That Unintended Consequence

By most accounts, the Pakistani Army is performing well in the Swat Valley. The advance is slow but steady, and while the Taliban remains in control of some of the larger towns in Swat, the military is slowly squeezing them out and deliberately taking back the area.

But there are several concerns to this. First of all, the Taliban won't fight head on:

Highlighting the difficulty, some extremists are simply melting back into the civilian population so they can fight another day, as they have during previous clashes over the past 18 months in Swat.

"You cannot distinguish between a Talib and a normal citizen," said Maj. Gen. Sajjad Ali, who commands troops in the northern portion of Swat. "The area is densely populated, and it's very easy for the terrorists to hide."

Second, the assault has already created almost 2.4 million refugees, according to the UN, and that displacement has fostered yet more extremism.

The government has been overwhelmed by the human tide that has washed over the northwest as about 2 million people have fled fierce clashes in Swat. With Pakistan experiencing its largest exodus since the nation's partition from India in 1947, only a fraction of the displaced civilians are receiving assistance in government-run camps. The rest are fending for themselves or getting help from private charities, including some that are allied with the very forces the Pakistani army is fighting in Swat.

Refugee camps in Pakistan have been prime recruiting grounds for militant groups ever since the Soviet invasion forced millions of Afghans to cross into Pakistan in the 1980s. Now, concern is growing that this latest wave of displacement will create a fresh crop of Pakistanis with grievances against the government and loyalty to groups that seek to undermine the state through violent insurgency.

The government says it is aware of the peril, but it appears incapable of mustering the resources it needs to provide shelter, food, water and medicine to so many people.

In essence, the Obama Administration forced the Pakistani government to deal with the threat within their borders. The government simply has no means to deal with those affected by such an offensive, and so we all must live with the unintended consequences. That's not necessarily an argument for not embarking on the offensive in the first place. But surely we can recognize the complexity of the situation, and that even the assumed "good options" have terrible outcomes embedded within them. Obviously the short-term solution, since the offensive will not be called back, is to pour humanitarian aid into the country and hope that the refugee camps don't become breeding grounds.

Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update

I'm surprised this didn't get more attention yesterday:

The U.S. military has begun flying armed Predator drones inside Pakistan and has given Pakistani officers significant control over targets, flight routes and decisions to launch attacks under a new joint operation, according to U.S. officials familiar with the program.

The project was begun in recent weeks to bolster Pakistan's ability and willingness to disrupt the militant groups that are posing a growing threat to the government in Islamabad and fueling violence in Afghanistan.

I mean, this basically confirms that we've crept the Afghanistan war into Pakistan, right? We're not talking about covert CIA missions, but the US military. And US officials acknowledged it today.

Now the President has a war of his own. In addition to his own humanitarian crisis.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, has called for a massive aid operation to help those displaced in north-west Pakistan.

He said that in the past two weeks, the UN had registered more than 800,000 Pakistanis fleeing fighting between the army and the Taleban.

Without help, he warned, they could contribute to the instability [...]

He said: "If you are not able to cope with the challenges posed by such an overwhelming number of people displaced, in communities that have not the economic capacity to absorb them, and if the very serious humanitarian response is not organised, this population will become a huge factor of destabilisation."

Wow, the stars go out of your eyes quickly in the face of all this death and suffering, don't they?

Sadr The Folk Hero

We've all been so focused on intra-Shiite conflicts in Baghdad and Basra and points south, everybody's figured that the Sunni areas were perfectly dandy. But that's not how Iraq works; stability is fragile no matter where you go.

Dozens of Iraqis were killed Tuesday in attacks that included a massive car bombing in Diyala province, where security had improved significantly in recent months.

A car bomb in that province's capital, Baqubah, killed at least 35 people and injured 66, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Iraqi officials provided a higher death toll, saying that 43 had been killed and that women and children were among those killed. The explosions destroyed three buses and damaged 10 shops, the military said.

Meanwhile, in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed at least 10 people, according to Iraqi officials.

