The Common Ground News Service, September 20, 2005
Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
September 20, 2005
The Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) is distributing the enclosed articles to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. Unless otherwise noted, all copyright permissions have been obtained and the articles may be reproduced by any news outlet or publication free of charge. If publishing, please acknowledge both the original source and CGNews, and notify us at cgnewspih@sfcg.org.
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ARTICLES IN THIS EDITION:
1. “Four years since Sept. 11 and since declaring war on terror” by Hasan Abu Nimah
Hasan Abu Nimah, Jordan’s former ambassador to the U.N., reflects on 9/11 and the human costs of actions taken since then. In a discussion of the link between superpower behavior and the actions of extremist groups, he raises some alternatives to the current strategy for fighting terrorism.
(Source: adapted from the Jordan Times, September 14, 2005)
2. “The Real Surprise in Egypt” by Mona Eltahawy
Mona Eltahawy, a Cairo-based journalist and former correspondent for the Reuters News Agency in Cairo and Jerusalem and writer for the UK Guardian, points out that what is interesting about the recent Egyptian elections is not Mubarak’s win but that so many Egyptians have left their apathy behind to vote, to demonstrate and to consider “a new idea of government.”
(Source: Asharq Alawsat, September 13, 2005)
3. “United against Iranian nukes” by Philip H. Gordon and Charles Grant
Philip H. Gordon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, comment on Iran’s rejection of the offer by Britain, France and Germany to support a civilian nuclear energy program and provide political and economic incentives in exchange for Tehran's agreement not to develop its capacity for nuclear enrichment and reprocessing. They then outline suggestions for overcoming this failure in Western-Iranian dialogue.
(Source: International Herald Tribune, September 14, 2005)
4. “Jordan's King Abdullah urges Muslims to reclaim religion from extremists” Middle East Times Editorial
This editorial piece from the Middle East Times discusses King Abdullah’s recent speech in Washington, during which he reiterated his desire to work together with the West against extremism. "The road of moderation and respect for others is not one for Muslims alone," he noted. “All humanity today needs to meet this challenge."
(Source: Middle East Times, September 14, 2005)
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ARTICLE 1
Four years since Sept. 11 and since declaring war on terror
Hasan Abu Nimah
This month, America and the whole world with it remembered the bitter memory of Sept. 11, 2001. For America, the fourth anniversary of the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania is a reminder of terrible loss of life and the loss of a sense of invulnerability of
the American “homeland”.
Most often costly events in history turn into useful lessons from which the human race learns how to fortify the future. Progress, after all, is an accumulation of the positive experience of individuals and groups, by simply pursuing the good and excluding the bad.
A quick assessment of the gains and losses in this “war on terror” reveals fairly horrifying results. Almost 2,000 US service personnel have been killed in Iraq and another 230 in Afghanistan. Nearly 15,000 Americans have been injured. An unknown number of Afghan and Iraqi civilians have also paid with their lives. In Iraq alone, credible estimates range from 15,000-100,000 and hundreds of bodies of people who died violent deaths show up in Baghdad's morgue each week. Despite countless “turning points”, Iraq appears no more secure, stable and free than it was three years ago. If anything, the situation is worse, as sectarian divisions, fuelled by the occupation, threaten to explode into civil war. While Afghanistan appears to be a success story in comparison to Iraq, the “democratically elected” government is totally reliant on external support and controls little outside the capital, where the same old warlords continue to run their personal fiefdoms and drug empires, as they always did.
At the same time, the number of people killed in terrorist attacks has increased, as has the scale and frequency of outrages.
Yet many Americans are starting to question this simplistic and politically convenient logic which absolves the United States of any responsibility for the situation. The challenge has come from respected scholars like Robert A. Pape, a University of Chicago expert on Al Qaeda and author of “Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.” Pape agrees that Al Qaeda does have a strategy, but not to force freedom lovers to retreat as Bush claims. It is “to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries,” Pape wrote in the International Herald Tribune on July 12, 2005.
Pape asserts that contrary to what most Americans had hoped, Al Qaeda has not been weakened as a result of American counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, 2001. “Since 2002, Al Qaeda has been involved in at least 17 bombings that killed more than 700 people — more attacks and victims than in all the years before Sept. 11 combined,” he wrote.
He noted that “the overwhelming majority of attackers are citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in which the US has stationed combat troops since 1990,” and that “of the other suicide terrorists, most came from America's closest allies in the Muslim world — Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco — rather than from those the State Department considers “state sponsors of terrorism, like Iran, Libya, Sudan and Iraq”. Afghanistan, he observed, produced Al Qaeda suicide terrorists only after the country was invaded by US forces in 2001.
