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Notes from Cairo, #2

I have gathered such a lot of great material from my time here in Egypt so far that it has been a challenge for me to figure out how to write it. One of the most interesting things has been the interview I did with Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson Dr. Issam al-Arian last Sunday (February 11). But even just to write that has been a challenge for me, as I felt the need to put in a lot of background and it was getting fairly unwieldy.

Plus, I was still running around doing a bunch of other things, as well.

So I finally decided to write the background material separately, and to upload it here. Expect the interview itself within the next few hours.

But right now, I probably need to go out for a long walk and clear my head. Often, when you’re crossing a major street like Qasr al-Aini Street or the Nile-side corniche, this involves playing the terrifying game of Extreme Human Frogger. Cairo is about the most pedestrian-unfriendly city I have ever been in. I haven’t seen a single posted vehicular speed limit within the whole city. Don’t the people here realize that allowing public space to be so hostile, or even potentially lethal, for pedestrians means that a whole chunk of members of society– the disabled, the elderly, mothers with young children– become effectively prevented from real social inclusion?

To say nothing of the damaging effects of the pollution…

But enough whining… I have actually been having a really great time here… And truly, this time as always I really do love Egypt!

1. Entering the twilight of the Mubarak era

Medical science is a powerful tool that has done much to increase
human wellbing and lengthen the productive and hapy lives of miliions
of people. However, no-one has yet found a way to prolong human life
indefinitely. (Even the kings of Saudi Arabia, who have
unconstrained access to all the most expensive forms of medical
treatment, have had to learn this.) Egypt’s President, Hosni
Mubarak, is 78 years old. And though he’s remarkably, as they
say, “well preserved” for his age, still the fact remains that in Egypt
today there’s an almost palpable sense that his powers are
waning. Everywhere there is talk of the succession– and this,
though he has another four and a half years to serve on his current
six-year term in office. But already, there are many rumors of
who might be in line for the succession, and how various sectors of
power might be circling around and lining up to position themselves for
the moment when either there’s the next scheduled election (September
2011), or, even before that, his powers might fail to the point that
some other form of succession becomes necessary.

Mubarak has notably never named
a Vice-President, a step that could have muted or even eliminated all
this uncertainty around the succession. He himself became
President after his predecessor, Anwar as-Sadat, was assassinated in
1981– by virtue of the fact that he had at the time been Sadat’s VP…
and prior to that, Sadat became President in 1970 by virtue of the fact
that he had been the VP of his predecessor, Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
So having a designated VP did on both those earlier occasions ensure a
nearly trouble-free succession.

So why has Mubarak never named one? What he says to people
bold enough to ask is that he considers it undemocratic for a president
to name the person who thereby becomes almost certain to be his
successor. But other possible explanations have certainly also
been mentioned here, including that he does not have enough trust in
anyone to name him as VP (with an undertone that that VP, if
underhanded enough, might actually undertake some action to speed up
the succession… ), and that he has been waiting and/or hoping
for his son Gamal Mubarak (named after you-know-who) to have enough
experience of national governance to be able to fit “naturally” into
the successor’s shoes…

Continue reading “Notes from Cairo, #2”

Testimony from an Abu Ghraib “hooded man”

The iconic “hooded man” in those shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib was also a man, not just an icon; and at least one of the men subjected to that form of torture is a very brave man, too. His name is Ali Sh. Abbas, and Faiza al-Araji has today posted on her blog his sworn testimony regarding the treatment he received while he was in US detention in Iraq in late 2003, including what happened to him in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib.
I say he is brave because I know from my extensive work on issues of torture that (1) The intention of torturers is most often to break the independent personality of their victims, and that certainly appears to be the case in this instance; and (2) The specifics of many of the means of torture used in Abu Ghraib– as elsewhere in the long, sorry history of torture– were designed to humiliate the victim both at the time and subsequent to any possible later release, in order to make it much harder for that individual later to be bring him/herself to be able to speak openly about what had happened.
(See, for example, the recent case of bus driver Imad al-Kabir, in Egypt.)
That is why I say Mr. Abbas seems to be a brave man, because for a while now he has gone publicly on the record with his account of the extremely humiliating treatment he received, which included numerous acts of rape, enforced nudity, etc, in addition to the electrocuting– which he says did occur, though I believe the US military people charged in connection with the case had claimed that wiring up the prisoners was only a “show” for them, to make them talk…
The author of the affidavit on Faiza’s site seems to be the same person as the man in this NYT story from March 11, 2006, Ali Shalal Qaissi, who at that point claimed to be “the” iconic hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib. I believe he is the same person– look at the photos in this Feb 7, 2007 blog post from the recent “Criminalizing War” conference held in Malaysia, which also features the testimony from Mr. Ali Sh. Abbas, and indeed reveals that that text was sworn as testimony in front of a Malaysian Commissioner of Oaths on, apparently, February 8, 2007. (I see a problem re the dating there? However, knowing the way that names get differently recorded in many Arab countries, I see no particular problem with the apparent “slipperiness” of this person’s name in various versions.)
I note that a few days after that March 2006 NYT story, the NYT ran a follow-up stating that “Military investigators had identified the man on the box as a different detainee who had described the episode in a sworn statement immediately after the photographs were discovered in January 2004, but then the man seemed to go silent.” In that story, Mr. Qaissi (Mr.Abbas) was reported as acknowledging that he was not the man in the specific, Penatgon-released photograph he had held up in a portrait that had accompanied the earlier NYT article. “But he and his lawyers maintain that he was photographed in a similar position and shocked with wires.”
The Pentagon maintains only one detainee was subjected to this treatment. Mr. Abbas claims that there was more than one.
The whole of Mr. Abbas’s sworn affidavit as posted on Faiza’s site should be read as widely as possible. (Be aware that some of the details he testifies to are extremely disturbing. You may need to think of a prayer of other self-care mechanism to help you during and after the reading.)
Many people in the human-rights community have been pushing for further prosecutions, including of people further up the chain of command, for the war crimes committed at Abu Ghraib. However I think it is equally important to pay attention to the victims/survivors of all such crimes and to do whatever we can to reinstate their humanity– including by listening and paying close attention to their testimony.
I therefore suggest that now that Mr. Abbas has shown himself willing to go as very publicly on the record as he did in Malaysia, the members of the U.S. Senate and House Armed Services Committees should be urged to contact him and any and other survivors of Abu Ghraib they can locate, with the following goals in mind:

hear their testimony face-to-face or by videolink

probe any portions of that testimony further

use such testimonies to build a much fuller picture of what occurred in Abu Ghraib

to provide compensation and post-trauma rehabiliation to all certified survivors of the torture rooms of Abu Ghraib

Anyway, here are some of the important parts of Mr. Abbas’s testimony:
He was arrested on October 13, 2003, and was transferred to Abu Ghraib two days later. Immediately, he was subjected to humiliation treatment:

And then, note what the first question was:

9. The first question they asked me was, “Are you a Sunni or Shiia?” I answered that this is the first time I have been asked this question in my life. I was surprised by this question, as in Iraq there is no such distinction or difference. The American interrogator replied that I must answer directly the questions and not to reply outside the question. He then said that in Iraq there are Sunnis, Shiias and Kurds.

I find that intriguing. There are a number of possible (not mutually exclusive) motivations behind the interrogators’ insistence on that question. First, very likely, they did not even know the answer from the get-go; but being determined to categorize all Iraqi detainees according to their own evolving means of categorization they want to get this item clear on their records. Second, maybe they were also trying deliberately to strengthen the detainees’ degree of self-identification according to those categories?
Here is what then ensued:

Now, when the person who translated this affidavit wrote “charged me for the following offenses”, I am assuming these were not formal charges, but rather accusations made in the context of the interrogation. But look at that first accusation there. What on earth relationship does being “anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic” have to the confrontation between the US and the Iraqis inside Iraq?
Then we have this:

14. When I did not cooperate, the interrogator asked me whether I considered the American army as “liberator” or “occupier”. When I replied that they were occupiers, he lost his temper and threatened me. He told me that I would be sent to Guantanamo Bay where even animals would not be able to survive.

Here is a clear attempt at mind control and the destruction of Mr. Abbas’s freedom of thought and analysis, and therefore of his independent personality.
He was then taken to another part of Abu Ghraib called “Fiji Land”,:

So he stayed a month in those conditions… Then this:

told me in Arabic that he was an Israeli had interrogated and tortured detainees in Palestine.

This Israeli dressed in civilian clothes tortured me by inserting in turn first with a jagged wooden stick into my rectum and then with the barrel of a rifle. I was cut inside and bled profusely.

He then pulled the bandage which stained with blood from my hand and in doing so, tore the skin and flesh from my hands. I was in great pain and when I asked him for some pain killers, he stepped on my hands and said “this is American pain killer” and laughed at me.

Present in the room was the Moroccan Jew, Idel Palm, the Israeli interrogator, two Americans one known as “Davies” and the other “Federick” and two others.

As the electric current entered my whole body, I felt as if my eyes were being forced out and sparks flying out. My teeth were clattering violently and my legs shaking violently as well. My whole body was shaking all over.

a doctor was called to attend to me. I was lying down on the floor. The doctor poured some water into my mouth and used his feet to force open my mouth. He then remarked, “There is nothing serious, continue!” Then he left the room. However, the guard stopped the electrocution as I was bleeding profusely from my mouth and blood was all over my blanket and body. But they continued to beat me.

he over heard some guards saying that I was wrongly arrested

So: four and a half months’ detention, some of the most brutal and humiliating treatment one could imagine– and at the end of it all they judged he had been “wrongly arrested” and he was released without a word??
Can you imagine the treatment he would have been given if they had decided he had indeed been some kind of a ringleader?
This is how he ends:

I hope that the people will answer our call for help. God willing.

Just a few last points from me. First, I believe it is very important to do some further probing into the role that Mr. Abbas alleges was played in his interrogation by all the other actors whom he identifies as present during the worst of the encounters, but especially by these three: the “Israeli interrogator”, the “Moroccan Jew”, and the “doctor.”
Was there really an Israeli interrogator participating in all those interrogations– or was this a ploy of deceit engaged in as a way to further terrorize the detainees? The citizens of both the US and Israel deserve to know this. (It is entirely possible it was one of the many US citizens who also carry Israeli citizenship and who may well have served in the Israeli security services.)
Was the Moroccan Jerw a citizen of Morocco and participating “on secondment” to the Americans from the Moroccan security services– services that, goodness only knows, have a long experience in doing torture? (Or maybe he was on secondment from the Israeli services?)
And the doctor??? What on earth kind of a doctor would agree to play that role of, essentially, assisting torture by helping to establish “medical” parameters for it? What kind of a doctor would behave in the way Mr. Abbas alleges that doctor acted?
Was it really a doctor, I wonder, i.e., someone who has taken an oath to “do no harm”? (There are a couple of other interesting, medical-related points in the testimony too, including the offers to “condition” treatment of Mr. Abbas’s hand on his provision of the information the interrogators sought.)
Secondly, I want to link back to this post I put up on JWN back in August 2005, in which I commented on the extremely important account that the pro-Algerian-independence French Communist Henri Alleg had written about his torture at the hands of the French Army in Algeria in 1957. That testimony was published as a little book, under the title “The Question“. I urged then that the existing English-language version of that book should be republished in full. Today I repeat that plea! In that JWN post I also copied out some of the introduction that Jean-Paul Sartre had written for Alleg’s book.
Alleg’s testimony of what he himself had suffered– including electrocution and a version of water-boarding– was bad enough. But he made sure to write that the treatment given to his fellow-detainees who did not have the “benefit” of French citizenship but were Algerian-Muslim indigenes of the country was far, far worse. (He also wrote very movingly about the degree of care his Muslim fellow-detainees would give to him after each of his torture sessions.)
Anyway, go read those portions of the Sartre text that I put in that post…
Thirdly, I want to thank Mr. Abbas for having agreed to put this testimony on the record, and to thank Faiza for getting it up onto the web. Mr. Abbas, Faiza, the organizers of the “Criminalizing War” conference in Malaysia, and any of the rest of us who seek to work further on this case should know that we may all be subjected to damaging personal attacks for any role we play in continuing to get this testimony better heard. I judge, however, that this testimony has a great degree of prima-facie credibility and deserves to be fully engaged with.
Including– directly– by members of the US Congress.

New affiliation with the Friends Committee on (US) National Legislation

I am very happy to announce the start of a new affiliation I have taken up, as “Friend in Washington” with the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is the very experienced lobbying organization that US members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) maintains on Washington’s Capitol Hill.
Longtime JWN readers should be well aware of the importance that my membership of a Quaker Meeting (congregation) has for me, and for my writings and other activities on social and political issues. Actually, having this blog has allowed me to do a lot to start “coming out” as a fairly public Quaker over the past few years. Now, taking up this affiliation with FCNL seems like a good next move in this direction, and I am extremely moved by their invitation to me to do this.
The Quakers are one of the historic “peace churches,” having upheld their (our) testimonies against war and violence, and in support of the equality and wellbeing of all human beings, for more than 350 years. FCNL describes itself as “A Quaker lobby in the public interest.” It is a very well-run, Quaker-led organization that focuses on trying to build the kinds of principled and respectful relationships with legislators in Washington in which “friendly persuasion”– exercised both in Washington and by FCNL’s nationwide network of Quaker and other supporters– will bring these legislators closer to working for such important public-interest goals as ending war, reducing military budgets, extending health-care coverage to all Americans, respect of Native American rights, and ending torture.
FCNL has done a lot of very productive work on issues that I care deeply about, including most definitely the whole US engagement in Iraq; and I’ve had many good conversations over the past 2-3 years with their Executive Secretary, Joe Volk, and members of his staff. So I’m looking forward to seeing where this new affiliation, which in the first instance has a term of six months, can lead all of us.
I understand it’s paradoxical that I start this affiliation while being in Cairo at the beginning of a three-month sojourn outside the US! But FCNL says in the announcement they issued about my new affiliation, “We will keep in close touch with her, and are confident that her experiences there will only strengthen the contribution she is able to make.”
Also, to mark this new relationship I have put the “Friendly (Quaker) links and concerns” section of my sidebar up near the top there, and I’ll keep it there for the next few weeks… So if you want to find out more about FCNL and other aspects of (mainly US) Quaker life, please go and explore some of those links.
The largest numbers of Quakers in the world are, actually, in Africa, and I’ll try to get some African links into that section when I can.
In the Middle East there has been a 120-plus-year presence of Quakers in both Palestine and Lebanon. In both those countries Quakers have maintained excellent schools and have small congregations of worshipers. In addition, in 1948 the American Friends Service Committee took on responsibility for providing all the international relief services that were given to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had flooded into Gaza during the Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli fighting of 1947-48; and it continued to do that work for ten months until the UN had finally organized itself enough to establish UNRWA, which has done the job there, and elsewhere, ever since then.
You can find out more about Quakers’ involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian issue if you read When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel a group-authored Quaker book that I helped work on, that came out in 2004.
Anyway, now I guess I need to get used to thinking of myself as a “Friend in Washington (on Assignment).”

Laila’s blog featured in ‘HaAretz’

I’ve been a huge admirer of Laila el-Haddad ever since I first read the brilliant blog Raising Yousuf (Unplugged) that she writes, mainly from her family’s longtime home in Gaza City… Then, around a year ago, I got to meet her there. She and her parents were SO welcoming, and I just loved meeting and talking with them all (as well as her too-cute-for-words little rascal, Yousuf.) And we’ve kept in pretty good touch since.
Now, Haaretz journo Ofri Ilani has also caught a case of Lailamania and has written a story about Laila and her blog, which is running in today’s paper. To write the story, Ilani evidently cruised the archives of Laila’s blog. She also interviewed Laila by phone. (L is currently spending a bit of time in North Carolina, where her spouse, Yassine, is doing his medical residency at Duke University Med School.)
At the end of the article, Ilani quotes Laila musing a little on the risks a person exposes herself to when she (or he) discloses a lot about herself through blogging:

“Some [comments on the blog] have been very vitriolic and hateful, to the point where I’ve had to initiate comment moderation. I’ve had people say: ‘Yousuf’s a beautiful boy; it’s too bad he has such a horrible mother who is raising him to become a suicide bomber like all other Palestinians.’ It makes you realize you are throwing yourself out there as cannon fodder, and you have to learn to live with the consequences of putting yourself out there like that. That is the price you pay for opening your door to the world.”

I know I’m not the only person who is really, really glad that Laila has been strong enough to take on those risks and persist in getting her voice out to the world. It’s great her voice is being made available to the readers of HaAretz, which is a significant Israeli daily newspaper that publishes (slightly different) editions in both Hebrew and English.
Interesting that on their English-language website, the piece is listed under “Arts and Leisure.” This seems a little demeaning. Laila’s voice is an important testimony to all aspects of the lives of the Palestinians of Gaza and of the Palestinian ghurba (diaspora)– daily life, politics, etc. But categorizing this article about the blog as “Arts and Leisure” makes it seem as though Laila just does it in her spare time, having taken it up as an alternative to reading novels or doing crossword puzzles, or whatever. Why is women’s work, and the contribution we make to the public sphere, so frequently demeaned and marginalized in one way or another, I wonder??
Oh well… It is nonetheless great news that HaAretz ran the story. (You can check out the comments afterwards for many examples of the kind of vitriol to which Laila gets exposed. Including, the very first one of all from a commenter who boldly asserts– based on zero evidence– that contrary to what Laila had written, based very much on her own intensely lived experience of these matters, that “Her hubby is free to enter [Gaza] thru Rafah… “)
I really don’t like HaAretz’s comments discussions at all. They are filled with anti-Arab hatred and propaganda points that, like that one, are totally unbacked by any evidence. They disseminate (and expose) some of the very worst parts of Israel’s public discourse… I really don’t know why HaAretz runs them without any discernible moderation at all.
But that’s a small quibble. The main point is: Good that they ran the piece, and good that Laila has a calm and persuasive voice that makes some Israelis, at least, want to take her words seriously.
Nice work, Laila!

More on the possible pre-peace overture from the 1920 Revolution Brigades

A quick search of Juan Cole’s blog revealed about 20 entries there to the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which is the way Juan (generally) renders the name of the Sunni insurgent group in Iraq that was apparently the one that recently forwarded a pre-negotiation proposal to Bob Fisk. (As I posted about yesterday, here.)
Juan really has done an extraordinarily valuable job of drawing together, and presenting to the English-reading public, nearly all the main news developments out of Iraq, day after day after wearying day since late 2002. What a truly incredible archive that blog now represents!
The earliest of Juan’s references to the 1920RB was, as far as I can figure, this one, from November 15, 2004. Juan wrote there:

The 1920 revolution against the British is key to modern Iraqi history. One of the guerrilla groups taking hostages named itself the “1920 Revolution Brigades.” Western journalists who don’t know Iraqi history have routinely mistranslated the name of this group.

And the most recent was this one– from last Saturday (February 10), in which he wrote:

says

refused to join the “Islamic State of Iraq” coalition or “al-Qa’eda and its allies on the other side. The US has called on the group to enter talks with Washington.

This indicates to me that the document passed to Fisk may have been an early 1920RB response to that invitation from the US? Interesting that they should try to communicate a document to and through Bob Fisk, presumably as a way of trying to win it a bigger readership in English-speaking countries than it could expect if it were handed only to Al-Hayat or other Arabic media.
(This, even if Bob Fisk did apparently misunderstand the exact name of the group communicating with him.)
Anyway, as I wrote in my earlier post and was well established by other commenters there, it is evident that this position from the 1920RB, if they are indeed, as I believe, the originators of the “Jeelani-Fisk proposal” is not one that the US can immediately agree to. But, and I can’t stress this enough, it looks like a good, solid pre-negotiation communication; and it should therefore be met with considerable interest by all Americans, as well as with a cautious– and possibly highly circumspect– welcome by our government, and a commitment to actively explore all aspects of the topics raised.
For example, the demand for the release, “as a goodwill gesture” of 5,000 of the more than 11,000 Sunni Iraqis currently being detained in US prisons in Iraq is surely one that could be looked at and responded to in some measure, or perhaps even fully?
Of course there is still massive distrust between these two sides– the Sunni insurgents and the US government– and this is fed by numerous sizeable grievances that are still vividly remembered by each side. No point trying to silver-coat or ignore that… And numerous vast questions still remain, as I noted in my earlier post, about the “shape” of any negotiations for a final peace in Iraq, including the roster of the parties that should be represented at them.
But as I told Juan in a private communication, I tend to go by “the Oliver Tambo rule”– remembering that that great leader of South Africa’s ANC once recalled that, when he was living in exile in Lusaka, the one thing he was terrified of was that he would not understand or correctly interpret the peace overture from the apartheid regime when– as he confidently expected– they finally decided to send it… and that through his inattentiveness on that score he would thereby consign his people to additional decades of quite unnecessary conflict…
When the peace overture did come to Tambo from Pretoria, in 1989, he did correctly interpret it; and it was he and the ANC’s exile-based National Executive that then authorized Nelson Mandela to proceed with the in-prison negotiations that we all know so much about… (Tambo died soon thereafter, RIP.)
Thank God Tambo went by “the Tambo rule” on that occasion, eh?
In this connection, too, I would recall that great quote from T.E. Lawrence that I wrote about back in this post, last month… In 1919-20, when he was considering the challenges of “dis-imperialism”, i.e. extricating a country’s armies and people from distant and damaging imperial entanglements, Lawrence wrote:

we will find our best helpers not in our former most obedient subjects, but among those now most active in agitating against us

So okay, the 1920RB seems like an organization that still uses violence– perhaps considerable amounts of it.
(So, of course, is the US military, especially in Iraq.)
The 1920RB’s politics seem to be– as Juan Cole described them to me– “murky”. In November 2005, he wrote this about “Iraqi guerrilla groups such as ‘the Islamic Army,’ ‘The Bloc of Holy Warriors,’ and ‘The Revolution of 1920 Brigades’: “Despite the Islamist names of these groups, they are probably mostly neo-Baathist.”
I have no way to judge that claim, for which Juan adduced no further evidence there.
But he also noted there that, at a key Iraqi resistance groups’ conference that was held in Cairo that month, those three groups had,

conveyed their conditions behind the scenes… Among their demands are 1) working to end the foreign occupation, 2) compensation to the Iraqis for the damages arising from the American invasion; 3) the release of prisoners; and 4) building political and military institutions that are not subservient to American and regional influence.

In that post, which was mainly Juan’s rendering of a long Hayat article on the topic, he presented many details about the sharp differences between those three, determinedly Iraqi guerrilla group and Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaeda-affiliated group. Zarqawi has, of course, since then been killed… And that sharp difference of opinion and strategy apparently still continues to the present. In this post from January 8, 2007, Cole writes– again citing Hayat– that,

“al-Qaeda” in Fallujah assassinated Muhammad Mahmud, the head of the 1920 Revolution Brigades in the district of al-Saqlawiya, threatening al-Anbar Province with a feud between the two Sunni guerrilla groups…

All in all, I think the “Jeelani-Fisk proposal” is a pre-peace overture to which all of us who want to see the US get out of Iraq in a way that is orderly, total, and speedy should give serious consideration. Let’s hope the relevant figures in the Bush administration are doing the same.
Is it too much to ask that they follow the “Tambo rule” too?

Thread to discuss the Bushists’ anti-Iran claims

I don’t have time right now to write anything substantive on the whole campaign the Bushists have been waging to build a “casus belli” against Iran… Dan Froomkin had an excellent roundup of the coverage on Monday in a broad range of US media. I’ve put that link and a few other relevant ones into the Delicious section of the sidebar here.
The total money quote in the Froomkin roundup is this one, from Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh and Maziar Bahari:

‘They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for,’ says Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs.

No word on the circumstances or timing of Ms. Mann’s exit from her post there, by which almost certainly hangs an intriguing tale…
Meanwhile some commenters here have gone off-topic and started discussing this “casus-belli-building” issue in the previous thread, which was on the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution. Tsk, tsk, friends! Henceforth, please try to keep these discussions separate… Thanks!
Update: One intriguing tidbit in the Hirsh-Bahari piece is that they quote James Dobbins, who was the Bush admin’s chief representative at the crucial talks on the political future of Afghanistan that were held in Bonn in December 2001 as recalling this about a discussion he had in Bonn with Javad Zarif, the head of the Iranian government team there (who later became Iran’s ambassador to the UN):

Dobbins… recalls sharing coffee with Zarif in one of the sitting rooms, poring over a draft of the agreement laying out the new Afghan government. “Zarif asked me, ‘Have you looked at it?’ I said, ‘Yes, I read it over once’,” Dobbins recalls. “Then he said, with a certain twinkle in his eye: ‘I don’t think there’s anything in it that mentions democracy. Don’t you think there could be some commitment to democratization?’ This was before the Bush administration had discovered democracy as a panacea for the Middle East. I said that’s a good idea.”

Lots more there, too, about other strands of the US-Iranian cooperation in the months right after 9/11… That is, until a neocon Bush speechwriter in decided to put the whole “Axis of Evil” thing into Bush’s SOTU speech in late January 2002…
But anyway, that was just my little digression there. The main topic of this post is still the Bushists’ casus-belli-building campaign.

Iraqi insurgents signaling pre-negotiation readiness?

Robert Fisk had an article in Friday’s Independent in which he presented the contents of what could be a very significant statement that was “passed to” him, that could represent the terms on which a significant portion of the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq is willing to make peace. (Hat-tip to commenter Diana.)
Fisk indicates that the statement was issued in the name of “Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement.” He wrote that Al-Jeelani’s group, “also calls itself the ’20th Revolution Brigades’, [and] is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003.”
I believe Fisk’s reference there should be to the “Brigades of the 1920 Revolution”, but would welcome clarification on this from commenters. I do know there is an organization of that name, referring back to an earlier heroic anti-occupation insurgency in Iraqi history.
I am also not sure whether, as Fisk implies on one occasion (but not another), this organization or this statement could be said to represent a position supported by all the Sunni insurgents. I strongly suspect not, but again would welcome clarifications and further info from readers.
I wish Fisk had just given us the text in full, with a commentary alongside. Instead, portions of the text are included in a straight new report there. Here’s what Fisk writes about it:

Fisk’s main commentary on the proposal is to note that its terms would be quite unacceptable to the Americans. He writes,

It is not difficult to see why the Americans would object to those terms. They will not want to talk to men they have been describing as “terrorists” for the past four years. And if they were ever to concede that the “resistance” represented “the will of the Iraqi people” then their support for the elected Iraqi government would have been worthless…

But in a real sense, that is not the point. No-one would expect the insurgents to come up with a political program that the US occupiers would immediately be able to agree to. But seeing the emergence of a leadership among the Sunni insurgent groups that is prepared to allow the US a negotiated withdrawal, and to start to spell out the terms for that negotiation, is already a good step forward.
And of course Fisk is right to note that many of the leaders of Shiite political parties– not to mention the Iranians with whom many of them have close links– will find these terms unacceptable. Indeed, figuring out the “shape” of the negotiation, i.e., which Iraqi groups should be represented, and how, is one of the first challenges for anyone trying to think through or plan the modalities of a negotiated US withdrawal. I am convinced the US is in no position to design the shape of this negotiation, even if its leaders wanted to (which they still certainly don’t.) That’s why I welcome the mention in the Jeelani statement of the possibility that “the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations”.
As for this business, also mentioned by Fisk, that the Bushists will not be happy to negotiate with people they have been describing as “terrorists” for the past four years– well, history is absolutely replete with occupying powers and colonial powers that have done exactly that! From the British and French colonial powers in their waning years, through the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1990, through the Rabin government in Israel in 1993… Governments can do this, and survive and prosper (though of course, sadly, Rabin personally did not.)
Could somebody ask Bob Fisk to put the plain text of the Jeelani statement up on the web so we can read it cleanly? Also, further clarification/information on the points I signaled above would be great. Thanks!

Shadid and others on the “widening” Sunni-Shiite rift

I see my younger colleague Anthony Shadid has been in Cairo, and he has a Cairo-datelined piece in today’s WaPo to which his editors gave this scaremongering headline: “Across Arab World, a Widening Rift; Sunni-Shiite Tension Called Region’s ‘Most Dangerous Problem’.”
Called that by what percentage of Egyptians or other Arabs, you may ask?
Turns out, regarding Egyptians, Shadid provides no evidence that it has been called that by any Egyptians at all. None. Zero. Nada. The quote-ette used by his headline writers there is one from Ghassan Charbel, a Maronite Christian who’s most likely from Lebanon, a country that these days is plagued by its own sharp political differences, some of which have a sectarian aspect.
From Egyptians, all that Shadid is able to provide by way of “evidence” for the headline-writer’s claim is two items:
1. This quote about sectarian divisiveness, from writer and analyst Mohammed al-Sayid Said: “To us Egyptians… [it is] entirely artificial. It resonates with nothing in our culture, nothing in our daily life. It’s not part of our social experience, cultural experience or religious experience.” But he added: “I think this can devastate the region.” (Left unclear: whether he included Egypt itself in the portion of the region that might be thus devastated, and what probability he assigned to this happening.)
2. This completely ambiguous description of the behavior of a (presumably Sunni?) sidewalk book vendor called Mahmoud Ahmed: “”The Shiites are rising,’ he said, arching his eyebrows in an expression suggesting both revelation and fear.”
And this is evidence??
I wonder, did Shadid go on and ask Mr. Ahmed the quite logical follow-up question, “And how do you feel about that rise?” If so, what answer did he get? Did he, more to the point, ask Ahmed or anyone else in Egypt whether in fact they consider sectarian divisiveness to be their region’s “most dangerous problem”? Did he, indeed, ask them to rank the danger they perceive from that phenomenon against that from, for example, further US military attacks in the region, or other US or Israeli actions here?
There are a few other significant things about the way Shadid’s piece has been constructed. First of all, I should note that Shadid does offer some intriguing and substantial evidence that Egyptian “men in the street” (no women quoted at all, I note… I wonder, do they not count?) are not actually very worried about the prospect of the relative rise in Shiite power in the region… Read the last one-third of his piece for that. Here’s what he says of a downtown Cairo tea-vendor and his customer:

Left unclear there was whether the quoted tea purchaser, Muhsin Mohammed, is himself a Sunni or Shiite. Most likely a Sunni, since only around one million of Egypt’s 75 million people are Shiites.
Shadid goes straight on from there to write, “That sense of Western manipulation is often voiced by Shiite clerics and activists, who say the United States incites sectarianism as a way of blunting Iran’s influence.” Then the evidence he provides of that comes from Lebanese Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah and some leaders of the Shiite community in eastern Saudi Arabia.
Left unreported by him were the statements forcefully rejecting Sunni-Shiite divisiveness that have been issued by both the Supreme Guide of the (Sunni) Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (e.g. here) and the Shaikh of the influential, government-backed Al-Azhar Mosque here in Cairo… In other words, Shadid leaves the reader able to think that it is only the Shiites among the Islamist religio-political activists who see the threats of sectarianism as a western plot, and that maybe the Sunni activists are all currently consumed by and contributing to the fears of the Shiites’ “rise”.
Ain’t so.
As I have written before, I see the main relevance of this whole issue, and the one-sided nature of the reporting on it in the US big media, as being the degree to which US decisionmakers might expect to win support from the Sunni-Arab states and their publics in the event of a US military attack on Iran. Most people in the policymaking community in Washington DC realize that to launch an attack on Iran in the absence of substantial support from the Arab states would be to leave all those US troops who are currently spread out very thinly in the Middle East, and the very vulnerable supply lines that support them, extremely exposed to the possibility of themselves being attacked. And therefore, to attack Iran in the absence of solid evidence of the probability of such support would be the height of recklessnes– actually, imho, recklessness to a criminal degree.
Administration officials and others who are either preparing the ground for an attack on Iran or actively advocating such an attack have therefore launched a broad campaign to persuade the rest of the (increasingly skeptical) US policy elite that this attack could garner wide Arab support. My judgment, which I have tried to express in various places, is that it would not… And everyone in the US policy elite needs to be very clear about that.
One of the key things I have found from my contacts here in Cairo so far is that anti-Americanism runs far, far deeper than any concerns about Iran or about the Shiites’ “rise”.
This was also found by the Zogby poll of opinion in six Arab countries with pro-US governments whose results Shibley Telhami released (possibly sooner than he was supposed to?) on February 9. (Hat-tip to Abu Aardvark for that link, which I “Delicioused” a couple of days ago.) That PDF file there contains more than 100 easy-to-read “slides” that present the survey’s results. I gathered from elsewhere that the survey was taken last November.
That’s significant, because it was taken before the Saddam-execution video, which no doubt did affect opinions to some degree. Though it’s not clear how lasting those effects were… Public opinion trends move very fast indeed in the Middle East these days. And the Saddam-execution story is nowadays very much “yesterday’s news” here, having been largely overtaken by all the Arab and Muslim concerns about Al-Aqsa mosque, jubilation at the Fateh-Hamas peace deal, etc… In other words, by stories that have tended to unite rather than divide the Muslims of the region.
But anyway, another interesting question: Why did the (US) people who commissioned this opinion poll delay so long before releasing the results??
You can find a brief description of the methodology on the last slide in Shibley’s collection there. The six countries were Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia (KSA), and the United Arab Emirates. Note that the population of Egypt alone among those is greater than the populations of all the other five put together, though there were only 800 Egyptians among the 3,850 individuals questioned by the pollsters.
So what were some of the main findings of the poll?
p.3: “Please tell me which world leader (outside your own country) you admire most:”

#1, Hassan Nasrallah– 14%; #2, Chirac– 8%; #3– Ahmadinejad– 4%; #4 Chavez– 3%. [Note that that wording excluded from consideration the views Lebanese people would have expressed about Nasrallah, roughly half of whom might otherwise have named him; and it also thereby distributed more votes among other ‘contestants’ in this race than they would otherwise have won… On the other hand, population-wise, lebanon doesn’t affect the total outcome very much.]

p.7: “Please tell me which world leader (oustide your own country) you dislike most?”

#1, Bush– 38%; #2, Sharon– 11%; #3, Olmert 7%; #4, Blair– 3%. Sharon + Olmert comes to 18%. The combined totals for these US, British, and Israeli leaders comes to 59%.

p.17: Name the two countries that you think pose the biggest threat to you:”

#1, US– 74%; #2, Israel– 79%; #3, Iran– 6%.

I note that Marc (Abu Aardvark) has published this update to his post:

(Israel is #1 at 85% in the corrected calcuations).

The results on p.22 are very worth reading.
On p.25 we have this: “Generally speaking, is your attitude toward the US very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable?”

