Clinton and Ashton: US-EU Girl Power Made Netanyahu Climb Down

The three "40+ breakthroughs"

• Hillary Clinton spent 40+ minutes on the telephone with Israeli PM Binjamin Netanyahu, making it perfectly clear that, this time, the Obama Administration would not accept "No" for an answer to its demands that Israel puts an end to its provocations.
• In a first show of which impact a united European stand can have on Washington's capacity to effectively change its policies in the Obama way, Catherine Ashton braved Israeli objections and visited Hamas-governed Gaza Strip on a 40+ hours' mission.
• Combined US and European action made the overconfident rightwing Netanyahu-Lieberman Government give in within another 40+ hours.

Israeli Government gives in and works at damage-control
This morning's Guardian brings a first evaluation: Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu in climbdown over US demands for peace.
The key issue of the clash between the US and Israel was the provocatively announced construction of 1.600 Jewish flats in the contested East Jerusalem area. The Guardian:

He [Netanyahu] did not announce, as the US had demanded, a freeze on the construction of Jewish homes in Ramat Shlomo, in East Jerusalem, the key point at issue.
But diplomats in Washington, Moscow and Jerusalem said Netanyahu had given a private promise that there will be a temporary freeze on any new construction. The work, while not cancelled, is to be postponed for several years.

Substantial negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are still far away. But this could be a turning point. The Guardian points out, that:

Obama and Clinton stand to gain from the Israeli retreat, which will heighten their reputation among the Palestinians and in the Arab world. Obama and Clinton were left looking weak after a similar stand-off with Israel last September when peace talks failed to get under way.

The EU as a whole is in an awkward position concerning the Middle East. They have big security interests at stake, much more important than those of the US.
During the G.W.Bush administrations, a divided Europe had to remain powerless at the side-lines, when its vital interests were put in danger by the 2003 Iraq invasion, by the Bush-supported killing of the remains of the Oslo arrangements, by the ill-inspired Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and, last but not least, the Cheney-handcrafted 2008 Georgian disaster (where Israeli "advisers" to the Georgian army played a key role).
A story of exacerbated European divisions
Most of the time, Europe was divided. In 2002/2003, divisions between the Blair-led UK and the other bigger EU powers France and Germany, were even exacerbated, as Blair harangued most fresh Eastern European EU-members and, to a still undisclosed measure, Balkenende's Holland, at the side of the US Neocon Iraq scheme. A lasting European rift was avoided, thanks to the stupidity of US post invasion policies in Iraq, that brought soon striking evidence of the underlying fraud and made it clear, how much the Iraq adventure was and is contrary to every possible European interest.
As part of the big powers' Oslo Quartet, the EU did not weigh much upon the steady dismantling of the two-state solution. As a "useful idiot", the EU furnished and still furnishes, the bulk of the international financial support to the Palestinian Authority, only to see its investments repeatedly destroyed by Israeli bombs (harbour, airport).
And Tony Blair again: As a Quartet appointed facilitator of negotiations in the region, what has he done?

During the 2006 Lebanon invasion, the EU found more of a common stand than before. It helped and helps, thanks to the wisdom of many Lebanese leaders, to maintain a shaky cease-fire at the Northern border of Israel. But proposals by the German Foreign Secretary Fischer, to extend the EU peace operation to areas of conflict between Israel and Palestine, fell on deaf ears.
Another result of the US failures, their pro-Likud stubbornness and their open contempt of the NATO allies, has been, now and then, a revival of outdated particular claims in the Middle East from former European colonizers and mandate-holders. France saw an opportunity, for instance, after the murder of Hariri in Lebanon, to reassert some of its former influence there, as the US hopelessly failed in understanding the particular dynamics of that multicultural society. That did not help to forge a common European stand, either.

Georgia: A turning point in retrospect
But Sarkozy's unique and rapid intervention (as he happened to be president of the EU in 2008) in the Georgian conflict, showed for the first time, that the EU can deal independently with its own interests in the wider region, if it acts quick and undivided.
While Cheney himself was desperately stoking conflict in defeated Tbilissi, France made for the EU an honorable compromise with Moscow that the Bush administration had to bow to.
This was exceptionally possible because of the halfheartedness of the US intrigue in Georgia.
For, in a general way, it is a hard fact, that the EU only can progress in its international security policy, if it is not going against the US and/or Russia's.
A united stand of the EU, even at this moment of the still fledgling Ashton mission, will also influence US and Russian positions, like it seems to me, that has happened now by way of the surprising Gaza initiative of the EU's Ashton.

Let us give the two-girls power a chance!

Sarkozy Plan about European guilt: Adoptions galore!

