Krauthammer On Hamas & Fatah, Challenges & Bench Marks

Charles Krauthammer sees the challenges and opportunities in the clarification of Hamas Fatah scenario, as well as noting how Israel, with the hands on the controls of Gaza's water, gas and electricity has Hamas by its radical Islamic short hairs:

Gaza is now run not by a conventional political party but by a movement that is revolutionary, Islamist and terrorist. Worse, Hamas is a client of Iran. Gaza now constitutes the farthest reach of the archipelago of Iranian proxies: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army (among others) in Iraq and the Alawite regime of Syria.

This Islamist mini-replica of the Comintern is at war not just with Israel but with the moderate Arab states, who finally woke up to this threat last summer when they denounced Hezbollah for provoking the Lebanon war with Israel. The fall of Gaza is particularly terrifying to Egypt because Hamas is so closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the chief Islamist threat to the secular-nationalist regime that has ruled Egypt since the revolution of 1952. Which is why Egypt has just invited Israeli, Jordanian and moderate Palestinian leaders to a summit next week -- pointedly excluding and isolating Hamas.

The splitting of Palestine into two entities is nonetheless clarifying.

. . . The policy implications are obvious. There is nothing to do with the self-proclaimed radical Islamist entity that is Gaza but to isolate it. No recognition, no aid (except humanitarian necessities through the United Nations), no diplomatic commerce.

Israel now has the opportunity to establish deterrence against unremitting rocket attacks from Gaza into Israeli villages. Israel failed to do that after it evacuated Gaza in 2005, permitting the development of an unprecedented parasitism by willingly supplying food, water, electricity and gasoline to a territory that was actively waging hostilities against it.

With Hamas now clearly in charge, Israel should declare that it will tolerate no more rocket fire -- that the next Qassam will be answered with a cutoff of gasoline shipments. This should bring road traffic in Gaza to a halt within days and make it increasingly difficult to ferry around missiles and launchers.

If that fails to concentrate the mind, the next step should be to cut off electricity. When the world wails, Israel should ask, what other country on Earth is expected to supply the very means for a declared enemy to attack it?

Regarding the West Bank, policy should be equally clear. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas represents moderation and should be helped as he tries to demonstrate both authority and success in running his part of Palestine.

But let's remember who Abbas is. He appears well intentioned, but he is afflicted with near-disastrous weaknesses. He controls little. His troops in Gaza simply collapsed against the greatly outnumbered forces of Hamas. His authority in the West Bank is far from universal. He does not even control the various factions within Fatah.

But the greater liability is his character. He is weak and indecisive. . .

Moreover, his Fatah party is ideologically spent and widely discredited. Historian Michael Oren points out that the Palestinian Authority has received more per capita aid than did Europe under the Marshall Plan. This astonishing largess has disappeared into lavish villas for party bosses and guns for the multiple militias Arafat established.

The West is rushing to bolster Abbas. Israel will release hundreds of millions in tax revenue. The United States and the European Union will be pouring in aid. All praise Abbas as a cross between Anwar Sadat and Simón Bolívar. Fine. We have no choice but to support him. But before we give him the moon, we should insist upon reasonable benchmarks of both moderation and good governance -- exactly what we failed to do during the Oslo process. Abbas needs to demonstrate his ability to run a clean administration and to engage Israel in day-to-day negotiations to alleviate the conditions of life on the ground.

Abbas is not Hamas. But despite the geographical advantages, he does not represent the second coming, either. We can prop him up only so much. In the end, the only one who can make a success of the West Bank is Abbas himself. This is his chance. His last chance.

Read the entire story here. Finally, some benchmarks we can get behind. This sounds perfectly appropriate and far more sound then just opening the spigots. We may have to force Fatah to succeed as a nation - rather then subsidize opulence for its war lords. Perhaps, given their recent fate in Gaza, we may find Abbas and his gang a bit more willing this time.

