Organizers of the Jewish National Fund conference in London had invited former Israeli Prime Minister Tzipi Livni to address their assembly at Hendon Hall Hotel on Dec. 13. Protest groups warmed up for the occasion--to no avail: Livni canceled her trip after a British court issued a warrant for her arrest.

The reason: A pro-Palestinian group filed suit against her in connection with her role in the Gaza war of 2009 (a war she crassly termed a "product of circumstance"). The warrant was annulled once the court figured out that Livni wasn't yet in the country, but it served its purpose as far as the protesters were concerned.

Livni used that old standard to explain her cancellation, an alleged scheduling conflict. But she was also listening to the advice of legal experts at Israel's foreign and justice ministries, who "have also advised Israeli officials to avoid Spain, Belgium and Norway, out of fear of similar 'universal jurisdiction' arrest warrants for war crimes," according to Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.

Among those officials: Ehud Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and current defense minister (a post he held during the Gaza assault), and Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister. Potential warrants against Livni and Barak gained credibility following the release of the United Nations Human Rights Council's Goldstone Report, which found Hamas and Israel to have committed what may be judged war crimes in an international court, though the report made clear that Israel's atrocities against civilians far surpassed those of Hamas.

See Also:

• Profile: Tzipi Livni
• Profile: Ehud Barak
• Final Tally of 2009 Gaza War Casualties
• Waltz With Hamas: Israeli Atrocities in Gaza
• What Is the Goldstone Report?

Exile Becomes Him: Rahim AlHaj, sultan of the oud. (© Douglas Kent Hall)

To keep up with music in (or from) the Middle East, I must sometime turn to my Alabaman colleague and friend, Rick de Yampert, who wields pen and sitar with equal dexterity.

The Grammy Awards are the quintessential American music celebration--one part art, 12 parts pop, 36 parts marketing. It hasn't been without its Arab influences of late: Shakira, whose blood courses with the torrid rhythms of Lebanese ancestry, won herself a few Grammys, and I vaguely recall Cheb Mami (the Algerian rai singer lesser known as Ahmed Khelifati Mohamed) doing "Desert Rose" with Sting at the 1999 Grammy Awards.

But I'd have missed it entirely had Rick not told me of one of this year's nominees in the Best Traditional World Music Album: Rahim Alhaj And Amjad Ali Khan. Alhaj is an Iraqi exile (and recent naturalized American) who plays the oud, the sultan of Arab instruments. Amjad is an Indian musician who plays the sarod, a sitar-like instrument distantly related to the oud. (I linked to a couple of wonderful oud pieces in a previous blog post.)

Rahim Alhaj's story is quite remarkable. Hearing it from Rick, I asked him to write a profile for Middle East Issues. He quickly obliged. An excerpt:

When Iraqi exile Rahim AlHaj fled to the United States in 2000, a charity organization in Albuquerque, New Mexico, found him a job. AlHaj spoke no English, but the academically trained oud player, who had studied both Western and Arabic music at the Institute of Music in his native Baghdad, quickly recognized that the venue was not suitable for his art.

No matter -- the job , at a McDonald's, was washing dishes.

Now, nine years later, AlHaj has been nominated for his second Grammy Award, one of the most prestigious music awards given in the United States. His latest album, a duo work with Indian Sarod master Amjad Ali Khan titled "Ancient Sounds," has been nominated in the Best Traditional World Music Album category.

In his homeland, AlHaj was known for his song "Why?," which became an anthem for the underground revolutionary movement that opposed Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime.

Read Rick de Yampert's full profile of Rahim AlHaj.

See Also:

• A Few Words About the Oud
• Rahim AlHaj's Web Site
• When Michael Jackson Was the World To Bahrain
• Best Protest Songs Against the Iraq War

It was like that in the Beirut of the 1980s, too: weeks, months of calm would pass, giving the impression that the civil war was over, then a colossal bombing would kill dozens and shatter the illusion of anything resembling peace or national cohesion. That's Iraq today, where the illusion of peace is always a trigger away exploding.

Five bombs today in Baghdad, at least three of them set off by suicide bombers. More than 120 killed so far. The bombers went after the central institutions of civilized and communal life: a college, a courthouse, a market, a mosque, a residential neighborhood not far from the Interior Ministry. That last is a clue about the bombers: the ministry is controlled by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki at one level, and by former Shiite militiamen at another. The ministry is the enforcer of Shiite hegemony in Iraq. It's Iraqi Sunnis' Bastille.

The coordinated bombings are al-Qaeda's signature, but that's knee-jerk analysis. Al-Qaeda didn't invent the coordinated bombing. Back in the Lebanon of the early 1980s, it was Hezbollah's signature (Hezbollah is Shiite). Al-Qaeda may have adopted the tactic. That doesn't mean the bombings today were an al-Qaeda job. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been eliminated, principally by Iraqis--and more to the point, by Iraqi Sunnis, whose distaste for al-Qaeda is similar to Hamas' in Gaza.

That's not to say that the bombings are less worrisome for it. To the contrary. They're more worrisome if, as I think is the case, they turn out to be the work of a reconstituted, or reconstituting, indigenous Sunni insurgency. That's been a running fear in Iraq: the so-called "Sons of Iraq," the former members of the Sunni insurgency bribed with American money to give up the fight and join the "Iraqi Awakening," have not been treated well since the Americans began their pull-back. They've not been paid. They've not been incorporated into the armed forces. They've certainly not been given entry to the Interior Ministry. The bombings may be their answer.

The bombings, besides their bloody results on Baghdad's streets, reflect another serious disconnect between American popular assumptions about Iraq and Iraqi realities. The "surge" didn't work. It pressed the pause button. As Steven Lee Myers wrote in The Times in late November, "Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling Iraq's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- all were benchmarks, and all remain partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed to create the space for political progress and thus peace."

Keep that in mind in light of President Obama's Afghan escalation.

Keep this in mind, too--the words Obama spoke about withdrawing from Iraq when he last visited there in April: "It is time for us to transition to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty. And in order for them to do that, they have got to make political accommodations."

Isn't that what he's already saying about Afghans? If most Afghans aren't listening, the Taliban certainly are.

See Also:

• Profile: Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki
• Who Are the Sons of Iraq, or Iraqi Awakening?
• Escalation Gamble: Obama Orders 30,000 More Troops to Afghanistan
• Interpreting "Good News" from Iraq
• Is the "Surge" Working? An Analysis

His own muezzin: Muammar el Qaddafi is lecturing Switzerland on its minaret ban. (right, Artyom Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images, and Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Libya's Muammar Qaddafi is a study in contradictions. The former "Mad Dog of the Middle East" (to borrow Ronald Reagan's somewhat rabid phrase) and the 1970s leading sponsor of terrorism is now accusing Switzerland of inviting terrorism with open arms.

"Al-Qaeda militants are now saying: 'We warned you that they were our enemies... Look at what they are doing in Europe. Come and join us for a jihad (holy war) against Europe,'" Qaddafi said Saturday in a speech celebrating the 40th anniversary of his rule. "Switzerland has done the so-called Al Qaeda, or the terrorists, the biggest favor."

Qaddafi was lamenting Swiss voters' approval last week of a referendum banning the building of minarets (even though there are no more than four minarets in the entire country, which is about a shade smaller than Virginia. Fewer than 6% of its of 7.5 million people are Muslim, fewer than a fifth of those are practicing Muslims, though the vote is likely to raise that proportion a few notches.

Of course Qaddafi is being disingenuous. But he's also right. He characterized the vote as the short-sighted idiocy that it is, an invitation for  Muslim countries to impose ban on the building of churches and other non-Muslim houses of worship (something Saudi Arabia already does) and to launch economic boycotts against Switzerland.

There are reports  however that a move is afoot to reverse the ban through another referendum. "Club Helvetique, a group of over 20 Swiss intellectuals, will draw up an action plan to overturn the ban," Reuters reports.

See Also:

• Islamophobic Swiss Ban Minarets
• Switzerland's Far-Right War on Minarets
• Profile of Libya's Muammar el Ghaddafi
• Tariq Ramadan on the Minarets Ban
• Ayan Hirsi Ali on the Minarets Ban
• What Is a Muezzin?

Algeria is the only Middle East nation that managed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa--a qualification as clouded by controversy, following the violence that attended its decisive playoff game against Egypt in Sudan's capital last month, as France's stolen goal against Ireland. And now the United States has drawn the only Middle East nation in its group, along with England and Slovenia.

True to form, ESPN's commentators, led by Alexis Lalas, immediately declared Team USA's fortunes lifted by assuming that Algeria will roll over. It appears that Americans have not yet learned the lesson of the past eight years: it's never safe, and usually counter-productive, to assume that a Middle Eastern nation Americans look to conquer will agree to a cakewalk. Algerians are likely ecstatic to have drawn the United States. They might have preferred France, their old colonizer, occupier and torturer. Lacking that, they're likely just as happy to take on the United States before the world, knowing they can bank on yet American surge to help them--the overconfidence kind.

Still, I wouldn't bet on an Algerian fairy tale. The team hasn't been in the World Cup since 1986. It barely made it into this one, and not just because it had to win that playoff against Egypt. Algeria's managed just eight wins in 13 games during qualifiers. It doesn't bode well for the only Middle East nation in the competition. Four years ago the Middle East could hedge its bets on three teams out of the 32 that qualified for the World Cup in Germany--Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Not one made it to the second round.

And for the United States, the group really is much easier than its draw four years ago, when it had to contend with the Czech Republic and Italy, both of them soccer powers, and Ghana, a feisty squad. Despite an unlikely draw against Italy, the U.S. didn't make it to the second round. Algeria and the United States have never met on a soccer pitch, though the United States and Algeria have a Treaty of Peace and Friendship reaching back to 1775, when American shipping was looking to neutralize the Barbary pirates. And John Kennedy was a strong supporter of Algerian independence from France, which won Americans warm affection. Algerians have found various ways to return the favor.

None of that will matter much when Algeria and the United States square off in Pretoria on June 23, 2010.

See Also:

• Algeria: Country Profile
• Qatar to Bid for 2022 World Cup
• Turkey, Armenia and Soccer Diplomacy
• American Soccer Stunner Restores Egyptian Pride
• Bahrain and Saudi Arabia's World Cup Dreams
• From Algeria to Iowa, with Love--And $150000 in Flood Aid
• Bouteflika and the Parody of Algerian Democracy
• Algeria at 2008 Beijing Olympics

_{The oud
(Wikimedia Commons)}

Just give this wonderful piece of music a listen. Hear the rich sonority and dexterity of the instrument, its playfulness and range: it's Palestinian artist Nizar Rohana playing the oud, or ud, a piece called emm-el-zeinat. You can slo hear him perform a more meditative piece called Ajam.

The Oud, or 'Ūd, a short-necked string instrument characterized by its rich, sonorous sound and rounded back frame, is the most popular instrument of the Arab world and East Africa. It is among the oldest of plucked instruments, with variations dating back to Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) in 2000 BC. In the Arab world, the oud is considered the king of instruments.

The word oud, or 'ūd, means is Arabic for twig or piece of wood. Iraqi and Iranian sources of the 9th and 10th centuries attribute the invention of the oud mythically to Lamark, a descendant of the biblical Cain. According to the Oxford Companion to Music, "on the death of Lamak's son, he hung his remains in a tree, and the desiccated skeleton suggested the form of the 'ūd (a contradiction between archaeological research and mythological tradition; the former assumes a process of evolution from lyre to lute, confirmed by organology). The myth attributes the invention of the mi'zaf (lyre) to Lamak's daughter."

Historically, the oud may have made its original appearance in southern Iraq in the 3rd century AD, according to 14th century authors Abū al-Fidā and Abū al-Walīd ibn Shiḥnāh. There is an interesting connection between the development of the oud and the spread of Manicheism, which considered music an integral part of the religious experience.

See Also:

• Fabulist, Forbidding Yemen
• Saudi Arabia: Beheadings, Riots and Inmates' MTV
• Bahrain's First Human Rights Film Festival

Cannon Fodder: West Point cadets waiting to hear Barack Obama tell them how he'll be doing more of the same in Afghanistan, with more of them. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

It's not the most upbeat way to warm up for President Obama's most important speech on the Afghan war to date, but nor should the numbers be ignored. Especially today. According to the latest CBS News poll:

• Just 38% of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the war, down from 58% in April.

• Among independents, approval is 32%; Republicans: 23%; Democrats, 57%.
• Just 23% say the war is going well, down from 35% in September, while 69% say it's going badly. The swing factor: independents.

• Approval for the way Obama is handling foreign policy as a whole is 50%, unchanged from last month.

Approval for Obama's performance as president is down to 53%, according to CBS. Other polls have him lower. Gallup has him at 51% (after dipping below 50% for a couple of days this month). The conservative Rasmussen poll has him at 47%.

Too bad the cadets at West Point, who'll be facing the president as he addresses them and the nation moments from now, won't have one of those gizmos they give CNN focus groups during presidential debates--you know, the ones that visually swerve approval up or down as the verbal action unfolds. One of the cadets waiting to hear the speech was caught by a New York Times photographer reading The Kite Runner, the Khaled Hosseini novel of Afghanistan. It's one way to delve into Afghanistan's many fictions.

See Also:

• How Would You Advise Barack Obama on his Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategy?
• Obama's Afghanistan: From Nightmare to Inferno
• Gen. McChrystal Goes MacArthur on Obama's Afghanistan
• More Troops for Afghanistan - Pros and Cons

Hard at Work: Afghan soldiers on a U.S. Army base. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It's not the minimum of 40,000 troops Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted. It's not the rejection of additional troops, let alone the withdrawal of troops, that those who've tired of eight years of futility wanted. It is instead your unsurprising average Obama decision to toss a salad of pressures and average out the results in a semi-committed, split-the-difference sort of way. Not what George MacGregor Burns would call Leadership.

But like many other things Obama in this season of bells and prevarication, it'll have to do. The president goes before the nation tomorrow night, borrowing a stagehand page from George W. Bush and delivering his speech to a military crowd at West Point, to explain his decision in yet another nationally televised address.

Given that the debate is no longer whether to escalate but what to expect from the escalation (which, in a grating irony, will bring combined U.S. and NATO troop levels almost even with the 150,000 troops the Soviets had in Afghanistan at the height of their delusions there in the 1980s), let's refocus.

What Obama Should Do: Set a Deadline

What Obama should say is that the escalation is temporary. That it's a last chance for McChrystal to make good on his claim, so similar to every general's claim before him, that with more troops he can finish the job. That by this time next year if the Taliban isn't everywhere in retreat, the Afghan army everywhere more in charge and dependable, and the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai displaying more evidence of responsible authority than corruption, an American withdrawal date will be set in stone as solidly as the one in Iraq.

Impose a War Tax

What Obama should say is that it's time for a war tax. War costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are past the $1 trillion mark. Yet since the wars began, Bush passed three major tax cuts, Obama one. In 1917, when GIs went to war in Europe, the top marginal tax rate in the United States was 67%. It went up to 77% the following year. (It was lowered to levels that made Ronald Reagan burst his pimples, 25%, in the 1920s). In World War II the top tax rate went to 81% in 1940, then 88% in 1942, and 94% in 1945. They didn't grumble. They got to be called "The Greatest Generation." The top tax rate stayed above 90% during Korea.

For most of the Vietnam War, it was at 70% or above. In 2001 it was at 39%. By 2003 it was at 35%. That's where it's been, not counting the tax cuts in dividends and capital gains and the explosion of tax credits for children, jobs created, depreciation, real estate, mortgage interest--you name it. From greatest to greediest generation.

No one who doesn't have someone there genuinely cares what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan because no one is paying for it. Time to raise the stakes and make people pay. Maybe they'll pay attention.

End Double-Standards in the Mideast

What Obama should say is that if more American troops are going to be put in harm's way to ensure better security and dignity for people in the Middle East, then it's time to face reality and apply the same principle to every country in the Middle East--whether it's Taliban-Lite Saudi Arabia and North Africa's "soft" dictatorships from Egypt to Morocco denying their people basic freedoms and representation or Israelis doing the same to 4 million Palestinians, who remain under military occupation or in a state of siege.

But Obama will say none of those things. He'll go on television, preen rhetorically, look presidential and a touch martial at West Point, and, his finger wagging, make the sort of vague and unkeepable promises about "benchmarks" and the buck stopping somewhere along a play to be named later. Too bad Mikhail Gorbachev, who saw the light in Afghanistan, isn't writing Tuesday's speech.

See Also:

• Barry Kolodkin: Will an Afghanistan Surge Work?
• Barack Obama and the Mideast: A Guide
• Pros and Cons of More U.S. Troops for Afghanistan
• "Good War" No More in Afghanistan
• A Chronological Guide to the War in Afghanistan
• Afghanistan's Fraudulent 2009 Presidential Election

Verboten: Swiss voters approved a referendum, floated by the ultra-right-wing People's Party, to ban minarets. (rytc via flickr)

How can 59 million people be so dumb, Britain's Daily Mail famously asked in a day-after headline of the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. The Daily Mail can notch a new one for its shame gallery: How can 3 million Swiss be so bigoted? Switzerland's People's Party, a far-right, nationalist brood whose members dominate the Swiss parliament, is celebrating: its initiative to ban minarets in Switzerland passed with close to 60% of the vote today.

In late October when I first wrote about this latest expression of European Islamophobia, the sense among pollsters and analysts in Switzerland was that the referendum would fail convincingly. A commenter here predicted that, just as they had other initiatives floated by the People's Party, including a proposal to boot out of the country family members of immigrants who commit crime (a measure tailored after Nazi-era purity laws in Germany), the proposed ban on minarets would fail, too. Two weeks ago, according to the Daily Mail, a survey showed 53 per cent of Swiss saying they'd reject the initiative, which was opposed by the Swiss government and parliament.

They didn't. Call it the booth effect. Call it the shame of admitting to pollsters how one's bigotries rate. Call it what you will: the Swiss have cast one of the most shameful votes in theirs and in European history (though to be fair to European history, religious bigotry today is a veiled imitation of its bloodier past incarnations).

And now Switzerland, the country that once hosted the first Zionist Congress in Basel, must live with its once-upon-a-time image as a tolerant and enlightened country shattered by reactionary bigotry in a country whose Muslim population is barely 6% out of a total population of 7.5 million. Fewer than 20% of Switzerland's Muslims practice their faith. Switzerland's entire census of minarets adds up to two. Two minarets. One in Zurich, one in Geneva. Not that it would have, or should have, made a difference if there were 10. Or 100. Or 1,000. There is no difference between a minaret and a church steeple. Neither has a claim greater or lesser than the other on faith. Both can be equally imposing visually and off-putting, or comforting, to the ears: churches have their bells, which can be infernal even to well-mannered Christian ears, and minarets have their muezzin's chants which, for all their beauty, can get on one's nerves in the middle of a nappy afternoon.

