Eric Fottorino, nouveau directeur du journal “Le Monde”

 

Le directeur de la rédaction du quotidien Le Monde, Eric Fottorino, a été élu, le 26 juin 2007, avec plus de 60 % des voix directeur du journal, lors d’une assemblée générale des journalistes, a indiqué Jean-Michel Dumay, président de la Société des Rédacteurs du Monde (SRM).

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Voir également les suites judiciaires de la polémique occasionnée par la publication du livre de Pierre Péan et Philippe Cohen, La face cachée du Monde: cliquer ici.

Streit um Evolution und Schöpfungslehre

Im Feuilleton der  Süddeutschen Zeitung berichtet Alex Rühle von einer ziemlich bersorgniserregenden Tendenz: Der Kreationismus, d.h. die Ablehnung der Evolutionstheorie aus religiösen Gründen, ist nicht nur ein amerikanisches Problem:

“Hierzulande geht man von 1,3 Millionen Evangelikalen aus, die die Bibel wortwörtlich auslegen und folglich auch die wissenschaftliche Evolutionslehre ablehnen. Die Zahl der Schulverweigerer aus fundamentalistischen Gründen wächst. Neben der Sexualkunde und dem gemischt-geschlechtlichen Sportunterricht ist die Evolutionstheorie eines der Hauptargumente der Eltern, wenn sie ihre Kinder vom Unterricht abmelden. Bernhard Wolf, der Sektenbeauftragte der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern, klagt darüber, dass sich allerorten kleine Zentren ‘fundamentalistischer Extremisten‘ immer besser miteinander vernetzten, um eigene Schulen gründen zu können.”

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Im Sog des medialen Populismus

In der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung berichtet der Medienwissenschaftler Professor Stephan Russ-Mohl über die negative Entwicklung der öffentlich-rechtlichen Fernsehsender in Europa:

“Blickt man indes auf die Nachbarländer, so werden große Anstalten wie die ARD, die BBC und die italienische RAI jedoch immer mehr zum Opfer einer Dynamik, welche Ökonomen als ‘Tyrannei der kleinen Entscheidungen’ bezeichnen: Millionen Zuschauer zwingen bei der täglichen ‘Abstimmung’ mit der Fernbedienung ein Programm herbei, das immer mehr sein öffentlichrechtliches Profil verliert. Es könnte genauso gut, aber zu einem Bruchteil der Kosten, von privaten Anbietern ausgestrahlt werden. Die Minderheiten, die Anspruchsvolles für ihre Gebührengelder erwarten, gehen leer aus – zumindest zu den Hauptsendezeiten bei den grossen Anbietern.”

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The capital interview: McConnell cites ‘overwhelming evidence’ of Iran’s support for Iraqi insurgents

 

New York, June 28, 2007

Interviewee: John Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence

Interviewer: Eben Kaplan

Admiral Michael McConnell, the U.S. director of national intelligence, says there is “overwhelming evidence” that Tehran is supporting insurgents in Iraq and “compelling” evidence that the same is happening in Afghanistan. McConnell cites insurgents’ increasing use of effective roadside bombs known as Explosively Formed Projectiles that are clearly traceable to Iran.

Speaking about challenges faced at home, McConnell says the intelligence community is “still learning” how to collect domestic intelligence in a way that provides security without infringing on Americans’ rights.

Admiral, just yesterday the Senate subpoenaed the White House for documents relating to domestic surveillance—underscoring the point that this is still a sensitive issue for the American public. I’m wondering how you reconcile the very real need for effective, efficient security with the nation’s desire to preserve civil liberties.

The bill that we have on the Hill at the moment to modernize FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is looking forward and is a request to get us in the position we need to be in to do two things: protect the nation from threats that we know—they’re planning mass casualties in the United States. We know that, we have clear information, clear indications, publicly stated, and we have good intelligence. And the second part is to protect American citizens from any kind of intrusive intelligence that would invade their privacy. The way to do that is very simple. The law needs to be updated so that we can target foreigners, regardless of where [communications are] intercepted in the world, and at the same time, if a U.S. person is ever a subject of surveillance for any reason, it would require a warrant.

There’s actually a third piece of the legislation, which we have to get corrected, and that is to cause the carriers or providers—those who provide telephone service, Internet service and so on—to collaborate and cooperate with the United States. They have to be protected [so that] if they provide that cooperation they’re not subject to suits.

The threat has increased, the intent is stated, and the way the wording in the current law is captured inhibits or prevents us from being successful. We have to do two things: capture the communication of foreign targets without warrants because they’re threats to the United States; and if it involves a U.S. person, a warrant should be required.

One of the more specific threats that we’ve seen, especially this summer, is the threat of homegrown terrorism. This is a relatively new problem for people in your industry to tackle, and so I’m wondering how you’re moving to overcome some of these new challenges. How do you incorporate state and local law enforcement agencies in attempting to deal with the homegrown threat?

This is a particularly challenging problem for us because our communities have always been involved in foreign intelligence, targeting things overseas. Because we had great oceans and certain insularity from the rest of the world, it would be difficult for someone to invade us. So for the most part, we didn’t pay much attention from an intelligence perspective to what was inside the United States. What we were not prepared for was when terrorists left a foreign location and came inside the United States. My personal view is that was why they were successful at 9/11, because they were virtually invisible to foreign intelligence, [and] they hadn’t broken a law so they could do what they needed to do to plan.

This is exactly the challenge for us today. Probably the nation that has the best experience with dealing with this is the United Kingdom in the context of the Irish Republican Army. They had to do domestic surveillance to contend with that problem. We’re still learning how to do that. Now, if someone in the United States is a terrorist, and has a connection with a terrorist located in a foreign country, the intelligence community should be able to target something going on in a foreign country that might involve someone in this country. Once it involves somebody in the United States, that should be a warranted situation, we should conduct appropriate surveillance.

It’s not widely known, many of the details are classified, but there have been any number of events that involved a domestic terrorist—homegrown—who was attracted to and coordinated and connected though some foreign nexus. We gained the insight on the foreign side, and then we made it a criminal situation for observation and bringing it to closure. A number of Americans are alive today because we were successful in making that connection. Now, what happens when a domestic terrorist has no foreign connection? And probably the most famous case is Timothy McVeigh [Oklahoma City bomber]. The way the system works, the way it’s designed by Congress and approved by the executive branch, is that’s a criminal situation.

In recent months U.S. officials have claimed to have evidence that Iran is providing support to insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and there’s been a lot of hawkish rhetoric thrown around Washington toward Tehran. In light of the prewar intelligence failures in Iraq, how much stock you put in these reports?

Interesting choice of words, the way you framed it—you said “claims,” as if it’s alleged, and not true, and you said “hawkish,” as if somebody has a political agenda. I have no political agenda. My mission is to speak truth to power. My mission is to be apolitical and to examine the data and provide a report.

There’s very clear evidence—overwhelming evidence—that Iranians are providing support and munitions and capability—the most heinous of those are referred to as EFPs, that’s shorthand for Explosively Formed Projectile.

