Author: Helena

Honey, I shrunk the superpower…

Rami Khouri has some excellent commentary today on the currently very evident contraction of US diplomatic power in the Middle East. He surveys the past week’s breakthroughs in intra-Lebanese reconciliation and Israeli-Syrian diplomacy– as I did here, on May 21.
Regarding the intra-Lebanese agreement, he wrote:

    The US was not fully defeated, but it was fought to a draw…
    The US is a slow learner in the Middle East, where the terrain is strange to it, the body language bizarre, the fierce power of historical memory incomprehensible, and the negotiating techniques other-worldly. But the US is not stupid. It learns over time that if you retread a flat tire over and over again, and it keeps going flat on you, perhaps it’s time to buy a new tire if you hope to move forward. Now that we have a draw in the broad ideological confrontation throughout the Middle East that pits Israeli-Americanism against Arab Islamo-nationalism, we should expect the players to reconsider their policies if they wish to make new gains.
    This, however, is not the most significant development this week that reflects the limits of American power in the Middle East. The remarkable manifestation of how the US has marginalized itself is the conduct of the Israeli government. The US has pushed the Israelis hard to do two things in the past two years: to not negotiate with Syria and to not engage Hamas. What has Israel done? It has been wisely negotiating with Syria via Turkey, and engaging Hamas on a truce deal through the mediation of Egypt. Hold on, Condi, this gets even worse.
    It is no big deal in Washington when nearly 500 million Arabs, Iranians and Turks ignore and defy the US. But when Israel – the only democracy in the Middle East, America’s eternal ally, and the bastion of the epic modern struggle against fascism, totalitarianism, Nazism, communism and terrorism – ignores the United States, that is newsworthy.
    So we now have a rare moment in the Middle East: Iran, Turkey, all the Arabs, Hizbullah, Hamas and Israel all share one and only one common trait: They routinely ignore the advice, and the occasional threats, they get from Washington. Condoleezza Rice was correct in summer 2006 when she said we are witnessing the birth pangs of a new Middle East. But the new regional configuration is very different from what she had in mind and tried to bring into being with multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia and Lebanon, and threats against Iran and Syria. The new rules of the political game in the Middle East are now being written by the key players in the Middle East, which should be welcomed.

Rami may, however, be a little too generous when he writes, “the US is not stupid. It learns over time.” Well, I guess it’s a question of over how much time the US government can “learn” what it needs to learn about the realities of the Middle East, and adjust its policies accordingly. As J. M. Keynes so memorably noted, “Over the long run, we’re all dead.”
So how steep can we expect the US government’s learning curve to be? Given the record of the past few years, I am not optimistic– unless the US public and government can both undergo a broad re-assessment of how they see the US’s relationship with the rest of the world, going forward.
Evidence about the slowness of the Middle East-related learning curve here is quite abundant… Back in 2002, just about everyone inside the US who knew much of anything about the strategic realities of the Middle East was warning vociferously that any kind of an essentially unilateral (i.e., not UN-sanctioned) US invasion of Iraq would end up as a disaster. All those voices of wisdom and understanding– which existed within various government bureaucracies and outside them– were systematically marginalized from having any impact, undercut through bureaucratic maneuverings and the wilful manufacturing of false “evidence”, and publicly derided.
Those of us who forecast that the invasion would be a medium- and long-term disaster were, however, right.
Some of us then argued that sufficient attention to running a “successful” post-invasion occupation could at least minimize the negatives arising from the decision to invade.
Due attention was not paid to that vitally important task. Instead, Iraq’s capacities for re-emerging self-governance were systematically ripped apart through Bremer’s wilfully destructive actions. (Bremer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wolfowitz got that plus the World Bank.)
Those of us who have argued for broad diplomatic re-engagement with Iran on a basis of mutual respect have been marginalized, undercut and publicly derided.
Those of us who argued against the strong support the Bushites gave Olmert’s disastrous assault against Lebanon in 2006 were marginalized, undercut, and derided.
Those of us who argued that the results of the 2006 elections in Palestine should be respected and the US should explore the many potential ways to deal with the elected government were marginalized, undercut, and derided.
Those of us have argued for robust and fair-minded US re-engagement in the remaining tracks of Israeli-Arab peacemaking have been marginalized, undercut, and derided.
Those of us who have argued that, given its track-record, the US is uniquely ill-suited to bringing internal reconciliation to Iraq, and that therefore it should request the UN to find a way to do so that will allow an orderly withdrawal of US forces from their expensive, vulnerable, and essentially dysfunctional positioning throughout Iraq have been marginalized, undercut, and derided.
Those of us who have argued that the US can and should find a way to include broadly supported popular movements like Hamas and Hizbullah into the diplomacy of the region rather than seeking to subvert and crush such movements have been marginalized and subjected to often withering waves of public derision…
So I’m not exactly holding my breath for “the US learning curve” suddenly to become steeper and to conform to the demands of our still-evolving present era any time soon. The Manichean mindset of “You’re either with us or against us”, the too-ready recourse to the rhetoric of a glibly anti-“terrorist” discourse that obfuscates rather than explains the realities of life in most Middle Eastern societies– these aspects of US public life are still far, far too prevalent.
But perhaps the fact that actors long considered stalwart supporters of the broad “GWOT” campaign in the region– actors like Ehud Olmert and Fouad Siniora– are now quite prepared to go off the GWOT reservation and to act in their own best interests as they perceive them, rather than as Elliott Abrams or other fevered minds in Washington might see them, might give us an opportunity, here in the United States, to start looking at the situation in a much more realistic way? Let’s hope so.
For the facts of the matter are:

    (1) the GWOT hasn’t “worked”, even in its own terms. Worldwide fatalities from terrorism in 2007 were 430 percent the level of fatalities from terrorism in that fateful year 2001– and that’s by the State Department’s own counting system; and
    (2) the US has lost a considerable degree of the ability it once had to assemble and essentially control region-spanning coalitions of its own supporters throughout the Middle East.

Time for a broad conceptual re-tool, I think.
Meanwhile, we can have some fun speculating which of Condi Rice or George W. Bush might turn to the other in the weeks ahead and confess to the truth: “Honey, I shrunk the superpower.”

Israel deports Finkelstein. Official US reaction?

Norman Finkelstein is a citizen of a powerful country (the US) whose financial, political, and military support to Israel is a vital ingredient of Israel’s security, that has also allowed Israel to maintain its policy of colonial expropriation of occupied Palestinian and Syrian land since 1967.
In the past, the Israeli government has denied entry to its national terrain– and also to the occupied territories that it completely controls– to large numbers of US citizens, many or most of them US citizens of Palestinian heritage. Others denied entry have been associated with political movements, including the commitedly nonviolent International Solidarity Movement. Those acts of discrimination have been (somewhat feebly) protested by US officials, over the years.
With today’s reported blocking of Dr. Norman Finkelstein’s entry into Israel, that country’s government has reached a new low. I am not sure what difference it should make to us as US citizens, in this context, whether Finkelstein is Jewish or not (he is), or whether he’s the child of two Holocaust survivors or not (which he is, too.) What seems clear is that Finkelstein is being discriminated against in the present instance solely on the basis of his expressed views, rather than on the basis of any evidence of past wrongdoing or planned future wrongdoing.
Finkelstein is a committed supporter of the two-state outcome to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which implies that he entirely supports Israel’s continued existence as a majority Jewish state. What he has strongly criticized are many of Israel’s actions that have inflicted considerable harm on citizens and residents of neighboring polities with the aim of trying to force these polities to bow to Israel’s will.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have also criticized these actions. Does that mean that we will also be denied entry the next time we seek to visit Israel?
Why on earth should our government and our tax-dollars continue to prop up a regime that behaves in this notably anti-democratic way?
Richard Silverstein blogged the following last night:

    For those wishing to protest against Finkelstein’s detention, you may call, fax or e-mail:
    Meir SHEETRIT
    Minister of Interior
    2 Kaplan St., Qiryat Ben-Gurion
    P.O. Box 6158, 91061 Jerusalem
    Tel. 972-2-670-1411 / 972-2-629-4722
    Fax: 972-2-670-1628
    Meir SHEETRIT
    Knesset
    Telephone 1: 972-2-640-8410
    Telephone 2: 972-2-640-8409
    Fax: 972-2-640-8920
    Email: mshitrit@knesset.gov.il
    If you are American, call the State Department’s Hotline for American Travelers: 202-647-5225. Let them know this is happening and is in violation of international law. Call your Congress member and senator NOW and advise them a U.S. citizen is being denied access to Israel.

Good advice (though technically, there’s no international law bar to Israel controlling its borders as it sees fit.) Realistically, it is probably too late now to prevent this deportation. But I think it’s important that US citizens should still make known to our own government and congressional representatives our continuing concern about Israel’s discriminatory and anti-democratic treatment of many of our fellow-citizens who seek to visit that country, and we can now add Dr. Finkelstein to the list of our examples.
My sympathies to Norman Finkelstein himself, meanwhile. I hope his treatment at Ben-Gurion was not too horribly humiliating.

Clawson preparing public for an attack on Iran?

