And here is an amazing photo of the Blue Mosque in Turkey

Blue Mosque, detail, originally uploaded by Timothy Neesam.

Friday prayers, Senossa, Mali

Photo courtesy of Steffan via Flickr

Mother and child, Nigeria

Mother and child, Nigeria, originally uploaded by Soumik.

West Africa does seem to be of increasing interest.....

But is America's interest about a. terrorism, b. oil, or c. both? (Full disclosure: Both are valid national interests as far as I'm concerned.)

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. military is putting together a new command, Africom, to bolster West African countries. As the Journal writes:

The effort, already under way in Benin, is an example of the type of security and social partnering the U.S. military hopes to replicate under a new U.S. command center focused on Africa. The idea is to bolster fragile nations and prevent failed states from breeding radical groups, like the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Now consider this context:

The move comes as the world's biggest oil companies -- including U.S.-based Exxon Mobil Corp. and France's Total SA -- are investing billions of dollars to boost production in Africa. . .

In most months, the energy-producing countries of West Africa -- primarily Nigeria and Angola, but also Gabon and the Republic of Congo -- ship as much or more oil to the U.S. as Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations.

Incidentally, this isn't just about American interests, violence and oil-smuggling cost African nations - and oil companies in the region - hundreds of millions of dollars a year, says the Journal.

To assuage concerns that any American military presence in the region will only invite terrorists, Theresa Whelan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, told the Journal that only in "extraordinary circumstances in extremis after all other options had been exhausted" would any type of military intervention ever be contemplated.

Libya was was singled out as being particularly cold to this new plan. More typical, suggested the Journal, was this response from a street vendor in Benin: "Beninese like the U.S. Having the U.S. here would help us, but it could bring terrorists," he says.

Tehran grows more isolated by the day

Agence France Presse reports that Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit is accusing Iran of being behind Gaza's recent seizure of Gaza, and of creating problems in Iraq too. As the AFP reports via The (Australian) Age:

"Iran's policies encouraged Hamas to do what it has done in Gaza and this represents a threat for Egypt's national security because Gaza is a stone's throw from Egypt," the minister said in comments carried by the Al-Masri Al-Yom newspaper.

"The Iranian influence in Iraq also represents a threat for Egyptian and Arab national security. This obliges Cairo to restrict its relations with Tehran," he said.

As the newspaper goes on:

Closing ranks against Hamas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has invited Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian leaders to a summit on Sunday.

Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, on the current situation

Described as "their unofficial poet laureate" by the The Economist, the magazine publishes Darwish's reaction to, as the magazine puts it, "the internecine fighting that culminated, during one-blood-soaked week, in what some fear could be a fatal schism in their putative state":

June amazed us on its fortieth anniversary: If we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our own hand so as not to forget!

The fortieth anniversary Darwish refers to here is that of the Six Day War, the war in which Israel defeated the militarized Arab states in less than a week.

The defeat was so humiliating for the Arab leaders that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading Arab Nationalist at the time, wanted to resign from power. The Egyptians protested this move, and Nasser, as is typical in the region, remained in office until he died.

Regardless of the loyalty Egyptians felt towards Nasser, his political program, the idea that hte Arab states would draw strength from and unify around the idea that they were all Arabs, united by culture and language, would be supplanted by a new unifying force: Islam as the solution to the region's problems.

Hamas is one of the groups who was able to capitalize on this belief.

As to what Darwish thinks will happen to the Palestinians, as he continues in his poem:

O future: do not ask us: who are you?
And what do you want from me?
For we too do not know.

A Classicist takes the pulse of the modern Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson, an expert on the Ancient Greeks, and a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, opines in today's NRO:

On the debacle in Iraq he writes:

...the United States is taking an enormous toll on jihadists, and despite the terrible cost in blood and treasure, has not given up on a constitutional government in Iraq.

As to what's going on in Kurdistan:

...Kurdistan is emerging as a success few envisioned, refuting some conventional wisdom about the incompatibility of capitalism and constitutional government with Middle Eastern Islam.

