Karzai Slams NATO

He's had it. With every civilian bombed or shelled into oblivion by NATO air strikes and artillery, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's government gets further undermined. Now, he says, NATO has killed up to 90-Afghan civilians in just the past ten days.

Karzai told reporters about the deaths of 52-Afghans in a NATO artillery barrage:

"In Chora, NATO, coalition forces fired artillery on Chora from Tirin Kot in which according to our latest information ... 52 of our countrymen were martyred," Karzai said, speaking at his palace in the capital.

The president also referred to strikes by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the southern province of Helmand early Friday that police said killed 25 people, including nine women and three young children.

The president said his repeated calls on the ISAF and US-led coalition to coordinate their operations with Afghan security forces to avoid hurting civilians had gone unheeded."From now onwards they have to work the way we ask them to work here. That's the line," he said.

This was happening because of "the extreme use of force, the disproportionate use of force to a situation and the lack of coordination with the Afghan government," Karzai said."You don't fight a terrorist by firing a field gun 37 kilometres (23 miles) away into a target. That's definitely, surely bound to cause civilian casualties," he said.

"...Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such," he said, reflecting a feeling among many ordinary Afghans who find the foreign forces arrogant and culturally insensitive.

Hey Toronto - Here's An Idea

The City of Boston is in the process of setting up a system that could be just the thing for Toronto. It's a gunshot detection system that's designed to curb shootings. From the Boston Globe:

"Mayor Thomas M. Menino touted the crime- fighting capabilities of the acoustic sensors that can pinpoint the location of gunfire within 30 feet of its origin and dispatch police to shooting scenes in less than 10 seconds.

"We need more tools in our arsenal to track shootings and have police on the scene within seconds," the mayor said at the time. "Delays always give criminals a chance to leave the scene."

Boston hasn't got the system up and running yet due to contract squabbles with the manufacturer, Shotspotter Inc. The technology is already in use in several US cities including Washington, D.C. The US Army has also bought fixed and mobile versions of the technology.

"The city first began looking at the technology more than a year ago, when Councilor Rob Consalvo asked the mayor and police officials to look at ShotSpotter, which was credited with a 31 percent reduction in violent crime in North Charleston, S.C., and with helping police in Gary, Ind., to catch shooting suspects with guns still in their hands."

A Dubious Secretary-General for NATO

It was all an unfortunate accident. That's the line of bullshit being spewed by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to explain away last night's NATO airstrike that slaughtered 25-Afghan civilians including three babies and nine women.

“If these things happen, they are mistakes, it’s never intentional,” he explained.

“From our point of view, a civilian gets killed and it’s an error,” he said. “But just recall that last week the Taliban killed 35 policemen and civilians in Kabul and they continue to do this. They continue to blow bombs off in their cities with indiscriminate actions. They don’t care who gets killed.”

Let's see, what was the accident anyway? Were these houses targeted by accident? No. Is it an accident that people sleep in their houses at night? I don't think so. Did we hit the wrong targets? No, we got the houses we were aiming to take out.

Obviously there was no accident, none whatsoever. We, that being NATO, called in an airstrike on two houses in a village. Past experience, if nothing else, has shown us that when we target villages we usually manage to kill innocent civilians.

The inevitable consequence of bombing village houses in the dark of night is to kill those inside. We are all deemed to intend the logical consequences of our acts. Therefore NATO intended to kill everyone inside those houses knowing there was a good chance they would kill innocents.

I'm not going to get into the laws of war here or the duty to safeguard the lives of civilians but the very legality of targetting residences for precision air strikes is questionable at best.

"From our point of view, a civilian gets killed and its an error." Damn right that's his point of view. They're dead, it's an error, forget about it. Yeah, but his point of view, NATO's point of view on this sort of attack is not good enough, not nearly good enough. It was an error but a very intentional one.

If this is the attitude of NATO's top dog, there's no reason to believe these killings won't just go on.

How Not To Spread Democracy

The following passages have been excerpted from a speech delivered by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, to Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Conference on Democracy in Contemporary Global Politics entitled "Hypocrisy, Democracy, War and Peace."

