Lebanon on The Huffington Post

Report: Lebanon arrests another suspected Israel spy

2009-11-19T06:31:12Z

Lebanese intelligence forces have reportedly arrested another citizen suspected of spying on behalf of Israel, following months of a crackdown on an alleged espionage ring.
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Yvonne R. Davis: The Challenge of Arab Unemployment -- An Issue We Must Not Ignore!

2009-11-16T12:52:19Z

The 10.2% unemployment rate in the U.S. has the citizenry completely disillusioned and vexed with our government. Despite the “Average Joe/Jane” outrage, a slight fall in jobless claims this month, a number of the unemployed live in neighborhoods with foreclosure signs over their heads. They hang on by their fingernails praying for economic relief. Never perhaps returning to the days of “good and plenty,” fear runs rampant with an aging “Super Power” population. According to the U.S. Census by 2030, 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 years and older. Our Nation’s fastest growing population is 85 and above.

As the “Senior Citizen Hegemons” go through its most painful metamorphosis to facilitate in a Google Economy, another part of the world we are appendaged to due to our devoted dependency on its natural resources, foreign debt, Wall Street ownership, wars and terrorism, is facing perhaps its most solemn challenge in its entire existence -- massive unemployment in the Arab World. And while we in America might want to be NIMBYish (Not In My Back Yard) about it, we can’t. There is a link between violence, terrorism and Arab youth many educated not having the ability to have pride and self-esteem because they lack gainful and respectable employment to take care of their families. On the contrary to America's aging population, over 60% of the Arab population is 40 years of age and under; with a mean age of 27 or younger in some countries. Whether we like it or not, the issue of Arab unemployment is on our front step and maybe the very thing that ultimately turns the world upside down economically, socially and politically if we do not begin to face this reality.

Saeed Al Khabaz, a retired Human Resources professional and father of four is a successful business owner and communitarian from the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Al Khabaz lives in the economic fulcrum of the Kingdom. Beyond the black gold that flows from the oil refineries, the region heavies with industries of steel, glass, construction materials, foodstuffs, aluminum products, pipes, air-conditioners, electrical equipment, carpets, soap, and rubber products. With all of this stuff going on, unemployment in the Eastern Province is climbing and so is the crime. “Right now in Saudi Arabia and throughout the entire Middle East and North Africa region, we are weathering a typhoon of unemployment,” declares Al Khabaz. “With an average jobless rate in some regions of 25%, the huge numbers of unemployment in the Arab world is creating all kinds of social problems, and no community can continue to survive this way.”

Ten years ago, after doing a very successful “turn around” on a medical clinic that was barely treating 40 patients per day, to over 100,000 annually, Al Khabaz made sure all of the employees he hired in his Al Hadi Medical Clinic in Qatif, Saudi Arabia were women under the age of 40. All of the women who work for Al Khabaz never want to leave him; despite receiving bigger opportunities because he believed in them and gave them a chance when no one else would and they succeeded. He meets the needs of a demographic with the greatest hardship. “You are talking about millions of young people who have the energy and they are frustrated and they have to vent their frustration at something,” says Al Khabaz. “I don’t think any community in history has been challenged like this before.” By 2015, the Arab population will be over 435-million. The United Nations and the International Labor Organization predicts by 2020, 100-million will unemployed in the MENA region. “No society can sustain that level of unemployment without exploding,” declares Al Khabaz.

Although reported to having some of the lowest crime rates in the world, in areas where unemployment is high with Arabs living on less than $2 per day in penury, coupled with the growing problem of jobs, there is a direct correlation between economic disadvantage and higher crime rates; especially among youth.The Investigation and Prosecution Commission (IPC) in Saudi Arabia reported a jump in reported crimes in 2009. This dynamic of low crime may change rapidly if solutions are not in place quickly enough to buffer the population explosion and need.

While the problem of unemployment in the Arab world seems insurmountable, there are a number of initiatives being implemented and proffered in the region to begin to put a dent in the problem.

Her Royal Highness Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, the consort of the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, is the Educator in Chief in her country chairing the Qatar Foundation for Education. She is the first Royal in the Middle East to create an Education City initiative that brings together world class Universities under one roof to educate students in her country and the region.

Sheikha Mozah founded Silatech (Sila means 'Connection' in Arabic), to meet the urgent need to create jobs with a primary focus in the Arab World where the need is greatest. A social enterprise, her organization creates signature level East-West partnerships with the private sector to provide opportunities for the youth in diverse markets. Silatech works on several levels, policy (government participation), psychological (mindset), programmatic (training) and practical (partnerships for actual jobs). Thus far, Silatech has launched a number of initiatives that include intensive training programs in the areas of media, hospitality and tourism, and leadership for women. Partnerships include: Fortune 500 companies like Cisco and Manpower, senior academic institutions, research centers such as Gallup and sister countries i.e. United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Lebanon for various training, banking and financing initiatives for young entrepreneurs.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Ron Bruder wanted to make a huge difference by taking not taking an American isolationist approach to dealing with the tragedy. A powerful man on Wall Street, Bruder left his profession and founded the non-profit Education for Employment Foundation (EFE). EFE’s mission is combat chronic unemployment in the Arab World by providing young men and women professional and technical training. What makes his organization special is that it guarantees jobs for Arabs when they graduate from the program. Bruder believes his organization can contribute a great deal to promote peaceful environments by eliminating the despair, doubt and rage caused by not having a job. “In order to have world peace, the youth must have piece of the global pie,” said Bruder. “The key component of that is an education that enables one to be employable in the country’s labor market. Our mission is to train youth in cutting edge skills that will enable them to immediately enter the labor market.”

Located in Jordan, Gaza/West Bank, Egypt, Morocco and Yemen, the EFE has remarkably changed the lives of several thousand Arab Youths and their families. His latest initiative includes establishing a partnership Prince Sultan University in Riyadh. “We helped launch the "Prince Salman Education for Employment Initiative" and an accelerated a second Bachelor’s of Science nursing program for unemployed young Saudi women in association with Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts,” announced Bruder. Classes are expected to begin in January 2010.

While Al Khabaz clearly articulates the problem of youth unemployment in the Middle East, he believes Arabs in the region should first seek find their own solutions by forming strategic mentor/protégé partnerships that expands social capital by investing in human capital on a multi-community and multi-country level. He is not for any “token support” that foreign enterprise gives often times in the Middle East. “We want foreign expertise, but it is better when the local people come together,” states Al Khabaz. He strongly believes local level investment must always be the priority. He also feels any plans created must be cohesive and involve the people on the ground at all times. “We have to be self-determined.”

His thoughts are evidenced by establishing the Qatif Youth Achievement Award and launching a virtual world initiative entitled Arab Youth Supercomputer 2010 Project. In its second year, the Qatif Youth Achievement Award annually recognizes seven men and women who have demonstrated skills and talents in a most distinctive way. Judges select winners based upon creativity, leadership, ingenuity, invention and drive. This award encourages small and medium sized enterprises to take serious looks at youths involved in Qatif; hiring them for jobs.

The Arab Youth Supercomputer 2010 Project challenges Arabs 40 and under from all over the MENA region to build a Supercomputer by year end 2010. With nearly 300 members world wide supported by a sister organization of about 500, Al Khabaz is leading a worldwide movement for change for his people. Khabaz has garnered support for this program from business leaders, marketing professionals, academics, IT technology professionals, and security specialists from as far as Europe, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United States. Those who support his initiative subscribes to the mission of building Arab economic sustainability -- “so that all that is being done benefits our community.”

Jamal Dajani: The Saudi-Iranian Neo Cold War

2009-11-13T10:04:38Z

It's been four months since I described Yemen as a powder keg ready to explode. At the time the entire world was riveted to the television, watching the unfolding events of the "Velvet Revolution" in Iran. The Yemeni keg has since exploded. It is currently on the verge of causing regional conflict.

For more than a week now, Saudi Arabia has been carrying out military operations on its remote southern border to punish Houthi rebels from neighboring Yemen who crossed over and attacked one of its patrols. Both Yemen and Saudi Arabia have accused Iran of arming the rebels.

Accusations and counter accusations have been flying between the two rival regional powers. On Tuesday, Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned that, "those who pour oil on the fire must know that they will not be spared from the smoke that billows."

This is not the first time Saudis and Iranians have faced off in the region. The rivalry between the two countries has been out playing its course for years, extending from the Persian Gulf (where the name alone is a point of contention, Saudis refer to it as the Arabian Gulf) into Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Like the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Saudi Arabia and Iran have been supporting their factions in all these countries, either militarily, financially, or both.

Both Tehran and Riyadh used Lebanon as their own battlefront to settle scores to the point of almost tipping the country into another civil war less than two years ago. Iran has been accused of pumping millions of dollars into Gaza and supplying Hamas with arms, while Saudi Arabia has been supporting the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Many Iraqi Shiites have accused Saudi Arabia of aiding the Sunni insurgency in the country.

Nowadays, even Hajj (Islamic pilgrimage) is not spared from being a subject of contention between the two rivals. The Saudi government has recently issued a warning against pilgrims staging demonstrations during this year's Hajj, which runs from November 25-29. Although Iran was not specifically mentioned in the Saudi statement, Tehran replied that it would take "appropriate measures" if Iranian pilgrims were interfered with in any way. The Islamic Republic of Iran has long complained about the mistreatment and harassment of its pilgrims to Mecca by Saudi authorities during the Hajj season.

Like the original Cold War, both countries have launched sophisticated misinformation campaigns against one another. A propaganda war has raged between Iranian and Saudi government controlled media. During the Iranian election, Saudi media and its proxies viciously attacked the Iranian regime, highlighting poll irregularities, and the brutality of the Iranian Basij security forces. The Iranian media has constantly questioned, and on many instances mocked, the House of Saud's role as the custodian of the Holy Islamic sites in the Kingdom.

Last week without warning, two satellite companies, the Egyptian-owned Nilesat and the Saudi-managed Arabsat pulled the plug on Iran's Arabic-speaking news channel, al-Alam, or the World. Nilesat's executive director, Ahmed Anis, announced that the broadcasting was cut due to contract violations; however, media sources throughout the Middle East suggest that al-Alam's support for the Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen angered Saudi officials, who in turn used their influence to take it of the air.

So far, both countries have shied away from direct military contact. Iran and Saudi Arabia, like the US and the USSR of old, have been competing in a series of peripheral surrogate conflicts. Could their relations be strained enough to lead to direct confrontation? Everything seems to be possible these days in the Middle East.

Sharmine Narwani: Did Clinton Just Change US Policy on Hezbollah?

2009-11-12T12:24:55Z

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to break with US policy on Tuesday when she discussed Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah on the Charlie Rose show, identifying only the organization's "military wing" as a terrorist concern.

Discussing the recent negotiations between the five UN Security Council nations plus Germany -- P5+1 -- and Iran, Secretary Clinton told Rose:

"I mean, the Iranians not only worry us because of their nuclear program, they worry us because of their support for terrorism, their support for the military wing of Hezbollah, their support for Hamas, their interference in the internal affairs of their neighbors, trying to destabilize gulf countries and other countries throughout the greater region."

Hezbollah has been on the US State Department's List of Terrorist Organizations since 1999, with no distinctions thus far made between the group's military or political branches. Hezbollah itself rejects distinctions between its various bodies.