Considering that continual bombing requires reconstruction and relief for affected families, you would think that the FIRST thing the military would do would be to ensure that the Iraqi government would be the clearinghouse for such activities. It would improve loyalty to the state and show some compassion, and heck some actual progress from the leadership in Baghdad. But that's not happening, and just like with Hezbollah in Lebanon, into the breach steps the Mahdi Army. This explains their popularity.

The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which has provided little financial assistance to the more than 2 million Iraqis who have fled the country's sectarian violence, has also failed to support millions more internally displaced persons who are instead being aided by militias, according to a report by Refugees International due for release today.

"Militias of all denominations are improving their local base of support by providing social services in neighborhoods and towns they control," the report says. It also finds that the Iraqi government, "although it has access to large sums of money," lacks the capacity and political will "to address humanitarian needs." [...]

The Refugees International study found that, with many displaced Iraqis living in poverty, the movement of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has become Iraq's "largest 'humanitarian' organization." It said that Sadr's group " 'resettles' displaced Iraqis free of charge in homes that belonged to Sunnis." It said Sunni militias "play a similar role with displaced and needy Sunnis."

A diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his Iraqi connections, said yesterday that there have been disagreements within the Maliki government over the refugees. "Iraq's response has been woefully inadequate, and more should be done to help the refugees," the diplomat said. "But the cabinet has not focused on it because of other problems, and the ministry handling refugees is dysfunctional."

This is how governments get overthrown - when the basic needs of their citizens are ignored. And in so doing, the Maliki government is turning Muqtada al-Sadr into some kind of civil rights leader. He's the one arguing for restoration of police and Army forces (which takes chutzpah, since they were fighting him), he's the one fighting for the people, calling for unity. Rahm Emanuel "skin in the game" comment was ghoulish, but it ought to be applied to the Iraqi government, who is tucking away tens of billions in Swiss bank accounts while militias take control of the country. This is a predictable disaster, and it's being tolerated because taxpayers here are propping up this irresponsibility by doing a lot of funding ourselves. Once again, our presence makes things worse.

The Basra Aftermath

Well, in the aftermath of the great Basra debacle of Aught-Eight, the Coalition of the We Can't Leave Yet is assessing its options.

The Bush administration was caught off-guard by the first Iraqi-led military offensive since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a weeklong thrust in southern Iraq whose paltry results have silenced talk at the Pentagon of further U.S. troop withdrawals any time soon.

President Bush last week declared the offensive, which ended Sunday, "a defining moment" in Iraq's history.

That may prove to be true, but in recent days senior U.S. officials have backed away from the operation, which ended with Shiite militias still in place in Basra, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki possibly weakened and a de facto cease-fire brokered by an Iranian general.

"There is no empirical evidence that the Iraqi forces can stand up" on their own, a senior U.S. military official in Washington said, reflecting the frustration of some at the Pentagon. He and other military officials requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak for the record.

The British had the same reaction, which is not a promising one given five years of training the Iraqi security forces. And yet this shouldn't necessarily be the response. The Basra nightmare showed that the surge had limits and that it was doing little more than keeping a finger in the dike - standing in for the Iraqi security forces and paying off Sunni militias so that everyone keeps a lid on the violence. The Iraqi forces have no power because their loyalty is paltry compared to the tribal militias. And the mission exposed the degree to which Iran - in this case controlled by a guy on the US terrorist watch list - exercises territorial control over the nation and the region. In response to the failure, Nouri al-Maliki has recruited 10,000 Badr Brigade militia into the security forces, essentially joining the Mahdi Army militia since he couldn't beat them (it's clear that the regular forces were defecting by the thousands). The fact that Maliki added 10,000 Shiite militia after telling the Sunni militia groups that he had no room for them is sure to raise tensions. As is the continuing air raids in Sadr City.

' "We realized what kind of government we have: They are like foxes," Abu Amir said. "The Americans are our enemies, not our friends. Maliki is an agent of the Americans. '

So, we have the professional armies transformed into militias protecting sectarian power groups. The Americans are superfluous and quickly growing hated. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff recognize that the Army will be disintegrated without a draft if forces continue to be deployed at the same levels. No wonder nobody in Washington wants to release the next intelligence estimate on Iraq publicly. What's already out there is damning enough.

