Author: Helena

On US over-stretch

When I blogged about the Ossetia crisis Sunday, I wrote that one thing it clearly showed was that “The ‘west’ is hopelessly over-stretched, what with all its current commitments of troops in Iraq, a crisis-ridden Afghanistan, and (still) in the Balkans…”
Today, McClatchy’s dogged reporter Jonathan Landay gives us more details of that over-stretch. (HT: Dan Froomkin.) Landay quoted one US official as saying that the US military authorities had not really understood the seriousness of the preparations the Russian military had recently made along the Georgian border– because US spy satellites and other means of technical espionage were “pretty well consumed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan.”
That, you could describe as logistical over-stretch. But there has also been political over-stretch. You’ll recall that back last year, shortly after the Bush administration announced that portions of its new “ballistic missile defense system” would be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia announced that it would withdraw from the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). Few people paid much heed at the time, or thought thaqt Moscow’s exit from that older treaty was very important. But one of the key provisions of the CFE Treaty was that signatories were committed to engaging in regular exchanges of information about troop movements and submitting to challenge inspections from other treaty participants.
Guess what. After Russia withdrew from the CFE, they no longer had to do that.
And guess what else. It truly seems that no-one in the Pentagon was on duty last week as Russia’s troop build-up gained momentum.
All that, despite Condi Rice’s long-vaunted reputation as a go-to “expert” on Russian military affairs…
Landay quoted the unnamed US official as saying,

    “I wouldn’t say we were blind… I would say that we mostly were focused elsewhere, unlike during the Cold War, when we’d see a single Soviet armor battalion move. So, yes, the size and scope of the Russian move has come as something of a surprise.”
    Now, the United States is left with few options for countering what it calls Russia’s “disproportionate” response to Georgia…

And that, mind you, despite the continued presence of presence of some 130 US military trainers in Georgia.
Ouch. Did anyone say “over-stretch”?
… So what does it all mean?
It means that this conceit that members of the US political elite of both parties have nearly all entertained for the past 15 years: that the dominance of the US military over just about the entire globe is really, kind of the natural order of things… and that yes, of course, our country has “vital” interests in very distant parts of the world that yes, of course, we need to be able to protect– on our own, if necessary… now, that entire conceit is no longer going to be sustainable.
We are, after all, less than five percent of humanity. Sure, there are still a few countries we can bludgeon in one way or another into supporting this or that military adventure. Like the way Tony Blair and Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili agreed– for their own reasons– to contribute their support and a limited amount of their own manpower to the US project in Iraq. Like the way that some (but not all) NATO countries got strong-armed into acting as if Afghanistan were really right their in their own “North Atlantic” backyard. But these contributions from the increasingly resentful allies never added up to anything that would solve either the intense manpower problems, or the intense legitimacy-deficit problems, or the horrendously mounting funding problems suffered by these imperial-style US projects in distant countries.
So we need a radically different model of how the world’s countries can act in response to the security challenges that just about all of our countries face.
As it happens, this model exists. It is one that the US itself created, back in 1945. It is one based on the unassailable foundations of a commitment to finding nonviolent ways to resolve thorny international conflicts, and a deep respect for the equality of all human persons and all nations. It’s called the United Nations.
It also happens that just last week I wrote a piece in the CSM arguing strongly that the US should seek UN leadership of the peace-restoration efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan…
Just imagine if, over the past seven years, the US government had put its energies into using, building up, and reforming the UN and its associated principles, instead of going full-bore for unabashedly US-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq!
Imagine how much stronger the mechanisms of nonviolent conflict resolution available to the world’s leaders would be today.
Imagine how different the politics of Russia’s relations with its neighbors and with the world’s other big powers would be.
Imagine how different Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, and that whole part of the world would look today.
Imagine the resources that, instead of being thrown into equipping very expensive, hi-tech military units and sending them halfway round the world to kill and die, could instead have been spent on rebuilding flourishing communities in Africa.
Imagine the lives that would have been spared. Imagine the families that would still be whole, instead of having to live with their current pain of bereavement or displacement…
Well, regarding the past seven years, we can only sit here and imagine that alternative universe.
But regarding the coming seven or 20 years, there are many things that we who are US citizens can and need to do, to turn our country away from the dead-end of unilateralism and militarism.
What’s happened this past week in Georgia has been a tragedy of serious proportions. But we also need to look at it as a lesson of what happens when one country, that represents only five percent of the world’s people, tries to run the whole world– and then finds itself hopelessly over-stretched.
There is a better way.
It’s called shared leadership, and the rebuilding of sturdy institutions of all-nation cooperation and action. Let’s pursue it.

Faiza: Blogging from inside the Iraqi refugee crisis

Back on August 1, I wrote this post about the new report the International Crisis Group has on the situation of Iraq’s refugees. I wish at the time I had thought to check in with the great blog that Faiza Arji, proud Iraqi citizen, writes from Amman, Jordan, where she has spent most of the past three years trying to provide front-line help to some of the very distressed Iraqi refugees in the city.
Because she’s been so busy doing that, in recent months she hasn’t been blogging very much– but that’s no excuse for me.
Today I went, and found this extremely heartfelt post that she put up there in English on June 24.
It is a classic piece of reportage from within one of the most vexing humanitarian crises of our day. (A crisis, I should note, that occurred as a result of Pres. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and his administration’s complete failure to exercise its responsibility as occupying power to assure public security within the country.)
Faiza describes the key demand being raised by the refugees themselves. It is for return home in a situation of general security and assured basic services:

    We want a real commitment from the [Iraqi] government, to ensure the return of the displaced inside Iraq to their houses and their areas, to provide security, services, and jobs for them, so they can have a decent life in their homeland.
    And how can the government ask the Iraqis in Jordan, Syria and Egypt to return to Iraq, while it hasn’t solved the problem of the internally displaced?
    How can we believe that the situation has improved?
    If those displaced inside Iraq returned to their towns and their conditions settled, now that would be a positive indication to the government’s credibility, and the Iraqis living in the neighboring countries will return when they see positive encouraging results on the ground… but now, even with all the suffering and the anguish, we do not think of going back; a least here there is security, water, and electricity…

About “re-settlement”, in countries other than Iraq– which is the option most frequently talked about by Americans, many of whom whom have a deeply engrained bias toward the alleged moral virtues of transcontinental migration– Faiza writes this:

    I also talk about some families I met here, who are waiting to be re-settled; some of them see this as a temporary solution until Iraq gets back to the state of security and settlement, while others despaired of the improvement in Iraq’s conditions, but they all say- our eyes and hearts will keep on watching Iraq, and we will get back as soon as things get better; we do not believe there is a country anywhere more beautiful than Iraq….

