Jonathan Edelstein and I both have new posts up at the Transitional Justice Forum blog. I put mine up last night. It’s about Serbia. Jonathan put his up today. It’s about Uganda. Amazingly, though, both deal with a number of the same tough issues, including the difficulty of negotiating between the interests of peace and those of justice, and also between the desire to punish one prominent accused perpetrator and the (peacemaking) interests of the broader community…
(The former of those dilemmas is a theme that Jonathan and I have both written quite a lot about.)
Anyway, head on over and join the discussions there.
Author: Helena
Iraq: an empowered government?
I’ve been a little AWOL here recently in commenting on political developments inside Iraq. I guess once the US machinations against Daawa/Sadr were rebuffed I figured that that was one significant watershed, and that Nuri al-Maliki’s subsequent work of government formation would be almost impossible to follow from a distance.
I do, however, have a couple of questions that I need answers to. And I invite readers to help us all find answers!
The first question is this: Even if supposing Maliki is able to pull together a coalition of government ministers that can win a robust majority in the parliament (not terribly difficult)– will it actually be able to govern the country?
I see two main problems in this regard: first, the still heavy hand of the US occupation presence throughout the country, including inside most of the important ministries; and second, the extreme degradation of the administrative and other capabilities of the ministries that has occurred under the US occupation to date. (Obviously, those two problems can’t be completely disaggregated.)
For example, if you’re even something as innocuous (and necessary) as the Minister of Agriculture, and you want to make sure that farmers are getting everything they need in terms of seeds, credit, fertilizers, marketing help, veterinary services, etc– well, how on earth do you do it unless you have a functioning ministry, the ability to communicate with all the parts of the country, reliable procurement mechanisms, etc etc?
… And my second big question is this: If, as is expected, Maliki announces his government over the weekend, do I take the ‘Democracy Denied in Iraq’ counter down off the sidebar here at that point, or wait a bit before deciding that?
I guess this latter judgment has to do with whether I judge that the government has sufficient democratic legitimacy for me to take the counter down, or not. The whole concept of the counter was based on the judgment I’d make back in December that the vote then, though flawed, did have sufficient bona fides to be counted as democratically legitimate. (As I have written before in connection with developments in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in the context of a complex political transition what one is looking for is not a completely perfect election but one that is sufficiently free and fair.)
Anyway, regarding the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter, after I put up here in early 2005, during the complicated post-election negotiations that led to Ibrahim Jaafari’s formation of a broad “transitional government”– as soon as he had formed it, I took the counter down. I gave him the benefit of the doubt at that point, really.
But this time, the situation is more serious. This government is supposed to be “the real thing”: Iraq’s real, full-term, and presumably fully empowered national government. Not a “transitional” government any more.
But how fully empowered will it be in practice? (See my first question above.)
The views of readers on these points are very welcome…
Meanwhile, let’s all just note that it is now 154 days— just about five months– since the December 15 election. Given the decisive nature of the results of the election, coalition formation absolutely need not have lasted more than one month. So Amb. Zal Khalilzad’s machinations have robbed the Iraqis of four months of self-government already. And it is not just that those “stolen” four months were neutral ones for Iraqis. Indeed, nearly the whole of the past five months has seen a ghastly exacerbation of insecurity throughout the country…
End the occupation and all its machinations! Bring the US troops home!
Cindy Sheehan and Ann Wright– in Charlottesville!
I finally got to meet Cindy Sheehan yesterday. She and Ann Wright both came to Charlottesville to speak at a public forum organized by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice.
We got well over 400 people there, which was exciting.
Cindy, I guess I don’t need to introduce to the readers here. Ann was one of the three US Foreign Service Officers who resigned the day the Bush administration started bombing Iraq. (Here‘s her resignation letter.) At that time she was the No.2 person in the US Embassy in Mongolia. She is a whip-smart, extremely principled, and very hardworking person! She was wearing a tee-shirt with the numbers of US (and Iraqi) casualties prominently taped to the front…
She had some really interesting ideas about how CCPJ ought to reach out and talk to folks at the US military’s very own law school– the “Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School“– which is located right here in town, next to the UVA law school and right behind one of our main shopping centers. She noted that the head JAG officers from all four of the military services had played a strong role in trying to uphold the government’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions, etc, and said it was quite likely we might find folks at the JAG school who have served down in Guantanamo, or in Bagram, or Iraq.
(I actually thought a while back we ought to do try to talk to some JAG school folks here. So it’s good that Ann kind of jogged my memory on that.)
Anyway, it was really inspiring to meet both Ann and Cindy, and to hear what they said. I don’t have time to write a lot here about it. If you have the capability to download a podcast, you can hear the whole forum yourself, here.
I do have to say, though, that I thought the evening went on a bit long. There were two fairly lengthy spoken introductions and then quite a lot of songs from Terri Allard before we got to the two main speakers. Many in the audience were tired even before Ann and Cindy got started– and it looked as though both of them were pretty tired, too…
These two women are national treasures! We have to look after them!
A footnote: the reason we were able to get these two fabulous women to come and speak here was because of David Swanson, an indefatigable antiwar organizer and nationwide Democratic activist who moved here to town with his wife Anna just a few months ago. We are so lucky to have him him here. Thanks for everything you do, David!
Boots
Last Wednesday, I spent the afternoon on the National Mall in Washington DC, helping to set out the (then) 2,428 pairs of combat boots that are at the center of the American Friends Service Committee’s traveling antiwar installation, “Eyes Wide Open”.
Each pair of boots represents a US service-member who has been killed in Iraq. The two clunky black boots in each pair have their laces tied together (for easy handling) and have the name, age, and hometown of the represented GI on a laminated card that is attached there. I gather that some of the boots are the actual combat boots of that soldier, and some are simply representative. Members of the anti-war veterans’ organizations that have been working with AFSC on the project have been in touch with all the family members involved, who have the option of having “Name withheld” put on the tag if they don’t want their loved one’s name included in the exhibition.
Very, very few of the tags that I read said “Name withheld.”
When I was working down there, it was the day before the exhibit was due to open. We had a number of preliminary tasks to do. One was simply to count the pairs of boots in the group of plastic bins used to transport the boots pertaining to each of the different states. A fellow-volunteer named Constance and I counted our way through the bins for a number of different states, finishing up with Texas.
Even just handling the boots to do the counting was already a much more moving experience than I’d been expecting. The boots had been brought here in big Rubbermaid-style storage bins, that were laid out along the side of the grass there in alphabetical order by state. We (and other volunteer duos working alongside us) had to take the boots out of each bin, counting them as we went, and then put them back in, counting again (to make sure.) Constance and I got into a rhythm. There were so many bins! It’s not till you stop to think about it that you realize how much sheer space 2,428 pairs of combat boots must take up. Each bin held roughly 20 pairs.
One-two-three-four… Slow and systematic. Try not to get the laces knotted around each other. Lay the pairs out within easy reach as you take them out. Neater works better…
Seventeen-eighteen-nineteen-twenty-twentyone. Right! Twentyone. Now, let’s count them back in. “You start!” One-two-three-four…
Then you start reading the names and the pitifully young ages of these men (and the much rarer women). And the hometowns. And you get to thinking about the life snuffed out of this young person.
Many of the boots have family memorabilia (laminated against the weather) also attached to them: Photos, poems, children’s drawings. Stuffed animals. Flags. Funeral eulogies.
It can get to you. But you can’t let it get to you, because you have to keep focused on the counting.
Eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen…
And then we came to Texas. Other duos had kind of side-skipped it, since its collection ran to twelve big bins. While Constance was off getting some water to drink, I took a deep breath and started in on it.
Texas added up to 214 pairs of boots.
“I wonder how many of those funerals George W. Bush went to?”
H’mm.
