Middle East: blood & bodies in streets of Bagdhad; are we gonna bomb Iran? and believe it or not, there are moderate Arabs

1. Sadr's Militia and the Slaughter in the Streets
'We Don't Need a Verdict,' One Commander Says
By Ellen Knickmeyer (from Washington Post)

BAGHDAD -- In a grungy restaurant with plastic tables in central Baghdad, the young Mahdi Army commander was staring earnestly. His beard was closely cropped around his jaw, his face otherwise cleanshaven. The sleeves of his yellow shirt were rolled down to the wrists despite the intense late-afternoon heat. He spoke matter-of-factly: Sunni Arab fighters suspected of attacking Shiite Muslims had no claim to mercy, no need of a trial.

"These cases do not need to go back to the religious courts," said the commander, who sat elbow to elbow with a fellow fighter in a short-sleeved, striped shirt. Neither displayed weapons. "Our constitution, the Koran, dictates killing for those who kill."

His comments offered a rare acknowledgment of the role of the Mahdi Army in the sectarian bloodletting that has killed more than 10,400 Iraqis in recent months. The Mahdi Army is the militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, now one of the most powerful figures in the country.

The death squads that carry out the extrajudicial killings are widely feared but mysterious. Often, the only evidence is the bodies discovered in the streets. Several commanders in the Mahdi Army said in interviews that they act independently of the Shiite religious courts that have taken root here, meting out street justice on their own with what they believe to be the authorization of Sadr's organization and under the mantle of Islam.

"You can find in any religion the right of self-defense," said another commander, senior enough to be referred to as the Sheik, who was interviewed separately by telephone. Like the others, he lives and works in Sadr City, a trash-strewn, eight-square-mile district of east Baghdad that is home to more than 2 million Shiites. They spoke on condition that their names not be revealed and that specific areas of Sadr City under their control not be identified.

"The takfiris , the ones who kill, they should be killed," said the Sheik, using a term commonly employed by Shiites for violent Sunni extremists. "Also the Saddamists. Whose hands are stained with blood, they are sentenced to death."

"This is part of defending yourself," the commander said. "This is a ready-made verdict -- we don't need any verdict."

Before Feb. 22, when the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra unleashed a wave of sectarian killing and retribution, U.S. authorities and others believed the primary force behind Shiite death squads was the Badr Brigade, the militia of another large Shiite organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But since the bombing, the Mahdi Army appears to have taken the lead in extrajudicial trials and executions, according to Joost Hiltermann, a project director in Jordan for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

For suspected enemies taken by the Mahdi Army, the outcome is swift, with guilt and punishment already determined, the commanders said.

"If we catch any of them, the takfiris, Saddamists, bombers, we don't hand them over to police. He could be freed the next day," the Sheik said.

The captured men get a rapid interrogation, he added. They are asked, "How do you come here? Who is working with you? Which organization is supporting you?"

"We get a full confession," he said. "Once we do, we know what to do with them."

A Widow's Story

In a darkened living room in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad, the widow of a retired army officer -- a Sunni allegedly taken by the Mahdi Army after the Samarra bombing -- recounted the last hours of her husband's life, stopping her account only to call aloud to God for revenge.

Gunmen from outside the neighborhood surrounded the mosque where her husband and other men were at late-afternoon prayer, she said. It was Feb. 23, the day after the shrine bombing. The armed strangers were wearing black clothes of the type then worn by the Mahdi Army. Sadr later ordered his fighters to discard the uniform, saying rivals were using it to commit killings in the guise of the Mahdi Army.

The gunmen took her husband and the other men to a police station in the Habibiya neighborhood of Sadr City, the black-clad widow said, surrounded by her daughters and granddaughters. Women of the neighborhood gathered in another room to pay their respects to the bereaved family. Some of the men were released, surviving to tell what happened. They recalled that her husband and three other retired officers from Saddam Hussein's military were subjected to a one-hour hearing.

"The trial was held in public, at 6 a.m., on Friday," she said. "At 10 a.m., they called us to tell us to pick the body up from the morgue."

As directed, male relatives retrieved her husband's body from the Baghdad morgue. The corpse bore bullet holes in the face and chest, with both hands still cuffed behind the back.

Fearful despite her anger, she refused to say who she thought killed her husband. An 8-year-old granddaughter whispered the answer into her ear: "The Mahdi Army."

"Darling," the widow scolded, frowning at the child to be silent.

