Author: Helena

Who are we kidding?

Every constructive thing the Bush administration claims to have built up in its 30 months in Iraq is a sham.
The “democratically elected Iraqi transitional government”?
— This government has never been held accountable to the 275-member National Assembly, the body that was directly elected (though in a flawed election) back on January 30. The National Assembly has rarely mustered even a quorum of its members of its members to deliberate together recently. Far less has it been able to hold Iraq’s strange, two-headed government to account.
–The “government” has not been able to deliver basic services to the citizens of Iraq. Provision of vital services– including, crucially, that of public security— has deteriorated markedly since January. A basic function of governments in the modern age is their “responsibility to protect” the citizenry. The transitional government elected in January has completely failed to exercise this reponsibility. In addition, delivery of other basic services like water and electricity has plummeted.
— The two contending “heads” of the governmental system have even, in recent days, had a serious falling out between themselves. I have written before about the troubling bicephaly of the governmental system established by the (completely non-democratic) Transitional Administrative Law of 2004. My reading of TAL would have given the transitional “PM” the executive responsibilities of a head of government, with the “president” exercising only the quasi-ceremonial function of a head of state. I guess the current “President”, the PUK’s Talal Jalabani had a different reading. Today, he even went as far as to call for the resignation of PM Ibrahim Jaafari.
What a sad, sick joke. What has either of them done for the people of Iraq?
Then there are “the Iraqi security forces”?
–Remember the Bush adage, “As the Iraqi forces stand up, we will stand down?” So where does that leave the prospects for a speedy, orderly withdrawal of US forces, given that the number of Iraqi battalions deemed ready to fight mysteriously declined by 66% over the course of two days last week? (To a puny total of one brigade.)
As I’ve written here on JWN a number of times in the past, the problem for the Iraqi security forces is not one of basic military training… It’s unit cohesion, and the cohesion and integrity of the command structures… I.e., it is primarily a political problem, not an issue of purely “technical” military training.
So you can send all the grandiose “NATO training missions” you want to Baghdad, with all their attendant fanfare… But if you can’t nail the issue of gaining the political integrity of the security forces, sorry buddy, you’re just pouring your training dollars down the drain.
— Well then, how about the state of the emerging democratic Iraqi constitution?
Ha-(sob)-ha-(sob)-ha…
The Draft Constitution that will be voted on October 15 was “rip’d untimely from its mother’s womb” (to quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, referencing Julius Caesar’s birth), in order to comply with US force planning and political election-planning timetables… It was notably not the result of an organic, inclusive process of intra-Iraqi negotiation… To say the least.
If this constitution is accepted in the referendum, its own terms already stipulate that it will be later be subject to considerable “fleshing out” and the detailed specification of many of its provisions… (But if it passes, most of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs will continue to be majorly pissed off with the political system.)
If it fails to pass, the whole text will have to be renegotiated sometime during the year ahead. (And if it fails to pass, the Kurds will be extremely pissed off, and will accelerate the many moves they’ve already made toward full independence…. )
Let’s be clear, whether this draft constitution is accepted or rejected on October 15, the following will happen:

    1.There will be an election for a new National Assembly on December 15. (The only question is over whether this will be a “post-constitutional” assembly, or yet another “transitional” assembly.)
    2. One or more of Iraq’s three major population groups will be majorly pissed off, and inter-group tensions– having been exacerbated by the very framing and holding of the referendum itself–can be guaranteed to continue.
    3. There will remain many fundamental details of the constitution to be decided, and
    4. The Kurds will continue their march toward secession/ independence, whether with more or less speed.

So what the heck real difference will the October referendum make? What the heck difference does this wad of paper called the “Iraqi draft constitution” actually make?
Goooood questions.
(And I didn’t even mention yet that the wad of paper that we currently have in our hands represents a massive step back for women’s rights and for freedom of religious conscience inside Iraq… Maybe I should have.)
And then there are… all the other things the Bush administration has constructed during its time in Iraq…
Like, um…
“Peace in our time?” Nah, scratch that.
“Freedom from global terror?” Don’t tell that to the people of London or Bali. (Or indeed, the people of Iraq, since they too are part of what people like to call the “international community”.)
Oh well, how about all those Iraqi schoolrooms that the US troops rebuilt and repainted?
Gosh we haven’t heard much about those recently, have we? Maybe this is because– whether in Tel Afar, Ramadi, or most recently Sadah or Al-Qaim— it is almost certainly the case that in recent months the US troops have been consistently destroying more schoolrooms each month than they’ve been rebuilding.
(Plus, back in the days when they were talking more about “rebuilding” and “repainting” schoolroomss, did you ever think how all those schoolrooms got destroyed in the first place? One hint: as of the US invasion in March 2003, the country’s tens of thousands of schoolrooms were still nearly all in decent– if sometimes rudimentary– shape… And then, the US military tried to get credit for repairing just a few of the many schoolrooms that its invasion of the country destroyed??)
So we need to face it: look as hard as we might, we can’t actually see the US troop presence in Iraq doing anything particularly constructive there at all, whether at the political, the geopolitical, the economic, social, or educational levels.
Meanwhile, they’re creating a heck a lot of physical destruction, and their presence is whipping up a maelstrom of inter-group tension, escalation, and distrust…
G-d save the Iraqi people. Somehow. G-d save the whole Middle Eastern region lest it become sucked into the vortex of violence in Iraq. And G-d save us Americans, and please, please, give us the strength and wisdom we need if we’re to pull our government back from its present destructive course.