Later, I worked with the groups of people trying to lay the boots out on the big broad lawn there. We were at the Washington Monument end of the Mall– but you could look up easily and see the great looming mass of the US Capitol Building at the far end of the greensward. The building, that is, where back in October 2002 the 535 lawmakers acting with their “eyes wide open” gave President Bush carte blanche to do anything he damn’ well pleased to Iraq… including, to invade it.
The boots were laid out in a broad, grid-based array. There were 39 in each row– meaning some 63 rows in all. Roughly four feet between each pair. If you think of all those 2,428 soldiers standing there to attention, this is roughly where their boots would be.
But the soldiers aren’t there…
This was mind-numbing work, too. Hauling the bins along the lines, taking out the boots, having someone get down and arrange them properly, respectfully… The work was a little disorganized, since the guys laying out the grids with strings and red golf-tees often weren’t far ahead of those of us trying to position the boots.
The blazing sun ground its way slowly down the big sky.
There were lots of passers-by. Nearly everyone seemed very interested, and very supportive. Random people stopped and offered to help. It got so that when I needed someone to help me haul a bin onto one of the little moving-dollies they had there, I would just ask a passer-by and he or she would always seem happy to help.
(George W. Bush is in deep, deep trouble over this war.)
When my four hours were up, I walked over to the other part of the exhibit, where they’d been working with huge piles of civilian shoes that represented the Iraqi civilian deaths during the war.
Here, they hadn’t even bothered to have a one-to-one representativity. Which total do you count, anyway? I was glad to see they had a big board highlighting the “epidemiological” study that concluded– ways back, a long time ago now– that just under 100,000 Iraqis had met a premature death on account of the war.
What the organizers had done with the pairs of civilian shoes was great. These, too, had the two shoes in each pair attached together, and had tags with the names of killed Iraqi civilians on them. But groups of volunteers had been spending long hours here laying them out end to end in the form of a huge and very complex labyrinth.
“Go ahead, walk it!” someone said. I did. I kept my eyes focused on the shoes as I walked: men’s shoes, women’s shoes, girls’ shoes, boys’ shoes, baby shoes. Scuffed and mangled shoes. Brand new party shoes. I looked at the shoes and followed the labyrinth in toward the center, and forgot all about the Capitol Building looming so close above me. It was very meditative.
… Well, I never had the chance to see the whole layout of all of the boots and shoes there. I gather that between Thursday and Sunday they had a large number of different activities planned there.
On Thursday, there were terrible storms all over DC. The exhibit organizers had made a decision not to try to take the boots off the exhibit to a dry place, but just to let them stand. I guess combat boots are meant to withstand bad weather. I don’t know about the civilian shoes, though. As I went to various meetings in DC Thursday and saw the downpours, I thought about the boots standing there.
… Well, guess who else went to the exhibit while it was up? Richard Perle– the “Prince of Darkness” himself! One of the major intellectual architects of the war.
Bill Perry, a disabled veteran of the US-Vietnam War and a member of “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” and other antiwar groups, was there and happened to recognize Perle. He put this post about the confrontation that a number of the antiwar people there– mainly war vets– had with Perle up onto David Swanson’s website Afterdowningstreet.org.
There are pictures there, too. I particularly like this one.
Perry wrote there:
- Richard Perle had a PBS camera crew about 80 or 90 yards off to the side of the Speakers’ Rostrum @ yesterday’s AFSC Eyes Wide Open (BOOTS) Demo, in Washington, DC. The PBS Producers said they were rehabilitating Perle’s image, so he can be kicked upstairs, similar to the Bush promotion of Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank.
They thought they wouldn’t be noticed using the “Boots” demo background during the speaking portion of the EWO demo…
I wish I’d been there for that!
Yes, it certainly seems very exploitative if Perle and the people filming him were using the Boots installation as a background for an attempt to rehabilitate him politically…
On the other hand, at least Perle did dare to go near the exhibit and be exposed to the potent reminders it gives of the costs of war.
As for our President???
ER documentary tells some truths about war
David Steinbruner, the author of the piece I just posted here, is one of the emergency physicians featured in the new documentary ‘Baghdad ER’ that HBO will be screening this coming weekend.
CNN had this pre-release description of the movie on their website last week. (Also here.) Read the description there. It makes me definitely want to see the movie, though we don’t have HBO.
The WaPo’s Paul Farhi had a short report in today’s paper about a special screening of the movie that was held Monday night at the National Museum of American History. The main thrust of Farhi’s piece was to note that the support the Pentagon once had for the movie project has waned drastically in recent weeks.
He writes:
- HBO executives say that top Army officials expressed enthusiasm for the documentary in March, but that the Pentagon’s support has waned. They believe the military is troubled by the film’s unflinching look at the consequences of the war on American soldiers, and that it might diminish public support.
The documentary, shot over 2 1/2 months in mid-2005, contains graphic and disturbing footage of soldiers reeling from their wounds — in some cases, dying of them — as Army medical personnel try to save them. The film illustrates the compassion and dedication of the staff of the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. But it also has many gruesome images, such as shots of soldiers’ amputated limbs being dumped into trash bags, and pools of blood and viscera being mopped from a busy operating room floor. At one point, an Army chaplain, reciting last rites for a soldier, calls all the violence “senseless.”
… The network screened the film in mid-March for senior Army officials, including Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey, and received an enthusiastic response, said Richard Plepler, HBO’s executive vice president.
… Thereafter, Plepler said, the Army’s support began to evaporate. The network’s offer to co-sponsor a screening of the film this week at Fort Campbell, Ky., the home of the 86th, was turned down by the Pentagon without explanation. The Army wasn’t an official sponsor of Monday’s screening, and none of the service’s highest-ranking officers or senior medical personnel attended, despite HBO’s invitation.
Farhi also wrote this:
- Among the guests in attendance was Paula Zwillinger, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Robert Mininger, 21, died in Iraq from injuries from a roadside bomb. Zwillinger said in an interview that she didn’t know exactly how her son died until the film’s producers — Joseph Feury, Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill — contacted her as they were editing the film. Mininger’s death is chronicled in a prolonged sequence at the end of “Baghdad ER.”
She called the film a gift. “It gave me peace. At least I know he was with someone, and didn’t die alone,” she said.
Despite the grim subject matter, Zwillinger said: “I am positive about this film. It needs to be shown. I want the world to know this is reality. War is graphic, war is raw, war hurts. And we need more support for our troops, no matter what we think of the war.”
Emma’s second birthday
- Here in the US of A, we’ve just had Mother’s Day, and we’re proceeding fast toward Father’s Day (June 18).
I’m thinking of all the mothers and fathers who are deployed in the US occupation force in Iraq, many under very difficult conditions, and I’m hoping sincerely that they can all come home soon, safe and sound, to be reunited with their kids.
And yes, of course, I’m also thinking about all the Iraqi moms and dads who have been separated from their children by the horrible circumstances of this war and wishing the same good things for them.
… So here, with great gratitute and appreciation to the author is a very moving piece of writing from David Steinbruner, a younger friend of our family who has been working as an ER doc in the Green Zone in Baghdad. He sent it to his family and friends and gave me permission to publish it here.
Back in Baghdad. And someone turned the heat up. I have been back now for about a month. It was good, though jarring, to go home. Everyone who is here for more than 8 months gets two weeks of R&R. For most of us this means a trip home. Although the journey drags on several days and nights and requires multiple aircraft, it really is disturbingly quick. One moment I am sitting in Iraq, wrapped in a heavy cocoon of kevlar plates with a hundred rounds of ammunition strapped to my body and an M-16 slung over my shoulder and then . . . I am back. Stripped of all the tools of war, I step off the plane in Dallas wonderfully unencumbered and wondering if I have just been having a strange, uncomfortable dream. Returning is exciting, awkward and moving. The world at home has continued on without any powerful indication of my absence. Life did not pause while I was gone. My children, at that age where they seem to grow overnight, are now not nearly as young as I remember. I landed in Dallas around 10 am on March 19th, many hours and half a world away from my last shower, with an aching need to be in [my hometown]. After two days of travel, this need was stronger than hunger or sleep, as if everything in my life had come down to those next few hours. Emma, my very talkative two year old, was having a birthday in several hours and there was no way in hell that I was going to miss it, not if I had anything to say about . . . Relax.
