Author: Helena

‘Surge’ brings surge in combat deaths

As I and others predicted back when Bush first proposed his plan to “surge” more troops into Iraq and to do so with a plan that would distribute them more widely throughout the country, that surge is now resulting in increased combat-related deaths of US soldiers– and also, most likely, of Iraqis as well. (Though that latter aspect doesn’t get reported much in the US MSM.)
This piece of good reporting from Sudarsan Raghavan and Tom Ricks in yesterday’s WaPo perfectly illustrates what has been happening. It tells how on Monday insurgent fighters organized and implemented a well-thought-out plan to attack an “outpost” in Sadah, in Diyala province, that had been newly set up as part of the US generals’ troop-distribution plan:

    As U.S. soldiers fired a hail of bullets, the first suicide bomber sped toward their patrol base. Reaching the checkpoint, the truck exploded, blasting open a path for the second bomber to barrel through and ram his truck into the concrete barrier about 90 feet from the base. The second explosion crumbled walls and parts of a school building, killing nine American troops and injuring 20.

The reporters quoted military spokesman Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly as giving these details about the operations that a squadron from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Regiment had been undertaking in Sadah:

    Four weeks ago, U.S. soldiers battled insurgents from town to town, eventually clearing them out, Donnelly said. Then, they set up the patrol base in an old school.
    “The purpose was not to allow the enemy to come back,” Donnelly said. “Once we had this patrol base, we wanted to take the fight to the enemy, and to gain trust and confidence of the population. That’s what it takes to win this counterinsurgency fight.”
    A U.S. military official in Iraq said a “T-wall” — concrete barriers around the outposts — was built “just a couple feet away” from the Sadah school building, which the official called a “giant” mistake. “Those [barriers] are really, really heavy. They crushed the building,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. Several soldiers’ remains were found beneath the rubble, the official said, adding that the attack was “devastatingly effective” and “very well-coordinated.”

So let’s step back and understand this. The guys from the 82nd Airborne (which is wellknown as very gung-ho, aggressive outfit… not well-suited or well trained to do ‘peacekeeping’ operations at all) fought their way through a number of other towns to get to Sadah, then they set up their “forward outpost” in what was described as “an old school.”
How old of a school, anyway? Maybe it was being used as a school until just a few weeks ago. Why would the US military imagine it would not offend local Iraqis to see US troops establishing a highly fortified military base in a school building– which would just about wreck any hopes that the school could be reopened for educational purposes any time in the foreseeable future?
Whose idea was it to use a school building for this?
And then, to protect themselves, the 82nd Airborne guys put into place these huge and heavy T-walls… and the insurgent planners figured that the T-walls’ weight could itself be used as a lethal weapon against the US soldiers inside.
(Operationally somewhat similar to Al-Qaeda’s use of fuel-laden US civilian airliners, and the design/engineering characteristics of certain high concrete buildings, to inflict 2,000 casualties in New York in September 2001. In both cases, the plan also depended on having operatives of steely self-control prepared to die in the course of the operation. The big difference was in the choice of target: civilians in New York; but in Sadah, Iraq it was members of an occupying military force.)
Raghavan and Ricks write this about these combat outposts:

    Once housed in vast, highly secured bases, many [US troops in Iraq] now live in hostile neighborhoods inside isolated combat outposts, the linchpin of a counterinsurgency plan designed to wrest control of the capital and other hot spots from Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
    Military tactical experts say such combat outposts, where soldiers are expected to interact with area residents and gather intelligence about potential enemies, are the most effective way of preventing car bombings and other attacks in the long term. Paradoxically, this approach is making U.S. soldiers more vulnerable as they rely more than ever on the Iraqi police and army — and the support of the local population — for their safety.

The idea that from behind these massive blast-walls the troops in such outposts are supposed to venture out to “interact with area residents” in any constructive way at all is absolutely laughable… Or would be, if it this whole “surge” plan were not so tragic for everyone concerned.
Three key facts about the US army currently occupying Iraq absolutely prevent the current “surge” from having any helpful effect in de-escalating tensions and restoring a measure of calm to the country:

    1. The vast bulk of the US military is not trained or oriented properly for anything like peacekeepings operations. They are trained and oriented as warfighters. Three weeks of quick “cultural awareness” seminars can’t reverse that entire mindset, which is heavily backed up by operating systems, norms and equipment, systems, ROEs, etc.
    2. There are not nearly enough of them to do the job. This might sound paradoxical. But if there were more US Army troops on the ground, closely connected and able to back each other up, then they would not be strung out in isolated outposts like the one in Sadah, where the handful of troops inside are so isolated and vulnerable that they feel they need high concrete walls to protect them. Those walls have two effects: (a) they wall the outpost off fro,m any possibility of having constructive interaction with the Iraqi neighbors; and (b) as we saw in Sadah, they can themselves be used by insurgents with lethal effect.
    3. These US troops are far too casualty-averse to do the kind of risk-taking, area-control tasks required for the “surge” plan to work.

Personally, as a US citizen, I am glad our soldiers are casualty-averse; and I’m glad that there are not more of them in Iraq than at present.
But in the circumstances– which also include an extremely high level of political fogginess about what the “surge” was supposed to achieve– this surge was doomed from before the time it was launched. It was yet another arrogant, lethal, and politically motivated roll of the dice by a commander-in-chief who back in November/December seemed to choose it merely as his own ill-considered alternative to the sober and diplomacy-focused recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.
It was as if President Bush, caught in a gunfight in a Western saloon, perhaps realized at some level that the fight was not then going in his favor, but was determined that if he had to exit the saloon he would do so with all guns blazing.
Because of that decision, the rate at which US soldiers are leaving Iraq in body-bags has risen. And the casualty rate among Iraqis caught up in all these localized gunfights throughout the country has doubtless also risen.
The surge was a lethal and tragic mistake.
In addition, when– as is absolutely inevitable– the time comes when the President realizes that he needs to find a way to negotiate the exit of the US troops from Iraq, the modalities of extricating these small groups of soldiers from all these widely distributed combat outposts will be even more complex than a simple withdrawal from a few massive bases would have been.
(For another WaPo story, on a combat outpost that got blown up by insurgents before the US troops could even move in, read this.)

Iraqis opposing US army’s movement control plan

This particular technique of movement control used by occupation armies is often called “quadrillage”– from when the French used it in Vietnam or in portions of Algeria. Strategic hamlets play the same function. So, of course, does the draconian system of invasive movement controls that Israel has maintained in the occupied West Bank for many years now…
But some smart-alecky officers in the US occupation army in Baghdad decided to call it a “gated communities” plan, instead. Never mind that in the US “gated communities” are a major marker of social inequalities, as well as a way for rich people to “gate themselves off” from taking any responsibility for the quality of life in the broader communities around them… I guess the officers who chose that particular name for the phenomenon thought that it sounded like something fairly desirable– or at least, sanitized, or acceptable??
(Note to Gen. Petraeus and his political masters: the French army is no longer in either Vietnam or Algeria. It actually didn’t work for them, did it?)
In that WaPo piece linked to above, reporter Karin Brulliard reported on one of these quadrillage projects in southern Ghazaliyah, which she described in these terms:

    The square-mile neighborhood of about 15,000 people now has one entrance point for civilian vehicles and three military checkpoints that are closed to the public.
    In some sealed-off areas, troops armed with biometric scanning devices will compile a neighborhood census by recording residents’ fingerprints and eye patterns and will perhaps issue them special badges, military officials said. At least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods are slated to become or already are gated communities, said Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, the deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad.

