Author: Helena

Arms exports mania

My copy of the 2006 edition of the annual Military Balance assessment produced by the International Institute for Strategic Studies dropped heavily into my mailbox today. I enjoy looking through their generally fairly reliable information, and have used it as a reference source ever since I worked in the Reuters bureau in Beirut, back in the day…
So, our big fact for today (p.404): In 2004, for the first time ever, the US’s share of the international arms trade rose above 50%. To be precise, it was 53.4%.
The runners-up in this contest of shame were:

    Russia– 13.2%
    France– 12.7%
    Britain– 5.5%
    Germany– 2.6%
    China– 2.0%

But look, isn’t this just the most amazing coincidence: Of the six front-running arms-exporters, five of them are veto-wielding permanent members on the UN Security Council. (And these are also the five “recognized” nuclear-weapons states.)
But it seems that not being content with having their own huge nuclear and “conventional” arsenals, these states want to get the rest of the world hooked on the arms-acquisition habit, too.
US arms transfers to other countries in 2004 came to a total value of $18.55 billion. Imagine what that sum of money could have achieved for real human security if it had been invested in schools, health-centers, roads, and safe-water systems instead…

Politics, diplomacy, and Bush’s ‘defense-of-marriage’ pander

Today in the US Senate, senators voted down a proposal that President Bush had been pushing with surprising intensity over the past few days: an amendment to the US Constitution (no less!) that would have spelled out explicitly that marriage is “a union between a man and a woman.”
That the proposal was voted down was no surprise to anyone. So why had Bush made such a big deal of jumping in at a very late date to push this strongly anti-gay proposal, if he (and everyone else) knew it was headed to defeat anyway? Didn’t this risk making him look weak by having suddenly jumped in to push it?
Well the consensus among DC political analysts is that this was a pretty “desperate” attempt by the Prez to try to energize the rightwing evangelical Christian networks who have always been a strong basis of his political support around the country– and to do this at a crucial point in the run-up to November’s midterm elections.
But why did he suddenly need to energize these people right now— that is, over the past few days?
The WaPo’s Dana Milbank has an extremely amusing account of some of the more obviously “pander-y” aspects of what Bush was doing. It starts like this:

    There’s violence in Iraq, corruption in the House and anxiety in the markets. Somebody needs to create a diversion.
    “The gays are aggressive! Gays have called war! Gays are attacking traditional marriage!”
    Bishop Harry Jackson was shouting these words outside the Capitol yesterday morning, at a rally for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
    “Marriage is under attack!” cried out Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), also at the rally.
    “We can have anarchy!” warned Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.).
    No doubt Jackson, Allard and Harris are sincere in their views about marriage. But the urgency of their alarm is a bit suspect to anybody with an eye on the electoral calendar…

Go read the whole thing… Milbank really does have a great eye for political detail. I said it was an amusing account. At one level it is. At another I just hate the amount of hurt these virulent anti-gay campaigns and the anti-gay legal environment inflict on my many gay and lesbian friends.
Though I agree with the broad thrust of Milbank’s analysis there I do have an additional explanation for Bush’s sudden enthusiasm of the “defense of marriage” issue in these recent days. Remember that these exact same days have also seen his administration make a 180-degree turn in its policy toward Iran… This, on an issue in which the evangelical right and the Jewish-American right have both been extremely busy pushing a hardline agenda. (See a report of some of AIPAC’s recent belligerent urgings regarding Iran here.)
But what is notable to me right now is that though Bush seems to have felt a need to appease the evangelicals at the time he (effectively) turned his back on their longheld position regarding Iran, he has not– so far– felt the need to pander in any parallel way to the AIPAC crowd.
The experienced former Indian diplomat M.K. Badhrakumar, writing in Asia Times Online yesterday, reminded us that

    hardly a fortnight has passed since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while visiting Washington, described the Iranian government as an existential threat.
    At a joint press conference on the White House lawn on May 23 with President George W Bush, Olmert made a hard-hitting statement: “… The Iranian threat is not only a threat to Israel; it is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the entire world. And it could mark the beginning of a dangerous and irresponsible arms race in the Middle East.”

