Author: Helena

Ahmadinejad, Bush, and the avoidance of war

Veteran Washington (now WaPo) columnist David Ignatius is, as I’ve written here numerous times before, a savvy and very well-connected journo. Within the past three weeks he has: (1) made a ten-day tour to Iran, (2) participated in a significant, if quirky, little conference on the problems of empire convened in Venice by some very well-connected Washington “paleo-conservatives”, (3) conducted a one-on-one interview with Pres. Bush, and (4) participated in a two-on-one interview in New York with Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In this latter interview, David was accompanied by diva-ish WaPo “First Sister” Lally Weymouth, whose transcript of the interview is here. (See Scott’s commentary on that interview, here.) Equally as interesting as the straight content of that interview is David’s very well-informed judgment of the historical moment it represents:

    The most telling moment in a conversation here last week with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came when he was asked if America would attack Iran. He quickly answered “no,” with a slight cock of his head as if he regarded the very idea of war between the two countries as preposterous.
    Ahmadinejad’s confidence was the overriding theme of his visit. He was like a picador, deftly sticking darts into a wounded bull…
    Over the course of a week’s time, I had an unusual chance to sit with both President Bush and President Ahmadinejad and hear their thoughts about Iran. The contrasts were striking: Bush is groping for answers to the Iran problem; you sense him struggling for a viable strategy. When I asked what message he wanted to send the Iranian people, Bush seemed eager for more contact: He spoke of Iran’s importance, of its great history and culture, of its legitimate rights. He made similar comments in his speech Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly.
    Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, is sitting back and enjoying the attention. He’s not groping for anything; he’s waiting for the world to come to him. When you boil down his comments, the message is similar to Bush’s: Iran wants a diplomatic solution to the nuclear impasse; Iran wants dialogue; Iran wants more cultural exchanges. At one point, Ahmadinejad even said that “under fair conditions,” he would favor a resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States.
    But if the words of accommodation are there, the music is not. Instead of sending a message to the administration that he is serious about negotiations, Ahmadinejad spent the week playing to the gallery of Third World activists and Muslim revolutionaries with his comments about Israel and the Holocaust. This audience hears the defiant message between the lines: America cannot do a damn thing.
    Ahmadinejad is the calmest revolutionary I’ve ever seen. Sitting in a plush easy chair in his suite at the InterContinental hotel, he barely moves a muscle as he makes the most radical statements. His feet don’t jiggle, his hands don’t make gestures, his facial expression barely changes. His eyes are the most expressive part of his body — sparkling one moment, glowering the next, focusing down to dark points when he is angry.
    An interview with Ahmadinejad is an intellectual ping-pong match. He bounces back each question with one of his own: Ask about Hezbollah’s attacks, and he asks about Israel’s attacks. Question his defiance of the United Nations, and he shifts to America’s defiance of the world body. In more than an hour of conversation with me and Lally Weymouth of Newsweek, he didn’t deviate from his script. Indeed, some of his comments in the interview were repeated almost word for word when he addressed the General Assembly a few hours later. This is a man adept at message control.
    The common strand I take away from this week of Iranian-American conversation is that the two countries agree on one central fact: Iran is a powerful nation that should play an important role in the international system..
    That’s the challenge: Can America and Iran find a formula that will meet each side’s security interests, and thereby allow Iran to return fully to the community of nations after 27 years? Iran can’t achieve its ambitions as a rising power without an accommodation with America. America can’t achieve its interest in stabilizing the Middle East without help from Iran. The potential for war is there, but so is the bedrock of mutual self-interest. The simple fact is that these two countries need each other.

It seems clear to me that right now in both capitals, Washington and Teheran, there is an intense internal struggle over this relationship– though quite possibly, the struggle is more intense inside Washington now, than it is inside Teheran.
Why do I say this? Because for all the rhetorical barbs he launched while in New York this week, Ahmadinejad was also very careful to express himself in a measured, calculated way when it came to the central core of the issue: the possibility of a real opening with Washington. For example, in the interview with Ignatius and Weymouth, he started off, in the first answer, saying that “the US administration” (does not create the right circumstances for negotiations) but immediately self-corrected that to say, “that is, a section of the U.S. administration — does not create the right circumstances. It destroys chances for constructive talks.” And later, he said, “Some politicians in the United States think that the nuclear issue is a way to put pressure on Iran.”
As David noted, this is a man who knows how to stay “on message”. And the message he is on now seems clearly to be one that seeks not to demonize the entire current US administration but to leave the way open to empowering any voices within it that might be ready to open a serious negotiation with Teheran.
That, and the relative calm and circumspection with which Ahmadinejad responded to, for example, Weymouth’s questions on Israel and the Holocaust indicate to me that the Superme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has now gotten Ahmadinejad sufficiently on board his more moderate diplomatic project that at least Ahmadinejad’s performance while in New York has not torpedoed (and may perhaps have helped?) Khamenei’s project.
While in New York Ahmadinejad also held a couple of other significant meetings with Americans. One was the very controversial meeting with the ultra-Establishment-oriented “Council on Foreign Relations”. Another was with a group of 50 non-governmental people convened by the Mennonite Central Committee. (More on this in a later post.)
Many of the attendees at the CFR meeting were later quoted as saying that his performance there had shown that Ahmadinejad was “impossible” to deal with– though at least one experienced diplomatist responded to those utterances by saying that they just showed how out of practice most Americans have become at the fine art of diplomacy over the years in which the US has been able to act as a largely unchallenged hegemonic power…
It looks, though, in general as if Ahmadinejad’s visit has kept the opening provided by former Pres. Khatami’s recent visit here at least wide enough open for some form of serious, de-escalatory communication to proceed. As I noted in this recent CSM column, that should at the very least include some kind of an inter-military hot-line system down there in the Gulf. But beyond that, there certainly need to be conflict-resolving talks on a wide range of issues including the modalities of a US withdrawal from Iraq, the American concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, and other outstanding regional issues.
Meanwhile, the US Navy is also proceeding on the parallel track of preparing an entire additional carrier battle group to leave Virginia to sail toward Iran. It is time to get the US-Iran diplomacy started.

