Author: Helena

Syria: ‘suicide’ and uncertainty

Earlier today, Syria’s powerful and well-connected Interior Minister, Brig.Gen. Ghazi Kanaan, was found dead in his office, an apparent suicide. Prior to taking up his present job Kanaan had for 20 years been Syria’s pro-consul in Lebanon. He was one of seven Syrian officials who were questioned recently by the UN-appointed Mehlis Commission, which has been investigating the circumstances of the killing of Lebanon’s Rafiq Hariri last February.
Mehlis is scheduled to submit his report to the Security Council on October 25.
One first very important question is: did Kanaan in fact commit suicide?
It isvery hard to think of someone who has carried out the repressive tasks Kanaan has carried out inside both Lebanon and Syria throughout his life being suddenly struck by an attack of remorse such as might have propelled a suicide. There are of course, “suicides” and “suicides.” A person can be surrounded by armed opponents, handed a gun, and given the option of “ending it quickly.” (An option far kinder than that given by Kanaan to many of his victims.)
Is this a suicide?
If we assume that the decision that Kanaan’s life be taken was not one made only by himself, we need to ask why other powerful figures inside Damascus might want him dead. So far there seem two conjectures worth entertaining:

    1. President Asad wanted Kanaan to be the fall-guy who would carry the rap as the “highest” Syrian official responsible for Hariri’s murder… He may well also have wanted Kanaan to be effectively silenced and put in a place where he could no longer be interrogated by Detlev Mehlis’s investigators. Such a place was found.
    2. (This one was suggested on Josh Landis’s excellent blog from Syria) “Was Ghazi Kanaan setting himself up to be Bashar’s alternative? Could he have been the Alawite “Musharrif” that some American’s and Volker Perthes suggested would take power from the House of Asad and bring Syria back into America’s and the West’s good graces.” Under this scenario, Asad would have found out about the plot and ordered the staged suicide fairly rapidly.

(Perthes, I should note, is a very well-informed expert on Syria, and like Mehlis a German national. He is someone whose judgment I would generally be inclined to trust. On the other hand, I– like Josh Landis– found Perthes’s analysis of Bashar’s present political weakness in that IHT article to be a little overdrawn…)
Josh also refers to this story on the Lebanese newswire Naharnet which tells us that,

    Hours before he died, Kanaan contacted the Beirut Voice of Lebanon radio station and gave it a statement, concluding with the words: “I believe this is the last statement that I could make.” He asked seasoned interviewer ‘Wardeh’ to pass his comments to other broadcast media.

From that story, it ‘appeared’ that Kanaan feared principally that he was about to be set up as the fall-guy for the Mehlis Commission. However, contacting the Voice of Lebanon to give it that statement at that time was an incredibly risky thing to do. What could Kanaan have hoped it would achieve– apart from, perhaps, activate some pre-agreed plan for his exfiltration at a time of dire distress? And if there was perhaps some such plan in which he had at least some degree of faith in, then Landis’s speculation about the possibility that Kanaan was plotting with the Americans might indeed be not far from the mark.
All of Damascus must be on tenterhooks right now. I wonder if there has been a widespread campaign of arrests there? If Kanaan was indeed setting himself up (with help from the Americans and possibly others) to topple the president, then that is what we should expect to see.
If there has not been such a campaign, then the staged suicide of Gen. Kanaan is much more likely to have been an intra-regime affair… Obviously, the killing of a man as politically powerful as Kanaan would leave a good proportion of his many political allies in the country angry (and scared), but that is a different matter.
We should get more clues as to the real story here within the coming days. But of course, given that the regime passes in and out of the cross-hairs of the ardent “regime-changers” in washington, almost anything might happen in Syria over the days ahead.
(I’ll just note quickly here that when I took part in that gathering about Syrian political futures in DC six weeks ago, one of the conclusions in which most of the expert participants concurred was that any political force that might replace President Bashar al-Asad at the present time would almost certainly be considerably more hostile to US policies than Asad has been…)
God save Syria.

Pre-referendum security in Anbar province

Four days to go to the referendum… and according to this story in Az-Zaman — as translated by IWPR– the Independent Electoral Commission has still not been able to open any voting stations in the western Anbar region, the site of military operations over the past two weeks.
The IEC head, Adil al-Lami, has apparently,

    urged Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jafari to stop military operations in the western sector of the country so that citizens can participate in Saturday’s constitutional referendum. Lami… said Jafari was cooperative on the matter. Lami announced that the commission has opened 94 voting stations in the Anbar region and Fallujah.

