Author: Helena

Nuclear disarmament, as well as nonproliferation

Late in June, on the last day that Tony Blair was in office in Britain, his Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett made a notable speech at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington in which she called on both the US and Russia to make deep cuts in their nuclear arsenals.
Beckett recalled that at the heart of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970 there was a “grand bargain” between the recognized nuclear-weapons states and the non-nuclear states, under which the nuclear-weapons states undertook to engage in complete and general disarmament, in return for the non-nuclear states foreswearing the pursuit of nuclear arsenals. And she noted the key linkage this established between nuclear (non-)proliferation and nuclear disarmament:

    Our efforts on non-proliferation will be dangerously undermined if others believe – however unfairly – that the terms of the grand bargain [between nuclear and non-nuclear states] have changed, that the nuclear weapon states have abandoned any commitment to disarmament.

This is an excellent point to make– though I don’t currently see any need for that caveat about “however unfairly”. So here are my two main questions about the Beckett speech:

    1. To what extent did the position she laid out actually reflect anything about the positions to be taken by the soon-to-take-over government of Gordon Brown?
    2. Which people of similar political stature within the US are equally ready to speak out publicly about the need for nuclear disarmament?

Regarding the first of those questions, I detected a faint echo of the “Beckett position” in the speech that new Foreign Secretary David Miliband made for Chatham House and Avaaz.org earlier this week. (Video from Avaaz, here.) Miliband spoke quite a lot there about nuclear nonproliferation, and the need to achieve this in cooperation with other countries, etc.– all pretty boiler-plateish stuff, really, unless you come from a John Bolton-like position of rampant unilateralism.
But he did also say at one point:

    We need to find similar ways of leading thought on other areas, whether this is concrete and immediate challenges such as nuclear disarmament and proliferation or longer term challenges such as the future of global institutions…

So I guess what I’m seeing there is that he thinks nuclear disarmament is a concrete and immediate challenge (and one that may be linked to nuclear proliferation)– but it is still only something we need to find ways to start thinking about, not something we actually need to do anything about at this point?
And it was indeed quite appropriate that Miliband didn’t commit his government to doing anything about nuclear disarmament right now… Especially since, as Paul Rogers has laid out at depressing length here, the Brown government last Wednesday announced plans:

    1. “to allow the US base at Menwith Hill in north Yorkshire to become a key component in the new national missile-defence system Washington is now developing” [maybe that should be a global missile-defence system? ~HC] and
    2. “to build two huge new aircraft-carriers for the Royal Navy, much bigger than any other ship the country has ever deployed… The military purpose of the two new carriers is to give Britain a global expeditionary strike capability that it has lacked for decades… ”

Yes, certainly depressing.
Rogers notes, too, that the new carrier-building program is intimately linked to the program had Blair started, to upgrade and replace Britain’s arsenal of Trident, submarine-launched nuclear missiles. He analyzes Brown’s decisions in these fields at some length, noting that the timing of the two announcements, “was in the best tradition of British democracy: in a familiar pattern for decisions that governments seek to ‘bury’, they arrived at the end of the parliamentary session as MPs prepare to leave for the summer recess, thus ensuring an absence of debate and (in the main) media discussion…”
He comments,

    What is really dismaying at this early stage of the Gordon Brown government is the missed opportunity to take a hard look at Britain’s defence policy and engage in a fundamental review of the country’s long-term security needs. Instead, it seems that in this key area of Whitehall – notwithstanding the rhetoric of change from the new prime minister – it is business as usual.
    There is a remote possibility that wiser counsel will prevail, perhaps after the next election…

And talking of elections, here we are in the United States, and what do our presidential candidates here have to say about nuclear proliferation and nuclear disarmament?
On the Democratic side, both Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Gov. Bill Richardson have articulated what look to me like excellent positions.
Kucinich’s, as expressed here is as follows:

    It is practical to work for peace. I speak of peace and diplomacy not just for the sake of peace itself. But, for practical reasons, we must work for peace as a means of achieving permanent security. It is similarly practical to work for total nuclear disarmament, particularly when nuclear arms do not even come close to addressing the real security problems which confront our nation, witness the events of September 11, 2001.

And Richardson’s, as expressed on his own website here, is this:

    Getting all nations to agree to a stronger nonproliferation regime will require skillful diplomacy and new thinking. Which brings me to the second task: the nuclear states must stop making new weapons and must reduce the size of their existing arsenals.
    The Non-Proliferation Treaty commits non-nuclear states to forego nuclear weapons, and it also commits the nuclear weapons states to the goal of nuclear disarmament. To get others to take the NPT seriously, we need to take it seriously ourselves. We should re-affirm our commitment to the long-term goal of global nuclear disarmament, and we should invite the Russians to join us in a moratorium on all new nuclear weapons. And we should negotiate further staged reductions in our arsenals, beyond what has already been agreed, over the next decade.
    In a world in which nuclear terrorism rather than war with Russia is the main threat, reducing all nuclear arsenals, in a careful, orderly way, makes everyone safer.
    Negotiations to reduce our arsenal also are our diplomatic ace-in-the-hole. We can leverage our own proposed reductions to get the other nuclear powers to do the same — and simultaneously get the non-nuclear powers to forego both weapons and nuclear fuel enrichment, and to agree to rigorous global safeguards and verification procedures.
    The United States also should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, not only because it is good policy, but also to send a signal to the world that America has turned a corner, and once again will be a global leader, not a unilateralist loner.

