Many journos in the mainstream media had noted that Iraqi PM-designate Nouri al-Maliki went to Najaf Thursday to meet with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and that Sistani's office afterwards issued a statement calling for the dismantling of the country's powerful militias. (E.g., here.). But it has taken long-time Sistani-watcher Reidar Visser to-- once again-- help us put that visit into a broader and more informative context.
Having studied Sistani's latest statement (bayan) carefully, Visser writes in this helpful piece of analysis on his website that,
In his latest analysis, Visser refers back to the much longer analysis of Sistani's role that he published in mid-March. (JWN commentary and discussion on that, here.) In the earlier analysis, Visser had written that whereas between June 2003 and November 2004 Sistani had sustained an active (and extremely influential) behind-the-scenes engagement in Iraqi politics, after November 2004 that engagement seemed to drop off sharply.
In that context, therefore, perhaps we could say today that "The breaking news from Najaf is that there is breaking news from Najaf"?
I went to Sistani's website and looked, for example, at the portal they have there to Arabic-language press comments about him. There were already four items up there with today's date-- showing that his people are tracking current media coverage of him quite closely. Before that, the earlier items they displayed had these dates: 4 April, 9 March (two items), 2 March, 22 February (two items), 20 February, 11 December (four items), 10 December, 9 December...
Well, there are many possible explanations for their having posted press items there so sporadically between Devember 11 and April 29. (Believe me, as a blogger, I could give you plenty of explanations for sporadicity!) But it is kind of notable how extremely disengaged they seemed to have been in that period surrounding and following the December 15 elections...
In his latest analysis, Visser discussed that period of quietism and Sistani's apparent decision to end it thus:
Anyway, demobilizing the country's numerous militias will clearly be a very tough undertaking. In the Shia community there are the Badr Brigades, the Mahdi Army, Fadila, etc... In the Sunni community there are some smaller but often much more lethal armed organizations. And then, up in Kurdistan, there are the pesh merga, whose leaders have shown no readiness whatsoever to have them dissolved... And meantime, the US plan to build up the "national army" under US trainers and US political commissars has been continuing to founder. (In this intriguing piece in today's WaPo, Jonathan Finer writes that US soldiers in the northern Iraq town of Hawijah "have developed a deep distrust of their Iraqi counterparts following a slew of incidents that suggest the troops they are training are cooperating with their enemies"-- and gives many details of such incidents.)
Clearly, then, if there is to be a demobilization of the Iraqi militias-- along with, as the best strategy for this, the integration of their operationally capable members into a new, unfied Iraqi security force-- then this will have to come about as a result of intra-Iraqi political reconciliation, rather than through any (quite phantasmagorical) concept of "US leadership" of the process.
Can the Iraqis do this, despite all the blood spilled, and the evident depth of the political disagreements and the distrust among them? Yes. As our friends in South Africa and elsewhere have shown us, even opposing political and military forces that have been fighting each other for a long time and with great lethality and the imposition of truly terrible suffering can reach an agreement-- provided it is based on a shared concept of national unity, national citizenship, and the broader national good... And yes, they can do this largely by themselves, without requiring the input or the professed "leadership" of meddling outsiders... Especially not, if the outsiders in question have a proven track record of having stirred up internal differences and tensions; and if they still quite fail to disavow having any longterm territorial or political ambitions of their own inside the country in question!
In this very necessary political process of intra-Iraqi reconciliation and the reconstruction of all the organs of Iraqi national power, Ayatollah Sistani's active involvement can make a big difference for the better. (Especially if he also works hard to reassure the country's Sunni Muslims about his role.) Given the attachment the Ayatollah has already shown in the past to the ideals of Iraqi national unity and national independence, I for one am delighted that he seems to have decided to re-engage with Iraqi politics.
-- hearing Qamar-ul Huda, a Muslim staff member of the US Institute of Peace, talking about the role that Rwanda's very small population of Muslims played in helping to save lives during the genocide there in 1994; hearing him reflect deeply and honestly on the phenomenon of seeing Muslims kill Muslims in Darfur-- and Muslims kill Christians and other non-Muslims, earlier, in Southern Sudan; and seeing al-Qaeda leaders and others exploiting Muslim teachings to incite violence and hatred; and listening to him talking about the continuing need to engage in internal debate within Muslim religious circles over interpretations of texts and the requirements of "correct" Muslim practice...What an incredible gathering-- and I haven't told you about the half of it here! There were numerous other really wise contributors, including Monica Anderson, a Swedish woman who works full-time in her country's Foreign Ministry on issues of genocide prevention-- the only government official anywhere in the world who has a mandate to do so. She made an impassioned plea (that I fully endorse) for the continued importance of engagement with formal politics, pointing out that peace agreements could never be reached and implemented, and decent, life-protecting institutions and structures put in place, without the involvement of governments and their diplomats.
-- hearing him talk, to, about a decision he'd learned about that was made recently by the heads of different religious organizations in the Iraqi city of Samarra, to jointly rebuild the Askariya Mosque, that was largely destroyed in the terrible sabotage attack of late February (why have I not heard about that elsewhere?)...
-- hearing Andrea Bartoli reflect with parallel anguish and honesty on the pain of having seen Catholics kill Catholics in Rwanda, and on having come to understand the role the Catholic hierarchy played at a certain time in buttressing colonial rule and colonial attitudes in Mozambique; and also, talking about the need for continued efforts to engage in debate and work inside one's own religious tradition...
-- hearing Vicken Aykazian, an Armenian Bishop fresh back in DC after a visit to Yerevan, talking about having participated for the first time in the annual Armenain Genocide remembrance there on April 24-- and how he saw two million people, out of the country's total population of 3.5 million, also coming to Yerevan to participate in it... hearing his description of how he moved he was when recently he wandered by chance into the offices, at VOA, of their Kurdish-language broadcasting team-- and of how the director there, on learning who he was, had invited him in, gathered colleagues in for a sit-down discussion, and told Bishop Vicken there and then that he wanted to apologize to him "for what our Kurdish people did to your people during the Armenian genocide of 1915"...
-- hearing Bishop Vicken also speak passionately about the need for as many people as possible to participate in the "Save Darfur" rally scheduled for DC this Sunday...
-- hearing Oded Wiener, the Director-general of the Grand Rabbinate of Israel, talk about the dialogue process the Rabbinate has been involved in for a number of years, with the Vatican, which has dealt with interpretations of the Holocaust and many other strands of Catholic-Jewish relations... and hearing him talk about the value of pluralism and diversity and its rootedness in traditional Jewish teachings; he also, importantly, noted the link between a consumerist culture and people's increased readiness to engage in anti-humane violence in order to win or protect material gains; and he urged the central need to educate people about the whole human family, not just one's own little portion of it...
-- hearing Sunday Mbang, a Methodist minister from Nigeria talking about the centrality of ideas of racial superiority to the gross violence that western countries had inflicted on Africa during the slave trade and the whole era of colonialism; and his pain that many of those who had engaged in such practices had professed themselves to be "Christians" despite the fact that they clearly transgressed against key teachings of the New testament... he also pointed to the terrible role that international arms suppliers had played in greatly increasing the lethality of inter-group conflicts in Africa; and talked with regret about the fact that a key Christian-Muslim dialogue process that used to exist in Nigeria had stopped operating a few years ago, but should certainly be revived to prevent the repetition of communal violence such as that that erupted there earlier this year...
African Union mediators who have been convening peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria, between representatives of the Sudanese government and the two main Darfuri opposition groups have put forward a draft peace agreement for consideration by the parties. (Hat-tip to Jonathan Edelstein for that news.)
The foregoing link goes to the Sudan Tribune's account of the content of much of the peace deal. That account says that the "Security" portion of it still has to be worked out. VOA's account of the draft presented by AU chief mediator Salim Ahmed Salim says, however, that the draft contains provisions in all spheres, including security.
Reuters' Estelle Shirbon writes in this very informative report that the AU-proposed draft includes a requirement that Khartoum disarm the Janjaweed militia.
As the April 30 target date for the final conclusion of the peace agreement approaches, there have been recent reports that both sides have been taking some worryingly escalatory moves.
IRIN reported from Nairobi today that,
Houreld writes:
Among the dusty tents and straw shacks of the refugee camps, the clumps of frightened people do not even know who attacked them, although most of the refugees who escaped agree their kidnappers spoke with Sudanese accents. At least four rebel groups - some Sudanese, some Chadian - are now active along the chaotic border between the two countries.
... Although the Darfur conflict has been marked by gross human rights violations and ethnic cleansing, Olivier Bercault of Human Rights Watch says the forced recruitment of fighters, including children, is a new development.
..."The war is shifting gear and [the various rebel groups] need more people to fight," said Bercault. "I'm very concerned about child recruitment. When you start with this, it's like an addiction. It's difficult to stop."
(Oh, and actor George Clooney has gotten into the action, too. In a newsclip he and his father made that I saw tonight, the dad-- described as "a journalist"-- got some very basic political facts about the situation wrong, referring to the janjaweed as "insurgents", which is precisely what they are not... Which doesn't give me much confidence in the quality of the duo's analysis.)
I hope the peace talks in Abuja can really succeed, and the rebuilding process that they envision can really take hold. That is far and away the best way to end the commission of atrocities in Darfur and start rebuilding a rule-of-law-based society there.
But what about the reports of the recent escalatory acts? Let's hope they were just one last push that each side was making, trying to win one last spot of negotiating advantage, before they both sign onto the peace deal...
Another interesting question: Have the UN's recent imposition of targeted sanctions and other political pressures from outside helped to nudge the government toward accepting the peace agreement? If so, that's good.
One last point. If the parties do sign onto the peace, then surely the main impetus in the "international community" has to be towards supporting this peace and giving it the very best possible chance to succeed. Including, obviously, by funding it. But also, by agreeing to be led by the AU negotiators regarding questions of how perpetrators of the conflict-era atrocities should be dealt with.
I certainly hope the AU has been making robust plans for the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration back into their home communities (DDR) of the vast bulk of the former fighters on both sides of the conflict... DDR is by far the best way to help rebuild societies torn apart by civil war.
Zal Khalilzad, the US viceroy in Baghdad, has been putting his own spin on his failure to break the unity of the UIA bloc by speaking to the WaPo's David Ignatius and claiming it was a victory for his diplomacy, after all.
Ignatius wrote that Khalilzad told him that "the Iranians 'pressured everyone for [former UIA candidate Ibrahim] Jafari to stay'", whereas the reputation of the now-confirmed UIA candidate for PM, Nouri (formerly Jawad) al-Maliki is of "someone who is independent of Iran."
Yeah, right. Whatever. But by casting matters in that light, Zal is able to keep alive his reputation in Washington as someone who-- to quote Ignatius-- "has been a match for the Iraqis in his wily political wrangling." As opposed to, for example, being seen as someone who tried hard but failed to break the basic unity of the UIA bloc.
David does concede, however, that, "Maliki is a tough Arab nationalist who will work with the United States in the short run but will want the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq. His authentic Iraqi credentials could help pull the country together."
Meanwhile, I see that Maliki has faced one challenge already: He had to turn up at a hastily arranged meeting with Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld who "just happened" to make a swing through Baghdad today.
That report, from AP, notes this:
First, though, Maliki has to form his government. I imagine that trying to make sure he understands Washington's views on that topic was the main reason Condi and Rummy rushed over so fast to meet him.
The NYT reported today that the UN Security Council yesterday voted to impose personalized sanctions on four named individuals suspected of involvement in the atrocities in Darfur.
Interestingly, the four persons sanctioned comprise two leaders affiliated with the Khartoum government: "Maj. Gen. Gaffar Mohamed Elhassan, a Sudanese Air Force officer accused of helping the government-backed janjaweed militias commit atrocities; [and] Sheik Musa Hilal, chief of an Arab tribe and a janjaweed leader"-- along with two leaders with the anti-government forces: "Adam Yacub Shant, a commander of Sudanese Liberation Army forces that broke a cease-fire to attack government troops; and Gabril Abdul Kareem Badri, the commander of another rebel force, which kidnapped and threatened African Union troops."
Is the Security Council (and perhaps also the ICC, with which it has been working on the Darfur atrocities) perhaps getting something right this time, in terms of the political "balance" of these sanctions?
The Council's position stands in notable contrast to that adopted by nearly all the mainstream media and political activists here in the US, who have stayed almost completely silent about the atrocities reportedly committed by the anti-government militias-- the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement-- while hyping up those committed by pro-government forces.
In a report on BBC t.v. the other day, I saw even the estimable Orla Guerin fall into that trap. She spoke breathlessly about refugees "streaming away" from a government-attacked village-- while in the frame behind her all you could see was a bedraggled group of around six people making their way mournfully from one side of the screen to the other. She also stated-- incorrectly-- that the African Union troops in Darfur "have no mandate to protect civilians". And at a point when a group of armed anti-government fighters were visible in a Jeep quite close behind her she made no mention of their presence or of the well-documented accusations that the anti-government forces are also accused of atrocities.
I note that many Jewish-American organizations are among those that have joined the (increasingly politicized, anti-Khartoum) US campaign to "Save Darfur" that was launched recently by Elie Wiesel and that is organizing a big march in DC this Sunday. If you go to the campaign's Unity Statement, you will see descriptions of atrocities committed by government and pro-government forces, but no mention at all of violence by anti-government forces.
Here's what it says:
Villages have been razed, women and girls are systematically raped and branded, men and boys murdered, and food and water supplies targeted and destroyed. Government aerial bombardments support the Janjaweed by hurling explosives as well as barrels of nails, car chassis and old appliances from planes to crush people and property. Tens of thousands have died. Well over a million people have been driven from their homes, and only in the past few weeks have humanitarian agencies gained limited access to some of the affected region...
... And the last sentence I quoted from the statement is now quite out of date and should be updated or dropped.
... Note, too, the way in which the "Unity Statement" tries to make the conflict seem quite simply to be one between "Arabs" and "Africans", and thereby to whip up the anti-Arab sentiment that lies very close to the surface of much US discourse; whereas, as best I understand it, the Darfur conflict is much, much more complex than that.
... And finally, the statement makes no mention at all of what the signatories believe should be done in response to the violence and suffering in Darfur. This is presumably because the signatory groups failed to agree on this? Some people here in the US have been urging the intervention of NATO forces "to save the Darfuris"-- a military campaign on the model of Kosovo, which would similarly weaken the central government involved, i.e., Khartoum. Others urge a more pacific, multilateral approach. But by waving the bloodied garments of the victims of pro-government violence, while making no mention of the victims of anti-government violence, this campaign will surely serve only to whip up anti-Khartoum feeling.
My own prescription for what should be done? Support peace efforts in these three troubled provinces of Sudan to the greatest degree possible.
Atrocities like genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes always (or nearly always) occur in the context of an ongoing armed conflict. The situation in Darfur is certainly no exception to that rule.
I share the angst of all those in the global rights community who are appalled at the grotesque, man-inflicted suffering in Darfur. But the way to bring those atrocities to a lasting end is to bring to a lasting end the conflict that has spawned them. By contrast, engaging in a campaign of one-sided, blame-hurling accusations against only one party to the conflict seems like a sure recipe for keeping the situation inflamed.
That's why I'm really heartened by the even-handed approach adopted by the Security Council.
By the way, the ICC-- to which the Security Council last April made a formal referral of the situation in Darfur-- has not yet named its own list of indictees, as you can see if you check the documents available through this ICC web portal on the topic. But I wonder if the prosecutor there consulted with the Security Council members on who should be the targets of these sanctions?
Yuval Ne'eman, the nuclear physicist who was the theoretical father of the Israel nuclear weapons program, died in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, aged 81.
(Its political father was none other than Mr. Nobel Peace Laureate Shimon Peres, author of the Qana massacre which occurred almost exactly ten years ago now, in April 1996.)
Ne'eman was also the founder of the viciously territorial maximalist Israeli party Tehiya. He served three terms in Israel's Knesset for Tehiya, during which time he was a member of three governments, usually having the "Science" portfolio.
