Author: Helena

Weissglas, son of Earl Butz?

Longtime Israeli National Security Advisor Dov Weissglas, who in February 2006 argued openly for applying the “Weissglas diet” to the entire population of Gaza, certainly wasn’t the first bullying imperial ruler to argue that starving citizens of another nation might be a handy way to force them to submit. As I just noted here, Raj Patel recalled that Richard Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz argued openly in the 1970s that,

    Hungry men listen only to those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the US negotiating kit.

Indeed, just about all the histories of various European colonial ventures around the world, or Japan’s colonial venture in mainland Asia, etc., mention the use of forced impoverishment and imposed hunger as key weapons in forcing the compliance of the conquered nations.
Butz was forced to resign as Secretary of Agriculture in 1976 after making a remark that was both racist and sexually demeaning. He died a few weeks ago, aged 98.
Maybe the Israeli government– as well as all those economists and policymakers who are still trying to argue that the so-called “free market” should always be allowed to reign supreme in everything– should be reminded that it is the agreed stance of the governments and peoples of the world that everyone in the world has the right “to have access to safe and nutritious food.” No exceptions.

A great resource on food (in-)security issues

Raj Patel, a South African specialist in development economics, has published an intriguing-looking book on global food issues.  It’s called Stuffed and Starved.  I definitely want to read it!  He also has a very informative blog, of the same name, about the global food crisis. (Hat-tip Rami Zurayk.)

In this post, about the food crisis in Haiti, Patel writes,

The fact that Haiti produced more rice in 1984 than it does now
isn’t an accident. The fact that the bags of rice to be found in Haiti
have US flags stamped on them is no accident. As former secretary of
state for Agriculture, Earl Butz, put it: ‘Hungry men listen only to
those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the
US negotiating kit.’

And that’s also one of the ironies behind the complaints of
institutions like the IMF and World Bank. At the same time as they
bemoan the food crisis, they are its architects. They have aggressively
prohibited the kinds of policy that might have mitigated the price
shock. No grain reserves. No support for domestic agriculture. No
tariff barriers. All so that weapon in the US toolkit could be honed a
little sharper.

In this post, about the global rice market, he notes that though many rice-eating countries have been hit by massive price increases in recent weeks, China, South Korea, and Japan have not.

He asks,

What distinguishes all three of these countries from others in Asia?
First, they have their own domestic production. Second, they augment
domestic production with domestic grain reserves. Third, they’re only
able to do this because they’re aggressive and powerful negotiators in
international trade agreements. Japan has long held that its rice isn’t
just a commodity but a way of life.

The political commitment to sustain this way of life, in China,
South Korea and Japan, using some Old School economic policy
(subsidies, protection, grain reserves) means that in the lean times,
these countries will be able to survive. That’s great for them –
there’s no indication that the lean times are going to end any time
soon. And it’s tough for the weaker countries in Asia, who find
themselves cut loose, in the perfect storm that the free market has
produced.

Patel’s bio says he used to work at the World Bank and has interned at the WTO.  He certainly seems to know a lot about what he’s writing about. This page on his website gives a handy list of "ten things that we all can do to promote justice and food sovereignty."  Definitely worth looking at! 

(cross-posted to the Re-engage! blog

Carter quite right– On Olympics, Hamas, and Nepali elections

I just watched this clip of George Stephanopoulos’s interview with Nobel Peace Laureate and former US president Jimmy Carter this morning. (Complete transcript here.) Carter is such a wise, inspirational figure. He was calm and reasoned as he discussed three issues:

    — the “transformational” importance of the elections in Nepal, which hold a real hope of a better future for the country’s 29 million citizens;
    — his argument that countries should not boycott the upcoming Olympics in Beijing– including why the situation around those Olympics is very different from that around the 1980 Games in Moscow, which the US did boycott, when he was president; and
    — his still-probable plan to hold talks with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal (among many others) during his upcoming visit to the Middle East.

One of the qualities of Jimmy Carter that I particularly admire is the stress he has always put on peacemaking and peacebuilding as vital to the attainment of full human rights. That has been evident in the Carter Center’s involvement in dozens of conflict-wracked situations around the world, including the role it has played in monitoring elections in, among many other places, Palestine in 1996 and 2006, and Nepal right now.
Another of his admirable qualities is the calmness with which he states a position that, once articulated, seems clear, straightforward, and (to me) evidently true, but which flies counter to much of the chatter generated by the US mainstream commentatoriat.
On Hamas, he said,

    it’s likely that I will be meeting with the Hamas leaders. We’ll be meeting with the Israelis. We’ll be meeting with Fatah.
    We’ll be meeting with the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudi Arabians, and with the whole gamut of people who might have to play a crucial role in any future peace agreement that involves the Middle East.
    As a matter of fact, I’ve been meeting with Hamas leaders for years. As a matter of fact, 10 years ago, after Arafat was first elected president of the PLO and the Palestinians, we were monitoring that election, and I met with Hamas afterwards.
    And then, in January of 2006, we were the monitors there for the Palestinian election, and Hamas won the election. We met with them after the election was over.
    And so, I think that it’s very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians, maybe to get them to agree to a ceasefire — things of this kind.
    But I might add very quickly, that I’m not going as a mediator or a negotiator. This is a mission that we take as part of an overall Carter Center project, to promote peace in the region.

