Israel, Syria and the Glaring Secret
September 25, 2007 1754 GMT

By George Friedman

What happened in the Middle East on Sept. 6?

The first reports came from the Syrians, who said their air defenses fired at an Israeli warplane that had penetrated Syrian airspace and dropped some ordnance on the country's North. The plane then fled toward the Mediterranean at supersonic speeds, the Syrians said, noting that sonic booms had been heard.

A Syrian delegation was meeting Turkish officials about the same time, and the Turks announced that two Israeli fuel tanks had been dropped inside of Turkish territory, one in Gaziantep province and the other in Hatay province. That would mean the aircraft did come under some sort of fire and dropped fuel tanks to increase speed and maneuverability. It also would mean the plane was flying close to Turkish territory or over Turkish territory, at the northwestern tip of Syria.

The Israelis said nothing. It appeared at first glance that an Israeli reconnaissance flight had attracted Syrian attention and got out of there fast, though even that was puzzling. The Israelis monitor Syria carefully, but they have close relations with the Turkish military, which also watches Syria carefully. We would assume they have intelligence-sharing programs and that reconnaissance in this area could have been done by the Turks or, more likely, by Israeli reconnaissance satellites. Yet, an Israeli reconnaissance flight seemed like the only coherent explanation.

What was most striking from the beginning was the relative silence on all sides. The Israelis remained mum, not even bothering to leak a misleading but plausible story. The Syrians, after threatening to take the issue to the U.N. Security Council, have been less vociferous than one would expect. The United States had nothing official to say, but U.S. sources leaked a series of incompatible explanations. The Turks, after requesting an explanation for the fuel tanks, dropped the matter.

The leaks, which seemed to be coming from the Americans, raised the scope of the operation from a reconnaissance to something more. It was U.S. sources who said up to eight aircraft were involved in the operation. Early on, a leak originating in the United States implied that there might have been Israeli commandos involved as well. U.S. leaks also mentioned that a shipment of cement had been delivered to Syria from North Korea a few days before the incident and implied that this shipment might have contained nuclear equipment of some sort that was the real target of the attack. All three countries were silent officially on the intent of the attack, but the Americans were filling in some blanks with unofficial hints.

The media also were filled with a range of contradictory speculation. One story said this was a dry run for an Israeli air attack against Iran. Another said the Israelis were demonstrating their ability -- and hence the U.S. ability -- to neutralize Syrian air defenses as a signal to Iran that it, too, is vulnerable. Some stories also claimed that new missiles, not nuclear materials, were being shipped to Syria. There were many other explanations, but these were either pure speculation or were deliberately being fed to the media in order to confuse the issue.

Officials finally started to go public last week. Israeli opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was consulted in advance and supported Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's action in Syria. U.S. President George W. Bush went out of his way -- commenting directly and through his press secretary -- to make it understood that he also knew a raid had been carried out, but had absolutely nothing to say about it. That drew attention to two things. First, the United States knew what was going on. Second, the United States was going to keep the secret -- and the secret was an important one. Between Netanyahu and Bush, the reconnaissance theory was dead. An important operation occurred Sept. 6. It remains absolutely unclear what it was about.

Another leak appeared via the Sunday Times, this time with enough granularity to consider it a genuine leak. According to that report, the operation was carried out by Israeli commandos supported by Israeli aircraft, under the direct management of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. It had been planned since June, just after Barak took office, and had been approved by the United States after some hesitation. The target was in fact nuclear "material" provided by North Korea, according to that leak.

All of this makes perfect sense, save one thing. Why the secrecy? If the Syrians have nuclear facilities, the Israelis should be delighted to make it public. Frankly, so should the United States, since the Bush administration has always argued that nuclear proliferation to rogue states, including Syria, is one of the key problems in the world. The Syrians should be spinning the story like crazy as well, denying the nuclear program but screaming about unprovoked Israeli-U.S. aggression. The silence from one or two parties makes sense. The silence from all parties makes little sense.

Looked at differently, Israel and the United States both have gone out of their way to draw attention to the fact that a highly significant military operation took place in Northern Syria, and compounded the attention by making no attempt to provide a plausible cover story. They have done everything possible to draw attention to the affair without revealing what the affair was about. Israel and the United States have a lot of ways to minimize the importance of the operation. By the way they have handled it, however, each has chosen to maximize its importance.

Whoever they are keeping the secret from, it is not the Syrians. They know precisely what was attacked and why. The secret is not being kept from the Iranians either. The Syrians talk to them all the time. It is hard to imagine any government of importance and involvement that has not been briefed by someone. And by now, the public perception has been shaped as well. So, why the dramatic secrecy designed to draw everyone's attention to the secret and the leaks that seem to explain it?

Let us assume that the Sunday Times report is correct. According to the Times, Barak focused on the material as soon as he became defense minister in June. That would mean the material had reached Syria prior to that date. Obviously, the material was not a bomb, or Israel would not have waited until September to act. So it was, at most, some precursor nuclear material or equipment.

However, an intervening event occurred this summer that should be factored in here. North Korea publicly shifted its position on its nuclear program, agreeing to abandon it and allow inspections of its facilities. It also was asked to provide information on the countries it sold any nuclear technology to, though North Korea has publicly denied any proliferation. This was, in the context of the six-party negotiations surrounding North Korea, a major breakthrough.

Any agreement with North Korea is, by definition, unstable. North Korea many times has backed off of agreements that seemed cast in stone. In particular, North Korea wants to be seen as a significant power and treated with all due respect. It does not intend to be treated as an outlaw nation subject to interrogation and accusations. Its self-image is an important part of its domestic strategy and, internally, it can position its shift in its nuclear stance as North Korea making a strategic deal with other major powers. If North Korea is pressed publicly, its willingness to implement its agreements can very quickly erode. That is not something the United States and other powers want to see happen.

Whether the Israelis found out about the material through their own intelligence sources or North Korea provided a list of recipients of nuclear technology to the United States is unclear. The Israelis have made every effort to make it appear that they knew about this independently. They also have tried to make it appear that they notified the United States, rather than the other way around. But whether the intelligence came from North Korea or was obtained independently, Washington wants to be very careful in its handling of Pyongyang right now.

The result is the glaring secrecy of the last few weeks. Certainly, Israel and the United States wanted it known that Syria had nuclear material, and that it was attacked. This served as a warning to other recipients of North Korean nuclear technology -- most especially Iran. At the same time, the United States did not want to publicly embarrass North Korea, out of fear that the North Koreans would simply chuck the disarmament talks. Moreover, Damascus had no interest in publicizing that it had thoughts of a nuclear program, so it quieted down.

We should note that if this theory is true, and the United States and Israel discovered the existence of a Syrian nuclear program only from North Korean information, this would represent one of the most massive intelligence failures imaginable by both Israel and the United States. Essentially, it would mean that, unless this was the first shipment of material to Syria, Israel and the United States failed to detect a Syrian nuclear program on their own. That is possible, but not likely.

It is a neat theory. It might even be a true theory. But it has problems. The biggest problem is why Syria would be trying to obtain nuclear technology. Sandwiched between Israel and Turkey -- a country that has not had great relations with Syria in the past -- and constantly watched by the United States, the probability of it developing a nuclear capability undetected is infinitesimal, and the probability of Israel not taking it out is nonexistent. Moreover, Syria is not Iran. It is poorer, has less scientific and other resources and lacks the capability to mount a decadelong development effort. Syria actually plays a fairly conservative game, taking its risks in Lebanese politics and allowing jihadists to transit through the country on their way to Iraq. Trying to take on Israel or the United States in a nuclear gambit is not the Syrians' style. But certainly they were caught doing something, or they would be screaming to high heaven.

There has been persistent discussion of nuclear material in Syria, which, if we took the words seriously, would tend to indicate that something radioactive, such as enriched uranium or plutonium, was present. If what was delivered was not equipment but radioactive material, the threat might not have been a Syrian nuclear program, but some sort of radioactive device -- a dirty bomb -- that might be handed off to Hezbollah. The head of Israel's military intelligence was quoted as saying something about the attack having re-established Israel's deterrence power after its failures in the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah. Perhaps the problem was that the material was being transferred from North Korea to Syria on its way to Lebanon, possibly to use against Israel.

That would explain Syria's relative silence. Concern that the deal with North Korea will fall apart might keep the United States quiet. But a Syrian transfer of such material to Hezbollah normally would set Israel to raging at the Syrians. The Americans might have kept quiet, but the Israelis would have leaked much earlier than this. Israel would want to use the threat as a tool in its public relations war.

Another reason for the silence could be psychological warfare against Iran. The speculation above might be true in some variant, but by remaining ominously silent, the Israelis and Americans might be trying to shake Iran's nerve, by demonstrating their intelligence capability, their special operations ability and the reach of their air power. With the Israelis having carried out this attack, this very visible secrecy might be designed to make Iran wonder whether it is next, and from what direction an attack might come.

Normally such international game-playing would not interest us. The propensity of governments to create secrets out of the obvious is one of the more tedious aspects of international relations. But this secret is not obvious, and it is not trivial. Though it is true that something is finally being leaked three weeks after the attack, what is being leaked is neither complete nor reliable. It seems to make sense, but you really have to work hard at it.

At a time when the United States is signaling hostile intentions toward Iran, the events in Syria need to be understood, and the fact that they remain opaque is revealing. The secrecy is designed to make a lot of people nervous. Interestingly, the Israelis threw a change-up pitch the week after the attack, signaling once again that they wanted to open talks with the Syrians -- a move the Syrians quickly rebuffed.

When events get so strange that interpretation is a challenge, it usually indicates it was intended that way, that the events are significant and that they could point to further instability. We do not know whether that is true, but Israel and the United States have certainly worked hard to create a riddle wrapped in a mystery.

September 25, 2007
Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
MYSORE, India — Thousands of Indians report to Infosys Technologies’ campus here to learn the finer points of programming. Lately, though, packs of foreigners have been roaming the manicured lawns, too.

Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.

India is outsourcing outsourcing.

One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving their tasks — and jobs — to India. But rising wages and a stronger currency here, demands for workers who speak languages other than English, and competition from countries looking to emulate India’s success as a back office — including China, Morocco and Mexico — are challenging that model.

Many executives here acknowledge that outsourcing, having rained most heavily on India, will increasingly sprinkle tasks around the globe. Or, as Ashok Vemuri, an Infosys senior vice president, put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”

To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do.

In May, Tata Consultancy Service, Infosys’s Indian rival, announced a new back office in Guadalajara, Mexico; Tata already has 5,000 workers in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Cognizant Technology Solutions, with most of its operations in India, has now opened back offices in Phoenix and Shanghai.

Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.

And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.

In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)

For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.

The company seeks to become a global matchmaker for outsourcing: any time a company wants work done somewhere else, even just down the street, Infosys wants to get the call.

It is a peculiar ambition for a company that symbolizes the flow of tasks from the West to India.

Most of Infosys’s 75,000 employees are Indians, in India. They account for most of the company’s $3.1 billion in sales in the year that ended March 31, from work for clients like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.

“India continues to be the No. 1 location for outsourcing,” S. Gopalakrishnan, the company’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview.

And yet the company opened a Philippines office in August and, a month earlier, bought back offices in Thailand and Poland from Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch company. In each outsourcing hub, local employees work with little help from Indian managers.

Infosys says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, apportion each slice to suitable workers, double-check quality and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can clone its Indian back offices in other nations and groom Chinese, Mexican or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them.

“We have pioneered this movement of work,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. “These new countries don’t have experience and maturity in doing that, and that’s what we’re taking to these countries.”

Some analysts compare the strategy to Japanese penetration of auto manufacturing in the United States in the 1970s. Just as the Japanese learned to make cars in America without Japanese workers, Indian vendors are learning to outsource without Indians, said Dennis McGuire, chairman of TPI, a Texas-based outsourcing consultancy.

Though work that bypasses India remains a small part of the Infosys business, it is growing. The company can be highly secretive, but executives agreed to describe some of the new projects on the condition that clients not be identified.

In one project, an American bank wanted a computer system to handle a loan program for Hispanic customers. The system had to work in Spanish. It also had to take into account variables particular to Hispanic clients: many, for instance, remit money to families abroad, which can affect their bank balances. The bank thought a Mexican team would have the right language skills and grasp of cultural nuances.

But instead of going to a Mexican vendor, or to an American vendor with Mexican operations, the bank retained three dozen engineers at Infosys, which had recently opened shop in Monterrey, Mexico.

Such is the new outsourcing: A company in the United States pays an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the United States border.

In Europe, too, companies now hire Infosys to manage back offices in their own backyards. When an American manufacturer, for instance, needed a system to handle bills from multiple vendors supplying its factories in different European countries, it turned to the Indian company. The manufacturer’s different locations scan the invoices and send them to an office of Infosys, where each bill is passed to the right language team. The teams verify the orders and send the payment to the suppliers while logged in to the client’s computer system.

More than a dozen languages are spoken at the Infosys office, which is in Brno, Czech Republic.

The American program here in Mysore is meant to keep open that pipeline of diversity.

Most trainees here have no software knowledge. By teaching novices, Infosys saves money and hopes to attract workers who will turn down better-known companies for the chance to learn a new skill.

“It’s the equivalent of a bachelor’s in computer science in six months,” said Melissa Adams, a 22-year-old trainee. Ms. Adams graduated last spring from the University of Washington with a business degree, and rejected Google for Infosys.

And yet, even as outsourcing takes on new directions, old perceptions linger.

For instance, when Jeff Rand, a 23-year-old American trainee, told his grandmother he

Madrassas in India, Pakistan Moving in Different Directions
By Deepak Mahaan
CNSNews.com Correspondent
September 25, 2007

New Delhi (CNSNews.com) - While the role of traditional Islamic schools or madrassas in Pakistan in spreading radical ideology continues to generate concern, similar types of schools in neighboring India reportedly oppose a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.

As the U.S. State Department earlier this month was releasing its annual International Religious Freedom Report, in India many Muslims were joining their Hindu compatriots to celebrate the Hindu festival of Ganesh Chaturthi.

In contrast to the report's observation that unregulated madrassas are teaching "extremist doctrine in support of terrorism" to students in Pakistan, observers say the situation in India is markedly different.

Social activist Asghar Ali said India's secularism has impacted the Muslim outlook, compelling Indian madrassas to modernize their curricula.

Ali, who organizes youth camps aimed at fostering Hindu-Muslim friendship, said the recent inter-religious cooperation in the Hindu festival "reiterates [the] strength of India's pluralistic culture that allows different sects and religions to learn and co-exist peacefully."

Traditionally, Muslim societies frown on the emancipation of women, and madrassas usually teach Islamic theology to boys only. In India, many Madrassas not only admit girls, but have also integrated English, Math, Sciences and Information Technology into their programs.

There are an estimated 35,000 madrassas in India, many that teach comprehensive skills to students of both sexes, as approved by the country's education department.

According to Abdul Qayyum Akhtar, founder of an independent madrassa in the city of Jaipur with a roll of 1,500 students, more than 50 percent of the country's madrassas have adopted the government syllabus and examination system. J.M. Khan, an Indian former senior civil servant, agrees with that estimate.

The U.S. religious freedom report says little about Indian madrassas, but does praise an incident in March 2006, when "one of India's leading Islamic seminaries issued a fatwa against terrorists targeting places of worship and killing innocent people."

"Just as all 'Hindu' schools do not spew venom against Islam and Christianity, all madrassas do not necessarily nurture fundamentalist ideas," said Dr. Mushirul Hasan, a historian and former vice-chancellor of Delhi University.

He said madrassas tend to flourish where governments don't provide enough "secular" educational institutions, thus compelling poor children to flock to religious schools.

While Indian governments have succeeded in persuading many madrassas to reform and adopt country's examination system, this hasn't occurred in Pakistan.

Under reforms instituted by President Pervez Musharraf, the teaching of sectarian or religious hatred and violence is prohibited in Pakistani madrassas, but problems persist.

According to the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank, extremist groups in Pakistan continue to operate mosques and madrassas. The ICG said the reforms were "lacking substance, legal muscle or an intent to institutionalize long-term change." The group attributed this to a reluctance by Musharraf to antagonize Islamic clergy.

Pakistan has nearly 13,000 madrassas, although the ICG reckons that many such schools in border regions particularly susceptible to Taliban and al-Qaeda influence are not accounted for.

Mohammed Rakesh, a scholar of the ancient Jain religion, said India's secular framework and tolerant culture has helped to soften rigid religious attitudes.

Rakesh, who recently toured Pakistan, said the dynamics of India's multi-racial society obligate Indian Muslims to pursue modern education, unlike Pakistan.

"While Indian Muslims have understood and grabbed incentives of modern education, most Pakistanis are still averse to change due to an insulated society," he said.

Rakesh said despite Western leanings, influential Pakistanis dread antagonizing Islamic clergy who have consistently disapproved of Western dress, makeup and scientific endeavor, viewing it as un-Islamic and immoral.

Muslim cricketers, film stars, writers and artists have been more successful and popular in Hindu-dominated India than their counterparts have been in Pakistan.

In Jaipur, Muslim clerics recently backed a unique residential educational camp for Muslims and non Muslim students of both sexes, who were expected to eat, pray and stay together - an experiment one cleric said afterwards could only have taken place in India.

Kurd capital a respite from horrors

You'd likely survive a night stroll in Irbil. The stability little resembles the rest of Iraq.

By Christopher Torchia

Associated Press

IRBIL, Iraq - For anyone who has spent time in Baghdad, the most startling thing about a visit to Kurdistan's capital is that it resembles a city at peace, at least by Iraqi standards. The last bomb hit Irbil on May 9, when 14 people died in a suicide attack on a government building.
Planes flying into Baghdad execute a rapid spiral toward the runway to reduce the chances of getting hit by ground fire. U.S. and Iraqi military vehicles ply the highway leading into the city from the airport. Traffic crawls through heavily defended checkpoints.

But the biggest hassle for a visitor arriving in Irbil by plane is mundane: a long wait in line at immigration.

The next cultural shock is the relative lack of guns on the streets of Irbil, an ancient city near the site of a battlefield victory of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great over forces of the Persian empire. A little more than a decade ago, the city was the scene of fighting among Kurdish factions, one of them backed by Saddam Hussein's military.

Soldiers, some in uniforms of American-made desert camouflage, carry automatic weapons outside key government buildings. Some armed guards, visibly relaxed, stroll down avenues or lounge outside banks, fuel depots and other installations. They don't wear helmets or bulletproof vests.

More secure

Security is tighter around a compound in the Ainkawa neighborhood of Irbil, where foreign contractors and U.S. diplomatic staff live. Even here, though, the concrete blast walls are fewer and lower than those found at similar installations in Baghdad. Ainkawa is a Christian district in a Kurdish city, which is as safe as it gets for Westerners in Iraq.
Kurds are a non-Arab, Sunni Muslim people distantly related to the Iranians, and they are about 15 percent of Iraq's population of 27 million. Neighboring Iran, Syria and Turkey also have Kurdish minorities that have come into conflict with governments seeking to curb their separatist movements.

Iraqi Kurds rebelled against Hussein after the Persian Gulf War in 1991. U.S.-led forces created a safe haven for the Kurds, who eventually established a stable, self-governing territory that had little in common with the chaos elsewhere in Iraq.

They rejoined the central government after Hussein was ousted in 2003, although they maintain a big say in their own affairs.

As U.S. allies, the Kurds are targets of insurgents, and the area under their control lies close to such troubled cities as Mosul and Kirkuk. But bombings in the Kurds' semiautonomous zone are considered unusual, partly a result of rigorous policing that keeps attackers from crossing the "Green Line" that divides Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq.

An official of the Kurdistan Regional Government invited an American journalist for ice cream and a walk through the downtown late one night to show that Irbil was safe. Such an excursion in Baghdad - for a foreigner or an Iraqi - would be extremely unwise. And unlike the Iraqi capital, Irbil does not impose curfews.

Bustling nights

Tea shops were packed, and smoke billowed from a barbecue restaurant. Iskan Street, a shopping thoroughfare, was hopping, even though it was quieter than usual because Islam's holy month of Ramadan was under way. The official urged the journalist to walk around at night by himself.
The U.S. military presence in Kurdistan is minimal. More than 1,000 South Korean troops in the area provide medical care at a hospital on their base and other humanitarian projects. It is easy to reach their compound entrance; just get waved through two lackluster Kurdish checkpoints without a car or ID check.

Owners of private cars in Irbil don't seem to have any qualms about driving around in big, white SUVs. Such vehicles are frequently attacked in Baghdad and other more dangerous parts of Iraq because they are favored by foreign contractors.

The largely homogenous civilian population in Kurdistan, eager to stay away from the sectarian and factional bloodshed among Sunni and Shiite Arabs farther south, keeps in close contact with their trusted security forces.

If a suspicious person loiters too long near a government building, someone will contact the authorities. If someone rents an apartment, the owner will likely demand proof of identity and clearance from security officials. Checkpoint guards want to know where travelers came from, where they are going, and whom they are going to see.

Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of Kurdistan's foreign relations department, said the Kurds had appealed in vain to American forces to provide surveillance cameras, equipment that detects explosives, and other high-tech security gear. But he said he felt comfortable without bodyguards.

"I drive alone," Bakir said. "I go the market. I go to restaurants."

Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, attended a traditional Ramadan feast at a Queens mosque last night, telling a multinational crowd from Iraq, Iran, India and beyond that the enemy bringing down the minarets of Shiite mosques in Iraq was the same enemy who brought down the World Trade Center.


Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
A multinational crowd from Iraq, Iran, India and beyond prayed at the mosque last night before breaking their fasts.
These are people who “have a sick interpretation of Islam,” he said, attributing most of the violence in Iraq to a few religious clerics and others who had turned away from the religion. “This is an open front against civilization, so it is the duty of all governments to fight in the face of this challenge.”

Mr. Maliki, who signed the death warrant that sent Saddam Hussein to the gallows, also blamed Iraq’s current problems on the dead dictator, saying he had left “a heavy difficult inheritance that we still suffer from.”

That legacy included sectarian tension and the lack of trust between factions, he continued, worse even than the destruction that he said Al-Qaeda was now visiting on the country.

The prime minister said Iraq would take over responsibility for his country’s security as soon as the United States determined it was time to withdraw, a statement that has drawn criticism in the past for being unrealistic.

He also said it was too early to determine what the long term military relationship between the two nations would be, saying it was premature to draw parallels with a place like South Korea, which senior American officials sometimes mention as a model.

The crowd of several hundred people filling the mosque in the building that also houses the offices of Al-Khoei Foundation was mostly sympathetic, prone to dismiss the criticism from American senators and other officials that Mr. Maliki should be replaced. Much of that criticism centers on his failures to overcome sectarian differences in Iraq, the lack of an agreement on such key factors as dividing the country’s vast oil wealth, and his inclination to remain too sympathetic to his own Shiite faction.

“He is trying to put all the Sunnis and Shiites together, but the Sunnis push him away,” said Mustapha al-Nasiri, 46, an Iraqi petroleum engineer now selling real estate in Boston. He argued that while not all Sunnis are bad, they formed the core of the Baath Party and of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a home-grown insurgent group that American intelligence agencies say is foreign led.

Another Iraqi immigrant worried that all the criticism would only help Iraq’s enemies. “They make him weak,” said Hussein Al-Jabouri, a 41-year-old businessman from Dearborn Heights, Michigan. He said he also wanted to know what the prime minister’s plans were for developing mostly Shiite, southern Iraq, plans he said were long overdue.

Mr. Maliki, however, was long about the difficult struggles still ahead but short on specifics.

“The deeper it goes, the more complicated it gets, so Iraqi politicians stay on the surface,” said Sheik Husham Al-Husainy, a visiting cleric from Dearborn. “Besides, when it comes to Iraq, on a lot of questions only God knows.”

Still, audience members like Sheik Husainy and Mr. Jabouri said they got what they came for — a little taste of Iraq.

Indeed, the sponsor, Al-Khoei Foundation, one of the largest Shiite Muslim charitable and educational associations in the world, made the mosque feel a little like Iraq. The Ramadan iftar, or breakfast in Arabic, was held inside the mosque itself, known for its distinctive blue dome, near the expressway leading from Kennedy International Airport.

Long plastic sheets covered the floor, with places set for as many as 100 people along one row.

After extended prayers, which the prime minister joined midway, most of the crowd broke the fast with a few dates and water. Then, sitting cross-legged on the floor, they ate a meal that included lamb curry, chicken biriyani, creamed spinach, roasted eggplants, hummus and salad.

The prime minister, surrounded by his top aides, sat at the end of one such row with Sheikh Fadhel al-Sahalani, the director of Al-Khoei Foundation in New York and the North American representative of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the top cleric in Iraq.

Sheik Sahalani introduced Mr. Maliki by asking everyone to say a prayer for all Iraqis and others who sacrificed themselves in fighting for the country. “We are still waiting for a change for the better,” he said.

When it came to the question and answer period, some of the faithful asked when Iraq would be peaceful enough for them to visit, including making the pilgrimage to the holy city of Najaf. Shiite Islam broke away from the main Sunni branch in the fights over succession in the years after the Prophet Mohammed died in 680, with the Shiites backing Ali, the prophet’s son-in-law and cousin. A huge mosque has been built around the shrine in Najaf, where tradition holds that he was buried.

“When will Najaf be safe enough to make the pilgrimage?” yelled out Azzam Mirza, a 60-year-old Indian-American.

“You can come with us now!” responded the prime minister.

“He said he wanted to visit, not to die there,” quipped Sheik Husham Al-Husainy, a visiting cleric from Dearborn.