Is Saudi Arabia using the price of oil to pressure Iran?

A lot of people think so, both in Middle East and elsewhere. Specifically, there is a widespread perception that the Saudis, in cooperation with the other Gulf oil producers, are deliberately allowing the price of oil to drift down--and that a key motive is to put pressure on Iran, for which reduced oil income is much more damaging than it is for Saudi Arabia. The NBC News piece below is only one that has made this case recently.

One factor that adds plausibility to this analysis is that the possible use of the Saudi oil weapon for this purpose has been telegraphed by a number of signals over the past several months. One example is the notorious Washington Post op-ed written in November 2006 by the very well-connected Saudi security analyst Nawaf Obaid. The warning in the subtitle captured the main thrust of the piece: Stepping into Iraq: Saudi Arabia Will Protect Sunnis if the U.S. Leaves.

Obaid's piece was officially disavowed, but most people took it as (deniably) conveying the genuine alarm felt by the Saudi government, along with other Arab governments, at the prospect that the US would pull out of Iraq and allow it to be taken over by Shiite parties that they regard as simply Iranian proxies. Among the other counter-measures that Obaid suggested the Saudis might then feel compelled to take, there was a significant reference to the price of oil.

[....] Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, [....] said in a speech last month that "since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited." If it does, one of the first consequences will be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.

Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and thwart Iranian influence there. Senior Iraqi tribal and religious figures, along with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries, have petitioned the Saudi leadership to provide Iraqi Sunnis with weapons and financial support. Moreover, domestic pressure to intervene is intense. [....]

Just a few months ago it was unthinkable that President Bush would prematurely withdraw a significant number of American troops from Iraq. But it seems possible today, and therefore the Saudi leadership is preparing to substantially revise its Iraq policy. Options now include providing Sunni military leaders (primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency) with the same types of assistance -- funding, arms and logistical support -- that Iran has been giving to Shiite armed groups for years. [JW: Since the Sunni Arab "insurgents" have long been getting support and assistance and sanctuary from the Sunni Arab world--though perhaps from technically non-governmental sources in a lot of cases--this is a bit rich. But be that as it may....]

Another possibility includes the establishment of new Sunni brigades to combat the Iranian-backed militias. [!] Finally, Abdullah may decide to strangle Iranian funding of the militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today's high prices. The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funneling hundreds of millions each year to Shiite militias in Iraq and elsewhere.

Well, there's a good deal that's disingenuous, one-sided, and otherwise tendentious in this picture of the situation. And it's safe to say that the well-being of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority is not the only concern of the Saudi government, though that's probably one element--there is also the matter of Iran's nuclear weapons program, for example, and its lavish sponsorship of Hezbollah in Lebanon. But for present purposes, the message delivered in this piece (which is worth reading, or re-reading, in full) seems more interesting and significant than the overall accuracy of the analysis (which is not totally inaccurate, either).

So perhaps they've decided not to wait until the US leaves Iraq before hitting Iran in the pocketbook? If this is indeed the strategy being followed by the Saudis (and other Gulf Arab oil producers), then it will be very expensive for them in terms of lost revenue. But their willingness to use the oil weapon against Iran at this point, despite the cost, is not implausible. It would be only one more sign of the obvious--which is that for a whole range of reasons a number of Arab governments are intensely alarmed about Iran's current policies and the threat of increased Iranian power and influence in the region.

=> On the other hand, there could also be all sorts of other reasons why the price of oil is dropping. Over the decades, it's been clear that the Saudis like to cultivate the impression that they have omnipotent control over the world oil market, even if it's not true, and that they can manipulate world oil prices for their own political ends, even when they can't. So perhaps this explanation of the falling price of oil is overly ingenious (or gullible).

[Update 2/1/2007: More recent reports, which seem to indicate that the Saudis are actually cutting oil production rather than increasing it, suggest that they are indeed bluffing again.]

But whether or not the Saudis are actually pulling the strings in this matter, there's every sign that the rapid drop in oil revenues is genuinely making the Iranian regime nervous.

Read the piece below, judge for yourself, and stay tuned ....

--Jeff Weintraub

==========================
NBC News
January 26, 2007
Are Saudis waging an oil-price war on Iran?
Falling fuel costs probably not a coincidence, oil traders say
By Robert Windrem
Investigative producer

Oil traders and others believe that the Saudi decision to let the price of oil tumble has more to do with Iran than economics.

Their belief has been reinforced in recent days as the Saudi oil minister has steadfastly refused calls for a special meeting of OPEC and announced that the nation is going to increase its production, which will send the price down even farther.

Saudi Oil Minister Ibrahim al-Naimi even said during a recent trip to India that oil prices are headed in the "right direction."

Not for the Iranians.

Moreover, the traders believe the Saudis are not doing this alone, that the other Sunni-dominated oil producing countries and the U.S. are working together, believing it will hurt majority-Shiite Iran economically and create a domestic crisis for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose popularity at home is on the wane. The traders also believe (with good reason) that the U.S. is trying to tighten the screws on Iran financially at the same time the Saudis are reducing the Islamic Republic’s oil revenues.

For the Saudis, who fear Iran’s religious, geopolitical and nuclear aspirations, the decision to lower the price of oil has a number of benefits, the biggest being to deprive Iran of hard currency. It also may create unrest in a country that is its rival on a number of levels and permits the Saudis to show the U.S. that military action may not be necessary.

The Saudis firmly and publicly deny this, saying it’s all about economics. Not everyone believes them.

“If under normal circumstances, the price of oil was falling this dramatically [17% in the last few months], Saudi Arabia would have already called for a special OPEC meeting,” says one oil trader. “It’s got to be something else and that something else has to be Iran.”

Costs higher in Iran

The trader notes that Iran, OPEC’s second largest producer, is “in trouble” both in the short and long term. Iran’s oil reserves, he notes, are declining more rapidly than Saudi Arabia’s and are more difficult to extract. While a barrel of oil costs the Saudis $2-3 to get out of the ground and to market, that same barrel costs Iran as much as $15-18.

“Iran does have some oil that costs them $8-10 but most of it is in that upper range,” he said.

Moreover, Iran has a large domestic market for oil, particularly fuel oil, which Saudi Arabia, with its smaller population and milder climate, does not.

Perhaps more important, because Iran has limited refining capability, it must import more than 40 percent its gasoline, making it the second largest importer of gasoline in the world after the United States, according to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency.

And since Iran sells gasoline at a rate comparable to the rest of the Gulf states — around 33 cents a gallon — it must subsidize the price on a massive scale. In fact, say traders, Iran is paying about $1.50 per gallon to subsidize domestic gasoline consumption — the world market price of gasoline minus the tiny price per gallon — a practice that is costing Iran billions of dollars annually and eating up most of the state-run oil company’s discretionary funds.

Iran has other problems that make it vulnerable. Inflation is officially running at 17 percent, the highest since the revolution, and unemployment is at 11 percent. U.S. intelligence, though, believes the real figures are much higher, with inflation as high as 50 percent and joblessness much higher among the country's restless youth). In addition, capital outflow is estimated at $50 billion annually and budget deficits are a chronic problem, leading to overseas borrowing.

And none of this takes into account the possibility that the United Nations will impose harsher sanctions if Iran continues its work on nuclear weapons technology.

Political fallout

There are domestic political consequences to such a convergence, note traders and officials in both the U.S. and Iran. Ahmadinejad was elected on campaign promises that he would end corruption and better distribute the nation’s oil wealth. He has been unable to do either; now, with declining oil revenues, his job will be even more difficult.

One sign of this is the street demonstrations he has faced each time his administration has so much as floated the suggestion of a small increase in the price of gasoline. To counter his inability to fulfill his domestic promises, Ahmadinejad has played the nationalism/nuclear card, accusing the West of trying to stifle Iran’s legitimate energy needs.

How long and how successfully he can play these cards is debatable. Municipal elections last month unveiled a lot of dissatisfaction as opposition parties swept through municipal majlises throughout the country. His rival in the 2005 presidential election, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, has criticized him publicly for the first time, as have others close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Student demonstrations and local newspapers are becoming increasingly critical of the “dictator.”

Meanhwhile, the Bush administration is only too happy to see Ahmadinejad's deteriorating domestic situation — and to let the Saudis further turn the screws. Moreover, administration officials are hinting they will be applying financial pressures to complement the Saudis. (As one official said recently, Iran cannot operate in the oil markets without using dollars.)

The officials did not reveal how the pressures would work, but said they are underway. The U.S. blacklisted the state-owned Bank Sepah, Iran’s fifth largest, in recent weeks and last month, Iranian Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh acknowledged having difficulties in financing oil projects. Commerzbank of Germany also has announced that it will no longer handle dollar-currency transactions for Iranian banks at its New York branch.

One trader is convinced that the U.S. and Saudis sealed a secretive deal on Iran when Vice President Dick Cheney met with King Abdullah in what appeared to be a hastily arranged summit in Riyadh in late November 2006. There have been lower-profile meetings as well that could have dealt with the arrangement.

