November 2007 – Page 2 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Golan: Getting it straight

Whoa there, AP! The generally well-regarded US newswire is putting out an extremely tendentious little “fact-box” today, on the situation in the Israeli-occupied Golan. Tendentious and, need I add, one-sided.
For example, here:

• LOCATION: Plateau at southwestern corner of Syria overlooking Sea of Galilee and northern Israel.

Note to AP: The occupied Golan also overlooks a huge stretch of Syria, including the national capital, Damascus. And from the top of Jebel al-Sheikh, the area’s highest mountain– known by the Israelis as Mount Hermon– Israel’s military is also currently able to dominate a large chunk of Lebanon, too.
Guess it depends on whether we have an Israelo-centric view of the Middle East, or not?
Then, the AP has this:

• HISTORY: Syrian soldiers shelled northern Israel from the Golan Heights between 1948 and 1967. Israel captured the territory in 1967 Mideast war. Israel annexed it in 1981, though no country recognized that.

The last two sentences there are correct. The rest of the graf is unbelievably one-sided. Yes, Syrian soldiers used Golan between 1948 to shell Israeli forces– but those forces were busy consolidating Israel’s military control over areas to the north of the Sea of Galilee that were supposed to have been completely demilitarized under the Armistice Agreement of 1949. UN records from the 1949-1967 period make clear there were infractions from both sides of the Israel-Syria Armistice Line– but more from the Israeli side than from the Syrian side.
Finally, the AP box gives us this:

• DISPUTE: In 2000, Israel-Syria peace talks broke down. Israel offered to withdraw from all the Golan Heights down to the international border in exchange for full peace. Syria insisted on recovering land across the border that it captured in 1948, including the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

This is simply not true. At Geneva, Ehud Barak notably did not agree to withdraw to the international border, which according to the maps drawn between Syria and Mandate Palestine ran either along the water-line along the northeast quadrant of the Sea of Galilee, (as in this recent BBC map or this CIA map), or in some versions through the Sea of Galilee roughly at the twelve o’clock and three o’clock lines. Anyway, in those days Syria had certain valuable rights as a littoral (coast-line) power on the SoG, including rights to fish, undertake water-borne transport on it, maintain small ports, etc.
In 1994, during the heart of the negotiations that Syria and Israel maintained from 1991 thru 1996, Israeli PM Rabin told the American mediators that in return for an array of other security measures, demilitarization, normalization of relations, economic links etc, he would be prepared to withdraw Israel’s forces to the international border; and in the negotiations that continued between then and the defeat of his successor, Shimon Peres, at the Israeli polls in spring 1996, that was the basis on which the negotiations continued. (In Israel, it became known as the “Rabin deposit.”) During marathon sessions at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in January 1996, the two sides came very close to concluding all the elements of a final peace agreement.
Peres’s success, Bibi Netanyahu, was not interested in proceeding with those talks. The talks resumed only some months after Ehud Barak was elected in 1999. But when he inveigled Bill Clinton into presenting his “final, final offer” to Syrian president Hafez al-Asad in May 2000, the extent of the promised Israeli withdrawal had mysteriously (or not) shrunk from the Rabin Deposit. Now, Barak insisted on Israel maintaining control off a strip some 100 or so metres wide around the whole of the SoG coast-line. Not surprisingly, Asad demurred. Less than a month later he had died of a heart attack…. and a few months after that, as we know, the Palestinians’ second intifada started, and then Barak lost at the polls to Ariel Sharon.
So, friends at AP: Please let’s not keep that very tendentious, and indeed inaccurate, listing of “facts” up on your newswire. The way you present this material matters. It matters both to the way you are viewed around the world– whether as fair-minded and accurate, or neither of those things. And it matters because your material affects the way many Americans (and perhaps other people elsewhere) think about these issues. If you want to make it look like the Syrians have always been wrong and the Israelis blameless, that matters.
By the way, since the Golan issue is now going to be discussed at Annapolis, people might want to take a look at this series of articles I published in Al-Hayat in 1998, on the human geography of the area.
Also, since I see that my 2000 book on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of 1991-96 is now listed by the publisher, the US Institute of Peace, as out-of-print, you might want to get a used one from Amazon.
I think I’ll contact USIP and see if we can maybe have them put the final chapter of the book up on the web… (Note to certain carping commenters here: I have never had a royalty agreement with USIP for sales of this book, since they had helped fund some of the research for it. So when I mention the book here, it is certainly not from a desire to increase my earnings.)