Pape finds strategic logic in Al Qaeda operative behaviour noting that “[s]ince 2002 the group has killed citizens from 18 of the 20 countries that Osama Ben Laden has cited as supporting American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq”.
This kind of evidence flies in the face of those who insist on denying any link between superpower behaviour and the irrational and often violent reaction of those who are most affected. Continued denial would only obscure effective methods of dealing with the issue of spreading violence and terror.
This seems to be a major factor for the decline of public confidence in Bush's management of the war on terror, according to analyst Jim Lobe, who points to the increasing sense of vulnerability of the American people to terrorist attacks as a result of the administration's actions, adding that “it now appears that much of the national security elite has made a similar assessment and, in an indication of the shifting political winds, is now more willing to speak out about it.”
Lobe cites an increasing movement among Washington elites to express an alternative to Bush's strategy, as well as recognition by some that an American withdrawal from Iraq and an Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories would do more to fight terrorism than military action could ever do.
There is evidence that some of these shifts among elites are reflected in public opinion. Poll after poll shows that Americans are no longer so easily appeased by Bush's self-righteous sloganeering. A Newsweek poll published to coincide with the Sept. 11 anniversary found that while 46 per cent approve of Bush's handling of “terrorism and homeland security,” 48 percent disapprove.
One interpretation of these results is that until now, Americans were largely shielded from the worst results of Bush's policies, although here in the region — whether in Iraq, Palestine or surrounding countries — we experience them directly. The disastrous performance after Katrina demonstrated to many ordinary Americans that the most important thing in government is not just a swaggering attitude and feel-good appeals to patriotism and folksy cowboy values, but that lives depend on sound policies executed by wise and qualified people.
Perhaps Americans will now scrutinise those who want to lead them more closely. If that is the case, then the whole world will benefit from better American leadership which has a crucial role in making the world truly safer and more peaceful for everyone. That is an America the world will have no trouble supporting.
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* Hasan Abu Nimah Jordan's former ambassador to the U.N.
Source: adapted from the Jordan Times, September 14, 2005
Visit the website at www.jordantimes.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained from the author for publication.
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ARTICLE 2
The Real Surprise in Egypt
Mona Eltahawy
CAIRO – Egypt’s first contested presidential election on Wednesday brought few surprises.
President Hosni Mubarak won 88.6 percent of the vote, giving him a fifth six-year term in office. This was no surprise.
But I did not return home expecting a surprising result. Instead, I came back to enjoy the surprises that have surrounded the elections – the first in which Egyptians could choose between more than one candidate.
When I left Egypt for the United States in 2000, I had reported on my country for 10 years. The story was getting stale and there was no sign that it would be getting exciting anytime soon.
But that changed last December when anti-government demonstrators took to the streets of Cairo to say Kifaya – Enough – and to call for change. And when the Egyptian constitution was amended to allow a multi-candidate presidential election on September 7, I knew I had to come home.
And so I arrived last week just in time to see the last few days of campaigning. And there have been several real surprises.
For starters, what a surprise it was to see Ayman Nour hold his last campaign rally in front of the Mogamma. For those who don’t know, the Mogamma is universally acknowledged as the home of Egyptian government bureaucracy.
So notorious is its reputation as one of those places where you enter thinking you need only 20 minutes to get an official document issued but you end up spending two hours instead that one of Egypt’s most famous comic actors, Adel Imam, immortalized the Mogamma in a massively popular film called “Terrorism and Kebab”.
The film chronicles Adel Imam playing a father who goes to the Mogamma in an attempt to transfer his children from one school to another but finds himself literally stuck in a vicious circle that takes him in vain from one clerk to another.
In a fit of frustration, the father grabs a rifle from one of the police guards in the building and takes hostage the Mogamma employees and some fellow citizens who happened to be caught in the bureaucratic rut.
When the minister of the interior himself appears to negotiate with the father, thinking he is a terrorist who will blow the building up, the father asks his hostages what they’d like and they all decide kebab is top of their wish list. The high price of meat makes it too expensive for many Egyptians. The film ends with the Adel Imam character walking out along with the hostages – Everyman who for a few hours fought back.
Ayman Nour’s rally in front of the Mogamma focused on that Everyman. By focusing most of his speech on domestic policy, Nour was serving notice that Egyptians deserved to be their government's No. 1 priority.
