Author: Helena

Iraq roundup: SOFA, Maliki in Iran, etc

So Maliki’s party has now split. (Also, see here.) One delicious aspect of this development– from the anti-occupation point of view– is that it’s former US puppet-in-chief Ibrahim Jaafari who has led the split, taking about 10 members out of the present PM’s party and into the new “Da’wa National Reform” trend, which has allied itself with the new Iraq-nationalist (i.e. anti-SOFA, anti-US-occupation and also somewhat anti-Iranian) bloc that has been put together by the Sadrists and others.
Does this mean it is definitely curtains for the Bushists’ attempts to force a longterm SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) on the Maliki government before they leave office? Probably.
Juan Cole writes today about the split in Maliki’s party,

    It is really quite remarkable that a sitting prime minister should preside over a schism in his own party, despite his control of billions of dollars in patronage.
    Apparently, al-Maliki has been maneuvered by the Bush administration into a position where he has virtually no popular or party support, and is left with Washington has his only anchor.

But wait. Washington, it turns out, is not Maliki’s only anchor! Because guess where– in this moment of extreme political threat for his premiership– he is headed today!
You likely already guessed: Iran.
Maliki’s decision to rush off there at a time of such great political tension at home hilariously demonstrates two things:

    (a) the degree to which the Bushists have been losing control of the situation in the Iran-Iraq theater; and
    (b) the degree to which there is now an increasingly strong convergence of interests between Iran and Washington inside Iraq, as both sides face the increasing strength of the Iraqi-nationalist trend.

Okay, regarding the convergence, see this piece that the ever-well-informed David Ignatius will be publishing in tomorrow’s WaPo.
In it, David is trying to plumb the thinking and intentions of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Qods (Jerusalem) Force.
David writes, somewhat grandiloquently, that

    it is the soft-spoken Soleimani, not Iran’s bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plays a decisive role in his nation’s confrontation with the United States.

Grandiloquent, because while Soleimani might be more powerful in Tehran than Ahmadinejad, both of them are clearly outranked both on paper and in terms of actual decisionmaking by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i.
Still, Soleimani is not inconsequential.
So here’s David’s methodology. He relies almost wholly on the hearsay accounts of someone he identifies only as “an Arab official who met recently with [Soleimani].” For what it’s worth, my money for the source is on the ever-agile Ahmad Chalabi, who I believe has some kind of a job-title that could enable one to describe him as an “official.”
(Chalabi snake-oil again, she groans, clutching her brow in disbelief? This can surely lead nowhere good… )
Well anyway, David does nothing whatsoever to reassure us that Chalabi is not the source…
So here, for what it’s worth, is what David’s un-named Arab tells us about Soleimani’s current thinking:

    Soleimani is confident about Iran’s rising power in the region… He sees an America that is weakened by the war in Iraq but still potent. He has told visitors that U.S. and Iranian goals in Iraq are similar, despite the rhetoric of confrontation. But he has expressed no interest in direct, high-level talks. The Quds Force commander prefers to run out the clock on the Bush administration, hoping that the next administration will be more favorable to Iran’s interests.
    “The level of confidence of these [Quds Force] guys is that they are it, and everything else is marginal,” says the Arab who meets regularly with Soleimani.

Toward the end of the column David concludes:

    The question for Soleimani-watchers is how he will play his hand in the growing confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program. The Bush administration seems to have decided on a course of escalating pressure against Tehran during its remaining months in office. The Iranians, while maintaining a tough line on the nuclear issue, as well as in Iraq and Lebanon, appear wary of an all-out confrontation.
    So imagine that you are Qassem Soleimani, commander of a covert Iranian army deployed across the Middle East: You doubt the Bush administration would run the risk of a military strike against Iran, but you can’t be sure. You think America can’t afford to play chicken in an election year, but you can’t be certain of that, either. You think Iran is on a roll, but you know how quickly that advantage can be squandered by unwise choices. You know that Arabs, even in Iraq, have become peeved at what they see as meddling and overreaching by Tehran.
    So you watch and wait. You give ground where necessary, but you prepare to strike back, as devastatingly as possible — and on your own terms, not those of your adversary.

Sort of inconclusive as an ending, I feel. If David’s source is Chalabi– or actually, regardless of the identity of that near-native informant– then one needs seriously to probe what his goal is in passing on this “information” to David. One also needs to probe David’s goal in publishing this piece.
Regarding Chalabi, the best explanation for the invasion-inciting role he played so brilliantly in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq is that he was in good part on the Iranians’ pay-roll in those years, when he was inveigling the Americans into toppling Tehran’s old nemesis Saddam Hussein, and that he looked forward to being installed as the new leader in Iraq with the support of both Washington and Tehran.
First part worked. Second part didn’t. Here he is again?
What is the current game-plan of this ever-shifty manipulator? Who knows?
Meanwhile, back to the Iraqi political system. I am very grateful to Reidar Visser for having added the following additional commentary to what I posted on JWN here yesterday, about the discussion with the two Iraqi parliamentarians:

