Author: Helena

Text of the draft Iraq-US SOFA

On August 31, Al-Sharq al-Awsat published a leaked version of the nearly completed text US-Iraqi security (SOFA) agreement. That text was dated August 4. Raed Jarrar of the American Friends Service Committee worked over the weekend providing a full translation into English, which you can read on AFSC’s website, here.
Great work, Raed!
Yesterday, Raed also blogged a translation of an important interview with Iraqi parliament Speaker Dr. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani explaining that the Iraqi parliament must ratify any such agreement– but why, in fact, it is quite unable to do that at this time.
So there is a sort of unreal aspect to all the discussion of clauses and sub-clauses in the draft “text” of the treaty. (As I have been arguing here for a long time now. Most recently, here.)
Indeed, the Iraqis side has had the “upper hand” in the negotiations for at least the past 2-3 months. All the talk in the US political elite about the US being able to ram the US’s “conditions” down the throats of the Iraqis is just that– talk. It has zero basis in reality.
Still, there are a number of mildly interesting points in the August 6 negotiating draft. Most of them come toward the end. And most are the points where lack of agreement is still indicated, rather than agreement.
For example, this:

    Article Twenty Seven
    Contract Validity
    1- This agreement is valid for (…) years unless it is terminated earlier based on a request from either sides or extended with the approval of both sides.

Oops. Is that the John McCain “100 year” agreement– or maybe just a three-month agreement? They haven’t figured that one out yet!
Or this:

    Article Twenty Six
    Targeted times to handover complete security responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces, and withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq
    Iraqi Suggestion: the Iraqi delegation has suggested the following title to this article:
    Transferring security responsibilities to Iraqi authorities, and the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq
    U.S. Suggestion: the U.S. delegation has suggested combining paragraphs 1 and 2 as follows:
    1- Both sides have agreed on the following time targets to handover complete security responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces and the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq:
    A- U.S. combat troops will withdraw from Iraq completely at the latest on (…)
    B- U.S. forces will withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages at latest by June 30, 2009 unless the Iraqi authorities request otherwise.
    Note: the head of the U.S. delegation offered to accept the new title only if their combined paragraph is accepted, and he linked the two as one deal

Plenty of work for the lawyers there, eh? But then, later in Article 26 comes this:

    6- U.S. forces may withdraw from Iraq before the dates indicated in this article if either of the two sides should so request. Both sides recognize the Iraqi government’s sovereign right to request a withdrawal of U.S. forces at anytime.

Article 23 is interesting:

    Article Twenty three
    Extending this agreement to other countries
    1- Iraq may reach an agreement with any other country participating in the Multi-National forces to ask for their help in achieving security and stability in Iraq.
    2- Iraq is permitted to reach an agreement that includes any of the articles mentioned in this agreement with any country or international organization to ask for help in achieving security and stability in Iraq.

I wonder, in the second clause there, if the agreement would allow Iraq to reach a similar kind of agreement with its friendly large neighbor Iran?
… Well, as I note above, there is an unreal air to this whole exercise. I quite agree with Raed when he writes in his blog:

    Politically, the majority of Iraq’s MPs are against signing any agreements with the US as long as the US is occupying Iraq. It’s impossible for the Maliki government to get the approval of a simple majority of MPs, let alone 2/3 majority.
    I think the US government should consider a different type of agreement with Iraq: an agreement for a complete withdrawal that leaves no troops, no mercenaries, and no permanent bases (and no 5,000 employees embassy either.)

Quite right. And just what I’ve been arguing consistently for, for many years now… And devising semi-detailed plans for, too.
One final point. Most Iraqi parliamentarians have been quite forthright in pursuing their rights, as an elected legislative body, to have rights of ratification before any international agreement of such great impact for the country goes into effect. Back in October 2002, the members of the US legislature faced imminent legislative elections and in those circumstances proved themselves easily cowed by a bellicose and overbearing administration… And they simply rolled over and gave the president the widest possible authorization to conduct any kind of operations against Iraq up to and including a full-blown war of invasion and occupation.
Which is how we got to where we are in Iraq, in the first place.
This fall, in the lead-up to yet another momentous round of US elections, let’s hope the members of the US Congress keep their heads and don’t allow themselves to be cowed into giving the president any permissions for either war-making or occupation-prolongation, such as would later turn out to be dangerous traps for our country.