She writes eloquently about the love of Iraq– and, crucially, the adherence to the idea of Iraqi national unity— that she encounters among the refugees she meets and works with:

    I am amazed by the Iraqis’ love of Iraq…
    When I sit with them, every person and every family, in separate meetings, no one knows about the other, but there is one common theme pulsing in their hearts, as if they have all agreed upon it among them…
    Praise to God… Muslim, Christian, Baptist or Yazeedi, they all say the same words, complain about the same wound… Praise to God who united us on the land of Iraq, to the love of Iraq, and the grief about what happened to it…
    And this amazing mixture of people lived together for thousands of years, they had an old, deep, common civilization since the dawn of history………. Many religions and various cultures lived on the land of Iraq, forming this beautiful mixture of people, who got accustomed to living together through the sweet and the bitter… wars, sanction, hunger, poverty and deprivation, until the last war came in 2003; which dedicated the ripping and tearing of this social, cultural and religious fabric, a fabric that survived for thousands of years in a tight solidity from the roots…
    Iraq is going now through one of the worst experience in Iraq’s life; a big dilemma that will either break it completely, or, Iraq might emerge from it strong, like the phoenix of the mythology, that will rise from the ashes every time; strong, soaring, like it is created all anew. And that is exactly what I hope will happen one day….

Her vision and her commitment are awe-inspiring.
… Especially when you consider the tragic under-side of what she sees among the Iraqis she works with:

    The agonies of the families here are countless… poverty, hunger and deprivation; by lack of finances, lack of food and medical services, patients who come from Iraq with diseases, most of which are cancerous, and the costs of treatment here are disastrous in private hospitals. These people suffer from the shortage of finances to cover the treatment costs, and I personally feel that with them I have lost some face; as I sent e-mails or phone calls asking for financial aid to cover treatment costs for this and that. And then I hear news about some Iraqis who drown themselves in nightclubs, dancing, drinking, and corruption, spending thousands of dollars every night on such silly matters, and say to my self: So; God is our aid, and He is enough.
    What is happening to the world? Are we passing a phase of losing noble values and an absence of conscience? Where did this hard-heartedness and indifference come from?
    I do not know…
    Sometimes I imagine the world is closing down on me, and my chest tightens…. I wish I can find a forest or an island in a far-off ocean to live in, and forget about these tiring creatures called- humans; I no longer have common points with them…. But my sorrow for the poor and the needy prevents me from running away, forcing me into the commitment to remain and help them; knocking on all doors, not to abandon them…
    … There is a number of Iraqi women who are alone without families; whose husbands or families were killed and they remained alone, waiting to be re-settled. They face improper advances and molestation by this and that, looking towards a life more dignified and more settled, in some spot in this world.
    At work, I daily receive women who were beaten and treated cruelly by their husbands. Poverty is the reason in most cases; or the frustration that befalls the man because of poverty and unemployment; they turn him into a wild, cruel, and aggressive creature. This is what happens to some Iraqi families here; the conditions of displacement, poverty, estrangement and degradation all put pressure on the men and the women and increase the rate of family violence…
    Some women also come to complain about their husband’s bad manners, being alcoholics, beating wives and children, or molesting their daughters. God help us; He is our aid, and He is enough…
    Are these the signs for the end of time, of the dooms day? That the world has lost its mind, its ethics, its mercy, justice, and all its beautiful features?
    I, personally, am tired, but I didn’t lose hope that some people still exist in this world who form a beautiful face to it…

I urge JWN readers to go and read the whole of Faiza’s post there.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the people who do front-line humanitarian aid work, who have by far the richest and most direct understanding of the humanity and needs of those in distress, often don’t have any time or mental energy left over to get their voice out into the public sphere. As a result, on sorts of issues that directly impact the lives and wellbeing of some of the world’s most vulnerable people, the global “public discussion” ends up being dominated by people like law professors or pundits who have sadly little direct experience of what they’re talking about. (Hence, for example, the easy readiness with which such people view the prospect of the civil war in Northern Uganda being prolonged for several additional years while they, the lawyers and law professors, seek to “prove” some abstract point about the theory of “international justice” in an air-conditioned courtroom in The Hague… )
That’s one of the many things that makes Faiza’s voice so special. She is personally living the Iraqi refugee crisis. And she’s personally deeply engaged in responding to it. And then, in addition, from time to time she makes sure she gets her voice out into the global public sphere about these issues that are of such existential concern to her.
Thank you, Faiza.
She doesn’t give any information on her blog about how to donate to support her projects. I suggest that any readers willing and able to give money to good humanitarian-aid projects directed at Iraqi refugees in Jordan or Syria (where their numbers are even greater) can do so through the US-based organization Mercy Corps International.

Arrest warrants for former Israeli military chiefs

Spain’s highest court, the Audiencia Nacional, has issued arrest warrants on charges of war crimes against six Israelis who were high-ranking military officials at the time of the IDF’s bombing of an apartment building in Gaza City in 2002 which killed 15 civilians.
The six include current Infrastructure Minister Binyamin (‘Fouad’) Ben-Eliezer, who was defense minister at the time of the incident; Moshe Yaalon, who was IDF chief of staff; and Dan Halutz, then chief of the air force and later IDF chief of staff. The others are Doron Almog, Giora Eiland, and ‘Mike’ Herzog.
(Does anyone have the text of the arrest warrant? I’d love to see that.)
The 2002 incident was part of a longstanding policy of the Israeli government of undertaking extrajudicial killings (EJKs) of its opponents. EJKs, also known as assassinations or in Israel’s somewhat euphemized parlance “targeted killings”, are precisely what they sound like: completely extra-judicial, that is, outside the rule of law. That is, there is no duly constituted court that considers in an impartial and open manner the evidence against the “accused”, listens to his defense, and judges the case on its merits. Instead, Israel’s military authorities get to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner all wrapped into one, though they have made various attempts to describe their efforts as “humane”, “restrained” and, of course, completely “justified.”
For one such attempt see this piece of sympathetic hasbara reporting from the WaPo’s Laura Blumenfeld back in August 20096. In it, Bluemnfeld describes the “anguish” experienced by several Israeli commanders– including, crucially, arraigned-in-Spain Moshe Yaalon– as they recalled their calculations regarding whether to undertake any particular EJK
Actually, though Blumenfeld’s reporting was extremely sympathetic to Israel’s high-ranking assassins, it contains many revealing details that could be useful in any court case against Yaalon and his co-defendants. (And also, against present Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a leader of some of Israel’s earlier EJK ops.)
Reflecting on her conversations with Yaalon about the period 2000-2003, Blumenfeld wrote,