And on May 24, Badhrakumar recalled, Olmert said this in his appearance at the US Congress:

    ” Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, and a notorious violator of fundamental human rights, stands on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. With these weapons, the security of the entire world is put in jeopardy … This challenge, which I believe is the test of our time, is one the West cannot afford to fail.
    “The radical Iranian regime has declared the United States its enemy. Their president believes it is his religious duty and his destiny to lead his country in a violent conflict against the infidels. With pride he denies the Jewish Holocaust and speaks brazenly, calling to wipe Israel off the map. For us this is an existential threat, a threat to which we cannot consent. But it is not Israel’s threat alone. It is a threat to all those committed to stability in the Middle East and the well-being of the world at large.
    “Our moment is now. History will judge our generation by the actions we take now, by our willingness to stand up …”

However, despite all of Olmert’s urgings Bush evidently made up his own mind regarding what to do about Iran. And Condi Rice then simply informed her Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, of the decision. Once Bush’s new initiative had been announced in Washington, Livni could do little more than issue a statement saying, “Israel appreciates the steps and measures by the United States in continuing to lead the international coalition and in taking all necessary steps to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability.”
As for AIPAC, it issued a statement noting tersely that, ” AIPAC is not taking a position on dialog with Iran.”
It seems that what is happening is that the Bushites have understood– finally!– that the situation they face in Iraq (and Afghanistan, and Somalia, and in many other places too) is really perilous… And this time they have no choice but to act in the US national interest, in an attempt to tamp down US-Muslim tensions and do whatever is necessary to try to set the stage for some form of non-chaotic and sizeable drawdown of the US troop presence in Iraq.
If they want to do that, of course they need some level of cooperation from the Iranians… who not only abut huge lengths of the Persian/Arabian Gulf… who not only also abut huge lengths of the heavily-populated eastern portion of Iraq… who not only sit right acorss the river from the key logistic chokepoints in and around Basra… but who also have pervasive networks of agents throughout the whole of Iraq itself at this point.
The possibility that at this point in history, when the US government has 135,000 hostages to Iranian fortune deployed as sitting ducks inside Iraq, it might choose to escalate tensions with Iran or even launch some form of military adventure against it, would be quite beyond belief– even for the extremely risk-happy gang of men at the top of this US administration. (I think we have to give them some credit for having learned at least a few lessons as a result of the failure of their “big roll of the dice” in Iraq?)
The people running the Bush administration understand this situation… And so, at a different level, do most of the members of the US Congress– especially since all the emembers of the House of representatives and one-third of the members of the Senate are up for re-election just five months from now.
With the US casualty toll in Iraq now standing at 2,482 body-bags and tens of thousands of other very badly wounded soldiers and Marines, few if any US politicians want to be the ones standing up right now and urging the launching of yet another unnecessary military adventure.
So this is a decision-point when the preferences of AIPAC and its extensive networks become basically irrelevant. And anyway, neither Israel nor the AIPAC crowd particularly want to stick their heads out right now regarding the US-Iran overture. With the US public majorly embittered by the results of the Iraqi invasion and occupation so far, now is obviously not a good time for the pro-Israelis to arouse too much US public interest in the whole question of… h’mmm, how exactly did Washington get drawn into the invasion of Iraq, anyway?
This, because as Mearsheimer and Walt (and many others) have noted, the evangelical right and the pro-Israeli right were the two major political forces that prior to March 2003 were pushing for the invasion…
Meanwhile, back in the discussion of the gay-marriage issue here in the US, we see that these two important strands of the US political right now have noticeably divergent interests. Opposing gay marriage is a big, perhaps defining, issue for the evangelical right these days. But for the pro-Israeli crowd in the country, it’s something else they don’t really want to talk much about. Mainly because, within the Jewish community, it’s such a deeply divisive issue. Certainly, for them it is nowhere near being such a hugely important issue as it is for the rightwing evangelicals.
… Anyway, I think it’s been really interesting to note that, when Bush was forced by the logic of international affairs to turn his back majorly on the “let’s attack Iran” forces, he apparently felt he had to throw some bones of appeasement to the evangelical rightwingers among them. But, as noted above, he didn’t feel the same way about the pro-Israelis. (Of course, you could argue that just carrying on with US governmental business as usual with regard to Israel– that is, dolloping out huge amounts of money to it with absolutely no questions asked about its land-grabbing policies in the West Bank, its inhumane siege on many Palestinian communities, etc.– is already appeasing it far too much already. But that discussion is for another day…)

