Two leading academics have tried to break the taboo against criticizing Israel's powerful U.S. lobby. It's a worthy aim, but their clumsy argument may backfire.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, may be the most powerful lobby in the country. As its Web site says, “Through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress — at home and in Washington — AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel legislative initiatives a year. From procuring nearly $3 billion in aid critical to Israel’s security, to funding joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to build a defense against unconventional weapons, AIPAC members are involved in the most crucial issues facing Israel.” At its conferences, a parade of politicians from both parties pay homage — this year, speakers included Vice President Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader John Boehner and former Sen. John Edwards.
All successful lobbies flaunt their power. But unlike, say, the Cuban lobby or the AARP, there’s a taboo against outsiders discussing the influence of AIPAC or the Israel lobby more generally, or criticizing the way it shapes American policy. To do so raises the specter of poisonous old narratives about mysterious cabals and dual loyalties, of hateful tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and “The International Jew.” So a strange, dim silence surrounds the Israel lobby, and the hushed atmosphere nurtures conspiracy theories about a power so great and so secret that you can’t even talk about it in public. Those conspiracy theories make the issue even more fraught, because respectable people don’t want to provide fodder for the likes of former Klan leader David Duke, who writes on his Web site, “Just as Jewish Israel-Firsters dominate the mass media, so Congress and the President are afflicted by the Israeli Lobby. ”
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, political science professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, apparently hoped to break through the taboos with their baldly titled paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” It was published last month in the London Review of Books and, in an expanded version, on the Web site of the Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is academic dean. The article argues that the United States’ close relationship with Israel is not in America’s national interest — that it is, indeed, counterproductive — and that it is sustained largely through the work of the Israel lobby (Walt and Mearsheimer refer to it, simply and ominously, as “the Lobby.”) Walt and Mearsheimer also argue that the lobby was a major force pushing for war in Iraq, a war they vocally opposed.
“In our piece, we argued that when people are critical of Israeli policy or the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the arguments are not taken on their merits,” Mearsheimer says when reached by phone. “What happens instead is that the great silencer — the charge of anti-Semitism — is leveled at the critics.”
In this case, that’s just what has happened. Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel called the paper “the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel,” adding, “Given what happened in the Holocaust, it’s shameful that people would write reports like this.” In a response to Walt and Mearsheimer published on the Kennedy School Web site last week, law professor Alan Dershowitz asked, “What would motivate two recognized academics to issue a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence, that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty to America?” Neoconservative Johns Hopkins professor Eliot A. Cohen penned a column about the paper in the Washington Post titled, “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic.”
On the surface, the whole imbroglio seemed like the latest version of a story that has replayed itself countless times in the last few years. A public figure strays outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion about Israel, or calls attention to the disproportionate influence wielded by supporters of Israel’s right-wing political factions, and is immediately attacked as a bigot or a paranoid. It happened to Howard Dean during the Democratic primary, when he said that the United States should be “evenhanded” in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, admonished him; an Israeli newspaper suggested that his Jewish backing would dry up; and Nancy Pelosi wrote him an angry open letter. All this despite the fact that Dean’s campaign was being co-chaired by a former president of AIPAC, and there was little daylight between his position on Israel and that of President Bush.
Not even such a famous friend of Israel as Steven Spielberg is immune to this kind of mau-mauing. When his movie “Munich,” about the Israeli response to the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, was released last year, various commentators berated him for being insufficiently Manichean in his treatment of the conflict. As Leon Wieseltier wrote in the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic, “Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience … All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective.”
At first glance, it seemed as if Walt and Mearsheimer were being run through a familiar wringer. Indeed, many of the charges against them have been grossly unfair. To their chagrin, David Duke has enthusiastically embraced the paper, calling it “a modern American declaration of independence.” Some critics have used this to associate the authors with the former Klansman. “Walt, Mearsheimer, and Duke happen to have reached the same conclusions, and share the same interest in vilifying Jewish leaders and spouting conspiracy theories about Zionist plots against American interests,” wrote Dershowitz. Stretching in a different direction, the Israeli historian Michael Oren, writing in the New Republic, blamed the affair on the malign influence of the late Edward Said and a postmodern coterie “infused with the nihilism of postmodern French philosophers.” This charge was especially odd, since Walt and Mearsheimer are known as two of the foremost exponents of political realism, a hardheaded school of thought that owes far more to Henry Kissinger than to Michel Foucault.
On one level, then, the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer are examples of the very phenomenon the writers describe. Yet for anyone who hopes for a more open and critical discussion of the Israel lobby, their paper presents profound problems. This is not just a case of brave academics telling taboo truths. In taking on a sensitive, fraught subject, one might expect such eminent scholars to make their case airtight. Instead, they’ve blundered forth with an article that has several factual mistakes and baffling omissions, one that seems expressly designed to elicit exactly the reaction it has received. The power of the Israel lobby is something that deserves a full and fearless airing, but this paper could make such an airing less, not more likely.
Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper began as an article commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly in 2002 on the subject of Israel and the U.S. National Interest. The magazine turned down the piece they submitted — editor Cullen Murphy wrote them a letter explaining why, though none of them will comment on what it said. According to Mearsheimer, he and Walt thought the piece was dead, but then a scholar who’d read it put them in touch with the editor of the London Review of Books, who agreed to publish a rewritten version. They posted the expanded essay on the Harvard Web site to coincide with the London publication.
The authors waste no time stating their case. “The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy,” they write on the first page. “For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.”
Even one sympathetic to Walt and Mearsheimer’s criticism of the Israel lobby should be struck by this assertion. After all, there’s a very strong case to be made that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy for the past several decades has been oil. Walt and Mearsheimer barely address oil, or the American relationship with Saudi Arabia. Similarly, in their view, the Iraq war had little to do with oil and much to do with Zionism.
