on the global stage.
Finally, Iran’s increased presence inside Venezuela opens another front from which Iran may launch geopolitical attacks on the US. Iran seeks to outflank the US and work with Chavez to force Washington into a more defensive stance.
Perception as a deterrent
“Since the war in Iraq has changed the power dynamics in the Middle East, Iran is unquestionably the strongest and most robust regional power,” Islamic studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Reza Aslan, told ISN Security Watch.
“While they’ve done a pretty good job of extending their reach across that region, what they want to do now is reach beyond the Middle East, and they see Chavez as a real ally in so far as trying to not only combat the unipolarization of the world, but also to feed off of each other,” Aslan said.
The most logical starting point was oil and Saudi Arabia’s hegemonic position within OPEC, he said. The close relationship between the US and its Middle Eastern ally exists because the former is the largest single market for oil, while the latter is the largest single source of oil. Saudi Arabia’s privileged position gives it some sway in Washington - something both Venezuela and Iran would like to change.
Together, the two countries control a significant portion of the world’s proven reserves. Neither can compete with Saudi Arabia in terms of export, but the perception of a closely united Iran and Venezuela cancels some of the power Saudi Arabia has over dictating export quotas and the price of oil. But the focus is not entirely on Saudi Arabia.
A sudden cut off of Iranian and Venezuelan oil likely would produce a spike in price that Saudi Arabia would not be able to quickly control at Washington’s request. The threat of closing down exports in Iran and Venezuela becomes more tangible as these countries grow closer together.
New World Order
Undermining the US' ambitions in around the world is the one unifying factor that brings Iran and Venezuela closer together, experts say. The pair, along with Cuba and other countries that form the core group of the Non-Aligned Movement, have created a gravitational core of countries that all seek to topple what many feel is a US economic and military empire.
This group of smaller countries seems to have unofficially tapped Chavez as their leader. Iran would happily stand at the forefront, but cannot due to Washington’s efforts to convince the rest of the world that Iran is their enemy, not just a US enemy.
“Whenever Iran seeks to do business with a country, the United States tries to convince that country not to do business with Iran,” Trita Parsi, the president and co-founder of the National Iranian American Council, told ISN Security Watch. “When Iran finds a market where it does not have to deal with that aspect, it’s an opportunity the Iranians can hardly afford to say no to.”
Iran has emerged as a regional power in the Middle East – a power that some observers say the US must eventually engage and recognize as a regional leader, if it hopes to succeed in Iraq.
Within Latin America, Venezuela has also emerged as a regional power, wielding considerable influence over a number of Caribbean nations, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, oppositional movements in Peru and Mexico and possibly the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Due to Venezuela’s regional leadership position and the fact that Chavez will remain in power for at least another six years, conservative observers say Washington cannot longer afford the luxury of ignoring Venezuela, just like it can no longer ignore Iran’s influential role in Iraq.
Strange relations
Aslan described the relationship between Iran and Venezuela as “one of these strange bedfellows the war on terror has created.”
“It’s not one of the only ones, but one of the more interesting,” he said.
Iran’s relationship with Venezuela has become a bullet point on the list of developing situations for closer observation and study in Washington.
During US National Intelligence Director John Negroponte's testimony to the US Senate’s Select Intelligence Committee on 2 February, he outlined his concern for Iran’s nuclear weapons program as well as the country’s efforts to increase trade and beat sanctions.
Dan Burton, former chair of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the Committee on International Relations, has been much more forceful with his language. In a statement during a hearing on energy security earlier this year, Burton said: “Any alliance between terrorist-sponsoring nations and leftist leaders in Latin America will be viewed as a serious and direct threat to the security of the United States and our friends in the hemisphere.”
Rumors abound – rumors such as Venezuela mining uranium to send to Iran. Even if there are just shreds of truth to such murmurings, perception is again a factor at play.
Beyond rumors
Beyond the rumors, experts say there is one resounding fact that cannot be ignored: Venezuela and Iran will only deepen their relationship in the future, as they need each other to further geopolitical strategies to undermine US power in both the Middle East and Latin America.
The Iran-Venezuelan partnership has become a mutually beneficial relationship that some fear could evolve from a nuisance to what Burton has called a “direct threat,” and those same observers fear that 2007 will decide to what extent the threat is real and the rumors are true.
