The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians along with those of the EU and President Obama's US were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.
I must end this year by again paying tribute to my readers for the wonderful generosity with which they came to the aid of two causes. First their donations made it possible for the latest "metric martyr", the east London market trader Janet Devers, to fight Hackney council's vindictive decision to prosecute her on 13 criminal charges, ranging from selling in pounds and ounces to selling produce "by the bowl" (to avoid using weights her customers dislike and don't understand). The embarrassment caused by this historic battle has thrown the forced metrication policy of both our governments, in London and Brussels, into total disarray.
Since Hackney backed out of allowing four criminal charges against Janet to go before a jury next month, all that remains is for her to win her appeal in February against eight convictions which now look quite absurd (including those for selling veg by the bowl, as thousands of other London market traders do every day). The final goal, as Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund insists, must then be a pardon for the late Steve Thoburn and the four other original "martyrs" who were found guilty in 2002 after a legal battle also made possible by this column's readers of breaking laws so ridiculous that the EU Commission has even denied they existed (but which are still on the statute book).
Readers were equally generous this year in rushing to the aid of Sue Smith, whose son was killed in a Snatch Land Rover in Iraq in 2005. Their contributions made it possible for her to carry on with the High Court action she has brought against the Ministry of Defence, with the sole aim of calling it to account for needlessly risking soldiers' lives by sending them into battle in hopelessly inappropriate vehicles. Thanks not least to Mrs Smith's determined fight, the Snatch Land Rover scandal, first reported here in 2006, has at last become a national cause celebre.
May I finally thank all those readers who have written to me in 2008 so many that, as usual, it has not been possible to answer all their messages. But their support and information has been hugely appreciated. May I wish them and all of you a happy (if globally not too warm) New Year.
The Muslim Public Affairs Commitee (MPACUK) is appealing to its supporters to track down the Muslim researchers who worked with the think tank Policy Exchange on a project to expose the sale of hate literature in British mosques.
Under the heading "The Hunt for 8 Sufi Zio-Con Frauds", the MPAC website claims that the researchers were members of "Sufi underground cults" who teamed up with the Zionists to discredit Islam. And it adds:
Who are they, what are their backgrounds ... MPACUK will dig deeper and expose every last detail of the Sufis who tried to destroy their own community.
If you know who they are - please write in and we will expose these men and women for all the Muslim community to see. Write in now and let us do what the incompetent idiots in the Mosque should be doing, protecting our community.
Let us do what, precisely? I wonder if this sinister announcement of a manhunt will persuade the BBC to stop sucking up to MPAC, whose spokesman Ashgar Bukhari says that any Muslim killed fighting Israel goes straight to paradise. Probably not.
When Holy Smoke reported Bukhari's views, I was denounced as part of the Zionist conspiracy. Actually, I don't give a toss what MPAC thinks: I'm not a Zionist and I wasn't impressed by the spluttering performance of a Policy Exchange spokesman when Newsnight confronted him with evidence that some of the receipts for hate literature were dodgy. (I mean, for God's sake, how difficult is it to produce genuine receipts for Muslim hate literature? I could pick some up from my local Islamic bookstore today.)
But that's beside the point. What we have here is a threatening post on the MPAC official website which is apparently encouraging someone to dispense Islamic justice to Muslim traitors. "Protecting our community", MPAC calls it. That's a handy little euphemism, isn't it?
'I BESEECH you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." So wrote Oliver Cromwell in 1650, and the world would be a better place if Cromwell's words were prominently posted over the desk of everyone who works in the pundit racket - those who get paid to tell the world what they think, but too infrequently pause to consider, let alone confess, that they might not actually know what they're talking about
Like weather forecasters and economists, those of us in the commentariat get paid even when we're wrong. If we didn't - well, just think of the political sages who would have been pounding the pavement after asserting confidently that Mitt Romney was sitting pretty in Iowa and New Hampshire, or that Barack Obama had no chance of defeating the Clinton machine. Fortunately, error isn't usually a hanging offense in this business. Just ask Dick Morris, the Fox News/New York Post commentator, who wrote a book in 2005 called "Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race." Or Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution scholar and frequent op-ed essayist whose latest book, on the Obama phenomenon, was titled "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win."
