Settlement Controversies/Al-Qaeda inside Iraq

Update from AIJAC

Settlement Controversies/Al-Qaeda inside Iraq

April 14, 2005
Number 04/05 #05

Today's Update leads with two pieces on the controversy over Israeli plans to, at some time in the future, build additional housing inside the Jerusalem suburb of Maale Adumim, which was criticised by the US during Israeli PM Sharon's visit to the US this week.

First, Sharon's predecessor Ehud Barak comments on the proposed building project. He argues that the Palestinian refusal to accept the obvious, that large settlement blocs near the border, such as Maale Adumim, are going to remain in Israeli hands are part of a larger impediment to peace. He argues that all-or-nothing Palestinian positions on these issues are an example of what needs to be overcome for progress. To read the whole thing, CLICK HERE.

Next, columnist John Podhoretz takes on some of the misrepresentation that have been ongoing with respect to Maale Adumim and the proposed expansion in a few years. He says the real game is the disengagement plan and says Palestinian/European efforts to use Maale Adumim to turn the US against Sharon and disengagement are as unlikely to succeed as settler efforts to turn Israelis against Sharon. For the full argument, CLICK HERE.

Finally, on a separate topic, Col. Austin Bay, a strategic analyst and columnist who recently served in Iraq discusses the latest strategy of al-Qaeda. He says they are currently deliberately trying to duplicate North Vietnam's Tet offensive, but this is unlikely to be effective. For this insightful look at the strategic situation in Iraq, CLICK HERE.

Trust is built on realities

Ehud Barak

The Guardian, Tuesday April 12, 2005

Four and a half years have passed since the Camp David talks failed to produce an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The period that followed was catastrophic for both peoples - thousands were killed, hatred spread and trust collapsed. We all paid a high price, just to return a few years later to essentially the same principles of peace.

The guidelines in terms of territory have always been clear for both sides. This framework entails a two-state solution, two nations living side by side rather than within each other. This requires Israel to remove settlements from the midst of the Palestinian population and allow the Palestinian state its territorial contiguity. The Palestinians, for their part, are expected to acknowledge that Israel will remain predominantly Jewish and that the major blocs of settlements will not be removed.

Both sides need to make painful concessions to ensure this framework becomes a reality. Indeed, in the past few months, it has seemed that despite the challenges, the will to go forward does exist. Mahmoud Abbas, for example, recently stated that the solution for the Palestinian refugee problem is to be found by settling them in a Palestinian state rather than in Israel. This principle, which preserved the identities of both states, was accepted by us, but - until now - was repeatedly rejected by Palestinian negotiators.

At Camp David, this insistence brought me to fear that the dispute was actually not about 1967, namely "occupation", but 1947, the very right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. It should be clear that our "demographic continuity" is no less important than the Palestinian desire for "territorial contiguity".

The Israeli leader, on the other hand, is expected to withdraw forces from Gaza, evacuate settlements and, apparently, uproot Jewish settlers by force. If anyone does not realise the extent of his historic compromise, he should examine the rightwing resistance to Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, or read the reports indicating a growing threat to his own life. His words yesterday, comparing the atmosphere in Israel to the eve of a civil war, are, unfortunately, far from empty rhetoric.

Evidently, the plan promotes the framework developed at Camp David. It removes Jewish settlements from densely populated Palestinian areas, reduces friction in the short term and consolidates the Palestinian areas so that they can control territory without our presence. However, while Israel is actively seeking to achieve these goals, the Palestinians should take measures to implement their obligations to dismantle, not only control, the terror infrastructure.

They should also accept the demographic realities. This is why a partial bureaucratic approval of an old construction plan in the city of Maale Adumim, adjacent to Jerusalem, should not be perceived as a danger to the peace process. All the diplomatic pressure on Israel, in this specific case, is not justified, simply because the Palestinians have already agreed this major bloc will stay under Israel's authority - if not at Camp David, in many other exchanges of ideas. While the construction plan is far from being implemented on the ground, threats by Saeb Erekat (or Abbas) that its authorisation "closes the door to peace" takes us back to a gloomy period where short-term political gains are put before long-term benefits.

No Israeli government can, should or needs to remove the major settlement blocs. These are where almost 80% of the settlers live in an area of no more than 6% of the total land area of the West Bank. This understanding should ease the recent tension between the sides, especially as the Maale Adumim plan specifically does not interfere with any unsolvable territorial contiguity issues.

But the story of Maale Adumim is only an example that serves to illustrate a broader challenge in future negotiations with the Palestinians. One lesson from our attempt to reach an agreement was that the attitude of "all or nothing" brought both sides to a stalemate. The cost of Yasser Arafat's insistence on strictly unalterable demands is too high and painful a price to be paid again. Repeating the same scenario is a historic mistake that none of us can afford to make.

We still have a long way to go until trust is renewed. Until we reach this point, long-term realities rather than short-term political gains should dictate not only actions on the ground, but also the declarations of leaders on both sides. Sticking to old slogans and "all or nothing" positions on either side will generate the same deadlock we reached four and a half years ago. This mistake should not be repeated.

· Ehud Barak was prime minister of Israel, 1999-2001

SOME 'SETTLEMENT'

John Podhoretz

New York Post, April 12, 2005

THE big story out of Israel - probably the biggest story of the last 25 years in Israel - is the remarkable (and remarkably controversial) decision by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw permanently from the Gaza Strip. This unilateral disengagement will take place in three months.

So why wasn't that the big news out of yesterday's visit by Sharon to President Bush's Texas ranch? Why did the media hype turn on a controversy involving an entirely theoretical issue involving possible future construction of apartment buildings and a road in and around a thriving Israeli suburb that sits only 4 miles from Jerusalem?

Certainly Bush and Sharon tried to focus on the Gaza withdrawal in the lead-up to their meeting in Crawford. And they tried to focus on the matter in their remarks after the meeting was over.

But if you were watching news channels or reading newspapers over the past week, you'd think that the United States and Israel were on a dangerous collision course over the issue of that suburb, which is called Maale Adumim.

You'd think that newly installed Secretary of State Condi Rice had made it her first order of business to go after Sharon and Israel over whether, at some undetermined point over the next decade, another 3,500 homes should be built in Maale Adumim. And you'd think that the very idea of constructing a new road between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim was an international scandal of the first magnitude.

Maale Adumim is usually called a "settlement." But as a description of the place, the word is absurd, because it conjures up an image of a few huts on an undeveloped bit of land. Maale Adumim is 30 years old and is home to more than 30,000 people.

The term "settlement" is used, as it is for all Jewish population centers on the West Bank, to suggest that the Israeli presence is only temporary. When there's a serious peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, so the theory goes, the Jews will just retreat into an Israel defined by the borders it possessed before the 1967 Six-Day War.

In truth, a serious peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians — by which I mean a deal that is not only acceptable to Palestinians but also to the vast majority of Israelis — will almost certainly leave Maale Adumim in Israeli hands. Such a deal would indicate that the Palestinians had finally achieved some measure of geopolitical sanity because they had finally accepted reality.

You might have read, or heard, that the construction of new homes and a new road would constitute a violation of the so-called "road map" to peace that was released by the United Nations in 2002. That is true, since the road-map document calls for a freeze on all settlement activity.

But so what? Though both the United States and Israel state for the record that they still accept the design of the road map, and though Bush specifically made mention of the road map yesterday in explaining the American government's continuing opposition to "settlement activity," the fact is that the 21/2-year-old document is as dated as the word "groovy."

With Israel's successful defeat of the Palestinian intifada, the death of Yasser Arafat and Sharon's stunning decision to cede Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, the terms of the discussion between the two parties have changed entirely.

The astonishing changes on the ground over the past 18 months are creating a new political dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians. The effort on the part of the press, the pundits and the Europeans to make the theoretical Maale Adumim issue a major scandal is an effort to deny the existence of this new political dynamic.

