Ethical questions raised as amateur basketball recruiters engage in a high-stakes battle for blue-chip recruits
By Bob Hohler, Boston Globe Staff July 23, 2006
First in a three-part series on the sneaker industry's influence on amateur basketball in New England.
SPRINGFIELD -- A brazen foot soldier in a multibillion-dollar war between sneaker makers for the soles of America's youth, Thomas J. ``TJ" Gassnola has peddled basketball dreams to inner-city adolescents across New England despite a lengthy criminal history and prodigious legacy of financial delinquency.
The face of youth basketball in the region for Adidas, Gassnola is a free-wheeling recruiter whose tactics often have clashed with rules set by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to protect amateur athletes who aspire to careers in college sports. Some of his practices underscore the inability of the NCAA and other watchdog agencies to adequately police abuses in summer youth basketball.
A Globe investigation of the sneaker industry's influence on youth basketball in New England found that Gassnola has handed cash to members of his Adidas-sponsored summer travel teams for expenses unrelated to basketball. Several parents of elite players said the Springfield-based recruiter offered them free airfare or Adidas merchandise while pursuing their sons, and another parent said he interpreted Gassnola's sales pitch to mean the recruiter would provide his son improper financial aid. NCAA rules bar amateur players from receiving anything but ``actual and necessary travel, room and board, and apparel and equipment for competition and practice."
The Globe also witnessed Gassnola drive his teenage players in several states, even though his Massachusetts driver's license has been revoked or suspended 24 times and was not valid from 1993 until last month.
``You're talking about putting kids at risk in so many different areas," said John Kottori, chairman of boys' basketball in southern New England for the Amateur Athletic Union. ``It makes my stomach turn to think about it."
Gassnola, whose supporters include Adidas, and numerous parents and players, has done it all in the company's name. As the sneaker giant's top New England recruiter in its quest to wrest supremacy of the market from archrival Nike, Gassnola operates in a loosely regulated subculture in which Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, a Canton-based Adidas subsidiary, spend millions of dollars on ``grassroots" campaigns to curry favor with children as young as 12 in their hunt for the next Michael Jordan or LeBron James, superstars whose endorsements shape the marketplace.
The system has created a cottage industry in which corporate agents such as Gassnola lavish free travel, shoes, gear, and other benefits on predominantly needy youths with basketball skills. For the players, it is a heady environment with a sometimes shady underside: For all the future college and pro stars who have prospered in the system, some have seen their reputations tarnished by their company-backed coaches or recruiters.
One of the most egregious cases involved a Nike-funded coach, Myron Piggie, of Kansas City, Mo., who was sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2001 for fraud and tax convictions after paying more than $35,000 to five teenagers, including future NBA players Corey Maggette, Kareem Rush, and Korleone Young, to play in his summer program. Three of the players, after enrolling in college, were suspended from basketball competition by the NCAA for periods ranging from five to nine games (the NCAA has no jurisdiction over amateur athletes until they are enrolled in member schools).
Subsequent efforts by the NCAA to crack down on abuses in summer youth basketball have produced few results, largely because of its limited jurisdiction.
``Every time we try to make rules, somebody tries to circumvent them," said Tom Izzo, who guided Michigan State to the national championship in 2000 and serves on a select NCAA committee of college coaches.
Gassnola, 34, aspires to make his New England Playaz the top power in summer youth basketball in New England, a distinction long held by the Nike-sponsored Boston Amateur Basketball Club. He declared himself ``hell-bent on destroying" the BABC and engaged in a verbal confrontation with BABC coach Leo Papile last winter that nearly became physical during a tournament in Chelsea.
``It's a personal war, a turf war, and a sneaker war," said Gassnola, who has stocked his team with some of the region's best talent, including stars he has poached from clubs in Greater Boston, including the BABC.
``When I die, I want it to say on my tombstone: `TJ Gassnola, The Guy Who Put Leo Papile Out Of Business,' " Gassnola said.
Fierce competition
Nike invests an estimated $15 million a year on amateur youth basketball, while Adidas spends about $10 million annually and Reebok $6 million a year, according to an industry executive.
Papile, 52, who founded the BABC in 1977, also serves as assistant executive director of basketball operations for the Boston Celtics. His program receives $50,000 a year from Nike plus sneakers, gear, and apparel, while Gassnola said he receives no cash from Adidas but an unlimited supply of merchandise.
Gassnola recently enhanced his program by gaining an endorsement from NBA Hall of Famer Bob Lanier, whose name now appears on the team's uniforms. But Papile, whose program has won 11 national championships and sent more than 200 players to Division 1 colleges, including NBA Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing and former Celtic Dana Barros, shrugged off Gassnola's challenge.
``I don't know know how old he is, but all I can say is, `Good to luck him, if he lives long enough,' " Papile said. ``I've seen guys like him come and go, and when they go, good riddance. They're not good for basketball."
The scramble among the sneaker giants for the nation's elite young athletes has escalated since the early 1990s, spawning dozens of company-sponsored teams that barnstorm the nation from April to July competing in showcases that often attract college recruiters, NBA scouts, and national scouting services.
Nearly every American-bred college and NBA star in recent years has played for a company-sponsored team, and organizers such as Gassnola and Papile have come to wield enormous influence with young players, helping them land lucrative scholarships to private secondary schools, fielding inquiries from college coaches, and advising them on their college choices.
In turn, players who make it big both by turning pro and reaping lucrative sneaker endorsement deals sometimes reward their summer coaches, though Papile said none of his alumni have given back to his program. Gassnola said he receives a combined $20,000 a year from three NBA players whom he declined to identify (none of his alumni has reached the NBA).
Indeed, a number of NBA stars, including Tracy McGrady, Tim Thomas, and Tyson Chandler, have designated portions of their multimillion-dollar sneaker contracts to their company-sponsored coaches or handlers.
``This is a big-time business," said Gassnola, a fast-talking recruiter with a self-portrayed ``degree in bull" and close ties to former University of Massachusetts coach John Calipari's program at the University of Memphis.
Papile raised eyebrows in the 1980s when he became a Boston-based assistant coach for Cleveland State University after five members of his BABC teams went to play for the school. Responding to rumors that he may have sold players to colleges, Papile issued an emphatic denial in a 1997 interview with the Globe.
``Anybody who has the courage to confront me with that, I would go into a steel cage with them and pound them to smithereens, because that's how untrue it is," he said. One summer coach who recently clashed with Papile over a player questioned the propriety of Papile serving as both a high-level scouting adviser for the Celtics and an amateur coach whose former players the Celtics could draft. Two former BABC players, Iowa State's Will Blalock and Notre Dame's Torin Francis, recently participated in predraft workouts for the Celtics.
``It's absolutely absurd that he's getting paid by an NBA team and running an AAU team," said Rick Isaacs, who coaches the H Squad, an elite independent travel team based in California. ``Is that not a conflict of interest?"
Papile said he has long reported his BABC role to the NBA, which has approved the activity as a community service. Papile, who said he is not paid by the BABC, also noted that Blalock and Francis worked out for many NBA teams other than the Celtics.
Though Papile has long served as the face of the BABC, his name has not appeared on corporate documents the organization has filed with the secretary of state. Instead, Papile's wife, Kimberly Johnson, is listed as the BABC's president, treasurer, and clerk, while Frank Burke, a basketball operations assistant for the Celtics, and Stuart August, a lawyer, are listed as directors. Papile explained his absence from the documents as a consequence of his work for the Celtics, which requires him to travel about 200 days a year. He also owns and manages a number of real estate properties.
``All I can do is coach," he said. ``I don't have time to do all the other stuff."
Before going nonprofit in 2003, the BABC functioned for many years as a for-profit corporation, though Papile said no one in the organization received a salary and ``we never came close to making a profit."
As a nonprofit, the BABC reported raising nearly $99,000 in 2004, the most recent year for which its federal tax return was available. The club reported spending more than $94,000, including more than $6,700 in charitable donations to scholarship funds at Chelsea High School and Charlestown High School.
Numerous coaches, however, have complained through the years about losing players to Papile's higher-profile program -- Kalon Jenkins of the Stoughton-based Bay State Magic said the core of his 15-and-under team jumped this year to the BABC -- yet Papile generally has maintained a favorable reputation while reigning as New England's dominant force in summer youth basketball.
He was inducted in 2004 into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame.
``If I feel my kids need to be at the next level, I deal with Leo only," said Pete Washington, who heads the Young Achievers Basketball Club in Mattapan and previously coached at Roxbury Community College and East Boston High School.
Criminal history
Gassnola, however, has become a pariah among many youth coaches for his history of breaking laws, rules, and promises. The AAU, a major force in youth basketball, has suspended him since 2000 for bouncing an estimated $2,500 in checks for tournament fees.
Gassnola said he has ``made a ton of mistakes in my life." He attributed many of the lapses to a ``dysfunctional" upbringing and said, ``I absolutely robbed Peter to pay Paul to make this [basketball] program work." But he said he has turned his life around.
Gassnola has been convicted three times of larceny over $250 or receiving stolen property, among other charges, and has been ordered by judges in at least 11 civil cases to make good on more than $45,000 in bad debt.
``This is what I do and I love it," he said of his basketball program. ``I've stepped on some people's toes I shouldn't have, but I didn't do it intentionally and I'll never do it again."
Court records show Gassnola's criminal record dates to 1988, when he was convicted of delinquent larceny at age 16 and ordered committed to the Department of Youth Services for a year, with the sentence suspended.
Gassnola said he has applied the lessons of his troubled youth to help a new generation of at-risk teenagers.
``Imagine a guy who sits in juvenile court with a chip on his shoulder the size of you and me," he said, referring to himself. ``He went from one juvenile home to another. His father left him at a young age and his mother never understood him. There were a lot of bumps in the road, but he tried to do the right thing. This guy understands kids better than anybody because he used to be one of them, and he doesn't want those kids to go down the same bumpy road."
The road remained bumpy for Gassnola in adulthood. At 22, he was convicted of assaulting a man outside a Springfield bar, for which he received a 90-day suspended jail sentence.
Less than a year later, Gassnola was indicted on charges of felony assault and unarmed burglary stemming from a confrontation in which one of the alleged victims told police he aimed a licensed handgun at Gassnola to ward him off. The alleged victim also reported a subsequent encounter with Gassnola.
``He told me he could have me killed and that he belonged to one of the highest organized crime families in Springfield," the man told police, according to court records.
A jury in Hampden Superior Court found Gassnola not guilty of the charges. (In an interview, Gassnola denied having any connection to organized crime, though he said he once was involved in bookmaking.)
Gassnola's criminal record also includes convictions for receiving stolen property and uttering a false check in 1998, larceny over $250 in 2000, and larceny over $250 in 2001 (the larceny convictions involved nearly $2,200 he stole from two women). He received probation or suspended jail sentences in each case and was ordered to pay a total of $3,091 in restitution.
Meanwhile, the list of plaintiffs who have received civil judgments against Gassnola for bad debts include a former basketball associate, a college in Springfield that rented him a gym, and a Hadley company that installed audio equipment in his SUV.
``It's tough to get started in this business," he said, estimating his program costs $100,000 a year (he said he already has invested nearly $32,000 of his own money this year).
``You kind of live beyond your means and sometimes you ruffle some feathers," he said.
Gassnola, whom the Globe witnessed driving teenage players in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Arkansas while his license was revoked, also has amassed a voluminous record of traffic violations such as speeding, operating with a suspended license, and operating an unregistered vehicle. (None of the violations involves alcohol or drugs.) He has been classified five times as a habitual traffic offender, with his latest four-year revocation ending May 3.
``He has continued to drive in blatant violation of the law," Amie O'Hearn, a spokeswoman for the Registry of Motor Vehicles, said before Gassnola regained his license last month.
Registry officials said they did all they could to sanction Gassnola while he continued driving. The rest, they said, was up to police and the courts.
Gassnola has heard critics voice the most derogatory assertions about him, he said, none more incendiary than that he has paid athletes to play for him and has directed players to colleges in return for cash. He said he has done neither.
``I'm not proud of a lot of stuff, but the proudest thing in my life is that I've been able to build this program with a level of success," he said. ``I'm trying to do the right thing."
Supporting cause
Gassnola has helped steer a number of players to major Division 1 basketball programs, including 6-foot-6-inch Antonio Anderson to Memphis from Lynn Tech and Maine Central Institute; 6-8 Kendric Price , of Dorchester, to Michigan from Buckingham Browne and Nichols; and 6-8 Demetris Nichols , of Dorchester, to Syracuse from St. Andrew's School in Rhode Island.
An Adidas spokesman, Terrell Clark, said the company has received ``no complaints or criticism" about Gassnola.
``We have, however, taken note of a great deal of praise by the parents of players directed to both the club and its officials," Clark said.
Carol Price said Gassnola played a key role in helping her son, Kendric, secure his basketball scholarship at Michigan.
``I can't say anything negative about the experience," Price said. ``It was one of the best things that could have happened for Kendric in terms of exposure."
Veronica Brantley credited Gassnola with transforming her son, Jamual Warren, a 6-2 guard from Springfield, from ``a hard-headed little boy to a responsible young man." Warren, whom Gassnola has mentored for more than eight years, attends Globe Institute of Technology in New York and will play next season for the University of Cincinnati.
``From the outside looking in, people will see what they want to see about TJ," said Brantley, a single mother of five. ``But TJ has been a blessing for me and my family, and he's done it all out of the kindness of his heart."
Coaches Marvin Avery at Lynn Tech and Mike Hart at St. Andrew's said they have encountered no problems with Gassnola. In 2001, Gassnola also received a recommendation in a sentencing hearing in Springfield District Court from John Robic, who then coached Youngstown State between stints as Calipari's assistant at UMass and Memphis.
``He's a good man," Avery said of Gassnola. ``I'm a big supporter."
Yet Gassnola has no shortage of detractors, many of who portrayed him as a hustler more concerned about enhancing his image with Adidas than protecting the interests of young athletes.
``He could end up hurting a lot of kids," said Darryl Bishop, of Roxbury, whose 16-year-old son, Darryl, is one of several players Gassnola tried to poach from Papile. ``I don't think he's very good for youth basketball and what it stands for."
Bishop, a former football star at Western Kentucky who serves as athletic director of the Shelburne Community Center in Roxbury, said Gassnola arrived there uninvited to try to lure away three of Papile's players: the younger Bishop and 6-7 Jamal Coombs-McDaniel of Dorchester, both of whom Papile helped steer to Lawrence Academy, and 6-8 Alex Oriakhi of Lowell, a 16-year-old phenom whom Papile helped enroll at the Brooks School.
``He didn't offer me anything directly, but he did talk money, about how he had helped out some kids in the past," Bishop said. ``I've been there before, so I knew what he was talking about. I told him, `Anything you do now could hurt my son down the road.' I explained to him that we're not about that."
Bishop, who rejected Gassnola's invitation, said he took Gassnola to suggest he would provide his son improper financial support. Gassnola denied offering anything inappropriate.
``I would never say anything like that," he said. ``I don't operate like that."
Still, Gassnola said he is bound by few, if any, regulations, largely because the NCAA is hampered by its limited jurisdiction and no other agency carefully monitors the summer basketball universe.
``You can do whatever you want [because] there are no rules," he said. But while he insisted he would never entice a player or his parents with money, Gassnola acknowledged delivering small amounts of cash to a number of players who have joined his program. He made clear the money was for things unrelated to basketball competition -- such as food and leisure travel -- and thus a possible violation of NCAA rules on amateurism. He said his only motive is compassion for his players.
``Do I wire a kid $40 so he can get something to eat? You're damn right I do," he said. ``I'm not leaving a kid on the side of the road who's got nothing at home."
In one recruiting ploy, Gassnola told Coombs-McDaniel's father, Pernell McDaniel, he would provide the elder McDaniel with Adidas footwear if his 16-year-old son joined the Playaz.
``He said, `What size sneaker do you wear? I'm going to take care of you,' " said McDaniel, who declined the offer.
Gassnola, who acknowledged making the offer to McDaniel, described the goods he receives from Adidas as a valuable resource.
``When a guy like me has product behind him, that makes a difference," Gassnola said. ``Kids say, `That's what T-Mac [Tracy McGrady] wears.' If I had no product behind me, this wouldn't be as easy."
In another recruiting episode, Gassnola failed to impress Doug Millard, of Goffstown, N.H., whose 6-8 son, Chad, played as a freshman last season for Rick Pitino at Louisville after starring at Trinity High School in Manchester, N.H., and Brewster Academy. Doug Millard said Gassnola invited his family to dinner at a Manchester Applebee's while he was recruiting Chad, but when the bill came Gassnola produced three credit cards, all of which were rejected. Millard then picked up the check.
``At that point, I said to Chad, `You're not playing for this guy. How can his team afford to travel if he can't buy a $50 dinner?' " Millard recalled.
Gassnola then encouraged Doug Millard to let Chad play in a tournament in Memphis. By Doug Millard's account, which Gassnola confirmed, Gassnola said, ``If you let Chad go, we have an extra plane ticket. You can go, too."
The offers to McDaniel and Millard could have posed a potential problem with the NCAA, under a provision that bans prospects and their families from receiving preferential treatment, benefits, or services based on an athlete's reputation.
``We met hundreds and hundreds of people in the basketball world over the last few years and 99 percent of them were great people," Millard said. ``They're not all TJ Gassnolas."
Tactics questioned
At 6-5 and about 260 pounds, Gassnola strikes an imposing figure. He wears a diamond earring, gold chain, and Adidas apparel, often from head to toe. A graduate of Springfield's Cathedral High School, where he played basketball, Gassnola has described his occupations through the years as bar owner, car dealership manager, and real estate entrepreneur.
But his prime pursuit has been youth basketball. He got his break in 1998 when he steered Warren to the powerful Playaz Basketball Club of Paterson, N.J., an Adidas-funded organization whose alumni include the NBA's Kobe Bryant and Vince Carter, and became one of coach Jim Salmon's assistants.
With the Playaz's blessing, Gassnola spun off his own team in their image two years ago. Both Gassnola and Salmon said they have no financial relationship, and Gassnola said he raises most of the money for his team from Springfield-area businessmen and the unnamed NBA players.
At the core of Gassnola's mission is delivering some of the region's premier talent to major national tournaments and camps, particularly those sponsored by Adidas. Under NCAA rules, the events represent the last major showcases for prospective college players before the November period for players to sign with NCAA schools, further boosting the influence of operatives like Gassnola.
``It's a world most people don't know very much about," said former Celtics coach John Carroll, whose 16-year-old son, Austin, plays for Papile's BABC. ``There are guys like Leo who have been doing it a long time and have built a good reputation, and there are bottom-feeders like [Gassnola] who try to make a name for themselves by going into inner cities and doing whatever they can to entice kids. It's sad."
Gassnola, who last year incorporated the New England Playaz as a nonprofit and listed himself as the president, treasurer, clerk, and sole director, insisted he cares more about helping his players secure college scholarships than scoring points with Adidas.
``I'm going to make sure they go to college and aren't walking the streets doing nothing," he said of his players. ``That means more to me than Adidas going, `Holy [expletive], you got Antonio [Anderson]. He's a [potential] pro.' "
At times, however, Gassnola has put basketball before education. In 2004, he helped 6-9 Travis George, of Roxbury, enroll at Notre Dame Prep in Fitchburg, only to quickly remove him over philosophical differences with the school administration. Bill Barton, Notre Dame's principal and basketball coach, said the differences included Gassnola expecting George to leave campus and compete with the Playaz when Barton insisted George remain there during summer school to study.
``We will not take TJ's kids anymore," Barton said. ``There are some coaches who should not be guiding young men."
George has attended five prep schools since Notre Dame and has yet to meet the NCAA's academic eligibility standards. For his part, Gassnola acknowledged personally assailing Barton for requiring George to study rather than play basketball.
``[Barton] was killing the kid," Gassnola said. ``Travis won't be going to Yale to be an engineer."
Gassnola also acknowledged owing money to Notre Dame after reneging on a pledge to pay Warren's tuition. To date, Notre Dame has taken no legal action, though word of Gassnola's debt has spread through the youth baskeball community, further tainting his reputation.
Several AAU coaches told the Globe Gassnola has snatched away players from them by making promises the coaches could not or would not match. Most youth teams charge athletes to play, while high-powered programs such as Gassnola's and Papile's cover all the expenses, including travel to tournaments across the country.
No one in Greater Boston has lost more players to Gassnola than Mauricio Vasquez, who runs the Reebok-affiliated Metro Boston program in Dorchester. The players include Anderson, Price, George, and Alvin Lewis, a freshman at Kentucky Wesleyan.
Vasquez said he no longer cares to speak to Gassnola.
``However he got the kids, so be it, I'm not going to sink to those levels," Vasquez said. ``If someone sells you a dream and you feel that's going to get it done for you, so be it."
Gassnola said he respected Papile's turf in Greater Boston until he learned that Papile advised a relative of Dominique Price, a star guard at Holy Name in Worcester, to steer clear of Gassnola because of his troubled past. (Papile denied the assertion.)
``If [Papile] had shut his mouth, I would have left him alone out of respect," Gassnola said. ``But now, it's like I told him in a voice message, `You know what, bro? Boston is open game.' "
Gassnola has little chance of unseating Papile, according to Sonny Vaccaro, who revolutionized the relationship between sneaker companies and youth basketball players as a Nike executive in the 1980s before he moved to Adidas in 1992 and joined Reebok in 2004.
``That's like taking on the Red Sox or the Yankees if you're the Pirates," Vaccaro said. ``It's silly to even say that."
But Gassnola, who hit the road this year with a team he stocked with Division 1 college prospects, said he has no plans to go away.
``Mark my words," he said. ``In 10 years, the No. 1 program will be the New England Playaz."
Monday, July 24, 2006
Failure to solve Palestinian question empowers Iran
July 23, 2006
BY MARK STEYN
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Afew years back, when folks talked airily about "the Middle East peace process" and "a two-state solution," I used to say that the trouble was the Palestinians saw a two-state solution as an interim stage en route to a one-state solution. I underestimated Islamist depravity. As we now see in Gaza and southern Lebanon, any two-state solution would be an interim stage en route to a no-state solution.
In one of the most admirably straightforward of Islamist declarations, Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the slaughter of U.S. and French forces 20 years ago, put it this way:
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
Swell. But, suppose he got his way, what then? Suppose every last Jew in Israel were dead or fled, what would rise in place of the Zionist Entity? It would be something like the Hamas-Hezbollah terror squats in Gaza and Lebanon writ large. Hamas won a landslide in the Palestinian elections, and Hezbollah similarly won formal control of key Lebanese Cabinet ministries. But they're not Mussolini: They have no interest in making the trains run on time.
And to be honest, who can blame them? If you're a big-time terrorist mastermind, it's frankly a bit of a bore to find yourself Deputy Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions, particularly when you're no good at it and no matter how lavishly the European Union throws money at you there never seems to be any in the kitty when it comes to making payroll. So, like a business that's over-diversified, both Hamas and Hezbollah retreated to their core activity: Jew-killing.
In Causeries du Lundi, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve recalls a Parisian dramatist watching the revolutionary mob rampaging through the street below and beaming: "See my pageant passing!" That's how opportunist Arabs and indulgent Europeans looked on the intifada and the terrorists and the schoolgirl suicide bombers: as a kind of uber-authentic piece of performance art with which to torment the Jews and the Americans. They never paused to ask themselves: Hey, what if it doesn't stop there?
Well, about 30 years too late, they're asking it now. For the first quarter-century of Israel's existence, the Arab states fought more or less conventional wars against the Zionists, and kept losing. So then they figured it was easier to anoint a terrorist movement and in 1974 declared Yasser Arafat's PLO to be the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," which is quite a claim for an organization then barely half-a-decade old. Amazingly, the Arab League persuaded the U.N. and the EU and Bill Clinton and everyone else to go along with it and to treat the old monster as a head of state who lacked only a state to head. It's true that many nationalist movements have found it convenient to adopt the guise of terrorists. But, as the Palestinian "nationalist" movement descended from airline hijackings to the intifada to self-detonating in pizza parlors, it never occurred to their glamorous patrons to wonder if maybe this was, in fact, a terrorist movement conveniently adopting the guise of nationalism.
In 1971, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton, Palestinian terrorists shot Wasfi al-Tal, the prime minister of Jordan at point-blank range. As he fell to the floor dying, one of his killers began drinking the blood gushing from his wounds. Doesn't that strike you as a little, um, overwrought? Three decades later, when bombs went off in Bali killing hundreds of tourists plus local waiters and barmen, Bruce Haigh, a former Aussie diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, had no doubt where to put the blame. As he told Australia's Nine Network: "The root cause of this issue has been America's backing of Israel on Palestine."
Suppose this were true -- that terrorists blew up Oz honeymooners and Scandinavian stoners in Balinese nightclubs because of "the Palestinian question." Doesn't this suggest that these people are, at a certain level, nuts? After all, there are plenty of IRA sympathizers around the world (try making the Ulster Unionist case in a Boston bar) and yet they never thought to protest British rule in Northern Ireland by blowing up, say, German tourists in Thailand. Yet the more the thin skein of Palestinian grievance was stretched to justify atrocities halfway around the world, the more the Arab League big-shot emirs and European Union foreign ministers looked down from their windows and cooed, "See my parade passing!"
They've now belatedly realized they're at that stage in the creature feature where the monster has mutated into something bigger and crazier. Until the remarkably kinda-robust statement by the G-8 and the unprecedented denunciation of Hezbollah by the Arab League, the rule in any conflict in which Israel is involved -- Israel vs. PLO, Israel vs. Lebanon, Israel vs. [Your Team Here] is that the Jews are to blame.
But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers.
There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.
Meanwhile, Kofi Annan in a remarkable display of urgency (at least when compared with Sudan, Rwanda, Congo et al.) is proposing apropos Israel and Hezbollah that U.N. peacekeepers go in, not to keep the "peace" between two sovereign states but rather between a sovereign state and a usurper terrorist gang. Contemptible as he is, the secretary-general shows a shrewd understanding of the way the world is heading: Already "non-state actors" have more sophisticated rocketry than many EU nations; if Iran has its way, its proxies will be implied nuclear powers. Maybe we should put them on the U.N. Security Council.
So what is in reality Israel's first non-Arab war is a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow: The EU and Arab League won't quite spell it out, but, to modify that Le Monde headline, they are all Jews now.
BY MARK STEYN
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Afew years back, when folks talked airily about "the Middle East peace process" and "a two-state solution," I used to say that the trouble was the Palestinians saw a two-state solution as an interim stage en route to a one-state solution. I underestimated Islamist depravity. As we now see in Gaza and southern Lebanon, any two-state solution would be an interim stage en route to a no-state solution.
In one of the most admirably straightforward of Islamist declarations, Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the slaughter of U.S. and French forces 20 years ago, put it this way:
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
Swell. But, suppose he got his way, what then? Suppose every last Jew in Israel were dead or fled, what would rise in place of the Zionist Entity? It would be something like the Hamas-Hezbollah terror squats in Gaza and Lebanon writ large. Hamas won a landslide in the Palestinian elections, and Hezbollah similarly won formal control of key Lebanese Cabinet ministries. But they're not Mussolini: They have no interest in making the trains run on time.
And to be honest, who can blame them? If you're a big-time terrorist mastermind, it's frankly a bit of a bore to find yourself Deputy Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions, particularly when you're no good at it and no matter how lavishly the European Union throws money at you there never seems to be any in the kitty when it comes to making payroll. So, like a business that's over-diversified, both Hamas and Hezbollah retreated to their core activity: Jew-killing.
In Causeries du Lundi, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve recalls a Parisian dramatist watching the revolutionary mob rampaging through the street below and beaming: "See my pageant passing!" That's how opportunist Arabs and indulgent Europeans looked on the intifada and the terrorists and the schoolgirl suicide bombers: as a kind of uber-authentic piece of performance art with which to torment the Jews and the Americans. They never paused to ask themselves: Hey, what if it doesn't stop there?
Well, about 30 years too late, they're asking it now. For the first quarter-century of Israel's existence, the Arab states fought more or less conventional wars against the Zionists, and kept losing. So then they figured it was easier to anoint a terrorist movement and in 1974 declared Yasser Arafat's PLO to be the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," which is quite a claim for an organization then barely half-a-decade old. Amazingly, the Arab League persuaded the U.N. and the EU and Bill Clinton and everyone else to go along with it and to treat the old monster as a head of state who lacked only a state to head. It's true that many nationalist movements have found it convenient to adopt the guise of terrorists. But, as the Palestinian "nationalist" movement descended from airline hijackings to the intifada to self-detonating in pizza parlors, it never occurred to their glamorous patrons to wonder if maybe this was, in fact, a terrorist movement conveniently adopting the guise of nationalism.
In 1971, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton, Palestinian terrorists shot Wasfi al-Tal, the prime minister of Jordan at point-blank range. As he fell to the floor dying, one of his killers began drinking the blood gushing from his wounds. Doesn't that strike you as a little, um, overwrought? Three decades later, when bombs went off in Bali killing hundreds of tourists plus local waiters and barmen, Bruce Haigh, a former Aussie diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, had no doubt where to put the blame. As he told Australia's Nine Network: "The root cause of this issue has been America's backing of Israel on Palestine."
Suppose this were true -- that terrorists blew up Oz honeymooners and Scandinavian stoners in Balinese nightclubs because of "the Palestinian question." Doesn't this suggest that these people are, at a certain level, nuts? After all, there are plenty of IRA sympathizers around the world (try making the Ulster Unionist case in a Boston bar) and yet they never thought to protest British rule in Northern Ireland by blowing up, say, German tourists in Thailand. Yet the more the thin skein of Palestinian grievance was stretched to justify atrocities halfway around the world, the more the Arab League big-shot emirs and European Union foreign ministers looked down from their windows and cooed, "See my parade passing!"
They've now belatedly realized they're at that stage in the creature feature where the monster has mutated into something bigger and crazier. Until the remarkably kinda-robust statement by the G-8 and the unprecedented denunciation of Hezbollah by the Arab League, the rule in any conflict in which Israel is involved -- Israel vs. PLO, Israel vs. Lebanon, Israel vs. [Your Team Here] is that the Jews are to blame.
But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers.
There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.
Meanwhile, Kofi Annan in a remarkable display of urgency (at least when compared with Sudan, Rwanda, Congo et al.) is proposing apropos Israel and Hezbollah that U.N. peacekeepers go in, not to keep the "peace" between two sovereign states but rather between a sovereign state and a usurper terrorist gang. Contemptible as he is, the secretary-general shows a shrewd understanding of the way the world is heading: Already "non-state actors" have more sophisticated rocketry than many EU nations; if Iran has its way, its proxies will be implied nuclear powers. Maybe we should put them on the U.N. Security Council.
So what is in reality Israel's first non-Arab war is a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow: The EU and Arab League won't quite spell it out, but, to modify that Le Monde headline, they are all Jews now.
Hezbollah's Iranian War in Iraq
By Dr. Walid Phares
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 24, 2006
When Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah held his press conference to declare his new victory over his enemy, Israel, he was triggering –probably without knowing- a new era in the history of Lebanon and the region. “We will continue in faithfulness to our line,” he declared, in legitimizing his cross border attack on an Israeli patrol, killing soldiers and kidnapping two. But the real “fidelity” Nasrallah was referring to wasn’t to his captured men in Israeli jails, but to the regimes decision-makers in Tehran and Damascus. The “operation of July” came as a tipping point in a larger conflict, which superseded Hezbollah’s detainee, the Shebaa farms, borders skirmishes and Israeli tactical responses. Beyond and above the events of that day, Hezbollah was triggering the first Iranian war on Lebanon’s soil: A Syrian-supported offensive, even at the height of the Assad II regime. Bringing fire and smoke to the Lebanese-Israeli borders, and week before to the Gaza-Israel demarcation lines, is not simply two local disputes, one over unilateral Israeli withdrawal in Gaza and the other over real estate on the western slopes of Mount Hermon. Nasrallah (as well as his counterpart of Hamas) has calculated perfectly how to conduct a hit and run with the Israelis ordered by regional regime who have miscalculated their strategies. Pressured by the new regional realities and world concerns about nuclear threats and Terrorism, Iran and Syria wanted to throw their allies into the greatest uncertainties of survival.
But as Israel’s Air Force began to pound Nasrallah’s organization and Lebanon’s transportation and communications infrastructure, and the media reported the war in progress with its horrific images, world opinion and decision-centers commenced to swing in all directions, seeking a name to the War and a projection of its ending, with great difficulties. Attempts are still ongoing to frame it from the most simplistic to the most conspiratorial: Lebanon is a beautiful country, it doesn’t deserve violence and victimization, says the less informed. Indeed such lamentation should have been expressed since 1975, when this country was thrown to the lions. Between the PLO attacks since the beginning of the War, the Syrian occupation as of June 1976, the Israeli invasion of 1982 and the Iranian penetration of the 1980s, in addition to the civil war between all communities, more than 180,000 people were massacred and killed, with very little compassion under the Cold War and despite its end in 1990. While most militias disarmed in 1991, only one camp dodged that duty: Iranian-backed Syrian-protected Hezbollah and its allies. Co-ruling the country with Syria’s security services, the militia presented itself as a “resistance” for a whole decade, building its networks, and consolidating power inside the country while claiming liberation against Israel’s occupation of the south. The “Khumeinist resistance” endorsed the Syrian “occupation” of Lebanon and never struggled to free its compatriots in Damascus’ jails. In May 2000 it achieved victory over Israel and its local allies, by occupying the so-called “security zone” in southern Lebanon after the latter being evacuated by the Israeli Government. Since then, Hezbollah reached its golden age: Control of about 70 km of international borders with the “Zionist entity,” warranting hundreds of millions of dollars and other military support from Iran’s Pasdarans; but also appropriation of enormous Government assets and resources under the auspices of Syrian control.
Between 2000 and 2005, Hezbollah increased its influence in Lebanese politics, becoming the dominant force, and remaining the principal ally of Syrian occupation. In this half decade, Tehran supplied the organization with weapons capable of reaching remote areas inside Israel. In those years as well, Hezbollah extended and grew its cells around the world including in South America, North America, West Africa and Western Europe. But the surge to high power, both in Lebanon and worldwide began to face challenges as of September 11, 2001.
From when the American public mobilized against Terrorism in general to the first US-led intervention in Afghanistan, Tehran’s leaders got extremely nervous about the changes hitting their neighborhood. Any democracy anywhere around them is a bad omen. When the Taliban regime was removed from Kabul in 2001, Tehran’s Khumenists witnessed the rise of women in the electoral process and within the Afghani Government. Iranian leaders understood the future implications at home. When Saddam’s regime was removed from Baghdad, Khamenei’s elite wasn’t unhappy with the removal, but with the multi party process that followed, even though they succeeded in inserting their influence in it. And when UNSCR 1559 was voted calling on Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon and Hizbollah’s disarming, both Tehran and Damascus felt the heat pressuring their joint influence on the Eastern Mediterranean. The Syrian Baathist reaction to the new era was quick with the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on February 14, 2005. Assad paid a dear price for this fast drawing and shooting against his opponents in Lebanon. In March of that year, and despite an attempt by Hezbollah to shore up popular support to the Syrian President inside Lebanon, one million and a half citizens marched in the street of Beirut, shattering the myth of both Syrian “brotherly” occupation and Hizbollah’s untouched position in the country. With the political weakening of its allied organization by the public and the pulling out of Damascus’ regular troops from Lebanon, Iran’s regime mobilized for the counter regional attack. Hezbollah readied for its role in the general Jihadi offensive.
The Jihadi Syro-Iranian offensive started simultaneously in early 2005, with the Hariri assassination in Lebanon and the selecting of Mahmoud Ahmedinijad as head of the Islamic Republic in Tehran. In Lebanon and as the pro-Syrian Government collapsed, new elections were held and an anti-Syria majority was established, Hezbollah executed a sophisticated one year plan in preparation for the war launched in July 2006. It began with Nasrallah imposing on the Seniora Government a strange offer: taking three members of the Party into his cabinet, while Hezbollah maintains a strategic relation with Syria’s regime. That success brought other moves forward. For six months, political leaders and journalists of the Cedars Revolution were assassinated with car bombs: Samir Qassir, George Hawi and Gebran Tueni. This sufficed to convince the anti-Syrian politicians that any serious obstruction of the Iranian-Syrian axis and opposition to Hezbollah will be “punished.” The terror treatment seemed to have worked, as the Government was forced to abandon the implementation of UNSCR 1559 and have its components sit down with Hezbollah to “discuss” the future of its weapons. In short, it took Nasrallah and his allies less than a year to contain and weaken the Cedars Revolution and the Government it has produced. Twelve months passed after Syria’s withdrawal from the country, and yet the Lebanese army was not allowed by Hezbollah’s veto power inside the Seniora cabinet to deploy along the borders or even inside the sensitive area of south Lebanon.
Strategically, Hezbollah absorbed the consequences of the Syrian withdrawal, penetrated the Government and along with pro-Syrian politicians created further divisions within Lebanon’s religious communities, including within Sunni, Druze and Christian political establishments.
During 2006, several factors pushed Iran and Syria to press their allies in Lebanon and in Palestine for havoc. The nuclear crisis with Tehran was the principal factor for convincing the Mullahs that a major crumbling of the region’s new democracies and peace processes is vital to deflect the crisis away from Tehran. In fact the international determination to remove the Iranian nuclear threat was breaking Ahmedinijad’s ambitions for increasing international power.
The several elections in Iraq, despite terrorism, indicated the rise of the political process in that country, with future impact on Iran itself. Syria’s isolation as a result of the UN investigation in the Hariri assassination further convinced the Assad regime that inflaming the Gaza and the Israeli-Lebanese borders is the recipe to overshadow the UN report. Hamas also had developed interest in the clash with the “Zionist enemy,” as the financial credibility of their newly formed Government in the Palestinian areas was sinking down and a civil war with Fatah looming on the horizon. And finally Hezbollah: the militia-turned party and still listed as a Terrorist organization on the US list of terrorist group, used extreme patience since 2000 in building its hyper-arsenal across the country, infiltrated the Army and avoided major escalation against Israel. But on Bastille Day Sayyed Nasrallah ended the previous era of preparedness: Now is the time for a qualitative Jihad, he seemed to imply.
In addition to the regional injunctions to strike Israel in order to focus the international heat on the Arab Israeli conflict, Hezbollah has also included a number of “Lebanese” factors in its decision to flare up the borders with its enemy. Back in March 2005, the leaders of the Iranian-backed organization saw in disbelief the enormous masses marching against Syria, and by ripple effect, against Hezbollah. Not only the largest democracy demonstration in the history of the Middle East, but also a multiethnic and multi-religious one: Christians, Druze, Sunnis and even some Shiites broke the taboo of Hezbollah’s “sacred” character in Lebanon. Second nightmare was with the actual withdrawal of the Syrian army from the country, opening the path for the implementation of the second item of the UNSCR 1559, i.e., disarming the fundamentalist militia. The third nightmare came when this anti-Syrian coalition brought a majority in Parliament during the May-June 2005 legislative elections in Lebanon. The threat to Hezbollah was not the formation of a cabinet opposing Syrian influence in as much as it was a signal that the people of Lebanon wasn’t endorsing the “resistance” story, or put it simply, wasn’t buying the party’s story period. The Cedars Revolution was the worse development the Khumeinist movement had to absorb since its inception. The sight of a million young men and women in colorful outfits marching in downtown Beirut was the beginning of a new era: liberal democracy, freedom and rejection of the dark ideology of Nasrallah. Hence, it became a must to eliminate that revolution at any price.
In a few months, a number of leading politicians and journalists were savagely murdered by the pro-Syrian camp: Syrian intelligence, Hezbollah and other groups were suspected as being behind the assassination campaign. In parallel, Hezbollah and its allies outmaneuvered the parliamentary majority, which was supposed to form an anti-Baathist Government, bring down the pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud and remove the pro-Syrian speaker of the House, Nabih Berri. A magic hand convinced the so-called politicians of the March 14 movement, that none of these measures is feasible. Hence Syria maintained its power in Lebanon, while U.S and French Presidents were singing the praise of the liberation of Lebanon. Furthermore, and in a suicidal move the Lebanese cabinet, headed by Fouad Seniora invited Hezbollah to join the Government, before the latter disarm. By the summer of last year, the Cedars Revolution was bleeding seriously. Not only entrenched in the legal Government of Lebanon, but Hezbollah succeeded in a penetration of the Christian community, the hardcore of the anti-Syrian resistance, by enlisting the former commander of the Lebanese Army who performed an about face after 10 years in exile, where he claimed opposition to Syria. Michel Aoun signed an agreement of “understanding” with Hassan Nasrallah during the spring of 2006. The “revolution” was beheaded and Hezbollah was waiting for the right time to operate its come back into the center of Lebanese politics, while executing the instructions of Tehran and Damascus.
By early July 2006, Hezbollah’s preparations for the bloody return to the top were fulfilled. The organization had already accomplished its Lebanese tasks:
1) Elimination (direct or in conjunction with Syrian intelligence or Syrian Social Nationalists) of visible symbols of anti-Syrian leadership: Tueni, Qassir and Hawi, and attempts against others such as May Chidiac, as an intimidation lesson to all others.
2) Paralysis of PM Seniora’s cabinet from the inside and in cooperation with President Lahoud networks on the outside.
3) Paralysis of the parliament in collaboration with speaker Berri and the Aoun bloc.
4) Dragging the political forces in the country in the so-called national dialogue on the weapons of Hezbollah, a major waste of time and marginalization of the 1559 stipulation
5) Intimidation of the Lebanese army command.
6) Attempts to divide the Lebanese diaspora by implanting agents linked to the axis.
7) Reactivation of the pro-Syrian and Jihadist networks in Lebanon and within the Palestinian camps.
8) Distribution of weapons among allied militias
9) Finally and most importantly, completing the final steps in the deployment of a system of rockets and long range artillery batteries aimed at Israel.
It is based on these domestic achievements in Lebanon and on strategic injunctions by its regional sponsors that Hezbollah decided to trigger its awaited Armageddon. What was the Hezbollah’s initial plan? The pro-Iranian militia had constructed a theory of invincibility based on the rationalization of a string of former successes against the United States and France in the 1980s, against Israel and the ex-South Lebanon Army in the 1990s, and its intimidation of the Cedars Revolution in 2005. In short, Nasrallah’s team was convinced of the following: A spectacular operation against Israeli military would:
1. Bring back the “struggle with Israel” to the forefront of Lebanese politics, thus cornering the Lebanese Government into capitulation on the Hariri and the disarmament matters.
2. Expect a harsh Israeli retaliation, good enough to attract world condemnation, but not strong enough to change realities in Lebanon.
3. The operation, dubbed “al-Waad al sadeq” (Faithful Promise) would signal the beginning of a series of skirmishes with Israel and a generalized assault on the Seniora cabinet and the Cedars Revolution, to be accused on treason and collusion with the Zionists.
4. With the crumbling of the Lebanese Government under the strikes by Hizbollah-Lahoud-Aoun, the pro-Syrian President would dismiss the Seniora cabinet, and in cahoots with pro-Syrian Berri, would disband the Parliament. A massive campaign of assassinations, arrests and exile would target the March 14 movement, followed by Terror-backed legislative elections, brining back a pro-Syrian Hizbollahi assembly and a radical Government.
5. The “putsch” would reestablish a Pro-Syrian-Iranian regime in Lebanon, and reconstruct a third wing to the Tehran-Damascus axis, reanimating the Arab-Israeli conflict, rejuvenating the Syrian dominance, isolating Jordan, reaching out to Hamas, crumbling Iraq, and unleashing Iran’s nuclear programs unchecked. The domino effects of Hezbollah’s “Waad al sadeq” are far from being even imagined by Western and Arab policy planners.
Nasrallah seemed to be in control of his strategy when he appeared in his press conference of victory. His back was safe since he has terrorized the Cedars Revolution’s movement, enlisted Aoun’s support (breaking Christian community unity), and pushed Sunni and Druze breakaways to challenge Jumblat and Hariri (the son). To his south, he was applauding Haniya’s Hamas “cabinet” for having already engaged the Israelis. To his east, Syria was mobilizing and waiting.
In Iran, the “masters” were extending their strategic umbrella; and in Iraq, the Terror sapping of sectarian relations was on. All the brothers in Khumeini Jihadism were awaiting Hezbollah to break the chain of events from the Galilee. Nasrallah was at the forefront of a plan aiming at wrecking the rising democracy and the fledgling stability of the region. The stakes were really high for the “axis.” But Hassan Nasrallah’s master plan failed. First the Lebanese Government, smelling the odors of conspiracy was quick to distance itself from the operation. “The Government was not informed by it nor does it endorse it,” stated the Seniora release. Second, Israel’s volte-face surprised Hezbollah and their allies. Why would the Olmert Government, declare a full war on an organization that classical armies cannot take out, thought the Tehran planners. Then came, the Arab position: Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, followed discretely by others didn’t extend their full support to the move. They certainly criticized Israel to the fullest of rhetoric, but didn’t praise the “Hizb.” On the international level, the Terror group “that-provide-services” didn’t fare better. The United States firmly extended its bipartisan support to UNSCR 1559; France and the rest of Europe stated the same –with their continental language- Russia wouldn’t side with Nasrallah against the world, and China has other priorities on its plate. Only Iran threatened to wage wars in the rescue of its most western army. Nasrallah fell into his own trap but decided to come up with a contingency plan.
Not so different from Plan A, the objectives of Plan B have been readjusted. If Israel bombards Hezbollah’s infrastructure to the ground, Iranian oil will rebuild it. If Israel invades by land, it will find itself against a more aggressive Hezbollah than the one of the 1990s. Besides, Hezbollah will attempt nevertheless to go after the Seniora Government anyway. Calling on the “reserves,” Hezbollah enlisted President Lahoud and his son in law Defense Minister Elias Murr to drag the Lebanese Army in the War against Israel’s forces. And in collaboration with Aounist cadres (while the majority of his partisans are still stunned by the events), Hezbollah has unleashed an international campaign against the “inhumane aggression.” If things go well, Nasrallah expect Plan B to become Plan A, and a land advance by Israel would unleash a total offensive against the Government of Lebanon by pro-Iranian and Syrian forces. If Israel moves north to create a safe area against Rockets, Hezbollah would move north to control the rest of Lebanon. The Syrian-Iranian axis will refuse UNSCR 1559, reject international initiatives for disarming the militias, and will make its stand in Lebanon, even if the Switzerland of the Middle East is to be reduced to rubbles. Assad wants to save his regime in Beirut, and Ahmedinijad wants to shield his bomb in the Bekaa: Alea Jacta Est, the dice are rolling.
Hezbollah’s plan for the Lebanese Army is to drag it to a fight with Israel, as a way to destroy it. For the past 16 years Syria and Hezbollah have penetrated the Lebanese Army and installed their followers at various positions. For example, the command of the southern command, the officers in charge of the southern suburb of Beirut, the Murabb’a al amni (security zone for Nasrallah) and many offices in the second bureau are in the hands of Shiite officers linked to Hezbollah. Syria’s allies including the Hezb and Amal can count on 20% influence within the institution. The commander in chief, General Michel Sleiman is neutral, with possibilities of shifts to either side. The head of the military intelligence, a Christian, follows Lahoud orders. The power map inside the Army keeps changing, but at the core of this institution, most officers are pro-Lebanese, close to the West. If Hezbollah pushes the regular troop into battle against Israel, the Army may split.
The United Nations is bound by a resolution it cannot but implement: UNSCR 1559. Having been among those who worked on introducing it in 2004, I have followed up till very recently the international efforts in this regards. There is a solid consensus that the resolution has to be implemented; it is inescapable. The question is who would implement it? Reality is that the Lebanese Government and its armed forces are too weak in front of the Hezbollah-Baath-Ahmedinijad axis. So if a regional bloc is obstructing a UN resolution, the international community should provide the balance of power. Hence, the US and France, along with the European Union, the moderate Arab states with the consent of the Security Council must provide the tools for the Lebanese Government to spread its sovereignty over its national soil, and the support for the Cedars Revolution to revive itself. The options are very limited: Either Hezbollah will dominate the Lebanese Republic, or the latter will disarm Hezbollah. Anything in between would be a waste of time. If Israel stops its operations short of an international intervention, Hezbollah will win the war. If Israel moves forward inside Lebanon after Hezbollah, an international intervention is inevitable. The days, weeks and months ahead will tell.
Meanwhile Hezbollah and its allies both in the region and in the West are and will be waging the mother of all propaganda wars. The task assigned to the propagandists is to stop military operations so that Hezbollah survives and fail international interventions so that the Lebanese Government collapses. A war of images, photos, mudding, internet, and media will explode in all directions. Operatives helping Hezbollah, including many with Christian names, will be waging an indiscriminate propaganda offensive against Lebanese, Arab, Western and obviously Israeli figures to spread confusion and psychological collapse in the international community. Objective: Obstruct the implementation of UNSCR 1559, trash the March 14 movement, criticize the Arab Government, and incite for Jihadi violence.
Hezbollah waged an Iranian war with Syrian backing. It knew how to start it, but it won’t know how it will end. The forces unleashed in this conflict have been unpredictable including Israel, Lebanon’s politics, the Arab Governments, and the international community. Hezbollah and its regional allies have spoken of “surprises” to come. In fact the latter are pretty much predictable: more rockets on and suicide attacks in Israel, coup d’Etat in Lebanon, and obviously international terrorism, including in the West. But “surprises” could also happen to Hezbollah. The “Waad al sadeq” operation may not be the only miscalculation by Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. The future of Hezbollah’s war is as uncertain as the fate of the organization.
Dr Walid Phares is the author of the newly released book Future Jihad. He is also a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington DC.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 24, 2006
When Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah held his press conference to declare his new victory over his enemy, Israel, he was triggering –probably without knowing- a new era in the history of Lebanon and the region. “We will continue in faithfulness to our line,” he declared, in legitimizing his cross border attack on an Israeli patrol, killing soldiers and kidnapping two. But the real “fidelity” Nasrallah was referring to wasn’t to his captured men in Israeli jails, but to the regimes decision-makers in Tehran and Damascus. The “operation of July” came as a tipping point in a larger conflict, which superseded Hezbollah’s detainee, the Shebaa farms, borders skirmishes and Israeli tactical responses. Beyond and above the events of that day, Hezbollah was triggering the first Iranian war on Lebanon’s soil: A Syrian-supported offensive, even at the height of the Assad II regime. Bringing fire and smoke to the Lebanese-Israeli borders, and week before to the Gaza-Israel demarcation lines, is not simply two local disputes, one over unilateral Israeli withdrawal in Gaza and the other over real estate on the western slopes of Mount Hermon. Nasrallah (as well as his counterpart of Hamas) has calculated perfectly how to conduct a hit and run with the Israelis ordered by regional regime who have miscalculated their strategies. Pressured by the new regional realities and world concerns about nuclear threats and Terrorism, Iran and Syria wanted to throw their allies into the greatest uncertainties of survival.
But as Israel’s Air Force began to pound Nasrallah’s organization and Lebanon’s transportation and communications infrastructure, and the media reported the war in progress with its horrific images, world opinion and decision-centers commenced to swing in all directions, seeking a name to the War and a projection of its ending, with great difficulties. Attempts are still ongoing to frame it from the most simplistic to the most conspiratorial: Lebanon is a beautiful country, it doesn’t deserve violence and victimization, says the less informed. Indeed such lamentation should have been expressed since 1975, when this country was thrown to the lions. Between the PLO attacks since the beginning of the War, the Syrian occupation as of June 1976, the Israeli invasion of 1982 and the Iranian penetration of the 1980s, in addition to the civil war between all communities, more than 180,000 people were massacred and killed, with very little compassion under the Cold War and despite its end in 1990. While most militias disarmed in 1991, only one camp dodged that duty: Iranian-backed Syrian-protected Hezbollah and its allies. Co-ruling the country with Syria’s security services, the militia presented itself as a “resistance” for a whole decade, building its networks, and consolidating power inside the country while claiming liberation against Israel’s occupation of the south. The “Khumeinist resistance” endorsed the Syrian “occupation” of Lebanon and never struggled to free its compatriots in Damascus’ jails. In May 2000 it achieved victory over Israel and its local allies, by occupying the so-called “security zone” in southern Lebanon after the latter being evacuated by the Israeli Government. Since then, Hezbollah reached its golden age: Control of about 70 km of international borders with the “Zionist entity,” warranting hundreds of millions of dollars and other military support from Iran’s Pasdarans; but also appropriation of enormous Government assets and resources under the auspices of Syrian control.
Between 2000 and 2005, Hezbollah increased its influence in Lebanese politics, becoming the dominant force, and remaining the principal ally of Syrian occupation. In this half decade, Tehran supplied the organization with weapons capable of reaching remote areas inside Israel. In those years as well, Hezbollah extended and grew its cells around the world including in South America, North America, West Africa and Western Europe. But the surge to high power, both in Lebanon and worldwide began to face challenges as of September 11, 2001.
From when the American public mobilized against Terrorism in general to the first US-led intervention in Afghanistan, Tehran’s leaders got extremely nervous about the changes hitting their neighborhood. Any democracy anywhere around them is a bad omen. When the Taliban regime was removed from Kabul in 2001, Tehran’s Khumenists witnessed the rise of women in the electoral process and within the Afghani Government. Iranian leaders understood the future implications at home. When Saddam’s regime was removed from Baghdad, Khamenei’s elite wasn’t unhappy with the removal, but with the multi party process that followed, even though they succeeded in inserting their influence in it. And when UNSCR 1559 was voted calling on Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon and Hizbollah’s disarming, both Tehran and Damascus felt the heat pressuring their joint influence on the Eastern Mediterranean. The Syrian Baathist reaction to the new era was quick with the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on February 14, 2005. Assad paid a dear price for this fast drawing and shooting against his opponents in Lebanon. In March of that year, and despite an attempt by Hezbollah to shore up popular support to the Syrian President inside Lebanon, one million and a half citizens marched in the street of Beirut, shattering the myth of both Syrian “brotherly” occupation and Hizbollah’s untouched position in the country. With the political weakening of its allied organization by the public and the pulling out of Damascus’ regular troops from Lebanon, Iran’s regime mobilized for the counter regional attack. Hezbollah readied for its role in the general Jihadi offensive.
The Jihadi Syro-Iranian offensive started simultaneously in early 2005, with the Hariri assassination in Lebanon and the selecting of Mahmoud Ahmedinijad as head of the Islamic Republic in Tehran. In Lebanon and as the pro-Syrian Government collapsed, new elections were held and an anti-Syria majority was established, Hezbollah executed a sophisticated one year plan in preparation for the war launched in July 2006. It began with Nasrallah imposing on the Seniora Government a strange offer: taking three members of the Party into his cabinet, while Hezbollah maintains a strategic relation with Syria’s regime. That success brought other moves forward. For six months, political leaders and journalists of the Cedars Revolution were assassinated with car bombs: Samir Qassir, George Hawi and Gebran Tueni. This sufficed to convince the anti-Syrian politicians that any serious obstruction of the Iranian-Syrian axis and opposition to Hezbollah will be “punished.” The terror treatment seemed to have worked, as the Government was forced to abandon the implementation of UNSCR 1559 and have its components sit down with Hezbollah to “discuss” the future of its weapons. In short, it took Nasrallah and his allies less than a year to contain and weaken the Cedars Revolution and the Government it has produced. Twelve months passed after Syria’s withdrawal from the country, and yet the Lebanese army was not allowed by Hezbollah’s veto power inside the Seniora cabinet to deploy along the borders or even inside the sensitive area of south Lebanon.
Strategically, Hezbollah absorbed the consequences of the Syrian withdrawal, penetrated the Government and along with pro-Syrian politicians created further divisions within Lebanon’s religious communities, including within Sunni, Druze and Christian political establishments.
During 2006, several factors pushed Iran and Syria to press their allies in Lebanon and in Palestine for havoc. The nuclear crisis with Tehran was the principal factor for convincing the Mullahs that a major crumbling of the region’s new democracies and peace processes is vital to deflect the crisis away from Tehran. In fact the international determination to remove the Iranian nuclear threat was breaking Ahmedinijad’s ambitions for increasing international power.
The several elections in Iraq, despite terrorism, indicated the rise of the political process in that country, with future impact on Iran itself. Syria’s isolation as a result of the UN investigation in the Hariri assassination further convinced the Assad regime that inflaming the Gaza and the Israeli-Lebanese borders is the recipe to overshadow the UN report. Hamas also had developed interest in the clash with the “Zionist enemy,” as the financial credibility of their newly formed Government in the Palestinian areas was sinking down and a civil war with Fatah looming on the horizon. And finally Hezbollah: the militia-turned party and still listed as a Terrorist organization on the US list of terrorist group, used extreme patience since 2000 in building its hyper-arsenal across the country, infiltrated the Army and avoided major escalation against Israel. But on Bastille Day Sayyed Nasrallah ended the previous era of preparedness: Now is the time for a qualitative Jihad, he seemed to imply.
In addition to the regional injunctions to strike Israel in order to focus the international heat on the Arab Israeli conflict, Hezbollah has also included a number of “Lebanese” factors in its decision to flare up the borders with its enemy. Back in March 2005, the leaders of the Iranian-backed organization saw in disbelief the enormous masses marching against Syria, and by ripple effect, against Hezbollah. Not only the largest democracy demonstration in the history of the Middle East, but also a multiethnic and multi-religious one: Christians, Druze, Sunnis and even some Shiites broke the taboo of Hezbollah’s “sacred” character in Lebanon. Second nightmare was with the actual withdrawal of the Syrian army from the country, opening the path for the implementation of the second item of the UNSCR 1559, i.e., disarming the fundamentalist militia. The third nightmare came when this anti-Syrian coalition brought a majority in Parliament during the May-June 2005 legislative elections in Lebanon. The threat to Hezbollah was not the formation of a cabinet opposing Syrian influence in as much as it was a signal that the people of Lebanon wasn’t endorsing the “resistance” story, or put it simply, wasn’t buying the party’s story period. The Cedars Revolution was the worse development the Khumeinist movement had to absorb since its inception. The sight of a million young men and women in colorful outfits marching in downtown Beirut was the beginning of a new era: liberal democracy, freedom and rejection of the dark ideology of Nasrallah. Hence, it became a must to eliminate that revolution at any price.
In a few months, a number of leading politicians and journalists were savagely murdered by the pro-Syrian camp: Syrian intelligence, Hezbollah and other groups were suspected as being behind the assassination campaign. In parallel, Hezbollah and its allies outmaneuvered the parliamentary majority, which was supposed to form an anti-Baathist Government, bring down the pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud and remove the pro-Syrian speaker of the House, Nabih Berri. A magic hand convinced the so-called politicians of the March 14 movement, that none of these measures is feasible. Hence Syria maintained its power in Lebanon, while U.S and French Presidents were singing the praise of the liberation of Lebanon. Furthermore, and in a suicidal move the Lebanese cabinet, headed by Fouad Seniora invited Hezbollah to join the Government, before the latter disarm. By the summer of last year, the Cedars Revolution was bleeding seriously. Not only entrenched in the legal Government of Lebanon, but Hezbollah succeeded in a penetration of the Christian community, the hardcore of the anti-Syrian resistance, by enlisting the former commander of the Lebanese Army who performed an about face after 10 years in exile, where he claimed opposition to Syria. Michel Aoun signed an agreement of “understanding” with Hassan Nasrallah during the spring of 2006. The “revolution” was beheaded and Hezbollah was waiting for the right time to operate its come back into the center of Lebanese politics, while executing the instructions of Tehran and Damascus.
By early July 2006, Hezbollah’s preparations for the bloody return to the top were fulfilled. The organization had already accomplished its Lebanese tasks:
1) Elimination (direct or in conjunction with Syrian intelligence or Syrian Social Nationalists) of visible symbols of anti-Syrian leadership: Tueni, Qassir and Hawi, and attempts against others such as May Chidiac, as an intimidation lesson to all others.
2) Paralysis of PM Seniora’s cabinet from the inside and in cooperation with President Lahoud networks on the outside.
3) Paralysis of the parliament in collaboration with speaker Berri and the Aoun bloc.
4) Dragging the political forces in the country in the so-called national dialogue on the weapons of Hezbollah, a major waste of time and marginalization of the 1559 stipulation
5) Intimidation of the Lebanese army command.
6) Attempts to divide the Lebanese diaspora by implanting agents linked to the axis.
7) Reactivation of the pro-Syrian and Jihadist networks in Lebanon and within the Palestinian camps.
8) Distribution of weapons among allied militias
9) Finally and most importantly, completing the final steps in the deployment of a system of rockets and long range artillery batteries aimed at Israel.
It is based on these domestic achievements in Lebanon and on strategic injunctions by its regional sponsors that Hezbollah decided to trigger its awaited Armageddon. What was the Hezbollah’s initial plan? The pro-Iranian militia had constructed a theory of invincibility based on the rationalization of a string of former successes against the United States and France in the 1980s, against Israel and the ex-South Lebanon Army in the 1990s, and its intimidation of the Cedars Revolution in 2005. In short, Nasrallah’s team was convinced of the following: A spectacular operation against Israeli military would:
1. Bring back the “struggle with Israel” to the forefront of Lebanese politics, thus cornering the Lebanese Government into capitulation on the Hariri and the disarmament matters.
2. Expect a harsh Israeli retaliation, good enough to attract world condemnation, but not strong enough to change realities in Lebanon.
3. The operation, dubbed “al-Waad al sadeq” (Faithful Promise) would signal the beginning of a series of skirmishes with Israel and a generalized assault on the Seniora cabinet and the Cedars Revolution, to be accused on treason and collusion with the Zionists.
4. With the crumbling of the Lebanese Government under the strikes by Hizbollah-Lahoud-Aoun, the pro-Syrian President would dismiss the Seniora cabinet, and in cahoots with pro-Syrian Berri, would disband the Parliament. A massive campaign of assassinations, arrests and exile would target the March 14 movement, followed by Terror-backed legislative elections, brining back a pro-Syrian Hizbollahi assembly and a radical Government.
5. The “putsch” would reestablish a Pro-Syrian-Iranian regime in Lebanon, and reconstruct a third wing to the Tehran-Damascus axis, reanimating the Arab-Israeli conflict, rejuvenating the Syrian dominance, isolating Jordan, reaching out to Hamas, crumbling Iraq, and unleashing Iran’s nuclear programs unchecked. The domino effects of Hezbollah’s “Waad al sadeq” are far from being even imagined by Western and Arab policy planners.
Nasrallah seemed to be in control of his strategy when he appeared in his press conference of victory. His back was safe since he has terrorized the Cedars Revolution’s movement, enlisted Aoun’s support (breaking Christian community unity), and pushed Sunni and Druze breakaways to challenge Jumblat and Hariri (the son). To his south, he was applauding Haniya’s Hamas “cabinet” for having already engaged the Israelis. To his east, Syria was mobilizing and waiting.
In Iran, the “masters” were extending their strategic umbrella; and in Iraq, the Terror sapping of sectarian relations was on. All the brothers in Khumeini Jihadism were awaiting Hezbollah to break the chain of events from the Galilee. Nasrallah was at the forefront of a plan aiming at wrecking the rising democracy and the fledgling stability of the region. The stakes were really high for the “axis.” But Hassan Nasrallah’s master plan failed. First the Lebanese Government, smelling the odors of conspiracy was quick to distance itself from the operation. “The Government was not informed by it nor does it endorse it,” stated the Seniora release. Second, Israel’s volte-face surprised Hezbollah and their allies. Why would the Olmert Government, declare a full war on an organization that classical armies cannot take out, thought the Tehran planners. Then came, the Arab position: Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, followed discretely by others didn’t extend their full support to the move. They certainly criticized Israel to the fullest of rhetoric, but didn’t praise the “Hizb.” On the international level, the Terror group “that-provide-services” didn’t fare better. The United States firmly extended its bipartisan support to UNSCR 1559; France and the rest of Europe stated the same –with their continental language- Russia wouldn’t side with Nasrallah against the world, and China has other priorities on its plate. Only Iran threatened to wage wars in the rescue of its most western army. Nasrallah fell into his own trap but decided to come up with a contingency plan.
Not so different from Plan A, the objectives of Plan B have been readjusted. If Israel bombards Hezbollah’s infrastructure to the ground, Iranian oil will rebuild it. If Israel invades by land, it will find itself against a more aggressive Hezbollah than the one of the 1990s. Besides, Hezbollah will attempt nevertheless to go after the Seniora Government anyway. Calling on the “reserves,” Hezbollah enlisted President Lahoud and his son in law Defense Minister Elias Murr to drag the Lebanese Army in the War against Israel’s forces. And in collaboration with Aounist cadres (while the majority of his partisans are still stunned by the events), Hezbollah has unleashed an international campaign against the “inhumane aggression.” If things go well, Nasrallah expect Plan B to become Plan A, and a land advance by Israel would unleash a total offensive against the Government of Lebanon by pro-Iranian and Syrian forces. If Israel moves north to create a safe area against Rockets, Hezbollah would move north to control the rest of Lebanon. The Syrian-Iranian axis will refuse UNSCR 1559, reject international initiatives for disarming the militias, and will make its stand in Lebanon, even if the Switzerland of the Middle East is to be reduced to rubbles. Assad wants to save his regime in Beirut, and Ahmedinijad wants to shield his bomb in the Bekaa: Alea Jacta Est, the dice are rolling.
Hezbollah’s plan for the Lebanese Army is to drag it to a fight with Israel, as a way to destroy it. For the past 16 years Syria and Hezbollah have penetrated the Lebanese Army and installed their followers at various positions. For example, the command of the southern command, the officers in charge of the southern suburb of Beirut, the Murabb’a al amni (security zone for Nasrallah) and many offices in the second bureau are in the hands of Shiite officers linked to Hezbollah. Syria’s allies including the Hezb and Amal can count on 20% influence within the institution. The commander in chief, General Michel Sleiman is neutral, with possibilities of shifts to either side. The head of the military intelligence, a Christian, follows Lahoud orders. The power map inside the Army keeps changing, but at the core of this institution, most officers are pro-Lebanese, close to the West. If Hezbollah pushes the regular troop into battle against Israel, the Army may split.
The United Nations is bound by a resolution it cannot but implement: UNSCR 1559. Having been among those who worked on introducing it in 2004, I have followed up till very recently the international efforts in this regards. There is a solid consensus that the resolution has to be implemented; it is inescapable. The question is who would implement it? Reality is that the Lebanese Government and its armed forces are too weak in front of the Hezbollah-Baath-Ahmedinijad axis. So if a regional bloc is obstructing a UN resolution, the international community should provide the balance of power. Hence, the US and France, along with the European Union, the moderate Arab states with the consent of the Security Council must provide the tools for the Lebanese Government to spread its sovereignty over its national soil, and the support for the Cedars Revolution to revive itself. The options are very limited: Either Hezbollah will dominate the Lebanese Republic, or the latter will disarm Hezbollah. Anything in between would be a waste of time. If Israel stops its operations short of an international intervention, Hezbollah will win the war. If Israel moves forward inside Lebanon after Hezbollah, an international intervention is inevitable. The days, weeks and months ahead will tell.
Meanwhile Hezbollah and its allies both in the region and in the West are and will be waging the mother of all propaganda wars. The task assigned to the propagandists is to stop military operations so that Hezbollah survives and fail international interventions so that the Lebanese Government collapses. A war of images, photos, mudding, internet, and media will explode in all directions. Operatives helping Hezbollah, including many with Christian names, will be waging an indiscriminate propaganda offensive against Lebanese, Arab, Western and obviously Israeli figures to spread confusion and psychological collapse in the international community. Objective: Obstruct the implementation of UNSCR 1559, trash the March 14 movement, criticize the Arab Government, and incite for Jihadi violence.
Hezbollah waged an Iranian war with Syrian backing. It knew how to start it, but it won’t know how it will end. The forces unleashed in this conflict have been unpredictable including Israel, Lebanon’s politics, the Arab Governments, and the international community. Hezbollah and its regional allies have spoken of “surprises” to come. In fact the latter are pretty much predictable: more rockets on and suicide attacks in Israel, coup d’Etat in Lebanon, and obviously international terrorism, including in the West. But “surprises” could also happen to Hezbollah. The “Waad al sadeq” operation may not be the only miscalculation by Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. The future of Hezbollah’s war is as uncertain as the fate of the organization.
Dr Walid Phares is the author of the newly released book Future Jihad. He is also a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington DC.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Jack Curry: McGwire's Path Could Foreshadow Bonds's
JACK CURRY
The New York Times
Published: July 23, 2006
Barry Bonds is the second-most-prolific home run hitter, but his eventual place in baseball history will be difficult to predict. How much will he be remembered for hitting more than 700 homers and how much will he be remembered for how he might have accumulated some of them?
Mark McGwire’s legacy as a power hitter may be more confusing. While Bonds is playing for the San Francisco Giants and being investigated by federal prosecutors in connection with a steroid distribution case, McGwire is retired and out of the public glare that surrounds Bonds.
But in one critical way, a referendum on McGwire’s career and the suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs could actually come before Bonds’s actions are judged by the legal system. On Dec. 1, McGwire’s name will be on the Hall of Fame ballot that is mailed to about 575 voters.
Because the three dozen or so players on the ballot will be listed alphabetically, McGwire will be positioned somewhere between Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr., two iconic players who are certain to be elected on their first ballot.
McGwire, who hit 583 homers in his career and who briefly held the single-season home run record before Bonds eclipsed it, was once considered a strong candidate to join Gwynn and Ripken in his first try for Cooperstown. Not anymore.
In a poll of 50 writers who are eligible to vote for the Hall as 10-year members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, only eight said they would vote for McGwire, a former first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Oakland Athletics. Twenty-six said they would not vote for McGwire and the other 16 were undecided. A player needs 75 percent of the votes for induction.
Although the poll was limited to a fraction of the writers who will vote, it could be an ominous sign for McGwire. If this sample is remotely emblematic of how the remaining voters feel, McGwire’s chances of being elected could be flimsy.
Most of the voters who said they would not check the box beside McGwire’s name said they were influenced by the suspicion that he used steroids. When McGwire was questioned during a Congressional hearing investigating steroids in March 2005, he refused to talk about his possible involvement.
“I’m not here to discuss the past,” McGwire said over and over.
Several writers cited McGwire’s silence in Washington as a tacit admission that he used steroids. Others noted that the guidelines for rating a player for the Hall of Fame include his record, playing ability, contributions to a team, integrity, sportsmanship and character.
“This might sound overly simplistic, but if McGwire did not feel the need to defend his career while appearing before Congress, why should I certify his career with a Hall vote?” Gerry Fraley of The Dallas Morning News said.
Steve Buckley of The Boston Herald said the refusal to talk about steroids would cause him not to vote for McGwire. “Whenever someone asks me to expand on my answer, I simply say, ‘I’m not here to talk about the past,’ ” he said.
Jeff Blair of The Toronto Globe and Mail, who said he would vote for McGwire, said: “Please spare me the drivel about McGwire’s performance before Congress. Seems to me that stonewalling congressmen is an accepted fact of life on Capitol Hill.”
Since McGwire’s uncomfortable and very public appearance 16 months ago, he has rarely been spotted at public events.
“Now he’s become the Howard Hughes of baseball,” said Tom Haudricourt of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Pete Rose, who admitted to betting on baseball, has never been included on a ballot; McGwire, who has not admitted to using steroids, will be on the ballot. While McGwire was playing, steroids were not banned from baseball and there was no drug-testing policy. And McGwire almost certainly faced pitchers who used steroids.
McGwire’s inclusion on the ballot, Patrick Reusse of The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, indicates that the commissioner’s office made no moral judgment on McGwire’s candidacy.
“What I’m saying right now is I’ll hold my nose and vote for him,” Reusse said.
A handful of voters said they would simply judge McGwire on what he did on the field, not what he might have done off it.
“The steroids won’t enter into it,” said Ray Ratto of The San Francisco Chronicle. “The Hall of Fame isn’t a church. It’s the history of baseball, good and bad.”
Jack O’Connell, the secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers’ Association and the man who handles the ballots, said that he never considered McGwire “a first-ballot shoo-in.” He said Harmon Killebrew, who had 573 homers during an era in which it was tougher to hit home runs, did not gain admittance to the Hall until his fourth year of eligibility. Ratto and O’Connell said they were undecided about McGwire.
Other voters also questioned whether McGwire, regardless of steroids, belonged in the Hall. Joe Posnanski of The Kansas City Star was one of many voters who compared McGwire with Dave Kingman, the one-dimensional, swing-for-the-fences hitter who finished with 442 homers.
Posnanski detailed the remarkable similarity between McGwire’s and Kingman’s statistics before they turned 32. McGwire had 277 homers and a .252 average in fewer than 4,000 at-bats; Kingman had 270 and a .243 average in fewer than 4,000 at-bats. But McGwire had 306 homers in his next 2,528 at-bats.
“He was closer to Kingman than Cooperstown,” before his incredible power surge, said Posnanski, who said he was leaning toward not voting for McGwire.
Because Gwynn, of the San Diego Padres, and Ripken, of the Baltimore Orioles, basically had careers free of controversy, Bernie Miklasz of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others said it would be unfair to them to have McGwire sharing the same stage on their anticipated enshrinement day. Miklasz said he was undecided about McGwire, although inclined not to vote for him.
The ballots that will judge the steroid era for the first time must be returned by Dec. 31; the results will be announced in January. Marc Topkin of The St. Petersburg Times said it was unfortunate that writers would be forced “to play chemist, physician, ethicist and modern historian” in deciding the legacy of players who may or may not have used steroids.
“Oh for the simple days,” Topkin said, “of whether 500 homers got you in or not.”
The New York Times
Published: July 23, 2006
Barry Bonds is the second-most-prolific home run hitter, but his eventual place in baseball history will be difficult to predict. How much will he be remembered for hitting more than 700 homers and how much will he be remembered for how he might have accumulated some of them?
Mark McGwire’s legacy as a power hitter may be more confusing. While Bonds is playing for the San Francisco Giants and being investigated by federal prosecutors in connection with a steroid distribution case, McGwire is retired and out of the public glare that surrounds Bonds.
But in one critical way, a referendum on McGwire’s career and the suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs could actually come before Bonds’s actions are judged by the legal system. On Dec. 1, McGwire’s name will be on the Hall of Fame ballot that is mailed to about 575 voters.
Because the three dozen or so players on the ballot will be listed alphabetically, McGwire will be positioned somewhere between Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr., two iconic players who are certain to be elected on their first ballot.
McGwire, who hit 583 homers in his career and who briefly held the single-season home run record before Bonds eclipsed it, was once considered a strong candidate to join Gwynn and Ripken in his first try for Cooperstown. Not anymore.
In a poll of 50 writers who are eligible to vote for the Hall as 10-year members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, only eight said they would vote for McGwire, a former first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Oakland Athletics. Twenty-six said they would not vote for McGwire and the other 16 were undecided. A player needs 75 percent of the votes for induction.
Although the poll was limited to a fraction of the writers who will vote, it could be an ominous sign for McGwire. If this sample is remotely emblematic of how the remaining voters feel, McGwire’s chances of being elected could be flimsy.
Most of the voters who said they would not check the box beside McGwire’s name said they were influenced by the suspicion that he used steroids. When McGwire was questioned during a Congressional hearing investigating steroids in March 2005, he refused to talk about his possible involvement.
“I’m not here to discuss the past,” McGwire said over and over.
Several writers cited McGwire’s silence in Washington as a tacit admission that he used steroids. Others noted that the guidelines for rating a player for the Hall of Fame include his record, playing ability, contributions to a team, integrity, sportsmanship and character.
“This might sound overly simplistic, but if McGwire did not feel the need to defend his career while appearing before Congress, why should I certify his career with a Hall vote?” Gerry Fraley of The Dallas Morning News said.
Steve Buckley of The Boston Herald said the refusal to talk about steroids would cause him not to vote for McGwire. “Whenever someone asks me to expand on my answer, I simply say, ‘I’m not here to talk about the past,’ ” he said.
Jeff Blair of The Toronto Globe and Mail, who said he would vote for McGwire, said: “Please spare me the drivel about McGwire’s performance before Congress. Seems to me that stonewalling congressmen is an accepted fact of life on Capitol Hill.”
Since McGwire’s uncomfortable and very public appearance 16 months ago, he has rarely been spotted at public events.
“Now he’s become the Howard Hughes of baseball,” said Tom Haudricourt of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Pete Rose, who admitted to betting on baseball, has never been included on a ballot; McGwire, who has not admitted to using steroids, will be on the ballot. While McGwire was playing, steroids were not banned from baseball and there was no drug-testing policy. And McGwire almost certainly faced pitchers who used steroids.
McGwire’s inclusion on the ballot, Patrick Reusse of The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, indicates that the commissioner’s office made no moral judgment on McGwire’s candidacy.
“What I’m saying right now is I’ll hold my nose and vote for him,” Reusse said.
A handful of voters said they would simply judge McGwire on what he did on the field, not what he might have done off it.
“The steroids won’t enter into it,” said Ray Ratto of The San Francisco Chronicle. “The Hall of Fame isn’t a church. It’s the history of baseball, good and bad.”
Jack O’Connell, the secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers’ Association and the man who handles the ballots, said that he never considered McGwire “a first-ballot shoo-in.” He said Harmon Killebrew, who had 573 homers during an era in which it was tougher to hit home runs, did not gain admittance to the Hall until his fourth year of eligibility. Ratto and O’Connell said they were undecided about McGwire.
Other voters also questioned whether McGwire, regardless of steroids, belonged in the Hall. Joe Posnanski of The Kansas City Star was one of many voters who compared McGwire with Dave Kingman, the one-dimensional, swing-for-the-fences hitter who finished with 442 homers.
Posnanski detailed the remarkable similarity between McGwire’s and Kingman’s statistics before they turned 32. McGwire had 277 homers and a .252 average in fewer than 4,000 at-bats; Kingman had 270 and a .243 average in fewer than 4,000 at-bats. But McGwire had 306 homers in his next 2,528 at-bats.
“He was closer to Kingman than Cooperstown,” before his incredible power surge, said Posnanski, who said he was leaning toward not voting for McGwire.
Because Gwynn, of the San Diego Padres, and Ripken, of the Baltimore Orioles, basically had careers free of controversy, Bernie Miklasz of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others said it would be unfair to them to have McGwire sharing the same stage on their anticipated enshrinement day. Miklasz said he was undecided about McGwire, although inclined not to vote for him.
The ballots that will judge the steroid era for the first time must be returned by Dec. 31; the results will be announced in January. Marc Topkin of The St. Petersburg Times said it was unfortunate that writers would be forced “to play chemist, physician, ethicist and modern historian” in deciding the legacy of players who may or may not have used steroids.
“Oh for the simple days,” Topkin said, “of whether 500 homers got you in or not.”
Selena Roberts: Mystifying, Misplaced Loyalty
SELENA ROBERTS
The New York Times
Published: July 23, 2006
WHAT inspires unconditional devotion to a lout?
By most accounts, Greg Anderson is not a foolish lug, but in choosing prison vistas over personal freedom, he has been a fool for Barry Bonds.
Of earthy intelligence, San Franciscans are too sophisticated to be enamored of material excess, but once inside AT&T Park, they have been love-struck over the expandable Bonds.
• There are former sycophants who have turned on Bonds (see his former mistress Kimberly Bell and his former business associate Steve K. Hoskins) with unseemly accounts of his steroid mood swings and money shell games. And with one revealing anecdote after another, the author Jeff Pearlman, in his book “Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero,” describes a callous superstar who belittles subordinates and discards relationships at random.
“He beats people down,” Pearlman said Thursday in a telephone interview. “He wears people out.”
If Bonds’s mean streak is the length of a dragon’s tail, if steroid evidence subverts his march on history, why does his pocket of protectors still defend his myth as the good fairy of martyrdom?
Before the steroid allegations, Jim Warren worked for Bonds as his trainer — a job for the thick-skinned. He uses one word to describe Bonds as an employer.
“Brutal,” Warren said when reached Friday. “He was a sweet, sensitive man with the worst temper ever. He’s got no — whatever the mechanism that a lot of us have to not say that last thing — he doesn’t have that. He’ll throw you under the bus.”
And yet Warren instinctively defended an ogre who wasn’t a take-your-secretary-to-lunch kind of boss. He was demeaning and demanding, but Bonds was also the most diligent athlete Warren had ever trained. One day, the radio-show barker Jim Rome was criticizing Bonds on the air. On Line 1, the caller was Warren.
“Bonds was my guy,” said Warren, who is the national director for Wellbridge health clubs and now trains only nonprofessionals. “I called because that’s what I thought you did. But why would I do that? I don’t know. He has a weird way of instilling that type of loyalty in people.”
It is warped, really. Warren has a home video of Bonds playing Duck Duck Goose with his 5-year-old son. “Of course, two days later, Barry is calling me a racist or whatever,” Warren said. “You let it go. You hold on to those great moments.”
But can a fleeting glimpse of warmth soften a jail cell bed? Can cameo acts of kindness sustain a man through prison visits?
Anderson was willing to spend 15 days in a federal prison rather than testify before a grand jury investigating Bonds for perjury and tax evasion. Anderson was released Thursday when no indictment was brought against Bonds, but he could be sent back to prison for as long as 18 months if his refusals persist. He will never break, Anderson’s law team has said.
If so, Anderson is apparently willing to play the role of Lil’ Kim, without the cleavage and stilettos. She was the bodacious rapper who preferred the label of convict over ratfink and served nearly a 10-month sentence for it.
But she had her street cred to lose. What’s in it for Anderson?
As Bonds described in grand jury testimony reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, “Greg has nothing, man,” adding: “Guy lives in his car half the time. He lives with his girlfriend, rents a room so he can be with his kid, you know?”
Bonds was unapologetic in detailing his frugality with Anderson, acknowledging payments of $15,000 in 2003 and $20,000 after his 73-home-run season in 2001. According to The Chronicle, a juror asked Bonds why he hadn’t bought his all-but-homeless buddy a house. “One, I’m black,” Bonds said, “and I’m keeping my money.”
Pearlman’s book illuminates this portrayal of Bonds as cruelly cheap and confounded by race issues, as perpetually insecure and doggedly mistrustful.
Somehow, Anderson, as Pearlman described, penetrated the wall to become one of five people in Bonds’s inner circle. Anderson’s identity as the true-blue bodyguard to Bonds’s legacy may trump his being called a snitch.
“Greg may not have a lot of people left,” Warren said.
The fear of losing Bonds may be Anderson’s most powerful motivation for remaining silent. Fear of losing face may be another.
Ridicule is a powerful suppressant. How many whistle-blowers are there in baseball? Truly, the list stops at Jose Canseco, mercenary tell-all novelist. George J. Mitchell, the head of baseball’s steroid self-examination, is beating the base paths for moles, but eyewitness accounts are not easy to come by.
Players and managers spend more time in clubhouses than they do at home, but curiously know nothing when pressed. Boston’s Curt Schilling once made bold estimates about steroid use in baseball but flipped his integrity in front of Congress. Why are we even here, he wondered out loud.
•Balco brought us here. A second grand jury may keep us here. There, of course, could be closure for Giants fans blindly devoted to Bonds, for players too afraid to point him out, and, mostly, for Anderson.
Bonds is the keeper of resolution. If he has a drop of compassion — if he, as he has said, is innocent of all allegations — Bonds could do what he does best: make a demand, not a request. He could tell Anderson: “I’m not worth prison. Testify.’’
But can a selfless act exist in a narcissist’s heart? Anderson may be about to find out.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
The New York Times
Published: July 23, 2006
WHAT inspires unconditional devotion to a lout?
By most accounts, Greg Anderson is not a foolish lug, but in choosing prison vistas over personal freedom, he has been a fool for Barry Bonds.
Of earthy intelligence, San Franciscans are too sophisticated to be enamored of material excess, but once inside AT&T Park, they have been love-struck over the expandable Bonds.
• There are former sycophants who have turned on Bonds (see his former mistress Kimberly Bell and his former business associate Steve K. Hoskins) with unseemly accounts of his steroid mood swings and money shell games. And with one revealing anecdote after another, the author Jeff Pearlman, in his book “Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero,” describes a callous superstar who belittles subordinates and discards relationships at random.
“He beats people down,” Pearlman said Thursday in a telephone interview. “He wears people out.”
If Bonds’s mean streak is the length of a dragon’s tail, if steroid evidence subverts his march on history, why does his pocket of protectors still defend his myth as the good fairy of martyrdom?
Before the steroid allegations, Jim Warren worked for Bonds as his trainer — a job for the thick-skinned. He uses one word to describe Bonds as an employer.
“Brutal,” Warren said when reached Friday. “He was a sweet, sensitive man with the worst temper ever. He’s got no — whatever the mechanism that a lot of us have to not say that last thing — he doesn’t have that. He’ll throw you under the bus.”
And yet Warren instinctively defended an ogre who wasn’t a take-your-secretary-to-lunch kind of boss. He was demeaning and demanding, but Bonds was also the most diligent athlete Warren had ever trained. One day, the radio-show barker Jim Rome was criticizing Bonds on the air. On Line 1, the caller was Warren.
“Bonds was my guy,” said Warren, who is the national director for Wellbridge health clubs and now trains only nonprofessionals. “I called because that’s what I thought you did. But why would I do that? I don’t know. He has a weird way of instilling that type of loyalty in people.”
It is warped, really. Warren has a home video of Bonds playing Duck Duck Goose with his 5-year-old son. “Of course, two days later, Barry is calling me a racist or whatever,” Warren said. “You let it go. You hold on to those great moments.”
But can a fleeting glimpse of warmth soften a jail cell bed? Can cameo acts of kindness sustain a man through prison visits?
Anderson was willing to spend 15 days in a federal prison rather than testify before a grand jury investigating Bonds for perjury and tax evasion. Anderson was released Thursday when no indictment was brought against Bonds, but he could be sent back to prison for as long as 18 months if his refusals persist. He will never break, Anderson’s law team has said.
If so, Anderson is apparently willing to play the role of Lil’ Kim, without the cleavage and stilettos. She was the bodacious rapper who preferred the label of convict over ratfink and served nearly a 10-month sentence for it.
But she had her street cred to lose. What’s in it for Anderson?
As Bonds described in grand jury testimony reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, “Greg has nothing, man,” adding: “Guy lives in his car half the time. He lives with his girlfriend, rents a room so he can be with his kid, you know?”
Bonds was unapologetic in detailing his frugality with Anderson, acknowledging payments of $15,000 in 2003 and $20,000 after his 73-home-run season in 2001. According to The Chronicle, a juror asked Bonds why he hadn’t bought his all-but-homeless buddy a house. “One, I’m black,” Bonds said, “and I’m keeping my money.”
Pearlman’s book illuminates this portrayal of Bonds as cruelly cheap and confounded by race issues, as perpetually insecure and doggedly mistrustful.
Somehow, Anderson, as Pearlman described, penetrated the wall to become one of five people in Bonds’s inner circle. Anderson’s identity as the true-blue bodyguard to Bonds’s legacy may trump his being called a snitch.
“Greg may not have a lot of people left,” Warren said.
The fear of losing Bonds may be Anderson’s most powerful motivation for remaining silent. Fear of losing face may be another.
Ridicule is a powerful suppressant. How many whistle-blowers are there in baseball? Truly, the list stops at Jose Canseco, mercenary tell-all novelist. George J. Mitchell, the head of baseball’s steroid self-examination, is beating the base paths for moles, but eyewitness accounts are not easy to come by.
Players and managers spend more time in clubhouses than they do at home, but curiously know nothing when pressed. Boston’s Curt Schilling once made bold estimates about steroid use in baseball but flipped his integrity in front of Congress. Why are we even here, he wondered out loud.
•Balco brought us here. A second grand jury may keep us here. There, of course, could be closure for Giants fans blindly devoted to Bonds, for players too afraid to point him out, and, mostly, for Anderson.
Bonds is the keeper of resolution. If he has a drop of compassion — if he, as he has said, is innocent of all allegations — Bonds could do what he does best: make a demand, not a request. He could tell Anderson: “I’m not worth prison. Testify.’’
But can a selfless act exist in a narcissist’s heart? Anderson may be about to find out.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
Saturday, July 22, 2006
David Horovitz: When It's Over
THE JERUSALEM POST
Jul. 20, 2006
Immediately after the soldiers were abducted, grabbed from their vehicle as they patrolled the northern border inside Israel, the IDF used tank and artillery fire to try and thwart the kidnappers' escape and sent assault helicopters and fighter planes up into the skies over Lebanon. The prime minister, furious, declared that he held Hizbullah, the Lebanese government and the Syrians to blame, and vowed that Israel would not rest until the boys were safely home. Within hours of the attack, the Israeli army had massed a vast array of forces at the northern border, poised to strike.
And then?
And then nothing.
And that was the original sin.
Omar Sawayid, Benny Avraham and Adi Avitan were seized by Hizbullah gunmen on October 7, 2000, and the IDF did not go heavily in after them. The IAF did not pulverize Hizbullah targets in southern Lebanon, or bomb the roads used by the convoys bringing vast quantities of Iranian and Syrian weaponry into Lebanon for Hizbullah's arsenal.
It had been only five months since the government of Ehud Barak, elected in large part because of a pledge to bring the army back from south Lebanon, had made good on that promise. The last thing it wanted was to embroil itself again in the Lebanese quagmire. So it trumpeted its anger. It issued threats. But it held its fire.
And a little over two years later, the bodies of the three soldiers, who had evidently died in the course of the original attack or soon after, were returned to Israel for burial, along with captured "businessman" Elhanan Tennenbaum, in what had become one of Israel's trademark asymmetrical exchanges, the latest evidence of its readiness to do anything to get its soldiers back, dead or alive. The country that would not meet then-Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas's entreaties to release prisoners into his hands, and thus strengthen his professed anti-terror position, instead released 400 Palestinian prisoners into the hands of the proudly terrorizing Islamic extremists of Hizbullah.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader who was responsible for both the October 2000 attack and last week's very similar incursion at Moshav Zar'it, which saw eight soldiers killed and Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser whisked off into Lebanon, might reasonably have believed that a similar scenario would play out this time - Israel huffing, puffing and, ultimately, bluffing. He might never have dreamed that Israel's peacenik defense minister, Amir Peretz, would unshackle the IAF and permit it to fire into the homes in south Lebanon where locals had Nasrallah's missiles stored, and into the Dahiya neighborhood in southern Beirut where Hizbullah had built up a vast command and control center.
He might, as both Peretz and his chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz, are known to believe, have miscalculated and overplayed his hand.
But he certainly served the cause of his Iranian masters admirably - distracting all attention from Iran's relentless march to a nuclear capability when the GA met earlier this week. And for all the unarguable superiority of Israel's military forces, much of his missile capability was still intact late this week, after a week's pounding by the IAF. Much, maybe most, of his fighting force was still alive. And, crucially, so was he.
Peretz and Halutz, like President George Bush when it comes to Osama bin Laden, have striven to avoid personalizing this war in the north. Killing Nasrallah, the word is, would be a heavy blow to Hizbullah. But just as Israel's killing of his predecessor, Abbas Moussawi, in 1992, didn't destroy the organization, neither, now, they would have us believe, would the permanent dispatching of Hassan Nasrallah. Except that, as even they would concede, the grey Moussawi cannot be compared to the charismatic Nasrallah. And for the sheikh and his followers, his crowing emergence from the bunkers - no matter how battered his organization - would constitute victory.
IN OCTOBER 2000, Halutz was just a few months into his job as head of the air force. Doubtless he had ideas of what the IAF could do to cut Hizbullah down to size and deter it from further military adventurism along the new, UN-guaranteed Israel-Lebanon border line. But any such suggestions, if they were made, were plainly discarded. The days and weeks passed, and that massed IDF presence at the border slowly filtered away.
Emboldened by Israel's inactivity, Nasrallah's men settled in on their side instead, building ever-more permanent positions right up against the fence year by year, under the unthreatening eye of UNIFIL and the constrained gaze of IDF soldiers spitting distance away.
Colossal explosive devices - hundreds upon hundreds of kilos - were planted to deter IDF incursions that never came; one of them, detonated 70 meters inside Lebanese territory when an Israeli tank ploughed across the border in pursuit of last week's kidnappers, ripped the tank to shreds, spreading debris over hundreds of meters, killing the four-man tank crew instantly.
If Halutz, promoted to chief of staff in June of last year, ever toyed with the idea of initiating the kind of onslaught necessary to destroy those border emplacements and much more of Hizbullah besides, he would have told himself that he would be wasting his time in even suggesting it. Attack Hizbullah out of the clear blue sky? The world would never stand for it, every politician would have told him. He'd have been laughed out of the cabinet room.
But Halutz evidently did seriously prepare for the day when Nasrallah would provide, not the pretext, but the trigger for action. The battle plan the IDF has been following for the past nine days was finalized four or five months ago, around the time the new government was taking shape.
And when Nasrallah murderously provided that trigger last Wednesday morning, Halutz found in Peretz an improbable ally. Told that the IAF would be largely incapable of tackling Hizbullah's short-range missile capability in south Lebanon unless it fired into the residential areas where the missiles and launchers were stored, but also told that the IAF had other, less sensitive targets in its plans that could be hit first, Peretz responded that while every effort should be made to limit civilian casualties, people who had rockets in their living rooms could not be considered non-combatants, and that the short-range missiles should be an early and prime focus.
The war Israel is fighting in the North is the consequence of a fundamental change in mind-set, both at the top of the army, and at the top of government, in the six years since Souad, Avraham and Avitan were abducted - a newly aggressive approach to fighting terrorism born of the bitter realization that Israel's enemies were laughing at an army perceived as impotent, not because it lacked strength but because its leaders were incapable of unleashing it. Its commitment to its soldiers, regarded in Israel as so central a component of the national ethos, was derided as weakness, as evidence of a nation gone soft. Grab a few soldiers, ran the thinking, and Israel, even under the loathed Ariel Sharon, would capitulate to any demand for their return.
In the Nasrallah conception, Israel was a spider's web, to be brushed away. Hit us hard enough and we'd break. The theory had worked in southern Lebanon. It emboldened Palestinian terrorists in the second intifada. It helped prompt the pullout from Gaza. So enthralled was Nasrallah himself by the notion that he may have missed the fact of the Israeli public's remarkable resilience in the ongoing second intifada/terror war. The population was weak, he believed. Fire missiles into the cities and the Israelis would be crying out for relief.
After Gilad Shalit was kidnapped on June 25, Arab cartoonists were drawing Israeli soldiers not as butchers but as geeks. The army's much-vaunted deterrent capability was diluting by the day.
The IDF and the government saw the critical imperative to change those perceptions. The approach is playing out not only in Lebanon but also in Gaza. What is still uncertain is quite how far the politicians, and the army, are prepared to go, and how much long-term significance they will achieve.
THREE OR four days into the IDF's offensive, Israeli commanders were assessing that perhaps 25 percent of Hizbullah's military capabilities had been destroyed. And Peretz was talking about needing another week to break Nasrallah's organization.
A week into the operation, the assessment was that 40-50% of the Hizbullah capability had been smashed. But tellingly, IDF chiefs were now suggesting that another week or two were still required before Israel should be contemplating accepting a cease-fire. Another week or two, at least. And they were also stressing how hard it was to assess how much damage they'd really caused, and that their evaluations were based in large part on such unreliable indicators as how many rockets had been fired in the previous 24 hours and from which areas.
An IDF with an air force man as its chief of staff is understandably confident in the capacity of the IAF to conclusively prevail in this conflict. Unarguably, furthermore, Israel's air force in recent years, of necessity, has become increasingly skilled in pinpointing key targets and hitting them with precision. With the narrow refugee camp alleys of the Gaza Strip a death trap for Israeli ground troops, the IAF is by far the most critical component of the IDF in waging war on Palestinian terror there.
But air power, however precise, has its limits. Hizbullah has a fighting force estimated at about 1,000 men and reserves of 7-10,000. How many of them have been killed in the relentless sorties being flown by Israel's combat planes in the last nine days? Nobody really knows. How many of Nasrallah's estimated 11,500 rockets - a quite staggering figure, simply unprecedented for a terror group - have been destroyed on the ground? Again, nobody really knows. Even the task of clearing a one-kilometer strip of territory all the way along the border fence, a job Halutz intends to have completed by Saturday, has been proving highly complex given the overwhelming reliance on air power.
In Gaza, using intelligence information and contacts built up over many years, the IAF has intermittent success in hitting alleged terror kingpins from the air; it is rare, even at the height of such activity, for more than a handful of such strikes to take place in the space of a week or two. In Lebanon, with no comparable intelligence structure, and no open-ended time frame, it may be unrealistic to expect the IAF to wipe out a significant proportion of Hizbullah's fighting force.
But the chief of staff emphatically does not want to send in the ground forces. The fate of that tank crew last Wednesday is probably giving him nightmares. That and all those other colossal explosive devices his troops have unearthed as they've been dismantling the Hizbullah border outposts this week. The other day, a D9 tractor rolled over one of those bombs, detonating it. Immensely robust, the D9 survived the blast; not many other vehicles would have.
Hidden explosives apart, IDF ground forces would, of course, be fighting in Hizbullah territory, against gunmen intimately familiar with the terrain, gunmen who have been salivating at the prospect of the Israelis coming at them.
Halutz is fully aware of the terrible price Israel's citizens have been paying in this conflict. The North at times resembles the eerily quiet set of one of those alien invasion movies, where the traffic lights still change but all the people have disappeared. The death toll is mounting. And Halutz knows that it's the men and women in uniform, not the civilians, who are charged with bearing the brunt of military conflict.
Reserve generals like Doron Almog have this week been urging that he send in the troops, all the way to the Litani River, as the only way to truly clear out Hizbullah from the south. But the palpable sense around Halutz is that he fears he would be sending too many of his troops to their deaths, that an increased use of ground forces would turn this into a blood-soaked conflict.
And when it was all over, would it have been worth those lost lives?
Or put another way, no matter how many weeks the international community gives Israel before it shuts the "window" of military opportunity, will the IDF truly be able to prevent the reconstitution of Hizbullah anyway?
OUR DIVIDED Israel has been all-but unified behind the IDF's fighters and the government that sent them into action. The sheer numbers and lethal impact of Hizbullah's rockets and missiles left few Israelis unconvinced that here was a threat that had to be defused. Ehud Olmert's "moment of national truth" speech in the Knesset on Tuesday unfolded to a sound no prime minister has heard when making an address of genuine import for years: respectful silence. With the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians leading the way, even much of the international community internalized the need for action and understood the nature of Israel's military campaign (though not, of course, much of the European media or, needless to say, the French).
Such disunity as there has been at home, indeed, has come from critics, left and right, who question the focus and declared goals of the conflict, and specifically the decision to grant immunity to Damascus. (On the left the question is also being raised as to whether a more energetic pursuit of perceived possibilities for peace with Syria in recent years might have crippled Hizbullah more effectively than any military offensive can today.)
Syria both supplies Hizbullah with its own missiles, and ferries Iran's missiles to Nasrallah via Damascus airport. A limited attack on Syrian army positions might pull Damascus into a conflict Israel could reasonably expect to win, or signal to Bashar Assad that worse would await him if he chose to refurbish the Hizbullah supply lines when this conflict is over. But the IDF has thus far spared him the choice, and thus done nothing to deter him from picking up where he left off before hostilities began.
Halutz is adamant that fighting in Gaza, thwarting terror in and from the West Bank, and tackling Hizbullah is enough of a stretch. Iran, in his view, is a problem for the international community to tackle. For now, at least. And far from seeking to draw in the Syrians, his concern has been that a desperate Nasrallah might try to do so, perhaps even by firing on Syrian positions in the hope that jumpy Assad might blame Israel and leap into the fray.
The chief of staff has also been careful to limit the declared aims even of the conflict with Hizbullah. After Sunday's Katyusha attack on Haifa, in which eight Israelis were killed, Peretz vowed to "break" it. Halutz doesn't use that kind of language. He remembers what the Syrians did to the Moslem Brotherhood in Hama in 1982, when Hafez Assad sent his troops to crush the growing threat of Moslem extremism by killing 10,000, perhaps 20,000 people. He looks at the Egyptians' eight decades of battles with the fundamentalists. Ideological groups cannot be broken, he argues. There will always be 10 or 20, or 100 or 200 adherents to keep the flame alive.
In fact Halutz believes that it might be a mistake to try and force an abject Hizbullah surrender. It will never raise the white flag. Persuade the Lebanese public that Hizbullah is bad for them, and simultaneously drastically reduce its capability - the twin aims of the Israeli offensive - and it will have to bend and concede, he believes. Publicly humiliate it, and it will determinedly reconstitute itself.
It's a strangely forgiving attitude to a ruthless terror group. But it will be vindicated if, as Halutz promises, when this conflict is ultimately resolved, around a table, Hizbullah has no seat. It will be vindicated if, once this war in the North is over, Regev and Goldwasser come safely home, Hizbullah is prevented from again bringing murder to the border, from regaining its missile capabilities, from reconstituting itself as a military threat.
For what, otherwise, will Israel have gained?
Jul. 20, 2006
Immediately after the soldiers were abducted, grabbed from their vehicle as they patrolled the northern border inside Israel, the IDF used tank and artillery fire to try and thwart the kidnappers' escape and sent assault helicopters and fighter planes up into the skies over Lebanon. The prime minister, furious, declared that he held Hizbullah, the Lebanese government and the Syrians to blame, and vowed that Israel would not rest until the boys were safely home. Within hours of the attack, the Israeli army had massed a vast array of forces at the northern border, poised to strike.
And then?
And then nothing.
And that was the original sin.
Omar Sawayid, Benny Avraham and Adi Avitan were seized by Hizbullah gunmen on October 7, 2000, and the IDF did not go heavily in after them. The IAF did not pulverize Hizbullah targets in southern Lebanon, or bomb the roads used by the convoys bringing vast quantities of Iranian and Syrian weaponry into Lebanon for Hizbullah's arsenal.
It had been only five months since the government of Ehud Barak, elected in large part because of a pledge to bring the army back from south Lebanon, had made good on that promise. The last thing it wanted was to embroil itself again in the Lebanese quagmire. So it trumpeted its anger. It issued threats. But it held its fire.
And a little over two years later, the bodies of the three soldiers, who had evidently died in the course of the original attack or soon after, were returned to Israel for burial, along with captured "businessman" Elhanan Tennenbaum, in what had become one of Israel's trademark asymmetrical exchanges, the latest evidence of its readiness to do anything to get its soldiers back, dead or alive. The country that would not meet then-Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas's entreaties to release prisoners into his hands, and thus strengthen his professed anti-terror position, instead released 400 Palestinian prisoners into the hands of the proudly terrorizing Islamic extremists of Hizbullah.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader who was responsible for both the October 2000 attack and last week's very similar incursion at Moshav Zar'it, which saw eight soldiers killed and Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser whisked off into Lebanon, might reasonably have believed that a similar scenario would play out this time - Israel huffing, puffing and, ultimately, bluffing. He might never have dreamed that Israel's peacenik defense minister, Amir Peretz, would unshackle the IAF and permit it to fire into the homes in south Lebanon where locals had Nasrallah's missiles stored, and into the Dahiya neighborhood in southern Beirut where Hizbullah had built up a vast command and control center.
He might, as both Peretz and his chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz, are known to believe, have miscalculated and overplayed his hand.
But he certainly served the cause of his Iranian masters admirably - distracting all attention from Iran's relentless march to a nuclear capability when the GA met earlier this week. And for all the unarguable superiority of Israel's military forces, much of his missile capability was still intact late this week, after a week's pounding by the IAF. Much, maybe most, of his fighting force was still alive. And, crucially, so was he.
Peretz and Halutz, like President George Bush when it comes to Osama bin Laden, have striven to avoid personalizing this war in the north. Killing Nasrallah, the word is, would be a heavy blow to Hizbullah. But just as Israel's killing of his predecessor, Abbas Moussawi, in 1992, didn't destroy the organization, neither, now, they would have us believe, would the permanent dispatching of Hassan Nasrallah. Except that, as even they would concede, the grey Moussawi cannot be compared to the charismatic Nasrallah. And for the sheikh and his followers, his crowing emergence from the bunkers - no matter how battered his organization - would constitute victory.
IN OCTOBER 2000, Halutz was just a few months into his job as head of the air force. Doubtless he had ideas of what the IAF could do to cut Hizbullah down to size and deter it from further military adventurism along the new, UN-guaranteed Israel-Lebanon border line. But any such suggestions, if they were made, were plainly discarded. The days and weeks passed, and that massed IDF presence at the border slowly filtered away.
Emboldened by Israel's inactivity, Nasrallah's men settled in on their side instead, building ever-more permanent positions right up against the fence year by year, under the unthreatening eye of UNIFIL and the constrained gaze of IDF soldiers spitting distance away.
Colossal explosive devices - hundreds upon hundreds of kilos - were planted to deter IDF incursions that never came; one of them, detonated 70 meters inside Lebanese territory when an Israeli tank ploughed across the border in pursuit of last week's kidnappers, ripped the tank to shreds, spreading debris over hundreds of meters, killing the four-man tank crew instantly.
If Halutz, promoted to chief of staff in June of last year, ever toyed with the idea of initiating the kind of onslaught necessary to destroy those border emplacements and much more of Hizbullah besides, he would have told himself that he would be wasting his time in even suggesting it. Attack Hizbullah out of the clear blue sky? The world would never stand for it, every politician would have told him. He'd have been laughed out of the cabinet room.
But Halutz evidently did seriously prepare for the day when Nasrallah would provide, not the pretext, but the trigger for action. The battle plan the IDF has been following for the past nine days was finalized four or five months ago, around the time the new government was taking shape.
And when Nasrallah murderously provided that trigger last Wednesday morning, Halutz found in Peretz an improbable ally. Told that the IAF would be largely incapable of tackling Hizbullah's short-range missile capability in south Lebanon unless it fired into the residential areas where the missiles and launchers were stored, but also told that the IAF had other, less sensitive targets in its plans that could be hit first, Peretz responded that while every effort should be made to limit civilian casualties, people who had rockets in their living rooms could not be considered non-combatants, and that the short-range missiles should be an early and prime focus.
The war Israel is fighting in the North is the consequence of a fundamental change in mind-set, both at the top of the army, and at the top of government, in the six years since Souad, Avraham and Avitan were abducted - a newly aggressive approach to fighting terrorism born of the bitter realization that Israel's enemies were laughing at an army perceived as impotent, not because it lacked strength but because its leaders were incapable of unleashing it. Its commitment to its soldiers, regarded in Israel as so central a component of the national ethos, was derided as weakness, as evidence of a nation gone soft. Grab a few soldiers, ran the thinking, and Israel, even under the loathed Ariel Sharon, would capitulate to any demand for their return.
In the Nasrallah conception, Israel was a spider's web, to be brushed away. Hit us hard enough and we'd break. The theory had worked in southern Lebanon. It emboldened Palestinian terrorists in the second intifada. It helped prompt the pullout from Gaza. So enthralled was Nasrallah himself by the notion that he may have missed the fact of the Israeli public's remarkable resilience in the ongoing second intifada/terror war. The population was weak, he believed. Fire missiles into the cities and the Israelis would be crying out for relief.
After Gilad Shalit was kidnapped on June 25, Arab cartoonists were drawing Israeli soldiers not as butchers but as geeks. The army's much-vaunted deterrent capability was diluting by the day.
The IDF and the government saw the critical imperative to change those perceptions. The approach is playing out not only in Lebanon but also in Gaza. What is still uncertain is quite how far the politicians, and the army, are prepared to go, and how much long-term significance they will achieve.
THREE OR four days into the IDF's offensive, Israeli commanders were assessing that perhaps 25 percent of Hizbullah's military capabilities had been destroyed. And Peretz was talking about needing another week to break Nasrallah's organization.
A week into the operation, the assessment was that 40-50% of the Hizbullah capability had been smashed. But tellingly, IDF chiefs were now suggesting that another week or two were still required before Israel should be contemplating accepting a cease-fire. Another week or two, at least. And they were also stressing how hard it was to assess how much damage they'd really caused, and that their evaluations were based in large part on such unreliable indicators as how many rockets had been fired in the previous 24 hours and from which areas.
An IDF with an air force man as its chief of staff is understandably confident in the capacity of the IAF to conclusively prevail in this conflict. Unarguably, furthermore, Israel's air force in recent years, of necessity, has become increasingly skilled in pinpointing key targets and hitting them with precision. With the narrow refugee camp alleys of the Gaza Strip a death trap for Israeli ground troops, the IAF is by far the most critical component of the IDF in waging war on Palestinian terror there.
But air power, however precise, has its limits. Hizbullah has a fighting force estimated at about 1,000 men and reserves of 7-10,000. How many of them have been killed in the relentless sorties being flown by Israel's combat planes in the last nine days? Nobody really knows. How many of Nasrallah's estimated 11,500 rockets - a quite staggering figure, simply unprecedented for a terror group - have been destroyed on the ground? Again, nobody really knows. Even the task of clearing a one-kilometer strip of territory all the way along the border fence, a job Halutz intends to have completed by Saturday, has been proving highly complex given the overwhelming reliance on air power.
In Gaza, using intelligence information and contacts built up over many years, the IAF has intermittent success in hitting alleged terror kingpins from the air; it is rare, even at the height of such activity, for more than a handful of such strikes to take place in the space of a week or two. In Lebanon, with no comparable intelligence structure, and no open-ended time frame, it may be unrealistic to expect the IAF to wipe out a significant proportion of Hizbullah's fighting force.
But the chief of staff emphatically does not want to send in the ground forces. The fate of that tank crew last Wednesday is probably giving him nightmares. That and all those other colossal explosive devices his troops have unearthed as they've been dismantling the Hizbullah border outposts this week. The other day, a D9 tractor rolled over one of those bombs, detonating it. Immensely robust, the D9 survived the blast; not many other vehicles would have.
Hidden explosives apart, IDF ground forces would, of course, be fighting in Hizbullah territory, against gunmen intimately familiar with the terrain, gunmen who have been salivating at the prospect of the Israelis coming at them.
Halutz is fully aware of the terrible price Israel's citizens have been paying in this conflict. The North at times resembles the eerily quiet set of one of those alien invasion movies, where the traffic lights still change but all the people have disappeared. The death toll is mounting. And Halutz knows that it's the men and women in uniform, not the civilians, who are charged with bearing the brunt of military conflict.
Reserve generals like Doron Almog have this week been urging that he send in the troops, all the way to the Litani River, as the only way to truly clear out Hizbullah from the south. But the palpable sense around Halutz is that he fears he would be sending too many of his troops to their deaths, that an increased use of ground forces would turn this into a blood-soaked conflict.
And when it was all over, would it have been worth those lost lives?
Or put another way, no matter how many weeks the international community gives Israel before it shuts the "window" of military opportunity, will the IDF truly be able to prevent the reconstitution of Hizbullah anyway?
OUR DIVIDED Israel has been all-but unified behind the IDF's fighters and the government that sent them into action. The sheer numbers and lethal impact of Hizbullah's rockets and missiles left few Israelis unconvinced that here was a threat that had to be defused. Ehud Olmert's "moment of national truth" speech in the Knesset on Tuesday unfolded to a sound no prime minister has heard when making an address of genuine import for years: respectful silence. With the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians leading the way, even much of the international community internalized the need for action and understood the nature of Israel's military campaign (though not, of course, much of the European media or, needless to say, the French).
Such disunity as there has been at home, indeed, has come from critics, left and right, who question the focus and declared goals of the conflict, and specifically the decision to grant immunity to Damascus. (On the left the question is also being raised as to whether a more energetic pursuit of perceived possibilities for peace with Syria in recent years might have crippled Hizbullah more effectively than any military offensive can today.)