BusinessWeek was chortling recently over a list of what it labeled "truly spectacular" wrong calls about 2008, such as President Bush's soothing analysis of the economy last March ("The market is in the process of correcting itself") and Jim Cramer's response on CNBC's "Mad Money" to a viewer who was thinking of dumping his Bear Stearns stock ("No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine! Do not take your money out . . . Bear Stearns is not in trouble!").
But not every howler made the BusinessWeek list. For example, it didn't include this elaborate forecast, which proved to be mistaken in every detail:
"New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will enter the presidential race in February, after it becomes clear which nominees will get the nod from the major parties. His multiple billions and organization will impress voters - and stun rivals. He'll look like the most viable third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. But Bloomberg will come up short, as he comes in for withering attacks from both Democrats and Republicans. He and Clinton will split more than 50 percent of the votes, but Arizona's maverick senator, John McCain, will end up the country's next President."
That impressive string of blunders was one of "Ten Likely Events in 2008" foretold by - yes - BusinessWeek back on Jan. 2. Anyone can make a bad call, of course, but it generally takes a professional - a paid journalist or expert analyst - to be wrong about something so comprehensively (and publicly).
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, nicely illustrates the point in the November issue of Commentary magazine. He rounds up the reaction of much of the punditocracy to the 2007 change of strategy in Iraq - the "surge" that led to such remarkable progress in the war. As Wehner shows, one commentator after another expressed not just doubt about the surge, but utter contempt for it.
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post assured readers that the surge "could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles." Time's Joe Klein derided it as a "futile pipe dream." Former ambassador Peter Galbraith explained in the New York Review of Books that the surge "has no chance of actually working." And Jonathan Chait announced in the Los Angeles Times that there was "something genuinely bizarre" about anyone who would support the new strategy. "It is not just that they are wrong - being wrong happens to all of us from time to time. It's that they are completely detached from reality."
Do tell.
I was wrong, too. A month before Bush announced the surge, I wrote that his sagging approval ratings would surely revive if only he would "make it clear that he is serious about victory" in Iraq and "will do whatever it takes to achieve it." Two years later, Iraq is in vastly better shape, but Bush's approval numbers are even worse.
"Think it possible you may be mistaken." My resolution for 2009 is to keep Cromwell's reproach in mind with every column I write. I'm not planning to get anything wrong, but it's been known to happen. Caveat lector.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe
Posted by: Fred ||
12/28/2008 10:57 ||
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Pakistan appears to be whipping up war hysteria with the twin objective of uniting its own people and simultaneously offering an excuse to the NATO forces for shifting its troops from the western front to its borders with India. Everyone knows that the civilian government in Islamabad is not in control of things. The irresponsible manner in which Pakistani leaders including President, Asif Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Geelani have been behaving suggest that they are now desperate to hold on to power.
Pakistan is a failed state, there is no doubt about that. Since its inception, the only thing that has held it together is anti-Indian sentiment. The civilian government there has little support from the Army as well as from the other major political party led by Nawaz Sharif. But if a war-like atmosphere is created, the various groups that do not back the government may finally rally behind it with the objective of facing India.
For Islamabad, shifting troops is also strategic since, under pressure from its western allies, Pakistan has been forced to engage in a conflict with its own people on the North West Frontier and other areas adjoining Afghanistan. The entire exercise carried out under duress is making both the Army and the civilian government extremely unpopular. But if a conflict or the possibility of a conflict remains, the government and the Army have a valid excuse for telling its allies that troops are needed on the other side and that the war against terror i.e Taliban and al-Qaeda can wait for a while.
Islamabad also realises that it has been caught red-handed in an act of terrorism in Mumbai. Had Kasab, the sole survivor also been killed by Indian security forces in Mumbai, it would have been difficult to prove Pakistans complicity to the rest of the world. Islamabad knows that realisation had begun to dawn on its western allies that terror in South Asia is different from terror against western countries. While Pakistan was treated by its allies as a partner in the war against terrorism in the West, it is the perpetrator of terrorism in South Asia, particularly against India.
But another significant development that has taken many western powers by surprise is the declaration by a section of the Taliban that if Pakistan and India go to war, it will fight along with the Pakistani forces against India. This clearly indicates that there is a definite nexus between the Taliban and Pakistan that has existed beyond the period when the US used Pakistan's proximity with the Taliban to fight the ``Soviet occupational forces'' in Afghanistan.
In sharp contrast to the hysterical utterances of the Pakistani leadership, the Indian side has acted in a mature manner. New Delhi's response has been measured. External Affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee has once demonstrated how much his experience counts for at a time when the Indian government was in a bind over its inept handling of the Antulay episode.