Equipment problems

Long term, traders say that the Iranian oil will become even more expensive, if not impossible, to extract because Iran does not have access to up-to-date exploration and drilling equipment. Only two countries, the U.S. and Canada, manufacture the equipment needed for the job and they simply do not sell to Iran. Iranian attempts to get the Japanese to sell some of their equipment — not the same quality as the North American equipment but adequate — failed when the U.S. pressured the Japanese.

The biggest field discovered in the past 35 years, at Azadegan, near the Iraqi border, is considered “geologically complex,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and thus will be costly to develop. The lower world oil prices, the more difficult it becomes to make the field profitable and to get foreign investors to do complicated joint ventures with the national oil company.

Rafsanjani is known to believe that Iran should not continue to anger the U.S. and should align itself with the Americans in a fight against the Sunnis, an opportunity that is slipping away as Iran angers the U.S. in Iraq and on the nuclear front. And this week, reformist Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri joined in the criticism.

For the U.S. and Saudis, this can only be seen as good news.

Race & politics in France - A revealing incident?

[From David T at Harry's Place --Jeff Weintraub]
January 27, 2007
Le chagrin et la pitié

The Sorrow:

The French Socialist Party has voted to expel a senior member for saying there are too many black players in the national football team.
A panel decided remarks by Georges Freche, head of Languedoc-Roussillon south-east regional government, were incompatible with Socialist values.

The Pity:

On Thursday, a court fined Mr Freche 15,000 euros ($19,000) for describing Algerians who fought on France's side in the Algerian war of independence as sub-human.

[P.S. According the the BBC story quoted above, although M. Freche is leaving the Socialist Party, he "has no intention" of quitting his government posts. --JW]

The latest sectarian conflicts in computer-land

[From A General Theory of Rubbish --Jeff Weintraub]

The AU is embarrassed by genocide - Are the rest of us?

Believe it or not, up until today it looked quite possible that the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, would be chosen as the new head of the African Union--despite the fact that his government is engaged in the genocidal mass murder of black Africans in Darfur. At the last moment, this grotesque outcome was averted when enough governments from sub-Saharan Africa balked at the prospect of electing Bashir to serve as the public face of Africa. Instead, an alternative compromise candidate, President Kufuor of Ghana, was named AU Chairman.

According to a Reuters report:

Sudan lost the leadership of the African Union for a second time after the pan-African group on Monday awarded the rotating chairmanship to Ghana because of widespread outrage over continuing bloodshed in Darfur. [....] Delegates at the summit said a deal was worked out through the mediation of South African President Thabo Mbeki and a group of seven respected presidents or "wise men".

The 2007 chairmanship was promised to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir a year ago when he was passed over for the post because of the violence in Darfur, which experts estimate has killed 200,000 people [JW: the actual figure is certainly 500,000 or more by now, but the news media seem to be stuck on 200,000 since mid-2004] and driven 2.5 million from their homes.

Critics say that far from abating, the violence has worsened in the last year and government-backed Arab militias have killed thousands. Bashir has repeatedly blocked deployment of U.N. peacekeepers to bolster an overstretched African Union military mission of 7,000 soldiers and monitors.

I suppose we should be thankful for small favors. But the real scandal is that the head of a genocidal government like the one Khartoum was a strong candidate in the first place. In fact, it seems clear that the Sudanese government fully expected Bashir's candidacy to be successful and was both surprised and angry when it wasn't (despite some face-saving diplomatic pretenses otherwise). As Nick Kristof correctly pointed out in a column yesterday ...

[...] it’s mind-boggling that African countries would even consider selecting as their leader a man who has systematically dispatched militias that pick out babies on the basis of tribe and skin color and throw them into bonfires.

Meanwhile, the more important news is that the Darfur atrocity continues to unfold. And despite this moment of embarrassment by some sub-Saharan African governments, the Sudanese government has every reason to believe that it can continue to proceed with impunity.

One reason Mr. Bashir has continued to engage in such behavior is that the world doesn’t seriously object. Almost all North African countries [were] backing his bid to chair the African Union. China, which supplies nearly all the AK-47s that are used to kill children in Darfur, has underwritten the genocide. [....]

Sudan promised a cease-fire, but instead it has been attacking aid workers. As Newsweek reported, at least four female aid workers have been beaten and sexually abused recently — raped in the case of two French women. [....] Broader security is also collapsing. On a road near Bulbul that used to be safe, gunmen stopped a public bus in the middle of the day and brutally beat the men and gang-raped the women for hours. In the face of all this, aid workers are jittery and some are pulling out.

Yet Europe is oblivious (the Davos conference here has great sessions on Africa but nothing on Darfur). President Bush has been better than most world leaders, but still pathetic: he mustered half a sentence in his State of the Union address. Perhaps this is because Mr. Bush regards the situation as tragic but hopeless, but in fact there is plenty he could do. [....]

However, no governments will contemplate serious action, even on the diplomatic plane, unless they feel public pressure to do so. (European readers, please take special note.) Read the whole column.

--Jeff Weintraub

[P.S. 2/1/2007: I notice that this post was among those quoted in a BBC News piece, Bloggers mull African summit. That's not very important in itself, but it's worth emphasizing that the British news media, including the BBC, have paid much more serious and consistent attention to the Darfur atrocity than news media or public opinion elsewhere in Europe.]

=========================
New York Times
January 28, 2007
A Choice for Darfur
By Nicholas D. Kristof

DAVOS, Switzerland

Over the next two days, African leaders will convene in Ethiopia and choose a new head of the African Union. Incredibly, that job may go to Sudan’s blood-drenched president, Omar al-Bashir, architect of the genocide in Darfur.

The outcome is still uncertain, with Sudan campaigning furiously for the job, but it’s mind-boggling that African countries would even consider selecting as their leader a man who has systematically dispatched militias that pick out babies on the basis of tribe and skin color and throw them into bonfires.

At a time when Africa is enjoying solid economic growth and improved leadership, this self-inflicted wound would sully Africa’s image and make it far more difficult for African Union peacekeepers to save lives in Darfur.

Mr. Bashir hasn’t confined himself to killing his own people, but has also sent his janjaweed militias to invade Chad and the Central African Republic. The janjaweed have beaten mothers with their own babies, until the infants are dead, and lately they have diversified into gouging out people’s eyes with bayonets. For anyone who wants the best for Africa, it is repulsive to think of President Bashir as the duly elected spokesman for the continent.

One reason Mr. Bashir has continued to engage in such behavior is that the world doesn’t seriously object. Almost all North African countries are backing his bid to chair the African Union. China, which supplies nearly all the AK-47s that are used to kill children in Darfur, has underwritten the genocide. Lately, it has encouraged Sudan to be more responsible, but President Hu Jintao is visiting Sudan shortly — let’s see whether he publicly expresses concern about Chinese-supported atrocities in Africa that far exceed the Rape of Nanjing.

Sudan promised a cease-fire, but instead it has been attacking aid workers. As Newsweek reported, at least four female aid workers have been beaten and sexually abused recently — raped in the case of two French women.

In addition, an aid worker in Sudan tells me that on Jan. 22 the police raided a party in the city of Nyala and arrested 22 employees of aid groups. Several were beaten and one woman was sexually abused but managed to fend off an attempted rape.

Broader security is also collapsing. On a road near Bulbul that used to be safe, gunmen stopped a public bus in the middle of the day and brutally beat the men and gang-raped the women for hours. In the face of all this, aid workers are jittery and some are pulling out.

Yet Europe is oblivious (the Davos conference here has great sessions on Africa but nothing on Darfur). President Bush has been better than most world leaders, but still pathetic: he mustered half a sentence in his State of the Union address. Perhaps this is because Mr. Bush regards the situation as tragic but hopeless, but in fact there is plenty he could do.

He could speak out forcefully about Darfur. He could bring victims to the White House for a photo op. He could help the U.N. send a force to protect Chad and the Central African Republic — while continuing to push for U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur itself. He could visit Darfur or Chad and invite European or Chinese officials to join him. He could invite African leaders to Washington for a summit meeting that would include discussion of Darfur. He could impose a no-fly zone. He could develop targeted sanctions against Sudanese leaders. He could begin forensic accounting to find assets of those leaders in Western countries. He could call on NATO and the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans in case the janjaweed start massacring the hundreds of thousands of Darfuris in camps.

And this weekend he could telephone a few African presidents to tell them what a catastrophe it would be if Africa chose Mr. Bashir as its leader.

Serious negotiations between the government and Darfur’s rebels are crucial for a lasting peace deal in Darfur, and new discussions are expected soon (that may be why President Hu dares visit Khartoum). But Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a Sudanese human rights leader, says the new talks will fail unless the Darfur rebels have a chance to consult first. And when they try to meet, the Sudanese government bombs them.

There are countless other practical ideas for Darfur, and I’d like to hear yours. Send your suggestions to me at DarfurSuggestions@gmail.com. I’ll post some on my blog at www.nytimes.com/ontheground and discuss them in a future column.

