Ray Close on the Israeli Sept. 6 Air Raid on Syria

This from Ray Close (ex-CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia)

Dear Friends:

More thoughts about the ongoing mystery surrounding the Israeli air raid on Syria of September 6, 2007:

I still believe that the final truth, whenever it is revealed, will prove to be a major embarrassment for both the Bush administration and the Israelis — and possibly some Arabs. There MUST have been a colossal screw-up by some or all of those who planned, approved and implemented the action. I can think of no other plausible explanation for Bush's angry and petulant refusal to give the White House press corps a polite and informative reply to their repeated questions — and for the administration's apparent failure so far to brief many of the key members of the appropriate committees of Congress —— of either party. If it could be represented as a necessity, and as the successful treatment of a real and imminent threat to the vital national interests of either the United States or Israel, then why the hell not step up and explain your actions and the reasons that justified it?

As an aside: I hope the rumors are false that the Jordanians, Egyptians and Saudis all approved of the Israeli raid when they were (allegedly) briefed in advance (possibly by Dick Cheney in person, without the knowledge of Condi Rice and Bob Gates) that it was coming. How foolish it would have been for any Arab government to approve such an Israeli action, because they should all know from sad experience that sooner or later the secret would leak out, to their acute distress.

In my mind, the biggest question remains the degree of American involvement in the planning and implementation of the raid. Even if the target was really the beginnings of a nuclear weapons plant, the justification for preemptive military action would be very weak, considering the fact that it would be many years before we could justifiably claim that Syria posed an imminent nuclear threat to Israel. Much more important, in the full measure of things, is the damage that another unjustified preemptive attack would do to the critical objective of fortifying the weak and wobbling system of international rules and controls to prevent widescale proliferation of nuclear weapons. Today, destroying a pathetically crude and ill-advised Syrian attempt to begin a nuclear program might impress some people as striking a blow for freedom, but it would in fact be a major defeat for the larger goal of supporting civilized implementation of an international rule of law. If George Bush and Dick Cheney have helped to undermine that vitally important overarching objective by involving America in another unjustified and unwarranted violation of international law in this case, then they will have done us all a disservice of major historical importance.

(By the way, if the goal was to send a warning signal to Iran, then that message has been thoroughly obscured in the fog of Foggy Bottom. Yesterday, in speaking of the Israeli raid, Condi Rice said archly: "Iran, take note!" Take note of WHAT, Madam Secretary? If your own Senate Foreign Relations Committee has not been given a coherent explanation of what happened, how to you expect Ahmedinajad to know what you're talking about? Are you saying that if Iran misbehaves, we will send the Israeli Air Force to teach them a lesson? What does that tell the world about the quality of the American president's world leadership role?)

One cannot minimize the fact that American collusion with Israel in such an offensive act would be a disastrous blow to our relationships with our few remaining Arab friends. We got away with that many years ago at the time of the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak (which, we should be reminded, the United States officially condemned as illegal at the time), but today it's a different Middle East, and we have no reserve of goodwill capital to fall back on. How would the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi governments, for example, explain and justify such action today by its so-called US ally?

Finally, we might all hold out some hope that the Bush administration's refusal to be transparent on this issue is because they attach a higher priority to keeping alive the prospects of a constructive peace conference on Palestine-Israel scheduled to be held sometime next month at Annapolis.

However, if that is the case, then it tells us three very significant things:

1. The Israeli leadership attaches a higher priority to restoring the credibility of its military dominance over its neighbors than it does to supporting American diplomatic efforts to advance the peace process — on which Israel's real security ultimately depends;

2. The (supposedly) most powerful and influential leader is the whole world is unable or unwilling to persuade the leader of tiny little Israel that reaching a viable peace settlement in the region deserves a higher priority than obliterating an empty building hundreds of miles from anywhere in the remote Syrian desert. George Bush, in other words, lacks the political courage and the moral stature to say to his Israeli friend: "Cool it, Ehud. I have more important problems to deal with right now. Don't ask for my help in undertaking a spectacular diversion of strictly minor significance, for your personal political benefit, just at a time when I am involved in much more critical and delicate undertakings."

3. The Bush administration is too cowardly to admit to the American people and to the world the truth of the two points just mentioned above.

Ray Close

From www.joshualandis.com/blog

Melody Tunes: All English, All the Time

Some friends told me to check out these YouTube clips two weeks ago, but the internet connection in Damascus is so damn slow that it would have taken me weeks to download them. I'm thankful for the DSL in Paris.