HRW revising its Russian cluster bomb accusations

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch started to step back from the claims it made very loudly last month that during the fighting in Georgia,”Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia, killing at least 11 civilians and injuring dozens.” Those claims were first made August 15, and were repeated in two further public statements issued by the organization, this one on August 21 and this one on September 1. In addition, individual HRW staff members repeated these accusations against Russia– which it claimed were backed up by solid “evidence”– in a number of other signed articles, media appearances, etc.
I blogged here, on September 2, about the flawed nature of the “evidence” HRW had used in its accusations against Russia, and the impact that such accusations can have on raising tensions and galvanizing opinion for war. (Cf., the “Kuwaiti incubator story” of 1991.)
Yesterday’s statement was titled Clarification Regarding Use of Cluster Munitions in Georgia. Referring only to its report of August 21 on this matter, not the earlier August 15 report, it said:

    On August 21, 2008, Human Rights Watch reported a series of attacks with cluster munitions around four towns and villages in Georgia’s Gori district. Human Rights Watch attributed all the strikes to Russian forces, but upon further investigation has concluded that the origin of the cluster munitions found on August 20 in two of the villages – Shindisi and Pkhvenisi – cannot yet be determined.
    …This clarification does not affect Human Rights Watch’s findings on August 15 that Russia used aerial cluster bombs to attack the village of Ruisi and the town of Gori on August 12. Eleven civilians were killed and dozens more injured in these two locations. In Ruisi, Human Rights Watch researchers found submunitions that they identified as PTAB 2.5M, which are known to be in Russia’s arsenal. Human Rights Watch based its findings on visual identification of the submunitions and the cluster bomb carrier in Ruisi, craters typical of submunition impact, and accounts from Georgian victims in both towns, as well as doctors and military personnel. The Russian government has yet to adequately respond to these findings.

What caused HRW to step back from the accusations regarding Shindisi and Pkhvenisi had been, the statement said, communications “from the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (NDRE), based on Human Rights Watch’s photographs.” The NDRE had identified the submunitions in the photographs as “M85 DPICMs, which have not been reported to be part of Russia’s arsenal.”
On August 31, as HRW told us September 1, the government of Georgia informed them that it had had a stockpile of ground rocket-launched cluster munitions that contained M85 submunitions. The Georgian government also told HRW it had used some cluster bombs “during an attack on Russian military forces near the Roki tunnel.” That tunnel is at South Ossetia’s northern border, quite a long way away from Gori.
It occurs to me that one explanation for what HRW’s witnesses in the Gori area saw is that the Russian aircraft might have blown up some of Georgia’s cluster bombs stockpiled in the area.. In HRW’s August 21 statement, and in the latest “Clarification”, the eye-witnesses to the attacks are quoted as saying that “Russian air strikes on Georgian armored units located near Shindisi and Pkhvenisi were followed by extensive cluster munition strikes that killed at least one civilian and injured another in Shindisi.” Would this description not be consonant with (a) the Russians having bombed ground targets in these areas– hopefully only legitimate military targets, and then (b) some of those strikes, hitting units equipped with cluster bombs, had caused secondary explosion of those cluster bomb munitions?
I looked at the video of one such attack that HRW has on its site, and this could be an explanation of what I was seeing.
If this is what happened– and I would welcome any comments on that from experts– then it’s very tragic. Well, whatever the explanation, it’s very tragic for all those noncombatants who were hit.
I note, though, that HRW’s “Clarification” is still far from satisfactory. It still maintains that the submunitions found in Ruisi and in Gori itself were of the the (Russian-owned) PTAB 2.5M type– though it gives us absolutely none of the evidence on which this finding is based. The photos of submuntions in the August 21 statement– published with no provenance given, though they seem to have been from Shindisi or Pkhvenisi– had been identified in the text as “Russian” too, though as NDRE noted, they actually were not.
So we still need to see HRW’s “evidence” regarding Ruisi and Gori.
The latest “Clarification” is also insufficient in the following ways:

    1. It expresses no apology to the Russians or anyone else for the inaccurate nature of the organization’s earlier allegations against the government of Russia. Indeed, it explicitly states its continued support for the allegations made on August 15, regarding Russian cluster-munition attacks in Ruisi and Gori– even though it also says it will “continue its investigation into the use of cluster munitions in Shindisi and elsewhere by all sides during the armed conflict.” So presumably that means it will continue its (re-)investigation into what happened in Ruisi and Gori. … But even before those investigations are completed, HRW still maintains a defiant, accusatory attitude toward Russia (but not Georgia), saying, “The Russian government has yet to adequately respond to [HRW’s allegations regarding Rusisi and Gori].”
    2. It says nothing about any internal investigation, within HRW, into the issue of how the organization could have earlier gotten the facts so very wrong about Shindisi and Pkhvenisi. Without such a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation, why should anyone believe what they say…. on anything?

HRW remains a frustratingly unaccountable organization, as I noted in my September 1 post.

