Through what the Ministry of Defence has called his "charm and dash", Prince Bandar rose to prominence despite unpromising beginnings: his mother was a servant to his father, the then Saudi defence minister, Prince Sultan.
He trained as a fighter pilot both at RAF Cranwell in the UK and in the US. Equally at home in the west and in Riyadh, British politicians found him easy to talk to, making him an ideal intermediary.
There were three previous BAE sales dating back to 1967, in which, according to British archives, commissions of up to 15% had been passed to key Saudi royals with British government connivance.
The deal with Prince Bandar was, it is alleged, to prove no different. Having been approached by Mrs Thatcher in December 1984 to ask for help in getting BAE a fresh weapons contract, Prince Bandar got to work. The newly appointed Saudi ambassador to Washington cleared the deal with the Reagan administration, which was unable to sell to Saudi Arabia for fear of pro-Israeli congressional opposition. He then flew to London to meet Charles Powell, Mrs Thatcher's top adviser; Colin Chandler, who headed the Ministry of Defence's arms sales unit, the Defence Export Services Organisation (Deso); and Dick Evans, who became chairman of BAE.

Our mercenaries in Iraq / The president relies on thousands of private soldiers with little oversight, a disturbing example of the military-industrial complex.

By Jeremy Scahill, JEREMY SCAHILL is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of the forthcoming "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
January 25, 2007 / Los Angeles Times

AS PRESIDENT BUSH took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA.

One had to look very closely to recognize the first signs of a brewing crisis. In Berlin, the Rote Grütze theater group was performing an enlightening piece called "Who Said Anything About Love?" To advertise the play, posters depicting a young man and a young woman, naked and full of innocence, were handed out in schools.

The schools had no qualms about displaying the posters, until a school official from Berlin's Tiergarten district requested a permit from the city's education authority. The agency turned down the request, arguing that the poster could hurt "the feelings of non-Christian pupils." The education authority was acting preventively and with what amounted to exaggerated concern for a cultural minority that had yet to be integrated into permissive German society. No Muslim pupils had complained about hurt feelings, nor had their parents expressed concerns about immoral harassment.

The Arab regional environment has changed greatly over the past few years. The Levant and the Gulf, in particular, face two major challenges requiring open minds and constructive coordination between governments, opposition forces and intellectual elites in the region.

The first is to study ways of overcoming the resistance versus moderate polarities that are currently dominating the political scene. The tragic repercussions of events in Iraq, the constant tensions in Lebanon since the assassination of Rafik Al-Hariri, Hamas's victory in Palestinian legislative elections, not to mention the growing regional influence of Iran along with the resurgence of radical rhetoric with the rise of Ahmadinejad as president, have combined to pit two distinct camps of opinion against each other. One champions resistance to what it describes as the American-Israeli project for hegemony over the Middle East, the other prefers, instead, to seek negotiated solutions to crises that it fears will jettison the last remaining chances for Arabs to realise stability and social and economic development.

Since the early 1990s, Somalia lacked any semblance of a strong, populist government. After the government collapsed in 1991, Shari'ah-oriented Islamic courts emerged, managing the judiciary system, acting as local police by preventing robberies and drug-dealing, and offering other services such as education and health care. These regionally dispersed Islamic courts enjoyed wide public support and, in 1999, began to assert their authority. Seven years later, in the summer of 2006, the regional system of Islamic courts banded together to form a rival government—the Islamic Courts Union (ICU)—to compete with the U.S.- and UN-aligned Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

A PALESTINIAN VIEW: There are clear indications that a political process is likely to start between Palestinians and Israelis in 2007. To what degree it will be a credible process that avoids all the pitfalls of the Oslo "peace process" is an open question, however. What is unquestionable since the end of last June, when the Israeli army invaded Gaza, is that the planned second "unilateral" withdrawal from the West Bank is shelved and "unilateralism" has failed.

The purpose behind such withdrawals was in part to generate "movement" to fill the political vacuum resulting from freezing the "roadmap", to which the Israeli cabinet under former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appended fourteen conditions for it to be acceptable. Sharon succeeded in convincing the Bush administration to support unilateral withdrawals in lieu of a political process, and thus fill the political vacuum resulting from the failure to quell the second intifada by military means.

AN ISRAELI VIEW: In looking at the likely status of the Arab-Israel conflict or diplomatic process during 2007, a key factor is the dramatic change taking place in Arab politics. On a strategic level, there is the rise of a new alliance, which might be called the HISH powers (Hizballah, Iran, Syria and Hamas). And on the ideological front, this bloc is accompanied by a new worldview, which can be called National Islamism.

Until recently, the key battle within Arab politics was that between Arab nationalism and Islamism, with the former in power and the latter furnishing the main opposition movements. Liberal democratic trends were a distant third. Yet National Islamism is presenting itself as a synthesis between the two main warring sides, in theory able to mobilize the Arab masses.

What that means is that Palestinians have a moral responsibility to first acknowledge the injustices committed by their own before pointing to injustices committed by Israelis.

Then and only then can the cry for justice resonate with a powerful moral depth. If Palestinians can stand up for the principle of justice and speak out against the killing of Israelis, then their cries for justice when Israelis kill Palestinians will carry the moral weight of righteousness.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - December , 2006,/ THE TERRORIST MINDSET / The Radical Loser / By Hans Magnus Enzensberger **

It is difficult to talk about the loser, and it is stupid not to. Stupid because there can be no definitive winner and because each of us, from the megalomaniac Bonaparte to the last beggar on the streets of Calcutta, will meet the same fate. Difficult because to content oneself with this metaphysical banality is to take the easy way out, ignoring the truly explosive dimension of the problem - the political dimension.

