Author: Helena

Additional resources on the Israel-Hizbullah war

Here, in no particular order, are some additional resources that I wanted to bookmark:
(1) Two informative, shortish papers on Hizbullah’s war-time decisionmaking and post-war prospects, by Dr. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb of the Lebanese American University, both PDF files: 1 and 2 .
These are published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, which summarizes their findings thus:

    • Hizbollah’s July 12 attack on an Israeli convoy was intended to provoke a prisoner exchange; it was not an Iranian-directed effort to trigger a wider conflict.
    • Although prepared for it, Hizbollah did not expect a massive Israeli counter-strike.
    • Hizbollah perceives Washington as the engineer of Israel’s current offensive and now views itself as in direct confrontation with the overall U.S. agenda for the region.
    • Hizbollah aims to compromise the perception of Israeli military supremacy in the region, with the hope of undermining the stability of Israel itself.

The papers contain a wealth of strong interview material with various Hizbullah leaders (including some I interviewed back in November 2004), but none with Hassan Nasrallah.
(2) The August 2006 (online) edition of Strategic Assessment, which published by the Jaffee Center for Strageic Studies at Tel Aviv University. This entire edition is devoted to the Israel-Hizbullah war, and just about all of the papers in it that I’ve read have been interesting– sometimes substantively, and sometimes because they reveal a certain mindset among the contributors.
It’s evident that the authors were laboring under the disadvantage that they were writing before the war had ended– but most likely, while it was already clear that it was not going well for Israel.
I found these nuggets particularly revealing:
(a) From Ephraim Kam’s paper, The Ayatollah, Hizbollah, and Hassan Nasrallah:

    There is no doubt about Iran’s deep involvement in Hizbollah activity… Nonetheless, there is no need to regard the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers, which led to the current deterioration in Lebanon, as an outgrowth of an Iranian initiative to ease international pressure regarding its nuclear weapons program. Despite its affinity with Iran, Hizbollah is not an Iranian puppet, and the two have not always seen eye to eye over political and operational issues. Hizbollah has its own considerations, which are not only related to its status as an important factor in the Lebanese arena, but also subject to Syrian influence. Therefore, one may assume that the move was, first and foremost, the result of a decision taken by the Hizbollah leadership.
    Hassan Nasrallah had good reasons of his own to kidnap the soldiers. He had announced his intention months in advance, and had tried to do so in the past. From his perspective the timing was right for a move of this sort, with the IDF engaged in a major operation in the Gaza Strip and the north at the height of its tourist season. On the other hand, it is difficult to see what great gain Iran would derive from the operation: since the apparent expectation was that Israel’s reaction would be limited, as in the past, the benefit in postponing the preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear issue could also be expected to be limited. Therefore, one may assume that in the current situation, Hizbollah coordinated the kidnapping with Iran at least in a general manner and that Iran gave the organization its blessing, but did not dictate its moves.

(b) And this, from JCSS head Zvi Shtauber, in his wrap-up piece The Crisis in Lebanon: An Interim Assessment:

    The main problem in Lebanon is the absence of a sovereign authority willing and capable of enforcing its rule. This is a highly problematic obstacle because of Lebanon’s sectarian composition and the Shiite majority, and no multinational force can be a proper substitute for such a sovereign authority. Ironically, the departure of the Syrians, who long served as traditional Israeli leverage to restrain Hizbollah, only made matters worse.

Ironic, indeed.
Anyway, enjoy all those as much as you want…

Bush preparing show trials for election run-up?

President Bush made news today by announcing that 14 alleged terrorists (ok, he didn’t actually use the word “alleged”, though these men have not yet been brought to trial) have been moved out of secret, US-run “black hole” prisons around the world and taken to Guantanamo to be “prepared” for the trials.
In taking this step, it seems to me that Bush is trying to achieve two things:

    (1) To keep the issue of these alleged terrorists and the heinous crimes they are accused of quite firmly in the public eye in the run-up to the elections, and
    (2) To “strengthen” the make-up of the detainee population at Guantanamo so that there will be more justification for the Senate to create the special “military tribunals” to be held there speedily and in a way that minimizes the detainees’ due-process protections.