With respect to the Hamas question, Rami Khouri also has an excellent column in the Beirut Daily Star today. (Hat-tip Judy for that.)
Rami uses an argument there that I have articulated on a number of occasions:

    he key to progress toward true peace may pass through judging and engaging Hamas on the same basis that was used with other militant or terrorist groups, including the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Viet Cong in Vietnam, SWAPO in Namibia, the ANC in South Africa, and, more recently, the “insurgents” in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
    This approach typically comprises four components: talk to the group in question rather than boycott it; make clear their objectionable actions that must stop; identify their legitimate national or political demands that can be met; and, negotiate in a context of equality to achieve a win-win situation that stops the terror, removes underlying reasons for it, satisfies all sides’ minimum demands and rights, and achieves peace and security.
    The key to achieving a peaceful win-win situation is to analyze and deal with Hamas in the total framework of its actions, and not only through the narrow lens of terror acts. This means understanding and addressing the six R’s that Hamas represents: resistance, respect, reciprocity, reconstruction, rights and refugees.

On Nepal, Carter noted that the Carter Center has been involved there for five years now, helping to provide ideas and serve as a sounding board for multiple parties as the country’s extremely debilitating and lengthy civil war wound down.
He told Stephanopoulos the election there,

    will totally transform the structure of a society and the political situation and military situation in Nepal.
    It will be the end, for instance, of 12 years of conflict, both military and political — a war that lasted for 10 years and cost about 13,000 lives — and this will bring peace.
    Secondly, it would transform completely the nature of the government. For 240 years, Nepal has had a Hindu kingdom — the only one on earth. And now, it will have a democratic republic.
    And the third thing I think is significant is that, for the first time, large numbers of marginalized people — more than 50 percent of their total population — will be guaranteed a place in the political process.
    The Madhesis, who live down on the Indian border, Dalits, who are Untouchables, ethnic groups — and particularly women. As a matter of fact, in the constituent assembly that will assemble as a result of these elections, that’ll write a new constitution for Nepal, will have at least 30 percent of the seats in the constituent assembly filled by women…

Finally, regarding the Beijing Olympics, I know I haven’t written about them here on JWN yet. I have to say, as a US citizen, one of my main concerns in the present controversy over Beijing’s human rights record and its hosting of the upcoming Olympics is the amount of seemingly mean-spirited and accusatory finger-pointing that has been going on in this country, against the Chinese government.
Yes, the Chinese government has a problematic human-rights record. (Though it also has many human rights achievements, especially in the field of economic and social rights. But China’s present western accusers give it no credit for those whatsoever. Indeed, you get the impression that many of them have no idea what it’s like to lack basic social and economic rights, in the way that hundreds of millions of Chinese people routinely did during the warlord regimes, civil war, and internal upheavals that preceded the Deng Xiaoping era.)
But guess what? Our very own country here in the US has an extremely disturbing human rights record, too! Guantanamo, anyone? Abu Ghraib? Launching a completely unjustified war of aggression against Iraq then running an extremely damaging occupation there for more than five years? Encouraging Ethiopia to invade Somalia, and Israel to assault Lebanon?
All those actions by our government caused or actually constituted very grave human rights abuses. So maybe if “rights-tainted” countries should be boycotted we should be arguing for our country to be boycotted? Certainly, the US activists who have mounted such a campaign against China should be people who take real responsibility, first and foremost, for the actions of their (our) own government…
I do think that most of the US media has played a bad role in the whole Olympic torch tour fiasco, easily buying into and propagating the meme of “bad China” and “admirable and daring anti-China demonstrators” without examining the issue any more deeply at all. (The same big media in this country, that is, that have almost always completely buried the anti-war demonstrations carried out within this country, while filling their space with all kinds of pro-administration propaganda.)
Talking of the role of the media, do look at the way Stephanopoulos asked Carter his question about the Olympics:

    You led the boycott of the Moscow Olympics to protest what the Soviet Union was doing in Afghanistan.
    Should the U.S. boycott the Olympics this year to protest China’s crackdown on Tibet and its complicity with the genocide in Darfur?

Okay, Steph is taking for granted there that China is “complicit” in the very complex inter-group conflict in Darfur, which he labels simply as “genocide.” There might or might not be a genocide in Darfur. But there is certainly a lot else going on as well, including war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by many parties, including the anti-government as well as pro-government side. But where do we get the idea that China is somehow uniquely “complicit” in the actions of the pro-government side there?
China has 315 peacekeepers in Darfur, as part of the AU/UN force there.
How many does the US have? None.
The US government has many under-the-table deals with the Khartoum government, especially in the realm of sharing intelligence about Al Qaeda.
Again, all the anti-China finger-pointing being undertaken by the more ardent “Save Darfur” people in this country seems misplaced…
Actually, many of the “pro-Tibet” people in the US– and their hangers-on in the media– seem to be trying to be much more hardline in their anti-China stance than most Tibetans themselves… especially His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who has never called for a boycott of the Olympics, or for Tibet’s secession from China, or for many of the other things that the anti-China crowd in this country wants to call for.
Anyway, it’s good to see that Jimmy Carter is a real force for wisdom, sensible engagement, and respect for other people, on both the China and the Hamas issues. I think perhaps where he got his wisdom from– in contrast to the shallow positions expressed by Stephanopoulos– is from his commitment to traveling to numerous countries around the world to see the situation in them for himself, and to listening carefully and respectfully to what he gets told by the people in those countries.
If Stephanopouls and his confreres in the big US media would get out of their US-bound echo-chamber a little more, and if they tried to listen carefully to people from a wide range of different backgrounds and with a wide range of different viewpoints, they might actually end up being a lot wiser and understanding how the world works a lot better? Two things that people in the US big media really need to understand a lot better than they currently do are (1) the absolutely inescapable link between war and atrocities, and (2) the fact that one-sided finger-pointing is never a helpful way to get problems resolved (but it can easily raise tensions and help set the stage for otherwise quite avoidable confrontations, even war.)