Lives and livelihoods in two ME blogs

My able tech assistant (and son) put Google Reader onto my computer as well as the Analytics last week. He said it’s the best RSS reader he knows, and showed my how you can aggregate different feeds into tags and themes, etc.
That meant I needed to go through the slightly chaotic collection of blogs that I’ve been tagging with my “Delicious” system over the past few months, and pick out a subset to put into my Google Reader. Lots of the “usual suspects” there– including a couple of the BBC’s excellently organized RSS feeds, Juan Cole, TPM, etc, etc. Two that I put in that have given me particular pleasure reading the feeds from have been these:

Inside Iraq

As you may know, McClatchy’s news coverage is about the best there is from Iraq, and this is due overwhelmingly to the work of these Iraqis. In the blog, though, they get to write much more informally about their lives and the neighborhoods they live in. Now that Faiza and Riverbend are no longer in Iraq to give us their vividly written, very intimate accounts of what daily life is like there, Inside Iraq is the next best thing.
Read Correspondent Hussein’s recent reflection about the tragedy of Dying Alone, or Sahar IIS’s post about the trouble her dental-student daughter has been having finding enough patients to practice her skills on. Or, come to think of it, any of the posts on the blog, and you’ll learn a lot about what out-of-the-office life is like for– I should imagine– mainly middle-class Iraqis these days.
(Plus, remember that these writers are different from many Iraqis because on the one hand they have jobs, but on the other the jobs they have make many or most of them direct targets for insurgents, so their lives are often lived under tremendous pressure.)

Land and People

Zurayk provides a lively and very well-informed take on agricultural issues as they affect not just Lebanon but also most other countries outside the rich world. He writes a lot about international agricultural policy (e.g. here and here.) He also dives into a lot of specifics about agricultural and environmental issues within Lebanon itself, including with this recent little reflection on recipes that use pomegranate, the health benefits of pomegranates, etc.
On his sidebar, he has links to some of his more political writings. He’s a Palestinian. (L&P also recently had an interesting post expressing his views on a project aimed at Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian cooperation in seedstock improvement.)
… With both of these blogs, as with many others that I have learned a lot from in recent years, what I’ve found of particular value is the opportunity to read these views/posts as they were directly and thoughtfully written by the authors, and un-mediated by the editorial or story-shaping choices of corporate editors. It is truly incredible, the whole new set of windows that the internet gives us into the lives, views, and concerns of other people around the world. (Thanks, Darpa!)
I think we should also give special recognition to McClatchy, a media corporation that respects and trusts the people who work– and risk their lives– for it enough to allow them to write the Inside Iraq blog.
If any of you can recommend other blogs that have similar qualities of immediacy, good writing, thoughtfulness, and insight into the lives and livelihoods of people who live outside the rich portions of the world, do please send in a comment that has, obviously, the URL, and also your own short note on what you find distinctive about it. Thanks!

Calling JWN’s readers from around the world!

