Helena – Page 164 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Palestinian unity government formed

Congratulations to the negotiators of Fateh and Hamas who have been able to reach agreement on a governmental list that will be presented to the Legislative Council for a (now merely formal) vote of approval on Saturday.
In the ultra-sensitive post of Interior Minister will be Hani al-Kawasmi. The head of Fateh’s parliamentary bloc, Azzam Ahmed, will be vice-premier to Ismail Haniyeh’s premier. My old buddy Ziad Abu Amr will (as previously agreed) be the Foreign Minister; Salam Fayad will be at Finance. Mustafa Barghouti will be information minister, etc etc…
There are some great choices here.
The Hamas website in Arabic tells us that French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy has sent an official message to Abu Amr congratulating him on the formation of the national unity Government and expressing the hope that the two could hold a meeting soon (no date given), in either Paris or the OPTs.
(The text of the ‘appointment letter’, agreed in Mecca February 9, by which PA Pres Mahmoud Abbas formally invited Haniyeh to form this new unity government, and which sets out the politica parameters for the government, is here.)
I want to recall that almost exactly 12 months ago, when I was in Palestine, the Israelis (and Americans) issued threats “of the most serious nature imaginable” against Ziad Abu Amr, in the event he would agree to join a Hamas-led government; and the threats worked.
This time around, the US has far less coercive power in the region, in general, and Hamas and the Palestinian people have proven that they can’t be broken by the quite inhumane siege that Israel and the US (and also, I note the US-backed governments of Egypt and Jordan, and also nearly all the rest of the international community) maintained around the OPTs. So things are noticeably different.
In Israel, however, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said his government would continue to boycott the PA government and encourage other countries to do the same because its program falls short of the conditions that the US-dominated “Quartet” set for its acceptance:

“Unfortunately the new Palestinian government seems to have said no to the three benchmarks of the international community,” Regev said. “Accordingly, Israel will not deal with this new government and we hope the international community will stand firmly by its own principles and refuse to deal with a government that says no to peace and no to reconciliation.”

One thing that always strongly puzzled me about the “Quartet” was why on earth the United Nations– which is supposed to be the organization that upholds fairness and the over-arching rule of law at the global level, ever allowed itself to be drawn into acting as the subordinate of the Bush administration in the Bushites’ very one-sided pursuit of a pro-Israeli agenda.
Maybe now, finally, enough European and other powers will be distancing themselves from the one-sided approach of the Bushites that the UN can start playing a much more constructive role in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy?
In fact, maybe it’s time– coming up as we are for 40 years into Israel’s very damaging pursuit of its settlement projects in the OPTs and in Syria’s Golan region– for the U.N. Secretary-General to convene an authoritative international conference to resolve finally, once and all, all the still-unresolved tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict, on the basis of international law and the UNSC’s many well-known resolutions.
Why would any sane person want to stand in the way of that?

London, Coventry, (Oxford)

I haven’t posted much here lately… Mostly because I’ve been busy catching up with old friends and colleagues here in England, and also traveling around a little and meeting some interesting new people.
Tuesday night I had dinner with my niece Rachel Clements, who’s what the Brits call an “A&E” doctor (what Americans call an ER doc.) Rachel is extremely smart, fit, and fearless: she works with the London Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, rushing around London in a chopper to rescue people in extremely dire straits … Well, they only use the chopper in the daytime. At night, she rushes around in a car with the paramedic on the team driving her. And okay, though I said ‘rushing around’, she did tell me over a great Italian dinner that a lot of the time on her shifts is spent waiting for the next call.
It was great to reconnect with Rachel, and really interesting to hear her talking with conviction and self-understanding about the challenges of her work, how she deals with the tough emotions it induces, and so on.
I told her how much I admire her, and admire the fact that she actually is out there, every day, saving lives, while as for the rest of us– ?
I would like to think that what I do might help to prevent future wars and all the suffering and death that wars always, without exception, bring in their train… But to be honest our track record in preventing the past ones has been really, really poor.
What more can we do to prevent the launching of a US war-of-choice against Iran?
We’re coming up to the fourth anniversary of launching the war-of-choice against Iraq, and I’m planning to write something to mark that occasion. A good time to reflect.
And later in the year, we’re coming up to the 40th anniversary of Israel’s launching of the ‘pre-emptive’ war of 1967 that set in train 40 years of rule-by-military-occupation over Golan and Palestine…
Anyway, yesterday I came to Coventry, in the heart of England,. where I spent the afternoon teaching a class for Prof. Andrew Rigby, the Director of the Centre for Peace & Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University. I talked mainly about my work on the Amnesty After Atrocities book, the conclusions I had drawn from it, etc. The student body was amazing! About two dozen of them, nearly all overseas students, with a very broad range of life experiences and all very articulate, thoughtful, and smart. It seems like an amazing center they have here.
Andrew’s on the editorial board of Peace News, too.
Today I’m returning to London via Oxford, where I’m having lunch with Avi Shlaim, at St. Antony’s College.

West’s relations with Syria starting to thaw

US Assistant Secretary of State for Migration Affairs Ellen Sauerbrey was in Damascus yesterday, discussing the situation of the million-plus Iraqi citizens who have found a temporary refuge there.
The Kuwaiti news agency reported that State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said that,

Sauerbrey called on Syria to work with the Iraqi government and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “to provide protection and assistance for refugees from Iraq that are in Syria.”

This hortatory tone sounds particularly inappropriate, given that Syria’s 20 million people and their government have given, on balance, a remarkably warm welcome to the displaced Iraqis who have fled there, while the USA, a very rich country with 15 times Syria’s population has admitted something like 450 Iraqi refugees over the whole of the past four years.
Also, it was the US invasion and occupation of Iraq that sparked the strife that has sent so many millions of Iraqis fleeing. And the US, as occupying power there, still bears the responsibility under international law to assure the protection of the safety of all Iraqis… which they have notably failed to do.
Sauerbrey’s visit is the highest profile visit by any Bush administration official to Syria since the US “recalled” its ambassador from Damascus in the aftermath of the killing of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri in Beirut in February 2005. There ensued two years of a strong attempt by the Bushites to encircle and isolate the Syrian regime, an attempt that was punctuated by periodic calls from powerful neocons for outright “regime change” in Damascus …
Now, finally, the admninistration has concluded that it needs to start engaging with Damascus, at least to some extent. (On Saturday, Syrian, Iranian, and US representatives all took part in the 12-party regional stabilization meeting held in Baghdad.)
When I interviewed Syrian FM Walid Mouallem in Damascus on February 28, he was modestly optimistic about the prospects of a thaw in US-Syrian relations. (See also the latter two portins of this interview, here and here.)
For his part, Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Shara has seemed a little more cautious than Mouallem. He told reporters in Cairo that

In another sign of the slow thaw in Syria’s relations with the west, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, is expected in Damascus any moment now.
Meanwhile, Josh Landis is carrying on his blog the full text of an article that the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha, recently penned.
Moustapha gives quite a lot of details about various overtures the Syrian government made to Washington, offering to provide security coordination regarding Iraq, but says at least two of these offers– made in March and September 2004– were brusquely rebuffed by the Bushites.
He concludes:

Syria firmly believes that the only way to achieve progress in Iraq is through the political engagement of all parties, without exception or exclusion. This includes all Iraqi factions, regional neighbors of Iraq, and international players with interest in stabilizing the situation in Iraq. A strategy of consensus and dialogue is the only way forward. Syria can play a constructive role if such a path is adopted.

Let’s hope everyone else can also start to play a constructive role?

Reidar Visser on Basrawis and oil; other oil questions

Our esteemed friend Reidar Visser has another great writing now available on the question of the thorny relationship between the people of the Shiite-dominated ‘Deep South’ of Iraq and their co-religionists in the more central Shiite heartland, especially over the issue of oil.
Visser’s excellent training as a historian– and a historian of southern Iraq, in particular– stands him in good stead there as he teases apart and analyzes the recent and current political trends at work in the Iraqi Deep South… which just happens to be the part of the country in which the vast bulk of the country’s proven oil reserves are located.
In regard to questions of oil location and potential versions of decentralization vs. centralism in Iraq, I just note that at a session on Iraq that I attended last Friday at Chatham House here in London, the point was underlined that with or without Kirkuk, the Kurdish-dominated north of the country still has far, far less oil in its land than the south (especially the Deep South)… And that therefore there are some Kurds who quite credibly argue that from the economic point of view their people would do better to count on having a population-proportionate amount of revenue from the oil resources of a still centralized Iraqi state than by getting the revenue only from “their own” oil resources up there in the north.
Interesting…
Anyway, here is the bottom line in Reidar’s piece:

[E]ven with [the] strong pressures in the direction of territorial sectarianism, signs of local resistance remain. Exhausted by experimentation with regional schemes, many Shi‘i citizens of Basra today simply favor the restoration of a central Baghdad government that can deliver security and services. Others still cling to the “southern region” project, despite a potentially fateful lack of progress in recruiting support among the secularists, Sunnis and Christians of Basra. Even the wild pan-Islamism of Ahmad al-Hasan survives. In the long run, these alternative visions may not derail the sectarian scheme and its powerful sponsors, but they will certainly delay it. In fact, they might prompt experienced actors like Iran, which probably takes a more nuanced view of the Iraqi scene than do many Western analysts, to distribute their bets more evenly, on a wider range of players on the Iraqi scene. In spite of extreme pressures from an increasingly violent political environment, projects like these will carry on an intellectual heritage that discourages many Shi‘a from thinking about their religious community in terms of crescents, rectangles or, indeed, any kind of cartographical projection.

Do go read the whole text. You can post comments and probably engage Reidar in discussion on it here.

What do we mean by ‘Justice’ and ‘Accountability’?

(This post has been cross-posted at ‘Transitional Justice Forum’)

Two of the key watchwords used by people who argue for war-crimes
prosecutions in the aftermath of atrocity are the need for “justice”
and “accountability.” Yet it seems to me that many of these
people construe both these concepts in a narrow and essentially
backward-looking way that often has the effect of keeping people in
communities that are struggling to escape from very serious recent, or
even ongoing, political conflict mired in the grievances and
blame-games of the past rather than investing their energies in
figuring out how to build a rule-of-law-resecting political system
going forward and then working together to build it.

This is one of the major conclusions I have reached after reflecting
deeply on the findings of my recent book Amnesty After Atrocity?: Healing Nations
after Genocide and War Crimes. In the book I compared
the
effectiveness of the policies that three sub-Saharan countries adopted
at the point, in the early 1990s, when they were trying to bring to an
end long-running political conflicts that had been marked by the
widespread commission of very grave atrocities. The three
countries were Mozambique, whose two major political movements in late
1992 concluded a General Peace Agreement (GPA) that ended the civil war
that had beset their country since 1977; South Africa, whose
major political movements agreed on the holding, in April 1994, of the
country’s first-ever one-person-one-vote democratic election, bringing
to an end 40 years of apartheid and 350 strife-torn years of colonial
rule; and Rwanda, where in July-August 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF) won a decisive battlefield victory that brought to an end
four
years of armed civil conflict that culminated in the three months of
the anti-Tutsi genocide committed by their ‘Hutu Power’ opponents.

As each of those conflicts came to an end (or, more realistically, a
conflict termination ‘opportunity’), these countries’ new,
post-settlement rulers each pursued a very different approach to the
challenge of dealing with the legacies of the recent atrocities.
In Rwanda, both the national government and the international community
pursued policies dominated by the need for war-crimes
prosecutions. In Mozambqiue, the post-GPA government was bound by
one of the provisions of the GPA that stipulated that a blanket amnesty
be granted to all who had committed criminal acts during the civil
war. Instead of launching any war-related prosecutions, the
government focused on disarming and demobilizing as many as possible of
the former combatants from both sides and reintegrating them as quickly
as possible into normal civilian life. This policy, known as
‘DDR’ in standard U.N. jargon, was enthusiastically supported by the
international community which underwrote most of the funding needed for
it. In South Africa, the post-democratization government was
similarly bound by an agreement concluded during the pre-settlement
negotiations that promised that an amnesty would be provided to all who
had committed criminal acts during the conflict. In South
Africa’s case, subsequent legislation spelled out that these amnesties,
and the resulting immunity from criminal prosecution, would be offered
only to those who individually applied for them to a special committee
that was part of the country’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), and then only if they could satisfy that committee
that (1) those acts had been been politically motivated, and (2) they
had also shared fully with the committee everything they knew about
such politically motivated criminal acts committed by themselves or
others during the apartheid era. So the deal there was amnesty in
return for truth-telling.