“There is virtually no evidence that oil was an important cause of the Iraq war,” Mearsheimer says. “It is an intuitively plausible argument, but when you look for evidence that the oil companies were pushing for war, or that Paul Wolfowitz was thinking in terms of oil as a geopolitical weapon, you cannot find it. Instead, you find lots of evidence that the neoconservatives and the leaders of the Lobby were pushing hard for war against Iraq.”
In fact, though, such evidence does exist — it has been compiled by Paul Roberts, author of “The End of Oil,” by analysts like James Paul of the Global Policy Forum, and by Kevin Phillips in “American Theocracy.” Phillips quotes James Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, saying, “what they [the Bush administration] have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies. The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war.” In his memoir “The Right Man,” David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and neocon par excellence, wrote that Bush’s campaign to bring freedom to the Middle East would also “bring new prosperity to us all, by securing the world’s largest pool of oil.” After the conservative public interest group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request, a court ordered the Commerce Department to turn over documents from Cheney’s Task Force; among them are Iraq oil maps and lists of foreign suitors for Iraqi oil-field contracts. And, of course, there’s the fact that, as Baghdad burned immediately after the 2003 invasion, the only government building the Americans saw fit to protect was the oil ministry.
This doesn’t prove that oil was the only factor in the war, and that Israel had nothing to do with it. But it does suggest that oil was at least a factor, casting some doubt on Walt and Mearsheimer’s assertion that “the war was due in large part to the lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it.”
Perhaps they don’t find any of the available evidence about the role of oil compelling, but that’s not what they argue — they simply ignore it. A similar pattern repeats throughout “The Israel Lobby.” There is little nuance and few caveats; facts that run contrary to their thesis are simply left out or, in a few cases, twisted. In his response, Dershowitz finds several factual errors that make the authors seem strangely careless. Most relate to the moral case against Israel.
As realists, Walt and Mearsheimer generally oppose giving idealism an important role in foreign policy decision-making. But because they argue in “The Israel Lobby” that considerations of morality can’t account for America’s support for Israel, they have to engage in moral arguments. “Viewed objectively, Israel’s past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians,” they write.
As Walt and Mearsheimer surely know, that’s a striking and hugely controversial claim. So it’s odd that they weren’t more careful in trying to back it up. Much of their case is compelling, but it is undermined by their own errors.
They are certainly correct when they write that, while Israel’s creation was largely a response to horrific crimes against the Jews, “[T]he creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
“Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs,” they continue, citing the work of famed Israeli historian Benny Morris. “The Arab inhabitants did resist the Zionists’ encroachments, which is hardly surprising given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands. The Zionists responded vigorously, and neither side owns the moral high ground during this period. This same scholarship also reveals that the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews.”
All this has been documented, although it’s not the whole story. If Americans tend to believe that Israel has the moral upper hand over the Palestinians, it’s not because of the conditions of the country’s founding, it’s because of decades of Arab aggression and Palestinian terrorism. Amazingly, Walt and Mearsheimer don’t even mention Fatah or Black September, Munich or Entebbe. One might argue that Israel has killed more Palestinians than visa versa, but it doesn’t change the role of spectacular Palestinian terrorism in shaping American attitudes toward Israel.
Worse still is the way Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes subtly twist the historical record to make their case against Israel even more damning. Dershowitz catches them quoting David Ben-Gurion strikingly out of context: “Ben-Gurion is … quoted by Mearsheimer and Walt as saying that ‘it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion,’ making it seem as if Ben-Gurion was advocating a ‘brutal compulsion.’ But they omit what Ben-Gurion said after that: ‘but we should in no way make it part of our programme.’ By omitting Ben-Gurion’s critical conclusions, they falsely suggest that Ben-Gurion was proposing the opposite of what he said.”
They do something similar, though less serious, when they write that the Jewish newspaper the Forward once described Paul Wolfowitz as “the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration.” As Forward editor J.J. Goldberg noted in an editorial, “A check of the endnotes shows that the words did appear in the Forward, but they were describing the conventional wisdom, not the Forward’s view. The article was about a pro-Israel rally where Wolfowitz was booed for defending Palestinian rights. The point was that the conventional wisdom was wrong.”
Walt and Mearsheimer also confuse critical issues about Israeli citizenship, which they say is “based on the principal of blood kinship.” That’s simply not true — as Dershowitz writes, “In reality, a person of any ethnicity or religion can become an Israeli citizen. In fact, approximately a quarter of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, a higher percentage of minority citizenry than in nearly any other country … The paper’s authors confuse Israel’s law of return — which was designed to grant asylum to those who were victims of anti-Semitism, including non-Jewish relatives of Jews — with its law of citizenship.”
These errors, and others like them, don’t nullify the paper’s thesis, but they’re evidence of a weird haphazardness. This is an enormously sensitive subject, but Walt and Mearsheimer’s approach is too often clumsy and crude. That’s especially true in their discussion of the divided loyalties of some American Jews, and of the pro-war manipulations of the lobby. They conflate groups that are merely sympathetic to Israel with those that actively back the hard-line policies of the Likud. Though they try to draw distinctions between the lobby and American Jewry more generally, they occasionally use the two terms interchangeably, citing Jewish campaign donations, for example, as evidence of the lobby’s power.
“The Lobby also has significant leverage over the Executive branch,” they write. “That power derives in part from the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections. Despite their small numbers in the population (less than 3 percent), they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 percent of the money.’” This treatment of Jewish money as a monolithic force is both ugly and misleading; the agenda of liberal donors like George Soros and Peter Lewis is quite different from that of a hardcore Israel supporter like Jack Rosen, head of the American Jewish Congress. Anyway, the fact that Jews are crucial funders of Democrats is not evidence of their power over an executive branch that has been Republican for most of the last 25 years.
