Author: Helena

Truths from Iraq

I am so happy about the news of the ceasefire agreed for Sadr City between the Sadrists, the Iraqi army, and the Americans.
May it hold! May it be extended to the whole country!
Meanwhile, I read with huge interest this piece in Sunday’s WaPo, by Steve Fainaru, a reporter who’s been embedded with a Marines unit for a while now. Though he seemed a little unquestioning of the official line earlier, here’s some of what he had in today’s piece:

    “Sometimes I see no reason why we’re here,” [Lance Cpl. Carlos] Perez said. “First of all, you cannot engage as many times as we want to. Second of all, we’re looking for an enemy that’s not there. The only way to do it is go house to house until we get out of here.”
    Perez is hardly alone. In a dozen interviews, Marines from a platoon known as the “81s” expressed in blunt terms their frustrations with the way the war is being conducted and, in some cases, doubts about why it is being waged. The platoon, named for the size in millimeters of its mortar rounds, is part of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment based in Iskandariyah, 30 miles southwest of Baghdad.
    The Marines offered their opinions openly to a reporter traveling with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines during operations last week in Babil province, then expanded upon them during interviews over three days in their barracks at Camp Iskandariyah, their forward operating base…
    “I feel we’re going to be here for years and years and years,” said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. “I don’t think anything is going to get better; I think it’s going to get a lot worse. It’s going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We’re going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We’re always going to be here. We’re never going to leave.”

And there’s much more:

Continue reading “Truths from Iraq”

Beirut, Part 3

Saturday was field trip day. Destination: parts of southern Lebanon.
To be precise, we visited, in short order:

  1. The Old City of Saida (Sidon),
  2. The family lands near Marjayoun to which my
    ex-husband–and therefore, in their turn, my two eldest kids– have some
    claim,
  3. Members of that same family, in Marjayoun,
  4. The infamous Khiam Detention Center, which through
    to the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 featured in numerous reports by human-rights
    organizations because of the tortures and other abuses practiced there by
    Israel and its local collaborators,
  5. The truly historic Beaufort Castle (Qala’at
    al-Shaqif).

In the course of the trip, I got a much more vivid idea than I’d previously
had both about the current situation in south Lebanon and about the complex
relationship between Hizbollah and the Lebanese government. I also gained
some interesting insights into the whole process of “unilateral withdrawal”,
such as Sharon is now proposing to undertake from the Gaza Strip. So number
“6” of what I post about here will be:

6. Some reflections after the trip.

Continue reading “Beirut, Part 3”

Afghan elections–a model?

In this Sept. 25 column in Al-Hayat, I asked:

    [I]s it possible that the upcoming Afghanistan election-like the one organized under U.S. military control in Vietnam in 1971-is more about consolidating U.S. military power around the world than it is about seeking and respecting the “free will of the (non-American) people”?

Sadly, as of now, it still appears that this answer may end up being answered with a yes.
The whole debacle in Afghanistan over the use of non-permanent inks by election officials is almost beyond belief.
Sometime during the day yesterday, all 15 of the opposition candidates announced their decision to withdraw from the elections because of the demonstrated seriousness of the ink-marking problem.
The AP’s Paul Haven wrote a great piece in which he contrasted the reactions of George Bush– who crowed about the election being a “marvellous thing”– with those of the actual election contenders in Afghanistan:

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Beirut, Part 2

In keeping with my “Helena eases herself back into Beirut gradually” approach
to my current existence I’ve been… okay, easing myself back into things
here pretty gradually. That has involved calling a few folks here– but slowly;
reading the Daily Star-IHT combo that’s sold here daily; lying around
reading a bunch of things not about Beirut; buying and trying
to read substantial parts of Al-Hayat every day (we had to buy an entirely
new Hans Wehr dictionary, since we left both of our existing copies of it
at home, by mistake); running every other day as usual; but most of all,
walking, walking, walking round the city trying to relearn it through the
soles of my feet and all my other senses.

Of course the big story here is the status of Lebanese-Syrian relations,
especially in view of the Security Council’s recent resolution (1559) that
called for a speedy Syrian withdrawal from the country, and the allied strong
push by the Syrians to get the parliament here to prolong the term of President
Emile Lahoud for a further three years after it expires in, I believe, late
November.

