Author: Helena

A Beiruti recalls the Pope

There’s a lovely piece in Thursday’s Daily Star (Beirut) by Adnan El-Ghoul, titled John Paul II’s legacy to Lebanon. I’m pretty certain Ghoul is a Sunni Muslim, which makes the piece all the more meaningful.
In it, he recalls the visit the Pope made to Lebanon in 1997:

    When the pope came to Lebanon the political and religious situation at the time posed distinct challenges in the wake of Lebanon’s bloody 15 year civil war. Among them, the status of the Lebanese government, largely dominated by Syria and set in place by the Taif Accord in 1989. He was also faced with the task of convincing extremists of both Christian and Muslim faiths to embark on a permanent dialogue with one another and to persuade young Christians not leave their homeland at a time when they were exiting in large numbers.
    … Eight years later, the number of Syrian troops has dropped from 40,000 to less than 8,000 and they are scheduled to leave by the end of this month. Israel pulled its troops out of South Lebanon and western Bekaa Valley in May 2000; at least according to the United Nations.
    … So what difference did the pontiff’s trip make to Lebanon? Did we have a Poland moment, where his visit glavanised his fellow countrymen to throw off the shackes of communism?
    We didn’t have the drama of a Polish moment, but in my view the papal visit did make a difference to this country. I would assert he actually helped establish a new political climate that paved the way for the current political uprising. He came here and said openly that Lebanon and the Lebanese needed to embrace change.
    …[S]ince the papal visit many realities changed in accordance with the pope’s wishes and guidance. He called for greater dialogue between this country’s myriad of religions. In his document “A New Hope for Lebanon,” he outlined the need for coexistance and for all Lebanese to look toward Lebanon for their future, calling all Lebanese to “open with confidence a new page in their history.”
    In this respect the visit laid the foundation for dialogue that helped trans-sectarian alliances and cooperation in this country which in turn has reaped rewards for Lebanon’s political opposition. His plea for reconciliation was most plainly seen in the visit by Sfeir to the Chouf Mountains to meet with Walid Jumblatt for the first time since the civil war. That visit can arguably seen as the first seeds in the flowering of the broad based united Lebanese opposition that the country currently has.

Ghoul also recalled fondly the Pope’s 2001 visit to Damascus when:

    Tens of thousands of Muslims and Christians attended the Mass celebrated by the pope in Damascus soccer stadium.
    The pope told the stadium crowd, speaking in French, “In this holy land, Christians, Muslims and Jews are called to work together with confidence and boldness and to work to bring about without delay the day when the legal rights of all peoples are respected and they can live in peace and mutual understanding.”
    Following in the steps of St. Paul, the pope’s visit to Syria took him to a landscape rich in Christian history. Syria’s 17 million people include two million Christians, and the pope’s presence there highlighted the rich mix of cultures and history of Syria.
    Pope John Paul traveled in what he called the Millennium Journey as a pilgrim to the Umayyad Mosque. He was the first pope to enter a mosque, stepping into a historic shrine alongside Muslim leaders.
    By visiting Umayyad Mosque, in the heart of the Old City of Damascus, the pope made a point on how Christianity and the preceding Roman Empire, were deeply rooted in the Middle East.
    The Umayyad Mosque has been a place of worship for more than 3,000 years…

And finally, this:

    Back in Beirut, the images of his 1997 visit which have been reshown on television following his death are a reminder that Beirut had not witnessed million-people marches since that time until the current crisis this year.
    One million people of all sects and religious beliefs attended the Sunday Mass the pope celebrated in Downtown Beirut close to Martyrs’ Square. I was one of them. Less than eight years later one million people of all sects again filled Martyrs’ Square to show their support to a united political opposition calling for Syrian withdrawal and political freedom.
    What is John Paul’s final legacy to Lebanon? I think we are seeing it: dialogue, tolerance, political freedom. As I write we seem to be on the verge of a return to sectarian rigidity and political bickering which looks set to threaten the principles outlined by the pope when he visited our small country.
    The “Apostolic Guidance,” which was published after his trip here would come in handy as a blueprint for containing the current political crisis before it develops into a communal conflict. It is worth reading now more than ever.

Blessed indeed be the peacemakers.

Iraq: over one hump

So finally today, 66 days after the January 30 election, the members of the National Assembly elected that day were able to reach agreement on an interim President, veteran PUK leader Jalal Talabani, and two Vice-President, slippery Shiite pol Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Sunni stuffed shirt (okay, stuffed jallabiya) Ghazi Yawar.
This article by Ed Wong on the NYT website today gives some interesting details about the Assembly session, including this:

    new problems erupted at the assembly meeting, as many Shiite members called for the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to be dissolved as soon as Mr. Talabani and his deputies were sworn in. Shiite officials have been particularly critical of Mr. Allawi’s rule, saying he has brought back into the government former senior members of the Baath Party who played key roles in oppressing ordinary Iraqis, especially Shiites and Kurds. The debate today foreshadowed what many people see as a potentially harsh purging of former Baathists from the government once the new rulers are installed.

Wong reports that interim human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin had insisted that Saddam Hussein and his imprisoned cronies be “forced” to watch a televised version of the proceedings inside their jail cells over near Baghdad airport:

    “I thought it was a very sensible idea for Saddam and his aides to watch with their own eyes Jalal Talabani, who had been excluded from all amnesties issued by Saddam, being elected today as president,” Mr. Amin said.

Wong also hinted strongly that Yawar (who had previously been named by Paul Bremer as one of the two key deputies to Iyad Allawi) might not be the best person through whom the new Transitional Government leadership could reach out to the Sunni Arabs… On the other hand, the “evidence” he adduces for that comes from disappointed candidate Adnan Pachachi, so it’s not clear how much value to give to his view.
The appointment of the three-person Presidential Council was a major “hump” in the road to government formation, since it required the Bremer-imposed two-thirds super-majority. That hump has now been passed. The Prez Council will now, I think, present its nominations for the prime minister and other ministers to the Assembly, where only a simple majority is required for passage.
That may happen as early as Thursday.
But will Iraq then get a Transitional Government that is both domestically legitimate and empowered (by the occupying force) to start ruling the country? That is really the question.
Until that happens, I think I’ll keep the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter going.
By the way, in that AP/Yahoo story I linked to above, there’s a fascinating little quote from Talabani that I consider to be a hopeful sign:

    Speaking after his election, Talabani … made a gesture toward those who side with the insurgency.
    “As for the Iraqis who are carrying weapons out of patriotic and anti-occupation motives, those people are our brothers and it is possible to talk with them and to reach a solution,” Talabani said.
    He added that his government would work to provide security so that U.S.-led coalition forces “could return home after the completion of building (Iraqi) armed forces that are capable of finishing off terrorism.”

In other words, Talabani is declaring that those “insurgents” (a completely anti-political term that US spinmeisters have tried to apply to militants from a range of different political orientations) whose motivations are “patriotic and anti-occupation”– as opposed to being anti-Shiite or anti-Kurd– are people whom he is ready to work with.
It’s great that, in rhetoric and also possibly in reality, Talabani is not presenting himself merely as a patsy for the occupation forces.
Also, that he seems to be aiming for, or prepared to accept, a complete withdrawal of US forces.
So the intra-Iraqi politics of this are getting interesting.

