Helena – Page 256 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Slouching toward withdrawal

I’ve been reading the account in today’s London Mail on Sunday of the leaked memo in which British Defence Minister John Reid last month set out plans to withdraw some 5,500 of the 8,500 troops the UK has in Iraq, between now and April 2006.
The article also said that “Emerging US plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in [total Allied troops] from 176,000 down to 66,000.”
Monday’s Guardian has a follow-up piece on the same topic (which the Guardian also partially covered in an earlier piece, last week.)
In the UK, the calculus of military and financial realism that has driven Reid to this position seems significantly further developed than any parallel calculus is, yet, in Washington. Or maybe the planners both sides of the Atlantic are in the same place– but the willingness of their bosses to “allow” leaks of their plans is at a different stage?
Anyway, the military leakers in London– who did such a good job getting the Downing Street memo out to the public– still seem to be alive and well, getting this memo, which was marked “Secret – UK eyes only” out to the broader public in a fairly timely fashion.
It is a total delight to me to see that despite all the sad and idiotic rhetoric that the pols both sides of the Atlantic continue to voice about “staying the course” in Iraq, etc, there are smart and realistic minds at work in the British Defence Ministry who recognize an imminent strategic defeat when they see one, and are able to to start to plan appropriate actions to minimize their country’s losses.
The Mail on Sunday story, by Simon Walters, says that the document in question, which is titled Options For Future UK Force Posture In Iraq, was “prepared for Mr Blair in the past few weeks”. The Guardian account, a little more explicitly, says the doc was “put to a cabinet committee chaired by Tony Blair”. But it doesn’t say when.
The MOS reported that,

Mr Reid states that his proposal is not yet a “ministerially endorsed position” – or Government policy – though he clearly believes it should be.

Also, this:

Yeah, right. So I wonder what other “options” (if any) they’ve been actively canvassing? Quite possibly, no other options. Quite possibly, this one, or something revised only very slightly from it, is IT.
So, given that defense planning in London is carried out in close coordination with that in Washington, what does this memo tell us about the state of thinking in the Pentagon?

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Former CIA director calls for Iraq withdrawal

I guess I missed this news item when it happened, back on June 7. Speaking at Harvard, former CIA Director John Deutch,

But it is also possible, he said, that the United States will fail in its Iraq objectives and lose international credibility by staying the course, even as its ability to deal with other crises, such as North Korea, Iran, and the fight against international terrorism, is compromised.

Fascinating. Now I don’t have to be the founder member of this century’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” club. John Deutch can be.
Deutch, a long-time strategic-affairs brainiac (and former MIT chemistry prof), was Clinton’s CIA Director from May ’95 thru December ’96.
It would be great if his wisdom could be heard and widely advocated by the Democratic Party leadership in the country. (If such a thing still exists.) Hearing so many of them continuing to voice the Topm friedman/ Ken Pollack argument that US troop levels in Iraq should be increased makes me really depressed.
… By the way, re the “nattering nabobs…” That was the slur voiced by Spiro Agnew back in the early 1970s against those who said the Vietnam War was unwinnable. The line was written for him by his speechwriter Bill Safire. Yes, the Bill Safire who was still cluttering up the op-ed pages of various newspapers. until recently
But now, I think it may be time for those of us who are convinced that the US’s position in Iraq is quite unwinnable to proudly reclaim the appellation. For my part, I am entirely negative on that score.
By contrast, though, I am quite positive about the opportunities in the five years ahead for the US citizenry to find a new and much healthier and more sustainable balance in its relations with the rest of the world. Let’s go for it! The debate over the craziness of the Iraq war can be our opening!

Bushies lose influence at home & abroad

Yesterday I wrote a column for Al-Hayat about how the Bush administration has been losing political influence at home, and the probable effects of this for Middle East diplomacy. (Short version: for Iraqi nationalists– good; for Palestinian-Israeli peace hopes– bad.)
Of course, the Bushies are also significantly losing influence overseas, as well as domestically. When their almost-puppet government in Baghdad ends up being all lovey-dovey with Teheran and cutting some really interesting deals there… when the Uzbeks etc start talking about cutting back US basing rights… when Bush feels obliged to say something about how human actions have contributed to global warming…. Well, when all these things happen you have to see that Washington’s global influence and ability to maintain the conceited illusion that it is “the indispensable nation” is starting to erode.
Of course this is not going to be a rapid or problem-free process. Nonethless, I think the time really is coming when people who are peace activists and US citizens can take the conversation with our compatriots about the kind of relationship that our country ought to have with the rest of the world to a whole new, much more constructive level.
I plan to write a bunch more about about this over the days and weeks ahead. But I can’t now. I have to drive off to Blacksburg, Virginia, to get to the tail-end of a big Quaker meeting that’s taking place there and catch up with some old f/Friends. Back home tomorrow.

