'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

At week's end

The last couple of weeks have been extremely busy. Last week I did four events connected with my Re-engage! book. The one at USIP Tuesday really involved me doing some new cogitation, and I've been thinking a lot more about that "Have foreign wars become unwinnable yet?" question ever since. (I'm trending toward Yes, but need to do more work on the matter.)

The other three events were all great. Two of them were in private homes. One of those was organized by the Women's Foreign Policy Group, and the other by an interesting new project, the "Chez Nous Salon", based in the DC exurb of Reston, Virginia, that aims mainly at bringing residents from that area together with each other for friendship and discussion... Standing room only at both those events, where I met some really interesting people-- most of them extremely supportive of the book project!

Friday, I got to talk about the book with a group of high-school teachers, in DC for a Summer Institute organized by the World Affairs Council of DC. Another great group. I truly think teachers are grossly under-valued in our society.

Learning about the recent "How to withdraw from Iraq" project, the degree to which they had ripped off some of my own longstanding work on precisely this topic, and the fact that, though they had consulted widely with alleged experts they never even deigned to contact me, all took a bit of time to deal with. But I hope we can all learn some good lessons from that about the need for better coordination and more serious, focused antiwar movement-building going forward. That's what I want to do, anyway.

But right now, I'm starting to change gears for the next ten days or so. My son's wedding is in Vermont next weekend. Bill and I will be driving up, and taking a few days to do so.

By the way, if you're anywhere near Johnstown, PA, on Tuesday afternoon, come hear me talk about my book at 1:30 p.m. at the Gathering of Friends General Conference, being held in the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. The book talk will be in the Gathering's bookstore.

Lots is, as always, still happening in the world. North Korea is off the US government's "terrorism list." Robert Mugabe has been acting like a real thug (though I'm trying to figure out why the US government feels it has any particular reason to say anything about that... really, who cares what Washington thinks about it?) The Israel-Hamas ceasefire is still in place, albeit shakily, given the determination of Fateh and others to torpedo it... The Quarantine Wall the Bushists have been trying to maintain against Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, and Hamas has seen yet more breaches with the news that the Hizbullah-Israel prisoner swap is even closer to being a done deal, and the news of further steps in the Israel-Syria peace talks dance. There have been new developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan...

Meanwhile, I've been reading Sy Hersch's latest piece in The New Yorker, which depicts in some detail the way the hawks in the Bush administration have been maintaining and escalating their provocative military and paramilitary activities against Iran... Their use of the term "preparing the battle space" for what they've been doing seems particularly ominous to me, as does the permission given to "defensive lethal" operations.

Well heck, aren't all the US's many wars around the world always sold to the citizenry here as being "defensive" at some remove??

Anyway, I have scores of things I wanted to post about here, but I don't have time. Over the next ten days I'll check in and post whenever I can. But no promises.

Crunch time coming in Afghanistan?

Maybe crunch time is approaching much faster than I had expected in Afghanistan, for US military planners desperately trying to assemble forces to deal with the deteriorating situation there?

Today, the Pentagon released a pair of Congressionally mandated reports that apparently depict a "fragile" security situation. What's more, even that Armed Forces Press Service (AFPS) report linked to there admits that the formal "Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan", which claimed some bright spots in the situation as of three months ago, may have been painting too rosy a picture compared with today...

The AFPS writer says:

Underscoring the fragility of situation in Afghanistan and its tendency for rapid change is the fact that some of the report’s assertions about security success -- based on information available several months ago and earlier -- [are] no longer are as solid as once believed.

For instance, the report highlights Khowst province in eastern Afghanistan as an example of a once-troubled region transformed by counterinsurgency operations.

“Khowst was once considered ungovernable and one of the most dangerous provinces in Afghanistan,” the report states. “Today, tangible improvements in security, governance, reconstruction, and development are being made.”

But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday expressed concern that attacks in NATO's Regional Command East section of Afghanistan, which includes Khowst province, rose 40 percent from January to May.

To me, one of the most relevant aspects of today's news-- which in classic Washington fashion, the Pentagon tried to "bury" by issuing it late on a Friday-- is that it probably makes much more urgent the arrival of the country's top military planners at a "Dannatt moment", named in honor of the former chief of the British armed forces who back in late 2006 recognized that the western alliance just does not have enough forces to sustain operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore has to choose between them.

Back when Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt reached that conclusion, he opted unequivocally for focusing on Afghanistan. I assume (hope?) that the Pentagon's top brass and suits will make the same choice once they reach Dannatt's level of understanding about the impossibility of sustaining both theaters. Afghanistan and the lawless Afghan-Pakistan border are after all the zones in which Al-Qaeda was incubated, and in which the Qaeda-friendly Taliban have been making a big come-back in the past year. Iraq does have some violent Islamist networks that call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq" (who never existed there before the US invaded the country in 2003, we might note.)

But the far greater challenge of terrorist regroupment is still that in Afghanistan-Pakistan.

So when Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs chair Adm. Mike Mullen reach their "Dannatt moment," I hope they'll make the same strategic choice that Dannatt made. What could make it easier is that, as I and others have argued for some time now, there really is a way we can plan for a US withdrawal from Iraq that is orderly, speedy, timely (and generous to Iraqis.) It's far harder, at this point, to think of such a plan for Afghanistan, though realistically the need for that may come along some time pretty soon, too.

I see that Mullen sounded pretty desperate in remarks he made today in Garmisch, Germany, about the understaffing situation in Afghanistan.

The AFPS report linked to there says this:

Mullen told about 200 students at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies he’s “desperate to get more capability” out of NATO. He said it’s critical that NATO lives up to its commitments to the alliance’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan...

“The simple math is that I can’t put any more [US] forces in Afghanistan until I come down in Iraq,” he told the group. He noted that initiatives to “grow” the Army and Marine Corps will take two to three years to develop deployment-ready troops. Meanwhile, U.S. troops are “pressed very hard” from multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, with too little time” at home stations between deployments. Mullen said keeping up the current operational tempo for the long term will be impossible.

In recent weeks, both Mullen and Gates have been pleading abjectly with the other NATO countries to contribute more forces to the Afghanistan mission. That AFPS report from Garmisch says,

Mullen told students at the Marshall Center that he finds it difficult to understand why some NATO countries don’t share the deep concern the United States and other alliance members have about the situation in Afghanistan.

“It is very clear to me that those who live in Europe see [the terrorist threat] differently from those of us in the United States,” he said. Why Europe “isn’t more excited about what’s going on there than those of us in the United States,” Mullen said, is a question to which he doesn’t know the answer.

Afghanistan, where NATO leads the ISAF effort, is “at the heart of NATO right now,” he said. “And I believe that whether NATO is going to be relevant in the future is tied directly to a positive outcome in Afghanistan... "

We could and probably should have a good discussion about why so many Europeans aren't "excited" about what's going on in Afghanistan. Maybe it's because when the US's gung-ho terrorist-hunting units there bomb populated areas and a lot of noncombatants die, many Europeans don't see that as a winning strategy? Maybe because they, like me, scratch their heads trying to figure out how Afghanistan, a country in Central Asia, could in any way be thought of as lying "at the heart of" an organization associated the North Atlantic? Maybe because they are reluctant to serve in Afghanistan under the leadership of a country (the US) that is badly tainted because of its reckless decision decision to invade Iraq and its blatant disregard of many of the human rights and humanitarian-law norms that Europeans consider to be important? Well, who knows why?

So yes, the US government needs a far smarter, more multilateral (and by that I mean something much broader than NATO) and more successful strategy for Afghanistan. But in order to arrive at that, it needs to get out of Iraq.

Maybe while he's in Europe, Adm. Mullen should go talk to Gen. Dannatt.

The 'Necessary Steps' recommendations, annotated

I've now taken the chance to examine the Executive Summary of the "Necessary Steps" report issued yesterday by the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq. From a quick scan through the report's other 28 or so pages, I think the Executive Summary looks easier to deal with. The rest looks a little amorphous and unclear.

My main reactions to reading it are these:

1. They did indeed use many of the ideas I have been working on and advocating for throughout the whole of the past three years. Points of what I would call our "distinctive" convergence include our shared emphasis on the need for the UN to have a key role in helping organize some of the key political aspects of the departure; and our shared emphasis on the need for the US to be "generous" to the Iraqis as we depart their country, in partial compensation for the sheer harm and misery inflicted on them.

2. There are many other points of convergence that i would not necessarily judge to be so "distinctive", since they are points that are also articulated by many others in the peace and justice community. These include, crucially, the need for the withdrawal to be total, which was indeed right there.

3. Altogether, therefore, there are very many points of convergence between their plan and what I have been articulating, refining, and advocating throughout these past three years. So bravo to them.

4. In four key respects, however, their plan differs significantly from what I have been advocating. These are:


(a) They do not envisage nearly so definitive a handoff of decisionmaking and "convening" power regarding Iraq, from Washington to the UN Secretary General, as I do.

(b) They make no mention at all of the need for focused attention also to be paid to reaching a final resolution of the remaining strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict, as I have consistently done since before the publication of the Baker-Hamilton report-- of which that was also, we can recall, a key feature. Baker Hamilton rightly recognized the close linkage between the two theaters. At a political level, I don't see how the US can expect to involve the UN in any meaningful way in handling complex diplomatic tasks regarding Iraq if at the same time Washington is keeping the UN and the international legitimacy it represents at arm's length in the Arab-Israeli theater.

(c) They make no mention of the need for new national elections in Iraq or, crucially, the need to craft a new, post-occupation Constitution, or at the very least, submit the existing one to very thorough review.

(d) They call for a plan to fund "refugee resettlement in third countries" but make no mention of supporting the return and repatriation of the two million refugees and the two million IDPs to their home communities; whereas I see that, rather than resettlement in other countries, as the prime need.

In general, therefore, I think it would have been excellent if I could have discussed these differences with the people who wrote the Necessary Steps report, before they published it. I think those discussions would have been excellent. We would probably all have learned a lot from them. And the result would have been a significantly richer and more helpful report all round. But, ahem, as I noted yesterday, they didn't bother to consult me before they went about ripping off my work without attribution and publishing this report.

In addition to the four broad points of difference I've identified above, I have some other, more detailed comments on some of the points they make in their Executive Summary. And I've made a table in which I've put those comments alongside the relevant portions of their text. So read on, dear readers...

The "Necessary Steps" report from the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq, June 2008, as annotated by Helena Cobban for Just World News, June 26, 2008.  Creative Commons license on this as on all my web-published work. (Yes, plagiarizers, you know who you are.)
	Their text	My comments
Intro:	The Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from iraq was formed to answer this charge:1 The President has announced that a complete military withdrawal from Iraq will take place over the next 12-18 months. What concrete policy steps can the US government take, immediately and during the withdrawal, to encourage peace and stability in Iraq? We do not underestimate the challenges posed by this charge. Iraq is a traumatized and politically fragmented country. Neighboring states may be tempted to intervene in Iraq’s internal conflicts to protect their own interests.2 The credibility of the United States is badly eroded by a war that most of the world opposed. The United States and the international community bear a responsibility3 to contribute to the alleviation of suffering and the advancement of stability and peace in Iraq. It was the consensus of our expert Advisory Group that there is little the United States can do to achieve those goals as long as it maintains an open-ended military presence in Iraq. In the context of withdrawal, however, there are many measures the United States and international community can take to maximize the chances for progress. In this report, we propose a set of initiatives that, taken in the proper sequence, can help to create the conditions for ending Iraq’s long national nightmare.	1. So I guess the "charge" mentioned in the first line there is one formulated by Rep. McGovern. It is a good one. It defines a timeline for a complete US  military withdrawal from Iraq, albeit one that is on a timescale longer than would be strictly necessary from a purely logistical point of view. 2. In the second graf there, it would have been more accurate and useful to write "Neighboring states may be tempted to continue intervening in Iraq's internal conflicts, with a variety of motivations including the protection of their own interests." 3. I'm wondering whether it's accurate or helpful to imply that  the "international community" has a responsibility equivalent to that of the US for the alleviation of suffering and the advancement of stability in Iraq. Under international  law, the US as occupying power and as UN-mandated power has the responsibility. If we in the US seek to engage the UN in the peacebuilding efforts, as we would do under this plan, then we should be quite clear that we are asking the rest of the "international community", however construed, to do the US an enormous favor.
A	To make its intentions clear prior to withdrawal, the United States can and should: Seek a short-term renewal of the UN mandate instead of a bilateral US-Iraqi security agreement. Announce support for a new UN mandate to take effect in 2009 that will legitimate and define international participation in Iraqi reconciliation, reconstruction, and humanitarian aid. Signal that all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Syria and Iran, will henceforth be treated as partners in promoting stability. Support the establishment of an International Support Group for Iraq. Inform the Maliki government that the United States will soon announce a timetable for withdrawal and will shift toward a stance that emphasizes neutrality and non-interference in Iraqi politics.	The 'plan' doesn't say anything about when or how the announcement of the timetable for total withdrawal gets made. The "charge" above supposes that the President has already made the announcement, whereas point 5 here supposes that that step-- as also possibly the four that precede it-- is taken before the announcement. This lack of clarity is troubling, because the wording of the Announcement and the modalities of its issuing (including when and how it gets made) are both extremely important. In what I've been writing and saying recently, I stress that the announcement of the timetable for the total withdrawal should be accompanied by a request to the UN Secretary-General to convene the negotiating forums necessary to allow the withdrawal to be accomplished in a timely and orderly manner. This formulation conveys the strength of the aspect of "handing over responsibility" for the Iraq project to the UN; and the term "request" conveys an appropriately supplicatory and low-key US attitude toward the UN as it makes this request (see note 3 in the above section.) Points 1 and 2 in this section are  pretty helpful in substance. However, framing them only in the terms that the US should "Seek a short-term renewal... " and "Announce support for a new UN mandate... " doesn't convey the sense of a definitive hand-off of responsibilities to the UNSG that I think is needed. Then, points 3, 4, and 5 here all strongly convey a sense of Washington as continuing to be the key actor. On point 4, I'm still not sure what the role of the International Support Group is supposed to be. On point 5, it is very clear to me that one of the key things the UN will need to do is organize new national elections, preferably under a constituency-based system, to generate a new, post-occupation national leadership capable of both governing the country and  crafting a new, genuinely nationalist-Iraqi Constitution. Why is there no mention of that anywhere in this plan?
B	Subsequent to the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal, to promote reconciliation in Iraq the United States can and should: Take vigorous diplomatic steps to stem the flow of arms and foreign fighters feeding the civil war and communal violence. Assist Iraqi actors and the UN in convening a pan-Iraqi conference on reconciliation, backed by an expanded writ for a UN mission in Iraq. Among other things, that conference should seek an immediate ceasefire and redress of the losses of refugees and internally displaced persons.	Okay, so re the timing of the timetable announcement, that seems to have just mysteriously happened somewhere between point A-5 and the beginning of point B. #1 here is banal. The US as such is already trying to do this. Actually, the majority of the "arms and foreign fighters" that are feeding the communal violence are coming from the US (who are, after all, foreign fighters) and their allies. So as the momentum shifts towards withdrawal then the "arms and foreign fighters" problem will correspondingly decrease. Yes, I know there will continue to be a strong motivation for the Saudis, Iran, and maybe Syria and other powers to continue sending arms and military trainers into Iraq. But after the timetable announcement, as I envision it-- accompanied by the request to the UNSG-- then it will be up to him, not the US, to take over the diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors, not the US. (Important note: Under my plan, the UNSG needs as much prep time as possible to get his show on the road prior to the Announcement being made.) Point 2 here is generally excellent.
C	On the international level, the United States can and should: Immediately re-engage Syria and Iran in non-coercive “give-and-take” diplomacy addressing bilateral issues. Engage with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey seeking their support for peace and economic recovery efforts in Iraq. Work within the International Support Group to encourage Iraq’s six neighbors to promote peace and stability in Iraq and the region.  Strengthen the provisions of the International Compact with Iraq for reparations and debt relief.	Point 1 here is excellent. But it's definitely worth spelling out that Washington's diplomatic re-engagement with both Syria and Iran should cover the whole range of the issues of contention that the US has with each of those powers. I am also very disappointed indeed that this Executive Summary says nothing about the need for a new policy towards Iraq to be accompanied by a strong focus on reaching final peace agreements on all the remaining tracks of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Even the Baker-Hamilton report made a poinjt of stressing the close linkage between the Israeli-Arab and Iraqi theaters and the need to address the Israeli-Arab peacemaking as part of the move toward mending Iraq. This report should certainly echo and amplify that point. Also, under my scheme of the UN taking the lead in convening all the negotiation forums needed to end the US occupation of Iraq, the tasks listed in points 2, 3, and 4 here would be performed primarily by the UN, with US help; they should not be thought of as tasks for the US to lead.
D	With regard to security, the United States can and should: Identify likely flashpoints and,   when requested by Iraqis, factor them into the planning for transitional US military activities during the period of  withdrawal. In anticipation that a blue-helmeted peacekeeping force will be needed and requested by Iraq when the US withdraws, support the UN in organizing and funding it. Assist the UN and donor states in creating disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs.	I don't think that an entirely new and separate UN peacekeeping force will necessarily be needed. Some of the US forces now present in the country should be reconceived and reconfigured as an effective, temporary national gendarmerie and act as such under UN command. The UN should meantime also offer to the Iraqis to take over the job of finishing the training and equipping of their national police and military forces. DDR is, as always, a really good idea.
E	With regard to economic and humanitarian issues, the United States can and should: Cease pressure on Iraq to open up its oil sector and other parts of its economy.  Support the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in better addressing the plight of Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons.  Give aid to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon earmarked for the care of Iraqi refugees. Support a plan to fund refugee resettlement in third countries. Donate to an Iraq Development Fund that bankrolls a labor-intensive public works program and helps to fix the broken food rationing system. Help to strengthen Iraqi NGOs, with special attention to women’s groups.	Points 1, 2, and 3 here are fairly banal (but definitely necessary.) I have a real problem with point 4, since I strongly believe that the primary stress when looking at the issues of the refugees and the IDPs (why no mention of the latter?) should be on repatriating them and giving them significant support to rebuild flourishing home communities on or near the home properties from which they fled. That is, quite rightly, the prime focus of the work UNHCR does in all refugee situations around the world; and it is surely the right option for Iraq's refugees (and IDPs). Also, which "third countries" should be prevailed on to take two million Iraqi refugees? And for goodness sake, why only "third" countries, and why no mention of the responsibilities the US itself to resettle that small proportion of Iraqis who may still have good reason to fear persecution in their country even after some real democratic and institutional reform? Note the slightly mysterious mention of "women's groups", but no other kinds of civil society groups there... This from the notably female-excluding group that produced the report!
F	In sum, the United States can and should: quickly carry out a full military withdrawal from Iraq, carefully pursue diplomatic remedies for the Iraq crisis, and generously give to help rebuild Iraq in the long run. The responsibilities are not America’s alone, but America must lead.	I agree with the first and third of the clauses here. But as indicated above, I believe the "who" question of who leads the conduct of this diplomacy is mis-answered here. Also, where did this "America must lead" business come from??

Comment on the new report on withdrawal from Iraq

The Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Institute has just issued an excellent report (PDF here) calling for a "responsible" withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is "quick, careful, and generous." Also, I believe, total-- though I'm not seeing this spelled out in my quick reading of the Executive Summary.

It looks like an excellent initiative, and they already have two members of the US Congress signed up in support of it.

I'll look in more detail at the report's contents later. But I just want to make a personal comment here.

I have been working steadily and publicly for the past three years to sketch out and promote the idea of a US troop withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, orderly, and generous. (Wording sound familiar here?) And I know that many of the people associated with this project read my work fairly regularly. Some of them I know personally. So I am really disappointed that none of them ever contacted me to ask me to work with them on this in any capacity, and they never even cited any of my numerous writings on the subject as far as I can see.

They have an advisory group of 14 people, listed on p.30 of the PDF document there. All of them (except one, see below) are male. Surprise, surprise. One of the four members of the "Organizing Committee" listed there is female. I don't know her.

Why is this yet another, so egregious instance of the ambitious professional male elevator at work? I have worked professionally on Middle East and strategic issues for 34 years. What does it take for a woman to get some acknowledgment and respect in this field? A sex-change operation?

Honestly, I don't think most of the "left" (which is what most of these people are) is any better on gender-inclusion issues than the right. It sometimes feels fairly depressing.

But I soldier on.

Update Thurs. morning:

I'm informed that Nadje al-Ali of London's SOAS, who's listed as a advisory group member, is female. I'm sorry not to have known or noted that. So we have one out of 14.

One member of the advisory group told me he had simply answered a call from Chris Toensing to participate, and agreed to do so. But why did no-one on any of these groups (organizing or advisory) ever think of drawing on the considerable amount of thinking and writing I have done on precisely this "How to get out of Iraq" issue over the past years? I note that the Commonwealth Institute is headquartered in the Boston area, where certainly my writings on this topic in the CSM and Boston Review would have had wide circulation.

I still believe the "ambitious male professional elevator" I mentioned above is a real factor-- and the picture of who was in the two groups bears out this assessment.

Like many of my female friends, I have seen this elevator at work in many, many different contexts, and I might describe them here in some future posts. But so many men still aren't even aware it exists; aren't aware there's a gender-exclusion problem; and are mystified (or worse, defensive and upset) when people tell them there is.

Disarray in Israel's ruling group

This is how Haaretz's Uzi Benziman describes what's been going on:

June 2008 may be remembered as the month when the Israeli public's patience with its leaders and their style of politics runs out, as citizens are currently witnessing the inner workings of the parties exposed for all to see. In the past, backroom dealings were kept secret, but now the politicians themselves are shedding light on their dark practices, and they are doing so with gusto, in a sort of unabashed striptease revealing all their deformities. Thus, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert informed the public that Defense Minister Ehud Barak allegedly imposed upon him to reach an agreement with Hamas [huh?? Interesting if true, though Benziman's qualification of "allegedly" implies he doubts it... ~HC] over a calm in the Gaza Strip not because it was in the national interest, but because of the Labor leader's political considerations.

Members of the defense minister's inner circle say in return that the prime minister allegedly reneged on an agreement regarding a prisoner swap for abducted Israel Defense Forces solders held by Hezbollah because of interests concerning the Kadima leader's political survival.

Furthermore, the prime minister said the defense minister is imposing his will on security establishment officials, which prompted the defense minister to claim that the prime minister's policy is as stable as a seesaw. Neither take into consideration that they are using the fate of the three abducted soldiers as ammunition to fire charges against each other.

Olmert's pride prevents him from doing the honest thing of stepping down, even for a period of three months, and turned authority over to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni until the police investigation against him clears up. His purely selfish interests, which are completely alien to the common good, have driven him to pull a maneuver that may lead to early elections.

Had Olmert allowed Livni to take over, or given the green light for his party to hold an early primary election, then he may have boosted the chances of the current government coalition to continue, and averted a political crisis. But Olmert has his urges, and he would rather throw everything down the drain then have Livni, or anyone else from his party, take over from him.

Say he manages to pull off a last-minute deal with Shas that keeps it in the coalition, or he succeeds in delaying the preliminary reading over the proposal to dissolve the Knesset - will he then have the right to make fateful decisions? Does he believe that a dubious deal with Shas promising the ultra-Orthodox party funds will endow him with the moral authority to conduct the nation's affairs with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority and Iran?

Olmert's public behavior these days are a repeat of his performance during the Second Lebanon War, which the public was not aware of in real time. Now like then, he lacks a cohesive opinion and is not displaying leadership. Also, his relationship with the defense establishment is problematic and, much like in July 2006, he does not trust his defense minister. Concerns about appearances are considerable factors in the prime minister's decisions over returning abducted IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.

