Author: Helena

Divide and rule, Israeli-style

AP’s Steven Weizman reported today that

    Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday he had given the go ahead for a shipment of weapons to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose loyalists are engaged in bitter infighting with the militant Islamic Hamas.
    … “I authorized last night the transfer of arms and ammunition to chairman Abu Mazen in order to strengthen his presidential guard, so he can strengthen his forces against Hamas,” Olmert said, referring to Abbas by his widely-used nickname.

This is quite tragic. Of course, if Olmert had really wanted to strengthen Pres. Abbas’s position vis-a-vis Hamas, he and the then-active Ariel Sharon had every opportunity to do so throughout all of 2005, when Abbas was the duly elected PA president and he had a pliant Fateh person, Abu Alaa’, as prime minister. For all that year (and until now) Abbas begged and beseeched Sharon and Olmert to give him something politically, in terms of meaningful peace negotiations or elements of the content thereof, that he could take to his people and show them thereby that his approach was fruitful for them.
But Sharon and Olmert steadfastly refused to give Abbas anything at all. Indeed, they left him looking quite impotent in front of his people.
And now they want to give him arms to fight Hamas?
What I would love to hear from Abu Mazen at this point is a clear statement “No! I don’t seek arms from Israel for this or any other purpose!” … And also, some real progress on the national reconciliation talks with the Hamas leadership…

Guantanamo and soul-sickness

I need, as a US citizen, to place on record that I am completely sickened that my government continues to hold detainees in Guantanamo and other locations in complete defiance of the norms of human decency and international law.
Over the weekend, three of the Gitmo detainees committed suicide, an act that can be thought of or described in many different ways. (Several reports of the loading of enslaved African persons onto transatlantic transports in previous centuries spoke of a number of the enslaved people either hurling themselves into the water or sitting quite still, refusing to eat, and dying through the sheer will to do so… The legal status of the Gitmo detainees under the US’s much-vaunted legal code seems little different from that of the enslaved persons.)
But the death of a human person– by his own hand or that of anyone else– is always, first and foremost, a tragedy.
What has happened to the souls of people in the Bush administration that they can respond to these tragedies in Gitmo with such unabashed hostility? Various administration officials have described the suicides as “a PR stunt” or even “an act of (asymmetrical) war“? Has Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Colleen Graffy, who made the accusation about the suicides being “a PR stunt” completely lost her humanity?
People who speak in such a way seem deeply soul-sick to me. How on earth can we end their ability to wreak their present, quite immoral havoc on the world?

Bush in Baghdad

“Mission Accomplished”– Part Deux?
Well, he didn’t have his “Mission Accomplished” flight suit on in Baghdad today, but Bush’s media and political advisers have certainly seemed eager to create (and then exploit) another key “victory photo op” to rally the flagging Republican base in the lead-up to the November elections.
AP’s Terence Hunt writes that Bush’s ostensible “host” there in the Baghdad Green Zone, PM Nuri al-Maliki, was given all of five minutes warning about the “guest” who, unbeknownst to him, had already flown into his country and was now anxious to meet him in the Republican Palace.
So much for Iraq’s “sovereignty”.
Hunt also told us about this crucial exchange between the two men:

    “God willing, all the suffering will be over. And all the soldiers will return to their country with our gratitude for what they have offered, the sacrifice,” al-Maliki said through a translator.
    Bush made it clear, however, that a U.S. military presence — now at about 132,000 troops — would continue for awhile.

The NYT had a good article in today (before the news about Bush’s “Mission Mission Accomplished” was released.) In it, David Sanger and Jim Rutenberg wrote about Monday having seen the first day of a two-day gathering of top-level Bush advisers, convened in the Camp David presidential “retreat” center 40 minutes north of Washington DC to discuss options at the present “critical juncture” in Iraq.
Sanger and Rutenberg wrote:

    The meeting was as much a media event as it was a high-level strategy session, devised to send a message that this is “an important break point for the Iraqi people and for our mission in Iraq from the standpoint of the American people,” in the words of the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett.
    It came as Republicans began a new effort to use last week’s events to turn the war to their political advantage after months of anxiety, and to sharpen attacks against Democrats. On Monday night, the president’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, told supporters in New Hampshire that if the Democrats had their way, Iraq would fall to terrorists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have been killed.
    “When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party’s old pattern of cutting and running,” Mr. Rove said at a state Republican Party gathering in Manchester.

It is now clear that convening the Camp David gathering was also a clever way to pull together Bush’s key advisers and prepare them for their trip to Baghdad in a place somewhat away from the public eye. (And also, as AP’s Hunt noted, to provide a pretext for Maliki be in the “Republican Palace” in Baghdad at just the right time… since he had originally been told to be there for a videoconference with Bush.)
So which “key advisers” do you imagine Bush took with him to Baghdad? According to the listing given in this noon-Tuesday story on the NYT website,

    He was accompanied by senior aides like National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Mr. Bartlett, Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagan and the White House spokesman, Tony Snow.

So that is one foreign-policy specialist, two domestic-policy specialists, and two public affairs flaks…
God help the Iraqi people.

Traveling; connections hard

I’m in NYC for a couple of days. High-speed connections are hard to come by. Plus I’m extremely busy: family stuff; setting up my Uganda trip for July; checking page-proofs on the Atrocities book…
I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to post anything new before Tuesday or so. But if people want to discuss the many importabnt and interesting developments in the Israeli-Palestinian sphere, why don’t you do so here?
(Plus if you put in links to helpful articles on the topic that wd be v. helpful for me!)

Federalism, Iraq, Spain, South Africa

Our esteemed colleague Reidar Visser has two good new entries on his website: this on the federalism issue in Iraq, and this on the latest cabinet appointments there.
I don’t, alas, have time for any prolonged comment on these really interesting essays here, and I note that both of them contain a wealth of well-organized information and analysis that’s just about impossible to come by anywhere else (or at least, anywhere else in the English-speaking world.)
I hate to make a critical point. But I note that in the “federalism” piiece he writes:

    A second group of federations are those that have been deliberately “designed”, often after a period of political upheaval and regime breakdown. Examples of this include post-war Germany, South Africa after apartheid and Ethiopia in the democratic era…

But today’s South Africa is really not a federal state in any sense in which I understand the term. It is a determinedly unitary state. The nine provinces in South Africa were deliberately– and as the result of a lengthy political process– deisgned to be purely administrative units, and not units that in any way embodied any ethnic or cultural particularity… And similarly, the ethnic and linguistic particularities in the state have no defined geographic basis (such as they have in, for example, Belgium.) That, though many Afrikaners and some, though by no means all, of the people who had previously been “citizens” of the Bantustans might at some point have been open to the idea of having ethnically based subunits within a broader South African federation.
For me, South Africa is a fascinating example of a state that, though unitary, is still intentionally dedicated to the goals of multi-culturalism and mutli-lingualism. It could therefore stand as a great example to either an Israeli-Palestinian unitary state in the future, or more immediately to the Iraqi state today. (Or indeed, to the US… )
Well, that’s just a small criticism. Clearly, I need to go and read both of Visser’s essays much more closely when I have the time.
I also note, regarding the relevance of the “Spanish example” that he cites for a possibly multilingual state, that that did not become possible for Spain until the internal linguistic-cultural issues had a chance of becoming “diluted” within the broader impulse of Spain’s assimilation within the broad, peaceable, democratic polity of the EU. But this is far from being the case in Iraq regarding, for example, the Kurdish question…
Lots of food for thought, though.

Ori Nir on Israel-neocon ‘split’ over Iran

Relevant to what I wrote here a couple of days ago– about the politics of the reaction to Bush’s overture to Iran– the sage, well-informed Israeli journalist Ori Nir has an intriguing piece in today’sNew York Forward titled: Bush Overture To Iran Splits Israel, Neocons. The sub-title there is: “Olmert Asks Groups To Keep Low Profile.” “Groups” there meaning “pro-Israeli groups within the US political system.”
Nir writes:

    Neoconservative analysts are blasting the administration, saying that holding talks with the Islamic regime would serve only to embolden it and undermine the anti-fundamentalist opposition in Iran. They argue that America’s ultimate goal should be to change Tehran’s theocratic regime.
    … Israeli officials and several influential Jewish groups, meanwhile, have refrained from criticizing the new American approach — which some experts are depicting as the most dramatic foreign policy shift of the Bush presidency — saying that they support more pragmatic ways to block Iran’s apparent dash toward a nuclear weapon. For Israel and Jewish groups — despite Iranian calls for Israel’s destruction — the fundamental goal is not regime change, but to block Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iam prepared to accept there’s some validity to Nir’s argument that there is some divergence between the longer-term goals of, on the one hand, Israel and its allies, and on the other, many or perhaps most of the neocons.
However, he also signals that there is another (less public) issue at stake in this disagreement, and that is the visibility of the pro-Israeli propaganda effort within the US discourse.
(Hey, have you wondered why the ardent pro-Israeli propagandists “David/Davis” and “Neal” have been so quiet on our comments boards here recently? I assure you it’s not because I’ve banned them. But mainly, they’re just keeping a low profile these days… It almost makes me miss them… Okay, not terrifically much… )
Anyway, here’s what Nir– who’s a good, generally strong-valued reporter– writes on the topic:

    The Walt-Mearsheimer paper has triggered an escalating debate on the influence of Israel and Jewish organizations that has spilled over onto the opinion pages of major publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
    Recently, with such scrutiny mounting, Israeli leaders asked American Jewish organizations to lower their profile on the Iran issue, the Forward has learned.
    In one notable example, a delegation of leaders from the American Jewish Congress met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert shortly before returning to the United States. When asked how he thinks Jewish groups should pursue the Iran issue, Olmert reportedly implied that he would prefer a low profile, according to one source familiar with the proceedings.
    “We don’t want it to be about Israel,” Olmert is said to have replied, explaining that although Iran’s president focuses his belligerent rhetoric on Israel, both Jerusalem and Washington have an interest in convincing the international community that a nuclear armed Iran would be a menace to the region and to the entire world.

Here’s what Nir wrote about the effectiveness of Olmert’s plea to the(Jewish) pro-Israel lobbyists inside the US:

    Israel’s support for Rice [on Iran] and Olmert’s request for Jewish groups to take a lower profile [on Iran] are being well received by many Jewish groups. Already, some Jewish groups had been asking the White House to stop suggesting that American efforts to block Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons are motivated primarily by a desire to protect Israel.

I think I’ve noted here before how pathetically craven and ideologically dependent most of these groups are… and how ready they are, as a result, to shift their positions by 180 degrees the moment their lords and masters in Israel tell ’em too. Why, they make the West European communist parties of the 1930s look like deeply principled, locally rooted rooted organizations in comparison…
Nir again:

    Jewish organizations have no interest in becoming “the lobby for war with Iran,” one communal official said.
    … [W]hile some Jewish groups are uncomfortable with the administration’s shift on direct talks with Iran, only the right-of-center Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs openly criticized the move.

