Author: Helena

Dialogue between west and Hamas, Hizbullah?

Last Wednesday, I went to a 90-minute panel discussion at the U.S. Institute
of Peace titled “How to handle Hamas and Hezbollah”.  One of the main
reasons I went was because my old friend and colleague Ziad Abu Amr
was listed as on the panel.  In the end, though, he “appeared” only
via a slightly dysfunctional speakerphone.  The other speakers
were Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke from an organization called
Conflicts Forum , and Fred Hof a smart and experienced guy from Armitage Associates– that’s the private
consulting firm founded a whole back by the high-profile former Under Secretary
of State Rich Armitage.

It was too bad Ziad wasn’t there.  I think he was speaking from his
home in Gaza, and it sounded as though he was up to his ears in the very long-drawn-out,
on-again-off-again negotiations between Abu Mazen and the Hamas leaders.
 Basically, he expressed the hope that the Palestinians could find a
way to put together a National Unity Government, and that the international
community would then find a way to deal with it.  One observatiopn he
made was that Hamas’s brush with the exercize of governmental power in the
PA– brief and strictly limited though it has been– has already been enough
to corrupt what he had previously seen as the “internal discipline” of their
decision-making process.  (This may or may not ba a bit of an exaggeration.
 What is clear to me is that the current circumstances of tight siege
make it very hard for Hamas’s far-flung leadership to be able
to conduct rational internal communications. This no doubt hampers their internal decisionamking considerably.)  He also said,
“Hamas’s relationship with Iran might turn out not to be a strategic
one for them.”  He made a strong pitch for the superior effectiveness
of “local” mediators between Hamas and Fateh, over regional and internatinal
ones.

Next up was Mark Perry of Conflicts Forum.  (Perry is an interesting guy: a former
journo and historian, he has published a number of well-received books about
US history.  Back in 1994, he published
A fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace
.)  He noted that CF had been involved in dialogue with Hamas for the
past 2.5 years.  He said that Hamas had indeed played by the rules of
the electoral game over that period– but that then the US government had
imposed the three additional requirements on it.  “The Hamas people
say to me, ‘If we do everything the Americans ask of us upfront, then what
is there left to negotiate with the Israelis about?'” he said. He added that
the Hamas leaders indicate fairly strongly that they would be prepared to
meet the three conditions at the end of of a negotiation, but not at the beginning.
 “The Damascus leadership of Hamas has said this, too, ” he said. (Check
my own reporting on these questions, from my trip to Gaza, the West Bank,
and Israel earlier this year,
here.)

Continue reading “Dialogue between west and Hamas, Hizbullah?”

Woodward and other bad news for the Republicans

Bob Woodward is a once-revered icon of the Washington journalism establishment. Back in the 1970s, he and Carl Bernstein helped to break the story of the involvement of the Nixon White House in the Watergate break-in. Earlier in the G.W. Bush presidency, Woodward had two very laudatory and insider-y books about the Bush administration, which portrayed Bush as a decisive, etc “great strategic thinker” (ha-ha-ha), though they did also reveal some pretty interesting details about how decisions were getting made inside the GWB White House.
Now the tide has turned on the Bush presidency. And if we need any more proof of this, it can lie in the fact that Woodward has been cutting his losses– i.e., saying “to heck with continuing to kiss butt in order to get good access, let’s tell some truth round here!” That, at least, seems to be the big message about his latest book, due out Monday.
However, the NYT’s David Sanger managed to buy an early copy and wrote about it in Friday’s paper, with a follow-up piece in Saturday’s paper.
In addition, Woodward has taped an interview for CBS’s program “60 Minutes”, and some excerpts of that were made available today.
Highlights from what Sanger wrote in today’s NYT:

    The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser [Robert Blackwill] who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war. [Gosh, sounds a lot like Israel today, don’t you think? ~HC]
    … Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.
    It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.
    The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.
    Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.
    … Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.
    On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.
    In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.
    The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”
    The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.
    After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

In Saturday’s paper Sanger writes that White House spokesman Tony Snow tried to rebut some of the book’s main findings. But Sanger notes that Snow did not explain,

    why Mr. Bush’s upbeat assessments of a “Plan for Victory” in Iraq, laid out in a series of speeches late last year, contrasted so sharply with the contents of classified memorandums written by officials who warned that failure was also a significant possibility.
    Some of those memorandums were written by Philip D. Zelikow, a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, including one in early 2005 in which Mr. Zelikow characterized Iraq as “a failed state” two years after the invasion, and another in September 2005, in which he said there was a 70 percent chance of success in achieving a stable, democratic state. That meant, Mr. Zelikow said, that there was a 30 percent chance of failure, including what he called a “significant risk” of “catastrophic failure,” meaning a collapse of the state Mr. Bush has tried to create.

In the CBS News interview, Woodward told interviewer Mike Wallace that,

    the president and vice president often meet with Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, as an adviser. [Kissinger???? See here. ~HC] Says Woodward, “Now what’s Kissinger’s advice? In Iraq, he declared very simply, ‘Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'” Woodward adds. “This is so fascinating. Kissinger’s fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will.”
    President Bush is absolutely certain that he has the U.S. and Iraq on the right course, says Woodward. So certain is the president on this matter, Woodward says, that when Mr. Bush had key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, he told them, “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney [his dog] are the only ones supporting me.”

That, though, as Woodward also told Wallace,

    insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. “It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That’s more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,” says Woodward.
    The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. “The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,'”

I am really glad this book is coming out in the run-up to the elections. In conjunction with the still-unfolding news about the involvement of sleazeball lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s many contacts with the White House and today’s abrupt resignation of Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley after revelations that he’d sent some highly improper instant messages to male teenagers working as “pages” in Congress, it’s been a bad news day all round for the Republicans.
(Even sleazier: Foley was chair of something called the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus and had recently introduced legislation to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He was also a deputy whip for the GOP. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.)

So really, who IS going to Gitmo?

I guess I never answered the question in the title of my last post. So the answer is: me, I’m going to Gitmo October 11.
Last week, I was contacted by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, Mr. Cully Stimson, who said he was organizing two one-day trips to Guantanamo in October, and invited me to make my choice between them. After hearing a little more about the trips, I decided to go. As Mr. Stimson described the trips to me, I’ll be able to see a number of facilities and workspaces around the detention camp(s), and talk to a number of officials there. I asked if I could talk to some detainees, but he said that the delegates from the ICRC are the only outsiders who are allowed to meet with them. I am very sorry about that. But still, I think it’s worth going so I can learn more about the system, the situation, and some of the people there.
I respect Mr. Stimson’s decision to invite me. He made clear when we talked that he had been reading what I’ve been writing about the detention operation, so I guess he knows more or less where I’m coming from. I think it is a strength of people in a democratic culture to be able to reach out and maintain respectful relations and communications with people with whom one might expect to disagree. So the fact that he’d invited me even though he could reasonably expect me to be a tough questioner is another reason I decided to go. I am going to go in a spirit of listening and learning as much as I can. I told him, of course, that I would be writing as much as I could about the whole experience, and he said he expected that.
Of course, I shall be writing as fully about what I am not allowed to see and do at Gitmo as about what I am allowed to see and do.
The preceding post here about the newly legislated ground-rules for the new Military Commissions is very relevant to what is going to be going on in Gitmo in October. I don’t expect that the new Military Commissions will be up and running by October 11, but no doubt some preparations will already have started to be made there for them.
Meantime, I need to learn as much as I can about the whole set-up at Gitmo before I go, so I’ll know what questions to ask when I get there. I have started collecting various resource materials… AP has a done some very solid work on getting basic details about the detainees out into the public domain through FOIA requests, and I found I could access some of this material through this portal (scroll down right sidebar.) I’ve been checking out as much as I can of the sgreat reporting by the Miami Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg and the websites of the big human rights organizations, and I’ve been talking to a few people… If JWN readers have other great ideas how I can prepare for the trip, let me know.

Guess who’s going to Gitmo?

Yesterday, all the Republican Senators except Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Olympia Snowe of Maine lined up with the Bush administration to pass the “Military Commissions Act of 2006”, which defines the category of “unlawful enemy combatant” and establishes a new class of special courts (commissions) where the UEC’s can be tried. The WaPo’s careful military correspondent Jeffrey Smith explains that,

    the bill empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone it determines to have “purposefully and materially” supported anti-U.S. hostilities. Only foreign nationals among those detainees can be tried by the military commissions, as they are known, and sentenced to decades in jail or put to death.

