April 3, 2008
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Iraq’s Sunni Time Bomb

By MATT SHERMAN
Washington

WHILE the recent fighting in Basra and Baghdad has alerted many Americans to the danger that Shiite-on-Shiite violence poses to our goals in Iraq, it should not divert our focus from another looming threat: that the Sunni tribesmen who have sided with the American-led coalition may turn against us.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the drop in violence during the second half of 2007 was the coalition’s hiring of some 90,000 men, mostly Sunnis, to protect critical government properties like pipelines and to take part in neighborhood-watch systems. The decision to support these so-called Sons of Iraq — armed, many times, with the same AK-47’s that had been pointed at our troops just months earlier — was always viewed as risky, but few options were available to us at the time to reduce violence. So far, the gamble has paid off.

The Sons of Iraq program was at the heart of what the United States military called its “bottom-up reconciliation movement,” intended to get Iraqis to stop fighting the government and one another at the local neighborhood and village level. But use of the term “reconciliation” may be misleading. The word conjures images of forgiveness and repentance. That’s not what the Sons of Iraq idea was about — the coalition set out simply to neutralize a large swath of rogue fighters, often with money, with the hope of finding ways to reconcile in the future.

This is not to say that reconciliation is not possible; I believe it is. And by this I don’t mean reconciling Sunni and Shiite Islam — 1,300 years of history are unlikely to be resolved in a relative instant. What we can do is help shift the debate inside Iraq so that it doesn’t rest on how one sect relates to another but how individual Iraqis relate to their government.

While the Sons of Iraq movement has been a leading contributor toward the reduction of violence against American troops, it remains highly fragile. Some of its groupings are nationalist, some are Islamist, many are tribally rooted and some may, unfortunately, be composed of hard-line Sunnis intent on restoring their sect’s domination over Shiites. Thus, unsurprisingly, the group is viewed with great skepticism by many Shiites in the Baghdad government.

With each passing day, the amount of influence American officials have with the Iraqi government dwindles, while the list of objectives we wish to achieve grows. We need to pick our priorities now — and at the top of that list must be finding a productive future role for the Sons of Iraq.

First, we must take a look at who the Sons of Iraq are and what motivates them. They are not a monolith; members come from more than 125 political and tribal groups holding differing aspirations and influenced by numerous entities, some of which have goals contrary to those of the Americans and the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Thus there is no single solution to all 90,000 potential problems.

The leading idea so far is to fold a fraction of them, about 20,000, into the Iraqi security forces. The remainder would be accommodated in civilian job-placement and training programs. But this will be far harder than it looks.

For political and sectarian reasons, the (mostly Shiite) ministers and officials who oversee the security forces are unenthusiastic about bringing in Sunnis. In addition, the government doesn’t have the bureaucratic efficiency to handle such a large influx of people easily. Aside from those problems, we’d need to come up with a way of deciding which men are qualified for security duty — a screening method to marginalize hard-liners and co-opt less ideologically driven members.

But the American leadership must press the Iraqis to overcome those obstacles. As we look to transform the Sons of Iraq, we are talking about more than just a venue to redirect insurgents from violence. This is also an opportunity to encourage engagement by Sunnis, many hailing from oft-ignored western Iraq and who have no real voice in the political system, in the new nation.

As for the American stake in this, the future drawing down of forces will be largely determined by the commitment of Iraqi factions to reach local political and security compromises. If we can’t help find a way to integrate the Sunnis into the state, many Sons of Iraq could revert to the insurgency. (This is another reason that it’s prudent to put a pause on further American troop reductions.)

By better understanding the objectives of this diverse group we can more efficiently create postwar employment, promote acceptance within the government, foster local security solutions and improve the chances of sustained success against the insurgents. Failure to find a new role for the Sons of Iraq, however, will result in the deterioration of government authority, an inability to draw down our own forces, and a return to militia rule for much of Iraq.

Matt Sherman has spent more than three years as a civilian official in postwar Iraq, most recently in 2007 as the political adviser to the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad. He is a principal with SCI Consulting, a senior adviser with the Scowcroft Group and an adjunct with the RAND Corporation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/world/europe/04kosovo.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
April 4, 2008
Former Kosovo Leader Acquitted in Hague Trial

By MARLISE SIMONS and GRAHAM BOWLEY
PARIS — The United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on Thursday acquitted Ramush Haradinaj, the former prime minister of Kosovo, of all charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, in a surprise decision that could inflame anti-Kosovar sentiment in Serbia just weeks after Kosovo unilaterally declared independence.

Mr. Haradinaj, a former guerrilla fighter who led the Kosovo Liberation Army in fighting against Serbian security forces in the late 1990s, was viewed as one of the most charismatic leaders to emerge from the Balkan wars and was treated as a hero by many Kosovars.

