Let me start by saying that this dot-connecting moment was brought to me by an unlikely source: rightie radio jock Glenn Beck ... I know, I know ... but he caught onto something this morning that pulls together some threads that I have trying to work out on this blog over the past week or so. Let's start with a disclaimer, or rather, two:
- Disclaimer number one: I tend to reflextively dismiss everything said by a member of the Bush administration as either pure partisan politics, or neocon world war lunacy.
- Disclaimer number two: I tend to side with the general world view of the career, "Arabist" State Department, sans the Bushie political overlay. That is to say I lean in the exact opposite direction of the neocons (who, by the way, despise Foggy Bottom, with the exception of former in-house neocon John Bolton, and current chief Condi Rice).
Okay, those were the disclaimers. Now for two general points:
First: There is a certain dance that takes place before countries enter into conflict, whether armed or diplomatic.
Second: When it comes to diplomacy, everything that is said almost always means something else.
I know this seems like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but bear with me. Let's go back to a little bit of background, which Beck rolled out very well this morning:
Yesterday, the U.S. State Department jumped straight into the middle of the global cartoon wars, when Condi Rice made the following charge:
"I don't have any doubt that, given the control of the Syrian government in Syria, given the control of the Iranian government — which hasn't even hidden its hand in this — that Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes ... and the world ought to call them on it." ... at the same time President Bush played the "good cop," making the following statement (during a presser with a key Mideast ally):
Bush chose his words carefully following a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah, saying the United States was a country of tolerance and understanding that fosters freedom to worship and a free press.
Violence must be rejected as a means of showing unhappiness with a free press, he said."And we also recognize that with freedom comes responsibilities," the president added. "With freedom comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others.
"I call upon the governments around the world to stop the violence, to be respectful, to protect property, protect the lives of innocent diplomats who are serving their countries overseas." Okay, so initially, as I normally do, I dismissed Condi's words as more opportunistic neocon blather, aimed at giving the U.S. a fresh excuse to demonize two plum neocon hit targets -- Iran and Syria -- as a pretext to displomatic isolation and possible military action against one or both. And a month ago I might have agreed wth Jerry Springer that the U.S. should just stay out of this one (too late, the protests are targeting American interests now, too). But consider this:
Rice, according to this and other news reports, was simply voicing what career people inside the State Department already believe: namely that Damascus and Tehran are taking advantage of the cartoon conflagration to weaken Europe's position against them.
Why is that probably true? Put aside for a moment your bias (and mine) against the neocon worldview about Iran and Syria (and hell, any other Muslim country...) and think about these facts:
The violent protests that have left 11 people dead have been intense all over the world, but the highest drama has come in four places:
- In Afghanistan -- where all the deaths have occurred, due to police there firing on protesters -- and where some 19 countries Europe, the Middle East (including Jordan) and the U.S. currently have thousands of troops operating --
- In Syria (where the Norwegian embassy in Damascus was torched) and in Lebanon, where protesters destroyed the Danish consulate and police were powerless to stop it despite the fact that the protest was well-publicized in advance...
- And in Iran, where the Danish embassy was also pelted with firebombs and stones, and which this week suspended all diplomatic relations with Denmark over the cartoons (and where, more colorfully but less important diplomatically, a leading state-run newspaper is now soliciting anti-Holocaust cartoons, to go with the Holocaust-denying rhetoric of the very in-your-face president of that country, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...)
Syria and Iran are not exactly places where you're going to get anywhere near the Danish or any other embassy without the police or the government allowing you to. And Lebanon is, to a large extent, controlled by Syria, via the Shiite, pro-Iranian group Hezbollah, even with the official occupation of that country ended as of last spring. And even people inside Lebanon are accusing Syria of stoking the violent protests there, they say to stoke inter-religious tensions. ... The anti-Danish boycotts have since spread, with that country standing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of commercial business with countries in the Middle East. ...