Sam Logan is an investigative journalist who has reported on security, energy, politics, economics, organized crime, terrorism and black markets in Latin America since 1999. He is the Latin American correspondent for ISN Security Watch.
Printed from http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=17045
Online version provided by the International Relations and Security Network
A public service run by the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich © 1996-2004
1. No Excuses Morning Cleanser
Posted by: "Lynnda"
Date: Sun Jan 7, 2007 1:43 pm ((PST))
No Excuses Morning Cleanser
Categories : Face
Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method
You need to read this one:
http://antiarabbigotry.blogspot.com/2007/01/aclu-testimony-on-hate-crimes-in.html
The American Gulag -- A record of anti-Arab bigotry in America
A record of growing anti-Arab bigotry in the new Gulag in the United States. Pundits like Dennis Miller claim that nothing happened to Arabs and Muslims after Sept. 11th ... "Only one person was attacked and he wasn't even Muslim" Miller claimed. Well, 14 people were murdered in the weeks after Sept. 11th and reports continue to show that acts of bigotry and assault against Arabs and Muslims in this country continue. The bias continues ...
That is the header on the blog.
This is the header for this page:
Monday, January 08, 2007
ACLU Testimony on Hate Crimes in Midwestern Texas afterr Sept. 11
Statement from
William Harrell, Esq.
Executive Director, ACLU of Texas
&
Sonali Mehta,
Texas Law Fellow, ACLU of Texas
To the
House Judicial Affairs Committee
Regarding
The Committee’s Oversight of the Texas Attorney
General’s Office
American troops `screen` Saddam jail notes: Lawyer
http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=346506&sid=WOR
http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=346506&sid=WOR
American troops `screen` Saddam jail notes: Lawyer
Amman, Jan 07: The US military in Iraq has confiscated Saddam
Hussein's
books as well as notes and poems he wrote in jail to "screen" them
before
returning them to his lawyers, one of his attorneys said on Sunday.
"We asked the Americans to hand US the books the President (Saddam)
read in
jail as well as the notes and poems he wrote but they want to screen
them
and read them in full before giving them to US," Jordanian lawyer Issam
al-Ghazzawi said.
"They promised to give them back once they are done but they did not
set a
date," he added.
Saddam was a prolific writer and is known to have penned several books
and
poems in his lifetime.
Ghazzawi said he asked the US authorities in Baghdad about the Koran,
the
Muslim's holy book, which Saddam held at all times during his trials.
"The President (Saddam) willed his Koran to Badr, a lawyer and son of
Awad
Ahmed al-Bandar," who was sentenced to hang along with Saddam and
Barzan
al-Tikriti, Ghazzawi said.
"The Americans said the Koran is with the assistant state prosecutor,
Munkiz
al-Faraon," who witnessed Saddam's execution on December 30 in Baghdad.
Saddam was seen clasping the Koran as he was taken to the gallows and
then
handed it over to one of the witnesses and asked him to give it to
someone
named Badr.
In November, an Iraqi court found Saddam, Barzan and Bandar guilty of
crimes
against humanity for the killing of 148 Shiite civilians in the 1980s.
Al-Zawraa and Egypt's on-air ambiguity
Al-Zawraa and Egypt's on-air ambiguity
By Lawrence Pintak
Commentary by
Monday, January 08, 2007
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=78309
Sunni-Shiite power politics and US-Egyptian relations have come
head-to-head
in a dispute over a satellite television station that is the latest
weapon in
the arsenal of Iraq's insurgents.
Al-Zawraa, a television version of the now-infamous jihadist Web sites,
is
being broadcast across the Arab world by Nilesat, a satellite provider
answerable to the Egyptian government. The Iraqi station features
non-stop
scenes of US troops being picked off by snipers, blown up by roadside
bombs
and targeted by missiles.
"We find the channel utterly offensive," said one US diplomat. Getting
the
Egyptians to pull the plug is "at the top of our agenda."
But the Egyptian government insists it's all just business.
"For us, it means nothing," Egyptian Information Minister Anas al-Fiki
told
me. "It is a channel that reserved an allocation on Nilesat. They had a
contract, paid the fees. There is nothing political for Nilesat. It's
pure
business. We have no concern what the channel is doing."
But, as is often the case in the Middle East, much more is going on
beneath
the surface. The diplomatic tug-of-war over the station comes as Sunni
Arab
governments in the region, increasingly worried about a resurgent Iran,
are
more overtly lining up behind Iraq's Sunni minority. Just last month, a
Saudi
close to his government wrote in The Washington Post that Saudi Arabia
would
take steps "to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering
Iraqi
Sunnis."
