Author: Helena

Now they’re censoring Tony Judt??

I happen to be in New York this week. Now, I’ve always known that New York was a strongly pro-Israeli city, but I was honestly really surprised to learn that the eminent historian of Europe Tony Judt has now been subjected to a heavy-handed attempt to silence him from speaking out here on the topic of the strength of the Israeli lobby.
That article, by Michael Powell in today’s WaPo, tells us that,

    Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the [Polish] consulate. Judt’s subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate. [!!]
    An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly concluded Judt was too controversial.
    “The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,” Kasprzyk said. “That’s obvious — we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that.”
    Judt… noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later this month at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish group had complained. Other prominent academics have described encountering such problems, in some cases more severe, stretching over the past three decades.
    The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.
    “This is serious and frightening, and only in America — not in Israel — is this a problem,” he said. “These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen.”

He is darn’ right it’s chilling.
The heads of the two organizations involved both made weaselly excuses about the actions of the groups they lead. Powell writes that they,

    denied asking the consulate to block Judt’s speech and accused the professor of retailing “wild conspiracy theories” about their roles. But they applauded the consulate for rescinding Judt’s invitation.
    “I think they made the right decision,” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He’s taken the position that Israel shouldn’t exist. That puts him on our radar.”
    David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, took a similar view. “I never asked for a particular action; I was calling as a friend of Poland,” Harris said. “The message of that evening was going to be entirely contrary to the entire spirit of Polish foreign policy.”

We could note, of course (as Powell does) that Judt is Jewish; he was “born and raised in England and lost much of his family in the Holocaust.” (Though note, too, that Powell also quotes Judt as making the quite non-remarkable observation that, “”For many, the way to be Jewish in this country is to aggressively assert that the Holocaust is your identification tag… I know perfectly well my history, but it never occurred to me that my most prominent identity was as a Jew.”)
Also, while Abe Foxman might accuse Judt of saying that Israel “shouldn’t exist”, actually Judt’s position is that the best outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is probably a secular, binational state. Again, that should be quite non-remarkable… But not, apparently, in this stewing mass of ultra-Zionist intolerance that is New York City.
Okay, I know I shouldn’t do the whole city down. Some of my very best friends, after all, are New Yorkers…
Actually, I think this childish over-reaction from Foxman, Harris, and Co, may well be just another example of what I remarked on recently here, with respect to Tom Friedman and Henry Kissinger, namely that,

    the bloody nose that Hizbullah was able to deal to Israel’s once-‘famed’ military in South Lebanon this summer [seems to have had] the effect of driving some long-time American supporters of Israel almost batty?

Poor old Tony Judt. But his point that the pro-Israeli organizations have done a lot to stifle open discussion of Israeli-Palestinian issues within the United States seems now to have been well demonstrated.

North Korea’s nuclear test

Oops. Yet another step toward global instability, taken while the US has been quite distracted by its self-created quagmire in Iraq:

    “The field of scientific research in the DPRK successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, 2006, at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward… ”

Oh, my God. All the world needs: another “great leap forward” in this or any other field of endeavor.
The world now apparently has nine nuclear weapons powers. Five of them are “recognized” nuclear weapons states: the US, Russia, China, Britain, and France. And four are non-“recognized”: Israel, India, Pakistan, and now North Korea. Only one state, the US, has ever used nuclear weapons.
By an “amazing coincidence” (irony alert!), the five recognized NW states are also the five states that wield vetoes at the Security Council.
Back in 1970 when the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) went into effect, the five recognized nuclear states and all other NPT signatories solemnly committed themselves to engaging in good-faith efforts of “complete and general disarmament.” (Article 6.) Having seen the huge constraints in the modern era of any too-great reliance on unilateralism and military force– in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and Lebanon– it is now time to draw all the nations of the world into a campaign to follow through on that promise. The ingenuity of humankind is surely great enough for us to devise ways of resolving problems and differences among us that do not rely on threats of speciescide.