Here comes another propaganda campaign designed to lull western publics into thinking that a military attack on a Middle East nation will likely be a whole lot more successful than most experts currently think.
“Cakewalk”, anyone?
The cakewalk is now being promised us is in Iran… and by that highly ideological, anti-Islamic Republic figure Patrick Clawson, deputy director of AIPAC’s longtime research offshoot, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In the article linked to there, Clawson discusses with Israeli commentator Yossi Melman the reasons he and fellow WINEP-er Michael Eisenstadt give in a forthcoming publication for why a military attack on Iran could be much more successful than most people currently fear.
Clawson seems to realize that he is trying to make a very tough argument, since he starts off with the old canard of obfuscation that “matters are a whole lot more complex than you think,” since there are “many variables” involved.
Melman asks: “Do you share the sweeping assessment of most experts that Iran’s reaction if attacked will be harsh and painful?” Clawson: “No. Iran’s record when it comes to its reactions in the past to attacks against it, or its important interests, is mixed… ” And he gives some examples from the 1980s and the early 1990s.
He makes no mention at all of the fact that the strategic picture in the Gulf region has changed considerably since then– including, crucially, that the US military now has 160,000 sitting ducks sitting in Iraq, just a stone’s throw away from Iran, with most of them in areas where the population is much, much more sympathetic to Iran’s interests than they are to the US’s.
This is, indeed, a key aspect of the currently re-emerging talk about “an attack” on Iran before Pres. Bush leaves office. Many participants in this talk gloss over the issue of whether it would be Israel or the US that launches the attack. In Melman’s questioning of Clawson, the assumption on both sides seems to be– as spelled out in one of Melman’s questions– that it would be Israel launching the attack.
So we here in the U.S. should be clear that Clawson, like a number of other strongly pro-Israeli figures, is openly arguing for an Israeli attack on Iran that will put thousands of US troops– and the very lengthy and vulnerable supply lines on which they depend– directly at risk of Iran’s retaliation.
Given the extremely close degree of military and political cooperation between the Israeli government and the Bush administration, if Israel launches a military attack against Iran then no-one inside Iran (or anywhere else) would find credible any protestation from the US government that it “was not involved at all” in the attack. Indeed, it is impossible to see how the Israelis could deliver warheads against targets inside Iran without the passage of those warheads (on missiles or planes) through US-controlled security environments– in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or the Gulf– having been cleared in advance by the US at the highest levels.
If any US government official colludes in any way with a plan whereby either Israeli or American weapons and plans are used to launch an attack against Iran that is not directly allowed by the UN Security Council, then that official is surely guilty of the highest levels of treason against our citizenry’s deepest interests. Like the majority of other US citizens, I have had quite enough of Israeli and pro-Israeli figures using cockamamie arguments to try to cajole my government into launching (or colluding in Israel’s launching of) a quite unjustified military attack against a Middle Eastern nation, thereby putting the lives of my fellow-citizens who are in the US military, and bound to follow the orders of their superiors, directly at risk.
All this re-emerging talk of an attack against Iran in the coming months– whether the attack has an Israeli “face” or a directly US one– needs to be decisively quashed. (Coincidentally, doing this could also help calm many of the current jitters in the global oil market.)
The best way to quash it, from the highest levels of US decisionmaking, would be for President Bush to declare publicly that

    (1) The US government does not seek and will not pursue any form of externally-pushed “regime change” in Iran,
    (2) The US seeks to re-open full diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic or Iran, and
    (3) The US wants to start broad negotiations with Iran (and the involvement of other relevant parties, as needed) on the whole range of issues that currently divide the two governments, and seeks the help of the UN Secretary-General in convening these talks.

This is not “giving away the store.” This is not the “appeasement” that Pres. Bush is so terrified of. This is a way of resolving international disagreements that has been tried and tested throughout the centuries. It’s called “diplomacy.”

AP’s flawed ‘Factbox’ about Golan

Who compiles this stuff, anyway? As a supposed aid to people seeking to understand the background to the latest news about the proximity talks between Syria and Israel in Turkey, the Associated Press has produced this ‘factbox’ about the Golan, the terrain at the heart of the territorial dispute between the two countries.
Of the five ‘bulleted’ items there, the first is generally okay.
The second starts off with: “Soldiers shelled northern Israel from the Golan Heights between 1948 and 1967…” It contains zero reference to the actions the Israeli military were taking in that period, when they were systematically advancing into the “demilitarized zone” that had been declared by the United Nations along the seam-line between the Israeli and Syrian armies in 1949, and the associated attacks the IDF maintained throughout that period against Syrian farmers, the Syrian military, and even UNTSO peacekeepers.
According to the AP version, the Syrians forces in Golan were just gratuitously shelling Israeli positions?
Excuse me?
In the third bulleted item in the ‘factbox’ it states,

    Most of the 100,000 Syrian residents of the Golan Heights fled during the 1967 war and were not allowed to return. A few of the roughly 17,000 left have accepted Israeli citizenship. About 18,000 Israelis live in 32 settlements built since 1967.

Zero mention of the fact that these Israeli settlements are completely illegal under international law.
It’s when we get to the fourth bulleted item that the level of “spin” sinks to the level of simple mendacity:

    Israel-Syria peace talks broke down in 2000. Israel offered to withdraw from all of the Golan Heights down to the international border in exchange for full peace. Syria insisted on recovering land across the border.

That is quite simply not true. The reason the peace bid that Israeli PM belatedly made in 2000 got absolutely nowhere was precisely because he pulled back on assurances PM Yitzhak Rabin had earlier given that Israel would withdraw to the international border. Barak was not prepared to do that, but Pres. Hafez al-Asad insisted as always that that was the only basis on which he would conclude a peace deal.
Asad did not ask for– far less insist on– a single inch of land that was not Syria’s under international law.
Where does AP get this nonsense, anyway? (Why does the name Barry Schweid come to mind?)
Finally, the fifth bulleted item seems completely Israelo-centric. How about we have some mention of the plight of Syrian families split up by Israel’s continued occupation of Golan and of the dire human-rights situation of the indigenous Golanis?
I wonder how many US newspapers editors, eager to inform their readers, will be running this ‘fact’-box without even being aware of the degree of spin and simple mendacity that have gone into its composition?
Editors and others interested in a more richly textured (and certainly, more fact-based) description of the human dimensions of the Golan issue would do well to go back to the vintage 1998 series I wrote about the question.

Middle East: US losing ‘Control’?

Two fascinating– and hopeful– items of Middle East news this morning. First, Syria, Israel, and Turkey have all confirmed that senior officials of Israel and Syria have been holding “proximity talks” on final-peace issues in Turkey since Monday.
Second, the Lebanese faction leaders and representatives who have been talking in Doha, Qatar since Sunday, have now announced their agreement on an package deal covering the three issues of: (1) getting the long-agreed presidential candidate Gen. Michel Suleiman finally inaugurated into office, (2) the make-up of the next cabinet, and (3) the rules for the next parliamentary election.
These items of diplomatic news are significant for these reasons:

    (1) In both cases, an entity that the Bush administration has been seeking to completely exclude from political participation has been included in a substantial way in this process. That is, Syria, and Lebanon’s biggest political party, Hizbullah.
    (2) In both cases, the mediation has been done by a non-American government that is (and remains) broadly friendly to the US, but with little regard for the preferences that the Bush administration has expressed very vociferously regarding the “exclusion” aim described above.

So it’s not the case that any anti-US forces are “taking over” the Middle East. But it is the case that Washington, which has long succeeded in exercising complete control over all the region’s “peace diplomacy” has now lost the ability to do that.
One earlier attempt by a pro-US power to do something broadly parallel to what the Qataris have achieved regarding Lebanon came in February 2007, when Saudi Arabia succeeded in brokering a “National Unity Agreement” between the Palestinian Fateh and Hamas movements.
On that occasion, Washington was furious, and stepped up its efforts to arm and train the pro-US Fateh people so they could retake the Palestinian polity by force. (They did succeed in breaking up the National Unity Government, but they left Palestinian society sorely wounded and badly divided.)
On this occasion, I’m not quite sure what cards the hardliners in Washington, led by Elliott Abrams, feel they might have left to play. Two facts are relevant to this. First, is the incredibly damaging effects that GWB’s diva-like appearances last week in Israel have had on his administration’s ability to exercise any persuasive sway at all in Arab capitals… And second is the fact that one of the parties going “off the Elliott Abrams-defined reservation” this time round is the Prime Minister of Israel.
I guess the Bush administration will just have to tag meekly along behind him.
Still worth watching for in the days ahead: whether these two diplomatic breakthroughs might also be accompanied by arrival at the long-promised breakthrough in the Israel-Hamas talks? (Pursuit of which by Israel in recent weeks has been another example of Israel going off the Elliott Abrams reservation.)
These are interesting times.

