LEBANON: SYMPTOM OF A DANGEROUS TREND

Lebanon’s latest crisis is yet another violent illustration of the fragile nature of a complex society and of a region that is in constant turmoil. It is a far cry from the days when the Bush administration pointed to that nation as the type of democracy President Bush planned for Iraq.
There is plenty of finger pointing about who is responsible for the latest round of violence between Islamic extremists based in a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli and the Lebanese army. The US and Israel claim extremists from a Sunni group called Fatah-al-Islam are being run by Syrian intelligence and are using violence to divert attention from the UN investigation of possible Syrian involvement in the assassination of the anti-Syrian Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri in 2005. That view was not supported by the EU president, Javier Solana. After a visit to the region, he said he saw no evidence at all of a Syrian hand in the latest violence.
Like everything that happens in Lebanon, what at first appears simple is in fact complex. Internecine warfare has characterized the country’s history but instability elsewhere in the region has often found its way into the politics of Lebanon.
On the face of it, this latest outbreak of violence has Lebanese troops, many of them Sunnis, battling Sunnis extremists who set up a base in Nahr-al-Bared, one of Lebanon’s twelve Palestinian refugee camps. The camp resembles a small city with apartment buildings, shops and a population of over 30,000 people. Close to 400,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon. The extremist group is said to number several hundred but that may be an over estimation of its membership. Many experts in the region say if is has one hundred active members that is about the height of it. The US and the Lebanese government claim it is linked to Al Qaeda and the White House is presently considering a request from the Lebanese president for $125 million in funding to rid Lebanon of it.
The confrontation between the Lebanese army and Fatah-al-Islam began after several members of the group raided a bank in downtown Tripoli. The raiders were cornered by the military and a gun battle ensued with violence spilling out to the edges of the Palestinian camp. Under a forty year agreement the army was not allowed to enter the camp so it began shelling it. That angered Palestinians throughout Lebanon who pointed out that they did not support Fatah-al-Islam. On the sidelines, Hezbollah, a Shia organization that has opposed the Lebanese government because of the policies of its US leaning Prime Minister, Faoud Siniora, backed the role of the army. Hezbollah’s posture was in part motivated by the fact that it sees all Sunnis as enemies, including Palestinians and members of Fatah-al-Islam and Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, Hezbollah suggested restraint, fearing if Palestinians entered the fray the country could find itself back in the middle of yet another civil war. Signs of civil strife were evident several months ago when Shias from Hezbollah and Sunnis fought each other on the streets of Beirut, reminding people of the civil war between 1975 and 1990 when Christians, Shias and Sunnis killed each other on a horrific scale.
The latest violence worried the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who pleaded with the Lebanese government to stop the shelling of the Tripoli camp. He warned it was wrong for the Lebanese government to connect Palestinians in Lebanon with Fatal-al-Islam.
Some issues at the heart of this new Lebanon crisis have been ignored. One is that Fatah-al-Islam has declared it is not run by Al Qaeda or Syria. It does not however shy from praising Osama Bin Laden. Another critical issue is that Fatah-al-Islam represents a dangerous phenomenon spreading throughout the region. The war in Iraq, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last year and Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza and the West Bank have contributed to a revitalization of Islamic extremism and the emergence of independent terrorist organizations, not necessarily run by a central command.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration likes to portray the war in terror in simplistic terms as though every terrorist organization and action emanates directly from Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That is a dangerous myth. The reality is that when the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was routed Al Qaeda was deprived of a base. It morphed into a cell structure because it did not have the reach it had when it had the luxury of an intact central command and large training camps. Had the US not decided to invade Iraq but instead concentrated on capturing or killing Bin Laden and his ragged followers when they were holed up in the mountains of Tora Bora Al Qaeda might have been all but been wiped out. But even in that event Islamic extremism would not have evaporated. Sadly, the war in Iraq provided not only a new battle ground and training center for potential jihadists it reinvigorated Islamic extremists around the globe. Many of them have since flocked to Iraq and surrounding countries and have joined small independent groupings that have operated with Sunnis insurgents and Al Qaeda proxies. Into that mix is yet another volatile ingredient. Many of these small, self sufficient terrorist groupings have been financed from funds provided by Sunni nations like Saudi Arabia who fear their fellow Sunnis in Iraq face annihilation from Shias. Some Arab states financing Sunni terror are arming Sunnis for the day the US leaves Iraq and the country descends into civil war. When that happens, Sunnis will be sufficiently well armed to carve out a slice of Iraq for themselves.
