Maureen Dowd (also known as MoDo) is a smart, often hilarious, and nearly always very savvy columnist for the NYT. Unfortunately, like all their columnists, she is currently locked up in a little orange box on the NYT.com website, so even though I’m a subscriber to the print edition of the paper I can’t figure out how to unlock her online persona.
She has a column about Iraq today titled Lost in the desert, in which her main point is that in Washington “no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here”.
She cites Dick Cheney. She cites Henry Kissinger. She cites Kofi Annan, Anthony Zinni, Lt.-Gen. Raymond Odierno, Gen. John Abizaid, Peter Beinart, etc., etc.
But she doesn’t cite me. I have a plan. It ain’t perfect, but I’ve thought long and hard about the tricky conundra around political legitimacy, public security, and regional interests that are entangled in Iraq and I’ve come up with what I honestly think is the best chance there is for a workable plan.
I described it most recently here. You could call it the “Namibia option.” It is a way to think through how to achieve a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is speedy, total, orderly, and (I very much hope) generous to Iraq’s long-suffering people.
I’m really peeved she didn’t say anything about my plan. After all, all the “experts” and pundits etc whom she cited were of a certain, frequently testosterone-soaked gender. And her latest book was titled Are Men Necessary?
In thinking through how to actually move from the present, horrendous situation in Iraq to one of orderly US withdrawal and a restoration of public order, calm, political legitimacy and political hopefulness in Iraq, then perhaps men aren’t the most helpful types of people to have around right now…
Meantime, as I’ve noted fairly frequently over recent years, the public discourse in the US ever since 9/11 has been one of extreme rollback of women’s voices on matters of national security. Condi Rice in positions of high authority? That is just “cover” for the rollback of allowing the great mass of female specialists to have much meaningful input. Really, look at all the “experts” who get air-time, fat contracting salaries, etc etc in commentating about the war these days: It is nearly all members of the very same gender that got us into this horrible mess.
So Maureen, go read my “Namibia” plan. And stop saying that “no one” knows what to do in Iraq.
Author: Helena
On human shields (and Human Rights Watch)
I’ve been having a bit of an email exchange today with Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch, over their decision, yesterday, to rush out a press release criticising the Gazans’ latest use of nonviolent mass action to halt Israel’s resumed practice of punitive home demolitions in Gaza.
The text of the HRW press release is now available on-line. It is titled OPT: Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks.
In Sarah Leah’s emails to me she has stressed two points: (1) The point, also made in the press release, that ““Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.” And (2) that for Palestinian military commanders, in particular, to ask civilians to act as “human shields” in this way represented an unlawful attempt to pur civilians at potential risk.
I have pointed out to her that by these lights, for Mandela (who was a military commander, much more than Ismail Haniyeh– who was quoted in the HRW release– ever was) to call for South Africa’s non-whites to engage in nonviolent mass actions against the apartheid regime, which were often very risky indeed, would also likewise have been considered “unlawful” or even– as HRW grandiosely terms the situation in Gaza “a war crime.”
I pointed out that many other people, in addition to alleged “military commanders” also joined the mobilization effort in Gaza. I pointed out that there has been no suggestion of any coercion being applied on anyone to participate in this quite voluntary human-shielding action. (This is, of course, the most marked difference with the situation when Israel– in the past, and reportedly as recently as last July– has forced Palestinians at gunpoint to act as human shields during its actions in the OPTs. This issue of the presence or absence of coercion is surely a very important one indeed.)
I also wish I’d pointed out more forcefully than I did that– contrary to what SL said both in the press release and to me– it does make a significant difference whether the threatened target of Israel’s violent action was a “legitimate military target”, or not…
So the conversation will doubtless continue. I still strongly question why Sarah Leah and the rest of HRW’s staff [previous word edited on Jan. 28, 2009, with apologies for the earlier, very disrespectful characterization of these people ~HC] rushed to get this very definitive and accusatory press release out so very quickly. Especially given that– as I’d noted here yesterday– over the past four months HRW had said not one word about Israel’s horrible, very harmful resumption, back in July, of the practice of demolishing large numbers of family homes in the Gaza Strip for purely punitive purposes.
It was that practice that the latest “human shields” operation was trying to prevent… and thus far, successfully so…
HRW did have the grace– finally!– in yesterday’s press release to mention the fact and scale of Israel’s resumption of undertaking punitive home demolitions min Gaza… But that very salient fact was buried ways down toward the end of their press release. And notably, the text completely fails to call on Israel to cease this extremely harmful and violent practice, which– in the absence of any evidence at all that the homes in question were used to store weapons– is a quite evident and serious infraction of the Geneva Conventions.
I note, however, that the Israelis must have been very peeved at the success of the latest human shield operation because earlier today they sent ground force (tank and sniper) units into northern Gaza, installing some of these units in Palestinian homes as a way of thereby “converting” them into military positions. Given that the population density in Gaza is such that people usually live in all these houses, this almost immediately turns these individuals– whom the IOF usually keeps through coercive means as prisoners in one or more rooms of their own homes– into coerced human shields. What they are “shielding” there is of course the IOF’s aggressive and violent presence in and atop their home.
(Sarah Leah, where’s the outrage?)
One of the homes taken over today was that of female Hamas legislator Jameela al-Shanti, one of the main organizers of the recent civilian mass actions.
Here’s that AP account linked to above:
- Troops also took over the home of a Hamas legislator who earlier in the month helped to organize a women’s demonstration that let dozens of militants escape an Israeli siege on a Beit Hanoun mosque, the lawmaker, Jamila Shanti, told The Associated Press.
She was not in the house at the time…
A bulldozer chipped away at the walls of the two-story structure so troops could enter, relatives inside the house and neighbors told her, she said. Once inside, they locked about 15 members of her family, including five children, into a single room and threw furniture and clothes out of windows, she said.
“They are only making us more stubborn,” she said. “We will resist with our last drop of blood.”
Bulldozers, skirting regular roads where mines could be planted, also created new routes of access by knocking down greenhouses in Jebaliya, Beit Hanoun and neighboring Beit Lahiya, and two small farmers’ houses.
The army confirmed it was operating in the area as part of its ongoing offensive against Gaza rocket squads, but gave no other details.
Poor Ms. Shanti. Just a couple of weeks ago the IOF’s artillery shelled her house, killing her sister-in-law Nahla, and terrifying all the children who live there. Can you imagine how the children felt during today’s ghastly, inhumane action?
In what possible way was the house a legitimate military target for the IOF?
… And finally, one last note on HRW’s application of what seem like evidently biased double standards regarding the whole “human shields” issue. You probably recall the furore back in July when a bunch of Israeli parents apparently took their “cute” little girl-children to visit a nearby and quite active artillery position in northern Israel, during the war with Hizbullah… and the girls all got to write little messages with felt-tip markers onto the large and very destructive artillery shells that were standing around there… And the whole scene was photographed and quite widely discussed in some parts of the blogosphere (including here, by Scott.)
This looks much more serious as an instance of “human shielding” than anything that happened in Gaza this week. The IDF artillery position was clearly itself a “legitimate military target”, and the commanders seem not to have tried to shoo the Israeli families away from the place. But can you only imagine the uproar if Hizbullah had targeted the position and hit it with its rockets– and 10 or 12 Israeli children had been blown up while they were there drawing their little designs and messages on the IDF’s artillery shells?
And Human Rights Watch said what about that incident??? As far as I can figure out, absolutely nothing.
But when the Palestinians of Gaza try to undertake an unarmed action of social defense of homes unjustifiably targeted for punitive demolition, HRW can’t hurry fast enough to issue its denunciation.
Truly, as I told Sarah Leah, I don’t understand what they’re thinking.
Rights-less in Gaza (or not even in it yet)
To understand somethng of how it feels to be a Palestinian, go read Laila el-Haddad’s account of her (so far unsuccessful) attempt to return with her son and her parents to her home-city, Gaza.
The Israelis claim to have withdrawn from Gaza in september 2005. But they still control all its means of contact with the outside world, including the tiny strip of internatinal border that Gaza shares with Egypt.
