Author: Helena

Iraq on fire

The Bushites, who dominate every single rung on the ladder of violence-escalation in Iraq, have recently been systematically choosing escalation over de-escalation… And escalation is what they have got. Only a small portion of this news is even getting heard in the US.
We heard a little about the incident on Haifa Street in Baghdad on Sunday, when Iraqis crowded jubilantly around a burning US Bradley Fighting Vehicle and then were strafed by US helicopters shooting down at them from the sky. Many Iraqi civilians were killed, and many more injured. One of the injured was Salam’s friend Ghaith, who went to the scene as a photog to get some pix. Salam urges us to go look at some of the pix Ghaith was able to shoot, anyway, regardless of his injuries.
If you go that gallery of Getty Images photos, you can scroll down for more and more great images, and click on each one for an enlargement.
More violence? Today AP is reporting that a car-bomb exploded near a Baghdad police station, killing at least 59 people. Also:

    Saboteurs blew up a junction where multiple oil pipelines cross the Tigris River in northern Iraq on Tuesday, setting off a chain reaction in power generation systems that left the entire country without power, officials said.

It goes without saying that in this escalation of violence in Iraq as in all others, nearly all the pain and harm is inflicted on Iraqis–and disproportionately on Iraqi civilians.
A proportion of this violence is inflicted by the Americans and their allies, and a proportion by the anti-US forces. Since the means of killing at the disposal of the Americans are so much more powerful and lethal than those at the disposal of the “insurgents”, it is almost certainly the case that a large majority of the harm suffered by civilians has been inflicted by the Americans. (Najaf; Falluja; Tel Afar; etc, etc.)
What is quite clear is that as the dominant (even if not monopolistic) military power in the country, the US has an unequalled capability to set the tone, and to ratchet down the level of violence. And indeed, since it is still the “occupying power” under international law, the US has a fixed responsibility to do this…

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What me? Pollyanna?

Several people have accused me of being unrealistically Pollyanna-ish in even suggesting–as I did when I wrote my column in last Thursday’s CSM— that this US administration might be interested in working toward a timely, free, and fair election Iraq… In this post, I’ll give my quick defense of that column. In a subsequent post I want to start looking at what seems to be emerging as the “Negroponte Doctrine” in Iraq, and what that mean for the country.
Okay, my defense of having written the column. My friend Jim, for example, wrote me quite laconically:”Good article. The advice is not likely to be taken, as you well know.
I wrote back to him:

    Yes, I know that because they’ve never taken my advice before! However, I do think it’s important to carry on making these arguments in public to help educate the public and to lay down clear markers along the path of this so-far tragic history. Then maybe in 20 years, after untold thousands more have been killed in and as a result of Iraq, historians can dig back thru the record and say, “well it still could have been possible to do things peacefully even as late as [Sept. 2004; or whenever]”
    I think it’s also important to just keep on and on demonstrating that there are ALWAYS alternatives to the use of violence.

(In retrospect, I should have started off that reply by saying, “Yes, I ‘know ‘ that,” since I don’t actually know it with 100% certainty, at all…)
I would add to the above that I think it’s really never helpful to set off on a discussion–even if it’s with someone whose actions you deeply disagree with–by assuming that that person is inherently “bad”, or has some kind of evil or sinister motives. It’s much productive to assume (and hope) that the person is acting from what she or he considers to be the highest and most excellent of motivations, and to pursue the discussion from there.
The Bushies say they want to bring the blessings of true democracy to Iraq. Well, at one level, it doesn’t even matter whether we believe them on that, or not. But their declarations to that effect do in themselves provide an excellent starting-point for the discussion on: “Okay, if you really want democracy, what might that mean in terms of some behavior change from sides including your own? How can everyone work toward the necessary de-escalation?”
In addition, I believe that profound transformations of human character and human behavior are indeed possible. They happen every day. So I continue to live in hope that what I write might contribute to a good kind of trasnformation, however small.
My working assumption here is that by writing in the Christian Science Monitor I am able to speak to a non-trivial portion of the U.S. political elite–both those inside and those outside the reigning administration. hey, the only time I’ve ever been inside the White House, there was the CSM, folded on a side-table. And I know my pieces have frequently been included in the Pentagon’s dailu news digest service…
If I am in a position to have that discussion with people in the US political elite, then why should I waste it by impugning the motives of the folks I’m able to talk to (and can hope, however minimally, to persuade), or by calling them names?
Also, I honestly don’t see myself as an intellectually wispy, unrealistic “Pollyanna” figure, at all…

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Post-9/11 wisdom and Danny Pipes’ Dad

Bullying, ideological neo-con Daniel Pipes has a father at whose ultra- (but more traditionally) conservative knee he grew up. Richard Pipes was an ultra-conservative historian of Russian history at Harvard who was extremely influential during the Reagan years. Richard Pipes was always extremely hawkish on Cold War issues…
And now, he’s being accused of seeking to “rewards” terrorists… This, because on Thursday he published an op-ed in the NYT titled “Give the Chechens a Land of Their Own”.
After making a very appropriate reference to the scale and extremely atrocious nature of the Chechen separatists’ recent terrorist action in Beslan, North Ossetia, Pipes Sr. wrote:

    In his post-Beslan speech, Mr. Putin all but linked the attack to global Islam… But the fact is, the Chechen cause and that of Al Qaeda are quite different, and demand very different approaches in combating them.
    Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness. The terrorists who blew up the train station in Madrid just before the Spanish election this year had a specific goal in mind: to compel the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. The Chechen case is, in some respects, analogous. A small group of Muslim people, the Chechens have been battling their Russian conquerors for centuries.
    … Because Chechnya, unlike the Ukraine or Georgia, had never enjoyed the status of a nominally independent republic under the Communists, the Chechens were denied the right to secede from the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so they eventually resorted to terrorism for the limited objective of independence.

I was amazed, indeed delighted, when I read Pipes’s op-ed on Thursday. He was quite right to seek to take on the whole insidious, anti-political discourse of “terrorism” in the way that he calmly did there… Terrorism is a means to an end: it can be employed for limited ends as well as for unlimited destructiveness.
This is an argument that many of us on the anti-war side have been trying to make ever since 9/11. The problem with the whole discourse of “terrorism” is that term gets used indiscriminately to describe, basically, any violent act of which we disapprove.
(Remember when Nelson Mandela and the ANC were routinely denounced as “terrorists” by the apartheid government in S. Africa, which built up a whole globe-circling campaign aimed at marginalizing and combating the ANC? Until, that is, they decided to try negotiating with them. At which point, they found the ANC to be very effective negotiating partners… )
And so it still is today. Indeed, Prez Bush’s johnny-one-note stress on the “Global War on Terrorism” has drowned out nearly all the essentially political aspects of what the US government needs to be doing in the world in a chorus of “You’re either with us in the GWOT, or you’re against us!” And meanwhile, the whole rhetoric of the GWOT has provided a boon and a comfort to dictators everywhere–include Putin in that– who simply by murmuring the accusation that their opponents are “terrorists” have been able to win continued strong support from Washington in all their attempts to suppress them.
So today, the NYT carried three letters from people excoriating Pipes for what he wrote…

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“Up to 100” ghost detainees

    [Update to the following, added Fri a.m.: Excellent lead editorials on this subject today in both the WaPo and the NYT.
    The NYT also led with the news story on this on the front page. Down near the bottom of that story is this intriguing little bit of reporting involving our old friend Dougie Feith. End of update.]

From Reuters, today (Thursday):

    The United States kept up to 100 “ghost detainees” in Iraq off the books to conceal them from Red Cross observers, a far higher number than previously reported, Army generals told Congress on Thursday.

This is serious. It’s a well-known fact in international human-rights practice that when people are detained in secret, that is the situation in which they are at most risk of extreme abuse.
The one major case people know of, in Iraq, was the one where a ghost detainee was apparently beaten to death and then his body was kept on ice (and photographed) before MPs took it out for disposal.
As I’ve noted here before, the worst abuses the apartheid-era security forces committed against SA nationals happened when those people were not in formal detention. Sometimes they would have people in formal detention, then release them especially so they could pick them up off the streets again and keep them “off the record books” before they tortured them to death.
Today, it was Gen. Paul Kern, commander of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who told a Senate committee hearing on abuses of Iraqi prisoners that he believed the number of ghost detainees held in violation of Geneva Convention protections was “in the dozens to perhaps up to 100,” far surpassing the eight people identified in an Army report, the Reuters report says.
The main reason Kern and Maj. Gen. George Fay, deputy commander at the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, who was also testifying could not be more precise was, they said, because the CIA–which apparently was responsible for the vast majority of cases of ‘ghost detainees’– did not give the Army investigators the info they needed for a more precise estimate.
Reuters added:

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Political progress: the missing element in Iraq

Okay, one more time, I want to restate my views on what’s really needed in Iraq. These views are based on my 30 years as a Middle East analyst, my experiences in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, and my more recent work looking at how protracted and violent conflicts in Africa and elsewhere have been successfully terminated.
In the US (and some international) discourse, some people say you need to put emphasis on security in Iraq, so that you can get around to economic reconstruction. Some say you need to put the emphasis on economic reconstruction, so you can get around to security.
And so they duke it out between themselves! Security first! No, economic reconstruction first! You’re wrong! No, you are!
Are they listening to Iraqis? Not very much.
I think people engaged in those kinds of arguments are missing the essential element: the need many, many Iraqis have articulated and continue to articulate to see real movement to the building of an accountable democratic order.
It’s the politics, stupid!
I’ve heard echoes, certainly, of a similar missing-the-point debate between “security firsters” and “economy firsters” with regard to the Palestinian question. There, the almost wilful desire of the Likud government (and many previous Israeli governments) not to hear the clear demand of the Palestinians for some real political progress is quite easy to understand.
But why the deafness of the US government and the vast majority of US commentators to the similar demands now being voiced by Iraqis?