But he was vilified as a terrorist by Serbia, which still considers Kosovo a rebellious province, and his case drew charges of favoritism from prosecutors. Mr. Haradinaj was a crucial partner in Western efforts to bring peace to Kosovo, so much so that prosecutors in Kosovo and The Hague say the United Nations and Western governments bent over backward to prevent his prosecution, and that the sense of impunity around him scared away witnesses.

He was seen by the West as a force for stability in the region and, exceptionally, he was released by the court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to return to active politics in Kosovo even after his indictment.

The prosecution’s chief witness, Tahir Zemaj, and his son and nephew were shot dead during the investigation. Another witness, Kjutim Berisha, died two weeks before the trial when he was hit by a car in Podgorica, the Montenegren capital.

Mr. Hardinaj was acquitted after judges found that prosecutors had failed to prove a deliberate campaign to kill Serb civilians in Kosovo or expel them.

Mr. Haradinaj and two other men began to stand trial at the tribunal in The Hague in March, 2007, charged with killing 40 people in 1998.

The tribunal also acquitted one of the other two men, Idriz Balaj. The third accused man, Lahi Brahimaj, was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment “for cruel treatment and torture of two persons” at the headquarters of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the court said.

The three were charged on 19 counts, including murder, torture, rape and cruel treatment.

Evidence presented by the prosecution “did not always allow the Chamber to conclude whether a crime was committed or whether the K.L.A. was involved as alleged”, the tribunal said in a statement.

The court also judged that the ill-treatment, forcible transfer and killing of Serb and Roma civilians as well as Kosovar Albanian civilians was “not on a scale of frequency that would allow for a conclusion that there was an attack against a civilian population,” the statement said.

Mr. Haradinaj’s supporters said that there was never any evidence linking him directly to the crimes and suggested that the court charged him simply to appear evenhanded.

But prosecutors alleged that the United Nations administration in Kosovo repeatedly blocked the prosecution of Mr. Haradinaj.

The tribunal’s top prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, referred to the trial in The Hague as “a prosecution that some did not want to see brought, and that few supported by their cooperation at both the international and local level.”

In March 2004, during rioting across Kosovo, Mr. Haradinaj was credited with stopping rioters from attacking Kosovo’s best-known Serbian Orthodox monastery. United Nations officials say he also helped ensure that a January 2005 visit by Serbia’s president passed without incident.

Marlise Simons reported from Paris. Graham Bowley reported from New York. Nicholas Wood contributed to this article.

Two-Tiered Alliance Could 'Rip Heart Out of NATO'
By Evan Moore
CNSNews.com Correspondent
April 03, 2008

(CNSNews.com) - At their meeting in Bucharest, Romania, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are expected to address the increasingly lopsided nature of the alliance. While some NATO nations participate fully, others pick and choose their missions.

This "very dangerous situation," threatens to "rip the heart out of NATO," one foreign policy expert told Cybercast News Service.

In February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he worries about NATO "evolving into a two-tiered alliance in which you have some allies willing to fight and die to protect people's security and others who are not."

Several analysts also have noted the emergence of a "two-tiered" structure in NATO, in which the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and some other countries perform the majority of combat operations and contribute the most to the alliance's efforts, while other countries (Germany) do not contribute as much as they could and impose restrictions on what they do provide.

While some member-countries contribute troops to NATO peacekeeping, reconstruction, and counter-insurgency missions, other nations such as France and Germany have placed national restrictions on their forces that effectively prevent NATO's military leadership from placing their troops in harms way.

Defense Secretary Gates recently urged the lifting of national restrictions, so as to bring more coalition forces into the fight in Afghanistan.

(French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France will decide by the end of the year whether to return to NATO's military command. France withdrew from NATO's military structure in 1966 to protest the dominance of US commanders, the BBC reported.)

In an interview with Cybercast News Service, Sally MacNamara, senior policy analyst in European Affairs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, indicated a two-tiered alliance is not workable in the long run.

"But it's absolutely turning out to be the case that certain member-states are saying 'we will do reconstruction, and 'we will do certain development things only if we can have 100 percent security guarantee for our troops,' while other member-states are actually fighting this war. It is a very, very dangerous situation, and can really, generally, rip the heart out of NATO."

Should NATO members be allowed to opt for one mission over another? MacNamara asked. "Absolutely not," she said. "You either are an alliance or you are not...Do we want a two-tiered alliance? No one seems to want it, but it's exactly what's happening in practice."

Derek Chollet, senior fellow at the left-of-center Center for a New American Security, agreed that NATO "is a two-tiered alliance," but he told Cybercast News Service that certain countries have "niche capacities," meaning they are particularly good at a certain skill-set.