Rumsfeld, Afghanistan, militarism

So there is Donald Rumsfeld, nearly six years into the Bush administration, and he has still managed to evade all the attempts to even start to hold him accountable for the violence he has played a big role in unleashing around the world during his tenure…
And here is Donald Rumsfeld, on the op-ed page of the WaPo today, telling us that in Afghanistan, over the five years since the US-led invasion, “the trajectory is a hopeful and promising one.”
I could spend some time refuting some of the rosy claims he makes about Afghanistan in this article. His claim, for example, that “Almost 600 schools have been built, and now more than 5 million children attend school, a 500 percent increase from 2001.” But how about this October 2 report from the UN’s IRIN news service that tells us that:

    Currently, due to fear of attacks, the doors of some 330 mixed schools have been closed in Kandahar, Zabul and Helmand provinces alone, according to Saifal Maluk, head of education in Helmand province.
    And it’s not just the south where primary education is suffering. “More than 200,000 students are shut out of schools across the country because of school closures due to fear of attacks,” Deputy Education Minister Mohammad Sadiq Fatman told IRIN from Kabul.

… Well, I could take on several of Rumsfeld’s claims in a similar way. But what really riveted me about his article was some of the language he used up near the top of it.
Especially the way he described the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, here: “from halfway around the world — with but a few weeks’ notice — coalition forces were charged with securing a landlocked, mountainous country…”
“Charged”. That makes it sound like they had some kind of official mandate for the invasion, doesn’t it? But in fact, the national armed forces that participated in the “coalition” had mandates only from their own governments. The UN Security Council did not come onto the scene with a resolution that explicitly authorized any outside military intervention in Afghanistan until December 20, 2001. That was Resolution 1386, that authorized the establishment of an international force to “assist” the “Afghan Interim Authority” that had by then been installed in Kabul by the US forces…
“Securing.” Now that is an interesting use of the word. To “secure” something can perhaps in military terms mean to “grab hold of it”– which was more or less what the US-led forces did to Afghanistan in October 2001. But most people would probably think that “securing” would also involve making a place secure. And that, the US-led invasion of the country has clearly failed to do.
Here is Bronwen Roberts of AFP, reporting yesterday:

    Widely agreed to have learnt more sophisticated tactics that reflect the methods of international terrorists, the fundamentalists are leading a revived insurgency.
    Nearly 100 foreign soldiers have been killed this year in their attacks on the 40,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan, and around 170 civilians have died in more than 90 suicide attacks blamed on Taliban…
    Meanwhile opium production in Afghanistan, the world’s biggest producer, jumped by nearly 50 percent this year on the previous year.
    Officials have said some of the proceeds may be going towards funding the Taliban.
    Outspoken parliamentarian Ramazan Bashardost is particularly critical of the developments of the past five years.
    “There is freedom for the people … but in the economy, politics and military it is a disaster,” he told AFP.
    “In Afghanistan there is now less security today than one year ago, there are a lot of people without jobs.”

