Friday, December 21, 2007

Will Lavishing more $$$ on the Palestinians Miraculously Make them more Stateworthy?

Six months ago I wrote about the dangers of enabling (On the Disastrous Consequences of "Enabling": Pitfalls Ahead of New 'Mideast Envoy' 6/29 & Why "Enabling" Only Perpetuates the Problem 6/18), a concept in psychology that describes counterproductive efforts to help an individual, often in the throes of addiction. Enabling is doing for someone things that they could, and should be doing themselves. Simply, enabling creates a atmosphere in which the individual can comfortably continue his unacceptable behavior.
The analogy seems an apt one for the West in its efforts to "help" the Palestinians move closer towards statehood. Below, several articles pointing out why this hasn't worked so well in the past and why it's not likely to meet with great success now. What's most confounding is that we seem to have learned little from the recent past. The Palestinian Authority has squandered more than $6 billion dollars in aid since 1994, making the Palestinians the most subsidized people on the planet.
Don't get me wrong; I understand that ordinary Palestinians are suffering and their needs are great. I'm not adverse to the West providing both humanitarian aid as well as assistance in building their economy and social infrastructure. But is it unreasonable to attach a few minimal strings to that handsome sum now pledged, totaling over $8 billion? Couldn't we get them to maybe eliminate the incitement to hatred emanating from their airwaves? At least humor us with a moratorium on the 'Virgins of Paradise' music video, exhorting young men to commit jihad and become martyrs on the fast track to Paradise? Or to insert some maps in the school textbooks that actually show Israel existing in the Middle East? Or put a damper on the Friday sermons at the local mosques preaching death to the Jews? Or do we really believe that more money and good faith is the answer?
david brumer

International Aid to PA No Guarantee for Boosting Moderates - Khaled Abu Toameh
Since its establishment in 1994, the PA has received nearly $6.5 billion in international aid. The assumption was that economic prosperity would weaken radicals and boost the moderates among the Palestinians. But hundreds of millions of dollars went into secret bank accounts or to build villas for senior PA officials. The international community that was pouring money on the PA did not seem to care about the stories of financial corruption and embezzlement. Nor did the donors pay attention to the fact that Arafat was inciting his people not only against Israel, but also against the same "infidels" who were signing his checks. While the billions of dollars promised at the Paris conference on Monday are likely to improve the living conditions of the Palestinians and strengthen their economy, there is no guarantee that the financial aid would have a moderating effect on many of them. This money is mainly designed to keep Fatah in power and prevent Hamas from taking over the West Bank. Unless the PA changes its rhetoric and starts promoting real peace and coexistence with Israel, the millions of dollars are not going to create a new generation of moderate Palestinians. The only way to undermine Hamas is not by channeling billions of dollars to the PA leadership, but by offering the Palestinians a better alternative to the Islamist movement. (Jerusalem Post)


What About the Palestinians' Record? - Diana West
Christmas came early to the Palestinian Authority when the "international community" decided to pledge billions in aid. Why? Did the PA end its terrorist ways? Stop state-sanctioned incitement against Israel and the West? Change Fatah's charter (forget about Hamas) calling for Israel's destruction? What we call "foreign aid" to the PA may be understood as a form of "jizya," the protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims. We avert our collective eye from the goals of jihad. Instead, we see ourselves as villains - Israel for its existence, and Israel's supporters for, well, their support for Israel's existence. (Washington Times)

What to Expect for $8.6B in Palestinian Aid - Greg Sheridan
So international donors have pledged $8.6 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority. This eye-popping amount of money will continue the Palestinians' status as the highest per capita aid recipients in the world. Not that I'm suggesting Palestinians don't have it tough, even if most of their suffering is caused by the appalling decisions of their corrupt, incompetent and extremist leadership. The aid pledged in Paris may do some good. It may stabilize living standards on the West Bank. And by exacerbating the contrast between a more prosperous West Bank, controlled by Fatah, and an increasingly poverty-stricken Gaza, controlled by the religious extremists, Hamas, it may strengthen Fatah against Hamas. Assuming all this works out perfectly, at the very best we might get a slightly improved status quo. Fatah is a busted flush of ageing cronies and local war lords. It has not produced a new generation of leaders and it has very little support among the Palestinian people. Remove the Israelis from the West Bank and the estimates of how long Fatah would remain in power range from two weeks to two hours. (The Australian)

