Friday, November 22, 2002

[2:15 PM] An article in the new Vanity Fair by Sebastian Junger details his visit to the tri-border region (which for some reason he calls Triple Border, with no article) to investigate links to al-Qaida. The article is longer on details than the recent one in the New Yorker mentioned in this post (Sorry, neither article is available online). Like the New Yorker article, Junger writes of terrorist training camps in the jungle outside the tri-border area and interviews a man who received training at one. It’s a very good article.

An interesting contrast is this brief from Middle East Newsline from yesterday

U.S. DOES NOT FIND HIZBULLAH ACTIVITY IN TRI-BORDER AREA
The United States has determined that Hizbullah does not operate insurgency cells in South America. U.S. officials said the CIA and other intelligence agencies have closely monitored the so-called tri-border area of South America for traces of Hizbullah activity. The area is where Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet. “The sense that we have is that there are few areas where certain specific groups in the Middle East like Hizbullah have contacts and raise money, probably lots of money,” a senior U.S. defense official said. “Do they have active terrorist cell operations here? No, we haven’t seen evidence of that.”

The senior official said the United States has been closely monitoring the tri-border area in cooperation with its South American allies. The official said the countries themselves have been cooperating in halting any Islamic insurgency activities in the area.

“Now, those countries are collaborating with each other and cooperating with us very, very closely to monitor this and what we are finding is a lot of illegal activity, some of this geared toward raising money,” the official said. The U.S. assessment confirmed an assertion by Argentina that it has not found any Hizbullah insurgency activity in the tri-border area. The area has a large Shi’ite community and U.S. officials had expressed concern that Hizbullah and Al Qaida could be cooperating in launching attacks against the United States.

Hizbullah was said to have deployed Shi’ite agents from the tri-border area to bomb the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and the Jewish community center in that city two years later. The two attacks killed more than 100 people.

# posted 2:18 PM

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

[12:48 PM] Donald Rumsfeld was in Chile this weekend for the Defense Ministerial of the Americas. In an interview with Chilean newspaper La Tercera Daily, he was asked about al-Qaida in the tri-border area (yes, the continuing Fields Report theme). Here’s the exchange

Q: There is some information about the presence of Al Qaeda members in this region, in the triple frontier, in Iquique in the north of Chile. Do you have information about that? What's the information you have?

Rumsfeld: I do not have any information that's discussible. Needless to say we have interest in all of the terrorist networks that operate in the world, and we see lots of reports about their movements around the world. In many cases it is scraps of information that is not verified and to some extent it involves actual hard information that it may be a transit as opposed to a location and in some instances it relates as much to financing, in some instances there are loose affiliations and I'm not in the intelligence business as such so I don't spend a lot of time trying to nail all that down. I get the assessments from the director of the central intelligence and look at that, but those kinds of things that are assessments and evaluations and they are not releasable.

Rumsfeld sounds much less worried about some of the reports coming out of the area about top-level terrorist meetings and plans to hit American and Israeli targets in the Western Hemisphere or he’s playing it very cool.

# posted 12:51 PM

[11:58 AM] NATO, NATO, NATO. President Bush has left for the NATO summit in Prague which will be held from November 21-22. Read his (uninspiring) interview with Czech television here. Throwaway line: “I think NATO is a good thing, and I look forward to working with our friends in NATO.” The Guardian warns against “free-range militarism” if the Bush administration has its way in transforming NATO. Visit the Prague summit website here.

# posted 12:01 PM

Friday, November 15, 2002

[11:00 AM] Nicholas Kristoff debates preemptive strikes, examining the Israeli bombing raid on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981. What is not mentioned in the op-ed and what has slipped into historical obscurity is that Israeli commandos attempted to destroy the reactor cores before they were delivered to Iraq. Saboteurs planted five explosive charges on the reactor cores as the awaited shipment in a warehouse in the French Mediterranean town of Seyne-sur-Mer on April 6, 1979. The resulting explosion, however, only damaged the cores and rather than suffer a two-year setback while the cores were rebuilt, the Iraqis accepted the damaged cores.