Nasrallah appears; war-time casualty tolls

Nasrallah has now– as forecast– made a public appearance at the big Hizbullah rally in Beirut today. This, in open defiance of the many threats that Israeli political and military leaders have made against his life, even after the conclusion of the August 11/August 14 ceasefire.
During late August and early September, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert taunted Nasrallah a number of times, asking when he would come out of the “bunker” in which, Olmert alleged, Nasrallah was hiding. On a number of occasions, Nasrallah calmly told interviewers from the media that he would appear at a seemly and appropriate time, once all the bodies of Lebanese residents killed by Olmert’s military had been recovered and buried.
By the way, human rights researchers in Lebanon say that in recent weeks they have been able to travel extensively around south Lebanon. Families of Hizbullah fighters are nearly always eager to note that affiliation on the tombstones and the memorial notices that are widely posted throughout the whole region. Based on this evidence, the researchers estimate that the ratio of Hizbullah fighters to civilians killed in Lebanon is somewhere around 1:7 or 1:8 .
With a total Lebanese casualty toll of about 1,200, that would give a total of about 150 to 170 Hizbullah fighters killed. Among Israelis, the casualty toll was 118 IDF members killed and 39 civilians. RIP, all of them.

Prunier on Darfur

I have a lot of respect for Gerard Prunier, a French Africanist with broad knowledge of the recent history of central and eastern Africa. I thought his 1995 book The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide was the very best study of that whole terrible episode. When I interviewed him in Paris in 2001 he was patient, articulate, and extremely informative.
Now he has what seems to me an equally informative article on the Darfur crisis on the Open Democracy website. He gives quite a lot of background about the nature and troubled history of Darfur-Sudan relations. His prescription for what might be done to improve the lot of Darfur’s people is, regrettably but probably realistically, rather depressing and very thin:

    What, then, is to be done? In the real world, the options are grim. It is possible to let things run their course and see the ethnic cleansing result in several thousand casualties more. This is still the most likely probability, given the incapacity of the international community to think beyond a ritualistic wail for a UN force to be deployed (which, even were it to be deployed, is unlikely to be effective).
    Another option would be to accept the fact that a major historical process is at work in a key corner of the continent and that it can be brought to a close only by the Sudanese themselves, not by foreigners. The ensuing logic of intervention would be to take sides in favour or against some of the actors in the conflict. This would in turn involve a clear, realistic judgment of their political character…
    In any case, there is no room for self-delusion: a true negotiation about the future of Sudan and the relative place of its various populations in an ensemble that still remains to be defined will in no way resemble the shadow theatre of Naivasha or Abuja [the locations of previous negotiations on the issue.] It can only come after political-military control and positioning on the ground have been redefined by the combatants themselves, rather than being artificially manipulated by outsiders (and outsiders, moreover, who are not even ready to honour the commitments they have made once the Sudanese they have “persuaded” into signing raise this issue).
    A true negotiation would also mean that the type of centralised, Nile valley “Arab” regime which has ruled Sudan since 1956 under one guise or another will also have to go. Its replacement must be a federation of some kind, though the creation of such a model will require an immensely difficult and detailed task of institution-building. The multi-ethnic nature of the country will have to be turned into a reality and not – as is the case at present – remain a polite fiction hiding the reality of “Arab” cultural, economic and political domination.
    None of this will be easy or peaceful. The elections scheduled for 2009 in Sudan will be an important political benchmark of progress in this direction, though if the present regime remains in charge it is unlikely that they will be free, fair or honest.
    Even amid such a long-overdue comprehensive overhaul of an unjust and obsolete political system – still a distant prospect – Darfur will remain a particular case. Its citizens will have to choose whether they accept their common regional bonds or whether they prefer to follow the beat of a distant drummer on the banks of the Nile. Their future, their lives – or possibly their deaths – will depend not on short-term technical fixes but on themselves: on the choices they make and on the means put at their disposal to achieve them.

