Author: Helena

Annapolis guessing game, prospects

The current guessing game in the US and Israel is over “which of the Arab states will participate, and at which level.”
Actually, for many ardent pro-Israelis inside and outside the two governments, those questions about Arab representation are the sole focus of their concern about Annapolis, rather than, as good sense would dictate: “What is the best way to ensure that this gathering contributes to the speedy conclusion of sustainable final-status peace agreements between Israel and all their neighbors?”
There is very frequently a sort of “scalp-collecting” aspect to the way many Israelis, inside and outside of government, think about the possibility of encounters with Arab state nationals.
But anyway, the biggest questions right now about attendance at Annapolis are those over the responses of Syria and Saudi Arabia These two will be among the Arab states that are sending their foreign ministers to Cairo for an all-Arab confab tomorrow, at which many Arabs hope they will be able to find that long-sought Holy Grail, a “unified Arab position.”
AP’s Zeina Karam has a good report from Damascus today, in which she presents the evidence backing up her lead, which is “Syria is softening its refusal to attend the Annapolis peace conference and already has won dividends.”
And Al-Hayat’s Ibrahim Hamidi has an interesting report (in Arabic) in today’s paper, explaining the various strands of analysis that have been pursued by government insiders in Damascus.
People seeking a rendering of Hamidi’s article in English are strongly advised not to rely on the version presented by the usually sound young US professor Joshua Landis, who for some reason seems to have pasted in a commentary on the Hamidi report from elsewhere– most likely, the Israeli press– instead of presenting his English-language readers with the promised direct translation of it.
It is Thanksgiving here in the US, so I can only imagine that Landis just quickly used that commentary instead of working on his own translation of the piece. But the result is very inaccurate and misleading.
There is so much finegrained diplomacy going on around the question of the prospects for Annapolis that I don’t have time to assess it all here. I will just quickly note the following:

    (1) This is in many ways reminiscent of the lead-up to the Madrid Peace conference of October 31, 1991, but with some very important differences. These are that: a) Madrid was an extremely serious peace conference whose main participants were the direct parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict, not a hodge-podge of rapidly enlisted states and governments from all around the known world. b) Madrid was extremely well-prepared, through a diplomatic process that lasted seven months and included winning the prior agreement of all parties on the language of the invitation letters, etc. Annapolis is a hastily-cobbled-together Amateur Hour, by comparison. c) The Bush I administration administration showed at and after Madrid that it was prepared to explicitly link the levels of US financial and political support to Israel to Israel’s continuation of its settlement-building program in the occupied territories. No-one in Bush II has dared breathe a word of any such linkage!
    (2) As always, the Israelis seem to be primed once again to try to “play off” the Syrians against the Palestinians. During the whole of the post-Madrid diplomacy, their use of that tactic was evident. (As noted in my 2000 book on the Syrian-Israeli negotiations of those years.) The result of the Israeli tacticians being “too clever by half” in that regard was that they ended up with neither a peace agreement with Syria nor a peace agreement with Palestine in hand… Unless that was what they had aimed for all along? Well, for some of the Israeli decisionmakers in those years, it is almost indisputable that that was their aim. For others, probably not. But the settlers in East Jerusalem, the rest of the Wset Bank, and Golan all got to continue their lovely lifestyles– and expand!
    (3) It is of course extremely relevant that poor old Lebanon is currently poised on the brink of constitutional disaster. In my work on my 2000 book, I examined the question as to whether, for this Baath Party regime in Syria, their interests in Lebanon or in Golan were weightier. And I concluded that at that time, it was their Lebanon interests. This time, of course, Syria’s situation in Lebanon is very different. But as a general rule, we can say that periods of intense Israeli-Arab peace diplomacy are often accompanied by an intensification of fighting (often, foreign-power-backed fighting) inside Lebanon. Why so many Lebanese people are so happy to allow foreign powers to jerk them around in this way is a subject for more consideration, another time. It would be wonderful if this time around, all parties, both Lebanese and non-Lebanese, could at least agree that the intervention of all outsiders in Lebanon’s internal politics is a no-no, and should be ended… And yes, that should most certainly include interventions from the US, Syria, Israel, and Iran.

And now, back to revising Chapter 4 of my current book project…
(Neither Bill nor I have time to cook a turkey today. We’re having our Thanksgiving meal at restaurant. Personally, I feel I have a lot to give thanks for this year. But the performance of the US Congress leaders we all helped elect a year ago is sadly nowhere near the top of that list.)

Somalia: Worse than ever? Worse than Darfur?

