Two days before Iran’s election on Friday, President Bush– that champion of democracy worldwide!– urged the country’s voters to stay home.
62.7 percent of Iranians defied his call, according to this AP story. Voter turnout in Iran was thus considerably higher than in the last US elections.
Bush was quite correct to note that the choices offered to the Iranian voters were significantly constrained by the requirement that, to be eligible to run, a candidate had to be declared fit to do so by the country’s Council of Guardians.
Seven candidates were thus declared fit, and by all accounts most of them ran spirited campaigns. Also, they did represent a significant (though obviously much curtailed) range of different positions and opinions.
Bush struts about the world stage on “democratization” issues as though the electoral system that generated his own presidency were quite perfect as a way of discerning and operationalizing the people’s will. It isn’t. The outrageous campaign-finance system in the US means that in order to be on the presidential ballot there a candidate is required, in effect, to have his candidacy declared valid by the country’s “Council of Big Money”.
In the end, only two or three candidates ever make the cut. In this last election, the differences in approach between Bush and Kerry on most major issues– including the war in Iraq– were razor-thin.
In both elections, I wish the choice offered the voters had been much broader, the rules of participation in the election much more inclusive, and the pre-election campaigning focused much more on the very difficult circumstances facing each country.
But it strikes me that for Bush– “Mr. “Democratization”– to call on the voters in another country to stay home during an election in their country is the height of hypocrisy.
In any event, there is quite some evidence that it backfired. Rafsanjani was, as expected, one of the two front-runners who will go into a run-off election next Friday. But the other one is not a reform candidate (as expected), but rather, Teheran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, described as a pro-regime hardliner.
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Addendum, Monday morning, New Zealand time–
Here is a good piece of reporting on the campaign the US neocons had mounted against the Iranian election in the days before the first round of voting June 18.
Author: Helena
Starting with his own lovely daughters?
Oh, don’t you love all those chickenhawks who just love to extol the military lifestyle– but not for their own offspring?
Latest one to join the club is Tom Friedman, writing this in today’s New York Times:
- Maybe it is too late, but before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground and redouble the diplomatic effort…
What a sorry ignoramus, for crying out loud!
Where on earth does he think the US military is going to find the additional 140,000-plus-plus troops it would take to achieve this? The army can’t even plan on sustaining the present level of deployment for more than the next couple of months.
Has he even heard about the recruitment crisis?
Maybe he’ll set the ball rolling to remedy that by frogmarching his own two lovely daughters down to the nearest recruiting office. (There’s another wellknown chickenhawk who could follow that example, too.)
H’mm. Come to think of it, they’ve extended the upper age-limit for active service to the extent that Tom himself could also sign up. Three members of the Friedman family– great!
Now, about the next 139,997 new recruits…
Actually, I’m kinda disappointed. I have disagreed with just about everything my old bud’ Tom has written on Iraq in the past four years. But usually he at least makes logical, well-informed arguments.
But this one?
In a class of his Aoun
I can’t resist writing something quickly about the Lebanese elections. And about the Michel Aoun phenomenon.
I thought I’d lost my capacity to be amazed (and frequently amused) at Lebanese politics many, many years ago… Maybe around 1983 or 1984, when I saw the brutally anti-Palestinian Falangists aligning themselves with Fateh against the Syrians…
Well, the kaleidoscope that is Lebanese politics has been twisted and re-twisted many times since them. With each twist the colored pieces fall into a new, and ever more amazing pattern…
We pick up the tale in late February of this year. Then, in the aftermath of the dastardly killing of Rafiq Hariri, the mainstream media in the US started crowing about the newfound strength and power of what they called the Lebanese “opposition”. Opposition, that is, in relation to Syria’s then-stifling military and political presence in the country.
At that point, Aoun was still in exile, rallying his supporters against Syria’s presence in the homeland he had been chased out of some 15 years earlier.
And many neocons and others close to the Bush administration in Washington were braying about the imminent victory of the Lebanese “opposition”, and the need for both a Syrian withdrawal, and the speedy disarming of Hizbullah…
Okay, since then, the Syrians have left Lebanon, and Aoun has returned. Has this led to the victory of the “opposition” forces– and is Lebanon now that much closer to the disarming of Hizbullah?
No, indeed. For a number of reasons. One is that none of the “parties” in the Lebanese “opposition”– with the possible exception of Aoun’s own Free Patriotic Movement– is really worthy of the name of “party” at all.
Another is that Aoun has suprised everyone on three crucial counts:
- (1) He has said that since the Syrians have now withdrawn, he’s not going to get drawn into continuing any anti-Syrian vendetta
Charlottesville, New Zealand, conversations in a trailer
So why else has my life been a little crazy recently, in addition to taking off for a weekend in Boston with Faiza?
Tomorrow, Bill and I leave for a couple of weeks in New Zealand. Which will be mainly fun and interesting. (So long as not too many Kiwis are still angry with me on account of my comments about Gallipoli last April? Rotten tomatoes as we arrive at Auckland airport? What do you think?)
Anyway, that’ll give me an opportunity to blog a bit from lands Antipodean… about Restorative Justice , which is quite widely practised there, and also about white-Maori relations, which still fascinate me.
Yesterday, after my return from Boston, I conducted back-to-back interviews for an oral-history project called StoryCorps, which has had a mobile recording studio/trailer on the downtown mall in Charlottesville for the past couple of weeks.
Yesterday late afternoon, I entered the recording booth first of all with my friend Jay Worrall, an 89-year-old Quaker who headed up the “War on Poverty” programs here in Charlottesville back in the 1960s and 1970s> As Jay explained it, dealing with poverty here in Virginia involved first and foremost tackling the problems and legacies of of racial segregation and other forms of discrimination. In the interview, he talked about getting arrested with nine other C’ville Quakers at the entrance to the White House back in those days.
Interestingly, Jay had been in the US Army before getting into the anti-poverty work. Including, he was in the Army for a long time after he became a Quaker. In the Army, he’d been a Military Police officer, and for a few years he was even head of the Army’s criminal Investigation Division units in greater DC.
He said that when he got arrested at the White House– this was after he’d left the army– one of the detectives who questioned him had been someone he’d worked with when he’d been running the Army CID… “”And he couldn’t quite figure out how I got to be where I was.”
The other interview I did was with a great couple of my acquaintance, Dr. Matthew Holden, a distinguished political scientist, and Dorothy Holden, a distinguished quilt artist.
Matthew talked about growing up in an African-American farm family in a town called Mound Bayou, Mississippi, that had been founded in the late 19th century by former slaves. His family had to leave the farm after a terrible drought in 1943, and moved to Chicago… He later became a much respected political-science professor; was President of the American Political Science Association; and testified in Congress about the inappropriateness of using an impeachment proceeding in the case of Bill Clinton’s dalliance (however sordid) with Monica Lewinsky.
In our pre-interview, he’d talked a little bit about the experience of picking cotton, which he’d done some of to help his father when he was still young. Cotton, he explained, really tears your hands up when you pick it. In addition, you have to drag a huge sack along the row behind you, on the ground, as you pick; and as it gets heavier it hurts your back really badly…
I wish I’d pressed him some more for some of those details during the recording session itself.
Dorothy talked with great passion about some of the things she’d done during desegregation years in the 1960s and 1970s, including helping write a big report for the Wisconsin library system on how to improve the portrayal of African-Americans in books for children.
She also talked a little about her quilting. Here you can see some slightly grainy images of two of her quilts.
Her work is so beautiful! You can’t really get a full picture of it there.
With Faiza in Boston
My life has been fairly crazy. I flew up to Boston for the weekend so I could both meet Iraqi blog queen Faiza (who’s been at this training course in southern Vermont) and visit my son, who’s in Boston for the summer. I decided to take my youngest, Lorna, who’s 20. Old enough to help me drive up to Dulles airport from Charlottesville, not old enough to drive a rental car in New England. Oh well.
Our United flight from Dulles to Boston got brought down in Philly for a couple of hours due to “mechanical problems”. Oh well.
After we arrived I dropped the daughter with the son, then ways behind schedule made the drive over to Brattleboro. I found New England bathing in an unaccustomedly steamy sauna of heat.
Anyway, meeting Faiza was a breath of fresh air. She drove back to Boston/Cambridge with me and we talked all the way. We have a lot in common, stretching back a long time. Politically, and family-wise. We each have three young-adult kids. She’s just about the most animated veiled woman I’ve ever encountered.
