Author: Helena

More on the four-year US occupation of Iraq

Commenter Bernard Chazelle suggested we watch this very moving short video from Guardian films. It’s about some kids in an Iraqi orphanage.
And there’s a link there to this other short video, which is a powerful testimony from and about Kadhem Jabouri, the one-time Iraqi weightlifting champion who achieved a brief measure of fame when he heartily swung a hammer against the base of the Saddam statue in Firdaus Square on that day in early April 2003 when the statue was brought down.
Today, Kadhem says he wished he’d never done it. He says the four years of occupation have been worse than Saddam’s dictatorship. He says, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” He takes the cameraperson on a sad tour of his neighborhood, ending up at the echoingly empty expanses of Firdaus Square.
So when– as no doubt will happen– in the early days of April the (increasingly depleted) ranks of the war supporters in the US and UK once again replay that footage of the (partly orchestrated, partly ‘spontaneous’) assault on the Saddam statue, and the statue’s final toppling… in their attempt to reconvince themselves and perhaps some others that their war venture in Iraq really was “worthwhile” because it resulted in a toppling of that dictator and his artistic representation there in the square… in an exuberant outpouring of the Iraqi people’s “popular will”…
When you see those film clips replaying again, go back to the one of Kadhem Jabouri, and listen carefully to what he says.
You can note also that though he did swing that hammer with great verve and gusto, actually as the statue-toppling scene progresses it was not the efforts of Kadhem and his friends that brought it down. (They only succeeded in inflicting a few broad pock marks on the statue’s plinth.)
What brought it down was the US armored vehicle that was later brought into the task.
Anyway, watch both those great video clips… Kadhem, and the children… No matter how idealistic the intentions of some of those who planned and undertook the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they surely need to understand the terrible effects that that invasion had on the lives of millions of actual Iraqis.
(Thanks for the link, Bernard!)

British mark bicentennary of their slave trade abolition

Here in London, many people are making a pretty big deal out of an Act passed by Parliament in March 1807 that outlawed the involvement of British ships in the slave trade. Just a block or two from I’m staying, the British Museum has a lot of special events relating to this bicentennial (e.g., this one, on Sunday.) There’s a movie coming out called Amazing Grace, that is based on the life of the abolitionist MP William Wilberforce. I see the British Quakers have put together an interesting little on-line exhibition to mark this bicentennary, featuring some texts and other items from the collections of Friends House Library.
I think it’s excellent to remember this anniversary, and to find ways to reconnect with the strong ethical and religious sense of all those who worked and organized to end the transatlantic slave trade. As far as I understand the long, long global history of that ghastly institution, the enslaved persons in the Americas were about the first slaves in history whose condition of bondage and status as chattel was passed down from parent to child. And in fact, in a cruel irony, as the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons of African origin died out– due to laws being passed against it on both sides of the Atlantic, not just one– the value of the slaves who were already in place, working under horrendous conditions in the US, many Caribbean islands, and some South American nations, merely rose… And there was a strong incentive, until the whole institution of slavery was outlawed, which took many further decades, for slave-“owners” to try to breed their slave-stock as much as much possible, a matter to which many white men in slave-owning communities made a big personal contribution.
If you look at the (US Census Bureau-derived) demographic table in this section of the relevant Wikipedia page, you can see that between 1810 and 1860 the number of enslaved persons in the US rose from 1.2 million to nearly 4.0 million– despite the fact that the importation of additional slaves had been outlawed by Congress in 1808.
Imagine how many enslaved women were raped by white men and boys as part of that “breeding” program. Yes, another proportion of them doubtless bore children from relationships with enslaved men, and I hope that many of those relationships were marked by affection… But whether there was affection or no, the practitioners of the institution of slavery gave almost no recognition to ties of marriage or any other kinds of family ties among the “slaves” whom they owned. As many slave testimonies told, husbands and wives among the enslaved persons could be (and were) as easily separated as parents and children. A man, woman, or child could be “sold down the river” at a moment’s notice; or whole families could be split up when the “property” of a deceased slave-“owner” was divided among his heirs…
I started traveling towards becoming a Quaker some ten-plus years ago, spurred overwhelmingly by my reading of the journal of John Woolman, who was a mid-18th-century Quaker who grew up in a strongly Quaker community near Philadelphia. Woolman pursued many very important ministries of justice and conscience during his life, including by calling attention to the status of the native Americans, and by agitating against Pennsylvania’s raising of a war tax. (This was in the 1750s– quite a long time before the secessionist UDI movement called by its participants the “American Revolution.”)
But one of the most important ministries he pursued was undoubtedly the one against the institution of slavery.
By that point, many, many portions of the white settler community in the US were heavily involved in the institution of slavery… including some portion of just about all the many Christian denominations that had proliferated in the settler communities by then– and yes, that included the Quakers— and also a portion of the Jewish settlers. As far as I know it was only the Mennonites, among the Christians (and perhaps the other Anabaptists?) who had never participated in the owning or trading of enslaved persons. But many, many Quakers certainly had.
Actually, if you go back and read what the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, had written about the institution of slavery in the 1670s, you will see it is far from being any kind of forthright protest against the whole institution. See what he wrote, for example, here:

    ‘…if you were in the same condition as the Blacks are…now I say, if this should be the condition of you and yours, you would think it hard measure, yea, and very great Bondage and Cruelty. And therefore consider seriously of this, and do you for and to them, as you would willingly have them or any other to do unto you…were you in the like slavish condition.’

There were huge hyper-profits to be made in the business; and some were made by Quaker plantation owners in the southern states or Quaker slave-traders in Rhode Island and other states to the north.
Eighty years after George Fox was writing, John Woolman came along. He saw at first hand the misery and inequity of the institution of slavery. He heard all the allegedly “do-gooding” claims of the slave-holders and slave-traders among the Quakers… that they were “saving these poor souls from the misery of wars in Africa”, etc etc… and he slowly confronted them with his witness, one-by-one, and also in small groups and at impassioned meetings for worship and business.
He was not alone. There were other American Quaker abolitionists who joined him in his campaign. But he was the one who kept an extremely moving journal of all his efforts… And between them, these Quaker men and women made a big difference. They managed to persuade all the Quakers of the US to dissociate themselves from the institution; and it was on the basis of that achievement that many Quakers of later decades then became leaders in the broad national movement against what the Americans have often called the “peculiar institution.”
Too bad that, come the 1860s, it was only through the waging of an extremely fierce and bloody war that slavery was finally ended forever in the country. (More on that, perhaps, later: I really think that war was the biggest test for the pacifism of US Quakers– much more so than the distant war against Hitlerism some 80 years later.) Anyway, I guess the ferocity with which the southern whites fought in that war was a marker of just how very profitable the whole institution had been for them…
Back home in Charlottesville, Virginia,my good friend Bill Anderson– who’s an Anglican peace activist and an African-American— has a couple of times said to me, “Helena, I always have a soft spot for Quakers: Your people freed my family back in the 1830s.” I never know what to say. I feel much more ashamed that back at one point, Quakers in Virginia may well have actually “owned” some of Bill’s ancestors, than I feel happy that they eventually helped to “free” some of them.
I guess I wish the events here in Britain being held to mark the bicentennary of this country’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 had a little less smug self-satisfaction, and a little more real reflectiveness to them. After all, should we really be doing much celebrating if someone stops beating his wife??
When I say “reflectiveness”, I just want to note that I’ve seen nothing in all the many newspaper articles and other items of commentary on this anniversary which looks at how many of the fine institutions of the “Enlightenment” here in Britain, as in the rest of Europe and also, certainly, in the Americas, were financed with the hyper-profits from the slave trade… And then, absolutely no reflection at all on the degree to which the legacies of the slave trade and other crimes of colonialism still live on in Africa; or, on whether these very rich and settled former slave-trading societies of northern Europe should not take seriously the task of effecting some real form of reparations to those ravaged home-communities of Africa.
… I do just want to put in links to two really excellent resources for anyone studying this subject. One is this book, Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews With Virginia Ex-Slaves, reprinted by the University of Virginia Press from a series of excellent interviews made by (generally) African-American interviewers, with some of the last living ex-slaves in the 1930s. The other is Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870.
But what I really want to say here is this. By the time John Woolman got around to visiting his fellow-Quakers up and down the east coast of America in the 1750s, many of those he visited had succeeded in becoming quite strongly convinced that the institution of slavery was not just acceptable, but also good and ethical. It took Woolman and his friends many years of persistent persuasion to convince them of the error of their ways.
From today’s perspective, the error of their ways seems blindingly obvious!
So what practices are we engaged in today– practices that we may well think are not just acceptable, but beyond that, actively good and ethical– that future generations will look back and say “Unbelievable! How could people back then do such terribly damaging things???”

Faiza: The story of Husaam

Faiza al-Araji is a courageous, talented Iraqi civil engineer of about my age (mid-50s), also with three grown-up children. Hers are all male; two of mine are daughters. When I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting her– in Boston in summer 2005; and later, more briefly, at a conference in New York City– I found we had so many things in common!
Yesterday, she had a really moving post on her blog “A family in Baghdad.”
Actually, for now, all her family is out of Baghdad. She and her spouse are in Jordan, her sons scattered to the corners of the earth. Well, that makes them representative of the vast number of Iraqis currently living in exile from their homeland, thanks to George W. Bush.
You may find the urological details at the top of the post a little hard to read. (Ouch! Poor Faiza! I hope you’re feeling better now… ) But if they don’t grab your attention, scroll on further down the post for the story of a young man she knows called Husaam.
One of the great things about Faiza’s blogging is the way she puts a human face on what we all know are some really horrible events. Her work is really a great example of what makes bloggging such a revolutionary medium.

Reidar Visser takes on US politicians’ myths about Iraq

Our esteemed friend Reidar has a solidly argued new piece on his website that roundly criticizes some of the myths about Iraq being disseminated by US politicians– primarily but not exclusively Democratic pols– in preparation for the pursuit of a policy of “cut and blame” in Iraq.
He writes,

    to dismiss Iraq’s civil strife as “chronic”, as Democratic commentators increasingly do, requires blind ignorance of centuries of Iraqi coexistence – as seen for instance during the monarchy (1921–1958), during Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century (when Shiites and Sunnis coexisted in the two mixed provinces of Basra and Baghdad), and during the reign of the Baghdad-based Georgian mamluks, who ruled from Mosul to the Gulf between 1747 and 1831. And to diagnose a state of “irreconcilable sectarian conflict” in contemporary Iraq would be to overlook the fact that it is the post-2003 Iraqi elites of returned exiles, rather than the Iraqi population at large, that are behind many of today’s most outrageous sectarian maximalist demands. In historical perspective, it is the current heightened sectarian tension – particularly acute since 2006 – that is the “artificial” aspect of the Iraq situation, and it should be an American responsibility to try to reverse this situation as part of a withdrawal strategy.

Blaming Iraqis for being the backward kind of people who are locked in age-old sectarian hatreds etc is very analogous to some of the arguments made by westerners about other conflicts throughout the world, including former Yugoslavia, Africa, etc. In all such cases these arguments are used as a pretext to cover up the ineffectiveness of the various interventions made by the “international community” or to try to justify the inaction of the states of the rich western world.
Visser makes some excellent argument in this piece. I am concerned, however, that he still seems too easily to believe that there is some “optimal” mix of US sticks and carrots that, if correctly brought to bear, can produce a better-than-otherwise outcome in Iraq. For my part, I still hold that

    (1) it is none of the Americans’ damn’ business at this point how the Iraqi people choose to rule themselves,
    (2) the track record of the US’s attempt to build a workable political order in post-Saddam Iraq has been abysmal, since the level of killings and major conflict there has increased with every year the US forces have remained there,
    (3) therefore the first demand of the US government should be to pull all of its troops out of Iraq, without engaging in any further political maneuvering inside the Iraqi system, whatsoever, and
    (4) the very fact of an imminent, rapid, and complete withdrawal of US troops from the country may well serve to concentrate the minds of Iraqis on finding their own form of political entente to produce a functioning national administration after the departure of the US troops and the end of all the harmful interference their presence has caused.

For more details of my thinking on these matters see any of the ‘withdrawal plans for Iraq’ that I provide links to near the top of the sidebar on the main page of this blog.

Drivers of US policy on Iraq

When I was in the Middle East in February, many of the people I talked to– smart people in Arab countries who realize that the fate of their region depends to a worrying degree on decisions made in distant Washington– were speculating as to whether Condi Rice is up or down, whether Cheney is up or down, etc. It struck me these observers were looking largely at the wrong thing. To me, by far the most interesting rising driver of US policy in Iraq is the uniformed military itself, and in particular the generals in the US Army and Marines.
We have been getting increasingly strong signals from these generals in recent months that they are extremely worried about the effects that George Bush’s imperial over-stretch in Iraq is having on the institutions that they head and from which they gain their own social stature and their lives, their meaning.
Ann Scott Tyson, who covers the uniformed military for the Wapo, has another intriguing piece in today’s paper, that starts out like this:

    Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.
    More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a “death spiral,” in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.
    The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery and other land forces, they said.

There are a lot of other interesting details in the article; but the bottom line is that the generals (a) are extremely worried about the US’s level of military readiness, including both its readiness to respond in what they judge an adequate way to any new challenges that may arise in any one of the dozens of spots around the world where they say they would like to ready; (b) want to get this concern onto the public record; so that (c) when– as they may well by now already judge to be nearly inevitable, the US has to draw down its forces in Iraq on unfavorable terms– they will be quite ready to say “We warned you this would not work.”
Of course, you could say that it would have been more helpful all round, for both Americans and Iraqis, if their predecessors in the Joint Chief’s of Staff’s famous ‘Tank’ had actually been a little more forceful about laying out the military realities regarding Iraq invasion scenarios back in 2002, rather than now, five years later…
But better later than never, perhaps??
Anyway, alert JWN readers will no doubt recall that back on March 9 I wrote a little about my earlier conversation with the Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann, including his bon mot that though the US and Iran both agree, regarding Iraq, that it should remain united and ruled by majority rule, they disagree on the question of the US troop presence in Iraq– “Because the US basically now wants to be able to withdraw those troops, and Iran wants them to stay!”
I also wrote, “For my part, I am slightly less convinced than [Hiltermann] is that the decisionmakers in the Bush administration at this point are clear that they want the US troops out of Iraq… But I think they are headed toward that conclusion, and that the developments in the region will certainly continue to push them that way.”
A few days later, Joost wrote me to say (and I quote this with his permission):

    On one point I think we are much closer than you suggest. Perhaps I did not express myself sufficiently clearly.
    I, too, think US troops will stay in Iraq. They will have to. But I also think a signficant drawdown from populated areas will take place because the administration does not want to become embroiled in a civil war.
    At this point, US troops still hold together whatever remains of Iraq’s government and security forces. Once they decide to get out from the thick of things, these will fall apart and Iraq will become a failed state. The challenge then will be to contain the civil war within Iraq, and for this the US will need to keep forces in the large camps (for special forces operations against Al-Qaeda and air support) and deploy them along Iraq’s borders.

Actually, when he spells it out this way I find myself obliged to say that I don’t agree with his prognosis completely. Mainly because I don’t think the US will stay in Iraq for very long… And the principal driver behind the decision for a fairly rapid drawdown (or even, perhaps increasingly likely, a complete troop withdrawal) will be precisely that increasingly strong feeling amongst the military brass that the Iraq deployment is threatening to bring infamy, chaos, and ruin to the military institutions that they hold dear. This is a factor to which Joost– a very serious and experienced analyst of matters Middle Eastern– seems in my judgment not to have given adequate weight.
Indeed, it’s worth going back to Ann Scott Tyson’s piece, just to read the concluding paragraph:

    “Boots on the ground matter,” [Army vice chief of staff Gen. Richard A. Cody] said. “If they are tied down, your ability to terminate a conflict on your terms, earlier, may not be there.”

Also worth reading in the article: the description of how Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defines the geographic reach of the mission of the US military. Tyson recalls that he told a House committee last month:

    “You take a lap around the globe — you could start any place: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, North Korea, back around to Pakistan, and I probably missed a few. There’s no dearth of challenges out there for our armed forces.”

At one level, you could say these guys are, quite simply, stark raving bonkers. The idea that the United States, a country that boasts less than 5 percent of the world’s population, should feel that it has some kind of a “responsibility” to respond to “challenges” (or whatever) right around whole world does have a certain noticeable zaniness to it.
At another level, I find this a deeply, deeply, scary thought.
And at another level still, I do think the world community as a whole– that is, the concerned citizens of all the countries around the world– needs to come together to start thinking about different, more effective structures to help ensure everyone’s security– structures that (1) certainly don’t allow one steroid-fueled hegemon to race around the world acting unilaterally just as and whenever it pleases, while (2) ensuring that vital lines of communication remain open, with their security assured through accountable, multinational mechanisms.
… But back to Iraq. I take seriously the proposition that the leaders of the US military really are very worried about the state and the status of the forces under their command — in addition to whatever political butt-covering they might currently be engaged in. Moreover, at this point they are most likely joined in their Powell-esque embrace of military planners’ realism by that dark-horse political actor, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. So my judgment is that it is this increasingly weighty coalition within the US decisionmaking class that will increasingly be driving policy in the weeks and months ahead… Already, as we can see, they are all working hard to build good links with the leading realist forces in Congress, from both political parties, in what is increasingly looking like a determined political end-run around Dick Cheney…
The consequences for Iraq of a primarily ‘Tank’-driven US withdrawal from the country need to be thought through a whole lot more…
And meanwhile, Bush’s ideological hard-right crony from Texas, Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, is also running into increasing trouble over the apparently politically motivated firings of eight federal prosecutors.
Very interesting times…

Open power struggle over Iraqi ‘High Court’

The Iraqi ‘High Court’– the special war-crimes court that was supposed Exhibit A in the US occupation forces’ attempt to bring accountability and the rule of law to Iraq– has become the scene of some ugly and very open political tussling between the US ‘advisors’ who have been the eminence grise behind the whole court from the very beginning and the Iraqi judge who thought he was supposed to be running it.
This report from AP’s Qassem Abdul-Zahra tells us that,

