Helena – Page 289 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Good sense from Ze’ev Schiff

Ze’ev Schiff is a crusty old guy, one of Israel’s founding generation, and I admit I’ve grown very fond of him and his wife Sara over the years. We disagree on a number of things, but agree on many others; his heart is in the right place, and he’s often quite ready to think outside the box.
I admit, at earlier points in the present intifada, his writings seemed to get a little hard-line for my taste. On the other hand, he’s always been a real gentleman, and he even tried to help me get into Gaza last February.
Now, he’s back in fine form with a good new column in today’s Ha’Aretz. It’s titled “Time for an Israeli initiative.”
He starts by writing that Israel has had– and missed– four “major opportunities [since 1967] for a significant change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Then, he notes,

So here’s the initiative he proposes. It must, he writes, focus on two principal elements:

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Meeting Hizbullah

What better way to respond to news that George W Bush has been elected President of the USA for the next four years than to go and visit contacts in Hizbullah, and in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, here in Beirut?
Hizbullah… Which has been listed by the US State Department as a “foreign terrorist organization”… Which has also been targeted in a US-inspired Security Council resolution that requires Lebanon to disband all “militias”..
…But which also happens to have been elected to no fewer than 12 seats in Lebanon’s 128-member parliament… and to have won control through popular elections of more than 140 municipalities throughout the country.
Hizbullah is quite a poster-boy for democratic control of local and national institutions! Just the folks to talk to about George W Bush’s extensive plans for democratizing the Middle East, don’t you think?
And then, there’s Shatila camp… Location of one of Ariel Sharon’s more notable earlier attempts to “solve” the Palestinian people through terror and extermination. I’ll write more about that, in a later post.
But meanwhile, back to Hizbullah… Back in the mid-1990s, the Lebanese people were chafing under a corruption-riddled system in which municipal leaderships had not been elected since 1963. Hizbullah was at the forefront of a movement to ensure accountable, democratic control of the municipalities, and managed to win government acquiescence in the idea of popular elections for municipal councils…
That first round of new local-level elections took place in 1998, and Hizbullah did fairly well in them. They did even better in the second round of municipal elections earlier this year, which indicates that their people performed pretty well during their maiden terms on the councils. (The local elections here Lebanon reflect the “popular will” of the electorate much more directly than the national-level elections. These latter consist of numerous small, multi-member contests conducted according to arcane rules specifying the religious affiliation of each of the candidates.)
So, being all in favor of finding out more about Hizbullah’s experiment in popular democracy, I set out this afternoon for their headquarters in the –Hizbullah-controlled– southern flanks of the city…. Also known here, more simply, as the “Dohhiya” (the suburb)…

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Rumsfeld’s massive “own goal”

There have been lots of reports that the “shock and awe” component of the Rumsfeld-Cheney invasion of Iraq last year was directed primarily not at the Iraqi people–who were merely to be pawns in this nasty game–but towards China.
Was it in “Plan of Attack” that I read some evidence of that? Or was it someplace else?
Well, it could make sense as an explanatory theory… Perhaps… Except that if the idea of launching that particular war, in that particular way (using lean, mobile forces… the kind that can be fairly easily deployed over large distances… Ooops! But they ain’t much good at running an occupation!) … If it was indeed Bombs-Away Don’s brilliant idea that doing that would scare the Chinese shitless, then… he scored one heck of a large-scale own goal, didn’t he?
How shocked and awed do YOU think the Chinese are by his little display of power (and its less than glorious outcome)?
In the International Herald Tribune today, Jane Perlez writes:

She then asks, quite sensibly,

Is anybody in terror-obsessed Washington paying attention?

She quotes one senior Asian diplomat as saying that since the mid-1990s, China’s diplomacy has been “consistent, subtle and creative.” During the same period, he said, the “U.S. has been out to lunch.”
She adds:

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Bush’s war against Iraqi cities

We can be pretty sure that a jubilant Prez Bush, his mandate strengthened, will continue the war-to-the-finish against Fallujah. (Read Riverbend’s views of this here.)
How will the “decisive” phase of this assault be waged? Or, how is it already being waged?
Daniel O’Huiginn of the Cambridge (UK)-based Campaign Against the Sanctions in Iraq, has been tracking the BBC monitoring reports of the means the US forces used in their assaults on Tel Afar and Samara in recent weeks. These provide many worrying precedents as to what may happen in Fallujah.
Especially regarding the strong possibility that the US forces may cut off the water to the city, in clear contravention of the laws of war.
Here’s how Dan sums up his reading of the BBC-monitored media clips:

Dan has provided long extracts from these clippings which provide, as he notes, ” much more than we’re getting reported in the US and UK”.
I haven’t had time to go through what he provided and edit or even reformat it at all, so I’ll just upload it here. It makes sobering reading. (Remember that Brits write their dates Day/Month/Year.)
I hope the folks in the big international human-rights groups are working on this issue of the laws of war.

