Pentagon chief favors Korea approach in Iraq

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. will need to keep a residual “stabilization force” in Iraq, under conditions negotiated with the Iraqi government, even after most American troops leave the country. Speaking in Honolulu, Gates said it would be a mistake for the U.S. to depart from Iraq “lock, stock and barrel,” as it did from Vietnam in the 1970s. He said he favored a model based on South Korea, where the U.S. maintains a force, with the permission of that government, more than 50 years after the end of the Korean War.

“What I’m thinking in terms of is a mutual agreement where some force of Americans, mutually agreed, with mutually agreed missions, is present for a protracted period of time, but in ways that are protective of the sovereignty of the host government,” Gates said today during a news conference at the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith.

Gates said such a force would be necessary to ease the security concerns of American allies near Iraq. It would provide “reassurance to our friends and to governments in the region, including those that might be our adversaries, that we’re going to be there for a long time.”

Gates was asked about comments by Army General Ray Odierno suggesting he may not be able to give a complete assessment of the current U.S. buildup in Iraq by September, as many in Washington are expecting.

“Right now, if you asked me, I would tell you I’ll probably need a little bit more time to do a true assessment,” Odierno told reporters today, according to a transcript.

‘GOAL POSTS’ UNCHANGED

Gates said he didn’t think Odierno, who is in charge of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, was definitively ruling out a September report. He said he thought Odierno was only suggesting the possibility that more time might be needed to assess the effects of the buildup.

“I don’t think the goal posts have changed,” Gates said, as he prepared to depart Hawai’i for an Asia security conference in Singapore.

The secretary said that while policy makers in Washington are going to have to take into account the “Washington clock” — a reference to the mounting impatience of U.S. lawmakers over the course of the Iraq conflict — he wanted his commanders in Iraq to make their assessments based on events there and not in the U.S.

One initiative Odierno cited was an emerging effort to offer truces to insurgents at “small levels” through American commanders in Iraq, in cooperation with the Iraqi government.

Odierno said “there are insurgents reaching out to us, which is the most important thing. So we want to reach back to them.”

Source:
The Honolulu Advertiser
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2007/May/31/br/br6704582391.html

Jerusalem: Israel Bans Muslim Burials in Old City Cemetery

 JERUSALEM — The Israeli government is preventing burials in an ancient Muslim cemetery in the Old City of Jerusalem, a move that could inflame fresh tensions in the city’s Muslim community, an Islamic official said Wednesday.

Sheik Azzam al-Khatib, head of Jerusalem’s Council for Waqf and Islamic Affairs, said the city’s Muslims used the cemetery for 1,400 years, until August 2006, when Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister of public security, ordered a halt to new burials because the site had spread beyond its original boundaries.

“This is an affront against the rights of Muslims,” al-Khatib said, charging that it was part of efforts to boost the Jewish presence in largely Arab east Jerusalem.

The cemetery lies near the plateau known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, which was the site of the Biblical Jewish temples. The Al Aqsa mosque compound that stands there today houses Islam’s third-holiest shrine.

The area is a tinderbox for Palestinian-Israeli tensions. In February, Israeli work on a ramp leading to the hilltop site touched off clashes between police and local Muslims and brought cries of protest from around the Islamic world.

Matti Gill, head of Dichter’s office, said Muslims had recently begun illegally interring their dead outside the original plot and action had to be taken. He said that while further burials would be prevented, existing graves would not be touched.

“The burial that was being done there was illegal,” he said, adding that there were plenty of alternative sites elsewhere in the city.

Gill said the area adjoining the graveyard would not be built up, but would be turned over to the Israeli Environment Ministry and preserved as a green space.

Muslim leaders have complained to the ministry and to police about the ban.

“We will not accept giving up any part of the cemetery,” said Adnan Husseini, a member of the Higher Islamic Council.

He compared the latest dispute to the case of the planned Museum of Tolerance in the western part of Jerusalem where the building site was found to encroach upon parts of a disused Muslim burial ground.

Construction of the project, backed by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has been frozen by a court order while lawyers for supporters and opponents argue the case.

“The truth is that there is a war going on over Muslim cemeteries in Jerusalem,” Husseini said. “This a sensitive and dangerous issue, and it should be dealt with as such.”