And just to demonstrate the connivance with which the US authorities viewed the Israeli nuclear program we can see that in the mid-1970s, Ne'eman was a professor at the University of Texas, which still proudly claims him as an emeritus.
My gosh! Do I smell double standards?
Wednesday and Thursday this week, the Community of Sant' Egidio, an international Catholic lay organization, will be bringing a wonderful pro-peace event to Washington DC: the International Prayer for Peace: "Religions and Cultures: the Courage of Dialogue".
I am honored to have been invited by my friend Andrea Bartoli, a Sant' Egidio representative in New York, to take part in a discussion he's organizing Thursday morning as part of this, titled "Religious Contribution to Genocide Prevention."
It should be a weighty discussion. There will be an Armenian bishop, someone from Great Rabbinate of Israel, a Methodist priest from Nigeria, a Muslim representative, and someone from the Swedish Foreign Ministry who works on genocide prevention full-time.
I am excited at the thought of there being a large, Catholic-led peace event right there in Washington DC. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, I sorely missed the strength, wisdom, and political muscle that US Catholics could and should have brought to antiwar movement... They were consumed at that time with the challenge of dealing with the painful legacies of their years of institutionalized child abuse....
But now, maybe we can see them come more strongly into the field of pro-peace activism, led by the wonderful people of Sant' Egidio. I was glad to see that the Archbishop of Washington DC will be opening the event. Excellent.
The latest (May/June 2006) issue of Foreign Policy mag-- right, the one with the letters and discussion about my recent war-crimes courts article-- landed on our front stoop last week. It has a seductively graphicized nine-page layout presenting the results of the 2nd annual "Failed States Index" that FP has produced in cooperation with the (also DC-based) Fund for Peace.
Two of these pages carry a large world map, with "Critical" (i.e., crisis-ridden) states in burgundy; "In danger" states in orange; "Borderline" states in yellow, etc. Well, that's most of the states in the world they have colored there. "Stable" and "Most stable" states are in shades of grey.
What does it mean, I wonder, to say that (for example) Mexico is a "borderline" state?
Actually, one aspect of this color-coding system really aroused my distrust. There are exactly 20 countries in each color zone... Either this is an amazing coincidence, or the colors are assigned according to purely "batch-processing" (i.e. on-a-curve) criteria, rather than representing some objective judgment made about their degree of criticality.
... So then, you turn the page and discover the impressive array of numbers on which these rankings are based. Here, all 60 states in the "colored" categories are assessed according to 12 "Indicators of instability". Judged most "unstable" are Sudan (total score for instability = 112.3 out of a possible 120), DRC (110.1), Ivory Coast (109.2), and then Iraq (109.0).
On this scoreboard, US-"liberated" Iraq romps home ahead of (i.e., more unstable than) Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia, Haiti, etc.
Interesting.
I, however, am equally interested in the methodology used here. At the end of the piece, they say you can find out more about the methodology if you go either to FP's website, or to that of the Fund for Peace. I totally couldn't find anything related to the topic at the FP site. (Though they do have a jaunty and engaging new blog over there, written by staffers. Also, now, a clean online version of my recent piece on war-crimes courts.)
But info on the methodology of the "Failed States Index"? Nope.
I went to the FFP site, and found this page, which is apparently about the 2005 Failed States Index... So through that one, you can arrive at this page, which provides a portal to definitions of each of the 12 "indicators of instability" and shows how you aggregate the scores, derive trend-lines over time, etc.
The "next step" after that one is interesting. It declares quite straightforwardly that,
* A competent domestic police force and corrections system
* An efficient and functioning civil service or professional bureaucracy
* An independent judicial system that works under the rule of law
* A professional and disciplined military accountable to a legitimate civilian government
* A strong executive/legislative leadership capable of national governance
So the FFP's "methodology" is called "CAST", for Conflict Assessment System Tool. Over the past few years, I have made quite a lot of use of a "rival" governance-crisis assessment tool-- the one that Swisspeace pioneered, which is called "FAST".
FAST uses a slightly different approach. Swisspeace uses it for only a limited number of countries. But for those, they have tried (not always successfully) to produce a quarterly rating. What they count are just a few broad categories of things, falling into these categories:
As I remarked here on JWN a while back, the whole current wave of enthusiasm for "political early warning" tools of these kinds dates back to the Rwanda crisis of 1994. The other main one that I know of is the International Crisis Group's "CrisisWatch", which is produced monthly. From my perspective, I find that the least useful of the three.
In general, it's excellent that all that work is being done. We can now know to within a whisker that North Korea is 0.6 degrees more unstable than Burundi... But still, I wonder: once we know all these things, what can we do about them? That is surely the problem! Are we going, for example, to stop exporting arms to these countries? Are we going to invest huge amounts in building in such states decent education and health-care systems? Are we going to change the terms of trade so that farmers and other producers in low-income countries have free and fair access to EU and US markets? Are we going to beat our own swords into plowshares and demonstrate to people that we know that there are better ways to resolve problems than through militarism and violence?
Well, are we?
If we don't take those further, quite necessary steps, then it strikes me there is a degree almost of self-aggrandizing voyeurism involved if all we are prepared to do is to sit here in the safe, secure west daintily charting how dysfunctional all "those peoples"' countries have become...
I wanted to wait till I'd read Reidar Visser's book on the pursuit and failure of a project for south-Iraqi separatism in the early 1920s, before I posted a short review here of it.
But here I am, stuck in Philadelphia airport in a rainstorm, forced to wait for a flight home tomorrow, work schedule unavoidably postponed... So I thought I'd post the links to the book for y'all here, at least. And then later, after I get reunited with the copy of the book that he sent me, and that's sitting at my home back in Virginia, and get back into reading it-- then, I can write something substantive here about it.
What's most interesting about the book, from a current-affairs perspective, is that what Reidar's writing about is an earlier attempt to form a separate, Shiite-dominated, south-Iraqi state-- and about its failure.
I am eager to get to the point in his narrative where he describes the denouement there: Why did the attempt fail? But sadly, here I am, stuck in a rainbound airport and separated from the book.
So anyway, go buy your own copy! Here, depending where you live, is how:
-- German publisher (English-language text)
The excellent and careful Norwegian historian of modern Iraq Reidar Visser has just produced an extremely helpful analysis of the evolution of the concept of the centralized Iraqi state as it developed in the post-Ottoman era... and he continues this analysis right through the the post-2003 era, concluding with some references to the views of PM-designate Jawad al-Maliki on the topic.
In current (post-March 2003) Iraqi politics this issue has assumed particular importance because of the strong preference of the country's US occupiers (and also the two makor Kurdish parties) for a radical decentralization and geographic devolution of governing authority in Iraq-- a project to which many US analysts misleadingly give the name "federalization".
In support of this decentralization/devolution project, many commentators have alleged that the entire construct of "Iraq" was a purely manufactured creation of the British-- and that therefore there is something "natural", appropriate, and almost inevitable about the deconstruction of that state.
I note that this argument about the "artificiality" of colonial-era boundaries is one that could-- potentially-- be applied to states in many parts of the world, perhaps nowhere more so than in Africa. (Oh, also the United States and if you think about it, just about every state in the world...) But nowhere else that I know has this argument been used so insistently, as it has with reference to Iraq, to try to justify the radical deconstruction of a central state.
Anyway, into this discussion, Visser is now injecting a much-needed degree of solidly informed historical realism.
He writes:
There is little doubt that some kind of Iraq existed, and that this concept was intelligible to ordinary people. Both Sunnis and Shiite Muslims used it to refer to the combined area of the Ottoman vilayets of Basra and Baghdad, at least north to Samarra. To what extent the popularity of the concept abated further north is a moot point. Some local writers had used expressions like “the Kurdish tribes among the people of Iraq” as early as in the nineteenth century (this would seem to imply that the concept was indeed in use north of Samarra as well); the Ottomans, on the other hand, except for a brief interlude in the early Young Turk period, maintained a distinction between an “Iraq” consisting of Basra and Baghdad and the area to the north which was mostly denoted through its administrative name, the province of Mosul. At any rate it is clear that the standard depiction of Iraq as something that was created by the British from scratch – without any pre-modern roots and essentially forced on the local population – is untenable. The British role was mainly to join Mosul to the two provinces of Basra and Baghdad, whose inhabitants for their part were already familiar with a larger concept of Iraq.
In its most vulgar form, the “constructivist” interpretation of modern Iraq has become allied to an even more problematic ethno-religious caricature map of the country. Mosul, it is claimed, was “Kurdish”; Baghdad, “Sunni Arab”; Basra, “Shiite Arab” or even “Shiite, with a strong orientation towards Persia”. Such models are another unfortunate side effect of twenty-first–century journalism being projected onto atlases of the past. They overlook the fact that the provincial border between Basra and Baghdad was located far south towards the Gulf (it ran eastwards from Nasiriyya to Amara), so that the majority of Shiite Muslims in the area were in fact residents of the province of Baghdad. Similarly, Mosul was highly complex in terms of ethnicity, with large groups of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens, Yazidis and Christians alongside the Kurds. But if this complexity is overlooked, the “artificiality” thesis perpetuates itself: cross-regional cooperation, if taken note of at all, is dismissed as the result of outsiders employing brute force against a population which for their part are portrayed as being locked in internecine antagonisms, unable to conceive of any sort of shared super-regional identity.
Visser writes about the decision of the British colonial administrators, who after WW1 had been "awarded" (or, had grabbed) the area of Iraq and ruled it under a League of Nations "mandate", to create a single, unitary state comprising the previously existing Ottoman regions of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. He notes-- and this is of some wry significance today-- that one of the goals of the British administrators in doing this was to dilute the influence that the country's quietly powerful Shiite clerics could exert over its governance...
He notes the determination with which the British pursued their project of creating a unitary state for the whole area (including Mosul), and also the fact that the British used military force including aerial bombardment in their pursuit of it.
He adds this:
One important factor in this was the enthusiasm shown by certain groups from outside the “historical Iraq” for participating in the new regime...
This tendency of support for the centralist and unitary state model persisted even beyond 1991 and the traumatic anti-Baath uprising of that year – and despite the fact that it was the regime’s exploitation and abuse of the concept of centralism that had enabled it to engage in military folly in Kuwait. Shiite Muslims, who suffered disproportionally as the uprising was brutally quelled, did not abandon the vision of a unitary state when they in exile renewed their planning for a post-Baath future. Indeed, much of the internal troubles of the Iraqi opposition in the 1990s were caused by Shiite unwillingness to accept autonomy demands by Kurds who now more uniformly than before propagated federalism as the ideal future structure of government.
Visser assesses the support of the Iraqi Shiites for decentralization ("federation"), after March 2003, in the following way:
Signs of possible changes in this picture did not emerge until the summer of 2005. International media then started to focus on calls made by one of the Shiite factions, SCIRI, for a single unified Shiite sectarian federal entity covering all the territory south of Baghdad down to the Gulf. Many analysts soon concluded that “all the Shiites of Iraq demand a single federal entity and exclusive control of the oil resources in the area”, even though the amount of actual agitation in favour of this particular scheme was quite limited. An alternative interpretation would be to see these initiatives as parenthetical projects in a wider historical context. If Shiite attitudes to federalism are studied over time, it seems clear that the more recent demands for a unified sectarian Shiite federal entity are atypical and even exogenous – and owe much of their prominence to Western journalists who seem drawn towards a simplistic but user-friendly Balkans model of Iraqi politics. Among the Shiite Muslims themselves, enthusiasm for these federal proposals has been much more in doubt. Influential Muqtada al-Sadr has repeatedly rejected any consideration of “federalism in the context of occupation”, and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s emphasis on non-sectarianism and nationalist values is at variance with SCIRI’s ideas about a single Shiite canton.(10) Still, SCIRI has managed to obtain a constitution that puts no limits on the scale of new federal entities, and they have been careful to present their rather hazy federal scheme as a “guarantee against anti-Shiite terrorism” – potentially a vote-winner in a climate of steadily increasing security problems.
Finally, regarding the views of PM-designate Jawad al-Maliki-- and the current prospects for the robustness of the project of keeping Iraq as a unified, multi=ethnic state-- he writes the following:
Actually, what he does is a little different from what Juan does. Visser spends more time on deep and considered historical reflection and less time on the "vacuuming up" of large numbers of items of daily news than Juan. I think it's really great that we can have easy internet access to both of these guys' work, and I am immensely grateful for their efforts.
“The Central Committee, over time, is becoming irrelevant,” he predicts. “After that, we might be able to have a conference. It could be that we will split, that we will split into two, three, four or five movements. We would like for Fatah to stay united, but we don’t believe that in the coming months, the top leadership of Fatah is willing to do anything serious for Fatah.” While he supports the registration and activation of members, Faris says that the Central Committee and Revolutionary Council are trying to shirk responsibility and place it on the local leaderships.
Of the president himself, Faris says that he and his circle reached out repeatedly since the elections, only to be ignored. “[Abbas] has been kidnapped by the old leadership in Fatah,” he says bitterly. “They are trying to use his power against the new generation.”
And then, this:In
the face of its defeat, Fatah and its allies quickly sought to assure
the US and the international community that it was still in the game.
These efforts led to rather bizarre exchanges...
Former national security adviser Jibril Rajoub was said by the Times of London to have told an audience at a February 8-9 follow-up meeting to previous bilateral talks that the elections had been a reversible “political accident.” The implication of the article was that the Palestinian president’s office meant to plot with the US against Hamas, a charge that the president’s office [i.e. Pres. Abbas, I think ~HC] roundly denies.
There is no denying, however, the confluence of Fatah’s aspirations with the interests of the United States, which has boxed itself into a position criminalizing material or other support of any one Hamas member, or the government as a whole. The State Department’s review of the $404 million earmarked for the Palestinian Authority areas cut out not only money for roads that could be construed as support for the government, but also tens of millions of dollars in private-sector projects. Legislation moving through Congress would further tighten the ban on financial support, while allowing exceptions for humanitarian assistance and aid routed through the Palestinian president’s office.So it is Jawad al-Maliki as UIA nominee. He is a Daawa person.
I've been traveling and busy for the past 48 hours. I flew back into Philadelphia yesterday, from Amman. I'm here in Philly for a meeting today, then back home to Virginia tonight.
When I posted here Thursday, I wrote, " if Jaafari does step down (and I think this is a very remote possibility) then his replacement as UIA nominee will still be someone from the Daawa-Sadr bloc who can be expected to follow exactly the same, firmly pro-withdrawal policy."
Okay, so Jaafari stepping down was not as "remote" a possibility as I had thought... But Daawa has still won the big battle of wills against Talabani and the Americans.
On Juan Cole's blog today, he has an amazing collection of links, extracts from documents, and fulltext translations of documents related to Maliki's nomination, and the reaction of various Iraqi parties to it. His putting these materials up into the public blogosphere is a real service to all of us who seek informed discussion of events there.
On another note, I saw before I left Amman yesterday that the "Iraqi religious leaders gathering" they'd been planning there, for today, has been postponed. Understandably, given the close involvement of many of those religious leaders in Iraq's political affairs.
I gotta run. I do have one more thing I want to post here before I go off to my meetings. I'll try to write some more commentary on the Maliki nomination a little later over the weekend.
In Iraq, it looks as though the Jaafari-Sadr bloc within the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) now seems poised, fnally, to cement its victory in the political battle against the US machinators. That, at least is my reading of what Juan Cole was writing very early today-- especially in his commentary on this article in today's Az-Zaman.
In this context, it occurs to me that the nasty street battles in the Baghdad district of al-Adhamiyeh may just be a fizzling reaguard attempt at divide-and-rule between Sunnis and Shiites, undertaken by (or at the very least, enthusiastically stoked by) the US military authorities as they face the possibility that at the political level inside Iraq they are about to lose their campaign to prevent the Jaafari-Sadr bloc from taking power?
Muqtada Sadr is, of course, a longtime bete noire for the Americans, and continues to be one because of his insistence on seeing a speedy withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq-- a program in which Jaafari has reportedly joined him and that has apparently received the strong but quiet backing of the leading Shiite religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The broader Shiite parliamentary bloc, the UIA, is reportedly meeting in Baghdad this morning, and will there decide whether to attend the parliament session scheduled for this afternoon.
