New Paradigms Are Needed To Manage Economies In 2011

By Dominique Strauss-Kahn 
This commentary was published in The Daily Star on 31/12/2010 

Over the last 25 years, the global economy has enjoyed a remarkable stretch of stable growth and low inflation.

The so-called “Great Moderation” lulled many policymakers into a false sense of security about their ability to manage the economy and deal with financial crises. But, as the Great Moderation metastasized into the Great Recession, fatal flaws in conventional thinking came to light. One of the most notable was just how poorly we grasped the linkages between the financial system and the broader economy – as well as the linkages between countries.

Today, as policymakers seek new paradigms for managing the economy in 2011 and beyond, a better understanding of these linkages will be essential to promoting economic growth and reducing the risk of crises. Equally important is the realization that by working together, we can build a more successful and more stable global economy, for the benefit of all countries.

Let me spell out what this means for three policy objectives: building a stronger and safer financial sector, achieving more balanced and more stable growth, and managing large and volatile capital flows.

A stronger and safer financial system is the bedrock of a successful economy. This requires strong regulation, with a sensible rulebook for financial markets and institutions. And, to ensure that everyone plays by the rules, financial institutions must be supervised intensively.

Now, even with the best rules and supervision, crises will still occur – which is why we need effective resolution mechanisms to deal with institutions that get into trouble. And, finally, given powerful interactions within the financial sector and across the broader economy, we need an overarching framework to manage risks in the financial system as a whole.

Much has already been done to advance regulatory reform, notably the recent agreement to strengthen bank capital (Basel III). Yet we are far from having the supervision needed for proper implementation of the rules. Effective resolution mechanisms and systemic frameworks remain even more elusive.

Moving to the broader economy, we have learned that growth must be balanced in order to be healthy. At the national level, this requires tools to prevent excesses in one sector from bringing down the entire economy. At the global level, it requires a better distribution of growth across countries, in order to prevent destabilizing imbalances.

What are the implications for macroeconomic policy?

Monetary policy needs to look beyond its core focus on low and stable inflation and pay much greater attention to financial stability. The debate now is how, exactly, to factor this imperative into monetary policy, and how to coordinate the work of monetary and regulatory authorities.

For fiscal policy, the crisis showed the value of maintaining low public debt and deficits during good times: countries with healthier public finances have more space to cushion the economic impact of crises. But the Great Recession has caused public debt and deficits in many advanced economies to soar.

How quickly fiscal retrenchment should be launched – and the right balance between higher taxes and lower spending – will vary by country, reflecting factors like the strength of the economic recovery, the market’s appetite for debt, and initial spending and revenue ratios. But the common objective for fiscal policy must be to support durable medium-term growth and job creation.

The distribution of income is another important issue. In the years leading up to the crisis, inequality rose in many countries, with worrisome consequences for social cohesion. Rising inequality may also have increased vulnerability to crisis: with fewer people able to dip into savings during bad times, the impact on growth is even larger.

Turning to the international dimension, understanding better how policies adopted in one country spill over onto other economies is key. This approach lies at the heart of the G-20’s efforts to achieve strong, stable, and balanced global growth. The International Monetary Fund is also stepping up its work in this area, through “spillover reports” on China, the euro zone, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Gaining a better appreciation of the financial linkages between countries is also important. During the crisis, we saw how quickly capital fled from countries previously considered safe bets. Today, many of these countries are reeling from a veritable tsunami of returning money.

Policymakers in many emerging-market countries worry that surging capital inflows will drive up the value of the local currency, destabilize financial markets, and fuel economic overheating. Their reactions range from buying up the foreign money to prevent currency appreciation to adopting capital controls, and, in extreme cases, to keeping the money out altogether. The situation has become quite tense, with talk of “currency wars” and a real risk of financial protectionism.

Clearly, we need to get a better handle on what is driving these capital inflows. We also need to identify the best policies for dealing with them – keeping in mind the impact of these policies on the global economy as a whole. And we should explore whether a system of global rules aimed at reducing the volatility of capital flows would be useful.

Global financial insurance is an important related issue. Just as a family backstops its savings with insurance, countries should be able to tap into a global financial safety net. Much has already been achieved since the crisis, through more resources for the IMF and new financing instruments. But more is needed, and the Fund is exploring cooperation with regional financing mechanisms, as well as new ways to use its instruments in a systemic crisis.

Let me tie all of this together.

One principal policy failure in the run-up to the crisis was a lack of imagination: we failed to appreciate just how intricate the global economic and financial web had become. Let our next failing not be the result of a lack of cooperation. We must reach across old dividing lines – both within economies and between them – and work together to build a stronger, more resilient global economy.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is managing director of the International Monetary Fund. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org).

Palestinian Housing Needs

By Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh
This commentary was published in The Jordan Times on 31/12/2010

The news carried in the media a couple of days ago about the Palestinian Authority’s plans to build the “first modern Palestinian city” is not only heartening and long overdue, but also significant.

The peace process between the Palestinians and the Israelis is at a total halt, due to the present Israeli government’s lack of interest in peace and its procrastination and subversive tactics. The only beneficiary of this stalemate is the Israeli government, which is losing no time in boosting its occupation and expansion policies, in the absence of real peace momentum.

In other words, the Israeli government takes the opportunity of the stalemate to confiscate more Palestinian lands, demolish more Palestinian houses, make movement for Palestinians in and among Palestinian towns more difficult, pressure Palestinians into leaving Palestine and, equally significantly, allow Israeli settlers to further expand their settlements and build new ones.

Of course, the real problem in Palestine is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The only way to end this occupation, and to restore to the Palestinians their rights, is through serious, sustained negotiations.

However, the Israeli occupation of Palestine should not be seen as the one and only problem. Settlements, which spring from the occupation, naturally, are another big problem. They are, actually, the more immediate problem to deal with.

In the absence of real peace negotiations and while Israel continues to expand and build settlements, what should the Palestinians (and those who support them in the Arab world and elsewhere) do about settlements?

The solution, I believe, does not lie in condemning settlements, as the Palestinians and others always do. Israel defies and disrespects humanitarian calls, human rights and (even) legal resolutions. Rather, the solution lies, in part, to be sure, in addressing Palestinian housing and living needs effectively.

Which brings me to the point about the “first modern Palestinian city”. It is projects like this that not only make life easier for the Palestinians but also enable them to stay in Palestine, thus countering Israeli occupation and settlement activities.

Most Palestinian cities and towns are overcrowded (many are slums in fact). The Palestinians need better housing, better roads, better schools, better hospitals, better universities, better farms, more gardens and parks, and better and more infrastructure.

The PA is expected to make these a priority. In the absence of real peace making, in fact even when peacemaking starts to happen, the PA needs to devote a great deal of attention to the daily lives and needs (including housing needs) of the Palestinian people.

This is where the real battle should be carried out, and this is where the Palestinians need and expect support from sympathisers in the Arab world and the international community.

Sympathy with Palestinians is important, words of comfort and solidarity are important, but tangible, concrete projects, like the city just spoken of, are what is needed now.

We should do all we can to enable Palestinians to stay in Palestine, especially since Israel is doing all it can to drive them out of their homeland.

