Escalation against Gaza

The situation in Gaza (and much of the West Bank) seems to be horrendous.
This UN OCHA report for June 30 provides some figures for the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli violence across the Gaza border:

    Since 26 June Palestinians have fired 20 homemade rockets towards Israel and the IAF have conducted 50 air strikes. The IDF has resumed and intensified artillery shelling since 28 June firing over 500 shells in the last two days primarily on the north and eastern borders with Israel.

The report detailed the results of just two of those 50 air strikes:

    An IAF air strike on 28 June destroyed all six transformers of the only domestic power supply plant in the Gaza Strip. This plant provided 43% of Gaza’s daily electricity supply (90 of the 210 megawatts). The remaining supply is provided by the Israel Electrical Corporation (IEC).
    Approximately 700,000 Gazans living in the middle governorate, and in the western and southern parts of Gaza City were initially without electricity. Currently, the Gaza Electrical Distribution Company (GEDCO) is load-sharing the remaining electricity supply from Israel among Gaza’s 1.4 million population resulting in intermittent power to households across the Gaza Strip.
    GEDCO estimates that it will take more than nine months to procure replacement transformers which need to be made to order. Alternative options of procurement within Egypt are being explored. The replacement cost of the six destroyed transformers is estimated by GEDCO at US$15 million.
    … Most of the 132 water wells managed by the [Coastal Municipalitiesd Water Utility] were powered through the destroyed GEDCO national electrical grid. Given the reduced electricity supply, generators are being increasingly relied upon to power water wells, threatening sufficient daily water supply to Gazan households.
    During an IAF air strike on a bridge between Nuseirat camp and Moghraga in the Gaza Strip on 28 June, a water pipeline serving approximately 155,000 inhabitants of Nuseirat, Bureij, Maghazi and Suweida communities was fractured. Water supply was completely cut, but according to the CMWU, the pipeline has now been repaired.
    The CMWU is concerned that they will not have the materials to repair future damages to pipe networks arising from any further Israeli military actions. They have had a number of containers with equipment, spare parts and materials at Karni crossing for over three months waiting to enter the Gaza Strip…

Laila el-Haddad blogged briefly about the situation earlier this week:

    I’ve just spoken to my grandmother in Khan Yunis, who confirmed the entire Strip has plunged into darkness, with people stocking up on food and supplies. The electricity of course has also been cut off in hospitals and clincs, though I’m not sure how long the generators can last.
    Friends in Gaza City also tell us that terrorizing sonic boom attacks have resumed, stronger than before, full force, by low-flying jets breaking the sound barrier throughout the night over the civlian population- -illegal in Israel, the united States, and most all of the world.

Much or perhaps all of the massive escalation that Israel has been mounting over recent days has to do with the fact that Palestinian militants of the Popular Resistance Committees– including, according to some reports, some members of Hamas– were able last Sunday to undertake a rather daring operation in which they tunneled under the Gaza-Israel border, went through the tunnel in the wee hours, surprised a slumbering Israeli tank crew, killed two of them, and were able to capture a third gunner, Corporal Gil’ad Shalit. (Two of the Palestinians were killed during the operation.)
In the West Bank, meanwhile, another group of Palestinian militants kidnaped and killed a young, male Israeli settler and murdered him.
Israel’s use of massive force against the Palestinian areas (and its threat of considerable further force, plus a possibly broad ground incursion into Gaza) are designed to forcefully “persuade” the PA’s government to turn Shalit back over to them. However, the groups claiming to hold Shalit have said they will release him only in return for the release of 1,000 of the Palestinian prisoners now in Israeli jails and the cessation of Israel’s military campaign against Gaza.
This latest round of escalation has caused immense difficulties for all the main political leaders on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides of the line. But most, perhaps, for Israeli PM Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Have Israel’s violent actions during the past week succeeded either in securing the safe release of Cpl. Shalit or, more broadly, in weakening Hamas’s PA government? No.
AP’s Diaa Hadid wrote this yesterday:

    Israel hopes displays of military might will pressure Palestinians into turning against the Hamas-linked militants who abducted an Israeli soldier.
    But the tactic could backfire — many Palestinians rallied around Hamas on Friday as Israel continued to bombard the Gaza Strip with warplanes and ground artillery.