In the middle of all this chaos are groups like Fatah-al-Islam and the tendency of the US or Israel is to define them as Al Qaeda when they are merely insurgent organizations with no central command who are driven by hatred of America, Israel and Shia Islam. Fatah-al-Islam moved into Lebanon last year during the Israeli bombardment of the country, threatening they would fight the Israeli military and send fighters to battle Americans in Iraq. That sat well with Palestinians but now that a Palestinian camp is under siege from the Lebanese military Fatah-al-Islam is no longer welcome.
The presence of this grouping among Palestinians in Lebanon points to another dangerous feature of Middle East politics. In Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas has worn the mantle of an extremist organization and has managed to keep Al-Qaeda type groups out of Palestinian territory. That is beginning to change as Hamas and the late Yasser Arafat’s Fatah engage in bloodletting and as the continued Israeli occupation generates even greater chaos in the occupied territories. While Israel and the US, and to some extent the EU have been happy to define Hamas as terrorists, they have failed to see that if the Hamas government is rejected as a partner for peace there is the risk that more extreme elements will supplant Hamas, elements that believe only in jihad.
Israel’s arrogance and its ability to persuade the West to withhold funding and to ignore the brutal character of the Israeli occupation have the potential for creating a Somali type atmosphere in the West Bank and Gaza. Whether Israel likes it or not, Hamas is prepared to negotiate with Fatah alongside it. If Hamas is swept aside as a partner for peace, more dangerous elements may take their place. Western intelligence sources know that Al-Qaeda type groupings are burrowing their way into the extremist fabric in the Palestinian territories. Therefore, unless Israel is persuaded to stop its continued seizure of Palestinian territory and to end its wall building and targeted assassinations, the future may see a new Intifada led by jihadists who reject any compromise.

DOLLAR'S DOWNWARD SPIRAL

Kuwait’s decision to detach its currency the dinar from the US dollar could be another signpost on a downward spiral leading to the dollar’s inevitable collapse as a reliable global currency.
Kuwait’s willingness to break away from other US Gulf allies who have pegged their currencies to the dollar came in the wake of the declining value of the dollar in relation to the euro and other major currencies. Kuwait’s Central Bank felt that the longer it relied on the dollar to keep the dinar strong the more vulnerable the dinar would be to speculators. It also believed the country’s inflation rate would continue to rise.
The move by Kuwait also marked a sharp departure from a strategy used for over two decades by countries awash with US dollars. The prevailing conviction was that being pegged to the dollar or buying US debt in the form of US Treasury Bills were hedges against speculators attacking a nation’s currency. The conviction went something like this. When speculators attack your currency they buy massive quantities of it and pull it off the market thereby making it so scarce its value shoots up and it quickly becomes a valuable commodity investors want to purchase. The moment speculators see its value soar they sell of their massive stocks of it and make a huge “killing.” However, by putting so much of your currency back on the market they quickly force down its value. Therefore the only you can protect your currency from plummeting to a zero value is to use your dollar reserves to go into the market to buy up as much of your own currency as you can. Having done that you pull a sizeable quantity of your currency off the market to stabilize its overall value.
George Soros the billionaire speculator went after the English pound in this way in 1992 and its value crashed forcing Britain to devalue. To avoid that catastrophe, countries began buying US Treasury Bills, which in effect meant they were not just buying dollars as an investment and a protection mechanism, they were buying US debt. Nevertheless, it put them in a position whereby they had large reserves of dollars to protect their own currency when it was attacked by speculators. That had the effect of deterring speculators but now that the dollar itself is weak countries like Kuwait feel it offers sparse protection in a financial crisis and is not a good long term investment. While the Kuwait episode is a sign of the dollar’s growing problems, there are greater problems on the horizon.
Since 2002 the dollar has fallen 25% in value on the international markets and last year a strategist for one of the major banks commented that the dollar was “going to hell in a handbag.” The basic problem is that for more than two decades the US has been importing far more than it has been exporting. The difference in value between what we buy in and what we manufacture at home and sell abroad is known as the current account. That account in 2006 had a deficit of almost $800 billion, meaning we bought that amount of good and services more than what we sold overseas. Our current account deficit stands at approximately $15 trillion. If this was any country other than the United States the IMF would be demanding the type of stringent curbs on our spending and economic policies that it has previously sought from poorer countries, especially in Latin America.