Even if Olmert is trying to implement the recommendations of the Winograd Committee war probe, he is failing to implement its main requirement of his job: Confidence and assertiveness, two further reasons why he should step down.

I guess I hadn't been paying attention to the continuing breakdown in the integrity an coherence of Israel's ruling group. It must be incredibly hard for anyone who's trying to negotiate with this chaotic government to figure out who they can rely on, or even who they should be dealing with.

One big concern. If this ruling system (I shall not say the two words "spider's... web... ") is really this close to chaos, doesn't that mean that these leaders' motivation to spark a war or some other form of national emergency to distract attention from their own deep shortcomings as leaders, and even if it looks quite reckless or otherwise counter-productive, correspondingly grows?

Best precedent: Peres's big, reckless, and quite counter-productive attacks against Lebanon in 1996. Also a precedent: Olmert's ditto of 2006.

Recklessness in the present circumstances might take the form of launching an act of war against Iran that would have a very high probability of sparking retaliation against the United States' very long and very vulnerable supply lines in Ira and the rest of the Gulf...

Or a big military assault against Gaza that would likely spark an explosion of anti-US actions throughout the Middle East...

Are people in the Bush administration worried about the political incoherence and instability in Israel's current leadership? They should be.

Searching for a brother's body in Iraq

Read this, from McClatchy's Baghdad correspondent Laith, and think about how the violence and social collapse set in motion in Iraq by President Bush's decision to invade the country has affected just about every Iraq family.

If you are Iraqi, as a US citizen I say to you I am sorry beyond words for what my government has done to your country. Many of us here in the US tried to prevent the invasion before it happened, but we failed to rein in our government. We should take responsibility for that failure.

If you are an American or any other non-Iraqi reading this, think about how you would feel if these catastrophes happened in your country.

In poll after poll after poll, Iraq's citizens tell us they want a fixed timetable for a total US troop withdrawal from their country. They are willing to take responsibility for what happens after that. For American politicians to claim they have to keep US troops in Iraq "for the sake of Iraq's people" is (a) quite simply mendacious, and (b) incredibly imperialistic and patronizing.

Stop the harm inflicted by the continuing US occupation. Pull the US troops out, and let Iraq's people find their own way to heal.

Dan Twining (and Gvosdev and me) at USIP

I wrote yesterday about Dan Twining, the State Department official who was one of my two co-panelists at the event at USIP yesterday morning, that he made a number of points that I'd found interesting though I didn't agree with all of them. The MP3 audio of the 2-hour event is here.

The two things Twining said that I found most thought-provoking were the following:

1. He talked quite a lot about the US's "free-riding" allies and how the US was doing-- and paying hard cash for-- nearly all the heavy lifting in global policing. That's an observation that has some validity to it from a strictly US-bounded point of view. But it points to further immediate questions. When did the rest of the world actually designate the US to be the world's policeman? (It didn't.) If the "burdens" of global policing were more rationally and equitably shared, wouldn't the other burden-sharing powers demand the right to co-direct the project? Surely so. In other words, the US would thereby lose the right the Bushists arrogated to themselves of deciding who in the global system gets to be punished and who rewarded in the global system...

Actually this argument of Twining's about "burden-sharing" also points to the deeper underlying truth, first laid out to me many years ago by my good friend the Sovietologist Mike MccGwire, to the effect that since around the end of WW-1, the "burdens" of maintaining global empires have outweighed, by an ever-increasing margin, the "benefits" to be had from ripping off the natural resources of whole countries, controlling trade routes, etc. It took the Brits a further 25 years, and the absolute draining and exhaustion they suffered during WW-2, to understand that truth; and the French and Portuguese quite a bit longer. But that was what underlay their successive retreats from empire.

The US-- okay, well, the Bushist portion of the political elite-- never learned that truth. (Or a bunch of other things, either?)

2. Twining talked, in a fairly satisfied way, about the growth of US relations with a whole range of countries in Asia, Africa, etc, under the Bush administration. Including, he mentioned with some satisfaction the military-to-military relations the Bushists have been building with China. I am happy to recognize and to applaud the general content of that accomplishment (though I would not really applaud the emphasis on mil-to-mil in many of these relationships.) But undoubtedly, having such relationships of cooperation, especially with potential challengers like China, is considerably better than keeping tensions high with Beijing... which had, of course, seemed to be the Bushists' first approach, back at the beginning of their term in office, with the whole issue of the provocative flights near to Hainan Island, etc...

I was interested to read this little account on Tim Johnson's "China Rises" blog yesterday, of a visit the US Navy aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan (!) and portions of its accompanying carrier battle group made to Beijing-controlled Hong Kong last week. Seems a typhoon arose while they were there, so for the safety of the vessels they were immediately taken out to sea to ride out the storm... but around 100 sailors had been on shore leave and got left behind.

Johnson quoted the South China Morning Post as writing about the event that some sailors woke up the next morning in whatever dive they'd slept in and wondered: “Dude, where’s my carrier strike group?” Good line, huh?

On a more serious note, though, this building of good working relations between Washington and Beijing-- which has occurred at many levels, and has been a longterm project since Nixon's momentous 1972 visit to China, interrupted mainly by the blips of 1989 and 2001-- underlines the way that the current shift in the global balance is occurring. It is occurring generally without conflict, and with the rising powers playing within the "rules of the game" that were long ago established by the dominant status-quo power, the US.

This phenomenon of the global power balance undergoing a deep structural shift in the absence of armed contestation and war is quite notable. (I wrote quite a bit about it here on JWN after hearing Kishore Mahbubani make this exact point at the IIUSS conference in 2005.)

I was about to write that it's an unprecedented way for the global power-balance to shift; but a moment's reflection reminded me that the shift from the big colonial European powers to the US during the middle of the 20th century was similarly not accompanied by armed conflict between the status-quo and the emerging powers. It was accompanied by massive armed conflict in WW-2. That conflict ran along significantly different fault lines, but it certainly did have the effect of draining the energies and treasuries of the British and French (and thereby revealing to the publics in those countries the degree of imperial overstretch they were already engaged in, even prior to 1939); and it left US power essentially uncontested on the world scene, except by a never terribly robust-- and also war-drained-- Soviet Union.

This issue of power-shifts occurring in the absence of major armed conflict between the status-quo and emerging powers also relates, too, in interesting ways that I don't have to time write about here, to one of the major points I made in my presentation at USIP, namely that the winnability of foreign wars is approaching asymptotically toward zero.

I guess that's a fancy way of saying I think it may well already be zero but I'm not quite prepared to say that outright yet... I also need to do some further exploration of what we all mean by "winning" in war. I have explored what we mean by it with regard to Iraq, a little bit here on JWN in the past. Maybe I need to go back and re-read those two or three posts.

Are foreign wars winnable? and other big questions

This morning I took part in a panel discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace on Foreign Policy and the Next U.S. Administration The other panelists were Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, and Dan Twining, a youngish analyst with the present State Department's Bureau of Policy Planning who previously worked for a while as a foreign-policy aide to Sen. John McCain. The session was ably chaired by Abi Williams, Vice President for Conflict Prevention at USIP.

It was an interesting and rich discussion. As I had expected, Gvosdev and I agreed about a lot of things. He is a very intelligent Realist. My view is that pacifism is the new realism. (Not sure if I managed to persuade him of that; but hey, he might become convinced of it some day!) Twining made a number of observations that I found really interesting, too, though we disagreed much more.

Wow. USIP's a/v and web-editing staff have done a great job and have gotten an MP3 version of the discussion up onto their website already. Easy to find my main presentation: I was on first.

If you don't want to listen to the audio, here's a rough outline of what I said:

I started by describing three momentous consequences of the globalization the world system has seen in recent decades:

1. Foreign wars have become nearly unwinnable. This for two reasons: (a) compared with, say, the situation in the 19th century, the global information environment has become much more transparent; and (b) the norm of human equality has become much more widely (and deeply?) acknowledged, even if still not by any means always respected.

2. The US is no longer the Uberpower it seemed to be back in the 1990s, but we are now really in what Richard Haass has called the "non-polar world.". This was a quick reprise of some of the analysis from Ch.6 of my Re-engage! book.

3. Climate change has emerged as an issue of core importance in world politics.

I went on to say how these three big developments structure the global environment in which the new president will be operating, and made a few other points... I concluded by noting that we need to develop a new, much more people-centered definition of "the national interest", and laying out my list of the three top things the next president should do within his first 100 days in office.

These are:

1. Announce a date certain for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, and invite the UN to convene the negotiation(s) which will allow that to happen in an orderly way.

2. Close Guantanamo; and

3. Announce that he is committed to participating in good faith in the post-Kyoto global negotiations on climate change.

Those of you who've read my Re-engage! book will probably recognize how this presentation built on some of the book's key themes.

More on the increasing unwinnability of foreign wars, and on the "Top 3 Things for the new president"-- later. Right now, I'm pretty tired.

On Democracy Now! yesterday, on Israel & Iran

... In case you missed it, here's the page with the transcript, audio- and video-stream versions, MP3 download, and more.

(If using the transcript, could you, you know, cut out some of my "you know"s?)

78 years later... The Anglo-Iraq Treaty of 1930

Thanks to Glen Rangwala of Cambridge and Jonathan Schwarz of Democrats.com who have found the definitive UN-archived version (PDF) of the 1930 treaty between Britain and Iraq.

Here is an HTML version of the treaty's text (copied and pasted from the text in Schwarz's blog post there.)

The 1930 treaty provides an instructive precedent for with the present US attempts to force the (US-constituted) Iraqi government into a long-term security arrangement in many respects:

• In both cases, a western government that had taken control of Iraq by military means later had its presence there given some cover by the world's leading intergovernmental body, and also set about constituting a puppet "national" government there which was the body with which this agreement was "negotiated."
  
• In both cases, there is some attempt by the occupying power to couch the treaty in terms of equality, and to make some of its provisions look advantageous to the occupied country. But in both cases, close attention to the terms of the agreement reveals its highly asymmetrical nature.
  
• In both cases, provision is made for the western power in question to have wide access to, use of, and control over military bases in Iraq; there are components relating to it providing "advisors" to the Iraqi armed forces; and Britishers service-members in Iraq are offered immunity from local prosecution and other privileges.
  

I note that Schwarz made some, but not all of those points. I'm hoping I can get back to doing a more thorough annotation of this treaty and what we know about the Bush administration's present proposals to Iraq, as soon as possible.

I note, however, that the regional and global political climate within which the Bush administration is pursuing its Iraq policy is very different indeed from those in which "His Britannic Majesty" was acting.

Back then, London faced no significant challenge from any third-party (i.e. non-Iraqi and non-British)powers to its pursuit of its imperial policies in Iraq. The biggest third-party "challenger" to British designs in the Middle East was France; and in the post-WW-I diplomacy, Britain and France had reached extensive agreement on how they would divvy up control over the mashreq between them. There were numerous Arab and non-Arab critics of Britain's policy in Iraq, but none that caused London any significant level of concern.

Today, as the Bush administration attempts a reprise of 1930, it faces significant opposition from the following sources:

* an educated and increasingly well-organized population inside Iraq;
* Iran;
* public opinion throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and some though not all of their governments;
* democrats (small 'd') in the US who increasingly reject lengthy, imperial-style entanglements in Iraq;
* most likely, other significant world powers.

So Bush is basically whistling in the wind on this...

However, the fundamental irrationality and unwinnability (not to mention immorality) of this project is no guarantee at all that he will not continue to pursue it, doggedly, as long as he can. That means, I guess, that we need to continue our campaign to oppose it.

Revisiting the history of the 1930 treaty is, it seems to me, a helpful part of doing this. Thanks, Jonathan and Glen.

Levy and Bronner on Israelis' distaste for peace

The headline of Gideon Levy's article today is even more provocative than mine: "Quiet is muck" is how it reads in the English translation. He leads off with this:

A great disaster has suddenly come upon Israel: The cease-fire has gone into effect. Cease-fire, cease-Qassams, cease-assassiations, at least for now. This good, hopeful news was received in Israel dourly, gloomily, even with hostility. As usual, politicians, the military brass and pundits went hand in hand to market the cease-fire as a negative, threatening and disastrous development.

Even from the people who forged the agreement - the prime minister and defense minister - you heard not a word about hope; just covering their backsides in case of failure. No one spoke of the opportunity, everyone spoke of the risk, which is fundamentally unfounded. Hamas will arm? Why of all times during the cease-fire? Will only Hamas arm? We won't? Perhaps it will arm, and perhaps it will realize that it should not use armed force because of calm's benefits.

It is hard to believe: The outbreak of war is received here with a great deal more sympathy and understanding, not to say enthusiasm, than a cease-fire...

So maybe this is the obverse side of the "bellophilia" (love of war) that Meron Benvenisti diagnosed sweeping the Israeli public in 2002. We could call the present phenomenon eirenophobia, the fear or hatred of peace.

Levy continues:

Hamas wants the calm because it serves its goals. That is not necessarily bad for Israel. A few months of quiet and the lifting of the terrible siege on Gaza could create a new reality. Noam Shalit's protest is understandable, but the new atmosphere of calm is precisely the time to finally secure the release of his son Gilad and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners - two positive developments for the two peoples.

Yes, the zero-sum game between us and them ended long ago. It is a shame we are the only ones not to have internalized it... A new and somewhat better life in Gaza will assure a new life for Israel, too. It is not for nothing that the days when the fence was breached between Gaza and Egypt were the quietest days the Negev had known in two years.

In the wake of the cease-fire, a Palestinian government of national unity may arise and be a real and not virtual partner, the representative of the entire Palestinian people and not half of it. True, Hamas will not quickly abandon its hard-line positions, but under the aegis of a unity government it may surprise people, at least in a passive way. An agreement with such a government will not be an agreement of puppets between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the one known as the "shelf agreement." If it is attained, it will be a real agreement. The cease-fire has already proven that not only is Israel willing to negotiate with Hamas, Hamas is willing to negotiate with Israel. Is this not good news?

The largely negative and fearful way that most Israelis have responded to news of the tahdi'eh with Hamas has also been remarked on by the NYT's Ethan Bronner. He writes:

After a year of painful violence — Hamas rockets flying into Israeli communities, soldiers killed and wounded on forays into Gaza — one might have expected the start of a six-month cease-fire with Hamas to be hailed here as good news. Yet what was the front page headline in Maariv newspaper that day? “Fury and Fear.”

That says a great deal about the mood in Israel, a widely shared gloom that this nation is facing alarming threats both from without and within. Seen from far away, last week must have offered some hope that the region was finally at, or near, a turning point: the truce with Hamas, negotiated by Egypt, started on Thursday; other Palestinian-Israeli talks were taking place on numerous levels that both sides said were opening long-closed issues; there were also Turkish-mediated Israeli negotiations with Syria, and a new offer to yield territory to Lebanon along with a call for direct talks between Jerusalem and Beirut.

But it looked very different here. Most Israelis consider the truce with Hamas an admission of national failure, a victory for a radical group with a vicious ideology. As they look ahead, Israelis can’t decide which would be worse, for the truce to fall apart (as polls show most expect it to do), or for Hamas actually to make it last, thereby solidifying the movement’s authority in Palestinian politics over the more secular Fatah...

The backdrop for all of this is the fear of Iran’s growing power and the world’s inability so far to stop it from working on atomic weaponry. But it is not only foreign relations that so depresses the Israeli public. It is also that their political system is in crisis with the leaders under investigation and feuding among themselves.

“It is not ‘the situation’ that darkens the mood here in Israel,” wrote Yossi Sarid, a longtime leftist politician, in an opinion article in the newspaper Haaretz. “It is the lack of exit from the situation. There is not really any hope for change. Who will rescue us from depression? Who will give us expectations?”

Bronner then notes that, whereas in the US, many people are pinning considerable hopes on Barack Obama as offering a chance for a "new beginning", and a way out of a still gloomy national situation, in Israel there is no such immediately evident and compelling alternative to the current, chronically logjammed and distrusted crop of political leaders.

Crucially, he notes this:

One point many commentators made last week is that while there may be a state of “calm” with Hamas, there is still nothing resembling that between Mr. Olmert and his defense minister, Ehud Barak. They remain at war. And the feuding goes beyond the two of them.

Both of Mr. Olmert’s two main lieutenants, Mr. Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, have called publicly for him to resign over an investigation into whether he took envelopes of cash from an American Jewish businessman. Everyone assumes there will be a new government by year’s end. Yet a vote tentatively planned for the coming week in Parliament, on whether to dissolve itself and trigger new elections, may not happen because so many parliamentarians worry they will not be re-elected.

Bronner ends with a few quotes from that supremely irrelevant and silly man, Tony Blair. He quotes Blair as saying that,

as he now understands it, what started in late 2000 when the second Palestinian uprising began and Israel counterattacked was “a complete breakdown in the credibility of peace.”

What an idiot Blair is. From 2000 till last year he was Prime Minister of Britain, and therefore had access to all the best "intelligence" the Britas and Americans could muster about the situation in Israel/Palestine. And it is only now that he finally understands that what happened in 2000 was a complete breakdown in the credibility of, as I understand what he's saying, the kind of coercive peace process the western powers had been trying to shove down the Palestinians' throats since 1993? When I took part in the 2-week-long Quaker fact-finding mission to Palestine/Israel in summer 2002, the breakdown in the credibility of the post-1993 "peace" process was already extremely evident. We wrote a lot about it in the book we then jointly published; and I wrote about it here on JWN and elsewhere on many occasions back then...

But the present developments in Israel are still very interesting indeed: the eirenophobia, the uncertainty about their national future, and the stalemate and strategic stasis of their political leadership.

I still don't buy Sayed Hassan Nasrallah's analysis that Israel is like a spider's web that is on the point of collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But if this is the response of most Israelis to news of the ceasefire with Gaza, then maybe Israel is closer to being an unsustainable spider's web than than it previously appeared.

63 months of American "Freedom" in Iraq

Juan Cole has a brilliant post today in which he soberly assesses and presents the data on the excess deaths suffered by Iraqis as a result of George W. Bush's decision to invade their country:

By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. This conclusion can be reached more than one way. There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were probably killed by US troops or by the US Air Force, with the bulk dying in bombing raids by US fighter jets and helicopter gunships on densely populated city and town quarters.

In absolute numbers, that would be like bombing to death everyone in Pittsburgh, Pa. Or Cincinnati, Oh.

Only, the US is 11 times more populous than Iraq, so 310,000 Iraqi corpses would equal 3.4 million dead Americans. So proportionally it would be like firebombing to death everyone in Chicago.

The one million number includes not just war-related deaths but all killings beyond what you would have expected from the 2000-2002 baseline...

And for a more granular, personal view of what it is still like, today, to live in the climate of violence, read this searing description by the LA Times's Usama Redha of a bombing near his home in the Hurriya neighborhood of Baghdad:

When I come home from work I always walk from the bus terminal past the vegetable and fruit vendors and shish kebab restaurants in the market, not just for shopping, but to chat a few minutes with some of the vendors who were my childhood friends.

Suddenly, BOOM! A huge explosion shook the bus..

But my daily chat that should have ended with a joke and a smile turned to tears and sorrow.

The driver swerved the microbus. We saw a huge ball of dust and black smoke rise from the bus terminal.

People were running to see what was going on and to rescue the injured.

I called my wife to tell her that I was OK, and then called the office to report the news.

My heart was pounding as each step took me closer to the scene. Through the heavy smoke I could see the human flesh. The faceless, burned body of a woman and others were spread here and there. They were lucky that they were in peace, I told myself. The injured lay on the ground in suffering. I thanked God because I could have been one of them. It was just three minutes between death and life.

I was trying to cover the story, but something fixed my legs to the ground. At first I felt afraid to go closer, afraid there could be another explosion. But then I saw people I knew screaming about beloved ones. I knew then that my friends were killed. I had lost two of my dear friends, their lives turned to lifeless digits in the casualty count of at least 63.

I passed the scene three days later. There were candles with flowers here and there. I approached a charred spot that had been a booth. There was a picture and black sign: "The Happy martyr Ahmad Salih."

I approached a man who was standing nearby. He was smoking and had an absentminded look.

"Why have people put the flowers and candles here?" I asked.

He looked at me, and said in a depressed tone, "These candles and flowers are for the ones whose bodies were not found."

The man spoke again more sadly.

"Look to the top of the building. There, people found the head of a child. He is my grandson."

Do we need to recall that, as the foreign belligerent occupying power, the US still bears overall responsibility for ensuring the security of Iraq's civilian population?

Hurriya, by the way, is Arabic for "freedom." I have always been disgusted that Bush and his officials gave the name "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to their military invasion of Iraq. What an Orwellian abuse of language.

Uh-Oh-Bama!

The candidate was reported as saying in Florida today:

"[T]here is no doubt that Iran poses an extraordinary threat to Israel and Israel is always justified in making decisions that will provide for its security."

Looks to me like ways too blank of a check.

No qualifications there, Senator? How about this: "Like any country, Israel is justified in making any legitimate decisions that will provide for its security."

Words matter. Especially when they're inscribed on blank checks.

Update Sunday a.m.:

Please note that in my critique above I haven't even touched on the factual basis behind Obama's assertion that "[T]here is no doubt that Iran poses an extraordinary threat to Israel." I wanted to focus on the operational part of the sentence. But the operational part is evidently logically linked to the antecedent assertion, even though not strictly entailed by it.

Regarding the factual assertion, it is quite simply incorrect. I am just one of many hundreds or even thousands of analysts of regional strategic affairs who judges that there is considerable doubt that Iran poses any "extraordinary" threat to Israel, let alone any threat of a gravity that would justify Israel starting a regional war to "prevent" or "pre-empt" it. Indeed, several strategic analysts in Israel itself, including former intel chief Efraim Halevy, judge that Israel could even live with a nuclear-armed Iran (though there is no evidence yet that that that is what the mullahs are actually aiming for.)

Also extremely relevant here-- though never mentioned by Obama or other leading members of the US political elite-- is, as always, Israel's own current possession of extremely robust nuclear weapons, whether fully assembled or just one step away from being so. Those give it, of course, considerable deterrent capability.

What the Greeks say

AFP reports from Athens that:

The Greek air force’s central command said Friday it had taken part in "joint training exercises" with Israel off the southern Mediterranean island of Crete.

The maneuvers, code-named ’Glorious Spartan 08,’ took place on May 28 and June 12, and consisted of aerial maneuvers and knowledge exchange.

According to Greece’s Athens News Agency, the operation involved simulated aerial combat, attacks on terrestrial targets, aerial refueling and search and rescue missions.

I still believe, as I wrote here yesterday, that given Greece's role in NATO the US military must have known all about the exercise. It also quite possibly provided material help to it, as well as helping ensure the operational safety of the airspace used.

ElBaradei, Powell, and the key role of legitimacy

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) today threatened to resign if Iran should be subjected to unwarranted military attack by any party.

Now, that's leadership!

I am just sitting here and thinking how different the world would be today if former Secretary of State Colin Powell had shown comparable moral grit and expressed an exactly similar intention, either publicly, or privately to the president, in the lead-up to Bush's launching of the war against Iraq... Powell reportedly had considerable reservations about the wisdom of the attack, but at a certain point he took a deep breath and went along with it, as "a loyal soldier." Indeed, he even agreed to lend the considerable political legitimacy he had accrued both at home and overseas to the shameful and mendacious effort to "sell" the war to the national and global publics with his UN speech.

The worldwide impact of ElBaradei's statement, which he made to the broadly pro-US Al-Arabiyya television station, is huge. Its impact here in the US is doubtless considerably less than a public Powell declaration of intent-to-resign would have been, but it is by no means trivial. For finally, after being immersed in neocon-generated delusions about America's global supremacy etc for so many years, the American people and even many members of our political elite are waking up to the fact that the US is not a widely admired and unchallengeable Uberpower any more.