Asked about the Mahdi Army's role in the surge of killings immediately after the Samarra mosque bombing, the Mahdi Army commander in short sleeves at the restaurant frowned, and answered carefully. "Terrorists" were at work then, he said, using a term employed by Shiites for Sunni insurgents. "There was an immediate need to move and contain these groups," he said.

Grisly Discoveries

Thousands of bodies turned up on the streets and vacant lots of Baghdad in the months after the Samarra bombing, found by U.S. Army patrols, Iraqi forces, passersby and families of the dead. Unlike earlier in the conflict, when the biggest share of victims were killed by the bombs of Sunni insurgents, these corpses were found shot to death, often bearing signs of torture and with their hands still bound. Shiite militias were blamed for many of these deaths.

The Mahdi Army commanders who were interviewed balked at detailing how many people the militia may have killed, and how. American forces, by contrast, saw nothing but the end results.

One small unit alone, made up of roughly two dozen Americans helping train the Iraqi army in Sadr City, happened upon more than 200 bodies this year along roads on the edges of Sadr City, said 1st Lt. Zeroy Lawson, the unit's intelligence officer.

Witnesses and residents of Sadr City told the Americans that the victims had been brought from all over Baghdad, said Lawson and Capt. Troy Wayman, an officer in the same squad. Victims typically had their shoes removed and their hands bound, Lawson said, and were executed in public. The Americans said they suspect that the women they found dead, like the men found with their genitals mutilated, were judged guilty of extramarital sex.

Lawson and Wayman offered several examples. One was a female worker at a Sadr City clinic that Mahdi Army members believed was a brothel. The militiamen warned the women there to shut the place down, pistol-whipped them in public and then shot the worker dead on the street, the two Americans said.

In another case, Lawson spotted the unmoving form of a paunchy man in a checked shirt by the side of the road. Residents told Lawson that the man, a Sunni, had been taken from his home in Mansour, an affluent neighborhood of Sunnis, Shiites and Christians in central Baghdad. Accused of conspiring to drive Shiites from their homes, the Sunni man had been brought to Sadr City and shot dead where he now lay, witnesses told the Americans.

In late spring, Wayman recalled, the Americans in Sadr City happened upon uniformed Iraqi security forces clustered around the body of an Iraqi man. Gunmen had shot the man dead seconds before, then sped off when the Iraqi and U.S. forces happened by, Wayman said.

Americans traced the killers' vehicle to a nearby police station, where they found two grateful captives inside. The men were Christians who told Wayman they worked at a store elsewhere in Baghdad that sold alcohol. Gunmen had visited the shop to tell the men that alcohol was forbidden by the Koran and that they must shut down. When the two refused, they told Wayman, the gunmen stuffed them into a car at gunpoint and brought them to a house in Sadr City.

A Shiite cleric visited the two Christians at the house, they told Wayman. The cleric demanded that the captives convert to Islam and, when they refused, informed them that alcohol was forbidden by Islam.

They would be punished, the cleric said, but he did not specify how. The captives said they believed they were second and third in line for execution, after the man who was found in the street.

Mahdi Army commanders interviewed uniformly denied that they kill people for selling alcohol. The Mahdi Army only warns liquor vendors, increasingly strongly, they said. If the vendors still refuse to stop selling, the Mahdi Army "beats them lightly, in accordance with the Koran," the commander known as the Sheik said.

Lawson, the intelligence officer, credits the Mahdi Army with an intelligence operation that has become skilled at feeding bad information to Americans about the militia's activities. But U.S. military officials say they know enough to condemn much of what the Mahdi Army does.

"I have no doubt . . . they hold trial courts and execute people," said Lt. Col. Mark Meadows, commander of a cavalry regiment with the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. Meadows's men oversaw Shula, a northern Baghdad neighborhood under Sadr's control, at the time of the Samarra bombing. The Mahdi Army "is probably the largest, most aggressive militia in this country," Meadows said. "They are a terrorist organization. They terrorize people."

But Iraqi and U.S. security forces are often left as puzzled spectators in areas under the Mahdi Army's jurisdiction.

On patrol early one morning, Wayman and his convoy pulled over at the telltale sign of a group of Iraqi police gathered by the side of a road in northern Sadr City, eyes cast down.

The police officers made room for Wayman, who looked down at an Iraqi girl lying on her side. She appeared to be no more than 15. The morning light bathed her face, and her hands curled gently to her mouth. Wrapped in a blanket, she looked asleep, except for two bursts of pink flesh from bullet wounds in her back.