Source: Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/30/AR2007053001536.html

Related: Israel Bans Muslim Burials Next to Al-Aqsa Mosque

What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia

The Commonplace Cowardice of Responsible Professors

What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia

By ROBERT JENSEN

For two years I have served at the University of Texas at Austin on the faculty committee on “academic freedom and responsibility,” a pairing of concepts that is common in higher education. While there is a fairly broad consensus on what “freedom” means, competing conceptions of “responsibility” lead to two very different ideas about the appropriate role for professors in public life.

On one side is the conventional (which tends to be cowardly), and on the other is the principled (which tends to be progressive). Norman Finkelstein, the controversial DePaul University political scientist, is in trouble because he not only believes in, but puts into practice, this principled interpretation. The conventional view is that professors should be free to investigate any question and go in any direction the truth, as they see it, takes them. But in speaking and writing publicly about their conclusions, faculty should be responsible — which in practice usually means not upsetting people with real power. Faculty who pursue esoteric, self-indulgent, and/or irrelevant research generally will not be bothered (because no one really cares what they are doing), nor will those whose conclusions about relevant subjects are in line with views of the powerful (because their work helps reinforce the structures of power).

The principled view is that faculty members — who have an extraordinarily privileged position in society, being paid to learn and convey that learning to others, with considerable autonomy that is rare in this corporate-capitalist economy, at a more-than-livable wage — have a responsibility to pursue research addressing relevant questions that are meaningful in the lives of real people, especially the most vulnerable struggling for justice. That kind of research is likely to lead to trouble (because it challenges the prerogatives of the powerful to rule as they please).

In other words, academics pursuing their work in responsible fashion (in the principled sense) are the most likely to be labeled irresponsible (in the conventional sense).

Such is Finkelstein’s fate.

The controversy over Finkelstein’s tenure case at DePaul puts on public display the clash of those conflicting definitions of responsibility. He is an accomplished scholar (many who disagree with his Finkelstein’s conclusions acknowledge the quality of his research) and a superb teacher (even his detractors acknowledge his classroom skills). The political science department voted 9-3 and the college committee 5-0 in favor of tenure. But the College of Liberal Arts dean then wrote a letter undermining those endorsements, which suggests that the strong support for Finkelstein among his peers may be ignored by the university’s top administrators, who are expected to decide in June.

By the promotion standards of universities such as DePaul, Finkelstein clearly deserves the job security that comes with tenure. But we all have a stake in his fate — if we want universities to be a place where critical thinking is encouraged.

Finkelstein has been a provocative scholar since graduate school, when he dared to critique Joan Peters’ 1984 book From Time Immemorial, a fraudulent attempt to discredit Palestinian claims to their land occupied by Israel. Displaying considerable courage in the face of those happy to use Peters’ book to justify undermining the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, Finkelstein challenged the bogus factual claims of the book and embarrassed those in the political and academic establishment who had praised the book.

>From there, Finkelstein has pursued research not only about the Israel/Palestine conflict but the Holocaust and the politics of reparations. His recent books and public comments have only increased the numbers who would like to silence him and the intensity of those campaigns. Finkelstein’s critique of the work of Alan Dershowitz has upped the ante; the media-savvy Harvard law professor has made it a point to torpedo Finkelstein’s career.

I have never met Finkelstein, though I did once interview him over the phone for a radio program I produced about Middle East issues. I have listened to, or read transcripts of, interviews with him, and I find him contentious but consistently insightful. I have read his well-researched and well-reasoned books on the Middle East and found them helpful in my work. I’ve concluded that Finkelstein is (1) probably not temperamentally suited for the role of a facilitator or mediator, and (2) unquestionably a first-rate intellectual doing important work to bring to light sometimes harsh truths about the way power is exercised in this world.

In short, Finkelstein is using his academic freedom responsibly.

Yes, he is polemical in public, sometimes harsh toward opponents, maybe even a bit cantankerous at times, which leaves me wishing Finkelstein were a colleague at my university. If I were a student at DePaul, I would sign up for any class he was teaching. We could use more like him in academic life.

When personnel decisions at DePaul are made next month, if Finkelstein’s name is not on the list of those granted tenure it will be no doubt a difficult day for him and a tragic one for anyone who cares about free and responsible intellectual inquiry.