You can add to all this the moral depredations of our Iraq policy. We are either unable or unwilling to rescue those Iraqis who helped us and bring them to this country. A female soldier is more likely to be raped by one of her colleagues than be killed by enemy fire. And the contractors are either overcharging the government or poisoning our own soldiers due to lax environmental standards. All of these regrettable episodes would end with a complete withdrawal.

All the while, professional liars like Robert Kagan are so utterly and completely clueless about events on the ground that even Joe Klein has to kill him for it.

Fresh from his assertion that the Iraq civil war was "over" a week ago, here's Fred--plus added bonus attraction Kimberly--Kagan reinforcing their profoundly warped view of Iraq in the Weekly Standard. There are several truly disingenuous, and flat out misleading, things here:

1. The promulgation of the myth that Maliki's Folly was to clean out "terrorists" rather than a violent election-year ploy to clear out his legitimate Sadrist political opposition.

2. Perpetuation of the myth that effective Iraqi Security Forces actually exist and aren't primarily composed of (a) pro-Maliki and pro-Hakim militias and (b) former Iraqi soldiers more interested in making a living than in fighting. (Add: No acknowledgment that U.S. troops in the field simply do not trust their Iraqi counterparts...Oh, and I should also add: Some of the most "effective" ISF units are Kurdish pesh merga militias.)

3. Conflation of the "special groups"--trained and supported by the Iranian Qods force--and the Jaish al-Mahdi, which is the main Sadrist Iraqi nationalist militia. Kagan, a military historian, should check with David Petraeus about the relationship of those two separate forces. Indeed, part of Sadr's cease-fire strategy was allow the U.S. to cleanse Iraq of the "special groups." Sadr's no hero, but if he's a terrorist then so are the majority of Iraqi Shi'ites--i.e. his supporters.

4. No mention at all of the Badr Corps, the pro-Iranian Hakim militia that is Sadr's main enemy in Basra and Maliki's best friend. No mention of the widely held belief that the Iraqi Army units in Basra are riddled with Badr militia members.

5. No acknowledgment of the sheer complexity of the situation--the fact that all Shi'ite militias are receiving support from Iran, the fact that Sadr may be the most popular political figure in Shi'ite Iraq, courtesy of his father's fierce anti-Saddam, anti-Persian nationalism. No acknowledgment that our policy toward the various Shi'ite factions might be more successful if we were as nuanced as the Iranians.

The situation is truly complex and our presence is only making things worse. Whether we leave now or in ten years the same fundamental dynamic will be in place if we don't change course. And so rather than pause our drawdown of forces I think it makes more sense to see the Basra mess as a moment of clarity, where we recognize that the situation is untenable, our soldiers are only targets, and that the only surge needed is diplomatic and regional, not military. It's time to leave.

No Way Out

Kudos to the New York Times editorial board:

Without a serious effort at national conciliation, American troops are just holding down the lid on a pressure cooker. Iraq’s rival militias, the insurgents, the bitter sectarian resentments and the meddling neighbors haven’t gone anywhere. Consider this all too familiar horror: yesterday, police said they pulled six bodies from the Tigris River about 25 miles south of Baghdad. They were handcuffed and showed signs of having been tortured. And five, including a child, had been beheaded.

Perhaps 160,000 American troops could hold down the overall casualty numbers indefinitely, but they cannot wipe away that sort of hatred. That’s the job of Iraq’s leaders. Either way, the American military doesn’t have enough troops for such an occupation without end, and the American Treasury can’t keep spending $10 billion a month to maintain it.

Read the whole thing. And here's some more facts to add on to that informed opinion. First of all, these numbers being cited as a source of success are increasingly being generated by the unreliable Iraqi government.

And just as Iraqi forces have had a mixed record in fighting insurgents, they have been spotty at providing data from the regions where they have taken command.

Iraqi officials have been reporting far higher civilian death totals than those reported by U.S. forces, and aides to American commanders now acknowledge that the U.S. military probably had been undercounting such casualties.

We're also wearing out our welcome with Iraqi lawmakers, as treatment in the Green Zone and throughout the country becomes more violent and aggressive. At some point, the trade-off between providing security and humiliating the locals will become unsustainable. Plus, eventually there are going to be a lot of refugees flowing back into these ethnically cleansed areas, and there is absolutely no plan to deal with them.