Neither American nor Iraqi forces had any inclination to investigate what had happened to the teenager.

"Who knows?" one of the Iraqi policeman said, preparing to bundle up the body. Wayman got back into his Humvee, and the Americans drove on.


2. Disavowed by Mahdi Army, Shadowy 'Butcher' Still Targets Sadr's Foes -- by Ellen Knickmeyer (from Washington Post)

BAGHDAD -- In a dirty war where shadowy death squads claim victims daily and leaders on all sides deny blame, there's one killer to whom Iraqis can attach a name, if not a face.

Abu Diri, or Father of the Shield, is the nom de guerre of a Shiite Muslim man. Sunni Arabs of Baghdad also know him as "the Butcher." Like countless other killers in Iraq's capital today, Abu Diri and his followers dump their victims in the streets bearing bullet wounds and sometimes the smaller holes made by electric drills.

But U.S. military officers, Sunnis and even many Shiites say they believe Abu Diri kidnaps and kills Sunnis and other rivals with a zeal that has made him notorious, even in Baghdad's daily carnage.

"He is a savage criminal; tens of murderers follow in his wake," said a posting on Truth, a Sunni Web site that is supportive of Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups. Many Iraqi Sunnis monitor its allegations regarding the country's growing sectarian strife.

At least until July, Abu Diri and the dozens of men believed to be under him operated out of Sadr City and Shula, two Baghdad neighborhoods that are home to more than 2 million Shiites. The districts are heavily loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia has a significant presence there. Abu Diri's victims typically were found blindfolded, with hands bound, in the streets lining Sadr City, American officers said.

U.S. military officials, distrustful of Sadr after battling his Mahdi Army in the first two years of the war, believe Abu Diri is linked to the militia.

"He's the enforcer," said 1st Lt. Zeroy Lawson, the intelligence officer with a small U.S. Army unit that works in Sadr City and is responsible for helping train the Iraqi army there. "He goes after specific targets" of Sadr and the Mahdi Army.

Lawson called him Sadr City's agent "for external affairs," going across Baghdad in pursuit of Sunnis or any others seen as enemies.

Sadr and his top aides publicly disavow Abu Diri.

"He is not Mahdi Army, he is the head of the gangsters," Riyadh al-Nouri, a brother-in-law of Sadr's and a senior member of the Sadr movement, said in an interview in Najaf. "He is not Mahdi Army and never was. All he does is fight for his own reputation and his own crimes."

Little is known about Abu Diri's background. Baghdad residents commonly agree on a few details: His real first name is Ismail. He is in his early thirties, a father of two and a high school dropout, and allegedly was a forger during the rule of Saddam Hussein, according to ordinary Sunnis and Shiites and to officials of Iraq's Interior Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Even his appearance is unclear. A photograph purporting to show him, distributed on Web sites frequented by Sunni Arabs in Iraq, shows a bearded, reed-thin man in white civilian clothes and a red-and-white-checked turban, squinting against the sun on a city street, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Three men who claim to be former bodyguards of Abu Diri reject that photo, however, and vouch for a different image of him: a short, stocky man, almost clownish, shown in a video distributed on cellphones and DVDs around Baghdad. The image shows a smiling man pouring a soft drink from a bottle into the gulping mouth of a camel.

Abu Diri meant the video to be a warning to Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, according to the bodyguards, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He aspires to capture and behead the Sunni politician and will sacrifice the camel to celebrate the day he does, they said.

Abu Diri's hideouts long included a far northeastern corner of Sadr City known as "the Lost 70s," after the area's street numbers and isolation, U.S. military officers say. Many mornings, after Baghdad's nightly curfew, U.S. troops find corpses dumped along the streets of the Lost 70s, a junkyard of rusted car hulks and trash, with rats that gallop along the sidewalks in daylight.

Iraqi and U.S. forces raided a house belonging to Abu Diri in Sadr City on July 9, marking the beginning of stepped-up joint operations against alleged criminals in areas under Sadr's control. Iraqi officials said the raid killed nine people. Abu Diri escaped and is believed to have fled Sadr City.

In interviews in Baghdad, the three men claiming to be former bodyguards of his said he carried out killings largely as a free agent, rather than under orders from Sadr's organization. Abu Diri used the fact that he had a brother with a high position in the Mahdi Army to play up his alleged connections with the militia, and had associates in the heavily Shiite Interior Ministry police forces, including its intelligence services, the men alleged.

Interior Ministry officials independently gave some of the same details regarding Abu Diri; some of the other details from the purported bodyguards could not be separately confirmed.