That's true, by the way, on both sides of the debate — on the part of those who want Israel to retreat to its pre-1967 borders and on the part of those settlers and their supporters who oppose any withdrawal from any occupied territory.

The former want the United States to turn on Sharon. The latter want Israelis to turn on Sharon.

They can try, but it's highly doubtful they will succeed.

The "Iraqi Tet" Fantasy

Austin Bay
The Strategy page, April 12, 2005

Al Qaeda remains trapped in a Vietnam fantasy.

Al Qaeda is desperately trying to produce an "Iraqi Tet" -- a Middle Eastern repetition of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong 1968 offensive in South Vietnam.

On April 2 and again on April 4, the terror gang led by Al Qaeda's Iraq commander, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, launched "military-style attacks" on the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Baghdad. In the April 4 assault, U.S. forces took 44 casualties (most of them minor wounds). The terrorist gang, however, took 50 casualties, out of a force estimated at 60 gunmen.

On April 11, the gang attacked a Marine compound at Husaybah near the Syrian border. As I write, terrorist casualties are unconfirmed, but the assault flopped.

While bomb attacks on unarmed Iraqi civilians continue (particularly against Shiites), public opinion now matters in Iraq, and the thugs' public slaughters have killed too many Iraqi innocents. January's election dramatically lifted public morale and changed the media focus -- suddenly, democracy looks possible, and an Arab Muslim democracy is Al Qaeda's worst nightmare.

Hence the "Tet gamble." Bombs haven't cowed the Iraqi people -- but perhaps the American people will lose heart and buckle if Al Qaeda concocts a military surprise.

U.S. forces, however, are "hard targets" -- unlike civilians standing in line to vote, U.S. troops shoot back. Since 9-11, Al Qaeda has never won a military engagement at the platoon level (30 men) or higher. Coalition forward operating bases are heavily fortified.

But the Tet fantasy is so compelling. Though Tet was by most measures a disaster for the communists, as a media and hence political event, Tet snuffed "the light at the end of the tunnel." The Johnson administration had told the American public Vietnam had reached a turning point -- "the light" -- but Tet demonstrated that North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars and Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas were still capable of potent action.

NVA General Vo Nguyen Giap planned for maximum psychological and political impact. Communist forces simultaneously hit cities and military bases throughout the south. Though they took huge casualties, Giap's real target was President Johnson. Communist attackers managed to break into the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon. The assault was repelled, but the moral damage -- and dramatic photos -- energized Sen Eugene McCarthy's "peace candidacy." Political support for LBJ and the Vietnam War withered.

Iraq, however, is no Vietnam. The Vietnam War was strategic defense, a bitter Cold War "battle of containment." The War on Terror is a strategic political and military offensive directed at the dictators and theocrats who rule by death squad and export terror -- and it's a war we are winning.

With Iraq's democratic political process gearing up, Zarqawi has decided the risk of facing U.S. troops is worth the reward in headlines. Hitting the Husaybah Marine compound is supposed to generate media echoes of Lebanon 1983 and the U.S. Marine barracks terror bombing that led to American withdrawal.

U.S. Navy Capt. Hal Pittman, CENTCOM's senior spokesman, told me Tuesday that the terrorists seek media coverage of these attacks "to empower their cause, break the momentum of representational government (in Iraq) and dissuade the coalition to continue its support."

Zarqawi's gang "used a fire truck at Husaybah as a car bomb. That's theatrics if you've ever seen theatrics," Pittman said. "They're trying to create a spectacular event, overrun a patrol or border outpost somewhere, an event with huge media value that would promote their cause and make them seem more powerful than they are."

At Abu Ghraib and Husaybah, Zarqawi failed militarily. He didn't get his scare headlines, either. Short of detonating a nuclear weapon in Baghdad, a ground attack on the Green Zone that succeeds in cracking the U.S. embassy and taking hostages is the only "Tet" card Zarqawi has. The Green Zone, however, is Iraq's hardest target.