Earlier this summer, the British government did make that distinction however, placing only Hezbollah's military wing on its list of organizations banned under the 2000 Terrorism Act. Globally, only the United States, Canada and Israel view Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

A State Department spokeswoman, however, denied any policy shift, saying: "The Secretary's statement is fully consistent with our existing policy. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization."

But if Clinton's statement during the lengthy interview with Rose was a mere slip of the tongue, it was a very precise and specific gaff.

Which begs the question, is the US administration about to tweak its decade-long position on Hezbollah, and if so, why now?

The US Secretary of State's new phrasing comes exactly one day after the formation of a unity government in Lebanon, led by US-backed Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

The government's new cabinet includes ten ministerial positions for the Hezbollah-led opposition, two of which will go to Hezbollah members.

Any change in the US's position on the Lebanese resistance group could reflect this new reality: that Hezbollah participated in democratically held elections and is now part of Lebanon's official governmental body.

In the background, however, lurks another possible incentive for a US policy shift. A war of words between Israel and Hezbollah has persisted since the end of Israel's 33-day war on Lebanon in mid-2006. The stalemate that resulted was widely viewed as a defeat for Israel, a country that has relied on the psychology of victory to act as a deterrent for its Arab neighbors. And this perception of defeat has caused significant frustration within Israel's military establishment.

This past summer, Israeli rhetoric threatening Lebanon peaked when it became clear that although the pro-US coalition had won the Lebanese elections, a unity government including Hezbollah was inevitable.

"If Hezbollah joins the Lebanese government as an official entity, let it be clear that the Lebanese government, as far as we are concerned, is responsible for any attack -- any attack -- from its area on the state of Israel," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as recently as August. These comments followed similar statements by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, increasing speculation that another military conflict could be in the offing.

Could the US administration be softening its stance on Hezbollah in order to give Lebanon's new government a shot at succeeding, and simultaneously warning Israel to back off? President Obama has a lot on his plate, juggling talks with Iran -- an Israeli foe and Hezbollah ally -- managing US military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq and trying to jumpstart peace talks between Palestinians and Israel. The last thing he needs is another large-scale armed conflict in the region to distract from his Mideast agenda.

In August, Obama's Assistant on Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism, John Brennan introduced more moderate language about the Lebanese resistance group at an event held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in DC.

While reiterating the US position on Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, Brennan painted a more nuanced picture of the group:

"Hezbollah started out as purely a terrorist organization in the early '80s and has evolved significantly over time. And now it has members of parliament, in the cabinet; there are lawyers, doctors, others who are part of the Hezbollah organization ... And so, quite frankly, I'm pleased to see that a lot of Hezbollah individuals are in fact renouncing that type of terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political process in a very legitimate fashion."

In an article in The Nation a few days later, a State Department spokesman responded to Brennan's comments: "U.S. policy toward Hezbollah has not changed. We do not make any distinction between the political and military wings."

But his Secretary of State just did.

Whether Clinton on Tuesday deliberately meant to redefine US policy on Hezbollah or not, it seems the thinking within the administration has taken a turn anyway.

Iranian Memoir By Freed Prisoner Haleh Esfandiari

2009-11-12T08:54:04Z

In Emin Prison

Claire Messud
The New York Review of Books

"My Prison, My Home:
One Woman's Story of
Captivity in Iran"
by Haleh Esfandiari.
Ecco, 230 pp., $25.99

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

Prominent intellectuals, politicians, activists, and journalists have vanished into its maw. Many, like the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who died in 2003 after being brutally beaten, or the twenty-nine Iranian prisoners executed in July 2008, have not survived to speak of their ordeals there. Many others remain incarcerated, among them scores of reformists arrested during the summer's demonstrations and, in particular, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, originally arrested in 2007 at the same time as Haleh Esfandiari, and recently shockingly condemned, at a show trial, to at least twelve years in prison.

In this company, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is one of the lucky ones. An apparently unlikely candidate for arrest--a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother at the time of her imprisonment in 2007, Esfandiari was in Iran to visit her ninety-three-year-old mother--she was sucked into the surreal vortex of the nation's Intelligence Ministry, interrogated for months, and held in solitary confinement for four months. Her release was apparently the direct result of an exchange of letters between Lee Hamilton, her employer and the director of the Wilson Center, and the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; although Esfandiari's husband, the historian Shaul Bakhash, along with many others (including the editors of The New York Review) campaigned tirelessly for her freedom, both in the United States and around the world. As she makes clear, it is impossible to know exactly what confluence of events led her captors to set her free: so much of their understanding of the world and of her role in it remained opaque to the last.

In the wake of her experience, Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. "My Prison, My Home" is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis, from the initial staged "robbery" when she was on her way to Tehran airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She is restrained in her telling--the book is filled with vivid details and facts, rather than emotional outpouring--a decision for which her narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her native culture.

In order for us to make sense of her imprisonment, we need to grasp both its historical background and Esfandiari's own particular life story. (This assertion may seem painfully rudimentary, but facts that are common knowledge to any Iranian, such as the people's abiding resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, seem frequently to have eluded our nation's policymakers.)

Cosmopolitan and intellectual, Esfandiari's own upbringing reminds the reader of Iran as the West once knew it. She is the older child of an Iranian botanist, himself the descendant of regional governors and politicians from the eastern city of Kerman, and of an Austrian mother. Her parents met at university in Vienna before the war. Raised between her mother's German-style home and her grandmother's traditional Iranian household, Esfandiari, like her parents, attended university in Vienna:

While I stayed clear of the student movement,...my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture.

Having completed her doctorate, she returned to Iran in 1964 at the age of twenty-four.

Esfandiari lays out the vital information of her nation's history alongside her own. The pivotal power struggle in the early 1950s between the Shah and his prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, took place when Haleh was only a child, but

even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d'Arc [a Catholic girls' school run by French nuns]. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out.

Unfortunately, the CIA did not agree with the schoolgirls. (The importance of the Jeanne d'Arc school in educating the young women of Iran's future elite in pre-revolutionary times is evident: a quick glance at contact information for alumnae shows them to be predominantly working professionals, with most of them living in the diaspora.) The Esfandiari household's relation to the Mossadegh uprising was complicated, moreover, because "the family was divided.... Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative."

Esfandiari explains the increasing difficulties of the Shah's regime during the course of the 1960s and 1970s--although she does not provide the sort of lavish detail about his infamous material excesses that can be found in Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski's "Shah of Shahs" (1985) or Christopher de Bellaigue's riveting "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs" (2005)--and she makes these problems concrete in relation to her own life. Her first career upon returning to Iran was as a journalist. She translated and wrote for the nation's largest daily newspaper, Kayhan, where she met her future husband, Shaul Bakhash, while they were both covering a visit to Iran by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. (That Bakhash is Jewish and she a Muslim was, at the time of their marriage in 1965, "highly unusual," but by no means scandalous: her conservative Muslim grandmother blessed their union.) After leaving Tehran for several years so that Bakhash could pursue his academic career at Harvard and Oxford, the couple returned in 1972.

Although she went back to Kayhan, Esfandiari found that she could not stay there long: "Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter." When Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda's protégé, Amir Taheri, was appointed editor of the paper, Esfandiari quit, and went to work for the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a women's rights group founded in 1966.

In a moving aside--and one that feels particularly significant, given the growing influence of women in the current Iranian reform movement and their heightened presence on the streets during last summer's demonstrations, as was noted in the anonymous "Letter from Tehran" published in The New Yorker in early October--Esfandiari comments on her work with WOI, which lasted until 1975:

After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could.... But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.

From there, Esfandiari went on to the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, a cultural organization set up by and named after the Shah's third wife (herself a graduate of the Jeanne d'Arc school), through which she oversaw museums and cultural centers. From this vantage, she watched the Shah's Iran crumbling around her:

By 1977, for example, Tehran's "poetry nights" at the German-sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners.

In this setting, Esfandiari explains, the popular appeal of Khomeini--who had publicly and volubly denounced the Shah since the early 1960s, and had lived in exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France--gained inexorable momentum. While the Shah's opponents were politically diverse, ranging from Communists to intellectuals to civil servants, "Khomeini's clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader." During 1978, demonstrations grew exponentially in size and force, and Esfandiari writes that "the regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation."

While Esfandiari is clear about some sources of the unrest, she does not dwell on the people's grievances against the Shah. It is enlightening to read Kapus´cin´ski's account of life in the Shah's last years of rule, written at the time of the revolution, and to note how familiar the Pahlavi regime's methods sound to any of us reading the newspapers today:

More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America.... Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak [the Shah's secret police, comparable to the contemporary Intelligence Ministry].... An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).

For Esfandiari and Bakhash, with a small daughter at the time, the upheaval of the revolution was too uncertain: Esfandiari took their daughter to London in early December 1978 for two weeks, to "wait things out."

In fact, however, she would not return home for many years. Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and within ten days the Shah's monarchy collapsed. Now "armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime--many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist." Bakhash had been offered a visiting professorship at Princeton, and the family moved to the United States, where they have lived since. Esfandiari taught Persian at Princeton until 1992. She then wrote her first book, "Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution" (1997), with the support of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and was asked by Robert Litwak, then the Wilson Center's director of the Division for International Studies, to start a Middle East program there, where she still works.

Esfandiari first returned to Iran in 1992, encouraged by the more liberal climate fostered by the relatively pragmatic President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his then minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami. After her father's death in 1995, she visited more frequently, to help care for her aging mother. She says of the late 1990s and early 2000s:

These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.

Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the tenor of society changed so much that "I made it a point on these trips to stay away from even mildly 'political' people." Unfortunately, her efforts were insufficient to protect her from the roving eye of the Intelligence Ministry, "heir to the Shah's secret police, SAVAK," although far more murderous even than they, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of dissenters.

This institution defined Esfandiari's existence from December 30, 2006, when she was to have returned home to Washington, D.C., until September 2007, when she finally did; and her interactions with its emissaries make for astounding reading. The experience was absurd, horrendous, and disturbingly banal: in a final, blackly comic flourish, her principal interrogator, Mr. Ja'fari, presented her, on the eve of her departure, with a gift: "a large, beautiful inlaid box" containing a leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran's famed fourteenth-century poet: "I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: 'No hard feelings. Let's be friends.'" As she says of them, "It's the way we play the game," and there is, about the surreal dance of her eight months in their hands, the quality of a game--destructive, potentially lethal, but a game nevertheless.

The Intelligence Ministry existed for Esfandiari primarily in the form of two men: her chief interrogator, Ja'fari, and his superior, Hajj Agha. Ja'fari she first met in early January 2007 at an interrogation center in a "house...modeled after the Petit Trianon," where he questioned her for long hours at a time, over a fortnight:

He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official...and faceless bureaucrat.

Hajj Agha, the more gracious and apparently accommodating of the two men, with whom she had more dealings once she was imprisoned in early May 2007, emerges in spite of his urbanity as the more sinister: his name is honorific rather than personal ("Hajj" refers to one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; "Agha" is a title for a military officer), so he is, in fact, nameless; and as Esfandiari was not permitted to see his face, and forced to face the wall, he remains, hideously, a cipher.

Ja'fari's line of questioning was, from the outset, clear: "He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end." Esfandiari marvels, "How does one persuade a man with Ja'fari's mind-set that the Ford Foundation...is not part of a 'Zionist conspiracy'? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent?"

More specifically, Esfandiari came to realize that Ja'fari and the Intelligence Ministry feared "that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution...in Iran":

It was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja'fari's most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations.... [It] had been active in newly in-dependent countries of the former Soviet Union.... In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as "velvet revolutions" or "rainbow revolutions" because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color--orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja'fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings.

The wildness of this paranoia is of course all the more intriguing because it is not, in some details, so very far from reality: orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, and green in Iran? This year's thwarted presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi may not have sought to provoke a "velvet revolution," but in their passionate cries for democratic reform, his supporters were not far from doing so, and their resistance, albeit less visibly, continues. While it is madness to blame the United States and Britain for supposedly coordinating and manipulating this discontent, Ja'fari is not wrong to be alarmed, or wrong to imagine that the West would wish for the reformists' success.

Nevertheless, to appreciate that a faction of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (because it becomes clear, during Esfandiari's ordeal, that there are bickering factions behind the scrim: "one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me") would seriously believe that the OSI was responsible for the revolutions in former Soviet countries, and intent on a similar strategy in Iran, is already to grasp the strange, novelistic, mutual incomprehensions that exist between Iran and the United States: we could not have imagined that they could genuinely imagine that. Suddenly, with Esfandiari's explanation, Tehran's apparently lunatic assertions about Western involvement in the events of June of this year take on a new tenor: it is vital that we understand that this is not mere rhetorical flourish. At least some portion of the Iranian establishment may believe, or believe they have to believe, these statements to be true.

Esfandiari's interrogations changed in nature, intensity, and locale. She was called upon to answer questions in writing, to provide documents and information pertaining to her work and life, and to speak on camera in a filmed "interview" that was broadcast nationally, along with those of two other prisoners: the political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (who had already been released, and who described the broadcast as "a page out of Stalinist Russia and George Orwell's '1984'") and the social scientist and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh. But the focus of the discussions never changed.

The questioning did, however, cease for a time: after the "Petit Trianon" interrogations and before Esfandiari's arrest, there were "eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways.... I spent my days in a figurative crouch...waiting for the blow to fall." This hiatus, during which she did not know what her fate might be, was nothing short of psychological torture:

My entanglement with the Intelligence Ministry meant I would never again feel safe in Iran, even at home. I could no longer carry out an unguarded conversation over the telephone. I believed the intelligence people were reading my e-mail. My nerves were always on edge.... I hated being cooped up in the apartment, but I was uncomfortable going out....
Mutti and I became increasingly isolated. The small group of academic "insiders" who had generously tried to help me began to disappear from my life....
I could no longer see the beauty of the landscape I had always loved. I saw only the gray ugliness of the streets, the piles of uncollected garbage, the potholes, the dirty water in the canals, the smog and the snarled traffic.

In this period, Esfandiari came to realize that while she "had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled," the reality was different: "My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire." The Americans' support for Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war; the Iranian funding of Hezbollah; the bombings in Lebanon in 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the George W. Bush administration's "democracy promotion" program, "a policy of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents"--all of this history played into the fate of a single woman on a visit to her aged, widowed mother in Tehran.

Finally, on May 2, 2007, Ja'fari announced that Esfandiari was being arrested and taken to Evin, to solitary confinement, where she would spend the next four months. Her vivid account of this experience, from her initial blindfolding upon entering the prison, provides us with a wholly unsensational picture both of her treatment and of her own psychological resistance. We learn what her cell looked like, how she slept and washed, what she ate, how she did her laundry, how the interrogations were conducted, what the guards were like--in short, all the details that enable us to imagine the imprisonment clearly. Esfandiari tells of her considerable weight loss, of her resistance to the prison doctors, and of the skin complaint that she worried might be cancer.

Inevitably, the mental toll of her incarceration is less readily communicable, but here, too, Esfandiari provides pragmatic explanations of her decisions and thoughts: "From the first day, I decided that if I were to avoid succumbing to despair, I had to impose a strict discipline on myself.... I knew I had to be mentally strong, keep my wits about me, remain focused on the interrogations," a decision that meant she would not dwell on her family and friends, and would instead devote much of her time to doing exercises to remain physically strong and fit. "While I exercised, I composed two books--not on paper but in my head. One was a biography of my paternal grandmother.... The other book was a children's story for my granddaughters." Eventually, she was allowed to borrow books from Kian Tajbakhsh, also in Evin at the time (although she did not meet him: "I never once spoke to another inmate").

Only once does Esfandiari speak of breaking down, following her one visit from her mother: not wanting her captors to see her vulnerability, she asked to take a shower: "In the shower, I let go of myself and cried copiously. I cried for what I had done to my mother. Instead of the calm, happy old age she deserved, she was experiencing a living hell." Even small moments of kindness in the prison proved hard to bear: when one of the guards, Hajj Khanum, brought her a flower, "a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger," or when another she had nicknamed Sunny Face brought in a rice dish that Esfandiari had taught her to cook, she was all but overcome.

Through these women guards, a number of whom were distinctly sympathetic to her plight, Esfandiari brings us a portrait of women's lives in contemporary Iran rather different from that of Azar Nafisi's lively literature students in her memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran" (2003):

They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America.

In her isolation, Esfandiari was almost wholly unaware of the extensive efforts underway to secure her release, including interventions from European governments. She did not know how long she might remain in isolation and was leery of all promising indications--such as Hajj Agha's question in June: "How do you know Obama?"

She fought back with rage and defiance--"I knew I must not let them break me"--and with her insistence, even when it was most difficult, on retaining perspective:

Outside prison, Ja'fari's and Hajj Agha's repeated references to "the triangle," "plots," and "conspiracies" seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sinister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha's deceptive view of the world.

This, of course, is the struggle for any prisoner in such a situation; but it is also the struggle for the Iranian people at large: How not to succumb to the regime's view of the world? Theirs is a society of constant contradictions, of mirrors and masks, of both authority and a theater of authority, to which they must subscribe. They, too, are terrorized by prolonged uncertainty, never knowing the limits of what is allowed--can women show their hair in public this month without fear of arrest? Can weddings allow dancing in private homes this year, or will the morals police break down the door? Can the press question the regime this week, or will the newspapers be shut down? Can you demonstrate freely today, or might you be arrested, tortured, and killed?

For Esfandiari, even in her darkest hour, there was always the American knowledge of the actuality of "reality as it might be": it hovered almost in sight, a passport and a plane journey away. Whether, before Lee Hamilton's letter to Khamenei apparently led to her release, this knowledge made the ordeal more or less endurable is hard to say. But as an Iranian, she was also always aware of the ironies of her native society; she could be at once fully in the world and yet not of it, and this may have been her salvation. She knew that her guards, for the most part, were not her enemies; and while shocked, she was perhaps not surprised when Ja'fari and "the boys," his colleagues at the Intelligence Ministry, presented her with the gift of a book of poetry at the end of her time in Evin. Perhaps they thought that, in spite of the horrors they had inflicted upon her, the greatness of the poet Hafez was something on which they could all agree.

Claire Messud's most recent novel is "The Emperor's Children." Her earlier novels include "When the World Was Steady."

Read more at The New York Review of Books.

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Christian Avard: Mothers and Soldiers: Healing the Bonds Destroyed by War

2009-11-10T20:30:26Z

The bonds established between mothers and children are sacred. Mothers provide unconditional love, caring and support, and they teach their children to live in the world with a sense of purpose. But life circumstances oftentimes get in the way of relationships and affect the outcomes for better or for worse. In times of war, the bonds between mothers and children can change in the blink of an eye. Strong relationships that took years to develop can be wiped out when a loved one is killed by enemy fire and other circumstances beyond their control. Many families in America have experienced this. So have many others in the Mideast.

Susan Galleymore is the author of Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War & Terror. Galleymore, co-founder of Courage to Resist, made international headlines as she traveled to Iraq to visit her son stationed in the Sunni Triangle. The more Galleymore learned about the military, the more she learned about how war affects mothers at home and mothers in Iraq. Her journey continued as she met with mothers in other war zones such as Israel and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan and the U.S.. I spoke with Galleymore about her new book and how war affects mothers and children, communities and cultures, veterans, and current service members.

They say time and time again that "information is power"' and books can be used as an effective tool for social change. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring are two good examples. What role do you believe books play in effecting social change? Do you see Long Time Passing: Mothers speak out About War & Terror as a book to be used in the same means as Sinclair's or Carson's?

Galleymore: The goal of the book is to create a larger story around the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not just something that's happening here in the U.S. but that the ripple effects are occurring all over the world and we are really interdependent. I think Rachel Carson was trying to get at that as well. There are interdependencies that we're not really recognizing. If anything, my book is trying to do something like that by using a story format. In this case, every single story is exactly the way it was told to me. I didn't impose my own cultural values or understandings on it. So I'm trying show these human beings have stories that are really enrichening to not only people in the United States, but to the larger picture of what war does.

What life-changing experiences did you have in your travels to the Mideast? What myths were shattered?

Well, I come from another country where we've seen the effects of war. My grandparents were immigrants after the Second World War to South Africa and we experienced a war against the indigenous people, if you could call it that. I came to the United States as a young woman and had my son born here the first year I arrived. I never understood how the American military works but I also think it has changed, certainly in the last 30 years. I never understood there was such a push to recruit young people. That's particularly true now that we have a volunteer military. There's a lot about how things function in American culture that I, as an outsider, didn't know. But I've come to realize that people who actually live in this country for generations don't understand either how the American military works. That was a huge learning experience.

Once I realized that my son had been sucked up into the military, believing all the cultural values from the movies, such as what a hero is, what a man is, etc., I had this urge that I had to talk with him about it. Once I got to Iraq, I recognized that this was a much larger story. The first Iraqi woman I talked to said her whole family was essentially wiped out by American troops on a couple of Humvees. They just shot up the whole car, killing her husband and three kids. She survived, she was pregnant, and her eight year-old daughter survived. So there was a story to be told. We can't imagine being in America and having that happen.

I also lived in Israel during the mid-1970s and I came from apartheid South Africa. So I was very comfortable in Israel at the time because it reflected a lot of the values that I came from. Of course it is an apartheid system (in Israel). Anyone who knows anything about how systems function realize that Israel is an apartheid system.

One of the things I learned about Israeli and Palestinian boys is Israelis are socialized to join the military to defend the homeland. Palestinian boys are pigeonholed to be suicide bombers because they'll be seen as martyrs. Did you encounter this in your travels? How difficult is it for Israeli and Palestinian boys not to go down this path? Are there any efforts being done to raise boys not to pick up a gun or strap on explosives? What roles do mothers play in shaping their sons?

One of the mothers I interviewed lost her son in a suicide bombing while two other of her sons were in the Israeli Defense Forces. Now this is a family that came from a 'left perspective' and her sons have become Refusniks and they are very active in a group called Combatants for Peace. Combatants for Peace works with former Israeli soldiers working with former Palestinian prisoners. They always work together, they make joint statements, and there were many other groups in Israel doing joint work. It was fascinating because sometimes I would talk to people who say 'I'm a Zionist and I work in this particular group' (not necessarily for Combatants for Peace). But there's a lot of complexities in these issues. It's fascinating because it's kicking up the level of thinking. Americans need to do about how complex the situation is.

It's also hard to be a man, especially in American culture. There's no ritual for it. I think that's partly what brings a young man into the U.S. military, but in Israel there is (a ritual). In Palestine, it's much more of a male dominated society and the ritual there has been so disturbed by the Israeli invasion of the culture. Everything is on shaky ground there and people are really struggling to hold on to their culture.

In the book, you try to understand the tension between individualist American culture and the complex communities of family and residence that typify much of the Middle East. What were some of the things you learned when two different cultures came face to face like this?

It's interesting. In America, we're taught that the best thing you can do is become independent and self-sufficient as soon as possible. In the Middle East, that's not the case. It's a collectivist-based culture. What I find is, unless you understand that the basic assumptions are very different, you're going to have conversations that are meaningless. A person from an individualist culture who is talking to a person from a collectivist culture are going to have a conversation that's not grounded in a similar reality. It's very difficult for Americans to understand that people in the Middle East (if I can generalize) don't want to be Americans. They're proud of their culture, history and heritage. Americans tend to think everyone wants to be like us, because we've been told "we're the greatest, the best, the most powerful", etc. It's very difficult for people to conceptualize that it may not be the case. I think we're seeing that in Afghanistan right now. The Afghan people are saying "leave us alone! We don't want you or your democracy!" The Afghans have their own traditions of democracy and we're not allowing them to surface very much.

I know current service members have told me time and time again "we don't get to choose which wars we get to fight in. We go where our president and Congress wants us to go to." But they do have voices. They should speak and think for themselves.

Another discussion that needs to happen is, what is a volunteer? We often say, "These soliders volunteered to do this." Well, they didn't volunteer to go off and kill Iraqi and Afghani civilians. They went out to promote what they heard was the message of their country, which is, "we are about freedom and democracy." When they get over there, they discover it's about opening corporate markets. There's a tremendous element (of) trauma they begin to feel. What are the troops going over there to do? What does a volunteer actually mean and what rights do they have? If you're a volunteer, it should also mean you should be able to not be a volunteer when you've had enough or when you've decided to get out. That's not the case.

Today is Veterans' Day. What do your book and your experiences add to this national holiday? What did you learn about our soldiers and the wars they fight in, that would be appropriate for people to know on this holiday?

The stories of the troops are extremely important to hear and to make connections with other war or combat events the U.S. has perpetrated. There are books on Vietnam where atrocities were par for the course. We need to recognize that atrocities are par for the course in war, no matter which one. If you put a young person who's 18- or 19-years old in situations that are completely terrifying they're not at all like the movies. I hear a lot of that from the troops. Then you bring them back home and you do not allow them to tell their stories. As long as we shut our troops and veterans up, as long as we do not want to hear what they have to say, we're going to continue to have the devastation of our young people that we're seeing. There is battle fatigue, shell shock, and general trauma. That is the result of war and that is what our veterans are going to deal with. We, as their families, need to understand what we're asking them to do and we need to respect what they tell us.

Every Memorial and Veteran's Day, it's very difficult for groups like Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, and others to have their voices heard. What kinds of obstacles are they up against in order to be heard?

That's a good question. The average American is very resistant to know what is being done in their name. There is a lot of resistance to know what our veterans bring back to our country when they return from war. Veterans trying to speak out about atrocities, the immoral wars, etc. are shut up by other veterans. It's this thing that if we talk about the kinds of things we are generally silent about, then what does it mean about who I am? What does it mean about what I did over there? What does it mean about who we are as a country? It's not just accepting some new information. It's really reconfiguring your whole reality and that's a very difficult thing to do. That's what needs to happen and I think that's why there's so much resistance. You'll see the Veterans for Peace or the IVAW with antiwar banners, and you really see other veterans coming down really heavily on them! It's about that, "don't share the secret, don't tell!" We saw what happened to John Kerry when he ran for president. He was swift-boated. What was that about? That was about not wanting to hear the reality of war and I think some of that has to do with the enormous profits made in war.

You mentioned the stigma and attacks soldiers face from other soldiers for speaking up against war and occupations. Could you elaborate on that?

I think the most commonly known example of this is the Swift Boat Veterans' effort to discredit John Kerry during his presidential bid. As you know, Kerry came out against the Vietnam conflict, supposedly throwing his medal over the White House fence after participating in the very first Winter Soldier Hearings. It turned out it was really only his ribbons, not the actual medals. As you probably recall the Swift Boat Vets piled on Kerry, denigrating his service, his courage, etc. These days, when groups such as Veterans for Peace or IVAW parade (or even apply to participate) they are often roundly scorned from the sidelines or refused permission to participate officially. I see this as stemming from a complex set of issues: an inability to distinguish between "the war" and "the warrior"; a refusal to admit how terrifying and confusing combat is, for "we" are "men" and so don't admit fear etc. If "we" talk about what happens in war, we'll let the cat out of the bag and have to re-examine some basic cultural concepts and if one decent person (say a service person) admits to war atrocities, it raises the spectre of other decent people being capable of the same- the "we're all painted with the same brush" syndrome when something shameful comes to light. These are the sorts of complexities inherent in how war is sold and consumed.

Despite all the trauma mothers experience and share in the book, you said that despite it all "the basic humanity of people shine through." What examples stand out for you the most?

What has become much clearer to me is that the human heart is a vibrant living entity and that underneath all the collective and individualist categories we have, that the human heart wants to reach out and make contact. I found tiny villages in south Lebanon where people would say 'Oh, you're an American. Weren't those people hostile to you?' That was never the case. It was more, "Come in! Who are you? Yes, we can share our story with you. Yes, please tell people about us." I would say my faith in human beings has become much deeper and become more determined to surface; that reality that we want to make contact with one another.

Sharmine Narwani: Interview: Hezbollah And Hamas on Obama, Netanyahu, Terrorism ... And Oprah

2009-11-09T15:30:53Z

In early August and late October, I met with Hamas' Usama Hamdan and Hezbollah's Ammar Mousawi, chiefs of their respective organizations' foreign relations portfolios. The two groups are vastly different in structure, level of development and historical experiences, but share much in common too. Each can credit its origin to Israeli occupation. Hamas was born on the eve of the first Palestinian Intifada, from a single incident when an Israeli truck mowed -- some claim deliberately -- into a carload of Palestinian workers in the Gaza strip. Officially formed in 1985, Hezbollah, in turn, was jumpstarted by Israel's 1982 invasion and occupation of Southern Lebanon. Although Hamas is a Sunni organization and Hezbollah a Shiite one, both groups embrace Islamic values as their core ideology and driving principle, though their political actions appear to be driven more by realpolitik than Quranic mandate. And the two groups form part of an increasingly powerful Mideast bloc that unapologetically refuses to accept any regional status quo that features an occupying and militarily adventurous Israel.

Hamas and Hezbollah are both seasoned denizens of the US State Department's List of Terrorist Organizations, a designation that seems odd when one considers that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese would fall through the cracks without the vital social services -- healthcare, education, employment, infrastructure development -- these two groups provide their indigenous populations. Ask a secular Palestinian or Lebanese civilian which of their political parties they trust most, and even the most begrudging among them may name Hamas or Hezbollah as the "cleanest" of their politicians.

And this influence continues regionally. Polls throughout the Middle East consistently point to Hezbollah's secretary general Hassan Nasrallah as the most popular leader in the Arab world. Hamas' Khaled Meshaal is never far behind -- a far cry from his main political opponent, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whose US-supported Fatah party is viewed as corrupt and incompetent, sometimes even by its own supporters. Despite US and Israeli efforts to isolate these groups by swathing them in the dreaded "terrorist" label and all that implies post 9-11, even pro-US Arab leaders are careful not to malign these groups. Popularity rubs off, so to speak.

But this isolation from mostly Western nations has taken its toll. Officials of both groups recognize that any resolution of conflict in the Middle East will likely necessitate US and European involvement. Concurrently, it appears that the West has copped on to a similar notion - that any resolution of regional conflicts will in turn necessitate the involvement of both Hamas and Hezbollah.

As a result, former US officials and current European officials have been making quiet pilgrimages to Beirut and Damascus for some years now - with occasional reciprocal visits - to try to build relationships and influence these groups. Tellingly, Hezbollah's Mousawi was meeting with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner just hours after our final interview. The going has been hard, but he points to the European Union's non-interference policy during the June Lebanese elections as a dividend of improved communications.

So where do things stand on rapprochement? What do they think of Obama? Do they have "hope" that US policy will "change?" What do they think of the peace process? Extremist groups in the Mideast - who are the worst offenders? Do they find inspiration in Americans and who might these figures be? Hamdan and Mousawi had plenty to say.

On Obama...

Ammar Mousawi: There is no doubt that we find certain traits that are distinguished in the character of Obama -- that he is no repetition of former US presidents. When we listen to his speeches, we certainly note something new. However, the political forces that make policy in the US allow any exceptional steps to be only limited. There is no doubt that there is a change in tone, but it is doubtful that there will be a change in policy. If change were to take place, it would not be in Cairo University -- it would have to be in the US Congress.

We know that Obama is experiencing political difficulties from his opponents. He is being besieged in domestic policy challenges and internal issues - healthcare reform, issues of his roots. So when he declared his ambitious approach for his solutions for the Mideast, they sent him the Israel lobby to put him in a corner.

Usama Hamdan: I think there has been no change since Obama became president. In fact, I believe we faced a great failure last month (when the US administration caved on the issue of an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank). It was a minor failure, but a failure nonetheless. Brings me as a Palestinian to ask why Palestinians should accept any conditions when Israel doesn't. I liked Obama's Cairo speech, but we have to see what happens on the ground.

The US is putting itself in a corner by thinking it is their responsibility to protect Israel in the region when Israel is doing the attacking. Someone has to be courageous enough - there must be conditions for Israel. If you have a child that doesn't have to follow rules, he will be spoilt. Israel is the US's spoilt child.

The US has to say to the Israeli government "That's it." They can do that. It is not so simple, but it is not too difficult either. Who in the world will support Israel against the US? Fifty percent of Europeans identified Israel as the biggest threat to peace and stability in the world -- not in the Middle East -- but in the world.

I understand that Obama is facing internal and external problems and pressures. But his priorities are not clear to us -- he seems confused. Palestinians will not wait forever.

On Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

Usama Hamdan: Netanyahu has always been against a genuine peace process. We had experience with him when he was prime minister from 1996-98 -- he undermined the Oslo Agreements, he divided the issues - there is a very bad experience with him. Adding to this is his foreign minister is Avigdor Lieberman -- the worst political figure in all the world. Add to that Ehud Barak. We are facing a government formed of extremists. Netanyahu, Lieberman and Barak? The worst combination in Israeli history.

Ammar Mousawi: One of the unfortunate aspects of Obama's term as president is that it is coupled with Netanyahu's. Netanyahu is not ready to even have an "apparent" flexibility toward peace.

On being called "terrorists:"

Ammar Mousawi: The War on Terror's objective was to corner legitimate resistance and prevent it from achieving its mission. The West still resists differentiating between resistance and terrorism -- and that is done on purpose. Resistance is defined as a legal fight against occupation as opposed to terrorism, which is defined as systematically killing innocent people. We are interested in having a dialog with the West because we would like to make them aware of our point of view. Resistance is part of world history -- it is not an uncommon thing. All these negative positions taken by the West are because of their support for Israel and unwillingness to see that the people of this region have the right to exist in peace. After the failure of all their attempts to destroy these resistance groups through military and political means, they concluded that they must now know more about us, how we operate. And so the dialogue begins.

(Hezbollah has been on the US terrorism list since 1999. Only the US, Israel and Canada recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.)

Usama Hamdan: We were listed on the US terrorism list in 1993 just because Israel asked for it -- before that we had direct contacts with the Americans. We even sent a letter to then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asking why. They know that they are wrong in this. They know that anyone who supports rights and justice supports the Palestinians. We want them to accept Hamas as the choice of the Palestinian people - they must respect the fact that Palestinians are committed to their rights. They will talk with us eventually. We are not in a hurry for that.

