Month: September 2005

Gaza Pullout Gets Diplomatic Results

Israel’s pullout of the Gaza Strip has resulted in a new and important diplomatic development, the AP reports this morning. Pakistan has publicly met with the Israelis at a bilateral meeting sponsored by Turkey, and the two nations appear headed towards diplomatic recognition:

The foreign ministers of Israel and Pakistan, a Muslim country that has long taken a hard line against the Jewish state, met publicly for the first time Thursday, a diplomatic breakthrough that follows Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
The meeting in Istanbul was at the initiative of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and was expected to be followed by confidence building measures, such as a relaxation of Pakistan’s ban against travel to the Jewish state, an Israeli official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. …
Pakistan was encouraged by Israel’s evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, which was completed last week, and set up the meeting, Israeli officials said.

Slowly, Israel’s actions have created some momentum in moderate Muslim countries to encourage diplomatic efforts with the Jewish state. Radical nations such as Iran will not follow suit, but Sharon understands the need to reach out to those who could help contain the extremists among the Muslims and Arabs. Pakistan could lend considerable prestige to its credentials with moderate nations in the area, and at the same time these nations could show that engagement with Israel gets better results for the Palestinians than monolithic opposition.
When people complain that Sharon withdrew from Gaza and got nothing for it, they reveal a short-term view that ignores reality. Israel had around 9,000 citizens in Gaza that found themselves surrounded by more than a million hostile natives. Plainly Israel could not effectively defend these people forever, and the effort to deny thi cost their government money and resources far beyond the worth of the land, real and perceived. Now the nation can focus on defending a contiguous border with Gaza instead of tiny islands behind enemy lines. Israel also just concluded an agreement with Egypt that will take even more pressure off of their military, and put more of the onus on Egypt to keep order in Gaza by making them responsible for the Sinai border.
Dumping Gaza not only bought the Israelis some credibility in diplomacy, but also allowed them to get rid of an albatross that had begun to stink decades ago. It allows them to use their resources more wisely in the West Bank. The diplomatic efforts and their increased efficiency places much more pressure on Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to clean up their act.

Terrorism Defined (Stupidly)

The Guardian (UK) reports that the Israeli defence ministry has decided that taking a gun on a bus and mowing down several civilians as a form of political action doesn’t qualify as terrorism. Does that sound strange in a country that suffers more terrorist attacks than any other? It should, and the explanation only makes it stranger:

Four Arab Israelis shot dead by a soldier opposed to the closure of the Gaza Strip settlements are not victims of “terror” because their killer was Jewish, Israel’s defence ministry has ruled, and so their families are not entitled to the usual compensation for life.
The ministry concluded that the law only recognises terrorism as committed by “organisations hostile to Israel” even though the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the killings by Private Eden Nathan Zaada, 19, as “a despicable act by a bloodthirsty terrorist.”
He shot dead four people on a bus in the Arab Israeli town of Shfaram on August 4 and was then lynched by a mob.

Ariel Sharon diagnosed this attack perfectly, and the Defence Ministry should be ashamed of itself. Openly targeting civilians with lethal force to lash out for political purposes is terrorism no matter who conducts it. The difference between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli terrorism is that the latter results in punishment by the Israelis, while the former results in praise and celebration by the Palestinian “government”.
The denial that this terrorism exists in the few isolated cases that occur, such as Zaada, erodes the moral standing of the Israelis. One cannot make an argument that the exact same action undertaken by a Jew and an Arab amounts to two different crimes and still claim to represent justice and tolerance. Either both commit terrorism, or both don’t. The Defence Ministry risks a revival of the Zionism-equals-racism charge with this extremely poor decision and should immediately reconsider it.

Katrina: Will We See A New New Orleans?

Today’s Washington Post looks at the catastrophe that Katrina has created in New Orleans and the prognosis for its recovery — and the message appears relentlessly negative. It bolsters the President’s warning yesterday that the recovery will take years and a great deal of national effort to accomplish, and calls for a debate on exactly how to rebuild New Orleans:

First they have to pump the flooded city dry, and that will take a minimum of 30 days. Then they will have to flush the drinking water system, making sure they don’t recycle the contaminants. Figure another month for that.
The electricians will have to watch out for snakes in the water, wild animals and feral dogs. It will be a good idea to wear hip boots and take care of cuts and scrapes before the toxic slush turns them into festering sores. The power grid might be up in a few weeks, but many months will elapse before everybody’s lights come back on.
By that time, a lot of people won’t care because they will have taken the insurance money and moved away — forever. Home rebuilding, as opposed to repairs, won’t start for a year and will last for years after that.
Even then, there may be nothing normal about New Orleans, because the floodwater, spiked with tons of contaminants ranging from heavy metals and hydrocarbons to industrial waste, human feces and the decayed remains of humans and animals, will linger nearby in the Gulf of Mexico for a decade.
“This is the worst case,” Hugh B. Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, said of the toxic stew that contaminates New Orleans. “There is not enough money in the gross national product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area.”

