LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
June 10/07

Bible Reading of the day
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Mark 12,38-44.
In the course of his teaching he said, "Beware of the scribes, who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers. They will receive a very severe condemnation." He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents. Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them, "Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood."

Free Opinion
The time for symbolism in Lebanon has long since passed-Daily Star. June 10/07
Desperately searching for a libertarian foreign policy-Michael Young. June 10/07
America looks for ways to fight its worst enemy: IEDs-David Ignatius. June 10/07
Outside History and Inside Sectarianism-By: Mustafa ZeinDar Al-Hayat-June 10/07
The Bitterness at Ain al Hilweh Camp-Asharq Alawsat- June 10/07

Latest News Reports From Miscellaneous Sources for June 10/06/07
Bush: Syria should not keep disrupting Lebanese gov`t-Ha'aretz
Israel Says Military Action Against Iran Possible-Voice of America
Lebanon army shells camp, 3 soldiers die-Reuters
Fighting in Lebanon enters fourth week-Washington Times
Tribunal Comes Into Force Sunday-Naharnet
Army Pounds Nahr al-Bared After Tightening Noose on Militants-Naharnet
Haniya Urges Peaceful End to Nahr al-Bared Siege-Naharnet
Saniora Points Finger at Syria, Calls for Understanding Over Cabinet Expansion-Naharnet
Per capita loss of Lebanon army more than all US losses in Iraq-Ya Libnan
Siniora: link between Fatah al Islam and Syria-France24
All Lebanese factions welcome proposal for Paris talks-Daily Star
Lebanese Army advances on Fatah al-Islam positions, killing 16-Daily Star
Fadlallah warns of tensions if 2 governments formed-Daily Star
Captured militant reveals plot against UN, diplomats-Daily Star
LAU holds annual Student Honor Society ceremony-Daily Star
Israeli cluster bomb kills civilian in South-Daily Star
Private security firms flourish amid spate of bombings-Daily Star
UNRWA highlights plight of Palestinians caught in Nahr al-Bared conflict-Daily Star
Zouk Mosbeh residents start clearing debris-Daily Star
Explosions shatter sense of normal life, lead many to turn to tranquilizers-Daily Star
Israel 'tests' Syria peace aims-BBC News
Israel says using secret channels to assess Syria-Reuters
US downplays possible peace deal between Israel, Syria-People's Daily Online

Army Pounds Nahr al-Bared After Tightening Noose on Militants
The Lebanese military on Saturday pounded Fatah al-Islam fighters hiding in the northern Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, a day after the army command vowed to "finish" the militants off. It was not immediately clear if the army intended to make a final push toward the camp in its attempt to uproot Fatah al-Islam.
Army gunners pounded the militants' outposts with 155-mm howitzers and tank cannons around UNRWA schools, where fighters have taken refuge, the National News Agency reported. It said the army also shelled the Cooperative building in the center of the camp, which had been reportedly deserted.
The militants responded with anti-tank and small arms fire against the encircling troops. Black smoke billowed from Nahr al-Bared where local TV stations reported some of the heaviest army shelling since June 1, when the Lebanese army — using tanks and artillery — launched an offensive to drive the militants from their positions inside the settlement. The army sent heavy reinforcements, including armored carriers and special combat units, that were spotted heading toward the camp early Saturday morning.
The main road linking the port city of Tripoli with the province of Akkar and the Syrian border was closed Saturday for the first time in several days.
The latest mediation efforts by Palestinian factions to try to convince the fighters to surrender have also been eclipsed by the intense gunbattles, An Nahar daily said Saturday. The army command, in a communiqué, said Friday its troops are "gradually controlling the terrorists' positions with the aim of finishing off the bizarre situation that has been imposed on Lebanon." The Army Command, the communiqué added, "adheres to safeguarding the security and dignity of Lebanese citizens and Palestinian brethren."It said Shaker Absi's terrorists "have no other option but to face justice."