Egypt: New Year Tragedy

This editorial was publish in the Arab News on 01/01/2011

It is essential that Egypt maintains its characteristic tolerance and moderation.

New Year has begun tragically and dangerously in Egypt with the killing of 21 people in a church in Alexandria with 79 injured in a terrorist attack.

The early theory espoused that Al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack cannot be ruled out. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been conducting a deadly campaign against Christians following the reported conversion to Islam by two Egyptian Christian women. The group says the women are being held against their will by the Coptic Church.

But at this time there is no firm evidence of an Al-Qaeda fingerprint. Meddling from abroad cannot be denied but does not address the issue in its fullest. The case is closed but not resolved, leaving everyone dissatisfied with the outcome.

No one can deny homegrown Muslim-Christian tension in Egypt: The seven Christians who were killed in a drive-by shooting on a church in 2009; the death of a Christian last November when hundreds of Christians rioted in Cairo after police suddenly stopped the construction of a church; and when a man with a knife stabbed worshippers in 2006, leading to days of clashes between Copts and Muslims — all point to the fact that sectarian violence is not new in Egypt and is arising with greater frequency. The country's characteristic tolerance and moderation has been starting to be replaced by an environment of sectarian exclusion and tension, undermining its tradition of religious coexistence.

The root cause: A tendency, across Egypt's sectarian divide, to place religious affiliation above the bonds of citizenry. It is through this narrow perspective that some people regard others, whether Muslims or Christians, in an exclusivist manner. It is through this flawed viewpoint that some people seek to live in a place of religious "purity." It is this quest for religious purity, which started in the 1970s, that is scuttling the boat. Under such circumstances, sectarian violence finds justification and religious hatred finds a cause. And this tendency for exclusion and the quest for religious purity are no longer confined to certain sectors of Egypt's Muslims. Even the Copts are now catching on.

Just as seriously, some sections of society have begun to accept only those versions that concord with their own views without even thinking that there may be another side to the story. Each side constructs its own theories of injustice. The normal objectivity and enlightened views of the parties concerned has turned into a one-sided attempt to lay the blame completely on the other.

To eliminate the root cause of the resentment, Egyptians should adopt a national spirit, with national identity taking precedence over narrower sectarian divisions. This is the only means to develop a modern nation state that respects citizens, upholds the values of tolerance and respects pluralism, whether religious, cultural, or political.

Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population of 84 million people, are, first and foremost, citizens and members of the Egyptian community and are not seen as a separate group or closed entity. As such, despite the Alex attack and those before it, Egypt continues to maintain a relatively cohesive national fabric. But simply depending upon a strong history of national unity is not enough. Egypt cannot afford to remain passive about sectarian tension; it cannot afford to alienate and exclude people on the basis of their religious affiliation. To break the cycle, it needs to revive its tradition of enlightened civil and religious rights.

Who Says Christians And Muslims Can't Live Together?

In the rural Lebanon of my childhood, people of both faiths dwelt side by side and helped each other in times of conflict

By Yvette Khoury

This commentary was published in The Guardian on 30/12/2010

Yarun village was bombed during conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. Christians and Muslims had lived peaceably side by side in the village for years. Photograph: Ali Hashisho/Reuters

 

 

I worship Allah and I am not a Muslim. I celebrate eid, and it is not a Muslim festival. I attended al-madrasa, but it was not a Muslim school. How might one explain what some perceive as contradictory terms? Allah, eid and madrasa are the Arabic words for God, festival and school, respectively. Therefore as an Arabic-speaking Christian these terms were part of my childhood vocabulary and so should have retained their apparent meanings. However, Allah, eid and madrasa have in recent times become associated with Islam and Muslims; they continue to be exploited and at times misused by the media.

Consequently, I have begun to feel alienated from the Arabic that was connected to my cultural upbringing. It is not unusual for a language to change and for its words to acquire different meanings over time. Nor am I the only person to feel alienated from her childhood linguistic and cultural associations. What is significant about the development of the above-mentioned terms is that their evolution seems to correlate with the decline of cross-cultural communication, religious tolerance and multi-faith communal co-habitation, ie people of different faiths living in the same community.

I grew up in a Lebanese farming village called Yarun, which was (and still is) inhabited by both Christians and Muslims. Yarun has a church and a mosque. Its patron saint is Saint George and, although I cannot tell you the name of its mosque, I can clarify that the Muslims in Yarun belong to the Shia sect. Furthermore, words such as burqa or hijab were unknown to me as a child – I only became acquainted with them in London. When Muslim Yaruni women went to al-hajj, they would wear scarves upon their return. As a child, I knew therefore that a hajji was a Muslim woman who covered her head because she had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. A Yaruni hajji was respected for what she believed and she did not show non-Muslims any hostility for not covering their heads. It was in London that I first encountered reproachful and contemptuous glances from the so-called pious Muslim women who seem to object to my uncovered and often unbound hair. Moreover, although hajj and hajji are the Arabic titles of masculine and feminine Muslim pilgrims, they are also used by Christians – some of the most devoted Christian couples in Yarun are affectionately known as hajj and hajji.

Yarun is a small village of no particular significance. It is situated on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Although Yarun dates from Phoenician times, that distant history must remain buried in its ancient rocks. In my living memory, Yarun was only mentioned once in the western media: when the village fell victim to the first systematic area bombardment by Israeli forces in July 2006. But the village's claim to fame, in my opinion, should not be Israeli bombardments: after all, these are not at all unique, since they occur on a regular basis (and often did when I lived there).

Yarun prides itself on the fact that Christians and Muslims still live side by side – even after 15 years of bloody fighting during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). Remarkably, the Yaruni community remained steadfast during the war; no blood was shed between Muslims and Christians and the only victims of the war were either shot by Israelis or were killed outside the village. What might this suggest? It suggests that the basis of cohabitation has more to do with cultural heritage than religious beliefs or political convictions.

Under attack

Indeed, to return to the incident that placed Yarun on the "global media map" in 2006, the villagers (Christians and Muslims alike) fled Israeli missiles and took shelter in a nearby village called Rmaish. (Compared with Yarun, Rmaish is a town, but for our purpose it is a village.) Israel targeted Yarun because of the strong connection between some of its Muslim inhabitants and Hezbollah (God's party). The unlawfully armed group, based in south Lebanon, had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and this led to Israel's disproportionate and heavy-handed retaliation against the entire country. The Muslim Yarunis who were not connected to al-hizb followed their Christian neighbours and fled to Rmaish hoping that they would be safer among its all-Christian congregation.

As the Israeli bombardment continued, more people from the surrounding villages flocked to Rmaish for safety. Despite their own anxieties, the people of Rmaish accepted the fleeing refugees and shared with them what little resources they had. With no running rivers in the village, water was obviously the most precious commodity in the dry and hot Lebanese summer. Cut off from the rest of the country and with no outside aid for 21 days, Rmaishi resources were fast diminishing. But the people of Rmaish did not discriminate between Muslim and Christian refugees: they housed and fed them all, as much they were able to. Faced with a common enemy and in times of adversity, these communities pull together on bases that have little to do with religious beliefs or political affiliations.

