Lebanon's War of Words

On Scene: With Hizballah raising the level of its anti-government rhetoric and prime minister Fouad Siniora virtually under siege, any chance for compromise in Beirut looks increasingly dim.

The Grand Serail, an Ottoman-era palace that houses Lebanon's government, began its life as a garrison for Turkish soldiers. The buff limestone building was restored after this country's long civil war, and it still looms over downtown Beirut like a hilltop fortress, with its arabesque arches punctuating the faade like so many cannon slits.

In the current political battle for Lebanon, the Serail has become a garrison once again, under siege by an angry army of opposition supporters camped out in white refugee tents in the squares of central Beirut. On Sunday, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators answering Hizballah and its allies' call for reinvigorated protests to topple the government, the Lebanese Army lined the causeways leading to the Serail with razor-wire barricades and tank columns, while riot police in full black battle armor guarded the citadel's gates.

The heightened security was one reason why the Prime Minister's speech from the Serail on Sunday — to mark the anniversary of the car bomb assassination of an anti-Syrian newspaper publisher — was so sparsely attended. In the silent moment before the telecast went live, Fouad Siniora stood at his podium in the chandeliered Great Hall with his back to the windows facing downtown while the sound of the chants and cheers from the miked-up multitude below seeped through the drawn curtains and echoed off the chamber's marble walls. "Down with Siniora," the demonstrators have often shouted. "Siniora Out" and sometimes even "Death to Siniora."

A plan for a compromise solution that would give the opposition greater representation in and effective veto power over a new "National Unity" government is being promoted by an Arab League envoy. There was a time not too long ago that such a deal could perhaps have been enough to assuage Hizballah's concerns that Siniora and his government are American puppets who are intent on disarming the Shi'ite militia and reshaping the Middle East in Israel's favor. But the standoff between the Hizballah-led opposition, and the government has lately become so raw, and so personal, that it is hard to imagine anything resembling unity returning to Lebanon anytime soon.

The rhetorical battle took a turn for the worse on Thursday, when in a speech that was broadcast to the crowds in Beirut on giant projection screens, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Siniora's government of collaborating with Israel to destroy Hizballah in this summer's war with the Jewish state, in part by trying to block supplies from reaching the battlefront of southern Lebanon. Siniora and his allies have responded by saying that Hizballah is acting on orders from Iran and Syria — from whom the group's military wing receives weapons and other aid — to destabilize Lebanon and mount a coup d'etat.

Though Nasrallah urged demonstrators to remain peaceful, in the violent world of Levantine politics, insinuating that a wartime prime minister collaborated with the enemy is just a few steps away from calling for an assassination. At the very least it complicates any potential for compromise: how can one negotiate with traitors, or for that matter, coup plotters? The accusations of treason are also at odds with how many in Lebanon remember Siniora's behavior during the war: He broke down in tears on television asking the world, and especially the United States, to push Israel for an immediate cease-fire.

But members of Siniora's governments have been taking no chances since last month's killing of Lebanese Minister of Industry Pierre Gemmayel. Several ministers have taken up quarters in the Serail, sleeping in offices and doing laundry in the bathrooms. "It's surrealistic," said Jihad Azour, the Minister of Finance, who had spent Saturday night at the Serail as a sign of support for Siniora, who now rarely leaves his government's headquarters. Dressed in a corduroy jacket and black bowling sneakers, he looked less like a member of the cabinet than someone's uncle on a tour. "This government was part of the Resistance. I was part of the Resistance. I kept the government functioning during the war. Each of us felt like we were resisting the Israeli occupation. Then three months afterwards to be treated like a traitor. It's unbelievable."

Though they are stuck in the Serail, Siniora and ministers still have plenty of support. On the same day that the opposition resumed its mass protests, pro-government counter-demonstrators, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, rallied in Tripoli, Lebanon's second-largest city, several miles up the coast. If the pro-Siniora forces lack the organizational clout of Hizballah, most independent observers agree that the country is split nearly even between those who support the government and those who want to bring it down.

The problem is that Hizballah is also fighting for its survival and unlikely to back down. The group's patron, Syria, is on the run from a UN investigation that has implicated the Assad regime in the car bomb assassination last year of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, an event that led to the end of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Moreover, UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the summer war with Israel, also placed thousands of new UN soldiers in southern Lebanon, which had been uncontested Hizballah territory since the group drove Israel out in 2000. "Both sides have decided that this is an existential struggle and that they are in it all the way," said a senior Western diplomat.

And the longer the struggle continues, the greater the stakes become. In his speech on Thursday, Nasrallah declared that unless the government resigned soon, Hizballah would demand even greater concessions than just a blocking veto in the cabinet. Nasrallah also threatened an escalation of tactics to include unspecified acts of civil disobedience, which could range from strikes by government employees who support the opposition, shutdowns at the ports and airport, and a walkout by opposition members of parliament.

Whether or not the two sides reach a compromise, what is clear is that Lebanon contradictory role as the bridge between East and West — both open to foreign investment and the frontline of the Arab struggle against Israel — has been badly damaged. Lebanon is losing some $ 40 million each day the crisis continues, in lost business and from the costs of deploying the army and police round the clock in Beirut, according to government ministers. This is on top of the reconstruction costs from the war with Israel, and from the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, which together have put the country about $40 billion in debt — $9 billion of which comes due next year. But with Syria reportedly re-supplying Hizballah with arms, and Israel threatening to return in greater force this spring, international investors may soon decide that the country's troubles have just begun. Which means that Lebanon could soon find itself as isolated as its prime minister .

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U.S. tries Google for Iran intel


Dafna Linzer
The Washington Post

Internet search yields names cited in U.N. draft resolution.
When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way -- by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as "Iran and nuclear," three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.

Policymakers and intelligence officials have always struggled when it comes to deciding how and when to disclose secret information, such as names of Iranians with suspected ties to nuclear weapons. In some internal debates, policymakers win out and intelligence is made public to further political or diplomatic goals. In other cases, such as this one, the intelligence community successfully argues that protecting information outweighs the desires of some to share it with the world.

But that argument can also put the U.S. government in the awkward position of relying, in part, on an Internet search to select targets for international sanctions.

None of the 12 Iranians that the State Department eventually singled out for potential bans on international travel and business dealings is believed by the CIA to be directly connected to Iran's most suspicious nuclear activities.

"There is nothing that proves involvement in a clandestine weapons program, and there is very little out there at all that even connects people to a clandestine weapons program," said one official familiar with the intelligence on Iran. Like others interviewed for this story, the official insisted on anonymity when discussing the use of intelligence.

What little information there is has been guarded at CIA headquarters. The agency declined to discuss the case in detail, but a senior intelligence official said: "There were several factors that made it a complicated and time-consuming request, not the least of which were well-founded concerns" about revealing the way the CIA gathers intelligence on Iran.

That may be why the junior State Department officer, who has been with the nonproliferation bureau for only a few months, was put in front of a computer.

More than 100 names
An initial Internet search yielded over 100 names, including dozens of Iranian diplomats who have publicly defended their country's efforts as intended to produce energy, not bombs, the sources said. The list also included names of Iranians who have spoken with U.N. inspectors or have traveled to Vienna to attend International Atomic Energy Agency meetings about Iran.

It was submitted to the CIA for approval but the agency refused to look up such a large number of people, according to three government sources. Too time-consuming, the intelligence community said, for the CIA's Iran desk staff of 140 people. The list would need to be pared down. So the State Department cut the list in half and resubmitted the names.

In the end, the CIA approved a handful of individuals, though none is believed connected to Project 1-11 -- Iran's secret military effort to design a weapons system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The names of Project 1-11 staff members have never been released by any government and doing so may have raised questions that the CIA was not willing or fully able to answer. But the agency had no qualms about approving names already publicly available on the Internet.