    Almost every day, Yaalon had to decide who would live or die. “Who is a ‘ticking bomb’ ? Can we arrest him? Who is a priority — this guy first, or this guy first?” Yaalon recalled. Once a week, military intelligence and Shin Bet proposed new names. At first, the list was limited to bombers themselves, but several years later it expanded to those who manufacture bombs and those who plan attacks.
    “I called it ‘cutting weeds.’ I knew their names by heart,” Yaalon said. How many did he kill? “Oh, hundreds, hundreds. I knew them. I had all the details with their pictures, maps, intelligence, on the table… ”

Then this, which is of direct relevance to the court case:

    Only once, Yaalon said, did he knowingly authorize a hit that would also kill a noncombatant, the wife of Salah Shehada. Shehada helped found Hamas’s military wing, which had asserted responsibility for killing 16 soldiers and 220 Israeli civilians. In 2002, the air force dropped a one-ton bomb on his home. The blast also destroyed a neighboring house, which Yaalon said he had thought was empty. Fifteen civilians were killed, including nine children. It felt, Yaalon said, “like something heavy fell on my head.”

Excuse me– something fell on his head??
Blumenfeld’s piece makes eery reading. But it also provides a vivid example of two important points:

    1. How unresolved feelings of victimization and helplessness from the past can be used to try to justify the perpetuation of new acts of escalation and violence. In this regard, she makes a point of noting that Yaalon’s mother, and the parent of one of the other high-ranking EJK perps were Holocaust survivors, and how this affected their thinking about the use of violence.
    2. How extremely slippery the slope of the justification of violence “for self-defense”, “pre-emption”, “prevention”, and “deterrence” can become. The Israeli decisionmakers were justifying their use of EJKs since 2000 mainly in terms of “deterrence,” that is, sending a powerful message “to discourage others from trying the same thing.” It worked in terms of raw violence, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of those “targeted”– along with additional hundreds of bystanders. But at the crucial level of politics, it didn’t work. Hamas kept on generating new cohorts of leaders, while retaining intact both its core political ideology and its ability to hit Israel with new kinds of weapons, primarily the fence-hopping rockets. Only recently did the Israeli government try another approach to the challenge posed by Hamas: the Egypt-mediated negotiations which resulted in the conclusion of a ceasefire (tahdi’eh) back in June. The ceasefire has not been totally successful, since a handful of very small, non-Hamas groups remain uncommitted to it. But by and large it has worked. The number of rockets falling inside Israel has been drastically reduced. And yesterday, even Ehud Barak– who was previously a strong skeptic of the ceasefire approach– announced that he now thinks it is the best way forward!

In Blumenfeld’s piece, she reports on the recollections of some of Israel’s super-assassins of another operation they conducted, against a reported gathering of Hamas leaders in a Gaza City apartment in September 2003. On that occasion, they used “only” a quarter-ton bomb, which was designed to hit “only” the third story of the targeted building. But the Hamas leaders being targeted– who included both political and military leaders– were sitting on the ground floor, and escaped with little damage. (Note that the idea of killing political leaders is completely outside what is allowed in the laws of war, as is the idea of killing military personnel when they are not on active duty. So such operations were war-crimes from the get-go, regardless of whether “untargeted” bystanders were also harmed, which in many or most cases they certainly were.)
Among those who escaped the airborne assassins that day were Hamas’s paraplegic founder and historic leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, whom the Israelis did succeed in killing a year later, and Ismail Haniyyeh, who ran in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006 and emerged as Prime Minister of the Palestinian government elected that month. Haniyyeh and his colleagues in the Gaza portion of Hamas’s leadership have been essential participants in the Egypt-mediated negotiations for the June ceasefire.
It is almost certain that if Israel had indeed “succeeded” in assassinating Haniyyeh and others in the present Hamas leadership, then it would have been far harder, or perhaps impossible, for the Egyptians and Israelis to find any Palestinian leaders with the political charisma, clout, and legitimacy that have been required to negotiate and implement the ceasefire from the Palestinian side. (It would be kinda nice if Barak could admit that publicly, and also apologize to Haniyyeh for his past attempts to assassinate him?? Dream on, Helena.)
As part of the tahdi’eh, Israel undertook to stop its EJK attempts against the Hamas leaders, which is valuable first step towards the further de-escalation of tensions (and positive peacemaking!) that is so desperately needed.
B’tselem has some good updates about the state of the EJK policy as of the end of 2007 in its 2007 annual report (PDF here.) It includes this:

    On 14 December 2006, the High Court of Justice issued its decision on the petition filed in January 2002 against Israel’s targeted-killing policy. The court did not rule the policy illegal, but it held that the actions involved in the targeted killing had to meet the principle of proportionality. It also ruled that, after the attack, a “thorough and independent inquiry” must be conducted to verify the identity of the persons hit and the circumstances. However, when B’Tselem demanded an inquiry of this kind into seven targeted-killing cases that took place in 2006 and 2007, which killed 36 bystanders, including 16 minors, the State Attorney’s Office rejected the demand.