In the West, they try to shape you before dealing with you. This is the Palestinian experience. They've done this with Fatah. Hamas' position is to say what we are, what we stand for - clearly - and we can defend our rights best that way.

On Extremist Islamic Groups:

Usama Hamdan: All Islamists should want the good of their people. The most important point is how they deal with their own communities. In my belief, you have to be a good man to your own people - not push them hard or kill them if they don't accept your point of view. In Rafah, Gaza this August, we had clashes with a minority group which started killing Palestinians just because they had different ideas, by putting bombs in internet cafes, beauty salons and wedding parties.

We are against groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban for this reason. We condemned the attacks of 9-11, the explosions in London, the Madrid bombing when it was clear to us that these were not accidents.

Ammar Mousawi: We try to promote a positive image of Islam that is open to dialogue between people and cultures. We are not responsible for the actions of groups that present a different picture of Islam. We do not agree with the behavior of these groups -- they give a negative view of Islam. But the question is who created and supported these extremists?

What gives life to these entities is the policies of the West: unlimited support for Israel will cause this extremism. All the wars in Afghanistan will feed this extremism. We are in a situation where we will have wars with no end. Sovereignty, development, mutual respect, the right to determine your own destiny -- these issues need dialog, not wars.

Hezbollah condemns the deliberate killing of innocent people -- it promotes in us a sense of sadness as happened with 9-11, London, Madrid. And if there are some differences between us and the US, this is not the way to sort out our problems -- these acts are not excusable.

Mr. Mousawi, what is the status of efforts to form a Lebanese unity government -- and what are the chances of such a government being successful in overcoming the deadlocks and disagreements of the past?

We believe there are currently good chances for the formation of a national unity government, having overcome the most serious obstacles. We have finally reached agreement on the inclusion of Jubran Basil as a member of the cabinet, and General Michel Aoun has been granted the Telecommunications Ministry, both issues having been points of contention for the opposition.
As for the issue over various ministries, we are still deliberating the cabinet posts that will go to the opposition, but we are hopeful that things will go smoothly.

Mr. Hamdan, what is the status of efforts to form a Palestinian Unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah? How will this impact the holding of elections in 2010?

I have to say that we are still committed to the Palestinian reconciliation and we are willing to have this reconciliation for the benefit of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. I believe that Mahmoud Abbas' move to hold elections on January 24, 2010 has undermined these efforts, but we are still working with the Egyptians to overcome this problem. However, I believe that no elections will take place without reconciliation between the two parties. On this same issue, a few days ago, Abu Mazen declared a clear failure in the peace process, saying that he will not be a candidate in the upcoming election. I think that was supposed to be a helpful step to go back to the Palestinian dialogue, because when you feel there is a failure in the process, you have to go back to the people. I think Abu Mazen was saying there is a failure in the political track, and he invited all the people to support national unity, to face the Israeli threat. This may help Palestinian unity.

No one can trust that there will be real elections without Palestinian unity and so it will be a waste of time and a new complication in the Palestinian cause if there is an election without this unity.

There must be a change in the Israeli mentality because they must understand that without ending the occupation, there will be no peace.

Outside of your own bloc, name a Middle Eastern leader you admire and tell us why:

Ammar Mousawi: I admire the Emir of Qatar who made something of his country -- it is small, but he has made it into a country of influence. They've helped us in rebuilding what Israel destroyed in its 2006 attack on Lebanon. The Emir was the first and only Arab head of state to come to the suburbs of Beirut to witness the horrifying destruction of the Israeli aggression. And we thank him for this because it motivated our own Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to come himself. Imagine the prime minister of all Lebanon didn't see the urgency to visit this area that had taken heavy bombardment and destruction? We are embarrassed in one sense, and angry on the other hand.

Your thoughts on US Middle East policy?

Ammar Mousawi: America is a great nation -- to get to this place has taken some great people, and a certain individuality that is renowned through history. We have no issues with the American people, we share many concerns with them on their government's policies. We have in the Middle East paid a heavy price for US policy. There are many Americans paying for these failed policies of previous administrations. Bush's ratings in the US dropped into the 20s. Therefore, can anybody be surprised if we say we object to aspects of US foreign policy?

We would like to say to Americans that they are subjecting themselves to a double standard - on one hand talking about values and on the other hand resisting and undermining these very values through their unconditional support of Israel's actions. The way they have received and treated the Goldstone Report has caused an uproar here.

I tell you this - America will not find anyone to assist it to come out of its Mideast crisis other than this bloc of nations that Hezbollah belongs to. If we count today the total US crises - in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, even Pakistan, what does the supposed Arab "moderate" bloc have and what does our group have in terms of cards to help the US. The strength is in the hands of our resistance bloc.

Usama Hamdan: The US administration has to realize that Israel is occupying Palestinian lands, not the other way around. But they are sending weapons to be used against Palestinians every day -- at least $2 billion worth is sent to Israel annually. They have to put these basic facts on the table before pointing a finger at Hamas' rockets. We have said before we are ready to engage in a prolonged ceasefire if there is a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian lands -- they did not even try to respond to this offer.

There is a peace process. Hamas opposes that peace process, not because we like to be against it, but because we believe there is no real peace. The Israelis and the sponsors of the process, mainly the US administration, were not creating peace through negotiations, they were dismantling the Palestinian cause. If you go through the Oslo Agreement, you discover that this agreement pushed aside the main issues that created the conflict -the status of Jerusalem, the land, sovereignty of a future Palestinian state, the right of return for refugees, and our natural resources. They said all of these have to be negotiated afterward!

We have an Arab saying that goes: the one who is safe from punishment will act badly. Israel feels it is totally protected, that it can do anything -- it feels it is a country above the law when the US uses its veto to protect Israel at every turn. If the Arabs work to protect their own interests, talk to the Americans about their mutual interests, I think the Americans will see the value of re-balancing their strategic interests in the region.

At the moment, nobody in the region can view the US as an honest broker of peace. That is because of the history of American foreign policy. The US has to make a major change - they have to show that they are balanced on the Palestinian issue and not just following the line of the Israeli lobby in the US.

Mr. Hamdan, are there any US presidents you admire, and why?

George Washington, because he led his people to independence. And John F. Kennedy, because he tried to make a change for the better.

Mr. Mousawi, do you watch any American television shows? Any particular programs you admire?

My wife likes the Oprah show, and I watch it with her sometimes -- Oprah seems to cover some interesting topics of social value.

Christopher Herbert and Victoria Kataoka Rebuffet: Weekly Foreign Affairs Roundup

2009-11-06T16:11:48Z

This Week's Top Stories in Foreign Affairs:

Like Him or Not, Karzai's the Man in Afghanistan
SI Analysis: After opposition candidate Abdullah Abdullah withdrew from the election in protest that voting officials suspected of fraud during the first round would not be replaced, Hamid Karzai was officially attributed another term as President of Afghanistan. The decision to give the victory to Karzai without a runoff election was fraught with debate where some said that his tenure would be legally and effectively illegitimate to those that his victory was certain either way and it was better to get faster to the heart of the matter (e.g. running the country). The many challenges to improving conditions in Afghanistan remain the same and now unambiguously Karzai is the president and the world must now look to working with him to improve the governance, economy and security of Afghanistan. Sadly, Abdullah will not be part of the Karzai government, many analysts hoped he would serve as an effective opposition force. With election and its drama now over, all eyes are now on Obama to articulate what his strategy will be for Afghanistan. Some of the key questions, outside of the amount of troop increases and nature of the counter-insurgency strategy, are: How to reinforce the Afghan National Security Force by building up a central command or building on tribal and militia strengths? How to improve governance and reduce corruption? How to build up Afghanistan's economy and eliminate the opium trade? How to get Pakistan to crack down on militants taking refuge inside its borders? How to bolster the international political will -- especially of Muslim countries -- to continue supporting the Afghan effort?

Saudi Sorrows Over Yemen
SI Analysis: Worries -- that strife in Yemen will develop into a complex regional conflict -- grow as there are reports of cross-border skirmishes between government and two different hostile non-state actors. First, it is believed that Shia al-Houthis rebels launched an attack against Saudi and Yemeni border security forces in the Saada province and then claimed to have captured a mountaintop well within the Kingdom. Some believe this act was in retaliation of the Saudi governments support to Yemen against the Shia Zaydis, who make up the al-Houthis. Saudi Arabia and Yemen contend that Iran is supporting the rebels. Saudi Arabia reportedly retaliated with aerial bombing of rebel positions. Second, a government convoy was attacked by Sunni foreign militants -- likely Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula -- near the Saudi border in the Hadramawt region. This may be the unforseen consequences of Yemini President Ali Abdullah Saleh's laxist policy allowing foreign Sunni militants haven in Yemen (reportedly in exchange for their help in fighting the Shia Houthis). Tacit agreements have broken down as the Sunni-led independence movement in the south has grown and won support from some of the foreign militants, whose main target remains the government of Saudi Arabia. The massive influx of refugees and foreign militants from the Horn of Africa does nothing to help Yemen's fragile hold on security of its country. With a rebellion in the north, another in the south and a brewing terrorist threat growing throughout Yemen, it is likely that Saudi Arabia will take greater action within Yemen in an attempt to mitigate the security risk to the Kingdom.

War Reports:

AfPak
SI Analysis: Pakistan claims that its "Operation Rah-i-Nijat" (path to deliverance) in South Waziristan is going better than expected. Skeptics say that the Taliban will just return as soon as the government withdraws. Others say the government is not doing enough to thwart the positioning of foreign militants and certain Taliban. Meanwhile, the assymetrical terror response of the Taliban countinues: Two would-be suicide bombers accidentally detonated themselves outside of Kohat City in North-West Frontier Province; a massive car bomb explosion in Peshawar killed over 100 people; and a suicide bomber in Rawalpindi killed at least 30 people.

Iraq
SI Analysis: Some say that al-Malikis political manouvering is undermining security in Iraq. Efforts to remove potential rivals -- both Shia and Sunni -- from key areas have actually weakened the strength and comptencies of the overall force. Some point to the October 25 deadly blasts in Baghdad as proof that Maliki may have gone too far in his purges of over 12,000 officials in the Interior, Finance and Foreign Affairs Ministries as well as in the National Intelligence Service. Offical US and Iraqi officials contend that recent violence is due to the last vestiges of foreign militants and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia; they cite a recent arrests in Kirkuk and Abu Ghraib of a key Al Qaeda operative as evidence that the risk is being addressed.

Under the Radar:

What Response to Iran?
SI Analysis: Western governments extend Iran a last bit of lenience -- to accept a recent deal to send its enriched uranium to Russia for its conversion to nuclear fuel. With the likelihood of an agreement being reached dwindling, severe energy sanctions are the next step provided that Russia will go along. The possibility of a unilateral Israeli action increases with diminishing hopes of an agreement. Meanwhile, Israel's Navy says it stopped a ship with significant amounts of Iranian weapons cargo bound for Syria and eventually Hezbollah militants.

