CIA gets the go-ahead to take on Hizbollah

What has been unofficially going on for a long while is made official.
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By Toby Harnden, US Editor

Last Updated: 1:47am GMT 10/01/2007

Con Coughlin: Siniora government's battle for survival The Central Intelligence Agency has been authorised to take covert action against Hizbollah as part of a secret plan by President George W. Bush to help the Lebanese government prevent the spread of Iranian influence. Senators and congressmen have been briefed on the classified "non-lethal presidential finding" that allows the CIA to provide financial and logistical support to the prime minister, Fouad Siniora. The finding was signed by Mr Bush before Christmas after discussions between his aides and Saudi Arabian officials. Details of its existence, known only to a small circle of White House officials, intelligence officials and members of Congress, have been passed to The Daily Telegraph. It authorises the CIA and other US intelligence agencies to fund anti-Hizbollah groups in Lebanon and pay for activists who support the Siniora government. The secrecy of the finding means that US involvement in the activities is officially deniable. The Bush administration hopes Mr Siniora's government, severely weakened after its war with Israel last year, will become a bulwark against the growing power of the Shia sect of Islam, championed by Iran and Syria, since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Mr Bush's move is at the centre of a fresh drive by America, supported by the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt as well as Israel, to stop Iranian hegemony in the Middle East emerging from the collapse of Iraq. The finding, drawn up at the White House by National Security Council (NSC) officials, is a sign of Mr Bush's growing alarm at the threat posed by Iran, which has infiltrated the Iraqi government and is training Shia insurgents as well as supplying them with roadside bombs. A former US government official said: "Siniora's under siege there and we are always looking for ways to help allies. As Richard Armitage [a former deputy US secretary of state] said, Hizbollah is the A-team of terrorism and certainly Iran and Syria have not let up in their support of the group." Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, the former Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington, is understood to have been closely involved in the decision to prop up Mr Siniora's administration and the Israeli government, which views Iran as its chief enemy, has also been supportive. "There's a feeling both in Jerusalem and in Riyadh that the anti-Sunni tilt in the region has gone too far," said an intelligence source. "By removing Saddam, we've shifted things in favour of the Shia and this is a counter-balancing exercise. Prince Bandar, now King Abdullah's national security adviser, made several trips to Washington and held meetings with Elliot Abrams, the senior Middle East official on the NSC. Prince Turki al-Faisal resigned abruptly as ambassador to Washington last month. Intelligence sources said that a principal reason for this was his belief he had been undermined by Prince Bandar, who had not told him of the Lebanon plan or even that he was visiting Washington. As a quid pro quo to the Sunni Arab states, Mr Bush and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, have agreed to work harder to re-start negotiations about a peace deal with the Palestinians. According to the Swoop website (theswoop.net), which contains briefings on diplomatic and intelligence matters: "US officials point to the Israeli release of some tax monies owed to the Palestinian Authority as the first fruits of this approach. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former clandestine CIA officer, said that such a finding would involve "various steps and types of non-military activity" agreed to by the Lebanese. "It takes two to tango. You're only those things that the Lebanese themselves would want you to do," he said. Bush administration officials have spoken of their desire to promote "mainstream" Arab states and have even spoken of the existence of a "Sunni crescent" in the Middle East. But there is tension between this policy and the support for Nouri al-Maliki's Shia-led government in Iraq, which has links to Shia death squads and Iran. "The administration is reaping its own whirlwind after Iraq," said the intelligence source. "For 50 years the US preferred stability over legitimacy in the Middle East and now it's got neither. It's a situation replete with ironies." toby.harnden@telegraph.co.uk

The Dems on Iraq: More Bark Than Bite

Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007

By Massimo Calabresi/Washington

Before they took control of the House and the Senate, Democrats had a lot to say about George W. Bush's use of Presidential power and what they claimed was Republican complicity in eroding both civil liberties and the authority of Congress. When the GOP pushed through a bill granting Bush the ability to suspend the ancient right of habeus corpus for terror suspects, the man who would become the Democratic Senate majority leader after the election, Harry Reid, said, "The framers of our Constitution understood the need for checks and balances, but this bill discards them." Across the country Democratic candidates for both chambers of Congress painted their opponents as rubber stamps for Bush's failed policy in Iraq. And the day before the Nov. 7 vote that would vindicate his chairmanship of the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, New York's Charles Schumer said voters were flooding to Democrats in part because they had decided that the country needed "some checks and balances in this government."