Black day

So it looks like we lost the damn election… I had been trying to steel myself for this, but still it feels like a body blow.
I guess those of us w/ foreign passports could take the easy way out and just stop thinking of ourselves as Americans. I don’t want to do that though. I want to retreat to my bunker in central Virginia and figure out how to reform this imperial beast into something better.
But just think of all the human misery that will occur– inside the US and outside it–before that reform project can take hold.
I am desperately trying not to feel angry with those of our “fellow citizens” who voted W in this time.
Big kudos and thanks to everyone in the peace and justice movement in the US for all their get-out-thevote efforts!!! Maybe in 2008 I should make a point of not quitting the country at election time so I can join that effort more wholeheartedly.
If the Empire ever lets us vote again, that is…

Election and empire

I feel a little impotent sitting here 5,000 miles away from the US in the run-up to an election that is of major importance for the entire world community.
I have cast my vote. I’ve done what I can to persuade all my voting friends and relations to do the same.
Now I sit here and wait. And think.
I’ve dared to dream a little about what might be possible if Kerry’s elected…. But I don’t want to go too far down that road because (a) it might not happen and (b) he might not be nearly as much different from Bush as we would like.
What needs to happen now, it seems to me, is a total rollback of the concept and practice of the US global empire. An equal voice and equal stake for each of God’s children. An end to this whole arrogant nonsense about “manifest destiny.”
100,000 Iraqi deaths. Let’s inscribe that number on our hearts.
(Update: read Scott Ritter’s excellent column, The war on Iraq has made moral cowards of us all.)
Maybe the sheer criminal folly of the venture in Iraq will be enough to persuade Americans of the craziness of the idea of our country trying to dictate everything to everyone else in the world?
I realize this persuasion campaign is not going to succeed overnight. But if Kerry gets elected, at least we can start the conversation.
If Bush gets “re-“elected, the conversation probably won’t start right away… But maybe when it does start, it’ll be even more serious… Because without a doubt if Bush is elected he’s going to create many, many more criminal blunders before we can think about starting rollback.
If the election is close, and long-drawn-out a la 2000, then I guess Bush will continue acting as though he’s the boss till it’s finally decided.
I have a question. If Kerry gets elected, how can we expect Bush to behave throughout his remaining 10 weeks in office? “Helpfully”, from the point of view of easing Kerry’s transition into office and easing the move toward a less arrogant, more multilateral stance in world affairs? Or “snittishly”, like a little boy who realizes he’ll soon lose his chance to play with all those lovely toy weapons, so decides he’s going to fire as many of them as he can before the adults come back and take them away from him?
… Just asking…

On unilateral withdrawal

Things have gotten fairly busy for me here in Beirut. One project I’ve been pursuing a little is on the whole concept of “unilateral” withdrawals, such as Sharon currently espouses for Gaza. The Israelis undertook an earlier such withdrawal, back in May 2000, from the occupied zone they’d held inside South Lebanon since 1978. And that withdrawal brought a good measure of stability to the border between the two states.
But Gaza is different from South Lebanon in at least two key respects. So why is Sharon so intent on making the withdrawal from Gaza unilateral, I wonder?? Especially since keeping it unilateral will without a doubt mean it’s a very ragged withdrawal under fire.
The withdrawal from South Lebanon was different from the one Sharon’s envisaging for Gaza in these vital ways:
(1) There was a government in Lebanon that was ready and eager to reassert as much control as possible over south Lebanon after the Israeli withdrawal, and
(2) The population of the occupied zone here, though it had risen strongly against Israel’s continued occupation, nevertheless has its roots and family landholdings here. So these people so could be expected to consider the reclamation of those lands after the withdrawal a real gain that should not easily be put in jeopardy thereafter by, for example, continuing to lob missiles over the Israeli border.
Neither of these factors applies in Gaza. There is no government there… and Sharon’s stress on not negotiating the withdrawal with any Palestinian party means that it would be almost impossible for the PA or any other governing body to take root there, post the withdrawal.
And neither does most of the population of Gaza have any longheld family landholdings or other vested interests in the Strip. Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are refugees from 1948, from inside Israel. Israel has completely refused to listen to their claims for return or compensation. And most of them only have mean hovels to eke out a living in, in the sprawling refugee camps of Gaza. They have almost nothing left to lose, and their longstanding claims against Israel are still outstanding. Why should they be content weith “merely” reclaiming a small degree more control over their very unsatisfactory current living environment?
And actually, the degree of control they gain will not be large. Sharon is insisting on retaining control over all the entry and exit points around Gaza, and over the air-space; he also insists on retaining the right to re-enter any point of Gaza he wants, post the so-called “withdrawal”… So what kind of self-government does that allow the Palestinians of Gaza? Far, far less than the Black South Africans got in their Bantustans… and nobody anywhere else in the world (except Israel and South Africa) expected them to be able to live with that.
Indeed, that form of apartheid was deemed by the UN to be a “crime against humanity”.
So why, I ask again, is Sharon so intent on making his planned withdrawal from Gaza “unilateral”?
I think I have one part of the answer…