Laila El-Haddad in NYC

The talented, engaging, and very knowledgeable Gaza blogger Ms. Laila El-Haddad will be speaking in NYC tomorrow evening (Thursday). The schedule and details are here. She’s apparently doing that speaking tour along with another really interesting and active young woman from Gaza called Fida Qishta.
If you want to learn about the situation in Gaza, this sounds like an excellent opportunity!
(I’m going to be in New York too this week… But not till Saturday. Maybe I can catch Laila in DC next week, instead.)
If any JWN reader gets to the New York event, do send us an account of it– either through the Comments box here or via email, to me.

‘At least a car bomb is indiscriminate’

Immortal quote from Riverbend yesterday:

    I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.

I can’t tell you how much this reminds me of Lebanon, 1976.
I covered the aftermaths of a number of car-bombs there. They were used especially by the “Christian”-exclusivist forces agains civilians living on the Muslim-and-leftist side.
Body parts scattered about. A hand on the dashboard of a car across the street… Random pieces of human flesh thrown onto a tree…
I covered the aftermaths of a lot of incidences of ethnic/sectarian cleansing, too. The “clearing out” of some 250,000 Shiite Muslims from the neighborhoods of East Beirut– and of course, the “clearing out” of the Palestinian refugee camps from there, too.
The International Organization for Migration reported June 2 from Iraq that,

    More than one million people are displaced in[side] Iraq as a result of decades of conflict with at least 203,000 of them particularly vulnerable and in need of humanitarian assistance. Most urgent however, are the needs of those displaced since late February.

The report also says,

    Nearly 100,000 people have been displaced in Iraq’s central and southern governorates since the bombing of the shrine at Samara on 22 February and numbers are continually rising,

Until recently, the UN Country Team (UNCT) that coordinates the humanitarian aid supplied by the various UN bodies in Iraq (UNHCR, World Food Program, WHO, Unicef, etc) has steadfastly tried to avoid supporting the establishment of any large-scale IDP camps, as this report from May 30 spelled out.
(This position was most likely adopted in line with the thinking of former UNHCR chief Mrs. Sadako Ogata, whom I heard agonizing back in 1995 over the effects inside Bosnis of the international community’s establishment of–nearly always– mono-ethnic IDP camps there. Her clear assessment was that the establishment of those camps had facilitated the many waves of ethnic cleansing that raged acorss that land and the concurrent emergence of mono-ethnic and often separatist polities there… This is an incredibly tough kind of decision for humanitarian-aid managers to have to make.)
However, in Iraq, the national government has already started to support the establishment of IDP camps. The UN report linked to there says this:

    The UNCT has consistently taken the position that the establishment of IDP camps should be avoided; and that IDPs ought to be supported through host family arrangements until alternative accommodation and durable solutions can be found. Nevertheless, given the fact that the government has already begun setting up IDP camps and isrequesting assistance from the humanitarian community, the UNCT’s IDP Working Group is preparing a guidance note on how the UNCT could support these camps as an option of last resort.