Evans describes some of the many flaws in our Western approach to spreading democracy, particularly hypocrisy:

"...what people most associate with politicians as a class, and most hate about them as a result, is hypocrisy, and all the familiar variations on that basic theme: double-standards, unprincipled inconsistency, saying one thing and doing another.

Hypocrisy and Democracy

"There are quite a few things we've learned about democracy promotion over the last few years, and most of them have emerged pretty clearly in course of discussion at this conference, so I will not labour too long over familiar ground.

"First, it is obvious now to just about everyone that democracy – or at least liberal democracy, the only kind that means anything – is about much more than holding elections. Protection of human rights, especially minority rights and those related to freedom of expression, and respect for the rule of law, are indispensable concomitants.

"Secondly, it is rather obvious now to everyone, except perhaps those most capable of doing it, that bombing for democracy – trying to deliver it on the tip of precision guided missiles, as my Crisis Group colleague Chris Patten puts it – is not, on the whole, a very good idea.

"Thirdly, and maybe not so obviously, democracy promotion can be rather bad news for democrats. I am thinking in particular of the cries of anguish we have been hearing recently from civil society and human rights activists in Iran, who have – following the US announcement that large dollops of democracy funding will be headed their way – been subjected to a rapid increase in state repression. ...at the very least we should be asking first those in whose interests we are supposed to be acting. Fighting for our principles to the last drop of someone else's blood is never very edifying.

"The fourth big thing we should have learned about democracy promotion, is that inconsistency is totally counterproductive: it is wholly damaging to the cause to advocate the case for democracy only when you are sure the that democratic process will produce an outcome you like.

"It has not been a pretty sight in this respect to watch the almost universal Western disavowal of Hamas after it won the Palestinian election that the West had so enthusiastically supported. An International Crisis Group report shortly after that election argued strongly that the international community needed to focus on encouraging Hamas to govern responsibly, not to force it out of government or make the government unworkable by imposing conditions that nobody believed could be immediately met, and we summarised the Hamas response as we found it as 'let us govern or watch us fight'.

"Another less than edifying experience has been the constant wriggling of Western, and in particular U.S. policymakers, in the face of Pervez Musharaff's continuing authoritarian rule in Pakistan, and in particular the contempt that continues to be expressed by so many of them – more veiled in public, but often quite open in private – toward the democratic parties as they struggle, with signs of growing popular and elite support, to recover ground.

"Of course we have to face the prospect in the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, that if full electoral democracy is introduced there is a prospect that Islamists will be elected – and a risk that cannot be ignored that the first such democratic election might be the last: Hitler was after all democratically elected. But it is absolutely critical to recognize that 'Islamism' or Islamic activism is not a single-stranded phenomenon, and that it is only a small minority of Islamists – which are in turn only a minority of Muslims – that would even be tempted to go down this absolutist path. "

The complete text of the speech can be found here:

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4906&l=1

Stop Killing Civilians, Damn It!

Has NATO completely lost its senses in Afghanistan or is it that its commanders and officers just don't give a shit about innocent Afghans any more?

NINE WOMEN, THREE BABIES and an ELDERLY MULLAH were among 25-villagers wiped out this morning in a NATO airstrike on an Afghan village. And, in case you're skeptical, that's the report from the Afghan police chief in Helmand province.

Standard pattern. An inconclusive firefight between Taliban guerrillas and NATO forces. The Taliban fall back into a village. NATO jets arrive and bomb the hell out of the place. Victory - dead villagers everywhere! And let's face it, the way NATO is going there's a good chance those babies would have grown up to become insurgents anyway, eh? And those women? Probably just breeders churning out more Taliban, eh? We sure showed those villagers, didn't we?

NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Mike Smith reported while an unknown number of innocents may have lost their lives, the fault for that was entirely the enemy’s: “In choosing to conduct such attacks in this location at this time, the risk to civilians was probably deliberate. It is this irresponsible action that may have led to casualties.”

For the record, Smith claims we killed 30-insurgents. Let's see - 25 dead villagers, five relatives for each vowing revenge on NATO, let's just round it off at an even hundred new recruits for the other guys.

No Colonel Smith, you cretin, the risk to civilians arose when NATO, that's our sided butthead, decided to greet the villagers with a display of aerial bombardment.