Oh, antediluvian old JINSA. Don’t you gotta love ’em? (Irony alert!!)
But there you have it, in a nutshell: “Jewish organizations have no interest in becoming ‘the lobby for war with Iran'”, as the anonymous offical of one of the US’s many generously funded and politically very powerful Jewish “community organizations” is quoted there as saying.
You betcha. Because if these Jewish-American organizations become labeled as ‘the lobby for war with Iran’, then what about the explanation for those 2,492 US force members who’ve been killed as a result of the US invasion of Iraq? Let’s please ask no questions in that very sensitive regard!
I should note that there are a number of Jewish-American community organizations that provide good social services to Jewish Americans (who as a result are generally not a particularly needy social group these days), or who work actively in support of social justice issues here in the US, in Israel/Palestine, or elsewhere in the world. However, the general rubric of “Jewish Community Federation” of whatever, which used to be federation of such philanthropic groups, has in many cases been hijacked by the ultra-Zionist, Israel-uber-alles crowd, to the point that it’s sometimes hard these days even to identify the Jewish-American groups that are sincerely working for a world without oppression, and which actually buy to some degree or another into the arguments of the territorial maximalists within Israel… (Here’s one that in my view, does great work on the basis of upholding the equality of all human persons: Brit Tzedek v’shalom.. Let’s hope that my identifying it as such doesn’t give the kiss of death to its fundraising effort.s.. )
Well anyway, big thanks to Ori Nir for his sterling reporting there. And to the Forward, which is a modern-day, English-language version of an old Yiddish-language socialst newspaper in New York, for the support it gives to good reporting like Nir’s.
I just add, a propos of nothing in particular here, that there have been strategic thinkers in Israel who’ve made the argument that Iran’s nuclear program is not such a big deal even if it has military aspects… because basically, if Israel and Iran both end up with nuclear weapons (or the capability for ’em), then that could even bring a degree of strategic stability to the Middle East…
But I gess that’s an entirely different area of discussion.

Salon.com article on US power shrinkage

My longish article on the broader implications of the US’s still-unfolding strategic defeat in Iraq is up on the Salon.com website today. The title and sub-title that the editors gave it were:

    The incredible shrinking U.S.
    Despite the death of Zarqawi, Bush’s huge gamble in Iraq has failed. As a result, the U.S. is weaker everywhere in the world — and that’s not all bad.

(If you’re not a “Salon Premium” member or whatever, you have to sit through a short advertisement before you can read the whole text there.)
Luckily, I did get the chance yesterday to work with my editor to put in a new lead mentioning the Zarqawi killing and the Iraqi PM’s completion of his cabinet. My broader judgment regarding the failure of the Bushites’ “big roll of the dice” in Iraq still stands, though.
The editor, Gary Kamiya, made me work hard on the piece! He pushed me to address several areas of the topic that I hadn’t done in my first draft… so the word length came in ways over the 2,000 words he’d originally suggested. But the points he made were very intelligent ones; I actually enjoyed working with him… and more to the point I like the way the piece came out in the end.
Talking of ends, here’s how the piece concludes:

    I realize there are many Americans who are not as ready as I am to welcome the prospect of a diminishment (or, as I would say, a rectification) of the disproportionate amount of power our nation has been able to wield in world affairs over the past 60 years. Many Americans today — like many British or French citizens 80 years ago — think it is somehow “natural” that their nation intervene in the doings of other nations around the world and act as the crucial arbiter in international affairs. (And yes, throughout history nearly all such interventions have always come dressed in “salvationist” garb: Very few nations ever knowingly undertake a war or any other foreign intervention that its people clearly understand to be unjust at the time. If such understanding comes at all, it does so only later.)
    Why does U.S. hegemonism in the world seem “natural” to so many Americans? Plumbing the roots of that particular wrinkle on the broader conceit of American exceptionalism would take a long time! Suffice it to note here that after 9/11 the attacks of that day laid their own potent overlay of shock, fear and anger onto the bedrock of those older American attitudes. For roughly 30 months after 9/11, feelings of vengefulness, and of the righteousness of American anger (and of all the actions that flowed therefrom), seemed still to dominate the consciousness of a broad political elite in the U.S. It was only after the revelations of Abu Ghraib in April 2004 that the country’s mainstream discourse on the war, and on what their vengefulness had caused the U.S. to become, became more self-aware and open to self-criticism.
    Today, a clear majority of Americans judge that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. A similarly clear majority say the administration should set a timetable for withdrawal. This willingness to challenge the Bush people’s spin on the situation in Iraq is a welcome sign of increased public understanding, but it does not signal any automatic readiness to challenge the principle of U.S. exceptionalism more broadly. Grappling with that issue is, I believe, our next great challenge as a citizenry; and it is a challenge that the events of the next few years will almost certainly force us to confront head-on.