Sarkozy and his Holocaust Adoption Plan

I am brooding about a proposal to my French readers, to make 81-91 year old Frenchmen forcibly adopt a Jewish French child who was a victim of the 1941-44 holocaust. In my opinion, that would be much more to the point, than French president Sarkozy's idea to impose such a forced "adoption" non all French children at the age of 11. Our octagenarians were in their twenties and thirties, when they could have done something (more) against the deportation of more than 100.000 Jews from France to the Nazi extermination camps.

Shame

It is their shame, allowing for the positive exceptions, that French railwaymen rode without problem the trains of death to their destinations, it is their problem, that the "rafle" of the vélodrôme d'hiver could happen, it is they who should question themselves, how the Drancy concentration camp could function unhampered in the Paris suburbia. That problem is not solved yet. In stead of charging symbolically innocent children (35% of them from immigrant parents) with that guilt, they should do wise, to end their "refoulement", make peace with their conscience and then, yes, only THEN, talk with their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in order to demand them to oppose resolutely and without compromise, without subterfuge, and always, genocide and racial discrimination.

Isn't that a better idea than Sarkozy's? I appeal to Mr. Kouchner, for here we are in an evident situation of "devoir d'intervention". The Government, he is a member of, seems to be going to culpabilise French 11-year olds, for something, they are not reponsible for at all. And, in the case of the 35% immigrant children, even their fathers and grandfathers are completely innocent of. This is a form of state-brainwashing, that cannot stand his high humanitarian principles. I do not imply, that the holocaust history should not be taught to French children. Not at all. More attention than now should be given to it. But, please, do it in a historical context, that children of that age can understand!

Other European Countries should Join!

And, thinking about contexts, why should the French Government limit itself to genocides that were perpetrated under foreign leadership? Why, for instance, not force French who are in their fifties and sixties, to adopt, each individually, an Algerian child, that has been a victim of French torture, rape and blind killing during the colonial war from 1954-1962 in that country? An estimated one MILLION Algerians met their death under French intervention. There are a sufficient number of victims in stock for that age-group. And I, for myself, I wouldn't exclude the Jewish victims of Muslim revenge in Oran or in other cities. Nor the poor pieds-noirs who were forced out of the country after the French defeat.

I do not forget the people in their seventies. For them, a Vietnamese child, victim of the French intervention after 1947, that ended so tragically in the defeat of Dien Bien Phu, is the one to adopt immediately.

Summing up: If the principle of Sarkozy's adoption plan is accepted, there is much work to do. Algerian victims and their torturers have to be identified. The same for the Vietnamese.

Then, after the French setting an European example, the British will adopt massively Indian, Burmese, Boer, Egyptian, Persian, Pakistanese, Sudanese, Chinese, and I do not know who else as adoptive children. I do not forget my Dutch and Belgian contemporaries: The former will adopt each an Indonesian child, victim of the so-called "Police-Actions" 1946-1949, while the latter will tend to a Congolese child, raped and mutilated in the wars, the Belgians helped to bring about in their former royal colony.

And why not the Spanish (republican -and non-republican- victim children from the thirties civil war), the Italians (Ethiopian children, victims of the Mussolini invasion) and the Portugese (from all former colonies under Salazar)?

And the Germans, what do we do with our dear Germans? The elder generations have mostly died. The younger ones are pro-Israelian and pro-American. They do not want a new holocaust, even the most right-wing among them. The Germans, they are against the Turks, or the Islam, generally. Allowing, again, for the notable exceptions. Our advice to the Germans is in the next post...

Sarkozy won. A fundamental change?

I wasn't a fan of Ségolène. I saw her performing once, in 1994, on a meeting in Bourgogne, of young entrepreneurs. Horrible.
But I preferred her to Nicolas Sarkozy, you'll understand.
Now, five years of Sarkozism must be taken into account in France.
The New-Labour-Fans expect a friend who modernises France's economy. You should not be too sure about that. He is a French nationalist and his actions are limited by the forceful French Trade Unions. My expectations are, that he won't change so much.
Anyhow, in order to change the suburban neighbourhoods, you need emancipatory workers.
There are some, terrible, in France. He'll have to use them, if he wants to show any real progress.
That is what keeps me going, tonight. France won't change so much. You'll see...

Week 5: Chrac on Iran; French internal presidential struggle; Europe and the Near East.

Chirac and the Iran Bomb
The best commentary I have seen on the incident around French president Chirac's declaration on Iran, is in @foe (A Fistful of Euros) by Alex Harrowell: Chirac has a transient dishonesty malfunction (4.2.07). The title is more cynical than the content is.
Basically, the author says, Chirac was right in what he said first, i.e., that Iran, having one or two bombs, wouldn't be a disaster:

"This is a pretty basic statement of nuclear deterrence, with the further point that in a sense, having one or two nuclear bombs makes you weaker than having zero nuclear bombs but the capacity to make them. Once you fire the one bomb, you have no further deterrent, and you’re definitely going to be nuked."

For, as he says, The US, Israel, but also France, Britain and Russia have the capability to retaliate. And do not forget Pakistan and India. He also mentions Jordan, Egypt and Saudi-Arabia as countries who have perhaps already nuclear capabilities, or who should be able to have them within short notice. Especially S.-Arabia, that, probably, financed the Pakistani bomb, could buy it (or, already have bought it) instantly.

It is strange however, that he forgets Turkey. One cannot suppose, that the Turks, surrounded in the West, the North and the South (Israel) by nuclear powers, and seeing them coming up in the East, should not have thought at obtaining an independent nuclear deterrent for themselves. It is more than possible, that the CIA frontstore in Istanbul, manned by the team of Valerie Plame, was observing those efforts and their possible collusion with Israel. It makes the 2003 denunciation of Plame by Cheney & Co. all the more suspect.

Was it part of the French presidential candidates' dance around the poll position?
Remains the enigma, if it was the old fox Chirac, who staged a short incident in order to see what happened and at the same time stress, for a moment, the independent French thinking, or, if it is senility that has overtaken the outgoing president?

The Financial Times, echoing US analysing, opts for the "senility" explanation. It goes as far as to discuss the legal (constitutional) possibilities of declaring the French president "inapt" and to be replaced by the French Senate president. But it also admits that it might have been a moment of undiplomatic "honesty":

Yet most experts said Mr Chirac’s gaffe sounded less like a mental aberration and more like an unguarded moment of honesty. “Jacques Chirac said what many experts in the world are saying, even in the US,” said Hubert Védrine, former Socialist foreign minister.

“He sounded like a man who knows it is almost over for him and was saying what he really thinks,” said Patrick Moreau Defarges, analyst at the French institute of foreign relations.

The worry for some analysts is whether Mr Chirac’s new free-speaking style will do more damage to France’s diplomatic relations in the short time left before his expected departure from office. “These were very irresponsible comments for a head of state to make,” said Mr Moreau Defarges.

But I bet on my first supposition. Chirac is subtly undermining his rival Sarkozy's position. He did so, with the apparently staged homeless manifestations at Christmas and his subsequent order to give them housing. That was a defeat for Sarkozy. Diverging so manifestly from the US-imposed policy regarding Iran, is another blow to Sarko, who suggests regularly a more "Atlantic" approach in international policy. On both issues, Chirac can be sure, to have the French public opinion at his side.

If I am right, one may expect a third intrigue from the old fox against Sarkozy on the economic field, where he could force the latter, as a member of the government until the end of March, to execute some symbolic anti-market measure.

And the French Socialists and their candidate Ségolène Royal? - They are nowhere, at this moment. They had no reply on the homeless issue and still less on the Iran bomb question.

Europe, Israel and the Bomb.
We should also link this to the Herzliya conference held recently in that Israeli bathing resort. There, a subtly composed mix of neoconservatives and mainstream US politicians have been brainwashed over the Iranian Bomb and its' dangers for Israel. There was no effort, as far as I have seen, to imply a significant European audience into this conference. An appeasing German, British or French intervention has been avoided. All seems to be set, to obtain a maximum US belligerence in face of Iran. Nonetheless, an Iranian nuclear capacity regards directly Europe and the Russians. Much more directly than the Americans.
In my opinion, this is a costly error, seen from the Israeli point of view. Europe and most of the rest of the world, will not accept another Iraq-like scenario. I am even sure, that the orthodox conservative mainstream US community is more and more against this eventuality. Israel should, in my view, accept, that it has to compose with its neighbours in order to safeguard its existence, and not rely on its nuclear blackmailing capabilities.

Could it be, that Chirac, who thinks that he might have found a restoration of French influence in the Near East through the shift of power in Lebanon and the (outgoing) French commandment of the UN troops in South Lebanon, was vexed, that he was not heard in Herzliya?

The growing European weight upon the Near and Middle East, caused by the American-British failure in Iraq and the dissociation of Turkey from the US policies, as well as the Afghan morass, doesn't express itself diplomatically, commonly and promptly. That is why, I think, an incident like this, ridiculous at first view, could produce itself.

On of the stumblings that will unheroically, but inevitably, lead to a common EU foreign policy.