This was a sad, sad day for the Republic. (Read the NYT’s excellent editorial on the shortcomings of the legislation, which ran yesterday, here.)
It was a sad day, too, for the Republican Party, three of whose leading senators– Warner, McCain, and L. Graham– had until last week stood out against the administration’s highly election-related attempt to ram this legislation through Congress. This week, only Chafee voted against the bill, while Snowe to her credit at least abstained.
Meanwhile, no fewer than welve Democratic senators crossed the floor to vote with the administration bill. (Names here.)
In his blog on Washingtonpost.com, Dan Froomkin wrote today:

    I’m still amazed that Democrats didn’t filibuster the bill in the Senate. Indeed, 12 Democrats actually voted for it.
    By contrast, Carl Hulse , writing in the New York Times, is amazed at how many Democrats voted against it: “The Democratic vote in the Senate on Thursday against legislation governing the treatment of terrorism suspects showed that party leaders believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished. . . .
    “It was a stark change from four years ago, when Mr. Bush cornered Democrats into another defining pre-election vote on security issues — that one to give the president the authority to launch an attack against Iraq. At the time, many Democrats felt they had little choice politically but to side with Mr. Bush, and a majority of Senate Democrats backed him.”

I guess this is a glass-half-empty vs. glass-half-full type of situation. On balance I guess I’m with Hulse. I think that, though it’s a pity that so many Dems in both houses ended up voting for the bill, at least it is good that (however slowly) some of the party’s pols are finding out that perhaps it’s okay to stand up to the Prez on issues vital to our self-worth and our national security…

Back to JWN

Phew! My horrible time/work crunch is now over. I had a really busy schedule planned for this week, and then on Mon. afternoon Deb Chasman at Boston Review sent me a marked-up copy of the big Lebanon-war upsumming piece I wrote for them at the beginning of September: She asked me to review the markups on it as fast as I could and get it back to her by Wednesday. I looked it over and quickly concluded it needed quite a lot more careful work from me– to update it, to refine its internal organization a bit, and to save it from what looked at that point a little like “death from too many different people having had a go at it.”
Meanwhile, this incredibly busy week loomed. Including me being the gracious hostess (!) for a small fundraiser Bill and I were hosting Tuesday evening for our great Congressional candidate, Al Weed; me getting to DC by 10 a.m. Wed. morning for a really interesting-looking discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace on “How to deal with Hamas and Hizbullah”; various other meetings in DC; various Quaker-related things; etc etc.
So I panicked a bit. Most of all I didn’t want to short-change the rewriting job for the BR piece, which needed a lot of the kind of focus that’s hard to muster when you have a zillion other things on your mind and you’re flitting from hither to yon. Deb finally gave me till this morning to get it done. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and last night, I did what I could. But it still wasn’t finished… Finally, by sitting straight down at my desk at 7:30 this morning I finally finished the rewrite and got it back to Deb by about 10… Then I pulled on my running clothes, walked the dog, ran three miles, and finally got to sit down with a cup of coffee and today’s newspapers.
So now, what better way to spend a relaxed afternoon than by blogging?
Deb says the issue with my piece in it will be a generally excellent one. I’ll trust her on that, but it won’t be out till the end of October. Since I started enjoying the instant gratification of blogging, I’ve often felt frustrated by having to endure something as onerous as a seven-week turnround for an important, timely piece of writing. But I guess it’s worth doing. I do, after all, keep coming across people who say they’ve read one or another of my longer, composed-and-edited articles– mainly the BR ones on the Middle East or Rwanda, but also my Foreign Policy piece from earlier this year, on war-crimes courts in general. So I guess it’s worth taking the trouble to try and make them as good as possible?
(Talking of long-turnround efforts, where the heck is my book on post-atrocity policies, anyway?? The folks at Paradigm Press told me it was due to ship from the printers a couple of weeks ago… But I haven’t seen it yet. Oh well, that just further reminds me how worthwhile it is to keep blogging.)
Watch for a few interesting posts coming up.

Thomas Jefferson and Iraq

Thomas Jefferson, the fourth president of the USA and the principal framer of our Declaration of Independence, is something of a local icon here in Charlottesville, his hometown. Today, my esteemed friend and colleague R.K. Ramazani, a professor emeritus of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia (which was founded by TJ) had a very timely op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled What would Jefferson say about Iraq?
The main points there:

    In contrast to Bush, Thomas Jefferson, the intellectual father of America, decried what today are called “wars of choice.” He clearly considered the one war for which he was U.S. commander in chief, the war against the Barbary Pirates, a defensive war. He said he banished “the legitimacy of war to dark ages” and in 1797 said, “I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.” While Jefferson would have seen U.S. military operations in Afghanistan as justified after 9/11, he would not have advocated a so-called preventive attack on Iraq…
    Jefferson would have opposed the imposition of democracy on any society by military action for several reasons. He believed that coercion is incompatible with liberty and that a society must undergo an evolutionary process before it will embrace democracy and the liberal values of justice, public education and a free press necessary for it to function. Jefferson would have faulted the Bush administration’s launch of democratization in Iraq without regard to the realities of Iraqi society, in which most people still have higher loyalties to family, religion and tribe than to the nation-state…
    Instead, if asked how best to spread democracy, Jefferson would have suggested three alternative and peaceful methods. First among these would be America’s own example of liberal democratic practices. In 1801, he wrote: “A just and solid republican government here will be a standing monument and example for the aim and imitation of people of other countries.”
    Second would be effective use of what we now call public diplomacy… He wrote in 1810: “No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its supporting free and good government.”
    Third, and most important… he would have advocated expanding American educational initiatives…. In his memorable words: “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
    And regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, Jefferson would have insisted on upholding the principles of international law in general, and the Geneva Conventions in particular… More than 200 years ago, Jefferson urged that Americans should endeavor “as far as possible to alleviate the inevitable miseries of war by treating captives as humanity and national honor requires.”

Having provided us all with some great insights into how this important Founding Father of US democracy would have viewed the 43rd president’s actions in Iraq today, Ramazani concludes thus:

    Jefferson would have been appalled by Bush’s misguided policy in the Middle East as tactically shortsighted, strategically ineffective, and above all, dishonorable. He would have … endorsed the efforts of Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and other congressional leaders to put the brakes on Bush’s foreign policy and redirect the country, even in these difficult times, to a path that preserves the morals of our founders: duty, justice and national honor.
    Otherwise, what are we defending?

Well written!

Lebanese war; post-war; role of UNIFIL

Here’s the short version of the 33-day war that wracked Lebanon and some of northern Israel this summer.
On the morning of July 12, Hizbullah undertook two cross-border actions against Israel. One of them (the diversion) was to rocket a couple of border areas (no casualties recorded.) The other– the “real thing”– was to ambush a two-jeep patrol. In the ambush they killed three IDF soldiers, wounded two, and captured two others, taking them to captivity somewhere in Lebanon.
The diversion had been so successful– and the IDF’s operating procedures so sloppy– that it was half an hour before any one in the IDF Northern Command even realised the jeep patrol had been attacked. At that point, the IDF sent a tank unit in “hot” (or by that time, decidedly “cool”) pursuit after the Hizbullahis into Lebanon. The tank unit went straight into a land-mine trap. One tank was completely blown up. It took the IDF nearly a further day (and one further life) to get the tank and the bodies of its four dead crew members out of there.
PM Olmert had never faced a national-security challenge like this before and may well have felt flustered and humiliated. He and his equally inexperienced defense minister Amir Peretz clearly felt they had a lot to prove… and they had chief of staff Dan Halutz, a former chief of the Air Force, whispering in their ears that he “had the solution” to all the government’s problems… By the end of that day, July 12, the Olmert government had decided to launch what was clearly signaled as a full-scale reprisal attack against all of Lebanon.
That CNN report there, from July 12, spells out that Olmert had stated that,

    The raid was “not a terror attack, but an operation of a sovereign state without any reason or provocation… The Lebanese government, which Hezbollah is part of, is trying to undermine the stability of the region, and the Lebanese government will be responsible for the consequences.”

The head of the IDF’s northern command, Udi Adam, said,

    “This affair is between Israel and the state of Lebanon… Where to attack? Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate — not just southern Lebanon, not just the line of Hezbollah posts.”