In the United States there are fewer and fewer spaces where truth-telling is possible. Electoral politics has become a poll-driven, sound-bite enterprise. Mass media specialize in the superficial and shallow. Universities, though dominated by corporate money and the corporate mentality, still provide one of the few remaining spaces for open and honest engagement. Protecting that space is important not only for those of us in the privileged position of faculty, but for the society more generally.

If Norman Finkelstein is denied tenure by DePaul, it won’t be because he was irresponsible but because he took his responsibility too seriously. If he is denied tenure, the loss will be not only Finkelstein’s and DePaul’s but also the larger project of real academic freedom and responsibility.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/jensen05252007.html

Romney, Tancredo “Shocked” CIA Outed, Not So Shocked Over “Peaceful” Plan to Destabilize Iran

“I was shocked to see the ABC News report regarding covert action in Iran,” Mitt Romney told reporters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Tom Tancredo, the Colorado Republican who likes the idea of water boarding kidnapped sheep herders and dirt farmers, called for an investigation into who leaked the information and “condemned” ABC News for “running the story which could jeopardize American lives.”Of course, for Romney, Tancredo, and a whole lot of other Republicans and Democrats, there is nothing wrong with “covert action” in Iran, that is to say destabilizing the country through terrorism and funding outlaw political groups. “The ABC News story reported that President Bush had given the CIA authorization to conduct a nonlethal covert action against Iran involving propaganda, disinformation and the manipulation of Iran’s international banking transactions,” reports Brian Ross.

No word on the other stuff Bush has authorized, or the fact reported earlier this month that the “governments of Saudi Arabia and the United States are working with other states in the Middle East to sponsor covert action against Iran,” including “covert attacks … against Iran’s oil sector,” according to Michael Roston. In fact, as Seymour Hersh reported in early 2005, Bush gave a wink and nod to the Pentagon, allowing them to run “operations off the books,” unchecked by supposed legal restrictions imposed on the CIA. Under “new rules,” the “Special Forces community” have created “action teams” in “target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations,” no problem if said “terrorist organizations” were elected by the people of the “target countries.”

It was the New York Post headline, however, that really took the cake: “CIA Launches ‘Peaceful’ Plot to Take Down Iran’s Maniac,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The plan is designed to peacefully pressure Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map—to cease the enrichment program, which could lead to the development of nuclear weapons, and stop aiding terrorists fighting in neighboring Iraq,” never mind Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” it is fully within its rights under the NPT to engage in nuclear enrichment, and there is no convincing evidence Iran is “aiding terrorists,” i.e., freedom fighters, in Iraq.

The CIA, naturally, does very little by way of “peaceful” intervention, as John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola, under then director Bush Senior, revealed in 1987. According to Stockwell’s estimation, the CIA, as of the late 1980s, was responsible for killing around six million people in “secret wars” against third world nations, that is to say “covert action” of the sort we are assured is now peacefully carried out against the elected government of Iran. Add to the total the million or so killed through medieval sanctions against Iraq under Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush the Junior, and Junior killing an additional 700,000 over the last few years, and you have crimes approaching those of the Nazis, responsible for killing 15 million, although “Uncle Joe” Stalin apparently rivaled this number by killing over 20 million people, and Mao Ze-Dong’s “cultural revolution” claimed nearly 50 million human souls. At any rate, the CIA, under various presidents, is a top drawer organization when it comes to killing people off in large numbers.

Since one needs to be a psychopath to rule the nation, or be considered to be selected to rule the nation, it is hardly surprising Mitt Romney and Tom Tancredo are “shocked” over ABC News decision to run this story.

Imagine, however, if the shoe was on the other foot, if a news story had slipped out revealing Iran launched “peaceful” covert action designed to destabilize the Bush administration. Every yahoo in the country would be in the streets demanding Iran be reduced to a glass parking lot.

But then, it was Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, who declared: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

In other words, if we have to kill seven or eight million people, including babies and grandmothers, and overthrow elected governments, target hospitals and water purification plants with cruise missiles, spread around cancer by way of depleted uranium, so be it.

Source: Another Day in the Empire
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=875

Battle for Jerusalem

Jerusalem from the air Enlarge Image

The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Today, Martin Asser looks at the struggle for Jerusalem.

Ancient Jerusalem has changed hands many times, its religious significance exerting a powerful pull on Jewish, Christian and Muslim conquerors.

