Author: Helena

Terrorism, and responses to it

So much killing, so much hatred… The BBC is reporting that at least 88 people were killed in the multiple bombings in Sharm al-Shaikh, Egypt, yesterday, and at least 22 have been killed today by a truck bomb in the east-Baghdad district of Mashtal (which means a nursery for young plants, or saplings).
This after the well-known series of other large-scale killings of civilians we’ve witnessed in recent weeks, in Iraq and London.
Each one of those lives snuffed out is equally precious… We should remember, too, that the “point” of terrorists who kills civilians is not just to carry on killing until everyone is dead, though sometimes it does almost feel that way. Their “point” is to leave everyone else so terrified that they accede to the demands of the terrorists. And along they way, they often hope to provoke an over-reaction from the targeted society. Llike, for example, the serious mistake the British police made when they shot to kill a fleeing “suspect” who turned out to be a Brazilian unconnected with the Qaeda-style terrorists the police were seeking.
That kind of an over-reaction helps to polarize important portions of society against the police, and thus poses a huge obstacle to the kind of very thorough and principled police work that– in Britain as internationally– remains the best answer for how to incapacitate the Qaeda-style terrorists.
Already, several prominent British Muslims have said that if the British police have a “shoot to kill” policy, that will make it much harder for the police to win cooperation in the Muslim communities.
… Well, if we think that the British police shooting to kill one fleeing individual was a dangerous and potentially self-defeating form of over-reaction, then what do we think about the Bush administration– “in response to” the threat from an Afghanistan/Pakistan-based Al-Qaeda– launching a war to invade and control a whole different country, Iraq?
In Britain, I hope and expect that the Rules of Engagement that last friday apparently allowed a small London police squad to shoot to kill a fleeing suspect have since been changed. And also, hopefully, that the whole incident will be rigorously investigated and any officer who exceeded the rules of engagement in place at the time would be disciplined.
Of course, the British police and government should also apologise profusely to the family of the slain Brazilian, and make some meaningful form of amends to them.
But what about the Bushites’ extreme form of over-reaction in Iraq?
When will we see that policy reversed?
When will see a thorough investigation into the whole affair, and those responsible for that dangerous over-reaction brought to justice and disciplined?
When will we see a US apology to the affected Iraqis, and serious efforts to make amends to them?
Soon, I hope.
And at that point, everyone in the world who actually, in practice, recognizes that solving longstanding political differences through dialogue and discussion is a far better way of doing things than through any applications of violence, can start to come together and make the case for a far smarter, more focused, response to the terrorists.
This response would be based on:

    (1) solid, international investigative and police work;
    (2) building strong political alliances based on a commitment to nonviolent values rather than a reliance on militarism; and
    (3) a commitment to hearing everyone’s existing political claims and grievances with an equally sympathetic ear, and a commitment to equality-based outcomes.

There are many ways to respond to terrorism without getting sucked into the terrorists’ games and paradigms of relying on violence to solve problems. Pleae God, let’s be smart enough, and concerned enough about the kind of world we’ll bequeath to our children and grandchildren, that we commit to using those ways.

Families

Tomorrow, Bill and I are leaving early to go to New York for the weekend. While there we’ll have some good time with the daughters and the son-in-law. Maybe I’m a sentimentalist but I really value the time I get to spend with my kids, my sisters, and other family members… Perhaps the fact that we’re all so broadly scattered makes the times we do get to spend together even more special.
When we have good family time together, however, I’m always acutely aware of the terrible pain that travel restrictions and visa restrictions put on families not as lucky as ours… For Palestinian or Iraqi families right now– a high proportion of whom have family members scattered in different countries– weddings, funerals, and other events that rightly ought to be occasions for a big family get-together instead become reminders of loss and separation.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Faiza and her son Khalid. I’ve heard no news yet about whether Kahlid’s still in prison… Hope and prayers for both of you… and for political prisoners everywhere.