Iraq open thread, #1

I’m afraid I have been too busy with other things to write much about Iraq recently. From one point of view, though, the ever-rising number on JWN’s “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter says it all…
65 today!
So now, 30.5% of the total time allocated to reaching agreement on a permanent Constitution has already passed.
I strongly believe it is important that the Iraqi parties get this permanent Constitution “right”– that is, to make sure it is one that the vast majority of Iraqi citizens feel comfortable with, going forward for– say– the next three generations. Crafting this Constitution should not necessarily be rushed to fit a Bremer-dictated deadline. I’m just hoping that a lot of the intra-Iraqi discussions and contacts that are going on now are about this extremely important topic.
But in the meantime there are many, extremely pressing issues of governance of the country that need to be attended to, and this should preferably happen at the hands of an empowered and legitimate Iraqi administration. That is the function that the yet-to-be-named “Transitional Government” is supposed to serve.
But if the convoluted and anti-democratic strictures of Bremer’s TAL should continue to prevent the Iraqi parties from forming this administration, then who the heck is is in charge?
Under international law, it is still the occupying military that’s in charge… Right through to the time of the conclusion of a final peace agreement between a legitimate Iraqi successor government and the governments of the occupying armies.
But with the “privilege” of running Iraq as a “foreign occupying power” comes an enormous amount of responsibility, too: responsibility for the wellbeing of all residents of the occupied territory (hah!) and responsibility to operate completely within the bounds of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rest of the provisions of International Humanitarian Law that govern the conduct of “belligerent military occupations”…
So far, the US/UK occupiers have contravened IHL in numerous ways in their conduct of the occupation… Not least by seeking already through the TAL and through the CPA’s many “Orders” and “Regulations”, which still remain in force, to completely change the juridical and governance underpinnings of the country’s administration in many, very serious ways. IHL completely forbids that.
Once there is an empowered and more-or-less legitimate (from the Iraqi citizenry’s viewpoint) Transitional Government, the TAL says it should stick by all those earlier Bremer-dictated laws and regulations. But what standing does any of the TAL have under international law? As far as I can see, very little indeed.
Anyway, I hadn’t meant to write much here. Mainly, I’ll leave an open thread here for y’all to put links and discussion into.

Juan Rocks, too!

Catching up with my reading here. I only just got down to this great post, “The Other Pope”, in which Juan Cole pulled together many facts about the late Pope’s political positions that were highly inconvenient to the US rightwingers who try to claim him as their own…
Including on Palestine, worker’s rights, the death penalty, the Iraq invasion, etc etc.
Great work.

Riverbend Rocks!

A combination of physiology and Real Life have taken over Helena’s brain and ability to blog today. I was going to post an open thread so y’all could post comments about Iraq (like Yankeedoodle used to before he brought in Matt and friendly Fire as his excellent ‘guest writers’.)
But then I moseyed (?sp) over to Riverbend’s blog and just loved this post on Iraqis’ new exposure to US Big Media:

    The first time I saw 60 Minutes on MBC 4, it didn

South African apartheid’s ‘Total Strategy’

South African JWN commenter Dominic and I have both started working on trying to find a good–preferably primary-source– articulation of the “Total Strategy” developed by the apartheid regime in 1976-77 with a view to being able to do a good comparative study between that and what is probably the Bush administration’s authoritative articulation of the ‘Global War on Terror’, namely the National Security Strategy document of September 2002.
We’re not quite there yet. Any other interested JWN readers are warmly invited to join our little project. Also, if you yourself are unable to contribute to this work but know of someone else who might be interested, please forward this post to them!
The quick background on the ‘Total Strategy’ is that in 1974-76 two disastrous sets of things happened to the “security situation” and the “security strategy” pursued up until then by the apartheid bosses:

    (1) Portugal’s massive African empire completely collapsed, “handing over” control of the two large southern African states Mozambique and Angola to national-liberation movements that were firmly African-nationalist and because of the nature and history of their struggle favorably inclined to the Soviet Union.
    This was seen as the “collapse of vital buffer states”. Plus, of course, the example of victory provided by the nationalists in those two countries might–it was feared in Pretoria– serve as inspiration to SA’s own majority Black and other non-White populations… And
    (2) In 1976, the sprawling, Black-only “townships” of Soweto incubated the Soweto Uprising, a revolt by disaffected Black youth that spread rapidly through most of the country’s urban areas. The youth were rebelling against the perceived passivity of their own elders as much as against the continuation of White control. They sought to make the country “ungovernable”, and were much more radical than most of the older-generation supporters of the existing nationalist organizations.

