Author: Helena

Iranian soccer revels

Here are some intriguing pictures of the revelries at various spots around Teheran on Wednesday night, after the Iranian soccer team beat Bahrain and thus secured a spot in the World Cup playoffs.
Basically what seems to have happened there is that masses of young people (and some, as you can see from the photos, not so young) took to the streets to express their delight, just as people in many other countries might have.
But in Teheran on Wednesday night, there were women and men celebrating together. And some of the young women seemed to have just about lost their headscarves, altogether.
From the point of view of the hardline clerics who’ve been running the country for 25 years, this must have seemed like the height of decadence. (They should see what goes on in most US college towns during the students’ three-day weekends…)
But significantly, the baseej, that is, the Revolutionary Guards who act as a kind of “morals police” in Iran, have been reported by many sources as having nearly all just sat around watching, or even, making themselves scarce… And so the revels continued.
Why was this? An interesting question that I don’t feel qualified to answer. But here are a couple of guesses:

    (1) There’s an important election in Iran next week. One might surmise that the mullahs don’t want to alienate a great chunk of the youth by cracking down on them so close to the day; and that the regime’s relatively light touch toward the revelers may be designed to entice members of the younger generation into the voting booth, at least, rather than sitting the election out as so many have been threatening to do; and
    (2) The overwhelming theme seems to have been an Iranian-nationalist one. This is not, by any means at all, bad for the mullahs at a time when they still feel themselves under threat by the Americans. The revelers certainly weren’t waving the Stars and Stripes, or holding aloft representations of the “Statue of Liberty”. Instead, their biggest symbolism was the three colors of the flag. Iranian nationalism? That’s by and large quite okay by the mullahs.

On the other hand… I hate to sound like a grouch here… But just how much of a victory is it, really, if a country with a population of 67 million can field a soccer team that beats one from a country with a population of 700,000?

Hiroshima + 60, part 2

I took part in our town’s peace vigil yesterday again, as I always try to do if I’m in town on a Thursday afternoon. The honking response from the drivers was great. Once again, there were times when there was a pretty awesome cacophony of honking from drivers waiting for the lights to change. Someone came by on a bike and, referring to the recent polls showing that Bush’s Iraq policy has been rapidly losing public support at home, said, “So you guys have been making a difference!”
(I wish I’d replied, “Yes, maybe. But why don’t you either come and stand with us, or at least give our peace center a nice fat donation.”)
Anyway, at around ten minutes of six, the heavens opened. As if the Almighty had opened a trapdoor in the sky and simply dumped around three inches of water on us within five minutes. That was what it felt like. I was stuck out on one corner on my my own with no shelter in sight. So I stuck it out, holding up my “Honk 4 peace” sign. There were some euphoric minutes of me standing there in the swirling waters of the sidewalk doing that, while cars still sloshed on forward through the driving gray rain and honked at us. Then I started to feel quite cold. I stuck it out till our usual ending time of 6 p.m., then a small group of us went to Christian’s Pizza on the downtown mall to start making plans for our annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki Day observation.
This year is the 60th anniversary of the terrible, terrifying decisiopn to drop those two bombs. (This year, also, H/N Day– August 6th– actually falls on a Saturday, which helps our planning some.)
We made some fairly good plans. I think. One of them is to do a sort of “Listening Project” with young people in our community, and just ask them what they know about the bombing of Hiroshima, and what they think of it.
President Truman’s decision to drop those two bombs– both of them on parts of Japan that he knew were heavily populated by civilians– marked the dawn of the “Atomic Era”. It was the only time in history that nuclear weapons have ever been used in combat.
The dropping of the two bombs was also the paradigmatic use, by the US national command structure, of the tactic of “shock and awe”. It was referred to as such by Harlan Ullmann, the author of the “S&A” document. The idea– not totally dissimilar to the thinking behind plans pursued by terrorists– was to launch an act so shocking (and shocking in part because it directly killed and wounded so many civilians) that the national command structure of the country targeted would instantly change its policies, and cave to US demands regarding the terms of the surrender.
The Bush administration’s continued commitment to the pursuit of “S&A” policies of various sorts, including in Iraq in 2003, is one way in which the events of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are still very relevant today. Another is the way in which possession of nuclear weapons has continued, from that day until now, to be a marker of great potency within the international political system. For example, why on earth should anyone think that the five favored “permanent members” of the UN Security Council should be the five “recognized” nuclear-weapons-states?
NW possession is a huge marker of many other aspects of international relations, too…

Continue reading “Hiroshima + 60, part 2”

The US-apartheid analogy, contd.