Melody Tunes Promo Madonna
Melody Tunes Promo Shakira
Melody Tunes Promo 50 Cent
Melody Tunes Promo Britney Spears
Melody Tunes Promo PussyCat Dolls

Landings

October 19 @ 3.20am

I had a haircut before I left Damascus. There are eight salons on my street (note: my street is at best five blocks long). Most of the salons boast opaque glass walls, and just outside the door there's usually a rack with about a dozen towels hanging to dry. Rocco's uses only black towels; Ziad's got blue and yellow.

It was almost eight-thirty when I stepped out the door. I felt proud that I was going to the salon at night. It was a first.

Ziad remembered me. Stacked all throughout his place are containers of gel with Swedish Adonises gazing at you with distant allure. The speakers buzzed with the new Timbaland featuring Keri Hilson while Ziad began to straighten my hair. This happens in Beirut too. Before the cut begins--no, even before the pre-haircut discussion begins, the stylist gets to ironing out your hair with the scalding, concentrated heat of a blowdryer. Digging into your scalp with a cylindrical brush, he aims his incinerator at the brush and holds the heat just long enough so that it burns with a jolt.

I'm starving. I want to eat the fur coat on the Turkish woman in front of me.

After a brief layover in Istanbul, my flight lands mid-morning in Paris.

I landed in Paris just over a year ago from London. It was the final leg of my evacuation from Lebanon, and I remember pulling up to Porte Maillot in the Air France Bus and catching my mother standing in the shade. She was leaning slightly to her right, and her hands were entwined in the rope of her purse.

---Yikes: time to board the plane! STAMPEDE!!!

Expatriate Expatriate

I went to the Ministry of Expatriates a couple days ago to obtain travel clearance. In addition to being an American expatriate, I discovered that I am also a Syrian expatriate even though I live in Damascus. Working through this conundrum, I found the Ministry at the end of a shiny tree-lined road in Dumar, a booming and vapid suburb of Damascus. The Ministry is an anomaly relative to the other bureaucratic structures: the interior is spacious; there is a Welcome Desk with a guard (shockingly not asleep!); there are COPY MACHINES (!) and PRINTERS (!!) and post-1992 computers.

Because I'm a Syrian male national, I'm required to serve in the military. In an attempt to squander money from its subjects, the government provides an alternate route: in lieu of service, you can pay a fee. Once you pay this fee, you get what's called daftar el khadmeh (Service Notebook), which allows you to enter and exit the country, no problem.

I am pursuing this route, or rather my father is pursuing this route while I observe from the sidelines. We've spent roughly five months plodding through the bog that is Syrian bureaucracy. Still no daftar.

On the plus side, I discovered that I don't need my daftar to go to Lebanon! This is of course because Lebanon isn't really another nation-state from Syria's perspective. This is also evidenced by the marked absence of a Syrian Embassy in Beirut.

The drive to Beirut took longer than usual. It was Friday and the last day of Ramadan, so the streets in Syria were absolutely empty. The woman in thick glasses spent about forty-five minutes at the Duty Free store near the border, and then, after we crossed the border, it took her about twenty minutes to buy labneh in Chtoura. We sat stewing in the car, honking occasionally with the hopes that she might hurry the hell up.

Although it wasn't Eid in Syria, it was Eid in Lebanon. As we drove into the city, dudes on motorcycles peeked into our taxi three times and asked, "Ta3aeedo el Soureyeen?" (Did the Syrian's celebrate Eid [yet]?)

Mama Hiam's bangs were curled with flare. We ate lunch just after I arrived and then passed out for a couple hours. I woke up to a symphony of fireworks, which twenty-seven hours later, is still going strong.

We made the pilgrimage to the airport to pick up D, my uncle's wife, who flew in from Dubai. It was packed and noisy. Whereas picking up friends and family from the airport in the states works kind of like a drive-by shooting or a hit and run accident, in Beirut (and Cairo and Damascus) it is a major social event featuring all generations of the family, at least 4 kids per adult running around and falling flat on their faces, and metallic balloons.

Earlier this afternoon, there was a flock of birds migrating south, reshaping their V every so often. I took a last sip of my Turkish coffee, and the conversation on the balcony froze in deference.

My uncle stood up and leaned against the balustrade.

"They're headed South, they'll follow the breeze down to Gaza, follow the Nile down into Africa. The hunting in Egypt is great, but these birds, these ducks, their meat stinks, tastes like fish. Better to shoot them when they return."

Lady Wise

I didn't go to the moon. I went much further--for time is the longest distance between two places.
-Tom in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

I've been thinking about Mrs. Wise lately.