The Indian government would have been in an even better position vis-a-vis its internal situation had it sacked Antulay after he retracted his insinuations about Bombay ATS chief Hemant Karkare's death. In fact, it would have been a political masterstroke if Antulay was sacked after the retraction. Since this was not done, the manner in which the whole thing was handled appeared to make a mockery of the collective responsibility of the Cabinet. In this case, the Prime Minister and his advisers seem to have erred.
Coming back to Indias response to Pakistan, Mukherjee seems to be steering the government through troubled waters with exceptional skill. He has on board even allies of Pakistan who are apparently convinced that Islamabad has not done enough to curb terrorism. In India too, people are expecting a war with Pakistan given that temperatures have been raised across our borders. But the government has not yet given up on other options. If Pakistan does not learn its lessons even now, war may be forced on a reluctant India. Between us.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/28/2008 16:18 ||
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The Indian government has an Harry Reid equivalent for a prime minister. I have serious doubts about the war drums that are being played.
Somebody needs to raise Indira Gandhi from her grave. India haven't had a credible prime minister since Indira. For example, in 1967, she started a national nuclear program to combat rising China. Under Indira, a successful nuclear underground test was done in 1974. That's less than 10 years.
The last Indian prime minister with balls of steel. They don't make'em like they used to.
It now appears unlikely that India will respond to last month's attacks on Mumbai (Bombay) -- its "9/11" -- with a military strike on Pakistan, the terrorists' haven. With three major wars behind them, neither rival wants a repeat.
The rest of the article goes downhill from this sadly mistaken premise. India doesn't want a war and would like to avoid one, but they're going to go to war because it is simply intolerable that the Paks can murder a couple hundred of their citizens.
Unfortunately, the possibility of war may intensify in years to come if India ramps up its "Cold Start" military doctrine.
Cold Start transforms New Delhi's traditional focus on defense and lumbering mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops to one that prizes nimble strikes against its neighbor within hours of crisis onset. The strategy assumes that occupation of limited Pakistani territory would be the bargaining chip to force Islamabad to heel. It also assumes that it could do this without crossing the nuclear threshold -- not an easy feat where rivalries run deep.
India has war-gamed this strategy since 2004. Adoption still must overcome equipment and personnel deficiencies and interservice rivalries, but work continues.
Rather than intimidate Pakistan to constrain militants or suffer the consequences, Cold Start may do just the opposite by inadvertently putting militants in the driver's seat. Previously, terrorist provocations would be met with action only after deliberation and delay. Under Cold Start, response would be much more immediate, effectively empowering radicals to hold the subcontinent hostage to their crisis-initiating whims.
To avoid that outcome, the time has come for India to short circuit the most critical incendiary, the disputed area of Kashmir. Despite some recent Islamic militant clamor to dominate the entire subcontinent, Kashmir remains the eye of the Indo-Pakistani vortex.
Removing its centrality will help pull the rug from under terrorist groups that have used the dispute to target both the region and the heart of India. Failure will only heighten the probability that Cold Start might someday precipitate a nuclear conflict.
Recent history shows that it's not a far-fetched specter. On Dec. 13, 2001, five Pakistani gunmen dressed in commando fatigues and driving a diplomatic car entered the VIP gate of India's Parliament's compound armed with AK-47 rifles, grenades, and other explosives. Their audacious objective: decapitate the Indian government.
An alert guard foiled their plans, and the ensuing shoot-out left 13 people dead, including the assassins.
India demanded that Pakistan ban the responsible terrorist groups and arrest their leaders. To press Islamabad, it mobilized half a million men. But the intended impact stumbled as India's Army took three weeks to get to the border. This allowed Pakistan sufficient time to ratchet up defenses.
Tension then bounced down and up. They relaxed with President Musharraf's Jan. 12, 2002, televised address to the nation declaring his intention to crack down on the militants. But the May 2002 attack on an Indian base in Jammu that killed the wives and children of Indian servicemen renewed the drumbeat for war.
By July 2002, intense American diplomatic pressure, coupled with subtle Pakistan nuclear threats, caused the belligerents to stand their armies down, leaving a sour taste for many Indians: Pakistan remained unpunished.
For some defense planners, Cold Start offered the answer in future crisis. Now Mumbai gives the strategy renewed stimulus. But resolution of Kashmir is where momentum should be building.
