Blogger is back up and working again over at the JWN Comments blog.
So our friend Dr. David Steinbruner was actually involved in treating the courageous and smart CBS News correspondent Kimberley Dozier after her near-fatal injury in Iraq Monday.
Dozier's colleagues James Brolan and Paul Douglas were killed in that attack. When I was working in Lebanon during the war there, my husband was a TV cameraman. I know that those guys (and the still photogs) run the very biggest risks of anyone.
Deep condolences to Brolan and Douglas's families.
And my prayers for Dozier's best possible recovery. (I think that Scott Harrop, who actually knew Dozier fairly well when she was a grad student in Middle East affairs here at Virginia some dozen years ago, is going to post more here about her.)
Dozier is now in Landstuhl military hospital, in Germany. CBS's latest report states:
"She was aware of his presence. She is still very seriously injured, but she's stable and she responds to stimuli," Shaw said.
Dozier is in critical but stable condition and, according to a statement from CBS, is "resting comfortably today after receiving further treatment for injuries to her head and legs." "We are encouraged by reports from Dozier's doctors about the outcome of her recent surgeries," the statement continued.
It would be great if every person injured in the war in Iraq could receive treatment as expert as Dozier has received.
Of course, if there were not a war in Iraq, none of this would have happened.
Anne Gearan of AP is reporting this:
"To underscore our commitment to a diplomatic solution and to enhance prospects for success, as soon as Iran fully and verifiably suspends its enrichment and reprocessing activities, the United States will come to the table," Rice said in remarks prepared for delivery at the State Department.
The Swiss ambassador to the United States was called to the State Department earlier Wednesday to receive a copy of Rice's remarks for transmission to Iran, U.S. officials said. The United States has had no diplomatic ties with Iran and few contacts at all with its government since Islamic radicals took over the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and held diplomats there for more than a year.
The United States and the European nations that led stalled talks with Iran last year have agreed on the basics of a package of incentives for Iran if it is willing to give up its disputed activities, Rice said.
"We hope that in the coming days the Iranian government will thoroughly consider this proposal," Rice said.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said the United States will not enter one-on-one talks with Iran. The European talks included Britain, France and Germany.
The United States has refused repeated calls from European nations, other leading diplomats and former U.S. secretaries of state to join the talks or make other diplomatic overtures to Iran.
The agreement to join talks now represents a major shift in policy for the Bush administration, which has been deeply suspicious of Iran's intentions and the prime mover for tough United Nations action against the clerical regime.
Iran has so far refused to do what the U.S. is now demanding as a first step to talks. Iran did voluntarily suspend those activities while talks were active with the Europeans last year, but resumed and stepped up those activities this spring.
This new Rice letter will not immediately open up a direct channel between Washington and Teheran. Indeed, that is not what Rice and Bush are aiming to do at this point... Instead, they are only saying they'll join unspecified "other nations"-- maybe just the EU-3, or maybe also China and Russia?-- in holding talks with Teheran... And that, only in response to serious further concessions from Teheran on the nuclear-fuels issue.
Still, what a relief to see the Bushites even starting to move in this direction... This, at a time when the rightwing and neocon networks are all still baying for military action and regime change in Iran.
Faiza has an eloquent and well-argued critique of the major US media on the op-ed pages of The Daily Star today.
Actually, right next to it is an intriguing piece by the DS's former editor, Rami Khoury, titled Arab Liberals and Islamists, Unite!
Both good reading.
There was a significant op-ed on Darfur in the NYT today. It's by Alan J. Kuperman, who was once Legislative Director for sen. Charles Schumer-- and in it, Kuperman directly takes on the arguments of those in the US who argue that outside military intervention is needed to stop the anti-"black" genocide in Darfur.
Kuperman notes that,
Kuperman recalls that, after US diplomatic intervention early this month the Khartoum government made even more concessions to the rebels, raising hopes that at last the two holdout rebel factions might be persuaded to join the peace agreement...
Seemingly bizarre, this rejection of peace by factions claiming to seek it is actually revelatory. It helps explain why violence originally broke out in Darfur, how the Save Darfur movement unintentionally poured fuel on the fire, and what can be done to stanch genocidal violence in Sudan and elsewhere.
Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks.
This reality has been obscured by Sudan's criminally irresponsible reaction to the rebellion: arming militias to carry out a scorched-earth counterinsurgency. These Arab forces, who already resented the black tribes over past land disputes and recent attacks, were only too happy to rape and pillage any village suspected of supporting the rebels.
In light of janjaweed atrocities, it is natural to romanticize the other side as freedom fighters. But Darfur's rebels do not deserve that title. They took up arms not to stop genocide — which erupted only after they rebelled — but to gain tribal domination...
Advocates of intervention play down rebel responsibility because it is easier to build support for stopping genocide than for becoming entangled in yet another messy civil war. But their persistent calls for intervention have actually worsened the violence.
The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels' initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials' extracting further concessions from Khartoum.
The key to rescuing Darfur is to reverse these perverse incentives. Spoiler rebels should be told that the game is over, and that further resistance will no longer be rewarded but punished by the loss of posts reserved for them in the peace agreement.
I disagree with this. I still maintain that there are always alternatives to the use of violence! And certainly in this situation, when the Khartoum government has expressed a commitment to general disarmament of militia forces, resettlement of the displaced, and reconstruction of the three Darfur provinces under a large degree of self-government...
Surely this is a project that could and should be easy to sell to the people of Darfur, even if not to all of their ambitious, self-appointed "leaders".
But it's interesting to see where Kuperman goes with his argument about the need to use force to quell the anti-humane rebellion. He argues that no UN force could achieve this. (And I would note here that if US and European forces were not so terrifically badly tied up in ill-planned missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, then they would be in a much, much better position to offer logistics and even personnel support for a UN force in Darfur... )
So Kuperman conclusion is this:
But Kuperman also makes a very good longer-range argument regarding the direction of US foreign policy:
America, born in revolution, has a soft spot for rebels who claim to be freedom fighters, including those in Darfur. But to reduce genocidal violence, we must withhold support for the cynical provocations of militants who bear little resemblance to our founders.
I was interested to read Kuperman's article. In 2001 he published a controversial short book on Rwanda in which he argued (I think) that the genocide there would have been much harder to stop militarily than most people thought, and that therefore claims that "the US could have stopped it but chose not to" were misleading... But he is evidently someone who has studied very closely the many ethical dilemmas entangled in the topic that western liberals like to call "humanitarian intervention", but that people in the international humanitarian-law field often prefer to call "military action with a claimed 'humanitarian' motivation." (Noting, of course, that wars are always launched with claimed 'humanitarian' aims much publicized. No national leader ever says publicly, 'Okay chaps, let's go out and launch ourselves a highly inhumane, unjust war.'..)
I would personally love to discuss all these issues more with Kuperman some time. I am strongly of the opinion that the "international community" needs to do a lot more to fund, refine, and upgrade our ability to launch all kinds of nonviolent interventions to protect lives and help broker and buttress peace agreements around the world, and that that is a better path to focus on than simply letting national governments reassert their own sovereignty while piously bleating at them from outside about the need to respect IHL norms.
But anyway, that discussion is for another day. For today, I am just glad to see Alan Kuperman entering the debate on Darfur with this feisty and generally strongly reasoned article.
May 31 is a deadline for the parties to the fighting in Darfur to sign onto the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), that was concluded in Abuja, Nigeria, on May 5. The augurs don't look particularly good. Reuters is reporting that the head of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Khalil Ibrahim, and representatives of the other holdouts-- a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)-- were heading to a last-minute meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia to try to find common ground with the AU negotiators. (Slovenia? Why Slovenia? Nice beaches?)
Ibrahim told Reuters:
That report continues,
"We hope that they will exemplify a historic responsibility and to realise that the agreement is a good basis to achieve peace in Darfur," Djinnit said.
"If not, the Peace and Security Council will meet to see what measures to take ... measures will be taken."
The AU special representative in Sudan Baba Gana Kingibe said efforts were continuing to woo the holdouts to sign the agreement.
It all sounds like a very tangled web indeed. The near-daily reports of the UN. Country Team in Sudan make clear that throughout Darfur a continuing level of anti-civilian violence, often lethal, still continues-- and that it is being committed by all sides. (You can access these reports and a lot of other great, up-to-date info through this excellent Reliefweb portal.)
Writing over at Headheeb May 26, Jonathan Edelstein noted the fragility of the DPA, and the possibility that the fighting in Darfur could spill over even more than it already has done into Chad and even perhaps the north of the Central African Republic. If you scroll down to the comments there, he makes this wise observation:
As it is, it's been a terrible struggle for the World Food Programme even to get, and once again to deliver, enough emergency rations to keep Darfur's many thousands of IDPs alive (as I noted here.) People need to be able to return to their home communities in security and dignity, and start rebuilding a future! And as we know very clearly from what we see every day in Iraq or Afghanistan, people cannot do that under conditions of prolonged warfare or rampant public insecurity... The fighting needs to end. And the Abuja DPA provides a reasonable basis on which to do this.
The New York-based organization Human Rights First has done consistently excellent work of fact-finding, analyzing, and seeking official accountability regarding the US government's use of torture since 9/11.
I see that they have been "doggedly" following the trial of Abu Ghraib dog handler Sgt. Santos Cardona. Their coverage of this trial even includes a fascinating and informative blog about being kept about it by HRF staff attorney Hina Shamsi, who has been observing it inside the coutroom.
For example, last Friday Shamsi wrote,
The whole blog makes fascinating reading. Shamsi has put lots of links to relevant documents right into the posts. And the side-bar contains many very useful links. Including one simply tagged Torture Facts, and one tagged Where are they now?
In "Torture Facts" you can learn this:
* 36 prisoners are believed to be held in unknown locations;
* At least 376 foreign fighters detained in Iraq to whom the Administration has asserted the Geneva Conventions do not apply;
* There were up to 100 ghost detainees in Iraq;
* The U.S. transferred at least one dozen prisoners out of Iraq for further interrogation in violation of the Geneva Conventions;
* 8 percent of 517 Guantanamo detainees were considered al Qaeda fighters by the U.S. Government. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection to al Qaeda or Taliban.
* 5 percent of the 517 detainees held at Guantanamo were captured by the United States and the majority of those currently in custody were turned over by other parties during a time when the United States was offering large sums for captured prisoners.
While I'm on the topic of human rights things, here is a version of the report that the UN Committee against Torture recently released about Bush administration's many infractions of the Convention Against Torture, thanks to the BBC.
The number of Guantanamo detainees participating in the hunger strike there has now risen to 75.
That report, by AP's Ben Fox, quoted Navy Commander Robert Durand as trying to downplay the seriousness of this action by the detainees by calling it an "attention-getting tactic". Fox also quotes Durand as saying,
Durand doesn't mention this. I wonder why not.
Nor does he see fit to mention the violation of the fundamental right of habeas corpus that the detainees are campaigning against.
Habeas corpus is a bedrock of personal liberty in the Anglo-American system of law and society. Since I studied Latin for five years, I always knew that habeas corpus means "that you may have the body", and I'd always assumed that it meant that individuals were thereby somehow given the right to have control over their own bodies (i.e., to enjoy personal liberty). Well, on reading that Wikipedia article linked to there, it seems clear that it does mean that-- but it means it in a way even more profound than I had thought.
It's not that through habeas corpus "the system" gives individuals the right to control their own bodies, but rather that antecedent to that the individual is assumed to already have the right to her or his own body, and that it's the state, when it wants to infringe on that right, that needs to show ironclad due cause for doing so.
This concept of personal liberty was of course fully enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence, which states,
So the issue for the detainees in Guantanamo-- and in Bagram and all the other places where my government holds detainees who have not had the benefit of a trial, is give them liberty, or give them a trial that will show them and everyone else why it is right that they be deprived of their liberty for some period of time.
Some of these detainees have now been deprived of their liberty for 54 months. 54 months of treatment that has often been inhumane, brutal, and by design extremely disorienting. 54 months of their loved ones often not knowing whether they are dead or alive. 54 months of isolation, psychological attack on their personhood, and uncertainty.
Give them liberty, or give them a trial. It's as straightforward as that.
The only circumstance under US (or international) law in which there would legally be a third alternative is if these detained individuals are classified as POWs, in which case they could continue to be held without trial for the duration of the relevant hostilities. But in return for the detaining government having that power, it has to guarantee a separate set of rights to the detainees: that they not be subjected to interrogation, and that the phsyical and psychological conditions of their detention meet the standards defined in the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush administration chose not to designate these detainees as POWs. Instead, it has used the category of "unlawful enemy combatants" in an attempt to deny them access both to the protections for POWs, and to the normal protections they would have under civilian law. That move deeply violated the US Constitution, as well as all relevant international law.
The Bushites cannot simply continue to hold these men-- who between Gitmo, Bagram, and other extra-legal holding centers could well number more than 1,000 individuals-- in this state of legal limbo forever. In fact, it should not continue for a day longer-- for any of them.
Why do they not bring these men to trial? Cmdr. Durand accused the men of seeking to be released so they could "return to the battlefield." But if they have trials and are found guilty of serious crimes, then they wouldn't be released any time soon, would they?
Actually, the problem for Cmdr. Durand and the whole machinery of the Bush administration above him is that bringing these detainees to any form of a fair trial would be hugely problematic for the administration. For reasons including these:
* In a fair trial, the detainees would be able to speak to the broaoder public about the way they have been treated for the past many months.
Maybe not. But anyway, this current dilemma is one for the Bush administration to face.
As for the rest of us, all we can say is, "Give them liberty, or give them a decent trial."
Al-Hayat is describing the demonstrations in Kabul yesterday as a "Tajik intifada"... That piece indicates that Khairkhaneh, the area of northern Kabul where the US military vehicle lost control and killed a number of passers-by, was near to the headquarters of former Defense Minister Gen. Muhammad Qasem Fahim, a leader of Afghanistan's Tajik community; and the young people in the neighborhood then comgregated around the convoy to protest-- and the American soldiers then fired into the crowd...
The ethnic-Tajik dimension to what happened hasn't been mentioned in any of the western media reports that I can find except for this one in Newsday by Moises Saman and James Rupert.
They write:
Tajiks make up around 27% of the national population and speak a language called Dari that is close to Persian.
Regarding the growth of Taliban activities-- and as a follow-up to the Ahmed Rashid piece I quoted from extensively here yesterday-- Rashid has a new piece up on the BBC website.
He writes:
From just a few hundred guerrillas last year, Taleban commander Mullah Dadullah now claims to have 12,000 men under arms and control of 20 districts in the former Taleban heartland in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan. There is also a strong Taleban-al-Qaeda presence in the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.
Why - five years after the Taleban and al-Qaeda were smashed by US forces - is Afghanistan facing a resurgent Taleban movement that is now threatening to overwhelm it?
... Neither Nato, nor the American forces they are replacing, have offered an honest assessment of their successes and failures during the past five years.
The events in Kabul today looked ominously like the events in Gaza that triggered the Palestinians' First Intifada against Israel at the beginning of December 1987. Today, as back then, a vehicle that was part of the foreign presence in the country apparently went out of control and ended up killing and injuring a number of the indigenous citizens... Today, as then, that lethal event triggered a response from the citizens that revealed a huge amount of pent-up anger and resentment... (Today, as then, the spokesmen for the foreign presence had previously been saying "all is fine and normal" with the general situation... But the eruption of anger gives the lie to that claim.)
It is far too early to tell how these events in Kabul will play out. The BBC is reporting that,
About 2,000 people demonstrated in the city centre, with some moving on to attack buildings in the diplomatic quarter.
For over two hours there were bursts of gunfire as hundreds of protesters rampaged through Kabul, burning cars and attacking police checkpoints.
Police and the army - including tanks - moved in to restore law and order and the curfew from 2200 local time (1730 GMT) to 0400 (2330 GMT) was imposed...
Veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has a very serious piece in Tuesday's Daily Telegraph. He writes:
Bush and Blair have only themselves to blame, as they fought an unnecessary war in Iraq and allowed the Taliban and al-Qa'eda to fester in Central Asia during the five years that followed 9/11.
Yesterday's widespread riots in Kabul are indicative of how disillusioned many Afghans feel about the failure of the West to help rebuild their country.
Nato is now stuck with the consequences...
Fighting a full-scale guerrilla war is not what countries such as Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and others enlisted for. The mandate from their governments is reconstruction, not combat.
"Nato will not fail in Afghanistan … the family of nations will expect nothing less than success," General James Jones, the head of US and Nato forces in Europe, told a recent seminar in Madrid.
Gen Jones is now desperately trying to persuade contributing countries to end the restrictions they impose on their troops, making it impossible for some of them to fight or commanders to run a proper military campaign.
"What is the point of deploying troops who don't fight," ask many Afghans. That is why Gen Jones calls these caveats - they now number a staggering 71 - "Nato's operational cancer".
Nato's weaknesses are what worry President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government. The Taliban and al-Qa'eda know this and more. They have closely followed the testy debates in parliaments across Europe about deploying troops to Afghanistan. They count on inflicting a few bloody casualties, letting body bags arrive in European capitals, and then seeing the protests against deployment escalate.
The Taliban are also testing American resolve. Nato's deployment is part of Washington's agenda to reduce its forces in Afghanistan. It is pulling 3,000 troops out this summer and possibly more later.
The Karzai government is angry with Washington, because many Afghans see this as the start of a full American withdrawal.
Despite Bush and Blair claiming to be successfully micromanaging the war on terror, the war is expanding and the region faces increasing chaos...
Al-Qa'eda, now under the operational leadership of the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, has helped reorganise the Taliban, create unlimited sources of funding from the sale of Afghan-grown opium and forged a new alliance linking the Taliban with extremist groups in Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Iraq. Al-Qa'eda has facilitated a major exchange of fighters and training between the Taliban and the extremist groups in Iraq.
Iran is spending large sums out of its windfall oil income in buying support among disaffected and disillusioned Afghan warlords. The day America or Israel attacks Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, these Afghans will be unleashed on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan, opening a new front quite separate from the Taliban insurgency.
In Central Asia, the Western alliance is floundering. America lost its major military base in Central Asia after Uzbekistan kicked American forces out last year. Emboldened, tiny Kyrgyzstan is now demanding that Washington pay it 100 times more for the base it provides for American forces. Russia and China are working on making sure that America and Nato surrender all their remaining toeholds in Central Asia.
All this is a result of America, Britain and others taking their eye off the ball and circumventing the indisputable truth of 9/11: that the centre of global jihadism and the threat it poses the world still lies in this region, not in Iraq...
Rashid is glaringly correct, however, to note that the effort to rebuild Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban was dealt a body blow by Bush's reckless decision to invade Iraq.
The poor, poor Afghans! This is the second time in recent history that the US, having won a significant military victory inside their country, then proceeded to majorly short-change the project of post-conflict reconstruction, thereby allowing it to sink back into warlordism, esclating social-political chaos, and all the miseries attendant on that situation.
The first time that happened was after the US-supported "mujahideen" forced the Soviets to withdraw their army from the country in February 1989... But after that, Bush I, and then Clinton, promptly forgot about Afghanistan and allowed the warlords (who had been Washington's allies in the earlier anti-Soviet campaign-- along with Usama Bin You-know-who) to wreak their havoc on the country's people...
Then, in November 2001, the US won a second significant military victory in Afghanistan when it toppled the Taliban regime there (with the help of many of those same warlords). And once again, in the aftermath of the military victory, Washington took its eyes off the ball, this time swiveling them toward Baghdad.
What is the problem of the US policymaking class? When will they ever learn that a military victory is worth nothing on its own, unless the "victory" that it allows can be nailed down solidly through a smart and committed policy of social-political reconstruction for as long as it takes, afterwards?
(Actually, they did know that once--back in 1945. But somehow the lessons seemed to get forgotten after that.)
This time, the stakes for Washington, and the world, are enormous. Afghanistan seems to be turning into a powder-keg. The US position in Iraq is a draining and futile quagmire. And in both places, the collapse of US power that seems to be approaching faster each day will have much wider regional repurcussions... (Pakistan, for instance, will not easily escape from the tumult that reigns along its ungoverned borderlands with Afghanistan.)
Those of us US citizens who oppose war and violence need to be very calm as we point out that:
(2) But better than standing around being ashamed, it is time for our country to cease its reliance on violence and to find ways to redirect all that spending, training, and hardware that until now has been poured into the military, and
(3) Meanwhile, nonviolent ways certainly always exist whereby the world's conflicts and the any threats to the lives and wellbeing of the US citizenry can be addressed and resolved: We need to return to using and strengthening those nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms.
Nir Rosen has a great piece of reporting/reflection about his most recent trip to Iraq in today's WaPo "Outlook" section. He describes the trip as having taken place "a few weeks back."
The headline there is simply Iraq is the Republic of Fear. That picks up on something Rosen wrote in the body of the piece. He recalled that "Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq 'the republic of fear'"... Well, actually it was Kanaan Makiya who coined that term, writing a book by that name that catapulted him to fame, glory, and financial security back in 1990-91.
Makiya subsequently used his considerable public prominence in the US to urge on the (already weighty) pro-invasion lobby. He was one of three Iraqi oppositionists brought into one of those key meetings with Pres. Bush back in 2002.
As Rosen writes, the anti-Saddam dissidents hoped the "republic of fear"
Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.
He writes:
During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites' indifference.
But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad's Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.
This is when sectarian cleansing truly began...
So if a lot of the inter-group hatred inside Iraq has indeed been stoked and provoked by the occupation forces and their more shadowy interventionist wings, then once the occupation ends, surely that stoking will also end?
Yes, it is true that inter-group hatred, once stoked, can all too easily acquire a life and cyclical dynamic of its own. It can't "simply" be turned off-- far less reversed. But in the absence of having the imperial (oh sorry, "occupation") power always there, whispering fear-talk into people's ears, and offering and making good on deliveries of lethal weapons to all sides, then at least there is more hope for an intentional message of national unity and national reconciliation to receive a decent hearing.
Also, if none of the people and leaders can any more harbor the hope that they can launch their own sectarian adventures while also receiving some protection from that outside power, then there is more chance that all Iraqis can sit down together and figure out more realistically how to deal with each other, with none of them any more relying on outsiders to put a finger on the scales in their support...
So though I have enormous respect and admiration for Nir Rosen, and feel quite confident that he was writing the truth of the situation in Iraq exactly as he saw it-- still, I have also lived through and seen situations in which apparently deep-seated hatreds and cycles of violence have been overcome and transcended through the application of smart and compassionate policies of national unity. South Africa is one great example-- how many of us, seeing the terrible inter-communal violence back in the 1980s, did not expect a continuation/exacerbation of the bloodbaths there? Mozambique is another. Lebanon, in its own quirky and radically unfinished way, is yet another. (How many people could have expected a Maronite-Sunni alliance such as we see today, or an Aounist-Hizbullah alliance, or indeed any of the literally scores of unlikely political configurations the country has seen since 1975? And still, there, none of the political forces has ever given any serious thought to the idea of secession... )
But anyway, my disagreement with Nir is mainly on the pessimism and fatalism of his prognosis. As for the observations and analysis in today's article-- why, everyone should rush to read them.
Last November, there was an incident in the western-Iraq town of Haditha in which one Marine and 24 Iraqi civilians ended up dead. The next day, the New York Times reported this:
The Time story provoked a serious investigation of the incident by the Marine Corps command. Today, Ellen Knickmeyer writes in the WaPo that,
An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged coverup are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.
"Marines overreacted . . . and killed innocent civilians in cold blood," said one of those briefed, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war.
A number of commentators are comparing the expected effect of the full revelation of what happened in haditha to either the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, or the revelations about the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse in Iraq. However, in May-June 2006, the Bush administration starts out with the domestic and global assessments of its project in Iraq already far more negative than they were at the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations in April 2004.
Therefore, the Haditha revelations, as they are fully made, could well turn out to be "the straw that breaks the camel's back" of US resolve to stay in Iraq. This, even though it is not clear to me that what happened in Haditha that day is necessarily the worst atrocity committed by the US forces in Iraq. How about the actions committed in Fallujah, or Ramadi, or Tel Afar?
The Haditha massacre seems to have had the same psychological dynamic as the Jenin Camp massacre committed by the IOF in April 2002. In both cases, the occupation force had suffered some casualties at the hands of resisters and then went on a rampage of bloody retribution against the local population. Military forces that go on rampages are generally something commanders want to avoid-- not only because it riles the local public and helps keep the flames of resistance burning, but also because such incidents signal a dangerous lack of discipline among the troops.
That AP piece reports that, "U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force 'only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful.'"
Isn't it about 38 months too late to deliver that message at this point?
Anyway, huge kudos to John Murtha and to all who have worked hard to uncover the facts about Haditha, to keep this issue alive, and to hold accountable those responsible... Perhaps in this case, as at Abu Ghraib, "those responsible" should include an American political leadership that used an inappropriately composed and inadequately trained military force to launch a gratuitous aggression against a foreign country, and then left those soldiers and Marines there for three-plus years without generating any effective plan for how to deal with the predictable local opposition to the occupation, or how to change the political dynamic and get the troops out.
No wonder some of those Marines were pissed-off, or just plain flat-out scared. If I were under the orders of this Commander-in-Chief I would be really scared, too.
Every month the occupation force stays will see the chance of another one, or two, or three Hadithas.
How can we risk that?
Get out now, before the rot sets in even deeper!
The Bush administration should announce immediately that it intends to have all US and "coalition" forces out of Iraq by the end of October. Then the planning and negotiation for that necessary step can begin in earnest.
The western media have given quite a lot of attention to the agreement reportedly concluded recently by leaders of the various political factions among the 7,000-plus Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. As far as I can see, the best and most complete text of this agreement in English seems to be this one, published yesterday by AP.
Most of the (western) commentary around this document has presented it as a strong political weapon in the hands of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fateh. Certainly, Abbas himself has tried to package it that way, giving Hamas a public "ultimatum" that he would give them ten days to accept the plan, and if they didn't then he would submit it to popular referendum. (It is not even clear to me whether he has the right to organize such an ultimatum? Help, anyone?)But I've read that AP version of the prisoners' plan, and it seems to me its political content is at least as favorable to the Hamas view of the world as it is to Pres. Abbas's-- perhaps more so.
(In which case, his "threat" to submit the plan to a popular referendum might have just about the same degree of effectiveness as a politically coercive threat as Sen. Biden's "threat" to the Iraqis that if they don't shape up and do what he tells them then maybe the US will have to pull out of Iraq?)
Let's look at that version of the agreement in some detail.
AP tells us that the signatories were, for fateh, Marwan Barghouthi, and then other named prisoner leaders from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP. Here's what they tell us about the content:
But of course, the content of that #1 clause is distinctly different from what Abbas concurred with during the Camp David and Taba negotiations, in the Geneva Initaitive, etc-- in relation to all of which fora he had signaled his readiness to make significant concessions from this "historic" (and international-law-based) Palestinian position...
Then we come to--
Number 4 doesn't seem to add much. Then we come to,
Specifying that any "fateful or decisive" agreement should be submitted to the PNC or to a public referendum "if possible" may be a new level of detail-- but certainly, the Hamas people who have talked about this idea always made clear that any agreement would have to have some effective form of popular ratification.
The PNC is a good body to ratify it from the point of view that it represents Palestini exiles from the homeland as well as those still resident in it. If the provisions in #2 regarding the re-formation of the PNC have been implemented, this would certainly give the PNC much more legitimacy as the ratifying body.
The political content of #9, once again, is very far from Camp David, Taba, and Geneva...
Number 10 thru 14 are pretty non-controversial, though #14 has some good language regarding "banning the use of weapons between the children of the same people" and upholding the right to peaceful protest.
I found No. 15 intriguing:
The West Bank is meanwhile bracketed there not with Gaza but with [East] Jerusalem, which makes sense in two ways: (1) Jerusalem was always the metropolitan hub of the West Bank and is still regarded by Palestinians as being that, and (2) with the building of all the walls in and around East Jerusalem the situation of the city's Palestinian residents is now more similar to that of their brothers and cousins in other walled-in West Bank cities and villages than it used to be...
Finally (in this short analysis), #17 is interesting and significant:
All in all, therefore, I think it is quite possible the Hamas leaders might be happy to call Abbas's bluff by either giving their "generous agreement" to this document, or by allowing him to present it to a referendum and then campaigning strongly in its favor.
Meantime, AP's Sarah El Deeb is reporting that Hamas withdrew its militiamen from the streets of Gaza today, cpulling them back into six concentration areas. She also wrote that Hamas seemed to be "divided" over the referendum issue, " with some in the group threatening to fight the referendum idea and others embracing it."
She also wrote that Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh,
Haniyeh said that since a parliamentary election was held just four months ago, there was no need for a referendum. "We are moving according to our vision and political program, and the decision of the people," he said. "And the people decided at the ballot box."
The Hamas government has rejected international demands that it recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing interim peace deals.
Haniyeh said he'd discuss the referendum idea with Abbas in coming days, and check on legal issues.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Abbas does not have the authority to call a referendum, while senior Fatah officials said Abbas can do so by presidential decree. The legal dispute is likely to escalate should Hamas decide to fight a referendum...
(Comments-- as courteous as usual, go here.)
The Comments posting software here has not been working for the past 2.5 days. I apologise to all who've tried to submit comments since then.
So here's what I've done. I've set up an entire parallel blog for JWN comments over at Blogspot.
You need to register as a Blogger user to submit comments over there. Many of you have already done that, since I see you commenting over at Juan Cole's blog. Anyway, it's easy to do.
Unlike Juan, I do not intend to pre-moderate comments that are submitted. So the discussion at JWN COMMENTS can hopefully be just as rich as we have been having over here. I require commenters to stick to the same discourse-enhancing guidelines there that I have developed over here. And there will be the same level of continuing moderation of the Comments discussions there.
The parallel Comments blog may or may not be a longterm thing. Comments-handling over here with my Movable Type software has become much, much harder recently. I've been thinking of putting a visual screening system into the Comments template here, but haven't yet figured how to do it. Blogger software already has one. That should cut out most of the spambotting that has been clogging up the Comments software here.
So here's the URL again: http://jwn-comments.blogspot.com/. Head on over and let's try to resume our discussions over there.
Earlier this week, Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University visited the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Turnout was very good, even with students largely gone for the summer. Doing his part to reduce oil demand, Fukuyama arrived at the talk on a sparkling Harley-Davidson. The main hall was packed, as was the overflow room.
So what was the draw? Why has Fukuyama’s recently released book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale UP) caused such a sensation? Quite simply, here we have a leading inner member of the neoconservatives in the Reagan and Bush Administrations breaking ranks with his former comrades. His book and his address at UVA explain why and set out a better course for American foreign policy.
In his lively prepared remarks, Fukuyama condensed his book into 30 minutes. He began with an overview of neoconservatism’s roots. Evolving far from its origins on the Trotskyite left in the 1930’s, neoconservatives after World War II retained an idealism about the universality of human rights and were impressed that American power could be used for noble purposes. On the domestic front, neoconservatives focused on counterproductive consequences of government social engineering efforts.
Yet between these two themes emerged a key contradiction and legacy. The same movement so eloquently skeptical of government’s capacity to enact social transformation was as sure in its convictions about the utility of international force to bring about “transformation” for other countries.
Applied then to the post 9-11 world, the Bush neoconservatives made three critical misjudgments. First was the expansion of the doctrine of “pre-emptive war” into that of “preventive war.” After 9/11, Fukuyama agreed that “containment was no longer an option” and invading Afghanistan was necessary – to pre-empt a demonstrated imminent threat. But too many variables of the presumed threat from Iraq were unclear. What imminent threat was to be pre-empted?
The second misjudgment in Fukuyama’s view was the neoconservative assumption of “benevolent hegemony,” a faith in “American exceptionalism” which presumed the world would accept American “leadership” because US motives were inherently laudable. But that faith woefully “failed to appreciate deep currents of anti-Americanism that were long-standing.” Fukuyama cites the raging debates over “globalization” as a cause, but does not mention widespread Middle Eastern disquiet over US policies deemed too tilted in favor of Israel.
As Fukuyama illustrates in his book, this cocksure faith in America’s exceptional motives resulted in a severe lack of international political legitimacy for the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration pressed ahead in contempt of such opinion, on the belief that America would receive the “approbation” of the international community after it demonstrated the correctness of its claims about Saddam’s Iraq. Unfortunately for the strategy, it backfired. Instead of finding real WMD’s, America reaped what in my judgment has been just as dangerous a WMD problem; “worldwide mass distrust” of Bush Administration policies, precisely at a time when the America needs more allies, not fewer, in the fight against terror.
The third misjudgment Fukuyama attributes to the Bush neoconservatives was that nation-building would be easy. It also happens to be ironic, as the Bush Administration came into office declaring that the US would foreswear it. Answering the question, “what were they thinking?,” Fukuyama cites false lessons from the end of the Cold War and the “political miracle” that had made harmonious transitions in eastern Europe seem so easy.
In the end, Fukuyama’s core complaint with the removal of Saddam was not about its “morality,” but with its execution. That is, was the strategy likely to have a positive outcome? In 2003, and now, he deemed the gambit as not prudent. At he put it in response to a question, “the neoconservatives meant well, but made bad policy choices.” That sounded to me uncomfortably close to the old saw about the pavement on “the road to hell.”
Going forward, Fukuyama takes issue with neoconservatives on their diagnosis of the presumed threat from Islam and the offered corrective – democratization. On the former, he rejects Krauthammer-style depicions of Islam as inherently unappeasable and anti-Western, bent on a global clash with the west. Instead, he follows the French scholar Olivier Roy in seeing much of radical Islam as a social problem of identity, wherein the ongoing forces of modernization have left traditional peoples uprooted, wandering, and vulnerable to siren songs from extremists. While compelling in part, Fukuyama again sidesteps the debates over resentments engendered by US and Israeli policies.
In any case, it follows from Fukuyama’s diagnosis that he does not accept Secretary Rice’s argument about the lack of democracy as the root cause of terrorism. The narrow focus on spreading democracy will not in and of itself reduce pressures for terror. Fukuyama instead has hope for the authentic expansion of an Islamist reformation which over time might provide a basis for “separating church and state.” Alas, that process took centuries in Europe and was not without immense strife; he sees little reason why it should be much quicker for Islam. On the other hand, its a struggle that America is ill-equipped to stage manage.
In the extended question period, Fukuyama was compelling on the challenge of terrorism. He characterized the immediate terror threat as boiling down to, “small groups of fanatics swimming within a much larger sea of those pissed off at the US for other reasons.” But the US is doing poorly at draining the swamp, as excessive US firepower has repeatedly been counterproductive. “The real battle is over ideas. But the US has a big credibility problem.” That is, its hard for America to be convincing in talking about the “rule of law” when we have so little “accountability” over American actions, beginning with the scandal of Abu Ghraib.
Professor Fukuyama struggled most with rather pointed questions on democracy. When asked to explain why the US pressured the Palestinians to have elections but then refused to deal with the victorious Hamas, Fukuyama lamely inserted the qualifier that the US ought to be pushing for “liberal democracy” not “democracy” per se. Subscribing still to the view that Fatah was too corrupt and having “no illusions about Hamas,” he gamely hopes that at least the old models of autocratic governance are no longer tenable. (In his book, he vaguely hopes that Hamas might yet “evolve.”)
Fukuyama flatly admitted that pressure for democracy in American foes like Iran but not for friends like Saudi Arabia is “hypocritical.” “Of course,” at times, “other interests override.” But Fukuyama doesn’t want to see America slide back into Kissinger-style realism and instead takes refuge in the long run, where “overall, the assertion of US ideals has mattered…. It would be worse if we didn’t care about democratization at all.”
I was mildly disappointed that Fukuyama did not have the time to expand on his book proposals for building an alternate model of “realistic Wilsonianism.” He’s not referring to the neoconservative penchant for building peace via the spread of democracy. Instead, he seeks to restore the Wilsonian ideal to work through international institutions to advance American interests and values – including democracy. While he has little confidence in the existing “undemocratic” UN, he favors a “dramatically demilitarized” US foreign policy that better mixes “hard” and “soft” forms of power and influence and works more energetically, if less arrogantly, to build more robust regional organizations for delivering development and fostering cooperation to achieve mutual goals.
In his book, Fukuyama anticipates that some Americans will ask why the sole superpower, why Gulliver, should risk binding itself into new organizations with so many nattering Lilliputians to tie it down. His answer, in part, cited America’s own domestic reliance upon “checks and balances” against concentrated power. So why then should the rest of the world be expected to trust a country that at least traditionally, doesn’t trust itself? International institutions, with all their faults, may yet be the best venue for crafting cooperative action and for providing the critically needed “international legitimacy” to see it through.
Fukuyama has surely added to our understanding of neoconservatism, its roots and its evolution. In the end, he remains comfortable with generic neoconservative goals, “but it's the methods that have failed.” Yet he is no longer interested in rescuing neoconservatism, lamenting that it has become inextricably equated with catastrophic Bush Administration failures. Fukuyama aims then to bury neoconservatism as a foreign policy doctrine and his book may well stand as a first draft of its obituary.
I got home from Kansas to find the heavy envelope containing my six copies of the edition of Boston Review that contains my big article on Hamas. Then today I checked their website, and it's there too. Actually, here.
It's an intriguing-looking issue altogether. I read the article on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with interest, and look forward to reading the pieces on Venezuela and Argentina. Managing Editors Josh Cohen and Deb Chasman have been doing a super job of building the mag up into a really good, thoughtful place for consideration and discussion of policy issues both global and national. Josh is on the point of leaving MIT, which has hosted BR for many years now. He's going to teach at Stanford instead-- on the far side of the country. But I gather he will still keep his editorial role at BR, which is great. I admired his work on democratic theory long before I ever even knew he was an editor as well...
Back to my piece. The first half is my big wrap-up of the important points from the interviews and reporting I did during my Feb-March trip to Palestine and Israel. Haniyeh, Zahar, etc. Much (but not all) will be familiar to attentive JWN readers. In the second half, I did something new and just interviewed myself, teasing out in Q&A format some of the implications of the sea-change in Palestinian politics that the Hamas electoral victory in Januray represented.
I asked myself questions like:
How will Israel and the international community react to Hamas’s attempt to establish a PA government?
I wrote the first draft of the piece, oh my, maybe back in late March? Then it sat for a while, according to BR's bimonthly publishing schedule; then it got tossed between me and an editor a couple of times, and updated... At the end of all that work I pleaded with Josh and Deb to be allowed to have a dateline put on it. Given how fast political developments move in Palestine, I wanted the "closing date" for updates to be quite clear.. So the dateline is May 1.
It still holds up pretty well, though May is now far advanced.
Anyway, I'll finish this post now. Tomorrow I'll have one about more current Palestinian developments.
I'm going to be traveling quite a bit this summer. I'm going with Bill the spouse to some pretty nice places in Europe, then I'm going to Uganda for a conference on ethics and development. Anyway, I probably won't want to be chained to the task of keeping the posts here on JWN fresh 'n' up-to-date while we're in Europe... And while I'm in Uganda who knows what the internet access will be like?
Meantime, quite a lot might continue to be happening in the US-Iran sphere over the months ahead.... Which is one of the reasons I'm particularly happy to be able to announce that my friend Scott Harrop has agreed to post pieces here between now and mid-August. In addition to being a very good neighbor, Scott has a lot of experience analyzing contemporary Iranian politics and society, a field he knows a lot more about than I do. He also knows a lot about Middle Eastern politics, international affairs in general, and who knows what else...
I've told Scott he can post about any or all of the subjects that JWN has traditionally covered. Heck, while I'm away maybe he'll even create some entirely new "Categories" here. Who knows?
While I'm away, Scott will also be moderating the comments boards.
I'll still be posting here with my usual frequency through June 20 or so, while Scott finds his sea-legs. Then between June 20 and August 15 I'll post when (1) I feel like it and (2) I'm able to do so.
Maybe having this break from the ball-and-chain aspect of the blog will give me a chance to think more about future directions for it. All (constructive) suggestions are welcome!
Meanwhile, big thanks to Scott for doing this for us all.
I'm in Kansas for a couple of days, doing something urgent and personal...
Back home in Virginia, meanwhile, I see that Al Weed, the Democratic challenger for our local US Congressional seat, has been getting some some potentially supportive attention in various places. (Here and here.)
I've known Al for a few years now. He's a former Special Ops officer who's served in numerous overseas places, from Vietnam to Bosnia (the latter, while in the reserves). He's been cultivating a vineyard not far from Charlottesville for many years now . Crucially, from my point of view, he has been quite clear on the question of the war against Iraq, and quite clearly opposed to it, from the very beginning.
On his website now, he writes:
As Americans, we must understand the potential costs of a long term presence in Iraq...
Our men and women in uniform deserve to return to their families. To stay indefinitely puts us at risk of being dragged into a guerilla war without a foreseeable end and cost us dearly in lives and resources. As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I speak from experience when I say that this is a possibility that we must carefully avoid.
(2) Virgil Goode has become badly ensnared in the Wade-Cunningham-MZM corruption scandal.
(3) Al, and the 5th district Democratic Committee have all worked hard and effectively to rebuild the Democratic apparatus in the district. You see, Goode had originally been elected from the district as a Democrat. Then he left the party and ran once as an independent. Then in the next election he ran as a Republican. Those switches left the Democratic Party apparatus in tatters, and it has been a long hard slog to rebuild it.
It's a little hard to blog from here as the folks I'm staying with have no broadband and just one landline phone. So as I'm posting this now over their phone line, I'm completely blocking them from using it!
This narrative completely ignores the "elephant in the room" of Iraqi politics, i.e. the continuing and heavy-handed influence exercised over the Iraqi parliament and government by US officials, primarily "Ambassador"-- in reality, "Viceroy"-- Zalmay Khalilzad.
Indeed, Khalilzad was actually in the chamber yesterday
during the crucial parliamentary session that confirmed PM Maliki's
(still incomplete) government list. WaPo reporters Nelson Hernandez and
Omar Fekeiki made clear in this
report that Khalilzad was not only present but also helping to
direct and stage-manage events there:
While a man read a verse from the Koran, Khalilzad talked to
a Sunni leader, then abruptly stood up and left the room. He returned a
few minutes later with Adnan al-Dulaimi and Khalaf al-Elayan, two
leaders of the main Sunni coalition, who both appeared to be reluctant
to attend.
Throughout all those years one crucial task for the outside
power was to control the outcome of the crucial vote in which the
Beirut parliament elected the country's president. It always did
this indirectly, through two main mechanisms:
(2) reliance on a broad network of allies-- whether
ideological allies, or allies-for-hire-- from among the body of the
parliamentarians.
To do so would, after all, give the lie to the whole "story" about the independence of Lebanon!
And I imagine the same was true in most of the parliaments of East and Central Europe during the years of Soviet domination... (I wonder, too, whether the local South African viceroys would actually go inside the parliaments of the nominally "independent" Bantistans to direct crucial political developments there?)
It is blindingly clear to me that the fact that Khalilzad felt he had to go into the chamber (and not just as a passive "guest" or "observer") signals a deep failure of Washington's political project inside Iraq. If you look at those two mechanisms of indirect control of a parliament that I identified above, it is clear that the US forces have completely control physical access to the Iraqi parliament, which is located inside the "Green Zone". But what the US administrators in Iraq evidently lack is any confidence that the parliamentarians gathered inside the chamber would, if left alone out of Khalilzad's sight, act at his bidding.
That, despite the huge amounts of money the US has always had available to hand out as bribes to Iraqi political figures!
In Lebanon, throughout the long years of Syria's overlordship there, financial incentives were a strong feature of parliament's every-six-years "election" of a president. It was quite a common observation that the Lebanese MPs would be engaging in an elaborate game of financial "chicken", since the price paid for each individual MP's vote would increase steeply as the Syrians (or in 1982, Israelis) came close to meeting the number needed for the election to succeed-- but once that number had been reliably reached, the price would suddenly plummet to zero.
Gosh, playing that game that must have been one of the hardest and most stressful jobs those MPs ever had to do during their very lengthy terms in power...
But in Iraq, despite the huge amount of money the US administrators have available, and the evident current penury of most Iraqis, Khalilzad can't even be certain he can reliably line up a parliamentary vote in the direction he wants without being physically present inside the chamber?? What is happening here???
(This fact actually gives me cause for some real hope that the parliament is not going to act as merely a rubber-stamp for the Bushists' desires and projects in Iraq...)
Also on the topic of this "elephant" in the Iraqi chamber, I read with interest this piece by John Burns in today's NYT.
He writes that, in contrast with the policy the US
administrators adopted in spring 2005 during the long-drawn-out process
Ibrahim Jaafari went through as he formed the Iraqi transitional
government--
Then, the policy laid down by John D. Negroponte, President Bush's first ambassador to Iraq, now back in Washington as director of national intelligence, was to respect Iraq's standing as a sovereign state, avoiding heavy-handed American interference in the government's formation to discourage an attitude of dependence among Iraqi leaders.
During these [current] negotiations, diplomatic sensitivities
were played down as the envoy who succeeded Mr. Negroponte last summer,
Zalmay Khalilzad, acted as a tireless midwife in the birthing of the
new government. An Afghan-born scholar who worked on Iraq policy in
Washington prior to the invasion, Mr. Khalilzad worked closely with Mr. Maliki,
the new prime minister, in reviewing candidates for crucial ministries,
and shuttling between rival Iraqi party leaders in an effort to sign
them up to the American vision of a national unity government.
One thing that remains unclear is how much independence Mr.
Maliki will have from attempts to exercise oversight by Mr. Jaafari,
who remains the new prime minister's political superior as Dawa's
leader, and who resisted pressures to relinquish the government
leadership for weeks until all but his closest loyalists abandoned him.
In that entire article today, he identified not a single source by name. Instead, in his second paragraph there he indicated only that it was based on conversations with "a wide range of [American] officers and diplomats interviewed before Saturday's events."
In his lede (lead paragraph), he conveyed what I read as a sense
among these people that the Bushist project in Iraq might well
fail rather badly over the months ahead:
So Iraq has a new government-- sort of.
That is, in Baghdad today, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented an intricately negotiated list of 37 government members to the parliament, which then approved it. What the list lacked, however, were names for the two positions most crucial to the wellbeing of the country's people: Interior Minister and Defense Minister.
Ever since the entry of the US and coalition forces into the country and the accompanying collapse of the Saddamist power structures, the country's most glaring problem has been the atrocious lack of public security. Without public security, the work of none of the other ministries has any chance of success. Therefore, I would say that until we see ministers in those two still unfilled positions (and I gather there is also a third unfilled position for national security affairs, too?) and moreover, until we see that these ministers and their ministries are capable of doing their jobs and empowered to do them, then the establishment of this "government" has little meaning.
This government, if it is ever to be able to govern Iraq, needs to succeed in addressing four tough challenges:
(2) to codify that entente in a final version of the as-yet-incomplete national Constitution;
(3) to rebuild administrative structures for the ministries and all other government entities that are effective and capable (and preferably also fully democratically accountable-- but see below) ; and
(4) to negotiate the modalities of the (preferably very speedy) withdrawal of all foreign forces and to take whatever other actions are needed to guard Iraq's national sovereignty and independence from outside influence.
But there were two crucial differences between those occupations of 1945 and the post-2003 occupation of Iraq:
(2) The policy of "imposed democratization" that the Allies pursued in Germany and Japan in 1945 was embedded in a broader, and very successfully implemented, policy of seeking the rebuilding and rehabilitation of those two societies. In Iraq, there may (or may not) have been some desire on the part of the Bush administration to rebuild and rehabilitate Iraqi society. But if there was such a desire, the actual policies pursued (and the resources deployed) were woefully unequal to the task. Once again, therefore, absent any serious and successful US commitment to the rehabilitation of Iraqi society, the US really loses any claim it might otherwise have had to be able to determine the shape of Iraq's political future.
But honestly, since I am a citizen of the "occupying country" (okay, actually of two of the occupying countries), I have to say that what the Iraqis do right now is their business. It is none of my business except inasmuch as I can help persuade my government to undertake a withdrawal of its occupation armies from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous.
(We also have many very urgent democracy-rebuilding tasks we need to undertake back here in the US... And if we focus our attentions on those more closely, that can have good effects for everyone involved, at home and abroad.)
In line with the above conclusion, I have decided to replace the "Democracy denied in Iraq" counter that I used to have up on the sidebar here with an "Occupation of Iraq" counter, that counts the days since the beginning of the US invasion and occupation of the country. I thought I should complement that with an "Occupation of Palestine and Golan" counter, since it is clear that we are talking about the same phenomenon of rule of a territory and its indigenous residents by a foreign military apparatus in both (all) of these cases. As we can see from the counters, after around 200 more days, the US occupation of Iraq will have lasted 10 percent of the time of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Golan.
... So I wish Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki well. I hope most fervently that he and his colleagues can accomplish the four tasks I have described above. And I will follow their efforts with just the same degree of interest in the future.
Back in May the US Congress, in its cravenly Israelocentric way, voted huge gobs of money to go into the destabilization of Iran under the so-called "Iran Freedom Support Act". (Which follows the same strategy the neo-cons used back at the beginning of their project to "con" Americans into invading Iraq. Anyone remember that?)
But how on earth is the administration going to spend all this new IFSA money?
I am sure that the people tasked to do this-- who include several longtime neocons from the Pentagon's infamous former Office of Special Plans-- will have lots of "plans" for how to go about it. But one of them may well be to do all kinds of disinformation about the Iranian regime... Including getting their old pal Amir Taheri to pen an op-ed in Canada's National Post which claims that last Monday, the Iranian parliament passed a law that,
Religious minorities would have their own colour schemes. They will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the colour of their zonnar.
Except that all of Amir Taheri's scaremongering about these special dress-codes and insignia is constructed out of, well, "whole cloth". (Which is to say, it is quite baseless.)
But it seems that some "world leaders" are prepared to believe just about anything bad they hear about the Iranian regime, and don't hesitate to criticise Teheran roundly for its alleged misdeeds even before they do any even basic checking on the veracity of the underlying accusations. Thus, we see in this report in The Australian that,
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he had only seen reports about the law but that he would not be surprised by them.
"Unfortunately, we have seen enough already from the Iranian regime to suggest that it is very capable of this kind of action," he said.
"It think it boggles the mind that any regime on the face of the earth would want to do anything that could remind people of Nazi Germany," he added.
"The fact that such a measure could even be contemplated, I think, is absolutely abhorrent."
It seems that on May 14, the Iranian parliament did pass legislation dealing with the need to buttress the existing nationwide dress-code and build up an Iranian clothing industry to support it... But colleagues whom I trust who read Farsi assure me that there is nothing in there at all about any special clothing or markers for religious minorities.
Taheri has been a busy person these past few days... If you go to the information page about him on the website of the well-connected neocon "Speakers Bureau" Eleana Benador Associates, you will see that he has published eleven op-ed pieces since May 9. Nearly all of them are virulently anti-Teheran. The main exception to that is this totally non-credible piece of propaganda about how well the US occupation authorities have been doing in Iraq...
Well, Taheri is just one ideological (though probabloy at this very point, very nicely paid) uber-hack. The more serious question is why national leaders like Howard and Harper were so perfectly primed to "respond" so quickly to the very damaging (and baseless) accusation that he had made about a foreign government. Maybe next time they could have their people do some fact-checking before they open their mouths?
It's a kind of rite of passage for new Israeli leaders: soon after they have finished forming their coalition government at home, they need to visit the United States.... And in the US, of course, all the powerful people from the President to the members of Congress, to the leaders of the big, politically powerful Jewish-American organizations, to the captains of industry and finance, to Hollywood performers, to the editorial board of the Washington Post-- you name it--seem quite prepared to bend their busy schedules quite out of shape in order to accommodate the new annointed one.
But in the run-up to this love-fest, typically, the new PM will call in the correspondent of the NYT and give an important interview. This text serves to frame the agenda for the public talks the PM hopes to have while in the US.
So yesterday, Ehud Olmert called in Steven Erlanger and Greg Myre of the NYT, and gave them an interview out of which the NYT's editorial people helpfully plucked the following snippet to serve as a title: Israel Will Buy Supplies for Gaza Hospitals, Premier Says.
Ehud Olmert the humanitarian! Oh, now we understand what makes the man tick! (Irony alert.)
In the interview Olmert was reportesd as saying that Israel would "pay if necessary from our own pockets" to make sure the Gaza hospitals don't lack medical supplies... Well, maybe it would help if he started by giving the PA government the three-plus months'-worth of Palestinian customs and other governmental revenues that Israel has quite illegally been withholding since the Palestinian elections of last January? (Erlanger write about this withheld money without specifying for the readers that it was Palestinian money from the get-go.)
Olmert also told his interviewers that he had agreed to take the "calculated risk" of opening the Karni goods-crossing point between Israel and Gaza. They showed a little sliver of reportorial independence by noting in their report that, " On Thursday, however, Karni was open only for exports to Gaza because of 'security reasons,' the Israeli Army said."
Erlanger and Myre also-- interestingly, from my perspective-- write this:
Anyway, the most interesting part of the interview, for me, was this:
The plan, he said, "needs to be coordinated with a lot of sensitivity with our different partners, particularly the United States government and the president, and of course, the United Nations, the Europeans, the Russians."
What about the Palestinians?
He stopped and said, "I don't believe that at any time in the future we will change things without talking to the Palestinians." But the decision, he made clear, would be Israel's. [So the point of talking to the Palestinians would be-- ?]
Mr. Bush is the crucial figure, Mr. Olmert said. "I feel that I come to my senior partner, and I hope that he is ready to accept me as his partner."
His predecessor and ally, Ariel Sharon, believed that the United States was Israel's only real ally. Mr. Olmert, almost 20 years younger, is a professional politician who did not come out of the election with as strong a mandate as he and Washington might have hoped. Some American officials are concerned that Mr. Olmert may have bitten off more than he — or, perhaps, a politically weakened Mr. Bush — can chew.
And then, look at that last sentence quoted there. Note the assumption embedded in it that "American officials" have the same goals as Olmert-- and also at Erlanger and Myre's failure to distance themselves, as independent "reporters", from that assumption in any way... Instead, they convey a strong sense of "We're all in this together!"-- Olmert, the Bush administration, and the two of them. (But then there's also the expression of concern that Bush's political weakness may damage this joint project that all these parties want to pursue... )
There a few interesting languaging issues in the article, too. One has to do with the English translation of the Hebrew term hitkansut, which is the name that Olmert has given at home to his planned project to carve up the West Bank. When I was at the Wilson Center conference on Israel and Palestine last week, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said, "In Hebrew it's a lovely word. But the most common English translation for it would be 'concentration.' That is obviously not such a lovely term in this context."
Erlanger and Myre make no mention at all of this "most common" rendering of the word in English. Instead, they write that Olmert "has called his ambitious project 'hitkansut,' which best translates as consolidation."
Right.
(I note that others in Israel have translated the word as "convergence". If they were to ask for my advice, I would say, stick to "convergence"-- it has a nice hippy-ish New Age feel to it... Actually, if they were to ask my advice, I'd say, "Quit playing around with all these settler-colonialist, land-grabbing plans and start dealing with your Palestinian neighbors as your human equals!")
Another language issue is in a part of the interview that I had omitted from the longer quote above: "This first trip to Washington is for discussion, Mr. Olmert said, calling consolidation 'a dynamic concept' requiring preparation." Maybe someone should tell these people that in Rumsfeld-speak, "dynamic" means it involves warfighting?
And finally, fairly disturbingly, at the end we have Olmert's revival of the use of extremely distasteful pathological analogies to describe the Palestinian issue.
Erlanger and Myre write that Olmert compared the Palestinian issue,
Back in July/August 2002, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon used another distasteful pathological analogy to refer to the Palestinian militants, when he said they were a "cancer" that had to be aggressively dealt with.
This use of pathological analogies is disturbingly reminiscent of the way the Nazis referred to the groups of people they considered subhuman: Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people with mental disabilities, etc. Olmert can try all he wants to present himself as a great humanitarian, but his use of such language to refer to his neighbors seems very far from humane...
My distinguished colleague Reidar Visser has a great new piece up on the 'Open Democracy' website. It's titled Iraq's partition fantasy. It presents-- in the form of a strong but measured argument-- some of the main themes in his book (which I have not yet finished reading, alas)... These are also themes that JWN readers are probably already familiar with from his comments here and from his other works as cited and linked to here.
What I really like about the new piece are three things: (1) Visser writing in "persuasive/opinion" mode rather than in the dryer tones of a professional historian (though of course he bases his opinions and arguments closely on his histroical and other work); (2) how well he writes these hard-hitting arguments; and (3) that he has put hyperlinks into the text. Yay!
He certainly does make some excellent arguments against the various partitionist "fantasies" suggested by politicians and armchair theorists in the west.
Visser's book is about the lead-up to the attempt that some Basrawis (people from Basra) made in 1920 to form an indpendent city state-- a sister, if you will, to the city-states then emerging all along the southern coast of the nearby Persian/Arabian Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Umm al-Qawain, Ras al-Khaima, etc etc. Certainly, compared with many of those "Imaras"-- princedoms-- Basra was much larger, more prosperous, and more populous... So it wasn't prime facie a crazy idea. But it never went anywhere... And Visser's book traces that whole story.
(I am really enjoying reading it. I love closely textured histories that have such a wealth of ethnographic and socio-political detail along with the diplomatic/administrative history.)
So anyway, in the OD piece, Visser looks at current developments-- and proposals-- in light of that history from 1920.
He writes:
For this was not a clergy-driven attempt at establishing some sort of Shi'a state. Instead, it was a scheme to create a small merchant republic on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab, a pro-British enclave that would cover Basra and the strategic coastal strip between the Gulf and the delta of the great Mesopotamian rivers north to Qurna only.
Moreover, it was an emphatically cosmopolitan enterprise: Arabs, Persians, Indians and Jews came together in pursuit of the Basra separatist movement. Sunni Arab emigrants from Najd were the moving spirits. The Shi'a Arabs, for their part, actually had their greatest numerical strength in the vast former Ottoman province of Baghdad (and not in Basra, as many of today's partitionists seem to believe); apart from a few pro-separation figures based in the immediate vicinity of the city of Basra they remained totally aloof from the secessionist bid.
Even though it constituted the most concerted domestic "southern" challenge to the territorial integrity of Iraq in 20th-century history, the Basra separation movement ended in fiasco. The separatists were the richest men of Basra – owners of enormous tracts of fertile date gardens and successful businessmen with networks extending into other parts of the world – and yet, they were unable to muster popular support for their daring enterprise.
Who was their enemy? An authoritarian regime in Baghdad with the military means to drive home its own megalomaniac ideas about Iraqi nationalism? A British colonial machine with a singularity of purpose so entrenched as to make impossible any challenges to London's preferred vision of a unified Iraq? Far from it. The Iraqi government apparatus of the 1920s was decidedly flimsy, and throughout the period of the mandate, the British would periodically contemplate scuttling "back to Basra". Both these forces would have had trouble in stemming the separatist project if it had in fact enjoyed universal local support.
No, it was the young men of Basra – impecunious and landless as they may have been – who defeated the separatist project, by presenting a competing and very different vision for the future. Many of them had been employed as civil servants in late Ottoman times, and had colleagues from the areas further north. Among themselves – and Ottoman documents prove this beyond doubt – they had referred to the territory between Basra and Samarra (and sometimes even Mosul) as "Iraq" long before 1914, quite contrary to the baseless but now widespread idea that there had been no sense of connection between Basra and Baghdad before the British.
Armed with this "Iraq" concept, the young intelligentsia converted the south to Iraqi nationalism at an early stage, with schools, newspapers and voluntary associations – not extortion or the use of force – as their principal instruments. The process was more universal in the south than in the north of Iraq, but even in the Kurdish areas there have been considerable regional variations with regard to relations with Baghdad, and in historical perspective only Sulaimaniya has an unbroken record of antipathy to the Iraqi capital.
While western observers soon became enthralled by the project, ordinary Iraqi Shi'a have proven more difficult to convince, and grassroots activity in support of this sectarian scheme has remained limited. In the Kurdish-dominated north the urge towards autonomy is far more widespread, but here too, perceptible regional differences – in this case between east and west – remain. They pose another challenge to neat ethnic categorisations whose principal virtue seems to be their soothing effects on the minds of western politicians.
Moreover, just as in the 1920s the alternative to decentralisation – Iraqi nationalism – remains flourishing. Even today, in a climate of growing sectarian terrorism calculated to obliterate the idea of coexistence, many Iraqis stubbornly refuse to reveal their ethno-religious identity when interrogated by western journalists. Many simply say they are "Iraqis" – an answer that tends to cause consternation among interviewers who expect more specific answers.
Among several key Iraqi leaders who never went into exile abroad, the situation is much the same. "Federalism" appears not to exist in the vocabulary of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani – who consistently emphasises national "unity" in his official pronouncements – and Muqtada al-Sadr's radical Islamism comes with a strong Iraqi nationalist component that foreigners often overlook.
In sum, then, the process of regionalisation in Iraq is far more tentative and open-ended than the orderly caricature maps currently bandied about in western think-tanks would indicate. But those partition schemes are more than a distortion of Iraqi history and today's realities. They also demonstrate flagrant contempt for the fragile democratic process which is underway in Iraq. This is rather ironic, given that many of those who advocate partition take pride in describing themselves as staunch opponents of "neo-imperialisms" of all descriptions.
He writes:
What are the implications of the lax requirements for calling a referendum, whereby comparatively small factions in local councils or the governorate populations at large (33% and 10% respectively) may challenge existing administrative borders and launch referendums and, conceivably, counter-referenda?
And what happens if a referendum fails and Iraqi nationalism once more prevails – can the challenge to the unitary state be repeated, and if so when?
If no checks are established here, Iraqi politics might easily degenerate into a perpetual cycle of referenda, with politicians frenetically probing for facile answers in a cultural tapestry that above all has proven complex and resistant to disentanglement procedures.
On these and other issues, the Iraqi constitutional framework has yet to provide clear answers. This is also where outsiders interested in the Iraqi transition process should properly expend their energies and contribute to debate, instead of undemocratically enforcing their own black-and-white thinking and fully-fledged federal models on a land whose people can draw on a centuries-long local tradition of multiethnic coexistence.
Partitionist quick-fixes designed along unimaginative ethno-religious lines would pull in the opposite direction of coexistence. They would constitute a cowardly cave-in to those foreign terrorists who for three years straight have unsuccessfully tried to blow up the sturdy social fabric of Iraq. The crude maps that accompany the break-up propaganda are an affront to the complex historical experiences they claim to represent, and encapsulate a continuous and highly disturbing trend towards the complete expropriation of the Iraqi transition process.
But Reidar-- super job there!
Jonathan Edelstein and I both have new posts up at the Transitional Justice Forum blog. I put mine up last night. It's about Serbia. Jonathan put his up today. It's about Uganda. Amazingly, though, both deal with a number of the same tough issues, including the difficulty of negotiating between the interests of peace and those of justice, and also between the desire to punish one prominent accused perpetrator and the (peacemaking) interests of the broader community...
(The former of those dilemmas is a theme that Jonathan and I have both written quite a lot about.)
Anyway, head on over and join the discussions there.
I've been a little AWOL here recently in commenting on political developments inside Iraq. I guess once the US machinations against Daawa/Sadr were rebuffed I figured that that was one significant watershed, and that Nuri al-Maliki's subsequent work of government formation would be almost impossible to follow from a distance.
I do, however, have a couple of questions that I need answers to. And I invite readers to help us all find answers!
The first question is this: Even if supposing Maliki is able to pull together a coalition of government ministers that can win a robust majority in the parliament (not terribly difficult)-- will it actually be able to govern the country?
I see two main problems in this regard: first, the still heavy hand of the US occupation presence throughout the country, including inside most of the important ministries; and second, the extreme degradation of the administrative and other capabilities of the ministries that has occurred under the US occupation to date. (Obviously, those two problems can't be completely disaggregated.)
For example, if you're even something as innocuous (and necessary) as the Minister of Agriculture, and you want to make sure that farmers are getting everything they need in terms of seeds, credit, fertilizers, marketing help, veterinary services, etc-- well, how on earth do you do it unless you have a functioning ministry, the ability to communicate with all the parts of the country, reliable procurement mechanisms, etc etc?
... And my second big question is this: If, as is expected, Maliki announces his government over the weekend, do I take the 'Democracy Denied in Iraq' counter down off the sidebar here at that point, or wait a bit before deciding that?
I guess this latter judgment has to do with whether I judge that the government has sufficient democratic legitimacy for me to take the counter down, or not. The whole concept of the counter was based on the judgment I'd make back in December that the vote then, though flawed, did have sufficient bona fides to be counted as democratically legitimate. (As I have written before in connection with developments in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in the context of a complex political transition what one is looking for is not a completely perfect election but one that is sufficiently free and fair.)
Anyway, regarding the "Democracy Denied in Iraq" counter, after I put up here in early 2005, during the complicated post-election negotiations that led to Ibrahim Jaafari's formation of a broad "transitional government"-- as soon as he had formed it, I took the counter down. I gave him the benefit of the doubt at that point, really.
But this time, the situation is more serious. This government is supposed to be "the real thing": Iraq's real, full-term, and presumably fully empowered national government. Not a "transitional" government any more.
But how fully empowered will it be in practice? (See my first question above.)
The views of readers on these points are very welcome...
Meanwhile, let's all just note that it is now 154 days-- just about five months-- since the December 15 election. Given the decisive nature of the results of the election, coalition formation absolutely need not have lasted more than one month. So Amb. Zal Khalilzad's machinations have robbed the Iraqis of four months of self-government already. And it is not just that those "stolen" four months were neutral ones for Iraqis. Indeed, nearly the whole of the past five months has seen a ghastly exacerbation of insecurity throughout the country...
End the occupation and all its machinations! Bring the US troops home!
I finally got to meet Cindy Sheehan yesterday. She and Ann Wright both came to Charlottesville to speak at a public forum organized by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice.
We got well over 400 people there, which was exciting.
Cindy, I guess I don't need to introduce to the readers here. Ann was one of the three US Foreign Service Officers who resigned the day the Bush administration started bombing Iraq. (Here's her resignation letter.) At that time she was the No.2 person in the US Embassy in Mongolia. She is a whip-smart, extremely principled, and very hardworking person! She was wearing a tee-shirt with the numbers of US (and Iraqi) casualties prominently taped to the front...
She had some really interesting ideas about how CCPJ ought to reach out and talk to folks at the US military's very own law school-- the "Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School"-- which is located right here in town, next to the UVA law school and right behind one of our main shopping centers. She noted that the head JAG officers from all four of the military services had played a strong role in trying to uphold the government's compliance with the Geneva Conventions, etc, and said it was quite likely we might find folks at the JAG school who have served down in Guantanamo, or in Bagram, or Iraq.
(I actually thought a while back we ought to do try to talk to some JAG school folks here. So it's good that Ann kind of jogged my memory on that.)
Anyway, it was really inspiring to meet both Ann and Cindy, and to hear what they said. I don't have time to write a lot here about it. If you have the capability to download a podcast, you can hear the whole forum yourself, here.
I do have to say, though, that I thought the evening went on a bit long. There were two fairly lengthy spoken introductions and then quite a lot of songs from Terri Allard before we got to the two main speakers. Many in the audience were tired even before Ann and Cindy got started-- and it looked as though both of them were pretty tired, too...
These two women are national treasures! We have to look after them!
A footnote: the reason we were able to get these two fabulous women to come and speak here was because of David Swanson, an indefatigable antiwar organizer and nationwide Democratic activist who moved here to town with his wife Anna just a few months ago. We are so lucky to have him him here. Thanks for everything you do, David!
Last Wednesday, I spent the afternoon on the National Mall in Washington DC, helping to set out the (then) 2,428 pairs of combat boots that are at the center of the American Friends Service Committee's traveling antiwar installation, "Eyes Wide Open".
Each pair of boots represents a US service-member who has been killed in Iraq. The two clunky black boots in each pair have their laces tied together (for easy handling) and have the name, age, and hometown of the represented GI on a laminated card that is attached there. I gather that some of the boots are the actual combat boots of that soldier, and some are simply representative. Members of the anti-war veterans' organizations that have been working with AFSC on the project have been in touch with all the family members involved, who have the option of having "Name withheld" put on the tag if they don't want their loved one's name included in the exhibition.
Very, very few of the tags that I read said "Name withheld."
When I was working down there, it was the day before the exhibit was due to open. We had a number of preliminary tasks to do. One was simply to count the pairs of boots in the group of plastic bins used to transport the boots pertaining to each of the different states. A fellow-volunteer named Constance and I counted our way through the bins for a number of different states, finishing up with Texas.
Even just handling the boots to do the counting was already a much more moving experience than I'd been expecting. The boots had been brought here in big Rubbermaid-style storage bins, that were laid out along the side of the grass there in alphabetical order by state. We (and other volunteer duos working alongside us) had to take the boots out of each bin, counting them as we went, and then put them back in, counting again (to make sure.) Constance and I got into a rhythm. There were so many bins! It's not till you stop to think about it that you realize how much sheer space 2,428 pairs of combat boots must take up. Each bin held roughly 20 pairs.
One-two-three-four... Slow and systematic. Try not to get the laces knotted around each other. Lay the pairs out within easy reach as you take them out. Neater works better...
Seventeen-eighteen-nineteen-twenty-twentyone. Right! Twentyone. Now, let's count them back in. "You start!" One-two-three-four...
Then you start reading the names and the pitifully young ages of these men (and the much rarer women). And the hometowns. And you get to thinking about the life snuffed out of this young person.
Many of the boots have family memorabilia (laminated against the weather) also attached to them: Photos, poems, children's drawings. Stuffed animals. Flags. Funeral eulogies.
It can get to you. But you can't let it get to you, because you have to keep focused on the counting.
Eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen...
And then we came to Texas. Other duos had kind of side-skipped it, since its collection ran to twelve big bins. While Constance was off getting some water to drink, I took a deep breath and started in on it.
Texas added up to 214 pairs of boots.
"I wonder how many of those funerals George W. Bush went to?"
H'mm.
Later, I worked with the groups of people trying to lay the boots out on the big broad lawn there. We were at the Washington Monument end of the Mall-- but you could look up easily and see the great looming mass of the US Capitol Building at the far end of the greensward. The building, that is, where back in October 2002 the 535 lawmakers acting with their "eyes wide open" gave President Bush carte blanche to do anything he damn' well pleased to Iraq... including, to invade it.
The boots were laid out in a broad, grid-based array. There were 39 in each row-- meaning some 63 rows in all. Roughly four feet between each pair. If you think of all those 2,428 soldiers standing there to attention, this is roughly where their boots would be.
But the soldiers aren't there...
This was mind-numbing work, too. Hauling the bins along the lines, taking out the boots, having someone get down and arrange them properly, respectfully... The work was a little disorganized, since the guys laying out the grids with strings and red golf-tees often weren't far ahead of those of us trying to position the boots.
The blazing sun ground its way slowly down the big sky.
There were lots of passers-by. Nearly everyone seemed very interested, and very supportive. Random people stopped and offered to help. It got so that when I needed someone to help me haul a bin onto one of the little moving-dollies they had there, I would just ask a passer-by and he or she would always seem happy to help.
(George W. Bush is in deep, deep trouble over this war.)
When my four hours were up, I walked over to the other part of the exhibit, where they'd been working with huge piles of civilian shoes that represented the Iraqi civilian deaths during the war.
Here, they hadn't even bothered to have a one-to-one representativity. Which total do you count, anyway? I was glad to see they had a big board highlighting the "epidemiological" study that concluded-- ways back, a long time ago now-- that just under 100,000 Iraqis had met a premature death on account of the war.
What the organizers had done with the pairs of civilian shoes was great. These, too, had the two shoes in each pair attached together, and had tags with the names of killed Iraqi civilians on them. But groups of volunteers had been spending long hours here laying them out end to end in the form of a huge and very complex labyrinth.
"Go ahead, walk it!" someone said. I did. I kept my eyes focused on the shoes as I walked: men's shoes, women's shoes, girls' shoes, boys' shoes, baby shoes. Scuffed and mangled shoes. Brand new party shoes. I looked at the shoes and followed the labyrinth in toward the center, and forgot all about the Capitol Building looming so close above me. It was very meditative.
... Well, I never had the chance to see the whole layout of all of the boots and shoes there. I gather that between Thursday and Sunday they had a large number of different activities planned there.
On Thursday, there were terrible storms all over DC. The exhibit organizers had made a decision not to try to take the boots off the exhibit to a dry place, but just to let them stand. I guess combat boots are meant to withstand bad weather. I don't know about the civilian shoes, though. As I went to various meetings in DC Thursday and saw the downpours, I thought about the boots standing there.
... Well, guess who else went to the exhibit while it was up? Richard Perle-- the "Prince of Darkness" himself! One of the major intellectual architects of the war.
Bill Perry, a disabled veteran of the US-Vietnam War and a member of "Vietnam Veterans Against the War" and other antiwar groups, was there and happened to recognize Perle. He put this post about the confrontation that a number of the antiwar people there-- mainly war vets-- had with Perle up onto David Swanson's website Afterdowningstreet.org.
There are pictures there, too. I particularly like this one.
Perry wrote there:
They thought they wouldn't be noticed using the "Boots" demo background during the speaking portion of the EWO demo...
Yes, it certainly seems very exploitative if Perle and the people filming him were using the Boots installation as a background for an attempt to rehabilitate him politically...
On the other hand, at least Perle did dare to go near the exhibit and be exposed to the potent reminders it gives of the costs of war.
As for our President???
David Steinbruner, the author of the piece I just posted here, is one of the emergency physicians featured in the new documentary 'Baghdad ER' that HBO will be screening this coming weekend.
CNN had this pre-release description of the movie on their website last week. (Also here.) Read the description there. It makes me definitely want to see the movie, though we don't have HBO.
The WaPo's Paul Farhi had a short report in today's paper about a special screening of the movie that was held Monday night at the National Museum of American History. The main thrust of Farhi's piece was to note that the support the Pentagon once had for the movie project has waned drastically in recent weeks.
He writes:
The documentary, shot over 2 1/2 months in mid-2005, contains graphic and disturbing footage of soldiers reeling from their wounds -- in some cases, dying of them -- as Army medical personnel try to save them. The film illustrates the compassion and dedication of the staff of the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. But it also has many gruesome images, such as shots of soldiers' amputated limbs being dumped into trash bags, and pools of blood and viscera being mopped from a busy operating room floor. At one point, an Army chaplain, reciting last rites for a soldier, calls all the violence "senseless."
... The network screened the film in mid-March for senior Army officials, including Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey, and received an enthusiastic response, said Richard Plepler, HBO's executive vice president.
... Thereafter, Plepler said, the Army's support began to evaporate. The network's offer to co-sponsor a screening of the film this week at Fort Campbell, Ky., the home of the 86th, was turned down by the Pentagon without explanation. The Army wasn't an official sponsor of Monday's screening, and none of the service's highest-ranking officers or senior medical personnel attended, despite HBO's invitation.
She called the film a gift. "It gave me peace. At least I know he was with someone, and didn't die alone," she said.
Despite the grim subject matter, Zwillinger said: "I am positive about this film. It needs to be shown. I want the world to know this is reality. War is graphic, war is raw, war hurts. And we need more support for our troops, no matter what we think of the war."
I'm thinking of all the mothers and fathers who are deployed in the US occupation force in Iraq, many under very difficult conditions, and I'm hoping sincerely that they can all come home soon, safe and sound, to be reunited with their kids.
And yes, of course, I'm also thinking about all the Iraqi moms and dads who have been separated from their children by the horrible circumstances of this war and wishing the same good things for them.
... So here, with great gratitute and appreciation to the author is a very moving piece of writing from David Steinbruner, a younger friend of our family who has been working as an ER doc in the Green Zone in Baghdad. He sent it to his family and friends and gave me permission to publish it here.
This must be a pretty common feeling for a returning soldier. I was met in Dallas by a very nice mother/daughter team that told me when the next flight to [my home city] was and which airline and where to go. I made the flight with time to spare. Many odd stares on the plane. There just are not that many soldiers flying back to [that airport]. The new uniform is not immediately recognized and most look puzzled. “Are you in the Army?”
“Yes, just coming back from Iraq”
“Wow” Then silence.
They want to say so much, to ask, but they are not sure where to go with it. Most just say thank you. I just smile and say “Your welcome, my pleasure” Don’t worry, I am thinking, I know the dilemma you're wrestling with and I don’t take it personally. The dilemma of a professional, volunteer, soldier in a conflict that defies easy answers. Wrestle away, I think, you are citizen of the Republic and it is your right and responsibility. Good luck.
I make it in time for the party. In a time-zone hopping induced haze, my father-in-law picks me up at the airport and deposits me at the door to Chuck E. Cheese. Now that is a bit of culture shock. Four days ago I was resuscitating wounded soldiers fresh from the deadly roads of Iraq. Now here I stand, dozens of kids blasting around in a sugar-induced frenzy. I am having trouble processing all this, when in walks my son Ryan and my daughter Emma. Behind them comes Gilda, slightly distracted and looking so beautiful it hurts me a little. If you ever forget how important your family is to you, I have a remedy. It may take some time and distance, but it will recharge your soul and remind you what really matters most.
Gilda sees me first and smiles. It is amazing what your wife can say to you without words. She bends down to Ryan [the 'big' brother] and whispers in his ear. He looks over to me, blinks once and seems to shake his head, just to make sure I am real. Then it is a sprint through the crowd and up into my arms. You know your child’s smell, like a memory that you had nearly forgotten but now seems so familiar. Emma follows slowly, confused, but curious. Ryan knows this man, who is he? I crouch down and smile, but wait for her to come to me.
“Emma, it's Daddy.” She pauses, unsure but the voice sounds familiar. Where has she heard that before? I walk over to here, kneel and put my arms out.
“It’s Daddy, Emma, remember?” Please God, let her remember, it has not been that long. Something clicks. She remembers the voice from the phone (she was listening) and she comes over. She lets me pick her up as she might a family friend who seems nice. Ryan is coming over and touching me, just to make sure. Now Emma understands, this is Daddy, the Daddy who talks on the phone to Ryan, the Daddy in the pictures. This is my Daddy. Suddenly all the hesitancy is gone. I cannot put her down for long before she turns to say: “Up Daddy, hold” And so I do. Home just in time...
Thereafter follow two weeks of reconnection, remembering and reunions. I switch back to being a father again. Each morning Ryan wanders into the bedroom, to my side of the bed and puts his head up next to mine. “Daddy?”
“Uh, yes Ryan?” It’s 5:30 by the way.
“Why did Anakin turn to the dark side of the force?”
This and other important questions need answering every morning for two weeks. Just checking in, to see that I am still there, that I have not slipped off in the night, back to the other side of the world. I love you too Ryan. I have missed you as well.
Emma, still locked into the crib at night, calls each morning: “Daaaddy, Daaaddy” And I get up happily, stumbling around their apartment, looking for where Gilda keeps the diapers. It is never too early to start training your father, apparently. For two weeks I get to give baths, read stories, and walk to the park. I remember what living is about. What my real purpose is.
In a gesture of cruel irony, our dog, Chief, chooses the moment of my return to stop eating. He has been sick for a long time, but had not shown it until this week. It is cancer. Death follows me home. It is not a difficult decision for me, given those with which I have been wrestling this past year. Yet the pain of watching him fall to sleep one last time is surprisingly sharp. We have him cremated. The pet cemetery and mortuary in Colma is run by a Vietnam vet. When Gilda and I go to pick up the ashes, he makes a point of coming over to me and shaking my hand. The pain of that conflict plainly shows on his face as he grips my hand. “Good luck over there. Take care.” The air is thick with what is not said. “I will.” I reply. We scatter Chief’s ashes at [a beach], the site of our first date.
And then it is over. Back to the war. There is a terrible feeling of life interrupted. I have been warned about the second farewell, about how difficult it can be. I leave them again, nearly the same place that I did the first time, standing by the security line. The pain of it is ragged across my wife’s face. She keeps it together for my son who has no such need to be strong. Ryan squats down on the floor, his back pressed to the glass window and cries. His sobs penetrate through the noise of the crowd and clutch at me. The vision of his little body, crumpled with sadness, fills me with overwhelming guilt. Emma, completely unaware, waves at the cars outside. “Bye bye cars.” She will ask about me in a few days. “Where did Daddy go?”
The guilt springs partially from my mixed feelings. I am, after all, a volunteer. What is happening to my family has a great deal to do with my choices. I am a co-conspirator in their pain. I am also eager to get back to work. It sounds strange, but my job in Iraq may turn out to be the most professionally satisfying moment of my life as a doctor. As I have said before, there is clarity of purpose, a sense of mission that is intoxicating. Whatever the political realities of this country, what we do and why we do it are made painfully clear with each IED explosion, with each fire-fight.
There is a somber tone of resignation on the flight back to Kuwait. Most of the soldiers sit quietly. All of us seem to be reflecting on the previous two weeks. It was so brief. With unusual efficiency I find myself on a C-130 flying back to Baghdad the next morning after arriving in Kuwait. After several gut-wrenching aerobatics, we land at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport). By midnight, I am bouncing along route Irish, the airport road, in a massive armored bus called a Rhino. The driver and security detail chat about the IED’s that were found on the same road the day before. Now I know I am back. Strangest of all to me is how familiar this seems. That is perhaps the most disturbing thing.
I arrived at that CSH at 3am, completely awake. My entire trip home begins to fade like an early morning dream, so lovely but now slightly out of focus. In honor of my return, Iraq, quiet for several weeks, erupts in a spasm of violence. Each day for the next few weeks brings death to our trauma room. The weight of these losses sits heavy upon us and my colleagues ruefully suggest that I go back home for the good of the country. Nothing would please me more.
Take care
This morning I finished my current round of editing/reviewing tasks on the Atrocities book manuscript. Phew!! That was hard work-- especially since the copyedited version came in both later than planned and at a time when i was anyway very busy.
Btw you can see the book listed in the Fall 2006 catalogue of Paradigm Publishers. (PDF version here.) I love the cover of the catalogue-- no clue yet what the cover of the book will look like...
So anyway, this morning, in addition, the webhosting service went down yet again. I read in the paper that the global spamming problem is rising to new levels, so I'm imagining that might be what's been happening over there at Cornerhost...
But sorry about that.
Anyway, now I and Cornerhost are both back in action here. I have a couple of good posts coming up-- and will then wade thru my backlog here and see what I could still salvage.
Tonight, Cindy Sheehan is coming here to Charlottesville, which I'm really looking forward to. (We're also having a little family dinner here before the 7 p.m. Cindy event, since Bill and two of our kids and I are all at home, but Bill's going to NYC tomorrow. I think I'm up for cooking... )
Enough rambling. Watch for the upcoming posts.
The webhosting service's databases were down (out?) for 16 hours there. People could not post comments in that time. Nor could I put up any new posts.
Actually, I didn't try to. Bill and I had guests yesterday afternoon-- our old friends Benny and Leah Morris. We had some extremely interesting conversations. More, later. (Maybe.)
Today and tomorrow I'm crashing on finishing my review of the copyedits on the Africa book.
Ellen Knickmeyer has a piece in today's waPo that I simply have to draw attention to.
The article is about a network of ill-supervised forces that together make up the Facilities Protection Service (FPS), which she describes as the government's largest paramilitary force, with 145,000 armed men and no central command, oversight or paymaster.
The FPS was first established by Viceroy Paul Bremer (remember him?) back in September 2003, with the mission of guarding Iraqi government facilities.
That was, of course, some five months after the US troops had stood idly by while just about every Iraqi government ministry, hospital, museum etc was subjected to top-to-bottom looting by private bands of miscreants. (Oh, with the exception of the Oil Ministry, which somehow the US forces did see fit to guard.)
But what's interesting is how Knickmeyer describes what the FPS has become since September 2003:
FPS guards often are seen roaming Baghdad's streets, holding Kalashnikov assault rifles and crowded into the backs of pickup trucks, some marked with insignia of the FPS or of the various government ministries they serve.
Increasingly, U.S. and Interior Ministry officials describe the FPS units as militias, each answering only to the ministry or private security firm that employs it.
Are the "private security companies" in question Iraqi-owned and run? Or are they owned and run American, British, South African, Israeli, or other foreign "experts" in this field? She doesn't say.
But what does seem clear is that-- in addition to the huge (and notably unsuccessful) efforts the occupation authorities have put into trying to recruit, train, and organize new army and police units for the still-weak Iraqi "government"--the occupation authorities have also been helping to pump arms and money into a large number of FPS units that come under the supervision of "private security companies" (i.e. companies of mercenaries.)
And the funds for these most likely come from the "budgets" of the ministries concerned.
And the result is to establish a large number of parallel and unsupervised mercenary-led forces inside the country.
Does anybody wonder why the "security" situation in occupied Iraq is so shockingly bad?
Does anybody wonder why the Iraqi "government ministries" are unable to accomplish very much of anything at all?
I guess I shouldn't have been so shocked by reading this story. But I was. I had heard of the FPS before, of course; but I'd sort of kept it in mind that it was just one or two forces of "tribal" irregulars who were being paid (or, paid off) to provide security along some isolated lengths of national pipeline somewhere... No big deal.
But the FPS phenomenon is a much bigger deal than that. The way Knickmeyer describes it, every government ministry has one of these things-- in other words, they're operating inside heavily built up areas. And they're each being run separately, and being run by mercenary security companies...
Maybe this is the ultimate in the neocons' plan to destroy any concept of a functioning national government for Iraq. I just hope the anti-occupation forces in Iraq are strong and well-organized enough to be able to put an end to this immoral and violence-sowing occupation regime as soon as possible.
I'm dealing with a lot in the 'real' world. There's a lot to discuss. I have a list of six or seven posts that I've been intending to put up. But no time, no time.
Y'all take over the shop for a couple of days. Send in posts and links on the global-affairs issues that concern you. I'll get back 'soon as I can.
Here
is the column I have in the CSM today. It is a plea to Americans (and our leaders) to get back to supporting the UN and its stress on finding nonviolent ways to resolve international differences.
Yesterday morning I went to a very interesting small conference jointly organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center and the American Task Force on Palestine. Former PA Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabboo was speaking, and so was former PA Culture Minister Ziad Abu Amr. These are both smart, articulate people whom I've known for many years, so I was eager to hear their views-- especially on current relationships between Fateh and Hamas.
(I see that the Fateh and Hamas prisoners have just negotiated a joint political platform, which was presented to Abu Mazen. It reportedly included acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas leaders not in pirson said they hadn't seen it and couldn't comment...Anyway, joint political discussions between the two leaderships are due to start in Ramallah soon.)
Ziad and Yasser both gave excellent presentations. Both men are much closer to Fateh than to Hamas, politically. But they both made impassioned pleas to the western nations to end the very harmful siege that has been imposed on the PA-held areas and on the Hamas government. Both said the move made by the Quartet Monday to create a Trust Fund to allow some external funding to go into the PA areas did not go near nearly far enough. Both also argued forcefully that pressure and exclusion would only strengthen the support for Hamas inside the PA areas and the region, and that a policy of political inclusion is the only way to force Hamas to test its political claims and reveal their weaknesses.
Both men pointed with anguish to the terrible, and very humiliating, treatment Pres. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has received at the hands of the Israelis and the Americans. They underlined that Hamas has now given Abu Mazen an explicit mandate to negotiate in the peace process, and that support for a negotiated peace leading to a viable two-state outcome remains high among Palestinians.
Ziad said at one point, "Hamas has made it clear that a two-state solution is fine, even though this doesn't end their more 'ideological' or sentimental claim to the whole of the land-- which is exactly the same as the Likud or Kadima people say."
... Anyway, I certainly haven't done justice there to the presentations those two gave. The other speakers included Nabil Amr, who is more of a Fateh apparatchik, Israeli journo Nahum Barnea, former Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval (who gave a speech worthy of the hardline territorial maximalist that he has always been; no change there), and former Foreign Ministers from Israel, Egypt ,and Jordan: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ahmed Maher el-Said, and Marwan Muasher. Later, Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Turki al-Faisal gave a "Keynote Address".
I was particularly interested to hear how Ahmed Maher, Muasher, and Turki spoke about Hamas-- since a big part of the US-Israeli campaign against Hamas thus far has concentrated on trying to get the Arab states to joint the economic siege on the Hamas-led government, while the Hamas ministers have had some (limited) success in breaking that aspect of the siege.
Ahmed Maher said he judged that clashes between Fateh and Hamas "are dangerous for the stability not just of the Palestinians but also for Israel and the whole region." He argued that "Fateh should support-- everyone should support-- the incorporation of Hamas into the political system. We all need to understand we have no right to choose the leaders of the Palestinians."
He noted that the US negotiated with the North Vietnamese even before there was a ceasefire. He urged the US to relaunch serious peace negotiations. "So maybe you can't have direct negotiations, but you should have the Quartet playing an active role in mediation. Hamas has accepted a hudna. It has accepted to let Abu Mazen negotiate. There is something to build on."
When Muasher spoke, he stressed that it was complete fallacy that Hamas's electoral victory in January interrupted an ongoing peace process. "There was no peace process!" He also said it was a fallacy that Hamas was elected primarily on the basis of its anti-peace program. "People voted for Hamass mainly because they were dissatisfied with the way the PA had been running before then." He said the implementation of the unilateral plan described by Olmert would result in the institutionalization of a Palestinian ghetto, and asked whether that could possibly be in Israel's interest.
He and Prince Turki both laid a lot of stress on the value of the "Beirut Declaration" of 2002 and urged that pushing that forward-- including, as an early step, winning Hamas's support for it-- would be the best way forward. (That declaration, which was supported by all the Arab states then and since calls for Israel's withdrawal from all the land it gained control of in June 1967; the creation in the West Bank and Gaza of an independent Palestinian state; a "mutually agreed" resolution of the Palestinian refugee question on the basis of UN resolution 194; the complete ending of the state of hostility between Israel and all Arab states; the establishment by Arab states of normal peaceful relations with Israel; and the establishment of a regional security order.)
There was some discussion in the conference as to whether the "Road Map" declared by Pres. Bush in 2002 was dead or not. All (except Shoval) agreed that the target dates defined in it needed to be updated if it is to have any relevance. All the Arab speakers stressed the importance of negotiating a final resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even if implementation is in stages; and said that the indeterminacy of the Oslo approach to negoptiations had been a real weakness of it.
Anyway, more on this later...
Just to record how glad I am that the main focus of international attention and activism regarding Darfur has shifted from one-sided finger-pointing to problem-solving... And specifically to the massive, multi-pronged effort that will be required to make and then buttress a sustainable longterm peace in that region.
Jonathan Edelstein has not only the text of the peace agreement but also what looks to me like an extremely well-argued commentary on the broad peacebuilding effort that must follow the signing of the peace accord.
Thanks so much for the clearheadedness and commitment you put into writing that, Jonathan.
Great that the US government is going to fund some of the needed efforts. Everyone else needs to pitch on in.
I can't decide whether I find it truly pathetic or quite criminal that US commanders in Baghdad are still-- three years after invading Iraq-- being described by reporters as trying to teach their troops a few of the fundamentals of waging war in built-up areas.
I mean honestly, how many times have reporters told and retold this exact same story (different general being brown-nosed to) over the past three years?
This, from the LA Times's James Rainey today:
Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, in a weekend training session with troops and in an interview afterward, said he found a need to reemphasize to soldiers that they must use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect, in part because the insurgency has persisted and grown.
Oh, and as a side-benefit of doing so, they might find it helps their ability to contain the insurgency?
Actually, it is probably ways too late for anything the US troops do in Iraq to make any scintilla of difference to the political outcome. Though they do have the capability to inflict considerable additional suffering on Iraqi families and should certainly be prevented from doing so.
Borzou Daragahi, also of the LAT, had an intriguing piece in the paper over the weekend titled, Iraq's Shiites Now Chafe at American Presence, Perceived U.S. missteps, a torrent of angry propaganda and the sect's new political sway have fused to turn welcomers into foes.
The whole of that piece is worth reading. It starts:
"The American ambassador is the gate through which terrorism enters Iraq," says a banner hanging from the fence surrounding the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, among the most revered martyrs of the Shiite Muslim faith.
... For three years, most of Iraq's Shiites welcomed — or at least tolerated — the U.S. presence here. In the weeks immediately after the American-led invasion, the mothers and sisters of Saddam Hussein's Shiite victims clutched clumps of dried earth as they wept over mass graves and thanked God for ending their oppression.
The Shiite acceptance of an American presence allowed troops to concentrate on putting down the insurgency in western Iraq, which is led by Sunni Muslim Arabs. With the exception of an uprising in mid-2004 by followers of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, the south has been relatively quiet and peaceful under the sway of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
But now the mood has shifted. Perceived American missteps, a torrent of anti-U.S. propaganda and a recently emboldened Shiite sense of political prowess have coalesced to make the south a fertile breeding ground for antagonism toward America's presence...
There, I was looking at the way that the Shiites in South Lebanon gradually shifted from being general supporters of Israel's military invasion of their country in 1982 to being militantly anti-Israeli just-- er-- three years later...
Not a bad piece, though I say it myself...
Looking at the prospects of radical change in the US-Shiite relationship in Iraq, I wrote there:
But hey, wouldn't it be nice if everybody's armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?
Even better: Don't go invading and threatening other countries in the first place! Please!!!
In my piece on Hamas for Boston Review, the dateline for which was May 1, I had written that the continuation of the harshly damaging boycott on allowing any material or financial aid to reach the PA-held areas was most probably a function of the continuing (as of then) absence of a new government in Israel... And that most likely once a Kadima-led government had been formed and started to stabilize itself it would quietly put out the word to the Bush administration and the pro-Israelis in Congress to ease up on the boycott....
(This, in line with the way the US government became persuaded to change its views on talking with the PLO, back in 1993: In other words, only when the word goes out from the Israeli government-- and in line with that, also from their allies in Washington's powerful pro-Israel lobby-- do the US administration and the leaders of the US Congress "dare" to change their policy. Which, on that earlier occasion, they did with truly breathtaking rapidity.)
So guess what. Today, suddenly we learn that a viciously anti-Palestinian piece of legislation called HR 4681, that had been proposed in the House of Representatives by the rightwing Islamophobe Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), has suddenly been taken off the floor and will not be considered this week.
Interesting, huh?
This, the same day that the WaPo published a piece from their Israel-Palestine correspondent Scott Wilson in which he writes,
"Nobody needs the collapse of the Palestinian Authority," a senior Israeli security official said in a recent briefing, speaking on condition of anonymity. "When I say nobody, I mean nobody."
The bluntly speaking former Mossad chief, a key adviser to former prime minister Ariel Sharon who supported harsh retaliation against Palestinian terror, is a supporter of the Iraq War who issues dark warnings about the dramatic increase in Europe's Muslim population. So, there were more than a few puzzled looks at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations last week when Halevy spoke out about the need to engage Hamas.
Twice he warned his audience that "we'll be seeing things we have not seen before," a seeming allusion to potential talks between Israel and Hamas.
By the way, Ori Nir also had a good piece on the shaky international state of the boycott campaign in last week's Forward. He wrote there:
"I have never come across anyone in Europe who wants to engineer the fall of Hamas's government, both because it's counterproductive and because we don't want to tamper with a clean election," said Jonathan Davidson, senior adviser for political and academic affairs to Washington's European Commission Delegation.
---
Addendum, Tuesday 10 p.m.:
So, this evening there was a surprise announcement from NYC that the Quartet members have all agreed to form a special "Trust Fund" to supply funding to the people of the PA areas. That AP piece says,
It is true that this "Trust Fund" money is not supposed to go to its recipients through the Hamas government. But it will presumably go through NGOs (and also may help pay the salaries of government employees.) Regardless of the exact modalities in that regard, what seems indisputable is that if a decent level of efficient, non-currupt human services are to be provided to the Palestinians, then Hamas-affiliated networks will be centrally involved with that effort...
(As I wrote in this Salon article.)
Next up: Watch as the Hamas government takes Gaza out of the Paris Agreement and into a new economic relationship with the world through Egypt. Exiting from Israel's economic stranglehold is a great way for the people of Gaza to get off the international welfare rolls...
My schedule has been crazy. Last week I got back the copyedited and laid-out versions of two significant longer articles that I needed to review very carefully. One was my piece on Hamas for Boston Review. The other was my article on the british counter-insurgency campaign in Kenya for Radical History Review. Each required a lot of concentration, and also required me to re-upload a huge amount of arcane knowledge back into my poor suffering grey cells.
And that was before I got an enquiry from Paradigm Publishers as to whether I'd finished reviewing the copyedited version my book on post-atrocity policies in Africa, that they had sent to me in early April... But the darn thing never arrived in my AOL inbox!!!!! So now the book's editing and production schedule has been delayed by a whole month... and instead of having some nice leisurely time in early April to go over that edit, I need to be doing it between last Thursday and May 17 or so-- a period when I already had a horrendous amount of projects scheduled.
Okay, whine, whine, whine. Now I'll shut up. This morning I told myself "Okay Helena repeat after me: 'It's great that I have such a lot of such great, meaningful work to do.'... " So yes, okay, it's great. But still, it has felt a bit burdensome. (She takes a deep breath.)
Actually, it's proceeding okay. I just finished reviewing Ch.4 of the copyedits on the book. I have two chapters to go-- and then I need to compose things like the Preface, the Dedication, etc.
And I've been doing a bunch of other things, too.
In a couple of hours, I'm driving to DC. I'll be there a couple of nights. Going to a good mini-conference tomorrow morning that I'll try to blog about... Then I'm helping to set up the Eyes Wide Open exhibit that's going to take a poignant antiwar message to the National Mall. ...
All this is to say that i recognize that my posting onto JWN has been a little spotty these past few days, and may be for the next few days, too. But I'll do what I can. Anyway, Blair and Bush are both still in big trouble. That hasn't changed-- so having that headline at the top there for the past few days hasn't been bad, at all.
Now, I'm going to post a couple of things quickly before I leave for DC....
The two heads of the "coalition" of forces occupying Iraq are both in BIG political trouble.
Blair was already foundering-- especially after Labour's disastrous showing in Thursday's local elections. Just yesterday, he axed Jack Straw and a bunch of other ministers (including former SecDef John Reid). And the Sunday Telegraph had gotten hold of a letter, reportedly supported by 50 Labour backbench MPs, in which they were demanding a speedy timetable for Tony to get out of No. 10, Downing Street.
(And soon after that, I would hope, out of Iraq as well.)
But all of that political unrest came before the downing of the British chopper in a heavily populated portion of Basra, in southern Iraq, Saturday.
In that piece AP's Robert Reid writes from Baghdad that the chopper,
Robert Reid continued,
As many as three armored vehicles were set on fire, apparently with gasoline bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, but the troops inside escaped unhurt, witnesses said.
The crowd chanted "we are all soldiers of al-Sayed," a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of foreign troops being in Iraq.
Calm returned by nightfall as Iraqi authorities imposed a curfew and hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers set up checkpoints and patrolled the streets, residents said. Sporadic rocket fire could be heard throughout Basra, Iraq's second largest city...
They say President George Bush was furious that Mr Straw said it was "nuts" to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option reported to be under active consideration in Washington.
Downing Street had already warned Mr Straw repeatedly to tone down his complete rejection of the military route as "inconceivable", insisting it was important to keep all options on the table.
Here in the US, meanwhile, we have the whole ongoing implosion of the Bush presidency... what with the Goss-Negroponte dust-up and the Foggo scandal, which between them are leaving not just the presidency but also the country's longer term intelligence capabilities in chaos.
The WaPo's Linzer and Pincus wrote today that,
But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.
Also heading downward: the US-led "coalition"'s performance in Afghanistan. Underlining that fact, Bush had his own downed helicopted problem today: ten US soldiers were killed when their Chinook came down in the east of Afghanistan.
This crazy idea that militarism can solve our problems and make the world safer is so incredibly harmful-- to everyone concerned!!
Are we now, I wonder, getting to the point of understanding that our parents and grandparents had reached in the summer of 1945, when they penned these words...
Well, however "good" or necessary it was, the people who had lived through it well understood that it, like every war, was a scourge.
And if even World War 2 was a "scourge", then what about George W. Bush's war to invade Iraq??
Now, the two key authors of the war are both in big political trouble. Now is surely therefore the time for the rest of humankind to get together and figure out how to use the United Nations and all its mechanisms for nonviolent problem-solving to rebuild the secure, life-affirming, right-respecting order that those two deeply misguided men and their accomplices have so notably failed to provide.
Hurrah! The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a small but very effective organization that lobbies the US Congress on issues of concern to Friends (Quakers), tells us that on Tuesday, the full US Senate,
Sadly, though, I have to tell you that FCNL is facing a harsh funding crunch. They have two great staff members-- Mary Trotachaud and Rick McDowell-- who have both spent a significant length of time doing humanitarian and peacebuilding work in Iraq, including before and since the US invasion. Rick and Mary have unique expertise when it comes to providing solid analysis of what's going on in Iraq today-- and they can speak with unique authority about the country when they go and talk to Members and their staffs.
But if FCNL's funding crunch continues, they might have to let Mary and Rick go. That would be tragic.
You can find out more about FCNL if you go here. And you can find out how to make a donation to their work-- either their lobbying work or their (tax-deductible) Education Fund-- if you go here.
Please consider being as generous as you can. We can go on all the peace marches we want. (And I went to my usual Thursday pro-peace vigil here in Charlottesville, Virginia, just this afternoon: we got a great response!) But to really keep up the steady work of persuading our members of Congress that there is a broad and very serious pro-peace movement out here in the citizenry and that they'd better listen to us--- well, FCNL is a great national network to be a part of... and it's a network with its pointedly persuasive end located right there, on Capitol Hill.
Great work, the FCNL team, and all your network of contacts there in the halls of Congress! Even, I should say (though I disagreed with him yesterday on a slightly different issue) thanks for your leadership in winning this declaration, Senator Biden!
38 days after their recent parliamentary elections, Israel has a government. That link goes to a JPEG file with pics and party affiliations of all the ministers. So it's 12 Kadima members, seven from Avoda (Labor), two Pensioners, and four from Shas. (Amazing how similar the neatly-groomed bearded men of Shas look like their Hamas counterparts.)
Jonathan Edelstein says he expects this government will be fairly stable:
Crucially, in terms of the prospects for peacemaking, the second and third points are these:
3. The government shall endeavor, as stated, to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians ... but if the Palestinians do not behave as stipulated in the near future, the government shall act even in the absence of negotiations and an agreement with them ... The government shall determine the borders of the state. The Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria must be reduced.
Actually, I still think there's a fairly high probability that the system of two parallel unilateralisms, on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, that we saw throughout the past 15 months will continue and become more engrained in the practice of both leaderships, at least for the coming couple of years.
As part of this, I believe there's a distinct possibility the Olmert government might act fairly soon (if still discreetly) to urge Washington to ease up some on the efforts to strangle the Palestinian administration through financial/administrative means.
It is only the Israeli government that is in a position to persuade Washington to do this-- and of course, Israel hasn't had a government able to do it ever since their election campaign started there in late February.
It truly is not in the interests of either the Israelis or anyone else to see an exacerbation of the pain in the Palestinian community. Added to which, using basic international aid payments and the Palestinians' own tax revenues as a lever to force compliance is quite immoral... And then-- they seek compliance with what? with a 'road map' that now really doesn't exist and that Olmert has never believed in?
Anyway, the weeks ahead will tell. let's check back on this issue in, say, four months, and see how matters stand then.
... One last point: The Israelis got their coalition government formed 38 days after their election... The Palestinians, operating under the difficult logistic conditions imposed by the Israeli occupation authorities, got theirs formed 63 days after their election... And in US-occupied Iraq? Well, it is now 140 days-- exactly 20 weeks-- since their election, and they still don't have a government. Ain't American military occupation a wonderful thing? (Heavy irony alert at the end there.)
I want to express my good wishes to Evo Morales and the people of Bolivia as they try to take back some control over their country's mineral wealth.
It looked to me that he moved intelligently and with good timing-- crucially by trying to ensure that the foreign firms operating in Bolivia's gas fields are not able to destroy vital production and financial records that will help Bolivia to sit down and negotiate the best possible deal with the firms in the weeks ahead.
I see that over at the CSM today, former foreign correspondent Richard O'Mara has quoted Abel Posse, described as "an Argentine novelist and diplomat knowledgeable about the Andean countries" as having written about the Andean indigenous peoples that,""They live bad, die early, pass through cycles of famine. They have been considered incapable of governing and incapable of being governed."
That sounds either fatalistic or derogatory (or both?). But O'Mara continues:
The people Morales represents, probably a large fraction of the more than 50 percent of the electorate who voted for him, "don't believe in globalization, don't believe in capitalism, don't believe in Marxism. (Che Guevara died in Bolivia because he failed to grasp that.)," wrote Posse. Nor do they believe in the institutions imposed upon them by whites and mestizos: the judicial system, taxation, everything that has to do with the "imaginary republic" created to further the interests of only 10 percent of the population.
So what do they believe in? Well, for one thing a softer approach to development and a deeper respect for the environment. Bolivia, owing to slash-and-burn agriculture and the worldwide demands for exotic hardwoods, suffers extensive deforestation, soil erosion, and industrial pollution.
Morales speaks of a cultural federalism, some new institution to bind together the divergent peoples who inhabit Bolivia's lowlands in the Amazon basin, virtually at sea level, and those of the sierra, who live in remote hamlets, some clinging to the high Andes at nearly 20,000 feet. These are very practical problems and concerns, hardly driven by ideologies of the standard sort.
Morales speaks frequently of multiculturalism and "convergent economies," whatever that means. But his policies are not all vague. Quite specifically, he wants to direct the wealth that flows from existing resources (Bolivia has the second largest reserve of natural gas in the continent) to the people who never got it before.
... Much will be heard in the coming months no doubt about Indian superstitions, mockery of their worship of Pachamama, their goddess who calls upon human beings to care for the earth. The rise of Evo Morales certainly won't restore the indigenous people of the Andes to their historical high estate. But a little improvement might be in the offing.
I mainly want to bookmark here, for future reference, the US government's own count of the number of terrorist incidents in Iraq in calendar 2005, as released last week by the National Counter-Terrorism Center. Okay, I also want to comment on it.
The NCTC's count is here, (PDF file-- go to page 8.)
What we see counted there are 3,474 incidents of terrorism in Iraq in 2005, resulting in 20,711 "victims", counting those killed, injured, or kidnapped as a result of the counted incidents.
I was trying to look at trend lines. If you go to this page on the NCTC's Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, you'll find it's the first of 176 linked web-pages there that list and give some info about all the counted terrorism incidents in Iraq between January 1, 2004 and December 31, 2005.
So the total for those two years was 4,413 incidents involving 30,643 victims.
So in 2004, there had been 939 incidents involving 9,932 victims.
So in 2005, the number of incidents increased by 270 percent over its counted 2004 rate, and the number of victims increased by 109 percent.
What a truly terrible record for the US occupation regime there, all round.
You have to know, too, that the counting system used was extremely partial, and doesn't convey the total amount of "terror" inflicted on Iraqi civilians through politically motivated violence (which is what the NCTC purports to count). Crucially, it fails to count all incidents of violent actions that inflicted death and other harms on Iraqi civilians that were carried out by the US military and forces allied with it including the Iraqi "security" forces. If we add in those incidents, we can see that the total amount of terror inflicted on the Iraqi citizenry in 2004, 2005, and until today is almost unimaginably high.
Just think how terrifying everyone in Israel finds it if, say, three Israeli civilians are subjected to politically motivated violence. And multiply that by many thousands over the course of a year. (Guess what, Iraqi people are just as much human as Israeli people; and they have the same capacity for inter-human empathy, solidarity, and feelings of pain.)
And of course it is not just the counted individuals who are impacted when anti-civilian violence occurs. It is their families, those who love them, and everyone who lives in that same community.
... Sometimes, Bush administration officials and their apologists have argued, with quite unpardonable cynicism and disregard for human life, that "it is better to fight the terrorists 'over there' than 'over here'." I find this argument revolting, and racist (in the global definition of that term, not the skin color-related US definition of it.)
Indeed, the US occupation presence in Iraq has not only attracted and helped to motivate the actions of new generations of Sunni-extremist terrorists there; but it has also inflicted its own often wanton violence on the Iraqi citizenry, and has empowered and trained some of the Shiite-extremist and Kurdish militias that have inflicted even more violence on the Iraqi citizenry. Nearly all the manifestations of those forms of violence-- including the US military's violence-- are "politically motivated", in the sense that that they're not motivated by, say, hopes of personal gain or outright thievery. (Though that happens too.)
Certainly, if Iraq is ever lucky enough to have something like South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then acts of rights-abusing violence undertaken by the occupation regime and its allies would come under exactly the same public microscope as similar acts undertaken by anti-occupation forces.
Quite rightly so, from the human rights perspective.
... And meantime, the Taliban are steadily making a comeback in many parts of southern Afghanistan.
So what on earth kind of a "counter-terrorism" policy has the Bush administration been running?
Anyone?
Riverbend had a good new post on her blog Tuesday. In her inimitable way, she sketched some of her memories of the US capture of Baghdad back in early April 2003... She also penned her (highly critical) reactions to more recent political developments in Iraq.
At the end, though, she writes:
However, now I have a few doubts creeping into my mind as to whether the "hostage" nature of the huge US troop deployment in Iraq really is enough to deter (we could say "self-deter") the Bush administration from launching a completely reckless military adventure against Iran.
After all, there were many of us with great experience in Middle East affairs who, in the run-up to his assault against Iraq, were warning Pres. Bush that to launch that assault would be counter-productive folly. That did not stop him then.
This time around, will he heed such warnings regarding the folly of attacking Iran? I would most certainly hope so. But at this point, I don't feel as certain of his rationality--and, equally importantly, the rationality of key advisors like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld-- as I did, say, six weeks ago.
Of course, the fact that Condi Rice seems to have been given new presidential authorization to outrank Rumsfeld, as evidenced in all the accounts of their recent trip to Baghdad, gives me some heart that her form of rationality might reign. She strikes me as significantly less reckless, stubborn, and ideological than Rumney or Chefeld.
However, hidden away in the back reaches of some portions of US "strategic thinking", however, is something called "the madman theory of history". This was pioneered especially by Henry Kissinger; it held that, in facing down the Soviet Union (at that time) there was strategic value in keeping or even cultivating a reputation for unpredictability and recklessness...
If the Bushies want to distance themselves decisively from that theory, then they should be working very hard right now to give assurances to the governments and peoples around the world (including the US citizenry here at home) that they are aware of the dangers of escalation-- including even"inadvertent" escalation-- in US-Iran relations and that they intend to act cautiously, rationally, and always with the best interests of the US citizenry and their (our) friends around the world front and foremost in their sights.
Note that to say this is to say nothing about the content of the policy they should pursue. (Though of course I have thoughts about that, too.)
But I have heard no such reassurance from the Bushies yet. That is a strong cause for concern.
---
Addendum Just one last thought. Back in 1980, Jimmy Carter lost an election because of his inability to solve the problem cuased by 57 US government employees who had been taken hostage by Iran. So how about the propsects for GWB and his party in the 2006 and 2008 elections if anyone points out that he has gratuitously given to the Iranians as hostages 150,000 US government employees?
Just a thought.
I've known Chris Hitchens for, gosh, 35 years now. He was two years ahead of me at Oxford, where we engaged in many of the same political activities. I kept bumping into him over the years that followed. When I was living and working in Beirut, he would come swanning through every so often, on a quick reporting trip. When I moved to DC in 1982, he was already there. He and his then-wife Eleni came to my second wedding, in Washington DC in 1984... etc, etc.
I haven't, however, seen him in person since that point in the late 1990s when he swung inexplicably around the back-side of the political spectrum and changed from being a fairly moderate lefty to being an extremely bitter and pro-war rightist.
So today, the big issue on Juan Cole's blog is Was Chris Hitchens drunk when he wrote a vicious piece about Juan on Slate recently-- or was he just, as Juan puts it, 'only an asinine thief'?
Earlier in the day, Juan had put up a lengthy post refuting Chris's smear-job. In that post, Juan wrote:
Well, I don't think it is any secret that Hitchens has for some time had a very serious and debilitating drinking problem. He once showed up drunk to a talk I gave and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism. I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind.
But still, anyone who's known Chris for even one-fourth as long as I have would have to admit the guy has long had a very serious drinking problem. Was it ad-hominem for Juan to mention that? Yes, probably, although he was doing so in a quasi-exculpatory way-- and Juan, like many of the rest of us, has had solid evidence of Chris's performance of professional duties having been impaired by his evident drunkenness...
Today, though, Hitchens' friend Andrew Sullivan wrote on his blog that he was with Chris when he wrote the latest Slate piece, and Chris was not drunk at the time. So Juan was left with no explanation for Chris's crass writing except that Chris is "an asinine thief."
The theft issue has to do with something Chris quoted directly in the article there, which was a private contribution Juan had made to a private listserv called Gulf 2000. Juan and I are both members of the, fairly large, membership of this group. Chris Hitchens is not.
Now, the whole point of having this private list is that its members-- who include citizens of many different countries, of many political complexions, and with many different areas of Gulf-related expertise-- can all explore ideas together in a safe space without the fear that what they write for it will get quoted in the public media. It might sound a little elitist (and probably is). But still, it is a remarkable place, where people who are citizens of many countries, including of course the numerous fairly repressive countries bordering the Gulf, can explore and exchange ideas.
For many list members, the promise of discretion for what they write is a completely necessary element of their personal security against the intrusions (and worse) of authoritarian state bodies.
So Chris Hitchens had just-- by some unknown means-- gotten hold of something Juan wrote for the list ten days or so ago, and published it there in his Slate article. By doing that, he (and whoever sent him Juan's contribution there) just blithely violated that requirement for privacy.
Yesterday, and on a few occasions prior to that, I have also cited things posted on the G2K list. But always with the permission of the authors. In fact, when Juan first put up the post in question April 23, I wrote and asked him if I could cite it here-- and he wrote back and said No, because he was still finetuning some of his analysis there.
Fair enough.
... Well, I glanced at Chris's piece. It is mainly a nasty hatchet-job against Juan-- blessedly, quite short. Juan does a superb job of refuting it. Hitchens, in the course of his piece, wrote:
Hitchens, it goes without saying, is currently part of the rightwing crowd in the US that is baying for some form of large military attack against Iran. Juan, by contrast, is extremely strongly against any such attack ... Indeed, the main portion of his first rebuttal of Hitchens was a pained plea for the US not to launch a war against Iran.
As JWN readers know, I have voiced several criticisms of the positions Juan has expressed over the past three years. Including, yesterday. But those criticisms don't for a moment dent the huge admiration I have for his scholarship and for the personal qualities of caring and commitment that he brings to all his endeavors.
I hope it goes without saying, too, that whereas Juan and I currently have some differences of opinion over US policies toward Iraq, I applaud and completely support the firmly antiwar position he has expressed regarding US policies toward Iran.
As for Chris Hitchens, I have been really saddened to watch his degeneration over the years. I have a number of friends who are recovering alcoholics. Being a recovering alcoholic is something they have to deal with every day of their lives: the alcoholism is so strong a force over them that they have to continue to battle it, every day, for ever. In the US, the main way people do this is through regular and frequent participation in the meetings of Alcholics Anonymous. In those meetings, people go through something called a "12-step program." The very first step (I think) is to recognize that you have a problem with alcoholism, rather than continuing to deny it or cover it up. Further down, one of the other steps is to recognize the damage you have caused in the world, and to other people, by virtue of your alcoholism.
If Chris Hitchens is not in an AA program, I am sure he needs to get into one. In the meantime, the rest of us should hold him quite accountable for his sleazy actions. Being an alcoholic does not give you a "carte blanche", or indeed any other kind of an excuse, to disregard the rules of human society and decent behavior. From that perspective, it really does not make any difference whether he had been drinking when he wrote the Slate piece or not. He needs to take full responsibility for his actions.
So, too, more to the point, does Slate, which has been publishing his ramblings for quite a long time now.
Jim Wolfensohn, the former World Bank President who has worked for the past year as the representative of the "Quartet" in furthering Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, has stepped down.
As is clear from this transcript of the press conference he and Condi Rice gave yesterday, he is not being replaced.
So is the "Quartet" now going to disband?
The Quartet, which comprises the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia, was formed in 2002, in response to the crisis in Israeli-Palestinian relations of spring of that year. (That included Ariel Sharon's extremely lethal assault on the institutions of the PA, and a number of Palestinian suicide bombers who blew up Israeli civilians and soldiers.)
Back then, remember, the political map of the world looked quite a bit different. The US stood at the apex of glopbal sympathies and global power. Under the Quartet arrangement, the other three parties all knowingly subordinated themselves to the Bush administration's "leadership" in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking....
At the time, that "leadership" was manifested mainly in Washington's generation of something called the "Road Map to Peace", which had a number of fuzzy deadlines on the way to a quite indeterminate future... Regardless of the Road Map's many evident flaws, however, the UN, EU, and Russia all rallied around it.
All the fuzzy deadlines spelled out in it have passed, of course. And though Sharon and his government paid a tiny amount of lip-service to the Road Map, they went ahead with their completely unilateral exercise in boundary-drawing, regardless. So the Road Map is, these days, yet another sad casualty of the international "community's" decision to subordinate itself to the Bush administration on this matter.
RIP.
... Well, the Road Map may have been flawed from the very beginning. But Jim Wolfensohn is probably a very decent man. That much seems clear from the text of the Monday press conference. For example, he said,
... The report includes a warning that failure to address Palestinian economic and government problems may cause ``other Middle Eastern states and political organizations'' to have a greater role in the region, with ``regional repercussions.''
If international diplomacy is truly focused on that goal, in an evenhanded way, then the diplomats of the world will not find either Hamas or anyone else on the Palestinian side blocking that outcome, or resorting to further violence. But the structural violence of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (and of Gaza's access points) has to end.
Les Gelb, the former President of the influential, New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, has long been an active supporter of splitting up Iraq into three mini-states. In November 2003, he produced this plan for Iraq, called The Three-State Solution. (You now have to pay gobs of money to read it on the NYT's website there, which is a pity. But commenting on it on JWN at the time, I described it as "almost lunatic and extremely dangerous.")
Juan Cole's reaction to Gelb's partitionist proposal at that time was very similar:
Yesterday, Juan picked up his own red pencil, and going one step further than the British administrator of Iraq, Sir Percy Cox, did in 1922 he decided to redraw a bunch of boundaries inside Iraq.
He wrote:
I do, however, believe that the tendencies toward separatism must be recognized and managed.
I say that we make 5 superprovinces: Deep South, Middle Euphrates, Baghdad, Sunnistan, and Kurdistan, along with two smaller ethnic enclaves, of Turkomanistan and Chaldeanistan in the north. Bear with me...
He then gives us-- yes!-- his very own map. More colors on it than old Percy ever had! Then he continues by discussing various details of what his plan is, and how to make it work. Along the way, he writes some extremely patronizing and imperialistic things... As in, saying that entering and controlling Kirkuk would be, "a good training wheel mission for the Iraqi army." (Training wheels, of course, being what parents put on young kids' bikes when they're still learning to ride 'em.)... As in, decreeing baldly that, "The Coalition should dictate an oil profit sharing agreement before they go."...
Well I could go on and on pointing out the follies my esteemed friend in Michigan engages in there. But the fundamental folly, surely, is his assumption that the US government has any right to determine the future shape of governance structures inside Iraq.
Then of course there is also (b), the folly of assuming that the US is still in any way capable of implementing any such scheme.
Today, he was backpedaling a bit. This was in response to yet another partitionist screed from Les Gelb-- one in the writing of which Gelb was joined, indeed, by US Senator and long-time presidential wannabe Joe Biden (Democrat, of Delaware).
Yesterday, Juan had described his own proposal as being one for the formation of a bunch of "stans" (which is sort of a buzzword in some US circles for obscure, generally Muslim states located, well, someplace further east over there in Central Asia). Today, he rebranded his proposal, saying it was one for the establishment of "provincial confederacies." He added:
Hey Juan, maybe it's time to sheath the red pencil and start acting a little less like Percy Cox?
Another interesting aspect of this whole story is that finally Les Gelb seems to have been able to persuade Joe Biden (Secretary of State in the next Democratic administration? Joe would love that!) to come on board his partition plan.
One aspect of what they write that I find extremely childish is that they leap right into their article by making a completely unexamined analogy with the situation in another, significantly different part of the world where the US has also in the recent past engaged in imperialistic (though in their view, successful) meddling. Namely, Bosnia.
Let me quote that whole introductory para to their piece:
... My friend and esteemed colleague Gary Sick, who's the Executive Director of the Gulf/2000 Research Listserv and an Adjunct Professor of Middle East politics at Columbia University, has picked up on many problems in the Biden-Gelb proposal in this commentary, which I am putting up on the JWN archive with his permission (and with my thanks to him.)
Gary writes there:
Note that a great deal hinges on what Gelb calls "international police protection." In other words, we must enlist the United Nations or a coalition of the willing to come in and do what we have been unable to do with our 130,000 troops and $10 billion per month. Is it reasonable to expect that a regional conclave with U.S. (Sunni) allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, U.S. enemies Iran and Syria, plus Turkey, which is preoccupied with the Kurds, will produce a harmonious and enforceable regional compact?
Let's just imagine that after we adopt a policy of separation under a weak central government, the militias remain vicious, the insurgency accelerates, ethnic cleansing becomes endemic, rights of women and minorities do not improve, and regional powers prove to be more interested in their sectarian interests than in saving Iraq. According to this plan, we have now accepted responsibility for making all of this work. Will we really be better off than we are now?
...Inside Iraq, meanwhile, there is lots of real, national-level politics going on, as the representatives of all the parties negotiate over how to form what will almost certainly be a government of broad national unity. Beyond that, under PM-designate Nouri al-Maliki it will almost certainly be a government dedicated to maintaining the unity of the country's administration as far as possible, as well as to negotiating a total and fairly rapid withdrawal of the US troops.
So I guess the pretensions of those Americans inside and outside the Bush administration who want to see the US act in as imperialistic a fashion in Iraq in 2006 as Sir Percy and the British India Office were able to in 1922 will have to come to naught?
Surely, the only "maps" and "red pencils" the US planners will be needing in the months ahead are those that will help them organize the most orderly and efficient form of troop withdrawal... Bring the troops home, and let's leave Iraq's future to its own people.
The L.A. Times's talented Baghdad correspondent Borzou Daragahi wrote me to say it was not true, as I wrote here, that "no-one" in the mainstream media had gotten the story about the impact of Ayatollah Sistani's re-entry into Iraqi public politics.
He sent me the text of this story, datelined April 28, which he co-authored along with Bruce Wallace and special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf.
They wrote there:
"The marjaiyah intends to interfere in some issues," Sheik Abu Mohammed Baghdadi, a Najaf cleric, said in an interview. "This monitoring and direct interference is an essential matter that has never before been proposed by the clergy. The marjaiyah, through this act, is expressing the voice of the people."
Sistani's statement followed a meeting with Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki, a conservative Shiite leader. Maliki came to Najaf to solicit Sistani's views in the midst of efforts to form a government, reinforcing a growing relationship between Shiite politicians in Baghdad and their religious counterparts in Najaf.
Sistani, the most senior of the marjaiyah, the four top Shiite clerics in Najaf, has weighed in on political matters before, notably in 2003 when he demanded that direct elections for a national government be held before a constitution was drafted.
More recently, he criticized the government for its inability to protect Shiite holy sites from a series of bombings by insurgents.
But Sistani's statement Thursday was among his bluntest and comes at a time of sensitive discussions over the selection of the Iraqi Cabinet and on the status of armed political groups.
"Now we have to go to Sistani," quipped Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni Arab lawmaker. "What kind of democracy is this?"
... In his statement, Sistani called for a government of "qualified figures, technically and administratively, who have integrity and decent reputations" without regard to "personal, party, sectarian or ethnic interests."
... [I]t was the unusually direct intervention from Sistani that rang loudest here. The cleric, who is regarded as the voice of Shiite moderation, often prefers to exercise his influence through backroom talks.
Last week, Sistani apparently nudged interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari into abandoning his quest to keep the top job in the face of opposition from Sunni Arabs, Kurds and secular politicians.
On Thursday, Maliki emerged from his meeting with Sistani to tell reporters that the cleric had "advised us, as always, to be Iraqis first."
Maliki also said his government would merge militias into the legitimate state security forces, a proposal that challenges the power of some of his own strongest backers, notably [Muqtada] Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.
Maliki and Sadr held a news conference in Najaf on Thursday afternoon in which Sadr denounced the Rice-Rumsfeld visit, calling it "blatant interference in Iraqi affairs." The cleric repeated his call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq but dodged the question of whether he would disband his own militia, known as Al Mahdi army.
In his statement, too, Sistani derided the U.S. presence, calling for the new government to "work seriously to remove all traces of the occupier."
See, for example, this Daragahi piece from April 29, which is mainly about the inter-party contacts over forming the government.
Or this piece, datelined today, to which Daragahi and unnamed "special correspondents in Baghdad, Najaf and Ramadi" all contributed. Most of this piece is about the "Biden plan", which I'm planning to blog about next. But at the end, it noted that Sistani had held a meeting (presumably in Najaf) with some leaders from the Turkmen community in the tinder-box northern city of Kirkuk. It says,
Altogether, though, a significant journalistic operation there. Sorry, Borzou, that I'd failed to read that April 28 piece before I posted last week.
Eight days ago on that Sunday I was still reeling from my recent trip to Jordan, dealing with my chaotic travel home from Philadelphia, etc., and come to think of it I don't think I even read the WaPo that day. I should have, because it carried Emily Wax's extremely interesting piece 5 Truths about Darfur. (Hat-tip to a Jeffersonian friend who urged me to read it.)
She is the WaPo's East Africa bureau chief, and a reporter on Africa whose writing I have come to admire over the past few years.
She writes,
Even one person killed because of political violence is bad enough. "Tens of thousands", and we should be very concerned indeed. But Wax is close to the ground, and close to the aid coordinators and AU officers who are probably the people who have the best sources of information inside Darfur on the true scale of the casualties.
As a matter of basic integrity and ethics in human-rights work opr journalism, one should always try to get the best authenticated sources of information possible, and when using estimates of casualties to err on the side of conservatism
Anyway, here's how Wax continues:.
1 Nearly everyone is Muslim...
2 Everyone is black
Although the conflict has also been framed as a battle between Arabs and black Africans, everyone in Darfur appears dark-skinned, at least by the usual American standards. The true division in Darfur is between ethnic groups, split between herders and farmers. Each tribe gives itself the label of "African" or "Arab" based on what language its members speak and whether they work the soil or herd livestock. Also, if they attain a certain level of wealth, they call themselves Arab.
Sudan melds African and Arab identities. As Arabs began to dominate the government in the past century and gave jobs to members of Arab tribes, being Arab became a political advantage; some tribes adopted that label regardless of their ethnic affiliation. More recently, rebels have described themselves as Africans fighting an Arab government. Ethnic slurs used by both sides in recent atrocities have riven communities that once lived together and intermarried.
"Black Americans who come to Darfur always say, 'So where are the Arabs? Why do all these people look black?' " said Mahjoub Mohamed Saleh, editor of Sudan's independent Al-Ayam newspaper. "The bottom line is that tribes have intermarried forever in Darfur. Men even have one so-called Arab wife and one so-called African. Tribes started labeling themselves this way several decades ago for political reasons. Who knows what the real bloodlines are in Darfur?"
3 It's all about politics
Although analysts have emphasized the racial and ethnic aspects of the conflict in Darfur, a long-running political battle between Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir and radical Islamic cleric Hassan al-Turabi may be more relevant.
A charismatic college professor and former speaker of parliament, Turabi has long been one of Bashir's main political rivals and an influential figure in Sudan. He has been fingered as an extremist; before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Turabi often referred to Osama bin Laden as a hero. More recently, the United Nations and human rights experts have accused Turabi of backing one of Darfur's key rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, in which some of his top former students are leaders...
"Darfur is simply the battlefield for a power struggle over Khartoum," said Ghazi Suleiman, a Sudanese human rights lawyer. "That's why the government hit back so hard. They saw Turabi's hand, and they want to stay in control of Sudan at any cost."
4 This conflict is international
China and Chad have played key roles in the Darfur conflict.
In 1990, Chad's Idriss Deby came to power by launching a military blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrowing President Hissan Habre. Deby hails from the elite Zaghawa tribe, which makes up one of the Darfur rebel groups trying to topple the government. So when the conflict broke out, Deby had to decide whether to support Sudan or his tribe. He eventually chose his tribe.
Now the Sudanese rebels have bases in Chad; I interviewed them in towns full of Darfurians who tried to escape the fighting. Meanwhile, Khartoum is accused of supporting Chad's anti-Deby rebels, who have a military camp in West Darfur. (Sudan's government denies the allegations.) Last week, bands of Chadian rebels nearly took over the capital, N'Djamena. When captured, some of the rebels were carrying Sudanese identification.
Meanwhile, Sudan is China's fourth-biggest supplier of imported oil, and that relationship carries benefits...
5 The "genocide" label made it worse
And secondly, she makes this,quite distinct argument under the rubric of No. 5:
"We called it a genocide and then we wine and dine the architects of the conflict by working with them on counterterrorism and on peace in the south," said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert for the Congressional Research Service. "I wish I knew a way to improve the situation there. But it's only getting worse."
And thus, the value of the whole approach pioneered by the authors of the Genocide Convention has been completely annulled. (Rove: "Who cares? The Genocide Convention is no better than the Kyoto Treaty or the NPT, is it?")
...Anyway, belatedly, I'd like to thank Emily Wax for a well-grounded and well-argued article there. I wish I'd read it earlier.
Let us first focus our energies on making sure that we and our governments are doing all we can to get literally life-saving basic humanitarian aid to the people of Darfur. They are women, men, and children with pressing physical, social, and psychological needs. They are not a "cause" to be taken up (or dropped) by well-meaning outsiders.
And yet, the international "community" has not yet responded in even a halfway acceptable way to the pleas of the World Food Program and others for enough basic food aid to be sent there.
The NYT reported Saturday that the WFP,
Then, we have to recognize that it is not only the pro-government forces in Sudan who are impeding the delivery of such aid as is available. This sobering press release issued last Friday by he UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) states:
The SRSG [Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General] Jan Pronk appeals to the SLM/A to take all necessary steps to assure the safety of humanitarian personnel and property in areas under their control and the consistent implementation of agreements. Unless these attacks and harassment stop immediately, the U.N. and its partners will be obliged to suspend all relief assistance to this particular area till effective safety for humanitarian personnel and assets is guaranteed. The U.N. will hold responsible the armed groups, including those related to the SLA, and their leaders, for the failure to assist the vulnerable populations under their control.
Now, of course, there is the additional political development of the nearly-secured peace agreement between the Sudan government and the rebels, that AU negotiators have been working on for two years now.
Yesterday, the Government of Sudan expressed its acceptance of the deal. But today, the two main rebel groups still seemed unprepared to accept it. In this piece, Reuters' Estelle Shirbon writes:
Mediators from the African Union (AU) agreed in the early hours after a deadline expired to give the government of Sudan and two rebel groups until midnight Tuesday to agree on a proposed peace plan, the result of two years of talks.
But on Monday morning, Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha left the Nigerian capital Abuja, venue of the talks. Taha had arrived three weeks ago and held face-to-face meetings with rebel leaders that had raised hopes of a deal.
A diplomat who is closely involved in the talks said Taha left because his latest meetings with rebel leaders had given him the impression they were not open to substantial talks.
"His meetings with the (rebel) movements yesterday were so bad. They were, frankly, so insulting to the government," said the diplomat, who described his mood as "depressed".
I have to ask whether the rebel groups' intransigence was perhaps stoked by the one-sidedly anti-Khartoum tenor of much of the Darfur-related mobilization in the US over the past few weeks? (Did that mobilization perhaps give the rebels the idea they could get more political support from Washington than they have been able to win, so far, from the African Union? If so, I suspect they will be sorely disappointed...)
Wouldn't it, honestly, have been better if from the get-go the people involved in the US "Save Darfur" coalition had focused their efforts somewhat less on one-sided finger-pointing, and much more on the urgent need for solid humanitarian aid, and the creation of the political climate of civil peace which is the only climate in which such aid can both be delivered in the shorter term and help to rebuild and heal war-torn communities over the longer term?
By the way, Jonathan Edelstein recently had a good post on the draft peace agreement out of Abuja, on his blog, here.
His analysis of the draft was this:
In addition to discussion of the role of the pro-Israel lobby, another major Israel-related taboo within the US mainstream media has to do with the topic of Israel's nuclear weapons.
Thus, today, we have the amazing spectacle of Dennis Ross, the former longtime Arab-Israeli "peace process coordinator" for the Bush I and Clinton administrations, writing an oped in today's WaPo about the Iranian nuclear issue without even mentioning the word "Israel" once...
Well, I imagine there are many contexts in which one could do that. But not in the context in which Dennis is writing his piece, since he is looking specifically at the Middle East regional implications of any move Iran might make toward developing nuclear weapons...
And in the course of doing that he comes up with zingers like this:
And then he goes on to examine likely responses from other Middle Eastern countries to any Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, arguing with a degree of dogmatic certainty that then Saudi Arabia "will seek" their own nuclear weapons capability, etc etc...
But still no word-- anywhere in this whole piece about Middle East nuclear matters!-- about Israel.
This, I note, just one day after the WaPo itself had published a very informative article by Avner Cohen and William Burr that described how US officials behaved back in the late 1960s as they became increasingly convinced that Israel had already developed its first nuclear weapons:
The one available report of an SRG meeting on NSSM 40 suggests that the bureaucracy was interested in pressuring Israel to halt its nuclear program. How much pressure to exert remained open. Kissinger wanted to "avoid direct confrontation," while Richardson was willing to apply pressure if an investigation to determine Israel's intentions showed that some key assurances would not be forthcoming. In such circumstances, the United States could tell the Israelis that scheduled deliveries of F-4 Phantom jets to Israel would have to be reconsidered.
By mid-July 1969, Nixon had let it be known that he was leery of using the Phantoms as leverage, so when Richardson and Packard summoned Rabin on July 29 to discuss the nuclear issue, the idea of a probe that involved pressure had been torpedoed. Although Richardson and Packard emphasized the seriousness with which they viewed the nuclear problem, they had no threat to back up their rhetoric...
That's a valuable-looking collection of documents there. (Just scroll down on that page for the links to them.) There are still, though, many other relevant docs that have not yet been declassified.
The main outline of this story was already pretty well-known back when, for example, I wrote an article titled Israel's Nuclear Game: The US Stake, and published it in the Summer 1988 edition of World Policy Journal. (Shortly after I published that, Helms, whom I had come to know a bit, wrote me telling me I had got the basic facts and the analysis there quite right.)
I guess I should work to get the text of that article-- and the follow-on piece I published in Foreign Affairs in Summer 1989, along with former US arms-control czar Gerard C. Smith-- up onto the internet. It shouldn't be too hard...
But what I want to note here is the kind of amazing self-censorship at work over at the WaPo: that the editors could publish that entire piece by Dennis Ross today without insisting that he at least make some reference in it to the big elephant in the room in any discussion of Middle East nuclear issues-- namely, Israel's longtime possession of a significant nuclear arsenal.
That's about equivalent to writing about terrorism in the world without writing about Al-Qaeda. (And of course, it makes Dennis's entire analysis correspondingly nonsensical.)
My 2005-2006 issue of the IISS's "Military Balance" describes Israel as possessing "up to 200" nuclear wraheads-- the same number, I think, that it has attributed to Israel for a number of years now.
I imagine, though, that Israel's nuclear arsenal has, if anything, grown over recent years, rather than shrunk or stayed the same size?
Certainly, Israel's ability to deliver these warheads has grown significantly over the years. Even back in a 1993 essay, the Israeli strategic analyst Gerald Steinberg was writing that Israel's Jericho-2 missile,
But Dennis Ross-- and his editors there at the WaPo-- think that with a straight face they can publish an article about Middle East nuclear-weapons developments without even mentioning Israel?
Now that's self-censorship.
In response to my earlier query on this, Reidar Visser sent me this handy link, which is to a site that automatically does either Gregorian-to-Hijri (Islamic) or Hijri-to-Gregorian calendar conversion.
A linked page there contains this listing of the various, lunar-based, Hijri months:
The most important dates in the Islamic (Hijri) year are: 1 MuHarram (Islamic new year); 27 Rajab (Isra & Miraj); 1 RamaDHaan (first day of fasting); 17 RamaDHan (Nuzul Al-Qur'an); Last 10 days of RamaDHaan which include Laylatu al-Qadar; 1 SHawwal (`iyd al-FiTr); 8-10 Thw al-Hijjah (the Hajj to Makkah); and 10 Thw al-Hijjah (`iyd al-'aDHHae).
Handy, huh?
There's an excellent piece over at The Nation about the Mearsheimer-Walt article. It's by Philip Weiss.
Weiss gives some significant background to the writing of the piece, which was originally commissioned-- from Mearsheimer alone-- by The Atlantic Monthly back in 2002. Mearsheimer brought in Walt, well understanding the kind of reaction he could expect to any objective treatment of the topic:
... "We understood there would be a significant price to pay," Mearsheimer says. "We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged." They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. "[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote," managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic's policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.
"I believe they got cold feet," Mearsheimer says. "They said they thought the piece was a terrible--they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened." The writing as such can't have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.
In the US, by contrast, as Weiss notes...
Weiss writes,
Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. [New America Foundation scholar and writer Anatol] Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. "If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue--my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government--has so much difficulty publishing, it's a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country."