By talking about unemployment, poverty, the inability of so many young Egyptian men and women to afford marriage, political prisoners, human rights violations, the rights of women and Christians, and government corruption, he was signaling that instead of courting government officials to get their daily needs met, government officials should be courting ordinary Egyptians to keep their jobs.
By putting himself squarely in front of a government fortress so redolent with the bureaucratic humiliation that government represents for the average Egyptian, Nour was promising a new idea of government.
Egyptians will not forget this.
And Egyptians will not forget the sight or sound of 3,000 of us marching from Tahrir Square to Ataba Square as part of a Kifaya organized march on Election Day. It was the largest anti-government march in Egypt for almost 30 years.
When I joined a demonstration through the Shubra neighbourhood during my visit to Cairo in June, we numbered 300 at most. On Election Day, we were 10 times that number and sometimes more as people who were watching only decided to join our march.
The electoral commission which announced the election results put voter turnout at a very low 23 percent. That means that only seven million of 32 million registered voters in Egypt turned out to cast their ballot on Wednesday. Keep this low figure in mind so that you can appreciate the significance of between 3,000 – 5,000 Egyptians marching through downtown Cairo calling for change.
The concern now is what will happen to the opposition movement in Egypt. Now that the election is over, the world must not forget them. Egypt is not the country it was just 10 months ago. As a member of Ayman Nour’s Ghad Party told me a few days before the election, "It is too late to stop the train of democracy or even reduce its speed."
Nothing can wipe our memories clean of the criticisms heaped on the government over the past few weeks ago by presidential candidates and the opposition movement which has organized almost weekly demonstrations.
As an Egyptian who lives abroad, I could not vote on Wednesday. Even when I lived in Egypt, I never bothered to apply for a voter registration card because I never thought my vote would count. I regret this apathy now. I will register myself for the next presidential election in 2011 when Egyptians abroad will be allowed to vote.
Egypt has begun a journey down a long path towards change. I have never heard so many relatives and friends take such an interest in Egyptian politics or -- more important -- feel that they had a stake in them.
That is the real surprise in Egypt these days.
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* Mona Eltahawy is a Cairo-based journalist, and former correspondent for the Reuters News Agency in Cairo and Jerusalem and writes for the UK Guardian.
Source: Asharq Alawsat, September 13, 2005
Visit the website at www.asharqalawsat.com/english
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 3
United against Iranian nukes
Philip H. Gordon and Charles Grant
Last February, a group of European and American foreign policy experts issued the "Compact Between the United States and Europe," a detailed proposal for trans-Atlantic cooperation on the key foreign policy issues of the day (IHT Feb. 17, 2005). The premise of the compact was that the split that had emerged between the two sides of the Atlantic in recent years was deeply damaging to the interests of both sides, and that agreements on common policy challenges were both necessary and possible.
In that light, we were deeply disappointed by Iran's rejection of the offer in August by Britain, France and Germany to provide Iran with support for a civilian nuclear energy program, as well as far-reaching political and economic incentives, in exchange for Tehran's agreement not to develop its capacity for nuclear enrichment and reprocessing.
The European proposal, which had explicit support from the United States, would have made it possible for Iran to acquire Western nuclear reactors and fuel for the civilian nuclear energy program Iran claims to need. Iran rejected it out of hand, removed International Atomic Energy Agency seals at its nuclear facility in Isfahan and resumed the process of uranium conversion.
We believe an Iranian nuclear weapons capability would be dangerous and destabilizing. It could lead to further nuclear proliferation in the region, provide cover for Tehran to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy and deal a fatal blow to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The European Union and the United States have a strong common interest in bringing Iran back to the negotiating table and persuading it to change course. The best way to do that is to make clear to Iran that it can win significant political and economic benefits if it forgoes a nuclear weapons program, but that it will pay a very big political and economic price if it does not. Such an effort will only work if America and Europe stand united.
Therefore, the United States and the European Union should endorse the following:
The United States and the European Union call upon Iran to renew the suspension of nuclear conversion activities and to send overseas all materials produced since the breaking of the seals at Isfahan as a basis for resuming nuclear discussions with Britain, France and Germany. Only a permanent and verifiable end to Iran's nuclear fuel cycle program can guarantee that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons.
The United States reiterates its support for the EU nuclear dialogue with Iran. If Iran permanently and verifiably ended its fuel cycle programs, the United States would support Iran's right to import technology for a civilian nuclear energy program, and it would not impose sanctions against European companies that engage in civilian trade and investment with Iran.
The United States declares its willingness to explore other issues directly with Iran, including bilateral diplomatic and economic relations, U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, Iranian support for terrorist groups, Iran's opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and Iran's membership in the World Trade Organization. The United States and the EU will continue to support the efforts of the Iranian people to secure basic human rights and build a functioning democracy in Iran.