The Iraqi government lacks a mechanism to settle property disputes if former residents return to Baghdad only to find that their homes are occupied, the officials said. Nor is it clear whether Iraqi authorities will be able to provide aid, shelter and other essential services to the thousands of Iraqis who might return. American commanders caution that if the return is not carefully managed, there is a risk of undermining the recent security gains.

“All these guys coming back are probably going to find somebody else living in their house,” said Col. William Rapp, a senior aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, speaking at a two-day military briefing on measuring military trends for a small group of American reporters in Baghdad.

“We have been asking, pleading with the government of Iraq to come up with a policy so it is not put upon our battalion commanders and the I.S.F. battalion commanders to figure it out on the ground,” he added, referring to the American and Iraqi security force commanders.

These conditions presage an eventual crumbling of a very fragile situation, and without political and diplomatic measures, we simply won't be able to keep that lid on.

NPR ran a very good piece this morning basically explaining that all the happy talk from Republican candidates about Iraq is almost completely irrelevant. They keep calling it a war against Islamofascism when it's actually a complex web of countervailing forces vying for power. Some think that Iraq will recede as a campaign issue, but that will only happen if the Democrats allow Republicans to get away with this blurring strategy. Iraq is still very dangerous, and we ignore that at our peril.

Iraq Update

I haven't written a ton about Iraq lately, but I've collected a bunch of articles that I thought I'd bullet-point. None of them represent exactly good news.

• First, there's this Spanish version of the Downing Street Memo, a transcript of a conversation between Bush and then-Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, wherein Bush explained that America would be in Baghdad in March 2003 regardless of a new UN resolution (in fact, he said that the coalition would attack if anyone on the Security Council vetoed the resolution). We all know that war was an inevitability from January 2001, really, strengthened by the attacks on 9/11, but this is just another reminder. Publicly, Bush was saying he hadn't decided to go to war at this time, but it was a foregone conclusion, and obviously so to anyone who was paying attention then. Juan Cole has more.

• Enough with the past, however, the biggest problem facing the future of Iraq is the growing refugee crisis. We're talking about over four MILLION Iraqis being displaced from their homes, two million of them internally. And only 1,000 have been transferred to the United States. Meanwhile, Iraqi refugees make up 10% of the ENTIRE population of Jordan. This will destabilize the entire Middle East if we fail to act. And right now, we're failing miserably.

• A tale of two national security figures on Gen. Petraeus: chief lickspittle Michael O'Hanlon defends his college buddy (yeah, they went to graduate school together; somehow that doesn't get disclosed much) and says he is "convinced" that the Pentagon's statistics on Iraq deaths, which contradict Petraeus', are wrong. Meanwhile, Andrew Bacevich, who has left blood on the battlefields of Iraq in the form of his son, speaks the unspoken truth about the General's testimony.

In testifying before House and Senate committees about the current situation in Iraq, Petraeus told no outright lies. He made no blustery promises about “victory,” a word notably absent from his testimony [...] Yet the essence of his message was this: after four years of futile blundering, the United States has identified the makings of a successful strategy in Iraq. The new doctrine that Petraeus had devised and implemented—the concept of securing the population and thereby fostering conditions conducive to reconstruction and reconciliation—has produced limited but real progress. This gives Petraeus cause for hope that further efforts along these lines may yet enable the United States to create an Iraq that is stable, unified, and not a haven for terrorists. In so many words, Petraeus told Congress that senior U.S. commanders in Iraq had finally found the right roadmap. The way ahead may be long and difficult—indeed, it will be. But Petraeus and his key subordinates know where they are. They know where they need to go. And above all, at long last, they know how to get there.

Critics have questioned the data that Petraeus offered to substantiate his case [...] The critics make a good case. Yet let us ignore them. Let us assume instead that Petraeus genuinely believes that he has broken the code in Iraq and that things are improving. Let’s assume further that he is correct in that assessment.