In recent years, India has sought to relax tensions by promoting confidence-building measures -- a bus line and commercial truck service between Srinagar and Muzzafarrabad, regular meetings between Indian and Pakistani local commanders, a crisis hot line, dialogue with moderate Kashmiri separatists, and improvement in the region's economic and human rights. These steps have tempered conflict but not Kashmiri objection to Indian rule.
New Delhi's reluctance to let Kashmiris define their future -- options include independence, division along communal lines, comanagement by both India and Pakistan, a UN trusteeship -- butts against recent history demonstrating that "letting go" more than holding on benefits politically divided states. Witness the pacific and beneficial demise of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Serbia/Montenegro.
India's future rests not on maturing Cold Start but becoming a 21st century economic power house. Hanging on to Kashmir does nothing to promote that goal. Letting go not only will benefit New Delhi's modernization by reducing the heavy military burden bad relations with Pakistan engenders, it also will allow Islamabad to redirect its military resources to the tribal areas benefiting Washington's position in Afghanistan.
By rattling South Asian relations, Mumbai's tragedy can give momentum to resolving one of the 20th century's most confounding impasses. A fast diplomatic start, not Cold Start, would benefit all.
Bennett Ramberg served in the State Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. He is the author of three books and editor of three others on international politics.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/28/2008 14:54 ||
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Yup. Surrender Kashmir; Pakistan will love you for it and never bother India again. /s
I think that the gentleman has been in the Sun too long.
The Pakistan government has failed to respond satisfactorily to Indias demands to convincingly end terrorism emanating from its soil and to hand over terrorist leaders and fugitives from Indian justice. Though both governments have toned down the political rhetoric and war clouds are no longer hovering on the horizon, the palpable anger of the people after the terror attacks on Mumbai has not been assuaged and a future conflict with Pakistan remains a possibility.Most analysts and commentators know that war is not a good option - it will add to the complexity of the challenge of cross-border terrorism without in any way helping to resolve it. Yet, there is widespread agreement that limited military measures and covert intelligence operations are necessary to raise the cost for the Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to wage a proxy war against India through terrorism. Unless some punishment is inflicted on the real perpetrators, they will not be persuaded to terminate their low risk-high payoff strategy to destabilise and weaken India by bleeding it through a thousand cuts.
The military measures that are actually adopted have to be carefully calibrated to ensure that escalation can be controlled short of all-out war. These include precision strikes by artillery, rocket and missile forces and air-to-ground strikes by fighter aircraft and attack helicopters against purely military targets in Pakistan-administered Kashmir so as to inflict punishment on the Pakistan Army, ISI and the leadership of the terrorist organisations acting against India. Special Forces raids will also be viable under certain circumstances. In case conventional conflict does break out, the endeavour should be to limit the fighting to the Line of Control in Kashmir so as to avoid risking escalation to nuclear levels.
There is, of course, some risk of conventional conflict spilling over from Kashmir to the plains. Though the Indian Army and Air Force still enjoy an edge over their Pakistani counterparts despite the slow pace of modernisation and numerous operational deficiencies, Pakistan may choose to escalate the conflict for political reasons. The Pakistani armed forces have received considerable aid from the United States to fight the so-called global war on terror but are in no shape to successfully fight a war with India because of their large-scale commitment in the NWFP, FATA and Swat Valley and because of the recent battering that they have received at the hands of militant groups like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
If conventional conflict does spill over to the plains, Indias army and air force will plan to take the fight into enemy territory through their new concept of joint air-land offensive operations. This has been tested in a series of annual exercises that have included Poorna Vijay (2001), Vijay Chakra, Divya Astra, Vajra Shakti (May 2005), Desert Strike (November 2005), Sanghe Shakti (May 2006) and Dakshin Shakti-Brazen Chariots (March 2008). All of these exercises were aimed at concentrating and coordinating the firepower of all available assets and fine-tuning army-air force joint operations in a strategic setting premised on conventional operations in a nuclear environment.
The doctrine for offensive operations prior to Operation Parakram (2001-02) was to employ the massive combat potential of Indias Strike Corps to advance deep into Pakistani territory to capture strategic objectives and to bring to battle and destroy Pakistans Army Reserve (North) and Army Reserve (South), so as to substantially degrade its war machinery. This concept was evolved in 1981-82 and tested in Exercise Digvijay when General Krishna Rao was army chief. It was further refined during the famous Exercise Brass Tacks IV in 1987 by General K. Sundarji as chief of the army staff and was accepted as the armys doctrine for offensive operations in the plains.
