With two Israeli army officers, “disciplined” for firing artillery shells towards a densely-populated area near a UN compound, still not facing a criminal investigation by the Israeli Defense Forces, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon confirmed on Thursday that he had received a full internal report from the Israelis.
This document completely expresses Israel’s commitment to conduct an honest internal probe according to the standards of international law. Despite the difficult conditions of fighting against Hamas terror, Israel has stringently abided by international norms and will continue to do in the future – though our foremost obligation is to protect our citizens.
However, The Independent of London reported a confession from a high-ranking Israeli official who talked to Israel’s Yedhiot Ahronot. The officer said that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement, concerning the protection of civilian lives, to minimise military casualties during the Operation Cast Lead. The senior commander said:
Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area… We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference.
According to the newspaper, a more junior officer who served during the operation described the new policy as one of “literally zero risk to the soldiers” as a part of the policy to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war.
This piece started as an update on our main analysis of the results of Lebanon’s elections, but with the US and British media’s misreading, simplifications, and exaggerations spreading like kudzu, a separate entry is needed.
For Michael Slackman of The New York Times, it’s not just a question of Washington shaping the Lebanese outcome: “Political analysts…attribute it in part to President Obama’s campaign of outreach to the Arab and Muslim world.” You can slap the Obama model on top of any election to get the right result: “Lebanon’s election could be a harbinger of Friday’s presidential race in Iran, where a hard-line anti-American president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may be losing ground to his main moderate challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi.”
Simon Tisdall, normally a shrewd observer of international affairs, trots out the same simplicities in The Guardian of London: “It’s possible that watching Iranians will be encouraged in their turn to go out and vote for reformist, west-friendly candidates in Friday’s presidential election. Lebanon may be just the beginning of the ‘Obama effect’.”
Juan Cole has posted a more thoughtful assessment, even as he opens with the reductionist and sensationalist declaration, “President Obama’s hopes for progress on the Arab-Israeli peace process would have been sunk if Hezbollah had won the Lebanese elections.” And Howard Schneider of The Washington Post, although premature in his anointing of Saad Hariri as Lebanon’s next and primary leader (setting aside not only President Suleiman but also presuming that Hariri will be chosen as PM), sets out “the choice…between a showdown with his supporters, a showdown with Hezbollah or — the more likely outcome — a continued stalemate over the very issues voters hoped they were addressing in Sunday’s balloting”.
What stands out internationally is that the Lebanese still believe in parliamentary democracy and President Obama, so soon after his Cairo lecture, will recognise that this tiny country still believes in free speech and free elections. Another victory for Lebanon, in other words, beneath the swords of its neighbours.
UPDATE: Gethin Chamberlain writes in this morning’s The Guardian of London on reports coming out of the camps, including claims that 15,000 people died in the last three months of fighting.
Understandably, most of the US and British media focused yesterday on the Sri Lankan Government’s military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the deaths of LTTE leaders including (probably) Velupillai Prabhakaran. Some, such as The Washington Post and The Times of London added calls for a “political process that is fully inclusive and democratic”.
Today, however, some outlets are noting the immediate humanitarian (and longer-term political) issue: the more than 250,000 refugees now in overcrowded camps. The United Nations Children’s Fund has demanded access to the shelters: “”People are arriving into camps sick, malnourished and some with untended wounds of war….Water and sanitation needs are critical.”
On 5 May, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a video report on the situation in one of the camps (secretly filmed before the arrival of another 65,000 people in recent days.) Below that is an article by Andrew Buncombe of The Independent of London, published last Sunday, on the plight of the civilians, including at least 50,000 children.
No one is safe as Tigers fight to the death
Some stare, others frown. Some smile at the camera, though there is remarkably little for them to smile about. As these youngsters trapped in Sri Lanka’s war zone stand in line with their bowls and cups, waiting patiently for soup, there are reports that food is running low and that children are dying almost every day from sickness and injury. All the while the fighting continues. Shells explode, gunfire rattles. Read the rest of this entry »
On Friday, The Independent of London put together some pieces of a military puzzle, linking US special operations and Afghan deaths from American bombing and missiles, to declare, “The US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, or MarSOC…was behind at least three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents.”