Bushites up the military ante against Iran

Dave Lindorff has just posted an article on The Nation website about the Navy’s recent issuance of “Prepare to Deploy orders” to a number of ships including the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier whose home-port is Norfolk, Virginia.
He writes:

    According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received recent orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

Lindorff quotes Col. Sam Gardiner, an air force officer who previously taught strategy at the Natinal War College, as saying, “You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It’s a very significant order, and it’s not done as a training exercise.”
Lindorff continues:

    “I think the plan’s been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran,” says Gardiner. “It’s a terrible idea, it’s against US law and it’s against international law, but I think they’ve decided to do it.” Gardiner says that while the United States has the capability to hit those sites with its cruise missiles, “the Iranians have many more options than we do: They can activate Hezbollah; they can organize riots all over the Islamic world, including Pakistan, which could bring down the Musharraf government, putting nuclear weapons into terrorist hands; they can encourage the Shia militias in Iraq to attack US troops; they can blow up oil pipelines and shut the Persian Gulf.” Most of the major oil-producing states in the Middle East have substantial Shiite populations, which has long been a concern of their own Sunni leaders and of Washington policy-makers, given the sometimes close connection of Shiite populations to Iran’s religious rulers.
    Of course, Gardiner agrees, recent ship movements and other signs of military preparedness could be simply a bluff designed to show toughness in the bargaining with Iran over its nuclear program. But with the Iranian coast reportedly armed to the teeth with Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles, and possibly even more sophisticated Russian antiship weapons, against which the Navy has little reliable defenses, it seems unlikely the Navy would risk high-value assets like aircraft carriers or cruisers with such a tactic. Nor has bluffing been a Bush MO to date.

I should note that I largely disagree with the “Bush is not bluffing” thrust of that second para there. (And I would also describe the list of counter-moves that Iran could be predicted to undertake a little differently.) It is true that the increasingly deranged-seeming Dick Cheney may well favor attacking Iran; but I think that, significantly, Rumsfeld seems not to be acting in total lockstep with Cheney these days (where is he, anyway? seems to have dropped off the map?); and Condi Rice isn’t in lockstep with Cheney either. Therefore there is a good chance at this point that the counsels of wisdom will prevail inside the White House.
In addition, I honestly believe that the military brass will be much more vigilant than they proved able to be back in 2002-2003, about not getting themselves dragged into a disastrous, quite unwinnable military adventure… Perhaps some military planners may have once hoped that airpower alone could win the American war goals in Iran and that they could regain their glory that way? If so, the outcome of Dan Halutz’s stunningly counter-productive air assault against Lebanon should certainly have given them pause.
As, too, the fact that– as explored at some length over at Pat Lang’s blog– it seems clear that during that war at least some of the Israelis’ communications as well as their air force’s ability to deploy many planes in “stealth” mode had been hacked into by Hizbullah and its Iranian backers. (We can assume, here, too, that Iran’s military intelligence would have learned at least as much if not more from the course of the battles during the war as the Israelis and their US military colleagues were able to learn… )
That blog post over at Pat Lang’s place cited this recent Newsday article, which said, “Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month’s battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults.” It even quoted an unnamed Hizbullah commander boasting about that ability. However, just yesterday I heard some very reliable observers who were in Beirut during the war noting that Hizbullah seemed to have an uncanny ability to “predict” IAF strikes against targets in South Beirut, as well, since a number of buildings there that the IAF bombed had been cleared of their inhabitants just shortly beforehand.
Interesting, huh?
… All this just really confirms the judgment I made here back on August 14 (ceasefire day, as it happened) when in response to the famous Sy Hersh piece about the broader implications of the 33-day war, I wrote that, if the Olmert/Halutz Blitz against Lebanon had indeed been intended as a “field test” for a possible future US assault against Iran,

    then the spectacularly unsuccessful politico-military results of the field test, from the US-Israeli perspective, must have left the Iranian mullahs sleeping much more comfortably in their beds.

There still remains, of course, the distinct possibility that the Bushites might be eager to do a bit of militaristic bluff ‘n’ blustering in the lead-up to our election day, November 7… Whatever their ultinmate intentions, though, I think it would be great if Virginians could find a way to get over to Norfolk to protest this latest deployment of these machines of death.

Israeli leadership’s slow implode continues

Israel’s national command authorities continue the sustained and serious process of implosion that was sparked by the many failures of strategy and intelligence (in both senses of the word) revealed during the 33-day war against Hizbullah. (See my Sept. 5 post on JWN on this topic, here. August 23, here and here.)
The latest Haaretz-Dialog opinion poll reveals that

    Olmert’s approval rating this week plummeted to 22 percent, compared to 48 percent six weeks ago. Defense Minister Amir Peretz fared even worse, with only a 14 percent approval rating, down from 37 percent six weeks ago…
    By comparison, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni enjoys a broad support base: She had a 51 percent approval rating, while only 33 percent think that her performance is inadequate. Still, even Livni lost 10 points compared to her approval rating six weeks ago.