    the list of signatories to the letter you linked to with Iraqi parliamentarians protesting is extremely interesting. It consists of the same parties that have been trying to put together a cross-sectarian alliance ever since 2006, despite the formidable disadvantage of having an opponent (the Maliki government) which receives all the backing of the Bush administration, while they themselves have almost zero support in the outside world.
    In October 2006 they tried to defeat the law for implementing federalism, but failed by a small margin. In January 2008, they produced a robust statement calling for a negotiated settlement of Kirkuk (instead of an early referendum) and criticised Kurdish attempts to circumvent Baghdad in oil contract dealings. The high point came in February 2008, when they managed to press through a demand for early provincial elections during the parliamentary debate of the non-federated governorates act, despite the determined opposition of the Maliki government.
    Today, they are trying to prevent attempts by Kurds and ISCI to manipulate the electoral process for the upcoming elections – attempts that include suggestions to create an electoral law that would prevent the use of “open” candidate lists (whereby voters can focus on individuals instead of parties).

Visser also asked this extremely important question:

    The big question is, when the Bush administration gives all its support to the opponents of this alliance – the Maliki government and the Kurdish–ISCI axis, why is it that the supposed creators of “alternative” US policies in Iraq, the Democrats, are focusing all their energies on outbidding Bush in this regard, by signalling even stronger support for the “soft partition” minority of Iraqis led by Barzani and Hakim?
    Would it not be more logical for them to reach out to this nationalist parliamentary bloc, which despite its difficult situation (its enemies are supported by both the US and Iran) could now be a real majority, and could certainly have a great potential if it just received a little help from the outside world? This is a fantastic initiative by the AFSC, but one wishes it had come from American politicians eager to craft an alternative Iraq policy instead…

Visser is absolutely correct to put the Democratic Party in the US on the line like this. I guess if pushed, many Democrats might give strong weight to Israel’s longstanding preference for Iraq not to re-emerge as a strong and capable unitary state…
I guess what I’m hoping, though, is that the visit to Washington by MPs Ulayyan and Jaberi has succeeded at least in opening good channels of continuing communication between them and all the political forces here in DC.
By the way, here is another account of the parliamentarians’ visit here, by the strongly leftist-leaning (except on Israel) reporter ,Spencer Ackerman. Ackerman met the MPs at two events different from the one I attended, and I believe he also reported on their appearance at the House Subcommittee on Wednesday.
Ackerman’s account there has much of interest in it. It is fuller than the account I blogged yesterday, and is completely consonant with what I heard. That’s good. It means the two MPs stayed consistently on-message during their time here.
Actually there is something of a gathering stream of Iraqi pols visiting DC these days. This is one of the collateral benefits of the administration here having undertaken its essentially colonialist project in Iraq in the name of “democratization”: That makes it hard for them to suppress all these outreach efforts inside the US by a wide range of Iraqi voices.

Bobby Kennedy, Palestinians, and Israel

Kudos to the Lenny Ben David of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs who has found and republished a series of four articles that the 22-year-old Robert Kennedy wrote for the Boston Post in late May and early June of 1948. (Hat-tip Dion Nissenbaum for that.)
I haven’t read all the Kennedy reporting in detail yet. Nissenbaum picks out some intriguing fragments at the top of his story.
What neither he nor Ben David mentions is that, as the youthful Kennedy walked around Jerusalem he may well have encountered a four-year-old Palestinian Christian child called Sirhan Sirhan, whose family’s life was probably– like that of all of Jerusalem’s Palestinians– deeply affected by the fighting of 1948 and its aftermath.
Almost exactly 40 years later it was Sirhan— by then a resident of Pasadena, California who suffered from sometimes severe psychological problems— who shot Kennedy to death in a hotel in Los Angeles. By some accounts, Sirhan had been enraged by Kennedy’s election-year demoagoguing on the Israel question. President Johnson had apparently been deflecting Israel’s requests that they be sent a batch of highly capable F-4 deep penetration fighter-bomber planes, offering them the less capable A-4’s instead. So in the primary campaign, Kennedy had begun demagoguing on that, criticizing Johnson for trying to enact that restraint.
I am noting this here absolutely not with any intention of excusing or even seeking to “explain” Sirhan’s quite unacceptable use of deadly violence, and not with the intention of raising in the present context the horrendous specter of “the A word” that so many in the Obama camp (actually, including myself) view with quite understandable dread.
I am noting it because– though all Palestinian movements and spokesmen have always been quite clear that Sirhan Sirhan had no connection with them and was absolutely not acting in their name– there still is that “Palestinian” angle to the story of Bobby Kennedy’s killing, which perhaps makes the rediscovery of Kennedy’s youthful writings on the topic even more poignant.
I’ll just close by recalling that in 1957, when John Kennedy was still a senator, he publicly articulated a very principled position of support for the Algerian liberation movement, an Arab liberation movement that was operating at the other (west) end of Mediterranean against that firm US ally, France. So the Kennedys had quite an interesting overall record on Arab liberation movements, as a family.