So here’s the rough history of this piece. Exactly two weeks ago today I pitched four story ideas to Gary: three of them were on topics related to the failure of the Bushite project in Iraq. It took him almost a week to get back to me, to tell me this was the one he wanted to run with. Meantime, I’d used some of the material from the suggested topic “How will we remember this war?” in this Memorial Day post here at JWN.
Last weekend and through to early Tuesday morning I worked hard on my first draft. (I was also doing a bunch of other important things in that time… It felt extremely fraught.) Then Gary and I went to and fro on it a bit, and it finally got up onto the site early this morning.
Today I need to work on the page proofs on my Africa book. Print publishing feels very arduous indeed these days. But worth it, I think.

On the peace line, Charlottesville

We had some interesting experiences on the peace vigil in town today. Much of the national media has been making a huge deal out of the killing of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. (Not so much mention of the woman and child reportedly killed in the building along with him… )
But of course, George W. Bush has also shown us his very public gloating over the killing of his foe. As one friend said to me: “You’d think they’d just won the Battle of El Alamein”…
So anyway, before I got out onto the street-corner with the peace signs today, I was wondering what kind of response we’d get from the passing (vehicle-borne) citizenry. And indeed, very unusually for our vigil these days days, today we did get two or three passing drivers who had evidently been hyped up by the media coverage and were eager to yell epithets at us and taunt us.
One of these guys– and yes, they are all men– was a well-known taunter from ways back who’s been notably quiet recently. Today, he rolled down his window and pushed his upper body half out of it so he could yell at us: “We got your buddy today! And you’re next!”
Poor guy. His face was contorted with anger. It seemed like he’d been saving up his bile for a long time and was just so very happy to have a chance to yell at us once again.
Zarqawi– “our guy”? That is so very sad and misinformed. (Not that this particular taunter was ever in a mood to come and actually talk to us about our views and affiliations. One time, maybe 18 months ago, he did get the guy who drives him home from work to stop a little way further down the street, and then he stomped back to our group and started berating a younger woman there… His buddy gently pulled him away.)
And as for his threat that: “You’re next!” Well, that has to come from a sick, delusional mind.
At one level, I am interested in this whole question of the psychological roots of violence– especially when, as seems so often to be the case, the violence is all bound up with a feeling of self-righteous anger. The urge to punish, pure and simple, is a huge leitmotif in the American psyche– whether it is “bringing justice to” Zarqawi by killing him outright (along with other individuals, including a child), or whether it’s capital punishment here at home.
This evening our state was due to be executing a borderline mentally retarded man called Percy Walton… The case went through many last-minute appeals and stops and starts until finally, just over an hour before the scheduled execution time, the Governor gave Walton a six-month stay of execution while his mental capacities are further examined by the state.
You see, here in Virginia, the second killingest state per capita in the entire union, you have to be sane enough to be “fit” to be executed in order to actually be executed. You could say, “a person would be insane to choose to be that sane!” Or you could say that the whole darn’ system is insane… But the root idea there is that the state requires that the executed person be in a position to fully comprehend what is about to happen to him, otherwise it’s not a “just” execution. Cruel and unusual punishment? I’ll say! Also, think about Percy Walton’s mental life this evening just a bit. If his cognitive functioning was sufficient that he understood what was scheduled to happen to him at 9 p.m. this evening, imagine what all his last 24 hours of dread were like… But then, the Governor gives him the six-month stay of execution; and somewhere along the way there state psychiatrists will come in and examine him. If at that point they find he is indeed “sane enough to be executed” then he has to undergo that entire lead-up-to-execution dread one time over again, in addition to the pain of the execution itself. Oh, ain’t “justice” a wonderful thing…
I digress. (Though not entirely.)
So there we were on the street corner this afternoon. Yes, we had two or three instances of clear hostility from drivers-by. But we also had a raucous cacophony of supportive horn-tooting in response to our peace signs! It seemed like the loudest ever. There were some extremely insistent honkers out there today… Including many trolley- and bus-drivers and once again a large city police vehicle.
My faith in the citizenry of our little corner of central Virginia was completely upheld. Bush may have had his few hours of gloating in the sun today. But based on the honking I heard on our street corner, the killing of Zarqawi has done little or nothing to persuade Americans that this war is headed in any kind of a desirable direction.
Bring the troops home.

