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Ed Webb

Syria Comment » Archives » "Bush White House Wanted to Destroy the Syrian Sta... - 0 views

www.joshualandis.com/blog

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shared by Ed Webb on 05 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 05 Sep 10
     
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Ed Webb

Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman denies ordering Jamal Khashoggi murder, b... - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...y-for-it-60-minutes-2019-09-29

KSA Saudi Iran Yemen houthis journalist torture murder rights MBS interview

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Norah O'Donnell: Did you order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): Absolutely not. This was a heinous crime. But I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia, especially since it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government.Norah O'Donnell: What does that mean that you take responsibility?Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): When a crime is committed against a Saudi citizen by officials, working for the Saudi government, as a leader I must take responsibility. This was a mistake. And I must take all actions to avoid such a thing in the future.
  • Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): If the world does not take a strong and firm action to deter Iran, we will see further escalations that will threaten world interests. Oil supplies will be disrupted and oil prices will jump to unimaginably high numbers that we haven't seen in our lifetimes.Norah O'Donnell: Does it have to be a military response?Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): I hope not.Norah O'Donnell: Why not?Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): Because the political and peaceful solution is much better than the military one.
  • One of the most prominent female activists who fought for the right to drive is Loujain al-Hathloul. She has been held in a Saudi prison for over a year.Norah O'Donnell: Is it time to let her go?Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): This decision is not up to me. It's up to the public prosecutor, and it's an independent public prosecutor.Norah O'Donnell: Her family says that she has been tortured in prison. Is that right?Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): If this is correct, it is very heinous. Islam forbids torture. The Saudi laws forbid torture. Human conscience forbids torture. And I will personally follow up on this matter.Norah O'Donnell: You will personally follow up on it?Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Translation): Without a doubt.
Ed Webb

U.N. Is Preparing for the Coronavirus to Strike the Most Vulnerable Among Refugees, Mig... - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...yemen-south-sudanthe-next-wave

pandemics aid UN UNICEF WHO Yemen Iran Venezuela SouthSudan Syria refugees development

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • United Nations is preparing to issue a major funding appeal for more than $1.5 billion on Wednesday to prepare for outbreaks of the new coronavirus in areas suffering some of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, including Gaza, Myanmar, Syria, South Sudan, and Yemen, according to diplomatic and relief officials familiar with the plan
  • the request—which would be in addition to ongoing humanitarian operations—comes at a time when the world’s leading economies are reeling from the economic shock induced by one of the most virulent pandemics since the 1918 Spanish flu
  • “Some of the biggest donors are seeing global recession about to hit them,” said one senior relief official. “How generous are they going to be when they have a crisis looming in their own backyards?”
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  • U.N. relief officials and aid organizations are bracing for what they fear could be a cataclysmic second phase of the pandemic: spreading in the close-quarters encampments of the world’s more than 25 million refugees and another 40 million internally displaced people.
  • More than 3 billion people lack access to hand-washing facilities, depriving them of one of the most effective first lines of defense against the spread of the coronavirus, according to UNICEF
  • the effort to ramp up an international aid response is being hampered by the quest to ensure the safety of international staff. Those concerns have been amplified by the announcement last week that David Beasley, the executive director of the Rome-based World Food Program, had been infected with the coronavirus. Some international relief agencies have recalled senior field officers, fearing they could be infected.
  • Konyndyk, who worked on the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that U.N. and relief agencies are having to balance ensuring the health of their own staff with delivering care to needy communities.
  • “You would have a hard time designing a more dangerous setting for the spread of this disease than an informal IDP settlement,” he said. “You have a crowded population, very poor sanitation … very poor disease surveillance, very poor health services. This could be extraordinarily dangerous … and I don’t think that’s getting enough global attention yet.”
  • In conflict-riven countries from Afghanistan to South Sudan to Yemen, dismal health care infrastructures are already overburdened after years of fighting
  • “For many population groups, living in overcrowded conditions, social distancing is a challenge or impossible,” according to the Assessment Capacities Project report. Many countries that host refugee camps, such as Afghanistan and Bangladesh, are likely to be overwhelmed by the health needs of their own citizens. Nations with weak health systems “may struggle to screen, test, and contain the epidemic for the host population let alone the refugees,”
  • After five years of war, with millions of people on the brink of famine, Yemen’s population is more vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak than those of most other countries. The conflict has left most of the country’s population effectively immunocompromised,
  • In Gaza, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides primary care for about 70 percent of the territory’s more than 1.8 million people, is bracing for the likely arrival of the coronavirus in one of the most densely populated place in the world. The U.N. agency—which the Trump administration defunded last year and has sought to dismantle—has some 22 medical clinics in Gaza, putting it on the front lines of the defense of the coronavirus.
  • “I’m told that there are 60 ICU beds in the hospitals,” Matthias Schmale, the director of Gaza’s UNRWA operations, told Foreign Policy. “If there is a full-scale outbreak the hospital sector won’t cope.”
  • The leaders of major relief organizations are pressing donors to grant them greater flexibility to redirect funding from existing programs that are likely to be paralyzed by the pandemic and use that money for programs—including clean water and sanitation projects—that could help stem the crisis.
  • “As bad as it is now in the well-organized and affluent north, with health systems, good sanitation, and big infrastructure, imagine how it will be when it will hit crowded camps with refugees and displaced people,” said Egeland, who spoke by telephone from quarantine in Norway.
  • sweeping U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions imposed on governments in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela are hampering relief efforts.
  • Egeland acknowledged that most U.N. sanctions regimes, including those for Iran and North Korea, include exemptions for the import of humanitarian goods. But the sanctions have scared financial institutions from providing vital financial services to relief agencies. “Not a single bank had the guts to transfer money, because they were all afraid to be sued by the U.S. government,”
  • The World Health Organization announced earlier this year that more than $675 million will be required through April—including $61 million for its own activities—to mount an international campaign against the virus. Though WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently that more money would be needed. On Feb. 17, UNICEF issued an urgent request for $42.3 million to support the coronavirus response. It will be used to reduce transmission of the virus by promoting distance learning for kids who can’t attend school and public information aimed at shooting down misinformation.
  • Guterres, meanwhile, expressed concern that the pandemic could claw back decades of efforts to raise international health standards and to scale back the most extreme levels of poverty, and undercut U.N. sustainable development goals, which are designed to improve the standard of living around the world by the year 2030.
  • “COVID-19 is killing people, as well as attacking the real economy at its core—trade, supply chains, businesses, jobs,” Guterres said. “Workers around the world could lose as much as $3.4 trillion.”
  • “We need to focus on people—the most vulnerable, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises,” Guterres said. “That means wage support, insurance, social protection, preventing bankruptcies and job loss. That also means designing fiscal and monetary responses to ensure that the burden does not fall on those who can least afford it. The recovery must not come on the backs of the poorest—and we cannot create a legion of new poor. We need to get resources directly into the hands of people.”
Ed Webb

How Biden Kept Screwing Up Iraq, Over and Over and Over Again - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/q-over-and-over-and-over-again

USA US diplomacy military politics analysis opinion Iraq Afghanistan

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • Reviewing Biden’s record on Iraq is like rewinding footage of a car crash to identify the fateful decisions that arrayed people at the bloody intersection. He was not just another Democratic hawk navigating the trauma of 9/11 in a misguided way. He didn’t merely call his vote for a disastrous war part of “a march to peace and security.” Biden got the Iraq war wrong before and throughout invasion, occupation, and withdrawal. Convenient as it is to blame Bush—who, to be clear, bears primary and eternal responsibility for the disaster—Biden embraced the Iraq war for what he portrayed as the result of his foreign policy principles and persisted, most often in error, for the same reasons. 
  • “I think the vast majority of the foreign policy community thinks [my record has] been very good.” That will be important context should Biden become president. He’s the favorite of many in Democratic foreign policy circles who believe in resetting the American geopolitical position to what it was the day before Trump was elected, rather than considering it critical context for why Trump was elected. 
  • National Democrats embraced the war on terrorism with enthusiasm and, with few exceptions, were disinclined to challenge Bush on foreign policy even as that foreign policy became more militant and extreme
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  • Biden’s hearings highlighted the dangers of occupation, such as the basic uncertainty around what would replace Saddam Hussein, as well as the bloody, long, and expensive commitment required to midwife a democratic Iraq. “In many ways, those hearings were remarkably prescient about what was to happen,” said Tony Blinken, Biden’s longtime aide on the committee and a deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration. “He and [GOP Sen. Richard] Lugar talked about not the day after but the decade after. If we did go in, they talked about the lack of a plan to secure any peace that followed the intervention.”
  • But the balance of expert testimony concerned guessing at Saddam’s weapons program, the pragmatic questions of invading, and the diplomatic legwork of an action whose justice—if not necessarily its wisdom—was presumed
  • the regnant foreign policy consensus in America: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had sealed his fate by doing so. It was an enormous factual mistake born out of an inability to see that Saddam believed that transparent disarmament would spell his doom at the hands of Iran. This misapprehension led advocates to accept that the U.S.—preferably with others, but alone if necessary—was justified or even obligated to get rid of Saddam
  • Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, convinced the White House to attempt securing United Nations support for the war. It was a cynical maneuver: the Security Council could accept additional weapons inspections but not war; Bush could claim he tried for an internationalist solution before invading unilaterally. Its primary effect was to legitimize the war in the eyes of uncomfortable congressional Democrats who had made the tactical error of disputing the war for insufficient multilateralism rather than arguing it was wrong
  • For Biden, the critical point, “what this is about,” was America daring to “enforce” U.N. Security Council disarmament resolutions that the U.N. was saying did not justify war. When the world stood against America, in the forum Biden considered critical and Bush considered pretextual, America would simply act in the world’s name. He approvingly quoted the infamous Henry Kissinger: “As the most powerful nation in the world, the United States has a special, unilateral capacity, and indeed obligation, to lead in implementing its convictions, but it also has a special obligation to justify its actions by principles that transcend the assertions of preponderance of power.” America’s confidence in its nobility was, in the end, all the justification it required. 
  • Biden acknowledged that the “imminence and inevitability” of the threat Iraq posed was “exaggerated,” although that recognition was irrelevant to both his reasoning and his vote. He performed an end-zone dance over Bush advisers who favored what he called the doctrine of preemption—a euphemism for wars of aggression—as if his vote did not authorize exactly the preemptive war those advisers wanted. The trouble Biden saw was that elevating preemption to a foreign policy “doctrine” would grant “every nation an unfettered right of preemption.” Left unsaid was that it would be better for America to keep that unfettered right for itself.
  • Biden was unprepared to break from prevention, which is always the prerogative of hegemonic powers. Boxed in, he continued to argue that the trouble was Bush elevating preemption to centrality in foreign policy, and fretted that predatory states would cite that “doctrine” to prey on weaker ones. He neglected to see that all those states needed was the example of the Iraq war itself. Eleven years later, when Biden was vice president, Vladimir Putin cited Iraq as a reason the U.S. had no standing to criticize him for invading Ukraine. 
  • Iraq was an abstraction to Biden—as it was, ironically, to the neoconservatives Biden had criticized—a canvas on which to project theories of American power
  • Nothing that followed went the way Biden expected. Bush did not share Biden’s distinction between the U.N. weapons-inspection process and the invasion. Iraq did not passively accept its occupation. And Biden did not reap the political benefit of endorsing the war that seemed so obvious to the Democratic consultant class in the autumn of 2002. 
  • Biden praised the leadership of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a shockingly corrupt and incompetent organization. Its chief, Jerry Bremer, was “first-rate,” Biden said mere months after Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, the greatest gift America could have given the insurgency
  • Rebuilding Iraq’s police force was left to former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom Biden called “a serious guy with a serious team.” Iraq’s police would soon become indistinguishable from sectarian death squads; Kerik would soon plead guilty to tax fraud and other federal corruption charges
  • By the next summer, with Iraq in flames, Biden continued his misdiagnosis. The original sin wasn’t the war itself, it was Bush’s stewardship—the same stewardship Biden praised in 2002. “Because we waged a war in Iraq virtually alone, we are responsible for the aftermath virtually alone,” he thundered at the 2004 Democratic convention. The intelligence “was hyped to justify going to war,” Biden continued, causing “America’s credibility and security [to] have suffered a terrible blow.” Yet Biden made no call for withdrawal. It was easier to pretend that Bush was waging a different war than the one he empowered Bush to wage. 
  • The U.S., unable to win the war it chose, would be better off reshaping the map of Iraq into something that better suited it. The proposal was a natural outgrowth of viewing Iraq as an abstraction. Now that Iraq had undermined American power, Iraq would be subject to a kind of dismemberment, a theoretically cleaner problem to solve than a civil war or a weak client state. In September 2007, Biden prevailed upon his fellow senators to endorse his proposal on a staggering 75-23 vote. There was no support for the idea among actual Iraqis outside Kurdistan, but they were beside the imperial point.
  • 2007 saw Biden’s most valorous act on Iraq. With the war a morass, Biden secured $23 billion, far more than the Pentagon requested, to buy Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, whose hull design proved more survivable against the insurgency’s improvised bombs. Replacing insufficiently armored Humvees with MRAPs was “a passion,” he said. While the number of lives MRAPs saved over the course of the program’s $45 billion lifespan has been disputed, the Pentagon estimated in 2012 that over 2,000 service members are alive today because of the vehicle. Biden counted securing the funding for the MRAP among his greatest congressional achievements.
  • Barack Obama had opposed the Iraq war, but was hardly afflicted with the “distrust of the use of American power” that Biden feared in 2004. Selecting Biden as his vice president laundered Biden’s reputation. No longer was Biden the man whose faith in American exceptionalism had driven the U.S. into a morass. He was the lovable uncle in aviators who washed his metaphorical Trans Am on the White House lawn. Obama gave him responsibility for a three-year project of U.S. withdrawal, one that Biden considers an accomplishment. 
  • Biden and other U.S. officials appeared at times dangerously unconcerned about Maliki’s consolidation of power that once again marginalized Sunni Iraq, which the war had already proven would give jihadis the opportunity they needed
  • Biden reflected America’s schizophrenic attitude toward ending post-9/11 wars, in which leaving a residual force amidst an unsettled conflict does not count as continuing a war.
  • “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA,” the Times quoted him. Instead, the following year, the Iraqi parliament did no such thing
  • Biden is the last of the pre-Obama generation of Democratic foreign policy grandees who enabled the Iraq war. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton both lost their presidential bids, saddled in both cases with the legacy of the war they supported
  • A President Biden is likely to find himself a man out of time. Writing in The Guardian, David Adler and Ben Judah recently described Biden as a “restorationist” in foreign policy, aiming at setting the American geopolitical clock back to what it was before Trump took office. Yet now an emergent China, a resurgent Russia, and the ascent of nationalism and oligarchy across Europe, India, and South America have fragmented the America-centric internationalist order that Biden represents. While Trump has accelerated these dynamics, he is far less responsible for them than is the martial post-9/11 course of U.S. foreign policy that wrecked itself, most prominently in Iraq.
Ed Webb

Permission to Narrate: Half the story: What @IDFSpokesperson leaves out about #Gaza - 0 views

blog.thejerusalemfund.org/...at-idfspokesperson-leaves.html

war Israel Palestine israelpalestine

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • In 2011, the projectiles fired by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians, of which 15 where women or children and the injury of 468 Palestinians of which 143 where women or children. The methods by which these causalities were inflicted by Israeli projectiles breaks down as follows: 57% or 310, were caused by Israeli Aircraft Missile fire, 28% or 150 where from Israeli live ammunition, 11% or 59 were from Israeli tank shells while another 3% or 18 were from Israeli mortar fire.Conversely, rocket fire from Gaza in 2011 has resulted in the death of 3 Israelis.
  • Last year, in a post about this issue, we showed how media portrayed a flare-up in cross border violence as a result of increased rocket fire while actual tweets from individuals in Gaza revealed that destructive Israeli strikes preceded and in fact provoked the upsurge in rockets. Of course, the events that came before the upsurge in Gaza-launched projectiles did not get reported.Now, with the daily data we have from UN OCHA and the data we have for launches from Gaza, we can graph the two lines next to each other.
  • Palestinian deaths from Israeli projectiles into Gaza led to a 22% increase in rocket launches the following day, Palestinian injuries led to an additional 4% increase
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • increases in the red line, which signifies Palestinian casualties, typically precede increases in the blue line, which signifies launches of projectiles from Gaza. This is particularly evident before the most significant spikes in the blue line. This suggests that Palestinian launches may be explained, in part, as a response to Israeli projectiles which kill or injure Palestinians
  • The three Israelis who died as a result of Palestinian projectile fire died during periods of upsurge provoked by preceding Israeli projectile fire into Gaza. In fact, 75% of launches from Gaza came during these upsurges provoked by Israeli fire.
  • This suggests that it is the Israelis and not the Palestinians who, through their capacity to actually inflict high casualties with their projectiles, control escalation in cross border dynamics. While all launches from Gaza cannot be explained as responses to Israeli fire, most of them are.
Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Iran vows response to suicide blast - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...20091018201522994684.html

Iran diplomacy USA Jundallah terrorism Revolutionary Guard

shared by Jim Franklin on 19 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Iran has promised a swift and crushing response to a suicide attack in the country's Sistan-Baluchestan province that killed at least 35 people, including 11 Revolutionary Guards commanders.
  • a Sunni group called Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, claimed responsibility for the attack.
  • "We consider the recent terrorist attack to be the result of US action. This is the sign of America's animosity against our country," Ali Larijani, Iran's parliamentary speaker, said.
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  • Washington has denied involvement with the group, which it has labelled as a "terrorist" organisation, and condemned the attack.
  • "Reports of alleged US involvement are completely false," he said.
  • Tehran has also suggested that Saudi Arabia and Britain have supported Jundallah
  • Other analysts have rejected the idea that the West supports Jundallah and other ethnic groups.
  • Ali Nouri Zada, the director of the Arab-Iranian Studies Centre in London, told Al Jazeera: "It's very easy to point at Saudi, to the British and Americans ... [but] it [Jundallah] is a local organisation,"
  • "It was expected because Jundallah have issued a statement saying they were going to carry out a suicide attack against those who align themselves with the Revolutionary Guards against their group."
  • The blast occurred ahead of a meeting between Revolutionary Guards commanders and tribal chiefs, part of efforts to foster Shia-Sunni unity in the region. About 10 senior tribal figures were among the dead.
Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - CENTRAL/S. ASIA - Scores killed in Pakistan blast - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...200910965717938522.html

Pakistan terrorism Taliban al Qaeda

shared by Jim Franklin on 09 Oct 09 - Cached
  • "The police are now saying that up to 100 kilos [of explosives] - perhaps more than that - may have been used in this particular attack."
  • "What is surprising everyone is that immediately after the attack, the provincial information minister came out and said that he knew where the attack came from, and started saying that people should be united against the Taliban, even though the Taliban have not claimed responsibility," he said.
  • No responsibility claim
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  • There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but previous attacks have been blamed on the al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani Taliban.
  • The targets have been mostly security forces and foreigners.
  • operation could start as early as Monday.
Jim Franklin

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran delays reply on nuclear plan - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8322901.stm

USA diplomacy Iran Russia France IAEA nuclear program

shared by Jim Franklin on 23 Oct 09 - Cached
  • "Iran informed the Director General today that it is considering the proposal in depth and in a favourable light, but needs time until the middle of next week to provide a response," the IAEA said in a statement.
  • State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: "We hope that they will next week provide a positive response."
  • He added that "obviously we would have preferred to have a response today [Friday]. We approach this with a sense of urgency".
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  • State TV said Iran would prefer to buy uranium for its research reactor, rather than send its own stock abroad for enrichment, as proposed.
  • Iran's rejection of the deal would come as a disappointment to the US, Russia and France, and it could make the wider negotiation with Iran much more difficult - and the threat of sanctions more likely, says the BBC's Bethany Bell in Vienna.
Michael Fisher

Tuning Out the Taliban - Video Library - The New York Times - 0 views

video.nytimes.com/...tuning-out-the-taliban.html

popular culture world music Pakistan Taliban video

shared by Michael Fisher on 12 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Michael Fisher on 12 Nov 09
     
    A Pakastani contends that the Taliban does not have a huge impact on Pakistan, rather the U.S. is guilty of having the biggest effect to its current situation. A response to this would make a great blog post, as it explores many underlying issues (politics, pop-culture, identity, etc...).
  • Michael Fisher on 12 Nov 09
     
    A Pakastani contends that the Taliban does not have a huge impact on Pakistan, rather the U.S. is guilty of having the biggest effect to its current situation. A response to this would make a great blog post, as it explores many underlying issues (politics, pop-culture, identity, etc...).
Ed Webb

Lebanon is struggling to cope with Syrian refugees, but young people are pushing the co... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...sels-middle-east-a8870416.html

Syria Lebanon refugees EU opinion youth generations

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • When the war in Syria broke out eight years ago, I was barely a teenager. Almost overnight, my small home country of Lebanon, with a population of only five million, saw a huge influx of people fleeing violence, terror and persecution. Most needed urgent humanitarian assistance. Now around one in four people in Lebanon is a refugee.
  • Even before the Syrian crisis, the Lebanese economy was suffering. When the Syrians came, it created additional pressure. Youth unemployment is at an all-time high, and the proportion of Lebanese nationals living below the poverty line has just topped 30 per cent.
  • the solutions, the opportunities, that have arisen from this dire situation
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  • many people in Lebanon blame the refugees for our problems – especially economic problems
  • I began taking part in an EU MADAD trust fund “Youth Resolve” project close to my home. It was run by UK aid agency CAFOD and Caritas Lebanon. Its main objective is to bring Syrian and Lebanese youth together.
  • We have been able to change some of the perspectives on both sides – among Lebanese people and refugees – and it inspired me to do more. People around me have started to understand that the Syrians did not come here by choice; they were forced to come here, and if they could go home, most of them would. These are all steps on the path to equal treatment.
  • We will be the ones raising the next generation, and we don’t need to do that based on opinions from another time. In the future, I hope to create a youth council back in Lebanon, where young people can share their views and be represented.
Ed Webb

State Department Considers Cutting Aid to Egypt After Death of U.S. Citizen Mustafa Kassem - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ssem-american-citizen-detained

USA US Egypt death prisoners prisoner aid military politics diplomacy

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In a memo sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by the agency’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in early March and described to Foreign Policy, the nation’s most senior diplomat was given the option to cut up to $300 million in U.S. military aid to Egypt over the death of Mustafa Kassem, a dual American and Egyptian citizen who appealed unsuccessfully to U.S. President Donald Trump to secure his release in his final days.
  • In his role as the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Leahy, a long-standing critic of Egypt’s human rights record, has held up $105 million in military aid to Cairo to purchase Apache helicopters and Hellfire missiles. Leahy imposed the funding freeze on Egypt two years ago in response to its detention of Kassem, its failure to fully cover the medical costs for an American citizen wounded in a botched 2015 Apache helicopter raid, and its refusal to permit adequate U.S. oversight of its use of American military assistance in its counterterrorism operations in Sinai.
  • In two years on the job, Pompeo has twice decided to overlook human rights considerations to greenlight military aid to Egypt, leading some experts to cast doubt on whether the Trump administration will make cuts even after the death of a U.S. citizen.
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  • Under Trump, the United States has been largely reluctant to challenge Egypt, the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, which provides the Department of Defense with overflight rights and the ability to navigate the Suez Canal.
  • Kassem had been on a liquid-only hunger strike and had not received proper medical treatment before dying of heart failure in January.
  • a State Department official said the agency would not comment on internal deliberations. “We remain deeply saddened by the needless death in custody of Moustafa Kassem and we are reviewing our options and consulting with Congress,” the official said. “In the wake of the tragic and avoidable death of Moustafa Kassem, we will continue to emphasize to Egypt our concerns regarding the treatment of detainees, including U.S. citizens.”
  • In a letter sent late last month, Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy and Chris Van Hollen also urged Pompeo to withhold $300 million in military assistance to Cairo and to sanction any Egyptian official “directly or indirectly responsible” for Kassem’s imprisonment and death
  • The dual citizen—held without charges for much of his six-year detention—insisted he had been wrongly arrested during an August 2013 visit to his birth country that coincided with the deadly Rabaa Square massacre against demonstrators protesting the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi. Kassem’s advocates said he was not involved in the Rabaa Square demonstrations. He was in prison for over five years before an Egyptian court, without due process, sentenced him to 15 years in prison in 2018.
  • There are at least three other American citizens—Reem Dessouky, Khaled Hassan, and Mohammed al-Amash—and two permanent residents—Ola Qaradawi and Hossam Khalaf—detained in Egypt on charges related to their political views, according to a bipartisan group of foreign-policy experts called the Working Group on Egypt that tracks the issue
  • “It is incomprehensible that Egypt, a close ally of the United States that receives some $1.5 billion annually in assistance from American taxpayers, would be less responsive than Iran, Lebanon, and other countries to repeated calls for the humanitarian release of detained Americans,”
  • Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham stopped a provision in the final version of the State Department’s appropriations bill last year that would have withheld nearly $14 million in military aid until Egypt paid off the medical expenses for April Corley, an American mistakenly injured in an attack by Egyptian military forces in the nation’s western desert in 2015.
  • The United States and Egypt set up a structured process of defense meetings to properly resource the nation’s military after the Obama administration suspended aid amid massacres after Morsi’s ouster, but the forum “has long devolved into a grab bag of weapons requests,”
  • “By sending this amount of military assistance for such a long time—when you add it up its $40 billion over decades—what the United States has ended up doing is feeding the beast that’s devouring the whole country,” she said, referring to the Egyptian military.
Ed Webb

To please Trump, Netanyahu washes his hands of coronavirus advice - +972 Magazine - 0 views

www.972mag.com/us-israel-netanyahu-quarantine

USA US Israel diplomacy politics Trump Netanyahu pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Israeli government’s original plan was much less drastic: advisors from the Health Ministry had initially proposed adding the United States to its list of countries from which returning Israelis have to self-quarantine for at least two weeks, in particular those landing from New York, California, or Seattle, which to date are the three centers of the outbreak in the U.S.
  • Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump, who has brought retrograde antisemitism roaring back into the American mainstream, is among his crowning foreign policy achievements, together with the pro-annexation gifts that the president has bestowed in return. It is therefore no shock that Netanyahu would agree to scratch his back with an eye on the upcoming U.S. election, much as Trump did by releasing his so-called “Deal of the Century” just over a month ahead of Israel’s recent election.
  • In a press conference Sunday night, Netanyahu delivered an unctuous appraisal of the White House’s response to the virus — which has been widely slammed at home and abroad — before announcing that no country would be “singled out” for self-quarantine requirements. The prime minister therefore effectively left two alternative options for Israel’s travel quarantine measures: impose no quarantine from the United States at all, thus ignoring his own Health Ministry’s advice, or enforce quarantine for everyone entering the country, no matter where they were traveling from, and whether they were returning Israelis or international visitors.
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  • U.S. Vice President Mike Pence — the science sceptic whom Trump has charged with overseeing the government’s response to coronavirus — personally asked Netanyahu on Sunday not to include the U.S. on its limited list of quarantine countries, but to set down a blanket policy instead. The prime minister complied.
  • Still, it is disturbing to watch the working logic of the Republican Party now informing the Israeli prime minister’s decisions during a public health crisis: keep Trump happy, even when doing so could cost your own citizens’ lives and/or throw your economy into disarray.
  • Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennett’s decision to place Bethlehem on lockdown, in response to an outbreak of the virus in the city, stood in stark contrast to the self-quarantine measures imposed on Israelis inside the Green Line. Such are the perks of a military dictatorship, including in a city which, as part of Area A, is ostensibly under full Palestinian Authority control.
  • Israel’s entire state apparatus is engineered to ensure that what is necessary for Palestinians is not so for Jews, and vice-versa, even when they live in the same area.
Ed Webb

Israel hoping for Iran confrontation before November election: sources - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/vember-election-sources-2020-7

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shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 20 - Cached
  • A former Israeli defense official told Insider it was common knowledge that at least some of the latest attacks in Iran were done by Israeli intelligence.
  • An EU official also told Insider that they fear Israel is planning to provoke Iran into military confrontation "while Trump remains in office."
  • Israel is involved in an extended campaign to pressure or damage Iran before President Donald Trump could be voted out in the November election, a former Israeli defense official and a current EU intelligence official have told Insider.
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  • Iran has seen weekly incidents including explosions at a missile-production facility on June 22; the Natanz nuclear facility, Iran's largest uranium-enrichment facility, on July 2; and an important shipyard in the port city of Bushehr on Wednesday.
  • Israeli officials told The New York Times in July that their intelligence services were responsible for the nuclear facility explosion, and implied that other attacks would be forthcoming.
  • I fear the Israeli plan here is to provoke an Iranian response that can turn into a military escalation while Trump remains in office
  • The attacks appear to be part of a campaign of "maximum pressure, minimal strategy," said the EU intelligence official
  • The source warned that Iran could be considering a rash response after exhibiting relative patience in the wake of the January assassination of top commander Qassem Soleimani in a US drone strike.
  • "It's been decided to follow the Trump administration's lead of exerting 'maximum pressure' on the Iranians," they said, referencing the US' economic sanctions policy directed toward Iran.
  • With a broad belief among America's allies that Trump is unlikely to win reelection, Israel's apparent shift in tactics towards high-pressure "kinetic" operations seem to reflect a belief that under a Biden administration, there would be a move to save the 2015 nuclear deal that had been scuttled by Trump.
Ed Webb

Will the U.S.-Saudi Arabia Relationship Ever Reach a Breaking Point? - 1 views

foreignpolicy.com/...t-relationship-oil-geopolitics

USA US diplomacy military politics analysis opinion energy Iran KSA Saudi

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jul 20 - Cached
  • Again and again, the unlikely partners would fall out—usually over the Arab-Israeli conflict, much later over the 9/11 attacks. But the fundamental bargain struck by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and then-King Ibn Saud in the waning days of World War II that consummated the U.S.-Saudi relationship 75 years ago would never break
  • lawmakers in oil states such as Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Alaska accuse Saudi Arabia of waging “economic warfare” and have drafted legislation to immediately pull out U.S. troops and furl up a decades-old U.S. security umbrella that has protected the vulnerable Saudi state
  • many in Washington are coming to question the very fundamentals that have underpinned a very special bilateral relationship for 75 years—essentially, U.S. security to ensure the free flow of Saudi oil and Saudi support for U.S. designs in the Middle East
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  • Today’s tensions stem, in many ways, from the original foundations of the odd-couple relationship: an oil-for security bargain that always sought, but never fully managed, to bridge the divide between a liberal democracy and a conservative religious monarchy
  • Some experts believe U.S.-Saudi ties will ultimately weather the storm, as they always have, because of the need for a large, wealthy, and anti-Iran anchor for U.S. interests in the Middle East
  • “But we don’t need the Saudis anymore—this comes in a very different geopolitical environment than previous crises.”
  • Saudi Arabia was one of the only countries in the world that continued to receive U.S. Lend-Lease aid after the end of the war.
  • essentially underwriting the security of an oil-rich desert sheikdom to keep oil supplies flowing—and to keep the Soviets out of the Middle East.
  • Roosevelt had met Ibn Saud hoping for Saudi support for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, which the king vehemently opposed, and the U.S. president—in Saudi eyes—gave his word not to press the matter. But Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, eventually supported the creation of Israel, sowing years of distrust and cries of betrayal in Saudi Arabia
  • “In my conversations with the king, the crown prince, and the deputy crown prince, they favored the effort to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But they wanted more: They wanted us to push on Iran’s actions in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and we didn’t do that.”
  • The Iranian revolution, as well as an assault that same year on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, terrified Saudi leadership, who saw how vulnerable their own position was. The revolution, by removing the shah and creating permanent enmity with the United States, left Saudi Arabia as America’s main linchpin in the Middle East, all the bad blood from the oil embargo notwithstanding
  • Fearful of being toppled by religious radicals, Saudi leaders embraced a much more conservative line and empowered hard-line religious leaders in their own country, the first steps toward a decadeslong program to export the austere Wahhabi brand of Islam particular to the kingdom. Soon, wealthy Saudis, including one Osama bin Laden, started funding the Muslim mujahideen who were fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began the same year as the Iranian revolution. Two decades later, that Saudi lurch toward a harsher official line on religion would end up creating the biggest crisis yet in the special relationship.
  • “The relationship never really recovered from 9/11,”
  • the George W. Bush administration, despite vehement Saudi objections, decided to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Saudis feared that would open the door to greater Iranian influence on their doorstep, as in fact happened.
  • In the end, the United States and Saudi Arabia patched up the dispute, and the oil embargo ended by the spring of 1974. But the scars it left were deep and long-lasting, permanently damaging Saudi Arabia’s image in American popular opinion, and leaving deep-rooted fears that the Saudis could and would use their oil weapon to damage U.S. interests—a fear that has persisted even though the nature of the Saudi oil threat has changed.
  • “King Abdullah was very respectful and liked Obama personally, but there were things they couldn’t understand,” said Westphal, who was present for three of Obama’s record four trips to Saudi Arabia. “‘Why are you supporting Maliki, who is essentially handing over his country to the Iranians? How can you not depose Assad?’”
  • Since 1979, Saudi leaders had seen Iran as the gravest threat to the region and their own security, and U.S. efforts to reach a nuclear deal while seemingly letting Iran continue its destabilizing behavior in the region unsettled the Saudis.
  • “There’s no question that the Arab Spring unsettled the U.S. relationship with the Saudis. For them, the U.S. response [to calls for reform in the Arab world] was way too sympathetic, and the relationship cooled,”
  • Saudi leaders famously rolled out the red carpet, and a glowing orb, for Trump’s first overseas trip as president. It seemed a surprising about-face after Trump’s attacks on Muslims, and repeated attacks on Saudi Arabia, on the campaign trail, when he accused the kingdom of carrying out 9/11, criticized it for sponging off American protection, and threatened an economic boycott. Saudi leaders were happy to overlook Trump’s comments, eager to forge ties with an untested and unorthodox president before other foreign leaders could. “Washington is like Rome in the Roman Empire, and we are like a satellite state—you pay homage to the emperor,” Shihabi said. “You could put a monkey in the White House, and we’d pay homage.”
  • The playbook that has reliably worked since 1945 to ground the bilateral ties in personal relationships with the president now seems to be backfiring. Mohammed bin Salman, reviled by many in Congress for his alleged role in the Khashoggi killing, as well as other continued human rights abuses inside Saudi Arabia and in Yemen, is seen as being exceptionally close to Kushner and Trump. Riding the coattails of a historically unpopular, already-impeached president isn’t the best way to improve Saudi Arabia’s image.
  • Despite decades of close economic ties and military and counterterrorism cooperation, Saudi Arabia never seemed to plant deep roots in the United States that would institutionalize the relationship beyond kings, generals, and presidents. This meant when tensions flared up between the two countries, Riyadh didn’t have many outside allies to come to its defense in Washington
  • Mohammed bin Salman’s foreign-policy excesses: the disastrous war in Yemen, the bizarre virtual kidnapping of Lebanon’s prime minister to pressure Iran and Hezbollah, and an embargo on Qatar, its small neighbor and a key U.S. military partner. At home, there was the regular drumbeat of reports on human rights violations, plus a $100 billion shakedown on wealthy political rivals to consolidate power under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign.
  • As long as they’ve been a country—they’re so young—they really don’t know what their place in the world would be like without the backing of the United States,”
  • Unlike in 1973, when Saudi Arabia used the oil weapon to jack up oil prices and hurt the United States, this time crashing oil prices did the trick. U.S. shale producers need oil prices above $40 a barrel to break even; the Russian-Saudi price war sent the price of oil to $25 and then into the single digits, ensuring a wave of bankruptcies and economic hardship from Texas to North Dakota.
  • “The Saudis have a deep problem with the Democrats, and that’s been clear for a long time. Now they have spoiled their relationship with Republicans,”
  • In the summer of 2019, when Iranian attacks on oil tankers near the Persian Gulf threatened the flow of oil, Trump’s response was to tell allies such as Japan and South Korea to protect their own ships, questioning why the United States should continue to carry out a mission it’s done for decades unless other countries coughed up cash. That fall, key Saudi oil facilities were attacked, allegedly by Iran, knocking out 5 percent of global oil production in a matter of minutes. The U.S. response, other than a Trump tweet, was to do nothing.
  • The bitter recriminations during this spring’s oil price war, coming on the heels of the Khashoggi murder, the continued war in Yemen, and other Saudi missteps, give many observers reason to believe that the relationship is due for a fundamental rethink.
  • as long as the United States continues to view Iran as a major threat, close relations with Saudi Arabia will have a strong appeal
Ed Webb

The F-35 Triangle: America, Israel, the United Arab Emirates - War on the Rocks - 0 views

warontherocks.com/...srael-the-united-arab-emirates

UAE Israel military US USA KSA Saudi Iran Turkey arms weapons

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Sep 20 - Cached
  • deepen what were heretofore covert ties across the full spectrum of civilian sectors from business to science to agriculture and even space. The Emirati-Israeli agreement builds upon years of “under the table” cooperation between security and intelligence professionals driven toward strategic alignment by a shared perception of the major regional threat — Iran.
  • the U.S. sweetener appears to be a commitment to sell it F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, as well as other advanced weaponry long sought by Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed
  • When Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, it secured the second largest military aid package in the Middle East after Israel, which continues today. When Jordan made peace with Israel in 1994, the announcement came along with debt relief and the sale of F-16 fighter aircraft — and, like Egypt, Jordan remains a top recipient of American assistance
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  • Reactions to Emirati acquisition of the F-35 have largely focused on whether Israel will support such a sale and the related requirement in U.S. domestic law to ensure Israel’s military superiority against all other countries in the Middle East. The longstanding policy term, later codified in law, is “qualitative military edge.” From the Emirati point of view, if they have entered into full diplomatic relations with Israel — with a promised “warm peace,” in the words of Emirati officials — and both countries share the same threat perspective, then Israel should have confidence that these advanced weapons will not be turned against it and should therefore not object to the sale. Moreover, unlike Egypt and Jordan, the United Arab Emirates has never attacked Israel.
  • Weapons sales are a leading area of competition in the Middle East, and in the words of the former Acting Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs Tina Kaidanow: Arms transfers are foreign policy. When we transfer a system or a capability to a foreign partner, we are affecting regional — or foreign internal — balances of power; we are sending a signal of support; and we are establishing or sustaining relationships that may last for generations and provide benefits for an extended period of time.
  • selling the F-35 to the United Arab Emirates would say much more about the Washington’s partnership with Abu Dhabi than it would about the evolving Emirati-Israeli relationship
  • Selling the F-35 to a country ought to be a signal that the United States has the highest measure of confidence in that country’s warfighting capabilities, decision-making on the use of force, and commitments to protecting sensitive technology. The Emirati record on each of these issues does not, however, inspire the highest confidence. The record is mixed.
  • As former government officials serving in the State and Defense Departments as well as in Congress, we are confident that the process going forward will be messy and time-consuming, specifically because the current case breaks precedent in so many ways.
  • competitors in the global arms export industry — particularly Russia and China — also leverage arms sales, but by and large with no strings attached for their use. Both governments use arms sales to challenge U.S. market dominance and to undermine American partnerships in the region
  • Reflecting a long-held U.S. policy view, during his nomination hearing Washington’s envoy to Abu Dhabi noted that the country “is a moderating and stabilizing force in one of the world’s most volatile regions.” The United Arab Emirates stands out among other militaries in the region for having contributed military forces to many U.S.-led coalitions since the first Gulf War — Kosovo (late 1990s), Somalia (1992), Afghanistan (since 2003), Libya (2011) and the anti-ISIL coalition (2014 to 2015). Indeed, Jared Kushner set a new precedent for framing the American-Emirati partnership when he effectively equated it with that of America and Israel, terming them comparably “special” during his most recent visit to the Middle East.
  • Emirati regional policies have been the subject of increasing congressional concern in recent years, largely focused on the country’s actions in Yemen and Libya. Since the beginning the Saudi-led coalition’s 2015 intervention in Yemen, most congressional action focused on the Saudi role in the conflict and not the Emirati one. But in 2018, congressional concern peaked in response to Emirati plans to launch an offensive to seize the Yemeni port of Hudaydah. The Trump administration subsequently declined to provide military support for the Emirati operation, given the risks of worsening an already severe humanitarian crisis, concerns regarding the complexities of the proposed military operation, and the likelihood of mass civilian casualties
  • In both Yemen and Libya, Abu Dhabi has not succeeded in leveraging its robust military investments toward political processes that would end the conflicts. In both contexts the divergent policies of the United States and United Arab Emirates — including use of military force, conduct in combat, and utilization of U.S. defense articles — should be considered as part of the F-35 deliberations.
  • Since the Yemen war’s inception in 2015, members of Congress have raised concerns about the conflict and U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition, in which Abu Dhabi was a partner and to which it contributed forces until withdrawing in the summer of 2019. These concerns, and the Trump administration’s refusal to address them, culminated in Congress mandating a report on steps taken by both governments to reduce civilian casualties and comply with laws and agreements governing the use of U.S.-origin weapons — indicating skepticism that either country was doing so
  • protecting Israel’s military superiority consists of both legal requirements and longstanding political and process steps that, while not mandated by law, have paved the way for decades of bipartisan congressional consent to arms sales in the Middle East, including of advanced fighter aircraft. The requirement to protect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” is enshrined in 2008 naval vessel transfer legislation, although it had been implemented as a matter of policy between Washington and Jerusalem since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
  • Presumably, the United Arab Emirates and Israel entering into formal relations affirms that the former does not pose such a military threat. The Israeli perspective at the moment, however, has been complicated by the continuing murk over whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blessed the U.S. commitment to sell the Emirati government the F-35 — without the knowledge of his own defense minister. Tensions in Netanyahu’s fragile governing coalition and a larger uproar in Israel’s defense establishment have prompted an awkward pas de deux among American, Emirati, and Israeli officials. Netanyahu — responding to concerns raised by the Israeli defense establishment — stated emphatically during an Aug. 24 joint press conference with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that he had not consented to any arms deal as part of normalization. Given Netanyahu’s close relationship with Trump, it is safe to say that no one in either country finds this claim credible. The public spat over Israeli consent to Emirati acquisition of the F-35 escalated when Netanyahu publicly vowed to go to Congress in opposition to the sale, and the United Arab Emirates in response cancelled a planned meeting between the Israeli and Emirati ambassadors to the United Nations.
  • extensive discussions should be expected between Israeli and U.S. technical and military experts to agree on the appropriate mix of offsets to ensure Israel’s military superiority. The offsets may involve discussions of quantity (how many F-35s the Emiratis will acquire versus the Israelis), technical variations in the F-35 platform, or additional sales and assistance to Israel. This challenge is not insurmountable, but it will be time-consuming and extend pass the upcoming American electoral cycle
  • The standard for this level of consultation with Israel before moving forward with arms sales packages to others in the region was set by the Obama administration — first in 2011 with the sale of F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, and later in 2013 with the sale of F-16 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates along with stand-off weapons to both the Saudis and the Emiratis. Concurrent with 2013 sales, the Obama administration negotiated a package for Israel to maintain its military edge that included V-22 Osprey aircraft, advanced refueling tankers, and anti-air defense missiles.
  • Though Israel has no legal right to  block the United States from selling a weapon to another country in the Middle East, Israeli support is critical, particularly during the period of congressional notification. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle will consult with the Israeli government, and will prefer to support a sale that earns a clear green light from the Israeli government. Members are likely be left unsatisfied by ambiguous and lukewarm Israel responses to the question of selling the F-35 to the Emiratis, precisely because technical talks have not yet begun. All parties risk being stuck between the divisive politics of the moment, and the deliberative, lengthy policy considerations that such arms transfer packages usually entail, opening the door to a further erosion of bipartisanship on a key issue of national security importance — the what, when, and how of a decision by the United States to provide advanced weapons systems to partner states in the Middle East.
  • Arab capitals are closely following whether the United States will follow through on its apparent commitment to sell the F-35 (and assorted other high-end systems) to Abu Dhabi, and whether American deliverables are sufficiently compelling to consider bringing their own relations with Israel into the daylight
  • The historical record from Egypt to Jordan and now the United Arab Emirates — across administrations of both political parties — is that formal relations with Israel facilitate strategic consistency from Washington
  • Will Egypt and Jordan request the F-35 in light of their existing peace treaties with Israel? Will countries in closer geographic proximity, like Saudi Arabia, request the F-35 and additional advanced U.S. weapons as part of their normalization package?
  • For Israel, Iran and Turkey represent sobering examples in that regard — previously solid security partners within seemingly stable governance structures that became hostile.
  • military edge risks eroding as Arab governments, whether blocked from purchasing certain weapons from the United States or in addition to acquiring them, turn to China, Russia, and other weapons exporters not obligated to maintain Israel’s military superiority
  • Competition in the Middle East between the United States and its adversaries is intensifying — particularly in the weapons sales arena
  • Washington may find itself in an escalating — and unsustainable — cycle of supplementing and upgrading support, technology, and other military offsets to Israel.
Ed Webb