That’s where Laila– along with, apparently, several thousands of other Gaza Palestinians– is trying to cross.
They got as far as El-Arish, a 30-minute drive from the Rafah crossing point and the closest large Egyptian town to the border:
- During times of extended closure, like this summer, and last year, it becomes a Palestinian slum. Thousands of penniless Palestinians, having finished their savings and never anticpating the length of the closure, end up on the streets. The storeowner and taxi drive relay story after story to us from this summer.
In response, and under Israeli pressure, the Egyptian police no longer allows Palestinians driving up from Cairo past the Egyptian port city of al-Qantara if the border is closed and Al-Arish becomes to crowded. “They turn it into a ghetto. That, and the Israelis didn’t want them blowing up holes in the border again to get through.”
We carried false hopes last night, hopes transmitted down the taxi driver’s grapevine, the ones who run the Cairo-Rafah circuit-that the border would open early this morning. So we kept our bags packed, slept early to the crashing of the Mediterranean-the same ones that just a few kilometres down, crashed down on Gaza’s beseiged shores.
But it is 4, then 5, then 6am, and the border does not open. And my heart begins to twinge, recalling the last time I tried to cross Rafah; recalling how I could not, for 55 days; 55 days during which Yousuf learned to lift himself up into the world, during which he took his first fleeting step.
… So, as always, we wait. We wait our entire lives, as Palestinians. If not for a border to open, for a permit to be issued, for an incursion to end, for a time when we do not have to wait any longer.
[What] is so frightening about borders-and particularly Rafah- that it drives chills down my spine? They are after all crossings like any others I tell myself. What divides one metre of sand from the next, beyond that border? It is exactly the same. It is history and occupation and isolation that changes it.
For Palestinians, borders are a reminder-of our vulnerability and non-belonging, of our displacement and dispossession. It is a reminder-a painful one-of homeland lost. And of what could happen if what remains is lost again. When we are lost again, the way we lose a little bit of our Selves everytime we cross and we wait to cross.
So it is here, 50 kilometres from Rafah’s border, that I am reminded once again of displacement. That I have become that ‘displaced stranger’ to quote Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Displacmenet is meant to be something that happens to someone else, he says. How true. To refugees that the world cares to forget. Who have no right of return. Who return to nowhere and everywhere in their minds a million times. When the border closes, we are one day closer to become that.
Of course, that, is Yassine [her husband; a Palestinian who grew up in lebanon and has a Lebanon-issued ‘Palestinian’ refugee ID] — who cannot even get as far as I– cannot even get as far as Egypt, to feel alone. He feels alone everyday, and is rejected everyday, finding belonging in other, non-static things: family, love, work.
But the Palestinian never forgets his aloneness. He is always, always reminded of it on borders. That, above all, is why I hate Rafah Crossing. That is why I hate borders. They remind me that I, like all Palestinians, belong to everywhre and nowhere at once. The Border of Dispossession .
God help you, dear Laila.
Pierre Gemayyel killed
Yes, I know that young Pierre Genayyal was assassinated today in Beirut, and I send my condolences to his family.
Huge kudos to his father, the former President Amin Gemayyel, for stressing the need for calm. It would be nice if world leaders could follow that good advice, too.
Twenty-four years ago, in September 1982, it was the killing of young Pierre’s uncle Bashir that sparked a horrible, Israeli-facilitated orgy of revenge killing by his crazed followers that left many hundreds of unarmed Palestinians dead in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Amin– and everyone else– has every reason to fear that strong adherents of the family’s Phalangist Paty might stage a repeat of those massacres. (Though of course, this time round, we can hope that there will be no facilitating party in there providing trucks to convey the Phalangist killers from their home areas to the refugee camps, and flares to light their way once they get there… )
But still, Amin’s call for calm is particularly valuable at this time. How truly terrible for him to lose his son in this way.
Gaza: Home demolitions, nonviolent resistance, HRW, etc
The Israeli government’s assault on the rights and the physical security of the 3.2 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza continues.
Today, the NYT made a good big splash with an article by Steve Erlanger about the report issued by the Israeli “Peace Now” organization that calculated that some 40% of the land on which Israeli settlements have been (and still are being) built in the West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.
