Washington, Iraq, Darfur…

I’ve been working so hard on my book about violence in Africa that I haven’t had time to blog much these past few days. The list I keep of “things I should blog about” has grown alarmingly long…
So to read some of my quick reflections about recent world events, click the “Continue reading” link below…

1. The 9/11 Commission:
2. The U.S. Army’s report on detainee operations.
3. Rumblings against Iran:
4. Meanwhile, regarding Darfur…
1. The 9/11 Commission: I barely had time to read the main news reports on this, let alone the whole of the report. I thought the line that Commission Co-chairs Kean and Hamilton made quite a big deal out of–that the success of the 9/11 attack represented a failure of “imagination” was a little diversionary… It didn’t really take imagination as such to surmise that such an attack might be possible. More like an ability to connect the already existing dots, and perhaps to project beyond the “known” just a little bit. But a far-reaching “imagination”? No, not really.
I was also interested to see that in today’s WaPo, Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus have focused on the conclusions that the report notably didn’t reach:

Conspicuously absent from Thursday’s final report of the Sept. 11 commission was any judgment on the most pressing policy debate of the Bush presidency: Was the invasion of Iraq a crucial part of — or a distraction from — the fight against terrorism?
This was no oversight. Commissioners quickly concluded in their deliberations that any judgment on the wisdom of the Iraq war would scuttle their hope to present unanimous judgments.

By the way, thanks to Juan Cole and others for passing on this link to an on-line, HTML version of the whole report.
2. The U.S. Army’s report on detainee operations. This was also released on Thursday–amid broad suspicions that the Army had timed that so it would get lost in all the media fuss about #1 above.
What the Army did was (!) investigate itself, and to probably nobody’s surprise it came out with a really anodyne report that amazingly managed to estimate the total number of people whose rights were violated in Army-run detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan at a grand total of “94”.
I was actually interested in reading the text of the report. I went to to this page, run by the Army. on it there are two things that purport to be links to a PDF version of the full report; but they sure didn’t work for me.
Anyway, what that page does do is tell you everything that Army Inspector-General’s Report, such as this one, can not do…

The report does not name names or identify units.. Inspector General inspections are not investigations… the results of a Report of Investigation (ROI) cannot be used to punish the individual. In fact, Army Inspector General records cannot be used to punish, reward, compare, or evaluate anyone…

So basically, it’s kind of a make-work program for Army I-G Paul Mikolashek, not a serious, holding-anyone-accountable kind of an exercize.
I was pleased to see that both the NYT and the WaPo had good strong editorials yesterday that rejected this pathetic report. The WaPo‘s said, inter alia:

The army’s attempt to hold itself accountable for the abuse of foreign prisoners is off to a terrible start. On Thursday, while the media and political worlds were focused on the report of the Sept. 11 commission, the Army inspector general released a 300-page summary of an investigation of “detainee operations” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though it identified 94 cases of confirmed or possible abuse, including 20 prisoner deaths, the probe concluded by sounding the defense offered up by the Pentagon ever since the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison were published: that the crimes did not result from Army policy and were not the fault of senior commanders but were “unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals.”
… To the credit of Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), the Senate Armed Services Committee quickly assembled for a hearing on the Army report, despite the not-so-subtle timing of its release, and some Republican as well as Democratic senators rightly voiced incredulity at the Army’s findings. They pointed out that, while identifying no “systemic failures” in the military, the inspector general’s team chose not to investigate such episodes as the hiding of “ghost detainees” from the Red Cross — a Geneva Convention violation that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has publicly stated was authorized by him. Nor did the investigation explore the handling of Red Cross reports by the staff of the Iraq commander in chief, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez — which, rather than acting to stop abuses, reportedly tried to restrict further Red Cross access. In fact, no one above the rank of brigade commander was considered culpable, the inspector general candidly told the senators. “We think it ended there,” said Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek.
Really? That’s hard to square with the general’s own report…
The senators who rejected this whitewash were correct: It is implausible and unacceptable. If the reputation and integrity of the Army are to be restored, some other authority will need to do better.