Those militias have something in common with the US and Iraqi
governments;
they, too, want the Egyptians to pull the plug on Al-Zawraa, which
laces its
anti-American programming with attacks on the Shiites. In one montage,
the
Iranian flag is superimposed over the faces of Iraqi Shiite leaders -
including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Graphic "crawls" at the bottom
of the
screen contain such messages as, "The natural place for criminals and
thieves
is with the mafia of Moqtada al-Sadr," a reference to the most militant
Shiite
militia leader.
Fiki says Egypt received "a warning from certain Iraqis" that if they
didn't
stop broadcasting Al-Zawraa, the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Baghdad
would
be attacked. "We don't accept this type of warning," he insists.
Despite Egyptian protestations that there is nothing political about
their
involvement, Cairo is doing more than just re-transmitting Al-Zawraa's
signal.
In early November, around the time that Saddam Hussein was sentenced to
death,
the station shifted from pushing a hard-line Sunni political message to
serving as an overt arm of the Islamic Army of Iraq, said to be
dominated by
former Baathists. Using a mobile transmitter, it began playing a
cat-and-mouse
game with Iraqi and US military authorities.
In mid-December, according to Nilesat chief Salah Hamza, the signal
went dead.
Since then, the Egyptian satellite company has been retransmitting the
same
few hours of tape at the request of Al-Zawraa officials. "They asked
us,
'please when we don't send, loop for us what you have.'" Technically,
this
means that rather than just up-linking a signal originating in Iraq,
Nilesat
is actually transmitting Al-Zawraa from Cairo.
It's a subtle, but very important distinction: An arm of the
anti-American
Iraqi insurgency transmitting from the capital of one of America's
strongest
Arab allies. The implications are not lost on Hamza, who became cagey
when
asked what Nilesat would do if Al-Zawraa provided it with new tapes,
instead
of just asking it to rebroadcast the old ones.
Al-Zawraa's fare includes programs such as "Juba: Baghdad Sniper,"
chilling
footage of unsuspecting US soldiers caught by the camera in the seconds
before - and during - their assassination, complete with slow-motion,
instant
replay of the blood-spray at the moment of impact; montages of American
military vehicles and civilian tanker trucks as they approach and are
destroyed by roadside bombs; and behind-the-scenes shots of insurgents
preparing and firing missiles.
In one English-language hour-long program, aired a week before
Christmas but
not seen since, the narrator addresses himself to President George W.
Bush,
referring to dead US soldiers in Iraq as "miserable nobodies." The
program
combines scenes of the preparation of car bombs, missile attacks and
comments
from alleged insurgent commanders with footage of US soldiers storming
homes,
torture at Abu Ghraib, scenes from "Top Gun," Bush's "mission
accomplished"
speech, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the final evacuation of
Vietnam.
The narration mixes warnings ("From now on, we are focusing our efforts
on
specific targets" including "high-ranking officers and VIPs to make you
bleed
to death") and sarcasm ("Your enlistment qualifications are kind of
comical.
Thirty-nine years old? You're recruiting nannies?") Somewhat bizarrely,
video
"bumpers" between segments feature actor Anthony Quinn in his role as
the
uncle of the Prophet Mohammad in the 1976 movie "The Message."
The failure of US officials to get the Egyptians to pull the plug on
Al-Zawraa
underlines the complicated nature of the US-Egyptian relationship and
the
limits of American influence in the new regional equation. It is also
another
example of the emerging Cold War between Iran and Sunni Arab powers in
the
region.
The Egyptian information minister has appointed a team to monitor the
channel
and provide him with a report. However, he says, the government can
only take
action if the channel has violated "the major codes of ethics of the
pan-Arab
media" and it receives a formal request from the Arab League, which,
not
incidentally, is seen by Iran as a tool of Sunni Arab power.
Having failed to convince the Egyptians to act - Fiki claims he was
approached
"in a friendly way" by US Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone but has
received
no formal request - the Americans had hoped Iraqi President Jalal
Talabani
would raise the issue with President Hosni Mubarak, but the Iraqi
leader's
December visit to Egypt was cancelled. However, the man said to be the
station's founder, former Iraqi member of Parliament Mishan al-Jabouri,
was
recently in Cairo.
So for now, the insurgents have their voice and the Middle East has yet
another of its countless inherent contradictions: The US, which is
demanding
freedom and democracy in the Arab world, wants a TV station muzzled;
Egypt,
whose prisons are crowded with home-grown Islamists and whose own media
is
tightly controlled, is defending the insurgents' right to their
electronic
pulpit.
Lawrence Pintak is director of the Adham Center for Electronic
Journalism at
the American University in Cairo and author of "Reflections in a
Bloodshot
Lens: America, Islam and the War of Ideas." He wrote this commentary
for THE
DAILY STAR.
http://www.jamestown.org
Eurasia Daily Monitor -- Volume 4, Issue 5
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2007 09:21:50 -0500
Eurasia Daily Monitor -- The Jamestown Foundation
January 8, 2007 -- Volume 4, Issue 5
IN THIS ISSUE:
*Minsk slaps customs tax on Russian oil exports using Belarusian pipelines
*Transneft rushes to build Pacific pipeline
*Rosoboroneksport reacts to U.S. sanctions
The Arab states drift into irrelevance
By Rami G. Khouri
Daily Star staff
Saturday, January 06, 2007
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=78281
Of the many transformations taking place throughout the Middle East,
the most
striking is that the new regional security architecture gradually
emerging in
the Arab world seems to be managed almost totally by non-Arab parties:
Iran,
Turkey, Israel, the United States, and now Ethiopia.
It is possible that the Arabs could write themselves out of their own
history,
ending up as mere consumers of foreign goods, proxies for foreign
powers, and
spectators in the game of defining their own identity, security and
destiny.
This is not certain, but the current trend points in that direction,
which
would be a demeaning cap after a century of repeated incompetence in
the field
of Arab security and statehood.
The United States is clearly looking to withdraw from Iraq in the
coming few
years, signaling the end of the short-lived neoconservative era in
Washington
leadership and foreign policy. The US will continue to protect its
national
security interests and friends in the Middle East, but by using more
sensible
methods than the diplomatic and military methods it has deployed in
recent
years, including its Rottweiler-like approach of intimidation and
overkill in
Iraq. A new security system will have to emerge to ensure stability and
order,
thus sparing the Middle East the ignominy of becoming a failed region
of the
world.
This occurs while two other major trends define the region. Traditional
major
Arab powers like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as lesser ones like
Syria,
Jordan, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, are less influential and
interventionist
regionally than they used to be. In many cases they also suffer greater
dissent and even some stressed legitimacy at home. At the same time,
powerful
new non-state actors in the Arab world now challenge, work alongside,
or even
replace long-serving regimes; the most noteworthy examples are
Hizbullah,
Hamas, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Badr and Mehdi militias in
Iraq, the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and, most recently, the Union of Islamic
Courts
in Somalia.
Arabs, Israelis, Turks, Iranians, Americans, Europeans, and now
Ethiopians,
will not sit around passively watching the rise to power of these
groups on
CNN and Al-Jazeera. All those concerned will try to secure their
national
interests and weaken their enemies, ultimately forging a new security
arrangement that allows the region's many forces to find a balance of
power
that is stable. This could be negotiated - like the historic Helsinki
Accords
between the East and West in 1975 - or it will emerge from the
political and
military battles we witness these days in Beirut, Gaza, Baghdad, and
southwestern Somalia.
The coming new era in which Middle Eastern geostrategic security is
handled
primarily by non-Arab regional players will replace the onetime US-USSR
superpower rivalry and the actions of major Arab players like Egypt,
Saudi Arabia and Syria. Several regional hegemons will emerge to balance each
other
out. The leading candidates now seem to be Iran, Israel, Turkey and a
toned
down or over-the-horizon United States. Any Arabs who play a role will
mainly
be surrogates, subcontracted militias, or outsourced intelligence
agencies to
these front-line powers. Arab military systems that cost hundreds of
billions
of dollars to build will be relegated to being little more than local
gendarmeries.
Political circumstances in Iraq, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon have
given
Tehran openings that it has exploited to forge closer alliances or
tactical
working relationships with groups as different as Hamas, Hizbullah, the
Syrian
Baathist leadership, and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government that is
merrily
hanging former Baathists. Turkey is primarily focused on
Kurdish-related
events in neighboring Iraq, Iran and Syria, though it could also play a
greater role in Arab-Israeli and United Nations peacemaking and
peacekeeping
activities. Israel works covertly throughout the region, but remains
constrained by its lack of formal ties with most Arab states and Iran.