On Chicago Public Radio’s ‘Worldview’, Wednesday noon; some Mom-bragging

My book Re-engage! and I will be featured on Jerome McDonnell’s great ‘Worldview’ program out of Chicago Public Radio Wednesday, at noon CST.
You can also hear it through their website there.
Sorry I haven’t done much substantive blogging recently. I’ve been in New York today for the graduation of my wonderfully talented daughter Leila Rached with an M.A. degree from the Peace Education program at Columbia Teachers’ College.
Leila is also a full-time teacher of some five years’ experience. She teaches third grade in a severely stressed part of Brooklyn. I went to visit her classroom there in January and found the students sharp, focused, and engaged. They are great writers, too!
For her MA thesis, Leila designed a whole third-grade curriculum program in Conflict Resolution, Human Rights, and Environmental Education for her class.
And okay, while I’m in Mom-bragging mode, my son is getting a Master’s degree in early June, too. This is his second one. It’s from MIT’s program in Technology and Policy. His main focus is on energy and environmental issues. He’s been looking at the validity of the different ways people try to account for the emissions-reducing benefits of renewable power generation.
I can’t tell you all how incredibly proud I am of the people my three kids have become, and the work they’re doing. I love spending time with them and the partners who have brought so much additional richness into all of our lives. I truly realize how lucky I am able to be able to spend good time with them.

Power shifts inside Lebanon: Some observations

My dear friend Rami Khouri has surveyed the chances of success of the current “Doha Round” of talks among Lebanon’s leading politicians and concludes that “the real issue” is

    the viability, credibility and legitimacy of Arab statehood. The weak state led to the birth of groups like Hizbullah to provide those services that it could not offer its citizens, and Hizbullah now is a parallel state. How can the state and Hizbullah coexist? This is the central issue around which all others revolve. It is also an issue that plagues many other Arab governments, as the years ahead are likely to show.

I respectfully disagree with a lot of this. Lebanon is decidedly not like most other Arab states. (To misquote Tolstoy we could say that all Arab states are dysfunctional in their own particular ways.) But Lebanon is not like any other state anywhere else. It is a state that from the get-go– and in many ways quite fittingly– was designed to be a weak state.
Fittingly, because the country is, at its core, made up of three sectarian groups who found in the fastnesses of the Lebanese Mountains a haven against the authority of centralizing and orthodoxy-imposing states elsewhere. Those are the Maronite Christians, the Shiites, and Druze. Well, you could bracket the Shiites and Druze together, in historical terms, since the Druze were an 11th-century offshoot of the Shiites.
Then around those three core, historically mountain-centered groups, you had the traders and lower-land farmers with whom they interacted: primarily the Sunnis and the Roum (Greek) Orthodox, who both had strong ties to the surrounding empires.
I am not a geographic (or historical) determinist. But it’s worth remembering that geography and history when you look at the modern Lebanese “state”, love-child as it was of Mr. Sykes and M. Picot in the immediate post-WW1 days. Maybe the strongest analogy of “Lebanese” attitudes towards the state is with the American settlers, the earliest waves of whom were fleeing the religious and political diktats of orthodoxy-dominated states back in Europe, and who therefore always harbored a deep distrust of, and antipathy towards, anything that smelled of strong (or even effective) central state bodies.
If today’s Lebanon has any possibility at all of serving the normal basic functions of a state, then it must be one that is built on a foundation of political accommodation/consensus among the numerous components of the body politic (who are NOT coterminous with the country’s “sects”, as marked forever on each citizen’s ID card.) Only a governing administration that represents something of a national consensus can be even halfway effective in providing the basic functions of any state, starting first and foremost with public security; but also, one would hope, some bigger services than that, including the effective and transparent regulation of internal and external markets, and basic services in health, education, and social welfare.
I have some hope that this Doha Round can achieve the basic level of national consensus that is required.
For the past four years, Lebanon has been the target of a western-led– in the first instance, a cynically French-spearheaded– campaign to break the national consensus by curtailing or even crushing the role played in public life by Hizbullah, the Free Patriotic Movement, and their allies, who between them represent considerably more than 50% of Lebanon’s population. That campaign was always egged on by Israel, which in 2006 tried to play its own, “super-hero” role within it: A decision that proved massively, and quite predictably, counter-productive for the broader squeeze-or-crush-Hizbullah campaign, as well as for PM Ehud Olmert’s political standing at home.
The whole anti-Hizbullah campaign in Lebanon was (yet another) very misinformed and cynical over-reach by the forces of the “west” in the modern Middle East.
Of course, the very worst such over-reach has been the US decision to invade and “remake” Iraq.
Lebanon has already witnessed its own earlier such over-reach, too. That came with Ariel Sharon’s US-backed 1982 decision to invade and “remake” Lebanon. On that occasion, Sharon even managed to entangle the US military into deploying large numbers of its own boots onto the ground of Lebanon, with tragic consequences all round.
The turnround point for that particular portion of that particular over-reach came on February 4, 1984. On that day Nabih Berri, the leader of the then-largest political/social movement within the Shiite community, called on all the Muslim members of the government to resign and on all Muslim members of the Lebanese army to refuse any orders that would have had them shooting into civilian areas…
As I wrote in my 1985 book The Making of Modern Lebanon (p.205):

    At this stage, Berri was still not directly calling on the Muslims in the army to desert. But over the next few hours this is just what they did– in numbers so overwhelming that by 6 February the authority of the army had collapsed completely in all of West Beirut…
    On 7 February, President Reagan made a surprise announcement to the effect that he had now ordered the Marines to withdraw from Lebanon, back to the nearby US navy ships.

President Amin Gemayel had worked since his inauguration in fall 1982 to further the US-Israeli agenda in Lebanon at the time, which was focused on excluding Syria from exercising any influence over the Beirut government….
So then (p.206),

    At the end of February [1984], Amin Gemayyel made his first presidential visit to Damascus, to discuss the terms under which President Assad’s regime there would save him.

… Which it did. He served out the remainder of his six-year term as, essentially, a vassal of Damascus. The US military went home to lick its wounds. Israel stayed bogged down in southern Lebanon for a further 16 years. By the way, Israel’s continuing presence there in those years was precisely the situation in which Hizbullah was born, incubated, and grew to maturity as a political force inside Lebanon.
One additional note here: I see that Haaretz’s Zvi Barel has tried to show of his “insidery” knowledge of Lebanese politics in a lengthy analytical piece in the paper today. But I think his bottom line (and title) there is most likely wrong. It was: Siniora’s gov’t will fall, the question is when. My impression is that the victors from the past week’s upsets might well prefer to keep Siniora around… to have him be their “Amin Gemayyel on the road to Damascus.”
Barel’s piece is full of “hot” details about the feud between rival Druze leaders Walid Jumblatt and Talal Arslan– including lots of scandalous allegations against Arslan, presented as gospel fact, with amazingly not a single mention of the many scurrilous details it would be possible to mention about Walid’s personal life. Also, it’s hard to get too far into any discussion of the present state of the Jumblatts vs. the Arslans without recalling that the redoubtable Mai Jumblatt, Walid’s mother, is herself an Arslan?
Here’s how The Daily Star’s Hussein Abdullah and Maher Zeineddine described yesterday’s surrender by Walid Jumblatt to Talal Arslan, which was carried out in generally gracious fashion by both sides:

    Walid Jumblatt said Friday after visiting his Druze rival, Lebanese Democratic Party head Talal Arslan, that political disputes cannot be resolved through the use of arms. “Resorting to weapons does not yield any solution … Our only alternative is dialogue,” Jumblatt said.
    Commenting on the efforts made by Arslan to broker a cease-fire between opposition and pro-government militants during recent clashes southeast of Beirut, Jumblatt said that Arslan’s efforts had yielded positive results.
    “We asked Emir Talal to help us end the internal strife … and his efforts succeeded in ending the fighting,” Jumblatt said.
    “It has been a long time since I last visited this house, which has always been a second home, the same way my house in Mukhtara is Emir Talal’s second home,” he added.
    For his part, Arslan welcomed Jumblatt and praised his wisdom during the recent events.
    “Jumblatt’s wisdom and that of Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has facilitated the success of my efforts,” he said.
    Arslan stressed that Mount Lebanon has and will always embrace the [Hizbullah-led] resistance.
    Jumblatt later toured a number of predominantly Druze towns in the Aley district, including Baysour and Aley.
    Jumblatt urged his supporters to preserve inter-communal living in the mountains.
    “We want to live peacefully alongside our fellow brothers in the Shiite towns of Kayfoun and Qmatiyyeh … We have our opinion, they have theirs, but political disputes should only be resolved through dialogue,” Jumblatt said.
    After visiting Information Minister Ghazi Aridi’s residence in Baysour, Jumblatt said Baysour had always been a “gate for resistance and liberation.”
    “There is a big bruise, but we are going to dialogue … Whatever our neighbors do to us, we will always react positively through dialogue.”

What, no more calls for “car bombs in Damascus”, Walid?
Jumblatt “touring” the Druze towns in the Aley district on this occasion has something of the air of Emperor Hirohito being carted around Japan by Gen. Macarthur after his surrender in 1945. There, too, the aim was to make sure the surrendered leader used his remaining political charisma to persuade his followers to lay down their arms and go along with the new order…
Finally, I see that on Thursday, everyone’s favorite Angry Arab, As’ad Abu-Khalil, wrote:

    Mark my words: Hariri, Jumblat, and Hizbullah may run on the same list, again. And I am sure that they will not forget the widow of Bashir Gemayyel (who ran on Hariri-Jumblat-Hizbullah list in Beirut last time): who used to prepare for Ariel Sharon his favorite meals–as he reported in his memoirs. This proves my theory: sectarians of a feather, flock together.

He may well be right.

Western MSM on Asian disasters, contd.