I personally have fond memories of growing up in a mixed-faith community. My parents hired Muslims who worked the fields side by side with Christians of the village. Growing up, I never felt or was made to feel that I should behave differently towards the Muslims in my community. Muslim friends came to celebrate Christian festivals with us. For instance, each Yaruni Christian family has an appointed eid of the Roman Catholic calendar, such as eid al-milad (Christmas) and al-eid al-qiyama (Easter), which it celebrates annually.

My family's appointed day is eid al-ghitas, the day of the Epiphany. After the Epiphany mass, Muslims and Christians came to my parents' open house to celebrate with us and drink a toast to al-'id. I expect my parents returned the obligations to their Muslim friends when they celebrated their religious festivals, but I never accompanied them: I was much too young and far too boisterous for adult company. I do, however, recall a strong day-to-day sense of community life. For instance, Muslims could buy fresh produce from the Christian shops (or I should say the shop, we only had one on the Christian side) that opened on Fridays, except for Good Friday, while Christians would do likewise on Sundays in the Muslim quarter. Both sides shared the enormous communal cauldron, approximately 2.5m in diameter and over 1m deep. The copper-interior-and-iron-exterior cauldron was used to boil wheat which would supply Yaruni families with cracked wheat, a staple ingredient of the Lebanese diet. This massive shared property would make its rounds in both Muslim and Christian quarters until every family had managed to cook its wheat and stock it for the long and cold winter months.

Life was not always work, worship and obligations. There was, for instance, a social element attached to the cooking of the wheat. Considering that this task coincided with the end of the harvest and that cooking the contents of the gigantic cauldron lasted all night, we used to pass the time dancing, singing and telling stories under the stars. In the morning we would breakfast on the freshly-cooked wheat before taking the strained remainder to dry on the flat roofs; once dried in the sun, the grain would be taken to the mill to be ground into cracked wheat.

On other social occasions, young men and women would take their places side by side, locking hands and standing shoulder-to-shoulder in dabki, a stumping-like, traditional dance. Young adults would spend what little recreation time they had together, walking, playing chess or hunting. Although inter-faith marriages were rare, many romances blossomed under these conditions. This well-balanced community life was a legacy that my generation had inherited, but sadly have since managed to lose: this way of life is not only threatened but seems so fragile now that it has all but disappeared.

Growing segregation

 

Multi-faith communities are on the verge of extinction, not only in Lebanon but also across the globe. In this globalised era, which suggests connectivity, we are becoming more divided: instead of social integration and multi-faith tolerance, we are promoting segregation and isolation. It is pitiful that my generation has not preserved the harmonious inter-faith co-existence they inherited. I feel embarrassed, indeed ashamed, that I belong to a generation that will be remembered for causing fundamentalism rather than promoting peace and harmony among religious groups.

I hardly recognised the village when I visited Yarun in 2008. Driving south from Bint-Jbeil, I was struck by the villas that had sprouted in recent years. The simple one- or two-storey houses were overshadowed by four- and five-storey villas. As we made our way through the Muslim quarter, which we had to cross before reaching the Christian side, we encountered the outward display of the extraordinary wealth that has poured into Yarun since the bombardment of July 2006. The villa owners have tried to outdo one another in extravagant expenditure on the exteriors, yet there were no signs of interior decorations: there were no curtains or blinds inside the mansions. Indeed, I was told on good authority that most of the inhabitants use the ground floor only; some live permanently in the hallways, sleeping on flat mattresses under the stairs as if to uphold the memory of their past humble existence. At night, the villas would shine like beacons in the dark: their owners had installed generators to ensure that these villas remain lit during the regular blackouts in southern Lebanon.

This obscene and vulgar display of wealth seems utterly out of place in the surrounding landscape. Who, I began to wonder, were Muslim Yarunis trying to impress, Israel or the Christians in the village? The Christian houses had also changed. Although some still wore the scars of the 2006 attacks, many had acquired fortress-like fences as if to keep out unwanted intruders or an aggressive enemy. Who, we need to ask, is the enemy that is being kept out? Surely not Israel for, as we have established, Israel can and does strike from the air. Do the Christians in Yarun feel threatened by their Muslim neighbours? Or are they keeping other Christians at bay? The sense of community has disappeared; consequently we might describe life in Yarun now as segregated co-existence rather than as a multi-faith cordial community. Yarunis had managed to rebuild their homes out of the rubble, but had failed to restore the ethos which made their community so special in the past.

Israel's strategic bombardment in July 2006 widened the rift between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. Israeli forces targeted Muslim areas in the 35-day bombardment, claiming that they were harbouring the militants who were firing rockets into their country. Hence Muslim areas were hard hit while some Christian quarters escaped virtually untouched. Consequently, Muslim conspiracy theorists began to argue that the Lebanese Christians had struck a secret deal with Israel to avoid being hit. Yarun's Christian quarter, however, was one of the exceptions: it was bombed, Israel claimed, because Hezbollah's fighters set off their rockets from the Christian side to which Israel retaliated by returning fire.

Consequently, most of the properties in the Christian quarter, including the church, were severely damaged by Israeli missiles. Yet we cannot put the entire blame for the rift between the two faiths on Israel. Some areas of the country have not recovered from the 15-year civil war. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the capital Beirut: the green line has long gone but the invisible divide between the Christian east and Muslim west of the city is stronger than ever.

The intention to live in dignity

Much money is being spent on promoting intra-cultural harmony and inter-faith tolerance, if not co-existence. Some international aid agencies have been working very hard on educating communities in some developing countries to appreciate their own cultures. It seems to me that such organisations are trying to reinstate the kind of life in which I grew up but which is now fast disappearing. Although I am a strong believer in education as a form of development – I have relentlessly pursued education throughout my life – I doubt if further education would re-build Yarun's harmonious co-existence. Looking back on my parents' generation, they were not armed with university degrees, nor did they obtain special diplomas in social sciences to live in multi-faith communities. Previous generations were not as well-educated as we have become. They simply decided to live side by side and tolerate each others' differences. Their primary asset, it seems, was the intention to live in dignity.

Thanks to positive intentions, open dialogue and hard work, Christians and Muslims in Yarun managed to share the same language and the same space without infringing on each others' boundaries or abusing their respective faiths. They managed to uphold this way of life for centuries, perhaps for over a millennium. Although, like their ancestors, Christian and Muslim Yarunis still live in the same village, the ratios are now grossly disproportionate: the Muslims far outweigh the Christians in numbers and wealth.

I cannot claim that Yarun's past can provide us with a model for religious tolerance. Whilst not wanting to belittle the monumental achievements of some international aid organisations and their efforts to educate developing countries, I do want to highlight that what is needed is more inducement than aid. People in developing countries do not need academic qualifications, but rather the incentive to take charge of their own development programmes.

Thus, instead of giving aid freely, charitable organisations should demand that local people build their own programmes for development and request (and be awarded) funds reflecting the strength of their applications. This would instigate dialogue between community members and it would give locals ownership of their own projects. If we continue simply to give, we risk creating a culture that expects constant handouts, which in turn leads to disgruntled and unsatisfied communities. We should, for example, look at projects such as Katine, which was launched by the Guardian and the Observer in indigenous Africa, and build on what they have learned.