Questions about Palestinian Aid - Steven Stotsky
The argument for increasing foreign aid to the Palestinians stems from the belief that the way to defeat radicalism is to eliminate its ostensible cause - poverty and ignorance. But as early as 1958, Daniel Lerner discerned that political activism in the Middle East was not driven by the "have nots," but rather by the "want mores." Claude Berrebi of Princeton University analyzed Palestinian terrorism and determined that "if anything...those with higher education and higher living standards are more likely to participate in terrorist activity." Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that Palestinian suicide bombers were more likely than the general population to have completed secondary education and were less likely to come from an impoverished environment. They also found similar results associated with membership in Hizbullah. (CAMERA)

What About the Palestinians' Record? - Diana WestChristmas came early to the Palestinian Authority when the "international community" decided to pledge billions in aid. Why? Did the PA end its terrorist ways? Stop state-sanctioned incitement against Israel and the West? Change Fatah's charter (forget about Hamas) calling for Israel's destruction? What we call "foreign aid" to the PA may be understood as a form of "jizya," the protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims. We avert our collective eye from the goals of jihad. Instead, we see ourselves as villains - Israel for its existence, and Israel's supporters for, well, their support for Israel's existence. (Washington Times)

What to Expect for $8.6B in Palestinian Aid - Greg SheridanSo international donors have pledged $8.6 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority. This eye-popping amount of money will continue the Palestinians' status as the highest per capita aid recipients in the world. Not that I'm suggesting Palestinians don't have it tough, even if most of their suffering is caused by the appalling decisions of their corrupt, incompetent and extremist leadership. The aid pledged in Paris may do some good. It may stabilize living standards on the West Bank. And by exacerbating the contrast between a more prosperous West Bank, controlled by Fatah, and an increasingly poverty-stricken Gaza, controlled by the religious extremists, Hamas, it may strengthen Fatah against Hamas. Assuming all this works out perfectly, at the very best we might get a slightly improved status quo. Fatah is a busted flush of ageing cronies and local war lords. It has not produced a new generation of leaders and it has very little support among the Palestinian people. Remove the Israelis from the West Bank and the estimates of how long Fatah would remain in power range from two weeks to two hours. (The Australian)

Funding the Palestinians
Daniel Pipes
Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped. Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.The windfall keeps growing. President George W. Bush requested a $410 million supplement in October, beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year. The State Department justifies this lordly sum on the grounds that it "supports a critical and immediate need to support a new Palestinian Authority (PA) government that both the U.S. and Israel view as a true ally for peace." At a recent hearing, Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, endorsed the supplemental donation.Not content with spending taxpayer money, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a "U.S.-Palestinian Public Private Partnership" on Dec. 3, involving financial heavyweights such as Sandy Weill and Lester Crown, to fund, as Rice put it, "projects that reach young Palestinians directly, that prepare them for responsibilities of citizenship and leadership can have an enormous, positive impact."One report suggests the European Union has funneled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians this year. Looking ahead, Abbas announced a goal to collect pledges of $5.8 billion in aid for a three-year period, 2008-10, at the "Donors' Conference for the Palestinian Authority" attended by over ninety states on Monday in Paris. (Using the best population estimate of 1.35 million Palestinians on the West Bank, this comes to a staggering amount of money: per capita, over $1,400 per year, or about what an Egyptian earns annually.) Endorsed by the Israeli government, Abbas immediately raised nearly that amount for 2008 at the donors' conference.Well, it's a bargain if it works, right? A few billion to end a dangerous, century-old conflict – it's actually a steal. But innovative research by
by Steven Stotsky, a research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) finds that an influx of money to the Palestinians has had the opposite effect historically. Relying on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other official statistics, Stotsky compares two figures since 1999: budgetary support aid provided annually to the Palestinian Authority and the number of Palestinian homicides annually (including both criminal and terrorist activities, and both Israeli and Palestinian victims).
In brief, each $1.25 million or so of budgetary support aid translates into a death within the year. As Stotsky notes, "These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism."
The Palestinian record fits a broader pattern, as noted by Jean-Paul Azam and Alexandra Delacroix in a 2006 article, "Aid and the Delegated Fight Against Terrorism." They found "a pretty robust empirical result showing that the supply of terrorist activity by any country is positively correlated with the amount of foreign aid received by that country" – i.e., the more foreign aid, the more terrorism.
If these studies run exactly counter to the conventional supposition that poverty, unemployment, repression, "occupation," and malaise drive Palestinians to lethal violence, they do confirm my long-standing argument about
Palestinian exhilaration being the problem. The better funded Palestinians are, the stronger they become, and the more inspired to take up arms.
A topsy-turvy understanding of war economics has prevailed in Israel since the Oslo negotiations began in 1993. Rather than deprive their Palestinian enemies of resources, Israelis have been following Shimon Peres's mystical musings, and especially his 1993 tome, The New Middle East, to empower them economically. As I wrote in 2001, this "is tantamount to sending the enemy resources while fighting is still under way – not a hugely bright idea."
Rather than further funding Palestinian bellicosity, Western states, starting with Israel, should cut off all funds to the Palestinian Authority.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