Actually, Erlanger is clearer in his language on this– using the term “privately owned” prominently in the lead to his piece, unlike the title of the Peace Now web-page linked to there, which says merely “owned by Palestinians.” This is an important distinction. Nearly all the land which is not identified as “privately owned by Palestinians” is in fact Palestinian state land. Israeli settlement builders have claimed that the fact that that land is not privately owned by identified individuals or families, somehow makes it “okay” for Israel to build settlements there. The 4th Geneva Convention, of course, makes no distinction between privately owned land and land held under communal mechanisms: It says simply that all land that comes under foreign occupation rule is deemed completely off-limits for the implantation of settlers from the occupying power.
Still, when the land settled on is also privately owned, in a sense that makes the infraction of the Israeli settlement builders a double infraction: it is a grave breach of the 4th Geneva Convention and also a violation of that family’s personal property rights…
And where is the US congress and government– staunch defenders of private property rights– in all this?
Nowhere. Silent. (As usual.) Content just to continue shoveling over huge wads of my tax dollars to Israel every year that end up bolstering the settlement-building project…
The settlements are, as we know, just one of the many ways in which the Israeli occupation regime maintains a constant assault on the rights of the Palestinians. Another (linked) policy is the continued demolition– under a variety of pretextst– of the homes of the occupied areas’ Palestinians.
This information page from the Israeli rights organization B’tselem tells us that since July 2006 there has been a sharp increase in the numbers of Palestinian homes demolished in the Gaza Strip “for alleged military purposes.”
This is very serious indeed.
Remember that Israel claimed to have “left” Gaza back in September 2005? So between October 2005 and June 2006, it undertook zero home demolitions there “for alleged military purposes.” In July, there were 64; in August, 71; and in September 2006 there were 21 demolitions. (No figures on that B’Tselem page yet for October 2006.) That is a total of 156 homes demolished in Gaza in those three months– homes that housed around 900 people.
You can also see B’tselem’s carefully compiled stats on Palestinian homes demolished by the IDF “as punishment” and for alleged infractions of planning regulations.”
And by the way, you might want to check out the facilities in the settlement of Ariel, in the heart of the West Bank, on the “municipal” website there.
… Is it any wonder, in light of the above, that many Palestinians have decided to dig in their heels and say “no more home demolitions”?
And thus, on Sunday, when the IOF made a public announcement to two members of the “Popular Resistance Committees” in northern Gaza that “had 30 minutes” to evacuate whatever they could out of thier homes which would thereafter be demolished, something very different happened instead. The targeted families and their friends in the local mosque invited their neighbors to come over… The invitation was broadcast from the loudspeakers of the mosque there in Beit Hanoun, and hundreds of people hurried to go and organize a round-the-clock sit-in at the two targeted homes.
This mass civilian action— which was almost completely, as far as I can see, nonviolent– met with a very welcome response, both from the Palestinians of the area who flocked to the two threatened houses, and from the IOF which called off (or perhaps merely postponed) the threatened demolitions.
In that BBC report linked to there, which was by Alan Johnston, Johnston noted that:
- Of course the tactic is dangerous and it takes courage.
Nobody rushing to a threatened home will know whether or not this time the Israelis will strike.
But for Palestinians the new strategy has benefits way beyond protecting the odd target.
The tactic is symbolically important and a propaganda coup.
From militant leaders to schoolgirls, Palestinians can unite in confronting their enemy and the passive resistance of the human shields will be admired from around the world.
The boys on the roofs, armed only with Palestinian flags and facing down war planes, are a David and Goliath image for the modern age…
He is quite right in most of these judgments, I think, including the one about the courage shown by the nonviolent resisters. (Check this photo gallery of the action, also from the BBC.)
He is wrong in two respects, though. I think it’s incorrect to describe the Palestinians’ action as “passive resistance.” It was not just a passive sitting-in-place: it was an active and seemingly fairly well-organized mobilization. Like the precursor action taken at the beginning of the month in and around the Beit Hanoun mosque, as I described here.