Richardson has considerable experience in the nuclear-weapons field. In the Clinton administration he occupied at different times the positions of both Ambassador to the UN and Secretary of Energy. The latter position involves a lot of oversight over the country’s nuclear arsenals. I am really delighted that he has adopted the clear and persuasive position that I read there.
But how about the two Democratic front-runners, and how about the main Republican candidates for president?
With a fairly rapid search, I have been unable to find any noteworthy statements any of those others have made on the topic of real nuclear disarmament (i.e., including by our side), as such.
If any of you readers out there can find good records of these other candidates’ positions on the topic, could you post a link to it here? Thanks!
Also, another point. When citizens or journos get a chance to ask questions of all these candidates in the weeks ahead, shouldn’t we all be asking them some very well-phrased questions about the need for “all-points” nuclear disarmament?

A UN maritime policing role in the Gulf?

I’ve just been writing a sidebar text on “Outcomes in Iraq and the Gulf” for my new book. The book is about the big-picture, slightly longer-term global fallout from the US’s ongoing debacle in Iraq, so that’s why in Chapter 1 Iraq and the Gulf get only a sidebar.
Anyway, I was thinking in particular about the possible range of outcomes that the US’s notable overstretch-and-later-defeat in Iraq might have on the geopolitics of the Gulf region. And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems to me that the outcome for the US’s until-now strategically dominant position in the Gulf will be analogous to the outcome that ensued there (albeit in a long-drawn-out way) from Britain’s notable similar (strategic) defeat in Egypt, in 1956.
Regarding Britain, until 1956 it seemed generally uncontested by any other significant world powers that Britain would keep a sizeable naval presence “east of Suez”, including its bases in Hong Kong, Aden, etc; and also that it would keep its position as the dominant naval power in the strategically vital Persian/Arabian Gulf.
In 1956, Anthony Eden notably overplayed Britain’s hand and joined with France and Israel in the tripartite invasion of Egypt’s Suez region. Those invasion/occupation forces were not driven out of Suez (and Sinai and Gaza) primarily through by the national liberation actions of the local people. But they were forced to withdraw completely from those areas under US pressure, in the broader global context of the US muscling into many third-world areas to displace the previous European colonial hegemons (and also, in the context of the US placing huge pressures on the Soviet Union to withdraw the troops it had sent into Hungary against the locally-based uprising there.)
Be that as it may… Eden’s participation in the Suez affair marked the beginning of the end for Britain’s ability to maintain its own robust naval presence east of Suez. Over the 14 years that followed Britain was able to conclude political arrangements with the local leaders of the city-states along the southern coast of the Gulf who had previously supported Britain’s naval presence there: these “emirs” were given “national independence” over their city-states, and thus we saw the emergence of the “states” of Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and for the seven even smaller local emirs, who banded together in something called the United Arab Emirates…
The US Navy was meanwhile increasing its abilities to maintain a strong naval presence in the Gulf; and essentially what happened was that as the exhausted crews of the Royal Navy steamed home, the bigger ships of the US Navy glided into the waters they had left.
That all took quite some time to happen, though. 14 years to be precise. The Gulf’s littoral (coastline) states had very little say in the matter.
So now, what might be the range of things that we see in the Gulf in the years after the exhausted US ground forces exit from Iraq?
I’d like to underline here something I think I should start stressing a bit more, namely that the longer the US government delays its withdrawal from Iraq, the worse– from the point of view of “the US national interest”, as it has traditionally been conceived, though not necessarily from the viewpoint of the actual, longterm interests of the US citizenry– will be the general strategic terms on which it is able to undertake this withdrawal.
That is, after all, the nature of quagmires, imbroglios, and imperial overstretch in general.
So I think we should all look rather seriously at the idea that the UN should plan to build and deploy a maritime policing capacity for the Gulf, and that that may well be the very best outcome. It seems highly anomalous that the US– which is half way around the world from this Gulf– should arrogate to itself the “right” to police the whole Gulf area. The only other current even near-contender for this role is Iran, which is overwhelmingly the most strategically weighty of the littoral states. Actually, though, looking at my copy of The Military Balance, I see that the Iranian Navy looks fairly puny. It has three Kilo-class submarines, three frigates, three corvettes, and few much smaller vessels…
More to the point, though, there would be numerous significant states, both in and far beyond the Gulf, that would strongly distrust Iran’s commitment to running a fair and safe maritime security regime in the whole Gulf. Hence, my suggestion that we should think of building the UN’s capacity to do this job.
I’ll just note here– as I noted in the sidebar I wrote this morning– that the littoral states of the Gulf, as well as everyone else around the world who is connected to the world oil market, all have a shared interest in the Gulf and its approaches being well policed. The Gulf states need to export their oil and to import the many other necessities of daily life on which they have become dependent– and the oil-importing countries need those sea-lanes open, too. So from one point of view, thinking of the UN having the maritime policing responsibility seems like an obvious solution.
On the other hand, the UN has never done anything like this before. So the capacity would have to be built up over a number of years. Who could contribute? All the littoral states should have some good contribution, according to their capacities. Beyond there, South Africa has quite a lot of experience in this field. So do a number of European and Asian powers.
(I just saw this piece in Asia Times in 2004, in which Eric Koo was suggesting a very similar UN maritime-policing role in South East Asia. He was wrong, though, I think to describe the UN as “a centralized, neutral body with considerable naval capabilities”. Neutral– arguably so. But centralized? Having considerable naval capabilities? I don’t think so!)
I also saw this entry on Maritime Security Regimes in Wikipedia. The author gives a little bit of good basic background. But s/he concludes, “the dearth of literature on Maritime Security Regimes, particularly maritime policing, International Agreements and Interstate Maritime Cooperation suggests more research is required.”
Indeed.

Mapping and the will to power

Today I was looking at this map on Wikipedia:
Image:Unified Command map s.jpg
(You can click on the map for a larger version of it. Or click here for an even better (5 MB) version.)
At one level, this map is not remarkable at all. It was produced in, I think, 2002, by the US military’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and it simply shows the way the various “regional commands” of the US military divide the world up amongst themselves for the purposes of their planning and operations. Thus, it shows the areas that come under “Pacific Command”, “Central Command”, and so on.
For an update, you can go to this little (also clickable) pair of maps:
Image:USAFRICOM United States Africa Command Map Draft .jpg
On it, you can see how the DOD is thinking of allocating the responsibility for most of Africa to a brand-new “Africa Command”, and what that command’s borders will be. (H’mm. I wonder if they had a big tussle among them, there in the Pentagon, over who “wins” control over Egypt? According to that latter map, it stays with Centcom, while Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa including Kenya get wrestled out of Centcom’s hands and allocated to the new Africom…)
At another level, though, these maps are completely outrageous and mindblowing!
Who in China do you think ever gave “permission” to the Pentagon to put the whole of their country squarely under the letters “USPACOM”? Who in Brazil or Peru gave permission for their countries to fall under the letters “USSOUTHCOM”?
Russia, you will see, has been restored not to its full former red glory– but it has been shaded in the delicate pink of USEUCOM. Reminds me of the old days, growing up in England, when so many of the old maps in our country also had a huge number of the world’s countries tinted pink, for “British Empire.”
Ah, talking of pink for British Empire, let’s look at this little (clickable) map:

It’s a reproduction of “Africa 1892” from something called Gardiner’s Atlas.
Quite a lot more complex than the “UASAFRICOM” map, you’ll notice. But the same land-mass. And descendants of the very same poor-bloody-Africans are still living there in that same terrain that’s getting divided up among outside powers with no-one seriously asking their permission.
Back in the 1880s and 1890s, it wasn’t the different branches of the US military who, arguing among themselves for bigger budgets and more flying space, had laid those lines on distant parts of the world as they laid claim to them. Instead, it was the “concert” of European powers who at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 daintily tinted huge parts of Africa pink (for Britain) and others grey (for France), orange (Germany), yellow (Portugal), or whatever.
Note that Congo (though not “French” Congo) was described on Gardiner’s map as “Congo Free State”, and marked a sort of aqua color denoting “independent.” Belgium’s King Leopold II must have been falling about laughing to see how he’d hoodwinked ’em all! Because he was at that very time running the whole darn country as his own, personal rubber-extraction plantation, and in the course of that inflicting genocidal mega-deaths on the country’s people…
Anyway, I guess my larger point is this. Mapping places and indeed other loci of knowledge is very frequently an essential concomitant to, or precursor of, the exercise of raw power.
Back in the 1980s, when I was doing graduate studies in strategic affairs at the University of Maryland, it was always kind of taken for granted that the US had somehow gotten into a position where it “had to” manage all these cumbersome strategic alliances with other powers around the globe… in its quest to “keep the international peace”.
Nowadays, though, I think its is either outrageous or hilariously funny, the idea that this one tiny country with less than 5% of the world’s people should even imagine it has the right to paint the colors of its various different “strategic commands” all over other everyone else’s countries around the world! One thing this situation certainly is not, is “natural”. It is in every way extremely un-natural, not to mention inherently unstable.
As a pacifist, too, I’d like to make the argument that this situation of the US pushing its military bases ways out beyond our own borders and into so many other different countries around the world, and George W. Bush asserting that the US has the right to use military force unilaterally and “preventively” wherever it pleases, are both manifestations of the reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory of “legitimate self-defense.”
Enough already! There really is a better way to assure the security and wellbeing of our citizenry than continuing with this arrogance and folly.

