JERUSALEM After a month of debate in Israel, the government on Sunday established a committee to investigate the political and military leadership's handling of the invasion of Lebanon.

In a country that expects swift and decisive military victories, many Israelis said the military campaign in Lebanon was poorly planned and executed, and that leaders should be held accountable. Israel was unable to halt the rocket fire by Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia group, and has not won the return of two soldiers captured by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid on July 12 that ignited the month-long conflict.

The committee "will examine the political leadership and the security echelon regarding all aspects of the campaign in Lebanon," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his cabinet at the beginning of its weekly session.

The cabinet voted 20 to 2 in favor of the committee, which will be headed by a retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd.

But dozens of protesters outside the prime minister's office demanded that the investigation be carried out by a state commission, which they asserted would have greater power and would be seen as more independent.

Under the arrangement approved Sunday, the government will be investigated by a committee it has appointed. A state commission would have been appointed by a judge of the Israeli Supreme Court.

Olmert defended the cabinet decision, saying the committee would have the powers of a state commission, allowing it to subpoena witnesses and order police searches.

Many Israelis, including a large number of disgruntled reserve soldiers, have been demanding an inquiry since the fighting ended on Aug. 14.

Olmert has faced some of the harshest criticism and his popularity has plummeted.

Critics have also called for the resignations of Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the military's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz.

Major General Udi Adam, who commanded the Israeli forces in northern Israel and southern Lebanon, submitted his resignation last week, making him the first senior figure to quit because of the war.

With an international peacekeeping force deploying in southern Lebanon, Israel has withdrawn from most of the positions it held at the end of the fighting, although it still has troops in a number of places across the border.

Meanwhile, Palestinian talks on a national-unity government, which have been marked by increasing friction, were put on hold when the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, left on a trip that will take him to the United Nations this week for the opening of the General Assembly.

Abbas wanted an agreement locked up so he could appeal to Western leaders to restore financial assistance that was cut after the Islamic group Hamas came to power after winning elections in the spring.

Abbas's Fatah movement and Hamas say they remain committed to the unity government, but they have traded sharp words in recent days. Yasser Abed Rabbo, a former information minister who is part of Abbas's delegation, described the internal talks as being in a state of "crisis."

He said Hamas needed to accept previous agreements between the Palestinians and the Israelis or a new government would not win international acceptance.

"We want clarifications from Hamas," Abed Rabbo said in a telephone interview from Jordan, where Abbas was on Sunday. "Hamas is affecting the credibility of the president and undermining his efforts to approach the international community."

Hamas, in turn, said its position had not changed, and that it still refused to recognize Israel. Western countries have demanded that the Palestinian Authority government recognize Israel as one of the conditions for restoring aid.

"We don't recognize Israel," Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said at a news conference in Gaza City. "If such a position is a problem, then we consider that an honor. We want to break the siege by the West, but the price should not be abandoning the Palestinian interests."

Hamas officials said they believed talks with Abbas and Fatah will resume when the president returns.
 

Representatives of 118 nations in the Nonaligned Movement condemned Israel's assault on Lebanon and supported a peaceful resolution to the U.S.-Iran nuclear dispute. The statements came in the final declaration over the weekend from a summit meeting that brought together some of the world's staunchest critics of the United States.

The 92-page declaration also broadly condemned terrorism, but with exceptions for movements for self-determination and battles against foreign occupiers.

And while declaring democracy to be a universal value, the movement said no one country or region should define it for the world. The leaders mentioned Venezuela and Cuba in particular as they asserted the right of every country to determine its own form of government.

The statements, many of which contain veiled criticisms of the United States, were approved by unanimous consent after another round of speeches Saturday night by leaders of the movement.

"No one in the Nonaligned Movement thinks that the United States is responsible for all the problems, but many think that it is for some," said the Cuban foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque.

An ailing Fidel Castro was named president of the movement, but he stayed home on doctors' orders while the acting Cuban president, Raúl Castro, presided over the meeting of two-thirds of the world's nations.

Even so, the elder Castro apparently found it hard to stay in bed: The Communist Party newspaper Granma reported Sunday that he had met during the summit meeting's final day with at least five heads of government - his friends Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Boliva and the leaders of Iran, India and Malaysia.

Raúl Castro joined numerous critics of the United States who said a bellicose Washington had made the world more dangerous.

"The United States spends one billion dollars a year in weapons and soldiers," he said. "To think that a social and economic order that has proven unsustainable could be maintained by force is simply an absurd idea."

Many demanded that the United Nations take action against the veto power of the five permanent Security Council members. Suggestions in the final declaration included expanding the council's membership and allowing council vetoes to be overruled by a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly.

"The U.S. is turning the Security Council into a base for imposing its politics," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran complained. "Why should people live under the nuclear threat of the U.S.?"