Roberts also notes that, despite the many, extremely costly military operations the US and its allies have undertaken in and around Afghanistan, both Osama bin Laden– whose “harboring” by the Taliban had been the reason the Bushites invaded the country in the first place– and Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, are still at large. (Funny that Rumsfeld makes no mention of that in his piece, don’t you think?)
I frankly admit that I don’t know enough about Afghanistan to be able to judge with confidence whether the situation of the country’s people is, on balance, better today than it was when the Taliban were in power, or not. One thing that seems clear is that it was pretty bad then, and it is pretty bad now, as well. And clearly, a large proportion of the country’s 30 million people are currently quite unable to feel “secure.”
I opposed the US invasion when it was still being prepared (though perhaps, in retrospect, not forcefully enough.) In the weeks after September 11, 2001, I argued that smart, coordinated, international police action was the best way to capture Osama Bin Laden and enough of his key lieutenants to incapacitate Al-Qaeda’s global networks.
But the Bushites were determined to wage war– and to wage it, as we soon enough learned, not just against Afghanistan but also against Iraq.
And now, the US-led forces are tied down badly, and bleeding, in both countries. But the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq– especially, I think, Iraq– are bleeding far, far worse than any of the invading countries.
We US citizens need to become a lot clearer than we have been thus far about the degree of harm and suffering that our government’s actions have inflicted on other peoples around the world. We need, desperately, to find new, non-violent paradigms for how our government can set about resolving the concerns and conflicts it will inevitably have with other governments– and we need to start to advocate strongly for, and follow, those nonviolent paradigms, rather than allowing our government to continue along the path of militarism and domination.
We need to bring our troops home from Iraq, and from Afghanistan, and to require our government that it work respectfully with the other nations of the world to find new models for addressing the security challenges that will remain in those two countries, as well as in far too many other (long-neglected) countries around the world. At least, if we start slashing our government’s spending on the military there should be a lot of money– from our own national budget, as well as from the budgets of other nations that currently try to compete or to “catch up with” ours in this regard– available to start redirecting toward new and effective models of UN peacekeeping, toward righting global economic imbalances, and to meeting the general global challenge of under-development and inequality.
But I think this whole effort has to start with recognizing the degree of harm our government’s militarism has already inflicted on the world.
One good way to come out against this will, of course, present itself when we go to the vote November 7. I have no illusions that most Democratic politicians have more of a “pro-peace” outlook than most Republicans. But at least if we can mobilize our fellow-citizens successfully against this lot now in power, and their policies, then after that we can carry on by urging the Democrats toward a better relationship with the rest of the world…
And in the meantime, we’ll have to carry on putting up with Rumsfeld. But oh, wouldn’t it be great if we had a Congress that would truly try to hold him accountable?

Chutzpah and Condi

It must take a certain dogged kind of chutzpah to be Condi Rice. I mean, there she has been for the past eight months doing everything she could to undermine the Hamas government in Palestine, including quite evidently condoning the Israelis’ continued use of quite disproportionate levels of lethal violence there, and their maintenance of the savage blocade around Gaza… But today, there was Condi in Egypt calling “bravely” for an end to the current intra-Palestinian violence:

    “Innocent Palestinians are caught in this violence,” Ms Rice said.

Well yes, Ms. Rice. But 15 times as many innocent Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the past eight months— and when did you ever speak out about that? Or when did you ever threaten to make any portion of the US’s extremely generous aid to Israel conditional on Israel ending its policy of killing and tight economic strangulation of the Palestinians?
Some figures from B’tselem: The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces in the OPTs since February 1, 2006: 431. Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the OPTs and inside Israel since February 1: 20. (Aggregated from 1 + 2 + 3 + 4)
This past summer, it also took a special kind of chutzpah for Rice to profess her strong support for the government and people of Lebanon at a time when she was actively conniving with Israel in every possible way to enable the continuation of the IDF’sbrutal assault against the country and its people– and when Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora was tearfully begging the whole world to help put in place a speedy ceasefire.
Well, once again now, “heckuva job, Condi”, eh?
Matters do currently seem fairly precarious inside the OPTs. Ten people have died in Fatah-Hamas clashes there in the past couple of days. (That, at a time when Israel has also continued its attacks against Gaza. All completely tragic.) And now the out-of-control Al Aqsa brigades are reportedly threatening to kill three top Hamas leaders. Luckily Abu Mazen and Ismail Haniyeh have both called for an end to the violence. But you really have to wonder who is arming and funding the Aqsa Brigades these days…
However, the pollsters from the (currently pro-Fateh) Jerusalem Media and Communication Center were able to get out and about in the days between Spetmber 19 and 22, when they conducted a poll of Palestinian opinion.
Many of the answers there are very interesting. If you go down to the bottom, Q. 28, “Which Palestinian faction do you trust the most?” you see the answers were neck-and-neck: Fateh– 30.7% and Hamas–29.7%. Hamas has certainly lost some support since the elections in late January, when they won 44% of the popular vote. However, things don’t look too great for Fateh in the event of new elections, either… And especially if people vote on the basis of personalities. In response to Q. 27, “Which Palestinian Personality do you trust the most?”, Haniyeh came top with 18.9%, followed by Abu Mazen with 14.5%. (Both those questions were “open” in structure. For Q. 27, 1.2% of respondents even said Yasser Arafat!)
But given the comprehensive nature and the viciousness of the pressure that Israel and the US have maintained on the Palestinians since January, it is notable that so many Palestinians there are still prepared to stick up for Hamas.
Does the “international community” intend to carry on punishing the Palestinians until they can force the whole people to their knees and “win” a return of Fateh to power? I certainly hope not. The “punishment” the Palestinian people have already suffered has already been quite unconscionable.
Here’s my best suggestion for a way out of the current impaase: The UN Security Council should organize a final, authoritative, and comprehansive Arab-Israeli peace conference, like Madrid in 1991 but under specifically UN auspices and to be held on the basis of international law and the existing UN resolutions… And then, all the Security Council members together should structure the incentives they offer to the Middle Eastern parties in such a way as to secure their good-faith participation in this negotiation.
And then, let us the world see who would come to this conference. On what possible grounds could anyone who professes to uphold international legitimacy object to such a plan?

Garrison Keillor takes on Gitmo

Garrison Keillor comes as close to being the bard of the American heartland as anyone I can think of. He does a weekly hour-long radio show, the whimsically named “Prairie Home Companion”, that is mainly good-natured entertainment that features live performers before a live audience in his home city of Minneapolis/St. Paul… But it also sometimes has a political edge to it.
Today, Keillor has a hard-hitting column in the International Herald Tribune. (Hat-tip to Jane C. there.) Commenting on the significance of the US Senate’s action last week that stripped the age-old right of habeas corpus away from non-citizens detained by the US overseas, Keillor writes:

    None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea.
    Mark their names: Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Imhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.
    …Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the Supreme Court will dispose of this piece of garbage.
    If, however, the Court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it.
    Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

Keillor then recounts a visit he recently made to the President’s “home” church in Dallas, Texas… and the inability of the very comfortable Methodists gathered there to even appreciate the irony with which he was commenting on how comfortable their lives all seemed.
He concluded thus:

    The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantánamo, stripped naked, forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise, so why should they worry? It’s only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies. The Christians are doing just fine.
    If you can’t trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

I should note that some of my very best friends are in one way or another Methodists. Also, Keillor’s reference there to the Jews and the homosexuals and the gypsies is a Nazi-era reference. It would have been kind of nice if he’d put “the Muslims” into that list, since all the detainees in Gitmo are in fact, as far as I know, Muslims. But I guess he was writing in a figurative way there, and it is certainly very evocative and hard-hitting. I think he made the point.

“Modern” means of coercion at Gitmo

I’ve been continuing my pre-Gitmo research. Thanks to all who have sent in suggestions for directions I can go with that. I just discovered tonight that I should be able to get some relevant books out of a nearby library, which is good.
Today, the WaPo had an excellent op-ed by Joseph Margulies, a law prof at Northwestern who was the lead counsel in Rasul, a key habeas-related case at Guantanamo. In the piece, Margulies recalls how, back during the Korean War, the North Koreans succeeded in getting 36 US airmen to falsely confess to a plot to bomb civilian targets…
How did they do this? Margulies writes:

    The senior officer among them was Col. Frank Schwable, the highest-ranking Marine captured in the conflict. “I want to emphasize,” Schwable said later, “that I did not undergo physical torture. Perhaps I would have been more fortunate if I had, because people nowadays seem to understand that better. Mine was the more subtle kind of torment.”
    The airmen were subjected to something new: touchless torture. They were kept isolated from all human contact, apart from their interrogators. One prisoner spent 10 months in solitary confinement, another 13. Schwable did not learn of the armistice until after he confessed.
    They were made to stand or sit in awkward and painful positions for hours at a time. One prisoner had to sit at attention on the edge of a stool for 15 hours per day for 33 days. Another time he had to stand for 30 consecutive hours, until he collapsed. Schwable was required to sit at attention every day for almost 10 weeks.
    They were demeaned, taunted and treated like animals. Schwable said the guards “growled” or “barked” at him, slopped food at him, and made him defecate in public. “Every effort was made to degrade and humiliate me,” he said.
    And of course they were interrogated. Grueling interrogations that lasted hours and hours, repeating the same material they had gone over the day before, and the day before that, until the past became a confusing whirl of fact and fantasy suggested to them by their relentless interlocutors. At last, exhausted and demoralized, their resistance overcome, they confessed. They all confessed in the end. And they all lied…