One entrance point for 15,000 people? Why, that makes it sound just as economy-strangling as the situation in the occupied West Bank! I wonder where the US Army got their “brilliant” idea from, anyway??
Brulliard reported this bit of sophisticated (not!) “strategic thinking” from First Lt. Sean Henley, 24, there in Ghazaliyeh: “If we keep the bad guys out, then we win.”
She heard a lot more wisdom from a couple of the Iraqis whom she listened to:

    Maj. Hathem Faek Salman… fears the barriers are more likely to anger residents than shut out violence.
    “This is not a good plan,” Salman, 40, had said before the meeting. “If my region were closed by these barriers, I would hate the army, because I would feel like I was in a big jail. . . . If you want to make the area secure and safe, it is not with barriers. We have to win the trust of the people.”
    The next day, a convoy rumbled out to Bakriyah, a small village west of Ghazaliyah — just outside the walls and a little more than two miles from the civilian checkpoint. It was a peaceful mission: to track down a town leader who is on a local citizens’ council that the soldiers meet with regularly. The man, Najim Abdullah, had skipped a recent meeting, and the soldiers thought his absence might have been to protest the barriers.
    … Abdullah, cross-legged in a gray dishdasha, or traditional robe, said he had missed the meeting because of an emergency. But the gated community idea, he said, “doesn’t make any sense.” His villagers had long driven into Ghazaliyah’s west end to go to its markets or continue toward central Baghdad. Now they would have to drive around it.
    “The barriers cannot be moved until all of the Ghazaliyah barrier plan is in place,” responded Lt. Lance Rae, 25. “But we will not forget the people down here. They’ve been very faithful to us.”
    “It’s your order. I disagree with it. But I accept it,” Abdullah said. “It does not matter to me. It matters to the people.”
    Abdullah rose, turned toward the blank white wall and sketched an invisible picture of the area with his hands. He pointed left, to Bakriyah. And a few feet right, to the checkpoint.
    “It will take two hours to get from here to here!” he said.
    Rae simply nodded and said, “Security is the key.”

I do wonder, though, at the journalistic decisionmaking involved in the construction of Brulliard’s article. Why are the views of these Iraqis put in only near the end of the piece– almost as a disposable afterthought? I would have thought they should constitute the lead and main thrust of the article. And why, too, does she make no reference to that other very evident example of a “barrier” that everyone else in the Middle East has as a touch-stone?
Anyway, Iraqi “PM” Nouri al-Maliki also hurried to say he wanted the wall-building exercise to stop. But he is out of the country– currently touring some other Arab capitals. And while he’s away from home, the “Iraqi military” which is supposed to report to him, seemed to have its own idea what should happen:

    The chief Iraqi military spokesman said Monday the prime minister was responding to exaggerated reports about the barrier.
    “We will continue to construct the security barriers in the Azamiyah neighborhood. This is a technical issue,” Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said. “Setting up barriers is one thing and building barriers is another. These are moveable barriers that can be removed.”

That, though the US Ambassador in Baghdad had already said he would “respect Maliki’s wishes” on the matter.
In that story, AP’s Lauren Frayer also reported from Baghdad that,

    hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Azamiyah to oppose what they called “a big prison.”

Juan Cole noted that prominent Kurdish pol Mahmoud Osman described the quadrillage plan as “the peak of failure.”
And Reidar Visser wrote this about the scheme:

    Ordinary Iraqis – Sunnis and Shiites alike – have already reacted angrily to the idea of “gated communities”. It is now high time that the wider world understands how these reactions are linked to a more basic ideal of sectarian coexistence and that solutions devised for the Balkans will often tend to be highly irrelevant in Iraq. Iraqis of different sects may be in violent conflict with each other, but they nevertheless detest the territorial expression of sectarian identities, which they traditionally see as belonging to the private domain. Above all, the enshrinement (takris) of sectarian differences in government structures is a long-standing taboo in Iraqi political discourse. In this way, the “gated communities” idea shares a major flaw with the Gelb–Biden plan of dividing Iraq according to sectarian criteria: it is a “solution” which the Iraqis themselves are not seeking. To many Iraqis, “gated communities” will first and foremost mean ugly, permanent scars – even if the idea may well have been conceived with noble intentions of “securing Baghdad neighbourhoods”.

He also makes the quite correct point that the effect of “gated communities”– and this is the case in Florida or in Iraq– is to “tear the social fabric”.
The broad, multi-community resistance to this plan is some of the best news I’ve heard from Iraq for a long time.

France to see Sarko-Sego face-off

I’m still in northern France. Today, our neighbors here in Lille and throughout the country went to the polls in high numbers, to participate in the first round of the presidential elections. The Gaullist Party’s Nicolas Sarkozy got around 30% and the Socialists’ Segolene Royal got 25.2%. Voters delivered a sharp rebuff to the far-right, anti-immigrant candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, giving him only 11.5%.
That means that Sarko and Sego will go to the second round run-off on May 6. Five years ago, Le Pen beat the Socialist candidate (Lionel Jospin) into second place, and thus got into the run-off ballot against Chirac a couple of weeks later.
Lille is in a traditionally leftwing part of the country; and many leftists here were shocked in 2002 that even this district had put Le Pen top of the ballot. I don’t have the detailed results to show which way Lille went this time.
There were twelve candidates on today’s ballot. Apart from those three, the other “big” one was the centrist Francois Bayrou, who got 18.3%.
In the run-off, the outcome will depend to some extent which way Bayrou’s supporters will turn. The other eight candidates are nearly all from the left. On the French TF-1 television this evening, I saw a Communist Party Senator saying clearly that their party will call for its supporters to come behind Segolene; and I imagine most other leftists will do that. Many of Le Pen’s people can be expected to support Sarkozy.
Sarkozy has made quite a break with some of the stiff nationalism the Gaullists have traditionally held to; and he’s been seen as far more pro-US than most Gaullists have been in the part. To a certain extent he’s had to run away from his pro-US sentiments during the election so far. But he is definitely seen as eager to start dismantling some key aspects of the French “social contract” and shifting the country to what is described here as “the Anglo-Saxon model.”
In the last few days of the campaign, Sarko also started talking quite openly about the importance of his Christian beliefs and the fact that France should be less militantly secularist than it has been for the past 125 years.
Is this a “George Allen” dodge? Like Allen, Sarko is someone with immigrant (and Jewish) heritage who may perhaps be waving all this Christian business around in order to assuage suspicions he might be too “Jewish” for some of the Gaullist base?
If you need some pork chitlins to start handing out on campaign stops, Sarko, I’m sure George A. would be happy to send you some. Heck, the guy is even without a job. Maybe he could bring ’em over to France for you himself?
Yesterday I was riding Lille’s fabulous metro system, which extends around 20 miles or so north to some other old industrial towns with long leftwing traditions. We went to the former municipal swimming baths in Roubaix, now turned into a really beautiful art museum. (“La Piscine.”) But they’ve kept in place many of the finely wrought art deco furnishings of the public baths: a monument to the longheld ideals of the common good…
On the way there I overheard some Afro-French women seated in front of me talking about whether they would bother to go and vote. From the way they were talking, it seemed the main issue for them was whether they would go to vote against Sarko, rather than voting for Sego or anyone else. I gather that’s been quite a common phenomenon.
Anyway, the next round will be a hard fight. Sego hasn’t really projected herself yet as having distinctive ideas. But she’s run a competent campaign. And at least the outcome so far indicates that (1) the left is not dead in France, as was feared immediately after 2002, and (2) Le Pen-ism can be countered and put back in its box.

Peace, justice, and war-crimes courts: the view after Iraq

    This morning I was invigilating the exam my students were taking here in Lille, at the end of the short course I’ve been teaching here on Transitional Justice and Conflict Termination. My job was to sit there and supervise all these great young people as they wrote their hearts out. So the least I could do was sit there in front of them with my laptop and also try to do some serious writing…

    This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s sort of a response to all those eager-beaver law profs who so breathlessly proclaimed right after Saddam’s capture in December 2003 that his trial would constitute, as they said, “a ‘Grotian Moment’ — defined as a legal develop­ment that is so signi­fi­cant that it can create new customary inter­national law or radically transform the inter­preta­tion of treaty-based law.” (Note to self: dig out photo of self with Hugo Grotius’s box taken in Amsterdam last summer. Now that was truly a Grotian moment.)

    Anyway, I’m now in the throes of grading these students’ papers, and Monday I’m off on a quick jaunt to Yorkshire. So I probably won’t get this think-piece finished for quite a while yet. As a result, I’ve decided to serialize it. This has the added advantage that y’all can submit your comments and I can then ruthlessly use your wisdom–okay, with due attribution– to improve later portions of the text. So do please post some helpful comments!

    Here’s part 1.

The war-crimes courts infatuation after Saddam

Part 1.

The record so far of the special war-crimes court established in
post-invasion Iraq to try former President Saddam Hussein and his
confederates on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war
crimes has been distasteful and of great concern even to many of those
who prior to 2003 argued strongly that all these men should be
prosecuted for their crimes.  This record, the tragic
mega-violence that continues in Iraq– and also, the uneven record of
many other war-crimes courts established since 1993– between them pose new and
urgent questions to all those around the world who have argued that
criminal prosecutions are the best way to deal with individuals accused
of high-level responsibility for acts of atrocity; and indeed, that
such prosecutions are a “duty” for all members of the international
community.

The tragic course of events in Iraq has also urgently revived old
questions about the relationship between the claims of “peace” and
those of “justice”.  Indeed, it forces us to re-examine in some
depth what it is that we in the international community mean when we
talk about “justice.”  For too many people in the international
community, the term “justice” has until now been used as easy shorthand
for “the orderly operating of a war-crimes court.”  But in the
Iraq of the past three and a half years, virtually all Iraqis have been
faced with a situation in which their most basic social and economic
rights– rights to food, clean water, safe shelter, basic medical
care– have been grossly infringed; and even their fundamental right to
life and to the physical integrity of their persons has been put in
extreme jeopardy and far too often directly infringed.  Those
abuses can and should be described  in the discourse of justice,
as constituting grave injustices imposed on the Iraqi people by the
situation of civil strife and military occupation in which they live
(or don’t live.)  Those around the world concerned with questions of
justice and eager to hold accountable those with high-level
responsibility for widespread rights abuses should surely attend to
this situation, too…

Regarding the general relationship between the claims of peace and
those of justice, it has been  popular on the left in the United
States in recent years to argue that, “If you want peace, you should
work for justice.”  I would argue that if the situation in Iraq
shows us anything, it is that there is a counter-argument of equal
validity, to the effect that “If you want justice, work for
peace.”  For in Iraq we can see very clearly that every day of continuing
non-peace that comes around is a day in which injustices– too frequently
of a grossly lethal nature– continue.  The question as to how the
claims of peace and those of justice can both be pursued in a
synergistic and constructive way is a huge one, one that sages have
pondered throughout the millennia  (and one, I should note, that
nearly always has a workable answer, though it often takes considerable
diplomatic creativity, and a real commitment to the building of a
sustainable and right-respecting peace to find it.)  But simply to
privilege the claims of a– frequently only vaguely defined– “justice”
over those of peace too often ends up bringing neither peace nor justice to those
living in situations of chronic and unresolved conflict. 

(I note, too, that the discourse of  justice has another, even
more troubling relationship with questions of war and peace.  For
this discourse has a special, privileged role within the rhetoric of war-makers
everywhere– none of whom has ever gone to war in the publicly admitted
pursuit of unjust ends! And what’s more, if one war-maker deploys the
discourse of “justice” in his venture, then you can be sure that the
leaders on the opposing side are doing exactly the same.  Given
the undeniable fact that the consequences of war always include
tremendous human suffering, this role that the discourse of justice
plays in “justifying” the acts of the war-makers should itself be
sufficient to give one pause about all absolutist claims of “justice”.)

For the US decisionmakers who took the extremely weighty decision to
invade Iraq in 2003, the venture was not supposed to turn out this
way.  There has been some debate about whether  some of these
decisionmakers in fact sought a significant diminution of the power of
the Iraq state– a supposition which remains unproven until now. 
But even those who sought that surely cannot have wanted to see the
Iraqi people suffer from the collapse of state power in their country
to anything like the degree that they have.  There is some
evidence, meanwhile, that at least some of the top US decisionmakers
viewed the occupation of Iraq as providing an opportunity similar to
the the victorious Allies had in occupied Germany and occupied Japan at
the end of World War 2: an opportunity to rebuild the occupied country
as a democratic, tolerant, and pro-American polity whose
soon-to-be-evident success would strengthen the US-led order around the
world.  On the “tolerant” bit, Japan was notably less successful
than Germany; but in general terms, both those occupation-for-democratization projects of 1945-50 were remarkably
successful.

In Iraq, pursuing that “model from 1945” seemed to the country’s US
occupiers to indicate a number of urgent policy initaitives.  It
indicated rapid de-Ba’athification,  the establishment of a
high-level (and preferably international?) court to try the top leaders
of the former Ba’athist regime, and the rapid disbanding of the
national army…

Well, actually, regarding the status of the Iraqi army after the US
victory in Baghdad, this was related to one of the three key areas in
which the situation of the US-led occupation force in Iraq differed
considerably from that of its predecessors in Germany and Japan.