One could go on and on in this way, listing logical errors and over-generalizations. And that’s unfortunate, because it clouds what is valuable in “The Israel Lobby.” Walt and Mearsheimer are correct, after all, in arguing that discussion about Israel is hugely circumscribed in mainstream American media and politics. Citing the liberal, pro-Israel journalist Eric Alterman, they write that the public debate among Middle East pundits “is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel. [Alterman] lists 61 columnists and commentators who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification. Conversely, Alterman found just five pundits who consistently criticize Israeli behavior or endorse pro-Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favors the other side.” A person who got all their information from the American media would have little idea about the ways Jewish settlers continue to appropriate land in the West Bank, harassing local Palestinian farmers and uprooting their crops. Indeed, one can find far more critical coverage of the Israeli occupation in liberal Israeli newspapers like Haaretz than in any American daily.
And this gets at the real problem. It’s not that the lobby supports Israel, it’s that it consistently supports right-wing, irredentist factions in Israel. In doing so, it is out of step with most American Jewish opinion as well as much Israeli opinion, and yet it manages to act as if it speaks for both groups. The result is American policies that tacitly accept Israel expansionism, despite the fact that most American Jews favor territorial concessions. There are structural explanations for why the Israel lobby has been able to amass such influence despite how unrepresentative it is. Walt and Mearsheimer, unfortunately, lack the subtlety to explore them.
A few others have, though — Michael Massing wrote a hugely informative article about the Israel lobby for the American Prospect in 2002. Those who are most adept at influencing government policy in the Middle East, Massing wrote, “do not necessarily represent the broad range of Jewish views on the subject. At a time when Palestinian terror bombings grow more horrific daily and Israel military action in the occupied territories grows steadily harsher, the bias in political representation has complicated negotiations and reduced the likelihood that the United States will be able to mediate the conflict successfully.”
As Massing explained, the two most important pro-Israel lobbying outfits are AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Both are controlled by hard-liners and have been consistently biased toward the Likud, so much so that, as Massing writes, when the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister, he told AIPAC that it would no longer be Jerusalem’s representative in Washington. “[I]n contrast to the bullish statements AIPAC had issued on behalf of the Likud government, its board remained largely silent on Rabin’s peace initiative,” Massing wrote.
Indeed, AIPAC went out of its way to sabotage Rabin. In 1995, wrote Massing, its board “took up an issue calculated to impede Rabin’s efforts: the location of the U.S. embassy in Israel.” Like most countries, the United States had its embassy in Tel Aviv because of Jerusalem’s contested status. Under Oslo, talks on the future of the city were set to begin in 1996. “Flexing its muscle in Congress, [AIPAC] got 93 of 100 senators to sign a letter urging the administration to move the embassy by 1999, regardless of what happened in the negotiations. Going further, it got Republican Sen. Bob Dole, who was preparing to run for president against Bill Clinton, to introduce a bill that would make the transfer mandatory by that year.”
That bill was opposed by both Clinton and, importantly, the Israeli government. “Members of the Likud, by contrast, were jubilant,” Massing wrote. This episode goes to show that the Israel lobby is not, as Walt and Mearsheimer say, “a de facto agent for a foreign government.” It is, rather, part of a bi-national right-wing movement that encompasses Israeli conservatives and American hawks, Jewish and gentile. The power of this movement is deeply troubling — it perverts American political discourse, promotes policies that inflame the Arab world, destroys many Palestinian lives and ultimately endangers Israel. But to conflate this movement with American Jewry is dangerous, and that is what Walt and Mearsheimer sometimes do, albeit inadvertently.
They note the difference between the two, but then they ignore it, writing, for example, “There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to make U.S. foreign policy support Israel’s interests.” They argue as if there’s no need to point out the distinction between, say, Joe Lieberman, one of the Iraq war’s staunchest supporters, and Russ Feingold, one of its steadiest opponents. In their formulation, the fact that a congressman is Jewish creates suspicion of dual loyalties.
This accounts for some of the shock commentators have felt reading “The Israel Lobby.” While some of the outrage is part of the predictable hysteria that accompanies any serious criticism of Israel, there’s more to it than that. There is, after all, a reason for the taboo surrounding talk of Jewish power and treachery. Tales of Jewish groups using money and secret influence to twist politics for their own, unpatriotic ends are a hallmark of reaction, spouted by everyone from the Nazis to Father Charles Coughlin to David Duke. Walt and Mearsheimer are not anti-Semites, or aligned with anti-Semitic forces. They seem, however, somewhat oblivious as to why the issue they’ve taken on is so horribly sensitive, and they make little effort to address the causes of the taboo they’re trying to dislodge.
“They overlook the fact that the notion of this Jewish cabal with mystical powers has been an excuse for genocide for centuries,” says the Forward’s Goldberg, adding that you have to be careful “if you’re going to wander into that.”
Likewise, there is a history to countries, during crises of national morale, blaming their predicaments on Jewish manipulation. This is part of what frightens Goldberg. “America right now, I think people are going nuts,” he says. “You look at all the things going on, the Arctic is melting, the world hates us, we’ve bankrupted ourselves as a nation, you can name three or four things that are inconceivably bad. You don’t want to blame the American public — we elected this guy, twice. We can’t be that nuts. Somebody must have done this to us.”
For Goldberg, the paper is a worrying sign that a domestic version of the Dolchstosslegende — the conviction that Germany lost World War I because Jews “stabbed it in the back” — could somehow take root in America. “If Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer can buy into this stuff, I guess anybody can,” says Goldberg. “I actually didn’t believe it was possible. I’m one of those weirdoes who thought it wasn’t going to happen here. I found their document scary because it is so illogical and so passionate.”
Goldberg grants that Walt and Mearsheimer are “right that the Jewish community and the pro-Israel lobby, separately and in different ways, make it hard to have a debate, partly on purpose and partly because there’s a level of emotion there.” Before a rational discussion can proceed, some of that emotion has to be defused. Instead, it’s been stoked.
Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer will likely pay a professional price, one that exceeds whatever criticism they deserve for their maladroit arguments. Walt will soon be stepping down from his job as academic dean — something he says was in the works well before the paper’s publication — and it’s unlikely he’ll ever be put in such a position again. “It is too soon to tell what all of the repercussions will be, but we believed going into this that both of us would pay a significant price in our professional lives,” says Mearsheimer. “We think, for example, that it would be almost impossible for Steve to ever be a high-level administrator at Harvard or any other top university. It is also highly unlikely that either one of us would ever get appointed to an important government position after this article. Plus there will be conferences and meetings that we won’t be invited to because of the piece.”
