The Skeptic الشكاك

921 Shabola on Obama

The Arab world could ask for no cuddlier a spokesman than its most esteemed political philosopher and McDonald’s jingle-writer, Shabola.

Shabola, remember, was an early Obama supporter. But his thoughts on Obama’s victory now rhyme:

Bush, curse him, made us vomit and wasted us for years, but people think Obama will be Salah ud-Din.

Talk about high expectations… Saladin now. The self-appointed Voice of the Arab Street is equating the next U.S. president with Saladin. [More of Shabola’s thoughts on Obama, Hariri, and Sheikh Yassin here]

The reactions I’ve heard from guys in grocery stores and in cafes have been more muted, but still celebratory. People are just glad Bush is gone, and that the American people didn’t vote for four more years.

The day Obama takes office will be a fragile moment of opportunity for the United States in the Middle East. I guess my message to the new U.S. president would be: Please don’t waste it. It won’t come back again soon.

898 Son of Irgun!

Obama may not “pal around with terrorists,” but his first act as president elect (after giving a rousing speech) was to ask the son of one to be his chief of staff.

Ha’aretz reports that Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois congressman, the inspiration for the character Josh on “The West Wing,” and a former advisor to President Clinton, is also the son of an Irgun member.

The paper also calls Emanuel an Israeli. I would be surprised to learn that dual-nationals can serve as congressmen, but I’ve been surprised before. Or perhaps Ha’aretz just got carried away, and meant “son of an Israeli.” Perhaps they will change the headline.

I have no doubt Emanuel is an intelligent and competent man, however many passports he holds. I assume he has the respect of at least the Clinton people Obama will choose to staff the White House. And Emanuel’s father’s mistakes may not reflect his own beliefs.

Regardless, the appointment of the son of an Irgun militant to such an important office will confirm many Arabs’ worst suspicions about the United States before the ink has dried on the headlines announcing Obama’s historic victory.

(Incidentally, if what the BBC’s correspondent says is true, Emanuel’s appointment would also confirm Republicans’ suspicions that Obama’s talk of bipartisanship is hollow.)

Obama never said he would change U.S. policy with regard to Israel and Palestine, and he did say he would appoint Clinton advisors. And presumably the U.S. policy of condemning the deliberate killing of civilians for any reason, including “national liberation” struggles, is not one of the things the Obama administration hopes to change.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be necessary, given that Emanuel was never a member of Irgun, nor could he have been at his age. Perhaps it’s unfair, perhaps Emanuel has no love for the Irgun, Hamas, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or any other group that seeks an independent state by killing innocent people. In which case it should be easy for Emanuel to denounce Irgun’s tactics.

Alternatively, he could contribute to the future President Obama’s efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by declining the job. I’m sure there are other qualified candidates.

[Update: Well, he took the job. Now he needs to tell his dad to shut up and stop talking to the press.]

891 November 4, 2008

(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

A new day dawned in Cairo today. As it does every day.

And it started as it always does: with birds, schoolchildren, and car horns. No national holiday here.

I’m looking forward to going out in the streets to hear the reaction. The best reaction I’ve heard so far: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Bah humbug. I confess I’m moved.

865 One in 250,000

A police officer beats a child with a stick as officers try to a repel hungry IDPs swarming a USAid food-distribution point. (Getty Images via the BBC, Nov. 1, 2008)

Two hundred fifty thousand people have been displaced. Yet even in Rwanda’s Sunday Times, a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable proportions has been eclipsed by discussion of the American horse race. (If you’re curious, Frank Kagabo concludes: “There is little for non-Americans to gain or lose from this election in real policy terms.”)

When I grow tired of clicking refresh on the poll trackers, I’m turning to ICG for background and IRIN’s email updates on the DRC as a good supplement to the daily headlines.

860 Lost

I thought this blog post, from the New York Times‘ Stephen Farrell in Baghdad, was excellent:

BAGHDAD — So, a couple of weeks ago I met a guy on a highway near Abu Ghraib.

An American contractor, who somehow drove the wrong way through the Looking Glass and ended up lost in the real Iraq. A real land full of real Iraqis who would really have killed him had he gone much farther out of the I..Z. (International/Green Zone). Or B.I.A.P. (Baghdad International Airport). Or V.C.B. (Camp Victory).

Wherever he was coming from. Some acronym for some Comfort Zone, somewhere, anyway.

Military acronyms are everywhere in Iraq. Some of them don’t make much sense unless you jump all the way through the mirror and embrace the thinking as well as the language.

They are created in a world where 1,000-year-old Iraqi towns barely exist in reality, only as grid references or satellite coordinates, where real people are dismissed cursorily as ‘Hajjis,’ and where the two helpful guys at the back of the Green Zone’s Oakley sunglasses-Oreos-and-Slasher Videos emporium are known as “The Iraqi Shop.” Because there’s only one, in this world.

Anyway I called this lost Abu Ghraib contractor Lost. Because he was. Because I didn’t know his name. Because it was mildly funny. And because he was a living, breathing metaphor who was even wearing an I.Z. tee shirt.

I shouldn’t have.

I met the real ‘Lost’ a few days ago, another guy entirely. And there was nothing funny about him. His American military boots were walking across particles of dead human flesh, which wasn’t his fault. And his mouth was uttering banalities of callousness. Which was.

There had just been a bomb. There has always just been a bomb in Iraq, still. They are smaller now, so the deaths are in single or double figures, not triple. They are less frequent, so overall casualty charts have spiked down. For which we are all grateful.
More…

835 So Long, and Thanks for All the Brains

Many thanks to Ahmad Gharbeia for creating section-specific news feeds for Al-Masry al-Youm‘s Web site, which doesn’t offer the service. Ahmad notes that the feeds are created by scraping Al-Masry al-Youm‘s code and so could break at any time if the site’s design changes. So enjoy, and thank Ahmad, while you can!

As I’m going to be spending 36 of the next 48 hours in an airplane, here are a few items of interest in the meantime:

• “World Migrants Up To 200 Millions, 1.5 Million Arab Brains Overseas” World thanks Middle East for the brains, notes global increase in strange headlines…
• The good news is that the world financial crisis may put an end to the brain-drain. My barber, who has a great Arab brain, yesterday told me he used to want to move to the United States for work, but now considers himself better off in Cairo. As he snipped and trimmed, the crisis continued to batter Egypt’s stock market, lending emphasis to warnings that poor countries may suffer permanent damage from the current crisis. For the moment, though, shares on the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange are rallying, following Asian markets’ response to European bail-out plans.
• Journalists Fined for Libeling Sheikh al-Azhar. Yesterday, a court fined Adil Hammuda and Mohammad al-Baz of Al-Fagr newspaper LE 80,000 each for comparing Sheikh Tantawi to the Pope. They were delighted they hadn’t been thrown in jail. A different court hearing Hammuda and three other editors’ appeal of another 2007 ruling against them yesterday said it would reconvene in December.
• Hundreds of thousands of U.S. voters from swing states may find themselves illegally disenfranchised in this election. In somewhat related news, absentee voters from a New York county were asked to choose between McCain and Osama for president.
• Dubai, “a failed video game in the desert”, from BLDGBLOG, one of my favorites:
  

  Atari had a stellar business plan and a first-rate marketing team—but, for all intents and purposes, it had nothing interesting to sell. Following the logic of this example, it is easy enough to see Dubai—or even Tucson, Arizona—as a failed videogame in the desert, ironically under-designed and over-promoted. […]

  One could even say that we have perfected the art of the anti-city—that we have made up anything but truly urban environments. Dubai, for instance, is famously difficult to navigate on foot, requiring a ten minute car ride down six-lane motorways, complete with frequently lethal U-turns, simply to get to the hotel across the street.

• Abu Dhabi may do it better. I think I dismissed the press release on this as, well, PR when I first saw it, but this sounds very cool and I really hope it works: “The Masdar Initiative is a new 6 million square meter sustainable development that uses the traditional planning principals of a walled city, together with existing technologies, to achieve a zero carbon and zero waste community.”
• A travel journalist from Connecticut recently visited Egypt and came home shocked at the sexual harassment she experienced. “Welcome in Egypt,” Lynn.

808 The CTUWS Blog

The Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) has a blog.

The Egyptian government closed the organization in April 2007 after officials from the Ministry of Social Solidarity blamed it for inciting workers to strike. Last June the Ministry of Social Solidarity announced that it would comply with a March 30 Cairo Administrative Court order to allow the center to reopen.

The people I have met from CTUWS have spent their adult lives trying to help Egyptian factory workers. Their blog promises to be an important resource on labor conditions around the country.

804 ‘Killing Is a Career’

The BBC’s Hugh Sykes talks to leaders of Iraq’s “Awakening movement” who warn that if their men aren’t incorporated into the Iraqi Army and police forces, they may switch sides.

An Ameriya engineer who did not want to give his name is also uneasy. He says the continuing security of the neighbourhood relies on all the Awakening men, not just a few of them.

He fears many will be bored, will lose their status, and may be tempted back to al-Qaeda.

“Killing is a career,” he said.

And al-Qaeda are busy threatening members of the Awakening movement. While I was sitting with him, Abu Ibrahim al Azawi got a mobile phone text message from an al-Qaeda member.