This must be a pretty common feeling for a returning soldier. I was met in Dallas by a very nice mother/daughter team that told me when the next flight to [my home city] was and which airline and where to go. I made the flight with time to spare. Many odd stares on the plane. There just are not that many soldiers flying back to [that airport]. The new uniform is not immediately recognized and most look puzzled. “Are you in the Army?”
“Yes, just coming back from Iraq”
“Wow” Then silence.
They want to say so much, to ask, but they are not sure where to go with it. Most just say thank you. I just smile and say “Your welcome, my pleasure” Don’t worry, I am thinking, I know the dilemma you’re wrestling with and I don’t take it personally. The dilemma of a professional, volunteer, soldier in a conflict that defies easy answers. Wrestle away, I think, you are citizen of the Republic and it is your right and responsibility. Good luck.
I make it in time for the party. In a time-zone hopping induced haze, my father-in-law picks me up at the airport and deposits me at the door to Chuck E. Cheese. Now that is a bit of culture shock. Four days ago I was resuscitating wounded soldiers fresh from the deadly roads of Iraq. Now here I stand, dozens of kids blasting around in a sugar-induced frenzy. I am having trouble processing all this, when in walks my son Ryan and my daughter Emma. Behind them comes Gilda, slightly distracted and looking so beautiful it hurts me a little. If you ever forget how important your family is to you, I have a remedy. It may take some time and distance, but it will recharge your soul and remind you what really matters most.
Gilda sees me first and smiles. It is amazing what your wife can say to you without words. She bends down to Ryan [the ‘big’ brother] and whispers in his ear. He looks over to me, blinks once and seems to shake his head, just to make sure I am real. Then it is a sprint through the crowd and up into my arms. You know your child’s smell, like a memory that you had nearly forgotten but now seems so familiar. Emma follows slowly, confused, but curious. Ryan knows this man, who is he? I crouch down and smile, but wait for her to come to me.
“Emma, it’s Daddy.” She pauses, unsure but the voice sounds familiar. Where has she heard that before? I walk over to here, kneel and put my arms out.
“It’s Daddy, Emma, remember?” Please God, let her remember, it has not been that long. Something clicks. She remembers the voice from the phone (she was listening) and she comes over. She lets me pick her up as she might a family friend who seems nice. Ryan is coming over and touching me, just to make sure. Now Emma understands, this is Daddy, the Daddy who talks on the phone to Ryan, the Daddy in the pictures. This is my Daddy. Suddenly all the hesitancy is gone. I cannot put her down for long before she turns to say: “Up Daddy, hold” And so I do. Home just in time…
Back on the (blog) beat!
This morning I finished my current round of editing/reviewing tasks on the Atrocities book manuscript. Phew!! That was hard work– especially since the copyedited version came in both later than planned and at a time when i was anyway very busy.
Btw you can see the book listed in the Fall 2006 catalogue of Paradigm Publishers. (PDF version here.) I love the cover of the catalogue– no clue yet what the cover of the book will look like…
So anyway, this morning, in addition, the webhosting service went down yet again. I read in the paper that the global spamming problem is rising to new levels, so I’m imagining that might be what’s been happening over there at Cornerhost…
But sorry about that.
Anyway, now I and Cornerhost are both back in action here. I have a couple of good posts coming up– and will then wade thru my backlog here and see what I could still salvage.
Tonight, Cindy Sheehan is coming here to Charlottesville, which I’m really looking forward to. (We’re also having a little family dinner here before the 7 p.m. Cindy event, since Bill and two of our kids and I are all at home, but Bill’s going to NYC tomorrow. I think I’m up for cooking… )
Enough rambling. Watch for the upcoming posts.