From the total huge number of polling stations that the IEC operated countrywide during the last election, 94 doesn’t actually sound like very many.
Let’s hope that transitional PM Jaafari and the US commanders actually do start a ceasefire immediately to enable some semblance of decent referendum to be held… Though even then, the conditions for a reasoned, well-informed public consultation on this matter still look, let’s say, decidedly sub-optimal.

Many Iraqis apathetic or uninformed on the constitution

I read it here, on Riverbend’s great blog, first. You should read the whole of that wonderful post there… Bottom line: a conversation with her nieghbor, Umm F., to whom River has loaned one of her much-marked-up copies of the constitution…. Only to find that Umm F has split the bundle of papers in two and is using the two bundles to sweep dried berries off her porch…
Riverbend:

    “But what will you vote?” I asked, watching the papers as they became streaked with the crimson, blood-like tooki [berry] stains.
    “You’ll actually vote?” She scoffed. “It will be a joke like the elections… They want this constitution and the Americans want it- do you think it will make a difference if you vote against it?” She had finished clearing the top edge of the wall of the wilting tooki and she dumped it all on our side. She put the now dusty, took- stained sheets of paper back together and smiled as she handed them back, “In any case, let no one tell you it wasn’t a useful constitution- look how clean the wall is now! I’ll vote for it!” And Umm F. and the hedge clippers disappeared.
    It occurred to me then that not everyone was as fascinated with the constitution as I was, or as some of my acquaintances both abroad and inside of the country were. People are so preoccupied trying to stay alive and safe and just get to work and send their children off to school in the morning, that the constitution is a minor thing.

And now, here is a poll from the United Nations, as reported by Duraed Salman of IWPR’s Baghdad bureau:

    a recent nationwide public opinion survey conducted by the United Nations found the majority of respondents – slightly over 60 per cent – knew little or nothing about the constitutional drafting committee. Nearly 77 per cent had not seen a copy of the proposed constitution, and 91 per cent had never participated in constitutional discussions hosted by civic or non-governmental organisations.
    On the streets of Baghdad, posters encouraging citizens to vote were torn down so often in some neighbourhoods that the government decided to stop replacing them. The UN began distributing five million copies of the proposed constitution for public distribution just a little over a week before the referendum. And a government-sponsored media campaign that was supposed to outline in simple language details of the draft has proved ineffective.
    Instead, the media has focused almost entirely on the politics surrounding the referendum on the proposed constitution, [sociology professor Adul-Qadir] Hamdi asserted, and has ignored explaining the document itself.
    “The public only knows about the disagreements among the blocs drafting the constitution,” he said.
    Some residents are so unaware of the upcoming vote that they believe it is for a new Iraqi cabinet. Others are not registering to vote because they say the results are already fixed. And some argued they are too consumed in trying to survive to pay attention to the referendum.
    “What vote are you talking about?” asked Amjad Sa’ad, a 31-year-old security guard. “When our basic daily needs are met and our security is restored, then we will care about such things.”
    Zuhra Abdu-Samad, 53, reacted angrily when asked about the upcoming referendum, indicating that it would not produce anything of value. “It is just like shaking a fruitless palm tree,” she said.

… Yes, or maybe a tooki tree. But then, at least you can use the constitution to help clean up the mess?

‘Cracking Iraq’ (and next up, Iran?)