Syria and Iran are both facing intense pressure from the U.N. and the international community; Syria over the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri -- a rub-out that is apparently linked to president-for-life Bashir Assad, and possibly to his brother and a group of aides, all of whom the U.N. is demanding to talk to outside Syria; and Iran over its aggressive push for nuclear ... er ... energy... The Syrian government rightly believes the U.S. is pushing the U.N. probe in a bid to strengthen its position, and gather world support for a diplomatic isolation of Damascus, which the U.S. war hawks have eyed for "regime change..." (they even have a Chalabi-like exile -- without all the crimey baggage -- to use if they want one... and they do...) Iran has every reason to believe the U.S. war hawks are spoiling for war with them, too, and they see their referral to the Security Council as the opening shot in that war (they fired a counter-shot, suspending cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA), with possible follow-up military action by the U.S., or by our proxy (or are we their proxy... so confusing) Israel. ... Syria and Iran have had a security cooperation agreement for quite some time, which pledges "... that besides bolstering mutual cooperation, Tehran and Damascus should deal with the threats posed by big powers." ... Back to the cartoons:
The cartoon protests began nearly four months after the cartoons first appeared in an obscure Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, and only after a prominent Denmark-based cleric, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, packed up a bundle of the drawings, mixed in with some even more outrageous and Muhammad-slandering material that he claimed was part of the Jullands Posten stash, but which really weren't, and headed off to a tour of Mideast countries, hoping to get an outrage going. According to the Counterterrorism Blog:
Last November, Abu Laban, a 60-year-old Palestinian who had served as translator and assistant to top Gamaa Islamiya leader Talaal Fouad Qassimy during the mid-1990s and has been connected by Danish intelligence to other Islamists operating in the country, put together a delegation that traveled to the Middle East to discuss the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars. The delegation met with Arab League Secretary Amr Moussa, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, and Sunni Islam’s most influential scholar, Yusuf al Qaradawi. "We want to internationalize this issue so that the Danish government will realize that the cartoons were insulting, not only to Muslims in Denmark, but also to Muslims worldwide," said Abu Laban.
On its face, it would appear as if nothing were wrong. However, the Danish Muslim delegation showed much more than the 12 cartoons published by Jyllands Posten. In the booklet it presented during its tour of the Middle East, the delegation included other cartoons of Mohammed that were highly offensive, including one where the Prophet has a pig face. But these additional pictures were NOT published by the newspaper, but were completely fabricated by the delegation and inserted in the booklet (which has been obtained and made available to me by Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet). The delegation has claimed that the differentiation was made to their interlocutors, even though the claim has not been independently verified. In any case, the action was a deliberate malicious and irresponsible deed carried out by a notorious Islamist who in another situation had said that “mockery against Mohamed deserves death penalty.” The delegation visited several Muslim capitals last November, and in Cairo they met with a very promient Grand Imam, and with the head of the Arab League, in a bid to "internatinalize" the cartoon controversy, which to that time had made no splash at all. In fact, as some blogs are reporting today, an Egyptian paper had published the cartoons as part of a story on disrespect for Islam, less than a month before Abu Laban's visit, with absolutely no impact on the wider Muslim world...
As many bloggers and writers are now pointing out, denunciations and conflagration from the tour stops seemed to have been timed and delayed for political effect, coming only after Hamas swept the parliamentary elections in Palestine in late January (EU offices in Gaza stormed four days later on January 30...), and after Ramadan (where apparently, copies of the cartoons were distributed to worshippers) and also after the referral of Iran to the Security Council this month. As a Telegraph analyst wrote recently, these kinds of large-scale, seemingly spontaneous movements take time to put together. The sophisticated orchestration of the protests is now plainly evident, even to the media...
After the elections, however, in January, the anger began to build in earnest, including a fatwa reportedly issued against the 500 or so Danish troops in Iraq...
When the protests began, they were basically peaceful -- if angry and attended with flag burnings -- but flag burning protests are no different from your average anti-war or anti-globalisation protests in Europe or the United States. What ratcheted up the crazy factor were the Danish embassy torchings in Syria and Iran...
