Author: Helena

Rogue tentacles,now?

You think it’s scary to have the United States occasionally barging around the world starting wars, defying international conventions, and generally acting like a rogue state?
Well, how about this: the idea that within the US administration there are rogue tentacles that go around the world doing exactly the same but almost entirely out of any centralized control system?
To me, that is even scarier.
At least, with a rogue state, you have the general idea that there’s some kind of a centralized “intelligence” at work, assessing risks and trying (perhaps) to minimize the overall damage caused to the global system… Or, at the very least, that there’s a single “address” to which people can go with any queries or complaints about various US actions.
But now, according to this disturbing article in today’s WaPo, the Pentagon is actively promoting a plan that,

    would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there…

The reporters, the estimable Ann Scott Tyson and Dana Priest, cite as their sources, “administration officials familiar with the plan.” They note that,

    The plan would weaken the long-standing “chief of mission” authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president’s top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.

According to Tyson and Priest, this shift is still only “proposed”. And not surprisingly the proposal has come in for a lot of resistance from the State Department (and also, perhaps a little more suprisingly, from the CIA.)
The reporters attrobute to “current and former administration officials” the news that,

    Over the past two years, the State Department has repeatedly blocked Pentagon efforts to send Special Operations forces into countries surreptitiously and without ambassadors’ formal approval.

And they attribute to recently retired deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage the info that, while he was still on the job,

Continue reading “Rogue tentacles,now?”

Comments working again

I apologize that the blog has not been accepting comments since late Sunday night. But now, it is again!
For the first 36 hours or so, the problem was that the webhosting service was down. Then, while it was down, I started out on a big session of IP banning– a heroic but almost useless campaign to ban the IPs used by the spambots that feed really nasty spam into the blog through the Comments and the Trackbacks.
(Meantime, the tech advisor was installing MT-Blacklist, a much more effective way to combat spam.)
Okay, closing the Comments boards to all users including bona-fide users was my fault. In an excess of zeal and a deficit of careful attention during my ban-athon Monday, I ended up “banning” a completely blank IP box, which apparently had the effect of banning all IPs from Commenting.
Well, I think that was the problem. Because half an hour ago after I discovered that blank line on my register of banned IPs and duly unbanned it, suddenly I was able to post comments onto the blog again.
Yay!

CSM column on post-Hariri Lebanon

Today’s CSM has my column on post-Hariri Lebanon. It’s titled: Can real peace take root in Lebanon?
Let’s hope so! There have been some encouraging signs, as noted in the column.
Today, I see that Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made a statement to reporters promising further “withdrawals” of Syrian forces from central and western Lebanon, back to the eastern part of the country bordering Syria (and very close indeed to downtown Damascus).
In that story I linked to there, by AP’s Albert Aji, the reporter noted that Muallem’s statement use of the term “withdrawal” was the first time that term– rather than “redeployment” has been used by Syria regarding troop movements in Lebanon.
Aji noted, however, that the promised withdrawal would not be complete; and also that Muallem did not specify a timetable for it.
I was somewhat reassured, back at the end of last year, when Syria’s President Asad put Muallem, a wise veteran diplomat, onto the Lebanese “case”. Muallem was Syria’s key diplomatic point-person throughout most of the Israeli-Syrian peace diplomacy that occurred 1991-1996.
Those negotiations were always overshadowed in the media by the much “flashier” (and ultimately also unsuccessful) negotiations on the Israeli-Palestinian track. But everyone in the west who is nowadays so eager to jump on a mindlessly ideological anti-Syrian bandwagon seems to have forgotten that throughout that five-year period in the mid-1990s– and later, right up to Asad Pere’s fated encounter with Prez Clinton, in Geneva, in May 2000– Syria and Israel came literally within a whisker of concluding a final peace accord.
Essentially, the nature of that deal was “full peace and normalization” for “full withdrawal” of Israel’s occupation forces and settlers from the Golan. Rabin and Peres were both prepared to do that. (Read all about the negotiations in my 2000 book on the topic from the U.S. Institute of Peace Press.) But when the swaggeringly over-confident Ehud Barak thought he could get the first half of the “grand bargain” for something significantly less than full withdrawal, the whole deal fell apart.
Syria participated creatively, flexibly, and in good faith in those negotiations (which was more than you could say of Israel under, for example, Netanyahu or Sharon.) And Syria has always, since 2000, expressed its readiness to resume the final-status talks with Israel… Walid Muallem has meanwhile been a quiet, steady voice in the Syrian elite arguing as to why those negotiations have been in the country’s best longterm interest.
… So I was cautiously optimistic when Walid was given (an undefined amount of) responsibility for Syria’s “Lebanon file”, back in November or so. The Syrians had previously made a really disastrous mistake in Lebanon by needlessly ramming the extension of President Lahoud’s term through the Lebanese parliament.
I hope Damascus has figured out how to pursue a wiser course now. Let’s watch and see.