Iraqi MPs in Washington: No to Bush’s SOFA, yes to Arab League mediation

Speaking to a civil-society audience of 60 people here in Washington DC today, Iraqi MPs Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan (National Dialogue Council) and Dr. Nadim al-Jaberi (al-Fadhila) both roundly rejected the idea of negotiating any binding longterm Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States as long as US forces remain in their country. Both also, intriguingly, said that the Arab League might be the outside party best placed to convene the negotiation required to achieve intra-Iraqi reconciliation.
Ulayyan and Jaberi were speaking at a lunch discussion hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They have spoken to a number of civil society groups here in the past two days. On Wednesday– as I noted here earlier today– they testified about their country’s situation at a hearing held by the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight.
While with the Subcommittee, they handed chair Rep. William Delahunt a letter spelling out the view of a majority of Iraq’s MPs that any SOFA completed between the two countries should stipulate a total withdrawal of US troops from the whole of Iraq before a date certain.
In that earlier blog post I also highlighted the importance I saw, in today’s increasingly transparent global environment, of the contacts that non-governmental groups and individuals (including parliamentarians) can now maintain with their counterparts across national borders without having all such interactions regulated by the national governments involved. Ulayyan and Jaberi’s visit to the US– which was originally also to have included three other Iraqis– has been organized by the American Friends Service Committee.
Great work, AFSC!!!
I’m hoping to write up a longer account of today’s Carnegie Endowment gathering as soon as I can. For now, I’ll focus on the questions about the SOFA and the sponsoring mechanism for the still-needed process of internal reconciliation. Those were indeed my main concerns going into the meeting. Someone else asked the two MPs about the SOFA question, and I was then able to ask the two MPs the reconciliation-sponsorship question.
In line with my now three-year-old plan for how the US can get out of Iraq, as laid out in the July 2005 writings linked to here, I also asked the two men what sponsorship they thought would be most effective for the international negotiations required to secure a US troop withdrawal from their country that is speedy, orderly, and complete. (My strong preference is for UN sponsorship.) They did not really address that part of the question. Maybe I’ll get a follow-up meeting with them sometime?
By the way, I think my 2005 plan for how the US can withdraw from Iraq has held up remarkably sturdily over time and is still very apposite.
Anyway, back to today’s Carnegie event. About the SOFA, Ulayyan said:

    We learned about the text being proposed by the US only through the media, and we’ve seen that it’s very unfair for the Iraqi people. Whoever sees it will see that Iraq would become not just under US occupation but as if it were part of the US! [But without voting rights, I might add. ~HC] It allows the US to use Iraqi territory and US military bases in Iraq for a very long time, and to use them to attack any country around the world from there. And it gives the US troops and civilians complete immunity from prosecution in the Iraqi court system. The US could do anything it wanted in Iraq without being accountable to anyone!
    Clearly, for anyone, it would be impossible to enter into an agreement with another party while being threatened by the other person’s weapons. Therefore the SOFA can’t be concluded as long as there are foreign troops on Iraq’s territory. For any agreement to work, there has to be a balance between the two parties to it.
    The timing of this attempt at getting a SOFA right now is also not appropriate because it would impede our national reconciliation process.

I had also asked the MPs whether they thought the US troop presence in Iraq was helpful or harmful to the state of internal relations within Iraq. Ulayyan replied on this point:

    We do believe the presence of US troops has been very harmful, for the following reasons: Firstly, the American forces have been creating problems inside Iraq to try to justify their own continued presence here. And secondly because many forces in Iraq today have been built up by the US, and they use the US troop presence to avoid dealing with the other parties.
    Therefore the withdrawal of the US troops according to a fixed timetable will aid national reconciliation.

To my question regarding what body they thought might be the one best suited to convene the intra-Iraqi reconciliation process, Jaberi replied,

    Some suggest the US or the UN or Iran as the best sponsors, or the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Or even Qatar, which as the lady said, did so well in successfully mediating the recent settlement even after the ‘big power’, the US, had failed. That latter success, by the way, was a way to protest external interventions in Lebanon– and its showed that a tiny country could solve a problem that a large country could not.
    But I see the Arab League as the best institution to sponsor a national reconciliation. First of all, it’s neutral, and secondly, it is the one best qualified to understand Iraq’s problems.
    We should recall that the Arab League has already been the only institution that has done anything successful at all to bring together the conflicting parties in Iraq– yes, parties that were actually in conflict at the time there– and win agreement from them all around some useful proposals for reconciliation. That was during the reconciliation session they hosted in Cairo in 2005.
    It came out with some good proposals, and our situation would have been a lot better now if they had been implemented. But what made it fail was that the parties weren’t allowed to implement it. The US administration blocked its implementation because they saw the Arab League as competing with them for influence.