Kristoff writes

The lesson of Osirak is very limited — that in extreme cases it is justifiable for a country to make a pre-emptive pinpoint strike to prevent an unpredictable enemy from gaining weapons of mass destruction that would be used against it. That's a reasonable approach toward Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to cooperate and if we have intelligence about what sites are worth striking.

Two things: Israel has no compunction about these sorts of things. Secondly, had the cores been destroyed before they left France, we wouldn’t have the Osirak example to frame the debate over preemptive strikes on a target country.

# posted 11:03 AM

[10:19 AM] Update: The Colombian bishop has been freed. Poor Ingrid Betancourt has moved back into obscurity.

# posted 10:22 AM

[10:16 AM] We’d really like these al-Qaida documents translated, but not that badly.

# posted 10:19 AM

Thursday, November 14, 2002

[12:19 PM] Hardliner president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe says that his government is willing to consider a hostage exchange with leftist rebels. This surprising announcement comes after guerrillas kidnapped Bishop Jorge Enrique Jimenez, president of the Latin American bishop’s conference. This is potentially good news for liberal presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who has been languishing in FARC custody for six months now. This demonstrates where Colombian presidential priorities lie.

# posted 12:22 PM

[10:10 AM] “[T]oday, the international community’s insistence on reform [of the Palestinian Authority] as precondition for a peace settlement is both harming its version of reform and delaying everyone’s notion of peace.”

Read the International Crisis Group’s new report “The Meanings of Palestinian Reform” here.

# posted 10:16 AM

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

[8:14 PM] Is Usama Bin Laden alive or dead? Is that his voice on the audiotape broadcast by Al-Jazeera? Fields Report is mildly interested in the answers to these questions. What would be more interesting is a transcript of the tape, which no major news service seems concerned with providing. The Washington Post has it online via the AP which got it from the U.S. government. Here it is courtesy of the Federal Broadcast Information Service (question—why did AP excise the bold portions?)

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. From the slave of God, Usama Bin Ladin, to the peoples of the countries allied with the tyrannical US Government.

May God's peace be upon those who follow the right path. The road to safety begins by ending the aggression. Reciprocal treatment is part of justice. The incidents that have taken place since the raids of New York and Washington until now -- like the killing of Germans in Tunisia and the French in Karachi, the bombing of the giant French tanker in Yemen, the killing of marines in Faylaka and the British and Australians in the Bali explosions, the recent operation in Moscow, and some sporadic operations here and there -- are only reactions and reciprocal actions. These actions were carried out by the zealous sons of Islam in defense of their religion and in response to the order of their God and prophet, may God's peace and blessings be upon him. What Bush, the pharaoh of this age, was doing in terms of killing our sons in Iraq, and what Israel, the United States' ally, was doing in terms of bombing houses that shelter old people, women, and children with US-made aircraft in Palestine were sufficient to prompt the sane among your rulers to distance themselves from this criminal gang.

Our kinfolk in Palestine have been slain and severely tortured for nearly a century. If we defend our people in Palestine, the world becomes agitated and allies itself against Muslims, unjustly and falsely, under the pretense of fighting terrorism. What do your governments want by allying themselves with the criminal gang in the White House against Muslims? Do your governments not know that the White House gangsters are the biggest butchers of this age? Rumsfeld, the butcher of Vietnam, killed more than two million people, not to mention those he wounded. Cheney and Powell killed and destroyed in Baghdad more than Hulegu of the Mongols. What do your governments want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany, and Australia.

We warned Australia before not to join in [the war] in Afghanistan, and [against] its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali. Its government falsely claimed that they [the Australians] were not targeted. If you were distressed by the deaths of your men and the men of your allies in Tunisia, Karachi, Faylaka, Bali, and Amman, remember our children who are killed in Palestine and Iraq everyday, remember our deaths in Khowst mosques, and remember the premeditated killing of our people in weddings in Afghanistan. If you were distressed by the killing of your nationals in Moscow, remember ours in Chechnya. Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning, and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability, and happiness be your lot? This is unfair. It is time we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb. And expect more that will further distress you. The Islamic nation, thanks to God, has started to attack you at the hands of its beloved sons, who pledged to God to continue jihad, as long as they are alive, through words and weapons to establish right and expose falsehood.