On Friday, army gunners observed an undeclared lull at noontime to enable believers perform their prayers at mosques close to fortified bunkers by the terrorists, field reporters said. As mosque minarets blared the Allah Akbar call for prayers, army gunners halted their shelling of Fatah al-Islam outposts, although the terrorists led by Palestinian-Jordanian Absi maintained shooting at army lines, the reporters added.
On Thursday a spokesman for the Absi terrorists known as Shahine Shahine told Agence France Presse : "We will widen the scope of the attacks beyond Nahr al-Bared" if the army continues its "destructive bombardment." Reports emerged on Friday that some of the militants who had been captured had told interrogators that among their targets were troops of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). A strengthened 12,700-member U.N. peacekeeping force is patrolling the Israeli border in the south under the terms of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 which halted last summer's war between Israel and Hizbullah. A judicial source told AFP on Friday that, "in the course of interrogations, some members of Fatah al-Islam testified that one of the principal aims of their group was to militarily attack UNIFIL operating in south Lebanon."
The source said they had spoken of being "indoctrinated" against Christians, depicted as crusaders, as well as against Shiites and leading Sunni figures, such as MPs, ministers and senior officials, considered to be "infidels." In their view, the source said, "Lebanon's political system, as well as anyone who participates in it, is ungodly, and it is just, from a religious point of view, to fight them." UNIFIL spokesman Milos Strugar said he was aware of statements by Fatah al-Islam as well as other statements made by different Al-Qaida leaders."We take these statements seriously, but we have full trust in the Lebanese authorities and armed forces, who are responsible for law and order in the country." The Lebanese authorities have demanded that the Fatah al-Islam militants, estimated at around 100 and entrenched in Nahr al-Bared, surrender, particularly those blamed for killing 27 soldiers on May 20 when the confrontation broke out. But Shahine said most of the wanted men had been killed or wounded and that "very few of them are still taking part in the fight." More than 100 people have been killed in the confrontation.(Naharnet-AFP-AP)
Beirut, 08 Jun 07, 16:58

Tribunal Comes Into Force Sunday
The international court that would try ex-premier Rafik Hariri's suspected assassins is to come into force automatically Sunday in line with Security Council Resolution 1757.The tribunal, however, will not be up and running for several months. On May 30, 10 of the council's 15 members passed the resolution setting June 10 as the date on which a 2006 agreement between the U.N. and Premier Fouad Saniora's government to establish the court is to enter into force.
Five members, including veto-wielding Russia and China as well as South Africa, Indonesia and Qatar -- three non-permanent members -- abstained, objecting to a decision that bypasses Lebanon's constitutional process. Sunday's date was set under a so-called "sunrise clause" to give rival Lebanese parties a final chance to break their deadlock over the tribunal. But in the absence of a domestic accord, Belgium's U.N. Ambassador Johan Verbeke, who chairs the Security Council this month, said Friday: "the sunrise clause is being activated." "This is an automatic clause so it will be entering into force automatically as of June 10," he told reporters in New York. Verbeke said the council did not plan any formal meeting on the case.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem warned last week that Damascus would not cooperate with the tribunal and deplored "the speed with which the Security Council decided on a tribunal without unanimity either on an international or Lebanese level."U.N. investigators have implicated top Syrian and Lebanese officials in the suicide truck bombing in Beirut that killed Hariri and 22 others in February 2005. Syria denied involvement.
The tribunal is to be held in an as yet undetermined "neutral" location. For reasons of security, administrative efficiency and fairness, the location will be outside Lebanon, with both Cyprus and Italy mooted as possibilities. It will include a three-member trial chamber -- two foreigners and one Lebanese -- and a five-judge appeals chamber -- two Lebanese and three foreigners. All foreign judges are to be named by U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, who will also appoint the prosecutor from nominations made by a panel of two international judges.(AFP-Naharnet) Beirut, 09 Jun 07, 07:48

Saniora Points Finger at Syria, Calls for Understanding Over Cabinet Expansion
Premier Fouad Saniora has said Fatah al-Islam, whose fighters are engaged in fierce battles with the Lebanese army at the Nahr al-Bared camp, was connected to Syrian intelligence agents. "Undoubtedly ... there is a link between them and some of the Syrian intelligence services," Saniora told French news channel France 24 On Friday. He said foreign fighters had entered Lebanon from Syria. Saniora also appealed to the Assad regime to exercise greater control over the border.