In order for Iraq to have a government at this point, under the Constitution adopted last October the following needs to happen:
(2) The duly constituted Assembly then needs to elect a President (and some vice-presidents?) by a 2/3 majority.
(3) Within 15 days thereafter, the President names the "nominee" of the largest bloc within the Assembly to be the PM.
(4) The PM-designate then has 30 days to assemble a government and define its program, before which deadline he (or she) needs to present both the government list and the program to the Assembly and win a simple-majority vote for their approval.
Basic agreement seems also to have been reached regarding step 2, the designation of the President and the Vicer-Presidents. As Juan writes, quoting Az-Zaman:
(Cole: I presume that the reemergence of al-Hashimi comes because he has dropped his opposition to Jaafari as prime minister. Al-Hayat says that Dulaimi admitted that the Sunnis of the Iraqi Accord Front had offered to drop al-Hashimi's candidacy if the Shiites would drop Jaafari. But it was the Shiites who had the upper hand, and they forced al-Hashimi out to make a point, without giving up anything at all. The Shiites played hard ball on this one).
He said that the Dawa Party [which had earlier indicated that it might consider alternatives to Jaafari] met on Wednesday and took a final decision to back Jaafari for prime minister.
But now, it seems, the Jaafari-Sadr bloc has been able to win out not only over Allawi (who these days is a political lightweight in Iraq, anyway), but also over Talabani. And this, because of the constitutional provision that requires Talabani to get a 2/3 majority in order to win the state presidency that he evidently covets.
Juan continues his rendering of the Zaman piece thus:
(Cole: The Shiite fundamentalists are in striking distance of having a simple majority in parliament, and are much more united, despite some frictions, than their opponents. It was always the case that if they maintained their unity, they would be able to impose their will with regard to the incumbents of high political positions. The attempt made by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and former interim PM Iyad Allawi to marshall the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites against Jaafari appears to have been defeated, by simple steadfastness on the part of the UIA.)
H'mm, those three pro-US "heroes", whose defections from the pro-Jaafari camp were breathlessly reported by the US media just 2-3 weeks ago, have been staying remarkably quiet recently...
So yes, it has been the UIA's remarkable defense of its internal unity that has been decisive. As for the success of the Jaafari nomination in the Assembly, it requires of course only 138 votes. The non-UIA parties are not nearly as united as the UIA, and I have always been confident that if the UIA could remain substantially united-- as it has-- then it would have no trouble finding the other 10 votes of support that it needs. I believe Mithal al-Alusi, a respected political indpendent, has already promised his support.
Also, as Juan notes, once Jaafari becomes reinstated as PM, he'll have a huge budget (= jobs, patronage) to control, so members of many parties will be lining up to join his government.
... Well, if the political knots over Tarek al-Hashemi and Jalal Talabani's nominations have really been resolved as per Sami al-Askari's reported comments, then we could see pretty rapid progress toward formation of a Jaafari-led government. However, even if Jaafari in person is not reconfirmed as PM, I think it has been demonstrated pretty clearly that the balance of political power within the UIA remains strongly with the Daawa-Sadr bloc rather than with SCIRI and the pro-Americans inside the UIA... So even if Jaafari does step down (and I think this is a very remote possibility) then his replacement as UIA nominee will still be someone from the Daawa-Sadr bloc who can be expected to follow exactly the same, firmly pro-withdrawal policy.
Which raises the nasty prospect that the US-stoked violence in Adhamiyeh might not be the last attempt at stoking such violence?
Indeed, as Dahr Jamail has noted, the US policy of stoking/enabling sectarian violence to occur, and then offering to step in to the victimized community to help "root out the troublemakers" does sound awfully like a cheap mafia proitection racket, doesn't it? (Hat-tip to Today in Iraq for that link.)
... All of which makes me really glad that no less a figure than Muqtada Sadr is expected to come here to Jordan for Saturday's "religious reconciliation in Iraq" meetings that are being convened by King Abdullah with backing from the Arab League.
From the few interactions I've had with Jordanians here-- mainly professors-- I would say there is some serious concern among at least those non-governmental Jordanians that the Shiite Iraqis are somehow "not Arab", or even that they are all "Iranians". This is very similar to the anti-Shiite propaganda that was stoked by Saddam Hussein in his time, and if you read the comments that Zeyad of Healing Iraq reported, from "people in the street" in Adhamiyeh in recent days, it also seems pretty widespread there, too.
Jordan, like most other Arab countries, has a strong majority of Sunnis in its national population (and almost 100% of its Muslims are Sunnis). In fact, Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon are the only three Arab countries that have a majority of Shiites among their Muslim populations. Anyway, amongst many-- but notably not all-- Sunni Arab communities and individuals there is considerable distrust of Arab Shiites as conmstituting some kind of possible "fifth column" for an Iranian influence that is seen by many ethnic Arabs as threatening and, well, "different".
Muqtada Sadr is a clearly Arab and very strongly Iraqi-nationlist Shiite political leader. That's why it's good that he is coming to Jordan, and I hope he can do something to reassure Jordanians and other Sunni Arabs that they and their Sunni co-believers inside Iraq have little to fear from the Sadr-Jaafari alliance.
Interestingly, Ayatollah Sistani had been the main Iraqi Shiite personality invited to attend. He sent his regrets-- and may well have given his imprimatur to Muqtada's plan to come, instead. I imagine Sistani is very, very wary of leaving Iraq at this time. The last time he left it-- for "heart treatment" that the British doctors said he really needed to have-- was in August 2004; and on that occasion the US and UK forces took the opportunity to launch an attack against Muqtada's forces... Better to stay at home in Najaf this time round, I think...
At the UNU reception here yesterday, my Afghan-Australian colleague Amin Seikal made a comment that I found very thought-provoking though it's probably something other people have thought a lot more about previously, than I have. We were talking informally about Iraq. (This was shortly after my lengthy, canapé-balancing chat with Queen Noor.) Anyway Amin and I were talking about best-case and worst-case scenarios for the upcoming US withdrawal from Iraq...
He said that the Bushites were presumably looking for a withdrawal with some shred of honor. I said they would more likely, at this point, be looking for a withdrawal in which the degree of dishonor was minimized. He said, "Yes, we should be looking most closely at the analogy with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan-- not at Vietnam."
The Soviet army first went into Afghanistan in force in December 1979. This, from Wikipedia, about the events that led up to their withdrawal nearly a decade later:
In this way, [Soviet puppet PM Mohammad] Najibullah had stabilized his political position enough to begin matching Moscow's moves toward withdrawal. On July 20, 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced.
Among other things the Geneva accords identified [mandated? ~HC] the U.S. and Soviet non-intervention with internal affairs of Pakistan and Afghanistan and a timetable for full Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan by February 15, 1989.
Just over 15,000 Soviet troops were killed from 1979 through 1989, in addition to many hundreds of vehicles and aircraft destroyed/shot down. An estimated one million Afghans died as a result of the invasion during this period.
And for the Soviet Union, the puncturing of the Soviets' regime pride in Afghanistran, as well as the massive drain that the hopeless war had constituted on the Soviet budget, both alike contributed the further unraveling of Soviet power, and the the dismantling first of all of the Warsaw Pact (November 1989), and then of the Soviet Union itself, in 1993.
Sic transit gloria mundi. I certainly wish a much better outcome than that for both the Iraqi and the US citizenries. As for the Bushites' project of extending and maintaining US hegemony over this vital portion of the world-- that should be ended as soon as possible.
I had a coffee today with an old friend of our family who is a Palestinian who was born and grew up in one of the great cities of the West Bank, graduating high school there in the early 1950s... That was shortly after the Jordanian King annexed the (previously Palestinian) West Bank to the East Bank land of (Trans-)Jordan that had been allocated to the Hashemites in the great post-WW1 carve up of the Arab-populated Near East.
In those post-annexation days, the official ideology was that "West Bankers" and "East Bankers" had all alike come together within the single happy family of "Jordan".
Our friend had some politically colorful years in his young manhood there. But by the mid-1960s he'd decided to throw his lot in with the monarchy... and he stuck to that position, through Jordan's "loss" of the West Bank to Israel in 1967 and even through the brief but lethal civil war that broke out in Jordan in September 1970, after King Hussein decided to expel the Palestinian guerrilla groups that were starting to sink some serious roots inside his kingdom. (Especially near the Jordan River.)
As he told me today, his judgment at the time was that "It would be far easier for us Palestinians to take our Palestinian state from Jordan than directly from Israel. So let Jordan get the land away from Israel and then we can discuss its future with Jordan." Not a crazy judgment-- but diametrically opposed to the tactics being pursued by Fateh and its allies at the time.
So he rose impressively high in the King's service. But as he told me today, "About 20 or more years ago, the King started blocking Palestinians systematically out from access to the kingdom's pathways of advancement." Jordan is a very state-centered country, one in which the main way in which young men can get jobs or technical training or access to edication is through either the army or one of the other branches of the state...
So at that point (and I should check with him again, exactly when he thinks that started happening), he said that these pathways started being blocked to the Palestnians-- who nowadays make up around 65% of the national population. "We have now had a complete social restratification here," he said.
Some of those Gulf Palestinians had money and resources-- but what they totally lacked was any concept of acting like a citizen-- in terms of participating in the work of professional unions, or lobbying for their rights, or joining any political organizations... All they had was the concept of being 'residents', that they had learned from being in the gulf. I can tell you-- I was there for a while, too. I know what it's like. Every year you're terrified that your residency rights will be revoked, and it just gnaws and gnaws at you, and you'll do anything to please the boss just so you can get your renewal.
And they brought that mentality here, to Jordan. Even though they have Jordanian nationality and can't be thrown out of here the way they were from the Gulf, they still think like that...
And the Palestinians here have a fear of losing more than what they've already lost. So that's why you don't see them protest more, why you don't see them doing any political organizing.
But on both sides, what the regime is able to play on, is a fear of loss...
One other thing I noted about our conversation. Completely gone from our friend's conversation was any use of the once-common terms "West Bankers and "East Bankers", to denote those two different subsets of the Jordanian citizenry. Now, it was all "Palestinians" and "Jordanians" that he talked about... Implying, of course, that the people here of West Bank origin aren't really considered to be "Jordanian" at all. Complex things going on...
Anyway, I didn't have too much time to ask him about the party-political status of the Palestinians here. He did say he thought Fateh was a completely spent force... but I wish I'd probed him more on what he thinks of Hamas's political organizing efforts here right now.
(I see that yesterday, a Jordanian government spokesman claimed that the security services recently intercepted a shipment of arms of explosives that, he claimed, Hamas was trying to smuggle into Jordan... and because of that, the kingdm has canceled a visit by Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar that was planned for today. This looks like a pathetic pretext-- used, presumably, to hide the fact of the regime's having caved in to US pressure on the matter, as Egypt also did, last Friday. The English-language
The Israeli government has decided it will try to take away from the four elected Hamas lawmakers who are residents of Jerusalem the ID cards that allow them to live in the city of their foreparents.
Political revocation of people's rights to reside in their ancestral cities... Does this not a strike a chord of memory with many Jews? Where might it end?
Israel claims the step is "in response to" the ghastly terror attack that on Monday killed nine people in downtown Tel Aviv. The Israeli government makes no claim that the four legislators are in any way criminally linked to the perpetrators of the terror attack, which was claimed by the Islamic Jihad organization. But Hamas had failed to denounce the attack, arguing that it constituted "legitimate self-defense."
I happen to strongly disagree with the Hamas leaders' argument on that score. But still, it seems to me that for the Israeli government to turn round and, in effect, expel these elected Hamas lawmakers from their home city simply because their party has failed to jump through a rhetorical hoop established by the Israeli government is a quite unjustifiable action... There are fears, too, that it could be the lip of a much larger-scale "slippery slope" of anti-Palestinian ethnic cleansing from Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Justice Minister has said he will appeal against the Israeli ruling to the International Court of Justice. I'm not sure whether (a) the PA has standing as a plaintiff at the ICJ, which only hears cases brought by established governments, and (b) whether this is the kind of case--involving, as it does, individuals, albeit lawmakers-- that the ICJ would hear anyway?
First, anyway, the threatened MPs will be appealing to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, I see from HaAretz that four Palestinian-Israeli Members of the Israeli Knesset went to visit three of the threatened Hamas lawmakers today, in a show of solidarity.
(Apologies to readers that the first version of this post was badly edited... It's hard to do all this on my modestly-sized laptop.... Now, it should be better. ~HC)
So the United Nations has its own university... Who knew? I gather from some comments made here on JWN earlier that some (or perhaps even many) among my readers did not...
Actually, that's not totally surprising, since UNU actually does most of its work in very technical fields, as you can see if you scroll down on this web-page to the list of UNU's research and training centers and programs. These centers and programs do some much-needed work in helping to build the capacity of (especially) low-income and medium-income nations in the various technical fields covered. But if you're interest is a more general one in global issues and global relations, you may well not have noticed their work.
So the symposium I was at yesterday was held to celebrate the opening of a new building for UNU's International Leadership Institute here in Amman, Jordan. It's a little hard to explain what the ILI does, especially since their website appears to be down right now... But I'm reading from a brochure here, that says, "Over the last five years, the Institute has hosted over 300 mid-career professionals from 93 different countries in local, reginal, and global leadership education and practical leadership programs... "
I should also confess I find the concept of "leadership", simpliciter, to be either fairly mystifying or fairly scary. (Fuehrerheit, anyone?) It is also, quite frequently, defined in a strongly male-gendered or otherwise elitist and exclusionary way. The best form of leadership, surely, should be leadership to do something-- that is, to reach a goal that is mutually agreed by all participants in the venture, that is clearly defined, and (obviously) constructive. It should also be a form of leadership that has transparency and accountability mechanisms built in... Anyway, there's my two cents' worth on the topic. (For now.)
So, the symposium yesterday was interesting. Hamid Zakri, the head of the Yokohama-based UNU Institute for Advanced Studies (in eco-restructuring, as it turns out) gave a talk on biodiplomacy. I learned more about the topic than I had ever known before, or indeed, than I had ever known existed... The Rector of the UNU, Hans van Ginkel, gave a talk about its history. The former Jordanian Prime Minister Abdel-Salam al-Majali-- who'd been a big force behind the establishment of the institute in Jordan-- gave a talk about his vision of leadership education. The UN "chief of Mission" in Amman, Christine McNab, gave a helpful talk about her view of leadership, likening it to being the conductor of an orchestra who encourages the individual players to do their own best interpretations of a symphonic piece while creating something even larger out of the sum of the parts of their efforts...
But the two presentatins I found most interesting were those by UNU Vice-Rector Ramesh Thakur, someone whose work I've long admired, and by Amin Seikal, of the Australian National University.
Amin, who grew up in Afghanistan, talked about democratization in Muslim Middle Eastern countries. His lecture came immediately before mine, so I didn't ake notes. But basically, he was pessimistic about seeing any rapid leaps toward democracy in the region; he noted the anomaly of the US pushing for democratic elections and then rejecting the results; and he concluded by saying that most Muslim ME countries still needed a lot of work in the development of civil society before we could expect much pgoress in democratization.
Ramesh's talk was about UN reform and its role in boosting peace and development. He said he would send me a written version of it sometime (which I'll post here). In the meantime, here are some of the main points from the notes I took:
-- He talked about the central role the UN plays in preventing war through nonviolent means... and also its role in developing the whole idea of the "Human Development Reports" that UNDP publishes annually, and that chart the progress (or regress) that nations make toward the optimization of human flourishing: "It was the UN that developed the idea of what to count, when you want to measure ‘development’ and also that stressed the need for the political independence and integrity of the statistics-gathering process.
-- He talked about a recent RAND organization study that compared US-led military operations and UN peacekeeping operations in various post-conflict episodes since the Congo crisis of 1961. The study showed showed that the UN operations had been far less costly and more successful than the US-led operations-- and this, despite the retrenchment of many western nationsfrom participating in UN forces. (Partly, because they were busy participating in the less effective US-led forces.)
