The Syrian Nuclear Mystery Evolves 

The Bush administration briefed the U.S. Congress on Thursday about the reasons behind the Sept. 6, 2007, Israeli raid on Syria. According to the secret briefing — the content of which, of course, not only was leaked immediately (as was intended) but was essentially confirmed by a White House spokeswoman — the target was a nuclear reactor, able to produce plutonium, that had been built with the assistance of North Korea. The administration showed a videotape, apparently produced byIsraeli intelligence, showing faces that were said to be in the facility and to be clearly Korean.

What is important to note is this information is not new. It is a confirmation of the story leaked by the administration shortly after the attack and also leaked by the Israelis a bit later. The explanation for the attack was that it was designed to take out a reactor in Syria that had been built with North Korean help. There are therefore three questions. First, why did the United States go to such lengths to reveal what it has been saying privately for months? Second, why did the administration do it now? Third, why is the United States explaining an Israeli raid using, at least in part, material provided by Israel? Why isn’t Israel making the revelation?

It has never been clear to us why the Israelis and Americans didn’t immediately announce that the Syrians were building a nuclear reactor. Given American hostility toward Syria over support for jihadists in Iraq, we would have thought that they would have announced it instantly. The explanation we thought most plausible at the time was that the intelligence came from the North Koreans in the course of discussions of their nuclear technology, and since the North Koreans were cooperating, the United States didn’t want to publicly embarrass them. It was the best we could come up with.

The announcement on Thursday seems to debunk that theory, at least to the extent that the primary material displayed was U.S. satellite information and the Israeli video, which was said to have been used to convince the United States of the existence of the reactor and of North Korean involvement. So why didn’t the administration condemn Syria and North Korea on Sept. 7? It still seems to us that part of the explanation is in the state of talks with North Korea over its own program. The North Koreans had said that they would provide technical information on their program — which they haven’t done. Either the United States lost its motivation to protect North Korean feelings because of this or the Bush administration felt that Thursday’s briefings would somehow bring pressure to bear on North Korea. Unless the United States is planning to use these revelations as justification for attacks on the North Koreans, we find it difficult to see how this increases pressure on them.

More interesting is the question of why the United States — and not Israel — is briefing on an Israeli raid. Israeli media reported April 23 that the Israelis had asked the Americans not to brief Congress. The reason given was that the Israelis did not want the United States to embarrass Syria at this point. As we noted on April 23, there appeared to have been some interesting diplomatic moves between Syria and Israel, and it made sense that revealing this information now might increase friction.

If this read is true, then it would appear that the United States briefed deliberately against Israeli wishes. Certainly, the Israelis didn’t participate in the process. One answer could be that the United States is unhappy about Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s moves on Syria and wants to derail them. The United States wanted Syria out of Lebanon. The Israelis have a more complex view of their presence. In some ways, they see the Syrians as a stabilizing force. And they certainly aren’t eager to see Bashar al Assad’s government fall, since whatever might replace the al Assad government would probably be worse from the Israeli point of view. That would mean that the Israelis would want to take out the reactor, but not necessarily rub the Syrians’ nose in it.

So there are two plausible answers to Thursday’s show. One is to increase pressure on North Korea. The second is to derail any Israeli-Syrian peace process. The problem is that it’s hard to see why North Korea is going to be moved by the official declaration of what Washington has been saying from the beginning. The second would assume that U.S.-Israeli relations had deteriorated to the point that the United States had to use this as a lever. That’s tough to believe.

The senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, said after the briefing, “This administration has no credibility on North Korea. A lot of us are beginning to become concerned that the administration is moving away from getting a solid policy solution to ‘let’s make a deal.’”

So that seems to undermine the prep for strike theory. That leaves tension between the United States and Israel as the last standing theory. Not a good theory, but the last standing one.

Iraq Green Zone shelled amid sandstorm
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 54 minutes ago
Suspected Shiite extremists hammered the U.S.-protected Green Zone Sunday in the fiercest salvo in weeks, apparently taking advantage of a sandstorm that blanketed the capital and grounded the American aircraft that normally prowl for launching teams.

