The Muslim Brotherhood speaks
Michael Totten and Armin Rosen interview Esam El-Arian of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This ought to give you some flavor.
MJT: Now, wait just a minute.
Armin Rosen: You think it’s okay for China to buy oil from Sudan, but it’s not okay for the U.S. to re-establish ties with Qaddafi after he gave up his nuclear weapons program? Isn’t that a double standard?
Esam El-Erian: China’s interests are economic only. It doesn’t link economics and politics. All your candidates say they will transfer your embassy from Tel Aviv to Al Quds [Jerusalem].
MJT: They always say that, but they never do it.
Esam El-Erian: But what’s the message to the Arab world? This is very dangerous for the image of Americans. You are biased!
MJT: Yeah, but you’re biased, too. You guys are completely biased toward the Palestinians.
Esam El-Erian: When Congressmen stood up thirty times to salute Netanyahu when he gave his speech in the Congress, it destroyed any dream for peace.
MJT: Why should Americans be unbiased, but it’s okay for you to be biased?
Esam El-Erian: We are fighting for and defending our interests.
MJT: So are we. That’s how the world works.
Esam El-Erian: This is our right.
Can you imagine a democratic Syria or a democratic Jordan assimilating Palestinians in their lands? They cannot. It is a matter of time. Those people must go back [to Israel]. You prevent Mexicans by force from secret immigration.
MJT: Only illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants.
Esam El-Erian: This is illegal. We cannot have non-citizens in our lands. They take our jobs.
MJT: Palestinian refugees have been living in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan for more than 60 years.
Esam El-Erian: No! Even if they’ve been there for 200 years, they must go back [to Israel].
MJT: What about all the Jews in Israel that got thrown out of places like Baghdad?
Esam El-Erian: Let them live together.
MJT: Should they go back to Baghdad?
Esam El-Erian: Let them live together. Why not? Live together.
MJT: They can’t live together because they don’t like each other.
Esam El-Erian: What about the Jews who came from Russia? Why do you put pressure on Syrian people, or Lebanese people, to compensate and tolerate Palestinians? You never put any pressure on Israel to compensate or tolerate Palestinians. Is this biased or not biased?
MJT: It’s biased, but why should we not be biased and not stick by our allies, while you are biased and stick by your allies? That’s just how the world works. Look, I don’t expect Egyptians to suddenly like Israel, so why…
Esam El-Erian: Our only war is the war for democracy. Those guys in Tahrir Square and Syria and Yemen are struggling for democracy. When democracy flourishes, it will solve everything, including the conflict with Israel. Democracy will solve it, peacefully, without bloodshed. We need democracy and freedom. These are human values. Are we an exception? We are not an exception!
You spend 40 million dollars here to promote democracy. This was declared in the Congress. This is good. But you can keep this for yourselves, and we can build our democracy without any aid.
MJT: You would rather that Americans who support Egyptian democracy not help you?
Esam El-Erian: Keep your money for poor Americans. It’s better for you.
MJT: Well, a lot of Americans would agree with you about that.
Esam El-Erian: You have trouble with your health care system. Sick people in America need this money. It would be good for them. And good for us.
He jumps around a little bit from topic to topic, doesn't he? Here's another one:
MJT: Who is the enemy of the Egyptians?
Esam El-Erian: Israelis.
MJT: You guys have a peace treaty with Israel.
Esam El-Erian: If they respect it, the Egyptian people will respect it, but the Israelis do not respect it.
MJT: Israel is not attacking Egypt.
Esam El-Erian: Israel attacks everybody.
MJT: Israel is not attacking Egypt.
Esam El-Erian: Why are you neglecting the attack on Gaza?
MJT: Gaza is not Egypt.
Esam El-Erian: Bombs came over our borders. Why do you neglect the treaty? We have no comprehensive peace and no Palestinian state.
The whole world is changing. This is a time to revise the whole world order, as George Bush the father said. We need a new world order. Human beings should have equal lives and equal opportunities with the West. We must share in this new order and not be neglected all the time.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Michael Totten, Muslim Brotherhood
Michael Totten visits Hebron
It took him a while to write about it, but Michael Totten visited Hebron when he was in Israel last summer, and he's now
written about it.
Everyone on the street could plainly see Eve’s Israeli license plates, and the posture from some of the young men walking by was palpably hostile.
Most communication between humans is non-verbal. It’s conveyed through body language and is the same across cultures. I wasn’t imagining the hatred directed at me from some of the Palestinian men on that road. It was obvious.
I am not paranoid around Arabs, not after having lived in an Arab country. Nor am I paranoid around Palestinians. I’ve met too many to count in Israel and was never once stared at in a hostile manner in Ramallah, perhaps because it was obvious, at least to some, that I was American and not Israeli, at least while I was walking around and talking to people. On my way into Hebron, however, no one could have known that I was American. Thanks to the plates on Eve’s car and the glass between me and them, they naturally assumed I was Israeli. And I felt their hatred as though it were heat.
Just a few weeks after I left, several Israeli civilians in a car much like Eve’s—including a pregnant woman—were shot to death on that very road by Palestinian gunmen.
...
“That’s certainly a primary reason,” David [Wilder] said. “Hebron is the first Jewish city in Israel. This is where Abraham came 3700 years ago. He lived here. All the patriarchs and matriarchs lived here. King David started the Kingdom of Israel here before he went up to Jerusalem. And with very few exceptions, Jews have always been living here. The last time there were no Jews here before the riots in 1929 was back in 1100 when the Crusaders threw all the Jews out and replaced them with Christians. The Christians have since been replaced with Arabs. But otherwise there were always Jews here. This community is part of a chain that goes all the way back to the beginning of Judaism.”
...
“Do you have any contact at all with the Palestinians here?” I said.
“Today?” David said. “Virtually none. There used to be contact. Relations between Jews and Arabs used to be good. Most relationships were positive. But in 1929, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, began inciting the Arabs. The Jews here were warned to gather weapons for self-defense, but they said no, the Arabs are our friends, they will protect us. They protected us in 1921, and the Jews here were sure they’d be protected again. So they didn’t take up weapons. And they were defenseless.”
...
“If you’re afraid you can’t live here,” David said, “but Jews in Israel are targeted no matter where they live. I know who lives around us, and I know what they’ve done. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it many times. Somebody put a teddy bear out here in the market that had wires sticking out of it. It was a bomb. They were hoping one of our kids would pick it up. So the army closed the market.”
He took me around the corner and showed me a destroyed home that Israelis recently occupied before the army threw them out.
“When we came back in 1967,” David said, “there was nothing here. Everything was destroyed. More recently we asked if we could move into empty buildings that were old Jewish property. The government, of course, wouldn’t let us. But after the baby was killed by a sniper, we moved in anyway. We put some apartments in here. And after five years the army evicted us. A year later two families who didn’t have anywhere else to go moved back in, one here and one at the other end. After they were discovered, the government sent hundreds of Israeli soldiers in to pull them out. The soldiers came in with sledgehammers and destroyed everything.”
Nobody gets to live in that building, not Jews and not Arabs, so the building is wasted and ruined. An entire swath of the old city is like this. Hebron would be a beautiful place if everyone could live together peaceably like they do elsewhere, but they can’t, so it’s not.
“These buildings,” he said, “without any doubt, belong to us. The courts accept that. But they won’t let us use the buildings because then there would be more Jewish families here. Some people don’t think we shouldn’t be here in the first place, so they certainly won’t let us grow. Palestinians have 97 percent of this city. They can build whatever they want wherever they want, but we’re not allowed to build anything.”
“There are, what, 800 Jews here?” I said. “And as many, if not more, Israeli soldiers? Why are there so many soldiers protecting so few people?
“It’s true that they’re here to protect us,” he said. “They’re also here to protect you and the other visitors. The main reason they’re here, though, isn’t to patrol this area, but to patrol the other side of the city. They go over there and arrest terrorists before they can blow themselves up in Jerusalem. They’re protecting the entire country and making sure Hamas doesn’t take over the area. If the Israeli army wasn’t doing that, Hamas would have taken over a long time ago. And everyone knows it.”
He took me to a memorial for the victims of the 1929 massacre. Sixty seven of Hebron’s Jews were killed in late August that year. Houses and synagogues were vandalized. Hundreds, though, were saved by Arabs who not only refused to participate, but hid would-be victims from their rampaging neighbors in their own houses.
“The killers did horrible things to people,” David said. “They castrated men. An Arab working at a bakery put his Jewish boss into the oven and baked him. They cut off women’s breasts and horribly raped them. These are the easy pictures to look at.”
...
Human life is surely more important than property and the right to move freely, but security here comes at a terrible cost to the city in the absence of peace and civil relations. What the Israeli military calls the “sterile zone” was once a vibrant ancient city. Today, it looks like a ghost town, as though everyone had been driven out by a violent catastrophe, which is pretty close to what happened. These streets are in Hebron’s old city, a part of town that would overflow with thousands of tourists and pilgrims from all over the world if it weren’t a slum made hideous by hatred and war.
Read the whole thing.
And as always with Michael, look at the pictures.
Labels: 1929 Hebron massacre, David Wilder, Hebron, Michael Totten
Read a chapter from The Road to Fatima Gate online
For those of you who are in doubt over whether to buy
The Road to Fatima Gate, author Michael Totten has put a chapter of it up online. You can read Part 1
here and Part 2
here.
Labels: Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
Lebanon is more important than Iraq
Jennifer Rubin publishes a two-part interview with Michael Totten about his new book,
The Road to Fatima Gate. What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall during that conversation! Part 1 of the interview is
here and part 2 is
here. Here are some highlights from Part 1:
But Totten also learned an important lesson when he left Beirut. “I went to Hezbollah-controlled parts of the country because what I was seeing in Beirut was not the entire story.” He is blunt: “I’ve never seen such bloodthirsty, warmongering propaganda in my life.” In fact, there was “no indication you were in Lebanon.” There were Hezbollah and Iranian flags, and vicious anti-Israeli propaganda and posters of the Ayatollah were omnipresent. “They were mobilized for total war.” In some respects the oppression and Islamic extremism are worse there than in Iran. “The difference,” he says, “is that in Iran Iranians hate the government. That’s obvious now.” But in the Hezbollah parts of Lebanon, he relates, “There is no opposition to Iran.” The result, and the predicament for the West, he says, is that in southern Lebanon, “Hezbollah rules with the consent of the governed.”
...
“Public opinion was 90 percent against the conduct of the [Second Lebanon] war,” Totten recalls. The stalemate and the political fallout from an unsuccessful war rocked Israel. Unless Israel was willing to fight a long ground war (akin to what Gen. David Petraeus would wage in Iraq), Totten thinks the air force should have hit another target – Syria or Iran. He says bluntly, “Assad in Syria is the kind of guy who can have an attitude adjustment rather easily. He told Joe Klein during the Iraq war, ‘Please send this message: I am not Saddam Hussein.’”
Totten continues, “Assad is incredibly vulnerable.” Two days of bombing Syria could well have been more effective than a month of bombing Hezbollah, he contends. Hezbollah can’t be supplied and can’t sustain itself “if Assad is no longer going to be the logistics hub” for the terror group.
And here are some highlights from Part 2.
By 2008 the Beirut spring (the “Cedar Revolution”) was a distant memory, and Hezbollah would make strides in its domination of Lebanon. Totten says simply, “In 2008 Hezbollah proved it could do what it wants by invading and occupying the capital city. After that, all it has to say is ‘boo.’ If it wants to collapse the government, it can. It can kill you, even if you are you a member of parliament.”
...
Now even the pretense of an independent Lebanon is gone. “Hezbollah,” Totten says “is the biggest threat the Israelis have in the world. Hamas is not even a bat boy in the league Hezbollah plays in.”
Hezbollah has a better-equipped fighting force than many countries. Totten says, “Hezbollah has rockets that can reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. You’ve been to Tel Aviv?” I nod. “Those glass skyscrapers would have missiles crashing through them” in a Hezbollah attack. And Totten emphasizes, “Hezbollah is the Mediterranean branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”
Totten returns to the key point: An Iranian surrogate is on Israel’s border and “Israel failed to stop it.” But Totten doesn’t believe there was an easy military solution. He recalls, “The Israelis fought a counter-insurgency war against Hezbollah from 1982-2000, which shouldn’t be surprising since we’ve been fighting the Taliban for 10 years. Counter-insurgency is really hard.” So absent that sort of bloody effort, the options were few. The United Nations, Totten explains, “could have authorized force to block off the Lebanon and Syrian border. But that would have turned into a small Iraq.”
Totten suggests it’s folly to chase after Hezbollah. He says, “Hezbollah is a terrorist guerilla army. Iran has an address and governs people who hate it. Israel is more likely to succeed by going after Iran, but I’m not saying it should do it today. Israel is hoping the Iranians can overthrow their government.” If Israel did go after Iran militarily, “Israel would get hit really hard.” I ask if this is endangering the Zionist vision, which is to provide Jews with a haven. Totten says cautiously, “There is no getting around it; Jews are safer here than in Israel.” But he recalls, “In 1973 thousands of people were killed in a couple of days. Israel thought the Egyptian and Syrian armies might wipe out the whole country, so I wouldn’t say this current situation is worse than that.”
...
In the near term, Totten says, “Regime change [is Syria] is unlikely. Assad will fight as hard as Gaddafi.” Moreover, a military option could very well “start a regional war. What could we do non-militarily? There are not really many good options. But we should not describe him [Assad] as a reformer, we should not have an ambassador in Damascus and we should not engage him except to tell him what to do.”