Her eyelashes were fake, and the shape of her body echoed a giant jelly bean.  During rehearsal, she'd down bags of popcorn while plopped at her throne.  Her voice, textured with years of smoke, gripped you in the gut.  Almost everyone in the high school was afraid of her, and it is a fact that she made the majority of her female actors cry.

I thought she was brilliant.  Her office was tucked in the backstage of the theatre at Woodward Academy, and I spent countless hours sitting across from her in that delicate ebony chair: she, overflowing in every sense of the word, and I, spellbinded.  I loved her.  Very much.

The summer just before I left to Yale, we were cruising in her Cadillac down Main Street in College Park and stopped by the Krystal, or maybe it was the Dairy Queen.  She had a milkshake craving.  We had been at her home and were on our way to school when she told me that she could feel something was wrong.  She pressed her hand into her kidney, and her voice wavered slightly with concern.

My friend S called me as I was passing Davenport on York Street in New Haven.  She told me Mrs. Wise had passed away.  I continued walking, past the rank smell of the Au Bon Pain and past the begging Vietnam veteran's cyclical, "Any change today?"

I didn't go to the funeral.  And, when I began writing this a few minutes ago, I could remember neither the season nor the year of her death.

But then I latched onto something--a letter I sent to my actors.  In February 2006:

I spent the last two weeks of my time in Cairo in upper class coffee shops with free wireless internet trying to translate Camus.  I'd plant myself at Beano's or Cilantro in Zamalek–sure to get the seat by the electrical output–and indulge in a pricey cafe au lait.

The patrons of Cilantro and Beano's were generally all from the Zamalek upper crust and from all age groups.  In the states, we rarely see a group of six or so wrinkled folks getting coffee.  Not the case in Cairo–groups of old people would sit and smoke and coffee it up next to the group of American-esque Cairene tweenagers.

The waiters began to expect me.  On any given day, there would probably be about six or so waiters in Cilantro--one to open the door for you, one to take your order, three to complete the order, one to deliver, and one to bid farewell.  I was the strange white kid with the laptop.

On one not so special day in Cilantro, I ordered a double espresso, sipped it up, asked for the check, and signed the bill.  Underneath the receipt was a faded pink folded notecard.  In sloppy blue pen, it read:

Everywhere
I go to there
I see your face
you Body your eyes
all of you your smile

I had an admirer.  I took the customer receipt and wondered what to do with the notecard.  Was she watching me?  Is she behind me?  Was this note meant as a joke?  Was it for the person before me?

I stuffed it in my leather messenger bag and scurried off.

I'm a foolish collector of useless pieces of paper--notes, post-cards, tickets, playbills, letters, and even tags from designer clothing.  Every paper collector has his own way of organizing and storing these precious memory documents.

When I returned to New Haven in August, I opened the flat pocket of my messenger and pulled out dozens of moments--and, one by one, I plucked a book or play from my bookshelf, opened it to a random page, stuck in the receipt or postcard, and reshelved the book.  I am proud of my arbitrary and efficient memento-storage system.

Tonight, after the rehearsals, the teas, the cakes, the ices, I plucked Death of a Salesman from the shelf.  And so fell the pink notecard from Cilantro.

Page 130 was held safe by a large paper clip.  Starred and numbered by Mrs. Wise were Biff's lines, beginning with "You're going to hear the truth, Willy, --what you are and what I am!  We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!  And I'm through with it.  Now hear this, Willy, this is me..."

I presented this Biff monologue with great success at the Georgia Thespian Conference one pubescent high school year.  The conference itself was an insignificant event--an orgy of dozens of bi-curious high schoolers.  The rehearsal I had with Mrs. Wise in her office, however,...

...was something else all together.

"I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you.  You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!  I'm one dollar an hour, Willy!  A buck an hour!  Pop, I'm nothing!  I'm nothing, Pop.  Can't you understand that?  There's no spite in it anymore.  I'm just what I am, that's all."

My eyeballs just flopped and plopped, and I was shaking, snot and it all–it was the first time I had viscerally connected with a text, an earthquake in College Park, GA.  My body purged and depleted.  Mrs. Wise my witness, yes, yes, I found and spewed myself into Biff's confrontation with Willy, and I have never been so raw.

Mrs. Wise and I would always refer to the Biff moment: "Oh, then...yes," or  "Hm...yah...a dime a dozen."  All it took was a couple words, and we were transfixed.  The time was ours, a secret, she the only one ever to have felt, heard, seen me there, my face, my body, my eyes, all of me.

And now I learn what happens to a secret memory when one of the keepers dies.

Rifts

Once upon a time, I had a story to tell.