International atrocities law

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… I did a quick edit on the other half of my recently junked (sob!) Chapter 11… So this is a piece titled “Notes on the development of international atrocities law since 1850”. It’s a companion piece to the “Notes on transitional justice” that I put up on the JWN archives last week .
In the conception of Chapter 11 that I was working with when I wrote those two segments, the present piece preceded the one on “transitional justice”. I wrote both of them with reference to the rest of the book, which focuses on three conflict-exiting countries in Africa: Mozambique, South Africa, and Rwanda.
But I think that each of these short segments now stands alone okay, and I hope they provide a useful introduction to some of the issues involved.
Comments, anyone?

Parsing Iraq’s TAL: why bother?

My dear friend Juan Cole has recently devoted quite some space on his blog to his own and others’ parsings of the notorious “Transitional Administrative Law” (TAL) that desert fashion maven Jerry Bremer tried to foist onto the proud people of Iraq back in March 2004.
Well, many of us have spent time in the past parsing the 62 articles of that egregious document. I did so myself, back here and on other occasions around then, too.
But now, I ask myself, Why bother?
What was the “status” of that so-called “law”, anyway?
(Answer: It was a text adopted by an “Interim Governing Council” that had been appointed by the occupying force.)
Why on earth should that have any status at all, in comparison with, for example, the will of the people?
Okay, okay, I do know that the “will of the people” is a tough concept to necessarily operationalize or get a good grasp of. It is frequently fickle; it can be capricious or disturbingly majoritarian. But discerning it and operationalizing it are, at the end of the day, what democracy and good governance are all about.
And yes, I know too that there were many, many flaws in the election that was held three and a half weeks ago now, in Iraq…
But still, despite those many evident flaws– which included the use by members of at least one list of governmental powers and resources to try to steer the election their way; the overwhelming presence of occupation forces in many parts of the country; the intimidation campaign launched by militant anti-occupation (and militant anti-Shiite) forces; and the many, many reported irregularities or worse in the conduct of the election– Yet, despite all those flaws, in the January 30 elections the Iraqi people spoke.
The clarity of what they said was necessarily muffled and distorted by all the flaws described right there. But still, I think we can hear a couple of clear things in what they said. Which were, for a significant majority of them, these two statements:

Continue reading “Parsing Iraq’s TAL: why bother?”

JWN hosting service was down. Sorry

I only realized this morning (central Virginia time) that the server that hosts the blog was down, and apparently had been since mid-day or so yesterday.
Apologies for the interruption in service. You should now be able to post your comments. (If you’re a “legitimate” commenter, that is. We’ve also been installing new spam-protection software here.)
I was also totally unable to post any new posts. Which prevented me from crowing about calling it, back on Feb. 13, about Ibrahim Jaafari winning the UIA’s internal leadership race.
Oh go ahead, Helena, crow.
Anyway, let’s hope the hosting service– and you know who you are, guys!– doesn’t let this happen again, eh?