I see that China Hand has posted an excellent analysis of the western MSM’s highly politicized (and sometimes just plain inaccurate) reporting on the “Western aid workers and Myanmar” story, that is considerably lengthier, and better authenticated in terms of good hyperlinks, than the few notes I penned here yesterday.
China Hand comments:

    the whole idea that Western aid workers are indispensable to disaster relief in the initial rescue period (and their absence is evidence of criminal and callous incompetence by the government of the afflicted region) is wrong and misleading, as well as something of an insult to the local people and organizations who, in any disaster, provide the bulk of first-responder disaster relief…

My own point, exactly.
CH further comments:

    We might have an effective Myanmar policy—one that doesn’t force it even deeper into China’s sphere of influence–if accurate reporting allowed us to understand the weaknesses, strengths, and priorities of the regime in light of the challenge of Cyclone Nargis and design a joint response to the disaster.
    But based on the instinctive and intellectually lazy junta bashing in the Western press encouraged by the posturing of the US, UK, and France, I’m not holding my breath.

I am delighted to see that, in CH’s research, s/he finds that one bright spot is provided by The Christian Science Monitor (yay! the CSM!). CH links to and quotes from this fascinating report by the CSM’s Simon Mortlake
Note to China Hand: always good to name reporters who do good work if you can?
Mortlake writes about the Myanmar-related work of

    The Tzu Chi Foundation, the largest NGO in the Chinese-speaking world and a rising player in global disaster relief, [which] has sent 15 volunteers from neighboring countries to Burma to work with more than 100 local staff to distribute aid, says Her Rey-Sheng, a spokesman for the group and a full-time volunteer.
    Tzu Chi also got permission this week to set up a distribution center at a Buddhist temple in Rangoon and work with monks there. It’s planning a fund-raising drive for reconstruction projects.
    Taiwanese relief organizations face some of the same logistical and political constraints in Burma as their Western counterparts…
    Still, Taiwanese aid workers say their low-key, hands-off approach [note: I think that means, “non-judgmental engagement”] to countries like military-ruled Burma, which has been lambasted by Western countries, pays off in times of crisis. Even Burma’s close political ties to Beijing, a fierce diplomatic rival of Taiwan, didn’t appear to intrude.
    In fact, Tzu Chi has even been able to win the trust of the Chinese government. In 1991, after flooding along the Yangtze River. Chinese authorities were suspicious of offers of help from Taiwan, over which it claims sovereignty, while some Taiwanese attacked the group for aiding “the enemy.”
    Its volunteers eventually got permission to work there. This year, it became the first NGO with a foreign legal representative to be licensed in China.
    Its bedrock belief, prescribed by Master Cheng Yen, the Buddhist nun who founded Tzu Chi in 1966, is that all charitable work should be grounded in gratitude to the needy to ensure selfless giving. “Every volunteer feels the same way. By going to help others, they feel blessed,” says Mr. Her.
    While Tzu Chi has 10 million members in more than 65 countries and annual donations of $300 million, homegrown Asian NGOs don’t yet match the size of Western humanitarian organizations, and the idea of cross-border humanitarian work is relatively new.

Oh my gosh! Do you mean that we’re going to have to start to think that “aid workers” might not all be like Angelina Jolie and the huge crowd of western lookalikes who populate the way that most westerners– including very lazy and self-referential western media people– have thought about “aid workers” until now?
You mean (gasp!) that the “west” doesn’t have a complete monopoly on good intentions and good implementation??
This is hard to believe.
Okay, irony alert in the last three paras, folks…
But nice reporting there, Simon Mortlake. Thanks.
Finally, China Hand takes on the question of the Chinese government’s much more expert handling of the western Big Media with respect to its coverage of the horrible, horrible earthquakes.
His comment there:

    Actually, I’ve got a hot story for Western newsies in China. And you’re right on top of it!
    Here it is: Chinese government cynically diverts precious disaster relief facilities to arrange unnecessary junket for scoop-hungry foreign journalists to death zone in order to obtain favorable coverage!
    Wonder when we’ll read about that in the papers.

Point well made.
And MSM-ers, your response to that??
Update 11 a.m.:
I just saw China Hand’s small earlier post, which is a hilarious update on the complete ineffectiveness of French FM Bernard Kouchner’s threat/promise to deliver aid to Myanmar whether the Burmese leaders wanted him to, or not.
Kouchner, who has long been one of the west’s strongest supporters of aggressive (including armed) western intervention in humanitarian crises, told reporters with great fanfare some ten days ago that the French navy already had a ship, the Mistral, sailing in the Bay of Bengal… and that it would be diverted immediately to deliver aid to Myanmar.
Except it turns out that… oops! … the Mistral had no spare rice or other needed goods aboard at all.
So it had to sail back to Chennai, India, and as of Wednesday was still loading the rice there… And according to this clip from aboard the ship that you can get from France’s English-language t.v. website, it hopes to arrive back in Burma this Sunday.
China Hand’s comment:

    somebody tell Bernard Kouchner.
    Next time you order up a humanitarian invasion…don’t forget the rice.