These three key differences were:

    1.  In 1945, in both Germany and Japan, the national society
    and the national state had alike been devasted by long years of
    devastating war (which included extremely fierce and lethal Allied
    bombardments of most major cities in both countries.)  In Japan, a
    weakened Emperor still survived and was able to submit a surrender and
    negotiate its terms, though from a very weak position.  In
    Germany, no national command authority survived to surrender; and in
    addition, nearly all the big military formations crumbled under the
    final assault.  There was little need to “disband” the German
    army, since it had effectively fallen apart; all that remained in the
    various parts of Germany to which demoralized small units had fled was
    to gather them up and put them into POW camps as the Allies swept in
    for their final advance.  In Iraq, by contrast, most of the Iraqi
    Army’s big units had done little or nothing to resist the Allies’
    advance.  They still existed– and equally importantly, most of
    their armories still remained intact.  When Bremer summarily
    ordered the disbanding of the entire Iraqi Army he overnight caused the
    disaffection of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men who had served
    in the army until then, as well as of all the family members who had
    been dependent on that man’s salary.  Moreover, these disaffected
    men had fairly good military training.  They often retained
    unbroken ties with their former comrades-in-arms.  And they had
    access to huge amounts of weapons and explosives lying in the armories
    that the occupation forces– mysteriously–did little or nothing to
    secure.  The potential in Iraq for the emergence of well-armed,
    well-trained forces that would resist the occupation regime made this
    occupation, from the beginning, very different frm that in Germany or
    Japan.

    2.  The US-led force that occupied Iraq in 2003 was extremely
    small compared with the forces that had occupied Germany and Japan 58
    years earlier. A study by the US Army’s Center for Military History
    records that,

On V-E Day, Eisenhower had sixty-one
U.S. divisions, 1,622,000 men, in Germany, and a total force in Europe
numbering 3,077,000.
When the shooting ended, the divisions in the field became the
occupation troops, charged with maintaining law and order and
establishing the Allied military presence in the defeated nation. This
was the army-type occupation. A counterpart of the military government
carpet, its object was to control the population and stifle resistance
by putting troops into every nook and cranny.
    In Iraq, by contrast, using as small a force as
    possible had been a big part of the war-plan developed by Donald
    Rumsfeld, who wanted to use the invasion of Iraq to demonstrate the
    effectiveness of the “small, highly mobile” forces that he
    favored.  Keeping the invasion force small also had political
    advantages for the administration both at home and abroad. 
    However, ending up trying to administer the occupation regime in Iraq
    with a force that was far, far too small for the task was another very
    consequential way in which this occupation differed from that of the
    occupations of 1945.

    3.  Finally, the US occupation regime in Iraq differed from those
    of 1945 in that it did not have within its cadre anything like the
    required amount of expertise on how to run the occupied country. 
    One example:  My father, a German speaker, had worked in British
    military intelligence since the early days of World War 2.  He
    worked on planning the landings in Normandy in June 1944; and
    immediately after those landings he was transferred to the unit that
    was already planning how to administer the occupation of Germany that
    now, after the success of D-Day, seemed clearly within the Allies’
    reach.  In 1945, as the British forces advanced into Germany, he
    moved forward just behind the first wave to start setting up the
    required structures of civil administration in the newly occupied
    areas.  He did so on the basis of his knowledge of Germany, its
    language and its people, and on the basis of having studied the
    specifics of running a military administration intensively, for the
    past year.  The US Army’s occupation officers with whom he worked
    seemed similarly well prepared.  In Iraq, by contrast, though the
    State Department had done quite a lot of earlier planning for running
    the occupation, those plans were all summarily jettisoned by Rumsfeld
    and his aides; and beyond that, Rumsfeld and his aides in the Pentagon
    made a point of trying to staff their entire occupation administration
    with people who were not
    Arabic speakers or experts on Iraqi affairs.  Instead, in line
    with many philosphical predilections of the Bushists, they outsourced
    most of the tasks of planning for an running the occupation– a job
    that was outsourced largely to the small coterie of  Iraqi exiles
    convened by Ahmad Chalabi…

The combination of these three factors meant that the
political/security environment in which the US government was trying to
run the occupation of Iraq after March 2003 was very different from the
political/security environment in occupied Germany and Japan after
1945.  So, too, was the potential for the eruption of very serious
organized violence, whether violence aimed at the occupation troops or
fratricidal violence among different segments of the occupied
population itself.  The threat and then the growing fact of both
these kinds of violence caused considerable further complications to
the project of  easily staging, in occupied Baghdad, a
re-enactment of the earlier trials in Nuremberg or Tokyo…

‘Great Britain’ headed for velvet divorce?

On May 3, the voters of Scotland are headed to the polls to vote for the third Scottish Parliament since that body was created in 1999. There is apparently a pretty strong chance of a Scottish Nationalist Party victory there. The SNP’s manifesto calls– in reasonably argued terms– for Scotland’s independence from the Union it has maintained with England for exactly 300 years now.
The newly emerged “Scottish question” is impacting London politics in some very significant ways. Only one of these is the newly emerging possibility that the Holyrood (Scottish) Parliament might move towards secession. Another is the fact that the Labour Party’s annointed successor to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, who has loyally stood in line for years to wait for his turn as party and national leader, is now seen by many English people as far “too Scottish”.
Until very recently being seen as Scottish would have been viewed by most English people either as a plus or as something fairly netural. But now, suddenly, a surge in anti-Scottishness among many English people suddenly has Brown’s chances of winning the intra-party succession vote thrown into a serious degree of doubt.
Plus, Scotland has always been a strong Labor stronghold. So an SNP victory would signal a broad repudiation among many traditionally pro-Labour Scots of the Labour Party as Tony Blair has (re-)fashioned it… And then, an SNP-led secession from the Union would give the Tory Party a much stronger chance to recapture Westminster at the next election. (Indeed, it might hasten that election considerably.)
So the “Scottish Question” is big. The respected Scottish commentator Iain MacWhirter has argued for some months now that it may be time for a ‘Velvet Divorce’, similar to the one that in 1993 allowed the Czech Republic and Slovakia each to go very peaceably along its respective way.
The SNP’s manifesto is worth reading in some detail. Here what it says on p.7:

    Scotland can be more successful. Looking around at home and at our near neighbours abroad, more and more Scots believe this too. Independence is the natural state for nations like our own.
    Scotland has the people, the talent and potential to become one of the big success stories of the 21st century. We can match the success of independent Norway – according to the UN the best place in the world to live. We can do as well as independent Ireland, now the fourth most prosperous nation on the planet.
    With independence Scotland will be free to flourish and grow. We can give our nation a competitive edge.
    … Together we can build a more prosperous nation, a Scotland that is a force for good, a voice for peace in our world.
    Free to bring Scottish troops home from Iraq.
    Free to remove nuclear weapons from Scotland’s shores.
    Free to invest our oil wealth in a fund for future generations…

