Month: November 2005

I invite you all to join me in praying for the wellbeing and safe release of the four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who were abducted by unknown assailants in Iraq on Saturday.
CPT headquarters has now released the names of the abductees. They include a fellow Quaker from Virginia called Tom Fox. I’ve never met Tom, but I just received an anguished call from a f/Friend who is a member of his Quaker meeting, in northern Virginia. Tom has intemittently, since October 2004, been keeping a blog called Waiting in the Light, that contains some very moving pieces of writing.
The other CPT abductees are Norman Kember, 74, from London, UK; James Loney, 41, from Toronto; and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, also from Canada.
Al-Jazeera has aired a video it received, presumably from the kidnappers: it showed the four men and a quick image of Kember’s passport. The abductors called their group the “Swords of Righteousness Brigade”. No group of this name has been heard of before. A voice on the tape accused the four CPT-ers of being spies working undercover as peace activists.
(A German woman archeologist called Susanne Osthoff was also, separately abducted in Iraq, apparently last Thursday. A video handed to a rep of the German t.v. station ARD in Baghdad showed images of Osthoff in captivity and threatened to kill her and her Iraqi driver–also abducted– “unless Berlin stopped cooperating with the US-backed Iraqi government.”)
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an incredibly brave and visionary organization, supported principally by three of the historic “peace churches”– the Quakers, the Brethren, and the Mennonite– but with the participation of pacifists from a number of other Christian denominations. Small CPT teams maintain a constant “ministry of presence” in a number of areas of strife and tension around the world. One of their concepts stresses the need to “Get in the Way”, in order to obstruct the perpetration of violence, but to do so in a way that embodies equal love and respect for everyone.
When I was in Hebron with a group of Quakers in 2002, we were given a quick, informative tour round the extremely strife-torn central part of the city by two red-capped members of the local CPT team. CPT has had a presence in Hebron for many years, where their presence gives some protection to the city’s much-diminished Palestinian population, who face continual bouts of extremely nasty violence from Israeli settlers who’ve been trying to take over the heart of the city
Tonight I’m praying for the five abductees in Iraq, and the families who wait anxiously for news of them at home… For the people who are holding them– that they can speedily come to understand and respond positively to the love, humanity, and extremely non-threatening nature of the CPT mission… For all the thousands of people being extra-legally detained inside Iraq, for their anxious families, and their captors… And for all the decisionmakers inside and outside Iraq whose decisions can lead either to a further escalation of tensions inside the country, or to their calming.
I see the historic peace churches as the heart of authentic, pre-Augustinian and pre-“Just War” Christianity. They/we try to keep faithful to the original, strongly pacifist and antiwar teachings of Jesus. The CPT people are true, but quiet, heroes because of the way they commit to living out their witness.
Please, you kidnappers, speak with these wise, gentle people from CPT and learn about all the work that they do! And then, please find a way to release them– and Susanne Osthoff– in safety.

This, definitely worth reading. Hat-tip to Diana.
I hadn’t seen this story before. It’s in today’s L.A. Times. It’s about a US Army straight arrow called Col. Ted Westhusing, who had a Ph.D. in philosophical ethics from Emory University in Atlanta and taught military ethics full-time at the West Point military academy. Westhusing thought he should get some experience in Iraq in order to be able to teach his officer-cadet students more effectively. So he asked to be deployed there and was tasked with overseeing a large army contract with a private, Virginia-based firm called USIS that was supposed to be doing some of the training of Iraqi security forces….
One night last June, he was discovered dead in his trailer, with a single gunshot wound to the head. A USIS manager who discovered the body later said he had personally moved the murder weapon “for safety’s sake”.
Lots of questions in this case. But what seems clear is that Westhusing– whose doctoral dissertation was on the concept of “military honor”– was deeply troubled by much of what he witnessed in Iraq.
Investigators found a four-page letter on the bed next to his body. It was addressed to his military superiors and included these words:

“I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
“Death before being dishonored any more.”

I was saddened (but not surprised) by the whole story. “The concept of “honor” meets the reality of US military operations in today’s Iraq? Someone should write a Greek tragedy about this, I think.
But this part at the end of the LAT story intrigued me greatly:

A [military] psychologist reviewed Westhusing’s e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the “most difficult and probably most painful stressor.”
She said that Westhusing … was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
“Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited,” wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. “He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses.”

