Author: Helena

Riverbend: Where is she?

Regular commenter Frank al-Irlandi quite rightly reminds us that it’s been nearly three months since the ultra-talented Iraqi female blogger Riverbend informed us on her blog that her family had decided they had to leave the country.
Even that post, which reported from inside a family making an extremely tough set of decisions, was characterized by Riverbend’s usual sense of groundedness and grittily wry humor. It ended like this:

    I know that leaving the country and starting a new life somewhere else- as yet unknown- is such a huge thing that it should dwarf every trivial concern. The funny thing is that it’s the trivial that seems to occupy our lives. We discuss whether to take photo albums or leave them behind. Can I bring along a stuffed animal I’ve had since the age of four? Is there room for E.’s guitar? What clothes do we take? Summer clothes? The winter clothes too? What about my books? What about the CDs, the baby pictures?
    The problem is that we don’t even know if we’ll ever see this stuff again. We don’t know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends… And to what?
    It’s difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.

Since when (April 26) we’ve heard nothing from her.
It is really tragic that so many of these fine people who have done so much, through their blogs, to bring the realities of war and occupation home to the audience in the anglosphere that is to a large extent responsible for the invasions and occupations inflicted on their people, have ended up having to leave their homelands. I’m thinking of Faiza, Riverbend, Laila el-Haddad… But at least, right now, I have a rough idea of where Faiza and Laila are. Riv has dropped out of the blogosphere (as, earlier, did that great US antiwar blogger “Marine’s Girl”). For both of them, I just hope they are alive and well.
Anyway, Frank wrote a short appreciation of his own of the impact of Riverbend’s work, which I am very happy to publish here:

    Whatever became of Riverbend?
    by Frank al-Irlandi, July 11, 2007
    It is now three months since we heard the sad news that Riverbend and her family had given up on Baghdad and loaded up the car to head for the frontier. A smart cookie like Riverbend would have filed the post after they had crossed the frontier
    She and her family probably have a small amount of money so they are unlikely to be among the destitute and desperate refugees in Syria and Jordan.
    I enjoyed Riverbend’s posts. She gave a human face to the misery being inflicted by our misadventure in Iraq. It was possible to empathise with her description of her family preparing for an American Air raid in Bagdad by comparing it with my mother’s story of cowering under the stairs in Belfast as the house fell down around them during a Luftwaffe Air Raid on the city.
    Her sympathy expressed in some of her early posts for bewildered young soldiers far from home in the heat and dust of Baghdad illustrates the size of the missed opportunity to build bridges in Iraq.
    Her description of the creeping collapse of civil society starting with her loss of a job because jobs weren’t for girls to harassment about dress and hijabs through the collapse of safety in the city and the rise of local militias protecting districts to the same militias controlling districts to the walling off of districts of the city to the progressive ethnic cleansing of the city shows us just what a developed and sophisticated society we have destroyed.
    Her description of the problems of gathering water and lack of electricity in the heat of the Baghdad summer and her grief at the death of her friends and acquaintances all serve to show us that we do not have Neville Chamberlain’s excuse of a far away country of which we know little.
    Even in all the misery of Baghdad her humanity is illustrated by the fact that she still had time to express outrage and sympathy for the unfortunates killed and wounded at Cana by an Israeli Air Raid.
    It was with some surprise that I saw Simone Veil the French Minister of Government and President of the European Parliament addressing the D-Day veterans in Normandy on the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings. She told them that she wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t landed because she had been liberated from Auschwitz seven months later. She overcame that horror and went on to build the European Union.
    I do hope that some University has offered Riverbend the opportunity to use her talents by making available a scholarship to study journalism or history or law and so make her one of the first of the exiles to train in the skills needed to rebuild whatever form of state replaces the present chaos. If this were the prototype of a scheme funded by the EU to build a skill base then so much the better.
    Otherwise we will see the effects of the dragon’s teeth that have been sown in the countries around Iraq in the very near future.
    Wherever she is, I wish her well.

I would just add that whatever “schemes” the EU might dream up, however visionary or well-meaning, seem to me to be highly unlikely to prevent the terrible effects of the dragon’s teeth that have been sown in the countries around Iraq… And indeed, the dragon’s teeth have already, as we know, majorly ripped into Iraq itself for the past 4.5 years. All that carnage– existing and potential, inside and outside Iraq– needs to be stopped.
If the EU’s people and leaders want to do something constructive in that part of the world they need to do everything possible not just to dissociate themselves from the ghastly US military adventure there, which they are, in a pussyfooting kind of way finally starting to do. But they need to be a lot more proactive in confronting the claims the Bushites are making about the continuing “need” for the US presence in Iraq. The Europeans are well placed to help pull the US government to a real forum to direct the real, sustainable de-escalation of all the region’s tensions, under UN auspices.
But will we see them play such a much-needed, humane, and constructive role any time in the near future? I doubt it.
Well, I realize that my little rant here about the EU’s “learned helplessness” in the face of US power is a diversion from the main topic of this post, which is Riverbend. Sorry about that. I guess I’ll have to write more about EU-US relations here later.

Three on Africa

In a fit of hyper-productivity I just put three posts on Transitional Justice issues in sub-Saharan Africa up onto the Transitional Justice Forum blog.
They are on Uganda, Sudan (including Darfur), and Charles Taylor and the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The last of those is heavily based on the JWN post I had on the topic last week. The other two contain considerably more new material. Read especially Moses Okello’s great commentary from Kampala on the ICC and Northern Uganda.
Comments should go over there rather than here.

A crucial week in DC, for Iraq

Has Bush’s ability to undertake anything like coherent governance of the US started to implode? In a column in today’s WaPo, Bob Novak writes that several weeks ago, Sen. Chuck Hagel had sent a private letter to Bush advocating the appointment of an international mediator for Iraq under UN Security Council auspices.
Then, according to Novak,

    Instead of the president responding to [that] overture from a longtime critic, Hagel was answered in routine fashion by a third-level bureaucrat (Jeffrey Bergner, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs).

Last week, Hagel therefore spelled out the content of his proposal in public, in this opinion piece in the Financial Times.
So one intriguing question is, who on earth in the President’s entourage made the stupid decision to blow Sen. Hagel off with such disrespect? Bush’s behavior there looks eerily like the rank arrogance displayed by Ehud Barak during his brief stint in the PM’s office in Israel, 1999-2000, when he assumed he was “so smart” he didn’t need to take any real account of the Labor Party’s partners in the ruling coalition– or indeed, of most of the other leaders of the Labor Party itself, most of whom had considerably more experience in governing than he did.
As a result, Barak’s coalition quickly collapsed paving the way for Sharon’s arrival into power and the continuing collapse of Labor as a coherent political entity.
Okay, I understand that the US’s governing system is very different from Israel’s (much more responsive) parliamentary system. But still, who in the White House is so arrogant that he would simply blow off Sen., Hagel? Only one, vice-presidential name comes to mind…
Anyway, clearly some people in the President’s entourage are finally getting the message that they need to be more politically agile and less stubborn on Iraq. David Sanger reports in today’s NYT that:

    White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.
    Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15… But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing.
    Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
    “When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

Both Sanger and the WaPo’s Shankar Vedantam reports that Secdef Robert Gates has cancelled a planned visit to Latin America this week so that he can work on the “interim report” on the surge that the administration needs to present to Congress before July 15.
I am really glad that Gates has decided to hang around in Washington this week in person. If he weren’t physically there, then Cheney could much more easily dominate and distort the discussion.
Here, by the way, are more details of what Hagel wrote in the FT last week, and a short commentary from on that text:

Continue reading “A crucial week in DC, for Iraq”

Schumer, Israel, etc.

A great post from Steve Clemons on Friday. While giving general praise to the position that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is currently articulating, Clemons also writes this:

    Every time I get an email from Senator Schumer, I am reminded of his support of John Bolton’s confirmation in the 2nd push the administration made on Bolton during the Israel-Lebanon conflagration. Several — yes more than three — U.S. Senators told me personally that Schumer was telling them “a vote against Bolton is a vote against Israel.”

    It is that kind of false choice thinking that undermines American prestige and moral credibility. So yes, Republicans are vulnerable on this war — but the kind of giddy notes that Schumer is sending out neglect his own role in empowering this crowd.