International tensions and the US election

Many parts of the world stand on the brink of major new escalations that could erupt before the day of the US elections, November 4. I would include in that list Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia, and Ukraine. Doubtless there are more, too.
I’ve been trying to think through what the effects of such escalations might be on the US elections. I reckon almost any of them– with the important exception of Iraq— would tend to strengthen the electoral appeal of John McCain, who “promises” the US voters that he’ll be tough, will stand up to aggressors, has military experience, etc.
Iraq is an exception to that rule because McCain has been running very strongly on the argument that he was “right” about the Surge, and that Obama was quite wrong to oppose it.
If there are escalations or problems inside Iraq that are of a scale to become relevant in the US elections, then that could damage McCain, given how tightly he has lashed himself to the mantra of that the Surge has “succeeded.” It would also raise for US voters the even bigger question that McCain has tried to distract them from, which was the question of the advisability of the US having invaded Iraq at all.
But what if there is a major new outbreak of violence in Iraq and also in some other global trouble spot? Then, things could get really complicated…
At one level, the result of the US election will make a difference to the prospects of world peace that is less than many Obama supporters might hope. There are serious structural limitations on the ability of any US president to even maintain the present levels of overseas deployment of US forces– let alone, his ability to launch new wars or aggressions. Whoever is president will most likely have to find a way to withdraw in some sort of good order from Iraq within the next three years– and also, to find a way to “internationalize” the challenge of governing in Afghanistan. John McCain is not totally incapable of summoning the requisite diplomatic skills. Indeed, I can see a scenario in which he could be the “De Gaulle” or “Nixon” figure who is aboe to sell significant a significant pullback of global power to the US citizenry precisely because of his previous image as a tough guy.
Nonetheless, I think Obama shows more of the “reframing” and rethinking skills that are needed in global affairs, at this prtesent po0nt. And at the level of domestic policies I strongly prefer his approach over John McCain’s.
Anyway, the two months ahead will be a sensitive time in world affairs. Let’s see what happens.

Iraq: Another Quaker in the ‘Red Zone’

The best-known U.S. Quaker to have undertaken a peace-witnessing mission inside post-invasion Iraq was Tom Fox, the widely loved member of Christian Peacemaker Teams who was killed there in early 2006. From my own personal experience, I know there are many Quakers, all around the world, who are working in different ways to help restore the rights of the Iraqi people, to provide humanitarian assistance to them, and/or to end the US occupation of their country.
Now, I can reveal to you that Bob Fonow, whose ‘End of Assignment report’ from his work as the US Embassy’s chief telecoms adviser I shared with you here recently, is also a Quaker. What’s more, shortly after Bob finished his 18-month term working with the Embassy inside the heavily fortified ‘Green Zone’, he returned to Iraq as a private individual, with the aim of trying to mediate an apparently complex set of disputes among shareholders of the country’s largest mobile phone company.
He went on that mission in April. And that time, he was working in what many people call the ‘Red Zone’– that is, the area outside the Green Zone.
Tom Fox and his CPT colleagues made a point of working in the Red Zone.
Bob is a member of the Herndon, Virginia ‘Meeting’ –that is, congregation– of the Religious Society Friends. (The RSF is the official name of the church, though we’ve been called ‘Quakers’ since almost the beginning of the RSF’s emergence as a pacifist Protestant church, back in 17th century England.) He first got in touch with me back in, I think, December, to challenge the assertion I’d made that I thought I was the only Quaker who’s also a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Not so, he said, since he is one, too.
And unlike a number of other Quakers– oh, for some reason Richard Nixon comes to mind– who have strayed pretty far from their connection with their home meeting, Bob has stayed in good touch with, and well grounded by, his meeting.
Bob has now been kind enough to say I can publish here a couple of the short reports that he sent back from the ‘Red Zone’ to members of his home meeting during and right after his late-April stay in the Red Zone. His descriptions of life there, and of the attitudes of the people he met and worked with, are certainly valuable for all of us to read and to reflect on. When he was there was when the US military was trying– using massive amounts of violence and force– to fight its way deep into Sadr City…
In his second letter to the Herndon friends, Bob wrote:

    At an Iraqi government meeting I was asked to attend on Tuesday I heard that several hundred thousand people in Sadr City have no clean water. They are drinking sewage, or water from filthy canals. The city is rat infested from garbage piling up. Electricity is limited to a couple hours a day. Medical services are holding up but US and Iraqi Army units are stopping ambulances. So far in the two weeks since Coalition forces started their attacks 925 Sadr City people have been killed and 2695 wounded. Earlier in the day I was told by one official that US Army snipers are playing games with killing. For a couple hours they are shooting men in the testicles, then a couple hours to the foreheads, and then a couple hours aiming at the heart. I hope this isn’t true, but I hope someone investigates.
    Several Mahdi Army officers visited my host in Baghdad on Tuesday to tell him that they can’t take much more. They are being attacked after calling a truce. They will have to declare all out war in a few days if the attacks don’t stop.
    … How is any more violence going to lead to peace, unless you kill every potential militant in Sadr City – which means hundreds of thousands of men and women? I haven’t yet met any Iraqis or Americans prepared to suggest that alternative. So there has to be a political and diplomatic solution.
    It’s time to stand down the military attack on Sadr City. It’s a useless operation with no strategic utility. There must be a better way.

He concluded like this:

    I’d like to go back to Baghdad, and I don’t want to go back. I want to help but I don’t want to get killed. I don’t know how to reconcile these competing feelings or how to determine the right level of my commitment to Iraq and the people I have learned to understand and like. Time for a clearance committee.