In this new, post-Uberpower world, that vital, if still somewhat hard-to-capture quality of "legitimacy" has become more and more important.

In the 19th century, the US Cavalry could go charging around the American west rounding up and expropriating the native peoples, and the European Big Powers could continue doing exactly the same thing in Asia or Africa-- and essentially there was nothing to stop them. The oppressed peoples themselves had nothing like the firepower required to resist the "White" armies, and public opinion back in the metropoles only rarely intervened to stop the massacres. News of the military forces' depradations took weeks, sometimes months, to reach "back home", if it ever did. And if the publics in London, New York, or Paris should receive news of a massacre here or there in the non-"White" world-- well, how much did most of them, actually, care?

We are no longer in the nineteenth century. Thank goodness.

We're in a century in which:

1. The international information environment is fast approaching global transparency. Now, we citizens of big, powerful nations often have real-time information about the effects of our military's actions on others around the world. We can never again say with conviction that "We didn't know."

2. The norm of the equality of all human persons has become much more solidly recognized (even if still only imperfectly respected) than ever before. It is impossible to stand up in any chancery or parliament today and say, "Oh, but it was only a bunch of fuzzy-wuzzies or towelheads who were harmed." Humanity matters.

The above two developments have transformed world politics. In the era of transparency and human equality, the legitimacy of any government or other body that is contemplating taking a radical action has become central.

ElBaradei embodies global legitimacy on issues of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. George Bush does not. (To put it mildly.) With his statement of intention to resign, ElBaradei has thrown down a challenge to the warmongers in Washington and Israel that I believe they will be unable to overcome.

Thank you, Mr. ElBaradei!

(In terms of "legitimacy", it is also notable that Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of a newly stabilized and new self-confident Russia-- which still, of course, has a veto-bearing seat on the Security Council-- has also recently issued a strong warning against the use of force against Iran.)

Iran: Israeli muscle-flexing, US vulnerability

The NYT's Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt today published a report, sourced to Gordon's favored sources, those ever-anonymous "Pentagon officials", that states,

Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Several American officials [who remain unidentified throughout] said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.

More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The military exercise in question, the Pentagon-leaked report about it, and the publication earlier this week of WINEP's long-awaited "It'll be a cake-walk, folks!", oh sorry make that"The Last Resort" report (PDF), that spins the neocon view of how painless an attack on Iran will be: all these developments together look like a sophisticated, multi-pronged campaign to prepare the world political climate for just such an attack.

Any military attack by one country on the land of another is an act of war. Let's not forget that. Warmongers have always sought to cloak the nature of their actions in euphemistic mendacity. The euphemism favored by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, the authors of the Cakewalk "Last resort" paper favor, is "preventive action."

Oh my! It makes it sound as admirable and low-risk as a measles-inoculation campaign in a low-income neighborhood, doesn't it? Don't be fooled for a moment.

Some first important points to note about the reported Israeli exercise:

1. If indeed it was of the scale reported by Gordon and Schmitt, then it was one large, very noticeable, and very expensive exercise. Two questions: Why have we not heard about it from other sources in Greece and the eastern Med before now? And why, if it was kept quiet until now, did these Pentagon officials choose to tell us about it now?

2. Over the years, it was the US that gave Israel the vast majority, if not all, of the air platforms used. These would be the same kind of platforms (i.e. planes and choppers) that would be used in the attack on Iran that is apparently being considered by Israel. But the transfer of all such weapons from the US to any other country is always attached to strict conditionality regarding the uses to which they can be put. Do we have any reason to think that the US would, actually, allow Israel to use these planes to bomb Iran? And why should it allow Israel to train to do so? These are very important questions.

3. The airspace over Greece and the eastern Med is part of Greece's and NATO's clearly understood area of operations. What authorities within Greece or NATO gave permission for an exercise of this nature to be conducted? What operational support did the Israelis receive in its conduct from either Greece or NATO?

4. The exercise looks to have been extremely expensive to conduct. Was any portion of that cost paid by the US? If not, how did Israel fund it?

One inescapable conclusion: There is no way this exercise was carried without direct coordination with US and and probably also NATO commanders at, presumably, the highest level. In that sense, therefore, it was not solely an "Israeli" exercise. It was a US-condoned or perhaps even US-supported or US-funded exercise, carried out by Israeli pilots in planes given to Israel by the US.

An important corollary: If Israel should build on what it learned in the exercise and actually undertake an act of war against Iran, then the US would be just as closely implicated in (and responsible for) that act of war as it was for the conduct of the training exercise. There is no way an Israeli air force strike group could reach Iran to bomb it without passing through airspace that-- in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf countries, and Turkey-- is all under tight control of either the US unilaterally, or of NATO.

My first thought on reading the Gordon-Schmitt piece was, "Oh my gosh, maybe the Israelis will actually go ahead and launch a war against Iran in which the US would, like it or not, necessarily immediately become entangled."

My second thought, on reading the two men's almost exclusively "Pentagon official" sourcing of the story was that it looks as though there are high-ups in the Pentagon actually conniving in something there.

But what? Hard to believe that even the most hardened neocons left in the administration (and there aren't a lot there any more) would collude with Israel in undertaking an act of war that would place in immediate jeopardy the lives of our 160,000 American sitting ducks in Iraq-- and the supply lines that support them... and the entire global oil market?

Don't be swayed, by the way, by all the attempts at emollient argument-- "it won't be so bad!" "we'll have lots of allies in the region, and even in Iran!"-- that Clawson and Eisenstadt brought forth in their Cakewalk paper. The effects of any outside country, whether US or Israel (with US collusion), launching a war against Iran would be of the utmost gravity.

So if these "Pentagon officials"-- and perhaps also some officials in Dick Cheney's office-- are conniving in something, maybe it isn't actually the planning for an Israeli attack on Iran? Maybe they've been conniving in generating an appearance of an imminent Israeli attack against Iran, with the aim of-- what? Trying to up the coercion-factor ante against Iran in the continuing negotiations, or non-negotiations, over its nuclear program? Perhaps.

(Note to Gordon and Schmitt in this context: No-one has yet produced any conclusive evidence that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program. You make mention of such a program twice in your article, both times in the context of reporting on allegations made about its existence by Israeli officials. But since you do mention it both times without comment or qualification, you surely owe it to your American readers to also note that Iran claims its program is for purely civilian purposes, and there is no conclusive evidence that it has a military dimension.)

But it is also possible that what the Israelis, and their friends deep in the Bush administration including the office of the Vice President, are doing is something altogether more nefarious. Perhaps they are seeking to "use" the threat that Israel might launch an attack against Iran at a time and in a way of its own choosing as a way of essentially blackmailing the rest of the US government into agreeing to either coordinate more closely and cooperatively with Israel in planning a joint attack against Iran; or to do something else the Olmert government really wants them to do (more money, more weapons, less pressure on the "peace process", etc.)

In any event, it is all an extremely risky business indeed... The oil market has already been showing jitters this morning, in response to the NYT article and to the latest declarations from Hugo Chavez.

Whether Israel and its allies within the US (inside portions of the administration, and in highly ideological think-tanks) are supporting the flexing of Israel's military muscle in order to prepare for an actual act of war against Iran, or "merely" to blackmail the rest of the US government, then either way it's an outrage and should end forthwith.

As for the still-continuing dispute between the US government and Iran over the latter's nuclear enrichment program, there are 1,000 ways other than war and violence to deal with that. Indeed, the non-US powers on the UN Security Council should right now be working overtime to try to convene an authoritative, high-level US-Iranian negotiation in which those concerns and all the other issues of concern between the two governments can be addressed.

The creation of the UN in 1945, as a body that provides numerous different avenues for the nonviolent resolution of tough international conflicts, is a signal achievement of US diplomacy and wisdom in decades past. Our country's citizens-- and the whole world!-- would be extremely well served if our president decided to use the world body to help de-escalate the current, extremely high-risk tensions. And we would be correspondingly ill-served if he allowed the warmongers to jerk him into supporting any form of a military attack against Iran.

Right now, as whenever there is an increased risk of an act of war being launched against Iran by the US or Israel, there is a heightened risk that matters might spin out of control. The stability of the global system as well as the lives of 160,000 US servicemembers in Iraq are put in direct risk.

Stop the madness. Stop the war. Start the diplomacy of real engagement and real problem-solving-- now.

Hamas's Bardawil on the tahdi'eh, etc.

Kudos to Haaretz's Avi Issacharoff who yesterday conducted a phone interview with Hamas legislator and Gaza Strip spokesman Salah Bardawil about the thadi'eh.

Issacharoff asked what Hamas would do to any Gazans who might violate the tahdi'eh by firing rockets at Israel.

Bardawil replied:

"I'm not going to say that we'll start deploying forces at the border and turn into the Palestinian Authority, which works to safeguard Israel?s security interest. But we made a decision that anyone who fires rockets at Israel will be doing so without our approval. We'll let the organization with which he is affiliated deal with him. If it?s someone who doesn't belong to any organization, measures will be taken against him. Anyone who violates the factions? decision on the cease-fire is harming the Palestinian interest and we will deal with him accordingly."

Evidently, anyone in Israel who wants to see the tahdi'eh maintained should have an interest in ensuring that the responsible party in Gaza, i.e. Hamas, has the capability to monitor and police the Strip's border zones, which given its tiny size means really the whole Strip, effectively.

The rest of the article is interesting, too. Issacharoff not only engages Bardawil in a fascinating conversation on broader prospects for Israel-Hamas diplomacy, but also has a short report of a conversation with an unnamed former Fateh official in Gaza who expressed what Issacharoff described as "consternation" that the ceasefire has further strengthened Hamas politically.

Issacharoff writes this about his conversation with Bardawil:

Unlike some of his Hamas colleagues, Bardawil does not act horrified when hearing the words "peace" and "Israel" put together. "The Arab world has already outstretched its hand for peace with the Israelis in the past," he says. "The ideas of Ahmed Yassin [Hamas' founder and former leader], who supported a cease-fire for some 15-20 years, focused on peace, not war. Hamas people who insist that there will never be peace with Israel do so because they are skeptical about the intentions of Israel's leadership. Everyone on your side is saying that the hudna [truce] is an opportunity for Hamas to narrow the military gap, but it's actually a historic opportunity for Israel and for all the sides involved to live in peace, and to build a future for the next generations."

... "Today, the relations between Israel and Hamas are those of enemies," Bardawil explains. "But during past negotiations between Hamas and Fatah we agreed on 'the national reconciliation agreement,' which declares that the Palestinian state will be established within the 1967 borders. Israel mustn't pass up such an agreement with Hamas − otherwise an ideology more extreme than Hamas will be the result. Israel has to understand that nowadays, Hamas is a factor that balances the radical and out-of-control voices in both the Arab and the Muslim world."

However, it's hard to ignore the more hawkish voices in Hamas, which see the cease-fire as little more than a timeout, allowing the organization to build up its military forces in anticipation of the future − when they envision wiping Israel off the map. But according to Bardawil, the Hamas members who speak in such terms are merely voicing religious ideas. "It's impossible to change religious beliefs," he says. "But the conflict between us and Israel is political and not religious."

So why don't you recognize Israel?

"We won't repeat Fatah's mistakes and get into the whole adventure of recognizing Israel. To this day, the borders of this state remain uncertain. It's too early to talk about negotiations with Israel. The cease-fire is a kind of de facto recognition of this entity, just as Israel recognizes the existence of Hamas. We cannot deny the reality of its existence."

Who's the winner and who's the loser when it comes to the cease-fire?

"The agreement meets the interests of both sides. No one won, but the truce benefits both Israel and Hamas. It's only natural for each side to try to portray the move as a victory for itself and to boast of its achievements. In the end, everyone gains. Otherwise, they wouldn't have agreed to the cease-fire."

I should note that what Bardawil said tracks very well with what I heard on these issues when I interviewed Khaled Meshaal in Damascus in January.

The Hamas people have gone through some extremely challenging times in recent years, including with the succession of very high-level assassinations that Israel carried out against its top leaders in 2003-2004. But the have shown a notable ability to rebuild and even increase their organizational integrity in the aftermath of those decapitation attacks. This is an organization that will be around a long time to come. Moreover, its ability to maintain and increase organizational discipline under extremely taxing circumstances stands in stark contrast to the situation inside Fateh, which continues to be marked by considerable organizational and political disorder. Fateh's leaders and officials have reason to be concerned about the future of their movement.

(For more background, go read some of my reporting on the Palestinian situation since 2002, as archived at Boston Review and accessible through this portal.)

Selling the tahdi'eh

The Hamas-Israel ceasefire (tahdi'eh) went into operation today, thank God. But not without-- as I forecast yesterday-- some last-minute salvoes from each side.

The tahdi'eh is scheduled to last in the first instance for six months. According to the agreement, which was mediated by Egypt, the reciprocal cessation of attacks between Gaza and Israel will be followed in short order by Israel taking significant steps to ease and then lift the economic siege it has maintained on Gaza for two years; by steps to open the Rafah personal-transit crossing between Gaza and Egypt; and by completion of the negotiation on a prisoner exchange.

Until very recently, Israel's leaders were adamant that they would not deal with Hamas, and Hamas's leaders-- who still do not grant Israel any of the legitimacy it craves as a Jewish state-- remained very wary indeed of having any dealings with it. Since the leaders on both sides have promulgated these views very widely among their own people for many years, they have now necessarily had to accompany the release of the news about the ceasefire with their own efforts to explain to their respective followers how and why this ceasefire is acceptable.

This work of psychological leadership, or "message management", is a necessary concomitant of all moves that leaders anywhere make from hostility to de-escalation or peacemaking. But studying it in this case is particularly interesting.

One perception the leaders on both sides have to combat is the idea that in reaching this de-escalation step they are displaying the "weakness" of their side vis-a-vis the other. In Hamas's case, the movement addressed that concern directly yesterday. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported that,

The Hamas Movement on Wednesday affirmed that it signed the calm agreement out of strength and not out of weakness and that it would abide by all articles of the agreement as mediated by Egypt.

PIC also reported the (not completely unjustified) attempt by a Hamas spokesman to frame the conclusion of the ceasefire as a positive achievement for the movement:

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said ... that both parties are committed to the agreement after approving it, adding that three days after the ceasefire goes into effect Israel would gradually open the commercial crossings and within two weeks they would be completely open.

The spokesman said that Egyptian sponsorship of the agreement was an important element in stabilizing it, adding that Hamas considers the agreement one of the fruits of resistance.

Note, in that statement, too, how Abu Zuhri, whose statements until recently would drip with scorn or skepticism regarding the credibility and trustworthiness of Israel's leaders, is now also assuring his Palestinian listeners that "both parties are committed to the agreement."

For the vast majority of the Gazans listening to him, the promise that the commercial crossings between Gaza and Israel will be "completely open" within two weeks will obviously come as a huge relief, and-- like the cessation of Israeli armed attacks that the ceasefire also involves-- a real benefit of the ceasefire. So from that point of view, the challenge that Hamas has faced in "selling" the tahdi'eh to its public has been relatively easy.

In Israel, where only a small proportion of the public has been adversely affected by the long-continuing (and highly asymmetrical) exchanges of fire with Gaza, the leaders' selling job has been considerably harder. Israel's leaders have therefore been trying to sell the tahdi'eh to their people in a different, much more convoluted way and, I would say, with notably less enthusiasm than the Hamas leaders.

Haaretz tells us this:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Hamas on Thursday that the cease-fire was the militant group's last chance to avoid an IDF incursion into the Gaza Strip.

Hamas supporters and the people of Gaza were "pissed off with Hamas" after years of violence, Olmert said in an interview with Australia's Sydney Morning Herald. [Without adducing any particular evidence for his claim, which indeed would be hard to come by. ~HC]

"I think the strategy of Hamas, which does not want to recognise Israel's right to exist in the first place, and the extremism, and the fanaticism, and the religious dogmatism, is the enemy of peace," Olmert reportedly told the newspaper.

"We are at the end of our tolerance with regard to terror in Gaza," he stated.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev on Thursday said Israel would fully implement all its commitments but added, "Our eyes are open, we are closely following what the other side is doing."

That Haaretz news report also tells us this:

Meanwhile, the IDF forces on the border with the Gaza Strip have been instructed to maintain restraint early in the cease-fire and to avoid any offensive operations.

The soldiers have been told they are allowed to respond if they come under fire; however, they have not been issued precise rules of engagement for the new situation that went into effect Thursday morning.

Similarly, no specific instructions have been issued on what actions to take if armed Palestinians are identified close to the border fence inside the Gaza Strip.

New rules of engagement are expected in the coming days.

Hamas sources said they do not intend to deploy any of their forces along the border so as to prevent any IDF operations.

The main point man negotiating the truce from Israel's side was ranking Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad. Haaretz's Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff report that,

now Gilad needs to speak out in support of the deal he reached - without any great enthusiasm - under orders from the political echelon. In this case, it seems the politicians find it more comfortable to hide behind the broad backs of their retainers.

Gilad's direct boss, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, was busy on Wednesday with a lightening visit to an armaments show in Paris. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made do with a few general comments.

When Gilad is called upon to explain the tahadiyeh, under conditions far from those Israel hoped for, he will say that it is a choice between a bad option and an even worse one.

A large military operation would not have immediately ended the firing of Qassam rockets or solved the problem of arms smuggling. At the same time, there was the need to quickly end the suffering of Israelis living near Gaza. Like Barak, Gilad believes that in the long run a confrontation with Hamas is almost inevitable, but then the cabinet can come to the nation with clean hands and say "we tried everything, now it is the IDF's turn."

What Gilad cannot say is that the choice of tahadiyeh was first and foremost a political one. From the moment Olmert and Barak reached the conclusion that they did not have public support or political breathing room for a large ground offensive in Gaza, the die was cast.

This is a fascinating commentary on the waning appetite of Israel's citizens for continuing the wars outside their own borders that their country always-- until the summer of 2006-- seemed prepared or even eager to undertake. And indeed, Harel and Issacharoff (and also, perhaps, Amos Gilad), directly link Israel's present reluctance to launch a massive attack against Gaza to the very unsatisfactory results it achieved in the large-scale war against Lebanon of that year.

The reporters write:

Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi understands the coalition picture [i.e., the government's point of view], but there are quite a number of senior officers below him who see the agreement as a big mistake. In their eyes, Israel has not even attempted to try a long list of measured operations that are less than an conquest of the Gaza Strip, but if tried, might have forced Hamas to accept a cease-fire from a competely different postion. Brigade-level operations in the strip were halted a long time ago, and no attempt has been made in recent times to threaten the lives of senior Hamas officials.

Last month the IDF initiated seven operations in Gaza, two of them at the battalion level and five at the company level. This is not really putting military pressure on Hamas, even if Olmert and Barak claim otherwise.

It is hard to ignore the influence of the Second Lebanon War on Israel's operations in Gaza. The pain of Lebanon is still clearly felt.[I believe this does not refer to pain in Lebanon but to the pain the Israeli body politic still feels as a result of their unsatisfactory experience in L ebanon. ~HC]Such pain adds to the limited political dialogue and dictates the choice of a cease-fire.

In Olmert's present situation, any agreement will be presented as an achievement: not just the tahadiyeh, not just the return of the abducted soldiers in the hands of Hezbollah. Even the swift and surprising willingness in Jerusalem to discuss the return of the Shaba Farms to Lebanon with a Lebanese government in Beirut which is completely dependent on a Hezbollah veto.

The present strategic goal is not peace, but quiet, even if only for a short time - until the elections.

And then, there is the hawkish Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, himself. In this densely "interpreted" interview with him, Ari Shavit writes:

Why a truce? Defense Minister Ehud Barak has answers that are not simple but are clear. When he observes the Middle Eastern reality through the window of his home in a Tel Aviv skyscraper, it is clear to him that the situation on the Gaza border requires a decision: an agreement or an operation. Apparently, in the end there will be no getting around an operation. Israel and Hamas are on a collision course.

However, since the repercussions of an operation could be grave, it is necessary first to try the other alternative - so that every mother liable to lose her son in the Gaza alleyways will know. So that every civilian in the Gaza envelope liable to get hit during the fighting with Hamas will know. So that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will know that Israel did not choose a military move, which the Egyptians fear, before giving a chance to the diplomatic move they initiated.

Because of both the domestic Israeli consideration and the Egyptian consideration, it is clear to Barak that the Israeli leadership had to try the truce before opening fire.

Now, my clear impression in recent weeks has been that Barak, who is the head of Israel's Labor Party, has been a significant force holding Olmert back from concluding this tahdi'eh agreement with Hamas. So what we are seeing in Shavit's interview with him is perhaps an explanation that Barak feels he needs to give to those of his supporters who had been urging him not to conclude it.

Shavit writes,

Will the truce hold up? The likelihood that six months from now there will be calm in the South is slim. There is always the possibility that an accident will happen and the experiment will succeed. But the working assumption [from Barak, I'm assuming ~HC] is that the truce will collapse. Perhaps within months, perhaps within weeks. And even if this happens, Israel will have lost nothing by acceding to the Egyptian initiative. It has not recognized Hamas and it has not created an irreversible reality. It has maintained its freedom of action in Judea and Samaria and it has created linkage between opening the crossing points and stopping the smuggling. It has ensured serious negotiations in the matter of captured soldier Gilad Shalit, which are liable to obligate the government to make difficult decisions in the very near future.

Ehud Barak has no doubt: A sober, objective and deep analysis of the situation necessitates a truce first. Truce before action, arrangement before attack. However, the former prime minister is troubled because many of his colleagues in the leadership do not understand the obvious. In his eyes, Israel is currently a place where the obvious is being crushed. The public discourse is shallow, as though crushed by a steamroller. The media coverage is sometimes influenced by petty personal considerations. And people in the government can be diagnosed with Second Lebanon War syndrome: a lack of seriousness, a lack of responsibility, fault-finding.

This is fascinating psychological drama! But oh, how he loves to blame and cast aspersions on everyone around him.

This is how Shavit's piece continues:

The 2006 war is still burning in Barak's bones. He sees it as the worst Israeli failure of recent decades. The government did not want to go to war, it did not intend to go to war and it did not even know it was going to war. In retrospect it told itself that its aim had been to block the strengthening of Hezbollah, which had increased from 7,000 to 14,000 rockets during six years of quiet in the Galilee. But in the two years since the war, Hezbollah has expanded to 40,000 rockets that can reach as far as Yeruham, Arad and Dimona and are capable of hitting 97 percent of the Israeli population. The achievements of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 have been eradicated and Hassan Nasrallah has accumulated significant political power in Lebanon.

Nevertheless, some of those who embarked on the war still believe that it was a stunning success. They have not internalized the failures, they have not done an accounting and they have even learned from the Winograd Report that the military is to blame, not the government. So they are prepared to implement in the South that same superficial way of thinking that failed in the North. If it works, they will have succeeded. If it doesn't work, it will turn out that the problem is with the reality and not with the way they managed that war.

Now, Shavit is sometimes a hard writer to read. Because he so heavily "interprets" the words-- and often even the thoughts-- of the people whom he interviews, it is usually (but not always) safe to assume that when he writes assessments such as the above, he is attempting to channel the thoughts of his interviewee.

But in the present piece, he abruptly at this point distances himself from Barak and becomes, I guess, himself, adding his own commentary to what has gone before. (Which casts sme doubt on the interpretation that in all that has come before he was striving straightforwardly to channel and represent Barak's views.)

Shavit continues thus:

Barak will not admit this, but he is alone. The strategic reality is challenging: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and two sensitive and complicated diplomatic processes. The coming years will be among the most important in the state's history. But what is really bothering the defense minister is the way politics here and the media are conducting themselves regarding these challenges. In his opinion, at a time when the defense establishment is doing impressive work, the political-media establishment is engaged in manipulations and vanities. It is making things very difficult for the two responsible adults bearing the entire burden: Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

The reality that surrounds us, Barak is thinking, does not permit us to behave as though we are participating in a reality show. To deal with what we are capable of dealing with, it is necessary to return to the essence of things. It is necessary to return to the basic values of leadership: integrity, courage, matter-of-factness and seriousness.

I guess one thing I come away from Shavit's article with is-- once again!-- a strong impression of Barak's arrogance toward his colleagues in the Israeli political system. But also, his smarts in terms of raw strategic analysis. His assessment of the outcome of the 33-day war is, I believe, spot-on.

And finally, in this round-up of the very complex ways in which Israel's leaders have been attempting to explain and sell the tahdi'eh to their citizenry, we have this, in a Haaretz editorial whose main thrust is to welcome the ceasefire and wish it a long life. The editorial cites, with evident approval, some comments thatthe former commander of the IDF's Gaza Division, Brigadier General (res.) Shmuel Zakai, made to the Israeli Army Radio. Zakai, the editorial said,

said he is worried by the skepticism with which the government has greeted the cease-fire. "The next round of fighting with Hamas is not a decree from heaven," Zakai said. The danger is that if we incessantly expect the next war with Hamas, we will not make an effort to maintain the cease-fire, we will be dragged into provocations, and the commander will be quick to pull the trigger. Or, as Zakai put it, "Every company commander will think that it makes no difference whether we fire the next shell now or a year from now."

That is an interesting and significant assessment from someone who presumably understands the strategic realities in and around Gaza very well indeed.

Bad timing

On the day that Israel announces it's agreed to participate in a reciprocal ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza, Ziad Asali, the head of the "American Task for Palestine" (more rightwing American than Palestinian, as a task force) has an anti-Hamas op-ed in the rightwing Washington Times.

It's titled "Miscalculation: How Hamas wastes Palestinian lives."

Asali and others associated with the ATFP have been working hard in Washington DC in recent months, urging the US (and Israel) to take even tougher measures to try to "punish", exclude, and crush Hamas.

Oops, who miscalculated now?

Memo to Sen. Obama on Iraq

Mr. Obama, I am not privy to the whole of the conversation you recently had with Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister in every Iraqi government since the US installed its own puppet regime there in 2003. Zebari, as you doubtless know, is also a prime example of what many Middle East experts have taken to calling the "Kurdification" of Iraqi politics under the Americans.

But Mr. Zebari waited barely a few hours before retelling his side of the conversation to the editors of the Washington Post (who returned the compliment by referring to him as a "dedicated Iraqi leader.") The way he told it, he had given you a a harsh lecture about (his version of) the realities in Iraq. The WaPo editors reported approvingly that Zebari said he'd told you "We have a deadly enemy" in Iraq", and that, while he believes the US force levels can and should be drawn down, those reductions should only be made gradually.

Senator, I'm glad you listened to Zebari. I don't know whether, in doing so, you probed him a little deeper on some of his assertions. It would be fascinating to hear, for example, his version of who he thinks the-- apparently monadic-- "enemy" in Iraq really is. The WaPo people never probed him on that, of course, because once you do try to define who "the enemy" is, you immediately see that the situation there is very complex, and certainly not conducive to any form of a US-imposed solution.

But Senator, you should also make sure you listen to a broad range of other voices from Iraq. Including, but not limited to, thoughtful Iraqi legislators and community leaders like the ones I listened to in Washington in the past two weeks. (See here and here.)

Above all, try to make sure you hear the views of Iraqis who are not residents of the US-protected Green Zone. You'll find that their views are very different indeed than those of their "foreign minister."

You've no doubt already remembered that Zebari was an important member of the coterie of Iraqi exiles who in the lead-up to 2003 worked tirelessly to try to get the US to invade Iraq (and then to install them in power.)

I'm assuming you're smart enough not to get snookered by these guys-- that is, either the Zebaris or the WaPos-- this time around, just as you weren't snookered by them in 2002...

Tahdi'eh: Israel confirms

There will be no handshakes and back-patting on the White House lawn, and no turn-on-a-dime lionizing of this Palestinian leadership by the pillars of the world Jewish community. But the tahdi'eh (ceasefire) agreement that Israel has now confirmed it has agreed to with Hamas may well bring a long-needed degree of calm to both Gaza and southern Israel. And if it holds, it could serve as a foundation stone for an entirely new kind of Israeli-Palestinian relationship over the years ahead.

The rest of the day today, Wednesday, may yet see some fighting, perhaps even a last-minute esclation, as we saw along the Israel-Lebanon border in the 40 hours before the August 2006 ceasefire there went into effect. The Hamas-Israel tahdi'eh is scheduled to go into force at 6 a.m. local time Thursday, 15 hours from now, so hopefully not too many more lives will be uselessly lost before then.

Here's the deal. Ever since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, the government of Israel-- with considerable support from the US-led portions of the "international community"-- has maintained and progressively tightened an inhumane and illegal economic siege on Hamas-dominated Gaza, while government leaders have said they would lift the siege only if Hamas and its allies stopped the sporadic rocket attacks they've been launching against southern Israel.

But the economic siege and the Hamas rocketings were not the only thing that was going on there. The Israeli military has also, until now, clung hard to a claimed "right" to exercise full freedom of military action in Gaza, and has undertaken many forms of very destructive military actions against militants and others in the Strip. (Remember that the sheer weight and lethality of the ordnance it has used there has far outweighed anything Hamas or anyone else had access to.) In recent years, Israel has also assassinated more than 120 alleged "terror leaders" in the Strip, many of them political leaders, and in the process killed a far greater number of innocent passers-by or family members.

So Hamas, not unreasonably, has demanded that any ceasefire it agree to should be equally binding on Israel.

In 2005 and early 2006, Hamas, like Fateh but unlike some of the smaller Palestinian groups in the Strip, largely complied with a Fateh-Hamas agreement unilaterally to refrain from taking any military action against Israel. That unilateral (Palestinians-only) ceasefire allowed Israel to undertake its withdrawal of troops and settlers from Gaza without major incident. It also allowed the orderly holding of the Palestinian elections of January 2006.

But once Israel had pulled its settlers out of Gaza, it felt no hesitancy about using its military to hammer Gaza hard whenever it pleased.

For Hamas, the idea of returning to a unilateral, Palestinians-only ceasefire with Israel was quite untenable. For them, winning reciprocity in the ceasefire aspect of the deal was vital. Now, they have won it. That is a significant achievement, won after much suffering.

There remains a major potential problem in that the compliance of the two sides with this ceasefire has no monitoring mechanism that I know of. Therefore, ill-wishers either side of the line could still provoke an incident unless the two parties are both willing and able to police it very robustly. If Hamas is to be able to do that, it will probably need some upgrading of its command and control structures, though it has already shown itself fairly capable of exerting discipline throughout the Strip over the twelve months since it chased the ragtag (and US-armed) Fateh bands and hangers-on out of the Strip.

The government of Egypt, which used its longstanding diplomatic relationship with Israel to good advantage to mediate this ceasefire agreement, might well be able to also play a continuing monitoring role? Perhaps even on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border? I'm not sure if that has been discussed yet, but it still could be.

Anyway, if the ceasefire succeeds, the Gaza issue will continue to be an increasingly large issue within Egyptian politics. As it will be, of course, if the ceasefire should catastrophically fail.

If this tahdi'eh goes forward as planned, the Israeli economic siege on Gaza will be progressively lifted, started pretty soon. At some point, the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt will also be re-opened-- but this time, according to the reports I've seen, notably without any Israeli monitoring role there at all. But with an EU role. An interesting diminution of Israel's control over Gaza's borders, if true.

Also, during the week ahead, if the tahdi'eh proceeds, negotiations on the prisoner exchange involving Gilad Shalit and some 350-plus Palestinian detainees will go into high gear. In Palestine as in Iraq, the mass detention of native peoples is one of the ways in which foreign occupying forces try to exert and maintain their control. Don't think for a minute that, in a huge proportion of these cases, there is any reason for these detentions other than the drive to control the natives, subvert their understandable movements for independence from foreign rule, and use them as hostages in negotiations.

But if this tahdi'eh thereby becomes what I call a tahdi'eh-plus, it might also lead towards some form of longer-term hudna (armistice) between Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank... that is, to some version of a two-state solution. Or, it could lead to a situation in which-- as both Hamas and Israel's Likud desire-- the border between the West Bank and Israel dissolves completely and a new kind of polity arises throughout the whole of Mandate (pre-partition) Palestine.

But that's for the future. For now, just keep hoping and praying for the success of this tahdi'eh. It will bring vitally needed relief to the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza, and to their neighbors in southern Israel. And it might provide enough calm inside both national communities for the members and leaders of both to start planning their future in the tiny slice of land between the sea and the Jordan River in a more rational, equitable, and sustainable way.

Tahdi'eh, and fading of two-state prospects

AP reports the following details about the tahdi'eh (ceasefire) deal that Hamas says it has now reached with Israel, with Egypt mediating:

• The truce takes effect at 6 a.m. Thursday (11 p.m. EDT Wednesday).

• All Gaza-Israel violence stops. After three days, Israel eases its blockade on Gaza, allowing more vital supplies in.

• A week later, Israel further eases restrictions at cargo crossings.

• In the final stage, talks are conducted about opening the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt and a prisoner exchange to free Cpl. Gilad Schalit, held by Hamas-affiliated groups for two years.

In Ha'aretz, Amos Harel and Jack Khoury report that

Israel has not officially confirmed the information; however, security sources said an accord is in the offing. Defense Ministry official Major General (res.) Amos Gilad left Tuesday for Cairo to conclude the final agreement.

... Gilad met Tuesday with Egyptian intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman. The Hamas delegation from Gaza, who met with Suleiman at the beginning of the week, is still in Cairo; Egypt may be shuttling between the parties to conclude the deal. Gilad is to return to Israel overnight with the final agreement and report to Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

The deal looks just about certain to go into effect.

It is notable that the latest steps of this negotiation were completed while Secretary of State Condi Rice was still in the region. The government of Israel has now spent some time engaging in "proximity talks" with both Hamas and Syria. Rice's proteges inside both the Lebanese and Palestinian political systems have been engaging very seriously with, respectively Hizbullah and Hamas. And her proteges in Iraq have been engaging very seriously with Iran.

So the Quarantine Wall that Rice and Pres. Bush have been working hard to maintain around Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran now looks to be in very bad shape indeed.

We might (or by now, actually, might not) recall that just last November, Rice and Bush stage-managed a huge Mideast summit conference in Annapolis, Maryland, at which they pledged their very best efforts to try to win a final-status peace agreement between Israel and the Fateh leaders of the Palestinian Administration by the end of this year.

But the Israelis now apparently pay so little heed to Washington's efforts that Rice's visit to Israel this week passed almost unremarked by the Israeli media, according to the CSM's Ilene Prusher.

If the Israeli side does indeed proceed with the tahdi'eh plan as publicized by Hamas, that is of course yet another serious setback for Fateh. Fateh is anyway, as noted above, engaged in its own effort to reconcile with Hamas. If Hamas has the tahdi'eh in its pocket, then that will strengthen its hands in those internal negotiations.

Conclusion of the tahdi'eh will also, more broadly, drive yet another political nail into the coffin of the two-state solution. Though goodness knows, thousands of other nails have already been driven into its coffin in recent months, with all the announcements from Israel of yet more contracts going out to build large numbers of new housing units in the colonial settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.

As I wrote in the Boston Review article, what you may therefore see emerging in Israel/Palestinian instead of two states is two "entities", with one of them being the Hamas-ruled, sub-state entity in Gaza and the other being an Israel that still finds itself unable to disentangle itself from the West Bank.

Over the longer haul, this is not a stable situation. But if Israelis are unable to withdraw from the settlements they have planted deep throughout the West Bank, then they must expect Palestinian claims inside 1948 Israel to grow stronger in response; and over time, a (binational) one-state outcome will likely become increasingly compelling...

US Diplomats and Boumediene Case

I too am encouraged by the US Supreme Court's Boumediene v. Bush ruling that detainees held at Gunatanamo Bay are entitled to Habeas Corpus protection -- the right to challenge their detention in a US Court. I also appreciate this LA Times analysis on the "internationalist" considerations that likely influenced the Boumediene majority. Yet I've also been perplexed by the fury of the dissents and the hyperbolic claim by presidential candidate John McCain that the ruling was "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."

Three complaints stand out: First, dissenting Justice Scalia darkly warns that the ruling will "almost certainly" result in more American being killed. Second, because the US is deemed to be at"war" with those who don't respect our values, we should not extend such rights to them. Cast as an inhuman "enemy," they only understand the "language of force."

Third, the critics condemn the Court for subjecting our laws to the dictates of international opinions -- to the norms recognized by the rest of the world. That's "judicial cosmopolitanism;" it's "too French." Or worse, it'd be like Thomas Jefferson in the first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence waxing about "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

In researching case background (and hat tip to Helena for this resource) I came across a timeless and eloquent response to such concerns, in the form of a Friend of the Court filing, prepared last year by some of America's best career diplomats. Endorsers include former US Ambassadors to Israel (and elsewhere) Sam Lewis, Thomas Pickering, and William (C) Harrop, as well as Bruce Laingen and the late William D. Rogers and our recently departed Charlottesville friend and mentor, David D. Newsom. (bless his memory)

Among their sage observations: (emphasis added):

If the mounting cost to American diplomatic interests is finally to be curbed, it is imperative, at minimum, to restore meaningful judicial review for prisoners at Guantanamo. Our nation cannot credibly champion the rule of law in the world, while being seen to disregard it in our own affairs....

[O]ur professional experience convinces us that American diplomatic credibility and effectiveness in many areas of international relations suffer greatly from the widely shared perception that, by denying prisoners at Guantanamo access to habeas corpus, our country has lost sight of its historic commitment to independent and effective judicial review of the lawfulness of detention.....

We have come to believe, in our representation of this country to other nations, that those nations are more willing to accept American leadership and counsel to the extent that they see us as true to the principle of freedom under the law. Indeed, the matter has rarely been better put than by President Bush in signing the Torture Victims Protection Act on March 12, 1992:

In this new era, in which countries throughout the world are turning to democratic institutions and the rule of law, we must maintain and strengthen our commitment to ensuring that they are respected everywhere....

(Perhaps this entire subject ought to be re-framed as, "Bush vs. Bush.")

The admiration and respect for this nation abroad is a function of our own commitment to liberty under law. In this, we have led the world. The success of our interests in the wider arena turns importantly on the extent to which this nation is perceived as continuing to abide by these principles. Any hint that America is not all that it claims, or that it is prepared to ignore a "nonnegotiable demand of human dignity," that it can accept that the Executive Branch may imprison whom it will and do so beyond the reach of the due process of law, demeans and weakens this nation's voice abroad.

We have taken it as our duty to so state to this Court. There is no doubting America's power at this juncture. But values count too. And, for this nation, there is no benefit in the exercise of our undoubted power unless it is deployed in the service of fundamental values: democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and due process. To the extent that we are perceived as compromising those values, to that extent will our efforts to promote our interests in the wider world be prejudiced. Such at least is our collective experience.

George Kennan's Long Telegram from the American Embassy in Moscow to the State Department in 1946 defined the authoritarian bestiality of the Soviet system and its aim to break "the international authority of our state." It was perhaps the most important American diplomatic communication of the last century. In closing, Kennan spoke for us all and for all time:

[T]he greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

I recommend this document as an enduring resource for policymakers, educators, and citizens alike, challenging us to consider that we don't have to toss aside our values to defend them, that our values are a component of our potential influence abroad, that defending our principles need not detract from our "power."

More confirmation on Israel-Hamas deal

Haaretz publishes this today:

Israel has agreed in principle to an Egyptian-mediated proposal for a cease-fire and the opening of intensive talks for the release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, security and government sources said yesterday.

The sources said that Defense Ministry official Major General (res.) Amos Gilad has relayed Israel's positions to Egyptian intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman.

A delegation of Hamas leaders is to meet today in Cairo with Suleiman to hear Israel's position. The delegation is headed by the Damascus-based deputy chief of Hamas' political wing, Musa Abu Marzuk, and senior Hamas leaders from Gaza. According to the outlines of the deal, Egypt will announce that Hamas and the other armed groups in Gaza have decided on a cease-fire, and Israel will stop responding to fire from Gaza. Israel has not agreed to Hamas' demand to extend the cease-fire to the West Bank but has told the Egyptians that quiet in Gaza will reflect on the chances for quiet in the West Bank as well.

Israel has also refused to agree to Hamas' demand that the cease-fire agreement include an opening of the border crossings into Gaza, but has said it will ease the economic blockade of the Strip.

The Rafah crossing is under Palestinian-Egyptian control. However, Egypt reportedly wants to open it only as part of the agreement with Israel. Israel apparently wants to delay the opening of the Rafah crossing until significant progress is made in a prisoner swap.

Hamas spokesmen last week said Shalit would be released only in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, and not as part of the cease-fire agreement.

Yesterday the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Alawsat reported that Israel had agreed to forego a link between Shalit's release and the cease-fire. Shalit's father, Noam Shalit, said Israeli officials have assured him that his son's release is an integral part of cease-fire discussions.

Israel is reportedly willing to exchange Shalit for 450 terrorists, to be released in two stages...

For background, see my my recent writings on Hamas, including my recent Boston Review article and full; text of my January interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, accessible here.

More commentary later tonight, inshallah. Timing obviously interesting in view of Condi's visit?

Hamas-Israel deal about to be reached?

Time.com's Tim McGirk reports from Jerusalem today that:

both Israeli and Palestinian sources expect that by the middle of next week, a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas brokered by Egypt may go into effect. It won't be announced as such - Israel is squeamish about officially striking a deal with what it deems a terrorist group - but if it goes ahead, Hamas will strong-arm its own fighters and those belonging to Islamic Jihad into halting the barrage of rockets aimed at the farming communities and towns of southern Israel. In exchange, Israel is expected to refrain from targeted killings of Hamas operatives, and will hold off on mounting any major assault into Gaza. Israel will also commit itself to gradually lifting the blockade on goods reaching Gaza's besieged inhabitants.

Israel is still pressing for the accord to include the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas for almost two years now since his capture on the Israeli side of the boundary with Gaza, but Hamas sources say negotiations over Shalit's freedom will start later. The militants are demanding that Shalit be traded for "over 400" Palestinians being held in Israeli jails. So far, Israel is refusing, saying it will only release around 70 prisoners who were not involved in deadly attacks.

Over the past three months, we have several times come close to seeing this reciprocal ceasefire (tahdi'eh) deal nailed down... but none of those earlier alerts were borne out.

Let's hope this one is.

If you haven't yet read my recent Boston Review article on Hamas, that gives considerable background about this negotiation, you can find it here.

Washington: Concealing SOFA plans since November 2003

The National Security Archive at George Washington University has succeeded in winning declassification of some intriguing-- though heavily "redacted"-- documents dating back to Nobember 2003 that detail the Pentagon's longstanding efforts to win a very permissive (from their point of view) long-term security agreement from Iraq.

The page linked to there has a good analysis of the documents and ends with links to PDF versions of the docs themselves.

The NSA analyst, Joyce Battle, starts with a reference to Patrick Cockburn's excellent recent reporting on the details of the SOFA-plus agreement that the Bushists presented to the Iraqi side at the beginning of this month. Under the heading "Looks like San Remo all over again"-- a reference to the 1920 conference at which Britain and France got generously handed their League of Nations "Mandates" over the governance of five majority-Arab countries (take that, Woodrow Wilson!)-- Battle notes:

Recently declassified documents show that the U.S. military has long sought an agreement with Baghdad that gives American forces virtually unfettered freedom of action in – and possibly around – Iraq. This new information appears to run counter to Bush administration claims that U.S. intentions have been more limited in scope.

The first of the declassified "documents" she presents is a PDF/PPT slideshow, heavily redacted, that she believes was created by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. It was dated November 27, 2003. That was just five weeks after the day on which the UN Security Council-- meeting in New York, not San Remo-- adopted Resolution 1511 which handed the US a qualified and highly time-limited mandate to rule over Iraq.

We might remember that the three most important clauses of res. 1511 were that, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council:

1. Reaffirms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq, and UNDERSCORES, in that context, the temporary nature of the exercise by the Coalition Provisional Authority (Authority) of the specific responsibilities, authorities, and obligations under applicable international law recognized and set forth in resolution 1483 (2003), which will cease when an internationally recognized, representative government established by the people of Iraq Is sworn in and assumes the responsibilities of the Authority, inter alia through steps envisaged in paragraphs four through seven and ten below; ...

13. Determines that the provision of security and stability is essential to the successful completion of the political process as outlined in paragraph 7 above and to the ability of the United Nations to contribute effectively to that process and the implementation of resolution 1483 (2003), and authorizes a multinational force under unified command to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq, including for the purpose of ensuring necessary conditions for the implementation of the timetable and program as well as to contribute to the security of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, the Governing Council of Iraq and other institutions of the Iraqi interim administration, and key humanitarian and economic infrastructure;

... and

25. Requests that the United States, on behalf of the multinational force as outlined in paragraph 13 above, report to the Security Council on the efforts and progress of this force as appropriate and not less than every six months.

So according to Battle, the requirements that the Pentagon sought in Iraq at the time included items in the following areas:

* Use of Iraqi facilities
* Pre-positioning of supplies
* Contracting
* Respect for Law
* Entry and Exit of forces
* Vehicle licensing and registration
* Bearing of Arms
* Taxation
* Import and Export
* Claims
* Movement of Aircraft and Vehicles
* Use of land and facilities
* Security requirements and support

The collection of documents presented through that NSA web-page comprises eight internal documents dated between the last week of November and the end of December 2003. In one of them, document 5, Paul Bremer laid out in a cable to the State Department and the National Security Council a lengthy list of items that the "coalition" forces would have to insist on still controlling and/or having access to, even after the restoration of Iraq's supposed "sovereignty."

Battle wrote this about the Bremer cable:

Text concerning one issue, "use of facilities" is redacted in its entirety. A section on "military/security operations," though partially redacted, includes several points, e.g.:

* "U.S. must be authorized to detain, intern, and interrogate anti-coalition and security risk personnel"
* "U.S. must be authorized to retain custody of current POWs/detainees/internees…"
* "U.S. must be authorized to seize and retain intelligence-related documents"
* "Coalition forces must have unlimited authority to conduct military operations they deem necessary and proper under the circumstances."

On the "bearing of arms, uniforms, flags & markings," the cable says:

* "U.S. forces must be authorized to bear arms and wear uniforms"
* "Designated U.S. contractor personnel must be authorized to bear arms."

On "utilities and communications":

* "U.S. forces must have access to utilities and enjoy priority in use" (Note 2)
* "U.S. forces must be authorized to use all necessary radio spectrums without charge."

Information in the cable on "postal and recreational facilities" was redacted in its entirety.

As to "privileges and immunities," according to Bremer's cable,

* "U.S. personnel must be accorded status equivalent to that accorded to administrative and technical (A&T) personnel (full criminal immunity and immunity from civil process for official acts)"
* "Contractors and Iraqis employed by the coalition must be immune from legal process for acts performed in official capacity"
* "U.S. personnel and contractor employees must not be surrendered to international tribunals or any other states or entities without approval of U.S. government."

On "entry and exit" into and from Iraq:

* "U.S. personnel must be allowed to enter Iraq with ID cards and orders"
* "Iraq must not use visa issuance as a way of imposing limits on contractor personnel."

