Herald.com | 12/23/2005 | Sharon's Stress Level

Ariel Sharon's doctors have advised him to try to reduce the stress in his life. That's a good one.

Let's see: Not only is the Israeli prime minister starting a new political party and running a campaign for elections coming in less than 100 days, but he has the kind of job that most of us get palpitations just thinking about.

While world leaders worry about how to answer Iran's efforts to build a nuclear bomb, the 77-year-old Sharon, who just left the hospital after suffering a mild stroke, knows exactly what Iran would like to do with a bomb if it had one. Sharon knows many in the region nodded in agreement when Iran's president said Israel should be ``wiped off the map.''

Iran is just one of the many matters on Sharon's presumably sharp mind. The man who has been told to cut back on stress has to worry about another election besides his own. The Islamic group Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and whose members are champions in the competitive field of killing Israeli civilians in suicide bombings, is moving up in the Palestinian polls. When Palestinians elect a new parliament early next year, there is a real possibility that they could choose an organization whose reason for being is not just taking over what is widely known as the Occupied Territories, but bringing an end to the state of Israel.

New party
Despite the lull in news reports, Israel is still facing attempted suicide bombings on a regular basis, and Palestinian militants are repeatedly launching missiles across the border into Israeli cities. But Sharon's doctors say he should ease off the bagels and cut back on stress.

That, of course, is reason for the entire Israeli public to check its blood pressure. That's because now everyone is thinking the thought that was too frightening to contemplate just a few days ago.

What would happen if Sharon suddenly died?
Israel is a democracy. That means there are institutions and mechanisms in place to replace a sitting head of government. But Sharon has just decimated his old Likud party to form the new Kadima. The new head of what's left of Likud is Sharon's old nemesis, Benjamin Netanyahu. And the former leader of the rival Labor party, 82-year-old Shimon Peres, is now also with Kadima. The new party has no rules, no membership list, no platform. The party, let's face it, is all about Sharon.

Netanyahu hopes that a weakened, faltering, or dead Sharon would mean the prime minister's office for him. But Netanyahu's Likud is third in the polls, trailing Sharon and Labor's new leader Amir Peretz. Kadima was topping the polls before the stroke and is showing even stronger numbers now. That means that Israeli voters want what Sharon offers. It means that, in Sharon's absence, the Israeli public will look for a leader offering the two elements of Sharon's new political persona: the prospects of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the vow to reach that solution without diminishing Israel's strength.

A real chance to achieve peace with strength and security: That's what Sharon means to Israelis. And that's what Israelis want.

Two-state solution

Once upon a time, Sharon was the champion of Israeli settlers and of those unwilling to give an inch to the Palestinians. No more. Sharon knows that to survive, Israel will have to live side by side with a Palestinian state. If it holds on to the Territories, Israel will cease to be a democracy.
Acceptance of a Palestinian state used to be the province of the Israeli left. But it is now in the undisputed mainstream of Israeli politics. Israelis -- not unlike most Palestinians -- see the two-state-solution as the new Promised Land. When (not if) the two sides agree on the borders, there will be peace -- at least with some of the Arab world. In the meantime, there are Iran, Hamas, Syria, Islamic Jihad, suicide bombers, missiles and elections. Not even Moses could handle that much pressure. But maybe Sharon -- and the stressed-out Israeli voters -- can pull it off.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs.

Iran's Lectures on Tolerance

Iran’s Lectures on Tolerance
By Frida Ghitis

The new government of Iran has launched a campaign for more tolerance, open-mindedness and freedom of speech in the West. Yes, Tehran now argues that, "The Europeans should get used to hearing other opinions, even if they don't like them.” How refreshing.
Fortunately, those close-minded Europeans will have none of it.
The call for more tolerance for differing views in Europe and the United States came from Iran’s foreign ministry following the furious response from the West to claims by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust – Nazi Germany’s slaughter of six million Jews -- was a “myth.”