The underlying problem in the region is not Hezbollah or Syria, certainly. Iran is the fundamental threat to Israel and the West more generally. The threat that it will acquire a nuclear weapons capability has receded from the headlines but has not diminished. As for military action, Totten says, “I think there is a will in Israel for it, but not in the U.S. in either party.” And once Iran acquires such weapons, our already minimal ability to deter Iranian aggression will diminish even further. “We’re not going to do anything, just like we didn’t risk a nuke confrontation with Soviet Union in 1956” in Hungary, Totten contends.
Read
both parts.
I can't wait for my copy of the book (it's on the way!).
Labels: Jennifer Rubin, Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
Interview with Michael Totten
The Daily Caller
interviews Michael Totten regarding his new book,
The Road to Fatima Gate. Here are some highlights.
2. Tell us about your experience dealing with Hezbollah while you were in Lebanon.
Dealing with Hezbollah is surreal. When I first arrived in 2005, the media relations department was reaching out to Western journalists and academics. The party’s officials hoped to get some positive coverage in the U.S. and Europe, but the guy in charge threatened me with violence after I cracked a joke he didn’t like on my blog. I was also detained by Hezbollah security agents when they suspected an American photographer I was working with was Jewish because his middle name is Isaac. He and I were both blacklisted for life for no real reason at all, though by now I’ve done much more to cheese them off than cracking a joke at their expense.
Almost every journalist I know who has ventured into Hezbollah territory has been detained, screamed at, threatened, or all of the above. They used to kidnap American journalists and chain them to radiators. The party’s officials and security people seem oblivious to Totten’s First Rule of Media Relations: be nice to people who write about you for a living.
Yet some reporters nevertheless run off to Lebanon and romanticize these terror-guerrillas as the authentic Third World resistance. They write fanboy-style dispatches about them in various newspapers and magazines. Some pretend that’s not what they’re doing while others are utterly shameless. They’re the same kinds of people who were communists during the Cold War. Hezbollah’s obscurantist and violent behavior makes no more an impression on them than Stalin’s show trials did to true believers in the 1930s.
...
9. What country keeps you up at night in terms of being a threat to America?
I can fall asleep almost instantly (waking up is more complicated), so nothing keeps me up at night except a late cup of coffee. I can and do sleep soundly even in war zones. But the one country that troubles me most — for all the usual reasons, but also for some of my own — is Iran. What Iran has done to the parts of Lebanon it controls through Hezbollah is absolutely horrendous, and I watched with my own eyes the Iranian government try with all its might to do the same thing in Iraq through the militias it sponsored there.
I don’t believe Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel, but at the same time we and the Israelis would be fools to think it can’t happen. I believe Iran won’t nuke Israel, but I don’t believe that in quite the same way that I believe France won’t nuke Israel.
If Iran and its Syrian, Hezbollah, and Hamas allies all decide to wage war at the same time — watch out. The entire region will burn, and the entire world’s energy source will be jeopardized to an extent few of us would be comfortable contemplating for long.
Read the whole thing.
I know what I would have asked. I've met Michael briefly, and I'm also friends with Noah Pollak, who spent time with Michael in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 (I actually thought it was 2007 when they were there and forgot that they were there during the war too). I recall that they lied about Noah being Jewish when they went to Hezbullahland. In response to one of the questions, Michael says that he was most scared when he and Noah were in a war zone on the Lebanese border with Israel. I wonder how much of that fear was fear of Hezbullah discovering that Noah is Jewish.
If either of you guys sees this and feels like answering, please do.
Labels: Hezbullah, Michael Totten, Southern Lebanon, The Road to Fatima Gate
For those who are tempted....
Michael Totten's
The Road to Fatima Gate has been released. My copy is on its way to Israel (thanks
Sunlight!). For those of you who have not yet decided whether to buy it, there's a lengthy excerpt
here that will let you try it out. I'm looking forward to reading it.
Labels: Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
Who are the Libyan rebels?
Michael Totten (pictured) finds someone he trusts on the ground in Benghazi and asks about the
Libyan rebels.
Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof is on the ground in Benghazi, Libya, working with the Shabakat Group which she says “has an extensive network in country amongst the transitional government, tribal chiefs, rebel forces, former Qaddafi officials, and the civilian populace.”
I don’t know her personally, but we have many friends and colleagues in common, people I trust more than anyone else in this business. So when I found out she was over there and had embedded, so to speak, with the anti-Qaddafi rebels, I had to ask her some questions that hardly anyone seems to have an answer to yet.
MJT: Who, exactly, are these rebels you’ve met? Are they democrats? Tribal leaders? Islamists? All of the above? What?
Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof: The rebels I’ve met so far are mainly young, educated, middle class, urban people with a powerful wish for democracy.
If you look at the demographics in Libya, 82.6 percent of the people are literate, an estimated 88 percent live in cities—mostly in Benghazi and Tripoli—and about half the population is under the age of 15. So the young urban rebels in Benghazi may be fairly representative.
The tribes exist here, but they’re more of a cultural phenomenon than a political one. I don’t think anyone here imagines, or wants, the tribes stepping up to power, though this may differ somewhat between regions.
About the Islamists—there are radical elements amongst the rebels, to be sure, but they are a minority, and they’re all grateful to the West at the moment. You would be amazed to see the number of people around here waving Western flags and thanking the West, especially France.
In Benghazi, every person I’ve met so far has insisted on showing me the bridge in town where the Qaddafi troops arrived and started firing—and that bridge is actually inside Benghazi—saying he would cleanse the city “street by street, and house by house.” They all say, “Allah saved us, he sent us French and British and American planes like angels, Alhamdulillah.”
Hmmm.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: al-Qaeda, Libyan civil war, Libyan regime change, Michael Totten
Gadhafi matters more than Mubarak or Ben Ali
Michael Totten explains why the fall of
Muammar Gadhafi would be far more significant than the falls of Egypt's Mubarak or Tunisia's Ben Ali.
The contrast between Libya and its neighbors is stark. When I visited Tunisia just a few months before going to Tripoli, I met plenty of people willing to criticize Ben Ali even when others were present. Sure, they lowered their voices, but they didn’t cower in fear. Egypt under Mubarak was even more open. I spoke to dissident bloggers like “Big Pharaoh” and “Sandmonkey” in restaurants and bars, and they didn’t care if anyone heard them slagging the president. Cairo’s mukhabarat didn’t seem to mind what anyone said as long as they didn’t act on their disgruntlement. Granted, regimes like these wouldn’t have lasted decades if they were easy to get rid of, but, ultimately, they lack the staying power of the hard totalitarian states.
States like Libya, that is. Tunisia is pleasant, prosperous, and heavily Frenchified, while Egypt is a poverty-stricken shambles, but Ben Ali and Mubarak were both pragmatic, standard issue authoritarians. Qaddafi, by comparison, is an emotionally unstable ideological megalomaniac. He says he’s the sun of Africa and swears to unite the Arabs and Africans underneath him. He has repeatedly threatened to ban money and schools, and he treats his country, communist-style, like a mad scientist’s laboratory. What I knew when I was there holds true today, even as his grip on power seems shaky: This guy is not going to liberalize, and he is not going to go quietly.
Indeed, his instruments of internal repression are proving as ruthless as promised in the face of strong civilian protests. (Libya’s second largest city of Benghazi and third largest city of Bayda are now reported to be in the hands of the opposition and under the guardianship of citizen militias and officers who have switched sides.) They’re busy assaulting demonstrators not with rubber bullets and tear gas but with artillery fire, attack helicopters, and war planes. Qaddafi has even imported mercenaries from Sub-Saharan Africa in case his own military officers flinch at orders to murder their neighbors (which some of them have, joining the demonstrators in the streets).
Ben Ali and Mubarak were low-hanging fruit, but, if a tyrant as vicious and murderous as Qaddafi can be taken out, it would seem just about anyone can be. If the people of Libya manage to overthrow him, it might even inspire Iran’s Green Movement to finish what it started in 2009 and push all the way to the end. But if Qaddafi survives by mass murder, which he just might, and if the world lets him get away with it, the Iranian regime and other despotic governments will take comfort in the knowledge that they, too, might do the same without consequence.
All of which makes the Obama administration's silence in the face of Gadhafi's war on his people - especially when compared with Obama's pushing Hosni Mubarak out the door - all the more stunning. One would think that the United States would do
anything that would lead to the Iranian regime falling -
including especially pushing out a vicious tyrant like Gadhafi.
The West will pay for its lack of courage to take on Gadhafi. Either - as Michael notes - he will survive by slaughtering his people, Libya will go down like Rwanda two decades ago as an eternal shame on the West's values, or Gadhafi will be pushed out and what replaces him will be anarchy or Islamism, which will be hostile to the West and its values.
Labels: Barack Obama, Libyan regime change, Michael Totten, Muammar Gaddafi
Stephen Walt gets it wrong again
Here's
Stephen Walt on Libya from January 2010 (Hat Tip:
Martin Kramer).
