Middle East Policy

A Transatlantic Front: United Against Iranian Nukes International Herald Tribune, September 15, 2005 Philip H. Gordon , Director, Center on the U.S. and Europe Charles Grant, Director, Center for European Reform Last February, a group of European and American foreign policy experts issued the " Compact Between the United States and Europe ," a detailed proposal for trans-Atlantic cooperation on the key foreign policy issues of the day ( IHT Feb. 17, 2005 ). The premise of the compact was that the split that had emerged between the two sides of the Atlantic in recent years was deeply damaging to the interests of both sides, and that agreements on common policy challenges were both necessary and possible. In that light, we were deeply disappointed by Iran's rejection of the offer in August by Britain, France and Germany to provide Iran with support for a civilian nuclear energy program, as well as far-reaching political and economic incentives, in exchange for Tehran's ...

Palestinian Governance Key to Mideast Peace, State's Welch Says United States concerned about security problems in Gaza By David Shelby Washington File Staff Writer Washington -- Much of the future progress in the Middle East peace process hinges on the ability of the Palestinian Authority to establish effective, accountable governance over the area that Israeli settlers and security forces recently have evacuated in the Gaza Strip, according to Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch. Welch told members of the House of Representatives International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia September 21 that the Palestinians must govern in a way that earns the confidence of the Israelis, the international community and the Palestinians themselves. “Now that Israel is out of Gaza, we have the first substantial test in decades of the proposition that the institutions of the state can be constructed in a responsible way by the Palestinians th...

Document: Quartet Statement on Middle East Peace Text released by the United Nations New York City 20 September 2005 Representatives of the Quartet -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, High Representative for European Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, and European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner -- met today in New York to discuss the Gaza disengagement and the prospects for movement towards peace in the Middle East. The Quartet recognizes and welcomes the successful conclusion of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank and the moment of opportunity that it brings to renew efforts on the Roadmap. The Quartet reiterates its belief that this brave and historic decision should open a new chapter on the path to peace in the region. It paid tribute to the political courage of Prime Minister Sharon and co...

It's Not Israel That's Driving Tehran to Nukes Author: Ray Takeyh August 27, 2005 International Herald Tribune It is by now a Washington ritual, with delegations of visiting Israeli officials armed with intelligence analyses and satellite imagery insisting to their American counterparts that Iran's nuclear program represents an existential threat to their beleaguered state. The persistence of such claims has essentially transformed Israeli assertions into a self-evident verity, a proposition that requires no further reproach. The only problem with this assessment is that it's not true. However objectionable Israel maybe to Iran's clerical oligarchs, it does not motivate their nuclear weapons program. As part of a project that surveyed Iran's discourse on nuclear weapons, including official pronouncements, sermons, speeches and media commentaries, I was stuck by how seldom Israel actually features into these deliberations. To be sure, for a generation of Iranian ...

The West Should Push Mubarak on Reform By Amr Hamzawy The Daily Star, September 13, 2005 As expected, Hosni Mubarak won Egypt's presidential election on September 7. However, with a voter turnout as low as 20 percent according to independent estimates and massive irregularities reported at the polls, the regime's claim that Mubarak was confirmed democratically and by a majority of Egyptians does not have much substance. Egypt's election day represented a step forward on the road to the opening up of a persistently authoritarian regime. It revitalized the political scene and partially minimized citizens' apathy toward politics. But to describe having nine opposition contenders against Mubarak as a historical breakthrough ignores the fact that the election was not competitive and that the election rules were clearly undemocratic. From the start the amendment of Article 76 of the Constitution, which opened the door for candidates of opposition parties, excluded independen...

Decision Time on Iran By Pierre Goldschmidt The New York Times , September 14, 2005 In November 2003, Iran averted a crisis when it agreed to suspend activities that could one day give it the capacity to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. The International Atomic Energy Agency had discovered an 18-year pattern of noncompliance by Iran with its obligations to report all its nuclear activities, during which time international inspectors could not verify that they were solely for peaceful purposes. Because Iran suspended its most sensitive activities, the agency's board agreed to hold off reporting Iran to the United Nations Security Council. This was understood, in effect, as a quid pro quo: suspension of uranium-enrichment-related and reprocessing activities in return for not being reported to the Security Council. Last November, Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany to extend its suspension to include "all tests or production at any uranium-conversion installation....

Discussions Point Way to Better U.S.-Libyan Relations, Rice Says Secretary of state also renews call for Iran to resume nuclear negotiations Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that discussions with Libyan Foreign Minister Abd al-Rahman Shalgam point the way toward "better and better relations" between the Libyan and U.S. governments and people. Speaking September 17 at a joint appearance with Shalgam in New York, where the United Nations General Assembly is holding its 60th session, Rice took particular note of Libya’s "historic decision of get rid of its weapons of mass destruction." (See related article .) The brief joint appearance augmented a written joint statement, which notes that their discussion had covered issues including "expansion of the U.S.-Libya relationship, reform issues, human rights, and cooperation on counter-terrorism and elimination of weapons of mass destruction." In the statement, Rice expressed appreciation for Libya’s effor...

On Iraq, Short Memories By Robert Kagan The Washington Post , September 12, 2005 If you read even respectable journals these days, including this one, you would think that no more than six or seven people ever supported going to war in Iraq. A recent piece in The Post's Style section suggested that the war was an "idea" that President Bush "dusted off" five years after Bill Kristol and I came up with it in the Weekly Standard. That's not the way I recall it. I recall support for removing Saddam Hussein by force being pretty widespread from the late 1990s through the spring of 2003, among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as neoconservatives. We all had the same information, and we got it from the same sources. I certainly had never based my judgment on American intelligence, faulty or otherwise, much less on the intelligence produced by the Bush administration before the war. I don't think anyone else did either. I had formed...

U.S., U.N. Organize Support for Lebanon Allies Back Relief From Syrian Control By Colum Lynch and Robin Wright Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, September 20, 2005; Page A18 UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 19 -- The United States, the United Nations and several European and Arab governments sought to bolster Lebanon's quest to shake Syrian domination over its political life Monday, pledging economic and political support for Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora. A high-level meeting organized by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice marked the first time that key Arab governments, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have publicly rallied behind the U.S.-backed initiative to support Lebanon's fledgling government. It represented a snub to Lebanon's Syrian-backed president, Emile Lahoud, who was not invited to the session and who was addressing the U.N. General Assembly while Rice, Secretary General Kofi Annan and foreign ministers from several countries debated his country's future. The im...

Article: A War to Be Proud Of By Christopher Hitchens The Weekly Standard September 5, 2005 Let me begin wtih A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad." I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin? I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War liber...

Editorial: Tentative Steps Down the Road to Democracy The Economist September 9, 2005 It was a lopsided fight, hastily arranged, poorly refereed, and pitting a big bruiser against bantams. Still, Egypt's first-ever presidential election, on Wednesday September 7th, marked a watershed, even though it came as no surprise whatsoever that the incumbent, Hosni Mubarak (pictured), won. State-owned newspapers said on Friday he had gained around 80% of the vote. Perhaps more than any other recent Middle Eastern event, from January's elections in Iraq to the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon, the simple running of a public political contest in the oldest, largest and most archetypically autocratic of Arab states presages an acceleration of the momentum for change in a region notable for political backwardness. As in similarly novel elections for the top post over recent years, in such Arab republics as Algeria and Tunisia for example, the incumbent could expect to sweep all rivals aside. Bu...

Survey: Mid-East extremes in power survey BBC, 14 September 2005 A global survey for the BBC about power and how it is used has found the Middle East to be home to some of the most sharply defined national attitudes. In Egypt, people are more likely to define themselves by religion than anywhere else in the world, it says. Israelis are more supportive of their intellectuals, military and business leaders than any other nationality. Gallup International questioned 50,000 people in 68 states for the BBC World Service survey Who Runs Your World. Two-thirds, compared with a global total of 26%, said they trusted their military and police leaders. Half of the 500 Israelis in the survey wanted military leaders to have more power in their country, which is higher than any other nation surveyed. Other professions also scored higher among the Israelis than other nationalities, including intellectuals (71%, against an international average of 35%) and business leaders (45%, as opposed to 20%)....

Rice Sees Major Historical Change Under Way in Iraq Sees insurgents losing popular support as Sunnis embrace politics By David Shelby Washington File Staff Writer Washington -- Iraq is undergoing a major historic transformation, according to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and as such it is not surprising that the progress is accompanied by acts of violence. "[W]hen you're in a very big historical change like this, you have progress and chaos existing side by side. And it is not going to be a consistent picture of one or the other," Rice told the editors of Newsweek magazine September 15. She said such transformations can be messy and violent, but added, "[T]hat exists side by side with a political process that's continuing inexorably to move on, where you have a million more Sunnis registered than voted last time." In an interview with the editorial board of NBC news the same day, she said that this growing interest in the political process, as exh...

Op-Ed: A Foot in the Door for Egyptian Democracy Author: Steven A. Cook September 8, 2005 Foreign Policy There was never any doubt that Hosni Mubarak would win Egypt's presidential election. But look a little further down the road, and you just might see a refreshingly uncertain path for Egyptian politics. Egypt's presidential election was a farce. Challengers running against the 24-year incumbent, Hosni Mubarak, faced insurmountable obstacles. But just because the election was a sham, doesn't mean that it was meaningless. The constitutional amendments that were instituted to make the election possible may just open the door for real democracy in Egypt. First, some perspective. Before this year, no Egyptian leader dating back to the Pharaoh Menes -- who ruled around 2900 B.C. -- had ever permitted a challenge to his rule. So Mubarak surprised almost everyone when, in February, he directed lawmakers to amend the Egyptian constitution and allow for multiple candidates for pre...

Open Door to Islamic Rule By Eleana Gordon National Review Online August 26, 2005 It was a relief for many Iraqi women and democracy activists when Thursday's deadline for Iraq's national assembly to vote on the draft constitution came and went. As the deadline loomed, many Iraqis frenetically rang the alarm bell about major loopholes in the constitution that open the door for Islamic law in Iraq. The delay buys a little time to work to close these loopholes — but it won't happen without U.S. support. The draft presented to the national assembly on August 22 does not establish an Iranian-style Islamic republic, as many pundits and critics of the Bush administration have rushed to claim. And it does contain some remarkably good language recognizing Iraq's ethnic and religious diversity and individual freedoms. But, amidst all the positives, the clerics managed to slip in a few key articles that could give them the room they need to hijack Iraq's emerging democracy. T...

Bush Sees a Great Moment in the Cause of Freedom Says building freedom-sustaining institutions should be work of democracy By Merle D. Kellerhals, Jr. Washington File Staff Writer United Nations -- President Bush told the 60th U.N. General Assembly September 14 that this is a moment of great opportunity in the cause of freedom. "Across the world, hearts and minds are opening to the message of human liberty as never before," Bush said. "In the last two years alone, tens of millions have voted in free elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, in Kyrgyzstan, in Ukraine, and Georgia." Bush said that through the establishment of the new U.N. Democracy Fund, the democratic members of the world body can work to help others who want to join the democratic world. He praised the leadership role taken by India, the world's largest democracy, in this effort, and noted that it has pledged $10 million to get the fund started. The Democra...