Commenters on this recent post have asked me to spell out more about my reasons for drawing this analogy.
At the top of that post, I identified four different strands of similarity that, imho, support this analogy.
At one level, perhaps it’s true that both kinds of policies, SA apartheid and US foreign policy since 9/11, fall into the broader category of being some form of “colonial” policies.
However, here are a few reasons why I think that it may well be more instructive to hold up to Americans the mirror of the fact that that their (our) country’s current foreign policy is “apartheid-like”, rather than that it is “colonial”.
Firstly, at the broad level of public rhetoric, the discourse of “colonialism” is not understood in anything like the same way in the US that it is in the rest of the world. “Colonial” is not, in fact, generally considered to be a bad attribute of anything, for most US citizens– Native Americans excepted. The US has never gone through the same process of “decolonization” that marked European society in the middle years of the 20th century. In this country, indeed, “colonial” is an admired architectural style, and a reference to a period of the country’s history that is overwhelmingly seen (except by Native Americans and African-Americans) as a sort of foundational golden age. I kid you not.
For example, the major newspapers of the Mid-Atlantic region where I live have all, these past few weeks, been running ads under the large title “The Colonial me… “ These ads are inviting people– even, and this strikes me as the height of chutzpah, some of them explicitly inviting African-American people– to “reconnect” with the values of hard work, pioneering, close community, etc that marked the “colonial era”… Namely, by visiting a tourist destination over in the east of Virginia that goes by the formal name of (I kid you not!) “Colonial Williamsburg”.
Now, I grew up in an England, in the 1950s and 1960s where just about every week or so it seemed, some grateful “new” African or Asian nation would be “given” its independence through the generous and foresighted policies of Her Majesty’s Government. There’d be the grainy images on the old Pathe newsreels of colonial governor X hauling down the Union Jack and new “President” Y– who sometimes would have been pulled only the previous week out of the jail he’d been sent to previously as a “terrorist” or “insurgent” leader– would solemnly haul up the flag of the new independent country.
As kids, we somehow knew that that was the right thing to do. (Even if I did sometimes hear my father asking quietly and subversively if “self” government was necessarily always so much better than “good” government… With the twin assumptions buried there that “of course”, British colonial government had always been good, and “of course” it would be very hard to imagine the “natives” being able to practise anything approaching good government… Oh well, RIP my dear late father, eh?)
But here in the US, as I’ve remarked on JWN a number of times before, the term “colonial” is understood in a completely different way than it is understood just about anywhere else in the rest of the world.
That is my first reason for saying that holding up a mirror of “colonialism” to US citizens reagrding their (our) government’s policies around the world may not be particularly helpful.
Holding up a mirror of “apartheid” may not be accurate in some respects, I grant you. The US does not have an institutionalized policy of discriminating against people on the grounds of skin color.
On the other hand, there are enough ways in which the US relationship with the rest of the world under Bush is the same or very similar to the White South Africans’ relationship with the rest of their non-White compatriots under apartheid that I believe the “apartheid” mirror can indeed be useful and instructive.
In one way, it all comes down to the kind of blind, solipsistic arrogance that (as some of the commenters on that earlier post noted) underlies both worldviews. “Arrogance” in that under George W. Bush the US has indeed arrogated to itself the right to make all the major decisions regarding war and peace in the world, even in defiance of the views of the rest of the world, as well as the right to try to dictate the forms of government that non-US citizens should practise.
Is there any better word for such acts of arrogation than “arrogance”?
This, despite the fact that the US citizenry (which GWB claims to represent– though thank God that claim is wearing thinner by the day right now) constitutes only 4% of the population of the world… At least, in South Africa, the “Whites” made up somewhere just over 10% of the national population. So their claims to be able to “speak for”, and indeed “decide on behalf of” all South Africans were that much stronger than the claims of the Bush administration to be able to speak for, or decide on behalf of, all of humanity.
Secondly, therefore, I would argue that even if US policy towards the rest of the world is not, as apartheid was, based on discrimination on the basis of skin color, still, it is based on discrimination based on citizenship (“We’re the US– we know best!”); and underlying both forms of discrimination is an incredibly strong sense of both arrogance and entitlement.
Holding up the mirror of our nation pursuing “apartheid-like” policies toward the rest of the world is useful, politically, in a number of ways, I think…

Continue reading “The US-apartheid analogy, contd.”