He has some revealing quotes and vignettes to back up that conclusion (and one that shows that the rallying round Hamas is not unanimous.) Here are a couple of his vignettes:

    Abu Kayed, a 50-year-old unemployed restaurant worker, tried to sell his camel to pay for food and rent. His family counts on help from Hamas-backed charities.
    “Hamas is more popular now than it has ever been,” said Kayed, who has six children. “I don’t understand why all the world is crying out for one soldier. We Palestinians are treated like dust.”
    Some Gazans, however, blamed Hamas for their troubles.
    “I was expecting my situation to be very good” after the Israeli withdrawal, said Ismail el-Shaikh, a 22-year-old who works in a pizza parlor. “I thought the beaches would be open. I thought I would travel, and I expected more economic projects to enter Gaza.”
    “That didn’t happen,” he added. “Hamas came instead and the situation is more difficult.”

As always, then, what is important in Gaza today is not the “mere” matter of military superiority, devastating though military technology can be to the lives and wellbeing of individuals. But as always, what is important in Gaza– as in US-occupied Iraq– is the way all this military superiority plays out at the political level.
(Clausewitz 101.)
So far, it doesn’t seem to be playing out very well for Israel– or, in Iraq, for the United States.

Why the Geneva Conventions are important

In case we needed a reminder of why the Geneva Conventions (which are part of the “laws of war”) are important, the most recent (of many now emerging) revelations about the misdeeds of US soldiers in Iraq can provide one.
On June 16, two US servicemen were captured during what looked like a fairly well-planned ambush of their patrol. Three days later, their mutilated bodies were found.
The Bushites pointed to the treatment of those two as revealing the inhumane nature of the insurgents in Iraq…
Now, AP’s Ryan Lenz has revealed that the two captured GIs belonged to the very same army platoon as five other soldiers who are now accused of having deliberately plotted and then committed the rape of an Iraqi woman and the subsequent murder of her along with three members of her family, back in March.
This is a grisly, tragic sequence of events all round. In no way do I argue that the gruesome earlier behavior of their platoon-mates in any way “justified” the way the two captured GIs were treated. All these abuses of the laws of war are quite unjustifiable.
I do, however, hold that it is quite likely that if members of this platoon had behaved all along towards the Iraqis whom they encountered in a way consistent with the Geneva Conventions, then those two murdered and mutilated GIs might now still be alive… That’s the thing about the Geneva Conventions: they provide a single unified code of conduct for how everyone should behave in a war zone.
Yes, of course if the soldiers in the US occupation forces all kept impeccably to the standards of the Gevena Conventions, it is quite possible that the insurgents would still commit some atrocities– though in far, far smaller numbers than the ones they’ve committed to date.
But the many messages the Bush administration’s high officials have put out about the idea that the Geneva Conventions are somehow “outdated” and don’t apply to Americans have certainly trickled down to the troops and affected the judgment of many of them regarding what they think is acceptable and what unacceptable in a war zone.
The piece by Lenz, by the way, is interesting in a number of ways. It seems he has been able to “break” the story about the March rape and murders in the US MSM in good part because, as the tagline at the end of the story informs us, he was previously embedded with the 502nd Infantry Regiment, the same regiment of which the accused delinquents were part. So I assume he must have had some fairly good sources at the regimental level there who helped give him some of the background to the story.
He writes:

    Up to five soldiers are being investigated in the March killings, the fifth pending case involving alleged slayings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.
    The Americans entered the Sunni Arab’s family home, separated three males from the woman, raped her and burned her body using a flammable liquid in a cover-up attempt, a military official close to the investigation said. The three males were also slain.
    The soldiers had studied their victims for about a week and the attack was “totally premeditated,” the [US military] official said on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
    … The official said the rape and killings appeared to have been a “crime of opportunity,” noting that the soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.
    One of the family members they allegedly killed was a child, said a senior Army official who also requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

But here is another interesting aspect of the case: Lenz writes that “Mahmoudiya police Capt. Ihsan Abdul-Rahman said Iraqi officials received a report on March 13 alleging that American soldiers had killed the family in the Khasir Abyad area, about 6 miles north of Mahmoudiya.” He doesn’t say whether Abdul-Rahman informed the US military of this allegation at the time. He does write that, “U.S. officials said they knew of the deaths but thought the victims were killed in sectarian violence.”
Oh, what a handy explanation, eh?
But the way the details of the crime started to emerge up at the officer level wasapparently through the participation of soldiers from the platoon in question in what are described as “counseling sessions” that were– according to an earlier filing from Lenz– organized among platoon members after the deaths of their two comrades, in an attempt to help them deal with their feelings, etc etc.
From what Lenz writes, the rape-and-murder action undertaken by the five had been known of prior to that by a number of their comrades. He writes, “A second soldier, who also was not involved, said he overhead soldiers conspiring to commit the crimes and then later saw bloodstains on their clothes, the official said.”
But it wasn’t till the “counseling sessions” that any of these other, non-involved platoon members shared their suspicions or concerns with their superiors. Omerta ruled…
Anyway, all branches of the US military that have members on active duty inside Iraq are now becoming stained by the revelation of earlier acts of atrocity and mistreatment of Iraqi civilians. Military discipline seems to be coming under exactly the same kinds of pressure there that it came under in Vietnam.
Yes, to a large degree I do hold these individual sodliers responsible for their misdeeds. Burt I hold their commanders even more responsible for their training and discipline… and the higher up the chain of command you go, the more responsible these commanders should be held.
So let’s see, that goes up through the level of their regimental commanders up to the all-Iraq command to Centcom to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to– Donald Rumsfeld, to President Bush. We US citizens should demand that the nation’s higherst commanders of all be held directly responsible for upholding the rule of law– whether in the midst of combat (the circumstance that is addressed directly by the internationally agreed “laws of war”) or in any other circumstance. They also need also to take robust action to ensure compliance with the laws of war by soldiers and officers at all levels.
If they don’t do that, then as citizens of a nation built upon the rule of law we need to do the “holding responsible” for them– at the ballot box!
Meanwhile, until the US reverts to being a nation that abides by and upholds laws, the risks to individual US soldiers (and civilians) will continue to mount.
Note, too, that a call that the US military start complying with the laws of war in no way contradicts my equally strong call that the US military be withdrawn from Iraq at the earliest possible time, and the US military as a whole be radically downsized. Of course, if there were no US occupation of Iraq back in March, then that poor Iraqi woman and her family would never have met the grisly fate that was inflicted on them. (And nor would the two slain soldiers or the other 500 or so US soldiers killed this year in Iraq have been sent home in body bags, either.)
But whether the troops are in Iraq or not, they need to uphold the laws of war. It’s as simple as that.

Bush’s Gitmo woes

I  know I’m late in commenting on the US Supreme Court’s decision,
announced June 19, that ruled
illegal
the Bushites’ project of establishing special “military
commissions” to ptorcess the cases of the 500-some men still held at
the Guantanamo Naval Base.

The decision is important at a number of levels.  Firstly,
regarding the fate of the Gitmo detainees, the Supremes told the
administration it has to either try them according to the existing
rules and procedures used by courts martial (which operate under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice)– or, it should go to Congress and
ask Congress to legislate new rules for dealing with these detainees.

(I’m assuming this also applies to detainees held by the US military or
“other government agencies” at Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan, or
elsewhere, as well?  I’m not sure, though.)

Secondly, the June 29 decision informs the President quite clearly that
even though 9/11 might have changed many things for Americans– a
proposition worthy of considerable further discussion– still, it did
nothing to alter the concept of the US as a political system that
operates under duly legislated laws rather than through
imperial fiat or the undisclosed and unregulated workings of secret
government agencies.  This will have huge effects, I hope, on the
Bushites’ ability to continue with other illegal projects like the
widespread use of warrantless wiretapping of everyone’s communications
and illegal scrutinization of people’s financial dealings…

Good for the Supremes!  (Or at least, for the five of them who
voted for this ruling, as opposed to the three who opposed it.)

Regarding the fate of the Gitmo detainees– many of whom have now
languished under the sometimes brutal and always demeaning control of
their captors for more than four years now– the administration (and
Congress) will find themselves dealing with some rather tough dilemmas:

Continue reading “Bush’s Gitmo woes”

Birthplace of the European Ascendancy

I’ve just spent a week in northern Italy on a long-planned
vacation trip with Bill the spouse.  Because I’d been so busy, he
ended up doing most of the planning for it– which is just fine by me
as we enjoy doing just about the same things when we’re on
vacation.  Right now, I’m writing this while hurtling on a train
from Mantova to Milano.  I love trains, and think that living in a
place with a robust train network is a really civilized way to live.