Regarding "movement of vehicles, vessels, and aircraft":

* "U.S. vehicles, vessels, and aircraft must be able to freely enter, exit, and transit Iraq"
* "U.S. vehicles, vessels, and aircraft must not be subject to taxes, fees, tolls, charges, regulation, registration, inspection, etc."
* "Iraq must accept U.S. driving licenses and permits as valid."

On "importation and exportation":

* "U.S. must be able to import and export equipment, supplies, and materials without inspection, restrictions, taxes, customs, duties, etc."

In regard to "contracting", CPA headquarters wrote:

* "U.S. must be free to contract for goods, services, and construction without restriction"
* "U.S. must be able to contract using its own rules"

On taxation:

* "U.S. forces must be exempt from all Iraqi taxes"
* "Iraq may not tax income of U.S. personnel and certain contractors received from U.S. government or sources outside Iraq."

All discussion of "claims" was withheld from disclosure...

On p.1 of this short (but PDF) 29 December memo, a Bremer assistant, who was transmitting to the boss a draft for his upcoming meeting with Iraqi-puppet Governing Council, suggested that "you may want to raise the issue of the Security Agreement." But Bremer did not want to. As Battle notes, in late January 2004, GC president Adnan Pachachi said he was "still waiting for a draft."

... And so it has gone on. Secrecy and legerdemain have been used at every turn to conceal the true contents of these momentous agreements from the legislators and publics in both Iraq and the US.

For four and a half years, now.

How does the old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me?

How about if someone is trying to fool all of continuously, for four and a half years? Then what?

Obama, Iraq, and Washington's unilateralist echo-chamber

So if Barack Obama wins the presidential election, what will his policy toward Iraq actually be in 2009? The answer to this question is extremely important to our country and the world over the years, or decades, ahead. But despite the candidate's generally sterling record of opposition to the original, 2003 invasion of Iraq, and his statements that he was to see the US begin a serious withdrawal soon after he takes office, still, the actual content of his policy remains shrouded in mystery.

Not least because of the extremely ill-advised comments that Samantha-- then still a key Obama foreign-policy aide-- made in early March to the effect that his public promises that he'll get U.S. "combat forces" out of Iraq in 16 months is just a "best-case scenario" that would be "revisited" once he becomes president.

A month ago, The New Republic carried this excellent article in which Michael Crowley analyzed what is known about Obama's actual thinking on Iraq. (Hat-tip Abu Aardvark.) It is not at all a reassuring picture, and underlines for me why it is important that people in the US antiwar movement continue to build our own strong and independent organization, to keep the pressure up both on the two candidates prior to November 4, and after that, on whoever it is that gets elected on that date.

Here, as a baseline, is what Obama has posted on his campaign website about his Iraq policy.

These are the most important paragraphs, numbered by myself:

1. Bringing Our Troops Home

Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.

2. Press Iraq’s Leaders to Reconcile

The best way to press Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future is to make it clear that we are leaving. As we remove our troops, Obama will engage representatives from all levels of Iraqi society – in and out of government – to seek a new accord on Iraq’s Constitution and governance. The United Nations will play a central role in this convention, which should not adjourn until a new national accord is reached addressing tough questions like federalism and oil revenue-sharing.

3. Regional Diplomacy

Obama will launch the most aggressive diplomatic effort in recent American history to reach a new compact on the stability of Iraq and the Middle East. This effort will include all of Iraq’s neighbors — including Iran and Syria. This compact will aim to secure Iraq’s borders; keep neighboring countries from meddling inside Iraq; isolate al Qaeda; support reconciliation among Iraq’s sectarian groups; and provide financial support for Iraq’s reconstruction.

4. Humanitarian Initiative

Obama believes that America has a moral and security responsibility to confront Iraq’s humanitarian crisis — two million Iraqis are refugees; two million more are displaced inside their own country. Obama will form an international working group to address this crisis. He will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find a safe-haven.

There's much to like there. I like the promise in para 2 that Obama wants to see the United Nations play a central role in convening the intra-Iraqi reconciliation process. That is welcome recognition of the fact that the US may be the party that is the least qualified of all to convene that process successfully. It is also a central pillar of the plan that I have been proposing steadfastly since 2005 for how the US can effect a withdrawal of troops from Iraq that is speedy, total, orderly, and generous.

If you haven't seen any iterations of my plan you can access many of them through this portal.

I like the statement in para 4 that Americans have a responsibility to help address (though I wouldn't have said "confront") Iraq's humanitarian crisis.

And I especially like what he says in para 3 there about launching "the most aggressive diplomatic effort in recent American history to reach a new compact on the stability of Iraq and the Middle East. This effort will include all of Iraq’s neighbors — including Iran and Syria."

Here is a guy who really is prepared to think outside the Washington-bounded box. Even in the heat of a campaign in which anti-Iranian threats are generally seen as good for fundraising, he has not withdrawn fully from his commitment to try to talk to Iran and Syria about matters of mutual concern and mutual interest.

Of which, Iraq is most definitely one.

Of course, I wish he had gone further there. I wish that, rather than just timidly referring to trying to reach "a new compact" on Iraq and the Middle East, he had gone as far as the Iraq Study Group and spelled out that resolution of all outstanding tracks of the Israeli-Arab conflict is also a strong US interest that can help ease the distrust with which the vast majority of Middle Easterners view the US's role and influence in their region.

I hope he understands that? Sadly, I have no way of knowing. I'd love to see more evidence that he's done some good, hardheaded thinking on the need for a much more effective and fair-minded US stance on Arab-Israeli issues.

However, most of the attention in Washington-- and perhaps throughout the US-- has thus far been pinned on what he's said about bringing (some of) the troops home.

Crowley's article plumbs that issue in considerable depth, starting off from the ambiguity within which Obama has wrapped his actual intentions in this regard.

Crowley writes:

The truth is Obama has no secret plan for Iraq. Interviews with nearly two dozen foreign policy and military experts, as well as Obama's campaign advisers, and a close review of Obama's own statements on Iraq, suggest something more nuanced. What he is offering is a basic vision of withdrawal with muddy particulars, one his advisers are still formulating and one that, if he is elected, is destined to meet an even muddier reality on the ground. Obama has set a clear direction for U.S. policy in Iraq: He wants us out of Iraq; but he's not willing to do it at any cost--even if it means dashing the hopes of some of his more fervent and naïve supporters. And, when it comes to Iraq, whatever the merits of Obama's withdrawal plan may be, "Yes, We Can" might ultimately yield to "No, we can't."

What I strongly suspect is that, Obama has not yet made up his mind on Iraq. He has, after all, been rather busy waging a tough primary campaign in recent months? But I hope he does so soon. And I hope, above everything, that he takes proactive steps to get advice and input from outside the deadening confines of the Washington DC foreign-policy echo chamber.

If you go 60% of the way down Crowley's article, you can read his best understanding of who has been advising Obama on Iraq issues. (I have inserted some helpful links to source docs there.)

This circle includes Clinton administration veterans Tony Lake, Susan Rice, and Greg Craig; Denis McDonough, former foreign policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle; speechwriter [Ben] Rhodes, a former aide to Lee Hamilton; former Pentagon counterinsurgency expert Sarah Sewell; and military men like former Clinton Navy secretary Richard Danzig, former Air Force officer Scott Gration, and former Air Force general Merrill McPeak. The personal views on Iraq of all these people isn't known, but this is not a homogenous or doctrinaire bunch. Danzig, a potential Obama defense secretary, recently told The Washington Post that he personally supports setting a negotiable exit date based on political progress. Rhodes's mentor, Hamilton, opposes a fixed timetable. Lake, who opposed the war from the start, expressed concern about the consequences of withdrawal in a February 2004 op-ed. "[T]o walk away [from Iraq], leaving chaos, would be a strategic and moral disaster," he wrote.

Obama also draws advice from an outer ring of Iraq-specific advisers who are effectively auditioning to become the State Department and Pentagon policymakers in his administration. Closest to the Obama camp are the determined withdrawal advocates at the Center for American Progress (CAP), which is home to McDonough, as well as Iraq specialists and campaign advisers Larry Korb and Brian Katulis. Korb and Katulis co-authored CAP's signature Iraq plan, which they call "strategic reset" and which calls for a swift exit accompanied by intensified diplomacy and a token U.S. force of perhaps 10,000 in the Kurdish north. Strategic reset also proposes to cancel training and funding for Iraqi forces unless some national political reconciliation is reached. (That approach diverts from some mainstream foreign policy thinking, including the Iraq Study Group, which emphasized the importance of training Iraqi forces.) "Strategic reset" ultimately looks a lot like the Obama plan.

But Obama also draws expertise from a more centrist Washington policy shop, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which has issued a plan envisioning up to 60,000 troops in Iraq for several years, though with an increased training role. Danzig is a CNAS board member, and its fellows include Colin Kahl, who leads Obama's Iraq working group. (The group is a semi-formal assemblage of ten to twelve experts who distill information and assist with tasks like debate preparation, Kahl says, rather than make policy.) Kahl is a proponent of the middle-ground concept of "conditional engagement," which incentivizes and rewards the political progress by Iraqi leaders with a larger U.S. troop presence to help them provide security.

I should note that this last sentence is unintentionally hilarious. The idea that you could "reward" US-desired political progress from Iraqi leaders with a larger US troop presence is one that, as of the summer of 2008, is completely cockamamie.

Well, I guess Kahl did make that statement before the events of the past 10 days, which have shown pretty definitively that the political tides inside Iraq have "surged" away from the pro-US position and toward the nationalist, anti-occupation position. But still, even in early May, when Crowley presumably interviewed Kahl for his article, it was certainly clear to any informed observer of Iraq affairs that the idea of using a larger US troop presence as a positive incentive had little credibility on the ground in Iraq.

And in a sense, this is the problem with all these people listed in the article as Obama's "key advisors" or whatever, on Iraq. Honestly, there is not a one of them who has ever provided any evidence that he (or she) knows very much of anything about Iraq itself.

Some of them have track records as fairly smart or well-informed analysts of US strategic policy, whether in Iraq or more broadly. But what do they know of Iraq: of the many political currents and tides swirling around that country; of the complex and subtle interactions of Iranian, Gulf-Arab, Saudi, nationalist and/or sectarian-nationalist groups and interests within it?

Darned if I know.

Does any of them speak or read Arabic? Does any of them regularly give evidence in their work that they are familiar with the major sources of information and analysis about Iraqi internal affairs? No. The vast majority of them-- or possibly, all of them-- work and write almost totally within the confined echo-chamber of inside-the-Beltway politics.

We should note that the removal of any trace of the relevant regional expertise from within Obama's advisory "inner circles" has also been the result of relentless efforts undertaken by the pro-Israeli lobbying groups inside Washington. That removal will have very real consequences on his ability to craft effective policies.

Marc Lynch, by the way, has an interesting account here of a discussion on future Iraq policy held at the center for National Security on June 11, in which CNAS's Kalh, CAP's Katulis, and the pro-Bush defense hawk Gen. Jack Keane all participated. (You can read Robert Dreyfuss's account of the discussion here.)

Lynch reported that Katulis pressed Kahl to explain exactly how his idea of the US using "you do what we say or we'll pull out our troops" pressure on the Iraqi politicians might actually work.

He added:

[Katulis] also pointed to the [current] Iraqi uproar over the US-Iraqi negotiations to make a wider point: US engagement may not be quite the "carrot" that Kahl thinks it is, at least to anyone other than the narrow group of Green Zone politicians who depend on US military support to survive politically.

So maybe Katulis has a little bit of interest in and familiarity with the ground-truth reality in Iraq that are required?

Lynch wrote that a suggestion from one of the questioners that the plan (PDF) introduced at the conference by Kahl represented Obama's "real" position,

misses the point. Katulis would have just as strong a claim to represent Obama's "real" position, as would a number of others. The more accurate takeaway is that there is serious thinking about Iraq going on within Democratic circles and within the campaign, with tough arguments and sharp, pragmatic analysis.

Well, let's hope so. And let's hope that this thinking includes people who can take into account the whole range of international (including Middle Eastern) developments that have been occurring far beyond the Washington echo-chamber, and of which most of the denizens of the echo-chamber seem woefully-- and perhaps in many cases, wilfully-- ignorant.

Actually, based solely on the content of his four-point platform, Obama himself already seems noticeably clearer and better informed on many of the points about the limits on US power in Iraq than are most of the Washingtonians who are clamoring to be his advisers.

Baghdad: Ways of seeing

Saad Khalaf of the LA Times's Baghdad bureau has a very interesting post over at the LAT's Mideast staff blog, Baghdad & Beyond. It recounts a helicopter visit he recently made over portions of his city, Baghdad.

He writes,

This was the first time I had ever seen Baghdad from the air, and it was strange to see my home city looking deserted.

The city also looked wounded and traumatized. From above, Baghdad's scars are even more obvious.

I saw the concrete blast walls and roadblocks that crisscross one of the Arab world's great cities. Buildings that were damaged in the war five years ago still sat unrepaired. Piles of garbage filled the streets in neighborhoods such as Ghazaliya and Ameriya, which had witnessed recent street battles.

It all made me feel sad and frustrated. I felt like there were very few tangible results to show from the last five years of bloodshed...

Khalaf writes about the considerable misgivings he'd had about going along on this trip, which was organized by the U.S. Army. He and his American bureau chief were going along to accompany Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division who was visiting soldiers at a pair of U.S. bases south of Baghdad. He wrote that his wife of one year had asked him not to go but he told her, "No, I want to see this."

I can understand why.

These days, most residents of Baghdad are trapped inside one of the huge cantonments that those big blast walls have carved into the city. They cannot soar above it looking down at the whole, as Khalaf was briefly able to do. (You can see his picture gallery from the trip here.)

As for someone like Gen. Lynch, he can criss-cross the city by chopper from time to time. But he will never really be able to understand the concerns, frustrations, and tempo of life of people living (if that's really the word?) inside the city's walled-off cantonments.

Different ways of seeing the city.

Imagine if Palestinians trapped in, say, Bethlehem or Nablus or Gaza could also take helicopter rides over their small country and see what has happened to it after 41 years of occupation.

I can understand the concerns of Saad Khalaf's wife, and I can understand that he, too, may have had qualms about about traveling around so evidently in the entourage of the army that's occupying his country. But I think the observations he wrote, based on the trip, are truly fascinating.

Let's all work hard so that one day as soon as possible, Iraqis and Palestinians will all have the opportunity to soar freely into the skies above their respective countries and look down on its much-loved geography-- from helicopters (noisy and polluting), or hot-air balloons, or whatever.

And that their skies are quite free of the military helicopters, fighter-planes, and attack drones with which, today, foreign occupation armies help maintain their system of violent control over each country's rightful citizens.

Israeli lawyers: Treatment of Gitmo detainees worse than what Israel does

I was interested, and encouraged, to see that among the 23 'amicus curiae' (friend of the court) briefs presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the habeas corpus petition submitted by Gitmo detainees Boumediene and Al-Odah was this one (PDF), sent in by seven Israeli law professors, one of whom has done his military reserve service as a military judge since 1994, and another who was previously President of the IDF's tribunal for the Southern (Gaza) Command.

The Boumediene ruling (PDF) was, of course, the one that the Supreme Court delivered yesterday that stated that yes, the detainees held at Guantanamo do indeed have the right to file habeas corpus petitions to the civilian US courts.

If you go to p.17 of the PDF file of the Israeli lawyers' amicus brief (p.2 of the original doc), you can read the summary of the argument they make. It says:

Judicial review of executive and military detention, the indispensable core of habeas corpus, need not be sacrificed to protect public safety and national security, even in the face of an unremitting terrorist threat. Israel has demonstrated that security detainees and prisoners of war, including alleged unlawful combatants, can and should be afforded the opportunity for prompt, independent judicial review of the factual basis for their confinement. Israeli experience
demonstrates unambiguously that providing such review to Guantánamo detainees would not be “impracticable and anomalous.”

... The safeguards provided under Israeli law, though denied to Guantánamo detainees, are not only workable but also are essential components of the rule of law. No process that lacks these core features can be considered an adequate substitute for time-honored forms of judicial review, such as the traditional writ of habeas corpus. Israeli authorities, executive as well as judicial, support these rights as necessary elements of the response to terrorism in a resilient democratic society governed by law.

Bottom line: the "CSRT" review system that the DOD established in Guantanamo provided even fewer safeguards for the rights of those detained than the hearing system used by Israel in its lengthy and often challenging administration of the occupied territories... And these lawyers tell us that these detainee rights are "necessary elements of the response to terrorism in a resilient democratic society governed by law."

Human rights organizations have frequently criticized several aspects of the Israeli system for military-judicial review of detention orders-- including the ruling the Israeli Supreme Court gave some years ago that states that "moderate pressure" is a permitted way of extracting "information" and does not taint evidence presented to these review bodies. allowed those engaging in the crime of torture to provide an ill-defined "necessity" defense for their acts. (See first comment below.) So I would not say that the Israeli system is anywhere near perfect.

But it is sobering to hear these Israeli specialists telling our Supreme Court how much worse the Guantanamo system is.

A banner day for the rule of law in America!

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention before a civilian U.S. Court!

This is such excellent news!

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has done the majority of the heavy lift8ing on the legal work that has led up to this decision-- as well as the representation of large numbers of Gitmo detainees.

They urgently need our financial support. Click here to donate whatever you can to them.

The NYT gives some of the reasoning from the SCOTUS's 5-4 decision, which was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy:

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court...

In a harsh rebuke of the Bush administration, the justices rejected the administration’s argument that the individual protections provided by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 were more than adequate.

“The costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody,” Justice Kennedy wrote, assuming the pivotal role that some court-watchers had foreseen.

The issues that were weighed in Thursday’s ruling went to the very heart of the separation-of-powers foundation of the United States Constitution. “To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say ‘what the law is,’ ” Justice Kennedy wrote, citing language in the 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court articulated its power to review acts of Congress.

Joining Justice Kennedy’s opinion were Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter. Writing separately, Justice Souter said the dissenters did not sufficiently appreciate “the length of the disputed imprisonments, some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years.”

The dissenters were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, generally considered the conservative wing on the high court.

Today, I feel I can hold my head up just a little higher.

The Gitmo detainees, however, still await their rights.

Ceasefire in Somalia?

Who knew? The Qataris, that's who.

'American University in Iraq': another Bushist fiasco

The American University of Iraq, which boasts Zal Khalilzad as a Regent and Fouad Ajami as a Trustee, has run into a serious difficulty. Dr Owen Cargol, who was hired as the university chancellor in April 2007 left his post in a hurry (or was terminated?) in late April of this year, after revelations that in 2001 he had to leave the presidency of Northern Arizona University in the wake of a serious sexual harrassment scandal.

The Inside Higher Ed website reported on the AU-Iraq affair yesterday. The report noted that AU-Iraq, which is located in the Kurdish city of Suleimani and boasts many pro-US Iraqi politicians including President Jalal Talabani and vice president Barham Saleh on its board, had received much attention from the NYT and other western MSM outlets as being one of the (very few) admirable and effective parts of the US intervention in Iraq.

IHE noted that risks involved in selecting Cargol as AU-Iraq's first chancellor,

could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search. The sexual harassment scandal that brought down Cargol at Northern Arizona University in 2001 was well publicized, in all of its explicit detail, but apparently never came to the attention of the U.S. officials who trusted Cargol to help reshape the Middle East.

The IHE report tells us that,

John Agresto, who was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to rehabilitate Iraq’s universities from 2003 to 2004, is now AU-Iraq’s interim chancellor...

Agresto... brings his own bona fides. As detailed in [Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book] Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Agresto has close connections to Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne Cheney, with whom Agresto served during a stint at the National Endowment for the Humanities. A self-described neoconservative who was “mugged by reality” in Iraq, Agresto “knew next to nothing about Iraq’s educational system” when he arrived with orders to rebuild it, The Washington Post reported.

How Agresto and his colleagues came to select Cargol to head AU-Iraq is unclear, but Cargol’s decision to reinvent himself as an administrator in the Middle East preceded his work in Iraq. Before he took the chancellor’s post, Cargol was provost of Abu Dhabi University, a private institution in the United Arab Emirates.

Efforts to reach Abu Dhabi officials were unsuccessful.

Attentive JWN readers are doubtless aware that I am on the board of something called the Global Partnership for an International University in Iraq. Our GP-IUI project has been running in low gear for four-plus years, in light of the insecurity situation in Iraq. But it was recently established as a legal entity in Canada, where it is based; and we are pursuing plans for professional development efforts with Iraqi academics who will, we hope, go on to form the core of t IUI's professional cadre.

Our board is led by a distinguished group of Iraqi, Canadian, US, and European intellectuals, including some recently retired individuals with proven track records in university leadership. We decided to incorporate in Canada for a number of reasons, including to dissociate ourselves clearly and unequivocally from the coercive machinations that the Bush administration has pursued in Iraq. The leaders of the AU-Iraq project evidently decided to take an almost directly different tack. (And see where it got them.)

The problems their project has suffered are disturbing. The entire structure of Iraqi higher education-- once the pride of the whole region-- is currently in very dire straits indeed; and it will take the focused efforts of scores of thousands of Iraqis (and some supportive outsiders) to restore it to a structure that can truly serve the needs of the country's 30 million talented and still generally well educated people. US taxpayers have poured at least $10.5 million-- perhaps considerably more?-- into the AU-Iraq project, which ended up being so poorly served by its board.

The IHE site tells us that Cargol's resignation from Northern Arizona University,

stemmed from allegations made by a Northern Arizona employee who alleged that Cargol, while naked in a locker room, grabbed the employee’s genitals, the Arizona Republic reported. In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as “a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.”

Cargol, who at the time was a married father of two children, went on to say that he was a “sensual kind of guy” who hoped the employee could “feel comfortable enough with me (and others) to reciprocate the same level of playfulness and affection,” the newspaper reported.

Cargol’s pressured resignation from Northern Arizona came just four months after he was appointed.

All that information was publicly available when the board hired Cargol in 2007.

G.W. Bush: democracy = 'Noise in the System'

GWB was asked in Germany today about the "increasing controversy in Iraq over the security agreement that's being negotiated... Does this concern you that the direction of those negotiations are going in?"

(Note, "controversy" is already a significant understatement of the tsunami of nationalist opposition the Bushists' SOFA-plus proposal has awakened among Iraqis.)

He replied:

First of all, I think we'll end up with a strategic agreement with Iraq. You know, it's all kinds of noise in their system and our system. What eventually will win out is the truth. For example, you read stories perhaps in your newspaper that the U.S. is planning all kinds of permanent bases in Iraq. That's an erroneous story. The Iraqis know -- will learn it's erroneous, too. We're there at the invitation of the sovereign government of Iraq.

Actually, no. The Iraqi government still doesn't have meaningful sovereignty. The US forces are still in Iraq as a belligerent occupation force whose occupation of the country has had a bit of pig's-lipstick put on it by Security Council resolution 1511.

The contempt with which Bush refers to the efforts made by elected lawmakers in both countries to learn the content of international agreements being negotiated by their national leaders, and to hold these leaders accountable to them is on a par with the lip-sneering "So?" with which Dick Cheney met a journalist's recent observation that Bush's record in Iraq was judged a failure by some two-thirds of Americans.

Is there anyone left on earth who thinks George W. Bush understands anything about democracy and good governance?

Secrecy vs. democracy in an increasingly transparent world

Kudos to McClatchy Newspapers for once again, as so often, getting out of the Washington media-power-elite echo chamber and doing some good, solid reporting on the politics inside both Iraq and the US of the Bushists' doomed attempt to force a longterm ("permanent") SOFA onto the occupied Iraqis. On this story today, it is Leila Fadel who takes the honors, backed up by Margaret Talev in DC.

