May 15, 2008 11:46 AM EST | Link

Oops, George, your time-frame slip is showing!

At the Annapolis summit last November, Pres. Bush pledged that he would work to secure a final-status Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement before his term in office ends. Soon after that, the goal was "clarified", to spell out that this would only be an uncomfortable type of thing called a "shelf agreement", that wouldn't have any operational capacity until a whole host of other conditions had been met.

Today, in his speech in the Knesset, Bush's timeframe seemed to be slipping even further. Um, by an additional 60 years, apparently. The most he could "promise" the non-Israeli people in the Middle East was that "60 years from now" the whole region would be peaceful, non-oppressive, etc etc.... And "the Palestinian people will have the homeland they have long dreamed of."

It doesn't really seem like a winning argument to me?

Bush also drew a quite ridiculous parallel between pre-1939 Nazi Germany and un-named "terrorists and radicals" in the Middle East today, in what was widely seen as a politicized side-swipe against Barack Obama.

May 14, 2008 8:56 PM EST | Link

Re-engage book, launch news

My Re-engage! book has been getting a good soft roll-out already. But next week we have the first two significant launch events-- one in Charlottesville, VA and the other in Washington DC. Then more will be coming along thick and fast.

The events we already have firmly scheduled are listed on this page on the book's website.

If you live in NYC or Boston and have concrete ideas about launch events in either of those cities for next month, please let us know a.s.a.p!

Tony is kind enough to comment there,

I heartily recommend her book and her site [that's JWN] to anyone seeking a more peaceful, constructive and cooperative relationship between the last superpower and the world that has long since slipped beyond its control.

May 14, 2008 11:44 AM EST | Link

Bush, Israel at 60, interesting days ahead?

McClatchy's perceptive Jerusalem correspondent Dion Nissenbaum has a great post on his blog today titled "Bush/Olmert: A meeting of lame ducks." (Though he does note the term was actually coined by Yedioth Aharonoth.)

Later in the post, Dion writes:

Once Bush leaves, Israeli leaders are expected to step up their [military] operations in Gaza... The military leadership once opposed a ground operation as a potential tar pit. Now, according to Maariv, they see it as inevitable.

Can anyone imagine that if, just a short time after a "triumphalist", extremely pro-Israeli GWB visit to Israel, Israel launches a big, very damaging military attack against Gaza, that wouldn't have a major impact on the US's standing around the region?

Meanwhile, it certainly seems that the three-months-long negotiations over a Gaza-Israel ceasefire (tahdiyeh), that Olmert has been conducting with Hamas, with Egypt's mediation, are currently at a dead-end after the failure of Egypt's security boss, Omar Suleiman, to nail them down last week.

It looks as though Hamas is preparing some interesting options, too. In this post on the Palestine Info Center website yesterday they called on their Gaza followers to join a march to the Erez checkpoint tomorrow.

I was intrigued that in the short, videotaped "welcome address" that Israeli Prez (and 1996 war-launcher) Shimon Peres had on the website of the grandiose "Facing Tomorrow" conference that Prez. Bush will be addressing today, Peres talked glowingly about "a frontierless world, a world without frontiers..." (The site is here. I'm sure you can find that welcome address if you dig around a little.)

I thought it was pretty strange for Peres to talk that way, given that the hall the conference is being held in is less than three miles from some of the tallest and most impenetrably concrete portions of the Separation Barrier that Israel has put up between itself and the Palestinian communities of the West Bank. But maybe tomorrow we can expect Peres to leap out of the conference hall and go to engage in a Berlin-style orgy of wall-smashing in order to build the "frontierless" world he is forecasting?

The only other explanation for his words is that, like his guest George W. Bush, he inhabits some kind of strange, alternative universe in which the mere "facts on the ground" such as the rest of the world sees and deals with, have no substance and no meaning? And, like Bush, he confidently expects the rest of us to agree with him that "the emperor has lovely clothes!"