Then this:

Westhusing’s family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing’s body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.
Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.
“He’s the last person who would commit suicide,” said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. “He couldn’t have done it. He’s just too damn stubborn.”
Westhusing’s body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.
In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing’s wife, and asked what happened.
She answered:
“Iraq.”

In addition to his widow, Westhusing also left behind three children.

The Bush administration’s rush toward repositioning itself as pursuing a policy in Iraq that is both “responsible” and one that involves a certain amount of troop withrawal has been amazingly speedy.
I suspect the main outlines of this move were most likely decided when Amb. Zal Khalilzad was in Washington around three weeks ago. But over the past few days there has been a torrent of reports from various US sources– in the Pentagon and in Iraq– about the nature of the newly emerging policy. Like this one, in today’s Newsweek, or this one, in today’s Time magazine.
The Newsweek piece describes the new plan in these terms:

The new approach is the result of long negotiations between Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces. Their overall strategy: on the military side, “clear, hold and build” while training up Iraqi forces; on the political side, wean Sunni leaders from their support of the insurgency, buying them off with incentives tribe by tribe and village by village; and on the U.S. domestic front, appease rising outcries for withdrawal by reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq to under 100,000 troops—hopefully by midterm Election Day 2006.
… Success or failure in Iraq … could well turn into a race between U.S. public opinion, which is increasingly impatient to see the bloody adventure over with, and a grand strategy that’s just getting ponderously off the ground. Is the political will going to be there to see the strategy through, especially when it is likely to cost many more U.S. casualties than the 2,108 dead and 15,804 wounded so far?

Good question.
Over at the New York Times, meanwhile, today’s “Week in review” section there carried this interesting piece by James Glanz, in which he looks at the difficult art, for imperial powers, of trying to effect a withdrawal-under-pressure as “gracefully” as possible– and crucially, while losing as little general political credibility as possible on the global scene.
He describes the challenge as being to look for “a dignified way out of a messy and often unpopular foreign conflict.” He then examines a number of possible historical precedents. Among them,

the wrenching French pullout from Algeria, the ill-fated French and American adventures in Vietnam, the Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan and the disastrous American interventions in Beirut and Somalia.
Still, there are a few stories of inconclusive wars that left the United States in a more dignified position, including the continuing American presence in South Korea and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. But even those stand in stark contrast to the happier legacy of total victory during World War II.

Bosnia, as a relative success story? I am certainly not sure about that… Just last week we had the tenth anniversary of the Dayton “peace” accords– an occasion that served to underline just how fragile and unsatisfactory the Dayton agreement has proved to be. (See, for example, here and here.)
Still, Glanz describes the current attitude of much of the US political elite with respect to Iraq fairly well when he writes: “The highly qualified optimism of these experts about what may still happen in Iraq – let’s call it something just this side of hopelessness – has been born of many factors, including greatly reduced expectations of what might constitute not-defeat there.” I love that use of the term “not-defeat”, since everyone is rapidly coming to the conclusion that the word “victory” will not be at all applicable.
Glanz is hilariously funny when he writes in an apparently dead-pan way about a history professor called William Stueck who seems to think that the “Iraqification” strategy might work if given enough time…

Korea reveals how easy it is to dismiss the effectiveness of local security forces prematurely, Mr. Stueck said. In 1951, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway felt deep frustration when Chinese offensives broke through parts of the line defended by poorly led South Korean troops.
But by the summer of 1952, with intensive training, the South Koreans were fighting more effectively, Mr. Stueck said. “Now, they needed backup” by Americans, he said. By 1972, he said, South Korean troops were responsible for 70 percent of the front line.