Why do we keep doing this? The Afghan president has begged us to stop. The country's parliament has demanded that we stop. The Afghan people are outraged by it and take to the streets in fury over it. They're coming to hate us for it. The only people who seem to want to do this are us - and, of course, the Taliban. They absolutely love it when they can goad us into doing something this insanely stupid. We're playing straight into their hands with every bomb and every dead kid.

This is disgusting and it's happening again and again and again. I've had it. There's no honour in this mission, none at all. It's a disgrace. Canada should have no part in this. Support the troops? I don't blame them, this is the doing of the brass and politicians, but I can't support them either while they're part of this butchery.

This Promises to be Very, Very Juicy

A quarter-century of CIA skullduggery is about to be declassified and publicly released next week and, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, "Most of it is unflattering."

The documents cover an era that stretched from the 50's through the 70's, secrets that are known within the CIA as the "family jewels." According to the Washington Post these documents " include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of 'unwitting' tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs."

Much of this has been the stuff of rich conjecture for decades.

At the time, Henry Kissinger fretted over the disclosure of these secrets in conversations with then President Gerald Ford. Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate."

Director Hayden said the documents, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."

Stay the Course - Forever?

NATO's Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is urging Canada to "stay the course" in Afghanistan after the mandate of "the mission" expires in 2009.

In Montreal to attend an international conference, Scheffer said, "I know how dramatic it is if Canadian soldiers pay the highest price," Scheffer said. "But I still say, you are there for a good cause ... You are there to defend basic universal values."

Fortunately no one called upon the Secretary-General to explain just whose "universal values" we are defending and what the Afghan people and their leadership think of those values. If we've learned anything surely it's that Afghan values and Western values don't always have a lot of universality.

Scheffer said it's important that all 26-members of the coalition carry on their missions. Carrying on and staying the course probably sounds pretty good to this guy because it avoids the fundamental issue of why some nations, such as Canada, are carrying far more than their fair share of the burden.

As Decent As They Come

In November, 1997, a gang of kids murdered 14-year old Reena Virk. They swarmed here and beat her up. Then two of the gang followed her, beat her again and drowned her in the Gorge in Victoria, B.C. It was a truly horrific, vicious murder.

Today the boy convicted of the murder, Warren Glowatski, was given day parole. Nothing particularly unusual about that except that, on hand to support him was Reena's mother, Suman Virk.

Following Glowatski's sentencing, the Virks made it clear they had no interest in vengeance and were saddened that, atop their daughter's death, these young people had ruined their own lives.

The Virks have kept an eye on Glowatski while he was imprisoned and they formed a profoundly compassionate opinion of the young man. That led them to attend Glowatski's parole hearing last Thursday to lend their support.

“He was an angry, scared little kid, who was trying to prove something in a negative way,” Suman Virk told the media after the hearing.

“Today I think we see a young man who has taken responsibility for his actions and is trying to amend the wrong that he did.”

Utterly remarkable people.

Fatah's Dirty Little Secrets on Display

Now that Abbas and Fatah have been forceably driven out of Gaza, Hamas is wasting no time in putting Fatah's execution and torture apparatus on display.

The current spin we're getting from the US, Israel and others, including Canada, has Fatah as the West's best friend, the good guys, and Hamas just a bunch of murderous Islamist thugs. Don't eat that stuff Charlie, that's horse shit.

Not only was Fatah corrupt but it ruled by murder, torture and terror. Der Spiegel's Ulrike Putz took a tour through the recently abandoned Fatah installations:

"The cells are small, perhaps six feet by six feet, with only an overhead lamp to provide light. The toilet is a hole in the floor behind a small wall. The prisoners have scribbled graffiti on the walls, including slogans like "Al-Qaida in Jerusalem" and "Islamic Jihad." One inmate even scratched the phrase "Mother, oh my mother" into the plaster.

"The headquarters of the Fatah-controlled security force in Gaza have been open to the public since last Thursday. Every day is open house now.

"For years the complex was a symbol of the horror disseminated by the security forces that reported directly to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. This is where Hamas men were taken after Fatah had arrested them. Some of those lucky enough to be eventually released reported that they had been tortured. Others disappeared forever.

"Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long voiced criticism of systematic human rights violations in the security force's prisons, both in Gaza and the West Bank. In this respect, the fact that Hamas captured the Fatah headquarters in Gaza last week was more than just strategically significant -- it was also a highly symbolic act.