And Halutz said,

    “If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years.”

So, the attack was quite evidently (and declaredly) not just against Hizbullah, though later the Israeli leaders tried to claim it had been. And that very night, the Israeli air force, navy, and long-range artillery units started attacking infrastructure targets throughout the whole of Lebanon.
* * *
What were they thinking?
As best as I can reconstruct it, Olmert’s very inexperienced leadership team was fighting at that point for one major goal: They sought to bomb Lebanon’s government and people into compliance with their request that the Lebanese authorities agree to disarm and hopefully also dismantle Hizbullah. And they would do this through “strategic counter-value bombing”, a strategy whose time, Halutz evidently felt, had finally come! Never mind that this time round, Israel didn’t even have any allies inside Lebanon in the way it had back in June 1982, when Ariel Sharon had launched his earlier war against the country. This time, Halutz evidently felt Israel didn’t even need any allies: they had total air superiority, plentiful supplies of extremely enormous and lethal American and Israeli munitions; and they could simply bomb the Lebanese people into submission.
(And never mind, either, 80 years’ worth of experience indicating that airpower on its own is only very, very rarely able to effect political change on the ground.)
Well, it didn’t work. Not only did the Saniora government not bow to Olmert’s demands– but Hizbullah’s rockets started coming into northern Israel in far greater numbers than they had done during that first, limited diversionary bombardment– and on a regular and seemingly unstoppable basis.
For Hizbullah, whose claims that they hadn’t expected the full-scale Israeli Blitzkrieg may or may not be true, the war had rapidly become one about something very important to them: their ability to “deter” a full-scale Israeli attack on Lebanon, which had been very badly eroded by Olmert’s decision to launch Halutz’s long-planned Blitzkrieg. Hizbullah’s people evidnetly felt they needed to restore the credibility of their deterrent.
But guess what? Once Hizbullah’s rockets started raining regularly on and around communities in northern Israel, the Olmert/Halutz leadership felt it needed majorly to restore the credibility of Israel’s military deterrent, too. (That feeling had anyway been percolating throughout rightwing circles in Israel ever since PM Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and had become stronger after Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year…)
And so the fighting ground on, between these two parties each fighting determinedly to restore the credibility of its own “deterrent.” Also, Hizbullah was understandably anxious not to let the Saniora government fall into the grip of Israel’s political schemes.
So Hizbullah’s very expert political operatives– who included two members of Saniora’s government, a dozen MPs, and numerous other pols very experienced in the intricacies of Lebanon’s internal situation– went into action. In the Lebanese political field, the Israelis had almost no assets at all with which to counter them. I mean, what could they say: “Dear Fouad Saniora, we’re so sorry we’re bombing your country and killing your people but please enter into an alliance with us anyway?”
So Halutz kept promising the Israeli government that “within ten days”, or “within two weeks”, or whatever, his bombardment would bear fruit. And they had the Bush administration (and lapdog Blair) totally on their side, running serious interference for them by blocking any possibility of a ceasefire for almost a full month there, at the UN and elsewhere.
The IDF was given all the time (and emergency resupply of munitions from the US) that it needed. But Halutz’s Blitzkrieig still didn’t have the desired political effect. Finally, during the first week of August, the Israeli leaders started getting serious about supplementing the air attack with a ground invasion. But Gen. Adam apparently understood full well that his ground forces were in lousy shape. He stalled (I think) and there was evidently a massive set of debates in the Kirya (Israel’s mini-Pentagon) in those days. Israelis anyway– and quite understandably– have a lot of wariness about sending ground forces for any length of time into Lebanon. When the ground incursion came it was late– it started, indeed, even after the text of the ceasefire resolution had been agreed at the UN in New York on the evening of August 11. It was also just as disastrous as Gen. Adam had feared it would be.
On August 14, ceasefire day, Israeli ground troops started pouring back home from Lebanon, carrying with them the many casualties they had suffered during those last two days, and a massive sense of shame, frustration, bewilderment, and anger that continues to rock Israel to this day.
On that same day, starting at 8 in the morning, the hundreds of thousands of civilian supporters of Hizbullah who had been violently displaced from their homes in south Lebanon by the fighting started flocking back to their homes in any way they could get there. Here’s what the very experienced military analyst Pat Lang wrote on his blog that day:

    A basic lesson of history is that one must win on the battlefield to dictate the peace. A proof of winning on the battlefield has always been possession of that battlefield when the shooting stops. Those who remain on the field are just about always believed to have been victorious. Those who leave the field are believed to be the defeated.

Well, yes and no… I did note with interest, however, the stress that Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah put in his most recent (Sept. 22) speech, on the evidently well-planned actions his adherents undertook on August 14. He told that adoring crowd of his supporters,

    When 14 August came, [the Israelis’] wager was that the presence of the displaced in the areas to which they were displaced would put pressure on the resistance to impose more conditions on it. The resistance did not submit to any conditions.
    Once again, you amazed the world when the displaced returned in their cars and trucks, and some on foot. At 0800, the southern suburb of Beirut, the south of Lebanon, and Al-Biqa were full of their proud and honourable residents, who returned with raised heads.

* * *
It seems clear to me that at this point, in the “battle” for the loyalty of the Lebanese government and people, Hizbullah has come out streets ahead of the Olmert government. Olmert in 2006, like Shimon Peres in 1996, sought to use extreme military pressure on the people and the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon to try to turn the country against Hizbullah. In 2006 as in 1996, this project not only failed, but it back-fired significantly, leaving Hizbullah politcally stronger inside Lebanon than it had been before the Israeli assault.
In the other “battle” that both sides were fighting, meanwhile– the one in which each was seeking to re-establish the “credibility” of its ability to militarily deter the other, both sides won. There is an element of good news in this. The Lebanon-Israel border is now marked by a return of the basic strategic stability– underpinned by effective reciprocal deterrence– that marked it from 2000 through July 12 of this year. That is the reason why the August 11 ceasefire has “stuck” so amazingly, and has been so remarkably successful since August 14– and also why it can be expected to continue to stick well for some further time to come. This stability has almost nothing at all to do with the presence of (now) about 5,000 more UNIFIL troops in southern Lebanon than were there before the war.
So a world that is crying out for proficient peacekeepers in so many trouble-spots might indeed ask today: What on earth are all those well-trained European and other UN units actually doing in South Lebanon at this time?
Good question.
Philippe Bolopion of Le Monde described a leaked version of the force’s new Rules of Engagement and “Operational Concept” as follows:

Continue reading “Lebanese war; post-war; role of UNIFIL”

US citizens: How to lobby for a troop pullout from Iraq

The Friends Committee on National Legislation’s website has a great resource page that tells us the specific lobbying steps we should be taking to push for a speedy (and hopefully also total and generous) withdrawal from Iraq. Look in particular at this page there, which tells us that right now, “Congress has one final opportunity in this session to pass legislation barring the Pentagon from spending money to establish permanent military bases in Iraq”
So do go there, explore their great and information-packed website… and get going with the lobbying. They have lots of great ideas for what we can do– on Iraq, and on a whole range of other issues.

US religious leaders and Ahmadinejad: nuclear issues, de-escalation, Holocaust, etc

While Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly last week, one of the groups he met with was a group of around 45 “religious leaders from Christian and Muslim faith backgrounds”. This group was convened by the Mennonite Central Committee, whose account of the meeting can be found here.
The Mennonite Chirch is one of the historic “peace churches” here in the US– that is, one of the churches that hews to the strong peace testimony within the New Testament rather than to the “Just War” theory, which was a much later accretion to the body of Christian belief and practice. The MCC has maintained an inter-faith dialogue with religious scholars in Teheran for several years now.
According to that report on the MCC website, the meeting in New York lasted about 70 minutes. After opening remarks from both Pres. Ahmadinejad and MCC Executive Director Robb Davis, Davis asked

    a question about the language being used by the U.S. and Iran, such as President Bush referring to Iran as one of the “Axis of Evil” countries, while Iranian protesters march through the streets shouting “Death to America.”
    Ahmadinejad responded by saying that “Death to America” does not mean death to the American people, but in fact Iranians love the American people. What it pointed to, he said, were problems with how U.S. government policy has negatively impacted the recent history of Iran from the Shah to the present crisis.
    “There was no cause for anger as they are not addressed to the American nation but to the aggressive, unjust, warmongering and bullying U.S. policies,” he said. He later added that there are times when people need strong language to express themselves.

That last part strikes me as an unhelpful cop-out.
Asked about his views on the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad

    made a direct connection between the current conflict between Israel and Palestine and the Holocaust in which he said the Palestinian people are being asked to pay the price of the Holocaust. In this context “the Holocaust is a European problem not a Palestinian one,” he said.
    Acknowledging the millions of people who died in World War II, Ahmadinejad asked why so much attention was being paid to those who died in the Holocaust and very little to the millions of other civilians who also died.
    Davis told Ahmadinejad that more dialogue was necessary on this issue.

Yes, indeed.
The group also discussed nuclear-weapons issues. The best account of this part of the discussion is this one from David Culp– also here. Culp heads the Nuclear Disarmament Program at our Quaker lobbying group, the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Culp picked out this statement from Ahmadinejad as central: “We believe the production or use of nuclear weapons is immoral.”
Culp wrote:

    I suspect that all of the people in this meeting had many areas where we probably disagree with the policies of the Iranian government. For instance, FCNL is concerned about political prisoners in Iran, religious tolerance, and Iran’s position on Israel. We also were aware that the Iranian president met with us as part of his effort to defuse the looming crisis between the Iranian government and the international community over Iran’s nuclear energy program.
    But I’ve been a lobbyist working for the abolition of nuclear weapons for more than a decade, and I’ve talked about these issues with a lot of people. Ahmadinejad impressed me as someone who had thought about these issues a lot. He’s a former engineer, who is thinking through the arguments from a number of different perspectives.
    For instance, although he starts any discussion by saying that nuclear weapons are immoral, Ahmadinejad also reminded us that the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, which didn’t prevent their government from collapsing. He added that, during Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s, Iraq’s alliance with a country with nuclear weapons (presumably he was referring to the United States) didn’t have any impact on the war. He convinced me that Iran is not interested in developing nuclear weapons.
    Iran is interested in developing nuclear energy. As a former engineer, he believes that nuclear fuel is the cleanest fuel there is and he explained that this energy source is critical for the future development of his country. And Ahmadinejad bristles at suggestions that the United States or anyone else would try to dictate how his country pursued its energy needs.

He reported that Ahmadinejad suggested that the 27-year-old Conference on Disarmament in Geneva might be a good place to discuss these issues, and added:

    He then offered a proposal: Iran will open all of its nuclear facilities to inspections, if the United States will also open its facilities to inspections. Neither Iran nor the U.S. have implemented the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that includes additional inspections, although we at FCNL believe both countries should do so. He added that the United States should refrain from building so-called second or third generation nuclear weapons.
    Now, I’m not endorsing Iran’s proposals or even arguing this is the only path to peace. And, in our meeting in New York on Wednesday, the Iranian president made other comments that I found deeply troubling. In particular, I was struck by his comments about the Holocaust…
    But when he spoke about issues that I cover, the nuclear weapons issues, what struck me is that the Iranian president was offering a reasonable basis for real negotiations. Since Ahmadinejad took office, Iran has been backing away from permitting full inspections of its nuclear program. But I think this is a bargaining stance to start negotiations. Iran wants to have full rights for civilian nuclear energy, including nuclear enrichment. Iranian leaders also want some kind of assurance that the United States will not bomb their country.

He added this little bit of further context:

    The day I left Washington to go to New York for this meeting, I attended a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The contrast was striking. Nicholas Burns, the number three official at the State Department, spent most of that hearing lob[b]ing what I can only describe as rhetorical hand grenades at Iran. In his first State of the Union address, President Bush described Iran as part of the “axis of evil.” That’s still the approach of some in the U.S. government.
    But what is even more striking is the pride U.S. officials take in insisting they will not even talk to Iran. Nicholas Burns, in his testimony this week to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made a point of saying he has never met with an Iranian government official. Now here is a man who has been part of the U.S. foreign service for decades, and he made a point of pride that he had never met with any Iranian official. If the U.S. continues to insist that no dialogue is possible with Iran, then war is the likely alternative.

These are great observations. Even more of a reason for folks to become big supporters (financial and otherwise) of FCNL’s truly constructive work there in Washington DC!