Bombs Make No Moral Distinctions Where They Fall

By Robert Fisk

This commentary was published in The Independent on 01/01/2011

To Mannheim for its annual film festival and I am gripped by Armadillo, a documentary on a Danish NATO unit in Afghanistan, real bullets whizzing past one of the bravest directors of photography in the world, real soldiers falling wounded, one with a Wilfred Owen pallour of death on his face.

But he survives. Others don't. After storming a Taliban position, the Danes find at least three Afghans, apparently still alive. There is a crack of gunfire and they are dead. "We eliminated them in the most humane way possible," one of the Danes says afterwards, right there on the soundtrack.

I am stunned. The words "war crimes" are in my mind. Then I stumble out into the cold afternoon to walk back to my hotel past the back of the 19th-century Kunstalle and there are shrapnel gashes up the red stone walls, deep wounds in the brickwork of the school next door, a slash in the basement window casing. Was this from the British fire raid of 1940, or the first attempt to raze the city on 16 April 1943, or the American raids of 1944? Well protected with underground bunkers, only 1,700 Germans were killed here, a mere 0.6 per cent of its residents. War crimes?

I find a small bookshop in a bleak, freezing street – the 1950s block architecture proves how much of this city much we destroyed – and I ask for a history of Mannheim in the Second World War. My request is received without emotion by a stooped, middle-aged man who brings me two beautifully produced volumes – "the last we have," he says – and I buy them at once: Mannheim under the Dictator and Mannheim in the Second World War, both produced with photographs and documents from state and city archives. I flip open the second book and there is a nurse bending over a carbonised corpse. Three women lie on their backs, all in coats; obviously caught in the open, perhaps during the great raid of 5-6 September 1943, in which 414 residents were killed. Two of them are elderly, one of them a much younger woman with high cheekbones and closed eyes.

Opposite is a page of death notices in the Neue Mannheimer Zeitung – like all papers in Germany, controlled by the Nazi party – printed a few days after the raid. Heinz Laubenstein was five when he was killed, his sister Ruth was 17, their father and mother, Hans and Bienchen, were 36 and 35. Katherina Witwe was 68, Berta Werle was 29. Anna Schindler was 56, her husband Anton eight years older. A victim of the 1944 bombing, a gaunt woman – her face like a skull – staring wildly, helped by a civil defence worker and a man who may be her husband clutching a ragged child, stands amid rubble. The Nazis liked to emphasise their own civilian suffering; and they gloated over their enemies. An amateur photograph shows two captured Allied fliers hiding their faces from the camera, trailed by two grinning schoolboys on bicycles; another shows a smouldering British Hereford bomber that has crashed plumb into the middle of a street across the Rhine in Ludwigshafen.

I prowl through the pages, searching for the faces of wartime Mannheim. I try to guess whether they are Nazi party members or not before reading the captions and – amazingly – I always get it right. The smug, fat, dark – yes, sinister – faces all turn out to be Nazis. The gentler, more intelligent faces are always those of old Social Democrats, of Jews and Communists. But I almost make one mistake. There is a photo of a young schoolboy in the 1920s, Gustav Adolf Scheel, again with bicycle, a pleasant but unsmiling face, harmless enough,dressed in a double-breasted jacket. Then I flip the page, add 20 years, and sitting in front of me is a mean-faced bully of a man in uniform, eagle and death's head on his cap, high leather boots. Pleasant young Gustav has turned into an SS officer in the Alpenland.

Hour after hour I read these books, and this has a strange effect. There is Hitler arriving at the small Mannheim airport that I passed in the tram yesterday. There is Goebbels in the opera house near the water tower where I have coffee every morning. There is the very same tower draped with a mighty Swastika. And there is a photograph of a dignified Jewish businessman confronting a bespectacled Nazi officer, whole family pictures of doomed Jews, sitting round a table, many of the pictures horribly torn and crushed. The Mannheim history books duck nothing. There is a whole chapter on the Holocaust.

There was even a baby resistance in Mannheim. A Gestapo photograph shows the tiled wall of a public lavatory on which someone has scribbled in a plaster join the words: "Hitler Shuft" – "Hitler is a gangster." And there is one, most moving letter from a Mannheim communist, whose childish roneo-published anti-Nazi tracts earned him a death sentence. Thirty-six year old Jakob Faulhaber was allowed a last letter, hitherto untranslated into English, to his wife Emma at their home at No 34 Hubenstrasse. "My loved ones," he writes on 14 September 1942, "now the decision has been taken, and everything we tried to do has failed. Our appeal has been denied and all our hope is at an end. When I think back on my life, it was a little too short – but it was worth it to have lived such a life. You all know that I always lived for my ideals and I'm a strong enough person to die for them ... Last greetings to all who were close to me in my life. What is it to live?" Jakob Faulhaber was hanged next day in Stuttgart.

Were some of the other Mannheimers "just like us", decent men and women who risked life for freedom, who responded to daily bombing in a way remarkably similar to that of Londoners in the 1940-41 Blitz, who wrote "Business as usual" on their shops? There is a snapshot of massive ruins in Mannheim and a hoarding which says: "...and despite all! Mannheim is a still a living city." But it was put there by the Nazis. The people, the Volk – and you can see them walking to work between smashed tenements – did not erect posters; they wrote their names and addresses on their ruined homes so that when their husbands and brothers and lovers came back from the front – if they did come back – they could find their families. Some of these men were war criminals in a most deliberate way, decimating entire peoples. But they also killed wounded soldiers, just as we did in Normandy. And in Afghanistan. And we knew, of course, when we bombed Mannheim, that we would kill a Heinz, a Ruth, a Berta and an Anna amid the destruction of the city's factories.

War crimes? Of course, we can all make moral assessments. Eliminated in the most humane way... The Taliban are not as bad as the Nazis. But they are much worse than the Danes. Isn't that right? What is this life?

Israel Present Tense

By Ron Leshem 
This Op-Ed was published in The New York Times on 01/01/2011

My great-grandfather was obsessed with the past. His generation venerated a bygone world. My grandmother was obsessed with the future. That was her generation’s rebellion. We, the young generation in Israel, suffer from an obsession with the present, a worship of the here and now, and a lack of faith in our power to bring about change.

Dreading what we sense our future holds, we bask in our own individualism and try to block the torment that is all round us. We do not protest. We do not take to the streets. That is our sin. Someone watching from afar cannot realize what it takes to live as we do, cherishing liberal democracy, while in the countries around us women are being stoned to death for adultery and men are hanged in the squares for insobriety and homosexuality. In the face of this, we are losing our will to fight for our liberal values.

My friends, members of what was once the “peace camp,” feel trapped: between the cruelty of collective punishment in Gaza and Hamas’s fundamentalist zeal, its willingness to execute Palestinians, to crushingly repress dissent, and to send rockets into Israeli towns and cities.