I found it notable that Dr. Jaberi, who represents a majority-Shiite party in Iraq, expressed such faith in the capacities of the Arab League. I should also note that though Fadhila is a majority-Shiite party, the position Jaberi expressed at many points during the discussion was that Iraq needs to thought of and constituted as “the state of the citizen” (dawlat al-muwatin), rather than being constituted on the basis of sectarian quotas of any kind. Indeed, he expressed strong criticism of the UDS for having introduced the whole idea of sectarian quotas into leading government positions, in the first place.
Jaberi’s mention of the Arab League as being well qualified to convene the internal reconciliation process was also notable because it echoed a point that Ulayyan had made earlier in response to a general question about the mechanisms for reconciliation.
Ulayyan had said,

    There should first of all be committees created for this purpose, with participation from both the [Iraqi] government and the political parties. But first, of course, we need to have the true will for national reconciliation…The process has to be inclusive…
    Now that Saddam has left there is no reason for us not to manage our own country!
    … And we should have the help of the Arab League and the United Nations in helping to establish the basis on which these reconciliation committees can be built.

Interesting convergence, huh?
Over to you, Arab League?
Notable bottom line there, though, that some possibly well-meaning Americans might still need to have highlighted for them: Both these two men– and also, I suspect, a large majority of the Iraqi people– are quite clear that the United States is the party that is just about the worst qualified of all to convene or sponsor a successful intra-Iraqi reconciliation process.
So much for the idea of the so-called “Pottery Barn Rule”, eh?

Trying to convert military aggressions into longterm political control: Iraq, Lebanon (x2)

Today is the 26th anniversary of Israeli PM Menachem Begin’s launching of a large-scale invasion of Lebanon. So, given the notably unsuccessful, or even counter-productive (from Israel’s point of view) record of that invasion, today is an excellent day on which to consider the stalling of the Bush administration’s present attempt to cash out some political gains– inside Iraq– from its decision to invade that country in 2003.
On May 17, 1983, Israel thought it was cashing out its political gains in Lebanon from the invasion of the year before. That was the day Israeli PM Menachem Begin, Lebanese President Amin Gemayyel, and U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz all gathered to sign a final peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel that included provisions for tightly US- and Israel-dominated security cooperation between Lebanon and Israel. (I don’t have my 1984 book on Lebanon to hand to provide all the details I need here. It should be with my by tomorrow.)
You can read the text of the May 17 agreement here. Though it was duly signed and ratified by all parties (including, I believe, by a Lebanese government that had been sufficiently bought and paid for by the US-Israeli alliance by that time), within less than nine months it was toast.
Lebanese nationalist forces backed by Syria were able to force out of the country the US Marine force that, though it was originally deployed in August 1982 to protect unarmed Palestinians, rapidly thereafter moved closer to giving outright support to Gemayyel’s minority government instead. The US plan in Lebanon also relied heavily on building up the national army to support their ally, Gemayel. But in February 1984, when Gemayyel ordered the army to start shooting into civilian areas, the majority of nationalist-minded Shiites who made up its ranks simply deserted en masse rather than follow those orders, and the whole army collapsed. (I recently blogged a little about that, here.)
With no “Lebanese Army” left to provide a cover for their presence, the Marines fled the country. By mid-February Gemayel– a man always more opportunistic than principled– had made his peace with Damascus and Amal.
The May 17 agreement lay in tatters on the floor.
So now, a different US administration is working very hard to translate its position as post-invasion military occupier of Iraq into a vassalage-style agreement with Iraq that is very similar– or even more draconian– than what Shultz and Begin were trying to impose on Lebanon in May 1983.
Patrick Cockburn is the western MSM-er who’s been doing the best and most systematic coverage of the actual extremely coercive “diplomacy” of this attempt. Here and here. Huge kudos to him.
The first of those pieces leads thus:

    A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
    The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
    But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US…

The second leads thus:

    The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.
    US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday…

As Cockburn and others note, however, the very coercive nature of the US diplomacy involved has aroused some very serious Iraqi pushback.
The WaPo.com’s excellent Dan Froomkin published a survey of accounts of some political aspects this pushback in his post yesterday.
Iraq’s nationalist forces are very smartly mounting their campaign against the arrangements proposed by the Bushists at three distinct levels:

    1. Through broad grassroots organizing against it. You can find some accounts of this through the Sadrist “Al-Kufiyya” news agency. Juan Cole has also produced two good recent compilations of accounts of this, on May 31, and June 3.

    2. Through some fascinating cross-sect and cross-party political work inside Iraq. You can find many glimpses of that in the sources cited by Cole… and
    3. Through political contacts Iraqi lawmakers are pursuing with American legislators and other sectors of US society. In a sense, this is the most intriguing aspect of the campaign. These Iraqi legislators are using precisely what we might call the emergence of a global political community– that is backed up by vastly improved global communications and by the strengthening of many key global norms– to appeal across national borders to their counterparts inside US society. And they are doing so in a way that may be very fruitful indeed. (Though they certainly shouldn’t end their grassroots organizing at home in favor of this international diplomatic initiative!)

This is where the events that Froomkin was reporting on yesterday become so important.
Basically, we now have these two Iraqi parliamentarians right here in Washington. (I think I’m going to a lunch event with them in about an hour’s time.) They are Nadeem Al-Jaberi, described by Reuters as “a co-founder of the al-Fadhila Shi’ite political party” and Khalaf Al-Ulayyan, identified as “A Sunni Iraqi lawmaker… [and] founder of the National Dialogue Council.”
That Reuters report tells us that on Wednesday Jaberi and Ullayan testified in person directly at a hearing convened by the International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight Subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee,. They stated in no uncertain terms,

    that U.S. troops should leave Iraq, and that talks on the long-term security pact should be postponed until after they are gone.
    “What are the threats that require U.S. forces to be there?” asked Nadeem Al-Jaberi…speaking through a translator.
    “I would like to inform you, there are no threats on Iraq. We are capable of solving our own problems,” he declared. He favored a quick pullout of U.S. forces, which invaded the country in 2003 and currently number around 155,000.
    … Khalaf Al-Ulayyan… said bilateral talks on a long-term security deal should be shelved until American troops leave — and until there is a new government in Washington.
    “We prefer to delay until there is a new administration in the United States,” he said.

Froomkin also provided a link to what was described as a letter that Jaberi and Ulayyan handed to the Subcommittee chair, Rep. William Delahunt (D.Mass.) (Take care, the link is actually, despite appearances, to a PDF file.)
The letter bears the signatures of only 31 of the 275 members of the Iraqi parliament. But at the top, the heading says that Jaberi and Ulayyan affirmed that it had been signed by these MPs “on behalf of parties representing a majority of the 275 members.”
The letter made two main arguments. The first was that under the procedures of the (Bremer-designed) Iraqi Constitution itself, any international agreement signed by the Iraqi “government” needs to be ratified by the parliament in order to enter into force.
The second was simply,

    We wish to inform you that the majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any … agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq, in accordance with a declared timetable anmd without leaving behind any military bases, soldiers or hired fighters.

Excellent clarity.
So what will Bush do next? The Democrat-strong US congress is (a) holding hearings like this one that expose the administration’s imperialistic shenanigans for what they are, and (b) strongly opposed to the idea that Bush might have the right to conclude any form of binding longterm agreement with Iraq without that agreement being submitted to the legislature here in the US, too.
Where is Bush’s “pro-democracy” rhetoric on this question, I wonder?
The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has a piece in today’s paper in which she provides details of the follow-up in the to-and-fro between the administration and Congress over this question of the longterm agreement with Iraq. She also reports that the US ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, tried to claim that the opposition that Iraqis had voiced to the proposed text had all been stirred up by the Iranians.
She quotes an un-named Iraqi official– probably foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari (whose personal qualities somewhat resemble those of Amin Gemayyel, see above)– as saying that Iraqi government may seek an extension of the UN Security Council “mandate” over Iraq rather than succumbing to the terms Bush is proposing for switching to a bilateral agreement.
Anyway, I guess I want to make a few last quick points here before I get ready for this lunch.

    1. The Iraqi nationalists really do seem to be getting their act together these days, pushing back five years’ worth of dedicated attempts by the US occupying force and others to foment divide-and-rule hatreds and conflicts.
    2. Though international law maintains its is quite illegal for an occupying power to push through deep changes in the governance system of an occupied territory, nevertheless, the system imposed by the US occupiers in Iraq does allow for some accountability on issues of fundamental national importance there– such as whether the country gets turned into a longterm vassal of the US, or not. The “democratization” rhetoric and campaign maintained by the Bushists has also sort of ended up hoisting them on their own petard with regard to allowing the Iraqi nationalist lawmakers a voice within the US system.
    3. The norms of national sovereignty and the accountability of governments to their citizens are anyway very well entrenched internationally these days. The arguments made by the Iraqi lawmakers cannot simply be ignored– even here, in the United States.
    4. In an international system that is today marked by greater degrees of international connectivity and transparency than ever before, as well as by the spread of respect for the global norms described above, 19th-century-style colonial campaigns to convert raw military dominance into solid political gains– as in the consolidation of the British Raj in India, or whatever– are simply no longer feasible. Israel learned this long and slowly in Lebanon after 1982, and then again in a short and sharp “refresher lesson” in 2006. The US political system is only now starting to learn this lesson in Iraq.

Bottom line: Military power just ain’t as useful to the world’s big nations as it once was. Heck, you could even say that when they employ it, the effect is nearly always actually counter-productive.
Whatever next? A world without wars of aggression? A world in which nations stay within their own recognized boundaries and resolve conflicts through negotiation, mediation, litigation, or other nonviolent means? How amazingly revolutionary! How very, um, United Nations-y.
(Which was, we can recall, a US creation, back in 1945.)