Ahead of COP27, Egypt is highly vulnerable to climate change - 0 views

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Egypt water agriculture food land climate COP sustainability SDGs

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Oct 22 - Cached
  • Adel Abdullah cultivates a subsistence living off of six acres of peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat, corn, and pomegranates. He is one of millions of smallholder farmers working in the Delta. He walks barefoot in his farm as a show of reverence to the land. The soil is pale and thin, almost as sandy as the beach, and choked by mounting concentrations of salt, left behind by periodic coastal flooding and pushed into underground aquifers by the rising sea.“This is the first place to be affected by climate change,” Abdullah says. “The barriers help a bit with flooding, but the salty soil is still really killing us.”
  • he takes irrigation water from the nearby Kitchener Drain, one of the largest and most polluted canals in Egypt that aggregates wastewater from the farms, businesses, and households of an estimated 11 million people in the Delta. By the time water reaches Abdullah’s farm, it may have been reused half a dozen times since entering Egypt in the Nile, each time accumulating more salts and pollutants and losing beneficial nutrients.
  • Abdullah is forced to douse the farm in fertilizers, pesticides, and salt-suppressing chemicals, all of which further degrade the soil. Those inputs, on top of the rising costs of irrigation systems and machinery, eat up any potential income Abdullah might earn
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  • The Nile Delta—where agriculture employs one-fifth of the country’s workforce and is responsible for 12% of its GDP and much of its food supply—is being hammered by rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and a growing shortage of water.
  • rapid urbanization and population growth
  • Climate adaptation solutions that could keep environmental problems from turning existential—fixing the battered and wasteful irrigation network, expanding affordable access to improved seeds and climate-smart farming technologies, and more effective and equitable regulation of urban development on agricultural land—are being rolled out by the government and research groups, but often slower than the pace of climate impacts. That’s left Egypt’s economy and food security exposed to growing risk.
  • “We’re really squeezed and marginalized here, and the government isn’t helping,” said one farmer down the road from Abdullah, who requested anonymity to speak frankly (with tens of thousands of political prisoners, Egypt’s restrictions on free speech are also gaining prominence ahead of COP27).
  • his children see no future in agriculture
  • Around 1805, an Ottoman general named Muhammad Ali took control of the country, and founded the dynasty of kings that would rule—eventually under British colonial supervision—for 150 years. One of Ali’s most enduring marks on the country was the establishment of the first modern network of dams and irrigation canals in the Delta, which allowed tens of thousands of new acres to come under cultivation.
  • water and land played a crucial role in Nasser’s legacy. 12% of the country’s arable land was owned by the aristocracy; Nasser nationalized this land and distributed it to about 340,000 impoverished rural families. He also further extended Ali’s irrigation network and oversaw construction of the Aswan High Dam, which brought an end to the Nile’s ancient seasonal flooding and fixed the river in its present position, with just two remaining branches forking through the Delta.
  • Egypt’s population has since more than quadrupled, to 104 million. Yet the flow of the Nile, which supplies more than 95% of the country’s water, has remained more or less constant. In the 1990s water availability fell below the international “water poverty” benchmark of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year.
  • Egypt has managed that scarcity by meticulously recycling agricultural water and, in recent years, curtailing the production of water-intensive crops like cotton and rice and importing 40% of its wheat and other food staples.
  • The population is still growing quickly, and could reach 160 million by 2050. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam that is nearing completion upstream could cut the flow of Nile water into Egypt by a quarter during the as-yet-unknown number of years it will take to fill its reservoir. By 2100, climate change-related heat waves upstream could reduce the Nile’s flow by 75%, Abousabaa said.
  • rising temperatures and falling rainfall mean crops—which consume 86% of Egypt’s water supply—will require more irrigation to survive.
  • current annual demand for water is about 35% higher than what the country receives from the Nile, groundwater, and a very small amount of rain—a deficit of about 20 billion cubic meters. To cover it, she said, Egypt will need to use every drop multiple times, aggressively minimize wastage, and boost the supply by investing $2.8 billion in dozens of new desalination plants with the aim to produce 5 billion cubic meters annually by 2050.
  • The unpredictability makes it difficult to identify solutions, Salah says: “Climate change is like a big black box.”
  • On the western fringe of the Delta, farms and suburbs are gradually overtaking the desert as the central Delta grows more crowded. Here, water is even scarcer and the impacts of climate change are more pronounced. But in this and a few other desert areas around Egypt, the government is working to link more than 1.5 million acres to groundwater irrigation, and says it is about one-third of the way there. Land reclamation could take some pressure off the Delta, and sandy soils are well-suited for the production of citrus fruits that are one of Egypt’s most lucrative exports.
  • “For the last two years, with heat wave after heat wave, we lost more than half the crop. It’s really sad.”
  • The farm relies on groundwater brought up from wells on the property, and Nasrallah says the suburbs are draining the aquifer. In the last four years he has had to dig an extra thirty meters to find water—and deeper wells mean higher electricity bills for pumping. Some wells have dried up altogether. Recently, government officials told him he had to stop watering the grass on a soccer field he built for his workers.
  • Urbanization is also spreading in the inner Delta, as many farmers decide that constructing housing is more profitable than growing crops. Since the 1970s, about 14% of the Delta’s arable land has been converted to urban development
  • Individual farms are also becoming smaller with each generation as, in keeping with longstanding Egyptian custom, land is divided among a father’s heirs (with sons traditionally taking a larger share than daughters). Urban development degrades the Delta’s soil and drives more farming into the desert, leaving the entire food system more vulnerable to climate impacts. Land fragmentation leads to the inefficient use of water and other resources and raises the costs of distribution for farmers.
  • in some cases, the government’s own plans are responsible, most recently in August when thousands of people living on a Nile island near Cairo that was primarily used for farming were evicted to make way for a state-sanctioned development project.
  • The network started by Muhammed Ali now includes about 33,000 miles of delivery and drainage canals across the country, enough to wrap around the globe, that range in size from small rivers to something a child could hop over. Delta residents say they used to bathe in these canals, drink from them, and raise fish in them. Now many of them, especially at the ends of the network, are polluted with farming chemicals and sewage, and choked with trash.
  • Between seepage, evaporation, and water wasted by farmers who flood their fields instead of using controlled irrigation hoses, nearly one-third of the country’s water is lost in the irrigation system between the Aswan High Dam and the sea
  • The soil is dark and appears rich, but is crusted with a visible layer of salt, a problem that affects up to 40% of Egypt’s arable soil.
  • Fixing the irrigation network is a priority for the government. Eman Sayed from the Irrigation Ministry said her agency has lined about 3,700 miles of canals with concrete in the last two years and is aiming to finish another 12,400 in the next few years. The ministry is also helping farmers cover the cost of installing drip irrigation systems, which researchers at AUC found can cut farmers’ water consumption 61% per year; today such systems cover only one-sixth of arable land in Egypt.
  • Authorities have also begun to restrict production of water-intensive crops like rice and bananas, although farmers say there is little enforcement of these rules, and both crops are still widely cultivated throughout the Delta.
  • Egypt has made clear that COP27 will focus primarily on wringing climate finance out of the rich countries that are most responsible for climate change.
  • On the horizon, an offshore natural gas platform is visible. Egypt, which seized the disruption of Russian energy supplies to Europe because of the Ukraine war as an opening to boost its own exports of natural gas, is now contributing more to the problem than ever before; an independent review of its new climate strategy ranked it “highly insufficient” for averting disastrous levels of carbon emissions.
  • By 2100, Noureldeen says, sea level rise could inundate nearly 700 square miles of the coastal Delta and displace four million people.
Ed Webb

Jadaliyya - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...abbani-on-Thirty-Years-of-Oslo

opinion analysis Palestine Israel israelpalestine Oslo MEPP

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Dec 23 - Cached
  • in exchange for a slew of Palestinian strategic concessions, Israel magnanimously agreed to negotiate the PLO’s terms of surrender.
  • The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, as the Oslo Accord is formally called, is only a few pages long and largely free of technical jargon, and well worth reading for those who haven’t done so. It contains not a single reference to “occupation”, “self-determination”, “statehood”, or anything of the sort. Rather, Palestinians were to exercise limited autonomy, within limited areas of the occupied territories (excluding East Jerusalem), from which Israeli forces would “redeploy” rather than withdraw
  • the issues that had the greatest impact were the effective abandonment of the refugees, who constitute the majority of the Palestinian people, by the leadership; the political-institutional fragmentation of the Palestinian people; the indefinite suspension of the national agenda in exchange for economic reconstruction that was unlikely to materialize (as it stands the Palestinian economy is today but a shadow of what it was in 1993); and the transformation of the national movement into a local authority
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  • Things have turned out very much worse than Oslo’s bitterest critics could have imagined, particularly in the Gaza Strip and Jordan Valley
  • The second enabling policy was Israel’s relentless campaign of mass violence throughout the occupied territories, and the Gaza Strip in particular, to crush the 1987-1993 uprising. It didn’t succeed, but as Graham Usher perceptively noted at the time, it did lay the basis for widespread Palestinian acquiescence, and quite a bit of enthusiasm, in these territories for the false promises of Oslo. 
  • Colonization of course commenced immediately after Israel occupied and initiated the “creeping annexation” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in June 1967, but Oslo was nevertheless a critical turning point. Although the settlement enterprise constitutes a grave breach of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (which is the primary reason Israel refused to ratify it), the Oslo Accords as a matter of design make no reference to international law. Further, the sponsor of the Oslo process, the United States, has spared no effort to ensure that international law is not applied to Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians beyond the confines of Oslo, that it is not held accountable for its actions, and that it can continue to act with unrestricted impunity. In other words, the United States ensured that Oslo was implemented beyond the purview of the norms and rules established to govern international conduct. 
  • Israel’s response to the 1994 Hebron Ibrahimi Mosque massacre by a fanatic Israeli-American settler, which it instrumentalized to further entrench its control over Hebron and the mosque rather than confront the settlers, provided an early, definitive indication in this regard. It bears recalling that this response was led by Rabin, his fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres, and their military commander Ehud Barak, not Binyamin Netanyahu or Itamar Ben-Gvir.
  • Every time Israel engaged in a new act of colonization, such as the construction of the Har Homa settlement on Jabal Abu Ghnaim in 1997, it was tolerated on the pretext of keeping the process alive
  • If, for the sake of argument, we take claims that Oslo was supposed to conclude with Palestinian statehood seriously, ignoring reality on the ground on the pretext of preserving the diplomatic process helped ensure its failure.
  • A second key Israeli policy enabled by Oslo is Palestinian fragmentation
  • Israel succeeded in making Oslo’s transitional phase a permanent arrangement, in the process transforming the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a local subsidiary of the Israeli state
  • if a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza Strip seeks to pursue a claim against Israel for an act committed between 1967 and 1995, let’s say against the Israeli military for unlawful use of force in 1976 or during the 1987-1993 uprising that rendered the claimant quadriplegic, the PA is under an obligation to ensure that the claimant brings the case before a Palestinian rather than Israeli court, and that any financial judgement by that court in the claimant’s favor is paid out by the PA rather than Israel. If the claimant despite the above brings the case before an Israeli court, and an Israeli judge rules in the claimant’s favor, on account of unlawful actions by the Israeli military years before the PA even existed, the PA is required to immediately reimburse Israel the full amount of compensation awarded to the Palestinian by the Israeli court. Article XX perfectly encapsulates the thoroughly lopsided nature of Oslo, the imbalance of power it codified, Israel’s insistence upon achieving retroactive impunity, and its determination to hold its victims responsible for its crimes against them. In my view nothing better demonstrates that this is a conflict between occupier and occupied and nothing else.
  • the enormous economic windfall Israel derived from the Oslo Accords and its integration into the global economy. Most importantly it led the Arab League to renounce its boycott of Israel and – crucially – of companies that do business with Israel. For all its shortcomings this boycott was exponentially more effective than the current Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and for example kept major Japanese and South Korean firms out of Israel and quite a few Western ones out of the Arab world. It is often forgotten that during the 1970s and 1980s Israel was something of an international pariah, but in the wake of the 1991 Madrid Middle East diplomatic conference and thereafter Oslo was able to normalize relations with much of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia
  • While Oslo promised Palestinian economic development in exchange for political paralysis, growth materialized only temporarily from the desultory baseline where it stood in 1993 at the conclusion of a prolonged uprising. A sharp reversal in fact commenced in the years leading up to the 2000 eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada on account of Israeli policy, and this deterioration has continued at an accelerated pace ever since. What Oslo did achieve was to catapult Israel into the ranks of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), of which it has since 2010 been a full member. It is virtually inconceivable Israel would have acquired this status without Oslo.
  • Palestinians, whether within the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within Israel, in its prison system, or in the diaspora, have been organizing and resisting in myriad ways. Most importantly, they have despite massive and systematic state violence and repression, and betrayal by their own leaders and Arab governments, refused to surrender – putting into practice “the power of refusal” advocated by Said. In doing so the Palestinians have retained the overwhelming support of the international community, and even in the West public opinion increasingly recognizes that Israel is a structurally racist, colonial state
  • when the succession commences Israel is likely to promote a model where different Palestinian population concentrations – Hebron-Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus-Salfit-Jenin, Qalqilya-Tulkarm – are administered by a series of local chieftains
  • even this model, a regional version of the failed Village Leagues of the 1980s, may prove unpalatable to the lunatics currently running the Israeli asylum. These are forces agitating for wholesale, formal annexation and then some, and which thanks to the inexorable rightward shift of Israeli society, and international and regional support and acquiescence (not unrelated phenomena) are only gaining in strength and power.
Ed Webb

Senate Democrats hold up arms sales for Saudi war in Yemen - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of t... - 2 views

www.al-monitor.com/...ar-yemen-senate-arms-sale.html

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shared by Ed Webb on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Congress was notified Aug. 19 of the Obama administration's intent to provide Riyadh with thousands of precision-guided munitions. The sale is linked to the administration's effort to placate Gulf countries' concerns about the Iranian nuclear deal, but it has hit a snag with Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who want to see the Saudi-led campaign reeled in.
  • “I fear that our failure to strongly advocate diplomacy in Yemen over the past two years, coupled with our failure to urge restraint in the face of the crisis last spring, may put the viability of this critical [US-Saudi] partnership at risk,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “The Leahy Law prohibits US security assistance — and many forms of defense cooperation — with forces that have engaged in gross violations of human rights. If reports are accurate, the Saudi indiscriminate targeting in the air campaign and an overly broad naval blockade could well constitute such violations.”
  • While the sale is almost certain to go through eventually, they hope to use it as leverage to win concessions on kick-starting political negotiations with the Houthis and lifting the blockade
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  • Critics of the sale in particular point out that Riyadh has been able to derive extra legitimacy from the US support for its campaign. “We are very careful in picking targets. We have very precise weapons,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told CBS News after an airstrike killed more than 130 people at a wedding reception. “We work with our allies, including the United States, on these targets.”
  • Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. “It's not all bad that the Saudis decided that they wanted to act immediately in Yemen. I don't think we need to be 'mother may I' in terms of folks acting in their own security interests in the region. But I am struck by the level of their response compared to what I view as an extremely tepid response to Sunni extremism. It's not just Iranian influence in the region that should trouble us.”
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