Author: Helena

Iraqi constitutional big yawn

So here’s why right now, as opposed to a few months ago, I’m not getting myself all worked up over Iraq’s constitutional discussions:
I don’t think that at this late date they can make even the slightest bit of difference.
Islam as “a” source of legislation, “the” source, “one of the primary sources”?
Yawn.
Borders of the Kurdish region?
Yawn.
Or maybe rather than finding these discussions boring, I should more accurately say that I think that at this point they’re almost totally irrelevant to the long-term future of the country.
Right now, they’re only being pursued with the current “energy” because of the imminent approach of the Aug. 15 deadline mandated in Paul Bremer’s highly mechanistic and undemocratic TAL document.
Now it’s true that I wrote just over two weeks ago that it looked as though the Bushies were now,

    using the adoption of this hastily scrawled [constitutional] text as their pretext for — well, if not a total exit (though that would indeed be nice, wouldn’t it?)– but at least, a significant drawdown in the US troop levels….

So since I am definitely in favor of a rapid and total withdrawal, perhaps I should be cheering for a rapid conclusion of the constitutional discussions?
But no, I’m not. I think the Bushies will go ahead and do whatever they feel they need to do, deployment-wise or withdrawal-wise, regardless of whatever piece of paper a bunch of “Eye-racki” pols in Baghdad come up with at this point. It is ways too late now for any serious constitutional discussions to be held between now and Aug. 15.
(How long did it take the US Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to complete its task?)
So by far the best quote I’ve seen so far on the current Iraqi constitutional discussions is this one, from Kurdish constitutional committee member Mahmoud Othman:

    The Americans want to make a quick constitution… They have a lot of experience in fast food, but they can’t make a fast constitution.’ (Reuters, Baghdad, July 31)

If I thought more about it might I conclude, as I was edging toward in that July 15 JWN post, that “locking” a constitution favorable to the Bushites’ interests in place might be a real danger to world peace? Somewhat analogous to Israel’s Likudniks having locked the extremely one-sided “May 17” agreement in place with the government of Lebanon back in 1983, but considerably more momentous?
Nah. In the end the May 17 agreement really didn’t constrain the Lebanese political system from doing anything much at all. It muddied the political-diplomatic waters inside Lebanon for a little while… But meanwhile, it also clarified a lot of issues that had previously been quite murky. It was never ratified or implemented, and sank in the water from the deadweight of its own improbabilities less than a year after it was signed.
I think any Iraqi “constitution” that is agreed on now, under the pressure of the US occupation presence, would have a roughly similar fate. That’s why I can’t get very excited about the issue.
Zzzzzzz. Wake me when it’s over.

Police work making a difference in London

Back last Sunday, I wrote that the best response to terrorism is based primarily on solid, international investigative and police work, not on militarism. The British government has been showing us all how to do this (despite the terrible over-reaction of the shooting death of Jean Charles de Menezes, for which Tony Blair was very fast to apologize.)
Today, the British and Italian police arrested three of the men accused of involvement in the abortive mass bombing attacks on July 21, meaning that now all four of the prime suspects from that day have now been arrested.
The success of this arrest operation– and the intel bonanza that will quite likely flow from the police having taken all four of these men alive– is great news for the British people and for opponents of terrorism everywhere. It also underlines the importance of something I have argued ever since 9/11/2001: namely the importance of focusing, in both the police and the political responses to acts of terrorism, on those who might have reason to condone those acts, as much as on the shadowy (but necessarily small) terror networks themselves.
In the current case, vital clues regarding the whereabouts of the first of the suspects arrested were reportedly supplied by the man’s own father. And I have no doubt that in the other cases, too, vital clues that helped locate those suspects were provided by people who knew them fairly well, even if not they weren’t blood kin.
Think about it. If you were a Somali immigrant to Britain, or indeed any kind of a British citizen, would you turn your son in to the authorities if he were accused of involvement in something like the July 7 bombings?
It’s a tough question. I’m thinking about my own kids. If any of them was accused of involvement with a heinous crime, in the States or in Britain, would I turn them in to the authorities? (This is not a purely hypothetical question. Remember that in the US, the police only ever got their hands on the Unabomber back in 1996 because his own brother turned him in.)
As a parent, I think I’d say that if there was a strong chance a child of mine would be tortured or otherwise badly abused after being arrested, I would probably be very reluctant indeed to turn her or him in. (Ted Kaczynski’s brother reportedly only turned him in after receiving assurances from the police that he would not be given the death penalty.)
So that’s a first point. If you want to get family or close friends of suspects to cooperate with the police– and very often, they would be people with some of the best clues as to how and where to find him– then they have to have some assurance that their cooperation will not lead to their relative or friend being abused. There has, therefore, to be a basic degree of trust in the fairness of the justice system to which this person is being given up.
At a broader political level, too, though, the judgments being made about the general fairness and political legitimacy of the political system by people in the suspect’s broader community are equally important.
This is where we come to the issue of the importance of focusing on the community of potential condoners of the terrorist network. Not the (presumably smaller) community of people who actual logistic, ideological, or financial supporters of the terrorist network… But the broader ethnic or religious circles in which people might know something about what the terrorist networks are planning– in more or less specific terms– and they are in a position to choose whether to share such information as they have with the police authorities, or not…
In Britain, it seems that the events of July 7 shocked many people in the Muslim communities there who might previously, for a number of different reasons, been prepared to condone or turn a blind eye to the activities of Islamic-extremist organizers. But after July 7, I’m sure that a large proportion of previous condoners of the militant networks suddenly thought, “Oh my gosh, this business is extremely dangerous to many, many things I hold dear… What can I do to help the police to root this violence out of here?”
Note that since July 7, the British leadership has been very calm, resolute, and systematic in its pursuit of the police investigations. Tony Blair did not immediately “declare war”, or take extravagant actions to put the country on a war footing. The British police did not launch any campaigns of mass arrests of Muslims. Blair’s public stance was notably not anti-Muslim.
(Actually, in some regards, Bush’s reactions immediately after 9/11 were similarly wise and measured… With these two huge exceptions: After 9/11 some 700 suspects, mainly Muslims, were hauled off the streets of various US cities and put into fairly abusive and lengthy detention situations of very dubious legality; and then, within just a couple of weeks of 9/11, Bush started to get into the rhetoric– and associated militaristic actions– of the Global “War” on Terrorism.)
So anyway, this evening I want to say hats off to the British and their focus on massive and (with that one notable mistake) successful police work. And hats off to their ability to build new relations of apparently greater trust and mutual respect with people who formerly– and for various reasons, not all of them crazy– might have turned the condoner’s blind eye to the activities of the men of violence in their midst.
Calm, de-escalation, building relationships, and sticking to decent values of respect for everyone’s human rights… That, it seems to me, is the best way to contain and then end the scourge of terrorism. Globally, as well as within nations.
And no, it needn’t take decades to do this. Not if we start out, from the get-go, with a solid, values-based approach.

More from Giraldi

The short article in which former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi wrote about Cheney/Pentagon contingency plans touse tactical nukes against Iran is now up on the American Conservative website. I’d written about this piece here Tuesday, but didn’t have a link.
(It turns out it has an August 1 dateline.)
The other two items in Giraldi’s piece there are interesting, too.
In the first, he writes that a CIA internal review of the agency’s performance pre-9/11 is “harshly critical” of Tenet, his former Director of Operations James Pavitt, and the head of the Counterterrorist Center then, Cofer Black. Giraldi adds,

    The report, completed by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, is especially acerbic regarding the failure of the agency to stop two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they entered the United States. Black did not share information on the two men with the FBI agents assigned to the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA and also turned down a request for a formal memorandum to be sent to FBI Headquarters. The report will be finalized and given to Congress after those criticized in it add their own comments. Pavitt… has publicly accepted full responsibility for the agency

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem…

The list of inflammatory, escalatory, illegal, and otherwise violent actions that the US-supported Government of Israel has taken against Palestinians in recent weeks continues to grow.
One recent addition to this long list, as reported by AP yesterday, is this:

    Jerusalem planners have approved the construction of a new Jewish neighborhood in the city’s Muslim Quarter, officials said Tuesday, threatening to further inflame tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city claimed by both as a capital.
    The plan to build 21 apartments for Jews in the walled Old City’s Muslim Quarter was approved 5-2 by a local planning board late Monday, said Yosef Alalu, a dovish city council member who is on the committee. The plan has to go through several more bureaucratic stages before final approval.
    The plan was presented to the planning board by the Housing Ministry.