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A Witches Brew in the Middle East

Harvard University Professor Niall Ferguson today keenly puts his arms around the vast witches brew of bloody conflict and competing interests in the Middle East, forecasting that we are likely on the precipice of another world conflict, if not Armagedon:

Divide and rule was an old maxim of Britain's Empire. In the Middle East today, there's certainly no shortage of division. But who is ruling as a result? Any lingering hopes of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians evaporated last week as the Islamist extremists of Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip. President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the more secular Fatah party, now finds himself president of the West Bank only. The next Middle Eastern peace plan will have to be a three-state solution: Israel, Hamastan and Fatahland.

Did I say three? I meant four. Because no peace could last long if it didn't somehow end the threat to Israel posed by Hezbollahstan - the strip of Lebanon controlled by the Iranian-backed terrorists whom Israel failed to obliterate last summer.

Meanwhile, even as hooded Hamas gunmen and Fatah forces traded bullets in Gaza, and even as another anti-Syrian politician was blown to pieces by a car-bomb in Lebanon, Sunni militants in Iraq destroyed the twin minarets of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, finishing a job they began last year, when they demolished the shrine's golden dome. Nothing could be better calculated to intensify the sectarian conflict that has been tearing the country apart for 16 months, pushing it another step closer to bloody partition.

And don't forget Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous republic in northern Iraq which is set to be the third state in Iraq's three-state (dis)solution. Or maybe not. In recent weeks the Turkish army has been massing troops on the Turkish-Iraqi border, threatening to launch raids against bases allegedly being operated by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Terrorism by the PKK has been a thorn in Ankara's side for more than 20 years. But this is also a renewed attempt by the secularists in the Turkish army to put pressure on the moderate Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Only the other day, the generals threatened to stage a coup if one of Erdogan's colleagues was elected president.

As I said, there's no shortage of division in the Middle East. But who gets to rule is less clear.

For some time I have been warning that the next great global conflict will begin in the Middle East, just as the two world wars had their origins in eastern Europe. The lethal combination of ethnic disintegration, economic volatility and an empire in decline (in this case, the United States) makes an upward spiral of violence hard to avoid. Add to that the demographic pressures due to high Muslim birth-rates, the money generated by vast deposits of oil and natural gas, and the risk that the most revolutionary power in the region will soon possess nuclear weapons, and you have a recipe for Armageddon.

What can the rest of the world do to defuse the Middle Eastern timebomb? According to that compulsive contrarian Edward Luttwak, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the answer is: ignore it. In a recent article, Luttwak dismisses the entire region as "the middle of nowhere", arguing that overblown prophesies of doom are, after oil, the Middle East's biggest export.

Luttwak's argument is twofold. First, we exaggerate the importance of violence in the Middle East. As he puts it, "the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000". Iran is no more of a threat to the west than Saddam Hussein's Iraq was. "Most Middle Eastern populations," he writes, "can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces". And Iranian-sponsored terrorism is an overrated counter-threat to the possibility of American air strikes. Iran is in any case so ethnically divided that it will probably break up sooner or later.

At the same time, Luttwak insists, we exaggerate the economic importance of the Middle East. It is an under-achieving region where "almost nothing is created in science or the arts". It boasts the second-lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa). Excluding Israel, its per capita production of patents is even worse than Africa's. Practically the only thing the Middle East exports is oil, but global dependence on that is declining.

Hence, since neither a hard line nor a soft line will cure the Middle East's inhabitants of their propensity for low-level violence, and since the region is economically stagnant and increasingly irrelevant, the only rational policy must be one of benign neglect. "Backward societies", concludes Luttwak, "must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily."

Of all the commentaries I have read in the past six months, this stands out as the silliest.

. . . Today, the Middle East is in many ways just as explosive as eastern Europe a century ago; perhaps even more so. Does Luttwak seriously believe that the disintegration of Iraq (or for that matter Iran, which he envisages) can be compared with the trivial disorders of Corsica and Sicily? Violence in Iraq is currently claiming the lives of around 3,000 people a month. Since 1998, according to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, Middle Eastern terrorism has killed 24,289 people and wounded nearly double that number - more than half of all the worldwide casualties due to terrorism. Is this Luttwak's idea of an acceptable level of violence? And would he like to estimate how many people may die in the next 10 years, as Iraq falls apart and the Israel-Iran showdown reaches its climax?

What's more, it is ludicrous to claim that the Middle East is economically irrelevant. True, the west is less dependent on oil from the region than in the Seventies, but has no one pointed out to Luttwak the recent and future trajectory of global oil supply and demand? The oil fields of the rest of the world are likely to be exhausted much sooner than the oil fields of the Middle East, which today account for 62 per cent of proved reserves, compared with 54 per cent in 1980. Meanwhile, Asia's economic boom is causing an unprecedented increase in demand. If Middle Eastern oil is so unimportant, why were crude futures up to $67 a barrel last week?

Far from benign neglect, what is desperately needed in the Middle East today is a more effective policy of diplomatic intervention - to establish some kind of rule amid the division. My worry is that, with two US aircraft carrier strike groups off the Iranian coast, and an admiral newly appointed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, precisely the wrong kind of intervention may be about to happen.

Read the entire story here. While I find Mr. Ferguson's analysis, as usual, spot on, I find his conclusion unrealistic. Diplomacy has not and will not work in the Middle East. I think, in fact, the Armagedon of which Mr. Ferguson warns is inevitable unless we succeed in breaking the cycle and bring stability to Iraq. The only thing that will achieve that end is the use of force. It is the one single tool of diplomacy that has ever proven effective in the Middle East.

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Lebanon, Syria & The UN Security Council

Of the myriad of issues involving the byantine politics of the Middle East, two of the most immediate are whether political assassinations are to be tolerated as an accepted tool of Middle Eastern politics and whether Syria will be allowed to continue its efforts to dominate Lebanon. Both hinge on how the 2005 assassination of Lebanese politician Rafiq Hariri is addressed by the UN Security Counsel. The matter is now before Counsel. The Counsel should immediately form a tribunal to hear evidence and pass judgment on the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.

Hariri was assasinated in 2005, with all evidence pointing to Syrian intelligence as the culprits. At the time, Hariri was challenging the continued occupation of Lebanon by Syria. As Amir Taheri explains:

[A U.N. investigator] established the motive for the murder as early as the autumn of 2005. He came out with evidence that showed the Syrian leadership, possibly at the highest level, had at one point decided that Hariri was the only Lebanese leader capable of challenging their old ambitions in Lebanon. At the start of 2005, none of the other players in the Lebanese political scene had any particular interest in wishing Hariri out of the way.

But Assad did not count on the ultimate backlash to the assassination of Hariri - a backlash that saw Syria ostensibly driven from Lebanon and a nascent democracy retake power. That did not end Syria's ambition to dominate Lebanon for economic and political reasons. And Assad clearly views preventing any tribunal from passing judgement on the Hariri murder as a mortal threat to that ambition, not to mention the problems such a judgemnt would pose for Syria on almost all levels.

Thus Syria, supported by Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, have done all they can to sidetrack such a tribunal. That has been problematic:

. . . In the general election that followed [Syria's withdraw], the pro-Hariri bloc and its allies won a majority in the parliament and formed a government dedicated to bringing the murderers to justice.

Unable to stop the investigation, Syria (backed by the Islamic Republic in Iran) tried to put Lebanese politics on a trajectory that would marginalize the Hariri case. The Syrians deployed Emile Lahoud - the president they had imposed on the Lebanese for a further three years - to paralyze the Siniora government.

Under Lebanon's Constitution, laws passed by the parliament and senior appointments made by the government must receive presidential assent to take effect. Prompted by the Syrians, Lahoud has been withholding his assent, effectively preventing the government from implementing the program for which it was elected.

Lahoud continues to this day to thwart the democratically elected majority who desire a tribunal. But Syria's meddling has gone far beyond just Lahoud.

There have been several additional murders of anti-Syrian journalists and politicians in the interim. But through it all, Lebanon's nascent democracy has not waivered.

It seems likely that the disastrous war started by Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, was motivated in part by a desire to prevent the Hariri tribunal from being formed. After the Hezbollah-Israel War, Hezbollah tried to bootstrap their claimed "victory" into additional political power. They demanded the Lebanese government grant them a veto power over legislation, clearly aimed at quashing the formation of a Hariri tribunal. When that did not work, they withdrew their ministers from the government and took to the streets, attempting to further intimidate the government with the threat of riots and possibly a renewal of the disastrous civil war that consumed Lebanon for years.

