As my boss Blake Hounshell noted this morning, Syrian activists are having a field day trawling through the hacked e-mails of officials in President Bashar al-Assad's regime. One particularly interesting note was sent by former British parliamentarian George Galloway to Assad advisor Bouthaina Shaaban.

Galloway was writing to request the Syrian government's help in organizing a convoy to the Gaza Strip. The plan was for vehicles to travel over land from London and the Gulf to the Syrian city Latakia, at which point they would board the Mavi Marmara - which had been the scene of a deadly raid by Israel Defense Forces solders only months earlier, as it tried to breach the Gaza blockade -- and travel to the Egyptian port city of al-Arish. From there, they would enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing. While the convoy did complete its mission, the Mavi Marmara does not appear to have ultimately taken part.

In securing Assad's help, Galloway recited the Baath Party's own rhetoric back to Shaaban. "Syria is as I have often said is the last castle of Arab dignity," he writes.

Von: b.shaaban@mopa.gov.sy

Reply-to: b.shaaban@mopa.gov.sy

An: buthainak1@hotmail.co.uk

Betreff: Fwd: IMPORTANT - private and confidential

Datum: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 06:03:38 +0300 (14.08.2010 05:03:38)

Your Excellency Dr Bouthaina Sha'aban

Special Advisor to President Bashar al Asad

President of the Syrian Arab Republic

Your Excellency, dear Dr Sha'aban

 

I hope this letter finds you well. Please be assured of my warmest fraternal greetings always. I am writing on behalf of Viva Palestina whose world-wide family of solidarity organisiations and registered charities will soon be setting out for beseiged Gaza again with our fifth convoy of aid. You will recall the outstanding assistance afforded us in Syria on previous occasions over the last period. I am writing once again to ask for Syria's co-operation although I do not doubt it for one moment. Syria is as I have often said is the last castle of Arab dignity. My only regret is to have to ask for your help again.

This convoy sets out simulataneously on September 18th 2010 from London, from Casablanca and from the Gulf. The London and Gulf columns of vehicles would like to converge on Latakia and sail from there to Al Arish. The Casablanca column hopes to join us in Al Arish and we hope all three columns - hundreds of vehicles strong - will enter Gaza through Rafah without hinderance.

The aid on board the vehicles will be 50% medical equipment and 50% educational, construction and other aid. The organisers of the convoy are Viva Palestina UK, Viva Palestina USA, Viva Palestina Arabia, Viva Palestina Malaysia, Viva Palestina Ireland, the Turkish NGO IHH,the International Committee to break the Seige on Gaza, Kia Ora - the Viva Palestina sister organisation in New Zealand, Viva Palestina Australia, Viva Palestina South Africa, Viva Palestina Spain, Viva Palestina Italia, and Viva Palestina France.

It is intended that the vehicles and passengers should sail to Al Arish on board the Mavi Marmara, which as you know is owned by IHH. If His Excellency the President Bashar al Asad and his government can accept this proposal in principle perhaps you could nominate partner organisation(s) and individuals with whom my colleagues could liaise about the practical details? The liaison from our side would be Mr Kevin Ovenden and Mr Zaher Birawi of Viva Palestina UK (as we believe 2 is enough).

In any case please convey my respect and my admiration to His Excellency the President.

 

With all good wishes

George Galloway

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati answered questions on Twitter on Sunday afternoon, one day after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria - a step that seems virtually guaranteed to plunge Lebanon's eastern neighbor into further violence. So what did the premier want to talk about? Spoiled spuds.

"I realize that some of you are being kept busy with a story on expired potato chips which clearly changes the usual focus of the discussion," Mikati wrote. "Let me reassure you that instructions have been given to investigate expired potato chips story, perform related Lab tests&take measures."