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Saturday, December 8, 2007

Disastrous Consequences of the NIE Report: Will the Fallout Prove Radioactive?

The National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) Report this week on Iran's nuclear weapons program defies credulity. While many analysts search for hidden messages and agendas, the damage has already been done. Efforts to undermine the toxic Iranian regime through sanctions were beginning to have some effect, with growing pressure on countries like Russia and China to participate. Now countries-and corporations-have a fig leaf to hide behind.
The report will only embolden Iran to aggressively pursue what it is undoubtedly already well on its way to accomplishing: developing the technological capability to produce nuclear power, which is then but a short step away from conversion to nuclear weapons.
For over a year, forceful arguments have warned against military actions to stop Iran. The given was that Iran was actively working to become a nuclear power. The question was how to stop this momentum, or whether the world could live with a nuclear Iran.
Ironically, those who hail the NIE report as supporting their belief that Iran's intentions are benign, and who are terrified by the prospect of a military response, choose to remain ignorant of how the report actually brings us closer to military confrontation.
If sanctions lose their teeth--and it is hard to see how that can now be avoided--and Iran's inexorable march toward nuclear capability proves successful, Israel, the country most immediately threatened by such a reality, may be forced to act decisively, powerfully, and likely alone. As Yossi Klein Halevi points out below, Israel could then easily be "branded a warmonger, and faulted for the inevitable fallout of rising oil prices and increased terror."
And when Ha'aretz, the most respected left-leaning daily in Israel, warns that the NIE report does nothing to mitigate Israel's real fears of a nuclear Iran who has threatened to "annihilate" Israel, the world should take heed. Below, more takes from Gerald Steinberg, Melanie Phillips, Avner Cohen, Alan Dershowitz, and others.
david brumer