The Europeans called Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denials “Wholly unacceptable,” and the US declared them “Outrageous.” Iran thinks they overreacted and says its time for an “academic debate.”
Some may still wonder why the West does not want to engage in a debate about history. What are we afraid of? The answer is that we have played this game before.
Europeans heard this kind of rhetorical Jujitsu many times before; an attempt to use the West’s own values against it.
As always, the calls for open-mindedness on the Holocaust come from individuals and groups with a track record that shows little tolerance and respect for other views, not to mention other races and religions.
If it weren’t so troublesome, it would be almost be funny to hear Iran, of all countries, call for open-mindedness and tolerance. This is a regime that imprisons journalists, assassinates opposition figures and executes gay teenagers. It won’t even tolerate Western music on state radio and television stations. According to Human Rights Watch, Iran’s government has closed down more than 100 opposition newspapers just since 2000. The revolutionary regime has executed thousands of real and perceived opponents since taking power. HRW says members of President Ahmadinejad’s new cabinet, particularly the Ministers of Information and the Interior should be investigated for crimes against humanity, including the assassination of dissidents in and out of Iran.
It is no coincidence that the same regime that suppresses dissent now calls for more tolerance on its views about the events of World War II.
Iran is not alone in its efforts to deny the Holocaust. It joins a long list of racists and demagogues who have tried to say the Holocaust never happened. And Iran did not invent the strategy of calling for more openness in discussing the issue.
As Emory University’s Dr. Deborah Lipstadt has described in convincing detail, Holocaust deniers use a strategy of distorting the truth in order to further their ideological objectives. The key point to examine when one listens to their exhortations for academic freedom is that theirs is not an argument in pursuit of learning the truth. They are not seeking to enhance the world’s body of historical knowledge. Their denial that the killing of six million Jews ever happened is a key element in a political effort to distort the truth in order to achieve political goals.
Hitler’s almost successful efforts to exterminate the Jewish people have been studied and documented to such a degree that no legitimate scholar any longer questions them.
The evidence of a one of the greatest crimes in history is overwhelming, from the eye-witness testimony from victims and perpetrators, to the physical evidence from gas chambers used to kill and the ovens used to dispose of bodies, to mountains of documents from the Third Reich and bits of information about the lives of millions of people killed in Europe’s death camps during World War II. True scholars now focus not on whether it happened -- which was conclusively answered decades ago -- but why.
Deniers, however, persist. That’s because claiming the Holocaust did not happen is a useful tool when pursuing other objectives. And those objectives always involve some form of intolerance, from anti-Semitism to generic racism.
Take Iran, for example. When the country’s new rabble-rousing president called the Holocaust an “invention,” he had already called Israel a “tumor” that should be “wiped off the map.”
Iran’s president now joins a group of Holocaust deniers, many of whom, incidentally, would refuse to sit in a room with an Iranian, a Muslim, an Arab, or a Jew.
We already know about the Holocaust. The matter still open for debate is what to do about the danger Ahmadinejad and his regime pose to the world.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs. She’s the author of “The End of Revolution: a Changing World in the Age of Live Television.”

Herald.com | 12/16/2005 | Hurricane Katrina's impact on Iraq

Hurricane Katrina's impact on Iraq

BY FRIDA GHITIS

As with virtually every new political step in post-Saddam Iraq, Thursday's vote by millions of Iraqis choosing a new government brings enormous expectations. Iraq's brave and determined voters present a powerful counterattack against extremist jihadists who would turn the country into an oppressive theocracy. And then, there's that other challenging goal, the need to recover from the damages wrought by Katrina on Iraq. Yes, that Katrina.

Of all the threats the Iraqi nation has faced in the last few decades -- wars against Iran and Kuwait, an American invasion, waves of suicide bombings, an incipient civil war -- none came more unexpectedly than Hurricane Katrina. The storm that battered the U.S. Gulf Coast more than 7,000 miles away from Baghdad didn't spill a drop of water on the Iraqi desert. And yet, it broke apart the leaking levees that had precariously held back the doubts of the American public about its government policies in Iraq.

When the structures collapsed, the White House found itself drowning in a sea of plummeting approval ratings. For Iraq, this meant the enormous danger that Washington would make decisions based more on boosting ratings than on improving the chances of success for their fledgling democracy.

To be sure, support for the Iraq campaign had been on a steady slide before Katrina struck in late August. But the floor collapsed after the calamity that followed the hurricane. For millions of Americans, Katrina left a nearly indelible impression that this administration is incompetent, unreliable and duplicitous. If it couldn't be trusted in New Orleans and Mississippi, it could not be trusted in Iraq.

Support for the war crumbled along with President Bush's overall approval ratings. In the weeks after Katrina, a Gallup poll showed a jump of almost 10 percent in the number of Americans disapproving of Mr. Bush's job in Iraq. The number of people saying they believe the administration deliberately lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction also jumped. As the mold grew on the walls of devastated New Orleans homes, pessimism about Iraq became rooted in the American psyche.

