Author: Helena

Palestine: ‘Parallel unilateralisms’ revived?

Efraim Halevy, who was head of the Mossad 1998-2002 and Sharon’s National Security Adviser for a year thereafter, has an important article in this week’s New Republic in which he argues that– given the “dire straits” in which the Mahmoud Abbas camp finds itself, and the “dire straits” the Americans find themselves regarding Palestine– it will likely soon be necessary for a “Plan B” that involves concluding some form of “a long-term ceasefire” with Hamas (in Gaza) and Fateh and Hamas (in the West Bank.)
You can read the fulltext version of Halevy’s article here.
I find this article particularly interesting because if, as I suspect, Halevy represents a significant body of opinion in the Israeli security establishment, then we might indeed see Israel returning to some form of the intentionally “unilateralist” approach to the Palestinian question that marked its policy under, in particular, Sharon… and see this, moreover, in the context of a working agreement with the predominant trend in the Palestinian body politic– that is, Hamas– that would “allow” Hamas also to pursue its project of Palestinian rebuilding in a parallel but also unilateral fashion.
Which is where things looked as if they might be headed back in early March 2006, when I was able to spend a few days in Gaza and interview some Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahhar, and emerged with the clear sense that the project they sought there was to be able to pursue their own form of unilateralism in parallel with the Israelis. (See most that reporting pulled together in this mid-2006 Boston Review article. You can find some more detailed field-reporting of the interviews there here and here.)
In the BR piece, I wrote:

    Over the past nine months, the Israelis and the Palestinians have each witnessed far-reaching political upheavals. The specifics have been different, but both resulted from strong shifts in popular opinion against the concept of a negotiated peace. This repudiation was confirmed for Palestinians by Hamas’s surprise victory at the polls in January and for Israelis by the waning of the Labor Party and its former allies in the peace camp and the swift rise of Kadima, whose rallying cry has been the pursuit of unilateralist “solutions” in Gaza and the West Bank.
    In the best-case scenario for the next few years, we would see each side forming a stable administration (with the Palestinians able to control all the unruly factions) and in parallel deciding to focus on domestic matters while postponing the conclusion of a final peace.
    Certainly, inside both societies, many, many people are ready to simply turn their backs on the members of the other nation…

So here is Halevy, today:

    in the likely event that the joint Israeli-American plan worked out in Egypt to support Abbas and isolate Hamas fails, it will be necessary to move to Plan B. This plan is predicated first and foremost on accepting realities on the ground and turning them to the best possible advantage. Hamas has demonstrated that when in distress, it is pliable to practical arrangements on the ground. Therefore, parallel to maintaining pressure on Hamas on a daily basis, isolating it regionally and internationally, contacts should be established with Hamas to see if a long-term armistice with it can be obtained. It must be a tough eyeball-to-eyeball exercise in which Hamas is brought to a point where its self-interest dictates such an understanding. An armistice will entail provisions for maintaining security, ending arms smuggling into the Strip, et cetera. Until this is achieved, constant military pressure must be maintained. In scope, this could resemble the original armistice agreements negotiated and agreed to by Israel and the Arab states after the War of Independence in 1948-1949. At that time, too, the Arab states refused to recognize Israel–just as does Hamas today–but they nevertheless signed binding agreements with it. Armistice would not be a political determination of the conflict but a down-to-earth method of reducing tensions–a goal most essential, inter alia to American interests in the Middle East at large.
    Parallel to this, identical agreements should be negotiated with Fatah in the West Bank. Fatah cannot pretend to represent Gaza, and it would be hard put to acquiesce in accepting Hamas, again as a limited player. Yet, should it refuse to do so, Fatah might face a West Bank implosion. This it cannot afford. Inter-Arab support for this construction must be sought. Both Fatah and Hamas must commit themselves to this arrangement at the highest Arab state level. It must ultimately be consecrated at the U.N. Security Council with strong U.S. support…
    Should current policy in Washington and Jerusalem and Ramallah flounder, Plan B should be on the table for consideration six months from now.

Of course, history can never simply be respooled and replayed. If Zahhar, Haniyyeh, and Co. sounded strongly as though they might be ready for such a vision when I spoke with them in March 2006, that doesn’t mean they would be equally ready now. Between then and now, a lot of additional harm has been inflicted on the Palestinians, quite deliberately, by Israel and the US, with the express intention of trying to persuade the Palestinians to turn against the Hamas leadership that had emerged as the result of a free election campaign and fairly conducted elections… And then, there was the arming, training, and activation of the Palestinian ‘Contras’ under Dahlan’s command (and doubtless with the planning help of the Svengali of the original Contras scheme, Elliott Abrams.)
Hamas and the broad networks of Palestinians who support it showed that neither the lethal, anti-humane pressure of the economic siege nor the military pressure of the Dahlanists could force them to cry “uncle.”
Also, the US position in the whole region has deteriorated quite significantly from what it was 15 months ago.
But still, it is interesting to see Halevy coming back with that proposal there.
Interesting, too, to see the clear-eyed way in which this very well-informed Israeli securocrat challenges the Bushists’ ignorantly perky assessments of the situation in the region with his own battalions of facts:

    Hamas is indeed in dire straits. But, unfortunately, it is not the only party to be experiencing a tough predicament. Whereas Mubarak initially condemned the Hamas takeover, naming it a military coup directed against Abbas, he clearly changed his tune a day after the summit and said he would be sending back his military mission to Gaza the moment things cooled down. He even hinted that there might still be room for reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions. Similar sentiments were echoed by Qatar (the Arab states’ representative on the U.N. Security Council), Russia, and others.
    The Ramallah government of Salam Fayyad is apparently also in dire straits. In recent days one commander after another has been dismissed for incompetence in the recent Gaza debacle. There have been arrests in the West Bank of Hamas operatives by government forces, but all know that, were it not for Israel’s almost daily incursions, security cannot be maintained. Israel wishes to move “hard and fast,” as Livni said, in tandem with Abbas; but what timetable can Abbas offer for establishing complete and effective control of the West Bank? When and how can he restore authority in Gaza? Can he negotiate a political settlement with Israel ignoring Gaza? How many real divisions does he have here and now? How many will he have in six months’ time? And if, as he said this weekend, he will hold new general elections isolating and banning Hamas from participation, what credibility will the results have in the eyes of the public? Can he hold credible elections in the West Bank alone if, as is clear, he cannot restore any vestige of his authority in the Gaza Strip. His call this weekend, in Paris, for the dispatch of an international force to take over control of Gaza and to facilitate the participation of the Gazans in the planned elections is testimony to the world of fantasy in which he is now functioning. Nobody will send troops into Gaza to uproot Hamas, and Abbas must surely know this because his French hosts made this clear to him.
    Further afield, the United States is similarly in dire straits…

On a related note, in this earlier post I wrote about the shambolic state of internal disarray inside Fateh since the debacle in Gaza two weeks ago. How deep is that disarray? I would say, very deep indeed, with the main piece of evidence on that coming from the fact that Fateh co-founder and longtime leader Hani al-Hassan felt obliged to criticize those Fateh factions (read Dahlan) that had taken money and weapons from the US and Israelis in order to fight Hamas… And then, Abu Mazen felt obliged to fire Hassan from his role as “presidential advisor.”
The tireless Badger has helpfully given us more details, in English, of what Hassan said on Al-Jazeera on June 28:

    Moderator: In statements on the program “No boundaries”, Hani al-Hassan, a member of the Fatah central committee, accused a faction within the [Fatah] movement of associating itself with the plan laid down by General Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator between Israel and the Palestinians, the gist of which plan was to ignite the fires of internal fighting. But he also said Hamas went [beyond what was necessary] in its reaction to the events in Gaza.
    Tape of al-Hassan interview: “What Dayton was trying to accomplish was to find a faction that believes in internal fighting; but what was surprising to us in Fatah was that Hamas went beyond reacting to the Dayton faction, and this was a big surprise, because the actual takeover of power in Gaza did damage to the democratic idea”.
    Moderator: Hani al-Hassan also stressed that what happened in Gaza was the collapse of the plan of the American general Dayton.
    Tape of al-Hassan interview: “What really collapsed was the Dayton Plan, and what collapsed with it was the small group of his collaborators who believed in the American point of view. As for the Fatah movement, the Fatah movement did not collapse in Gaza, because 95% of it has no relationship with that Plan.”

If Abu Mazen really has broken definitively with Hani al-Hassan– or, the other way around– then that is huge. At this point, and given his very long history in the Fateh movement (which you can read about in my 1984 book on the early years of Fateh, still in print today!) Hassan probably has a lot more credibility among Palestinians both inside– and perhaps even more crucially, outside– the homeland than anything Abu Mazen can muster.
I shall watch with interest the further fallout inside Fateh… Or maybe, I’ll go back and re-read my December 2005 lament to the “current, cascading collapse of Palestinian secular nationalism.”

Mr. Blair discovers Palestine

I was reading Paul Rogers’s latest contribution to Open Demcracy, at the end of which he considers the question of whether Tony Blair will be able to have any impact at all in his new role as the envoy of the “Quartet” to Palestinian reconstruction and reform effort. In it, Paul lays out a fairly long list of things Blair ought to do if he wants to succeed, including being “prepared to engage in around five years of low-profile, media-averse effort”, etc etc… And then he concludes that “Under such circumstances, it is just conceivable that Blair might have a useful role to play.”
There are a number of structural problems in Blair’s role that Paul fails to mention, however. These include:

    1. The fact that Condi Rice and others US officials have made quite clear that Blair’s “mandate” (hah! evocative word in this context, don’t you think?) from the Quartet does not extend to Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking but only to overseeing and boosting some aspects of internal Palestinian reform.
    2. The intractability of these internal Palestinian reform efforts so long as (a) the (US-goaded) Fateh leadership continues to refuse to share power with Hamas, since Fateh itself is in a shambolic state of internal disarray and quite incapable of building any functioning national institutions on its own; and also, Hamas remains a potent force in Palestinian politics in the West Bank and the diaspora– not just in Gaza.
    3. The utter intractability of these internal Palestinian reform efforts so long as (b) the Israelis do nothing significant to dismantle the West Bank chokepoint/checkpoints that prevent the West Bank’s economy from functioning at any even minimally acceptable level.
    4. The pointlessness of these internal Palestinian reform efforts so long as (c) the Israelis make no significant engagement with serious, final-status peace diplomacy. Various ‘peace processors’ over the past 40 years have imagined you could build a tractable and functioning Palestinian leadership in a vacuum, quite insulated from the repeated smash-ups in the peace diplomacy. You can’t. If there’s no progress visible towards final-status peace you might have a functioning Palestinian leadership– but it won’t be “tractable.”
    5. This diplomacy doesn’t have five years to wait. If the overlords of the Israeli settlement project continue pouring their concrete over the West Bank for even the next 1-2 years at the same rate they’ve been going, there won’t be any viable two-state peace. Indeed, the whole region might be in an uproar.

Re the first point above, I was in a conversation with a couple of very savvy people last week in which they were speculating as to why one earth Blair would even think of taking a job with such a very, very limited “mandate.”
“Blair has to know he can go to Bush any day he wants and get his mandate changed,” one of these guys said. “It doesn’t make any sense for him otherwise? Why on earth would he take on the job if he can’t take on the crucial, Palestinian-Israeli aspect of it?”
Well, it is true that Bush owes Blair… big time!
But for Blair to elbow his way into the diplomatic portions of this job and then to hope to succeed at it– well, he has to be prepared to take on not only Condi but also Cheney and the whole ranks of maximalist pro-Israelis who are so deeply embedded within the whole US political system, not just the White House.
Does he have the guts as well as the smarts required to do this? I remain unconvinced. For all that he seems– especially by comparison with our own head of government here in the US– to be something of an intellectual “genius”, he is still someone who evidently lets his heart (or who knows what) rule his head when it comes to vital matters Middle Eastern. I mean, as I wrote a number of times in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Brits should— given their long and frequently harsh experience in Mesopotamia– have known much better than to give any support at all to Bush’s criminally ill-conceived invasion and “transformation” plan there…
So why should we think Blair could be any smarter over Palestine, today, then he was over Iraq five years ago?
Especially, given that he has done absolutely nothing to signal any second thoughts, reflectiveness, or real self-awareness about the terrible, terrible mistakes he made in 2002-03.
It would be great if he could rise to the moment and do something helpful in Palestine. But this man? Given his track record, I doubt it.

Alan Johnston– freed?

AP is reporting that BBC reporter Alan Johnston has been freed by Hamas from the clutches of the Gaza sub-clan/militia that has held him for nearly three months now, and that he is now in Hamas’s hands.
Great news, if confirmed. Even better news for him and his family once he gets home to Scotland.
I admire Johnston tremendously.
Of course, there is still the possibility of many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip… Let’s hope the Israelis don’t choose tonight to launch some big new attack on Hamas, eh?
And no word yet on whether any of the other literally thousands of people in the Middle East who have been unjustifiably deprived of their liberty will see a similar liberation any time soon.

How likely is a dramatic Bush shift on Iran?

In the post I put up here in the wee hours of this morning, I was writing about the (perhaps fairly divergent) assessments that the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, Gen.Mohsen Rezai, and the US reporter Michael Hirsh have of the likelihood that President George W. Bush might, within the 18 months remaining in his presidency, enact a “dramatic” shift towards de-escalating the US’s currently still high level of tension with Iran.
This morning, I just went back into that post to clarify the paragraph dealing with that issue a little bit.
I started to add in my own assessment of the likelihood of such a shift, but then I realized that was fairly diversionary from the main thrust of the post. Plus, it meant that my own assessment got buried ways down near the bottom of the post. Bad idea!
So here’s my assessment of the likelihood of such a shift. I would it put it at above 50%, for the following reasons:

    1. With every week that passes there is still a fairly high chance of either a fairly catastrophic event befalling some portion of the US forces distributed widely throughout Iraq, or a much broader catastrophic collapse of the entire US position in Iraq (through collapse of the supply lines, or whatever.) In the event of such a catastrophe, which could– if it occurs while the US troops are remain as widely and vulnerably distributed as they have been under the “surge”– directly threaten the lives of many hundreds of US soldiers, the US authorities will feel a strong need to do whatever it takes to stabilize the situation in Iraq and find a way to concentrate their forces back within more easily defensible perimeters prior to extracting a good portion or perhaps all of them completely.
    It is important to “realize” at this point that the US citizenry really doesn’t believe in this “mission” in Iraq any more, whatever it is. That means they (we) would be very upset– to put it mildly– by any further large-scale US losses at all. We are also now deep into the next election.
    “Whatever it takes” most certainly could (and in my view, should) include talking seriously to the Iranians about all the outstanding matters at issue between the two nations. (The agenda of the whole Grand Bargain, that is.)
    2. The faction now becoming more powerful within the Bush administration is not composed of neoconservative ideological numbskulls like those who controlled the presidency from 2001 until recently. Condi Rice might continue to reveal herself as an intellectual (and moral) lightweight. But Cheney’s influence has been waning appreciably, while Defense Secretary Gates– who is a realist in strategic affairs much more than he’s an ideologue– has quietly been increasing his degree of control over the levers of strategic decisionmaking. (He was even able to force the early exit of Joint Chiuefs Chauir Peter Pace. That was a good sign.)
    I would wager that Gates and those who are working with him are acutely aware of the risks described in #1 above. From Gates’s point of view, as someone who presumably wants to do the best possible job he can under the lousy circumstances he agreed to take on last November, avoiding those kinds of catastrophe would be far, far better than responding to them.

I should also note that there’s another aspect of this question to be addressed, linked to the dynamics of next year’s phase of the US election, when the contest may really heat up in a polarized, party-political way.
We absolutely should not assume that the Democrats would be more dove-ish, on issues relating to Iran, than the Republicans. This, because of the much stronger role that pro-Israel lobby money has within the Democratic Party than in the GOP.
That is, the Dems might be more noticeably more dove-ish than the Republicans on issues linked to Iraq alone; but put Iran’s strategic weight into the mix there as well and the matter becomes far less clear-cut.
So the pro-Grand Bargain Iranians (such as Rezai seems to be) may well prefer to at least start the talks on the GB agenda as soon as possible, so that the Bushites (Gates-ites?) don’t have as much fear that by sitting down with “the mullahs of Tehran” they might get badly mauled next year by the mutually competing Democratic candidates. By then, the Bushites might even hope to have some significant achievements they could point to, from their diplomacy with Iran.
For a US administration that has as few achievements as the Bushites currently have– especially after their immigration reform plan went down in flames last week–I am sure the attractions of pulling off some kind of a “Nixon to China” diplomatic/strategic coup with Iran must seem pretty alluring to at least some of the more intelligent and visionary people inside the administration? But I think they’d better get this underway pretty fast.
Maybe Rezai should put just a little more on the table to tempt Washington to act quickly?