Asked why the Mahdi Army does not shut down Abu Diri's activities, Nouri said, "Like everyone, he has his own gangsters protecting him."

In Najaf, another senior Sadr official, Aus al-Kafaji, said, "We are looking for him ourselves."


3. "Folks, We Are Being Set Up Again!"
Iran's Nuclear "Threat"
By JUAN COLE

Here is what the professionals are saying about the Republican-dominated Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy report on Iran that slams US intelligence professionals for poor intelligence on Iran: The report demonstrates that these Republicans have poor intelligence . . . on Iran. What follows is summaries of things I've seen from other experts but I can't identify them without permission..

First of all, former CIA professionals Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski point out that the Republicans have a lot of damn gall. It was high members of this Republican administration who leaked to the Iranians and the whole world the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative who spent her professional career combatting the proliferation of WMD and was, at the time she was betrayed by Traitor Rove and his merry band, working on Iran. Had it not been for these Republican figures, none of whom has yet been punished in any way for endangering US national security, we might know more about Iran.

It is being said that the staffer who headed the report is Frederick Fleitz, who was a special assistant to John Bolton when Bolton was undersecretary of state for proliferation issues. Fleitz was sent to the unemployment line when Condi wisely exiled Bolton to the United Nations, where there is a long history of ill-tempered despots who like to bang their shoes on the podium. So this report is the long arm of Bolton popping up in Congress. It is Neoconservative propaganda.

I repeat what I have said before, which is that John Bolton is just an ill-tempered lawyer who has no special expertise in nuclear issues or in Iran, and aside from an ability to scare the bejesus out of young gofers who bring him coffee and to thunderously denounce on cue any world leader on whom he is sicced, he has no particular qualifications for his job.

Nor do the Republican congressmen know anything special about Iran's nuclear energy program. They certainly know much less than the CIA agents who work on it full time, some of whom know Persian and have actually done . . . intelligence work.

We are beset by instant experts on contemporary Iran, like the medievalist Bernard Lewis, who wrongly predicted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would attack Israel on August 22, based on Lewis's weird interpretation of his alleged millenarian beliefs. Once the Neoconservatives went so far as actually to make fun of reality in the hearing of a reporter, their game was up.

Pete Hoekstra, who is the chair of this committee, has a long history of saying things that are disconnected from reality. Like when he made a big deal about some old shells with mustard gas found in Iraq left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, and claimed that these were the fabled and long-sought Iraqi WMD over which 2600 of our service people are six feet under and another 8000 in wheelchairs. Nope.

Bolton at one point was exercised about an imaginary Cuban biological weapons program, which even his own staffers wouldn't support him on, and at one point he was alleging that Iranian mullahs were sneaking into Havana to help with it.

This congressional report is full of the same sort of wild fantasies.

On page 9, the report alleges that "Iran is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade using a 164-machine centrifuge cascade at this facility in Natanz."

This is an outright lie. Enriching to weapons grade would require at least 80% enrichment. Iran claims . . . 2.5 per cent. See how that isn't the same thing? See how you can't blow up anything with 2.5 percent?

The claim is not only flat wrong, but it is misleading in another way. You need 16,000 centrifuges, hooked up so that they cascade, to make enough enriched uranium for a bomb in any realistic time fame, even if you know how to get the 80 percent! Iran has . . . 164. See how that isn't the same?

The report cites the International Atomic Energy Agency only when it is critical of Iran. It does not tell us what the IAEA actually has found.

By the way, here is what IAEA head Mohamed Elbaradei said in early March, 2003, about Iraq:

'After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.'

At the same time, Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld were saying he knew exactly where Iraq's WMD was!

Elbaradei was right then, and Fleitz was wrong. Can't get fooled again.

And here is what the IAEA said about Iran just last January:

"Iran has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as requested by the Agency, and to act as if the Additional Protocol is in force, including by providing in a timely manner the requisite declarations and access to locations."

Last April Elbaradei complained about the hype around Iran's nuclear research, and said that there is no imminent threat from Iran.

The only thing that the IAEA knows for sure is that Iran has a peaceful nuclear energy research program. Such a program is not the same as a weapons program, and it is perfectly legal under the Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran, unlike Israel, has actually signed.

The report allegedly vastly exaggerates the range of Iran's missiles and also exaggerates the number of its longer-range ones, and seems to think that Iran already has the Shahab-4, which it does not. It also doesn't seem to realize that Iran can't send missiles on other countries without receiving them back. Israel has more and longer-range missiles than Iran, and can quickly equip them with real nuclear warheads, not the imaginary variety in Fleitz's fevered brain.