A
comprehensive, fair Arab-Israeli peace accord would open many doors for
Israeli ties with other Middle Eastern states, making its role in a
regional
security system more legitimate and acceptable.
This picture is startling for the prevalent absence of Arab states in
the
creation and management of their own security order. What remains
unclear is
how the enormous power of Islamist militant and resistance groups will
translate into formal engagement with a new regional security system.
The best
we can hope for is that Islamists who win democratic elections would
assume
power and responsibly manage the affairs of state and society,
including
striking diplomatic deals with regional and foreign powers. Attempts by
Iran,
Syria and others to control Islamists will not work in the long run,
because
the Islamists only have legitimacy and impact in their role as
nation-specific
defenders of their own people's rights, not as agents for foreign
governments.
Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
Alien considerations
By Haaretz Editorial
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/810506.html
The government approved a scandalous bill yesterday - submitted by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon - to import 3,000 foreign laborers to work in agriculture. They would join the 26,000 foreign workers already employed by the Israeli agriculture industry. The bill runs contrary to previous government decisions to gradually reduce the annual quotas for foreign workers in agriculture, construction and industry. It also runs contrary to the policy of Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai and that of the government employment service, which are interested in making more workplaces available to unemployed Israelis, and it is in contradiction to the policy of the treasury and the Bank of Israel.
The deputy governor of the Bank of Israel, Prof. Zvi Eckstein, is in the process of formulating a comprehensive plan to drastically reduce the number of foreign workers in Israel. Eckstein, an economist and expert in labor market policy, relies on a model adopted by Australia and intended to curb the entry of millions of foreign workers from other countries in the region. Instead of bringing in a foreign and cheap labor force, Australia introduced agricultural mechanization. Eckstein thinks there is no reason for the Israeli government not to adopt a similar policy and subsidize farmers who bring mechanization into their fields and hothouses. Given the small number of landowners who make a living from agriculture, this is not an impossible task.
There have been previous attempts to subsidize Israeli agriculture workers, but such efforts were shot down by the farmers, who argued that Israelis are not prepared to work in agriculture and are not skilled in agricultural work. The farmers tend not to mention another key consideration: wages.
The Kav La'Oved hotline for the protection of workers' rights recently received a complaint from a woman from Nepal who was hired to do agricultural work for between eight and 13 hours a day for NIS 11 an hour, even though the legal wage is NIS 19.28 an hour. Investigations of such complaints have proven over and over again that the salaries of foreign workers - despite government attempts to increase them through various charges and fees - are still 30 percent lower than those of Israeli workers.
Bringing foreign laborers into Israel is also a profitable venture for the Israeli companies that receive thousands of dollars from these downtrodden workers, who are forced to get loans and mortgage their property to get the longed-for permit to do manual labor in Israel.
Simhon has been pressing for an increase in the number of foreign workers for a long time now. He, and others in the Labor Party, are subject to pressure by vote contractors who supplement their income from agriculture with their ownership of human-resources companies that import foreign workers.
Olmert - like his predecessors, including Ariel Sharon - is submitting to the pressure. The agriculture lobby is indeed one of the strongest lobbies in Israel, as it is in other countries, like France. Determination is required in order to stand against it. Instead of bringing in more and more workers, a serious plan must be developed to replace them with Israeli workers and sophisticated machinery. Israel must free itself once and for all from enslavement to a cheap labor force, with all its economic and ethical ramifications.
Today in History:
January 8, 1992 - Greece
Pan Am Bomber Convicted
On January 8, 1992, a Greek court convicted Palestinian terrorist Mohammad Rashid of premeditated murder for planting a bomb on a Pan American aircraft in August 1982. The bomb exploded as the plane was about to land at Honolulu, Hawaii, killing one person and injuring several others. Rashid was arrested in Greece in May 1988 as a result of a tip from the United States.
January 8, 1959 - Cuba
Fidel Castro Takes Power
President Fulgencio Batista flew to exile in the Dominican Republic and Castro marched into the capital, Havana, on this date to take power.
January 8, 1912 - South Africa
Founding of the SANC
The South African National Congress (SANC), forerunner of the African National Congress (ANC), was formed to fight for black political rights.