What does that mean? If your method of attack that is most effective turns out to be a roadside bomb, and the response on the part of the forces that are being attacked is to build it heavier—more armor—then what you need to be effective is some way to penetrate armor or to push through. There’s a technique in the munitions business: If you can explosively form the projectile it can penetrate many, many inches of armor.

So when the Iraqi insurgents were proving to be less successful, what the Iranians provided were these specially designed machines. The Iranians today, we have clear evidence, are providing the very weapons that are causing U.S. servicemen and women to die. That’s clear, that’s not refuted, that’s not hawkish, that’s not shaded. That is the fact.

On the Afghanistan side, it’s a little less clear. Clearly, we have found munitions that, based on the stenciling, the labeling, are manufactured in Iran; they came from Iran, and they’ve been captured in the recent timeframe. Now, the Iranian government, [which is] Shia, and the old Taliban, [which is] Sunni, were not friends. In fact, they’re enemies. So why would the Shia regime of Iran be supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan?

The only conclusion I can draw is what they’re attempting to do is raise the price for the United States and NATO for our presence in Afghanistan; to inflict casualties on Americans and Germans and Dutch and French and British and New Zealand and other players that are there; to cause reaction in the home countries from which those forces came. The evidence is overwhelming in the Iraq situation, and it’s very plain and, to me, compelling in Afghanistan.

In your Foreign Affairs article, you mentioned the intelligence community is harnessing new Internet technology such as blogs and wikis. I’m wondering what sort of incentives you’re creating to get intelligence professionals to buy into these new technologies, and how much faith you have that they will make a difference in the work that you do.

In my business I was required to do it, to understand it, and it was a matter of survival. So I became an early addict and an early convert.

More than half of the national intelligence community today came in since 2001, so this is not something we’re doing because we’re forcing people. They’re making [it] a condition of continued employment with the United States government, they demand these things. So it’s not hard to do. You just provide the right tools.

In some cases, we’ve had the resources to invent some of the technologies, so some of the capability we have is even more advanced. This is a very definite march. It’s not a trend, it’s not something that’s being forced. We have to go there.

And when we go there, we’re incredibly more effective. Because a machine can do things in milliseconds that a human being could never do. And so if you have the machine do what it does best, what it does is enable the human being. Think of it this way. I used to work with analysts who had a mechanical process to get the information displayed. They spent 80 to 90 percent of their time preparing the information, and 10 percent analyzing—and now that’s upside down.

The machinery can prepare the information in 10 percent of the time; they can spend 90 percent of their time thinking and understanding and developing nuance and insight. So we’re going there. We have to do this to survive—and to do our job effectively, we have to do it in essentially the way U.S. industry is doing it.

Reprinted with kindly permission of the Council on Foreign Relations.

US-EU airline deal

Deutsche Welle reports that U.S. and European Union officials struck a deal to share passenger information relating to transatlantic flights for security purposes. Officials negotiating the deal had long differed on how to balance security with passenger privacy.

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Brown’s British government

Britain’s new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has replaced six influential ministers from Tony Blair’s cabinet including Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett. Gordon Brown tapped Blair insider David Miliband to replace Beckett and picked the longtime party insider Alistair Darling to replace himself as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Economist estimates Gordon Brown will seek to retain strong ties with the United States and to continue Blair’s policy of troop withdrawal from Iraq.

The Daily Telegraph has a special dossier about Gordon Brown.

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La stratégie africaine de la Chine

Pékin a annoncé la création d’un fonds d’un milliard de dollars pour développer l’investissement et le commerce en Afrique.

Pour la Chine tout comme pour les États-Unis d’Amérique, le Soudan occupe une position géostratégique majeure, en servant par exemple de plate-forme pour le commerce et le transport du pétrole entre l’Afrique Centrale et le Moyen-Orient.

Valérie Niquet, sinologue, professeur au Collège interarmées de défense, met en lumière la stratégie africaine de la Chine.

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Overhauling Intelligence

by Vice Admiral John Michael McConnell

Director of National Intelligence of the United States

Summary: Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.

INTELLIGENT REFORM

Before World War II, the United States’ defense, intelligence, and foreign policy apparatus were fragmented, as befitted a country with a limited role on the world stage. With U.S. entry into the war, interagency collaboration developed out of crisis-driven necessity. Wartime arrangements, although successful, were ad hoc. And after the war, President Harry Truman and Congress realized that the United States could not meet its new responsibilities without a national security structure that rationalized decision-making and integrated the intelligence and military establishments.

It was against this background that on July 26, 1947 — 60 years ago this summer — Truman signed the National Security Act, a seminal piece of legislation for the U.S. intelligence community that laid the foundation for a robust peacetime intelligence infrastructure.

With the proper tools and public support and the help of allies, the United States built the world’s premier intelligence establishment. It put spy planes in the sky, satellites into space, and listening posts in strategic locations around the world. It also invested in its people, developing a professional cadre of analysts, case officers, linguists, technicians, and program managers and trained them in foreign languages, the sciences, and area studies.

But by the time the Cold War ended, the intelligence establishment that had served Washington so well in the second half of the twentieth century was sorely in need of change. The post-Cold War “peace dividend” led to a reduction of intelligence staffing by 22 percent between fiscal years 1989 and 2001.

Only now is staffing getting back to pre-Cold War levels. The National Security Act mandated that information be shared up the chain of command but not horizontally with other agencies. At the time of the act’s passing, little thought was given to the need for a national-level intelligence apparatus in Washington that could synthesize information from across the government to inform policymakers and help support real-time tactical decisions. That reality, coupled with practices that led to a “stovepiping” of intelligence, arrested the growth of information sharing, collaboration, and integration — patterns that still linger.

All these shortcomings have made the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) and the creation of the post of director of national intelligence (DNI) timely and appropriate but, by themselves, insufficient. Indeed, these measures must be only the beginning of a larger reform. The state-sponsored terrorist groups that threaten the United States are accompanied by an ever larger number of nonstate actors moving at increasing speeds across geographic and organizational boundaries. These new actors blur the traditional distinctions between foreign and domestic, intelligence-related and operational, strategic and tactical. To respond, Washington must forge a collaborative approach to intelligence that increases the agility of individual agencies and facilitates the effective coordination and integration of their work.

BRINGING DOWN WALLS

The post of DNI was created in 2005 to transform and modernize intelligence institutions, rules, and relationships to meet today’s intelligence needs. Since 1947, new threats to U.S. national security have appeared, new missions have been developed, and new intelligence agencies have come into existence. A national intelligence authority was needed to focus, guide, and coordinate all the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies to better provide timely, tailored intelligence support to a wide range of users with different, and often competing, requirements. The National Security Act sought to unify U.S. military and foreign intelligence efforts, but it did not envision or provide for today’s requirement to integrate intelligence and law enforcement. Our main challenge in doing this is to strike the right balance between centralized direction and decentralized execution so that the Office of the DNI does not just end up being another layer of bureaucracy on top of the existing structures.

Ensuring the integration of foreign and domestic intelligence collection and analysis, as the 9/11 Commission recommended, is one of the most important responsibilities given to the Office of the DNI — and a vital component of striking that balance. How to do this while respecting and protecting the rights Americans hold dear has been among the most difficult challenges facing the intelligence community.

