Helena – Page 165 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Thoughts on traveling to London

1. Israel the microcosm

The day before yesterday, in the evening, I went to bed in Cairo.
We woke at 1 a.m., in time to catch a ‘graveyard shift’ flight to
Frankfurt, arriving at breakfast time. Bill headed over to
Prague; our friend Brantly who had been visiting us in Cairo headed
home to Virginia; and I came to London, arriving before noon.

Traveling as we did so (relatively) easily between these countries, and
traversing as we had to the numerous movement-control barriers they maintain–
generally at or near their international airports, or international
borders– I suddenly had a vivid sense that the extremely discriminatory
and damaging movement-control systems Israel maintains in the land it
controls in the West Bank and Gaza may well (and quite rightly) be
criticized by the good, liberal citizens of the rich countries of the
west… But actually, the international order over which these
same western citizens preside is also, itself, in many ways just
a larger version of the system Israel has maintained in the occupied
territories.

Consider this:

Continue reading “Thoughts on traveling to London”

Human rights, democracy, the US, and Syria

(This post has been cross-posted to The Notion.)

I spent a few days in Damascus at the end of February, and was able to get a ground-reality view of the effects of the Bush administration’s (former) campaign for the forced ‘democratization’ of Middle Eastern societies on the work of Syrian citizens with long experience struggling for human rights and democracy in their country.
Bottom line: “Very bad indeed.”
That was the verdict rendered on the Bushites’ ‘democratization’ campaign by Danial Saoud, the President of the venerable Committee for the Defence of Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms in Syria (CDF).
Saoud was himself a political prisoner from 1987 through 1999, and has been President of the CDF since August 2006. He was adamant that what Syria’s rights activists need most of all right now is a resolution of their country’s state of war with Israel.
Speaking of Condoleezza Rice he said,

Her pressure on the regime had a very bad effect for us. Now, for 18-24 months the Americans and Europeans have put a lot of pressure on the regime– but the regime then just pushes harder on us.

Mazen Darwish, who is Saoud’s colleague in the CDF’s three-person Presidential Council, told me,

Before the US invasion of Iraq, people here in Syria liked us, the human rights activists, and we had significant popular sympathy. But since what happened in Iraq, people here say ‘Look at the results of that!’

Saoud stressed that for Syrians, the question of Israel’s continued occupation of Syria’s Golan region itself constitutes a significant denial of the rights of all the Syrian citizens affected– both those who remain in Golan, living under Israeli military occupation rule there, and those who had fled when Israel occupied Golan in 1967 and have had to live displaced from their homes and farms for the 40 years since then. “Golan is Syrian land, and we have all the rights to get it back,” he said.
In addition, he and the other rights activists I talked with pointed to the fact that the continuing state of war between Syria and Israel has allowed the Syrian regime to keep in place the State of Emergency that was first imposed in the country in 1963. “All these regimes in this area say they are postponing the issue of democracy until after they have solved the issues of Golan and Palestine,” he said.

Both men pointed out the numerous contradictions and ambiguities in the policy the US has pursued regarding democratization in Syria. Darwish noted that, “When the US had a good relationship with Syria, in 1991, Danial was in prison– and the US didn’t say anything about that.” These two men, and other rights activists I talked with also noted that more recently, even during the Bushites’ big push for ‘democratization’ in Syria in 2004-2005, the Bushites were still happy to benefit from Syria’s torture chambers by sending some suspected Al-Qaeda people there to be tortured. (Canadian-Syrian dual citizen Maher Arar was only the most famous of these victims. In September 2005, Amnesty International published this additional list.)
Over the past year, two processes have been underway in Syria that seem to confirm these activists’ argument that US pressure on the Damascus regime has been detrimental to their cause. Firstly, the rapid deterioration in the US’s power in the region has considerably diminished Washington’s ability to pressure the Syria regime on any issues, and Damascus has become notably stronger and self-confident than it was a year ago. For some evidence of this, see my latest interview with Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, serialized here, here, and here.
Secondly, over the same period, the situation of human rights activists within the country seems to have improved some.
Saoud told me that the number of (secular) political prisoners in the country is now less than 20. Indeed, the day we talked, about 16 Kurdish and student activists who had been held for less than a month had just been released. He said “No-one knows how many Islamist activists are in detention… We don’t hear about them until they come to court.” He said, “They don’t torture people like Anwar al-Bunni or Michel Kilo, or the others who were detained last year for having signed the Beirut-Damascus Declaration.” He indicated, however, that it was very likely that many of the Islamist detainees had been tortured. (Human Rights Watch’s recently released report for 2006 states that in Syria, “Thousands of political prisoners, many of them members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and the Communist Party, remain in detention.)
… Meanwhile, the main factor dominating political developments in Syria as in the rest of the Middle East, is the continued and extremely painful collapse of conditions inside Iraq. Syrians have watched that collapse in horror. Their country has received and given a temporary refuge to more than a million Iraqis (a considerable burden on their nation, equivalent to the US taking in some 17 million refugees within just a couple of years.) And since Iraq’s collapse has occurred under a Washington-advertised rubric of “democratization”, the whole tragedy in Iraq has tended to give the concept a very bad name, and has caused Arabs and Muslims throughout the Middle East to value political stability much, much more than hitherto.
Under those circumstances, it is very moving to still hear people living in Arab countries talking about the need for democracy. But when they do so, they are very eager to distance themselves from the coerciveness inherent in Washington’s recent ‘democratization’ project. And they all– regime supporters and oppositionists, alike–stress the need for moves toward democratization to grow out the local people’s needs and priorities, rather than the geostrategies pursued by distant Washington.

Mouallem interview, part 3 (final)

This
is the third installment of my write-up of the interview I conducted
with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem in Damascus on February
28. The first two installments appeared in these two earlier JWN
posts: 1, and 2. ~HC.

So, I had been asking Mr. Mouallem about the fate of the many settlers
whom Israel has implanted into the occupied Palestinian and Syrian
territories since 1967, and he had been saying, “To make peace you need
a political decision. The issue is not one of settlers, but their
presence there is used as an excuse
for the lack of political will in Israel”…

I asked again about the question of the settlers, and whether the
presence, now, of nearly 500,000 of them inside the occupied West Bank
(including East Jerusalem) might not make the political question, for
any Israeli government, of effecting a total withdrawal from that
occupied area much more difficult to resolve?

He replied,

You talk about the 500,000 settlers–
but what about the four million Palestinian refugees? How can the
international community be happy with that dispersal of the
Palestinians from their homes but say it cannot easily think about
relocating 500,000 settlers? The existence of the settlements
there doesn’t in any way affect the requirements of international law.

Regarding the negotiations over Golan, the issue of the Israeli
settlements there was raised during our negotiations with Israel. The Israeli
negotiators agreed to remove all those settlers and asked for
compensation for the costs of pulling them out and relocating them.

Whom did they ask this of? I asked.

He replied, “Those who were watching the negotiation”– a clear
reference to the Americans, who were the sole outside
mediators/facilitators of all the bilateral peace negotiations that
Israel held, in parallel, with the Syrians, Palestinians, and
Jordanians in the 1990s.

“If the Israelis had asked us,” Mouallem
added, “we would have countered that request with our own request for
compensation for all the many monetary losses our people suffered as a
result of the occupation of our land.”

However, he noted that that principle of compensation from an outside
party for the costs of relocating Israeli settlers from occupied
territories– a principle that has earlier been applied with respect
both to the settlers Israel withdrew from Sinai in 1982, or from Gaza
in late 2005– could also be applied to settlers being relocated out of
the West Bank in the context of a final Palestinian-Israeli peace.

If a comprehensive peace process is resumed within the coming period, I
asked, did he expect that the Syrians would be able to coordinate more
effectively with the Palestinian negotiators than they had in the
1990s, when Yasser Arafat presided over all aspects of the
Palestinians’ dipliomacy?

Mouallem replied, “I can’t tell, because the Syrian issue is much
easier to resolve than the Palestinian issue. Between 1991 and
2000 we built the structure of the peace agreement on our trac, and we
achieved about 85 percent of the final agreement.”

What about the recent press reports that, between 2004 and summer
2006, a Syrian-American business executive called Ibrahim Soleiman had
conducted some “track two” diplomacy with a group of well-connected
Israeli private citizens, and had passed a number of significant
messages between the governmental authorities in Israel and Syria in an
attempt to exoplore the possibility of a resumption of the negotiations?

“It was a personal issue,” he told me. “Ibrahim Soleiman is an
individual who is keen to see peace between Syria and Israel. But
I have no knowledge of any contacts between him and the Syrian
government.”

Did he have any fears that, if there is a comprehensive
Arab-Israeli peace negotiation, this might make problemns between his
government and Iran?