I guess maybe many in Bush’s political entourage hoped they could actually have some riveting ‘”show trials” going on in the run-up to this November’s election? But the trial of Saddam and his colleagues in Baghdad has dropped off the map amidst many accusations of procedural flaws… and these “military commissions” in Gitmo will most likely not get started for many months yet.
But still, by making the dramatic move of bringing these 14 to Gitmo and announcing his hopes for a procedure to try them, Bush is keeping Al-Qaeda and its allies front and center in the run-up to the election season.
Four further notes.
First, he made clear he is not closing the “black hole” prisons program completely: “The current transfers mean that there are now no terrorists in the CIA program. But as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical — and having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.” (The people brought to Gitmo are thereby transferred to DOD not CIA control.)
Second, the nature of the cases against the vast majority of the people held in Gitmo remains very low-grade. That fact was underlined in this long story in The New Yorker today, which was about a former Qaeda operative turned US government informant… In the course of it, the writer, Jane Mayer (who had done much of the investigative reporting that revealed the “black hole” prison program), makes clear that the government has so far only been able to bring seven formal claims of criminality against the whole prison population of Gitmo, which Bush today put at 455.
Third, I found this description that Bush gave, in public today, about the treatment given to the detainee known as Abu Zubaydah fairly spine-chilling:

    We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures…I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why — if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

And fourth, for all of the circuses and tricks of political legerdemain that Bush may pull off between now and the election, the reality on the ground inside Afghanistan continues to worsen radically… and Osama Bin Laden has also reportedly gotten himself a new safe haven in Northern Waziristan…

Nasrallah in Safir– now in English

It’s here. It’s long. It’s from the US taxpayer-funded ‘Open Source Center’.
I have just skimmed it but haven’t had time yet to give it anything like a close read.
Though the OSC doesn’t tell you this, the interviewer was Talal Salman, who is I believe the Managing Editor of As-Safir.
We can discuss it here. If you want to either suggest corrections for a portion of the translation or to comment on a portion of the text, please give the first few words of the para you’re refrring to so we can find it easily. Thanks!

Deep political/leadership crisis in Israel

I’m always intrigued both by those very revealing ‘dogs that don’t bark in the night’ (as in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’) and by dogs that, though barking, are not portrayed as barking in the night.
So why is the US MSM– and the British MSM, come to that– so noticeably silent on the ongoing leadership and self-identity crisis that is unfolding within Israel?
If you read HaAretz daily, and Ynet as often as you can, as I do, then it’s evident that there is a major crisis of confidence and of self-identity going on in the Israeli political elite these days.
Thus from the English-language HaAretz site, just from Wednesday’s edition, we have the following stories:

    (1) This one, about the fact that the attorney general has rejected two of the five people (men) whom Olmert had named to serve on the committee he is forming to look into the problems of the recent war. The reason? Because, as an Israeli good-governance NGO pointed oput, these men are both executives with major defense-contracting companies, and therefore have a clear financial/professional stake in the ooutcome of the committee’s work… (Oh, Israel and its massive, globally active military-industrial complex– how far from the more idealistic dreams of the Zionist forefathers, eh?)
    (2) This one, about the fact that HaAretz has found potentially five more women who claim they have been either sexually harrassed or sexually assaulted by State President Moshe Katsav– at least one of whom now says she’s prepared to join the existing complainant in testifying publicly against him.
    (3) This one, by Ze’ev Schiff, noting that IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz now faces a “crisis caused by the lack of confidence that some top Israel Defense Forces officers, and many reservists, have in him,” after the recent war, and that, ” Halutz and Defense Minister Amir Peretz … do not work well together, a problem that has manifested itself in the competition between them over the committee that each set up to investigate the war. Each leader also faces problems unique to himself… The problem with Peretz is that his term marks the first time in Israeli history that an inexperienced defense minister has been in power during wartime.” (Read the whole piece there. It’s interesting.)
    (4) This article, saying that PM Ehud Olmert “did not know in advance” that the Housing Ministry had put out for tender contracts for building 690 apartments in two West Bank settlements. (Most experts in international humanitarian law, I note, consider the building of these settlements to be a, “a trave breach” of the fourth Geneva Convention, that is, a war crime.)… So the Housing Minister just went ahead and put these contracts out for tender, reportedly without Olmert’s knowledge. But guess whom he had informed about them in advance? That would be Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who in his job as DM is, of course, right there in the chain of command regarding anything to do with Israeli actions in the West Bank which is a territory under Israeli military occupation. (As the figure on this blog’s sidebar will tell you, this occupation has now been going on for no fewer than 13,397 days.)
    Well guess what again? Amir Peretz (see #3 above), is also the head of the so-called leftwing “Labour” Party and a self-proclaimed “lover of peace”. And now he’s signing off on this gross expansion of the settler presence in the West Bank? No wonder the country’s in an extremely confused situation!!
    (5) And then there are this pair of articles in the paper: This one quotes Amir Peretz (see above) as saying “A way has to be found to … do everything possible to create conditions so that there will be a dialogue on the Syrian front”, and this one says that Olmert “yesterday” (i.e. today) told a Knesset committee that ” “it would take a great deal of imagination to see in this situation potential for dialogue [with Syria].” Oh, I have to reproduce a bit more of this report, which is very interesting indeed:

      MK Ran Cohen (Meretz), who called Olmert’s appearance before the committee “haughty,” said everyone in Israel knows the war is the forerunner for the next one. “This war ended in complete failure,” Cohen added.
      Banging on the table angrily in response to the criticism, Olmert said, “I’m sorry that some MKs have lost their sense of proportion. Stop exaggerating.
      “No danger to Israel was revealed during the past month. You didn’t know that Hezbollah had 12,000 missiles in Lebanon? You didn’t know that Iran supported them?”
      Olmert also told the committee that “there were failures in the war, but there were also amazing achievements. Has the U.S. collapsed after three years in Iraq? What’s the panic? We all make mistakes, I first of all.”
      “What did you think, that there would be a war and nothing would happen to our soldiers,” Olmert asked the committee. “The claim that we lost is unfounded. Half of Lebanon is destroyed; is that a loss?” [Actually, Ehud, I think it is. It’s a terrible loss, both in absolute terms, and in terms of Israel ever thinking it can live in peace and equality with its neighbors… You honestly think that destroying half of Lebanon can be counted as anyone’s gain??? ~HC]
      With regard to the demand for a state commission of inquiry, Olmert said that while he valued the judicial system very highly, “that does not mean that at any given time they have to be the problem-solver.”
      The prime minister argued that a state commission would paralyze the political and military systems for a long period of time.
      Olmert said the Shahak committee appointed by the Defense Minister Amir Peretz [see above] to examine the military aspects of the war had to discontinue its investigation because the Military Justice Law does not authorize the committee to ensure the immunity of witnesses it might call to testify.

    My G-d, what a shambles here. But, moving right along, we have:
    (6) This article, saying that Amir Peretz’s Labour Party, plus Shas and the Pensioners’ Party– all key members of Olmert’s present governing coalition– are now threatening to pull out of the coalition “if it turns out today that the social welfare cutbacks are included in the budget book.”
    Well, I would say that the fact of the recent war means that Israeli society now needs to decide in a serious way whether it is going to invest in “guns” and the big demands of military readiness, or “butter” and the ever-attractive latte-sipping lifestyle over the years ahead. Can’t have both. Cash is one constraint, sure, but the bought-and-paid-for US Congress will always ensure that ain’t too much of a problem. The real constraint there is the manpower needed for the “guns” option… But right now, it looks like a tussle over the budget. So let’s see which way this one goes.
    And finally we have–
    (7) This article by Yoel Marcus, in which he makes the interesting argument that Olmert should not as many have urged him to, opt to establish a fully empowered “state commission”, most likely headed by Supreme Court head Aharon Barak, to investigate Israel’s shortcomings in the recent war. Marcus makes two interesting arguments here. First, that this is a highly political matter, so it is best to leave it to the political process to deal with it (including, presumably, the possibility of a coalition breakup and/or a vote of no confidence) rather than throwing the burden onto the judiciary, as happened with the post-October War “Agranat Commission”. His second argument is that actually Olmert shouldn’t have to bear more than a small amount of the responsibility for the failings revealed by the recent war, since he has only been PM for four months, and the failings at all levels that were revealed by the war were the responsibility of many more people– from all parties– acting over the the past few years.
    Here’s some of what Marcus writes:

      Yes, the situation on the home front was scandalous. But the commission of inquiry will have to start investigating five years back. It will have to scrutinize what Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Ariel Sharon and Shaul Mofaz did when they were in power. And the same goes for Moshe Ya’alon, who, according to his friends, is walking around with a belly full of grievances, but who has those empty supply rooms to answer for. And Dan Halutz may be guilty of bad judgment, but he was not appointed by Olmert.
      Olmert can tell the state commission: As far as things that depended on me are concerned, I was the one who created the most supportive atmosphere we have ever had in the international community for a war on terror. We had all the time in the world to take care of Hezbollah. In the end, we signed an agreement that will keep Hassan Nasrallah away from south Lebanon, and Lebanese soldiers and a multinational peacekeeping force will deploy in the vacated zone, which is the arrangement we have been wanting for years. From this standpoint, I got Israel the best possible deal – I, Ehud Olmert, who had been prime minister for a total of 120 days. I can only be accountable for things that went wrong after I assumed responsibility…

So there you have it. Or rather, just a portion of what’s right there, in a single Israeli newspaper on a single day in early September.
Is this a country experiencing a severe leadership crisis and crisis of self-identity, or what?
And in “normal” times, wouldn’t the US MSM be absolutely chock-full of details about all these developments? (I’ve never before noticed them ignoring Israel as much as they do most of the other countries in the Third World.)
So as to why the US MSM aren’t writing about it, I have a couple of ideas. One is that all the journos there who write about Israel were so busy during the war that they’ve taken a few days off since then… And the other– operating mainly at the editorial level– is that many of those editors may be kind of embarrassed to give much coverage to this whole cascading set of developments that indicate just how much the strategic failure in Lebanon has rocked the Israeli political system. Much better and safer not to mention that all intra-familial “dirty linen” in front of the broader public, don’t you think?
As for me, I don’t think so. I think these political developments are really important and interesting, and we need to know much more about them. In fact, I’ve been thinking maybe I should go to Israel soon, because so much of great political interest is happening there…
(By the way, as a small counter-weight to all the above-mentioned political shenanigans, I discovered a great new Israeli web-site recently called Occupation magazine. It looks as though it has some great material on it. Check it out! As soon as I can, I’ll put a link to it on the sidebar here.)

Nasrallah in As-Safir– help, anyone?

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave an interview to As-Safir’s Talal Salman which is in the paper today. Here are the highlights from it. And here, in three parts, is the text: 1, 2, 3.

    (Btw, I think those URLs work only on the day of publication. On future days, to get to the same place, where the URL currently has ‘/today/’ you should replace that with ‘/oldissues/20060905/’. I think that’s how it works… though I don’t know why they can’t put them up with permalinks from the get-go. Grrr.)

Anyway, it looks interesting. Here’s a quickie Al-jazeera rendering of the main points in English.
It includes this:

    In an August 27 televised interview, Nasrallah had said he would not have ordered the capture of the two Israeli soldiers if he had known it would lead to such a war.
    But in the As-Safir interview, Nasrallah said his group fought a war that brought “strategic and historic victory” for Lebanon.
    Nasrallah contended that Israel was unable to achieve any of its declared goals, including destroying Hezbollah’s rocket launchers and infrastructure, pushing its fighters away from south Lebanon and freeing the two captured soldiers.
    He mocked Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, saying: “His only achievement was putting me in a shelter.”
    Nasrallah went into hiding on the first day of the war and has not been seen in public since.

Here is a short UPI story about the interview, in English.
It includes this:

    In an interview with Beirut’s daily As-Safir Tuesday, Nasrallah said his party will keep its Iranian-supplied rockets in south Lebanon but will not use them against Israel unless in the case of a large-scale invasion or aggression against Lebanon.
    “We will retain these rockets as we did from 1996 until 2006 without using them. These rockets will not be resorted to unless Israel launched an all-out military offensive on Lebanon,” Nasrallah said…
    Nasrallah said he did not regret kidnapping the Israeli soldiers stressing that “the resistance movement did not commit a mistake, but its move was accurate and well calculated.”
    Nasrallah contradicted what he told a local television channel only a few days ago that he would not have taken such a move had he known that the Israeli retaliation would be that harsh.
    The black-turbaned cleric said he presumed Israel’s reaction to the kidnapping would be similar and as harsh as its offensive on Gaza after the abduction of Israeli soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit by Hamas.
    Nasrallah pointed out that the “resistance movement is present in an undeclared way south of the Litani River” and that “its role is to back up and support the Lebanese army.”

This strikes me as quite significant. He is saying in public what everyone knows, which is that Hizbullah will be keeping its rocket force (in south Lebanon only? or not specified by him thus in the text? anyone?) But hitherto, I think he and everyone else has been a little coy about stating this in public.
Does this signify a new self-confidence? A desire to tweak his opponents in Israel and elsewhere?
… Anyway, if anyone can point us to, or provide, translations of greater portions of the interview than this, or clarifications or informed answers to some of the above questions, that would be great. It looks like another important source.
Thanks!

Sistani down, Moqtada aggressive and up?

I read the whole of the important piece of reporting that was in The Sunday Telegraph (London) yesterday about the decline of Ayatollah Sistani’s power among Iraq’s Shiites. (Hat-tip to both Juan Cole and Pat Lang there.)
To me, the significance of what reporters Gethin Chamberlain and Aqeel Hussein write there lies not just in the strong evidence they present of a steep decline in Sistani’s power, but also, some equally strong evidence that the militia and political organization headed by Moqtada Sadr– who seems to have gained much of the popular support that Sistani has lost– has indeed turned massively towards participating in revenge killings against Sunnis.

They write:

    Hundreds of thousands of people have turned away from al-Sistani to the far more aggressive al-Sadr. Sabah Ali, 22, an engineering student at Baghdad University, said that he had switched allegiance after the murder of his brother by Sunni gunmen. “I went to Sistani asking for revenge for my brother,” he said. “They said go to the police, they couldn’t do anything.
    “But even if the police arrest them, they will release them for money, because the police are bad people. So I went to the al-Sadr office. I told them about the terrorists’ family. They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get revenge for your brother’. Two days later, Sadr’s people had killed nine of the terrorists, so I felt I had revenge for my brother. I believe Sadr is the only one protecting the Shia against the terrorists.”
    According to al-Sadr’s aides, he owes his success to keeping in touch with the people. “He meets his representatives every week or every day. Sistani only meets his representatives every month,” said his spokesman, Sheik Hussein al-Aboudi.
    “Muqtada al-Sadr asks them what the situation is on the street, are there any fights against the Shia, he is asking all the time. So the people become close to al-Sadr because he is closer to them than Sistani. Sistani is the ayatollah, he is very expert in Islam, but not as a politician.”
    Even the Iraqi army seems to have accepted that things have changed. First Lieut Jaffar al-Mayahi, an Iraqi National Guard officer, said many soldiers accepted that al-Sadr’s Mehdi army was protecting Shias. “When they go to checkpoints and their vehicles are searched, they say they are Mehdi army and they are allowed through. But if we stop Sistani’s people we sometimes arrest them and take away their weapons.”

Yes, it is certainly also important that they write this:

    Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.
    “I will not be a political leader any more,” he told aides. “I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters.”

You can read a couple of things I wrote about Sistani back in January 2004, here and here. I note that this is not the first time that Sistani has made a demonstrative turn away from intervention in political matters.
I only have time to add a couple of quick further notes here. One is that if Sistani’s political stock in Iraq has indeed been plummeting, then the mullahs in Teheran may indeed be quite happy about this, given that he espouses a view of the role of the Islamic jurisprudent in politics that is very different to, indeed antithetical to, their own. Perhaps therefore we can see here the Iranians playing the same kind of nefarious, destabilizing game among the many different factions in Iraq that the Syrians played for many years amongst the factions in Lebanon? Broadly speaking, that was a role that sought the fissiparousness (splitting) of the factions into as many small grouplets as possible, all the better to turn them against each, keep them perpetually off-balance, and thereby retain one’s own role as “the essential balancer.”
Of course, you can also see this role being played inside Iraq by the US. The poor bloody Iraqis, if they are now having this horrible game played on them by both the Americans and the Iranians…
Another thing I want to note is that our old “friend” (irony alert there!) Adel Abdul-Mahdi has been in Washington. Pro-administration WaPo columnist Jackson Diehl writes coyly today, “Mahdi is now Iraq’s vice president, but he called his meetings with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and key senators and congressmen a ‘private visit.'”
Diehl seemed not to have read the Telegraph report of Sistani having announced his retirement from politics, and seemed to take at face value– which I don’t– Abdul-Mahdi’s claim to be acting “on Sistani’s behalf.”
Diehl wrote:

    Sistani’s message to Bush, Mahdi told a group of reporters I joined last week, was that “Iraqis are sticking to the principles of the constitution and democracy.” But the ayatollah wanted to know if the United States is still on board as well.
    “It’s a critical moment. We want to be sure that we understand perfectly what’s going on, and what is the real strategy of the United States in Iraq,” Mahdi said. “We read in the press about different perspectives and attitudes. That’s why we want to be clear — whether there is a Plan B.”
    Mahdi said he got Bush’s commitment to stand by the government…
    Mahdi, Sistani and other Shiite leaders in the government don’t share Washington’s perception of a downward spiral. (!) They also don’t buy the American sense of urgency — the oft-expressed idea that the new government has only a few months to succeed. Consequently, the many ideas for silver bullets tossed around in the U.S. debate mostly don’t interest them.
    You could see this in the conversation I joined at Mahdi’s suite at the Ritz Carlton hotel. We journalists peppered him with questions about why the formation of a unity government had failed to reduce the violence. We asked about all the options usually talked about in Washington — from a rewrite of the constitution to a partition of the country; from an international conference to the dispatch of more U.S. troops.
    For the most part, our queries were politely and somewhat laconically dismissed. Iraq is not in a civil war, Mahdi said, and doesn’t need more U.S. troops. It has a constitution and elected government, and thus there is no need for an international conference. As for constitutional reform, the Shiite and Kurd parties that wrote the charter last year are waiting for proposals from Sunni dissidents. Mahdi added: “So far we have heard nothing.”
    So what is the solution? “Time — that is it,” Mahdi replied. “A nation like Iraq needs time. The elections for a permanent government happened eight months ago. We have been in office a few weeks. The people who we have in office have never governed. These people come from oppression and a bad political system. We can’t import ministers to Iraq. There will be many mistakes. The Americans made many mistakes, and Iraqis had to support that.”
    “Our options as Iraqis are that we don’t have an exit strategy or any withdrawal timetable,” Mahdi said, somewhat bitterly. “We simply go on. . . . It is a process, and brick by brick we are working on it.”