Seven EJKs that killed 36 bystanders? Where’s all the much-vaunted “proportionality” and “restraint” that Blumenfeld was writing about in her article?
As for the Spanish arrest warrants against Ben-Eliezer and the others, the Israeli government is reportedly “battling hard to overturn [the] Spanish court’s decision.”
My view– with this case in Spain, as with the earlier attempts to indict Ariel Sharon through the Belgian courts– is that though these court cases play an important role in helping to sensitize wwestern opinion to the nature of some of the actions involved, and though they hold out the important hope that “international criminal justice” can be brought to bear impartially, including against offenders who are not members of groups marginalized within the present, “west”-dominated international system, still, the pursuit of these cases is not the path that will lead to finding and implementing a durable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it is that path of conflict termination that is the one that must most urgently be pursued.
Back in the early 2000s, when the Belgian court made a (notably halfhearted and short-lived) attempt to go after Ariel Sharon for war crimes committed against Palestinians in 1982, he was still the Prime Minister of Israel. And though seeing him in the dock may have given some satisfaction to some Palestinians, still, what they most needed from him at that time was his serious engagement in serious peace negotiations… and inasmuch as the Belgian court case distracted attention or commitment from that path, it might actually have been harmful.
And similarly with the present Spanish court cases. Of course, the actions on which the defendants stand arraigned were heinous ones: the assassination of political opponents on a wide scale, and with far too little heed to the effects of those actions on bystanders. And the past actions and decisions of many of the Hamas leaders were equally heinous in their disregard for the laws of war, including the absolute injunction to avoid civilian casualties. But the priority– with regard to the misdeeds of both sides– must still remain on the search for a durable political outcome to the conflict.
Is such an outcome in sight? Perhaps not as far distant as many westerners seem to think. I think the new interest that some leaders in the secular portion of the Palestinian nationalist movement are expressing in the longheld goal of a single, binational state in all the area of Mandate Palestine is a heartening development.
Since 1967, the Israelis have had numerous chances to achieve a two-state solution, which could keep essentially intact their goal of having a state in existence that would be strong, secure, intentionally Jewish, and at peace with all of its neighbors. That would involve a return to something at or very close to the lines of June 4, 1967.
But repeatedly over the years they avoided making that choice. Instead, every time, they voted with their concrete mixers, pouring vast volumes of concrete into the project to build Jews-only colonial settlements throughout the West Bank (and Golan) and to connect them with their own, beyond-apartheid grid of Jews-only roads. As a result of that, and of the implantation of 450,000 Jewish settlers into those settlements, it is now almost impossible to imagine how the West Bank could be separated from Israel proper. The small chunks of land there that might be left to a Palestinian Bantustan would be quite incapable of supporting a viable Palestinian state.
Time to return to the older dream of humane Zionists like Martin Buber or Judah Magnes, who held up the goal of a unitary, binational state…

The South Ossetian War: Some thoughts

Some of the best running commentary on the War of South Ossetia has been that produced by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama over recent days. Including this post today. What I find particularly useful about Bernhard’s blogging is his ability both to keep up with diverse news sources and to reveal to “western” readers the biases that are often deeply embedded in our MSM’s coverage of the events. For the latter, see some of what he wrote here.
Today, the NYT’s James Traub had a lengthy piece on the Ossetian war. It provided a lot of deep background about the decades-old disputes between Georgia and Russia (but actually, not a whole lot more than you can get in Wikipedia); and it noted, quite rightly, the relationship between Russia’s support for the self-rule of the South Ossetians (and Abkhazians) and the recognition that many western nations recently gave to the “independence” of Kosovo.
There are a large number of structural parallels between these cases, as well as a causal relationship. (Parallels, too, with the campaigns many westerners have supported for the breakaway of Iraqi Kurdistan and Darfur from the countries of which they are currently part.)
Traub’s piece is, however, plagued by being confined within the same occidocentric bubble that Bernhard does such a good job of identifying and puncturing. For example, Traub repeatedly refers to westerners “getting it” when they come to share his own judgment that Putin’s Russia is aggressive and hostile. (So much for “objectivity”!) And in his last graf, he writes this:

    One party has all the hard power it could want, the other all the soft.

I’m assuming he means it’s the Russians who have all the hard power, and the Georgians who have all the soft power?
Well, perhaps inside the NYT bubble things look like that. (“Harsh Russian aggressors! Poor, long-suffering Georgian victims!”) But in the rest of the world– and almost certainly within Russia itself — they probably look very different, or perhaps even the reverse of that. There have certainly been civilian victims of Georgian military power within South Ossetia, and Georgian civilian victims of Russian military power within Georgia. But you can bet that in the Russian media, only the former have been given the spotlight; just as in the NYT’s reporting today there were three prominent photos of Georgian victims surveying the results of Russian bombing (one of them on the front page), and only one photo of Ossetian victims of Georgian bombing. This, though the wire-service reporting seems to indicate that there have been much greater numbers of victims in S. Ossetia than in Georgia.
Well, it is hard at this point to know the precise numbers of victims on either side. But it’s not hard to conclude that Traub’s judgment about the relevant distribution of hard power and soft is quite misleading.
It’s interesting, too, to see that Haaretz reported today that,

    Jewish Georgian Minister Temur Yakobshvili on Sunday praised the Israel Defense Forces for its role in training Georgian troops and said Israel should be proud of its military might, in an interview with Army Radio.
    “Israel should be proud of its military which trained Georgian soldiers,” Yakobashvili told Army Radio in Hebrew, referring to a private Israeli group Georgia had hired.
    … Yakobashvili said that a small group of Georgian soldiers had able to wipe out an entire Russian military division due to this training.

H’mm. That sure sounds like some Georgian access to hard power, to me. As do the reports of Georgia getting SAM-5 missiles from Ukraine… Also, I wonder how those revelations in Haaretz might affect Israel’s long-tended relations with Moscow?
Well, despite Yakobashvili’s crowing, it seems the Georgian government took enough of a drubbing from its massive northern neighbor that it is now eager to sue for peace.
The final outcome on the ground from this nasty and damaging little war are still far from clear. But some of the broader implications for world politics of what has been happening are already emerging:

    1. The “west” is hopelessly over-stretched, what with all its current commitments of troops in Iraq, a crisis-ridden Afghanistan, and (still) in the Balkans. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was most likely relying to a great extent on the NATO forces pulling his chestnuts out of the Ossetian fire if they should start to burn there. But NATO is in absolutely no position to do that. All the US could do to give him any concrete help was to gather up and return to his country the 2,000 Georgian troops who had previously part of their occupation coalition in Iraq. That airlift is happening right now. But it will do little to affect the balance on the ground in the Caucasus, while it will certainly cause considerable disruptions to the US project in Iraq.
    2. Russia is coming back as a force to be reckoned with in world politics. This is no longer the 1990s– which for Russians was an era of economic mega-crisis, dismemberment, and rampantly atrocious (mis-)governance. The Russia of the years ahead will not have the great weight in world politics of the Soviet era. But neither will it be the confused, resource-starved pygmy of the Yeltsin era.
    3. Westerners who thought they could easily redraw international boundaries as they pleased, without consequence for their own interests, will have to rethink the wisdom of that tactic. The national boundaries drawn up and laid down in, basically, the post-1945 era, are in many places highly imperfect. (Especially throughout Africa!) But the system of boundaries and sovereignty that they represent acquired its own logic, however imperfect. Tinker with one, and the whole system threatens to unravel. I tried to argue that point– among others– back in February, when I expressed my criticism of the move that many western nations made toward recognizing (and even encouraging) the Kosovars’ declaration of independence. Lots of food for thought there for the Iraqi Kurds, too…

This latter point about the wisdom of the tendency many westerners have shown in recent years to encourage secessionist movements– especially those seeking to secede from countries they disapprove of— is worth a lot more exploration. Back in February, Russia’s leaders were quite explicit in warning that if western nations proceeded with backing Kosovar independence, then they might well push for a similar outcome for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin and Medvedev had also repeatedly expressed their deep concern at the prospect that NATO might extend membership to both Georgia (and Ukraine.) So Saakashvili should have known he was playing with fire when, earlier this week, he ordered his security forces to “retake South Ossetia by force”, thus breaking the Sochi Agreement of 1992, which gave responsibility for public security in the S. O. region to a Russian-commanded peacekeeping force.
That would be equivalent, in Kosovo, to Serbia sending in its armed forces to seize control of Kosovo from the western-dominated peacekeeping force that’s currently in control there.
(Worth reading about present-day Kosovo, by the way, is this depressing piece of reporting by Jeremy Harding in the LRB. He writes, “No one would have imagined that a UN protectorate in Europe, stuffed with NGOs and awash with donor receipts, could perform so badly. Kosovo has low growth, no inflation, and few signs of an emerging economy… In Kosovo every scam and indignity, from the protection of ex-KLA war criminals down, is common knowledge…” Under its new banner of “independence”, Kosovo doesn’t quite seem to have become the land of milk and honey that some people predicted?)
But back to Saakashvili. He seems to have miscalculated, rather badly. The west that was so ready and eager to take on the Russians over Kosovo back in March 1999 is not nearly as ready– or able– to take them on over Georgia, nine years later.
On Friday, Reuters’ William Schomberg quoted James Nixey, an analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, as saying that,

    Saakashvili had worried Western capitals with his tendency to overreact when provoked.
    That was shown when he used force last year to quash anti-government protesters and again now in the conflict in South Ossetia, [Nixey] said…
    “If he is going to start a war, he is going to lose the support of a lot of friends in the West.”
    … Analysts said Saakashvili’s gamble in launching military action against the rebels could trigger a David-and-Goliath war between his country and the its powerful neighbour Russia, and it was far from certain that the West would come to his rescue.
    “He has had plenty of warnings from the West that it won’t pull any chestnuts out of the fire for him so I don’t think he can count on the cavalry riding in,” said Fraser Cameron of the EU-Russia centre in Brussels.

One last little note I want to make here is about the use and abuse of the whole concept of “humanitarian intervention”, being used as a reason to launch military operations that by their very nature are quite anti-humanitarian.
I have no doubt at all that Russia’s media are at this very moment displaying all kinds of images of suffering Ossetian civilians and describing Russia’s actions in Ossetia as as an intensely “humanitarian intervention.”
And similarly (mutatis mutandis) in Georgia.
This should give us all pause.
Back in 1999, I was one of the few liberal commentators in the western MSM who argued consistently against the idea that a western military campaign against Serbia could ever be described as a “humanitarian intervention”, or otherwise justified.
Please, let’s now take this opportunity to bury this idea, once and for all, that wars can ever be described as “humanitarian.”

Iraqi FM insists on ‘clear timeline’ for US troop pullout

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari still insists on a “clear timeline” for the withdrawal of US troops from his country, according to this report from AP’s Robert Reid.
Reid writes that Zebari also said that the Iraqi and US negotiators are “very close” to reaching a longterm security agreement, but stressed that Baghdad won’t consider an agreement that doesn’t specify the timeline.
He adds this:

    Last week, two senior Iraqi officials told The Associated Press that American negotiators had agreement to a formula which would remove U.S. forces from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009 with all combat troops out of the country by October 2010.
    The last American support troops would leave about three years later, the Iraqis said.

His sources on the US official side say there is no agreement on specific dates and that completion of the SOFA/MOU negotiations is not close, putting them at odds with Zebari’s assessment.
As I’ve written here before, I think the Bushites lost the “Battle of Baghdad”– that is, their campaign to lock in security agreements with Baghdad that would allow a longterm US troop presence in Iraq– some time ago.
It was of course Clausewitz who wrote the important truth that “War is an extension of politics by other means.” All wars start and end in politics. Back in late 2002, I remember my pro-invasion Iraqi-Kurdish friend Siyamend Othman talking about the need to win “the Battle of Washington”– that is, the battle to win Washington’s support for the invasion project. Well, he and his Iraqi allies (who of course included Zebari, Ahmed Chalabi, Barham Saleh, etc) won that one. But now, their US allies have lost the Battle of Baghdad.

At Baltimore Yearly Meeting

The reason I haven’t been posting much here this past week is that I’ve been at the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. As nearly always seems to happen when I come here, I start off by thinking I’ll manage to get plenty of time to blog, but end up not able to do much. Partly it’s because the internet connection is slow. But partly, too, it’s because I go into a different mental zone when I’m here.
I wish I had the energy to tell you some of the interesting, uplifting, and thought-provoking things that have happened here. But I’m afraid I don’t even have the energy to do that.
Ommmm.
John Woolman, 1763: “Love is the first motion.” Yes, indeed.

Progress in untying the ICC-Northern Uganda knot?

