Author: Helena

Former Rumsfeld advisor: “Army is broken”

Maj.-Gen. (Retd.) Robert H. Scales is a former commander of the US Army War College– and also, according to Col. Pat Lang, a former ‘counsellor’ to D. Rumsfeld. So we should all take it very seriously that Scales writes, as he did yesterday,

    the current political catfight over withdrawal dates is made moot by the above facts. We’re running out of soldiers faster than we’re running out of warfighting missions. The troops will be coming home soon. There simply are too few to sustain the surge for very much longer.

(Hat-tip to Pat Lang for that, anyway. Also, for the very similar message reportedly coming from Gen. Barry McCaffrey.)
Scales starts his article, which was published in the rightwing Washington Times, thus:

    If you haven’t heard the news, I’m afraid your Army is broken, a victim of too many missions for too few soldiers for too long…

He also writes,

    The Army’s collapse after Vietnam was presaged by a desertion of mid-grade officers (captains) and non-commissioned officers. Many were killed or wounded. Most left because they and their families were tired and didn’t want to serve in units unprepared for war.
    If we lose our sergeants and captains, the Army breaks again. It’s just that simple. That’s why these soldiers are still the canaries in the readiness coal-mine. And, again, if you look closely, you will see that these canaries are fleeing their cages in frightening numbers.
    The lesson from this sad story is simple: When you fight a long war with a long-service professional Army, the force you begin with will not get any larger or better over the duration of the conflict. For that reason, today’s conditions are pretty much irreversible. There’s not much that money, goodwill or professed support for the troops can do…

I could add to this, perhaps, that the Bush administration’s deliberate decision of having as much of this war as possible outsourced to private contractors has hugely accelerated the rate at which sergeants and captains have been leaving the nation’s military…
But anyway, the Scales piece is just the latest piece of evidence that– as I have been writing for a while now, including here— the main driving force pushing the US towards a fairly rapid withdrawal from Iraq currently comes from within the military establishment itself.
Scales also makes clear that however much money Bush and the Congress want to try to throw at the Iraq problem, and however much they want to try to increase the size of the military, it is now quite simply too late to “save” the situation in Iraq.
(Lang also notes this: “MG Robert Scales has been a military analyst for Fox News, and was a counselor to Rumsfeld. He helped create the situation that he complains of now. He should go and hide somewhere and not walk abroad among the living.”)
So now, I guess the US will be pulling out of Iraq with the Army it has, rather than the Army it might wish it had?
We do all still need to figure out what the politics– domestically and globally– of a ‘Tank’-led US withdrawal from Iraq will look like.
We also need– all of us in the world community, not just people who are US citizens– to work together to figure out what kind of a military establishment the US might actually need as it comes out of this terrible, terrible misadventure in Iraq.

Olmert on peace prospects, etc

Somebody seems to be spinning the line to AP’s Matti Friedman that Olmert’s response to the Arab Peace Plan is generally positive. But it is quite weird for Olmert either to hail the Arab states’ current restatement of their support for this five-year-old plan as marking a “revolutionary change”.
It is also bizarre that Olmert should try to claim that the proceedings of the Arab summit now underway in Riyadh– to which the Iranian Foreign Minister has also been invited– show that the Arab states now judge they “may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem.”
Does Olmert not have information at all about what has been going on in Riyadh? And wWhy on earth would an ASP reporter not seek to insert a little fact-based reality of his own into his reporting of the PM’s spin?
Anyway, it is interesting that Olmert, who along with the rest of the Israeli political elite damned and/or ignored as quite irrelevant the Arab Peace Plan when it was issued back in 2002, now feels obliged to try to find something faintly positive about exactly the same plan.
So I’ve been reading the English-Haaretz version of the current Olmert pressathon. Basically, he’s been giving long interviews to the major Israeli print media, “to mark the first anniversary of his tenure as PM”– but also, presumably, to try to reverse the sag in his political fortuned that has taken his ratings down to around 3 %.
Olmert expresses some basic confidence in the stability of current governing coalition. And Israeli friends whose judgment I respect generally agree with this assessment… the argument there being that most of the other, smaller parties that re in Olmert’s current coalition have so much reason to fear the outcome of any imminent holding of another election that they prefer to hang in there with Olmert.
There is this:

    Olmert opened the policy section of the interview with an optimistic declaration: “Gentlemen, I believe that in the next five years, it is possible to arrive at a comprehensive peace agreement with the Arab states and the Palestinians. That is the goal. That is the effort, the vision.”

But then, almost immediately, this:

    This week Olmert hosted the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He rejected ideas of making rapid progress in negotiations with the Palestinians, of a shortcut to the final-status settlement, and committed himself only to biweekly meetings with the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), at which confidence-building measures will be discussed. Rice had hoped to leave Jerusalem with a dramatic declaration on the revival of the peace process, but had to make do with a lukewarm statement.
    “There was no real disagreement between us and the Americans,” the prime minister explains. “There were very interesting and very productive discussions. All told, we said that there is no point in a bypass route, and that we have to confront the Palestinians and oblige them to fulfill commitments.”

“Confidence building measures”!! After 40 years of military occupation, this is all they are discussing? (While the Israeli concrete mixers and bulldozers continue their relentless work of transforming the human geography of the entire West Bank… How about the question of fulfilling past promises– or holding to the requirements of international law– as being equally applicable to both sides, Ehud??)
Then, this:

    Olmert believes that various factors in the past year – the Second Lebanon War, the growing fear of Iran, and extremism – have pushed Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, into a different perception of the regional reality. “A bloc of states is emerging that understands that they may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem, and that maybe it is worthwhile to reach an understanding that includes acceptance of Israel’s existence,” he says. “I very much hope that the conference of Arab states will contribute to this.”

Does he have any idea of history and causality? The very same Arab Peace Plan that without a doubt will be endorsed and reconfirmed by the current Riyadh summit is five years old. So how, exactly, does he conclude that the events of the past year have pushed the Arab states into any kind of a downgrading of the priority of the Palestine question??
The journalists there, Aluf Benn and Yossi Verter, press him a little on the fact that nothing his government has done militarily regarding Gaza– either taking military actions or refraining from taking them– has yet stopped the firing of Qassam rockets from northern Gaza into Israel…
Then, there is this:

    Did you miss an opportunity to renew the talks with the Syrians?
    “I want to make peace with Syria. Unequivocally. But we all know – and the Palestinian experience also shows us – that there is a disparity between declarations and a credible process, which can also bring about a correct outcome. It is not enough for someone to make a vague declaration through some court journalist. I want to arrive at the possibility of peace with the Syrians, and when I believe that the conditions are right, I will not miss the opportunity.”
    What are those conditions?
    Olmert is mysterious: “Conditions that make negotiations possible, and everyone with any experience of negotiations with the Syrians knows about them.”

“Mysterious” is one word for it. “Evasive” would be another.
More intriguingly, Olmert clearly implies that it was soon after he assumed the acting premiership, four days after Sharon had his debilitating strokein January 2006, that he started orchestrating the changing of the strategic plan for Lebanon to focus it on the “massive retaliation” approach we saw in July:

    “I have dealt with the Lebanese issue since January 8, 2006 – four days after Arik [Sharon] fell ill and I assumed office. We deployed for the possibility that what happened in the end, would happen. Throughout these discussions, there was total across-the-board agreement, by all the security elements and by the civilian echelon, that it would be impossible not to respond differently from the way we did in the past. Some said that the absence of a response would cause strategic damage to Israel.
    “All these processes led to determination of a position well before July 12. When I was asked by the army why I wanted to see the plans, and why I wanted to consolidate a clear position far in advance, my answer was very simple. I didn’t want to reach that day and then start from scratch. I wanted to know where I stood, the considerations for and against, what was on the agenda, what the damage would be in each scenario – and then to reach a conclusion.
    “All these matters were presented to the cabinet in great detail, and the entire cabinet, 24 ministers, voted unanimously in favor. It is true that I am the prime minister and I bear supreme responsibility, but still, there were 24 ministers there, and they voted unanimously in favor. What they told the Winograd Committee later, what they said or didn’t say, I don’t know.

Anyway, lots of interesting points there… But I don’t have time to comment any more.

Factors for successful peacemaking: Northern Ireland

I am so joyful that it now looks as if the people of Northern Ireland can enjoy a much better, more peaceful future, thanks to the peace agreement announced on March 26 between Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party.
(Also, look at the inspiring, very forward-looking content of the statements made March 26 by both Paisley and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.)
Last October, I was lucky enough to hear Dr. Cathy Gormley-Heenan of the University of Ulster talk about the attributes of leadership that she considered essential to success in resolving complex, very long-running conflicts like that in Northern Ireland.
Gormley-Heenan subsequently published a book on the subject, which I’m eager to see.
Her focus in her presentation last October was primarily on the leadership needed from the primary participants in the peacemaking, not the evidently fairly different qualities required of outside third parties… What stood out most for me from her presentation– and these are lessons that I think could certainly be applied in the remaining strands of the Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy– were two main points:
(1) She underlined the need to embrace political inclusiveness in the peacemaking. The sole criteria for inclusion in the process in Northern Ireland, she said, had been (a) willingness to abide by a ceasefire, and (b) the holding of a clear mandate from the electorate.
Note that by these criteria, Hamas could and should have been included in the peace diplomacy, while the government of Israel– which never abided by any ceasefire toward the Palestinians over the past year– would not. (H’mmm.) Note, too, that the criteria Gormley-Heenan listed did not include anything, at that first stage of the negotiation, about any requirement to disarm, to subscribe to any particular version of the final outcome, or to issue statements recognizing the other side’s “rights” in any regard. And neither did the diplomacy that, 15 years ago, led to the successful resolution of the longstanding inter-group conflict in South Africa require any of these steps up front.
(2) The second point that Gormley-Heenan made that stuck in my mind– and in the notebook that I have to hand here– is that the N.I. diplomacy worked when the leaders on each side took as their prime responsibility bringing their own constituency into the peace camp. She noted that on occasion, leaders of one side argued that it was the duty of the other side to take actions to “help” them bring their own supporters into the peace camp– but that these demands were nearly always resented and divisive.
In the Arab-Israeli arena, how many hundreds of times have we heard demands from Israeli leaders that the Arabs should do things to help bring Israelis into the peace camp? (And how many times, the reverse, too?) In contrast to that, I do like Gormley-Heenan’s formulation.
Anyway, I guess we should all go and buy her book to find out her other lessons.
I would add to the above that– as evidenced in the content of those two leadership statements noted above– another important attribute for any leader seeking to engage in successful peace diplomacy would be.a commitment to being forward-looking, in terms of being willing to set aside the many grievances, injustices, and hurts from the past and focus on building a better, rights-based order in the future for everyone involved, rather than continuing to harp on endlessly about those past grievances.
Certainly, that was an attribute that the friends at Sant’ Egidio stressed when they helped to midwife the 1992 peace agreement that ended 15 years of atrocity-laden civil war in Mozambique. (You can read Chapter 4 of my latest book to find out more about that.)