What then should he have recommended to the Congress and the president? That is, if the commitment of a modest increment of additional forces —the 30,000 troops comprising the surge, now employed in accordance with sound counterinsurgency doctrine —has begun to turn things around, then what should the senior field commander be asking for next?

A single word suffices to answer that question: more. More time. More money. And above all, more troops.

It is one of the oldest principles of generalship: when you find an opportunity, exploit it. Where you gain success, reinforce it. When you have your opponent at a disadvantage, pile on. In a letter to the soldiers serving under his command, released just prior to the congressional hearings, Petraeus asserted that coalition forces had “achieved tactical momentum and wrestled the initiative from our enemies.” Does that reflect his actual view of the situation? If so, then surely the imperative of the moment is to redouble the current level of effort so as to preserve that initiative and to deny the enemy the slightest chance to adjust, adapt, or reconstitute.

Yet Petraeus has chosen to do just the opposite. Based on two or three months of (ostensibly) positive indicators, he has advised the president to ease the pressure, withdrawing the increment of troops that had (purportedly) enabled the coalition to seize the initiative in the first place.

This defies logic. It’s as if two weeks into the Wilderness Campaign, Grant had counseled Lincoln to reduce the size of the Army of the Potomac. Or as if once Allied forces had established the beachhead at Normandy, Eisenhower had started rotating divisions back stateside to ease the strain on the U.S. Army.

Petraeus can't advocate for a maximum effort because the public won't stand for it, but I would also add that it wouldn't appreciably change the situation in Iraq, and would not leave him an "out" to say that the troop levels and lack of American will (the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics) were the eventual causes of failure. But Bacevich is spot-on.

• As for what's actually going on in Iraq, well, it's fun stuff. The Sunnis are waging an assassination campaign. The US, at the same time, is trying to press its relationship with the Sunnis in al-Anbar by trying to recruit Sunnis into the Iraqi National Police, an effort decried by the leading Shiite bloc that has since been scrapped. You can look for yourself at this picture from MacLean's, the Time Magazine of Canada, and read the story about how Bush is reaching out to Saddam's former henchmen; the ruling Shiites understand this as well, and are rebelling against it. The Kurds are still freelancing on their own and intimating that they will break apart as an autonomous state, which the Turks consider a security risk and a threat. American snipers are being pressed to notch more kills, a throwback to Vietnam, where body counts stood in for victory. And also, American troops continue to die.

• If things were going so well in Iraq, the AP wouldn't have their footage confiscated by US troops.

Yesterday the AP reported that U.S. troops in Iraq confiscated an AP cameraman's videotape of the aftermath of a Baghdad bombing. A military spokesman, Lt. Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, explained that the troops were enforcing an Iraqi law prohibiting the photographing or videotaping the aftermath of acts of violence. That seemed strange -- U.S. troops enforcing Iraqi law?

So yesterday I asked U.S. military representatives in Baghdad about the confiscation, the alleged law, and the use of U.S. troops as law enforcement for a foreign country. A spokesman replied to me that he knew of no agreement or arrangement "that would compel [U.S. forces] to enforce Iraqi law." A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy declined to comment on the matter at all -- even to confirm the existence of such an Iraqi media law -- and instead referred me back to the military.

The military is being extremely evasive about this. Clearly they're covering their own ass while trying to blame it on an Iraqi law.

Going Down With The Ship

The Levin-Reed amendment failed this morning, and with it so did the entire menu of Democratic options regarding Iraq. The Senate Republicans simply won't budge.

It's curious, this intransigence. The Petraeus hearing clearly bought some time, and they'll tout that the 20,000 or so troops coming home by next summer (which is, you know, a long way off) represents some kind of progress. But the warning signs in Iraq are actually horrific. Due to the Blackwater shooting, the country is on lockdown, with US diplomatic personnel unable to leave their homes. Even the CIA can't walk the streets without Blackwater's cover; that's right, the licensed-to-kill years-of-training CIA can't even walk around. The mercenary company exists in a legal black hole that Congress is only now beginning to understand, making their exit from Iraq unlikely. If the Maliki government can't even expel contractors from their own country, the people of Iraq are quickly going to decide "what good are they as a government," and in addition American forces will increasingly become targets, even more so than they are now. This isn't the only contractor problem, as we learn today that deals totaling $6 billion dollars are under CRIMINAL review by investigators. The procurement system is a treasure trove for profiteers, and as that money doesn't go toward reconstruction or security, the people of Iraq are again angered.