A high-level Iranian overture

Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh had an important piece in today’s WaPo, reporting on the fact that Gen. Mohsen Rezai, the former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the secretary of the country’s extremely powerful Expediency Council, had called him in and given him some important messages to (as it seems) pass on the Bushites.
Rezai seemed to support the proposal made by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei that Iran might commit to a moratorium, halt, or “timeout” (in US sports parlance) of its uranium enrichment program.
Hirsh:

    “What it means is for Iran to stay at the [enrichment] level it has reached, with no further progress. By the same token, the U.N. Security Council will not issue another resolution,” said Rezai, who indicated that the idea is gaining support inside the Iranian regime. “The Iranian nuclear issue has to be resolved through a new kind of solution like this.”

And this:

    Rezai’s effort at outreach suggests that the policy of diplomatic coercion being pursued by the United States, Britain, France and Germany is working, at least to some degree. Iran has grown weary of its economic and political isolation, and senior officials in Tehran remain preoccupied with the possibility of a U.S. military strike. Now Iran is eager to satisfy ElBaradei’s demands for further clarity on the illicit history of its program — so much so that [Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Ali] Larijani met twice with him last week.
    What is not clear is whether the Bush administration will accept a “timeout,” as opposed to a full suspension of Iran’s enrichment activities. It also is not clear, despite Rezai’s hopes, that Bush has given up on regime change; hence the “presidential finding” Bush recently signed that authorizes the CIA to conduct non-lethal operations to harass the Iranian regime. Having isolated Tehran diplomatically, the Bush administration seems content to simply wait until it “caves.”
    But my 10-day visit to Iran in late June, mostly spent in Tehran, convinced me that any hopes that Iran will just give up are badly misguided…

Hirsh reviews the history of the gestures the Iranians have made to the Americans since 9/11, primarily in late 2001 and in 2003– and of their having been rudely rebuffed by the Bushites on both those earlier occasions.
He adds:

    The Bush team is in danger of letting the current opening from Iran pass it by as well. The administration doesn’t seem to recognize that diplomatic coercion by itself can’t work — not with a country that has turned its nuclear program into a national crusade. And one hears little acknowledgment from senior U.S. officials that the United States and Iran share some critical interests. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a June 8 roundtable with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, called the U.S.-Iranian relationship “overall rather zero-sum” and confessed that she couldn’t figure Iran out. “I think it’s a very opaque place, and it’s a political system I don’t understand very well,” she said.

I guess I had missed reading any reports of those remarks. Goodness, if Condi really did describe the relationship as “rather zero-sum” that really does show how very mediocre her own intellect and information base are.
Amazing and disturbing, too, that she would confess in semi-public that she didn’t much understand the political system in a country as vital to the security of that vital part of the world as Iraq!
Hirsh continues:

    It is this impression of inevitably clashing interests that Rezai was trying hard to dispel. He pointed out that his is the only country that can help Washington control Shiite militias in Iraq, slow the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan and tame Hezbollah’s still-dangerous presence in Lebanon all at once. “If America pursues a different approach than confronting Iran, our dealings will change fundamentally,” he said.
    My conversations with hard-liners and reformers inside Tehran also suggested something deeper: that under the right circumstances, Iran may still be willing to stop short of building a bomb. “Iran would like to have the technology, and that is enough for deterrence,” says S.M.H. Adeli, Iran’s moderate, urbane former ambassador to London.
    And what of other overlapping interests? Let’s start with Iraq, the one area where Washington does seem to acknowledge it needs Tehran’s help, even as the administration continues to accuse Iran of delivering sophisticated makeshift bombs to Iraqi militants. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government “is of strategic importance to us,” Rezai said. “We want this government to stay in power. Rival Sunni countries oppose Maliki. We haven’t.”
    … Of course, the elephant in the room is Iran’s toxic relationship with Israel, especially President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial that the Holocaust happened and his threats toward a U.S. ally. But several Iranian officials hinted that Ahmadinejad crossed a red line in Iranian politics when he pushed his rhetoric beyond the official hope that Israel would one day disappear to suggest that Tehran might help that process along. A new Iranian president would rebalance that position, they indicated.
    Still, the Iranians themselves recognize that a more dramatic shift in policy is unlikely to happen on Bush’s watch. “Mr. Bush’s government is stuck at a crossroads” between confrontation and engagement, “and it can’t make a decision,” Rezai said. “We have a saying in Farsi: When a child walks in darkness, he starts singing or making loud noises because he’s afraid of the dark. The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran, and that’s why they’re making a lot of loud noises.” Whether or not that’s true, new noises are clearly coming from Tehran. Washington should listen.

I am interested in that word “recognize” that Hirsh uses at the top of that last paragraph. As someone who frequently reports (as well as opines), I am acutely aware of the fact that the apparently descriptive verbs that a reporter uses in her/his writing often also convey the reporter’s own attitude to the truth-value of what is being said, or judged, or argued, or whatever. So when Hirsh writes that the Iranians “recognize” that a more dramatic shift of US policy toward their country is “unlikely to happen on Bush’s watch”, that clearly conveys Hirsh’s own very pessimistic view regarding that likelihood. (As opposed to writing, for example, that the Iranians “judge” the shift to be unlikely, or “consider” it to be so; neither of which verbs would convey Hirsh’s own view on the substance of the matter.)
And then, the Rezai quote that Hirsh plugs in, apparently to support the (value-loaded) statement he has just made there, in fact does not tell us that Rezai, being one influential Iranian, has made any such judgment about the likelihood of a dramatic shift on Bush’s watch. Instead, Rezai is quoted as saying merely that Bush is “at a crossroads”; and then we have that little Farsi saying, adduced to back up Rezai’s assertion that “The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran.”
My bottom line, therefore, is that Hirsh has not provided any evidence that sheds any light on what this influential Iranian thinks about the “likelihood” of a dramatic shift in US policy on Bush’s watch. Rezai may consider it likely, or unlikely. We do not know. But even if he considers it “unlikely” (i.e. a probability of < 50%; but maybe only, say, 45%), that has apparently still not stopped him from making his overture through Hirsh at this time, i.e., with 18 months more of the Bush presidency to run.
… Rezai also said something there about Iran’s support for the Iraqi government headed by Nouri al-Maliki. Regarding Iran’s close relations with another key political figure the US relies on inside Iraq, Juan Cole today had a little post on his blog with a video clip of a very jovial Iraqi President Talabani visiting his Iranian counterpart, Pres. Ahmadinejad, recently.
No surprise there for me. (But maybe for Condi?) We should all, surely, remember that Talabani, Abdel-Aziz Hakim, Ahmad Chalabi, and other stalwarts of the neocons’ plans to invade Iraq in 2003 have been close allies of the mullahs’ regime in Iran — and also of Baathist Syria– for far, far longer than they have ever been “friends” of the US, in any way, shape, or form. (Hakim– who has been relentlessly pumped up by US military spinmeisters as “the most powerful member of the Shiite alliance for the past four years, notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary, now seems to be dying of cancer in a clinic in– you guessed!– Iran… And his son Ammar, who now seems to be in line to replace him, will most likely continue in his father’s footsteps.)
But back to the main topic here: the overture from Rezai. What he was spelling out quite clearly to Hirsh were the main dimensions of what some people call the possible “Grand Bargain” between Washington and Tehran, in which Iran’s nuclear program, stability in Iraq, and other regional-stability issues would all be put on the table and resolved together.
Would such a “Grand Bargain” be a good idea? You bet it would! Certainly, it would be far, far better for everyone concerned– Iraqis, Americans, Iranians, and many others in and beyond the Middle East– than any escalation of tensions, or even (heaven forbid!) war, between these two countries.
Of course, any Grand Bargain that involved only these two governments would most likely arouse the suspicions and defensiveness, and outright opposition, of many others in the region, especially predominantly Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan that have been Washington’s “traditional” allies in the region for many decades. (And also of Israel, though I tend to think that Israel can look after itself.)
That’s why embedding a US-Iranian Grand Bargain within a broader process of regional peacemaking that also involves the Iraqi government, all of Iraq’s other neighbors, and other important regional and world powers– and to have a newly empowered UN convene this process– makes the most sense… As I have long argued, here and elsewhere.
But none of this can work without a serious rapprochement taking place between Washington and Tehran. Twenty-six years after the end of the large-scale hostage crisis between the two powers it surely is time they both started acting like responsible adults?
Rezai is strongly indicating that Iran is prepared to do so. But are the Bushites? That is still the question. It is one for which, day after day after day, Iraqis and US soldiers will continue to die in Iraq.

Bush the strategist, annotated

On Thursday, President Bush gave an address at the Naval War College that was seen by some as his response to the speech in which Sen.Richard Lugar last Monday publicly broke ranks with the President over Iraq.
Bush’s NWC speech gained some notoriety– from Juan Cole and others– because in it Bush argued that Israel– which he described as “a functioning democracy that is not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities”– is “a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq”.
How not to win friends and influence people in Iraq and in the broader Arab and Muslim worlds, eh? Who on earth does the Prez have advising him on such matters??? (Oh, that old convicted felon Elliott Abrams. Enough said.)
But anyway, I read the whole speech and thought it significant enough, as a public expression of what exactly this President thinks he is doing in Iraq, and where he thinks he’s headed, that I decided to try to do one of annotations on the text. But I wanted to find a more dynamic way to do this than the simple “tables” feature I have previously used; and tried using “frames” in the HTML… After a couple of very frustrating mistakes, I found I can do this– but only in a separate web-page, not in the body of the blog posting.
Maybe this even has a slight advantage for some readers, since if you open it in a separate browser window you can then comment on it in this window?
Well, anyway, here at last it is.

Republicans mutinying over Iraq

I have always argued that– regardless of one’s own party-political proclivities– the movement to end the United States’ disastrous occupation of Iraq and restore reason and sustainability to a national security stance that since 9/11 has been hijacked by the militaristic unilateralists known as neocons must be, and rightfully is, a broadly non-partisan effort; and also, indeed, that there are many (paleo-con?) Republicans who have all along been making a good contribution to this movement.
I have also noted here previously that the grassroots pressure will be or become particularly strong on Republican candidates for elective office to distance themselves from the neocon cabal that has been surrounding President Bush.
So it was really excellent, Tuesday morning, to hear news of the important speech that Sen. Richard Lugar made in the Senate Monday evening. In it, he noted the unreality of much of the discussion ongoing in Washington about whether the “Iraqi” government and armed forces are capable of reaching made-in-Washington “benchmarks”. He also, even more significantly, called on the President to change course from the current adherence to a “surge” strategy that Lugar said had little chance of success, and to start planning now to

    downsize the U.S. military’s role in Iraq and place much more emphasis on diplomatic and economic options.