He replied,

No. We negotiated
with Israel from 1991 through 2000, and we continued to have good
relations with Iran throughout those years. Of course, it’s
possible the Iranians were convinced that the Israelis would never
complete the negotiation– that Prime Minister Shamir had been serious
when he later revealed that his intention, when he participated in the
Madrid conference, was simply to tie the Arab side
up in negotiations for a further ten years without arriving at any
final settlement.

I asked how he saw the position of the present Olmert government in
Israel. He had said earlier he saw it as “weak”– so what did
that portend for the chance of successful negotiations?

I prefer not to look at
individuals but at the movements of public opinion. The Israelis
lack any leadership that is dedicated to creating a peace culture
inside their society and to preparing public opinion for the era of
peace. Now, instead, we see a leadership that plants fear in public opinion, and
prepares the public there for another military confrontation.

But had the Syrian leadership, for its part, done much to create a
culture of peace, I asked?

He said,

During the peace
negotiations, and especially during the summit between President Hafez
al-Asad and President Bill Clinton in Geneva in 1994, President Asad
said clearly that ‘Peace is our strategic option’, and spoke about ‘the
peace of the brave.’ Until now, President Bashar al-Asad
considers this to be a fact.

Addressing another aspect of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, I asked how he
saw the more activist role the Saudi monarchy recently started playing
regarding several aspects of regional diplomacy including the negotiation of the Mecca
Agreement concluded in mid-February between Fateh and Hamas. I
asked whether he considered the Saudis had gone significantly further
in this diplomacy than Washington might have been happy with.

He said merely,

We are happy to see the
Saudis having a dialogue with the representatives of [Lebanese]
Hizbullah, and hosting Hamas and Fateh in Mecca. We’re happy to
see His Majesty the King supporting the Mecca Agreement, which we are
happy with. We’re happy, too, to see them hosting an Arab summit
in Riyadh in the near future. This is the role we should see
Saudi Arabia play, in contributing to increase the stability in the
region.

We’re also happy to see them undertaking a dialogue with Iran.

At the beginning of our meeting– before he told me “So now, you can
ask me anything you like!”– Mouallem had made a quick introductory
statement summing up how he saw his country’s present position.
“We have passed the period of imposed isolation,” he said, with evident
relief. “Why it was imposed on us, I still don’t know.”

He continued,

The problem we face is that
the Israelis always try to resolve issues by force, and this has led to
the absence of peace for many decades. We see that the US policy
has also, similarly, involved a reliance on force– in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, and in this current mobilization against Iran.

We believe that without a political regime in the region [by which I
understood him to mean a coordinated political-diplomatic approach to problem
solving], you can’t resolve issues or find stability. This has
been demonstrated clearly– in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and
Palestine. You even need a political regime in the ‘War on
Terror’.

Without a political dialogue with the relevant parties in this region,
the Middle East won’t ever see stability.

Is the current instability seving America’s interrests or the region’s
interests? It is surely not.

They tried to tell us about some projects they had, like the Greater
Middle East, or the ‘New’ Middle East, or the alliance among ‘moderate’
countries in the Middle East. But what is their definition of
‘moderate’? Is it a country that supports an ignorant American
policy on regional issues?

You find many questions along these lines being asked in the streets in
the whole of this region. Why has the American reputation reached
such an unprecedentedly low level in so many countries in and beyond
the Middle East?

No-one in the administration has yet answered this.

Toward the end of the interview, I returned to the question of the
United States’ current position in the Middle East, including the
status of the campaign it pursued in 2004 and 2005 for democratization
throughout the region; and I asked how he saw Washington’s position now.

He replied,

Nobody in this part of the
world is against democracy. But still, the people of the region
have our own priorities– and the first priority for us is to
liberate the Golan Heights and end the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Because this on its own would have profound political, economic, and
social consequences on Syrian life.

We want to see the Middle East stable and secure. We want to see
Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine all stand up! This, for any Syrian,
is a priority. And this will lead to other priorities, like
democratization.

I asked his reaction to reports I had heard that some
officials in the Bush administration, including Deputy National
Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, had indicated that they gave such a
high priority to democratization and regime change in Syria that they
had argued that the present, Baath Party-dominated government in Syria should not be “rewarded”
by being engaged in a peace process that would almost certainly lead to
the return of Golan to Syrian control.

He said,

If Mr. Abrams said so, this
means that in his lifetime he hates to see peace.

When Israel conquered the Golan, did it do so on behalf of peace and
democratization– or on behalf of conquering and expansion?

You should ask Mr. Abrams if what’s happening in Iraq is
democratization. The average number of people killed every day in
Iraq is 60 to 70 people. So many Iraqis are now obliged to choose
between being killed and leaving their country. And this is
democratization?

People like Mr. Abrams damaged the cause of democratization more than
any others. Because democracy is an important way to govern a
country– but only if you respect each country’s priorities and needs.

We finished the meeting with some small talk. He and
his key media advisor Bushra Kanafani talked a little about the
dangers they faced during the trip the two of them– and one other
Foreign Ministry official, Ahmed Arnous– had made to Baghdad last
November.

Throughout our whole meeting, Mouallem projected a clear sense of
relief that, in his view, the president whom he serves and the
government of which he is a part had successfully survived a period of
some danger and political uncertainty, and was now prepared to be
somewhat gracious and understanding in the way it deals with the United
States and other western and pro-western powers in the period ahead.

I gathered this same impression of a government and regime that feels a
new (if still not yet complete) sense of self-confidence from
all the other contacts I had during my three-day visit to
Damascus. Those included contacts with a number of members of the
country’s liberal political opposition. Indeed, I was struck by
how similar some of the key the arguments– and even the language– I
heard from them was to that I heard from Mouallem. But I shall
write more about that, later.

Mouallem interview, part 2: Iraq, Lebanon, peace process

On
February 28, I conducted a 70-minute interview in Damascus with
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem. Mr. Mouallem spoke about
numerous issues including Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian question, the Arab-Israeli peace process, Saudi Arabia’s new diplomatic activism, the American role in the
region, and bilateral Syrian-US realtions. Yesterday, I was able
to write a JWN post that contained the central points of what
he said about Iraq. Now, I shall write up what I can of the rest
of the interview, though I might not get it all finished in this post
before my next meeting here in Amman. ~HC

Last November, Mr.
Mouallem headed a small Syrian delegation that, at the invitation of
the Iraqi government, made a short visit to Baghdad. Then in
January, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani made a multi-day state visit to
Damascus– the first time an Iraqi leader had visited Syria for nearly
30 years. (So long as there was a Baath Party government in Iraq
the two Baath Party leaderships, there and in Syria, pursued a very
harsh competition with each other, which seemed to be exacerbated by
the fact that each claimed to be the ‘authentic’ successor to the
mantle of the Baathist version of pan-Arabism. During that
period, Mr. Talabani and many, many other members of what were then
opposition movements much hunted and oppressed by the Saddam Hussein
regime, had made their homes in Damascus.)

In Damascus on Wednesday, Mouallem expressed his concern about the
medical crisis that two days earlier had sent Talabani rushing to Amman
for urgent medical treatment. “I certainly wish him a speedy and
full recovery,” Mouallem said, describing Talabani as “an important
leader.”

Mouallem made a number of other significant statements about Iraq, in
addition to the ones reported here on JWN
earlier. As noted there, he did decline to specify the total
length of the timetable for the total US withdrawal from Iraq that he
said Syria sought. He said instead that that timetable should be
determined primarily by the length of time it would take to rebuild the
Iraqi national forces on a truly nationalist basis– “and we should
make this the timetable.”

He said that the challenge of social and political reconstruction in
Iraq could not be compared with any other cases–

because of the multiplicity of
ethnicities in Iraq and also because of terrible legacy left by
[onetime US administrator L. Paul] Bremer’s many mistakes there.

No-one can completely dismantle an entire army and send all the troops
and the trained officers onto the streets! And there was no logic
to the complete dismantling of the Baath Party that Bremer
ordered. Iraq needs
a nationalist movement as a counter-balance to its different religious
movements.

No-one could think of legislation that dismantled the civil service
corps of all the ministries.

Once, when [US Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage came here, I
asked him what kind of staffing they had at that point in any of the
Iraqi ministries. And he told me there were only five or six
people left in each one!

Also, the new Constitution in Iraq is not giving assurances for Iraq’s
unity.

Now, we have the issue of Kirkuk coming up. This is a major
issue! Why are the Iraqis and Americans not making Kirkuk into an
example of tolerance and coexistence for the future of all of
Iraq? Why are the Americans not helping to lower the sectarianism
in Iraq?

We have an enormous fear of sectarian fitna
[social breakdown]. This type of conflict can be endless and is
always a recipe for division. For this reason, President Bashar
al-Asad sent me to many countries to mobilize political and religious
efforts to prevent this from spreading in the region.

We in Syria are proud that
we are a country of tolerance and coexistence without any discrimination
on a religious or ethnic basis.

I asked Mouallem how he saw the continuing political crisis in another
key neighboring country, Lebanon. He said,

The stability of Lebanon is important
to Syria, and we are also very concerned about Lebanon for humanitarian
reasons.

During the war against Lebanon last summer we received more than
300,000 Lebanese citizens here in Syria. We opened our homes to
them! And we also received more than 400,000 foreigners who had
been in Lebanon and needed to leave the country quickly. We
helped them to move on to their home countries from here.

We worked night and day to deal with this. This affected us here
in Syria so much!

You know that according to the Lebanese Constitution, the country
cannot be ruled by a majority that rules over a minority, but only by
coexistence and consensus. We hope the Lebanese themselves can
solve the present situation on this basis. I am optimistic that
they can do it. The Lebanese have to depend on themselves.
If they can’t do it, no-one can help them.

The special investigation team charged with investigating the February
2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri has
been continuing its work. Earlier reports from the team have
indicated– though not conclusively– some official Syrian role in the
killing. How did Mouallem see the prospects regarding this team’s upcoming
reports?

We are working closely with the
investigation, because reaching the truth on this matter is in our
vital interest.

The prospect of having a court to try those named as suspects is a
purely Lebanese issue, and it a point of contention among the Lebanese
themselves.

The demand of the Lebanese opposition is simple. It wants a
larger government there, and to be allotted eleven of the government’s
30 members. And the issue of the court would then be on that
government’s agenda.

The court itself is not an issue for us. The issue for us is to
prevent others from using
the court issue in a politicized way.

I asked him about the role the French government has played since the
summer of 2004 regarding the Lebanese issue, and Syria’s involvement in
Lebanon. “It is not France’s role as such, but President Chirac’s
policy that concerns us,” he said. “That policy seems negative to
us in Syria. Maybe it stemmed from his personal friendship with
Hariri or from other causes. We don’t understand why Chirac
adopted that policy.”

In the 1990s, Mouallem had played a key role in the diplomacy on the
Syrian-Israeli “track” of the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, first of
all by virtue of his position as Syria’s ambassador in Washington, and
later when he stepped in to lead the Syrian team that negotiated with
Israel until the spring of 1996. (The course of those
negotiations between 1991 and 1996 were the topic of a book I published
with the U.S. Institute of Peace Press in 2000– you can find further
details of this book, including ordering information, through this page on my home
website. Mouallem was one key source for that work, having
allowed me to conduct numerous, on-the-record interviews with him on
the topic between 1996 and 1998.)

That diplomacy was interrupted by Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s
withdrawal from the peace talks in 1996, and was later briefly resumed
by Ehud Barak after he became Israel’s Prime Minister in 1999.
But after a summit meeting held in Geneva in 2000 it all fell apart
again, largely because Barak retracted the offer that PM Rabin had held
out in almost authoritative way back in 1994-95, that in the context of
a full peace with Syria, including wideranging economic and security
provisions, Israel would withdraw from the whole of the territory in
Syrian Golan that it has held under military occupation since 1967…

In Damascus on Wednesday, I asked Mouallem about his current hopes for
the resumption of the peace diplomacy with Israel.

He said,

We never interrupted this peace
process, ever since the Madrid Conference in 1991. Our question
is always, “Is this process real?”

There was a narrow window after the war on Lebanon last summer, and
President Bashar al-Asad made many interviews saying he was ready to
widen it. Sadly, the response from Israel and from the American
administration wasn’t encouraging. Indeed, if we believe the
press reports, the US intervened with the Israelis to prevent them from testing
our seriousness. Why?

We see the Olmert government as a weak government, and usually weak
governments leave their security and diplomatic policy in the hands of
others.

We didn’t see this US administration put on the agenda the need for a
comprehensive peace.

I asked about the obstacle posed to hopes for peace by the increasingly
large presence of Israeli settlers who have been implanted into the
occupied Syrian and Palestinian territories with the support of
successive Israeli governments. How could the settlers be dealt with?

He replied,

According to international law, you
can’t create de-facto facts on other people’s territories or change the
heritage or status of these territories, because sooner or later you
are still obliged to withdraw from them. This was quite clearly
laid out in Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle
of the exchange of land for peace that they embodied.

Given the particularly heavy presence of Israeli settlers within the
Palestinian West Bank, I asked if he still saw the possibility for the
Palestinians to be able to establish a viable national state there.

To make peace you need a political
decision. The issue is not one of settlers, but their presence
there is used as an excuse
for the lack of political will in Israel.

(Regrettably I need to go to another meeting, so I’ll break off the
interview here and get back to it when I can. More, later.
~HC)

Syrian Foreign Minister Mouallem on Iraq, etc

“The day after any military attack against Iran would be a
disaster– not just for the Middle East region, but for international
stability.” This was the clear warning I heard voiced by Syria’s
Foreign Minister, Walid al-Mouallem, during a 70-minute interview I
conducted with him in Damascus on February 28.

I had asked Mr. Mouallem whether he had any fears of an imminent
military attack against either his country, or Iran. “About
Syria, I don’t have any such fear,” he said.

But regarding Iran, it’s more
complicated. There is no logical analysis that could support the
idea of such illogical behavior. But honestly, no-one can claim
to predict the behavior of this American administration.

For example, they are saying all the time, ‘All options are open’, and
they are mobilizing all these forces. No-one knows why!

And then, no-one knows what will happen the day after any attack on
Iran. Especially, since the Americans didn’t have any strategy
for the day after the invasion of Iraq!

The day after any military attack against Iran would be a
disaster– not just for the Middle East region, but for international
stability. Think of the effect on oil prices, and the effects
that would have on Europe and Japan, and on the stability of the
economies of all the Gulf countries. Think of the consequences of
Iran’s possible acts of retaliation against American interests
worldwide. What would be the effects on the ‘Global War on
Terror’? What would happen to American soldiers in Iraq and in
Afghanistan? These are the questions that need to be answered
before there is any military decision.

I hope there will be no
military decision. These differences can be solved through
political means, through direct negotiations.

I asked his view of the meeting planned for Baghdad March 10, where a
representative of the U.S. administration will sit down for the first time with
representatives of both Syria and Iran. (The Iraqi
government has invited all of its neighbors and all five members
of the Security Council to this conference.)

Mouallem confirmed that his deputy would
be attending the meeting. He added,

The idea of the meeting is to
rally the goodwill of the neighboring countries and to express support
for Iraq’s security and stability. For Syria, it’s our vital
interest to achieve security and stability in Iraq. In Syria, we
have more than a million displaced Iraqis. They are a real burden
on our economy, and on our education and healthcare systems.
We’re not getting any support from anyone for this– including the
Iraqi government.

This is a humanitarian issue, and it’s increasing in gravity on a daily
basis, because of the terrible security situation in Iraq.

He explained that because Syria hopes that these displaced persons
can speedily return to their homes in Iraq, his government is reluctant
to refer to them as refugees, calling them instead “displaced perople.”

Mouallem described the Bush administration’s decision to attend the
Baghdad conference as,

a partial step in the correct
direction. But it’s not the full step we are expecting Washington
to reach to. The full step will be when the Americans decide to
have a comprehensive dialogue on regional issues, starting with the
Arab-Israeli issue, which is the core issue in the region.

Had he seen any signs yet that this was happening?

I haven’t seen any yet. The only
positive signs we’ve seen from America have been the Baker-Hamilton
report and some signs coming from some of the members of the Senate and
Congress who have been visiting, and from some scholars.

I asked what policies Syria supported in order to
de-escalate the tensions in Iraq.

I’m not a military man, but I read the
news daily. And I don’t see any news from Iraq or Afghnaistan
that tells me the situation is good…

We speak about the need for an agreed timetable for a US withdrawal
from Iraq– agreed between the US and the Iraqi government.

This timetable would have two or three dimensions: One for the
rebuilding of the Iraqi forces, with a timetable that allows Iraqi
units to replace the foreign forces there. The second would be
that it would provide a hope
for the many Iraqis resisting occupation, to tell them not to use force
because they could be sure that by a fixed date they would see the
independence and unity of Iraq. So that would help the job of
rebuilding the security forces. Thirdly, this would announce that
it is a duty for the Iraqi forces and also for all of Iraq’s neighbors
to help assure this process.

We are not talking this way about a withdrawal in order to offend any
party, but it’s our thinking based on the realities there.

… No-one is thinking about imposing defeat on the US
forces. On the contrary, we are trying to find an honorable
withdrawal for them. Thus we say the timetable should be agreed
with the Iraqi authorities. Of course, it must be a total
withdrawal, since one of our central goals is to achieve Iraqi
sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity, in accordance with UN
Security Council resolution 1546.

He later declined an invitation to be more precise about the total
length of the timetable for the US withdrawal.

Syria’s views on all these matters are of course extremely significant,
given the country’s pivotal position in the Middle East and given the
fact that it enjoys good relations with not only the present government
of Iraq but also many strands of the Iraqi opposition including many
trends inside Iraq’s Sunni-Arab society.

