A Dayton Process For Iraq
By Rend Al-Rahim
Thursday, May 10, 2007; A23

Last June, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced a 24-point plan for national reconciliation. Since then there have been meetings of clerics, tribal elders, army officers, civic organizations -- all with much fanfare but little result. Less-public meetings with dissident Sunnis, especially in Amman, Jordan, have had little tangible impact on the political and security situations.

The United States has placed much emphasis on laws deemed necessary for Iraqi national reconciliation. Two significant laws, part of Maliki's 24-point plan, are stalled. The draft of a new, less draconian de-Baathification law has languished because Shiite factions oppose it. A draft oil law, designed to ease Sunni fears, is opposed by the Kurds. The review of the constitution, scheduled to be completed by May 15, is another benchmark on the path to national reconciliation, but the deadline probably won't be met. Dialogue with armed Sunni groups is deadlocked because the parties to the coalition government cannot agree on which groups are acceptable.

Meanwhile, regional diplomacy has intensified. On March 10 the Iraqi government hosted a meeting in Baghdad that brought together Iraq's neighbors, members of the U.N. Security Council and other regional and international participants. A follow-up meeting of foreign ministers took place last week in Egypt.

But as useful as regional and international agreements may be, they cannot provide a solution. Countries in the region can exploit opportunities for mischief provided by the fissures within Iraq, but they cannot mend these fissures. The paramount problem in Iraq is the disagreement among Iraqis themselves and their reluctance to compromise, and what is needed first and foremost is an agreement among Iraqi social and political groups. Only then will regional and international agreements be relevant. Similarly, the attention the United States pays to the legal aspects of national reconciliation puts the cart before the horse: Laws and constitutional revision must be outcomes of a national agreement, not conditions for one.

The central unresolved questions in Iraq are: Who rules, and how? The heart of the problem is the Shiite-Sunni competition for power: Shiite parties see no reason to give up the gains they made after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, and they believe it is their turn to govern; the Sunnis cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that they no longer dominate the Iraqi state. Trust between the two is at a low ebb, and each side feels an existential threat that makes compromise difficult.

The United States must focus above all on an Iraqi compact. In 1995, after a war that left hundreds of thousands dead, a frustrated international community finally decided that the parties to the conflict in Bosnia had to be brought to the negotiating table. The Serbs, Croats and Bosnians were pressed to convene in Dayton and pressured by other nations to stay at it. The Dayton Accords were ratified by the key parties and overseen by the international community, and they have kept the peace in Bosnia.

The differences between Iraq and Bosnia should not deter us from using the Dayton process as a model. Many countries have high stakes in Iraq's stability. These countries must coax, persuade and otherwise induce Iraqis to engage in sustained negotiations in which they spell out disagreements, aspirations and fears, and reach compromises or solutions that determine who rules and how.

A Dayton-like process for Iraq would be a multi-tiered international engagement. At its heart would be an Iraqi national compact forged by Iraqis with international and regional endorsement. The process would require certain indispensable elements.

First, there must be a strong and credible driving force behind the process; the United States is best placed to be that driving force but need not be alone in this task. Second, the process must have a credible sponsor, such as the United Nations, and high-profile, skilled facilitators. Third, the single objective must be producing a Sunni-Shiite agreement as the cornerstone of the national compact. Fourth, Iraqi groups must be represented at the highest decision-making level. Fifth, the discussions and negotiations should be sustained until the necessary compromises have been made and agreements reached. Sixth, mechanisms for implementing the agreement have to be spelled out -- with a timetable.

Finally, concerned countries, including Iraq's neighbors, must ratify this accord and agree to respect it. Once a national compact has been reached, it should be linked to other regional and international mechanisms and accords, such as the International Compact for Iraq, with its system of benchmarks, achievements, and Iraqi and international obligations.

Senior Iraqi officials said last month that measures on the path of political reconciliation were moving on an Iraqi timetable and that they should not be rushed. Unfortunately, this leisurely pace, so easily adopted by politicians living in the Green Zone, costs scores of Iraqi and American lives each day. It's time to inject a little urgency into the process.

