Power and Policy Team update (English)

Iraq’s neighbors
This Los Angeles Times article describes the struggle between some of Iraq’s neighbors to fill the void that the United States might leave. “Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey are all pursuing their agendas and taking sides along a Sunni-Shiite divide. That could become dangerous as U.S. troops withdraw.”

Pakistan
Raza Haider, the leader of the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), was assassinated on Monday. His death set off a wave of violence that has left at least 47 people dead the southern port of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. (See NYT report.)

BP Oil Spill
According to the White House 75% percent of the oil spill has been “captured, burned off, evaporated or broken down”. (Source: The Guardian.)

U.S. Supreme Court
Debate on Elena Kagan’s nomination started in the Senate. She has the support of all Democrats and some Republicans, and is expected to be confirmed by the end of the week. (More in NYT.)

Health care reform setback
Voters in Missouri approved a measure “intended to invalidate a crucial element of President Obama's health care law — namely, that most people be required to get health insurance or pay a tax penalty.” The effect of the vote remains uncertain, since the insurance requirement does not take effect until 2014 and since by then the courts “are likely to weigh in on the provision”. (See NYT report.)

Israel and Lebanon
Israeli and Lebanese forces exchanged fire among the border. At least four people were killed, the deadliest incident in the border since 2006. Lebanon and Israel traded accusations, but neither seemed interested in escalating the conflict. (Seen in FT$.)

Patrick Signoret and Isabel Gil

Power and Policy Team update (English)

Isabel Gil y Patrick Signoret

War in Iraq
By August 31st America´s mission in Iraq will end, said president Obama. According to the promises made during his campaign, by the end of this month there will only be 50,000 troops in Iraq, which will be in charge of supporting and training Iraqi security forces. These troops will leave Iraq at the end of 2011. Meanwhile, Iraq is in political deadlock, five months after the parliamentary elections. Here’s a link to Obama's full speech: http://tinyurl.com/24w3j95 (NYT, FT, White House)

Israel
Ban Ki-moon formally announced the creation of a commission to investigate the incident of the Gaza flotilla. Israel, who had previously been reluctant, announced its cooperation on Monday.
(NYT)

Bernanke speech
One week before the next interest rate setting meeting, Bernanke gave a speech in South California where he argued that even though the financial crisis seems to have passed, the U.S. has still a long way to go in order to achieve full economic recovery. “A long way to go” and “caution” were the main words that stuck in markets and newspapers.
(FT)

Sullivan on Israel and Gaza

I agree with my brother Tom, who says that Andrew Sullivan probably got it right in his January 2 post:

From the perspective of intent, there does seem to me to be moral clarity between Israel and Hamas. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist in peace; Israel refuses to recognize Hamas' right to exist as a legitimate polity in Gaza because Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist. Hamas also was the first to break a barely-held ceasefire recently. There seems to me to be no question that Israel has the higher moral ground from the perspective of recent events.

At the same time, Israel's actual resources of military and economic power far exceed Hamas's; and its pulverization of Gaza has led to a huge imbalance between the victims of Hamas's war on Israel and Israel's war on Hamas. The Palestinians are suffering something like ten times the trauma and deaths of Israelis. What they have endured in Gaza for the past couple of years must also be taken into account. It is not a function of appeasement or wimpiness or fondness for Jihadism that makes this conclusion inescapable. It is simply being human.

And so you have an excruciating confluence of the questions of proportionality in a just war and asymmetry in the war against terrorism. What renders the current awfulness particularly wrenching is that the immoral means Hamas uses are logical from the point of view of an entity that is committed to Israel's destruction but not powerful enough to achieve it. And the response of Israel is logical from the point of view of a Western country enduring constant terrorist bombardment. Hence the never-ending argument in which both extremes reinforce themselves. This is not, one remembers, a Likud government. This is what the center left needs to do in Israel to stay in power at this point. And it has the backing of Egypt.

The nature of the conflict therefore ensures that Israel will kill and injure and traumatize far more human beings than Hamas can, even though Israel's intentions may be more honorable (and the relative lack of civilian deaths, given the pounding that has been going on in Gaza, is striking evidence for Israel's relative scrupulousness). This means that Israel will continue to lose the war of ideas and that Hamas will benefit from the impasse. Meanwhile, Jewish Israelis face a demographic reckoning and the forces of Jihadism gain a new recruiting tool. Abbas is temporarily weakened; and Iran's ideological strength temporarily waxes. Democracy, pace the neocons, is not a panacea: Hamas has more democratic legitimacy, it seems to me, than Mubarak.

This is all horrible news for the Jewish people; and deeply disturbing for the rest of us. America's president and president-elect must ensure that the US is not drawn into this battle on one side or the other any more than is absolutely necessary. The West's interests in the Middle East are not exhausted by a defense of Israel's existence and security, especially when such a position comes allied with Arab autocracy and repression.

The one silver lining I can see is that Sunni Arab fear and loathing of Iran is still very real, and can be exploited. (If Arab powers are now reduced to acquiescing in the deaths of Palestinian children from Israeli bombs, you can see how vulnerable they feel toward the wave of religious extremism sweeping the region.) The best you can hope for in the Middle East is that one axis of hatred will temporarily eclipse another. Generally speaking, adherents of one religion hate each other more than they do adherents of another sect altogether, so the prospects for some advancement of Israeli and American self-interest in a broader Muslim civil war are real. With Muslim anti-Semitism, of course, we might have stumbled onto a rare exception.

I would appreciate a translation to Spanish of the quotation from Sullivan. Any volunteers?

How about a thoughtful blog post on the topic in Spanish that I should know about? (Perhaps Enrique Krauze has written something. I must venture over to the Letras Libres blogs ...)

***

Concuerdo con mi hermano Tom quién en una carta expresó que probablemente tiene razón Andrew Sullivan en su artículo citado arriba sobre las cuestiones éticas relacionadas con Gaza hoy en día.

Agradecería una traducción del texto citado de Sullivan al español. ¿Algún voluntario?

¿Y, alguien me puede dirigir a un artículo de blog bien meditado sobre este mismo tema pero en español? (Tal vez Enrique Krauze haya escrito algo. Habría que dar una vuelta a los blogs de Letras Libres ...)