Compare this with this account, which comes from a recent article by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone in which Tietz describes at some length the treatment received by Omar Khadr, a young Arab-Canadian who was just 15 when he was captured by US forces after taking part in a firefight in Afghanistan:

    Before boarding a C-130 transport to Guantanamo, Omar was dressed in an orange jumpsuit and hog-chained: shackled hand and foot, a waist chain cinching his hands to his stomach, another chain connecting the shackles on his hands to those on his feet. At both wrist and ankle, the shackles bit…
    Just before he got on the plane, Omar was forced into sensory-deprivation gear that the military uses to disorient prisoners prior to interrogation. The guards pulled black thermal mittens onto Omar’s hands and taped them hard at the wrists. They pulled opaque goggles over his eyes and placed soundproof earphones over his ears. They put a deodorizing mask over his mouth and nose. They bolted him, fully trussed, to a backless bench. Whichever limbs hadn’t already lost sensation from the cuffs lost sensation from the high-altitude cold during the flight, which took fifteen hours…
    At Guantanamo, Omar was led, his senses still blocked, onto a bus that took the prisoners to a ferry dock. Some of the buses didn’t have seats, and the prisoners usually sat cross-legged on the floor. Guards often lifted the prisoners’ earphones, told them not to move, and when they moved — helplessly, with the motion of the bus, like bowling pins — started kicking them. The repeated blows often left detainees unable to walk for weeks…
    A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. “Get up,” the guard said. “You have a reservation.” “Reservation” is the commonly used term at Gitmo for interrogation.
    In the interrogation room, Omar’s interviewer grew displeased with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Omar tightly to an eye bolt in the center of the floor. Omar’s hands and feet were shackled together; the eye bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left alone for half an hour.
    Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar’s arms, pulled them behind his back and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this particular “stress position” can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.
    An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his chains and pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they’d successfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days…

How come these accounts sound so gruesomely similar? A good part of the answer is given us in Margulies’s article. He recalls how, after the 36 downed US airmen were finally returned home and started talking about their treatment in North Korea,

    One institution, however, was not repelled but intrigued. The experience led the CIA to accelerate its research into the theory and science of coercive interrogation.
    Between 1950 and 1962, the CIA poured millions of dollars into studies that tested different interrogation techniques, hoping to learn from and refine the lessons of Korea. The research culminated in the top-secret KUBARK manual, a 1963 primer on how to conduct coercive counterintelligence interrogations. The manual was finally disclosed in 1997 and is now available online.

That would be here. Or here.
(KUBARK, according to the National Security Archive web-page at that first link, is the CIA’s cryptonym for itself. Go figure.)
Anyway, at some later point, the basic principles in KUBARK turned up again, in the “SERE” program that the army Special Forces etc started to use. One interesting aspect of the SERE program was that it was purportedly a defensive program– i.e., it was to train these people to be able to resist various forms of coercive interrogation if they were ever captured. But in a period in which many human-rights organizations had mounted large and fairly successful campaigns against the KUBARK program– especially, in the various forms in which it was taught to repressive Latin American militaries at the School of the Americas and elsewhere– having the SERE program out there kept alive a lot of so-called specialized “know-how” in the US military about coercive interrogations. (This is parallel to what goes in in the field of, for example, bioweapons… where everyone who’s doing the research for it claims very loudly that “It’s only for defensive purposes!” — but guess what, they still end up with all those handy toxins on the shelf in case they need them.)
Anyway, despite the plethora of footnotes at the bottom of that KUBARK manual, the whole business is not so terribly arcane, “modern”, and special as you might think. In fact, it includes many techniques of coercion known throughout history, including many used by the various European colonial powers around the world throughout the past 400 years.
Back in 1992, I organized a conference of Middle Eastern human rights activists in Spain at which the main focus was on trying to build a trans-national network against torture. We had a small number of people from other regions there, too, including a great psychiatrist from the Copenhagen-based International Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims. He quoted the organization’s founder, Dr. Inge Genefke, who has famously said:

    “The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder… Today we know that survivors of torture can be helped to regain their health and strength, and in helping them we take the weapon from their torturers. They sought the destruction of other human beings. We have proved that they have not succeeded.”

Genefke’s colleague who came to our conference went a bit further than that, too. He said that the aim of the torturer is to destroy the victim as an independent personality, and that it is the independent personality that is the basic building block of democracy. Quite true.

Powell held captive for four years?

‘Tis the season for “big” political books in Washington DC. The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has a new one just about to come out on Colin Powell– just at the same time that Bob Woodward’s book about the whole Bush administration will be hitting the bookstores. Today, he got a first chunk of his excerpted in the main section of the paper. As for DeYoung, she had a longish excerpt from her book, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, in the paper’s color-mag section today.
Her book won’t be coming out till October 10. It is based on a number of interviews with Powell– and probably even more from members of his entourage like Rich Armitage and Larry Wilkerson.
To me, the biggest revelation in DeYoung’s excerpt today is this: Colin Powell was held captive by heinous forces in his office in the State Department for the entire four years he was Secretary of State.
Who knew?
… Well, that, at least, is the only way I can interpret this little portion of DeYoung’s prose, where she was discussing the humiliating circumstances in which Bush brought Powell’s tenure as SecState to an end in Nov 2004: “After four long years, Powell had anticipated the end of his service and sometimes even longed for it.”
So, um, if he had– not just once, but “sometimes”– “longed” for the end of his service, then why on earth did he stay? I mean, being Secretary of State is not like being in the military, where you have to sign a termed contract that has some extremely tough constraining clauses. At least, I always used to think that a SecState was quite free to leave her/his post any time. (Especially if he or she “longs” to do so, wouldn’t you think?)
But now, I am learning that there must have been some heinous force tying Powell to his desk there. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser…
Pat Lang, however, has another explanation for what was going on with Powell. He calls it the “Great Man Syndrome”, that is, the delusion a person might have that he is “great” and even indispensable.
Here’s what else he writes about Powell there:

    Here is the case of a wise and great man (perhaps “dimly wise and rudely great” but, nevertheless..) who, I think, could have been president of the United States and who, with seemingly unwavering determination threw himself under the wheels of a bus. (rhetorical flourish)
    Powell knew that “W” was out if his depth as president. He had to know that. He must have known that the “Vulcans” were successfully tutoring his boss on the subject of “the world.” Powell certainly knew that the imagined connections of [Al-Qaeda] to the Iraqi government were false. He clearly doubted the whole tissue of falsehood surrounding the WMD “pitch.” (Wolfie’s description)
    If I am correct about this, than why on earth did he go up to New York to the UN to smear shit all over the memory of his service? Why?
    The answer given to me by my bag of analytic tools is that he just could not remove himself from the action. He was a victim of GMS…