As in any instance of atrocity-laden inter-group conflict, large numbers of Iraqi citizens have also fled outside their country. I am not sure how many there are in Jordan or Iran right now. (Any info on such figures, friends?) But this report by the UN’s IRIN service from Damascus says:

    Local NGOs put the number of Iraqis in Syria at about 800,000, the majority of whom live in the suburbs of Damascus in deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Before the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003, their numbers were estimated at only 100,000.
    The report further noted that prostitution among young Iraqi women, some as young as 12 years old, “may become more widespread, since the economic situation of Iraqi families is deteriorating.” “Organised networks dealing in the sex trade were reported,” it noted, citing evidence that “girls and women were trafficked by organised networks or family members”.
    Rising child labour was also cited as a worrying trend…
    “We can’t leave Syria alone on this issue,” said Dietrun Günther, senior protection officer at the UNHCR in Damascus. “If the West really wants to help Syria in this matter, it must negotiate new terms for its support of refugees.”

Anyway, let’s all just work for the speediest possible end to the violence and destruction in Iraq, and the speediest possible return of all these internally and internationally displaced Iraqi citizens to their homes.
And we could light a special candle for Riverbend: The clarity, humanity, and eloquence of her writing about the effects of the maelstrom of violence in Iraq make her testimony every bit as powerful as Anne Frank’s testimony of living as a hunted fugitive in Nazi-occupied Holland.

US commanders understand Iraq mission’s failure

This little piece of reporting by Capitol Hill Blue’s Doug Thompson looks very significant. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for flagging it.)
Thompson writes:

    Military commanders in the field in Iraq admit in private reports to the Pentagon the war “is lost” and that the U.S. military is unable to stem the mounting violence killing 1,000 Iraqi civilians a month.
    Even worse, they report the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha is “just the tip of the iceberg” with overstressed, out-of-control Americans soldiers pushed beyond the breaking point both physically and mentally.
    “We are in trouble in Iraq,” says retired army general Barry McCaffrey. “Our forces can’t sustain this pace, and I’m afraid the American people are walking away from this war.”
    Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has clamped a tight security lid on the increasingly pessimistic reports coming out of field commanders in Iraq, threatening swift action against any military personnel who leak details to the press or public.

McCaffrey has been in Iraq fairly recently and was one of the Iraq experts called in to a small-group meeting with Pres. Bush last week. I just hope that Bush (1) allowed McCaffrey enough time to give an honest report on what he had seen, and (2) listened to him carefully and understood what he was hearing.
I’ve been pretty busy over the past few days writing two pieces that I consider important on the theme that the failure of the Bushite project in Iraq is now clear. One is my column for Thursday’s CSM. The other is a longer think-piece that should appear on Salon.com tomorrow.
It has become increasingly clear to me over recent weeks that:

    (1) The US military has no ability and no plan for resolving Iraq’s interlocking crises of public security collapse, infrastructural breakdown, and prolonged political impasse. These problems are unevenly distributed through the country. But the fact that the insecurity is greatest of all within the huge metropolis of Baghdad, the hub of the country, is fatal to the Bushite project.
    (2) The political process being shepherded forward by Viceroy Khalilzad has been going nowhere. Here we are, now nearly 6 months after that much-hyped national election of december 15, and the country still doesn’t have a full government!
    (3) Also, Juan Cole’s daily events-in-Iraq blog, which used to contain many tidbits of internal Iraqi political news, has become almost totally a lengthy daily catalogue of grisly deaths and mayhem. (And of course it’s not just Juan… That is, unfortunately, most of the news that’s happening inside Iraq these days.)

Invading Iraq was– as I note in both the pieces I’ve been writing– a huge roll of the geopolitical dice by the Bushites. That they have lost the “game” they played there there will have huge repurcussions– both in Iraq, and far beyond.
Here, just as a benchmark, is the lead to the column I had in the CSM on January 9, 2003:

    Any use of massive violence such as that Washington is now threatening against Iraq is a terrible thing.
    Everything we know about violence gives two clear lessons. First, the use of force always has unintended – often quite unpredictable – consequences. And second, war in the modern era always disproportionately harms civilians.