Mikati was referring to a dastardly plot to alter the expiration date of 35 tons of potato chips at a warehouse owned by his brother-in-law. Whatever the facts of the case, it is something less than the great struggles against dictatorship seizing the rest of the Middle East. It also says volumes about the issue Mikati doesn't want to talk about: The slow-motion collapse of President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Mikati's line is that Lebanon will "disassociate" itself from events in Syria, remaining neutral in order to avoid the blowback from the incipient civil war. But all the major political actors in Beirut are doing precisely the opposite -- even those within Mikati's own government. Lebanese Ambassador to the U.N. Nawaf Salam, for example, was talking with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice on the floor of the Security Council just before the key vote on Syria. Salam reports to Lebanon's Foreign Ministry, which is run by a representative of the Amal party, a close ally of Hezbollah. It's difficult to see how inserting himself into the proceedings serves the purpose of "disassociating" Lebanon from events to the east.

The examples are piling up. As Hezbollah stages raids on towns in search of Syrian dissidents, arms smugglers carry weapons across the border to Syrian militiamen. Hassan Nasrallah promises to stand by Assad to the end, and Sunni leader Saad Hariri says that "change is imminent" in Damascus.

Violence is also piling up. Eight Lebanese have reportedly been killed in Syrian incursions across the border since the uprising began, and the Lebanese Army is now using helicopters in the north to search for "terrorist groups" at the request of the Syrian regime. And twice in the past three months, Lebanese parliamentarians have gotten into fistfights on live television.

There is little point in criticizing Lebanon's prime minister, who is picking from a series of bad options, of being disingenuous. But from the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser to the civil war, Lebanon has a sad history of being destabilized by regional forces beyond its control. If Syria is poised to become 1980s Lebanon on steroids, as my colleague Marc Lynch writes, Beirut will get pulled down into the tragedy sooner or later.

As the U.N. Security Council meets today to discuss how to halt Syria's descent into civil war, the available statistics show a country more violent than ever -- and increasingly defined by armed conflict.

In mid-November, I charted the rising bloodshed in Syria and found that the country was on pace for its deadliest month yet. Since then, the United Nations has admitted that it can no longer keep track of the country's death. However, the Violations Documenting Center in Syria (VDC), which is affiliated with local activist groups, has continued to keep track of the body count -- and the picture isn't pretty.

The past three months have easily been Syria's bloodiest, resulting in 3,029 deaths. By way of comparison, roughly 3,100 people were killed during the first six months of the revolt -- meaning that violence in the country has doubled since then. And it's only getting worse: 829 Syrians were killed in November, 1,049 were killed in December, and 1,151 were killed in January.

The statistics also bear out the view that the revolt increasingly resembles a guerilla war. According to the VDC's statistics, 312 soldiers were killed in January -- 27 percent of the total death toll, the highest proportion during the entire conflict. By contrast, in December, military members only accounted for 18 percent of the deaths. It is unclear whether the VDC counts the deaths of defected Syrian soldiers as civilian or military, so the actual percentage of combatants killed in Syria could be even higher.

This February also marks the 30th anniversary of the Hama Massacre, when President Hafez al-Assad initiated a brutal crackdown in the western Syrian city in order to put down a rebellion. Since then, Syrians, historians and policymakers have wondered how a regime could be allowed to virtually destroy a city while the international community sat and watched.

The low-end casualty estimates for Hama stand at around 7,000 people. According to the VDC, a total of 7,054 Syrians have been killed in the past year. Three decades later, it seems, we have our answer.

My, isn't this awkward. Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski stumbled across a copy of John McCain's 200-page opposition research file on Mitt Romney from the 2008 presidential campaign, which will now undoubtedly be pored over by President Barack Obama's campaign staff for useful nuggets to trip up Romney in the 2012 campaign.

The 20-page section of the oppo file lays the foundation for attacking Romney as a John Kerry-esque flip-flopper -- and one with fewer foreign policy chops. It accuses Romney of choosing his stands either because they proved politically expedient, or because he was woefully uninformed on the issues and simply stumbled into new positions.

As befits a document written in 2008, much of the research focuses on Romney's positions toward the Iraq war -- material unlikely to be of much use to the Obama campaign, given the conclusion of the war. But there is some grist in there for those who would paint Romney as a world-class waffler: In June 2007, for example, he answered a question about whether the Iraq war was a mistake by attacking the question as "a non-sequitur...or a null set" and an "unreasonable hypothetical."