Ironically, the Iraqi people have remained extraordinarily optimistic about the prospects for their own country. A recent poll conducted by Oxford Research International on behalf of five media organizations from Japan, Germany, the United States and the UK, found more than 70 percent of Iraqis saying their lives are good or very good. That's unchanged from a similar poll last year.
Iraqis, most of whom said they personally feel secure in their own neighborhoods and in their own lives, expressed concerns for their country; but two-thirds of those polled said they believe life will improve next year.

And, with incomes up an average of 60 percent in the last 20 months, 70 percent said their economic situation was good. Not surprisingly, a majority (65 percent) of Iraqis said they oppose the U.S. presence there, but only 26 percent said they want the troops out immediately. Iraqis, like many Americans -- including many who opposed the war -- know that a departure by U.S. forces now, with only a semi-trained Iraqi army in place, would bring disaster.

Perhaps most encouraging of all were the political preferences reflected in the poll. Some 57 percent said they want a democracy, versus just 14 percent who want an Islamic state. That's a drop in support for religious regime from the last time the question was asked. A ''strong leader'' was the choice of 26 percent.
Of course, in a war situation the bullets can prevail over the wishes of the majority. If the 14 percent who want an Islamic state win on the battlefield, the 57 percent who want democracy may never vote again.

Is that likely to happen? A poll by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations showed two different views in America.

The survey, released a few weeks ago, showed that 64 percent of U.S. military officers believe the United States will succeed in establishing a successful democracy in Iraq. When pollsters asked journalists and academics the same question, fewer than one third of them said Iraq would become a stable democracy.

Who's right -- the Iraqi people, the military officers or the journalists and academics? That will depend, in large part, on what the United States does. In the end, it may all depend on whether Iraqi voters succeed in recovering from the effect of hurricane Katrina.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs.

The music that plays in Mexico's background

Star-Telegram | 12/04/2005 | The music that plays in Mexico's background

PUERTO ESCONDIDO, Mexico - If you travel through the villages and towns of Mexico asking people about their lives and about the idea of crossing their country's northern border, you discover that the siren song that has brought immigrants to the United States over the centuries never stops calling, its unsettling sounds inviting and threatening at the same time.

The prospect of an odyssey across the desert beckons like a mirage of opportunity and danger. Every single person I have asked, without exception, has told me about relatives who have gone to the United States.

Everyone, without exception, has talked about having at least considered going to the country where there is money to be made, but only for those willing to go through terrifying dangers to reach an unknown land.

Noe Silva, who works in this fishermen's town on Mexico's Pacific coast, told me he makes about $4,000 a year working a variety of odd jobs. He's a waiter when the tourists come, a carpenter when they leave. And he even moved to work in neighboring Chiapas for a few years. That's where the rebel Zapatista army a few years ago declared an old-fashioned leftist revolutionary war on behalf of the poorest of the poor.

Silva has considered the trek to the United States many times. But the fear of dying in the desert keeps him from trying it. Besides, he says, this is the land he knows. This is where he walks on the beach every morning, where his father took him out fishing as a child. Where he knows everyone and everyone knows him.

For the millions who make it to the United States, a life of relatively high earnings does not mean a life of comfort. Mexican migrants send so much of what they make back to their families that remittances have become the second-largest source of revenue for Mexico, second only to oil exports.

Mexico needs the cash, but the belief that America would simply stop functioning without Mexico's millions of undocumented workers is almost universal here.

The concept was most undiplomatically expressed by the country's President Vicente Fox, when he said Mexicans do the jobs that "not even blacks will do." The statement rightly enraged African-Americans, but the thought that the United States needs Mexicans is widespread.

One conspiratorially minded Mexican explained Washington's policy this way: The United States needs Mexicans, so it makes it illegal and dangerous for them to come. That way, only the most talented and strong and determined end up making it. That's how Americans want it.

The conspiracy takes it a bit far, but the view from a man who, like many Mexicans, resents and mistrusts Washington holds the key to the Darwinian secrets of immigration.

One of the reasons that the United States has become one of the most successful countries in history is that it was built by immigrants, a self-selected group that has always included some of the most determined, driven and hard-working people from around the world.

As long as the United States needs workers and Mexico has more people than jobs, as long as Mexico remains so much poorer than the United States, Mexicans will give in to the call and seek to make their fortune in America. And as long as there is no viable legal option to enter the United States, an illegal infrastructure rather than legitimate immigration authorities will control the border.

That will make the Mexico-U.S. frontier one that will open America to anyone willing to pay cash and take the risk.