Author: Helena

Interview with Amb. Imad Moustapha

Syria does not fear any imminent US military escalation against itself, though
it fears the Bush administration may yet launch a strike against Iran…
 Syria sees itself as the only power that has good relations with all
the parties inside Iraq, and is very willing to use this position to help
mediate and moderate intra-Iraqi disputes…  It calls for a reconciliation
process in Iraq in which “all parties should be involved, without exception,
but in which none would dominate the others”; and for a regional peace process
involving Iraq, all of its neighbors, and the US…  Syria’s relations
with many portions of US society, including the US Congress, have improved
considerably in the last 18 months, “But the only ‘fortress’ resisting engagement
with us is the administration”….

These were some of the main points in an informal, one-hour interview I held
January 26 with Ambassador Imad Moustapha, in his embassy in Washington DC’s
Kalorama district.

Moustapha drew a strong contrast between the standoff-ish and sullen
attitude the Bush administration presents towards Syria today and the behavior of an earlier US administration, during a period
of much greater substantive tension between the two parties, back in 1983:

Back then, US Navy vessels were directly shelling Syrian military
positions in Lebanon, and the US Air Force was attacking our positions in
the Bekaa valley.  You remember, we shot down a  US flyer on that
occasion…  But despite the continuation of that direct military engagement
between us, the Reagan administration still engaged with us diplomatically,
with the mission of Ambassador Philip Habib, who came to Damascus a number
of times.  But now, they won’t even talk to us?

Regarding his embassy’s relations with other sections of US society, he said
he feels he has had some real success reaching out to people in Congress,
the media, and civil society “including Jewish-American groups.”  He
recalled that several members of Congress visited Syria over the recent winter
break, and noted in particular that the meeting that ISG co-chair James Baker
held in Damascus with Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem last September had
been very successful.  

Mouallem was very clear with Baker.  He told him that
Syria wants to cooperate on resolving the differences inside Iraq– for its
own reasons.  We are not seeking any ‘deal’ to link that issue to Lebanon…

And then, see the strong degree to which we’ve restored our relations with
the government in Iraq.  We have just been having this long and very
productive visit to Syria by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, in the course
of which he signed a large number of interior and security agreements with
Damascus.  And this was at exactly the same time that Secretary Rice
was criticising us so strongly on Capitol Hill for our allegedly unhelpful
interference inside Iraq?  Her criticisms don’t seem to make much sense.

… No, I am not concerned about a possible American imminent escalation
against Syria.  But I do worry that the administration might do something
against Iran-– to try to save face and to reawaken patriotic feelings
among the Americans.

This would be disastrous.

Moustapha expressed significant concern about the eruption of Sunni-Shiite
sectarianism in the Arab world.  “Many Arabs see this as a direct result
of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq .  What happened there was
the dismantling of the state… and then religious, sectarian, and tribal
leaders were the only ones able to provide the most needed sense of some
security in the neighborhoods.”

He said the number of Iraqi refugees in Syria had now reached “nearly one
million”.  He described a visit he had made to one of the numerous,
completely new private universities that have been springing up in Syria
in recent years.  “But this one was different.  This was a completely
Iraqi institution, totally run by Iraqi professors and administrators…
 And there’s another one in Jordan,. too.”

I suggested that these institutions must be bringing great benefits to their
host countries.  But he said, “No,  the main thing is that it’s
a disaster for Iraq!  Iraq was always such a great center of Arab higher
edication!  My father got his degree there… so many other Arabs did.
 And now, it is all becoming destroyed.”

We had a short discussion about the recent reports on a possibly productive
Syrian-Israeli “back-channel” negotiation that occurred between 2004 and
July 2006.  Moustapha said the contacts in question never had any authorization
or standing with the government he represents.  “Syria’s position is
well-known and consistent,” he said.  “I have to tell you we have people
coming to us all the time and offering to conduct some such  private
negotiation.  But we don’t need it.  Our offer to resume the negotiations
at the open, official level with Israel is clear, and it’s on the table.”

He talked a little about his government’s relations with many of the different
parties and groups inside today’s Iraq.  He started by recalling how
many of the politicians who emerged in the immediate post-Saddam era had
had long ties with Syria, having spent a good portion of their previous years
of exile in Damascus.  “Seventeen of the 25 members of the Interim Governing
Council established by Paul Bremer once carried Syrian diplomatic passports!” 
After the US invasion of Iraq, many of those Iraqi politicians had turned
their back on Damascus to some degree– “But now, even those who disdained
us for a while are coming back into a relationship with us.”

Moustapha noted that Moqtada al-Sadr had a very good visit to Syria in early
2005, “and later, he became a kingmaker in the political system in Baghdad.”
 He stressed that in his view, Sadr was very far from being any kind
of an Iranian puppet.

He concluded by laying out his proposal for an all-party reconciliation process
inside Iraq, to be parallelled by a regional process involving all Iraq’s
neighbors and the United States.  “This wouldn’t solve all the
problems,” he conceded.  “But it would certainly change the reginal
dynamics.”

I asked whether he saw a role for the UN in convening such a process.  “The
UN can’t act unless the US allows it to,” he said.

…  The above account has been written in great haste.  I’ve had
a lot of work to do in the past few days, and I’ve also been packing and
preparing for a three-month trip away from home that will take me to Cairo,
various other Middle Eastern places, London, and France.  We leave on that
trip less than two hours from now.  But I did want to get this account
of the discussion with Amb. Moustapha posted onto the blog before I leave.

He is a smart and engaging man.  (Heck, he even has his own blog, which
makes some interesting reading.)  He shows a good understanding of the
different trends in the US policymaking elite, and seems to represent his
government’s positions accurately and persuasively.  From talking to
him, I got the sense that he– and most likely also the government he represents–
has a degree of quiet self-confidence about the government’s own survival
and prospects, but considerable concern for the possibility of further, more
damaging deteriorations in Iraq, or a US attack on Iran.  I have to
say he was pretty scathing about the prospects for the US occupation force
in Iraq, and the prospects of President Bush’s latest “surge” plan in particular.
 At one point he noted wryly: “Look , they don’t even seem to be able
to control Haifa Street, which is just a kilometer or so away from the Green
Zone.  How on earth do they hope to control the whole country?”

Was the Najaf fight more about tribes?

Zeyad of Healing Iraq compiles several different accounts of who the people were who got so bloodily killed in the shootout in Zarqaa/Najaf on Sunday and early Monday.
One of these accounts– perhaps the most convincing, but who knows?– is what you might call the “tribal” one:

    A mourning procession of 200 pilgrims from the Hawatim tribe, which inhabits the area between Najaf and Diwaniya, arrived at the Zarga area at 6 a.m. Sunday. Hajj Sa’ad Nayif Al-Hatemi and his wife were accompanying the procession in their 1982 Super Toyota sedan because they could not walk. They reached an Iraqi Army checkpoint, which suddenly opened fire against the vehicle, killing Hajj Al-Hatemi, his wife and his driver Jabir Ridha Al-Hatemi. The Hawatim tribesmen in the procession, which was fully armed to protect itself in its journey at night, attacked the checkpoint to avenge their slain chief. Members of the Khaza’il tribe, who live in the area, attempted to interfere to stop the fire exchange. About 20 tribesmen were killed. The checkpoint called the Iraqi army and police command calling for backup, saying it was under fire from Al-Qaeda groups and that they have advanced weapons. Minutes later, reinforcements arrived and the tribesmen were surrounded in the orchards and were sustaining heavy fire from all directions…

Zeyad notes the many discrepancies among the various accounts of the incident produced by Iraqi officials. And, too, that these tribes have been fairly resistant or hostile to the organizing efforts of all the big Shiite parties
The only thing that is clear at this point is that this is an extremely “foggy” war. Also, that whichever explanation of what happened is correct, the US-trained “IraqI’ security forces come out looking extremely poorly organized, lethal, and ill-disciplined.
I note, too, that many of these big tribal confederations in southern Iraq straddle the Shiite-Sunni divide, having members belonging to each of the two divisions of Islam.
(Hat-tip to Badger for the above.)

Is the Iraq war all about George W. Bush?

Several people have already commented on the disconnect between the glowing account Pres. Bush gave, in this radio interview Monday, of the performance of the US-trained “Iraqi” forces in recent days and the accounts that reporters in Iraq have been giving of the Iraqi forces’ performance in the battle near Najaf, or the ones raging along Baghdad’s Haifa Street…
For example, in this piece in today’s NYT, Marc Santora, Qais Mizher, and another unnamed Iraqi reporter wrote of the Najaf battle,

    Iraqi forces were surprised and nearly overwhelmed by the ferocity of an obscure renegade militia in a weekend battle… and needed far more help from American forces than previously disclosed, American and Iraqi officials said Monday.
    They said American ground troops — and not just air support as reported Sunday — were mobilized to help the Iraqi soldiers, who appeared to have dangerously underestimated the strength of the militia…
    American Apache attack helicopters and F-16s, as well as British fighter jets, flew low over the farms where the enemy had set up its encampments and attacked, dropping 500-pound bombs on the encampments. The Iraqi forces were still unable to advance, and they called in support from both an elite Iraqi unit known as the Scorpion Brigade, which is based to the north in Hilla, and from American ground troops.
    Around noon, elements of the American Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division were dispatched from near Baghdad…

Bush truly does seem to live in some bubble-like cloud-cuckoo land when he talks about the capacities of the “Iraqi” forces. This is what he told NPR’s Juan Williams yesterday:

    the Iraqis are beginning to take the lead, whether it be this fight that you’ve just reported on where the Iraqis went in with American help to do in some extremists that were trying to stop the advance of their democracy, or the report that there’s militant Shia had been captured or killed. In other words, one of the things that I expect to see is the Iraqis take the lead and show the American people that they’re willing to the hard work necessary to secure their democracy, and our job is to help them.
    So my first reaction on this report from the battlefield is that the Iraqis are beginning to show me something…

Seemingly obivious to the facts, yes. But I noticed something else there, too: A clear indication that Bush, emperor-like, now thinks that the war in Iraq is all about him… and that the job of the Iraqi forces who have been trained by the Americans is to show him personally how well they can perform.
Maybe the rest of us need to find a better way to break through his bubble of solipsism and self-referentiality.
No, George Bush, this war is not all about you. It’s about the desire for self-rule and national independence of 28 million Iraqis… It’s about the anxious families of the 140,000 US service members whom you have recklessly deployed into harm’s way… And it’s about when and how the US citizenry can find a way out of the quagmire of unilateralism, self-referentiality, and threat into which your ill-informed warmongering has led us.
So please, please don’t carry on acting as though it’s all about you. It’s about all of us, the citizens of all the world’s countries, and how we can build a new set of much more secure relationships among us based on human equality and mutual respect.
One hint: this is probably not best achieved with attack helicopters, F-16s, and 500-pound bombs…

Guest op-ed from Stanley J. Heginbotham

    Stanley Heginbotham is someone who thinks carefully and compassionately about issues of war and peace. I was interested to read some thoughts he’s put together on the US-Iraqi imbroglio, and I am happy to publish them here as a contribution to our continuing discussion. ~HC

WHEN IRAQIS PLAY BY IRAQI RULES  

Implications for US Strategy

by Stanley J. Heginbotham,

New York City, January 30, 2007

The author served for 10 years as chief of the foreign and
defense policy division at the Congressional Research Service.  As a
junior officer in the US Marine Corps in the early 60s he was OIC of a counter
guerrilla warfare school.  He received the PhD in political science
from MIT and a BA in History from Stanford.  He taught comparative politics
at Columbia University and was VP of the Social Science Research Council. 

Americans recognize that Iraqis behave according to their own rules.  
But we lack a clear sense of what those rules are.  We can, however,
derive some close approximations because we have several years of evidence
of how Iraqis behave – as opposed to what they say  — and we know a
lot about basic features of Iraq and countries facing analogous situations: 
Iraq’s social stratification, how divided societies response to rapid transitions
from authoritarianism to electoral politics;  how people in tribal systems
operate, and how people think in economies that haven’t known sustained secular
growth.  

