Just World News with Helena Cobban
Info, analysis, discussion – to build a more just world
Riverbend is back today with a small serving of her trademark wonderful prose from Baghdad.
She writes:
I’ve been thinking a bit more about the conference on
Terrorism, Security, & America’s Purpose
that I sat through for a long day on Tuesday and most of yesterday. There
was lots of great substance, from some very impressive thinkers and analysts
(and a fair bit of dross, too.) The “spectacle” aspect of it was notable
too: 700 people sitting at banquet tables in a vast banquet-hall in the Capital
Hilton; panel after panel of big-name politicians, thinkers, and funders
following each other with clockwork regularity to a long “front table” lit
with heavy TV lighting and flanked by massive video screens…
(And, it has to be said, a gallery of performers that was very heavily tilted
towards white males… What is it about “security” issues that makes the
guys sweep women’s wisdom aside so lightly? I swear to God things were
better in Washington DC in this respect ten years ago, than today.)
At one point early along the way I got to wondering, “What is this massive–and
not cheap– undertaking all about?” And as I noted
here,
I concluded that it was an an attempt to stage a public forum on the listed
was “both high level and wide-ranging”. And it’s true that the
conference did lend itsK-Street-glitzy stamp of political “legitimacy” to
ideas as far-reaching as that (1) Bush’s Iraq policy needs a serious re-thinking
, and even that (2) the non-resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
had contributed to Muslim and worldwide hostility to the US. As
an addendum to the latter proposition– which I had voiced a few times in
my work in the working-group on “Underlying causes of terrorism”, and which
Nir Rosen, Juan Cole, and a number of other speakers made very explicitly
from the big podium– it was even urged that (3) the US government needs
to be much more pro-active in working for a Palestinian-Israeli peace than
it has been until now.
Well, none of those propositions is actually terribly radical– though number
2 there scarcely ever gets adequately voiced in the mainstream political
discourse in the US. But all three of them have been under-argued until
now. So the conference made a good– if perhaps not optimally cost-effective?–
contribution to opening up the space in the mainstream discourse wherein
such propositions can be more fully aired, discussed, and even seriously
advocated…
I have a column in the CSM today about the importance of the UN to the US. It decries the bullying tactics that John Bolton has used since his arrival there in Mid-August.
My timing is perhaps not optimal, given that Paul Volcker released his fourth– and I think penultimate– report into the oil-for-food scandal of the 1990s, just yesterday.
However, even given the evidence of serious mismanagement and corruption that Vocker has released, it is still important to underline to the CSM’s mainly US readership the importance of having a UN– and most preferably, a well-functioning one.
Kofi Annan has never been known as a great manager. (That’s an under-statement, huh?) He was installed, you’ll remember, at the strong urging of Madeleine Albright, who couldn’t stand his Egyptian predecessor, Boutros Ghali.
One could argue that you deal with the world with the UN you have, rather than the UN you want… And the UN that we women and men of the world have today is flawed, and is also almost completely the creature of the nations that dominate the U.N. Security Council.
But I know that the release of the latest Volcker report will increase the torrent of fundamnetally anti-UN feeling that is always roiling just under the surface of much of the public discourse inside the US. So yes, it is important to re-state the importance of having a UN– and also, of having the very best-managed and most accountable UN we can build.
In my column, I write that the UN is “based on principles of national sovereignty, national equality, and human solidarity.” I wish I’d had more space to flesh that out and write about the stress that the writers of the UN charter put on finding nonviolent ways to resolve international conflicts, and on the slow trend the UN has seen in recent decades toward focusing more on human equality than on national equality…
Anyway, this looks like a good short news piece about the impact of the Volcker report– also in today’s CSM. In it, Howard LaFranchi writes,
The status of negotiations over the border crossing at Rafah between Gaza and Egypt still seems very unclear. This is a good piece of reporting from AP’s Ravi Nessman about how the stranglehold that Israel already operates at the Karni crossing point between Gaza and Israel has been stifling the Gaza economy for years.
Now, Israel also wants to be able to (continue to?) exert the same kind of control over the goods passing through the Rafah crossing-point, too.
Nessman’s piece seems like a good snapshot of the land-border issues, and is worth reading in full.
He quotes Mohammed Tilbani, the owner of a cookie factory in Deir al-Balah that in the past has employed as many as 350 Gazans, as saying he believes his company can sell as much as $1.1 million worth of cookies a month if there are no restrictions on exporting his products (and presumably, also, no restrictions on importing his raw materials). Tilbani, Nessman wrote,
If the owner of a medium-size light-goods manufacturing business feels that way, you can imagine how the large proportion of Gazans who have considerably less sunk capital in the system in Gaza feel about issues of war, peace, and the value of “stability”.