The difficulties have been compounded by the need to operate under the rigid barriers put in place by the National Security Act. Under the act, U.S. intelligence capabilities involve four distinct areas of responsibility: supporting the president, engaging in clandestine activities abroad in support of national policy goals, protecting the United States against Soviet penetration, and supporting strategic military operations. The director of central intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are given responsibility over the first two, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over the third, and military intelligence units over the fourth.

Today, sticking rigidly to these historical distinctions would be a serious impediment to protecting U.S. national security. The United States has enemies who seek to acquire and detonate weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil. This is a constant and significant threat, and the intelligence community’s work to thwart it must not be constrained by policies of the past. U.S. intelligence agencies started to integrate domestic and foreign intelligence operations after the first World Trade Center terrorist attack in 1993 and the follow-on attacks on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.

The work took on even greater urgency after the tragedy of 9/11. As a result, Americans today benefit from the combined intelligence work of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI’s National Security Branch — an office that brings together the bureau’s counterintelligence, counterterrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and intelligence components. The DHS and the FBI are providing a more integrated approach to intelligence in order to protect the United States from foreign and homegrown terrorists.

But even as the wall between domestic and foreign intelligence collection was coming down, a wall between foreign intelligence and law enforcement remained standing. In 1981, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration was taken out of the intelligence community because of concerns that it would improperly mix intelligence and law enforcement. But that commingling was absolutely necessary: with its large law enforcement presence abroad, the DEA is able to contribute unique narcotics information and overseas experience. Hence, last year, the DNI helped the DEA establish its Office of National Security Intelligence. This newest member of the U.S. intelligence community brings access, insights, and experience in foreign and domestic narcoterrorism.

Coordinating domestic and foreign intelligence continues to be a challenge. The intelligence community has an obligation to better identify and counter threats to Americans while still safeguarding their privacy. But the task is inherently a difficult one. New technology being developed by the Office of the DNI’s chief information officer and chief technology officer to access and process vast amounts of digital data to find terrorist-related information is being overseen by the DNI’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Office.

Another challenge is determining how and when it is appropriate to conduct surveillance of a group of Americans who are, say, influenced by al Qaeda’s jihadist philosophy. On one level, they are U.S. citizens engaging in free speech and associating freely with one another. On another, they could be plotting terrorist attacks that could kill hundreds of people.

COME TOGETHER

The DNI also needs to transform the culture of the intelligence community, which is presently characterized by a professional but narrow focus on individual agency missions. Each of the 16 organizations within the intelligence community has unique mandates and competencies. They also have their own cultures and mythologies, but no one agency can be effective on its own. To capture the benefits of collaboration, a new culture must be created for the entire intelligence community without destroying unique perspectives and capabilities.

The way to do so would be to follow the model provided by the Goldwater-Nichols reforms of the military in the late 1980s. The Goldwater-Nichols Act created a unified military establishment and, among other things, laid the foundations for a “joint” military. It created incentives for interservice collaboration (such as requiring joint service to achieve flag rank) and promoted joint training and development. What Goldwater-Nichols did for the military, IRTPA should provide the means to do for the U.S. intelligence community.

Greater collaboration is vital because no single agency has the capacity to survey all the available information. The U.S. intelligence community collects more than one billion pieces of information every day. Intelligence can only help inform and shape decisions if it is processed through the mind of an analyst who resolves any conflicts and ambiguities. For example, a piece of paper with a list found on a suspected terrorist — known in the field as “pocket litter” — could turn out to be a grocery list or a coded roster of associates. It takes an analyst trained in what to look for to tell the difference. U.S. intelligence agencies will never have enough analysts to fully examine all the data they collect, but the ones they do have can do their job better by developing new ways of thinking about analysis and information distribution in a more integrated community.

As the intelligence community grew during the Cold War, it sometimes acted like anything but a collaborative community. Analysts often did not know their counterparts at other agencies unless they reached out to them on their own. There were few processes in place to collaborate, share lessons learned and best practices, and exchange viewpoints. This approach may have worked during the Cold War, when strategic threats evolved slowly and various streams of analysis could proceed independently before being combined, but it cannot succeed today, when events evolve quickly and require rapid action.

Consider a recent example. In the spring of 2005, the CIA and the military’s Northern Command received information about two passengers aboard a plane flying from the Middle East to Mexico that would shortly cross U.S. airspace.

Because the flight was not operated by a U.S. carrier and was not scheduled to land in the United States, there was no requirement for the passenger list to be reviewed prior to takeoff. Although the airline’s ticket agent thought the two passengers appeared suspicious, the flight departed before their names could be checked. The airline passed on the names and the flight information to U.S. authorities, however, and this information was funneled to the National Counterterrorism Center, the U.S. government’s hub for all counterterrorism intelligence, where analysts can access more than 30 separate government computer networks carrying more than 80 unique data sources.

Within hours, the NCTC found information indicating that the two passengers had been placed on a “no-fly list” immediately after 9/11 because they had lived in the United States in the 1990s, had connections to two of the 9/11 hijackers, and possessed pilot’s licenses. Based on this information, the plane was denied entry into U.S. airspace, and the pilot decided to return to Europe. The intelligence community’s real-time coordination and rapid-response capabilities were essential.

Interagency collaboration needs to be established at two levels: intelligence collection and intelligence analysis. To this end, the Office of the DNI is in the process of developing virtual communities of analysts who can securely exchange ideas and expertise across organizational boundaries and harness cutting-edge technology to find, access, and share information and analytic judgments. Analysts are increasingly using interactive online journals, such as classified blogs and wikis, to this end. Such tools enable experts adept at different disciplines to pool their knowledge, form virtual teams, and quickly make complete intelligence assessments.

Interagency joint-duty programs are also being implemented so that personnel from any agency can benefit from the knowledge of the entire intelligence community. An example of progress thus far is the newly created Rapid Analytic Support and Expeditionary Response, or RASER, team, a group of relatively new analysts drawn from all the intelligence agencies who undertake special training so that they can react rapidly to crises, drive intelligence-collection efforts, and work as catalysts for increased integration. Starting this summer, this elite “special forces” analytic team will be ready to be deployed against some of the United States’ hardest intelligence targets.

The U.S. intelligence community also needs to know where collection gaps exist, where it needs greater specific intelligence, and on what areas it is overly focused. Some gains have been made with the creation of mission managers — a recommendation of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission — who oversee and manage high-interest topics, such as North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela, and counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence, for appropriate collection and analysis.

The intelligence community is also investing in more in-depth and long-range analysis so that analysts can dig deeper into issues of concern for the future, such as the changing character of warfare and energy security, unencumbered by the demands of producing current intelligence. Furthermore, addressing a critical need emphasized by the 9/11 Commission and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, the intelligence community has formed “devil’s advocate” and alternative analyses, examining, for example, whether avian influenza can be weaponized and how webcams could aid in terrorist planning. Beyond these efforts, the intelligence community can still learn a lot from commercial best practices and best-in-class analytic technologies to help its analysts sift through data and more rapidly identify key insights.

CULTURE SHOCK

Old cultures and practices need to be changed so that today’s intelligence community can rapidly exchange information between officers on the ground — both at home and abroad — and decision-makers in Washington.

Most important, the long-standing policy of only allowing officials access to intelligence on a “need to know” basis should be abandoned. The U.S. intelligence community needs to adopt a mindset guided by a “responsibility to provide” intelligence to policymakers, war fighters, and analysts while still reasonably protecting sources and methods. Significant progress has been made since 9/11, but policy and cultural impediments remain. The challenge now is to convince collectors that they are not data owners so much as data providers.

The way to do so would be to share threat information with state and local officials as well as members of the private sector. The unique contribution made by men and women on the ground is vital to U.S. national security.

In 2000, for example, a county sheriff’s investigation into a local cigarette smuggling case in Charlotte, North Carolina, uncovered a multistate terrorist cell supporting Hezbollah. In 2005, a local police detective investigating a gas station robbery in Torrance, California, uncovered a homegrown jihadist cell planning a series of attacks in Illinois. State and local partners should no longer be treated as only first responders; they are also the first lines of prevention. Changing mentalities in this way is the responsibility of the program manager for the Information Sharing Environment, which was created by the IRTPA and exists to foster a partnership between all levels of government and both the private sector and foreign partners in order to share terrorist threat information.

Another important area in which mindsets need to change is in hiring practices. Policy barriers have stood in the way of attracting intelligence professionals with the right skills and backgrounds. The responsibility to protect sources and intelligence-collection methods from unauthorized disclosure has heightened some organizations’ risk aversion. As a result, intelligence agencies have faced significant obstacles in hiring some of the people they need most: first- and second-generation Americans with fluency in languages ranging from Albanian to Urdu and with unique political, technical, or scientific skills. These men and women possess cultural insights and skills that no amount of teaching can impart. If the intelligence community is going to reach out to native speakers, it must change its recruitment practices, which currently make it difficult to hire such candidates.

STAYING ON THE CUTTING EDGE

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. intelligence community was at the forefront of technological innovation, be it for weapons systems, computers, or satellite technology. In the last 20 years, its lead has dwindled as innovation has moved from the public to the private sector and technological know-how has spread across the world. Worse still for the United States, its adversaries have been quick to adapt to technological improvements.

The U.S. intelligence community needs to harness the promise of advances in fields such as the biosciences, nanotechnology, and information technology. The new Intelligence Advanced Research Program Agency seeks to do just that, much as a similar Department of Defense program is doing to drive leading-edge technologies to meet defense requirements.

One fruit of that effort was the development in 2004 of Argus — named for the giant from Greek mythology with one hundred eyes — which monitors foreign news media and other open sources for early indications of epidemics or other serious biological incidents, such as increased absenteeism, failures of health-care infrastructure, and other disruptions of normal life.

At the outset of the avian flu outbreak in November 2006, Argus became fully operational and provided rigorous, validated information on the disease. Today, it monitors more than one million reports a day from nearly 3,000 sources in 21 major languages in 195 countries. In the future, Argus may be able to use open-source reporting to more rapidly detect other causes of societal disruption — especially in closed societies — such as nuclear accidents and environmental disasters.

Beyond developing technologies, however, it is essential to make sure new tools get from the drawing board to the field. To that end, our Rapid Technology Transition Initiative focuses on invigorating research and development so that ideas can be translated into usable tools quickly and cost effectively. RTTI has already shown its value. Since its deployment late last year, the FBI’s Biometric Quick Capture Platform — a portable database funded through RTTI — has facilitated the biometric identification of suspects in custody overseas. It has helped users collect and store fingerprint data and perform real-time electronic searches of federal fingerprint databases. These queries can quickly establish links to a person’s previously used identities and past criminal or terrorist record. Just two months after the release of RTTI funds to the FBI, the bureau’s field personnel were using this tool to identify whether individuals in custody overseas had criminal records or were dangerous threats to U.S. forces.

But moving cutting-edge technologies into the hands of U.S. intelligence personnel means shortening timelines for developing these technologies. In this area, there is still much work to be done. The U.S. intelligence community’s European colleagues, for example, are able to build, launch, and operate a new satellite system in about five years and for less than a billion dollars.

By contrast, a U.S. spy satellite system, although admittedly more complex than a European equivalent, can take more than ten years and cost billions of dollars to develop. This is due, in part, to the larger number of requirements the United States tends to place on individual systems and its higher aversion to the risk of mission failure, both of which increase the systems’ complexity and the demands placed on the technology. If the U.S. intelligence community is to close this gap, it will need a more disciplined, agile acquisition policy. It was to this end that the DNI recently elevated the task of acquisitions to the level of a deputy director of national intelligence (there are four deputy directors).

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Although the United States is improving the nuts and bolts of its intelligence system, it must not lose sight of the strategic conditions that will determine the ultimate success of those efforts. The United States must comprehend the profound threats of the times and position its institutions to meet those challenges. The intelligence community understands the threats posed by terrorists inside and outside the United States, nuclear proliferators, and rogue and failed states. Now, it must set its priorities to meet these threats.

If the efforts to improve the intelligence community are to endure, they will need sustained support from the executive branch, Congress, and the American people. It will take years to fully clarify and coordinate the DNI’s responsibilities and powers, transform the collection and analysis of intelligence, accelerate information sharing, change institutional cultures, build high-tech capabilities, and boost the acquisition of new technologies. And it will take the patience of the American people and their willingness to lend their talent and expertise to the intelligence community.

From Foreign Affairs,  July/August 2007.

Reprinted with kindly permission of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Photo description: Arlington, Va., The Pentagon (Dec. 9, 2002)

Former President George H.W. Bush (center), the 41st President of the United States examines a model of CVN 77, the U.S. Navy’s 10th Nimitz-class aircraft carrier officially named USS George H.W. Bush by The Honorable Gordon England, Secretary of the Navy, at a ceremony held in the Pentagon. Photographed from left to right are Adm. Vern Clark, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Gordon England, Secretary of the Navy, former President George H.W. Bush, Senator John Warner, R-Va., and General James L. Jones, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.

U.S. Navy photo by Chief Photographer’s Mate Johnny Bivera.

Germany needs an Israel lobby

Why Germany doesn’t have an Israel lobby—and why it should.

by Alan Posener, chief columnist, German newspaper Welt am Sonntag

The other day I had the honor of being invited to attend AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington, D.C. AIPAC, in case you didn’t know, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, otherwise known as the dreaded Israel Lobby. The dreaded I.L. being, if we are to believe John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, a bunch of unpatriotic Jews who have managed to deflect US foreign policy from its true course of sucking up to oil-rich Arab dictators, with the result that the United States is in the thrall of a “shitty little country” (as a French diplomat once called it) that doesn’t have a drop of oil.

Now, one might consider the incompatibility of the conspiracy theory put forward by Mearsheimer and Walt (and endorsed by leading oil-rich Arab dictators) with that proposed by, say, Michael Moore, according to which the White House and State Department are controlled by Big Oil.

One might also ask whether the most powerful lobby group in the United States isn’t in fact that strange body politic “We, the people…” armed with a potent weapon called the right to vote and the common sense to realize that democracies ought to stick together.