And this is the least of their worries. There are Iraqis whose entire family are being systematically killed, and there are two million Iraqis living as refugees abroad, in addition to the other two million who are internally displaced. They are running out of money and goodwill in places like Syria and Egypt, and this humanitarian crisis could spark more regional tension; meanwhile the United States has a quota to take in a MEASLY SEVEN THOUSAND refugees, and hasn't even managed that; 68 Iraqis have been admitted as of March. We talk about the responsibility we owe to these people, yet the ones who would likely be killed as a result of a pullout, the ones who have been working with the US military, are meaningless to us.

Meanwhile this "Anbar miracle" is just window dressing, and actually has the potential to make things more dangerous. The Sunni sheikhs have no interest in compromise with the Shiites in the government, and indeed are cooperating with the Americans because they think they have beaten them. Meanwhile the constant talk about success in Sunni-controlled Anbar endangeres the lives of our troops.

I worry that’ll be the case on the political scene, as well. Sunni political and tribal leaders are increasingly throwing in their lot with U.S. forces here against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent types. But, to get them to come over to our side, the American military has fed them a steady diet of anti-Shi'ite propaganda.

Arrests and killings of Shi’ite militants are announced from loudspeaker blasts; President Bush’s bellicose rhetoric towards Shi’a Iran is reported on friendly radio programs. But the majority of this country is Shi’ite. Are we setting ourselves up as the enemies of the majority here? Are we priming the pump for an all-in sectarian battle royale? It seems like a possibility.

In a country flush with weapons on the black market, most of them put there by US contracts, the idea of allowing both sides of the civil war to be heavily armed is just shocking.

So why have Republicans bought it, when the public certainly hasn't? Why are they content to go down with the sinking ship? Who knows, maybe they think we need the oil that badly, or maybe they've simply been duped by one too many dog-and-pony shows. They believe what they want to believe. But it's clear to me that the best of a lot of horrible options in Iraq is for the military to disengage and for diplomacy to take root, whatever that results in.

Today I Am Ashamed To Be A Jew (UPDATED AND BUMPED)

Like everyone of the Jewish faith, I have citizenship in Israel. One of the core tenets is rememberance, the idea that we honor our forbears by keeping them and their struggles in our thoughts. Central to this is the rememberance of the Holocaust; there is even a holiday, Yom Ha-Shoah, a tribute to those millions we lost during the Nazi Wehrmacht, and a vow to never forget the stinging power of genocide.

We have forgotten.

CAIRO, Aug. 19 -- Israel closed the door Sunday on a surge of asylum-seekers from Sudan's Darfur region and from other African countries, the largest influx of non-Jewish refugees in the modern history of the Jewish state.

Authorities announced that they had expelled 48 of more than 2,000 African refugees who have entered illegally from Egypt in recent weeks. Officials said they would allow 500 Darfurians among them to remain, but would deport everyone else back to Egypt and accept no more illegal migrants from Darfur or other places.

If this was a problem of space, or a rigid stance against lawbreaking, they wouldn't allow 500 to stay. They have put a limit on compassion for those fleeing their own genocide, the same circumstance out of which Israel was born.

Israeli officials claim that they have assurances from the Egyptians that the refugees won't be sent back to Darfur, but when asked directly, the Egyptians did allow that these Sudanese would be sent back to the Sudan. Which would be a death sentence.

An Egyptian Foreign Ministry official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel had sought no assurances about the future of the refugees. "Israel just said, 'Please take them,' " the Egyptian official said [...]

Sudan and Israel officially are enemies, and Sudan's government has said any refugees sent back from Israel would be considered as having dealt with an enemy state and treated accordingly.

"If deported to Sudan, they will be tried for treason," said Madhal Aguer, a private aid worker in Cairo for refugees from a separate conflict in southern Sudan; a long-running civil war between the north and south killed up to 1 million people before a peace deal in 2005.