North Korea, meanwhile, defended its nuclear weapons program, Sudan's leader rejected a UN peacekeeping mission for the Darfur region and Ahmadinejad insisted on Iran's right to develop nuclear energy.

The final declaration supported Iran's position while encouraging Tehran to continue cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The leader of the North Korean Parliament, Kim Yong Nam, said his communist nation "would not need even a single nuclear weapon if there no longer existed a U.S. threat," and said U.S. financial sanctions had "driven the situation into an unpredictable phase."

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, agreed that the Security Council must be more responsive to less powerful countries.

"The Security Council must reform for the sake of the developing world, and for the sake of the United Nations itself," Annan said at the meeting. "The perception of a narrow power base risks leading to an erosion of the UN's authority and legitimacy - even, some would argue, its neutrality and independence. I have in the past described this as a democracy deficit."

The Nonaligned Movement was formed in 1961 to establish a third path in a world divided by the United States and the Soviet Union.

Cuba last acted as host to the group in Havana 27 years ago.

ROME Pope Benedict XVI drew rising anger on Friday over comments he made about Islam, as Muslim leaders around the world angrily accused him of dividing religions and demanded an apology.

In Britain, Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Indonesia, Muslim leaders registered their protest. The Parliament in Pakistan passed a resolution against the pope's statements and the government later summoned the Vatican envoy to express official displeasure.

In Lebanon, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the most senior Shiite cleric, demanded "a personal apology - not through his envoys."

And emotion spilled over in Turkey, which Benedict is scheduled to visit in November, as a top official in the Islamic-rooted governing party said that the pope was "going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini."

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages," the official, Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan, was quoted on the state-owned Anatolia news agency as saying. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

Reaction to the pope's remarks - in which he quoted a description of Islam in the 14th century as "evil and inhuman" - have presented Benedict with the first full-blown crisis of his year- and-a-half papacy. Already some in Turkey have questioned whether he should make the planned visit, which would be the pope's first trip to a Muslim country.

Many Muslims are also comparing his comments to the unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that stoked deep Muslim anger this year.

But unlike with the cartoons, the reaction has not been violent. Several bombs reportedly exploded near a church in Gaza, though it was unclear whether they were related to the pope's comments.

The Vatican released no official comment Friday. On Thursday, as Benedict returned from a six-day trip to Germany, the pope's chief spokesman said that he had not intended to "offend the sensibility of Muslim believers." Meanwhile, other top Vatican officials also sought to tamp down the furor.

"I am convinced the pope did not mean to assume a position against Islam," a German cardinal, Walter Kasper, told the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica.

Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, a French prelate with experience in the Islamic world, was appointed Friday as the Vatican's new foreign minister. He told Agence France-Presse: "The dialogue between different civilizations, cultures and religions - which nobody can hide from - will be one of the great questions which I will tackle in my new job."

In a speech Tuesday at Regensburg University, where Benedict had taught theology, the pope delivered a long, scholarly address on reason and faith in the West.

But he began his speech recounting a conversation between the 14th-century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"

Benedict did not explicitly agree with the statement nor repudiate it.

He also briefly discussed the Islamic concept of "jihad," which he defined as "holy war," and said that violence in the name of religion was contrary to God's nature and to reason.

But he also suggested reason as the basis for "that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today."

Benedict, a respected theologian, is said to write many speeches himself, and some commentators in the Italian press speculated that the Vatican would be forced into a more stringent review of his statements in the future.

The controversy came with the establishment of a new top Vatican hierarchy, whose first job will be to contain the controversy: In addition to appointing Mamberti as foreign minister, the pope installed a new secretary of state, the Vatican's highest position after the pope. He is Cardinal Tarcisco Bertone, 71, an Italian and a longtime colleague of the pope's.

Amid the angry reactions, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who met with the pope on his trip there, defended his speech.

"Whoever criticizes the Pope misunderstood the aim of his speech," she was quoted as saying in the Bild newspaper. "It was an invitation to a dialogue between religions and the Pope expressly spoke in favor of this dialogue, which is something I also support and consider urgent and necessary."

Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Memo #37
14 September 2006

-- Richard Bernstein, New York Times, 11 September 2003.¹ 

The sympathy and support for the United States that surged worldwide in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks ²  began to ebb as soon as US bombs began falling on Afghanistan.³  Supportive sentiments continued to recede through 2004, driven increasingly by the Iraq war and eventually settling at levels unseen since the early 1980s. The trend has temporarily reversed in some places at some times, either in response to hopeful news from Iraq (such as the December 2004 elections) or in reaction to local events (the November 2005 terrorist bombing in Jordan). Also, there are national exceptions to the trend (Israel) and partial exceptions (India). On balance, however, the United States today finds world opinion substantially at odds with its foreign policy and its leadership on most particulars.