For those unfamiliar with his record, I should note that Lugar is an extremely well-respected voice on foreign affairs. He was the co-author in 1991 of the “Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program”, a program to work with the authorities, managers, and scientists in Russia and other former-Soviet countries to find ways to safely dismantle nuclear weapons as called for in previous disarmament agreements, and to convert the institutions once devoted to development and production of WMDs into institutions with other more useful missions in the post-Cold War era.
(That expertise should come in handy once we all start planning how to convert the US’s current huge military industries into something more useful for humanity.)
Anyway, Lugar is also the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, having previously been the Chair of the Committee when the Republicans controlled Congress.
On Tuesday, he followed up his Monday speech by sending a shortened version of it to be published in the WaPo. In addition, his Monday speech prompted the writing of this important news report in Wednesday’s WaPo, which noted the following:

    Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Bush yesterday urging the president to develop “a comprehensive plan for our country’s gradual military disengagement” from Iraq. “I am also concerned that we are running out of time,” he wrote.
    Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, praised Lugar’s statement as “an important and sincere contribution” to the Iraq debate.
    Republican skepticism has grown steadily, if subtly, since the Senate began debating the war in February. One lawmaker who has changed his tone is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Earlier this year, McConnell helped block from a vote even a nonbinding resolution opposing the troop increase. Now, he views a change in course as a given. “I anticipate that we’ll probably be going in a different direction in some way in Iraq” in September, McConnell told reporters earlier this month. “And it’ll be interesting to see what the administration chooses to do.”
    Indeed, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill had been hoping to stave off further defections until after a report on military and political conditions in Iraq is delivered by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker in September. However, some in the GOP fear that the White House is stalling, hoping to delay any shift in U.S. strategy until the fall. A major test will come next month, when the Senate considers a series of withdrawal-related amendments to the defense authorization bill — and Republicans such as Lugar and Voinovich will have to officially break ranks or not.
    White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Bush hopes “members of the House and Senate will give the Baghdad security plan a chance to unfold.”
    Lugar consulted with McConnell before delivering his speech, but not with the White House, according to Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher.

And yesterday, AP’s Anne Flaherty wrote the following:

    A majority of senators believe troops should start coming home within the next few months. A new House investigation concluded this week that the Iraqis have little control over an ailing security force. And House Republicans are calling to revive the independent Iraq Study Group to give the nation options.
    While the White House thought they had until September to deal with political fallout on the unpopular war, officials may have forgotten another critical date: the upcoming 2008 elections.
    “This is an important moment if we are still to have a bipartisan policy to deal with Iraq,” Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said in an interview Wednesday.
    If Congress and the White House wait until September to change course in Iraq, Lugar said “It’ll be further advanced in the election cycle. It makes it more difficult for people to cooperate. … If you ask if I have some anxiety about 2008, I do.”

In his Monday speech, Lugar was quite explicit about the link between decisionmaking on the failed policy in Iraq and the demands of the US’s already-heating-up campaign for the 2008 elections.
For now, the Bushites are just urging everyone to give the surge more of a chance to succeed, and to wait at least until the point in September when the military chief in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, and the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, come back in person to report to the two houses of Congress on how it has gone as of then.
Petraeus, of course, is well known as a lead author of the Army and Marines’ recently updated counter-insurgency (COIN) manual. In there, one of the things he warns about is the erosion of political support for (foreign) COIN operations, from the public back at home. Dan Froomkin noted on Tuesday that Petraeus already, in the lead-up to an earlier election (Fall 2004) played an important role trying to paint the rosy kind of picture of the situation in Iraq that could help Bush’s re-election chances in that election.
Petraeus wrote then:

    I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously. . . . There are reasons for optimism.

If he comes to Congress this September– three years and around 2,500 dead US soldiers later– and says something very similar, we should all certainly hope that the Senators and Representatives would call him on the inaccuracy of that earlier evaluation, and ask him why we should be expected to believe a “rosy” scenario from him this time round!
I have a lot more I’d like to say about the Lugar speech. I really do welcome this sign that a solid realist wing is starting to re-emerge within the Republican party. There is actually very little difference between the general position that Lugar adopts and that adopted by the leading Democratic candidates for president. Crucially, all these people talk about things like “the need to re-establish effective US leadership in the Middle East and the world” and “the need to ‘re-set’ [i.e. increase the size of] the US military.”
My own evaluation is that the diminution in US power brought about by Bush’s reckless and quite evidently failed attempt at imperial-style power projection in Iraq means it is too late (and fairly unhelpful) to think that US policy can be successfully reconstructed in these still quasi-hegemonic terms. I wish Lugar, Clinton, Obama, and all the rest of them would speak more forthrightly about the need for the US to build a new, more solid relationship with the rest of the world that is not based on questionable assumptions about US “leadership”, but rather, on commitment to human equality and human values…
But the position that Lugar has expressed so far is already a good start. And it portends some interesting times in the Republican Party over the weeks and months ahead.

Ten reasons to talk to Hamas

1. Diplomacy is not mainly about talking to people you agree with, but to people you disagree with.
2. They won a free and fair parliamentary election in 2006. Fateh’s Mahmoud Abbas won a free and fair presidential election in 2005. Outsiders have no credibility when they seek to include one of these parties while excluding and indeed also attacking the other.
3. For 18 months or more in 2005-6 Hamas participated in good faith in a ceasefire against Israel even though the ceasefire was not reciprocated by Israel either formally or informally.
4. When the British government finally realized it could not “defeat” the IRA by force but needed to explore reaching a political agreement with the IRA / Sinn Fein, they set as the only two preconditions for any party entering peace talks that it should (a) engage in good faith in a ceasefire and (b) demonstrate that it had at least some significant mandate from the electorate. The peace negotiations thereby started met with eventual success.
5. When the (White) South African government finally realized it could not “defeat” the ANC by force but needed to explore reaching a political agreement with the ANC and other anti-apartheid parties, they set as the only two preconditions for any party entering peace talks that it should (a) engage in good faith in a ceasefire and (b) be prepared to participate in good faith in an election. The peace process thereby started met with fairly rapid and amazingly far-reaching success.
6. In both those peace processes, and countless other successful peacemaking ventures around the world, the idea that one party– and one party only– should have to completely demobilize and disarm, and make significant concessions on its core political doctrine, before it could be admitted to any peace talks had already been proven to be a non-starter for many years before the more flexible, limited– and successful– view of the pre-requisites of peacemaking was adopted.
7. Everyone around the world should be opposed to acts that constitute terrorism, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other serious laws-of-war violations. As part of a reasonable ceasefire process, all parties should indeed be asked to foreswear the use of such vile, anti-humane tactics. (Though this would be strictly entailed in any meaningful ceasefire commitment, anyway.) However, the tactic of labeling one party to a contest as “terrorist” and arguing that that disqualifies it from inclusion in any peace diplomacy, while completely ignoring the very serious laws-of-war violations committed by other parties (a) is intrinsically inequitable and erodes respect for the integrity of the principles underlying the whole process, and (b) was shown to be completely unsuccessful in South Africa, Mozambique, and elsewhere. Getting stuck in the discourse of counter-“terrorism” blinded Maggie Thatcher and others to the reality of the situation in South Africa. In the Arab-Israeli arena, recourse to this same tactic has paralyzed the ability of the main western powers to play any constructive role in the diplomacy.
8. Hamas is very different from Al-Qaeda. Westerners need to to pursue intelligent policies that differentiate between, on the one hand, Islamist political movements that are rooted within and answerable to an identifiable national or sub-national community, and are willing to prove their links to this community by participating in good faith in free and fair elections (see #2 above), and on the other, Islamist movements that have no such community anchor or answerability but instead roam nihilistically across the world stage sowing destruction and tension wherever they go. If we and our leaders can’t engage in this kind of intelligent differentiation, then we’ll end up merely pushing additional tens or hundreds of millions of Muslim men and women into the ideological embrace of the nihilists.
9. Western governments already engage in intention-probing diplomacy with many international actors whose actions are far more damaging than those of Hamas. (Such as North Korea.) I understand the concern many people have with those parts of Hamas’s core ideology that threaten Israel’s existence; and indeed I share a good part of that concern. But Hamas leaders have talked about their readiness to enter into even a very lengthy, politically endorsed ceasefire with Israel (the tahdi’eh, which is a more serious undertaking than the merely operational hudna that they already engaged in for a long time, though it did not bring them any reciprocation.) Why should that Hamas proposal not be diplomatically probed?
10. The Palestinian issue cannot be resolved if the policy of excluding and attacking this significant component of the Palestinian body politic is maintained. Hundreds of millions of people around the world (Arabs, Muslims, and others) continue to consider this issue one of major significance in the encounter between the Western countries and the rest of the world. Realism, including the realism of compassionate and principles-based conflict termination, dictates that Hamas should be urgently included in the peace-seeking diplomacy.
(JWN readers who haven’t yet read the article I published about Hamas in Boston Review last summer might want to do so. It used much material from the reporting trip I had made to Gaza and Israel in February/March 2006. Several aspects of the situation have changed since then, of course. Principally, Hamas showed itself able to withstand the tight siege imposed around its strongholds in Gaza, and Fateh’s main leadership showed itself more willing than I had judged possible to accept the role of Inkatha/Contras that was being offered to it. Still, the broad political facts of the unconquerability of Hamas and the need to include it in any peacemaking effort that is serious both still remain. This, notwithstanding the hoopla in some of the western media over the current diplomacy, that involves a very small number of not terrifically representative Middle Eastern leaders.)

Reconciliation, from Africa to the Middle East

Actually, the reason that I received a paper copy of the latest issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal, which I
have just written about on JWN here, is that
it has a review of my latest book, Amnesty
after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes. 
Since the book hasn’t actually received many reviews yet– though it
got some great pre-publication blurbs, that are printed on the back
cover– I wanted to write something here on JWN about this one… Okay,
I’ll admit: Especially, because this is a very favorable review! 
The reviewer, Sol Gittleman, seemed to really “get” what I was trying
to do with the book, which is always a good experience for any author
to have.

Gittleman is a former provost of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.,
and currently holds a University Chair there.  He twinned his
review of my book with another, of a book called Bridging the Divide: Peacebuilding in the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which is co-authored by my old
friend Edy Kaufman along with Walid Salem and Juliette Verhoeven..

Gittleman starts his review by writing: “It takes a very special kind
of courage to continue pressing toward reconciliation in the face of
overwhelming odds… ”  Then he writes appreciatively about
Kaufman et al’s book before he comes to my book.  Which is where he says
(okay, here is where I blush):

Helena Cobban is a first-rate
journalist who has observed the transition from anarchy to justice and
reconciliation all over the world. [Actually
a bit of an exaggeration there; but in many places, yes.
~HC]  She has no axes to grind. Her analysis of the post-war
responses to the horrors of South African apartheid, genocide in Rwanda
and the brutal armed insurgency in Mozambique are moving, but marked
completely by a reality developed over years in reporting on humanity’s
capacity for brutality…

In each of the three case studies, Cobban asks the difficult
questions…

He gives more details about the topics  the book covers, and my
reflections on them there.  Then he concludes the review by
writing

Here we have two serious studies that
hold up at least the possibility of peace on Earth, good will toward
humanity.  If their goals and aspirations were fulfilled, it would
mean, paradoxically, the end of civilization as we have known it. [I take it that is written with some irony??] 
Good luck to all of us in these perilous times.

So, a big thanks to you for that, Sol Gittleman… And here, by the way, is a nice, easy-to-download JPEG version of the
book’s cover:

AAA-cover-smaller.JPGAnyway, I’m really happy this review appeared where it did– that
is, in a journal that is seriously read and referred to by many people
in the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking community– and in the way it
did: Namely, alongside consideration of a book on the challenges of
peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian context.  When I launched
into the research that became this book, I knew I was venturing out
into some geographical terrain in sub-Saharan Africa that was almost
completely new to me.  But I found the topic of how people emerging from
very hard- (and roughly) fought conflict could ever possibly overcome
the many wounds from the past to be a riveting one, and it was one that I
had often wrestled with during my earlier engagement with various
citizen-diplomacy peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.