Two women died in that earlier action, and a number were wounded. But it did succeed in defusing the extreme tensions around the mosque, and in spiriting to safety the armed men who were being encircled there. So the fact that people responded to these latest mobilizations– in spite of the evident risks– ssays even more for their courage, I think.
Jonshton is wrong, too, to write that this latest nonviolent action “will be admired from around the world.” It has notably not been admired by my colleagues from Human Rights Watch, who rushed to deliver into my mailbox today an extremely bitter little news release stating,
- Palestinian armed groups must not endanger Palestinian civilians by encouraging them to gather in and around suspected militants’ homes targeted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Human Rights Watch said today.
Calling civilians to a location that the opposing side has identified for attack is at worst human shielding, at best failing to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians from the effects of attack. Both are violations of international humanitarian law.
According to media reports, on Saturday the IDF warned Mohammedweil Baroud, a commander in the Popular Resistance Committees, to leave his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp as they planned to destroy it. Baroud reportedly summoned neighbors and friends to protect his house, and a crowd of hundreds of Palestinians gathered in, around, and on the roof of the house. The IDF said that they called off the attack after they saw the large number of civilians around the house. On Monday, the BBC also reported that the IDF had warned Wael Rajab, an alleged Hamas member in Beit Lahiya, that that they were preparing to attack his home, and that a call was later broadcasted from local mosques for volunteers to protect the home.
“There is no excuse for calling civilians to the scene of a planned attack,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.”
(The news release is not up on their website yet; but it came to me by email.)
So Human Rights Watch’s august leaders sitting in their comfy homes in New York want to tell Gaza’s people who they can and cannot invite to come and visit them (unarmed) in their homes there? (And not, as far as I can see, exerting any coercion on them at all as to whether they should come or not.) HRW’s chutzpah is beyond belief. And this, from an organization that has said nothing at all previously that I can find about the post-July surge in Israeli home demolitions in Gaza.
I’m almost ashamed at this point to still be on the ‘Middle East Advisory Committee’ of HRW, an organization that seems obsessively concerned with appeasing the presumed sentiments of their donor base by criticizing Palestinians at every opportunity. (Actually, I think they under-estimate the donor base that would be out there if they adopted a forthright and fair approach to the way they address the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.)
… Meanwhile, most human-rights organizations inside Israel are doing a far, far better job of working for the rights of the Palestinians than Human Rights Watch is. On November 16, a coalition of Israeli rights organizations issued a joint statement on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. After sketching out the main dimensions of this crisis, the statement says this:
- Israel cannot shirk its responsibility for this growing crisis. Even after its Disengagement in 2005, Israel continues to hold decisive control over central elements of Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip:
1. Israel continues to maintain complete control over the air space and territorial waters.
2. Israel continues to control the joint Gaza Strip-West Bank population registry , preventing relocation between the West Bank and Gaza , and family unification.
3. Israel controls all movement in and out of Gaza , with exclusive control over all crossing points between Gaza and Israel , and the ability to shut down the Rafah crossing to Egypt .
4. Israeli ground troops conduct frequent military operations inside Gaza.
5. Israel continues to exercise almost complete control over imports and exports from the Gaza Strip.
6. Israel controls most elements of the taxation system of the Gaza Strip, and since February has withheld tax monies legally owed to the PA, and amounting to half of the to tal PA budget.
The broad scope of Israeli control in the Gaza Strip creates a strong case for the claim that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip continues, along with an obligation to ensure the welfare of the civilian population. Regardless of the legal definition of the Gaza Strip, Israel bears legal obligations regarding those spheres that it continues to control. Israel has the right to defend itself. However, all military measures taken by Israel must respect the provisions of international humanitarian law.
The following Israeli human rights organizations call on the international community to ensure that Israel respects the basic human rights of residents of the Gaza Strip, and that all parties respect international humanitarian law:
* B’Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
* Association for Civil Rights in the Israel
* Amnesty International–Israel Section
* Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights
* HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual
* Gisha: Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement
* Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
* Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
* Rabbis for Human Rights
What an honor roll of fine, principled organizations. (Another great Israeli organization is the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, ICAHD.)
What we need now, of course, is more action at the international level– and especially here in the US– in support of the Israeli groups’ highly principled position. What we absolutely don’t need is one-sided, blame-the-victim statements from an organization like Human Rights Watch that seek to lay “blame” on the Palestinians of Gaza for having turned– at last!– towards smarter and more intentional use of nonviolent mass actions.
Alan Johnston, in that piece he put onto the BBC website, also wrote this:
- nobody should imagine that the likes of Hamas are suddenly being won over wholly to the strategies of pacifism.
If they possessed anti-aircraft guns, they would surely blaze away at the circling planes.
Well perhaps, and perhaps not. Perhaps if the Indian nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s had had a bursting arsenal of hi-tech weapons, they would have never have flocked around Gandhi. We will never know– in either case.
As it is, now, however, what we have been seeing in Gaza over the past three weeks– and what we saw in Lebanon in 1996, 2000, and earlier this year– is organizations of nationalist-Islamist resistance to foreign occupation and foreign military intervention that figured out over time the political-strategic advantage that can be won by laying ever greater stress on nonviolent actions undertaken by civilian mass organizations, and less on the actions of small, always threatened, military cells.
It is true that neither Hamas not Hizbullah is, at this point, dominated by what I would call the concept of “principled” nonviolence. But both organizations have moved very far indeed toward incorporating the use of Gene Sharpe-type “strategic” nonviolence into their practice. Which is an excellent development! And certainly, far, far better than continuing along the road only of violence and killing.
This makes the practice of these two organizations similar in many respects to that of South Africa’s ANC in the apartheid years. Too many people in the west today forget that the ANC had a fairly large military apparatus right until the very end of the struggle (at which point it was incorporated into the “new” South African National Defence Force.) But it was precisely for having founded and headed that military apparatus that Nelson Mandela received his lengthy prison sentence in the 1960s.
No-one ever insisted that the ANC had to give up its military option completely, before negotiations could even start. All that was required at that point– from both sides– was commitment to a ceasefire… But it was the strongly networked string of civilian mass organizations that provided the main strategic weight of the ANC from the early 1980s on… and that came to make apartheid South Africa literally ungovernable. And those networks, united in the UDF, carried out their work alongside the continuing (though fairly ineffective) work of the ANC military…
(Okay, I’m getting a little tired here and don’t have the energy to give this post a final, more elegant shape… But I hope you get the drift of my argument here… )
Amb. Dani Ayalon’s interview with Ma’ariv
Here is an English-language version of a fascinating interview that Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Dani Ayalon gave recently to ben Kaspit of Ma’Ariv. (Thanks to the US government’s taxpayer-funded Open Source Center for the translating.)
Ayalon makes many intriguing points here, some of which I have bolded for your reading ease. However, I’m in a rush and don’t have to comment more right now, except to note that he confirms what I have been writing all along, namely that the strengthening of the Democrats in the recent election is not necessarily seen by Israeli policymakers as bad for them:
- The Americans’ support for us is not partisan. Nancy Pelosi, Tom Lantos, Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Bayden, Steny Hoyer — all those prominent Democrats — are huge friends of Israel…
And this, about what he was hearing from Democrats (and others) during the 33-day war:
- when the war in Lebanon started, one of the most liberal Democrats told me: “Go for Nasrallah’s head.” The Neo-Cons are not the only ones who understand terror these days. The world is changing. Everybody knows now what Israel is going through. They understand the consequences of terror. From the US point of view, Israel has turned into something like a laboratory, a model that proves that terror can be beaten, that there are ways of dealing with suicide terrorists. Every day that goes by with no suicide terrorist blowing up in Tel Aviv helps the Americans prove to the Europeans that they must not blink, that they must not make compromises with terror…
MESA and blogging in Boston
I’m at the MESA conference here in Boston this weekend. Sunday evening, we went to Juan Cole’s presidential address on “Islamophobia and neo-orientalism”. He talked mostly about the former, and generally informatively so.
Tomorrow (or actually, later today, Monday) he and I– along with As’ad Abu-Khalil, Josh Landis, and Abu Aardvaark are all taking part in a panel discussion on blogging the Middle East. I note I’m the only female on the panel (though the chair and organizer, Leila Hudson, is also female.) Ways back when leila approacjhed me about doing the panel I said we needed to talk about gender issues in the blogosphere, and I suppose I feel some responsibility for raising that question, along with a few others.
Is the blogosphere just one more public arena in which the boys always have their hands up first and dominate the conversation? I don’t think it needs to be like that; and I have certainly wlecomed the opportunity to have my own space here, as well as to hear the un-‘media’-ted voices of other women in the blogosphere like Riverbend, Faiza, Laila el-Haddad, Imshin, Yvette (in her day), etc. But I suppose I should think this issue through a bit more before talking about it tomorrow. I also intend to challenge the guys on the panel as to how they try to address (and redress) gender concerns in their blogging.
Anyone want to bomb Iran?
Well, foaming-at-the-mouth neocon Joshua Muravchik wants the US to do it, as he argued in this overwrought op-ed in today’s LA times. Muravchik’s main argument was that Iran seemed poised to become as great a threat to world peace as the Soviet Union, and its progress towards possession of a nuclear arsenal would only accelerate this trend…
He also, amazingly, blamed the rise of fascism and Nazism on the Soviet Union:
- Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him.
Well, as I said, the piece was more than a little overwrought in its argumentation.
No word from Muravchik, either, on what the US should do on the day after it has bombed Iran… Um, hasn’t the US citizenry been led down this path of launching an ill-thought-through war before??
For his part, Sy Hersh has another good piece out today in The New Yorker. He writes that one of the problems the Bushites have encountered in the push that some of them– most notably, Unca Dick Cheney– have pursued, toward launching a military attack on Iran, has been the CIA’s production of,
- a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A. challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency...
The C.I.A.’s analysis, which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech (and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity were found.
A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the C.I.A. analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it…
So, the professionals at the CIA can’t find the “evidence” needed to justify a US attack on Iran. But wait! Somebody else apparently has.
Hersh:
- As the C.I.A.’s assessment was making its way through the government, late this summer, current and former military officers and consultants told me, a new element suddenly emerged: intelligence from Israeli spies operating inside Iran claimed that Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear bomb. The provenance and significance of the human intelligence, or HUMINT, are controversial. “The problem is that no one can verify it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We don’t know who the Israeli source is. The briefing says the Iranians are testing trigger mechanisms”—simulating a zero-yield nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials—“but there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site? How often have they done it? How big is the warhead—a breadbox or a refrigerator? They don’t have that.” And yet, he said, the report was being used by White House hawks within the Administration to “prove the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track. And tests leave no radioactive track, which is why we can’t find it.”
Over at HaAretz, meanwhile, Aluf Benn notes that during his most recent visit to the US, Israeli PM Olmert has been “beating the drums of war”– particularly in a speech he gave to the General Assembly of the Jewish Communities of North America in Los Angeles.
Olmert told that audience, “”We have reached the pivotal moment of truth regarding Iran… Our integrity will remain intact only if we prevent Iran’s devious goals, not if we try our best but fail.”
This was understood, not surprisingly, as a declaration that Israel itself would go ahead and bomb Iran if it considered that to be necessary, without waiting for the US to do the job.
Benn writes this about the political context of Olmert’s declaration:
- Olmert stepped up his attacks on Iran’s nuclear program without consulting any professionals. His declarations last month have broken his “low profile” policy on Iran that Israel adopted in its effort to present Tehran’s bomb as an international problem. As late as last month, Olmert held talks in Israel on the Iranian nuclear program, and decided to stick with the low-profile approach.
So what happened to change his position?
“A weak prime minister who is dropping in the opinion polls suddenly found himself faced with Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Effi Eitam, who are politicizing the issue, and with a public that does not have faith in the prime minister due to his lack of security experience,” senior officials in Jerusalem explained.
“Olmert is under attack for not being able to deal with the Qassam rockets, so he is under pressure and is moving away from the low-profile approach,” they added.
These officials also said that the Iranian issue had been taken out of their hands and had been placed on podiums and television shows.
Therein lies Olmert’s problem: After he made his bold statements, Netanyahu’s warnings that Israel is faced with a situation similar to that faced by European Jewry when threatened by Hitler in 1938, and Shimon Peres’ description of Ahmadinejad as “a Farsi-speaking Hitler,” the moment of truth for Israel’s political leadership is nearing.
The public will justifiably want to know what has been done to prevent the threat to its existence posed by Iran, and to stop the possible mass exodus of Jews from Israel, as described by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh. Domestic pressure calling for military action will intensify…
Benn, who is an experienced diplomatic reporter, noted that if Olmert does go ahead and order military strikes on Iran, this would require:
- Diplomatic coordination with the Americans. The U.S. forces in the region could become targets of Iranian retaliation, just like Israel, and therefore there is no way that an independent Israeli action can take place without authorization from Bush. Did Olmert get such a go-ahead and is this why he was pleased with his visit to the White House?
You bet there had better be diplomatic “coordination” with Washington over any attack– that is, a clear and unequivocal US order restraining Israel from launching it. Because even if Israel does launch such an attack without consulting Washington, no-one in the Middle East, or elsewhere, would ever believe this was done without a US “green light”, and the retaliation against the US forces’ extremely vulnerable troop concentrations and supply lines in the Gulf area would be speedy indeed.
Benn has this slightly sad little description of the policy Israel (and the Bushites) had been pursuing toward Iran until recently:
- International pressure and sanctions were supposed to delay the Iranians, at least until the regime there fell, or some miracle happened. [And they call this a “policy”???] However, it is not working out.
In another article in Monday’s HaAretz, Yossi Verter writes that “several weeks ago”, Bush told French President Chirac that an Israeli attack against against Iran was quite possible. Verter adds,
- Bush also said that if such an attack were to take place, he would understand it. According to European diplomats who later met with Rice, the secretary of state did not express the same willingness to show understanding for a possible Israeli strike against Iran.
Phew! It’s good to have at least one sentient being working in the administration…
Henry K: Now he tells us!
Bush administration eminence grise Henry Kissinger told the BBC in an interview aired today that a US military victory in Iraq is now impossible.
To be precise, he said:
- “If you mean by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible.”
He also said the Bush administration needs to enter into a dialogue with all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran, in order to make any “progress” at all in the region.
At the same time, though, he warned against a rapid withdrawal of US troops… Or at least I think that’s what he was saying. All I have so far is the AP account of the interview, linked to above, which seems to conflate the idea of a rapid withdrawal of US troops with “a dramatic collapse of Iraq”. Personally, I think that’s a big mistake. It is, after all, the presence of the present US troop structure there that has led to the dramatic collapse the country has seen in the past three years.
But anyway, the fact that Henry is now urging a significant change of course– including talking with Iran and the other neighbors– means that it is now much, much more likely that this is the course the Bushites will follow. Let’s hope that’s soon. And let’s hope the new, more diplomatically inclusive policy comes close to the approach I sketched out here, nine days ago.
And from Henry, shall we have a little contrition, self-reflection, and perhaps even a mea culpa for having been so wrong about Iraq for so long? I hold my breath for it…
Threat alert: Memo to U.S. government leaders
Avigdor Leiberman, Israel’s newly appointed “Minister for Strategic Threats” has very productively been launching more than a few of them. Today, in a single speech, he:
- * urged Israel to take back full control of Gaza’s border with Egypt,
* called for the assassination of entire (elected into office) Hamas leadership,
* dismissed elected PA President Mahmoud Abbas as too ineffectual to be worth dealing with, and
* dismissed the entire post-Oslo peace process, ditto.
In Israel, Meretz Party chairman Yossi Beilin has denounced Lieberman’s statements and called on PM Olmert to dismiss him from office.
But what about the attitude expressed toward Lieberman’s statements by US policymakers? So my question to the men and women in the US administration, and the members of the US Congress is this:
How much longer will you use the tax monies and the legitimacy given you by the US citizenry to fund and give strong political support to a government that contains an individual so damaging to the peoples of the Middle East and the security of key US interests in the region?