"Using a piece of intel on project 1-11, which we couldn't justify in open-source reporting, or with whatever the Russians had, would have put us in a difficult position," an intelligence official said. "Inevitably, someone would have asked, 'Why this guy?' and then we would have been back to the old problem of justifying intelligence."

A senior administration official acknowledged that the back-and-forth with the CIA had been difficult, especially given the administration's desire to isolate Iran and avoid a repeat of flawed intelligence that preceded the Iraq war.

"In this instance, we were the requesters and the CIA was the clearer," the official said. "It's the process we go through on a lot of these things. Both sides don't know a lot of reasons for why either side is requesting or denying things. Sources and methods became their stated rationale and that is what they do. But for policymaking, it can be quite frustrating."

Washington's credibility in the U.N. Security Council on weapons intelligence was sharply eroded by the collapse of prewar claims about Iraq. A senior intelligence official said the intelligence community is determined to avoid mistakes of the past when dealing with Iran and other issues. "Once you push intelligence out there, you can't take it back," the official said.

U.S., French and British officials came to agree that it was better to stay away from names that would have to be justified with sensitive information from intelligence programs, and instead put forward names of Iranians whose jobs were publicly connected to the country's nuclear energy and missile programs. European officials said their governments did not rely on Google searches but came up with nearly identical lists to the one U.S. officials offered.

"We do have concerns about Iranian activities that are overt, and uranium enrichment is a case in point," said a senior administration official who agreed to discuss the process on the condition of anonymity. "We are concerned about what it means for the program, but also because enrichment is in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution."

The U.S.-backed draft resolution, formally offered by Britain and France, would impose a travel ban and freeze the assets of 11 institutions and 12 individuals, including the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the directors of Iran's chief nuclear energy facilities, and several people involved in the missile program. It would prohibit the sale of nuclear technologies to Iran and urges states to "prevent specialised teaching or training" of Iranian nationals in disciplines that could further Tehran's understanding of banned nuclear activities.

The text says the council will be prepared to lift the sanctions if Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA's director general, concludes within 60 days that Iran has suspended its enrichment and reprocessing of uranium and has halted efforts to produce a heavy-water nuclear energy reactor.

Uneasy about sanctions
Many Security Council members are uneasy about the sanctions. The Russians and the Chinese -- whose support is essential for the resolution to be approved -- have told the United States, Britain and France they will not support the travel-ban element of the resolution, according to three officials involved in the negotiations. Russia is building a light-water nuclear reactor in Iran and some people on the sanctions list are connected to the project.

"The Russians have already told us it would be demeaning for people to ask the Security Council for permission to travel to Russia to discuss an ongoing project," a European diplomat said yesterday.

U.S. and European officials said there is room for negotiation with Russia on the names and organizations, but they also said it is possible that by the time the Security Council approves the resolution, the entire list could be removed.

"The real scope of debate will be on the number of sanctions," one diplomat said. "Companies and individuals could go off the list or go on."

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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Why It's Dangerous For the Maverick To Be the...Front Runner




John McCain was a straight-talking upstart in the 2000 presidential election. Now he's poised to be the G.O.P. favorite for 2008, but at what cost?

As a rallying cry. "Common sense conservatism" doesn't have quite the ring of "Straight Talk Express." But the new slogan on the website of John McCain's presidential exploratory committee--a slogan he manages to repeat at least three times in every speech he gives these days--tells you all you need to know about how different this presidential campaign will be from his last one. McCain '08 will be a bigger, more conventional operation--a tank, not a slingshot. The prevailing wisdom about McCain used to be that his bipartisan appeal would make him a sure bet in a presidential race--if only he could get past the Republican primary. But as more and more of the party establishment climb aboard a campaign that McCain has not yet even formally launched, it's starting to look as if the opposite may be true. By trying to become the perfect candidate for the primaries, McCain could be creating difficulties for himself in a general election.