(Mouallem talked about a number of other important topics, too, including Lebanon and the Palestinian issue.
I’ll post more material from the interview on JWN as soon as I get the
time. Now, I’m afraid I need to run to something else. By the way, I’m now back in Jordan.)

Bushites forced to deal with Syria and Iran

It is excellent news that the Bushites have finally been forced— by their own puppet government in Baghdad, no less– to sit down at the same table with representatives of Iraq and all its neighbors, including Iran and Syria.
That WaPo report says this:

Of course these meetings won’t be the end of the sorry tale of the US’s extremely destructive involvement in Iraq. But they point the way to possible process in which a steady, orderly– and let’s hope complete and speedy!– US withdrawal from Iraq might occur.

The terrible odyssey of Marwan Jabour

Human Rights Watch and the WaPo have both done ground-breaking work on the case of Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian whom the US accused of funding and helping Al-Qaeda operatives and who was held by the CIA and its Pakistani and other subordinate agencies in horrendously degrading conditions in secret, “black” prisons for two years.
The WaPo’s report, published in today’s paper by Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate, is here. The portal to the lengthy HRW report (which I haven’t had time to read in full) is here.
Back in September, when the Bushites transported 14 alleged “high-value detainees” from US-supervised black prisons in (most likely) Pakistan and Afghanistan to Guantanamo, they assured us publicly that the whole of the black prison program had then been shut down. Human Rights Watch is very dubious of this claim. The organization’s Joanne Mariner has written a letter to President Bush, in which she lists the names of 16 people whom HRW believes were held in CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown, and the names of another 22 people who may have been held in CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown.
What has happened to these “disappeared” individuals? And how, given the horrible record of these secret prisons, can we be assured there are not dozens of others like them whose names we do not know??
The HRW report on the odyssey of Marwan Jabour is lengthy and detailed, but it is well presented on their website through this portal. Jabour was arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, in May 2004. He was held under Pakistani and US custody in different secret prisons in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan. During his captivity he was subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and many other forms of torture and degrading and inhumane treatment until he was transported from Afghnaistan to Jordan in July 2006.
Here’s how Linzer and Tate start their story in today’s WaPo:

stripped naked, seated in a chair and videotaped by agency officers.

According to the HRW report, Jabour was transported by plane from Afghanistan to Jordan (amid some very fear-inducing circumstances), and later from there to Israel. After the Israelis examined his case– and gave him the first access he had ever had to a lawyer, since his detention in May 2004– they determined he was not a threat and transported him to Gaza, where he was freed and reunited with his parents.
Above, I note in particular the detail about Jabour having been– just before his transfer from Afghanistan to Jordan– stripped naked and videotaped. I am pretty sure the CIA people running that black prison would have done that with the aim of making him too embarrassed about the threat of the possible release of those tapes to be easily willing to speak out publicly about the treatment he had received during his two-plus years in CIA custody.
I therefore applaud his courage in breaking through that barrier of fear.
Jabour himself told HRW that when the time approached for his release from the CIA black prison in Afghanistan, the prison’s assistant director told him,

there was no toilet in the plane so Jabour would have to wear diapers, and that they would make a video of his naked body to show that his body had not been harmed.

The next day he was wrapped up like a mummy and taken by car to an airstrip. The HRW report continues:

It is very likely, of course, that a plane traveling that distance would be equiped with some form of toilet facilities.
(I note that all the accounts of how prisoners were transported to Guantanamo over the years include accounts of how the circumstances of these transfers were nearly always made as physically humiliating and as fear-inducing as possible. This is straight out of the CIA’s classic torture handbooks.
As for Linzer and Tate, they also write this:

U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed [Jabour’s] incarceration and that he was held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would not discuss conditions inside black sites or the treatment of any detainee.

And crucially, they note this:

plans to investigate the fate of the missing detainees

This is excellent news, and is the first step we need if we, the concerned and law-abiding US citizenry, are able to recapture our country as place that is ruled by law and in which black prisons, torture, and the unbridled militarism and sense of national “chosen-ness” that incubated those ills are to be made into a thing of the past.

Returning to Damascus

Yesterday, I came by car from Amman to Damascus. (And no, I
didn’t undergo any life-changing experiences along the way.) I had told
my friends in Damascus that I’d be here by about 11 a.m.
yesterday. But since I didn’t leave my hotel in Amman till around
8 a.m., that was wildly optimistic. I came by share-taxi from the
Abdali bus- and taxi-station in downtown Amman. It took a
bit of time to find a car to Amman that was close to filling up with
passengers, but finally I bought two seats in a car to fill the
complement and we set off from there at around 9:40.

The road out of the ever-increasing reaches of Amman was
undistinguished, but fairly fast along a good highway. Then we
headed north, arriving at the Jordanian side of the border about an
hour later. There wasn’t too much of interest along the
road. But it had rained some over the past two weeks so at least
there was a bit of green in the median strip and along the roadsides,
making a nice contrast with the dun-colored sand and rock of the
surrounding arid hills. We did pass two or three very new-looking
university campuses along way: the Hashemiya University, the Al-
al-Bayt university, etc. And of course the numerous turn-offs to
various other Jordanian towns and towards the Iraqi border. I
watched to see if I could see any noticeable military supply trucks
barrelling along to Iraq, but failed to.

Continue reading “Returning to Damascus”

Visser on Southern Iraq and oil

The well-informed southern Iraq scholar Reidar Visser has an important new piece of analysis here, titled Basra Crude: The Great Game of Iraq’s “Southern” Oil.
He adds some very important clarifications to the whole current discussion of the linked questions of oil regulations and federalism in Iraq.
Some very important information he injects into this discussion:

is completely on the sidelines in local government

traditional Iraqi nationalism also seems to remain surprisingly strong among the population at large.

Visser also notes that if the currently proposed suggestions for revisions in the country’s oil-regulation laws are confirmed by the Iraqi parliament, then “the incentives for seeking federal status for existing governorates – such as Basra – will become greater.”
Anyway, go read his whole piece of analysis there. Then you can come back and discuss it– including, most likely, with Reidar himself– on the comments board attached to this post.

Hersh’s ‘bombshells’: Real info and/or Sy-war effort?

I read with interest Sy Hersh’s recent New Yorker article on the Bush administration “Redirection” in the Middle East. It contains a wealth of “information”– some of it new, some of it not new, all of it presented in a very scaremongery way, with the whole piece extremely disorganized.
I haven’t known what to make of it, really, which is why I haven’t blogged about it until now. Sy is an extremely energetic reportorial sleuth, who has a wealth of longtime contacts hidden deep inside the intelligence agencies of the US and more than one Middle East government. (And yes, that includes the Israeli intel agencies.) He does dig out considerable amounts of information, some of which is absolutely new, and some of which is very disturbing. But he is also an extremely disorganized writer who sometimes, it seems to me, has a fairly weak ability to sift things he hears or to test them against other sources… especially in the Middle East. Hence, I believe we should be open to the possibility that to some degree or another some of what he writes may (without him necessarily being aware of this) be a dissemination of a “(p)sy-war” effort directed by some of his danker sources.
I don’t have time to go through this entire article of his to point out the internal contradictions, or the errors of fact or interpretation that I have found in it. (As in some of his earlier work on the Middle East, too.) For now, I’ll just note this sentence, in the introductory framing of the article:

The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Doesn’t this make it sound as though the Bushists’ new policy has brought it, largely unknowingly, into an independently existing “widening sectarian conflict”?
My own analysis is that at least some figures in the administration have been extremely happy to try to fan the flames of sectarianism in the region; and that meanwhile there are substantial indigenous political forces here that have been resisting that attempt, with some considerable success.
(I write this from Damascus, after having spent three weeks in Egypt and a few days in Jordan. So I base my view of this situation this on discussions with a wide range of people, some of whom are trusted longtime friends and colleagues. Hersh bases his reporting largely on un-named sources in intelligence agencies and on the uncritically reported views of named– and nearly always strongly pro-Israeli– analysts in distant Washington.)
He also seems fundamentally not to have understood the degree to which the Saudis have “gone off the [US] reservation” in their diplomacy– that is, have broken through the limits that the Bushites sought to place on their freedom of diplomatic action. This has been evident with regard to many recent Saudi actions– regarding Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, and above all with regard to Iran.
Actually, one of the reasons Sy’s piece is so disorganized and misleading is because it was, evidently, reported over a fairly lengthy period of time– e.g., his interview with Nasrallah was back in December– and matters have been moving extremely rapidly in all these areas of diplomacy over these recent weeks… So some of what he’s reporting there may have been the “wishful thinking” of Bushite/Israeli insiders (and their friends) back in, say, early January; and at that point there were still not many counter-facts in place that challenged the veracity of those claims.
Bottom line, I think we all need to read Hersh’s text extremely carefully and critically. There are some intriguing (but often largely unsubstantiated) pieces of new “information” in it. But there is also some misinformation (or unknowingly recycled disinformation) and a lot of extremely poor analysis.