When the “flavor of the month” (okay, decade) in the international
human-rights movement increasingly, throughout the 1990s, became to
consider that every conflict that came to an end should be accompanied
by– or even, God help us, preceded by– some form of war-crimes
trials, I was already very skeptical.  How could that ever happen
in the context that I knew best, that of the Palestinian-Israeli context?  Goodness, when the
Palestinian and Israeli leadership do finally manage to get together
and conclude a final peace
agreement, as I sincerely hope they do before too many more years have passed, how would one ever start in the context of that, to unravel
the many long chains of responsibility for the very many
thousands of dead and harmed on either side of the national
divide?  And if one ever attempted to launch such a process– in
the accusatory way that criminal prosecutions always, of necessity,
assume– what effects would that have on the prospects of maintaining
and building the peace thus with such difficulty won?

I honestly couldn’t see it as being helpful.

In 2001, when my friend the Lebanese lawyer Chibli Mallat worked with
some survivors of the 1982 massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps to bring a prosecution against Israeli PM Ariel Sharon–
and under Belgium’s extremely bizarre law allowing for “universal”
(i.e. completely extra-territorial) jurisdiction– a part of me
applauded the effort from the sidelines.  But an even larger part
of me asked, “How on earth is this
going to help bring Sharon to where he needs to be: Namely, sitting
down in an authoritative, final-peace negotiation with the Palestinian
leaders?”  I mean, really: How will it help the Palestinian and
Israeli people to escape from the yoke of war, occupation, pervasive
insecurity, death, and destruction if this one man, Ariel Sharon, ends
up in the dock as a defendant?

Later, as my research on the Africa book continued, I met and interviewed some people
in Mozambique who had committed and organized acts of anti-humane
terror that dwarfed many times over any of the bad actions that
Israelis have ever committed against Palestinians, or Palestinians
against Israelis.  (If you don’t believe me, go back and read some
of the reports on the kinds of tortures, mutilations, and other
terrioble abuses that the fighters from Renamo, in particular,
committed during the 15-year civil war there.)  But here’s the
thing: By the time I met these men, who had been the highest military leaders of Renamo, in Maputo in 2003, they had been
completely reintegrated into national society.  Very nearly all
Mozambicans had judged at the end of that terrible war that the only
way they could move forward
as a country was to put all the pain, ugliness, loss, grief, and
blame from the war era very firmly behind them…

So yes, I do still think that the big lessons that I learned from my
work on the book have huge relevance in the Middle East. 
Including, of course, in Iraq, where surely we have all now seen the
debacle and the horrendously peace-threatening tensions that resulted
from the knee-jerk application of the prosecutorial strategy in the
case of the Saddam trial.

Anyway, if you JWN readers have not yet read (and preferably also
bought!) my book, I hope you do so… I hope, too, that wherever you live
in the world and whatever parts of the world you are concerned about,
reading the book might help you to think more deeply about what it
really takes to make and build sustainable peace processes in
conflict-wracked parts of the world.  (My hint in this regard:
Western-based rights activists have not yet found all the answers…)

Discussing Jerusalem (reasonably)

I got a wonderful item in the mail this week: the latest issue of 
the Palestine-Israel Journal, a
quarterly, now co-edited by (Palestinian) Ziad AbuZayyad and (Israeli)
Hillel Schenker, that’s been coming out since 1994.

This issue is focused on the situation in and prospects for Jerusalem,
40 years after the Eastern half of the city, including its historic,
walled “Old City” area, came under Israeli occupation in 1967. 
You can read some of these articles online (the portal is here.)  I
think it’s a pity they didn’t also make freely available there the
article in which former City Council member Meir Margalit writes quite
explicitly, and with apparent personal contrition, about the ways in
which the  Israeli-dominated City Council has practiced, and
continues to practice, systematic discrimination against the 35% or so
of Jerusalem’s current residents who are Palestinian Arabs.

For example, Margalit writes (pp.24-25),

East Jerusalem [i.e. Palestinian]
residents, who make up 35% of the population, receive 9-12% of the
municipal budget– well below their urgent and legitimate needs–
suffer from deprivation and a chronic lack of infrastructure… 
Regarding demography, the State determined, in one of its most shameful
decisions, that the Arab sector should not exceed 30% of the population
of the city in order to maintain an absolute majority of Jews. 
The latest master plan … sets a new limit– 40% Arab. The
decisionmakers are apparently incapable of understanding the moral
implications of their untenable policy.  It is not difficult to
imagine how the State of Israel would react if a European country
intended limiting the number of its Jewish residents. (pp.24-25)

His exploration of the mindset of the Israeli officials who administer
what is, in intent as well as in effect, a very racist policy, as well
as his comparison of this with the mindset of officials implementing
European colonial policies in Asia and Africa, are very interesting and
could well have been developed even further.

Menachem Klein’s short reflection on his his own personal journey–
from having been a religious nationalism-infused teenager who in 1971
proudly took part in establishing a new Jewish settlement near
Bethlehem to being a convinced peacenik who worked with Yossi Beilin
and Yasser Abed Rabbo on drafting the “Geneva Initiative”– is also
well worth reading.

The paper edition also carries the transcript of an intriguing
round-table discussion on the Jerusalem question among eight of the
city’s sons and daughters– four of them Israelis, and four Palestinian.

I just note, yet again, the degree to which discussions that are held
on these weighty issues on the Palestinian-Israeli agenda among the
people most directly concerned can frequently be so much more calm and
realistic than the one-sidedness, ideological rigidity, and
name-calling that one so frequently encounters in discussions of these
issues in the US.

So anyway, go and get hold of the paper version of this issue of the PIJ if you possibly
can!  (Ordering instructions are there, on their website.) 
The articles on Jerusalem in this volume, in particular, will make an
excellent addition to any library in the west.