In order for the US to keep running such a massive current account deficit it must have money to keep the economy functioning. To get that money it sells US Treasury Bills to countries like China. The Chinese are only too happy to buy the Bills because they know the money they pay for them finds its way into the hands of American consumers and as long as American consumers are flush with money they will continue to buy approximately 25% of China’s exports. It is estimated China holds approximately $900 billions in Treasury Bills from which it constantly earns interest from the US. All of that provides China with a considerable amount of economic clout and political leverage when bargaining with Washington.
For its part, the Bush Administration has been happy to see the dollar plummet in the belief it makes US exports more competitive thereby producing greater internal growth and ultimately slowing the volume of imports, especially from China. The argument goes that this will eventually reduce the size of our current account deficit.
That is all very well until one looks at the bigger picture of a declining dollar and the fact that an international crisis or a dollar hitting zero value could trigger a doomsday economic scenario for the US economy. If China was on the verge of a conflict with the US it could flood the global market with dollars and demand the US allow it to cash out almost $1 trillion in Treasury Bills. Other countries like Russia, Japan and even Iran would be likely to follow suit. Such a move could send the US economy into freefall.
The dollar hitting a zero vale is a nightmare scenario that is not so far fetched. We Americans are living on borrowed money from foreign purchasers of our Treasury Bills and it is estimated we borrow approximately $3 billion per day. As a consequence, we are paying hundreds of billions of dollars each year on interest accruing from our national debt.
The IMF, not for the first time, has warned the US about its increasing debt and some experts have speculated that if steps are not taken to rein in Chinese imports and increase our manufacturing base the debt could reach almost 50% of our GDP. Such a situation would be unsustainable.
The most worrying aspect of the dollar’s decline is just how much the destiny of the dollar is in the hands of others, especially Russia and China. They hold in reserve so many dollars that if they decided the euro was the better currency and sold off their dollars the US would be weakened economically and politically.
Much of the dollar’s strength since the early 1970s has relied on the fact that it has been the global currency for buying and selling oil and gas. Known as the Petro-Dollar it has been the currency favored by Central Banks for energy deals. If the US and Russia headed back into a Cold War relationship, Russia which holds the world’s largest gas and oil reserves, could opt for the Petro-Euro. China would follow Russia’s lead and so too Iran with its sizeable reserves of gas and oil. That would result in a collapse of the dollar as a reliable international currency. It is with that in mind that many experts argue the US should long ago have used its technological expertise to develop alternative energy sources. But the US has plummeted as a world competitor in the field of technology. In 1990, we were exporting tens of billions of dollars more in advanced technology items than we were importing. Now it is the other way round and we have a negative balance vis a vis what we export and what we import in that sector of the economy.
China has been happy with the state of the dollar because its weakness and our poor manufacturing output have meant that the Chinese have controlled our destiny. They continue to pay us to buy their cheap products so that they can grow into a superpower. The closer they reach that goal the more likely they may not need to rely so much on a weak dollar and US consumers. The Chinese Central Bank has hinted in the past year that if the dollar continues to slide and the US current account deficit grows to almost 40% of our GDP international investors may not feel it is worthwhile to buy US Treasury Bills. Coming from the Chinese, who have deliberately kept their currency low in order to sell us cheap imports, that is the height of hypocrisy. But it is a measure of Chinese confidence that China can tell the US to get its act together. After all, China wants to continue to milk the golden cow while it moves inorexably to superpower status.

THE SHADOWY WORLD OF INFORMERS

When the trial of six Muslim men charged with planning a massacre of soldiers at Fort Dix begins later this year a significant part of the prosecution case will rely on the controversial role played by what the FBI calls “CWs” – cooperating witnesses.
The term is a confusing one because “CWs” are mostly paid informers. Some of them offer their services to the intelligence community in return for money while others are coerced or blackmailed into betraying associates in return for immunity from prosecution, or in some cases an offer of US citizenship. They have steadily become a critical ingredient in the shadowy war on terror in which the FBI and CIA are often forced to rely on people with shady backgrounds to penetrate terror cells. In many instances informers, or informants as the FBI sometimes prefers to call them, find it easy to blend into a terror networks because they share religious, racial or social connections with those running the networks or individual terror cells.
In the Fort Dix investigation the FBI used two paid informers to infiltrate a group of young Muslim men. One of the informers presented himself as an Egyptian with a military pedigree. Defense lawyers will no doubt argue that both informers – “CW-1” and “CW-2” acted as agent provocateurs in their year-long relationship with the accused. In response, prosecutors will hope to show through detailed recordings and videos that the FBI informers merely played along with a plan that was already in the minds of the accused.
The FBI has already indicated that it had problems with one of its informers two months prior to him being inserted into the Fort Dix investigation, a fact defense lawyers will no doubt seek to exploit. The FBI made the following admission:
“CW-1 has had one instance of not fully reporting fully truthfully information. In January 2006, CW-1 reported to his/her handler that he/she misstated the identity of a friend with whom he/she had contact in an effort to protect that individual. CW-1 was informed by the handling agent that all information must be fully and completely reported. Since this incident, no new derogatory information concern CW-1 has been reported. In this case the FBI has been able to independently corroborate the information provided by CW-1 through consensual recordings and surveillance operations.”
Any time the FBI has had a problem with an informer it has not resulted in derailing a terror case, generally because secret recordings and videos taken by the informer confirmed central tenets of the prosecution case. A classic example of an informer who went off the rails was Mohammed Alanssi, 52, who set himself on fire in front of the White House in November 2004, claiming the FBI had shortchanged him. He survived his suicide attempt with severe burns to the upper part of his body and later refused to discuss his personal problems with the FBI.
Nevertheless, before setting himself alight he provided a glimpse into his history as an informer. He left a note for his FBI handler, Special Agent Robert Fuller, alleging the government wronged him and had refused to permit him to visit his ailing wife in his native country, Yemen. He also charged that some FBI agents promised him he would be a millionaire yet he only received $100,000. In his view that was a sum that hardly paid for a major operation he had to undergo.
Before attempting suicide, he also contacted the media and said he had feared at one stage he would be put in prison and tortured if he stopped being an FBI informer. There was, he claimed, a real risk if he gave evidence in court his family in Yemen would be killed. Many of his claims are hard to verify beyond the fact he was an important FBI “CW” in a terror case against a prominent Yemeni cleric, Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad whom the FBI believed was funneling millions of dollars to Al Qaeda and Hamas. To get their hands on the cleric who lived in Yemen, the FBI used two informers - Alanssi and a naturalized American who masqueraded as a Black Panther but did not speak Arabic. Alanssi was the FBI’s key informer in that particular operation.
But how did the FBI recruit Alanssi to go after the cleric? Well, if one is to believe the official story he was an employee at the US embassy in Yemen but fled to the US in 2000 after a financial deal fell through and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He then settled in Brooklyn where he acquired a reputation for borrowing money and not paying it back. It was said he was good at telling tall tales in order to crave sympathy. After 9/11, he came to the attention of the FBI after 9/11 which was desperately trying to recruit informers within Muslim community across the US, especially in the New York area.
While that is the official account of Alanssi’s road to becoming an informer, it is just as likely the CIA and FBI recruited him while he was at the US embassy in Yemen and provided him with a shady cover story before he fled to the US. But, whether he was an informer before he left Yemen or approached the FBI and offered to work for them for money when he got to America, we may never know. What is not in doubt is that he was on the FBI’s books as a paid informer in the Muslim community in Brooklyn in 2002. It was not long before his handlers found a bigger role for him, namely luring the prominent Yemeni cleric, al-Moayad out of Yemen to Frankfurt in Germany where the US could get its hands on him and have him extradited.
Alanssi made several trips to Yemen to talk to the cleric and successfully lured him to Frankfurt. There, Alanssi and his co-informant, who was masquerading as a Black Panther, secretly videotaped and recorded conversations with the cleric. That evidence was later used to extradite the cleric to the US and charge him with financing terrorism. Before Alanssi was due to take the stand in the trial of the cleric, he set himself on fire and was never called to give evidence. His absence, however, did not derail the case and the cleric was sentenced to 75 years behind bars. Some observers concluded that it was just as well the prosecution did not rely on testimony from Alanssi because he was an unstable individual with a shady past.
Most terrorist cases now rely on paid informers or terrorists who have been coerced or encouraged to change allegiance. As a rule, these individuals are unsavory people with criminal backgrounds. Some have committed crimes ranging from assault to theft, burglary, rape and murder. But it is their criminality and immorality, allied to their proximity to organized crime or to terrorism that makes them special. They can be easily inserted into the Mob, Al Qaeda or any loosely organized bunch of people with dreams of planning attacks on the United States or its allies.
The vital tasks facing “handlers” - intelligence officers running informers – include exercising tight control and knowing when to rein in their informers. Unfortunately, it is not always a good thing to place too many constraints on informers or terrorists working for the state because they tend to function better and are more readily accepted by their peers when they are permitted to behave like the people they are targeting. In other words a terrorist employed by the FBI or CIA can better maintain his/her cover and credibility when he/she commits terror and establishes a reputation as a committed terrorist within a terrorist cell. For an agent handling such a terrorist there are serious moral issues and the same applies to handlers dealing with informers who may only be able to penetrate an organization when they have proved they can undertake criminal actions.
Terrorist recruited as agents of the state are vital to winning the war on terror. That was proven by British intelligence in its undercover war against the IRA for almost 30 years. The British learned that a terrorist informer was more effective than electronic surveillance because his roots were in the indigenous population enabling him to blend into that population. An outsider playing the role of an agent was too easily exposed by the IRA’s own informer hunters – its Internal Security Department.
Terrorist organizations are constantly aware of the risks they face from electronic counter insurgency measures, such as telephone and internet taps and eye in the sky photography and management of the majority of tele-communications across the globe. They are also conscious of the use of man-to-man surveillance by intelligence agencies and that can be difficult to mount in tight communities, in mountainous terrain like Afghanistan, in volatile parts of Baghdad or even in tight communities in Brooklyn or New Jersey. In contrast, a terrorist informer or paid informer like Alanssi can blend into his/her own community. If an informer is properly trained that informer can be a major asset. Once on the inside, an informer is the most lethal weapon an organization like the CIA or FBI can ever possess. He/she can alert a handler to planned operations, identify leading terrorist operatives and reveal the terrorists’ means of communication. The informer can also be used to plant listening devices in terrorist hideouts and to insert similar bugs or explosive devices in weapons’ caches. The inserting of explosive devices in weapons ensures terrorists are killed the moment they remove weapons from a “dump” or when they try to fire them. More importantly a terrorist informer can feed terrorists bogus information from his/her handler.
For all the above reasons, the FBI and CIA are constantly on the lookout for people they can recruit as paid informers or those they can easily coerce or blackmail into working for them. Terrorists are more difficult to recruit because of the ideological and anti-interrogation training they go through. They are therefore mostly recruited through special projects such as the one that has been running for several years at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. There, detainees are broken down mentally and scrutinized for lengthy periods and some then become amenable to changing sides. Blackmail is a favoured technique of intelligence agencies to recruit paid informers like Alanssi or terrorists. A person’s sexual perversions or sexual indiscretions can be equally powerful tools to force people to inform.
The handling of terrorists as agents of the state can be a very nasty and controversial business. Often a handler must permit a terrorist informer to behave like a terrorist in order to maintain a cover within a terrorist organization. It can mean allowing a terrorist to kill innocent people. The argument often proffered - and one which will always remain classified – is that a terrorist informer by maintaining his/her cover will over time save the lives of many more people than he/she will need to kill in order to demonstrate his/her worth to fellow terrorists.
Many people see that as a specious dense for unlawful killing and it is an issue that will rarely find its way into the public domain. By its very nature, the handling of terrorist informers is so controversial in nature it will remain one of the most secretive and classified aspects of the war on terror. In contrast, the role of paid informants like Alanssi will become more common as terror cases wind their way through the courts.

GUARD NOT READY FOR HOMELAND DISASTERS

The Iraq war has so seriously depleted the National Guard’s supplies and monopolized its personnel that it may not be able to cope with several natural disasters occurring at the one time, or with a major terrorist attack involving chemical, nuclear or biological weapons.
That is the message coming loud and clear from senior Guard officers and politicians in the wake of the tornado that almost obliterated the Kansas farming town of Greensburg. As the Governor of the State, Kathleen Sebelius, surveyed the damage and contemplated the massive clean up that must follow, she lamented the fact that the recovery operation will be hampered by a National Guard that is ill-equipped to deal with domestic emergencies.
The Governor believes the federal response to the disaster has been negatively impacted by the National Guard’s Middle East deployments.
“If you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters the response is going to be slower,” she told reporters, adding that the real victims of a slower recovery pace will be all those who lost their homes or lost loved ones.
The White House response to her criticism was that the National Guard has plenty of equipment positioned around the country, ready to deal with disasters. That statement was somewhat disingenuous because it did not specifically deal with the problems in Kansas as outlined by Gov. Sebelius.

“Here in Kansas, about 50% of our trucks are gone. We need trucks. We’re missing Humvees. We’re missing all kinds of equipment to respond to this kind of emergency,” she complained.
A spokesman for the Kansas National Guard confirmed that more than 20% of its Humvees and as many as 19 helicopters were in Iraq.
The concerns expressed by Gov. Sebelius pointed to a much bigger issue, namely the Guard’s level of unpreparedness at home. For several years, senior military figures and members of both sides of the House have tried to impress on the Bush administration the fact that continued Guard deployments to Afghanistan, and particularly Iraq, have slowly weakened the Guard, leaving it short of personnel and equipment to discharge its duty to respond to national disasters or emergencies on US soil.
The Guard has approximately $3 billion worth of equipment in Iraq and much of that will not be coming home soon because it is needed for the president’s “surge” strategy. Some analysts reckon much of it will be left in Iraq when our forces withdraw because it will be needed by the Iraqi army or it will be too old and worn out by then. Therefore, it would not make economic sense to ship it home. That has left the Guard in some states across the nation with a third or less of the standard equipment needed to discharge its domestic responsibilities vis a vis disasters and homeland security crises. Many observers say the real problem lies in the fact that the Guard comprises over 20% of our combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and the National Guard commitments in both conflict zones have seriously reduced recruitment levels.
In March 2007, Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, spokesman for the Guard in Louisiana told the Washington Post he was concerned he would not have the kind of equipment needed to deal with a Katrina type aftermath. He believed all the Guard could cope with was “maybe a Category 1 tropical storm” that did not create massive flooding or the need for a massive rescue operation.
Back in January this year, the Government Accounting Office issued a report that admitted the wars overseas had “reduced equipment needed for state-led domestic missions” at a time when the nation was facing an expanded array of threats at home.
The Guard’s National Guard Bureau Chief, Lt. Gen H. Steven Blum has publicly voiced the view that governors are right to be concerned because of what he calls the “equipment piece” of the Guard. In his view the National Guard “has never been less ready” because of its depleted stores of equipment.
For National Guard troops returning home the picture is just as bleak. They are often coming off long tours of duty in Iraq, lasting as much as 13 months, and are suddenly tasked to move to another state to deal with a natural disaster such as tornado damage, forest fires or massive floods etc. In many instances employers end up angry at having to keep jobs open for such lengthy periods and families become very upset that their loved ones are home for 24 hours and then gone. It is all having a negative impact on National Guard recruitment because seasoned soldiers are finding it hard to cope with extended periods away from jobs and families, and families are discouraging their kids from signing up with the Guard.
Many people point to the Vietnam War as an example of how the National Guard coped well in a time of war and say they find it difficult to understand why the Guard should now be under so much strain. Well, the difference between the present wars and Vietnam is that there was a draft during the Vietnam War. Nowadays, the lack of a draft means that active duty troops after 12-month tours in Iraq and Afghanistan are being replaced by Guard soldiers. As a consequence, the continued use of the Guard has gradually weakened it in terms of its ability to fulfill its domestic roles. Additionally, it image of part-time soldiers has been replaced by a new reality that affects recruitment. For example, the war in Iraq in particular has essentially converted National Guard troops into active-duty combat troops undertaking lengthy deployments. And with commitments in Afghanistan the pressure on the National Guard to fill gaps in active duty rosters in both conflict zones has become increasingly demanding.
The war in Iraq has been the greatest drain on the National Guard and the longer it continues the greater the damage to the Guard’s ability to be an effective force if needed to respond to emergencies at home. Congress may also have to consider providing as much as $3 billion to replace equipment that will never leave the two conflict zones. As for the Guard, the longer its troops are used in long tours of combat the more difficult recruitment will become and some observers say it may take a decade to restore the National Guard to the level of readiness it was at prior to the invasion of Iraq.

ISRAEL REELS FROM REPORT ON LOST WAR

Israelis are in shock after a devastating report revealed that the Israeli Cabinet and Military hastily launched its 34 day war against Hezbollah in 2006, arrogantly convinced its military might was sufficient to deter anyone, especially Hezbollah from fighting back the way it did.
During the war, Hezbollah fired 4,000 rockets into Israel, killing 41 civilians. On the ground, Hezbollah fighters killed 117 Israeli frontline troops and destroyed a sizeable number of tanks and armored vehicles. In response, Israel launched a shock and awe bombing campaign that killed 900 Lebanese civilians and an estimated 300 Hezbollah fighters. The Israeli bombing also destroyed much of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.
This latest report on the war, written by a five member Israeli commission headed by retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd, is probably the most withering critique ever of the actions of an Israeli government and its military establishment in a time of war. The report primarily lays blame, for what most consider Israel’s defeat at the hands of Hezbollah, at the door of the Israeli Prime minister, Ehud Olmert, his Defense Minister, Amir Peretz and General Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the IDF – Israeli Defense Force. The commission anticipated the likelihood Ehud Olmert would try spread blame for the Lebanon war debacle across his whole Cabinet. Therefore commissioners pointed out that the Cabinet only agreed to the launching of the war because Olmert presented Ministers with “ambiguous” goals. From the outset, he was determined to get Cabinet Ministers on board the war train even though some of them disagreed with his determination to go to war.
The Winograd commission as it is now known analyzed only the run up to the war and its first five days. Nevertheless, its findings have proved devastating and have shocked an Israeli public already humiliated by what it considered its military’s failure to destroy a guerilla organization. Top of the commission’s criticisms of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz was that each of them failed to fully comprehend the outcome of launching a military plan. In the opinion of the commissioners, the trio acted without “exercising proper judgment, responsibility and prudence.”
For example, there was no defined military plan when Olmert decided to go to war. He proceeded militarily without “examining professional and political reservations presented” to him. He also neglected to consider a “while range of options.” The commission found he ignored his Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, when she urged a political and military solution during the war.
The greatest indictment of the three was that they authorized military action without an exit strategy and with unclear goals. They represented what the commission called “military and political elites” within Israel who believed their country’s “military might” was a deterrent in itself. Not for a moment did they consider Hezbollah could hit Israel with 4,000 rockets.
The IDF was not spared in the report with the commissioners pointing out that the Israeli military displayed little creativity and flexibility and was less than forthright about being unable to achieve the goals set for it. There was no consideration of the complexities of a campaign in Lebanon because authorization for military action was taken much too hastily. In fact, within days of the killing of eight Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others by Hezbollah fighters Olmert decided to go to war without asking for a plan. In taking that decision he and Gen. Halutz acted “impulsively,” in the opinion of Justice Winograd.
The report blasted the IDF for being unprepared for war and naively failing to anticipate that a group like Hezbollah could strike back at Israel in the way it did, especially with its rocketry. Israeli civilians were left exposed because many air raid shelters were not properly equipped and the country’s reserve forces were not ready for war. On the front lines in Lebanon, Israeli generals had not anticipated that Hezbollah fighters would be so well armed they would have little difficulty taking out tanks and armored vehicles. In many instances, Israeli combat troops lacked proper body armor, ammunition supplies and food.
Gen. Halutz was described in the report as an Air Force officer who lacked battlefield experience and, like Olmert, believed a shock and awe bombing campaign of the type the US used in Iraq would finish off Hezbollah. Halutz refused to listen to senior officers who disapproved of his tactics and failed to provide the Olmert government with alternatives to war. There was also no early mobilization of reserves and that left the IDF overstretched when it went into Lebanon and began taking casualties.
The report firmly placed blame on Olmert, whom it said bore “supreme and comprehensive responsibility for the decisions of the government and the operations of the army.” In the commission’s view he acted with haste without having a detailed military plan or even asking for one.
“The prime minister is responsible for the fact the goals of the campaign were not set out clearly and carefully and there was no serious discussion of the relationships between these goals and the authorized modes of military action. All of this adds up to a serious failure,” said the report.
The commissioners were just as scathing about Defense Minister, Peretz whom they criticized severely for lacking experience in “military, political or governmental matters, thereby impairing Israel’s ability to response to the challenges that it faced.
Surprisingly, the report did not consider the outside influences on Olmert to act decisively against Hezbollah, an organization the Bush Administration had consistently condemned. The omission of any reference to pressure from the White House or Tony Blair in Downing Street to launch a war in Lebanon may be due to the fact the Winograd findings represent merely an interim report on the opening days of the war. Certainly, the over reliance of Olmert and Gen Halutz’s on air power had echoes of the kind of tactics promoted by Donald Rumsfeld. And, during the war the US and Britain were criticized across the globe for encouraging Israel to keep bombing Lebanon. Evidence has since shown that Britain and the US actively encouraged Olmert to expand his excessive use of air power even though it was increasingly counterproductive. It was also alienating the Arab and Islamic world from the West. To most observers at the time, the Olmert-Halutz bombing strategy was killing innocent civilians and not eliminating Hezbollah. It was also breaching the Geneva Conventions by deliberately destroying the entire civilian infrastructure.