The Kadima-led government was of course– like “Kadima” itself– formed almost solely on the basis of its promise to pursue a unilateral withdrawal of the IDF from some parts of the West Bank. (Oh, and let’s not forget the promise Olmert made in his campaign that he sought to make Israel a “fun” place to live. They haven’t done too well on that one, either… )
But the indecisive– indeed, from Olmert’s viewpoint, quite disastrous– war against Hizbullah showed once and for all, along with the continuation of some low-level anti-Israel rocketing from Gaza, that a completely un-negotiated withdrawal cannot assure Israelis of the security they crave, no matter how high the walls are with which they seek to separate themselves from their neighbors. To get security, you need peace agreements with neighbors. As between Israel and Egypt, or between Israel and Jordan. And to get a peace agreement you either need to be able to crush the enemy and ram a surrender down his throat, as Sharon tried but notably failed to do with Lebanon in 1982– Or, you need to negotiate.
Welcome to the world of the interdependence of nations.
So anyway, the fateful decision that Olmert made on July 12 to fight against the entire country and people of Lebanon backfired on him miserably. In late August he told the Israeli people that the promised partial withdrawal from the West Bank would now be “indefinitely postponed”. Since then Kadima and its government have had, really, no continuing raison d’etre. The country’s leadership has been dangerously adrift; and a whole cascade of scandals concerning sexual and monetary malfeasance has meanwhile been showering down on many of its top people, from President Moshe Katsav on down.
It is my understanding– perhaps faulty?– that in the Israeli system, as in the British system, the head of state plays mainly a ceremonial role, but can also play a crucial political role in two particular ways: (a) by choosing which party head to invite in and have first crack at forming a government– a role that is particuarly sensitive in a strongly coalition-based system such as Israel’s, less so in basically two-party Britain; and (b) by providing quiet and non-partisan counsel to the serving prime minister at sensitive times.
Evidently, President Moshe Katsav, who is fending off serious charges of sexual aggression, is not in a great position to play any of these roles. But of course, it is not just, Olmert, and Peretz who are in trouble. The IDF’s chief of staff Dan Halutz is also, at this exact same time, trying to deal with increasingly insistent calls for his resignation. Indeed, almost the entirety of the “centrist” portion of the country’s political elite is in an extremely deep funk.
So where is Israeli public opinion headed? Sadly, it seems that so far it’s headed toward the right. That same Haaretz report, which is by Yossi Verter, tells us that

    Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is still benefiting from his support for the government during the war, with a 58 percent approval rating, compared to 29 percent who disapprove.
    Indeed, if elections were held now, Likud would receive 24 seats in the Knesset, while Kadima would only win 16 seats, a loss of 13 seats. Labor, which seemed to have hit bottom during the previous election, with 19 seats, would now win only 15.
    Another major winner would be Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, which would capture 18 Knesset seats if elections were held now.
    Survey participants were also asked to express their confidence in four leadership duos, each comprising a civilian and a military personality. The four were: Ehud Barak and Avraham Burg; Ami Ayalon and Avishay Braverman; Benjamin Netanyahu and Moshe Ya’alon; Tzipi Livni and Shaul Mofaz.
    The results were clear: Netanyahu and the former chief of staff received 30 percent support, followed by Livni-Mofaz with 19 percent, Ayalon-Braverman with 15 percent and Barak-Burg with 10 percent.

And what about the Israeli left?
Amongst Jewish-Israeli leftists, the story has for the most part remained a sad, sad tale. They seem to be saying almost nothing. By Googling around for the well-known names and organizations, I did find this account of a conference call that Meretz head Yossi Beilin had on August 20 with people in the excellent, US-based Brit Tzedek v’Shalom organization. In it, the most that Beilin could do was call for a repeat, 15 years later, of the landmark, all-party Madrid Peace Conference, that had been convened by the first Bush administration on October 31, 1991.
According to the transcript, he said this:

    My idea is that we should push for something like this so that Syria, Lebanon, Palestinians, Israelis, and of course America or the Quartet, will participate in such a conference, will launch bi-lateral talks between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinians, and try to suggest that in a few months it could be possible to have peace treaties with our neighbors.
    I must admit that right now it might seem quite detached from reality. The reality seems very gloomy when you think about Israel, when you think of these thirty days of nightmare in which it was almost a courageous step to go from Tel Aviv to Haifa. And people do think that this mighty army of ours could not overcome the small militia of Hezbollah in a short while. So the question right now is whether the embarrassment, the confusion, the gloomy feelings and the weakness of the leaders, might lead us, at the appropriate time, to go toward something which will attract the attention of the peoples in the region, of the peoples in the world, away from this sadness, or darkness, into a hope and into light. This is the question.

Indeed.
So we still need to go back and understand what happened to the Israeli peace movement during the war. Luckily, my dear friend (and former deputy speaker of the Knesset) Naomi Chazan had held a conference call with Brit Tzedek v’Shalom on August 6– that is, while the war was still underway. So it’s good to go back and see what she was saying then:

    where is the peace movement in all of this? Frankly, the Israeli peace movement has been very seriously divided during the course of the war and is seriously divided today. Every Saturday night there have been demonstrations in Tel Aviv. I would say that 90 percent of the demonstrators the first few weeks were Arab Israelis, Palestinian Israelis. These were demonstrations that were organized by the radical peace movement in Israel and essentially populated by members of Hadash and Balad [far left Israeli political parties]. It was very difficult for Israeli Jews to participate in these demonstrations. I admit, I’ve been to every single one of them, and I did so because I felt from the word ‘go’ that military action would escalate and perhaps get out of control and I felt it might be possible to do some kind of public action to stop it. I should probably know better at my age, but nevertheless I think one has to voice these things publicly as well.
    The demonstration that was held last night was different because at least significant portions of Meretz, which is also very heavily divided, joined last night’s demonstration and I spoke, Yael Dayan spoke as well. So there’s the beginning of a movement. This morning A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and David Grossman, Israel’s most noted literati, published a big ad in Haaretz saying that even though they justified the war they think it’s enough; they think its time for a ceasefire. So we’re beginning to get a more tactical approach from the moderate segments of the peace movement in Israel. But I would say that this war has split the peace ranks even more than the second intifada.
    The one ray of light here is actually the women’s peace movements, which have been very consistent in opposing the war from the outset and have made their voices heard through organizations like Bat Shalom, and Women’s Coalition for a Just Peace, or through the newly formed coalition, Women Against War, or through the International Women’s Commission which actually brings together Palestinians and Israelis and internationals. So the consistency of the women’s peace movement here is notable.

(In this regard, check this out.)
Naomi is one of the sharpest analysts, as well as the most compassionate people, whom I know. The whole of her presentation there with BTV is worth reading.
Including this– expressed on August 6, remember…

    I think the key victim of this war is unilateralism. Unilateralism for now on will be a non-starter, both because of the Israeli public mood but also because it is not a viable strategy for achieving lasting accord. But what we have learned from this war as well is that there is a clear benefit to withdrawal to an internationally recognized boundary. But that is not enough because in the case of Lebanon, where Israel withdrew to an internationally recognized boundary, and therefore enjoys a certain amount of support in the global arena, this was not accompanied by an agreement and without an agreed withdrawal to an internationally recognized boundary. Israel’s security, and I think the security of the entire Middle East will be in peril.
    But moving from there, the question is, how can one take advantage of what is occurring now and avert disaster, to create the conditions so that this type of situation does not recur. And it seems to me that ironically, but also in a promising way, a ceasefire may open some serious opportunities here. The silver lining is that there are real possibilities for opening negotiations with the Palestinians if the Israeli government will have the courage to pursue these opportunities.
    And more significantly, this may be the chance to begin to explore seriously the Arab League initiative, what’s known as the Saudi initiative, which talks about the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a comprehensive agreement that will include Lebanon and Syria. So on the diplomatic front I am more optimistic if all efforts are made now to channel some of the lessons of what is taking place into constructive avenues. What is needed now though is a ceasefire agreement. Everyday that passes not only are more civilians being killed on both sides, but the mood is becoming so terrible that it’s making any thought of talking much more difficult. So there is an opportunity here and I don’t think one should lose sight of this opportunity.

There’s an amazing congruence there with what I was writing for the CSM that very day– it appeared in my August 10 column. And I regret to admit I hadn’t been in touch with Naomi at all during the war (or, indeed, for some months now.)
So there are a few teeny pinpricks of light from Jewish Israel: individuals of conscience and integrity like Chazan, Beilin, or Ury Avneri and the rest of the great, principled Gush Shalom crowd. Another potential point of light: the militarists and advocates of more toughly “strong-arm” policies really don’t have either a workable plan for resolving Israel’s problems or a record of unimpugned credibility within Israel or abroad. Hard, I think, for any western government professing a support for democratic principles to give unabashed support to a government in which, for example, Avigdor Leiberman might be Defense Minister (as is currently being discussed.)
As I’ve said on a number of occasions in the past six weeks, the present moment is a time of great uncertainty, great vulnerability, and also– potentially– great opportunity within the Israeli political system. If only the other powers in the world on whom Israel is still, despite all its disavowals, so very deeply dependent could get together and express their strong support for a robust, comprehensive, 242-based final peace agreement between Israel and all its neighbors, then now could be a very good time to push forward on winning such a peace.
But in the US, significant parts of the political elite don’t actually these days want to push forward toward a 242-based peace agreement. Why not? That is the issue that, I think, we peace activists inside the US and worldwide need to be pressing hard on.

Probing the withdrawal issue with J. Cole, contd.

I see Juan Cole has blogged today about our debate/discussion Sunday, and he has responded to the complaint I expressed here yesterday when I wrote that I found it “a rather worrying cop-out” for someone in his/our position to look at the situation our government’s actions have created in Iraq and say, as he did Sunday, that he has “no plan.”
I apologize to Juan that I hadn’t found a friendlier way to express and frame that complaint. But I’m really delighted that he has chosen to continue to engage with, in particular, that part of our discussion. Long-time JWN readers will, I hope, be quite aware of the esteem in which I continue to hold Juan and the value I give to our continued friendship. But friends can and do look at some things differently. Hopefully, by exploring those differences we can all come to a richer and more informed analysis of the situation and of our responsibilities within it.
Juan writes this today:

    I’m just being realistic. It is increasingly silly to dream up ten point plans to resolve the Iraq crisis. It would be nice to see a multilateral approach, but we should not fool ourselves that the Bangladeshis can succeed in al-Anbar where the Marines couldn’t. It would be nice to see Maliki’s reconciliation program broadened to include neo-Baathist guerrillas and Salafis, as it must if it is to succeed. But that isn’t going to happen because Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and the Kurds would veto it, as would the US Congress. I actually think that offering glib solutions like “Complete US withdrawal in 3 months” is the cop-out, because they seem to offer hope but are no more substantial than a desert mirage and about as likely to quench any existential thirst.
    It is better just to admit to people when there are not good options, and be honest with them about the various likely scenarios that would ensue from what realistic options there are. That is what I try to do. It is not a cop-out.