Many commentators are writing about the process involved in the present Iraq draft constitution being one of “federalizing democratization” or “democratizing federalism”. It is no such thing. To federate means “to come together for joint action”. It is what happens when functioning, pre-existing states come together in a strong way, pooling many aspects of their soveriegnty into a broader, federated union… Like the 13 US states, in 1787, after they found that their previous “articles of confederation” were too weak. Or the “United Arab Emirates”: 7 small existing states that came together in the early 1970s to pool their respective capabilities.
What the present draft constitution proposes for Iraq is the exact opposite. It is the breakup of many key attributes of Iraqi soveriegnty and their division among a still unknown number of smaller, new sub-entities. It is incorrect to call this process “federation”; it is more rightly called devolution.
What the present draft constitution proposes for Iraq is a breakup very similar to what happened with the breakup of Bosnia into ethnically distinct sub-entities, or the partition of India into India and Pakistan, or the still-continuing breakup of the previous “Soviet Russian Federation”, including in Chechnya.
When initiated by democratic governments that enjoy real political legitimacy– Britain recently, or Spain in the years after democratization– devolution can enhance democratic participation and accountability at many levels. But when initiated under less ideal political circumstances, this breaking-up process can lead to fierce contestation over the newly-drawn internal borders and access to resources, mounting fear and mistrust, and a desire for ethnic-religious homogeneity within the various zones that can can all too easily lead to widespread or even near-complete campaigns of ethnic or sectarian “cleansing”.
The cycle(s) of violence that are launched may take many decades to lose their ferocity.
(By the way, I took the title of this post from a good novel by Bapsi Sidhwa about the pain of the Indian partition: Cracking India.)
And guess what? It is not only Iraq that’s on the neo-con’s menu for “cracking”… Now, some of the cracked-headed among them want to try the same formula in Iran, too…
Well, that’s what Michael Ledeen, the sleazy author of the Iran-Contra scandal and various other ignominious and illegal escapades, is now proposing. On October 26, Ledeen is moderating a conference on the topic at the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-con powerhouse where he’s hung his hat for several years now. The conference is titled The Unknown Iran: Another Case for Federalism? and it involves a roster of apparently exile-Iranian scholars of whom nobody I know ever seems to have heard. (Any further info on those individuals from JWN readers gratefully received.)
Well, there you have it. Occupation-encouraged “cracking” is evidently working so well in Iraq these days (irony alert, folks)– why not tempt Iranians into trying it in their country, too?

G. Achcar on present risks in Iraq & Saudi Arabia

Gilbert Achcar’s latest despatch warns us regarding Saturday’s upcoming referendum in Iraq that:

    whether the [constitutional] draft passes the referendum or not, there will be a largely autonomous Shiite entity in Southern and Central Iraq, in control of the major part of Iraqi oil reserves and allied with Iran. When one bears in mind the fact that the bulk of Saudi oil reserves are located in the Shiite-majority Eastern province of the US-protected Saudi Kingdom, one gets to realize the full extent of what is more and more of a nightmare for Washington.

Anyway, big thanks to Gilbert for sending us yet another update. The translations and analysis that he provides here are really helpful. They provide useful background to everything the English-language MSM is telling us about the maneuverings by Khalilzad, the Arab league etc., in the run-up to the referendum.

So here, starting with a couple of pleasant little literary flourishes, are the three parts of today’s despatch:


1) Gulliver in Iraq —for how long?



US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay
Khalilzad, best epitomizes the actual status of the US occupation
of Iraq, which looks more and more indeed, in its relation to Iraqi Shiites
and Sunnis, like Gulliver among
Lilliputians and Blefuscudans (Google shows that the reference to Gulliver
with regard to Iraq is already very frequent—you know how this episode of
Gulliver’s Travels ended)
.



After having meddled very unsuccessfully in Iraqi haggling over the draft
constitution, and proved unable to convince the Shiite parties to water down
their own demands in order to get an impossible consensus, the Ambassador
is terrified at the result he could not prevent. One more time, the US is
proving to be an “apprentice-sorcerer” in the Middle East (after so many
decades of failed apprenticeship, it is high time for the US government to
quit this ambition).



From the very beginning of its occupation of Iraq, the US administration has
sought to apply the classical imperial recipe of “divide and rule.” In order
to be successful, such a game needs smart Machiavellian players: definitely
not what you’ve got in
Washington
. The result now is that, whether the draft passes the referendum or not,
there will be a largely autonomous Shiite entity in Southern and Central
Iraq, in control of the major part of Iraqi oil reserves and allied with
Iran. When one bears in mind the fact that the bulk of Saudi oil reserves
are located in the Shiite-majority Eastern province of the US-protected Saudi
Kingdom, one gets to realize the full extent of what is more and more of a
nightmare for Washington.