Clemons’ own comment on this tidbit focuses on what he calls the “historical amnesia” currently being displayed by Schumer (and other leading Democrats.) But he makes no comment on the assumption embedded in the argument attributed to Schumer that the (claimed) interests of a foreign country, Israel, should outweigh any other concerns his fellow senators might have had about Bolton.
We could also, certainly, go back and look at the role that the claimed interests of that same foreign country played back in 2002 in persuading so many senators and House members to allow the administration to proceed full-bore with its plan to invade Iraq… or the role that those same interests play today in the argumentation of those urging an attack against Iran.
Why do so many US senators and representatives still seem simply to assume that placing Israel’s (claimed, but perhaps not actual) interests so high in their priority list is the wise thing for our country– and them– to do? Especially now that we can palpably see that the Iraq war and the appointment of John Bolton as UN ambassador, to mention just two notable recent results of that thinking, led to such chains of disasters for the interests of the US citizenry…
Maybe it’s time for these US pols to engage in a much deeper discussion with people representing all strands of Israeli thinking, including the country’s many thoughtful advocates of peace and coexistence– rather than taking into account only the shrill warnings of the most extreme of the Israeli militarists, which is what seems to have happened until now.

Benchmarks? What benchmarks?

Karen DeYoung and Tom Ricks write in today’s WaPo that unnamed senior administration officials involved in Iraq policy have admitted that “The Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January”, when he announced his launch of the notably unsuccessful surge policy. And that therefore,

    officials are marshaling alternative evidence of progress to persuade Congress to continue supporting the war.

In other words: Benchmarks? You thought we had benchmarks? No sirree, all we have is the marks made on the floor after we rapidly shifted the benches across it…
Turns out, though, that these benches can’t be shifted quite that easily… since in May, the Democratic-controlled Congress hoisted Bush on his own well-benchmarked petard and wrote into law not only the 18 goals he had established for Iraq but also a few of their own. They also set September 15 as the deadline by which Petraeus and Crocker need to come to DC to report on how well they have succeeded in meeting these benchmarks.
DeYoung and Ricks write:

    “That is a problem,” the official said. “These are congressionally mandated benchmarks now.” They require Bush to certify movement in areas ranging from the passage of specific legislation by the Iraqi parliament to the numbers of Iraqi military units able to operate independently. If he cannot make a convincing case, the legislation requires the president to explain how he will change his strategy.
    Top administration officials are aware that the strategy’s stated goal — using U.S. forces to create breathing space for Iraqi political reconciliation — will not be met by September, said one person fresh from a White House meeting. But though some, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have indicated flexibility toward other options, including early troop redeployments, Bush has made no decisions on a possible new course.
    “The heart of darkness is the president,” the person said. “Nobody knows what he thinks, even the people who work for him.”

Personally, I think it’s unfair to refer to Bush as “the heart of darkness.” Isn’t there someone else very close to him who deserves that monicker even more (and who, by all accounts, is the person who makes most of the presidential decisions)?
Another of the great quotes in this piece is this one, from a Pentagon official, talking about the Iraqi police:

    “half of them are part of the problem, not the solution.”

H’mm, if half of them are part of the problem, then that means that only half or perhaps significantly less than half are part of the solution. So wouldn’t the “problem” ones and the “solution” ones just about cancel each other out?
Why are US taxpayers putting up with this damaging nonsense?
What is the US doing inside that distant foreign country, anyway?
I have always thought the whole idea of “benchmarks” was extremely patronizing, colonialist, stupid, and counter-productive. But given that it has existed out there as an idea in the US political discourse, I do kind of enjoy seeing the administration squirming around trying to deal with it now.
Bottom line: Enough with all these attempts, however well-intentioned, at the complex social and political engineering of another people’s entire country. Just leave!

NYT calls for exit from Iraq!!!

The editorial team of the New York Times finally, today, wrote this (text also here):

    It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

I could say this is long overdue… But more to the point, it is huge and significant.
This editorial is a long one, taking up an entire broad column in the paper. It went on to say:

    Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.
    At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.
    While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.
    The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.
    Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.
    A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.
    That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.
    The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

I should note how very, very similar some of these editorialists’ thinking is to the argument about the need for a speedy and orderly withdrawal that I have been writing about since July 2005. (E.g., 1, 2, and 3.) Over these past two years some 2,000 US service members and many scores of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives.
One important point where the editorial– unlike the ISG report and much current thinking in the US political elite– mirrors the thinking I have always articulated about the diplomacy required to negotiate this speedy and orderly withdrawal is that it calls explicitly for a UN role. Not only in the section excerpted above, but also later on where it says:

    The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.