While this initial war report makes no mention of the support Olmert got from Washington and London it tends to show that the encouragement he received from Tony Blair and George Bush was just as misguided as his war strategy because the war was a failure militarily and held the US, Britain and Israel up to international ridicule. It also damaged Israeli self confidence and for once eroded Israel’s belief in its military invincibility.
Olmert has arrogantly tried to distance himself from criticism that he was the man in charge and the buck should stop with him. Even as a time when he may face legal charges following an audit of his financial affairs relating to property deals and other issues he continued to boast that he feels “indestructible.” That was not how Gen Halutz felt in January when he resigned, less than a year after warning his military would “turn the clock back 20 years” in Lebanon by bombing the civilian infrastructure into rubble. However, even when he stepped down he refused to accept responsibility for what many considered a military failure, if not defeat.
Waiting in the political wings, hoping to benefit from this devastating critique of Olmert, is the Likud Party’s Benyamin Netanyahu, known as a political hawk. He feels the Labor Party, a partner in Olmert’s coalition government, will distance itself from Olmert as the import of the Winograd report reaches into the Israeli psyche. However, the Israeli political establishment more often than not survives on a jobs-for-the-boys mentality. The 76 members who make up the Coalition government in the 120 member Knesset may not want to walk away from their jobs at this time and risk not being re-elected. Nevertheless, if the next report on the overall conduct of the war is as damning as this one it is unlikely Olmert will survive. His popularity is in single digits but as the Winograd Commission pointed out he is a man who does not consider alternatives and in this case the alternative is life in the political wilderness. That is something he has no wish to face.ezbollah could strike Israel

BITTER EXCHANGES
PART OF REAGAN-BEGIN
LEGACY


President Ronald Reagan was so angered by Israel’s bombing of Beirut in August 1982 that he deliberately used the term holocaust to the describe Israel’s actions.
That is just one of many revelations from “The Reagan Diaries” due to be published by Harper Collins on May 22. In excerpts from the dairies in the latest edition of Vanity Fair, Ronald Reagan is also quoted as having been unhappy with Israel’s unilaterism. In particular he was upset that he only learned of the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor on June 1981 after the event. In his dairies, he sometimes restricted his thoughts to simple yet powerful sentences:
“Got word of Israeli bombing of Iraq – nuclear reactor. I swear I believe Armageddon is near,” he wrote.
In February 1982, he again became fixated on the Middle East and wrote “trouble brewing.” The trouble he foresaw was Israel living up to his threats to invade Lebanon. He felt Israel had already “lost a lot of world sympathy” and was doing the wrong thing. He was proved right because there was international outrage six months later after the Israelis blew up the Accra building in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, killing 250 refugees sheltering inside it. In the wake of the bombing, he received a phone call from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia imploring him to stop the Israeli bombardment. Fahd pointed out that aside from Israeli bombs, Israeli artillery shells were also raining down on Beirut causing a serious loss of innocent life.
In his diaries, Reagan wrote that King Fahd was “begging me to do something. I told him I was calling P.M. Begin immediately. And I did. I was angry. I told him it had to stop or our entire relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said the symbol of war was becoming the picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”
But Reagan for all his anger made it clear in one diary entry that “we are not turning on Israel. That would be an invitation for the Arabs to attack. It’s time to raise H..L” The abbreviated word was Hell because Regan throughout the diaries refrained from fully spelling out profanities. For example, instead of damn he would write “d..n.”
The dairies are also said to contain references to his fears about the spread of communism in Central America and the fact he received what he called “definite evidence” that Nicaragua was moving “hundreds of tons of arms” from Cuba to El Salvador. The conflict in Nicaragua and El Salvador would later blight his eight year presidency in what would be called “The Contra Scandal.”
However, his comments about Israel will spark the most interest, especially his anger at its failure to inform the US before it bombed the Iraq nuclear reactor in 1981 and its excessive use of power in Lebanon. People will see parallels with the present day. For example, Israel has repeatedly warned it might bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. The question is would it repeat the Regan era mistake and not inform the White House in advance. Another glaring parallel is the recent Israeli commission report on its 2006 war in Lebanon. In 2006, just as in 1982, Israel was condemned for its excessive use of force against Lebanese civilians and the country’s civilian infrastructure. But, unlike Ronald Reagan, George Bush, encouraged the Israeli bombing of Lebanon rather than trying to end it.