Religious writer Karen Armstrong has observed that those who held it longest are those who showed the most tolerance to devotees of other faiths.

She cites two Muslim leaders – Caliph Omar and Saladin – as exemplars of this approach, and the Crusaders as the city’s most blood-soaked ravagers.

Forty years ago, Israel’s army captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the June 1967 War.

The area fell in the heat of a deadly battle, but Israel did not massacre its Palestinian inhabitants or destroy its holy shrines like the medieval Christian knights.

From the Jewish perspective 1967 brought the “reunification” of the holy city, restoring a divine plan after centuries of interruption.

History has yet to decide if Israeli rule over the city is a doomed enterprise that will founder – on Karen Armstrong’s analysis – because of the very measures taken to make Jerusalem Israel’s “eternal and indivisible” capital.

Modern fortress

The victory of 1967 and the capture of East Jerusalem was an exhilarating time for Jews, both religious and secular.

Photo journal: East Jerusalem

Battle-weary Israeli troops ran through the narrow alleys of the Old City to the Western Wall to pray and celebrate.

Under Arab control since 1948, the Jewish holy places had been tantalisingly out of reach to Israelis – in violation of the Israel-Jordan armistice agreement.

Nothing was going to stop the 1967 leaders from creating facts on the ground that made it impossible for Muslim Arabs to reclaim the eastern half of the city.

“We have returned to our holy places… And we shall never leave them,” said Gen Moshe Dayan as he stood before the timeworn stones of the Western Wall.

Indeed, a raft of UN resolutions and international conventions outlawing the change of status of occupied territory conquered by military means have had little impact on Israeli thinking.

Click here to see Jerusalem’s changing shape

Within days Israel had annexed east Jerusalem, drawn new, greatly expanded municipal boundaries (that cut out some heavily populated Palestinian areas) and demolished an entire Arab quarter of the city in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.

Guide: Jerusalem’s holy sites In pictures: Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif Political archaeology

Years of rampant development followed, increasing Israel’s presence in East Jerusalem. It has become a fortress – defended not by walls and ramparts, but by a ring of settlements, blocks of flats and highways.

The architecture is there for all to see, but the diplomatic situation is more complicated.

The international consensus has never recognised Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem – the city and its surroundings were designated a corpus separatum by the UN in 1947 to be given a special international status and government.

No country has its embassy in Jerusalem. Even Israel’s closest ally the US does not formally recognise the city as Israel’s capital.

Precarious existence

The 240,000 Arab inhabitants of East Jerusalem live a strange half-existence, rarely in direct conflict with Israel, but resolutely clinging on to their Palestinian identity and cause.

Allowed special Israeli residency permits, they enjoy advantages over those in the occupied West Bank – but many feel their future in the city is not guaranteed.

They say they face discrimination; restrictions on building or renovation, disregard by the municipality even though they pay taxes, bureaucratic obstacles if they marry Palestinians from elsewhere, confiscation of their papers, revocation of their residency rights if they take residency or citizenship in another country or spend more than seven years abroad.

Israel has allowed the Palestinians of East Jerusalem to remain, but it has hemmed them in, squeezed them, left them in no doubt the city is not theirs.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved to the occupied east of the city – an area the Palestinians hope to establish as the capital of their future state.

Palestinians from outside the city – in the West Bank and Gaza – are rigorously excluded by a ring of roadblocks and Israeli military checkpoints.

They now find themselves experiencing the same sense of deprivation and longing for Jerusalem, and determination to make it theirs again, that the Diaspora Jews once did.

In recent years Israel has been building the controversial West Bank barrier around Palestinian population centres, a response to the suicide bombings of the 1990s and after 2000.

Around parts of East Jerusalem it is a massive wall, separating some Palestinian suburbs from the centre of Jerusalem and others from the West Bank.

Many observers see the possibility of disaster in Israel’s unyielding pursuit of its policies in Jerusalem.

They argue that resolution with the Palestinians, and the wider Arab and Muslim world, will not be possible without compromise on the holy city.

---

Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6668603.stm

As jets pound Gaza, Israel threatens to assassinate Hamas political leaders

5 Palestinians, Israeli killed as clashes intensify

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated Monday when Israel killed five militants in air strikes and hinted that Hamas political leaders could be their next target. A rocket fired from Gaza killed an Israeli woman, inviting a harsh response.