His hard-line position on Iraq is a perfect case in point. McCain has continued to press for more troops there, and spent last week dismissing the Iraq Study Group recommendation to bring them home as nothing short of a recipe for defeat. That's the kind of strong, consistent hawkishness that G.O.P. primary voters look for. "Besides," says McCain strategist Mark Salter, "it's what he believes." The problem is that exit polls in last month's election said only 17% of voters overall share that view, which could leave the other 83% wondering whether McCain's famous independent streak, so appealing on most issues, would be such a good thing to have in a Commander in Chief who has the power to take the country to war. Already there are signs that his image is taking a hit. In the CBS/New York Times poll, McCain's favorability rating slid 6 points, to 28%, between January and September.

McCain insists that he has always been more conservative than many of his fans believe him to be. But the most important perception people have about McCain is not about ideology; it's about integrity. After staking his reputation on the moral high ground by speaking truth to power on issues ranging from deficits to torture, McCain is uniquely vulnerable to anything that hints of hypocrisy--even on questions that ordinary politicians would get a pass on. To have a shot at winning a presidential election these days, for instance, it is nearly a requirement that candidates opt out of the federal finance system, forgoing its matching funds because it's too difficult to mount a credible campaign within the law's spending caps. But that move, however pragmatic, would look bad coming from an author of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law.

Also, it's harder for McCain than most to explain away inconsistencies. How, for example, could a deficit hawk vote to make President Bush's tax credits permanent after opposing their passage in the first place as fiscally irresponsible? Or why, after declaring Jerry Falwell to be an agent of intolerance during the brutal 2000 primary campaign, did McCain deliver the commencement speech last May at Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia?

Such overtures might make inroads in a skeptical Republican base, but these shifts make some of his longtime allies worry. "A profile in courage can become a profile in unrestrained ambition," says former Reagan White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein, who was one of the few G.O.P. establishment figures to support McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. "He has to remember who his friends are and not spend his integrity on one-night stands with those who will never fully trust him."

Critics pounced last week when McCain let it be known that he has lined up a top G.O.P. operative to run his campaign--Terry Nelson, who was national political director for President Bush's 2004 campaign. "Terry's a great get," says Salter. "He's a good, savvy, very disciplined, smart guy with a lot of experience." Nelson is yet another recruit from the once antagonistic Bush operation, and more evidence that the party establishment is falling into place behind McCain. But Nelson is known for hardball tactics that don't exactly square with the Arizona Senator's white-knight image.

Most recently, Nelson oversaw the Republican National Committee's independent expenditure operation, which produced the most notorious ad of the 2006 campaign. In it, a bare-shouldered white actress claimed that she had met the black Senate candidate Harold Ford at a Playboy party. The ad ended with the blond cooing, "Harold, call me." The resulting protest by black leaders and union groups was enough to force Wal-Mart to sever its ties with Nelson, who had been a consultant for the company's campaign to improve its image. Ford lost the election.

McCain strategists say they will all be taking their lead from the candidate, not the other way around. "Any campaign has to be a reflection of who the candidate is," Nelson says. In 2000, McCain ran his insurgent operation out of a dilapidated headquarters just outside D.C. that had previously been occupied by homeless people. Now, as the front runner, he faces a different set of expectations. Nearly from Day One, he will have to have full-fledged operations up and running in 15 or 20 states. Last time around he could skip Iowa to focus on staging an upset in New Hampshire, but this time McCain will have to compete--and avoid losing his balance--on every battleground. Says an aide: "We will go wherever one vote is available."

While the Republican Party has a history of anointing its candidates early, this rarely happens without a fight. "It's easy to throw the bombs," says G.O.P. pollster Tony Fabrizio. "It's tough to be the front runner every day." For McCain, the biggest potential threats at the moment appear to be Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who is getting good buzz on the right but is largely unknown even to Republicans, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who comes out ahead of McCain in many polls but has yet to begin building much of a campaign operation.