On the Sunni Arab states:

The Sunni front-line states, who subsidized jihadists and still enjoy our misery in Iraq, but they are now terrified that these killers, in league with the Iranians, will turn on them. The net result is not just that some Sunnis are helping us in Iraq, but that they are being urged to for the first time by those in the Arab world, who would prefer to see the Iraqi government, rather than the terrorists, succeed.

And on Iran's quest for regional hegemony:

Theocratic Iran is not exactly as “empowered” as is generally alleged, but in the greatest crisis of its miserable existence. As the mullahs up the ante in the region, they could very soon not only lose Iraq, but also their own dictatorship. Trying to oppose the West in Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank is taking an enormous financial toll, as is the general isolation from the world community.

With oil prices at an all-time high, Iran can't provide gasoline for its own people, who resent the billions spent instead on Arab terrorists abroad. If oil were to dip from near $70 to $50-55 a barrel, the regime would face abject bankruptcy.

Next on Syria, Iran's loyal client-state:

Syria for all its terror still can't overthrow the government in Lebanon, but has managed the impossible: Not only does the Arab world seek to isolate it, but France and the United States are cooperating to thwart it in Lebanon.

On Hamas coup d'etat so to speak:

Hamas is high on victory in Gaza for now, but all it has accomplished is to further concentrate its nexus of terror into one small miserable — and quite vulnerable — locale in the midst of Jordan, Israel, and Egypt, while sacrificing the Palestinians greatest advantage: deniability of culpability. It will be harder now for the tired good cop/bad cop excuses, “militant wing,” etc. and all the other justifications for terror that the Palestinians use. Since Hamas bragged that it had routed (it matters less whether true or false) the Palestinian Authority from Gaza, the next barrage of rocket attacks from there, rightly or wrongly, will liberate Israel in its response from the past worries of collateral damage.

And finally, how the "Hezbollah victory" in Lebanon must look in hindsight from the perspective of the victors:

For all the talk of losing the Lebanon War, it is Iran and Syria, not Israel, that are stuck with billions in reconstruction costs for their battered Shiite pawns on the front lines.

If you think Israelis treat Palestinians bad, look how their Arab brothers treat them

Iraqslogger reports:

The plight of Palestinian refugees fleeing violence in Iraq and stranded in camps on the Syrian-Iraqi border is continuing to deteriorate as the summer heat intensifies and a solution remains elusive.

There is currently one camp on the Syrian side of the border, one in no-man's land and one on the Iraqi side of the border housing Palestinian refugees.

As the summer heat has increased, with temperatures now reaching 50 degrees Celsius, living conditions in the desert have become increasingly hazardous with snakes, scorpions and sand storms.

"The weather is very, very hot and people are becoming very nervous and upset," said one Palestinian in Al-Tanf camp, situated on no-man's land between Iraq and Syria. "We can't live here, it's too difficult. We need help, particularly air coolers."

"Children in particular are developing medical conditions that they've never had before simply because of the high heat and dust storms," said Sybella Wilkes, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Syria. The refugees are becoming increasingly desperate.

Iraqi refugees, by contrast, haven't been herded into such camps. I wonder what the difference is - that's right, the Palestinians aren't really human - they're just political pawns to be moved around the region's chessboard - or at least that seems to be the Arab view.

Gas is cheap in Iran - well, if you can get it

Look at this interesting graphic from Foreign Policy comparing what it costs to fill up a Honda Civic:



But as was widely reported today, while Iranians may have about the lowest gas prices in the world, Tehran just announced last night that gas rations would now be in effect.

Apparently some Iranians weren't too happy about this - up to 17 gas stations were reportedly set on fire by people protesting the government's new policy. As the Associated Press reports via the International Herald Tribune:

The president has come under growing criticism _ even from conservatives who once supported him _ for dramatically rising housing and food prices in the past year. Many fear the increase in fuel costs will further increase inflation.