"They passed through Syria, and there is a joint responsibility. I do not deny Lebanon's responsibility, but nobody can deny Syria's responsibility either," he said.
"We call on the Syrians to take up the responsibility of controlling the border and prevent the infiltration of individuals and arms smuggling into Lebanon."
The prime minister said the violence at the Palestinian camp in north Lebanon also raised questions about the longstanding convention under which the army leaves security in Lebanon's 12 refugee camps to Palestinian militant groups. "Fatah al-Islam's entry into the Nahr al-Bared camp shows the failure of the Palestinians' autonomous security system," he said. About calls by the Hizbullah-led opposition for the premier's resignation and formation of a cabinet of national unity, Saniora said: "We have to reach an understanding over a national unity government by expanding the current cabinet.""The expansion of the current government is being currently discussed away from spotlight," he said.(AFP-Naharnet) Beirut, 09 Jun 07, 08:04

Haniya Urges Peaceful End to Nahr al-Bared Siege
Palestinian Premier Ismail Haniya called on Lebanon Friday to agree a negotiated end to the army siege of Fatah al-Islam militants in the northern Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared."The solution to the Nahr al-Bared problem should be political and not military. We need to spare our people, who have suffered for more than 60 years, a new exodus," Haniya said.The prime minister, whose Hamas movement has been involved in efforts to broker a peaceful end to the siege, said the Palestinian leadership was "against any attack on the prestige of the Lebanese state or its army."
Relief agencies are particularly concerned about the plight of some 4,000 Palestinian civilians still trapped inside the camp near the northern port city of Tripoli.(AFP-Naharnet) Beirut, 09 Jun 07, 10:23

Fadlallah warns of tensions if 2 governments formed
Daily Star staff
Saturday, June 09, 2007
BEIRUT: Senior Shiite cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah warned on Friday that problems with the presidential election might lead to the formation of two governments in Lebanon, which would "disturb the balance" in the country and lead to "more complications on the security level."
"The formation of two separate governments in Lebanon is likely to make the already tense situation even worse and have drastic repercussions on constitutional institutions," Fadlallah said during his Friday sermon at the Imam Hassanayn Mosque in Haret Hreik. The cleric also warned against "foreign as well as Arab" intervention in Lebanese domestic affairs, as "amid the prevailing divisions, both foreign and Arab groups could find ample ways to infiltrate the Lebanese political scene." Fadlallah said that many "serious" dangers threaten Lebanon's security, economy and tourism, "because the skirmish between government supporters and the opposition is becoming quite unhealthy, with each group sticking to its conditions and counter-conditions." "The conflicts between the opposition and the ruling majority are complicating things even more and jeopardizing any resolutions," he added. Commenting on the continuing fighting at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli, Fadlallah voiced concerns about the Lebanese Army being dragged into a "war of attrition" which will lead to "more foreign interference in internal Lebanese issues and will stoke fear in the already nervous Lebanese." The battles between the army and Fatah al-Islam militants has caused the deaths of at least 110 people since the fighting began May 20."The Lebanese cannot become any more worried, especially when local as well as foreign media report that fighting might spread to other camps across Lebanon," Fadlallah said. - The Daily Star

All Lebanese factions welcome proposal for Paris talks
Compiled by Daily Star staff
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Factions from both sides of Leb-anon's political divide voiced their support on Friday for a French proposal to host informal fence-mending talks in Paris. The Future Movement, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, and opposition parties Hizbullah, Amal and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) welcomed the new French proposal.