Fast forward to today, and those Condi Rice accusations:
Syria and Iran remain intense pressure, with both their heads of state set to be scrutinized by the Security Council in the next couple of months...
Leading up to that, the Muslim world has now forced the EU and the United Nations to apologize for the cartoons:
The United Nations and European Union have reached agreement to issue a joint statement condemning cartoon "insults to Islam" that were first published in a Danish newspaper and have been widely reprinted recently, resulting in a rash of violence throughout the Muslim world.
According to a report in WAM, the United Arab Emirates news agency, the agreement is the work of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Conference.
The agreement, according to Ihsanoglu, will mean a formal rebuke by the U.N. and EU of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten for publishing the offensive cartoons.
The statement, he added, stresses that divine religions and religious symbols must be respected, and that freedom of speech must not be taken so far as to desecrate religions.
"The statement also calls for renouncing all forms of violence," he said, according to WAM. It is in that climate, plus the constant threat of street violence that can easily reach into the heart of Europe, that Iran and Syria will now negotiate with the West.
Oh, and by the way, here's a little something you might not know about Denmark:
Danish membership of the Security Council and chairmanship of the CTC
The permanent mission of Denmark to the United Nations, headed by Ambassador Ellen Margrethe Løj, has taken seat in the Security Council in New York from January 2005 for a two-year period. The election of Denmark might be regarded as a common rotation system between the world nations; however, becoming a member of the Security Council has required some diplomatic efforts to obtain support from the individual member states of the General Assembly.
Moreover, Denmark has succeeded in being elected as chairman of the UN Counter Terrorist Committee (CTC) from April 2005. The CTC is subsidiary to the Security Council and monitors the individual member states' obligations to raise national capacity against terrorism, according to resolution 1373 of September 28, 2001. This brings Denmark in a central position in a world where security policy is becoming increasingly synonymous with the fight against terrorism. And another thing (and this was the Beck "aha" catch this morning): Guess who is set to assume the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council -- just when possible sanctions against Iran, and further action on Syria in the Lebanon affair -- are set to be debated? You guessed it: Denmark.
Diplomacy is about leverage. And while those of us in the West tend to portray Muslims as brainless animals who do little more than riot and complain about Jews, make no mistake: Iran and Syria are sophisticated demi-powers who are playing the chess match of their lives -- against the Europeans, whom they hope to scare into a softer stance (and into not taking sides with the U.S. on, say, military action...) against the U.S. -- a game Condi Rice joined fully yesterday, and against the specter of "regime change" as evidenced just next door, in Iraq.
So a radical cleric on tour, plus some smart media manipulation, and angry, young male populace ginned up and ready to explode on cue (with a little prompting, of course), mixed with a really stupid, culturally ignorant and rather arrogant Danish newspaper publisher (and clones around Europe and the U.S.) -- hands Iran and Syria a means to change the negotiating environment.
Believe me, it's very, very rare that I will agree with anything said by ayone at the Weekly Standard or even worse, Michelle Malkin (who always manages to mix a little truth with a lot of anti- [fill in the blanks with non-White Christian group] crap -- she seems to really be enjoying rubbing those cartoons in the faces of Muslims, doesn't she?) ... and I identify completely with the outrage of Muslims over these stupid, insensitive cartoons (granted not all of the 12 were negative), which I think were only made possible by the post-9/11 epidemic of Islamophobia (fueled by anti-immigrant European racism, in my opinioin) sweeping the West. And I think the whole "print the cartoons" kerfuffle is a silly sideshow that misses the point (but gives rightie bloggers a golden opportunity to bash CNN -- something I still don't get with Wolf Blitzer, Howard Kurtz, Rush Limbaugh's girlfriend and all the other wingerbots working there...). But in this case, there really appears to be a chess game going on, and ordinary, God-fearing Muslims are being used.
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Tags: Muhammad cartoon, Cartoons, Religion, Islam, Muslims, Denmark, Jyllands-Posten,Mohammed, Christianity |