Riyadh: current center of Middle East diplomacy

We should note, first, who is at the current Arab summit meeting in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Not merely the heads of state of just about all the Arab countries (which is no trivial achievement), but also: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, etc.
Note that this includes authoritative representatives of two of the four members of the US-led so-called “Quartet”. (Here‘s the text of what Ban said. It’s worth reading.)
Note that no high-level representative from the US attended. (I wonder if any were invited?)
Then, note what Saudi King Abdullah said in his opening address.
The main headline-grabber there: the part where he termed the US troop presence in Iraq “an illegitimate foreign occupation.”
Here, by the way, are some key excerpts from the draft of the statement that will be discussed and then adopted by the summit. Since the minister-level sherpas already did a lot of work Tuesday refining this Saudi-provided draft, it is expected that it will get adopted substantially as it is.
My, goodness, how the world has changed!!
Used to be that Saudi diplomacy was timid, very unclear, and conducted behind the closed doors of places of influence– mainly inside the United States. Now, suddenly, it looks both clear and amazingly robust and well-conducted.
Back when King Abdullah brokered the Mecca Agreement between Fateh and Hamas in early February, I wrote that the Kingdom seemed seriously to have “gone off the [US-delimited] reservation” in terms of the content of its diplomacy. At the time, some people said that– in light of many long decades Saudi kowtowing to Washington–they could not believe Saudi Arabia would do that. They argued that maybe in their diplomacy over the Mecca Agreement the Saudis were still acting, effectively, as “agents” of a US plot that was particuarly heinous because it’s content and shape could not even fathomed. I said, “No! There is no way the Bushites would willingly be part of any diplomacy that involved the inclusion of Hamas rather than its continued exclusion.”
I surmised, then, that Saudi diplomacy was entering a completely new era of acting independently from the will of Washington; and since then, considerable additional evidence of this has come to light. That includes the exchange of high-level visits between the Kingdom and Iran (including Pres. Ahmedinejad’s recent visit to Riyadh); the fact and content of the joint Saudi-Iranian diplomatic initiative in Lebanon; many other strands of Riyadh’s diplomacy in the region (including regarding Syria); the King’s most recent snub of President Bush, when he abruptly turned down an invitation from Bush to host a state dinner in Washington in his honor… And now, this speech at the summit.
When I was in Egypt at the beginning of this month, many people there were remarking on the fact that suddenly it seems as if Saudi Arabia is playing the leading role in regional diplomacy that Egypt for a long time used to play. Actually, to me it now looks bigger than that: it looks as if the Saudis are now– partly through their own intent, born of desperation, and partly also because of the almost complete absence of US power or decisiveness in the region– poised to replace the even larger role in the region that the US played for many decades…
If I were King Abdullah, I’d be very attentive to issues of personal security. Many Saudi decisionmakers still harbor their own clear analyses and fears regarding the death in 1975 of the last of the Saudi monarchs to stand up to US power, Abdullah’s older half-brother King Faisal bin Abdel-Aziz. Faisal was shot dead at a family gathering by a reportedly deranged nephew who had just recently returned home from the United States.
But for now, we need mainly to understand that the Middle East is entering a significantly different era. Of course US power is not absent from the region. (And nor is Israeli power.) But the US is still led by a man of extremely limited vision and understanding, who presides over an administration at odds with itself and under growing attack from the new majority in Congress.
Back in 1975, the US and Saudi Arabia shared one vast overarching concern, which was to contain Soviet power and influence in the region. Now, many in Washington (and Israel) have tried to make the argument that Washington and the Arabs share a new overarching concern: the containment of Iranian power…. Well, maybe the Saudis and other Arabs do have some concern about Iran’s growing influence. But the way they are choosing to act on that concern is very, very different from what the Americans want them to do.
The Americans want the Arab regimes to agree with them (and the Israelis) that Iran is “the biggest” threat in and to the region– and also, if possible, to forget or at least downplay their concern for the Palestinian question. But the Arab regimes have a different view of the region and their interests in it. They consider that finding a way to manage the growing threat posed to all them by militant Islamists of all stripes– people from both inside and outside their own societies– is their first priority. And that’s a threat that would only increase if they lined up with the anti-Iran, forget-about-the-Palestinians agenda being offered to them by Washington.
Condi Rice, who has systematically insulated herself from being able to have any real understanding of regional dynamics or concerns by surrounding herself with high-level neocons like the two Elliotts, seems to have no clue how to respond to all this. And neither, of course, does her boss the President. To me, this makes the situation significantly more unstable and scary than it might otherwise be.
But anyway, the permafrost of diplomatic inactivity that settled over all strands of Arab-Israeli diplomacy with the advent of the Bushites to power in early 2001 now seems suddenly to be melting. Fascinating times ahead.

The Arab world and Iraq: column & discussion

Here is my latest CSM column on the views that Arab analysts have of the situation in Iraq. (Also, here.)
Sometimes, as on this occasion, I find writing in the CSM-column format hugely challenging… primarily because of the intense constraints on word-length. My experience is that it is far more intellectually challenging to write a short piece– especially when I have so very much great material to be working with– than it is to write something much longer. (Such as I frequently write here on the blog.) Or to put it another way– when I write “composed” pieces, there are always numerous intellectual, organizational, and conceptual challenges involved… and generally, these don’t seem any easier to deal with when writing a short piece than when writing a long, long piece like some of my great long things in Boston Review. But what you end up with in a CSM column is just 850 tightly-considered words. It might not seem very substantial, but I can tell you it represents a huge amount of work.
This column was written about ten days ago, and has undergone various edits since then. I’m not as happy with the shape of it as I was with the “Four trends” one that preceded it. Moreover, this one raises many more queries than it actually answers.
For example, I report there (with, as you may imagine, my own implied approval) the judgment of my Iraqi friend that there’s a possibility that a fairly speedy US withdrawal from his country “would concentrate the minds of his countrymen on the need to find a workable reconciliation”… but “if the Americans stay, we can expect the situation to remain bad.” But I also note later on– with my own explicit endorsement, the judgment of another longtime friend and colleague, Hussein Agha, that, “for now, all of Iraq’s neighbors prefer that US troops stay tied down inside Iraq, rather than withdraw.” In addition, I express my own clear judgment that, “the broad deployment of US troops in Iraq has been transformed from an American asset in the region into a liability that erodes US power and standing.”
How, therefore, can all these widely varying interests in the remaining or leaving of the US troop presence in Iraq be reconciled? This is, clearly, a tricky diplomatic/strategic conundrum. (One regarding which, imho, the UN is the only body capable of orchestrating the search for a solution. And I approach that question in the full knowledge that the UN we have is the UN we have, if you get my meaning.)
Basically, what I come out of this whole analysis with is the conclusion that,

    (a) The Arab governments are all quite serious in their argument that US needs to find a way to deal straightforwardly and in a constructive way with Iran, rather than continuing to pursue destabilizing agendas of regime change or other forms of confrontation and escalation against Iran;
    (b) They are also quite serious about the need for real progress to be made on Arab-Israeli peacemaking; and
    (c) Regarding US-Iran relations, they do have a fear that the US and Iran might conclude a ‘grand bargain’ covering Iraq and various other issues without any input from them and in a way that might infringe seriously on their own interests.

Anyway, the regional dynamics in the Middle East right now are extremely interesting. One big additional factor that I didn’t adequately reflect in the column is that the US troop ‘surge’ is being notably unsuccessful… I conclude that this means that what I have called a ‘Tank’-driven US withdrawal from Iraq– that is, one that is driven on the US side primarily by the need of the military establishment to avoid complete logistical/organizational breakdown due to the overstretch in Iraq– will become more urgent than ever within the coming weeks…

Sewage-flood tragedy in Gaza

Laila el-Haddad has a great post on her blog about the collapse of the dam holding back a sewage lagoon in northern Gaza, which sent a flood of human excrement surging into nearby communities. The flood killed two toddlers, two elderly women, and one other person.
Laila writes:

    It was bound to happen. All of the major humanitarian organizations issued endless reports and warnings about its imminent flooding. But even if the funding was available, the permission to expand and renovate the facility was not granted by the necessary “Authorities” who built it (on a major acquifer) in the first place.
    I’m referring to the collapse and flooding of Gaza’s northern sewage treatment facility, known locally as the “Death Swamps”, which you can see here on wikimapia…
    “This was not only foretold, it happened twice before, in 1988 and 1993,” tells me human rights consultant, and friend, Darryl Li, who has worked for Israeli, Palestinian, and International HR groups. Darryl’s last trip was in August, to this very facility…
    The facility stopped functioning entirely in the weeks after the power cutoff last year (when Israel bombed Gaza’s power plant), and later functioned at very low efficiency levels with generators. Water level consuquently rose dangerously high.
    The embankments of the cesspool have also been the target of frequent Israeli shelling, threatening their integrity, says Li.

She also quotes Li as saying:

    “This is life in a ‘disengaged’ Gaza: It is not enough to be locked into an open-air prison by Israel. Nor to be turned into a beggar by the international community for voting in a democratic election. Nor to be torn apart by internal feuding. Now Palestinians have to drown in their own shit? I can’t wait to hear the latest excuse about how this, too, is their own fault.”

Anyway, go read the whole thing.

More on Palestine-related diplomacy

My ‘Delicious’ tagging system is not working. I found this fascinating article today by my very well-informed old friend Jihad Khazen on the recent Arab Foreign Ministers’ gathering and Condi’s meeti8ng with the ‘Arab Four’ (I hate the word ‘Quartet’ at this point.)
He writes:

    According to my information, the Arab group’s talks with Dr. Rice were confined to the Palestinian Cause. Rice heard once again that all the region’s issues are linked to the fate of this Cause, which is the core of all issues.
    Neither did Rice ask for the amendment of the Arab Peace Initiative, especially the refugees’ right to return, nor did the Arab ministers think of it.

This latter point is in direct contradiction to some Israeli whisperings and general hasbara to the contrary.
He also writes this:

    Two days ago, the main-story headline of Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth was: ‘New Initiative to Coordinate an Overt Israeli-Saudi Summit’, with efforts exerted by EU Policy Chief Javier Solana and Rice. However, when I read the story, I found that it talked about a possible meeting between the Arab Quartet with Israeli officials. A meeting between officials is not a summit; and it certainly isn’t a Saudi-Israeli summit, if a meeting occurs in the first place. In an article a day before this, US renowned political commentator, Thomas Friedman, called on King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz to follow in the footsteps of the late president, Anwar Sadat, and visit Jerusalem.
    I can say that King Abdullah will not visit Jerusalem or deliver a speech in the Knesset, not tomorrow, or even after a thousand years. I also say the same for myself, although I always prefer to speak or write as a historian, not a fortune teller. But I’m sure of my information and my knowledge of King Abdullah and Saudi policy.

Also on the current Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, read this from IPS’s Jim Lobe.
I’ve spent most of today at a meeting on Palestinian affairs at the venerable London foreign-policy think tank, Chatham House. I did tell them this morning that I now see new possibilities for real, constructive political change within the US political firmament. Many of the others there seemed skeptical. But the point Lobe makes in his last para there– namely, that even strongly pro-Israeli American members of the ICG board like Ken Adelman and Steve Solarz have signed on to the recent ICG Board Statement calling for engagement with the new Palestinian government, etc etc– seems strongly to prove my point.
Strikes me that the once firm-seeming ice-cap that the extremist pro-Israeli discourse-suppressors were once able to maintain over all aspects of the political discourse within the US has been melting gratifying fast… So now, the world might see some significant movement in the diplomacy over this long-frozen issue.

The way forward in Palestine

Last December, when the co-chairs of the Iraq Study Group presented its recommendations to President Bush, the Prez angrily swept them aside, placing his emphasis instead on the planning for his own much-trumpeted ‘surge’.
Well, the surge has been underway for some weeks– and it seems increasingly clear that the Bushites are now, in addition,backing into some degree of compliance with at least two of the ISG’s key recommendations! They have already held some preliminary official contacts with both Iran and Syria, and more are to follow. And they have launched a new round of Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy that may yet show some signs of robustness.
The politics of this Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy are particularly interesting. At this point, after Fateh’s entry into a coalition government with Hamas, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has acquired considerable new political strength. Even if domestic support for the bicephalous PA government is not quite the 96% support that PA Info Minister Mustafa Barghouthi claims, it is still extremely high.
In addition, this Palestinian leadership is now– quite unusually– backed by a wall-to-wall coalition of Arab states. The Arab leaders will soon be convening at a summit meetingin the Saudi capital, Riyadh; and the central issue on their agenda there is an effort to push forward the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy on the basis of the key peace plan that an earlier Arab summit endorsed, back in Beirut in March 2002.
But here’s where the structure of this round of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy gets complex: Both Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and the US Prez himself are extremely weak with their respective publics. Did I see somewhere that political support for Olmert had dropped to around 3%? Anyway, it’s extremely low. And Bush’s job-performance and ‘favorability‘ ratings have both been hovering down between 30 and 37 percent throughout most of this year.
Bush, at least, can’t resign. (And I’m interested to see that the ratings given to our newly elected Congress are just about as low as Bush’s numbers. So the Dems have no particular reason to feel triumphalist at this point, either.) But Olmert can resign, and may well be forced to at some point over the next three months. So this all raises a number of intriguing questions:

    (1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert as such, since the guy is so evidently a very lame duck?
    (2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next government that comes into power in Israel?
    (3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public? and
    (4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?

One approach I think we might adopt is to stop calling the Arab peace plan the “Arab” peace plan. Why should it not be the world’s plan for bringing peace to this very tormented part of the world? Indeed, let us hear what reasonable objection any other governments in the world– or indeed, the UN as a body– have to this peace plan?
Here, in a nutshell, is what the 2002 peace plan does:

    (a) It calls on Israel to withdraw completely to the territory it held prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the establishment in the Palestinian portion of the occupied territories a “sovereign independent Palestinian state… with East Jerusalem as its capital”;
    (b) It calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194”; and
    (b) It promises, in return, that all the Arab countries– including, presumably, the sovereign Palestinian state to be created– will determine that the Arab-Israeli conflict has been finally ended, and these parties have no outstanding claims against Israel. They will also all sign peace agreements with Israel; will “provide security for all the states of the region”, including Israel; and will establish “normal relations” with Israel.

I note that the withdrawal clause is in full accord with UN Security Council resolutions on the matter, which all mention the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
The main objections I have heard to this plan have been over that withdrawal clause… and over the clause that addresses the refugee issue. UNGA Resolution 194 did, in its clause 11, state that the General Assembly,

    11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
    Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation…

