A Lebanese man mourns over the coffin of assassinated Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, at St George Cathedral in Beirut, Nov. 23. (AFP File Photo)

The assassination of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel on Tuesday has thrown that country further into yet more turmoil.
The crisis is a further testament to the bankruptcy of George W. Bush’s Middle East policy. Under the dishonest rhetoric of ’democratization,’ what Bush has really been about is creating pro-American winners and anti-American losers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Bush’s vision is not democratic because he always installs a tyranny of the majority. The vanquished are to be crushed and ridiculed, the victors to exult in their triumph.
The problem is that when you crush the Pushtuns of Afghanistan, who traditionally ruled the country, they have means of hitting back. When you crush the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who had traditionally ruled Iraq, they have ways of organizing a guerrilla movement and acting as spoilers of Bush’s new Kurdish-Shiite axis in Baghdad. When you crush Hamas even after they won the elections in early 2006, they have means of continuing to struggle.
In Lebanon, Bush egged on the pro-Hariri movement against the Syrians and their allies. Then he egged on Israel to bomb the Shiites of southern Lebanon. So he tried to create the March 14th alliance around Hariri as the winners who take all in Lebanon.
So obviously there will be trouble about this. Everything Bush touches turns to ashes, bombings, assassinations. He doesn’t know how to compromise and he doesn’t know how to influence his neo-colonial possessions so that they can compromise.
Lebanon for the past two years has been caught between several outside forces. The Hariris represent Saudi interests. Hizbullah and Amal, the Shiite parties, are aligned with Syria. The Gemayels have an old, longstanding behind the scenes alliance with Israel and the United States.
As I read the record, Syria provoked the initial crisis in fall, 2004, by overplaying its hand and making the Lebanese accept its choice for president, Gen. Emile Lahoud, for a further 3-year term. PM Rafiq al-Hariri resigned over this heavy-handed interference and looked set to challenge Damascus in the spring, 2005 elections. He was then assassinated in February, 2005.
The assassination of Hariri touched off a mass protest demanding that Syrian troops finally leave Lebanon (a peacekeeping force came in 1976 with a US green light, during the civil war).
Syria did withdraw. At that point, Lebanese politics became less polarized, and elections produced a national unity government that Hizbullah also joined.
But then in summer of 2006, Israel launched its long-planned war on little Lebanon, wreaking vast destruction on south Lebanon and on the southern slums of Beirut where Hizbullah was based. Israeli policy was in part to attempt to divide and conquer the Lebanese by making the reform government of Fuad Seniora attempt to disarm Hizbullah, which maintains a small paramilitary force of 3,000 to 5,000. The Lebanese government is too weak to take on Hizbullah, but members of the March 14th reform movement did lay the blame for the war at its feet.
As a result, Hizbullah has pulled out of the government. With Gemayel’s assassination, the government will fall if it loses even one more cabinet minister. Worse, the society has now been economically devastated by Israeli bombing raids and is increasingly polarized. Lebanon is on the brink.
Can the Middle East withstand another unconventional war, alongside those in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, without unraveling altogether? And if it unravels, will it still produce petroleum for US automobiles? Will Israel be held harmless?
Stay tuned.
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
JUANCOLE.COM

In contemporary Britain the ideology of liberal democracy reigns supreme. This encompasses many liberal myths such as a basic belief in the neutrality of the state, in the benign nature of government and a pluralistic view of the distribution of power in society. However, there is no bigger liberal sacred cow than the BBC.
While laughing at the American news media, many people, including many on the left, reverentially hold the BBC up as a shining light of independence and integrity in the dirty world of journalism. If the American news is subservient, bombastic and partisan the BBC must be questioning, balanced and neutral, right?
In reality the BBC has a long history of support for, and subservience to, state power, starting almost from its own inception with Lord Reith’s collusion with the Government during the 1926 General Strike.
Taking the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq as an example, we can see little has changed.
Greg Dyke, Reith’s successor at the time, wrote to Tony Blair in March 2003 to defend the BBC from government criticism arguing Dyke argued in its defence that he had “set up a committee which.... insisted that we had to find a balanced audience for programmes like Question Time at a time when it was very hard to find supporters of the war willing to come on.“ The same committee, “when faced with a massive bias against the war among phone-in callers, decided to increase the number of phone lines so that pro-war listeners had a better chance of getting through. All this“, wrote Dyke, “was done in an attempt to ensure our coverage was balanced.“ Dyke then admits to deliberately manipulating audiences and phone-ins to create an impression of ’balance’ that in reality never existed. This truly is Alice in Wonderland stuff.
More recently, the internet media watchdog Media Lens challenged the BBC to justify its claim that British and American forces “came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights“. Clearly unaware of Eduardo Galeano’s dictum that “in general, the words uttered by power are not meant to express its actions, but to disguise them“, Helen Boaden, the BBC’s Director of News, replied that this “analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair.“ Presumably, had Boaden been working as a journalist in Germany in 1939, she would have taken at face value Adolf Hitler’s justification for invading Czechoslovakia: “We have no interest in oppressing other people. We are not moved by hatred against any other nationÉ The Czech maintenance of a tremendous military arsenal can only be regarded as a focus of danger. We have displayed a truly unexampled patience, but I am no longer willing to remain inactive while this madman ill-treats millions of human beings.“
Inspired by Media Lens I wrote to my local BBC television news after a story referred to British troops on leave from “peacekeeping duties“ in Iraq. I noted this was “a very odd way to describe an occupation of another nation, after an illegal (as explained by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan) war of aggressionÉ Were German troops on ’peacekeeping duties’ in France between 1940 and 1944?“ The Editor of BBC Look East replied, “We called the forces ’peacekeeping forces’ because that is their official title, bestowed on them by our elected government.“
A 2003 study carried out by Cardiff University’s School of Journalism regarding the way the four main UK broadcasters reported the invasion of Iraq concluded, “The BBC emerges as generally more respectful and sympathetic towards the government than other broadcasters.“ 11% of the sources quoted by the BBC were of coalition government or military origin, the highest proportion of all the main television broadcasters. Furthermore the BBC was least likely to use independent sources such as the Red Cross, to focus on Iraqi casualties and to report Iraqi unhappiness about the invasion.
The stakes could not be higher. The journalist George Monbiot noted, “The falsehoods reproduced by the media before the invasion of Iraq were massive and consequential: it is hard to see how Britain could have gone to war if the press had done its job.“ BBC journalists, for the most part sitting in comfortable offices in Britain, need to realise people--about 655,000 Iraqi people according to the Lancet medical journal--pay with their lives for the poor quality of the journalism they practice.
In May 2004 the New York Times and the Washington Post both printed belated apologies for their coverage of the build up to the Iraq war, with the former noting “we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been... Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge.“
Perhaps, with all the
evidence collected above, it is time the BBC did the same?
ZMAG.ORG

It may be an old saw, but it remains true: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And this, ultimately, is why occupation is so pernicious. The occupier is at once all powerful, able to arrest and berate the occupied at will, but also powerless, for he knows that his security and safety are largely outside his control. He knows he is hated.
The result is this .
There’s a lot of talk about the mounting toll in Iraq: in blood , in treasure , in the lives of innocent Iraqis. But one of war’s darkest legacies is the moral corrosion it inflicts on those who wage it. The longer we stay in Iraq, the worse it will get.
Next time that little boy will be wielding a rock. Later, a bomb.
Christopher Hayes
COMMONDREAMS.ORG

Residents walk down a road that leads to the county's power plant in Zhangjiakou, northeast China's Hebei province, June 19, 2005. (AFP File Photo)

The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol covers the five years from 2008 to 2012. Now is the time to start discussing the international framework for the second commitment period, which begins in 2013.
In considering the international framework for the post-Kyoto Protocol era, the crucial question is whether the United States will return to the agreement.
The U.S. accounts for 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2 emissions, and without its participation, any agreement for controlling global warming will be ineffective.
Without active U.S. involvement, it is meaningless to discuss the possible participation of China, India and other developing countries.
At the 11th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Convention (the first meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol) held last year in Montreal, Canada, former U.S. President Bill Clinton made a surprise appearance at the invitation of the Canadian government. To the dismay of the U.S. delegation, Clinton told the conference that it was the Bush administration--not the American public--that opposed the Kyoto Protocol. I hope Clinton was right.
On March 28, 2001, President George W. Bush stunned the world by announcing U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. The announcement, which preceded the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War, was the first sign of the administration’s unilateralism.
Ever since Bush said in June 2001 that the protocol had “fatal flaws,“ I have been thinking about what he really meant. The agreement does set a busy schedule, requiring that a target period be set every five years. Yet the plan would make only limited funds available for long-term research and development of projects such as:
* Separation/recovery of CO2 from smoke emissions for storage in aquifers.
* Solar-power generation in space (launching a large number of solar panels into space, building solar-power generators by remote control from a space station, converting generated electric power into microwaves for transmission to terrestrial rectifying antennas followed by reconversion into electric power for transmission).
* A new generation of atomic power and nuclear fusion.
Therefore, the Kyoto Protocol would appear to impede long-term technological development that contributes to reduction of CO2 emissions. Bush may have been right when he mentioned the “fatal flaws“ of the protocol.
Assuming that my analysis is correct, I believe that the best way to encourage U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol is to propose a framework for international cooperation on long-term technological development that will contribute to reduced CO2 emissions in parallel with five-year goals set under the protocol.
It is hoped that China, the world’s second-largest CO2 emitter, and India, the fifth-largest CO2 emitter, will join the protocol. Incentives should be offered to encourage their participation. As developing nations, China and India should be required only to “restrain“--rather than reduce--their emissions.
Developing nations should be prohibited from merely producing “hot air“--that is, they should be obligated to achieve an “appropriate“ target for restraining emissions by hard work.
Under the “cap and trade“ system of the protocol, developing nations could enter the market for emissions trading and make profits only by accepting a restraint on their emissions. If they achieved an emissions cutback above the target, they could sell the excess portion to other countries and earn foreign currency. This system of awarding developing countries the right to enter the emissions trading market in exchange for their promises to restrain emissions would provide an incentive for developing nations to participate in the protocol.
Takamitsu Sawa
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

Time is running out for success in Afghanistan. The Nov. 28-29 NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, may be the last chance to pull that country back from the brink. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization assumed responsibility for providing security for all of Afghanistan in October. While about 8,000 of the 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan operate independently, the rest have joined the most ambitious military venture in NATO’s history, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Each of the 26 NATO allies has troops in Afghanistan, as do 11 other countries. Some, like Macedonia and Finland, belong to the Alliance’s Partnership for Peace. Others, like Australia and South Korea, come from farther afield. Soldiers from different countries operate almost as a single unit with shared objectives, similar methods, compatible equipment and complementary skills. A half-century of working together, plus a decade and a half of adapting to new threats and demands, is paying off.
The bad news is that the 40,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan are not enough. A few Afghan provinces, including those along parts of the border with Pakistan and its Taliban sanctuaries, have little or no ISAF presence and no Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
Abysmal air and land transport limit the ability to move fighting forces to where they are needed most. Several countries, including NATO allies, have imposed “national caveats“ that limit where their troops can be deployed or the tasks they undertake.
So, before any operation, commanders must determine which troops can take part and in what capacity, hampering both efficiency and effectiveness. Nevertheless, NATO would succeed if outside civilian efforts, resources, organization, and leadership in Afghanistan were equal to its own.
Unfortunately, there is no central direction or even coordination of civilian efforts. Although nongovernmental organizations are doing an effective job, responsibilities assigned to different European countries--such as helping the Afghan government with law enforcement and poppy eradication--have fallen short of both needs and promises.
Poppy production is soaring, experiments with alternative crops are lagging, and there are not enough forces to provide security for farmers willing to try growing something different.
The shortfalls of the civilian effort and the unwillingness or inability of the Afghan government to provide good governance are the country’s central problems. These factors largely explain the Taliban’s violent revival, and the uncertainty of many Afghans about whom to support.
Firm commitments at Riga of more allied troops and equipment for the ISAF and fewer national “caveats“ must be part of the answer. But allied leaders must also act on the knowledge that NATO does not have the skills, resources or experience to take full charge of meeting Afghanistan’s requirements for external civilian help. That task must belong to the European Union, the one institution with the collective means, skills, resources and--potentially--the leadership to relieve NATO and ISAF of burdens for which they are not suited.
Yet the EU holds back. Turf battles with NATO intrude, as well as competition between the EU’s executive Commission and the member-based Council. Even though 19 of NATO’s 26 members also belong to the EU, leaders and bureaucrats in most of these countries have been unwilling to back the commitment of their troops with the economic resources needed.
At Riga, NATO should challenge the EU to take its proper share of responsibility for success in Afghanistan. This will require the EU to contribute money, manpower and officials on the ground of the rank and stature of ISAF commanders in an equal partnership with NATO.
PROJECT-SYNDICATE.ORG