-- He noted that the RAND study showed that whereas the US spending $4-5 billion per month in Iraq, the UN is meanwhile sustaining 17 different peacekeeping operations around the world at a total cost level of $4 billion per year. (He also noted that the RAND study said, "This is not to suggest that the United Nations could perform the U.S. mission in Iraq more cheaply, or perform it at all. It is to underline that there are 17 other places where the United States will probably not have to intervene because UN troops are doing so at a tiny fraction of the cost of U.S.-led operations.")
-- In this context, he differentiated between the concepts of power and authority, saying the US has the former but not the latter, while the UN has the latter but not the former. He added, "The US frequently acts likea world governor, but it pays little heed to outcomes at many levels." He also noted that while US officials speak about the "balance of power", their UN counterparts speak about the "community of power."
-- Regarding UN reform, he noted that he had helped develop the concept a "responsibility to protect", which was embedded in the December 2004 report of the UN UN Secretary-General's "High Level-Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.. The report had identified the three main threats to security being internal conflict, terrorism, and nuclear weapons…
-- He spoke a little about the NPT, and said the collapse oif last September's NPT conference on non-proliferation and disarmament had been described by the Secretary General as a “real disgrace”.
-- Regarding internal (civil) wars, he noted that more than 50% of countries that conclude peace agreements in civil wars relapse into renewed conflict within 5 yrs, citing the examples of Angola, Rwanda, Haiti, etc. And he talked about the importance of the UN's new Peacbuilding Commission, being established (or already established?) in line with a recommendation in the High-level Panel's report...
I had time to produce three quick Power Point slides... On one I put the first words of the Preamble of the UN Charter: "We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…" On another, I managed to put my favorite excerpt from the NPT: "Each of the Parties… undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to… nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament."
Anyway, I thought it went pretty well. I was a bit tired afterwards, what with jet-lag and everything...
Oh, look what I found here. I'd copied a whole longer chunk from the RAND study over from the online PDF version. The PDF version has some interesting graphics and some other text that's worth reading. But in case you don't want to bother with downloading it, I'll leave this text portion-- which is from pp. xxv-xxvi of the "Executive Summary"-- right here for you:
In addition to the horrendous human costs, war inflicts extraordinary economic costs on societies. On average, one study suggests, civil wars reduce prospective economic output by 2.2 percent per year for the duration of the conflict. However, once peace is restored, economic activity resumes and, in a number of cases, the economy grows. A study by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler looked at the cost and effectiveness of various policy options to reduce the incidence and duration of civil wars. It found that post-conflict military intervention is highly costeffective— in fact, the most cost-effective policy examined. Our study supports that conclusion. The UN success rate among missions studied—seven out of eight societies left peaceful, six out of eight left democratic—substantiates the view that nation-building can be an effective means of terminating conflicts, insuring against their reoccurrence, and promoting democracy. The sharp overall decline in deaths from armed conflict around the world over the past decade also points to the efficacy of nation-building. During the 1990s, deaths from armed conflict were averaging over 200,000 per year. Most were in Africa. In 2003, the last year for which figures exist, that number had come down to 27,000, a fivefold decrease in deaths from civil and international conflict. In fact, despite the daily dosage of horrific violence displayed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world has not become a more violent place within the past decade. Rather, the reverse is true. International peacekeeping and nation-building have contributed to this reduced death rate.
The cost of UN nation-building tends to look quite modest compared to the cost of larger and more demanding U.S.-led operations. At present the United States is spending some $4.5 billion per month to support its military operations in Iraq. This is more than the United Nations spends to run all 17 of its current peacekeeping missions for a year. This is not to suggest that the United Nations could perform the U.S. mission in Iraq more cheaply, or perform it at all. It is to underline that there are 17 other places where the United States will probably not have to intervene because UN troops are doing so at a tiny fraction of the cost of U.S.-led operations.
This morning I'm in Charles de Gaulle airport en route to Amman for the UN University event there. I should start working on the lecture I'm to give, eh?
Actually, one of the greqt things about this blog is that serves as warm-up exercises for my thinking... So when I have a big deadline due I can review things I've written here recently and bingo, up pops the topic and the way to qpproqch it;
Yesterday, JWN was down for q good part of the day. I'm really sorry about that... I don't know what hqppened. I fired off an email to the owner of the hosting service, qnd eventuqlly it cqme bqck up. I was sitting in Atlqntq qirport there composing those three posts offline.
Today, as you can see, I'm struggling with a French-lqnguqge keyboard here... Instead of starting off QWERTY it starts off AZERTY, and my brain and fingers find this hard to handle.
Au revoir and ila-l-liqa'.
The quest for a master plan for
counterterrorism originated in the
need to update or change pre-9/11 laws, presidential policy documents
and bureaucratic structures that treated international terrorism
directed at Americans primarily as a law enforcement problem, not as a
global struggle to be won on foreign battlefields with arms and ideas.
That review stretched over two years in one form or another and appeared to have been completed when NSPD 46 [that's National Security Presidential Directive] was formally adopted behind closed doors by the Bush national security team one week before the public release on March 16 of the administration's National Security Strategy. In fact, some crucial unresolved disagreements were simply passed over in the interests of a show of consensus on "a statement of aspirations," in the words of one participant.
The most
contentious issues -- particularly how far the Defense Department
should go in carrying out Bush's direct order to "disrupt and destroy"
jihadist terrorist networks, even if they operate in friendly or
neutral countries -- were left to be dealt with in annexes that are
being negotiated by the departments of State and Defense and the CIA...
The struggle for control was absent in the emergency days after 9/11, when Bush gave the "disrupt and destroy" order to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. That was followed by an "AQSL Ex. Ord." -- a directive that bin Laden and 10 other members of al-Qaeda's senior leadership be brought to justice by all necessary means, "dead or alive," as Bush said.
That was the seed from which grew a broader plan of attack against al-Qaeda's networks, other jihadist bands and the jihadist ideology that loosely unites them. But as the extremist Islamic movement metastasized through the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Rumsfeld is said to have pushed for a presidential directive that would contain clearer definitions and authority for the Pentagon to carry out its "kinetic" missions abroad.
"This war erases that old bright line between conventional warfare and diplomacy," one official told me. "It has moved soldiers and foreign policy experts alike up a ladder of escalation, from trying to bring in bin Laden dead or alive to today's mission of destroying the entire jihadist movement and its ideology. We can't use old thinking and win. We can't wait and win."
A State
Department official put it differently: "We have been through the
immediate responses we can make and are now in a moment of looking
around, of focusing on the long term. It is important to assign the
right roles and responsibilities to the government agencies that will
lead the war on terror."
I'll just pause here and note that Hoagie, who worked as a reporter
for some 20 or more years before he moved into the 'opinion' department
of the paper, provides no named sources for any of his quotes at
all. And since he was from the old school of "Daddy knows best"
journalism, he doesn't even see the need to give any resons for the
anonymity. (Current practice on the new spages of the NYT, for
example, is to write something like, "a source who agreed to speak only
on conditions of anonymity said... ")
Anyway, even though Hoagie's attribution to sources is
old-fashioned, and even though I have disagreed with just about all the
opinions he's
expressed, especially his flag-waving support for the invasion of
Iraq-- despite those things, it strilkes me he does know and talk to
some interesting people inside the administration... So it's good he
deigns to share some of what he learns with the WaPo's readers, anyway.
So anyway, getting right back to his story there:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated her department's concerns ... bluntly during a videoconference linking Bush's top aides in mid-January. Letting the Pentagon operate outside the U.S. ambassador's control to roll up extremist networks in foreign countries would make U.S. policy "almost exclusively kinetic" -- that is, warlike -- she argued, to Rumsfeld's discomfort, according to a briefing given to colleagues by one official involved in the meeting.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on April 4, Henry A. Crumpton, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, made an oblique public reference to the State Department's continuing desire to change relatively little. "Our best means of countering the multilayered terrorist threat is to engage coordinated networks of interagency Country Teams operating under the ambassador" in "an intimately connected whole-of-government approach. We are not there yet, but we have made progress," he noted.
They are not there yet, in large part because far-reaching proposals from the Pentagon to find and deal with Islamic extremists in a systematic way -- "so that we are not chasing rabbits," said one official -- have stirred opposition from the State Department and the CIA, which fear losing primacy abroad through the militarization of foreign policy and intelligence operations.
The New York Times lifted a corner of the veil surrounding the larger conceptual battles by reporting in March on State and CIA opposition to the Pentagon's use of Military Liaison Elements, small teams of Special Operations forces charged with finding and countering jihadist networks.['Countering'... Now there's another intriguing euphemism, don't you think? ~HC] They work with local security forces or on their own in countries where central authority is weak or nonexistent, such as Somalia.
"At this point, this would probably amount to maybe 60 guys in 20 countries," said one official. Added another, "It works in the field in most cases, but creates more hierarchal trouble than it should back here."
Hoagie finishes the piece by noting that, despite wobbling on the issue last year, Bush has now decided to "stand firm" with his designation of the struggle his administration is engaged in as a "Global War on Terrorism".Police fought back against Coptic Christians, who were encircled by a security cordon around the Saints Church ... after hurling stones and bottles from inside the police line. Fellow demonstrators tossed Molotov cocktails from the balconies of nearby buildings.
Police could be seen repeatedly beating a boy of about 12, who was among the crowd of Coptic young people who fled into the church, slamming the doors behind them, or dashed down narrow streets surrounding the church. Most of the protesters were between the ages of 12 and 25.
Later, a huge mob of what appeared to be Muslim protesters charged the police cordon from the other side.
Mustafa Mohammed Mustafa, a Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarian, said a 24-year-old Muslim died early Sunday of wounds from a beating by Christians during rioting Saturday...
Sirens blared as ambulances raced toward
the scene. Armored police
vehicles surrounded the church as tear gas fumes sent protesters
fleeing down narrow streets in the neighborhood.
It all sounds so ugly and so terrifying. Sectarian clashes
are., sadly, not at all a new thing in Egypt... But nearly every
time it happens the actions of the police seem to inflame tensions even
more. I think the police needs to have much better training in
crowd control.
But ithe political situation in the country also needs some much
broader attention, too. How can you have a police force that
treats people humanely and with dignity if the political system as a
whole is one that treats the average Egyptian like the downtrodden
subject of a Pharaoh?
Anyway, I was reassured to read at the end of that AP piece that,
Now, as in the mid-90's, any United
States bombing campaign would
simply begin a multi-move, escalatory process. Iran could respond three
ways. First, it could attack Persian Gulf oil facilities and tankers —
as it did in the mid-1980's — which could cause oil prices to spike
above $80 dollars a barrel. [Or,
much more ~HC]
Second and more likely, Iran could use its terrorist network to strike American targets around the world, including inside the United States. Iran has forces at its command that are far superior to anything Al Qaeda was ever able to field. The Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah has a global reach, and has served in the past as an instrument of Iran. We might hope that Hezbollah, now a political party, would decide that it has too much to lose by joining a war against the United States. But this would be a dangerous bet.
Third, Iran is in a position to make our situation in Iraq far more difficult than it already is. The Badr Brigade and other Shiite militias in Iraq could launch a more deadly campaign against British and American troops. There is every reason to believe that Iran has such a retaliatory shock wave planned and ready.
No matter how Iran responded, the question that would face American planners would be, "What's our next move?" How do we achieve so-called escalation dominance, the condition in which the other side fears responding because they know that the next round of American attacks would be too lethal for the regime to survive?
Bloodied by Iranian retaliation, President Bush would most likely authorize wider and more intensive bombing. Non-military Iranian government targets would probably be struck in a vain hope that the Iranian people would seize the opportunity to overthrow the government. More likely, the American war against Iran would guarantee the regime decades more of control.
Good judgment there, guys. You don't have to "love" the mullahs who rule in Teheran to reach this conclusion... You just need to have some basic grasp of the realities of regional and global power dynamics.President Bush came out swinging yesterday to offer what WaPo reporters called, "an unequivocal vote of confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld."
And to show just how seriously he considered this matter, he even took time out from his long weekend to issue a special statement denying claims that Rumsfeld completely ignored the professional advice he'd gotten from the generals in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at several stages since...
This brass-vs.-suits contest inside the Pentagon over the conduct of the Iraq war is not a new issue Check for example this JWN post from November 2003.
What is new is the willingness of small numbers of retired US flag officers to come out publicly not just to criticise Rumsfeld but also to issue a four-year-overdue call for his resignation. The IHT yesterday identified a fifth retired general who had done this.
But here's the thing. There are literally hundreds of serving flag officers in the four branches of the US military. (If someone has time to verifiably research the exact number that would be grand: just post the number and a link in the Comments here.) David Ignatious wrote in yesterday's WaPo that,
I think an answer needs to be built from a number of components... One of these is of course that we have a valuable and long-engrained system in the US of civilian control of the military.
That's grand, and it's a basic component of democracy. I am totally not calling for a military coup here!
But still, even within that system, there has to be a way for basic professional expertise to be made available to the (civilian) policymakers at all levels in a purely professional and unpoliticized way. Shinseki tried to do that, and was canned. He was then replaced as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the nation's top military officer) by two Rumsfeld yes-men in turn, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers and then Marines Gen. Peter Pace.
Rumsfeld, of course, is the person who makes the recommendation to the White House regarding who to nominate for that job. So he has made it crystal clear that he only wants a yes-man in the job.
There are other powerful ways in which the country's top officers are trained (or "incented") to be loyal yes-men, too. One of course is the whole tenor of basic military training, which is such as to inculcate and value the blind following of orders and the setting aside of personal considerations and analyses... (But then, regarding operational matters, the military wants to encourage innovative, out-of-the box thinking in mid-level officers... So there's quite a bit of a tension there.)
And then, there's the pay structure. And not just the structure of the pay and benefits for serving officers, which already and understandably incent people toward behavior that will ensure promotion, but also-- and this is crucial for top-rank people coming near the end of their careers-- the structure of the military pension scheme in which an officer, once retired, will then find himself for the rest of his (or her) life.
Expectations about pension levels have been mentioned by many reporters when discussing the very cautious behavior of the highest-ranking officers... So I thought I'd go over to the DOD's Final Pay Retirement Calculator to see what difference it would make for me, if I were a senior-level officer coming toward the end of my career in, say, 2010, having served for 30 years at that point... (I kept the default "expectations" regarding inflation rate etc that are given in the bottom half of that web-page.)
So I found out there that if I retired in 2010 as a Colonel (O-6), my monthly pension would be $7,609. Not shabby at all-- especially given the many other perks and benefits that military retirees get in this country, to say nothing of opportunities for lucrative consultancies, etc...
Ah, but if I'd been a loyal officer and got to retire at O-7 level (Brig.-Gen.) level in 2010, instead, then I'd make $8,664 per month. ($12,660 more per year.) But if I'd been even more "loyal"-- to my superiors, to the Secretary of Defense, etc-- I might be an O-8 (Maj.-Gen.) and pull in $9,767/month instead (a further increase of $13,236/yr.)... Or an O-9 (Lieut.-Gen.), and retire at $10,780/mth.... or an O-10 (full Gen.) and get $10,901/mth.
I have to tell you a few things here. Firstly, the incentive is certainly there for a serving high-rank officer "just to keep quiet for a couple of further years" as s/he heads toward retirement... and certainly to avoid doing anything dramatic that might force him/her to resign from the force at the existing rank, if need be, in order to protest the policy. And also, to do nothing that might jeopardize that vital next promotion, that could-- over the course of 35 more years of life after retirement-- add up to huge amounts of actual $$$.
Second, I find all these retirement levels (and all the pay levels for still-serving officers at the top end of the scale) quite obscenely high. The serving generals in this country live very nicely indeed, with all kinds of country clubs, subsidized housing and transportation, tax breaks, etc... They form a special class of pampered and very powerful individuals who nowadays roam the world trying to run programs and projects in scores of different countries... And when they retire, many of them find well-paid additional jobs inside our country's bloated military-industrial sector.