Many Israeli writers petition for peace and rail against the occupation. I have added my voice to that choir, particularly in May during the government’s lethally inept handling of the Turkish flotilla that tried to break the embargo on Gaza. Yet, as I look back at 2010 and the flotilla, I deeply believe that the greatest peril is from a ruthless and implacable foe: religious fanaticism. And the people on the ship that the Israeli naval commandos boarded, the Mavi Marmara, with their motive and capacity to manipulate world opinion, were acting cynically on its behalf. The death of nine people on the Mavi Marmara was a calamity. But activists on board stabbed and shot the soldiers who sought to steer the ship to a port from which nonmilitary cargo could be trucked to Gaza.

It is simple for an author to declare: “Peace. Peace now!” But it is a hollow demand. Instead I say that all progressive, humane and fair-minded people are my brothers and sisters. All fundamentalists, Jews included, who seek to demolish liberalism are the enemies. Yes, we Israelis have made countless mistakes, allowed innumerable opportunities to slip through our fingers — mostly on account of our fears. We must change that. We must form an alliance with all liberal secular Palestinians. But first, we must awaken our younger generation and restore its belief in the future.

RON LESHEM, author of the novel “Beaufort.” This article was translated by Mitch Ginsburg from the Hebrew.

Transforming U.S. Military Might Into 21th-Century Weapons

By David Ignatius

This commentary was published in The Washington Post on 02/01/2011

Alight-bulb moment for me last year was hearing a Chinese defense expert named Dingli Shen in Shanghai talk about the future of warfare.

No, he wasn't expressing a pipe dream about building a blue-water navy to challenge U.S. dominance in the Pacific. Instead, he was talking about the irrelevance of traditional land and sea power in the dawning age of combat - when weapons will include cyberattacks, space weapons, lasers, pulses and other directed-energy beams.

Shen, who teaches at Fudan University, was countering the view of some Chinese analysts that Beijing should embrace the gospel of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the 19th-century American missionary for sea power. Mahan is outdated, he said: With a laser weapon fired from space, "any ship will be burned." China's future isn't in competing to build aircraft-carrier battle groups, argues Shen, but in advanced weapons "to make other command systems fail to work."

The Chinese theorist's comments suggest a trend that you might not appreciate watching the news footage of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The nature of warfare is nearing another "hinge point" attributable to the advance of technology. Just as gunpowder, cannons, airplanes, rockets and nuclear power changed the face of combat, so, too, will a new generation of weapons on the drawing boards - not just in America but also in China, India and other advanced technological nations.

Here's a hint of the coming competition: In 2010, China matched the United States in the number of rocket launches into space (15), the first time any nation has equaled the United States, according to Wired magazine's "Danger Room" blog. Meanwhile, according to Aviation Week, peaceful Japan is planning to put a directed-energy weapon on its next-generation fighter.

The reality that warfare is changing has half-dawned on the Pentagon. The Navy and Air Force in particular are developing exotic weapons systems that use every trick of science. Here are a few examples I pulled from defense publications.

The Air Force, for example, has a "Directed Energy Directorate." If you think "ray guns" are just for Buck Rogers, consider this pitch from one of the directorate's publications about using gamma rays, lasers, microwaves and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum: "Intensifying and focusing these waves can produce a variety of directed energy concepts capable of being developed into a highly effective weapons-class arsenal."

The Navy has a "Maritime Laser Demonstration" project that seeks to build a shipboard laser cannon by 2014. Its first sea test was halted in November because of a malfunction, but it will be back. So will the Air Force, whose test of an airborne, megawatt-class chemical laser failed in October.

And while we're discussing tests of spooky systems, how about an Air Force contract awarded last month to bombard computers with high-powered electromagnetic radiation, to see when they fail. The objective, says Wired's Spencer Ackerman, is to "learn how to fry the other guy's electronics while protecting your own."

What worries me is that even as the military looks forward, the brass is still clamoring to build the legacy systems - think aircraft-carrier battle groups - that will soon be vulnerable to the new weapons. It's as if the Pentagon were trying to be the old IBM, running big, clunky mainframes while trying to be an Apple-like innovator. We can't afford to do both.

The puzzle to ponder in 2011 and beyond is how the United States can retain the "legacy power" benefits that come from conventional fleets and bases around the world while transitioning to the new realities of military power. We don't want to be the national equivalent of a train company at the advent of air travel, or a radio network trying to protect its old programming in the age of television.

I come back to Shen, the Chinese analyst. He says that he's grateful that the United States is willing to spend so many billions of dollars to protect the sea lanes on which China depends for its global commerce. But instead of competing to build ships and tanks, he says, China will focus on the weapons that can cripple them. Somehow, we need to stop being the suckers when it comes to defense.

We can't stop "fighting the last war" when we're in the middle of it. But it's time to think more about the vulnerability of existing systems and whether there are ways to cut sharply the Pentagon's "legacy" budget, even as we spend more for the new age.

2011: Should We Be Worried?

By Abdul Rahman al-Rashed
This commentary was published in Asharq al-Awsat on 01/01/2011
 
Whilst it is true that it was not the most fantastic year ever, neither was it the worst…in fact, for the most part 2010 was better than we feared! This was a year that we lived in relative safety, although there were a few big disappointments.
 
I recall that the majority of headlines focused upon Iran, and we saw speeches, mutual threats, and political action, with tension in the country coming to a head. However despite all of this, the year passed by without any single conflict with the Iranians. The same applies to the Palestinian issue. Although the year ended without any political progress being made on this issue, there were also no political crises. The Arab front that is confronting Israel also experienced its most quiet year, and what is reassuring is that this time the Arabs have found somebody to fight Israel on their behalf, rather than fighting Israel on behalf of others. I am of course talking about Turkey which has become an additional front against Israel, and it does not matter that the Turks have different objectives [than the Palestinians].
 
One of the strangest incidents of last year was that we saw wars being fought by the countries that are most concerned about peace. For Saudi Arabia, with its full military might, entered a conflict along its southern border for the first time in 30 years since the signing of the Jeddah Agreement with [Egyptian President] Gamal Abdel Nasser [signaled the end of the North Yemen Civil War]. This war was with one of the Yemeni rebel groups, the Huthi insurgents, who thought to open a new front of conflict with Saudi Arabia, in addition to their conflict with the Sanaa government, however this only served to further impede their military activity. If this war was surprising, the manner in which it ended was equally so, for all signs indicated that this was a conflict that would continue to run, when the Huthis – who are allied with Iran – announced their withdrawal.
 
Despite the grumblings we heard about the political situation in Baghdad, the Iraqi elections occurred peacefully, and the results were more positive than we expected. However 2010 also was a year that Al Qaeda are sure to be proud of, for this year saw a huge number of terrorist plots across the majority of the world, from Saudi Arabia to the USA to the depths of the Sahara desert in Africa. However despite the huge number of terrorist plots, only a few of the smaller plots were actually carried out, with all the major plots being successfully thwarted.
 
2010 passed without any significant surprises, there have bee no major coups, no major world leaders have died or slipped from power.
 
So, in light of this, can we describe 2010 as a failed year? Perhaps this was a boring year, but I do not think that we can call it a failed one. I believe that many of the seeds for the future were sown in 2010, and I fear for this bitter harvest, and I believe that 2011 may be an extremely dangerous year [due to this]. I do not think that the next few months will be characterized by the same monotony [that we saw in 2010]; for Iran is on fire internally and besieged externally, and so 2011 will undoubtedly be a year full of news from Iran. However it may also perhaps be a better year for the Palestinians, as there is still a long path ahead in the Palestinian and Israeli negotiations. As for the Gulf, for the first time since the liberation of Kuwait, this region is entering a year that will be full of uncertainties. Fortunately for the Gulf, the political arrangements here remain the regions major guarantor, for the least tremor here affects the entire region as a whole.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

This editorial was published in The Jordan Times on 31/12/2010

We reached again, and quite fast, alas, the threshold of a new year. Nations across the globe celebrate this occasion with much jubilation, usually hoping that the new year will bring positive changes in the lives of peoples and better relations among nations.

The year that has just ended had its more or less customary ups and downs, witnessing natural catastrophes in many parts of the world and the miraculous escape of Chilean miners after a long ordeal underground, rescue celebrated across the world.

The April oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, on the other hand, may have topped the list of disasters this year.

Passengers trapped at airports - because of the Icelandic volcanic ash and, more recently, because of severe snowstorms - are part of this year’s overall picture, proving, once again, man’s helplessness in the face of nature.

On the political and economic fronts, there have been no major achievements. The world economy, ours included, showed a few timid signs of recovery, but these stayed just that, with no major buttressing or spectacular revival. Even if some countries were doing better, bailing out industries or other nations took a toll, eclipsing any progress.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict seemed to be getting a boost when direct negotiations between the two began, only to end in utter failure because of Israel’s defiance of international law and community.

In Lebanon, the international tribunal mandated to look into the assassination of prime minister Rafik Hariri split, again, the country, while in Iraq, after almost 10 months of uncertainty and haggling, Nouri Maliki finally succeeded in forming a government, just a few days ago.

Afghanistan is still torn by war and violence, a situation from which the US seeks to extricate itself, and Iran is threatening by its nuclear programme.

Acts of terrorism have increased, with scores of innocent people falling prey to ruthless individuals who have no respect for human life.

Relations between Washington and Moscow warmed up in the wake of the approval of the START programme, limiting the number of warheads and coming up with effective means of inspecting nuclear sites.

Global warming was tackled, but no immediate solution seems to be in sight, which should give way to no smaller worries than the global economy.

WikiLeaks will probably go down in history as the biggest happening of the year, proving, above all, that technology is not infallible.

All the above, and more, will accompany us into the new year and will have to be tackled. But, more importantly, the quality of human life, progress in the fight against diseases, and uplifting the marginalised and disadvantaged among us should be of main concern.

It is hope for better tidings that keeps most of us in a joyous spirit on the occasion of the new year.

And, hopefully, the days ahead will still surprise us and make it a great and happy year.

Lebanon Is Staring Into The Abyss

Whatever the tribunal into the death of Rafik Hariri decides, it will pour petrol on Lebanon's raging fire

By Fawaz Gerges

This commentary was published in The Guardian on 31/12/2010

Saad Hariri says he recognises fears of the politicisation of the tribunal and potential implications of an indictment of Hezbollah. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty

 

Once again, Lebanon is on the brink of major social and political upheaval. Rumours of an impending armed clash between Hezbollah and the pro-western governing coalition have spread like wildfire among the Lebanese people, who are hoarding food and arms in anticipation of the worst.

On the surface of it, the current crisis revolves around a United Nations tribunal set up to investigate the 2005 assassination of prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. An indictment from the tribunal is imminent; there is increasing evidence that the tribunal will accuse members of Hezbollah, the Shia-dominated resistance movement, as having played a central role in the assassination. If true, this could provide the spark that ignites the next confrontation.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has repeatedly dismissed the tribunal as an "American-Israeli" tool intended to incite sectarian strife in Lebanon. He has warned that the looming indictment will be an act of war against his group. He has demanded that the Lebanese government – led by Saad Hariri, the son of the late prime minister – distance itself from the UN tribunal and renounce it before the indictment is released.

On a deeper level, the standoff reflects a broader institutional crisis. Lebanon's institutions are dysfunctional and defective; they have failed dismally to mediate conflict among rival groups, as well as to integrate rising social forces into the political process. The Hariri tribunal is a case in point. Lebanon's three major institutions, the presidency, the cabinet and the parliament, are paralysed, unable to solve the impending crisis.

The recent impasse is mired by a series of "false witnesses" linked to the UN probe into Hariri's killing. Consequently, all eyes are now on Saudi Arabia and Syria, the two regional patrons of the rival Lebanese camps. They have attempted for months now to broker a settlement (with little success so far) that nullifies the tribunal and thus averts bloodshed. On the other hand, the United States has reportedly impressed on its allies the need to show resolve in the face of Hezbollah's threats and support the tribunal.

Sadly, Lebanon's leaders have forsaken their responsibility and have resigned themselves to the belief that the resolution of the tribunal problem lies in the Saudi-Syrian initiative. Lebanon's national unity government has proven to be an unworkable mixture of ministers from across the political spectrum. An abject failure, this multi-coloured cabinet has stalled all efforts to pass crucial policies.

Institutionally, Lebanon is a failed state. The political class has consciously and systemically used identity-politics to advance its material interests and undermine institution-building and nation-building; in moments of duress it has called on foreign powers to sustain its dominance.

Far from being sectarian-based or driven, the power struggle in Lebanon is multi-layered and complex. Sectarianism is used and abused to mask vested interests and differences.

On one level, the political class is divided along two camps: Lebanon-first v Arab-Islamic. The Lebanon-first constituency advocates a pro-western foreign policy and active neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In contrast, the Arab-Islamic constituency supports al-muqawama or "the resistance" against Israel and the Iranian-Syrian front.

On another level, the power struggle conceals changes in the demographics of Lebanese society which have not been given their equal representation in the political system. While Maronites and Sunnis formally control executive power, the rising Shia community, disfranchised historically, feels under-represented and politically marginalised.

Moreover, Lebanon is a battleground for a fierce confrontation between the US and its regional allies, on the one hand, and Iran-Syria and their local friends, on the other. A bitter struggle has exacted a heavy toll on the stability and security of the tiny country and paralysed its institutions further.

In a way, the fight over the UN tribunal is an extension of the US-Iranian rivalry. Hezbollah fears the tribunal is politicised, a tool of US policy, designed to weaken and destroy the resistance against Israel. The Obama administration hopes that the indictment of Hezbollah will expose the warts of Iran and Syria and their surrogates in Lebanon and hammer a deadly nail in the moral standing of Hezbollah throughout the region. What US officials neglect is the effects of such an indictment on social harmony and peace in Lebanon.

Lebanon faces a stark choice between justice and stability. There is a real danger that justice is no longer achievable and that the costs are exuberant. Regardless of the evidence marshalled by the tribunal, thedecision will likely pour gasoline on a raging fire and reinforce the two camps' opposing narratives: Hezbollah's cohorts will view it as a conspiracy, while for Hariri's supporters, conclusive evidence of the guilt of the Iranian-Syrian camp.

Hariri says that he recognises the fears of the politicisation of the tribunal and the potential implications of an indictment of Hezbollah. On the other hand, Hariri has asserted that he cannot renounce the tribunal because he wants the assassins of his father to be brought to justice, and because he possesses no authority over the UN tribunal. Hariri is also under pressure by the Americans to buckle up and back the tribunal.

No matter if Lebanon can weather the gathering storm, this will not be the first crisis, or the last. The country's dilemma is structural; as long as Lebanon's political class substitutes identity-politics for formal institutions, it will continue to be politically unstable. As long as Lebanon's leaders rely on foreign intervention to tip the internal balance of power in their favour, they will remain passive bystanders in determining their country's future.

With Friends Like Avigdor Lieberman

What is surprising is not the Israeli Foreign Minister's views but Benjamin Natanyahu's tolerance of his expressing them

By Donald Macintyre

This commentary was published in The Independent on 31/12/2010

Those puzzling in Britain on how far public disagreement should be allowed between members of a coalition Cabinet may like to consider the case of the Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. In Israel, where, unlike in Britain, coalition has always been the norm, the stiff-upper-lip concept of collective responsibility has never been a big deal. Disputes are out in the open, and often remain so after the decision in question has been taken. Yet even by these relatively lax standards Mr Lieberman has boldly gone where few, if any, ministers have gone before.

Mr Lieberman is after all supposed to be the leading spokesman for the government abroad and might therefore be thought to have a special responsibility to express government policy. In September, however, at the UN General Assembly in New York, he made a speech diametrically opposing the position of Prime Minister Netanyahu (or at least the public one), that it was possible to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians within a year. Mr Lieberman said that even an "intermediate" deal could take decades, and went on to expound his own highly personal – and, to many, toxic – proposal for "static transfer" by locating the most populous Israeli Arab area in a distantly future Palestine.

Then this week, he did it again. Just as efforts, undoubtedly in Israel's strategic interest, were being made to patch up relations with Turkey that had gone into deep freeze after Israel's lethal raid on the Gaza-bound vessel Mavi Marmara, Mr Lieberman chose to denounce the Turkish leadership for their "lies", going on to reaffirm his opposition to reaching an agreement with the "illegitimate" moderate Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. The Israeli Foreign Minister, in other words, has made a mockery of Lyndon Johnson's famous remark about why it was better to keep J Edgar Hoover on at the FBI. Mr Lieberman is inside the tent. And he is pissing in as well as out.

What is surprising is not Mr Lieberman's views on these topics but Mr Netanyahu's seemingly inexhaustible tolerance for his expression of them. It can be debated whether an ultra-nationalist who fought the last election on a proposal to force Israeli Arabs to swear allegiance to the Jewish state in order to qualify for citizenship, and who once said that Arab parliamentarians who talked to Hamas should be executed, could ever become the Israeli Prime Minister. But one point on which both men seem agreed – and they are not alone – is that Mr Lieberman remains Mr Netanyahu's most dangerous rival on the right. And Mr Netanyahu has apparently decided, for now at least, that his Foreign Minister is marginally less threatening inside his coalition than out of it.

Mr Netanyahu's refusal to sack his Foreign Minister has therefore been widely read in Israel as growing weakness. And it is made the more inevitable by the lack of an alternative agenda, especially in relation to the Palestinians, that Mr Netanyahu can stand on. It isn't easy to sack a minister as powerful as Mr Lieberman for deriding the peace process if there is no peace process to speak of. 2010 was the year in which even the most hardened sceptics struggled to suspend their disbelief, and will the Prime Minister to feel the hand of history on his shoulders. On the old Nixon-recognises-Red China principle, it was argued, only the right can make a lasting peace; Netanyahu wouldn't want his second premiership to end in failure as the first one did. And so on. At the turn of the year, these panglossian sentiments are becoming harder and harder to utter with any credibility.

The Americans cannot escape blame for squandering 18 months of diplomatic capital on an ultimately vain effort to persuade Mr Netanyahu to sustain the settlement freeze without which the Palestinians said they would not negotiate.

It still seems incredible that the Obama administration allowed the agreement on a resumption of the freeze which Mr Netanyahu was supposed to have struck over seven hours of talks with Hillary Clinton in mid-November to be unravelled within days by his right-wing coalition partners. In his television interview this week, moreover, Mr Netanyahu blandly blamed the Palestinians for being "unwilling to make peace" and suggested Israelis now focus instead on their country's economic strength.

That approach would be fine if not for the fact that Israel is massively the stronger party, that the Palestinians had by all accounts agreed to the original Clinton-Netanyahu terms, and above all if political progress were not centrally an Israeli interest as well as a Palestinian one.

This point was dramatised this week when the veteran Labour minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer urged his colleagues "to do everything possible" to get negotiations restarted, adding: "I wouldn't be surprised if within one year the whole world supports a Palestinian state, including the United States. Then we'll ask where we were and what we were doing."

He spoke in a context in which the Palestinians are resorting to a diplomatic Plan B, securing "recognition" of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders by Latin American countries, and now promoting a UN resolution condemning settlements. These moves will not end the occupation; and the US may well veto such a resolution. But the reason that they have any traction at all is the very one that should be propelling Israel back to negotiations at virtually any short-term price, that there will never be a more secure neighbour than the state-in-waiting that the Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, intends to have built by the late summer of 2011.

The international efforts to resume negotiations will continue. Rather as the Northern Ireland peace process diverted round the road block of IRA arms decommissioning a decade ago, so the US-led mediators will now try to find significant confidence-building measures other than a settlement freeze that they can persuade Israel to agree as an incentive to talks. And some of the Europeans, irritated at being allocated by Washington the servile task of "selling" to the Palestinians proposals for getting back into talks that they did not devise, may seek a more creative role next year.

The problem is that Israeli politics has not stood still in the past 18 months. In a column starkly headlined "It's over" the Haaretz commentator Aluf Benn this week depicted an agenda-less Prime Minister who could have built a broader coalition but for whom it was now "all downhill until the next elections". He argued that the West would do well to concentrate its efforts on preventing the "military escalation" – whether from a strike on Iran or a fresh war in Gaza – to which he pointed out Israel is especially prone in the run-up to elections.

With a strengthened Mr Lieberman – who once exhorted his colleagues to treat Gaza as "Russia operates in Chechnya" – waiting in the wings, it's isn't impossible that Mr Netanyahu would be tempted catastrophically into Gaza, as Ehud Olmert was tempted so bloodily in an election year when Mr Netanyahu himself was similarly waiting in the wings. But either way, the momentum towards a Middle East breakthrough that seemed possible when Barack Obama was elected two years ago is at once more necessary and much harder to generate than it was then.