Meanwhile, in other Jerusalem-related news, Akiva Eldar tells us that

The Jerusalem municipality has begun the process of approving a plan for a new [Jews-only] housing complex, including a synagogue, in the heart of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan south of the Old City.

Hours before Bush arrived, Israel's Shas party, a crucial coalition partner, said that Olmert would approve hundreds of new homes in the West Bank soon after Bush heads home.

The boast was denied by Israel's Housing Ministry, but... This time around, according to Israel's Maariv newspaper, Bush has given Olmert the OK for the construction.

May 13, 2008 11:54 AM EST | Link

Lebanon: The human cost of war

Rami Zuraik has yet another excellent post on his blog today. It is about the vulnerable and encircled small informal settlement in West Beirut in the area known as "Behind Sports City." (At one point, I lived not far from there. I know exactly what he's talking about.)

He focuses on the experiences during the recent fighting of one BSC resident, a house-cleaner called Najwa:

On Wednesday, Najwa told me, the Future militia established armed presence around her and shot at the houses of opposition supporters. Many left. When the skirmishes started on Thursday afternoon, the neighborhood filled up with armed men. She looked out of her door and saw her neighbors sitting outside the house. Their 17 years old stood up and walked towards the street. He was shot and died there.

Najwa and her son left the house in a hurry and ran down the hill to seek shelter in Sabra. The Palestinian camp was boiling, filled with armed men. Hamas and Fateh supporters were eying each others menacingly. Hama's people support Hizbullah, and Fateh are sympathetic to Hariri and the Future movement. But when the night fell, they all joined rank as the camp began to tremble. As the sound of explosion and gunfire increased, a rumor had spread through the camp: Samir Geagea men, the Lebanese Forces, were coming back to massacre everyone, as in September 1982. Najwa tells me that as of this moment, the camp established serious guard rounds till the morning, and only relaxed when the news came that the Opposition had taken over the city.

When she went back to her house, Najwa found the neighbors in mourning. Being Shi'a, their grief and anger had been adopted by the Amal militiamen. These had gone around shooting and terrorizing some of the known Future supporters. The Nawar [i.e. Roma] people, she told me, paid the price. But her neighbor's son was dead.

The poor, regardless of color, race or creed, always pay the price.

(That reminds me of the period in Beirut in the late 1970s when Turkish Kurds started pouring into the city. Beirut was in the full throes of the civil war... but those Kurds felt that even Beirut was more secure than their own home areas in Turkey at the time. I visited some of the places where they lived in Beirut: half-destroyed houses very close to the Green Line. It was truly Dickensian-- but still, better than staying where they had been in Turkey.)

As Rami says, when there's war and insecurity it is always the poor and marginalized who pay a disproportionate amount of the price.

May 12, 2008 9:26 PM EST | Link

Earth to GWB: The Lebanese Army isn't on your side any more!

So there was George Bush, telling the BBC today that he is willing to send US aid to the Lebanese Army... Doesn't he realize that, as I suggested here yesterday, the Lebanese Army isn't on his side any more??

Is it any wonder that the administration led by this man is losing so badly in the Middle East these days?

May 12, 2008 12:13 AM EST | Link

Prospects for Lebanon

Rami Khouri, a very astute observer, writes in Monday's Daily Star

The consequences of what has happened in the past week may portend an extraordinary but constructive new development: the possible emergence of the first American-Iranian joint political governance system in the Arab world. Maybe.

If Lebanon shifts from street clashes to the hoped-for political compromise through a renewed national dialogue process, it will have a national unity government whose two factions receive arms, training, funds and political support from both the United States and Iran. Should this happen, an unspoken American-Iranian political condominium in Lebanon could prove to be key to power-sharing and stability in other parts of the region, such as Palestine, Iraq and other hot spots. This would also mark a huge defeat for the United States and its failed diplomatic approach that seeks to confront, battle and crush the Islamist-nationalists throughout the region...