Other ambitious academicians may take notice and leave this subject alone, even if they could shed more light on it than Walt and Mearsheimer did. It would be a strange irony indeed if as a result of their attempt to break the taboo, it ended up stronger than ever.
DOHA, Qatar — Twitter and Facebook have been widely credited with enabling citizens to upend dictatorial regimes.
But while oppressive governments were initially caught off guard by the new media tools, those still in power appear finally to be catching on. In some cases they are happily embracing social networking to play Big Brother in a way never before possible.
Many governments struggling with dissent appear to be using a double-barreled strategy to fight back against the so-called Facebook revolutions: classic repression and by promoting their own views using the very same platforms.
“The thought police already have a presence online in these countries,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “And they have a very heavy presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks. They go out there and intimidate people. And they accuse people of being heathens. And call for their heads.”
Jeffrey Ghannam, a media lawyer and analyst in Washington, thinks the propaganda strategy will win out over subjugation.
“It’s my sense that Arab governments will focus less on control, filtering and blocking — though those efforts will not completely disappear — and begin to assert their own views in the Arab cyberspace,” he said.
“Consider the cases of so-called Bahraini twitter trolls and the Syrian cyber attacks that go after critics of these respective Arab regimes. The official Arab government view is increasingly in the mix,” he said. “Another example is the way the SCAF (Egypt’s Supreme Council of Armed Forces) uses Facebook and Twitter. It may not be beautifully done, and it does draw tens of thousands of critical remarks online that are viewable, but the SCAF is contributing its views. These are all significant developments and point to increasing government engagement in the Arab cyberspace.”
Some of the official efforts smack of classic public relations techniques.
In Bahrain, the government launched an online campaign called “We Are All Hamad,” asking supporters to post pictures of Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Bahrain’s ruler, on their Facebook and Twitter pages.
In Tunisia, government officials, including President Moncef Marzouki (@Moncef_Marzouki) have joined Twitter. The royal family in Jordan, as well as the mayor of Amman, Jordan’s capital, also use Facebook and Twitter to speak directly to constituents.
These regimes, however, have a long history of using heavy-handed tactics and are apparently not about to give up on old habits. Many, in fact, have learned that social media can help identify potential targets of their crackdown.
This nascent trend, however, has not led authorities in these countries and elsewhere to give up old habits. Many have continued to opt for the more traditional and heavy-handed response.
Last month, for instance, Moroccan authorities arrested 18-year-old college student Walid Bahomane on charges of “defaming Morocco’s sacred values” by posting unflattering pictures and videos on Facebook that poked fun at King Mohammed VI. Authorities also convicted another student, Abdelsamad Haydour, 24, earlier in the month for criticizing the ruler in a video posted on YouTube.
These developments have taken place in a country largely praised for its response to citizen discontent over the past year. In November, Morocco held peaceful parliamentary elections as part of a governmental reform process initiated by the king that also included a new constitution.
In Saudi Arabia, 23-year-old journalist Hamza Kashgari faces charges of blasphemy, an offence that carries the death sentence, for tweeting an imaginary conversation he was having with the Prophet Muhammad. The uproar over Kashgari’s comments prompted the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Azeez ibn Abdullaah Aal ash-Shaikh, to issue a fatwa against Twitter, which he told “real Muslims” to avoid as a “platform for trading accusations and for promoting lies,” according to an article in The National.
And in Jordan, a masked assailant on Feb. 20 stabbed university student Enass Musallam after he published a blog post that criticized a member of the Jordanian royal family.
Authorities in the region are now also turning to old laws — such as emergency laws, anti-terrorism laws and press laws — to justify the arrest, fines and incarceration of individuals for online expression.
“When the internet and social media blogs were just starting to become popular, press laws were only applied to the mainstream media. But that’s no longer the case as these media platforms continue to converge,” said Courtney Radsch, program manager for the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at Freedom House in New York.
Earlier this month, for instance, authorities in the United Arab Emirates arrested pro-democracy activist Saleh al-Dhufairi for tweets criticizing the UAE’s decision to deport Syrian expatriates who demonstrated outside their consulate in Dubai without a permit.
“Saleh al-Dhufairi has been arrested on accusation of spreading ideas by speech, writing and any other means that provoke strife, hurt national unity, and social peace,” a spokesman for Dubai police said in a statement.
Al-Dhufairi’s arrest is a scare tactic by a government that is itself scared of any significant dissent, CPJ’s Abdel Dayem.
“Events are occurring that are of monumental political weight and have very far reaching implications. So what happens in Tunisia matters in the Gulf and what happens in Syria matters in the Gulf,” Abdel Dayem said. “These are obviously separate political entities and separate states but there is a Pan-Arab media consumed across borders, so journalists, bloggers, regular citizens and everyone else is exploring these new found venues for expression.”
“They are testing government tolerance for criticism, not just in Libya, Egypt and Yemen where there was an actual change in the political arrangement, but also in countries where there hasn’t been change.”
And these governments in turn are testing their responses, said popular UAE commentator Sultan Al Qassemi, who has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter.
“What we are seeing today is part of the teething process of accepting social media as an avenue of communication and criticism of society and government in the Gulf,” Qassemi said. “As the adoption of social media tools grows in the Gulf there will naturally be a larger output of opinions, some less agreeable to the authorities than others.”
Citizen journalists, bloggers and average citizens who run afoul of the law for expressing their opinions online must also contend with inadequate legal representation.
“This is a new realm for many lawyers in these countries. It requires training and requires a level of experience with the technology and that’s lacking in many countries if not all,” Radsch said. “Certainly, in the U.S. where you’ve had a longer history with internet-based content you have some more sophistication there.