"This man, Ahmadinejad, has damaged all things. The timing of the rationing is just one case," said Reza Khorrami, a 27-year-old teacher who was among those lining up at one Tehran gas station before midnight on Tuesday.

I'm reminded of the line from Hamlet. Ahmadinejad now seems to be in the process of hoisting himself with his own petard.

And just I was feeling a bit smug myself...

Indulging in some of my own self-congratulation, feeling that well, in the end, it will be we optimists who prevail (see post below if you have no idea what I'm talking about here), I then have a severe reality check when I see this New York Times story: "Truck Bomb Hits Baghdad Mosque, and 61 Are Killed."

You should check out Alissa Rubin's multimedia presentation from the scene of the aftermath to fully appreciate the horror of what just happened.

But, in case you can't, here's a glimpse from the Times written report:

"It was like an electrocution,” said Najim Abdul Wahid, 45, a carpenter who was working in the square at the time. “I saw a flash. When I was able to stand up again, I saw many charred bodies in the streets. People were screaming, calling for help. I saw many people burning inside their cars. Charred bodies mixed and melted with charred cars.”

Iraqis blamed the usual suspects for the bombing, Rubin reports (duly noted - they didn't blame Mossad - yet):

Jalal Jaff, a Sunni Kurd, who lives just behind the street where the bomb exploded and raced to the scene to pull people from burning cars, turned his head away on Tuesday as he passed the parking lot with more than a dozen destroyed cars, only their charred frames left, the rubber completely burned off their tires.

“He is a paid terrorist, not a human being,” he said. “The families will never know which body belongs to their relatives. They were mutilated. They had no faces.”

Like most of the people in the neighborhood, Mr. Jaff blamed Al Qaeda, a term used by Iraqis to refer generally to terrorists. The group operating in Iraq known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia includes many Iraqis but has some foreign leadership.

“Al Qaeda is like an octopus with many arms and hands,” he said. “This bombing was a challenge to the American and Iraqi army; they cannot get rid of these terrorists.”

Others in the neighborhood went further, accusing the Americans of helping Al Qaeda, which most people believe is responsible for the majority of the suicide bombings.

A man who identified himself only as Qassim, some of whose friends were killed in the large open parking lot across from the mosque, shouted: “The Americans finance Al Qaeda. They secure places and routes for them to do this.”

But others said they saw the bombing as an effort by religious extremists to inflame sectarian divisions. “People here realize that there is a conspiracy to sow hatred between us,” said Mr. Jaff.

Smug alert: Beware of good news from Iraq

USA Today has an interesting set of graphics on the changes in death patterns in Iraq.

The number of civilians killed in multiple-fatality bombings targeting civilians (read terrorist attacks) seems to be plummeting.

Jan 379
Feb 622
Mar 617
Apr 634
May 325
Jun 38 (through June 8)

Now I admit, the June numbers are way too preliminary, but still, there does seem to have been some positive trending.

The cost of this progress, you should note, has been U.S. and Iraqi military lives. As USA Today reports, April and May were the deadliest two-month period since the war began for U.S. forces. And Iraqi military and police fatalities topped 300 in April compared to January's death toll of 91.

Now whether this positive trend will continue - well, I hope it will. But then I'm not someone who is invested in the idea that the U.S. should fail in Iraq.

Call me cynical, but I sense that some people want the U.S. to fail in Iraq only so they can say I told you it would be a disaster. They don't care about the consequences of such a failure, they are just desperate to feel smug.

This guy must have a bad case of Islamophobia....Oh wait, he can't, he's....Muuusssssssssss

Here's what the doctor is ordering for Hamas

(No wonder this guy no longer practices medicine.)

The BBC is reporting that Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's second-in-command (or his he in charge now? -- it has been a long time since we've heard from the top Al Qaeda leader) is suggesting that Hamas unite with Al Qaeda.

Apparently this idea occurred to him after seeing that Hamas was finally in control of its own territory in Gaza. Of course, as he says in the videotaped message, "taking over power is not a goal but a means to implement God's word on earth." By this he most likely is tacitly suggesting that now is the time for Hamas to ensure that not only the human sexes are segregated now in Gaza, but also the vegetables too.

Or maybe, after having seen where that brilliant stroke of governance led (the Anbar Province revolt for those of you who only look at the pictures on this blog), maybe he didn't purposefully mention this now because perhaps he's thinking that it would make more sense to first shut all girls' schools down, ban women (and laughter) from the public square, forbid women from working (including, of course, even widows who might be the only remaining breadwinners for their families), crush the homosexuals to death, outlaw kites, toys, videos, music on the radio, and, yes, pet songbirds, too, and convert all the soccer stadiums to chop-chop squares (that is places where the public can gather to see people beheaded, adulteresses stoned, and thieves relieved of their hands). At that point, he seems to tacitly suggest here, nobody will rebel when they're asked to segregate their vegetables.

Great advice, doctor and I bet Hamas is dumb enough to follow it too.

And now a break from jihad

Unless of course your idea of jihad is the spiritual rejuvenation you'll get from this rocking video by the Bangladesh group Maqsood O'dHAKA.

A Tuareg chief at the annual Festival at the Desert

I'd like to see bin Laden tell this guy his people can no longer host such un-Islamic events.

FestivalAuDesert063, originally uploaded by cedavril_.

Or will Al Qaeda youth soon be joining Tuareg dancers?

Then again, maybe they already have.

Danseurs, originally uploaded by Yelema.

See post below to see what I'm talking about.

Will Al Qaeda youth now be joining Tuareg bands?

Vanity Fair also has a great article in this month's issue on Mali's annual Festival of the Desert, written by former MTV Networks chairman and Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston.

He, Jimmy Buffet, the "troubadour of the Caribbean" - as Freston calls him - and Island Records founder Chris Blackwell (among others) attended last year's annual celebration of Tuareg music and culture, that took place, as it has since it began in 2001, in the Sahara desert, 70 km north of Timbuktu.

As Freston writes:

Timbuktu used to sit on the edge of the desert. Today, with desertification, the sands have passed it by on their journey south. The city is inhabited mostly by Tuareg, who are nomadic, very independent, and ethnically different from those who live in southern Mali. There are people in Timbuktu from the Fulani and Songhai tribes as well. The Tuareg have risen up regularly - against the French in colonial times and against the Malian government today. There was a bloody rebellion more than a decade ago, with a lot of fighting in Timbuktu itself. It ended in 1996, with promises of better representation for the Tuareg in the government, and more freedom of movement.

Since then it's been mostly quiet on the northern front. Today, Mali is a functioning Muslim democracy. On some levels, it is a study in success. The country is tolerant, diverse, optimistic, and stable. But it's also, and very obviously, one of the world's poorest countries.

Freston and his fellow travelers are among the few Americans who attended last year's festival, he reports, most likely because of the advisory the U.S. State Department had issued just prior to the event, warning Americans that "banditry, factional rivalry, and car jackings" made this "lawless area" unsafe to visit.

Freston was surprised then, that the first festival goers he encountered upon landing in Timbuktu were, well, fellow Americans. He writes:

Three young Americans, all with military buzz cuts and identical wraparound shades, meet us. Turns out they are looking for Jimmy Buffett. Parrotheads in the Sahara. They tell us they are with "the D.O.D." I was unsure what that was, and they clarified ("Department of Defense"). We'll run into them again, but never quite figure out why they're here.

As he continues his report, the festival closed with "rousing set from the group Tinariwen" as he explains, the band formed in the rebel camps of Libya, where Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was providing refuge to the Tuaregs in the 1990s. In addition to a safe harbor, the rebels also discovered electric guitars. In the camps, Freston writes:

The young men practice, they write songs about revolution and freedom, and they marry these lyrics to a new electric sound. On top of that, these young Muslims create a band that has (gasp) women in it. Then, in this land of no media, no Internet, the music of Tinariwen travels all over the Sahara by casette and inspires an entire generation of young people. The music is officially banned in Algeria and Mali, which only adds to its allure.