I want to engage with that a bit. I would say:

    (1) I believe I am realistic. He believes he is. That’s good. At least we are holding our discussion is in the realm of realism, not ideology.
    (2) I don’t have a ten-point plan. He once did. This was the nine-point plan I articulated in July 2005. It actually still looks pretty good to me. Check it out.
    (3) I have never argued that, “the Bangladeshis can succeed in al-Anbar where the Marines couldn’t.” Indeed, I do not envision any role for the UN or any other outside forces inside Iraq post- a US troop withdrawal except at the invitation of a duly constituted Iraqi government. When arguing for a leadership role for the UN in the negotiations around a US withdrawal I am suggesting that the UN play mainly a “holding the ring” role, providing the best format within which the negotiations over the modalities of the withdrawal can take place (as in the S. African withdrawal from Namibia, etc etc), and being the organization best-placed to secure and then hopefully monitor the non-intervention of outside forces in Iraq after the US withdrawal. But if there are UN forces, say, along some of Iraq’s borders in the peri-withdrawal phase, then maybe the Bangladeshis could do an excellent job in that blue-hat role, I don’t know. I did find Juan’s reference to them there faintly derogatory.
    (4) Regarding Juan’s very firmly expressed prescriptions rgearding intra-Iraqi political matters, this is precisely the area in which I firmly believe the Iraqis must be left to work out their own internal arrangements; and neither the US government nor any US citizens, however well-meaning, have any legitimate standing to issue diktats (or even, really, to express preferences) in these matters. See #5 in my 9-point plan there. This is a deep disagreement between Juan and me.
    (5) He writes that he thinks, “offering glib solutions like ‘Complete US withdrawal in 3 months’ is the cop-out, because they … are no more substantial than a desert mirage.” I do not consider making a statement like this– though perhaps, with a time-period a little longer than 3 months– to be either glib or a mirage. (In my 9-point plan, I’d written “4-5 months.”) What I’m talking about here is the total time needed between Date D, the date of the US President’s announcement of a firm intention to undertake a withdrawal that is speedy, total, generous (and orderly), and Date D + X, the date of the last US serviceperson exiting Iraq by boat or truck.
    If we’re talking about a speedy withdrawal, what is the minimum value of X? If Centcom is even 50 percent as diligent as it should be, it must have many contingency plans on the shelves in Qatar for contingencies up to and including catastroiphic contingencies requiring a total emergency evacuation of all forces from Iraq. What is the “X” value in those plans? For an orderly withdrawal, you would need a bit more time, because you would not be blowing up the ammo dumps and many of the facilities as you go, but would hope to transport a lot of the materiel as well as all the troops out of Iraq. You also need, at the beginning of that “X” period, rapidly to conclude the negotiations with other relevant parties that allow for the orderly withdrawal. But having a defined value of X from the get-go would wonderfully focus the minds of all those participating in those negotiations.
    At the forum Sunday, Juan said the military would need “at least 12-18 months” to achieve this. I still think that with the right degree of focus, a total X value of less than 6 months would be achievable. But okay, let’s say you’d need even 12 months. Does Juan think it would be a bad idea to call for this withdrawal to be initiated right now? I think he does, for the reasons discussed in #4 above. As I said, that is a very serious disagreement. (And in that case, his disagreement with me is not one over the length of the X time, but over something completely different.) But I would be delighted to learn that he thinks a plan for a total withdrawal “over 12-18 months” should be initiated now.
    (6) He writes: “It is better just to admit to people when there are not good options, and be honest with them about the various likely scenarios that would ensue from what realistic options there are. That is what I try to do.” To this I would respond as follows:
    I have never said at any time since March 2003 that there are any good options for the US in Iraq. They all look highly imperfect. But there are some options that seem significantly more doom-laden than others. Looked at purely realistically, “Staying the course”– e.g. by choosing not to take the quite available path towards a speedy and total withdrawal– looks like a choice that will bring results significantly more terrible than opting for a speedy and total withdrawal. Announcing and then implementing a speedy and total withdrawal is entirely realistic. Staying the course in the hope that things may get better in Iraq looks to me, based on the entire trend-line from 2003 through the present, to be an entirely Quixotic expectation.
    However, I note that Juan nowhere expresses any expectation that things will get better in Iraq. Therefore, his position seems to me to be not Quixotic so much as a counsel of deep despair. It seems he sees no way out of the current awful situation. I think that is really, really tragic.

Anyway, let’s continue this discussion…

Visser on decentralization etc in Iraq

Reidar Visser’s latest (Sept. 17) analysis of the political decentralization issue in Iraq is really worth reading. I don’t have time to comment on it here. (I’m just off to breakfast at the Carter Center.) But any of you who are interested in the internal dynamics within Iraq should read it with care.
Visser, crucially, doesn’t seem to buy in to what is increasingly becoming the “received wisdom” in much of US discourse– and now, too, I note, from Kofi Annan as well!– about the imminence and almost inevitability of a Sunni-Shiite civil war.
He writes that a path for US policymakers that would be better than their current one would be,

    tapping into existing Iraqi nationalist sentiment. Ideas about a possible four-years moratorium on any federalism south of Kurdistan have circulated for some time among Sunnis and nationalist and Islamist Shiites; this could be justified as an attempt at giving Iraq a chance to get up and running again, to function as a normal, oil-rich, bi-national (Arab–Kurdish) federation, without the perversions of the Baathist regime (the move would be constitutional as part of the special revision process). This sort of “restoration of Baghdad” is regularly called for in newspaper interviews with ordinary citizens who think federalism is merely a politician’s tool designed to facilitate the self-aggrandisement of a tiny elite. Tired of militia strife, even the regionalists in the far south – possibly the Shiite pro-federal current that enjoys the greatest degree of cross-party backing locally – might well be mollified by the emergence of a genuinely national government in Baghdad capable of addressing concerns about regional underdevelopment.
    If this trend should continue to grow inside the Iraqi parliament, the United States could find a way of supporting it as a policy alternative, without interfering directly. Washington would be able to expect a vastly improved security situation in the wake of serious Shiite–Sunni rapprochement, and should therefore be in a position to offer an accelerated withdrawal of forces in exchange for postponement of the federalism issue. At the very least, US officials could make an honest attempt at spelling out the security implications (and the likely prospect for a reduced foreign troop presence) of a rapid restoration of an effective unified government south of Kurdistan – versus what can arguably be described as the more risky option of devolution, where terrorists could be tempted to interfere at every single juncture along the road to new regions, and where external stabilisation forces might be required in greater measure. By choosing this sort of approach, Washington would be able to communicate with and build on Iraqi nationalist sentiment that is present among Shiite and Sunni Islamists alike, instead of creating further antagonisms through attempts at hypnotising Iraq’s entire population into a pro-federal trance.

I guess I wished I shared more of Visser’s presuppositions about the Bushists’ policies– such as that they are made on the basis of broad knowledge and colly applied reason, or that they are motivated above all by a desire for the wellbeing of the Iraqi people… But maybe they are open to reason at this point?
His observations about and analysis of what has been going on inside Iraqi politics, however, seem to me extremely informative. Just one question, though? After Hakim’s failure to get his decentralization legislation rammed through last week, what is the possibility he’ll be coming back with new attempts in the near future?

What should the Dems say about Iraq?

I read with interest the attempt the attempt that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin made to draft a “speech” for Democratic congressional candidates trying to run against the Bush administration on the Iraq issue. (Hat-tip to Juan for that.)
Trudy made a number of excellent points in her draft– primarily, that it was the Republicans who got the US into the mess it is currently in, in Iraq, so why on earth should we trust them to get us out of it?
However, I was left vaguely dissatisfied with her column there, and I think that was primarily because she made not one mention of the UN. And I totally don’t see any chance of achieving a non-catastrophic end-game for the US in Iraq without securing the active engagement of the UN there. (Another reason for my dissatisfaction with what she wrote was that she came very close to suggesting– in the way John Kerry and other fairly hawkish Dems have until recently– that what is actually needed to stabilize Iraq is an increased US military presence there. As though that could “solve” anything?)
So then, I decided to go on over to the website of our strongly “anti-this-war” Democratic candidate for the US Senate in November, Jim Webb, to see what he is actually, in this very real electoral race, saying about the war.
Webb is a fascinating candidate– not least, because he jumped ship from the Republicans to run in the Democratic primary for this race… And while he was still a Republican, and a very young man, he was Secretary of the Navy in the second Reagan administration. Prior to that, he was in the Marine Corps, as his son now is. He makes great, and apparently effective, play of all this military experience when he debates with our sitting, and extremely pro-Bush, Republican (junior) Senator, George Allen, whose finest day of glory was long ago on some Virginia football field.
Webb has the advantage– like our local, anti-war, Democratic Congressional candidate, Al Weed, of having been against the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning. So neither of these guys has to “square the circle” in the same way John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, etc have to do, in terms of having to explain themselves on why they supported both the war-enabling congressional resolution and the actual war itself, back in the day.
Much of what Webb says is fairly (but not brilliantly) smart, in a foreign-policy “realist” kind of way:

    The overriding challenge of today for our country is international terrorism. And I would say that terrorism and Iraq were separate issues until George W. Bush incorrectly and unwisely linked them. We need to end the occupation of Iraq so that we can repair our relationships around the world and turn our focus back to the larger issue of terrorism.
    Terrorism is intimately linked with the troubles in the Middle East, but what we’ve done in Iraq has been to make these problems worse. In my view, the conditions in Lebanon today are a direct result of the complete failure of our Iraq policy and indeed our entire Middle East policy. This administration planned from the beginning to make war in Iraq and it used the public fear and anger after September 11th to pursue that objective. I predicted at the time that invading and occupying Iraq would only strengthen Iran, therefore, benefiting virtually all of America’s enemies in that region, as well as affecting our relationships with other countries throughout the world. This administration and its supporters refuse to connect the actions in Iraq to the larger problems in the Middle East generally and to terrorism specifically nor do they appear to appreciate that their foreign policy has affected a wide range of issues across the globe which demand our strategic focus…

Here’s a very good point that he makes:

Continue reading “What should the Dems say about Iraq?”