Iraq: A sinkhole, not a quagmire

For too long, I and many others in the commentatoriat have been describing
the war in Iraq as a Vietnam-like “quagmire” for the US.  It is
now clear that’s a poor analogy.  It implies, after all, an area
through which one slogs with great difficulty and perhaps great
losses– but that there is, potentially, a solid piece of land on the
far side of the quagmire at which, through doing enough tough slogging,
one can arrive.

Not true.  It now seems clear– and the events and decisions of
the past week have confirmed this– that there is no solid “far side” of
this troublesome terrain that
the US can reach simply by doing more slogging. 
Instead, the sticky mud that we thought was just a quagmire has in fact been
a temporary cap sitting atop a massive sinkhole, and the sinkhole is
now poised to swallow up the whole of the US’s until-now little
questioned position of hegemony in the Middle East, as well as, on a
longer but linked time-scale, the position of unipolar military
hegemony the US has held over the last 17 years at the global level.

Here are the relevant facts as I see them:

1. In a situation in which
there are already clear strains on the US military’s worldwide
force-planning system, President Bush this week announced unequivocally that his decision has been to prioritize
the Iraqi theater over the Afghan theater or planning for any
other potential military contingencies around the world. 

Bush did this by hiding behind the skirts of his top field commander in Iraq and saying “Whatever Gen. Petraeus wants for Iraq, Gen. Petraeus
gets.”  But we should all be quite clear about what the broad implications of what Bush was saying there: he was simply blowing off the requests from the Afghan
government and the NATO allies that the US considerably beef up the
contribution it makes to the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan.

We could call this Bush’s “anti-Dannatt moment.”

He was also blowing off the concerns that the highest members of the US military have expressed about the strain the US force planners are already under, as a result of the overstretch in Iraq. On Wednesday, the Army’s vice of staff, Gen. Richard Cody told
the House Armed Services Committee quite explicitly that, “The
current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the
sustainable supply and limits our ability to provide ready forces for
other contingencies.”

The strain on the US force planners will be all the more acute, because
Bush also sought to appease his critics from within the US military
by announcing the reduction
of the “standard tour” that service members are sent on in Iraq or
Afghanistan from 15 months to 12 months.

In terms of force planning and the ability of the US military to
confidently prepare for any number of contingencies around the world–
Taiwan Straits? renewed problems with North Korea? turmoil in Egypt?
Haiti? Somalia? etc– Bush is certainly now “planning” to bequeath to
his successor a system in complete disarray.

(As a convinced pacifist, I don’t view the prospect of the end of the
US’s worldwide military empire as a bad thing.  But this empire
could end in a large number of different ways, many of which could end
up inflicting considerable harm and suffering on citizens of
the world’s most vulnerable countries.  Hence, all of
us– Americans and non-Americans, alike– now have a considerable
responsibility to try to ensure the shift away from a US-dominated
unipolar world is negotiated in such way that it occurs in as orderly, equitable, and
sustainable a way as possible.)

2.  Though Bush has given
Gen. Petraeus broad latitude to cherry-pick whatever he wants out of
the US force-planning system, the US budget, etc., in fact there is no way Petraeus or any
other commander can “win” in Iraq. Indeed– as we saw
demonstrated very clearly during last week’s hearings– there is not even any
publicly announced definition of what “winning” would mean there.

 This is the “sinkhole” aspect of the problem.  You pour in
money and service-members, and they just get gobbled up.

Sen. Barack Obama’s questioning of Petraeus in the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee spoke directly to the issue of “What would it mean to ‘win’
in Iraq?”  Petraeus was quite unable to provide a clear answer.

3.  There are, meanwhile
many clear– and extremely worrying– signs that Bush and Cheney have
decided that the current
best way to “justify” the US military presence/engagement in Iraq is by
linking it more clearly than ever to the administration’s anti-Iran
campaign.

We could make a very long list indeed of the many “justifications”
the Bushites have adduced for their military engagement in Iraq over
the years…  None of these justifications has proved
sturdily convincing over the long haul, or even the medium haul. 
Hence the need constantly to generate new ones.