Fadel reports from Baghdad that Iraqi lawmakers tell her the US is actually demanding 58 bases in Iraq under the SOFA, for starters. She quotes Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (IISC, formerly SCIRI), as saying of the US proposal,

The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation. We were occupied by order of the Security Council [referring to UNSC resolution 1511 of, actually, 2003 not 2004]... But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far.

...If we had to choose one or the other, an extension of the [UN] mandate or this agreement, we would probably choose the extension. It is possible that in December we will send a letter the UN informing them that Iraq no longer needs foreign forces to control its internal security. As for external defense, we are still not ready.

Then Fadel has this, about Iraq's (Kurdish) Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari: "Zebari... criticized the lawmakers for poisoning the public discussion before an agreement is concluded."

So this is what the Bushists' push for "democratization" in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East has come to? That Bush and his officials are working with Zebari and other close (bought and paid for) allies in Iraq to ram a truly momentous "security agreement" into force without allowing any meaningful oversight from elected legislators in either Baghdad or Washington?

In Washington, McClatchy's Talev has been on the case. Presumably it was she who contributed the following important reporting:

Leaders in the U.S. Congress have also demanded a say in the agreement, but the Bush administration says it is planning to make this an executive accord not subject to Senate ratification.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain didn't respond for requests for comment but the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, said through a spokesman that he believes the Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress and that it should make "absolutely clear" that the United States will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

No reaction that I've seen yet from any US politicians to the news of the security agreement that the Iraqi and Iranian defense ministers signed yesterday in Tehran. (And also, no word on how Iraq's lawmakers will respond to that one.)

Iraq signs military agreement-- with Iran

The Bush administration has been working with PM Nouri al-Maliki's government in Iraq since at least November to try to win the Iraqi government's agreement to both a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and a broader agreement on defense, economic, and political cooperation.

Today, Iraq's Defense Minister did indeed sign a defense cooperation agreement. But oops, it was not with Washington but with Iraq's looming eastern neighbor, Iran.

That Reuters report there explained that the signing occurred during a meeting that Iraq's Defense Minister Abdul Qader Jassim, held with his Iranian counterpart Mostafa Mohammad Najjar. It cited the official Iranian news agency IRNA as saying that, "Mine clearance and the search for soldiers missing in action would be part of the planned cooperation."

Also,

"The two parties, stressing the importance of defense cooperation in the balanced expansion of ties ... called for development of this sort of cooperation with the aim of strengthening peace and stability in the region."

Jassim has been in Tehran as part of the delegation accompanying PM Maliki on his three-day visit there. During the visit, Maliki has met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and then today with "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i.

This later Reuters report spells out some of the dilemma that Maliki now finds himself in:

Iran's supreme leader told visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Monday that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq was the biggest obstacle to its development as a united country.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hit out at the "occupiers" in Iraq at a time when Baghdad is negotiating with the United States on a new agreement aimed at giving a legal basis for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq after Dec. 31, when their U.N. mandate expires.

Iran and the United States blame each other for violence in Iraq and are also sharply at odds over Tehran's nuclear programme...

Maliki's government treads a fine line in its relations with the Islamic Republic, seeking support while mindful of U.S. accusations that Iran supports Shi'ite militias in Iraq.

Iran denies this and blames the presence of U.S. troops, currently numbering about 150,000, for the bloodshed that has followed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Iraq's government spokesman said before Maliki's three-day visit started on Saturday that the issue of Iranian interference would be raised, but it was not clear whether it had been discussed in his meetings so far in Tehran.

But the piece hints-- imho correctly-- that Tehran is also treading a careful path:

Analysts say Iran does not want Iraq to descend into chaos but nor does it want U.S. forces to have an easy ride, which might give Washington ideas about military options against Iran.

Meanwhile, back home in Baghdad, opposition to the SOFA-plus deal being proposed by the Americans has continued to be strong. AP says that this opposition has even been voiced by the head of the Badr Organization, which is closely allied to Maliki. (But oh, Badr is also even more closely allied to Iran. So I suppose there's no surprise there.)

Indeed, the main thrust of that last AP article is this:

The Bush administration is conceding for the first time that the United States may not finish a complex security agreement with Iraq before President Bush leaves office.

For all those of us working for a US troop withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, and orderly this is excellent news. It means that the Bushists' attempt to lock in longterm-- or even "permanent"-- agreements with Iraq on security and economic issues before they leave office will have failed.

We therefore need to redouble our calls to both the main presidential candidates that they take a clear-eyed look at the balance of forces in the Gulf region-- which is still tipping every week further in Iran's favor-- and work for a UN-sponsored agreement on the speedy pullout of US troops from Iraq as soon as possible. (Go look at some of my earlier writings for guidelines on how this can most effectively be done.)

To be durable, any longterm agreement that Washington concludes with Baghdad needs to be concluded with a government in Bagjdad that is truly sovereign. No agreement concluded while US forces dominate the Iraqi strategic environment, including the center of the Iraqi "government" in the Green Zone can win the longterm legitimacy, both inside Iraq and in the broader international community, required for it to endure. (See "May 17 agreement" for an object-lesson in that regard.)

If, as now seems just about certain, the Bushists will not be able to conclude any form of SOFA or SOFA-plus agreement with Baghdad before the end of this year, then the question of the basis in international law for the presence of US troops in the country after December 31 will have somehow to be agreed before December 31 arrives. Currently, the US forces are there under a "mandate" extended to them by the UN Security Council on the grounds that the situation in Iraq falls under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. (That was a nice bit of diplomatic finessing, achieved in UNSC resolution 1511, that the Bushists won from the UNSC after their invasion of Iraq was a done deal, even though the invasion itself had been quite unsanctioned by the UNSC and indeed, as even Kofi Annan admitted later, had been enacted in clear violation of international law.)

But resolution 1511 did require that the UNSC review the mandate it gave the US in Iraq every year. And in December 2007, PM Maliki flexed a nationalist muscle or two when he told the SC that his government would agree for the mandate-- then due to run out at the end of 2007-- to be extended "for the last time", by just one further year.

In the immediate run-up to the coming deadline, all parties in the region and on the SC will know who the next US president will be, though the final content of this man's policies will probably not yet be known, or perhaps not even yet finally decided. But there will have to be some deft diplomacy among the UNSC principals, the governments of Iraq and Iran, and probably both the outgoing and incoming US presidents to try to figure what to do on December 31. Perhaps a "holding pattern", whereby the UNSC mandate is extended a further six months, might be one way forward.

But who knows what the domestic-Iraqi, regional, and international balances will look like by then?

I just want, finally, to note some of the contortions in the way that an (un-named) US official spoke to the AP's Lolita Baldor about whether the US had indeed been, as part of the now-failing negotiations, requesting permanent bases in Iraq or not.

Baldor wrote:

The Bush administration is seeking an agreement with Baghdad that would provide for a normal, permanent U.S. military and diplomatic presence in Iraq. The word "permanent" has been a flashpoint for many who oppose the war, both in the U.S. and Iraq. But the U.S. official stressed that the agreement will not call for permanent U.S. bases on Iraqi soil.

Instead, the proposed agreement would allow U.S. troops or personnel to operate out of U.S., Iraqi or joint facilities through either short or long-term contracts, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are not public.

"The idea that the U.S. will have a normal, diplomatic and military presence, and need access to facilities — not necessarily our facilities, but need facilities — is permanent," said the official, who is close to the ongoing talks.

Those facilities, the official said, could belong to the Iraqis, and the U.S. would simply be using them on a renewable basis. Or they could be existing U.S. facilities that over time would be taken over by the Iraqis.

So what this official-- my money is definitely on Crocker-- is saying is that the presence of US troops in Iraq would be permanent, though perhaps they might, over time, move from one base to another; and perhaps the bases ("facilities") they would operate from might have some nominal Iraqi ownership.

It strikes me that this US official simply does not understand the strong distaste for most Iraqis for any idea of a "permanent" presence of any foreign troops on their soil. It's not the bases the Iraqi object to as much as the permanent presence of US troops on Iraqi soil.

For what it's worth, this (Arabic only) is what the Sadrists' Al-Kufiyeh website posted today as being their version of "The secret clauses in the security agreement between the Iraqi government and America."

Here's a quick translation:

1 - American forces have the right to build military camps and bases; and these camps will be to support the Iraqi army; their number will be dependent on how the Iraqi government sees the security conditions, in consultation with the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and with the American [military] command and the officers in the field, and also in consultation with the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and the competent authorities.

2- ضرورة ان تكون اتفاقية و ليس معاهدة . 2 - It should be a convention and not a treaty. [In an attempt to escape the scrutiny of legislators at either end, I imagine. ~HC]

3- لا يحق للحكومة العراقية ولا لدوائر القضاء العراقي محاسبة القوات الاميركية وافرادها، ويتم توسيع الحصانة حتى للشركات الامنية والمدنية والعسكرية والاسنادية المتعاقدة مع الجيش الاميركي . 3 - Neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi justice authorities have any jurisdiction over the American forces or their personnel, and immunity would also be extended to security, civilian and military companies, and contractors working with the American Army.

4- صلاحيات القوات الاميركية لا تحدد من قبل الحكومة العراقية، ولا يحق للحكومة العراقية تحديد الحركة لهذه القوات، ولا المساحة المشغولة للمعسكرات ولا الطرق المستعملة. 4 - The powers of American forces would not be not determined by the Iraqi government, and nor would the Iraqi Government have the right to define the movement of these forces, the areas used by the military camps, or the roads they would use. used.

5- يحق للقوات الاميركية بناء المراكز الامن بما فيها السجون الخاصة والتابعة للقوات الاميركية حفظا للامن . 5 - The American forces would have the right to build security centres, including special prisons that would belong to the American forces in the interest of security.

6- يحق للقوات الاميركية ممارسة حقها في اعتقال من يهدد الامن والسلم دون الحاجة الى مجوز من الحكومة العراقية و مؤسساتها . 6 - The American forces would have the right to arrest those who threaten peace and security without the need for consent from the Iraqi government and its institutions.

7- للقوات الاميركية الحرية في ضرب أي دولة تهدد الامن والسلم العالمي والاقليمي العام والعراق حكومته و دستوره، او تستفز الارهاب والميليشيات، ولا يمنع الانطلاق من الاراضي العراقية والاستفاده من برها ومياهها وجوها . 7 - The American forces are free to attack any state that [in the US judgment] threatens world or regional security or peace, in general, or Iraq, or its constitution, or that provokes [instigates?] terrorism and militias; and nothing prevents [the American forces] from starting out [on such missions] from Iraq's land or from using Iraq's terrain, or waters, or airspace for this.

8- العلاقات الدولية والاقليمية والمعاهدات يجب ان تكون للحكومة الاميركية العلم والمشورة بذلك حفاطا على الامن والدستور . 8 - The American government must be informed of and consulted on all [Iraqi] International and regional relations and treaties, in order to defend security and the Constitution.

9- سيطرة القوات الاميركية على وزارة الدفاع والداخلية والاستخبارات العراقي ولمدة 10 سنوات، يتم خلال هذه المدة تأهيلها و تدريبها واعدادها حسب ما ورد في المصادر المذكورة، وحتى السلاح ونوعيته خاضع للموافقة والمشاورة مع القوات الامريكية . 9 - U.S. forces would have control of the Iraqi Ministries of Defense, Interior, and Intelligence for a period of 10 years, and during this period they would be rehabilitated and trained and prepared as described in the sources mentioned, and even weapons and their types would be subject to approval of and consultation with American forces.

10- السقف الزمني لبقاء القوات هو طويل الأمد وغيرمحدد وقراره لظروف العراق ويتم اعادة النظر بين الحكومة العراقية والاميركية في الامر، الا ان الامر مرهون بتحسن اداء الموسسات الامنية والعسكرية العراقية وتحسن الوضع الامني وتحقق المصالحة والقضاء على الارهاب واخطار الدول المجاورة وسيطرة الدولة وانهاء حرية وتواجد الميليشيات ووجود اجماع سياسي على خروج القوات الاميركية . 10 - The timetable for the forces remaining in place would be a long but undefined period, depending on the circumstances in Iraq, and would be reviewed by the Iraqi government and the U.S.; but this matter would be dependent on improved performance of the Iraqi military and security institutions, the improvement of the security situation and the achievement of reconciliation, dealing with terrorism and the dangers of neighboring countries, the extension of state control, ending the militias' freedom freedom of action and presence of militias, and the achievement of political consensus on the exit of U.S. forces.

These reported terms are very similar to those that Patrick Cockburn reported on, here, June 5, though his report was more specific at some points, and Al-Kufiyeh's more specific at others.

Lolita Baldor's well-reported piece for AP today gave indirect confirmation that both accounts had described the Bushists' original "ask" from the Iraqis in the agreement essentially correctly. She wrote,

On Monday two Iraqi lawmakers who saw the proposed draft said the document, put forward Sunday, ... seeks to address some of Iraq's concerns. It adds an explicit promise that U.S. forces in Iraq will not attack neighboring countries and that Iraqi authorities will be notified in advance of any action by U.S. ground forces, the lawmakers said.

While it gives U.S. forces the power to arrest suspects, it says any detainees would be handed over to Iraqi authorities, said the lawmakers, Mahmoud Othman and Iman al-Asadi.

That does seems to imply that an earlier draft of the proposal had not had those assurances in it, I think?

Anyway, as noted in the main body of this post, at this point the details of the text the US side was proposing have now all become OBE, operationally irrelevant-- and of interest only to afficianados of diplomatic arcana.

So Sunday was the day the US side suddenly proposed the changes described by Baldor. M6nday was the day Iraq signed a security agreement-- with Iran.

Joost Hiltermann on Iraq's Kurds

Joost Hiltermann has just published what has to be the very best assessment in the English language of the situation of Iraq's Kurdish minority. Joost has followed Iraqi-Kurdish developments very closely for 20 years or more now. (A couple of years ago he published a whole book on Saddam's 1988 use of chemical weapons against Halabja in 1988.)

In this latest article, he writes about the degree to which, after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the two big Kurdish parties were able to start, as he writes, "Kurdifying" Iraqi politics.

He writes:

the Kurds succeeded in “Kurdifying” Iraqi politics to the extent that no decision can be taken without Kurdish input or, more, without the threat of a Kurdish veto. This power was most visibly evident in the country’s interim constitution, the 2004 Transitional Administrative Law, which held that the country’s permanent constitution needed an absolute majority to succeed in a popular referendum and could be voted down by a two-thirds majority in a minimum of three governorates— code for the three Kurdish governorates. In other words, no constitution could be passed without the Kurds’ approval. The result was a constitution that reflected the interests of the parties that had won the January 2005 elections: the Kurds and ISCI (which headed the United Iraqi Alliance, a loose coalition of mostly Shi‘i parties and individuals). Because so much of Iraq’s parliamentary politics since 2005 has concerned constitutionally mandated legislation, the Kurds have left their imprint repeatedly and decisively. They have been helped by their internal discipline and meticulous preparation (especially compared to everybody else), as well as the unity of their strategic vision...

Their crowning achievement was Article 140 of the constitution, a clause that, though dangerously vague and open to interpretation, appeared to point the way toward the Kurds’ acquisition (they would say retrieval) of Kirkuk within two years. Article 140 set out an itinerary (“normalization,” census, then referendum) and a deadline (December 31, 2007) that favored the Kurds by mandating a mechanism—a plebiscite— that could only yield victory, given the Kurds’ expected demographic majority in Kirkuk following completion of the process known as normalization. The term refers to removal of Arabs settled in Kirkuk and return of Kurds expelled from the region by former regimes as part of their Arabization policy.

But while Article 140 evinces the Kurds’ strength in the new Iraq, it has also proved their fundamental and enduring weakness as a minority... While the Kurds are able to veto legislation that runs counter to their interests, they cannot force implementation of laws that serve them and that they drafted, such as Article 140. The December 2007 deadline passed without a referendum, or a census, or indeed without meaningful progress toward “normalization.” A number of Arab “newcomers” (wafidin) left Kirkuk already in 2003, ahead of the Kurds’ arrival, but no significant numbers have followed them since, despite the Kurds’ unremitting pressure and inducements in the form of promises of state-provided compensation for those who agree to pull up stakes. Worse, from a public relations point of view, is the painful reality that few Kirkuki Kurds have come back. While expressing a desire to return one day, they decry the absence of security, jobs and essential services; many have steady jobs in Erbil and Suleimaniya, where their children can go to school safely and the situation is stable...

Control over governance in Kirkuk, where the Kurds won a majority of provincial council seats in 2005 and have arrogated most senior administrative positions (governor, heads of directorates and security chiefs) since 2003, has allowed them to advance their dominance in all areas, but not to change Kirkuk’s status. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) pays—extra-territorially—the salaries of Kurdish civil servants in Kirkuk (many of whom arrived from Erbil and Suleimaniya in April 2003), but provides no reconstruction aid, which it sees, with some justification, as the federal government’s responsibility. The Baghdad government, however, has excelled in dithering; its record of governance is so poor that ministry officials often only meet their counterparts in the governorates thanks to US “helicopter diplomacy” ferrying them to and from the Green Zone. Funds remain stuck in the federal treasury; reconstruction occurs mostly by the grace of US military commanders, who are empowered to spend emergency funds directly or via provincial reconstruction teams attached to military units. In Kirkuk, the US has encouraged the equitable allocation of reconstruction funds by the provincial council, but a boycott by its Arab and Turkmen members has given rise to discrimination, or at least the perception thereof. Rather than convincing Arabs and Turkmen of their good will and potential as fair rulers if and when Kirkuk joins the Kurdistan region, the Kurdish parties have succeeded instead in persuading them of the opposite and in hardening their opposition to any change in Kirkuk’s status. Economically backward despite its great oil wealth, the place is profoundly unhappy and divided, its disposition in limbo with the referendum deadline’s lapse. Meanwhile, Kurdish leaders have precious little to show for their immersion in Baghdad politics, as their critics in Kurdistan are quick to point out. Ironically, after having whipped up elite support for Kirkuk’s incorporation into the Kurdistan region, the KRG faces intense criticism now that it has failed to accomplish its goal by the deadline. It is also coming under growing scrutiny for oil deals it signed in secret with international companies, and for corrupt practices more generally. Kurds do not understand why they have less electricity today than in the years of hardship in the early 1990s, and tend to blame political party nepotism and kickbacks rather than other factors.

Nevertheless, the Kurds have left an indelible mark on the architecture of post-2003 Iraqi politics. The regime’s removal led not to its replacement by a more democratic administration but to a fundamental overhaul of the state system: from a highly centralized state that a ruthless leader was able to turn into a vicious dictatorship to a state that threatens to be so completely decentralized as to become utterly ungovernable. While this transformation is not solely the Kurds’ doing, they have played a leading role in bringing it about...

He has some scathing criticism, too, of the role that Viceroy Bremer played in feeding the idea that Iraq's different ethnic and sectarian groups "could not" live together. But he notes that the original concept of a tripartite division of Iraq-- into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia subdivisions-- that was relentlessly promoted by Bremer and all the other US viceroys, has not, in the end, been bought by the majority of the country's ethnic Arabs.

He writes that after the victory of, in particular the fairly strongly Arab/Iraqi-nationalist Sadrist movement in the January 2005 election,

the Kurds may have thought that the safest way forward would be to eviscerate the state by encouraging additional regions to emerge and devolving as much power as possible to them. Moreover, Kurdistan’s existence and powers would find helpful justification in a quest by other Iraqi actors, such as ISCI, to attain regional status as well. The upshot has been an increasingly polarized debate about the degree of decentralization necessary to keep together a country that is coming apart at the seams.

It may be difficult to undo the damage, although a new, but very loose, coalition of Iraqi parties is trying. Spanning the ethno-sectarian divide, these parties have a nationalist undercurrent in common. They include the Sadrists, who have no interest in playing second fiddle to ISCI in a Shi‘i super-region in the oil-rich south when their main strength lies in Baghdad, an area with little oil; the Fadhila Party, a Shi‘i Islamist group strong in Basra; Iyad Allawi’s secular National Iraqi List; and the two main Sunni Arab lists, the religious Iraqi Consensus Front10 and secular Iraqi National Dialogue Front. Although these groups do not all wholeheartedly embrace federalism as a concept, they all have indicated they can live with some form of decentralization, disagreeing mostly about the degree. They share an intense distaste for the extreme decentralization advocated by ISCI and the Kurds, however, and they have started to push back against the latter’s drive to implement their vision of a decentralized Iraq via constitution-based legislation, including a law that sets out a mechanism for creating regions. This law squeaked through a vote in the Council of Representatives in October 2006 following a last-minute compromise that delayed its entry into force for 18 months.

That period has just passed but, tellingly, Baghdad has remained silent: There is no apparent movement to launch local initiatives in southern governorates, as ISCI has advocated. Instead, Iraqis appear preoccupied with provincial council elections that are supposed to take place by October 1 and whose outcome could transform politics. Nor have ISCI and the Kurds found any support among neighboring states, or in the world, for their particular brand of federalism. To the contrary, Iraq’s neighbors may prefer a relatively weak state but not one so incapacitated that it would fall to pieces, threatening the region. In sum, Iraq’s federalism remains in an unsteady holding pattern based on local and regional power balances in which neither domestic side can impose its own preferred scheme.

Saddam’s Kuwait gambit opened a window of opportunity for the Kurds. President George W. Bush widened it with his madcap adventure to transform the Middle East by using the US military as a vehicle for installing democracy in Iraq. Today it has started to close again. This is a result of the surge, Bush’s “hail Mary” bid to salvage both his undertaking and his legacy. To diffuse the centrifugal forces that are tearing the country apart, his administration has sought to recalibrate power in Iraq, curbing the ruling parties’ latitude and luring disaffected Sunni Arabs into the new order, all the while fighting “irreconcilable” extremists, such as fighters associated with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), as well as “Special Groups” loosely affiliated with the Sadr movement that are allegedly sponsored by Iran. In Baghdad and Anbar, this effort has taken the form of a struggle to absorb as many insurgents-turned-“concerned citizens” as possible into the state’s institutions and security forces, and find employment for the rest. In the so-called disputed territories, however, the move by Sunni tribal elements to establish anti-AQI Awakening councils (sahwat) is being resisted by the Kurdish parties, who see the councils as a direct challenge to their influence in these areas, which they seek to annex to Kurdistan.

About the Turkish air attacks on Kurdistan from december 2007 on, he writes:

Iraqi Kurds saw the Turkish pilots, and the politicians behind them, as having not only the PKK but also the KRG in their sights, and they responded with great anger, including over the realization that the US had publicly signed off on the attacks and apparently had supported them with actionable intelligence. To the Kurds, all this pointed toward a US reaffirmation of Iraq’s territorial integrity and a reminder that US support of the Kurds was contingent on their willingness to subscribe to the US agenda in Iraq.12

Of course, the Kurds do not claim to be preparing for secession, even as they assert at every turn that independence is in their hearts. They remain caught in their principal dilemmas: Should they push to incorporate Kirkuk by hook or by crook and thus risk alienating, angering and incurring reprisals from neighboring states such as Turkey, on whom they are economically dependent, and allies such as the US, who have protected them, because of the perception that what they really are doing is making a veiled bid for statehood? Or should they press for greater rights, powers and access to resources within current boundaries and political constraints and thereby risk facing another powerful central Iraqi state sometime in the future that could undo all that they have accomplished over the past two decades, and worse?

How can they escape geography? Some Kurdish maps may show a Kurdistan that reaches the Mediterranean, but no Iraqi Kurdish politician I know has fooled himself into believing that this is a realistic ambition. Even if the Kurdistan region wins the Kirkuk oilfields and/or develops the ones located inside its own territory, it will still need to pump the stuff out and sell it, and for the moment the only viable route leads through Turkey. If it wishes to diversify, it would have to make a deal with Syria as well, which takes just as low a view of Kurdish designs on Kirkuk as does Turkey (or, for that matter, Iran, which has made its opinion abundantly clear through statements uttered by its officials in public fora). The Kurds’ freedom of maneuver will depend on their good relations with their neighbors for a long time to come.