A clearness committee is a mechanism we Quakers use when we face difficult decisions or dilemmas. I hope that in the four months since he wrote about his conflicted feelings in that intimate way, Bob found the clearness he needed.
And now, the whole US citizenry and our government need to look much more seriously for the clearness we all need, at the broader level, regarding Iraq. As Bob wrote, “there has to be a political and diplomatic solution.” It so happens that– as longtime JWN readers are doubtless aware– I have done quite a lot of thinking about what that solution might look like, stretching back more than three years now.
… But now, I am just very happy to let you read the full text of Bob’s two reports from the Red Zone. To read them, just keep on reading or click on the link below. Thanks, Bob– and here’s praying for your safety in your continuing world travels.

Continue reading “Iraq: Another Quaker in the ‘Red Zone’”

HRW’s flawed ‘Research’ on Georgian cluster bombs

On August 15, Human Rights Watch issued a statement— still published on their website without comment– saying its researchers “have uncovered evidence that Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia.” On that same page is a photo of Georgian men standing around a crater pointing to what is described in the caption as “the remnants of an RBK-250 cluster bomb dropped by Russian aircraft on the village of Rusisi…”
This story about “Russia’s use of cluster bombs in Georgia” got huge play in the western MSM, many of whose leading contributors have come to treat HRW with almost oracular reverence.
On August 21, HRW issued another statement on the same subject, adding that despite Russia’s denials that it had used these weapons, its researchers had “documented additional Russian cluster munitions attacks during the conflict in Georgia.”
It turns out, though that the “research” in question was considerably less than expert or thorough, and that HRW’s much-lauded lead “researcher” on this topic, Marc Garlasco, may have fallen victim– or worse– to a Georgian disinformation campaign.
Bernhard of Moon of Alabama is just one of those who’ve been pointing out that the bomb remnants in the photos published by HRW in those two releases are very different from those of a Russian “RBK-250 cluster bomb”, or its submunitions. Indeed, they’re not items of Russian manufacture at all… but Israeli, as can easily by seen by comparing them with stock weapons-ID photos and charts.
However… At some point in late August, the Georgian government finally confessed to HRW that it had used cluster bombs during the recent conflict– and that these had indeed been of Israeli manufacture. That news was posted on the HRW website yesterday, here.
The latest HRW news release does nothing to retract or raise questions about its earlier “reports” about Russian use of cluster bombs in Georgia. Instead it says this:

    In August, Human Rights Watch documented Russia’s use of several types of cluster munitions, both air- and ground-launched, in a number of locations in Georgia’s Gori district, causing 11 civilian deaths and wounding dozens more. Russia continues to deny using cluster munitions.
    “Russia has yet to own up to using cluster munitions and the resulting civilian casualties,” said Garlasco.

So Garlasco is still in good favor at HRW’s New York headquarters, in spite of the clearly flawed nature of his earlier “documentation”?? And the two August reports about Russian use of cluster bombs remain in their original positions on the HRW website, with no clarificatory comment attached?
We need to understand what Garlasco’s original “research” or “documentation” on the cluster-bomb remains in Georgia consisted of.
Here’s what the first of the reports on the HRW website said about the research methodology:

    Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed numerous victims, doctors, and military personnel in Georgia. They examined photos of craters and video footage of the August 12 attack on Gori. Human Rights Watch has also seen a photo of the submunition carrier assembly and nose cone of an RBK-250 bomb in Gori. The Gori video showed more than two dozen simultaneous explosions during the attack, which is characteristic of cluster bombs. Two persons wounded in Gori described multiple simultaneous explosions at the time of the attack. Craters in Gori were also consistent with a cluster strike.
    … Photographic evidence on file with Human Rights Watch shows a civilian in Ruisi holding a PTAB submunition without realizing it could explode at the slightest touch…