In this latest campaign of linking
what the US military is doing in Iraq to the continuing campaign
against Iran they contort
human rationality and logic in a way that would be hilariously
funny were it not so deeply tragic and depressing.  Here are
some examples:

  • Administration officials accuse Iran of providing various forms of
    support to Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement and militia, which engaged in
    some tough battles against the Iraqi government’s security forces in
    the past two weeks.  Well, this is probably true.  But the
    Iranian government has also, more stably and over a period of many
    years, been giving continuing support to the Badr Brigades militia that
    is allied with the current Iraqi government.  (Do we still need to
    remind anyone of the fulsome welcome that Iranian President Mahmoud
    Ahmadinejad got from Iraq’s PM and President on during his recent state
    visit to Baghdad?)
  • They make no mention at all of the fact that Iran’s powerful
    Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani recently called on Iraq’s current
    oppositionists to stop shelling the Green Zone in Baghdad. Oops, that
    development just didn’t fit into the Bushists’ narrative of Iran
    playing a big spoiler role inside Iraq. 
  • They made scant mention, too, of the fact that it was the head of
    Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps who negotiated the key ceasefire that
    interrupted the recent fighting between the Sadrists and the ISF in
    Basra.
  • The Bushists are now trying to rush around the Arab world trying
    to tout the “Arab-ness” of the regime in Iraq– this, in contrast to
    the “Iranian-ness” of the regime in Iran.  This new “Arab-ness”
    narrative may well have been introduced after it became clear for
    various reasons that the “anti-Shiite” narrative with which they had
    previously tried to mobilize the Arab regimes against Iran had
    failed.  But to see them touting the present Baghdad regime for
    its notably “Arab” qualities is particularly amusing after having seen
    them spend the first four years or so of the occupation of Iraq
    deliberately trying to erase the Arab identity and affiliation of
    Iraq’s government and as many of its people as possible.  That
    included installing Kurdish Iraqis as both the government’s president
    and Foreign Minister, as well as systematic efforts to start describing
    all Iraqis as either “Shiites, Sunnis, or Kurds” rather than building
    on the identities of being either “Iraqi” or “Arab.”
  • Meanwhile, actually, within the Iraqi Shiite community, the
    Sadrists are considerably more “Arab nationalist” in their outlook and
    positions than pro-government groups like Badr/ISCI, which have a much
    more closely pro-Iranian orientation.

4.  This new ramping up of
the “anti-Iranian” justification for the US troop presence in Iraq is
worrying at a number of levels.  I ask myself: Is this just a
“justification” for whatever it is they’re hoping to achieve in Iraq,
or are they actually trying
to prepare the ground for some kind of  real military action
against Iran in the nine months that George W. Bush has left in office?

Personally, I still find this latter prospect extremely unlikely. 
After all, in the event of any form of US military attack against Iran,
the US troops deployed in Iraq are sitting ducks and hostages to
fortune– and these risks outweigh by a factor of tens or
hundreds the contribution that these troops could as a potential
“advance guard” or “supporting force” for this attack.  I have
considerable confidence that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the
serious, battle-tested men in charge of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff
all understand these realities.

On the other hand, as we know, George W. Bush prides himself on being
“the Decider.”  Well, given the huge cognitive constraints on Bush
being able to “decide” anything, make that Vice-President Cheney.

5.  Jim Hoagland, whose
work on Iraq I have frequently criticized in the past, actually has a
good piece
in tomorrow’s WaPo that tends to confirm my general confidence in
the judgment of the JCS, but raises some worrying questions about
Gates’s role. He writes:

The most intense arguments over U.S.
involvement in Iraq do not flare at this point on Capitol Hill
or on the campaign trail. Those rhetorical battles pale in comparison
to the high-stakes struggle being waged behind closed doors at the
Pentagon.

On one side are the “fight-win guys,” as
some describe themselves. They are led by Gen. David Petraeus
and other commanders who argue that the counterinsurgency struggle in
Iraq must be pursued as the military’s top priority and ultimately
resolved on U.S. terms.

In this view, the Middle East
is the most likely arena for future conflicts, and Iraq is the
prototype of the war that U.S. forces must be trained and equipped to
win.

Arrayed
against them are the uniformed chiefs of the
military services who foresee a “broken army” emerging from an all-out
commitment to Iraq that neglects other needs and potential conflicts.
It is time to rebuild Army tank battalions, Marine amphibious forces
and other traditional instruments of big-nation warfare — while
muddling through in Iraq.

About Gates, however, what Hoagie writes is not so encouraging.  He
writes that Gates, “has in fact encouraged the spirited debate between
the Petraeus and Fallon-Cody camps without tipping his own hand.” 
Interestingly, though, he writes that when Centcom chief Adm. William
Fallon was suddenly ousted from his post last month, the cause was not any differences between
him and Gates over the prospect of attacking Iran (or over the big
debate over force configurations).  Rather, it was, “Fallon’s
rigid, overbearing style and a refusal to listen to others
[that] gradually cost him Gates’s confidence, according to military and
civilian officials who worked with Fallon.” 

That leaves open the possibility that Gates still agrees
with what Fallon has said about the patent folly of the US launching a
military attack on Iran.

6.  So, back to this
sinkhole theory of Iraq.  How bad is it?  What will it leade
to over the next nine months?  And how can the next president
minimize the damage caused around the world by the latest series of
disastrous decisions made by Bush/Cheney?