JWN readers will recall that I wrote about the political importance of Gaza gaining maximum access to international markets in this August CSM column and this JWN post that I put up that same day.
Uh-oh. Tragic and very unsettling news from Gaza about extreme discord and violence being used among the general circles of Fateh there.
Specifically,
This is an interesting account by Matt Welch of how dark rumors about the disorderly and violent tendencies of the low-income and mainly black evacuees from New Orleans have often preceded them to their places of (let’s hope) temporary refuge…
But Welch also writes that “none of the reports were true.”
I think that was referring to reports of violence committed in Baton Rouge, after evacuation. But he also pulls in several pieces of evidence showing that the reports of violence inside New Orleans prior to evacuation were in some cases untrue and in others greatly exaggerated.
Welch writes about the staggering lack of information suffered by everyone in New Orleans during the worst days last week, and how that contributed to the ease with which scary rumors got circulated. (He doesn’t mention the private security companies, like Blackwater, that were also making successful– and I should imagine, very lucrative– bids for contracts to “protect” media stars and others eager to get into the city to do their stand-uppers. I wonder how their sales pitch went, exactly?)
Welch adds:
I just note that even though I was born after the second World War, in England there were still lots of stories about the hostility that kids evacuated from London during the Blitz faced from the (mainly rural) communities that received them.
I’m back in the Great Wen (Washington DC) again this week… Taking
part in this mega-conference on “Terrorism,
Security, and America’s Purpose“. It is probably an admirable
venture: an attempt to stage a public forum on these issues that is
both high level and wide-ranging. I had originally thought it was
an attempt to start to define a strategy for the Democratic Party—
a task that certainly still needs to be done! But no. It
turns out the speakers come from both parties, and even from the far
right (e.g. Grover Norquist, the long-time campaigner against any and
all forms of taxation; and the fiction writer Tom Clancy, who is about
to enter this massive banquet hall where the main sessions are being
held.)
My personal high points so far have been listening to Nir Rosen of Asia Times
Online, and Gen. Wesley Clark…
(Aha, there’s Clancy on the podium now, looking pudgy and jowly.
He looks like a little old grandpa with his jaws sort of collapsing
into his mouth; and one tuft of his hair is sticking straight up…)
Okay, so Nir Rosen.
He was on, I guess, the second of the big panels this morning. I
missed the first one, because the “working group” I’ve been a part of
was having it’s meeting then. So I got to miss George Soros and
someone described as “The Hon. Roger Cressey” who– I kid you not–
used to be my research assistant back in the mid-1980s… The
Honorable?? Well, anyway, I missed him.
Then I missed most of Sen. Joe Biden’s presentation.
Nir– whom I’d never met before, in the flesh– was on a large panel
along with Robert Pape of the Univ. of Chicago, Yosri Fouda of al-Jazeera and a couple of other
folks. I have to tell you this is very much a Washington
‘establishment’ event. Nearly all white males, most of them
middle-aged or older; everyone in standard power suits and monochrome
(red or blue) ties… And then there’s Nir Rosen, 28 years
old, three days growth of beard, swarthy, and rumpled.
He spoke in almost a monotone. I couldn’t figure out why.
Maybe it was the weirdness of being where he was– TV lights blaring;
all this DC establishment stuff going on around him. What
he talked about was Fallujah, mainly. (He also talked about how,
during recent visits to Somalia and Pakistan, he has already seen
stores named after Fallujah, and people wearing tee-shirts talking
about Fallujah. “So it’s become a big rallying-point in different
parts of the Muslim world.”)
He talked quite rapidly, and in that fairly soft monotone. He
talked about the brutality of the US occupation of Iraq as he has seen
it, and said that wherever he goes Muslims tell him they hate the US
for what it does, not what it is…
Laura Rozen of War & Piece has been providing great coverage of Katrina-related developments.
(I’m afraid I’ve been a little busy with other things this weekend. One of them was running the Charlottesville Women’s 4-Miler yesterday. I do figure this whole struggle to remake our country as a decent, caring community is one that we need to be in for the long haul… So we need to pay attention to both the mens sana aspect of our lives and the corpore sano aspect… I’ve also been doing a lot of Quaker stuff: we had a Meeting for Business today which was fairly complex.)
Anyway here are some highlights that Laura’s compiled:
* New Orleans police and firefighters traumatized
* A great Open Letter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune to President Bush… Worth reading the whole text there, espeically the call for Bush to fire FEMA chief Michael Brown….
* Commentaries from German TV stations on the disaster
* This story from the UK Guardian, which uses a very moving photo that turns on its head the ugly anti-Black racism that has marked some of the commentary about the people who did not evacuate New Orleans before the levees broke, and
* An L.A. Times story about the resignation of the Pentagon ‘s “inspector-general” amid, as Laura says, “accusations of blocking investigations of senior Bush officials; allegations of forging press releases, blocking an investigation into an Air Force official’s deal with Boeing, withholding information from Congress… the usual.”