The writer, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, was Iraq's representative to the United States from 2003 to 2004. The views expressed here are her own.

THE BRAVEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD
Written by Caroline Glick
Friday, 11 May 2007

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is arguably the bravest and most remarkable woman of our times.

To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles:

To force the Western world to take note of Islam's divinely ordained enslavement of women,

And to force the Islamic world to account for it.

A series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief. Sunday (5/6) Moslems shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Rafah in the Gaza, administered by the Palestinian Authority. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught.

The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls.

The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls.

Last Thursday, May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Moslems detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.

On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap.

The pious Moslems who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls.

And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out "Allah Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.

A year ago, she wrote her first book, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam. Late last year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel.

In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two competing human impulses - conformity and individualism. In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural collapse.

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically active father who sought to free his country from Said Barre's Marxist dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family, Hirsi Ali's childhood in Arabia and Africa revolved along the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand of the Saudi-financed Moslem Brotherhood and Khomeini's Iran.

Hirsi Ali's rebellion against Islam was personal, not political. As a young girl and later as a young woman, she found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a five-year-old in Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock when her grandmother tied her down and had a man with a knife mutilate her genitals.

Living in Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness of the "true Islam." Why, she wondered, were she and her mother and sister prohibited from leaving their apartment without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in Nairobi she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the company of boys was sinful.

Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of polygamy? Why could she not choose her own husband? Why was she told by one and all that her normal human impulses to seek love, respect and compassion and think for herself were sinful and evil?

As she puts it,

I could never comprehend the downright unfairness of [Islam's] rules, especially for women. How could a just God - a God so just that almost every page of the Koran praises his fairness - desire that women be treated so unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's, I would think, Why? If God is merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, then why did unbelievers have to go to Hell?

In her words, "The spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit."

Ali credits Harlequin romance novels for her initial mental deliverance from submission. These books, with their passionate loves and steamy sex scenes, were her first glimpse at the possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and desires she was told to repress were natural and could even be beautiful and right.

Her impulse to rebel was matched by her impulse to conform. As a teenager, Hirsi Ali tried to be a faithful Moslem and even joined the Moslem Brotherhood. Embracing the notion of submission she began wearing a full-body burka.

But try as she might, she could not accept that her own will had no inherent value. She blamed the preachers for the terror she saw as a Moslem girl, believing they must be distorting the Koran.

"Surely," she writes, "Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were disobedient? Surely a woman's statement in court should be worth the same as a man's?"

Yet, when she sat down and read the Koran on her own, she found that everything the preachers had said was written in the book.

At 21, Hirsi Ali emancipated herself. Fleeing from an arranged marriage to a Somali immigrant in Canada, she sought and received asylum in Holland. There, she embraced Dutch society and freedoms and quickly flourished in a true rag-to-riches immigrant tale.

She learned Dutch fluently and began supporting herself as a translator. In just four years she had bridged the cultural divide between Africa and Europe and began studying political science with the creme de la creme of Dutch society at the University of Leiden.

A mere decade after her arrival, as a naturalized Dutch citizen, she was a pubic figure, an outspoken social critic of Islam in Europe. In January 2003, she was elected to Parliament as a member of the conservative Liberal Party.

In Holland, Hirsi Ali found herself confronted by a kinder, gentler type of cultural tyranny - the moral relativism of political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by the Left.

Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so in Holland she refused to submit to the will of the majority not to notice, judge or take action against the misogynist tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Moslem minority.

Hirsi Ali's labors brought her to film director Theo Van Gogh. In 2004 the two produced the film Submission.

The short film shows a young Moslem woman wearing a see-through burka. Passages of the Koran permitting the abuse of women are written on her body. The woman prays in submission to Allah all the while noting her abject suffering in his name. At the end of the movie, the woman raises her head to Allah and calls into question the reasonableness of her submission.

The film's provocative message placed both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh's lives in imminent danger. And on November 21, 2004 Van Gogh was butchered by a Dutch Moslem on the streets of Amsterdam. The murderer stabbed a letter into Van Gogh's chest in which he threatened to murder Hirsi Ali "in the name of Allah Most Gracious and Most Merciful."