Elections, Somaliland

There’s a Filipina woman called Yvette Lopez who is one of my heroes. She has been working for around two years now for a Catholic-based international development organization— deployed in Somaliland.
Do you know where or what Somaliland is?
It’s a portion of what on international maps is called Somalia… a place that is today– tragically– an almost totally non-functioning country. But some years ago Somaliland and, I think, a couple of other portions of “Somalia” just decided to carry on doing their own thing, trying to rebuild their society from the ground up.
Yvette has been there as one of a small number of international development workers helping them do that. To do her job in Somaliland she left her husband and daughter behind at home in the Philippines.
And she writes a really beautiful blog. It’s in English, and she posts great pics that give you a real idea of what Somaliland is like.
(Hint: it’s a very, very poor, war-ravaged country. There are frequent security scares. But Yvette usually seems to be able to be very productive. She seems to have made some great friends there, too, and has become quite a connoisseur of the best camel-meat restaurants in the capital, Hargeisa.)
This past week, Yvette’s been one of the international election monitors in Somaliland’s parliamentary elections. You can read a great account of her activities doing that if you start at this Sept. 26 post on her blog, and then go forward a page at a time until October 1 (and probably beyond there, too.)
Mainly I read (and link to) Yvette’s blog because I admire what she does, so much. But I’m also very interested in the situation of Somaliland itself, which seems to be a little like that of Iraqi Kurdistan, or Kosovo, or perhaps now Gaza. In other words it’s a part of the inhabited world where the sovereignty situation is very fluid indeed, and where fairly strong locally based based communities are trying to develop their own “nation state”-type institutions.
I guess you could put Somaliland’s nascent parliament into the category of such institutions.
Regarding Somalia, meanwhile– the country from which Somaliland has been breaking off– the famous war photographer Kevin Sites has started his “Hotzone” direct newsfeed for Yahoo.com from there this week. Mainly he’s been showcasing the misery and violence in the capital, Mogadishu. (Like here.) Actually, he hasn’t just been doing photography. He’s also been making videos and writing almost-daily blog entires. Boy, they keeping him busy!
Next week, Kevin’s going to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I must really try to see all the work he does there. Some four million people have died due the conflicts in DRC in the past five or so year– but the US MSM seldom even mentions the place…
Meanwhile, I want most of this post to be about Yvette and her steady, building-from-the-ground-up work in Somaliland. You’re doing such a great job there, Yvette.

Dem party think-tank’s plan for partial withdrawal from Iraq

    Note: This post contains what I think is a handy little table comparing different withdrawal and redployment plans, including this latest one. If you want to go straight to the table and skip the analysis, click here.

In the absence of any strong leadership from leading Congressional Democrats
for the movement to withdraw the US occupation troops from Iraq, it has been
left to some think-tanks and private individuals to formulate their (our)
own plans in this regard.  The latst comes from an interesting source:
the fairly influential, middle-of-the-line Democratic “Center for American
Progress“.  It is called “Strategic Redeployment“.  You
can download a PDF file of the whole, fairly easy-to-read text
here
.

I know one of the two co-authors– Larry Korb, a hard-nosed but
smart and personable defense intellectual who used to work at the Brookings
Institution in DC, when I had a two-year fellowship there way back when.
(By the way, though the sub-title of the plan is “A progressive plan for
Iraq and the struggle against violent extremists”, people should not really
be misled by the use of the word “progressive” there.  In my experience,
this term often doesn’t mean the same thing inside US politics– and certainly
not inside Democratic Party politics– as it means elsewhere in the world.
 Inside the Dem Party, it often denotes a particular kind of technocratic,
social-engineering approach to problems more than a leftist orientation…
And that is the case here.)

