Busant79's Blog

Celebrating Jakarta’s Anniversary

busant79 — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:26:43 +0000

Today’s Sunday,28 June 2009 , me with family, my wife Wulan, my doughter Sifa, and my son Sultan were went to Monas the Indoensian National monument at central Jakarta in order to enjoy jogging while celebrating jakarta’s anniversary with jakarta’s people including Jakarta’s Gavernor Fauzi Bowo and his administrations.

We were leaving from home at 6.00 am by Daihatsu Feroza car. At first, i was no intention to go to monas from the day before, but when i was woke up, i suddenly remember that today there is a celebration of Jakarta’s anniversay at Monas where my soldier were invited to join the marching competition.

Soldier!

busant79 — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:01:42 +0000

This morning at morning rollcall, i give a speech to my soldier about TNI soldier role in daily life of our nation, the speech can be resumed as:

TNI role in nation life has been stated by the chief of TNI that TNI’s are Warrior, People and Proffessional soldier. TNI as a warrior means that it has function to struggle in defending our nation either from outsider or insider threat. Hence TNI must be equipped with standard weaponry system but that has not a primary factor, the most important that TNI must have bravery and unflinching feeling.

busant79 — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:55:00 +0000

By Kevin Peraino NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 10, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jan 19, 2009
Only a few weeks ago, Ehud Barak‘s political prospects were a joke. When he appeared in late December on the Israeli equivalent of “Saturday Night Live,” the defense minister drew the loudest guffaws when he suggested he might actually win the upcoming election for prime minister. It would have pained the Jewish state’s founders—who thought of Barak’s Labor Party as the epitome of the secular Zionist ideal—to see their heirs ridiculed. But the party, once influenced by Karl Marx and still the political anchor of the Israeli left, has long been in decline. This past November the dovish novelist Amos Oz declared, with a Hegelian flourish, that Labor had “completed its historic role.”
Since the bombs started falling in Gaza, however, the fortunes of Israel‘s leftists have been strangely reinvigorated. For months Israel’s hawkish opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu had been leading polls in the run-up to parliamentary elections on Feb. 10. Yet the Gaza war—popular at home if not abroad—has bolstered his rivals. A poll released last week shows a doubling in support for Barak’s Labor Party—which is now predicted to win 15 seats in Parliament instead of seven. Another suggests that the defense minister’s personal popularity has soared by 19 points. More important in Israel’s coalition politics: Tel Aviv University pollsters say a broader left-wing bloc including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party has pulled even with Netanyahu and his allies; polls show each camp now winning 60 spots in Israel’s 120-seat Parliament. Gaza’s outcome was still in doubt at the end of last week, and much of this support could prove ephemeral. But it would be supremely ironic if the war, which has infuriated peace activists around the world, ends up delivering Israel’s doves to power.
With more than 800 dead in Gaza, including many civilians, there’s something vaguely Orwellian about referring to Barak and Livni as “doves.” The war’s moral cost has been immense: a strike on a U.N. school last week killed more than 40 people, and the Red Cross accused Israel of violating international law by failing to assist wounded Palestinian civilians. Compared with Netanyahu, who regularly rails against dividing Jerusalem and handing back land to the Palestinians, Barak and Livni are much more flexible about the concessions required to achieve peace. But they’re benefiting from taking a hard-line stance toward Hamas. Netanyahu has long been the loudest voice calling for a crushing strike against Gaza. Barak is “doing well … because he’s doing what Netanyahu told him to do,” says Israeli historian Tom Segev. “It’s really Barak the general [the people are] behind—not Barak the leader of Labor. They’re not the same person.”
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As Labor leader, Barak has stepped into the shoes of some of Israel’s most iconic figures. Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, is the movement’s best-known living alumnus. (In 2005 Peres defected to Kadima.) Labor Zionism’s secular kibbutz culture—infused with communal ideals and revolutionary ardor—is one of the state’s most enduring romances. It was always more myth than reality; as times changed, the kibbutzniks evolved. Yet Israel’s founders had in fact grown up in what Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University, refers to as an “age of ideologies” at the turn of the 20th century. Then the world was swirling with intriguing new “isms.” Now the founders’ grandchildren have little use for utopias. Labor’s decline, Ezrahi says, is partly about “the victory of pragmatism over ideology.”
Barak, a war hero turned dove, is suited to such times. As an officer in Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit in the early 1970s, he stole into Beirut disguised as a woman to assassinate PLO operatives responsible for the murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the year before. Yet decades later, as prime minister, Barak angered right-wing Israelis by pulling out of Lebanon, negotiating over the Golan Heights and indicating he would return Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to the Palestinians as part of a peace deal. Livni also defies easy categorization. A onetime Mossad spy, Livni began her political career in Netanyahu’s Likud Party, but later joined Ariel Sharon’s Kadima after deciding a two-state solution was inevitable. With Arabs soon to outnumber Jews, the thinking went, Israel could not remain both Jewish and democratic without giving up Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
It’s far from clear, though, whether Barak and Livni’s surge will last long enough for their loyalists to dominate the elections and ultimately strike a peace deal. If casualties mount and international outrage intensifies, Israelis will likely turn against the war, as they did in the summer of 2006 during the Lebanon conflict. And even as Barak and Livni peel off centrist voters from other parties, they risk alienating their bases the longer the war goes on. Already Barak seems to be preparing the political ground if the fighting takes an unexpected turn. Last week, as Israeli leaders debated whether to expand the conflict into Gaza’s city centers, a leak claimed that the defense minister opposed intensifying the ground war, even as other cabinet members lobbied to broaden it. “He doesn’t want to push it,” says one source close to Barak, asking not to be identified in order to speak freely. Livni is said to have taken a similar line.
If, on the other hand, a ceasefire is struck while Hamas remains in charge of Gaza, Netanyahu is likely to say the war ended too soon and its outcome would have been more decisive if he’d been in charge. The implication, according to Yossi Beilin, one of the deans of Israel’s peace camp, is that Israel’s military “was on the verge of victory—and then we stopped one day short. It’s very difficult to refute something like this.” Still, at that point, peace talks in order to strengthen Palestinian moderates at the expense of Hamas will become only more important. Israeli voters might prefer an enthusiastic backer of negotiations in the P.M.’s chair, rather than an obstructionist like Netanyahu.
But with Israeli leaders voting late last week to fight on in defiance of the U.N. Security Council, Palestinian doves are in trouble. President Mahmoud Abbas has already lost credibility because of his fruitless talks with the Israelis. The Islamists “are not going to be eradicated,” says Mohammed al-Masri, an Abbas loyalist and former Gaza intelligence chief. “Hamas will come out stronger on the ground than before.” The resurgence of Israel’s doves won’t bring peace if their Palestinian counterparts are crippled in the process.
With Joanna Chen in Jerusalem

busant79 — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:56:00 +0000

A November 2005 photo shows the nuclear enrichment plant of Natanz in central Iran. The New York Times reported that the Natanz plant was the target of an attack that Israel sought help for from the United States.

updated 7:38 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2009

WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush rejected a plea from Israel last year to help it raid Iran’s main nuclear complex, opting instead to authorize a new U.S. covert action aimed at sabotaging Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, The New York Times reported.
Israel’s request was for specialized bunker-busting bombs that it wanted for an attack that tentatively involved flying over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plan is located, the Times reported Saturday in its online edition. The White House deflected requests for the bombs and flyover but said it would improve intelligence-sharing with Israel on covert U.S. efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
The covert efforts, which began in early 2008, involved plans to penetrate Iran’s nuclear supply chain abroad and undermine electrical systems and other networks on which Iran relies, the Times said, citing interviews with current and former U.S. officials, outside experts and international nuclear inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity. The covert program will be handed off to President-elect Barack Obama, who will deciding whether to continue it.

According to the Times, Bush decided against an overt attack based on input from top administration officials such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who believed that doing so would likely prove ineffective and could ignite a broader Middle East war.
Israel made the push for permission to fly over Iraq for an attack on Iran following its anger over a U.S. intelligence assessment in late 2007 that concluded Iran had effectively suspended its development of nuclear weapons four years earlier. Israel sought to rebut the report, providing evidence to U.S. intelligence officials that they said indicated the Iranians were still working on a weapon.
Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, declined to comment Saturday.
In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this week, Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, said he believed that Iran is the biggest challenge Obama will face in the Middle East and that more sanctions will be needed to force Tehran to forgo its nuclear ambitions and support for extremists. He said the Bush administration has been trying to “shore up and store up leverage” to bequeath to the Obama administration.
Last month, Obama suggested that a combination of economic incentives and tighter sanctions might work. Tehran rejected the proposal. Obama also has said he would pursue tough-minded diplomacy.