It also, like the ISG, myself, and all informed realists, recognizes that Iran and Syria must be fully engaged in this diplomatic effort.
Where the editorial differs from my position is that it makes no explicit mention of the withdrawal being one that is generous to all the Iraqi people— i.e., that it not be a peevish, punitive withdrawal like the one from Vietnam that was followed by many long years of economic sanctions. The editorial does say that the US has an obligation to take in “many more” Iraqi refugees for permanent resettlement– and “The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will — translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers — whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.” But how about the 26 million Iraqis who do not seek resettlement outside their country but who want, rather, to be able to live decent, hopeful lives within it? The US “owes” them just as much consideration, aid, and goodwill as those who seek resettlement.
(The editorialists show that they share the “migrationist” bias of much of the US’s culture when they say that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia “must share the burden of hosting refugees.” That seems to assume that most of the Iraqi refugees want to stay as refugees, which I am convinced is not the case. UN norms regarding the options offered refugees rightly stress that the highest priority of all should be given to creating the conditions that will allow them to return safely home.)
The editorial also does not come down unequivocally in favor of the policy that the withdrawal should be total. It says, quite worryingly:

    the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self- inflicted wound for the foreseeable future.
    The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.
    There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy — and too tempting — to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washington’s real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations’ governments.
    The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

This implies, of course, that as the result of a negotiated agreement that allows the safe withdrawal of the US forces from all or most of Iraq, the other parties to that negotiation– including both the Iraqis and all their neighbors– would be quite happy for the US still to have a very broad mandate for unilateral action “to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies” within Iraq “for the foreseeable future.”
Why should we expect that all the other parties to the withdrawal negotiation would be prepared to give the US military this kind of broad leeway for continued action inside Iraq?
No, it is just not politically feasible. Either an intra-Iraqi political entente will emerge that is strong enough to take on the anti-terrorist function inside the Iraqis’ own country, or the Iraqis and a new coalition of perhaps UN-backed supporters will find a way to do it. But to have US Special Forces continuing to run around like bulls in china stores inside Iraq even after the supposed conclusion of a “withdrawal” agreement? No, it’s not going to happen.
Also, quite honestly, once the US commits to a firm date for a total withdrawal, the entire political dynamics within Iraq will change. The motivation for Iraqis to give any sustained support to the rootless agitators of Al-Qaeda would be diminished considerably, if not completely. This whole idea of the US needing continuing permission to operate inside Iraq “to combat the terrorist forces” is a dangerous canard.
Nevertheless, the appearance of this editorial today is a really, really welcome sign that the US elite is shifting significantly in the right direction!

Crooke on Fateh, Hamas

I recently read and enjoyed the informative and generally very well argued review article on three recent books on Palestine that the British conflict-resolution entrepreneur Alastair Crooke has in the latest issue of the London Review of Book. I really must try to get hold of all three of the books he’s reviewing there, which are respectively written by Azzam Tamimi and Sara Roi, and edited by Jamil Hilal.
In the article, Crooke well describes the depressing record of the damaging machinations that the US and the Europeans have undertaken in their attempts to bring down first of all the hopes the Palestinians’ elected Hamas leaders had of creating a broad unity government under their leadership last year, and then the national unity government that Hamas and Fateh jointly established through the Mecca Agreement of last March.
I have two small quibbles with Crooke’s analysis. One is where he describes the US-European plan to build a Fatah militia around Dahlan that could confront Hamas militarily as being part of a plan to engineer a “soft coup d’état” against the Hamas-led government. Not much “soft” about that plan, as far as I can see. Especially not in view of the fact that it was also linked to the continuing Israeli-US efforts to put intense economic pressures on the Palestinians (pressures which have killed vulnerable members of the Palestinian community), as well as Israel’s continual crackdowns on Hamas leaders and activists in the OPTs, including the IOF’s arrest of tens of elected Hamas legislators from the West Bank.
A second, bigger criticism I have of Crooke’s analysis has to do with his judgment that,

    now that Fatah has been humiliated the grass-roots are unlikely to be in a mood to support anyone who argues for a working partnership with Hamas. It is one thing to be perceived by fellow Palestinians as a Western proxy: to be regarded as a failed Western proxy is far worse.

First of all, the judgment in that first sentence simply is not true. Dahlan’s threatening moves against Hamas, and Hamas’s successful counter-strike against Dahlan has not led– as it seems Crooke was supposing it would– to any “circling of the Fateh wagons” around Dahlan. Quite the opposite. As I wrote near the bottom of this recent JWN post, and as Khaled Amayreh wrote in this piece in Al-Ahram Weekly, the humiliation that Dahlan’s (US-armed) people suffered in Gaza two weeks ago quite predictably led to an intensification of the infighting within the perennially fractious Fateh movement.
And as part of that infighting, very weighty voices inside Fateh like those of Hani al-Hassan, Farouk Al-Qaddoumi, Jebril Rajoub, Marwan Al-Barghouti, and Ahmed Hellis have criticized Dahlan and started to call for an urgent rapprochement with Hamas.
Crooke’s follow-on sentence there also seems a little puzzling. Mainly, perhaps, because all the “Western proxies” that have arisen within the Palestinian movement over the past years have not only quite evidently failed in any efforts they have made to protect the lives, dignity, and property of the Palestinians, but they have also been clearly seen by the vast majority of Palestinians (including, in lucid moments, by many of these people themselves) to have thus failed. This is, after all, one of the main causes of the massive loss of morale and the ideological and organizational collapse within Fateh. Ask a Fathawi what he or she is fighting for, and how their current leadership’s actions are getting them towards that goal, and in many cases all you’ll get is wry giggle of embarrassment. (Same with many NDP officials in Egypt, by the way.)
Anyway, as I said, these are relatively small criticisms of Crooke’s review. Otherwise, it is certainly well worth reading.

Options, tables, and Iran

There she was again, yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, talking to the audience of the CNBC t.v. channel about the fact that, regarding Iran, “all US options are on the table.”
But I think she went further than she or any other administration has gone before– and, I certainly hope, further than she really intended to go– when she said,

    the President’s never going to take his options off the table

Never? Never? That is an immensely rash and foolish thing for anyone, especially the head of any country’s entire diplomatic body, to say.
Oh yes, she did go on to say that, “the President’s made clear that we believe that diplomatic solutions to the Iranian problem are very much possible.”
But what would that diplomacy be about if the President’s “options”– which in this context, as everyone fully understands, refer to the threat of a US military strike, including perhaps a nuclear military strike, on Iran– are all kept firmly welded to the top of the table?
So my question is, did Rice really mean “never”? If so, what is there to talk about? If she didn’t mean to say it, perhaps she should clarify. Loose lips on a top diplomat can sink a lot more than just a few ships.

Republican realists’ resurgence grows

Another Republican Senator, New Mexico’s Pete Domenici, has thrown his hat into the “stop the surge” ring, bringing to four the number of GOP senators who are now clearly lined up in opposition to Bush’s petulant “stay the course” course.
In a press conference yesterday, Domenici said,

    We cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress… I do not support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops. But I do support a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to coming home.

Actually, I wrote above that Domenici’s change of heart brings the number of Resurgent Republican Realists in the senate to four (him, Lugar, Voinovich, and Warner.) But we should probably add in there Sens. Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith, who made their opposition to the surge policy public some time ago– and possibly also the two women GOP senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
On Tuesday, Hagel was back home in Nebraska, where he “received a standing ovation in Lincoln Tuesday after speaking for more than two hours on Iraq and immigration.”
That news account there continues,

    About 300 people periodically applauded during Hagel’s pre-July 4th Town Hall meeting at the University of Nebraska campus.
    Hagel wants a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq. He also called for an international mediator to improve Iraq’s government and stop sectarian violence.
    There is a gradual disintegration of the Iraqi government and it has failed to meet benchmarks for progress, he said…
    “I know this issue,” he said. “I knew this (war) was wrong. I believe it’s the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of this country. I’m not afraid to say what I believe.”

The Bushites have been hoping to avoid having either house of Congress do anything definitive on Iraq until September, when Gen Petraeus and Amb. Crocker are scheduled to come back and make some kind of a progress report on the “surge”.
But it now looks as though the RRRs are gaining in strength so rapidly that the Senate will want to do something much sooner than that.
The speculation in the WaPo and elsewhere is now that the Iraq Study Group Implementation Act might provide the vehicle for this action.
Go to that last link to find out more about the ISGIA.
As I wrote about the ISG when it came out,

    The ISG report did not urge two of the key steps that I consider essential if the US is to be able to undertake a troop withdrawal from Iraq that is orderly, speedy, total, and generous. It did not urge that President Bush publicly specify a deadline or timetable for the completion of the US withdrawal. And it did not urge giving the key role in sponsoring the diplomacy required to allow this withdrawal to the U.N. However what it did recommend was a quantum-leap improvement over the policies still being pursued and advocated by the President. In particular, I think its call for US engagement with Iran and Syria as part of the strategy of managing and deconflicting the imbroglio in Iraq is both necessary and long overdue.

(I note that Hagel shares my view that an international mediating framework is required for this diplomacy to work. That’s good.)
It is evident from what Sen. Domenici and Sen Smith have said that contact from their constituents in their home-states has been very important in helping them shift into the RRR camp. I therefore urge all US readers of JWN to join the campaign that the Friends Committee on National Legislation is running to persuade people to contact contact their senators– regardless of party affiliation– and urge support for the ISGIA.
Do it today! We the people can start to regain control over our government’s policy in Iraq.

CSM, Charles Taylor, LRA, etc

And so, under the new order at the Christian Science Monitor, I do have a new column “occasional contribution” in today’s paper. (It is also here.) It’s on the Charles Taylor case– the trial of the former president of Liberia that is being conducted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. This trial is being conducted not in the SCSL’s own seat in Freetown, but in one of the ICC’s unused courtrooms in The Hague, instead.
In the piece I write the following text… Be aware, though, that the mark-ups, formating, and hyperlinks in what follows are ** Exclusive to JWN!

    In 2002, when the UN was figuring out how to deal with the aftermath of the many atrocities committed during Sierra Leone’s civil war, they tried to correct flaws that had become evident during the work of Africa’s oldest war-crimes court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Serious criticisms of the ICTR have been expressed – by myself and others – on five main grounds. Despite the excellent motives of ICTR’s founders and officials, it has been:

      1. selective in its choice of cases…
      2. disconnected, both geographically and conceptually, from the primary stakeholders whom it seeks to serve, inside Rwanda…
      3. very expensive, gobbling up international aid dollars…
      4. largely unaccountable, either to the survivors of the Rwandan genocide or to anyone else,
      5. [a]nd it has strongly polarized Rwandan politics.

    So in Sierra Leone, the UN located its new war-crimes court inside the country, and, by making it a “joint” court with the national justice system, they tried to maximize the good effects it would have on that system. Also, alongside the court, the UN established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that could – like its earlier model in South Africa – help build national reconciliation while getting the truth out about earlier atrocities. (The Sierra Leonean TRC finished its work in 2004, leaving a mixed record of achievement.)