Peace demo # 82 or so

It was good to be back home this week and go to our regular Thursday afternoon peace demonstration in the center of town. (The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice had resumed the weekly peace presence in early December 2003. Hence the numbering system above.)
These past few months, we’ve been trying to urge our supporters to make a special effort to come out to the vigil on the first Thursday each month, even if they find it hard to make the other Thursdays. The weather has not been cooperating. Each of the months since we’ve had this policy, the afternoons of the first Thursday has been very rainy. Yesterday was no exception.
Nevertheless, six or seven of us did turn up. I’d taken my rain gear, and the rain was nowhere near as bad as I have sometimes experienced it there… But oh, yesterday as always in recent months, the demonstration was definitely worth doing! The honks of support that we got were extremely numerous– at some stages fully half of the passing drivers were participating.
Yes, we had a couple of people yelling bad things at us. I can understand if people were upset over what had happened in London. I was myself. But the general reception we got was great.
Two especially nice things happened. One woman driver rolled down her window and handed us a bag of truly delicious, home-baked cinnamon buns. (Note to self: remember next time that it’s well-nigh impossible to hold the sign, wave to passing motorists, and hold a cinnamon bun all at one time.) Then at a different point, one of our Charlottesville City Police officers came by on her bike, looking very snappy and efficient in her bike-police uniform. “Thanks for being there,” she told us cheerily as she passed.
Of course, one could interpret this as “Thanks for being there, on that sidewalk,” as opposed to in the median strip, which the police tell us– probably rightly– can cause a traffic hazard. But still, I realize that we really are lucky to live in a city where peaceful political protest is recognized and even welcomed as part of the normal order of things, and moreover is protected by the law.
Anyway, this is just to let our non-American readers know that the antiwar movement is alive and well in some spots of heartland America.
Also, it’s slowly but surely growing in influence nationwide. About time, eh?

Exit-from-Iraq movement gathering steam

Catching up with my reading after the NZ trip I see from the website of the Friends Committee on National Legislation that The first bipartisan resolution calling on the president to begin planning for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq was introduced in Congress on Thursday, June 16.
FCNL is a Quaker organization based in Washington DC that lobbies Congress on issues of concern to Quakers. Such as, right now, the need to push for a speedy and total withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
The site notes that the bill introduced June 15 was sponsored by Republican Representatives Walter Jones (NC) and Ron Paul (TX) and Democrats Dennis Kucinich (OH), Martin Meehan (MA), and Lynn Woolsey (CA). It calls on the president “to announce before the end of this year a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.”
It has the engaging subtitle of “Homeward Bound”.
You can read the text of the legislation here.
Elsewhere on the FCNL site, you can see a handily interactive map showing the location and some details about the 14 possibly “enduring” military bases inside Iraq for which President Bush sought funding in May 2005.
Relevant to what I wrote yesterday about the highly contested north-Iraq cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, note that two of those bases are in Mosul and one in Kirkuk.
Talking of big, lucrative construction contracts, there’s this, from Reuters yesterday:

signed the work order with Kellogg Brown and Root, a unit of Halliburton, in May.

was not made public when it was signed because the Army did not consider that such an announcement was necessary, she said.

So what do we imagine the profit-margin on a $4.97 billion contract is? It must be more than one billion.
How much of that profit will go into Dick Cheney’s blind trust and the bank accounts of his friends and former colleagues from Halliburton? And why did it take the US Army two months to decided that maybe the fact of this contract should be made available to the US public, after all?
… Well, anyway, it strikes me that all of those are just signs of the increasing desperation of an administration that is coming to recognise these two key facts:

Pull the troops out of Iraq in decent order while you still can, guys! Follow my 9-point plan for how to do it!