I, with my pathetic little income as a writer, have to subsidize all that? (FCNL tells us that 42 cents of every dollar I in taxes goes to the military now.) And the grunts out there in the field risking their lives in obedience to Bush's scary and destabilizing war plans are supporting the generals' lifestyle, too.
So the very least we should all expect from these guys, given how nicely we are all treating them, is that they should candidly give the country and its citizenry their best professional estimate of whether a proposed war-plan will work, or not.
Shinseki tried to do that, and got canned for it. But why have we not seen any other generals trying to "storm the ramparts of the SecDef's office" since then?
This is, of course, the kind of question that few in the US public discourse yet dare to ask... (As for me, I'd put it a little differently. I think that a failure of the Bush administration's project in Iraq could constitute a net victory for the US citizenry, in terms of starting to re-balance our relations with the rest of the world away from imperial hegemony and back towards basic human equality.)
But anyway, how interesting that Roni Bart, an analyst at Tel Aviv University's prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies should be the one now publishing a short analytical paper titled What if the United States fails in Iraq?
Bart judges that:
An evacuation-in-failure could take place due to a protracted political deadlock in Iraq, ongoing guerilla warfare and terror activities with no end in sight, or deterioration into a full scale civil war (perhaps resulting in an increase in American casualties). Such circumstances might force American decision-makers to realize that the mission cannot be achieved and/or that potential fallout, in terms of foreign policy or domestic politics, is too risky. Arguments along these lines are already being made not only by Democrats but also by various Republican groups...
Beyond the immediate Palestinian issue, any American attempt to forge some kind of regional response to a Shiite potential ascendancy and/or to a Sunni terror center will not include Israel. As the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War proved, Israel is perceived as a coalition breaker. Nevertheless, Israel will have to prepare itself for increased security threats, such as a Sunni terror center (with ties to Hamas?) and/or a Shiite-empowered Hizbollah in Lebanon. There may well be ground for covert cooperation with Jordan and Kurdistan against common threats.
The conventional threat posed to Israel by Iraq was removed in 1991; the nuclear one proved to be non-existing. An American failure in Iraq would transform the once ominous "eastern front" from a relatively minor threat to a new source of terror and instability.
As I wrote elsewhere recently-- never mind about the American pols, but I hope to heck the US military has started producing some sensible plans for a speedy and peaceable total evacuation of Iraq, under a number of different but increasingly possible scenarios...
Almost immediately after my column in today's CSM on nuclear-weapons issues went up onto their website, I received an interesting email from Rajat Talwar of Rolla, Missouri. The column dealt with the current US-Iran standoff in light of other moves the Bush administration has been making with regard to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the treaty that since 1968 has been the main pillar of the US's approach to preventing the global spread of nuclear weapons. The NPT came into force in 1970.
The kind of n/w proliferation the NPT deals with is also sometimes known as "horizontal" proliferation, i.e., proliferation to additional countries... as opposed to "vertical" proliferation, which is the proliferation of weapons/warheads within any single country's arsenal, a field in which the US has always-- clearly-- been "the leader".
Rajat Talwar made some important and serious arguments in his email, so with his permission I'm putting the whole text of our exchange to date up here so all the rest of you can join in a general discussion on the value of the NPT. (It looks as if the comments on yesterday's quick post about the column are mainly about the Iran dimension. That's good. These are two distinct and important discussions. Let's discuss the general value of the NPT here.)
I personally believe that the only language the NPT nuclear powers understand is the stick of nuclear terror - the same stick that they have used on "lesser" powers. A nuke in everyone's pocket brings respectful diplomacy.
Sincerely,
Rajat Talwar
Rolla, Mo
For a number of reasons I think supporting the NPT including especially its Article 6 (cited in the column) is the best way to go.
But we should continue this conversation! That's why I'd like to post your email on my blog...
Be well, friend--
Helena Cobban
I realize the dangers of nuclear weapons but I also realize that disarmament does not happen in a political vacuum. The NPT's Article 6 is a joke because it has no time limit and no mechanism for enforcement. Even the non nuclear states don't take that Article seriously. Australia and Canada, for instance, have nuclear dealings with weapon states without requiring the latter to begin disarmament. Under these conditions, to persevere to enforce the NPT will only result in the perpetation of the unjust requirements of the treaty - an enforceable one on non weapon states while the weapon states enjoy impunity.
I hate to say this but you need to look at your own writings, for example. Just last week, China signed a deal to buy massive quantities of Australian Uranium without IAEA safeguards or without declaring an end to its nuclear weapon production. Yet no nonproliferation advocate cared enough to point out that China is in violation of its Article 6 commitments by refusing to end weapon production, Yet, the India deal has caused a furor. Did you even know about the China deal? If so, where is the proof that your dedication to the NPT is just as strong when it comes to China?
Regards
RT
However, I am still quite shocked by your claim that "A nuke in everyone's pocket brings respectful diplomacy." Certainly I can see the prima facie egalitarian appeal of that argument... but it seems fraught with terrible, terrible potential for mundicidal mishap.
Can we agree that securing actual implementation of the goals mentioned in Article 6 is desirable and very necessary? If so, wouldn't you agree that starting and then finishing the mentioned negotiations for a complete and general disarmament would be more easily accomplished if the effort is based on an existing regime of some trust and global cooperation? Don't you think that the existing NPT regime could be seen as providing that basis?
Actually, maybe rather than getting into arguments about "a nuke in everyone's pocket" we should be brainstorming on how to get to the convening and the successful conclusion and implementation of the general disarmament goal. (The UN already has a lumbering old body called the Conference on Disarmament, as well as a Disarmament Commission... But neither seems to me to have any clear orientation toward implementing the goal of the NPT's Article 6. Equally importantly, world public opinion is not very attuned to this whole issue... Maybe that's what we need to try to change first!)
Of course, India and the other non-NPT states need to be folded into the general-disarmement effort from the very beginning. But why should we put up with wrecking the significant global cooperation we already have in the NPT regime, as we proceed? I think that's an unacceptable and very reckless prospect.
One of the problems with the NPT, and with the entire global system as currently constituted (with the five NPT-recognized nuclear 'have' states gaining thereby veto power in the security Council) is that it incents every else to try to get nuclear weapons. In my view, we should be doing everything we can in our dealings around the world to reduce the value of weapons-- all weapons-- and of militarism in general, and to re-stress the value of cooperation as the best (and in the end, the only) way to support human flourishing and indeed to assure human survival....
Anyway, let the discussion continue...
The column I wrote yesterday about the Iranian nuclear program, western concerns about that, and the urgent need to preserve the NPT is now up on the Christian Science Monitor website. It's actually going to be in Thursday's paper.
It's titled Work through the NPT to address concerns about Iranian nukes.
In there, I also point out that the Bush administration is currently attempting to drive a ten-ton truck through the NPT by urging Congress to change the US's own anti-proliferation legislation in order to allow ratification of his recent proposed nuclear deal with India.
I already had one very interesting letter in response, from someone who argued that all nations should indeed be allowed to have nuclear-weapons programs...
But I'm really glad the looming presence of the Indian-nuke deal will force folks in the US to seriously engage with whether we want to keep (and strengthen) the NPT or not.
I say, "Yes!"
Anyway, go read the column, and you can post your (as always, courteous) comments on it here.
I see from the handy "Democracy denied in Iraqi" counter here that 118 days have now passed since the much-vaunted Iraqi parliamentary election of December 15.
It has become clearer and clearer to me over recent weeks that the major cause of the political impasse that has brought so much uncertainty and violence to the country since then has been the anti-democratic meddling of the machinators of the US occupation force and some of their close political allies within the Iraqi political system. (See e.g., here, here, and here... )
Today, there is news that the acting Speaker of the Parliament, the very venerable Adnan Pachachi, has said he, "will convene the legislature next week to push the formation of a new government that is stalled over who will be prime minister." Pachachi added, according to that AP report, that "Shiite politicians told him they hope to have the deadlock over the nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari resolved before the session".
I certainly wish Pachachi well in his efforts. But we need to understand that the big, multi-party Shiite electoral list, the UIA, has thus far stuck firm with its original decision to nominate the current interim PM, Ibrahim Jaafari, to form the new government. That despite huge efforts by President Bush and others to try to scuttle his nomination
Regular JWN readers will know that I've been following intra-UIA political developments here for some time-- and in a way markedly different from that pursued by most people in the MSM.
Recently, Reidar Visser wrote to me to add some of his own, impressively detailed analysis to what I'd written earlier. He wrote:
It is now rumoured that the Fadila Party have been quite prominent in the wheeling and dealing over government posts (and that they have even toyed with the idea of presenting their own leader, Nadim al-Jabiri, as a compromise PM candidate). If they are this thirsty for office they may well be particularly susceptible to the sort of arm twisting that no doubt is taking place these days. Thus, the Fadila element is probably not an overwhelming anti-Abd al-Mahdi force at the moment, and might conceivably at one point even follow Qasim Dawud's example. (On the other hand, I have not yet seen any credible reports of the Muqtada supporters and the two Daawa factions reneging on their support for Jaafari. Also I should think that the spiritual leader of Fadila, Muhammad al-Yaqubi, the favourite of Muqtada's late father, will dislike an ideological sell-out for the sake of positions of power.)
A great Amira Hass piece on April 12 reminds us of some of the realities of the stifling and anti-humane interaction between Israelis and Palestinians inside the West Bank.
Remembering of course that things are now noticeably different from the way they are in Gaza. In the West Bank, the Israeli military and "Border Police" people are still intimately entwined with the lives and movements of the Palestinians-- even in the areas in the north from which four (or was it six?) "Illegal outposts" were removed. Whereas in Gaza, there is no ground presence of either Israeli troops or Israeli settlers. But that has given the IOF much greater latitude to treat the whole Strip as a free-fire zone, if they choose.
So the nature of the interactions in the two territories have now become different...
Hass's piece is titled The uber-wardens, and it details many of the forest of restrictions placed on the West Bank's 2.4 million Palestinians as they try to pursue the errands and chores of everyday life.
We actually did a lot in Chapters 2-4 of our 2004 Quaker book on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, to describe these restrictions, and the role that their always unpredictable and often capricious nature plays in making the pursuit of an "ordinary life", including the simple ability to plan one's activities for the days or hours ahead, impossible for Palestinians.
Hass concludes by writing about the Israeli military-government bureaucrats who design the many prohibitions places on the Palestinian residents of the West Bank that,
I can't finish this string of posts without urging you to go read Laila el-Haddad's extremely moving description of how life feels in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. And then, from today, she had this description of the famioly of the 9-year-old girl killed yesterday, Hadil Ghabin, dealing with their shock (and with the grievous wounding of several other kids from the family, including 10-year-old Ahmed Ghabin who was blinded in the attack.)
Just so we can see some figures on what's been happening, AP reporter Amy Teibel wrote today from Jerusalem:
So which side do we think has been acting in a more esclataory way? The one that in this period launched sixteen airstrikes and 2,200 artillery rounds and killed 17 people-- or the one that launched an estimated 32 [very primitive] rockets and inflicted zero casualties?
Teibel actually tells us that,
In a major policy shift, it has begun allowing guns to fire close enough to hit populated areas. That change claimed the life of Hadil Ghaben, 8, on Monday, after two shells blew huge holes in a concrete block house in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip. The girl's mother and seven siblings were hurt in the attack.
Wishing a blessed Pesach to all of JWN's Jewish readers. And special greetings to the wonderful group of young Jewish men and women in Boston who held this seder outside the AIPAC office there today, under the banner, "Passover Means Liberation For All".
One participant reported,
Here is Faiza's description of last month's Iraqi-US gathering organized by the Global Peace Initiative of Women-- that same meeting that I described here and here.
... And talking of "leaked Zarqawi letters", here's an interesting story from Sunday's edition of my old rag the London Sunday Times, talking about the anger of "Israeli military intelligence officials" that people in the Bush administration have publicized a supposed letter to Zarqawi from Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri that the Israelis had given the Americans back in October, on conditions of strictsecrecy...
The reason the Israeli intel people are upset, according to this piece which is bylined Uzi Mahnaimi, is that they fear that publication of the letter will, "undermin[e] their attempts to infiltrate Al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq".
Mahnaimi writes:
Thomas Ricks had an interesting piece in yesterday's WaPo, reporting on some leaks he'd gotten from U.S. Army officers about some PSYOPS (disinformation/ black propagnda) operations that they'd done back in 2004 to try to blacken the name of the possibly mythical Al-Qaeda figure, Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi.
Among the things that at least one officer reported having done, according to the first of these two Power Point stills that someone gave to Ricks, was to make a "Selective leak to [the NYT's] Dexter Filkins" about Zarqawi, back in February '04.
Ricks writes,
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.
He wrote there that he'd been shown the Arabic letter in question and an English translation made by the US military, and was allowed to copy down large chunks of the English translation. No indication that he could read the Arabic, or that he was allowed to take his own Arabic translator in there with him...
The gist of the "Zarqawi letter" that Filkins described was-- in effect-- that Zarqawi was planning to foment a sectarian war. (Gosh, that makes Mr. Z. look rather bad, don't you think?)
And this-- for an administration that was struggling hard to persuade people of the connection between their war in Iraq and the broader "war on terrorism":
Filkins did retain enough of his reportorial indpendence to write that, in addition to the claims made by his US military contacts that the letter was an "authentic" communication from Zarqawi, "other interpretations may be possible, including that it was written by some other insurgent, but one who exaggerated his involvement."
He notably didn't mention the possibility that the whole thing may have been a piece of black propaganda (PSYOPS) perpetrated on him and his unsuspecting readers by the US military.
Oh, but he did try to authenticate the letter in one way. His Washington colleague Douglas Jehl evidently contacted, "a senior United States intelligence official in Washington."
This person, Filkins wrote,
In Ricks's piece yesterday, he wrote,
Greg Mitchell over at Editor & Publisher has dug up some more info about the fallout from the Filkins piece. Writing yesterday, he noted:
William Safire, in his Feb. 11, 2004, column for the Times titled “Found: A Smoking Gun,” declared that the letter “demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a '’clear link’ between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.” Safire mocked the Washington Post for burying the story on page 17, while hailing a Reuters account quoting an “amazed” U.S. officials saying, “We couldn’t make this up if we tried.”
Three days later, another Times columnist, David Brooks, covered the letter as fact under the heading “The Zarqawi Rules.” The letter was covered in this manner by other media for weeks. So clearly, the leak to Filkins worked.
A Web search of New York Times articles in the two months after the scoop failed to turn up any articles casting serious doubts on the letter. Two leading writers for Newsweek on its Web site quickly had a different view, however.
Christopher Dickey, the Middle East regional editor, on February 13, 2004, asked: “Given the Bush administration’s record peddling bad intelligence and worse innuendo, you’ve got to wonder if this letter is a total fake. How do we know the text is genuine? How was it obtained? By whom? And when? And how do we know it’s from Zarqawi? We don’t. We’re expected to take the administration’s word for it.”
Rod Nordland, the magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief, on March 6 wrote: “The letter so neatly and comprehensively lays out a blueprint for fomenting strife with the Shia, and later the Kurds, that it's a little hard to believe in it unreservedly. It came originally from Kurdish sources who have a long history of disinformation and dissimulation. It was an electronic document on a CD-ROM, so there's no way to authenticate signature or handwriting, aside from the testimony of those captured with it, about which the authorities have not released much information.”
Ricks... quoted one internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, which revealed that Kimmitt [Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004] had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
M.J. Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis at the extremely centrist American pro-Israeli organization Israel Policy Forum (IPF). And he has a beef with the extremely hardline American pro-Israeli activist Daniel Pipes.
In a very moving column Rosenberg wrote last Friday, he started off by talking a little about his extended family of Holocaust survivors, including his kids, their American cousins, and their Israeli cousins:
The ancestors they have in common would have a hard time recognizing their descendants. The Americans are very….American. Life is all about jobs, sports, hip-hop music, internships, iPods, etc.