For me, there was an uncanny, almost a full-circle feeling in reading DeYoung’s piece. Powell’s hapless February 2003 presentation to the UN was the subject of my first two posts here on JWN (1 and 2). In the second of those, I noted the parallels between the flimsy public “justifications” Powell and his cronies were amassing for the increasingly imminent attack on Iraq and the extremely flimsy “justifications” Shimon Peres had provided for his 1996 assault against Lebanon.
The really frustrating thing is that none of these gung-ho militarists ever seems to learn anything from his mistakes or those of his close allies. I mean, Colin Powell, for goodness’ sakes!! He was the guy who quintessentially had “learned” the lessons of Vietnam, had worked hard to reconstruct the US army after that debacle, wrote very movingly in his memoir about the terrible costs of Vietnam… But there he was in February 2003– not in a uniform, but still, in a very real sense, playing a dealbreaker role there in the administration.
I mean, if he had come out in public back on February 6, 2003, and had said, “Mr. President, all this so-called ‘intel’ you’ve stove-piped to me about Iraqi links with Al- Qaeda or Iraqi WMDs is a crock of s**t,” then he could have stopped this war in its tracks. His credibility– then– was just so, so much greater than the President’s.
Heck, he didn’t even have to come out in public and say anything. All he needed to do, back at that time, was resign.
But he didn’t.
And the world got what the world got in the way of war, devastation, fitna, and destruction. Most of it, quite unforgivably, in Iraq, but some here in the US, too.
Just because of Colin Powell’s attachment to his position.
I am beyond words.

Ending the occupation rule of Palestine and Golan

After 42 months of US occupation rule in Iraq, have we in the US finally learned a few truth about the true nature of rule by military occupation?
First and foremost, this: Rule by a foreign military occupation force– like any form of military rule– is inherently anti-democratic.
As we learn this fact, can we finally start to convince our fellow-citizens here in the US that Israel’s exercise of military occupation rule over some millions of its neighbors is a situation that has to be brought to a very speedy end?
And can we accept that our government here in the US, including successive administrations from both parties and the vast majority of members of Congress from both parties, has actually enabled and colluded in perpetuating this inherently oppressive, anti-democratic situation… which has been proceeding now for nearly 40 years? And therefore, that we as US citizens have a special responsibility to end the extremely generous financial and above all political support from our government, that has enabled this highly discriminatory form of rule to continue…
This includes bringing to a definitive end Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, its occupation of the rest of the West Bank, its continued occupation-at-some-distance of Gaza, and its continued occupation of Golan. Golan is part of the sovereign territory of Syria (and Israel’s ‘annexation’ of it in 1981 has no standing whatsoever in international law.) The West Bank and Gaza are territories that the UN unequivocally allocated in 1947 to a fully sovereign Palestinian Arab state, though this state has never been allowed to be born. And Palestinian East Jerusalem– like Israeli West Jerusalem– is territory that the UN had allocated to a special “corpus separatum”. Whether that latter idea is now revived or not, still, Israel has no claim to ownership of East Jeruslaem except by virtue of its conquest of the area in 1967– and the UN has repeatedly, and quite rightly, underscored the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
Running a prolonged military occupation over another nation’s people is, self-evidently, very harmful to the wellbeing, and often even to the lives and physical security, of the people thus occupied. But it is also– as many Israelis and Americans can now attest– extremely harmful to the moral and spiritual quality of the community doing the occupying. In fact, it is harmful all round– except for the small number of entrepreneurs and shysters who in any such situation arise to make money off it. (I’m thinking of shareholders in companies like Halliburton, the private security companies that have proliferated in both Iraq and the Israeli-occupied territories, the real-estate and construction companies that have been making a huge killing by exploiting, basically, looted lands and resources in Palestine and Golan, etc etc…)
Because occupation is so harmful, and so deeply anti-democratic, I think we should work just as hard to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and Syrian lands as we do to end the US occupation of Iraq.
Imagine living under military rule for nearly 40 years!
Anyway, I’ve put a couple of new resources up on the front-page sidebar here on JWN, to help people understand more about Israel’s occupation rule over E. Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan. One is the link to “Occupation magazine” that’s just below the second of my occupation “day-counters” there. I have to say that site is not perfectly organized. But it certainly has a large amount of (mainly, Israeli-sourced) material.
The other resource, a bit further down on the sidebar, is the link to the five-part series I wrote about “The human dimension of the Golan issue” in 1998, based on a quick reporting trip I made there in March that year. It’s a bit dated, obviously. But still, not many people write about the human dimension there, viewing Golan only as a chunk of strategic geography instead of as a beloved homeplace to its indigenous people– both those who still live there, and those who fled in 1967. (This piece, by Gideon Levy in today’s HaAretz, is also about Golan.)
.. And if we want any more “proof” about the parallellism of the two occupation forces, just look at all the efforts they have both made to stoke extremely harmful “divide-and-rule” actions among their subject peoples. As if things weren’t bad enough already for the people of Gaza and of Baghdad without having all these added layers of fear, divisionism, and suffering heaped onto them… God save them all.

Woodward on Kissinger’s role

Maybe I’ve been engaging in unsuspected age-ism all along? I just kind of assumed that everyone else regarded 83-year-old Henry Kissinger, as I did, as an out-of-it, barely articulate old guy whose days of exercizing any real power or influence were long behind him.
So Bob Woodward is now here, in the first exceprt of his new book to be carried by the WaPo (Sunday), telling me that I under-estimated Kissinger’s role completely:

    A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
    “Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”
    The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
    Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
    In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
    In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Kissinger wrote, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”
    He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
    Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
    He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
    Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn’t have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That’s why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
    In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
    “The president can’t be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece,” Kissinger said. “You may want to reduce troops,” but troop reduction should not be the objective. “This is not where you put the emphasis.”
    To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
    “Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded,” he wrote.
    The policy of “Vietnamization,” turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. “It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”
    Two months after Gerson’s meeting, the administration issued a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.

There is a little bit in this excerpt about the infighting among top Bush advisors that was featured in the NYT stories about the book Friday and Saturday.
The other notable thing in the WaPo excerpt was the account of a meeting this past March between Centcom commander Jean Abizaid and the courageous Rep. John Murtha, who’s been calling openly for a quick withdrawal from Iraq.
Woodward wrote:

    Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
    Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha…
    “The war in Iraq is not going as advertised,” Murtha had said. “It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.”
    Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman’s office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, “We’re that far apart.”

Woodie doesn’t tell us, of course, what Abizaid plans to do about that…
Anyway, those are the best bits so far.

Thuggish Israeli minister calls for killing Nasrallah

It seems to me that assassinating one’s opponents is– like torture– a slippery slope. Maybe the first few times you do it, you’re still a bit hesitant. But do it scores or hundreds of times, and it might become a habit. Heck, you might even start bragging about it in public.
It strikes me that has already happened in Israel. Here, today, we have Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer openly calling for the killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: “We should wait for the right opportunity and not leave him alive.”
I met Ben-Eliezer once, briefly, in the lobby of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. He struck me even then as fairly thuggish. He strikes me even more that way now. He is one of the”grand old men” of the Israeli Labor Party, and was Sharon’s Defense Minister in the early years of this decade.
And of course, when he calls for assassinating leaders of neighboring communities, this is not just rhetoric. It may well have an effect on Israeli policy– especially since he has been a close advisor to neophyte Defense Minister Amir Peretz. Also, Israel has already assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas Musawi; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdul-Aziz Rantisi, and many other Hamas political figures– as well as considerably more than 100 suspected organizers of violent acts in Gaza and the West Bank.
(Of course, none of those individuals intentionally assassinated was ever given a “day in court”; no-one has ever been shown the “evidence” that brought about their killing. Also, numerous bystanders have also been killed in these lethal operations.)
How easy it has become for Israeli politicians to now speak openly about intentionally pursuing a policy of killing and destruction!
Here in the United States, the Bush administration has undertaken, certainly, a number of deliberate “targeted killings” (assassinations), along the Israeli model. But there is no open public incitement from powerful members of the government for this. Why, even George Bush says of Osama Bin Laden only that he wants him “Dead or Alive”. (And that is bad enough.) And Saddam Hussein, for all the considerable evidence against him, ended up in a courtroom.
I find it extremely disturbing in general that my tax dollars fund so much violence, escalation, killing, and oppression around the world. But somehow, the idea that a high-level recipient of US aid money can go around openly inciting lethal violence in the way that Ben-Eliezer is doing seems even worse than most things the Israelis do.
Killing anyone is wrong. Period. Where did Ben-Eliezer get the idea that it’s okay to carry on like this? Time, surely, for our leaders here in the US to call a halt to such incitement.