My new book: Help with mapping and other graphics

I wrote here about the new book project I’m currently working on. I’d really like any help any of you can give (or link to) regarding production of good graphics for it.
Yesterday, I figured out some fairly good chart-creating tools– on Excel and from the “Createagraph” website. So that’s good: pie-charts, bar graphs, here we come!
Today I’m a bit stuck on maps. Primarily, I’d love to find a good clear outline map of the whole world on which I could overlay either a few lines (as in, these lines regarding how the US military overlays its operational planning on the whole world) or perhaps some text-boxes, as in, texts relating to the numbers of people from each continent killed through armed violence since 2000, or numbers of people living in poverty in each continent, or whatever.
Nice to be able to put such info onto the shape of a clearly recognizable world map, don’t you think?
Note: all these graphics must look good and clear in black and white!
Any suggestions, friends?

My new book project, & a request

I know that my posting here at JWN has been a little episodic in recent weeks. One big reason is that I’ve been working on conceptualizing and pulling together the planning for my next book. And now that I’m on the point of signing the contract for it with one of the US’s most forward-looking, capable, and agile publishing houses, Paradigm Publishers, I wanted to tell y’all a little bit about the project and start requesting your help on some portions of it.
The book actually takes off from two posts I put up on JWN back in May, on the theme of “Global Security after Iraq” (here and here). But instead of taking a disembodied, view-from-nowhere-y, approach to the topic, I have decided to make the book a manifesto within the US body politic. It’s not that I don’t like interacting a global audience. I love doing it! When we get a good, multinational and multicultural discussion going here on JWN I think it enriches and informs us all. But still, I do think that those of us who have the numerous benefits of US citizenship also need to take seriously the special responsibility we have to put a particular focus on the change we can achieve by interacting with our fellow-citizens– and most particularly, with those who don’t already think along more or less the same lines as us…
So the main topic I’ll be addressing in this book is “The US and the world after Iraq.”
Exciting, huh?
Even more exciting (read “scary”), when you consider that Paradigm wants me to have a punchy, strong manuscript on this topic ready for them this September 15th, so they can get it into their Spring 2008 list and have it out fairly early during next year’s election season here.
Oh my.
So… I have the eight chapters more or less mapped out, and today I started writing the first of them. This is a fabulous project! The book is intended for a concerned but not specialist readership. It will have an innovative format and a lot of visual aids in the form of tables, boxes, maps, etc. I may well ask y’all for suggestions regarding these graphic elements, as I go along and figure out what they should be.
In addition, the chapters may or may not have epigraphs– you know, the snappy little quotes from other authors that usually stand at the head of a chapter or other body of text.
So here’s the thing. In Ch.1, I am making in broad terms the case that the US drawdown or complete withdrawal from Iraq gives us, the US citizenry, a unique opportunity to rethink the terms and nature of our relationship with the rest of the world. Including, we can and should start reframing many of the things that our leaders have tried to force us to think of only as “threats” (that necessarily have to be responded to through forceful and on many occasions unilateral military action)… So that we can start looking at them more in the way of challenges that (1) we share with many or most other people around the world, and that therefore (2) are amenable much more to cooperative, global action than to blindly pursued, unilateral military action…
I am also introducing the idea in this chapter that our country needs to move from pursuit of a Global Control Paradigm to pursuit of a Global Inclusion model for action (as described a bit in this JWN post.)
So right now, can any of you send me good, short quotes along these lines that I might consider for use as epigraphs for this chapter?
Salient quotes from within the bounds of the mainstream US discourse, or from individuals with a truly global inspirational quality, would be particularly useful. (We can’t have them all from, say, the Dalai Lama… Or alternatively, all from Zbigniew Brzezinski or Chuck Hagel… But those are some examples of the kinds of people whose quotes might be helpful in the general argument I am trying to make in the book… Oh, never forgetting Thomas Jefferson, Abigail Adams, or other icons of US history, of course… )
Anyway, if you can contribute some quotes you think I might consider for this chapter– preferably, with full source-citation, including page numbers where appropriate, that would be excellent.
Thanks for any help you can give on this score.
I shall doubtless be coming back later for a lot more help. All those whose contributions are used will have that fact acknowledged in the book; and JWN readers who over the next three months make multiple helpful contributions to my work on the book will receive one or more free copies, as well.
Let’s harness the power of the internet together!

22,000: the Iraqis held by the US in Iraq

Buried deep in this WaPo story today was the news that, oh by the way, “the number of detainees held by the U.S. military in Iraq has increased to almost 22,000, from 15,400 six months ago.”
Think about it. These are nearly all men of bread-winning age, most likely with an average of around five dependents. That makes more than 100,000 people who are directly affected by this mass-detention situation.
In the circumstances faced by the US military (and everyone else) in today’s Iraq, the US military doesn’t even claim to have “probable cause” for the detention of each one of these men; and it certainly doesn’t have the capacity to hold individualized hearings to investigate the nature of any allegations that may have been made against them.
Actually, the vast majority of these detainees are probably not being held because they are judged through any rational process to be personally guilty of having committed a crime. No, they are most likely being held “preventively”, that is, because of a generalized fear that they might commit some action against the US occupation forces in Iraq, someday. (Sort of on a par with the reasoning Bush used to invade their country in the first place– doing this “preventively”, rather than to respond to or even “pre-empt” any evidently threatening Iraqi attack against the US.)
Now, as that WaPo article makes clear, there has arisen another strong incentive to increase the number of detainees, as well: The bulk of the article is about the informal “amnesty” process that many US units are now using toward Iraqi tribal sheikhs, whereby men loyal to these sheikhs who are in detention are released into the sheikhs’ control in return for the sheikhs agreeing to work as allies with the occupation force.
So under this model, if a local US officer wants to win the support of a local sheikh, he has every incentive to capture a few of the sheikhs’ supporters as hostages– an action, I should note that,

    (1) has been pioneered by the Israelis many years ago, and before them by every single other colonial/occupying force in history, and
    (2) is in absolutely clear contravention of international law.

Oh, and here we are, in news from Ramallah, that,

    Family and friends joyously hugged 255 Palestinians freed by Israel on Friday, hoisting them on shoulders for a boisterous heroes’ welcome meant to give President Mahmoud Abbas [= local tribal leader with whom a deal has been done] a political boost in his power struggle with Hamas.

Of course I share the joy of those families. But that’s not the point. The point is that these two occupying powers– the US and Israel– have no darn business at all engaging in the antecedent broad campaigns of hostage-taking, undertaken for purely manipulative political ends rather than through any form of due-process, regulated, criminal justice procedure.
That AP report from Ramallah spells out that “thousands more Palestinians remained in Israeli jails”. 22,000 Iraqis meanwhile languish in US prisons in Iraq– and many further thousands of (mostly Sunni) political hostages languish in terrible conditions in prisons run by the Iraqi ‘government’, as well.
The NYT today carried a stomach-turning series of photos taken inside one of these Iraqi government jails. You have to know that, since the people in charge of this jail let the photographer in, it was evidently among the “most humane” of the prisons they run. (We can probably hardly even imagine the life-threatening squalor and the torture chambers inside some of their other prisons…) But even the scenes in these photos reminded me of the intense overcrowding I glimpsed during the short visit I made to the Central Prison in Kigali, Rwanda, in June 2002.
Yes, post-genocide Rwanda is just another of the many US-supported regimes around the world that have used massive campaigns of “preventive” detentions– i.e., political hostage-taking– as a way of intimidating and coercing whole populations judged too critical of the central government.
If you want to get a bit of historical context on this whole phenomenon of how colonial regimes use mass detentions in an attempt to subjugate whole populations, you should read this article that I published not too long ago, on the ghastly mass incarceration campaigns that Britain used against the Kikuyu of northern Kenya in the 1950s…. Or better still, study the award-winning historical study of the topic by Caroline Elkins that I was reviewing there.
In my own much smaller researches into the effects of the Rwandan government’s more recent mass-detention campaigns against their country’s majority Hutu population I was able to confirm her findings that such campaigns have devastating and long-lasting effects not only on the detainees themselves but also on their families and on the broader fabric of society that is rent asunder by the detentions…
In today’s Iraq, the US government has a lot to answer for. The effects of the ongoing mass-detention campaign should not be forgotten.
Meanwhile, the tide of history is certainly running against the ability of the Bushites to “win” this contest in Iraq. (Whatever “winning” would mean.) So all these detentions, all these campaigns the US military is engaging in to arm this faction or that faction inside Iraq– they will lead to nothing… Nothing, that is, except to deepen the scars of violence that the US occupation has carved deep into the very being of Iraqi society.

Forced ‘confessions’ in Tehran

My heart aches for Shaul Bakhash and Haleh Bakhash, respectively the husband and daughter of the Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who has been detained in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for the past couple of months.
This week, Iran’s state television has been airing a two-part series featuring material from interviews conducted with Esfandiari and with Kian Tajbakhsh, another detained Iranian-American who’s been working on urban planning issues in Iran under contract for George Soros’s Open Society Institute. A slide show accompanying that AP story has image grabs from the series. In them, you can see Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh talking with an apparently off-camera interviewer… But the interviews are reportedly all cut up and edited to be intercut with material about the (US-supported) Orange Revolution in Ukraine and similarly US-supported ‘people power’ movements in other countries, to give the impression that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are admitting that their activities have been part of some nefarious plot to use their ‘people-to-people’ contacts with their own compatriots in Iran to foment instability and revolution inside Iran.
I find that ‘confessions’ made by people under arrest or detention and broadcast or otherwise publicized by their jailers are always a stomach-turning business. In these images, we see Esfandiari, who normally appears in public immaculately made-up and carefully dressed in her very professional clothing, sitting on a sofa in a black chador with no make-up and looking very tired.
I happen to be a person who doesn’t like to wear make-up. But I recognize that for many women, it is an important part of the way they appear in public; and I should imagine for Esfandiari and her family it may be very demeaning and disquieting for her to appear in public like that.
The content of these interviews, which the Iranian authorities are apparently trying to persuade everyone are ‘true confessions’, is probably nothing more than coerced or carefully edited and re-edited garbage. And we should probably all treat them like that.
At least, though, we do see these two detained people on our screens. Their families say they have lost weight and have been kept in physical conditions far, far worse than the comfy-looking sitting-room where they appear to have been filmed. But they certainly don’t look as if they’ve been treated anywhere near as badly as the US’s former detainees in Abu Ghraib (for example). And they have reportedly been allowed to have short but fairly regular phone contact with one friend or family member each throughout their detention, which is being undertaken by the Iranian authorities during the conduct of a judicial investigation into their activities in Iran.)
Meanwhile, in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, US government agencies are holding thousands of detainees, with most of them being held completely outside of the sphere of anything resembling due process. These detainees include five Iranian diplomats, who were held for some months before they were even given access to the consular service of the government they represented. It is probably also fair to guess that a large proportion of the detainees being held by the US in these places have not had the opportunity to inform their families of the fact or location of their place of detention, let alone to have any form of phone access to their families.
The families of those detainees are every bit as human, and as anguished, as Shaul and Haleh Bakhash. So while my heart goes out to those two, and while of course I hope that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are either freed unconditionally or brought with due speed to a fair trial, still I wish exactly the same for all those detainees held by the US and its surrogates, and for their families.
Sadly, the US government, which US citizens might hope would be in a great position to petition other governments in defense of the rights of US citizens unfairly detained in other countries, currently has no credibility whatsoever in this matter. Maybe US citizens should understand that when our government abuses the rights of others, it puts all of us who travel overseas at great risk?
My hope for Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh is that these nauseating broadcast ‘confessions are– as with the British sailors back in March– a precursor to the Iranian government releasing them. But who knows?
And my hope for all the detainees held quite unfairly by my own government is that they too can either speedily win either their complete freedom or at least their day in a fair and duly constituted court of law.

More violence-inciting doctors

Further to the rush of commentary last week on “how could” a medical doctor engage in violence, as a handful of Muslim-immigrant physicians in Britain recently have, I thought of a few more names of violence-inciting docs (to add to that of the notorious Dr. Baruch Goldstein referenced by Juan Cole and others.)
They are, in no particular order: Che Guevara, Charles Krauthammer, Radovan Karadzic, and Frantz Fanon, all of them trained as physicians, but advocates in one context or another of the use of coercive violence. (The latter three of these, interestingly, were trained as psychiatrists.)
The Hippocratic Oath, of course, enjoins doctors to “do no harm”. But in reality, the practice of modern, western-style medicine often involves cutting into people, giving them powerful chemo drugs, or doing other things that in themselves are potentially risky or even sometimes life-threatening– but to do so in pursuit of the future (and hopefully greater) good of becoming either wholly or partially cured. Thus can perhaps too easily be inculcated the idea that “the end justifies the means”?

Bush whitewashes, tries to prop up Abu Mazen

President Bush today made a speech in the White House with the clear intention of assuring an ever-skeptical world that he is concerned about the Palestinian question, and that he’s confident that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Abbas’s illegitimately installed Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, can “deliver” something worthwhile to the Palestinian people.
In order to do this, Bush had to airbrush out a whole lot of extremely unsavory facts about the circumstances in which the Fayyad administration came into being. For example, he said,

    The alternatives before the Palestinian people are stark. There is the vision of Hamas, which the world saw in Gaza — with murderers in black masks, and summary executions, and men thrown to their death from rooftops…
    There’s another option, and that’s a hopeful option. It is the vision of President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad; it’s the vision of their government; it’s the vision of a peaceful state called Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people. To realize this vision, these leaders are striving to build the institutions of a modern democracy. (Ahem, what about the parliament that the Palestinians democratically elected back in January 2006, which the US government systematically tried to undermine from the day it was elected, and which has now been rendered inoperative through Israel’s broad arrests of legislators and through Abbas’s unconstitutional appointment of Fayyad?? ~ HC) They’re working to strengthen the Palestinian security services, so they can confront the terrorists and protect the innocent. (!) They’re acting to set up competent ministries that deliver services without corruption. (!) They’re taking steps to improve the economy and unleash the natural enterprise of the Palestinian people. And they’re ensuring that Palestinian society operates under the rule of law. (!) By following this path, Palestinians can reclaim their dignity and their future — and establish a state of their own…

So the way he presents it, Hamas is only a “terrorist” organization that uses unconscionable violence against Palestinians (as well as Israelis). He makes zero mention at all of Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections– or, of Israel’s quite unforgivable detention of more than half of the duly elected Hamas legislators. All that is airbrushed out of Bush’s view of “history.”
Luckily, yesterday US readers were able to read this sterling piece of reporting by the NYT’s Steve Erlanger, who used his extensive understanding of the realities in the occupied Palestinian territories to write at length about the deep corruption into which Fateh has fallen, the horribly corrosive effects Israel’s stonewalling on the peace “process” has had on the lives of Palestinians, the commission by some Fateh bodies of torture and other forms of gross abuse against other Palestinians over the years, the US- and Israel-orchestrated campaign against the Parliamentary leadership elected by the Palestinians last year, and so on…
And nor does he spare Hamas from his scrutiny (though he gives a far more informed description of the political realities within which it operates, and in which it has grown so strong in recent years than anything G.W. Bush could even dream of producing). Erlanger led his piece thus:

    Palestinians never used to do these things to one another. Putting bullets in the back of the heads of men on their knees. Shooting up hospitals. Killing patients. Knee-capping doctors. Executing clerics. Throwing handcuffed prisoners to their deaths from Gaza’s highest (and most expensive) apartment buildings. There is a madness in Gaza now. Hamas — a religious political-military organization that dominated the last Palestinian elections — claimed it was fighting infidels, with a holy sanction to kill. Fatah — the largest group in the Palestine Liberation Organization — was nearly as brutal as Hamas and claimed it was fighting the Nazis. Poor young men from the squalid, stinking refugee camps of Gaza, their heads filled with religious slogans and revolutionary cant, took off their knitted black masks to pose in front of the gilded bathrooms of the once-powerful and rich men of Fatah. Then they stole the sinks, toilets, tiles and pipes, leaving the wiring and the metal scraps for the ordinary, unarmed poor.

Not quite the image of Fateh as the nonviolent “peace-lovers” that George Bush was trying to convey, it seems?
(Do read the rest of Erlanger’s piece, if you can.)
So, back to Bush…
He describes a few fairly rapid steps he wants the US and its allies in the so-called “Quartet” to take. Then, he says this:

    With the proper foundation, we can soon begin serious negotiations toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
    These negotiations must resolve difficult questions and uphold clear principles. They must ensure that Israel is secure. They must guarantee that a Palestinian state is viable and contiguous. And they must lead to a territorial settlement, with mutually agreed borders reflecting previous lines and current realities, and mutually agreed adjustments. America is prepared to lead discussions to address these issues, but they must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis, themselves.

I really don’t see how anyone can take seriously any more the notion that America has any remaining legitimacy to continue “leading” the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. For 34 years now– ever since the brief convening of an international Middle East peace conference in Geneva in December 1973– the US arrogated to itself the claimed “right” to dominate all aspects of Israeli-Arab peacemaking. And for a while, the rest of the world was, for a broad variety of reasons, prepared to go along with that.
Twenty years later, in 1993, the Norwegians handed to the Americans on a plate a unique opportunity to build on the relationships of trust that Norwegian negotiators had built up between the PLO and Israeli leaders, including a commitment the Israelis and Palestinians had both signed on to, that by 1999 they would have concluded a permanent peace agreement between them– and the Americans completely squandered that opportunity… Through first and foremost their continued pursuit of blatantly one-sided pro-Israeli partisanship, but also through their recourse to all sorts of silly, time-wasting ruses under the rubric of “confidence-building”, peace-“processing” etc, etc, and through President Clinton’s deep failure to engage with the need to work seriously on the all-important negotiations for a final peace agreement (as opposed to all those time-wasting little side-talks about this or that situation under the endlessly prolonged ‘interim’ situation.)
Well, 34 years of failed American “leadership” in the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy notwithstanding, here is President Bush breezily telling us that once again, “America is prepared to lead discussions to address these issues, but they must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis, themselves.”
No mention there, you will note, of such things as “the principles of international law”. No. Under this so-called American “leadership”, these two parties– the one a state with the world’s third- or fourth-largest army, a GNP in the mega-billions, nuclear weapons, a massive prison system, and many other means of violent coercion at its disposal, and the other a ragtag collection of sad and corrupt little US-financed “ministries” under Abbas’s and Fayyad’s control, deploying a few little pop-guns (but oh, not against Israel)– are going to be able to sit down together and negotiate a fair, sustainable outcome?
I don’t think so.
That’s why getting a firm grounding of “the principles of international law” into the process is so important. Without that, the Palestinians can’t “negotiate” anything worthwhile or lasting.
Bush goes on, embedding some fairly racist assumptions about the nature of Palestinians into his discourse:

    To make this prospect a reality, the Palestinian people must decide that they want a future of decency and hope — not a future of terror and death. They must match their words denouncing terror with action to combat terror. The Palestinian government must arrest terrorists, dismantle their infrastructure, and confiscate illegal weapons — as the road map requires. They must work to stop attacks on Israel, and to free the Israeli soldier held hostage by extremists. And they must enforce the law without corruption, so they can earn the trust of their people, and of the world. Taking these steps will enable the Palestinians to have a state of their own. And there’s only way to end the conflict, and nothing less is acceptable. (I’m not sure what the first half of the preceding sentence means. But maybe it doesn’t matter? ~HC)
    Israel has a clear path. Prime Minister Olmert must continue to release Palestinian tax revenues to the government of Prime Minster Fayyad. Prime Minister Olmert has also made clear that Israel’s future lies in developing areas like the Negev and Galilee — not in continuing occupation of the West Bank. This is a reality that Prime Minister Sharon recognized, as well. So unauthorized outposts should be removed and settlement expansion ended. At the same time, Israelis should find other practical ways to reduce their footprint without reducing their security — so they can help President Abbas improve economic and humanitarian conditions. They should be confident that the United States will never abandon its commitment to the security of Israel as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people.