In my book I examined these varying approaches to dealing with the
perpetrators of past atrocities. In addition, since I was doing
this work some dozen years after those respective political
transitions, I sought to to understand and analyze the effectiveness of
those approaches over those crucial post-conflict years. One
early challenge I came up against was to enquire: effectiveness at
doing what?
Now, I know that many lawyers and legal theorists are reluctant to
apply extrinsic yardsticks to the work of juridical institutions, which
they hold somehow to exist in a rarefied zone of pure deontology far
from the grimy world of politics or history. But for my part,
since I am a long-time participant in the international human-rights
movement, I would hope at the very least that the policies adopted by
the government of any country still reeling from a period of widespread
atrocity commission would lead to a measurable and sustained
improvement in the rule of law situation within that country.

As it happens, there is an institution in New York City that, on a
world-wide, country-by-country basis measures this every year.
This is Freedom House, which each year assesses each
country on a two-headed scale, giving it one number for “political
rights” and another for “civil liberties”. It is a very
specialized way of ranking. The best score a country can win is
“1; 1”, and the worst is “7; 7”; therefore, there are potentially
twelve total intervals of variability between the top score and the
bottom score. I checked the Freedom House rankings for the the three
countries I had studied, for the years 1994 and 2006 (and for several years between), and Idiscovered the
following:

Continue reading “What do we mean by ‘Justice’ and ‘Accountability’?”

Kahanist hate-site taken down

Longtime JWN readers might remember this October 2005 post about a hate-spewing website called “Masada 2000“, which incited its readers to many kinds of violence– especially sexual violence– against Jewish people who dared to speak out against the expansionist policies of the government of Israel. They even listed, and incited hate against, Jewish people whose “crime” was to sign petitions against the Apartheid Barrier!
Then, more recently, the M2000 hate-mongers took on Richard Silverstein, a very dedicated Jewish-American peace activist who lives in Washington State and has a number of blogs, including Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place. Richard wrote about it here…
When I had written about M2000, I huffed and puffed that “someone” should try to get M2000 site taken down from the web. Richard did something about it. Today I got this email from him:

Bsinet.net

Yes, Richard, we will.
And thank you so much, Richard, for having followed up on contacting the site’s web hosts with your complaint. You have made the WWW a noticeable safer place for all of the 8,000 Jewish people of conscience who were listed on that site. (Who included, as I had written earlier, a number of my other friends.)

The US and Iran, in Iraq

One week ago today we were sitting in the lobby of our hotel in Amman,
Jordan, talking with the very smart and well-informed Middle East
analyst Joost Hiltermann about the interactions that US power now has
in and over Iraq with Iraq’s much weightier eastern neighbor,
Iran. (Hiltermann has worked on Iraq-related issues for many
years, including for several years now as the senior Iraq analyst for
the International Crisis Group.)

He said,

Well, the US and Iran agree on two
things inside today’s Iraq– but they disagree on one key thing.

What they agree on, at least until now, is the unity of Iraq, and need
for democracy or at least some form of majority rule there.

What they disagree on is the continued US troop presence there. Because the US basically now wants
to be able to withdraw those troops, and Iran wants them to stay!

He conjectured that the main reason Iran wants the US troops to stay in
Iraq is because they are deployed there, basically, as sitting ducks
who would be extremely vulnerable to Iranian military retaliation in
the event of any US (or Israeli) military attack on Iran. They
are, in effect, Iran’s best form of insurance against the launching of
any such attack.

I have entertained that conjecture myself, too, on numerous occasions
in the past. So I was interested that Hiltermann not only voiced
it, but also framed it in such an elegant way. (For my part, I am
slightly less convinced than he 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.)

From this point of view, we might conclude that the decisionmakers in
Teheran– some of whom are strategic thinkers with much greater
experience and even technical expertise than anyone in the current Bush
administration– would be seeing the possibility of “allowing” the US
to withdraw its troops from Iraq only within the context of the kind of
“grand bargain” that Teheran seeks. The first and overwhelmingly
most important item in that “grand bargain” would be that Washington
credibly and irrevocably back off from any thought of pursuing a
strategy of regime change inside Iran or from any threats of military
force against it.

Under this bargain, Washington would need to agree, fundamentally, that
despite serious continuing disagreements in many areas of policy, it
would deal with the regime that exists in Teheran– as in earlier
decades it dealt with the regime that existed in the Soviet Union–
rather than seeking to overthrow it. Teheran might well also ask
for more than that– including some easing of the US campaign against
it over the nuclear issue, etc. But I believe there is no way the
mullahs in Teheran could settle for any less than a basic normalization
of working relations with Washington– that would most likely be
exemplified by the restoration of normal diplomatic relations between
the two governments– in return for “allowing” the US troops to
withdraw from Iraq.

There are numerous paradoxes here. Not only has Washington’s wide
distribution of its troops throughout the Iraq has become a strategic
liability, rather than an asset, but now the heirs of the same Iranian
regime that stormed the US Embassy in the 1970s and violated all the
norms of diplomatic protocol by holding scores of diplomats as hostages
there are the ones who are, essentially, clamoring for the restoration
of diplomatic relations with Washington.

… Meantime, however, a great part of the steely, pre-negotiation
dance of these two wilful powers is being played out within the borders
of poor, long-suffering Iraq. For the sake of the Iraqis, I hope
Washington and Teheran resolve their issues and move to the normal
working relationship of two fully adult powers as soon as possible.

One last footnote here. I do see some intriguing possibilities
within the Bushites’ repeated use of the mantra that “All options are
still on the table” regarding Iran. Generally, that has been
understood by most listeners (and most likely intended by its utterers) to mean
that what is “on the table of possibilities” is all military options– up to
and perhaps even including nuclear military options, which the Bushites
have never explicitly taken off the table with regard to Iran.

But why should we not also interpret “all options” to include also all diplomatic options?
That would certainly be an option worth pursuing.

(This post has been cross-posted to the Nation’s blog, The Notion.)

Hoagie mentions possible Cheney resignation

I just Delicious-ed this piece in today’s WaPo from erstwhile Iraq war uber-hawk Jim Hoagland… But I clicked the Delicious before I read to the end of the piece, where Jimbo raises the intriguing possibility that Cheney might resign…. not because the Prez hasn’t been taking his advice much recently, but because,

Bush… desperately now needs a vice president in stable physical, emotional and political health. That is the equation you want to be watching.

Hoagland is a very well-connected guy. This is getting interesting.

CSM column on Syria

Here is the column I had in the CSM today. (It is also here.) The editors put this title on it: The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues; Damascus seems willing to work with the US on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq.
The timing is actually great, since Saturday will see the 12-party conference in Baghdad involving the ambassadors of Syria, Iran, all Iraq’s other neighbors, Iraq, the US, and the other permanent members of the security Council.
By the way, I also have a piece in Le Monde Diplo this month. But I don’t think you can read it online… It’s about Gen. Petraeus.
Dedicated readers of JWN will find most of the material in both these articles fairly familiar, since as you might have guessed I use the blog to archive my notes and interviews and to try out ideas in general.

Fragments from Iraq

Iraq is in fragments. Over the period since 2002 the government of my country, the US, took a number
of decisions whose effect
(quite regardless of their intention,
something of which we can speak later) has been to destroy the
country’s state apparatus and institutions and to fracture the dense
network of social and political relationships that previously held it
together.

I am very sorry indeed that I and those other US citizens who knew all
along– based on the understanding that many of us had about the nature
of Iraq, the nature of Middle Eastern societies, and also, yes, the
often quite unexpected effects of the use of military poower–
that the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq would turn out
very badly indeed, and who did what we could to prevent the invasion
from being launched in the first place, were unable to prevent it.