I think for now, I prefer to leave this blog post where it is and
come back to these important big questions later.  All I can
sketch out right now is that

  • The Iraqi sinkhole will almost certainly, within the time-frame
    of the next 3-5 years, draw in (and bring to an end) the US’s hegemonic
    position in the Persian Gulf region;
  • Alongside the sinkhole effect of Iraq, we certainly need to
    consider the effects on the
    US’s worldwide power of the current and continuing crisis in the US-led world financial system    ,
    recognizing that
    the diminution of the US’s relative economic power in the world has itself
    been considerably hastened and exacerbated by the financial “sinkhole” the Iraq war
    has become for the US;
  • The Iraq sinkhole will certainly– along with the crisis of US
    economic power and Middle Eastern developments including those in Egypt
    and Palestine– lead to a considerable diminution/dilution of the
    near-hegemonic role the US has exercized for the past 30 years
    throughout the broader Middle East;
  • The effects of the Iraq sinkhole on the situation in Afghanistan
    and the rest of the crucial “Great Game Board” within Central Asia will
    become increasingly significant for the standing within the world power
    balance of NATO (aka the “West Militant”) — and for the standings of
    the other major parties rerepresented on the Great Game Board: Russia,
    China, Iran, and militant Sunnism;
  • The next Prez will have to work extremely hard, and in an
    inclusive and creative manner if he (she?) is to minimize the damage to
    the US ctizienry and the world– and of course, to Iraq’s oh-so-suffering people– caused by this sinkhole.

… Well, my bottom line for now is mainly to urge you to remember
this: Iraq is a sinkhole,
not a quagmire.  There is no firm “bank” we can just slog through to on
the other side of this one.

Krugman worried. Soros still worried. Worry.

The US-dominated world financial system may well be in much more trouble than most people think. Paul Krugman is blogging today about his concerns in the “spreads” between LIBOR rate– the rate that London banks actually charge each other for overnight loans– and the T-bill rate, and between the LIBOR and US Fed funds futures.
He concludes:

    All of this involves fear of defaults by banks — despite what look from here (central New Jersey) like utterly clear signals from the Fed that bank debts will be socialized if necessary. I’m puzzled, and worried.

George Soros is also still worried. Bloomberg’s Patricia Kuo and Bei Hu report that he said that the crisis in financial markets caused by the US subprime mortage collapse “will get worse before it gets better.”
He also said,

    This is a man-made crisis and it’s made by this false belief that markets correct their own excesses. It will take much longer for the full effect of the decline in the housing market to be felt.

That’s roughly the same thing he said in the conference call I participated in with him last week.
What we learn from the Krugman remarks cited above is that (a) what Krugman’s hearing is that the Masters of the Universe at the top of the world financial system are so worried about the present situation that they’re even prepared to go much further down the road of “socializing” (i.e., nationalizing) their favored cash cows, the banks; and (b) even that might not be enough to save the world financial system from further implosion.
Actually, the “a” there already seems like a clear sign of crisis. (And if these imploding banks do get socialized, guess who gets to pay all their debts and bills? And guess who gets off scot free, and padded by handy golden parachutes, great gobs of accumulated savings, etc??)
Krugman and Soros are two very savvy guys. Be worried. And maybe we should be planning a more humane and rational economic system, starting right now?

So this is the way the US’s “unipolar moment” will end?

… Not with a bang but with the whimper of hungry children in scores of different countries around the world??
Still concerned about the ongoing steep hike in food prices, I just Googled “food price protest.” On the first of the 200-plus Google News pages there we had stories from Haiti, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Philippines, Guinea, the United States– and three general worldwide wrap-up stories.
This wrap-up story from the London Times says,

    From Yemen to Uzbekistan, simple hunger has emboldened citizens to protest against regimes more used to cowed docility.
    Public order is at risk in at least 33 countries, according to the World Bank.

Meanwhile, US government subsidies for biofuels roll on.
Hey, people, US taxpayers are subsidizing US farmers so that US drivers can continue to drive their SUVs– while low-income people round the world are dying from the starvation that has resulted, in good part, from those subsidies.
My suggestions? At a personal level: to try to drastically reduce the amount of meat we all eat, since producing meat uses up a lot more grain than eating the same amount of protein in the form of grain or veggies. That way there’ll be more left for everyone else.
And at the public-policy level: We should stop the subsidies for biofuels immediately.
Governments should also be empowered to stop the financial speculation in basic foodstuffs that is one of the many fallouts from the present worldwide financial crisis.
These steps are urgent. Pass it on.

Carter to meet with Meshaal?

Guess who is reportedly going to Damascus to meet Khaled Meshaal.
An excellent decision by Pres. Jimmy Carter.
I don’t know where so many Americans got the idea that simply by talking to someone, you’re signaling to them that you totally agree with them.
Or, indeed, the idea that it can be in any way legitimate to marginalize and seek to crush a movement that was duly elected to be the leadership of its people in a free and fair election, and has repeatedly signaled its readiness to reach a reciprocal ceasefire even with a neighbor who has caused its people considerable harm.