    A session of the war crimes trial of six former officials in Saddam Hussein’s government was canceled Sunday after a defense attorney who had been ejected last week made an unexpected appearance, court officials said.
    Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa asked bailiffs why Badie Arif Ezzat was back in his courtroom, and was told the attorney was there on the order of U.S. officials attached to the court in an advisory capacity, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
    “So, does my decision mean nothing?” an angry al-Khalifa responded, referring to his decision to eject and hold Ezzat in contempt last week. The two had a heated exchange over comments Ezzat made in a television interview. The judge said the remarks were an insult to the court.
    Al-Khalifa adjourned the trial until March 26.

Abdul-Zahra added that the court officials said,

    that negotiations between the two sides would continue until a mutually satisfactory settlement is reached.
    They said the U.S. officials took custody of Ezzat from Iraqi authorities over the weekend, keeping him under protection in a residence located inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified Baghdad region that houses the U.S. Embassy and offices of the Iraqi government and parliament.
    U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said he was checking on the report but could not immediately offer comment.

In the past, at least one attorney providing services to the defense side in the court has been killed, and it is quite possible that Ezzat has entertained some strong and not unreasonable fears for his life in recent weeks.
Many people in the international legal and human rights communities held out the hope for a long time that criminal trials for past atrocities, such as have been attempted by this Iraqi ‘High’ Court, can somehow be insulated from political considerations and in a generalized, ex-cathedra sort of way somehow magically help in strengthening the rule of law in multiply stressed and traumatized societies.
They can’t. Indeed, in societies in which political power is still hotly contested, conducting a criminal trial of major political figures will always exacerbate existing social and political cleavages and make far harder the attainment of the kind of social-political calm in which the rule-of-law protections can start to have real effect.
Let’s hope this whole series of debacles in this US-run political court in Iraq will cause more people in the international human -rights movement to understand the strict limitations on the applicability of war-crimes trials in politically fragile situations that have recently experienced deep inter-group violence or that– as in Iraq, Rwanda, Uganda, or elsewhere– are still actually living under the rights-abusing yoke of such conflict.
(For more of my recent thinking on this check out this recent JWN post or more of the writings on the Transitional Justice Forum blog.)

Tanya Reinhart, RIP

I have been so sad to learn of the death, both early and I think sudden, of Tanya Reinhart. (Hat-tip for David for alerting me to this.)
Tanya was a strong proponent of Palestinian equality and national independence and a fierce critic of the particular round of the ‘peace’ process — that is, all process, no peace– that was inaugurated with Yasser Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993.
I had never met her until I went to Israel and Palestine with the International Quaker Working Party in 2002. We met her at Tel Aviv University, where she was a very distinguished member of the faculty of linguistics until last December, when she found the situation in Israel had become so hostile to her that she left Tel Aviv and moved to New York to teach at NYU.
Since I came to England two weeks ago I have had several impassioned discussions with Palestinian friends old and new about the whole course, meaning, and content of Oslo. My position, in a nutshell is that Oslo was specifically designed by the Israeli party to to be an indeterminate process, that is, to leave quite open the nature of the ‘final outcome’ whose negotiation, according to the text of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, should be completed by mid-1999.
To me, that indeterminacy was a very serious structural flaw in the DOP. A peace agreement whose negotiation is completed but whose implementation is phased according to an agreed schedule is one thing– there, at least, everyone knows what the final destination will be. But a peace ‘process’ that leaves quite undefined the final outcome will (a) provide more continuing power within the process to the existing power holders and (b) leave everyone from all sides extremely jittery regarding what the final outcome will be, and therefore prone to over-reactions to any tiny blip or setback along the way.
Such as we saw from both sides in the years that followed Oslo– but particularly, perhaps, from the Israeli side.
Having said that, I would say– as someone who sat bemused on the lawn of the White House on that bizarro day in September 1993 when the Oslo Accords were signed there– that despite that flaw there was still a chance the Palestinians could do well out of the process, provided they had wise strategic leadership that maximized the many levers of potential power at their people’s disposal.
Which included, let us remember, considerable sympathy from many parts of the international community and from a still-vibrant peace movement inside Israel.
Instead of which, they had Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar), a man who (a) had zero concept of how to develop and pursue a strategy, and (b) proceeded, immediately after the return to the Occupied Territories that Oslo bestowed on him, to dismantle all the organizations and networks of community-based ‘people power’ that by then were the Palestinians’ major strategic asset. (And whose activities during the largely nonviolent First Intifada had, indeed, led to the conclusion of the Oslo Agreement in the first place.)
Arafat was a truly terrible negotiator– one might even say recklessly or criminally so, from his people’s perspective. The major case in point was his allowing the Israelis, under the terms of the Oslo DOP, to build a whole entire new road system within the West Bank with which successive governments of Israel then proceeded to strangle the Palestinian communities there.
So maybe Tanya Reinhart was right– maybe there was nothing the Palestinians could have done to “improve” Oslo, or to pull from that sow’s ear of a flawed agreement the silk purse of an acceptable, final-status peace agreement? I honestly don’t know, though I do strongly think that with much wiser leadership, the Palestinians could have had a good shot at doing that.
Where Reinhart was absolutely right, however, was to note the terrible effects that Oslo had on the balance of political and demographic power within the occupied West Bank. The new, Israelis-only road system was an absolute disaster for the Palestinians. So was the building of additional settler-only housing there– the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubled in the five years after Oslo, and today stands at around 500,000 (counting East Jerusalem settlers along with the rest.)
Where she was right, too, was to roundly criticize the claim that Ehud Barak made, that the ‘deal’ he offered Yasser Arafat at the end of of 2000 was a “generous offer” whose inexplicable rejection by the Palestinians just “proved” their bad intentions all along… That claim– coming from a Labour Party Prime Minister– did more than anything else to kill the Israeli peace movement as a large, significant force within Israeli society.
And now, that brave and percipient advocate of human equality Tanya Reinhart is dead. What a terrible, terrible shame.
As for the Palestinians, at least they now have a unity government. Let’s hope it can start to turn around the situation of their people, still reeling from more than a year’s-worth of the tough and deeply anti-humane siege.that Israel initiated but in which all the major governments of the world have shamefully colluded.

