Today, I got up at 6 a.m. to go and take part in the first running race I’ve competed in since I was nine years old (42 years ago). It was the Charlottesville Women’s 4-miler, which is a great community event here in my hometown. This year, they capped participation at 1,850 runners…
Well, I usually run three miles, every other day. That’s the mainstay of my fitness routine. I figured four miles wouldn’t be too much of a stretch– and anyway, whenever I’m in New York, I usually put in just a little under four miles when I run the circuit round Prospect Park, in Brooklyn.
Today’s race was a lot of fun. I had a quick twinge of claustrophobia at the beginning. (So many other runners!) After that, it was great: beautiful weather, the hills not steep at all, beautiful views of the Blue Ridge foothills, and lots of great female athletic energy all around.
I remember reading on Yvette’s Taste of Africa blog about how hard they’ve had to work to build one small indoor sports hall there in Hargeisa (Somaliland), for women and girls to play some sports in. It had to be indoors because it wouldn’t be “proper” for women to be seen playing sports outside.
What a crying shame for the women of Somaliland! I love being outdoors and being able to run outdoors. So do hundreds and hundreds of the other women here in Charlottesville. There were all shapes, sizes, and ages of females out participating today. How much better for our physical and mental wellbeing for us to be doing that rather than sitting at home watching Fox TV or whatever!
I think my time was around 40 minutes. But they’ll have a listing of all our times in the local paper tomorrow. I’ll let you know.
Update, Sept. 6: Our local newspaper logged my time at 40 mins. 18 secs. Personally, I think it was less, since the Finish Line clock read 40:11 as I ran under it. Oh well, better luck next time at busting that 40-minute barrier.
I came in #550 out of 1,850 runners, of whom 1,509 finished the race. In the 50-54 age-group I was 35th out of 155.
Please note that I closed the Comments here because I was getting only spam there.
Author: Helena
A week of politics in Iraq
It must have been a fascinating week for politics in Iraq… Wish I were there! I guess everyone’s still dealing with the fallout from Sistani’s dramatic return last week, and tryng to figure out the new parameters of the political game.
That was kind of an embarrassing step-back by Allawi on Tuesday or so when he said, “Oops, sorry, I can’t make a deal over Sadr City because the Americans won’t let me.”
Well, those weren’t exactly his words. But that sure as heck was the gist of the thing. Anyway, Allawi’s been continuing to try to project himself as a master political manipulator, out there fine-tuning deals with tribal leaders here or there…. Let’s see what comes of it all, eh?
Which reminds me: there’s been a noticeable change of style with Negropontra in charge there now in place of Bremer, hasn’t there? You never hear of Negropontra making those kind of showy public gestures that Bremer used to make. Of course, that’s not to say that he’s not just as active–perhaps even more so!–behind the scenes. But he’s smart enough not to grandstand publicly while doing it.
And then– Chalabi’s back in the game, too. Whoa. This Iraqi politics business moves extraordinarily fast. How did that happen, I wonder? Was it that, (1) Sistani insisted Chala be let back into the game, or (2) that Chala bought his way back in? A bit of both, I suspect.
Anyway, since Juan Cole’s been paying quite a lot of attention elsewhere this week, I thought I’d run quickly through the three available issues of the Institute on War and Peace Reporting’s Iraqi Press Monitor to glean some more info about what’s been happening there this week that you might not have read about elsewhere.
Mainly to bring myself up to speed, since I’ve been writing about South Africa all week. But also, to share with y’all. Here it is, then:
Iranian nukes: are we scared yet?
Hands up anyone who is not terrified that “Iran might be on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons”.
[She looks around her.]
Am I the only person sitting here with my hand up? Sometimes, it sure seems that way. The entire tone of the public discourse here in the United States is to stress two things:
(1) Iran really is about to acquire these things, and
(2) It would be a disaster for the whole world, and a real and present threat to the United States, if it managed to do so.
I disagree, on both counts. Let me tell you why:
Perle, the kleptocrat
So it seems that Richard Perle, the éminence noire of the current neo-con cabal is, at the heart of it all, just a mundane old kleptocrat after all, not a courageous, idealistic “true believer” in anything?
Okay, maybe he’s both.
But as this report in today’s WaPo makes clear, there are plenty of his former colleagues on the board of the media conglomerate Hollinger International who now say he was just in it for the money. $5.4 million in bonuses and compensation, to be precise.
Hollinger– which owns the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and until recently London’s right-kookie Daily Telegraph— was put together and run the originally Canadian (now also British) Likudnik Conrad Black.
Some of the shareholder reps on the Hollinger board commissioned the report after the company nearly went totally belly-up last November.
Perle, also a director of the company, got that $5.4 million in a series of sweetheart deals with Black. WaPo’s Frank Ahrens writes that the latest report said, “Perle should return the money.”
More greats from Faiza
Faiza Jarrar, the wise and talented author of A family in Baghdad, had another great English-language post up yesterday. It looked like she wrote it last Friday–which was SUCH a tense and momentous day in Iraq. I can only imagine how she felt as she wrote.
Anyway, if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here are two of the parts I found most interesting.
First, her writing about what Najaf and its extensive cemeteries mean to her:
- Najaf city became a sacred symbol to Muslims, especially Shi’aa, where they bury their dead.Graveyards in Najaf are vast, endless cities, as if without boundaries…as if they are real cities, but its residents are in another world, having different customs…differing from the cities of ordinary people. On its walls there are writings: Peace be upon you, people of – NO GOD BUT THE ONE GOD, you are the former, we are the latter…When I read it I feel spiritually calm, shy from the dead, and feel sad for the fate of all humanity. Every year we go, my sisters and I, to visit my parent’s graves…we take fruits and pastries to distribute among the poor, asking them to read Al-Fatihaa Verse (The first verse in Quran) for the souls of our dead…we sit by the graves, lighting candles, reading the Holy Quran, remembering our loved ones, and we cry for their separation from us… and when we get back to Baghdad…I keep thinking all the way: How petty life is, how a human should live in all honesty and truthfulness, because he will surly die, so die an honest, well-remembered person, better than dying a villain who harmed people and stole their rights, or spilled their blood without justification… And I remember the words of Imam Ali (Peace be upon him): Death is the best preacher…meaning- that remembering death schools the soul, and purifies it from greed and follies.And also his words: Work for your life as if you will live forever, and work for your after-life as if you will die tomorrow…
Interview with Iyad Moussawi, translated
On a Comments board here last week, one commenter referred to an interview Sayyid Iyad Moussawi (or, in French, Ayad Moussawi) gave to Le Monde‘s Baghdad correspondent, last Thursday (8/26).
Well now, a JWN reader has taken up my invitation to translate the whole interview. Here it is. Big thanks to the friend who sent it!
The interview is now a little outdated, given the torrent of events sparked by Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s bold, peaceful initiative. But it provides a glimpse into the thinking of someone well placed in Sistani’s entourage. Cécile Hennion, the interviewer, describes Moussawi as:
- the head of the Constitutional and Political Union of the Seyyeds (the descendants of the Prophet) and the Tribal Chiefs in Iraq; he is also a member of the Marjaya (the hightest Shiites authority) and close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. Put under house arrest and arrested several times under Saddam Hussein’s regime, he never left Iraq. He was also among the clerics who negotiated the Najaf truce in June.
The things I found most interesting in the interview were the harshness of the criticism Moussawi expressed about the Allawi government, and the way he described what I’d call the “intentional nonviolence” of the march that Sistani planned to make. First, on the Allawi government:
Outbreak of politics in Iraq?
The major media are usually drawn to war and violence like a moth to light. Bang-bang-bang!!! That will get you on the front page! Anyway, war is just so much more, well, exciting, and graphic…
All the better news to see, therefore, that Monday WaPo has an intriguing piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that leads with this:
- Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said Sunday that he had held private meetings with representatives of insurgent groups from the restive cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra to persuade them to accept a government amnesty offer.
Allawi described the meetings as designed,
- to split the insurgency by luring lower-ranking members away from harder-core elements. Although he said he has not reached agreement with any of the groups, he insisted that some of the representatives are “changing horses . . . and taking the amnesty seriously.”
As Chandra notes, these meetings,
- represent the most significant effort yet to address the insurgency [in western Iraq] through political rather than military means.
Is peace about to break out in Iraq? Well, it’s far too early to conclude that yet. There is still a lot of violence and killing in various different parts of the country.
But still, it is notable that the dramatic initiative that Ayatollah Sistani undertook last week has cleared some space in which some political rather than only military interactions have started to happen.
Hallalujah!
As Chandra notes, Allawi’s meetings with the emissaries from Fallujah, etc., have not been the only acts of political bridge-building in recent days:
Larry Franklin Affair, contd.
Kudos to Laura Rozen of “War and Piece” for the interview she got in which wellknown international arms-and-snakeoil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar spoke (=bragged) about the number of meetings he’s had about the Iran situation with Michael LeSleaze; the Italian Defense Minister and the head of Italian Military Intelligence; and Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin from Doug Feith’s office.
It surprises me not one whit that Ghorby and LeSleaze (a.k.a. Ledeen), who have been co-conspirators from the the days of the Iran-contra affair of the mid-1980s, if not before, would have had numerous meetings in recent years. Heck, they’re probably godfathers for each other’s children, or whatever the relevant cultural indicator of familial intimacy is.
There is nothing I find “shocking” in that– not even knowing that LeSleaze was hired to be a consultant to Wolfie at the DOD at some point. LeSleaze also has a long, nasty history of dirty business with the Italian military “intel” folks.
And it seems kinda unexceptional that LeSleaze would have taken his good friends Rhode and Franklin to meet with Ghorby and the Italians, either… Except that, according to the Washington Monthly story by Rozen, Josh Marshall, and Peter Glastris, the US Ambassador in Italy–where most or all of the meetings were held–didn’t know about them. And when the ambassador, Mel Sembler, found out about one of the meetings, in December 2001, he “ratted” on the conspirators to the local CIA station chief and to his own boss, Colin Powell.
Powell and CIA head George Tenet then went screaming to the NSC leadership. Obviously!! They knew that Ghorbanifar had been bad news ever since the days of the Iran-Contra affair, and must have asked what the heck Feith’s people thought they were doing meeting with him!?!??? According to the WaMo article, the Italian mil-intel chief had also checked in with Tenet…
Anyway, the upshot was that Condi Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley put the word out: No more meetings with Ghorbanifar. But soon enough, the meetings resumed…
Thus far, the whole story seems unexceptional. It is quite possible that Feith and his people– who don’t really know that much about Iran (see Juan Cole’s take on this)–could be fairly easily seduced by the promises of that practiced snake-oil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar… Especially if he came with the warm recommendation of Wolfowitz consultant Michael LeSleaze…
So I can see Franklin and Rhode going along to the meetings throughout 2002, flush with excitement, thinking, “Hey, for Iraq we’ve got ‘our man’ Chalabi– and now, for Iran, we’ve got all this hot info from ‘our man’ Ghorbanifar!!! And we’re his main handlers! Yay for us!!!”
I’ve written much on JWN before about just how eager the neo-cons were to buy all the snake-oil that Chalabi was selling them up to March 2003. (Like here and here.) It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that similar kinds of people hearing the practiced blandishments of old Ghorby could be similarly seduced…
And it seems that, from another end of the story, the reason the FBI made its hurried public announcement on Friday about the investigations and possible arrests at the Franklin end of the case was because CBS’s Lesley Stahl was about to break that part of the story on “60 Minutes”.
However, a number of intriguing questions and loose ends remain to be clarified:
The Israeli spying accusation: big questions!
Such interesting news yesterday about the FBI “investigating a mid-level Pentagon official who specializes in Iranian affairs for allegedly passing classified information to Israel…”
That WaPo account there names the chief suspect as Larry Franklin, described as a desk officer in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia Bureau, which is run by neo-con William J. Luti.
(The NYT doesn’t name the suspect, and says he worked for the Pentagon’s #3 guy, Douglas Feith. Feith and Luti are strongly pro-Likud figures who were both heavily involved in creating the “alternative intel universe” that produced the “justifications” for launching the invasion of Iraq. Feith is more senior that Luti.)
The accusation is that Franklin handed Israel classified assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Much more stunning than that: un-named “law enforcement officials” (presumably from the FBI) told the WaPo and other media that the documents were handed to Israel via AIPAC, the hitherto unassailable “armored bulldozer” of pro-Israeli influence in US political life.
There are at least four intriguing aspects to this story:
(1) That the suspect works in such a strategically sensitive and politically controversial shop in the Pentagon, and was presumably under the protection there of an extremely politically powerful boss– whether Feith, or Luti. Is someone trying to “get at” one of those two more powerful figures by taking down his protégé first?
(2) That– given the already existing, extremely close links at all levels up to the very highest between the national-security policymakers in this administration and in Sharon’s Israel — Israel would have felt the need to do any extra-curricular spying at all! Israel security officials already have the virtually free run of the whole Pentagon! To put it bluntly: why would they need to suborn Larry Franklin when they already have Dougie Feith in their pocket (with the full permission of Feith’s superiors)?
(3) That people in the FBI are willing to publicly finger AIPAC. That takes guts! They must, presumably, have some extremely conclusive evidence. Otherwise, expect to see the FBI’s budget shut down completely with a single snap of AIPAC’s fingers in next year’s budget, should AIPAC decide to counter-attack.
(4) That the government has apparently given Franklin and his associates a few days more leisure between announcing their intention to arrest them, and actually doing so. The WaPo piece says: “arrests in the case could come as early as next week, officials at the Pentagon and other government agencies said.”
This last aspect of the case is truly mind-boggling!
Continue reading “The Israeli spying accusation: big questions!”
Salam/Pax is back!
Hey, folks, Salam/Pax has been blogging from Baghdad since August 9! This is great news for all of us who relied on his wry, Baghdad-based view of world in the months leading up to and immediately after the US/UK invasion.
(Big kudos to faithful JWN lurker Marjolein for telling me of S’s return.)
Salam says he’s just going to be back in Baghdad for 5 weeks this time. He’s been down in Najaf and doing some t.v. documentaries for the BBC with the Mahdi Army, on which he has some good observations.
It also seems his father is a minister in the Allawist government. Which gives Salam a unique perspective: