LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
ِNovember 17/2011

Bible Quotation for today/Jesus Heals a Boy with a Demon
Matthew 17/14-20: When they returned to the crowd, a man came to Jesus, knelt before him, and said, Sir, have mercy on my son! He is an epileptic and has such terrible attacks that he often falls in the fire or into water. I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him. Jesus answered, How unbelieving and wrong you people are! How long must I stay with you? How long do I have to put up with you? Bring the boy here to me! Jesus gave a command to the demon, and it went out of the boy, and at that very moment he was healed. Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked him, Why couldn't we drive the demon out? It was because you do not have enough faith, answered Jesus. I assure you that if you have faith as big as a mustard seed, you can say to this hill, Go from here to there! and it will go. You could do anything!

Latest analysis, editorials, studies, reports, letters & Releases from miscellaneous sources 
Food and Syria's failure/By Spengler/November 17/11
Speechless in Bashar Assad’s Syria/By Michael Young/The Daily Star/November 17/11
Israel the winner in the Arab revolts/By Spengler/November 17/11

Latest News Reports From Miscellaneous Sources for November 17/11
Catholic Patriarchs of the East Urge Christians to Cling to their Homeland
Lebanese Forces Leader Samir Geagea condemns Lebanon’s position on Syrian crisis
Hezbollah slams U.N. report, says Ban biased toward West
Deputy head of the Hezbollah's executive council Sheikh Nabil Qaouk
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister meets with Israeli Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak
Two blasts in south, U.N. says no sign it was target  
Sleiman asks politicians to tone down rhetoric
Calm prevails during Lebanese Parliament Q & A
Neighbors: Brothers accused of murder seemed nice, polite
Two blasts rock south Lebanon hotel popular with UN staff
Future bloc MP Ahmad Fatfat slams Berri’s handling of parliamentary session
Miqati Stresses Dialogue to Consolidate Unity, Confirms Security Situation ‘Under Control’
Report: Jumblat to Announce New Strategy, Shifts Positions
Juppe Says Syrian Opposition Must Get Organized
Russia says world should urge Syrian opposition to stop violence
Syrian rebels hit ruling party after raid on intelligence
Syria's Muslim Brotherhood says it will accept Turkish "intervention"
Damascus attack left 20 killed, wounded: opposition
Syria faces army defectors, worldwide isolation
Barak: Iran is testing uranium- and plutonium-based bombs – not tactical arms
Barak: Iran nuclear program not aimed solely at Israel
IAEA seeks special Iran mission to address mounting nuclear concerns
Yossi Melman / Speaking about Iran, Israel's leaders are delirious
European diplomat: Palestinians willing to freeze UN bid if Israel, U.S. resume funds
Iran expert: U.S. elections increase likelihood of Israeli strike

Catholic Patriarchs of the East Urge Christians to Cling to their Homeland
Naharnet/Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi called on the Christians on Thursday to keep their grip on their homeland amid the developments storming the Arab world. “Christians should hold onto their homeland and historical sacred places,” al-Rahi said at the end of the 20th convention of the Catholic Patriarchs of the East held in Bkirki. Al-Rahi stressed on the importance of the national dialogue and the implementation of human rights to achieve peace and reject violence. The recommendations that were read by the patriarch also called for the implementation of political and social reforms.“Religion paves way for peace and bridging the gap between citizens,” he said. He also called for coexistence, praising the visit of Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill. Concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, al-Rahi said that it should be resolved based on a two-state solution to establish a comprehensive peace.“The Palestinians should be allowed to establish their own state, recognized internationally and within safe borders,” he stated.“The Holy Land has the right to live in peace,” the patriarch added

Lebanese Forces Leader Samir Geagea condemns Lebanon’s position on Syrian crisis
November 17, 2011 /Lebanese Forces Leader Samir Geagea condemned Lebanon’s stance before the Arab League regarding the crisis in Syria.Geagea added that, “The Lebanese government invented the term ‘distancing Lebanon from the crisis in Syria’, but completely forgot it during the Arab League Foreign Ministers’ meeting on the crisis, contrary to what happened during the UN Security Council’s session.”The Arab League on Saturday suspended Syria’s membership in the organization until President Bashar al-Assad implements an Arab deal to end violence against protesters, and called for sanctions and transition talks with the opposition. Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour said during the Arab League Saturday meeting that he objected to the decision to suspend Syria because the move “has dangerous repercussions on Syria and the region.” The UN Security Council in August condemned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's deadly crackdown on protests and called for those responsible for violence to be held "accountable."Lebanon did not block the adoption, but disavowed the document.Lebanon's political scene is split between supporters of Assad’s regime, led by Hezbollah, and a pro-Western camp headed by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri.Assad’s troops have cracked down on protests against almost five decades of Baath Party rule which broke out mid-March, killing over 3,500 people, according to UN Human Rights committee, and triggering a torrent of international condemnation.-NOW Lebanon

Future bloc MP Ahmad Fatfat slams Berri’s handling of parliamentary session
November 17, 2011 /Future bloc MP Ahmad Fatfat said on Thursday that Speaker Nabih Berri worked to “protect the cabinet and not hold it accountable” for its actions during Wednesday’s parliamentary session. Fatfat told the Voice of Lebanon (100.5) radio station that Berri prevented some MPs from making statements during the session and prepared the agenda “on his own” without coordinating it with the Parliamentary Bureau Board.“What Berri did is weird, and it [harms] the institution’s democratic work.”The MP added that it is the opposition’s right that a parliamentary session be held on security and political issues. Berri chaired on Wednesday a parliament session to address questions already submitted formally by several MPs.-NOW Lebnaon

Alcohol raising ire in Tyre?
Matt Nash, November 17, 2011
Residents of the southern city of Tyre had mixed reactions to two bombs that targeted a restaurant and a liquor store early Wednesday morning. While everyone NOW Lebanon spoke with condemned the destruction, there were competing views as to what message lay behind the explosions.
Interior Minister Marwan Charbel came out early Thursday to say the blasts were definitely not aimed at members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), despite the fact that the restaurant, which serves alcohol, is popular with UNIFIL staff. He said the bombs, which went off minutes apart, “have nothing to do” with security problems and instead suggested the establishments were singled out because they sell alcohol.
While a UNIFIL vehicle was parked outside of the restaurant when the bomb went off, Andrea Tenenti, the peacekeeping force’s deputy spokesperson, also ruled out an attempted attack on UNIFIL, which has frequently been targeted in Lebanon—most recently in July. The two bombs caused material damage but no injuries.
The Don Edwardo Steak House is on the ground floor of the Queen Elissa Hotel. Its large windows, which normally offer guests a view of the Mediterranean, were all blown out Wednesday afternoon, with broken glass, wooden debris and shards of ceramic roof tiles littering the street. A gaping hole in a wall under one of the windows seems to be where the bomb was placed, outside of the restaurant.
“It wasn’t because of alcohol,” a man in a camera store next to the restaurant told NOW Lebanon in a quiet, confident and conspiratorial tone.
“No? Then why?” NOW Lebanon asked.
He half-smiled and raised his eyebrows. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t because of alcohol.”
Hassan Dbouk, president of the Tyre municipality who was visiting the restaurant Wednesday afternoon, told NOW Lebanon he would wait until the end of a police investigation before drawing any conclusions about the bombings. He said it looked like the motive was targeting establishments that serve alcohol, but noted that many other stores and restaurants around the city have long served alcohol without incident.
When asked who he thought perpetrated the attack, he refused to guess. A man in the crowd interjected, “Maybe it was Fatah al-Islam,” a militant group that fought a war with the Lebanese army in northern Lebanon in 2007 and is currently based in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp outside of Saida.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Dbouk said. This summer, liquor stores in the southern towns of Nabatiyeh, Bablieh and Houla were attacked or forced to close their doors. Residents of those municipalities told reporters at the time that Hezbollah supporters were behind the incidents. No one NOW Lebanon interviewed said they thought the Party of God was involved in the blasts, nor did anyone report protests or threats against the locations before they were bombed, as happened in some of the towns where liquor stores were targeted this summer. Nearly everyone NOW Lebanon spoke with said that people in Tyre have no problems with alcohol, and they blamed the attacks on “people not from here.”
Reem Nasser, however, did say that many residents who live near the hotel are often angered by drunk people who leave the restaurant in the middle of the night. Nasser, who lives and works near Don Edwardo’s, said the hotel plays loud music and that drunk people often cause a ruckus when leaving. She thought targeting alcohol sellers was the reason behind the bombs, but did not think anyone from the neighborhood perpetrated the crime.
Leila Salhab, a photographer who lives near the restaurant, said she thought the bombs were meant to stir up discord between Muslims and Christians. The liquor store targeted is in a majority Christian neighborhood near Tyre’s port. Don Edwardo’s and the hotel are owned by a Shia Muslim named Hussein Mughineh, but frequented by Christians and UNIFIL employees, she said.
While Salhab did not venture to guess who is trying to cause trouble between the religious communities or why, she noted that the bomb outside of the restaurant exploded just before the dawn call to prayer and only 10 days before the Islamic month of Muharram—which includes the Shia hold day of Ashoura—begins. She dismissed the alcohol explanation.
On the other side of town, Youssef Katoura looked dismayed as men swept up broken glass and worked to clean the floor. Katoura owns the liquor shop—situated directly across the street from General Security’s Tyre office—that was also bombed Wednesday. He said he has lived in Tyre and sold alcohol for decades without problem.
Katoura said he will simply repair the damage and keep his store open. Is he worried there will be more bombs? “God willing, no,” he said.

Hezbollah slams U.N. report, says Ban biased toward West
November 17, 2011/The Daily Star
BEIRUT: Hezbollah slammed U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon Thursday over his latest report to the Security Council on the implementation of Resolution 1701, describing him as biased toward the West and warning that Western hegemony over the international body threatened peace and security. "U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon insists on confirming once again his ultimate bias toward the Western will, which installed him in this international position,” Hezbollah said in a statement. "Instead he should be biased toward strengthening peace and security, which is the international organization’s global goal," Hezbollah said. Ban handed the latest report on the implementation of UNSCR 1701 to the Security Council Tuesday. The top international body will discuss the report on Nov. 29. Resolution 1701 brokered a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon following the July-August war in 2006.
Hezbollah criticized Ban for continuing to issue statements that dealt with the situation in Lebanon, “which are influenced by Western allegations stemming from absolute hostility toward the resistance and disregard for the feelings of the Lebanese people.”
The U.N. chief’s 17th report contained “fallacies,” Hezbollah said, adding that it “contradicts with the simplest facts about the stability of the situation in south Lebanon.”
Hezbollah also warned that Western hegemony over the United Nations was a threat to global peace and security. “We believe that United Nations institutions falling under Western domination, particularly the U.S., pose a great danger and threatens international peace and security,” the group said. In the report, which has been picked up by local newspapers, Ban reportedly criticized Beirut for not fulfilling promises made since 2010 to control Lebanon’s borders, saying the government has a responsibility in controlling its borders to prevent the entry of weapons into the country. He also expressed deep concern about the increase in security incidents in Lebanon, noting that uncontrolled armed groups and the ongoing flow of weapons into Lebanon continued to pose a threat to the country.

Qaouk: Arabs in league with U.S. working to topple Assad
November 16, 2011/By Dana Khraiche/The Daily Star
BEIRUT: Deputy head of the Hezbollah's executive council Sheikh Nabil Qaouk accused Arab leaders Wednesday of working with the U.S. in an attempt to topple President Bashar Assad’s government. “Lebanon and its resistance cannot be [associated with] Arabs who are U.S. agents involved in the aggression against Syria,” Qaouk said during a ceremony in Beirut’s southern suburb of Ouzai. “[Lebanon] would never take a position of treachery or conspire against Syria nor punish it politically, financially or economically,” Qaouk added.
The Arab League voted Saturday to suspend Syria’s membership, citing Syria’s failure to implement an initiative by the league to end the eight-month crisis in that country.
The regional organization also said it would impose political and economic sanctions against Damascus.
Lebanon voted against the decision with President Michel Sleiman warning that isolating its neighbor could result in dangerous repercussions.
During his speech Wednesday, Qaouk, who described the Arab League as being dominated by the United States, said the body was failing to play “role of the fair mediator,” and that Syria would overcome conspiracies against it. Last week, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah warned that any attack on Syria or Iran would engulf the region, prompting analysts to assume that Hezbollah would join the fight but against the Jewish state by opening the south Lebanon front.
During his speech Wednesday, Qaouk said the allies of the U.S. and Israel in Lebanon and the region were seeking to weaken Syria and Hezbollah.
"The American-Zionist project and its tools in Lebanon and the region is betting on weakening the resistance through the crisis in Syria and work to exhaust and weaken the regime in Syria,” the Hezbollah official said,” Qaouk added.

Sleiman asks politicians to tone down rhetoric
November 17, 2011/ By Nafez Qawas/The Daily Star
BEIRUT: President Michel Sleiman urged politicians Wednesday to tone down their rhetoric and avoid “fiery or extremist” statements that increase tension, in the wake of an obscenity-laced televised exchange between March 14 and March 8 rivals earlier this week. Addressing ministers at the Cabinet session at Baabda Palace, Sleiman said “we are in utmost need of wisdom and dealing with various matters with a high level of patriotic responsibility.” The president said he was renewing his call for calm and rational discourse and “staying away from fiery, hard-line or extremist positions that could provoke similar stances,” which would renew political tension. While Sleiman did not refer to a specific incident, the comments came two days after a local television talk show degenerated into a near-brawl between former Akkar MP Mustafa Alloush and Fayez Shokr, a former minister and Baath Party official.
Shokr became enraged when Alloush called Syrian President Bashar Assad a “liar” and launched a glass of water, and nearly a chair, at his fellow guest, before station officials broke up the fight. In making the plea for toning down political rhetoric, Sleiman also promoted the idea of tolerance and diversity, citing his meeting this week with the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. He said Lebanon was a “pioneering” model for pluralism and “true participation by all elements of society in decision-making,” which was especially important in light of popular uprisings in the region. Amid the calls for calm, the government is also moving ahead with a controversial project to install high-tension electricity wires above ground in the Mansourieh area of Metn, which has provoked angry protests and responses from local residents, citing health fears.
Social Affairs Minister Wael Abu Faour, the acting information minister, told The Daily Star that the government, which also convened Tuesday, had “affirmed its earlier decision” to move forward with the project. Abu Faour said “a carrot and stick” approach would be used to allay local residents’ objections to the electricity project, which has required police protection for electricity workers installing the equipment.The Cabinet also tackled the election law that will govern the 2013 parliamentary polls, based on proposals by Interior Minister Marwan Charbel.
A statement issued after the meeting said ministers put forward questions about the details of the system of proportional representation that is being considered to replace the winner-takes-all system that has governed every previous election round.
They discussed the quota for women candidates and the mechanism of the preferential vote, which allows voters to rank their candidates in terms of preference, and how this would play in practice. Charbel noted the ministers’ remarks on the proposed electoral changes, and will reformulate his proposals for discussion at a later session.
Asked whether Cabinet tackled twin explosions in Tyre and the ransacking of the Orthodox archbishopric in Beirut earlier in the day, Abu Faour said the incidents were being followed up by Sleiman and the heads of security bodies. The minister said no political motivation had been proven to be behind the attacks as yet, which were still being investigated by the authorities.
Abu Faour was also pressed on whether Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour was expressing Lebanon’s official position Saturday when he voted against suspending Syria from the Arab League during a meeting in Cairo. The issue was tackled during Tuesday’s Cabinet session, and Abu Faour said that the explanation offered from the day before was “sufficient.”
At Tuesday’s session, ministers agreed that any Cabinet decision should serve the national interest and the requirements of civil peace.
However, Abu Faour was asked whether Beirut’s stance wasn’t taken up again during Wednesday’s session, with Mansour representing Lebanon in Morocco for a meeting of Arab foreign ministers. “It’s true that the foreign minister is in Rabat, and is in contact with the president and the prime minister. The Lebanese position is rational as we said before, we need to distance Lebanon from anything that incites division among the Arabs, or among the Lebanese,” Abu Faour said
 

Vatican protests Benetton ad showing pope kissing imam
Reuters – VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican on Wednesday protested to Italian clothing firm Benetton over its use of an image of Pope Benedict kissing an imam on the mouth in its latest shock advertising campaign. Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi called the unauthorized and "manipulative" use of the pope's picture in the photo montage "totally unacceptable" and suggested it might take legal action against the company. "This is a grave lack of respect for the pope, an offence against the sentiments of the faithful and a clear example of how advertising can violate elementary rules of respect for people in order to attract attention through provocation," he said in a statement. A large banner with the image of the pope and the imam was hung from a bridge near the Vatican on Wednesday morning before it was removed. Other photo montages in the same campaign, in which Benetton says it supports the Unhate Foundation, show other world leaders kissing each other on the mouth.President Barack Obama is shown kissing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in one.The Italian clothing company has run controversial advertising campaigns in the past, including one that showed grieving parents at the bedside of a man dying of AIDS.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; editing by Andrew Roche

Two blasts rock south Lebanon hotel popular with UN staff
Blast went off in pub of Queen Elissa Hotel in port city of Tyre; minutes later, another explosion damaged a liquor store; no casualties reported.
By Avi Issacharoff, Jack Khoury and The Associated Press
A bomb exploded Wednesday at a hotel frequented by UN staffers in southern Lebanon, causing damage but no casualties, a Lebanese security official said.
The official said the blast struck the pub at the Queen Elissa Hotel in the port city of Tyre early in the morning. Rubble littered the pavement outside the hotel, and part of the ground floor was badly damaged by the blast. Another explosion minutes later damaged a liquor store in the city, also causing no casualties. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. It wasn't immediately clear whether UN staffers were the target of the attack at the hotel. The blast shattered the windshield of one UN SUV parked outside the inn. Lebanese troops and peacekeepers cordoned off the area after the explosion. The official estimated the hotel bomb to weigh about 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds), adding that a sample was sent to Beirut to determine the type of explosives used. Tyre is a predominantly Muslim city and serving alcohol is common at hotels and restaurants.
There have been several attacks against UN peacekeepers in Lebanon in the past, most recently in July, when a roadside bomb blew up next to a UN convoy carrying French peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, wounding at least five people. UN peacekeepers have been deployed in southern Lebanon since 1978 to monitor the border with Israel. The force was boosted to almost 12,000 troops after Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006. Under the UN resolution that ended the fighting, the mission is monitoring a zone south of the Litani River where Hezbollah is banned from keeping weapons.

Syria's Muslim Brotherhood says it will accept Turkish "intervention"
November 17, 2011 /The leader of Syria's exiled Muslim Brotherhood said Thursday that his compatriots would accept Turkish "intervention" in the country to resolve months of bloody unrest. "The Syrian people would accept intervention coming from Turkey, rather than from the West, if its goal was to protect the people," Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Riad Shakfa told a press conference. "We may ask more from Turkey as a neighbor," he also said, without elaborating on the nature of the intervention which the Brotherhood might consider acceptable.On Thursday, pro-government daily Sabah reported that the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC), together with the Muslim Brotherhood, had asked Turkey to establish a no-fly zone on the Syrian side of the shared border to protect Syrian civilians. Mohammed Farouk Tayfour, political leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a member of the SNC, declined to comment on the allegations, saying only that discussions were held on "every possible means" with several governments in order to stop violence.-AFP/NOW Lebanon

Syrian rebels hit ruling party after raid on intelligence
November 17, 2011 /Rebel troops hit youth offices of Syria's ruling Baath party on Thursday, a day after a spectacular raid on a military intelligence base outside Damascus, a human rights group said. There was no immediate word on any casualties from the attack in Edleb province in northwest Syria, close to the Turkish border. "A group of dissident troops attacked regime youth offices, where security agents were meeting, with rocket-propelled grenades and clashes broke out," the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The attack came hot on the heels of a raid on an air force intelligence base in Harasta, outside the capital, on Wednesday by fighters of the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group formed by army deserters that has inflicted mounting losses on the regular army in recent months. The rebel group announced on Wednesday it was forming a temporary military council to "bring down the current regime, protect Syrian civilians from its oppression, protect private and public property and prevent chaos and acts of revenge when it falls." In Washington, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said it was "not surprising" that the opposition was resorting to violence. "We don't condone it in any way, shape or form but...it's the brutal tactics of Assad and his regime in dealing with what began as a non-violent movement [that] is now taking Syria down a very dangerous path," he said. "We think that this kind of violence...it really plays into Assad's and his regime's hands when this becomes violent," the spokesperson warned. In Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the world community should call on all sides in Syria including the opposition to stop violence. "There are more and more weapons that are being smuggled in from neighboring countries," Lavrov said."Today I saw a television report about some new so-called rebel Free Syrian Army organizing an attack on the government building, on the building belonging to Syria's armed forces," he told reporters."This was quite similar to a true civil war," he warned. Syrian anti-regime protests erupted in mid-March. According to UN estimates, more than 3,500 people have been killed in the crackdown on demonstrations.-AFP/NOW Lebanon

Russia says world should urge Syrian opposition to stop violence
November 17, 2011 /Russia said the world community should call on all sides in Syria including the opposition to stop violence, saying the Arab League's recent peace plan for Syria should be made more "concrete.""The Arab League's position on the necessity to stop violence - irrespective from where it comes - needs to be made detailed and more concrete," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters."For the realization of the Arab League initiative, we propose that all the states that are concerned about the peaceful resolution of the events in Syria call not only on the Syrian authorities to stop violence but also all opposition groups, without exception.""This should be done both on behalf of the Arab League and those countries whose territory the opposition is working from," Lavrov said. Moscow, a key ally of Damascus from Soviet times, has refused to back Western calls for sanctions against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and repeatedly blamed the Syrian opposition for the unrest in the country."There are more and more weapons that are being smuggled in from neighboring countries," Lavrov said."Today I saw a television report about some new so-called rebel Free Syrian Army organizing an attack on the government building, on the building belonging to Syria's armed forces," he told reporters. "This was quite similar to a true civil war."Syrian army defectors known as the Free Syrian Army attacked a military intelligence base just outside Damascus on Wednesday in one of the most daring raids by the opposition in eight months of unrest. Lavrov told reporters earlier this week that arms were smuggled into Syria from Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and "obviously other countries." "No-one disputes these facts although few comment on them," he said. "Armed extremists are using peaceful protesters."
-AFP/NOW Lebanon

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe Says Syrian Opposition Must Get Organized
Naharnet /The Syrian National Council opposed to the regime of Bashar Assad needs to be better organized before any official recognition of it, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Thursday. "The SNC must get organized," Juppe told RMC radio, excluding immediate official recognition of the confederation of most anti-Assad groups protesting Assad's regime in Syria. "We have contacts with them, I saw Mr. Burhan Ghaliun in Paris, who's the president. We help them, we have contact and we encourage them to get organized," he added.
The CNS has so far only been officially recognized by the new post-Gadhafi Libyan authorities. Juppe hit out again at the Damascus regime, saying that "the brutal, savage repression being carried out for months cannot continue." He hailed the "turning point" of "neighboring countries realizing that you can no longer trust Bashar Assad" after the Arab League voted to suspend Syria over the bloody suppression of protests. Given permanent U.N. Security Council member Russia's opposition to sanctions on the Syrian regime, Juppe said France was trying to get a resolution passed by the U.N.'s General Assembly. "We've drawn up a draft resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for an end to the repression and the beginning of a reform process," he said. France on Wednesday said it was recalling its ambassador to Damascus after French and other nations' diplomatic missions were attacked by pro-Assad mobs.
Arab leaders on the same day gave Assad three days to halt his "bloody repression" of anti-regime protests the U.N. says has killed more than 3,500 people, or risk sanctions.
*Source Agence France Presse

Barak: Iran nuclear program not aimed solely at Israel
Defense minister says Israel must convince world leaders to impose tough sanctions on Iran since its nuclear program threatens the entire world order.
By Haaretz and Barak Ravid
Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned Thursday that the Iranian nuclear program is not aimed solely at Israel, and urged world leaders to impose further sanctions on the Islamic republic.
Speaking with Army Radio from Canada, Barak said Israel is currently struggling to recruit the international community to stand firm against Iran and impose concrete sanctions in order to stop its nuclear program. "In order to do this," he explained, "we must convince world leaders and the public that the Iranian nuclear program is not only targeting Israel, but the foundations of the entire world order as well." Barak denied telling Charlie Rose in a PBS interview that if "I was an Iranian, I too would want a nuclear weapon," saying he only meant it hypothetically and explained that he is not deluding himself into thinking that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon only to attack Israel.
Meanwhile, head of the National Security Council Yaakov Amidror leveled criticism of former head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, over his role in the Israeli debate over an attack against Iran. Addressing the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Amidror alluded to Dagan's public opposition to an Iran strike, saying, “some of the people in the civil service get confused and think that they have a better understanding of the world than decision-makers do.”
“If have an understanding of the world, then they should stand for election to the Knesset,” he said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency recently issued a damning report on Iran's nuclear program. It found that Iran appeared to have worked on designing a nuclear weapon and may be continuing research relevant to that end. The International Atomic Energy Agency will host a forum next week among its member states, including Israel and Arab countries, to consider setting up a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Iran, which was asked in September whether it would attend, has not yet replied and is unlikely to take part, said diplomatic sources at the agency's headquarters in Vienna. The forum, initiated by IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, is part of the agency's efforts in recent years to persuade Israel to open its nuclear facilities to IAEA supervision and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The idea of a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East came from Arab states headed by Egypt, which have been raising this demand at every international forum for years.

Statement by Minister Baird on Syria’s Suspension from Arab League
(No. 348 – November 16, 2011 – 7:20 p.m. ET) Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird today made the following statement:
“Canada welcomes today’s Arab League confirmation formally suspending Syria's membership.
“This is an important signal from Syria's neighbours that the egregious behaviour of the Assad regime will not be tolerated.
“Its campaign of terror against the Syrian people must end. President Assad and those supporting him must go. We especially welcome the positive contributions of Turkey and Jordan in this regard. “Canada will continue to urge the isolation of this illegitimate regime. We stand with the Syrian people who have courageously stood for freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law in the face of brutal repression. “Canadians in Syria should leave now by commercial means while these are still available.”

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister meets with Israeli Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak
November 16, 2011/Ottawa/Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Israel’s Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, discuss the regional security situation in the Middle East as well as recent developments in the Middle East peace process at a meeting in Ottawa.
Canada’s long-standing position has been that lasting peace can only be achieved through negotiations between the two parties. Canada urges them to resume direct peace talks without delay or preconditions on the basis of the September 23, 2011, Middle East Quartet Statement. Canada is committed to helping to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting solution in the Middle East, whereby two states live side by side in peace and security.
The two ministers also discussed possible next steps following the International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran’s nuclear program. According to a recent statement to the press by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “the regime in Tehran represents probably the most significant threat in the world to global peace and security.”

Syria faces army defectors, worldwide isolation
17/11/2011
BEIRUT (AP) — Syria's president faces a growing challenge to his iron rule from home and abroad, with renegade troops launching their most daring attack yet on the military and world leaders looking at possibilities for a regime without Bashar Assad.
Also on Wednesday, France recalled its ambassador to Damascus in the wake of recent attacks against diplomatic missions and increasing violence stemming from the 8-month-old uprising. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe warned that "the vise is tightening" around Assad, and a government spokeswoman said Paris is working with the Syrian opposition to find an alternative to the regime.
The move comes as the 22-member Arab League formally suspended Damascus over the crackdown, which the U.N. estimates has killed more than 3,500 people, and threatened economic sanctions if the regime continues to violate an Arab-brokered peace plan.
The foreign ministers, meeting Wednesday in Rabat, Morocco, also gave the Syrian government three days to respond to an Arab peace plan that involves sending an Arab League delegation to monitor compliance.
"Economic sanctions are certainly possible if the Syrian government does not respond," said Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim.
Gamal Abdel Gawad, an Arab affairs expert in Cairo, said the League's vote suggests Arab leaders are scrambling to influence the type of regime Syria sees in the future.
"Regime change is unavoidable," he told The Associated Press.
The growing calls for Assad's ouster are a severe blow to a family dynasty that has ruled Syria for four decades — and any change to the leadership could transform some of the most enduring alliances in the Middle East and beyond.
Syria's tie to Iran is among the most important relationships in the Middle East, providing the Iranians with a foothold on Israel's border and a critical conduit to Tehran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian Hamas in Gaza.
Syrian allies in Russia and China also worry that the downfall of Assad would seriously hamper their interests in the Middle East.
On the other side of the equation, Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Mideast have long tried to break the Syria-Iran alliance in a campaign to roll back Tehran's influence in the region. Assad's fall could usher in a regime more bound to Sunni power.
Iran has encouraged Assad to talk to the opposition and even suggested he cannot rely only on force and intimidation — the same formula used in 2009 by Iran against protesters after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But generally, Tehran has mirrored the Damascus line about the unrest, saying foreign powers are stirring up trouble as part of a conspiracy to destabilize Syria.
Javad Larijani, the head of Iran's Human Rights Council, on Wednesday accused the West of incitement.
"Our position is that all the hands should be cut off from this kind of interference. It is up to the people of Syria to decide," Larijani told a press conference Wednesday at U.N. headquarters in New York.
But as more countries shift away from Damascus, Assad's power could wobble.
Assad, a 46-year-old eye doctor who inherited power 11 years ago, already is facing the most profound isolation of his family's four-decade rule.
World leaders who once hoped Assad could transform his father's stagnant dictatorship into a modern state are abandoning him in rapid succession.
French government spokeswoman Valerie Pecresse said Wednesday that Paris is working with the Syrian opposition "to try to develop a political alternative" to Assad's government.
Britain's Foreign Office said its ambassador will remain in Syria despite France's decision to recall its envoy, although it said the matter is under "regular review."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford, who was withdrawn over security concerns, still planned to return to Syria next week.
"Let's be very clear that it is the brutal tactics of Assad and his regime in dealing with what began as a nonviolent movement that is now taking Syria down a very dangerous path," Toner said. "We have said all along the brutal crackdown by the Syrian government would engender this kind of reaction."
In neighboring Jordan, King Abdullah II said this week that Assad should step down for the good of his country — the first Arab leader to publicly make such a call. Jordan's powerful Islamic opposition then urged Amman to recognize the broad-based Syrian National Council in yet another rebuke to Assad.
Inside Syria, thousands of people who even a year ago would have been too terrified to speak out against the ruling elite are calling for nothing less than Assad's downfall. It is a stunning transformation for a leader who insisted in January that his country was immune to the Arab Spring uprisings because he is in tune with his people's needs.
In a series of interviews, Israeli officials told the AP they expect Assad to fall within months, if not weeks. Israel and Syria are bitter enemies but have not fought each other for nearly 30 years.While they remain concerned that Assad's downfall could destabilize the area, they are also less convinced that an Islamic regime hostile to Israel will take power in Damascus after he leaves. One Israeli official who deals with the question of Syria said Israel had drawn up several scenarios, including a survival of a military regime dominated by the minority Alawite sect even if Assad is forced to step down. Assad and the ruling elite belong to the sect, although Syria is overwhelmingly Sunni.
The officials, including both government and military figures, all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing sensitive security and diplomatic assessments.
Alawite dominance in Syria has bred resentment, which Assad has worked to tamp down by pushing a strictly secular identity. But he now appears to be relying heavily on his Alawite power base, beginning with highly placed relatives, to crush the resistance.
Assad and his father before him stacked key military posts with Alawites to meld the fates of the army and the regime — a tactic aimed at compelling the army to fight to the death to protect the family dynasty.
In many ways, however, the unrest is spinning out of Assad's control.
Attacks on Syrian forces by defecting troops have been growing, highlighting the potential for a larger armed conflict in a country of 22 million with a volatile religious and ethnic mixture.
Although activists say the anti-government protesters have remained largely peaceful, an armed insurgency has developed recently, targeting Assad's military.
On Wednesday, Syrian army defectors attacked military and intelligence bases near the capital of Damascus and an army checkpoint in Hama province.
The deadliest attack was in Hama, where army defectors killed at least eight soldiers and security forces in the checkpoint assault in the village of Kfar Zeita, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
But the most brazen attacks were just outside Damascus. Attacks by army defectors have been rare near Assad's seat of power, so Wednesday marked a significant shift.
The Free Syrian Army — a group of military defectors — said in a statement that its main pre-dawn attack targeted a compound run by air force intelligence in the Damascus suburb of Harasta. Defectors also hit checkpoints in the Damascus suburbs of Douma, Qaboun and Arabeen and Saqba.
Despite the army defections, the military has remained loyal to Assad to a large degree.
Most of the defectors appear to be lower-level Sunni conscripts, not officers. But observers say the tide could change if the military continues to be called upon to shoot unarmed protesters.
Wednesday's attacks could not be independently confirmed, and the Free Syrian Army released no details about the fighting or possible casualties.
The Syrian government has largely sealed off the country, barring most foreign journalists and preventing independent reporting. Details gathered by activist groups and witnesses, along with amateur video, have become key channels of information. Violence has continued unabated in Syria for months, even after Damascus agreed Nov. 2 to an Arab-brokered peace deal that called for the regime to halt violence against protesters, pull tanks and armored vehicles out of cities, release political prisoners, and allow access for journalists and rights groups.
On Saturday, the Arab League voted to suspend Damascus over its failure to stop the bloodshed. The group officially enforced that decision Wednesday in Rabat, Morocco.
"The Syrian government has to sign the protocol that was sent by the Arab League and end all the violence against the demonstrators and free political detainees and all that has to happen in three days," said bin Jassim, the Qatari foreign minister.
"At that point we will send a mission of observers," he said.
The suspension has enraged Syria, which considers itself a bastion of Arab nationalism. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem boycotted the meeting.
Damascus fears the United States and its allies might use the rare Arab consensus to press for tougher sanctions at the United Nations. Veto-wielding Russia and China have so far opposed efforts at the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Syria — a stance that could become harder to maintain in the face of the Arab position.

Damascus attack left 20 killed, wounded: opposition
November 17, 2011/Daily Star
AMMAN: An attack by army defectors on a major intelligence complex in a Damascus suburb left 20 security police dead or wounded, prompting retaliation by security forces on the neighborhood, residents and opposition sources said on Thursday. Wednesday's attack on an Air Force Intelligence complex in Harasta was the first on a major security target in the eight month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, indicating that fighting could be spreading to Syria's centers of power.
"The defectors used rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns and managed to inflict casualties on those who were within the ... outer wall," said an operative involved in supplying the defectors. There was no confirmation of the attack from authorities. Syria's ban on most foreign media makes it hard to verify reports of events on the ground from activists or officials.
One of the residents of the suburb, who declined to be named, said there were no casualties among the attackers, and that the operation lasted for 10 minutes. He said the defectors were mostly from the Damascus suburbs of Harasta and Douma, which have taken the brunt of a crackdown on protests demanding Assad's removal in rural Damascus.
Residents said around 70 people have been arrested in the last 24 hours, with Air Force Intelligence agents raiding houses and destroying several businesses.
"Roadblocks have been set up everywhere in Harasta, especially in al-Seil neighbourhood, where activists are concentrated. Five textile workshops were ransacked," another resident said.
"Air Force intelligence trucks are patrolling the suburb also, and the agents are carrying RPGs," he said. Together with Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence is in charge of preventing dissent within the army. The two divisions have been instrumental in a crackdown on the uprising against Assad which the United Nations says has killed 3,500 people.
Syria blames the violence on armed groups backed by foreign powers, and says more than 1,100 soldiers and police have been killed since the uprising erupted in March.
Syria's military is controlled by Assad's brother Maher and members of their minority Alawite sect, while the army is comprised mostly of Sunni Muslims, who also form the majority of Syria's population and have been defecting from the army in mounting numbers. The pervasive security apparatus, dominated by Alawites, underpins the power structure. Security chiefs of an estimated eight major secret police organizations answer directly to Assad.

Neighbors: Brothers accused of murder seemed nice, polite
November 17, 2011/By Marie Dhumieres/The Daily Star
BEIRUT: Residents of the Nabaa building that housed five brothers arrested Tuesday in the murders of at least six people described the men as “nice” and “polite” neighbors.“
They’re good people and neighbors,” said Hussein Hajj, who lives in the apartment opposite Michel Tanielan’s. They were “good people with us, but with others, I don’t know ... They didn’t seem strange.”The brothers have been identified as Michel, George, Aziz, Movses and Maurice Tanielan. A security source who spoke to The Daily Star Tuesday, said Michel has admitted to killing 10 people and attempting to kill two others.
One or more of the suspects are believed to have used stolen taxis over the past two months to commit murders, killing some of the victims inside the taxis, which were later set on fire. At least six people, including a Lebanese Army soldier, have been found dead on the outskirts of Beirut. Most neighbors said they knew very little about the brothers.Hajj said Michel lived alone on the fourth floor, but would often have “friends” visit. “I know Michel. He didn’t work and was always home,” Hajj said, adding that “he was abroad [for a time] and came back.” In Michel’s apartment, which appeared to have been ransacked, a photograph of a man on holiday – identified as Michel by Hajj – was hanging on the wall.
From the street, empty bird cages and drying clothes could be seen on the first-floor apartment’s terrace, where the other four brothers and their family lived.
“George worked on cars, Musa didn’t work because he’s injured from the war, Maurice only comes once in a while and Aziz has a taxi,” Hajj said. Fakhreddine, a neighbor who asked to be identified by her family name only, also said the brothers were polite but not very talkative. “They would say ‘hello,’ but that’s all,” she said.
Fakhreddine, who bought her apartment five years ago, said the brothers were already there when she moved in. She’s never seen the inside of their apartments and used to “wonder” about the brothers’ occupation.
Michel, she said, is “a nice guy who likes to have fun, go clubbing and get drunk,” adding that there were often women and “people we didn’t know” visiting him.
She said the brothers often “fought with each other when they were drunk.”Neighbors said a foreign woman in her 20s was also living in the first-floor apartment with her 7-year-old son.
They seemed not to be sure whose wife she was, as “sometimes she used to come to Michel’s, sometimes to George’s,” Hajj said. “George used to say the kid is his.”
They said the foreign woman, along with two other women and the brothers’ mother, were also taken into police custody.
Describing Tuesday’s raid, Fakhreddine said the police asked residents not to leave their apartments, but she heard from upstairs police asking, “Who do these guns belong to?” and later saw police carrying bags out of the building. In the building’s narrow street, a man who asked not to be identified said he lived next to one of the brothers. He also said that the brothers didn’t say much but were good neighbors. “We didn’t see anything wrong with them. We would just say hello to each other, but they were nice.”A shop owner further down the street said he was very surprised by the brothers’ arrest. “We didn’t know anything about these guys. Some people say that they’ve done a lot of [wrong] things, but not in this neighborhood.”

Iran expert: U.S. elections increase likelihood of Israeli strike
By Reuters /An Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites may become likelier in 2012 if Israel calculates it has more room to act alone in a U.S. presidential election year, a former U.S. official and nuclear diplomacy expert said. Mark Fitzpatrick, an Iran watcher at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, told Reuters the latest report by the UN nuclear watchdog made him more worried that Iran was closer to mastering how to use nuclear power as a weapon. Iran insists its nuclear program is for civilian energy only. But Fitzpatrick, who was a State Department official responsible for nuclear non-proliferation, said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report was damning. It found that Iran appeared to have worked on designing a nuclear weapon and may be continuing research relevant to that end. Fitzpatrick said an IAEA governing board meeting on Thursday and Friday in Vienna should demonstrate serious international concern over the findings. But he doubted whether Russia or China would go along with any resolution finding Iran to be in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). And he said he feared that if countries like Israel that felt most threatened by Iran lost faith in the international community to act firmly, they could act alone.
"When you consider that next year being the U.S. presidential election year, and the dynamics of politics in the United States, this could increase Israel's inclination to take matters into its own hands," Fitzpatrick said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might not necessarily ask President Barack Obama for permission to mount a strike, Fitzpatrick said, if Israel believed Iran could acquire a nuclear weapon or place one in a site out of reach. Netanyahu said on Sunday Iran was closer to getting an atomic bomb than had been thought.
"The most likely possibility is that Netanyahu calls up Obama and says: 'I'm not asking for a green light, I'm just telling you that we've just launched the planes, don't shoot them down'," Fitzpatrick said. "And in a U.S. presidential election year, I think it's unlikely that Obama would shoot them down." An Israeli attack on Iran would raise the possibility of a wider conflict in the Middle East, at a time when the Jewish state has become more isolated due to changes wrought by the Arab Spring. Fitzpatrick said he did not think Israel was at that point yet but he saw the danger rising. He said if Iran took the political decision it could produce a bomb within a year, given its current stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU). But he doubted whether Iran would race to produce a single bomb, and it would take a couple of years to produce the handful needed to constitute a "real nuclear deterrent". Since last year, Iran has tested long range missiles, increased its LEU stockpile, and installed more advanced centrifuges for further enrichment, putting some deep inside a fortified mountain facility at Fordow.
Fitzpatrick said the onus was on governments to implement UN mandated sanctions against Iran to exert maximum pressure. "There is still evidence that Iran is receiving nuclear and missile-related material from front companies in China and elsewhere," he said. "There's evidence that some of the Iranian front companies that had been operating out of Dubai have shifted base - some of them moving here to Istanbul." itzpatrick said it was clear that some countries were using every means at their disposal to retard Iran's nuclear program, short of military action. "I don't have any direct evidence of sabotage efforts or so-called decapitation, but clearly Iranian scientists involved in the nuclear program and in the ballistic missile program are in danger," Fitzpatrick said. "Some have been persuaded to defect, others have been assassinated." An explosion at a military base near Tehran last Saturday killed Brigadier Hassan Moqaddam and 16 other members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards. Moqaddam was regarded as the architect of Iran's missile defenses. Tehran has said the explosion was an accident.