Switzerland will have to contend with the Muslim world's reaction, too. Boycotts? Trade snubs? Less oily money circulating through Geneva's banks? Then again, Arab unity, let alone Muslim unity, are chimeras. The Swiss image will pay a price, but it'll be as largely self-inflicted and contained. Switzerland isn't alone in its reactionary mood against Muslims. It's a European trend, from Nicolas Sarkozy wanting to ban 300 or so women from wearing their burqas in France to bloodier outbursts in Germany and elsewhere.

Bruce Bawer, who three years ago published the screedish While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday), must be smiling. He approvingly quotes the Norwegian head of Kripos, the Norwegian FBI, saying that there was a direct link between immigrants and the country's crime rate, and that asylum seekers' fingerprints should be freely accessed by Kripos. "You realize you may be seen now as someone who hates foreigners?" he was asked in a newspaper interview. "Yes," he replied," and I have no problem with that. Someone must dare to say it out loud."

To which Bawer adds: "That was in 2003. Those willing to 'say it out loud' are still few and far between."

Not in Switzerland. The difference between your average Swiss and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the poster child of racist rants, has just gotten much narrower.

See Also:

• Switzerland's Far-Right War on Minarets
• Ban the Burqa? You Decide
• Beer Guts, Not Burqas
• France, Child Molesters and the Burqa
• Sarkozy to Veil-Wearing Women: Stay Home
• Moroccan Woman Denied French Citizenship for Her Niqab
• Jillian York: When Arab and Muslim Stereotype Fuels Dangerous Assumptions

Some of you may remember the racism-tinctured brawl three years ago: a Dubai concern was looking to buy the management operations of several major American ports (in New York, New Jersey, Miami, Baltimore and New Orleans, among others).

The ports were owned by a foreign concern already: Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. But P&O, as it's known was a British firm. The concern looking to acquire ports management from P&O was Arab--Dubai Port World. Nothing like Arabophobia to irrigate bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress. Democrats and Republicans howled, claiming that a Dubai-based firm could not be trusted with the nation's port security. After all, weren't two of the 9/11 hijackers from the United Arab Emirates? (They were. Just as Timthey McVeigh was from the United States. Maybe the Department of Homeland Security should be disqualified from providing homeland security.) Even The New York Times opposed the deal. So did Hillary Clinton (though that's not surprising, given her many intentional blind spots regarding Arabs and the Middle East).

In March 2006, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to block the deal. Rather than press its case, Dubai Ports World sold its stake in P&O to AIG.

Why rehash the old story? To put in context what may be the next unraveling of the world's economy, now that Dubai is going bankrupt. Dubai Ports World, you see, is a subsidiary of Dubai World, the "sovereign wealth fund" owned by the government of Dubai and indebted to the tune of $50 billion. Dubai World is the fund that, earlier this week, announced it could no longer make payments on its debts, sending world markets reeling and investors fearing that another global crisis is about to sabotage the shaky economic recovery.

All because of a sovereign wealth fund.

So what are those beasts?

A sovereign wealth fund is a fancier way of referring to a government-owned and government-controlled investment mechanism.

In financial terms, a sovereign wealth fund takes cash accumulated from domestic and trade surpluses (especially those generated from oil sales), foreign currency trading and other cash-generating ventures (such as the privatization of state-owned enterprises) and invests it in stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities and other investment venues.

In simpler terms, government wealth funds are the play money of mostly nouveau-riche nations such as Middle Eastern oil exporters and the Asian Tigers of the Pacific Rim. The funds are rarely transparent.

Read the full FAQ, with examples and fresh facts: "What Are Sovereign Wealth Funds?"

See Also:

• Is Bubble-Bursting Dubai Bankrupt?
• What Is Dubai?
• The Gulf's Cash Guzzlers
• What is the Gulf Cooperation Council?
• Millionaire Explosion in the UAE
• Dubai's $7.6 billion Metro Subway System