The “reduce their footprint without reducing their security” line is quite cute… But it falls far short of calling for an unequivocal withdrawal of Israel from the areas its army occupied during the war of 1967. Whatever happened to that fine clause embedded in Resolution 242 about “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force”? Has George Bush, the Emperor of the Whole World, now decided that acquiring territory by force has become quite acceptable?
Bush again:

    The international community must rise to the moment, and provide decisive support to responsible Palestinian leaders working for peace. One forum to deliver that support is the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee — a group chaired by Norway that includes the United States and Japan, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. (This ‘Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee’ completely follows the model the Bushites love to use for addressing thorny international issues. Rather than using the existing and far more legitimate channels for multilateral action– primarily, the UN– they like to pull together ‘ad-hoc committees’ of their own choosing, and under their own leadership, to address this or that problem– and quite free from the constraints of anything called ‘international law’. I really don’t don’t see why other countries continue to go along with this norm-corroding, self-serving approach. Unfortunately, regarding the ‘Quartet’, even the UN itself went along. ~HC) Today I call for a session of this committee to gather soon, so that the world can back its words in real support for the new Palestinian government.
    The world can do more to build the conditions for peace. So I will call together (He honestly thinks he’s been elected ‘leader of the whole world’? What madness is this?) an international meeting this fall of representatives from nations that support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties. The key participants in this meeting will be the Israelis, the Palestinians, and their neighbors in the region. Secretary Rice will chair the meeting. (Take that, Tony Blair!) She and her counterparts will review the progress that has been made toward building Palestinian institutions. They will look for innovative and effective ways to support further reform. And they will provide diplomatic support for the parties in their bilateral discussions and negotiations, so that we can move forward on a successful path to a Palestinian state.

And then we have this… I knew it had to come into the speech somewhere!

    The conflict in Gaza and the West Bank today is a struggle between extremists and moderates. And these are not the only places where the forces of radicalism and violence threaten freedom and peace. The struggle between extremists and moderates is also playing out in Lebanon — where Hezbollah and Syria and Iran are trying to destabilize the popularly elected government. The struggle is playing out in Afghanistan — where the Taliban and al Qaeda are trying to roll back democratic gains. And the struggle is playing out in Iraq — where al Qaeda, insurgents, and militia are trying to defy the will of nearly 12 million Iraqis who voted for a free future.
    Ceding any of these struggles to extremists would have deadly consequences for the region and the world. So in Gaza and the West Bank and beyond, the international community must stand with the brave men and women who are working for peace.

So let’s see what this sudden burst of (claimed) Bushist enthusiasm for Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy leads to… Will we see a serious attempt by the US government to curb Israel’s settlement-building project? Will we see a serious attempt by them to push Israel into lifting the debilitating shackles it has placed on the ability of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to maintain anything like a “normal” economic, social, and political life?
I wait to be pleasantly surprised. But I am not holding my breath. Quite honestly, I think humanity could devise a better mode of global “leadership” than this one.

U. Iweala on whitefolk who want to ‘save’ Africa

Uzodinma Iweala, a young novelist from Washington DC and Nigeria, has a great opinion piece in today’s WaPo that should be must-reading for all young whitefolk who get the urge to “save” Africa.
He writes:

    News reports constantly focus on the continent’s corrupt leaders, warlords, “tribal” conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like “Can Bono Save Africa?” or “Will Brangelina Save Africa?” The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and “civilization.”
    There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one’s cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head — because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West’s fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West’s prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems.
    Why do the media frequently refer to African countries as having been “granted independence from their colonial masters,” as opposed to having fought and shed blood for their freedom? Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?
    Two years ago I worked in a camp for internally displaced people in Nigeria, survivors of an uprising that killed about 1,000 people and displaced 200,000. True to form, the Western media reported on the violence but not on the humanitarian work the state and local governments — without much international help — did for the survivors. Social workers spent their time and in many cases their own salaries to care for their compatriots. These are the people saving Africa, and others like them across the continent get no credit for their work.
    Last month the Group of Eight industrialized nations and a host of celebrities met in Germany to discuss, among other things, how to save Africa. Before the next such summit, I hope people will realize Africa doesn’t want to be saved. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.

Fair partnerships? We are still a long, long way away from that. One excellent first move would be for the US, the EU and Japan to immediately end the massive subsidies their governments give to their own agricultural producers– primarily, at this point, it should be noted, producers who are part of large-scale agribusiness concerns. These subsidies have completely tipped the playing field of international trade against farmers in Africa and other low-income parts of the world, and have forced them off their farms and into penury and, far too often, into a state of a desperate struggle for the resources needed for basic survival that too often becomes full-scale conflict fueled by– you guessed it!– Western exporters of small arms.
Yes, let’s have some fairness and basic inter-human respect restored to these relationships, indeed.