Thank you for posting Mr. (Asaad Appologist) Credability


Dr Patrick Seale is a writer and consultant on Middle East affairs.

He runs a consultancy on Middle East affairs for a number of international clients and writes regularly for Al-Hayat (London) and Al-Ittihad (Abu Dhabi), as well as The Daily Star (Beirut), The Saudi Gazette (Jiddah) and Gulf News (Dubai).

His books include:
The Struggle for Syria, 1965; new edition 1986
French Revolution 1968 (1968)
Philby, the Long Road to Moscow, 1973
The Hilton Assignment, 1973
Ed: The Making of an Arab Statesman: Abd al-Hamid Sharaf and the Modern Arab World, 1983
Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East, 1988
Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire, 1992.

He helped HRH Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, now Assistant Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, write Desert Warrior, 1995, a volume of memoirs of the Gulf War.

He lives with his Syrian wife (Asma Akhras) in Paris and the South of France.

P. Seale: "I happen to believe that the Arabs should close ranks if they want to keep their enemies at bay. If this makes me an Arab nationalist, so be it. It doesn't mean that I believe in 'a golden Arab future'. Far from it, the Arabs have never been weaker and their prospects never so doubtful. If you think Lebanon can get by on its own, think again. I also think it is rather short-sighted to think in terms of Lebanon versus Syria, or of democratic Lebanon versus authoritarian Syria. The two countries are as flawed, as corrupt and as violent as each other. They are also indissolubly linked in a thousand ways. One day, their relations will be put on a healthy basis, free from the disgraceful networks of the past. They have many common interests, not least the need to deter Israel. If you hope for another 17 May 1983 accord [between Israel and Lebanon, since abrogated], I'm afraid I would have to part company with you. I note that even the 'anti-Syrian' Michel Aoun understands the need for a relationship with Syria. It's always worth remembering that Lebanon has only two neighbours--Syria and Israel--and must choose between them. The idea that it can somehow escape from the regional power struggle is pure utopia."

Middle East studies in the News

A Trained Seale Goes Rogue [on Assad biographer Patrick Seale]
by Michael Young
Reason
June 16, 2005

http://www.reason.com/links/links061605.shtml

It isn't often that the British journalist Patrick Seale takes the Syrian government to task. Best known for writing two highly influential tomes on Syria—The Struggle for Syria (1965) and Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (1988)—Seale had virtually incomparable access to the late President Hafiz Assad, even as he routinely rationalized, albeit with sporadic criticism, the behavior of the "sphinx of Damascus."

But recently, just before Syria's 10th Baath Party congress, Seale displayed unsettling agnosticism about the Assad regime, the most palpable sign yet of his growing doubts about decision-making in Damascus. The shifting attitudes of a journalist hardly count as news these days, but Seale is a unique case. Throughout the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, he was a sympathetic observer and frequent player in matters Syrian, pursuing a peculiar brand of journalism blending advocacy, political message transmission, and informed analysis. In his writings, he was always careful to protect his access to the Syrian leadership. This meant fudging over certain details that might have embarrassed the Assad regime (Seale's enemies were blunter, describing him as a Syrian "propagandist"), but always in exchange for exclusive information. Whether you agree with Seale or not, you can't ignore him on the topic of Syria.

Seale's gradual metamorphosis is a sign not only of his disillusionment with the Assads (some would say it came decades too late), but more importantly perhaps with the notion of a progressive Arab nationalism—as a buttress to regional autonomy from Western encroachment—that Seale has implicitly or explicitly peddled for decades in his writings. That doesn't mean he has given up on the idea, but what largely remains today, in his columns particularly, is not confidence in a golden Arab future, but Arab nationalism's more tedious sidekick: disapproval of the West in general and the United States in particular.

How important was Seale to the Syrians? At one time he was a main conduit to the West for authoritative information on and from the regime. It was to him, for example, that Syrian officials leaked valuable details of the country's negotiations with Israel after 1991—an effort designed to shape future talks between the two parties—which Seale published in a series of indispensable articles in the London-based Al-Hayat in November 1999. And it was he who, following the abortive negotiations between Hafez Assad and President Bill Clinton in Geneva in March 2000, proposed, again through Al-Hayat, a median solution between Assad's demand for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's insistence on retaining a strip of land around the Sea of Galilee.

The latter article was interesting in that Seale seemed to acknowledge that Assad had missed an opportunity to conclude a deal by failing to offer practical counterproposals of his own. For someone then regarded as a semi-official interpreter of the Syrian mindset (to the extent that Seale was invited to Israel to brief officials on the Syrian position), this was a minor precursor of subsequent reservations. But Assad was very sick at the time, and two months later he died. Seale would not have the same access to Bashar Assad that he had to his father.

Seale continued to defend Syrian behavior in a general way, noticeably writing little about Syria's hegemony and multiplying errors in Lebanon. However, in an article two weeks ago he showed that his faith in the Assad regime's ability to reform was nearing an end. The language was diplomatic, but not the meaning. The reason for the resentment was that Syrian security forces had just arrested nine members of an independent Syrian discussion group, the Jamal Atasi forum, the last remnant of the civil society movements that thrived during the brief "Damascus spring" of 2000-2001, when a number of similar endeavors were tolerated by the regime.

Seale wrote that the "harsh response by the authorities is regrettable and counterproductive," and went on to reveal, when he needn't have: "The Atasi group is not, however, the only victim of Syria's security services. There have been several arrests at Damascus airport and elsewhere, as well as reports of political kidnappings. Armed robberies have also taken place by criminal gangs, some of them linked, or so it would appear, to disorderly cousins of the president, or even to his brother Maher Assad, a commander of the Presidential Guard."

Accusing members of Syria's royal family of sundry crimes means stating the obvious, but it also means crossing a red line for those who don't want to break with the regime. Nor did it stop there. Consider this revealing (if somewhat Jesuitical) passage: "The U.S. appears bent on regime change in Damascus, on the grounds that Syria is providing a rear base to the Iraqi insurrection. France, in contrast, has no wish to overthrow Assad, but it does want him to commit himself to substantial political as well as economic reforms. It would welcome a tough statement from the president that if any Syrian were found to be implicated in the murder of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, he would be put on trial and punished."

There was Levantine subtlety here, but in so many words Seale was admitting to Syrian involvement in the murder, even as he carefully stitched it all together with a conditional while putting it into France's mouth. In reality, as Seale knows (but such a disclosure would really have been too much), the Hariri hit could only have taken place with Assad's approval, explicit or tacit. On matters such as major assassinations, decisions are taken to the top.

But that was already a lot from Seale in one article, and his condemnation was noteworthy for coming on the eve of a three-day Baath Party congress that was supposed to be a seminal moment for Syrian reform. It was also justified: The congress did very little more than allow Bashar Assad to replace his father's party dinosaurs with a few of his own. Indeed, while Assad before the congress was said to have wanted to weaken the stranglehold of the Baath, he instead chose to use the party to consolidate his power, ensuring that Syria would continue to shuffle through the dankness of a Brezhnevism warmed over.

An interesting footnote to the story, beyond Seale's judicious leap from the sinking Baathist ship, is that on the way down he probably crossed Flynt Leverett climbing aboard. Leverett, a former National Security Council official and John Kerry campaign staffer, has apparently decided to fill the void as Western barker for the Assad regime. He's just published a book titled Inheriting Syria: Bashar's Trial by Fire, but it was a piece in the New York Times last March that first showed where he was coming from.

Leverett warned the Bush administration against pushing the Syrians too hard. He argued that if the U.S. destabilized Assad in Lebanon, no one could predict what would follow a possible Baathist downfall in Syria. Instead, he observed: "The Bush administration can elicit more sustained improvements in Syrian behavior on Iraq and terrorism by using the threat of intensified criticism of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon—including Security Council action—as a badly needed stick in the repertoire of policy options toward Syria."

The point would have been mildly arguable had not the Lebanese by then made amply clear their resolve to end 29 years of subjugation to Syria. While they were demanding freedom, Leverett was whispering that it was better to allow the Syrians to remain in Lebanon so American "sticks" could be wielded against them there. It was realism at its most essential; it was also craven, and it was surely a splendid idea as far as the Assads were concerned, since there was nothing they would have liked more than to enter into a transaction with the U.S., where sticks could be coupled with carrots.

Seale knows that game well. And while he may be loath to describe his disenchantment with Syria's Baathists as a divorce, his silence about the dud congress was eloquent. The peoples of the Middle East began questioning the Arab nationalist enterprise long ago; only in the West does one still hear its creaking springs, mostly among denizens of the Middle East studies field. Syria, with Lebanon, was the birthplace of Arab nationalism. Credit those who concede, even reluctantly, that it may also be its graveyard.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut.

Note: Articles listed under "Middle East Studies in the News" provide information on current developments concerning Middle East studies on North American campuses. These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of Campus Watch and do not necessarily correspond to Campus Watch's critique.
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2075





And What they are blogging about Mr. Impartial in Lebanon...


Patrick Seale just got a fat paycheck!