Now, obviously, I wasn’t in the little gathering in the Ritz Carlton, so I don’t know what Abdul-Mahdi actually said. But what Diehl seems to be implying Abdul-Mahdi said– and possibly on behalf of Sistani?– is that the Iraqis are not currently seeking a speedy US withdrawal…
Anyway, in my view Adel Abdul-Mahdi is just a footnote at this point. The much more serious news has to do with the killing and violence that continue to rock many of the ethnic-Arab areas of Iraq, and with Sistani’s reported decision to (once again) pull out from active involvement in politics…
Be worried for Iraqis. Very worried indeed.

Article-writing lockdown here

I just have to intensify the article-writing lockdown I’ve been trying to impose on myself for the past week. For some reason this Boston Review piece is proving hard to organize… Mainly, there’s ways too much to say. Plus I have to finish another piece soon, for Tom Paine, for the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
Meanwhile, a lot of other stuff has been going on in my life. Including Quaker commitments, family stuff like the kids coming to visit, etc., etc. The rich fabric of a real life, you might say.
Rightly.
Yeah, well. But I didn’t even have the time or energy yesterday to go run the C’ville Women’s Four-miler Race, which I generally like to do. Maybe this year would’ve been the year I busted 40 mins for the race?? Who knows??
Anyway, much thanks to those who’ve been sending me material either for the BR piece or for JWN. I must promise myself however at this point, though, that I shan’t put any new posts on the blog till I’ve finished the BR piece.
So just post interesting things here yourselves, onto the various existing comments threads, as appropriate.

Khatami in US (& coming to C’ville!)

Iran’s former (reformist) president, Muhammad Khatami, arrived in the US recently for a ten-day tour. Kudos to him for coming– and that his schedule will include participation in a United Nations conference in New York on the “Dialogue of Civilizations” on Friday, held to mark the upcoming five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Kudos, too, to the Bush administration for allowing the visit, in what many of their more Islamophobic supporters might well see as a worryingly friendly gesture towards this person who for eight years was the President of an “Axis of Evil” power.
Khatami is even coming to our hometown later in the week (and twice, it seems… or maybe not.) I think I’ll be at two of his events here (or maybe one.) I can’t blog ’em directly because the State Dept. security people won’t allow laptops, cellphones, or whatever. Khatami and the Iranian regimne as a whole have a lot potentially dangerous opponents who are active here in the US, including people who support the “Mujahedeen-e-Khalq” organization, which has long been on the US terrorism list.
But I’ll have my ever-trusty notebook and report on whatever I can of these events.
I think it is always great to be able to break down walls of distrust, to be able to identify and discuss common goals and common threats, and increase everyone’s appreciation of the humanity of people with whose actions they might disagree… All of which tasks are, really, a good part of what diplomacy should be about… So I’m very glad that Khatami’s coming here, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the interactions he has.
Here is an AFP report on some of his first events here:

    In first US visit, Iran’s Khatami calls for secular, religious dialogue
    by Mira Oberman, AFP (English),
    Chicago, September 2, 2006 Saturday 11:10 PM GMT– Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, in his first public appearance in the United States, spoke Saturday about the need to create a dialogue between the secular and religious worlds.
    His remarks came as Tehran and the UN Security Council head for a showdown over Iran’s nuclear energy program, which is suspected of masking an effort to develop atomic weapons.
    Khatami is the most senior Iranian official to visit the United States since Washington broke off diplomatic relations following the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran.
    “The people of true faith and the people who are truly concerned about humanity… These two communities can work together,” Khatami told community leaders gathered at a mosque in a suburb of Chicago.
    “They can communicate among one another for the betterment and better understanding of the cause of humanity,” he said through an interpreter. “The dialogue can help to bring these two communities together.”
    Khatami did not take questions from reporters or comment on the current impasse as Iran vowed to defend its nuclear program and the United States pushed for sanctions to force Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.
    Instead, he focused his 40-minute address on a philosophical discussion of how peace and human development can be best achieved.
    Neither religions that preach a complete withdrawal from the material world nor the modern religion of science and materialism can eliminate insecurity, Khatami said. Only by finding a “third way” that addresses both the spiritual needs and the material needs can a “life of peace and satisfaction” be achieved, he said.
    Khatami also called for greater dialogues between religious groups.
    “There is a great opportunity of dialogue and cooperation and working together among people of faith and people of religion,” said Khatami, a reformist who was president from 1997 to 2005 and whose successor is the more hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
    “But I mean people of true religion — I don’t mean the extremists, I don’t mean the terrorists or the people who exploit the name of religion,” he said.
    Khatami, who founded and heads the International Institute for Dialogue Among Civilizations and Cultures, was granted a US visa on Tuesday even though he was president when the United States declared that Tehran backed terror activities.
    Khatami was scheduled to address the Islamic Society of North America’s convention later Saturday night in Chicago.
    On Thursday he is expected to address a select audience at the Washington National Cathedral. He will to attend a United Nations conference in New York on the “Dialogue of Civilizations” on Friday, which comes five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
    He might also meet with former US president Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was marred by the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran.

(Hat-tip to co-poster Scott Harrop for the AFP piece. I think he’s also pretty busy these days…)

Israel’s navy (and other branches) in the war

Israel’s hasbaristas (propagandists and apologists) have been out in force the past couple of weeks, here and elsewhere, desperately trying to shore up the confidence of Israelis and their friends around the world that the country’s military services have not fallen into operational disarray. Yossi Melman, a purported journalist, has been one of the most active– and far-fetched– of these spinmeisters. (Also, on occasion, our commenter here, JES. Okay JES: I “grant” you that the Israeli Air Force was extremely effective in knocking out Lebanon’s vital infrastructure and services, and killing large numbers of civilians. You happy now?)
But the performance of the IDF’s once-vaunted ground forces during the war was truly pathetic… And the navy got a nasty jolt in the war’s early days, too, when a Hizbullah C-802 missile hit its flagship, the INS Hanit, killing four crew members, essentially disabling the ship, and sending it limping back to port…
By chance, today my colleague and friend Nick Blanford, an experienced reporter for the CSM and other media who stayed in Lebanon during the war, penned this, which I share here with his permission:

    Despite US intelligence officers’ assertions that it was Hizbullah’s Iranian-assisted jamming prowess that enabled the Israeli flagship INS Hanit to be struck and disabled, there have been several articles in the Israeli media blaming the ship’s crew for failing to switch on their defensive systems. The latest was by Zeev Schiff of Haaretz who wrote in yesterday’s edition, “Even though the destroyer entered a war zone and cruised along the Lebanese shores, the crew forgot to turn on the automatic operation system of the Barak [anti-missile system]. The result was that no effort was made to intercept the Iranian-Chinese missile, and unobstructed it struck its target.” [I note, parenthetically, that though Ze’ev is an old and valued friend of mine, he has also done a certain amount of hasbara throughout his long career, as well. His despatches sometimes have to be read and decoded with Kremlinological skill. ~HC]
    As for the claim [Blanford continues] that the INS Hanit was the only Israeli navy ship struck by Hizbullah’s C-802 missiles, I can only offer this personal observation. I was in Tyre in south Lebanon on August 12 when a flash came through that Hizbullah had hit another Israeli ship off the Tyre coast. I went out onto the seafront and scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars. After a minute or two, a thin tendril of smoke could be seen on the horizon to the southwest. The smoke grew into a thick plume and lasted for about 20 minutes before dissipating. I couldn’t see any ship and cannot confirm that it was the result of a Hizbullah missile attack on an Israeli navy vessel, but the timing was suggestive as was the most unusual sight of smoke on the horizon off the Lebanese coast.
    The threat posed by Hizbullah’s C-802s appears to have forced the Israeli navy to deploy its ships far further from the Lebanese coastline than in the past. During the April 1996 Grapes of Wrath operation, Israeli ships could be seen easily with the naked eye shelling sites inland. This time around they weren’t to be seen at all. Also the Israelis appear to have made far less use of helicopter gunships than in the past, presumably, as Schiff mention in his article, because of the prospect of Hizbullah having acquired more advanced anti-aircraft missiles. We saw them flying at high altitude over the sea and could hear them come closer inshore at night, but I didn’t see any helicopters over land during the war. Instead, the helicopters seem to have been replaced by missile-firing reconnaissance drones whose handiwork was evident in the number of destroyed civilian vehicles lining the roads of south Lebanon.
    Nicholas Blanford
    Beirut

So the navy commanders realized that something serious had indeed happened when the C-802 hit the Hanit, it seemed.
I just want to add a couple of footnotes to this discussion. Firstly, it is evident that even as I write this, officers in all branches of the Israeli military– with, most likely, some coordination with their US counterparts, as well– are poring over the exact record of what worked, what didn’t , and why during the war, and trying to figure out ways to “fix” the problems identified.
Evidently, planners within Hizbullah’s military wing and their colleagues in the Iranian military will be doing the same thing, too. Hizbullah has proven over the years to have an impressive operational lesson-learning capacity.
On both sides– but particularly in Israel, given the many operational failings revealed by the war– there will be a huge temptation to invest a lot in significant upgrading of its forces. (Two nuclear subs recently received from Germany… But they might be just the tip of a much larger– submerged– iceberg of naval and ground-force upgrading yet to come.)
Israelis might well find themselves tempted to become even more of a “Sparta” than they already are. But that stuff is expensive– in financial terms, and also in the requirements for manpower, which could make the recently discussed plans of transforming the IDF into something close to a US-style all-volunteer force just impossible to realize any time soon.
Time for the country’s people to revolt and join the latte-sippers of the “western” nations that so many of them identify with, I say! Time, too, to learn some lessons from Portugal, circa 1974; to turn away from a strengthened reliance on militarism, and check out the prospects for its very realistic and much more hopeful alternatives.
… One further point. In my 1991 book The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict I had a whole chapter charting, basically, how after the 1967 war Israel started basing its “pitch” to members of the US policy elite increasingly on its “strategic value” to the US– this was in the Cold War, remember– rather than on the “shared values” of respect for life, freedom, tolerance, all those good things, that had previously lain at the heart of its appeal.
Well h’mmm. After what happened in the latest war, Israel’s “appeal” as a humane, caring, life-loving, etc country has (once again) been significantly dented.
But this time, its reputation for “military prowess” and for the ability to provide solid military/operational services to the US in that part of the world, has also taken a noticeable nose-dive, I’d say… I think it is that reputation that the hasbaristas have been working so hard to try to shore up.
So to JES, Ze’ev, and all my other Israeli friends I’d say, Look guys, if you want to gather some shreds of self-esteem around yourselves in order to enter into a serious peace process with your heads held high, I’m all for that. (And you should understand the need to let the Palestinians do it, too.) But if you want to shore up your reputation for “military prowess” in order to keep a solid lock on a strategic relationship with the militarists of the Bush-Cheney administration, then I don’t support that at all.

Palestine: casualties and open thread

Here is the weekly summary that the Palestinian Center for Human Rights produced for the period 17-23 August, 2006, cataloguing major rights abuses inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli Occupation Forces in (and around) Gaza and the West Bank.
During the week, as PCHR reports, 30 Palestinians, including 3 children, a mentally disabled young man and a woman, were killed by IOF. The 30 included two who died during the week from wounds previously inflicted by the IOF.
The report added:

    the number of Palestinians killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip since 25 June 2006 has increased to 217, including 46 children and 12 women. In addition, 755 others, mostly civilians, including 203 children, 28 women, 4 paramedics and 6 journalists, have been wounded.

Figures available from the “Statistics” page on B’tselem’s website (click through the links in that first table there, and look down the right sidebar on the pages that up) tell us that from January1 through July 31, 2006, a total of 15 Israeli civilians and 3 Israeli security forces personnel were killed by Palestinians… while the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the OPTs and in Israel in the same period was 346.
And then, yes, there was Laura Blumenfeld’s spine-chilling article in the WaPo (and elsewhere) August 28, in which she told us how much the Israeli securocrats “agonized” over every single decision they “had” to make regarding the “targeted killings” of Palestinian suspects.
Including this, about former IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon:

    Almost every day, Yaalon had to decide who would live or die. “Who is a ‘ticking bomb’? Can we arrest him? Who is a priority — this guy first, or this guy first?” Yaalon recalled. Once a week, military intelligence and Shin Bet proposed new names. At first, the list was limited to bombers themselves, but several years later it expanded to those who manufacture bombs and those who plan attacks.
    “I called it ‘cutting weeds.’ I knew their names by heart,” Yaalon said. How many did he kill? “Oh, hundreds, hundreds. I knew them. I had all the details with their pictures, maps, intelligence, on the table… ”

We learn from B’tslem, that from January to the end of July this year, 16 Palestinians were the targets of Israeli assassination sqauds, whereas 31 Palestinians, total, were killed during these operations.
Maybe Yaalon could spend some of his time at the (AIPAC-affiliated) Washington Institute for Near East Policy reading the testimonies of former apartheid enforcers like Jeffery Benzien. Now there’s an (a-)moral community he could be a part of, where he might find people who would understand his “wrenching dilemmas”.
Of course, no word in Blumenfeld’s article about the people being targeted for assassination being given the benefit of anything like “due process under the law”….
Anyway, friends, because this is such a crucial and tragic subject, please keep the discussion here courteous and constructive.