Regarding the “selectivity of indictments” at the SCSL, I’ll note that it has indicted Charles Taylor and ten other individuals, with all the others apparently being Sierra Leonians. It has not, however, indicted any representatives of the numerous international shady businesses– arms dealers, etc– whose decisions and support kept the SL civil war going for so many long years. Indeed, in the article I note that one of Charles Taylor’s closest business partners was the US televangelist Pat Robertson. Maybe, to make a truly effective point that these modern-era war-crimes courts will make sure no-one, however well connected, is above the law, the SCSL could have indicted Robertson on a charge of “aiding and abetting”, at the very least?
As it is, though, don’t all these courts– and especially the ICC– look worryingly like European-dominated institutions that seek to haul over the coals some naughty Africans while completely ignoring the role that people of European heritage have played for centuries, and all too often continue to play, in fomenting, enabling, and conniving in the commission of atrocious violence in Africa?
Then, regarding the expense of the SCSL, I did try to do find out the size of its global budget. The best estimate I could come up with, from combining the figures in various annual reports and doing one needed act of interpolation (for FY2003-04), was that for its whole duration, 2002-2009, SCSL will have budgets totaling about $200 million… and that, to try a total of 11 indictees. Which would be a per-case processing cost of around $18 million. This would be a considerable improvement over the ICTR, whose per-case costs were at one point running at about $43 million… But the figure still looks outrageous and excessive.
(Per-case processing costs for the many, often very complex amnesty applications processed by South Africa’s TRC came to just under $4,300– see my Amnesty After Atrocity book, p.193.)
You might also want to take into consideration that in 2004 the GDP per capita in PPP$ for Sierra Leone’s 5.3 million war-battered people was $561, while for Liberians it was literally unmeasurable because of the lengthy perpetuation of post-civil war impoverishment and social breakdown in the country. (In the Netherlands, meanwhile, it was a very comfortable $31,789.) In 2004, Sierra Leone received a total of $359.7 million of overseas aid.
… And now, more news just in from IRIN in Kampala, where Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda told reporters on 4 July that the Ugandan penal code would have to be changed to include in it a provision to use Mato Oput, which is a system of “traditional” justice practised by the Acholi community of northern Uganda.
Big hat-tip to Jonathan for passing on the link to this story, btw!
The Acholi have been the community worst affected by the 11-year war between Lord’s Resistance Army insurgents and the government forces. Both sides in that war have used brutal, extremely inhumane tactics against noncombatants– mainly, but by no means exclusively Acholi– who have been caught in the middle. The Acholi are also the community from which LRA leader Joseph Kony and his main sidekicks all emerged.
Meanwhile, Kony and three of his sidekicks are the subjects of a full 50% of the indictments that ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has issued so far in his four years on the job, and for perhaps understandable institution-building reasons Ocampo has so far remained quite unwilling to withdraw or even suspend those indictments… a fact that has considerably complicated the ability of Uganda’s peace negotiators to complete the task that most Acholis and perhaps most other Ugandans as well want them to achieve, which is to get Kony and his sidekicks out of the bush— a place from where they are able to pose a continuing threat to all the peoples of Northern Uganda.
(Last July I spent a bit of time in Uganda researching this whole situation. You can read a lot of my writings on that if you go to this post on Transitional Justice Forum and follow the links from there.)
The fate of Charles Taylor– offered a safe haven and then later handed over from it to the Americans and the UN for trial in the US-backed SCSL– has been mentioned as an additional complicating factor by people involved in the Northern Uganda peace negotiations.
Here’s a bit more from that IRIN report of the statements from Rugunda– who is also the Kampala government’s main negotiator in the peace talks with the LRA:

    Government and LRA delegations to the peace talks in the Southern Sudanese capital of Juba reached an agreement on 29 June on the principles for handling accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed during the conflict.
    “The parties committed themselves to ensuring accountability and reconciliation,” said Rugunda. “This will require all those who committed crimes to admit the crimes they committed. They will be taken through a transparent justice mechanism to be agreed upon.”
    Those who confess to war crimes under the Mato Oput mechanism will be required to ask for forgiveness and pay reparations.
    Government soldiers accused of human rights abuses will, however, continue to be tried under martial law, the minister said.
    Comparing the two justice systems, Ruganda said the national penal code was punitive, while Mato Oput was “restorative [and] hence promotes reconciliation”.
    “We agreed to formulate and adopt an alternative justice mechanism which will draw on the strengths of the two justice mechanisms and address the weaknesses of each system,” he said. “By so doing, the question of impunity will be addressed while at the same time reconciliation will be promoted.”

All power to the peace negotiators there, I say! I am still haunted by the round-circle discussion I had with a group of camp leaders in Unyama IDP camp last July… and how the residents in that bleak, dusty camp could only look out at the green hillsides where the ruins of their homesteads were, since the ongoing state of war and the government’s regs still kept them cooped up in the camp… and how wistfully one of them said the thing he really hoped for most was that peace could be achieved before the next planting season.
Didn’t happen. Let’s hope that now no more planting seasons will pass before peace can be achieved and these people are allowed to return to their homes and farms. I hope the very urbane Mr. Ocampo is capable of understanding the importance of that.