Aha! So all the US needs in order to “win” with Iraqification at this point would be a further 21 years in which to pursue it?
One of the historical examples that Glanz uses that has a clearly “de-colonializing” story-line is that of the French retreat from Algeria. He quotes another historian, Matthew Connelly, as saying that, “Over the long run, history treated de Gaulle kindly for reversing course and agreeing to withdraw… De Gaulle loses the war but he wins in the realm of history: he gave Algeria its independence… How you frame defeat, that can sometimes give you a victory.”
H’mm. I’m not so sure about that. It may have made De Gaulle look masterful, statesmanlike, and “modern”. But the loss of Algeria was nonethless part of a worldwide retraction of French imperial power. Britain’s worldwide empire was also very busy indeed retreating in those days. Both those formerly sizeable global powers were losing global power at a rapid clip between 1950 and 1970, and it is important to remember that.
Now, the same kind of erosion of global power is happening, to some degree, to the United States’ globe-girdling military behemoth. And all of us who seek a world that is not dominated by military force and that is not structured to provide privilege to the US citizenry over and above everyone else in the world should be very clear about that fact, and should welcome it.
In fact, as I wrote here a couple of days ago (and have written on JWN before that, too), even a complete withdrawal of the US military from Iraq will not be enough to build the basis for the kind of just, nonviolent, and egalitarian global system that the 96 percent of the world’s people who are not US citizens so desperately need. And especially not if the (nuclear-armed) US military continues to dominate the entire Gulf region from its fleets inthe Gulf and all their supporting Gulf-side bases.
There was one bit of significant and generally welcome news in the Newsweek story, I should add. This came towards the end of this page of the story:

Khalilzad revealed to NEWSWEEK that he has received explicit permission from Bush to begin a diplomatic dialogue with Iran… “I’ve been authorized by the president to engage the Iranians as I engaged them in Afghanistan directly,” says Khalilzad. “There will be meetings, and that’s also a departure and an adjustment.”

Okay, so we may all have grave reservations and worries about the role that Iran is playing inside Iraq today. But still, as Winston Churchill so memorably said, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”. (It sounds better in English-English than it does in US “English”, by the way.) If the US is going to be talking to Iran about its concerns regarding Iraq, that is far, far better than the situation two years ago when it was threatening to invade it.

Next stop, a resumption of talks with Syria, I hope?
But beyond all this, I think it’s time for people in the peace movement here in the US– while we continue working on the need for a rapid and total US withdfrawal from Iraq– to start also thinking more broadly about the kind of relationship we want our country to have with the rest of the world, say ten or 20 years from now.
What we most certainly don‘t want to see at that point is a country that– having “recovered” from its little setback back there in Iraq in 2006 or so– is willing and able to launch some similar kind of a catastrophe on another country someplace else.
We have to recognize that our country has some very dangerous forces in it… and we need to find ways to prevent them from acting out their sick fantasies on the world stage (and also, here inside the US) ever again.
How can we do that?
One first strategy must be to give them serious punishment at the polls. In 2006, and again in 2008, 2010, 2012, and so on.
Another must be to relentlessly continue the investigations into just how, through outright manipulatipon and lies, they were able to visit their sick fantasies on so many member of Congress back in 2002.
Another must be to pass strong legislation that will bind the executive branch to a full respect of the global Convention Against Torture– and while we’re about it, also the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and especially Article 6 of the NPT…
So, there’s a long road ahead– both on Iraq, and beyond Iraq. We can still only start to glimpse the full dimensions of that road. But still, though I know things are still really horrendous for the people of Iraq, and probably continue to be so for some time– still, at least now we can start to see that there might be a better world for everyone somewhere ahead… Because finally, the US empire is being forced into a significant and long overdue retreat.

The noted Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has now written in the US Jewish newspaper Forward that:

The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.

Van Creveld– whose work I have followed, and admired (with some caveats) for more than 20 years now– points out that in Vietnam, at least the retreating US forces had the option of leaving most of their heavy gear behind, with the nominally indepedent Army of the Republic of (south) Vietnam, the ARVN. It then took a couple of further years before that equipment fell into the hands of the North Vietnamese, with the definitive collapse of the ARVN in 1975.
He notes that today, the situation is different. Firstly, there is no opposing government with which the modalities of this withdrawal can be negotiated. In addition, he notes that that the weapons now being used by the US inside Iraq:

are so few and so expensive that even the world’s largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.
Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.

As in the nine-point exit plan that I spelled out on July 7, Van Creveld wrote that the retreating US forces will have to be withdrawn through the south of Iraq:

Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.
Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.

Van Creveld does write, however, that a “complete” withdrawal “is not an option”:

A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.
First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as “the Great Satan.” Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war — a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs’ clutches.
A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets’ nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah’s name.
The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.

