Nir Hasson reporting for Haaretz:
Hours before Hamas strongman Ahmed Jabari was assassinated, he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the cease-fire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip. This, according to Israeli [...]]]>
Nir Hasson reporting for Haaretz:
Hours before Hamas strongman Ahmed Jabari was assassinated, he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the cease-fire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip. This, according to Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who helped mediate between Israel and Hamas in the deal to release Gilad Shalit and has since then maintained a relationship with Hamas leaders.
Baskin told Haaretz on Thursday that senior officials in Israel knew about his contacts with Hamas and Egyptian intelligence aimed at formulating the permanent truce, but nevertheless approved the assassination.
“I think that they have made a strategic mistake,” Baskin said, an error “which will cost the lives of quite a number of innocent people on both sides.”
Baskin accordingly offered a very grim picture of the near future for Gazans and Israelis in the Daily Beast’s “Open Zion” today:
I can only imagine that the assassination of Jaabari has bought us the entry card to Cast Lead II. This time, the experts say, “Let’s finish them off. Let’s do the job that we didn’t do last time. Let’s do a regime change.” Well, I ask: what then? Do we really want to reoccupy Gaza, because that will be the consequence of a regime change. I don’t believe that Netanyahu wants re-occupation. So if that is not what he wants, he must be aware that, on the morning after, we will still be living next to Gaza, which still be run by Hamas. They are not going away and the people of Gaza are not going away.
The assassination of Jaabari was a pre-emptive strike against the possibility of a long term ceasefire. Netanyahu has acted with extreme irresponsibility. He has endangered the people of Israel and struck a real blow against the few important more pragmatic elements within Hamas. He has given another victory to those who seek our destruction, rather than strengthen those who are seeking to find a possibility to live side-by-side, not in peace, but in quiet.
Wheeler also wonders why Arbabsiar cooperated so quickly and willingly with the authorities. The evidence might be in the original complaint in the case, writes Wheeler, but it remains sealed.
One document that might explain Arbabsiar’s motives for cooperating is the original complaint in this case. The document that’s been publicly released is actually an amended complaint written 12 days after his arrest, presumably written to incorporate Shakuri in the charges based on Arbabsiar’s cooperation. But in a rather unusual move, the first complaint against Arbabsiar remains sealed — meaning we don’t know when the government first charged him or for what — with the approval of the Chief Judge in Manhattan, possibly in an entirely different docket (the amended complaint is entry number 1 in this docket). Thus, it is possible that Arbabsiar was originally charged for a completely unrelated crime — perhaps the opium deal. And it is possible Arbabsiar was charged much earlier than his arrest on September 29. As a result, we don’t know what kind of incentives the government might have offered Arbabsiar for his testimony.
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]]>Leading the charge is the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the ideological successor to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which played a critical role in mobilising support for “regime change” in Iraq in the late 1990s and subsequently spearheaded the public campaign to invade the country after the 9/11 attacks. The group sent reporters appeals by two of its leaders for military action on its letterhead Monday.
In a column headlined “Speak Softly …And Fight Back” in this week’s Weekly Standard, chief editor William Kristol, co-founder of both PNAC and FPI, said the alleged plot amounted to “an engraved invitation” by Tehran to use force against it.
“We can strike at the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back,” he wrote, adding that Congress should approve a resolution authorising the use of force against Iranian entities deemed responsible for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, acts of terrorism, or “the regime’s nuclear weapons program”.
Kristol’s advice was seconded by Jamie Fly, FPI’s executive director, who called for President Barack Obama to emulate former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton when they ordered targeted strikes against Libya in 1986 and Iraq in 1993, respectively, in retaliation for alleged terrorist plots against U.S. targets.
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]]>I won’t bother going over her recommendations and rebutting them, because so many have already done it for me:
Matt Duss at the Wonk Room, whose entire post is a definite must-read:
What’s Farsi for ‘Cakewalk’?
…Maybe there are Iranian democrats who support the U.S. bombing their country, I’d love to hear from them. But I think we’ve gotten far too casual about proposing these sorts of attacks. If we’re going to talk about it, let’s at least talk about it seriously, recognizing that very many people will very likely die. They deserve a lot better than than you know, if everything goes just right, it just might work!
Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists.
…The “car accident” line in her post is a clear reference to the bombing of two scientists’ cars last month in Tehran. Here is a BBC account of those attacks, carried out by unknown men on motorbikes. One of the scientists was killed and one was wounded. Both of their wives were also reportedly wounded. Another nuclear scientist was killed in a similar bombing earlier this year.
No one has argued that any of these men could be considered combatants. It’s also still unclear who was behind the attacks, though Iran has accused the United States and Israel of having a role. But even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.
At Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss picks up on this same inconsistency, but has a broader point about the Post:
The Washington Post has replaced the American Enterprise Institute as the primary hub of neoconservative arguments for U.S. aggression in the Middle East. AEI served a Republican administration, and cannot perform that role for Democrats. So the Post is now doing the job, percolating militarist ideas for the Obama administration. Old wine in a new bottle. Jennifer Rubin is the latest hire, fresh from Commentary magazine, arguing for an attack on Iran…
Later on Weiss comes back to the issue, and points us to a Huffington Post piece by David Bromwich, who calls it “barbarous dialect”:
There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the past year, and especially in the past six months. Why?
Bromwich focuses on President Barack Obama’s decision to assassinate a U.S. citizen who preaches violent extremism against the U.S., and the fact that even the president can joke about “drone strikes” — that is, shooting missiles down on villages from on high. Bromwich:
]]>A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.