So the researchers don’t even claim that they’ve actually traveled to see the cluster bomb remnants in situ, and document where they had been found. All they did was rely on “photographic evidence” about them. All talk about photographic “evidence” is quite meaningless unless we have a well identified provenance for these items. Whose word are we being asked to take that these photos were taken “in Gori” or wherever it was listed as? And whose, that these cluster bombs were seen being delivered “by Russian aircraft”?
Garlasco also considerably– perhaps fatally– undermines his own credibility by stating that the cluster bomb remnant in the photo is that of a “cluster bomb dropped by Russian aircraft”, since the remnant in question not only isn’t Russian but also was not dropped by any aircraft, since its fins have the distinctive curving of the ‘pop-put’ fins of an artillery-launched bomb.
Garlasco seems guilty of, at the very least, considerable professional slipshoddiness as a researcher. And how could his superiors at HRW have accepted– and agreed to publish– as “evidence” for his claims, just a few photos whose provenance, timing, and other attributes have not been thoroughly checked and cross-checked? The professional slipshoddiness at HRW goes considerably higher than just Marc Garlasco. And it also extends to those media outlets that just reproduced all his/HRW’s arguments and claims about “Russian” use of cluster bombs– for which we still have no actual evidence, at all– without interrogating and trying to understand the extremely flimsy nature of the “evidence” he was using.
This incident reminds me a lot of the time in January 1991 when Amnesty International got “used” by the Kuwaiti hasbara machine in Washington to give its stamp of approval to Kuwait’s fabricated story about the Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital. Then, as now– and as very frequently happens when people are trying to beef up public support for a war venture– the “bloody shirt” of the civilian losses inflicted by the other side is waved to try to persuade people of “our side” to support confrontation, escalation, and war.
Was Marc Garlasco used, or did he connive in the Georgian disinformation? Either way, why is he still apparently regarded by HRW-NY as a credible researcher on these matters?
This matters to me because I still sit on the Middle East advisory committee of HRW. HRW’s work in the Middle East has certainly been the location of a lot of disagreement about priorities and policies, but overall the Middle East division has done some excellent, ground-breaking work. Work that has always– with one notable exception, back in November 2006– been painstakingly researched, documented, and reviewed long before it is released for publication.
What happened to that whole extensive documentation and review process this time round? HRW has some very serious questions of methodology and internal procedures that it now needs to address.
Also, HRW, which is one of many organizations around the world calling for greater accountability by all kinds of public bodies, needs to become much more accountable, itself.
The November 2006 incident occurred when the organization rushed out a statement criticizing– on grounds allegedly derived from international humanitarian law– an action of mass nonviolence undertaken by Palestinian organizations in Gaza. I was one of those who prominently and publicly called them out on it, noting that nothing in IHL provided any basis for criticizing the action in question. HRW then took more than three weeks to issue a correction. And when it did so, it did it without fanfare and without even distributing the correction to the whole of the same list that had received the original accusation.
That is not good accountability.
This time around, HRW needs to assemble a high-level team of credible people– not including Marc Garlasco– to investigate the performance of the whole organization regarding these accusations of Russia’s use of cluster bombs, and other aspects of its work during the Russian-Georgian war, and then in a timely manner to issue a public report on what was done well and what was done badly during this work. This report should also contain concrete recommendations regarding methodology and internal procedures, to ensure that slipshod and potentially inflammatory work like that done by Marc Garlasco does not appear in the organization’s name again.
I quite understand that, being a privately-funded organization, HRW has a lot of motivation to have “something to contribute” to the public discussion on the latest issues of the day. They probably think this is necessary in order to keep their funding flowing in. (And it also lets HRW’s leaders appear to be “big players” on the international scene.) But there can be no substitute for careful, painstaking, and thoroughly well documented research. Human rights work should never seek to be “flashy”, and should absolutely never allow itself to become politicized.
Wake up, Ken Roth and the rest of the HRW leadership. This issue is most likely your “Kuwaiti incubator story,” and you need to deal with it effectively, honestly, and well.
And yes, if you invite me to sit on your “Georgia incident special investigation team”, I would be happy to do so.

More on China in Iraq

Last week we learned that China has ‘beaten’ all those bit-champing western oil companies, and has signed a $3 billion deal to help develop Iraq’s al-Ahdab oil field.
It turns out that the relationships that Chinese businesses have with various different sectors of the Iraqi economy is far more extensive than I– or, I suppose, most other Americans– had realized.
Bob Fonow is a veteran IT consultant and trouble-shooter who in March concluded an 18-month term as the U.S. State Department’s “Senior Telecommunications and IT Consultant to the Government of Iraq.” In the End of Assignment Report that he submitted recently, he wrote about the broad presence he saw various Chinese government bodies and corporations as having established throughout Iraq. Fonow, I should note, saw nearly all these relationships as being good for Iraq, as I do; and he urged his former clients at the State Department to continue and strengthen them.
Fonow makes many other very informative points in his report. He has kindly given me permission to publish it. It’s a 14-page PDF document, and since I don’t think I can upload it directly to JWN, I have uploaded it here instead.
He writes,

    Chinese telecommunications companies are selling equipment into every city and province in Iraq. Few, if any, American equipment vendors sell in Iraq outside the Green Zone. Chinese sales people and engineers seem to have freedom of passage. While subject to the same random dangers as everyone in Iraq, they aren’t picked out for immediate assassination at checkpoints. This is a controversial statement, perhaps more anecdotal than based on fact and research. But according to Chinese telecom executives in Iraq the last problem experienced by a Chinese telecom person was a relatively gentle mugging on the way to the airport in October 2007. If you ask MoC [Iraqi Ministry of Communications] officials if the Chinese have freedom of passage they will say no. If you phrase the question another way – why do the Chinese have freedom of passage? – the answer is that their relationships go back to the mid-1990s, and that they are our friends.