First, although Libya is far from a democracy, it also doesn't feel like other police states that I have visited. I caught no whiff of an omnipresent security service -- which is not to say that they aren't there -- and there were fewer police or military personnel on the streets than one saw in Franco's Spain. The Libyans with whom I spoke were open and candid and gave no sign of being worried about being overheard or reported or anything like that. The TV in my hotel room featured 50+ channels, including all the normal news services (BBC World Service, CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, etc.) along with contemporary U.S. sitcoms like "2-1/2 Men," shows like "Desperate Housewives," assorted movies, and one of the various "CSI" clones. A colleague on the trip told me that many ordinary Libyans have satellite dishes and that the government doesn't interfere with transmissions. I tried visiting various political websites from my hotel room and had no problems, although other human rights groups report that Libya does engage in selective filtering of some political websites critical of the regime. It is also a crime to criticize Qaddafi himself, the government's past human rights record is disturbing at best, and the press in Libya is almost entirely government-controlled. Nonetheless, Libya appears to be more open than contemporary Iran or China and the overall atmosphere seemed far less oppressive than most places I visited in the old Warsaw Pact.
...
My own view (even before I visited) is that the improvement of U.S.-Libyan relations as one of the few (only?) success stories in recent U.S. Middle East diplomacy. Twenty-five years ago, Libya and the United States were bitter antagonists: U.S. and Libyan warplanes clashed on several occasions in the Gulf of Sidra, and Libyan agents bombed a discotheque in Germany that was frequented by U.S. soldiers. U.S. aircraft attacked Libya more than once, targeting Qaddafi on at least one occasion (and killing his adopted daughter Hannah). Libya was also held responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 (though some recent accounts have questioned its culpability) and it had an active WMD development program and received substantial nuclear weapons technology from the illicit A. Q Khan network.
I guess those 'improved relations' with the United States are why President Obama has been almost silent in the face of the slaughter going on in Libya.
So was Walt duped? Is he just a tool? And by the way, did he visit the same country
Michael Totten did?
Call me unimpressed with Walt's overwhelming brilliance. He's not - as we say in Boston - wicked smaht.
Labels: Libya, Martin Kramer, Michael Totten, Stephen Walt
Michael Totten in Libya
Fortunately for Michael, he's not there now, but back in 2005 (the date on the link to his original article in the sidebar is December 30, 2005) Michael Totten visited Libya and wrote about it for LA Weekly. He
re-upped the post at Pajamas Media. As usual, the pictures are stunning (okay, most of the country is concrete so they're not as stunning as usual). Here's a very small sample of what he has to say.
The gift shop offered a wide range of totalitarian propaganda books and pamphlets in multiple languages. A fantastic selection of Qaddafi watches ranged in price from $25 to $600. I bought one for $25. Qaddafi is shown wearing his military uniform, officer’s hat and sunglasses like a swaggering Latin American generalissimo. It was busted right out of the box, the hour hand stuck forever at 9 o’clock.
The lobby was plastered all over with portraits of the boss in various poses. He wore shades in most of them, but in some pictures from his early days, he wore a buffoonish 1970s haircut instead.
I had to suck down my giggles. God, was this guy for real? His unexportable Third Universal Theory was internationalist insofar as it obliterated any sense that Tripoli was Middle Eastern or African — at least from the point of view of the back seat of the car. I could have been in any former Soviet republic, or even in some parts of the Bronx. But look at those portraits! Now there was something exotic.
Most of the other men in the lobby (I hadn’t seen any women since I landed) looked like Arab businessmen who bought their suits from Turkish remainder bins. The only expensively dressed man sat at a shiny wooden desk, the kind you’d expect to see at a law firm. He had no work in front of him, not even papers to shuffle. His job was to stare holes through everyone who stepped in and out of the elevator.
There were no towels in my room. The bathroom was, however, generously stocked with products, all of them packaged in green — the color of Islam and Qaddafi’s so-called revolution. The hotel gave me green shampoo, green soap, green bath gel, green toothpaste and even a green shoehorn and comb. All were clearly (and, I must say, unnecessarily) marked “Made in the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.” There was no booze (it’s banned), no soda, no water, no juice in the mini-bar. A burn the size and shape of a deflated basketball was seared into the carpet.
I switched on the TV: nothing but hysterical state-run propaganda. I couldn’t lower the volume (the knob was broken), but at least I could change the channel and choose whether I wanted to be droned at or screeched at in Arabic.
My window overlooked the Mediterranean Sea and, closer in, a drained and stained swimming pool. There was a forlorn rocky beach down there, cut off from the hotel and everything else by a blank gray slab of a wall. The cold wind whistling into the room from the patio sounded like moaning ghosts trapped in a well.
...
Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the façade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The bastard couldn’t even leave people alone when they were home.
