Month: August 2008

STILL NECESSARY TO REVIEW RELATIONS BETWEEN AZERBAIJAN AND TURKEY: DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTE

TREND News Agency
Aug 29 2008
Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan, Baku, 29 August / Trend News corr. I.Alizade / The Human
Rights Institute of the Azerbaijani National Academy of Sciences
believes that if Armenia recognizes independence of North Cyprus
Turkic Republic, relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey may strain.

"At present the Armenian Parliament is developing a document to
recognize independence of North Cyprus," Rovshan Mustafayev, the
director of the Institute, said during the discussions on situation
in South Caucasus on 29 August.

Cyprus was divided into two parts after the Turkish-Greek war. None of
countries, except Turkey, officially recognized independence of North
Cyprus, where Turkish people reside. The international organizations,
including the European Union (EU), recognized independence of Cyprus
Republic, where Greek people reside.

According to Mustafayev, seven of eight versions of draft law was
developed and it is still unknown which of them will be put for
discussions.

"Processes are developing in the direction of Armenia’s recognition
of North Cyprus’s independence. However, discussions on this matter
are hidden from the public, because public’s opinion does not interest
anybody," the head of the institute said.

Mustafayev believes that necessity has aroused to review relations
between Azerbaijan and Turkey. Thus, official Ankara’s some steps
evolved questions, which should be answered.

"The United States tries to pull out Armenia out of Russia’s
influence. Washington wants to carry out this task through
Turkey. Therefore, Ankara has become more active recently and began
to establish relations with Armenia. Presently, the main issue is
its level of influence on relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey,"
Mustafayev stressed.

According to Mustafayev, situation is strained in South
Caucasus. Scenario of 1945 may be repeated to reduce tensions:
"In that case, the United States bombed Japan. Currently, the United
States may bomb Iran to prevent the Russian aggression. It is not a
favorable version for Azerbaijan, because Azerbaijan is located in
an intermediate zone."

HOW TO MANAGE SAVAGERY
Bret Stephens

Commentary
http://www.commentarymagazine .com/viewarticle.cfm/how-to-manage-savagery-12507
Aug 29 2008
NY

"Islam has bloody borders." So wrote Samuel Huntington in "The Clash of
Civilizations?," his 1993 Foreign Affairs article later expanded (minus
the question mark) into a best-selling book. Huntington argued that,
eclipsing past eras of national and ideological conflict, "the battle
lines of the future" would be drawn along the "fault lines between
civilizations." Here, according to Huntington, was where current and
coming generations would define the all-important "us" versus "them."

At the time of its writing, "The Clash of Civilizations?" had, beyond
the virtues of pithiness and historical sweep, something to recommend
it on purely empirical grounds. It seemed especially plausible as
applied to the "crescent-shaped Islamic bloc" from the Maghreb to
the East Indies.

In the Balkans, for example, Orthodox Serbs were at the throats
of Bosnian and later Kosovar Muslims. In Africa, Muslims were
either skirmishing or at war with Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, and
Ethiopia. In the Caucasus, there was all-out war between Orthodox
Russia and Muslim Chechnya, all-out war between Christian Armenia and
Muslim Azerbaijan, and violent skirmishes between Orthodox Ossetia
and Muslim Ingushetia.

In the Middle East, some 500,000 U.S. troops had intervened to expel
Iraq from Kuwait. Israel had just endured several years of the first
Palestinian intifada, soon to be followed by a fraudulent peace process
leading, in turn, to a second and far bloodier intifada. Further to
the east, Pakistan and India were at perpetual daggers drawn over
Kashmir. There were tensions–sometimes violent–between the Hindu
majority and the large Muslim minority in India, just as there were
between the Christian minority and the Muslim majority in Indonesia.

For Huntington, all this was of a piece with a pattern dating at
least as far back as the battle of Poitiers in 732, when Charles
Martel turned back the advancing Umayyads and saved Europe for
Christianity. Nor was the pattern likely to end any time soon. "The
centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is
unlikely to decline," he wrote. To the contrary: "It could become
more virulent."

As predictions go, Huntington’s landmark thesis seemed in many ways to
have been borne out by subsequent events. Long before 9/11, and long
before George W. Bush came to office, anti-American hostility within
the Muslim–and, particularly, the Arab–world was plainly on the
rise. So was terrorist activity directed at U.S. targets. Meanwhile,
the advent of satellite TV brought channels like al-Jazeera and
Hizballah’s al-Manar to millions of Muslim homes and public places,
offering their audience a robust diet of anti-American, anti-Israel,
and often anti-Semitic "news," propaganda, and Islamist indoctrination.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that Muslim reaction to the
attacks of September 11, 2001 tended toward the euphoric–in striking
confirmation, it would seem, of Huntington’s bold thesis. And that
thesis would seem to be no less firmly established today, when opinion
polls show America’s "favorability ratings" plummeting even in Muslim
countries once relatively well-disposed toward us: in Turkey, for
example, descending from 52 percent in 1999 to 12 percent in 2008,
and in Indonesia from 75 percent to 37 percent in the same period
(according to the Pew Global Survey). These findings are all the more
depressing in light of the massive humanitarian assistance provided
to Indonesia by the U.S. after the 2004 tsunami. The same might be
said of Pakistan where, despite similarly critical U.S. assistance
after the 2005 earthquake, already low opinions of the U.S. have sunk
still further.

Nor is the phenomenon of "Muslim rage" directed against America
alone. In Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France and
Germany–countries with widely varying foreign policies toward, and
colonial histories in, the Muslim world–terrorist plots, terrorist
attacks, spectacular murders, and mass rioting have made vivid the
gulf that separates embittered and often radicalized Muslim minorities
from the societies around them. Even in tiny, inoffensive Belgium,
whose government was among the most vocal in opposing the war in
Iraq and has bent over backward to respect the sensitivities of the
Muslim community, the entire Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek,
according to the Flemish newspaper Het Volk, has been turned into a
"breeding ground for thousands of jihad candidates."

_____________

And yet even as these trends unfolded, and continue to unfold, a second
and almost opposite set of trends can be perceived today. Contrary to
Huntington’s forecast, much of world conflict is now overwhelmingly
characterized by fighting and competition not between or among
civilizations but within them. And nowhere is this truer than in the
Muslim world.

Look again at the peripheries of the Islamic crescent where Huntington
perceived a collision course between Islam and the West. In the
Balkans, NATO intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo secured
Muslim populations and ultimately ended the Serbian regime of Slobodan
Milosevic. In Africa, U.S. diplomatic mediation helped to bring an
end to the 22-year second Sudanese civil war and to initiate de-facto
autonomy–with the ultimate goal of independence–for that country’s
largely Christian south. In Israel, the second intifada with its
wave of suicide bombings was all but stopped cold by a combination
of aggressive counterinsurgency operations and the building of a
separation fence.

In the Caucasus, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended with
a ceasefire that has held to this day, while Chechnya was brought
to heel by a brutal military campaign directed by Russian President
Vladimir Putin. In Kashmir, there has been no direct fighting between
India and Pakistan; the head of the main jihadist group lamented this
past July that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had "murdered the
Kashmir cause." Even as far afield as Mindanao in the Philippines,
the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement has been crippled by a
combination of Filipino and American arms.

True, not all the wars of the Islamic periphery have ended: Hamas’s
Kassam rockets continue to fly from Gaza into Israel, and Hizballah,
itself an Iranian proxy, has fully re-armed following the summer 2006
Lebanese war. In January 2007, Ethiopia invaded neighboring Somalia
to depose a Taliban-like regime. Bombay was hit with a Madrid-style
bombing attack on its commuter rails in 2006. Thailand’s Muslim
minority has been restive and violent.

Remarkably, however, the wars that chiefly roil the Islamic world
today are no longer at its periphery. They are at the center, and they
pit Muslims against other Muslims. The genocide in Darfur is being
perpetrated by a regime that is every bit as Muslim–and black–as
its victims. The Palestinians went from intifada to civil war: in
2006 and 2007, nearly as many Palestinians died violently at the
hands of other Palestinians as at the hands of Israelis. In Lebanon,
there have been bloody clashes this year among Shiites, Sunnis, and
Druze. Last year, the Lebanese government had to send troops into
Palestinian refugee camps to suppress an insurrectionary attempt by
a Syrian-sponsored terrorist group.

It does not end there. Saudi Arabia has been under attack by al
Qaeda since 2003. In November 2005, Jordan suffered devastating
suicide bombings at three Amman hotels in which nearly all the
victims were, like their murderers, Sunni Muslims. In Afghanistan,
a Muslim government led by Hamid Karzai–a Pashtun–fights an Islamist
rebellion by Taliban remnants and their allies, also mostly Pashtun. In
Pakistan, the axis of conflict has shifted from the east to the west,
where sizable areas are under the control of Islamist militants; in
2007 alone, some 1,500 Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks,
former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto notably among them.

