May 5, 2008
Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD — Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.

The United States has long charged that the Iranians were training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran, which Iran has consistently denied, and there have been previous reports about Hezbollah operatives in Iraq.

But the Americans say the reports of Hezbollah’s role at the Iranian camp offer important details about Iranian assistance to the militias, including efforts Iran appears to be making to train the fighters in unobtrusive ways.

Material from the interrogations was given to the Iraqi government, along with other data about captured Iranian arms, before it sent a delegation to Tehran last week to discuss allegations of Iranian aid to militia groups.

It is not known if the delegation confronted its Iranian hosts with the information, or how the Iranians responded.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government announced Sunday that it would conduct its own inquiry into accusations of Iranian intervention in Iraq and document any interference.

“We have experienced in the past that Iran interfered and has special groups in Iraq, but Iran also had evidence that they were participating in positive ways in security,” Ali al-Dabbagh, a senior Iraqi government spokesman, said in an interview.

“We would like the Iranians to keep their commitment, the commitments they made in meetings with the prime minister and with other groups that have visited them,” he said. “They had made the promise that Iran would be playing a supportive role.”

There has been debate among experts about the extent to which Iran is responsible for instability in Iraq. But President Bush and other American officials, in public castigations of Iran, have said that Iran has been consistently meddlesome in Iraq and that the Iranians have long sought to arm and train Iraqi militias, which the American military has called “special groups.”

In a possible effort to be less obtrusive, it appears that Iran is now bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, American officials say.

The militants then return to Iraq to teach comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made of Iranian components, according to American officials. The officials describe this approach as “training the trainers.”

The training, the Americans say, is carried out at several camps near Tehran that are overseen by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Command, and the instruction is carried out by militants from Hezbollah, which has long been supported by the Quds Force. American officials say the Hezbollah militants perform several important roles for the Iranians.

First, they say, the Iranians believe it is useful to have Arabs train fellow Arabs. Second, Hezbollah has considerable experience in planning operations and using weapons and explosives in Lebanon.

According to American officials, the four Shiite militants who provided the information on Hezbollah’s role were captured between last September and December after they had returned from training in Iran. They were questioned individually and provided similar accounts, the American officials said.

The captured men described themselves in the accounts as part of a class of 16 militants who crossed into Iran from southern Iraq and were taken to a camp near Tehran, where they studied in a classroom and in the field. Some had been in Iran several times as part of a program that American officials said was aimed at turning them into “master trainers” and which could last several years.

According to their interrogation reports, the militiamen believed that militants from other countries were also being trained at the camp, an impression based on hearing snippets of conversations in other dialects and languages. But the group was kept separate and was not allowed to mingle with others.

American officials say that they believe that similar classes have been arranged for other groups of Iraqi militants, but that the effort appears to be compartmentalized to ensure security.

An American official said that an Iraqi who facilitated the militiamen’s travel to Iraq was also captured and confessed that he had been paid by an Iranian. The official summed up the information from the interrogation reports but did not make them available. He declined to be identified because the information had not been released publicly.

Other evidence of Iranian involvement that American officials have provided to Iraqi officials involves details of captured Iranian arms, like 81-millimeter mortars and 107-millimeter rockets that American officials say bear markings indicating that they were made this year. The weapons have a particular type of fuse and are painted in a way that American experts say is unique to Iran.

The Iraqi military also seized Iranian-made weapons with 2008 markings during their offensive last month in the southern port of Basra, according to American officials.

The reports of Iran’s training program and the discovered weapons caches are politically very significant. When Mr. Maliki visited Iran in August, the Iranians sought to reassure the Iraqis that they were not intervening in Iraq’s internal affairs.

The Bush administration, which has sought to draw attention to Iran’s support for militias, has cited the interrogation reports and evidence of recently made Iranian arms as an indication that the Iranian officials were not keeping their word.

“We don’t want to be at war with Iran, and we will not allow anyone to settle their scores with Iran on Iraqi soil,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Mr. Maliki, said Saturday in an interview. “But at the same time, we don’t want Iran to settle their scores with the United States on Iraqi soil.”

Discussing the delegation’s recent visit to Iran, Mr. Dabbagh, the government spokesman, and close associates of Mr. Maliki familiar with details of the trip said the group did not meet with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but met with leading officials from the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the intelligence agency.

Jalaluddin al-Sagheer, a prominent member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite political party, asserted that the Iraqi Shiite politicians would be loath to take any position that would alienate Iran.

“Iran is not an easy country for us,” he said. “We have a long border with them; we have a long history of relations with them; we have strong commercial ties with them and we cannot hurt that because of copies of documents.”