An Insult to Intelligence: The Israeli Defense Community Responds to the NIE -
Yossi Klein Halevi (New Republic)
With the release of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, America, even under George Bush, is hardly likely to go to war to stop a nuclear weapons program many Americans now believe doesn't exist. The sense of betrayal within the Israeli security system is deep. After convincing the international community that the nuclear threat was real, now that has been undone by Israel's closest ally.
What makes Israeli security officials especially furious is that the report casts doubt on Iranian determination to attain nuclear weapons. There is a sense of incredulity. The Israeli strategists I heard from ridicule the report's contention that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs."
For Israeli security analysts, the suspension in 2003 of Iran's covert nuclear military program - the NIE's defining issue - is hardly pivotal. The working assumption in Israeli intelligence is that the Iranians have resumed their covert military program. "The Syrians were working on their nuclear project for seven years, and we discovered it only recently," says one security analyst. "The Americans didn't know about it at all. So how can they be so sure about Iran?"
Shabtai Shavit, former head of the Mossad,
said: "My assessment is that, after they decided to aim for nuclear weapons, they advanced on three parallel tracks: enriching uranium, creating components for a bomb, and developing missiles. The missiles are ready for operation. As for enrichment, they have encountered all kinds of problems, like exploding centrifuges. I estimate that they made great progress, and very quickly, on the military track. Since they have problems with the uranium enrichment track, they can allow themselves to delay the military track, and wait for progress with uranium."
And if Shavit had written the report? "I would have based my assessment on the facts and said unequivocally that Iran is going to create the ability to make a bomb."
Until now, pessimists here could console themselves that a last-resort Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would likely draw wide international sympathy and even gratitude--very different from the near-total condemnation that greeted Israel's attack on Saddam's reactor in 1981. Now, though, the NIE will ensure that if Israel does attack, it will be widely branded a warmonger, and faulted for the inevitable fallout of rising oil prices and increased terror.
Ironically, an Israeli reading of the report only confirms the anxiety here, felt across the political spectrum, about Iranian intentions and capabilities. Responding to the NIE, the left-wing newspaper, Haaretz, sounds like a neo-con organ: "While Iran continues threatening to annihilate Israel, what American intelligence thinks about Iran's nuclear capability is irrelevant.... The report establishes that if Iran wants to produce a bomb it can do so, and if it doesn't want to, it won't. This evaluation may have a restraining effect in internal American politics. But in Israeli politics it should cause the opposite reaction."
Once the material is available, the final step toward constructing a bomb is the least complicated part of the process. "Today the Iranians are enriching uranium at four percent; to make a bomb, you need 90 percent. From there, the transition doesn't require a lot of time. Most of the work has been done to get to the four percent. It is a matter of months, not years."
That sense of urgency is evident in the highest ranks of the Israeli military. A recent letter circulated by Eliezer Shkedi, commander of the Israeli Air Force, to his officers offered a textual comparison between quotes from Hitler threatening Europe's Jews in the 1930s with quotes from Iranian President Ahmadinejad threatening Israel today. An accompanying letter, signed by an officer identified only as "responsible for the Iranian arena," noted laconically, "We can rely only on ourselves." With the release of the NIE, that old Israeli sentiment has become far more acute.
(Yossi Klein Halevi is a contributing editor of TNR and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem)

Israel Cannot Let Down Its Guard in the Face of Iranian Threats -(Ha'aretz Editorial)
While Iran continues threatening to annihilate Israel, what American intelligence thinks about Iran's nuclear capability is irrelevant. It is not fantasy or paranoia when we hear regular, concrete threats from Tehran. Therefore, the question of whether Iran obtains a nuclear capability to destroy Israel in two years or seven years is not important. While other nations can amuse themselves by mulling their economic interests with Iran, Israel is the only country that cannot let its guard down as long as the current Iranian regime is in power. The American intelligence report cannot justify a policy change or a calming down. The report establishes that if Iran wants to produce a bomb it can do so.

Stupid Intelligence- By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
The recent national intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is just about the stupidest intelligence assessment I have ever read. It falls hook, line and sinker for a transparent bait and switch tactic employed not only by Iran, but by several other nuclear powers in the past.
The tactic is obvious and well-known to all intelligence officials with an IQ above room temperature. It goes like this: There are two tracks to making nuclear weapons: One is to conduct research and develop technology directly related to military use. What every intelligence agency knows is that the most difficult part of developing weapons corresponds precisely to the second track, namely civilian use. In other words, it is relatively simple to move from track 2 to track 1 in a short period of time.
The authors of this perverse report, which is influencing policy so immediately and negatively, will have much to answer for if their assessment results in a reduction of pressure on Iran—which is the only nation actually to threaten to use nuclear weapons to attack its enemies—to stop its obvious march toward becoming the world’s most dangerous nuclear military power.

In Iran We Trust? - Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin (New York Times)
The latest National Intelligence Estimate contains the same sorts of flaws that we have learned to expect from our intelligence agency offerings. During the past year, a period when Iran's weapons program was supposedly halted, the government has been busy installing some 3,000 gas centrifuges at its plant at Natanz. These machines could, if operated continuously for about a year, create enough enriched uranium to provide fuel for a bomb. In addition, they have no plausible purpose in Iran's civilian nuclear effort. All of Iran's needs for enriched uranium for its energy programs are covered by a contract with Russia. Iran is also building a heavy water reactor at its research center at Arak. This reactor is ideal for producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, but is of little use in an energy program like Iran's, which does not use plutonium for reactor fuel. For years these expensive projects have been viewed as evidence of Iran's commitment to nuclear weapons. Why aren't they still? The answer is that the new report defines "nuclear weapons program" in a ludicrously narrow way: it confines it to enriching uranium at secret sites or working on a nuclear weapon design. Valerie Lincy is the editor of Iranwatch.org. Gary Milhollin is the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