Reporter Jerome Starkey explained that the unit, “created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld,…call[ed] in air strikes in Bala Boluk, in Farah, last week – believed to have killed more than 140 men, women and children”. In March 2007, after a suicide bombing close to the Pakistan border, a MarSOC company “fired indiscriminately at pedestrians and civilian cars, killing at least 19 people”, while in August 2008 “a 20-man MarSOC unit, fighting alongside Afghan commandos, directed fire from unmanned drones, attack helicopters and a cannon-armed Spectre gunship into compounds in Azizabad, in Herat province, leaving more than 90 people dead – many of them children”. Read the rest of this entry »
US envoy Holbrooke and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, didn’t even catch the attention of The Washington Post. Which might be a good thing, because Pakistani officials did not follow the Obama script for a united War against Al Qa’eda/Taliban terror: Read the rest of this entry »
While most of the media is moving on from Friday’s message by Barack Obama and the Iranian response, there is still a disturbing whiff of “Tehran rejects US” in today’s stories. For example, Katherine Butler of The Independent of London bluntly asks, “Why has Iran apparently dismissed Barack Obama’s call for ‘a new beginning?”
It’s an easy, sometimes lazy interpretation which fits the pre-conception of hard-line, intransigent Iranian leaders, and in this case, it’s flat-out wrong. As our colleague Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran says in a more sensible Reuters analysis, “Iran sets terms for U.S. ties”, “I think they [the Iranian leadership] are quite willing to have better relations if the Americans are serious.” Khamenei’s website offers a summary, “Supreme Leader Demands Genuine Change in US policies”.
So here, courtesy of Juan Cole, is the US Government’s translation of the speech by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini on Friday. And, in a separate entry, Farideh Farhi offers an incisive analysis of the possibilities in the Iranian response.
In the first meeting of its kind, two French senators travelled to Damascus two weeks ago to meet the leader of the Palestinian Islamist faction, Khaled Meshal (pictured)….Two British MPs met three weeks ago in Beirut with the Hamas representative in Lebanon, Usamah Hamdan.
Amidst the attention to the possible US military “surge” in Afghanistan, we’ve been keeping a close eye on an alternative strategy, namely, talks with “moderate Taliban”. High-ranking officials in Pakistan have long favoured such a strategy, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been vocal recently in advocating such discussions.
The twist in the excellent article below by Kim Sengupta of The Independent is the detail of Saudi Arabia, notably the head of Saudi intelligence Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (pictured), in setting up these secret negotiations. Conversely, there is little sign of Pakistani involvement, probably of the great pressure from Washington for Islamabad to show a tough line against the Taliban as well as its own insurgents.
Secret talks with Taliban gather pace as surge looms: Saudis warn Washington that offensive may hinder talks with militant group
By Kim Sengupta Read the rest of this entry »
With two Israeli army officers, “disciplined” for firing artillery shells towards a densely-populated area near a UN compound, still not facing a criminal investigation by the Israeli Defense Forces, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon confirmed on Thursday that he had received a full internal report from the Israelis.
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This piece started as an update on our main analysis of the results of Lebanon’s elections, but with the US and British media’s misreading, simplifications, and exaggerations spreading like kudzu, a separate entry is needed.
On Friday, The Independent of London 
Lost amidst the attention to President Obama’s trip in Europe, another US tourist, 
While most of the media is moving on from Friday’s message by Barack Obama and the Iranian response, there is still a disturbing whiff of “Tehran rejects US” in today’s stories. For example, 
Update (9 p.m.): 
Amidst the attention to the possible US military “surge” in Afghanistan, we’ve been keeping a close eye on an alternative strategy, namely, talks with “moderate Taliban”. High-ranking officials in Pakistan have long favoured such a strategy, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been vocal recently in advocating such discussions.
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