Condolences to friends in China, Myanmar/Burma

I know I’m late saying this, but I want to send heartfelt condolences to everyone in China and Myanmar/Burma whose universe has been shattered by the loss of loved ones, homes, or livelihoods due to Cyclone Nargis and China’s earthquake. The pictures, whenever I see them, are all searing, and I wish comfort and strength to all the traumatized surviving people of the two devastated areas.
I continue to be extremely concerned about the endlessly mean-spirited, politicized, and accusatory way in which most of the western MSM has covered the Myanmar losses. Today, even the WaPo’s usually wise Al Kamen got into the act, writing, “Human rights advocates were wincing at a photo on the wires of Agency for International Development chief Henrietta Fore shaking hands and beaming with a Burmese military thug at the Rangoon airport a few days ago.” Come on! Fore was delivering aid, and the Burmese officer was receiving it. In the circumstances, it was quite appropriate that both were smiling. Why refer to him in this context as “a Burmese military thug”?
I think that one thing that most western human rights activists and their many friends in the MSM, like Al Kamen, fail to understand is that humanitarian action– action that is designed purely at reducing the immediate suffering of our fellow-humans– should have its own space, quite insulated from the concerns of politicians and of the west’s self-styled (and often quite heavily politicized) “human rights advocates.”
Would Kamen and his “human rights advocate” friends have preferred that Fore had not delivered the aid? Or that she had delivered it while wagging a harsh accusatory finger at the general (thereby most likely dooming her ability to ever deliver any more aid?)
All quite bizarre: childishly accusatory and revealing these people’s deep ignorance of the meaning of humanitarian solidarity.
The western MSM’s coverage of China has generally been a lot better. But even there, I have seen unsubstantiated and quite inappropriate accusations of governmental ineptitude. On ABC News last night, a correspondent in one of the horrendously affected cities urgently told the camera something like, “Here, too, there has been a large degree of chaos. People have even had to stand in line for drinking water!”
Now the second of those statements quite obviously negates the first. When people stand in line for a scarce and desperately needed commodity, that denotes not “chaos”, but its opposite. And indeed, in the frame behind him we saw people standing in an orderly line awaiting their bottled water handouts.
Has that reporter ever seen “chaos”, I wonder?
Anyway, my media criticism is for now quite secondary to my desire to express my human solidarity with all those affected and with all those in those two countries who working so hard to help them.
For anyone seeking a range of (generally) non-politicized reports of the aid efforts that Burmese and non-Burmese bodies are undertaking inside the country, Reliefweb can give you lots of solid, up-to-date news. For example, this from Malteser International about the work of some of the 200 staff members they now have working in the country.
The report states: “As Malteser International has been able to start the relief activities in the disaster area right after the Cyclone, they are now also bundling the assistance of other organisations and partners and implementing it.”
They’re appealing urgently for funds and provide details of a bank account based in Koln, Germany, to donate to:

    Donation Account 120 120 120
    Bank für Sozialwirtschaft, Wörthstr. 15 – 17, D-50668 Köln
    Sort Code : 370 205 00
    IBAN : DE49 3702 0500 0001 0258 01
    BIC: BFSWDE33XXX
    Reference : “Cyclone Nargis”

Re-engage update

I put a couple more interesting posts onto the Re-engage book’s blog this week. This one has a fascinating map showing how, in a time of high oil prices, life in the exurbs becomes much more expensive than life closer in. (Hat-tip Paul Krugman.) This one deals with weighty issues around whether and how to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Also, I see that Scott MacLeod, the Cairo bureau chief of Time magazine, has written some nice things about Re-engage! on Time’s “Middle East” blog– here.
He writes:

    Journalist Helena Cobban’s Re-engage! is a citizens’ manual with a broader agenda. Cobban feels that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has led to a strategic failure of a similar magnitude as the 1956 Suez crisis, which effectively diminished the global role played by once-great imperial powers Britain and France, and as the 1979 Afghanistan invasion, which helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Believing that the next American president has a new chance to put things right, Cobban calls for a revamped foreign policy of global inclusion to replace Bush’s unilateralism…

And this:

    Since 2003 she has operated Just World News, a lively, informative blog on world affairs that is popular with specialists and non-specialist citizens alike. Just World News, like Re-engage!, is a good example of the role citizens can play in helping shape a new, better narrative for the Middle East and the world.

These comments are so kind. Thanks, Scott!
Further details about Re-engage!, including ordering info and a list of the upcoming book events, can be accessed through the book’s website.