Low-Level Tensions in Lebanon Persists
SI Analysis: Political, internal security and border tensions make Lebanon a tinder-box for conflict. Politically, Michel Aoun, leader of the opposition Free Patriotic Movement, dashed hopes that Saad Hariri, Lebanon's PM-elect, would be able to form a Cabinet by week's end. Aoun says Hariri's proposals of ministerial appointments were inadequate. Meanwhile, there are distrubing reports that Sunni extremists are infiltrating Lebanon in an effort to undermine peace with Israel and to counter the Shia and moderate Sunni presence in the country: an obscure group called the Battalions of Ziad Jarrah claim responsability for the 11 September rocket attack on Israel; meanwhile, Lebanese Security Services made a key arrest of Sunni foreign militant connected with Fatah al-Islam, the Sunni extremist group; and the security services also reportedly thwarted an assassination attempt on a key Sunni cleric. All of this adds to recent speculation of increased posturing and counter-espionage ongoings between Israel and Hezbollah (along with the Lebanese intelligence services) involving the destruction of telecommunications towers in Southern Lebanon and the break-up of an Isreali spy ring earlier this year.

Tempered Expectations for Myanmar
SI Analysis: US Assistant Secretary of State Scot Marciel visits Myanmar (Burma) and meets with the ruling military Junta as well as opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Marciel says that hopes for any major democratic reform or advancement on the protection of human rights should be relatively low. Any progress will take place in small steps and on the junta's terms. However, analysts suggest that Burma's desire to lift banking and travel sanctions and to counter growing Chinese influence in the country could be motivation to allow some reform and perhaps allow Aung San Suu Kyi to participate in 2010 elections.

Analysis in Brief:

The Absence of a Middle East Peace Process: Peace seemed ever-more elusive after US Secretary of State Clinton appeared to concede to Israeli pressure to restrain rather than freeze settlement building. The Palestinian and Muslim world's response in general was very hostile. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he will not run for re-election in January elections citing Israeli settlements, dwindling American support and domestic division.

North Korea's Wager: In what is seen as a misguided effort to secure bi-lateral talks with the US, North Korea says that it had resumed its plutonium extraction activities.

Merkel's Charm Offensive: German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke before US Congress urging cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran's nuclear program and the international fight against Climate Change ahead of the December UN Conference Copenhagen.

This Roundup can be read on the Simple Intelligence Site and on the Huffington Post World Page.

Christopher Herbert and Victoria Kataoka Rebuffet: Weekly Foreign Affairs Roundup

2009-10-30T16:15:58Z

This Week's Top Stories in Foreign Affairs:

Iran Rejects Uranium Transfer Deal
SI Analysis: In a show of shrewd and bizarre diplomacy, Iran says that it was willing to cooperate with the West over its nuclear program but sought to change provisions in a deal reached last week that would have marked a massive detente in the standoff between the international community and Iran over its nuclear program. Essentially Iran is refusing to transfer its enriched uranium to Russia for its conversion to nuclear fuel without actually saying so. Iran's dithering and stalling was expected. What the international response will be is unknown at this point. There may be a brief effort to renew the deal, but unless Iran commits quickly and clearly to it strong energy sanctions are likely (if the US and Europe can still convince Russia to go along with them).

Zelaya To Return to Power in Honduras
SI Analysis: In a surprise development ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya will likely return to power in Honduras, after US diplomats reached an agreement with interim President Roberto Micheletti. Zelaya's return is dependent on Congressional approval of the deal that also stipulates that the 29 November Presidential elections must take place, the international sanctions against Honduras be lifted and a truth commission be created.

War Reports:

Afghanistan and Pakistan
SI Analysis: Ahead of runoff elections on 7 November between incumbent Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, international observers and experts warn of likely widespread fraud and proffer a pessimistic outlook for Afghan governance regardless of the result; the candidates launch reciprocal barbs -- with Abdullah at one point even threatening to boycott the polls; and a spate of Taliban attacks across the country aim at keeping people away from the polls. Perhaps surprising to Western pundits though, the Afghan sentiment is reportedly rather optimistic, as most Afghans believe that overall the situation in their country is improving. Meanwhile, two US helicopters crash resulting in 14 US casualties. US President Obama will wait on the results of the election to announce the new US strategy in Afghanistan, though two options both with troop increases ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 were subject to a round of war games to project likely results and response by the Taliban and Afghan government conducted by the Pentagon this week. Elsewhere, there was a flurry of debate over the New York Times story that contends Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President's brother and known thug and drug lord, is on the CIA payroll.
In Pakistan, US Secretary of State Clinton openly criticized the Pakistani state's leniency on certain Taliban and Islamist extremists. She also announced a series of controversial US aid packages to Pakistan. Just after her arrival a massive car bomb killed over 100 people in Peshawar. Pakistan took great umbrage to the criticism in light of its recent crackdown on militants in South Waziristan and Swat, Taliban factions that are responsible for a series of bloody attacks across Pakistan. But the tension between Pakistan and the US is really over the presence of Taliban and foreign extremists who take refuge in Pakistan, conducting attacks not in Pakistan but in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Iraq
SI Analysis: Following a massive terrorist attack in downtown Baghdad that killed over 155 people and wounded over 700, analysts are warning of the return of radical political Sunni insurgents to Iraq. This attack is the latest in a series ahead of the elections aimed to intimidate Iraqis and thwart the smooth governance of the Iraqi state. At best, this is an action by a relatively small and unpopular group of foreign militants whose power is waning. A recent report on the improved security situation in southern Iraq around Basra supports this hypothesis. At worst, it would suggest the re-emergence of both nationalistic and foreign extremists opposed to the Shia-majority Iraqi government. Meanwhile, a stalemate preventing the passing of an effective electoral law in Kirkuk endures, thus presenting an impediment to January elections taking place.

Under the Radar and Analysis in Brief:

Chinese and American Military Detente
SI Analysis: Chinese General Xu Caihou meets US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Washington in the first high level military meeting between the two countries in more than three years. Gates will reportedly reciprocate and travel to Beijing soon. This is a significant and positive development since US/Chinese military relations have suffered in recent years. The most notable events have been a series of naval standoffs in the South China Sea, cyberattacks on US governmental and military databases that have been traced back to China and China's destruction of one its own satellites as a clear demonstration of an effective and asymmetrical military deterrent to the US expansion and development in space. Moreover, the US has regularly accused China of opacity regarding its military growth and budget and expressed concern regarding its rapid increase in military expenditures.

Low Level Tension Endures in Lebanon
SI Analysis: As PM-elect Saad Hariri struggles, perhaps in vain, to form a coalition government (recent hangups have centered around opposition leader Michel Aoun's claim in the Telecommunications Ministry), tensions between Israel and Hezbollah (and Lebanon as a whole by extension) continue to simmer at a low but real intensity. Following a recent rocket attack from southern Lebanon into Israel, Israel retaliated with rocket fire. There were no casualties on either side. Following the skirmish, Lebanese and UN officials diffused four Katyusha rockets in an abandoned house in southern Lebanon, most likely a Hezbollah weapon's cache. It is important for the Lebanese government to be able to form a strong and legitimate centralized government in order to decrease the legitimacy of Hezbollah and its militia as an extra-governmental independent actor in southern Lebanon and to more effectively resolve its long-standing conflicts with Israel.

Indian Insurgents Act Out in West Bengal
SI Analysis: A train in the Indian state of West Bengal is hijacked and then released by Maoist Naxalite rebels there, an ongoing low level insurgency group.

Very Fragile Prospects of Peace Talks
SI Analysis: US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell travels to Israel ahead of Secretary of State Clinton, slated to arrive there Saturday and hopefully relaunch the peace process. Following her visit, she will meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the UAE. Meanwhile, intra-Palestinian tension rises as Hamas instructs Palestinians to boycott next year's elections called by President Mahmoud Abbas, citing Fatah's unilateral action on this matter.

You can read this Foreign Affairs Roundup at Simple Intelligence and on the Huffington Post.

Barak cancels Spain trip amid UNIFIL leadership crisis

2009-10-30T11:47:37Z

Defense Minister Ehud Barak cancelled his scheduled visit to Madrid on Friday as tension grows between the two countries due to a disagreement over the command of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
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Read more: Madrid, Lebanon, Spain, Home News

Lebanon: Israel arranged Katyusha fire to keep tensions high

2009-10-29T04:46:08Z

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman on Thursday suggested that Israel had arranged for collaborators in his country to fire Katyusha rockets at the Galilee earlier this week, in a bid to keep tensions high in the area.
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Michael B. Laskoff: Obama Strikes Back -- First Year Agenda, Phase III

2009-10-27T15:35:54Z

Conservatives exult. Liberals despair. The public option is dead. Not one week ago that all seemed perfectly true. The question is what changed between then and Harry Reid's surprising pronouncement recently. After much consideration, I have come to conclude that the answer is absolutely nothing. Rather, the Obama agenda has simply entered Phase III, in which a calculating and effective administration strikes back.

Before delving Phase III, let's review what has already happened. Phase I was Camelot: Obama and team used blinding speed and overwhelming public popularity to push through reforms. GM and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy and taken right back out (in record time). The financial system was stabilized via huge federal intervention, albeit one that has not resulted in sufficient reform. Foreign policy was overhauled to generally good results. (One can reasonably argue that Lebanon stayed in the Western camp because of the Cairo speech.)

Phase II was moderation and side stepping the tea bags. Obama backed off on some on some his campaign pledges, like gays in the military. Such sacrifices make those of us on the left unhappy, but they also rob the religious right of rallying cries. In addition, the president proved his 'moderate chops' by acting like a leader of a grand coalition rather than the head of an overwhelming majority. Like so many others, I was lulled by this into thinking that the administration had lost its spine, but in reality we were all missing the strategy: let the teabaggers have their fiery, fleeting moment and burn out. They're not gone, but it would be shocking to see Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich and Fox News whip up such a frenzy again anytime soon.

So now we find ourselves in Phase III: Obama Strikes Back. The Republicans are still leaderless; their teabaggers have hung up their Lipton for the winter (with nothing to show for their summer of anti-love); and the Republican Congressional caucus has demonstrated that it simply will not agree to health care and finance reform under any circumstance. (It's not so much a brave voice of opposition as a thrashing cacophony of obstruction.) Meanwhile, two-thirds of Americans still want health care reform, and the Blue Dogs have come to understand that supporting a public option will not cost them their seats in 2010. Add all that up and you get meaningful, if imperfect, health care reform, this year. And once that's done, I think that we can look forward to an overhaul of the financial system as well.

Beyond that, all bets are off. My gay friends will still be denied their civil rights. Innocent Uigers will continue to languish in something GITMO-like. US soldiers will be dying in Afghanistan -- the once necessary war that has gone on too long. And of course, too many Americans will be without jobs. Nevertheless, important business of national significance will have have been conducted to our collective and mutual benefit. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

Patrick Nayyar, Conrad Stanisclaus Mulholland Charged With Trying To Give Weapons To Hezbollah

2009-10-27T15:11:01Z

NEW YORK — Two New York City men have been charged with trying to provide weapons, ammunition and vehicles to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Forty-five-year-old Patrick Nayyar of Queens and 43-year-old Conrad Stanisclaus Mulholland were indicted Monday in federal court in Manhattan on a charge of trying to provide material support to a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

Lebanon earns Guinness World Record for largest bowl of hummus ever

2009-10-24T13:01:21Z

About 250 Lebanese chefs made the largest bowl of hummus ever recorded on Saturday, earning the group a Guinness World Record for the feat.
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After Lebanon war devastation, Hezbollah suburb now booming

2009-10-23T05:31:09Z

Dahiyah - meaning the suburb in Arabic - is the Hezbollah stronghold that was heavily targeted by Israel during its war with the militant Shiite group during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. The bombardment leveled Hezbollah's headquarters as well as entire blocks across the neighborhood.
...

