Author: Helena

My BR article on the 33-day war

It’s finally here: The 33-Day War: Hizbullah’s victory, Israel’s choice, the piece I wrote back in late August/early September about the Israel-Hizbullah war.
Yesterday I went over to BR’s new digs, just a mile or so northwest from MIT, where they used to have their offices. I said hi to Josh Friedman, the Managing Editor, and Chloe Foster, an editorial assistant, who had both worked on editing my piece. I had my first look at the paper version of this issues, which is sensational. (It has the long piece by Nir Rosen in it, as well as other good pieces by Elaine Scarry and Anatol Lieven.)
Then I went out for lunch with Deb Chasman, who is one of the two incredibly talented people at the top of BR’s masthead. The other one, the political philosopher Josh Cohen, is now in California, having taken up a position at Stanford University. So he exercises his editorial functions from there.
It was a pity not to be able to see Josh C. here; but Deb and I had a good time. I always really appreciate the opportunity to connect with smart colleagues who are also female. We discussed a couple of new ideas for the mag, of which I’m a Contributing Editor. Actually, one of the new things they’re already doing is a series of short, very classily-produced books on various topics. Deb’s background is in book publishing, so she’s very attached to that project. (I immediately started thinking which of my various ideas could be crammed into that 20-30,000-word format…)
One final short point before I invite you all to contribute your comments on the text of the BR piece… Since the ceasefire I have nearly always referred to the war as the “33-day war”. However, toward the end of his editing, Josh F. noted that many other people refer to it as the “34-day war”. He asked me whether we should consider going with that.
Well, my original thinking was that the war “started” at around 9 a.m. on July 12 and the ceasefire went into operation at 8 a.m. (or earlier) on August 14. So in terms of 24-hour blocks of time, it was just under 33 of those. However, if you look at days on a calendar that included hostilities, there were 34 of those…
There is a small political subtext to the choice, too. In calling it the 33-day or 34-day war, there is an almost immediate contrast with the 6-day war of 1967– one in which the Israeli army definitively conquered the armies of of three entire Arab states (or four, if you count Iraq, which did contribute some troops.) So just in mentioning the length of this summer’s war– in either of the two formulations– one is pointing toward the fact that Hizbullah not only held out 5.5 times as long as those Arab armies but also that it was by no means definitively defeated by them… Given that political subtext, therefore, I think it’s wise to go with the slightly smaller counting method. No need to exaggerate Hizbullah’s strategic achievements during the war, I figure: they were evident enough without any exaggeration.
So we went with the 33-day figure.
Today, I get to take a boxfull of copies of this issue along to the Middle East Studies Association meeting in downtown Boston.
Enjoy the article; tell your friends and colleagues about it; and comment (courteously) on it here.

US media and the demand for withdrawal from Iraq

Writing for Truthout yesterday, Norman Solomon had an interesting different take on the Michael Gordon/Mark Mazzetti article in yesterday’s NYT that I posted about here, yesterday.
Solomon’s argument– by looking at that Gordon/Mazzetti piece alongside another one Gordon had in the NYT on Wednesday, under the title Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say, and an appearance Gordon made on CNN later Wednesday– was to claim that:

    The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing US troops from Iraq.

Personally, I think this may be overstating the case a little. Michael Gordon is, after all, only one reporter– though evidently his work at the NYT, and the way it is presented, in terms of headlines, placement, etc, is supported by colleagues there with significant editorial clout.
Still, Michael Gordon and the paper that pays his very handsome salary are not insignificant players; and regarding that group of journalists, Solomon has an excellent point.
He writes:

    If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of US troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against any such withdrawal during his November 15 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded – and probably would be taken off the beat – by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state.
    That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.

I think, though, that the diagnosis that the NYT’s news department “eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state” may only be part of the story. I mean, I don’t necessarily see this as a consciously adopted position on behalf of the managing editor for news and his/her staff, but more a case of intellectual and moral laziness toward the eager-beaver, source-cultivating work of one already very well-connected reporter…. Actually, very analogous to the way the WaPo’s news editors have treated Bob Woodward over the past 30 years– allowing him to do all kinds of things they would never let a “regular” reporter get away with, simply because of the guy’s good connections and personal celebrity value.
Since I grew up in England and have worked in both the British and the US media, I have often been struck by the different self-images and self-definitions that journalists seem to have within the two different national cultures. In the UK, as I understood matters, a “good” journalist was always expected to keep some distance from, and a huge degree of skepticism towards, the holders of or aspirants to political power. But in the US a “good” journalist was seen as one with good connections with the holders of power… The norm of US officials anonymously “leaking” tidbits of newsworthy information to favored journalists only strengthened this tendency of these journos– Tom Friedman comes to mind here for some reason– increasingly seeing themselves as part of the power structure, judiciously giving their advice to power wielders while helping the powerful to frame the image they presented to the voting public…
Of course, this is not an absolute division between the two bodies of journalism. There are some fine, independent-minded journos in the US MSM, and there are doubtless many bootlickers in the UK MSM by now, as well.
There is, however, also a keen structural difference between the two systems in that in the US, an entirely new body of top-level administration officials comes to Washington every four years or every eight years, and they desperately need some help in understanding how the levers of policy work in the capital, as well as in the world at large… A guy like Michael Gordon, Tom Friedman, or Jim Hoagland (or earlier, Judith Miller, as well) has been in DC for decades, and knows all the issues and all the players quite intimately. In one sense, these people are– and too frequently come to see themselves as– a non-trivial part of the “institutional memory” of the US governing class. In the UK, by contrast, by the tyime someone gets to be Prime Minister, Home Secretary, Forteign Secretary, or whetever, she or he will have spent years in parliament deliberating and bearing the responsibility of voting on all the weightiest national issues.
So does the US system tend to foster an elitist view of “journalism”? You bet! (And a very seductive one, too. The rewards are generous: not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of being taken “seriously”, and being kowtowed to by others as a well-connected person… )
Solomon has a great vignette at the end of his Truthout piece, that really captures this elitism. He recalls some footage from the CBS show “Face the Nation”, from the period in 1964 when the US involvement in Vietnam was mounting in a serious way. He writes:

    The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”
    “Couldn’t be more wrong,” Senator Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”
    Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, Senator?”
    Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back – and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”
    The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”
    Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? … I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”

(Hat-tip to Jane C. for the Solomon piece.)

Abizaid reveals the military dead-end

I read carefully the two accounts in the NYT of the hearing the Senate Armed Services Committee held yesterday into the administration’s Iraq policy. Michael Gordon and Mark Mazzetti wrote a fairly standard, ‘news’-type account under the title: General Warns of Risks in Iraq if G.I.’s Are Cut. The general in question being the head of Centcom, Gen. John Abizaid.
However, Abizaid was also apparently warning of “risks” if the US troop level were increased, though that didn’t quite make it to the headline. Here’s what Gordon and Mazzetti wrote:

    Gen. John P. Abizaid, made it clear that he did not endorse the phased troop withdrawals being proposed by Democratic lawmakers. Instead, he said the number of troops in Iraq might be increased by a small amount as part of new plans by American commanders to improve the training of the Iraqi Army.
    General Abizaid did not rule out a larger troop increase, but he said the American military was stretched too thin to make such a step possible over the long term. And he said such an expansion might dissuade the Iraqis from making more of an effort to provide for their own security.
    “We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect,” he said. “But when you look at the overall American force pool that’s available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the Army and the Marine Corps.”

Right next to the Gordon/Mazzetti piece was another account of the same hearing, written by Kate Zernike, who was apparently much more focused on tracking the “party-political” aspects of the hearing. She wrote about the body language the various senators used, how the Republicans arrived late and left early, apparently in pique at having lost the recent election, etc etc.
But she also had this description of Abizaid’s position:

    Senator John McCain of Arizona, pressed his argument that more troops were needed in Iraq. When General Abizaid disagreed, Mr. McCain called attention to the remarks of retired military officers who characterized Congressional proposals for phased withdrawal as “terribly naïve.” Mr. McCain’s protégé, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, backed him up; when the general insisted that more troops were not the solution, Mr. Graham cut him off, saying, “Do we need less?” forcing General Abizaid to say that no, that was not the solution, either.

So what message was Abizaid trying to convey here, I ask?
Principally, I would say he was trying to undertake the classic strategy known in the Pentagon as “CYA”, refrring to the need to provide cover to a posterior body part. Boiled down, his message read: “More troops won’t work; nor will less troops.” The only thing the senators failed to ascertain is whether the present troop levels are “working”… But I guess they didn’t need to, since we see the negative answer to that question every day on the nightly news.
(More evidence that Abizaid’s main mission at the hearing was CYA was that he made a point of reminding senators that the US military’s troubles in Iraq go back to Rumsfeld having notably failed to take Gen. Shinseki’s advice on the need for much higher troop levels at the get-go, ways back in late 2002.)
I don’t want to be harsh on Gen. Abizaid, who must be agonizing over the continuing rate of US troops deaths and the understanding he seems to clearly have that there is no military way out of this problem. I just wish he had said that, explicitly and straight out: “Senators, my conclusion is that there is no purely military way out of this problem. We have always done what we were asked to do by the political leadership in this country; and now it is up to that leadership to change the politics opf their intervention in Iraq.”
JWN readers will recall that I sketched out my own main ideas on how this should be done, in this post, which I wrote last Friday. In it I wrote that the new US policy, to have any chance of success, should seek the active engagement in helping solve the Iraq problem of these three parties: Iran, the UN, and Iraq’s other neighbors.
Also speaking at yesterday’s hearing was David Satterfield, the State Department’s policy coordinator for Iraq.
According to Gordon and Mazzetti, Satterfield

    told the Senate committee that the United States was prepared “in principle” to discuss the situation in Iraq with Iran, but the timing was uncertain.
    “We are prepared in principle to discuss Iranian activities in Iraq,” Mr. Satterfield said. “The timing of such a direct dialogue is one that we still have under review.”

“The timing is uncertain”???? What a load of irresponsible nonsense! The situation in Iraq, for Iraqis, continues to get worse, month by month, and the political pronlems of sectarianism, fear, violence, killing and ethnic cleansing get worse by the month, too. So when is the “right” time for Washington to reach out to Iran and other neighbors (and, crucially, the UN) in order to engage their help??? It is today– or better still, yesterday.
Two other articles of note regarding this question of timing:

    (1) This article by Robin Wright in today’s WaPo, under the title: As Pressure for Talks Grows, Iran and Syria Gain Leverage. (Duh!) and…
    (2) This great and truly tragic collection of on-the-ground reports from Iraq by Nir Rosen, spanning from before the US invasion to just last April, which clearly shows how much worse the situation has gotten over the past three years.

If you don’t have the time (or perhaps, the stomach) to read Nir’s whole article, scroll down to near the end where he gives his bottom-line:

    America did this to Iraq. We divided Iraqis. We set them at war with each other. The least we can do is stop killing them and leave Iraq.

Longtime JWN readers will recall that in this summer 2005 forum on Iraq in The Nation, Nir and I both strongly advocated the speediest possible withdrawal of US troops (and Juan Cole didn’t.)
Imagine if the US, back then, had started implementing the kinds of policies I have been advocating all along: for a US withdrawal from Iraq that is (orderly), speedy, total, and generous… How much better of a situation both countries (and the whole Middle East) would most likely be in today….
Ah well. The US decision-making elite seems, however slowly, to be coming around to my viewpoint. It is just that now, extricating the US troops from Iraq is going to be a whole lot harder (and actually, the strategic/political cost exacted from Washington by the rest of the world a lot higher) than it would have been if the process had started 15 or 30 months ago.
That’s one of the reasons why everyone involved really needs to look long and hard at this point at the “Namibia approach”– that is, to have the US occupation forces work hand-in-hand with the UN in fashioning both the political and the operational modalities of how to withdraw the occupation force and support the emergence of a capable and politically legitimate indigenous successor power there. In its time, Namibia looked extremely politically complex and intracatable, too… But the transition worked.

“We Want Peace” on YouTube

Hagit Tarnari, one of the dedicated pro-peace Israeli participants in our recent U.N. University conference on nonviolence in Amman, Jordan, made a little video at the end of the conference and has posted it on YouTube: here.
I’ve watched it three times, and find it incredibly moving… It brings all those people’s faces and strong, dedicated personalities so vividly back for me.
Among the people in the video you can pick out:

    * Vasu Gounden, the Executive Director of Accord in Durban, South Africa,
    * (me, looking very tired toward the end of the fourth day of the conference,)
    * Jan Benvie from Scotland– a leader in Christian Peacemaker Teams who co-led the whole afternoon’s proceedings with me on the second day of the conference. (She was on her way to northern Iraq, where she and two other CPTers have been investigating the possibility of re-establishing some of CPTs Iraq programs from Suleimaniyeh.)
    * Rabbi Moshe Yehudai, a lifelong pacifist and wonderful brave soul who also describes himself as a Zionist,
    * Nasser Sheikh Ali, a member of the Liberal Forum from Jenin, Palestine,
    * Murad Tangiev, from Chechnya, Russia, who has been working at the UNU and helped with the administration of this conference,
    * Neven Bondokji from Jordan, a talented and brave young woman who’s been working with CARE, trying to establish basic humanitarian/relief services for some of the hundreds of thousands Iraqi refugees in Jordan,
    * Dr. Koteswara Prasad, the Director of the Mahatma Gandhi Center for Peace and Conflict resolution in Madras, India,
    * Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Bukhari from Jerusalem, a Sufism teacher who is also the head of Jerusalem’s 400-year-old community of Uzbek Muslims, and
    * Hagit herself, at the very end.

You may or may not notice that not many of the two dozen or so Arab state citizens who took part in the conference appear in the video. Everyone was, obviously, given a choice whether to appear or not. All the people from Palestine and the other Arab countries who came to the conference participated fully, and in a respectful and friendly way, with all the other participants in all the conference’s formally scheduled activities. But these are people who want to continue to make a difference for good in their own societies, and I imagine it was with that in mind that some of them chose not to appear in a video that we hope will be widely available to a global public. But some of them did, and their participation makes the video particularly powerful and effective.
What a great way this video is, to share some of the energy from our conference! It was shot by a Jordanian cameraman who was at the UNU building working on another project, and came over and donated his time and expertise to Hagit’s project. I’m not sure who did the final editing and production work– I think, Hagit.
Great work!
JWN readers: please share the news about this video as widely as you can!

Accountability for the Beit Hanoun massacre

Gideon Levy in Ha’Aretz. A true voice of the Jewish/Israeli conscience. Read him:

    Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought. There is no other way of describing the circumstances of their killing. Someone who throws burning matches into a forest can’t claim he didn’t mean to set it on fire, and anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can’t claim he didn’t mean to kill innocent inhabitants.
    Therefore it takes considerable gall and cynicism to dare to claim that the Israel Defense Forces did not intend to kill inhabitants of Beit Hanun. Even if there was a glitch in the balancing of the aiming mechanism or in a component of the radar, a mistake in the input of the data or a human error, the overwhelming, crucial, shocking fact is that the IDF bombards helpless civilians. Even shells that are supposedly aimed 200 meters from houses, into “open areas,” are intended to kill, and they do kill. In this respect, nothing new happened on Wednesday morning in Gaza: The IDF has been behaving like this for months now.
    But this isn’t just a matter of “the IDF,” “the government” or “Israel” bearing the responsibility. It must be said explicitly: The blame rests directly on people who hold official positions, flesh-and-blood human beings, and they must pay the price of their criminal responsibility for needless killing.
    … A few hours after the disaster, while the Gaza Strip was still enveloped in sorrow and deep in shock, the air force was already hastening to carry out another targeted killing, an arrogant demonstration of just how much this disaster does not concern us…
    Mourning, of course, did not descend on Israel, and there was not even a single manifestation of genuine participation in the sorrow. It did not occur to Israel to promise compensation to the families and it did not provide help, apart from transferring some of the wounded to hospitals in Israel. We provided more aid to the victims of the earthquake in Mexico, even though there we didn’t have a hand in the disaster. For the most part, the media were not very disturbed by the killing and devoted less attention to it than to the Gay Pride parade.
    A day or two after the disaster it was totally forgotten and other affairs are filling our lives. But it is impossible just to go on to the next item on the agenda. This disaster is not an act of God. There are people who are clearly responsible for it, and they must be brought to justice….

Also in HaAretz: Zvi Bar-El, and even Bradley Burston.
From Burston, poignantly:

    A few months before that March election, at a huge memorial in Tel Aviv marking 10 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, I listened to the newly elected leader of the Labor Party, Amir Peretz, speak with passion and evident conviction of his goals:
    “I have a dream, Yitzhak, that one day an industrial zone will be set up in the no-man’s land between Sderot and Beit Hanun. Entertainment venues and playgrounds for our children and Palestinian children will be set up, and they will play together, and build a common future together.”

So much for meaningless rhetoric, eh?
And while much of the Israeli press is carrying soul-searching like this over the massacre of Beit Hanoun, what do we hear about Beit Hanoun from politicians, the media, and other members of the political elite here in the US?? Silence!
And then, in the wings of the discussion here in the US you can here, as always, the loudly twittering chorus of all the people who will try to find ways to excuse Israel, whatever it does. Including wiping out 18 members of a single extended family with “misguided” artillery fire.
We do need to see, of course, the exact settings on the fuzes of those artillery shells. Why, after the first one or two of them slammed into the apartment building, did they just keep on coming? The IOF clearly has a serious fire-control problem. But whether this is “technical” or due to the human intervention of extremists in the IOF who are keen to keep tensions stoked high: that is one important thing to know.
Either way, under the doctrine of command responsibility the commanders–right up to the commander-in-chief– who set in motion the deployment and the orders that sent that artillery unit there must also be held completely accountable… Including by the US taxpayers who pay all these people’s salaries and buy them their deadly war-toys, and whose interests are then directly put in jeopardy by the IOF’s actions.

Bolton vetoes resolution on Gaza

This is exactly the kind of one-sided US policy action that needs to change. Bush’s ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, today vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have:

    * condemned Israel’s recent military actions in Gaza,
    * called on Israel to withdraw its troops from Gaza,
    * condemned the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel,
    * called on the Palestinian Authority to take “immediate and sustained action” to end the rocket fire,
    * created “an international mechanism for the protection of civilians” in the area,
    * requested that Kofi Annan establish a fact-finding mission to investigate Wednesday’s attack on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and report back within 30 days, and
    * called for the resumption of international efforts to achieve peace by the so-called Quartet.

Bolton reportedly told the council that the resolution “does not display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
??
The first draft of the resolution was submitted by council member Qatar, in the wake of the ghastly incident Wednesday night in which a sustained Israeli artillery attack against a residential complex in Beit Hanoun killed 18 of the Palestinian civilians who lived there, many of them children and women. Over the two days that followed, the wording was subjected to intense negotiation and renegotiation, and the draft that was finally submitted for a vote this afternoon won a yes vote from ten of the council’s 15 members.
Only the US voted against. But of course, given the SC’s bizarre system of vetoes, that vote was sufficient to quash the entire initiative.
Four council members abstained: Britain, Denmark, Japan, and Slovakia.
France, which has voted with the US on a numnber of recent issues, voted for the resolution as finally submitted. That NYT report linked to above noted that,

    Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the ambassador of France, said he felt the final negotiated text was “a balanced one” and would have sent the right message to both Israel and the Palestinians. He added, “I hope that the fact this text has not been adopted will not renew tensions on the ground.”

It is hard to see, on the basis of what that NYT account tells us about the text, why the Bush administration would object so strongly to it that it cast a veto. It is especially hard to see why they would do this at a time when US soldiers and their supply-lines are strung precariously throughout a Middle East that has long been extremely resentful of the one-sided help that the US has continued to provide to Israel, at every level, despite Israel’s many transgressions against international law and its assaults on the lives, interests, dignity, and hopes of its Arab neighbors.
Is this administration really ready to put US service members and US citizens’ interests at additional risk because of its slavish support for “Israel, right or wrong”? I thought this was what a majority of us here in the US voted against, just on Tuesday.

A plea from Jameela al-Shanti

Whem I was in Gaza in March, one of the Hamas people I interviewed was newly elected legislator Jamila al-Shanty. In this piece that I subsequently wrote for Salon, I described her in this way:

    Jamila Shanty is a robust, good-natured woman with a well-defined, expressive face who bustles into our meeting toting a large, tattered briefcase. Formerly a professor of psychology and philosophy at Gaza Islamic University, she relishes her new role in the parliament where, she tells me, she hopes to sit on the political and legal-affairs committees.
    “We need to strengthen our internal front and restore some discipline to Palestinian society,” she says of Hamas’ imminent priorities. “We must not give Israel the chance to come in here and bomb… ”

Well, Hamas stuck for many months to the unilateral ceasefire it had maintained, despite strong and continuing Israeli provocation… But that didn’t stop Israel from bombing Gaza (as we know)… or from blocading and stifling and trying to starve it’s 1.3 million people.
Last week, Shanty was one of the prime organizers of the nonviolent action wherein hundreds of women from the Beit Hamoun area defied the Israeli cirfew and went down to the town’s mosque to rescue their menfolk. A couple of days later the Israeli artillery shelled the house where she lives with her sister-in-law, and the sister-in-law’s children. Her sister-in-law Nahla and two of Jamila’s bodyguards were all reportedly killed, though Jamila herself was not there that night.
Yesterday, Ms. Shanty had this very poignant article in The Guardian. It was published under the title “We Overcame Our fear.”
In it she wrote this:

    We still do not know what has become of our sons, husbands and brothers since all males over 15 years old were taken away last Thursday. They were ordered to strip to their underwear, handcuffed and led away.
    It is not easy as a mother, sister or wife to watch those you love disappear before your eyes. Perhaps that was what helped me, and 1,500 other women, to overcome our fear and defy the Israeli curfew last Friday – and set about freeing some of our young men who were besieged in a mosque while defending us and our city against the Israeli military machine.
    We faced the most powerful army in our region unarmed. The soldiers were loaded up with the latest weaponry, and we had nothing, except each other and our yearning for freedom. As we broke through the first barrier, we grew more confident, more determined to break the suffocating siege. The soldiers of Israel’s so-called defence force did not hesitate to open fire on unarmed women. The sight of my close friends Ibtissam Yusuf abu Nada and Rajaa Ouda taking their last breaths, bathed in blood, will live with me for ever.
    Later an Israeli plane shelled a bus taking children to a kindergarten. Two children were killed, along with their teacher. In the last week 30 children have died…
    Shortly after announcing his project to democratise the Middle East, President Bush did all he could to strangle our nascent democracy, arresting our ministers and MPs. I have yet to hear western condemnation that I, an elected MP, have had my home demolished and relatives killed by Israel’s bombs. When the bodies of my friends and colleagues were torn apart there was not one word from those who claim to be defenders of women’s rights on Capitol Hill and in 10 Downing Street.
    Why should we Palestinians have to accept the theft of our land, the ethnic cleansing of our people, incarcerated in forsaken refugee camps, and the denial of our most basic human rights, without protesting and resisting?
    The lesson the world should learn from Beit Hanoun last week is that Palestinians will never relinquish our land, towns and villages. We will not surrender our legitimate rights for a piece of bread or handful of rice. The women of Palestine will resist this monstrous occupation imposed on us at gunpoint, siege and starvation. Our rights and those of future generations are not open for negotiation…

We all need to listen to the pain and the arguments that Ms. Shanty, a very savvy political organizer and community leader, articulates here. We don’t need to agree with everything that she or other women and men from Hamas say in order to recognize and acknowledge that some of what they say has validity. The Palestinian question has to be addressed, and has to be resolved in a fair and sustainable manner; and this will not happen unless the large proportion of Palestinians who share this M.P.’s views are actively included in the peacemaking.
For myself, I want to start by sending Ms. Shanty my heartfelt condolences on the loss of her sister-in-law, her friends, and her family property– and my promise that I will do everything I can to work for a de-escalation of all the violence between Israel and the Palestinians and a fair and sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My country has for far too long given Israel unquestioning support for all the actions it has taken against the Palestinians– including giving Israel huge financial, military, and political support that in recent years has been continued with no linkage made at all between that aid and Israel’s military or diplomatic misbehavior toward the Palestinians (or the Lebanese.) That has to stop. Fair-minded conditionality and accountability has to be established toward both sides in this tragically destructive conflict. And we need to extend equal human respect and concern to people on both sides of the line.
People in the US have in recent months been (re-)learning that we cannot build our nation’s security on an attempt to dominate others by violence and brute force. The same is equally true for Israel.

America’s Iraq policy after the elections

I’ve been thinking through what is likely to emerge regarding policy for Iraq from the new configuration emerging in Washington after Tuesday’s elections.
Giving Donald Rumsfeld the boot the day rights after the election was only the first of a series of changes we can now expect. “Stay the course” is now (finally!) history, and the only question is what approach will be adopted to replace it.
Almost certainly, as had been widely predicted, the Iraq Study Group will play a key role in formulating the new approach. Its contribution is needed much more now than it was before November 7, because it was intentionally composed of people with strong links to the two major US parties and is therefore in a strong role to help broker the intra-US political terms of the “deal” that needs to be done over Iraq.
It is my sense that if, as seems to be the case, the people on the ISG consist mainly of political ‘realists” from both parties, rather than ideologues, they may well seek to move very quickly indeed to formulate the terms of that deal. They can use the present political inter-regnum– before the new Congress is sworn in and while the old Congress now has little if any real political clout– to find a workable and bipartisan policy toward Iraq before Inauguration Day in January, and thus to set the agenda for the incoming Congress.
Though JWN readers must know that I have a few partisan sympathies of my own, I do think that finding a workable bipartisan approach to Iraq (and the related issues) is very valuable. Tough decisions will need to be made and a steady hand placed on the wheel of policy if the poor bloody Iraqis are not to have their country plunged into even greater chaos, and if the current violence in Palestine and the strong sense of unease throughout the rest of the Middle East are not to explode uncontrollably and with massive damage for millions of people throughout the region.
US voters have spoken. On Tuesday they made clear (1) that Iraq was a very strong concern for them, and (2) that, judging the present policy a failure, they need to see a distinct change of policy– one that offers a hope of a US troop withdrawal within a reasonable length of time.
My suggestion for a plan
US citizens do not, obviously, want the manner of the US withdrawal to be either: (1) an operational debacle that brings massive or unnecessary troop losses or a too-evident loss of US face, or (2) one that it leaves a completely failed state in Iraq that could, like pre-2001 Afghanistan, incubate further waves of Qaeda-style terror.
To be frank to my Iraqi readers, I should say that it’s possible that most US citizens don’t give a hoot for the wellbeing of ordinary Iraqis– or rather, they don’t care enough about stability in Iraq to be prepared to lose even one US soldier’s life to ensure it. However, as soon as we start thinking about how to bring about an orderly (i.e., not a debacle-laden) withdrawal of US troops from Iraq– whether this is total or even only, in the first place, ‘substantial’– then it becomes very clear that the possibility of an orderly US withdrawal is inextricably linked to the possibility of Iraq having some form of working governance structure after that withdrawal.
(I’m also of the opinion that there is no such beast, at this point, as a “partial” US withdrawal that would have any significant longevity. But this is not the most immediate issue. In my view, the logic of the negotiations and of real Iraqi self-empowerment will anyway, almost inevitably, lead to a total US troop withdrawal within 1-2 years after the start of a serious, internationally supported peace process for Iraq.)
So the question is, how can we even think of any form of stable Iraqi governance structure emerging? The US has had three and half years of complete hegemony inside the country to try to achieve this goal, but failed. Right now it has neither the credibility to be given another chance at doing it, nor, frankly, any signs that it has the capability of getting it right.
It desperately needs help.
But who can help it?
My answer is, basically, these three parties, in this order: Iran, the UN, and Iraq’s other neighbors:
* Iran, because it is, actually, the newly emerging hegemonic power inside Iraq. It has strong links with all the powerful actors inside Iraq, with the exception of some of the Sunni actors. It has immense proximity, and easy supply lines into Iraq along the lengthy mutual border. Plus, at present you could say that the 147,000 US troops in Iraq are currently there only on Teheran’s sufferance: Teheran likes to have them there because their very vulnerable deployment there form a potent self-deterrent against any dreams US officials might have of launching a military attack against Iran.
There is thus, literally, no hope for the US of having any debacle-free drawdown of troops from Iraq without getting the explicit permission for this from Teheran. And that, of course, also means paying a “price” to Teheran that is considerably higher than merely– and very belatedly– agreeing to “talk” to it. No, there will have to be discussions about a range of issues including nuclear issues and the whole question of the security regime in the Gulf region, that go considerably beyond merely “talking”, i.e., saying hello…
* The UN will be necessary to provide a cover of some international legitimacy for whatever the security regime on the ground inside Iraq will be– and to help broker both the intra-Iraqi political compact that needs to be won and the international dimensions of the agreement over the whole transformation of the security situatin in the region.
As noted above, the US is currently in no position at all, on its own, to broker any kind of new agreement among Iraqis. That’s the big thing it needs the UN for; and indeed, it should hand over the lead role in brokering this agreement to the UN, as soon as possible. But Washington also needs the UN to give “cover”– perhaps through some form of re-hatting operation– for a security regime inside Iraq that will continue, in the interim period, to be dominated by the US troop presence, though it could also helpfully be supplemented by some other, non-US and preferably non-western troops– and especially commanders– who have real and substantial experience in peacekeeping, rather than imperial domination.
Read about Nambia and the role the UN played during the transition from South Africa’s (illegal, foreign occupation) regime there to the emergence of a legitimate and accepted indigenous successor regime.
Read about it very fast.
* Iraq’s other neighbors will also be very important… And here I’m talking about, essentially, the whole of Iraq’s Arab “hinterland” stretching from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait down through the entire Peninsula, and from Jordan and Syria across to Egypt, as well as (though to a lesser extent) Turkey.
The fact of the matter will be that for the US to get out of Iraq, Iran is going to have to be given a bigger role in the Gulf (and the broader Middle East) than the US has allowed it to have at any time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This will be–already is!– deeply unsettling for the conservative, Sunni-ruled monarchs of Jordan and the Gulf, and also for the conservative, Sunni-ruled President of Egypt. So all these rulers– and even more importantly, the restive Arab populations atop whom they today precariously balance– will need to receive a lot of reassurance from the US and from other participants in the process.
There is no way this can happen if, at the same time, the US and the UN are not actively doing something very productive indeed to engage with the very real and longstanding grievances of the Palestinians. Forget the pathetic old “Road Map to Nowhere” which has gotten us to precisely that destination after four years of blather and hot air. What the Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, and others are going to expect to see is something speedy, authoritative, and truly transformational like the Madrid Conference of October 1991.
… Which was convened, we should note, by Jim Baker.
These states (including Syria) will also need to have a meaningful behind-the-scenes role in being a contact group, or whatever, for the transition of power inside Iraq, where they have their own strong interests, fears, and concerns..
… So once we have sketched these kinds of “realistic” paths forward in the Middle East, it becames immediately clear that (1) the Israelis are not going to like a lot of what must lie ahead in these scenarios, and (2) their friends in the Democratic Party won’t like it, either… That’s where the key role in the ISG of Lee Hamilton, a very experienced man who was head of the Democratic-controlled House International Relations Committee for many years, will come in…
The Israelis have already, as I can see, started to read the tea-leaves, and are desperately trying to figure how they stop this train. The bombastic old war-horse Efraim Sneh has again threatened that Israel will will go ahead and bomb Iran on its own if no-one else will do the job. And Olmert is rushing to the US in the coming days…
But Israel’s rightwing leadership has lost a lot of the clout it once had within the US system, by virtue of the now-evident collapse of the neocon network as well of some of the political clout of the Zionist evangelicals.
The Middle East will be waking up to a new day. Let’s hope the ever-looming catastrophes can be avoided and a new sense of realism prevail. Militarism and US hegemonism were, after all, what brought the US and Iraq to the present parlous situation in Iraq.