Have any of you read Mr. Seale's recent and indispensable contribution to the discourse surrounding Lebanese Syrian relations??? Well... at the very least, his words quench the rumors that he has had a "falling out" with the Baâth regime ever since Bashar came to power.

The title of his article is the following: "Is Lebanon Heading for Catastrophe?" His answer is that as long as Syria does not dominate Lebanon, the country will head towards that end. His words are a clear warning to the Western regimes: back off… or else, you will lose Lebanon.


Here are some ridiculous exerpts:
there are alarming signs that a hard-line Christian faction, known as the Lebanese Forces, is rearming clandestinely, no doubt because it feels threatened by Muslim militias, notably that of the Shiite movement Hizballah and of armed Palestinian groups. The Lebanese army, made up of different sects, seems unable to impose its will on these rival movements.

If Syria is in fact responsible for the murders in Lebanon, we should perhaps consider that it is acting in self-defense...
At 12:04 AM, Anonymous said...
I can't blame Seale. We all have our price, and life in London is so expensive.
At 12:09 AM, Anonymous said...
"Fourthly, external interventions in Lebanon have reached a new height -- whether by the United States, France, Israel, the UN -- in some cases encouraged and invited in by Lebanese factions themselves. "

That moron accused every country of interfering with our politics, except one (guess who).

p://lebanesebloggers.blogspot.com/2005/12/patrick-seale-just-got-fat-paycheck.html

"Over here, everybody is the army," one soldier said. "Everybody is Hezbollah. There's no kids, women, nothing."

Another soldier put it plainly: "We're going to shoot anything we see."

We kind of already knew that, but its nice to hear them say it, so their apologists can stop tryiong to claim otherwise.

In a sick way, I respect this guy for being blunt with his hatred...


Cartoonist likens Olmert to Nazi
By MICHAEL FREUND

Invoking a scene from the film Schindler's List, one of Norway's largest newspapers recently published a political cartoon comparing Prime Minster Ehud Olmert to the infamous commander of a Nazi death camp who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them at random from his balcony.

The caricature by political cartoonist Finn Graff appeared on July 10 in the Oslo daily Dagbladet. It has prompted outrage among the country's small Jewish community and led the Simon Weisenthal Center to submit a protest to the Norwegian government.

In the cartoon, Olmert is likened to SS Major Amon Goeth, the infamous commandant of the Plaszow death camp outside of Krakow, Poland, who was convicted of mass murder in 1946 and hanged for his crimes.

While in charge of Plaszow, Goeth would go out to the balcony on his villa, and engage in target practice by aiming his telescopic rifle and firing at random at Jews imprisoned there, often killing them.

The scene was famously depicted by director Steven Spielberg in his 1993 film, Schindler's List..

In response, the Norwegian Israel Center against Anti-Semitism, an Oslo-based organization comprising Jews and Christians, has appealed to the government to speak out against hatred of Jews.

He addresses the US's use of Nukes in WWII. and Israel's current war against Hezzbollah in one piece...


Then and now

By Thomas Sowell

What if the people, institutions, and attitudes of today were somehow taken back in time to World War II? What would have been the result? Would we have ended up winning or losing that war?

Those of us old enough to remember World War II face many painful reminders of how things have changed in Americans' behavior during a war. Back then, the president's defeated opponent in the 1940 election — Wendell Wilkie — not only supported the war, he became a personal envoy from President Roosevelt to Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
We were all in it together — and we knew it. People who had been highly critical of American foreign policy before we were attacked at Pearl Harbor now fell silent and devoted themselves to winning the war.

What if the people, institutions, and attitudes of today were somehow taken back in time to World War II? What would have been the result? Would we have ended up winning or losing that war?
What about the great cry of the hour, a cease fire?

It so happens that World War II had the biggest cease fire in history. It was called "the phony war" because, although France was officially at war with Germany, the French did very little fighting for months, while the bulk of the German army was in Poland and France had overwhelming military superiority on the western front.
Famed correspondent William L. Shirer reported on the "unreal" western front, with soldiers "on both sides looking but not shooting." German soldiers bathed in the Rhine and waved to French soldiers on the other side, who waved back.
During this period Hitler offered to negotiate peace with France and England.
Kofi Anan would have loved it.

On November 19, 1939, Shirer's diary reported: "For almost two months now there has been no military action on land, sea, or in the air." On January 1, 1940, he wrote, "this phony kind of war cannot continue long." But it was now exactly four months since war was declared. How is that for a cease fire?
Did this de facto cease fire lead to peace? No. Like other cease fires, it helped the aggressor.
It gave Hitler time to move his divisions from the eastern front, after they had conquered Poland, to the western front, facing France.
Now that military superiority along the Rhine had shifted in favor of the German armies, the war suddenly went from being phony to being devastatingly real.
Hitler attacked and France collapsed in six weeks.