Eventually, however, peace comes, and as Freston continues:

The band moves back to Mali, signs an international record deal, gets down to business, and becomes even more popular.

Tinariwen's story parallels Mali's more hopeful scenario. Swords turn to guitars, democracy blooms, and music helps bring a sense of national unity. I'm not sure I ever understood what those American soldiers were doing in Mali's desert. But I do know that the American invasion that really made a difference here was one of electric guitars.

I can tell Freston what the other Americans were doing there: they were obviously looking for signs of Al Qaeda, now alleged to have established training camps in the Tuareg region.

So here's a question: Now, assuming that Al Qaeda really is being harbored in Tuareg territory - and this is not at all well established as far as I'm concerned - will the Tuareg change Al Qaeda or will Al Qaeda change the Tuareg?

Because as much as I appreciate Freston's belief that all it took was American-made electric guitars to bring peace and democracy to Mali, I can guarantee that if the Al Qaeda folks are considering staying in these parts, they're not going to see these foreign instruments quite the same way Freston does.

On that note, I'd love to see what measures bin Laden will have to take to keep his teenagers away from next year's festival - assuming, of course, they really are in the Sahel (that is Mali and environs, what used to be the edge of the Sahara).

By the way, you can see the BBC slideshow presentation on last year's Festival in the Desert here.

Wow, could China really be worse than the West?

Photo by Pan-African News Wire...
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir being greeted by
Chinese official at the 2006 Sino-African Summit

To find if China might be a more irresponsible, um, power, than Western countries, we will begin by looking at what the Christian Science Monitor's uncovers in its four-part probe into the question "Is China Good for Africa?"

Today's focus will be on Sudan. As the Monitor apprises us: 64 percent of Sudan's oil is now sold to China, the world's second-largest consumer of oil, after the United States.

But check this out, China is also the majority owner of Sudan's two largest oil consortiums, Petrodar and the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company.

So how is China, Sudan's new, um, economic partner, comporting itself in the Sudan? As the Monitor reports:

CNPC has invested billions in oil-related infrastructure here in Paloich, including the 900-mile pipeline from the Paloich oil fields to the tanker terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a tarmac road leading to Khartoum, and a new airport with connecting flights to Beijing.

But they have not invested in much else here.

Locals live in meager huts, eating peanuts with perch fished out of the contaminated Nile. There is no electricity. A Swiss charity provides healthcare. An American aid group flies in food and mosquito nets. Most children do not go to school. There is no work to be found. Petrodar, for one, has its own workers – almost all of whom are foreigners (mostly Chinese, Malaysians, and Qataris) or Sudanese northerners. The consortium hires Paloich residents only rarely, for menial jobs.

And what do the locals think? According to the Monitor:

Locals blame their lot on oppression by Sudan's Islamist government and the long war with the north. But they also blame the Chinese.

"[The Chinese] moved us away so we would not see what was going on. They were stealing our oil and they knew it," says Abraham Thonchol, a rebel-turned-pastor who grew up near Paloich. "Oil is valuable and we are not idiots. We were expecting something."

US-based Chevron was the first oil company to arrive here, setting up operations in the 1980s. "They employed us," says Mr. Thonchol. "We helped with the drilling, drove them around, and worked as cooks. "

The second group of oilmen to show up was not as benevolent, say many locals. [As one told the Monitor,] "They looked like whites to us. We could not detect any difference, except, maybe, that they were shorter," he says. "But then we found they behaved differently."

Chased out by civil war in the mid 1980s and '90s, and later kept away by pressure from human rights groups, Chevron and other Western companies left the oil fields for others. . .

Chinese firms were more than happy to fill the void.

But as the Monitor goes on:

Chinese operations were marked "from the beginning," by a "deep complicity in gross human rights violations, scorched-earth clearances of the indigenous population," says Sudan activist Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

In Darfur, for example, the China supplied the Sudanese government with most of the arms it in turn is alleged to have given the janjawid, the militia it used to kill hundreds of thousands of tribal Africans since a rebellion began there in 2003.

As a Darfur rebel, a leader of the Justice and Equality Movement in Darfur, Abdul-Aziz Mour, told Sebastian Junger who writes about the Chinese in the Sudan and Chad in this month's Vanity Fair:

"Darfur was a sovereign state until 1916. Now 95 percent of the population lives on half a dollar a day. We don't have a single paved road. We are fighting for very basic human rights, like education. We are fighting for drinking water. Our country is not poor; we are living on a big cistern of petroleum. And the central government is killing us like snakes."

John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group seems to corroborate Mour's view, as he reportedly told Junger, "[The Sudanese government] is basically destroying the non-Arab population in Darfur to destroy the rebellion."

Junger calculates that Khartoum has spent some 80 percent of its oil revenues on arms since 2003 quelling this insurgency, with most of these arms being purchased from - you guessed it - China. As he concludes, this means that most of the $2 billion dollars a year the Chinese were spending on Sudanese oil was immediately made back in weapons deals.

Not surprisingly, then, it the fact that it is China who effectively blocks any U.N. resolutions proposing sanctions or military force against Sudan to put pressure on Khartoum to stop what President Bush has termed the genocide going on there. Without U.N. - or Chinese - support, U.S. sanctions alone have little bite.

But, before we in the West can take comfort in China's emergence, an emergence that would it seems, portend to make us feel that we're no longer the guiltiest parties on the planet, consider Junger's conclusion:

The tragedy in Darfur - and perhaps a future tragedy in Chad - is fueled by China's reliance on brutal regimes for access to oil. That reliance, however, stems directly from Western domination of more easily accessible supplies. For example: in 2005, a state-owned Chinese oil company tried to buy the American oil giant UNOCAL for a price that was $1 billion higher than that of the closest Western bidder. Reaction in the U.S. Congress was so blistering that UNOCAL accepted the lower bid rather than open the door to China.

Alas, we're still the root cause of all the world's problems, even when it is China who is carrying out today's abuses...

Remember this casus belli? (That is, justification for war)...

From the "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq":

"Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people;"

Well, as John Burns reports from Baghdad in today's New York Times, another one of the former regime elements who used these WMDs against his fellow Iraqis appears to be just about to bite the dust:

As the judge pronounced five death sentences on the man Iraqis know as Chemical Ali, the defendant seemed on Sunday to be a shadow of the merciless enforcer who oversaw poison gas attacks that killed thousands of Kurdish villagers in Iraq’s northern uplands nearly 20 years ago.

At the age of 61, severely weakened by diabetes, the defendant, Ali Hassan al-Majid, leaned heavily on a walking stick for the 18 minutes it took the judge to read guilty verdicts on counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. . .

As the Times reports, this sentence brings to seven the number of top officials who have been sentenced to death for their crimes against the Iraqi people under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Four of these have been executed. As the Times continues, this marks the end of the Anfal trial, Saddam's name for his campaigns against the Kurds in which an estimated 180,000 men, women, and children were killed when Iraqi forces bombed and razed hundreds of Kurdish villages, and tortured and starved to death many of the survivors because he suspected the Kurds of having been traitors during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1987).

Even though there hasn't been much interest in this trial - either in the Iraqi or the international press - there are even more such trials to come. As the Times continues:

The next case will be the so-called Intifada trial, involving the suppression of a Shiite uprising across southern Iraq in 1991 that followed the Persian Gulf war, in which, Shiite officials say, at least 150,000 people were killed. . .