Then there is Iraq. Though Americans naturally focus on the more than
4,000 U.S. servicemen killed so far since the country was liberated
in April 2003, that figure pales in comparison with the number of
Iraqis killed in inter- and intra-sectarian violence: Sunnis against
Shiites and Kurds, Sunnis against Sunnis, Shiites against Sunnis,
Shiites against Shiites. Cumulatively, the number of civilian deaths
since early 2006, when sectarian fighting got under way in earnest, now
stands at just over 100,000 (according to the Brookings Institution).

All this serves as a useful reminder of another significant fact. In
the years immediately prior to 9/11, non-Muslims tended to be the
likeliest targets of terrorism. In recent years, Muslims themselves
have overwhelmingly been their co-religionists’ primary victims. In
2007, of the nearly 8,000 deaths due to terrorism in the Middle East,
only a handful were Israeli. Similarly, of the roughly 270 suicide
bombings in 2007, some 240 took place in predominantly Muslim
countries. Nearly 100 mosques were also the targets of terrorist
attack, many at the hands of Muslims.

_____________

Taking the long view, one might note that intra-Islamic feuding is as
old as the religion itself. Of Muhammad’s immediate successors–the
"righteous caliphs," according to Sunni tradition–the first, Abu Bakr,
may have been poisoned; the next three are all known to have been
assassinated, with the murder of the third caliph (Othman) resulting
in the schism from which the Shiite branch of Islam emerged. The
Abassid revolt destroyed the Umayyad caliphate in the 8th century;
the early 9th century was marked by civil war between the sons of the
fifth Abassid caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. Al Qaeda itself has ancient
Islamic antecedents: the 8th-century Kharajites, for instance, were
notorious for their extreme puritanism, frequent recourse to violence,
and the belief that they could declare their Muslim opponents to be
infidels and treat them accordingly.

To be sure, endless feuding is hardly unique to Islamic civilization:
the history of the West is also one of intense competition, bitter
conflict, and outbursts of religious fanaticism. On the whole, though,
these conflicts have dissipated and evanesced as the West has almost
universally adopted democratic forms of governance. By contrast,
Islam’s foundational patterns not only persist into the present day
but in many ways have intensified.

There have been devastating civil wars in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq,
and Yemen, and an even more terrible war between Iran and Iraq. Even
a partial list of prominent political assassinations in the Muslim
world since World War II runs to over 100 names. It includes two prime
ministers and a president of Egypt; two presidents and a prime minister
of Bangladesh; three prime ministers and a president of Iran; a king
and two prime ministers of Jordan; two presidents, a president-elect,
a prime minister, and a former prime minister of Lebanon; a president
of Syria; a king and two prime ministers of Jordan; a king and a former
prime minister of Iraq; a president, a prime minister, and former prime
minister of Pakistan; a king of Saudi Arabia. And these are just the
successful attempts. The list of coups in the Muslim world is about
as long. In Syria alone there have been no fewer than nine since 1949.

Several explanations have been offered for this history of
violence. There is the absence of democracy, which forecloses
opportunities for non-violent political change and pushes most forms
of dissent into the mosque. There is the oil curse, which allows
states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to finance expensive wars, buy
political support, sustain huge sclerotic bureaucracies, and prevent
the diversification and modernization of their economies. There is
the endemic tribalism of Muslim, and particularly Arab, societies,
and the values that go with it: the claims of kinship, the premium on
familial honor, the submission to established hierarchies, suspicion
of those outside the clan. There is the moral abdication of the Muslim
intellectual class, which, with some notable exceptions, fell prey to
nearly every bad idea that came its way, from fascism to socialism
to third-worldism. And there is the history of Islam itself, which
has made a virtue of military conquest, dealt sharply with heretics,
and, until the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by Turkey’s Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, typically combined political with religious authority.

There is also the fact that European colonial regimes overstayed their
welcome in their Middle Eastern possessions, with the effect that
more or less liberal movements like the Egyptian Wafd came to be seen
as stooges of the West, incapable of achieving national goals through
nonviolent means. Partly as a result of this failure, the Muslim world
soured on liberalism before it ever really tasted it, and traditional
liberal parties and policies were discredited in favor of more radical
alternatives: the Muslim Brotherhood, the violent Arab nationalisms
of the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the
"Free Officers" in Egypt, Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and
so on. Despite the manifest failings of these movements, and the
triumph of liberal politics from Mexico City to Warsaw to Seoul,
liberalism has never really recaptured its good name in the Muslim
world beyond a handful of courageous individuals.

Exactly how to weigh the relative importance of these factors is
hard to say; plainly they are mutually reinforcing. And while Muslim
and especially Arab societies are not alone in suffering from them,
they have come together in a unique way in those societies to produce
a culture of perpetual failure and worsening crisis.

_____________

Should this have been more apparent to Huntington when he wrote
"The Clash of Civilizations?" Perhaps. It may have been obscured,
in part, by what later turned out to be the Muslim world’s own
version of a holiday from history. The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988,
and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in the following year seemed to
cool Iran’s revolutionary ardor. Civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen were
brought to an end, leaving most existing Arab regimes as entrenched
as ever. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the Middle East was
no longer a cold-war battleground. Socialism lost favor, and some
Middle Eastern regimes began expressing an interest in reforming
their economies. From the outside, at least, one could almost begin
imagining a "New Middle East," as Israel’s Shimon Peres did with
consummate naiveté in a 1993 book.

But the Soviet (and Yugoslav) collapse had another important
consequence: it reshaped the map of the Muslim world by bringing newly
independent post-Soviet states into its fold. Some independence
movements, notably in Chechnya and Bosnia, took on an Islamic
coloration. Elsewhere, a pan-Islamic consciousness, which had already
gained considerable momentum with the 1979 Iranian revolution and
the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was
spreading rapidly. It was aided immeasurably by advances in mass
communication and by the worldwide establishment of thousands of
Saudi-funded madrassas preaching an inflexible version of desert
Islam. If, previously, the very idea of an "Islamic civilization"
would have seemed at most a remote abstraction to most Muslims living
within it, in the 90’s it became at least possible to imagine this
as an expression not only of common religious identity but also of
shared political aspirations.

Most deeply invested in the concept were the Islamist radicals for
whom the abolition of the caliphate represented not the passing
of an outdated institution but a historical calamity. To them, the
90’s presented its own set of opportunities. Unable to dislodge the
"apostate regimes" of the Middle East through terrorist campaigns, they
decided to focus on dislodging their patron–the United States–from
the region.

The idea of killing large numbers of Westerners, particularly
Americans, had the additional advantage of being both plausible and
popular. Plausible, because the Reagan administration’s precipitous
withdrawal from Beirut after the 1983 bombings of our Marine barracks
and embassy, followed a decade later by the Clinton administration’s
equally precipitous withdrawal from Somalia, suggested a superpower
easily frightened. And popular because the U.S. really was broadly
detested throughout the Muslim world, not least on account of its
support for the selfsame apostate regimes that were detested by
the radicals.

The strategy of an "escalating sequence" of terrorist attacks on
American targets was explicitly laid out by the jihadist theoretician
Abu Bakr Naji (the name is almost certainly a pseudonym) in a
document, The Management of Savagery, published on the Internet in
2004. Predicated on the idea that everyone loves a winner, it was not,
in its own terms, a bad strategy.

In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration
and other governments had been quick to brand Osama bin Laden as
an outcast among Muslims. But the overwhelming weight of evidence
suggested differently. There were large public demonstrations
of support for bin Laden in the Philippines and Indonesia. In the
Muslim areas of Thailand, the name "Osama" became suddenly popular
among newborn boys and girls, according to an October 2001 report in
the Hindustan Times. Portraits of bin Laden were hot-selling items
from Bangladesh to Nigeria. A poll found that fully 42 percent of
Kuwaitis, whose country the U.S. had liberated only a decade earlier,
considered bin Laden a "freedom fighter." Among Palestinians, 9/11
made bin Laden "the most popular figure in the West Bank and Gaza,
second only to Arafat," according to a Fatah leader in Nablus.

Al Qaeda’s popularity would not soon fade. In 2004, the Pew Global
Survey found 55 percent of Jordanians and 65 percent of Pakistanis
holding a favorable view of bin Laden. Nor was al Qaeda slow to
capitalize on its stardom. By 2002, European intelligence agencies
were reporting a sharp uptick in the organization’s recruitment
efforts. More worrisomely, al Qaeda was able to transform itself
from a group into a movement. Some jihadist outfits, like Abu
Musab al Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal-Jihad and the Algerian Salafist
Group for Preaching and Combat, swore loyalty oaths directly to bin
Laden. Others, including Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, began imitating
al Qaeda’s methods by attacking prominent Western targets. Cells
sprang up in Gaza. Al-Qaeda "wannabes" murdered 52 people in the
London bombings of July 2005 and plotted to murder the prime minister
of Canada.

But it was the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that, as Naji
wrote in The Management of Savagery, had the most galvanizing effect
on would-be jihadists. Even before the U.S. toppled the Taliban,
the radical televangelist Sheik Yussuf al-Qaradawi had decreed:
"Islamic law says that if a Muslim country is attacked, the other
Muslim countries must help it, with their souls and their money,
until it is liberated." His call was widely heeded. By late 2006,
al Qaeda could count on as many as 5,000 to 10,000 active members
in Iraq, many of whom (including nearly all the senior leadership)
had come from abroad. And while they were never the major part of
the Sunni insurgency that gripped the country until last year, they
accounted for an estimated 90 percent of all suicide bombings.

Late 2006 was also the moment when it became at least conceivable
that Naji’s strategy, which foresaw the creation of "liberated zones"
under the dominion of al-Qaeda-like groups, might actually succeed on
the ground. Al Qaeda in Iraq had largely "liberated" Anbar province
through an unbridled campaign of terror against other Sunnis. It had
also pursued a policy of deliberate carnage against Iraq’s Shiites,
with the intent, and effect, of creating all-but ungovernable chaos
in the country. In the United States, the report of the Iraq Study
Group, headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, recommended that no
more U.S. troops be committed to Iraq, while the Democratic party,
which had largely supported the initial decision to invade Iraq,
began issuing increasingly hectic calls for immediate withdrawal.

Had those calls become U.S. policy, Naji’s strategy might
have been vindicated. The "fall of prestige of America" that he
prognosticated would have accelerated dramatically throughout the
Muslim world. Precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would have been
seen by jihadists and their fellow travelers in a similar light to
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988–as proof that it was
possible to defeat a superpower, and as a harbinger of their enemies’
complete rout. Al Qaeda would have had every incentive to apply the
Iraq model–the "management of savagery"–to other Muslim states,
particularly weaker secular states like Jordan, deemed guilty of
"apostasy." And al Qaeda’s own prestige would have been hugely
boosted, offering a large pool of new recruits to replenish those
who had been lost.

_____________

That, however, is not how matters have turned out, at least so
far. President Bush pushed ahead with his "surge" strategy, under
a new commanding officer using tried and true counterinsurgency
tactics. Its effects were soon felt. Al Qaeda’s ranks were decimated,
and the flow of foreign fighters dried up.

In late 2007, the U.S. military captured letters from two of al Qaeda’s
"emirs" in Iraq. One of them appraised his situation thus:

There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the [Sunni]
tribes changed course 360 [sic] degrees. . . . Many of our fighters
quit and some of them joined the deserters. . . . As a result of that
the number of fighters dropped down to 20 or less. We were mistreated,
cheated, and betrayed by some of our brothers who used to be part of
the jihadi movement, therefore we must not have mercy on those traitors
until they come back to the right side or get eliminated completely.

The second emir offered similar testimony:

The Islamic State of Iraq [al Qaeda] is faced with an extraordinary
crisis, especially in al-Anbar province. Al Qaeda’s expulsion from
Anbar created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created
panic, fear, and the unwillingness to fight.

Nor was it only in Iraq that al Qaeda found itself on the run. In
summer 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate warned that the terrorist
group was once again in a position to strike the U.S. Yet less than
a year later, CIA Director Michael Hayden offered a strikingly
different assessment to the Washington Post. "On balance, we’re
doing pretty well," he said. "Near-strategic defeat of al Qaeda in
Iraq. Near-strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant
setbacks for al Qaeda globally . . . as a lot of the Islamic world
pushes back on [its] form of Islam." Polls found declining levels of
support for al Qaeda and other Islamist groups in several places in the
Muslim world; in Pakistan, Islamist parties were trounced in February’s
parliamentary elections. Key al-Qaeda leaders were also killed in
Predator strikes in the Pakistani hinterland bordering Afghanistan.

In short, al Qaeda’s star has dimmed considerably, and it is important
to consider the reasons why. Though there can be little question that
the surge accounts for a large part of the explanation, it is equally
true that the surge would not have succeeded without the support of
the very Sunnis who, until 2007, had provided sanctuary and support
to men like Zarqawi and his minions. This switch is in turn explained
by al Qaeda’s barbaric treatment of ordinary Sunnis and their tribal
leaders during the period of the "Anbar caliphate."

And that raises a question: why did al Qaeda put itself "in a state
of war with the masses in the region" (in Naji’s words) rather than
using those masses as allies or pawns in their war against America
and the so-called apostate governments? The answer, it turns out,
is inscribed in the very nature of the jihadist movement.

_____________

"All existing so-called Muslim societies are also Jahili societies,"
wrote Sayyid Qutb, al Qaeda’s intellectual godfather, in his 1964
book Milestones. By "Jahili societies," Qutb was referring to the
pre-Islamic, pagan world of Arabia that lived in "ignorance of divine
guidance." Put simply, Qutb, his fellow travelers, and his spiritual
heirs were, and are, not merely at war with the modern world, as
defined by liberal democratic government and Western social mores. They
are also murderously inclined toward "heretical Muslims," particularly
Shiites. They object violently to Muslim attempts to fashion a kind
of compromise modernity between Western and Islamic norms. They seek
to overthrow secular Muslim regimes like Indonesia and Jordan, and
religious Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia that maintain relations
with the West.

They are also–crucially–at war with the pre-modern world: traditional
tribal societies in which authority is handed down from father to
son and in which Islam is a religion and not a binding legal code or
political ideology. Typically, Muslim regimes have been careful to
accommodate their tribes, plying them with money, government jobs,
small arms, and other tokens of honor, and above all by allowing them
to govern their internal affairs. This was (generally) true even in
Saddam’s Iraq. To the jihadists, however, tribal structures represent
a twofold political challenge: first, they instill a powerful sense
of local identity as opposed to a strictly pan-Islamic one; second,
their systems of patronage and charity get in the way of the jihadists’
agenda of radical social change.

It was this anti-tribalist attitude, combined with the utter savagery
with which the jihadists put it into practice, that proved to be al
Qaeda’s undoing in Iraq. And that was not the only manner of its
undoing. Precisely because of the post-9/11 transformation from a
group to a movement, al Qaeda’s leadership lost control of what in
the West would be called message discipline.

"I repeat the warning against separating from the masses, whatever
the danger," wrote Ayman al-Zawahiri to Zarqawi in an intercepted
2005 letter, stressing the need to avoid killing other Muslims,
including Shiites. Zarqawi ignored the advice. The mass killings
of fellow Muslims reversed the popular support previously garnered
through attacks on Western targets. Worse, al Qaeda picked fights
with countries that might have otherwise looked the other way at
its activities. As late as early 2002, for example, Saudi Arabia’s
interior minister, Prince Nayef, was flatly denying that al Qaeda
even existed in his country. Four years later, after spectacular
al-Qaeda attacks on the kingdom, the same prince was threatening to
"cut off the tongues" of bin Laden and Zawahiri.

Most significantly, al Qaeda’s failures and reversals began to sow
deeper doubts about its basic purposes. The breakthrough came with
the publication of The Document of Right Guidance for Jihad Activity
in Egypt and the World, a systematic refutation of al Qaeda’s theology
and methods by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, a/k/a "Dr. Fadl." The importance
of this work derived from the standing of its author. Dr. Fadl was
the first "emir" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the author of the 1988
Foundations for the Preparation of Holy War, a bible among jihadists.

There are various theories as to why Dr. Fadl–now imprisoned in
Egypt–wrote the book; these range from a long and bitter personal
feud with Zawahiri to coercion by the Egyptian government to a genuine
ideological volte face. Whatever the case, its chief significance
lies in its insistence that jihadist activities must be subordinate
to ordinary moral considerations. The jihadi, Dr. Fadl writes, cannot
steal for the sake of jihad, or murder Muslim civilians, religious
minorities, or foreign tourists, or seek the overthrow of existing
Muslim governments, or cavalierly decree the apostasy of others, or
disobey his parents. ("We find parents," Dr. Fadl states severely,
"who only learn that their son has gone to fight jihad after his
picture is published in the newspaper as a fatality or a prisoner.")

Even now, after his "conversion," Dr. Fadl is no one’s idea of a
modern secular thinker. Rather, his manifesto rejects the inherent
radicalism of jihadism in favor of more orthodox conservative values,
a return to a kind of Islamic mean. More than that, it is a frank
recognition of reality–namely, that the jihadist fervor of men like
Zawahiri can only lead Muslims down one dead-end street after another.

_____________

How widespread is this recognition? That remains to be seen,
as do its consequences. As Max Boot has noted in COMMENTARY,1 it
takes neither a large organization nor particularly deep pockets
to perpetrate devastating terrorist attacks, and terrorist groups
have shown considerable resilience even in the face of the most
devastating setbacks. Furthermore, although al Qaeda may have been
gravely wounded in the past year, Hizballah has grown considerably
stronger and more confident. The Bush administration kept its nerve
in Iraq, and may finally have won the war. But it seems to have lost
its nerve vis-a-vis Iran’s quest to become a nuclear power. Israel
defeated Yasir Arafat’s second intifada, but it may soon be beset by
a third one, this time planned and instigated by Hamas.

Still, al Qaeda’s decline offers a kind of portrait-in-miniature of a
civilization that seems perpetually to be collapsing in on itself. Here
is a movement in which suicide–that is, self-destruction–is treated
as the ultimate act of self-assertion. A movement that sees itself
as an Islamic vanguard, leading the way toward a genuine Muslim umma,
but is permanently at war with the Muslim communities it inhabits. A
movement whose attacks beyond the Islamic world have mainly had the
effect of accelerating the very forces by which it is sealing its
own fate. To use an inexact astronomical analogy, this is a movement
with the quality of a supernova: even as an envelope of superheated
gas rapidly expands outward, its core is compressing and ultimately
implodes.

A similar pattern played out with the pan-Arabist regimes of the
1950’s and 60’s. And the same forces are at work today in Iran, where
the regime’s outward-directed, "revolutionary" activities–from
supporting Hamas to engineering Hizballah’s de-facto takeover
of Lebanon to developing nuclear weapons–seem almost purposely
designed to counterbalance the weight of the regime’s manifold
domestic discontents.

As for how the United States and its allies should attempt to deal with
this new reality, one temptation is simply to stay away, on the theory
that no good can come from putting our hands in such a mess. This is
roughly the view of the libertarian and paleoconservative Right, and
perhaps a majority of the Left. But the view hardly bears discussion:
all mention of Israel aside, access to Middle Eastern energy resources
is a vital American interest and will almost certainly remain so for
decades. The Muslim world is also inextricably a part of the Western
one, particularly in Europe. Nor is the global terrorist threat likely
to go away even if al Qaeda does. The possibility that a regime that
sponsors or supports terrorists might be in a position to supply them
with weapons of mass destruction is a direct threat to us.

A second option, associated with the so-called realist school,
contends that with rare exceptions, the U.S. should deal with the
Muslim world more or less as it is, without seeking to change it.2
This is a view that has much to recommend it–at least in the hands
of a master diplomatic practitioner. But Metternichs are hard to come
by, and in the hands of lesser statesmen, realism easily slides into
passive acquiescence in an intolerable status quo–or into intolerable
changes to it. Witness the readiness of Colin Powell, as chairman of
the joint chiefs of staff during the first Bush administration, to
accept Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 as a fait accompli.

A third view, shared to varying degrees by neoconservatives and liberal
internationalists, is that the U.S. and the West have no choice but
actively to seek domestic reforms in Muslim countries. Needless to say,
such a course is fraught with risks and often prone to mishandling,
overreaching, and failure. But some version of it is the only approach
that can, if not heal the pathologies of the Muslim world, then at
least ameliorate and contain them so that they do not end up arriving
unbidden on our doorstep, as they did one morning in September 2001.

This is not the place to lay out precisely how the U.S. might go about
pursuing such a course with greater success than it has achieved thus
far. But a few points are worth noting in light of the experience
detailed above:

â~@¢ First, while we should pursue democratic (and economic) openings
wherever we realistically can do so, our overarching and primary
aim is to make the Muslim world unsafe for radicalism–whether that
radicalism is of the Islamist, pan-Arabist, or Baathist variety. This
means a policy of unyielding opposition to groups like Hamas and the
Muslim Brotherhood and to the Iranian and Syrian regimes, despite
growing calls to come to terms with all of them. But we must also
come to terms with the limits of what intervention in Muslim politics
can plausibly achieve. In particular, we need to be attentive to the
fact that Western-style political or social prescriptions can often
be counterproductive.3

â~@¢ Second, the experience of the so-called Anbar Awakening of tribal
leaders against al Qaeda is an instructive reminder that the Muslim
world does not, as was widely asserted in the wake of September 11,
divide merely between a handful of extremists and a "vast majority"
of moderates who can easily be rallied to our side. Instead, Muslim
societies typically divide into at least three significant blocs: a
"pre-modern" element, consisting mainly of tribesmen, peasants, nomads,
and the like; a "modern" element, typically urban, educated, and, by
the standards of their societies, middle-class; and an "anti-modern"
element, consisting mostly of Islamists but also of members of the
Baath party and other fascistic groups.

So far, many of our democracy-promotion efforts have been aimed at
the middle group, the one most familiar to us. But this is not, in
all cases, politically the most consequential element. What we have
learned in Iraq is that it is possible, indeed necessary, to isolate
anti-moderns by creating political alliances between the urban middle
class and the tribes.

â~@¢ Third, we can seek ways to cultivate nationalist sentiment in the
Muslim world, not least because jihadists detest, and fear, the notion
of Arab and Muslim nationalism as yet another locus of loyalty that
has nothing to do with Islam. In hindsight, Iraq’s near-miraculous
soccer victory in last year’s Asian Cup was a significant moment in
its evolution as a post-Baathist state, confirming that there really
is such a thing as an Iraqi nationalism shared by Sunnis, Shiites,
and Kurds alike.

â~@¢ Finally, although the internal factors that ultimately did so
much to cripple al Qaeda were, so to speak, written into its very
DNA, they were not triggered until the United States proved itself
capable of defeating the bin Laden gang militarily–first incompletely
in Afghanistan, later decisively in Iraq. The importance of these
confrontations lay not only in the actual killing or capture of al
Qaeda’s leadership and its foot soldiers but also in the demonstration
to a watching Muslim world of the full extent of American power and
the comparative weakness of al Qaeda. Its defeat finally pricked the
Muslim myth that the jihadists were a military match for the U.S., just
as Israel’s victory in the Six-Day war of 1967 made a mockery of the
martial pretensions of pan-Arabism and dealt Nasser a near-fatal blow.

Now the government of neighboring Iran has invested some $20 billion
of scarce national treasure, and the weight of the regime’s prestige,
in its nuclear programs. Aside from the inherent case for getting rid
of these programs for the threat they pose to core U.S. interests,
it ought at least to be considered that their swift destruction might,
far from rallying Iranians to their leaders’ side, produce precisely
the opposite effect.

These suggestions are only a sketch of a policy. But effective
policy depends above all on a correct understanding of the people,
places, and things toward which it is being applied. To speak of an
Islamic civilization is to speak in error. Rather, there is a Muslim
world. It is fractured, and fractious. At times, Muslim causes or
conflicts spill over into the non-Islamic world, as they did in the
1990’s. Today, thanks in no small part to our actions, they remain
internal–expression not, or not merely, of a clash of civilizations,
but of the convulsion of one. In this internal disunity lie our
strength and our opportunity–and ultimately, perhaps, the reform of
the Muslim world itself.

_____________

Footnotes

1 "Are We Winning the War on Terror?," July-August 2008.

2 I dealt at length with this school of thought in "Realists to the
Rescue?," COMMENTARY, February 2007.

3 In Morocco, for example, the king, not parliament, appoints
and oversees the minister of religious affairs. He, in turn, is
solely responsible for approving religious rulings, weighing their
compatibility with sharia in much the same way the Congressional
Budget Office assesses the fiscal impact of a tax cut. The result is
a religious environment that is at once more tightly controlled and
more progressive in its attitudes toward family law, women’s rights,
and so on.

About the Author

Bret Stephens is a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street
Journal and the author of the paper’s "Global View," a weekly column.

–Boundary_(ID_M3oTfAh5pYDIF3EXkR15oQ)–

DARON MALAKIAN ROCKS ON WITH HIS NEW BAND
By Richard Cromelin

Providence Journal
Aug 29 2008
RI

LOS ANGELES "I don’t get it when people complain that baseball games
are too long," says Daron Malakian, watching the action from a seat
behind home plate at Dodger Stadium during one of the team’s recent
home games. "This is my favorite place in the world. I don’t care
how long it goes, I’ll be here to the end."

This most wholesome and mainstream of settings probably isn’t the place
you’d picture as Malakian’s chosen refuge, given the apocalyptic,
dissident, disillusioned, angry, irreligious scenarios that belch
from the self-titled debut album by his new band, Scars on Broadway.

"You’ve never seen the sky like this / You never want to die like
this," he sings in "Universe," a grand anthem that describes what
might be an environmental catastrophe. In the Bowie-tinged ballad
"3005," he watches from a spaceship as civilization and "resurrection
junkies" — his term for those addicted to religion — sink below the
surface. And what is it they say in the band’s single "They Say"? They
say "it’s all about to end."

"It’s what’s around me. It’s what I hear, it’s what I see, it’s what
I’m absorbing like a sponge," says Malakian, 33, eating a pregame hot
dog and garlic fries. "It’s the times we’re living in, and I think
as an artist I’m just trying to put my finger on that."

Not that he’s on a mission. In fact, when he writes — always alone
at home — it’s more like a mystery.

"I consider myself a medium to it all. A lot of times, I don’t feel
responsible for the songs myself. But that’s my job or my place in
life, to keep my search and catch the ideas before they pass me by."

Malakian’s methods helped make his other band, System of a Down, one
of the most commercially successful and critically admired groups
in hard rock, and that audience is primed for Scars on Broadway,
which was released a few weeks ago. Malakian isn’t the only System
mainstay in the group — he brought bandmate John Dolmayan into Scars
as co-leader after a couple of other drummers didn’t work out.

Along with Metallica’s upcoming return, the Scars album figures
to be one of the hard-rock highlights of the second half of the
year. "They Say" registered 100,000 downloads when it went up free
on iTunes, and the group — rounded out by guitarist Franky Perez,
keyboardist Danny Shamoun and bassist Dominic Cifarelli — made a
few buzz-building appearances in the spring.

On stage, Malakian is an imposing figure, seemingly possessed
and almost demonic in his intensity. At the ballpark, though, he’s
small in stature and low-key in manner — just a bearded, black-clad
L.A. sports fan.

"All four members of System are very different in temperament, unique
personalities," says Dolmayan, 36, slipping into the bar for a break
during the fourth inning. "I’d say that me and Daron are the alpha
male types. I think he’s always been looked at as kind of a leader
among friends, and I’ve kind of experienced that. Actually, me and
him got along the worst. . . . We both have a lot of drive."

An only child, Malakian was born and spent his early childhood in
Hollywood in a family of Armenian heritage. They later moved to
Glendale, Calif., where he and his friends at one point noticed
swastika-like designs engraved in some old lampposts near his high
school — the scars on Broadway that would later give his band
its name.

He and flamboyant singer-songwriter Serj Tankian formed the front line
and creative core of System of a Down, which began in 1995 and whose
combination of aggressive power, musical eccentricity and political
outspokenness made it one of the most popular hard-rock bands of
that decade.

In 2006, the group announced that it would take an indefinite break,
and Scars on Broadway follows Tankian’s Elect the Dead as the second
album to come out during the hiatus — a term that seems all right
with everyone involved except Malakian.

"I see it as a separation," he says. "We’re separated, but didn’t
get divorced, and there’s a door that’s open that someday we may get
together and play. But I’m headed down the Scars highway right now,
and that’s it. I don’t have any plans, and nobody I think has any
plans, to re-create or do anything with System right now."

"Not bad" is the way he describes his relationship with Tankian. "We
don’t really see each other very much because we’re doing our own
things."Dark notes ‘n’ ballads

â~@~CIf System of a Down’s legacy has created high expectations for
singer Daron Malakian’s new band, Scars on Broadway, its shadow is
adding to the pressure he admits he’s feeling.

"It’s starting over. People get very fixated on name brands, and System
became a name brand that people became a fan of. I think that’s the
challenging part, getting people to accept these songs the way they
accepted those System songs. I put in just as much of myself, and I
feel they’re just as powerful as anything else I’ve ever written in
my life."

â~@~CBandmate John Dolmayan says of the Scars songs, "In my opinion,
they’re more rock-oriented, they’re more melodic in a lot of
ways. There is a darker tone to a lot of the stuff, which to me is
reminiscent of like the Kinks or bands like Pink Floyd. I’ve always
been attracted to dark melodies, so that aspect of it really works
for me."

â~@~CThe songs are definitely more varied, ranging from the raucous to
the reflective and exposing a new array of influences, from a musician
who cites David Bowie, Roxy Music, Brian Eno and ’60s pop on one side,
and the Stooges, the Ramones and the Dead Boys on the other. Malakian
even suggests the late punk provocateur GG Allin as the inspiration
for the caustically explicit "Chemicals."

â~@~CThen there’s "Babylon," a measured, atmospheric ballad with a big
finish and a tender refrain: "I like the way we slept on rooftops in
the summertime / If we were all marooned again I’d give my soul to save
your life." â~@~CMalakian explains, "My family is now out of Iraq,
but when the war was just starting, a big part of my family lived
in Iraq. That song kind of came out of me at that time. I just felt
helpless, I really wanted to save them and get them out of there. That
helplessness I think comes out in the song.

â~@~C"In the Middle East in the summertime, to keep cool, a lot of
people sleep on the rooftops. When I visited Iraq when I was 14 years
old, we slept on the roof. It’s just kind of me talking to my family."

–Boundary_(ID_2BRW9jCVyHDqeVGCCjmR aA)–

IRAN TO START EXPORTING GAS TO ARMENIA BY OCTOBER 1ST

Payvand
Aug 29 2008
Iran

TEHRAN — Due to latest negotiations, Iran will start gas exports to
Armenia by Oct. 1st, head of the gas export operation office of the
National Iranian Gas Company (NIOC) said here on Wednesday.

"Last week Iran and Armenia held talks and studied the problems of
Iranian gas transfer to Armenia. During this negotiations Yerevan
declared its readiness to receive Iranian gas and export its
electricity to Iran," Rasoul Salmani added, PIN reported.

"Iran plans to annually export some 1.1 billion cubic meters of gas
to Armenia. In the first phase Iran will export less volume to Armenia
but will increase the export volume gradually," he explained.

"Iran will annually import 3.3 billion kw/h of electricity from
Armenia," Rasuli stated while adding that Armenia has not yet decided
about the export volume in the first phase.

The 100km Iranian section runs from Tabriz to the Iran-Armenia
border. The Armenian section runs from Meghri region to Sardarian.

Iran is expected to supply all of Armenia’s gas needs within the next
two years. The total outlay for the pipeline is about $28.2 million

MORE WORLD LEADERS CONGRATULATE CHINA ON SUCCESS OF BEIJING OLYMPICS

Xinhua

Aug 29 2008
China

BEIJING, Aug. 29 (Xinhua) — More world leaders and parliament speakers
have warmly congratulated China on the complete success of the Beijing
Olympic Games.

Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet, who had attended the opening
ceremony of the Games in Beijing, said in his congratulatory message
that the Beijing Olympiad, themed "One World, One Dream", was not only
a global sports event, but a rare opportunity to share and promote
unity, friendship and peace — the common values of all humankind.

The successful hosting of the Games served as an opportunity for the
whole world to deepen its understanding of China’s social customs
and culture, showcase China’s ever growing international status
and prestige, as well as its capability to host grand activities,
Triet said.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said the huge success of the
Beijing Olympics will be carved into people’s memories along with the
image of fearless Chinese rescuing survivors after the devastating
8.0 magnitude earthquake in China’s southwestern Sichuan province.

During the opening ceremony, China sent the world a strong message of
"peace," which is not only China’s goal, but also the direction that
the whole world should take, Fukuda said.

He expressed hope of consolidating and enhancing the strategic and
mutually beneficial relations between Japan and China, and together
making a gesture of peace to the world.

Describing the Beijing Olympics as one of the most splendid sporting
events, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the president of the Maldives, said
the Games showcased China’s recent rapid development, and promoted
the spirit of friendship, unity and cooperation.

The king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz, said China achieved
"unprecedented" success in organizing the Beijing Olympic Games.

The achievements made at the Games reflected the wishes of all humanity
for peaceful coexistence, and increased friendship and cooperation,
he said.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan highlighted the hospitality of the
Chinese, the well-organized Olympics, the excellent facilities, and the
opening ceremony coherent with Chinese culture and modern technology,
all of which had left an indelible impression on the audience.

Nigerien President Mamadou Tandja congratulated China on the successful
conclusion of the Beijing Olympics and expressed appreciation of the
friendship between the two countries.

President Thomas Boni Yayi of Benin said the people of China were
earnest and willing to be devoted to the Olympics, and the Chinese
government had shown great foresight and brilliant leadership, all
of which contributed to the success of the Beijing Games.

President Emanuel Mori of the Federated States of Micronesia said
he had left China with the full understanding of the "One World,
One Dream" theme and appealed for the building of a better world
for everyone.

Argentine Vice President Julio Cobos said the marvelous opening
ceremony of the Beijing Games had amazed the world. China’s perfect
organization had allowed the athletes to participate in the sports
gala without worries and compete for good results.

The speaker of the Lithuanian parliament or Seimas, Ceslovas Jursenas,
said China had revealed its features, potential and long history to
the world during the Olympics and wished the country success in its
future comprehensive development.

Dimitris Sioufas, the president of the Greek parliament, praised
China’s historic contribution to the development of the Olympic Games
and the great achievements of its reform and opening up policy. He
expressed the belief that the China’s development would inspire the
whole world.

Jean Ping, the African Union Commission chairperson, said China
had provided favorable conditions for the athletes which helped them
achieve repeated successes. The foreign guests were all satisfied with
the reception and the Beijing Olympics had gained world recognition,
he added.

ARMENIAN-CANADIAN GUITARIST LEVON ICHKHANIAN PERFORMS IN OLYMPIC TOUR

eJazzNews

znews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&amp ;file=article&sid=9787&mode=thread&ord er=0&thold=0
Aug 29 2008
Canada

Multi-instrumentalist/producer Levon Ichkhanian is in Beijing to
participate in a historic event uniting Western and Eastern stars
with artists living with disabilities on the world stage between the
Olympic and Paralympic games. He joins Shiela E, Dee Dee Bridgewater,
Oliver Jones, Taylor Dane and others on the Marriage of Excellence
Tour in China, with specially taped messages from Celine Dion, Chaka
Khan and Itzhak Perlman.

Held during the 10 days between the Olympics and Paralympic games,
the tour will demonstrate the power of the Arts in fostering
cross-cultural understanding and excellence that can be achieved when
we live the notion of "One World, One Dream" … the slogan for the
2008 Olympics. "I have always believed that music is the common voice
for all cultures, so it was an honour to be invited to perform and
represent my culture during the Tour," states Ichkhanian.

One of only 3 Canadians invited to participate, Levon will represent
his Armenian-Canadian heritage performing "Siroun" a traditional
Armenian piece, as well as one of his compositions commissioned by
the Nashville Chamber Orchestra "the Gift" with the Beijing Symphony
Orchestra at the historic Prince Jun Palace, built in the time of
the Qing Dynasty.

A versatile musician with large international appeal and experience,
Levon’s musical travels have connected him with a diverse group of
talented people from all cultures and styles of music from around
the world (A.R. Rahman, Hariharan, Peter Murphy, Isabel Bayrakdarian,
Janne Lappalainen from Varttina, among others). This has inspired Levon
to incorporate many different sounds in his music (e.g. Armenian,
Middle Eastern, Brazilian, Indian, etc) earning his recognition
for his efforts in blending cultural influences both in his live
performances and on his CDs. He is a sought after clinician and
teacher, having delivered hundreds of sessions across Canada, United
States and Europe, and was awarded the International Association of
Jazz Educator’s Award for "Outstanding Service to Jazz Education".

DON’T WRITE RUSSIA OFF YET!
By Sergei Markedonov

Prague Watchdog
4-000003-000131&lang=1
Aug 29 2008
Czech Republic

A response to Sergei Gligashvili’s polemic article "An empire on the
verge of collapse".

Even a superficial acquaintance with the West’s behaviour during
the second half of the twentieth century is sufficient to stop one
harbouring any illusions. The West has always noticed Russia (and
formerly the USSR) when its interests are directly affected, and is
ready to ignore or even indulge Russia if that is consistent with
the national interest of the United States and the countries of Europe.

Thus it was in 1941-1945 (as though America didn’t know about the
Stalin-era deportations). Thus it was in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968
in Czechoslovakia, when the Soviet Union imposed order on its zone
of influence and responsibility. Thus it was in 1991 in Riga and
Vilnius. It was almost the same in 1996, when the election of Boris
Yeltsin as president turned out to be of strategic importance for the
United States and the countries of Europe. Who remembered Chechnya
then? And after September 11 it was hard to find many supporters
of "free Ichkeria" in Washington. The issue of Chechnya was only
seriously raised in the West in 1999-2000, and then only because
of the fact that Moscow’s position on Kosovo was incompatible with
the line adopted by the US and the EU – remember Yevgeny Primakov’s
famous U-turn over the Atlantic.

It was for somersaults like this that efforts were made to teach Moscow
a few lessons. But when it turned out that Moscow and Washington
had more strategic interests in common than they had differences,
"struggling Ichkeria" was simply forgotten.

Meanwhile, one suspects that the fuss surrounding the Russian
action in Georgia will soon die down – especially after the US
presidential elections have been held. Today it is important to the
US administration (and its heir-in-waiting John McCain) to convince
ordinary Americans that Washington will support the "democratic little
Georgia" about which they have been hearing from their television sets
for the past four years. And so they need to create an atmosphere
of fear and hysteria in order to show people that the United States
and its faithful allies have foiled the Kremlin’s plan to revive the
Soviet Union. All that needed to be done was to sacrifice a couple
of places called Abkhazia and South Ossetia (which are not even not
visible on the map). As for the plans to reunify the Evil Empire,
they fell through.

It is strange that the "watchdogs of democracy" stubbornly refuse
to notice that without Russia’s participation it would today be
physically impossible to resolve a large number of the most critical
issues of world politics. There is Afghanistan (to which the transit
route lies through Russia and Central Asia, where Russian influence
is extremely strong and consistent with American interests). There is
Iran, with which negotiations are sometimes simply impossible without
Russia’s involvement (otherwise Iran simply will not talk). There are
the problems of North Korea and the Middle East, terrorism, and the
full range of nuclear issues. Closer to the South Caucasus, there is
above all Karabakh, where the positions of the US, Russia and France,
the three mediating countries, are absolutely identical.

And it can quite safely be asserted that the disintegration of a
nuclear power into separate pieces has no part in the plans of the
United States, any more than the U.S. intended to bring about the
break-up of the Soviet Union. While there are plans to weaken Russia,
complete collapse is not on the agenda.

Regarding the question of standards and international law, any decision
on recognition (or non-recognition) is taken – and not just by Russia –
on the basis of national interest rather than abstract standards. The
European Union and the United States opted for the right of nations to
self-determination when they recognized the independence of Croatia,
Slovenia and Kosovo, and did their utmost to defend the territorial
integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Russia has
fought separatism in Chechnya and regional particularism in the North
Caucasus and the Volga region, but has recognized the independence
of Georgia’s two separatist republics. Turkey emphasizes that the
principle of the territorial integrity of the states in the region
is the aim of its Caucasus policy, and also does its best to fight
Kurdish separatism. At the same time, Turkey was one of the first
countries to recognize Kosovo and is still alone in recognizing the
de facto Turkish Cypriot state.

And here there is no contradiction, because this apparently illogical
policy is built around one idea – the ensuring of Turkey’s national
interests and security. On the other hand, among experts in polite
society it is considered simply indecent to talk about international
law after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the
Yalta-Potsdam system. International law is always related to history
– it is produced in specific contexts, and not on the basis of
abstract altruism. The Yalta-Potsdam system reflected the reality
that developed after 1945. And as soon as it ceased to reflect them,
it passed into history.

Now to turn to the argument about the "Abkhaz boomerang," which is
supposedly going to rebound against Russia (in Chechnya, Tatarstan
or elsewhere). Mr. Gligashvili writes: "The Kremlin has given an
impetus to processes that no one is capable of controlling. And it
looks as though Russia may turn out to be the principal victim of a
new world order, or – more precisely – disorder. At some point events
will evolve spontaneously, since Moscow’s recognition of Georgia’s
autonomous regions is setting in motion a mechanism that revises the
basic principle of territorial integrity in the post-war world."

It’s a great pity that the expert has ignored numerous examples
of the revision of the principle of "territorial integrity" in
the world since 1945. Cyprus, Bangladesh, Eritrea, East Timor,
fifteen republics of the former USSR, Slovakia, six republics and
one autonomous province of the former Yugoslavia. And these are
only the successful examples. There were also Biafra, Katanga, and
three unrecognized republics of Yugoslavia. So it all began long
before Kosovo. The Yalta-Potsdam system was built on the basis of
two irreconcilable principles (territorial integrity and the right
of nations to self-determination). These principles undermined the
system from within, and finally toppled it. As for the process of
recognition as an alleged factor in influencing a country’s integrity,
here too one should not try to create myths out of nowhere. Quebec did
not break away from Canada just because Canada recognized Kosovo. When
it recognized the ex-autonomy of Serbia, France did not automatically
experience a Basque uprising or a Corsican secession. And so the
main problem for a multi-ethnic society is not the recognition or
non-recognition of separatist territories, but the creation of a
competent domestic policy and the building of national status.

If the dissident Georgian nationalist movement began its struggle for
power with the slogan "Georgia for the Georgians", the demand for the
abolition of national autonomous regions and a ban on participation
in elections by the Georgian regional parties (Adamon Nykhas and
Aydgylara), then one should have had no illusions about how the
Abkhazians and Ossetians would feel about the "Georgian State"
project. None of Russia’s presidents (for all their failures,
stupidities and crimes) has ever called the Chechen people "trash
that has to be swept out through a tunnel". For that is what Georgia’s
first President Zviad Gamsakhurdia said about the Ossetian people at
a rally in the village of Eredvi in 1989.

One can argue about whether what happened in South Ossetia was
genocide or not. The claim is probably an exaggeration founded on
propaganda. But the fact that the city of Tskhinvali was stormed
four times in seventeen years (twice in 1991, once in 1992 and most
recently in 2008) – is an obvious fact. During the Georgian-Abkhaz war
of 1992-1993 3,000 Abkhazians out of a pre-war population of 93,000
died in the fighting. The failure of the creation of a Georgian nation
state became the spur to separatism in the former autonomous regions.

I am not going to remain silent about the Russian excesses in
Chechnya. But the conflict in that republic is very different from
anything that has taken place in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In
Chechnya, military clashes began long before the entry of Russian
troops into its territory in 1994. In 1992 Grozny fought with the
forces of Nadterechny district, and then the republican government
began another confrontation (using heavy armour) with the Grozny city
authorities. There were several conflicts in Chechnya throughout the
whole of the 1990s.

The conflict between Moscow and Grozny was only one of those. There
were also conflicts between nationalists, supporters of secular
democracy and Islamists, between Sufis and Salafists, between
supporters of secession and their opponents (the Avtorkhanovites,
for example). Russia has always had its allies in Chechnya. In 1996,
Alu Alkhanov defended Grozny’s railway station from the guerrillas
and in 1999 Beslan Gantamirov and Said-Magomed Kakkiyev stormed it
together with Russian troops. And behind these leaders there were
always armies and a certain degree of strength. Georgia has not faced
"its Abkhazians" for sixteen years.

There is much else that could be said about Chechnya. About Chechen
business activity in Moscow, which continued even during the two
military campaigns, about the migration of Chechens to Russian regions
(for some reason there is no Abkhazian business activity in Tbilisi,
and in August 2008 the Ossetian refugees fled to Vladikavkaz rather
than the Georgian capital). Thus Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia is unlikely in itself to become a challenge to the
country’s unity. If the Russian state is able to conduct an effective
campaign against corruption and the privatization of power, which is
happening in Kadyrov’s Chechnya, it will not collapse like a house
of cards. But if the Kremlin is not able to alter those negative
domestic tendencies, then that is what will be fatal for Russia,
and not the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov was right when he referred to Georgia
as a "little empire". It is precisely the inadequacy of its own ideas
concerning its role and place in world politics that has led Georgia
to a natural collapse. Georgia should have been more realistic and
cut its cloth to suit its cloak, rather than trying on suits made in
Washington. Then it would not have had to go looking external causes
for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and bring political
storms against its the northern neighbour, the country from which
only recently "the sun rose on Georgia." But nota bene: it wasn’t
Moscow’s politicians who talked such nonsense!

Sergei Markedonov is a senior researcher at the Institute for Political
and Military Analysis, Moscow.

RUSSIA: HOW THE NEW ‘COLD WAR’ PLAYS AT HOME
Ivan Sukhov

Georgiandaily
ex.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=693 9&Itemid=132
Aug 29 2008
NY

Russia’s war in Georgia has killed Medvedev’s hopes of reform. But
recognition of independence for Abkhazia and South Ossetia could foster
trouble across the ethnic patchwork of North Caucasus, particularly
among the Muslims

Only a week ago, Russia’s recognition Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s
independence was regarded as unlikely by most observers. They hoped
that the Kremlin today was too strongly integrated into the world of
global finance to resort to a drastic escalation of antagonism with
the West. Nonetheless, this took place.

Even after 25 August, when both chambers of the Russian parliament
voted for recognition, it could still be hoped that this vote amounted
to nothing more positioning at the beginning of a potentially difficult
and lengthy bargaining process. The chips in this negotiation could
have been not only the status of the disputed territories and the
peacekeeping operations in the conflict zones, but also Georgia’s plans
to join NATO, as well as Russia’s political and economic interests in
Georgia. Now that Russia has decided to recognise the independence of
these two states, this bargaining can no longer be used as a means of
coordinating the interested parties into relatively sensible positions.

To some extent, Moscow could be said to have been forced into
recognising Abkhazia. Once Tbilisi, along with Washington and most
of its European allies, made it clear that the territorial integrity
of Georgia was its only concern, there was no more place in Medvedev
and Sarkozy’s plan for international discussion of the future status
of the territories. Moscow began to see unilateral recognition
of independence as the only way to maintain its military presence
in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In the light of the now seemingly
inevitable accession of Georgia to NATO it was bound to want this.

The time has come to abandon the idea that Russia, by its actions
in the Abkhaz and South Ossetian conflict, had a decisive influence
on Georgia’s choice to join NATO. By making its choice Moscow has
effectively deprived the unrecognised republics of the possibility
of full international legitimacy, or at least postponed it to the
medium-term planning. But it has also gained the opportunity of
creating a buffer zone on its border, right where NATO is likely
to expand.

Once it has signed agreements on military cooperation with Sukhumi
and Tskhinvali, it will be able to keep troops in this buffer zone,
unrestricted by international peacekeeping controls on the number and
quality of these troops. To put it bluntly, it will no longer need to
explain why Russian air force planes are stationed at the aerodrome
in Gudauta (Abkhazia), which they should have left a long time ago,
and why Russian soldiers use their infrastructure in the region of
Dzhava (South Ossetia).

If you accept the Kremlin viewpoint of NATO as a military rival and an
upholder of alien values, Moscow can be seen as having succeeded. It
has finally found the courage to be consistent in its policy towards
the two unrecognised republics. They have been rescued from the status
of a conditionally controlled ‘gray zone’, which they have occupied
for the last 15 years. Isolation from the western community, which even
leading Russian politicians now admit is a possibility, is seen by them
either as an inevitable side-effect, or even as a desirable result.

In August 2008, Russia twice showed that it was not in any way a
part of the West. The idea of a renewed confrontation not only does
not deter it. It is even popular among Russian voters, however little
this may mean in a ‘managed democracy’. Russia’s political elite and
the majority of the population warmly supported the decisive measures
of President Medvedev in the Caucasus. Clearly, they want to believe
that Russia has regained its ability to act in a heavy-weight capacity
on the international stage, like America. Constrained as it is in its
policies towards Moscow by dependence on Russian energy resources,
the EU has been relatively compliant. This only strengthens Russia’s
dangerous and self-satisfied delusion.

Domestic effects of a new ‘cold war’

But the domestic political scene suggests that populist considerations
and the desirability of creating a military buffer zone in a region
of potential NATO expansion may not have been the Kremlin’s main
motives for recognising the disputed territories.

The August crisis in Georgia has had an important political effect
domestically. It has practically destroyed any hopes that President
Medvedev, who was elected in March 2008, would play an independent role
in changing the character of the regime formed under Vladimir Putin.

There can be no doubt that the war in Georgia has been months in
the planning. Preparations must have begun when Medvedev had not
even been in office for 100 days, before he had even had a chance of
taking an independent position. After some delay at the beginning of
the war, Medvedev started making public statements which showed that
his policy towards Georgia was completely determined by the siloviki
from Vladimir Putin’s circle. As a result, for three weeks in August,
Russia’s relations with the western community plunged to below freezing
point, lower than they have been since the fall of the USSR. They are
worse even than during the dramatic moment when Russian paratroopers
were about to make a descent on Pristina (Kosovo), when Prime Minister
Primakov’s plane turned back over the Atlantic Ocean in response to
the American bombings of Belgrade in 1999.

Unfortunately, it was no slip of the tongue when Medvedev’s used
the term ‘cold war’ in an interview he gave half an hour after the
recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The experience of the last
century tells us that a ‘cold war’ is more than an exhausting foreign
policy confrontation: it costs the economies of the participants
dearly.

This war is also a political statement that blocks any attempts at
internal reform in Russia. By putting Medvedev up against a ‘cold war’,
the siloviki and Putin have ensured their own positions within the
Russian elite. For them this is undoubtedly more important than the
battle for independence of the Ossetians and the Abkhaz. Furthermore,
Medvedev has to carry full responsibility for the events, while Putin
can stay in the shadows and preserve his image as a politician whose
relations with the West, while maybe not rosy, were not as problematic
as they have unexpectedly become under his successor, from whom people
were on the contrary expecting a thaw.

This may be good for the siloviki, but it is not too good for the
country. The relative stabilisation of the elite is perhaps preferable
to a new wave of a division of power and property. But the problem
is that the regime has stabilised itself while creating a whole
number of problems to the system. Quite apart from those posed to
the national economy, there are the issue of relations within parts
of the Russian Federation, with all the inter-ethnic and religious
difficulties connected with this.

Federation troubles

At the moment, relations between different parts of the federation
come down to the personal relationship between the head of state
(and/or Prime Minister) and specific regional leaders, who on the
basis of a certain mutually beneficial contract try to control Russian
territories. This may work in the traditional Russian provinces or
the rich oil and gas regions of Siberia. But in the North Caucasus,
it is becoming increasingly clear that this means of managing the
regions will not be able to cope with important challenges like the
rapid growth of political Islam.

Moscow’s relationship with governors in the Caucasus still follows
the old model. But the people it appoints in these regions are
facing tectonic-scale cultural shifts, to which they have no way
of responding. This not only increases the alienation between
the government and the country’s growing number of Muslims
still further. It is grist to the mill of a coming ‘cultural
revolution’. None of this bodes well for Russia’s influence and
presence in the Caucasus. Russia has created problematic ‘buffer zones’
for itself in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Moscow’s decision to recognise the independence of these two republics
may put a dampener on escalating violence in neighbouring regions
of the North Caucasus. Refugees from South Ossetia are now unlikely
to fuel the old inter-ethnic conflict between the Ossetians and the
neighboring Ingush. Furthermore, the decisiveness shown by Moscow
towards Abkhazia and South Ossetia may improve the image of federal
power in the eyes of North Caucasian elites and the population of
the republics. It is at least a more popular step than handing over
the unrecognised republics would have been.

But in the medium- and long-term perspective, Moscow will have
to face the very danger about which it warned western governments
when they insisted on the independence of Kosovo and Metochia. The
principle of the territorial integrity of nations has effectively
been abolished by Russia on its very own borderlands. These regions
are hotbeds for separatist movements. They died down in the mid 2000s
for opportunistic rather than ideological reasons. But they may well
return. Only this time it will no longer be the naïve separatism
of the early 1990s. Now it will be fed by a powerful movement of
political Islam common to the Muslims of the Caucasus, one which the
muftis controlled by Moscow cannot oppose. Unrest in the Caucasus is
bound to increase if the analogy with Kosovo is carelessly applied
to the situation in Nagorny Karabakh.

The Azerbaijan factor

The problem of Karabakh (along with the problem of the transit of oil
and gas through Georgia that has been disrupted by the war) seriously
concerns Azerbaijan. The country is just as important a player in the
South Caucasus today as Russia. The experience of two wars in Chechnya
suggests that Azerbaijan may become a source of instability for the
Russian part of the Caucasus. The communities of divided Dagistani
peoples living there – such as Lezgians and Avars – may become new
conflict zones. If that were to happen, the echo of these conflicts
would inevitably be heard north of the main Caucasian mountain range.