The Israelis, from a 1939 Polish Jewish point of view, are just as improbable. They live in a country that last existed as a Jewish state 1900 years previous. They speak Hebrew. And they are also very religious (none of the Americans are) with their lives revolving around youth groups, studying in yeshivot, the army, etc.
When we are together, there are always discussions about politics. The Israeli cousins demonstrated against the Gaza withdrawal and are on the Right. That certainly is not the case with the Americans.
But the political discussions do not descend into arguments. Even though we are family and even though the Americans have strong feelings on Israeli politics, the Americans are not going to tell the Israelis what they should think. The Israelis live there and the boys go into the army. There is a real hesitancy about telling them what they should or shouldn't do with their lives.
Everyone is aware of what is and isn't appropriate for American Jews to be telling their Israeli counterparts...
He believes, and has repeatedly written, that Israel should abandon the idea of compromise of any sort with the Palestinians and should instead defeat them the way the allies defeated the Nazis i.e. make them surrender and have the victor dictate the terms of the peace.
In general, Pipes' view of the situation indicates a fairly unsophisticated grasp of Israel's situation. He seems not to know that the Palestinians are not a regime, which can be eradicated, but rather a people with whom Israel is destined to share the land forever. (They also represent close to half the population of historic Palestine and, before the refugees fled, represented a majority of it).
In his New York Sun column, Pipes excoriated all of Israel's leading political parties for seeking ways to achieve coexistence with the Palestinians rather than "offer[ing] the option of winning the war against the Palestinian Arabs."
He calls this omission a "striking and dangerous lacuna." (I didn't know what lacuna meant until I looked it up. It is "an empty space or a missing part.") In other words, missing from Israeli politics is a determination to fight the Palestinians to the death.
Brave words from Philadelphia.
Pipes then itemizes all the bad ideas Israelis have come up with as alternatives to war. These include the security barrier, disengagement, promoting Palestinian economic development, territorial compromise, promoting democracy and bilateral negotiations.
He even rejects the noxious idea of “transfer,” the Kahanist plan to deport Palestinians across the border, as an attempt to “manage the conflict without resolving it.” How chilling is that? If Pipes considers the insane idea of “transfer” too moderate, what precisely would be acceptable to him?
For a start, he believes Israel needs another war. Anything else is a waste of time. Only another war will do the job although seven previous wars – 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and the first and second intifadas –somehow did not. But Pipes believes that the next one will – if it is pursued to unambiguous victory.
Needless to say, Israelis, who heard about Pipes' call to arms, were angered.
Bradley Burston, a Ha'aretz columnist, calls Pipes a "new kind of Israel basher." And, he adds, Pipes is far from alone in his physical bravery by proxy.
"In fact,” Burston writes, “a number of our readers who live in North America, some of whom regularly use the word coward to describe Israeli moderates, have any number of suggestions for us as well, up to and including the use of weapons of mass destruction on Palestinians, apparently in an effort to change their minds about us.
"Daniel Pipes…is an equal-opportunity hater of Israelis. None of us is good enough for him. We lack the will to fight….Try as we might, we just can't seem to win his war for him."
"His war."
Pipes, like so many others on the Right, does not support endless war for Israel out of a love for the Jewish homeland gone terribly wrong. They support war because they are simply tough guys from afar. They walk taller when some Israeli 19-year old dons his uniform. As Burston puts it, Israelis are their "mercenaries." Or, at least, that is what these guys want them to be.
I have read many columns by Pipes and the other well-known columnist/hawks and I cannot recall any in which their ardor for Zion is expressed in a positive way. They don't extol the beauty of Jerusalem or the live-and-let-live Mediterranean style of Tel Aviv. Israel, as depicted by them, is neither beautiful, nor spiritual nor cultural. It is just some would-be Sparta, clad in uniform, always ready for the next fight. In fact, their negative feelings toward Palestinians far outweigh any positive sentiments toward Israel.
"A new kind of Israel basher." That is exactly right.
So that's even better in a way. If even people associated with a very middle-of-the road Jewish-American pro-Israel organization are expressing such strong public criticisms of Danny Pipes, that's good news indeed.
Yesterday, in major cities throughout the US, there were massive demonstrations by recent immigrants to the country-- documented and undocumented-- and by their allies, to protest a new set of anti-immigrant laws passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The vast majority of those who participated in the demonstrations were what is known here as "Hispanics"-- that is, people coming from places where Spanish is a common lingua franca, though actually for many of these people an indigenous (pre-Columbian) language may well have been their mother tongue. (Check, for example, this language map.)
Veteran WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, an African-American, wrote today:
The most important legacy of the histrionic debate over immigration reform will not be any piece of legislation, whether enlightened or medieval. It will be the big demonstrations held in cities throughout the country over the past few weeks -- mass protests staged by and for a minority whose political ambition is finally catching up with its burgeoning size. In the metaphorical sense, Latinos have arrived.
It is not only the size and nationwide reach of yesterday's mobilization that indicates to me that this mainly-Hispanic movement is one of seriousness and resilience. There was also the impressive discipline and focus that the participants showed in expressing themselves, this time, as determinedly pro-US.
Last week there were some precursor demonstrations that caused concern among quite a lot of "Anglos" here because many participants were carrying the flags of their nations of origin-- a sea of Mexican, Salvadoran flags and flags from other central-American nations.
But yesterday, at all the demonstrations I saw, the overwhelmingly main motif was the US flag-- hoisted high, rendered on bandana, painted on people's faces: everywhere, the Stars and Strips. And the theme was quite focused: a desire to be included. (Sort of the same effect as when participants in the large Hizbullah demonstrations in Lebanon in March 2005 all carried the national flag rather than Hizbullah's own yellow party banners. The same political smarts, focus, and mass discipline.)
This country of some 292 million people now has an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working here-- the vast majority of them people from Mexico and the seven small countries of Central America. And they are not just in the borderlands: throughout the whole country they do the hard work on the construction sites, in the restaurants, in agriculture and a number of other fields in which US employers are just too downright stingy to offer anything like a decent wage that most US citizens would accept.
All US citizens benefit from the lower prices that the presence of the immigrants allows us-- though their presence also keeps wages depressed in numerous occupations...
The US-Mexico border is too long, and the wage differential between north and south of it too great for anyone to imagine ever being able to stop the flow of undocumented workers across it altogether... Plus, we're supposed to have a "Free Trade Agreement" with Mexico (and Canada), though that hasn't succeeded in providing very much of the promised stimulation to Mexico's economy.
So here's my proposal. Why don't we just forget about continually trying to upgrade the fortifications along the US-Mexico border, and start discussing a vision of a Union of North and Central America that would work more or less like the EU? Including, crucially, with complete freedom of movement of people, goods, and investment from the Arctic North of Canada right down to Panama's south-eastern border?
(For starters, that border-- with Colombia-- would be a lot easier to police effectively than the US's sprawling border with Mexico.)
The population balance would look like this (2003 figures):
It could be an exciting and very constructive mix! As in the EU, members of all the different groups would need to continue to figure out what their ethnic and cultural identity means to them, and how to preserve and celebrate it. The richer societies of the north should do a lot to invest in helping to build up the conditions of life for the people in the (still reeling-from-conflict) communities of Central America. Indeed, maybe the Central Americans should get together and start demanding reaparations from the US for all the terrible damages the US-inspired wars inflicted on them during the Cold War.
And we in North America would certainly find our society and politics enriched by the energies (including the political organizing energies) of our hermanas and hermanos from the south...
Equally importantly, pursuing this kind of a goal of building up the conditions of life in Central America (and Mexico) could provide a wonderful "purpose" for the US citizenry at the time that it becomes clear that seeking our national "purpose" through the pursuit of military adventures in various places is counter-productive and self-defeating...
One last point. I'm an immigrant in this country. I came here because I married a U.S. citizen, someone born to citizens of (mainly) ethnic-German and Swiss heritage. All of us here except for the "Native Americans" are in one sense deeply illegal immigrants... in that our entry into the country was always arranged and protected through the agency of a clearly colonial venture. Meanwhile, it is clear that the vast majority of the "Hispanic" immigrants here are people of mainly indigenous origins-- "brown" Americans, in Eugene Robinson's words...but definitely, people whose ancestors have been on this continent for a lot longer than any whitefolks have. So in one way, it looks like pure whitefolk arrogance if the English-speaking peoples here are now busy trying to keep them out.
... Well, this is just a suggestion. I'm sure there are plenty of people in Mexico and Central America who would be wary of too close an integration with Gringo-land. But it's definitely a conversation we all ought to be starting to hold. (And it's probably a whole lot easier of a conversation to hold than the similar conversation the European nations ought to be having right now with their North African neighbors.... )
Jim Lobe of Inter Press Services did a phone interview with me Friday, about Iraq, and got this story on the topic up onto the wires on Saturday. It quotes me fairly extensively.
In the phone interview, as in the resulting article, Lobe noted that in many respects my analysis on current developments in Iraq is the same as that of conservative commentator (and Wall Street Journal columnist) Reuel Marc Gerecht. So be it. I call things as I see them, on the basis that if we don't understand the world how on earth can we hope to change it?
Jim said he'd send me the URL for the piece when it came out. I guess my spam filter ate it? Oh well, I'm glad I caught it over there at Antiwar.com.
Today in Iraq, three years after the US-engineered toppling of the Saddam statue in Firdaws Square, the leaders of the factions in the biggest electoral list, the UIA, all met to affirm their "freedom" to nominate whomsoever they-- rather than the Americans-- choose to be their nominee for the PM post.
Against the strong pressure that the Americans have been exerting on them for the past two months, they decided to stick with their existing nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari.
Today, near Firdaws Square, Mohammed Ahmed, a money changer whose shop overlooks the impressionistic statue representing "freedom" that was erected in place of the Saddam statue, said, "It has no meaning because there is no freedom."
AP's Bushra Juhi reported that Umm Wadhah, a 51-year-old housewife in black robes who lives nearby, said of the statue."It does not stand for anything,...It does not symbolize the country, or unity, or anything. We want something that stands for us ... all of us."
Yesterday in Cairo, the increasingly autocratic and out-of-touch Egyptian President, a long-time US friend and ally, told al-Arabiyah TV that,
Many signs of a desire for national unity still exist inside Iraq, regardless of what some of the Arab world's unelected leaders, and some machinators and pundits elsewhere, might say...
So, to help mark the third aniversary of the fall of Baghdad to the invasion force, I thought I would just look back at what I was writing on JWN at the time...
I recall I was in Arusha, Tanzania when it happened. I watched the toppling of the statue being endlessly replayed on CNN, on the t.v. in my hotel room there. On April 12, once the scale of the post-fall looting in Iraq had become more evident, I posted this post on JWN. Looking back, I think it wasn't bad for something written from so far away, and with such little access to good sources of information.
I wrote:
(1) The legacy of 30-plus years of Baathist authoritarianism, that resulted in the total repression of Iraqi civil society and a serious, longterm degradation of public and even personal morals throughout the country. In a place where children are routinely encouraged by the regime to spy on and report on any suspect political tendencies amongst their teachers, parents, and neighbors-- and this has been the case there for nearly two generations now-- basic social trust, and the ability to sustain it, are the real casualties; and
(2) Bombs Away Don Rumsfeld's brilliant "strategy" of moving extremely fast to take out the power-center of the regime, with little thought given to how to consolidate public safety in the rear of the advancing forces.
Based on my experience of having lived in Lebanon during the first six years of the civil war there, I would say that whoever inside Iraq can manage to sustain the kinds of effective social organizations that are capable of providing public order there will de-facto end up in control of those areas where they are able to do this. People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form--whatever form it may be!-- of public order.
The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so. ("Eeeegh! Nation-building! Not for us!") And the Americans' non-reponsiveness to the urgent and urgently-expressed need of Iraqis for public order will certainly not go un-noticed. And that includes Bombs-Away Don's public attitude of condoning--almost celebrating!--the looters at their work.
In the north-- and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense-- the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order. But if they do so, we cannot tell yet what the reaction of the Turks and other neighboring powers will be. And it's not even certain that inter-Kurdish rivalries may not break out again. The same rivalries that crippled the Kurdish areas 1991-96... So, still some big uncertainties there.
In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.
We in the global anti-war movement need, I think, to keep our focus clear. We can quickly rejoice that Saddam is no longer in power. But in a real sense, now, Saddam is not the issue. (I can even unite with Bombs-Away Don on that.) The issue is the wellbeing of and longterm prospects for Iraq's 24 million people. How on earth can they be saved from falling into chronic, extremely atrocious and destabilizing, Lebanon-like disorder??
It is clear to me that the further use of aggressive violence is not going to bring this about. As we have already seen, the massive violence applied to Iraq by the US-UK forces has already brought forth torrents of follow-on violence from within that deeply-scarred society. Our emphasis has to be on continuing to urge everyone involved to use the many nonviolent means that remain in order to resolve the remaining issues of serious disagreement.
Thank God we still have the UN! For all its flaws, and for all the battering it took at the hands of US arrogance last month, it is still there as an institution that we or any of the parties involved inside Iraq can call on to help to negotiate an exit out of the present, extremely anti-humane state of chaos inside Iraq.
People living, like Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld, in tidy, secure western countries where by and large the maintenance of public order is not even an issue really do not, in my humble opinion, understand how central that one, socially-generated "commodity" is to the wellbeing of actual humans.
Can the presence of the US forces inside Iraq contribute to the provision of public order? Certainly, it is their responsibility to do so, under the 4th Geneva Convention. (And the fact that, in their "race" toward Baghdad, they apparently failed to make any effective plans at all to secure public order in the areas behind their lines could possibly even be described as a "grave breach" of Geneva-4; that is, a war crime.)
By the same token, if they cannot provide public order then they should just get out of the country, rather than staying, possibly compounding the problem of insecurity by their presence, and by their continuing presence preventing anyone else from doing the job.
Can we see a democratic, tolerant, and self-governing Iraq emerge from all this? No, this goal still, sadly, sadly, seems far away. I guess we need to continue to hope, pray, and work hard for it to come about.
But the central message remains: Violence still cannot solve problems successfully, in Iraq or anywhere else.
So much mayhem has occurred during those years. So much suffering. And the suffering and the US's use of arrogant, colonialist political machinations still continue.
But honestly, as I wrote here last Friday, I do think that the end of the US occupation is now (however faintly) in sight.
Two additional, key indicators in this regard are two recent development in the US Congress, which I need to write more about here. From the Friends Committee on National Legislation I have now learned that on March 16, the House of Representatives, our lower house,
Now, all we need is for the full Senate to adopt that declaration...
What we are seeing, folks, are the two houses of the US Congress starting-- however creakily-- to exert their budget-making powers in important ways to curtail the administration's behavior in Iraq.
(If you're a US citizen, go to FCNL's Iraq Peace Campaign website as fast as you can to see what you can do to help.)
Sy Hersh has a piece in the latest New Yorker, which says that
As Hersh writes, the previous context in which US military planners considered the use of bunker-busting TNWs was against the massive underground complex the Soviets were building outside Moscow during the Cold War. He quotes a retired intel official familiar with that earlier project as arguing that non-nuclear weapons could perhaps perform the task-- if the US planners have enough reliable info about the target. But in Iran, they don't. Hersh continues:
He quotes that same retired intel official as saying,
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”
The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.
(1) Ever since I first arrived in Washington DC in 1982, there have been ardently pro-Israel lobbyists and alleged "experts" arguing that Iran (and also, in those days, Iraq) was "two to five years" away from having nuclear weapons. I even served for a few years there in the 1980s as a member of a body called the "Washington Council on Nuclear Non-proliferation."
Well, "two to five years" was the typical time-period mentioned in those days, and over the years since then.... And now, amazingly, it's still about the same...
In the interim, 24 years have passed, and Iran has neither acquired nuclear weapons nor verifiedly pursued a nuclear weapons program. What the heck are we supposed to conclude from that?