He also gives an interesting small reflection on the gas attack against Halabja having been really quite predictable by the Kurdish peshmerga:

while Saddam Hussein unequivocally was guilty of a crime against humanity by sending his bombers to drop their poisonous load on a Kurdish city, the Kurdish parties played a role that cannot be ignored— one that is actively being questioned by people in Halabja and beyond. It was the Kurdish parties who chose to ally themselves with Iran during a war that was existential for both countries, and it was they who guided the Iranian Revolutionary Guards into Iraqi territory to throw out Iraqi forces and liberate Halabja. However justified the wartime alliance may have been given the Iraqi regime’s extreme brutality, the peshmerga made a gamble, knowing full well what the regime was capable of doing, and would do, in reprisal against the defenseless townspeople. If there was anything surprising about the Halabja chemical attack, it was its extraordinary scale and ferocity, not that it took place or even that it involved gas, which the regime had been using against the Kurds for almost a year at that point.

The result was not only a civilian catastrophe but also the utter collapse of the Kurdish national movement, which gave up the fight and fled. The parties had clearly overreached and they suffered the consequences.

Hiltermann assesses that the Kurds are unlikely now to be able to succeed in their quest to win and hold onto control of Kirkuk. He concludes:

The better way forward for the Kurds in their legitimate quest for security may therefore lie in a push for the maximum that is realistically and consensually attainable at this historical juncture. Backed by the US they have an uncommon opportunity to strike deals that will be both beneficial and durable. These deals are unlikely to yield exclusive Kurdish control over Kirkuk. But they may allow the KRG to develop its own oil and gas fields under federal legislation that will draw the international investments the Kurds require to explore and develop their natural wealth. Such deals could also produce a boundary to the Kurdistan region that would be accepted by Iraq and neighboring states and as such could be recognized officially by the UN and major states, and thus could attract guarantees of inviolability.

In the end, the Kurds will have to choose between endemic strife and a compromise accord that could buy them peace for a generation or more.

Altogether, an extremely helpful contribution to our basis of knowledge and understanding.

Bush SOFA push collapsing

The attempt by the Bush administration to impose an extremely unfair SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) onto the Iraqi government before July 31 now seems clearly destined for failure, if it has not already, actually, failed.

Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki is on the second day of his current visit to Iran, where he has reassured his host, Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that the present Iraqi government "will not allow Iraq to become a launching pad for an attack on Iran." That AP report there also says the following:

Al-Maliki also appeared to signal that Tehran would not be squeezed out by any agreement, saying Iraq's "development and stability will be provided through more bilateral cooperation" with Iran.

Ahmadinejad, in turn, underlined that Iran had a key role in Iraq's security. "The responsibility of (Iraq's) neighbors is doubled in this regard," he said, according to [Ahmadinejad's presidential] Web site.

The Iranian president hinted at concerns that the security agreement would mean U.S. domination in Iraq. "Iraq must reach a certain level of stability so that its enemies are not able to impose their influence," he said, without specifically mentioning the deal.

Iran fiercely opposes the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, saying it will lead to permanent American bases on its doorstep in Iraq, reflecting Tehran's fears U.S. forces could attack it. Last week, powerful Iranian politician Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said the deal would "enslave" Iraqis and vowed it would not be permitted to be passed, and Iran's pro-government press has frequently railed against it.

The Iranian government has acted persistently and skilfully in Iraq over the past six-plus years. First, it worked with its longterm allies and friends among Iraq's Shiites and Kurds to help push the US government into toppling Saddam Hussein and installing those allies and friends as leaders of the replacement regime there. Then it was careful to increase the effectiveness and visibility of the influence it has continued to exert over those allies so gradually that the Bush administration people either didn't really realize what was going on, or found themselves unable to react effectively once they did. (The "boil the frog slowly" method.)

In this regard, we could note that Iran was one of the first governments to recognize the US-installed "government" in Baghdad and send an ambassador to post-invasion Baghdad. That, while most Arab states continued to protest the illegality of the US invasion and of the Iraqi "government" that had flowed from it. As a result only a few Arab states have diplomatic representation in Baghdad. Those that do include, not surprisingly, Iran's ally Syria.

What the Iranians have done in post-invasion Iraq reminds me of the way my Aunty Katy would help me when I was learning to knit... She would patiently work along behind me to pick up all the stitches I had dropped and return my work to something like what was intended. In the case of the Iran-Iraq-US triangle, however, what is emerging is much more what Iran intended than what the Bushists intended.

Hey, for now, having 160,000 US troops tied down as sitting ducks in Iraq is the best guarantee the Iranians have that the US won't undertake or allow any military attack against them. And meantime, in the vast expanses of Iraq that exist outside the US military cantonments, Iran's influence is considerably stronger than that of the very distant US.

By the way, I think this is the most interesting portion of the broad range of reporting on Iraqi developments that Al-Hayat carries today.

(Why on earth won't the folks at Hayat upgrade the English-language portion of their website so it includes some of their excellent news coverage????? I have repeatedly urged them to do that. Meantime, I struggle along trying to read as much of the Arabic as my poor brain can. Google Translate is sometimes of some help, but not much yet I fear... Okay, end of rant.)

Basically that story indicates that Patrick Cockburn's important recent reporting on the Bushists' threat to use as a bargaining chip in the SOFA "negotiations", Iraq's access to the $50 billion of Iraqi government funds that are held by the US Federal Reserve Bank has drawn excited considerable attention (and pushback) inside Iraq.

The US's manipulative use of these funds is, of course, strongly analogous to the Israeli government's quite illegal use of the tax and customs revenues it has collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (under the terms of the Oslo Accords), as a bargaining chip in its ever-stagnant "peace negotiations" with the PA.

Wonder where the Bushists got the idea for this?

Of course, given the present windfall increases in oil prices, Iran is currently quite cash-heavy and probably in a good position to "outbid" whatever economic incentives the Bushists might be trying to offer the Iraqi politicians. For that reason and also because of its obligations under international law, the degree of control Washington can exercise over Iraq's finances is actually far less than the control Israel exercises over the PA's. So Washington ends up looking (and being) sleazy and manipulative. It ends up harming Iraq's hard-pressed citizens. And with all that, it can't even achieve what it has been seeking in terms of this highly coercive SOFA agreement. What an absolute fiasco of "diplomacy".

The Bushists have shown themselves quite incapable of converting the overwhelming superiority over all comers that they exhibited in the military realm during the invasion of Iraq ("Shock and Awe") into any kind of lasting political-strategic gains inside the country. It is quite possible that, in today's hyperlinked global environment, their use of overwhelming "Shock and Awe" itself meant that they could not win what they wanted at the political level in Iraq thereafter. But I really don't think the extent and depth of their political failure there was foreordained. Most of it, they have brought completely upon themselves.

US troops out now! No to any coercive SOFA with Iraq!

Addendum relevant to the "Boil a Frog" issue I discussed above:

I see that the Wall Street Journal had a hilariously misdirected editorial on Friday (hat-tip "Gloomy Gus") in which they argued:

It's crucial for Americans to understand that, apart from the Sadrists, all factions of Iraqi politics now support some kind of U.S.-Iraq status of forces agreement to succeed the U.N. mandate that expires later this year.

We are winning in Iraq. Indeed, we can now say with certainty that we will win...

My goodness, if that's the smartest analysis Wall Street can offer, no wonder this country's economy is in such chaos...

Iraq roundup: SOFA, Maliki in Iran, etc

So Maliki's party has now split. (Also, see here.) One delicious aspect of this development-- from the anti-occupation point of view-- is that it's former US puppet-in-chief Ibrahim Jaafari who has led the split, taking about 10 members out of the present PM's party and into the new "Da'wa National Reform" trend, which has allied itself with the new Iraq-nationalist (i.e. anti-SOFA, anti-US-occupation and also somewhat anti-Iranian) bloc that has been put together by the Sadrists and others.

Does this mean it is definitely curtains for the Bushists' attempts to force a longterm SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) on the Maliki government before they leave office? Probably.

Juan Cole writes today about the split in Maliki's party,

It is really quite remarkable that a sitting prime minister should preside over a schism in his own party, despite his control of billions of dollars in patronage.

Apparently, al-Maliki has been maneuvered by the Bush administration into a position where he has virtually no popular or party support, and is left with Washington has his only anchor.

But wait. Washington, it turns out, is not Maliki's only anchor! Because guess where-- in this moment of extreme political threat for his premiership-- he is headed today!

You likely already guessed: Iran.

Maliki's decision to rush off there at a time of such great political tension at home hilariously demonstrates two things:

(a) the degree to which the Bushists have been losing control of the situation in the Iran-Iraq theater; and

(b) the degree to which there is now an increasingly strong convergence of interests between Iran and Washington inside Iraq, as both sides face the increasing strength of the Iraqi-nationalist trend.

Okay, regarding the convergence, see this piece that the ever-well-informed David Ignatius will be publishing in tomorrow's WaPo.

In it, David is trying to plumb the thinking and intentions of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Qods (Jerusalem) Force.

David writes, somewhat grandiloquently, that

it is the soft-spoken Soleimani, not Iran's bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plays a decisive role in his nation's confrontation with the United States.

Grandiloquent, because while Soleimani might be more powerful in Tehran than Ahmadinejad, both of them are clearly outranked both on paper and in terms of actual decisionmaking by "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i.

Still, Soleimani is not inconsequential.

So here's David's methodology. He relies almost wholly on the hearsay accounts of someone he identifies only as "an Arab official who met recently with [Soleimani]." For what it's worth, my money for the source is on the ever-agile Ahmad Chalabi, who I believe has some kind of a job-title that could enable one to describe him as an "official."

(Chalabi snake-oil again, she groans, clutching her brow in disbelief? This can surely lead nowhere good... )

Well anyway, David does nothing whatsoever to reassure us that Chalabi is not the source...

So here, for what it's worth, is what David's un-named Arab tells us about Soleimani's current thinking:

Soleimani is confident about Iran's rising power in the region... He sees an America that is weakened by the war in Iraq but still potent. He has told visitors that U.S. and Iranian goals in Iraq are similar, despite the rhetoric of confrontation. But he has expressed no interest in direct, high-level talks. The Quds Force commander prefers to run out the clock on the Bush administration, hoping that the next administration will be more favorable to Iran's interests.

"The level of confidence of these [Quds Force] guys is that they are it, and everything else is marginal," says the Arab who meets regularly with Soleimani.

Toward the end of the column David concludes:

The question for Soleimani-watchers is how he will play his hand in the growing confrontation over Iran's nuclear program. The Bush administration seems to have decided on a course of escalating pressure against Tehran during its remaining months in office. The Iranians, while maintaining a tough line on the nuclear issue, as well as in Iraq and Lebanon, appear wary of an all-out confrontation.

So imagine that you are Qassem Soleimani, commander of a covert Iranian army deployed across the Middle East: You doubt the Bush administration would run the risk of a military strike against Iran, but you can't be sure. You think America can't afford to play chicken in an election year, but you can't be certain of that, either. You think Iran is on a roll, but you know how quickly that advantage can be squandered by unwise choices. You know that Arabs, even in Iraq, have become peeved at what they see as meddling and overreaching by Tehran.

So you watch and wait. You give ground where necessary, but you prepare to strike back, as devastatingly as possible -- and on your own terms, not those of your adversary.

Sort of inconclusive as an ending, I feel. If David's source is Chalabi-- or actually, regardless of the identity of that near-native informant-- then one needs seriously to probe what his goal is in passing on this "information" to David. One also needs to probe David's goal in publishing this piece.

Regarding Chalabi, the best explanation for the invasion-inciting role he played so brilliantly in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq is that he was in good part on the Iranians' pay-roll in those years, when he was inveigling the Americans into toppling Tehran's old nemesis Saddam Hussein, and that he looked forward to being installed as the new leader in Iraq with the support of both Washington and Tehran.

First part worked. Second part didn't. Here he is again?

What is the current game-plan of this ever-shifty manipulator? Who knows?

Meanwhile, back to the Iraqi political system. I am very grateful to Reidar Visser for having added the following additional commentary to what I posted on JWN here yesterday, about the discussion with the two Iraqi parliamentarians:

the list of signatories to the letter you linked to with Iraqi parliamentarians protesting is extremely interesting. It consists of the same parties that have been trying to put together a cross-sectarian alliance ever since 2006, despite the formidable disadvantage of having an opponent (the Maliki government) which receives all the backing of the Bush administration, while they themselves have almost zero support in the outside world.

In October 2006 they tried to defeat the law for implementing federalism, but failed by a small margin. In January 2008, they produced a robust statement calling for a negotiated settlement of Kirkuk (instead of an early referendum) and criticised Kurdish attempts to circumvent Baghdad in oil contract dealings. The high point came in February 2008, when they managed to press through a demand for early provincial elections during the parliamentary debate of the non-federated governorates act, despite the determined opposition of the Maliki government.

Today, they are trying to prevent attempts by Kurds and ISCI to manipulate the electoral process for the upcoming elections – attempts that include suggestions to create an electoral law that would prevent the use of “open” candidate lists (whereby voters can focus on individuals instead of parties).

Visser also asked this extremely important question:

The big question is, when the Bush administration gives all its support to the opponents of this alliance – the Maliki government and the Kurdish–ISCI axis, why is it that the supposed creators of “alternative” US policies in Iraq, the Democrats, are focusing all their energies on outbidding Bush in this regard, by signalling even stronger support for the “soft partition” minority of Iraqis led by Barzani and Hakim?

Would it not be more logical for them to reach out to this nationalist parliamentary bloc, which despite its difficult situation (its enemies are supported by both the US and Iran) could now be a real majority, and could certainly have a great potential if it just received a little help from the outside world? This is a fantastic initiative by the AFSC, but one wishes it had come from American politicians eager to craft an alternative Iraq policy instead…

Visser is absolutely correct to put the Democratic Party in the US on the line like this. I guess if pushed, many Democrats might give strong weight to Israel's longstanding preference for Iraq not to re-emerge as a strong and capable unitary state...

I guess what I'm hoping, though, is that the visit to Washington by MPs Ulayyan and Jaberi has succeeded at least in opening good channels of continuing communication between them and all the political forces here in DC.

By the way, here is another account of the parliamentarians' visit here, by the strongly leftist-leaning (except on Israel) reporter ,Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman met the MPs at two events different from the one I attended, and I believe he also reported on their appearance at the House Subcommittee on Wednesday.

Ackerman's account there has much of interest in it. It is fuller than the account I blogged yesterday, and is completely consonant with what I heard. That's good. It means the two MPs stayed consistently on-message during their time here.

Actually there is something of a gathering stream of Iraqi pols visiting DC these days. This is one of the collateral benefits of the administration here having undertaken its essentially colonialist project in Iraq in the name of "democratization": That makes it hard for them to suppress all these outreach efforts inside the US by a wide range of Iraqi voices.

Bobby Kennedy, Palestinians, and Israel

Kudos to the Lenny Ben David of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs who has found and republished a series of four articles that the 22-year-old Robert Kennedy wrote for the Boston Post in late May and early June of 1948. (Hat-tip Dion Nissenbaum for that.)

I haven't read all the Kennedy reporting in detail yet. Nissenbaum picks out some intriguing fragments at the top of his story.

What neither he nor Ben David mentions is that, as the youthful Kennedy walked around Jerusalem he may well have encountered a four-year-old Palestinian Christian child called Sirhan Sirhan, whose family's life was probably-- like that of all of Jerusalem's Palestinians-- deeply affected by the fighting of 1948 and its aftermath.

Almost exactly 40 years later it was Sirhan-- by then a resident of Pasadena, California who suffered from sometimes severe psychological problems-- who shot Kennedy to death in a hotel in Los Angeles. By some accounts, Sirhan had been enraged by Kennedy's election-year demoagoguing on the Israel question. President Johnson had apparently been deflecting Israel's requests that they be sent a batch of highly capable F-4 deep penetration fighter-bomber planes, offering them the less capable A-4's instead. So in the primary campaign, Kennedy had begun demagoguing on that, criticizing Johnson for trying to enact that restraint.

I am noting this here absolutely not with any intention of excusing or even seeking to "explain" Sirhan's quite unacceptable use of deadly violence, and not with the intention of raising in the present context the horrendous specter of "the A word" that so many in the Obama camp (actually, including myself) view with quite understandable dread.

I am noting it because-- though all Palestinian movements and spokesmen have always been quite clear that Sirhan Sirhan had no connection with them and was absolutely not acting in their name-- there still is that "Palestinian" angle to the story of Bobby Kennedy's killing, which perhaps makes the rediscovery of Kennedy's youthful writings on the topic even more poignant.

I'll just close by recalling that in 1957, when John Kennedy was still a senator, he publicly articulated a very principled position of support for the Algerian liberation movement, an Arab liberation movement that was operating at the other (west) end of Mediterranean against that firm US ally, France. So the Kennedys had quite an interesting overall record on Arab liberation movements, as a family.

Iraqi MPs in Washington: No to Bush's SOFA, yes to Arab League mediation

Speaking to a civil-society audience of 60 people here in Washington DC today, Iraqi MPs Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan (National Dialogue Council) and Dr. Nadim al-Jaberi (al-Fadhila) both roundly rejected the idea of negotiating any binding longterm Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States as long as US forces remain in their country. Both also, intriguingly, said that the Arab League might be the outside party best placed to convene the negotiation required to achieve intra-Iraqi reconciliation.

Ulayyan and Jaberi were speaking at a lunch discussion hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They have spoken to a number of civil society groups here in the past two days. On Wednesday-- as I noted here earlier today-- they testified about their country's situation at a hearing held by the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight.

While with the Subcommittee, they handed chair Rep. William Delahunt a letter spelling out the view of a majority of Iraq's MPs that any SOFA completed between the two countries should stipulate a total withdrawal of US troops from the whole of Iraq before a date certain.

In that earlier blog post I also highlighted the importance I saw, in today's increasingly transparent global environment, of the contacts that non-governmental groups and individuals (including parliamentarians) can now maintain with their counterparts across national borders without having all such interactions regulated by the national governments involved. Ulayyan and Jaberi's visit to the US-- which was originally also to have included three other Iraqis-- has been organized by the American Friends Service Committee.

Great work, AFSC!!!

I'm hoping to write up a longer account of today's Carnegie Endowment gathering as soon as I can. For now, I'll focus on the questions about the SOFA and the sponsoring mechanism for the still-needed process of internal reconciliation. Those were indeed my main concerns going into the meeting. Someone else asked the two MPs about the SOFA question, and I was then able to ask the two MPs the reconciliation-sponsorship question.

In line with my now three-year-old plan for how the US can get out of Iraq, as laid out in the July 2005 writings linked to here, I also asked the two men what sponsorship they thought would be most effective for the international negotiations required to secure a US troop withdrawal from their country that is speedy, orderly, and complete. (My strong preference is for UN sponsorship.) They did not really address that part of the question. Maybe I'll get a follow-up meeting with them sometime?

By the way, I think my 2005 plan for how the US can withdraw from Iraq has held up remarkably sturdily over time and is still very apposite.

Anyway, back to today's Carnegie event. About the SOFA, Ulayyan said:

We learned about the text being proposed by the US only through the media, and we've seen that it’s very unfair for the Iraqi people. Whoever sees it will see that Iraq would become not just under US occupation but as if it were part of the US! [But without voting rights, I might add. ~HC] It allows the US to use Iraqi territory and US military bases in Iraq for a very long time, and to use them to attack any country around the world from there. And it gives the US troops and civilians complete immunity from prosecution in the Iraqi court system. The US could do anything it wanted in Iraq without being accountable to anyone!

Clearly, for anyone, it would be impossible to enter into an agreement with another party while being threatened by the other person's weapons. Therefore the SOFA can't be concluded as long as there are foreign troops on Iraq's territory. For any agreement to work, there has to be a balance between the two parties to it.

The timing of this attempt at getting a SOFA right now is also not appropriate because it would impede our national reconciliation process.

I had also asked the MPs whether they thought the US troop presence in Iraq was helpful or harmful to the state of internal relations within Iraq. Ulayyan replied on this point:

We do believe the presence of US troops has been very harmful, for the following reasons: Firstly, the American forces have been creating problems inside Iraq to try to justify their own continued presence here. And secondly because many forces in Iraq today have been built up by the US, and they use the US troop presence to avoid dealing with the other parties.

Therefore the withdrawal of the US troops according to a fixed timetable will aid national reconciliation.

To my question regarding what body they thought might be the one best suited to convene the intra-Iraqi reconciliation process, Jaberi replied,

Some suggest the US or the UN or Iran as the best sponsors, or the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Or even Qatar, which as the lady said, did so well in successfully mediating the recent settlement even after the 'big power', the US, had failed. That latter success, by the way, was a way to protest external interventions in Lebanon-- and its showed that a tiny country could solve a problem that a large country could not.

But I see the Arab League as the best institution to sponsor a national reconciliation. First of all, it’s neutral, and secondly, it is the one best qualified to understand Iraq's problems.

We should recall that the Arab League has already been the only institution that has done anything successful at all to bring together the conflicting parties in Iraq-- yes, parties that were actually in conflict at the time there-- and win agreement from them all around some useful proposals for reconciliation. That was during the reconciliation session they hosted in Cairo in 2005.

It came out with some good proposals, and our situation would have been a lot better now if they had been implemented. But what made it fail was that the parties weren’t allowed to implement it. The US administration blocked its implementation because they saw the Arab League as competing with them for influence.

I found it notable that Dr. Jaberi, who represents a majority-Shiite party in Iraq, expressed such faith in the capacities of the Arab League. I should also note that though Fadhila is a majority-Shiite party, the position Jaberi expressed at many points during the discussion was that Iraq needs to thought of and constituted as "the state of the citizen" (dawlat al-muwatin), rather than being constituted on the basis of sectarian quotas of any kind. Indeed, he expressed strong criticism of the UDS for having introduced the whole idea of sectarian quotas into leading government positions, in the first place.

Jaberi's mention of the Arab League as being well qualified to convene the internal reconciliation process was also notable because it echoed a point that Ulayyan had made earlier in response to a general question about the mechanisms for reconciliation.

Ulayyan had said,

There should first of all be committees created for this purpose, with participation from both the [Iraqi] government and the political parties. But first, of course, we need to have the true will for national reconciliation…The process has to be inclusive…

Now that Saddam has left there is no reason for us not to manage our own country!

... And we should have the help of the Arab League and the United Nations in helping to establish the basis on which these reconciliation committees can be built.

Interesting convergence, huh?

Over to you, Arab League?

Notable bottom line there, though, that some possibly well-meaning Americans might still need to have highlighted for them: Both these two men-- and also, I suspect, a large majority of the Iraqi people-- are quite clear that the United States is the party that is just about the worst qualified of all to convene or sponsor a successful intra-Iraqi reconciliation process.

So much for the idea of the so-called "Pottery Barn Rule", eh?

Trying to convert military aggressions into longterm political control: Iraq, Lebanon (x2)

Today is the 26th anniversary of Israeli PM Menachem Begin's launching of a large-scale invasion of Lebanon. So, given the notably unsuccessful, or even counter-productive (from Israel's point of view) record of that invasion, today is an excellent day on which to consider the stalling of the Bush administration's present attempt to cash out some political gains-- inside Iraq-- from its decision to invade that country in 2003.

On May 17, 1983, Israel thought it was cashing out its political gains in Lebanon from the invasion of the year before. That was the day Israeli PM Menachem Begin, Lebanese President Amin Gemayyel, and U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz all gathered to sign a final peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel that included provisions for tightly US- and Israel-dominated security cooperation between Lebanon and Israel. (I don't have my 1984 book on Lebanon to hand to provide all the details I need here. It should be with my by tomorrow.)