Abbas-Hamas reconciliation: Bushist Quarantine Wall crumbles further

So now PA President Mahmoud Abbas has decided to join the long stream of US Middle East allies– including Israel, Egypt, and Qatar, and the UAE, etc etc– who are having political dealings with Hamas.
Elliott Abrams, one of the key authors of the policy to “marginalize and if possible crush” all states and parties critical of the Bushist policy in the region, must be tearing his hair out.
Hamas’s Ismail Haniya, head of the Palestinian government elected in 2006, “told a press conference that his government was ready to respond favorably to any Arab or international effort to initiate national dialogue in the Palestinian arena.”
Still no news yet, though, on completion of Israel’s tahdi’eh-plus negotiations with Hamas.
For background on all this, you can go to my recent Boston Review article on Hamas.

Bernard Chazelle on Palestine-Israel

Long-time JWN commenter Bernard Chazelle has written and web-published a thoughtful description of, and reflection upon, a recent substantial trip he made to Israel and Palestine. (Or to Palestine/Israel? Or to Pal-sreal, or Is-lestine, or whatever you want to call, um, you know, that chunk of land that the British ruled for a while as “Mandate Palestine”.)
Chazelle’s description is first-class, and definitely well worth reading by anyone who wants to understand the deadening effect all those Israeli roadblocks have on the lives of the West Bank Palestinians. He didn’t even get in to Gaza to give us a description of life there…
After re-reading the reflective “Essay” that occupies the second portion of the web-page, I have to say that I disagree with some of his analysis and conclusions. Specifically, I’m not sure that the game-theoretical approach he uses to the “problem” of the negotiations works very well since it seems to generally assume that each of the two political leaders is a monolithic actor.
Also, I think he is simply not accurate when he writes this:

    To blame the lobby [for the dysfunctional nature of the US-Israeli relationship], however, one needs to make the case that US policy would be notably different in its absence. The evidence is thin. [I dispute that.] Israel has been the linchpin of Pax Americana in the Middle East since June 1967: Cold War then; Carter Doctrine now. The lobby may rejoice in this but can’t take credit for it.[I dispute that, too. I think the pro-Israel lobby can take a great deal of credit for it.]

These are serious issues, which I’m sure we can usefully discuss a lot more. But most JWN readers will anyway, like me, get a lot of value out of reading the whole of Chazelle’s piece.

Obama and Israel

Barack Obama made the obligatory candidate’s visit to AIPAC’s annual convention today. Look, I’ve been in this country through six presidential elections. I don’t recall a single major candidate who hasn’t gone to the AIPAC convention and made some extremely pandering remarks there. By that (admittedly very low) standard, Obama stands out– just a little bit– but perhaps not trivially.
Here’s the L.A. Times account of what he said , which is the fullest I can find. LAT reporter Johanna Neuman writes there:

    Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama won applause with a promise to “do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He also assailed his Republican opponent, John McCain, for “willful mischaracterization” of his call for diplomatic outreach to the Iranian regime and said he “has no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking.”
    But as president, Obama said, “I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place and my choosing — if and only if it can advance the interests of the United States.”
    Calling the threat posed by Iran “grave,” Obama said that “as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.” He pledged $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade to “ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat — from Gaza to Tehran.” To a standing ovation, he said, “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — everything.”
    The presumed Democratic nominee took a shot at President Bush for delaying peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. “I won’t wait until the waning days of my presidency,” he said. “I will take an active role and make a personal commitment to do all I can to advance the cause of peace from the start of my administration.”
    Saying that Palestinians “need a state that is contiguous and cohesive,” Obama said any agreement “must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders” and with Jerusalem the capital of an undivided country. [Actually, that’s really sloppy reporting in that last sentence. What CNN reports Obama as saying at that point is, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” CNN also has the video of the speech.]
    The Illinois senator sought to dispel concerns in the Jewish community, circulating on the Internet, that he is a Muslim and is allied with critics of Israel. Obama is a Christian. “If anyone has been confused by these e-mails,” he said, “I want you to know that today I’ll be speaking from my heart, and as a true friend of Israel.”
    And he reminded the audience that African Americans and Jewish Americans had stood together during the civil rights era. “They took buses down South together,” Obama said. “They marched together. They bled together. And Jewish Americans like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were willing to die alongside a black man — James Chaney — on behalf of freedom of equality.” Calling the legacy of the three slain civil rights workers “our inheritance,” Obama said, “We must not allow the relationship between Jews and African Americans to suffer.”

Even Haaretz’s sometimes fairly hawkish commentator Shmuel Rosner was moved to observe of the parade of pandering presidential wannabes to today’s AIPAC gig that,

    Generally speaking, the AIPAC delegates tended to applaud the speakers when they talked tough about Iran, and to remain relatively silent when they were talking about peace with the Palestinians…
    Of course, some people will make this yet another proof that AIPAC is hawkish, warmongering, radical organization. I think it is a sign of grim and realistic skepticism. Maybe it was better for the delegates to make an effort and cheer more enthusiastically when peace was mentioned – but it was also perfectly understandable, for their part, not to.

A general election– and a show trial?

So finally, we know who the two main candidates will be in our general election here in the US this November. Yesterday evening, Barack Obama pulled past the magic number of 2,118 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. That, after the Democratic Party had finally held primaries or caucuses in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
I watched CNN for much of yesterday evening. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Obama all gave significant speeches. Hillary’s was almost– but not quite– a farewell speech. She has not yet conceded the nomination to Obama, but indicated she would make a decision fairly soon. I think her delivery of the speech was the strongest I have ever seen from her, though the content was pretty poor. Not just that she didn’t acknowledge Obama’s by-then obvious victory. But her speech also lacked substance.
What were more interesting to me were the speeches of the two remaining, big-party presidential candidates, MacCain and Obama. McCain’s was truly pathetic. He was speaking in New Orleans (which he insisted on calling New Orleyans, not ‘Norlins’ as most locals there do.) In that proud city that was once a hub of African-American-Cajun culture he had gathered about 200 people, all of them apparently “white”. Also, as one of the CNN commentators noted, McCain managed to assemble a crowd of such an age that he seemed to be the youngest man in the room.
I was interested to see the degree that he– like Obama– focused his speech on international issues, primarily the situation in Iraq and the whole question of the use of the US military in international affairs. I guess I’d thought that rising economic worries here at homer might have already shifted the topic of debate between the candidates from international affairs to economic affairs. But that doesn’t seem to have happened at this point.
McCain’s delivery was wooden and self-conscious.
Then came Hillary’s speech, given to a crowd that was larger but certainly not huge, in the basement gym of Baruch College in New York. As I said, her delivery was excellent. The crowd seemed dominated by ardent and somewhat cult-like Hillary-supporters. I guess they’ll need a bit of time to come to terms with her defeat. She, obviously, needs to show some clear leadership in bringing them around to give enthusiastic support to a Democratic ticket that she won’t be heading. (There’s been a lot of talk about whether Obama will choose her as his Vice. She certainly seems to be angling for that. That’s a tough decision for him to make.)
And then we had Obama’s speech, which was delivered in the same sports stadium in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans will be holding their convention this September. In this notably “white”-dominated state, Obama had packed the 17,000-seat stadium, and according to local police there were an additional 18,000 people gathered outside, as well. His people are a little cult-like, too… But I guess that in the American system, if any candidate succeeds in generating enthusiasm and buzz, then a gathering of his/her supporters could appear cult-like from the outside. It’s something to do with the intense personalization of the system here.
He was accompanied to the stage by his radiant-looking spouse, Michele Obama, a tall, extremely competent woman, who exchanged a hug and a playful little knuckle-punch with him before she left him alone under the Klieg lights to deliver his speech.
Right near the beginning he announced, “Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.”
He then moved right into addressing his presumed opponent, McCain– something he has already been doing for some weeks now, as the certitude of his imminent victory in the Democratic primaries has grown ever larger. He described McCain as “a man who has served this country heroically,” immediately adding: “I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine. My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign.”
I think that displayed just the right amount of respect and collegiality toward McCain, though with an appropriate small edge of feisty criticism.
Here was where Obama delineated his approach to international affairs:

    there are many words to describe John McCain’s attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush’s policies as bipartisan and new. But change is not one of them.
    Change is a foreign policy that doesn’t begin and end with a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged. I won’t stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq, but what’s not an option is leaving our troops in that country for the next hundred years – especially at a time when our military is overstretched, our nation is isolated, and nearly every other threat to America is being ignored.
    We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in – but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future. It’s time to rebuild our military and give our veterans the care they need and the benefits they deserve when they come home. It’s time to refocus our efforts on al Qaeda’s leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century – terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That’s what change is.
    Change is realizing that meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy – tough, direct diplomacy where the President of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for. We must once again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That’s what the American people want. That’s what change is.

The arguments I emphasized there all look like good and compelling ones. (Though I think that linking a withdrawal from Iraq to to more reliance on the UN– there and elsewhere– would have been better than linking it to a sort of “blame the Iraqis” meme?)
Anyway, his delivery of the speech was– as always– spectacular. Obama is a truly gifted rhetorician, along with his many other talents. Anyway, crafting and delivering a great speech requires huge understanding at the levels of both raw intellect and human affairs.
So here we are, with the national attention now shifting to the general election contest. If it were just about McCain and Obama, then I think McCain would have an extremely tough job of winning. Obama’s greatest strength is the authenticity with which he can represent his “change” agenda– this at a time when the vast majority of Americans are evidently fed up with the present situation (economic and military) and have a very poor opinion of Pres. Bush. McCain is not only 25 years older than Obama (and looks and acts it); in addition, he is closely allied to Bush’s policies on all issues, except climate change.
But it is McCain’s party association with Bush, who still holds considerable levers of power in the country, that makes me wary of predicting any easy victory for Obama. As head of the executive branch, there are any number of actions Bush and his people could take that he might hope would help push the election toward his fellow Republican.
Yes, even including actions in the arena of war and peace. This would certainly not be the first time this has happened… (Wag the Dog, anyone?)
However, initiating any kind of election-related, pre-election attack on another country would be a very risky business, at two levels:

    1. It would most likely, in today’s global political climate, stir up a very extensive and damaging hornet’s nest internationally, and
    2. It might not even have the “desired” effect on an electorate at home that is, I believe, considerably savvier about the risks of international escalation than the US citizenry was back in the 1990s. Indeed, a pre-election escalation or attack, against Iran or any other possible target, might even backfire at the polls. Remember what happened to Jose Maria Aznar when he tried a last-minute escalation of his rhetoric against the Basques?