(2) Hersh has an interesting vignette about the consternation the administration's policies have caused for officials of the IAEA, which is the international body charged with overseeing implementation of the NPT:
In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”
(4) The following quote from the Hersh piece seems particularly revealing. Writing about the fears of many western leaders about whether Iran's nuclear program has a military component or is an all-civilian venture, as the Iranians claim, he quotes one high-ranking diplomat in Vienna as saying:
Friends, everyone has now seen three years-worth of the way that the Iraqi people have responded the Bushites' demonstration of military "shock and awe" against their country... And it has led to the exact opposite of the US having any ability whatsoever to "control" the hearts and minds of Iraq's people.
Why on earth would anyone even start to fantasize that this project might "succeed" in Iran?
(5) I still, even after reading Sy's piece, remain a war-on-Iran skeptic. That is to say that I still can't believe that-- most especially after the experience the world has been through over the past three years-- there is anyone in the world including in the upper reaches of the Bush administration who would be crazy enough to actually launch a military attack against Iran.
It is evident, however, that there are a lot of people in and around the Bush administration who have been busy talking up the possibility. Sy Hersh has only talked to a few of them. But there are a lot of them out there!
For some of them, the intent is most likely to try to build up diplomatic-political pressure on Iran, to try to force Iran to dismantlle its recently resumed uranium enrichment activities. (Or, to meet other goals of the Bush administration, in other spheres.)
But the trouble is that this kind of completely irresonsible, belligerent, and escalatory talk can itself have many dangerous effects. It might spur Iran into taking risky moves on the grounds of "preemption" or even that old Bush administration standby "prevention" of the US attack.
Or, it might actually start to lock the Bush administration even more thoroughly into actual pursuit of the military optiopn, since at a certain point the Prez might find himeself tied into a corner by the rhetoric of his own officials.
Plus, such talk generally raises tensions on a regionwide and global basis....
Enough! Stop the war talk! Stop the preparations for war! This is pure madness!
Whenever you hear people say something like they have, "little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons" you should take a deep breath and say, "That is madness."
Of course there are choices other than the choice of escalatory and inhumane violence... There always are...
(6) I still have some unanswered questions about the extent and goals of the Iranian nuclear program. I'm sure a lot of people do. I don't think that Amb. Javad Zarif answered them all in his recent op-ed on the topic in the NYT. But luckily, a team of IAEA inspectors have just arrived in Teheran to start one of their scheduled inspections there. And IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei will going there sometime next week for high-level talks.
That, surely, is the way to have the world's questions answered. Meanwhile, I think we should take all the nonviolent actions we can possibly think of to halt in their tracks the activities of all the war-mongering Americans identified so clearly in Hersh's article. Truly, those people must have warped, distorted, and deeply hurting spirits.
I'd like to express my big thanks to Neal Kozodoy, a distinguished colleague in the journalism profession-- indeed, he's the longtime editor of Commentary magazine, a key mouthpiece for the whole US neoconservative movement.... Now, it seems that Neal has been contributing considerable amounts of his intellectual property, gratis, to Just World News over the past two and a half weeks.
I am even considering preparing a little paper version of some of our exchanges here, which I can sell and send the profits to, say, the Atfaluna project in Gaza, one of my longtime favorites. (If any JWN readers want to help with this publication, let me know.)
Thank you so much for your contributions, Neal.
I guess I still have a lingering question or two. Does your Board of Trustees over there at the American Jewish Committee, which publishes your mag, realize how much time you've been spending-- during what appears to me to have been your workdays-- in composing sometimes lengthy contributions to JWN? (87 of them within the single 17-day period from March 21 through yesterday, indeed.)
Also, why did you suddenly stop contributing yesterday afternoon? Intriguingly, that seemed to happen right after I'd mentioned the possibility-- in this discussion-- that our frequent commenter "Neal" might indeed be Commentary's Neal Kozodoy. Were you shy?
So anyway, Neal, come on back! But don't be shy next time. Use your full name.
So his true identity is still shrouded in mystery. That's a pity. The discussion here is much richer, more authentic, and more constructive when commenters give us some indication of the life experience and expertise they bring to their contributions. Neal writes, "there are a few topics about which I know a great deal. One of those things is the treatment of non-Muslims in the Muslim regions. The other is Islamic theology. And I know a fair amount about the history of the Muslim regions." But we have no means of testing these claims to expertise if we don't know who he is.
Yesterday I wrote a post over at Transitional Justice Forum that looked at one of the high-order issues I've been examining in my project on post-violence policies in Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique.
The post is titled Meta-tasks for societies exiting from mass violence. I also briefly introduce there the idea that the interests of peacemaking and peacebuilding need to be considered in/by such societies, along with the interests of "truth" and "justice" that seem to absorb so many participants in the west-based human rights movements.
If these are topics that interest you, head on over and read the post, and do please consider contributing to the Comments-board discussion there.
Also, if you have friends or colleagues who find these topics interesting, send them the link, too. (I hope, anyway, that you're telling everyone you know to read JWN... But the readership and definitely the participation in the Comments boards over at TJF could both use a boost... )
1. US opinion has been swinging consistently against the war this year. And this is not simply the evidence from my expreiences on the street corner. If you look at the AP/Ipsos opinion-poll figures here , you'll see that the the public's judgments on the Bushites' handling of the Iraq issue run as follows:
|
Disapprove (%)
|
Approve (%)
|
|
| Early Jan '06 |
58
|
39
|
| Early Feb '06 |
60
|
38
|
| Early Mar '06 |
58
|
39
|
| Early Apr '06 |
63
|
35
|
Compare those figures with, for example, the early-January of 2005 figures of 54 percent disapprove/ 44 percent approve....Anyway, based on the above confluence of what has been happening politically inside Iraq with what has been happening politically inside the US-- that is why I now think it's possible to conclude that the end of the US troop presence in Iraq may well be nigh. Okay, that there is now, say, a 60% chance that all US troops will be out of Iraq by this time next year.
2. Throughout 2004 and 2005, the US public was continuously being promised that there were political 'watershed events' ahead in Iraq that would make the US invasion and occupation of the country all look (relatively) worthwhile. Those events included the "handover of sovereignty" (!) in 2004; the holding of the January '05 election; the August '05 "completion" of the Iraqi constitution; the Iraq-wide referendum on the same; and then the holding of the "definitive" election for a "permanent" Iraqi government in December 2006. Those pronmises, and indeed the staging of all of those events more or less as promised, kept a non-trivial chunk of US opinion on board the administration's project in Iraq. (Regardless of the effect of these events on opinion in Iraq, which for the Bushites' purposes is almost an irrelevant consideration.)
American people sincerely wanted to believe that something good could come out of the whole venture in Iraq-- and the Bushies were promising them that these good things were "just ahead".
But since December15, 2005 they've run out of politically stage-managed rabbits to pull out of their magician's hat. Indeed, they haven't even been able to "win" the formation of an Iraqi government as a result of the December election. (Of course, as I've argued elsewhere recently, they could have gotten an Iraqi government formed if they'd been prepared to go with the Iraqi people's duly decided choice. But they haven't been ready to do that, because "the people's choice", Ibrahim Jaafari, is not their chosen puppet. And furthermore, he has also committed himself to seeking a firm timetable for a -- presumably complete-- US troop withdrawal, which they don't like.)
The US-caused (or at the very least, US-aggravated) "impasse" in the formation of an Iraqi government accountable to the elected parliament there has caused great hardships for the Iraqi people. But it has also caused great political problems for the Bush administration, who now have literally no more political rabbits to pull out of their Iraqi hat.
3. Based on my close following of both the events in Iraq and the Bush administration's record there over the past three years, I conclude the following: (a) they still really don't have a clue about what's going on there-- apart from whatever it is that their legions of bought-and-paid-for lackeys choose to tell them, and (b) at the political level they have no plan, workable or otherwise, for how to get of the mess they're in. Let's hope, at the very least, that the military has some workable plans for peaceable force extraction?
4. There are mid-term elections coming up here in November. To try to stabilize the politically disastrous record of its Iraq project as much as possible before then, the Bushies will need to have some non-trivial "victory event" sometime before the end of September. Ideally, from their point of view, this should include the very visible return home of a significant chunk of the soldiery currently deployed there-- maybe 50,000 of them at a minimum. "Welcome home" parades in major US cities, etc, etc. (But maybe they should not use the "Mission Accomplished" banner and the flight-suit thing again.)
Even that might not do it-- in terms of allowing the Republicans to win their goal of keeping control over both Houses of Congress in November. (Let's hope not!) But of course, if they do pull a large chunk of the soldiery out of Iraq before a reliably pro-US administration has been installed, then the likelihood that such an administration could ever be installed there will plummet to near-zero, and the likelihood of a really serious debacle befalling the depleted forces that remain will also rise. (It's a strange fact of the current US deployment in Iraq that the vast majority of those troops have now been pulled back into performing purely "force protection" tasks-- i.e., guarding their own enclaves and supply-lines.)
Just one last thing before I "go" back to Africa today. Global Policy Forum has just-- with my permission-- put up on their website a short text I wrote for a private listserve yesterday, that draws together things I've been writing on JWN in the past ten days to provide an explanation of what's going on politically in Iraq.
It might seem a little circular if I put the whole text up here? But anyway, y'all can read it there and then come back and discuss it in the Comments zone here, if you so desire.
(I should note that since I wrote that, I've had a couple of further thoughts on the issue which would add further wrinkles to the analysis. But I totally need to get back to my Africa piece and I shan't come back to JWN until it's done... )
Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, has a significant op-ed piece on the nuclear issue in todays NYT. Titled "We Do Not Have a Nuclear Weapons Program", the piece says:
Lost amid the rhetoric is this: Iran has a strong interest in enhancing the integrity and authority of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It has been in the forefront of efforts to ensure the treaty's universality. Iran's reliance on the nonproliferation regime is based on legal commitments, sober strategic calculations and spiritual and ideological doctrine. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has issued a decree against the development, production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.
Let me be very clear. Iran defines its national security in the framework of regional and international cooperation and considers regional stability indispensable for its development. We are party to all international agreements on the control of weapons of mass destruction. We want regional stability. We have never initiated the use of force or resorted to the threat of force against a fellow member of the United Nations. Although chemical weapons have been used on us, we have never used them in retaliation — as United Nations reports have made clear. We have not invaded another country in 250 years.
Worse still, that WaPo report and the NYT report both said that Kerry and Biden said they were inclined to support the deal. Maybe we should write the obituary for the NPT and move on? No! That is ways too scary a prospect... I really think we all need to work together to find a way to save (and indeed strengthen) it. And we should fight for implementation of its Article 6, too.
I've been working on a conference paper on (mainly) African topics these past couple of days. So I failed to produce "instant" commentary re the plan that John Kerry proposed for exiting from Iraq, in yesterday's NYT.
Maybe I'll come back to it later. But here, I'll just note the following:
(2) He is now urging "a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year's end." This is good-- even though it's not spelled out exactly as being the "speedy, total, and generous" US withdrawal that I've been urging for nearly a year now. I'm particularly worried about the qualifier "combat" that Kerry put there... What other kinds of US forces are there that might remain according to his plan? Perhaps special ops forces, or MPs, or...
(3) In addition, when Kerry advocates this withdrawal schedule, it's still conditional on the Iraqis "putting together a government" first....
(4) In fact, this business of placing conditions and demands on the Iraqis is integral to the general approach of his piece, which is to seek to "cover" what is actually a call for (some kind of) withdrawal behind a lot of imperialist-sounding rhetorical bombast... "Iraqi politicians should be told... !"
(5) But this is precisely the point at which his approach is shown to be thin, blustery rhetoric, because what they are to be told is this: "that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military." Excellent idea! So, John, why don't we just make plans to "immediately" (i.e., as rapidly as possible) withdraw the military anyway, and forego all the bluff and bluster?? And not just make the withdrawal plans, but also announce and implement them?
(6) For all the operational thin-ness of what Kerry proposed, at least it's an important development in the upper ranks of the Democratic Party leadership that he has moved this far toward a pro-withdrawal position. (Even if he still feels he has to cover his behind with the rhetorical bombast.)
(7) So when will Hillary and the rest of the party leadership be following him?
One was Juan Cole's argument that,
For my part, I'm fairly distrustful when guys start to talk about "honor" in any context-- but particularly in the context of a still-aspiring world hegemon like the mainstream US, it sounds like a cover for keeping the hegemonic aspirations well in place. Personally, I believe the longterm interests of the US citizenry are best served if we seek to reintegrate ourselves into the world community on a respectful, nonviolent, and egalitarian basis that recognizes that actually, we make up only around 4% of humankind... So any aspiration to act hegemonic, boss other people around, change their regimes, invade their countries, etc, is one of pure arrogance (and actually, of zero "honor.") And in the longer-than-tomorrow term it is doomed not only to fail but to bring great human suffering as it does so.
... In addition yesterday, there was an intriguing piece about Iraqi politics from David Pugnacious in the WaPo, that featured reports of phone conversations he'd had with Zal Khalilzad and Barham Saleh, among others.
It includes this:
An example of what's in these unity documents is a passage that calls for "a timetable so the Iraqi forces assume the security tasks completely and end the mission of the multinational force in Iraq." That timetable language is vague, but it would allow the new government to say it is committed to ending the American occupation. Interestingly, U.S. officials said yesterday that this passage on troop withdrawal is consistent with Bush administration policy.
And then there's this:
I'll write more about all of this-- and more about the real reasons behind the political 'impasse' in Iraq, as best I understand them-- as soon as I can. For now, I have to get back (conceptually) to Africa.
AFP is reporting that Jordan will be hosting a gathering of Islamic religious leaders April 22, to discuss reconciliation in Iraq.
Actually, I'm going to be in Jordan April 17-21. I'll be giving a lecture at the inauguration of a new U.N. University leadership institute there.
Convening this religious leaders' gathering seems to me like a good move. (You can read my recent paper on "Religion and Violence" to see how I identified the important kinds of contribution that religious precepts, practices, and institutions can make to peacemaking.)
AFP quotes an official statement as saying that the gathering,
The conference will be placed under the patronage of King Abdullah II who will "join his voice to those of the Iraqi religious and tribal leaders in calling for an end to violence and religious tensions in Iraq." [tribal leaders??? Well, I guess that's a Hashemite thang... ~HC]
It is expected to produce a statement signed by all the participants and indicating "that there is no religious legal basis for hostility and fighting among Shiites and Sunnis," it said.
"The tension and fighting underway in Iraq is taking cover behind religious and sectarian motives ... which is not justified by our noble Muslim religion," the statement said.
Religious leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Turkey, as well as from other Arab countries are also expected to attend.
Participants are to include Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of the Cairo-based Al-Azhar, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, as well as Arab League secretary general Amr Mussa.
So Palestinian FM Mahmoud Zahhar has sent an intriguing letter to UN chief Kofi Annan. In the portions of the text seen by the AFP reporter, Zahhar assures Annan that,
The letter does mention the two-state solution that is favored by the international community, including the Quartet of the US, UN, EU, and Russia. But it does not express any actual attitude toward the concept, either for or against. It merely notes that, "Israeli procedures in the occupied territories will put an end to all hopes to reach a final settlement based on the two-state solution."
Of course, if the Hamas-led government is really prepared to live, "in peace and security... side-by-side with all our neighbours", you would think that should include Israel. But he's not spelling it out.
Soon, anyway, Zahhar will be off to visit China.
China's representative to the Palestinians, Yang Wei Guo, reportedly
"We discussed the joint relations and the bilateral projects and we hope to continue and strengthen the cooperation and friendship in the future," he said. "China was and will continue to support the Palestinian people in their legitimate struggle to restore their national rights."
Read Laila el-Haddad's account of how Israeli F-16s today bombed President Mahmoud Abbas's presidential compound near the area of downtown Gaza where she and her family live:
The local radio stations and Palestine TV confirmed this: Mahmud Abbas's presidential compound was under attack. Israeli F-16s bombarded Abbas's helicopter launchpad/runway which is located near his office in the presidential compound in Gaza City, and another location in northern Gaza that security forces use to train.
Hospitals reported two injuries.
So the question becomes, why would they attack the presidential compound? Most certainly, there are no Qassam rockets being launched from there...
That AFP report cited there continues:
"Continued arbitrary shelling in Gaza is an unjustified escalation," he later told reporters.