Thoughts of London

AP is now reporting (based on US sources) that the death toll in the London bomb blasts is “at least 40”, and the number of injured more than 300.
This seems like a ghastly, Qaeda-orchestrated replay of the March 2004 Madrid bombings. I imagine that all of London is as hurt and shattered as the Madrilenos were at that time. I just spoke with my sister Diana, who lives in far-west London. She and her family are ok, but she sounded very, very sobered by what was unfolding.
I have numerous other friends and family in London to worry about, too. My niece Rachel is an emergency-room doc at the Royal London Hospital near Liverpool St. Station, which has been taking in many of the casualties. All power to her life-saving elbow in these hours.
So Qaeda (or whichever other actually terrorist group) has been busy organizing all this– not entirely unpredictable by the British authorities, on the day the G-8 summit opens in the UK?– while the British and US governments have been expending truly massive amounts of blood, treasure, and national-level attention on pursuing their wholly unjustified war in Iraq?
Talk about a wholly unnecessary and diversionary expenditure of national energies.
If they had not launched the war against Iraq, but had instead invested one-fourth as much time and finances in a smart policy aimed at (1) doing the solid police work of tracking down and incapacitating the Qaeda leadership, and (2) denying that leadership an operating base by engaging politically with the legitimate demands of potential Qaeda condoners… If the Bush and Blair administrations had done that, Qaeda could have been wiped off the map as an operating force, quite possibly as long ago as late 2002, or 2003.
Instead of which…
I guess it’s not really a time for recriminations now. But we should not forget that back in 2002– or even late 2001– a deliberate choice was made in Washington to invade Iraq, regardless of whether there was any solid link between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda, or not.
I am also thinking, ghastly as things undoubtedly are for Londoners right now, at least they have functioning hospitals and a functioning emergency-response system that can reduce the human damage caused by these bomb blasts to an absolute minimum. Meanwhile, every week in Iraqi cities there are multiple bomb-blasts and other assaults that are comparably damaging– but then, because of the breakdown of the hospital system and of public order there, people who would have been saved in London’s hospitals end up dying because of a lack of adequate support and relief services there… Basic services that were present in Baghdad to a significant degree prior to the US invasion, but have been seriously degraded since then.
Well, we can talk about all this over the days ahead. For now, I send my empathy and human support to all the Londoners affected by these blasts.

Kurdistan-Kosovo

In the post I wrote yesterday outlining my 9-point exit plan from Iraq, I drew an analogy between the distinctly unsettled and unsettling situation in Kosovo today, six years after its partial amputation from Serbia, and the prospects for a Kurdistan that might similarly end up as a redoubt for US and allied armies.
There are similarities and dissimilarities between the situations of the two territories. Both are, quite significantly, landlocked. Both contain impressive mountain fastnesses within which, historically, “minority” populations had sought refuge. Both still come formally under the sovereignty of the broader polity with which they have been connected for many decades; but in both, a form of formalized or less formalized autonomy has been practiced and enjoyed for some time now.
In Kosovo, the “final outcome” of the sovereignty question is judged by the UN to be still unresolved– but with resolution promised “soon”, once UN-prescribed conditions are met in the area.
In Iraqi Kurdistan the soveriegnty question is not really, at present, on the table as such– though the question of a more dilute form of devolved, semi-autonomous rule very much is. But sovereignty could be placed very centrally in question if the US decided to regroup/concentrate some of its forces in I.K. after a withdrawal from the rest of Iraq. Of course, the landlocked nature of I.K., and the fact that surrounding states could be expected not to be happy to see a US-Kurdish power emerge there, would most likely make maintaining a US troop presence there for any length of time very costly in both financial and political/diplomatic terms.

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How to exit from Iraq

For some reason, the Bush administration has still not taken the advice I’ve been giving it for more than two years now, quite simply to get out of Iraq. I can’t think why. Maybe they don’t know how to organize this logistical feat?
So as a free public service to them, I am happy to offer them the following handy nine-point plan for how to do it.
(1) Head south
Looking at the logistics, it seems a happy coincidence that one of the least badly-run parts of the country is the British zone in the south. Since most of the US forces will need to be “redeployed” out of the country by sea, and the only outlet to the sea is in the south, the British presence in and around Basra is rather handy. Not that Basra’s port will be able to handle anything like this volume of traffic– or, probably, much at all. But the troop convoys will most likely need to transit Basra on their way towards the ships and planes awaiting them in nearby Kuwait.
(2) Auxiliary exit routes
Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia might all also be willing to allow transit rights to the redeploying troops. I somehow suspect Syria and Iran would not be so happy to do so. However, no doubt the Iranians would be happy to negotiate some kind of an arrangement whereby– in return for some quid pro quo– they might undertake not to harass US troops leaving Iraq along routes close to Iran or its vital sea-lanes, so long as the redploying troops stick to agreed corridors and a known timetable of redeployment.
(3) One potential can of worms
Some folks in the Pentagon and elsewhere might still be tempted to leave a successor force in Iraqi Kurdistan. This seems like a real can of worms. They could easily become just as bogged down there as the UN presence is in Kosovo, six years after the US-led war to “rescue” Kosovo’s ever-fractious people. (The international-law status of both areas could become very similar– that is, Kurdistan’s could become just as murky and basically unsustainable as Kosovo’s if the US succeeds in breaking it off– but only partially– from the rest of Iraq.)
(4) How can US troops redeploying out of Iraq be assured they won’t be harrassed/attacked along the way?
This is a concern with some validity. The US authorities could negotiate an agreement on this matter with the Jaafari government. Of course, at present, the Jaafari government is not a body viewed as representative by many Iraqis, especially the more nationalistic ones. But if he could say to his compatriots: “Look, here is the plan for the total withdrawal of US troops so let’s all calm things down,” then he actually might suddenly develop nationwide credibility. And even if he didn’t gain that, simply the fact that the US troops are visibly following a well-publicized and timely withdrawal schedule would certainly mean that many other Iraqi leaders at the local level would come forward and say, “Yes, let’s make sure this goes smoothly.”