Memo to Prez and everyone else: How to organize a US pullout from Iraq

In this evening’s t.v. news show on the ABC network, the “political analyst” and former high-level aide to Pres. Clinton George Stephanopoulos said that a Democratic president would face a thorny problem after January 20,2009, if Gen. Petraeus or his successor comes to Congress and said that he “still needs to keep a high US troop deployment in Iraq for yet more time to come.”
But George, it really isn’t so difficult for a president to exercise wise leadership on this matter.
Note, firstly, that Petraeus is only a second- or third-rank employee of the President and it should not be he who answers questions on how high the troop level in Iraq or any other country should be. As merely the commander in Iraq, Petraeus does not have responsibility for overall US strategic planning, which must also take into account all the other considerations and constraints relevant to the US deployment of troops or other means of intervention, worldwide.
Also note that it really is not so terribly difficult to organize a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is orderly, total, and speedy. It ain’t rocket science. People have planned and executed even more challenging redeployment operations in the past, and succeeded. Hint: Once the Iraqis know that we are truly on our way out, they will every incentive (a) not to harrass US troops as they exit, and (b) to resolve their remaining internal problems, rather quickly.
US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker argued in today’s hearings that how the US gets out of Iraq will be as important as how it got in. That was a good point, but obviously should not lead to the conclusion that the US should never get out of Iraq!
As I have argued for three years now, for the US to get out of Iraq what is required is, basically, a mindset shift from thinking that the US, alone, can and should unilaterally determine the length of its stay in Iraq and the manner of its inevitable pullout from the country, to a mindset that says, “Hey, folks, we need help here! We need a body that has considerably more international legitimacy than we have regarding Iraq. And therefore, let’s invite– or perhaps, more appropriately at this point, BEG– the United Nations to convene the two different levels of negotiation that will allow us to exit the country without suffering far worse and possibly even catastrophic consequences than those that currently face us… ”
I will readily admit that the UN is flawed. It is weak (not least, because many years of US policy have made it so.) It is tainted in the eyes of many Iraqis (which US policy during the 1990s definitely bears most of the responsibility for.) But the UN remains the only body with the international legitimacy required to convene the two key negotiations required to secure an orderly US pullout from Iraq.
Of course, this will also require a significant change in the power-balance between Washington and the UN. But that is all good. This idea that the US, whose citizens constitute less than 5% of humanity, can or should make major decisions that affect the security and wellbeing of all the peoples of the world is one that is hopelessly out of date!
What are the negotiations that need to be conducted in order to allow for an orderly US pulllout from Iraq? One is at the international level: a negotiation that involves Iraq, all of its neighbors, the US, and other permanent members of the UN Security Council. And the other is internal to Iraq. It would involve the US (which is, of course, a major player within Iraq), and all the country’s major indigenous parties and movements. This latter negotiation would determine both the modalities of the US troop pullout and the nature of the country’s governance system going forward, including the question of how much (if any) the Iraqis want to retain of the “Constitution” that was written for them by the occupying power back in 2005.
So I want to underline here: It really is not so very difficult to figure out how to withdraw the 155,000 US troops from Iraq… Provided the US administration and public are prepared to shift their mindset from thinking the US “alone” should determine how this is to be done to recognizing that another more neutral body is needed to help, by overseeing and running, this process.
This is why I have also called this process the “Namibia option.” During the UN-led negotiations around White South Africa’s extrication from its unsustainable military entanglement in that much-battered country, Pretoria was still a very weighty player indeed. But crucially, it did not– because it could not– supervise the whole political process that was required top secure its extrication. It had to call in the United Nations to do that.
The process worked.
One quick final note. Jim Fine of the Friends Committee on National Legislation has written two excellent guest-posts (1 and 2) on the “Quakers’ Colonel” blog, in which he summarized what he judged to be the main points that emerged from today’s hearings. I urge you all to go over there and read those excellent posts.
In the first one, Jim noted that most of the intervention from the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee fell along strictly party lines (Republicans = generally supportive of Petraeus and Crocker; Dems = generally critical/questioning.) Except for Sen. Richard Lugar, a key elder statesman within the Republican Party who is also the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Jim wrote that Lugar,

    delivered a strikingly frank opening statement asserting that “Iraq will be an unstable country for the foreseeable future” and that the idea of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq emerging anytime soon was an illusion. U.S. security operations, he said, had reached a plateau and could not be expected to have a further “transformational” effect on the situation. The limited number of U.S. troops available made a substantial draw down certain, he added, and concluded, “We need a strategy that needs a political end game.” If you didn’t have a score card, it would have been hard to tell if the statement came from a Republican or a Democrat. It was a glimmer of nonpartisan realism and candor that made it possible to think for a moment that Congress might be capable of uniting around a new policy on Iraq.

I also gathered that Sen. Warner did repeat his question to Petraeus as to whether Petraeus though the US policy in Iraq was “making the US safer.” And Petraeus still avoided giving any direct answer to that question.
Definitely worth noting.

Serious unrest in US ally, Egypt

Ever since the Washington managed to broker the 1978 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt has played a huge role in American military planning in the Middle East. This is the case not just because, with 73 million citizens and a long and proud history, it is in many respects the weightiest of all the Arab countries. And not just because it sits astride the Suez Canal, a key artery in the shipping lanes that support the US war effort in Iraq. And not just because the Egyptian regime’s torture chambers have been subcontracted on numerous occasions to perform torture on demand (aka “renditioned torture”) as part of the Bushists’ “Global War on Terror.”
No, Egypt is important for all these reasons, and many more. And now, the increasingly sclerotic, 27-year-long regime of President Husni Mubarak is in deep trouble. It faces challenges on three crucial fronts:

    — from the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), a very broad and generally well-organized Islamist movement that now has a long track record of nonviolent social and political engagement;
    — from a population growing increasingly angry about massive recent rises in food prices; and
    — from a wide smorgasbord of social and political movements that are individually much smaller than the MB, but that look increasingly capable of uniting around a clear anti-Mubarak platform, in parallel with the MB.