Are Uganda’s talented people about to unlock the riddle of “peace versus justice” that has confounded so many other peoples around the world in recent times?
As long-time JWN readers are aware, I have a longstanding interest in the complex intersection between working for peace and working for ‘justice’, however the latter might be defined. (Hint: In my view, it is not co-terminous with “the orderly working of a western-style criminal court,” shocking as that thought might seem to some readers.)
Two years ago, I spent a little time in Uganda, trying to learn about the complex interaction there between the workings of the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), which then had five arrest warrants outstanding against Ugandan citizens who were in the leadership of the long-standing Lord’s Resistance Army movement, and the peace process the Government of Uganda had been pursuing with– yes– exactly that same leadership of the LRA.
The ICC’s actions had caused the peace process to freeze in place, since LRA Joseph Kony and his colleagues feared that if they left “the bush”, that is, the inaccessible areas of northeastern DRC where they and their remaining fighters were hiding out, and came forward to complete the negotiation, then they would be arrested and whisked off to The Hague.
I did some interviews with members of the ethnic group most affected by the continuing insurgency, the Acholi. The vast majority of their numbers had by then been shut by the government into vast sprawling encampments described by the government and the “international community” as “IDP camps”, but which could more accurately be described as strategic hamlets or concentration camps. You can read some of my reporting from that trip, and from the interviews I had done immediately beforehand with ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, here.
Bottom line: The vast majority of the Acholi people seemed clearly to want to have the peace settlement with the LRA concluded, including by getting Kony “out of the bush” and bringing him back to be reintegrated in some way into civilian society.
That was two years ago. Moreno-Ocampo had a number of ways he could have withdrawn or suspended his indictments, but he chose not to pursue those paths. Of course, he was not living in a concentration camp for all that time.
Fast forward to today. Numerous Acholi community leaders have been working hard, along with representatives of both the government of Uganda and the LRA leadership to try to find a way to integrate into the country’s national legal system provisions of the Acholi traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms that would allow the reintegration of the vast majority of LRA people into their home communities in the context of the Final Peace Agreement, the return of the IDP/concentraion camp residents to their ancestral homes and lands, and the submission of Kony and his high-level colleagues to some form of national-level judicial process. This would get Ocampo and the ICC off all their backs, since the ICC is supposed to be subsidiary to national-level justice efforts.
In May, the excellent, Kampala-based Justice and Reconciliation Project held a very important workshop in Kampala, with high-level representatives of both the government and the LRA taking part, at which the questions around how exactly these accountability and reconciliation processes might be designed to work together in the interests of allowing the peace to proceed. The good people at the JRP recently put the Final Report of that workshop up onto their website. I found it a little hard to get the link to the actual report. But if you go to their website’s front-page, you can currently click there on the link that says “On Accountability: Agreement III, Juba Peace Talks,” and that will take you to it.
I regret I don’t have time right now to write out most of the comments I have on the report, which I read about a week ago. Suffice it to say, for now, that I think the JRP did a great job in convening the workshop, which looks as if it resolved numerous really important questions, including about the the relationship between the newly formed “Special Division” of the Ugandan judiciary and the ICC. (There will be none.)
I hope I can write some more about this later. But since the Uganda case is so very important in the whole, rather sad history of the ICC to date, I wanted to make sure this report gets the attention it deserves. Maybe some of you who have more time available than I do, or who have knowledge of the whole issue that’s more up-to-date than mine, can chime in here with some comments and move the discussion along a bit further.

Lest we forget: Hiroshima Day

August 6 is the anniversary of the first ever use of the atomic bomb against “enemy” targets. This action was committed, as we know, by the United States government in 1945, as World War 2 was drawing towards an end. Atomic bombs have only ever been deployed twice against enemy targets. The other time was three days later, when the US dropped a bomb of a different design over Nagasaki.
The Wikipedia entry on the effects of the Hiroshima bomb reads as follows:

    According to most estimates, the immediate effects of the blast of the bombing of Hiroshima killed approximately 70,000 people. Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 from burns, radiation and related disease, the effects of which were aggravated by lack of medical resources, range from 90,000 to 140,000. Some estimates state up to 200,000 had died by 1950, due to cancer and other long-term effects. From 1950 to 1990, roughly 9% of the cancer and leukemia deaths among bomb survivors was due to radiation from the bombs. At least eleven known prisoners of war died from the bombing.

Those were the casualties from just one bomb, which was much smaller than many of the thousands of A-bombs in the arsenals of the world’s eight nuclear powers today.
Among the casualties in Hiroshima there were also large numbers of indentured or virtually enslaved Koreans who had been brought to work in in war industries there by Japan’s military-governmental authorities and many thousands of civilians, including women, children, retirees, and workers in civilian industries.
It is worth remembering the US’s status as the only nation that has ever used an atomic bomb in war— and which did so against two densely populated cities– as we listen to the bellicose rhetoric that has been coming from Washington in response to Iraq’s pursuit of its nuclear technology program (about which no-one has produced evidence on ongoing attempts to weaponize it.)
Last week I was fortunate to have a short conversation with Prof. Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru, a professor of political science at Kansai University, near Osaka, Japan and a native of Hiroshima, who has been here in Washington studying the US government’s decisionmaking system in matters of war-making. She talked quite a bit about the whole system of peace education that grew up in Hiroshima and elsewhere in Japan in response to the events of the 1930s and 1940s, including the US atomic bombings and fire-bombings of many Japanese cities. She reviewed how in Hiroshima, the concern for the victims of the bombing has been broadened over time to include the Korean (and the Japanese “buraku”, or “untouchable”) victims of the bombing, as well as the more powerful “mainstream” (i.e. non-buraku) Japanese victims.
I was familiar with some of those issues from 2000, when I visited Hiroshima. At that point, the local authorities had just moved into the main Peace Park that lies at the heart of the bomb-affected area the memorial to the Korean victims of the bombing, which previously had been kept outside the park.
Prof. Otsuru talked a little about how the victims and survivors from Nagasaki often get short shrift in remembrances of the bombings. And she talked about the pressures that have been building up in Japanese government circles to move even further away from the strictly “self-defense” aspects of the country’s military forces that are mandated under its post-1945 constitution. These pressures have also, I note, come from the US, which has been eager to have the Japanese “Self-Defense” Forces play a bigger role in supporting the US deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prof. Otsuru also put me in touch with Dr. Hiroko Takahashi, an assistant professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who recently published a book (in Japanese) that charts the way the US occupation authorities in Japan used the population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as, in effect, guinea pigs from which they could learn more about the physiological and biological consequences of detonating the bomb.
(I recall from my own visit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, that they showed that the whole bombing had been planned to be, to some extent, a “human trial” experiment from the get-go, since shortly before they detonated the bomb they dropped a number of passive sensors over the city whose only function was to record the radiological events that would follow.)
Anyway, Dr. Takahashi has kindly allowed me to re-publish here on Just World News a short article she has prepared in English that summarizes the main findings of her book. She writes that most of her book was based on US government documents covering not only the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also subsequent US nuclear activities including “Operation Crossroads”, a series of two atomic-bomb tests conducted on Bikini Atoll in 1946.
Here, with my thanks to her, is her article. (I have very lightly edited it. All the emphases in the text are my own. ~HC.)

    The Reality of Nuclear War Concealed by U.S. and the A-bomb Disease Certification Class-action Lawsuits

(Winner of the 2nd Peace Study Encouragement Award of the Peace Studies Association of Japan)
By Hiroko Takahashi
In February 2008 I published a book entitled Fuin sareta Hiroshima/Nagasaki [Classified Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The U.S. Nuclear Test and Civil Defense Program] (Gaifusha, 2008).
This book reflects the research I have carried out in Hiroshima since my appointment at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, and the doctoral dissertation which was submitted to Doshisha University in 2003. For this book I drew mainly upon U.S. government Documents collected at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland U.S.
Drawing upon Manhattan Project records and contemporary newspaper articles, Chapter 1 examined the activities of the U.S. government and military regarding the collection of medical information in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and public announcements about the impact of the A-bomb during the period of the occupation of Japan.
As part of the Manhattan Project, in 1943 the U.S. government set up the “Radioactive Poisons Subcommittee,” and conducted a study on the military use of radioactive materials. A report of the subcommittee explained “the factors involved in employing radio-active materials effectively” are “Highly persistent and can contaminate an area for many months. Immediate decontamination could take place only at the sacrifice of personnel.”
Following the dropping of the A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government claimed that the A-bomb was a more brutal weapon than poison gas which had been prohibited by international law.
On September 5 1945, following the start of the occupation, Wilfred Burchett’s report published in the British Daily Express stated that, “People are still dying mysteriously and horribly－people who were uninjured in the cataclysm–from an unknown something which I can describe as the atomic plague.” On the other hand, Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy to the Head of Pacific Command Major General L.R. Groves, “denied categorically that it produced a dangerous lingering radioactivity in the ruins of the town or caused a form of poison gas at the moment of explosion.” (New York Times September 13, 1945). That is to say, he denied the existence of residual radiation which occurred one minute after the detonation of the A-bomb.
The purposes of the U.S. government in making such a statement which underestimated the influence of the A-bomb were to reject the Japanese government’s claims that the use of the A-bomb was against international law, and to make practicable the landing of occupation troops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, the U.S. Military Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey collected, brought to the U.S. and classified many Atomic Bomb materials.
Chapter 2 focused on the U.S. government’s declassification policy of the A-bomb issue through the use of documents from the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. Before the commencement of Operation Crossroads, the U.S. nuclear test held in the Pacific in the summer of 1946, Groves recommended the publication of the Manhattan Engineer District Report, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report, and a report written by the British Mission to Japan. However, at the same time he stated that “No authoritative statement on radiation and its effects can be made by anyone until the completion of the analysis of the available data by the Joint Medical Commission.”
After the first two Operation Crossroads tests were conducted, due to the serious contamination caused by the second test, a further test was canceled. It was recommended that “if it was desirable from a Naval standpoint to do so, that all pictures and written material be censored and edited by someone familiar with security and the technical information involved.” U.S. Navy personnel cleaned the contaminated battleships used for the test, but it was nevertheless admitted that “Immediate decontamination could take place only at the sacrifice of personnel.”
Chapter 3 discussed the Civil Defense Program of the early 1950s. The U.S. government explained how people could survive a nuclear attack by means of a “Duck and Cover” approach and ignored the issue of the impact of residual radiation.
Chapter 4 discussed the 1954 Bikini Atoll nuclear test and the subsequent Civil Defense Program, drawing upon documents from the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and Atomic Energy Committee (AEC). Following the exposure of the Lucky Dragon crew members to fallout from a nuclear test, the dangers of fallout began to be widely understood. In 1955 the FCDA and AEC claimed that “You can survive” even the dangers from fallout through inviting civilians to a nuclear test conducted in Nevada. At the time, the AEC was still denying the existence of fallout (residual radiation) in the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to the fact that the detonation of the A-bombs had taken place at high altitude.
Chapters 1 to 4 reveal that the U.S. government consistently underestimated the influence of the radiation caused by the A-bomb and based on such public statements, constructed the Civil Defense Program.
Following the submission of this dissertation in March 2003, newspapers reported about citizens filing A-bomb disease certification class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government. I was very surprised to learn that the so-called “science” which had basically been produced by the U. S. government was still being applied in the Japanese government’s certification of A-bomb disease, which ignores the influence of residual radiation. The standards and logic produced by the “perpetrator” were still being actually applied to the “victims.”
It is clear that “data” collected from Hibakusha [the survivors of the two bombings in Japan] were being collected for the purpose of preparing for future nuclear war. On the other hand, these people’s appeals were ignored in the name of “science” which did not recognize the existence of residual radiation. Sixty-three years have already passed since the dropping of the Atomic Bomb. Now it is time to “judge” this event for the sake of human beings and not for militaristic purposes. I hope that this book will contribute towards this “judgment” and eventually assist in the procurement of justice.

    (Thanks for the work you’ve done, Dr. Takahashi. I hope your book gets widely read– and that it quickly gets translated into English! ~ HC)

Never again! Nuclear disarmament now!

Afghanistan: Can NATO succeed?

