November 21, 2007
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Debating Iraq’s Transition

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Watching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice making repeated trips to Israel to try to broker some kind of deal between Israelis and Palestinians, while Iraq remains politically unresolved, leaves me feeling like my house is burning down and the fire department has decided to stop along the way to get two cats out of a tree.

At one level, I just don’t get it. It’s clear that the surge by U.S. troops has really dampened violence in Iraq. So don’t we now need a surge in diplomacy to finish the job?

It often feels to me as if Secretary Rice just wants to keep Iraq at arm’s length and hope that it will somehow end up on someone else’s report card.

If you were President Bush and your whole legacy was riding on the outcome of this war, wouldn’t you be sending your top diplomat to Baghdad to work with Iraqis and their neighbors to broker a political settlement and not let them grow complacent that they have an open-ended commitment from the American people?

(It makes you glad Democrats are still banging their drum.)

But then I talk to people in Baghdad and look at what is really evolving there and I say to myself: “Maybe you’re missing something that Secretary Rice knows — that there isn’t going to be any formal political reconciliation moment in Iraq, grand bargain or White House signing ceremony. The surge has made Iraq safe, not for formal political reconciliation yet, but safe for an ‘A.T.M. peace.’ ”

That is, each of the Iraqi factions basically agrees to live and let live with the new lines drawn by the last two years of civil war and the Baghdad government serves as an A.T.M. cash machine — supporting the army and local security groups and dispensing oil revenues to the provincial governors and tribal chiefs from each community.

Sure, the Shiites haven’t passed a law to let more Sunni Baathists into the government, but they’re still letting some back. Yes, they haven’t passed an oil law, but the government is still spreading around the cash.

Michael Gordon, The Times’s top military expert, whose history of the Iraq war, “Cobra II,” is one of the best books on the subject, said the phrase circulating in the military lately to describe the situation evolving in Iraq is “accommodation without reconciliation.” The various parties basically accept the new imbalance of power — Shiites on top, but allowing the Kurds and Sunnis to have a share — and the political struggle continues with lower levels of violence.

It isn’t irreversible. That only happens when refugees start returning in large numbers, because they see a flourishing economy, a government delivering services equitably and reliably, political alliances developing across Sunni-Shiite lines and security forces they can trust in their neighborhoods. We are still miles away from that, yet something seems to be moving.

And that brings me back to Secretary Rice. Is she just keeping away from the Iraq mess to save her image, or does she know that the Iraqi politicians will not and cannot seize this moment to reach a grand bargain, because making big public concessions to one another is still extremely dangerous in a country like Iraq. It is an invitation for assassination.

But maybe their own very Iraqi, very ad hoc, very oil-lubricated, modus vivendi can still get us somewhere stable and decent.

If that is the case, maybe the question we need to start asking is not: When do Iraqis reach a formal internal peace so we can go? But rather: Can the informal arrangements they’re cobbling together reach a level of stability that would enable a major drawdown of U.S. forces next year?

I don’t know. My Iraq crystal ball stopped working a long time ago. I’m taking this one step at a time.

Right now what is indisputable is that we are seeing the first crack in years in a wall of pessimism that has been the Iraq story. It is only a crack, but it creates new possibilities. It would be reckless to ignore or exaggerate.

You have to keep your mind open that something may be emerging from the ground up — and yet be wary. Are the parties really working something out, or are they just tired? Is Secretary Rice wisely letting the situation ripen or deftly running from the problem?

I have more questions right now than strong opinions.

So I went to a source I knew I could trust — my colleague James Glanz, The Times’s Baghdad bureau chief who has lived through so much craziness there: “There is a sense of quiet on the streets that we have not seen for a long time in Baghdad,” he told me, “but there is also a big question mark in the shadows of every alley. We don’t know what is lurking back there, but we suspect, and evidence suggests, that it is the same set of problems that were always there.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

November 20, 2007
Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves

By DAMIEN CAVE and ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, Nov. 19 — Five months ago, Suhaila al-Aasan lived in an oxygen tank factory with her husband and two sons, convinced that they would never go back to their apartment in Dora, a middle-class neighborhood in southern Baghdad.

Today she is home again, cooking by a sunlit window, sleeping beneath her favorite wedding picture. And yet, she and her family are remarkably alone. The half-dozen other apartments in her building echo with emptiness and, on most days, Iraqi soldiers are the only neighbors she sees.

“I feel happy,” she said, standing in her bedroom, between a flowered bedspread and a bullet hole in the wall. “But my happiness is not complete. We need more people to come back. We need more people to feel safe.”

Mrs. Aasan, 45, a Shiite librarian with an easy laugh, is living at the far end of Baghdad’s tentative recovery. She is one of many Iraqis who in recent weeks have begun to test where they can go and what they can do when fear no longer controls their every move.

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.

Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. But the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question.

By one revealing measure of security — whether people who fled their home have returned — the gains are still limited. About 20,000 Iraqis have gone back to their Baghdad homes, a fraction of the more than 4 million who fled nationwide, and the 1.4 million people in Baghdad who are still internally displaced, according to a recent Iraqi Red Crescent Society survey.

Iraqis sound uncertain about the future, but defiantly optimistic. Many Baghdad residents seem to be willing themselves to normalcy, ignoring risks and suppressing fears to reclaim their lives. Pushing past boundaries of sect and neighborhood, they said they were often pleasantly surprised and kept going; in other instances, traumatic memories or a dark look from a stranger were enough to tug them back behind closed doors.

Mrs. Aasan’s experience, as a member of the brave minority of Iraqis who have returned home, shows both the extent of the improvements and their limits.

She works at an oasis of calm: a small library in eastern Baghdad, where on several recent afternoons, about a dozen children bounced through the rooms, reading, laughing, learning English and playing music on a Yamaha keyboard.

Brightly colored artwork hangs on the walls: images of gardens, green and lush; Iraqi soldiers smiling; and Arabs holding hands with Kurds.

It is all deliberately idyllic. Mrs. Aasan and the other two women at the library have banned violent images, guiding the children toward portraits of hope. The children are also not allowed to discuss the violence they have witnessed.

“Our aim is to fight terrorism,” Mrs. Aasan said. “We want them to overcome their personal experiences.”

The library closed last year because parents would not let their children out of sight. Now, most of the children walk on their own from homes nearby — another sign of the city’s improved ease of movement.

But there are scars in the voice of a ponytailed little girl who said she had less time for fun since her father was incapacitated by a bomb. (“We try to make him feel better and feel less pain,” she said.) And pain still lingers in the silence of Mrs. Aasan’s 10-year-old son, Abather, who accompanies her wherever she goes.

One day five months ago, when they still lived in Dora, Mrs. Aasan sent Abather to get water from a tank below their apartment. Delaying as boys will do, he followed his soccer ball into the street, where he discovered two dead bodies with their eyeballs torn out. It was not the first corpse he had seen, but for Mrs. Aasan that was enough. “I grabbed him, we got in the car and we drove away,” she said.

After they heard on an Iraqi news program that her section of Dora had improved, she and her husband explored a potential return. They visited and found little damage, except for a bullet hole in their microwave.

Two weeks ago, they moved back to the neighborhood where they had lived since 2003.

“It’s just a rental,” Mrs. Aasan said, as if embarrassed at her connection to such a humble place. “But after all, it’s home.”

In interviews, she and her husband said they felt emboldened by the decline in violence citywide and the visible presence of Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint a few blocks away.

Still, it was a brave decision, one her immediate neighbors have not yet felt bold enough to make. Mrs. Aasan’s portion of Dora still looks as desolate as a condemned tenement. The trunk of a palm tree covers a section of road where Sunni gunmen once dumped a severed head, and about 200 yards to the right of her building concrete Jersey barriers block a section of homes believed to be booby-trapped with explosives.

“On this street,” she said, standing on her balcony, “many of my neighbors lost relatives.” Then she rushed inside.

Her husband, Fadhel A. Yassen, 49, explained that they had seen several friends killed while they sat outside in the past. He insisted that being back in the apartment was “a victory over fear, a victory over terrorism.”

Yet the achievement remains rare. Many Iraqis say they would still rather leave the country than go home. In Baghdad there are far more families like the Nidhals. The father, who would only identify himself as Abu Nebras (father of Nebras), is Sunni; Hanan, his wife, is a Shiite from Najaf, the center of Shiite religious learning in Iraq. They lived for 17 years in Ghazaliya in western Baghdad until four gunmen from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is led by foreigners, showed up at his door last December.

“My sons were armed and they went away but after that, we knew we had only a few hours,” Abu Nebras said. “We were displaced because I was secular and Al Qaeda didn’t like that.”

They took refuge in the middle-class Palestine Street area in the northeastern part of Baghdad, a relatively stable enclave with an atmosphere of tolerance for their mixed marriage. Now with the situation improving across the city, the Nidhal family longs to return to their former home, but they have no idea when, or if, it will be possible.

Another family now lives in their house — the situation faced by about a third of all displaced Iraqis, according to the International Organization for Migration — and it is not clear whether the fragile peace will last. Abu Nebras tested the waters recently, going back to talk with neighbors on his old street for the first time.

He said the Shiites in the northern part of Ghazaliya had told him that the American military’s payments to local Sunni volunteers in the southern, Sunni part of the neighborhood amounted to arming one side.

The Americans describe the volunteers as heroes, part of a larger nationwide campaign known as the Sunni Awakening. But Abu Nebras said he did not trust them. “Some of the Awakening members are just Al Qaeda who have joined them,” he said. “I know them from before.”

With the additional American troops scheduled to depart, the Nidhal family said, Baghdad would be truly safe only when the Iraqi forces were mixed with Sunnis and Shiites operating checkpoints side by side — otherwise the city would remain a patchwork of Sunni and Shiite enclaves. “The police, the army, it has to be Sunni next to Shiite next to Sunni next to Shiite,” Abu Nebras said.

They and other Iraqis also said the government must aggressively help people return to their homes, perhaps by supervising returns block by block. The Nidhal family said they feared the displaced Sunnis in their neighborhood who were furious that Shiites chased them from their houses. “They are so angry, they will kill anyone,” Abu Nebras said.

For now, though, they are trying to enjoy what may be only a temporary respite from violence. One of their sons recently returned to his veterinary studies at a university in Baghdad, and their daughter will start college this winter.

Laughter is also more common now in the Nidhal household — even on once upsetting subjects. At midday, Hanan’s sister, who teaches in a local high school, came home and threw up her hands in exasperation. She had asked her Islamic studies class to bring in something that showed an aspect of Islamic culture. “Two boys told me, ‘I’m going to bring in a portrait of Moktada al-Sadr,’” she said.

She shook her head and chuckled. Mr. Sadr is an anti-American cleric whose militia, the Mahdi Army, has been accused of carrying out much of the displacement and killings of Sunnis in Baghdad. They can joke because they no longer fear that the violence will engulf them.

In longer interviews across Baghdad, the pattern was repeated. Iraqis acknowledged how far their country still needed to go before a return to normalcy, but they also expressed amazement at even the most embryonic signs of recovery.

Mrs. Aasan said she was thrilled and relieved just a few days ago, when her college-aged son got stuck at work after dark and his father managed to pick him up and drive home without being killed.

“Before, when we lived in Dora, after 4 p.m., I wouldn’t let anyone out of the house,” she said.

“They drove back to Dora at 8!” she added, glancing at her husband, who beamed, chest out, like a mountaineer who had scaled Mount Everest. “We really felt that it was a big difference.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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Chavez Tells OPEC to Use Politics, Curb `Imperialism' (Update1)
By Daniel Williams and Maher Chmaytelli

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez brought his revolutionary zeal to the cartel that controls 40 percent of the world's oil, urging fellow members at a weekend summit to fight against ``imperialism'' and ``exploitation.''

Chavez used the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to advance a struggle for the soul of the cartel. Countering him was the conference host, Saudi King Abdullah, who said the organization's goal was simply to produce prosperity.

Their contrasting visions elbowed aside the usual OPEC talk about production quotas and currency fluctuations. In the short term at least, Abdullah's vision is likely to prevail, said Ihsan Bu-Hulaiga, who runs a private business consulting firm in Riyadh and advises the Saudi government.

``OPEC has to do with oil; it cannot solve the world's problems with a political agenda,'' he said. ``It would be putting its bread and butter at risk.''

Support for Chavez came from President Rafael Vicente Correa of Ecuador and from Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose nation is the target of a U.S.-led campaign of sanctions and pressure over allegations that it is pursuing nuclear weapons and destabilizing the region.

Chavez, 53, and Correa, 44, stopped short of threatening an embargo in case of a U.S. attack on Iran. ``We don't want to speculate,'' Correa said in response to a question about whether a halt in oil sales to the U.S. should be employed in case of war.

Anti-Colonial Roots

Chavez said his call for geopolitical activism takes OPEC back to its anti-colonial roots. He likened OPEC to the Non- Aligned Movement, a group founded in the 1950s to stand outside the Soviet-U.S. rivalry.

Chavez also addressed OPEC's debate over whether to drop the U.S. dollar as its currency for pricing oil. ``The dollar is in a free fall and everyone should be worried about it. The fall of the dollar is not the fall of the dollar. It's the fall of the American empire,'' he told a cluster of reporters outside the OPEC meeting hall yesterday.

King Abdullah brushed off proposals from Chavez and Ahamdinejad to drop the dollar.

To counter Chavez's appeal, Bu-Hulaiga said, OPEC needs the U.S. to help ease tensions with Iran and to resolve the Israel- Palestinian conflict. ``It's not enough to ask Chavez to be quiet,'' he said in an interview. ``We need responsibility everywhere. The United States can help lower the tone.''

OPEC has used oil as a weapon before, when its Arab members stopped sales to countries that supported Israel in the 1973 Middle East war. The actions sent petroleum prices spiraling upward, created long lines at gas stations in the United States and Europe and produced high inflation across the globe.

$250 Barrel

Correa said a new war in the region could drive prices to $250 a barrel. Chavez, in his speech, predicted a figure of $200 ``if the United States is crazy enough to invade Iran.'' On Nov. 16 in New York, crude oil for December delivery closed at $95.10 a barrel.

Ahmadinejad, 51, played down the possibility of a U.S. attack, saying that President George W. Bush's administration lacks the ``economic, political and military'' means to carry one out. ``No war will break out in the region,'' he predicted during a news conference yesterday.

``Iran and Venezuela, because they have ideological differences with the U.S., are trying to drag the other OPEC members into the conflict, by appealing to solidarity against imperialism and aggression,'' said John Sfakianakis, chief economist at the Saudi British Bank in Riyadh and formerly a research fellow at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

The era of OPEC political activism is over, the cartel's Secretary General Abdalla el-Badri told reporters last week. ``We are not using the oil we sell to the world as a political weapon,'' he said at a Nov. 14 press conference in Riyadh.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said OPEC wouldn't take a stand on a possible U.S. invasion of Iran. ``These are issues that can be raised in other forums, not in OPEC,'' he told a news conference yesterday.

To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Williams in Riyadh at dwilliams41@bloomberg.net ; Maher Chmaytelli in Riyadh at mchmaytelli@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 19, 2007 03:52 EST

On the Road to Nowhere, Merchants Pay the Toll
Fence Cuts Lifeline of West Bank Town
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 21, 2007; A01

MAS-HA, West Bank -- From the Zeituna Restaurant to the Basel Furniture store, business once thrived along the road that runs through this Palestinian village, conducted in a language no longer spoken here.

For years Hebrew was the lingua franca of Arabs and Jews on Route 505, an Israeli-built highway that rushed bargain hunters from the Jewish state to Arab-owned businesses in the West Bank and Palestinian laborers to jobs inside Israel. Now, the highway is a road to nowhere, the flaking Hebrew signs along its empty length symbols of Israel's abrupt economic break with the occupied Palestinian territories.

The highway has been blocked at the western edge of this village by the $2.5 billion barrier Israel is building to separate Jews from the Palestinians of the West Bank, splitting a largely shared economy whose shops, factory floors and restaurant terraces once provided a rare meeting place for two peoples. Now they are living increasingly estranged lives in the land they are unable to share.

"Just traveling this kilometer and a half would take you an hour on Saturdays," said Ibrahim Amer, 53, who sells plastic furniture from a row of mostly shuttered storefronts under a large Hebrew sign at the village's only intersection. "As you can see now, no one is coming."

Since the September 2000 start of the most recent Palestinian uprising, the Israeli government has imposed stiff restrictions on Palestinian trade, permission to work inside Israel and movement among West Bank towns and cities. More recently, it has severed the economic link between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the main territorial elements of the unrealized Palestinian state.

In a process that has accelerated sharply since the January 2006 election victory by the radical Islamic movement Hamas, the isolated Palestinian economy has imploded while Israel's has thrived on increased trade with Europe and the United States. Industries in Israeli settlements have also benefited financially by employing low-wage Palestinian laborers barred from Israel.

The Israeli government says the steps it has taken help ensure Israel's security in the absence of a peace deal. But Palestinian officials argue that the impoverishing effects of the economic separation spawn unrest in the territories and increase the potential for attacks inside Israel.

Israel's economy is nearly 40 times larger than that of the territories, even though its population is less than twice the Palestinian one in the territories. The lopsided effects of Israel's economic withdrawal have left much of the territories economically lifeless.

"We knew them," said Ruven Hirak, 51, an Israeli economics professor at Bar-Ilan University, who lives in the wealthy Jewish settlement of Elqana along Route 505 just beyond the separation fence from the village of Mas-Ha.

Grocery shopping in Elqana's busy central mall one recent afternoon, Hirak said of his Palestinian neighbors, "I sat with them in restaurants, bought from them, and some of them worked here.

"Now," he said, "there is no relationship at all."

The Road From Mas-Ha
Among the first Palestinian stores that Israelis encountered along Route 505 was Hisham Amer's home-improvement shop, the name of the paint brand Tamour written in Hebrew above the entrance. In pressed cotton pants and a plaid shirt, Amer watched a Ramadan soap opera in his unlit shop one recent afternoon, unbothered by a single customer.

Most of his clients were Jewish residents of Israel.

"We called it the million-and-a-half-shekel market because that's what we made each weekend," said Amer, 38, referring to the Israeli currency the two economies share. "Now it's zero. Since the fence went up, no one comes here, not even Arabs."

According to the World Bank, the Palestinian gross domestic product per capita has shrunk 30 percent -- to $1,129 -- since the uprising began. Unemployment and poverty rates have spiked across the territories, especially during the 16-month international embargo that followed Hamas's election victory.

By contrast, the International Monetary Fund estimates that Israel's per-capita GDP is $31,767, nearly double what it was on the eve of the Palestinian uprising.

Amer's brother, a partner in the business, has moved to Jordan to work in their father's store there. His other partner also has departed, leaving Amer with a wall lined with Hebrew-labeled hardware products and no one to buy them.

"If I get the opportunity, I will leave too," he said.

In Bidya, east of Mas-Ha on Route 505, a sign in Arabic reading "Abu Sayed Furniture" has been pasted over one in Hebrew that advertised clothes.

"It was clear that the Israelis do not come anymore," said Sayed Marai, a taciturn father of five, who made the language change after moving from Mas-Ha a few years ago.

The chests, cribs and bed frames spilling out of his small space are featured items in a Palestinian bride's dowry. After the two-month wedding season, Marai said, "we can go days without making a single shekel."

"I have no alternative," he said. "There is no other work."

The more than 550 military checkpoints, roadblocks and other obstacles within the West Bank, along with restrictions presented by the 456-mile separation barrier, have made it impossible for many Palestinian merchants to attract customers outside their small local markets.

The commercial obstacles are even more severe in Gaza, which Israel recently declared a "hostile entity," citing the persistent Palestinian rocket attacks originating there.

Since Hamas seized control of Gaza in June, the movement has run a parallel administration in the strip. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah leader pursuing peace talks with Israel, leads a U.S.-backed government in the West Bank.

Seeking to improve Abbas's tenuous political standing, the Israeli government is allowing more Palestinian trade and employment inside Israel and its settlements. But the restrictions are being eased only for the West Bank -- not for Gaza -- even though Israel once pledged to treat the regions as a "single territorial entity" pending the creation of a Palestinian state.

"The West Bank economy will go up, and Gaza will go the other way," said Lt. Col. Baruch Persky, who heads the economic branch of Israel's military administration in the territories. "But even the West Bank's relationship to the Israeli economy will depend entirely on the security and political situation."

Given their poor local market, Gaza manufacturers once exported 95 percent of the furniture, clothing and other goods they produced. Nearly all of it was bound for Israel and the West Bank.

Many had Israeli business partners. But Gaza has been effectively sealed since June to all but emergency aid. The United Nations estimates that 85 percent of the strip's manufacturing businesses, unable to import raw materials or export their products through the Israeli-controlled passages, have shut down.

"We actually have lots of material in storage but no one to buy our products," said Ibrahim Mushtaha, a partner for more than three decades in el-Arusa Ice Cream Co. in Gaza City.

No longer able to export his ice cream bars to the West Bank, Mushtaha has laid off all but a dozen of his 60 workers since June.

"We only produce a little now because there is so little money here," he said.

Settlement Industries
In recent years, Israel has turned away from the Palestinian territories as a source of cheap manual labor and as a market for its goods. The transition has been economically painless for Israel thanks to the forces of globalization.

Many immigrants from South and Southeast Asia, reliable and unthreatening in the eyes of Israeli employers, have taken the jobs of Palestinians now barred from Israel's construction sites, citrus fields and restaurant kitchens.

On the eve of the uprising, 136,000 Palestinians, or nearly a quarter of the labor force, worked inside Israel or in Israeli-owned enterprises in the territories. With a financial stake in Israel's security, said Persky, the Israeli army officer, only a "very few" were even tangentially involved in suicide attacks. Today, 47,400 Palestinians from the West Bank, or less than 9 percent of the workforce, have such permits.

The United States and Europe are increasingly the largest markets for Israel's more than $40 billion in annual exports -- including cut diamonds, high-tech hardware and software, arms and agricultural products. Less than 5 percent of Israel's exports are sold in the Palestinian territories. By contrast, roughly 90 percent of Palestinian exports are sold inside Israel.

"It has always been attractive for us to get cheaper products and labor, and the short distance between us made this possible," Persky said. "Both sides benefited, but their side the most."

On the ridgeline east of Bidya stretches the Barkan Industrial Park, a gated compound of 200 Israeli factories churning out products from pretzels to software for sale in Israel and beyond. Its businesses have come under pressure from political activists who oppose their presence in the occupied territories. The Barkan Winery, which sold much of its product abroad, moved out as a result.

But Ariyeh Kestenboim, a 26-year-old Orthodox Jew, moved his textile factory into the industrial park three years ago when he could no longer secure low-cost Palestinian labor for his plant in Petah Tiqwa, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Israel's frequent closure of the territories often left him with no workers.

Half of the Palestinians with Israeli work permits are employed by Israeli-owned enterprises in the occupied territories. Persky calls the arrangement, increasingly prevalent, "a win-win situation" for the Palestinian workers and settlement businesses.

Kestenboim, the third-generation of his family to run the business, employs 10 Palestinians at his hillside factory. He also pays half the municipal tax he did inside Israel, revenue that goes to the nearby settlements.

"If I hadn't moved here, I would have had to close," he said. "The problem now is China."

A group of Palestinians walked along the industrial park's streets, among them a 38-year-old with a three-day beard named Atta Kleb.