There have been earlier indications of Hezbollah involvement. Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Lebanese Hezbollah commander, was captured in Iraq in March 2007. At first he refused to talk, presumably to avoid giving away his Lebanese accent. As a consequence, he was initially dubbed Hamid the Mute by American officials.

According to American officials, Mr. Daqduq eventually acknowledged under questioning that he had come to Iraq to evaluate the performance of Shiite militias that the organization had played a role in training. He was making his fourth trip to Iraq when he was captured. After his detention, Hezbollah militants appear to be less visible in Iraq, American officials say.

Alissa J. Rubin and Qais Mizher contributed reporting.

May 4, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who Will Tell the People?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

And us? Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in “downsized labs, layoffs of post docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions.” Today, she added, “China, India, Singapore ... have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

Responding to Joshua Muravchik about "Moderate Islamists"
by Daniel Pipes
Thu, 1 May 2008
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/05/responding-to-joshua-muravchik-about.html

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Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute began a debate with me on the subject of lawful Islamists in a June 2007 piece titled "Pipes v. Gershman," to which I responded on July 6, 2007 at "When Conservatives Argue about Islam." Muravchik initiated a second round in February 2008 with an article (co-authored with Charles P. Szrom), "In Search of Moderate Muslims."

Here is my reply to the latter, in the form of a letter to the editor of Commentary magazine, published in the May issue. The following version differs in many small ways from the published one; in three places, where the print version differed substantially from my original text, I added square brackets to show the contrast:

To the Editor:

As a contributor to your pages since 1979, I write unhappily to defend myself from an article in Commentary. But, to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, I suppose magazines have no eternal allies; so, reply I must to Joshua Muravchik and Charles P. Szrom's "In Search of Moderate Muslims," in the February 2008 issue.

[Print version: As a contributor to COMMENTARY since 1979, I write unhappily to defend myself from Joshua Muravchik and Charles P. Szrom's arguments against me in "In Search of Moderate Muslims."]

In policy terms, there are, broadly speaking, three kinds of Muslims. Violent Islamists, we all agree, are the enemy; in contrast, moderate, pro-Western, anti-Islamist Muslims are unarguably allies. Non-violent Islamists, however, represent the murky in-between. Policy battles royal have already taken place over them, with many more to come. Tariq Ramadan provides a useful symbol of this disagreement: excluded from the United States on account of his support for terrorism, he is employed by the British government in its "roadshow" to dissuade Muslim youth from terrorism.

Official U.S. government policy since 1992 has been to treat these non-violent Islamists (whom I prefer to call lawful Islamists) as friends. Liberals widely adopt this position, but a number of conservatives have also promoted it, including Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Reuel Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center, and, of course, Muravchik and Szrom.

To make their case more convincingly, these advocates whitewash lawful Islamists; [Print version: But such advocates of dialogue can succumb to whitewashing the records of the Islamists.] thus do Muravchik and Szrom dub Kamran Bokhari a "former Islamist." But a closer look reveals he is actually a "former violent Islamist" who is today a lawful Islamist. He has journeyed merely from overt to covert enmity.

Joshua Muravchik.
Muravchik and Szrom take issue with my term "moderate Muslim," calling it "perhaps unfortunate," and equating it with people who are "not too Islamic." But that is not what I mean by "moderate." Moderate Islam is fully Islamic, though not Islamist. It implies not a lesser quantity or quality of piety but an Islam at odds with the fundamentalists, radicals, literalists, Salafists, and other assorted extremists. By analogy, moderate leftists – Social-Democrats, Labourites, even Titoites – served as U.S. allies in the Cold War. Stalinism, like Islamism, represented a novelty, or in Islamic terms, bid`a.
Muravchik and Szrom also dislike my formulation that "mak[ing] a distinction between the mainstream Islamists and the fringe ones [is] like making a distinction between mainstream Nazis and fringe Nazis. They're all Nazis, they're all the enemy." Instead, they suggest that had there been Nazis "who clearly rejected violence. … Would they not have been meaningfully distinguishable from Hitler's crew?"

Such Nazis did not exist, but such communists did, so let us revert again to that analogy: Soviet and French parties differed deeply in their readiness to rely on brute force, but they shared a common goal and ultimately stood on the same side in the Cold War. To invest in lawful Islamists would be as foolish as having helped French reds seize power.