While the option to strike deep and call Pakistans nuclear bluff remains on the table, a new concept of offensive operations now under consideration is a combination of cold start and integrated battle groups (IBGs). During Operation Parakram the Strike Corps had taken too long to move to their concentration areas. The aim of Cold Start is to move rapidly from the cantonments directly to battle positions to launch a number of potent strikes all across the western border without prior warning to give India strategic advantage. IBGs based on combinations of infantry divisions and armoured brigades are offensive battle groups capable of penetrating across the border over a wide front. Supported by massive firepower, IBGs can launch multi-pronged offensive operations into Pakistan without presenting large targets for nuclear strikes.
Indias strike formations are now better capable of launching offensive operations quickly. Within 72 to 96 hours of the issue of the order for full-scale mobilisation, a large number of IBGs based on strike divisions may be expected to launch offensive operations even as the defensive divisions are still completing their deployments on the border. Such simultaneity of operations will unhinge the adversary, break his cohesion and paralyse him into making mistakes from which he will not be able to recover.
Each strike division battle group will be specifically structured to achieve designated objectives in the terrain in which it is expected to be launched and yet be flexible enough for two or more of them to be grouped for concentrated operations under a corps HQ. This will enable them to bring to bear the combined weight of their combat power on a common military objective deep inside Pakistani territory. The pivot or holding Corps has been provided significant offensive capability that is now integral to them. The then army chief, General J.J. Singh, had stated that they have been assigned roles, which are offensive as well as defensive
Should the Pakistan army find itself unable to stop the Indian juggernaut, it may consider launching nuclear strikes against Indias mechanised forces operating inside its territory. However, Pakistan has a lot to lose by initiating nuclear strikes. Its military leaders are well aware that while India will sustain considerable damage in a Pakistani first strike, Indias massive retaliatory strike will completely destroy major Pakistani cities, industry and combat forces and Pakistan will cease to exist as a nation state.
Under the circumstances, Pakistans red lines are not as close to the border as the Pakistan army has been trying to convince Indian military planners to believe. Obviously, the red lines vary according to the terrain. For example, in the developed state of West Punjab, Pakistans nuclear threshold will be much lower than in the Cholistan or Thar deserts, which are relatively less developed and, consequently, more thinly populated.
The nuclear tipping point in a conventional conflict is a matter of fine military judgement. A rational Pakistani approach would be to opt for a graduated response in case push comes to shove. Lt Gen Sardar F.S. Lodhi (Retd) has written about a demonstration warning shot followed by a low-yield nuclear explosion over Indian forces advancing inside Pakistani territory. If that fails to stop Indian offensive operations, Pakistan may choose to target a small border town in India. However, it will risk total annihilation.
In the end, Indias conventional superiority will prevail and a future conflict in the plains may be expected to end on terms favourable to India. Hence, while war is not a rational option, there is no need to fear war and act timidly. India must act in its national interest and not continue to suffer the adverse consequences of Pakistans interminable proxy war.
Gurmeet Kanwal is Director, Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi
Posted by: john frum ||
12/28/2008 10:36 ||
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Most analysts and commentators know that war is not a good option - it will add to the complexity of the challenge of cross-border terrorism without in any way helping to resolve it.
Most analysts and commentators have their head up their ass. Kiling "terrorists" and their sponsors (and ideally their friends and relatives) greatly simplifies the problem and resolves it with an impressive finality.
Like bullfrogs out after heavy summer rains, Pakistani cyberspace and the realm of the printed word are full of the croaking of neocons who have convinced the already ignorant that the Security Council sanctions against Jama'at-ud Dawa and certain individuals only came because Pakistani officials were either sleeping at the post or had conspired with the 15-member Security Council to let the axe fall.
These people are not interested in facts. They only have opinions.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: john frum ||
12/28/2008 00:00 ||
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And this takes me back to Pervez Musharraf's first visit to the US after his coup. At a meeting with a group of journalists among whom I was present, my dear and much lamented friend Tahir Mirza, then the Dawn correspondent, asked Musharraf why he was not acting against Lashkar-e Tayba and Jaish-e Muhammad. Musharraf went red in the face and shot back, "They are not doing anything in Pakistan. They are doing jihad outside."