None of this has deterred Lebanon's majority in the government, but with Syrian control of the presidency, there has been deadlock. Lebanon's Prime Minister has written to Ban Ki Moon at the UN, requesting that the Security Council, without formal request of Lebanon, create a formal tribunal to pass judgment on the murder of Hariri. In response, Syria has formulated violence among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The Palestinians have long been problematic for Lebanon, and are now becoming a serious problem with the growth of al Qaeda linked organizations inside Palestinian holding areas. A Syrian backed Palestinian group has chosen the day Lebanon sent its letters to the UN to begin an unprovoked attack on Lebanese army positions near the Syrian border.

The longer the Security Council refrains from moving on the Lebanese government's request for a tribunal, the greater will be the blood spilled among innocents in Lebanon. A complete failure to act will abandon Lebanon to Syrian control and only ensconce political assassination as a reasonable tool of Middle East foreign policy. Syria must be brought to heel and their foreign policy of assassination and intimidation subject to the bright light of international scrutiny and judgment. The time for the U.N. Security Council to act is now.

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Radical Islam Moves Into White Collar Crime

Many will recall that a few years ago, radical Islamists in America were using a variety of criminal activities to generate funds that were then transferred to terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Possibly the most famous of the illegal fund raising acts was the cigarette smuggling ring that was run by a Hezbollah cell out of North Carolina. It seems today that the illegal activities have not stopped, but they have morphed as the radical Islamists in our midst are now relying heavilly on white collar crime, such as mortgage fraud. Read the story here.

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An Almost Good NYT Piece on Iran EFP's & Militia Contacts

There is a long NYT article this morning that discusses Iran's extensive involvement in supporting Iraqi Shia militias with training and, in particular, EFP's. The article carefully and thoroughly tracks the dawning realization among U.S. officials that Iran was directly involved in the violence in Iraq through the IRGC, the Quds Force, and through Hezbollah.

I call the article almost good because, while informative and without spin through much of the article, it falls into traditional Democratic bias at the end, finishing with the ludicrous suggestion that we could get Iran to stop their bellicose and murderous ways if only we would sit down and talk to the mad mullahs. One can almost hear the DNC singing Kumbaya punctuated with the sounds of EFP's in the background. See here and here.

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Bob Baer on the Defection of General Asgari

Former CIA agent Bob Baer weighs in on the importance of the defection of Iran's IRGC General Asgari. Baer highlights the importance and breadth of the information Asgari knows, and suggests that Asgari alone could become a PR tool to justify open war with Iran.

Normally, vanished intelligence officers barely merit one short paragraph on page eight. Asgari is different, though. As the IRGC commander in Lebanon in the late '80s and early '90s, he knows dirty secrets, secrets that could be used to justify going to war with Iran. Asgari was in the IRGC's chain of command when it was kidnapping and assassinating Westerners in Lebanon in the '80s. Asgari knows a lot about other IRGC-ordered, Lebanon-based terrorist attacks, including the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

As IRGC commander in Lebanon, Asgari was also one of Hizballah's stepfathers. In the late '80s and early '90s, he was Hizballah Secretary General's Hasan Nasrallah's primary Iranian contact, and certainly in a position now to provide evidence of Nasrallah's involvement in terrorism. Asgari was the primary Iranian contact for one of the world's most lethal and capable terrorists, 'Imad Fa'iz Mughniyah. Mughniyah is indicted in the U.S. for the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the murder of a Navy diver.

The bad news for Hizballah and Iran doesn't end there. Asgari would be able to tell us about Hizballah's secret military commanders, its overseas networks, and possibly its cells in the U.S. A friend close to Hizballah's leadership tells me Hizballah has gone to battle quarters, concluding Asgari's "kidnapping" is a prelude for its next round with Israel.

The more important question is what Asgari's possible defection would mean for this Administration's plans for Iran. Nothing is certain when it comes to Iran, but here's what I think we should look for: If Asgari resurfaces in the next couple months with a detailed, convincing bill of indictment against Iran and Hizballah (unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's supposed confession), we should expect a confrontation. For instance, in the late '80s Hizballah, under IRGC orders, sent plastic explosives to secret cells around the world. Only one shipment was intercepted. The others are presumably still in place. If Asgari helps us dig one up, the Administration has a propaganda weapon it never had going into the Iraq war.

Read the entire post here. I do not agree with Baer that trotting out Asgari for pr at some point necessarilly presages open war with Iran. I would thing that the U.S. would use Asgari's informaton for as long as possible to direct and expand its covert operations to neuter Iran. Following that, I would see the U.S. using Asgari as a p.r. tool for any number of reasons short of open war, such as to justify why Europe needs to stop dealing with Iran and join in harsher sanctions. At any rate, it is clear that Iran is in a very uncomfortable spot at the moment.

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Highlights from National Intel Director Testimony

The new Director of National Intelligence, retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, and his staff testified before Congress yesterday. The highlights include:

Iran is training Iraqi Shia militants at Hezbollah camps in Lebanon. Senator Lieberman noted that this is very serious and recommended "we ought to consider taking steps to stop [this training] in defense of our soldiers."

3/4 of the old leadership of al Qaeda has been killed or captured

al Qaeda is reconstituting in the Fronteir Provinces of Pakistan, an area that is only nominally under Pakistan's control

al Qaeda is planning attacks throughout Europe, as well as in Iraq and Syria.

Iraq is the "cause celebre" for foreign jihadi recruitment. Note that I do not know whether Director McConnell was asked what the effect of a rapid withdrawal would be on jihadi recruitment.

The political situation in Iraq is difficult because Shia are not confident in their control of Iraq, the Sunnis act as if they are in control, and the Kurds are biding their time and protecting their position.

Democrats at the hearing complained because the National Intelligence Estimate included an assessment that a rapid withdrawal from Iraq would lead to chaos.

Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.) was one of several Democrats who questioned the decision to include an assessment of a "rapid withdrawal" of coalition forces from Iraq as part of the recent National Intelligence Estimate. The NIE judgment was that such a withdrawal would increase violence and hasten deterioration of the situation in Iraq -- a finding that has since been cited by Bush and others who support a troop increase and oppose withdrawal.

National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar, who supervised production of the NIE, told the Senate panel that "unquestionably and categorically" there had been no political pressure to shape the estimate.

"I'm not criticizing your bona fides," Bayh told Fingar, "but I do care about the credibility of your work product . . . and when you start down that slippery slope, you just get into these kinds of arguments."

The Democrat's reaction on this issue goes to the trouble that is at the center of the party right now -- how to make the greatest partisan advantage out of the war while not having to face responsiblity for any acts that they may take.

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IN THE U.K., THE LIBERAL WORLD ON ITS HEAD

The WSJ shines a spotlight on the radicalized left of the U.K., and there curious acceptance and promotion of radical Islam. The author begins with Red Ken, the Mayor of London, who seems to run his own foreign policy in support of a revolving door of dictators and radical islamists.

The other day Ken Livingstone, the mayor of my hometown of London, organized a conference on Islam and the West. It was a carefully rigged affair in which handpicked speaker after handpicked speaker stood up and announced that the democracies were to blame for the tidal wave of murder sweeping the world.
. . . .
. . . [C]ommentators for the BBC and nearly every newspaper here describe Mr. Livingstone as one of the most left-wing politicians in British public life. Hardly any of them notice the weirdness of an apparent socialist pandering to a reactionary strain of Islam, pushing its arguments and accepting its dictates.

Mr. Livingstone's not alone. After suicide bombers massacred Londoners on July 7, 2005, leftish rather than conservative papers held British foreign policy responsible for the slaughters on the transport network. ("Blair's Bombs," ran the headline in my own leftish New Statesman.) In any university, you are more likely to hear campaigns for the rights of Muslim women derided by postmodernists than by crusty conservative dons. Our Stop the War coalition is an alliance of the white far left and the Islamist far right, and George Galloway, its leader, and the first allegedly "far left" member to be elected to the British Parliament in 50 years, is an admirer of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah.

I could go on with specific examples, but the crucial point is the pervasive European attitude to the Iraq catastrophe. As al Qaeda, the Baathists and Shiite Islamists slaughter thousands, there is virtually no sense that their successes are our defeats. Iraqi socialists and trade unionists I know are close to despair. They turn for support to Europe, the home of liberalism, feminism and socialism, and find that rich democrats, liberals and feminists won't help them or even acknowledge their existence.

And as the author goes onto point, at the root of this suicidal rush of leftist lemmings is multiculturalism and moral equivalency.

In Europe and North America extreme versions of multiculturalism and identity politics have left a poisonous legacy. Far too many liberal-minded people think that is somehow culturally imperialist to criticize reactionary movements and ideas--as long as they aren't European or American reactionary movements. This delusion is everywhere. Until very recently our Labour government was allowing its dealings with Britain's Muslim minority to be controlled by an unelected group, the Muslim Council of Britain, which stood for everything social democrats were against. In their desperate attempts to ingratiate themselves, ministers gave its leader a knighthood--even though he had said that "death was too good" for Salman Rushdie, who happens to be a British citizen as well as a great novelist.

I could not concur more with this author's assessment. If you want to see this suicidal mindset in action, please see my post here. And it also dovetails with Niall Ferguson's article today as to why the world hates America.

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HEZBOLLAH PREPARES FOR NEXT WAR

Hezbollah is in the midst of rearmng, compliments of Iran, and is preparing for another round of hostilities against Israel. Hezbollah now occupies the hills and valley's north of the U.N. positions on the Lebanon-Israel border from Sheba Farms and across to the sea.

It is widely suspected that Iran is the principal supplier of this hardware and that Syria is actively allowing these weapons to be transported across its borders. Hezbollah could, therefore, be in a position by this summer in which it could fire missiles over the land south of the Litani river, which is controlled by the UN force, and strike at Israeli civilians. The domestic pressure on Israel to respond by bombing would be huge.

The international tension which a fresh round of conflict here would provoke may suit the Iranian leadership. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared yesterday that Iran’s nuclear programme involved “no reverse gear” just as representatives of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council prepare to meet in London to discuss additional sanctions against Tehran. If past form is any indication, Iran will try to play for time by exploiting its capacity to cause trouble in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. It is likely to engage in those tactics yet again.

Read the whole story and here. This was both expected and unfortunate. It may actually place Israel in a very difficult position. If Hezbollah launches rocket attacks from behind the U.N. buffer, which they surely will, Israel will be at a strategic disadvantage. They will of course be able to respond with air and indirect fire, but it would seem that a push by troops on the ground will be greatly complicated by the buffer zone and U.N. forces. I think Iran will play the Hezbollah card once again, but precisely when is the question.

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JOHN EDWARDS SELF DESTRUCTING. At a recent Hollywood reception, Mr. Edwards opined:

Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace . . . [is] the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.

Perhaps Mr. Edwards could join Congressmen Silvestre Reyes and John Murtha and invest in a current events class on Iran, Ahmedinijad, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, etc. Edwards might have had a shot against Hillary, but with gaffes like this one and last weeks fiasco with the intemperate bloggers he hired and then fired, and coupled with the rise of Obamamania, Edwards will not long last as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination for President.

Hattip: Drudge .

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SOMALIA AND OUR 'MODERATE' ARAB FRIENDS. Until December, 2006, the fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union (ICU) seemed poised to take over all of Somalia and impose a Taliban-like regime upon the country. It was widely reported at the time that al Qaeda was operatng in Somalia, assisting the ICU and with the expectation of establishing a safe haven. Al Zawahiri, the no. 2 man in al Qaeda, made numerous calls for all Muslims to join in a jihad in support of the ICU. A recently released report by the United Nations establishes that the training, arming and funding of the ICU was coming out of such 'moderate' Arab countries as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Other entities deeply involved in support of the ICU were Hezbollah, Syria, Lybia and Iran. As to the Iranians, they were reported to be attempting to barter with the ICU in return for plutonium.



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