But that wasn’t what was going through my head as I sat in the Washington Convention Center among 7,000 pro-Israel lobbyists and was treated to a stellar array of political bigwigs and would-be bigwigs, including Dick Cheney, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama, who obviously all felt that, whatever Mearsheimer and Moore might say, it would be a good career move to suck up to the dreaded Israel Lobby. What was going through my head was: “Wow, I wish we had something like this in Germany.”

Because the plain fact is, Israel does not have a lobby here. When German Catholic Bishops traveled to the Holy Land recently and, after visiting Yad Vashem, compared Israel’s security wall to the wall around the Warsaw Ghetto, thus comparing the Jewish state to the Nazi regime, the only official voice raised in protest was that of Israel’s long-suffering ambassador Shimon Stein.

The silence from the ruling parties was deafening. Because of course Catholics are a powerful lobby in Germany, whereas friends of Israel, be they Jew or Gentile, aren’t. When you talk to, say, MPs of the Bavarian conservative party (Christian Social Union), they’ll tell you—off the record—that back home their voters ask them why Germany should stick its neck out for that shitty little country (for instance by patrolling the Lebanese coast as part of the UNI-FIL mission), which only makes us a target for terrorists. And on the other side of the aisle, Green parliamentarians will tell you the same thing.

On the other hand, there isn’t anybody lobbying these MPs in their districts for deinvestment in Iran, although polls show that Germans do see Iran as a dangerous country. Almost as dangerous as Israel and the United States.

You have to hand it to the German political class, as I told the AIPAC delegates in the workshop I’d been invited to address, for sticking to their conviction that support of Israel is, for historical reasons, part of Germany’s raison d’état. Just as the medieval Church protected the Jews because their very existence was witness to the truth of the Bible and thus conferred legitimacy on Christianity’s claim to the legacy of Abraham, so Germany stands by Israel because that stance conveys legitimacy to Germany’s democratic legacy.

Now I don’t want to get into a discussion on Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism here, because the point I want to make for the present is that a political stance based, if you will, on a lesson of history or, to be more crude, on a bad conscience, will not long endure.

And as history progresses and Germans as a people claim what Chancellor Helmut Kohl called “the grace of a late birth,” the attempt to tie an unpopular policy, i.e. the support of Israel, to an unpopular duty, i.e. the remembrance of the Holocaust, will only make both more odious. This is a real danger.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not be the world’s most cerebral guy, but when he bangs away at what he calls the Holocaust myth and says that “even if it did happen,” today’s Germany cannot be held responsible for those crimes and should not be duty bound to support the “Zionist entity,” which he wants to wipe off the map of the earth, it does strike a chord in this country.

Indeed, many Germans have managed not only to dissociate the support of Israel from the legacy of the Holocaust but to turn the argument around: precisely because Germans have the responsibility to ensure this kind of thing never happens again, runs the argument, they must stand up for—the Palestinians.

This is the kind of thinking behind the Bishop’s Warsaw Ghetto comparison and the nutty behaviour of a group of Protestant pilgrims from south Germany who I recently met on a boat on Lake Galilee. They were staying, of course, with Palestinian friends in Bethlehem, and on this one-day outing to Israel they had the edgy air of people moving in enemy territory.

As the boat coasted near where Jesus of Nazareth preached the Sermon on the Mount, the pastor led his flock in singing a hymn. And the number this German man of God chose was “Morning Has Broken” by Cat Stevens alias Yussuf Islam, well known and rightly despised in Israel for his support of the terrorist organization Hamas.

A marginally more subtle argument holds that Germans—steeled, as it were, by going through the furnace of Holocaust remembrance—not only have the moral right but also the moral duty to protect Israel’s Jews from self-destructive behavior. Thus the True Teutonic Friend of Israel, legitimized precisely by the fact that his father or grandfather marched stiff-armed behind the Führer shouting “death to the Jews,” shakes his head sadly at Israel’s stiff-necked refusal to appease those who work for the final solution of the Zionist problem.

In short: historical sensibilities are no substitute for a good, old-fashioned lobby. A lobby that would have to make the point that Germany’s ties to Israel are not a burden but an asset. Israel shouldn’t just be seen as a place where German politicians go to lay wreaths, spout politically correct platitudes, and agonize about the stalled “peace process,” but where they go to learn how democracy can work in the Middle East; to affirm common values and to pinpoint common enemies; to encourage tourism, academic cooperation, and investment; to work on a strategy of enlarging the European Union’s zone of freedom, prosperity, and security through Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel to the borders of Egypt.

Or even shorter: today the Israel lobby in Germany consists of six million dead people. Israel needs six thousand living people. Amazing as it may seem, there is no pro-Israel think tank in the country. No professional outfit monitoring the scandalous anti-Israel bias of the media, especially the state-run media. No concerted effort to provide decision-makers and key media figures with the facts they need to counter this bias. No pro-Israel advocacy groups on campuses and in churches. To get an organization with this agenda up and running, German friends of Israel would need a starter capital of, say, six million euros. Less than half the €13.5 million annual salary of Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann. A fraction of the hundreds of millions paid by Siemens to bribe contractors worldwide and labor representatives at home. Or of the 900 million euros in investment insurance put up last year by the German government for firms doing business in Iran. Apart from being tax-deductible, I wonder what the return on that investment might be.

Reprinted with kindly permission of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (German Council on Foreign Relations).

The next globalization battle

The German government says it aims to review purchases of German equity by foreign government-controlled investment funds. The move comes at a time of concerns that China, Russia, or major oil-producing nations might seek to leverage their financial might into increased political power (Financial Times).

Writing in a yesterday’s Washington Post column, Sebastian Mallaby says efforts by government-controlled funds to exert financial clout will be the “next globalization battle.”

“The next globalization battle lurks over the horizon, but you can already guess its contours. It will be shaped by two revolutions in finance and business: the growth of vast government-controlled investment funds abroad and the muddled progress toward shareholder democracy in this country. Taken together, these changes will give foreign governments a say in how corporate America is run.”

Read full story.

France and USA push Darfur action

Following a conference today in Paris attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Nicolas Sarkozy called for international action to coordinate peacekeeping efforts and resolve the Darfur crisis.

Nicolas Sarkozy proffered 10 million Euros and seven thousand French troops to assist the African Union. The French leader wants his nation back on the diplomatic parquet, and he seems to have the tools, the desire, and the political moment to do so, experts say.

“It all fits together … Sarkozy and Kouchner have seized the moment,” says François Heisbourg, chairman of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and special advisor to the French think tank Fondation pour la recherche stratégique. “Six months ago this wouldn’t have worked. The Chinese would have refused. But now that Steven Spielberg has captured China’s attention, and I mean this, Beijing can see that their role in Darfur is harming their reputation, and they have wised up.”

The following article examines the roots of the Darfur conflict.

***

DARFUR: CRISIS CONTINUES

by Carin Zissis

INTRODUCTION

Three years after government-backed Arab militias known as “Janjaweed” began burning villages and conducting large-scale massacres in the Darfur region, the Sudanese authorities and rebel forces are moving at a painfully slow rate toward peace. In the meantime, a situation the U.S. State Department has called “genocide” has left some 2 million people displaced and hundreds of thousands dead. A well-meaning but ill-conceived peacekeeping mission by the African Union has failed to stop the massacres and destruction of villages. Now the UN Security Council, in spite of reluctance on the part of China and Russia, is calling for greater UN and NATO involvement in the crisis, against the wishes of the government in Khartoum.