What will end up being the most serious indictment on the charge-sheet leveled against the Bush administration for its reckless mishandling of foreign policy since 2001? Oh my! So hard to tell. The candidates for this sad honor are legion.
But we’ll have to put Somalia on the list somewhere. Somalia where, you’ll remember, in November and December 2006 the Bushites plotted with the government of Ethiopia and other parties to launch a massively armed assault against the body that was just then, however tenuously, starting to bring some order to Mogadishu and other areas of the country…
That was the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a body that– like the Taliban in Afghanistan– had found a unifying Islamist ideology that helped its supporters to rebuild some social solidarity within a country riven by ferocious and mega-lethal warlordism.
In late November 2006, the wise analysts of the International Crisis Group warned the US of the expected, very escalatory consequences of an impending US decision to arm and support the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.
The Bushites went ahead anyway.
Things went violently awry from almost the very beginning of the Ethiopian occupation of much of Somalia that ensued.
Today, the NYT’s Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Somalia that,

    The worst humanitarian crisis in Africa may not be unfolding in Darfur, but here, along a 20-mile strip of busted-up asphalt, several top United Nations officials said…
    Top United Nations officials who specialize in Somalia said the country had higher malnutrition rates, more current bloodshed and fewer aid workers than Darfur, which is often publicized as the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis and has taken clear priority in terms of getting peacekeepers and aid money.
    The relentless urban combat in Mogadishu, between an unpopular transitional government — installed partially with American help — and a determined Islamist insurgency, has driven waves of desperate people up the Afgooye road, where more than 70 camps of twigs and plastic have popped up seemingly overnight.
    The people here are hungry, exposed, sick and dying. And the few aid organizations willing to brave a lawless, notoriously dangerous environment cannot keep up with their needs, like providing milk to the thousands of babies with fading heartbeats and bulging eyes. “Many of these kids are going to die,” said Eric Laroche, the head of United Nations humanitarian operations in Somalia. “We don’t have the capacity to reach them.”

Today, too, the spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Jennifer Pagonis, announced in Geneva that the number of displaced people in Somalia, population nine million, has now risen to one million.
She added that,

    Sixty percent of the population [of Mogadishu], or some 600,000 people, are believed to have fled from the lawless Somali capital… since February this year – nearly 200,000 of them in the past two weeks alone, leaving entire neighbourhoods in the volatile capital empty.

Now, I am quite certain that, when the Bushites discuss and then authorize various military actions around the world, they do not intend that those actions end up inflicting massive harm on large populations of non-Americans. But look at the record! Look at Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia today. (Or look at the US-authorized prolongation of Israel’s assault against Lebanon last year.)
These are almost unbelievably reckless and harmful operations.
Someone needs to rein in the militarists who have taken over the White House– and also, I fear, far too much of rest of the US political elite. Mainly, it is the responsibility of the rest of the US citizenry– the anti-militarists amongst us– to do this. But it would be great if we could also count on a ready and capable United Nations, and a coalition of the world’s other, non-US powers to help us turn the tide of history away from mindless militarism and back toward a real commitment to using non-military ways to resolve the many conflicts among the peoples of the world.
So many such ways exist! And the UN could be– if the other powers really wanted to make it so– a powerful vehicle for diverting the energies of governments, including my government, away from violence and back toward the really constructive work of negotiation, peacebuilding, and reconciliation.
Pray for the people of Somalia tonight. And then tomorrow, let’s resume the campaign to do all we can to save the world from the forces of militarism.
By the way, this is Reliefweb’s excellent portal to the latest news of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia.

Any hope for Annapolis?

I would be so happy if the planned Annapolis meeting between Israel and the Palestinians succeeded.
But succeeded at what? At orchestrating a pretty photo-opportunity? No, that would be no particular cause for joy, given the number of times such photo-ops have been staged in the past and– crucially– the role they have played in both substituting for any tangible progress in the peacemaking, and also masking the absence of such progress.
Succeeded at getting one side to make, unreciprocated, a declaration publicly “demanded” from it by the other side?
No, that would not constitute any meaningful success either, since it would augur so poorly for the future success of the peacemaking…
Right now, the only success that counts is the success of peacemaking: That is, visible progress toward the speedy conclusion of final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine— and also, a final peace between Israel and Syria. That’s the prize we should all keep our eyes on.
Yes, it needs to be progress towards a final peace, because both Israelis and Palestinians had the emotion-churning experience in the 1990s of seeing the strong focus on interim agreements, that were described in the deeply flawed Oslo process as being “steps on the path to a final peace,” instead drain energy and momentum out of the search for that final peace.
That was the particular “contribution” to the process made by the failed diplomatist Dennis Ross, who since I first met him in the mid-1980s argued endlessly that the Israelis and Palestinians would need a long interim period in order to “build confidence” before they could muster the political will required to negotiate a final peace. Instead of which, Ross’s shepherding throughout the Clinton years of the implementation of his flawed– and, I might add, extremely self-serving and one-sided– formula led only to the intense disillusionment of nearly a whole generation of the former “peaceniks” on both sides of the Green Line… To a rise in frustrations on both sides… To ever-tighter restrictions on the Palestinians’ freedom of movement… And to the continued expansion of the illegal Israeli settlement project in the occupied West Bank.
For example, look at the post-1993 increase in the settler populations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem columns of this table. Under international law E. Jerusalem is actually a part of the West Bank, so I don’t know why those folks put them in separate columns there. But if you do the math you can see that the population in both columns combined increased from 264.4K in 1993 to 443K in 2005, an increase of 68%. Lucky settlers: gobbling up all those yummy US-taxpayer-assisted subsidies along with the Palestinians’ land and resources!
(Amazingly, some people have even recently been “mentioning” Dennis as a possible high-level foreign-policy official in a post-2009 democratic administration. Does no-one even look at his actual past performance?)
Oh, and the GDP per capita in Israel as a whole skyrocketed during the years after Oslo, thanks to the opening of massive new markets, especially in East Asia and especially for weapons, that was inaugurated by that agreement.
So please, 14 years after Oslo, let’s have no more talk of “interim” agreements.
I am slightly reassured by the fact that the Bushites seem not to have given way to that temptation (yet.) On the other hand, they have not yet projected anything like the degree of vision and commitment that they’ll need if they really want to bring about the signing of the final peace agreement before Bush leave office in January 2009.
So yes, I would be extremely happy if a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland could bring closer the conclusion of a sustainable, that is, “fair enough”, final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine.
(Okay, I’m a little troubled by the symbolism of Annapolis itself, which after all is the location of the officers’ academy for the major instrument of US armed power around the world; but apart from that, I guess it’s a nice enough seaside location…)
I would be happy if Annapolis truly succeeded, because I know how badly the parties to the dispute– but most especially, at this point, the Palestinians– have been suffering. I would be happy because I know that military occupation is always an extremely oppressive and unjust situation, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan has gone for more than 40 years now: far, far too long. I would be happy because the prolongation of the state of occupation has sown fear and violence in far too many hearts both sides of the line. Large proportions of the people on both sides live in a state of fearfulness that is itself injurious to them, and that also leads to their support for continuing acts of violence. All those wounds need to be healed, and they cannot be healed so long as the inequitable situation of one country ruling over the other is ended.
However, like the vast majority of my Israeli and Palestinian friends, I have harbored high hopes of imminent diplomatic success before– and on every previous occasion I’ve seen those hopes dashed. For many people, that can even be a worse experience than not having any hopes at all. To be honest, regarding Annapolis, despite the intensity of my desire that this might– finally!– be the turning point on the road to real success, I also struggle with the analytical side of me that, looking as coolly and objectively as I can at the facts on the ground (including here), does not really see them pointing in a hopeful direction.
Yet.
I am still waiting to be pleasantly surprised and am open to the possibility that might happen.
Among some of the disturbing pieces of recent evidence:

    * Ehud Olmert averring that, while he would promise not to build any “new settlements” and would– oh, so belatedly– start to dismantle the “illegal outposts” that he promised to dismantle back in 2003– still, he would not “strangle” the many already existing big settlements…. That is, all the previous ruses that Israeli governments have used to continue the settlement project by building entities described as “new neighborhoods” in existing settlement, could still be continued.
    * Olmert’s continued insistence that, for the peace process to proceed, the Palestinians have first to recognize not just “Israel’s right to exist”, which is a long-held Israeli position, but also, now, Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state.”

Israel’s introduction of this new “as a Jewish state” rubric has generally been understood in the US MSM as underlining Israel’s refusal to allow any of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, or their descendants, to return to their ancestral properties in what has been Israel for 59 years. But it is also a rubric of great significance within Israeli society, since many of the 25% or so of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish– most of them ethnic Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the rest Russians– prefer the idea, common in democratic countries, that Israel should be “the state of its citizens.”
Anyway, for Olmert to require Mahmoud Abbas to jump through this recently introduced hoop even before serious negotiations can start, is not a good sign. And why do we hear nothing from the party that seeks to present itself as a “neutral” mediator in these talks, telling Olmert and the Israelis that the introduction of this hoop is very unhelpful indeed?
(I wonder what would happen if Abbas stated publicly that he would require Israel to recognize Palestine’s “right to exist as a Muslim state” before he would even negotiate?)
Anyway, a mediator in such a situation could, if truly committed to moving rapidly toward a sustainable final peace agreement, certainly find ways to “mediate” and find creative ways to sequence and link all the cross-cutting demands and concerns voiced by the two sides.
And I guess that is the final, and perhaps biggest, cause for my current concern: I am not yet seeing anything from the Bush administration that indicates any such degree of commitment.
I realize the “structure” of this negotiation would be hard for any mediator to deal with. There is one very strong party currently sitting on the neck of a very weak party. Both the contending parties, moreover, have considerable bodies of supporters elsewhere… But the particular challenge for Washington is that the weak party’s main external supporters are in a part of the world that is very important to the US– while the strong party’s main external supporters are within the US political system itself.
And this, in a US election year in which, though George W. Bush himself is not a candidate, still his party will presumably not want him to gratuitously diminish their chances of success.
So maybe, as I’ve argued for a long time now, the US really is just about the most unsuitable choice one could imagine for a successful “mediator” in this situation. In which case, the decent thing to do would be to resign from the task and hand it over to a party that can get the job done both speedily and sustainably.
But so long as they hang onto the task, I guess I shall just have to wait for them to prove me wrong…

Yet more Americo-myopia on Pakistan

… This time it comes from veteran warmonger Fred Kagan and (imho, sadly) Brookings’s Michael O’Hanlon, writing in today’s NYT.
In a sense, the title of their op-ed says it all:

    Pakistan’s collapse, Our Problem

I beg your pardon? Wouldn’t a collapse of government power in Pakistan be in the first instance a massive problem for its own 160 million people?
No hint of that in the K&O’H text.
But also, no hint that a collapse of government power in Pakistan– a country that has a nuclear arsenal estimated to contain 24-48 HEU warheads and perhaps 3-5 plutonium warheads– would pose a massive challenge to everyone in the world. And most especially those sizeable and well-armed nations that are its neighbors. Like India. Like Russia. Like China. Not to mention Afghanistan and a host of other very vulnerable countries in that region…
The US homeland is, by contrast, located almost exactly on the other side of the world.
What on earth is it with the hubris of so many US “strategic analysts”? That they think that US is in some way “uniquely” threatened by developments in distant Pakistan? That those developments are therefore somehow “uniquely” a problem for the US. And therefore, that it is the US, alone, that needs to figure out how to “respond”?
K&O’H lead their piece thus:

    AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that…

Then, as the piece unfolds, there is, I swear, not even a word of recognition that the possible loosening of the controls the Pakistani government may have (even if, who knows, imperfectly) on the country’s nuclear arsenal and production and research facilities could be a threat to anyone else except the US!
Similarly, there is no recognition that any other power, apart from the US, might be part of a pro-stability political-diplomatic process/solution in Pakistan. This, though the two authors go to great lengths to game-plan out various scenarios for– you guessed it– unilateral US military action aimed at securing, at the very least, Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.
Reading the piece, I was amazed and saddened to see the degree to which such authors– okay, well specifically, Michael O’Hanlon, whose expertise and judgment in military-strategic matters I had until recently held in quite a degree of respect– can just simply assume that the prospect of internal collapse is a problem only for the US.
And why would the op-ed page editors of the NYT publish a piece expressing such an amazingly Americo-myopic worldview? Wouldn’t a smart and informed editor insist on asking the question, “Hey guys, maybe you should put in something about a few other actors and not just the US?”
But no. Apparently, all of them now live inside this incredibly self-bounded, self-referential, and provincial little Americo-bubble whose inhabitants don’t even really grasp, let alone give any public acknowledgment of, the idea that there are many other countries and people in the world who all also have their own interests and capabilities… And that, indeed, on a world scale, the US makes up less than 5% of the world’s people, and has no valid claim whatsoever to act “on behalf of” the whole world community in a matter of truly global concern such as this one.
I guess 15-plus years of drumbeating rhetoric about US “leadership” in the world has left as an effect a lot of US people who think that the unexamined “fact” of US leadership gives the US an equally unexamined “right” to act on behalf of the world community whenever and wherever it pleases around the world.
Sad. And very, very shortsighted.
I guess I find O’Hanlon’s descent into this very childish kind of Americo-myopia particularly discouraging since, as I noted, until recently I saw him as much more realistic and objective an analyst than the sad old (or young-old) warmonger Fred Kagan.
So yes, we really do need to have a serious, globe-circling discussion of the very destabilizing situation that several decades of bad US policy– along with other factors– have brought both Afghanistan and Pakistan to today. But please, let that not be a discussion based on the childish, “me”-centered assumptions of Americo-myopia.

Exciting Swiss diplomacy on Iran-nuclear issue

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told reporters in Saudi Arabia that he will be discussing with the Gulf Arab countries a plan (that they had proposed earlier) enrich uranium for their projected nuclear power program in a neutral country “such as Switzerland.”
The plan earlier proposed by the six (all-Arab) members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was for the establishment of a consortium for this purpose that could provide nuclear fuel to Iran and any other Middle East states (though perhaps not including Israel?), who might be planning their own nuclear power programs.
Ahmadinejad’s confirmation of interest in the GCC proposal, and his naming of Switzerland as the possible location for this project, are both very significant. Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had suggested that his country could provide uranium-enrichment services for Iran, but that proposal got nowhere. As I recall, that was due in good part to the opposition of Washington; but Ahmadinejad was only lukewarm about it, too.
Interesting if this time around, he is signaling a much greater degree of interest in this outsourcing proposal…
Switzerland’s involvement in the current plan is interesting. On its face, it would seem not to portend the formation of a potentially hostile anti-US bloc, as the idea of Russian involvement did for many people. Also, I imagine the GCC countries would be a lot happier to have Switzerland host the enrichment project (and to put their money into the project there), than to have that all happen in Russia.
Also this weekend, Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey confirmed that her country is actively pursuing a plan to engage the US and Iran in direct negotiations. According to that link, which is to an AP story in the IHT, Calmy-Rey told a Swiss weekly paper that her country’s long-held tradition of neutrality in international relations,

    puts it in a key position to mediate the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program.
    “It is a fact that the … big powers have so far been unable to prevent Iran from pursuing uranium enrichment,” she said in an interview published Sunday, her first public comments about Switzerland’s role.

Switzerland has, of course, handled consular affairs between Iran and the US ever since the two broke off relations in 1979. But the new diplomatic role Calmy-Rey is carving out for her country seems to go far beyond the provision of such purely technical services.
All power to her!
The AP story also notes that Calmy-Rey,

    has said Switzerland rejects the proliferation of nuclear technology but recognizes the right to use the technology for peaceful purposes.

That has been, of course, the sticking point in the current international conflict over Iran’s nuclear program. The US, Israel and a handful of other countries, including France and the UK, have been very strongly opposed to Iran gaining a working nuclear program even for power generation, arguing that it could too easily be converted to a program to develop nuclear weapons (which the US, Israel, the UK, and France all already have, and show no signs whatever of giving up.)
If the fuel enrichment for Iran’s nuclear power program can be done outside Iran, that makes the “conversion/diversion” danger much, much smaller.
Ahmadinejad’s apparently strong expression of interest in the GCC proposal looks remarkably statesmanly. It is also some pretty smart diplomacy. Especially at a time when the US has been rushing around trying to enroll all the Arab states into its drum-beating, anti-Iran “crusade” (oops, sorry, make that “campaign.”)
I should just reiterate at this point the judgment I have held to for a long time now, that though many Arab states have misgivings– some of them quite strong ones– about Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East, still, they all without exception fear the fallout from any possible US-Israeli military attack against Iran much, much more, and are willing to work hard to avert such an attack.
So maybe the Switzerland-GCC plan is a good way in which the tension over Iran’s nuclear program can be de-escalated, and relations between Teheran and Washington returned to a much more even and less globally destabilizing a tone.
Let’s hope so!
However, many of those who have been agitating hardest for a US (and/or US-Israeli) military strike against Iran can be expected to be upset about this. This is particularly the case of all those who urged such a strike not, basically, because of their fears about Iran’s nuclear program, but because they sought regime change in Tehran and have been prepared to rack up and use the issue of the Iranian nuclear program in order to “justify” the military attack.
But if the GCC-Swiss proposal can verifiably meet people’s concerns regarding the Iranian nuclear program, it should be welcomed by everyone.
Meanwhile, Calmy-Rey is 1,000% correct to continue to push her campaign for the opening of serious direct talks between the US and Iran. Only through the direct contacts between these two parties, and the concomitant establishment of an all-party, Iraq-plus-all-its neighbors-plus-the-UN-and-the-US negotiation can the US ever hope for an orderly withdrawal of its troops from the continuing quagmire in Iraq.
All the rest of the world also desperately needs the US-Iran relationship to stabilize.

On desertions and conscientious objection

The rate of desertions from the US army “skyrocketed” during the 12-month period ending September 30, according to this report in the semi-official Army Times. Reporter William McMichael noted that 4,698 soldiers were declared deserters during that year (which, in US government parlance is known as “Fiscal Year 2007”.)
He wrote that that was a 42.3% increase over FY2006– and “More disturbingly, the pace of Army desertions appears to have increased even during fiscal 2007: 63.6 percent of the year’s 4,698 desertions were recorded from April through September, according to Army data.”
He added this:

    The Army has borne the brunt of the contentious Iraq war. Thousands of troops are on their second, third and even fourth deployments. Soldiers currently deploy to Iraq for 15 months and come home for 12; leaders at all levels lament the lack of “dwell time,” saying troops need more time to rest and reconnect with families as well to properly train for the next deployment.
    Troops in mobilized, deployed and deploying units who have reached the end of their enlistment contracts fall under the ongoing “stop-loss” program and cannot be discharged.
    That strain largely explains the rise in desertions, said Lawrence Korb, formerly a senior Pentagon personnel official in the Reagan administration and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It’s a combination of not enough dwell time, and having to go back [to the war] as well as the type of people you’re taking in,” Korb said.
    The increased rate of desertions in fiscal 2007’s second half, he said, coincided with the surge of troops sent to Iraq. “A lot of them probably didn’t want to go back,” Korb said. “And don’t forget, you’ve lowered your standards of people you’re taking in.”
    In an effort to boost recruiting, the Army granted moral waivers for past criminal behavior to 11.6 percent of new recruits in fiscal 2007, and accepted more recruits who dropped out of high school or scored low on entrance tests.
    … Desertion is a felony, punishable by death under military law if committed in wartime.
    While it’s still treated seriously, that maximum punishment may be a thing of the past. The last service member executed for desertion was Pvt. Eddie Slovik, who was shot by a firing squad in France on Jan. 31, 1945, following his conviction for desertion under fire.
    … A death penalty for desertion “obviously has struck [military] convening authorities and juries as excessive,” said Eugene Fidell, an attorney specializing in military law who is president of the National Institute of Military Justice. “We rely more on positive incentives for our personnel to remain with their units, rather than fear of death.”

On a related (though dissimilar) note, I want to once again draw attention to the website of Quaker House, in Fayetteville, NC, which counsels individuals seeking to register their conscientious objection to participation in war. The website has been upgraded a lot over the past couple of years: it has a large amount of very informative material on it.
Including the numbers for the “G.I. Rights Hotline”: +1-877-447-4487 (toll-free) and +1-919-663-7122.
One of the cases Quaker House worked on was the application of Jeremy Hinzman for asylum in Canada, on the grounds that he would face persecution in the US on account of his (mid-service) application for CO status in 2002 and his subsequent refusal to be shipped to Iraq. Yesterday, however, the relevant court in Canada turned down the asylum applications from Hinzman and fellow CO, Brandon Hughey, and today the Candian Supreme Court refused to hear the two men’s appeal against that judgment.
These are tragic stories that involve serious issues of principle as well as families bing torn apart and men being punished for trying to follow the dictates of their conscience.
All the more reason, then, to strengthen the campaign to bring the troops home now and– most certainly– not to launch the US military into yet another (quite avoidable) military maelstrom any time soon, or indeed ever. War wreaks terrible things on everyone who is involved in it, whichever end of the gun barrel they stand.