I'll only attach the one further small observation: That actually, the government in Iraq is already, effectively a US-Iranian condominium, given the long and still-continuing ties between Iran and the parties that dominate the government in the Baghdad Green Zone.

It is possible, though, that in Lebanon Hizbullah may be aiming for a bit more than a "US-Iranian condominium"?

On Saturday, after the collapse of the anti-Hizbullah militias in West Beirut, the Siniora government backed down from its earlier demands that (1) the pro-Hizbullah security chief at the Beirut airport be removed and (2) Hizbullah dismantle its relatively secure, fiber-optics communications system. Siniora said something like, "Oh gosh, we really didn't mean to do that-- but let the army decide what's best."

The army, whose officers have been extensively courted by Hizbullah over the past years, reacted by requesting the government to revoke those two decisions.

The position adopted by the army leadership has considerable importance for the prospects of any kind of stability in the country in the months ahead. Not least because, under UNSC resolution 1701 it's the army that is responsible for assuring the security of Lebanon's southern border. And various things like the movements of the UNIFIL forces in the south are subject to the supervision of the army, which represents Lebanon's sovereignty within the country.

Hizbullah has acted in responsible fashion in most parts of the country where it routed opposing militias: It almost immediately handed over the areas it thereby brought under its control to the army.

Evidently, right now, Hizbullah's leaders feel they have reason to trust the army.

But what of Lebanon's civilian "government"? So far, PM Siniora (or as Pres. Bush routinely mis-names him "Sonora") has kept on hewing to a fairly strongly anti-Hizbullah line -- with the exception of the bowing toward realism Saturday, when he said it should be the army that decides on the airport-security and Hizbullah telephony issues.

But in at least one semi-official Hizbullah commentary today, (here in English) a Hizbullah person is "predicting" that Siniora himself won't last long in office. Mohamad Shmaysani writes there, on the Al-Manar English website that "sources" had told him that close US ally Saudi Arabia

stopped Saniora from tendering his resignation on Friday... The source told Al-Manar that Riyadh was close to agree[ing] on Saniora’s resignation, but US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interfered and stopped the process. She assured Saniora and promised his big Arab support during the ministerial meeting in Cairo Sunday as well as international backing Monday.

What’s next?

The fast fall of the ruling bloc is for sure and a new political era will start; an era that will have its repercussions on the regional stage, for sure.

The Arab League demanded Shiite gunmen pull out of West Beirut and leave Lebanon's army in charge of security. The gunmen had mostly left the streets by Sunday, a day after the army called on them to clear out.

But I'm not sure that the Arab League can save Siniora's government at this point?

Oh, and did I mention that Pres. Bush is going to be making a splashy big appearance in Jerusalem on Wednesday?

In the context of the continuing stasis in the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations, I imagine that all the heavily trumpeted instances of Bush's undying support for Israel that we'll hear over the days ahead might not be quite what the increasingly embattled pro-US forces in the Arab world need at this point?

May 11, 2008 10:57 PM EST | Link

Bush's conference in Jerusalem

Pres. Bush is scheduled to arrive in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Once there he'll be the guest of honor at a big international conference that Israeli Pres. (and former war-launcher) Shimon Peres is holding under the blah, catch-all title Facing Tomorrow. (Conference organizers are said to be keeping their fingers crossed that all the unseemly news about the latest probe into PM Olmert's alleged improprieties doesn't take the gloss off the conference.)

The conference has its own, extremely lame English-language blog. You can read the schedule either there or in this PDF file, available on the official conference website.

Though the conference is headlined by Peres, I guess his office doesn't have the budgetary or administrative capability to put on something as big and glitzy as this. So the funding has come from the ever-controversial Sheldon Adelson, who made himself the third-richest man in the US by buying and developing casinos in the USA and worldwide. Adelson is a big financial backer of, among many other organizations, the rabidly pro-war "Freedom's Watch" organization in the US, and the strongly pro-settler Shalem Center in Israel.

He and his wife have been named as "Honorary Chairs" of the conference.