Thunderous explosions resounded throughout the evening as rockets or mortar shells slammed into the heavily fortified area in central Baghdad.

Anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, meanwhile, rejected terms set by the Iraqi government for lifting a crackdown against his Mahdi Army militia.

Sirens wailed in the Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government on the west side of the Tigris River. The public address system warned people to "duck and cover" and stay away from windows.

The U.S. Embassy confirmed the area was hit by indirect fire, the military's term for rocket or mortar attacks, but said it had no immediate word on casualties.

The Green Zone has been regularly shelled since fighting broke out over a U.S.-backed government crackdown against militias that began in late March. At least four Americans, including two soldiers, have been killed in the attacks.

But the U.S. military has claimed success with operations that have effectively sealed off the southern section of Baghdad's Sadr City, a militia stronghold that is believed to be one of the prime launching sites for the Green Zone attacks.

American commanders have blamed what they call Iranian-backed Shiite factions they say have broken with a cease-fire imposed by al-Sadr in late August.

Al-Sadr's spokesman in the holy city of Najaf called the Shiite-led government's terms for stopping the crackdown against the militias "illogical."

Salah al-Obeidi accused Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, himself a Shiite, of wanting to resolve the problem by force instead of dialogue. Chief among al-Maliki's demands announced Friday were that the militias surrender heavy weapons and hand over all wanted people.

Sporadic clashes also continued Sunday in Sadr City, a sprawling district in northeastern Baghdad with 2.5 million people.

The U.S. military said five suspected militants were killed in three separate airstrikes late Saturday and early Sunday in the area.

A local hospital official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said one person was killed and 11 others wounded in street battles.

In all, at least 349 Iraqis have been killed since the daily clashes began on March 25, 34 of them since Wednesday, according to an Interior Ministry official who declined to be identified for the same reason.

Acknowledging the hardship caused by the crackdown for ordinary Iraqis in the densely packed district, a visiting delegation of about 40 lawmakers from various Sunni, Kurd, Turkomen and Shiite parties urged the government to stop the military campaign there.

But Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, the Iraqi military spokesman for Baghdad operations, refused to set an end date, saying it was an ongoing effort.

Al-Moussawi also said that over the past month, militants had fired a total of 712 missiles and mortar rounds inside Baghdad.

"They were all Iranian-made brought into Iraq in many ways," al-Moussawi told reporters at a joint news conference with Driscoll. He did not elaborate on how the security forces had determined the origin of the exploded munitions.

Heavy clashes also broke out between Shiite militiamen and Iraqi troops in the Maalif area on the southwestern edge of Baghdad. Police said that five people died and 14 were wounded in the fighting. The U.S. military said its forces were not involved.

AP Television News footage from the area showed a minibus riddled with bullets and a pool of blood in another minibus.

Two suicide car bombers also targeted Iraqi forces elsewhere in Baghdad. One killed three people and wounded nine and another killed two and wounded five.

In political developments, al-Maliki met with Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi to discuss rebuilding a "national and unified government," a statement from the president's office said.

The meeting came amid a series of optimistic statements that the main Sunni bloc, the National Accordance Front, is ready to rejoin the Cabinet after a nearly nine-month absence.

But Sunni officials have said internal power struggles within the Front over who should be appointed to which posts have delayed a formal decision.

Northeast of Baghdad, Iraqi troops also unearthed a mass grave containing more than 50 decomposed bodies in an orchard in an area that had been controlled by al-Qaida in Iraq near Baqouba, according to the Diyala provincial coordination center.

___

Associated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report.

At Columbia, Remembering a Revolution
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2008; A02

NEW YORK, April 26 -- Forty years ago, they launched a student protest at Columbia University that involved the occupation of five campus buildings, the hostage-taking of a dean, 712 arrests and injuries to scores of students, faculty members and police officers.