Well, once again, kudos to John Warner, who is one of our two senators from Virginia. (He was once married to Liz Taylor. Maybe that helped him develop a sense of courage and steadfastness?)
3. Rumblings against Iran: There have, of course, been various such rumblings, over a long period of time, in the US media and policy circles. Then last week, I was interested to hear the tone of the kinds of statements the new Iraqi “Foreign Minister”, Hoshyar Zobari, was making during a visit to Cairo…
He was speaking, as I recall, to a gathering of the other FM’s of Arab league states. What he was saying, as I recall, was something along the lines of, “Well, you guys better stop helping the people who are destabilizing Iraq because remember, we could also do the same to you.”
Zobari, remember, is Iraq’s first Kurdish Foreign Minister… Given the plethora of reports about the freedom of action that Israeli special-ops people have inside Iraqi Kurdistan, maybe Zobari’s threats would not have been heard in Cairo as idle ones…
But Prime Minister Iyad Allawi seemed to be taking a somewhat different tack in his communications with Iraq’s neighbors. The July 22 edition of the Iraqi Press Monitor cited an undated, recent issue of Al-Adalah as reporting of Allawi that,

He said his government tended to solve the problems through transparent and open dialogue which kept in mind the interests of the entire region. He added that Iraq has started a new phase of good relations with its neighbouring states.

The July 23 edition of IPM cited the 21 July issue of Al-Adalah, which they describe as issued by the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, as running an editorial stating:

We have called upon our neighbours to prevent infiltrators from crossing borders, and warned them that terrorism would keep spreading and might include them. We believe dialogue is the best means of fighting dangers and the Cairo meeting is evidence that everyone has felt the danger. We see that our neighbours have changed and become closer to us. Now they realise that it is in everyone’s interest to have a dialogue after they closed its door for more than a year. Hence, it is not right to deal with our neighbours according to the logic of threats. We cannot call for cooperation from others while threatening them. We say to them that we are on the same ship, so we have to steer it safely.

That seems interesting: it seems as though SCIRI is even backing Zobari’s policy veiled threats a bit.
Allawi has been in Syria where, according to the BBC, Prime Minister Naji el Otri assured him that Syria was opposed to any cross-border infiltration.
Before Syria, he was in Egypt and Jordan; and from Damascus he’ll go to Beirut, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
4. Meanwhile, regarding Darfur… The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution Thursday that calls on the administration to call the present series of atrocities in Darfur, “by its rightful name: ‘genocide’.”
The resolution also, “urges the Bush administration to consider ‘multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide should the United Nations Security Council fail to act’.”
Now, what kind of an “intervention” would that be, I wonder? Talking of which, I am really, really sad that the new organization faithful America has been mobilizing heavily around the “let’s ‘intervene’ in Darfur” issue. Once again, in their communications, they talk about “humanitarian intervention” when what they mean is, I think, war.
(If they don’t mean ‘war”, then I’d be very happy indeed to stand corrected.)
There’s quite a lot of continuing bad news out of Darfur–as from many other, much less publicized parts of the world. But among some non-bad items worth noting are the following:
(a) My good friend Francis Deng, who’s Kofi Annan’s Special Rep on IDPs, has just started a visit to Darfur. Francis, who’s a Dinka from South Sudan has the experience and the wisdom–if anyone has–to see what can be done to bring about a rapid improvement in the situation.
(b) The leaders of two key rebel groups in Darfur have reportedly agreed to start political talks with the Khartoum government to resolve the political dispute at the heart of their insurgency and the current crisis. These groups are the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). Officials from the African Union and the UN–headed by Annan’s Special Advisor on Africa, Mahammed Sahnoun–have helped broker the agreement-to-negotiate.
Both of the above items, btw, came from ReliefWeb. Always worth checking there.