France said on Friday that it would invite Lebanese politi-cal leaders and prominent civic figures to an informal meeting aimed at improving political dialogue in the country. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has "taken the initiative to invite to France representatives of all the Lebanese political forces and of civil society to participate in an informal meeting to help restore a dialogue between all political forces of the country," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Denis Simonneau at a news conference. The meeting was likely to be held in late June, he added.
Simonneau said the aim of the planned meeting was "to help the Lebanese meet in a convivial, passion-free setting, which we hope will enable the renewal of dialogue between the different parties." In Beirut, the majority coalition quickly welcomed the French plan and said it was willing to take part in the meeting.
A Future Movement official who asked not to be identified said the group "welcomes the initiative" to broker an end to a political deadlock that has paralyzed the state for nearly seven months. "We are absolutely ready to respond positively to the initiative, once it has been formally made," the official said.
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea said the ruling coalition has long been calling for a return to roundtable talks, which were abandoned in the middle of last year after months of fruitless negotiations.
In a news conference on Thursday, Geagea said the March 14 Forces would agree to establish a national unity government on the condition that all the country's major controversial political issues were resolved at the same time. While Lebanon's opposition expressed its willingness to take part in a meeting of Lebanese political leaders and other dignitaries to be hosted by France, it did not have high expectations, a senior opposition source said on Friday "We do not mind participating, but the invitation does not carry high expectations for a solution," the source said.
Hizbullah MP Hassan Hobballah said his party will deal positively "with any initiative from any friendly or brotherly state which will attempt to help Lebanon out of its crisis." Hobballah reiterated Hizbullah's demand that "any solution be based on guaranteed, real and effective participation of the political groups in Lebanon's political decision-making." An official from Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri's Amal Movement, another pillar of the opposition, said: "We will deal positively with the proposal."
Visitors who called on Berri at his Ain al-Tineh residence on Friday said that the speaker was showing a "more flexible attitude," because he "apparently" no longer opposes dialogue before the formation of a national unity government. Berri's visitors said he did not mind holding dialogue, but he would prefer such a meeting take place "away from the media," while adding that Berri was ready to hold talks with parliamentary majority leader MP Saad Hariri.
The opposition faction FPM also welcomed the French initiative. Simon Abi Ramia, a spokesman for FPM leader Michel Aoun, said Aoun had already indicated he would respond favorably to the proposal when he meets Kouchner in Paris on May 28. The French Foreign Ministry stressed earlier on Friday that the proposal to convene talks at a venue still to be decided was merely intended to break the ice between the rival factions. "This is not intended as a substitute for intra-Lebanese dialogue," said a spokesperson at the French Foreign Ministry. - Agencies

Fighting forces Asian games to find new venue
Daily Star staff
Saturday, June 09, 2007
BEIRUT: Lebanon has withdrawn as host of next month's Asian Athletics Championship as a result of the current security situation within the country, an Indian athletics official said. "They [the Lebanese federation] have expressed their inability to host the event because of the circumstances there, the violence," Indian athletics secretary Lalit Bhanot told Reuters on Friday. The Asian Athletics Association (AAA) was notified that the Lebanese government lacked the ability to guarantee the security of all the championship's participants, a Hindu newspaper also reported on Friday. Efforts are currently under way to find an alternate venue for the event before the World Championships begin in Osaka, Japan on August 25, the report added. Beirut was scheduled to host the championship from July 29 to August 2. Lebanese Sports and Youth Minister Ahmad Fatfat said Friday the committee charged with organizing the event had faced what he described as "organizational obstacles."
"Some participating countries are hesitant to travel to Lebanon due to the current circumstances," Fatfat told The Daily Star.
Fatfat expressed regret regarding the cancellation. "Between 700 and 1,000 people were expected to take part in the championship," he said.