Note that reference to “our oil wealth”… With the vast majority of the North Sea oil that is currently controlled by London lying in what– under any divorce– would be Scotland’s economic exploitation zone, that line in the manifesto is presumably sending shivers down the spine of economic planners in London. (Note, too, those to “bring[ing] Scottish troops home from Iraq” and “remov[ing] nuclear weapons from Scotland’s shores.” Those ideas also seem to be very popular in Scotland these days.)
There are other reasons for many English people to worry about Scottish secession, too. One is that, without a concept of a shared “Britishness” to rely on, the question as to what it is that actually constitutes “Englishness” seems fairly hard to fathom.
I write this as someone who grow up in southern England, with Scottish, English, and Welsh forebears all proudly acknowledged as such within the family. And a high proportion of my “English” friends have similarly mixed ancestries.
But here’s another thing on this vexed question of English identity. I also grew up Anglican– which, in terms of religious affiliation was in the England of the 1950s and 1960s a sort of an unthinking default option. Back then, if you were a Catholic, or a Jew, or a non-conformist (i.e., a member of a non-Anglican Protestant denomination), then you knew who you were and what you were supposed to believe.
If you were Anglican, you never even really questioned who you were; and you certainly were never required to believe anything in particular.
In this regard, the idea of “Englishness” feels to me like a sort of ethnic-affiliation ‘default option.’ It’s what you are if you’re British but you’re are also not Scottish or Welsh or Irish.
I note that George Orwell, back in the day, had a similar problem figuring out what it was that constituted ‘Englishness’ for him. In one of his writings, it really came down to knowing how to make a proper, English-style pot of tea. And yes, that was an important task we had to master to get our Brownie Girl Guide badges back in the England of the 1950s…
MacWhiter has done some great writing many aspects of the Scottishness question. In this recent article, he wrote, fairly mildly:

    Most Scots seem to favour, not separation, but extending the powers of the Scottish parliament. They want a parliament that looks and behaves less like a Labour local council and more like national champion.
    Inexplicably, Labour have decided to reject any significant alteration or enhancement of Holyrood’s powers…

And here, he wrote about the anti-Scottishism expressed by many English writers:

    When commentators talk of the Scottish “raj”, “whingeing Jocks”, etc, they can indulge in identity politics without fear of being accused of supporting the BNP [the fascistic British National Party]. During last summer’s footie wars, The Observer ran the front-page headline: “Brown under fresh pressure over Scottish roots”. If Brown had been black the story would never have been printed.
    This ethnic hostility is rife on the internet. It is an opportunity for English people to get it off their chests, to rant at the non-English, and to celebrate their own values. For one problem about criticising multiculturalism, and calling for a return to British values, is deciding what those values are. George Orwell’s warm beer, cricket and spinsters on bicycles usually figure on the inventory of Britishness. But these are essentially English, rather than Scottish, values. It is not easy to have a Scottish “cricket test”.
    Now, I’m not for a second denying that Scots aren’t guilty of this kind of communal hostility themselves. There is far too much anti-English feeling in Scotland which is excused as banter, but is – in its own way – racist. That’s not the point.
    This identity crisis may be one factor behind the withdrawal of English support for the union, and it is having a blow-back in Scotland. It may be that English nationalism is becoming a more important dynamic of constitutional change than Scottish nationalism. That like the Czech Republic before the velvet divorce from Slovakia, the momentum for dissolution is coming from the senior partner in the union…

So anyway, the May 3 Scottish election: Definitely one to watch.

    Update Friday morning, Lille time:

I cross-posted this over at The Nation’s blog. There, I had also inserted the following paragraph:

    How ironic would that be– if, while government ministers in Washington and London argue about what final shape Iraq’s governance structure should take, one significant fallout from Blair’s decision to join W’s war-venture in Iraq should turn out to be the dissolution of Britain’s own 300-year-old Act of Union?

CSM column on Europe’s global role

I have a column in the CSM today. (Also accessible here.) It’s titled Europe springs ahead.
It’s datelined from Lille, France, and it starts out like this:

    With the United States becoming bogged down in Iraq, how ready might the European Union (EU) be to pick up the slack in global affairs left by the diminishment of American power?
    I’ve been in Europe for nearly six weeks – in Britain, Belgium, and here in northern France. My clear impression is that the EU is too divided and too concerned with pressing internal issues to provide any real alternative to the role the US plays in world affairs. Expect China and India to fill that vacuum instead.

Then, after a quick romp through a few of the political issues now facing European countries, it concludes thus:

    Today’s Europe is an exciting, engaging place to be. Most European economies are humming. The publics here are dealing with challenging issues of governance, including how to build a multicultural community that works for all its citizens. But there isn’t much appetite or energy for running the wider world as well.
    As Washington deals with the challenges that lie ahead in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe, it won’t find a strong, unified Europe standing at its side. Perhaps the best help European countries can provide is to reassure Americans that life can still be good even after a retrenchment from global empire.

When I was first planning this column, I was thinking of looking at the potential Europe has to play a strong role– distinct from the US role– in the Middle East. But the more I thought about it the more it seemed clear that I should take the broader view to see the potential for Europe to play a strong (and independent) role in the world as a whole. What remains from my earlier conception is the framing of the question as to whether the EU could “provide any real alternative to the role the US plays”… and the conclusion that No, actually the EU countries are too divided amongst themselves, and too busy with matters of internal governance, to have much “appetite or energy for running the wider world as well.”
Anyway, I wrote the first draft of the piece on Monday. My editors at the CSM needed to cut it quite a bit and we then had a bit of friendly to and fro on how to do that.
The paragraph about the emergence of Scottish-ness and English-ness refers to something new and very interesting indeed. I think I’ll write a whole separate blog post about that.

66 percent of Americans now see the light on the Iraq war

I am so, so happy that two-thirds (66 percent) of our fellow US citizens now share the opinion that a small group of us within the country have held and expressed since before the US war on Iraq ever started: namely, that this war was not worth fighting.
That link there goes to the first report of a new ABC News/WaPo opinion poll, published on the ABC NEws website today. The poll found, in addition, that 51 percent of US citizens now think that the US will “lose” the war in Iraq. Not defined there, though, is what the respondents understand the word “lose” to mean, in practice…. a topic that is certainly worth probing more deeply…
Hat-tip to Juan Cole on signaling the existence of this polling report. I was a little dismayed, however, to see that he reported the news of the poll in these terms:

    For the first time in polling on the Iraq War, a majority of Americans (51%) say that they expect the United States to “lose” in Iraq. Worse, 66 percent say that the war was not worth it!