There is quite a lot to applaud in the SR report, though I think it also
has a number of notable shortcomings.  Perhaps most significantly, coming
as it does from a think-tank that is heavy with Dem Party politicos, is that it spells out directly the fact that,

Opponents of President Bush

Le Monde Diplo on NTFU

Yesterday, Le Monde diplo put an item about the NTFU story up on its website, in its “Valise diplomatique”, here.
It’s a short piece, concluding with this:

    This information [about NTFU], revealed by the Italian media, was picked up in the United States but had few repurcussions in France. So what are the investigative journalists doing, huh?
    Check out the debate by going to the blog of Helena Cobban, an American researcher… [then a link to this August JWN post.]

I was just checking my site-usage logs, which tell me that the link has already sent some hundreds of Le Monde readers over here.
Alors, soyez bienvenues, les nouveaux lecteurs francophones.

Investigations of abuse: porn-site and ACLU

The US military has reportedly closed the disciplinary/criminal investigation that it claimed it had launched into the involvement of US military personnel with the the body-part porn website, NTFU.
Incredibly fast work, huh, given that this time nine days ago the army still claimed it had not even heard of the abusive activities at the NTFU site?
By the way, both of those links above link to JWN. The first of them is to the Al-Jazeera web-site’s story of today. It also quotes me as saying various wise things. (Check ’em out.)
Well, the Army might have hurriedly closed down that “investigation”. But now, another detainee-abuse issue seems about to explode in its face. That is the story of the more than 70 photographs and three videos depicting abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq– images that most members of the US Congress have had a chance to see but that the US public, which pays the salaries of both the members of Congress and the officers and soldiers responsible for detainee affairs, has thus far not been able to see.
Today, a federal court in New York agreed with the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) that these images should indeed be made available to the public.
Significantly, the judge in this case, Alvin K. Hellerstein, ruled that publication of the images will help answer to questions both about the behavior of the soldiers depicted therein– and also about,

    the command structure that failed to exercise discipline over the troops, and the persons in that command structure whose failures in exercising supervision may make them culpable along with the soldiers who were court-martialed for perpetrating the wrongs…

The command structure that empowered (and quite possibly also encouraged) the commission of those abuses: Yes! That is exactly where public attention and governmental investigations now need to focus.
… Is there a disconnect in what I am arguing here? Namely, that the publication of some images of the desecrated bodies and body parts of some Iraqis and Afghanis (by NTFU) is something to be decried, while the publication of other images– that may well show scenes that are very similar, from inside Abu Ghraib– is something that is to be applauded?
No, I don’t think there is a disconnect. The context and intention of the act of making these images public is extremely important; and they are very different in each of these cases.
As a member of the US citizenry, I certainly want to be informed, in a responsible way, of the end-product of what it is that my taxes have been “buying”, in terms of the behavior of US soldiers during the war in Iraq. What I don’t want is that my taxes should support the ability of individual soldiers or groups of soldiers to engage in the “trophy-displaying” publication of images of the desecrated remains of Iraqis or Afghanis on commercial websites. (And especially, I would say, on commercial porn websites.)
In addition, the most important thing right now is to push all these investigations of abuse and malfeasance as far up the chain of command as they need to go. As I have noted all along with regard to the use of abuse and torture by US forces, the only way to stop it is through the clear and unequivocal exercise of leadership at the very top of the chain of command.
Since President Bush has thus far chosen not to adopt such a clear leadership role, then the best way we have left to change his behavior is through the relentless pursuit of investigations that come up the chain of his administration from the bottom up. Kudos to the ACLU– and to Human Rights Watch– for their dogged persistence in this regard.

Capt. Fishback’s stand for humanity

Regarding the responsibility of the US military and political command at the highest levels for the commission of atrocities by people at lower levels of the military ladder– as I just mentioned in this earlier post–the work of Ian Fishback, a captain in the 82d Airborne and a West Point grad, has been particularly courageous.
Fishback was most probably one of the main sources for Human Rights Watch’s recent report on torture and abuse being carried out by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today, the WaPo carries the text of the letter that Fishback sent on Sept. 16 to Sen. John McCain.
In it, he wrote to McCain (from Fort Bragg, NC):