This is key, it seems to me. When I was writing here about China’s parallel plans to large amounts of investment into US-occupied Afghanistan, I noted that the security (and therefore the viability) of those vast new projects– which include a copper mining complex, a power plant, and a new nation-spanning railroad– will depend crucially on the fact that the Chinese are not NATO, and have never been associated with the occupation regime that the US and NATO have been running there since 2001.
I found some informative– if slightly dated– background about China’s economic activities in post-2003 Iraq in this article, which was published by Yufeng Mao on the Jamestown Foundation’s website in May 2005.
She wrote:

    Since 2003, China has pursued a two-pronged Iraq policy of promoting Chinese interests while avoiding antagonizing the Untied States. On the one hand, this policy addresses concerns about oil and construction contracts and the desire to use the Iraq crisis to increase Chinese political influence in the Middle East. On the other, China has carefully avoided confrontation with the United States…
    China opposed American intervention in Iraq in 2003 partly because of its substantial economic interests there under Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the years before the war, Beijing actively pursued oil and construction contracts with Iraq under the UN Oil-for-Food program. From China’s perspective, a war in Iraq would substantially hurt Chinese interests since it would result in the loss of Iraqi contracts valued at over one billion U.S. dollars, which in turn would disrupt its oil supply and increase oil prices…
    The American decision to invade also raised concerns among Chinese leaders and analysts that the strong influence of the United States in the Middle East would hinder China’s effort to access economic resources in the region. China’s repeated call for the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis reflects a deep anxiety concerning U.S. domination of Iraq’s economic resources.
    China… jumped on the bandwagon of reconstruction after the war. Beijing’s pledge of $25 million and an agreement to forgive a large part of Iraq’s multi-billion dollar debt made China a significant donor to the country, but this generosity is not motivated by sheer goodwill. Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Shen Guofang explicitly stated that China hoped to forgive some debt owed by Hussein’s regime in order to gain access to the bidding processes on big oil and infrastructure projects.
    Desire to do business in Iraq has contributed to intensified efforts towards improving relations with the new Iraqi authority. The Chinese embassy in Baghdad reopened less than two weeks after the transfer of authority to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004. China offered material assistance for the January election, provided fellowships for Iraqi students to study in China, and is helping to train a small number of Iraqi technicians, management personnel, and diplomats. For example on April 1, 2005, 21 Iraqi diplomats were funded by the Chinese government to start their month long training program at China Foreign Affairs University.
    … In contrast to its usual inactivity in the United Nations on Middle Eastern affairs, since the beginning of the Iraq crisis, China has engaged in a flurry of activity. In early 2003, the Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan flew to UN headquarters in New York four times to lobby for a political solution to the Iraq problem. Most significantly, on May 26, 2004, China submitted to the Security Council an “unofficial document,” offering Chinese views on how to revise a draft resolution proposed by the U.S. and the UK. This marked an unprecedented move by Beijing to seek a more visible role on Middle Eastern affairs. In this document, China proposed that the U.S.-led multinational force withdraw from Iraq in January 2005. Even though Resolution 1546 did not adopt this suggestion, Beijing believes that its document contributed to the resolution’s terms about full Iraqi sovereignty over its resources and security matters. Moreover, China has consistently called for a larger UN role in Iraq, both with regard to WMDs and reconstruction efforts. From China’s perspective, a more prominent UN role would not only limit American power in the region, but it would also give China more leverage in dealing with the new Iraqi authority.

If anyone has a fuller or more up-to-date assessment of China’s policy toward post-2003 Iraq that they could provide a citation or better yet a link for, I’d love to see that.
In Bob Fonow’s report, he laid special emphasis on the role he judged China could play in training a whole new generation of Iraqi IT managers.
He wrote:

    A huge training requirement remains. The situation in Iraq is comparable in effect to the period following the Cultural Revolution in China. A 15 year gap in technical knowledge and management capability is evident in Iraq, especially in middle managers who were not able to keep up to date in the most modern telecommunications technologies in the later years of the former regime. The Office of Communications [in the US Embassy in Iraq] believes 200,000 to 300,000 telecommunications and information technology specialists will need training to support a modern information economy in Iraq. The United States is not prepared for this requirement in terms of visa administration or price per student.
    China is the best place to conduct this training. [My emphasis there, as everywhere else. ~HC] After the Cultural Revolution a system of telecommunications universities was set up to improve quickly China’s telecom infrastructure. Today this system produces the equivalent of one Regional Bell Operating Company a year. China today maintains the largest cell phone, Internet, landline networks, etc. in the world. The training requirement within China has peaked and there are sufficient places for thousands of Iraqi students a year at price points that can’t be matched in other countries.
    The Office of Communications, with the knowledge of the China desk at Main State, has introduced the Ministry of Communications to the key telecommunications education officials in China. Coordination in Iraq is necessary between the Ministry of Communications, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Educations. The Chinese appear willing to consider training large numbers of technicians and the planning for the program is underway in 2008.
    The China training programs should be limited to specific technical and operations training requirements. Bachelor level education should be conducted in Iraq, since the education system produces acceptable entry level engineering graduates. Graduate level training and research should remain in the United States.
    This may not sit well with those in the Department of Defense who consider China to be the next strategic enemy. However, pragmatism should be the guiding principle in Iraq to achieve order, stability and rapid reconstruction, certainly in essential services. The major Chinese communications equipment vendors Huawei and ZTE already train hundreds of Iraqi students a year at their commercial training facilities in Shenzhen. Several times a year Government of Iraq ministerial officials with telecommunications and IT portfolios , in groups of 24 or so, are invited to China, flying first and business class, staying in five star hotels in Beijing, the latest limos provided and spending money passed out. The Chinese have a long term commercial and diplomatic plan for Iraq.