Yesterday was one test for the regime’s ability to control the streets. Many of the non-MB movements, including the liberal party Kefaya, the allied Karama Party, and some labor organizations had called a “strike” to protest price hikes. With harsh, bullying rhetoric and a massive show of force (that in at least one place left two strike supporters reportedly dead from police bullets), the regime managed to keep the lid on those protests– for a while.
Today, though,further serious confrontations were reported from the labor-activism epicenter in Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo. That Reuters report says that demonstrators,

    set ablaze a primary school, a preparatory school and a travel agency, among other shops in the working-class town, and stopped an incoming train by putting blazing tires on the railway tracks, witnesses said.
    Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the protests. Some 40 people were injured and hundreds of others had breathing problems from gas inhalation, security sources said.
    Protesters threw stones at police, attacked police vehicles and tore down the posters of the ruling party’s candidates in Tuesday’s local elections, witnesses said.

Which brings us to tomorrow, which is the date scheduled for local “elections” throughout the the country.
The MB had sought to run some 6,000 candidates in the elections slated to fill some 52,000 posts in local administration throughout the country. The regime placed many kinds of obstacles in their way– including deploying security forces to forbid entry to the places where candidates needed to register, and widespread campaigns of arrest without trial and other forms of intimidation. (As denounced by Human Rights Watch, here.) In the end, only 20 of the MB’s 6,000 chosen candidates were able to make it onto the electoral list, at all.
Today, the MB announced that it will boycott tomorrow’s elections completely, “and call on the Egyptian people to do the same.”
So let’s check back and see what happens tomorrow.
The Arabist has two excellent recent roundup and analysis posts on his blog:

    — this one, on the complex makeup of yesterday’s strike effort; and
    — this one on the MB decision to boycott tomorrow’s polls.

I will just close by recalling that my first visit to Egypt as a reporter was when the London Sunday Times sent me to cover the massive bread riots that broke out there in January 1977. By all accounts, the severity of the crisis revealed by those riots helped push President Anwar Sadat into the idea of doing something “dramatic” to speed along the process of integration into US regional planning that he had started in 1972-73, but that had only sputtered along in the intervening years.
That something “dramatic” turned out to be his landmark visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, an action that jumpstarted the diplomacy that led to the Camp David Accords of the following year, and thence to the conclusion of a final-status peace agreement with Israel in 1979.
It was at that point that Egypt, which in the 1960s had been a key ally of the Soviet Union in the Middle East, became firmly integrated into Washington’s strategic planning.
In 1981, Sadat paid with his life for those choices and for the extremely paranoid series of decisions he made in the middle of that year, that included clamping down very tightly indeed on– and indeed, arresting– all members of the Egyptian body politic whom he felt he had any reason at all to disagree with. An Islamist extremist (not an MB person) shot Sadat dead during a military parade in October that year; and his deputy, Husni Mubarak, immediately stepped into his shoes.
Mubarak has developed such a paranoid political style that he has never even dared to name a Vice President. In recent years, though, he has made some evident moves to groom his son, Gamal, to succeed him.
…. So now, 31 years after 1977, might we be seeing a re-eruption of bread riots in Egypt that could, over the years ahead, lead to a shift in Egypt’s strategic leanings as significant as the one sparked by the 1977 bread riots? Who knows?
I just wrote over at the Arabist’s blog that my main two recollections from 1977 are the sight of all the burned-out night-clubs along the Pyramids Road, and Mohammed Hassanein Heikal telling me– as he sat in his lovely Nile-side office there at the Al-Ahram Center, that “the Egyptian people are like the Nile: they run deep and apparently quietly– until the point where suddenly they burst their banks.”
Actually, I have a third recollection. I arrived one or two days into the riot. And already the Sadat regime had started to deploy trucks full of security people along the main arteries. Those scared country boys sat in their trucks, armed only with clubs and looking very warily about them.
Cairo still has thousands of trucks-full of those security men– probably the sons or grandsons of the ones I saw.
The regime’s dilemma is how to build a force that is large enough to intimidate or quell all possible signs of public disquiet– while preventing this force from becoming large enough and well-armed enough that its leaders might think to come and topple the regime, instead. Oh, it’s such a hard job being a dictator– especially one who has fashioned his policies so evidently to be in line with the whims of a blundering, arrogant, and unpopular external power like the United States.
Egypt. As I’ve written before: watch that story as it develops.

Who is the greatest strategist of them all?