When we’re in Milano, Bill has reservations for us to see Leonardo’s
‘Last Supper’ (recently restored, and needs advance booking.) We have
seen so much incredible late Medieval and Renaissance art in the past
week that my head is almost spinning.  We’ve been in Venice,
Padua, Verona, Vicenza, and Mantua, and in each place we’ve hiked
“religiously” from church to church to church to museum to palazzo to
duomo to church, to see and experience as many great works of art and
as many wonders of Romanesque and Renaissance architecture as we
could.  A big part of the charm of all this for me is also seeing
how human and livable the traditional European concept of urban living
still is….  To the extent that in all these cities, having a car
becomes almost a burden.  Certainly, the cities have all created
extensive pedestrian-only zones, which makes walking around them a
whole lot easier and more attractive a proposition than it wold
otherwise be.  Venice, of course, is almost entirely pedestrian-
(and boat-) only, which is the nec
plus ultra
of car-free living…

While we’ve been on the trip I’ve been deliberately trying to take a
vacation from political and conflict-related news.  I
have, however, been trying to gain an appreciation of the roots of the
European Ascendancy in world affairs.  Northern Italy and the
Netherlands– which we’re going to later– are two good places to do
this.  There was a whole long period, after all, in which Venice
was the dominant power in the whole East Mediterranean and controlled
most of the trade routes between Europe and Asia.  It did that
after amassing huge naval power, which it was able to pay for from a
combination of the surplus of northern Italiy’s hefty agricultural and
early manufacturing production and creative financing– since the
northen Italians virtually created the modern kind of banking system.

Continue reading “Birthplace of the European Ascendancy”

Deborah J. (‘Misty’) Gerner

My dear friend Deborah J. Gerner (also known as ‘Misty’) died yesterday. She’d sustained a hard battle against increasingly invasive forms of cancer for the past eleven years.
She was brave, determined, fair-minded, and a passionate advocate for justice and human equality.
I had known Misty, vaguely, for many years. Then in 2002 we worked together on When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel, a big Quaker book on Israel and Palestine. She was a Light, a peacemaker, and a very spiritual person. At hard times in our work– of which there were more than a few– she was a steady and supportive presence, gently urging us all to find the truth that is greater than any one of us is.
She was a member of Oread Friends Meeting there in Lawrence, Kansas.
I was with Misty and her spouse, Phil Schrodt, in Kansas last month when they were making some very hard end-of-life decisions. I’ve spent the past weeks saying goodbye to her in one way and another.
Kansas University, where she was a professor of political science, put out this news release about her passing. It tells a lot about her life and her many professional accomplishments.
Misty was 50 years old. Life seems miserably unfair sometimes. However, she leaves behind her a very rich legacy of knowledge and caring that will be with the world forever.
I’m writing this in an airport. I’m headed for Europe. I’ve been thinking such a lot about Phil, who’s been caring for her in the most loving and personal way in their beautiful home on a wooded hillside there, ever since they shifted from hospitals to “hospice” care. I know he has a strong network of friends there… Let’s send our comforting thoughts to them all.

Sad developments in U.S. Congress

I realize I didn’t blog much last week. I was busy elsewhere. But it was a sad, sad week for the relationship of the US citizenry with the rest of the world. For two main reasons:

    (1) We saw Karl Rove, finally let off the hook of fearing a possible indictment over Plamegate, coming back into the party-political arena with all his most divisive guns firing.
    (2) We saw the Democrats, who’d previously held together on a sort of lowest-common-denominator course of standing by to watch the Republicans implode politically under the weight of their own contradictions, being completely sandbagged by Rove, and unable to come up with any unified, proactive, and effective political response to Rove’s truly vicious attacks.

One big risk Rove took– and I see him as perhaps the most risk-happy person in the whole Bush entourage– was to turn the subject of politics inside the Washington Beltway back to Iraq.
So risky for the Prez, you would have thought, wouldn’t you?
Previously, the Repubs (also known– I have no clue why– as the “Grand Old Party”, GOP) had been trying to steer clear of talking much about Iraq. They were trying to keep the conversation on topics like immigration or gay marriage, instead. Immigration turned out to blow up in their face: they looked deeply divided over it, while the Dems could stand aside, looking principled and thoughtful while not having to do much (or take responsibility for much) at all. Gay marriage also turned out not to be a great support-winner for those in the GOP who are passionately opposed to it.
So Rove comes along, and turns the topic to Iraq, with some vicious accusations that the Democrats just want to “cut and run”… And what this has done is send the Democratic Party politicians into a tailspin of internal division and indecisiveness… Revealing that on this, the most important issue facing our country right now, the Democratic Party leadership is still too divided to be able to take any kind of a principled public stand.
Taking most of the heat from Rove has been that great and principled patriot, Congressman John P. Murtha from Pennsylvania… a much-decorated former Marines officer (and generally, a “hawk” on defense issues), who has become one of the most outspoken voices in Congress urging a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
Murtha knows very well whereof he speaks. See this transcript of a TV talk show. (It’s from yesterday, June 18, though the heading says “June 11”.)
Rove has been going with special venom after Murtha and the other Dems who had voted for the war-enabling resolution back in October 2002 and then later came out against the war. As noted in a transcript of a videotaped portion shown on that same t.v. show, Rove said,