"Lebanon would have benefited a lot from the event. It would have constituted an important promotion of our country. But we have asked to host the next championship." Fatfat added that three other events scheduled to be held in Lebanon this summer - the West Asian Football Championship, an Arab Scouts meeting, and a Lebanese-Emigrant Youth Camp -have also been cancelled. The Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp - near the northern city of Tripoli - is currently mired in fighting between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militants. Additionally, five bombs and several grenades and concussion bombs have exploded in and around the Lebanese capital of Beirut since the fighting broke out on May 20. -The Daily Star, with agencies

The time for symbolism in Lebanon has long since passed
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Editorial-Daily Star
The Lebanese people are once again the audience for yet another concert of "positive signs" that new momentum is building toward the formation of a unity cabinet that would end the power struggle between the government and the opposition. The latest version of a "new initiative" involves input from France, Iran and Saudi Arabia, three countries whose interest in - and knowledge of - Lebanon suggests at least the capacity to get the key players back to the negotiating table. Dialogue is a good thing, especially when compared to the endless televised rhetoric to which the Lebanese have been subjected for months, but the time for symbolism has long since passed. Thanks to their own failings, the participants face not only the original challenge of coming to agreement but also the new one of convincing the Lebanese people that they are serious about doing so.
The people of this country have had their hopes raised and then dashed on numerous occasions, a bitter experience that is causing increasing numbers of them to vote through their travel agents: Those with foreign passports and residencies are returning to the more stable lands that granted them; those without are lining up to apply for immigration; business owners are moving their operations to the Gulf if they can and shutting down if they cannot. And those who are leaving are the very ones whose presence is most needed to both repair the damage wrought by the Israeli military last summer and heal the wounds inflicted by Lebanese politicians ever since. They are the proverbial best and brightest, they have capital and education, and their purchasing power alone makes them essential to economic recovery.
No politician can look on this developing exodus with anything but foreboding, for it portends Lebanon's resumption of its former role as a regional basket-case. It is probably safe to assume that neither the government nor the opposition wants to start competing with Iraq and Somalia in the race to the bottom, but neither has demonstrated either sufficient comprehension of the dangers in play or the necessary will to overcome them.
Should outside mediators manage to get the squabbling Lebanese back to the table, therefore, the participants had best be aware that while their earlier acts are hardly tough ones to follow, their long-suffering audience is in no mood for additional shenanigans. Amateur hour is over: We all know which buffoons like which tricks, and which blowhards regurgitate which slogans. Now we need them to get down to business by coming prepared for the most important discussion of their - and the country's - lives. At this stage, that means concrete, realistic proposals to deal with two towering issues: how to conduct elections whose results will be accepted by all (or at least most) Lebanese; and how to design a national security doctrine that addresses every major threat this country faces and accounts for every asset is has to keep itself safe. Plenty of other problems need fixing as well, but right now they are minor distractions by comparison. The priorities must be to gain the confidence of the public and to restore a sense of stability, a twin goal whose accomplishment would also serve notice to the region that Lebanon is no longer anyone's battleground.

Desperately searching for a libertarian foreign policy
By Michael Young -Daily Star staff
Saturday, June 09, 2007
In his 2007 essay "What's Left?" Nick Cohen wonders how it is that many on the political left have lost their souls, at least on the defining matter of human rights. Why is it that a left faced with the collapse of socialism and the triumph of market economies, which at one time stood against fascism in defense of the individual, should now find itself excusing parties and regimes of the far-right, "as long as they are anti-Western"?
The question is well posed, but it would be useful to bring our own libertarian brethren into the discussion. Why is it that libertarians, for whom the benchmark of political, economic and social behavior is the individual, and American libertarians in particular, find so little to say about the defense of the individual in foreign affairs? Why is it that those who have reminded us of this lacuna, those who first imposed the human rights and democracy agenda on foreign policy thinking, are mainly figures of the left? Not surprisingly, given the rightward drift described by Cohen, some of these gadflies have since turned into exiles of the left.
One such exile, Christopher Hitchens, told an interviewer what he saw as a problem in the libertarian critique: "I threw in my lot with the left because on all manner of pressing topics - the Vietnam atrocity, nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy - there didn't seem to be any distinctive libertarian view. I must say that this still seems to me to be the case, at least where issues of internationalism are concerned. What is the libertarian take, for example, on Bosnia or Palestine?"