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Arafat: a Palestinian tragedy

Yasser Arafat reportedly collapsed yesterday evening while eating soup with present “prime minister” Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa) and former PM Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The new reports coming out of the Muqataa compound in Ramallah where he has been imprisoned by the Israelis since March 2002 give a hint of the unseemly political jockeying and chaos that are underway there as contenders for power try to position themselves for the succession era.
The AP’s Muhammed Daraghmeh writes this:

How tragic, then, that it’s “business as usual” in the Muqataa, a place that over the past 31 months has become the focus of nearly all the international concern about Palestinian politics when in my view people should have been paying a lot more attention instead to the parlous situation of the broad Palestinian communities on the ground–whether in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, or elsewhere.
When looked at from that perspective, the sad effects of the many political mistakes that Arafat has made over past decades are evident. But his personal flaws are so deep that– as I have written a number of times here and elsewhere–he started to think increasingly that the Palestinian question was all about him. Sharon was then able to play to that fantasy like a maestro, making it seem in the world of international diplomacy that the Palestinian issue was indeed all “about” dealing, or not dealing, with Arafat.
I’ve been following Arafat’s political progress fairly closely for 30 years now– I last saw him in person in the Muqataa, last February–and I can honestly say that I don’t think he’s a bad person… Just extremely, extremely limited in his political capabilities and personal vision.
At one level he’s quite a phenomenon. The post-colonial world has in the past couple of decades–tragically– seen all too many of what the Africans call “big men”. You know: men who in their youth led daring and visionary independence movements, who were then handed the reins of power and spent some years in the heady and sometimes productive phase of nation-building… but whose rule later hardens into the autocracy/kleptocracy of the “big man”, who has come to identify his own fate almost totally with that of his “nation”…
Arafat skipped through that middle phase–the one of nation-building–almost completely.
That is one dimension of the tragedy of Arafat…

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Explosives heist: the real story

AP’s Christopher Chester has a really clear “Q&A” presentation of the facts around the looting of the explosives from Al-Qaqaa.
He goes thru the following facts:
— that the IAEA monitoring team had previously gathered all or most of such potentially nuclear-trigger-able high explosives from Iraq in Al-Qaqaa, for easier monitoring, and had checked and renewed the seals on the bunkers containing them on March 15, 2003, shortly before they were ordered to leave when Bush issued his ultimatum for the war;
— that twice in early April, huge US military convoys had stopped at Al-Qaqaa to regroup or whatever as they made their way toward Baghdad. One of these had people in it who searched (unsuccessfully) for chemical weapons, but neither of them had anyone who showed any interest in the massive high-explosive cache — though information about its location and importance was easily available from the IAEA should the US have been interested.
Then, this:

A month later, on May 8, a visiting American team found the plant heavily looted

the first time U.S. troops searched specifically for high explosives was on May 27, 2003, after a purported request by the U.N. nuclear agency on May 3. The troops found that the seals had been broken.

It doesn’t seem so. The nuclear agency says it first learned of the disappearance of the explosives from the Iraqi government on Oct. 10, 2004.

‘October surprise’?

Many people have expressed a concern that in the run-up to next Tuesday’s election, the Bushites might be tempted to launch an “October surprise” in the form of some militarily spectacular action … with the most “popular” targets for such a “Wag the Dog” exercise being identified as either (1) Fallujah or (2) some portion of the Iranian nuclear complex.
A number of friends have asked my evaluation of such fears. They are not totally baseless or irrational. In 1981, the context in which Menachem Begin launched the military attack against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was precisely the context of a hard-fought election at home. In fact, from the many years I lived in and have been concerned by Lebanon, I can tell you that nearly every election inside Israel was–until PM Barak finally withdrew his troops from this country in 2000– prefaced by the sitting government in Israel launching some extremely lethal new escalation against this poor benighted neighbor.
(And people wonder why many Arabs have a jaded view of Israel’s “democracy”?)
I don’t under-estimate for a minute the degree to which Bush and many people in his entourage take many of their political and military cues from their friends in Israel. Nor do I under-esimate the “native political wiliness” of a person like Karl Rove, whose willingness to resort to electoral dirty tricks has in the past known almost no bounds.
Having said all that, though, I think a Bush-team-generated “October surprise” of the above-mentioned kind is quite unlikely this time around. And for that, I think we have largely the good sense of the Spanish electorate to thank…

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