‘Justice’ and war: A conundrum

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself this: How come, in all the long history of warfare, very, very few leaders engaging in a war have ever done so on the basis of a cause that they publicly proclaimed to be any less than perfectly just?
Seems like no ‘unjust war’ has ever been fought. Amazing.
Especially if you consider that any war that has any duration is always engaged in by at least two parties or nations, each of whose leaders is there publicly proclaiming that his cause is perfectly just.
What does this tell us about the nature of war– and about the nature of claims of ‘justice’?

Four years on

It has
been almost four years.



Back in January
2003, I voiced
this warning in my column in the Christian Science Monitor.

Any use of massive violence such as that Washington is now threatening
against Iraq is a terrible thing.

Everything we know about violence gives two clear lessons. First, the
use of force always has unintended – often quite unpredictable –
consequences. And second, war in the modern era always
disproportionately harms civilians.

For these two reasons, there is a strong presumption in international
law and international custom against any easy or voluntary recourse to
war. War is still allowed in international law, yes – but only for
self-defense, and only as a very last resort, after all avenues for
peaceful resolution of differences
have been exhausted.

Mr. President, you have no such justification for the war you now
threaten against Iraq. There is still time to stand down the huge US
expeditionary force and return to some version of the mix of
containment and deterrence that has proved successful against Iraq
until now – as it did against the much more threatening Soviet Union in
an earlier era. Turn back from this war before its consequences come
back to haunt you and the rest of the world.



And then, I
noted the consequences that followed the decision that Ariel Sharon had
made, when he was Israel’s Defense Minister in 1982, to invade Lebanon:

That
campaign had two key similarities to the one you now threaten against
Iraq. It was a war of “choice,” not one imposed on Israel by other
powers
like some of its other wars. Secondly, Mr. Sharon’s campaign aimed
explicitly
at bringing about “regime change” in Lebanon, as yours promises to do
in
Iraq.

At the military level, Sharon’s warriors succeeded. Within two months,
they controlled half of Lebanon including the capital Beirut. They
forced
Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian guerrillas to leave the country, and
“persuaded”
Lebanon’s parliament to vote in Israeli ally Bashir Gemayel as their
new
president.

Politically, however, Sharon’s campaign did not go well. The continued
presence of Israeli forces in the country catalyzed the birth of a new,
much
more militant Lebanese Muslim group called Hizbullah. Mr. Gemayel was
assassinated.

Before 1982 ended, Israel was seeking to reduce its footprint in
Lebanon. But it was unable to deal with the resistance that its
presence provoked, and ended up staying in Lebanon an additional 18
years.

Israel (and Lebanon) bled profusely for all those years. (And the
Palestinians? Their national movement simply changed its form. In 1987,
it launched its first serious uprising – “intifada” – inside Gaza and
the West Bank.)

No one in Israel today gives a favorable verdict to Sharon’s 1982
campaign. One can only wonder how Americans 20 years from now will
judge the results of a US war on Iraq.

In February
2003, I wrote this:

Right now, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims strongly oppose the
US launching what they see as a quite avoidable war against Iraq. (Most
non-Muslims worldwide seem to share this view, too.) With his latest
message, bin Laden seeks to insinuate himself into the leadership of
the sprawling collection of societies known loosely as the “world
Muslim community.”

If the US blindly goes ahead with the threatened attack on Iraq, will
that bring bin Laden closer to his goal, or further from it?

My judgment, based on more than 25 years of studying Muslim issues, is
that it will bring bin Laden much, much closer.

The tragic irony in this is that, just days before the airing of the
bin Laden tape, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his presentation at
the UN, significantly inflated the strength of the link between Saddam
Hussein’s regime
and bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Now, as in the Yiddish folktale “The Golem,”
bad
dreams seem to be taking on real substance.

In his Feb. 5 speech, Mr. Powell laid out the best evidence he had for
the existence of what he called, “the potentially … sinister nexus
between Iraq
and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.”

But the case he made at that time for the existence of this nexus was
thin and deeply unconvincing. To note this is not to stick up for
Saddam Hussein. He’s a very abusive ruler with a long record of
deception on significant weapons-related
issues. But prudence still dictates that the Bush administration needs
to
get its facts straight about the Baghdad-Al Qaeda nexus.

Finally,
as the drumbeats of the approaching war grew louder, on March 13, 2003,
I wrote this:

The
fight-to-the death that the
president is poised to launch against Saddam Hussein’s regime will send
a tsunami of destabilization throughout the Middle East. But beyond
that,
if this war is not authorized by the UN Security Council, it threatens
to unravel not just the 58-year-old UN system, but the whole web of
interstate
relations that has grown up through the past four centuries. We would
be
catapulted back to a Hobbesian world of “might makes right” in
international
affairs. In such a world, as Hobbes warned us, human life can only be
“nasty,
brutish, and short.”

The threat to the UN system is already dire. Yes, the UN has made
mistakes and still has many shortcomings. And yes, the US has sometimes
had rocky relations with the UN over the years. But for the vast
majority of the world’s people, the UN represents an ideal of national
equality, and embodies their desire that international conflicts be
resolved without war. In thousands of places around the world, the UN
delivers basic human services – nutrition, healthcare, water
management, shelter – that governments are too weak or
impoverished to provide. In explosive hot spots – including the
Kuwait-Iraq
border – UN peacekeepers help monitor and defuse otherwise deadly
tensions.

President Bush has repeatedly said, “When it comes to our security,
we don’t need anybody’s permission.” That can only mean he’s prepared
to
go to war against Iraq even without Security Council authorization.
Make
no mistake: If the president does that, he will start a cascade of
actions
and counteractions that could unravel the UN, all its good works and
the
ideals it represents, within months – not years.

… Many Americans remember a previous effort by a well-meaning
president to use the US military’s dominant position to forcibly impose
democracy
on another country. That was President Johnson, in 1968, in Vietnam.

In 2003, a similar effort to impose democracy on Iraq through force
can similarly be expected to fail. This time though, the cost to global
stability and human well-being would be much higher. Mr. President,
turn
back!

All of us
urging Bush to turn back failed, and on March 19-20, 2003 the first
waves of the US invasion force started pounding Iraq. 

The carnage and social collapse that Iraq has seen since then have
exceeded even my worst expectations,which had previously been
‘seasoned’ by having experienced six years of Lebanon’s civil
war up close and very personal in the 1970s.

There a number of reasons for that, I think.  One is that the
Lebanese have always, as a people relying on trade and on cultivation
in the valleys of inhospitable mountains, been deeply distrustful of
government, so many elements of their society never relied on the
existence of a central government for very much of anything. 
Iraq, by contrast, is an ancient riverine culture in which central
government regulation of many aspects of economic life is deeply
engrained into the national culture.  Add to that 30 years of
Baathist authoritarianism (and 12 years of tough international
sanctions), which between them deepended Iraqis’ dependence on
government for many basic necessities of life… And you can see how
the collapse of central government had so much more drastic an effect
on the lives of ordinary people in Iraq than an anlogous collapse had
earlier had in Lebanon…

Secondly, the amounts and kinds of weaponry at the disposal of the
local militias and fighting forces have been a quantum leap more lethal
than anything the fighting parties in Lebanon ever had access to.

In both cases, external occupying powers have worked hard to stir the
pot of internal divisiveness in pursuit of their own policies iof
‘divide-and-rule’…

Anyway, just going back to what I was writing there in the early months
of 2003, I’d like to note the following:

1. Very sadly, all
my dire warnings proved correct.  The exuberant enthusiasm of
those deeply ignorant souls who promised us ‘cake-walks’ and rapturous
greetings with rice and flowers proved to have no substance at all.

2. Where has been ‘accountability’ in all this??  The thing that
rankles for me, most of all, is that the ‘international community’
(whatever that is) rewarded
Paul Wolfowitz, who had been one of the pleading architects and
implementers of the war, with an appointment as President of the World Bank. 
This is madness, madness– if the ‘world community’ wants to say
anything serious at all about (a) the strength of the norm it places on
the avoidance of war, and (b) the value it places on the work of the
World Bank.

The World Bank does much-needed work in many areas of the world where
war is recent, or is a current and recurring threat.  How can it
have any credibility working in such zones– on all its programs for
the ‘peaceful resolution of conflicts’, etc etc– if it has at its head
a man so terribly tainted by the forceful role he played in fashioning
and carrying out a policy of unbridled militarism in Iraq?

(I could also ask how much his salary is in that very comfortable and
powerful perch… compared to the pathetic little shreds of income that
I and most other consistent critics of the war policy are currently
able to pull in.)

Of course, most other architects of the war policy have also been well
rewarded, going on to think-tanks, universities, and consultancies
(oftentimes, with arms manufacturers or arms dealers) that pay them
well.  Those facts
hurt, yes, but they have less to tell us about the values of the
‘international community’ of which the World Bank is a part than does
Paul W’s continuing employment there.

3.  I did write in early 2003 about the dangers that the Bushites’
unilateral and quite unjustified invasion of Iraq posed to the
functioning and integrity of the United Nations system.  That is
still a strong concern for me, though the unraveling of the UN has not
been as serious or as speedy as I had feared.

However, the weakness of the UN is already quite serious enough that
the many pleas I have voiced that the UN be given a serious role in
helping to de-escalate the conflict in Iraq and provide a politically
‘legitimate’ framework within which the US can pull out its troops do
seem less convincing, and more problematic, than they otherwise
would.  Of course, the fact that the Bushites have been able to
suborn the UN into acting as their junior partner in some key aspects
of Middle East diplomacy– primarily by enlisting the UN as a junior
partner in the time-wasting, doomed-to-failure ‘Road Map’ scheme– has
also considerably underrmined both the integrity of the UN process and
the political credibility it is able to project within the Middle East.

Evidently, the UN is at a slowly evolving turning-point.  The
Bushites’ actions have forced the world’s other powers to make a
choice: Do they want a world that is, in fact, ruled by a single
American hegemon, or do they want to try to revive the rules-based,
international equality-based approach of the earlier UN?  (Put
crudely: When will the Chnese, the Russians, and the other powers call
in their chips, sell their large stores of US Treasury bills, and push
the US back to punching at its own weight in international affairs–
which on a population basis, is around 5% of the total?  This is
unlikely to happen soon– the other big powers are doing nicely with
the world economy the way it is; and they have little interest in
giving Washington too much help to stop the diminution of US military
power that is continuing at a fast rate, day by day, inside
Iraq…   It is only the poor bloody Iraqis who are
suffering, for now.)

There is a lot more to write, too.  I want to write more about the
historical precedents for the US’s current experience of ‘imperial
over-reach’ inside Iraq… In those early 2003 CSM columns I mentioned
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the US’s earlier experience
in Vietnam.  But I did not mention Britain (and France)’s
experience during the invasion of Gaza, Sinai, and Suez in 1956; and
the role that Britain’s experience there, in particular, had in
catalyzing and hastening London’s withdrawal from (nearly) all the rest
of its imperial holdings around the world, over theyears that
followed…  Or apartheid South Africa’s bruising experiences
during its war against Angola in the 1980s… Or the Soviet Union’s
experience in Afghanistan from 1989 on… (or Israel’s experience in
Lebanon in 2006?)

In those other instances, that I had failed to mention in the columns,
the setbacks experienced during one discrete military-imperial
adventure had consequences for the military-imperial power that were considerably broader than in just
that single territory they had attacked.

I definitely need to do a more serious study, sometime, of this
phenomenon of imperial
over-reach leading very rapidly to imperial rollback or even the
collapse of empire.


How far will the rollback of US power extend in the wake of this
still-ongoing debacle in Iraq?

(I have other things I need to write about too… including, what the
exact motors are of the current political developments inside Wasington
DC… something that, I have found in my travels, many non-Americans
seem to have only a rather fuzzy notion about…  But for now, I
have to run…  Back posting here again soon, I hope.)