(A lot of westerners– many of whom, I suspect, have never met a veiled woman– think that wearing a veil somehow “makes” a woman into a timid, submissive doormat. Far from it! For many Muslim Arab women whom I know, wearing a veil enables them to go out and participate in the public sphere. And many of them do so in a very self-confident, outspoken manner. Faiza is one of those.)
“Knowing” someone through her or his blog is a funny thing. Certainly, Faiza’s writing on her blog is very intimate, and gives you the feeling you really know her fairly well. And then you meet her… Wow!
I was interested mainly to learn more about her view of the situation in her country, and of what it is possible to do there, politically, in today’s horrible circumstances.
I was so happy to find that she hadn’t lost hope– at all. Though she didn’t underestimate at all, either, the ghastliness of the circumstances in most of Iraq.
Faiza talked a bit about her involvement with Adnan Pachachi’s list of candidates in the run-up to the January 30th election. Apparently, they asked her to run, and she was ready to do so. But then Pachachi dropped out at the last minute– after the US authorities started pressuring the heads of all the lists to commit to NOT pressing for any deadline for a US force withdrawal. Refusing to bow to that pressure was, she thought, quite the right thing to do.
She expressed at some point her disappointment (or worse) with the people in the Iraqi “government” that did emerge from the elections. She stressed that most of them were recently returned exiles, who’d come back to Iraq with the occupation, and who didn’t seem to know much or care much about the networks of people that had long existed inside the country. We talked a bit about Ibrahim Jaafari, comparing him with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Her view, in general, was that while both of them seemed at one level to be decent, worthy people, still “they were participating in politics in the wrong way, at the wrong time.” (This is, certainly, very much my own view re Mahmoud Abbas. I was interested to hear that she made this exact same analysis of Jaafari.)
Faiza seemed very confident that her disappointment (and worse) in the current Iraqi “government” has become very widely shared throughout Iraq. “My dear! Thibngs were horrible in Iraq in the months after the election. Just horrible! And all the politicans could do in those months was sit around and argue over who gets which ministry. No-one was thinking of helping the people, at all!”
Lech Walesa on detention issues
The International Committee of the Red Cross’s flagship publication, the International Review of the Red Cross has devoted most of its latest issue to the question of detentions.
All the articles there that I’ve been able to look at look really, really interesting and important. Including this one, on “Human Rights and Indefinite Detention”.
But perhaps this interview with Lech Walesa— who was interned by the pro-Soviet regime in Poland a number of times in the 1970s, and then again in 1981– is the article that should receive the widest circulation inside the US. (To most members of the US political elite, especially those who shout loudest about the need to “extend freedom”, Walesa– like Vaclav Havel– is regarded as a big hero.)
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
- Qun: Coming back to detention issues, where are the limits that because of religious or moral reasons we are not allowed to overstep?
The United States leads the world economically and militarily, but it no longer does so morally. This is partly due to the fact that it has occasionally resorted to immoral methods to fight the phenomenon of international terrorism. It says: we have the money, we have the means, and we will fix the problem ourselves. But how much will this cost in human terms? You have to prove your high moral standing by deeds, not by words. This also applies to detention. I say it with all due respect for the reasonable concerns of the United States and as a friend of the Americans, who are facing serious threats from terrorist organizations…
What are the responsibilities of politicians?
Politicians have a moral and legal obligation to give clear and unambiguous messages and instructions to uphold minimum humanitarian standards even in the worst situations. It is their moral responsibility. I am afraid the present international atmosphere is not helping us, but I believe that everybody is increasingly aware of their responsibilities and that we are heading in a better direction.
I must say I do not share his optimism on that last count.
One small window into Gitmo
The best definition of torture that I know of is one I heard from a physician at the renowned Danish center for treatment and rehabilitation of torture victims. He said, “Torture is an attempt to destroy the indpendent human personality.”
Physical abuse is often a part of it. But the most devastating part is the systematic attempt, using psychological mechanisms, to break a person’s mind.
This is why I found reading the interrogator’s report printed in this week’s Time magazine so disturbing.
Including these portions:
- 20 December 2002
1115: … Interrogater began by reminding the detainee about the lessons in respect and how the detainee had disrespected the interrogators. Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong and know how to protect innocent people from bad people. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated.