And here’s how I finished it:

    Mr. President, there is still time to stop this war. True, the build-up toward it has already been very expensive. But you should not conclude that the fact of those already sunk costs locks you into a path of war against Iraq from which there is no escape. If you launch this war, then the cost – in dollars, in human suffering, and in unfolding strategic chaos around the Middle East and the world – will be unimaginably greater than anything you’ve spent to date.
    Turn back. You have many friends in the US and around the world who will eagerly help you find a way to do so.

He didn’t listen to me, or to any others of the hundreds of experts in Middle Eastern and world affairs who warned him this would turn out badly… I am crying for the people of Iraq this week. I just hope they can find a way to hold their country together and bind up the wounds they are all currently suffering.

Tuwaitha, June 7, 1981: a short memoir

The Raid on the Osirak /
Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre, Sunday 7th June, 1981

The story of the bombed
Nuclear Site in Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre (South Baghdad)



“Operation Opera
(sometimes referred to as Operation Babylon)”

by Salah Yacoub*

On the 7th of June 1981, during the
Iraq-Iran war, the Israeli Air Force bombed the Iraqi nuclear site. Many
tried to justify this act. (For example, one commentator wrote, “America
and the coalition forces might have faced a nuclear-armed Iraq during the

Persian Gulf War
in 1991, and again during the U.S. invasion
of
Iraq
in 2003, had Israel not destroyed Iraq’s nuclear
reactor in 1981.”) But the majority of Iraqis judged that it was a crime
and a terrorist act sponsored by state of Israel.

The attack raised a number of questions of interpretation
regarding international legal concepts. Was it an act of legitimate self-defense
justifiable under international law under
Article 51
of the charter of the United Nations (UN)?
I wonder what the reactions would be if Israel’s neighbours used the same
argument, claiming that Israeli nuclear power represented a threat to them
also!

Let’s start with the Iraqi defence and military
arrangements for The Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre in 1981.

The site was protected by 50 meter
high earth ramparts all around it. This was this to force any planes to fly higher
before approaching the site so that the Iraqi air-defense radar stations
would detect them.

The Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre had its own air
defense station, combined of anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles.
On the top of earth ramparts there were many AA guns set to open fire in
event of any warning so they would make a ring of fire around the site. Also
there was a radar station to detect planes if it approached the site.

All around the site there were also balloons
filled with gas connected with cords to the ground so they kept over the
site at an altitude higher than the earth ramparts.

The city of Baghdad was protected by
Russian type SAM-2 and SAM-3 Air Defence missile networks with two different
killing zones (technology of the late 1950s).

Also around Baghdad on top of most high building
there were AAA guns: all had orders to open fire to protect the sky over
Baghdad city in any event of warning.

On the borders there was early warning radar
stations. Ttheir mission was to give early warning if any plane pass the
border or approached it. But at the time
the Iran war was going on on the Eastern
borders, so most of the attention was toward the East Borders.

During that time all SAM sites were working from
dawn till sunset. During the night-time the crews were on alert.

The Iraqi Air force also kept a daily patrol
flying over Baghdad, on the edge of the city from dawn till sunset. All
fighters would land by sunset time, but the crews remained on alert at all
the times.

On Jun 7 shortly after the time when all the
batteries of SAM2&3 had just been turned off, and the Iraqi fighter air
patrol had just landed at the end of the day-long mission, there came the
sound of explosions and shortly after that the sky was filled with the
flashes of exploding rounds from all the guns set up around…

Continue reading “Tuwaitha, June 7, 1981: a short memoir”

6-power overture to Iran working?