But they do not, it seems, have the intellectual clout to pull together a world-class set of conferees for this gathering. So that job has been left to-- guess who? ... None other than our old friend Dennis Ross, who for 12 years there was the chief US official in charge of the Israeli-Arab "peace process."

But now, Ross has reinvented himself as the head of the Board of Directors of the Jerusalem-based "Jewish People Policy Planning Institute". And it is JPPPI that has been paid, presumably by Adelson, to provide the "content" for the conference.

On p.6 of that PDF file about the conference, Dennis has a letter in which, on behalf of JPPPI, he "welcomes" all the conference participants to Jerusalem.

Dennis has also been described as a leading foreign policy advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Are you confused enough yet?

Is he a US citizen, or an Israeli, or both at this point? The extremely deep intermingling of the two countries' political elites continues.

Dennis Ross has always been a bit of a political chameleon. He was secretary of State Baker's chief implementer when Baker (and Bush I) Organized the Madrid Arab-Israeli peace conference in October 1991. Then in 1992, as Bush's re-election chances started diving along with the US economy, Bush drafted in Baker-- a supremely accomplished political operator-- to run his campaign. And Dennis went with him into the GOP campaign. But that one lost to Clinton, as we know. And who should pop up as Clinton's Arab-Israeli negotiations chief but-- Dennis Ross!

Quite a feat. Proving, perhaps (as with all the more recent Obama and Clinton buzz) that in some elite political circles in the US a proven commitment to Israel is more important than, and can sometimes transcend, "mere" party-political differences.

While working for Clinton, Dennis was the strongest advocate of the incrementalist, process-fixated approach that allowed Israel to drag its feet in signing anything at all throughout the whole of the 1990s, while it also stepped up its drive to build Israeli settlements in the West Bank-- while incurring no penalty whatsoever for that from its superpower patron. In 2000, he and Clinton, working totally in cahoots with Ehud Barak, inveigled first Pres. Hafez al-Asad then Yasser Arafat into renewed negotiations with Israel under false pretences; and both those coercive, very-last-minute negotiations failed miserably.

So we can certainly expect Dennis Ross to be in the receiving line when Pres. George W. Bush arrives at the conference, Wednesday. "Welcome to Israel, Mr. President!"

May 10, 2008 5:18 PM EST | Link

Intra-Iraqi ceasefire met with escalated US bombardments

So in Iraq, earlier today, the (Shiite-dominated) Iraqi government concluded a ceasefire agreement with the Sadr movement... and just hours later the US military started an aerial bombardment of Sadr City that according to this "Voices of Iraq" report lasted six hours.*

What on earth is going on?

Have large parts of the Bush administration and the US military all gone absolutely, criminally bonkers all at the same time?

Only two possible explanations present themselves to me. The first is the "all gone bonkers" one. (Which would also fit with the reports about imminent US missile attacks against Iran.) The other is that this is all part of a sane-but-devilish scheme cooked up by the US military, perhaps in cahoots with some of its people in the Iraqi government... and playing very much according to the "one last battering before the ceasefire gets implemented" playbook followed by Israel in Lebanon in August 2006.

You'll recall how disastrous that "one last battering" ploy proved to be for Israel at the time.

Anyway, I do note from the "Voices of Iraq" report that the ceasefire goes into operation "Sunday." (Also noted in the AP/Yahoo account linked to above, and in Xinhua.)

I believe that under the ceasefire agreement the US forces are supposed to leave the positions they had seized inside Sadr City over the past couple of weeks.

It seems to me that in both Sadr City and West Beirut, the anti-US forces have been playing a carefully calibrated game in their relations with national governments that had, until now, been solidly pro-US. (Following Hamas's playbook there.) Their preferred strategy seems to be not to overthrow or directly confront the national government, unless the national government confronts them... But rather, to do a combination of whittling down the government's legitimacy while also holding out to it a potential life-raft of cooperation-- but on the basis of a nationalist and ever more strongly anti-US platform.