Speechless in Bashar Assad’s Syria
November 17, 2011
By Michael Young/The Daily Star
To capture the essence of the Syrian regime’s behavior today, a very useful place to start is W. H. Auden’s poem “August 1968,” whose theme is the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring. “The Ogre does what ogres can,/Deeds quite impossible for Man,/But one prize is beyond his reach,/The Ogre cannot master Speech:/About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain,/The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,/While drivel gushes from his lips.”
It was, indeed, an inarticulate Syrian ogre that greeted the decision of the Arab League, traditionally a generous assemblage of ogres, to suspend Syria’s membership in the organization. And the drivel has come in the form of indignant statements by Syrian ambassadors and officials; but also in the mob attacks against diplomatic missions, a reminder of how frequently the Assad regime, that of father and son, have targeted foreign envoys to make their displeasure known.
Were it not for the fact that President Bashar Assad, with his family and close comrades, is steadily transporting Syria toward civil war because he refuses to leave office, we could derive grim satisfaction from the incoherence in Damascus. For once the explicit thuggishness, the feigned outrage to mask the shameless deceitfulness, the apocalyptic warnings, are failing to have an impact. Assad has misled several times too often, and, finally, his credibility has evaporated.
And yet we tend to forget that the Syrians had their way for decades by deploying precisely those methods. Their fury comes from the realization that their act, the single act that Syria’s regime has learned, is boring the audience. To gain Arab attention, Assad must take steps to further intensify the violence against his own population. He hopes to provoke an all-out sectarian conflagration that polarizes opinion, thereby creating a frightening enemy, in that way, perhaps, recouping for his regime much of its lost support. And yet a sectarian conflict is precisely what the Arab states wish to avert, and Assad must sense, with the example of Moammar Gadhafi still fresh in his mind, that a civil war really can go either way for an autocrat clinging to power.
Where Assad is right is in realizing that the Arab League plan that he was offered represents a roundabout way of getting rid of him. The liberation of tens of thousands of prisoners and the withdrawal from Syrian cities of the army and security forces would make irrelevant any dialogue with the opposition, another facet of the Arab plan. Once the streets are in the hands of the protesters, there will be no dialogue whatsoever; only an irrepressible drive to tear down Assad rule.
Here are the stark options that Syria’s leadership have left for itself: Either crush the intifada or be crushed. From day one the Assads responded to the rolling unrest with gunfire and sham concessions. No one was duped, just as no one was duped the first, second and third time Syrian officials, including Assad himself, pronounced the uprising over. It is remarkable how the vernacular of the Syrian regime is shaped by claims diametrically opposed to reality: that peaceful protesters are “armed groups”; that the engine of reform has started, even as the death toll climbs; that sanctions will never work, when Syria is that rare example of a place where sanctions may work.
How familiar this sounds for those Lebanese who remember Assad’s actions six and seven years ago. Here was the Syrian leader in summer 2004, insulting our intelligence by serenely telling an Arab newspaper that it was the Lebanese who would decide whether to extend Emile Lahoud’s mandate. That was before Assad issued his threat in person to Rafik Hariri, instructing him to vote in favor of the extension, or else.
And there was Assad in March 2005, two weeks after Hariri’s assassination, explaining to the gaggle of sycophants Syria calls a parliament, that he would redeploy his soldiers in Lebanon toward the Syrian border. No mention was made of whether they would cross to the other side, because the president hoped to avoid such an outcome. He expected Hezbollah’s intimidatory rally of March 8, three days after his address, to silence his Lebanese foes. And when a Syrian pullout did come, because March 8 brought on the massive anti-Syrian demonstration of March 14, it came sullenly and surreptitiously, in the night, a bad-tempered signal that Assad would do everything to return.
The mendacity, the arrogance, the condescension, the surreal levels of criminality, have all been in full view these past months, as the Assads have slaughtered their people without flinching. The Arab states gave the Syrian regime ample time to stifle the dissension, until they saw that Bashar Assad was going to lose anyway. Panic has set in as the intifada veers toward a Sunni-Alawite war, which would have dire repercussions for Syria’s neighbors, and the Arab world in general.
One should have faith. A people that has mostly avoided resorting to arms though eight months of carnage, is one wise to the ways of its tormentors. Syrians have the Assads to thank for that. Having endured for four decades the whims of two sordid families, they know what to expect. See through the bully, and you’re on your way to deflating him. Assad dreams of containing the Syrian intifada and imposing a bogus reform project that consolidates his authority; but to many Syrians he is simply irrelevant. Recognition of that fact was implied in the advice of King Abdullah of Jordan that Bashar Assad step down.
It is difficult to predict what will happen next in Syria. But the Assad order has been stripped down to its carcass, left only with the brutality of Alawite solidarity, fortified by mounting Arab isolation. The ogre is stammering, meaning the end cannot be too far off.
**Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR and author of “The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle.” He tweets @BeirutCalling.