Pro-Israeli figures in the US have often argued that the implementation of this clause would result in Israel suddenly becoming demographically “swamped” by a flood of Palestinian returnees. For its part, ever since the GA adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948, Israel has staunchly asserted its right, as a sovereign state, to regulate any entry of persons into its borders (though this right surely cannot simply over-ride the right– enshrined in the Universal declaration of Human Rights– of all persons to be free to leave the country of their birth or to return to it); and in practice, Israel has refused to allow the vast majority of the Palestinian refugees from 1947-48 to return to the homes and farms that they fled during that war.
It is surely evident to everyone that a workable (i.e. sufficiently “fair”) resolution of the refugee issue needs to agreed upon– and accepted by the great mass of the four million Palestinian refugees themselves– if any Arab-Israeli peace process is to be final and stable. Luckily, Resolution 194 itself specifically mentions a number of alternatives to outright “Return”. These include the payment of “compensation… for the property of those choosing not to return”, and “resettlement” (i.e., either where they currently are, or in third countries.) R-194 also specifies, for those choosing “Return”, that they commit to living at peace with the neighbors they will find around them after their return– and also, that this return be undertaken “at the earliest practicable date”…
So it does seem to me that within the context of a comprehensive peace agreement some package of different options– each with a different “compensation” component attached, and perhaps with varying implementation timetables– could be offered to each Palestinian refugee family (however defined), and this would still be in line with both resolution 194 and the longstanding norms regarding the kinds of outcomes that are offered to refugees in other situations around the world.
In other words, the reference to R-194 need not be seen as a barrier to other people and governments expressing their support for the “Arab” peace plan. And nor, in my view, should the reference to a full Israeli withdrawal.
Which among us, after all, is prepared to stand up today for the claim that it is indeed quite okay for nations to acquire new territories purely through the exercise of physical force??
If we want to go back and see what the United Nations itself has ever said, in a more positive vein, about the “national complexion” of the lands of West Bank and Gaza, then we need to go back to the 1947 Partition Plan, under which the whole territory of Gaza was declared to be part of the “Arab State in Palestine”; so was most of the West Bank– except for that chunk in the middle that, according to the Partition Plan, was deemed to be included (along with West Jerusalem) in the internationally administered “corpus separatum” of Jerusalem. A large area of further land that the Partition Plan also allocated to the “Arab State in Palestine” was conquered by Israel during the fighting of 1947-48; no-one in any rounds of diplomacy in the past 50-plus years has ever requested that Israel withdraw from and cede those areas. Israel’s control of them has been essentially uncontested for many decades now.
… The “Arab” peace plan has the huge advantage that– notably unlike the interim (and largely failed) accords concluded at Oslo in 1993– its clauses are all firmly rooted in the resolutions of the United Nations and in the norms of international law. For example, Oslo implicitly condoned the continuation of the support Israel gave to the illegal settlement-implantation project in the occupied territories– and quite explicitly gave open support to the settlement project by stipulating the construction of a whole network of settler-only highways throughout the West Bank. But the 2002 Peace Plan makes no mention of the settlers at all. If the assumption of the plan’s framers was that all the settlers should simply summarily leave the land of the future Palestinian state, still, perhaps the modalities of that relocation could also be subject to some negotiation… (And anyway, how many of the settlers would really want to stay in place under Palestinian sovereignty, and without the whole vast basket of special favors that they currently receive from Israel?)
The 2002 Peace Plan also has the great advantage– again, in clear contrast to the tragic, failed, and very damaging experiment of Oslo– that it speaks directly and solely to the issue of the final-status agreements that have always been so urgently required on both the Israeli-Palestinian and the Israeli-Syrian tracks. Oslo spoke only to the Palestinians, excluding the Syrians. Regarding the Palestinians it said nothing specific at all regarding the content of the final status, so when setbacks occurred, everyone on both sides immediately feared the worst about the intentions of the “others”, and very destabilizingly acted on those fears.
So now, let’s go back to those four questions near the head of this post:
(1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert?
I don’t think any of them should.
(2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next governmental change in Israel?
This is the more important campaign that pro-peace figures and responsible leaders in the Arab countries and elsewhere should be focusing on. The fact is, there are currently about 180,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem, about 246,000 elsewhere in the West Bank, and 17,500 in Golan. These Israelis constitute a very significant voting (and opinion) bloc within the Israeli system.
In addition, though Olmert is currently weak, it is a sad fact that by far the strongest force that’s challenging him is from the right wing. After the political/military setbacks that Olmert government suffered last summer in Lebanon, the political mood in Israel seems deeply unsettled, uncertain, and fearful; and the pro-peace “left” that was once such an evident presence within the Israeli system is now only a tiny, weak shadow of its former self.
One of the actions that would have the greatest potential to focus the attention of Israel’s long-pampered Jewish population on the need to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Syrians (and through the Syrians, with the Lebanese, too), would be if the US government started showing its serious interest in the need for an peace that is comprehensive, final, sustainable, and based on the solid tenets and norms of international law.
It is probably quite unrealistic to expect that President Bush or any of his officials will come out any time in the foreseeable future and express open support for the “Arab” peace plan. We have heard him talking about the need for a Palestinian state (with no date or other details attached to that), and we have heard Condi Rice talking, rather tentatively, about the need for “a political horizon.”
It would, however, be much more reassuring and helpful to hear administration officials start talking openly and directly about the need for a peace that is “comprehensive and based on international legality.” They should certainly all be requested to do this; and if they refuse to, they should be asked for their reasons for this refusal. And then, beyond merely talking about the need for such an approach, they should be challenged to use the many levers of power they have over Israel (not only financial aid, but also access to markets, military cooperation, etc etc) to underline that message. In other words, the conditionality that used once to exist as between Israel’s activity in the settlement sphere and Washington’s granting fo special favors to Israel should certainly be reinstated.
Experience shows that when Washington undertakes such actions, it really does affect the political behavior of Israelis in the desired way.
But Arabs who are serious about their peace plan should also figure out ways to try to “sell” it to Israelis– or at least, to make sure that it gets clearly and directly explained to them, and in as humanly convincing a way as possible… I know that after the apparent failure of all the heavily funded “people-to-people” efforts the Palestinians engaged in with Israelis in the 1990s, the desire to repeat such ventures dwindled considerably. But still, the need for a sustainable and comprehensive peace is now so urgent that no effort to try to win the support of Israelis– or at the very least, to reduce the ranks of the Israeli hard-liners– should be spared…
(3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public, and from others?
In the present era of participatory politics, no peace plan can be expected– in the USA, or indeed anywhere else– merely to “sell itself”. Persuading the great mass of the US’s extremely powerful voting public of the fairness and essentially constructive nature of the 2002 Peace Plan will take a major, and very well-considered “marketing effort.”
And when I say “marketing effort”, the one thing I certainly do not mean by that is that some official in the Saudi Embassy in DC might put out a huge contract for this job with some slick “marketing” firm somewhere in the country and sit back and think the job is done.
Oh no. I have seen ways too many similar contracts go out in the past, with their results ending up being absolutely nothing (or, indeed, quite frequently risibly counter-productive, as longtime JWN readers might recall my having remarked in the past.)
What’s needed is a serious effort to engage politically with a broad range of opinion-makers throughout the country… And the great thing right now is that, for a number of reasons, the US citizenry may well be in a good mood to connect with such a message, for the following reasons:

    (a) The terrible outcome to date in Iraq has prepared the US public to really “hear” many messages about the Middle East that it may well not have been ready to “hear” properly prior to 2003. The parallels between the disastrous consequences of the US decision to use force in Iraq and the Israelis’ repeated recourse to force in the occupied territories are evident. So is the role that strongly pro-Israeli figures played in jerking the US into the war in Iraq in the first place.
    (b) The US now has many experiences of its own in trying to run a strongly contested military occupation. US citizens are in a much better position than they were before 2003, to really understand what military occupation is; how unsustainable and damaging it is over the long run– to all concerned!– and to understand that ending the situation of rule by foreign military occupation, wherever it occurs, is the only legitimate, moral, and in the long term feasible way to proceed.
    (c) Some important steps have already been taken in recent months to open up the whole, very necessary intra-US discussion on the huge role and damaging effects of the country’s strong and very well-organized pro-Israel lobby. I wrote about the role of the lobby in the chapter on the US-Israel relationship that I published in my 1991 book on Israel, Syria, and the superpowers… But that didn’t attract much attention then. Now, the work of Walt and Mearsheimer, of Jimmy Carter, and Tony Judt, has opened huge additional public space in which the discourse-suppressing, truth-distorting role of the lobby can be dispassionately discussed. More importantly, by allowing discussion of the lobby’s role, this also allows a much franker and more reality-based discussion among Americans of the facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

…And finally,
(4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. As may be clear from the above, I do think that the US remains an important player in world affairs. But I also think it’s time for Americans and everyone else in the international community to break out of slavish adherence to the idea that it is somehow only right and “natural” that the US should continue to exercise near hegemonic control over all the modalities of Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
It is not.
In fact, it’s a pretty extraordinary state of affairs if one government, distant from the scene and representing less than five percent of the world’s people, should be judged to have any “right” to control all aspects of a diplomatic task as central to the stability of the whole of humanity as this one.
For this reason, I am at this point probably not among those who think it would be helpful for the US to put forward its own plan. For if we say that it would be desirable and helpful for Washington to do this, aren’t we just merely perpetuating the view of Washington as constituting the main focal point of any peace diplomacy?
How on earth did it get to the point that the United Nations would agree to be a junior partner of Washington in that strange arrangement called the “Quartet”?
So here’s my Four-point Diplomatic Plan for Palestine:

    (1) Scrap the ‘Quartet’ with its ridiculous power arrangements and its continued adherence to that inane and by now quite outdated ‘Road Map to Nowhere’;
    (2) Have the Security Council appoint a responsible envoy tasked with urgently convening authoritative negotiations over the terms of the final-status peace agreements on all the remaining ‘tracks’ of Arab-Israeli diplomacy– that is, between Israel and respectively Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians;
    (3) Scrap the name the ‘Arab’ Peace Plan and let the Arabs energetically work to get global adherence to the terms of the 2002 Peace Plan, while sympathetically exploring the concerns that others might have about it and brainstorming with them on ways that those concerns can be met;
    (4) Send Condi Rice and her sad and outdated set of very vague and woolly ideas home.

So there you have it…

Quakers and slavery, contd.

In the post I wrote here yesterday about Quakers and slavery I was arguing that it is probably just as important– for Quakers and others– to reflect deeply on the fact that for many long decades our forebears owned, traded in, and profited mightily from the labor of enslaved African persons, and to investigate the degree to which those earlier systems of violence and rapine set in place a situation of great and still continuing inequality between the communities descended from the former slave-“owners” and those of the formerly enslaved, as it is to “celebrate” the role any of our forebears may have played in ending one or another aspect of the institution of slavery…
I had found a small quote from George Fox, the 17th century English guy whom Quaker blogger Marshall Massey calls “the principal human co-founder of Quakerism.” The nub of what Fox wrote was this:

    do you for and to them [the enslaved Blacks], as you would willingly have them or any other to do unto you…were you in the like slavish condition.

On reflection, this not only does not express any clear opposition to the institution of slavery, but it seems to take the institution– and the then-present power relations within it– as an unchallengeable given, urging only the exercise of a certain degree of empathy for the enslaved “Blacks” caught up in it.
Marshall Massey writes in his blog post that,

    George Fox, the principal human co-founder of Quakerism, saw slavery with his own eyes in the English colonies of the New World, but did not condemn it outright.
    William Penn, one of the greatest second-generation Quaker leaders, not only saw slavery but practiced it himself, keeping African slaves on his estate in Pennsylvania.
    Quaker merchants were involved for several generations in the slave trade…
    As historian Douglas Harper has observed, there were African slaves in the Quaker city of Philadelphia within two years after its settlement. The great Quaker body in that area, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, didn’t turn decisively against slavery until 1758, a full three generations later. And in fact, Friends didn’t fully give up slavery until after slavery ceased to be profitable in their area.

But, Massey argues,

    There is no evidence… that early Friends as a religious body ever said slavery was a good or desirable thing.
    Some individual Friends must have said so. William Penn might have, defending his own personal decision to employ slaves. And a fair number of eighteenth-century North American Quaker slaveholders definitely did say so.
    But those were the positions of individual Friends, speaking for themselves. The overall community of Friends never did endorse their views.
    And some groups of Friends came out flatly against slavery at a very early date. It was just four years after the first slaves were imported into Pennsylvania, for example, that several members of the Germantown, Pennsylvania, monthly meeting issued a protest [1688 ~HC] against slaveholding that asked, in labored English, “Is there any that would [himself] be done or handled at this manner? viz., to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?”

(Actually, the whole of that 1688 text is worth reading, and I don’t find the English in it labored, at all. It’s a magnificent text!)
I find this rather interesting. Germantown Monthly Meeting is one local congregation of Friends (Quakers). That congregation had come out clearly against the institution of slavery as early as 1688; but then it took the larger, more authoritative Quaker body of which they were part– Philadelphia Yearly Meeting–a further 66 years before it came out unequivocally against the institution by going as far as to “disown” (i.e. expel) any member of the Religious Society of Friends who refused to free such slaves as he still held. (See the timeline on p.2 of this PDF document.)
We could and should reflect on the question of “What took them so long?”
… Anyway, I have also– since I have a copy of George Fox’s Journal conveniently to hand– checked out a few of the things he included there on the subject of slavery. Basically, what he seems to be expressing in the Journal is an essentially very ‘paternalistic’, i.e. denigrating, view of the enslaved persons and their capacities.
In August 1671, George Fox set out from London with an accompanying group of twelve other Quaker “ministers”, on a visit to Barbados, Jamaica, and mainland North America. The voyage over the Atlantic was a little exciting, since off the coast of the Azores they saw what they described as a “Turkish pirate” ship standing by– the Quaker chronicler at that point, John Hull, described it as coming from “Sallee”, presumably today’s Salé, near Rabat, Morocco. (In reference to which, look at the vividness of the description at the head of the Germantown Friends’ minute regarding slavery, on the fears of “white” settlers in North America regarding the possibility of enslavement by the “Turks.”)
Fox and his companions also had at least one other, even more hair-raising adventure of being chased by a “Sallee” man-of-war as they got near to Barbados. (Domination of the sea lines of communication across the Atlantic was always central to the success of the north American settlement venture; and at that point it was still not wholly assured.)
Anyway, Fox and the companions made it to Barbados, where they proceeded to travel about a bit holding Meetings for Worship, and smaller meetings with various local notables. The Quakers in those early days– which were ones of great religious ferment in the whole English-speaking world– were eager to spread (their version of) the Word and to undertake large-scale evangelizing. Also, as much “strategic” evangelizing as they could… Why, one courageous Quaker woman minister had even set out to convert the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps with the hope that– as with Saint Helena’s conversion of her son the Roman Emperor– with that one conversion a whole empire-full of souls could be gained for the faith. She failed…
So in Barbados, the Quaker evangelizing team (which included two women ministers, and the rest men), not only held as many large meetings for worship as they could, they also wanted to make sure they had continued permission to hold such meetings– which meant they had to have some serious, strategic meetings with the representatives of the settler administration there and persuade those men that their activities were not subversive. (And maybe they tried to convert some of those officials, too.)
Remember, as well, that Fox and many of his companions had already had several long experiences of having been imprisoned under very harsh conditions back in England, on charges related to the radicalism of their views…
So at some point during their time in Barbados (still in 1671), Fox and his companions drew up a letter to “the Governor and Assembly of Barbados”, which is reprinted in the Journal, pp. 602-606. Most of the letter is comprised of a vigorous defense of the orthodoxy and general acceptability of the content of the Friends’ preachings… And indeed, the following portion of the Journal– which includes the texts of letters written from Barbados by both Fox and others, as well as journal entries– mentions quite a lot of large meetings for worship that were held, of both “whites” and “blacks”, during the three months the Quaker mission team stayed in Barbados, from October 1671 through January 1672…
So this is a key little portion of the letter Fox and his companions sent to the Governor and Assembly of Barbados:

    Another slander and lie they have cast upon us is, namely, that we should teach the negroes to rebel, a thing we do utterly abhor and detest in and from our hearts, the Lord knows it, who is the searcher of all hearts and knows all things… For that which we have spoken and declared to them is to exhort and admonish them to be sober and to fear God, and to love their masters and mistresses, and to be faithful and diligent in their masters’ service and business, and that then their masters and overseers will love them and deal kindly and gently with them…
    Now consider , Friends, that it’s no transgression for a master of a family to instruct his family himself or else some others in his behalf, but rather that it is a very great duty incumbent upon them, as Abraham did and Joshua did… And further consider this, that it is a duty incumbent upon us to pray, and to teach, instruct, and admonish those in and belonging to our families…
    Now negroes and tawny Indians make up a very great part of families here in this island for whom an account will be required by him who comes to judge both quick and dead at the great day of judgement… (pp. 604-606)

In his own short journal account of what the group had achieved in Barbados, Fox wrote:

    We came from London on the thirteenth day of the sixth month [Aug.] and we came to Barbados the third day of the eighth month [Oct.], where we had many and great meetings among the whites and blacks. And there was some opposition by the priests and Papists but the power of the Lord and his glorious Truth was over all and reached most in the island. And we stayed above a quarter of a year there and I went to visit the governor and he was loving to me… And I was at several men’s meetings and several women’s meetings which was of great service for the island. And we set up meetings in families in every Freind’s house, among the blacks, some 200, some 300, in their houses that the masters and dames of families might admonish their families of blacks and whites, as Abraham did, which is a great service.(pp. 609-610)

I have to say I find these words extremely disturbing to read. The idea that Fox and his companions could so easily consider that the “masters and dames” (i.e. the slave-owners) stood at the head of some “family” that comprised their hundreds of slaves, and that this somehow gave them the right to instruct and “admonish” those enslaved persons, almost beggars belief.
“Admonish” being far too dainty a word, I think, for the kinds of punishments that were routinely administered against enslaved persons, in those times as afterwards.
I know that elsewhere Fox wrote that, while he was troubled by some aspects the institution of slavery, still, he saw the enslaved Africans as so un-“instructed” and so ill-equipped to fend for themselves that keeping the institution of slavery in place for a generation or two in order to give the “masters and dames” a chance to “instruct” the slaves up to the level required for self-sufficiency was probably the best way forward.
(Does this kind of argument have any present-day echoes in the pleadings of those who say the US occupation of Iraq may have some bad aspects… but the Iraqis are somehow not really “ready” for full self-rule, so in the meantime the occupation forces should stay??)
Anyway, Fox gives no evidence at all of having talked at any length to any of the enslaved persons in Barbados, to find out what they might have thought about his argument. Nor does he show any signs of the deep reflectiveness with which, 80 years later, John Woolman set out to try to investigate all the moral dimensions of the institution of slavery. One clear example: Woolman was deeply troubled by the idea of receiving hospitality from a plantation owner who might, in offering that hospitality, be exploiting the uncompensated labor of “his” slaves… So he proceeded, during all his visits to those slaveholders, to give some coins of due compensation for the labor involved in hosting him– either directly to the enslaved persons who had served him or to their masters, with instruction that they be “paid” to the servants concerned… In Barbados, by contrast, George Fox left us no record of having entertained any such qualms, but seemed happily to have taken at face value the claim that all the black slaves (and “tawny Indians”– I guess that was before they were wiped out completely by the colonizers) were just part of the “one big happy family” that by a most amazing coincidence just happened in every single case to be headed by the white slave-owners.
… By writing in this way, do I intend to “condemn” George Fox? No. He was a creature of his evangelizing times, perhaps blinded to some degree by the burning strength of his goal of evangelizing. (Even the Conquistadors thought they were doing a service to the people they conquered in nearby Central America– some of them argued that even if they were flailing the bodies of their captives, at least they were saving their souls!)
So I can certainly point out what I see as the terrible effects of George Fox’s extremely permissive (and also, I would say, distinctly supportive) attitudes toward and actions regarding the institution of slavery, without condemning all of George Fox as a person.
But given that I have such great admiration for many other aspects of his life and ministry, recalling that some of his actions caused real harm (in my view) to others of God’s children can indeed challenge us today to reflect on what actions we might be taking that– though we think we taking them with excellent intent– might actually be having a very harmful effect on other humans.
… Well, I didn’t mean this post to be so long. But I was interested in going back into GF’s Journal to check on what I had read there some ten or more years ago, and to be able to insert it into the present discussion on slavery, the Quakers, and the values of the “Enlightenment”.
(H’mm, maybe we should rename it “the Darkening”?)