In both Lebanon and Sadre City, the anti-US forces seem to be doing rather well at this game, the ultimate "prize" of which is to win the loyalty of the national government (and therefore, also, all of its international legitimacy.) Given that this game requires smarts, subtlety, patience, and an intimate knowledge of the minutiae of local/national politics, is it any surprise that the US is doing very poorly at it?

I shudder to think of the effects of that six-hour bombardment, though. We peace activists in the US have to redouble our efforts to get the US troops out of Iraq and let the Iraqis have their country back!

---

* Big hat-tip to the ever-diligent Badger.

May 10, 2008 4:31 PM EST | Link

RIP Sarwa (and so many others)

The L.A. Times's Tina Susman has a wrenchingly sad post on their blog today, writing about the May 4 killing in Mosul of Iraqi journalist Sarwa Abdul-Wahhab.

Susman writes:

[Sarwa Abdul] Wahab, who was 35, was in a taxi with her mother on the morning of May 4 when gunmen forced the car to stop. It appeared to be a kidnapping attempt. Wahab resisted and was shot to death in front of her mother, whom she was taking to a hospital to visit an ailing relative.

In the past year alone, at least three female journalists have been killed in Mosul. They include Zeena Shakir Mahmoud, 35, who was killed on her way home from work last June.

A few days earlier, 44-year-old Sahar al-Haidari had been slain in the city.

The fact that so many of the people working these dangerous and high-skill jobs are female underlines the degree to which Iraqi society, even under Saddam, and even through the horrendous, 13-year-long tribulations of the US-spearheaded 'sanctions' era, was one in which women got good educations and good professional skills. The US occupation has, tragically, been a major factor in pushing Iraq "back to the Stone Age" in so many respects, not least in terms of the opportunities available to rising generations of girls and younger women.

Susman includes some tragic details about Sarwa Abdul Wahhab's life:

The object of [Abdul] Wahab's affection was a Kurdish man. She was not a Kurd, and that was the reason he gave her for not being able to marry. "She died without having the man of her dreams," her friend wrote, adding that friends counseled Wahab to find someone else to no avail.

Wahab had been supporting her family, including her mother and several siblings, since her father's death recently. It wasn't an easy life, and it wasn't the one she necessarily dreamed of. But, her friend says, she kept on smiling and spent what little extra money she had on colorful scarves and accessories to brighten up her life, and the lives of those around her.

May 10, 2008 4:02 PM EST | Link

Combustive Mideast mix: Political crisis, meet economic crisis

I want to underline something very significant about the multiple crises now simmering in the Contested (once 'Fertile') Crescent that stretches from Egypt through Israel/Palestine, to a lesser extent Syria, and then finishes strongly in Iraq. That is that right now you have considerably heightened political tensions in that crescent, revolving principally around the question of whether US-Israeli power is to be succumbed to or resisted, that come on top of rapidly worsening economic conditions.

It is this combination-- plus of course, Pres. Bush's singularly ill-timed, and Israel-centered visit to the region this coming week-- that make the crises potentially more serious than any of the other internal crises of governance this region has seen in recent years.

Thus we have seen:

In Egypt, on May 4, the Muslim Brotherhood, which in terms of both economic and social policy is fundamentally very conservative, threw its weight behind the anti-price-rise stoppage called by non-MB networks of social-issues activists. That, after the MB notably stood aside from engagement in previous economics-focused public actions.

In Lebanon, we should recall the confrontations of recent days started with a nationwide protest against price hikes.

In Gaza and the West Bank, Israel's policy of tightly linking economic issues to issues of political control and domination has continued for so long, and with such viciousness, that it is now just about impossible to disentangle the two. But the economic-political combination there is particularly combustible right now.

In Iraq, the failure of the US occupation force to allow the rebuilding of a working, livelihoods-focused economy-- or indeed, we could say the decisions it took at so many levels to block the re-emergence of a functioning national economy-- has contributed hugely, and for more than five years now, to the occupation power losing its political legitimacy in the eyes of Iraq's citizens. Most recently, and most acutely, the economic/anti-humane suffering inflicted through the occupation power's aggressive pursuit of plans of military control and quadrillage in Sadr City have forced the whole situation there to a crisis.