No Boys Allowed: Pink Taxi Cabs Exclusively For Women

2009-10-22T17:18:26Z

Women in Puebla, Mexico who are tired of being gawked and leered at by cab drivers have a new option - female-only taxis.

Pink Taxi is a government-backed fleet of 35 cabs driven exclusively by women, and each is equipped with a beauty kit, an alarm button and a GPS system.

"Some of the woman who have been on board tell us how male taxi drivers cross the line and try to flirt with them and make inappropriate propositions," said taxi driver Aida Santos, who drives one of the compact, four-door taxis with a tracking device and an alarm button that notifies emergency services. "In the Pink Taxi they won't have that feeling of insecurity, and they feel more relaxed."

The taxi service creates new jobs for women in a traditionally male-dominated field, but women's rights activists feel the taxis do not fully address the harassment issue.

Similar women-only taxi services have cropped up from Moscow to Lebanon, where women have expressed that the taxis are a much safer and more comfortable means of transportation.

Ladies, have you felt harassed in taxicabs or on public transportation? Share your stories with us at impact@huffingtonpost.com.

India: Single Women Break Their Silence

2009-10-22T10:07:54Z

By Nitin Jugran Bahuguna

NEW DELHI, Oct 22 (IPS) - It has been more than eight years since the January 2001 earthquake struck the Indian state of Gujarat, but Hansa Rathore still cannot quite shake off memories of that not too distant past -- all because it left her a widow.

Twenty-nine-year-old Rathore was just one of thousands of women widowed in the deadly earthquake, one of the worst in India's recorded history. The disaster that left nearly 20,000 people dead in its wake changed her life forever.

"My mother was widowed in the same calamity; my house was destroyed and I had no means to feed my nine-month-old son," she recalls.

She soon learned what it meant to survive in a cloistered conservative community that socially ostracised widows, imposing cruel restrictions on them. "I got no help from my in-laws and was forced to shelter literally in the open, rigging up a makeshift room with sacks and a tin roof. I had no access to work, food or health services for my son, who became very ill," she states.

Sudha Jha, 49, of Katihar district in the northern state of Bihar was widowed in 1998 and has since struggled to raise her three sons and one daughter single-handedly.

"My in-laws didn't want me to stay with them after my husband died, and it was tough getting work to feed and educate my children," says Jha matter-of-factly. She adds that one of the most direct impacts of widowhood was restricted mobility, which often makes widows invisible and unable to access work outside the home.

"A widow is not treated with respect. At times she is still expected to shave her head, wear extremely simple and course white clothes, forbidden to wear jewelry or make-up, and is forced to eat separately, the food consisting of a frugal vegetarian diet," Jha points out. "Why should widows undergo such tortures? Men don't face such discrimination when their wives die; they just marry again!"

Rich or poor, widows struggle against a deep social stigma in most communities in India. Even more ostracised are women who live alone, either because they are unmarried or have been deserted by their husbands. Many married women are trapped in dehumanising personal situations in the family, often enduring battering, humiliation and physical and mental cruelty, unable or unwilling to strike out on their own.

Widowed, abandoned and destitute, Rathore and Jha have resolved to change their predicament and fight for their basic human rights. With the assistance of ActionAid, a non-governmental organisation that started work in the earthquake-affected areas of Gujarat in 2002, Rathore mobilised single women to form 'Ekal Nari Shakti Manch' ('Single Women Power Association') in the same year. Jha, on the other hand, became a staunch advocate of a single women's group in Bihar, called 'Ekal Nari Sangharsha Samiti' ('Single Women's Struggle Committee').

These two women, together with six other single women representing the states of Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Orissa and Madhya Padesh, converged in the national capital early this month to launch a 'National Forum for Single Women's Rights'.

Their demands, which they have presented to the government, include a monthly social security pension of 1,000 rupees (21.65 U.S. dollars), free health care for single women and their children, right to work, rights to property in both natal and marital homes and allotment of land to build a house.

According to the 2001 census by the government -- the latest available data -- there are 36 million single women in India. But activists dismiss this figure as a conservative estimate, saying it only includes legally divorced and separated women and widows. Abandoned, deserted or unmarried women remain outside the ambit of government's policy and welfare schemes.

"Over 36 million women in India are single, yet there is no attention being paid to the issues that concern this sector," stated Dr Ginny Shrivastava, a social activist from Rajasthan state in northwest India, during the forum.

Thirty-something Saraswati Singh of 'Ekta Mahila Manch' ('Association of Empowered Single Women') in Jharkhand state in the east was engaged to a youth from her village only to break her engagement when she decided to put her education ahead of marriage. But it appears she had a deeper reason for her decision.

"After witnessing the physical and mental torture that my elder sister's husband and in-laws inflicted on her because she brought insufficient dowry after marriage, I resolved never to marry myself," Singh confides. But ironically, this decision led to another form of discrimination at home.

"I was doubly stigmatised, once because I was not married, and twice because I often ventured outdoors in connection with the association's work. My family told me I had lost my caste and forbade me to enter the kitchen [considered the most clean and sacred room of the house in conservative Indian communities, which women can only enter after their morning ablutions]," she says. "Also, my brother became afraid that I would try to stake a claim to our father's property, and so persuaded my father to sign over his retirement benefits to him," she adds.

In 2005, the government launched an ambitious national employment programme to ensure that all poor people got at least 100 days of employment in a year. Initially dubbed 'National Rural Employment Guarantee Act' (NREGA), the government later renamed it the 'Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act' on Oct. 2, 2009 (Gandhi's birthday).

It is thus ironic that groups like single women, whose empowerment mattered most to Gandhi, find that they are not benefitting from the scheme, observe Singh and other single women activists.

Avengillista (who gave only one name), representing Jharkhand in the organising committee of the forum, points, out that programmes like NREGA have left them out on various grounds.

"In some instances, we are told we are too young and not fit to work. In others, we are told that since we have small children, it is not possible to give us any work, and older women are not considered at all," she says.

During the forum the government gave assurances that it would take steps to correct such injustices.

"Exclusion of single women from one of the most important poverty alleviation programmes of the country -- NREGA -- will amount to undermining the stated objective of the government's Eleventh Five-Year National Plan [that envisions] inclusive growth," says Dr Syeda Hameed, a member of the Planning Commission of India, which formulates and approves the five-year plan of the government. "We will recommend that the scheme adopt new guidelines in order to ensure that single women get their rightful entitlement to the scheme."

According to Girija Vyas, chairperson of the National Commission for Women (NCW), all evidence shows that single women are socially disadvantaged in more ways than one. "While widows constitute 33 percent of women who experience sexual harassment, when it comes to basic indicators like access to food and health care, they fare even worse," she pointed out during the gathering.

Vyas has declared that the NCW will advocate with the government to introduce specific plans and programmes for single women and find ways to provide them employment. "The NCW is committed to reviewing and expanding the legislation on women's right to property and ensuring that women would inherit their share from their parents and also their in-laws," she stressed.

Amid the difficulties that confront them, the women behind the forum and similar undertakings have made a firm resolve to address these gender inequities.

"We are here to break decades of silence and redefine societal perspectives on single women," says Singh of the Association of Empowered Single Women.

"We want to make sure that the day-to-day struggles that single women are waging against unjust social customs, denial of social entitlements and the various forms of violence that are perpetrated against them are made visible and known to everyone," she adds.

Read more at IPS News

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Leon T. Hadar: Getting the Vietnam Analogy Right in Afghanistan

2009-10-21T15:20:51Z

The ghosts of the Vietnam War seem to be hanging around the White House Situation Room as President Barack Obama and his national security aides are debating a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, and in particular whether to deploy more U.S. troops to that country. Indeed, if to judge by their required reading list, Vietnam is very much on the minds of President Obama and other officials, lawmakers and pundits in Washington.

The headline above a recent report in The Wall Street Journal,"Behind the War Debate, a Battle of Two Books Rages," seem to illustrate the way supporters and opponents of increasing U.S. troop level in Afghanistan have been making use of what they see as the lessons of Vietnam, and applying them to the debates over the process of presidential national security policymaking and civilian-military relationship.

Hence, political scientist Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster which depicts a President Lyndon Johnson being pressed to escalate the war in Vietnam by a somewhat narrow-minded military is being cited by those skeptical about the recommendation by General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, to increase the number of troops there.

At the same time, military analyst Lewis Sorley's A Better War, which describes the administration of President Richard Nixon under public and Congressional pressure to get out of Vietnam and rejecting what could have become an effective counter-insurgency strategy by the military, is being touted by those who leaning in the direction of General McChrystal's recommendations.

Applying historical analogies à la "the lessons of..." to contemporary foreign policy dilemmas could certainly be instructive. As President Obama prepares to make his decisions in Afghanistan, he should consider the pitfalls faced by U.S. presidents, starting with John Kennedy as they tried to calibrate U.S. strategic choices in Vietnam by drawing on the input of their military and civilian advisors and juggling conflicting political pressures from the public, Congress and the bureaucracy.

But the historical analogies of Vietnam could become confusing if not misleading when one shifts the focus from the decision making processes to ideological premises of U.S. involvement the Cold War. In fact, Obama and his advisors should recall that as President Johnson and the members of his national security team were deliberating whether to expand U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, it was the specter Munich 1938 that was haunting Washington then, and that the lessons of British attempts to appease Nazi Germany's dictator Adolph Hitler were being employed in a way that seemed to be leaving the White House with no other choice but to hang tough and stay the course in Vietnam lest U.S. policymakers would be perceived as lacking the resolve to stand-up to Hitler-like aggressors.

The reason that the lessons of Munich in the context of World War II seemed be so relevant to U.S. policymakers during the Vietnam War taking place at the height of the Cold War was that American intervention in the two wars were driven by grand Manichean narratives in which a U.S.-led Western alliance was confronting a powerful global aggressor representing a threatening and dynamic ideology.

Indeed, for the American foreign policy establishment as well as for the general public, North Vietnam was perceived to be an integral part of a monolithic Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, including its Eastern European satellites, China and Cuba. The only serious debate in Washington was over the kind of mix of diplomacy and military force that the U.S. needed to employ in defending South Vietnam and confronting North Vietnam. And in that context, it wasn't difficult for the "hawks" in Washington to suggest that just like Czechoslovakia in 1938, South Vietnam was being threatened by a regional satellite of an antagonistic global adversary and thus required forceful American military support.

Recognizing that nationalism and not adherence to communist ideology or solidarity with the Soviet Union and China was the main driving force behind North Vietnamese policy could have changed the strategic calculations of policymakers in Washington. Indeed, the growing realization that there was no Soviet-led global communist bloc led to the U.S. opening to China -- which ended-up going to war against Vietnam -- and to the use of the "China Card" in dealing with the Soviet Union. And it helped accelerate U.S. détente with the Soviet Union as well West German rapprochement with Eastern Europe or "Ostpolitik."

In the aftermath of 9/11 and in the period leading to the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it seemed for a while as though President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors would be successful in constructing a new grand Manichean narrative that conceived of a U.S.-led West confronting a global Islamofascist threat or a Caliphate-in-the-making that allegedly included Al Qaeda, a radical Muslim-Sunni fundamentalist terrorist group; Taliban, an Afghani-Pashtun and Sunni-fundamentalist movement allied with U.S. partners, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; Iran, a Muslim-Shiite fundamentalist state and Hizbollah, a Lebanese-Arab Shiite movement as well as the secular Syrian Ba'ath regime and the Palestinian-Sunni Hamas movement, elected to power in a U.S.-sponsored election and a mish-mash of national and regional militant Muslim groups -- in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, and in places like Chechnya (Russia), Kashmir (India), and Xinjiang (China).

In a way, it was the costly and failed Iraq War that helped disprove the Islamofascist myth -- after all, the collapse of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban helped strengthen Iran -- and undermine the ideological premises of short-lived grand narrative that steered the U.S. into the war in Mesopotamia while preventing it from achieving its original and limited goals in Afghanistan (destroying Al Qaeda). Indeed, any serious discussion of the political realities in the Greater Middle East taking place in Washington today would have to assume that the U.S. has to deal today -- including in Afghanistan -- not with a unified and monolithic adversary or "axis" but with a hodgepodge of Muslim governments and movements that lack any shared ideology or common interests.

To apply the historical analogies here, the choices facing the U.S. in Afghanistan are unlike the dilemmas the U.S. confronted during the Vietnam War, in the same way that the "loss" of South Vietnam wasn't akin to the destruction of Czechoslovakia by Hitler's Germany. Even under a scenario under which the Taliban ends up controlling even more territory than it already does today, the impact on core U.S. national interest would be limited. Local and regional players (India, Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) would be forced to work together or separately to prevent the country from becoming a source of instability and a center of international terrorism. Hence, taking limited steps towards securing U.S. narrow goals of preventing Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a military base should not be regarded as a new and dramatic chapter in a grand narrative but as a cost-effective exercise in fighting terrorism.

Ethan Bronner: In The Mideast, Force Trumps Diplomacy

2009-10-20T09:58:38Z

JERUSALEM As the Obama administration tries to broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is a dark truth lurking: force has produced clearer results in this dispute than talk.

Lebanon elected to UN Security Council

2009-10-15T14:16:33Z

Politically divided Lebanon was among the five countries elected to the UN Security Council on Thursday.
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Kevin Sullivan: A Soft Power Opportunity for Iran

2009-10-14T18:45:35Z

During his recent visit to New York for the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, much to the chagrin of officials in Washington and elsewhere, repeatedly insisted that the United States should view the Islamic Republic of Iran as a friend. Iran, Ahmadinejad proclaimed, is "an opportunity for everyone." This alleged "opportunity" must have come as news to Iran's Mideast neighbors -- especially Israel. With its well-documented penchant for supporting terrorism and upheaval throughout the region, it's difficult to see any opportunity in Tehran's often hollow overtures.

But in the neighboring country of Yemen, a very real opportunity to make good on its promise of friendship is rapidly emerging for Iran. Deprived of ink and oxygen by wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a bloody and volatile conflict has been raging in the unstable northern Yemeni province of Sa'ada. Houthi Rebels -- Shia disciples of the late Zaidi leader Hussein al-Houthi -- have for five years engaged in an on-again, off-again battle with Yemen's central government for sovereignty of the nation's mountainous north. The conflict reached its apparent apex in recent months, when the Sunni-dominated government in Sana'a unleashed what it termed "Operation Scorched Earth"; an aggressive and intentionally overwhelming summer assault from both land and air intended to shock the Shia insurgents into submission.

The conflict has created a growing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, as approximately 150,000 refugees trapped between Yemen's warring factions have been forced to flee their homes and take to makeshift camps near the southern border of Saudi Arabia. Both Riyadh and UN relief workers have to date struggled getting essential aid to these Yemeni refugees, as both Sana'a and the Houthi rebels place blame on each other for the prolonged conflict. The group Human Rights Watch recently accused both factions of endangering civilians and perpetuating the refugee crisis; while Yemen's central government continues to accuse Shia agents in Iran and Iraq of supplying and aiding the rebels.

Tehran, for its own part, has done little to assuage Yemeni -- and, for that matter, Saudi -- concerns of an Iranian hand in the conflict beyond rote denial and perfunctory statements. Sana'a, certainly not lacking in its own paranoia and fear of all things Shia, claims to have recovered Iranian-made short range missiles and other armaments from Houthi weapons depots. And just last week, one of Yemen's top Sunni clerical figures, Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zandani, placed blame for the burgeoning civil war squarely upon the Islamic Republic. "The way events are moving in this country," exclaimed al-Zandani, "indicates to us that Iran wants to export the Shia ideology by force, which we utterly reject."

However, beyond Yemeni accusations, there has been little evidence thus far pointing to Iranian involvement in the conflict. With Tehran moving tentatively toward engagement with Washington over its controversial nuclear program, it would do little good for Iran to fuel a humanitarian crisis on the border of America's primary Arab ally in the region. The concerns over Iranian misdoings being voiced in Riyadh and other Mideast capitals are more often rooted in geopolitical brinkmanship and serious misconceptions about Iran's range in the region.

But then, that's the funny thing about misconceptions -- often, they can create a window of opportunity for the misunderstood; and in the case of Iran, the conflict in Yemen could potentially serve as a leveraging device of goodwill in its efforts at Western rapprochement. Whether actual or exaggerated, Iran may possess the influence to manage and foster a ceasefire in Yemen's war torn north.

Since its inception, the Islamic Republic has invested in various proxies to aid it in its war against the West. Whether it was Sunni Hamas in the Palestinian territories, or Shia Hezbollah in the Levant, Iran quickly realized after its long and bloody war with Iraq that direct military engagement with the United States was not feasible. Instead, Tehran offered up its services to the dissidents and dispossessed of the Middle East. For these aggrieved groups, Iran provided the training and tools to resist and terrorize their enemies. For Iran, these proxies gave them legitimacy on the so-called Arab Street, as well as a tool for pressuring Western forces in the Middle East.

Using those same resources it routinely employs for asymmetric upheaval in places like Iraq and Palestine, Iran possesses the means to alter the Yemeni conflict in several ways. One, Tehran could deploy its diplomats and prominent Shia clerical figures to assist -- alongside UN monitors and Saudi officials -- in the mediation of an immediate armistice between Sana'a and the Houthis. Using its infamous Quds Force, Iran's Revolutionary Guard could divert resources and training away from its more insidious activities, and instead work to integrate Yemen's Shiites into the social and governmental fabric in Sana'a. Inverting the model it used in Lebanon, Tehran could employ, pacify, and ultimately help disarm Yemen's aggrieved Shia community.

If this sounds unlikely or far-fetched, that's because it is. Still, with just a little imagination and reorganization, Iran could transform itself into a kind of public defender for Shia minorities all around the Mideast -- call it a Peace Corps for Quds.

In the case of Yemen, Iran could earn points with the Saudis by helping to avert a refugee crisis on the Saudi border. And by pacifying the north, Tehran will free Yemen's military to focus its attention on Al Qaeda operatives in the south, earning Iran more points in Sana -- and in Washington.

Such an effort would require a massive sea change of thought inside the Islamic Republic; stripping the country's power brokers of their anti-American crutch. But in its ideological stead would be the seedlings of a positive soft power role for Iran in the Middle East. Instead of fermenting upheaval in Sunni-ruled regimes with sizable Shiite populations -- as it once did in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait -- Iran could aid in the politicization and, when necessary, the pacification of dissidents and insurgents throughout the region.

Lebanese Blogger Leila Abu-Saba Mourned

2009-10-14T10:19:18Z

Lebanese-American blogger Leila Abu-Saba has died after a long battle with cancer. Bloggers who have interacted with her over the years recall her merits and endless quest for peace.

Writing as Bedounia at Dove's Eye View, Leila started blogging in January 2004. In that month she wrote:

The point of this blog is to focus on a vision for peace. Concentrating on the solution is the only way to bring that about.

When her father died in 2006, Leila wrote:

Elias Abu-Saba lived the values I hope to promote in this blog: mutual tolerance, social justice, and concern for the earth. He wanted to see those values embodied in Lebanon, his beloved homeland, as well as in

America, his adopted country. Because many people in Lebanon and around the world read Dove's Eye View, I am going to tell you some important things you must know about him.

More on Mr Abu-Saba's amazing story here.

Sympathies from around the world poured in after Leila's death on October 12.

From Egypt, The Arabist has fond memories of Leila, saying:

Leila Abu Saba, of the blog Dove’s Eye View, passed away yesterday after a long struggle with cancer. Laila was a frequent reader of this blog and, especially in its early days, a prolific commenter. She was dedicated to peaceful coexistence among Palestinians and Israelis and, more generally, Muslims, Christians and Jews. We agreed on these issues but disagreed about her pacifism (or my anti-pacifism). She was an optimist, as this entry on her blog from a year ago, “Hello Kind World” shows.

Fellow Lebanese-American blogger Dr Assad Abu Khalil, or the Angry Arab, writes:

I never met Leila, but she often communicated with me on Facebook and on email. She even brought me books from the Middle East. She once participated in a “fly a kite for peace” affair in Oakland, and I wrote some smart ass comments and mocked it. She was not pleased.

John Ballard, at Newshoggers, is distraught:

Leila Abu-Saba has died of cancer.

A part of me dies with her.

I cannot write any more about her yet.

At About.com: Middle East Issues, Pierre Tristam notes:

We'd exchanged many emails and links over the few years we knew each other through our sites. She never let anyone imagine that her voice would be silenced. Not so soon. Or that her copious world of words would become a memorial. But there they are. Let's hope the site, Leila's testament and sanctuary to supreme civility, never disappears.

And Canadian Maryanne Stroud Gabbani, who lives in Egypt, borrows a title from one of Leila's blog posts to mourn her friend. In A Dove Has Flown, Maryanne writes:

One of the wonders of the internet is the ability to keep up with friends of ours from all over the world…and to make these friends in the first place. Many years ago when I first started blogging, Leila Abu-Saba posted some comments on my blog and we became net friends. We followed each other's blogs and when we discovered Facebook we connected there as well. For quite a few years, Leila was battling first breast cancer and then liver cancer as well and just recently she lost her fight to stay with us.

She continues:

The title to this piece is a link to Leila's blog post which was a meditation on cancer, forgiveness, and politics. I don't know anyone who could have expressed this better. Friends of hers are making sure that her books get published, the task that she was trying hard to finish in her last days. Look for them and let her words, thoughts, and spirit live on.

Leila's manifesto for hope is a good place to start.

On Twitter, Middle East commentator Marc Lynch remembers:

Lebanese blogger Mustafa, who blogs at Beirut Spring, shares similar sentiments:

And her sister-in-law Debbie McLeod writes:

May her soul rest in peace.

Today in History - Oct. 14

2009-10-14T00:00:58Z

Today is Wednesday, Oct. 14, the 287th day of 2009. There are 78 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

Exploding shell caused blast at Hezbollah home

2009-10-13T15:34:26Z

BEIRUT — A blast at a Hezbollah member's home in southern Lebanon was caused by an exploding shell and injured one person, Lebanon's army said Tuesday.

Monday night's explosion occurred in a garage, and Lebanese security officials said the building might have been used to store weapons – a violation of the U.N. resolution that ended the monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

Lebanon: Shell caused blast at Hezbollah official's home

2009-10-13T07:46:14Z

The Lebanese Army on Tuesday backed Hezbollah's claim that one person was wounded and none killed in an explosion in the southern Lebanese village of Tayr Filsi a day earlier.
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Read more: Tayr Filsi, Lebanon, Home News