Chollet said Norway is a good example of a county with niche capacity. "It's unrealistic to think that a Norway is, all of a sudden, going to spend 20 percent of its GDP on defense and create this huge military," he said. That's why the U.S. has been encouraging Norway to be "the special forces specialists."

Chollet noted that Afghanistan has become a controversial political issue in many NATO countries. "Germany is a good example," he said. Having German troops in Afghanistan is not widely popular among the German people. "There are politicians on the other side who are using the issue to beat up their opponents."

Chollet said there's a wide gap between what Germany could be doing and what it is actually doing. Germany has around 3,200 peacekeeping troops deployed in northern Afghanistan, which is relatively peaceful. Most of the fighting is in the south.

MacNamara was sharply critical of Germany's reluctance to commit its troops to the fighting, saying "This is a military alliance, a defensive alliance, it's not a coalition of the willing. I think that Germany's behavior...is generally intended to restrict them to very peaceful areas, and do reconstruction, not really do what NATO was designed to do."

Speaking in Romania on Wednesday, President Bush said he expects NATO allies to "shoulder the burden necessary to succeed" in Afghanistan. "We fully understand the politics that prohibit some nations from contributing, but nations need to take this mission seriously because it's in our mutual interests," Bush said -- in an apparent reference to Germany.

Last week, Bush bowed to Germany's refusal to send its troops to southern Afghanistan. I want our partners to make decisions that they can well support,'' Bush told Germany's Die Welt newspaper. "I want Chancellor Merkel to reach a conclusion that she can well live with."

Recently, the U.S. deployed another 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan to bolster its efforts there. Bush said he did it "to send a clear signal that we're willing to do our part."

Bush is trying to encourage similar contributions from other NATO partners, Chollet said. "No one doubts that the United States is strained in terms of our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so the fact that we're able to come up with 3,000 more Marines to go into combat in Afghanistan is evidence that we're digging deep."

Chollet said the troop commitment won't ease the strain on U.S. forces -- "but we're doing it because we think it's the right thing to do. In a way, it's to show the Europeans, 'Look, we're doing it, and we understand it's hard, but we're going to do it, and we'd like you to come along with us,'" Chollet said.

High Court to Decide if Town Must Allow New Age Monument
By Pete Winn
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
April 03, 2008

(CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Supreme Court will decide next term whether a Utah city must allow a New Age religion that promotes pyramids, mummification, and sexual ecstasy to erect a monument to its beliefs on public property.

Justices agreed this week to hear a case about a Salt Lake City-based religion called Summum and whether the First Amendment allows the religion to memorialize its beliefs on a monument in a public park in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

Last year, the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld a lower court decision forcing the city to let Summum place a monument to its "Seven Aphorisms" alongside a monument to the Ten Commandments, which had been donated to Pleasant Grove by the local Eagles Club in the 1950s.

Salt Lake City attorney Brian Barnard, who represents Summum, is expecting the high court to uphold the 10th Circuit Court decision.

"It's a matter of simple fairness," Barnard told Cybercast News Service. "If you allow one group to do it, you've got to allow every group to do it."

Barnard said his clients aren't asking for the Ten Commandments display to be taken down. To the contrary, they simply want to be able to display their own beliefs.

"The city of Pleasant Grove has allowed the Eagles to display their beliefs in the Ten Commandments for the last 40 years," he said. "And my client simply approached the city and said, 'We believe our Seven Aphorisms are comparable and complementary to the Ten Commandments. Would you please allow us to display them?'"

But Pleasant Grove, which said "no" to the display - and which has suggested it will remove the Ten Commandments statue if it has to - welcomes its day before the high court.

"We're delighted that the Supreme Court agreed to take this critical case," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative group, which is representing Pleasant Grove.

Sekulow told Cybercast News Service that this case doesn't have anything to do with the Supreme Court's 2005 decisions on the Ten Commandments. There, justices held that officials could allow religious displays on public property as long as the overall message presented was neutral toward religion and secular.

"This is not about the Establishment Clause. They have already lost on that," Sekulow said. "The issue is the freedom of speech - only, it's really about the government's freedom to speak."

The city will argue that "mayhem" would result if every city, county, or state is forced to allow "alternatives" to be set up alongside government-sponsored monuments.

"That's like saying, if you have a Veterans of Foreign Wars monument in a city park, you should have to allow an anti-war group's monument to go up, too," Sekulow said.

"Or how about an atheist group's monument to free thought? The ramifications of this are huge," he said.

Sekulow argues that, if Summum is successful, cities with memorials to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., should expect racist groups to use the decision as legal precedent to have racist memorials erected.

A controversial 'belief system'

Summum is a controversial belief system and, according to the IRS, a religion that is virtually unknown outside of Salt Lake City and certain Internet circles.

According to the group's Web site, Summum is based on Gnostic Christianity and Egyptian practices. It promotes a modern form of mummification as a funeral rite and promotes "sexual ecstasy" as a way of knowledge.