Now that they're in charge, Democrats are still talking the talk. This week, they are hammering away at Bush ahead of his Iraq speech while planning a resolution opposing his proposed troop increase in the war. Today incoming Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy held hearings on what he says are executive branch infringements on Americans' privacy. And on Thursday Leahy will have attorney general Alberto Gonzales appear before his panel for a wide-ranging oversight hearing, which the committee's spokesperson says will dig into the civil liberties issues Democrats raised in the campaign.

But when it comes to actually taking any action to check Bush's war powers, there's not much bark to the Democrats' bite. Which raises the question: will Democrats use their new power to rein in what they say is an overreaching president? Or will they choose to continue what proved to be a successful political strategy when they were in the minority: criticizing the administration for unpopular policies while avoiding taking action themselves that could prove equally unpopular?

On Iraq, Hill Democrats have chosen the latter course. Sen. Edward Kennedy yesterday introduced a bill to block funding for deploying additional troops to Iraq. But Reid and the Democratic leadership prefer a non-binding, "sense-of-the-Senate" resolution opposing the troop increase that is designed to embarrass Bush by peeling off dissenting Republicans, without actually taking any action to block the move. Kennedy's proposal, leadership aides say, is a stalking horse designed in part to placate the base by attacking Bush while leaving Democrats who support the leadership's alternative safe from accusations they don't back the troops.

And if war opponents are likely to be disappointed by the Democratic response to Bush's proposed troop increase, those who believe he is eroding American civil liberties will be even more downcast in coming weeks. Yesterday at a press briefing in the Senate Hart office building, American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony Romero said that while Democrats had not been willing to obstruct Bush's war on terror initiatives before the November elections, he hoped the Democratic rout might have changed the political calculation. "We hope that the Democrats have found their spines again," he said.

Leahy, the incoming Judiciary chairman, is doing his part. In addition to the hearings, he and the ranking minority leader, Arlen Specter, have introduced a bill that would roll back Bush's habeus-overriding powers. Leahy, Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, and New Hampshire conservative John Sununu today will introduce a bill that would require executive branch agencies regularly to report on data mining efforts. On the record, Harry Reid's office is nominally supportive of these efforts. "The new Congress will review all aspects of the war on terror to see what improvements are needed," says Reid spokesman, Jim Manley.

But privately top Democratic Senators, aides and advisers say the political calculation has not changed since before the election. While Bush and his policies are unpopular in the extreme, Americans still support a strong hand at the White House when it comes to national security matters. From the Democrats' perspective, that means plenty of willingness to criticize Bush on all fronts when it comes to his handling of national security and even the use of his war powers — but, at least for now, no overt efforts to curtail them.

"You're going to see many more hearings," Schumer said yesterday when I asked him if there was increased willingness of Democrats to confront Bush's war powers. North Dakota's Byron Dorgan, the Democrats' third ranking member of the Senate and an outspoken administration critic, said he thought it was "a little early" to roll back Bush's expansion of executive power in the previous Congress. A Democratic judiciary staffer supportive of a rollback said, "We understand the political reality." And leadership aides say bluntly that short of new revelations that turn public opinion against expanded executive authority, the Democrats are going to avoid directly confronting the President.

Critics think this approach is short-sighted, arguing Democrats could get away with criticizing the President without curtailing him when they were in the minority, but risk looking hypocritical now that they're in charge on the Hill. The ACLU points to its own polling that it says shows Americans support pushing back against the President and cites three races to back the numbers up. In Montana and Ohio, Senate challengers opposed to the popular Patriot Act fended off harsh attacks from Republicans on their position, and in a key Connecticut House race the anti-executive authority position helped seal victory for the Democratic challenger. Still, "that doesn't guarantee that the Democrats have found their backbone," says ACLU Washington representative, Caroline Fredrickson.