Does anyone in the Bush administration have any idea what Jerusalem– and in particular, the lovely, walled “Old City” that lies at its heart– means to 1.2 billion Muslims around the world?
When will we hear President Bush or any other US political leaders speaking up to denounce this latest application by Israel of unilateral, quite illegal, and extremely inflammatory structural violence against the Muslims of Palestine?
When will we see the US leadership take concrete steps to rein in the inflammatory actions of its coddled darling, Israel?
When will we see the US start to forthrightly advocate the building of an equality-based political order in Israel/Palestine, whether within one single state or two?
(Okay, I’m not holding my breath. But will they please do something?)
The present walls of Jerusalem’s Old City were built by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. But most of the structures inside their enclosure–including the whole Muslim Haram al-Sharif area with its two holy mosques; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and numerous other ancient churches; and the foundations of the Jewish Temple– are far, far older than the walls. In line with traditional Islamic principles of city planing, the city is divided into four ethnic/religious “quarters”– the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian Quarters.

Continue reading “Meanwhile, in Jerusalem…”

Hiroshima + 60 , meet Teheran??

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer who has spilled some good beans on the plans and goings-on within the Bush administration. In the next-to-last (July 18) issue of The American Conservative he wrotean article in which he stated that Dick Cheney’s office,

    has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. … As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing–that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack–but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

I paused awhile before posting this piece. (Hat-tip to Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton for signaling it, and a friend from American Conservative for confirming its veracity… The piece is not, unfortunately, on AmCon’s website.)
But I paused because I almost couldn’t believe my eyes, and I didn’t want to be part of a slanderous scare campaign.
However, after my AmCon friend confirmed the existence of the piece, and after I checked out Giraldi a little bit, I have to say that this looks like an entirely serious report.
In just eleven days we’ll be marking the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The idea of an established nuclear-weapons state planning, threatening, or even possibly (God forbid) launching a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear-weapons state that’s a signatory of the NPT flies in the face of Washington’s commitments under the treaty…
But above and beyond that… Has Dick Cheney completely lost his marbles?

‘GWOT’ ended (but not ‘won’)

Attention all enthusiastic participants in, and perpetuators of, the discourse of “terror”– your one-time leader Donald Rumsfeld has now abandoned you! Writing in the NYT today, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker note the following:

    In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation’s senior military officer have spoken of “a global struggle against violent extremism” rather than “the global war on terror,” which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.

Well, it only took these guys about 46 months to recognize their mistake… And meantime, they’ve used the misleadingly constructed concept of the “Global War on Terror” to jerk Americans and others into two major wars and scores of smaller military commitments around the world.
So for those like to be “up-to-date” with the latest conceptual tools coming out of that bastion of intellectual enlightenment, the Pentagon (major irony alert there, folks)… What, you will be asking, is the new discourse of choice?
… And the winner is…
The discourse of “civilization”, as presented by Rumsfeld last Friday, when he addressed an audience at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. According to that NYT report, at that event,

    Mr. Rumsfeld described America’s efforts as it “wages the global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilization.”

The use of the discourse of “civilization” to mask the true content of strategies of global domination is, sadly, as old as globe-girdling colonialism itself. The British used it in Tasmania as they exterminated the indigenous peoples there… The Germans used it in South West Africa as they did likewise… The Spanish used it in Central America as they…
And now, Donald Rumsfeld.
You might think that an administration that has brought us the kinds of abuses that continue in detention centers and military prisons from Guantanamo to Bagram to Baghdad might be ashamed to even mention the word “civilization”??
But no. These guys apparently lack any capacity for either shame or self-awareness. A sad day for “civilization”, I would say.

