Is the Sahel about to become the new Afghanistan? A band of territory immediately south of the waterless Sahara, it has become a lawless haven for smugglers, kidnappers, armed Islamist groups and hungry nomadic tribesmen. It is one of the poorest regions of the world.

An unforeseen consequence of NATO’s intervention in Libya has been further to destabilise the Sahel, creating new opportunities for criminals and terrorists. Tens of thousands of men from the Sahel, who had gone north to work in Libya or had been recruited as mercenaries by Muammar al-Qadhafi, headed for home when Libya sank into chaos. Many took with them weapons plundered from Qadhafi’s stores.

The impact on Mali — a hinge state between North Africa and West Africa — has attracted the anxious attention of neighbouring states and of Western counterterrorist forces, such as America’s Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCTP), part of the US Africa Command, which is thought to spend $100m a year in boosting the anti-terrorist capability of the Sahel.

Large numbers of Tuareg were among the men returning from Libya. These nomadic Berbers, dispersed between southern Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, have long yearned for an independent homeland of their own. Mali has been particularly vulnerable. Over the past half-century, the Tuareg have risen several times against the government in Bamako — and been put down or bought off. The first Tuareg rebellions in Mali occurred in the 1960s, when several of the countries of the region became independent. They were followed by several others, with settlements usually brokered by Algeria. Each time, the Tuareg were promised development projects, but these never materialised. Mali simply did not have the means.

Mali is not alone in suffering from hardship. Right across the Sahel, millions of families are undernourished. Anthony Lake, head of UNICEF, has said that the drought-stricken region is today threatened by famine as never before. A World Bank consultant, Serge Michailof, has estimated that rural development in the Sahel would require an investment of 1.5bn Euros a year for ten years.

Such is the background to the Tuareg rebellion which broke out in Mali‘s vast northern region on 17 January this year. Bamako’s small, ill-equipped army was in no state to engage the rebels. Its senior officers, grown rich by corruption, had no appetite for a perilous campaign.

It was then that a group of junior officers made a violent entry on the scene. Outraged at the inaction of their government, they mutinied at the Kati military base, some 15 kilometres from Bamako. Marching on the capital, their mutiny turned into a coup d’etat, which on the 22 March overthrew President Amadou Toumani Touré, widely known as ATT. (A loyal officer managed to smuggle him out of the presidential palace to safety abroad.)

Naming his junta the “National Committee for the Revival of Democracy and the Restoration of the State,” the leader of the revolution, Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, 39, called on the people of the north to resist the Tuareg rebels. He was no semi-literate hot-head, but a former instructor at Mali’s military academy who had attended several military courses in the United States. He knew English and had been awarded a diploma as a military interpreter.

Unfortunately, the coup in Bamako seems to have fired Tuareg ambitions. Little more than a week later, Touareg rebels, calling themselves the MNLA (Movement National de Liberation de l’Azawad) — their forces stiffened by defectors from Qadhafi’s army — took control of the whole north of the country. As they advanced, the Mali army fled.

Sanogo’s coup and the Tuareg rebellion alarmed Mali’s neighbours. When President ATT fled the country, ECOWAS, the 15-member Economic Community of West African States, chaired by President Alassane Ouattara of the Ivory Coast, pressured Captain Sanogo to agree to return Mali to constitutional rule. A deal on 6 April provided for the appointment of an interim president — the former speaker of Parliament, Dioncounda Traoré – and of a prime minister — Sheikh Modibo Diarra – whose task was to form a national unity government and conduct elections. (Prime Minister Modibo Diarra is, in fact, a distinguished French-trained astrophysicist who spent 13 years working for NASA, America’s space agency, and later headed Microsoft Africa.) The idea was to ease Capt Sanogo and his junta out of power.

But Sanogo was no push-over. Resisting attempts to unseat him, in mid-April he arrested 22 political and military opponents and transferred them to the army camp at Kati. He also made sure that three key ministries in the new government — defence, security and territorial administration – were in the hands of his men. He rejected an ECOWAS plan to send 3,000 peacekeepers to Mali and opposed the extension of the transitional phase to 12 months saying that the new president and prime minister would have to leave office within 40 days.

Faced with this challenge, ECOWAS could not decide what to do. Was it to go to war? Even if Sanogo were removed, who could recapture the North from the Tuaregs? It could not be done without French, American, or perhaps Algerian air cover, but none of these powers was eager to intervene. Reports that the rebels were resorting to pillage, rape and the recruitment of child-soldiers struck terror in Bamako. Some 300,000 people were said to have fled the fighting and were living rough along the borders of Algeria, Mauretania, Burkina Faso and Niger.

The real fear, however, is not so much of the Tuaregs as of armed Islamist groups operating in the same northern region. Of these the most alarming is AQIM (Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) which, under its three ‘emirs’, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, Abu Zayd and Yahya Abu al-Hammam, has recruited fighters from Algeria, Mauretania, Libya, Tunisia and Nigeria. Afrique Asie, a well-informed monthly, reported that AQIM’s hostage-taking has yielded $183m in ransom money!

Another radical group is Ansar al-Din, which, under its Tuareg chief Iyad ag Ghali, was set on establishing an Islamic state in Mali and indeed an Islamist caliphate across the whole Sahel. It has already captured the northern Mali towns of Kidal, Timbuktu and Gao. A third more shadowy group is the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, which has claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on 3 March against a police post in Tamenrasset in southern Algeria, and for the kidnapping of the Algerian Consul at Gao in Mali on 5 April. Algeria is clearly worried at the emergence on its borders of an independent Tuareg republic, harbouring militant Islamists. Memories are still fresh of its bitter war of the 1990s against its own Islamists, which led to the death of some 200,000 people.

The Sahel is evidently in a deeply disturbed state. Millions are close to starvation. Weak regional states are desperately in need of aid. Violent groups conduct their violent business unchecked. But the world looks elsewhere.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 May 2012
Word Count: 1,138
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Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is facing an unprecedented challenge. In office for more than three years, he had come to seem immovable. But leading figures of Israel’s security establishment, as well as prominent American Jews, have started openly to contest two of his most fundamental policies: his portrayal of Iran’s nuclear programme as an ‘existential’ danger to Israel, raising the spectre of an imminent Holocaust; and his steady expansion of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, with a view, as many suspect, of creating a ‘Greater Israel’.

The challenge to Netanyahu could have far-reaching consequences. For one thing, it appears to have removed any likelihood of an early Israeli attack on Iran, such as Netanyahu has threatened and trumpeted for a year and more; for another, it has revived the possibility of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a solution many had thought moribund, if not actually dead.

Netanyahu’s most virulent critics happen to be some of Israel’s most decorated army and intelligence chiefs. For example, Yuval Diskin, recently retired as the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, told a meeting in late April that he had “no confidence in the current leadership of the State of Israel, which could lead Israel into a war with Iran or a regional war.” He accused Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak of taking decisions “based on messianic sentiments. …I saw them up close, they are not Messiahs…These are not people whose hands I would like to have on the steering- wheel.” Far from ending Iran’s nuclear programme, Diskin predicted that an Israeli attack on Iran could result in “a dramatic acceleration of Iran’s nuclear programme.”

Israel’s current Chief of Staff, Lt Gen Benny Gantz, is another senior officer who has openly contested Netanyahu’s apocalyptic rhetoric. “I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people,” he told the Haaretz newspaper in April, adding that he did not believe Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would “want to go the extra mile” to acquire nuclear weapons. Mossad’s current chief, Tamir Pardo, has also contradicted Netanyahu by stating that Iran did not pose an existential threat to the Jewish state.

For his part, Meir Dagan, a celebrated former Mossad chief, has ridiculed Netanyahu’s war-mongering by saying that the idea of attacking Iran was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” and that a pre-emptive Israeli strike would be “reckless and irresponsible.” In an interview with Ben Caspit of Ma’ariv on 27 April, he also inveighed against the small parties in Natanyahu’s coalition which, with their own narrow agendas, rob the Prime Minister of any real freedom of action because, to keep his coalition alive, he must bow to their wishes.

Dagan was particularly critical of the Haredim, members of the most conservative form of Orthodox Judaism, who do not serve in the army, pay less tax than other Israelis, and seek to promote sex segregation in Israel — and also in New York! Dagan believes that “the spirit of the law” demands “an equal distribution of the burden among all the citizens.” The Haredim, he declared, should be compelled to serve in the army, while the Arabs of Israel should also serve, if not in the army, then in the police, the fire brigade, or in Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross or Red Crescent. Ephraim Halevy, another former Mossad chief, has also stated publicly that “ultra-orthodox radicalization poses a bigger threat than [Iranian President] Ahmadinehad.” He, too, has declared that Iran poses no existential danger to Israel.

Shaul Mofaz, a former chief of staff and defence minister and now the new head of Kadima, Israel’s centre party, said recently on television that an attack on Iran could be disastrous. Netanyahu, he argued scathingly, “wants to create an image that he is the protector of Israel.” He accused the prime minister of using Iran as a tool to divert attention from last September’s protests, when 450,000 Israelis poured into the streets of Tel Aviv to demand social justice.

Such recent statements by Israel’s former and current security chiefs show how seriously Netanyahu’s views are being challenged and how impatient many Israelis are for change.

On the Palestine question, two remarkable articles, published in the International Herald Tribune on April 25 (reproduced from the New York Times), also point to a wave of new thinking among prominent Jews. In one article, Ami Ayalon, a former commander of the Israeli Navy and a former head of Shin Bet, advocates a “radically new unilateral approach” to the Palestine problem, which would set “the conditions for a territorial compromise based on the principle of two states for two people, which is essential for Israel’s future as both a Jewish and a democratic state.”

To promote his ideas and rally supporters, Ayalon has created an organisation called Blue White Future. He argues that Israel does not need to wait for a final-status deal with the Palestinians. Instead, it should renounce all territorial claims east of the West Bank security barrier, end all settlement construction there, as well as in Arab East Jerusalem, and plan to re-locate to Israel 100,000 settlers who live beyond the barrier. Israel, he says, should “enact a voluntary compensation and absorption law for settlers east of the fence.” In the absence of an accord with the Palestinians, he believes Israel should begin to create a two-state reality on the ground.

On the same page of the International Herald Tribune, Stephen Robert, a prominent Jewish philanthropist and former investment banker, now chairman of the Source of Hope Foundation, calls for a “reset” in Jewish thinking. Israel, he argues, is no longer “a vulnerable little state.” It has become “the most powerful military force in the Middle East.” Its existence is threatened, however, by the fact that it “has occupied the territory of 4 million Palestinians for over 40 years. Virtually imprisoned the Palestinians lack freedom of movement and civil or political rights. They are subject to imprisonment without charges. They often lack water and jobs and are citizens of nowhere…”

In a passionate appeal, he added: “Israelis must understand that in liberating the Palestinians they will also liberate themselves… A state that persecutes, deprives and denies its neighbours in a manner so similar to what our tormentors did to us cannot be acceptable.”

Peter Beinart’s recent book, The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012) provides yet another indication of the growing realisation among Jews that Israel has taken a wrong turn and must urgently change course. Beinart advocates boycotting products from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied territories — as a UK supermarket chain, the Co-Operative Group, the country’s fifth largest food retailer, has just done.

At a time when Israel is celebrating its 64th birthday, something like a wind of change is blowing through the minds of its most senior security officials and some of its most fervent overseas supporters. The Palestinians, and the Arab world as a whole, should hurry to respond positively to this most welcome development.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 May 2012
Word Count: 1,233
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The gloomy topic of Afghanistan is expected to dominate the NATO summit in Chicago on 20-21 May, when the assembled leaders will have to wrestle with three uncomfortable facts:

• The first is that talks with the Taliban have broken down, removing any immediate prospect of a negotiated exit from the conflict. This conjures up the spectre of a forced NATO retreat — in other words of a humiliating defeat.

This month provided worrying evidence of the Taliban’s growing ability to mount coordinated attacks all over the country, even in areas of maximum security. On 15 April, Taliban suicide fighters infiltrated into Kabul and attacked the heavily-defended Embassy Quarter and Parliament. In the ensuing gunfights, some 36 insurgents were killed as well as 11 members of the Afghan security forces.

• The second uncomfortable fact is that public opinion in the United States and its allies is weary of the war and seems unconvinced that fighting and dying in distant Afghanistan makes them safe from terrorist attack. The Obama administration has not yet come round to this view, as may be seen from a recent statement by Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Kabul: “To get out before the Afghans have a full grip on security, which is a couple of years out, would be to invite the Taliban, Haqqani [a Pakistan-based Islamist network], and Al Qaeda back in and set the stage for another 9/11. And that, I think, is an unacceptable risk for any American.”

But is Crocker right? Some U.S. allies clearly do not think so. One or two of them have already announced their decision to quit before the previously agreed 2014 deadline. Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard said this week that Australia’s 1,550 soldiers would shift from a front-line role to a largely support function by mid-2013. At Chicago, she is expected to try to persuade her fellow leaders that mid-2013, not end-2014, should be the date to end NATO’s combat role in Afghanistan. France’s François Hollande has gone one better. If he is elected President of France on May 6 — as is widely expected — he has pledged to bring France’s 3,550 troops home by the end of this year.

• Thirdly, because of what it sees as a continuing terrorist threat, the United States seems determined to maintain some sort of long-term presence in Afghanistan — much to the displeasure of Iran and Pakistan. NATO leaders are bound to squabble in Chicago over who will foot the bill for continued assistance to Afghanistan after 2014. Because budgets are tight, NATO members have agreed that it will no longer be possible to fund and equip an Afghan army of 352,000 — an overly-ambitious target which is expected to be reached this year. Instead, the force is to be reduced to 230,000, at a cost to donors of about $7bn a year. The United States will probably have to pay the lion’s share, with the rest coming from other NATO countries.

But if the Afghan army is slimmed down, as is proposed, what will happen to the 120,000 men laid off? Armed and trained, they might join the insurgents — a nightmare scenario for NATO. A disturbing development this year has been a rash of incidents in which Afghan soldiers turned their guns on their NATO trainers. Since January, 16 NATO troops have been killed by Afghan soldiers.

Agreement was reached last weekend on a draft U.S.-Afghan strategic pact, providing for counter-terrorist cooperation and U.S. economic aid for at least another decade after 2014. In the lengthy negotiations, two contentious issues were resolved which opened the way for agreement on the strategic pact. First, the United States agreed to hand over to Afghans the detention centre at Parwan, where suspected insurgents are held and interrogated, and secondly, the United States agreed to give Afghans control over night raids on houses of terrorist suspects by U.S. Special Forces. To the outrage of many Afghans, these night raids often involve the forced entry into houses where families are asleep. The violation of the privacy of women has caused particular anger.

One wonders when the United States will grasp that its counter-terrorist policies create more terrorists than are killed by its drone attacks, air strikes and other violent acts. America’s ongoing ‘war on terror’ has aroused fierce anti-American feeling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and other Muslim countries, undermining the legitimacy of leaders in these countries, who are seen to be collaborating with the United States in waging war on their own people.

Earlier this month, the United States offered a $10m reward for information leading to the arrest of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani militant group. Apparently undaunted, Hafiz Saeed continues to criss-cross Pakistan making fiery anti-American and anti-Indian speeches. He does not seem to be in danger of arrest. Pakistani opinion is still inflamed by a U.S. air strike last November which accidentally killed 24 Pakistani border troops. A Financial Times report from Islamabad this month noted that United States-Pakistan relations had sunk to their lowest ebb in a decade.

Several shocking incidents have greatly damaged America’s reputation and seem to point to poor training of young American soldiers and a breakdown of discipline. In January, a video was released showing American soldiers urinating on dead Afghan insurgents; in February, the accidental burning of Korans at Bagram Air Base led to widespread rioting. In March, a U.S. sergeant went on a rampage killing 17 Afghan civilians, including women and children; in April, the Los Angeles Times published photos (allegedly taken in 2010) showing grinning American soldiers of the 82nd airborne division posing with mangled body parts of Afghan insurgents.

The United States might perhaps ask itself why it has aroused such hate in the Islamic world and what it might do to restore its reputation. It might care to consider the following suggestions: Wind down the ‘war on terror’ and stop killing Muslims; put a firm check on Israeli settlement building and promote the creation of a Palestinian state; reduce the U.S. military presence in the Gulf States by reverting instead to an ‘over the horizon’ naval presence.

Above all, the United States should strive with maximum goodwill to reach a fair settlement with Iran over the nuclear issue. In return for a verifiable Iranian pledge to stop enriching uranium above the limit allowed by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the United States should end its economic warfare against Tehran. Instead of inciting the Arabs against Iran — and thereby fuelling Sunni-Shia antagonism — the United States should encourage Arab Gulf States to include Iran in the region’s security architecture.

Washington seems unaware that it will need Iran’s help if peace and stability are ever to be established in Iraq and Afghanistan. Crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic are unlikely to win its cooperation. This is not the least of the many incoherent features of American policy.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 April 2012
Word Count: 1,141
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Although it is too early to make a judgement, it looks as if Israel’s Iran policy has back-fired and may result in a very different outcome from the one Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has long sought.

Israel’s thinking these past three years has been that punitive sanctions, cyber warfare and the assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists must eventually force a crippled Islamic Republic to agree to ‘zero enrichment’ of uranium – that is to say to dismantle its entire nuclear programme. This, it was hoped, would open the way for ‘regime change’ in Tehran.

To bring about sufficiently severe pressure on Iran, Israel’s strategy has been to threaten to attack. It calculated — rightly as it turned out — that the United States and its allies would not dare call its bluff. Instead — to head off an Israeli attack, which they feared could trigger a regional war with unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences — they worked to bring Iran’s economy to its knees.

Israel’s strategy was working. Everything seemed to be going its way. Punitive sanctions on Iran were beginning to bite. Impatient for regime change, pro-Israeli propagandists in the United States had even started to call for covert action in support of the Iranian opposition.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, then stepped into the fray. Confounding the hawks, she made an offer to Iran to restart negotiations, using a conciliatory tone quite different from the usual hectoring heard from Washington, Paris and London, and wholly at odds with Israel’s relentless sabre-rattling. Iran responded positively to Ashton’s invitation. Its first meeting with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) took place in Istanbul on 14 April, and, by all accounts, was a surprising success.

Saeed Jalili, the chief Iranian negotiator — who had joined Catherine Ashton for an informal dinner at the Iranian consulate the previous evening — spoke of “a positive approach.” She, in turn, called the discussions “constructive and useful.” As a framework for the talks, she listed a number of principles, which must have reassured the Iranians and caused Israeli hawks to grit their teeth.

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, she declared, must be a key basis for the talks. But the NPT allows signatories to enrich uranium on their own territory up to 3.5%, for power generation and other peaceful purposes. Ashton thus seemed to be sending a signal that Iran’s right to do so would be recognised. It looked as if the P5+1 had dropped Israel’s demand for zero enrichment. Instead, the suggestion was that the focus would be on getting Iran to stop enriching uranium to 20%, once it was guaranteed supplies for the Tehran Research Reactor, which needs uranium enriched to this level to produce isotopes for the treatment of Iran’s cancer patients. Since President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that Iran would stop producing 20% uranium if it was assured of supplies from abroad, the glimmer of a settlement seemed in sight.

Moreover, Catherine Ashton also said that the negotiators would “be guided by the principle of the step-by-step approach and reciprocity.” This reference to a gradualist approach and to mutual concessions gave a strong indication that sanctions would be lifted in stages once Iran provided convincing evidence that it was not seeking nuclear weapons and would accept intrusive inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. She had evidently decided to give some credence to the 2005 fatwa issued by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he forbade the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.

At the close of the 10-hour Istanbul meeting, Iran and the P5+1 agreed to hold their next meeting in Baghdad on 23 May, in what promises to be a prolonged series of talks.

Netanyahu’s angry reaction was fully in character. “Iran has been granted a ‘freebie’” he declared sourly, “to continue enrichment without any limitation, any inhibition. Iran should take immediate steps,” he stormed, “to stop all enrichment, take out all enrichment material and dismantle the nuclear facility at Qom. I believe that the world’s greatest practitioner of terrorism must not have the opportunity to develop atomic bombs.”

This shrill accusation seemed to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Quite apart from its continued oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians, Israel has a long record of murdering its political opponents, and is widely believed to have been responsible for the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists in the last two years, as well as for introducing the Stuxnet virus into Iran’s computer systems — clear acts of state terrorism.

With crucial help from the French, Israel built its first atomic bombs in the 1960s, nearly half a century ago. They were ready for use if the 1967 war, which Israel launched against the Arabs that year, had turned against it. Most experts today estimate Israeli stockpile of nuclear weapons at between 75 and 150 warheads. Israel also has a second strike capability in the form of nuclear-tipped missiles on its German-built submarines.

Netanyahu claims that the Islamic Republic poses an ‘existential threat’ to Israel. There is not a scrap of evidence to support this claim. The Iranian President did say something to the effect that Israel would one day “pass from the pages of time” — a phrase Israel miss-translated, no doubt for propaganda purposes, to mean an Iranian plan to “wipe Israel off the map.” Quite the contrary, it is Iran that would risk annihilation if it ever attempted to attack Israel. In addition to its large nuclear arsenal and sophisticated delivery systems, Israel has a vastly more powerful conventional military capability than Iran, largely supplied by the United States. The U.S. has indeed pledged to maintain Israel’s military superiority over all regional states — its so-called Qualitative Military Edge — a pledge which has been written into U.S. law.

What, therefore, is the reason for Israel’s anxiety? It fears that if Iran were to build a nuclear weapon — or merely acquire the ability to do so — Israel’s freedom of action would be restricted. It would no longer be able to strike its neighbours at will without risking being hit back. The simple truth is that Israel wants to deny its neighbours the ability to defend themselves. None is to be allowed to acquire a deterrent capability! Israel detests Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza because these resistance movements have acquired some limited capacity to retaliate against Israel’s assaults. For this reason Israel calls them terrorist organisations and blames Iran for arming them.

Netanyahu has long opposed talks between Iran and the international community, and no doubt prays for them to collapse. The pro-Israeli lobby in the United States will very probably be mobilised in this cause. But if Catherine Ashton gets her way, if the negotiations with Iran are successful and the spectre of war is dispelled, Israel may have to live with a small dent in its regional supremacy.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 April 2012
Word Count: 1,150
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The emergence this month of Shaul Mofaz on the Israeli political scene as the new head of the centre-left Kadima party is a welcome development. It carries with it the promise — still only a faint one, however — that a reinvigorated and politically-successful Kadima could bring about a softening, even a reversal, of the expansionist, war-mongering policies of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and his nationalist, ultra-orthodox and right-wing Labour coalition partners.

For the moment Netanyahu seems immovable. In office since 31 March 2009, he has become Israel’s longest serving prime minister. His skilful mobilisation of Israel’s supporters in the United States — in the lobbies, the Republican Party, the media, in conservative think tanks and especially in Congress — have allowed him to brow-beat U.S. President Barrack Obama on Middle East issues, winning the plaudits of the right in Israel and the United States.

But Israeli politics are notoriously volatile. A realignment of the political landscape — as has often happened in the past — is by no means impossible. Led by Mofaz, who has now replaced the politically incompetent Tzipi Livni, Kadima could evolve into an effective counter-weight to Netanyahu’s Likud and its far-right partners.

Netanyahu’s aggressive posturing against Iran, his potentially dangerous humiliation of Obama (who may seek revenge if re-elected next November), and his relentless drive to expand settlements in Palestinian territory, while paying only faint attention to the growing social and economic disparities in Israeli society, have already aroused considerable anxiety in some sections of the electorate. This anxiety could find political expression at Israel’s next elections, due to be held before the autumn of 2013, but which may well be held earlier.

Kadima (Forward in Hebrew) is ripe for a make-over. It was created by Ariel Sharon in 2005 when, having broken with Likud hard-liners, he rallied moderate Likud and Labour members in support of his plan to disengage from Gaza. But when Sharon suffered a stroke, it was Ehud Olmert who led the party at the 2006 elections, and then formed a coalition government when Kadima won 29 out of the 120 seats, becoming the single largest party in the Knesset. At the 2009 elections, Kadima again won the most seats, this time led by Tzipi Livni, but it went into opposition when Natanyahu formed a Likud-led government together with Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist Israel Beiteinu, the ultra-orthodox Shas, and Ehud Barak’s right-wing Labour faction.

Since then, Netanyahu has done his utmost to crush Palestinian aspirations for statehood, and has spurned all Arab peace overtures. Evidently a ‘Greater Israel’ fanatic, he has made clear that he prefers land to peace. Meanwhile decades of right-wing propaganda have convinced many Israelis that the Palestinians and other Arabs are out to kill them, and that Israel has no partner for peace.

This is the powerful current of ideas that Mofaz, now 63, will have to defeat if he is to lead Israel towards peace with its Arab neighbours and away from the belligerent policies of the Netanyahu era. For this task, he has several valuable political assets. As a former military chief of staff and defence minister, he is well-positioned to reassure a jumpy Israeli public that he can be counted on to protect the country.

Mofaz’s background is another potential asset. He is not part of Israel’s Tel Aviv elite, largely of European origin. On the contrary, he is an Iranian Jew, born in Tehran, speaking Farsi, who at the age of nine was brought to Israel by his parents and was brought up in poverty. In an interview with Ethan Bronner of the New York Times (published in the International Herald Tribune of 7-8 April 2012) he explained how this harsh background had allowed him to understand the hardships and frustrations of the many Israelis who struggle to make ends meet in a country — to cite his own words — where “the rich get richer and the poor poorer.”

Mofaz was always considered something of a right-winger. But, as the new head of Kadima, his expression of liberal and enlightened views on Israel’s social and economic inequalities, as well as on the two main controversial issues of peace with the Palestinians and war with Iran, comes as an agreeable surprise. Iran has clearly been a subject of life-long interest for him. One senses in Mofaz a readiness to deal with Iran on a business-like basis, far from the apocalyptic hysteria of Netanyahu, who never tires of demonising Iran and depicting its (so far non-existent) nuclear bomb-making programme as an ‘existential’ threat to Israel and a menace to the whole of mankind.

“The greatest threat to the state of Israel,” Mofaz told the New York Times, “is not nuclear Iran but that in 30 or 50 years it would become a bi-national state. So it is in Israel’s interest that a Palestinian state be created.” He criticised Netanyahu’s focus on Iran’s nuclear programme which, he said, had distracted attention from more important priorities, like making peace with the Palestinians, ending settlement building in much of the West Bank and reducing the country’s inequalities. He said he believed Israel should keep the West Bank settlement blocs but give the Palestinians 100 percent of their territorial demands by swapping land. He went on to say that borders and security could be negotiated in a year and that tens of thousands of settlers would leave their homes with the proper incentives. Those who remained would be forced out.

In the opinion of many observers, Israel in recent years has made several serious strategic mistakes. It attempted to destroy Hizbullah by its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and it attempted to destroy Hamas by its ferocious assault on Gaza in 2008-9. Both endeavours failed. The Gaza operation, in particular, earned Israel the opprobrium of much of world opinion and shattered its close relations with Turkey.

By repeatedly threatening to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israel has blackmailed the United States into imposing crippling sanctions on Tehran in the evident hope of closing down Iran’s nuclear activities altogether. This unrealistic objective is unlikely to be achieved at the talks due to open this Friday between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the so-called P5+1.) At the same time, the current Syrian crisis has aroused Israeli hopes that the whole Tehran-Damascus-Hizbullah ‘resistance axis’ could be brought down, and Israel’s unchallenged supremacy re-established — but this, too, is an unrealistic objective.

With the Palestine problem in dangerous limbo, and with the ever-present danger of war breaking out with Iran, Israel urgently needs a voice of reason such as that of Shaul Mofaz.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 April 2012
Word Count: 1,095
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Does U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton want confrontation and war in the Middle East or dialogue, reconciliation and peace? Her pronouncements and policies during her visit to the region last weekend suggest impatient belligerence. She seems intent on spreading mayhem, to the puzzlement and anxiety of many of the locals, as I discovered on a visit which coincided with hers.

In Riyadh last Saturday, 31 March, she returned to her now familiar theme of seeking to incite the Gulf Arabs against Iran, a country she insists on demonising as ‘a regional and global threat.’ At a meeting with foreign ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman) she proposed erecting a strong missile shield to protect the Arab states of the Gulf. ‘It is a U.S. priority,’ she declared, to help the GCC build a regional missile defence architecture’ against what she saw as a looming ballistic missile threat from Iran.

It is hard to see how Iran would have any conceivable interest in attacking, let alone destroying, the Gulf States, since they are among its prime business partners – or at least they were before the United States tried to sever Iran’s long-standing banking and commercial ties with countries such as Dubai.

Clinton’s missile shield proposal might be good for U.S. defence contractors but would seem to have little local relevance. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a U.S. scheme to defend Europe and the United States from a hypothetical Iranian nuclear missile attack — a scheme dismissed by William Pfaff, one of the wisest of U.S. commentators, as ‘a make-work project for the American aerospace industry.’

Many Gulf Arabs I spoke to in the region earlier this week see Iran as a potential partner rather than an enemy. They think it is the United States and Israel that are seeking to deepen the rift between Iran and the Arabs — and between Sunnis and Shi’is — for their own geostrategic advantage. Muslims, they believe, should close ranks and not allow external powers to exploit their divisions by drawing them into the quarrel between the United States and Israel, on the one side, and Iran on the other. As a well-placed Arab (who wishes to remain anonymous) put it to me: ‘The essential vocation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia must surely be to unite Muslims not divide them.’

Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, is attempting to re-launch negotiations over the nuclear issue between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (the so-called P5+1). But instead of lending America’s full support to these efforts, Hilary Clinton insists on throwing doubt on Iran’s sincerity in wanting to reach an agreement. ‘It is up to Iran whether they are ready to make the right choice,’ she declared belligerently in Riyadh. ‘What is certain,’ she added, ‘is that Iran’s window of opportunity to seek and obtain a peaceful resolution will not remain open forever.’ This is precisely the threatening language we are used to hearing from Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.

Clinton, in fact, expressed serious doubt about whether the Islamic Republic had any intention of negotiating a solution that would satisfy the United States and Israel. As is well known, Israel wants to close down Iran’s nuclear programme altogether — a totally unrealistic objective. As a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is entitled to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian purposes, under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA.)

Is Clinton now saying that America has embraced the Israeli objective of forcing Iran to accept ‘zero enrichment’? If that is the case, she is undermining efforts to re-launch talks with Iran before they have even started — which is precisely Israel’s objective.

For his part, President Barack Obama has continued to ratchet up sanctions on Iran, with the evident aim of closing down its oil exports. But such measures, however crippling, are unlikely to make Iran yield. What the Islamic Republic wants is respect, recognition of its regional role and guarantees against attack — notions which are apparently totally absent from the mindset of the U.S. Secretary of State.

From Riyadh, Hilary Clinton went to Istanbul to attend the ‘Friends of Syria’ meeting, where she again preached confrontation rather than reconciliation — this time against Syria. Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, has been mandated by both the UN and the Arab League to seek a peaceful resolution of the Syrian crisis. Last Monday, he told the UN Security Council that the Syrian government had pledged to adhere to the ceasefire and pull back its troops by April 10, in accordance with Annan’s own six-point peace plan.

But on Syria, as on Iran, Hilary Clinton has displayed nothing but impatient belligerence. As if seeking to undermine Annan’s mission, she has misrepresented his objectives. Annan called for a simultaneous ceasefire by both the regime and the armed opposition. But Clinton has accused President Bashar al-Asad alone of having failed to keep his promise to pull back his troops. Instead of urging the opposition to put aside its weapons and accept a ceasefire, she has put the onus of stopping the fight on Asad alone. Her demand that Annan impose a ‘time line’ on Asad risks subverting Annan’s peace mission.

Annan’s six-point peace plan makes no mention of Asad stepping down, but Clinton keeps repeating that ‘Asad must go!’ Annan has stated clearly that he is against arming the opposition, knowing that it will only lead to more bloodshed. But Clinton has come very close to endorsing armed opposition to the Syrian regime. She has confirmed that the United States is providing Syrian fighters with satellite communications equipment to enable them to ‘organize and evade attacks by the regime.’ While promising $25m in humanitarian aid, she has encouraged Arab Gulf states to pledge $100m in pay for opposition fighters. In his report from Istanbul on the Friends of Syria meeting, Steven Lee Myers of the New York Timescommented that this ‘blurs the line between lethal and nonlethal support.’

By setting up a working group to coordinate U.S., EU and Arab sanctions against Syria, Clinton’s evident intention would seem to be to bring down the Syrian regime in order to weaken Iran. By seeming to fear a peaceful settlement of the Syrian and Iranian crises, she has exposed America’s aggressive face.

Kofi Annan’s mission has only just begun. It might take weeks, if not months, before it shows results. There is clearly a need to give him more time, while pressing both sides to put up their guns. Similarly, Catherine Ashton’s attempts to re-start a dialogue with Iran in order to arrive at an overall settlement should be given every encouragement and not sabotaged by unnecessary threats and crippling sanctions.

The United States should be careful not to add to the catastrophic legacy of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the violent hostility its policies and actions have aroused in Pakistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 April 2012
Word Count: 1,180
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Plagued by bitter unresolved conflicts — both within and between states — the Middle East is once again in a dangerous condition, which risks escalating into a wider war. External powers, long accustomed to meddling in Middle East affairs, are likely to be drawn in. Once again, the grim spectre of large-scale casualties and great material damage hangs over the region, as it did in 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 1991, 2003, 2006, 2008-9, and in the many other lesser skirmishes and explosions of violence over the past six decades.

It is surely time for the international community to seek to arrest this repeated descent into war. Festering conflicts urgently need to be addressed.

What instruments does the international community have for this task? The prime responsibility lies with the UN Security Council and its five permanent members — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. Other influential countries, such as Germany, India and Brazil, could also be brought in to lend their additional weight. Acting together, these powers would be well placed to negotiate a ‘Grand Bargain’ between feuding Middle East opponents, and then use their combined muscle to ensure implementation of any agreement reached. Stick would, no doubt, be needed as well as carrot.

Why a ‘Grand Bargain’? The answer, in a word, is because the nature of Middle East conflicts requires a global rather than a piecemeal approach. A striking feature of these conflicts is their close inter-connection. The Syrian regime, for example, is today fighting a war on two fronts — against an uprising at home and against a campaign of subversion, sanctions and boycotts by its enemies abroad. But the campaign against Syria is also connected to a similar, but even more intense, campaign against Syria’s strategic partner, Iran. Those who want to bring down the regime in Damascus have in mind to weaken Tehran, end its nuclear programme – and perhaps bring down its regime as well.

Targeting Iran is also intended to cripple it as a regional power and isolate and undermine Hizballah and Hamas, which Iran has backed in the struggle with Israel. These two resistance movements are an integral part of the wider, still smouldering Arab-Israeli conflict, which itself is influenced by America’s three decades-long feud with Tehran. The pattern, therefore, is one of inter-locking conflicts, each one impinging on the others.

The advantage of a ‘Grand Bargain’ is that it would allow concessions on one front to be traded against concessions on another — thus improving the chance of overall success. For example, the attempt to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear programme – or scale it down to the point of ruling out any bomb-making — would undoubtedly have a far greater chance of success if it were linked to a deal allowing for the emergence of an independent Palestinian state, negotiated at an international conference under the stern eye of a unified block of Great Powers. This would puncture a boil which has poisoned political relationships in the Middle East for decades, repeatedly exploding into violence. To spare the Arabs and Israel further miseries, it must surely be resolved.

Tehran is deeply implicated in the Palestine question. Much of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli rhetoric is inspired by outrage at the fate of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation or siege. If pressures and inducements by the Powers were to bring about an acceptable resolution of the Palestine question, it is more than likely that Iran would, in turn, be ready to yield on the nuclear issue. Israel’s fears of a potential ‘Holocaust’ would be dispelled, while Tehran would no longer live in fear of attack. Indeed, Israel and Iran might then be able to revive the close friendship they enjoyed not so long ago under the Shah.

A crucial aspect of the ‘Grand Bargain’ would, of course, have to be a constructive dialogue between Washington and Tehran, leading to a decision to put past grievances aside, to restore diplomatic relations, remove sanctions, and re-launch the relationship on a basis of mutual respect. Any such development would have a hugely beneficial effect right across the region. Most importantly, it could open the way for a strategic dialogue between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two regional heavyweights, easing Sunni-Shi‘a tensions in the Gulf, as well as in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, and dispelling the spectre of another Gulf war. As partners rather than rivals, the Saudi Kingdom and the Islamic Republic would then recognise their joint responsibility, for the stability and security of their vital oil-rich region.

Once Iran was included in the security architecture of the Gulf, it would surely be possible to imagine the Saudi Monarch and Iran’s Supreme Guide together attending a future summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council in an atmosphere of peace, prosperity and reconciliation!

Is this no more than a utopian dream? Not necessarily. Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, is trying to revive negotiations on the nuclear issue between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany (the so-called P5+1). At the same time, Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, is trying to persuade both regime and opposition in Syria to agree to a ceasefire as a necessarily condition for a dialogue. In both cases, there is a growing realisation that there is no military solution to the current conflicts and that negotiations will become inevitable if normal life is to be restored.

Syria, in particular, will need the curative influence of something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal the deep wounds, physical as well as psychological, of recent months. The regime and its opponents must now work together to bring about the profound transformation of Syria’s political system which the country needs and the crisis demands. Once the guns fall silent, the time for real statesmanship and for mutual compromise will have arrived. Syria is too important an Arab country — too important in Arab history and consciousness — to be allowed to sink into the agonies of civil war.

All these problems, sectarian and political — whether in Syria and Iran, but also in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, in Iraq, the Gulf and in Washington itself — would be more easily resolved within the context of a ‘Grand Bargain’, negotiated, pushed through and monitored by the Great Powers. The overriding objective would be to save the region from further blood-letting. The way to achieve this goal would be by trading concessions.

Whether in resolving family quarrels or international disputes, the principle of give-and-take has long been recognised as the key to peace.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 March 2012
Word Count: 1,089
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In one of Jean de la Fontaine’s 17th century fables, a frog envies an ox. Consumed with the urge to make itself as big as the ox, the frog puffs itself up, ever bigger and bigger, until it finally explodes. Israel’s behaviour towards its neighbours in the Middle East is not so very different from that of the over-ambitious frog. If it fails to correct its policies, it must surely risk suffering the same fate.

With this parable in mind, it is possible to identify six strategic blunders which Israel has made in recent decades, and which have become all the more blatant — and dangerous to itself — under the far-right government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.

The first of these errors, from which several of the others spring, is Israel’s adamant refusal to allow the emergence of a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip. Any expression of Palestinian nationalism is vigorously stamped on — even the harmless commemoration of the nakba, the Palestinians’ catastrophic defeat and dispersal in 1948. To an independent observer, Israel’s rejection of the national aspirations of the captive Palestinians — or the reduction of these aspirations to a security problem, to be dealt with by unremitting harshness — would seem to be an extraordinary example of political insanity.

Seen from the outside, it looks blindingly obvious that a small and prosperous Palestinian state living in Israel’s shadow would be an enormous asset for the Jewish state, assuring its long-term security by opening the door to peace and to its full acceptance in the region.

How then to explain Israel’s frantic efforts to prevent any advance towards Palestinian statehood? Some Israelis may fear that any acknowledgment of Palestinian national claims could undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s own national project — built as it was on the ruin of Arab Palestine. A more down-to-earth explanation is simply Israel’s land hunger. The relentless expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, with the evident intention of creating a Greater Israel, is Israel’s second strategic error, since it risks putting an end once and for all to any possibility of a two-state solution.

Years ago, James Baker, U.S. Secretary of State from 1989 to 1992 in George H. W. Bush’s administration, urged Israel to abandon the “unrealisable dream” of a Greater Israel. But his words went unheeded. Netanyahu and his far-right colleagues are steadily proceeding with a ruthless land grab, brushing aside the admonitions of the whole world, including Israel’s indispensable American ally.

Many influential Jews, such as Professor Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism, have understood the grave dangers of this expansionist policy. An article by Beinart in theInternational Herald Tribune of March 19 is entitled, “To save Israel, boycott the settlements.” It is time, he writes, for “a counteroffensive — a campaign to fortify the [1967] boundary that keeps alive the hope of a Jewish democratic state alongside a Palestinian one.”

A third strategic error is Netanyahu’s febrile warmongering against Iran. He has repeatedly threatened to strike its nuclear facilities to avert what he claims is the danger of “another holocaust.” It is here that the moral of La Fontaine’s fable would seem to apply. Iran’s population is ten times that of Israel and its vast land area and natural resources dwarf those of the Jewish state. What is Netanyahu up to? Does he wish to endanger Israel’s future generations by turning the Islamic Republic into an “eternal enemy”?

By threatening war — and seeking to blackmail the United States into joining in on Israel’s side — Netanyahu seems determined to sabotage the talks which Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign affairs chief, is attempting to re-launch with Iran. If he succeeds, and if a regional war breaks out as a result, history will judge him very severely.

The truth is that Netanyahu is prepared to risk war — with all its unpredictable consequences — not to avert an alleged, but so far non-existent, ‘existential threat’, but rather to assure Israel’s continued military supremacy. He seems to fear that any advance in Iran’s nuclear capability might one day restrict Israel’s freedom to strike its neighbours at will. Instead of building Middle East peace on the foundations of a regional balance of power — which would be eminently sensible — he insists on dominating Israel’s neighbours by force, with military means provided by the United States. This permanently aggressive posture is Israel’s fourth strategic error.

Its fifth strategic error is, without doubt, its murderous attitude towards Gaza, as was evident in its recent assassination of Zuhair al-Qarsi, secretary-general of the Popular Resistance Committees, together with his companion, Mahmoud al-Hannani, a recently freed prisoner. Predictably, these targeted killings provoked rocket fire from Gaza. Israel then responded with air-raids, which killed 25 Palestinians and wounded close to a hundred, demonstrating yet again its total indifference to non-Jewish human life. Some observers even believe Israel callously killed al-Qarsi in order to test the efficacy of its Iron Dome anti-missile system.

What do Israel’s hardliners now propose to do about Gaza? Efraim Inbar and Max Singer of the Begin-Sadat Center (BESA) provide an answer, published in the Jerusalem Post on March 14. The following is their blood-chilling executive summary:

Israel has to respond to the attacks from Gaza with a large-scale military operation. If no such action is taken, the attacks against Israel will surely increase. Gaza is small enough so that Israel can destroy most of the terrorist infrastructure and the leadership of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other organisations. The goal would be to restore deterrence and to signal Israel’s determination to battle the rising Islamist forces in the region. By acting now in Gaza, Israel will also greatly reduce the missile retaliation it would face if and when it strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities. Political conditions seem appropriate as Hamas is divided, most of the Arab world is busy with pressing domestic issues, and the U.S. is in the middle of an election campaign.

The expression of such extreme views surely points to how far Israel has strayed from rational politics.

Geological surveys, confirmed by recent discoveries, suggest that the Eastern Mediterranean contains very large natural gas reserves, located off the coasts of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus and Gaza. Once developed, they could transform the economies of these countries. Urgently required, therefore, are maritime demarcation agreements to establish how these riches are to be shared so that all can benefit — but this, in turn, will require peace agreements.

Israel’s failure to understand that now is the time to make peace not war is its sixth, and possibly greatest, strategic blunder.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 March 2012
Word Count: 1,095
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After all the bellicose bluster of recent weeks, there is a faint chance that the tide of war may be receding in the Middle East — especially in the two hot spots of Iran and Syria. The latest developments in these countries suggest the possible opening of a new phase of dialogue rather than of conflict.

This month has seen the launch of two important initiatives by Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, and Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General. If successful, they could trump the hawks and silence the drums of war. It remains to be seen, however, whether the parties themselves will have the sense to seize the opportunities now being presented to them.

Gaza is the major exception to this somewhat more promising picture. Israel’s air strikes – conducted in the name of its pitiless and provocative policy of ‘targeted killings’ or extra-judicial assassinations — have this past week taken the lives of some 25 Palestinians (until the Egyptian-brokered truce on Monday) and wounded close to a hundred more. Palestinian factions struck back with rockets, wounding a dozen Israelis. But these painful events should not distract attention from the bigger picture.

Just when Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, was at his most histrionic and bellicose at the recent AIPAC convention in Washington — shamelessly comparing Iran to Auschwitz — Baroness Ashton took the wind out of his sails by offering to resume talks with Tehran on the nuclear issue. Her initiative took the form of a letter to Tehran on March 9 offering renewed talks with the P5+1 (the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany) “within the coming weeks at a mutually convenient venue.” The goal of the talks, she stressed, remained “a comprehensive negotiated long-term solution which restores international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature” of Iran’s nuclear programme. Her letter was in response to one last September by Saeed Jalili, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, expressing Iran’s readiness for talks.

Meanwhile, just when Syria seemed to be sinking into the hell of a sectarian civil war, Kofi Annan, mandated by both the UN and the Arab League, embarked on a mission aimed at stopping the killing and creating the conditions for a negotiated settlement. After calling on the Arab League secretary-general in Cairo, he held two long meetings with President Bashar al-Asad in Damascus on 10-11 March, before travelling to Doha for talks with the Emir (the Qataris have been vociferous in wanting to arm the Syrian rebels) and then on to Turkey for meetings with the Syrian National Council.

Do the initiatives of Ashton and Annan have a chance of success? They at least have the advantage of setting the international agenda for a while. They could, however, be easily sabotaged. The hawks will not easily give up.

Israel detests the idea of the great powers negotiating a settlement with Tehran, since it knows that talks must inevitably result in recognising Iran’s right to enrich uranium, if only to modest levels for purely civilian purposes. Netanyahu wants Iran’s entire nuclear programme shut down — his goal is “zero enrichment” — a demand which no Iranian regime, whatever its colouring, could possibly accept.

On his recent visit to Washington, Netanyahu tried to secure a pledge from President Barack Obama to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities or to lend American support to an Israeli strike. He failed to get the pledge he wanted. Although Obama reaffirmed his determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he also made very clear to Netanyahu that sanctions and diplomacy must first be given a chance to work.

For all Netanyahu’s tough talk, it is highly unlikely that Israel will dare attack Iran on its own. Its strategy has been to get the United States to do the job for it — in much the same way as pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, manipulated intelligence to push the United States into war against Iraq in 2003 on Israel’s behalf.

Israel wants at all costs to protect its regional monopoly of nuclear weapons. It has a nuclear arsenal estimated at between 75 and 150 warheads, a range of sophisticated delivery systems, and a second strike capability based on long-range missiles mounted on German-supplied submarines. In contrast, there is as yet no convincing evidence that Iran intends to build a nuclear weapon. America’s annual National Intelligence Estimate — the collective opinion of its 16 intelligence agencies — has repeatedly confirmed that Tehran has not so far taken any such decision.

Talk of Israel facing an “existential threat” from Iran has no basis in fact. Rather it is Israel’s neighbours who risk annihilation. As the former French President Jacques Chirac once said: If Iran were ever to contemplate launching a suspect missile towards Israel, Tehran would be immediately obliterated!

The issue is not, and has never been, about ensuring Israel’s survival, but rather about ensuring its regional military supremacy — a supremacy which, over the past several decades, has given it the freedom to strike its neighbours at will without being hit back. If Iran were ever to acquire a nuclear weapon — or merely the capability of building one — Israel fears this would restrict its freedom of action. It might even be a step towards creating a regional balance of power, which Israel is determined to prevent.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that if Iran were supplied with 20% enriched uranium for the Tehran Research Reactor and medical purposes, it would immediately stop enriching uranium to that level, restricting itself to 3.5% enrichment for electricity generation. (He repeated this pledge to Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post on 13 September 2011; to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times on 21 September 2011; and to Reuters on 22 September 2011. To Iranian TV in October 2011, he declared: “If they give us the 20 percent fuel, we will immediately halt 20 percent.”) In return, however, he would no doubt expect a US guarantee that it would not seek to overthrow the Iranian regime by subversion or force. The outline of a deal with Iran is, therefore, already on the table.

As for the Syrian conflict, neither President Bashar al-Asad nor his opponents seem yet ready to compromise. Having flushed out the rebels from Homs, Bashar is now seeking to drive them out of their other strong-points before he will contemplate a negotiation. For their part, the rebels seem to believe that — with fresh fighters, weapons and funds flowing in to them — they must eventually triumph. Both sides are almost certainly mistaken. Kofi Annan’s task is to persuade them that there can be no military solution to the conflict, and that, sooner or later, they must sit down and negotiate a way out of a crisis which is destroying their country.

The time has surely come for President Obama to lend his full weight to the two initiatives of Catherine Ashton and Kofi Annan. He is fully aware of the urgent need to spare the region — and the United States itself — another catastrophe such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 March 2012
Word Count: 1,174
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Of all the actors in the Arab Spring, one of the most effective — and perhaps the most intriguing — has been the state of Qatar. Protruding from the eastern flank of Saudi Arabia, this mini-state points a plump finger of waterless desert at Iran on the opposite side of the Gulf. Situated between these two regional giants — with each of whom it entertains somewhat wary relations — little Qatar’s remarkable achievement has been to carve out an independent and ambitious role for itself.

How has this pocket-sized state become a world-class mover and shaker? And what is it seeking to achieve? Any visitor to Doha, Qatar’s glittering sea-front capital-city, is bound to ask himself these questions so great is the contrast between the country’s global ambitions and its limited human resources. Its foreign service, active on numerous fronts across the world, is staffed by a mere 250 diplomats. Its native population numbers only some 200,000. These fortunate few – whose annual per capital income of over $100,000 is said to be the highest in the world – are served, pampered and supported by an immigrant Arab and Asian population of 1.7 million.

Over nearly two decades, Qatar has built a considerable reputation for itself in the tricky and often tedious field of conflict mediation. It has tried, and usually succeeded, in calming tempers and forging agreements between opponents – whether between Eritrea and Yemen in their dispute over the Hamish Islands in 1996; or between Eritrea and Sudan a couple of years later; or between Yemen and its Huthi rebel movement in 2007; or between rival Lebanese factions in 2008, which ended 17 months of crisis and prevented a return to civil war; or between Sudan and Chad in 2009; or between Eritrea and Djibouti in 2010; or between feuding Palestinians factions in early February 2012, to name only some of its many endeavours in the cause of peace.

This past year, however, has seen a major change in Qatari diplomacy: From being an impartial mediator, praised by all parties, it has begun to take sides in Middle East conflicts. For example, it played a key role in the overthrow of Libya’s dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi, pouring into the civil war hundreds of its own well-equipped troops and some $400m in aid to the rebels. In Syria, Qatar has led the assault against President Bashar al-Asad, pressing for his condemnation and boycott in the Arab League while arming and funding the opposition.

Even more significantly, Qatar has been a major backer of the Muslim Brothers in their recent rise to power across the Arab region. This has caught the West by surprise, in particular the United States. Having spent the past fifteen years fighting the Islamists, Washington is now scrambling to come to terms with — and even befriend — these new political actors, whether in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Morocco and elsewhere. Unlike Qatar’s earlier mediations, this switch to activist policies inevitably makes enemies as well as friends. Not the least of Qatar’s contradictions is that while it embraces progress and modernity with open arms, it also promotes radical Islamic movements, for example giving ample airtime on Al Jazeera to the tele-preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

In waging its battles, Qatar deploys many assets, of which the first is undoubtedly the vigour and daring of its leadership. Four members of its ruling autocracy deserve special mention. The Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, 60, a graduate of Britain’s Sandhurst military academy and former Defence Minister, deposed his father in a bloodless coup in 1995, setting the country on its path to spectacular development. The Emir’s right-hand man is his distant cousin, Sheikh Hamad bin Jasim Al Thani, 53, who has served as Foreign Minister (since 1992) and also as Prime Minister (since 2007), acquiring a formidable reputation as an international diplomatist but also as a remarkable financier with major stakes in Qatar Airways, in the London department store Harrods, and dozens of other real-estate, commercial and industrial enterprises. He is the owner of the 133-metre yacht al-Mirqab, said to be the eighth largest super-yacht in the world, valued at over $1bn. Some sources estimate his personal fortune, perhaps with a touch of hyperbole, at $35bn.

Another major figure is the Emir’s second wife, Sheikha Mozah, widely admired for her elegance, energy and culture, who chairs the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. One of her five sons is Crown Prince Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, a clever, highly-popular, French-speaking young man in his early thirties. Sheikha Mozah’s Foundation has brought numerous foreign universities to Qatar’s ‘Education City’ and sponsors many training and leadership programmes, as well as the lively Doha Debates on Al Jazeera television, Qatar’s brilliant media arm — a powerful agent of its world-wide influence.

Needless to say, all this would be vain were it not for the prodigious revenues Qatar derives from exporting oil and liquefied natural gas. Its oil reserves of 25 billion barrels would enable continued output at current levels for the next 57 years, while the reserves of its offshore gas fields are estimated at 250 trillion cubic feet, the third largest such reserves in the world. Gas provides 85% of Qatar’s export earnings and 70% of government revenue.

Qatar’s skill has been to acquire a wide variety of foreign friends without being overly dependent on any of them. Since his 1995 coup, the Emir has forged especially close ties with France, which supplies some 80% of the country’s military equipment. He has purchased one of France’s top football clubs, Paris Saint Germain (PSG) — perhaps as a prelude to hosting the 2022 World Cup — as well as a score of valuable properties across the French capital. Serious investments have been made in major French firms such as Veolia and Lagardère. Qatar also has warm relations with Britain, the former colonial overlord of the Gulf until its withdrawal in 1971, and is bound militarily and industrially to the United States.

Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base is the forward headquarters of the United States Central Command, which oversees a vast area of responsibility extending from the Middle East to North Africa and Central Asia. CENTCOM forces are deployed in combat roles in Afghanistan as well as at smaller bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. No doubt the presence of CENTCOM provides Qatar with some protection, but it also runs the risk of attracting hostility if, for example, Qatar were to allow itself to be sucked into the quarrel now raging between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other. A regional war could deal a catastrophic blow to Qatar’s prosperity and development.

Qatar has become a global brand name as well as a global player. These are clearly the goals its leaders have striven to achieve. But this mini-state operates in a turbulent region, a situation which demands constant vigilance and nimble footwork. Many might wish it had restricted itself to its noble role as a peace-maker.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 February 2012
Word Count: 1,163
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