CSM column on democratization

Here’s the column I have in the CSM today.
The lede is:

    Should Americans and their leaders be pushing for greater democratization in the Middle East even if this process risks bringing to power parties – including avowedly Islamist parties – that seem strongly opposed to US policies?
    Yes. All people who claim they’re committed to democracy have to be for the process even if – at home or abroad – it brings to power parties with which we disagree. That is the whole point of democratic practice, after all: to allow people with widely differing ideas to work together to resolve those differences through discussion and the ballot box, rather than through violence.
    But what if some countries elect committed Islamists as leaders?…

Anyway, you should read the whole thing to see what more I have to say about that.

Good sense on the Iraqi constitution

Somebody else agrees with my view that constitution-writing in Iraq is too weighty a matter to be rushed.
Today, the Crisis Group (formerly the International Crisis Group) came out with this report, titled, Iraq: Don’t rush the Constitution.
It took them a while to come to broadly the same conclusion I expressed back in this April 14 column in the CSM. And they don’t explicitly say, as far as I can see, that the next election in Iraq could be held on the basis of an Interim Constitution and thus need not await and be held hostage to the attainment of final agreement on a Permanent Constitution.
But still, the CG undoubtedly has a whole lot more weight in international affairs than I do. So it’s good to see them take even this partial step.

US public wising up

Things are moving, inside the US body politic. In a good direction. Not nearly as fast as I would have hoped… But still, in the right direction.
Today, the WaPo and ABC News released the results of their latest public opinion poll, conducted between June 2 and June 5. Here’s the lead on the WaPo story:

    For the first time since the war in Iraq began, more than half of the American public believes the fight there has not made the United States safer, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
    While the focus in Washington has shifted from the Iraq conflict to Social Security and other domestic matters, the survey found that Americans continue to rank Iraq second only to the economy in importance — and that many are losing patience with the enterprise.
    Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, while two-thirds say the U.S. military there is bogged down and nearly six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting — in all three cases matching or exceeding the highest levels of pessimism yet recorded. More than four in 10 believe the U.S. presence in Iraq is becoming analogous to the experience in Vietnam.
    Perhaps most ominous for President Bush, 52 percent said war in Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States, while 47 percent said it has. It was the first time a majority of Americans disagreed with the central notion Bush has offered to build support for war: that the fight there will make Americans safer from terrorists at home.

It is worth registering as a WaPo online reader to look at this graphic, which tracks Bush’s approval rating since February 2001, and identified the effects of certain notable events like Sept 11, the start of the war in Afghanistan, the start of the war against Iraq, etc. Each of those events seemed to give the Prez a boost, btw, tho it’s hard to disaggregate the effects of the first two, which happened very close together.
The Dec. 2003 announcement of the capture of Saddam also gave GWB a boost, of some 7 or 8%.
The only time before now that his overall approval ratings were notably below 50% was in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations (which interestingly were NOT identified as a discrete event on the WaPo graphic.)
Now, he’s down to 48% approve, while 50% disapprove and only 1% claim to have “no opinion” re approval/disapproval.
Of course, it would help tremendously if we had a robust opposition party in this country that was clearly identified with both an alternative set of policies and an alternative worldview.
We don’t. We have the Dems, who are still stumbling along seemingly not sure what to do about the war.
Still, there is a little movement in Congress as well as in public opinion on the Iraq issue, as I noted in this May 27 post. There, I noted that 128 members of the House of Representatives had voted for a resolution that called on the President to

    develop a plan as soon as practicable after the date of the enactment of this Act to provide for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq…

Significantly, five of the people voting for that were Republicans…
Meantime, though, several prominent Dems are still calling for more US troops to be sent to Iraq.
As I said, the “progress” on the Iraq issue here is slow… But at least it’s in the right direction.
The US public seems finbally to be waking up from the almost narcotic stupor it seemed to be in on voting day back last November.
The WaPo is also posting the details of the most recent poll, which are worth looking at.

Continue reading “US public wising up”

The US-apartheid analogy

Today I’m going to write a column for Al-Hayat about how the Bush administration’s “campaign” for global democratization, and its claim to speak in the name of democracy worldwide, puts it in roughly the same position vis-a-vis the rest of the world that South Africa’s apartheid regime was vis-a-vis SA’s unfranchised non-White majority population.
This is another thread of the broad US-apartheid analogy that I’ve been thinking through over the past few months.
The GWOT/National Security Strategy similarity is another thread of it.
In both cases, too, we have the same phenomena of outright resource greed and a Biblically “justified” sense of entitlement…
Talking of the “democratization” campaign, I found a great quote in this column by the well-connected WaPo columnist David Ignatius today.
David was writing about some attempts at political “reform” being planned by Jordan’s decidedly non-constitutional but strongly US-backed monarch, King Abdullah II, these days.
He wrote:

    Abdullah has taken other steps to shake up Jordan over the past two months, including forming a new government in April in which reformists are more prominent, installing a new chief of the royal palace and replacing the director of public security. Because these moves followed a trip to Washington by the king in late March, the chattering classes in Amman have speculated that they resulted from U.S. pressure. But there’s little evidence of that. Indeed, when Abdullah explained his reform plans in a White House meeting in March, President Bush is said to have approved, but cautioned, “Take it easy.”

