Ambassador Tom C. Korologos comments on the United States accomplishments in the Middle-East and Iraq. Korologos also comments on the situation in Afghanistan. (0:54)

 

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The American Enterprise Institute hosted a panel on Lebanon highlighting many of the issues affecting the country. The panel consisted of Danielle Pletka and Michael Rubin of AEI, Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group, Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute, and Hassan Mneimneh, Iraq Memory Foundation.
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Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) says that if the United States wants to see a transformed Middle East with Iraq and Lebanon as “pillars of that transformed Middle East” then the U.S. must be “in the game every single day.” He said the U.S. has had a policy of giving pronouncements which are rarely followed by action, but that Iran is “in the game every single day.” (1:49)

 

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United States Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Kahlilzad statements at the Security Council stakeout on Monday regarding Hezbollah and the recent conflict in Lebanon (1:51)

 

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Briefer: Dana Perino

President’s Schedule

President Bush had his normal briefings at 8 am this morning. At 10.50 am, he will participate in a small foreign print media round table and later also meet with foreign television media. At 11.40 am the President has an interview with Mark Knoller and Peter Maer of CBS News.
There is an update in the schedule for the afternoon where the President was supposed to introduce Mrs. Bush at the Preserve America Presidential awards ceremony, but she is now on her own, as the President will prepare for the Middle East trip.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino will brief the press at 1 pm today. (more…)

Mohamad Bazzi, Council on Foreign Relations fellow on the ground in Beirut, held a media conference call to discuss the events this week in Lebanon. He said that on Saturday Hezbollah was accused of spying on the Lebanese state with a camera on a Beirut airport runway, and also of using a private communication network to communicate with each other through their own infrastructure. He said that on Monday night the Lebanese government held a meeting, and condemned what Hezbollah had done. He said Hezbollah and other opposition parties used a strike planned by labor unions on Wednesday as a vehicle to express their displeasure with the government’s decisions. (more…)

Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Mohamad Bazzi describes how he woke up today to gunfire, as Hezbollah fighters moved methodically through the streets. He says they took over offices and media under the Sunni leader, Saad Hariri, but then turned them back over to the Lebanese army. He says by midday Hezbollah was able to exert control over pretty much all of West Beirut. (1:06)

 

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Mohamad Bazzi, Council on Foreign Relations fellow on the ground in Beirut, says that the recent outbursts of violence caught most people in Lebanon by surprise. He says that the violence over the last four to five days is rooted in events that transpired over the weekend, when Hezbollah was accused of spying on the Lebanese state with a camera trained on a runway of Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport. (0:59)

 

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Speaking at an American Enterprise Institute panel on bloggers in the Middle East, Lebanese blogger Tony Badran says that blogs can be used both for dissent against regimes and also tools for disinformation by regimes. (0:30)

 

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Speaking were:

Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian blogger who had been sentenced to 14 years in prison for espionage and insulting the country’s leaders, speaking through an interpretter

Mohammed Ali, an Iraqi blogger (http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/)

Tony Badran, a Lebanese blogger (http://beirut2bayside.blogspot.com/)

Arash in his opening statement described how he was forced into blogging by the pervasive censorship of the media in Iran. Publishing anything critical of the government results in beatings, fines, and jail. When Arash began blogging, the government was largely unaware of the Internet, so he was free to publish whatever he wanted. In recent years, though, it has begun monitoring the Internet. Arash said that western funds to promote democracy in Iraq allows the government to brand bloggers and others as mouthpieces of the US, so a better form of aid would be to help people get Internet access. Responding to a question from Paul Wolfowitz about the reach of Voice of America and other media, Arash also said that access to western media is more limited than access to drugs. He also noted that Ahmadinejad is still quite popular, and the general people don’t know about economic sanctions against Iran.

Ali, an Iraqi blogger, said that he had spoken with other bloggers, in both Iraq and Sudan, who had been inspired by him to begin blogging. Arab media outlets are heavily government funded, but blogging allows independent people to express themselves cheaply. Blogging can be difficult, though, because Internet access is scarce.

Tony Badran said that in Lebanon, where Internet access and access to western media are much more common, blogging presents other difficulties. Blogs are being used for propaganda and conspiracy theories by Syria, and it can be difficult to distinguish genuine citizen blogs from Syrian “info ops.”