The Flaws in the Iran Report - John R. Bolton
The headline finding - that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 - is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE. Moreover, the distinction between "military" and "civilian" programs is highly artificial, since the enrichment of uranium, which all agree Iran is continuing, is critical to civilian and military uses. Indeed, it has always been Iran's "civilian" program that posed the main risk of a nuclear "breakout." The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The 2007 NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. (Washington Post)

Not the Best Intelligence - Avner Cohen
The release of the National Intelligence Estimate was a political miscalculation that has struck a fatal blow to the administration's diplomatic efforts to bring sanctions against Iran. The community of nuclear experts in Washington, including many of us who oppose military action against Iran, were shocked at the methodologically shallow, confusing and unprofessional way that many of the NIE's findings were formulated. Some believe that the intelligence officials, with Rice's assistance, have taken upon themselves the patriotic task of saving Bush from himself. The report notes that Iran suspended or halted the working groups building the bomb, but creates the false impression that this was the main component of Iran's nuclear weapons development program. The writer is a senior research fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. (Ha'aretz)

Decoding the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program -
Gerald M. Steinberg
The U.S. government's latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has concluded that Iran froze its active efforts to manufacture nuclear weapons in 2003, and will not have such a capability until at least 2012. While the NIE states that the U.S. intelligence community has "high confidence" that the Iranians halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, it also states that it has only "moderate confidence" that Tehran has not restarted the program. In contrast, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said that while it is "apparently true that in 2003, Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a certain period of time," nonetheless, he adds that "in our estimation, since then it is apparently continuing with its program to produce a nuclear weapon." Israeli analysts have long warned their U.S. counterparts about the potential for a parallel "black" Iranian weapons program, based on a small nuclear reactor producing plutonium, and following the North Korean model. Indeed, Iran is known to be constructing just such a reactor at Arak, leaving room for another undetected facility. (Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)

Iran's Nuclear Program and the National Intelligence Estimate -
Interview with Senator Joe Lieberman (Federal News Service)
"The headline you just read shows the danger here, which is that people will reach a conclusion that all of our concern about Iran building nuclear weapons was misplaced, it's over, there's no problem. If you read this report, this intelligence report, you see that that's not true. It says very clearly Iran has both the capacity and intention to build a nuclear weapon." "And in fact, they are focused now on the first, most important thing that they need to do, which is to enrich uranium. So this is not cause for complacency. There's still a lot about what Iran is doing that should concern us and encourage us to keep the economic and diplomatic pressure on them."

Peres Warns: One Morning We'll Wake to a Nuclear Iran - Roni Sofer (Ynet News)
According to President Shimon Peres, historically, intelligence reports sometimes turn out to be inaccurate, but on the Iranian issue the international community must eschew compromise and focus on a few clear warning signs. Peres warned visiting former American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that whenever Iran develops a successful civilian nuclear energy program, the transition to developing nuclear weapons will be quick and easy. Furthermore, Peres warned that it was impossible for any intelligence agency to know the exact nature and scope of the technological knowledge purchased from North Korea and Russia at high prices. "We are likely to wake up one morning and discover that comprehensive nuclear technology was passed on without interruption and is close to implementation," he said.

The Thousand Volt Farce - Melanie Phillips
How Iran is laughing. America has achieved the remarkable feat of dealing a terrible blow to all those fighting to defend civilization. It has actually strengthened Ahmadinejad, whose grip on power had been looking ever more fragile. But then the U.S. handed him a priceless gift in the form of the NIE report which says, in effect, that U.S. intelligence hasn't got a clue about the Iranian nuclear threat. We can all see from its ludicrously threadbare reasoning - much of it merely using guesswork to assess Iran's intentions, in the absence of reliable information on the ground - that intelligence of any sort is clearly in short supply in the U.S. security world. (Spectator-UK)

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