Bush’s 24 hours of Iraqi sunshine

Two “gains” for the Bush folks’ project in Iraq today, that I am sure will get heavily hyped by the administration and all its flaks: The reported killing of Abu Mus’ab Zarqawi in Ba’quba, and the naming and rapid swearing-in of ministers to the crucial three security portfolios there.
That latter AP report tells us:

    The new defense minister is Iraqi Army Gen. Abdul-Qader Mohammed Jassim al-Mifarji [with] Shiites Jawad al-Bolani for interior and Sherwan al-Waili for national security.

(Note the now apparently routinized identification of people by sect. I find that scary.)
These two political “gains” for the Bush project in Iraq come on a day when two of my articles announcing the failure of this project are being published. However, my underlying analysis still certainly stands– and primarily, my conclusion that it’s no use having even the “full deck” of government ministers named and sworn in if the administrative machinery of governance is so broken that it hardly works at all.
Can a Minister for National Security deliver security? Can all of these three ministers together do the same?
Can a Minister for Water deliver water? A Minister for Agriculture deliver the services that will allow the repair of the country’s many technical, financing, and marketing systems in that field? No.
(I had actually written something to that effect in my first draft of the CSM column, since I thought the three security ministers might get named between me writing it and it coming out… But that got cut out in the editing.)
Anyway, let us now see. I would be extremely happy if the naming of these latest ministers was associated with finding a significant resolution of the deepseated political issues that have come to divide the country. If that is the case– if a spirit of “Iraqi national unity” can now spread throughout Iraq– that would be truly be a blessing.
Given the political balance within the country, however, I don’t see that any such entente, if found, would result in the emergence of a pro-US political order in the country. Therefore, whether the Maliki government “succeeds” politically– which, I maintain, it can do only on Iraqi-nationalist terms– or whether it fails, then the Bush project of installing a pro-US order in Iraq will have failed. Let us see exactly what kind of a “cakewalk” this turns out to be…
(And as for Zarqawi? From everything I understand about Iraq, his killing will make only a dent, at most, in the trajectory of the anti-US insurgency in Anbar and other provinces. I agree with Juan Cole when he wrote today, “Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don’t expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.”)
So anyway, today will no doubt be a day for the Bush administration’s leaders, flaks, and allies to have a day of public jubilation. Tomorrow, when they get back to figuring what to do with the many very difficult problems they face around the world, things won’t look so different from they did yesterday. Long-term outlook for them: still gloomy.

CSM column on need for rapid troop withdrawal

Here is my column in Thursday’s CSM calling for a rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (I also warn there that various catastrophic scenarios in Iraq are very possible.)
Here’s how it starts:

    When President George W. Bush and his advisers launched the invasion of Iraq, they promised that this project was intended not only to find and destroy the “weapons of mass destruction” that they claimed were there, but also to remove Saddam Hussein and bring good governance to Iraq’s 26 million people.
    Now, some three-plus years later, it is clear that this latter project has failed. (And there were no WMDs to be found.)
    Indeed, Mr. Bush’s good-governance project in Iraq has failed so miserably that it cannot now be revived…

Here’s how it ends:

    In March 2003, Bush launched a big roll of the geopolitical dice when he invaded Iraq. The stakes were very high. But now it is crystal clear that he “lost” that bet. Far better to cut the nation’s losses now and shift to rebuilding a decent relationship with the rest of the world, than to sit idly by in Iraq waiting for what can only be a further deterioration of the situation.

In the Salon.com piece, which should be up on their site on Thursday, I expand on some of the further geostrategic implications of what I wrote about in the CSM piece.
How capable are the Bushites– and the US citizenry as a whole– of coming to terms with the new geopolitical realities, I wonder?