    While I served in the Global War on Terror, the actions and statements of my leadership led me to believe that United States policy did not require application of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. On 7 May 2004, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s testimony that the United States followed the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and the “spirit” of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan prompted me to begin an approach for clarification. For 17 months, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command through battalion commander, multiple JAG lawyers, multiple Democrat and Republican Congressmen and their aides, the Ft. Bragg Inspector General’s office, multiple government reports, the Secretary of the Army and multiple general officers, a professional interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, the deputy head of the department at West Point responsible for teaching Just War Theory and Law of Land Warfare, and numerous peers who I regard as honorable and intelligent men.
    Instead of resolving my concerns, the approach for clarification process leaves me deeply troubled. Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
    This is a tragedy. I can remember, as a cadet at West Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.
    That is in the past and there is nothing we can do about it now. But, we can learn from our mistakes and ensure that this does not happen again. Take a major step in that direction; eliminate the confusion. My approach for clarification provides clear evidence that confusion over standards was a major contributor to the prisoner abuse. We owe our soldiers better than this. Give them a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation.
    Some do not see the need for this work. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
    Others argue that clear standards will limit the President’s ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable…

If you go to this page of the HRW report you can find the testimony of anonymous informant “C”, which is prefaced with this explanation:

    C is an officer with the 82nd Airborne Division and West Point graduate who served in Afghanistan from August 2002 to February 2003 and in Iraq from September 2003 to March 2004. HRW spoke with him more than two dozen times in July, August, and September 2005. Below are excerpts from those interviews grouped by subject matter (the subject headings were supplied by Human Rights Watch).
    At FOB Mercury, he was not in charge of interrogations but saw several interrogations in progress and received regular reports from NCOs on ill-treatment of detainees. He felt strongly that abuses there reflected larger policy confusion about what was permitted, and that the officer corps in particular has a duty to come forward and take responsibility.

Based on that and on the content of the testimony that follows, it certainly looks as if “C” is Capt. Fishback. In which case I’d like to send him my sincerest congratulations for acting as a fine, conscientious American and a responsible officer.

NTFU porn story reaching MSM

The body part porn story is (at last) reaching the English-language portion of the MSM. Today’s UK Guardian has a good short report on the NTFU website, written by Andrew Brown.
Yesterday, Brown and I briefly discussed the “trophy” nature of the images on the NTFU site– both the sexual-porn ones that are its usual staple and the body-part-porn ones that are its most shocking special feature. He quotes me as saying: “It is like finding Mistah Kurtz, sitting in the middle of the black jungle, surrounded by heads on stakes.”
The NYT also has a piece on the topic today. It’s by Thom Shanker. It gives no hint of the role that people in the blogosphere– Nur al-Cubicle, Christiane, I, others– played in getting this story to an English-reading public, but makes it seem as though the idea for the story sprang fully-formed out of Thom Shanker’s omniscient head.
Oh wait. Buried down deep here in the piece is a reference to Mark Glaser’s September 20 piece on the topic in the Online Journalism Review.
Shanker doesn’t, however, go as far as mentioning Glaser by name… Oh no. That would make it seem as though someone other than his own exalted self had been in the lead on this story.
(And nor, of course, does he mention Glaser’s citing of my role in helping break the story.)
Shanker’s “lede” in his “story” does not focus on the existence of the obscene, deeply troubling NTFU website. Instead, he leads with this:

    The Army has opened an investigation into whether American troops have sent gruesome photographs of Iraqi war dead to an Internet site where the soldiers were given free access to online pornography, Army officials said Tuesday…

So what about this breathlessly announced Army “investigation”? What is it going to focus on??
It looks like, as usual, the lower-downs and grunts. (Think Lynndie England, but in this case most likely male.) Here’s Shanker:

    Officials said the military’s preliminary inquiry was being conducted by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. They said it had proved difficult to identify the military personnel who can be seen in some of the photographs wearing Army or Marine Corps uniforms but no clear name tags or unit markings.

But going after the grunts and foot-soldiers is really the “easy”– and I would say, the wrong and dishonest– thing to do. As I said in remarks quoted in Glaser’s article that are notably not cited in Shanker’s piece.
The outrage here, folks, is that members of the US military committed outrages of mutilation, killing, and desecration of bodily remains against their fellow humans in the first place. Not so much, I would argue, the boy’s-clubbish sharing of atrocity photos afterwards– though that is also pretty bad, and might at the margins incentivize the commission of further atrocities.
Those atrocities against Iraqis and Afghans were committed, in large part, because of the Bush administration’s wilfull and criminal disregard of its obligations under the laws of war. (See next post.)
Well, I’m truly delighted the story is getting out. A little due attribution to predecessors and a little less olympian assumption by the NYT’s writers and editors of the claim to their own omniscience would of course be even better.
(You can check out some of my fairly ground-breaking August writings on the NTFU issue here.)