McCain's forces say they are preparing for all challengers. But what will it cost him? That's a question that McCain himself has struggled with. There was a time just a few years back when he would tell people he didn't think he wanted to run for President again. Not because he was getting too old. And not because he didn't think he could win. McCain thought it just couldn't possibly be as much fun as it was the first time around. He would say wistfully, "You can't bottle lightning." But while he may be in a better position to win now, he'll still need some of that old electrical charge to do it.


With reporting by James Carney / Washington

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Today in history - Dec. 11


The Associated Press

Today is Monday, Dec. 11, the 345th day of 2006. There are 20 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Dec. 11, 1936, Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson.

On this date:

In 1792, France's King Louis XVI went before the Convention to face charges of treason. (Louis was convicted, and executed the following month.)

In 1816, Indiana became the 19th state.

In 1882, Boston's Bijou Theatre, the first American playhouse to be lighted exclusively by electricity, gave its first performance, of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe."

In 1928, police in Buenos Aires, Argentina, announced they had thwarted an attempt on the life of President-elect Herbert Hoover.

In 1937, Italy withdrew from the League of Nations.

In 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States; the U.S. responded in kind.

In 1946, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was established.

In 1980, President Carter signed into a law legislation creating a $1.6 billion environmental "superfund" to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps.

In 1981, the U.N. Security Council chose Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru to be the fifth secretary-general of the world body.

In 1991, a jury in West Palm Beach, Fla., acquitted William Kennedy Smith of sexual assault and battery, rejecting the allegations of Patricia Bowman.

Ten years ago: A China-organized committee of 400 Hong Kong notables elected shipping tycoon Tung Chee-hwa to be the first postcolonial leader of Hong Kong.

Five years ago: In the first criminal indictment stemming from Sept. 11, federal prosecutors charged Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, with conspiring to murder thousands in the suicide hijackings. (Moussaoui pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2005 and was sentenced to life in prison.) The chairman of the militant Jewish Defense League, Irv Rubin, and an associate, Earl Krugel, were arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up a Los Angeles mosque and the office of an Arab-American congressman. (Rubin died in November 2002, 10 days after what federal officials described as a suicide attempt in jail.) The government approved Swiss food giant Nestle SA's $10.3 billion purchase of Ralston Purina.

One year ago: Thousands of drunken white youths, angered by reports that youths of Lebanese descent had assaulted two lifeguards, attacked police and people they believed were Arab immigrants at a beach in Sydney, Australia; young men of Arab descent retaliated in several Sydney suburbs, fighting with police and smashing cars. Explosions ripped through a major fuel depot north of London, injuring 43 people; the cause of the blasts was later found to be accidental. Paramount Pictures announced it was buying independent film studio DreamWorks SKG Inc.

Today's Birthdays: Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn is 88. Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant is 76. Actress Rita Moreno is 75. Actor Ron Carey is 71. Former California state lawmaker Tom Hayden is 67. Pop singer David Gates (Bread) is 66. Sen. Max Baucus (news, bio, voting record), D-Mont., is 65. Actress Donna Mills is 64. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is 63. Singer Brenda Lee is 62. Actress Lynda Day George is 62. Music producer Tony Brown is 60. Actress Teri Garr is 58. Movie director Susan Seidelman is 54. Actress Bess Armstrong is 53. Singer Jermaine Jackson is 52. Rock musician Nikki Sixx (Motley Crue) is 48. Rock musician Darryl Jones (The Rolling Stones) is 45. Singer-musician Justin Currie (Del Amitri) is 42. Rock musician David Schools (Gov't Mule, Widespread Panic) is 42. Actor Gary Dourdan ("CSI") is 40. Actress-comedian Mo'Nique ("The Parkers") is 38. Rapper-actor Mos Def is 33. Actor Rider Strong is 27.

Thought for Today: "The people who think they are happy should rummage through their dreams." — Edward Dahlberg, American author and critic (1900-1977).

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