“We will put you in the sewer,” it read, “like all unbelievers who sell their souls for dollars.”

The message continued: “You are the shoes of the worshippers of the cross.” Showing the sole of a shoe is a profound Arab insult. [Full story]

(Had to include that last sentence for Angry Arab, who gets a kick out of foreign journalists explaining that “showing the sole of a shoe is a profound Arab insult.”)

Along the same lines, see Robert Dreyfuss’ phone interview with another Awakening commander:

The commander of the Sunni-led Awakening movement in Baghdad says that attacks by the Iraqi government and government-allied militiamen against Awakening leaders and rank-and-file members are likely to spark a new Sunni resistance movement. That resistance force will conduct attacks against American troops and Iraqi army and police forces, he says. “Look around,” he says. “It has already come back. It is getting stronger. Look at what is happening in Baghdad.” [Full story]

780 Contractor Wants Immunity in Abu Ghraib Suits

Yeah, I’ll bet they do…

HAGERSTOWN, Maryland (AP) — Defense contractor CACI claims it should be immune from lawsuits alleging torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, saying it was doing the U.S. government’s work as a supplier of interrogators.

The Maryland-based company and its sister, CACI Premier Technology, say in court documents that they’ll ask for the charges to be dismissed next week.

Eleven U.S. soldiers were convicted of breaking military laws in the Abu Ghraib scandal but no contractors have faced charges.

CACI and another contractor, L-3 Communications, are accused in separate lawsuits of a conspiracy to torture detainees in 2003 and 2004.

Plaintiffs attorneys said the company’s claim of immunity has no merit.

While we’re on the subject of the United States abroad, see this response to the U.S. presidential debate from Pakistani dentist and blogger Awab Alvi.

768 The Limits of Sanctions on Iran

My former Farsi teacher, Kouross Esmaeli, argues (with Ramin Karimian) that the sanctions on Iran are not having the desired effect:

While the US pressures do pose a nuisance, they are in no way destabilizing the regime. In fact, for the section of the Iranian ruling elite who advocate greater independence from the West, such pressures are only further proof of US injustices. Moreover, the US economic sanctions, putting a Western face on the structural roots of Iran’s economic problems, create a greater opportunity — an impetus as well as an excuse — to advance their domestic and international agenda. So, even as the sanctions compound the changes Iran’s economy is going through, the Iranian government is capable of managing their impacts.

The full article contains some useful reporting from Tehran, as well as this analysis of current Iranian politics:

Despite his image in the West, this is the primary role that President Ahmadinejad is playing inside Iran: he is using the autocratic and repressive state apparatus to privatize public industries, weaken labor laws, and take away government subsidies. He is, of course, doing so with an eye on building a stronger base for the regime and for his own re-election campaign next year. And in that sense, Ahmadinejad is becoming a double-edged sword for the leadership of the Islamic Republic. He is at once re-mobilizing some of the popular support for the regime and building a base for himself in order to operate as independently as possible. He recently voiced frustration at the limitations on the powers of the President to implement his vision, the same frustration that former President Khatami expressed a few years ago and was denounced widely as being out of step with the regime. So, while Supreme Leader Khamenei has proclaimed his pleasure at President Ahmadinejad’s strong stand against the West and has even hinted that the President should expect to be re-elected to a second term next year, establishment politicians such as former President Rafsanjani and former Speaker of the Parliament Nategh-Nouri have deepened their criticism of Ahmadinejad, his economic policies, and his attempts at repressing competitors.

In this process, one of the interesting outcomes of Ahmadinjead’s leadership is the fact that a layer of the ruling (and relatively more liberal) clerics are being marginalized at the hands of lay technocrats. Many of these technocrats are veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, and they see themselves as, once again, picking up the banner of the Islamic Revolution from the indolence-prone mullahs. They hope to further the independence of Iran while supporting other developing countries suffering under Western imperialism. The nuclear program plays the ideological role of buttressing this sense of independence, and there are no forces inside Iran who are allowed to openly disagree with it. Because of the West’s choice to ignore the Khatami presidency’s desire for rapprochement, President Ahmadinejad can say his own strong stand against the Western pressures is the only way to deal with Iran’s adversaries. And as far as the Iranian establishment is concerned, he has been proven right. The current negotiations between the West and Iran have come to allow Iran a lot more leeway than those under President Khatami, whose nuclear negotiation team was willing to accept the West’s preconditions before starting dialogue. The West rejected President Khatami’s overture, whereas President Ahmadinejad can point to his own success at bringing the West to the negotiating table under more favorable and just terms for Iran.

Interesting. I frankly don’t know enough to comment, but I’m curious to hear better-informed readers’ responses…

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