Folks, we are being set up again.

(Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute. This article is extracted from Juan Cole's website)


4. The Iranian paradox: to gain victory the West must first concede defeat – by Anatole Kaletsky

DEFEAT IS NEVER pleasant, but often it is better to lose than to win. Defeat in the Second World War was the best thing that ever happened to Germany and Japan in their thousand years of recorded history. For America, losing in Vietnam was also a blessing in disguise. While defeat seemed to shatter the illusion of an “American century” of global dominance, it was followed by 30 years of almost uninterrupted prosperity, a political renaissance for conservative values and America’s total victory over communism in the Cold War.

Such thoughts may not offer much consolation to George Bush, Tony Blair and Ehud Olmert as they contemplate their defeat at the hands of Iran and its Hezbollah allies. But the ordinary citizens of America, Britain and Israel should try to draw some constructive lessons from history, even while their leaders make ever greater fools of themselves with their idle threats against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The “international community” is now totally powerless in its nuclear confrontation with Iran, even more so than with North Korea. Pyongyang needs food and fuel to survive and is therefore susceptible to pressure from China. Iran, at the moment flush with oil wealth, needs nothing and is not dependent on anyone.

The sort of economic and diplomatic sanctions being ominously debated by the UN Security Council — curbing investment in Iran’s oil industry or banning exports of machinery and luxury goods — would be worse than ineffective. They would actually strengthen the regime of Iran’s fanatically anti-American and anti-Israeli President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Economic sanctions would help Ahmadinejad by adding to the xenophobic paranoia that always tends to reinforce nationalist extremists, at least in the short term. In the case of Iran, however, there is another, more important, reason why sanctions would be counter-productive. Far from defeating Iran through economic exhaustion, sanctions would make the country, or at least its Government, even richer and more powerful than it is today. This paradox, which has never before arisen in the use of economic sanctions for diplomatic purposes, arises because of the state of the global oil market today.

Oil prices have more than doubled in the past three years because steadily rising demand, especially from China, has run up against the limits of global production capacity. If Iran, which is the world’s third-largest oil producer after Russia and Saudi Arabia, had even a small part of its exports removed by sanctions from world markets, the oil price would shoot up to $100 or more. As long as the percentage increase in oil prices was higher than Iran’s percentage loss of export volumes, sanctions would result in the Government’s total revenues going up, instead of down.

Iran also controls the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow strip that separates the country from the Arabian peninsula and which provides a passage for roughly 40 per cent of the world’s internationally traded oil. If Iran were to close the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise threaten foreign shipping in response to an attempt to impose economic sanctions, the oil price would jump not just to $100 a barrel but probably to $150 or beyond. As a result, the Iranian Government could quite conceivably double its present revenues after the imposition of sanctions. Thus sanctions would provide President Ahmadinejad with even more money to buy popularity among his domestic voters, and unleash an even greater torrent of oil money to finance Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and anti- American Shia in Iraq.

But if sanctions are doomed to failure, what about military options? As a last resort, couldn’t America or Israel stop the nuclear programme by threatening to bomb Iran? Sadly or happily (depending on your worldview), the answer is a very clear “no”. Militarily, America and Israel have now shot their bolts in Iraq and Lebanon respectively. They have neither the firepower nor the willpower to do anything to stop Iran’s nuclear programme — and even if they did have the capacity to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, they could not afford the risk of destabilising their other Middle Eastern interests even further by taking military action. Moreover, both America and Israel now understand that a bombing campaign that could not be backed by an infantry invasion would only reinforce the existing regime’s grip on power.

The last argument against a military strike, but by no means the least one, brings us back to the oil issue. If the US or Israel were to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations, Iran would have the strongest possible pretext to ramp up the oil price to $150 a barrel or higher by closing or restricting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Thus a military attack on Iran, just like economic sanctions, would increase the Government’s capacity to finance global terrorism and curry favour with the Iranian public. It would also cause potentially catastrophic disruption to the world economy when the American public is already turning against the Iraq adventure and Republicans face a potentially disastrous electoral defeat.