This came after Hitchens had ended a two-decade-old relationship with the left-wing The Nation because, as he angrily wrote, the magazine was "becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that [then-US Attorney General] John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." For Hitchens, like for Cohen, the petty hatreds of the left, American or British, had thrown hitherto valued priorities out of whack.
Another exile of the left had similar misgivings. In an interview I conducted with the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, he had this to say about the notion of breaking Iraq up into sectarian or ethnic entities: "I fear attempting to carve [Iraq] will only plunge [its] people ... into greater paroxysms of violence. And nothing is worth that in my opinion. I judge everything in relation to one overriding criterion, namely how many fewer Iraqi lives a particular course of action will cost. That is the be-all and end-all of politics as far as I am concerned these days."
That was simply put, but also very much expressed a thought at the heart of the libertarian ideal: that one is free to pursue ones own choices, as long as these don't encroach on the rights and freedoms of others. Building a workable corpus of foreign policy thinking around this single idea would represent a monumental challenge. However, and let's be blunt here, in the absence of a serious critique on how to address deficiencies in freedom overseas, libertarians, "realists," and those on the political left ceded vital terrain to the neoconservatives around President George W. Bush in the post-9/11 period. Only the neocons, it seemed, had an explanation for why 19 young men from the Middle East had decided to kill thousands of innocent civilians for no apparent reason. The neocons claimed that a major problem was the dearth of democracy in the Arab world, which had turned frustrated youths into mass murderers.
One can dispute the interpretation of the neocons, doubt their sincerity, but that is irrelevant in explaining why they prevailed. The fact is that when decision-makers in Washington were looking for insights into what had happened and tried to do so, like most Americans, by explaining the individual motivations of the hijackers, libertarians, political realists, and much of the left had little to say. Instead, many libertarians and liberal leftists turned to examining the domestic abuses of the Bush administration, while realists either opportunistically latched onto Bush's policies or ridiculed the idea of Arab democracy - a way of saying Arabs merited repression. In several cases, those deriding Arab democracy were former policy-makers who, when in office, had helped ensure the United States would disregard democracy promotion.
However, the neocons were not especially original. Their diagnosis of the Arab malady as being an absence of democracy, their denunciation of American support for Arab absolutists, was a refrain heard throughout the Cold War years, and it largely came from a left not yet enamored of Arab tyrants viewed as worthy foes of Western "neocolonialism." Once again, however, we have to wonder why those most taken with individual rights, at least in theory, were nowhere to be seen in this conversation.
Recently, French President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed a liberal internationalist, and a scion of the 1960s left, to be his foreign minister. The elevation of Bernard Kouchner was odd for two reasons. First, the other person on Sarkozy's short-list for the post was Hubert Vedrine, also a socialist, who is in every way Kouchner's opposite. Vedrine, a former foreign minister, is smelted in the style of traditional French foreign affairs, someone who finds dictators distasteful, but who in the name of sovereignty and a vague sense of Gallic fatalism remains tolerant of their crimes and stalemates; a practitioner of an amoral art rather than a devotee of moral crusades. Here is a man who, in indignantly denouncing American unilateralism and "arrogance," showed an affinity for the time-honored concept of a balance of power between states. Click on his Wikipedia entry and you will see him in a most natural pose, chatting pleasantly with Tunisia's autocrat, President Zein al-Abedin Ben Ali.
Kouchner, in contrast, is a former communist, a doctor who became a guru of international humanitarian intervention. Here is someone who always expressed intolerance for France's baroque compromises with thugs; a backer of foreign interference in Bosnia to save the Muslims, when France always tended to favor the Serbs. Kouchner returned to the Balkans in 1999-2000, as head of the United Nations mission in Kosovo. His method in his early years of prominence was not to improve the world through revolution, but through medical and humanitarian assistance. In 1971 he helped create Doctors Without Borders, which was destined to be, in the words of Paul Berman, "a more political Red Cross," with socially conscious doctors who "instead of carrying AK-47s ... carried medical bags, in order to serve the poor and the oppressed."
Kouchner's position on the war in Iraq was more ambiguous. Though he wrote in the February 4, 2003 issue of Le Monde that he was both against war and against Saddam, he threw in a critical caveat: "[W]e do not want the suffering of the Iraqi people to continue." If war was the only means to alleviate that suffering, then it really made little sense to oppose war. The second reason Sarkozy's choice was so odd was that Kouchner perhaps best embodied France's 1968 legacy that the new president hoped to bury through his electoral victory. This was the legacy of the May 1968 demonstrations that supposedly overhauled what the left saw as the smugness of postwar bourgeois France. Oddly enough, it was Kouchner's revolutionary dislike of that status quo, the one supposedly represented by Charles de Gaulle, which seemed to appeal to Sarkozy's dislike of the French status quo hardened by his own predecessor Jacques Chirac.
But one can also hope that Kouchner's appointment is more than that: confirmation that even in a place like France, with its venerable history of diplomatic hardnosedness, foreign policy is being refocused on the individual, on human and political rights, on the advancement of democratic values. It would be silly to declare victory; the indifference generated by state-centered realpolitik will remain with us. But the most urgent task is for those who would place the individual at the center of social or political action, to find something useful to say when it affects victims abroad whose individuality is battered on a daily basis.
***Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR. This commentary first appeared on the Web site of the libertarian magazine Reason.

America looks for ways to fight its worst enemy: IEDs
By David Ignatius -Daily Star staff
Saturday, June 09, 2007
The photographs gathered by The Washington Post each month in a gallery called "Faces of the Fallen" are haunting. The soldiers are so young, enlisted men and women mostly, usually dressed in the uniforms they wore in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's striking is that most of them were killed by the roadside bombs known as "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs.
The United States is losing the war in Iraq because it cannot combat these makeshift weapons. An army with unimaginable firepower is being driven out by guerillas armed with a crude arsenal of explosives and blasting caps, triggered by cell phones and garage-door openers. This is Gulliver's torment, circa 2007. The US has thrown its money and technology at the problem, with limited effect. The Pentagon in 2004 created a special task force known as the Joint IED Defeat Organization (or JIEDDO, in Pentagon-ese). It has spent $6.3 billion and assembled a staff of nearly 400, but every day more of our brave young people die, and we seem unable to stop it.
"Once the bomb is made, it's too late," says Representative Ellen Tauscher, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who has studied the IED problem. She says the best hope is to disrupt the money and supplies that allow the bombs to be constructed.
Low-tech seems to trump high-tech. The military is now operating nearly 5,000 robots in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to 150 in 2004. The latest model, known as "Fido," has a digital nose that can sniff explosives. Yet the bombs are so cheap and easy to make, and the robot sniffers are so expensive and finicky to operate, that the cost-benefit ratio seems to work in favor of the insurgents.
We have dozens of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over Iraq at any given time, monitoring highways and ammunition dumps and suspected terrorists. And we have many hundreds of additional sensors, adding more data. But the flow of this intelligence information is now so vast that it overwhelms our ability to analyze it. We need new machines to explain what the existing machines are seeing, at still more expense.
Someday, perhaps, the Pentagon will track and target bombers by identifying biological tags - smells or DNA traces that are unique signatures. Someday, we will be able to examine the microbes on an insurgent's skin or in his gut to find out if he was trained in Iran or the Bekaa Valley or Afghanistan. But in a world with an ever-expanding supply of suicide bombers, will such technology make any difference?
The insurgents who kill our young soldiers are ruthless, but we have sometimes been cautious in our response. Take the question of targeting bomb-makers: There may be an unlimited supply of explosives in Iraq, but there is not an unlimited supply of people who know how to wire the detonators. In 2004, CIA operatives in Iraq believed they had identified the signatures of 11 different bomb-makers. They proposed a diabolical - but potentially effective - sabotage program that would have flooded Iraq with booby-trapped detonators designed to explode in the bomb-makers' hands. But the CIA's general counsel's office said no. The lawyers claimed the agency lacked authority for such an operation, one source recalled.
