Author: Helena

The US in Iraq and Afghanistan: what to do?

The news from Iraq has been so bad, for so long, that I’ve been almost too depressed to even write about it. I’m not sure that any of us who opposed the ghastly US invasion and occupation of the country from the get-go– and even before then– can take any pleasure at all in reading the news these days.
Like this AP report today: “Police found 30 bodies bearing signs of torture Friday, the latest in a wave of sectarian killings sweeping the Iraqi capital despite a monthlong security operation… ”
On it goes. On and on and on. I weep for my friends in Iraq. (Yes, and I continue to go to our weekly anti-war demonstrations here at home, whenever I can. Yesterday, once again, we got great support from the drivers-by.)
One possible glimmer of good news: The recently reported failure of SCIRI’s scheme to create a Shiite super-region in the south and cdenter of the country. Such a scheme would surely have led to levels of Sunni-Shiite fear, hatred, and violence even higher than what already exist… plus an intensification of sectarian “cleansing”, endless battles over frontiers and access to resources, etc etc.
Iraqis already have the de-facto secession of much of Iraqi Kurdistan. An unfinished process, certainly, and one which portends a lot more violence along the way. (Kirkuk, anyone?) But I think it’s good that they’re not going to have a second splittist process going ahead within the ethnic-Arab community as well.
So that’s the glimmer of good news for Iraqis at this point. Not much to compensate for all the hundreds of other ghastly things that are going on in their country… And for which, of course, the US, as the occupying power, remains responsible.
… Anyway, I wanted to try to take a “big picture” look at what has been going on in Iraq over recent weeks. And one good jumping-off point for this is this piece by Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at Bradford University in the UK, which was published on Open Democracy’s website yesterday.
The article, which is titled Al-Qaida’s new terrain, looks at the current situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I think this is a good way to approach the subject these days, given the increasing numbers of political and strategic reverberations between the two (US-“liberated”) countries.
Regarding Afghanistan, Rogers writes of “rapidly increasing levels of insecurity” there, citing in particular, this report from the Independent on Sept. 13 in which Kim Sengupta cited a British soldier serving with the US-led ISAF force in the southern province of Helmand as saying:

    We are flattening places we have already flattened, but the attacks have kept coming. We have killed them by the dozens, but more keep coming, either locally or from across the border. We have used B1 bombers, Harriers, F-16s and Mirage 2000s. We have dropped 500lb, 1,000lb and even 2,000lb bombs. At one point our Apaches [helicopter gunships] ran out of missiles they have fired so many. Almost any movement on the ground gets ambushed. We need an entire battlegroup to move things. Yet they will not give us the helicopters we have been asking for.

In the original, that soldier then went on to say, significantly:

    We have also got problems with the Afghan forces. The army, on the whole, is pretty good, although they are often not paid properly. But many of the police will not fight the Taliban, either because they are scared or they are sympathisers.

Sounds familiar?
And this, in what was supposed to be hearts-and-minds-y, reconstruction-focused mission down there in Helmand. Small wonder that some of the Canadians who were persuaded to serve in it feel just a little disillusioned… And of course, NATO is now scurrying around looking for more warm troop-bodies to deploy there.
Rogers writes that there have also been two other disturbing developments outside Afghanistan, that will most likely also undermine the stability of the ISAF-led order there:

    The first is the decision of the Pakistani government to negotiate an agreement with paramilitary groups [including pro-Taliban groups] in North Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan… [T]he indications being that the district will become even more of a refuge, training centre and support base for militias operating across the border…
    The second development is a report from a usually reliable source [Syed Saleem Shahzad, writing in Asia Times Online] that Osama bin Laden himself has now recovered from his serious kidney problems and is in sufficiently good health to take to the road again, possibly travelling from South Waziristan into some eastern Afghan provinces… [T]he very fact that he seems to have emerged from an obscurity that has lasted two years is likely [to] give a boost to the wider al-Qaida movement.