Poor old Lebanon, eh? Always the football for one or the other (or
both) of its two, much more powerful neighbors’ realpolitik. In
the current circumstances, Syria is still evidently majorly spooked by having
the US army poised along its 450-mile eastern border (the one with Iraq),
while it still has the IDF perched on the slopes of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount
Hermon), overlooking Damascus itself. So the idea that international
pressure might force it also to open up its satrapy, Lebanon, to the probable
infiltration of solidly pro-western forces… at a time when plenty of people
in the Bush administration are still loudly baying for regime change in Syria…
Well, you can imagine how spooked the Syrian regime folks must be by
all that.

I haven’t been to Syria since late 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
It was an interesting and fairly disquieting visit. (Read about it here.)

So anyway, for our afternoon hike today, I dragged Bill around some of my
old haunts in town. Beirut is a city that is perpetually in the midst
of an extreme makeover. Okay, quite a lot less extreme today than in,
say, the summer of 1982, when Sharon’s army was bombing the bejeesus out of
it. You can still see many traces of Israeli-invasion and just plain
civil-war fighting, even on very posh-looking streets. In addition what
you see are the fruits of many years, now, of hectic building and rebuilding efforts– and the combined results of 60-plus years of an extremely laissez-faire approach
to governance in this country that means there are almost no shady, refreshing
public spaces in the whole city– except the Corniche, as I mentioned here Tuesday, which can be refreshing
but is certainly not shady (or quiet)…

Continue reading “Beirut, Part 2”

Global outbreak of candor?

We seem to be witnessing a sudden, worldwide epidemic of candor:
In the US, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer, and the head of the Iraq Survey Group (Charles Duelfer) have all been voicing comments and assessments that shred the already thin tissue of lies on which the administration had earlier built the case for invading Iraq.
(Juan Cole has brought together the accounts of most of these incidents of candor. The Beeb’s account of the Duelfer report is here.)
In the UK, the Daily Telegraph recently published excerpts from previously unreleased British Cabinet Office documents that show that,

    Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for “many years”…

The documents also show that the people in the Cabinet Office were quite aware of the flimsiness of the evidence indicating that Saddam had WMDs in the pre-war period.
(You can find a good analysis of the revelations made in those leaked documents, done by Cambridge University’s Mike Lewis, here. Lewis also provides a handy portal to a PDF collection of the leaked documents.)
Okay, I know that the publishing of leaked documents doesn’t count as “candor” on the part of the officials concerned, but bear with me….
In Israel, Sharon’s eminence grise Dov Weisglass has told Ha’Aretz flat out, regarding Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza and a tiny handful of very marginal West Bank settlements, that:

    “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process…
    And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress…
    The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

Well we kind of knew that already, didn’t we? But still, it’s interesting that Weisglass feels confident enough–including of the support of the US president and “both houses of Congress”–that he can talk openly about this underhanded, deeply anti-democratic and abusive scheme.
And then, there’s Iraq, where just a bare few days after he’d prattled on to the US public that everything inside Iraq was coming up roses, the country’s US-appointed PM Iyad Allawi is now somberly telling his own people that,

    It’s clear that since the handover, the capabilities are not complete and that the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges… The police force is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority…

Okay, so there we have three significant Bush administration hawks, Dov Weisglass, and Iyad Allawi– all infected with this new virus of truth-telling… How on earth can the rest of us, who have gotten so used to hearing lies and evasions from such people, adjust to this new reality?
First of all, how can we explain it?

Continue reading “Global outbreak of candor?”

Diversionary spin (again) in Israel

In the world of political ‘spinning’ as in combat–and especially, perhaps,
in the political spinning that surrounds combat– there is
a really handy maneuver some people use which is to launch a diversionary
attack.

You’d think that Sharon and the leaders of the IDF had taken a lesson right
out of Karl Rove’s playbook with the way that over the past few days they spun a massive campaign aimed
basically at diverting world attention from the vastly disproportionate
and escalatory campaign they launched against northern Gaza at the end of
last week.

The diversion? To accuse the UN relief agency UNRWA of allowing one
of its ambulances in Gaza to transport a rocket to the front-line on behalf
of the Palestinian militants…

Continue reading “Diversionary spin (again) in Israel”

Beirut, Part 1

We’ve been here in Beirut for two days now. I have to admit that beforehand,
I was looking at the prospect of the trip with whole bundles of mixed
feelings. Who was it who said you can never, really, go “home” again?
Well, I lived here in Beirut for seven years when I was a young adult.
It was truly my home. I had my first two kids here, and started
defining a professional identity for myself as a journalist and writer that
has stuck with me more or less ever since.