Food and Syria's failure
By Spengler
"In the south it all started after a group of school students started to write some sort of proclamations and complaints, protesting against growing food prices," Middle East analyst Vladimir Ahmedov told The Voice of Russia March 24. Arab-language Syrian press reports and blog posts indicate that the administration of President Basher al-Assad tried to prevent a rise in food prices, but provoked instead a wave of hoarding that has pushed the price of staples like oil and rice "above the purchasing power of consumers", as the online daily al-Tashreen reported from Damascus March 27. As I wrote in Food and failed Arab states (Asia Times Online February 2, 2011), the newly prosperous consumers of Asia have priced food grains out of the reach of the destitute Arab poor. This is a tsunami which no government in the region can resist. Of all
Dilbert
the prospectively failed states in the region, Syria seemed the least vulnerable, with a determined and vicious regime prepared to inflict unspeakable brutality on its opponents, and its inability to contain unrest is a frightening gauge of the magnitude of the shock. The Arab bazaar speculates in foodstuffs as aggressively as hedge funds, and the Syrian government's attempt last month to keep food prices down prompted local merchants to hoard commodities with a long shelf life. Fruit and vegetable prices, by contrast, remain low, because the bazaar does not hoard perishables. The fact that prices rose after the government announced high-profile measures to prevent such a rise exposed the fecklessness of the Assad regime.
In response to the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, President Assad reduced taxes on oil and sugar, and cut import tariffs on basic foodstuffs. This action had unintended consequences. A blogger on the Syrian website sy-weather.com reports, "I spent fifteen days on formalities to reduce customs duties on some basic food items, but I have not seen a glimmer of hope on the horizon. This was supposed to reduce the prices of the targeted goods. On the contrary, a liter of oil that sold for 65 Syrian pounds [US$1.38] now sells for 85 pounds." That's an increase of 30% over the month. Other bloggers report that the prices of basic foodstuffs have risen by 25% to 30%.
What happened is seen frequently in Third World command economies: local importers bribe customs officials to control the flow of goods, and then hoard them. "The only beneficiaries of the price-reduction decrees," the blogger concluded, "are the traders."
What are essentially dictatorships like Syria rule through corruption. It is not an incidental fact of life, but the primary means of maintaining loyalty to the regime. Under normal circumstances such regimes can last indefinitely. Under severe external stress, the web of corrupt power relations decays into a scramble for individual advantage. The doubling of world food prices over the past year has overwhelmed the Assad family's ability to manage through the usual mechanisms. The Syrians sense the weakness of the regime, which rests on the narrow base of the Alawi religious minority.
Virtually every sector of Syrian society has a grudge against the Assads, most of all the Muslim Brotherhood, which led an uprising in the city of Hama in 1982 that Hafez al-Assad crushed with casualties estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000. Ethnic fractures have not yet contributed to the unrest, but the country's Kurds are "ready, watching and waiting to take to the streets, as their cause is the strongest", as Robert Lowe, manager of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, told CNN on March 24.
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From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Hindu Kush, instability will afflict the Muslim world for a generation, and there is nothing that the West can do to stop it. Almost no-one in Washington appears to be asking the obvious question: what should the United States do in the event that there are no solutions at all?
No one, that is, but US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius March 22 that "the unrest has highlighted 'ethnic, sectarian and tribal differences that have been suppressed for years' in the region, and that as America encourages leaders to accept democratic change, there's a question 'whether more democratic governance can hold ... countries together in light of these pressures'." The implication [Ignatius writes]: ''There's a risk that the political map of the modern Middle East may begin to unravel too, with, say, the breakup of Libya.''
The Defense Secretary's Delphic utterance suggests that he has learned a great deal since the 1980s, when as the Central Intelligence Agency's Russia desk chief he refused to believe that the Soviet Union was headed for a crackup. This time he foresees the chaos to come. But Gates, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, already has announced his eventual departure.
The kibitzer corps of Western policy analysts is competing to offer putative solutions to the region's problems. What do you do when there isn't a solution?
In the bad old days of imperialism, the rapacious Europeans looted their colonies, and sometimes, though no fault of their own, left them in better condition than they had found them. That is not true everywhere; in the Congo, the kings of Belgium left nothing but a trail of pain.
India, though, was first unified by the British, who gave it a civil service, the example of a parliamentary system, a railroad system, and a national language; although the British interest in the subcontinent was predatory not philanthropic, India benefited in some respects from the Raj. The British, rather like Goethe's devil, were the spirit that always wanted to do evil but at least sometimes did good.
Former president George W Bush wanted to build democracy, and the Barack Obama administration has embraced the "Arab spring" with the enthusiasm of a Sorbonne undergraduate in May 1968. "Helping to get them right" is "a challenge for American foreign policy as any we have faced since the end of the Cold War," as William J Burns, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee March 17:
The revolutions ... are about the brave, proud, and determined people of Arab societies, intent upon better governance and more economic opportunities, intent upon erasing the disconnect between the rulers and the ruled that for so long has been so stifling for so many. And they're about the universal values that the President spoke about two years ago in Cairo - the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, and the right to determine one's own destiny ... ''It is a moment of great possibility for American policy and help; a moment when the peaceful, homegrown, non-ideological movement surging out of Tahrir Square offers a powerful repudiation of al-Qaeda's false narrative that violence and extremism are the only ways to effect change.''
This flight of fancy was flagged by the Israel-based analyst Barry Rubin (at rubinreports.blogspot.com). The administration's romantics, such as Samantha Powers, the Irish human-rights activist who once called for UN troops to take over the Israel-Palestine conflict, and United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, appear in charge of Middle East policy. Anyone who doubts that ideology trumps raison d'etat in the Obama White House should read Stanley Kurtz' just-published book, Radical-in-Chief.
The Republicans for the most part are competing with Obama to show that they can do a better job of fixing the Middle East. "Barack Obama's union base is looking like a national security issue," complains Daniel Henninger in the March 24 Wall Street Journal, because the unions oppose free trade agreements that he thinks would fix Egypt's economy.
Never mind that two-fifths of Egyptians are illiterate and that (according to Egypt's new Finance Minister Samir Radwan) ''the products of the education system are unemployable." Henninger's advice recalls the anecdote about the operatic tenor who drops dead of heart attack onstage. "Give him an enema!," calls an elderly Jewish lady from the balcony. The attending doctor replies gravely, "Madam, the man has suffered a massive coronary!," to which the old woman replies, "Well, it wouldn't hurt!"
Like most of his colleagues in the commentariat, Henninger feels obliged to offer a solution. He writes, "Many people in US public life don't want to get involved with this Middle East tangle. Alas, the gods do not ordain a timeline for crises. These insurrections - now spread across 11 separate nations - are a big, historic moment, similar in some ways to what happened around Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall fell. The US didn't blow that one. What's needed now is an equivalent level of leadership and strategic thinking to ensure we don't fall on the wrong side of this one.”
It is worth recalling just what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall. America won the Cold War not by enticing the Soviet Union into democratic reforms but by proving to Russia's generals that they couldn't win - by installing missiles in Germany that could hit Moscow in four minutes, by shredding Russian forces in Afghanistan, by demonstrating the weakness of Russian avionics, and by threatening (in part as a bluff) to build a missile defense system.
The result was to bring ruination to the Russian economy and ruin tens of millions of lives. Male life expectancy plunged into the mid-50-year range largely due to alcoholism, and millions of Russian women turned to prostitution.
After the Cold War, American free marketeers fanned out like missionaries to spread the capitalist gospel around the world. In some respects we succeeded. Asia listened, and flourished. During 1992-1993, I was one soldier in the small army of American economists and policy advisers who set out for parts East to bring the American economic gospel to our former enemies. My business partner at the time was the late supply-side pundit Jude Wanniski. Political friends arranged my appointment as an economic adviser to Yegor Gaidar, then Boris Yeltsin's finance minister and later prime minister. I traveled to Moscow several times to promote a plan to stabilize Russia's collapsing currency.
Yeltsin had not yet invited the oligarch Roman Abramovich to move into an apartment at the Kremlin, which he did in 1996. But it did not take long to see that the job description of an "economic adviser" was to find means for Russian officials to steal everything available and bank the proceeds abroad. This was not so much corruption as free-for-all looting.
The Yeltsin government, it was later explained to me, was "the family office" (the investment management arm) of Abramovich, a former small-time player now worth 11 figures. There were no restraints because communism had erased Russian civil society and made the people passive and despondent. Russian democracy under Yeltsin allowed the sheep the right to vote about whatever it liked while the wolves ate their fill. It took a restoration of the old security services in the person of Vladimir Putin to restore a degree of order.
Russia remains a crippled giant, a raw-materials monoculture dependent on more than ten million foreign workers to compensate for its demographic decline. And Russia was a superpower that nearly beat America in the Cold War, the first country to send a man into space, the home to many of the world's best scientists and mathematicians.
The Muslim world has not produced an innovation of note in seven centuries; except in Turkey, it lacks a single university that can train students to world standards (and only 23% of Turkish students finish high school). To expect the Arab Middle East to compete with Asia in light manufactures or information-technology outsourcing is whimsical.
Iran might have had a chance before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but most of its human capital has long since fled. Pakistan is a half-illiterate failed state. Turkey has kept its head above water, but just barely, as I reported last week (The Heart of Turkness, March 22, 2011); Indonesia and Malaysia have more to do with emerging Asia than the Middle East. The only pocket of Arab population with an economic future might be the West Bank territories, where the gravitational pull of Israel's high-tech economy draws in Arabs educated at universities founded after Israel conquered the region in 1967. At the University of Samaria on the other side of the Green Line, one sees scores of young Palestinian women in headscarves.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt understands the local situation much better than American policymakers of both parties. As Israeli officials observe, it has no ambition to rule Egypt for the moment, for the Brothers believe that Egypt's position is hopeless for the time being. No matter who is in power for the immediate future, the country will descend into chaos. The Brotherhood will wait in the wings, hoping to emerge as a national savior at some future date.
What might emerge from the Arab world two or three generations from now is beyond anyone's capacity to foresee. As individuals, Arabs are as talented and productive as anyone on earth. For the time being they are caught in the maelstrom of a failing culture. The social engineers of the neither the American left nor right will ''get them right,” in Undersecretary Burns' grammatically challenged expression.
Gates is right: the existing political structures will not hold. As he told David Ignatius, ''I think we should be alert to the fact that outcomes are not predetermined, and that it's not necessarily the case that everything has a happy ending ... We are in dark territory and nobody knows what the outcome will be.'' As I said of Egypt in my February 2 essay: we do not know what kind of state will follow Basher Assad. We only know that it will be a failed state.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. Comment on this article in Spengler's Expat Bar forum.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Israel the winner in the Arab revolts