Ashoura attacked again this year…

I just want to note, even if belatedly, the terrible human cost the Iraqi Shiites have been paying over their recent commemoration of Ashoura, in terms of the more than four-score members of their community killed by suicide bombers who seemed to be targeting the Shiites gathered for their holy rites.
This year, as last year.
I also want to note the magnificent self-restraint with which the members and leaders of the Shiite community have so far responded to thse tragedies.
My goodness, can you imagine the carnage of revenge attacks that might under other circumstances have ensued?
Condolences to so very many bereaved families. Prayers for the ability of the leaders of all of Iraq’s communities to be able to find a decent and workable national entente.
(And some big questions about the responsibility of the occupying power for these continuing, gross lapses in public security…. nearly two years after the occupation started…)

Fences and indigenous peoples

JWN reader Scott H., who is part Lenni Lenape, sent along a reference to this AP story out of Oregon yesterday, which tells of yet another attempt to fence in a group of indigenous people…. In this case, the native-American students at a boarding school in Salem, Oregon:

    Barbed wire turned out to be the wrong way to mark the 125th anniversary of the Chemawa Indian School, which serves tribes across the nation.
    Construction crews began setting up an 8-foot-high fence, topped with barbed wire, around the 200-acre campus in Salem as the boarding school was preparing to celebrate its anniversary this weekend. The barbed wire was being removed Friday following protests.
    The construction … [resulted] in a student demonstration and letters from parents to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ordered the $63,000 project.
    “Chemawa means `happy home,’ ” student Jeremy Cummings told the Statesman Journal newspaper in Salem. “It doesn’t make a happy home with a fence around it.”

Indeed not. Neither there, nor in the fenced-in cities in occupied Palestine.
By the way, I explored that Lenni Lenape website a little bit, and found this page about the people’s history which should be of special interest to US Quakers.
One of the first big groups of Quakers on this continent was the group brought over in the late 17th century by William Penn, who has a “land grant” from whichever British King it was and came over here to launch what was called the “Holy Experiment” in Quaker governance.
Quakers have prided themselves on having tried to treat the native peoles of north America fairly– in particular, by “buying” their land from Indians for a “fair” price, etc etc. (In later centuries, Quakers also participated along with other churches in undertaking the cultural genocide of many Indians by putting their children and youths into boarding-schools where they were forbidden from speaking their people’s languages. But I suppose they thought they were “doing them a favor”? Anyway, that phase came a lot later… )
So the Lenni Lenape were some of the first native peoples that Penn’s colonists encountered. I guess he and the Quakers who came with him tried to treat them decently. But much or most of the land they had in “Penn”-sylvania and New Jersey was actually held in Penn’s personal name, and after he died his descendants weren’t nearly so attentive to trying to treat the Indians fairly.
According to the Lenape story told on that page I linked to, after William Penn’s death his descendants,

    falsely represented an old, incomplete, unsigned draft of a deed as a legal contract. They told the Lenape that their ancestors some fifty years before had signed this document which stated that the land to be deeded to the Penns was as much as could be covered in a day-and-a-half’s walk.
    Believing that their forefathers had made such an agreement the Lenape leaders agreed to let the Penns have this area walked off. They thought the whites would take a leisurely walk down an Indian path along the Delaware River. Instead, the Penns hired three of the fastest runners, and had a straight path cleared. Only one of the “walkers” was able to complete the “walk,” but he went fifty-five miles.

And so the colonists claimed from the Lenape an extra 1,200 square miles of land inside “Penn”-sylvania… The Lenape were put off that land and sent off on what became a 130-year “trail of tears” that pushed them ever further west and south till they ended up in Oklahoma…
In June 1762, the New Jersey Quaker John Woolman determined to travel from his home-farm westwards to visit some of the native Americans in the center of what is today Pennsylvania. In his journal he wrote,

Continue reading “Fences and indigenous peoples”

Foray into DC

Bill and I made a quick foray into Gomorrah-on-the-Potomac this weekend. A dear friend of ours was having a Big 6-0 birthday party there. Her spouse organized the party as a surprise, and amazingly it worked. One hundred people in fancy duds were all packed into one of the city’s swankiest private clubs and when the birthday girl arrived we all leapt up saying “Surprise!”
I have this complex sort of love-hate relationship with Washington DC. Mainly, a lot of amazement at the toxic miasma of militarism and arrogance that marks nearly all of what passes for policy discourse there. There’s a critical mass of people who work in the administration, people who work on the Hill, people who work in the (so-called) “think tanks”, and very insidery “press” people… And they all talk to each other and create this massive echo chamber of likeminded people who seem sincerely to be of the belief that what they’re talking about is “the world”, when quite frequently it isn’t at all.
On the other hand, I did live there for 15 years. I got to know hundreds of nice people, and still count many of them as my friends.
One person I’ve known for oh, 20 years, let’s just say someone who used to be a very senior diplomat who spent the past year working in Baghdad’s Green Zone, called out to me at the party last night (with a big smile): “Helena Cobban! The provocateuse!”
“Why d’you say that?” I asked once I could get closer to him.
“Because you tell the truth,” he said.
So that was nice. We talked a bit longer, but the party was pretty crammed and the accoustics terrible.
I keep thinking I should try and spend a little more time in DC to catch up with some of the folks there a bit more, like him. Seven years after leaving the city, I’m maybe just about ready to go back in some way.
But heavens, no: definitely not to become any kind of “insider”.