But in many of these countries, blogging really just got going in 2004 and 2005.”
“With the advent of TV, you saw fewer cases against broadcasters at the beginning because it was still new and they were figuring things out, but you’re going to continue to see this battle between governments and citizens play out,” she said.
This time, however, the very nature of the internet and social networking might be enough to break the cycle.
“One thing is different,” Radsch said. “There are a lot more stakeholders and users of social media. The mainstream media is owned by a few and provides jobs for a few more but the vested interest across the broad swath of the public using social media could mean far more stakeholders could fight for the right to keep this space open.”
JERUSALEM — On Monday, both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Ehud Barak head to Washington for separate but urgent meetings, a day after Iran beat Israel at an indisputably benign competition, the Oscars in which the Iranian film, “A Separation,” beat Israel’s “Footnote” for best Foreign Film.
The matter was at the root of wry commentary accompanying a flurry of visits not seen in years.
In the past few weeks, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon have all held high level meetings in Jerusalem. Barak is scheduled to meet with Panetta and with Vice President Joe Biden. Peres will meet with President Barack Obama, as will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will fly to Washington for a much anticipated meeting on March 5.
The subject at hand is nuclear Iran — not the movie version, and not even the proxy war version, which has seen the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, the attempted assassinations of Israeli diplomats, and genial computer viruses attack Iranian nuclear installations, making centrifuges spiral out of control, as in Hollywood’s imagination.
On the eve of the Israelis’ Washington visits, there is a divergence of opinion between the United States and Israel regarding the utility of the recently hardened sanctions on Iran, and a growing apprehension on both sides about what the other may be prepared to accept from the Islamic Republic’s leadership.
Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel bilateral relations who holds posts at Bar Ilan University and at the University of Southern California, said the situation is stark and in some ways unprecedented.
“The Obama administration has little trust in Netanyahu and vice versa. The new sanctions that have been imposed have produced economic hardship in Tehran, but this does not mean they are working. To work, they have to change the Iranian government’s policy toward nuclear development, and this has not yet happened.”
“The UN Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just announced that Iran has substantially increased enrichment, which seems to contradict American statements that have appeared in all the media suggesting that Iran has not yet made the decision whether to develop nuclear weapons.”
Two points of dispute stand out in creating what Sen. John McCain, also on a visit to Israel last week, called the “daylight” between the two countries regarding Iran’s nuclear plan.
The first is the question of what constitutes unacceptable progress toward the manufacture of an armed nuclear device, or, in Barak’s words, Iran’s entry into a “zone of immunity.” The other is the extent of uranium enrichment at a nuclear site near the holy city of Qum, which was highlighted by the IAEA report.
The United States and Israel agree that the secret underground structure is better protected from a possible military strike than other known Iranian facilities. But from that point of agreement, different conclusions are drawn.
Israeli analysts believe Iran is moving fast toward a nuclear military option, and taking advantage of the pressure of sanctions and the time granted by European offers to negotiate in order to assemble all the parts necessary to build a bomb. The United States, which is in the midst of an election year, meanwhile, thinks sanctions may yet bring Iran — “if it is behaving as a rational actor,” in Gilboa’s words — to negotiate.
“The process is preparing everything for the building of bombs, with the aim of creating all the parts and then needing only a very short period of time to assemble a weapon. So it is just playing with words if we say that we don’t know whether they have made a decision. If you produce all the parts, it is obvious that means you intend to produce a bomb,” Gilboa said.
“I think that what Obama wants from Netanyahu next week is a commitment not to strike Iran at least until the American election, to give heavier sanctions a chance and not to surprise the United States.”
Gilboa does not believe Israel would attack Iranian nuclear installations without notifying the Americans beforehand.
Still, he points out, “The current situation is unprecedented. The U.S. has never before asked Israel to refrain from military action, and Israel has never before asked the U.S. for permission. This is all new ground.”
The 1981 Israel Air Force attack on Osirak, Saddam Hussein’s French-built nuclear reactor is now ancient history. In that campaign however, only eight jets were involved.
The New York Times estimated that at least 100 Israeli fighter planes would be needed today for a crippling attack on Iran. At the time of the Osirak strike, the United States angrily condemned Israel. But in 2005, former President Bill Clinton said, “Everybody talks about what the Israelis did at Osirak in 1981, which I think, in retrospect, was a really good thing.”
The current disagreement between Israel and the United States seem not to be on the substance of Iran’s nuclear program, or even on the possibility of a necessary, last-resort, military strike, but on the timetable and method of response to the threat.
Many Israeli analysts believe the Obama administration and Europe are not convinced that the full effect of sanctions has yet been felt. Israelis are concerned that by the time they are felt, possibly by next summer, when Europe’s oil embargo on Iran is scheduled to go into effect, it might be too late.
“What Obama would like is to put the crippling sanctions to the test. He thinks that the sanctions being used this time, alongside the oil embargo, will actually have an impact,” said Tel Aviv University professor Uzi Rabi, the director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.
“He is in effect saying to Israel, don’t surprise us. We want to be updated from A to Z. The second thing, I think Israel is being asked is to play down the shadow war and really just let sanctions work. If the sanctions are going to be fully implemented it could inflict a lethal blow on the Iranian regime, and since what we are talking about is the survival of the regime itself, this could be very effective.”
As to Israel, Rabi says, “It would like to make sure everybody knows that from its point of view, a nuclear Iran is unbearable. This combination of ayatollahs and power is something that poses an existential threat to Israel, and it is something Israel is really afraid of. What Israel thinks is the right thing to do is to make sure the military option is not only on the table, but actually feasible.”
Not many in Israel think that Iran, even with a nuclear weapon in hand, would attack Tel Aviv.
“Based on rational thinking, which is not one of the strongest characteristics of the Middle East, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it would be tantamount to suicide were they to use them. Iran would be wiped out by Israel’s second strike capability and by American nukes,” Gilboa said.
“I think they want them in order to acquire hegemony in the Middle East. By becoming a nuclear power they can threaten anybody. The power of threat is much more than the power of destruction.”