Also, the Israelis claimed that they would separate those Sudanese coming from Darfur and those coming from the rest of the country, accepting those facing genocide in the region. This they did not do.

Israel sent back the first group of 48 African refugees through the Karm Abu Salim, or Kerem Shalom, crossing with Egypt late Saturday night, Egyptian and Israeli officials confirmed. Egypt said the deportees included refugees from Darfur.

Israel apparently expelled them without hearings, in contravention of a refugee accord it has signed that requires countries to determine whether deportation will subject asylum-seekers to mistreatment, said Ben-Dor, the Israeli refugee lawyer.

They have forgotten their history.

In the 1930s, when Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe in droves to escape the coming crackdown from the Nazis, Jews were denied access to Palestine by the British. In fact, many countries closed their doors to the Jews who were trying to escape Germany, Austria, Poland, and practically every country in Europe. Fueled by anti-Semitism, countries dithered and made excuses not to accept Jewish refugees. Even the United States never raised their immigration levels beyond a certain quota, which was left unfilled to begin with (one of the few countries that allowed Jews to settle was China, and many of them were transported to Shanghai, as depicted in the film Shanghai Ghetto). Hundreds of thousands of Jews were denied safe haven, which meant almost certain death in the concentration camps.

Why the Israeli government is doing this is baffling to me. I give credit to the majority of the Israeli Parliament, who actually petitioned against this. But it was to no avail. Ehud Olmert played the part of a little bureaucrat who added up numbers in a book instead of looking at the human costs involved. It's shameful, and it does violence to my ancestors.

UPDATE: Some idiot at the Corner called the influx of 2,300 "Muslims" an existential threat to Israel, and praises the deportation. First, Darfurians escaping the genocide are Christians. Second of all, as Neil says, "2300 refugees have come into Israel, which has a population over seven million, over the last six months. Israel already has over a million Arab residents. Existential threats don't come in the form of a couple thousand people fleeing genocide who would quickly fall in love with a country that rescued them."

UPDATE II: Good for Rahm Emanuel. From Jesse Lee in an email:

Ambassador Sallai Meridor
Embassy of Israel
3514 International Dr. N.W.
Washington DC 20008

Dear His Excellency Ambassador Meridor:

The British Broadcasting Corporation reports today that Israel has returned 48 Sudanese people to Egypt and intends to refuse entrance to refugees from the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.

I am writing today to express my disappointment that Israel would turn away any person fleeing from persecution. I understand the concern the State of Israel has for maintaining the integrity of her borders, but if any country should understand the special needs of those affected by the genocide in Darfur, it should be Israel. Since its founding, Israel has been committed to finding homes for those who suffer at the hands of war and despair. The international community looks to Israel as a land of hope and sanctuary.

In 1948, the Jewish Diaspora finally had a place to call home. I hope that the state of Israel will reconsider its decision to turn away those refugees who must flee Darfur to avoid death and persecution so that the Sudanese people can find asylum in a state that was founded to be a home and a place of hope for those who had suffered similarly.

Sincerely,

Rahm Emanuel
Member of Congress

How Do I Lie? Let Me Count The Ways...

A brief sampling of Bush Administration lies over the past few days...

• Laura Bush sez many Iraqi refugees have been welcomed to the United States. If by "many," you mean less than 500 out of the nearly two million Iraqis who have fled their country.

• General David Petraeus completely focuses on Al Qaeda in Iraq as the source of the problems in Iraq, when they are maybe 3% of the overall insurgency. He's also claiming that the September date is not a deadline for a policy change, when it is to the Congress, who actually has the ability to make that determination and not some general.

• Former deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty just wasn't all that involved in the firing of US Attorneys or the hiring of replacements, or really anything in the Justice Department, so I'm not sure how he spent his time. Of course, the Attorney General has said that he relied on McNulty's advice in approving the firings.

• Tony Snow responded to the scandal of White House officials using RNC email accounts in violation of the Presidential Records Act by saying "Clinton did it too," which is, um, not true. It's so untrue, in fact, that then-staffer John Podesta wrote a specific memo stating that all email must be incorporated into the official records system.