Lebanon: the multi-track version

A dizzying number of different narratives are being unfolded in Lebanon these days. here are the main ones:
Track 1: The facts about the hideous killing of Rafiq Hariri
Track 2: The international “uproar” and rush to judgment
And then, the most fascinating track of all…
Track 3: The birth of an inter-sectarian, nonviolent opposition movement in Lebanon
This is such great news!
I wonder how whoever carried out the grisly deed last Monday is looking at this development? Almost certainly, whoever did it was intending to spark off further, terrible, inter-necine fighting inside Lebanon… Instead of which, we have this great and very mature response from the Lebanese opposition:

    Lebanon’s political opposition has called for an “intifada for independence” as it stepped up it attacks on the government.

What is exciting is that the people at the head of this movement are by no means patsies or stalking horses for US or Israeli interests. They are people of real political substance with long histories in left-nationalist organizing inside Lebanon… They are also old, old friends of mine.
Like Walid Jumblatt, the MP and former minister whose father Kamal Bey Jumblatt was killed by the Syrians in 1977 at the time that the Syrians were doing Washington’s bidding by “saving” the Falangists (Maronitist extremists) from being over-run by the Lebanese leftist and Palestinian forces.
Like Samir Frangieh, a wry, longtime Marxist intellectual who has for decades now been one of the notable voices of conscience inside the Maronite community.
Lebanese politics is notably complicated for people who don’t know much about the country’s extremely complex society. The twists, turns, wrinkles, and turnrounds can be confusing enough for anyone!
So Walid Bey Jumblatt is the hereditary “community head” of the Druze community inside Lebanon. As such, he has many quasi-feudal powers within Lebanon’s Druze community– — and also, much influence among Druzes in Syria (including the Israeli-occupied Golan) and among those in Israel itself.
The Druze– in case by chance you didn’t know this?– are a small, fairly secretive religious group that broke off from Shiite Islam in the days of Egypt’s very weird Fatimid ruler Al-Hakem bi-Omrillah [sorry, make that Al-Hakem bi-Amrillah] in the 11th century. The Druze “closed” the call to convert to their sect in 1085, and have had very few converts since. The Jumblatts, interestingly enough, were some of those converts, having come over to Lebanon from somewhere in Kurdistan a few centuries after 1085.
(Read all about this in my 1985 book on Lebanon. If you can get hold of a copy. I’m actually trying to regain my rights to it, to reissue it, right now.)
So Walid Bey has this position of quasi-feudal leadership… And he is also head of Lebanon’s most stable socialist party, the PSP, whose red flags you might have seen waving at Hariri’s funeral.
Oh, and by the way, in a tradition not followed by many socialist parties anywhere else in the world, he also inherited his role as head of the party from his father.
His mother, May Arslan Jumblatt, is a fabulous woman– a pioneering, chainsmoking, volubly French-speaking feminist from the “rival” Yazbecki trend in Druze feudal politics who was divorced from Kamal Bey when Walid was still small. We spent a great evening with her, Walid, and Walid’s wife Nura up in the family’s ancestral seat in the mountains, back in October.
Okay, and then there’s Samir Frangieh, a Maronite Christian who is the second cousin of Suleiman Frangieh, the present Minister of the Interior. Suleiman F., btw, is the grandson of the generally pro-Syrian man of the same name who was President back in the 1970s. Suleiman’s father Tony was killed along with, his wife, a baby daughter, and 31 supporters in an attack set by Maronitist rivals in 1978.
For details of a long list of nasty assassinations inside Lebanon since 1975, go here.
All of which history makes the emergence of a determinedly nonviolent opposition movement in the country even more notable.
(There have been some small attempts to do this before– led mostly by women. But they never got anywhere. The men just couldn’t, in those days, resist grabbing for their guns when the going got tough.)
So according to that same Daily Star report cited above, Jumblatt, Samir Frangieh, and the others declared that they intend to place all the country’s parliamentary business on hold,