21 December 2002
2223: As I began to inform the detainee of the changes the Saudi government has been making in order to support the efforts of peace and terror free world I began to engage closeness with the detainee. [I’m assuming the writer of this report is probably female ~HC] This really evoked strong emotions within the detainee. He attempted to move away from me by all means. He was laid out on the floor so I straddled him without putting my weight on him. He would then attempt to move me off of him by bending his legs in order to lift me off but this failed because the MPs were holding his legs down with their hands. The detainee began to pray loudly but this did not stop me from finishing informing the detainee about the Al Qaeda member, Qaed Salim Sinan al Harethi aka Abu Ali, that was killed by the CIA.
Here below is an entry that has many terms that I don’t understand. (Can anyone explain “sissy slap” to me?) But buried in it is a reference to “dance instruction” that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who remembers the scene in the movie “The Pianist” where the German guards at the crossing point out of the Warsaw ghetto force some of the Jewish detainees waiting to walk through it to dance for the guards’ own amusement…
Or, the narratives of enslaved African people on British and American slave ships being forced to “dance” for the amusement of the boat’s crew members…
- 13 December 2002
1115: Interrogators began telling detainee how ungrateful and grumpy he was. In order to escalate the detainee’s emotions, a mask was made from an MRE box with a smily face on it and placed on the detainee’s head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labeled the “sissy slap” glove. The glove was touched to the detainee’s face periodically after explaining the terminology to him. The mask was placed back on the detainee’s head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instruction with the detainee. The detainee became agitated and began shouting.
While you’re reading these accounts, don’t forget that physical force and violence are also being used on the detainee at this point; and earlier, considerably more physical violence may well have been used on him.
The excerpt Time has there on its website is fairly short. But there is no mention anywhere in it of the interrogators actually asking the detainee for any information. Their intention seems only to be to humiliate and “break” him. (Perhaps also to try to “test” some of their techniques on him?)
But what useful information would he have anyway, in December 2002– probably more than a year after he was captured?
Why was he still there, being tortured and humiliated in that way?
He is most likely still there. (Only a small proportion of Gitmo detainees have been released since then.)
Is he still– 30 months after December 2002– being subjected to these kinds of humiliations? Quite likely. Can you imagine what happens to a human personality after a total of, now, some 42 months of abuse, torture, and outrageous, intentional humiliation along these lines?
And Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have now firmly told everyone— including the President, who looked like he might be getting a little “wobbly” on this point– that they have no intention of closing the Guantanamo prison.
A Hoagland classic
Jim Hoagland, MSM’s war-drum-beater-in-chief in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq (on behalf of his trusted pal, A. Chalabi) seems to be running scared… He’s writing in the WaPo today about a “dangerous” transition point having been reached.
Oh my! What danger might that be, Jim?
Here’s what he wrote:
- That dangerous transition point could be glimpsed in this month’s Post-ABC News survey, when 52 percent of those polled said that the war in Iraq was not contributing to American security and 49 percent said they disapproved of President Bush’s handling of the global war on terrorism.
Polls are snapshots that change quickly, as White House aides quickly pointed out. But this one reflects my own anecdotal sense of a shift that I have been hearing about from politicians and activists in the nation’s capital and elsewhere over the past six weeks. This survey should be treated by the White House as a serious warning.
Here’s more of his diagnosis of this “danger”:
- It is not just the surge of violence in both conflicts in the past month that is shaking support for Bush. It is also the growing concern of middle-of-the-road Americans that they cannot trust the information they are being given by the administration — and particularly by the Pentagon — about the conduct and progress of these wars…
The failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has forced the administration to emphasize the moral reasons that underlie the case for regime change, a cause I argued for through four successive administrations. But it is American morality — not Saddam Hussein’s demonstrated lack thereof — that is becoming a defining issue now, however unfair that may seem.
So is he calling for greater morality and accountability for all participants in US political life? That might seem logical don’t you think?
Nah. If our Jimbo were to do that, he might have to face up to to the nefarious role he himself played in having beaten the drums for this war.
He might feel he ought to apologise, at the very least, to the families of the nearly 1,700 US service members killed in Iraq to date– as well as to all Iraqis for the devastation that the war he helped to bring about has visited on their country.
If he were Japanese, then considering the gravity of the suffering he has materially helped to cause in the world, he might consider falling on his sword in repentance.