Now, they are lawyers, judges, playwrights, poets, professors and ministers. They gathered this weekend back on campus with former classmates to hear memories of those events and occasionally raise a revolutionary fist for old times' sake.

"Strangest reunion I ever saw," said Victoria Benitez, a spokeswoman for the university, which did not sponsor the event.

Some of the most radical are no longer fomenting revolution. Mark Rudd, the student leader who later helped start the Weather Underground and spent seven years as a fugitive, is now retired from a community college in Albuquerque.

The idea for the reunion developed at the prestigious World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where Robert Friedman, editor of the student newspaper in 1968 and now an editor at Bloomberg News, ran into the current Columbia University president.

But many of the student protesters of 1968 see their effort as part of a series of upheavals in American society that prompted deep change. They say the events also shaped their personal and professional decisions, and the people they became.

"It crystallized the emotion that struggle was necessary, and that you could win, and it marked us the rest of our lives," said Raymond Brown, then a student spokesman, now a criminal defense attorney.

In 1968, the students sought to end Columbia's affiliation with a think tank involved in Pentagon weapons research. They also wanted to halt construction of a gym in Morningside Park they thought would be segregated because of its separate entrances for Columbia students and Harlem residents.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated over spring break, and students returned to campus to see smoke from the fires in Harlem. Meanwhile, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam had been playing out for months at home on television.

On April 23, the Columbia rebellion began. Three hundred students barricaded a dean in his office in Hamilton Hall and seized the building without any real plan, they recalled at a forum Friday night in which dozens of alumni took turns at the microphone, telling bits of the story.

Soon students controlled five buildings. After a week of meetings with faculty and student negotiators shuttling among the parties, the administration opened the campus gates to 1,000 New York police officers, who rushed into the buildings with riot clubs and nightsticks.

Sid Davidoff, Mayor John V. Lindsay's assistant, was sent to the scene. "The elite police were chewing on their sticks, just waiting . . . for seven days to get a shot at you," Davidoff said at the forum Friday.

When police arrived, black students holding Hamilton Hall gave up and were arrested without violence. But whites in the other four buildings resisted -- some passively, others by hurling chairs at police. In all, 136 students and faculty members and 12 police officers were injured in the melee. Dean Henry S. Coleman was released unharmed.

From the beginning, the students formed an awkward coalition of white antiwar activists and black students of all political persuasions.

"Other people said, 'Stop the war.' I just talked about the gym," said Brown, then an officer of the Student African American Society. "There was a growing sense among the black students that while some of our fellow students thought this was a revolution, we knew it was a demonstration."

In fact, the Class of 1968 was the first at Columbia with a sizable number of black students -- about 20, said Brown, speaking at Friday's forum. They entered college 10 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawed school segregation.

On campus, security guards would stop black students to ask for identification, black alumni said. White students used racial insults, and many of the African American students identified more with Harlem than with the campus overlooking it.

Soon after the students took Hamilton, the black students asked white students to leave and occupy other buildings. They took over four. Columbia officials did not move in right away, fearing that Harlem residents would turn their anger on the institution.

Once the students were barricaded inside Columbia's buildings, they became the focus of outside activists. Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers visited. Juan Gonzalez, now a journalist at the New York Daily News, recalled finding rifles, smuggled in by outside agitators, lined up against a bathroom wall.

Nancy Biberman, who was a member of the radical campus group Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, was a courier who ran back and forth among the strikers' meetings. "It was exhilarating," she said.

But at the same time, Biberman said, she began to realize that as a woman, her role was limited: "I was typing up what was discussed at meetings to which women were not invited. . . . It's what propelled me into law school. I wanted to have a professional title."

In the end, Columbia abandoned plans for the gym and cut ties with the think tank. "Ordinary folks faced with superior power don't need to lose," Brown said.

But not all were able to seamlessly incorporate the experience of the protest into their lives.

Rudd was leader of the campus SDS chapter, and the protest made him a media star. Afterward, he said, the spotlight pushed him to be ever more radical.