"'This building is a symbol of injustice in stone,' says Abu Mohammed, an officer in Hamas's militant al-Qassam Brigades, who led the attack on the complex. He and his unit have occupied the compound since the building was captured, and Abu Mohammed is using the gatehouse as his office. 'We came because we wanted to see the place where our brothers were killed,' he says."

Pakistan Pushes Plutonium Production

ABC News has obtained a satellite picture that it claims reveals Pakistan is nearing completion of a previously unknown, third plutonium production reactor.

The highly unstable Musharraf government is believed to already possess some 60-nuclear warheads. The new reactor, and an earlier one also nearly complete, are believed to allow Pakistan to build another 10-warheads per year. It is also believed that with larger stocks of plutonium, Pakistan will be able to design smaller, lighter and more powerful warheads better suited to its lovely line of short and medium-range missiles.

Pakistan is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and so is not subject to inspections. The US, by contrast, is a signatory to that treaty but governs itself as though it wasn't.

America's Constitutional Quasimodo

Oh, I forgot. Quasimodo was a good guy, sort of. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, seems to think he too lives in some sort of bell tower, high above the American constitution.

Cheney is now claiming that the Vice-President of the United States is not part of the executive branch and therefore is exempt from a presidential directive governing the protection of classified information by government agencies. Let's see, he's not part of the judiciary, he's no judge although he's quick to judge. And he's not part of the legislative branch, no one elected him to congress. So, if he's not part of the third branch - why he's a big, greasy hunk of nothing!

There really is no end to this Dick.

Peter Brookes, The Times of London

Taliban Not a Long-Term Threat - Karzai

Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the BBC today that the Taliban, "...is not a threat to the survival of Afghanistan, its government, its future objective." This assessment flies straight in the face of the continual claims of NATO and mission-friendly supporters such as our very own Stephen Harper.

Mr Karzai also said international forces in the country should do more to prevent the killings of civilians. As for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Karzai said they don't "have the guts" to seriously threaten the Kabul government.

Mugabe's Monetary Meltdown

Have you ever heard a number as bizarre as "one million, five hundred thousand per cent"?

That's the estimate of the coming inflation facing the people of Zimbabwe says US ambassador Chris Dell.

Dell told The Guardian, "Prices are going up twice a day, in some cases doubling several times a week," said Mr Dell, who is approaching the end of his posting to Zimbabwe. "It destabilises everything. People have completely lost faith in the currency and that means they have lost faith in the government that issues it.

"By carrying out disastrous economic policies, the Mugabe government is committing regime change upon itself," he said. "Things have reached a critical point. I believe the excitement will come in a matter of months, if not weeks. The Mugabe government is reaching end game, it is running out of options."

I expect when Mugabe goes out, it'll be much like the end of Mussolini, with the tyrant hanging by his heels in some public square. It's hard to imagine him getting out of this alive.

NO, Not Again!

Guess who's planning on taking another bite out of the Democratic vote in the 2008 election? It's Ralph Nader, the "independent" without whom Al Gore would have defeated George Bush in 2000.

Nader, who took 2.7% of the vote overall, captured 97-thousand votes in Florida, the cornerstone state that Gore lost by only 537 votes, using George Bush's math and the Supreme Court's alchemy.

But for Nader Kyoto would have stood a vastly better chance of success, the Middle East would not be in flames and America would still have the respect of the world.

In an interview with the newspaper Politico, Nader said, "The two parties are still converging. I really think there needs to be more competition from outside. Democrats have become, over the years, very good at electing very bad Republicans. Democrats always know how to implode, how to waver, how to not be authentic."

Nader took a broad swipe at Hillary Clinton. "She is a political coward," Mr Nader said. "She goes around pandering to powerful interest groups on the one hand and flattering general audiences on the other. She doesn't even have the minimal political fortitude of her husband."

Ralph Nader - building a Republican dynasty, one stolen election at a time.