From this perspective, I believe that the more we can educate the US electorate at home about the very real risks that would be incurred internationally by any unjustified US military attacks against other countries, the more we might be able to deter the Bushists from launching any such attack.
But launching a Wag the Dog attack isn’t the only thing the nation’s chief executive and his employees can do between now and November. They could also, oh, to mention one wild and crazy example, schedule some show trials to start in September? Something connected with 9/11? With a huge related media operation? That would serve in those vital last weeks before the election to work the electorate back up into a tizzy of fear and xenophobia… ?
No, they wouldn’t stoop to doing that, would they? Would they?

Iraq: The big nationalist showdown about to start?

US casualties in Iraq in May declined to 19 fatalities, the lowest monthly level since the invasion was launched 63 months ago. However, the attention of most Iraqis has now shifted to the attempt the Bushists are now undertaking, to ram through speedy completion of a US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
The prospects of the Bushists getting what they want in this regard seem slim-to-zero.
The present UNSC “enabling resolution” for the US troop presence in Iraq runs only through the end of 2008, and the Bushists seem determined to get the SOFA signed and sealed before then. But the mere mention of any agreement that would allow the continuing presence of US troops in the country has aroused a very broad pushback, involving not only forces within the political opposition in Iraq but also significant forces inside the government coalition itself.
For further evidence on the breadth of the pushback, see e.g. here and here.
The present US Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has been described by many in the MSM as a smart guy who understands a lot about the Middle East… If so, then why on earth do the pols in Washington think they can get any Iraqi government to sign off on a deal that allows for a large continuing US troop presence, broad continuing US oversight of the Iraqi economy, immunity from Iraqi legal proceedings for non-Iraqis working for foreign contracting companies, etc.?
Maybe the pols haven’t been listening to Crocker? And if that’s the case, why does he stay in his job? Why doesn’t he do the honorable thing and resign?
At the end of the day, as Clausewitz pointed out, what is really important is what happens at the political level. Mere military-technical superiority is worth nothing if you can’t get the political outcome you want. (Israel in Lebanon 2006, anyone?) And I don’t see any way the US can get the kind of political outcome that the Bush administration is currently trying to win in Iraq. Not persuasion, not coercion, not even any tragic replays of the divide-and-rule policies they’ve been applying with a vengeance there since March 2003.
Oh my goodness, maybe sometime before the end of the year– or perhaps even fairly soon– the Bushists will conclude they can’t ram this thing through, and that they’ll have to go to the U.N. Secretary-General and beg him to convene a broad negotiation over the political future of Iraq?

Those commander-in-chief videoconference records

It has been a new and notable feature of the present administration’s wars that the Prez has “reached down deep” into the command structure to build personal relationships with the U.S. military’s front-line commanders on the ground. He has done this mainly through secure videoconferencing– a technology that he has also used to conduct regular video-conned discussions with government leaders in Iraq and doubtless elsewhere as well.
Now, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of US troops in Iraq, has published a memoir in which he describes how Bush behaved during a secure videocon held in April 2004, after Americans learned of the burning and lynching of four US military contractors in Fallujah.
Sanchez writes (hat-tip to the WaPo’s Michael Abramowitz here) that during that videocon Bush launched into what Sanchez described as a “confused” pep talk:

    “Kick ass!” he quotes the president as saying. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! … Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

Abramowitz adds that “A White House spokesman had no comment.”
Now, I’m assuming that Sanchez would not have put such shockingly provocative words into the mouth of the US President if he did not have full records (i.e., most likely, a tape of the videocon) to back them up.
“If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!” … “Stay the course! Kill them!” … “We are going to wipe them out!”
Excuse me?
Is this the language of the leader of a self-confident, cultured, and democratic nation? (I noted particularly the irony of the bit about “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, ve vill seek them out and kill them… “)
But here’s something else this news report reminded me to make note of. Presumably, all these videoconferences have been archived and stored somewhere deep in the archives of the government that organized them?
As a taxpayer in a democratic country, I feel quite entitled to require that

    (1) The archives of those command deliberations not be destroyed, and
    (2) These archives be declassified and made available to the public as soon as possible.

I hope that my representatives on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees make every effort to ensure the preservation and speedy declassification of these records.
(I have also previously noted the extent to which the “personal” relationships that Bush has built with front-line commanders have played havoc with the country’s long-established and legally correct command structure, according to which the Prez should communicate with commanders through via his SecDef, the Chairman of the JCS, and the regional CINCs– in this case, the Centcom CINC. Bush’s “reaching down deep” into the structure has had terrible consequences, above all, for the ability of the nation’s military to conduct a rational and sustainable system for achieving force planning objectives. But that’s another story.)