WHAT IS THE BACKGROUND OF THE DARFUR CRISIS, AND WHO ARE THE MAIN PLAYER?

African farmers and Arabic nomads long have competed for limited resources in western Sudan’s Darfur region, particularly following a prolonged drought in 1983. Meanwhile, the Muslim government in the north was engaged in a civil war with rebels in the Christian/animist south. The Sudanese government funded Darfur’s Arab militias—which came to be known as the “Janjaweed,” or “armed horsemen”—to keep the rebels at bay. This enflamed Arab-African tensions in Darfur and, as a Council Special report says, the regime of President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir transformed a competition for scarce resources “into a large-scale violent confrontation tinged with serious racial and ethnic overtones.”

The current crisis in Darfur began in February 2003, just after the government began peace negotiations to resolve the civil war with the south. The loosely aligned Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels attacked government targets in central Darfur and demanded autonomy. After a ceasefire mediated by Chadian President Idriss Déby between the government and rebel groups fell apart in December 2003, Khartoum used the Janjaweed militias to attack the villages populated by African Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa peoples.

The SLM/A and JEM draw much of their support from these groups. Although these African ethnic groups are mostly Muslim, they practice a form of the religion that is infused with Sufism and animism, and is held in contempt by the Arab Islamic government of Khartoum. “The ethnic cleansing in Darfur is a combination of wanting to convert Muslims who are looked on as going astray and driving them off the land,” says Robert Collins, an expert in African history at the University of Santa Barbara, California.

WHAT IS THE STATE OF THE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS IN DARFUR?

Since the beginning of the conflict, almost 2 million Darfurians—a third of the region’s population—have been internally displaced as a result of the systematic destruction of villages; some 200,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Chad. An estimated 350,000 people in the region have died as a result of violence, disease, and starvation, according to a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Sexual violence is rampant, and UN Undersecretary General Jan Egeland told the Security Council in 2005 that “rape is systematically used as a weapon of warfare.” The UN World Food Program announced that, starting in May, it will be forced to make drastic cuts in food rations in Sudan because of a severe funding shortage. According to a February Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, the Janjaweed have also crossed over the border into Chad to attack civilians.

Complicating matters, says International Crisis Group Senior Advisor John Prendergast, is the fact that, over the past year and a half, the rebel groups have become fragmented under “the strain of a failing rebellion combined with active recruitment and payoff by the Khartoum regime, leading to more infighting and more ‘warlord-ism’ on the ground in Darfur in rebel-controlled territories.”

As a result of the humanitarian disaster in Darfur, human rights organizations such as HRW, the Save Darfur Coalition, and the ICG have called for greater international pressure on the Sudanese government to put an end to the massacres and destruction of villages.

WHAT IS THE INTERNATIONAL PRESENCE IN SUDAN?

The African Union (AU), a regional organization comprising fifty-three African nations, sent monitors to oversee the 2003 peace negotiations. After those talks failed in 2004, the African Union sent around 3,000 troops to protect the observers there and provide security. There are now about 7,000 AU soldiers in Darfur, which many experts say falls short of the actual security presence needed. The African Union has continued to mediate in peace negotiations—now in their seventh round after two years—between the government in Khartoum and the Darfur rebels, but the SLM/A and JEM refused to sign the AU’s latest proposed peace agreement by the April 30 deadline at talks in Abuja, Nigeria. Prendergast says the AU’s peace proposal “was so biased to the government’s [side] that it would have been tantamount to unilateral surrender” on the part of rebel groups, adding that the best hope to protect civilians would be to deploy UN forces backed by NATO logistical support.

WHAT ROLE IS THE UNITED NATIONS PLAYING IN DARFUR?

The UN Security Council has praised the AU’s efforts in Darfur, but called for a transition by September 30 to UN-led, largely African peacekeeping troops. Part of the reason for the lengthy transition, says Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Roberta Cohen, is the difficulty of moving some 20,000 troops into the remote region. Although Bashir’s government has voiced opposition to the presence of UN troops in Sudan, claiming that a UN presence would call into question the nation’s sovereignty, Prendergast predicts, with strong diplomacy and pressure, “they will accept UN forces there.”

The UN Security Council also declared on April 25 travel and financial sanctions against four Sudanese nationals accused of war crimes related to Darfur. Two of the individuals were from the rebel groups, one was a former Sudanese air force head, and the fourth was a pro-government militia leader. Initially, China and Russia opposed the Security Council resolution, but they eventually abstained.

WHAT ARE CHINA’S AND RUSSIA’S POSITIONS ON DARFUR?

“China seems in many respects quite oblivious to anything but its need for energy in regard to Sudan,” says Cohen. She attributes the failure of China and Russia to oppose Khartoum’s role in the devastation in Darfur as being related to those two countries’ economic interests in Sudan. China bought 50 percent of Sudan’s oil exports in 2005, and Russia has a history of selling arms to Khartoum’s government. But Cohen also says it is in both countries’ interests for there to be peace in Sudan. Hence, they have therefore abstained rather than vetoed UN resolutions that include the recent sanctions against Sudanese nationals.

WHAT HAS BEEN THE U.S. ROLE IN DARFUR?

In September 2004, then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said “genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the Government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility.” The United States, along with the United Kingdom, has been active in pressuring for a greater UN role in Sudan, and has also taken part in recent peace negotiations. U.S. and British officials, including U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, headed to Abuja to support AU negotiations after the latest round of peace talks foundered. And two days before recent rallies calling for increased international attention on Darfur took place in Washington, Bush met with Darfur advocates and called for an expansion of peacekeeping forces under UN leadership.

But in spite of U.S. pleas for an end to the genocide, experts note the United States will not be sending troops or making the conflict a policy priority. “It’s not going to happen because we’re already mired down in one Muslim country and the Muslim world would be furious if we took action in Sudan,” says Collins, referring to the U.S. campaign in Iraq. As Gene B. Sperling, a CFR senior fellow, recently wrote, after President Bush’s February call for doubling peacekeeping efforts in Darfur, “the White House immediately seemed to downplay Bush’s comments.” Adds Cohen: “Sudan is not a main strategic interest for the United States.”

DO EXPERTS EXPECT A RESOLUTION TO THE CRISIS?

Some are cynical about the UN’s ability to maintain peace in the region. “I really hate to say this, but a year from now—two years, three years—Darfur will be like it is today,” says Collins. But Prendergast says deployment of UN troops to protect Darfurians “would be a great advance.” Any compromise agreed upon by Khartoum must recognize Sudan’s diversity, experts say. “A peaceful future for Sudan,” Cohen says, “is going to be about power-sharing, wealth-sharing, and realizing that the country is multi-religious and multi-ethnic.”

Reprinted with kindly permission of the Council on Foreign Relations.

EU Summit success: Nicolas Sarkozy stakes his claim as power broker

After days of negotiation, European leaders bridged major policy rifts Saturday to agree to an EU treaty aimed at reforming the bloc’s administration and giving it a more prominent role global.

The International Herald Tribune notes that one of the main benefactors from the agreement is France’s new President Nicolas Sarkozy, who established himself as a continental “power broker.”

Read full story.

Special dossier: the Watergate

The Washington Post has a special dossier exploring in-depth the Watergate story, the scandal that changed American politics, with the original Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stories, the White House tapes, and videos of President Richard Nixon and key witnesses.

Read full story.

Images insolites de Jacques Chirac

Über den säkularen Staat im 21. Jahrhundert

In der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung denkt der einstige Verfassungsrichter und Mitherausgeber der Fachzeitschrift Der Staat Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde über die Bedingungen eines friedlichen Zusammenlebens der Religionen in Europa nach:

“Mithin bleibt als Grundfrage, wieweit der Islam seiner Art nach auf eine grundsätzliche Trennung von Religion und Staat und die Anerkennung des säkularisierten Staates hin vermittelbar ist.”

Essay lesen.

Priesterin eines traurigen Rituals

In der Welt tritt der Schriftsteller Burkhard Spinnen bei der Verabschiedung von Fernsehen-Moderatorin Sabine Christiansen kräftig nach.

“Frau Christiansen geht – und ich hätte jetzt also Grund zur Freude. Denn schon vor Jahren habe ich begonnen, mir öffentlich und schriftlich zu wünschen, diese Talkshow möge verschwinden, da sie nicht nur mir den Sonntagabend, sondern überdies der Republik die Freude an der Demokratie verdirbt.

Sie war die Anstandsdame eines Betriebsausflugs von hauptberuflich Verzweifelten. Während sie auf forciert seriöse ebenso wie auf nonchalante Art und Weise die Liquidierung des politischen Gesprächs betrieb, tröstete sie gleichzeitig über diese Exekution hinweg.”

Essay lesen.

Rushdies Ritterschlag, Anatomie eines Aufruhrs

Die Demonstrationen gegen Salman Rushdie in Pakistan und im Iran sind nur Inszenierungen des Volkszorn zur Ablenkung von innenpolitischen Problemen, meinen die Autoren Ranjit Hoskote und Ilija Trojanow in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung:

“Jeder kennt das Skript, die Symbolik ist allen vertraut. So muss nur noch die Logistik des Protestes zur Verfügung gestellt werden – die Lastwagen, die Megaphone, die Fahnen und Plakate. Selbst die Bühnen sind allen bekannt, die Plätze vor bestimmten Moscheen, die öffentlichen Parks. Schließlich bedarf es nur noch eines Anrufes bei den Fernsehstationen – und man hat sich mit einfachen Mitteln eine Weltöffentlichkeit gesichert. Das laute Entsetzen im Westen steigert die lokale Aufmerksamkeit. Die Organisatoren solcher Proteste verstehen sich auf die Ästhetik und die Macht des Fernsehens.”

Artikel lesen.

B’nai B’rith International outraged over United Nations Human Rights Council’s anti-Israel obsession

B’nai B’rith International (BBI) condemned the UN Human Right’s Council for its decision to designate Israel as a permanent and separate agenda item.

BBI issued a statement that it “is outraged, but not surprised, at the downward spiral the United Nations Human Rights Council has taken in perpetuating an anti-Israel agenda.”

The council also indefinitely extended the mandate of the special rapporteur, or expert, who focuses on alleged Israeli violations. The extension is in direct contrast to the more than 40 other human rights experts whose mandates are allowed to expire.

BBI President Moishe Smith said, “The Human Rights Council has become hostile terrain for Israel and those who consider Israel to be a beacon of democracy and openness. The only world body meant to protect human rights has again institutionalized a bias against the sole democracy in the Middle East. Despite our disappointment, we are taking the long view and will redouble our efforts to advocate reform at the United Nations to end this bias, for the situation as it stands now is abhorrent.”

Nuclear energy, balancing benefits and risks

 

Author: Charles D. Ferguson
Fellow for Science and Technology, Council on Foreign Relations

Increased concern over energy security and global climate change has led many people to take a fresh look at the benefits and risks of nuclear power for the United States of America and other countries.

This Council Special Report, produced in partnership with the Washington and Lee University (Virginia), provides the factual and analytical background to inform this debate.

Read the report.

World trade talks collapse

The chances that the Doha Development Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) will produce a deal before President George W. Bush leaves office have dwindled dramatically as talks between the four main parties (the United States, European Union, India, and Brazil) collapsed in Potsdam, Germany.

The negotiating parties were unable to reach compromise on reducing U.S. or European agricultural subsidies, or on terms under which developing nations like India and Brazil might lift open their economies.

Read full story.

German Cardinal Karl Lehmann: Christianity needs special status in Europe

Karl Lehmann, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic cardinal in Germany, warned against uncritical religious tolerance, in a statement angled at Germany’s rapidly increasing Muslim community.

Read full story.

Brutale Gewalt in Gaza

von Dr. h.c. Johannes Gerster

Präsident der Deutsch-Israelischen Gesellschaft

Die mit Waffen und Gewalt erzwungene vollständige Machtübernahme der radikal-islamistischen Hamas im Gazastreifen beweist, dass der israelisch-palästinensische Konflikt längst durch den Kampf islamistischer Fundamentalisten gegen die gemäßigte arabische Mehrheit überlagert, dominiert und angeheizt wird.

Gerade hatte die Arabische Liga angekündigt, dass eine Anerkennung Israels und ein Ende der Gewalt gegen Israel eine realistische politische Option sei, wenn Zug um Zug ein gemäßigter palästinensischer Staat neben Israel realisiert werde.

Dieser friedensfördernde Lösungsansatz der arabischen Welt wurde mit brutaler Gewalt durch die Hamas durchkreuzt und zunächst zunichte gemacht. Einmal mehr haben Radikale eine kleine Chance zum Ausgleich und zum Frieden umgehend im Kein erstickt.

Die Hamas hat die arabische Welt düpiert, den demokratisch gewählten Präsidenten Abbas in Gaza rechtswidrig entmachtet und die Aussichten auf einen palästinensischen Staat neben Israel in weite Ferne geschoben.

Den radikalen Kräften der Hamas und ihrem Mentor, dem iranischen Präsidenten, geht es nicht um ein Ende der Besatzung, einen Ausgleich zwischen Israelis und Palästinensern und ein friedliches Zusammenleben in der Region. Ihnen geht es ausschließlich um die Zerstörung Israels. Letztlich geht es um den Kampf des islamistischen Fundamentalismus gegen die freiheitlichen Demokratien – mittelalterlich denkende Radikale gehen mit Waffen und Gewalt gegen die Neuzeit vor. Palästinenser fliehen vor Palästinensern aus dem Gazastreifen und bitten Israel um Hilfe.

Mancher eilfertige selbsternannte Nahostexperte sollte seine unverhältnismäßige Kritik an der einzigen Demokratie in Nahost, an Israel, selbstkritisch überdenken.

Wir setzen auf das Quartett: auf die EU, die USA, Russland und die UNO. Das Übel muss an der Wurzel gepackt werden und diese ist der Iran, der Hauptfinanzier und Initiator radikal-islamistischer Gruppen.