This week is (once again) going to be Petraeus and Crocker week on Capitol Hill, with the military and civilian heads of the US occupation in regime appearing before a slew of Senate and House committees, starting Tuesday.
When they were last there, last September, the best question of all came from our (very) senior senator here in Virginia, John Warner, who asked Petraeus flat out whether the Iraq war was making America any safer.
Petraeus answered, “Sir, I don’t know exactly.”
All the senators and members of congress should make a point of asking Petraeus– and Crocker– that question once again, and probing their thinking on this issue a bit more deeply than Warner did last Septamber.
Since then, an additional 243 US service-members and thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the war; and somewhere in excess of an additional $84 billion of taxpayers’ money has been poured into the sewer of the war (that is, in good part, into the pockets of the shareholders of Halliburton, etc.)
I was struck by Petraeus’s answer at the time, thinking it seemed to reveal that they guy had some core of professional integrity. Either that, or naivete, inasmuch as he seemed unable to think fast enough to provide a fudged, more “diplomatic”, answer.
Or maybe both.
But the answer was also important because it revealed the degree to which Petraeus was indicating that he judged that the question being asked was ways above his pay-grade.
No particular surprise there, especially given that he had only received a very hastily organized promotion to four-star general just shortly before his appointment as head of the “Multi-National (!) Force– Iraq”. Prior to that, he had co-authored a handbook at the level of operational art, that is, in the waging of a counter-insurgency. But he had not operated at the level of strategic thinking required to consider questions like which counter-insurgency should one seek to win, and on what terms? Or: which counter-insurgencies are worth investing a lot in? Or: on what basis should one make a judgment like this? Or: in a time of scarce resources (such as manpower), how should one prioritize one’s commitments to the fighting of various different battles/counter-insurgencies occurring in different theaters?
(This last one is the Dannatt question, of course.)
So I was reminded of Petraeus’s painfully honest answer of last September when I read this article by Michael Abramowitz in today’s WaPo. Abramowitz was examining the high degree of importance Pres. Bush gives to receiving military advice, on a regular basis, directly from Petraeus.
He writes,

    By all accounts, Petraeus’s view that a “pause” [in the drawdown of troops from Iraq] is needed this summer before troop cuts can continue has prevailed in the White House, trumping concerns by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others that the Army’s long-term health could be threatened by the enduring presence of many combat forces in Iraq.

Abramowitz also notes the degree to which modern technology has allowed Bush to keep in much closer direct contact with Petraeus than any previous war-time president could maintain with any of their field commanders:

    improved videoconferencing technology has allowed the president to communicate to an unprecedented degree with commanders on the battlefield… Bush has also held videoconferences with Casey and other previous Iraq commanders, but after Petraeus and Crocker were appointed last year, the process was institutionalized in a regular Monday morning war council between Washington and Baghdad. (A similar Afghanistan meeting takes place every two to three weeks, a White House spokesman said.)

That last detail is notable: Iraq once a week; Afghanistan, every two to three weeks. H’mmm…
Then this,

    those who have witnessed the Monday videoconferences describe Petraeus as a gifted briefer who moves beyond the dry recitation of the metrics of battle — enemy killed and captured — to describe how military developments interact with political ones…
    Bush, sitting in the White House Situation Room, often takes the lead on political issues, such as dealings with Iran or Iraqi politics. [Ohmigod, I have to say this is a very scary thought…] But officials said he is deferential to Petraeus on military matters. The president “sets the goals,” Gates said. “He expects the military professional to handle the mission.”
    While Bush and Petraeus are said to have bonded over their love of exercise [!], administration officials describe their relationship as more professional than friendly.

So here is my concern– and it is evidently one that has been shared by many other people, including Petraeus’s superiors in the chain of command, as well as, according to Abramowitz, the chair of the senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin: If Bush’s main and continuing way of getting military advice about the war in Iraq is from the commander in Iraq, at what point does he get the advice he needs about the overall strategic importance of that battlefield, relative to other calls that may be made on the US military, in Afghanistan or elsewhere?
Abramowitz reports that Carl Levin said, quite correctly, that,

    Bush should rely primarily on the advice of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Not only are they General Petraeus’s superiors,” Levin said, “but they have the broad view of our national security needs, including Afghanistan, and the risks posed by stretching the force too thin.”

He writes that Bush’s insistence on dealing directly with Petraeus, “created friction that helped spur the departure last month of Adm. William J. ‘Fox’ Fallon, who, while Petraeus’s boss as chief of U.S. Central Command, found his voice eclipsed on Iraq.”
He writes that Fallon and Petraeus, “differed over military planning and the scale and pace of the drawdown. Fallon and other top military officials have also voiced their concerns to Congress, in public testimony and behind closed doors.”
He also writes that– just as I would have expected under these circumstances– Fallon’s successor as head of Centcom, JCS Chairman Mullen, and Secdef Gates, all make a point of trying to sit in on Bush’s weekly videoconferences with Petraeus, whenever possible.
Hence, among all the other dysfunctional consequences of this bizarre arrangement, you have the spectacle of all three of these very senior links in the nation’s chain of military command having to invest considerable time and energy simply in trying to keep tabs on whatever it is that Petraeus and the Prez are cooking up between the two of them.
Abramowitz also writes this:

    Some officials said Petraeus is pushing on an open door with Bush. The president has privately expressed impatience with military concerns over the health of the force, telling the Joint Chiefs that if they are worried about breaking the Army, the worst thing would be to lose in Iraq, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Ah, of course, this is why we do not need Gen. Petraeus to be a great strategist at the world level– because we have a president who is making these large-scale judgments on his own… a president who still thinks the US can “win” in Iraq, while also not suffering any catastrophic setbacks anywhere else.
Be scared. Be very scared indeed.