No, Jim, I’m not recommending harakiri. Some kind of reparative action would be far more useful for the world. (Contact me if you want suggestions. I have plenty.)
But starting out with a full mea culpa, and a clear apology, and a resignation from the extremely high-paid and respected position you occupy in the WaPo could be a good place to start.
Secret revealed
I’m in Boston with Faiza of A Family in Baghdad this weekend. I’d originally been hoping that Susan of Dancewater could be with the two of us someplace, but that isn’t going to work out this time round. (I think she’s getting with Faiza later in the month.)
Anyway, being with Faiza is a blast. She’s as animated, informative, and talkative in real life as you’d expect from her blog.
More, later. We have a full day together today.
Looks a lot like apartheid to me
WaPo reporters Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru had a great piece in today’s paper. Shadid, who speaks Arabic, went along with one of the newly forming “Iraqi” fighting units, and Fainaru, who doesn’t went with the Iraqis’ American military “handlers”.
This is one little excerpt:
- Last week, U.S soldiers from 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and Iraqis from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, clambered into their vehicles to patrol the streets of Baiji. The Americans drove fully enclosed armored Humvees, the Iraqis open-backed Humvees with benches, the sides of which were protected by plating the equivalent of a flak jacket. The Americans were part of 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.
As an American reporter climbed in with the Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers watched in bemused horror.
“You might be riding home alone,” one soldier said to the other reporter.
“Is he riding in the back of that?” asked another. “I’ll be over here praying.”
Here’s another:
- The [Iraqi] men are housed at what they call simply “the base,” a place as sparse as the name. Most of the Iraqis sleep in two tents and a shed with a concrete floor and corrugated tin roof that is bereft of walls. Some have cots; others sleep on cardboard or pieces of plywood stacked with tattered and torn blankets. The air conditioners are broken. There is no electricity.
Drinking water comes from a sun-soaked camouflage tanker whose meager faucet also provides water for bathing.
“This is the shower of the National Guard, Baiji Division,” said Tala Izba, 23, a corporal, as others laughed.
“Mines, car bombs and our duties, and then we have to come back to this?” said another soldier, Kamil Khalaf.
Pvt. Aziz Nawaf, 23, shook his head. “At night, I’m so hot I feel like my skin is going to peel off,” he said.
Almost to a man, the soldiers said they joined for the money — a relatively munificent $300 to $400 a month. The military and police forces offered some of the few job opportunities in town. Even then, the soldiers were irate: They wanted more time off, air-conditioned quarters like their American counterparts and, most important, respect. Most frustrating, they said, was the two- or three-hour wait to be searched at the base’s gate when they returned from leave.
Well, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be sticking around long. Here’s how that excerpt continues:
- The [Iraqi] soldiers said 17 colleagues had quit in the past few days.
“In 15 days, we’re all going to leave,” Nawaf declared.
The two-dozen soldiers gathered nodded their heads.
“All of us,” Khalaf said. “We’ll live by God, but we’ll have our respect.”
And right up at the beginning of the piece, the reporters wrote about this:
- An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army’s Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. “We have lived in humiliation since you left,” one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. “We had hoped to spend our life with you.”
I guess that’s what you get when all you try to do to enroll soldiers is to pay them (relatively) big bucks, rather than giving them a political vision that seems worth fighting for.
It strikes me that, given that the Iraqi units the US has been training seem to have dissolved away time and time again (as “Charlie Company”* seems on the point of doing), and given that the US forces themselves are in the midst of a massive recruitment shortfall… the only halfway workable thing to do at this point is to organize a complete US withdrawal from Iraq. As speedy and as honorable and in as good an order as possible.
That is one of the three key points Raed Jarrar is calling for, in this important Wednesday post on his blog Raed in the Middle.
Here are all his three points:
- (1) Issue a Public Apology and hold responsibility for the destruction of Iraq…
(2) Announce A Schedule For Complete Military Pullout From Iraq; a full withdrawal that leaves no permanent bases behind. I think a timetable of one year is more than enough for all the troops to leave safely without being attacked by the resistance…
(3) Start fixing the mess caused by the war and occupation by both Paying Compensation And Bringing War Criminals To Justice…
That looks like an excellent, very clear list.
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* Over on Today in Iraq, I saw that Shirin commented that even just calling this unit in the “Iraqi” army “Charlie Company” showed an incredibly arrogant American mindset.