Just over a week ago, my son put Google Analytics onto JWN, so i now have a week’s worth of their great data on who YOU, the readers, are.
I am thrilled that during the past week, readers from 107 countries (1,281 cities) visited JWN. I love the mapping gadget. I could travel from the Cape to Cairo through countries where JWN has readers. Can’t quite make it right down the Pan-American Highway through central America… Laos and Myanmar are the only standouts in East Asia. We had visitors from all the states of the US except North Dakota, with California very evidently leading the pack.
I’ve been very interested, ever since I first started writing JWN, in developing a global readership. (Remember back when I tried to use the non-English options for the date-stamps here?) It turns out that 42% of the visits this past week came from non-US-based readers. Well, I know there are some US-citizen readers who visit us from outside the US, and some non-US readers who visit from inside the US, so maybe those two categories more or less balance each other? The top five locations among non-European-heritage locales are India, Egypt, Pakistan, China, and South Africa, all bunched together with each having around 0.6% of the total visitorship.
So it’s still not a totally global forum here. But I’m really delighted to find how international it is.
I realize that over the past few months, while I’ve been working on this latest book of mine and doing a few other things, I haven’t been as systematic or intentional– okay, some might say “obsessive”– as I have been at various earlier stages of publishing the blog. I was starting to feel a bit burned out with it, or feel it wasn’t achieving very much, or whatever. I even thought of closing it gracefully down. (Or ungracefully. Bam! Just like that!)
But seeing the Google Analytics maps has been a real blast. And I’ve even started to think about various ideas for ways I could make JWN more effective. I think it will always be fairly idiosyncratic, or as the Lebanese say, “mazaji.” But there are probably things I could do either with the layout or with a better organization of the content, or by trying to be a bit more intentional in planning the content, that would make it more interesting for more readers.
What do any of you think? Would you like more shorter posts? (Please don’t ask for photos.) What other ideas do you have? What do you like about JWN? What might make it more interesting or useful for you? What would make it so much more interesting that you could recommend it to more of your friends?
Actually, instead of sitting here enjoying looking at the maps and thinking about the future of the blog, what I should be doing is finishing the revisions on the book manuscript. I really do need to get it done within the next two or three days….
If you put your ideas here in the form of a comment, could you just tell me your home-country as well when you do so? Thanks!

Annapolis: Saudi and Palestinian dimensions

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said today in Cairo that he will attend the Annapolis meeting. I think this is a good decision. It will allow him to give the extremely helpful, Saudi-initiated “Arab Peace Plan of 2002” a good and serious presentation there.
That AP story by Salah Nasrawi also notes that Prince Saud said that at Annapolis he “would not take part in a ‘theatrical show,’ such as handshakes with Israeli officials, saying the gathering must make serious progress.” That is fine, too. Under his plan, the Arab states would all engage in full normalization of relations with Israel simultaneously with Israel undertaking its withdrawal from all (or nearly all) the lands its army occupied in 1967. (Many Israelis and their friends want to have this recognition/normalization performed upfront. Of course they might want that. But I can’t see why they would reasonably believe that anyone else would support that request.)
Regarding the core issues of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, I see that Amira Hass has another piece in Haaretz today in which she explains why many Palestinians consider the PA’s negotiating stance to be a weak, overly appeasing one. I think this is a further commentary on the Nov. 17th negotiating Draft (note that’s a PDF there) that she had received recently– the one in which the Israeli and Palestinian sides could not even agree whether it should be a “Joint document” or a “Joint statement.” There were also, at that point, many other remaining disagreements between the two sides.
Also in today’s Ha’aretz is an intriguing account by Akiva Eldar of the conclusions reached by members of something called the Aix Group, a group of Israeli, Palestinian, and “international” experts that has been trying to unravel the many economic strands that would be involved in a satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue.
The group recommends that Palestinian refugees from 1948 should be allowed to choose their place of permanent residence, but implementation of that should be subject to the sovereign wishes of the state involved; and an alternative package of full compensation would be offered to those not returning to their original homes and properties in what is now Israel. The total amounts of compensation involved would, the group estimated, come to “between $55 and $85 billion.”
Exploratory work like that– based on updated surveys of the extent of Palestinian property claims against Israel, like those recently produced by Prof. Michael Fischbach here in the US– is really helpful. If a Palestinian-Israeli final peace agreement is to be sustainable, it must of course be sold to a sizeable majority of the people in both national communities, and must provide a basis for the new Palestinian state that is viable in both economic and political terms.
Maybe a formula like that proposed by the Aix Group, which involves overwhelmingly compensation to the refugees rather than actual physical return, could work out. But I believe it only really has a chance of working provided the territorial base of the Palestinian state is broad enough and coherent enough to accommodate Palestinian aspirations for a viable state. That is, it cannot be eaten into in the West Bank by the massive blocs of illegal Israeli settlements, as solidifying the line of the current Israeli “security” barrier into the final state boundary would do. Most of the areas currently occupied by those settlements would therefore have to come under the authority of the Palestinian state.
In addition, a permanent passage between the West Bank and Gaza needs to be assured. Completely free interaction between Palestine and the world economy– notably, NOT an interaction mediated always through Israel, as in the Oslo formula– needs to be guaranteed. And of course, a workable formula needs to be found for Jerusalem.
Much of the work of brainstorming possible formulas on all these issues has already been done. You can see a survey of proposals on Jerusalem, for example, in the 2004 book on the Israeli-Palestinian question that I worked on, along with a group of fellow Quakers from around the world.
Mainly at this point, what is needed is for the leaderships on both sides to show that they really are committed to finding a robust and sustainable solution that meets the needs of all the people iinvolved– around 8 million-plus Palestinians and 7 million-plus Israelis– sufficiently fairly.
Given that gross population data, an outcome that ends up giving the Palestinian state a land base that is in any significant way inferior to the 23% of Mandate Palestine that makes up the West Bank and Gaza, would seem very far from able to meet this requirement.
So there’s a lot of work to do at the bilateral level. And a lot of hard decisions that the US government will need to take, especially regarding the degree to which it plans to continue underwriting Israeli intransigence in this peacemaking.
There are also numerous other regional issues that need to be addressed. To see my comments on some of them, read my previous post here.