Kleb once commuted along Route 505 to a job in a supermarket warehouse in the Israeli city of Herzliyya. But Israel revoked his work permit when the uprising began, and he scraped by with day jobs on local construction sites until two months ago, when he showed up at the park's gate looking for work.

At the time, the Palestinian employees of the Beitily furniture company had walked off the job demanding a pay raise. When they were rehired a few weeks later, Kleb kept his fill-in job because he spoke Hebrew.

For his work on the factory floor, he receives $45 a day, although he said the hours can stretch well into the night without additional compensation. His pay is not as much as it was inside Israel, but it supports his wife and nine children. His brother, who once worked with him in Israel, is still unemployed.

"This is all we have," Kleb said.

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State Dept. Tries Blog Diplomacy
By Walter Pincus
Monday, November 19, 2007; A15
WASHINGTON POST

T he State Department, departing from traditional public diplomacy techniques, has what it calls a three-person, "digital outreach team" posting entries in Arabic on "influential" Arabic blogs to challenge misrepresentations of the United States and promote moderate views among Islamic youths in the hopes of steering them from terrorism.

The department's bloggers "speak the language and idiom of the region, know the culture reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly, rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a U.S. government spokesperson," Duncan MacInnes, of State's Bureau of International Information Programs, told the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism and unconventional threats on Thursday.

"Because blogging tends to be a very informal, chatty way of working," MacInnes said, "it is actually very dangerous to blog." So State has a senior experienced officer, who served in Iraq, acting as supervisor and discussing each posting before it goes up. "We do not make policy," MacInnes added.

The State Department team's approach is to join a blog's conversation, often when it turns to the motivation for U.S. policy toward Iraq, and when others are claiming that the U.S. occupation is meant to help Israel or to secure oil. "Our job is to address that motivation issue and show them that that's not the motivation," MacInnes said.

"You can't just say, 'Well, here's our policy,' and drop it into the blog. You have to have what I call a bridge," MacInnes said. He then described using a sporting or current event or even poetry that would "allow one to get to be in a conversational mode with people."

Even though the State Department employees were not going into hard-core terrorist sites, the worry, MacInnes said, was that after identifying themselves and using their own names, "we would be, in the parlance of the Internet, 'flamed' when we come on" -- meaning their entries would be subjected to intense attacks.

They were not, and there were such posts as, "We don't like your policies but we're sure glad you're here talking to us about it," MacInnes said. As a result, State is expanding the team to six speakers of Arabic, two of Persian and one of Urdu.

To prove that it, too, can plug into the modern media world, the Pentagon's Central Command has a blogging operation at its headquarters. Its Joint Forces Command also has the capability and has even written a brochure on how to do it. "It's an area we're moving into," Navy Capt. Hal Pittman, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communications, told the House panel. He added that Central Command may not be using its own Arabic or Farsi speakers, but rather contract personnel. "We're sharing with State and trying to, you know, better our knowledge on how to do it."

The State-Defense communications approach is also turning to a more sophisticated message, one that moves away from trying to change perceptions of the United States, focusing instead on the self-perceptions of its target audiences. "Our core message must outline an alternative future that is more attractive than the bleak future offered by the terrorists," said Michael Doran, deputy assistant secretary of defense for support of public diplomacy.

Another step they described to the House panel, in what they called "counterterrorism communications," is having a greater awareness of the impact of what U.S. speakers are saying. "When we say 'Islamo-fascism,' whether the term has a meaning or not, what they hear is 'war on Islam,' okay -- 'attacking my religion,' " MacInnes said.

He described the phrase as "a verbal equivalent of poking a stick in somebody's eye . . . and [Osama] bin Laden has been very good at taking our words and turning them around to his advantage by saying, 'See, they're actually at war with Islam.' "

President Bush has not used the phrase recently.

National security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus pores over the speeches, reports, transcripts and other documents that flood Washington and every week uncovers the fine print that rarely makes headlines -- but should. If you have any items that fit the bill, please send them tofineprint@washpost.co