Four rules provide a useful guide to what determines Iraqi behavior. 
Further, they suggest a number of predictions of how key groups in Iraq will
behave in the near future.

Rule 1:  As Iraq moved from authoritarianism to electoral politics,
successful politicians focused their appeals on core sources of personal
identity:  tribe, faction, religion, and ethnic community.  Politicians
who staked out broad public policy positions in order to appeal across ethnic
and religious identities have been strikingly unsuccessful and marginalized. 
 

The December 2005 elections marked a profound setback for American
aspirations for such parties and leaders.  Ahmad Chalabi was unable
to secure a single seat in the parliament.   Support for Iyad Allawi’s
party declined dramatically as a result of those elections.  Subsequently
he has been only a peripheral player in national politics and now lives primarily
abroad.   

Rule 2:  The gains of any political group are seen as being
achieved only at the expense of its adversaries.

The notion of  win-win result — Sunni, Shi’a and Kurds
cooperating in a unity government that stimulates growth and benefits all
— is inconceivable to key Iraqi politicians and their followers. The stark
reality is that our invasion dethroned Sunnis and replaced them with Shiites.
 
This is a classic zero-sum perspective.  It is common – and makes good
sense – in societies that haven’t experienced secular economic growth.

The middle and professional classes who could conceive of a win-win solution
no longer matter.  Indeed, many have fled Iraq in the face of dashed
hopes and serious threats to their personal survival.

Continue reading “Guest op-ed from Stanley J. Heginbotham”

Sadrist delegation in Kurdistan

Aswat al-Iraq/ Voices of Iraq is reporting that a delegation of four Sadrist MPs has traveled to Arbil to visit with Kurdish President Masoud Barzani.
VOI’s Abdul-Hamid Zibari writes there that Sadrist MP and delegation member Baha al-Araji described the visit as unprecedented. Araji also said that the Sadr movement would back the Kurdistan Coalition’s demands in parliament “if these demands did not clash with the national and Islamic basics.”
This is just another little sign of the cross-“group” politics that still goes on in Iraq, alongside the violence that makes up most of what we read in the MSM.
I don’t understand why– according to the counters posted right there on the VOI site– so few people seem to be reading their very informative newsfeed in English. The range of material they publish there every day is really amazing.
I’ve been revamping my sidebar a bit today, and I just put a link to their English-language homepage there in the “Links” section.

Battles with (a new kind of) Mahdists near Najaf

Yesterday’s fierce battles near Najaf saw the tumultuous emergence and apparent defeat of what most sources now agree was a fervent, well-armed group of some 300-plus supporters of Ahmad al-Hasan, a man who claimed to be the “true” deputy of the Shiite twelfth Imam, the long-awaited Mahdi.
Note that adherence to, and longing for, the Mahdi is a common theme in Shite belief and practice. These latest Mahdists are not the same as Moqtada al-Sadr’s “Jaish al-Mahdi.” (Also, Mahdism transcends the Shiite-Sunni divide. It was also a powerful force in the anti-British movement in Sudan in the 19th century, where its adherents were mainly Sunnis with a Sufi flavor. Go figure.)
Haider al-Kaabi of Aswat al-Iraq (Voices of Iraq) yesterday published this fairly full account of the Najaf/Zarqaa events. And today, Aswat al-Iraq carries this update:

    More than 250 gunmen were killed in military operations in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, 160 km south of the capital Baghdad, Iraqi police sources said.
    “Iraqi forces, backed by U.S. tanks and helicopters, killed 250-300 gunmen in fierce battles on Sunday in the area of al-Zarga in northeastern Najaf with members of the self-styled Ahmed al-Hassan Group,” an official police source told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
    Clashes had erupted when an Iraqi police and National Guard force raided at the early hours of Sunday a headquarters of the group of Ahmed al-Hassan, who claims to be the successor of Imam al-Mahdi, the 12th Imam (religious leader) highly revered by the Shiites.
    Meanwhile, the U.S. army announced that two U.S. soldiers were killed when their helicopter gunship crashed in the violent clashes that continued for a whole day.
    The U.S. army, in a statement, did not say why the chopper went down but it crashed in the same area that witnessed Sunday’s clashes.
    A media spokesman for security forces in Najaf told reporters that the battle is over and fighters of Ahmed al-Hassan group were beaten after U.S. troops and Iraqi Scorpion Brigade took part in the clashes.
    “The forces took control of the armed group camp and troops were combing the area,” the spokesman said, adding “the battle is over and calm will be restored to the area.”
    “The raid was meant to arrest the group leader Ahmed al-Hassan but the strong resistance led the Iraqi forces to ask for support from the U.S. troops,” he said.
    According to the agreement that transferred the security responsibility to the Iraqi army in Najaf on December 25, the Iraqi security forces may ask for support from the U.S. forces.
    “Ahmed al-Hassan Supporters” is an extremist Shiite armed group that sought leadership over other Shiite groups after its leader claimed to be a deputy of the Shiite twelfth Imam, the Awaited Mahdi.
    Al-Zarga area, the stronghold of Ahmed al-Hassan Supporters, is a rural area that is located outside Najaf.
    Only last week, Iraqi security forces launched a wide-scale campaign to stem this extremist group.

The account also notes that many thousands of Shiite pilgrims are in the area for the observances of Ashura.
We are all also lucky that Reidar Visser has given us some additional background on Ahmad al-Has(s)an:

    If … reports concerning the involvement of Ahmad al-Hasan of Basra are correct, this would mean a qualitative change in the situation. In contrast to [Moqtada] Sadr, [Muhammad] Yaqubi and [Mahmud] Hasani, Hasan represents full-blown Mahdism. His message is that he is the representative of the Mahdi – the Messiah-like figure whose appearance all Shiites yearn for, as a sign of the start of the apocalypse. Hasan believes that he possesses “divine authority” (wilaya ilahiyya) and is in a position to overrule the traditional Shiite clergy in any issue of jurisprudence. In another divergence from Sadr, Yaqubi and Hasani, he completely dismisses the concept of legal interpretation (ijtihad) and demands that in legal questions where the Koran is ambiguous, the faithful should refer to him as the sole source of emulation. In contrast to the Sadrist radicals, he uses his lack of scholarly training as decisive proof of his divine status (“How would I, a person without religious education, otherwise be able to disseminate Islamic knowledge?”)
    To back up his claims to religious authority Hasan employs several Shiite traditions concerning the coming of the Mahdi – among them prophecies that an “Ahmad from Basra” will appear shortly before the Mahdi himself. Ahmad al-Hasan also says he is “the Yemenite” (al-yamani) described by many Islamic sources as a sign of the Mahdi’s imminent emergence, and resolves the apparent contradiction as regards his own Basra origins by claiming that Yemen extends into Hijaz and that all Arabs are in fact “Yemenis”. And to prove his point that the apocalypse is near, he refers to the appearance of the forces of evil in the shape of Dajjal – the deceiver – whose incarnations he identifies as the US military forces in Iraq as well as the leading establishment of the Shiite clergy (Hasan has been particularly critical of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani).
    Hasan has been active in the south of Iraq, around Basra, Amara and Nasiriyya, since 2003, when he first declared his “revolt”. He has since been conspicuous in several clashes and disputations with small Sadrist splinter groups in that area. The traditional clergy have reportedly even accused him of links to the former regime. If it is indeed his followers that are currently fighting in such large numbers outside Najaf, this would mean that Mahdism has now entered Iraqi politics on a larger scale – with the inevitable evocation of past schismatic movements in Shiism similarly inspired at least to some extent by Mahdism, like Shaykhism and Babism, which for long periods during the nineteenth century created civil-war like conditions in Persia and the Ottoman provinces of Iraq.

I’ll just close by noting that the death in battle of such large numbers of people is a terrible, terrible tragedy. Would there not have been a better, less violent way to contain and end any threat this group might have posed to the surrounding society?
Any time of deep social and political and existential strife can incubate a large number of apocalyptic visions and end-time-ist groups. (The period of the Civil War in 17th century England that incubated the Quakers and tens of other new religious-social groupings of varying degrees of radicalism was a time of very similar religious and political turmoil. The main difference between that epoch and today’s Iraq is the horrendous lethality of today’s armaments— plus, of course, the looming presence and divide-and-rule interventions of a massively well-armed external power.)
If Iraq’s present turmoil continues, we should certainly expect more such groups to emerge… Also, despite the Iraqi officials’ present claims of total victory, it is possible that this group itself might re-emerge.
It is a tragedy for the people of Iraq that the leaders of their weak, powerless, and very widely distrusted “government” felt they could not deal with this Mahdist emergence without calling in the American forces.
How many of those killed in the date groves of Zarqaa were mown down from US helicopters, I wonder?
Update, Monday, 11:30 a.m.:
Reuters’ Khaled Farhan is reporting this:

    The leader of an Iraqi cult who claimed to be the Mahdi, a messiah-like figure in Islam, was killed in a battle on Sunday near Najaf with hundreds of his followers, Iraq’s national security minister said on Monday.
    Women and children who joined 600-700 of his “Soldiers of Heaven” on the outskirts of the Shi’ite holy city may be among the casualties, Shirwan al-Waeli told Reuters. All those people not killed were in detention, many of them wounded…

New, weekly nonviolence events in Hebron

    Jan Benvie, the very inspiring staff member of Christian peacemaker Teams (CPT) with whom I had the honor of working at our nonviolence workshop in Amman last October, is back in the field with CPT, in Hebron, occupied Palestine. Here’s a press release CPT put out on Friday over her name:

CPT RELEASE
Conference in Hebron
by Janet Benvie
26th January 2007
On the 25th of January nearly 200 Palestinians and international peace activists, including CPTers Bill Baldwin, Bob Holmes and Dianne Roe, participated in an open-air conference beside the Israeli military checkpoint at the top of Shuhada Street in Hebron. The conference was the second event organized by Palestinian ISM in Hebron, calling for the Israeli military to open Shuhada Street, in accordance with an Israeli High Court decision in December 2006. (see http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/809722.html )
There was an almost carnival atmosphere about the peaceful event, as young and old, Palestinian and international, gathered together to listen to speeches and to chant, sing and dance. Everyone was united by the desire for freedom, justice and peace.
People held placards that called for freedom of movement, an end to the illegal Israeli occupation and an end to settler violence, as well as for the opening of Shuhada Street. Palestinian residents of Tel Rumeida, the community most severely affected by the closure, spoke eloquently about the harsh living conditions caused by the movement restrictions enforced by the Israeli military. A local school headmistress spoke about the difficulties her students face every day trying to get to and from school. A twelve-year-old boy from Tel Rumeida, spoke about his experiences of growing up in a land under military occupation.
Shuhada Street used to be one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The Israeli army has prevented Palestinians from using the street for the past six years, and has also enforced the closure of all the stops and stall on the street. This has had a profound, detrimental effect on the livelihood of thousands of Palestinian families.
CPTer Jan Benvie later spoke with an Israeli peace activist, in another area of Hebron, who told her that he had been prevented from passing through the checkpoint to join the conference. The military often prevent Israeli peace activists, who want to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, from entering Hebron.
Last week, on Thursday 18th January, the Israeli police prevented some 150 Peace Now (an Israeli peace group) activists from traveling to Hebron. The Israeli’s wanted to protest in Hebron against settler violence, following the airing of a video showing a settler verbally attacking a Palestinian family. (see http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3350480,00.html )
Issa Amro, a Palestinian nonviolent activist, and one of the conference organizers, told CPT that they plan to hold weekly events until the Israeli army abides by the court ruling.
Photos of this conference, and other events in Hebron, may be viewed at: http://www.cpt.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=hebron

The Bushites’ latest weapon: SADDAM

What to call the new, Middle East-wide coalition that the Bushites are seeking to build in the Middle East (as described by David Ignatius in this fairly fawning account of an interview he had with Condi Rice recently)?
Moroccan-American writer Issandr el-Amrani has a good suggestion:

    I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical precedent. In the 1980s, some of you may remember, there was another Saddam who proved rather useful against Iran. Saddam invaded Iran without provocation, sparking an eight-year-long war that was one of the 20th century’s deadliest. Along the way, the U.S. and the Arab states listed above provided much in funding, weapons and turning a blind eye when Saddam got carried away and used chemical weapons against Kurds (it did not raise that much of a fuss when he used them against Iranians, either).
    By forming SADDAM, the Bush administration hopes to do several things. Firstly, encourage countries with ambivalent policies towards Israel to accept a new regional security arrangement with the Jewish state firmly as its center—the holy grail of the neo-conservatives who, despite reports to the contrary, continue to craft U.S. Middle East policy. (Otherwise, why would Elliott Abrams still have his job?) Secondly, it is securing the support of these countries against Iran, in preparation for a possible strike against its nuclear facilities or some other form of military action, or at least to ensure the recently announced United Nations sanctions against Iran are effective. One tactic is getting the oil-producing SADDAM countries to up production and bring the price of the oil barrel back to under $50, as Saudi Arabia is obviously doing by boycotting calls by fellow OPEC members to cut production.
    At stake is limiting one of the biggest effects caused by the administration’s decision to invade Iraq (and subsequently failing to maintain order): the rise of Iran as a regional power…

This whole article is a fine, fine piece of analysis and of writing. I nominate it for whatever awards there are.

Peace March January 2007

Today I was back on the streets, as part of United for Peace & Justice’s big anti-war march in Washington DC.
It was exhilarating and wonderful to be there– though I never did find the four buses’-worth of folks who came up from Charlottesville today and were supposed to be marching together somewhere. I came to DC on Thursday to do some work in the city. Today I rode in to the march on the Metro (subway) with my friend Corky Bryant. On the Metro there was a great sense of anticipation– just like in the big antiwar march in New York in February 2003, when I rode into Manhattan with my daughter and son-in-law on the subway, and at every stop more people in marching gear would get on with their placards and a mounting air of excitement.
This time the rally didn’t seem to be as well organized. It was kind of hard to figure what was going on at times, and they didn’t have any big screens, just a fairly poor sound system.
Still, the weather was good and the spirit was excellent. There were many very creative placards– including a good number that drew a direct line between the waging of war abroad and the deterioration of basic good governance and civil liberties here at home.
There didn’t seem to be any unification of slogans or approaches. There were church groups, revolutionary socialists, labor unions (especially the great SEIU), many locality-based peace and justice groups from all over the country, and quite an impressive contingent from “Iraq Veterans Aagainst the War.” Toward the end of the march, I found myself next to this last group: about 40 or so mainly young-ish men, most wearing blue jeans and their combat-camo jackets. Marching right there with them were an older generation of guys from Vietnam Veterans Against the War– and a small contingent of passionately articulate men from the “Appeal for Redress”, which is the anti-Iraq-War organization of serving military people.
They are all so brave.
In addition, I saw quite a number of protesters wearing T-shirts or signs that identified them as family members of service-members killed in Iraq. And many signs and banners referred to the horrendous casualty toll among Iraqis so far.
It remains to be seen what effect this march will have. The big media all seem to be trying to downplay it– including by saying, over and over again, that only “tens of thousands” took part. It was hard to get a single unified look at the crowd but by my estimate more than 200,000 people were there… And surely people in those news helicopters and police helicopters circling overhead could get a better estimate than me?
Anyway, the organizing work will go on. On Monday, UFPJ is organizing some in-office lobbying visits with members of Congress. I won’t be here for those– I need to get back home and make some final arrangements before I leave the country Wednesday.
I’m really tired. Corky took some photos and I’ll see if I can get them up here tomorrow…