Without a doubt, Katrina gave us the worst natural disaster in a century, perhaps ever once the final death toll becomes known. Galveston nearly got wiped off the map by a similar hurricane in 1900 and remains our deadliest natural disaster for the moment, but didn’t face the same obstacles for its rebuilding. Most of the problems that the Post reports come from two topographical features of the city that make New Orleans unique: its site in a bowl-shaped basin and the below-sea level position in which that places the city.
For rebuilding, the first priority will be pumping the water out, but where will it go? The water flooding the city has so many contaminants now that pumping it anywhere will lead to another ecological disaster. Its residue will still leave a dry toxic-waste site in the New Orleans basin once the water gets removed, and all of that will remain in every building that got flooded in any fashion, let alone submerged. And before anyone starts rebuilding, the problem of surviving another “big one” will require some rethinking of the levee system holding back Lake Pontchartrain and the ability to drain water from the basin in a more expeditious manner.
Small wonder that around the nation, watercooler talk openly questions the idea of rebuilding The Big Easy at all, especially since the trend in disasters like Katrina sees residents taking the insurance money and relocating elsewhere. Those disasters, like Hurricane Andrew, took weeks for recovery to begin. This recovery will take months before decisions even get made on whether to salvage anything in the stricken areas.
However, Americans don’t do pessimism, not as policy and not as part of our national character. We grew into the nation we know through an unbridled optimism about the kind of people we are and the kind of people we could become. Jimmy Carter found that out when he decided to tell Americans that we had come as far as we could go in his infamous “malaise” speech, and that we needed to know our limits. Rarely has an elected leader so misunderstood the people he led. We put men on the moon less than a decade after the notion occurred to us as a real possibility. We don’t do limits.
How we take care of New Orleans will say something about our national character and whether it remains as tough and optimistic as our history, for all its flaws, amply demonstrates. Will we walk away from a tough fight? Will America shrug its shoulders and tell the city that we don’t want to take on difficult tasks? Make no mistake; our response to New Orleans will say just as much about our staying power as a cut-and-run from Iraq would, and to much the same audience. Believe me, some of those who plan our destruction have cheered the scenes shown on television around the world of Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans, and they’re watching to see what we do.
And so New Orleans must be rebuilt, in some manner, right where it is now. No leader will get up and say, We give up. Katrina beat us. Let’s move on. That message will not resonate with the vast majority of Americans on either side of the political divide, which will bring a political consensus to ensure that we produce some kind of recovery for New Orleans. We can and will debate the how and the what, but not the whether. We’re Americans, and we don’t run from a fight.

Able Danger: Hearing Will Be Public

Arlen Specter raised the ante yesterday when announcing the scheduling of the hearing he will conduct with the Judiciary Commitee on the Able Danger project. The September 14th hearing into the datamining effort and its identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as potential terrorist threats will be conducted publicly:

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Wednesday that it was investigating reports from two military officers that a highly classified Pentagon intelligence program identified the Sept. 11 ringleader as a potential terrorist more than a year before the attacks.
The committee’s chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview that he was scheduling a public hearing on Sept. 14 “to get to the bottom of this” and that the military officers “appear to have credibility.”
The senator said his staff had confirmed reports from the two officers that employees of the intelligence program tried to contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2000 to discuss the work of the program, known as Able Danger.

Public hearings will allow Shaffer and Phillpott to get an examination that the nation can judge on its own. We can judge the credibility of the career officers, one of whom may have given up any hope for the Admiralty to take his case to the American people. Private contractor J.D. Smith will also take the stand, yet another witness to the results of the program and the identification of the terrorist cell that killed almost 3,000 Americans.
This has put the onus on the Pentagon, which now has to explain how all three men could possibly have lied about Able Danger or how they came to lose all of its relevant documentation. The New York Times reports that the Pentagon continues to hedge its initial skepticism. They now say they will not dispute the recollections of the three witnesses, even though they cannot find any documentation to support their statements. The Pentagon has apparently decided to take their usual spokesman, Larry Di Rita, off the case. Instead, Major Paul Swiergosz reiterated that the military couldn’t even find documentation that led to the program’s documentation.
I suggest that Senator Specter call the Pentagon counsel at the time of Able Danger as a witness, as well as anyone who handled documentation for the project. Something changed the Pentagon’s tenor, something more than the revelation of the names of Phillpott and Smith. Probably the project documentation no longer exists, as it would have been destroyed after the project’s cancellation, given the explosive reasons Smith cited for its abrupt end. A review of their counsel notes regarding meetings held between Pentagon lawyers and the Able Danger team regarding the sharing of the data should still remain extant — and would corroborate a key portion of their testimony.
We will know more in a fortnight, it appears. Set the TiVos for C-SPAN2 and review the material, especially the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission on the Mohammed Atta timeline.