Recent hosting service malfunction
The webhosting service’s databases were down (out?) for 16 hours there. People could not post comments in that time. Nor could I put up any new posts.
Actually, I didn’t try to. Bill and I had guests yesterday afternoon– our old friends Benny and Leah Morris. We had some extremely interesting conversations. More, later. (Maybe.)
Today and tomorrow I’m crashing on finishing my review of the copyedits on the Africa book.
Bushist ‘vision’ for Iraq:145,000 mercenaries
Ellen Knickmeyer has a piece in today’s waPo that I simply have to draw attention to.
The article is about a network of ill-supervised forces that together make up the Facilities Protection Service (FPS), which she describes as the government’s largest paramilitary force, with 145,000 armed men and no central command, oversight or paymaster.
The FPS was first established by Viceroy Paul Bremer (remember him?) back in September 2003, with the mission of guarding Iraqi government facilities.
That was, of course, some five months after the US troops had stood idly by while just about every Iraqi government ministry, hospital, museum etc was subjected to top-to-bottom looting by private bands of miscreants. (Oh, with the exception of the Oil Ministry, which somehow the US forces did see fit to guard.)
But what’s interesting is how Knickmeyer describes what the FPS has become since September 2003:
- Although the FPS guards are not police officers, they were allowed to wear variations of the blue uniform of Iraqi police. Many witnesses and survivors of death squad-style attacks have said the assailants were dressed in police uniforms.
FPS guards often are seen roaming Baghdad’s streets, holding Kalashnikov assault rifles and crowded into the backs of pickup trucks, some marked with insignia of the FPS or of the various government ministries they serve.
Increasingly, U.S. and Interior Ministry officials describe the FPS units as militias, each answering only to the ministry or private security firm that employs it.
As I read her piece, the way that it seems to work is this. Each Iraqi government ministry (and perhaps other government entities, as well) has to put out a contract for its own security. These contracts are placed with what she describes as “private security companies”, which then hire and organize that ministry’s FPS units.
Are the “private security companies” in question Iraqi-owned and run? Or are they owned and run American, British, South African, Israeli, or other foreign “experts” in this field? She doesn’t say.
But what does seem clear is that– in addition to the huge (and notably unsuccessful) efforts the occupation authorities have put into trying to recruit, train, and organize new army and police units for the still-weak Iraqi “government”–the occupation authorities have also been helping to pump arms and money into a large number of FPS units that come under the supervision of “private security companies” (i.e. companies of mercenaries.)
And the funds for these most likely come from the “budgets” of the ministries concerned.
And the result is to establish a large number of parallel and unsupervised mercenary-led forces inside the country.
Does anybody wonder why the “security” situation in occupied Iraq is so shockingly bad?
Does anybody wonder why the Iraqi “government ministries” are unable to accomplish very much of anything at all?
I guess I shouldn’t have been so shocked by reading this story. But I was. I had heard of the FPS before, of course; but I’d sort of kept it in mind that it was just one or two forces of “tribal” irregulars who were being paid (or, paid off) to provide security along some isolated lengths of national pipeline somewhere… No big deal.
But the FPS phenomenon is a much bigger deal than that. The way Knickmeyer describes it, every government ministry has one of these things– in other words, they’re operating inside heavily built up areas. And they’re each being run separately, and being run by mercenary security companies…
Maybe this is the ultimate in the neocons’ plan to destroy any concept of a functioning national government for Iraq. I just hope the anti-occupation forces in Iraq are strong and well-organized enough to be able to put an end to this immoral and violence-sowing occupation regime as soon as possible.
Open thread for courteous discussion
I’m dealing with a lot in the ‘real’ world. There’s a lot to discuss. I have a list of six or seven posts that I’ve been intending to put up. But no time, no time.
Y’all take over the shop for a couple of days. Send in posts and links on the global-affairs issues that concern you. I’ll get back ‘soon as I can.