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The CSM column on Iraqi elections

My Sept. 9 column in the CSM on the need for a US de-escalation in Iraq and more focus on the election process there is now up on their website: here.
It looks more or less as good as I’d hoped it would, though God knows the discipline of keeping under 850 words is sometimes really wearing.
(That’s why I really like doing things for Boston Review. One of my pieces there ran 14,000 words, and I think they said it was the longest article they’d ever run.)
I wish the mainstream media had more information about the election-prep process in Iraq. It really is what people should be focusing on!
Anyway, do post any comments you have about the piece up here. (And if they’re nice comments, send them as a Letter to the Editor to the CSM, too… My editors there say they always get plenty of anti-Helena rants in their mailbag.)
Also, alert reader and web-surfer BQ found my latest Hayat piece up on Hayat’s English-language website. That’s here. So you can put away your Hans Wehr Arabic-language dictionaries and read it in English now.
As for me, I’ll be pulling out my Hans Wehr soon and heading to Beirut for two months, God willing. Bill the spouse is coming, too. We each have plans of some degree of vagueness for what we want to do there. If conditions in Baghdad allow it, I plan to head on over there. Who knows?
We’ll leave Charlottesville at the beginning of October. I need to crash on my book about Africa before then. I’m into Chapter 10 already. Woohoo!

The first 1,000

It is a somber moment. It happened today: according to AP, 999 US service members have now died in Iraq, along with three civilian employees of the military. Total: 1,002 families bereaved by the violence of a war that was totally unnecessary.
And of course, there are also the far, far larger number of families bereaved inside Iraq, and the smaller numbers of families bereaved in all the “coalition” and other countries involved in the Cheney-Halliburton adventure in Iraq.
One big question: Why doesn’t John Kerry make exactly this same point, about the unnecessary–indeed, fraudulent–nature of the whole Iraq war project?
I saw him on ABC News tonight. He expressed appropriate sympathy with the families. Then he went on to say something quite anodyne like “We will carry on fighting for what they fought for.” For Bush’s version of manifest destiny and fat contracts for Cheney’s chums: that’s what you want to fight for, John Kerry?? Shame on you.
Anyway, I don’t want to expend energy lamenting John Kerry’s tin ear on the war. I wanted to write a bit about the cyclical structure of the violence in Iraq these days, and the responsibility of the US to participate in–indeed, to lead–a major turn toward de-escalation…

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Trial news: Saddam & Slobo

There were two piece in today’s Iraqi Press Monitor related to the plans to try Saddam Hussein.
One, from the independent daily Al-Sabah said this:

    “Iraq for All” news network was informed that the Cabinet has decided to dismiss Salim al-Chalabi, the man chose to chair the special court to try Saddam Hussein. The decision results from demands to move Saddam’s trial out of Iraq, which Chalabi opposed. An arrest warrant was recently issued for Chalabi…

That sounded pretty intriguing. Chalabi opposed moving the trial outside of Iraq? Has that possibility really been discussed, I wonder? Or was it some kind of a bungled rendering of the idea of “extending the purview of the trial beyond acts committed inside Iraq” that the report was referring to, instead?
That might have been what the discussion was about–given the other recent news that the Iraqis have been trying to urge Iran not to press its own strong case against Saddam for war crimes–and also, given the degree of Iraqi-nationalist opposition to the idea of including the Kuwaitis’ claims against him on the charge-sheet.
The other IPM piece related to an article in yesterday’s al-Sharq al-Awsat, a pan-Arab daily published in London. Since this paper has a good online edition, I was able to go over to the original article there to read it. (Which also let me get a bead on the accuracy of IPM’s highly abbreviated rendering of it in English: fairly good, I would say, but still some room for improvement…)
Anyway, here’s what IPM said:

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Thinking like Karl Rove

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it…
So okay, if I were Karl Rove, what would I need to have happen in Iraq before November 2?
I think, if I were him, the thing I’d most like to see is some palpable progress toward stability and elections in Iraq. (As in Afghanistan, where the holding of the elections has been rushed forward to October, specially to fit Mr. R’s election priorities in the US.)
But if actual progress toward stability in Iraq doesn’t look probable–and faking it for the whole electorate might be a LOT harder than faking it for the GOP faithful who flocked to new York last week– then, well, how would a bit of determined bang-bang play for Bush’s election campaign instead?
My fears about this are certainly related to my experience of seeing half a dozen successive Prime Ministers in Israel launch escalations in Lebanon as part of their re-election strategies… Oh, the Lebanese have a very intimate view of the dark chauvinistic under-belly of Israel’s “democracy”. And then, remember the strong influence that Israeli politicians have on many in Bush’s close circle.
Actually, if I were Karl Rove, I wouldn’t think that a big, showy escalation in Iraq would necessarily–in the US context–be such a great vote-getter. But still, I might be tempted… Wag the dog, and all that…
So my fears in this regard [Helena speaking now, not Mr. R.] were piqued when I read a big piece of US Army swagger coming from the lips of Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the number 2 in the military command in Iraq, as reported by AP’s Jim Krane today.
Krane wrote:

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