Evil Bastard

I woke up this morning and tried to catalogue the reasons to despise US Veep Dick Cheney. I went through the usual list - Iraq, fear mongering, Halliburton, lying, Afghanistan, secrecy, Halliburton, corporate democracy, the Taliban, suppression of civil rights, KBR, Saddam and al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Bechtel, Saddam and WMDs, Iran, Halliburton, death and suffering and misery on a massive scale - you know, the same old same old - but then I noticed something was missing, overlooked.

Oh yeah, it was the black thing. As a Congressman in 1980's, Cheney voted against resolutions demanding the release from prison of Nelson Mandela. Cheney smeared Mandela as a "terrorist." There it is. Add that to his opposition to Martin Luther King day and you have all the fixins' of a genuinely evil bastard.

Actually I'm still not sure I got it all. How about it? Anything to add?

Why Hamas?

After 9/11 almost gave George w. Bush an excuse to conquer Iraq and after he got caught lying through his Texas teeth about Saddam's WMDs and links to al-Qaeda, Shrub fell back on his messianic delusion about bringing democracy to the Middle East. Elections would wash away all his sins. Democracy was just the ticket. So elections it would be.

Afghanistan had elections. Iraq had elections. So did Lebanon and Palestine. And just how did that turn out for the Champion of Democracy? Afghanistan elected a parliament with a solid representation of warlords, drug lords and common criminals. Not so good. Iraqis elected religious fundamentalists, the perfect formula for sectarian squabbling and sectarian violence. Even worse. In Lebanon, Hezbollah made out like bandits at the polls. Not what George was hoping for. And the Palestinians handed their votes to Hamas. Hmmm. That's four for four for the Frat Boy in the Oval Office, a sweep, all of them failures from Washington's point of view.

But just what made the Palestinian people shift their support from Fatah to Hamas anyway? UCLA Professor Saree Makdisi explains why in an opinion piece in the LA Times:

"...for one thing, the old government had been democratically elected; now it has been dismissed out of hand by presidential fiat. There's also the fact that the new prime minister appointed by Abbas — Salam Fayyad — has the support of the West, but his election list won only 2% of the votes in the same election that swept Hamas to victory. Fayyad and Abbas have the support of Israel, but it is no secret that they lack the backing of their own people.

"There is a reason the people threw out Abbas' Fatah party in last year's election. Palestinians see the leading Fatah politicians as unimaginative, self-serving and corrupt, satisfied with the emoluments of power.

"Worse yet, Palestinians came to realize that the so-called peace process championed by Abbas (and by Yasser Arafat before him) had led to the permanent institutionalization — rather than the termination — of Israel's 4-decade-old military occupation of their land. Why should they feel otherwise? There are today twice as many settlers in the occupied territories as there were when Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat first shook hands in the White House Rose Garden. Israel has divided the West Bank into besieged cantons, worked diligently to increase the number of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem (while stripping Palestinian Jerusalemites of their residency rights in the city) and turned Gaza into a virtual prison.

"People voted for Hamas last year not because they approved of the party's sloganeering, not because they wanted to live in an Islamic state, not because they support attacks on Israeli civilians, but because Hamas was untainted by Fatah's complacency and corruption, untainted by its willingness to continue pandering to Israel. Fatah leaders were viewed as mere policemen of the perpetual occupation, and the Palestinian Authority had willingly taken on the role of administering the population on behalf of the Israelis. Hamas offered an alternative.

"Has Hamas done unspeakable things? Yes, but so has Fatah, and so too has Israel (on a much larger scale). There are no saints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Palestinians, frankly, see a lot of hypocrisy in the West's anti-Hamas stance. Since last year's election, for example, the West has denied aid to the Hamas government, arguing, among other things, that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel. But that's absurd; after all, Israel does not recognize Palestine either. Hamas is accused of not abiding by previous agreements. But Israel's suspension of tax revenue transfers to the Palestinian Authority, and its refusal to implement a Gaza-West Bank road link agreement brokered by the U.S. in November 2005, are practical, rather than merely rhetorical, violations of previous agreements, causing infinitely more damage to ordinary people. Hamas is accused of mixing religion and politics, but no one has explained why its version of that mixture is any worse than Israel's — or why a Jewish state is acceptable but a Muslim one is not.