While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under armed guard in army installations, her message proved too much of a challenge for the Dutch establishment which vomited her out last year. Her own party found a formality on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out of the country and the parliament. Although the public outcry that ensued forced the government to restore her citizenship, the message was clear.

Hirsi Ali moved to Washington, DC. As a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, she continues to warn the West of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural disintegration under the tyranny of multiculturalism.

Just last month, her work brought an imam from Pittsburgh to call for her murder for the crime of apostasy.

In her life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times. She holds a mirror up to the Islamic world and demands that it contend with the evil it propagates in the name of divinity.

She holds a mirror up to the Free World and demands that we defend our freedom against the onslaught of moral relativism and cultural decline.

So too, she demands our compassion for the women of Islam. She says we must see the suffering beneath the veil and work to alleviate it.

Whether it means that we must mass produce and distribute Arabic and Urdu copies of Harlequin romance novels throughout the Islamic world; challenge veiled women to explain why they ascribe to a faith that gives men the divine right to beat and rape women; or simply hold Moslem communities in the West to the standards of freedom on which our civilization is based, the West must help these women free themselves from oppression.

Finally, in our own societies we must protect and uphold voices like Hirsi Ali's. For the past five years, Hirsi Ali has lived under threat of death for her views.

We must understand that only when she, and people like her can walk on the streets unafraid will we have properly defended our freedom.

Caroline Glick is deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 11, 2007; A02

Vice President Cheney yesterday rejected former CIA director George J. Tenet's assertion that the Bush administration did not engage in serious debate before invading Iraq in 2003, escalating a public conflict over what happened during the run-up to the war.

In his first comments on the matter since Tenet's book came out, Cheney took issue with the former intelligence chief's account of the months before the invasion when, Tenet says, Cheney and others seemed determined to topple Saddam Hussein and were not interested in discussing whether Iraq posed an imminent threat or whether it could be contained without an invasion.

"That's just not true," Cheney told Fox News during a trip to the Middle East. "I haven't read George's book, but to state that somehow the president didn't spend a lot of time thinking about this or talking about it -- we had extensive conversations. Maybe George wasn't included in those, but the fact of the matter is this decision was weighed as heavily and given as careful consideration as any I've ever been involved in, and I've worked for four presidents."

Cheney likewise disputed Tenet's characterization of his now-infamous "slam dunk" comment regarding the case that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In "At the Center of the Storm," Tenet says that the "slam dunk" remark, which was made during an internal meeting in late 2002, has been misinterpreted and that Cheney used it to publicly scapegoat him by presenting it as a tipping point.

"The president asked him that question specifically: 'How good is the evidence, George?' " Cheney recounted. "And George says, 'It's a slam dunk.' It's an honest, accurate statement of what transpired. . . . I never said it was a tipping point."

Cheney, who made the comments hours after completing a two-day visit to Iraq, said he harbors no animus toward Tenet. "Listen," he said, "if I had ill feelings towards everybody who has written books, it'd be a pretty long list."

Brace yourself.



Hatikva
Scott Simon of NPR reports on a rare recFording of "Hatikva " from almost 62 years ago. If this doesn't give you goosebumps I don't know what will.

It was recorded by a British reporter on April 20, 1945 in Bergen-Belsen
when the British army liberated the few thousand survivors in the
concentration camp, half of which were Jewish, most of them at the extremes
of their strength. It was recently discovered and apparently was loaned to
NPR by the Smithsonian Institute.

The British priest organized prayers for Kabbalat Shabbat for the Jews. It
was the first time after six years of war and after more than 10 years of
persecution. With a lot of effort the Je ws organized themselves and,
knowing they were recorded, sang " Hatikva".

As you can hear they sang the original version as it was written by Naftali
Imber. Picturing them in the midst of the concentration camp singing after
all they had been through renders this a very moving scenario.
PUT YOUR Speakers on.

THEN CLICK ON THE LINE BELOW. You might want to save this.

http://genealogy.org.il/BergenBelsenHatikva.mp3

Will France's New President Deal With the Islamic Threat?