The woman was the first Israeli to die in a Palestinian rocket attack since November.

Even before the fatal salvo, Hamas leaders feared for their safety. They turned off their cell phones, stayed out of official vehicles and reduced their movements as militant groups declared a state of emergency.

The precautions followed an Israeli air strike late Sunday on the home of Hamas lawmaker Khalil al-Haya that killed eight people. Israel denied that al-Haya, who was not there at the time, was the target. But Israel’s leaders said they would employ more drastic measures to stop daily barrages of rocket fire into Israel.

On Monday, an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at a car carrying four Islamic Jihad men, killing all of them. A spokesman for the group said they were targeted just after firing rockets into Israel.

Islamic Jihad, which has carried out hundreds of rocket attacks and suicide bombings in recent years, threatened “earthshaking” revenge.

Other air strikes Monday killed a Hamas militant and hit suspected weapons-storage facilities, the Israeli army said. More than 40 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since a decision last week to start hitting back for the rocket barrages.

Late Monday, Israel imposed a closing on Gaza and the West Bank, banning Palestinians from entering Israel except in humanitarian cases. The military said the closing could be lifted Wednesday after a Jewish holiday, depending on the security situation.

The Israeli strikes have not slowed the rockets. A new barrage slammed into the Israeli town of Sderot early Tuesday, lightly injuring two residents, the army said. Israel responded with two new air strikes against buildings housing weapons depositories in central Gaza.

The Hamas military wing said it fired 23 rockets Monday, including nine at Sderot.

At sundown Monday, a Palestinian rocket hit a car and set it on fire in Sderot, about a mile from Gaza. A woman died en route to the hospital and two others were wounded in the attack. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

Deaths in rocket attacks often trigger a harsh Israeli response.

Monday’s salvo came during a meeting in Sderot between Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief. They were not harmed.

At a news conference in Sderot, Solana denounced the violence, and Livni called for international action “to put pressure on the terrorists and the Palestinian government and not compromise with terror.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited Sderot late Monday for the second time in a week, his office said.

Angry Sderot residents demonstrated outside the building where Solana and Livni were meeting and later burned tires, saying the Israeli government has failed to protect them.

Hamas pledged to “strike at the enemy anywhere in Palestine, whether with suicide attacks or operations against soldiers,” said the group’s military wing spokesman, Abu Obeida. Since 2000, Hamas has carried out dozens of suicide bombings in Israel, killing more than 250 people.

Moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was making efforts to restore the cease-fire that greatly reduced Israeli-Palestinian violence in Gaza from November until last week, said Abbas aide Saeb Erekat.

Source: Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0705220001may22,1,2379934.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Jordan king in Palestinian plea

King Abdullah is hosting the summit

Jordan’s King Abdullah has urged the world to act to end what he described as the continuing suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. “There can be no more delay,” he told some 1,000 politicians and businessmen at the World Economic Forum in Jordan.

“This suffocating situation has brought poverty, malnutrition, frustration and radicalisation,” King Abdullah said.

He urged the gathering to prepare investment plans for the “day after peace” in the Middle East.

Addressing the three-day forum in Shuneh on the shores of the Dead Sea, King Abdullah said the absence of peace and continuing Israeli occupation were having a devastating effect on the Palestinians.

The monarch said that three of every five Palestinians were jobless, and that hundreds of thousands were living in poverty.

King Abdullah avoided any direct reference to renewed fighting between Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which had prevented Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas from attending the forum.

However, Saeb Erekat – Mr Abbas’ aide, who is attending the forum – described the current situation in Gaza as “the darkest chapter in Palestinian history”.

“It’s partly due to the absence of the rule of law, the one authority, the one gun,” Mr Erekat said.

‘Prepare for peace’

King Abdullah also called on the participants to be ready for a time when peace in the conflict-torn region became reality.

“As we look to that day, we need to begin asking a new question: what about the day after peace?

“Will we be ready? Will we have the plans in place to realise the benefits of peace and build on them? Will we have the vision to see our region’s potential and act on it?” the monarch asked.

The Geneva-based World Economic Forum is an independent international body that seeks to improve the state of the world by engaging leaders to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

It holds its meeting every year.

Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6670379.stm