I bet he said the same about Osama and friends
Posted by: john frum ||
12/28/2008 12:46 Comments ||
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Covering just 365 square kilometres and home to 1.5 million people, Gaza is one of the most densely populated regions in the world. So it is unlikely that Israel would be able to launch a military offensive against Hamas militants, who have fired hundreds of rockets across the border in recent days, without inflicting terrible casualties on the civilian Palestinian population. But, say Israel's leaders, the threat to their own civilians leaves them no choice.
Air strikes were duly launched on Hamas targets in Gaza yesterday and scores have been killed. An operation by Israeli ground forces could be imminent.
It is a depressingly familiar scenario, a cycle of provocation and reprisal that periodically escalates into full-blown war. There is no simple account of events leading up to the current confrontation that does justice to the amassed sense of grievance on both sides. But two specific events have played a decisive role: the decision earlier this month by Hamas to end a six-month ceasefire and elections in Israel due in February.
In reality, the "ceasefire" was a tempering of aggression on both sides rather than a cessation of hostilities. Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni has declared the rocket attacks "unbearable" and asserted that the Hamas administration in Gaza must be "toppled".
Ms Livni's hawkish stance is conditioned in part by the aspiration to become prime minister. Her Kadima party is trailing in opinion polls, behind Likud, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, a determined hardliner.
The standing of incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Olmert never recovered from the disastrous war he waged against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. Then, too, Israeli civilians came under attack from rocket fire and the army was sent in to rout militants over the border. But it did so with such indiscriminate force that, despite tactical gains, international outrage forced a prompt withdrawal. For Israel, it was a moral and strategic defeat.
Mr Olmert wants strikes against Hamas to be more effective, which in theory means they would be forensically targeted. But that is not easy. Besides, as a six-month economic blockade on Gaza demonstrates, the welfare of ordinary Palestinians is always subordinate to Israeli security objectives. The blockade has accelerated the decline of Gaza's population into hunger and poverty. Israel insists Hamas is to blame, saying sanctions will be lifted when the rocket fire stops.
But the blockade suits Hamas, which "taxes" money and goods smuggled in and provides welfare services to the population. Under siege, its monopoly is secure. There is, meanwhile, no mechanism to negotiate a way out of this impasse. It is not just Israel that does not talk to Hamas. The EU and US also refuse contact.
That is because Hamas is a terrorist organisation. Its founding charter claims the Holy Land exclusively for Islam and calls for the complete annihilation of Israel. For all that the international community might wish for Israeli restraint, no government in the world would tolerate an enclave on its border run by an organisation ideologically motivated and heavily armed to kill its citizens. From the Israeli perspective, painful compromises already made - pulling down Jewish settlements in Gaza - resulted in less, not more security. That feels like a betrayal.
But an equivalent betrayal is felt on the Palestinian side. Compared with Gaza, there have been modest improvements in conditions in the West Bank under Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But there is nothing like the progress towards statehood that would allow Mr Abbas to claim his more moderate approach works better than the militant line taken by Hamas.
Even those Israeli and Palestinian politicians who are minded to negotiate are boxed into uncompromising stances, and for both the main reason is Hamas. But attempting to remove the problem with military power will not work. Hamas craves confrontation because its support increases when ordinary Palestinians are collectively punished, as has happened under the blockade. There are compelling reasons why Israeli politicians do not try to talk Hamas out of its militancy. But the near certainty of failure is also a more compelling reason not to try force instead.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/28/2008 12:26 ||
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Years of talking have produced nothing. Talking only kills more people but over a longer period of time.
The events along the southern front which commenced at 11:30 on Saturday morning are the closest thing there is to a war between Israel and Hamas. It is difficult to ascertain (geographically) where and for how long the violence will reach before international intervention forces a halt to the hostilities. However, Israel's opening salvo is not merely another "surgical" operation or pinpoint strike. This is the harshest IDF assault on Gaza since the territory was captured during the Six-Day War in 1967.
Palestinian sources in Gaza report that 40 targets were destroyed in a span of three to five minutes. This was a massive attack much along the lines of what the Americans termed "shock and awe" during their invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Simultaneous, heavy bombardment of a number of targets on which Israel spent months gathering intelligence. The military "target bank" includes dozens of additional targets linked to Hamas, some of which will certainly come under attack in the coming days.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/28/2008 00:00 ||
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Except the Israelis didn't hit, for the cameras, a bunch of known empty palaces. An improvement I'd say.