Die freiheitlich orientierte Welt muss die Zeit unausgegorener und nichts sagender Resolutionen überwinden und dem Iran effektiver Grenzen setzen und deren Einhaltung durchsetzen. Sonst fallen die nächsten Dominosteine: Durch eine Machtübernahme der Hamas auch in der Westbank und der Hisbollah im Libanon. Auch dort will der Iran die gemäßigten Kräfte ausschalten und Staatengebilde nach dem Modell der Scharia mit Gewalt durchsetzen.

Wer wort- und tatenlos diesem Treiben zusieht, macht sich schuldig.

Iran: „Wir unterstützen Hisbollah und Hamas“

„Wir unterstützen Hisbollah und Hamas; das stimmt. Aber diese beiden sind keine Terrorgruppen. Es sind zwei Gruppen, die ihr eigenes Land verteidigen.“ Dies hat der Vorsitzende von Irans Oberstem Nationalen Sicherheitsrat, Ali Larijani, dem US-Nachrichtenmagazin Newsweek in einem heute erschienenen Interview mitgeteilt.

Für die Unterstützung, die die amerikanische Politik dem palästinensischen Präsidenten Mahmoud Abbas zukommen lässt, hat der Iraner kein Verständnis: „Mit solchen Schritten bevormunden die Amerikaner die Palästinenser nur. Haben die Amerikaner irgendein Wunder gesehen, dass bei der Unterstützung Abbas herausgekommen wäre? Wir haben immer gesagt, dass die Hamas als Volksbewegung von uns unterstützt wird.“

Gleichzeitig zeigte sich Larijani gegenüber Newsweek unbeirrt darin, dass sein Land sein Nuklearprogramm fortsetzen wird. Zu den Anstrengungen der Amerikaner und Europäer, über den UN-Sicherheitsrat Sanktionen gegen den Iran zu verhängen, meinte er: „Sie können eine weitere Resolution verabschieden, und wir werden einen weiteren, weitergehenden Schritt vollziehen.“

© Yedioth Ahronot, 22.06.2007

Vietnam President at White House

Vietnam’s President Nguyen Minh Triet meets President George W. Bush in Washington today, the first visit of a Vietnamese president to the White House since the Vietnam War.

The talks come amid criticisms by U.S. lawmakers about Vietnam’s human rights record.

The Freedom House examines Vietnam’s human rights violations.

Read full report.

The rise of China and the interests of the U.S.

by Carl Minzner

International Affairs Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations

While the grinding Iraq war currently dominates the attention of the American public and government, China’s steady rise in economic and political influence is the single event that will reshape international politics in the 21st century. Sooner or later, American officials will turn their attention to confronting this issue.

There are two key points to keep in mind. 

First, China’s rising influence is natural.

It is a country of 1.3 billion people. Until 1800, it comprised a third of world economic output. China’s rapid growth over the last 30 years reflects a return toward this long-term historical equilibrium. China’s development, as well as that of the rest of Asia, will necessarily alter the preeminent geopolitical position that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War, and that Western nations have enjoyed since the 19th century. The operational question is not whether we like it or not. It is how we adapt. 

Second, China’s leaders are not seeking a worldwide confrontation with the United States.

Their key priorities are domestic. The single issue that keeps them up late at night is the fear that the growing discontent of rural farmers and migrants could metastasize into a revolutionary force that topples them from power. All of the formidable energies of the Chinese party-state — the tough police controls, the focus on rapid economic development, and the new emphasis on addressing the needs of the rural poor — are directed at warding off such an event.   

This is not to ignore the existence of real and important conflicts between the United States and China.

Tensions over Taiwan remain. Chinese officials continue to violate their own laws and treaty commitments granting citizens religious liberty and free speech, generating recriminations on the part of the American government and public. But China today, unlike the Soviet Union of the 1950s, is not seeking to challenge the very foundations of the international political and economic order that have been established since World War II. 

So what does this mean for U.S. policy toward China? 

First, we need to view China not as a threat, but as a challenge.

We should address Chinese competition, not through economic protectionism, but rather through sustained investment in the education of America’s children. We should address increased Chinese political influence, not through bellicose unilateralism or timid isolationism, but rather through expanding existing institutions to give Chinese authorities a role in shaping the international order, and bear corresponding responsibilities in handling international crises such as North Korea and Sudan.   

We should also directly address Chinese violations of human rights standards and denials of political liberties, not through willful ignorance or high-pitched denunciations, but through careful and consistent emphasis on the extent to which they fuel the social unrest Chinese officials so desperately wish to avoid. The ability of the United States to remake any country in a democratic mold by compulsion is limited, if not nonexistent. These efforts often result in a nationalist backlash and rejection of the very democratic principles which the United States espouses, particularly when American officials themselves are forced to compromise these principles for the sake of their geopolitical interests.

But the concepts of rule of law and representative government continue to hold appeal for many in China, particularly those who appreciate the extent to which many of China’s internal troubles are rooted in a fossilized political system that has failed to keep pace with the rapid economic and social changes of the past three decades. 

We should support calls for positive reform, and in particular emphasize that citizen experimentation with these concepts does not represent American efforts to impose a foreign ideology, but rather an ongoing search by Chinese citizens themselves for means to resolve the core problems of governance, social unrest, and violations of citizen rights that confront China. 

Second, the United States must reaffirm its commitment to international norms and multilateral institutions as a means to protect our interests.

American officials do not want to see China’s growing economic and political muscle funneled into creating free-trade zones and political alliances that exclude the United States. Out of simple national self-interest, American officials should seek a China that is firmly anchored in multilateral institutions and processes. But realizing that goal requires American officials to make serious commitments to strengthening these institutions now. 

If American authorities undermine our commitments under international human rights or WTO treaties now in favor of short-term political gain, we limit our own ability to invoke them in our defense in the future, when our relative influence may be weaker, and our need to resort to them greater.  

Third, we must deal with China in a bipartisan manner.

American politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, have all too often viewed China as a means to score political points with narrow domestic constituencies, instead of trying to work together across the aisle to formulate a broader strategic vision. One can do that with small nations. One can not with a country that represents a fifth of humanity.

Reprinted with kindly permission of The Council on Foreign Relations.

Hamas takeover of Gaza: implications for Israel

The Hamas military takeover of Gaza is a major development in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but exactly how it will play out is unclear.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) looks at the implications for Israel and the region.

Read full story.

Le traité simplifié débattu par les 27 États de l’Union européenne à Bruxelles

Un traité simplifié, en lieu et place d’une constitution, pourrait-il sauver l’Union européenne de la paralysie institutionnelle?

Nicolas Sarkozy et Angela Merkel s’évertueront à convaincre les 25 autres membres de l’Union européenne les 21 et 22 juin 2007 à Bruxelles.

Depuis le double non français et néerlandais, la construction européenne est en jachère et le passage à 27 a considérablement ralenti les prises de décision.

Si la Grande-Bretagne réticente et la Pologne qui menace de mettre son veto acceptaient finalement ce texte, le traité simplifié pourrait éventuellement débloquer la situation.

Lire l’article.