The more I think about this, the more outrageously– and tragically– improbable this appears.
Let’s review the reasons:

    1. NATO is a military alliance. What its members have trained extensively to do and are equipped and organized to do is to fight a military enemy, including by the application of overwhelming firepower, and to win actual military wars. Afghanistan’s worsening crisis of governance is not a military problem.
    2. NATO is the military club of the “North Atlantic”– that is, West and Central European and non-Hispanic North American– powers that comprise, roughly speaking, the dominant grouping within the construct of “the West”. Afghanistan is far distant from the North Atlantic, geographically, culturally, politically. Just look at the length of the supply lines! Just look at the length of the cultural misinterpration possibilities!
    3. NATO’s Afghanistan mandate was only won from the UN as a result of a particular conjunction of circumstances in late 2001. As NATO’s failure to resolve Afghanistan’s escalating crisis of governance becomes ever more evident, the Security Council and whatever legitimacy-seeking portions of Afghanistan’s national government remain will have to look for a new instrument of de-escalation and peacebuilding in Afghanistan. NATO, meanwhile, might lie in ruins. (Remind me, anyway, what exactly is its rationale for still being existence 17 years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact?)

This is my big-picture take on the current situation in Afghanistan, which is one of continuing tragedy for most of the country’s 32 million people. For example, on August 1, a network of NGOs in the country said that “Up to 1,000 civilians are among the 2,500 killed in armed conflict so far in 2008.” Also, “July was reportedly the worst month for Afghan civilians in the past six years, with 260 civilian casualties recorded.”
Those casualties counted there, remember, include only those that (a) were the direct result of the physical violence of armed clashes, and (b) were reported in ways that reached the national news media and/or the NGO networks. So they don’t include either those killed by direct physical violence that was not reported or, even more significantly, those who died because of the indirect results of the conflict that continues in the country, including people who:

    — died from causes that decent basic health care including access to hospitals could have prevented, but where that care and access were blocked by the continuing conflict;
    — died from diseases, especially those related to unsafe drinking water, that could easily have been prevented in a time of public security and the provision of basic public health services that were blocked by the continuing conflict;
    — died from complications of childbirth that a functioning public health system could have identified and treated;
    — etc…

In short, the situation in which many or most Afghan people are living is fraught with uncertainty, fear, and the blighting of human capabilities. Western news reports tend to focus only on “western” casualties in the country.
For example, this recent AFP report led with the news that “Bomb blasts killed five NATO soldiers in Afghanistan on Friday…” But it relegated to the second graf the news that “Five Afghan policemen were also killed in an overnight bomb attack… ” And it left till the fourth paragraph the news that four of the killed NATO soldiers were– oh, by the way– also accompanied by a civilian interpreter who was also killed in the attack…
Why did they not write the lead thus: “Five NATO soldiers, five Afghan policemen, and a civilian interpreter were killed in bomb attacks Friday”? Or better still: “Six Afghans working with the security forces and five NATO soldiers were killed in bomb attacks Friday””? Anyone who is a NATO soldier has, after all, quite voluntarily taken the oath of military service under which he or she recognizes that s/he can indeed be killed in the line of duty (while s/he also has the right, under certain circumstances, to kill others while undertaking those same duties.)
Civilians have never taken such an oath. Their deaths in combat therefore have a far graver ethical weight.
Bigger point: The western media have not been giving anything like adequate coverage to the crisis of governance that’s been escalating in Afghanistan under NATO’s “rule” there, and to the extensive human suffering this has caused.
… Last week, the US Institute of Peace hosted a presentation by Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, an adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai who since 2005 has served as vice chair of Afghanistan’s Demobilization and Reintegration Commission. I was unable to attend that, but frequent JWN commenter Bob Spencer did get there. He filed this short report of the event.
He writes:

    After one and a half hours of listening to highly motivated and deep thinking specialists, it was clear that we, in the West, have only begun to scratch the surface of identifying the “challenges” and dynamics of Afghanistan’s complex politics. On top of that, I began to wonder if the western mind might not ever adapt to, let alone comprehend, Afghanistan’s complex ways…

Ah, but isn’t the model being applied that it’s Afghanistan’s people who should be expected to “adapt to”– and indeed, completely adopt– the ways of the west, which are, after all (in the view of many westerners) what this whole thing called the “international community” is all about?
By the way, Stanekzai published a pretty interesting report on the dysfunctions of the present western effort in Afghanistan, back in June.
And if you want to listen to the MP3 audio of his most recent presentation, you can do so here.

Badger’s sit-rep on the US-Iraq SOFA etc talks

The ever-diligent Badger has been reading Al Sabah, which he describes as “the Green Zone newspaper”, and gives his translation (scroll down) of what today’s edition says about the progress of the negotiations over the terms of a SOFA and MOU, including its assessment that this could be signed “in the coming [unspecified] period of time.”
Badger does great work, digging around in the Arabic-language primary sources for all of our benefits. Just one critique, though, He describes the present Iraqi government as “the Green Zone leadership”. I think this is too reductive a view of what’s been going on in Baghdad. Georgraphically– and yes, also politically– the Maliki government has a non-trivial presence outside the Green Zone, as well as inside it.
For example, when Maliki and Talabani hosted Pres. Ahmadinejad in Baghdad, this was done not inside the GZ but, as I recall, in the substantial compound that Talabani maintains outside it. In other words, the current Iraqi political leadership is not completely under the thumb of the US military, though it may still depend on it in several important ways.
I see what’s been going on in Iraq in recent months very much as a “struggle for the soul of the Maliki (et al) government”, with the non- and anti-US actors in that struggle having tipped the balance in their favor.
I’ve been reading Tim Weiner’s excellent book “Legacy of Ashes” recently. It’s a very well-sourced and intensely depressing history of the CIA. It reminds us that in earlier decades, in Syria, Iran, South Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere, the US government would frequently overthrow other governments, including those that had been quite duly or even democratically constituted.
In Iraq, thus far, it has not done this to Maliki’s government, even though Maliki has been straying further and further off the US-defined reservation. (Maintaining those lovey-dovey relations with Iran, for example.)
It is worth reflecting a little on this fact and what it says about the US’s currently grossly over-stretched role in the world… Also, what it says about the nature of national power in the present world, and the fact that the “legitimacy” of international actors has become a lot more important in the current century than it was back in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.