Gilboa predicts that next week Netanyahu will ask Obama how he plans to ensure Iran’s non-nuclear status in the event sanctions fail to cripple the nuclear program, and that Obama “will evade the answers.”
Rabi says “Israel is afraid to be left alone. I don’t think Iran would attack Israel. But their actions provide a source of inspiration for lunatic radical movements like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the fact that they are attacking Israelis in Baku, Delhi and Tbilisi, though ineffective for now, show that this is a state that could act in accordance with the modus operandi of a terrorist group. This has very negative implications for the stability of the Middle East.”
Not all Israeli experts see in the commotion of transatlantic visits and consultations evidence of tension between the United States and Israel. Shlomo Shpiro, vice chair of the Department of Politics at Bar Ilan University, believes those claims to be overstated.
“I think there anxiety among some in the U.S. administration who fear that a powerful Israeli military action against Iran could have an impact on the election in November. I don’t think there is tension. A whole range of senior American officials have been visiting Israel almost on a weekly basis.”
“I think the threat assessment is very similar in Washington and in Jerusalem,” he adds. “I think Obama is very concerned about the possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons. Both are very worried, and both countries agree the process is moving quickly. The disagreement is only about how to prevent or delay it.”
Any Israeli military option, Shpiro says, would be a “last resort.”
“But if it comes to a last resort, I think Israel’s leadership will not hesitate. It all depends on the progress of Iran’s nuclear program and on information that the U.S. and Israel obtain about that program.”
For now, the war of nerves will play on, with Israel pressuring the U.S. and Europe to fully implement severe sanctions as soon as possible, and demanding assurances, perhaps impossible to give, about what the West will do if sanctions do not deter Iran.
The psychological warfare, many say, may lead Iran to believe it can “safely assume it can continue with its plan to build nuclear weapons without much interference,” Gilboa said. “There is a possibility the Iranians are laughing at everybody. For example, why announce sanctions and then say you’ll impose them only in six months?”
“The Iranians are the only ones producing consistent statements, and this is our problem. Too many of the statements coming from the West are confusing and could be interpreted in any number of ways.”
Since the heady first days of the Arab Spring, it has become increasingly obvious that things are not quite as they seem. Many of the idealistic, youth driven uprisings have been manipulated by great powers to serve a much bigger regional game.
The age old rivalry between Russia and the West is being played out in the Middle-East, pitting the largely Sunni Muslim Arab states against Russia’s ally in the region- Iran. An important player bridging the gap between Shi’ite Iran and the Arab Sunnis is Lebanon’s Shi’ite resistance movement known as Hezbollah (Party of God.)
Hezbollah has enjoyed enormous popularity across the entire region, perceived by many as the champions of the Arab world, successfully standing up to the bully in the playground, Israel. There was a time when the portrait of Hassan Nasrallah hung on the walls of homes and cafes from Baghdad to Casablanca. Yet, following a relatively cool reception of Nasrallah’s speech on the 16th of February , one got the distinct impression that the Lebanese resistance leader may not enjoy the same popularity he once did with the Arab masses.
A simple explanation might be Hezbollah’s unequivocal support for Bashar el-Assad’s regime in Syria. In a speech broadcast by al-Manar on May 25th 2011, Nasrallah declared his group’s strong support for the Assad regime. He hailed Syria for its support of the Resistance movement in Lebanon and Palestine. Many have been unable to comprehend why the former champions of the resistance would side with the regime against the people, especially considering Hezbollah’s unreserved support for the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain. This has eroded the party’s popularity not only among Sunnis in Syria, who dominate the opposition, but also in the Arab world at large as regional tensions intensify between Shi’ite Iran and the predominantly Sunni Arab states.
Ironically, the very cause which won Hezbollah respect from thousands across the region, also, lost them the support of their own people. Throughout the 1990s, the Lebanese, regardless of sect, were united by Hezbollah’s resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon and again in 2006 when Israel threatened reinvasion. However, critics point to Hezbollah’s reluctance to disarm as the main source of national instability. Lebanese political leader Samir Geagea asserting that “The ones who are involving Lebanon [in crises] are those wielding power outside the Lebanese state” and demanding that Hezbollah put down its arms and integrate itself with the official Lebanese army and government.
In a similar vein, Hezbollah has alienated many followers by becoming embroiled in a petty tit-for-tat exchange with the March 14 coalition over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, investigating the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq el-Hariri. Many, regardless of their politics, had respected Nasrallah for his commitment to his cause and ability to avoid entanglement in party politics.
Though not Hezbollah’s fault, as such, the persisting devastation of the socio-economic condition and infrastructure of southern Lebanon has also served as a harsh reminder, to the organisation’s critics, of the consequences of war with Israel
In the Asia Times, Sami Moubayed, points out Hassan Nasrallah’s total withdrawal from public life in Lebanon in recent years; choosing to address his supporters on live television rather than the massive public rallies for which he has been famed. His disappearance has been due to security fears. However, this has made it difficult for followers to connect with him. It is, also, now harder to draw in new supporters from across the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Despite their somewhat dented popularity, Hezbollah is still massively important on a strategic level, with regard to predicting the outcome of unrest in Syria.
In a speech broadcast by al-Manar on the 25th August 2011, Nasrallah named Syria as a very important ally in the region “The Syrian support has been crucial. A great part of the Iranian support comes through Syria. If it had not been for the will of Syria, even the Iranian support would have been blocked”. So, it is reasonable to assume that the fall of the Assad regime would serve a tremendous blow to Hezbollah, but also, act as catalyst to a power struggle within the country. A regime in Syria based on the Sunni Muslim majority would most likely be more friendly to Hezbollah’s local rivals in the March 14 coalition. Such a regime would also have good relations with regional powers that have severe disagreements with the Hezbollah movement over sectarian and political issues.