Summum was founded in 1975 by a former Mormon named Claude "Corky" Rex Nowell. A former supply company employee, Nowell said he received a series of "visits" from "highly intelligent beings" - or "Summa Individuals" - who gave him "higher knowledge."

Nowell legally changed his name to Summum Bonum Amon Ra, though he is usually referred to as "Corky Ra" (a reference to the ancient Egyptian sun god, Ra).

Adherents meet and meditate in a pyramid-shaped temple in Salt Lake City and use a wine-like beverage they call "nectar," which they manufacture. The group also has what it calls a "Divine Logo," which is a pentagram within a pentagon within a circle.

The Seven Aphorisms that Summum adherents want to memorialize are: "psychokinesis" (the idea that the mind is the universe), "correspondence," "vibration," "opposition," "rhythm," "cause and effect" and "gender."

A spokesman for Summum, a 501[c] 3 nonprofit, declined to comment for this story.

Barnard, meanwhile, told Cybercast News Service that his clients are entitled to their beliefs.

Justices will hear oral arguments this fall.

Reducing US Foreign Aid Will Help Africa, Scholars Say
By Josiah Ryan
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
April 03, 2008

(CNSNews.com) - Scholars participating in a panel discussion at the libertarian Cato Institute Wednesday called for a partial divestment of aid to troubled African states as a solution to that continent's many problems. One scholar said the foreign aid is so damaging that he hopes to see more of it stolen by corrupt government officials.

"If someone really cared about Africa, they would do the very opposite of what we have done so far," said panelist Edward N. Luttwak, senior associate at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. "Foreign aid blocks the emergence of organic entities which are waiting to emerge and gives the government legitimacy.

"I wish there was more corruption in Sudan," he said. "If it's wasted, it does less harm. Somebody takes the money, feeds his family, and [that] means that there are less soldiers running around with weapons shooting each other."

The other panelists at the discussion, entitled "Let Failing African Governments Collapse: A Radical Solution to Underdevelopment," included and

Vicki Huddleston, a visiting fellow with the liberal Brookings Institution, told Cybercast News Service that the idea that foreign aid damages Africa is nonsensical. Also, the panel's view of how aid is distributed in Africa demonstrates "ignorance" about what's really happening, she said.

"We do it very well - the money - and for the most part we oversee it, there is accountability, and we know how it is being used," Huddleston said. "Most of it is going to much-respected, well-known organizations."

Huddleston said that in Sudan, for instance, most of the money is going to run refugee camps.

Mauro De Lorenzo, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that sending foreign aid to Africa relieves leaders there of responsibility to their own taxpayers. "If you are getting money from the people you are representing, you are much more likely to treat them well than if you are getting it from the United States," he said.

George Ayittey, an economics professor at American University, said that beyond the damage our foreign aid does to the continent, Africa has plenty of its own resources that could be exploited to help its own people instead of Western money.

"The foreign aid resources that Africa needs can be found within Africa itself," Ayittey said. "Africa does not really need our aid."

But Huddleston contended that the amount of aid the West sends Africa is relatively small and that while some African states are rich in resources, Africa also hosts some of the poorest states in the world.

"Africa does need our help, and it certainly isn't a lot of money," she said. "It's a small percentage of our GDP. It's not really a great [amount] of money."

U.S. humanitarian and development aid to Africa is pegged at nearly $5 billion for 2008, according to USAID.

Ayittey noted that no matter how legitimate his argument, suggesting less aid for Africa is an unpopular notion.

"It's extremely difficult to make the case for less aid to Africa," he said. "Even the Bush administration has quadrupled aid. If you propose this idea of withholding aid, you are suddenly accused of being stingy. We need something other than the same old failed paradigm."

Ayittey noted that the idea of foreign aid is especially unpopular among the African political elite. "You tell them to cut government spending, and they will set up a ministry on less government spending," he said. "They are not interested in what Africa needs the most, which is reform."

There was some disagreement among the panelists. De Lorenzo said that Luttwak's idea that withdrawing U.S. resources would help to collapse corrupt regimes was not realistic.

"Letting African states collapse is obviously preposterous and has perhaps moral lessons as well," De Lorenzo said. "We think we are somehow the ones saving these states from collapse and that it is in our power to do so."

But Luttwak contended that the aid was sustaining the corrupt regimes.

Some of the arguments put forth by the panel were viewed as so controversial that moderator Marian Tupy, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, commented, "We say if you can't say it at Cato, you can't say it anywhere."

If Africans aren't going to receive aid, I am sure these scholars are calling on us not to give aid to anyone. For the richest country in the world to become so parsimonious that we can't give even a little bit makes me sick, especially when most of it goes for health and education," Huddleston said .