New X-linking with ‘Today in Iraq’

Over the weekend, Yankeedoodle and his friends who write Today in Iraq sent me an invitation to cross-post my Iraq-related posts from here onto their fine blog.
I said “Yes”. It’s a great idea. I have often cited either their blog directly, or materials I found on it (always with, I hope, due hat-tips to TII.)
You can find my inaugural TII post here.
For now, I don’t think I’ll be posting anything new there that I’m not posting here. Mainly, it’s to let their readers know what’s going on here.
The two blogs are fairly different in style, so there’s some useful complementarity in this new move, I think. TII is an excellent compilation blog that makes a substantial success of being a “compilation blog of record” about the US war in Iraq. Between the painstakingly produced main posts and the supplementary links people send in to their comments boards, it provides a very full picture, day by day by excruciating day, of all that the war has brought to Iraq– and to the US, and other countries affected by it.
In addition, YD and his veteran co-authors Matt and Friendly Fire bring their own wit, sense of irony, and occasional “rants” to the readers, too.
JWN, as you’ve probably figured by now, doesn’t attempt to be– at least, at the day-by-day level– a blog of any kind of complete “record”. It is quirky, eclectic (some might say disorganized), discursive, and sometimes passionate. It deals with a lot more than “just” the US war in Iraq. In it, I try to identify and explore big trends and issues in global affairs, though I am also still so much of an unreconstructed news junkie that the latest op-eds from the NYT and the WaPo or the latest pronunciamento from Planet Cole do, I admit, sometimes disproportionately distract my attention.
I also use JWN for many of my own purposes: trying out ideas, archiving links to matters of interest, seeking information, etc.
In addition, I generally really love the discussions on the comments boards here. They are often very substantive and reflect good and generally civil interactions among a bunch of people from different countries and different worldviews.
(The comments boards on TII generally serve a different purpose. In line with the main, info-compiling mission of the blog they serve more as a bulletin board to exchange new information, than a place for sustained conversations.)
Anyway, I’m excited about working with Yankee, Matt, and Friendly in this way. Thanks, guys, for tossing me the key to the executive washroom there on TII! (And thanks, Yankee, for that great story you told me about one certain executive washroom… )

Realism from the generals (and the ICG)

Back in April, I published a CSM column in which I argued for two key changes in US policy toward Iraq.
Now, very belatedly, key portions of the west’s decision-making apparatus seem to have become persuaded of the value of these changes.
The first change I advocated was that, “The Bush administration should issue an authoritative declaration that the US has no claims of its own on Iraq’s territory or natural resources…” (That would include for permanent military abses.)
Today, the WaPo’s well-connected columnist David Ignatius, acting as the carrier of a set of crucial messages from the generals who head US Centcom to the broader US public, tells us that,

    Centcom chief, Gen. John Abizaid… [and] his top generals … don’t want permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. Indeed, they believe such a high-visibility American presence will only make it harder to stabilize the country.

Right.
The second change I advocated back in April was that Iraqi and US policymakers should consider tweaking the plan for the transition to Iraqi self-rule, “so that what is drafted and voted on this year would be only an interim constitution, rather than the final thing…”
Today, the International Crisis Group– a well-respected global think tank that acts as a sort of policy-advice shop to the “better behaved” western governments, like the Scandinavians, the Canadians– has issued a report that states bluntly that the constitution-making process in Iraq has “gone awry”.
The report notes (probably rightly) that it is now too late to revise any further the terms of the constitutional text that will be voted up or down in a referendum October 15. But it urges the US to,

    embark on a last-ditch, determined effort to broker a true compromise between Shiites, Kurds and Sunni Arabs that addresses core Sunni Arab concerns without crossing Shiite or Kurdish red lines. This would require that… the U.S. sponsor negotiations to reach a political agreement prior to 15 October concerning steps the parties would commit to take after the December elections, whether through legislation or constitutional amendment.

In other words– as now seems very clear from the terms of the present constitutional text itself– this text would be subject to very rapid amendment, and would therefore function only as an “interim constitution”, anyway. But the Crisis group report spells that out a lot more clearly.
The Crisis Group also urged two other key changes: that the number of present Iraqi provinces that could agglomerate into new “regions” should be four or less– to lessen fears of the emergence of a single, 9-province Shiite “super-region”; and to exclude low-level members of the old Baath Party from any future administrative or other sanctions.
Now, I know the International Crisis Group is not nearly as powerful as the US military. So I’ll leave you to follow up on the rest of their report and its conclusions on your own.
What was much more interesting to me was David Ignatius’s reporting from his high-level embedment with Gen. Abizaid and his supporting generals…

Continue reading “Realism from the generals (and the ICG)”