Author: Helena

Marla Ruzicka, RIP

Marla Ruzicka was an extremely compassionate and talented person who sought constantly to understand, chart, and publicize the steep human costs of war. Any war. Including in Iraq.
At the end of 2003, working with Raed Jarrar and other Iraqis, she helped produce the first systematic Iraq-wide survey of casualties attrobutable to the war the US launched upon the country in March 2003. The results were published here.
Now Marla herself has joined the casualty list. Raed reports that he has been informed that Marla was killed in a car crash in Baghdad Saturday night.
Raed posts this email he got from Justin Alexander:

    Dear friends & collegues of Marla,
    Sometime between 3-6pm Baghdad time Marla died in a car crash. My current information is poor, but the accident may have happened on the Baghdad Airport road as she travelled to visit an Iraqi kid injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this conflict.
    A US military convoy was involved in the event, but it is not clear at this stage in what way precisely.
    I have no information on the whereabouts or health of her collegue Faiz who I believe was with her in the car.
    I believe it is important that Marla be commemorated and that her work continue. In the short term I hope her friends will be able to identify and help those Iraqis she was in the process of assisting.
    […]
    Marla was one innocent victim of conflict among millions, but I believe her work over the last two years has made a unique impact in highlighting and helping these people often forgotten as “collatoral damage”.

It is true that Marla was “one innocent victim of war among millions”. Still, if we can stop and remember her, and celebrate the incredible gifts she gave to humanity, we can also perhaps imagine that each and every one of those other millions killed by war opver recent years– Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, West Africa… — was a person with equal gifts, equal human warmth, equal God-given potential.
RIP, Marla Ruzicka. RIP, all the victims of war.
This is a good profile of Marla that ran in the WaPo last August.
This is a letter she wrote to the editor of the NYT just in February.
What can we do to commemorate Marla?

Selling ‘democracy’ in Iraq

Faiza of “A family in Baghdad” has her most recent post now up on her blog in English. Go read it. It’s about her experience at some kind of “democracy in Iraq” conference to which she’d been invited. It was hosted by some US organizations, which she doesn’t name but they probably included the US taxpayer-funded “U.S. National Endowment for Democracy” etc etc.
The conference was in Amman. Many women traveled to it from Iraq, though Faiza has been living in Amman for a few weeks now.
She and apparently many of the other Iraqi women at the conference were not happy with the “brain wash” they felt they were being exposed to there. I’d give you excerpts but regret I don’t have the time.

Kurdistan/Kosovo

The Institute for War & Peace Reporting’s Iraq projects have sadly been in real trouble recently. I don’t know if all their good participants and trainees got snapped up to work for deep-pocket western media people? If so, that’s a real shame, because the project, which produces articles in Arabic and Kurdish editions as well as in English, has always looked poised to make a serious contribution to the development of independent journalism inside Iraq.
However, their projects in the Balkans have been continuing in great shape. I have long been interested in the issue of Kosovo, both in itself and as one of the primary locations for the experiment many western neo-cons and neo-liberals have been undertaking in remaking the world in the way they would like to see it.
Primarily (in Kosovo as in Kurdistan) by nibbling away at the national territory of a nation-state whose leaders they have seriously disagreed with, while making all kinds of promises to the people of the nibbled-away area.
I should recall that unlike many of my friends in the western “human rights” movement I opposed NATO’s war for Kosovo in 1999 and have seen no reason at all since then to revisit the judgment I made on that.
In Kosovo in 1999 as in Iraq four years later, in the lead-up to the war there were people from an internationally mandated monitoring organization on the ground inside the territory up to the point of the western powers declaring the war; and that monitoring presence was doing a fairly good (though not perfect) job of preventing/reducing the evil it was supposed to be monitoring. Then, in both cases, Washington decided it wanted to go to war; the moniotoring presence was then rapidly pulled out; and the situation that subsequently unfolded in Kosovo was then the perpetration of precisely those exact great wrongs that NATO had claimed all along it was seeking to prevent! (In Iraq, after the pullout of the UNMOVIC monitors, the proliferation of weapons–though not of WMDs, since there were none– similarly started precisely after the pull-out of UNMOVIC and the start of the US war.)
Well, all that is now history. What of Kosovo today– a territory that has received fantastically great gobs of western aid and many western promises that everyone’s lives there would be improved by the eviction of the Yugoslav troops and their replacement by NATO?
We could pick up the story, viw IWPR’s reporting, back in mid-March of this year, when former Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj turned himself in to the International Copurt (ICTY) in The Hague where he faced 37 counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war:

    The indictment against him, released to the public on March 10, throws into sharp relief the image he has successfully nurtured in Kosovo in recent years as a respectable statesman and champion of independence for the protectorate

Some JWN upgrades (well, changes, anyway)

I did a bit more tweaking on the main JWN sidebar this morning. Including, I thought I should put in links to some of the documents I’ve archived on JWN in the past few months, so there’s a whole new sidebar section for that.
Then I decided that in our tour of different world calendars we’d spent long enough reading the dates in Slovak. The next option down was Slovenian, which was very similar. Below that was Spanish, which I thought would be a little bland. Maybe I’ll come back to it later?
So now we’ve arrived at Suomi. Oh my gosh. Happy huhtikuu 16 to all of you.
I think maybe I’d better put something on the sidebar that explains what’s going on here?

The Saudi government pays money for this?

Every so often, I get an email from someone called “halah@qorvis.com”. Since I vaguely remember that these are press releases from the Saudi Embassy in DC, I usually delete them just as fast as I delete all the other junk that comes into my in-box.
Today, I decided to open it. It contained just under 600 words of totally useless, non-newsworthy garbage. Interesting only faintly, in its capacity as providing a teeny window into what it is that someone at Qorvis Communications Inc., the p.r. agency hired by the Saudi Embassy, thinks it is that people might want to be hearing from the Saudis these days.
I reproduce the email in its entirety (and lightly annotated by yours truly) below.
So after opening the email I decided to refresh myself as to what this deal is that the Qorvis Corporation has with the Saudis. There’s a lot of interesting information out there on the topic.
Including this, from the WaPo last December, which says:

    The FBI searched three offices of the PR firm Qorvis Communications and delivered subpoenas to a fourth office. Officials confirmed the raids but refused further comment, saying there was an “ongoing investigation.” Saudi Arabia is a major Qorvis client; the firm called the investigation a “compliance inquiry” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Justice Department found that “the Saudi Arabian Embassy paid Qorvis $14.6 million for a six-month period,” for such services as distributing material highlighting Saudi Arabia’s “commitment in the war against terrorism and to peace in the Middle East.”

$14.6 million? That’s, um, around $2.43 million a month…
A part of me feels really sorry for the Saudis. They’re shelling out $2.43 million a month to this “Qorvis Communications”, and they get rubbish like this in response? (See text of press release, below.)
It reminds me of those extremely unfortunate American Indian tribes, newly very rich with casino profits, who have recently been taken majorly for a ride by various Washington DC shysters. Except that the Saudis are not “newly” rich… They’ve had plenty of time to realize they need to protect themselves from the Gucci-loafered shysters of Washington’s K Street.
Look, let’s lay aside morality for one small moment, and look at this question purely on technical grounds. Do you know who was the best foreign “operator” in the past quarter-century in Washington DC, in the city’s own sleazy terms of influence-peddling, schmoozing, and generally getting ahead?
No question but that it was the late Nizar Hamdoun, who through the 1980s was Iraq’s Ambassador to Washington and had the somewhat unenviable task of trying to “sell” Iraq to a generally very hostile crowd there.
Hamdoun, an extremely canny and fairly charming person, knew how to take a bad case and a big budget and make the budget work for him. He courted everyone, right across the political spectrum, with small dinners, semi-open policy round-tables, and plenty of dosh to throw around. I think he even succeeded in persuading Danny Pipes and Laurie Mylroie to go to Baghdad for a “high-level briefing”, after which those two came back to DC to advocate for an audacious new pipeline scheme that Saddam was trying to organize.
(The pipeline would have gone down to Aqaba, Jordan, but crucially it was thought to require a guarantee from the Israelis that they wouldn’t bomb it before the investors would shell out the money… The appropriately named “Pipes” helped the Iraqis to get Israel’s Shimon Peres involved in the scheme. It was 1985. The plan went nowhere– though intriguingly, a very similar plan is now being peddled once again… Of course, shortly after 1985, both Pipes and Mylroie turned against Saddam in a big, big way. That development had something of the psychology of a major love-affair that all went bitterly wrong…)
Anyway, the man who brought it all together in DC for Saddam’s regime in those days was Nizar Hamdoun. And yes, “bringing it all together” certainly also included those visits that Donald Rumsfeld was making to Baghdad at exactly the time that Saddam was busy using chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds…
Hamdoun died of leukemia a few years ago. But not until after many, many of his high-ranking American friends had intervened to try to get him to high-end doctors in New York, etc.
Yes, he was, from a purely technical point of view, an outstandingly “capable” diplomat.
And now, there are the Saudis…
I invite you to enjoy with me the idiocy, the sheer, breathtaking vacuity, and the near-total nullity that characterize the press release that Qoprvis Communications sent me today:

Continue reading “The Saudi government pays money for this?”

US public opinion on Iraq

I’m writing a column for Al-Hayat today. About US politics, attitudes to Iraq (maybe), that kind of thing.
I just found this web-page, from The Polling Report, Inc., which looks fairly useful. It aggregates data from a number of opinion-polling firms on US public attitudes on Iraq-related issues.
I find all the info presented there really interesting– both the results of recent “in-depth” surveys, such as are found toward the bottom of the page, and the time-series data presented at the top.
For example, from the top, here’s the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, conducted April 1-2, 2005:

    “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?”
    Approve: 43%; Disapprove: 54%; Unsure: 3%.

GWB has lost the little “bounce” he got in early February in response to that same question (50% approval).
(And you thought the election in Iraq was about Iraqi politics?? Hah!)
But his approval ratings on Iraq are not yet back down to where they were in May and June last year (41%). That was in the immediate aftermath of both the messy and widespread battles of April 2004 and the revelations about the tortures in Abu Ghraib.
The absolute high-point for Bush’s approval rating regarding his handling of Iraq came– not surprisingly– in April 2003: 76% approval.
Okay, I need to go look at more polls on other issues, too. But that page certainly looked worth bookmarking for future reference.

Raed and friends, doing God’s work

Folks who made a donation to the campaign mounted by the Jarrar family of Baghdad to get urgently needed medical supplies to Iraqis in distress should check out the entries for today on Raed Jarrar’s blog.
Taken together, these blog posts give you both copies of the receipts Raed and his friends got from the drugstore in Amman, Jordan where they bought many or all of the med supplies, and then a photo essay on moving these numerous bulky items through, as Raed says, “my mother’s apartment”.
Each image is posted as a separate post which makes it a little hard to link to the whole sequence. But the whole series is worth looking at and shows some really wonderful young people working together on this project. Just keep on scrolling down…
This trans-shipment was taking place in Amman, a fairly good place from which to get things into Iraq (especially cities west of Baghdad like Fallujah, Ramadi, etc.) Raed’s mom Faiza has been living in Amman for a few weeks now. At the end of the photo-essay you see the group’s four big cars loaded with supplies “leaving for Baghdad”.
I particularly liked the picture titled “my mom was totally shocked when she woke up and found the house FULL of medicens boxes!!” Go, Faiza!
I realize that what Raed and his family and friends have gathered together is only a drop in the bucket of the total needs. But even one drop in the bucket is better than none! And they are showing the way for all concerned individuals and groups.
You can still contribute to these great people’s ongoing campaign through the Paypal button on the sidebar of Raed’s blog.

CSM column on Iraq transition

My column in Thursday’s CSM on the Iraqi transition is now up on their website. I’ve also archived it here.
Here’s the core of what I’m writing:

    Can the hoped-for handover of power [in Iraq] to a permanent elected body take place without further major crises? I believe that two parallel sets of steps – one to be undertaken by the US alone and the other by the US in conjunction with Iraq’s transitional leadership – would help a lot.
    In Washington, the Bush administration should issue an authoritative declaration that the US has no claims of its own on Iraq’s territory or natural resources, and no desire to constrain the decisionmaking of a freely elected Iraqi parliament in any way. This would do a huge amount to reduce suspicions and tensions inside Iraq. It would also rightly focus the attentions of all Iraqis on finding a good formula for getting along with one another rather than – as some have done – relying on US power to bolster their own group’s position.
    In Baghdad and Washington, meanwhile, policymakers should certainly consider tweaking the terms of the US-designed TAL so that what is drafted and voted on this year would be only an interim constitution, rather than the final thing. At the same time, the two planned end-of-2005 referenda could be consolidated into a single vote – which would be both a general vote of confidence in the interim constitution and the election of a sovereign democratic government based on it. Smaller details of the final constitution could be worked out later, and submitted to a referendum at that time.