You could describe this as a small subset of the global economic-political order, which is also to some extent US-dominated, though in the Contested Crescent the political, and therefore also the economic, domination is particularly extensive and all-encompassing.

Around the world, there have been signs of considerable pushback against US policies regarding, in particular, the very basic issue of very basic foodstuffs: policies that in recent months have helped to drive many parts of the low-income world toward starvation.

Thanks to alert JWN commenter Roland for contributing this linkto a Times of India article from May 4 titled: US eats 5 times more than India per capita. The article presents a wealth of data, including a very recent US Department of Agriculture survey that found that, "Each Indian gets to eat about 178 kg of grain in a year, while a US citizen consumes 1,046 kg."

The story also surveys various disparities around the world in the consumption of other foodstuffs (noting that many Indians are anyway vegetarians.)

It adds:

the story would not be complete without mentioning the plight of Africa, where foodgrain consumption in 2007 was a mere 162 kg per year for each person, or about 445 grams per day. Don’t forget they are not getting any meat or milk products out there.

But US citizens and everyone else around the world need to understand that food-price issues which are now becoming something of a factor inside the (ever-self-referential) US political system are a much larger issue in the politics of countries and communities that are living closer to the edge of real food insecurity and starvation. And understand, too, that given the dominance that the US undoubtedly exercises over much of the global economy, concerns and resentments that various non-Americans around the world harbor over food-price issues segue almost seamlessly into resentment against the US's strong and often controlling role in world politics, as well.

This global economic order that the US has built up over the past 63 years is being sharply tested by the current food crisis, and in many parts of the world it is being found wanting. US government actions like the decision to subsidize the conversion of fine American agricultural land to production of the inputs for motor fuel have provoked quite understandable anger around the world. As did Bush's completely maladroit recent statement about the global food crisis having been in some sense "caused" by the rise in living standards in India and China in recent years. (Right. From what to what, Mr. Bush?)

... So what's happening in the Contested Crescent these days is all a part of that broader global picture. But in the CC, it strikes me, these issues of economic and political control have come into particularly tight focus, in good part because of the destabilizing presence and actions of the US military and its allies in the Israeli military.

So many people, writing about the present crisis in Lebanon, have tried to portray it as a "sectarian"-- or even, in Juan Cole's bizarre recent post, "ethnic"-- conflict. Fundamentally, it is no such thing. It is a political conflict, that is overwhelmingly over this issue of being for or against US domination of the region. Though it does have some sectarian overtones-- but no "ethnic" ones at all-- these are quite secondary to the political issue at stake. Thus, you'll find a majority of Shiites back the jabhat al-mumana'a (anti-US) alliance, and a small minority who back the pro-US March 14 movement. The country's Christians, including its Maronite Christians, are probably about evenly split between Mumana'a and M-14. The Sunnis and Druze probably trend fairly strongly toward M-14, though there are certainly plenty of Sunnis, and some Druze, who are Mumana'a supporters.

FWIW, the Shiites are easily the largest population group in the country. They are historically extremely deeply rooted in Lebanon, where they have three strong centers of demographic concentration.

But the present unrest is notably not just about politics. It is also about the economic crisis that has been gathering force in Lebanon as everywhere else in the Contested Crescent. That is, in large part, why the US currently looks so weak in the region: Because it is blamed, among other things, for having presided over a world and regional economic order that has failed to assure basic food and economic security to the citizens of these countries. There is a disquieting degree of justification to those accusations.

Oh, and the US is also blamed for having invaded and smashed Iraq, and for having connived in Israel's smashing-up of Palestine.

It looks like huge flocks of chickens of long-time US policies in the region are these days coming home to roost.

On Mr. Bush's shoulder when he attends Israel's continuing Independence Day ceremonies next week, perhaps.