"My friends and I took the success at Columbia and felt it could be replicated, not only on university campuses, but in the society as a whole," he said.

He helped form the Weather Underground, but after three comrades died when a bomb they were making exploded, Rudd became a fugitive. "I went too far," he said. "I've spent the past 25 years trying not to be Mark Rudd."

Sanliurfa is about 500 miles W of Erbil (Hawler, in Kurdish), the longest-inhabited city on earth, and just north of the Syrian border. It's where the Kurds emerged at least 8,000 years ago. Keep your eye on this archaeological opportunity, which could change history!

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TURKEY: DISCOVERY OF 12,000-YEAR-OLD TEMPLE COMPLEX COULD ALTER THEORY OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Nicholas Birch 4/17/08

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As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, representing the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important -- a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet.

"This place is a supernova", says Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."

Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-colored sea, stretches south hundreds of miles to Baghdad and beyond. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.

Compared to Stonehenge, Britain's most famous prehistoric site, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 meters across. What makes the discovery remarkable are the carvings of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500 BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Never mind circular patterns or the stone-etchings, the people who erected this site did not even have pottery or cultivate wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

"Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", says Ian Hodder, a Stanford University Professor of Anthropology, who, since 1993, has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's most famous Neolithic site. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That fact alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time."

With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavations, Gobekli Tepe's significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think the site was the center of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the center of each circle representing a man and woman.

It's a theory the tourist board in the nearby city of Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet, see Adam and Eve.

Schmidt is skeptical about the fertility theory. He agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy," and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning.

But the site is devoid of the fertility symbols that have been found at other Neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless. "I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods", says Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers."

"In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all," Schmidt continued. "What is this universe? Why are we here?"

With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes the hill top was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles. He notes how the tallest stones all face southeast, as if scanning plains that are scattered with archeological sites in many ways no less remarkable than Gobekli Tepe.

Last year, for instance, French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara in northern Syria uncovered the oldest mural ever found. "Two square meters of geometric shapes, in red, black and white - a bit like a Paul Klee painting," explains Eric Coqueugniot, the University of Lyon archaeologist who is leading the excavation.

Coqueugniot describes Schmidt's hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was meeting point for feasts, rituals and sharing ideas as "tempting," given the site's spectacular position. But he emphasizes that surveys of the region are still in their infancy. "Tomorrow, somebody might find somewhere even more dramatic."

Director of a dig at Korpiktepe, on the Tigris River about 120 miles east of Urfa, Vecihi Ozkaya doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500 year-old graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.

"Look at this", he says, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. Southeastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilization."



Editor's Note: Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav041708a.shtml

 The archaeologist in charge of the dig believes that this artwork has connections with the Eden story. The archaeologist is Klaus Schmidt; the site is called Gobekli Tepe. In academic circles, the astonishing discoveries at Gobekli Tepe have long been a talking point. Since the dig began in 1994, experts have made the journey to Kurdish Turkey to marvel at these 40-odd standing stones and their Neolithic carvings.
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The complex


A pillar with a carved relief of a fox
The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic . The oldest occupation layer (stratum III) contained monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures. So far, four such buildings, with diameters between 10 and 30m have been uncovered. Geophysical studies suggest 16 further structures.

Stratum II, dated to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) , revealed several adjacent rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime, reminiscent of Roman terrazzo floors.

The most recent layer consists of sediment deposited as the result of erosion and of agricultural activity.

The monoliths are decorated with carved relief of animals or of abstract pictograms . These signs cannot be classed as writing, but may represent commonly understood sacred symbols , as known from Neolithic cave paintings elsewhere. Some of the pillars, namely the T-shaped ones, have carved arms, which may indicate that they represent stylised humans. The very carefully carved reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, snakes, other reptiles and birds. Whether their creators wanted to portray simply the local fauna or perhaps mythical beings remains unknown. The meaning of the pictograms is equally unclear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Barnett: The next globalization- inspired religious awakening

By Thomas P.M. Barnett
Sunday, April 27, 2008

As our era features globalization's rapid and unprecedented advance, it will logically also feature the greatest single religious awakening the world has ever seen. Religion will become eminently more important because economic conditions will change more dramatically in coming years and decades than at any other time in human history.

Hardly the clash of civilizations, this upsurge will reflect the efforts of societies to adapt to an era of widespread abundance as a global middle class emerges. People want an independent code of behavior to help them navigate all these new opportunities - guidelines for a life well led.

All of the world's major religions were formed during the Malthusian era of human economics, or before the Industrial Revolution permeated Western societies, shifting people from a just-getting-by paradigm to "how do I deal with abundance?"

Survival economies demand a strict code, but with abundance comes a choice: "Do I adapt the ancient rules to this economic liberation or do I reject it as social evil?" For, once the go-forth-and-multiply logic is disrupted, then long-held strictures regarding marriage, family, sex, homosexuality, etc., are suddenly put in jeopardy.

Almost like the oil "curse," the abundance "curse" provides successful individuals with their own source of funding, independent from the collective. Worse, abundance allows for "chosen families," replacing the previous iron logic of "given families." Unhappy with your family circumstances? Then upgrade like you switch jobs.

This is where globalization's economic connectivity generates revolutionary social change, unleashing personal freedom that is stunning - even perverse - by historical standards. The upside, of course, is the commensurate unleashing of personal creativity. Progress thrives off such genius, thus triggering the virtuous cycle by which more freedom is granted. Once society enters this realm, the logic of political pluralism is easily obtained.

As society divides between economic winners and losers, the temptation for the latter is an end-times ideology that promises deliverance from these unacceptable circumstances. Such fundamentalism pursued peacefully presents no problem: They live apart from the evil world.

But, when challenged by globalization to globalize itself, the fundamentalist impulse is often conflated with political liberation. And, if the state standing in the way can be accused of spiritual infidelity, either because it encourages decadence through modernizing economic connectivity and/or persecutes the faithful, then it's logically tarred as the local devil backed up by the distant devil of globalization-mongrelized America.

Thus we live in revolutionary times, even though, in an economic sense, history really has ended. It's precisely because there's little debate over globalization - outside of freaked-out America - that so much social tumult unfolds right now.

Religion has always been a demand function - i.e., adapted to people's needs. In the Malthusian era, such adaptation was glacial because economic conditions were largely unchanging. But, with the West's age of abundance, people's conditions and thus spiritual needs changed with stunning speed. The bourgeoisie needed a bourgeois God.

Globalization's sequencing challenge seems clear: economic connectivity, done well, triggers abundance; that secularizing dynamic triggers religious awakening and even radicalism, as well as rising nationalism; to exploit the progressive political impulses of that awakening, a religious marketplace must be encouraged; until achieved, democratic elections are more likely to result in illiberal outcomes than true pluralism.

So, how to navigate the highly charged middle sequence between economic connectivity and political pluralism?

Based on the American experience, there seem to be two answers: (1) encourage nondenominationalism among the major sects of a country's dominant religion or among the competing religions; (2) allow the religion in question to maintain its social model of separatism while subjugating itself to the secular state.

The first example pertains to the evolution of Protestantism in America, while the latter speaks to the effective nonevolution of Catholicism and the recent emergence of socially conservative evangelicals. In both examples, believers accept the "two kingdoms" thesis, meaning both heaven and hell can wait on life. In the latter examples, a certain fundamentalism is internalized, allowing the believer to pursue life on his or her own terms within a wider, more secular world.

Globalization is defined by the spread of rules - across networks, throughout markets and even spiritually among individuals. Governments remain the main codifiers of these rules, but they face much competition thanks to globalization - religions chief among them.

American awakenings share a history of triggering mass social reform. The same can and should be true of globalization's current awakening.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a distinguished strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.