You can read the text of the May 17 agreement here. Though it was duly signed and ratified by all parties (including, I believe, by a Lebanese government that had been sufficiently bought and paid for by the US-Israeli alliance by that time), within less than nine months it was toast.

Lebanese nationalist forces backed by Syria were able to force out of the country the US Marine force that, though it was originally deployed in August 1982 to protect unarmed Palestinians, rapidly thereafter moved closer to giving outright support to Gemayyel's minority government instead. The US plan in Lebanon also relied heavily on building up the national army to support their ally, Gemayel. But in February 1984, when Gemayyel ordered the army to start shooting into civilian areas, the majority of nationalist-minded Shiites who made up its ranks simply deserted en masse rather than follow those orders, and the whole army collapsed. (I recently blogged a little about that, here.)

With no "Lebanese Army" left to provide a cover for their presence, the Marines fled the country. By mid-February Gemayel-- a man always more opportunistic than principled-- had made his peace with Damascus and Amal.

The May 17 agreement lay in tatters on the floor.

So now, a different US administration is working very hard to translate its position as post-invasion military occupier of Iraq into a vassalage-style agreement with Iraq that is very similar-- or even more draconian-- than what Shultz and Begin were trying to impose on Lebanon in May 1983.

Patrick Cockburn is the western MSM-er who's been doing the best and most systematic coverage of the actual extremely coercive "diplomacy" of this attempt. Here and here. Huge kudos to him.

The first of those pieces leads thus:

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US...

The second leads thus:

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday...

As Cockburn and others note, however, the very coercive nature of the US diplomacy involved has aroused some very serious Iraqi pushback.

The WaPo.com's excellent Dan Froomkin published a survey of accounts of some political aspects this pushback in his post yesterday.

Iraq's nationalist forces are very smartly mounting their campaign against the arrangements proposed by the Bushists at three distinct levels:

1. Through broad grassroots organizing against it. You can find some accounts of this through the Sadrist "Al-Kufiyya" news agency. Juan Cole has also produced two good recent compilations of accounts of this, on May 31, and June 3.


2. Through some fascinating cross-sect and cross-party political work inside Iraq. You can find many glimpses of that in the sources cited by Cole... and

3. Through political contacts Iraqi lawmakers are pursuing with American legislators and other sectors of US society. In a sense, this is the most intriguing aspect of the campaign. These Iraqi legislators are using precisely what we might call the emergence of a global political community-- that is backed up by vastly improved global communications and by the strengthening of many key global norms-- to appeal across national borders to their counterparts inside US society. And they are doing so in a way that may be very fruitful indeed. (Though they certainly shouldn't end their grassroots organizing at home in favor of this international diplomatic initiative!)

This is where the events that Froomkin was reporting on yesterday become so important.

Basically, we now have these two Iraqi parliamentarians right here in Washington. (I think I'm going to a lunch event with them in about an hour's time.) They are Nadeem Al-Jaberi, described by Reuters as "a co-founder of the al-Fadhila Shi'ite political party" and Khalaf Al-Ulayyan, identified as "A Sunni Iraqi lawmaker... [and] founder of the National Dialogue Council."

That Reuters report tells us that on Wednesday Jaberi and Ullayan testified in person directly at a hearing convened by the International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight Subcommittee of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee,. They stated in no uncertain terms,

that U.S. troops should leave Iraq, and that talks on the long-term security pact should be postponed until after they are gone.

"What are the threats that require U.S. forces to be there?" asked Nadeem Al-Jaberi...speaking through a translator.

"I would like to inform you, there are no threats on Iraq. We are capable of solving our own problems," he declared. He favored a quick pullout of U.S. forces, which invaded the country in 2003 and currently number around 155,000.

... Khalaf Al-Ulayyan... said bilateral talks on a long-term security deal should be shelved until American troops leave -- and until there is a new government in Washington.

"We prefer to delay until there is a new administration in the United States," he said.

Froomkin also provided a link to what was described as a letter that Jaberi and Ulayyan handed to the Subcommittee chair, Rep. William Delahunt (D.Mass.) (Take care, the link is actually, despite appearances, to a PDF file.)

The letter bears the signatures of only 31 of the 275 members of the Iraqi parliament. But at the top, the heading says that Jaberi and Ulayyan affirmed that it had been signed by these MPs "on behalf of parties representing a majority of the 275 members."

The letter made two main arguments. The first was that under the procedures of the (Bremer-designed) Iraqi Constitution itself, any international agreement signed by the Iraqi "government" needs to be ratified by the parliament in order to enter into force.

The second was simply,

We wish to inform you that the majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any ... agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq, in accordance with a declared timetable anmd without leaving behind any military bases, soldiers or hired fighters.

Excellent clarity.

So what will Bush do next? The Democrat-strong US congress is (a) holding hearings like this one that expose the administration's imperialistic shenanigans for what they are, and (b) strongly opposed to the idea that Bush might have the right to conclude any form of binding longterm agreement with Iraq without that agreement being submitted to the legislature here in the US, too.

Where is Bush's "pro-democracy" rhetoric on this question, I wonder?

The WaPo's Karen DeYoung has a piece in today's paper in which she provides details of the follow-up in the to-and-fro between the administration and Congress over this question of the longterm agreement with Iraq. She also reports that the US ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, tried to claim that the opposition that Iraqis had voiced to the proposed text had all been stirred up by the Iranians.

She quotes an un-named Iraqi official-- probably foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari (whose personal qualities somewhat resemble those of Amin Gemayyel, see above)-- as saying that Iraqi government may seek an extension of the UN Security Council "mandate" over Iraq rather than succumbing to the terms Bush is proposing for switching to a bilateral agreement.

Anyway, I guess I want to make a few last quick points here before I get ready for this lunch.

1. The Iraqi nationalists really do seem to be getting their act together these days, pushing back five years' worth of dedicated attempts by the US occupying force and others to foment divide-and-rule hatreds and conflicts.

2. Though international law maintains its is quite illegal for an occupying power to push through deep changes in the governance system of an occupied territory, nevertheless, the system imposed by the US occupiers in Iraq does allow for some accountability on issues of fundamental national importance there-- such as whether the country gets turned into a longterm vassal of the US, or not. The "democratization" rhetoric and campaign maintained by the Bushists has also sort of ended up hoisting them on their own petard with regard to allowing the Iraqi nationalist lawmakers a voice within the US system.

3. The norms of national sovereignty and the accountability of governments to their citizens are anyway very well entrenched internationally these days. The arguments made by the Iraqi lawmakers cannot simply be ignored-- even here, in the United States.

4. In an international system that is today marked by greater degrees of international connectivity and transparency than ever before, as well as by the spread of respect for the global norms described above, 19th-century-style colonial campaigns to convert raw military dominance into solid political gains-- as in the consolidation of the British Raj in India, or whatever-- are simply no longer feasible. Israel learned this long and slowly in Lebanon after 1982, and then again in a short and sharp "refresher lesson" in 2006. The US political system is only now starting to learn this lesson in Iraq.

Bottom line: Military power just ain't as useful to the world's big nations as it once was. Heck, you could even say that when they employ it, the effect is nearly always actually counter-productive.

Whatever next? A world without wars of aggression? A world in which nations stay within their own recognized boundaries and resolve conflicts through negotiation, mediation, litigation, or other nonviolent means? How amazingly revolutionary! How very, um, United Nations-y.

(Which was, we can recall, a US creation, back in 1945.)

Abbas-Hamas reconciliation: Bushist Quarantine Wall crumbles further

So now PA President Mahmoud Abbas has decided to join the long stream of US Middle East allies-- including Israel, Egypt, and Qatar, and the UAE, etc etc-- who are having political dealings with Hamas.

Elliott Abrams, one of the key authors of the policy to "marginalize and if possible crush" all states and parties critical of the Bushist policy in the region, must be tearing his hair out.

Hamas's Ismail Haniya, head of the Palestinian government elected in 2006, "told a press conference that his government was ready to respond favorably to any Arab or international effort to initiate national dialogue in the Palestinian arena."

Still no news yet, though, on completion of Israel's tahdi'eh-plus negotiations with Hamas.

For background on all this, you can go to my recent Boston Review article on Hamas.

Bernard Chazelle on Palestine-Israel

Long-time JWN commenter Bernard Chazelle has written and web-published a thoughtful description of, and reflection upon, a recent substantial trip he made to Israel and Palestine. (Or to Palestine/Israel? Or to Pal-sreal, or Is-lestine, or whatever you want to call, um, you know, that chunk of land that the British ruled for a while as "Mandate Palestine".)

Chazelle's description is first-class, and definitely well worth reading by anyone who wants to understand the deadening effect all those Israeli roadblocks have on the lives of the West Bank Palestinians. He didn't even get in to Gaza to give us a description of life there...

After re-reading the reflective "Essay" that occupies the second portion of the web-page, I have to say that I disagree with some of his analysis and conclusions. Specifically, I'm not sure that the game-theoretical approach he uses to the "problem" of the negotiations works very well since it seems to generally assume that each of the two political leaders is a monolithic actor.

Also, I think he is simply not accurate when he writes this:

To blame the lobby [for the dysfunctional nature of the US-Israeli relationship], however, one needs to make the case that US policy would be notably different in its absence. The evidence is thin. [I dispute that.] Israel has been the linchpin of Pax Americana in the Middle East since June 1967: Cold War then; Carter Doctrine now. The lobby may rejoice in this but can't take credit for it.[I dispute that, too. I think the pro-Israel lobby can take a great deal of credit for it.]

These are serious issues, which I'm sure we can usefully discuss a lot more. But most JWN readers will anyway, like me, get a lot of value out of reading the whole of Chazelle's piece.

Obama and Israel

Barack Obama made the obligatory candidate's visit to AIPAC's annual convention today. Look, I've been in this country through six presidential elections. I don't recall a single major candidate who hasn't gone to the AIPAC convention and made some extremely pandering remarks there. By that (admittedly very low) standard, Obama stands out-- just a little bit-- but perhaps not trivially.

Here's the L.A. Times account of what he said , which is the fullest I can find. LAT reporter Johanna Neuman writes there:

Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama won applause with a promise to "do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." He also assailed his Republican opponent, John McCain, for "willful mischaracterization" of his call for diplomatic outreach to the Iranian regime and said he "has no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking."

But as president, Obama said, "I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place and my choosing -- if and only if it can advance the interests of the United States."

Calling the threat posed by Iran "grave," Obama said that "as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel's security." He pledged $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade to "ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat -- from Gaza to Tehran." To a standing ovation, he said, "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon -- everything."

The presumed Democratic nominee took a shot at President Bush for delaying peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. "I won't wait until the waning days of my presidency," he said. "I will take an active role and make a personal commitment to do all I can to advance the cause of peace from the start of my administration."

Saying that Palestinians "need a state that is contiguous and cohesive," Obama said any agreement "must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders" and with Jerusalem the capital of an undivided country. [Actually, that's really sloppy reporting in that last sentence. What CNN reports Obama as saying at that point is, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." CNN also has the video of the speech.]

The Illinois senator sought to dispel concerns in the Jewish community, circulating on the Internet, that he is a Muslim and is allied with critics of Israel. Obama is a Christian. "If anyone has been confused by these e-mails," he said, "I want you to know that today I'll be speaking from my heart, and as a true friend of Israel."

And he reminded the audience that African Americans and Jewish Americans had stood together during the civil rights era. "They took buses down South together," Obama said. "They marched together. They bled together. And Jewish Americans like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were willing to die alongside a black man -- James Chaney -- on behalf of freedom of equality." Calling the legacy of the three slain civil rights workers "our inheritance," Obama said, "We must not allow the relationship between Jews and African Americans to suffer."

Even Haaretz's sometimes fairly hawkish commentator Shmuel Rosner was moved to observe of the parade of pandering presidential wannabes to today's AIPAC gig that,

Generally speaking, the AIPAC delegates tended to applaud the speakers when they talked tough about Iran, and to remain relatively silent when they were talking about peace with the Palestinians...

Of course, some people will make this yet another proof that AIPAC is hawkish, warmongering, radical organization. I think it is a sign of grim and realistic skepticism. Maybe it was better for the delegates to make an effort and cheer more enthusiastically when peace was mentioned - but it was also perfectly understandable, for their part, not to.

A general election-- and a show trial?

So finally, we know who the two main candidates will be in our general election here in the US this November. Yesterday evening, Barack Obama pulled past the magic number of 2,118 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. That, after the Democratic Party had finally held primaries or caucuses in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

I watched CNN for much of yesterday evening. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Obama all gave significant speeches. Hillary's was almost-- but not quite-- a farewell speech. She has not yet conceded the nomination to Obama, but indicated she would make a decision fairly soon. I think her delivery of the speech was the strongest I have ever seen from her, though the content was pretty poor. Not just that she didn't acknowledge Obama's by-then obvious victory. But her speech also lacked substance.

What were more interesting to me were the speeches of the two remaining, big-party presidential candidates, MacCain and Obama. McCain's was truly pathetic. He was speaking in New Orleans (which he insisted on calling New Orleyans, not 'Norlins' as most locals there do.) In that proud city that was once a hub of African-American-Cajun culture he had gathered about 200 people, all of them apparently "white". Also, as one of the CNN commentators noted, McCain managed to assemble a crowd of such an age that he seemed to be the youngest man in the room.

I was interested to see the degree that he-- like Obama-- focused his speech on international issues, primarily the situation in Iraq and the whole question of the use of the US military in international affairs. I guess I'd thought that rising economic worries here at homer might have already shifted the topic of debate between the candidates from international affairs to economic affairs. But that doesn't seem to have happened at this point.

McCain's delivery was wooden and self-conscious.

Then came Hillary's speech, given to a crowd that was larger but certainly not huge, in the basement gym of Baruch College in New York. As I said, her delivery was excellent. The crowd seemed dominated by ardent and somewhat cult-like Hillary-supporters. I guess they'll need a bit of time to come to terms with her defeat. She, obviously, needs to show some clear leadership in bringing them around to give enthusiastic support to a Democratic ticket that she won't be heading. (There's been a lot of talk about whether Obama will choose her as his Vice. She certainly seems to be angling for that. That's a tough decision for him to make.)

And then we had Obama's speech, which was delivered in the same sports stadium in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans will be holding their convention this September. In this notably "white"-dominated state, Obama had packed the 17,000-seat stadium, and according to local police there were an additional 18,000 people gathered outside, as well. His people are a little cult-like, too... But I guess that in the American system, if any candidate succeeds in generating enthusiasm and buzz, then a gathering of his/her supporters could appear cult-like from the outside. It's something to do with the intense personalization of the system here.

He was accompanied to the stage by his radiant-looking spouse, Michele Obama, a tall, extremely competent woman, who exchanged a hug and a playful little knuckle-punch with him before she left him alone under the Klieg lights to deliver his speech.

Right near the beginning he announced, "Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States."

He then moved right into addressing his presumed opponent, McCain-- something he has already been doing for some weeks now, as the certitude of his imminent victory in the Democratic primaries has grown ever larger. He described McCain as "a man who has served this country heroically," immediately adding: "I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine. My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign."

I think that displayed just the right amount of respect and collegiality toward McCain, though with an appropriate small edge of feisty criticism.

Here was where Obama delineated his approach to international affairs:

there are many words to describe John McCain’s attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush’s policies as bipartisan and new. But change is not one of them.

Change is a foreign policy that doesn’t begin and end with a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged. I won’t stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq, but what’s not an option is leaving our troops in that country for the next hundred years – especially at a time when our military is overstretched, our nation is isolated, and nearly every other threat to America is being ignored.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future. It’s time to rebuild our military and give our veterans the care they need and the benefits they deserve when they come home. It’s time to refocus our efforts on al Qaeda’s leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century – terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That’s what change is.

Change is realizing that meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy – tough, direct diplomacy where the President of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for. We must once again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That’s what the American people want. That’s what change is.

The arguments I emphasized there all look like good and compelling ones. (Though I think that linking a withdrawal from Iraq to to more reliance on the UN-- there and elsewhere-- would have been better than linking it to a sort of "blame the Iraqis" meme?)

Anyway, his delivery of the speech was-- as always-- spectacular. Obama is a truly gifted rhetorician, along with his many other talents. Anyway, crafting and delivering a great speech requires huge understanding at the levels of both raw intellect and human affairs.

So here we are, with the national attention now shifting to the general election contest. If it were just about McCain and Obama, then I think McCain would have an extremely tough job of winning. Obama's greatest strength is the authenticity with which he can represent his "change" agenda-- this at a time when the vast majority of Americans are evidently fed up with the present situation (economic and military) and have a very poor opinion of Pres. Bush. McCain is not only 25 years older than Obama (and looks and acts it); in addition, he is closely allied to Bush's policies on all issues, except climate change.

But it is McCain's party association with Bush, who still holds considerable levers of power in the country, that makes me wary of predicting any easy victory for Obama. As head of the executive branch, there are any number of actions Bush and his people could take that he might hope would help push the election toward his fellow Republican.

Yes, even including actions in the arena of war and peace. This would certainly not be the first time this has happened... (Wag the Dog, anyone?)

However, initiating any kind of election-related, pre-election attack on another country would be a very risky business, at two levels:

1. It would most likely, in today's global political climate, stir up a very extensive and damaging hornet's nest internationally, and

2. It might not even have the "desired" effect on an electorate at home that is, I believe, considerably savvier about the risks of international escalation than the US citizenry was back in the 1990s. Indeed, a pre-election escalation or attack, against Iran or any other possible target, might even backfire at the polls. Remember what happened to Jose Maria Aznar when he tried a last-minute escalation of his rhetoric against the Basques?

From this perspective, I believe that the more we can educate the US electorate at home about the very real risks that would be incurred internationally by any unjustified US military attacks against other countries, the more we might be able to deter the Bushists from launching any such attack.

But launching a Wag the Dog attack isn't the only thing the nation's chief executive and his employees can do between now and November. They could also, oh, to mention one wild and crazy example, schedule some show trials to start in September? Something connected with 9/11? With a huge related media operation? That would serve in those vital last weeks before the election to work the electorate back up into a tizzy of fear and xenophobia... ?

No, they wouldn't stoop to doing that, would they? Would they?

Iraq: The big nationalist showdown about to start?

US casualties in Iraq in May declined to 19 fatalities, the lowest monthly level since the invasion was launched 63 months ago. However, the attention of most Iraqis has now shifted to the attempt the Bushists are now undertaking, to ram through speedy completion of a US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

The prospects of the Bushists getting what they want in this regard seem slim-to-zero.

The present UNSC "enabling resolution" for the US troop presence in Iraq runs only through the end of 2008, and the Bushists seem determined to get the SOFA signed and sealed before then. But the mere mention of any agreement that would allow the continuing presence of US troops in the country has aroused a very broad pushback, involving not only forces within the political opposition in Iraq but also significant forces inside the government coalition itself.

For further evidence on the breadth of the pushback, see e.g. here and here.

The present US Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has been described by many in the MSM as a smart guy who understands a lot about the Middle East... If so, then why on earth do the pols in Washington think they can get any Iraqi government to sign off on a deal that allows for a large continuing US troop presence, broad continuing US oversight of the Iraqi economy, immunity from Iraqi legal proceedings for non-Iraqis working for foreign contracting companies, etc.?

Maybe the pols haven't been listening to Crocker? And if that's the case, why does he stay in his job? Why doesn't he do the honorable thing and resign?

At the end of the day, as Clausewitz pointed out, what is really important is what happens at the political level. Mere military-technical superiority is worth nothing if you can't get the political outcome you want. (Israel in Lebanon 2006, anyone?) And I don't see any way the US can get the kind of political outcome that the Bush administration is currently trying to win in Iraq. Not persuasion, not coercion, not even any tragic replays of the divide-and-rule policies they've been applying with a vengeance there since March 2003.

Oh my goodness, maybe sometime before the end of the year-- or perhaps even fairly soon-- the Bushists will conclude they can't ram this thing through, and that they'll have to go to the U.N. Secretary-General and beg him to convene a broad negotiation over the political future of Iraq?

Those commander-in-chief videoconference records

It has been a new and notable feature of the present administration's wars that the Prez has "reached down deep" into the command structure to build personal relationships with the U.S. military's front-line commanders on the ground. He has done this mainly through secure videoconferencing-- a technology that he has also used to conduct regular video-conned discussions with government leaders in Iraq and doubtless elsewhere as well.

Now, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of US troops in Iraq, has published a memoir in which he describes how Bush behaved during a secure videocon held in April 2004, after Americans learned of the burning and lynching of four US military contractors in Fallujah.

Sanchez writes (hat-tip to the WaPo's Michael Abramowitz here) that during that videocon Bush launched into what Sanchez described as a "confused" pep talk:

"Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! ... Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

Abramowitz adds that "A White House spokesman had no comment."

Now, I'm assuming that Sanchez would not have put such shockingly provocative words into the mouth of the US President if he did not have full records (i.e., most likely, a tape of the videocon) to back them up.

"If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!" ... "Stay the course! Kill them!" ... "We are going to wipe them out!"

Excuse me?

Is this the language of the leader of a self-confident, cultured, and democratic nation? (I noted particularly the irony of the bit about "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, ve vill seek them out and kill them... ")

But here's something else this news report reminded me to make note of. Presumably, all these videoconferences have been archived and stored somewhere deep in the archives of the government that organized them?

As a taxpayer in a democratic country, I feel quite entitled to require that

(1) The archives of those command deliberations not be destroyed, and

(2) These archives be declassified and made available to the public as soon as possible.

I hope that my representatives on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees make every effort to ensure the preservation and speedy declassification of these records.

(I have also previously noted the extent to which the "personal" relationships that Bush has built with front-line commanders have played havoc with the country's long-established and legally correct command structure, according to which the Prez should communicate with commanders through via his SecDef, the Chairman of the JCS, and the regional CINCs-- in this case, the Centcom CINC. Bush's "reaching down deep" into the structure has had terrible consequences, above all, for the ability of the nation's military to conduct a rational and sustainable system for achieving force planning objectives. But that's another story.)

HC writings on Hamas, 2006-2008

One strategy you can always pursue is to check out my writings on Hamas, both those published here on JWN and (links to) those published elsewhere, by going to the JWN main page and doing a site search for "Hamas" in the search box on the right sidebar.

But here are some of my key writings on Hamas from March 2006 through June 2008:

• Breakout: Hamas and the end of the two-state solution, in Boston Review, May/June 2008
  
• Who is Khaled Meshaal?, JWN, April 15, 2008
  
• Discussing Hamas on Capitol Hill, JWN, February 13, 2008
  
• "Amayreh-Froman Accord: A way forward for Israel and Palestine?", Just World News, February 4, 2008
  
• The full transcript of my January 16, 2008 interview with Khaled Meshaal
  
• "Egypt's diplomacy on Hamas-Fateh and the Rafah crossing", Just World News, February 3, 2008; and other posts on Hamas in JWN's February 2008 archive
  
• "Seven Questions: The world according to Hamas" (condensed version of the January 16, 2008  interview with Khaled Meshaal), Foreign Policy website, January 2008
• "No way to avoid Hamas", The Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 29, 2008
• "Hamas transforms the regional map", Just World News, Jan. 28, 2008 (and many other posts on Hamas in JWN's January 2008 archive)
  
• "Facing Hamas and Hezbullah", originally published in The Nation (New York), November 2007
  
• "Ten reasons to talk to Hamas", Just World News, June 2007
  
• "Hamas's next steps", from Boston Review, May-June 2006
• "Sisterhood of Hamas", from Salon.com, March 2006