Iran’s positive response to the international negotiators’ overture is really exciting. Long may this progress towards de-escalation in the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the broader region continue!
Wednesday is the 25th anniversary of Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear plant at Tuwaitha (Osirak). I’m planning something special here on JWN to mark the occasion.
Oh, and look who‘s sending out a fundraising letter urging a tough US position against Iran. That would be AIPAC… Well, I guess after the Bush administration started thinking a bit harder about the 2,480 US body-bags that resulted from the last successful piece of warmongering by AIPAC and its allies, they decided that maybe there was a better way of doing things…

More on Darfur death tolls

A few readers have challenged what I wrote here recently, when I challenged Ruth Messinger’s claim that “Half a million people are dead and 3.5 million are displaced” as a direct result of the genocidal violence in Darfur. In that post I noted that the WaPo’s Emily Waxreported from the Chad-Darfur border at the end of April that “tens of thousands” had been killed during the genocide, and said my judgment would be to prefer Wax’s figure over Messinger’s.
I’ve done a little more online research on the issue. A WaPo editorial noted on April 24 that, “On his recent visit to Sudan, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick… said that the State Department’s estimate of deaths in Darfur was 60,000 to 160,000.”
The editorial claimed that range was far too low, and continued: “Other authorities suggest that mortality is likely to be closer to 400,000.” The sources they used for that included various extrapolations from limited samples taken by NGOs.
In this report from Khartoum yesterday, Evelyn Leopold of Reuters wrote,

    Since 2003, at least 200,000 people in Darfur have died from bullets, hunger or disease, 2.5 million have been thrown out of their homes, many burned to the ground, and hundreds of women have been raped, mainly by Arab militia after a rebellion broke out. The Sudan military had armed militia although it is no longer certain if they control their allies.

And in this June 4 report, also from Khartoum, AFP’s Charles Onians wrote:

    In 2003, the SLM alongside the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched a rebellion in the western region of Darfur, prompting a heavy-handed crackdown by the Khartoum government and its proxy militia called the Janjaweed.
    Since then, the conflict has left around 300,000 people dead and 2.4 million homeless.

Since Leopold and Onians are currently on the ground in Sudan, and presumably in good contact with the many aid workers and international diplomats there, I would be inclined to go with their estimates at this point.
I really liked the way Onians framed his little casualty report– putting the casualties clearly in the context of the armed political conflict of which they are such a tragic result, without trying to claim that they were “all” the victims of either one side or the other.
So maybe I would go with his casualty total, or say something like “somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 deaths.” This is considerably more than “tens of thousands.” But I also think it’s important not to convey the false impression (as Messinger did) that all the deaths have been inflicted by one side in the conflict.
Each one of these deaths is a tragedy. How many unrecognized Mother Theresas, how many Yo-Yo Ma’s had their lives snuffed out in those brutal circumstances?
Let’s all do whatever we can to help end the conflict that made such brutality possible.

Somalia: a sadly familiar scenario

Hey, does any of this story-line sound familiar? Some years ago, the US military was engaged in a conflict in Country X that US leaders described as being of great “geopolitical” significance… Then, inexplicably, the US shrugged off its interest and concern for X. (And since, during the 1990s, the US was widely judged by other governments to be the global hegemon, no other world power showed much concern for Country X, either.)
For many years, the various communities of Country X fell into ever greater political chaos, warlordism, impoverishment, social disorder, and de-development…
Then one day, along comes what seems like a fairly dedicated Islamist movement. It wins popular support by promising to rescue people from the ills of the warlordism that besets them. Propelled by this popular support, it seizes power in the capital…
Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1996– or Mogadishu, Somalia, today?
I watched some intriguing footage from Mogadishu on the BBC t.v. news tonight. It showed what looked like a mass rally being held by the the Islamist movement, which is called the Union of Islamic Courts, which looked very large indeed.
That piece I linked to from the BBC website says that officials with the UIC say that talks are taking place with fighters still loyal to the warlords.
Somalia’s shell of a national government has its hesadquarters not in the capital but in Baidoa, some 200 miles (I think) to the south. The BBC reports– presumably from Baidoa– that Interim Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi says his government wants to begin dialogue with the UIC. It adds:

    Earlier, Mr Ghedi sacked four powerful Mogadishu-based warlords who had been serving as ministers.
    Nine of the 11 Mogadishu-based warlords have now left the city, reports the BBC’s Mohammed Olad Hassan.
    The four sacked ministers include Security Minister Mohammed Qanyare Afrah and Trade Minister Muse Sudi Yalahow who over the weekend lost control of their Mogadishu strongholds.
    Most of Mr Qanyare Afrah’s fighters have joined the Islamic militia, but Mr Sudi Yalahow and his commanders remain in the capital and are locked in talks over their next move.
    This year’s clashes in the capital have been the most serious for more than a decade, with some 330 people killed and about 1,500 injured in the past month.
    In a statement read over local radio stations, the Union of Islamic Courts leader Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed said the control of Mogadishu by warlords was over and he urged residents to accept the new leadership.
    “The Union of Islamic Courts are not interested in a continuation of hostilities and will fully implement peace and security after the change has been made by the victory of the people with the support of Allah,” he said.
    “This is a new era for Mogadishu,” he told AFP news agency, adding that the Islamic Courts were ready for dialogue.
    Local people in Mogadishu gave a cautious welcome to the news.
    “They said they would work with residents to improve security in the capital,” city resident Ali Abdikadir told Reuters news agency.
    “This is good news for us because the warlords were always engaged in battles. We are looking forward to a life without fighting.”
    But some seemed unconvinced that the weeks of bloodshed were really over.
    “It’s good to see conflict resolved but I don’t want to celebrate a temporary victory,” housewife Hawa Ismail Qorey told AFP. “Mogadishu is witnessing political history but it may be good or it may be bad.”
    And others expressed concern about what the future might hold with Islamists who want to introduce Sharia law in control.
    “What I am afraid of is if they interfere with the education system and bring religion by force to the schools,” Asha Idris, a mother of five, told AFP…
    The violence began earlier this year when warlords who had divided Mogadishu into fiefdoms united to form the Anti-Terrorism Alliance to tackle the Islamic Courts, who they accused of sheltering foreign al-Qaeda militants.
    The Islamic Courts deny this. They were originally set up in Mogadishu as a grassroots movement by businessmen to establish some law and order in a city without any judicial system.
    The head of the BBC’s Somali service described the rise of the Islamic Courts as a popular uprising.
    The Islamic Courts have long said the warlords in the Anti-Terror Alliance were being backed by the US.
    Washington merely says it will support those trying to stop people it considers terrorists setting up in Somalia but stresses its commitment to the country’s transitional government, which functions from Baidoa, 250km (155 miles) north-west of the capital.
    President Abdullahi Yusuf had urged the US to channel its campaign against Somalia’s Islamists through his government, rather than the warlords.

Reuters, meanwhile, is reporting from Washington that:

    Warlords were getting cash payments of more than $100,000 a month from the
    Central Intelligence Agency, according to Somalia expert John Prendergast of the think-tank International Crisis Group. He said he learned about the support during meetings with members of the warlords’ alliance.

Well, now we need to see what the international community (with or without the US) is prepared to do, to help Somalia’s seven million people get out of this long-festering mess…
Meanwhile, both Afghanistan and Iraq now show many signs of being threatened by an imminent collapse (or for Afghanistan, relapse) into outright warlordism. The militarism and arrogant hegemonism that have characterized the United States’ engagement with the world over recent decades have a lot to answer for.
US militarism has indeed been a powerful force for social collapse and human suffering in many countries around the world. At this point, the US military machine needs to be trimmed radically– back to the rock-bottom level that is needed for absolutely immediate national defense. US citizens need to turn our back quite decisively on all these feverish dreams of world domination that have gripped the Bush administration (and before it, the Clinton administration), and find out how to re-engage with the other peoples of the world as the human equals that we all are…
Then, think how many freed-up national resources we would have that we could pour into starting to repair some of the harm we have caused around the world, and to build up productive and self-confident communities everywhere.
Meantime, though, let’s wish the very best for all the people of Somalia.