What then should America and its allies do in the face of Iran’s nuclear defiance? The answer is clear: concede defeat. Iran has won this tussle and there is no point in pretending otherwise. Instead of trying to stop Iran’s nuclear programme, the international community must bring Iran back into the civilised world. The only way to do that is to stop issuing empty threats and to start offering Iran real incentives for co-operative behaviour — non-aggression guarantees from America and Israel, removal of the residual US economic sanctions dating back to the 1980s and the prospect of steadily improving treatment in investment and trade. Of course, such a U-turn seems inconceivable while President Bush remains in office. But remember President Nixon’s historic opening to China as he was losing the war in Vietnam. To paraphrase Johnson, a politician’s mind can be concentrated wonderfully by the knowledge that he is faces defeat.


5. Be grateful that exasperation has not stifled moderates -- by Prince El-Hassan bin Tala

How much aggression in our region has been justified by the mantra that Western interests are under threat? The battle cries claim that all is at stake and every strike is a final defense of freedom and stability. But the premise behind this thinking has become all too obvious. Arabs and Muslims of whatever race or hue are not to be trusted. They are not to be dealt with fairly and the "liberal values" that protect the righteous of Israel or the United States are not for our defense or our protection. It seems that even the moderates in Arab societies lack the fiber that would grant them equality under international law. We are all as one, barbarians at the gate to be cowed and bullied into silent submission.

But we should be thankful that Arab moderation fights on with stoicism. Moderation will continue to battle for the hearts of those millions for whom this "war on terror" is an offense to their existential realities. Boaz Ganor, the prominent Israeli thinker, addressed the question of terrorism and demanded that there be "no prohibition without definition." Terrorism must be defined objectively, based upon accepted international laws and principles regarding what behavior is permitted in conventional wars between nations.

The roots of that Arab anger and disillusionment that allows legitimacy to be handed over to extremists cannot be ignored. Terrorism is a tactic borne out of a perversion of lines of representation. If we do not allow the many to speak, then the violent few will scream to be heard. It may be difficult for most Israelis to admit, but the Shiites of Southern Lebanon became politicized and militarized only in response to repeated Israeli aggression. The citizens of Israel and the other states in the Middle East must be honest about the effects of decades of abuse of people and of international law, unless you believe that we Arabs possess a unique terrorist gene, which has ignited our responses in recent decades. If this is the case, then throw firewood on the blaze and let our region burn until you have killed or exiled every last Arab in our neighborhood.

The founders of Israel and, indeed, the United States, fought what they perceived as occupation. Recently, Israelis commemorated the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as a landmark act in ending the British Mandate. But surely this must be defined as an act of terror. A statement in the British House of Commons at the time described the attack, in which 92 people were murdered, as "one of the most dastardly and cowardly crimes in recorded history."

The Lebanese have been damned to repeat this phrase in recently describing attacks on their country. But in our world, righteousness belongs to the victor. If this is the way of the new world order, and international law no longer has a place - then, by all means, the extremists on all sides must fight to the death. The question is what can usefully be won in such a scenario? The evils of pain, suffering and moral bankruptcy are all the spoils of our new-world fighters.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

The traumatic effects of the collective punishment of civilian populations will be felt for generations to come. The Israeli armed forces have made terror a daily reality for the civilian populations of Palestine and Lebanon, populations who have lived and continue to live under illegal occupation. For the other side of this global war on terror, violence is most often something to read about. The threat of terror is "fetishized" by media and politicians, and provides a scant excuse for policies that make terror a daily reality in the lives of millions of people in the Middle East.

No can one ignore the pain and suffering of the Israeli people in recent weeks, but the policies of disproportionate reprisal and abuse of humanitarian norms can only beget further violence. Jordan is a country that fought two world wars on the side of the Allies against the Axis. We have suffered from the shockwaves of aggression on all sides and we have endured threats and terror right up to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrible attacks on Amman. So do not patronize us by dubbing us allies in the war on terror and then dismiss our words when we question your policies.

American and Israeli politics in this region are the product of a false perception. Our regional perspective is being ignored and, all the while, empowered extremists are gaining greater control. We must not be fooled into thinking that a new Middle East can be devised by political strategists and imposed from the top down. The promotion of participatory democracy has been curtailed by a fear of empowering moderate Arabs and moderate Islamists. Regimes within the region and powers outside attempt to stifle the protests of dismayed populations - protests that should be aired through banners and the ballot box.

But the moderates are now shouting also. The evolution of freedoms cannot be controlled from above, nor blasted into alien forms that poorly represent the needs of those seeking freedom. With the ever-increasing polarization of hate, we should be grateful that exasperation has not stifled the protest of moderates.

(Prince Hassan bin Talal is president of the Arab Thought Forum. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with the Common Ground News Service.)