Instead of actually looking into the thousand faces of the loser, sociologists stick to their statistics: median value, standard deviation, logarithmic distribution. Rarely do they entertain the possibility that they too might be among the losers. Their definitions are like scratching a sore place; and as Samuel Butler says, this scratching generally leaves the sore place more sore than it was before. One thing is certain: the way humanity has organized itself - "capitalism," "competition," "empire," "globalization" - not only does the number of losers increase every day, but as in any large group, fragmentation soon sets in. In a chaotic, unfathomable process, the cohorts of the inferior, the defeated, the victims separate out. The loser may accept his fate and resign himself; the victim may demand satisfaction; the defeated may begin preparing for the next round. But the radical loser isolates himself, becomes invisible, guards his delusion, saves his energy, and waits for his hour to come.

A war that cannot be ended is sometimes worse than a war that is lost. Therefore, the Iraq report is more than a plan to rescue Iraq; it is a road map for extricating America from the mayhem of an unwinnable war. However much the study group shunned recommendations for a precipitous withdrawal, and avoided strict timetables for disengagement, their report is not only an unequivocal repudiation of Bush’s “stay the course” obsession, but also a counsel to cut and run.

Syria and Iran do not interact with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the same way. While there could be both advantages and disadvantages for Israel in prospective American-Iranian talks, there is a slim but nevertheless intriguing possibility that talks with Syria, by both the US and Israel, could produce a variety of positive benefits for Israel. This is far less likely with Iran.

Because at the regional strategic level Israel appears to be headed on a collision course with both Syria and Iran, it behooves Jerusalem to exploit any opening for talks that might help avoid an open and devastating conflict. Equally important, talking to Syria could conceivably have far-reaching consequences for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Broadly speaking, Iran's and Syria's self-appointed roles in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are to support the most extreme Palestinian movements that refuse to recognize Israel and reject a two-state solution. Iran, indeed, itself rejects a two-state solution, and calls for the elimination of Israel. But Syria does not, creating the impression that its support for Hamas has less to do with Islamist ideology than with Damascus' alliance with Tehran and its desire to hold a few trump cards for eventual negotiations with Israel.

The Baker-Hamilton report reached a series of obvious conclusions. Everything is linked. The United States cannot remain in the Iraqi swamp much longer; nor can it abandon Iraq and leave it in its current chaotic state. In order to leave Iraq gradually there is a need for a pragmatic Arab coalition that assists the shaky Iraqi government. The cooperation of the pragmatic Arab states can be ensured if they can justify themselves in the eyes of their publics, and for this to happen the US must make a major effort to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

Baker and Hamilton are the answer to six years of an American foreign policy march of folly, particularly in the Middle East. For President George W. Bush to accept their recommendations he must admit serious mistakes. Hence he almost certainly will not accept them unless American public opinion forces him to. Baker and Hamilton understand the extent of the damage caused by the American policy of boycott toward Syria, Hamas and other actors in our region and beyond. They are right to propose holding talks with those actors and trying to develop genuine dialogue with them. Personally, I doubt whether talks with Iran would bear fruit, but in contrast I believe that talks with Syria could contribute to a change in the regional map.

One of the most prominent features of Palestinian politics after the election victory of Hamas is the return of the influence of regional forces on the internal Palestinian scene.

Such influence was one of the major problems in Palestinian politics until the departure of the PLO from Beirut and later its return to the Palestinian territories. Since then, regional influence waned in favor of growing influence of the Palestinian public on the politics of the different factions.

The election of Hamas with its regional and Islamic agenda opened the door to the influence of countries like Syria and Iran. In turn, this development is likely to bring other factions, especially Fateh, closer to rival countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and their ally, the US. In other words, competing Arab, regional and international forces have made their reentry into Palestinian politics.

Interviews with Jimmy Carter in Newsweek and Democracy Radio in the USA

 Q&A: Jimmy Carter’s ‘Apartheid’ Book  / Newsweek
Dec. 18, 2006 issue - President Carter has a new book out, his 23rd since leaving office and his most controversial. “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” has drawn fire for its use of the word “apartheid,” and a former associate, Kenneth Stein, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University, is raising questions about the book’s accuracy. (Disclosure: NEWSWEEK’s Christopher Dickey was one of the people asked to comment on an early draft of the book.) President Carter spoke to Eleanor Clift:

You’ve created quite a stir. I suspect it was partly intentional.
Well, it was. But one of the purposes of the book was to provoke discussion, which is very rarely heard in this country, and to open up some possibility that we could rejuvenate or restart the peace talks in Israel that have been absent for six years.

Full text in the following page: / Dec. 6, 2006 — - The United States “must not make open-ended commitments to keep large numbers of troops deployed in Iraq.”
“The Way Forward: A New Approach” is the title of the group’s 142-page report.

Among the report’s 79 recommendations is a change in the central mission of U.S. troops in Iraq and a renewed diplomatic effort in the Middle East.
“The primary mission of U.S. forces should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army,” the report reads. “It’s clear [the] Iraqi government will need U.S. assistance for some time to come, especially in carrying out new security responsibilities. Yet the United States must not make open-ended commitments to keep large numbers of troops deployed in Iraq.”
“The most important questions about Iraq’s future are now the responsibility of Iraqis,” the report says. “The United States must adjust its role to encourage the Iraqi people to take control.” U.S. Troops Not Involved With Iraq Security Could Leave by 2008
The report recommends an initial increase in the number of U.S. troops dedicated to training and supporting the Iraqi security forces, but calls for the gradual withdrawal of all other U.S. forces. All U.S. troops not involved in this training and support mission, the report says, could leave Iraq by “the first quarter of 2008.”
The bipartisan commission is co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton.