Author: Helena

Neocons, Chalabi, fight for exits from catastrophe in Iraq

The catastrophe that is the Bush administration’s “intervention” in Iraq is now clearly revealed for all to see, and there is currently a massive mêlée of neocons and other architects of that policy (including JWN’s longtime nemesis, Ahmed Chalabi) scrambling to pass off the blame for it to somebody else… anybody else at all.
Of course, their protestations of non-responsibility are inherently non-credible. They are even less credible than all the accusations they pumped up and circulated in the pre-war period about Saddam Hussein’s possessions of WMDs, his links to Al Qaeda, etc… which is to say they have no credibility at all.
But still, it is a wonderful sight to see these men– and yes, they all are men– scrambling to distance themselves from the sinking ship that is Bush’s Iraq “policy”, trying to grab for themselves any lifebelts of self-justifcation that might be around (though there aren’t many), while wildly pointing fingers of blame all around and savagely beating away the hands of any of their own one-time comrades also trying to grab onto the lifebelts they now claim for themselves.
At one point, I used to think we should tread gently and graciously with former participants in the Bush-war venture, calmly welcoming any expression of self-doubt they might feel moved to voice while not pointing too many fingers of blame of our own at those misguided souls.
I am almost past that now. The scale of the suffering they have inflicted on Iraqis (and along the way, also on Palestinians… let’s not forget that) is too large now for me to feel much motivated to stick to the niceties. I am feeling increasingly happy to wallow in the enjoyment of the spectator sport now being played out by and amongst these men before our very eyes…
Just in the past couple of days we have had:
Chalabi blaming Wolfowitz:

    “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge…

This is in a piece by Dexter Filkins that will be in Sunday’s NYT Magazine (Nov. 5). The text should be more freely available on Sunday, I think.
Btw, this piece also includes some intriguing vignettes from a trip Chalabi made to Iran in November 2005. Filkins writes about, “the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there.” After crossing a land border into Iran with Chalabi, Filkins discovers an executive jet waiting nearby that whisks Chalabi and the entourage to Teheran where Chala is almost immediately taken into a lengthy meeting with Iran’s national security adviser, Ali Larijani… And the next morning he has a meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…
Filkins quotes former CIA operative Robert Baer and former DIA analyst Pat Lang as describing Chala as, basically, an Iranian asset:

    “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections – he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.

Well, enough about Chala (for now.) because we also have, in a great piece rushed out under the title “Neo Culpa” by Vanity Fair’s David Rose, the following great tidbits:
Frank Gaffney, David Frum, and Michael Rubin blaming Bush himself.
Here’s Frum, the Canadian who as Bush’s speechwriter invented the whole concept of “axis of evil”:

    “I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. (!) And that is the root of, maybe, everything.”

Kenneth ‘cake-walk’ Adelman blaming Rumsfeld:

    “I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

Oh, let’s not forget Rummy’s expensive new mansion in St. Michael’s, Maryland, while we’re at it. How much are these various pieces of real estate worth between them? I think that many people wronged by Rumsfeld in Iraq and elsewhere could bring a nice little civil suit against him and strip him off all his ghastly, ill-gotten gains pretty quickly…
And Rose tells us we also have:
Richard Perle blaming Condi Rice:

    “[Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly.”

For most of these years, of course, Rice was the national security adviser; and after she went over to the State Department her former deputy Stephen Hadley took over at the NSC…
Michael Ledeen blaming the women in the White House:

    “Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

H’mmm. This is a new angle. Last thing I knew, Dick Cheney was probably the single most powerful person in the White House. Is Ledeen trying to tell us that Unca Dick is, secretly, yet another of the “women who are in love with the president”? Strange world…
Adelman also blaming Tenet, Franks, and Bremer:

    “The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There’s no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.”

But not him, Kenny Adelman, oh no… Of course, you can get a great behind-the-scenes view of the role that Adelman and all these neocons– and Chalabi– played in not only pumping up the threat of war but also determining the way it was fought, if you read Bob Woodward’s latest book…
Richard Perle blaming everyone except the neocons:

    “Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.”

… So yes, all in all, it is excellent sport to see the great falling-out among all these miscreants who took the US into the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is particularly excellent that all these revelations– from the Woodward book on, and including all these latest revelations– have been put into the public domain before rather than after the now-imminent midterm election.
I recognize that it makes very little difference indeed at this point to the traumataized and war-shattered survivors of the US-induced violence in Iraq whether any of these once-preening warmongers now feels regret or not about the role he had played in instigating, promoting, and executing the invasion. It might make a difference to Iraqis over time, however. For if we in the US who have always opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq can now take advantage of these latest revelations to gain increased political power and influence inside our own country, then hopefully the policies that emerge from Washington over the months ahead will be less damaging to Iraqis than they might otherwise have been.
As I have long argued, the best– or let us say at this stage, the least bad– policy that the US can pursue is one that works for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is speedy, orderly, complete, and generous.
Maybe this latest round of revelations will make it more possible to attain such a policy over the months ahead?

Well-organized people power in northern Gaza

I have long argued– including in this article on Hizbullah, or this article on the women’s organizations of Hamas– that the bedrock of the political strength of well-organized Islamist organizations like Hamas or Hizbullah has been their ability to build sturdy, resilient civilian mass organizations covering all sectors of society– rather than merely their creation of the (much smaller) armed organizations whose activities seem to get most of the coverage in the western media.
Well now, the Hamas women have played a hugely important role in defusing the latest crisis in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
Over the past couple of days, the Israeli occupation forces, which had forced their way back into parts of Gaza after a short-lived withdrawal from the Strip, have been mounting extensive “search-and-screening” operations in Beit Hanoun. They had surrounded the whole town of some 28,000 people and cordoned it off, announcing a complete “curfew” (i.e. lockdown) on all residents except for men aged 16 through 50– and all these men were ordered by loudspeaker to report for screening to centers the IOF had set up.
However, according to that report linked to above, which is by AP’s Yakub Ralwah, a group of menwhom he described as “dozens of gunmen” on Thursday sought refuge in the mosque, instead…
Ralwah:

    …Most were thought to belong to the military wing of the ruling Hamas party.
    [Israeli] Armored vehicles quickly surrounded the building, and the two sides began exchanging fire that lasted throughout the night, the military and Palestinian security officials said.
    Israeli soldiers trying to pressure the gunmen to surrender also threw stun and smoke grenades, and knocked down an outer wall of the mosque with a bulldozer, causing the ceiling to collapse…

But then, as sporadic shooting continued this morning, Hamas’s radio called on Beit Hanoun’s women to walk as fast as they could to the mosque. And–

    Dozens of women left their homes to a hurry to the mosque, and en route, came under Israeli fire, witnesses and officials said.
    One woman, about 40, was shot and killed, and 10 others were wounded, they said.
    The army said troops spotted two militants hiding in the crowd of women and opened fire, hitting the two.
    By midmorning Friday, veiled women protesters had gathered outside the mosque, where troops were positioned in tanks and armored personnel carriers. The army said the gunmen in the mosque took advantage of the demonstration to escape because there were not enough soldiers to block the protesters from approaching the building, and troops did not want to shoot into the crowd.
    But live ammunition was fired in the course of the demonstration, wounding a Palestinian cameraman and an unidentified woman.
    Loudspeakers across Gaza called on people to come to demonstrations after Friday prayers to express solidarity with Beit Hanoun. By late morning, two rallies were already in progress in Beit Hanoun, and militants in the crowds were firing at soldiers, the army said.
    Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas “saluted the women of Palestine … who led the protest to break the siege of Beit Hanoun.” Haniyeh urged U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to witness firsthand “the massacres of the Palestinian people,” and appealed to the Arab world to “stop the ongoing bloodshed.”
    A spokesman for Hamas militants said 32 gunmen who had taken cover in the mosque escaped with the help of the women. The spokesman, Abu Obeida, denied reports that the men disguised themselves as women to escape, but one woman said she handed women’s clothing to some of the gunmen.

This action of mobilizing the women to come and form an unarmed interposition force around the Beit Hanoun mosque is very similar indeed to the action Ayatollah Sistani organized in Najaf back in August 2004. (See this , this, and this.) On that occasion, units of Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army were holed up in portion of Najaf and the US occupation force was closing in on them… But Sistani called for “a million men” to march peacefully to the city. That call was answered by, at least, hundreds of thousands of Sistani’s supporters from around the area, and in the course of that procession, also, the Sadrists were able to make theirescape.
Hamas’s mobilization of women in this role is particularly notable. But they’re an impressive bunch. Go read that article on Hamas women that I linked to up at the top.
Regarding Hizbullah, their mass civilian organizations proved their strength and value a number of times during the horrible crisis of last summer. Most notable of these occasions was when just about the entire pro-Hizbullah population of the devastated towns and villages of south Lebanon answered Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s call to return en masse to their homeplaces starting on the very day the ceasefire went into effect, August 14. Helped by Hizbullah’s well-practiced social-relief and social support organizations, the southerners responded to that call in every way they could. As they did so, they defied and openly mocked the announcements the Israelis were making that civilians should “wait until it was safe” for them to return home. And by returning home– unarmed, and in huge numbers– they reclaimed the whole of south Lebanon for Hizbullah.
Actions like this, I should note, take considerable amounts of courage, self-confidence, trust in the leadership doing the mobilizing, and discipline. The women who gathered at the Beit Hanoun mosque today showed all those qualities.

    Update: This later filing by Ralwah tells us that two women were killed, and ten wounded. He also writes that shots were fired toward them as they approached the mosque. Imagine their courage as they continued toward their goal! You can also see some photos of the parts of the mobilization on the Yahoo website.

I have noted, a number of times, that the way Hamas and Hizbullah have been combining their use of armed action with the building and use of extensive, basically nonviolent, civilian mass organizations is very reminiscent of the way that South Africa’s African National Congress organized during the latter decades of the anti-apartheid struggle in their country. Nelson Mandela, remember, had been a key originator and the first implementer of the idea that the ANC should have an armed wing, in addition to its long-existing political organization; and it was for playing that role as head of theANC military that he was imprisoned by the authorities. That fact– and the fact that the ANC continued to keep its armed wing in existence right through to the conclusion of the peace negotiations, at which point it was integrated with the regime’s military into a new unified national defense force– both tend to get forgotten in a sanitized western media portrayal that glorifies the role of Mandela in the negotiations without saying much at all about the multifaceted nature of the ANC’s political strength…
Well, anyway, here today is a great new example of Palestinian people power in action. Yes, it is quite tragic that one of the women participants in that (unarmed) demonstration was killed by the IOF. But still, the women’s mobilization did serve to defuse the tensions around the mosque, most likely saving the lives of many more than one person at the scene. Plus, it no doubt helped show the leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian political groups– and the women participants themselves– the great value and strength of civilian mass organizations.
Yes, it would be great if Hamas transformed itself totally into an organization of civilian, nonviolent, mass action. (Ditto, of course, the state of Israel, which commands and is clearly prepared to use means of violent aggression and control that are hundreds of times more lethal than those used by any Palestinians.) But neither Hamas nor the state of Israel is, it seems, about to do that.
But still, absent a complete disarming of organizations like Hamas or Hizbullah, seeing them turn increasingly to, and recognize the value of, nonviolent means of organizing is a very important and constructive development.

Jordan: Court considers charging former minister Abu Audeh

    Note: This is an updated version of the post that I put up on this topic at 12:40 p.m. today.

I got home to Virginia, from Jordan, late last night. This morning I learned that my longtime friend Adnan Abu Audeh (also transliterated as Abu-Odeh) was this morning threatened with being prosecuted by Jordan’s fairly infamous “state security court” on the basis of two charges: One was “threatening national unity” and the other was, in Arabic, “Italat al-Lisan”, literally, having too long of a tongue (toward the status of the king), that is, lèse majesté.
Abu Audeh’s daughter Lama Abu Audeh, who teaches at Georgetown University Law School in Washington DC, tells me that the “threatening national unity” charge carries a sentence of up to three years imprisonment.
Adnan Abu Audeh is a very accomplished and prominent Jordan citizen. He was Minister of Information in the 1970s, later going on to become Head of the Royal Court for several years under the late King Hussein. After King Abdullah II succeeded Hussein in 1999, he appointed Abu Audeh as a political advisor. But he removed him from that position after Abu Audeh published a book (with the U.S. Institute of Peace Press in Washington DC) that analyzed the relationship inside Jordan between citizens whose families were originally from east of the River Jordan– that is, from within the present-day territory of the Kingdom– and those whose families were originally from west of the river, in the “West Bank” area that is claimed by the Palestinians.
Jordan had annexed the West Bank to itself after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, though no other governments except Britain and Pakistan ever recognized that act of annexation. At that point, West Bankers were given Jordanian citizenship. In 1988, however, King Hussein laid down Jordan’s claim to exercizing any form of sovereignty in the West Bank.
Abu Audeh is of West Bank origin, having been born and brought up in Nablus.
In recent years, he has made a great contribution to international understanding and global political life through his service on the board of the International Crisis Group, a very respected research organization whose board also includes many other high-level political personalities from around the world.
Lama Abu Audeh told me that today, after being interrogated, and told that the judge would now try to establish a case for his indictment, her father was allowed to return home. (I wonder what the evidence might be. Will there be an anthropometric measuring of the length of his tongue, I wonder?) I sincerely hope that if he is taken into custody at any point he will not be subjected to the kinds of torture that are reliably reported by Amnesty International and other bodies to occur within the prisons run by the state security apparatus. (See some of the reports available through this Amnesty portal.)
The fact that the Jordanian regime is even considering charging a West-Bank-origin citizen of such distinction and prominence as Adnan Abu Audeh on such flimsy charges indicates to me that the political situation in the country must be much more fragile than I had already, on the basis of my recent trip there, judged it to be. I confess that while I was there, I spent just about all my time cocooned in the conference environment and had almost no time to talk with local friends… (If I had, Abu Audeh would certainly have been one whom I contacted. Now I deeply regret not having done so.) However, just from a few things I noticed while in the country, the situation did already seem to be quite fragile.
I can quite understand that Jordanians, whose country is sandwiched between Palestine and Iraq and contains large bodies of refugees from both areas– including a well-established community of West-Bank-origin people who now make up more than 60% of Jordan’s citizenry– must be feeling very concerned indeed about the fallout inside their country from the oppression, hopelessness, and political violence that continue to mark the situations in both those weighty neighbors. But surely, to threaten to indict a person like Adnan Abu Audeh on the basis merely of secretly compiled charges of speech crimes does nothing to build trust within the country and ensure the longterm wellbeing of its people?
The matters Mr. Abu Audeh has raised in public about the nature of the relationship between East Bankers and West Bankers are surely a legitimate subject for public discussion, particularly if that discussion is held in the measured, non-confrontational way in which he discusses them.
If this investigation continues and charges are indeed brought against him, the effect on civil discourse in Jordan will be a chilling one, and citizens who have legitimate grievances against the regime may well feel more inclined to pursue them through violence. Charging Adnan Abu Audeh with speech crimes seems like a recipe only for increased tension and violence.

Travel, conference, disutility of war

The conference in Amman on nonviolent leadership was incredibly moving and absorbing. So much so that I didn’t get a moment to blog for most of that time.
I’m on my way back home (Atlanta airport.) As I get back into reading the news more closely I have– not surprisingly– been having some big thoughts on the disutility of war and other forms of state violence. The situations in Iraq and Palestine are both quite tragic and completely illustrative of this…
But surely, it is time for us all to go out quite explicitly in public and say: Military violence doesn’t “work”… There has to be– indeed, there is– a much better way to build a more secure world.
Anyway, I’m still pretty tired now. I’ll try to get some lengthier, more analytical posts up here in the days ahead…

Maliki pushes back; power shift in the relationship?

So according to Hassan al-Suneid, an aide to Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki, Maliki demanded a video conference with George Bush Saturday, and when he got Bush on the line he managed to win from him a promise “move swiftly to turn over full control of the Iraqi army to Baghdad.”
That quote was from the AP report on the conversation, as written by Steven Hurst and Qassim Abdul-Zahra. They added that Suneid:

    said later the prime minister was intentionally playing on U.S. voter displeasure with the war to strengthen his hand with Washington.

And this is what Suneid quoted Maliki as having told Bush on the phone:

    “The U.S. ambassador is not (L. Paul) Bremer (the former U.S. administrator in Iraq). He does not have a free rein to do what he likes. Khalilzad must not behave like Bremer but rather like an ambassador.”

The writers noted that this was

    the fourth time in a week that al-Maliki challenged the U.S. handling of the war. The ripostes flowed from an announcement by Khalilzad on Tuesday that al-Maliki had agreed to a U.S. plan to set timelines for progress in quelling violence in Iraq.
    Al-Maliki’s anger grew through the week until on Friday, al-Suneid said, the prime minister told Khalilzad: “I am a friend of the United States, but I am not America’s man in Iraq.”
    After Saturday’s talks, White House spokesman Tony Snow said of al-Maliki: “He’s not America’s man in Iraq. The United States is there in a role to assist him. He’s the prime minister — he’s the leader of the Iraqi people.”
    Snow said that reports of a rift between the United States and Iraq were wrong and that Bush had full confidence in al-Maliki.

And if you believe that, then I have a nice piece of swamp in Florida I’d like to sell you…
It seems to me this might be the pivotal moment in Maliki’s relationship with the Bushites?
There have, of course, been many reports in the past month or so that the Bushites are getting so “tired” of Maliki, or are so “dissatisfied” with him for one reason or another, that they have fairly inelegantly been threatening him that they’d overthrow him in a coup if he didn’t behave.
Well, who’d do that? The Bushites and whose army?
For his part, Maliki now seems to be acting as if he finds such threats and reports inherently non-credible. And maybe at this point, he’s right?
On the other hand, if I were him I’d be very, very careful regarding all aspects of personal security in the days ahead.
Perhaps especially in the days after November 7? After all, it wouldn’t play too well at the polls that day if Bush’s “Potemkin democratization” project in Iraq fell apart in quite such an evident way between now and then. But after November 7??

UNU conference in Amman

The conference is totally awesome. Today we heard an Indian Gandhi scholar called Dr GK Prasad talk about Gandhi’s legacy; veteran US civil rights activist Michael Simmons talk about Martin Luther King Jr; Cathy Gormley-Heenan from INCORE and the University of Ulster talk about leadership in the peace process in Northern Ireland; Vasu Gounden, the Exec. Director of the African Center for Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) talk about his organization’s peacemaking work in DRC and Burnudi; and Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the UN University talk about “UN Peace Keeping Operations: Successes/Constraints/Challenges”
It was an incredible feast, both intellectual and inspirational. We were going from 8 a.m. until about 10:30 p.m., so I’m too beat to write more. Tomorrow I’m running the afternoon session along with a (new) friend from Christian Peacemaker Teams called Jan Benvie, who’s here for the four days of the conference between serving in Hebron in southern Palestine, and Suleimaniyah in northern Iraq. After we got back to our hotel this evening, she and I worked some more on what we’re going to do with the session.
More details tomorrow or Monday– or whenever I regain some energy…

Sins of the predecessors

Should the largely pauperized population of today’s Iraq be held responsible for making ‘reparation’ payments to people and institutions in Kuwait and elsewhere that were damaged by Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait?
Should the extremely poor population of today’s South Africa be held responsible for making ‘reparation’ payments to people and institutions in even poorer Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and elsewhere that were damaged by the apartheid regime’s decades-long aggressions against those countries?
Should the largely pauperized population of today’s Iraq be held responsible for making ‘reparation’ payments to people and institutions in Iran that were damaged by Saddam Hussein’s September 1980 invasion of Iran and the very lengthy war that ensued and that also involved Iraq’s largescale use of chemical weapons against Iran?
I would say that the people damaged in all three of these cases have roughly equivalent moral claims to some form of ‘reparation’. But the problem is, of course, that the people now governing in South Africa (and ‘governing’ as best they can in Iraq) are people who were themselves majorly the targets of the earlier, abusive governments in those two places. So it is hard to see how these new successor governments can be held responsible for the sins of their predecessors… And indeed, in South Africa, the question of the country paying financial recompense to the peoples of Mozambique, Namibia, and Angola has never really to my knowledge come up.
And neither has the question of Iraq paying reparations to Iran.
All of which makes it fairly disquieting for me to have learned recently that the UN Compensation Commission that was established in 1991 with the purpose of “process[ing] claims and pay[ing] compensation for losses and damage suffered as a direct result of Iraq’s unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait” has continued until now on its course of turning over to Kuwait and other claimants regular payments funded by the UNCC’s expropriation of five percent of the proceeds of Iraq’s oil exports.
Just yesterday, the UNCC issued a press release describing proudly how in the current quarter it has disbursed $417.8 million to claimants in seven countries. The countries that got the biggest shares of those payments? Kuwait, which got $335.5 million, and Saudi Arabia, which got came in a distant second with $30.3 million.
A factsheet issued by the UNCC some time earlier reported that “Awards of approximately US$52.5 billion have been approved in respect of approximately 1.55 million … claims”, and at that point around $21 billion had been disbursed. As far as I can see from the charts I viewed, the lion’s share of that money has gone to Kuwait.
Now I know Saddam’s regime was bad, and caused much damage to Saudis and Kuwaitis. And it is possible (I suppose) that there, somewhere, some indigent Kuwaitis who benefit a lot from these reparations. But Kuwait’s GDP per capita in 2005 was $17,421. It seems quite crazy to me to expect that Iraq’s hard-pressed people should still today– 15 years after the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam’s rule, and more than three years after Saddam’s overthrow at home– be paying these reparations to Kuwait.
Doesn’t anyone in the international “community” remember the effect the reparations exacted from Germany after WW1 had in helping to incubate Nazism among the Germans? Is this a good way to build stability in the Gulf region today?
[Cross-posted at Transitional Justice Forum.]

The ‘real’ George Bush?

So after his “surprise” press conference with the MSM people Wednesday morning, the Prez had a second gathering, with reps of the avowedly rightwing media, in the afternoon.
Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com wrote about that one, too.
Froomking writes that tellingly, while meeting with people closer to being his partisan soul-mates, “Bush made it clear to this group of supporters that ‘stay the course’ remains his strategy.”
So much for the President’s recent avowals– stridently backed up by spokesman Tony Snow(job)– that his mantra was no longer “stay the course”, and indeed it had been ages since that had ever been his mantra… As I noted here last week: “The President ‘at war’ (with himself.) Not a reassuring sight.”
Here’s the longer excerpt from Froomkin:

Continue reading “The ‘real’ George Bush?”

Reidar Visser takes on the ‘Biden Plan’

I’m very happy to publish the following commentary from Reidar Visser. Please disseminate it widely. Be aware that all material published on JWN is published under a Creative Commons license, and be aware of what that entails.
There Is No Biden Plan
by Reidar Visser, October 26, 2006

To an outsider with no particular affection for the foreign policies of either US political party, the chief interest of the mid-term elections lies in their ramifications for the rest of the world. One of the most striking features of current Iraq discussion in the United States is that much of what is being said is based on the false premise that there exists a radical “third way” territorial solution to the Iraq crisis: a tripartite division of the country.
This option, often referred to as the “plan” of Senator Joseph Biden, would involve active American policy steps to bring about a three-way separation of Iraq’s ethno-religious communities – a Kurdish north, a Sunni Arab west, and a Shiite Arab center–south. These entities would form part of a loose confederation, with sharing of oil revenues as the glue that binds the system together. The senator has repeatedly stressed the supposed “constitutionality” of his plan.
The published accounts of this “Biden plan” reveal, however, that it violates the Iraqi constitution in two significant ways. Back in May, Sen. Biden boldly declared that he wanted the establishment of “one Iraq with three regions”. The problem here is that whereas the Iraqi constitution does establish federalism as a general principle of government for Iraq, it leaves the demarcation of any new federal units outside Kurdistan to the Iraqi people – who are empowered to create federal entities “from below”, through referendums. This means that no outsider can dictate any particular future Iraqi state structure – it might be two federal entities, five, or fifteen, or for that matter a unitary rump Iraq federated with a decentralized Kurdistan, all depending on the choice of the Iraqi people.
More recently, Biden seems to have realized this deficiency in his plan, and last month he admitted that “the exact number [of federal states] should be left to the constitution”. Still, he offered the “guess” that there would be three entities. But subtract the guesswork, and the bottom falls out of the plan.
Biden’s second point, oil distribution, is based on his first: he wants to see an agreement on sharing of oil revenues between his three imagined Iraqi sub-communities; presumably this would be inserted in the constitution through the planned revision process. But again, this is in dissonance with the Iraqi legal framework. The revision of the constitution is to be completed before October 2007, whereas no federalization is supposed to take place before April 2008. Hence, the only oil revenue settlement that would be politically neutral and could avoid pre-empting any subsequent popular initiatives on federal entities would be one based on the existing 18 governorates.
The remaining points in Biden’s plan are of less interest, either because they already enjoy cross-party support, or because they will be of limited significance to achieving political stability. “More Aid, But Tied to the Protection of Minority and Women Rights” is all fine, but frankly this is not something that will make or break the Iraqi reconciliation process. “Engage Iraq’s Neighbors” is a good point, but one that already enjoys increasing support among realist Republicans and, reportedly, in the State Department. That leaves us with the final item on Biden’s agenda – withdrawal of US forces – which in turn means that we are back to where we started: if Biden wishes to adhere to the Iraqi constitution, then he simply does not have a policy alternative that is truly distinctive. It considerably weakens the whole American debate on Iraq – and that of the Democratic Party in particular – if an illusory and spurious policy proposal like Biden’s is allowed to remain dominant.
But despite these contradictions, Biden continues his campaign, perhaps believing he can goad the Iraqis into adopting his own ideas. That too is problematic. In today’s Iraq, there exists far more diversity than the simplistic three-community model would suggest, but through his black-and-white discourse Biden bulldozes this pluralism and chases the Iraqis further into the mental prisons of sectarianism. For instance, within the Shiite community singled out by Biden for separate treatment, some voices in fact completely reject the idea of federal subdivisions among the Arabs of Iraq, whereas others are calling for several non-sectarian sub-entities among the Shiites instead of a single unit. (Does the senator know that a single governorate – Basra – holds more than 80% of what he describes as “Shiite” oil reserves?) Why are these groups not to be given a democratic hearing in the new Iraq? Why should they be forced to accepting an ethno-religious formula that could easily produce ethno-religious dictatorships if internal tensions within the federal units (say, Sadrists versus SCIRI) are ignored? It is alarming that on questions like these, people like Sen. Biden should be allowed to muddle Democratic Party discourse (and the US debate in general) by adopting an approach that was fashionable in the times immediately after the First World War but in recent years has been the preserve of neo-conservative fringe writers.
And sometimes there is an even more assertive Biden, one that does not restrict himself to “guessing” the outcome of the Iraqi federalization process. A few days ago, an angry voice could be heard on television: “Like heck we can’t tell the Iraqis what to do.” This was Joseph Biden, the Democratic senator! Yes, it is probably true that, if the United States seriously wishes to enforce a division of Iraq – by circumventing the Iraqi constitution – it has the military capability to do so. But it would be a tragic outcome of the supposed democratization of Iraq if Washington should choose to exit by neo-imperialistically imposing a particular state structure on the country. It would alienate huge sections of the Iraqi population. It would be a gross provocation to most of Iraq’s neighbors, who view a tripartite federation as a particularly brittle state structure and a powder keg in terms of potential regional instability. And it would be the ultimate gift to al-Qaida – who would finally get the manifest evidence they have been craving in order to back up their conspiracy theory of the US as a pro-Zionist force bent on subdividing the Middle East into weak and sectarian statelets. Senator Biden would do well to consider the long-term damage to American interests that would follow from such reactions before he annexes Basra to the Middle Euphrates, merges Diyala and Kut, and rips the heart out of Mosul.

US service members call for end to Iraqi occupation

This is important. It’s a report on Raw Story that tells us that 346 service members, 125 of whom are on active duty, have now joined a call to end the US occupation of Iraq.
The organization Appeal for Redress is organizing this petition.
Here is the text of the petition:

    As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq . Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

If you know any service members who might want to sign, send them to the website, pronto!