Upcoming Significant Events:
January 9, 1964 - Panama
Martyrs' Day
Commemorates anti-American rioting which resulted in the deaths of four U.S. soldiers and twenty students at a Panamanian high school. Panamanians have demonstrated annually to protest this incident.
January 11, 1944 - Morocco
National Holiday
Independence Manifesto issued by nationalists during French rule.
January 12, 1964 - Tanzania
Zanzibar Revolution Day
The African majority revolted against the Arab sultan, and a new government was formed with the Afro-Shirazi party leader as president. Marks the establishment of the People's Republic.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070105/ap_on_re_eu/france_shooting
Motorist opens fire in Paris; none hurt
Posted on Friday, January 5, 2007 at 8:05pm
A motorist opened fire at storefronts and bus stops in a Paris neighborhood near the Arc de Triomphe on Friday night, but nobody was injured, police said. The man, at the wheel of a Renault Twingo, fired about 20 rounds in the upscale 16th district of the French capital, police said. He then abandoned the car at the scene and fled on foot. It was not immediately clear if he had been aiming at someone. Police said they did not know what motivated the shooter. Full Story
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070106/wl_uk_afp/britainsafricadefencecompanybae
British investigators probing South Africa arms deal: report
Posted on Friday, January 5, 2007 at 10:56pm
Britain's Serious Fraud Office is investigating alleged "substantial payments" from BAE Systems to a senior South African defence ministry official over a 1999 arms deal, The Guardian has reported. The newspaper said the SFO was liaising with South Africa's organised crime unit to probe the accounts of Fana Hlongwane, a prominent businessman and former adviser to the country's late former defence minister Joe Modise. Full Story
samples of muslim brainwashing:
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate/terrorist2.html
A quick peek shows this site to be interesting:
[history]
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate/
Update: Info on Port of Miami Head
Thanks to AliVeritas. And to Milford421, who sent it to me.
http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/180
Deputy Director of the Miami Port Khalid Salahuddin aka Imam of the
Al Ansar mosque
July 4, 2004
John Ashcroft recently issued a heightened terror warning for South
Florida.
With this in mind MIM wants to inform readers about the militant
Islamist groups in South Florida and the organisations and
individuals who are supposed to be serving the public interest who
are joining with them.
Most alarming is the fact that Khalid Salahuddin, the Deputy
Director of the Port of Miami and Imam of the Al Ansar mosque
appears to be conducting business as usual.
Last week Salahuddin spoke at public forum "Alternatives to
Extremism" which was organised by JAM. (Jews and Muslims and All).
Several of the organisers and participants in the event are tied to
militant Islamists.
Note that the wording of the event billing does not condemn
extremism and implies that extremism is legitimate, and that the
public forum is an intellectual exercise intended to discuss whether
or not their are any other options.
The fact that the Deputy Director of the Port of Miami is also
acting as an Imam in one of the largest mosques in South Florida is
worth noting.
That the Deputy Director of the Port of Miami ,who plays a key role
in Port Security would speak at a "Town Hall Forum " sponsored by a
group associated with Dar Ul Uloom and other Islamists in South
Florida, begs the question as to where Homeland Security and the FBI
think the terror threat is emanating from.
JAM is run in part by Malana Shafayat Mohammed who is the Imam of
the Dar Ul Uloom mosque.
MIM pointed out Mohammed's ties to Bin Laden funded Ahmed Deedat and
other supporters .
http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/126
Maulana Shafayat Mohammed also funds some of JAM's activities.
As MIM readers will recall,Dar Ul Uloom was the mosque attended by
Jose Padilla, Adnan Shukrijumah, Jokhan Shueyb and Iman Mandhi.
Shueyb and Mandhai are now in jail on charges of "planning to wage
Jihad with explosives".
Mandhai's first lawyer, Nashid Sabir,is listed as a director of the
Dar Ul Uloom Islamic Center.
Sabir is also the registered agent for Khalid Salahuddin's
mosque "Masjid Al Ansar"
Salahuddins militant Islamist ties were the subject of an article
which can be seen on MIM enititled : Port of Miami or Port of
Jihadi?
http://web.archive.org/web/20040701113106/http://www.militantislammon
itor.org/article/id/13
In 2002 Salahuddin had been a speaker at a CAIR forum in Ft.
Lauderdale with an alarming array of militant Islamists.
CAIR is a Saudi funded front group for Hamas :
In CAIR : Moderate Friends of Terror: Daniel Pipes writes :
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/394
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