https://www.stratfor.com/reports/podcasts.php?ref=070516%20-%20GIR%20-%20PRE&camp=060714-letter&format=HTML>

The United States, Iran and the Iraq Negotiation Process
By George Friedman and Reva Bhalla

At long last, the United States and Iran announced May 13 that they will engage in direct public bilateral talks over Iraq. From Washington, it was the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Council that broke the news. From Tehran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confirmed that the two sides will meet in Baghdad in a few weeks, most likely at the ambassadorial level. That makes these talks as officially sanctioned as they can be.

Already there have been two brief public meetings -- albeit on the sidelines of two international conferences -- between senior officials from the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department in March in Baghdad and in May in Sharm el-Sheikh , Egypt. The upcoming meeting in Baghdad, however, will be the first official bilateral meeting. After months of intense back-channel discussions, both sides have made a critical decision to bring their private negotiations into the public sphere, which means Tehran and Washington must have reached some consensus on the general framework of the negotiations on how to stabilize Iraq.

Why Now?

The U.S. political situation illustrates why both sides are willing to come to the table right now. Both Iran and the United States are closely eyeing each other's busted flushes , and they understand that time is not on their respective sides.

From the U.S. perspective, it is no secret the Iraq war has soaked up an enormous amount of U.S. military bandwidth. With the 2008 presidential election fast approaching, the Bush administration is left with little time to put a plan in action that would demonstrate some progress toward stabilizing Iraq. It has also become painfully obvious that U.S. military force alone will not succeed in suppressing Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militias enough to allow the government in Baghdad to function -- and for Washington to develop a real exit strategy. But by defiantly sending more troops to Iraq against all odds, Bush is sending a clear signal to Iran that it is not in the Iranians' interest to wait out this administration, and that the United States is prepared to use its forces to block Iranian aspirations to dominate Iraq.

From the Iranian perspective, Tehran knows it is dealing with a weak U.S. president right now, and that the next U.S. president probably will have much greater freedom of action than Bush currently does. The Iranians learned that dealing with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter would have been preferable to dealing with his successor. If you know negotiations are inevitable, it is better to negotiate with the weak outgoing president than try to extract concessions from a strong president during an increasingly complicated situation. The Iranians also know that the intensely fractious nature of Iraq's Shiite bloc -- which Iran depends on to project its power -- makes it all the more difficult for Tehran to consolidate its gains the longer Iraq remains in chaos.

U.S. and Iranian Demands

And so the time has come for both Iran and the United States to show their cards by laying out their demands for public viewing.

U.S. demands for Iraq are fairly straightforward. Our understanding of what Washington wants from Tehran regarding Iraq rests on these key points:

1. The United States wants Iraq to be a unified and independent state. In other words, Washington knows a pro-U.S. regime in Baghdad is impossible at this point, but Washington is not going to permit an Iranian-dominated state either.

2. The United States does not want jihadists operating in Iraq.

3. The United States wants to be able to withdraw from security operations, but not precipitously, thereby allaying Sunni Arab states' concerns .

Essentially, the United States is looking to create an Iraqi government that, while dominated by the Shia, remains neutral to Iran, hostile to jihadists and accommodating to mainstream Sunnis.

Iranian Demands

Iran's answers to these demands were publicly outlined in a paper at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit. The Saudi-owned, U.K.-based daily newspaper Al Hayat established the details of this paper in a May 5 article. The key points made in the presentation include the following:

1. Iran does not want an abrupt withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq for fear this would lead to reshuffling the cards and redistributing power. Instead, there should be a fixed timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. and British forces from Iraqi cities and relocation at bases and camps inside Iraq, provided the Iraqi forces have reached the point at which they can provide security. The Iranians also stated that they would extend all possible assistance so that foreign forces could exit "honorably" from Iraq.

The U.S. decision to surge more troops into Iraq forced Iran to think twice about placing its bets on a complete U.S. withdrawal. An abrupt withdrawal without a negotiated settlement leaves more problems than Tehran can manage in terms of containing Iraq's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions, and Iran does not want to be left to pick up the pieces in a country that is already on the verge of shattering along sectarian lines.

It is important to note that Iran is not calling for a complete withdrawal from Iraq, and actually acknowledges that U.S. forces will be relocated at bases and camps inside the country. Though this acts as a blocker to Iranian ambitions, the presence of U.S. bases also provides Iran with a stabilizing force placating the Sunnis and Kurds. Moreover, the Iranians are sending assurances to the United States that they are willing to cooperate so the Iraq withdrawal does not look like another Vietnam scenario for the U.S. administration to deal with at home.

2. Iran is "strongly opposed to all attempts to partition Iraq or impose a federal system that allows for regional autonomy." No region should be allowed to monopolize the resources in its territory and deprive other regions of the revenues from these resources.

Iran is essentially saying that Tehran and Washington have a common desire to see a unified Iraq. The U.S. insistence on a unified Iraq takes into account Sunni concerns of being left with the largely oil-barren central region of the country. Iran is signaling that it is not interested in seeing Iraq get split up, even if such a scenario leaves Tehran with the second-best option of securing influence in a Shiite-dominated, oil-rich southern autonomous zone.

3. Iran wants a plan, involving the Kurds and Sunnis, drawn up to root out the transnational jihadist forces allied with al Qaeda in Iraq. Sunni tribes should also assume the responsibility of confronting jihadists, whether they are Iraqi citizens or are from other Arab and Muslim countries.

In this demand, Iran and the United States share a common goal. The jihadists will use every attempt to sow sectarian strife in Iraq to prevent a political resolution from developing. The United States does not want to provide al Qaeda with a fertile base of operations, and Iran does not want its ideological nemesis gaining ground next door and working against Shiite interests.

4. Iran clearly states that the negotiations over Iraq cannot be separated from other regional issues and Tehran's nuclear file.

Stratfor has extensively discussed the nexus between Iran's nuclear agenda and its blueprint for Iraq. Iran is trying to link the nuclear issue to its dealings with the United States on Iraq as a sort of insurance policy . Iran does not want to reach an agreement on Iraq and then leave the nuclear issue to be dealt with down the road, when the United States is in a stronger position to take action against Tehran.

Iran basically is looking for a deal allowing it voluntarily to agree to freeze uranium enrichment in exchange for political concessions over Iraq, but without it having to dismantle its program. That would leave enough room to skirt sanctions and preserve the nuclear program for its long-term interests. Washington is not exactly amenable to this idea, which is what makes this a major sticking point. The United States already has made it clear that it is leaving the nuclear issue out of the Iraq discussions.

5. Iran wants a new regional formula that would make Iraq a region of influence for Tehran.

While it does not appear that Iran explicitly stated this in its presentation, a majority of participants at the conference got the message. Washington cannot afford to allow Iraq to develop into an Iranian satellite, but it is looking for assurances from Iran that a U.S. withdrawal will leave in place a neutral, albeit Shiite-dominated, government in Iraq.

Iranian Offers

The Iranian paper outlined several key concessions it would offer the United States and Iraq's Sunni faction if its demands were met.

1. Iran would help the Iraqi government rein in the armed Shiite militias and incorporate them into the state security apparatus.

2. The de-Baathification law can be revised to allow for the rehiring of former Iraqi army personnel, the bulk of whom are tied to the Sunni nationalist insurgency. However, Iran wants assurances that former Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and other former Baathists will not be allowed to hold the position of prime minister when the time comes to replace current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

3. Iran would be willing to see fresh parliamentary elections, the formation of a new Cabinet and the amendment of the Iraqi Constitution to double the Sunni seats in parliament to 40 percent, with the Shia retaining 60 percent. Tehran has said nothing about what would be left for Kurdish political representation, however.

4. Iran has proposed the "fair" distribution of oil revenues in Iraq to satisfy all parties, especially those in "central Iraq," the Sunni-dominated, oil-deprived heart of the country.

Tehran's offers illustrate the Iranians' open acknowledgment that they are not going to be able to have their cake and eat it too. Instead, they are going to have to guarantee Iraqi neutrality by giving the Sunnis a much larger slice, leaving the Kurds to get screwed yet again.

Back in Washington, the Bush administration is looking at the Iranian withdrawal plan skeptically. Right now, the United States wants assurances that a withdrawal plan worked out with the Iranians does not simply leave a longer-term opportunity for Iran to gradually take control of Iraq once the major roadblocks are out of the way. In other words, the United States needs guarantees that, as it draws down its troop presence, the Iranians will not simply walk in. The Iranian proposal to expand Sunni representation is a direct response to these concerns, provided the relevant parties can actually deliver on their promises.

This is still highly questionable, though significant developments are already taking place that reveal the United States, Iran and various Iraqi players are making concrete moves to uphold their sides of the bargain. With Iran's blessing, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has announced it will undergo a process of "Iraqization" -- a largely symbolic demonstration that SCIRI will not operate simply as an Iranian proxy. Meanwhile, the Sunni tribes and clans in Anbar province are increasingly broadcasting their commitment and progress in combating transnational jihadists. And finally, numerous reports in the Arab media suggest the United States would be willing to heed the Iranian demand that the Iraqi military not have offensive capabilities allowing it to threaten its Persian neighbor.

The negotiations are moving, and it is becoming more and more apparent that a consensus is emerging between Tehran and Washington over how the Iraq project should turn out. With enough serious arrestors in play for this deal to fall through, it is now up to all players -- whether those players call Washington, Tehran, Riyadh or Baghdad home -- finally to put their money where their mouths are.

Contact Us
Analysis Comments - analysis@stratfor.com
Customer Service, Access, Account Issues - service@stratfor.com



Was this forwarded to you? Sign up to start receiving your own copy – it’s always thought-provoking, insightful and free.


Go to https://www.stratfor.com/subscriptions/free-weekly-intelligence-reports.php to register

The Terrorism Warning Process: A Look behind the Curtain
By Fred Burton
U.S. and German officials fear terrorists are in the advanced planning stages of an attack against U.S. military personnel or tourists in Germany, ABC News reported May 11. The report followed the issuance of a Warden Message by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on April 20 announcing that U.S. diplomatic and consular facilities in Germany were increasing their security posture in response to a heightened threat situation. The message, which remains in effect, also encouraged Americans in Germany to increase their vigilance and take appropriate steps to bolster their own personal security. Continuing chatter from a number of sources indicates the threat is real.

The warning comes as no surprise. Like much of Europe, Germany has a large Muslim population, and within that population is a small but dedicated radical element. It was in Germany where a diverse group of Muslim students from various countries was radicalized and later organized into the "Hamburg Cell." Members of the cell, including Mohamed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh, would go on to attend al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, where they were selected to form the nucleus for al Qaeda's 9/11 operation. Even after the Hamburg Cell was dismantled, the jihadist network in Germany has remained active in publishing Internet propaganda and recruiting and sending young Muslim men to fight in places like Iraq.

Additionally, jihadists left two timed incendiary devices on trains in the German towns of Dortmund and Koblenz on July 31, 2006. The group allegedly responsible for the attack comprised mainly Lebanese Muslims living in Germany, who reportedly had been incensed over the Prophet Mohammed cartoon controversy. German prosecutors have alleged that the men charged in connection with the attack were also radicalized after arriving in Germany. In many ways, then, Germany is facing the same tactical realities as the United Kingdom and other countries in that it faces a threat from homegrown militants as well as from professional al Qaeda operatives.

The warning in Germany, however, does provide an opportunity to draw back the curtain on the U.S. terrorism warning process -- to examine what drives it, why it sometimes works and why it sometimes does not.

Reasons for Warnings

The U.S. government issues public warnings for a number of reasons. One of these, of course, is genuine concern for the welfare of U.S. citizens. A second reason (although perhaps not the second in priority for some officials) is simple bureaucratic butt-covering. The last thing a government official wants to do is to end up before a congressional committee or a governmental accountability review board and answer pointed questions about why he or she had threat information that was not shared with the American public.

Indeed, following the bombing of Pan American flight 103, an investigation conducted by the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism discovered that the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, received a threat Dec. 5, 1988, stating that "sometime within the next two weeks" a bomb would be placed on a Pan American flight flying from Frankfurt to the United States. The committee found that this threat information had been selectively distributed by the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Department of State, giving rise to the charge of a double standard in the authorities' choice to warn traveling government employees but not the general public.

Upon receiving the commission's report, the U.S. Congress passed The Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990, which said civil aviation threats could not be passed along only to selected travelers unless the threat applied only to those travelers. The Bush administration expanded on that legal precedent to include the dissemination of all threat information, establishing what is now commonly referred to in the counterterrorism community as the "no double-standard policy." This policy requires that threats be disseminated to the public in addition to government employees.

The "no double-standard" policy was intended to be applied to timely, credible, corroborated and specific threats. Over time, however, it has been applied to almost any and every threat. Bureaucratic butt-covering inevitably leads to this type of overreaction because nobody wants to be caught not sharing information after the fact, or being accused of making a bad analytical assessment of the threat. Therefore, nearly everything is reported, regardless of its veracity. Obviously, this type of overreaction leads to the release of many more alerts -- many of which are not well-founded. This leads to alert fatigue.

Warnings also can be issued in an effort to pre-empt an attack. In cases in which authorities have intelligence that a plot is in the works, but the information is insufficient to identify the plotters or make arrests, announcing that a plot has been uncovered and security has been increased is seen as a way to discourage a planned attack. In practical applications, however, this does not always work.

Although it might seem logical that militants would abort an operation in the works once a warning is issued, history has shown otherwise. In the Dec. 6, 2005, attack against the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for example, the perpetrators not only continued their operation despite the issuance of a warning, but also despite a government operation that resulted in the disruption of a second cell that was supposed to participate in the attack. Several other attacks also were preceded by warnings or security alerts, including the failed July 21, 2005,
London subway attack, which occurred while the city remained under a heightened alert following the bombings two weeks earlier.
Sources of Warnings
The intelligence that leads to a warning can come from a variety of places. Sometimes the warning is spawned by good, hard intelligence from a technical or human source. Other times it can be a tidbit picked up after the arrest of a suspect, such as the warnings in 2004 of the plot to attack financial targets in the United States that followed the arrest of Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan in Pakistan.
Threat intelligence also often results from interrogating captured militant operatives, as was seen in the raft of warnings that followed the September 2002 arrest and interrogation of al Qaeda operational planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Threat information can even come from a previously unknown source who walks into an agency and volunteers information.
The intelligence services of other countries also will share information they have obtained with their U.S. counterparts -- though without direct access to the source, the U.S. agencies might find it difficult to determine whether the information is credible and to obtain additional information. Additionally, there are times when foreign liaison services pass "threat" information as part of a political agenda, perhaps to get a local insurgent group listed on the U.S. terrorism list -- or merely to jerk the Americans around.
Of course, all intelligence can be problematic. For one thing, there is the problem of fabricators, human sources who concoct stories to sell to intelligence agencies for financial gain. Quite often these fabricators base their stories on a thread of truth that makes them appear genuine. During the early 1990s the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was closed on several occasions due to the bogus and exceedingly dire threat reports of a clever fabricator who milked the FBI for tens of thousands of dollars.
Secondly, there is the problem of disinformation, or information purposefully leaked by an organization to mislead or confuse analysts. In retrospect, the great number of warnings of pending attacks against U.S. and Israeli interests overseas before the 9/11 attacks -- during what the 9/11 Commission Report calls "The Summer of Threat" -- might have been part of an al Qaeda disinformation plot to distract U.S. attention from the group's real plans. Disinformation also can be provided by terrorist suspects during their interrogations in an effort to create red herrings and protect real operations that are under way. Such disinformation attempts by militants also can be useful for pinging the system in order to judge U.S. responses to threats. This also can serve to help induce alert fatigue.
Another problem in intelligence is misinterpretation. That is, receiving intelligence and indicators and then drawing the wrong conclusions from them, or even misinterpreting an innocuous item to be a critical item of intelligence. In a 2003 case, for instance, the U.S. national threat level was raised from yellow to orange during the holidays after a CIA analyst mistakenly claimed to have discovered a cache of secret al Qaeda messages imbedded in the moving text at the bottom of the Al Jazeera news channel. Though some have scoffed at the CIA over the case, the potential blowback for not taking possible indicators seriously has caused the intelligence community to err strongly on the side of caution in issuing such alerts.
The Warning Track Record
Because of the problems inherent in intelligence work, and the amount of bureaucratic butt-covering going on because of the political environment, the historical track record of warning messages has been mixed. Though the vast majority of warnings have proven to be false alarms, at times and in some specific places the warnings have been quite accurate. For example, on Feb. 15, 2006, the U.S. Embassy in Manama, Bahrain, issued a Warden Message concerning the threat of al Qaeda attacks in the region. The Australians issued a similar warning six days later. On Feb. 24, al Qaeda's Saudi node attacked the Abqaiq oil processing facility near Bahrain. In fact, there was a clearly discernable pattern in Saudi Arabia in 2004 in which a warning would be issued and then followed shortly by an attack or raid that resulted in the arrest of militant suspects.
Another example is the Bali suicide attacks in October 2005. The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta had been warning about attacks against foreigners at soft targets in Indonesia since spring 2005, and on Sept. 30, the day before the attacks, issued a Warden Message warning against possible attacks in "… places where Americans and other Westerners live, congregate, shop or visit, including hotels, clubs, restaurants, shopping centers …" The Oct. 1 attacks targeted restaurants.
The Israelis also have had good intelligence on jihadist threats in the Sinai. In fact they issued a warning to Israeli citizens to avoid the area prior to the October 2004 attack against the Hilton hotel in Taba.
This kind of intelligence penetration of al Qaeda has occurred far more frequently at the local or regional level. It has been far harder to penetrate the central core. Moreover, after certain intelligence methods have been disclosed to the public -- such as monitoring the satellite phone conversations of al Qaeda leaders -- those intelligence sources that had provided insight into the activities of the core group have dried up.
This intelligence penetration on the tactical level is frequently short-lived because the type of access that provides the timely and accurate intelligence needed to predict threats often is then used to dismantle the organization. Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the jihadists linked to al Qaeda in the Sinai -- regional nodes that were subjects of accurate threat reporting over the past few years -- were all hammered hard by local security forces. Afterward, though, the quality of the threat information dropped noticeably, with an increasing spike in the number of false alarms.
For example, after highly accurate threat reporting in Saudi Arabia in 2004 (and a string of successful actions against al Qaeda by the Saudi government), a rash of warnings in Saudi Arabia in 2005 about pending attacks against U.S. government and commercial targets proved to be unfounded. The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh was even closed for two days in August 2005 because of a threat that did not materialize. A similar pattern was seen in Indonesia and the Sinai.
As long as there are attackers -- and bureaucrats concerned about being grilled by Congress -- there will be terrorism threat warnings. The difficulty will be deciphering which are bogus and which are based on timely, accurate and specific intelligence.

Contact Us
Analysis Comments - analysis@stratfor.com
Customer Service, Access, Account Issues - service@stratfor.com

Op-Ed Columnist
Failing by Example
E-Mail
Print
Save
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 16, 2007
If you want to know why we are losing in Iraq, go back and read this story that ran on the front page of The Times on Saturday. It began like this:

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas Friedman.
Related
Q. & A. With Thomas L. Friedman
The columnist answered readers' questions.
Columnist Page »
Podcasts
Audio Versions of Op-Ed Columns
TimesSelect subscribers can listen to a reading of the day's Op-Ed columns.

“Two years ago, Robin C. Ashton, a seasoned criminal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, learned from her boss that a promised promotion was no longer hers. ‘You have a Monica problem,’ Ms. Ashton was told. Referring to Monica M. Goodling, a 31-year-old, relatively inexperienced lawyer who had only recently arrived in the office, the boss added, ‘She believes you’re a Democrat and doesn’t feel you can be trusted.’ Ms. Ashton’s ouster — she left for another Justice Department post two weeks later — was a critical early step in a plan that would later culminate in the ouster of nine United States attorneys last year.

“Ms. Goodling would soon be quizzing applicants for civil service jobs at Justice Department headquarters with questions that several United States attorneys said were inappropriate, like who was their favorite president and Supreme Court justice. One department official said an applicant was even asked, ‘Have you ever cheated on your wife?’ Ms. Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that were supposed to be nonpartisan.”

What does this have to do with Iraq? A lot. One benchmark the Bush team has been urging the Iraqi government to meet is to rescind its broad “de-Baathification” program — the wholesale purging of Baathists after the fall of Saddam — which has alienated many Sunnis and hampered national reconciliation.

But while the Bush team has been lecturing the Iraqi Shiites to limit de-Baathification in Baghdad, it was carrying out its own de-Democratization in the Justice Department in Washington. We would feel that we had failed in Iraq if we read that Sunnis were being purged from Iraq’s Ministry of Justice by Shiite hard-liners loyal to Moktada al-Sadr — but the moral equivalent of that is exactly what the Bush administration was doing here. What kind of example does that set for Iraqis?

And this wasn’t only a Washington problem. Read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s outstanding “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” which details the extent to which Americans recruited to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad were chosen, at times, for their loyalty toward Republicanism rather than expertise on Islamism. “Two C.P.A. staffers said that they were asked if they supported Roe v. Wade and if they had voted for George W. Bush,” he wrote.

But this degree of partisanship — loyalty over competence — was destructive in a much bigger way. It also deprived the Bush team of the support it needed when things in Iraq didn’t turn out to be as easy as it expected.

Only a united America could have the patience and fortitude to heal a divided Iraq — and we simply don’t have that today. Why? Because George Bush and Dick Cheney asked everyone to check their politics at the door when it came to Iraq, because victory there was so important — everyone but themselves. They argued that the war in Iraq was the central front of the central struggle of our age — an unusual war, a war against terrorism and the pathologies that produce it — but then they indulged in the most rancid politics as usual at home.

They actually thought they could unite Iraq, while dividing America.

Whenever Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had a choice between seeking political advantage at home or acting in a bipartisan fashion to buy more unity, time and space to do all the heavy lifting needed in Iraq, they opted for political advantage.

When Franklin Roosevelt fought World War II, he made a conservative Republican, Henry Stimson, his secretary of war and did all he could to hold the country together. The Bush- Cheney team, by contrast, summoned us to D-Day and then treated it like it was just another political wedge issue, whenever it suited them.

It has not worked. As Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, put it: “You cannot govern like Winston Churchill some of the time and like Grover Norquist most of the time.”

Democrats need to be careful, though, that they don’t let their rage with the hypocrisy of Mr. Bush make them totally crazy, and blind them to the fact that they — we — still need a credible plan to deal with the very real threat to open societies posed by Islamist terrorism. But I understand that rage. After all, who can ask more soldiers to sacrifice their lives in Iraq for an administration that wouldn’t even sacrifice its politics?

Dissident Watch: Abdul Karim Nabil Sulayman

by Jeffrey Azarva
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2007
http://www.meforum.org/article/1692

On November 6, 2006, Egyptian security forces in Alexandria arrested 22-year-old Abdul Karim Nabil Sulayman, better known by his pen name Karim Amir, for posting articles critical of the state and Islam on a personal blog. His arrest occurred the same day Reporters without Borders added Egypt to its "worst suppressors of Internet expression" list.[1]

Amir has a long history of defiance. After he wrote about Christian-Muslim strife in Alexandria in October 2005, police stormed his house, confiscated documents, and detained him for eighteen days.[2] Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious institution for Sunni religious scholarship in the Arab world, expelled him for secularism and filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor's Office when, in March 2006, he questioned some religious teachings and suggested that the regime of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was destined for "the dustbin of history."[3]

Although Egypt's cyber-dissidents number only in the low thousands, the Egyptian blogosphere is gaining ground as Egyptians seek photos and news accounts absent from the state-run media. But as online forums become infused with politics, they have drawn the government's ire. Some groups use websites to mobilize anti-government rallies. In May 2006, Mubarak warned, "If they [the bloggers] think what they are doing is an expression of their freedom, they should remember who gave them this chance."[4]

He did not wait long to crack down. Police attacked peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Cairo later that month, arresting six bloggers, including 24-year-old Muhammad al-Sharqawi, previously featured on this page.[5] The next month, a state court upheld a government decision to shut down any website threatening national security.[6]

Though Amir's plight is not unique—the Egyptian regime has held other prisoners of conscience indefinitely under its emergency law—it marks a new phase in Mubarak's attack on free expression. Amir is the first blogger snatched from his home solely for his ideas. Earlier arrests focused on participants in street protests.

As Mubarak accelerates his campaign against the blogosphere, there is little cause for optimism. One blogger, Hissam el-Hamalawi, believes the situation "will get worse. We will witness more crackdowns on bloggers."[7] Despite such concerns, Washington has yet to weigh in. Given the pace of Egypt's repression, it will soon not matter.

Jeffrey Azarva is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

[1] Reuters, Nov. 7, 2006.
[2] Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), Nov. 17-23, 2005.
[3] Al-Quds al-Arabi (London), Nov. 11, 2006; The Daily Star Egypt (Cairo), Nov. 7, 2006.
[4] Al-Jumhuriya (Cairo), May 30, 2006.
[5] Jeffrey Azarva, "Dissident Watch: Muhammad al-Sharqawi", Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2006, p. 96.
[6] The Daily Star Egypt, Nov. 9, 2006.
[7] Ibid.

Where God Was Born

The acclaimed bestselling author of Abraham and Walking the Bible takes readers on a heart-racing adventure to the frontlines of Israel, Iraq, and Iran and discovers an unexpected source of hope.

"The collision of politics, geography, and faith has dominated nearly every story in the Middle East since the birth of writing. It also dominates the greatest story ever told Nowhere is the struggle between faith and violence described more vividly, and with more stomach-turning details of ruthlessness, than in the Hebrew Bible.

"Yet nowhere is it described with more humanity and hope."-Bruce Feiler

At a time when America debates its values and the world braces for religious war, National Public Radio commentator and PBS presenter Bruce Feiler travels 10,000 miles through the Middle East-Israel, Iraq, and Iran-and examines the question, "Is religion just a source of conflict or can it be a source of peace?" Part wartime chronicle, part archaeological detective story, part personal spiritual exploration, Where God Was Born takes readers to biblical sites not seen by Westerners for decades and uncovers little known details about the common roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In his intimate, accessible style, Feiler invites readers on a never-in-a-lifetime experience, retracing the Bible through the bloodiest places on the planet, from the Garden of Eden in war-torn Iraq to the rivers of Babylon just south of Baghdad; from David's conquest of Jerusalem to Queen Esther's face-off with the King of Persia. At each site, Feiler discusses the Bible with local characters, from archaeologists to army chaplains, and draws lessons for fostering reconciliation in our time.

Beginning with a daring helicopter ride over the West Bank and climaxing with a hair-raising airlift into Baghdad, Bruce Feiler redefines some of the greatest stories ever told, including Joshua's conquest of the Promised Land, David's showdown with Goliath, and Jonah finding God in the whale. Where God Was Born is a powerful, inspiring story, sure to make headlines, that offers a rare, universal vision of God that can unite members of different faiths into a shared allegiance of hope.