Did he mean “Worse from the Bush administration’s perspective“? If he’d meant that, surely he would have said it? Or did he just mean “worse”, in general?
We do, of course, need to keep in mind that back in March 2002 and for a considerable period of time after that, Juan supported the Bushites’ basic decision to launch the invasion of Iraq, though he criticized some aspects of the way it was launched. So the news that 66 percent of his compatriots now judge that the war he supported at that time “was not worth fighting” might well seem considerably “worse” to him than it does, for example, to me.
I think it is excellent news. At last the US people are starting to wake up!
Back to the ABC/WaPo poll. In addition to the above-linked short report published as a simple web-page, the ABC News site also has this PDF file with a fuller report on the poll, along with some fairly revealing time series. The following observations relate to the PDF version, with the page numbers from there.
… P.1 has an interesting little time series containing four ‘snapshots’ since December 2005 of responses to the expectations question, Will the US win or lose the war? (Note this is not an assessment of whether it currently is winning or losing it.) Basically, back in December ’06, a plurality of respondents said they thought the US would lose (46% lose and 34% win.) The figures shifted in a January ’07 poll to 40% lose and 43% win. Now, April ’07, lose has surged again– to 51%; and with win now at 35%.
Then, this:

    [A majority of respondents] now reject Bush’s argument that winning in Iraq is necessary to win the broader war against terrorism. Fifty-seven percent disagree with that contention, up from 47 percent in January. That echoes a change that appeared in January and continues today, in which most (56 percent) now favor eventual withdrawal even if civil order is not restored.
    (top of p.2) Yet, given pro and con arguments (avoiding further casualties vs. potentially encouraging Iraqi insurgents), a pullout deadline is not broadly popular. The public divides about evenly, 51-48 percent, on setting any deadline. It’s about the same specifically on the effort by congressional Democrats to force withdrawal by no later than August 2008.
    DEMOCRATS – Indeed the Democrats in Congress haven’t conclusively seized the reins on Iraq: Their approval for handling the war is low as well, 37 percent. Nonetheless, they do continue to lead Bush, now by 25 points, in trust to handle it. By a similar margin, 58 to 34 percent, most say the Democrats are taking the stronger role in Washington overall.

Again, that concept of “taking a stronger role in Washington” seems a little ambiguous, and has ambiguous political effects. If it means the Congressional Dems seen as being more effective in Washington than the Prez and the Congressional Republicans, that’s one thing. But if they’re seen as wielding more power than the Prez or the Congressional Republicans, that’s something else… Because then, it would also mean that the public holds them more responsible for governing the country well. But since they don’t have the presidency, it is quite impossible for them to deliver on such an expectation.
Then, the report has this (still p.2):

    With Bush into his third year without majority approval – a trough unseen since Harry Truman’s presidency – the Democrats are benefiting in other ways. Just over 100 days into their regime, 54 percent approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are doing their jobs; just 39 percent approve of the Republicans.

      Approval rating (Approve/Disapprove)
      Bush 35%/62%
      Republicans in Congress 39/59
      Democrats in Congress 54/44

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a 53 percent approval rating, 18 points better than Bush’s (and 12 points better than Speaker Newt Gingrich’s best after the Republicans took control in 1995). And a shift toward Democratic self-identification that began after the Iraq war has accelerated this year.

Yay, Nancy!!!
We learn later (p.4) that the poll “was conducted by telephone April 12-15, 2007, among a random national sample of 1,141 adults, including an oversample of African-Americans.” No explanation for that over-sampling… But still, very notable that the poll was conducted just a few days after all the Bushite fuming and media brouhaha about Pelosi visiting Syria.
On the Iraq war, the report says this (p.3):

    Bush’s “surge” of U.S. forces has not changed minds. The night he announced it, 61 percent opposed the idea. Today it’s 65 percent. And 53 percent say the United States “is losing” the war, as well as the 51 percent who think it “will lose.”

They then have a really stunning graph, at the end of p.3, charting responses to the question Was the war worth fighting?, as recorded fairly frequently since April 30, 2003. See that blue line for “yes” go zigzagging down across the page, and the pink line for “no” going correspondingly upward….right up to today’s 66% No, which they tell us there is indeed a record high.
On p.4, there is this:

    ABC/Post polls have asked three times if Americans were “hopeful” about the situation in Iraq. In March 2003, during the main fighting, it was 80 percent. In May 2004, 62 percent. Today hopefulness on Iraq is down to 51 percent.

This is another concept that it would be worth unpacking further. Down on p.18 I discovered that the question was asked this way:

    20. Do any of the following describe your own personal feelings about the
    situation in Iraq? The first is (READ ITEM). How about (NEXT ITEM)?
    4/15/07 – Summary Table (Yes/ No/ No opinion)
    a. Angry 54/ 45/ 1
    b. Hopeful 51/ 48/ 1
    Trend:
    a. Angry (Yes/ No/ No opinion)
    4/15/07 54/ 45/ 1
    5/23/04 57/ 43/ [Less than 1 percent]
    3/23/03* 30/ 68/ 1
    “About the war”
    b. Hopeful (Yes /No/ No opinion)
    4/15/07 51 48 1
    5/23/04 62 37 1
    3/23/03* 80 18 2
    “About the war”

Well, first of all, asking people’s feelings “About the war” is very different indeed from asking about their feelings “About the situation in Iraq”; and I think it was probably unwise for them even to attempt to aggregate the answers in the same table as they did there. I do rather like the latter question “…about the situation in Iraq” since it should, if understood holistically, refer to people’s feelings about the whole situation in Iraq– i.e., a situation that currently directly affects around 26 million Iraqis and just 150,000 or so US citizens. However, I suspect that many of the respondents may well have understood the question to refer to their feelings “about the US’s situation in Iraq”? Who knows?
But here’s what I find interesting. Just a bit earlier, respondents were asked (qun.18, p.17) about their expectations regarding whether the US would win or lose in Iraq… And, as noted previously, 51% said they thought the US would lose. But we also have 51% of respondents saying they feel “hopeful” about the situation in Iraq. That means that at least 2% of the respondents– and in reality, probably quite a lot more– must have said both that they think the US will lose the war, and that they feel hopeful about the situation there.
These actually correspond fairly roughly to my own combination of judgments and sentiments… I believe the US will “lose” in terms of being forced to leave the country on terms not of the Bushites’ own choosing (though I don’t necessarily consider that an all-round defeat for the US citizenry as a whole.) And I remain somewhat hopeful about the longterm prospects for Iraq and its people– particularly if everyone concerned can show the wisdom required to figure out a way for this US withdrawal from the country to be conducted in a way that is not chaotic for either the Americans or the Iraqis.
(Which I honestly believe still to be possible… Thoughit will require a huge amount of political vision and an equally huge commitment of political will by many different parties around the world.)
But whether those other US citizens who share my combination of expecting a US defeat and also being hopeful about the situation inside Iraq do so on exactly the same grounds as I do, or not, it is still really interesting to me that there are a noticeable number of other citizens– we don’t know how many; but they/we verifiedly do exist!– who can foresee a US “defeat” there and not be railroaded into thinking this is necessarily a disastrous outcome.
Linked to this, probably– given the widespread concern about the threat from global terrorism– is the degree of linkage Americans see between the outcome for the Bushites in Iraq and the level of the risk from global terrorism. So question 19 (p.17) is particularly interesting:

    19. Do you think (the United States must win the war in Iraq in order for the broader war on terrorism to be a success), or do you think (the war on terrorism can be a success without the United States winning the war in Iraq?)
    [The figures given are for: Agree with the first statement/ Agree with the second statement/ No opinion]
    4/15/07: 37/ 57/ 6
    1/10/07 45/ 47/ 8

This, too, is great news. It shows a noted erosion since January in support for the view that the US must win in Iraq if the “broader war on terrorism” is to succeed. The fearmongering arguments in this regard being loudly circulated by Bush, Cheney, and co seem to have done nothing to stem this erosion.
All this is great. I always had faith in the essential decency, good sense, and fairmindedness of the vast majority of my fellow-citizens there in the US. And finally that faith is being shown not to have been misplaced. We do have some national-level leaders (in both parties, but mainly at the moment in the Democratic Party) who are able to withstand the shrill fearmongering of the Bushites. And we have– as noted previously, here— at least a partial return by some organs of the big US media to the role they should be playing: that of relentless truth-seeking.
I’ll be returning to the US at the end of next week, and plan to be spending more time in Washington DC than hitherto. It strikes me it’ll be an interesting time to be there.

Kamiya on the US MSM and Iraq

Belatedly, a serious hat-tip to Salon’s Gary Kamiya for the very thoughtful analysis he wrote last week on the topic of Iraq: Why the [U.S.] media failed.
His contention– based on a well-organized survey of the ample evidence plainly available on this subject– is firstly that, “perhaps the press’s most notable failure was its inability to determine just why this disastrous war was ever launched.” In this connection, he cites Kristina Borjesson, the author of a collection of interviews with 21 journalists about why the press collapsed, recently published under the title Feet to the Fire as saying,

    The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation’s top messengers about why we went to war… [War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren’t clear about it, that means the public wasn’t necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don’t think the American people are clear about it.

(For my part, I’m not so sure that what was needed was either a consensus from the nation’s leading journalists or their own ability to reach a clear determination of what the war was about… But I think what was needed, much more, was the clear-eyed readiness of these journos to cast into question all the assertions made by all sides– but most especially, by the administration– about the reasons for going to war, and to aggressively test these assertions against the facts. It was that failure to stand aside from the Bushites’ circle and subject it to rigorous reality testing that was the MSM journos’ biggest professional failing. I also feel distinctly uncomfortable with the definition of journalists as being “this nation’s top messengers”, which sounds far too “official-sounding” for my ears. I think I would prefer a tag like “the nation’s leading (and very handsomely paid) truth-seekers”. Ah, but that’s not what most of them were, was it… “Chroniclers and amanuenses of the administration in power” might be more accurate… Anyway, I evidently need to buy Borjesson’s book when I get back to the US next week.)
But back to Kamiya. He introduces the real meat of his article within this frame:

    Why did the media fail so disastrously in its response to the biggest issue of a generation? To answer this, we need to look at three broad, interrelated areas, which I have called psychological, institutional and ideological. The media had serious preexisting weaknesses on all three fronts, and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm…

Under the “psychological” rubric, he produces a small vignette from his own experience with cautious editors:

    A personal example: In a Salon piece I wrote before the 2004 elections, when the worst of the patriotic fervor had long subsided, I wrote, “Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact — more specifically, to react foolishly — to an attack that left 3,000 dead.” The idea that we had “overreacted” to this sacred event was so explosive, even then, that my editor flagged the line and questioned me about it. In the end the line stayed, but I write for Salon — one of the few major media outlets that were consistently against the war from the beginning, one that has no corporate owner and is aggressively independent. How many such sentiments ended up on cutting-room floors across the country — or were never even typed? As Mark Hertsgaard noted in his important study of the media’s weakness during the Reagan years, “On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency,” the most effective censorship is self-censorship.

He also notes this:

    Not all was lost. Some of the best breaking commentary was on the Internet, on blogs like Juan Cole’s “Informed Comment” and Helena Cobban’s “Just World News,” but these sites had a limited readership. There were some notable exceptions on the print side, like the superb reporting of Knight Ridder’s Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who aggressively reported out the Bush administration’s bogus claims about the “threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus also questioned Bush administration claims about WMD (his big pre-war story on this subject, after almost being killed, was relegated to page A-17). And the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner, writing for the New York Review of Books, also distinguished themselves with excellent coverage of Abu Ghraib, following the thread that led directly from the blood-spattered rooms outside Baghdad to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
    But such authors and journalists were few and far between, and they were almost never seen on TV. Long into the Iraq war, much of the mainstream media continued to fixate on Saddam Hussein’s missing WMD and bloviate about the challenges of “reshaping the Middle East,” ignoring these deeper arguments. It was a stark illustration of the difference between journalism and scholarship.

I certainly second the plaudits he gives to Landay and Strobel, in particular (since I don’t think their work has received nearly enough general recognition.)
And I thank Gary for what he wrote about me there. On the last page under “ideology”– and specifically the ideology of entrenched pro-Israelism that pervades the vast majority of the US MSM– he notes this:

    the U.S. media works within a tiny ideological spectrum on the Middle East, using the same center-right and right-wing sources again and again. To take just one specific example, the New York Times, when it needs comment on Israeli affairs, often relies on experts from the Washington Institute on Near East Affairs (WINEP), a center-right, pro-Israel think tank. The Times rarely asks center-left or left-wing Middle East experts like Cobban or M.J. Rosenberg to comment on Israel. There is no evidence that the Iraq debacle, which these right-wing pundits almost universally supported, has led the media to rethink its sources or its ideological orientation.

I think he’s generally correct there. But I live in hope that further constructive change in the attitudes of the MSM-meisters is still possible!
His conclusion:

    So has the media learned its lesson? And what does the future hold? In many ways, the media has definitely improved. After the war turned south and the WMD failed to appear, most news organizations began to get much tougher on the Bush administration. The New York Times, in particular, has found its backbone, roasting the administration for its incompetence and duplicity and turning an increasingly skeptical eye on its claims of progress in Iraq. And from the beginning of the war, the media’s reporting from the field in Iraq has been far better than its analysis.
    The problem, of course, is that the press only really turned on Bush when his ratings began to fall — another indication that the Fourth Estate has become more of a weathervane than a truth teller.
    The final verdict is not yet in. The media has improved, without question, but it has a lot of making up to do. The structural problems — psychological, institutional, ideological — that played so big a role in its collapse have not gone away, and there is no reason to think they will. And then there’s war, which reduced so much of the media to flag-waving courtiers. If the media has learned that a bugle blast can be sounded by a fool, that not every war the United States launches is wise or necessary, and that self-righteousness is not an argument, maybe something can be salvaged from this sorry chapter after all.

Good piece. If JWN readers haven’t yet read it all, you should.