What is more, both South Ossetia and Abkhazia have ethnic relations in
the Russian Caucasus. The Northern Ossetians and the Cherkess peoples
of the West Caucasus are now bursting with euphoric solidarity for
the peoples of the republics just recognised by Russia, whom they
believe have achieved their goals. Ossetia and Cherkessia (in the wide
sense of this ethnonym, which includes Cherkess, Adygians, Karabdins,
Abazins, Shapsugs and other Western Caucasus peoples of common Cherkess
origin) are not likely in the short term to demand a special status
in Russia by analogy with the status achieved by Abkhazia and South
Ossetia. But we should remember that the Beslan hostage catastrophe,
where 331 people died in North Ossetia on 3 September 2004, seriously
undermined Ossetian trust in Russia. Because of its Christian culture,
this region is justifiably considered to be the most reliable ‘outpost’
of Russia’s presence in the Caucasus. But with instability on the rise
north of the mountains, independent South Ossetia and Abkhazia could
become poles of attraction for Ossetian and Cherkess separatism. This
could in turn be directed against Moscow itself.

–Boundary_(ID_GRLqqH7bqoOQ2JcxZdC8Iw)–

FRANCE: NO EU SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA IMMINENT
By Laurent Pirot

The Associated Press
Aug 29 2008

PARIS (AP) — The European Union is not expected to imposed sanctions
on Russia at a summit next week but may name a special envoy to
Georgia to ensure that a cease-fire there is observed, officials in
Paris and Brussels said Friday.

They also said that the EU might send a high official — perhaps
French President Nicolas Sarkozy — on a shuttle mission to the region.

The 27 European Union leaders are scheduled to hold a special summit
in Brussels on Monday to discuss how to respond to the recent brief
and bitter war between Russia and Georgia, and Russia’s subsequent
recognition of the independence of two breakaway regions of Georgia.

The EU already has an envoy to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. But
under a plan that will be discussed at the summit, that job would be
split up to create the special envoy to Georgia, said an official at
the EU headquarters in Brussels.

The official also said that a visit by Sarkozy to both Moscow and the
Georgian capital, Tbilisi would be discussed. The official spoke on
condition of anonymity because of the rules of the job.

France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had said the EU was
considering sanctions against Russia following its recognition of
South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But he told reporters Friday that a provisional text for the Brussels
meeting has been drawn up, and that the focus was on unity in the
27-member EU bloc.

"France doesn’t foresee any sanctions," he said.

A high-ranking official in Sarkozy’s office also said sanctions
wouldn’t be imposed at the summit.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of office
policy, said the EU is also likely to ask Sarkozy to continue his
"mission" in the crisis, which involved shuttle diplomacy and visits
to both Moscow and Tbilisi earlier this month.

The French official said France’s priority is ensuring that Russia
respects a cease-fire deal that France helped craft.

Moscow’s recognition Tuesday of South Ossetia and Abkhazia followed a
brief war between Georgia and Russia earlier this month. Georgia had
launched a military offensive to retake South Ossetia from separatists,
and Russia responded by sending tanks into the Moscow-friendly province
and Georgia proper.

European countries considerably toughened their stance against Russia
after Moscow’s move to recognize the provinces as independent. Kouchner
said Thursday that France was not behind the effort for sanctions
and that the French role was to unite Europeans in a common position.

A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she believes it
is important for Monday’s summit to send "a clear political signal
of the European Union’s unity" on the crisis.

The EU is united in saying that Georgia’s territorial integrity is
not up for discussion, that the EU will help in rebuilding destroyed
infrastructure and that the recognition of Abkhazian and South Ossetian
independence is unacceptable, Merkel spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said
in Berlin.

Associated Press Writers Robert Wielaard in Brussels and Jamey Keaten
in Paris contributed to this story.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

RELUCTANT BAKU SAYS ARMENIA VISIT DECISION UP TO TURKEY

Today’s Zaman
Aug 30 2008
Turkey

Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov has met with Turkish
officials in Ankara to discuss a crisis in the Caucasus that Turkey
hopes can be resolved through dialogue among regional countries that
would include Armenia, with which Azerbaijan is officially at war
with over the occupied region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Turkey, in contrast to its NATO allies, has refrained from a strong
condemnation of Russia after it fought a brief war against Georgia
and later recognized two Georgian breakaway regions, South Ossetia
and Abkhazia, as independent states. Instead, Ankara has proposed
a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform, a scheme that calls
for new methods of crisis management and conflict resolution. But
involvement of Armenia is problematic in the mechanism, given that
Turkey has no formal ties with Armenia and that Azerbaijan is still
in a state of war with Yerevan due to its continued occupation of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

But there have been developments that suggest a thaw in Turkey-Armenia
relations. It has emerged that Turkish and Armenian diplomats have been
holding secret talks on normalization of ties, and Armenian President
Serzh Sarksyan has invited his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, to
watch a World Cup qualifying game between the national teams of the
two countries on Sept. 6. Gul says he is still considering whether
to accept the invitation.

Asked to comment on a possible visit by Gul to Yerevan, Mammadyarov
declined to comment. "This is a decision that the president of Turkey
will make," he told reporters upon his arrival in Ankara. He met his
Turkish counterpart, Ali Babacan, President Gul and Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan later in the day.

Speaking after talks with Mammadyarov at a brief press conference,
Babacan assured Azerbaijan that Turkey and Azerbaijan were "strategic
partners" acting with an understanding that they share the same destiny
in all areas, in an apparent reference to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

But Mammadyarov, in turn, was less enthusiastic about supporting a
US-backed pipeline to transfer natural gas from the Caspian region
to Europe via Turkey. Asked about Russian readiness to buy Azeri
natural gas, something that could deal a blow to the planned pipeline,
Mammadyarov said Azerbaijan would consider profit while deciding on
the offer. "We haven’t given a response yet. Talks are continuing,"
he said before meeting with Babacan.

Azeri gas is set to become a major source of supply for the planned
Nabucco pipeline, a cornerstone of Europe’s policies to diversify away
from heavy reliance on Russian gas. Pressed to say whether accepting
the Russian offer would undermine Nabucco, Mammadyarov said, "This
is a matter of trade and profitability."

Turkey closed its border with Armenia and severed formal ties after
Armenia occupied Nagorno-Karabakh. Normalization of ties depends
on Armenian withdrawal from the Azerbaijani territory, Yerevan’s
shelving of support for Armenian diaspora efforts to win international
recognition for Armenian genocide claims and formal recognition by
Armenia of the current border with Turkey.

Azerbaijan, Turkey’s regional and ethnic ally, is likely to be offended
by any rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia. But the recent crisis
in the Caucasus may force a rethinking of regional balances. The
Russian operation in Georgia raised questions about the security of
regional transportation and energy transfer lines. With its Armenian
border closed, Turkey relies on Georgia as an outlet to the Caucasus.

The proposed Caucasus platform will also require a restoration of
some sort of dialogue between both Armenia and Turkey and Armenia and
Azerbaijan. Turkish officials have said Armenia will definitely become
a part of the proposed platform and that formalities of the dialogue
with Yerevan will be decided after further talks with Armenian ally
Russia, raising expectations that dialogue between Ankara and Yerevan
could take place via Moscow’s mediation.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will arrive in Turkey early next
week for talks on the proposed Caucasus platform. On Sunday, Georgian
Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili will have talks in Ä°stanbul on
the situation in the region and on the potential Caucasus platform.

Azerbaijanis cool to Gul visit

In the streets of Azerbaijani capital Baku, public opinion is divided
but mostly cool to a possible visit by Gul to Armenia to watch the
World Cup qualifying game on Sept. 6.

"Gul should not go there because there will be provocation and
chaos if he goes. No one will be welcoming if Gul agrees to visit,"
said Akif Rustemov, a teacher, to Cihan news agency. He softened
his opposition when asked whether Gul and Sarksyan should discuss
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. "If this is the case, then he should
go. In fact, our president, Ilham Aliyev, should also join. Foreign
mediators have been trying to find a solution for 17 years, but
nothing happens. We have to solve this ourselves."

"Gul should not go to Armenia because it is a hostile country,"
said Ahmed Halilov, a civil servant, to Cihan. "If it’s an enemy of
Azerbaijan then it’s also an enemy of Turkey because we — as our
politicians say — are one nation with two states."

Mahmud Necefov, however, disagreed, saying Gul should visit Armenia
and discuss every issue of dispute. "Political issues should be taken
up and the Nagorno-Karabakh issue should definitely be discussed,"
he said. "I think he should go and discuss everything."

In remarks published yesterday, Gul refused to give a hint on whether
he is planning to go but sent warm messages to Armenia. "We want to
solve our problems with all neighbors. This is our region and we are
all children of this region. Turks and Armenians live side by side
in these lands," Gul told Radikal daily.

–Boundary_(ID_qOQ8RA2N0agfvBMJTTD1FA)–