By Spengler
Civilian casualties are the currency of Middle East diplomacy. The military issue in the region has never been whether Israel had the power to crush its opponents, but whether it had permission to do so. Iran and Syria have supplied Hezbollah with 50,000 rockets, many capable of hitting any target in Israel with precision. Many are emplaced under homes, schools and hospitals. Thousands of civilians used as unwilling human shields would perish if Israel were to destroy the missiles.
Too much collateral damage will "stain the conscience of the world", as United States President Barack Obama intoned over
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Libya. By this reckoning, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and other Arab dictators have enhanced Israel's strategic position by cheapening Arab life.
Another 34 Syrians died in last Friday's protests, the largest to date, bringing the body count to 170 in the past three weeks.
Estimates of the dead in Libya's civil war, meanwhile, range from 1,000 to 10,000. No one paid much attention to the dozen and a half dead in Israel's latest retaliatory strike in Gaza. At the US State Department briefing April 7, spokesman Mark Toner condemned the latest rocket attacks on Israel "in the strongest possible terms", but said nothing about the Israeli response.
That is harbinger of things to come. Assad may cling to power, but Syria has vanished as a prospective player in peace negotiations. A comprehensive peace is impossible without Syria, which explains why Washington has not demanded Assad's ouster along with Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
To do so would amount to a formal announcement that the Oslo Accords are dead. For reasons I laid out in a recent essay (Food and Syria's Failure, March 29), Syria will only fracture further. Israel's best course of action is to dig in its heels through the November 2012 US presidential elections while its prospective adversaries descend into chaos, and await the right opportunity to settle accounts with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Iran and its proxies cannot defeat Israel in open war, but they hope to provoke it into actions which would lead to diplomatic isolation and an imposed settlement on the 1949 ceasefire line. With just 13 kilometers between Arab territory and the sea, Israel would be vulnerable to rocketry on its western as well as its northern and southern borders, and even more constrained from military action by the presence of a recognized Palestinian state. Salami tactics of this sort, Iran and Syria believed, eventually would make Israel's position untenable.
Only one country's opinion has real weight in this matter, and that is the United States. Under the previous administration of George W Bush, American policy explicitly rejected salami tactics. In return for Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, Bush gave a letter to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon stating, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949," as former National Security Council official Elliot Abrams reported in the June 29, 2009 Wall Street Journal.
On the other hand, then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice engineered a settlement to the August 2006 war on Israel's northern border by forcing Israel to accept international guarantees to demilitarize southern Lebanon, which Iran and Syria ignored and the US did nothing to enforce.
Obama, by contrast, leans toward advisers who in the past have proposed an international military intervention to impose a settlement. Samantha Power, the reported architect of the recent Libyan intervention, became a liability to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign when journalist Noah Pollak unearthed [1] a 2003 interview with Power in which she explicitly called for military intervention to impose a settlement: "Both political leaders [Arafat and Sharon] have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention."
Power was cashiered from the campaign over a public insult to Hillary Clinton, and appointed to a lowly human-rights position at Obama's National Security Council, but has since emerged as Obama's lead adviser on the Middle East.
Power disavowed her 2003 intervention proposal, but it seems unlikely that her views have changed, given her lifelong devotion to "human-rights" politics. Stanley Kurtz profiled [2] her radical views April 5 at National Review, concluding, "Obama and Power are attempting to accustom us to a whole new way of thinking about war, and about America's place in the world." The object of the Libyan intervention is not to protect the US or to assert American interests, but to forestall civilian deaths.
Power is not only insidious, however, but also incompetent. Her Pulitzer Prize for human-rights reporting did not prepare her for the unpleasant realities on the ground in the Middle East. She shot her bolt prematurely over Libya, landing America in an embarrassment.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's desultory air strikes have had little impact on the outcome, and the ragtag rebel forces (who include elements of al-Qaeda) have crumbled before Gaddafi's counterattacks. America ditched its old ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and bombarded Gaddafi, who cooperated with US counter-terrorism efforts, without managing to dislodge him. America's limited intervention will contribute to a prolonged civil war and a humanitarian catastrophe, mocking the idea of intervention to protect civilian life.
Judge Richard Goldstone's recent personal doubts over his charge that the Israeli army deliberately targeted civilians in its Gaza incursion came at a propitious time for the Jewish state. America's United Nations ambassador Susan Rice declared that the United States wanted Goldstone's 2009 report to the UN Human Rights Commission to "disappear".
Syria will prove impossible to stabilize, for reasons sketched in my March 29 essay, and explained in more detail by economist Paul Rivlin [3] in a note released the same day by Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center, entitled "Behind the Tensions in Syria: The Socio-Economic Dimension."
Quoted at length in the Arab press, Rivlin's report went unmentioned in the Western media - a gauge of how poorly the Western elite understands the core issues. Clinton has been ridiculed for calling Assad a "reformer" (in fact, she said that some members of congress think he's a reformer). Rivlin explains Syria's president is a reformer, at least in economic policy. The trouble is that Syrian society is too fragile to absorb reforms without intolerable pain for the 30% of Syrians below the official poverty line of US$1.60 a day. As Rivlin explains:
Syrian agriculture is suffering from the country's move to a so-called "social market economy" and the introduction of a new subsidy regime in compliance with international trade agreements, including the Association Agreement with the European Union (which Syria has still not ratified). The previous agricultural policy was highly interventionist, ensuring (at great cost) the country's food security and providing the population with cheap access to food items. It is now being replaced with a more liberal one that has harsh consequences for farmers and peasants, who account for about 20% of the country's GDP [gross domestic product] and its workforce.
Syria's farm sector, Rivlin adds, was further weakened by four years of drought: "Small-scale farmers have been the worst affected; many have not been able to grow enough food or earn enough money to feed their families. As a result, tens of thousands have left the northeast and now inhabit informal settlements or camps close to Damascus."
Assad abolished fuel subsidies and freed market prices, Rivlin adds. "In early 2008, fuel subsidies were abolished and, as a result, the price of diesel fuel tripled overnight. Consequently, during the year the price of basic foodstuffs rose sharply and was further exasperated by the drought." Against that background, Syrian food prices jumped by 30% in late February, Syrian bloggers reported after the regime's attempt to hold prices down provoked hoarding.
The rise in global food prices hit Syrian society like a tsunami, exposing the regime's incapacity to modernize a backward, corrupt and fractured country. Like Egypt, Syria cannot get there from here. Rivlin doubts that the regime will fracture. He concludes, "Urban elites have been appeased by economic liberalization, and they now fear a revolution that would bring to power a new political class based on the rural poor, or simply push Syria into chaos. The alliance of the Sunni business community and the Alawite-dominated security forces forms the basis of the regime and, as sections of the population rebel, it has everything to fight for."
The most likely outcome is a prolonged period of instability, in which two sides that have nothing to gain from compromise and everything to lose from defeat - the dispossessed poor and the entrenched elite - fight it out in the streets. Like Yemen and Libya, Syria will prove impossible to stabilize; whether Egypt's military can prevent a descent into similar chaos remains doubtful.
As Anwar Raja, a leader of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, told the RIA Novosti Russian-language service April 2 (I translate), "Syria plays a key role in the region as a supporter of the resistance movements in the Arab world, especially in Palestine and Lebanon. Destabilization of this country would allow the US and Israel to restore their dominance in the region, which they lost, especially after the changes in Egypt."
That is a remarkable statement, given that Washington pulled the rug out from under its old ally Mubarak, thus undermining its position in the region, but benefits from the misery of Assad, of which it is guiltless. On the contrary, the Obama administration clings to the delusion that democracies will flower in the "Arab spring", and that Assad is a crucial partner for peace. In the race to the bottom, Damascus has plummeted ahead of Washington. That is why Anwar Raja's estimate is precisely correct. The scenario would be hilarious if not for the grim death toll.
Sadly, Arab corpses will continue to pile up until the Western media tire of photographing them, and the "conscience of the world" finds it tiresome to read about it. That Islamists will attempt to exploit the chaos goes without saying, but even Islamists need to eat almost every day. For the third of Syrians below the poverty line, the March increase in the price of a liter of cooking oil was equal to a quarter of daily income. It is not hunger so much as humiliation and hopelessness that drives the protesters back into the streets, and into the guns of the security forces.
Under the circumstances, Obama's claim rings hollow that an Israeli-Palestinian accord is "more urgent than ever". When all the actors in the region are in play, whatever Israel might negotiate with the Palestine Authority is meaningless. Neither bombs and rockets, nor the droplets of economic assistance the administration might squeeze out of constrained budget, will stop regime failure from revealing itself to be a symptom of societal failure.
The Palestine Authority will continue to campaign for "recognition" by the United Nations General Assembly, a meaningless step unless the major powers endorse it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already told the Palestinians not to act on their own. The vote that outweighs all the others, to be sure, belongs to Washington. Given the massive support for Israel among American voters (63% against 15% for the Palestinians, according to a Gallup Poll [4]), it is most unlikely that the Obama administration would put the screws on Israel before the November 2012 elections.
And by then the map of the Middle East may look quite different.
Obama, to be sure, wants Israel to make unilateral concessions on West Bank settlements in order to maintain the illusion that a peace process still exists. But the only stick he has to brandish at Jerusalem is to failure to use the American veto should the Palestinians seek United Nations recognition for a state within the 1949 ceasefire line.
But this threat is empty. As the Israeli commentator Caroline Glick wrote on April 4 [5]:
Perversely, if [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu bows to Obama's wishes, he will not avert US support for Palestinian UN membership and UN recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and Gaza. He will facilitate it by making it appear non-controversial. Netanyahu's best bet in this case is not to ask Obama for favors. Since the General Assembly will likely approve Palestinian membership even if the US does veto a Security Council resolution, Obama's ability to prevent the gambit is limited. And the price he wants to exact for a veto is prohibitive.
The price that Obama would pay in American politics for throwing Israel under the bus would be even more prohibitive.
Nothing about this will be pleasant for Israel, which may suffer considerable damage from Hezbollah rockets in the event of another northern war. In that event, Israel will have the opportunity to fight, and win decisively. I do not wish war on anyone, but it is worth bearing in mind that nothing wins like winning. An Israeli military victory would do more to discredit the Islamists in the Arab world than all the elections in the world.
Notes
1. Obama and Israel - It Gets Worse, January 2008.
2. Samantha Power's Power April 5, 2011.
3. Behind the Tensions in Syria: The Socio-Economic Dimension March 29.2011.
4. Support for Israel in U.S. at 63%, Near Record High February 24, 2010.
5. Richard Goldstone and Palestinian statehood April 4, 2011.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. Comment on this article in Spengler's Expat Bar forum.
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