{"id":416,"date":"2007-10-07T03:12:25","date_gmt":"2007-10-07T03:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=416"},"modified":"2007-10-07T03:12:25","modified_gmt":"2007-10-07T03:12:25","slug":"news-round-up-6-sept-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/news-round-up-6-sept-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"News Round Up (6 Sept 2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Uri Avnery reviewing the The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy<\/a> by Mearsheimer and Walt. Two Knights and a Dragon,<\/a> 06\/10\/07<\/p>\n

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THERE ARE books that change people's consciousness and change history. Some tell a story, like Harriet Beech Stowe's 1851 "Uncle Tom's Cabin", which gave a huge impetus to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Others take the form of a political treatise, like Theodor Herzl's "Der Judenstaat", which gave birth to the Zionist movement. Or they can be scientific in nature, like Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species", which changed the way humanity sees itself. And perhaps political satire, too, can shake the world, like "1984" by George Orwell.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Suicide bombers head to Iraq,<\/a> Articulate, middle-class men are leaving Damascus and preparing to die for Bin Laden. London Times. (Interesting interviews with three bombers in Damascus, who are on their way to Iraq.)<\/div>\n
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Syria Is Said to Be Strengthening Ties to Opponents of Iraq’s Government<\/a>, By HUGH NAYLOR, NY Times. <\/div>\n
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Oct. 6 — Syria is encouraging Sunni Arab insurgent groups and former Iraqi Baathists with ties to the leaders of Saddam Hussein’s government to organize here, diplomats and Syrian political analysts say. By building strong ties to those groups, they say, Syria hopes to gain influence in Iraq before what it sees as the inevitable waning of the American presence there. <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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“The Syrians feel American power is much weaker in Iraq than in the past,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, the Damascus bureau chief of the pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Hayat. “Now they can take a bold public initiative like helping Iraq’s opposition organize without much fear, especially since President Bush has become a lame duck.”…<\/p>\n

“Syria looks to the resistance as freedom fighters, like George Washington fighting the British,” said Mahdi Dahlala, a former Syrian minister of information. “We understand that the rising up against occupation is a natural phenomenon.”<\/p>\n

“Syria is not going hand over any Iraqis to the Iraqi government unless they produce evidence of wrongdoing,” Mr. Dahlala said.<\/p>\n

Officials in the Bush administration say that Syria has had a mixed record recently, taking some steps that American officials see as helpful in Iraq and others that show that Damascus is seeking to build its own influence there.<\/p>\n

In an interview, a senior Defense Department official praised Damascus for canceling the opposition conference and noted that the Syrians had cracked down to a degree on Islamic militants operating near the border with Iraq, a move long sought by Washington.<\/p>\n

An intelligence assessment released in August in Washington said that the Syrian government had gone after Islamic smuggling networks. But it did so not out of a desire to help the United States, the report said, but because it feared that the groups presented a threat to the Syrian government.<\/p>\n

The report also criticized the Syrians for funneling money to Sunni insurgent groups inside Iraq “in a bid to increase Syrian influence.”…<\/p>\n

Thabet Salem, a Syrian political commentator, said Syria was also exploiting a rift between two former Iraqi Baath Party leaders, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former vice president under Mr. Hussein, and Muhammad Younis al-Ahmed, who is believed to be living in Syria. The two men, accused by Washington and Baghdad of leading and financing terrorist operations in Iraq, have multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads. <\/p>\n

“Younis al-Ahmed is trying to go under the umbrella of the Syrians as a way to unite the Baathists,” Mr. Salem said. “And the Syrians quietly support him, because they could have more control over their actions.”<\/p>\n

In January, Mr. Ahmed held a conference in the northern Syrian city of Homs to try to revive the Iraqi Baath Party. Some Syrians speculated that he wanted to take a more conciliatory stance with the Iraqi government and the United States. His rival, Mr. Douri, who is suspected of having stronger ties with insurgent groups, rejected the conference.<\/p>\n

“Douri deeply distrusts working with the Syrians because he distrusts the Iranians, who are strong allies with Syria,” Mr. Salem said. <\/p>\n

Mr. Ahmed is believed to be garnering increasing support in Syria from former Iraqi Baathists, at the expense of Mr. Douri and other rivals, by offering cash incentives and Syrian residency permits. Loyalty to his leadership is said to be particularly strong among the poorer, Sunni Arab, segments of Syria’s two million Iraqi refugees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Syria could gain tremendous influence in Iraq if it could get control over the Iraqi Baathists,” Mr. Salem said. “It has much more in common, ideologically speaking, with them than it does with the Islamists in Hamas.” <\/p>\n

A spokesman for Mr. Douri’s wing of former Baathists living in Syria, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad, condemned Mr. Ahmed and denied suggestions that former Baathists were turning away from Mr. Douri or considering negotiating with Washington. <\/p>\n

“We want every American soldier out of Iraq, and we won’t stop fighting until that happens,” Mr. Muhammad said. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Condoleezza Rice opposed Israel’s attack on Syrian nuclear site<\/a>. US Secretary of state persuaded the Israelis to delay military strike on Syria last month. London Times<\/p>\n

Regrets Only?<\/a> By DEXTER FILKINS in NY Times Sunday Magazine (This is a brilliant article. Read all)<\/p>\n

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Kanan Makiya spent years in exile advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The war he supported brought about an Iraq he never imagined…..<\/p>\n

Then came Fouad Ajami, a Johns Hopkins professor of Middle East history, a Lebanese-American intimately identified with the Iraqi project. The American invasion of Iraq, Ajami said between bites of fish, would yet prove to be a transforming moment in the region. “Persuading the Americans to take down Saddam was Chalabi’s finest hour,” Ajami said, referring to the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi<\/font><\/a>. The conversation drifted along on a cloud of agreement until Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University near Boston, leaned forward to pose a question.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“How many Iraqis have died since 2003?” Makiya asked his friends.<\/p>\n

There was silence at the table. Makiya was asking the others, but he also seemed to be asking himself.<\/p>\n

“Five hundred thousand?” Makiya mused. “Two hundred thousand? What are the estimates?”<\/p>\n

Someone said something about a study.<\/p>\n

“It’s getting closer to Saddam,” Makiya said. Then he sat back in his chair, and the conversation continued on its way…..<\/p>\n

Where did it go wrong? Makiya asks himself. Or, more precisely, where did he go wrong? It’s the second question that Makiya is finding the most troubling, for it concerns a lifetime of believing, as he puts it, that hope can triumph over experience. “I want to look into myself, look at myself, delve into the assumptions I had before the war,” he told me.<\/p>\n

Makiya’s life is no longer what it was. In 2003, on returning to Iraq, he reunited with his sweetheart from high-school days, married and took her back to Cambridge. He also found out he has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the same disease that killed Edward Said, the Palestinian-born Columbia University<\/font><\/a> professor and Makiya’s intellectual nemesis….<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Uri Avnery reviewing the The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt. Two Knights and a Dragon, 06\/10\/07 THERE ARE books that change people's consciousness and change history. Some tell a story, like Harriet Beech Stowe's 1851 "Uncle Tom's Cabin", which gave a huge impetus to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,15,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq","category-israel","category-weapons"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nNews Round Up (6 Sept 2007) - Syria Comment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/news-round-up-6-sept-2007\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"News Round Up (6 Sept 2007) - Syria Comment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Uri Avnery reviewing the The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt. 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