You’ll find a lot of other really interesting material in Fonow’s report. His description of the administrative chaos that still dogs the US’s effort to do “reconstruction” in Iraq makes extremely depressing reading. Interestingly, from his perspective, the chaos became worse in early 2007, as the State Department started pumping large numbers of extremely unqualified people into the Embassy there, as their contribution to the “surge”.
… Anyway, I can see I’m assembling the building blocks here for a really interesting article on how George Bush’s completely misplaced reliance on military assault and invasion in both Iraq and Afghanistan has not only not “resolved” the problem of violent Islamist extremism… It has not only resulted in the deaths of 4,200 Americans and uncountable scores of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan… It has not only destroyed a lot of Iraq’s vital physical and institutional infrastructure, and failed after nearly seven years to bring public security or public order to most of Afghanistan… It has not only helped plunged the US into trillions of dollars worth of debt– that our grandchildren will be paying off for many decades to come– with much of that debt held by Japan and yes, also by China… But it has also made these Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly incredibly hospitable to Chinese mercantilism, and has considerably accelerated China’s emergence as significant political actor in both south-central Asia and the Middle East.
Heckuva job, George!
But perhaps that isn’t totally a fair assessment. It wasn’t only that George Bush and his advisers turned out to be unbelievably wrongheaded, shortsighted, and maladroit in their handling of these two countries… It was also, it seems to me, that the Chinese regime has until now played its cards in both countries incredibly well.
Also, the bigger lesson, as noted here several times before: In the modern world, we are no longer in the 19th century. Relying on military power just doesn’t get you what you want any more…

Palin and the 3 a.m. phone call

I have long experienced at first hand the way that some men try to belittle and exclude women in public life through aggressive and often painful forms of name-calling and public humiliation.
I have also, certainly, heard “white” men– and women– use similar forms of name-calling to belittle, humiliate, and exclude African-Americans, Muslims, Arabs, gay people, and even occasionally Jewish people from the public discourse. When I, as a straight, “white” woman hear such appeals to a supposed ethnic or straightnik solidarity that the perpetrators imagine I might share with them, it is sometimes a challenge to know how to respond. What I always like to do in such circumstances– and certainly try to do– is draw a clear line by saying I find such language offensive and don’t want to stick around to hear it.
I actually don’t hang around a lot with people who say such ugly things. And it’s been a long, long time since any guys of my acquaintance used language around me that was openly demeaning to women.
Maybe that’s largely a function of my selection of companions.
So what does it tell us about VP candidate Sarah Palin that, as Governor of Alaska already, she would

    (a) agree to go on a radio show run by two guys who had built their audience precisely by throwing demeaning language around very freely, and
    (b) during the on-air interview, after they have called another leader in the state’s Republican politics both a “cancer” and a “bitch”, she would do nothing but give a nervous little giggle before assuring them warmly that she has enjoyed being on the show with them?

I have found all the reports of Palin’s behavior on that occasion– as ably presented here by Juan Cole– extremely disturbing.
Even without taking into consideration that the political rival in question, the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green, is herself a cancer survivor. Though of course that makes it a lot worse. (And we should surely assume that Palin knew of Green’s health status at the time.)
In Juan’s post there, he also adds a clip from a GOP fundraiser earlier this year when a woman very loudly asks John McCain — in relation to, I imagine, Hillary Clinton– “How are we going to beat the bitch?”… and there are prolonged and loud guffaws of complicity all round, including from John McCain.
Both incidents tell us a lot about these two people who aspire to lead our country.
Neither of them drew any lines in the sand at all against the public use of such hateful language. Both seemed to me to be a little embarrassed by their interlocutors’ use of the B-word. But that didn’t stop eithert of them from laughing at it. And most importantly, neither of them did anything at all, right there and then, to dissociate themselves from the general idea that such language is quite acceptable and “okay” to use in pubic political discourse.
Palin reportedly, later, issued a public apology to Green. (But it may have been of the exculpatory form that “I am sorry if Ms. Green took offense at what was said”… blaming the victim for her reaction, rather than the perpetrators for their hate-fueled boorishness.)
But how about her reaction at the time, which came across like a couple of short bursts of possibly nervous giggling?
She didn’t stand up to her interviewers then at all. Not one iota. She giggled along with them.
John McCain is not a young man. If Palin becomes president, is she the kind of person we want answering the 3 a.m. phone calls when there’s an international crisis?
Not her. And not McCain either, for reasons too numerous to mention.