Politically, however, it's hard to argue with a winning strategy. The ACLU's three races fly in the face of Harry Reid's victorious approach throughout the 109th Congress: hammer the President in every public forum on Iraq and executive overreach, but never, ever get on the wrong side of tough national security policies. Echoing the dominant centrist approach, California's Dianne Feinstein, who sits on both the intelligence and judiciary committees, told me yesterday she thinks, "it is right to give the government reasonable leeway to protect Americans," while "having hearings and oversight is also helpful in clearing the air."

In the end, that means little legislative push back in the war powers battle. Privately, leadership aides say there is no reason for Reid to get ahead of habeus cases working their way through the courts that could save Democrats the political pain of an open battle with Bush. Even Leahy's office holds out little hope of rolling back Bush's wiretapping program. And Reid's non-binding resolution on Iraq will do nothing to slow the reported imminent deployment of more troops to Baghdad. By the time the Administration's request for emergency funds for the war comes through next month, opponents of the surge will be in the position of having to vote against money for troops already in a war zone. And even the most outspoken critics of the Bush White House know that's a losing proposition.

A 16-year cycle of treachery

<>IHT
Diane E. King

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

PULLMAN, Washington

The United States abandoned the Kurds in 1975 and again in 1991. Sixteen years separated these first two betrayals. Another 16 years have elapsed, and America may be on the verge of another betrayal, however unintended and inadvertent, of the residents of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Iraqi Kurds (and members of other ethnic groups in the Kurdistan region) have been unflinching allies of the U.S. forces in Iraq. Some of their support has entailed acting under a Kurdish banner, like when Kurdish fighters, the peshmerga, provided logistical support and hospitality to paratroopers landing in the north as the war began.

But much more of their support has been under an Iraqi rubric. On my several trips to Iraq since 2003, I have observed that at least in the northern part of the country, Iraqi troop composition is very heavily Kurdish. I also saw strong evidence of a warm, cooperative relationship between Kurdish Iraqi and U.S. soldiers. Statistics on the makeup of the Iraqi Army released in late 2005 also suggest that ethnic Kurds are probably the heaviest participants, proportionally, in the Iraqi military.

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'Unintended and inadvertent'? Now that's a laugh. The owner of the IHT supports escalation.

Iraq wants no part of more U.S. soldiers

<>By Sabrina Tavernise

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

BAGHDAD

As President George W. Bush challenges public opinion at home by committing more soldiers to Iraq, he is confronted by an essential paradox: An Iraqi government that does not really want them.

The Shiite-led government here has not opposed more troops. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said as much in a videoconference with Bush on Saturday. But the government is skeptical of American intentions and is determined to push back the reach of Washington's authority to run the war the way it wants.

Haidar al-Abadi, a member of Parliament who is a close associate of Maliki's, said: "The government believes there is no need for extra troops from the American side. The existing troops can do the job."

That opinion is broadly held throughout the ranks of the Shiite political elite, which after two years in power is stretching its wings and trying to stamp its authority on a chaotic capital. A long-oppressed majority, they are acting out of a deep-seated fear that power could be taken away at any moment.

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Bush says U.S. will clamp down on Iran, Syria as part of Iraq strategy

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush's new strategy for the Iraq war calls for clamping down on what the United States sees as Iran and Syria's support for insurgents and trying to get more help from American allies in the region. He said the United States would expand intelligence cooperation in the Middle East and deploy Patriot missile defense systems to help allies. He also said he would deploy an additional carrier strike group to the region. Bush said he would help Turkey and Iraq resolve problems along their border. Turkey has been pressing Iraq to stop Kurdish guerrillas from staging hit-and-run attacks from northern Iraq. Bush's comments came in a nationwide address to Americans in which he said he was increasing U.S. troops in Iraq by 21,500 in an attempt to change the course of the war. Bush said Iran and Syria "are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq." "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," Bush said. "We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria." He said he would use "America's full diplomatic resources to rally support for Iraq from nations throughout the Middle East." "Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States need to understand that an American defeat in Iraq would create a new sanctuary for extremists — and a strategic threat to their survival," he said. He noted that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to the region on Friday.

The triumph of death

© Steve Bell 2006

steve.bell@guardian.co.uk

Cartoon: Steve Bell on George Bush's speech on Iraq.

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