Oh, don’t you love that use of a passive verb: Bush “is said to have… cautioned”.
“Is said” by whom, David?
I’m assuming, either the “chattering classes” in Amman, or perhaps even the King himself.
But there, in a nutshell, is a good window into what is most likely really going on… Despite all the great rhetoric about supporting democratization worldwide, Prez Bush and his advisors possibly don’t really want to push it to the point that in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc it might bring into power regimes that, for example, did not do abusive interrogations of individuals “rendered” to them by the US authorities, etc., etc…
And then, there’s Uzbekistan…

The politicized charge-sheet

So the Iraqi Special Tribunal is going to try Saddam for invading Kuwait in 1990– but not for invading Iran in 1980? This, despite the fact that the human carnage that resulted from the 1980 invasion was on a far, far greater scale than that occasioned by the 1990 invasion…
Can it be that the people organizing the Special Tribunal place a higher value on the lives of Kuwaitis than on those of Iranians?
Or did the decision come out this way because the US opposed the Saddamist aggression against Kuwait, but condoned, encouraged, and even supported the aggression against Iran?
Whatever the reason: shame on the Tribunal!

Trying Saddam?

How many times have we heard announcements from “officials” in Iraq that Saddam Hussein is “about to be put on trial– any day now”?
The latest one came in this announcement today, made by Ibrahim Jaafari’s US-educated spokseman Laith Kuba.

Kuba told reporters that Saddam,

    will go on trial within two months on charges of crimes against humanity, with prosecutors focusing on 12 “thoroughly documented” counts, including the gassing of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq.

He also said that, though it would be possible to bring “500” cases against Saddam, the Iraqi government will only bring 12 of the better documented charges against him.
These would all, Kuba said, be charges of “crimes against humanity.”
That AP article linked to above quoted Kuba as saying that, the attack with chemical weapons on the Kurdish town of Halabja would be one of the charges brought, but he “did not elaborate on the other 11.”
If the charges are indeed all to be charges of crimes against humanity, then that would indicate that they would all be charges connected with actions Saddam took against people within Iraq’s own national borders— the classic definition of crimes against humanity.
If the charges were to include actions undertaken against either Kuwait or Iran, then those would more likely be designated as “war crimes” or possibly “crimes against the peace”.
This latter category of atrocity, which concerns, essentially, the launching of an unjustified war, has not been prosecuted since the post-WW2 trials. But if it was applicable to Hitler and his generals, and to the Japanese generals and militarists, then why not to Saddam Hussein?
Oops, it might involve having Iran take part there as one of the two aggressed-against victims. Some one million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s 1980 aggression against their country. (That figure is far, far higher than the number of Kuwaitis who died as a result of his invasion of Kuwait nine years later.)
And oops, if launching an unjustified war that imposes terrible suffering on large numbers of people can be prosecuted these days, then how about the Bush administration??
So no. It seems that they’ve agreed for now to stick to the “safer” charges connected with the actions Saddam took against his own people.
Of course, the whole process looks irretrievably politicised at this point. Not just in the choice of “charges” brought.
But look who made this latest announcement??? Wouldn’t it really have been a lot better for the rule of law in Iraq if announcements like this had come from the Chief Prosecutor or someone in his office? Why on earth have them come from the Prime Minister’s spokesman?
Back in December 2003, shortly after Saddam’s capture by the US forces, I wrote here that,

    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.