How could I come “home” to that 23 years after leaving the city? Come
back to it, moreover, in such a new context; with a different husband; and
moreover, traveling with him in something like the always complex “accompanying spouse” role…
He has more of a defined goal in being here than I do; and when he suggested
it I was just more or less, “Oh, Beirut for two months in the fall? Sure,
yeah, why not?” and I didn’t think much more about it after that… (Fairly
intentionally didn’t think about it, I would say.)

So we stepped out of the airport terminal Sunday afternoon into the bustling chaos outside,
and the smell of the city just jumped right up off the sidewalk and hit me
in the face. How to describe it? Hot asphalt, a special kind
of ground-in dust smell, all leavened with a memory of dryed-out thyme and
something sweeter than that, too. Beirut’s end-of-dry-season smell.
I smiled to myself. Okay, I can deal with this…

Continue reading “Beirut, Part 1”

Juan Cole in Charlottesville

I should have written something here before about the visit Juan Cole made
to Charlottesville last week. He stayed with us, and he gave a couple
of talks at UVA. Then in the evening Friday–this was on the eve of
our departure for Beirut– he, Bill, about five other folks, and I went out
to dinner together (Al Dente, on the Charlottesville downtown mall).

Toward the end of the dinner, Juan and I had a lengthy face-to-face reprise
of the debate we had in the blogosphere in the summer of 2003. Essentially
over whether the invasion of Iraq ever could have been a worthwhile thing
for the US government to do. Juan’s criticism of the Bushies’ actions
in Iraq has always been that they completely mishandled the post-invasion
occupation (but that if they had run the occupation more effectively,
the attempt at regime change could have been proven worthwhile.) Mine
has been that the invasion itself was an unjustifiable act of violence…
(And also that they’ve mishandled the occupation;but what else could one
expect?)

We neither of us persuaded the other. I wish I could remember more
of what we both said. I do recall touching on the nature of evil, the
roots of violence, the unpredictability of violence, etc etc. He talked
about the heinous nature of the Saddam regime, etc etc… Shoot! Next
time we should take a tape-recorder.

Or drink less wine.

To Lebanon (and elsewhere?)

Tomorrow, Bill the spouse and I will drive from Virginia to Philadelphia, leave our car there with Lorna, then fly to Lebanon for a couple of months. Bill has a university-exchange arrangement there with AUB, and I’ll be–
Well, I’m not quite sure what, right now.
Maybe I’ll sit by the Mediterranean and finish the last three chapters of my book about Africa?
Maybe I’ll go to Iraq?
Iran? Turkey? Syria? (Almost certainly, that.) Palestine/Israel?
Look, it’s just been hard enough for me to figure how to get organized to be in Lebanon for two months without making further plans. Even if I just sit in Beirut it’ll be interesting.
Yeah, I have a few ideas of things to do. You can find out what they are if you keep reading JWN. But from Sunday on, my main base will be somewhere in the Middle East.

Kerry’s debate– good enough?

The three folks with whom I watched the first debate last night and I all agreed that Kerry made an impressive showing and Bush looked defensive, rattled, and ill-prepared.
The most significant thing Kerry said was to promise– a couple of times– that if elected one of the first things he’d do as president would be to declare straighforwardly that the US has no longterm ambitions to control Iraq, either by keeping a longterm military presence there or (and this was by implication) by controlling the oil industry.
I thought this was an excellent thing to say. Something I’ve been urging him to say for a long-time. A strong, credible declaration like that–backed up by moves like halting the constructin of the 14 “enduring” US military bases in Iraq– can do a lot to change the whole dynamic within the country.
Another welcome thing Kerry said was that it doesn’t help the worldwide fight against nuclear proliferation if the US is busy developing a new generation of bunker-busting nuclear weapons.
So, there are some things about the US’s relationship with the rest of the world that he apparently “gets”…
Well, all well and good if the four of us, sitting in our friends Chip and Betsy’s basement, all thought Kerry did well. But how about the great “American people” out there? What did they think?
The initial poll results I’ve heard about indicate that Kerry did do fairly well with the general public. In addition, this morning I saw a segment of ABC News where the reporter had a breakfast-counter discussion with six people in Ohio who had previously described themselves as “undecided and open to persuasion”…

Continue reading “Kerry’s debate– good enough?”