But though he writes that a complete withdrawal “is not an option”, from the wording he uses, it’s not clear whether he would foresees that some of the residual force he’s writing about would be stationed inside Iraq, or not. Most likely, not, since he writes specifically about a “withdrawal from Iraq”, not a retrechment/redeployment of forces inside the country. The residual force he has in mind would therefore, it seems, most likely be stationed just “over the horizon” from Iraq– with components most likely dispersed among Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the in-Gulf US Navy presence.
In my book, a sizeable residual force would still be a force for quite unwarranted US intervention in the region. We should aim for its dismantling, too– as part of the much broader re-ordering of US relations with the rest of the world that will be needed in order to build a world marked by real human equality.
Nevertheless, Van Creveld’s plan seems to go significantly further than, for example, Juan Cole’s plan of leaving a significant US residual force inside Iraq. It is great to have this clear-eyed strategic realist and very experienced military historian writing that what I have been advocating for a while now has indeed become a necessity.
Van Creveld concludes, quite pointedly:

Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Well said!
Van Creveld, I should note, is no raving lefty anti-American. He’s a very sober historian whose tag-line there at the the Forward tells us that, “He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army’s required reading list for officers.
And I forgot to tell you the title of his article there. It is this: Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War.

A lot has been happening in the world– including in Iraq– in the past
ten days.  I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last posted.  But
at least now I can  try to give a broad overview, based on what I’ve
been reading and on conversations I had in DC, of how I see things developing.
 Here are the headlines:

Iraq moves front and center of US politics

The internal debate over Iraq policy, inside the US political system, is
now more audible and prominent than it has been at any time since August-October
2002.  Actually, probably since long before then, too, given the paucity
of the debate at that time.  (But d’you remember Sen. Robert Byrd’s great
oratory?)

But once Congress had passed the war-enabling resolution, back in that traumatic
October of 2002 when nearly all the Dems were scared sh**-less by the prospect
of being tarred as “lily-livered pacifists” in the upcoming mid-terms, public
debate on the policy at the level of the national party leaderships became
almost completely silenced.  And especially, of course, once the invasion
had been started.

Since then, “Iraq”, and the tremendous human and financial losses it has
inflicted, has been the silent elephant in the room of  US national political
discourse.  The Dems couldn’t find a voice, or a policy they could visibly
unite around and proclaim as their own.

Well, they still haven’t.  But the rising casualty toll, the revelations
of continuing US war crimes, the failure to achieve anything credible on the
ground in Iraq, the budget crisis in this country to which the Iraq war has
so visibly contributed– all those factors, plus (heh-heh!) the salutary setback
the GOP suffered at the state-level polls earlier this month mean that the
once-silent elephant has started to trumpet its presence very loudly.

Okay, I recognize that in the US political context, talking about an elephant
starting to trumpet loudly could also be interpreted as referring to the Republican
Party, since the elephant is their symbol…. And in one way, that’s appropriate,
since the debate over Iraq policy that’s been going on inside the
Republican party has been at least as significant as the one between it and
the Dems.

And this has led to the really delicious signs of GOP disarray over how
to respond to Congressman Murtha.  Sure, the House Republicans tried
to stomp all over him.  (And the House Democratic leadership didn’t
do very well in defending him, either.)  But while Bush himself then
felt forced to intone talking-points about Murtha being a great patriot etc.,
Cheney was still adopting a very accusatory and weaselly public stance.

Bush administration forced to give some appearance of troop withdrawals

Behind the childish rhetoric of “staying the course”, the administration
has clearly made a decision that it needs to start presenting at least the
appearance of some movement toward drawdown of the troop presence in Iraq.
 I imagine their main motivators for this are (a) a long-overdue (and
still small) amount of budgetary and military-planning “realism”, and (b)
pressure from within the Republican party– especially after the most recent
elections here– to the effect that there needs to be a significant decrease
in the troop deployment before November 2006 if the party is to avoid getting
creamed in the mid-term elections…

Continue reading “Iraqi round-up”

Riverbend had a great post yesterday about White Phosphorus, and she has another great one today about the torture houses.
Excellent reading, both. Thanks to Janinsanfran for the heads-up.