At least 10 other trials are being prepared, Iraqi officials say. One will focus on the poison gas attacks in March 1988 that devastated the town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan, where as many as 5,000 people are said to have been killed. That attack, more than anything else, drew international attention to the plight of the Kurds under Mr. Hussein. It was separated from the Anfal trial because of its notoriety, and its deep resonance among the Kurds.

Other trials will center on the killing of prominent religious and political figures under Mr. Hussein; the killing of hundreds of members of a prominent Kurdish political family, the Barzanis, in the 1980s; the persecution of the Shiite marsh dwellers of southern Iraq; and an incident in 1993, when another half-brother of Mr. Hussein’s, Watban Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, arrested dozens of Baghdad market-sellers for alleged profiteering in foodstuffs, then had them hanged from lampposts after trials that lasted less than a day.

Note this interesting commentary on "Western legal-monitoring groups":

For the Kurds, the Anfal verdict’s significance was heightened by the fact that five of the six defendants were found guilty of genocide. While Western legal-monitoring groups have expressed doubts whether the Anfal campaign met the international legal definition of genocide, in the sense of a systematic attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic or religious group, Kurdish officials in Iraq had said that guilty findings on the genocide charges would add momentum to the claim by Iraqi Kurds that their survival can be assured only by an entrenched autonomy within Iraq.

I wonder, by contrast, how many of these same Western legal-monitors support the Armenian's claim to genocide with respect to Turkey's actions during World War I. I hope somebody does this analysis (as I'm too busy at the moment).

Does this crackdown really mean Iran is cracking up?

The New York Times reports:

Iran is in the throes of one of its most ferocious crackdowns on dissent in years, with the government focusing on labor leaders, universities, the press, women’s rights advocates, a former nuclear negotiator and Iranian-Americans, three of whom have been in prison for more than six weeks.

The shift is occurring against the backdrop of an economy so stressed that although Iran is the world’s second-largest oil exporter, it is on the verge of rationing gasoline. At the same time, the nuclear standoff with the West threatens to bring new sanctions.

To me this seems like the Islamic Republic must be getting desperate. And here are even more signs that the Iranian leadership is flailing (not failing, flailing - as in acting as though it has no clue about how to lead or what people expect from a government):

The country’s police chief boasted that 150,000 people — a number far larger than usual — were detained in the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic. More than 30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, according to Human Rights Watch, five of whom have since been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an Internet campaign to collect more than a million signatures supporting the removal of all laws that discriminate against women.

Eight student leaders at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University, the site of one of the few public protests against Mr. Ahmadinejad, disappeared into Evin Prison starting in early May. Student newspapers had published articles suggesting that no humans were infallible, including the Prophet Muhammad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The National Security Council sent a stern three-page warning to all the country’s newspaper editors detailing banned topics, including the rise in gasoline prices or other economic woes like possible new international sanctions, negotiations with the United States over the future of Iraq, civil society movements and the Iranian-American arrests.

And here is even more evidence of the regime's current desperation:

At least three prominent nongovernment organizations that pushed for broader legal rights or civil society have been shuttered outright, while hundreds more have been forced underground. A recent article on the Baztab Web site said that about 8,000 nongovernment organizations were in jeopardy, forced to prove their innocence, basically because the government suspects all of them of being potential conduits for some $75 million the United States has earmarked to promote a change in government.

Professors have been warned against attending overseas conferences or having any contact with foreign governments, lest they be recruited as spies. The Iranian-Americans are all being detained basically on the grounds that they were either recruiting or somehow abetting an American attempt to achieve a “velvet revolution” in Iran.

But as the Times continues:

Not that everyone has been intimidated. More than 50 leading economists published a harshly worded, open letter to the president saying his policies were bringing economic ruin. High unemployment persists, there has been little foreign investment and inflation is galloping, with gasoline alone jumping 25 percent this spring.

. . . Amid all the recent oppression, for example, last week the public stoning of a couple — the punishment for adultery — was called off. Women’s rights advocates had been agitating against it.

You see, there's still hope in Iran after all.