Syria both supplies Hizbullah with its own missiles, and ferries Iran's missiles to Nasrallah via Damascus airport. A limited attack on Syrian army positions might pull Damascus into a conflict Israel could reasonably expect to win, or signal to Bashar Assad that worse would await him if he chose to refurbish the Hizbullah supply lines when this conflict is over. But the IDF has thus far spared him the choice, and thus done nothing to deter him from picking up where he left off before hostilities began.
Halutz is adamant that fighting in Gaza, thwarting terror in and from the West Bank, and tackling Hizbullah is enough of a stretch. Iran, in his view, is a problem for the international community to tackle. For now, at least. And far from seeking to draw in the Syrians, his concern has been that a desperate Nasrallah might try to do so, perhaps even by firing on Syrian positions in the hope that jumpy Assad might blame Israel and leap into the fray.
The chief of staff has also been careful to limit the declared aims even of the conflict with Hizbullah. After Sunday's Katyusha attack on Haifa, in which eight Israelis were killed, Peretz vowed to "break" it. Halutz doesn't use that kind of language. He remembers what the Syrians did to the Moslem Brotherhood in Hama in 1982, when Hafez Assad sent his troops to crush the growing threat of Moslem extremism by killing 10,000, perhaps 20,000 people. He looks at the Egyptians' eight decades of battles with the fundamentalists. Ideological groups cannot be broken, he argues. There will always be 10 or 20, or 100 or 200 adherents to keep the flame alive.
In fact Halutz believes that it might be a mistake to try and force an abject Hizbullah surrender. It will never raise the white flag. Persuade the Lebanese public that Hizbullah is bad for them, and simultaneously drastically reduce its capability - the twin aims of the Israeli offensive - and it will have to bend and concede, he believes. Publicly humiliate it, and it will determinedly reconstitute itself.
It's a strangely forgiving attitude to a ruthless terror group. But it will be vindicated if, as Halutz promises, when this conflict is ultimately resolved, around a table, Hizbullah has no seat. It will be vindicated if, once this war in the North is over, Regev and Goldwasser come safely home, Hizbullah is prevented from again bringing murder to the border, from regaining its missile capabilities, from reconstituting itself as a military threat.
For what, otherwise, will Israel have gained?
Debra J. Saunders: A Global Body Parts Bazaar
The San Fransisco Chronicle
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Is China harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners -- who are killed in the process? David Kilgour, a former Canadian member of parliament, and Canadian human-rights attorney David Matas admit that they cannot prove or disprove allegations that China has killed thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in order to harvest their organs, but they fear and believe it is happening. So they wrote in a report released this month for the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of the Falun Gong in China.
China denies the allegations. An embassy spokesman reminded me that U.S. officials toured a site in Shenyang allegedly used for these operations, but a U.S. State Department official said they found "no evidence that the site is being used for any function other than as a normal public hospital." The official U.S. position on the controversy is that the administration is "concerned" about Chinese persecution of Falun Gong, as well as allegations of organ harvesting.
On the other hand, last year a Chinese health official admitted that the organs of executed prisoners were sold to foreigners. A new law now prohibits taking organs without written permission -- even as China has launched a new fleet of execution vans that are turning lethal injection into a movable feat.
There is no question that China is persecuting Falun Gong members. In 2004, the U.S. State Department reported that, "tens of thousands of practitioners remained incarcerated in prisons, extrajudicial re-education-through-labor camps and psychiatric facilities. Several hundred Falun Gong adherents reportedly have died in detention due to torture, abuse and neglect since the crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999."
Falun Gong is a meditative practice -- sometimes dubbed "Chinese yoga" -- which, practitioner Steve Ispas of Los Altos, Calif., tells me promotes "truthfulness, compassion and tolerance."
Nonetheless, the People's Republic of China refers to Falun Gong as an "anti-humanity, anti-society and anti-science cult" and claims that practitioners refuse needed medical treatment -- which apparently makes it acceptable for the government to jail, even torture, believers.
You don't have to take the word of Falun Gong members to believe that the Chinese government is killing adherents for their body parts.
China has seen a steep rise in transplants over the past six years -- from 18,500 in the six-year period 1994 to 1999 -- to 60,000 in 2000 to 2005. (That figure was extrapolated from the China Medical Organ Transplant Association.) With no sign of a rise in brain-dead donors and family members donating organs, the report found, "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six-year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained."
Websites for Chinese medical facilities demonstrate that it is quick and easy to get a human organ in China. One site boasted, "It may take only one week to find out the suitable (kidney) donor." Maximum wait time: one month. One clinic advertised an average waiting time for a liver of two weeks, another clinic cited an average wait of one week for a liver. That's fast service for an operation that requires a fresh, healthy and compatible corpse.
The median waiting time in Canada for an organ was 32.5 months in 2003.
The report also relied on testimony from witnesses, including a woman who claims her ex-husband harvested corneas from some 2,000 Falun Gong members. The report also cited transcripts of phone calls to Chinese hospitals in which doctors offered up healthy organs from live Falun Gong donors.
America has a role in China's human-parts boom. As the Chronicle reported in April, a San Mateo, Calif., father of six plunked down $110,000 and walked away with someone else's liver. He didn't bother to find out if the donor was an executed prisoner, but after the fact, he did bother to go online to inform other affluent Americans how they can buy fresh Chinese organs.
Speaking on the phone from Washington, Kilgour told me that while the buyer of Chinese organs may tell himself that his organ donor was a criminal who was going to be executed anyway, he believes that when foreigners buy a kidney, a Chinese official then "chooses a healthy Falun Gong practitioner who would die in the process of giving you a new kidney."
Kilgour and Matas penned 17 recommendations to thwart what they believe is happening.
Countries need to pass laws that require doctors to report patients who obtain trafficked organs. Medical groups should not invite Chinese transplant surgeons to conferences. Meanwhile, if the PRC wants to convince the world that it is not harvesting organs from Falun Gong members, it needs to allow human-rights organizations to inspect re-education camps and interview prisoners.
According to the report, one transplant doctor volunteered to a caller that he had 10 "beating hearts" available at his hospital. If western democracies do nothing, if they continue allow their citizens to buy Chinese organs from unwilling donors, the developing world threatens to devolve one big organ bazaar -- with human life itself as a hot commodity available to the highest bidders.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Is China harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners -- who are killed in the process? David Kilgour, a former Canadian member of parliament, and Canadian human-rights attorney David Matas admit that they cannot prove or disprove allegations that China has killed thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in order to harvest their organs, but they fear and believe it is happening. So they wrote in a report released this month for the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of the Falun Gong in China.
China denies the allegations. An embassy spokesman reminded me that U.S. officials toured a site in Shenyang allegedly used for these operations, but a U.S. State Department official said they found "no evidence that the site is being used for any function other than as a normal public hospital." The official U.S. position on the controversy is that the administration is "concerned" about Chinese persecution of Falun Gong, as well as allegations of organ harvesting.
On the other hand, last year a Chinese health official admitted that the organs of executed prisoners were sold to foreigners. A new law now prohibits taking organs without written permission -- even as China has launched a new fleet of execution vans that are turning lethal injection into a movable feat.
There is no question that China is persecuting Falun Gong members. In 2004, the U.S. State Department reported that, "tens of thousands of practitioners remained incarcerated in prisons, extrajudicial re-education-through-labor camps and psychiatric facilities. Several hundred Falun Gong adherents reportedly have died in detention due to torture, abuse and neglect since the crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999."
Falun Gong is a meditative practice -- sometimes dubbed "Chinese yoga" -- which, practitioner Steve Ispas of Los Altos, Calif., tells me promotes "truthfulness, compassion and tolerance."
Nonetheless, the People's Republic of China refers to Falun Gong as an "anti-humanity, anti-society and anti-science cult" and claims that practitioners refuse needed medical treatment -- which apparently makes it acceptable for the government to jail, even torture, believers.
You don't have to take the word of Falun Gong members to believe that the Chinese government is killing adherents for their body parts.
China has seen a steep rise in transplants over the past six years -- from 18,500 in the six-year period 1994 to 1999 -- to 60,000 in 2000 to 2005. (That figure was extrapolated from the China Medical Organ Transplant Association.) With no sign of a rise in brain-dead donors and family members donating organs, the report found, "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six-year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained."
Websites for Chinese medical facilities demonstrate that it is quick and easy to get a human organ in China. One site boasted, "It may take only one week to find out the suitable (kidney) donor." Maximum wait time: one month. One clinic advertised an average waiting time for a liver of two weeks, another clinic cited an average wait of one week for a liver. That's fast service for an operation that requires a fresh, healthy and compatible corpse.
The median waiting time in Canada for an organ was 32.5 months in 2003.
The report also relied on testimony from witnesses, including a woman who claims her ex-husband harvested corneas from some 2,000 Falun Gong members. The report also cited transcripts of phone calls to Chinese hospitals in which doctors offered up healthy organs from live Falun Gong donors.
America has a role in China's human-parts boom. As the Chronicle reported in April, a San Mateo, Calif., father of six plunked down $110,000 and walked away with someone else's liver. He didn't bother to find out if the donor was an executed prisoner, but after the fact, he did bother to go online to inform other affluent Americans how they can buy fresh Chinese organs.
Speaking on the phone from Washington, Kilgour told me that while the buyer of Chinese organs may tell himself that his organ donor was a criminal who was going to be executed anyway, he believes that when foreigners buy a kidney, a Chinese official then "chooses a healthy Falun Gong practitioner who would die in the process of giving you a new kidney."
Kilgour and Matas penned 17 recommendations to thwart what they believe is happening.
Countries need to pass laws that require doctors to report patients who obtain trafficked organs. Medical groups should not invite Chinese transplant surgeons to conferences. Meanwhile, if the PRC wants to convince the world that it is not harvesting organs from Falun Gong members, it needs to allow human-rights organizations to inspect re-education camps and interview prisoners.
According to the report, one transplant doctor volunteered to a caller that he had 10 "beating hearts" available at his hospital. If western democracies do nothing, if they continue allow their citizens to buy Chinese organs from unwilling donors, the developing world threatens to devolve one big organ bazaar -- with human life itself as a hot commodity available to the highest bidders.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Film Review: 'The Lost City'
[Be sure to check out Mr. Hunter's novel "Havana"...it's one of the Earl Swagger/Bob Lee Swagger tales set in Cuba during the late '50s...I recommend reading these books in order starting with "Point Blank"...they are smart, rousing and blood-drenched yarns...and usually, the correct fella's blood is doing the drenching.]
'Lost City': Halcyon Havana
Andy Garcia's Take On the Revolution Era
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006; Page C05
Nobody remembers pre-revolutionary Havana more clearly than those of us who weren't there. We remember the whores, the gangsters, the dirty movie palace, the spies, the strippers and Havana's Shanghai Theater (actual magazine line: "A Cuban Has Cracked the G-String Barrier.") After all, we all saw "Godfather II" or read Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana."
But Cubans remember it differently. They remember an elegant Spanish city of grand architecture, crashing surf against the sea wall at the Malecon, the palm trees, the broad boulevards, the pulsating music -- and the families, their own and others, that formed a dense interrelationship of love and rivalry and angst and fear and pity.
Those actual memories are at the heart of Andy Garcia's "The Lost City," a tribute to that time and place, an elegy on what was lost, a little payback for a regime that drove them out, and, best of all, a synthesis of the driving Afro-Cuban rhythms of the extraordinary music.
The big news in the movie will be Garcia's portrait of the young, ruthless, movie-star handsome Che Guevara (Jsu Garcia), so beloved by the American (and world) left. They should know; after all, they saw "The Motorcycle Diaries." Andy Garcia -- an emigre who fled with his parents when he was 5 1/2 -- and the late Cuban novelist-screenwriter G. Cabrera Infante have a different take. They see a punk killer who knows how beautiful he is, how cool, how sexy. He's Mick Jagger with a .45 automatic and plenty of notches in the grip.
Good Lord, what will this do to the T-shirt sales?
But that's only a tiny part of the movie, which is really the story of a family. And the truth is, the movie is pretty fair: It also shows the brutality and corruption of the Batista regime in full frontal frankness, and if it laments the direction that history happens to take, it doesn't question the idea that a change was necessary.
Again, though, that's not the movie, which aspires to be more universal. The model is classic and transcends culture. You can see it in such diverse works as "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Legends of the Fall" and, I suppose, "The Three Little Pigs." It tracks the fate of three siblings across a turbulent era and watches each fate as it transpires, leaving, ultimately, a melancholy survivor lamenting what and who have passed.
The film focuses on the Fellove family. Papa (Tomas Milian) is a college professor but a man of means. They live in a hacienda that could easily be confused with paradise, a vast white house with gardens and servants and billowing curtains at the windows. But they know that change will come: It's 1958 and the Batista government is getting more and more repressive, just as the scruffy rebels are getting more and more bold. Batista had lost the middle class and the aristocrats; he holds only the army. Of course, secret policemen hunt the bad boys in the shadows of the city and the game is played as hard as any revolutionary struggle.
Each brother has a different attitude toward what is happening around them. Fico (Andy Garcia) the eldest, is proprietor of El Tropical, a thinly disguised version of the still extant Tropicana. He is, like so many in show biz, apolitical, as the demands of running the club are so intense they leave him little time for the larger picture. (His profession also gives the movie a platform to offer up almost 40 Cuban songs.) At the same time, he is a traditional Spaniard, who believes in the patriarchal system, and nothing makes him madder than when his two younger brothers disrespect the grave, kind idealist who is their father.
Son No. 2 is Luis (Nestor Carbonell), a pacifist like his father but a man who abhors the politics of now. He yearns for a democratic Cuba but comes to conclude that one man stands between that and reality -- Batista. Thus, he joins the March 13, 1958, assault on Batista's palace by an anti-communist revolutionary group calling itself The Directorio (the details aren't from the movie, but from Hugh Thomas's "Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom"). Castro had been approached by the group but refused to pitch in; a veteran of an earlier shootout at Moncada Barracks, he sat this one out in the mountains, a wise decision as the attempt ended in failure and massacre. (Even an American tourist got shot by Batista's trigger-happy guards!) "The Lost City's" re-creation of this twisted battle is the most dynamic sequence in the film.
Son No. 3, Ricardo (Enrique Murciano), at least knows which way the wind is blowing. Chastened by the results of that engagement, he joins Castro and soon adds beard and fatigues to his look. Meanwhile, Fico takes it on himself to obey his middle brother's wish and take care of his wife, Aurora (beautiful Ines Sastre), and soon the older brother and the widow have more on their minds than politics.
Some of the tropes of "The Lost City" are ineffective. Bill Murray plays an unnamed "writer" who befriends and hangs out with Fico, offering a comic subtext to all the revolutionary gloom and doom. Murray is always funny and when someone puts him in that forgotten '50s outfit of the short-pants suit, he looks particularly hilarious. He says a lot of things, too, but somehow his character, meant to represent the offbeat stylings of G. Cabrera Infante himself, doesn't quite work.
Then there's Dustin Hoffman in the movie briefly as the famous Meyer Lansky. His is a different version of the character played by Lee Strasberg in "Godfather II," the visionary genius fixer ("Hyman Roth" was the nom de guerre), but again the movie's not about the Cuba of Mafia corruption, sleaze, gangsterism and commercial sex that was at the center of "Godfather II" and more than a few novels. Lansky's appearance, and that plotline, doesn't come to much.
What does work is the sense of loss. Infante finds a brilliant device in the love affair between Fico and Aurora, in that Aurora in some way becomes Cuba. She is absorbed by it and the revolution, and though she loves Fico (who doesn't love a revolution that imparts its discipline on his entertainment enterprise), she cannot tear herself away from a dream of a glorious revolutionary future.
As a director, Garcia's best skill is in evoking great work from his cast, particularly Milian, Murciano, Sastre and Carbonell. They are the heart of the film, the doomed, damned Felloves, victims of the classic wrong time, wrong place tragedy. The movie makes one thing achingly real: the fact that it isn't fun to be born in the cross-hairs of history.
The Lost City (143 minutes, at Landmark's E Street and Bethesda Row) is rated R for violence.
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