Prof. Joseph Bahout at Sciences Po in Paris notes that, in such a situation, Hezbollah would be faced with two alternatives, if faced with waning support from Syria “will Hizballah gradually become more flexible in terms of Lebanonization and civilianization? Or, on the contrary, will it increasingly pursue a radical position and bitterly defend its share of the Lebanese system while echoing Tehran’s dictum that Assad’s rule in Syria is a red line?” Judging by Hezbollah’s stern rhetoric over the past few months, the leadership has already decided on the latter and will continue to stand by the Assad regime.
Perhaps, most dangerously, Hezbollah also play an extremely important strategic role in what has been suggested as an imminent conflict between Israel and Iran. Would Israel be capable of conducting an aerial battle with Iran at the same time as defending itself against Hezbollah, closer to home?
Ha’aretz commentator Yoel Marcus thinks not, saying that a strike on Iran would be out of Israel’s league and points to cautions issued by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan against attacking Iran, amidst concerns that such a move would drag Israel into a regional war, which would involve Hezbollah, Hamas and possibly Syria.
Tensions have been escalating between Israel and Iran for some time, recently, heightened following attacks on Israeli embassies in India, Thailand and Georgia. An official for the Israeli counter terrorism bureau, quoted in Ha’aretz warned Israelis of further attacks and noted that Nasrallah’s threats of revenge for the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughaniyeh were being taken into account. Nasrallah categorically denied any involvement in the explosions in his speech on February 16th.
But what would such a conflict mean for the Arab world at large? It seems unlikely that Egyptians, Jordanians or, the Palestinians, all not so embroiled in the sectarian debate, would support Israel in any conflict against Muslims whether they be in Lebanon or, in Iran. However, countries in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) might have more to gain from a weakened Iran.
The GCC have been concerned about Iran’s capabilities, behavior and intentions for a long time, but it takes on an additional importance in light of the Arab Spring. This has certainly been the case in Egypt and Bahrain, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, possibly in Yemen, and now in Syria.
GCC countries have repeatedly accused Tehran of attempting to destabilise their internal security, and attempting to instigate sectarian strife. Iran has rejected these accusations, and pointed to the GCC’s appalling treatment of Shi’ite citizens. Particularly, concerning the brutal suppression of the largely Shi’ite uprising in Bahrain against the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy, a struggle which was obviously covered up by Gulf sponsored media such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya.
Tensions have also been rising over Iran’s ability to developing nuclear weapons, something that is already of great concern to the GCC. Without a nuclear advantage, the Gulf far outguns Iran in terms of military capability, although, Iran is not reluctant to use its geopolitical position and has threatened to close off the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes, if pressured.
When placed in the context of a larger regional conflict between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah plays an absolutely crucial part as an ally of Iran, especially in the absence of Syria. Yet, when the financial might of the GCC is also turned against Iran, Hezbollah, which is ultimately a financially dependent arm of Iran, becomes inconsequential.
It is possible that Hezbollah may look to find solutions to its waning popularity, and a possible run in with the GCC, by pre-emptively launching a strike against Israel. In his speech on Feburary 16th, Nasrallah ambiguously claimed that “We have arms and they are increasing [in number]. We have well-known weapons and there are others which are hidden and unknown. We are hiding them because we need to protect our country and prepare surprises for the Israelis.” Whilst this may be an empty threat, a Hezbollah spokesman has said that the organisation would be willing to go to war with Israel, should Syria be attacked. It seems likely that the same logic would apply if an attack were to be staged against Iran.
Prof. Juan Cole has said that, in the case of a conflict with Iran, Hezbollah would almost certainly launch a rocket attack, which would threaten up to a quarter of the Israeli population. The casualties might be even worse if Hezbollah is able to target toxic gas storage in Haifa or nuclear reactors in Dimona and Nahal Sorek. Already Israel has been taking steps to shut down these facilities, in the event of an attack.
This seems to be a departure from Nasrallah’s statement in 2006, shortly after the 34 day war between Hezbollah and Israel, when he told Lebanon’s NTV that had he would not have ordered the capture of two Israeli soldiers, had he known that this would lead to such devastation. However, six years on, the situation between Iran and Israel has escalated, and for Hezbollah this has become a battle for existence. In an earlier speech, February 7th, Nasrallah admitted that the organisation has been completely dependent on Iran for “moral, political and financial support” since 1982.
Hezbollah has found itself in the unenviable position of choosing between its Iranian financial backer and its Arab popular support base. Ironically, Hezbollah’s only hope may be an Israelis attack on Iran, thus gaining it some support, once more, as the champion of resistance against the Zionist aggressor. But should the pressure on Iran be laid on by the Gulf states, Hezbollah will be left with no alternative but to cut its ties with Iran or, face complete irrelevance within the Arab world.
Syria looks like Libya all over again. A brutal dictator uses his military to repress his country’s protests. A civil war erupts. And, oh yes, a split opens among American liberals over what to do about it.
With a few notableexceptions, the conservative movement has been of one mind on foreign policy issues since 9/11. All right-wingers supported the Afghanistan war, and virtually all supported Iraq, as well. Everyconservative believes President Obama has been a craven appeaser of America’s enemies, and now all believe that pressure should increase against Iran, even if that means another war in the Middle East.
Liberals have shown no such unanimity. They were divided not only on Iraq but also on President Bush’s 2006 surge, Obama’s Afghanistan escalation, and the intervention in Libya. Views fall roughly along two lines. Dominating the party since Bill Clinton’s ascension are liberal hawks who believe it is in America’s interest to use military power abroad to promote human rights and expand democracy. More popular among the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party are attitudes skeptical of the use of force in major wars. (The only exception to this split is over the use of drones, which nearly all Democrats support).
Though Barack Obama opposed the Iraq War when he was a state legislator, as president he is closer to the liberal hawks camp. The best account we have of the decision-making on Libya, from Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, has the president explicitly declaring that America needs to have an expanded conception of its role in the world. Just looking after its own affairs, attending to its national interests, is “not how America leads,” Obama said. The rationale Obama employed in a speech delivered at the National Defense University in March of 2011 was the closest he has come to defining an Obama doctrine.