"A genuine peace based on the two-state solution would require an end to the Israeli occupation and the creation of a territorially contiguous, truly independent Palestinian state.But that is not happening. Fatah seems to have given up, its leaders preferring to rest comfortably with the power they already have. Ironically, it is Hamas that is taking the stands that would be prerequisites for a true two-state peace plan: refusing to go along with the permanent breakup of Palestine and not accepting the sacrifice of control over borders, airspace, water, taxes and even the population registry to Israel.

"Embracing the "moderation" of Abbas allows the Palestinian Authority to resume servicing the occupation on Israel's behalf, for now. In the long run, though, the two-state solution is finished because Fatah is either unable or unwilling to stop the ongoing dismemberment of the territory once intended for a Palestinian state.

"The only realistic choice remaining will be the one between a single democratic, secular state offering equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians — or permanent apartheid."

A Draft By Any Measure?

US Embassy, Baghdad

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has lowered the boom on her department's diplomats who haven't been too keen on applying for openings at the embassy in Baghdad. At the moment the vacancy rate is just 1% but a lot of the people holding down those jobs are coming up for rotation and there's been a real drop in interest from the replacement pool.

Yesterday Rice sent a cable to all US embassies and missions which read, in part: "We must ensure that these top priority requirements are met before any other staffing decisions are made. To that end, we have decided to take the unprecedented step of creating a special country-specific assignment cycle for Iraq, commencing with the release of this message.''

In US diplomatic-speak that means Rice could hold up appointments to other posts and force, or "direct,'' some diplomats to accept positions at what is the largest U.S. embassy in the world.

A senior State Department official allowed that Iraq is an extremely dangerous hardship post with near daily insurgent mortar attacks on the fortified Green Zone where the embassy is located but accused the American Foreign Service Association (the diplomats' union) and some in the State Department of attempting to hamper policy by advising Baghdad candidates not to go and warning of potential career damage.

The US embassy in Baghdad occupies about the same amount of land as the Vatican and comprises 27-buildings, making it by far the biggest US embassy in the world.

Gaza - More Fuel for al Qaeda

There's another dimension to the Hamas/Fatah civil war. Al Qaeda may be poised to pick up the pieces. As Soumaya Ghannoushi writes in The Guardian, Washington and London may have done it again:

"Since declaring jihad in 1998, al-Qaida has aspired to acquire the legitimacy of representing the Palestinian cause, well aware of its rich symbolism within the Arab and Islamic collective conscience

"When Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri issued their "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders" statement on February 28 1998, responses to their declaration varied from apathy to amusement. They were an obscure group lost in the faraway emirate of the Taliban, a pathetic remnant of the fight against the USSR during the cold war. Their role looked historically defunct and their discourse archaic.

"Things could not be more different now. Al-Qaida has become an intensely complex global network, with a decentralised, flexible structure that enables it to spread in all directions, across the Arab world, Africa, Asia and Europe. Whether pursuing active cells or searching for sleeping ones, the security world is haunted by al-Qaida's ghost.

"The organisation's penetration of Palestinian politics is the climax of a long, still unfolding process. Rapidly expanding from one location to another, al-Qaida currently boasts branches throughout the Arab region. ...Nationalist demands and aspirations of liberation of Palestine, independence from foreign dominance, and sovereignty over resources, began to be spoken with an Islamic voice, in a region where the national and the Islamic have always been intimately intertwined.

"With the severe restrictions imposed on them by their western-backed governments and the evaporation of American promises of reform and democratisation, this "democratic Islam" currently finds itself in the grip of a crisis. The greatest beneficiary is al-Qaida. In the Middle East, its battles are fought on two fronts: against "traitor" regimes and their western backers on the one hand, and against popular Islamist oppositions deemed "deviant from the true path of jihad" on the other. In a speech recently broadcast on the al-Jazeera satellite channel, al-Zawahiri scolded Hamas for straying from the path of resistance by participating in the political process.

"Events on the ground give further credibility to al-Zawahiri's words. Arabs have watched with horror as Palestinians have been severely punished for their electoral choices, isolated, starved, and propelled towards the bottomless pit of internecine feuding. The message from Washington and London seemed to be: don't bother with the ballot box - only through bombings and violence is change possible. Between occupation and obstruction of peaceful change, the US is creating the ideal environment for al-Qaida to flourish, the product of a sick geopolitics and a deformed view of the region and its needs."