Annapolis guessing game, prospects

The current guessing game in the US and Israel is over “which of the Arab states will participate, and at which level.”
Actually, for many ardent pro-Israelis inside and outside the two governments, those questions about Arab representation are the sole focus of their concern about Annapolis, rather than, as good sense would dictate: “What is the best way to ensure that this gathering contributes to the speedy conclusion of sustainable final-status peace agreements between Israel and all their neighbors?”
There is very frequently a sort of “scalp-collecting” aspect to the way many Israelis, inside and outside of government, think about the possibility of encounters with Arab state nationals.
But anyway, the biggest questions right now about attendance at Annapolis are those over the responses of Syria and Saudi Arabia These two will be among the Arab states that are sending their foreign ministers to Cairo for an all-Arab confab tomorrow, at which many Arabs hope they will be able to find that long-sought Holy Grail, a “unified Arab position.”
AP’s Zeina Karam has a good report from Damascus today, in which she presents the evidence backing up her lead, which is “Syria is softening its refusal to attend the Annapolis peace conference and already has won dividends.”
And Al-Hayat’s Ibrahim Hamidi has an interesting report (in Arabic) in today’s paper, explaining the various strands of analysis that have been pursued by government insiders in Damascus.
People seeking a rendering of Hamidi’s article in English are strongly advised not to rely on the version presented by the usually sound young US professor Joshua Landis, who for some reason seems to have pasted in a commentary on the Hamidi report from elsewhere– most likely, the Israeli press– instead of presenting his English-language readers with the promised direct translation of it.
It is Thanksgiving here in the US, so I can only imagine that Landis just quickly used that commentary instead of working on his own translation of the piece. But the result is very inaccurate and misleading.
There is so much finegrained diplomacy going on around the question of the prospects for Annapolis that I don’t have time to assess it all here. I will just quickly note the following:

the lead-up to the Madrid Peace conference of October 31, 1991

“play off” the Syrians against the Palestinians

my 2000 book

Lebanon is currently poised on the brink of constitutional disaster.

all

And now, back to revising Chapter 4 of my current book project…
(Neither Bill nor I have time to cook a turkey today. We’re having our Thanksgiving meal at restaurant. Personally, I feel I have a lot to give thanks for this year. But the performance of the US Congress leaders we all helped elect a year ago is sadly nowhere near the top of that list.)

Somalia: Worse than ever? Worse than Darfur?

What will end up being the most serious indictment on the charge-sheet leveled against the Bush administration for its reckless mishandling of foreign policy since 2001? Oh my! So hard to tell. The candidates for this sad honor are legion.
But we’ll have to put Somalia on the list somewhere. Somalia where, you’ll remember, in November and December 2006 the Bushites plotted with the government of Ethiopia and other parties to launch a massively armed assault against the body that was just then, however tenuously, starting to bring some order to Mogadishu and other areas of the country…
That was the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a body that– like the Taliban in Afghanistan– had found a unifying Islamist ideology that helped its supporters to rebuild some social solidarity within a country riven by ferocious and mega-lethal warlordism.
In late November 2006, the wise analysts of the International Crisis Group warned the US of the expected, very escalatory consequences of an impending US decision to arm and support the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.
The Bushites went ahead anyway.
Things went violently awry from almost the very beginning of the Ethiopian occupation of much of Somalia that ensued.
Today, the NYT’s Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Somalia that,

higher malnutrition rates, more current bloodshed and fewer aid workers than Darfur

Today, too, the spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Jennifer Pagonis, announced in Geneva that the number of displaced people in Somalia, population nine million, has now risen to one million.
She added that,

nearly 200,000 of them in the past two weeks alone

Now, I am quite certain that, when the Bushites discuss and then authorize various military actions around the world, they do not intend that those actions end up inflicting massive harm on large populations of non-Americans. But look at the record! Look at Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia today. (Or look at the US-authorized prolongation of Israel’s assault against Lebanon last year.)
These are almost unbelievably reckless and harmful operations.
Someone needs to rein in the militarists who have taken over the White House– and also, I fear, far too much of rest of the US political elite. Mainly, it is the responsibility of the rest of the US citizenry– the anti-militarists amongst us– to do this. But it would be great if we could also count on a ready and capable United Nations, and a coalition of the world’s other, non-US powers to help us turn the tide of history away from mindless militarism and back toward a real commitment to using non-military ways to resolve the many conflicts among the peoples of the world.
So many such ways exist! And the UN could be– if the other powers really wanted to make it so– a powerful vehicle for diverting the energies of governments, including my government, away from violence and back toward the really constructive work of negotiation, peacebuilding, and reconciliation.
Pray for the people of Somalia tonight. And then tomorrow, let’s resume the campaign to do all we can to save the world from the forces of militarism.
By the way, this is Reliefweb’s excellent portal to the latest news of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia.

Any hope for Annapolis?

I would be so happy if the planned Annapolis meeting between Israel and the Palestinians succeeded.
But succeeded at what? At orchestrating a pretty photo-opportunity? No, that would be no particular cause for joy, given the number of times such photo-ops have been staged in the past and– crucially– the role they have played in both substituting for any tangible progress in the peacemaking, and also masking the absence of such progress.
Succeeded at getting one side to make, unreciprocated, a declaration publicly “demanded” from it by the other side?
No, that would not constitute any meaningful success either, since it would augur so poorly for the future success of the peacemaking…
Right now, the only success that counts is the success of peacemaking: That is, visible progress toward the speedy conclusion of final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine— and also, a final peace between Israel and Syria. That’s the prize we should all keep our eyes on.
Yes, it needs to be progress towards a final peace, because both Israelis and Palestinians had the emotion-churning experience in the 1990s of seeing the strong focus on interim agreements, that were described in the deeply flawed Oslo process as being “steps on the path to a final peace,” instead drain energy and momentum out of the search for that final peace.
That was the particular “contribution” to the process made by the failed diplomatist Dennis Ross, who since I first met him in the mid-1980s argued endlessly that the Israelis and Palestinians would need a long interim period in order to “build confidence” before they could muster the political will required to negotiate a final peace. Instead of which, Ross’s shepherding throughout the Clinton years of the implementation of his flawed– and, I might add, extremely self-serving and one-sided– formula led only to the intense disillusionment of nearly a whole generation of the former “peaceniks” on both sides of the Green Line… To a rise in frustrations on both sides… To ever-tighter restrictions on the Palestinians’ freedom of movement… And to the continued expansion of the illegal Israeli settlement project in the occupied West Bank.
For example, look at the post-1993 increase in the settler populations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem columns of this table. Under international law E. Jerusalem is actually a part of the West Bank, so I don’t know why those folks put them in separate columns there. But if you do the math you can see that the population in both columns combined increased from 264.4K in 1993 to 443K in 2005, an increase of 68%. Lucky settlers: gobbling up all those yummy US-taxpayer-assisted subsidies along with the Palestinians’ land and resources!
(Amazingly, some people have even recently been “mentioning” Dennis as a possible high-level foreign-policy official in a post-2009 democratic administration. Does no-one even look at his actual past performance?)
Oh, and the GDP per capita in Israel as a whole skyrocketed during the years after Oslo, thanks to the opening of massive new markets, especially in East Asia and especially for weapons, that was inaugurated by that agreement.
So please, 14 years after Oslo, let’s have no more talk of “interim” agreements.
I am slightly reassured by the fact that the Bushites seem not to have given way to that temptation (yet.) On the other hand, they have not yet projected anything like the degree of vision and commitment that they’ll need if they really want to bring about the signing of the final peace agreement before Bush leave office in January 2009.
So yes, I would be extremely happy if a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland could bring closer the conclusion of a sustainable, that is, “fair enough”, final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine.
(Okay, I’m a little troubled by the symbolism of Annapolis itself, which after all is the location of the officers’ academy for the major instrument of US armed power around the world; but apart from that, I guess it’s a nice enough seaside location…)
I would be happy if Annapolis truly succeeded, because I know how badly the parties to the dispute– but most especially, at this point, the Palestinians– have been suffering. I would be happy because I know that military occupation is always an extremely oppressive and unjust situation, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan has gone for more than 40 years now: far, far too long. I would be happy because the prolongation of the state of occupation has sown fear and violence in far too many hearts both sides of the line. Large proportions of the people on both sides live in a state of fearfulness that is itself injurious to them, and that also leads to their support for continuing acts of violence. All those wounds need to be healed, and they cannot be healed so long as the inequitable situation of one country ruling over the other is ended.
However, like the vast majority of my Israeli and Palestinian friends, I have harbored high hopes of imminent diplomatic success before– and on every previous occasion I’ve seen those hopes dashed. For many people, that can even be a worse experience than not having any hopes at all. To be honest, regarding Annapolis, despite the intensity of my desire that this might– finally!– be the turning point on the road to real success, I also struggle with the analytical side of me that, looking as coolly and objectively as I can at the facts on the ground (including here), does not really see them pointing in a hopeful direction.
Yet.
I am still waiting to be pleasantly surprised and am open to the possibility that might happen.
Among some of the disturbing pieces of recent evidence:

averring

Israel’s introduction of this new “as a Jewish state” rubric has generally been understood in the US MSM as underlining Israel’s refusal to allow any of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, or their descendants, to return to their ancestral properties in what has been Israel for 59 years. But it is also a rubric of great significance within Israeli society, since many of the 25% or so of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish– most of them ethnic Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the rest Russians– prefer the idea, common in democratic countries, that Israel should be “the state of its citizens.”
Anyway, for Olmert to require Mahmoud Abbas to jump through this recently introduced hoop even before serious negotiations can start, is not a good sign. And why do we hear nothing from the party that seeks to present itself as a “neutral” mediator in these talks, telling Olmert and the Israelis that the introduction of this hoop is very unhelpful indeed?
(I wonder what would happen if Abbas stated publicly that he would require Israel to recognize Palestine’s “right to exist as a Muslim state” before he would even negotiate?)
Anyway, a mediator in such a situation could, if truly committed to moving rapidly toward a sustainable final peace agreement, certainly find ways to “mediate” and find creative ways to sequence and link all the cross-cutting demands and concerns voiced by the two sides.
And I guess that is the final, and perhaps biggest, cause for my current concern: I am not yet seeing anything from the Bush administration that indicates any such degree of commitment.
I realize the “structure” of this negotiation would be hard for any mediator to deal with. There is one very strong party currently sitting on the neck of a very weak party. Both the contending parties, moreover, have considerable bodies of supporters elsewhere… But the particular challenge for Washington is that the weak party’s main external supporters are in a part of the world that is very important to the US– while the strong party’s main external supporters are within the US political system itself.
And this, in a US election year in which, though George W. Bush himself is not a candidate, still his party will presumably not want him to gratuitously diminish their chances of success.
So maybe, as I’ve argued for a long time now, the US really is just about the most unsuitable choice one could imagine for a successful “mediator” in this situation. In which case, the decent thing to do would be to resign from the task and hand it over to a party that can get the job done both speedily and sustainably.
But so long as they hang onto the task, I guess I shall just have to wait for them to prove me wrong…

Yet more Americo-myopia on Pakistan

… This time it comes from veteran warmonger Fred Kagan and (imho, sadly) Brookings’s Michael O’Hanlon, writing in today’s NYT.
In a sense, the title of their op-ed says it all:

Pakistan’s collapse, Our Problem

I beg your pardon? Wouldn’t a collapse of government power in Pakistan be in the first instance a massive problem for its own 160 million people?
No hint of that in the K&O’H text.
But also, no hint that a collapse of government power in Pakistan– a country that has a nuclear arsenal estimated to contain 24-48 HEU warheads and perhaps 3-5 plutonium warheads– would pose a massive challenge to everyone in the world. And most especially those sizeable and well-armed nations that are its neighbors. Like India. Like Russia. Like China. Not to mention Afghanistan and a host of other very vulnerable countries in that region…
The US homeland is, by contrast, located almost exactly on the other side of the world.
What on earth is it with the hubris of so many US “strategic analysts”? That they think that US is in some way “uniquely” threatened by developments in distant Pakistan? That those developments are therefore somehow “uniquely” a problem for the US. And therefore, that it is the US, alone, that needs to figure out how to “respond”?
K&O’H lead their piece thus:

our feasible military options

Then, as the piece unfolds, there is, I swear, not even a word of recognition that the possible loosening of the controls the Pakistani government may have (even if, who knows, imperfectly) on the country’s nuclear arsenal and production and research facilities could be a threat to anyone else except the US!
Similarly, there is no recognition that any other power, apart from the US, might be part of a pro-stability political-diplomatic process/solution in Pakistan. This, though the two authors go to great lengths to game-plan out various scenarios for– you guessed it– unilateral US military action aimed at securing, at the very least, Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.
Reading the piece, I was amazed and saddened to see the degree to which such authors– okay, well specifically, Michael O’Hanlon, whose expertise and judgment in military-strategic matters I had until recently held in quite a degree of respect– can just simply assume that the prospect of internal collapse is a problem only for the US.
And why would the op-ed page editors of the NYT publish a piece expressing such an amazingly Americo-myopic worldview? Wouldn’t a smart and informed editor insist on asking the question, “Hey guys, maybe you should put in something about a few other actors and not just the US?”
But no. Apparently, all of them now live inside this incredibly self-bounded, self-referential, and provincial little Americo-bubble whose inhabitants don’t even really grasp, let alone give any public acknowledgment of, the idea that there are many other countries and people in the world who all also have their own interests and capabilities… And that, indeed, on a world scale, the US makes up less than 5% of the world’s people, and has no valid claim whatsoever to act “on behalf of” the whole world community in a matter of truly global concern such as this one.
I guess 15-plus years of drumbeating rhetoric about US “leadership” in the world has left as an effect a lot of US people who think that the unexamined “fact” of US leadership gives the US an equally unexamined “right” to act on behalf of the world community whenever and wherever it pleases around the world.
Sad. And very, very shortsighted.
I guess I find O’Hanlon’s descent into this very childish kind of Americo-myopia particularly discouraging since, as I noted, until recently I saw him as much more realistic and objective an analyst than the sad old (or young-old) warmonger Fred Kagan.
So yes, we really do need to have a serious, globe-circling discussion of the very destabilizing situation that several decades of bad US policy– along with other factors– have brought both Afghanistan and Pakistan to today. But please, let that not be a discussion based on the childish, “me”-centered assumptions of Americo-myopia.

Exciting Swiss diplomacy on Iran-nuclear issue

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told reporters in Saudi Arabia that he will be discussing with the Gulf Arab countries a plan (that they had proposed earlier) enrich uranium for their projected nuclear power program in a neutral country “such as Switzerland.”
The plan earlier proposed by the six (all-Arab) members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was for the establishment of a consortium for this purpose that could provide nuclear fuel to Iran and any other Middle East states (though perhaps not including Israel?), who might be planning their own nuclear power programs.
Ahmadinejad’s confirmation of interest in the GCC proposal, and his naming of Switzerland as the possible location for this project, are both very significant. Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had suggested that his country could provide uranium-enrichment services for Iran, but that proposal got nowhere. As I recall, that was due in good part to the opposition of Washington; but Ahmadinejad was only lukewarm about it, too.
Interesting if this time around, he is signaling a much greater degree of interest in this outsourcing proposal…
Switzerland’s involvement in the current plan is interesting. On its face, it would seem not to portend the formation of a potentially hostile anti-US bloc, as the idea of Russian involvement did for many people. Also, I imagine the GCC countries would be a lot happier to have Switzerland host the enrichment project (and to put their money into the project there), than to have that all happen in Russia.
Also this weekend, Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey confirmed that her country is actively pursuing a plan to engage the US and Iran in direct negotiations. According to that link, which is to an AP story in the IHT, Calmy-Rey told a Swiss weekly paper that her country’s long-held tradition of neutrality in international relations,

Switzerland has, of course, handled consular affairs between Iran and the US ever since the two broke off relations in 1979. But the new diplomatic role Calmy-Rey is carving out for her country seems to go far beyond the provision of such purely technical services.
All power to her!
The AP story also notes that Calmy-Rey,

recognizes the right to use the technology for peaceful purposes.