China and Iraq

I’ve been doing a bit of background research for a post I’m planning on China’s growing presence in Iraq… I hope to have a pretty interesting post about that topic up on the blog soon.
But in the meantime, here’s a little teaser that shows you just how longstanding Iraqi-Chinese relations really are.
How venerable do you guess they would be?
Try 1,250 years?
If you go to this page on the website of DC’s Smithsonian Institution, you can find the catalogue and an on-line interactive display related to a late-2004 exhibit that either the Freer or the Sackler Gallery had, titled Iraq & China: Ceramics, Trade, and Innovation. (To see both of those, click on “Interactive” on the portal page… and in the “Interactive” section, click on “Resources” to get the catalogue.)
Here’s what I learned from the catalogue:

    By the middle of the eighth century, Arab and Persian seafarers had successfully mastered the long ocean crossing from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. Since the Chinese were not interested in undertaking extensive oceangoing voyages at that time, Muslim merchants moved swiftly to take advantage of new opportunities for overseas trade. They acted as middlemen in selling goods, such as ivory, pearls, incense, and spices. On their return journey they supplied the Abbasid court and the affluent middle classes with prized Chinese goods: silk, paper, ink, tea, and ceramics…

Many of those Muslim seafarers shipped out of Basra, in present-day Iraq; and it was there that local artisans, impressed by the shiny and beautiful white porcelain the seafarers brought back from China, set about trying to reproduce some of its effects. They didn’t have access to the white, kaolin-based clays used in China, but they developed their own heavy white glazes to cover their yellowish clay… and thus a new era in Islamic ceramics was born…
By the end of the 10th century, the Abbasid caliphate was starting to disintegrate. But by then the ceramic techniques developed in Basra had spread to other points in the Muslim world, including Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain…
Back at the moment of that first contact in the eighth century, it was the Muslims who were good at (and wanted to invest in doing) the seafaring, while the Chinese were always wary about straying too far over the ocean, but had great land-based technologies.
And now, 1,250 years later? China and Iraq look poised for a new era of technological interaction in a large number of spheres. Not only oil tech, as revealed by the news of China’s latest big investment in that, but many other technologies too…

Egyptian delegation to break Gaza siege

The plan, as described on Hamas’s website here, could be huge. It will almost certainly have a much bigger impact than the two-small-ship siege-busting effort undertaken from Europe last month. That latter effort did a lot to focus European (and to a lesser extent, US and other western) attention on the gross injustices of Israel’s punitive, 30-month siege of Gaza. But in terms of actually either delivering goods to Gaza or changing the policies of the source-country governments, it did very little.
The Egyptian siege-busting project is being organized by a group from “the Egyptian judges club [association], parties, and popular forces,” and will aim to cross into Gaza from Egypt on October 9. Here’s what the Hamas website says about it:

    Mahmoud Al-Khudairi, the chairman of the Alexandria club for judges, told Quds Press that the delegation would include 14 judges along with representatives of all syndicates, unions and parties.
    He said that the delegation would leave from the relief committee at the Cairo doctors syndicate on 10/9 heading to Gaza and would carry whatever they could collect of foodstuff and medicine. He said that Egyptian MPs would join the convoy.
    Dr. Hamdi Hassan, member of the Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc, urged all legal and relief organizations along with the Egyptian masses to join the delegation to break the siege.
    He said, “I will go alone in my car and carry whatever it could take of food supplies and medicine, anyone is welcome to coordinate with me or with others”.

I have wondered for a while now why the many popular and political forces in Egypt who are strong sympathizers of the Palestinians, and who have chafed under the knowledge that their government has gone along with Israel’s plans to maintain a tight siege around Gaza, have not done more to challenge the siege from their side of the border. It is true that Gaza is a five-hour drive from Cairo, so organizing a convoy of siege-busters in a country in which the military-security forces play such a strong role is no small matter… I guess I simply concluded that these pro-Palestinian Egyptians– okay, primarily, the leaders of Egypt’s powerful but badly repressed Muslim Brotherhood– had judged that the time was not right to challenge the regime’s power, and its intent to keep its relations with Israel good at all costs, in this very head-on way.
Now, it seems, that calculus has changed.
The fact that the convoy organizers have announced their plans so publicly and so far in advance is a key tactic of nonviolent mass organizing, a strategy to which the Egyptian MB has been committed since the mid-1980s. What can or will the Cairo government do to stop them– especially during the holy month of Ramadan– that will not itself make the situation worse? Possibly, a lot worse?
This convoy could succeed in getting huge amounts of much-needed goods into Gaza. It could succeed in opening the Rafah crossing for considerably longer than just a few hours. And most crucially, at a time when Egypt is suffering fin-de-regime jitters that could well be a lot worse than any it has suffered since 1952, this project could put the MB and its agenda into a position in Cairo that is much stronger than anyone in the fortress-like US embassy there (and their Israeli allies/overlords) can be happy with.
Savvy JWN readers will know that Hamas was originally, back in 1987, a project of the Palestinian branch of the MB. Back in January, when Hamas felled the high barrier walls between Gaza and Egypt and organized the big “bust-out” of deprived Gazans across the felled walls to buy some badly needed basic supplies, Egypt’s ageing president Hosni Mubarak made a huge and partially successful effort to portray that bust-out as an “invasion” of Egypt’s national territory by those repressed, hunger-driven– and almost completely unarmed– souls.
You can access some of the commentary I wrote about that whole series of incidents, and about the crucial role that Egypt plays in the long-range planning of the Hamas leaders, here.
But now, it looks as though what the MB and its allies are planning for next month is a “bust-in” into Gaza, instead.
Watch this story as it develops.