On the surface, the criteria that Obama outlined in his Libya speech are present in Syria: impending and ongoing massacres; a multilateral coalition led by America’s traditional allies; and an opportunity to side with the people in a crucial state in the Arab spring. For this reason, many liberal writers have called on the U.S. to intervene. Paul Berman has signed onto a conservative-led letter to the president asking him to intervene in Syria. The New Republic has an entire symposium with intellectuals (mostly) asking Obama to side militarily with the Syrian resistance. “Lead again from behind!” Leon Wieseltier exhorts. Especially powerful is a heartfelt plea for American help from a Syrian activist in Washington:
If the United States does successfully build a partnership with Syria’s democratic opposition right now, at its time of greatest need, it will have earned a steadfast regional ally for the long-term. Indeed, Syria’s political future, and its future alliances, are currently up for grabs. In that way, there are important strategic, as well as humanitarian, issues at stake.
Pressure is building in Congress. Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who both serve on the Armed Services Committee, have argued for arming the Syrian rebels. Obama’s former State Department policy planning head Anne-Marie Slaughter was among the first to call for intervention. In late January, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said it’s only “a question of time” before President Bashar al Assad falls. In December, the State Department pointman said Syria’s leader was a “dead man walking.” More recently, White House press secretary said on Tuesday that “additional measures” such as rebel-arming may need to be taken if the international community keeps dithering.
There are two significant reasons the administration has not pushed for military intervention, however. First, the international consensus that existed on Libya is not present in Syria. Russia and China vetoed a Western- and Arab-sponsored U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government. Imagining that they would agree to a military intervention is simply fanciful.
What hasn’t been much discussed is why China and Russia vetoed the resolution. And here we circle back to Libya. The resolution authorizing military action in Libya was limited to protecting civilians in Benghazi and other areas. NATO and its allies quickly went beyond the scope of this mandate, using airpower to assist the rebels in defeating Col. Gadhafi and his forces. Such actions may have been morally justified, but they didn’t go unnoticed by the Chinese and Russians, who are extremely sensitive to infringements on state sovereignty (lest they be targeted one day). Tellingly, foes of the proposed Syria resolution explained their decision in terms of national sovereignty. Russia’s foreign minister said that “the Security Council by definition does not engage in domestic affairs of member states.” Russia’s U.N. envoy faulted the resolution for aiming at “regime change,” even though the wording of the text notably did not call for it and the Arab states explicitly rejected Western military intervention.
The second reason Libya isn’t acting as a template for Syria is one of logistics. As Middle East expert Marc Lynch has explained, “Military intervention in Syria has little prospect of success, a high risk of disastrous failure, and a near-certainty of escalation which should make the experience of Iraq weigh extremely heavily on anyone contemplating such an intervention.” The Syrian opposition, impressive and courageous as they have been, is divided, weak and controls no territory. Air power of the sort the West can provide would not be effective in preventing civilian deaths, and the fighting is taking place in densely populated cities. For these reasons and more, a Libya-style no-fly zone simply won’t fly.
Eventually, the Syrian government’s efforts to suppress the rebellion may be so bloody that the Obama administration feels compelled to intervene. But so far, the conditions that were present in Libya are not present in Syria. It may be a double standard, and one that liberal hawks are not comfortable with, but it is one with good reason.
Jordan Michael Smith writes about U.S. foreign policy for Salon. He has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post.
More Jordan Michael Smith.
Libyan rebels head towards the front line outside the eastern town of Brega, Libya Friday, April 1, 2011 (Credit: AP)
GlobalPost correspondent James Foley spent 44 days in captivity inside Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. This first chapter of his story originally appeared on GlobalPost. For the full series, click here.
There is a single main highway along which lies every major city between the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in the east and the capital Tripoli in the west. It snakes along the coast and passes through Ajdabiya, Brega, Sirte and Misrata, cities made world famous by months of back and forth, and deadly, conflict.
The four of us were riding in the back of a blazing red minibus at the beginning of April, approaching the strategic oil town of Brega, where the worst fighting of the conflict had been taking place. Our driver was a teenage boy, like his friend in the passenger’s seat. The so-called front in this war was always changing. But we had already passed the last rebel checkpoint and we knew whatever front existed was beginning to reveal itself.
Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.
We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.
Two armed trucks raced toward us from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but have no clear leader or command structure.
Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gadhafi’s forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.
We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.
“We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gadhafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.
With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gadhafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.
Libya: Tripoli scenes from the uprising:
I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched in front of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.
“Help, help,” I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. “Anton, are you OK?” I shouted between bursts of fire.
“No,” he said, in a much weaker voice.
****
I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid Internet connection, by evening.
But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by confusion, abductions and an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had none of the idealism of Tunis or Cairo. For me, it began with a rifle butt to he head, which bled into weeks of uncertainty, crushing captivity and ended, however improbably, in a four-star hotel in the besieged Libyan capital.
Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gadhafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.
I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi’s “katiba” and took them by force.
I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.
As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.
With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.
Our plan was to try to get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.
But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu and I had leaped into for escape. We went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.
Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.
We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.
The red minibus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.
“Hit by a Sam 7,” Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.
****
The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn’t know that we were reporters. Rebels didn’t dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.
I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It means “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.
There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me. He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out.
As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head. My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily through my body. I felt no pain.
I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.
A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, “You go on patrol! You go on patrol!” as if he knew exactly what we’d been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. “Gadhafi Meia Meia,” a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gadhafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me. After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gadhafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country’s dictatorial leader of more than four decades.
Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.
“Jim, are you OK?” she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.
Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa waves as he leaves 10 Downing Street in London, December 12, 2011 (Credit: Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly) 
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama 
Hassan Nasrallah (Credit: AP/Mahmoud Tawil) 
Syrian rebels (Credit: AP) 
Libyan rebels head towards the front line outside the eastern town of Brega, Libya Friday, April 1, 2011 (Credit: AP) 