In conclusion, I ask God to help us champion His religion and continue jihad for His sake until we meet Him while He is satisfied with us. And He can do so. Praise be to Almighty God.

# posted 8:17 PM

Monday, November 11, 2002

[7:34 PM]

“The increasingly popular idea in Washington that the United States, by toppling Saddam Hussein, can rapidly democratize Iraq and unleash a democratic tsunami in the Middle East is a dangerous fantasy. The U.S. record of building democracy after invading other countries is mixed at best and the Bush administration’s commitment to a massive reconstruction effort in Iraq is doubtful.”


This is the from a Carnegie Endowment
policy brief entitled “Democratic Mirage in the Middle East.” The brief makes some interesting and broad recommendation on fostering democracy in the region. Although it’s a little short on specific policy prescriptions and more a philosophical guideline, in cautioning against fanciful thinking it presents a list of pragmatic ideas (my favorite being "Don't confuse a 'sell America' campaign with democracy promotion") about dealing with the complexity of the region.

# posted 7:37 PM

Friday, November 08, 2002

[12:34 PM] CNN reports that a group of “top terrorist operatives” met recently in the tri-border region of South America to plan attacks against U.S. and Israeli targets in the Western hemisphere. The story was also featured on Newsnight with Aaron Brown last night (the transcript isn’t up on the CNN website yet). Fields Report follows with interest Islamist terrorism in the tri-border region (and unfortunately was out of the office when CNN called for comment before the story ran). Read my article on this subject here.

# posted 12:37 PM

Thursday, November 07, 2002

[1:19 PM] Anthony Lake and Robert Gallucci set the record straight on North Korea, the Clinton administration, and the 1994 Agreed Framework.

“Since the agreement was violated by the North Koreans, critics argue that it was the product of a capitulation by the Clinton administration, that we offered Pyongyang only carrots while brandishing no sticks. James A. Baker III, writing in The Post on Oct. 23 [op-ed], claimed that Washington folded after North Korea threatened to turn the capital of South Korea into ‘a sea of fire.’ This simply is not true.”

The op-ed continues

“An ideological disdain for negotiating with our adversaries seldom serves our interests, and in this case could be highly dangerous…Successful diplomacy is wedded to power -- and our global power depends also on our successful diplomacy.”

Sounds a little like what Fields Report has been saying.

# posted 1:22 PM

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

[10:27 AM] The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the German Marshall Fund of the United States recently conducted an in-depth survey of U.S. and European public attitudes on foreign affairs. The presidents of both of those organizations write about “The Real Transatlantic Gap” in
this article in Foreign Policy.

# posted 10:30 AM

Monday, November 04, 2002

[3:54 PM] I’m assuming—and it is a huge assumption given this administration—that the Bush administration has open back channel negotiations with North Korea and that it is only a matter of time before some miraculous “concession” comes, and the North Koreans announce that they will abandon their recently-revealed uranium enrichment project with no preconditions. But why does the administration insist on being so publicly belligerent and obstinate? North Korea is desperately seeking engagement. And they have the bad weapons—the ones that have the administration all in a fit to march into Baghdad—and they’re further along in their nuclear program. Others have written about how North Korea is different from Iraq and how this problem is more amenable to diplomatic solutions versus military threats. So when is the Bush administration going to act like this is actually true? “North Korea should not have abandoned its obligations, and that's what they’ve done,” Ari Fleicher proclaimed. The administrations want to engage in a battle of who’s right and who’s bad. One can’t help but question the motives of the administration on other security issues given this posturing. It certainly doesn’t seem that security and containing WMD proliferants is actually a priority—unless of course we’re speaking of Iraq. This is the time for quiet diplomacy, not finger pointing rhetoric.

# posted 3:57 PM