Continue reading “Shadid and others on the “widening” Sunni-Shiite rift”

A few random notes from Cairo

1. We’re staying in “Garden City”, a portion of the near-downtown that used to be filled with very gracious 1930s-style Art Deco homes. Now, few of those remain, and they’re dwarfed by massive and nearly all very ugly concrete tower blocks. The ugliest by far is the ghastly, 15-story block-house of the (new-ish) US Embassy, whose builders apparently made no attempt whatsoever to take into account any esthetic considerations. Luckily, we can’t see it from the window. When I do my morning yoga workout I look out of our 10th-floor window and can see some little peeks of the Nile, some fascinating scenes in the shanties built atop some of the lower buildings around, a few Art Deco gems, and some really precarious high-rise construction underway.
2. From here, I can walk almost anywhere I want. Yesterday, Bill and I walked to the mosque of Sayeda Zeinab. She was a grand-daughter of the Prophet and is supposedly entombed there. The two youngish (male) guardians of the women’s side of the mosque tried to rip me off so I didn’t hang around. Instead, Bill and I walked through the amazing street market down the side of the mosque. Note to self: next time try to get some audio of the incredible street-barkers there.
3. Today I walked along to the Egyptian Medical Union and interviewed the former Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson– and current “Guidance Committee” member– Dr. Issam al-Arian. (More, later.)
4. Friday, I got my best-ever score at One-Minute Perquackey. It was 4,350. On to 5,000…
5. Last night we watched the amazing Indian movie “Earth”, by Deepa Mehta. It was about the Partition of India in 1947 and was (very loosely) based on a book called “Cracking India” that I read several years ago. It’s a gut-wrenching look at what happens inside a mixed, Muslim-Hindu-Sikh-Parsee, group of friends in Lahore as Partition approaches. Some aspects of it I think Mehta didn’t get quite believably– mainly, the fact that all the members of this group of friends seemed to participate in it only as monads, and didn’t have much discernible life at all outside it… they just sat around talking all day. But some aspects I think s/he got brilliantly; mainly, the way friends can turn on each other “on a dime” once the cancer of divisiveness and sectarianism takes root. Of course, watching it at the same time that we know a very similar form of ethnic cleansing is underway in Iraq made it even more horrific.
6. Earlier this evening we had a Quaker meeting for worship here, with just two of us taking part. Bill isn’t a Quaker so it was me and one other person, the guy who lives here and whose name is listed as the “contact person” for Quakers in Cairo in all relevant directories. We sat together for just about an hour and then joined Bill for dinner. It felt good to re-center as a Quaker. As I sat I thought a bit about how much I love my home Quaker Meeting (congregation) and all the people in it; how much I’ve learned from them and how much they sustain me. I thought about the Quakers I’ve worshiped with in South Africa and Rwanda, and about all the many Quaker Churches there are in East and Central Africa, and how they’re doing so much good by holding up our peace testimony in often very, very conflicted times… So being here and having a (small) Meeting for Worship right at the north of this great continent felt good. It’s going to be a busy next couple of weeks.
7. By the way, watch for an important announcement here on JWN sometime Monday.

Choice time: unravel Al-Qaeda or fight Iran?

So just how firmly do the Bushists want to pursue the campaign to unravel Al-Qaeda? In today’s WaPo, Dafna Linzer has a story, attributed largely to unnamed but concerned administration insiders, in which she gives some disturbing new information about the extent to which they have subordinated this campaign to their current push to escalate tensions with Iran.
The back-story is that, as Linzer writes,

a group on the State Department’s terrorist list

Bush ultimately rejected the exchange on the advice of Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued that any engagement would legitimize Iran

Now, Linzer has learned that, in addition to Osama Bin Laden’s son Saad, those in Iranian custody include al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith of Kuwait and Saif al-Adel of Egypt, both of whom are reportedly members of the “al-Qaeda operational management committee.”
It is not clear to me how much the Bushists really care about the interests of that militant Iranian opposition group, the Mojahideen e-Khalq (MEK), around 3,000 or so of whose members had been in armed training camps in Iraq back in Saddam’s day, and have been kept in a detention camp in Iraq under the Americans. It is important to remember that, as Linzer noted there, the MEK is still on the State Department terrorism list, in connection with some very lethal acts its members carried out inside Iran in the 1980s.
(So you’d think the US government might want to actually put on trial at least the leaders of the MEK people they have under their control in Iraq, wouldn’t you? Nah… instead they have kept them there– under conditions that may or may not at this point include their complete disarming– as a way of keeping up the pressure on Teheran.)
You can see there, of course, the extent to which the Bushists have been willing to manipulate the quite legitimate global “concern” about terrorism for their own ideological ends.
What also seems very clear from Linzer’s article is the degree to which the top levels of the Bush administration are ready to compromise the anti-Qaeda campaign in the interests of maintaining their current campaign to isolate, encircle, and threaten Iran.
This is completely cock-eyed. Yes, Americans and others have a number of remaining concerns about Iran’s behavior. (And Iranians, about ours.) But numerous diplomatic channels remain, through which all these concerns can be put on the table, fairly addressed, and resolved. If the Bushists continue with their campaign to isolate and threaten Iran, this runs the risk of unleashing not only a war between these two nations but also a tsunami of instability that will “surge” throughout the region and the world…
But already, even before we have got to that point, it is clear that the Bushists’ campaign of anti-Iran escalation has forced many unwelcome costs on the world community. One of these is that the anti-Qaeda campaign– to which the Iranians have already made many significant contributions– is being compromised. We should all be very, very concerned.