Muravchik and Szrom's gratuitous attack on the Center for Islamic Pluralism, a three-year old organization I helped put together, particularly dismayed me. Establishing the CIP required a full year of due diligence to ensure that it included only true moderates. To dismiss this small but worthy organization as "largely a one-man operation run by Stephen Schwartz, a former Trotskyist" is both offensive and inaccurate.

Indeed, Josh well knows its inaccuracy, having been critiqued by a joint letter signed by seven CIP members. He responded to it with a probing letter to 4 of the 7 co-signatories that attempted to pry them away from Schwartz. All four strongly rebuffed him, some with great verve. (The full correspondence can be found on the CIP website, at "The CIP-Muravchik File, 2007.")

[Print version: Indeed, Mr. Muravchik well knows its inaccuracy—a previous such swipe of his was subjected to criticism in a letter signed by seven CIP members. His subsequent attempt to pry them away from Schwartz was strongly rebuffed. (The full correspondence can be found on the CIP website.)]

The personal attacks on Schwartz also perturb me, so I offer two facts in his defense. His book, The Two Faces of Islam (2003) was banned in Malaysia, suggesting that he threatens Wahhabism in ways that Muravchik, Carl Gershman, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy do not. Also, about the time that Josh wrote a wide-eyed account of his "Saudi sojourn" as a guest of the sheikhs, Schwartz was working with the American Jewish Committee to organize two trips of moderate Muslims to Israel.

I hope Joshua Muravchik and Commentary will re-discover their stalwart and eloquent voices of old and re-enlist in the ranks of those who are fighting today's ideological enemy. It suits neither to be aligned with the accommodating left; and their current actions damage what I still hope is our joint cause.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Pipes
Middle East Forum
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Muravchik then begins the third round in his response to the above. Time availing, I will in turn answer him. (May 1, 2008)

This review is from: The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (Hardcover)
The author of The Great Experiment is an honest to goodness intellectual with the academic bonafides and practical policy experience to back it up. He is also an unabashed liberal but nonetheless delivers a very interesting, basically fair and highly readable book. It is not really about Mr. Talbot's politics but they do surface in his choice of anecdotes (which are interesting all the same) and the sometimes telegraphed rebukes of the Bush Administration (probably deserved). The writing is consistently good throughout but the level of detail, depending on your interests, may at times be surprising (like his excellent multi-page synopsis of the evolution of the three great religions to rise from the Middle East) and at other times over-done (like his much shorter discourse on the Gypsies in Britain). He concludes with a hopeful if not fully feasible prescription for the future but, when all is considered, this is a very useful and thoughtful book that you will enjoy reading and will refer back to as well

Last July Dr. Cass and a group of Christian leaders met with Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq to discuss the persecution of the Christian community and the need to provide further protection for them. During the meeting they were able to pray in Jesus' name for the Prime Minister, the government of Iraq, and the Christian community there. Maliki assured Dr. Cass that the government of Iraq was committed religious liberty for all Iraqis, including Christians.
In the past year Christians in Iraq have faced increasing persecution, many are being killed and threatened and others are seeking refuge in other countries. As the persecution grows, many are taking notice. A recent Washington Post article shows relief organizations to Christians in Iraq consider the persecution as "ethnic cleansing."
Ten churches have been bombed, two prominent clergyman have been murdered, and many worshippers have been targeted for practicing their religion. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, though Christians make up only 3 percent of the Iraqi population, they compromise almost half of those fleeing Iraq.
Before the war in Iraq, the Christian community varied in size's estimated between 800,000 and 1.2 million. Now it is estimated that the number of Christians remaining in Iraq are between 500,000 and 700,000.
French and German officials are pleading the case of Iraqi Christians seeking refuge in their countries. A recent rally was held in Belgium near the European Union headquarters with 4,000 protesting for the European Union to do something to help these Christians that are fleeing from violence and threats.
During Pope Benedict's recent visit to the United States, he and President Bush discussed the issue of the "precarious state" of the Christian community in Iraq. And Prime Minister Maliki vowed to increase protection of the Christian community after a recent killing in March of Mosul Archbishop Bulus Faraj Rahhu.
Christianity's roots are in Iraq and predate those of Islam, yet Christians are being removed from Iraq for fear of their lives. Whether it is good for them to take refugee in far off countries is debatable. Some predict that those Christians remaining in Iraq will face even greater persecution.
ACTION ITEM:
Please pray that the Iraqi government would provide security for the Christian population and that there would be peace in Iraq.
Contact the Bush administration and ask them to protect Iraqi Christians.
Email: contact@whitehouse.gov
Phone: (202) 456 1111
Get Dr. Gary Cass' book Christian Bashing  click here
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