Maybe it’s too timid and incrementalist. Maybe I should have been bolder? But what I wanted to make quite clear was that insisting on sticking by the letter of the (unwieldy, US-designed) TAL would probably be a recipe for disaster, and that there are reasonable, constructive alternatives.
Also, I think the point about the US making an authoritative “no lasting claims” declaration is really, really important. Why on earth don’t they just do it?

Oil price spike: who suffers?

    [T]he US appears to have fought a war for oil in the Middle East, and lost it. The consequences of that defeat are now plain for all to see.

Yes, indeed. I was totally gobsmacked when I filled up my mid-sized car yesterday and had to fork over more than $29 for the privilege. The prices seem to be climbing almost by the hour here in central Virginia.
That quote above, btw, above comes from a really excellent letter submitted to the Financial Times by Dr. Ian Rutledge, who describes himself as the author of a recently published book called Addicted to oil. (Memo to self: look for it. And hat-tip to Matt of Today in Iraq for the lead to Rutledge’s letter.)
In the letter, Rutledge argued that one of the Bush administration’s main motives in launching the invasion of Iraq had been to secure control of the Iraqi oil-fields and thus be able to start pumping an extra 2 million barrels of oil a day out of them to feed the world market (as well as, no doubt, the coffers of the US oil companies who’d be doing the pumping.)
But then,

    in the words of another US oil company executive, “it all turned out a lot more complicated than anyone had expected”. Instead of the anticipated post-invasion rapid expansion of Iraqi production… the continuing violence of the insurgency has prevented Iraqi exports from even recovering to pre-invasion levels.

So now, the price-hike.
I’ve been thinking through who suffers most from this. One group that evidently doesn’t suffer are those who, like so many of George W. Bush’s friends, have major investments in the US oil industry. All kinds of previously “marginal” drilling operations are now become daily ever more and more viable. Profits will do very well, thank you.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the “big oil” folks stood to do very well indeed whether Bush’s big gamble in Iraq turned out well, or not? Nah, maybe not “ironic”, at all. More like, the way near-monopoly capitalism always works.
Inside the US, who suffers most, I think, are the rural poor— people who have zero access to public transportation and are absolutely forced to use their cars to pursue even the most basic activities of daily life. Lots of folks, including poor folks, inside US cities don’t have access to public transport either, because of the country’s extremely strong tilt toward automobilocracy.
Globally, though, the effects are far, far worse. Especially for the hundreds of millions of residents of the very poor parts of the world. How on earth can their trucking companies survive? How can their farmers get their goods to market? How can their infant industries survive, with gas prices expected to remain at or above their present levels?
If the people in power in the world truly thought of all of humankind as a single “human family”, then surely this is an issue we’d expect the whole “family” to come together to deal with right now.
Starting by dealing with the miscreant family member who thought he’d go out and smash up an oil-producing country in the Middle East from a mixture of personal motives, from recklessness, and almost as a “lark”.
This same family member, moreover, is one that has been hogging and wilfully wasting this vital global resource for many decades now.
… Well, I’m not going to sit around waiting for the “community of nations” to start calling Uncle Sam to account any day soon. But what everyone really does need to focus on is how to prevent the economic disaster now hitting the “very-low-income world” as a result of spiraling oil prices from causing even more privation, starvation, and human misery in those countries than their people are already suffering.
Ideas, anyone?

US interrogation centers in Iraq till 2009!

Rosa Prince of London Daily Mirror has reported that:

    THE US Army plans to remain in Iraq until at least 2009, secret documents obtained by the Mirror reveal.
    Contract tender forms for civilian workers disclose a huge expansion of interrogation and detention centres in Iraq to remain in place for a minimum four more years.

(Chapeau to Friendly Fire of Today in Iraq for the lead.)
Prince adds that:

    According to the documents from the Assistant Chief of Staff, Multi-National Forces, US chiefs plan a