But while Iraq has faded from the U.S. political agenda, concerns about what to do about Iran have only increased. In 2007, Romney said that a U.S. military attack on Iran is "not going to happen" -- perhaps that's a line we'll soon be seeing in a Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich commercial. There's also the issue of Romney's supposed business entanglements in the Islamic Republic: In 2002, Bain Capital, the company he co-founded, purchased a chemicals business SigmaKalon, which had an office in Tehran. But that seems to be a thin reed, as Romney had long ago left Bain at the time of the purchase, and was on the verge of being elected governor of Massachusetts.

Romney's gaffes make for some of the document's most entertaining reading. He seems to have a particularly difficult time connecting with Cuban-Americans: During one event in Miami, he repeated a phrase, "Fatherland or death, we shall overcome," which was the traditional sign-off of Fidel Castro's speeches. He also referred to rising GOP star Marco Rubio as "Mario" and echoed a line from the movie Scarface in a speech to Cuban-Americans during the same trip.

That's embarrassing, but not likely to do serious damage to the Romney machine. If Obama or Romney's GOP rivals are looking for a silver bullet, it's not going to be in his foreign-policy pronouncements.

Reuters has a small, strange story today about Israeli preparations to offer refuge to members of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's sect in the event that his regime falls. "We are preparing to take in Alawite refugees on the Golan Heights," said Israel Defense Forces chief Benny Gantz to a Knesset committee on Tuesday.

There's only one problem with that offer: There aren't many Alawites on the Golan Heights. The region is overwhelmingly Sunni and Druze -- communities that would likely come out on top in a post-Assad Syria. Ghajar, a disputed village of a couple thousand along the Syrian-Lebanese border, appears to be the last Alawite community in the region.

So to flee to Israel in any significant numbers, Alawites living in Damascus or Syria's northwestern mountains would have two options: They could brave the journey across the presumably hostile Golan Heights, or they could travel into Lebanon and cross along its southeastern border, presumably at Ghajar. Why these Alawites would prefer Israel over south Lebanon -- home of the Assad's longtime ally, Hezbollah -- is a mystery.

Given the improbability of this scenario, the most likely explanation is that Gantz was trying to tweak Assad -- saying, in effect, that Israel would offer relief to his people once he no longer could. But the premise of his remarks -- that Alawites would be forced to flee for their lives after Assad fell -- isn't a sentiment that Syria's opposition will welcome. Gantz's statements may have been anti-Assad, but they weren't pro-revolution.

The above video, where Rick Santorum provides his narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, really needs to be seen to be believed. It's from November, but has only been dredged up from the dark recesses of the Internet now because Santorum appears poised to finish strong in tonight's Iowa caucuses.

Santorum is debating with a young voter, laying out his case why Israel should not dismantle its settlements in the West Bank.  "All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis, they're not Palestinians," he says. "There is no ‘Palestinian.'"

This echoes Newt Gingrich's contention in December that Palestinians are an "invented" people -- but, for my money, Santorum's comments are worse. Historical revisionism in the service of political gain has been a staple of international affairs since time immemorial. But what Santorum is suggesting is actually profoundly damaging to U.S. and Israeli interests: If the 3 million people of the West Bank are Israeli citizens, they have the right to vote, and will fundamentally reorder the Israeli government. That's a prospect the Israelis themselves have been trying to avoid, and the reason why they have never annexed the West Bank. Too bad nobody ever told Rick Santorum.

Ali Tarhouni, Libya's former minister of finance and acting prime minister, has had a busy year. He began 2011 as a professor of economics at the University of Washington, only to rush back to his home country, from which he had been exiled for decades, as the revolution gained steam. He was charged with establishing some semblance of order over the Benghazi-based government's finances during the war, and then took the first steps to incorporate the rebel militias into a national army in the capital of Tripoli.

Now out of government, he was in Washington last week to deliver a personal letter of thanks from Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC), to top U.S. policymakers for standing with Libya's rebels in their war to oust Muammar al-Qaddafi.