That has been, of course, the sticking point in the current international conflict over Iran’s nuclear program. The US, Israel and a handful of other countries, including France and the UK, have been very strongly opposed to Iran gaining a working nuclear program even for power generation, arguing that it could too easily be converted to a program to develop nuclear weapons (which the US, Israel, the UK, and France all already have, and show no signs whatever of giving up.)
If the fuel enrichment for Iran’s nuclear power program can be done outside Iran, that makes the “conversion/diversion” danger much, much smaller.
Ahmadinejad’s apparently strong expression of interest in the GCC proposal looks remarkably statesmanly. It is also some pretty smart diplomacy. Especially at a time when the US has been rushing around trying to enroll all the Arab states into its drum-beating, anti-Iran “crusade” (oops, sorry, make that “campaign.”)
I should just reiterate at this point the judgment I have held to for a long time now, that though many Arab states have misgivings– some of them quite strong ones– about Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East, still, they all without exception fear the fallout from any possible US-Israeli military attack against Iran much, much more, and are willing to work hard to avert such an attack.
So maybe the Switzerland-GCC plan is a good way in which the tension over Iran’s nuclear program can be de-escalated, and relations between Teheran and Washington returned to a much more even and less globally destabilizing a tone.
Let’s hope so!
However, many of those who have been agitating hardest for a US (and/or US-Israeli) military strike against Iran can be expected to be upset about this. This is particularly the case of all those who urged such a strike not, basically, because of their fears about Iran’s nuclear program, but because they sought regime change in Tehran and have been prepared to rack up and use the issue of the Iranian nuclear program in order to “justify” the military attack.
But if the GCC-Swiss proposal can verifiably meet people’s concerns regarding the Iranian nuclear program, it should be welcomed by everyone.
Meanwhile, Calmy-Rey is 1,000% correct to continue to push her campaign for the opening of serious direct talks between the US and Iran. Only through the direct contacts between these two parties, and the concomitant establishment of an all-party, Iraq-plus-all-its neighbors-plus-the-UN-and-the-US negotiation can the US ever hope for an orderly withdrawal of its troops from the continuing quagmire in Iraq.
All the rest of the world also desperately needs the US-Iran relationship to stabilize.

On desertions and conscientious objection

The rate of desertions from the US army “skyrocketed” during the 12-month period ending September 30, according to this report in the semi-official Army Times. Reporter William McMichael noted that 4,698 soldiers were declared deserters during that year (which, in US government parlance is known as “Fiscal Year 2007”.)
He wrote that that was a 42.3% increase over FY2006– and “More disturbingly, the pace of Army desertions appears to have increased even during fiscal 2007: 63.6 percent of the year’s 4,698 desertions were recorded from April through September, according to Army data.”
He added this:

On a related (though dissimilar) note, I want to once again draw attention to the website of Quaker House, in Fayetteville, NC, which counsels individuals seeking to register their conscientious objection to participation in war. The website has been upgraded a lot over the past couple of years: it has a large amount of very informative material on it.
Including the numbers for the “G.I. Rights Hotline”: +1-877-447-4487 (toll-free) and +1-919-663-7122.
One of the cases Quaker House worked on was the application of Jeremy Hinzman for asylum in Canada, on the grounds that he would face persecution in the US on account of his (mid-service) application for CO status in 2002 and his subsequent refusal to be shipped to Iraq. Yesterday, however, the relevant court in Canada turned down the asylum applications from Hinzman and fellow CO, Brandon Hughey, and today the Candian Supreme Court refused to hear the two men’s appeal against that judgment.
These are tragic stories that involve serious issues of principle as well as families bing torn apart and men being punished for trying to follow the dictates of their conscience.
All the more reason, then, to strengthen the campaign to bring the troops home now and– most certainly– not to launch the US military into yet another (quite avoidable) military maelstrom any time soon, or indeed ever. War wreaks terrible things on everyone who is involved in it, whichever end of the gun barrel they stand.