GMT 5-9-2007 5:57:6
Assyrian International News Agency
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(AINA) -- Paris vaut bien une messe ("Paris is well worth a Mass") --- A Protestant Henry III of Navarre on adopting Catholicism in 1593 to become the king of France.

As soon as the news of Nicolas Sarkozy's victory in presidential election was announced, three hundred socialists and anarchists responded by rioting on the streets of Paris. The French riot control police had a tough time in taming them. They shouted 'Sarko-fascist' and reiterated their accusation that Sarkozy would turn France into an authoritarian state.

But French electorate appear to have a saner understanding of the situation than those 19 th century relics. Hence they handed out a conservative Sarkozy a comfortable victory against socialist hopeful Ségolène Royal. Jacque Chirac, having presided over France for 12 years, had incurred great unpopularity. But socialist Royal, failed to capitalize upon this rightist anti-incumbency, because she proved a status quo candidate. A rightist Sarkozy carried the electorate with him by projecting his maverick image strongly.

"Occasion" said Napoleon Bonaparte, 'produces the leader". Napoleon, in the post-Revolution turmoil of France, had distinguished himself as one. His Tuscan ancestry or Corsican birth not withstanding, French nation loved him deeply. Just ask a Frenchman why there is no boulevard, or park named after Napoleon in France. He would say that Napoleon was too big a person- entire France is Napoleon.

Why today the French nation has handed the baton of history to a person of non-French ancestry? Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian immigrant father. His Sephardic Jewish genealogy from maternal side shows on his face, and his grit. His name, like Napoleon's accent, is not really French. Napoleon dropped the letter 'u' from his surname Bounparate; Sarkozy has added de Nagy-Bosca to appear French. The French nation sees in Sarkozy a leader who can rise to the occasion. He is not only a fine orator, but a man of action. His tough stance on the night riots in France in 2005, indulged in by North African immigrants, has endeared him to French people.

Sarkozy had attributed the riots to a 'well-organized conspiracy'. November 9, 2005, after 13 nights of rioting ordered the expulsion of all foreigners convicted of taking part in the riots. He told that Parliament that 120 foreigners found guilty of involvement would be deported without delay.

Today across French cities there are hundreds of no-go areas. A French urban department neatly lists out 751 Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or Sensitive Urban Zones, actually no-go areas (which are mini Islamistan). Home to nearly five million North African immigrants, or eight percent of France, these are like sovereign territories where French laws are unenforceable. Frenchmen are resigned to annual burning of 1400 cars by Arab hoodlums. In 20-nights long riots of 2005, some 8973 vehicles were burnt. The cars of Muslim owners, which sport verses of Koran or stylish map of Algeria, are selectively left out.

French police, even on regular patrol, come under attacks from North African immigrants. In 2006 alone, the figure was more than 2500. A right wing police union claimed that Muslims were waging a civil war against them.

Last October Sarkozy admitted "We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more; it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their 'comrades' free when they are arrested".

The socialists and anarchists, who received Sarkozy's victory by rioting on the street, are blind to how Arabs are running riot with France's proverbial liberalism. To what extent Sarkozy, an elected President, can stem the civilizational rot of liberal France. He is a practising Catholic himself, and has spoken about reducing the gulf between the Church and state, religion and public life for Frenchmen. Remember, the 2005 night-riots erupted, weeks before the centenary of laicism -- the 1905 law separating Church from the state. Laicism was meant to give leeway to the Jews in the aftermath of infamous Dreyfus affair. But Western Europe is realising to its horrors, that dealing with Islam, is altogether different ball game.

Personally, Napoleon was a non-religious person, who subscribed to the ideas of French Revolution. But scandalized by the atheism unleashed by the French revolution, he rehabilitated Christianity in France after assuming power. Today what will Sarkozy do stem the secular rot in the French life, which threatened with Islam, is gravely imperilled. This explains Sarkozy's emphasis on Christianity. No wonder of the four pillars of Sarkozy's party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (along with Gaullism, Republicanism, and Radicalism) is Christian democracy.

By Priyadarsi Dutta

Priyadarsi Dutta is based in New Delhi, India and writes for the multi-edition newspaper The Pioneer.

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