Who has been murdering Iraqi civilians? - A reminder of the obvious

[Guest-posted on the weblog of Norman Geras - Normblog]

In a previous item guest-posted on Normblog in October 2005, I raised the question of Who murders Iraqi civilians? and suggested that we shouldn't lose track of the main answer. For an update on this answer, here are a few examples from one week in Baghdad (headlines from the Washington Post).

Baghdad Market Bombings Kill at Least 79 (Tuesday, January 23, 2007)

The near-simultaneous explosions of two powerful car bombs devastated a crowded street bazaar in central Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 79 people [death toll later revised to 88 - JW], wounding more than 140 and showering the pavement with shards of metal, tattered vending carts and bloodied human remains.

The midday attack at the Bab al-Sherji market was the second mass-casualty bombing attack in Baghdad in a week and the deadliest of the year. The T-shirt vendors, DVD dealers and fruit peddlers it targeted were primarily working-class Shiite Muslims, a sign that the Sunni Muslim insurgency remains capable of inflicting heavy losses even as Iraqi and U.S. forces prepare to intensify a security crackdown.

The attack came as Shiites were marking Ashura, the 10-day religious holiday commemorating the death of the prophet Muhammad's grandson in the 7th century.

The bombs exploded within seconds of each other around noon, a peak shopping time, and sent a dark mushroom of smoke high into the blue sky over Baghdad. Witnesses said a suicide attacker drove in with one of the bombs, veering his vehicle into a cluster of stands before blowing it up. A second car exploded about 150 yards to the northeast along the same street.

At Least 24 Killed in Car Bombings in Baghdad (Thursday, January 25, 2007)

Two car bombs detonated in a busy commercial area of central Baghdad on Thursday afternoon, killing at least 24 people [later revised to 26 - JW] and injuring dozens more, Iraqi officials said.

The bombs were placed in Karrada, a predominantly Shiite Muslim sector of the city, and wounded at least 60 people when detonated, according to a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry. A set of car bombs killed at least 79 people in a Shiite market in central Baghdad on Monday.

Bomb kills 13 in new attack on Baghdad pet fair (Friday, January 26, 2007)

A bomb killed 13 people and wounded 33 in the second attack in as many months on Baghdad's much-loved Friday morning pet market, police sources said.

The blast hit the Ghazil market in the city center about an hour before a weekly 11 a.m. (0800 GMT) vehicle curfew in the Iraqi capital, aimed at protecting mosques during Friday noon prayers.

A police source said witnesses believed the bomb had been planted in a box that the bomber had punched with air holes to pass it off as a container for birds. Parrots, canaries, cats and more exotic pets are prime attractions at the market.

On December 1, also a Friday, a car bomb killed three people at Ghazil market. It lies in the crowded commercial district of Bab al-Sharji, where a double car bombing killed 88 people on Monday, in one of the bloodiest attacks of recent months.

Amidst the horrifying reports of death and suffering coming out of Iraq these days, it is occasionally useful to remind ourselves of some basic facts about the situation - including who, precisely, has been killing Iraqi civilians since 2003 (and before that).

There have been wildly differing estimates of the numbers of Iraqis who have died since the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime in May 2003, but one point on which all serious estimates agree is that killings by US and other Coalition troops account for a small proportion of the total. If we focus just on Iraqis killed in politically related violence (leaving aside estimates for disease, ordinary crime, and other categories), the great majority of the victims have been Iraqi civilians murdered either by the Sunni Arab 'insurgents' or, more recently, by a growing wave of reprisal killings by Shiite Arab death squads.

Over the course of 2006, this violence has exploded into a catastrophic bloodbath of inter-sectarian murder, torture, and mutual ethnic cleansing within Arab Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan, of course, has been fairly quiet and prosperous), in which both Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs have been victims. Unfortunately, experience shows that once this process of inter-group massacre, torture, expulsion, and other atrocities takes off it develops a self-reinforcing dynamic of its own that is very hard to break.

The atrocities by both sides in this sectarian civil war need to be equally condemned. But we should also not forget that the prime mover in this story has been the savage and unrelenting campaign of terrorist mass murder against Iraqi Shiites carried out since early 2004 by the coalition of Ba'athists and Islamist fanatics at the core of the Sunni Arab 'insurgency'. (Some people refer to these fascist and jihadist mass murderers as the Iraqi 'resistance' - and I suppose this term is broad enough that it might fit, if we bear in mind that the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War US south also saw itself as 'resisting' black emancipation, the elected Reconstruction state governments that implemented it, and the occupying Federal troops that protected them.) A central thrust of the Sunni Arab 'insurgency' has been a systematic strategy of murdering Iraqi Shiites - ranging from major religious and political figures through government employees and professionals to indiscriminately targeted ordinary people - in order to detonate a full-scale sectarian civil war that would render the country ungovernable and panic the US into leaving Iraq, after which they expect (rightly or wrongly) that they can crush the Shiites and restore the dominance of the Sunni Arab minority.

It took a while for this strategy to succeed, in part because the mainstream Shiite political and religious leadership made frantic efforts to prevent reprisals against Sunni Arab civilians while it pursued an alternative strategy based on coming to power through elections and majority rule (under US protection). But eventually this terrorist strategy worked. Most observers agree that the bombing of the Askariyah Shrine in Samarra in February 2006 was the critical event that finally pushed the Shiites over the edge and unleashed a wave of sectarian reprisal killings that rapidly spiralled out of control.

Of course, the long-term consequences of this brilliant tactical success may turn out to be a catastrophe for Iraq's Sunni Arab community, but the "insurgents" appear to have viewed this risk with equanimity--and perhaps a touch of denial, too. Among other things, this whole strategy seems strangely oblivious to the existence of Iran and to the fact that, if the Americans leave, the Shiite political forces expect to turn more heavily to the Iranians for support.

(For some of the background on all this, see:
Some thoughts on the terrorist strategy of the Iraqi 'insurgency'
The four wars for Iraq (Norman Geras)
Who is murdering Iraqi civilians? (Norman Geras)
Zarqawi - Man of the year for 2006?
Some unhappy thoughts on options in Iraq
'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans'
Inside Baghdad's civil war (contd.) )

=> Of course, there is a good deal of blame to spread around. Part of the responsibility for this horrible situation lies with the US administration for its astonishingly incompetent and irresponsible mismanagement of the post-Saddam occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, since this helped the Sunni Arab 'insurgency' to emerge and in other ways contributed to the socio-political conditions for the current sectarian bloodbath. Responsibility is also shared by a wide range of governments, institutions, and political groups who have either failed to aid the post-Saddam reconstruction of Iraq or have actively helped to sabotage it (some of whom have even supported the mass murderers of what they call the 'resistance' rhetorically or practically).

But these wider considerations, while important, should not allow us to evade what seem to me two central truths.

First of all, the primary responsibility for this ongoing mass murder, torture, and ethnic cleansing of Iraqi civilians lies with those who are actually doing it - and who have been doing it steadily for years.

And second, whether or not one thinks the 2003 Iraq war was wise or justified, and whether or not one believes that continued US involvement can help to achieve a decent political outcome in Iraq, there is absolutely no reason to believe that a US withdrawal at this point would end or reduce this ongoing sectarian bloodbath - quite the contrary. A US abandonment of Iraq (rapid or 'phased') might or might not serve long-term US interests. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into pretending that it would somehow be good for Iraqis.

Instead, it would almost certainly lead to an escalation of sectarian civil war, among other disasters, and it would certainly represent a victory for the mass murderers (on all sides). One might even want to argue that at this point such an outcome is inevitable, since all the alternatives are hopeless, so the US might as well get out of the way and let it happen - again, that's another discussion. But this is a reality that ought to be faced honestly. (Jeff Weintraub)

Why humans are dangerous neighbors

Or, why we no longer have "Giant kangaroos, marsupial lions and wombats the size of a car" (gratefully lifted from Mick Hartley, who is always good at noticing this kind of stuff). Some animals, like cockroaches, love having us around. But for large (non-domesticated) mammals, we have always been bad news. There once used to be lions in ancient Europe and elephants (of the woolly mammoth variety) in North America, too. --Jeff Weintraub

=========================
Mick Hartley
January 25, 2007
Giant Roos and Marsupial Lions

The thesis that human encroachment killed off the great megafauna in Australasia and America ties in well with the dates. And in New Zealand, with the extinction of moas and much of the rest of the unique giant bird species happening within historical time, the facts are undeniable. Still, it conflicts with that whole noble savage stuff, where the natives lived in harmony with their environment till the arrival of rapacious Europeans, so there have been plenty of arguments for climate change as the primary cause.

The latest finds in Australia add more weight to the human intervention argument:

Giant kangaroos, marsupial lions and wombats the size of a car survived all that climate change could throw at them but were wiped out by the arrival of mankind, according to a study. Fossil remains of the animals were found in a cave on the Nullarbor Plain, in southern Australia, and scientists have been astonished by the number and variety of creatures preserved.