Posted by: ed ||
12/28/2008 12:55 Comments ||
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The lame duck prime minister, Ehud Olmert, stated that peace with Syria can be clinched in a short time, and immediately flew to Ankara to accept the Syrian territorial demands to fish in the Sea of Galilee. He obviously prefers to go down as peacemaker rather than a crook. This seems to be the only logical explanation for his hyperactivity on the Syrian track. The mere opening of indirect negotiations with Damascus via the services provided by Ankara lacked any diplomatic logic. Why should Israel help Bashar Assad escape his international isolation following his mischievous behavior in Iraq and Lebanon? Indeed, the Bush administration is justified in its anger with the Syrian dictator for allowing insurgents access to Iraq via Syria and for undermining the Seniora pro-Western regime in Beirut.
The most important reason why Israel should not engage Syria is that the state has nothing significant to offer. A peace treaty with Syria does not improve the strategic situation. Nothing beats the status quo.
Politically, the desire for an embassy in Damascus is too costly. Giving up the strategic Golan plateau deprives Israel of its best defense against potential Syrian aggression. It also signals weakness and undermines deterrence. Economically, uprooting 20,000 Jews and the attempts to resettle them will cost at least $20 billion. In these difficult economic times, this will pose a heavy burden on the economy, not to mention the deep psychological effects on society.
The cost of a peace treaty nowadays is clear, as is the current quid pro quo. A treaty with Syria will not improve the country's strategic situation. Generally, Israel has little to gain from economic or cultural interactions with the Arab world. Our neighbors have not opened up to globalization and have remained poor, an unappetizing market for our products. Moreover, their societies are despotic, corrupt, fanatic and in deep cultural crises. The Arab world has nothing to offer and Israel should keep its distance.
Moreover, at this particular historic junction Syria carries little weight in the Arab world. The Arab states do not fear a Syrian veto on relations with Israel. More precisely, the Saudi initiative indicates Arab willingness to accommodate Israel in facing the Iranian nuclear challenge. Many Arab states share deep concerns about Syria's strategic relationship with Iran and its rising power in the Middle East.
The naïve belief that territorial concessions will dissuade Syria from continuing its cozy relationship with Teheran is baseless. Precisely those who belittle the strategic importance of the Golan Heights believe that Syria ascribes great importance to this piece of territory and its transfer to Syrian hands could change the foreign policy orientation of Damascus. Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, tried unsuccessfully to move Syria toward a pro-American orientation in 1976. Under more auspicious international circumstances, after the Cold War, the formidable US secretary of state James Baker tried again but failed. Even when Washington was the only game in town, the Syrians preferred no ties with the Americans.
Many analysts ignore the fact that the regime in Damascus is similar to the dictatorial anti-American regimes in Havana and Pyongyang. Unfortunately, there is a genuine dislike of Uncle Sam in these capitals and an opening up to the West is a mortal danger for these despotic regimes. Why would Bashar Assad jump on a pro-American bandwagon, when the US displayed weakness by electing Barack Obama, a man willing to talk to Iran and advocating an early withdrawal from Iraq? A declining United States is not a desirable ally.
Similarly far-fetched is the expectation that Damascus would stop arms and cash flow to Hizbullah and would expel the Islamic Jihad and Hamas headquarters from Syria. Lebanon is still of great importance to Syria, and it is unlikely Assad will relinquish his influence on Lebanese politics. Similarly, Assad will be reluctant to refrain from intervening in Palestinian politics. The expectations that the Syrian regime will behave differently than in the past betrays an ignorance of Middle Eastern politics, and espouses unfounded optimism. In reality, Assad clearly stated that Syria's foreign policy will not be hostage to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
The status quo, quite bearable from an Israeli point of view, has been stable since 1973 because Israel is militarily stronger than Syria. As long as the power differential continues, there is little chance for a Syrian challenge to the status quo. Syrians are not unfamiliar with power politics. Indeed, in facing Turkish superiority they gave up their claim to the Alexandretta region, five times as large as the Golan.
Leaders such as Olmert are dangerous even during their last hours in power. Fortunately, they can not muster a majority in the Knesset for a reckless move on the Golan.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day". 
As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians along with those of the EU and President Obama's US were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world. 
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent 