You could say that the combination of those two sets of developments, both outside and inside the country, acted as a kind of “9/11” for the leaders of the apartheid government. They described what they saw happening as a Soviet-orchestrated “Total Onslaught” on the good, White, Christian, pro-western values that the apartheid system sought to uphold. This Total Onslaught had to be met with a “Total Strategy”, that would be pursued simultaneously both inside and outside the country and involved many elements of social control, and social and political manipulation, at many different levels– not just the immediately “military” level, but also including that very prominently indeed.
It does sound a lot like the Bush administration’s GWOT already, doesn’t it? I guess my aim is to flesh out this hypothesis as much as possible.
Dominic doesn’t think this portion of Vol. 2 of the TRC report gives much useful info about the TS. However, I think it’s not a bad place to start, especially paras 108-139 and 152-165.
Dominic has found a couple of really helpful (though still not primary) sources. One is a book that I think he picked off his bookshelf called

Out of contact, 2 days

I’m in Maryland. My laptop doesn’t work. I’m just borrowing a friend’s computer to check email and write this.
It felt very frustrating, then I remembered most folks in the world don’t organize their lives according to “instant access”, cyber-time. And their mental health and general effectiveness in running their lives is probably far superior to those of folks who’re foreever rushing around to catch the “latest” of the latest news.
Ommmm.
Actually, today and tomorrow I’m doing Quaker things. So perhaps some cyber-silence is very appropriate.
Back Sunday evening, or Monday. If way opens.

“Far Away”

Last night, we went to an amazing production– directed by my very good friend Betsy Rudelich Tucker– of “Far Away“, a play written in 2000 by the brilliant British playwright Caryl Churchill.
I don’t have time here to write much about it. If any of you gets a chance to see it– rush to the theater in question! To think that Churchill wrote it before 9/11 is truly amazing. The woman can see into the future!
The future she sees into, and portrays in around 70 mins of very sparse performance time, is one in which two human tendencies– the desire to paper over or ignore disturbing signs of violence and violation, and the desire to be extremely judgmental about others– rapidly degerate into what can only be described as a form of dementia.
In the last scene, the entirely believable and fairly sympathetic three characters in the play are earnestly talking to each other about whether “the cats have come down on the side of the Frendch”, or “the Chinese, the porcupines, and the gazelles have lined with the Germans and the children under five”… And even whether “the river is for us or against us this week”.
Before that scene there is a lengthy, completely silent scene that consists only of a slow parade of individuals, one by one, across the stage. When each reaches a box in the middle of it, s/he stands and holds his hands out and then is “executed” with a flash of light.
After the performance, Betsy talked about it a little. She said that Churchill’s own directions for this scene had been very sparse: that there should be a slow parade of “raggedly dressed individuals wearing fantastic hats” across the stage, where each one in turn should be executed. (The hats, and the making of them, were part of an earlier scene.)
Betsy said that Churchill gave no precise number for the number of those doing this, except to write that ten was too few, and it could be 20 or 100 or more… Betsy had 34 of them, but it went so slowly that it took up maybe 25 minutes of the entire performance.
The way Betsy and her costume designer staged this, though, felt like a blow to my solar plexus. I felt literally sick to my stomach. She had each of the condemned persons dressed in ragged canvas pants and dragging a shackle from one foot. The very “fantastic” hats were perched atop a plain black hood that covered the whole face. Then beneath that each prisoner wore a ragged but clearly rectilinear poncho whose shape was clearly revealed as, just before the execution, he held his hands out to the side… Standing on a box…
Not “far away” at all.

Toothless Robb-Silberman report

Before last year’s election, things were getting so bad in Iraq that the Bush administration was forced to commission two additional studies of “what went wrong?” The higher-level of these studies was the one the Prez commissioned “personally”– the one headed by former Virginia Senator Chuck Robb and legal eagle Larry Silberman.
That one looked into “why the US intel agencies had gotten it so wrong on so many of the ‘claims’ the administration had made about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, etc, in the lead-up to the war. ” (Wrong question. It wasn’t mainly the work of the intel agencies that was faulty– though certainly, numerous mistakes were made. But it was overwhelmingly the fault of the political leaders who created a clear climate in which the intel chiefs were encouraged to bring in completely skewed intelligence… But the commission wasn’t “allowe” to look into that.)
The other, lower-level and more technical report was one produced by the quasi-nongovernmental Rand Corporation, which looked into the failures of planning for the post-war period in Iraq.
I’ve quickly skimmed the news reports about the Robb-Silberman report, and I think that today’s NYT editorial got it pretty right in its scathing critique of the report this morning:

    The president’s commission on intelligence gathering could have saved the country a lot of time, and considerable paper, by not publishing its report yesterday and just e-mailing everyone the Web addresses for the searching studies already done by the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. After more than a year’s dithering, the panel produced some 600 pages of conventional wisdom about the intelligence failures before the war with Iraq, along with a big dose of political spin that pleased the White House but provided little enlightenment for the public.
    We were not optimistic when President Bush was pressured into creating this panel in February 2004. Though bipartisan, its membership lacked stature or independence, and Mr. Bush failed to give the commission a sweeping mandate that would go beyond rehashing the distressing but well-known shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. Still, it seemed worth waiting until after the election for the results because it was hard to imagine that the panel would not ask the vital questions.
    Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue – how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was “not authorized” to look at this question, so it didn’t bother. The report says the panel “interviewed a host of current and former policy makers” about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not “review how policy makers subsequently used that information.” (We can just see it – an investigator holding up his hand and declaiming: “Stop right there, Mr. Secretary! We’re not authorized to know what you did.”)
    Just compare this job with the work of the 9/11 commission, whose chairman, Thomas Kean, battled the White House over access to documents, fearlessly expanded the inquiry and insisted that policy makers testify in public – and not just about the shortcomings of their subordinates.
    The report is right in saying that American claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs were “dead wrong” because the intelligence was old or from highly dubious sources, and because the analysis was driven by a predetermined conclusion that Mr. Hussein was a threat. But we knew that.
    The panel said timidly that “it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.” But it utterly ignored the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.
    It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.
    The way the administration hyped the intelligence on Iraq is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is vital that the public know the answers because Americans are now being asked to accept a new set of claims about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. A full airing of this issue could help John Negroponte, after his expected confirmation as national intelligence director, ensure that the missteps and misrepresentations are not repeated as the nation grapples with real threats from those and other countries, not imagined threats from Iraq.
    As it stands, the report has mainly negative value. It reminds us that the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete and publish its investigation of the handling of the Iraq intelligence. And it shows us what the 9/11 panel’s report might have looked like if Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Henry Kissinger chairman.

Well said. In general, I think the NYT has been doing a great job with its Iraq-related editorials recently.
Of course, with the Republicans having increased their hold on the Senate in the November elections, I don’t think we should hold our breaths waiting for the Senate Intel Committee’s report to come out with a fearless exposé of the intel-handling issue, either.

A note for commenters

One of the best things about this blog is the discussion on the Comments boards. Amazing to think of this globe-circling, multicultural discussion forum under continual development here. However, my own experience and that of many other people who try to post comments is that they now often take a long, long time to post.
I am very sorry about that.
The reason for the delay is the complex anti-spam software we had to put in to save the site from the barrage of extremely nasty, often very pornographic spam that had started to come in.
We haven’t completely solved the spam problem. But we’ve succeeded in blocking a vast proportion of it. The “cost” of doing this is that all incoming comments now go through the very complex series of anti-spam filters we’ve installed. That can take time.
Someone who’s posted a comment may rapidly jump to the conclusion that the attempt to post it failed, and then try again (and again, and again, and again). If you do that, you end up with multiple iterations of the comment on the board. No big problem in that except it’s a bit of a waste of time for the commenter, and for me when I go in to delete the duplicates– and a bit of a distraction for readers.
So I’m afraid I just need to ask you for some patience. Maybe you could go off and visit another JWN post or another website for a minute or two before you come back and check whether your comment has posted. In my experience the comments-posting system is actually working pretty well these days, even if slowly. So you don’t even really need to go back and check, at all.
Except hey, it’s always nice to see one’s own words in “print”, don’t you think?