Ariel Sharon’s Ariel “full monty”

I was going to title this post “Sharon’s bait and switch”. As in, making a big show about withdrawing from the tiny Gaza Strip while quietly consolidating Israel’s hold on the much larger areas of the West Bank that it wants to hang on to.
Then I thought, “No, he doesn’t even feel the need, in front of an ‘outraged’ international public opinion, for example, to engage in any subterfuge on the issue. It’s all fully out in the open. He’s saying, in effect– to Israelis and foreigners alike– ‘You’ll see, I’ll withdraw somewhat from Gaza (which is a heck of a place to try to administer, anyway.) And I’ll hang onto Ariel and all the other places in the heart of the West Bank that I’ve been building up for some time… Does anyone want to try and stop me?'”
Here’s what Sharon said at the large West Bank settlement (colony) of Ariel yesterday:

    “I reiterate and clarify that this bloc is one of the most important. It will forever be part of the State of Israel. There is no other thought and no other direction of thinking.
    “I came here today to see how the city can be expanded and the bloc strengthened, as I do and shall do in the other blocs. This bloc will forever be an inseparable part of the State of Israel, territorially contiguous with the State of Israel like the other blocs,” he said.

Here (scroll down a little) is a map that shows you how deeply the Ariel bloc cuts into the northern West Bank.
And here is what I wrote back in March 2004 about Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza:

Continue reading “Ariel Sharon’s Ariel “full monty””

Ghosh on prisons and social control

I’ve had a (strongly critical) interest in punishment theory for some years now. Many months ago I rashly agreed to write an article on mass incarcerations and political control for a friend of mine, who graciously reminded me a couple of weeks ago that the deadline was either highly imminent or actually overdue… That’s part of the reason I’ve been reading Caroline Elkins’ detailed study of the exact and complex dynamics of the mass punishment of Mau Mau suspects in British-controlled Kenya.
Today, I read this excellent article by the (subcontinent) Indian-American anthropologist Amitav Ghosh, who draws a direct line between British carcereal practices in colonial India and the practices of the US GI’s in Abu Ghraib. (The piece was written to mark, roughly, the anniversary of the Abu Ghraib revelations.)
Here are some of the similarities he identified:

    some of the Abu Ghraib images are eerily reminiscent of photographs taken by British prison officials in Asia in the late nineteenth century. In these too, the prisoners are naked, men and women, and they stand with an arm outstretched and their genitals facing the camera; although their clothes have been removed, many wear fetters and chains. The difference is that these pictures were taken for officially sanctioned projects of documentation, and the jailors were absent from the frames…
    Another continuity lies in the marriage of incarceration and cultural theory. The methods employed in Abu Ghraib and Guant

The woman behind the byline

… Hannah Allam, that is, the talented and incredibly courageous 27-year-old journo who’s been running Knight Ridder’s Baghdad bureau since late 2003.
That nice profile of her there, from Editor & Publisher notes that,

    Allam has gained a reputation for being outspoken on matters of reporter safety.
    Just last week, she responded sharply to a column by St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Mark Yost, which claimed reporters were not giving a full picture of life in Iraq, especially positive news.
    The Baghdad bureau, which has been housed in seven rooms on the top floor of a hotel, has seen its share of tragedy in recent weeks. On June 24, stringer Yasser Salihee was killed on his day off, while the assassination on Tuesday of Miijbil Issa, a member of the Iraq Constitutional Convention, affected the bureau because he was a favored source.
    “He is my third source in a month to be killed,” Allam said. “Will it ever stop? Every day they are dying.”

As I recall, that idiot piece by Mark Yost appeared after he’d made a whirlwind visit to the Baghdad Green Zone under heavy US military protection…
Allam is an exceptionally capable reporter and administrator– in her two years in Baghdad she has, as the E&P piece notes, built KR’s bureau there into a 16-person operation that “has received praise from journalists both in and out of the newspaper chain.”
But in addition, Knight Ridder itself– which is a chain that owns 31 daily newspapers across the US, as well as 34 web sites– has shown a strong and continuing commitment to excellent coverage of Iraq war issues. Their Washington bureau contains Warren Strobel and Jonthan Landay, veteran journos who throughout the whole buildup to the war were two of the few MSM reporters to aggressively question and investigate the Bushies’ often bizarre and frequently fallacious claims about the Saddam regime.
(Here’s the latest piece of excellent Strobel/Landay reporting… A typically well-done piece telling us about a recent meeting in Europe between two powerful but wacko Republican lawmakers and a representative of Iranian arms merchant Manoucher Ghorbanifar… He of the “Iran-Contra” affair of the 1980s… )
So it’s good to see that this apparently well-run news operation, Knight Ridder, is supporting a very capable correspondent like Allam as she takes a next important step in her career. Now, she’s heading to Cairo to establish a new KR bureau there that will have broad responsibilities for covering the whole Middle East.
The E&P profile of her also notes:

Continue reading “The woman behind the byline”

Column on withdrawing from Iraq

My column calling for a total, speedy, and generous US withdrawal from Iraq is in today’s CSM.
In it, I write:

    The interests of both Americans and Iraqis have been badly harmed by the three-year US occupation of Iraq (though far more Iraqis have suffered than Americans). If these two peoples are to be saved from further – even cataclysmic – harm, then Washington must quickly devise and implement a withdrawal strategy that’s total, speedy, and generous to the Iraqi people.
    Some Americans seem not to understand how deeply, in most postcolonial societies, including Iraq, the fears of foreign domination still linger. So long as President Bush refuses to set a date for withdrawal, these fears will continue to multiply. No Iraqi political forces, except some in the Kurdish north, can be expected to support a long-term US troop presence in their country. (Kurdish leaders who think this might be a good idea would do well to remember the lawless condition of Kosovo, six years after its partial “liberation” by Western armies.)

I then go on to respond to some commonly voiced objections to this proposal…
Read it and tell me what you think.
Interesting to note that the rightwing Republican Congresswoman from Flordia Ileana Ros-Lehtinen yesterday succeeded in attaching to a bill on US international spending a (non-binding) amendment opposing a “premature withdrawal” of US troops from Iraq and stating that setting any date for the withdrawal would “embolden” terrorists.
Congressional Quarterly reporter Gayle S. Putrich– sorry, no link– wrote that Ros-Lehtinen said from the floor that,

Trials of trying Saddam, revisited

Ways back in mid-december 2003, right after Saddam Hussein was captured, I wrote here:

    No doubt about it: the trial of Saddam Hussein has many, many political aspects to it. It certainly won’t be the simple, gloating “victory lap for the Coalition” that many in the US media now think it may be.

Time has proven me right. Indeed the chaotic jousting over who gets to make the key decisions in this case that I predicted back then has continued till today, and is currently escalating.
Today, the NYT’s John Burns is reporting that:

    The Iraqi tribunal preparing the trial of Saddam Hussein has been thrown into turmoil by the dismissal of nine senior staff members and a threat to dismiss 19 others, including the chief investigative judge.

Burns said that the issue burst into public view Tuesday when one of Ahmed Chalabi’s aides,

    confirmed that Mr. Chalabi had begun to press for the removal of former members of Mr. Hussein’s ruling Baath Party from the tribunal’s staff of judges, prosecutors and administrators. Mr. Chalabi contends that the 28 men he has cited for removal are ineligible under Iraqi law to work at the tribunal because of their party affiliation.

Burns also reports that Chalabi contends that the “Iraqi” Chief Judge of the Special tribunal, Raid Juhi, should be among those dismissed– but had agreed to hold off from pushing for this.
Today, AP confirms that nine, relatively low-level employees of the court have indeed now been dismissed– and adds that, “The cases of 19 others, including the chief investigative judge [Juhi], are under review.”
This, at a time when the eminent Egyptian-American international law expert Cherif Bassiouni has just published an open letter to Iraqi PM Ibrahim al-Jafaari urging him, among other things to, “Erase the American Footprint” from the trial process. Pointing out the many ways in which the “Iraqi” Special Tribunal is in fact a US creation, Bassiouni writes:

    A large segment of the public in Iraq and the broader Arab world suspects that the tribunal is an attempt by the United States to divert attention from its own abuses in Iraq (and at the Abu Ghraib prison, in particular) and to justify the invasion by focusing on Saddam

Caroline Elkins’ Mau Mau book, contd.