The Khamenei text

Huge kudos, once again, to Juan Cole for having made available to the public a key publicly funded product of the US government’s “Open Source Center”– namely, the OSC’s English translation of substantial excerpts from the speech that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave yesterday at Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum.
The speech contained significant and very well-argued responses to the principle accusations the US government has been making against the Iranian government. Khamenei lists these accusations thus:

    First, that there is an international consensus against Iran.
    Second, that Iran is a threat to the world.
    Third, that Iran is trying to make a nuclear bomb and nuclear weapons.
    Fourth, that Iran is a violator of human rights…

And then, as I say, he responds to those…
The whole of the text that Juan publishes there is incredibly important, especially in these days when the Bushites’ fear- and hate-mongering campaign against Iran has assumed a front-and-center position in their’ engagement (such as it is) with the rest of the world.
Juan makes two excellent points about the limitations on the availability of the Khamenei text:

    (1) The US media presented only a snippet from the speech of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran on Sunday, in which he threatened to damage oil supplies to the West if the US militarily attacked Iran. He did say that, but he also announced that Iran had no intention of striking first, had not attacked and would not attack another country, and that it has no nuclear weapons program and does not want a nuclear bomb. I didn’t hear any of those statements reported on television.
    For some strange reason, a relatively full text of important speeches given by world leaders is almost never provided to the public by any US media in English. I doubt there are even a handful of speeches easily accessible in English by Spanish President Zapatero, e.g. I cannot entirely explain this strange phenomenon, of the coccooned and almost deliberately ignorant approach to the world of the US corporate media and their audience.

And,

    (2) the American public pays tax dollars so that the Open Source Center of the USG can translate such primary texts. They are, however, not made freely available, though you can get them via university and maybe other good libraries.

Well, yes, Juan, you can get them easily via university libraries if you have a nice tenured professorship at such a university. As for the rest of us taxpayers here…
Which is why it is great that Juan, who is one of the privileged few in this regard, takes the trouble to publish an important text such as this on his freely accessible blog.
I have a suggestion. Either the US government should make the products of the publicly funded OSC freely available via the (also publicly funded) world-wide-web. Or it should change the institution’s name to the Closed Source Center.
There is just one thing that Juan writes in his post there that I disagree with. That is this: “I should think it is obvious that I loathe Khamenei and his regime, but I suppose I have to say so yet again in today’s wretched intellectual environment.”
For my part, I am deeply concerned by some (but not all) of what I know about the human-rights record and other practices of the Iranian regime. But that doesn’t lead me to “loathe” anyone. Moreover, I don’t see that the sentiments of any one private individual like Juan Cole toward someone else (even a public figure like Khamenei) have any particular broader relevance; and more importantly, I don’t see that bringing his own private feelings into his discussion of the Khamenei text adds anything of value to the discussion. Far from it, it detracts from the value of the discussion, for two reasons: (1) It indicates there may be an emotional and not totally rational dimension to his analysis, and (2) By saying, “I suppose I have to say so yet again in today’s wretched intellectual environment” Juan seems to me to be giving the authors of that wretched intellectual environment a quite unnecessary victory…
Far better, surely, if he had written something like, “Think what you may of the track-record of the mullahs’ regime, Khamenei’s speech at least deserves wide dissemination and a fair hearing.”
(At another level, too, I strive to not to let my strong disapproval of the acts of some individuals or groups of individuals become generalized into any “hatred” or “loathing” for those individuals. This is a Gandhian– and also, a Christian– thing to do. Loving the sinner while hating the sin… I think it is really important.)
So anyway, at this point, let me join Juan in disseminating the Khamenei text. Here (without Juan’s marking-up in “bold”) it is:

Continue reading “The Khamenei text”