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Settler societies, indigenes, culture, language

Jonathan, Shirin, and I have been having a really interesting interesting discussion down here about issues of culture and power in settler societies.
In the course of the discussion there Jonathan has been starting to develop a really interesting typology of different kinds of settler societies. Since he’s a guy who knows an amazing amount about many really intriguing parts of the world, including but not limited to the Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Middle East, what he has to say is really worth reading.
We also address the ever-thorny question of when cultural appropriation– mainly, in this context, by the settlers, of the cultural products/practices of the indigenes– is legitimate and when it should be (at the very least) questioned. In the discussion there, we make a distinction between cultural appropriation (generally ok) and cultural expropriation (generally not ok).
Finally, I’ve been looking at the report that New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal issued in 1986 on the issue of whether Maori language (te reo Maori) counts as a “treasure” (taonga) of the Maoris under the terms of the 1840 Waitangi Treaty and is thus deserving of the government’s protection.

[That web document there presents both the English-language and the equally authoritative Maori-language versions of the Treaty. In “Article the second”, the “kuini o Ingarani”, that is, the Queen of England, undertakes to protect the unqualified exercise of the Maori chiefs’ chieftainship over all their “ratou taonga katoa”– their most precious treasures….
Note also in the Maori-language second para of “Article the First”, that the language actually had no word for or concept of the European-origined concept of “sovereignty”. Therefore they used a Maori transliteration/adaption of the concept of “governorship”– Kawana-tanga.]

Well anyway, in 1913, 90% of Maori schoolchildren could still speak their ancestral language. (Marcia Stenson, 2004, p.97) But since the view (and possibly the desire) of most of the Pakeha (i.e. mainly-Anglo settler) majority in the country was that the Maoris were “a dying race”, whose last remnants would presumably soon be assimilated into English-speaking society, government policies forbade Maoris from using their mother-tongue in schools and provided no access for them to use it in their dealings with the government.
By 1975, fewer than 5% of Maori schoolkids could speak their ancestral tongue.
Enter the Waitangi Tribunal— a body established that very same year as

a permanent commission of inquiry charged with making recommendations on claims brought by Māori relating to actions or omissions of the Crown, which breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi. The Tribunal comprises up to 16 members… Approximately half the members are Māori and half are Pākehā.

So here are some excerpts from what the Tribunal reported, in April 1986, about the language issue:

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Independence Day

Happy July 4th.
I’ve been thinking about what “national independence”, i.e. sovereign self-government, should mean for any national group. I can support it for the US citizenry only by also supporting it for Iraqis and Palestinians, and only by also working to see the US citizenry make meaningful amends to both the indigenous peoples of this land and the descendants of those enslaved people whose coerced, unpaid labor built so much of the “national” infrastructure here in the US East.
However, even with all the problems of its misinterpretation and mis-implementation, the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 remains an inspiring text:

all men [and women] are created equal

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it

Exactly.
Rule by a foreign military organization is very different from any form of rule that derives its powers “from the consent of the governed.” Did the January 30 election in Iraq provide an indicator that the Jaafari government has “the consent of the governed” in Iraq? It could have done so– provided Jaafari were free to exercise the normal rights of a sovereign power in his own country. But heisn’t. He is evidently constrained from doing so by the US military’s exercise of its powers throughout Iraq, accountable only to Washington and not to the “elected” leadership of Iraq.
Thus far, the vote of January 30 has had its democratic content subverted.
… For a really great take on the meaning of July 4 in our present era, check out Matt’s great post on the “Today in Iraq” blog today. Read that one and weep at the march of human folly (and indeed, probable criminality) in today’s United States…
Meanwhile, back in the 1776 text, check out how many items in the “bill of particulars” articulated therein against the British Crown could be applied today to the US’s practices inside Iraq:

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