… Thanks so much, Laura!
If you Google for “disaster management graduate courses” you can find many fine institutions of higher education in the US and elsewhere that offer just such training. So you might think that the person appointed by Prez Bush to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency– the lead federal agency coordinating responses to Hurricane Katrina– might be someone with some, uh, background or experience in this important field?
Think again. As Laura Rozen of War and Piece revealed yesterday, Michael D. Brown, who has headed FEMA since 2003, “has no qualifications.” Rozen wrote that before he won the FEMA job, Brown,
The fact that Brown has terrifyingly little experience of managing disasters did not prevent him from going on CNN last night and, in essence, blaming the people who did not get out of New Orleans when the instructions to evacuate were issued for the fate that subsequently befell them.
No word from Brown, though, about how the scores of thousands of people without cars, or the hundreds of patients and staff in the city’s hospitals and nursing homes, were supposed to leave the city without any adequate logistical help being offered them.
Readers who haven’t read much yet about the situation in the city’s hospitals can get a general picture of what things were like in the large, publicly-owned “Charity Hospital” today– five days into the city’s trauma– from this AP account.
The US military/ National Guard was finally able to get some good convoys into Norlins today. Hopefully the humanitarian situation of those still in the city can improve as public order is restored and– just maybe– a rational plan for relief, belated evacuation and recovery gets underway.
But things will continue to be really tough for the two million or so (former) residents of the Gulf Coast for many months or even years to come. Can and should all of those towns and cities actually be rebuilt? How will the water- and storm-management plans be improved to deal with the even heavier storms that will be coming in over the decades ahead, thanks to global warming?
In addition, the consequences for the US economy will most likely be huge.
Paul Krugman had a strong column in the NYT today. He concluded it with this:
This idea that the Bush administration– and many other members of the US political elite– has a fundamental lack of understanding, or even an active contempt, for the fundamental demands of good governance is something I’ve been arguing for a while now. It’s a theme I hope to explore more here in JWN in the weeks ahead.
You see it (as Krugman noted) both at home and abroad.
I think one of the things that the Bushies and most other members of the US economic hyper-elite here seem to lack is any solid concept of egalitarian, democratic governance. They seem to have no concept of “we’re all in this together”– or even of the “we” to which such a statement might apply. I think that rather than thinking of themselves as fundamentally co-equal members of a democratic citizenry, they see themselves more in the way feudal leaders used to: people who because of their privileged economic and social position are “born to rule”– while the rest of us poor suckers are left to scrabble on our own for what we can get.
You see this in so very many aspects of US life: the lack of any national health insurance or social safety net; the intense privatization of so many functions that in other–much more developed– countries are carried out by the government; the deeply engrained hostility to taxation; the general climate of entitlement, hyper-individualism, and meanspirited-ness that those feudalists foster.
For my part, I’m going to be an optimist. I’ll certainly do everything I can do to provide help to the poor, the sick, the lame, and the disadvantaged of Norlins and the other Gulf Coast communities. But I think the best thing that any of us inside the US who really care about the fabric of our society can do over the longer haul is to commit to the struggle for deepseated structural change… All the Red Cross collection bins in the country can’t substitute for what a truly accountable (and decently resourced) network of national and state-level governments needs to do in a situation of major disaster. And nor should private organizations have to do these things… Not in any fundamentaly egalitarian national community in which people truly felt that “we are all in this together.”
Headline: One thousand martyrs in an Iraqi catastrophe on the al-Aema bridge [bridge of the Imams]; Ja’fari announces three days of mourning; the Health
Minister calls on the ministers of the Interior and Defense to resign; Washington is confident the crisis can be overcome; the people of al-Aazhamiyeh rush to the aid of the wounded from the incident; and Iraqis accuse the government of a lack of readiness regarding security and services.
Dateline: Baghdad, Abdel-Hussein Ghazal and Zaner Mazloom Abbas– AFP– Reuters
Text:
Iraq was inflicted yesterday with the catastrophic killing of one thousand Iraqis most of whom were women and children from the visitorsof the Grave of Imam Moussa Ibn Jaafar El-Kadhim (peace be upon him) in Baghdad, where the stampede over the bridge of the Imams resulted in the suffocation or drowning of hundreds after the the sides of the bridge collapsed and the victims collided with the concrete obstacles which were placed for security reasons two years ago. Eyewitnesses relate that rumors about a booby-trapped car have caused fear amongst the people so a stampede resulted and that’s when the catastrophe occurred. The losses increased because of the lack of emergency services and the shooting in the air by police increased the fear and confusion amongst the crowd…