Washington’s continued coup preparations for Pakistan

So here’s the deal: The Bush administration, which until recently has been pushing Pakistan’s Prez Musharraf very hard to “take off his uniform” and rule as a civilian, has become frustrated with his unwillingness to do that to order. So now they are moving a lot closer to trying to topple him– with a military coup.
Go figure.
A gang of three NYT reporters are currently the administration’s leakees of choice in this campaign. Is the goal to use these always-anonymous leaks to put additional pressure on Musharraf– or, to encourage their chosen successor-general to him, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to finally launch this posited coup against him? Hard to tell.
But not hard to tell that there is a concerted campaign of leaks on this subject to these NYT reporters, who use a three-headed byline on today’s story– “This article is by Helene Cooper, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde.” How’s that for diluting the responsibility of the individual reporter? Just like the sleaziest practices of Time magazine, etc..
This reporting, I should note, looks a near-total reprise of some of Judith Miller’s wildest days of anonymous Cheney-channeling over there at the NYT.
The story leads thus:

    Almost two weeks into Pakistan’s political crisis, Bush administration officials are losing faith that the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can survive in office and have begun discussing what might come next, according to senior administration officials…

A few grafs down, we are told that:

    More than a dozen officials in Washington and Islamabad from a number of countries spoke on condition of anonymity because of the fragility of Pakistan’s current political situation.

Not a single administration source is named in the whole piece. Do I need to repeat that?
Then, there is the question of whether this tricephalous reportorial unit has its own “point of view” regarding the complex political judgments that their piece purports to “report”. The NYT has a separate category of articles that, though they appear on the “news” pages also contain the authors’ analytical judgments. Those pieces are clearly titled “News Analysis.” This piece is not titled thus. Therefore, it is supposed to contain only reporting. (And good, thorough, reporting, too; which this piece notably does not.)
Buried one-third way down in the piece we have this:

    the State Department and the Pentagon now say they recognize that the Pakistani Army remains a powerful force for stability in Pakistan, and that there is little prospect of an Islamic takeover if General Musharraf should fall.

Note that verb “recognize”. It is one of those supposedly “reportorial” verbs that also carries the author’s own judgment about the truth-value of the judgment being reported: namely, that it is a correct judgment. Good neutral ways to convey the same bit of reporting would be to say that these official bodies “judge”, “say”, or “claim” that the Pakistani Army remains a powerful force, etc etc. Not that they “recognize” that this is the case.
Well, the unintentionally revelatory writing style of these three reporters is only a secondary aspect of this story, with its main aspect being that there evidently does seem to be an increasingly strong tendency in the Bush administration that’s urging a military coup in Pakistan.
Here is the scenario laid out by the Gang of Three, citing, presumably, some or all of their “dozen” anonymous administration sources:

    If General Musharraf is forced from power, they say, it would most likely be in a gentle push by fellow officers, who would try to install a civilian president and push for parliamentary elections to produce the next prime minister, perhaps even Ms. Bhutto, despite past strains between her and the military.
    Many Western diplomats in Islamabad said they believed that even a flawed arrangement like that one was ultimately better than an oppressive and unpopular military dictatorship under General Musharraf.
    Such a scenario would be a return to the diffuse and sometimes unwieldy democracy that Pakistan had in the 1990s before General Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup.

So now, the game plan seems to be that, instead of pushing for a Musharraf-Bhutto two-handed power-play, they are switching to an Army-Bhutto two-handed power play, with hopes for the coup pinned, for now, on Kayani, whom they describe thus:

    General Kayani is a moderate, pro-American infantry commander who is widely seen as commanding respect within the army and, within Western circles, as a potential alternative to General Musharraf.

They do note, however, that Kayani has already been designated by Musharraf as his the man who will head the army after, as Musharraf still promises, he steps down as Chief of Staff within the coming weeks… No surprise, then, that the NYT Three describe him as a bit reluctant to move against Musharraf at this time.
What effect might the publication of this “news” report be expected to have on Kayani? H’mm. Maybe increase his reluctance?
Meanwhile, I’d like to also note that nearly all the US MSM is continuing to report the Pakistan crisis as one that, among non-Pakistani powers, involves only the US. Given Pakistan’s lengthy history of close relations with China, and it position in Southwest Asia between Afghanistan and India, this is a very myopic view of the matter, indeed.
China Hand has had another couple of good posts on her/his blog, about Pakistan. Here and here.
 Definitely always worth reading CH’s non-US-centric commentary.

US Quaker activists gather

This past weekend was the annual
conference of the Friends Committee on
National Legislation.
Veteran Quaker activists on
peace issues and other issues of intense social concern had come to a
conference center in Washington DC from all
around the US. I have gotten to know quite a few members of FCNL’s
national headquarters staff in the months I’ve had the affiliation of
“Friend in Washington” with them; and of course, from my home Quaker
meeting (congregation) back home in Charlottesville Virginia, I’ve had
one small grassroots view of how FCNL operates. But what was new and
energizing this weekend was to experience this critical mass of engaged
social-activist energy all in one place at one time.

I heard many great stories of what FCNL’s mainly– but by no means
exclusively– Quaker supporters have been doing around the country:
contacting their members of Congress; writing to local papers;
organizing peace vigils; working on pro-green projects; delving deep
into the challenges of peacemaking and peacebuilding; etc, etc.

The keynote speaker, on Saturday night, was Congressman John Lewis
(D- Georgia), who was honored with FCNL’s Edward F. Snyder Award for
National Legislative Leadership in Advancing Disarmament and Building
Peace.  Lewis was born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama, the son of
African-American sharecroppers.  At a young age he became one of
the historic leaders of the US civil rights movement.  When he was
23 he was the head of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), and in that capacity he was one of the speakers at the
important “March on Washington” along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

He told us that he had been just 17 when, as a student at the
historically Black Fisk University in Knoxville, Tennessee, he first
made the acquaintance of Quakers, who were organizing workshops on
nonviolent social action in a nearby church.  He started
participating in the workshops which, he said, moved him very deeply.
Soon enough, he and his colleagues from Fisk and elsewhere in the
still-segregated south started a campaign of going to sit down at
“Whites Only” lunch counters:

We sat in at the lunch counters and
people would come up and spit on us, or put lighted cigarettes in our
hair or down our backs.  And we wouldn’t react.  We wouldn’t
get angry.  We kept our
eyes on the prize.

Lewis has been a member of the
US House of Representatives since 1987 and the senior chief deputy
whip in the Democratic caucus since 1991.  He has been a
consistent and strong voice in the anti-war caucus in Congress, too.

He told us on Saturday,

Nothing has troubled me more than the
war in Iraq and the prospect of military engagement in Iran. 
These would both be wars of choice, not of necessity.

… Sometimes I feel like crying out loud for our nation, for what the
administration has done in our name!

He recalled the occasion when he and Dr. King spoke to the March on
Washington.  And he said,

We hear a lot about the Rev. Martin
Luther King’s speech there that day: the ‘I have a dream’ speech. 
But we don’t hear nearly enough about the important speech
he made at Riverside Church in New York City, just a year before he
died, in which he spoke out against the Vietnam war and said the US was
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

If he could speak here tonight, he would tell us that war is not the answer; war is
obsolete.

Seeing and listening to this historic figure was incredibly
inspiring.  Lewis had a wonderful, down-to-earth charm.  At
one point, he recalled the time he had spent in his youth helping his
parents raise chickens– and how even as a boy he had gathered the
chickens and some of his younger cousins together in the hen-house, and
practised “preaching” to them. He commented,

Continue reading “US Quaker activists gather”

New blogging gig on urban transportation systems

I have a new little blogging gig— a periodic feature called “Eyes on the Street” over at The City Fix, which is a blog published by the Washington DC-based World Resources Institute on Exploring Sustainable Solutions To The Problems of Urban Mobility.
While I was working on my new book over the summer, it became clear to me that the emergence of the climate change challenge is one of the two or three big issues in world politics that the US political class has been largely “out to lunch” over, over the past 4-5 years, because of the country’s quite understandable focus on developments in Iraq.
No, I’m not going to stop writing about Iraq or any of the other issues I’ve been dealing with here at JWN. But I am a long-time train-freak; and in general I like and value urban public transportation systems, because of the tenor and context they give to public life.
Ethan Arpi, the editor of TCF, suggested the name for my little feature there as a tribute to the great American/Canadian urbanist Jane Jacobs, who argued in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities that:

    A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe. But how does this work, really? And what makes a city street well used or shunned? … A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:
    First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space…
    Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street…
    And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers…

Well, I’m honored and inspired to think I can play a little part in keeping Jacobs’ great heritage alive.
One of my other big goals doing this new gig is to try to wake more Americans up to the idea that not having a car can be a quality-of-life enhancement, rather than its opposite. This is, of course, particularly the case in well-planned cities.
Finally, a small confession. I have always regretted a little that I didn’t become an engineer or city planner. Or maybe an architect. So this way I get to indulge in a little bit of urban criticism, at least… (I’m writing this from Boston, where I’ve already planned out my subway-plus-walking routes for the next few days.)

Hamas “military” upgrading in Gaza?

Gideon Levy had a fascinating article in Haaretz yesterday, reporting this:

    The group of reservist paratroopers returned all astir: Hamas fought like an army. The comrades of Sergeant-Major (Res.) Ehud Efrati, who fell in a battle in Gaza about two weeks ago, told Amos Harel that “in all parameters, we are facing an army, not gangs.” The soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces were impressed by their enemy’s night vision equipment, the tactical space they kept between one another – and their pants even had elastic bands to make them fit snugly around their boots.

Levy’s very sensible reaction to this is unequivocally that this is good news for Israelis:

    the news the soldiers brought is … encouraging on several other levels. According to their descriptions, a Palestinian Defense Force has emerged. Instead of a rabble of armed gangs, an orderly army is coalescing that is prepared to defend its land. If it makes do with a defensive deployment against Israeli incursions, we will again have no moral claim against them: Hamas is entitled to defend Gaza, just as the IDF is entitled to defend Israel.
    The coalescence of an army also ensures that if Israel tries to reach an accord with the Hamas government – the one and only way to stop the firing of Qassams – there will be someone in Gaza to prevent the firing. An armed and organized address in the chaos of Gaza also means good news for Israel. But the respect the reservists felt for the way Hamas fought is liable to trickle down deeper. “The Palestinians never looked like this,” the surprised soldiers told Haaretz. Perhaps we will finally stop calling them “terrorists” and refer to them as “fighters.” A bit of respect for the Palestinians and, in particular, an end to our dehumanization of them is liable to mark the beginning of a new chapter.

Well, I certainly hope he’s right that an increased “respect” for the Palestinian Hamas forces will trickle through to larger number of Israelis (though I would not as yet bet my farm on it.)
I do recall that back in 1982, an earlier generation of IDF reservists also discovered a “new” level of respect for the Palestinians fighters who were dug in around Beirut, during the punishing siege the IDF maintained around that city for ten long weeks. (Q.v., the Schiff and Yaari book, “Israel’s Lebanon War”, or any number of other contemporary sources.)
And then, during the first intifada, many Israelis expressed some grudging respect for the Palestinians who maintained a largely nonviolent, mass civilian uprising against the occupation for many years, despite Rabin’s “Iron Fist” and other brutal punishments.
Recently, however, it has been mainly the forces of Hizbullah who’ve won some “respect” from the Israelis, not particularly any Palestinians.
Levy makes an excellent point, though, about the need for a coherent force to be able to maintain order in Gaza– especially under today’s extremely stressed (and distressed) circumstances there.
I suspect, though, that very few of Levy’s countrymen will immediately agree with him that “Hamas is entitled to defend Gaza, just as the IDF is entitled to defend Israel,” though that is certainly a courageous, fairminded, and generally admirable sentiment. (Of course, “defending” both territories through nonviolent means on both sides of the line would be highly preferable to having them both use of military force.)
Levy writes:

    Perhaps the reservists’ reports will dissuade the defense minister from carrying out his plan to conquer Gaza and will motivate Israel to try, for the first time, a different approach with Hamas – negotiations. [One would certainly hope so, though I am less hopeful of this than Levy seems to be. ~HC] Only the recognition of Hamas’ strength is liable to persuade Israel to be cautious about another operation, and only its military buildup will make us understand the full stupidity of the boycott policy that was designed to weaken Hamas…

In his ending, he eerily echoes some of the arguments I made in this recent JWN post, about the problematic absence of any “mutually hurting stalemate” between the Israelis and Palestinians at the present time. He writes:

    Ours is a country that has been ready to make concessions only after blood is spilled. Since the interim accords following the Yom Kippur War and through the withdrawal from Lebanon and the disengagement, Israel has needed a relatively strong enemy to get its act together. If not for Hezbollah, we would still be in Lebanon; if not for Hamas, we would still be in Gaza.
    Now the time has come for the next chapter: Did we think leaving Gaza and imprisoning it was enough for life in Israel to be hunky-dory? Hamas comes along and reminds us that this does not suffice. The West Bank is quiet in the meantime? Until an organized and strong resistance movement is revived there, we will not consider evacuating even one little outpost. We will conduct talks every two weeks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, we will go to Annapolis, but we will not discuss, heaven forbid, the “core” issues there. And our terrific lives will continue, while in the West Bank the masses will crowd together at the checkpoints for hours, be subject to humiliation and risk their lives every time they go outside.
    These words are not meant to encourage another wave of Palestinian terror. They are intended to try to motivate us, for the first time, to move beyond our usual habits and reach the conclusion – this time without bloodshed – that the occupation cannot continue forever. Perhaps the news about the elastic bands on the Hamas men’s pants will do it for us, and the next cycle of violence will be averted.

Anyway, regardless of Levy’s possibly over-optimistic prognosticating, I think many of the analytical points he makes in the piece are valid… And the facts he reports– about the impressions those seasoned IDF soldiers had of Hamas’s upgraded organizational capabilities– are extremely important.
One depressing prospect is, of course, that instead of reacting to these reports the way Levy clearly hopes, the Israeli political leadership will react in exactly the opposite way: that, egged on by Elliott Abrams and the rest of the Bushites, they will argue instead that Hamas is engaged in a “dangerous, Iranian-backed military buildup in the heart of Gaza that needs to be snuffed out immediately.”
(In March 2006, when I talked with the hawkish Israeli figure Dore Gold in Jeruslaem, that was almost exactly the tenor of the argument he made to me about Hamas’s then-recent victory in the parliamentary elections… Except that in his extremely fevered and fearmongering version of the matter, the Hamas people– along with their alleged Iranian “backers– were also on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons… Are we scared enough yet?)