For those who do not know about the Saudi Eastern province, here are excerpts
from a
good Wikipedia
description:

Continue reading “G. Achcar on present risks in Iraq & Saudi Arabia”

Rats and sinking ships

This important piece by Tim Phelps of Newsday highlights the disillusionment that three key, previous ultra-hawks– Kanan Makiya, Rend Rahim (Francke), and Danielle Pletka– are now expressing about the situation inside Iraq, including the contents of the draft constitution. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for noting Tim’s story.)
Kanan and Rend are both Iraqi-Americans… Kanan was probably the leading “liberal” intellectual validator of the whole project of the US invading Iraq (but now admits he earlier misunderstood some key aspects of the Baath Party control system there…. Thanks for telling us, Kanan.)
Rend was the woman who famously, in the run-up to the war, said she hoped to ride atop the first US tank to enter Baghdad. She didn’t do that but was for a while Allawi’s pick to be Iraqi Ambassador to the US.
Pletka is a different kind of political personality. An intensely pro-Likud Jewish-American, she worked a while as Sen. Jesse Helms’s chief foreign-affairs aide and is now Vice-President at key neo-con power-house the American Enterprise Institute. She has outraged people throughout the Arab world by, e.g., insisting on walking through very socially conservative downtown Gaza in a mini-skirt, or going to various capital cities and lecturing heads of government on how they should run their countries. (Oh, and did I mention she was a key advocate of the war?)
I don’t consider any of these three to be, literally, “rats”; and I have some lingering admiration for Kanan, whom I’ve met a couple of times, though I always thought he was more than a little naive.
But if these three individuals are now openly quitting the “ship” of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, then I have to say the ship is headed rapidly for the depths.
(This whole phenomenon seems eerily similar to, and parallel with, the ire that social conservatives are launching against Bush re the Harriet Miers nomination… Interesting, huh?)

Iraqi referendum: a question

Given the truly terrible security situation in many or most of the majority-Sunni parts of Iraq, and concomitant inability of reputable international election-monitoring organizations to field anything like a satisfactory presence of monitors around the country– then if the “no” vote in the majority-Sunni provinces in next Saturday’s referendum on the “constitution” is announced as being not sufficient to block the constitution’s implementation, why should anyone, including Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and their backers and friends elsewhere, be expected to accept the validity of that result?
I’m just asking the question. I guess around this time next week we’ll start to see what the answer might be…

Disasters, natural and man-made

The death toll from yesterday’s earthquake in eastern Pakistan already stands at “more than 20,000 people” and is expected to rise. This IRIN story says:

    About 19,400 people were killed and more than 42,000 hurt in Pakistan, Reuters quoted interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, as saying, with the divided territory of Kashmir and its capital Muzaffarabad worst hit. But the communications minister for Pakistani Kashmir, Tariq Farooq, said the toll there alone could reach 30,000 as the focus so far had been only on the main towns, not mountain villages. At least another 600 people died in the Indian side of Kashmir, where many mud and stone houses were buried by landslides.

On Tuesday, torrential rains and mudslides hit Central America, leaving at least 640 people dead. With 338 people still listed as “missing” in Guatemala alone, it seems very likely the regionwide death toll there will rise above 1,000.
It seems clear to, from my 23 years living in the US, that the Gulf of Mexico storm systems have been getting fiercer in recent years. Central America already got hit very badly back in May… and then we had Katrina and Rita… In September 2004, and September 2003 there were previous bad hurricane systems in the Gulf of Mexico…
And it is less than a year since the South Asian tsunami…
Can’t we all ask our political leaders to, please, take a few deep breaths and then start focusing on protecting humankind from these kinds of disasters, and from the others like avian flu that might be “waiting in the wings”, instead of continuing to wage wars and foment tensions that may well lead to the waging of wars in the future?
Of course, some of the worse natural disasters will always continue to have significant death tolls. But the death tolls from all disasters can be greatly reduced by taking steps like using suitable building methods, enforcing of building codes, installation of early warning systems, planning and implementation of evacuation schemes– and also, steps like long-term ecological planning that could reverse the effects of decades of deforestation in a place like Central America, and could slow down and then hopefully also reverse the effects of global warming.
You could say that an event like the mud-slides that have killed so many this past week in Guatemala– or even, the ferocity of many of the storm-systems now coming out of the Gulf of Mexico– is a combination of a natural and a man-made disaster.
And how about the continuing (and largely avoidable) death toll from disease and malnourishment in vast swathes of Africa: is that the result of “natural” or “man-made” factors? Well, however you choose to describe these phenomena, there are known human actions that could be taken, that would massively reduce the numbers of those deaths… So in a sense, if the world– we, us, and primarily the well-resourced portion of humanity– does not take those steps, then we must bear some responsibility for the deaths of those children, women, and men.
Instead of which… There are George Bush and Tony Blair waging war and causing multiple new cascades of death and disaster in Iraq… there’s Vladimir Putin waging war in Chechnya, and the Chinese playing potentially escalatory war-games around Taiwan… Talk about man-made disasters!
Enough! Those four leaderships make up 80% of the “Permanent Five” who hold the fate of humankind in their hands. (And the French have done plenty of bad things in their time, too.)
So okay, the P-5, when are you going to get your collective act together, declare a moratorium on your own new arms acquisitions, on your transfers of arms to other parties, and on you continued pursuit of war? When are you going to declare a worldwide humanitarian ceasefire, and call the nations of the world together to discuss:

    1. The resolution of all outstanding conflicts by nonviolent means, and
    2. The mobilization of the resources of all the nations to end global poverty and strengthen the resilience of all communities worldwide to the ever-stalking ghosts of hunger, disease, ecological disaster, and war.

It so easily could be done. All it would take is a slight shift of mindset… “An injury to one is an injury to all”– but on a truly global scale.

JWN site design things

This past week has been a time for tweaking the HTML on many aspects of both this blog and the new group blog, Transitional Justice Forum.
You’ll see I’ve changed a couple of things on the sidebar here, which I do from time to time. One of the most useful things I did on JWN, though, was to make the “Topics” index much more useful. Instead of coming up with an e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y lengthy fulltext version of all the posts that I’ve filed under each particular category, it now comes up with just a listing, with each item followed by the standard RSS-style excerpt of the post in question.
If you haven’t used the “Topics” index before, you’ll find it down near the bottom of the right sidebar.
So do we still need the sidebar’s listing of ‘JWN Golden Oldies’, I wonder? I haven’t actually added anything to it since the end of 2003… the items on it are become more olden-and-golden with every month that passes. It was kind of a pain to pull it together month by month, back when I was doing it. Maybe I should just let the Topics listing and the MT Search capability do their job and forget the Golden Oldies. (Or I could put their listing into a simple link-to file rather than having them all right there on the sidebar.)
Could the site use a second sidebar, I wonder?
More on Topics’, aka ‘Categories’… I see this MT3.2 that I now have allows for sub-categories as well as main categories… I had tried for something of the same effect recently when I decided to add date-based listings to the main “Iraq” category, which had become completely unwieldy… But it’s not nearly as unwieldy now that I have the excerpt-only delivery system. So I’ve got a couple of different options with “Iraq” now, that I need to sort out… Also, since the Categories (Topics) now do look so much more useful than hitherto, I should go through the whole JWN archive and try to make sure the categories (including multiple categories) are appropriately assigned and indeed appropriately chosen… Sounds like more fairly detailed work… for someone…
Anyway, now that I’m thinking about all this stuff, do send in your comments, reactions, and suggestions re the design of the site. And if you’d like to help with checking out the Category assignations for the archive, or have some good ideas ideas about the present choice of items under Categories, please let me know about that, as well.

Netherlands still hosts NTFU site, despite Wilson arrest

I just checked, and the NTFU website is still up and operating today, even though its owner, Chris Wilson, was arrested yesterday. I think his servers are in the Netherlands. I imagine the anti-obscenity laws there are laxer than in most US jurisdictions.
But how about their anti-war crimes legislation there? I imagine that is much tighter and more effective than in most domestic US jurisdictions?
So can’t we persuade the prosecutors in the Netherlands to go after this site and close it down?
Anyone?
If you go to this page on the NTFU site, you will learn:

    1. That whereas access to most of the “sex-trophy” pictures requires registration, and thus presumably also the payment of some fees, access to the two areas titled Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – General and Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – Gory require no registration and are thus available to anyone. (Also, at least one of the images in the latter category combines gory war-trophyism with sexual lewdness in a really troubling way.)
    2. The site has 191,000 registered users.

Of course, it is quite possible that if the site gets shut down in the Netherlands, it would merely migrate to some less-policed corner of the globe. But does Netherlands really want to be known as the home of trophy-displaying war criminals like the ones posting their photos there?
A final point. Though I think it is very important that these photos be taken down off the web, it is even more important that US forces operating all around the world cease engaging in the torture and abuse of detainees that is continuing, to this day. For this to happen, as I have always argued, we need clear and unequivocal leadership from the very top…
And if there are to be prosecutions of US government personnel, these should go right up the chain of command to the very top and not be limited to the misguided grunts down at the bottom.