The posters weren’t funny anymore. There were too damn many of them, for one thing. And, besides, Qaddafi is ugly. He may earn a few charisma points for traveling to Brussels and pitching his Bedouin tent on the Parliament lawn, but he’s no Che Guevara in the guapo department.
I felt ashamed that I first found his portraits even slightly amusing. The novelty wore off in less than a day, and he’s been in power longer than I’ve been alive.
He was an abstraction when I first got there. But after walking around his outdoor laboratory and everywhere seeing his beady eyes and that arrogant jut of his mouth, it suddenly hit me. He isn’t merely Libya’s tyrant. He is a man who would be god.
His Mukhabarat, the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.
And he is deranged. He says he’s the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can’t help it if the people of Libya love him so much they plaster his portrait up everywhere. Fuck him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.
...
Worlds can’t meet worlds. But people can meet people. I forget who said that, but I like it, and I thought about it as I walked around inside Libya, hanging out, and talking to regular folks.
In a nation where so many report to the secret police, where a sideways word can get you imprisoned or killed, walking around blue-eyed and palefaced with an American accent has its advantages. I met one shopkeeper who opened right up when he and I found ourselves alone in his store.
“Do Americans know much about Libya?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
He wanted to teach me something about his country, but he didn’t know where to start. So he recited encyclopedia factoids.
He listed the principal resources while counting his fingers. I stifled a smirk when he named the border states. (I had looked at a map.) When he told me Arabic was the official language, I wondered if he thought I was stupid or deaf.
“And Qaddafi is our president,” he said. “About him, no comment.” He laughed, but I don’t think he thought it was funny.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Comment away. I don’t live here.”
He thought about that. For a long drawn-out moment, he calculated the odds and weighed the consequences. Then the dam burst.
“We hate that fucking bastard, we have nothing to do with him. Nothing. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.
“Qaddafi steals,” he told me. “He steals from us.” He spoke rapidly now, twice as fast as before, as though he had been holding back all his life. He wiped sweat off his forehead with trembling hands. “The oil money goes to his friends. Tunisians next door are richer and they don’t even have any oil.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“We get three or four hundred dinars each month to live on. Our families are huge, we have five or six children. It is a really big problem. We don’t make enough to take care of them. I want to live in Lebanon. Beirut is the second Paris. It is civilized! Women and men mix freely in Lebanon.”
Read the whole thing. Until recently, I thought of Gadhafi as a clown. In fact, I still think of him that way. But he's a brutal and deadly clown. He can't die soon enough.
Labels: Libya, Michael Totten, Muammar Gaddafi, Tripoli
Great new book coming out in April
I would love to get a copy of
this, but unfortunately, for now at least, he's only taking orders to ship to the US and Canada (but if you want to buy me one and bring it with you to Israel for Passover...).
Labels: Michael Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate
Purity of arms
During his trip to Israel this past summer, Michael Totten saw how the IDF trains its soldiers to fight in civilian areas while not harming civilians. The doctrine is called
purity of arms.
God only knows how Hezbollah trains its fighters, but I have a pretty good idea what the Israelis are up to because Abe Lapson, an IDF director of combat engineering, hosted me at the urban warfare training center in the northern Negev near the border with Gaza.
They built a scale model city out there in the desert where Israeli soldiers engage in sophisticated combat exercises. They fight each other in these exercises, so it’s always a challenge. Trained Israeli soldiers are far more dangerous than any army—even Hezbollah—the modern Arab world has yet produced.
I saw the skyline of the “city” as we approached on a road through desert, and from a distance it almost looks real. Up close it’s different.
“It almost looks like a set for a video game,” I said.
Lapson chuckled and said, “But it’s real.”
I could see everything from the control tower. The buildings are smaller and farther apart on the outskirts than they are in the center, just like a real village or town in the West Bank, Gaza, or Lebanon. And I have to say they did a pretty good job with the realism. Pyrotechnic teams set off explosions. Vehicles emit different colors of smoke depending on what kind of damage they’ve supposedly taken. Walls have simulated blast holes because doors and windows are often booby-trapped, forcing soldiers to create alternate entrances.
The Israelis here shoot blanks at each other, and they wear sensors on their torsos and limbs that tell them when and where they’ve been “shot” and whether or not they are “dead.”
“We’ve even argued about how much garbage we should put on the ground for realism,” Lapson said.
The casbah and the refugee camp are the most dangerous places. They’re built in a hodgepodge manner and are usually crowded. It’s hard to find adequate cover because roofs often cover the paths. None of the Israeli soldiers standing above can provide overwatch protection.