    Like too many Democrats, it strikes me they are ready to give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party’s old pattern of cutting and running…

Murtha, it has to be said, did not keep his cool when shown that video during his live broadcast there. He said of Rove:

    He’s, he’s in New Hampshire. He’s making a political speech. He’s sitting in his air conditioned office with his big, fat backside, saying, “Stay the course.” That’s not a plan. I mean, this guy—I don’t know what his military experience is, but that’s a political statement. This is a policy difference between me and the White House. I disagree completely with what he’s saying…

A near-toxic rightwing attack-dog/commentator called “Ann Coulter” has also been majorly getting her rhetorical teeth into Murtha, saying recently that that he was, “The reason soldiers invented ‘fragging.'” (Fragging is US soldiers’ slang for trying to kill your officer.)
But what seems saddest to me is not the frenzy of the anti-Murtha rhetoric but the failure of the Democrats as a political leadership group to be able to come out forthrightly and unitedly to say, “This war in Iraq is going disastrously, and was anyway built on a lie perpetrated by the ruling party. We need to get out of Iraq and to re-order our relations with a world that will no longer be simply standing aside to allow the US to wreak such havoc on other nations. Let’s all work together to heal our relations with the rest of the world and with each other… based first and foremost on bringing our much-abused troops home from Iraq.”
Instead of which, at the end of a disgraceful, politically charged debate in the House of Representatives last week, 42 Dems bucked their leadership and joined a virtually united GOP in the House to pass a resolution stating,

    that the United States must complete “the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure and united Iraq” without setting “an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment” of U.S. troops.

The authors of that WaPo report linked to there note that the 42 Democratic “defectors” this time “were about half the 81 [Dems] who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force”…
So at this rate, it could take us just as long again to arrive at a Democratic Party that is clear and united in opposition to the Bushist vision of perpetual and unilateral US “preventive” war?
H’mmm, that would take us until, let’s see, January 2010?
Not fast enough, guys! Let’s get ourselves a real and principled Democratic Party in the country long before then!
(The good news: at the broad level of the US public, few people seem to have been bamboozled by Bush’s “Mission Accomplished Part Deux” last week, or by the bullying tactics used by Rove and Coulter, into reducing their opposition to this disastrous war effort. The Democratic Party just needs to catch up with the people…)

Khalilzad’s report on things falling apart

Is the “Khalilzad Cable“, the full text of which was published by the WaPo today, the present war’s equivalent of the Vietnam War’s “Pentagon Papers“?
Back in 1971, when Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg leaked huge portions of the 47-volume report on US-Vietnam relations commissioned by SecDef Robert McNamara to the NYT and the WaPo, their publication by the two papers sparked a storm of controversy in the US and helped to swing elite opinion massively against the war.
The “Khalilzad cable”, which was sent from Viceroy Khalilzad to Secretary of State Condi Rice just “hours” before the surprise trip that Bush made to Baghdad on June 12, reveals how stunningly unsuccessful all the US’s efforts to stabilize Iraq and build effective, pro-US new security forces there have been. Equally significantly, it also reveals the degree to which Zal Khalilzad, the US Viceroy in Baghdad, is aware of this situation– despite all of Bush’s earnest public avowals that things are going ahead very well in Iraq.
That’s why it deserves to have the same impact within the US policy elite that the Pentagon Papers had in their day.
The text of the cable– marked “Sensitive”, but also “Unclassified”– was given by a person or persons unnamed to brilliant WaPo columnist Al Kamen. The title that Khalilzad put in the “subject” line was this: Snapshots from the Office: Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord.
Okay, the content of what was in the cable was pretty interesting– though not much in it comes as any huge surprise to anyone who’s been following the good Iraqi blogs and good journalism from Iraq over the past few months. But what intrigued me just as much was the context within which Khalilzad was writing it… It seems to be a detailed study of the behavior and attitudes of just nine employees in (I assume from the title) the Public Affairs Office at the “embassy”.
Why did the ambassador spend so much time and effort producing this particular piece of work, I wonder?
I have two suppositions: (1) It’s possible that the “Social Discord” within the PAO had grown to the degree that the office’s work had become noticeably fault-ridden… in which case Condi might well have asked her man there: “Zal, so what the heck is going on in the PAO, anyway?” Or, (2), Zal, last weekend, for whatever reason, might have thought it would be instructive to try to provide Condi with the most firsthand description he could of “How Iraqis Live”… Well, he’s not going to get that from talking to the Iraqi political leaders… and he’s not about to exit from the Green Zone in a disguise like some latter-day Haroun al-Rashid and go out ‘n’ about in downtown Baghdad to see how his subjects are really living there… so the “subjects” of the planned enquiry who are closest to hand seem to be the three Iraqi women and six Iraqi men who work in his own PAO.
(Or, of course, both motivating factors might have been at work.)
Para 4 of the cable is interesting. He writes that the women from the PAO, “also tell us that some ministries, notably the Sadrist controlled Ministry of Transportation, have been forcing females to wear the hijab at work.” This is recounted with the air of being ‘news’– and it indicates that Khalilzad’s best way of learning what’s going on in Iraqi government ministries is to listen to hearsay from the handful of women who work in his PAO?
Similarly, in para 6, Khalilzad once again shows us how reliant he is on indirect hearsay to learn things about life in Iraq that are common knowledge to bloggers, good journos, and human-rights workers within the country:

    An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province… ”

Para 11 gives a little snapshot of how terrifying life has become for the Iraqi employees in the US Embassy. It deals with the strong suspicions these employees have about the hostile attitudes of the Iraqi forces personnel controlling the access checkpoints around the Green Zone:

    They seemed to be more militia-like and in some cases seemingly taunting. One employee [told us that] guards had held her embassy badge up and proclaimed loudly to nearby passers-by “Embassy” as she entered. Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people.

Paras 12-15 seem particularly revealing:

    12… [O]f nine employees in March, only four had family members who knew they worked at the embassy. That makes it difficult for them, and for us…
    13. We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their “cover”…
    14. Some of our staff do not take home their American cellphones, as this makes them a target. Planning for their own possible abduction, they use code names for friends and colleaguyes and contacts entered into Iraqi cellphones. For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members at on-camera press events.
    15. More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions we would make for them if we evacuate.

Then, there are some paras where Zal tells Condi what he has learned about general security conditins in the area around Baghdad from these PAO staff people:

    20. Since Samarra [i.e. the late-February bombing of the mosque in Samarra]… [o]ur staff– and our contacts– have become adept in modifying behavior to avoid “Alasas,” informants who keep an eye out for “outsiders” in neighborhoods. The Alasa mentality is becoming entrenched as Iraqi security forces fail to gain public confidence.
    21. Our staff report that security and services are being rerouted through “local providers” whose affiliations are vague. [Or perhaps your staff know but don’t want to tell you, Zal? Had you thought of that?]… Personal safety depends on good relations with the “neighborhood” governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by the militias. People no longer trust most neighbors.

And finally, in para 23, Zal does reveal that he’s not quite sure how much he can trust even these staff people: “Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exaggerate developments or steer us towards news that comports with their own worldview. Objectivity, civility, and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don’t abate.”
So okay, at the next press briefing at the White House or the State Department, let’s hear some of those reporters asking the Prez, or Condi, or their flaks: “So really, how are things going in Baghdad? And do you judge that Ambassador Khalilzad is an experienced and well-informed judge of the situation there?”
My judgment from all the above– assuming the cable as leaked and published is genuine (and I assume the WaPo would have done much to authenticate it before they published it)– is that things are even more precarious for the US position in Iraq than I had previously thought… It seems to me that Khalilzad and his staff there are hanging on by a hair. And what’s more, he seems to understand this– and to be eager to warn Condi about just how bad things are… And this, apparently even after he’d gotten the good news about the killing of Zarqawi and Maliki’s completion of forming his government…
(We have also, earlier, seen Khalilzad or his staff people telling the NYT’s John Burns that of course it was the US Viceroys in Baghdad before him who made all the big mistakes… not him, at all.)

Nonviolent peace organizations gathering in Virginia

If you’re anywhere near the east coast of the USA on July 7-9 and are interested in the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, Peace Brigades International, or other organizations that do nonviolent peacemaking/peacekeeping internationally, then you should definitely try to get to PBI’s 25th anniversary conference, being held in Front Royal, Virginia, about one hour west of Washington DC.
I, alas, can’t be there since I’m going on a long-planned trip to Europe. I did go to PBI’s 20th anniversary conference which was held (on different days) in both Switzerland and southern Germany. It was really informative and inspiring. Here’s what a press release from PBI says about the upcoming gathering:

    nonviolent peace teams from all over the world are meeting to exchange lessons and strategies about protecting civilians and human rights workers in conflict areas. Joining Peace Brigades are Christian Peacemakers Teams (Iraq, Palestine, Colombia, First Nations People), Nonviolent Peace Force (Sri Lanka), the Guatemala Accompaniment Project, the International Solidarity Movement (Palestine), International Women’s Peace Service (Middle East), Witness for Peace (Central and South America), Michigan Peace Teams (U.S.-Mexico Border), and PBI’s own teams (Indonesia, Nepal, Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia).
    The groups will also discuss how they can best support each other during a critical incident, such as an abduction or massacre of our field teams…

I wish I could be there. Any JWN readers who can get to it, please send in some reports for posting here!

Every heart a peace factory!

Whew!! I just finished the painstaking process of going over the page proofs for my upcoming book Amnesty After Atrocity? Healing Nations After Genocide and War Crimes. The page layout looks really good… very readable indeed.
The hardback is priced ways high for my taste. I need to look at the contract to see when Paradigm are planning to put out a paperback…
Anyway, I am really happy to have done it. By and large the text still reads well. (Though of course I have a l’esprit de l’escalier-ish regret regarding some portions where I wish I had expressed myself better. Too late! It is nearly ready to go– and at this stage, changes that I request start costing me heavily– as well as, always, introducing the possibility of further glitches and infelicities. Mainly, I just have to trust the careful wholetext edit I did back in February.)
Anyway, working with the material has also been a great retreading of memory lane, and has once again reminded me why I thought this material and this project was important.
Two of the most inspiring people I interviewed in connection with it– two of the most inspiring people I have ever met in my life– were the (Catholic) Cardinal Alexandre Dos Santos and the (Anglican) Bishop Dinis Sengulane… both in Maputo, Mozambique. They and a small group of other church leaders had all played a key role in starting/enabling the direct Frelimo-Renamo peace talks that in October 1992 brought an end to the 15 years of atrocity-laden conflict that had wracked their country. Dos Santos, who was already nearly 80 years old when I interviewed him in 2003, had an ethereal, almost pure-spirit air about him. Sengulane was probably 20 or so years younger, but also extremely wise.
One of the many memorable things Sengulane said was at the point when he was describing the role the Mozambican churches had played in building popular support for the 1992 peace. He said,

    we from the churches went to the places where the war had happened and we talked with the people there about making our hearts into ‘peace factories’.

What a beautiful concept! It’s so completely Christian, so completely Buddhist, so completely true. Hostile acts start with hostile intent, and peacemaking acts have to start with peacemaking intent.
It’s true, good intent is never enough on its own. But it is an indispensable starting point… and it’s not one that’s necessarily always easy to achieve. In the book of Henri Nouwen’s that I commented on here not long ago, Nouwen pointed out that many people who want to work for a peaceable world use scaremongering (and in his view, counter-productive) ways to do so:

    Panic, fear, and anxiety are not part of peacemaking. This might seem obvious, but many who struggle against the threat of a world war not only are themselves motivated by fear but also use fear to bring others to action. Fear is the most tempting force in peacemaking… We need to be reminded in very concrete ways of the demonic power at work in our world, but when an increase of fear is the main result we become the easy victims of these same powers. When peacemaking is based on fear it is not much different from warmaking… (Peacework, p.35)

The radical Quaker activist of the 1930s A.J. Muste captured something of the same insistence on the organic unity of ends and means when he said, quite simply: There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
But I like Sengulane’s formulation, too. It reminds us (well, me, anyway) of the need to continually audit my own intentions and practices, to try to make sure that my heart really is a peace factory. As the old song goes, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”