    Editorial note: I put this post up last night. It elicited some interesting & helpful comments. This morning I wanted to correct a couple of typos in it & put in a couple more page numbers… But by mistake I ‘deleted’ the whole post! Yikes! Luckily I still had one loaded on my browser, so now I’m reposting it here (with those comments.) Sorry for any confusion caused. If you want to link to this post, please use the present permalink (above).

On Sunday, I wrote how much I was learning from a book about Britain’s shockingly repressive end-of-empire counter-insurgency in Kenya, Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning. One commenter noted there had later been a letter to the NY Review of Books that had questioned some of Elkins’ use of her sources.

Today, by chance I picked up an old issue of the NYRB, and there was the letter. It was from David Elstein, who is not a historian of Africa or even, it seems, any kind of expert on matters African. He’s a TV producer.

His main criticism was with, as he wrote, the fact that, “She suggests ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Kikuyu died at British hands

Iran, Iraq, (Lebanon)

So finally, 39 months into Iraq’s “liberation”, there is some hope that an outside power will be able to help it get back on its feet.
That would be mega-neighbor Iran… And by an amazing coincidence it would not be the distant (and politically disengaged) US.
AFP tells us that,

    –
    Iran signed a deal with
    Iraq to exchange crude for refined products desperately needed by its western neighbour as a result of persistent insurgent sabotage.
    The two countries’ oil ministers — Bijan Namdar Zanganeh for Iran and Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum for Iraq — signed the deal as Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari wrapped up a landmark visit to the former foe, the Iranian oil ministry’s Shana news agency reported.
    The swap will require three new pipelines across the neighbours’ southern border, which will be funded and built by Iran within 10 months, Zanganeh said on Monday.
    “The idea is for Iran to buy 150,000 barrels per day of Basra light crude. In return, Iran will provide petrol, heating oil and kerosene,” Zanganeh said, adding that the latter two products would come from Iranian refineries but that the petrol would have to be imported.

This, while Iranian ally Hizbullah (Lebanon) is now set to join the Lebanese government for the first time ever.
This is Hizbullah high-up Muhammad Fneish, who’ll be in a bit of a hot seat as Minister for Power and Water. But Hizbullah has a reputation for getting things done– and moreover, without the terrible cronyism and racketeering that have dogged ministerial management of the vital utilities for many decades.
The Foreign Minister will also be a Shiite– a professional diplomat who is not a member of any party, but deemed “acceptable” by both Hizbullah and the other main Shiite party, Amal.
Meanwhile back in Iraq– oh, sorry, I mean Iran– there is this from Monday’s edition of the pro-Khomeini daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami (Islamic republic):

    News Service: “Sadun al-Dulaymi,” the Iraqi defense minister, who has
    traveled to Tehran, said at a press conference accompanied by Admiral Shamkhani, our country’s defense minister: “I have come to Iran to ask for forgiveness and apologize for what Saddam did.” According to this report, the Iraqi defense minister also emphasized he has to ask forgiveness from Kuwait and all of Saddam’s victims.

Well, apologies for wrongdoing are always good– a vital social lubricant, I’d say. (Not that Mr. Dulaimi personally was in the Iraq government at the time… but still.)
Then, from the same source, translated by FBIS and sent to JWN by helpful reader WSH, this:

    This report adds that Hojatoleslam val-Moslemin Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, the president, also met with “Sadun al-Dulaymi,” the Iraqi defense minister, on Thursday. As reported by the president’s media affairs office, Mr Khatami referred to the hardships the Iranian people have endured for the sake of independence and liberty, and said: “The maturity and growth of the Iraqi nation in determining a transitional government and the elections they held are noteworthy.” The president considered Iraq’s move toward the establishment of democracy to be correct and expressed hope the move would continue with the will of the Iraqi nation…

Very bizarre. Khatami (who is on his way out, btw) seems to giving huge credit to the “political system” the US occupation has been running inside Iraq.
Well, I guess there’s a reason. Iran seems, after all, to be making huge geopolitical gains, day after day, in Iraq and elsewhere, with every days that passes so long as the US troops are still deployed– in an extremely vulnerable fashion– throughout the whole of Iraq.
It’s amazing how rapidly the geopolitical balance has been tipping inside Iraq in recent weeks. Watch that space.