"That stand -- that moral courageous stand -- changed dramatically the kind of relationship that the United States can have with this part of the world, with Libya," he told Foreign Policy. "The door is wide open ... to build a more strategic relationship between the two countries."

One aspect of that relationship will certainly be cooperation on developing Libya's extensive energy reserves. Tarhouni noted that Libya's oil production had recently reached 1 million barrels a day - a figure that had even shocked both Libyan officials, he said, who initially hadn't expected to reach 500,000 barrels a day by the end of the year.

"There are no foreign companies there, no kind of consulting ... all this is done by Libyan hands and minds and brains and bravery," he said. "The difference is that now people feel that they own these institutions, and that feeling of ownership is what made this revolution successful."

None of this is to say that it's all smooth sailing for Libya from here. As the country witnessed so painfully under Qaddafi, the massive influx of oil revenue can be used to concentrate power in the hands of a few just as easily as rebuild the country. Tarhouni, however, said that the NTC had learned its lesson from the Qaddafi era -- he pointed to the website for Libya's National Oil Company, which lists all the oil contracts signed and shipments sold, as a step forward for transparency.

"Will it be a perfect story? No," he said. "[But] it will not be the same sad story as before."

The interim government's struggle to establish control over the many militias operating in the country has also caused it to clash with its erstwhile ally, Qatar. Abdel Jalil slammed the oil-rich emirate last month for undertaking actions in Libya "that we as the NTC don't know about" -- a criticism that Tarhouni expanded on.

"I think what they have done is basically support the Muslim Brotherhood, and I think that's an infringement on the sovereignty of the country," he said. "They have brought armaments, and they have given them to people that we don't know -- I think paid money to just about everybody. They intervened in committees that have control over security issues."

Qatar admitted that hundreds of its soldiers were on the ground during the Libya war to help the rebels topple Qaddafi, but has denied charges that it is interfering in Libyan politics.

So, what's next for Tarhouni? He said he will found a new political party, which he describes as a movement that can bring ordinary Libyans into the political process. Without such an option, he fears, the political space could be seized by Islamist movements.

"There's a political vacuum in the country," he said. "The only organized group is the Muslim Brotherhood. They're small, but they're well-organized and financed."

Sounds like it's going to be another busy year.

It's notoriously difficult to get a sense of what's going on in North Korea -- after all, the world didn't even learn of Kim Jong Il's death until two days after it occurred. But Foreign Policy has published some amazing articles on the Hermit Kingdom. Here's a small selection:

Pyongyang Spring: As the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East, could Kim Jong Il be the next dictator to fall? Don't bet on it, wrote Sebastian Strangio -- the North Korean regime employs methods of repression that could even make Arab autocrats blush.

The Land of No Smiles: Tomas von Houtrye shot his magnificent photo essay, which was nominated for a National Magazine award, after entering North Korea posing as a businessman. His images capture the hardship of everyday life in the Hermit Kingdom.

The Secret History of Kim Jong Il: A North Korean professor who first met Kim in 1959, as a shy student struggling to learn Russian, tracks his evolution into an eccentric dictator. In the process, he describes his own gradual disillusionment with a regime that he once served.

The Rise of Kim Jong Un: Ken Gause's article was one of the first to describe the succession scenario that would likely play out following Kim Jong-Il's death. "[F]or those of us who read the tea leaves in Pyongyang for a living, the growing focus on the third son as the successor appears to be reaching a critical mass," he wrote presciently.

North Korea's Race Problem: Literary critic B.R. Myers spent eight years reading the propaganda that Kim Jong Il used to justify his rule. What he found was not communist agitprop, but pure ethnic chauvinism. "Up close, North Korea is not Stalinist," he wrote. "It's simply racist."

Can North Korea Change?: This article, by Peter Beck, addresses whether North Korea's leaders could ever be attracted by the "China model" -- that is, economic reform coupled with continued authoritarian rule. Beck argues that Pyongyang may have no choice but to embark on a tentative liberalization, or risk an economic collapse that would threaten the elites' hold on power.