The Weekly Wrap: December 31, 2010

By Steve Levine
This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 31/12/2010

Whither Ahmadinejad: Has it been a good or bad year for Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? A mysterious computer worm called Stuxnet confounded the work of Iran's nuclear centrifuges; unknown assassins targeted Iranian nuclear scientists; and Iran was forced to slash fuel subsidies in the face of tighter western banking sanctions.  But whether Ahmadinejad's political power waned is another matter. As Bruce Walker suggests, history is replete with leaders making hay while crippling their country. Meanwhile, one of the few nations still officially doing business with Iran - India - joined those tightening a financial grip on the country, Lydia Polgreen and Heather Timmons write at the New York Times. India conducts some $11 billion a year in oil and gas trading with Iran, but now India's central bank has halted the use of a key method of making payments for the fuel, known as the Asian Clearing Union.

The Greenhouse Gas Conundrum: One victim of 2010 was climate science. The second-biggest emitter of CO2 on the planet, the United States, opted out of internationally negotiated mandatory carbon cutbacks, reversing what had appeared to be sure passage of legislation that for the first time would put a price on carbon emissions. As the year wound down, the Obama Administration advanced a detour strategy of which it had warned since it took power two years ago: If Congress would not regulate carbon emissions, the White House would do so administratively through the Environmental Protection Agency.  As John Broder reports in the New York Times, EPA regulation begins to take effect Sunday. Yet, that strategy, too, will face a collision with new U.S. politics - the strengthened power of the Republican Party, vocally powerful swaths of which question the science underlying climate policy.

The Power of the Energy Market: China, holding a corner on the market for rare-earth elements, in 2010 began to slowly capitalize on that leverage to squeeze technology-based countries around the world. This story - one of the most important economic developments of 2010 - looks likely to overlap into next year, as Japan and South Korea are especially reliant on the rare-earth minerals for their key export industries including advanced batteries, solar and wind. Next year, China will cut exports of the 17 elements by another 11 percent, calling it a move against illegal mining. At the New York Times, Keith Bradsher writes that the folks doing the actual mining are often the victim of gangsters who control China's rare earths black market.

Gas, Gas, Gas: The most important wild card in global energy is natural gas, as we learned in 2010. A ramp-up in shale gas production in the United States shook Europe, and reduced Russia's gas-fueled hold over the continent, as this blog reported. Next year looks likely to carry the trend forward. Many analysts think that environmental concerns such as water pollution make it unclear how much shale gas will end up actually produced. But the market thinks otherwise - 2010 was marked by tens of billions dollars in domestic and foreign investment in the U.S. shale gas patch. As Telis Demos reports in the Financial Times, 2011 is shaping up similarly, as BHP Billiton may buy Anadarko Petroleum, one of the biggest shale-gas players in the world. A new venue for the gas frenzy is Israel, Charles Levinson and Guy Chazan report in the Wall Street Journal. This week, Noble Energy confirmed that it had found 16 trillion cubic feet of gas in a field called Leviathan underneath the Red Sea, "the world's biggest deepwater gas find in a decade, with enough reserves to supply Israel's gas needs for 100 years," Levinson and Chazan report.

Happy New Year, Matt Bryza:  Matthew Bryza's wait has seemed interminable, but in this week he got what he had waited for patiently: the ambassadorial post in petro-state Azerbaijan. This blog has chronicled Bryza's woes as he battled State Department intramurals (insiders who thought Bryza's rise was too fast) and local politics (Armenian groups who thought him too glib on the question of the 1915 massacre of Armenians in Turkey). All that comingled with poisonous election-year politics to confound Bryza's Senate confirmation, as two senators up for re-election (Barbara Boxer in 2010 and Robert Menendez in 2012) and vulnerable to Armenian politics placed holds on his nomination. But, as James Morrison reports in the Washington Times, President Barack Obama included Bryza on his list of recess appointments. The appointment allows Bryza to serve for a year while the White House attempts to navigate Senate politics.

 

I Lie To You

By Ghassan Charbel

This commentary was published in al-Hayat on 31/12/2010

Dear reader,

I have this overwhelming urge to lie to you, and then claim that I rarely do so. However, the last day of the year leaves me perplexed, affects my calm demeanor, and hides the observer that lives in my brain. How do I deal with this day? Should I call it the last crutch of the year that is readying itself to commit suicide? Should I call it the last bullet held by an exhausted warrior amidst darkness? I feel puzzled to be at the edge of the upcoming year, the edge of expatriation, the edge of the homeland, the edge of civil war, the edge of the eroded state, the edge of blood and revenge, and the edge of the darkness that swallows books and eyes, cities and the countryside, TV stations and universities.

I have an urge to lie to you like we were lied to when we used to believe. The journalists who removed the bridles, the writers who smuggled dreams to their readers, the poets who rebelled against the murky dictionaries, the thinkers who said that retrogression, declination, and deterioration are not the product of fate; that the Arab house will not remain open; that the nation will awaken from its inattentiveness; that our schools will not be prisons of imaginations; that our universities will not produce blind armies; and that the coming days are better than the bygone times.

I have an urge to lie to you, and repeat the game of those who lied to us, and tell you that tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday; that Arabs will not take part in a conflict if it lures them. They will not turn against their neighbor in the same district, city, or country; they will not allow the language of yesterday to trap their children; they will not let themselves be led to killing and suicide bombings; they will not consider the other as an enemy; they will not consider that any difference is an opportunity for clashing; they will not allow deadly illusions to flow through their veins. The Arabs will not consider the cities of others to be an aggression on their existence, or their universities to be a violation of their own peace of mind. They will not consider everything that is new to be a dagger or a conspiracy.

I will not exaggerate in lying to you. I will not say for instance that complete concord will prevail over inter-Arab relations, and that the skies will be swarming with pigeons carrying messages of love. I will not say that the factories of blind armies will shut their doors, that charlatans will find themselves unemployed, and that fortune tellers will stop taking viewers for imbeciles. I will not say that cities will drown in coexistence and solidarity, that scores of tourists will gather around fountains, that fanatics will not drown in the blood of innocent people, that gun silencers will retire, and that assassinations will become a thing of the past. I will not lie to this extent.

I know, dear reader, that you know, and that disappointments have uprooted your dreams, and that you believe that every bottom pushes us to another bottom; every slope takes us to a steeper slope; and every abyss throws us in an even deeper abyss. I know that you do not ask for more than some bread, drinking water, an acceptable job, a just police force, an honorable judiciary system, and institutions that protect you from the storm instead of aligning it against you. I know that you do not demand more than the minimum necessary in order to avoid the humiliation of waiting in line in front of embassies or fleeing in the boats of death.

Despite the above, I feel that what is coming cannot be more blatant. Maybe it is because I believe that we have reached rock-bottom; that the journey of decline has been going for a long time; that the spirit of the nation cannot keep on staying away; that new generations will ask new questions and will interpret the tragedy in a manner that will allow them to get out of it; and that the questions of honor, freedom, and truth in life, progress, and interaction will lead in the end to open a window in the wall of darkness and injustice.

On the last day of the year, I recall the front pages of Al Hayat, and I feel the urge to apologize. Explosions and funerals were always present. We have poisoned the days of readers with thousands of corpses, from Sa’dah to Waziristan, as well as many other stages. I attempt on this last day to atone the sins of the messenger, not the perpetrator. Hence, we shall try to light a candle, even if the reader will accuse us of lying to him.

Ghassan Charbel is the editor-in-chief of The Pan-Arab daily al-Hayat