To be fair, not every Bush Administration official lies. Some of them don't say anything at all.

John A. Rizzo, who has spent much of the past five years honing the CIA's interrogation policies, knows how to avoid answering questions under pressure -- at least in public. In nearly two hours of Senate testimony yesterday, his longest response by far was six sentences long.

For much of the session, Rizzo confined himself to "Yes, sir," "No, sir" and "I think I'd best address that in closed session." [...]

Asked if he approved of a Justice Department opinion that only pain resulting in "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" qualified as torture, Rizzo carefully said he "did not object." Perhaps it "did appear overbroad," he added, "but I can't say that I had any specific objections to any specific parts of it."

He may be the best Administration official yet, because he tries really really hard NOT to lie.

What's Happening In Baghdad

The vaunted Iraqi security plan that is taking place is not even managing to find any Iraqis:

Thousands of U.S. troops swept house-to-house through mostly Shiite areas virtually unopposed Wednesday in the opening phase of the long-awaited Baghdad security crackdown. But four U.S. soldiers were killed outside of the capital in an area not covered by the operation.

The U.S. military said 14 suspects were detained and four weapons caches discovered during the day's operation — seemingly a low tally. But U.S. officials say they are more concerned about establishing a long-term presence in the areas so that the public will gain confidence in security forces to protect them.

Outside the capital, fighting continued.

The military said four U.S. soldiers were killed Wednesday in an explosion in Diyala province, among six new U.S. deaths announced by the military. U.S. officers have expressed concern that insurgents and militias are leaving Baghdad to transfer the fight to Diyala and other provinces that border the capital.

Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, warned that advance publicity on the security operation had given Shiite militias time to flee the city for bases elsewhere in the country.

"I have information that numerous of their leaders are now in Basra and other southern provinces in safe havens," he told Al-Arabiya television. "I believe that those who were behind the bloodshed and the chaos should be pursued and criminals must face justice."

I believe they call that "Whack-A-Mole," and it was inevitable regardless of a super-duper secret surge or one publicized with billboards. It's happened every time the US has tried to assert themselves in any part of the country. Even al-Sadr has gone under (though I don't believe he's in Iran, I think that's just a pretext to give another reason to attack), only to emerge again at some later date or in some other place. But this crackdown mandated by the Iraqi government, which involves "reverse ethnic cleansing," taking Iraqis out of homes where they are not authorized and extending the curfew, will be hard to sustain. It's essentially martial law:

It is impossible to know exactly how many people have been forced from their homes, but estimates by Iraqi and American officials range from tens of thousands to as high as 200,000.

Samantha Power, a public policy professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government who has written widely on genocide, described the plan as either a public relations ploy that would never be enforced, or worse, a prelude to more sectarian cleansing and catastrophe.

“To do this in the middle of a war when tempers have been inflamed and militarization is ubiquitous seems to be putting the cart before the horse,” she said. “You haven’t stopped the willingness to ethnically cleanse, but you’re imposing the moral hazard of ethnic cleansing on the cleansee? Unless you create security first, you are paving the way for a potential massacre of returnees.”

There's more here. I don't see how this is anything other than a slow-motion massacre. Mercenary contractors are involved in the operation as well, clearing out homes and essentially emptying the capital. That's one way to stop the violence there, but at what cost? These sound like roving death squads which will shoot on sight. If one of the thousands of roving child beggars are found in a house where they shouldn't be, what are the rules of engagement? Must orphans leave the city and figure out their own way to survive?

According to the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI), the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq is the main reason for the increase in the number of street children since the occupation of the country began in 2003. The next major contributor is the increase in the number of widows countrywide.

"The economic situation of the Iraqis is decreasing month after month. Lots of families are using their children to get additional income, which they can get through begging. There are also families who send their children to work," Cedric Turlan, information officer for the NCCI, said.

The Bush Administration has been shamed into accepting more Iraqi refugees. But 7,000 is still a paltry sum, considering that this new crackdown will create on the order of a couple hundred thousand.

An empty shell of a capital is not a secure capital. It's just a series of bombed-out buildings. It does nothing to protect citizens in a civil war. It denies them shelter, actually.

How is this making anything safer?