"They (Israel) are trying to complicate the life of Palestinians and finish destroying Palestinian institutions after destroying so many in previous years.
"I address myself to Arab countries, the UN, Russia and the European Union to explain that these acts complicate the lives of Palestinians and have serious repercussions on the humanitarian, social and economic situation."
An Israeli military spokeswoman said a wave of air strikes was ordered after Palestinian militants fired four rockets that exploded near Israeli communities without causing damage or casualties.
"We attacked an open area that it is unpopulated inside Gaza City. There was no intention of attacking the building that is near it," she told AFP.
"We wanted to pass a message. We want to make it understood that Israel and the IDF (army) will not tolerate the firing of Qassam rockets," she added.
Israeli strikes have repeatedly failed to put a halt to the rocket attacks, with the armed wing of the ultra-radical Islamic Jihad claiming to have fired five rockets towards the southern town of Ashkelon on Tuesday. The army could confirm four rockets had been fired without causing injuries or damage.
Anyway, I urge you all to read the rest of Laila's post about life in Gaza, too.
Iraqi political chameleon Adel Abdul-Mahdi today joined his UIA colleagues Qasem Daoud and Jalaleddine al-Saghir in calling openly on Ibrahim Jaafari to withdraw his candidacy for the PM post.
So that makes three of the UIA's 128 National Assembly members who have thus far succumbed to intense US/UK arm-twisting to come out openly against Jaafari.
It is now 51 days since Jaafari was nominated, Feb. 12. At this rate-- one open UIA defection won every 17 days-- it will take the US/UK outside agitators "only" a total of 1,105 days to win the open defections of the 65 UIA members required to overturn the Jaafari nomination.
And 51 of those days have already passed... So "only" a further 1,056 days will be required for Washington to win its goal of having a compliant PM nominated by the UIA.
Why, that's less than three years! Surely the Iraqi people can see what's good for them and wait those further years before they get a government?? (Very heavy irony alert there.)
... Yes, of course I realize that Jaafari only originally won his February nomination by a margin of one vote. But that's not the point here. The UIA people who are speaking out openly now against his nomination are doing so expressly against the wishes of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose few recent declarations on Iraqi political matters have all stressed the supreme need for his followers to maintain their political unity. That is why we haven't seen a cascade of 63 UIA parliamentarians (those who voted against the Jaafari nomination back in February) all now streaming into the openly anti-Jaafari camp.
Once again, it seems to me, there is something about Ayatollah Sistani that the Americans just don't get.
(And let's face it, getting Adel Abdul-Mahdi to come out openly against Jaafari probably wasn't terrifically difficult, since he has consistently been described by US officials as the person whom they would like to see in the PM post.)
At last an American MSM publication (other than JWN) seems to be starting to find the right way to approach the question of the continuing government-formation impasse in Iraq. Newsweek's Rod Nordland has a mid-length piece in this week's Newsweek titled Sadr Strikes. The subtitle is: Deadly Vision: U.S. forces once had the renegade cleric in their cross hairs. Now he's too strong—and too popular—to confront.
And for good measure, alongside that article, they're running this interview with Fatah al-Sheikh, described as "a trusted confidant of Moqtada al-Sadr and editor of the cleric's personal newspaper, Ishraqat al-Sadr".
Nordland is quite right to focus right now on the "kingmaking" role that Sadr now plays. He writes:
Sadr has joined the political process, with stunning results. The current prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, effectively owes his job to the renegade cleric. "Despite the fact that Sadr was not himself an elected official, he and his followers were able to play the role of 'kingmaker' within the Shiite coalition," says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Sadr's group has 30 seats in the new assembly that was elected last December, but the Sadrist party is allied with a larger Shia coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance. With Sadr's blessing, his followers cast the deciding vote making Jaafari the choice of the UIA for prime minister.
Boy, that makes a change, after all the pumping-up of SCIRI's role we've heard from the US MSM over the past few months.
Here on JWN, I've been consistently noting the Sadrists' success in the Dec. 15 election-- back as long ago as this Jan. 1 post, this Jan. 20 post, and this Feb. 11 post. Or even this Dec. 22 post.
In all of those, I was leaning heavily on the detailed, expert work of the western world's leading UIA-ologist, Reidar Visser, and also on my own other readings, gut feelings, and analysis... But meanwhile, Juan Cole and just about the whole of the US MSM have been continuing to parrot the description of SCIRI/Hakim as "the most powerful force in Iraq", etc, etc....
All of which must have made it very difficult for anyone to understand why Zal Khalilzad was so unsuccessful in imposing his favored candidate (SCIRI's Adel Abdul-Mahdi) on the rest of the UIA, as I noted here recently. In this early-February analysis, Visser provided his own best explanation for the misperceptions of western analysts, most of which he attributed to SCIRI's fairly successful, west-oriented (or should I say occidented?) media operation...
But enough of my longstanding "Why doesn't anyone listen to me and Reidar?" rant. What about Nordland's piece?
Well, for starters, he'd have done well to have read or spoken to Reidar Visser about all this... a long time ago! As long ago as early February, Visser calculated that the Sadrists (pro-Muqtada plus Fadila flavors) accounted for a total of 45 seats-- as opposed to SCIRI's total of 29. (And as opposed to Nordland's own figure of "30" seats for the Sadrist party in the new Assembly.)
And then, in much of the body of his piece, Nordland seems to be following the very standard, US-government-issue line that portrays Muqtada as only a violent and divisive troublemaker. For example, he writes of Muqtada's behind-the-scenes role as the real power behind the Jaafari nomination that:
Nordland quotes a very telling comment that Khalilzad made "to" Muqtada Sadr through the open pages of al-Hayat daily. He doesn't give a date for it; and I must have missed it at the time-- but here it is:
So much for the myth that Washington is prepared to treat either the present lame-duck Iraqi government or the incoming Iraqi government as actually being sovereign governments, entitled to make their own decisions about whether the US troops should stay or leave...
And here, from the interview with Fatah al-Sheikh, is Sheikh's description of the core of Sadr's political deal with Jaafari:
I just finally want to note one slightly bizarre effect of Nordland's complete failure to mention either SCIRI or Hakim. This is to make it seem that there might be a PM candidate out there who does not share all the "faults" that his article mentions with regard to the Sadr-Jaafari axis... Such as, that the Sadrists are linked to a viciously sectarian militia, that they want to "stir up trouble" for the Americans, etc etc. But what about SCIRI in these regards? SCIRI is linked to a militia that has been far more viciously sectarian than the Sadrist militia. And SCIRI favors a political program that is far more exclusionary towards the Sunnis than the Sadrist program, etc., etc.
Still, maybe we should be thankful for small advances in the realm of telling the truth about what's been happening politically in Iraq over these past 110 days... At least, Newsweek seems to be getting the story about 60% right. (Time for Juan Cole to catch up, perhaps?)
An interesting recent survey of opinion among (camp-residing) Palestinian refugees in Lebanon found that,
The pollsters found more support for the PFLP in the north, and more for Hamas in the south.
The WaPo had an interesting article today. Written by David Brown, it described the publication of the 2nd edition of a book called Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP), which provides useful info for policymakers who want to save and improve peole's lives in a cost-effective way in low- and middle-income countries (LIMC's).
The article tells us that over a million deaths are now caused worldwide every year by traffic accidents-- many of them in LIMCs. Simply installing speed bumps on roads, especially near dangerous intersections, can prevent many of these deaths. The epidemiologists working with the DCP project estimate that this simple measure costs about $5 for every year of a person's life that is saved, making it one of the most cost-effective life preservers available anywhere...
The DCP has its own website, through which all kinds of really interesting information can be downloaded.
... Anyway, thinking about traffic-slowing speedbumps and the power they have to save lives got me to thinking about the more political kinds of "speedbumps" that can slow down any nation's rush to war, since wars cause just as many-- or more-- avoidable deaths around the world these days as do traffic accidents.
Someone called Matthew White has done a huge amount of work compiling a website that charts the Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century. Luckily, he does go a bit further than just the 20th century-- including, he has this compilation of stats about the casualties attributable to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
That page was last updated in June 2005. Of course those numbers would be quite a lot higher today. White refers to the Lancet epidemiological study of October 2004 which found 98,000 excess deaths in Iraq since March 2003. But his own estimation, as of June 12, 2005, was that around. 43,000-58,000 had been killed as a result of the war at that point. (He was using the Iraq Body Count numbers that I use on my sidebar here. However, I note that IBC counts only the reported deaths due to direct physical violence. It misses completely all the deaths caused by war-caused degradation of the water system and other vital infrastructure, war-related degradation of the health services in Iraq, etc etc... Those broader figures were picked up in the Lancet study.)
The epidemiological approach has also been used in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is similarly (or even more so) a place wracked by terrible inter-group violence and the related social-political breakdown. This report from October 2000 tells you about the main methodology used in such circumstances, which is to make the best possible estimate of the "crude mortality rate" (CMR). In stressed societies the CMR is typically measured in numbers of deaths per 1,000 people per month. Dr. Les Roberts, cited in that report there,
So here's my simple proposal. We know wars kill and maim people in unacceptably large numbers. There is no such thing as a "humane" or "humanitarian" war. This DCP website tells us that in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the war-related fatality rate in 2001 was around 28 deaths per 100,000 people, far higher than in any other part of the world.
So why can't we put political "speedbumps" on the roads that lead to war?
Hey, we could even create an organization that, in order to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, might do some or all of these things:
# develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
# achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
# be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
What's that you say-- you, over at the back there? You're telling me there already is such an organization? And that it's called the United Nations?
So if such an organization, and such mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of outstanding disputes, were already well established in March 2003-- then why on earth did the Bushites gratuitously go to war against Iraq that month?
I think it's definitely time to revive and strengthen the principles and all the mechanisms of the United Nations. (Including, maybe we should reinstitute harsh punishments for people committing the crime of aggression, which was a crime that was prosecuted at Nuremberg.) We have to save the world from any re-eruption of US aggressivity. We have to carefully put in place real, effective speed-bumps that can not merely slow any rush to war, but also halt it. People's lives-- perhaps hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of them-- depend on it.
And the great thing is-- not only would such an approach be extremely cost-effective, if we could prevent all this arms-buying and other forms of military spending, then we'd all actually be saving huge amounts of money!. And we could take all those sums saved and invest them in building up the lives of needy people, rather than by killing them...
As I noted earlier, these are fateful days in Iraq. Condi Rice, fresh from the embarrassment of the reception she got from the good people of Blackburn, Lancashire, flew to Baghdad with her friend Jack Straw to try a hands-on approach to subverting the results of last December's election.
But what they are trying to sell to Iraqi politicians is, it seems to me, notably unsellable. Their basic pitch (in public) is, "If you Iraqis want to get rid of the occupation forces then you need to hurry up and form a government." But Rice (and Straw, for what it's worth) are still also apparently determined that Ibrahim Jaafari, the person duly nominated to the PM post by the largest bloc in the parliament, is "unacceptable" to the occupation forces. So they have been wheedling and doing goodness only knows what else to try to get as many Iraqi politicians as possible to come out publicly against the Jaafari nomination...
In recent days they won two breathlessly reported tactical victories, winning public statements from two political figures within the victorious UIA alliance who called for Jaafari to step down. The two are Qasim Daoud, the head of the small Movement of Iraqi Democrats (hat-tip to Reidar Visser, there) and Jalaleddine al-Saghir of SCIRI.
But here's the thing. In insecurity-plagued, traumatized circumstances like those in which the Shiite (and most other) Iraqis are currently living, what would persuade any individual to go against the opinion that is still sustained by a majority of members of the community with which which he/she most closely identifies? I suppose it could be a judgment that working with (rather than against) the Americans at this point would be "good" for the general interest of the person's community of identification-- or, an expectation of professional, financial, or other forms of personal advancement...
But if the Americans are also, at the same time, saying that they want this Iraqi government formed so that the occupation forces can get out, then it strikes me it is going to be hard for them to attract any Iraqis-- but most especially, any Shiite Iraqis-- to their anti-Jaafari scheme for any but the basest of personal motives.
Everyone knows the Americans are currently the declining power inside Iraq... So why would any Iraqis seek to hitch their wagon to them? Unless it's for the sake of that secret bank account in Switzerland, promises of Green Cards for all members of the extended family, etc etc...
While Rice and Straw were having their "newsmaking" sleepover visit to the Green Zone Sunday/Monday, they met a bunch of Iraqi pols, of course. Including, they held a notably frosty meeting with Jaafari himself. One person they didn't meet with, but with whom they were evidently extremely eager to communicate while there, was Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
This AFP report from Baghdad notes that,
"Without the remarkable spiritual guidance shown by his eminence, the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, this country for all its problems it now faces would not have in its hands the potential for a better future," said Straw.
The unnamed Sistani aide quoted in that AP report,
The messenger also was said to have explained that the letter reinforced the American position that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari should not be given a second term. Al-Sistani has not publicly taken sides in the dispute, but rather has called for Shiite unity.
The United States was known to object to al-Jaafari's second term but has never said so outright and in public.
But on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad carried a similar letter from Bush to a meeting with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the largest Shiite political organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. [As noted here.]
The al-Sistani aide said Shiite displeasure with U.S. involvement was so deep that dignitaries in the holy city of Najaf refused to meet Khalilzad on Wednesday during ceremonies commemorating the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The Afghan-born Khalilzad is a Sunni Muslim...
Last weekend, Czar George tried to deliver a direct personal veto to Iraq's dominant parliamentary bloc, the UIA, regarding its still-extant nomination of Daawa Party head Ibrahim Jaafari to be (remain as) Prime Minister. That apparently backfired.
Now, the US-backed plotters have managed to persuade a number of UIA personalities to come out publicly to back the call that Jaafari step down. That link takes you to an NYT article by Kirk Semple and Thom Shanker, in which they report that a UIA member identified as Kassim Daoud had told them he and a number of other UIA parliamentarians now want Jaafari to step down.
They wrote that Daoud,
"We all hope that he will respond because we know that he is a statesman and he will take the country's best interest into consideration," Mr. Daoud, who would be a possible candidate for the post, said Saturday in a brief telephone interview.
This Reuters piece describes Daoud as "a senior member of the independent group within the Alliance". Whatever that means. (Any more info about him would of course be very useful. Please send it in as a comment!)
This AFP piece also has a quote from Daoud along similar lines. The AFP reporter adds that,
"There have been numerous calls from the members of the Iraqi Alliance, on an individual basis without being the view of the entire bloc, to change the current candidate of the alliance, Jaafari, to resolve the ongoing political crisis," Qandil told AFP.
As I noted in my March 29 post here, the US claim that there is an "impasse" in the Iraqi government-formation process is quite disingenuous, since it has been US meddling that has caused the impasse so far.
Also of note: that Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yacoubi has now openly entered the Iraqi political fray. Ed Wong of the NYT wrote in today's paper that in his Friday sermon yesterday that Yacoubi-- who is the head of the pro-Sadrist Fadilah Party-- called for the Bush administration to replace Zal Khalilzad as US Ambassador in Iraq...
Wong wrote that Yacoubi said,
I am not close enough to Gaza to be able to say anything definitive about the clashes that have occurred there the past couple of days. Yesterday, Abu Yousef Abu Quka, described as a senior commander in the Popular Resistance Committees, was killed in a car bomb; and after that there were some related clashes that have so far killed three people and wounded 36.
I find it interesting and significant that it is Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh who has been speaking out about the need to end the clashes and, as this AP report says, to have the
This seems like an early security challenge for the new Hamas-led government. What role have the various Fateh security bosses been playing in provoking them, I wonder? And how many of them will be prepared to cooperate with Hamas in ending the internal fighting?
Maybe this is the 'Altalena' for the new government. But the out-of-control gunmen they need to contain come from a number of different factions and sides, many of them affiliated with Fateh.
(When I interviewed FM Mahmoud Zahhar on March 6, he expressed confidence that most of the Fateh-affiliated people in the various PA structures would work honestly to continue to help the PA project succeed under its new management. I guess that we will now see whether that is indeed the case.)