The EU reiterates its willingness to support Iran's civil nuclear energy program, but declares its readiness to impose meaningful penalties on Iran if it refuses to end its fuel cycle programs or withdraws from the NPT. If Iran refuses to renew the full suspension of all enrichment related activities, EU leaders will support asking the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution requiring Iran to do so or face economic and diplomatic sanctions, including a ban on new foreign investment in Iran's energy sector.
EU countries would seek consensus at the Security Council, but Russian or Chinese opposition would not prevent them from imposing sanctions on their own, together with the United States and Japan. The EU will consider additional steps should Iran end its suspension of nuclear enrichment, withdraw from the IAEA Additional Protocol or withdraw from the NPT.
Other signers are: Urban Ahlin, Giuliano Amato, Gerassimos Arsenis, Samuel R. Berger, Jean-Claude Casanova, Richard Burt, Ivo H. Daalder, Marta Dassu, Thérèse Delpech, Lawrence Freedman, Francis Fukuyama, Leslie Gelb, Robert Gelbard, John Gibson, Nicole Gnesotto, Ulrike Guérot, David Hannay, Douglas Hurd, Robert Hutchings, G. John Ikenberry, Josef Janning, Géza Jeszensky, Robert Kagan, Daniel Keohane, Ivan Krastev, Mart Laar, Anthony Lake, Mark Leonard, Andrew Moravcsik, Kalypso Nicolaidis, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Michael O'Hanlon, Soli Özel, Ana Palacio, William J. Perry, Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, George Robertson, Gary Samore, David Sandalow, Simon Serfaty, Narcís Serra, Jeremy Shapiro, Stefano Silvestri, Anne-Marie Slaughter, James B. Steinberg, Strobe Talbott, Antonio Vitorino and Joris Vos.
The full text of this statement will be found on the Web sites of the Brookings Institution (www.brookings.edu) and the Center for European Reform (www.cer.org.uk).
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* Philip H. Gordon is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Charles Grant is director of the Center for European Reform.
Source: The International Herald Tribune, September 14, 2005
Visit the website at www.iht.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 4
Jordan's King Abdullah urges Muslims to reclaim religion from extremists
Middle East Times Editorial
WASHINGTON -- Jordan's King Abdullah II drove home his message of religious tolerance in a speech in Washington this month, urging Islamic scholars and leaders to reclaim the religion from extremists.
"The ultimate goal is to take back our religion from the vocal, violent and ignorant extremists who have tried to hijack Islam over the last hundred years," the king said in a speech at the Catholic University of America. "They do not speak for Islam any more than a Christian terrorist speaks for Christianity."
The Jordanian monarch, accompanied on his trip to the United States by his wife Queen Rania, noted his government initiative known as the "Amman Message" that was launched last year in a bid to encourage fellow Muslims to reject extremism and embrace tolerance and acceptance.
He said that the initiative had prompted scholars representing Islam's various schools of thought to agree that religious edicts could not be handed down by people such as Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and his Iraq frontman Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi, as both lacked the proper qualifications and religious knowledge.
"They [the scholars] agreed that no one can call another Muslim an apostate - as the extremists do to those who disagree with them," the king told his audience of about 350 scholars, diplomats, religious figures and students.
He also urged leaders outside the Muslim community to contribute to his effort to foster dialogue between the West and moderate Islam.
"The road of moderation and respect for others is not one for Muslims alone," he noted. "All humanity today needs to meet this challenge."
He also alluded to the hurricane that devastated the US Gulf Coast, saying that it was a reminder that "we are all in God's hands".
Rabbi Jack Bemporad, of the Center for Interreligious Understanding, said that the king's speech was a welcome ray of hope coming from the leader of an Islamic country.
"These are seeds that are absolutely essential," he said.
Ahmed Iravani, a professor of Islamic law at Catholic University, stressed that the king's message of tolerance had a chance of succeeding as it had received the backing of a number of respected religious scholars and theological centers around the world.
"If real scholars of Islam get involved in this than his message has a chance of succeeding," Iravani said.
Abdullah made his speech shortly before heading to New York to attend the United Nations summit. He is due back in Washington after the summit to meet with Muslim and Jewish leaders.
The king on Monday met with Pope Benedict VXI at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, saying that he wanted to establish an honest dialogue between the Islamic world and the West.
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* This article appeared as the editorial of the Middle East Times.
Source: Middle East Times, September 14, 2005
Visit the website at www.metimes.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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