An admirable vision from Israel

Gershon Baskin is someone I like, respect, and admire a lot. He’s a Jewish Israeli, quite forthright in his espousal of his version of the Zionist ideal. Moreover, unlike a lot of “Zionists” who sit in the United States and tell other Jewish people to go live in Israel, he actually “made aliya” to Israeli himself and has been living with the risks that that entailed ever since.
Gershon has a very moving op-ed in the Jerusalem Post today, in which he states his personal values very clearly:

    Zionism was not about conflict with our neighbors. It was about creating a just, progressive and humane society based on “Jewish values” for Jews to live and prosper, both in spirit and in substance. Real Zionism accepted the reality that non-Jews would always live within our midst. This was expressed with both eloquence and finesse in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That Declaration has always served, for me, as a kind of statement of intent and of the values upon which this state and this society rests, or should rest.
    ZIONISM is not about occupying the West Bank and Gaza. The continuation of the settlement enterprise is an act of suicide for the Zionist dream. It is not only about demographics. It is perhaps even more so about values, morality and lessons that we, as Jews, should understand better than anyone else.
    The disengagement from Gaza is a Zionist act. Ending our occupation and domination over Gaza and its people is an action aimed at saving Zionism from those who have tainted the noble aspects of its cause since 1967. The Zionist dream is still in danger and the Zionist enterprise is at risk as long as we continue our occupation and domination over the West Bank and its people. The march out of the occupied territories must continue. We must return to ourselves and build Israel from within.

For many years now, Gershon has been the Jewish-Israeli co-director of an organization (that he founded) called the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and Information. One of the reasons I respect him such a lot is that, back in the early 1990s I was doing a lot of Israeli-Palestinian peace-building work, and he was one of the very few Jewish Israelis I worked with who sincerely seemed to “get” that having Jewish Israelis (and their Jewish-American friends) controlling every aspect of the “joint” Israeli-Palestinian projects that were proliferating like mushrooms in those days was not, actually, the best way to build longterm relations of reciprocity and mutual respect between the two peoples.
I could write a book about how many, extremely well-meaning Jewish Israeli “peaceniks” I worked with who thought that because they knew best, they should be able to make all the big decisions and keep their Palestinian “partners” in a quite subordinate position.
How incredibly patronising!
No wonder that a huge proportion of those “joint” projects ended up failing. When the second intifada broke out in September 2000, almost all them collapsed (but not until after a lot of the Israeli organizations and individuals– along with a much smaller number of their Palestinian counterparts– that had participated in them had profited handsomely from the investment put into them by well-meaning but naive international donors.)
Anyway, I write that here as background to the principal reason why– though I don’t always agree with Gershon– still, I respect him so much: he has always seemed to me to be sincerely trying to build IPCRI on a basis of true human equality between members of the two nations… What a breath of fresh air! (This is, incidentally, one of the main reasons that IPCRI was one of the few “binational projects” organizations to survive September 2000.)
A number of well respected Palestinian figures have worked with Gershon as co-director of IPCRI. The current one is veteran newspaper editor Hanna Siniora.
Indeed, Gershon’s commitment to allowing his Palestinian partners to have their own voice within and through IPCRI’s projects even, earlier this month, extended to allowing them to use IPCRI’s mailing list as part of their effort to “take on” and publicly criticize the extremely patronizing/controlling approach often followed by people associated with the “Peres Center for Peace”, which is one of the veterans in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace”-monopolization business.
That whole dispute– which most likely continues– is over the terms on which Palestinian health professionals choose to engage with their Israeli counterparts. (You can find a short guide to that dispute, with links to some of the relevant statements and publications, here.)
Anyway, all of that is some more background as to why it’s worth reading what Gershon has written in the Jerusalem Post today:

Continue reading “An admirable vision from Israel”