With J.Cole in Ann Arbor

I’m in Ann Arbor, MI, traveling to Atlanta today. Yesterday Juan Cole and I spoke at an afternoon gathering at the big Unitarian church here. It seemed like a large crowd– 250? 300? Very friendly and supportive.
Juan and I gave largely complementary presentations– mine, mainly on Palestine, and his mainly on Iraq. But in the question period one substantial (and longstanding) disagreement emerged between us. I had stressed earlier that I still thought we in the US peace movement should work for a US troop withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous— as I’ve been arguing for a long time now. Someone asked Juan what he thought would ensue inside Iraq if that happened. He expressed, mainly, a kind of despair. He has this thing that he says, which is, “When people used to ask me what we should do, I used to tell them I had a ten-point plan. Then later, they’d ask and I’d say I had a five-point plan. But now, I have no points, no plan. I’m running on empty… ” This, as part of a long exposition that involves him painting the many drastic aspects of what, in his view, is almost certain to happen inside Iraq after any kind of a quick US withdrawal.
Well, yes, and no. I agree with him that the present trends seem to indicate that the outlook for a post-withdrawal Iraq don’t look very good. But– and I think this is how I tried to express it yesterday– we really don’t know what will happen after we leave. But what we do know, based on the trend-line from 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 is that that the trend there has been that for every year the US troops stay in Iraq, the situation for the Iraqis becomes worse.– and we have no reason whatsoever at this point to expect any change in that trend. Plus, at some point, the US troops are going to have to withdraw, anyway. Might we expect that the post-withdrawal situation inside Iraq will be better if we postpone starting the withdrawal to say, 2008 or 2009 than if we start it today? No. Because we have no reason at all to hope that the “base-line” situation in the country is going to get any better between today and 2008 or 2009. Indeed, the trend-line indicates that, absent a withdrawal or even any announcement of a firm withdrawal plan, things will continue– as they have even since 2003– to get worse.
So surely, it would be better to start now.
Plus, I think Juan was overly pessimistic, indeed somewhat alarmist, in what he said about the prospects in and for a post-withdrawal Iraq. Firstly, there are certainly many things the US can and should do to negotiate with other parties the modalities of the US troop withdrawal. These parties should include– at a minimum– parties within Iraq, Iraq’s neighboring states, and the UN. That negotiation is absolutely necessary, to ensure that the withdrawal is as orderly and damage-free as possible for the Americans. But it is also necessary (or at least, highly advisable) in order to try to have these exact same parties agree on the “rules of the game” among them in the post-withdrawal period. For example, to pin down asurances from all of Iraq’s neigbors that they will respect Iraq’s territorial integrity in the post-withdrawal period– and maybe establish a UN-run monitoring system to ensure that this occurs and dispel any misunderstandings on this score among various mutually suspicious neighbors… Similarly, to have Iraq’s internal parties agree to work under UN auspices in continuing negotiations on their constitution…
But secondly, it’s also important, imho, to point out that there are things the US cannot and should not aspire to do in the post-withdrawal period… Mainly, things to with dictating matters concerning the internal governance of Iraq… At the forum yesterday, Juan mentioned the prospect of a Shiite “super-region” arising in the south Iraq, and expressed great concern that that might act as a pole of attraction/inspiration for the Shiites who make up the majority of the population of eastern Saudi Arabia– which happens to be the part of the Kingdom where most of its oil resources are located… And, and, and… (Disruptions of the global oil market and the de-industrialization of the entire industrialized world were two of the possible consequences he mentioned.)
I said that I found some of these warnings alarmist. After all, as everyone in the world discovered after earlier periods in which nations sitting on large oil reserves nationalized their oil industries, these nations still need to have access to global oil markets in order to gain the revenue from the oil that keeps the rest of their economies going. “You can’t eat or drink oil, after all.”
But at a more fundamental level, it really is none of our damn’ business as Americans, to tell Iraqis how they should govern themselves, and we need to understand that.
… Well, this is an old disagreement between Juan and me, as longtime JWN readers already know. (See, e.g., the Nation Forum from July 2005.) And it’s still there.
Maybe we are headed for an imminent convergence point, though? I mean, if Juan says he has no plan at this point for what the US government should do, then perhaps he could agree with me that the challenge of resolving the whole “Iraq question” would best be handed over to the only other party even remotely capable of handling the many tricky political and diplomatic issues involved– namely, the United Nations?
I should say, though, that I think it’s a rather worrying cop-out for someone– a US taxpayer and a non-trivial member of the US policy elite– to look at the truly ghastly, inhumane situation that our government’s actions have created for the people of Iraq and simply say he “has no plan.”
Me, I have a plan. It likely ain’t perfect, but after considerable thought on the matter it’s still the best I can come up with.