Bahrain Snapshot: Obama Administration's Ineffectual Plea to Crown Prince "Please Change"

The significance of this article by Mark Landler of The New York Times is not in the immediate story of Obama Administration officials meeting the Crown Prince of Bahrain in Washington this week but in the political reality beyond the encounter.

The Administration's strategy of persuasion, alongside some mildly critical rhetoric, is unlikely to achieve much, if anything, in Bahrain. Indeed, as Landler indicates below, the Crown Prince's visit may be a political sideshow --- in mid-March, his approach of engagement of some elements of the opposition to discuss reform was quashed by other members of the ruling family, and he has struggled to regain influence since then.

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Egypt Feature: "The Struggle is Far from Over" (Worth)

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 27 May 2011Three months after the revolution, Egypt is in the agony of self-discovery. As other Arab revolutions founder or lapse into civil wars, Egypt has achieved far more than its young rebels ever hoped for. First, they forced out Mubarak in only 18 days. Then, with renewed protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, they rid themselves of his loyalists, including Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister.

Nominally, Egypt is being ruled by a panel of military generals, who have governed in an uneasy dialogue with the revolution’s self-appointed leaders, making concession after concession to popular demands. But protesters continue to call for deeper reforms, and workers are striking throughout the country, demanding better pay and the removal of Mubarak-era bosses. Meanwhile, many Egyptians seem eager to carry the revolutionary energy of Tahrir Square into everyday life. “I was part of the regime — I used to take bribes,” intones a man in a new public-service TV ad campaign. “But Egypt is changing, and I am changing.” Sitting in traffic, I saw bumper stickers proclaiming: “As of today, I won’t run traffic lights,” and “I will change.” Posters have appeared on walls across Cairo urging Egyptians to stop littering, stop cheating, stop putting up with police abuse and sectarian slurs.

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Yemen Breaking: "Islamic Militants" Occupy the New York Times

Photo: Hani Mohammad (AP)UPDATE 1930 GMT: The Times has an article with a different approach this afternoon, "Yemen Battles Opponents on Two Fronts". While the reference to "Islamist militants" remains, this at least is set alongside the developments in Taiz:

"The Yemeni government ratcheted up its violent response to opponents on two fronts Monday, pounding a major coastal city with airstrikes aimed at dislodging Islamic militants, and smashing the country’s largest antigovernment demonstration in overnight clashes that killed more than a dozen protesters, according to witnesses reached by phone."

So what happens to the priorities of "Western" reporting when the spectre of "Islamist militants" arises?

Exhibit A from The New York Times, which headlines on the occupation of Zinjibar in Yemen by 300 insurgents, "Islamists Seize a Yemeni City, Stoking Fears". (The lead photograph (see left) of armed men is not actually of "Islamists" in Zinjibar, but of "tribesman" in the capital Sana'a, if you can read the small-font caption.)

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Middle East Analysis: Dennis Ross & the Battle Within the Obama Administration

Israeli PM Netanyahu and Dennis RossIn February 2009, we headlined, "Treading Softly on Iran: Dennis Ross Sneaks into the Administration". Our analysis at the time:

He has been brought [into the Administration] with a remit so broad that it threatens to be vague. Now he is not focused on Iran but overlapping with both [Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy Richard] Holbrooke and [Israel-Palestine envoy George] Mitchell. There may be some State Department master-plan setting out how Ross, a forceful personality, will work with those two envoys --- equally forceful personalities --- and how he and his staff will in turn work with permanent State Department desks overseeing the Middle Eastern, Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asian regions.

More than two years later, Holbrooke is dead and Mitchell has resigned in frustration. But Ross is still very much present in the National Security Council. And the operative term is not "work with" other personalities and other departments but "work against".

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Middle East: Obama Plans a Speech, But Little Prospect of Substance (Landler/Cooper)

Mr. Obama had considered laying out American parameters for a peace deal [between Israel and Palestine], several officials said — a move that [Secretary of State] Clinton favored, but one that would have put him at odds with his national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and his top Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross.

But the unity accord between Hamas and Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, effectively killed the plans to try to push through an American proposal, one administration official said. “It’s hard to imagine how we do that when Hamas hasn’t agreed” to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to forswear violence against Israel, the official said.

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Libya Snapshot: The Hidden Workshops of Misurata (Chivers)

When the bloody siege of this isolated city began, the rebels who rose against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s conventional army had almost no firearms. Many of them relied on hands, knives and stones.

Now they roam the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.

The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from Misurata’s center to its outskirts, is in part the result of a hidden side of this lopsided ground war: a clandestine network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.

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Bin Laden Follow-Up: US-Pakistan Tension Escalates (Myers/Perlez)

Obama Envoy Grossman & Pakistan PM GilaniTensions between the American and Pakistani governments intensified sharply on Tuesday as senior Obama administration officials demanded answers to how Osama bin Laden managed to hide in Pakistan, and the Pakistani government issued a defiant statement calling the raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader “an unauthorized unilateral action.”

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Guantanamo WikiLeaks Feature: From "Probable Al Qa'eda Member" to US Ally in Libya (Nordland/Shane)

For more than five years, Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu (see his Guantanamo detainee file) was a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay prison, judged “a probable member of Al Qaeda” by the analysts there. They concluded in a newly disclosed 2005 assessment that his release would represent a “medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”

Today, Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah Brigade for his birthplace, this shabby port town of 100,000 people in northeast Libya. The former enemy and prisoner of the United States is now an ally of sorts, a remarkable turnabout resulting from shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.

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Israel-Palestine Snapshot: Obama Administration Wonders, "What to Do, What to Do?" (Cooper)

A Republican invitation for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address Congress next month is highlighting the tensions between President Obama and Mr. Netanyahu and has kicked off a bizarre diplomatic race over who will be the first to lay out a new proposal to reopen the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

For three months, White House officials have been debating whether the time has come for Mr. Obama to make a major address on the region’s turmoil, including the upheaval in the Arab world, and whether he should use the occasion to propose a new plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

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Libya Feature: Rockets, Snipers, and Resistance in Misurata (Chivers)

Photo: Filippo Monteforte (AFP/Getty)Misurata is nearly severed from the world, a densely inhabited city where anti-Qaddafi rebels have been all but surrounded by Colonel Qaddafi’s conventional troops. They face front lines to their south, east and west. The Mediterranean Sea is at their back.

They endure regular barrages from high-explosive munitions and shortages of equipment and ammunition. But kept alive by tenuous resupply into the port they barely hold, the rebels have created a maze of fighting positions and tank obstacles. They have managed for almost two months to prevent their city from being overrun.

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