Visser on the recent gathering of Southern Iraqis

    A couple of days ago, Al-Hayat carried this report about a conference held by a coalition of southern Iraqi political figures called the the Federal Democratic Iraq Gathering (Southern region council). It aroused some interest in the ‘big’ blogosphere (e.g., Juan Cole.) However, Badger of Missing Links had a noticeably different translation into English of one of the key sentences there.

    Then, building on Badger’s translation, Reidar Visser sent me and his other email ‘subscribers’ the quick analysis that follows. I reproduce it here with his permission. He asks me to note that this piece of analysis had been sent as an ‘exclusive’ to subscribers rather than being posted as an online article on his website.

    His text follows.

By Reidar Visser (http://historiae.org)

15 April 2007

A conference
held in
Baghdad on 14 April by members of the Council for the Region of the
South (Majlis Iqlim al-Janub) has attracted some interest in the
pan-Arab press. The council works for the establishment of a southern
region limited to Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar that would create a wedge
internally among the Shiites by concentrating all the oil wealth in a
single region and leaving six Shiite governorates without any oil.

The pan-Arab
press
has focused on negative reactions to the project among Iraqi
parliamentarians, as could perhaps be predicted. Historically, even
Shiite politicians from Baghdad and Najaf have been uneasy about the
zest for autonomy among the population of the far south. Thus it is
unsurprising that Ali al-Adib of the Daawa party should criticise the
movement and its timing, although the manner in which he did so is
quite remarkable: he said that such conferences should not come about
without prior agreement with governmental and parliamentarian forces.
That sort of comment is of course antithetical to the “federalism from
below” spirit of the Iraqi constitution (where regions are to be
created by popular initiatives rather than by national politicians),
but is perhaps another sign that parliamentarians are ambivalent about
the powers they theoretically have ceded in this manner – the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI) has so far been
prominent in trying to impose a federal vision “from above”, namely,
that of all the nine Shiite-majority regions south of Baghdad. Negative
reactions from Sunni Islamists (who refer to the ongoing process of
revising the Iraqi constitution) and “Sadrists” (who on this occasion
continue to construe federalism as a plot to partition Iraq) are more
in line with expectations, although it is noteworthy that the “Sadrist”
press comment was delivered by a Fadila MP from Basra – which could be
indicative of the ongoing tension between centralist and regionalist
wings inside the Fadila, or a case of a defection from Fadila to the
supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. (The media tend to use the term
“Sadrists” for the latter only. Conflict between the two groups have
surged in Basra lately.)

The goals of
the
southern regionalists are well known. They have been pursued for more
than two years, primarily by the Fadila party, but also by some
secularists in Basra and by tribal leaders in Maysan and Dhi Qar (for
background, see for instance http://historiae.org/oil.asp
) The interesting aspect about this story is the identity of the
regionalists in question. No names are given in the most recent press
report, but an organisation with an identical name was founded in
Nasiriyya in May last year – so far without attracting much attention
from outsiders. Intriguingly, the leading figures behind that move were
from SCIRI, Daawa and various smaller political groups in Nasiriyya.
The Sadrists and Fadila were not represented. Of course, the central
leadership of SCIRI favours a project which competes with the Region of
the South (three governorates) – the far bigger Region of the Centre
and the South (nine governorates), and as such the SCIRI-led
organisation in favour of a small-scale south at first comes across as
an astonishing contradiction.

There are at
least
two possible explanations. Firstly, regional sentiment in the far south
of Iraq is very pronounced and often overrides the ideology of the
central leadership of the national parties. This has been seen in
Fadila (which has always been more localist in Basra), Daawa, among the
Sadrists of Maysan (who sometimes employ regionalist rhetoric in the
context of oil), and even among SCIRI members in Basra (some of whom
continued to focus on Basra and the far south even after the central
leadership had declared a single Shiite region as their goal.) The
Nasiriyya-based Council for the Region of the South could be yet
another example of regionalist sentiment cutting across ideological
affiliations. Alternatively, this may be another instance of a
phenomenon seen elsewhere in the south, where SCIRI have created
“copycat” organisations in order to gain a foothold in a region where
they traditionally have had problems. In Maysan, for instance, there
are two Hizbollahs, one tribal and quite secularist, another pro-SCIRI
and more Islamist. SCIRI are clearly trying to capitalise on the
ongoing tension in the Sadrist camp in Basra between Fadila and
followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, and theoretically this latest move by the
Council for the Region of the South could have to do with another
attempt at breaking down resistance to SCIRI in the far south, by
co-opting and diluting it. The fact that the foundation of Majlis Iqlim
al-Janub back in 2006 was widely reported in SCIRI and Badr media might
suggest that the latter interpretation is the more plausible one.

Thanks to Badger
for highlighting these interesting developments at his site http://arablinks.blogspot.com

Tragedy at Virginia Tech

Tragedy has struck the community at Virginia Tech, our state’s “other” fine flagship university, which is located around 120 miles southwest of my hometown, Charlottesville.
Apparently a single gunman went on a rampage there earlier today and killed at least 30 members of the university community– most likely, most of them students.
Obviously, this is a truly horrible blow for all members of the community there.
Equally obviously, we know that communities throughout Iraq have been suffering blows as huge as this one– or on occasions, even larger blows– on a daily or almost daily basis throughout the past 3-4 years. Many communities in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from gun violence on this scale, too. And last week, Algeria, in North Africa, was the scene of two extremely lethal suicide bombings…
Can we all unite in grief together, and in sad wonder at the senselessness of ultra-lethal weapons and the tragedy of their widespread availability and use in many different parts of the world?
Can we unite in sad wonder at the depth of alienation and hopelessness that leads some people to engage in mass killings, even sometimes to the point of throwing their own lives into the project, as well?
Can we unite with a commitment to support, help, and try to repair all those bereaved by these and other acts of violence?
Can we unite around a strengthened commitment never ourselves to resort to violence, and to redouble our search for the nonviolent ways that always do exist to resolve any differences among us as humans?
I have only been to Virginia Tech once. It was a magical half-day I spent there, in the summer of 2005. The Friends General Conference (FGC), which is the main body of ‘liberal’ north American Quakers, was holding its annual summer gathering in a small part of Tech’s beautiful campus, which is built from flinty blue-grey stone in the incredibly beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I wasn’t a participant in the gathering, but I made a special trip there one evening to spend a few hours with my dear friend Misty Gerner, who was then in a fairly advanced stage of her cancer. Misty, her husband, and I walked around the beautiful lawns a bit, and had dinner at a small nearby restaurant. Then Phil (the husband) left Misty and me alone a while. We walked and talked a whole lot more. She was wracked with bouts of pretty intense physical pain but her spirit was radiant.
I prefer to remember Tech’s campus as the place where I talked with Misty on that sunny evening about life, death, love, God, justice, peace, and the Middle East… She died last summer. Maybe a little part of her still hovers over the Tech campus. If so I hope she can help to comfort the many shocked and bereaved people there today.
God forgive us all for having let the spirit of violence permeate our communities and animate our actions to this extent.