Eventually, by 1945, allied armies had both Germany and Japan retreating. What would have happened if we had had Kofi Anan and the mushy mindset called "world opinion" at work then?
Kofi Anan would undoubtedly have called for a cease fire.

He could have pointed out that the American response to Germany was wholly "disproportionate" because the Germans had never landed troops in America or bombed American cities, and were certainly no real threat to the United States at that point.
Much of the Japanese navy was at the bottom of the ocean by this time and most of their planes had been shot down. Why not a negotiated settlement, in order to spare innocent civilian lives?

And what if we had listened to such talk?
No doubt Germany and Japan would have signed some kind of negotiated agreement in order to get the allied armies off their backs and get some breathing room.

Both Germany and Japan had programs to try to build nuclear bombs. One of the Nazis' last acts before surrendering was to send material by submarine to Japan to help advance their nuclear program. Any peace we might have negotiated with Japan would have given the Japanese time to develop not only nuclear technology but also war planes whose plans had been gotten from Germany, which had the most advanced planes in the world at that time.
There is not the slightest doubt that Japan would not have had the slightest hesitation to drop nuclear bombs on American cities. And they would not have come back in later years to wring their hands at what they had done, as too many American have done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But we didn't cease firing until our enemies were defeated. Kofi Anan and today's "world opinion" would not have liked that.


Thomas Sowell is a prominent American economist and political writer. He is presently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

[Edited by - colorfl1 on 07-26-2006 10:02 PM]

You needn't be a hawk to understand Israel's legitamate right to fight Hezzbollah...

"...The Left's anti-Israel positions until now were based, at least in theory, on its opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land and its belief in the "cycle of violence" between Israel and its enemies. However, this time there is no occupied land involved and the violence is not a cycle with its implied lack of a beginning. There is a clear aggressor — a terror organization devoted to Islamicizing the Middle East and annihilating Israel — and no occupation.


That is why the Israeli Left is almost universally in favor of Israel's war against Hezbollah. Amos Oz, probably Israel's best-known novelist and leading spokesman of its Left, a lifetime critic of Israeli policy vis a vis the Palestinians, wrote in the Los Angeles Times:


"Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. . . . This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages. . . . There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah."

Likewise, another longtime liberal critic of Israel, historian and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, wrote last week:

"As one who rejects war, I regret Israel's heavy bombing of Lebanon last week, as I deplored Israeli attacks in population centers and on infrastructure in Gaza. . . . Yet, given the rejectionism of both Hamas and Hezbollah . . . is the path of negotiations actually open to Israel? . . . There is no moral equivalence between enemies here. . . . It seems urgent [to] reaffirm foundational support for Israel. . . . The fury of anti-Israel rage among Arabs and Muslims is accounted for only partially by the present conflict. It resuscitates . . . the long European habit of scapegoating Jews. . . . No one should think that embedded contempt for Jews — anti-Semitism — is not part of the current crisis."

They don't care about future generations. Nor did the past ones who keep propergating this mess.

The men see women and children as properties. Free to do what they want with them.

I'm sure if they see a woman and 15 schoolchildren they're not going to shoot them up. The point was made that everyone left is a Hezbollah fighter. You're one really dense guy.

Posted by Killa4luv:

Posted by martin:

Posted by colorfl1:

Posted by Killa4luv:

"Over here, everybody is the army," one soldier said. "Everybody is Hezbollah. There's no kids, women, nothing."

Another soldier put it plainly: "We're going to shoot anything we see."

We kind of already knew that, but its nice to hear them say it, so their apologists can stop tryiong to claim otherwise.

I assume you missed the previous line...

"They have been told civilians have left the region where they will fight."

it's always not so good to take a one-liner out to show a point. I think anyone could pull a quote that someone says to prove almost any side of an arguement when there is no context.

Well I guess if they have been told that its ok to open fire on anything they see. Hope you, and they, can sleep tight knowing they have been told that.

Once again Killa, its called war. There will alwasy be collateral in war. If Israel was killing civillians on purpose, the number of the dead would be in the hundredth of thousands. The fact that only 400+ are reported dead alltogather after like 2 weeks of fearce fighting and bombing all over the place alone proves your point. But hey, its ok to hold Israel to a higher standard than every other nation in the history of mankind. Considering you don't even give Jews the right to have their own country, or recognize them as a single ethnic/cultural entity ("jews are not a race, etc", I guess I can see how your logic works.