And here we are, 18 months later, with that point now, I think, very well proven. (If you haven’t read that whole post there, you really ought to go back and do so.)
The whole process of “trying Saddam” is absolutely, inextricably political at this point. However, it is not the main priority for the Iraqi people. It’s a sideshow, grotesquely inflated for western audiences by an Iraqi administration seeking to curry western favors.
I think– and I’m relying on JWN’s Iraqi readers here to correct me if I’m wrong– that there are many, many tasks that are more important for Iraqis today than staging what will under even the very best of circumstances at this point be nothing better than a show trial.
Meanwhile, Saddam and his top henchfolk are being kept carefully in US custody, in a place where they can be prevented from releasing embarrassing details about things like the encouragement they received from the US, UK, and other western powers back in the 1980s as they upgraded their chemical weapons capabilities and launched a quite gratuitous war against Iran…
By the way, John Burns wrote in the NYT today that the total number of detainees being held as “suspected insurgents” in just the US-run detention facilities in Iraq has now rerached 14,000. That is a shockingly high number! Can you imagine the conditions in which most of those people are being held?
Burns also wrote that of those 14,000, only 370 were foreigners, “according to figures provided by the American command.”

Killing and voting in Lebanon.

Deep condolences to the family and comrades of the slain lebanese journalist samir Kassir. The fact and manner of his killing were both equally shocking.
Kassir, a convinced leftist activist, probably deserved just as much or more activism at the time of his killing as the late Rafiq Hariri. But the Lebanese “opposition” politicians who created such a successful and telegenic media spectacle after Hariri’s killing have proven (once again) that they do not have the long-term vision and commitment required to build a longterm political movement.
Kassir was buried Saturday. Though some of his comrades called for the ouster of pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud in response, the much wiser Maronite Patriarch, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, called for calm in his sermon today. That Daily Star article linked to above quotes Sfeir as saying: “If President Emile Lahoud is forcibly removed, would this truly stabilize political life in Lebanon?”
All this came after the near-total failure of a call the “opposition” launched right after Kassir’s killing, for the country to observe a general strike Friday.
In that Daily Star piece, Leila Hatoum wrote:

    Despite opposition calls for a general strike Friday in response to the assassination of Samir Kassir, life went on as normal in the capital with the vast majority of businesses more concerned about making a living than protesting.

She quoted “Mohammed, a young waiter working at one central district cafe” as saying,

    “The mighty opposition figures think they can control us and play with our destiny, but they don’t feel with us. They have the money and power to last a boycott, but if we the poor stop working for a day, we would not find anything to eat at night.”
    Mohammed continued: “Yesterday, a great journalist died, just like many great Lebanese men before him, but we refuse to kill our country by closing it down to please the politicians’ whims.”
    Abu Jean, a parking attendant in Gemmayzeh, agreed.

Meanwhile, south Lebanon has today been seeing the voting for the region’s 23 parliamentary seats. Six of these seats saw no contest. The races for the others saw, according to this article in the Daily Star, great successes for the joint Amal-Hizbullah list.
Reuters reported that, “Interior Ministry sources said turnout among the 675,000 eligible voters was 45 percent.” That was noticeably higher than the voting for the Beirut-area seats last week.
Today’s poll was the second of the four weekly rounds of voting in the parliamentary election.
If you read only the mainstream US media about developments in Lebanon you probably would not have known about the failure of the opposition’s call for a general strike Friday. And you might have thought there were some politically viable Shiite canidates in the election there who were not associated with the Hizbullah-Amal list.
For example, in this piece in today’s NYT, Hassan M. Fattah wrote:

    For many Lebanese, while Hezbollah retains much of its draw, the patina of heroism that it earned in the 23 years of Israelis occupation of the south has dulled as the group has been forced to make alliances and operate like any other party.
    Ibrahim Shamseddine is a widely respected Shiite leader and the son of a leading Shiite cleric. Bushra Khalil is a well-known lawyer from a prominent Shiite family who proudly admits she is on Saddam Hussein’s defense team. Riad al-Asaad is a cousin of the multibillionaire Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and sees himself as a reformer. All have taken on Hezbollah candidates.

Okay, Fattah then immediately admits that, “Most independent candidates admit they have slim chances.” But I think his analysis that the party’s political support has waned as it has entered Lebanon’s parliamentary system is just plain wrong, and wrong-headed.
Hizbullah decided to enter parliamentary politics back in 1991, and has done fairly well ever since then. Its moment of greatest national support came in 1996, and of greatest national glory in May 2000, when it demonstrated its remarkable ability to force a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the country. But throughout all those years it continued to pursue a very smart policy within the Lebanese political system.
This has not dulled its “patina”. In general, the solid work that Hizbullah politicians in local and national government have done– often in alliance with other parties– has served the people well by delivering decent levels of service to them. Thus, if anything, it has burnished the party’s “patina” with the public.
Is it too difficult to be able to explain these complex aspects of Hizbullah to an American audience? It really shouldn’t be. But I suppose it depends on what your “editors” want you to write…