    until Hariri’s murderers are identified.
    Speaking from Chouf MP Walid Jumblatt’s residence in Clemenceau Qornet Shehwan Gathering member Samir Franjieh said: “In response to the criminal and terrorist policy of the Lebanese and Syrian authorities, the opposition declares a democratic and peaceful intifada [uprising] for independence.”

Reporter Nada Raad wrote,

    Monday’s upcoming parliamentary session looks set for chaos as the opposition insisted it will not discuss the draft electoral law until a full debate is held on Hariri’s murder and the attempt on the life, last year of Chouf MP Marwan Hamade and Syrian troops are withdrawn from Lebanon.
    The refusal to discuss the electoral law could delay this May’s parliamentary elections.
    Interior Minister Suleiman Franjieh was dismissive of the opposition but still took time to warn them against inciting tensions in the wake of this week’s tragic events.
    He said: “Should security be tampered with, the government will not stand unmoved, and the army will be given the order to act.”
    But despite the warning he added: “It is not worth announcing a state of emergency.”
    The opposition statement followed a meeting of opposition groups at Le Bristol Hotel in Beirut. Sources close to opposition leader Jumblatt said he did not attend the meeting for “security measures” after receiving what they described as “direct threats.”
    In his latest direct attack on President Emile Lahoud, Jumblatt said: “He should be removed from Lebanon in a Syrian truck.”
    He added: “They cannot assassinate the one or even two million people who support us.”
    Jumblatt again accused Lebanese and Syrian security services of being behind Hariri’s murder. He said: “We ask for an international investigation not involving the Lebanese regime.”

She noted that the meeting in the Bristol Hotel had been attended by,

    around 44 MPs, including some members of Hariri’s parliamentary bloc and a dozen of political parties, including exiled former army commander General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement.
    The attendants wore red and white ribbons in support of Lebanon’s independence.
    Opposition members also asked Lebanese expatriates to organize sit-ins and demonstrations in front of Lebanese embassies.
    Samir Franjieh said: “We ask Lebanese expatriates’ political and financial support for our cause. We demand the United Nations’ support to protect the Lebanese people.”
    Hariri’s grave in downtown Beirut has become a shrine since his burial last Wednesday and Samir Franjieh urged the Lebanese people to continue their presence and prayers there.
    On Friday, hundreds of Lebanese marched from Phoenicia Inter-Continental Hotel, where Hariri was assassinated, to Gemmayzeh chanting slogans against Syria and calling for “freedom, sovereignty and independence.”
    Some students threatened to march “everyday at 7 p.m. until the government resigns.”
    Opposition members called for the formation of an “interim government as a supreme national necessity to protect the Lebanese people and ensure the immediate and complete withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.”

Expected responses from the Syrians and the remaining pro-Syrian forces inside Lebanon?
Not clear yet. But there is that news about Bashar having dismissed his military mukhabarat chief somewhat precipitately… Plus, there’s this interesting report from AP’s Zeina Karam in Damascus, who says “some Syrians” are now saying it’s time to withdraw the 15,000 troops their country has in Lebanon.
She gives no further quantification for the degree of support she found for that view, and notes that,

    This is not yet the opinion of the Syrian government, which has spent the week denying responsibility for Monday’s assassination and reaffirming its close ties to Lebanon.

One of the Syrians she does quote by name as urging an immeidate withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon is the left-leaning writer Michel Kilo, whom she describes (rightly) as “prominent”.
Karam also quotes two businessmen as saying that’s not a wise course… But let’s see.
Regarding the pro-Syrian forces inside Lebanon, they seem generally to be acting pretty wisely, and not in an escalatory way right now. But who knows how they will be moving forward? Hard for anyone to guess.