I feel deep shame, as a US citizen, that it is the government of my
country that has visited this death and terrible, terrible destruction
on the people of Iraq. Also, that our President was re-elected,
or as we might say, elected for the first time; but anyway, returned to
the presidency by the citizenry in a generally free polling process– even in the fall of 2004,
once it was already becoming increasingly clear that (1) the invasion
and its after-effects were inflicting increasingly high levels of
death, damage, and destruction on Iraqis, and (2) the WMD ‘pretext’
that had jerked most of the US citizenry, and most of our lawmakers,
into supporting the invasion had zero evidentiary basis and indeed had
been considerably hyped, exaggerating, and one might even say
manufactured by the Bushites.

During the month-long journey in and around three Arab countries that I have just completed, I had
a much starker and more vivid sense of what the destruction of Iraq
must be like and must feel like, for Iraqis. I had already, some
30 years ago, lived through the destriction that prolonged civil war
(and intermittent Israeli attacks) visited on that country. And
now, most recently, here I was again– driving through the settled
fields and olive groves of southern Syria; driving along the canals,
through the date-groves and the new ex-urban conglomerations that ring
Cairo; hearing the call to prayer ring out in a city in northern Jordan
as we passed it; seeing the citizens of all three of these Arab
countries going about their daily business with focus and good humor,
more or less confident (most of them) that they could continue to
pursue this very well-rooted but also remarkably adaptable lifestyle
throughout the months and years ahead, perhaps save a little for their
children’s future, perhaps move a bit toward their long-held dream of
winning more real accountability from their governments, enjoying their
friendships and their webs of relations with people from different
communities, sitting around their coffee-shops and sheesha-houses,
going to their mosques and their many ancient churches… with tomorrow
generally fairly well predictable from today, and crucially, a general
(though not complete) environment of public security and public safety.

And there in Iraq, just a few hundred miles away, people who are very
similar to these Arab citizens in so many ways, and who had been lives
very similar to those I was seeing here, had had all these things taken
brutally from them and were now living (and dying) in a state of
generalized, existential fear and uncertainty.

All the citizens of these other Arab countries with whom I spoke
conveyed passionately to me how deeply, deeply disturbing they found
the developments inside Iraq, especially the more recent rounds of
inter-sectarian killing..

(I read a really cruel and stupid Tom Freidman column recently in which
in his most accusatory and preachy was he was ‘bemoaning’ the alleged
fact that no Arab or Muslim leaders have spoken out against the
sectarian carnage being enacted in Iraq. What complete and utter
nonsense!! Has Tom Friedman actually been to any Arab countries
in recent months and heard what opinion leaders of all sorts are saying
there? Has he even spoken to any Arabs at all in recent weeks,
apart from Mamoun Fandy, whom he quoted there, who lives and works here
in London?)

And the destruction in Iraq all seemed so much more vivid to me, when I
was there so close, and in such a very similar environment.

I realize this is mostly because of my own failure– when I sit in the
distant US of A– of being able vividly enough to imagine the lives and
conditions that the people of Iraq currently have to suffer.

When I was in Syria and Jordan– as recently as last Saturday– I both
wanted to visit with and talk with some of the million-plus Iraqis who,
because of what the US has done to their country, have had to flee
their homes and loves there and rush to those two countries to seek the
raw physical survival of themselves and their families; and I also
feared doing that.

What could I say to such an Iraqi refugee?

I had a few small encounters with Iraqis, in Jordan. But still, I
confess that I found it easier to talk about the Iraqi refugees
with Syrians and Jordanians than I thought I would find it to talk to Iraqi refugees in either
place.

I feel ashamed about that, too.

However, Bill and I did get a chance to sit down and talk in Amman with
two Iraqi friends of fairly long standing. These are people who
have not– yet– fled their country completely. They are people
whom I like and admire a lot, but with whom I have in the past had some
strong disagreements. primarily over the US decision to invade
their country, which both of them supported strongly at the time,
overwhelmingly on human-rights grounds. But because I like
and admire them both so much, and really care about their wellbeing, I
have tried to keep in touch with them as much as all of our busy
schedules have allowed, and I am glad that they have done the
same. Our meeting in Amman last week was the first time I’d seen
them since January 2006. We all had a lot to talk about.

Let me tell you a little about what we discussed with these friends, whom I’ll call ‘T’ and ‘J’…

Continue reading “Fragments from Iraq”