At least 69 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, a third of them now extinct, have been unearthed at the site after falling and becoming trapped in the deep caves 400,000 to 800,000 years ago.

Among the hundreds of fossils were giant kangaroos that weighed 31½st (200kg) and stood 10ft (3m) high, and the first complete skeletons of Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial lion. Eight kangaroo species previously unknown to science were uncovered at the Thylacoleo caves, including two that lived only in woodland, and a giant bird, Leipoa gallinacea.

It had previously been assumed that for the land to support such a range of large animals it would have to have been wet enough to sustain woodland and lush vegetation of a type that is absent from the arid Nullarbor Plain today.

Analysis of the remains, however, has revealed that the climate when the animals died was just as dry as it is now — and yet it supported far more vegetation.

The finding, reported in the journal Nature, means that palaeontologists must rewrite theories on Australia’s environmental history that has hitherto held Ice Age-driven climate change to be the cause of the animals’ extinction. [...]

The research leader, Professor Richard Roberts, of the University of Wollongong, said that the animals had survived repeated climate change yet had disappeared suddenly in the past 50,000 years.

“Suddenly and during quite pleasant climatic conditions when the megafauna should have thrived, they went extinct. Why? The only new ingredient in the mix at that time was humans,” he said.

“Humans very likely played the decisive role in the extinction event through hunting of juveniles, burning of the vegetation cover and changing the plant composition to disadvantage the browsers and grazers.”

January 25, 2007 at 10:23 AM | Permalink

Lebanon on the brink? (Michael Young)

(Or, as Norman Geras put it, on the edge?)

The Lebanese journalist and political analyst Michael Young, whose response to that question has so far been a guarded "no," is beginning to wonder. In his recent commentaries, the basic pattern that Young has identified in the struggle between the coalition of anti-Syrian forces controlling the government and the pro-Syrian coalition centered on Hizbullah is that the latter have repeatedly pushed confrontation to the point where the alternatives were de-escalation or the outbreak of inter-communal civil war, and at that point have pulled back from the brink. But now the dynamics of this confrontation might be getting out of control, especially since external forces play such a significant role.

For the third time in almost a year Lebanon has averted a civil war, but we're nearing the end of the rope. If the Danish Embassy demonstrations and Hizbullah's mobilization in early December were, ultimately, manageable when it came to Christian-Sunni or Sunni-Shiite antagonism, what happened on Tuesday was, in its permutations, pretty much war. And if anything induced Hizbullah to suspend the protests, it was an awareness that if these continued for even a day, war was inevitable.

In this wide-ranging and characteristically illuminating overview of the current situation, Young doesn't offer many firm predictions--in fact, he sees the immediate prospects as quite uncertain--but he does make a number of interesting and thought-provoking observations. I was especially struck by two of them.

The first is a unfashionable suggestion that in some key respects Hizbullah's position has been getting weaker since last summer, not stronger.

The last six months have been a period of meltdown for Hizbullah. The party has been neutralized in the South, at least for the moment; its reputation in the Arab world lies in tatters because it is seen as an extension of Iran; domestically, Hizbullah is viewed more than ever as a menace to national coexistence and civil peace; few Lebanese, other than Hizbullah's own, believe that its insistence on participating in the political process means respect for the latter's rules, free from foreign interests; and none of Nasrallah's political rivals trust him anymore.

At the same time, Hizbullah has shown that under all that weaponry lie weak knees. The party's threshold has been surprisingly low in moments of internal crises. It took only three and a half weeks during the 2006 summer war with Israel for Nasrallah to announce that he was amenable to a cease-fire under any conditions. This was an acknowledgment that his Shiite community could not long endure living in public facilities, streets, and parks. Six days after the start of the December protests, Nasrallah retreated before a wall of Sunni opposition. He did organize a massive rally a few days later, but only to cover for the fact that the government had beaten Hizbullah to a draw in the Downtown. And on Tuesday evening, Hizbullah's decision to "suspend" the protests proved that the party could not transgress certain limits in bullying the majority. This may have exhibited good judgment, but it also exposed Hizbullah's vulnerabilities.

However, it's also possible that these very vulnerabilities, combined with the frantic desire of Hizbullah's Syrian patron to block further inquiry into Syria's role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, might lead Hizbullah and its allies to go too far.

Not surprisingly, the truth of the moment had to be found outside Lebanon's borders. Government sources are going with this version: Saudi Arabia and Iran are currently engaged in trying to find a solution to the crisis in Lebanon. A few days ago, the Iranian official Ali Larijani traveled to Damascus to get Syria's views on a draft proposal for an agreement. The Syrians set several conditions: that the tribunal in the Hariri assassination be established only after the United Nations investigation is completed, by which time the opposition will have gained veto power in the government; and that the new government go through the process of endorsing the tribunal once again - effectively allowing Syria's allies to either block the institution or empty it of its content. The Saudis said no, and Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, responded by ordering his people into the streets.

But by late Tuesday evening the tables were turned. At that point Hizbullah had cut off most roads between the eastern and western sectors of Beirut, as well as the airport road. The irresponsibility of those steps was staggering. Not only did the party take Lebanon back to the symbolism of the war years, but Beirut's Sunnis saw the move as trapping them in their half of the capital. The word "blockade" started being used, prompting the mufti to heatedly muster his community. Wael Abu Faour of the March 14 coalition warned that if the army did not reopen the roads, supporters of the majority would. Hizbullah backed down, aware, let's not forget, that a Sunni-Shiite confrontation is a red line for Iran.

However, that reality only reaffirmed how Hizbullah has been juggling contradictory agendas. The Iranians may not want sectarian discord, but what happened this week was fulfillment of the Syrian side of Hizbullah's agenda. The main obstacle remains the Hariri tribunal and Syria's refusal to permit its creation. How Tehran and Damascus will work out their clashing priorities is anybody's guess. You have to assume that with the Lebanese so close to doing battle, and given the dire implications of what this would mean for Hizbullah and its already dilapidated reputation in the Sunni Arab world, Iran will remind Nasrallah of who pays the checks. On the other hand, the Iranians realize that the tribunal might be fatal to the Syrian regime, depriving the Islamic Republic of a key asset in the Levant. [....]

Yet things are unlikely to improve soon. Nasrallah is confirming daily that his tactics are far more adept at damaging Lebanon than helping it, while Aoun is grasping at a presidency he will never get. If we're lucky, however, the Lebanese system of communal compromise will triumph over that brash pair, who in their own way can't seem to grasp its essential rules.

Or maybe not. Stay tuned.

--Jeff Weintraub

====================
Daily Star (Beirut, Lebanon)
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Next time around, Lebanon will be in a civil war
Michael Young

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.

For the third time in almost a year Lebanon has averted a civil war, but we're nearing the end of the rope. If the Danish Embassy demonstrations and Hizbullah's mobilization in early December were, ultimately, manageable when it came to Christian-Sunni or Sunni-Shiite antagonism, what happened on Tuesday was, in its permutations, pretty much war. And if anything induced Hizbullah to suspend the protests, it was an awareness that if these continued for even a day, war was inevitable.

Not surprisingly, the truth of the moment had to be found outside Lebanon's borders. Government sources are going with this version: Saudi Arabia and Iran are currently engaged in trying to find a solution to the crisis in Lebanon. A few days ago, the Iranian official Ali Larijani traveled to Damascus to get Syria's views on a draft proposal for an agreement. The Syrians set several conditions: that the tribunal in the Hariri assassination be established only after the United Nations investigation is completed, by which time the opposition will have gained veto power in the government; and that the new government go through the process of endorsing the tribunal once again - effectively allowing Syria's allies to either block the institution or empty it of its content. The Saudis said no, and Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, responded by ordering his people into the streets.

But by late Tuesday evening the tables were turned. At that point Hizbullah had cut off most roads between the eastern and western sectors of Beirut, as well as the airport road. The irresponsibility of those steps was staggering. Not only did the party take Lebanon back to the symbolism of the war years, but Beirut's Sunnis saw the move as trapping them in their half of the capital. The word "blockade" started being used, prompting the mufti to heatedly muster his community. Wael Abu Faour of the March 14 coalition warned that if the army did not reopen the roads, supporters of the majority would. Hizbullah backed down, aware, let's not forget, that a Sunni-Shiite confrontation is a red line for Iran.

However, that reality only reaffirmed how Hizbullah has been juggling contradictory agendas. The Iranians may not want sectarian discord, but what happened this week was fulfillment of the Syrian side of Hizbullah's agenda. The main obstacle remains the Hariri tribunal and Syria's refusal to permit its creation. How Tehran and Damascus will work out their clashing priorities is anybody's guess. You have to assume that with the Lebanese so close to doing battle, and given the dire implications of what this would mean for Hizbullah and its already dilapidated reputation in the Sunni Arab world, Iran will remind Nasrallah of who pays the checks. On the other hand, the Iranians realize that the tribunal might be fatal to the Syrian regime, depriving the Islamic Republic of a key asset in the Levant.