There are technologies that would allow American soldiers to detonate every roadside bomb in Iraq by heating the wires in the detonators to the point that they triggered an explosion. But these systems could severely harm civilians in the area, so we're not using them, either. "We are constrained by the environment we're in, and by the issue of collateral damage," says Tauscher.
We wrote the book for the insurgents, in a sense. By arming and training the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, we created the modern dynamics of asymmetric warfare. That extends even to the fearsome armor-piercing "explosively formed penetrators," or EFPs, which we have accused the Iranians of supplying to Iraqi insurgents. The CIA referred to these tank busters as "platter charges," back when we were covertly helping provide them to the Afghan rebels.
The simple, low-tech answer to the IED threat is to reduce the number of targets - by getting our troops off the streets during vulnerable daylight hours, to the extent possible. It's an interesting fact that very few IED attacks have been suffered by our elite Special Forces units, which attack Al-Qaeda cells and Shiite death squads mostly at night, with devastating force. They blow in from nowhere and are gone minutes later, before the enemy can start shooting. That's the kind of asymmetry that evens the balance in Iraq and Afghanistan.
**Syndicated columnist David Ignatius is published regularly by THE DAILY STAR.

Outside History and Inside Sectarianism
Mustafa Zein Al-Hayat - 09/06/07//
The sectarian and tribal groups in our countries seem to be outside history. This is confirmed by the literature of government loyalists and the opposition in any Arab country. We do not exclude from them the leftists who preserve their revolutionist spirit and manipulate it in the name of progress in favor of the rightists. Nor do we exclude the rightists who are following the American Empire.
This literature has theorized these political regimes, which regard the political groups participating in the same cycle of life as rigid blocs not subject to the logic of history. On this basis, legislation was drafted, institutions built and the "citizen's" ideological and ethical structure formed.
In this sense, Lebanon's Maronites or its Shiites, for example, remain in the eyes of the law and the State's institutions not prone to any transformation or development, as if each sect is an isolated planet living in a different time and the alliance between any two sects becomes an alliance of interests against a third sect. Therefore, regions where different sects or factions live are marginalized. These regions become the stronghold of this sect or that tribe which should take its own action if it came under attack. The authority could extend help such as any charity organization would help the afflicted.
South Lebanon is a vivid example of this. After the Cairo Agreement in 1969, this south has become outside the authority of the State and became known as the "Fatah Land". After expelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1980s, it became merely a "border line" governed and controlled by a Lebanese officer "in cooperation with Israel". Its liberation was assigned to a single sect, whose transformation, which is supported by foreign alliances, is feared as it would tip the balance of sectarian equation, thus another outside party was brought in to offset the balance.
Another example is that the Palestinians in Lebanon are still looked upon as if they have just come to the country as refugees. This racist view had not changed nor have the laws that regulate their presence. They are also out of history. Their State-like relations with the PLO and their educational assistance from the United Nations and humanitarian organizations and Israel contributed to "freezing" them as a bloc outside history.
However, this illusion of isolation has quickly dissipated and the authority is unable to protect it and history is not waiting for heavenly solutions. The danger lies in the absence of the developed laws and then the blocs, groups and sects invoke their texts and old myths to seek protection as long as the present does not exist, except in its torture and tyranny.
A third example is that the American occupation drafted a "modern" constitution for Iraq on the basis of sectarian pluralism, after Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, al-Jaafari, al-Maliki and others returned from Iran as Shiites not Iraqis, and after Talabani and Barzani entered Baghdad in the name of the Kurdish bloc and Sunnis turned into an Arab bloc consisting of small blocs which are the tribes. Bloc is the most suitable word to describe the state of clash and conflicts.
After this, do we exaggerate when we say that attempts to freeze time had produced al-Qaeda, Fatah al-Islam, Osbet al-Ansar, Jund al-Sham and other factions that reverted to their private histories to rule us by their sword? Do we exaggerate if we say that the future would be these histories in modern attire