Of course, the fake casbah and refugee camp are easier to fight in than the real ones. In the real world there are people, donkeys, clothes lines, vendors, and noise, not to mention live ammunition and traps.
I’ve never been to a Hezbollah training camp, although I did ask Hezbollah officials if I could see one before they blacklisted me for “writing against the party.” They refused. Still, I’m certain they don’t have dummies representing civilians who aren’t to be touched.
The Israelis do, though. They place mannequins on the grounds dressed in the clothes of civilians and peacekeepers as well as enemy soldiers and terrorists.
“The other side includes both hostiles and civilians,” Lapson said, “and the hostiles will often embed themselves among the civilians. We go over a large number of what-if scenarios. We imbue an ethical and moral backbone in all our soldiers from the very beginning, and we have humanitarian officers with our infantry troops. We take extra precautions, even when it puts our own troops in danger.”
You could argue, I suppose, that the Israelis pulled a con job on me, that they planted these civilian-clothed mannequins as part of some Soviet-style propaganda campaign, but there’s no evidence that’s what happened. Totalitarian regimes sometimes use Potemkin stage pieces and actors to fool foreign journalists. Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) had just such an experience when he visited North Korea. Israel, though, is the sort of place that only behaves this way in the feverish minds of conspiracy theorists.
“We train our soldiers to respect sacred buildings,” Lapson said. “We have a lot of respect for the holy places of all peoples and all cultures. This is something we integrate into our training. We train our soldiers with extra sensitivity even though we know it can be used against us by our enemies.”
“What do you do if someone is firing at you from a mosque?” I said.
“That’s a decision that’s made by the higher ranks on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “It’s always case-by-case even though it slows down the pace of the fighting. It’s very slow when we have house-to-house combat. It’s already slow, but when we have to stop and judge each individual case on its merits, we have to slow down the fighting even more.”
Read the whole thing and look at the pictures, which are spectacular as usual.
I have mixed feelings about this. I'm all in favor of abiding by the Geneva Convention and not targeting civilians, but the IDF goes much further than the Geneva Convention requires - much further than any army in the World goes - to avoid civilian casualties on the other side. That carries a price as we saw in Jenin in 2002 - we take much higher casualties than necessary among our own soldiers. Meanwhile, the other side uses its civilians as human shields, knowing that we will continue to play by the rules.
The rules also need updating, as I have discussed before. They are designed for battles between uniformed forces and not for fighting terrorists.
Labels: IDF purity of arms, IDF urban warfare training center, Michael Totten
TSA: A picture says 1,000 words
[Picture removed due to sleazy opportunistic Nevada lawyers]
The picture above in Thursday's
Denver Post. Caption:
Transportation Security Administration agents perform enhanced pat-downs on passengers at DIA on Wednesday amid growing controversy about the screenings and full-body scanners, one week before Thanksgiving air travelers crowd airports. (Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post)
Hey guys - make sure you cough while he's doing that.
Here's one for the ladies:
I read somewhere that underwire bras get TSA agents all excited, so keep that in mind when you dress for your trip.
This is from
Michael Totten in Friday's New York Post.
Terrorists have yet to use the same weapon twice, and the TSA isn't even looking for whatever they'll try to use next. I can think of all sorts of things a person could use to wreak havoc on a plane that aren't banned. Security officials should pay less attention to objects, and more attention to people.
The Israelis do. They are, out of dreadful necessity, the world's foremost experts in counterterrorism. And they couldn't care less about what your grandmother brings on a plane. Instead, officials at Ben Gurion International Airport interview everyone in line before they're even allowed to check in.
And Israeli officials profile. They don't profile racially, but they profile. Israeli Arabs breeze through rather quickly, but thanks to the dozens of dubious-looking stamps in my passport -- almost half are from Lebanon and Iraq -- I get pulled off to the side for more questioning every time. And I'm a white, nominally Christian American.
If they pull you aside, you had better tell them the truth. They'll ask you so many wildly unpredictable questions so quickly, you couldn't possibly invent a fake story and keep it all straight. Don't even try. They're highly trained and experienced, and they catch everyone who tries to pull something over on them.
Because I fit one of their profiles, it takes me 15 or 20 minutes longer to get through the first wave of security than it does for most people. The agents make up for it, though, by escorting me to the front of the line at the metal detector. They don't put anyone into a "porn machine." There's no point. Terrorists can't penetrate that deeply into the airport.
By the way, the profile that Michael fits is some of the visa stamps on his passport.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Michael Totten, strip or grope, TSA
Michael Totten and Armin Rosen interview Esam El-Arian of the Muslim Brotherhood. This ought to give you some flavor. 