Regarding Iraq, Rogers writes,

    Iraq has experienced an increase in violence on an even more substantial scale…
    In response to the increased violence in Baghdad towards the end of August, United States troops were moved from other parts of Iraq to bolster security in the city. This has exacerbated a loss of control by US forces that stretches right across Anbar province, which covers a large swathe of land right up to the Syria border and includes major centres of resistance such as Fallujah and Ramadi. An unusually frank assessment by a senior US marine-corps intelligence officer, Colonel Pete Devlin, reveals the problems the US military is facing in Anbar (see Thomas E Ricks, “Situation Called Dire in West Iraq“, Washington Post, 11 September 2006).
    Devlin’s report was dated 16 August, just as the violence was escalating in Baghdad, but actually covered the province that lies to the west and north-west of the city. It describes a vacuum in which governmental institutions do not function and the writ of US forces hardly extends beyond their permanent bases. Instead, insurgent groups, including those linked with al-Qaida, have developed local power bases that effectively replace external authority.
    The key point here is that Anbar province encompasses those major centres of the insurgency that have been subject to intense military action by US forces since the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime three and a half years ago. A sustained policy of “clear and hold” has been applied, based on a process of clearing a city, town or district of insurgents and then holding it with a combination of US and Iraqi security forces.
    Fallujah, in particular, was the site of a major marine-corps action right back in April 2004, and this was repeated on a much larger scale in November of that year when a joint US army/marine corps force took over the entire city in the largest single action since April 2003; this killed around 5,000 people and destroying three-quarters of the city’s infrastructure.
    At the time, the Bush administration expressed a solid conviction that Fallujah was the most important centre of the whole Iraqi insurgency, but insurgents took control of much of the city of Mosul even as the US operation in Fallujah was still underway. Moreover, within months of the November 2004 operation, and despite a secured perimeter and well-armed roadblocks, insurgents were proving able to manufacture car-bombs within the city. Elsewhere in the province, including the city of Ramadi, attempts to control the insurgency were failing.
    The problems in Anbar province actually go well beyond insecurity in particular cities because Colonel Devlin’s report implies that the province has essentially been “lost” from US control. This throws into question the whole “clear and hold” policy that has underpinned the US military approach to winning the war in Iraq. There have been occasional reports that CIA assessments of the situation in Iraq have been negative in recent months, but US military intelligence reports have tended to be more positive. Devlin’s is clearly an exception, and appears to be much more in line with the CIA…

I have never been convinced that “Al-Qaeda” has been responsible for most of the anti-US armed activity in Iraq. And nor am I now. But it does seem evident to me that Qaeda-linked networks and cells have a much greater presence in Iraq today than they ever had before March 19, 2003. Well, actually, there were virtually no Qaeda cells in Iraq when Saddam was still in charge– only that little groupuscule that Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi was running up in an area of Kurdistan that was more under US control than it was under Saddam’s.
But matters have changed now. Qaeda-linked groups almost certainly have a non-trivial presence in western Iraq, though it remains as hard as ever to estimate what proportion of the anti-US “resistance” in those areas these groups actually comprise. What does seem clear is that repeated US efforts forcibly to “pacify” majority-Sunni cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Tel Afar, etc etc have had the– quite predictable– effect of radicalizing the population in an anti-US direction.
Paul Rogers, in his piece, adduced the two examples of Iraq and Afghanistan in order to compare the veracity of the claims about those political situations made by, respectively, Qaeda strategist Ayman al-Zawahiri, and President George W. Bush. Bush had said Sept. 11, “Today we are safer but we are not yet safe.” (He also once again used the argument that, “we have to fight the terrorists over there in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them at home”, and in general, did everything he could to associate the US mission in Iraq with the “Global War on terror”.) And Zawahiri recently declared that the US is “facing defeat” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the conclusion to his piece, Rogers writes:

    Uncomfortable though it may be to western analysts, al-Zawahiri may be closer to telling the truth about this situation than President Bush. The first phase of George W Bush’s war on terror is essentially about taking control in Afghanistan and Iraq while destroying the al-Qaida movement. The second phase will then be about regime change in Pyongyang and Tehran and the creation of a pro-American “greater middle east” that will secure Gulf oil supplies for decades. As of now, he is losing, not winning, that first phase.

I agree with this assessment. I agree, even if I don’t think that Qaeda is necessarily doing as well inside Iraq as Rogers seems to…. I just think the situation there is far more complex and fluid than being just a two-party “US vs. Qaeda” game. (That is more the case inside Afghanistan than Iraq, I think– though even there, there are many other parties and interests also involved.)
But anyway, for me this raises a huge question as to what we in the global peace movement plan to do about all this. I don’t think it’s sufficient any more just to make the argument– which I have made many times before– that if only the Bush administration had not been “distracted” by Iraq, then it could have undertaken a serious, post-war stabilization and reconstruction effort in Afghanistan.
Even though that is now revealed today as being truer than ever. There are, as Paul Rogers reminds us, 36,000 foreign triios in Afghanistan– but there are now 147,000 U.S. troops in Iraq! (Hat-tip to Juan C. for that. See you in Ann Arbor on Sunday, Juan.)
But I don’t want to be in a position where my activism contributes to a resurgence of Taliban/Qaeda rule inside Afghanistan.
We can of course also note that it has overwhelmingly been the actions and decisions that the Bush administration has made that have led– almost directly– to the present resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan/Pakistan, and that has led to the birth and some growth of a Qaeda presence inside Iraq.
But again, just saying that doesn’t seem to me to be enough at this point.
I think we need to go back to some first principles regarding the US presence and actions in both those countries, and say first of all that the US’s active exercise of its militaristic policies there has inflicted great suffering on the peoples of both countries. (And both those peoples were anyway very vulnerable, having already been badly traumatized by preceding events, even before the US went and imposed its militarism on them.)
Therefore, we peace-minded US citizens need to call for:

    (1) the withdrawal of US military power from both those countries, and for
    (2) the complete– or any way substantial– demilitarization of our country’s interaction with the rest of the world. (If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail. Surely we can see the truth of that at this point?)

Those are our primary responsibilities. Those are things that we US citizens could and should do.
And then after that, do we have any “special” responsibilty as to what happens inside Afghanistan and Iraq once US military force has been extracted from those two situations? Yes, we do. The responsibility to do whatever we can to repair the citizens of those countries from the many traumas we have helped to inflict on them. But helping to “repair” their situation does not come with any concomitant “responsibility” (far less, any “right”) to tell those peoples how they should rule themselves in the future. That is honestly up to them… So long as they don’t do anything to threaten any other countries.
But honestly, right now, whether between the US and Iraq or between the US and Afghanistan: which country’s actions are threatening the other country the worst? To me, it seems very clear in Iraq: the US’s actions threaten Iraqis much more than the actions of any Iraqi (individual or institution) threatens the US. So we have zero “right” to tell the Iraqis, post- a US withdrawal from the country, what kind of policies they they should pursue.
And the same in Afghanistan. Though honestly, matters seem a little more ethically complex there. There, after all, the presence of the US and allied forces already has some legitimacy from the UN…
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, however, a non-catastrophic “end-game” to the present US entanglement looks possible only with much, much more active involvement from the UN. And this will require Washington to try to find a lot of goodwill from all around the world… We peace- and equality-minded US citizens certainly have a huge job to do, to try to turn round this lumbering and currently very destructive “ship of state” of ours before it crashes into the shoals of global catastrophe.

Sad JAGs and “Snow” jobs

In today’s WaPo, Charles Babington and Jonathan Weisman have a little more on the back-story behind the sad little pro-administration letter that high-ranking JAGs from the four services and a legal advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs sent to Congressional leaders on Sept. 13. (As noted here yesterday.)
The WaPo reporters write this:

    The Pentagon letter immediately generated controversy. Senior judge advocates general had publicly questioned many aspects of the administration’s position, especially any reinterpreting of the Geneva Conventions. The White House and GOP lawmakers seized on what appeared to be a change of heart to say that they now have military lawyers on their side.
    But the letter was signed only after an extraordinary round of negotiations Wednesday between the judge advocates and William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department’s general counsel, according to Republican opponents of Bush’s proposal. The military lawyers refused to sign a letter of endorsement. But after hours of cajoling, they assented to write that they “do not object,” according to three Senate GOP sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were divulging private negotiations.
    [Dissident Senate ASC member Sen. Lindsey] Graham, a former Air Force judge advocate general, promised to summon the lawyers to a committee hearing and to ask for an explanation of the circumstances surrounding the letter.
    One of the military lawyers, Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., reiterated yesterday that he still has reservations about the administration’s proposal, just not in the areas discussed in the letter. He said he was not forced to sign.
    “I made my several personal objections to the administration’s proposal clear in my [House] testimony,” Dunlap said. “This matter was not among them.”

And then, Babington and Weisman have this extremely disturbing description of how White House snow-job-maker-in-chief Tony “Snow” tried to belittle the distinguished professional experience on the basis of which Colin Powell came out publicly against the administration’s proposal:

    At a feisty briefing, Snow said critics have misconstrued the administration’s intent, which he said is to define the Geneva Conventions’ ban on cruel and inhumane treatment, not to undermine it.
    “Somehow I think there’s this construct in people’s minds that we want to restore the rack and start getting people screaming, having their bones crunching,” Snow said. “And that’s not at all what this is about.”
    He said Powell did not discuss the issue with the White House before releasing his letter.
    “They don’t understand what we’re trying to do here,” he said of Powell and retired Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., who wrote a similar letter. Asked if Powell is “confused,” Snow said, “Yes.”

Snow’s biography makes no mention of him ever having served in the military or had any responsibility for the making of national-security decisions.
So the reason we should take his argumentation on this whole issue seriously is— ?

Thank you, Senators!

Our senior Senator from Virginia, John Warner, today led three other Republicans in the Senate Armed Services Committee–and all the committee’s eleven Democratic members– in endorsing legislative language that preserves the vital “common Article 3” of the Geneva Conventions exactly as it is. The legislation in question is that to establish the special “military commissions” (courts), that the Prez asked for last week.
The vote by Warner and his allies delivers a hefty whump to the President’s plan to make this aspect of “fighting terrorism” into a partisan issue that, his political advisors had hoped, could help the Repubs in the upcoming mid-term elections. These four Republican Senators– Warner of Virginia, McCain of Arizona, Collins of Maine, and Lindsey Graham of S. Carolina– have shown two things:

    (1) They will not allow the president to play politics with an issue of such fundamental importance as the US’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, and
    (2) They have a clear understanding of the need for, and value of, international reciprocity regarding such international obligations.

That Warner and McCain led this ASC mutiny is notable. Sen. Warner has served two terms in the military: one in the US Navy at the very end of WW2, and one in the Marines during the Korean War. Later he served first as Under-Secretary of the Navy then as Secretary of the Navy (1972-74). He has been in the senate since 1978.
McCain also served in the navy, and is well-known for having been taken captive in Vietnam during the Vietnam war, during which time he gained a vivid and very personal understanding of the importance of the Geneva Conventions.
Bush’s defeat on this issue is all the more notable since today he had also taken the step– extremely unusual for him– of actually traveling the 1.5 miles to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress for his Article-3-busting language in person.
He succeeded in getting the House Armed Services Committee to endorse his language. But Warner, McCain, and their colleagues he was unable to persuade.
One other notable aspect of this vote was the intense lobbying around it by retired military leaders– and indeed, by some serving military officers (is this illegal?). On the pro-Article-3 side, General John Vessey, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a forceful letter to Sen. McCain on September 12, saying that reported plans to dilute Article 3,

    may weaken America in two respects. First it would undermine the moral basis which has generally guided [our] conduct in war throughout our history. Second, it could give opponents a legal argument for the mistreatment of Americans being held prisoner in time of war.

On September 13 Colin Powell, who both succeeded Vessey as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and– perhaps more notably– actually served as Pres. Bush’s first Secretary of State, sent a short letter to McCain endorsing what Vessey had written.
On Sept. 12, 29 former generals, admirals, and high-ranking civilian Pentagon officials had sent a fairly lengthy letter to Sens Warner and Carl Levin (the ranking Democratic member on the ASC) in support of leaving US adherence to Article 3 exactly as it was. These august individuals argued,

    The framers of the [Geneva] Conventions, including the American representatives, in particular wanted to ensure that Common Article 3 would apply in situations where a state party to the treaty, like the United States, fights an adversary that is not a party [to the Geneva Conventions], including irregular forces like al Qaeda. The United States military has abided by the basic requirements of Common Article 3 in every conflict since the Conventions were adopted. In each case, we applied the Geneva Conventions — including, at a minimum, Common Article 3 — even to enemies that systematically violated the Conventions themselves.
    We have abided by this standard in our own conduct for a simple reason: the same standard serves to protect American servicemen and women when they engage in conflicts covered by Common Article 3. Preserving the integrity of this standard has become increasingly important in recent years when our adversaries often are not nation-states…
    We have people deployed right now in theaters where Common Article 3 is the only source of legal protection should they be captured. If we allow that standard to be eroded, we put their safety at greater risk.
    Last week, the Department of Defense issued a Directive reaffirming that the military will uphold the requirements of Common Article 3 with respect to all prisoners in its custody. We welcome this new policy. Our servicemen and women have operated for too long with unclear and unlawful guidance on detainee treatment, and some have been left to take the blame when things went wrong. The guidance is now clear.
    But that clarity will be short-lived if the approach taken by Administration’s bill prevails. In contrast to the Pentagon’s new rules on detainee treatment, the bill would limit our definition of Common Article 3’s terms by introducing a flexible, sliding scale that might allow certain coercive interrogation techniques under some circumstances, while forbidding them under others. This would replace an absolute standard – Common Article 3 — with a relative one. To do so will only create further confusion.
    Moreover, were we to take this step, we would be viewed by the rest of the world as having formally renounced the clear strictures of the Geneva Conventions. Our enemies would be encouraged to interpret the Conventions in their own way as well, placing our troops in jeopardy in future conflicts. And American moral authority in the war would be further damaged.
    All of this is unnecessary. As the senior serving Judge Advocates General recently testified, our armed forces have trained to Common Article 3 and can live within its requirements while waging the war on terror effectively.
    As the United States has greater exposure militarily than any other nation, we have long emphasized the reciprocal nature of the Geneva Conventions. That is why we believe – and the United States has always asserted — that a broad interpretation of Common Article 3 is vital to the safety of U.S. personnel. But the Administration’s bill would put us on the opposite side of that argument…

Powerful stuff. Even more so when you read the (auto)biographical information the writers have included there at the end of the letter.
And on the other side of the argument, we have–
A sad, perfunctory little letter addressed to the Chairs of, respectively, the House ASC and the Senate ASC, by (I think) the serving Judges Advocate-General of the four armed services and a colonel described as “Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff”.
These five guys say,

    We do not object to section 6 of the Administration proposal, which would clarify [actually, obfuscate and dilute] the obligations of the United States under common Article 3… Indeed, we think these provisions would be helpful to our fighting men and women at war on behalf of our Country.

I note, of course, that as serving members of the military we cannot expoect these guys to come out and write or say anything in public that is critical of the President’s policy. I find it outrageous, though, that the Bushies have dragged these poor men into the fight on their side like this. (It would have been good if even one of them had resigned rather than be used in that way.)
Anyway, there have been some people in the serving military a bit braver than those five sad, weak-kneed individuals. For example, Human Rights First tells us that, in response to Bush’s Sept. 6 speech on the need for new legislation, “the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, Lt. Gen. John F. Kimmons, announced the Army’s rejection of coercive interrogation techniques in its revised Field Manual on Interrogations. Lt. Gen. Kimmons stated categorically that “[n]o good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices.”
Actually, that whole resource sheet from HRF is really well written and clearly argued.
So I’m not sure what will end up happening with this legislation. At some point, the full Senate needs to vote on it– not sure when– and at that point, the President might get the vote he needs. Or he might not…
But anyway, I think I’m going to call Sen Warner’s office tomorrow and give him a big bravo. Any JWN readers who live in– especially– Virginia, Arizona, Maine, or South Carolina should think of giving their relevant Senator a call along the same lines. Quite often we call our senators or representatives to ask them to do something. But they no doubt also appreciate it when we call to say a heartfelt “Thank you for going out on a limb and standing up for an important set of principles there.”

Kissinger and Friedman– unhinged?

Did the bloody nose that Hizbullah was able to deal to Israel’s once-“famed” military in South Lebanon this summer have the effect of driving some long-time American supporters of Israel almost batty?
I wanted to explore this issue in a post here this evening, with special reference to columns that Tom Friedman had in today’s New York Times and Henry Kissinger in the WaPo.
Hard to write as much as I wanted on the topic, though. I have the paper versions of both papers here in front of me, but you can’t access either of these texts on the web. (I think that as subscribers to the NYT, our family is probably entitled to get into the special “premium” part of their website where Tom Friedman lurks. But I’ve never figured how to do it.) As for Henry the K, his stuff is far too “high-value” for the WaPo to even dream of putting it on their website.
I have frequently disagreed with Tom in recent years. But I do think that, generally, he has tried to be a moral and humane individual. That’s why it was so disturbing to read these kinds of things in the column he had today:

    If Hizbullah could just attack Israel– unprovoked– claiming among its goals the liberation of Jerusalem [excuse me??], and using missiles provided by an Iranian regime that says Israel should be wiped off the map, then it was a war about everything. And Israel had to respond resolutely.
    So, gauging the right response was intrinsically hard. In the end, Mr. Olmert bombarded Hezbollah’s infrastructure, and tragically but inevitably, the homes of Hezbollah’s Shiite followers, among whom Hezbollah fighters were embedded.
    The Israeli response was brutal, but it did send a deterrent message…

Where can you start to unpack such over-hyped and partisan war-mongering?
The Lebanese of all sects whose homes, roads, bridges, power stations, and other vital inastructure were deliberately targeted by Israel would be amazed by Tom’s description of what happened. Back on July 12 itself, the Israeli government publicly announced that it had decided to go to war against the whole country of Lebanon. (And what amazing accuracy Tom claimed– that those Israeli 2,000-lb bombs could actually discriminate between the home of a Shiite Hizbullah follower, and someone who was not!)
Here’s what Gen. Udi Adam, the head of the IDF’s northern command, said on July 12:

    “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.”

Adam, by the way, handed in his resignation today. He was the guy whose performance during the war was so much criticized by chief of staff Dan Halutz that Halutz put another general in to work over him…
Unlike Tom Friedman, the Israeli political and military leaders understood clearly that the conflict was not about Hizbullah fighting “to liberate Jerusalem”, but about the terms on which each side might win the release of people taken captive by the other side. (Yes, it was also about each side reasserting its deterrent power– and both sides succeeded in doing that, Tom, not just one… )
Here’s what Halutz himself said on July 12:

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

Well, Tom goes on and on in that alarmist vein. I can’t re-type it all into here. But he does say this:

    The UN/European force evolving in Lebanon may offer a new model. It’s not “land for peace” or “land for war”, but what I’d call “land for NATO.” Israel withdraws and the border is secured by a force that is UN on the outside but NATO on the inside.

He even gives an approving nod to a quote from the Israeli analyst Yaron Ezrahi who says this might be a model for the West Bank and Gaza, too.
I doubt it. NATO???
And moving rapidly along, here, to Kissinger’s lengthy bloviation (“After Lebanon”) in today’s WaPo… Well, here’s an AFP digest of what HK wrote. But again we have the same frenzied tone as from Tom Friedman, and the same hyped-up worries that, with the rise of Hizbullah and Hamas, the very existence of Israel seems to hang in the balance. Get a grip, guys! Israel still has huge military capabilities and a robust population. What’s more, it is quite capable (if it chooses to, which I hope it doesn’t) to continue oppressing the Palestinians for many years into the future.
Let’s review the facts here a little. Which side is occupying land belong to the other side– the Arabs or the Israelis? Which side has thousands of members of the other side’s population in its prisons– the Arabs or the Israelis? Which side is still many times more capable than the other of affecting the lives and wellbeing of members of the other side– the Arabs or the Israelis?
Israel is doing okay. It is nowhere near the point of being about to be “conquered.” Take a d-e-e-p breath.
Kissinger:

    Hezbollah, which took over southern Lebanon [!], and Hamas and various jihadist groups, which marginalized the Palestinian Authority in Gaza[!], disdain the schemes of moderate Arab and Israeli leaders. They reject the very existence of Israel, not any particular set of borders.
    One of the consequences is that the traditional peace process is in shambles…

Gimme a break!
Where does this whole narrative to the effect that there was a humming-along peace process prior to the “assaults” by Hamas and Hizbullah, and then they stopped it in its tracks– what planet does that stuff come from?? Not the planet Earth, that’s for sure. Guys! The “peace process” died many, many years ago. haven’t you been on the same planet here smelling its corpse along with the rest of us?
And who was it who marginalized the PA in Gaza, and then the pro-US March 14 movement in Lebanon? It was Israel and the US that accomplished those amazing feats, much more than Hamas and Hizbullah.
Anyway, Kissinger goes on to hype up the Iranian “threat”, stating as a fact that,

    It works on a nuclear weapons program, which would drive nuclear proliferation out of control and provide a safety net for the systematic destruction of at least the regional order. The challenge is now about world order more than about adjustments within an accepted framework.

Dr. Strangelove lives!
… But anyway, I’ve been wondering what it has been about the events of the past few weeks that have driven these two guys toward the brink of insanity. I think it is this. I think that both of them– Freidman and Kissinger– have operated for so long on the basis of the never-spoken assumption of Israel’s ability to dominate the strategic environment of the entire Near East that what Hizbullah was able to do to the IDF in Jebel Amel (south Lebanon) in the past two months has shaken their worldview(s) to their very foundations.
I mean, if you’re a Tom Friedman, and you write a lot about the Middle East and care about it a lot, and are a liberal kind of a pro-Israeli, you can be “liberal” so long as Israel’s domination of the whole Middle East (and the pro-Israeli narrative’s domination of the US public discourse) both remain unchallenged. But when a ragtag bunch of Shiite militiamen in south Lebanon are capable of bloodying the nose of the great, heroic Israeli military– why, then the rubber of the Friedmanesque “liberalism” smashes hard against the road of his pro-Israelism… and its the liberalism that gets stripped off, isn’t it? (As well as a lot of Tom’s attentiveness to veracity.)
And if you’re Henry Kissinger, and you make gazillions of bucks from “consulting” with a whole range of governments in the Middle East– Israel, Arab government, Turkey, various Central Asian petrocracies– well, you can carry on servicing all those clients with equanimity so long as the assumption of the domination of the enture region by the US-Israeli alliance is never brought into question at all. But when it is? … Well, that just has to be deeply shocking for the old guy; and so now you see Kissinger retreating into a tight little “Euro-heritage power” lager. (a.k.a. NATO, come to think of it.)
But you know what? Today’s world is a world in which all nations and all peoples are vulnerable… Some more so, some less so, but all of us vulnerable, none of us totally self-sufficient. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s part of the human condition, from the very earliest days of humanity.
But I guess for these guys, this is a shocking prospect. Personally, I find it really interesting to see the degree to which, as it now seems, both of these weighty members of the US commentatoriat– and likely many others as well– have been affected by that one little turn of events this summer in distant Lebanon.

My ‘Atrocities’ book– about to ship!

I can’t figure out why I’m so excited about my new book, Amnesty After Atrocity?: Healing Nations After Genocide and War Crimes… Maybe because it was a new, intellectually challenging, but ultimately very inspiring subject to work on?
Anyway, last week, the folks at Paradigm sent me the book’s cover (big PDF file there; be warned.) It’s absolutely beautiful. It features a pen-and-ink drawing by the great Mozambican artist Malangatana that to me looks very Guernica-esque. It’s titled “O Aberto”– “the Opening”. You can see the “opening” there just above the middle of the picture, if you look.
(I just found another version of that image on the website of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, which owns the picture. And on this web-page of theirs you can learn that this picture– described as a screenprint, so perhaps there are other copies?– was donated to the Court by Justice Albie Sachs, who is one of my heroes.)
Anyway, the blurbs on the back cover of the book are fabulous. I had no idea the folks there at Paradigm were gathering such great blurbs for me while I was traveling over the summer…
Here’s a downloadable order form (also a large PDF file) for the book. Alternatively, if you go to the Paradigm website you can order the book there and get a non-trivial discount that brings the shipped price of the hardcover edition in at under $70.
Okay, I know that’s an astronomical figure for many people. Self included. The paperback– priced at under $25– will be out in January.
Here, by the way, is the Table of Contents:

    1. Atrocities, Conflicts, and Peacemaking
    2. Rwanda: Court Processes after Mass Violence
    3. South Africa: Amnesties, Truth-Seeking—and Reconciliation?
    4. Mozambique: Heal and Rebuild
    5. Comparing Postconflict Justice in Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique
    6. Restoring Peacemaking, Revaluing History

The amazing thing about books is that they really do take on a life of their own. They are surely the artefact for which the term “shelf-life” has the most applicability. This remains true today, even with all the great electronic gadgetry we have… I mean, it really is not as much fun to curl up in bed or stretch out on a couch and read stuff off a laptop, is it?
I’m not sure, though, that the subject of my book is one that you necessarily want to read about just before going to bed. Sorry about that…

CSM column on US-Iran relations

My column urging easing of US-Iran tensions is in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor.
It uses some of the material I gleaned from Pres. Khatami’s visit here.
The column is titled Back from the brink, Iran and the US must now build comity. Here’s how the text starts:

    The Bush administration and Iran seem to be stepping back from the brink of their confrontation over accusations that Iran is pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. On Sunday, Iranian officials in Vienna said they would consider suspending their controversial uranium-enrichment program for two months if that would improve the climate for the talks. Washington’s chief negotiator there said he welcomed the move.
    This is great news. The last thing the Middle East or central Asia needs is an outbreak of fighting between the US and Iran. In Afghanistan and Iraq, US and allied troops face a worrying escalation of hostilities. In both countries, these troops are deployed in vulnerable positions, at the end of equally vulnerable supply lines. Iran lies between those two countries – and abuts the US naval presence in the Persian Gulf.
    So it is not nearly enough to take just one small step back from the brink. Washington and Tehran need urgently to start addressing the broader issues of power and security in the region. They also need to make sure that the military forces they both have deployed and primed for action there do not get mistakenly jerked into action. Does each side have a hot-line arrangement to dispel misunderstandings, I wonder? If not, they should.
    How can the weightier challenge of stabilizing the long-stormy US-Iran relationship be tackled? This is a real conundrum…

By the way, Scott Harrop and I had an interesting little side-meeting with Col. Pat Lang after his appearance here in town Monday. (I was, sadly, unable to get to the main event. So I’m lucky Scott was able to go, and to post such a full description of it on JWN for us!) We talked about the virtues of a military-to-military hot-line system some. And I learned from Lang that in mil-speak this would be referred to as a “deconfliction mechanism.” Right. Let me remember that…
Anyway, here’s how the column ends:

    It was not clear to me whether Khatami was proposing himself for any key diplomatic role. What did seem clear was his commitment, in a general but philosophically deep way, to the ideals of peaceful coexistence that motivated his US trip. If this visit – and Mr. Bush’s wisdom in letting it proceed – helps the world avoid a US-Iranian explosion and brings the two countries closer to improved relations, then that is already cause for huge relief.

So, comments courteous and to the point, as usual, please…

U.N.U. workshop on non-violence, October

Here’s an announcement for another project I’m contributing to. Again, please feel free to copy, distribute, and re-post this one.

    United Nations University
    International Leadership Institute
    A 4-day, workshop-style course on:
    “Non-violent approaches to conflict resolution, peace building, and reconciliation
    To be held at UNU-ILI headquarters, Amman, Jordan, October 28–31, 2006
    Non-violent approaches as espoused by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King have been powerful forces in resolving conflicts and effecting peaceful change and reconciliation. Yet this way seems to have lost momentum in the latter half of the 20th century and at the beginning of this century. Instead we see a world of intolerance with little respect for diversity, complexity and nuance but a readiness to resort to violent means, often mindless and brutal, to resolve conflicts. No sustainable development can occur amidst the continuing inter and intra-state conflicts that ravage many parts of the world in particular the Middle East and Africa. Under these conditions, democratic governance cannot be introduced or established nor can human rights be upheld.
    This course will explore reasons as to why the non-violent approaches have not been deployed to a much greater extent and what can be done to resurrect and reinsert them into the body politic of contemporary society as a means of peace building and reconciliation. Concurrently, leadership strategies for conflict prevention and its recurrence, mediation and arbitration will be discussed.
    It is anticipated that distinguished scholars from across the world will constitute the faculty. About 50 participants will be recruited with emphasis on developing countries, post-conflict and conflict societies. This course will be undertaken in partnership with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Germany
    —————
    For more information or to apply to the course, contact the Institute by fax at + 962 6 533 7068 or by e-mail: poapp@la.unu.edu; the closing date for applications is 30 September 2006.

Yup, I’m one of the “faculty” members there. The other faculty people look really exciting. I am looking forward to this a lot. Send in your applications! (Sorry I couldn’t find out yet how much the course will cost… But I know that UNU-ILI is trying to get funding for scholarship support for participants from low-income countries.)

Excellent Middle East library seeks new home

Loyal JWN readers will recall that in June, I wrote about the death from cancer of my dear friend Deborah J. “Misty” Gerner.
Now, pursuant to her request, I’d like to post this announcement:

    The Deborah J. Gerner Collection
    Before her passing in June the much-loved scholar of Middle Eastern affairs, Dr. Deborah J. Gerner expressed her hope that the professional library she had assembled over many years might find a home where it could be of use to new generations of enquiring minds. The collection comprises over 1,900 books, some 90 materials in other media, and near-complete series of periodicals like IJMES, JPS, MEJ, etc., from around 1983 through 2005 or 2006. Nearly all the materials are in English, are in good condition, and were published between 1983 and 2006 (though a few are older.)
    The collection would make an excellent “starter library” for any college or research institution seeking strongly to enhance its offerings in M.E. studies. If we could find help in covering shipping costs, then shipping it to a suitable institution in the developing world would be attractive. Dr. Gerner did, however, leave a bequest to support the incorporation of this collection into the library of the recipient institution, whether in North America or overseas. Please contact Helena Cobban (hcobban’at’gmail.com) for further information about the collection or with any suggestions you have regarding a suitable recipient institution (your own or another), or possible sources of help for transoceanic shipping.

I would really appreciate any help JWN readers could give in helping to find a good home for Misty’s professional library. So do please feel free to copy this announcement to any person or location you think might be interested.
Thanks!

1.2 million cluster bomblets; phosphorus bombs

From HaAretz’s Meron Rapoport today:

    “What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
    Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.
    In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.

This is, of course, a follow-up to the piece Rapoport published Friday (Sept. 8), as discussed on JWN here.
Today’s piece continues:

    The rocket unit commander stated that Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) platforms were heavily used in spite of the fact that they were known to be highly inaccurate.
    MLRS is a track or tire carried mobile rocket launching platform, capable of firing a very high volume of mostly unguided munitions. The basic rocket fired by the platform is unguided and imprecise, with a range of about 32 kilometers. The rockets are designed to burst into sub-munitions at a planned altitude in order to blanket enemy army and personnel on the ground with smaller explosive rounds.
    The use of such weaponry is controversial mainly due to its inaccuracy and ability to wreak great havoc against indeterminate targets over large areas of territory, with a margin of error of as much as 1,200 meters from the intended target to the area hit.
    The cluster rounds which don’t detonate on impact, believed by the United Nations to be around 40% of those fired by the IDF in Lebanon, remain on the ground as unexploded munitions, effectively littering the landscape with thousands of land mines which will continue to claim victims long after the war has ended.
    Because of their high level of failure to detonate, it is believed that there are around 500,000 unexploded munitions on the ground in Lebanon. To date 12 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these mines since the end of the war.
    According to the commander, in order to compensate for the inaccuracy of the rockets and the inability to strike individual targets precisely, units would “flood” the battlefield with munitions, accounting for the littered and explosive landscape of post-war Lebanon.
    When his reserve duty came to a close, the commander in question sent a letter to Defense Minister Amir Peretz outlining the use of cluster munitions, a letter which has remained unanswered.
    It has come to light that IDF soldiers fired phosphorous rounds in order to cause fires in Lebanon. An artillery commander has admitted to seeing trucks loaded with phosphorous rounds on their way to artillery crews in the north of Israel.
    A direct hit from a phosphorous shell typically causes severe burns and a slow, painful death.
    International law forbids the use of weapons that cause “excessive injury and unnecessary suffering”, and many experts are of the opinion that phosphorous rounds fall directly in that category.
    The International Red Cross has determined that international law forbids the use of phosphorous and other types of flammable rounds against personnel, both civilian and military.
    In response, the IDF Spokesman’s Office stated that “International law does not include a sweeping prohibition of the use of cluster bombs. The convention on conventional weaponry does not declare a prohibition on [phosphorous weapons], rather, on principles regulating the use of such weapons.
    “For understandable operational reasons, the IDF does not respond to [accounts of] details of weaponry in its possession.
    “The IDF makes use only of methods and weaponry which are permissible under international law. Artillery fire in general, including MLRS fire, were used in response solely to firing on the state of Israel.”
    The Defense Minister’s office said it had not received messages regarding cluster bomb fire.

I don’t feel the need to add anything except my sadness at the inhumanity that seemed, “demonically”, to have taken possession of the IDF commanders who planned and ordered these kinds of actions, and my appreciation to both Rapoport and to his informants who saw the need to bring these facts to light.
Of course, a good part of the evidence is still all out there, spread over the lands of south Lebanon, so many of which have now become killing fields because of this wildly indiscriminate and disproportional spraying around of cluster bomblets.
But it is also great to start investigating the perpetration of these criminal actions. Who undertook them? Who planned and ordered them? Too bad that no-one in the Kirya (Israel’s Defense Ministry complex) is prepared to speak more openly about it. But it is certainly very laudable that that rocket unit head recognized, and was prepared to say to Rapoport, that what his unit had done with the cluster bombs and phosphorus shells was “insane and monstrous.” Indeed.

Something completely different

I confess that Bill and I share a teeny weeny addiction. It’s to a word-game called Perquackey that we’ve been playing a couple of rounds of, oh, just about every evening for the past four years on which we’ve both been together.
Yes, of course we played most evenings when we were traveling together in Europe in the summer. And when I was traveling in Palestine in March, Bill rigged a webcam over the playing table so we could play transcontinentally via Skype… I’m afraid our fondness for the game is that bad.
Most people play Perquackey with a 3-minute timer for each round. But we long ago decided that was too slow. So we play with a one-minute timer from another game-box, which makes the game go much faster and builds the adrenalin better.
Not that we’re competitive about this, you understand.
So why am I sharing this dark family secret with you right now? Because this evening I got my best score ever, that’s why! 4,200 points in one 60-second round. If you’ve ever played one-minute Perquackey you might understand how elated I felt about that. (The ace in the hole there was the word “floorings”, which with 9 letters gave me 1,000 points.)
In case you want to know more fascinating details about how we play, here they are: We use the 1974 Lakeside edition of the game which is better than the later, tin-box “Cardinal Industries” edition in a number of ways. And we use the Scrabble dictionary as our absolute go-to “Bible” on the admissibility of words. Since Bill grew up American and I grew up British, we had to have a neutral arbiter for this; and this, with all its faults, is what we chose.
4,500 here I come…