At a more parochial level, the opposition's actions were self-defeating for being built on a lie. If the benchmark of success was Hizbullah's ability to close roads, then Tuesday was indeed successful. However, that weapon has now been used up, and the government remains in place. The next time the opposition threatens to do something similar, we might as well load the guns or head for the shelters. On the other hand, what kind of confidence can anyone have in a party, and its Christian appendages in the Aounist movement and the Marada, that promises to be peaceful, only to practice intimidation? There is such a thing as Lebanese civil society, one hardened by the 1975-1990 war, and it will unite against such abuse.

The last six months have been a period of meltdown for Hizbullah. The party has been neutralized in the South, at least for the moment; its reputation in the Arab world lies in tatters because it is seen as an extension of Iran; domestically, Hizbullah is viewed more than ever as a menace to national coexistence and civil peace; few Lebanese, other than Hizbullah's own, believe that its insistence on participating in the political process means respect for the latter's rules, free from foreign interests; and none of Nasrallah's political rivals trust him anymore.

At the same time, Hizbullah has shown that under all that weaponry lie weak knees. The party's threshold has been surprisingly low in moments of internal crises. It took only three and a half weeks during the 2006 summer war with Israel for Nasrallah to announce that he was amenable to a cease-fire under any conditions. This was an acknowledgment that his Shiite community could not long endure living in public facilities, streets, and parks. Six days after the start of the December protests, Nasrallah retreated before a wall of Sunni opposition. He did organize a massive rally a few days later, but only to cover for the fact that the government had beaten Hizbullah to a draw in the Downtown. And on Tuesday evening, Hizbullah's decision to "suspend" the protests proved that the party could not transgress certain limits in bullying the majority. This may have exhibited good judgment, but it also exposed Hizbullah's vulnerabilities.

Then there is Michel Aoun, the big loser of the Tuesday protests. Until then, the general could count on support among the many floating Christians neither with March 8 nor March 14. His error was to so polarize the atmosphere by imposing a strike on all, that many of his coreligionists could only turn against him. The Aounists will not easily live down their siding with Shiite stone-throwers against Lebanese Forces youths at the Hazmiyeh roundabout, which many Christians, for better or worse, regard as "their" area. Nor would they have held the streets for very long without the army around to protect them. In Zahleh, Aoun's ally Elie Skaff was soundly humiliated by the refusal of even his own supporters to obey the strike order - an order that he sought to impose by force of arms early in the day. January 23 could be the beginning of Aoun's descent into terminal irrelevance, and even the cautious Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir was said to be livid with the general.

The big winner, on the other hand, was Samir Geagea, who seemed to have a plan (along with Walid Jumblatt and his Progressive Socialist Party) to counter the opposition. Rather than focusing on volatile areas bordering Shiite quarters - for example Ain al-Remmaneh - he went after the Aounists and cleared roads within the Christian heartland. For example, it was a Lebanese Forces push against the Aounists in Nahr al-Kalb that compelled the army to open the northern highway. Something similar happened in Jbeil. Where Aoun managed to alienate hitherto ambivalent Christians, Geagea may have brought some of them over to his side. In the struggle for Christian hearts and minds - and it's unfortunate how the hard-liners win out in such cases - Aoun was defeated in the very districts that he and his parliamentary bloc represent.

It was also Geagea who first publicized the ambiguous role played by the army. By the end of the day there was palpable anger in many areas of Lebanon, both Christian and Muslim, that the armed forces had failed to implement their promise to maintain roads open. Geagea could notch up that perceptiveness to his advantage.

The great mystery was the army's performance, or rather non-performance. Maybe it was defensible early in the day for the military command to avoid confrontations that might split its ranks. But by the later hours there were too many signs of implicit collusion between the army and the opposition, or simple lethargy in units, for things not to smell fishy. Keeping the airport road closed was unjustifiable, as was the behavior of soldiers actively preventing people from reaching their jobs. And it was a scandal that the army let Hizbullah cut off roads between both sides of the capital in the late afternoon. In many cases the meagerly manned roadblocks could have been cleared within minutes by troops.

Between 1990 and 2005 who appointed senior military commanders? Basically, the Syrians, Hizbullah, President Emile Lahoud, and Michel Murr, when he was defense minister. Many remaining officers were Aounists. Is this a problem today? Unless Army Commander Michel Suleiman convinces the Lebanese that the army is truly neutral, this legacy will come back to haunt him. There has been talk of Suleiman's presidential ambitions. Based on yesterday's actions, the general must undo a hefty knot of mistrust - and that probably includes the mistrust of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Where there is mistrust of the armed forces, there is also a tendency for people to resort to communal self-defense.

Today in Paris, Lebanon will be given a much-needed boost by the international community. That's good news, despite the reprehensible efforts of those who seek to deny Siniora and the majority any credit. Yet things are unlikely to improve soon. Nasrallah is confirming daily that his tactics are far more adept at damaging Lebanon than helping it, while Aoun is grasping at a presidency he will never get. If we're lucky, however, the Lebanese system of communal compromise will triumph over that brash pair, who in their own way can't seem to grasp its essential rules.

Genocide in Darfur - The next stage (Eric Reeves)

A key feature of the ongoing catastrophe in Darfur, which Eric Reeves aptly termed "Rwanda in slow motion" as far back as 2004, is that the process of genocidal mass murder has developed in stages rather than in a single orgy of slaughter. The complexity of this process seems to have confused some outsiders about what is really going on, and has helped some of them to conclude that this is not really a case of genocide, so it may be worth spelling out how this sequence of stages has unfolded.

The first stage was an intense assault by Sudanese military forces and Janjaweed militias during 2003-2004, peaking in a crescendo of violence during 2004, in which hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, millions of others were driven as refugees into the deserts of Darfur and neighboring eastern Chad, and the entire social fabric of the African tribal peoples of Darfur was demolished. In addition to straightforward mass murder, villages were looted and burned to the ground, women were gang-raped, children were abducted into slavery, crops and trees were destroyed, wells were poisoned or choked with corpses, and so on. Refugees who tried to return home, or even to leave the refugee camps to obtain water or firewood, continued to be targeted for murder, rape, and mutilation.

The result was that almost the whole surviving black African population of Darfur wound up trapped in huge refugee camps, totally dependent on on outside assistance for food, medical care, and other necessities. Everything else has followed from that.

The second stage has been an ongoing process of genocide by gradual attrition rather than rapid extermination. A massive humanitarian aid effort by the UN and a range of NGO's has saved millions of people from immediate starvation. But hundreds of thousands have continued to die from malnutrition, disease, and sporadic violence.

In the third stage, which we have been witnessing over the course of 2006 and 2007, escalating violence and other pressures against these humanitarian organizations have sabotaged and restricted their operations, forcing some of them to suspend or actually stop their activities, and increasingly threaten to shut down the entire humanitarian aid operation in Darfur. If and when that happens, millions of people could die in a relatively short time, and the process of genocidal mass murder would be completed.

=> How far are we from this genocidal endgame? In December 2006 UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland warned of an impending collapse of humanitarian operations in Darfur and eastern Chad, due to a "meltdown in security," unless urgent action was taken.

Citing a "dramatic deterioration" of the situation in Darfur, the top U.N. humanitarian official said a crisis is approaching for the region in Sudan that could cost millions of lives.

"I was there in 2004 when there was 1 million people in need," Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, told reporters. "2005, 2 million ... in the spring, 3 million. And now there are 4 million in desperate need of humanitarian assistance." [....]

In a report from Reuters, Egeland also accused Sudan of deliberately hindering relief aid in Darfur, attacking villages and arming brutal militia to combat rebels and bandits.

Egeland told the Security Council that international relief operations were threatened by government obstruction and members needed to talk to Sudanese officials immediately as well as put pressure on those sending arms to rebels.

"The next weeks may be make or break for our lifeline to more than 3 million people," Egeland said in the Reuters report. "This period may well be the last opportunity for this Council, the government of Sudan, the African Union, the rebels, and all of us to avert a humanitarian disaster of much larger proportions than even the one we so far have witnessed in Darfur."

Part of the problem, Egeland said, is a "meltdown in security. The humanitarians are confined to the towns. We cannot even reach many of the camps."

Since then there has been no serious response from the alleged "international community." As Eric Reeves explains (below), the result is that the current horrifying situation is, "almost incomprehensibly," on the verge of getting much worse.

--Jeff Weintraub
=========================
Guardian on-line, "Comment is Free" web-page
January 14, 2007
A tragedy without end
By Eric Reeves

Almost incomprehensibly, the humanitarian crisis in Darfur continues to deepen, threatening the millions of people the UN describes as "conflict-affected". Security throughout the humanitarian theatre, including much of eastern Chad, is deteriorating badly. Aid operations now operate among high levels of danger. Hundreds of thousands of civilians may die if there is no significant improvement in security.

More than a million human beings have no access to basic humanitarian aid - food, medical care and clean water. Oxfam International reported in December that more than a third of Darfur's worst-affected population was "effectively out of bounds to aid agencies." This news came as Unicef reported that nutritional studies revealed over 70% of the population is experiencing food insecurity, and localised studies found acute malnutrition affecting 20% of children under five.

There were eight emergency evacuations of humanitarian workers in December alone, involving 400 personnel throughout Darfur. The same number were also evacuated from aid operations in eastern Chad, the scene of rapidly accelerating ethnic violence, most of it by Khartoum's Janjaweed proxies or Chadian rebel groups supported by the National Islamic Front regime.

Humanitarian access is at its lowest ebb since early 2004, the most violent phase of the Darfur genocide. Withdrawals by major humanitarian organizations continue, with a steady erosion of relief capacity. In turn, there are fewer international witnesses to the ethnic crimes that define the conflict in Darfur. Khartoum's crackdown on journalists traveling to the region has also reduced the means of chronicling the accelerating genocide.

This is the context in which to understand President Omar al-Bashir's insistence that Khartoum will not allow UN troops into Darfur - indeed, that Darfur doesn't need UN troops. Asserting that Khartoum's "experience with UN operations in the world is not encouraging," al-Bashir went on to declare: "There are sufficient forces in the Sudan from African countries to maintain order and they can provide order. All we need is funding for the African troops."

It is a political and moral failure of the first order that this mendacity should be the obstacle to deployment of the UN forces needed to protect the collapsing humanitarian operations and vulnerable population. Acquiescence to al-Bashir's defiance makes a mockery of the world's "responsibility to protect" civilians in places such as Darfur. This responsibility was a centerpiece of the September 2005 UN World Summit and was unanimously reaffirmed in UN Security Council Resolution 1674 of April 2006.

Politically savvy, al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front regime realized that their defiance of the UN needed a public relations complement. This was the real significance of the 60-day ceasefire announced during the visit of the US politician and presidential aspirant Bill Richardson, who recently traveled to Sudan - to be followed by Jan Eliasson, UN special representative of the secretary-general. Although packaged as a breakthrough by both Richardson and Khartoum, the reality is that a ceasefire has been nominally in place for more than two years, but has proved meaningless since it began in April 2004.

Moreover, Khartoum's regular forces have been badly mauled recently by rebel groups that did not sign the disastrous Darfur peace agreement in Abuja last year. A ceasefire will allow the regime to regroup its depleted military units in both north and west Darfur. The regime's Janjaweed forces have also suffered significant losses, chiefly at the hands of the potent rebel alliance called the National Redemption Front.

There is no reason to believe that this ceasefire can be monitored any more effectively than the previous one: the African Union (AU) will still do little more than file reports on those few violations it has detected. Khartoum will also continue to hamstring monitoring by denying the AU mission fuel supply for its aircraft, by creating bureaucratic burdens and by imposing flight restrictions.

Moreover, any ceasefire violations that are reported will certainly be justified by Khartoum as "defensive actions," the excuse it repeatedly offers for attacks on civilians. And what will be the consequences for ceasefire violations that are confirmed? What is the AU in a position to do now that it could not do under the terms of the previous ceasefire? What credible penalties are spelled out? There are no encouraging answers.

The non-signatory rebel groups will be watching Khartoum's behavior with a justified skepticism. Violations, whether by the regime's regular forces or militia, will not be accepted passively. The likelihood of the ceasefire holding is exceedingly remote, as are the prospects for meaningful negotiations. Khartoum has ensured that the flawed Darfur peace agreement remains the only basis for further talks. Since the security provisions of the agreement, in particular disarming of the Janjaweed, depend largely upon Khartoum's goodwill, this will be unacceptable both to rebel groups and to those in the refugee camps.

The miserable compensation provisions of the agreement - $30m in the first year, with nothing further guaranteed - would also be preserved if the Abuja agreement is a starting point for renewed negotiations. This represents less than $8 per affected person, compared with the millions of people who have lost everything over the past four years. For Darfuris this is hardly an acceptable basis for negotiations, even as Khartoum successfully insists on enshrining the terms of the agreement - including as a condition of its accepting the new ceasefire.

Khartoum's adamant rejection of the large UN force and robust mandate authorized by Security Council Resolution 1706 remains unchallenged. The consequences will be further deterioration in security for humanitarian operations in Darfur, as well as in eastern Chad. This in turn may trigger increasing evacuations or even total withdrawal by aid groups from Darfur. Civilian mortality will be catastrophic.

This is the grim syllogism of genocidal destruction in Darfur. There is no evidence that the terms have changed or will in the foreseeable future. Until the international community - in particular, China - finds the will to confront Khartoum, a savage genocide by attrition will continue indefinitely.

Darfur - Escalating war against the aid workers (Newsweek)

Why humanitarian operations in Darfur (and eastern Chad) have been collapsing.

Last Sept. 11 was a momentous day in Darfur, too. After unidentified militiamen attacked aid workers from the Nobel Prize-winning Médecins sans Frontières at a roadblock on that date, most of the international aid groups ministering to Darfur's 6 million people stopped using the roads. On Dec. 18, in the southern town of Gereida, unrelated gunmen attacked the compounds of Oxfam and Action Contre la Faim. More than 70 aid workers subsequently pulled out of the refugee camp there—Darfur's largest, with 130,000 people—leaving only 10 Red Cross employees behind. Yet at the time no one revealed what had really sparked the dramatic pullbacks. In both cases, international staff, including three French aid workers, were either raped or sexually assaulted in territory controlled by the Sudanese government and its allies.

Rape as a weapon has become depressingly commonplace in Darfur, where 200,000 Africans have been killed [actually, more like 500,000 --JW] and a third of the population have been sent fleeing into camps in three years of war. But the attacks on international aid workers herald a dramatic and dangerous new trend—the deliberate targeting of those helping to keep Darfur's millions of refugees alive. A dozen staffers from foreign NGOs have been killed in just the past six months, more than in the previous two years. [....] Last week 14 U.N. agencies working in Darfur issued a stark warning that "the humanitarian community cannot indefinitely assure the survival of the population in Darfur if insecurity continues." [....]

Khartoum has pledged to give aid agencies unfettered access to Darfur, and has frequently boasted of its cooperation with the international community. Yet the NGOs say their workers, especially those from Western countries, are frequently denied visas and travel permits, while key equipment and supplies are held up in Sudanese Customs. And they cannot complain too loudly. "We can't afford to be kicked out," says Dawn Blalock, spokesman for the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The stakes are too high: Blalock points out that the aid groups have managed to lower the overall malnutrition rate in Darfur below the emergency level of 15 percent. Without them, no one knows how bad it could get.

Those who speak out have paid a price. The Norwegian Refugee Council, serving 250,000 displaced Darfurians, was expelled in November to hardly a murmur from the United Nations. Late last year the U.N. secretary-general's representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, the highest U.N. mission official there, was thrown out by Khartoum after he complained publicly about continued Janjaweed attacks. He has yet to be replaced, leaving the U.N. mission leaderless. "The international community have been taken for a ride," says Pronk. And yet again, the ones suffering most are the people of Darfur.

Read the rest below.

--Jeff Weintraub
=========================
Newsweek
January 29, 2007
Africa: War on the Rescuers
Darfur: The newest targets in the territory's widening violence are the aid workers keeping its people alive.
By Rod Nordland

Last Sept. 11 was a momentous day in Darfur, too. After unidentified militiamen attacked aid workers from the Nobel Prize-winning Médecins sans Frontières at a roadblock on that date, most of the international aid groups ministering to Darfur's 6 million people stopped using the roads. On Dec. 18, in the southern town of Gereida, unrelated gunmen attacked the compounds of Oxfam and Action Contre la Faim. More than 70 aid workers subsequently pulled out of the refugee camp there—Darfur's largest, with 130,000 people—leaving only 10 Red Cross employees behind. Yet at the time no one revealed what had really sparked the dramatic pullbacks. In both cases, international staff, including three French aid workers, were either raped or sexually assaulted in territory controlled by the Sudanese government and its allies.

Rape as a weapon has become depressingly commonplace in Darfur, where 200,000 Africans have been killed and a third of the population have been sent fleeing into camps in three years of war. But the attacks on international aid workers herald a dramatic and dangerous new trend—the deliberate targeting of those helping to keep Darfur's millions of refugees alive. A dozen staffers from foreign NGOs have been killed in just the past six months, more than in the previous two years. There are an estimated 14,000 aid workers in Darfur now, the majority of them Sudanese, working for foreign NGOs and U.N. agencies and delivering $1 billion a year in aid. Just a few more horrific attacks could throw that massive operation into jeopardy. Last week 14 U.N. agencies working in Darfur issued a stark warning that "the humanitarian community cannot indefinitely assure the survival of the population in Darfur if insecurity continues."

Médecins sans Frontières country director Jean Vataux confirms that two MSF staffers, a Sudanese and a European, were subjected to a serious sexual assault on Sept. 11 after being forced out of their vehicle near Zalingei, in an area under government control. While the women were not raped, Vataux says, "there was a clear desire to hurt and humiliate." The women were badly beaten as well. Vataux says MSF reported the incident to Sudanese authorities, who promised to investigate but so far have not reported any outcome. Action Contre la Faim's country director Philippe Conraud confirms that two Frenchwomen working for ACF in Gereida were raped by armed men, but would not provide details. In the Gereida attack, aid agencies' compounds were systematically looted, numerous vehicles stolen and staff terrorized at gunpoint for six hours.

The two incidents add to a pattern of increased violence since a peace agreement was signed last May between the government and some rebels. After that, rebel factions splintered further. In some areas, the government is working with rebel signatories; in others, it's fighting them, and in some places the rebels are fighting one another. The version of the conflict that has seized the imagination of the world—and that prompted former secretary of State Colin Powell to describe the killing there as "genocide"—involved marauding Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, often backed up by Sudanese military forces, laying waste to scattered villages. Now as many as 12 different groups are at each other's throats, tussling over control of huge refugee camps or angling for their share of promised government compensation. On Jan. 10, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson announced he had brokered a 60-day ceasefire; so far, it has yet to start. "The ceasefire?" says a senior officer with the African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of offending Sudanese authorities. "That's like the peace. We haven't seen either."

Assaults on aid organizations have wide repercussions. After a Dec. 8 attack on the International Committee of the Red Cross compound in Kutum, in northern Darfur, all but three of the international staff pulled out. Villagers driven from their homes by Janjaweed have since dispersed rather than seek refuge in the camp there. "We don't know where 30,000 people are," says Rebecca Dale of the International Rescue Committee. "Only about two or three thousand have shown up."

Khartoum has pledged to give aid agencies unfettered access to Darfur, and has frequently boasted of its cooperation with the international community. Yet the NGOs say their workers, especially those from Western countries, are frequently denied visas and travel permits, while key equipment and supplies are held up in Sudanese Customs. And they cannot complain too loudly. "We can't afford to be kicked out," says Dawn Blalock, spokesman for the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The stakes are too high: Blalock points out that the aid groups have managed to lower the overall malnutrition rate in Darfur below the emergency level of 15 percent. Without them, no one knows how bad it could get.

Those who speak out have paid a price. The Norwegian Refugee Council, serving 250,000 displaced Darfurians, was expelled in November to hardly a murmur from the United Nations. Late last year the U.N. secretary-general's representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, the highest U.N. mission official there, was thrown out by Khartoum after he complained publicly about continued Janjaweed attacks. He has yet to be replaced, leaving the U.N. mission leaderless. "The international community have been taken for a ride," says Pronk. And yet again, the ones suffering most are the people of Darfur.

David Hirsh on the increasing respectability of anti-semitism & anti-Zionism

David Hirsh, a British sociologist and democratic leftist, is a co-founder of Engage, which was originally formed in 2005 to help mobilize opposition to the AUT blacklist of Israeli academics from a perspective committed to support for a negotiated two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including an independent Palestinian state and an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories captured in 1967. Engage played a significant role in helping to get the blacklist overturned by the AUT membership.

The Engage website continues to be be a an important and enlightening focus for fighting anti-semitism and anti-Zionism (in the sense of bias against and hysterical demonization of Israel, not criticism of specific Israeli policies)--particularly, though not exclusively, in their "left" and otherwise allegedly "progressive" forms. (I happen to be affiliated with Engage, and I strongly recommend visiting the Engage website and its on-line Journal.)

People like David Hirsh are engaged in a Sisyphean task. In a brief but cogent interview with London Independent, Hirsh points out that over the past several years assorted versions of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, often in complex combination, have continued to become increasingly respectable in wide sectors of "mainstream" discourse. This is depressing, but it happens to be correct, so it's a reality that needs to be faced honestly.

Hirsh might have added that there are also increasing tendencies to smear any criticisms of anti-semitism or extremist anti-Zionism as McCarthyite attempts by an allegedly all-powerful "Israel lobby" to "stifle debate," suppress open policy discussions, etc. That kind of stuff is standard in Britain, but we're now seeing more of it here in the US, too. The intent is to intimidate legitimate critics of anti-semitism or anti-Zionism into keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, or at least to restrict themselves to embarrassed, defensive, low-key whimpers.

How to respond? This dilemma is the subject of David Hirsh's intelligent letter to the Jewish Chronicle (also below), which is due to be published tomorrow. As Hirsh concludes:

Britain's Jews should draw more heavily on the radical anti-racist and cosmopolitan traditions; we should be strong and united against antisemitism and we should be loud and clear in favour of a Palestinian state.

Enough of [....] flag-waving conservatism in the face of legitimate criticism of Israel and enough of [....] 'keep your head down and whisper in powerful ears' conservatism in the face antisemitism.

Good advice for American Jews, too.

Yours for reality-based & morally serious discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

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The Independent (London)
January 25, 2007
Against The Grain: '"Zionist" has now become an insult, an epithet for evil'
Interview by Nick Jackson

David Hirsh is lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He argues that anti-Semitic ways of thinking are becoming acceptable in Academe and public life, and that this encourages rising levels of violence on the street

"There are many spheres in Britain in which it has become common sense that Israel is a unique and radical evil in the world. 'Zionist' has now become an insult, an epithet for evil.

These shared assumptions about Israel are fertile ground for the emergence of an anti-Semitic movement. Much of the far right is now adopting the language of the anti-Zionist left. And you have people being accepted in the Palestine solidarity movement, such as Gilad Atzmon, who denies being anti-Semitic but says he is "an anti-Zionist".

"Contemporary anti-Zionism emerged after the 1967 war, but there's now a clear, accelerated process of mainstreaming going on. It's even big in the Liberal Democrats. What does Baroness Tonge mean when she says that the 'pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips'?

"The Association of University Teachers boycott showed how such discourse can lead to exclusion of Israelis from campuses and conferences. They say, 'Israelis not Jews', but we have to look at how that operates in reality. Some who campaign for a boycott of Israeli thinkers, artists, scientists argue for a McCarthy-esque test, by which Israelis may be allowed to be part of the global community if they denounce 'Zionism' or its 'apartheid policies'. Boycotts of Israelis wouldn't help the peace process in the Middle East, and would provide the basis for anti-Semitism here.

"There's an overenthusiasm about anti-Zionism. British and American operations in Falluja cared less about civilian casualties than Israeli operations in Gaza. Israel is far from the most serious human-rights abuser on the planet, but how to explain this focus on the uniqueness of Israeli evil? People rightly get upset about Palestinian children dying in the conflict, but it's an easy slippage from outrage at particular incidents to a notion that 'Israel is a child-killing state'; from politics and protest to blood libel and demonisation. And then Israel gets compared to the Nazis: it makes no sense, but there have been placards of the Star of David and swastikas at demos.

"You can see it in the way people think about Hizbollah and Hamas. Both have openly genocidal policies towards the Jews, and yet, in the summer, placards reading, 'We are all Hizbollah now', were accepted on peace demonstrations." [JW: See here.]

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David Hirsh: Letter to the Jewish Chronicle (posted on the Engage website)

The debate in the JC between two conservative Jewish leaders is instructive.

Isi Leibler argues for a right wing 'Israel right or wrong', 'defend the occupation' conservatism, while Antony Lerman responds with a left wing case for a softly softly conservative approach to antisemitism. Leibler wants us to close our eyes to Israel's human rights abuses. Lerman hasn't yet noticed that the anti-Israel over-enthusiasm that is becoming normal in Britain comes laden with antisemitic undertone and threat.

Britain's Jews should draw more heavily on the radical anti-racist and cosmopolitan traditions; we should be strong and united against antisemitism and we should be loud and clear in favour of a Palestinian state.

Enough of Leibler's flag-waving conservatism in the face of legitimate criticism of Israel and enough of Lerman's 'keep your head down and whisper in powerful ears' conservatism in the face antisemitism.

David Hirsh

"The second holocaust will not be like the first" (Benny Morris)

This piece by the Israeli historian Benny Morris was first published on January 6, 2007 in the German newspaper Die Welt (in German translation) with an introductory note succinctly spelling out its central message.

"Benny Morris believes that the Iranian regime will annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons, and nobody will stop it in doing so. Morris used to have the reputation of being an Anti-Zionist, but he rejects the accusation that he questions Israel's right of existence. In this article written for Die Welt, Morris explains why he is convinced that sometime in the future millions of Israelis will be murdered." (Die Welt, translated by Ursula Duba)

Morris's original English-language version has now appeared in the Jerusalem Times (below).

This is a prediction, so the scenario presented here may not actually happen. But it is plausible enough to be worth worrying about. (For a reminder of some reasons why this is true, see these sensibly anxious remarks by Richard Just.)

--Jeff Weintraub

P.S. I notice that Mick Hartley beat me to it, once again. His comments:

Benny Morris is one of Israel's most respected historians, having written extensively on the question of the foundation of Israel and Palestinian refugees. As Solomonia (via whom) says, he's the "anti-Zionist Left's favorite out of context quoted historian". See here for an interview from 2004 (scroll down). So when he writes about the second holocaust, it's worth taking notice[.]

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Jerusalem Times
January 18, 2007
This Holocaust Will Be Different
By Benny Morris

The second holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye and ear contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims.

The Germans, along with their non-German helpers, had to round up the men, women and children from their houses and drag and beat them through the streets and mow them down in nearby woods or push and pack them into cattle cars and transport them to the camps, where "Work makes free," separate the able-bodied from the completely useless and lure them into "shower" halls and pour in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the bodies and prepare the "showers" for the next batch.

The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or more Israelis in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.

Some of the dead will inevitably be Arab - 1.3 million of Israel's citizens are Arab and another 3.5 million Arabs live in the semi-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa have substantial Arab minorities. And there are large Arab concentrations immediately around Jerusalem (in Ramallah-Al Bireh, Bir Zeit, Bethlehem) and outside Haifa. Here, too, many will die, immediately or by and by.

It is doubtful whether such a mass killing of fellow Muslims will trouble Ahmadinejad and the mullahs. The Iranians don't especially like Arabs, especially Sunni Arabs, with whom they have intermittently warred for centuries. And they have a special contempt for the (Sunni) Palestinians who, after all, though initially outnumbering the Jews by more than 10 to 1, failed during the long conflict to prevent them from establishing their state or taking over all of Palestine.

Besides, the Iranian leadership sees the destruction of Israel as a supreme divine command, as a herald of the second coming, and the Muslims dispatched collaterally as so many martyrs in the noble cause. Anyway, the Palestinians, many of them dispersed around the globe, will survive as a people, as will the greater Arab nation of which they are part. And surely, to be rid of the Jewish state, the Arabs should be willing to make some sacrifices. In the cosmic balance sheet, it will be worth the candle.

A question may nevertheless arise in the Iranian councils: What about Jerusalem? After all, the city contains Islam's third holiest shrines (after Mecca and Medina), Al Aksa Mosque and the Mosque of Omar. But Ali Khamenei, the supreme spiritual leader, and Ahmadinejad most likely would reply much as they would to the wider question regarding the destruction and radioactive pollution of Palestine as a whole: The city, like the land, by God's grace, in 20 or 50 years' time, will recover. And it will be restored to Islam (and the Arabs). And the deeper pollution will have been eradicated.

To judge from Ahmadinejad's continuous reference to Palestine and the need to destroy Israel, and his denial of the first Holocaust, he is a man obsessed. He shares this with the mullahs: All were brought up on the teachings of Khomeini, a prolific anti-Semite who often fulminated against "the Little Satan." To judge from Ahmadinejad's organization of the Holocaust cartoon competition and the Holocaust denial conference, the Iranian president's hatreds are deep (and, of course, shameless).

He is willing to gamble the future of Iran or even of the whole Muslim Middle East in exchange for Israel's destruction. No doubt he believes that Allah, somehow, will protect Iran from an Israeli nuclear response or an American counterstrike. Allah aside, he may well believe that his missiles will so pulverize the Jewish state, knock out its leadership and its land-based nuclear bases, and demoralize or confuse its nuclear-armed submarine commanders that it will be unable to respond. And, with his deep contempt for the weak-kneed West, he is unlikely to take seriously the threat of American nuclear retaliation.

Or he may well take into account a counterstrike and simply, irrationally (to our way of thinking), be willing to pay the price. As his mentor, Khomeini, put it in a speech in Qom in 1980: "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah... I say, let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant..."

For these worshipers at the cult of death, even the sacrifice of the homeland is acceptable if the outcome is the demise of Israel.

Deputy Defense Minister Minister Ephraim Sneh has suggested that Iran doesn't even have to use the Bomb to destroy Israel. Simply, the nuclearization of Iran will so overawe and depress Israelis that they will lose hope and gradually emigrate, and potential foreign investors and immigrants will shy away from the mortally threatened Jewish state. These, together, will bring about its demise.

But my feeling is that Ahmadinejad and his allies lack the patience for such a drawn-out denouement; they seek Israel's annihilation in the here and now, in the immediate future, in their lifetime. They won't want to leave anything up to the vagaries of history.

As with the first, the second holocaust will have been preceded by decades of preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to different audiences, but all have (objectively) served the same goal, the demonization of Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught: "The Zionists/Jews are the embodiment of evil" and "Israel must be destroyed."

And Westeners, more subtly, were instructed: "Israel is a racist oppressor state" and "Israel, in this age of multiculturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous." Generations of Muslims and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these catechisms.

The build-up to the second holocaust (which, incidentally, in the end, will probably claim roughly the same number of lives as the first) has seen an international community fragmented and driven by separate, selfish appetites - Russia and China obsessed with Muslim markets; France with Arab oil - and the United States driven by the debacle in Iraq into a deep isolationism. Iran has been left free to pursue its nuclear destiny and Israel and Iran to face off alone.

But an ultimately isolated Israel will prove unequal to the task, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an onrushing car. Last summer, led by a party hack of a prime minister and a small-time trade unionist as defense minister, and deploying an army trained for quelling incompetent and poorly armed Palestinian gangs in the occupied territories and overly concerned about both sustaining and inflicting casualties, Israel failed in a 34-day mini-war against a small Iran-backed guerrilla army of Lebanese fundamentalists (albeit highly motivated, well-trained and well-armed). That mini-war thoroughly demoralized the Israeli political and military leaderships.

Since then, the ministers and generals, like their counterparts in the West, have looked on glumly as Hizbullah's patrons have been arming with doomsday weapons. Perversely, the Israeli leaders may even have been happy with Western pressures urging restraint. Most likely they deeply wished to believe Western assurances that somebody, somehow - the UN, G-8 - would pull the radioactive chestnuts out of the fire. There are even those who fell for the outlandish idea that a regime change in Teheran, driven by a reputedly secular middle class, would ultimately stymie the mad mullahs.

But even more to the point, the Iranian program presented an infinitely complex challenge for a country with limited conventional military resources. Taking their cue from the successful IAF destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, the Iranians duplicated and dispersed their facilities and buried them deep underground (and the Iranian targets are about twice as far from Israel as was Baghdad). Taking out the known Iranian facilities with conventional weapons would take an American-size air force working round-the-clock for more than a month.

At best, Israel's air force, commandos and navy could hope to hit only some of the components of the Iranian project. But, in the end, it would remain substantially intact - and the Iranians even more determined (if that were possible) to attain the Bomb as soon as possible. It would also, without doubt, immediately result in a world-embracing Islamist terrorist campaign against Israel (and possibly its Western allies) and, of course, near-universal vilification. Orchestrated by Ahmadinejad, all would clamor that the Iranian program had been geared to peaceful purposes. At best, an Israeli conventional strike could delay the Iranians by a year or two.

In short order, therefore, the incompetent leadership in Jerusalem would soon confront a doomsday scenario, either after launching their marginally effective conventional offensive or in its stead, of launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the Iranian nuclear program, some of whose components are in or near major cities. Would they have the stomach for this? Would their determination to save Israel extend to preemptively killing millions of Iranians and, in effect, destroying Iran?

This dilemma had long ago been accurately defined by a wise general: Israel's nuclear armory is unusable. It can only be used too early or too late. There will never be a "right" time. Use it "too early," meaning before Iran acquires similar weapons, and Israel will be cast in the role of international pariah, a target of universal Muslim assault, without a friend in the world; "too late" means after the Iranians have struck. What purpose would that serve?

So Israel's leaders will grit their teeth and hope that somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will behave "rationally"?

But the Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes - not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing. After the Shihabs fall, the world will send rescue ships and medical aid for the lightly charred. It will not nuke Iran. For what purpose and at what cost? An American nuclear response would lastingly alienate the whole Muslim world, deepening and universalizing the ongoing clash of civilizations. And, of course, it would not bring Israel back. (Would hanging a serial murderer bring back his victims?)

So what would be the point?

Still, the second holocaust will be different in the sense that Ahmadinejad will not actually see and touch those he so wishes dead (and, one may speculate, this might cause him disappointment as, in his years of service in Iranian death squads in Europe, he may have acquired a taste for actual blood). And, indeed, there will be no scenes like the following, quoted in Daniel Mendelsohn's recent The Lost, A Search for Six of Six Million, in which is described the second Nazi action in Bolechow, Poland, in September 1942:

A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and Germans, who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping and entreaties of bystanders didn't help and she was taken from her home in a nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall.
There... she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of Ukrainians present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth and she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown - It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits hanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall, afterwards she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded her into a carriage in a train to Belzec.

In the next holocaust there will be no such heart-rending scenes, of perpetrators and victims mired in blood (though, to judge from pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physical effects of nuclear explosions can be fairly unpleasant).

But it will be a holocaust nonetheless.

The writer is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University.