Author: Helena

Hoagie seeing sense?

The WaPo’s Jim Hoagland, for so long the uber-hawk of the inside-the-Beltway commentatariat, may at last be seeing some sense on Iraq? I live in hope…
His column today, Perception Gap in Iraq, seemed about the most sensible I’ve seen him write for a long time…
He starts off by recognizing that,

    nearly three weeks of partial sovereignty may have helped the Bush administration’s drive to reduce its political vulnerability on Iraq at home.
    Reducing that vulnerability is now the White House’s most urgent goal…
    Read through or watch Allawi’s blunt, sparse statements and you too may be impressed by how much of his message is intended to reassure his American audience, rather than Iraqis. They [I guess he means Iraqis] are more keenly aware of the huge obstacles that Allawi faces in carrying out his ambitious promises.
    To the relief of the White House, the American public and media seem to be slowly trying to tune out Iraq’s continuing violence.

Soon enough, however, his tone becomes more somber. He ends with this:

    Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.
    Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq’s insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.
    The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency’s exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington’s version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.

Vietnam, anyone?
Of course, it would be strongly preferable were Hoagie to do a proper, three-star mea culpa and explain to all of us how it was he got duped by Chalabi and ended up being for so long a cheerleader for this whole grisly war. And if he then wrapped himself in sack-cloth and ashes and begged forgiveness from the families of everyone who’s been killed in it…
Well, dream on, Helena. For now, I’ll take his admission that things are looking pretty darn’ shitty out there as a good first step. “That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.” Indeed. Except that, of course, some of us “called” the strategic defeat of the US plan in Iraq quite a bit earlier than today. Like here, JWN, April 9.

The myth of ‘humanitarian’ war

The attempt by the authors of last year’s US/UK aggression against Iraq to retroactively repackage their venture as a “humanitarian” war seems almost complete. Both Bush and Blair now say in public, “Well, we may have gotten it wrong about the WMDs and Saddam’s relationship with al-Qaeda… But at least the Iraqi people are now better off than they were under Saddam.”
(Unca Dick Cheney is not, of course, even willing to concede the opening premise there. But he is not, formally at least, the president.)
This business of–whether retroactively or pro-actively–pinning a ‘humanitarian’ label on a war has undergone a bit of a revival in recent years. Remember Kosovo, 1999? Remember Bosnia, before then?
But trying to claim that any war can be ‘humanitarian’ is fundamentally dishonest. No war is ‘humanitarian’, ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights–their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves ‘humanitarian’ aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war–facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.
Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing ‘humanitarian’ war aims… Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric… Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an ‘unjust’ or even ‘unjustified’ war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping.
Anyway, I want to write something here about the sad history of ‘humanitarian’ war in the present era. And primarily about the kinds of outcomes we have seen, and continue to see, from the west’s most ‘humanitarian’ war in recent history, that in Kosovo…

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Slobo: ‘fit’ to be tried, contd…

Ana Uzelac of the Inst. for War & Peace Reporting had a good piece in their 9 July collection of stories about Slobo’s trial in The Hague. She was exploring the whole issue of him being declared “fit” or “unfit” to stand trial, and what the court’s options are.
It turns out that, contrary to what I wrote here last week, Slobo was not declared (globally) “unfit to stand trial”, which is sort of a different proceeding. What Judge Patrick Robinson did July 5 was merely postpone the trial, pending the defendant gaining the strength needed to proceed with his own defense… And that was done again, July 12.
If he is declared more generally “unfit” to stand trial, then the court has various options. According to Uzelac, what the judges ruled last week was that:

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Institute for War & Peace Reporting

When I was a young journo working in the Middle East for the Christian Science Monitor, I was lucky enough to work for an extremely wise Foreign Editor called Geoffrey Godsell (of blessed memory) who always stressed that what the CSM wanted was not to have its reporters competing with people working for other international news dailies who sought to be a complete “newspaper of record” in every 24-hour period… No. Geoffrey used to stress over and over that it was more important to seek to understand the events I was writing about, even if that should take a bit more time.
“Leave chasing the so-called ‘scoops’ to the others,” he’d say. “Who knows in any given 24-hour period what will be of lasting importance, anyway? We want you to give us the stories of lasting importance.”
All of which is, I guess, a long-winded way of saying that I may be late, but I try to be good. I feel a bit late in having discovered a great new news source that covers a lot of the things that I’m interested in: Iraq, the Balkans, ICTY, Afghanistan, etc. But now that I have discovered it, I want to share the good news with you (if you don’t already know about it, which maybe you do.)
I’m referring to the excellent website of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, where you can get good, street-level reporting in English and a variety of other languages on all the above topics, and more.
Plus, they have a well-compiled page called the Iraqi Press Monitor, that provides a handy daily digest of the Arabic-language press in Iraq (plus, quite frequently, cartoons from Iraqi newspapers).
Anyway, today, I was cruising around the blogosphere, still a bit concerned that Riverbend still seems too depressed to post stuff for us… I had this feeling of “I want more, quality news and views from Iraq”. And where’s Anthony Shadid, anyway, just when we need him?? I’ve kind of had it with nervous-nelly gringos writing from inside the Green Zone or from dartingly short forays outside of it.
(Okay. I admit I’m even more of a nervous nelly than most of those gringo journos working there now. I haven’t even been to Iraq since the war; or indeed since 1981. But I’ve been writing this book on Africa, and the other one on Israel/Palestine. Gimme a break, already!)
So okay… I’m looking for news on Iraq, preferably by native-born Iraqis, and what I find is the IWPR.
In addition to their daily press digest, referred to above, what they also have up on their website is a weekly collection of stories–mainly ‘hard news’, but also some ‘soft news’ and ‘opinion’– produced by Iraqi trainees in a journalism training program they’ve been running there. And much of it is really, really good.
For example, if you go to this page and scroll down a bit, you’ll come to the latest week’s-worth of stories by the trainees. The most recent ones I found there (13 July dateline) were pretty interesting and wide-ranging. But last week’s collection (6 July) looked even better to me, in good part because they had a variety of different stories describing the street-level reaction to Saddam’s first court appearance.
Like this one, “Saddam’s TV Appearance Brings Popularity Surge: Support for the former dictator appears to strengthen after his self-confident debut in court”, written by Dhiya Rasan, from Baghdad. Rasan’s lede was:

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Wiped

I’m wiped. I finished writing the section of my book on Rwanda today. And I don’t even have energy for blogging. What’s happening here??
Don’t worry. I’ll be back tomorrow with another rush of trenchant comments on the ways and woes of the world.
Tonight, I’ll curl up with a Carol Shields book I got from the library. Tomorrow, I’ll run, maybe dig a bit of garden… Then I’ll be back!

David Passaro/ Hyder Akbar contd.

The second good piece in today’s NYT mag is a short “as told to” piece featuring Hyder Akbar. You may recall that Akbar is the young Bay Area Afghan-American who had the un-nerving experience of accompanying a “wanted” man in Afghanistan into the custody of some US soldiers and contractors– only to be called in three days later and told that the man, Abdul Wali, was dead.
US contract employee David Passaro is now being tried in connection with the torture of that suspect. (I wrote a post about that here, on June 17.)
Anyway, in this latest piece, Akbar gives many more details than he had done in an earlier, NPR-broadcast radio diary about the time he spent taking Abdul Wali to the American base back in June 2003.
In fact, he stayed with Abdul Wali and with the three Americans who were interrogating him inside the US base for quite a while, interpreting between the two sides. (It seems that none of the Americans apart from him knew any of Abdul Wali’s language. Nor, as seems equally clear, did they understand anything about the local culture.)
So there they were: Akbar, then 18 years old, Abdul Wali, and also (according to Akbar’s latest account)…

    Steve, Brian and Dave, who proved to be David A. Passaro, the C.I.A. contractor now facing trial. It was more than 100 degrees in the small room, and above us, a fan whirred wildly.
    The interrogation started casually enough. In his friendly Southern accent, Brian dispensed with the nuts and bolts: have you been in contact with Taliban? Were you Taliban? Then the subject turned to Wali’s recent visit to Pakistan.
    ”How long ago were you in Pakistan?” Brian asked.
    Wali looked confused, and I doubted he’d be able to answer. People in Kunar don’t have calendars; most of them don’t even know how old they are.
    ”You don’t have to give a specific date,” Brian said. ”Was it two, three days ago? Two, three weeks ago? Two, three months ago?”
    ”I don’t know,” Wali responded. ”It’s really hard for me to say.”

Soon therafter:

Continue reading “David Passaro/ Hyder Akbar contd.”

The trials of trying Saddam, contd.

The NYT mag has two (or perhaps more) good pieces in it today. One is this consideration by Peter Landesman of some of the trials of trying Saddam Hussein.
The piece reveals that Salem Chalabi, the INC-appointed head of the “Iraqi Special tribunal” is not completely stupid. (What it does not reveal are the strong pro-Likud inclinations of Marc Zell, whom Landesman mentions. Zell is the Israeli settler who was SC’s partner in the commercial-law company the two of them set up in Baghdad immediately after the start of the US occupation.)
Anyway, not completely stupid:

    ”Iraqis have their own goals for this tribunal, not that it brings justice but that it punishes people,” said Salem Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, nephew of Ahmad Chalabi and general director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal since April. ”I’m treading a thin line between what Iraqis want, which is a quick process to judge Saddam guilty and just kill him, and what the international community desires, which is due process, a fair trial. All this will end up being thrown aside if you let Iraqis take over. They may just want to go ahead and create a new kind of process and just kill everybody, which is a realistic alternative.” He added, ”A lot can go wrong.”

The piece also reveals that US investigators and prosecutions specialists continue to do much of the work of preparing Saddam’s indictment, even after Saddam’s largely nominal “handover” to the “legal custody” (but not the physical custody) of new Iraqi quasi-government.
Landesman quotes Zuhair Almaliky, the chief investigative judge of Iraq’s central criminal court, as saying: ”This tribunal is not ours; it is somebody who came from abroad who created a court for themselves… ‘Chalabi selected the judges according to his political opinions.”
He quotes M. Cherif Bassiouni, the former chairman of a United Nations commission to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, as saying:

Continue reading “The trials of trying Saddam, contd.”

Rwanda’s Kagame: losing his ‘license’?

The NYT had an interesting editorial about Rwanda’s gacaca courts today. The editorial writer referred to some of the ‘procedural’ problems with this court system, which is one of the main vehicles Pres. Paul Kagame’s government has been using to deal with the scores of thousands of still-untried genocide suspects who’ve been mired in the country’s prisons, some of them for nearly 10 years now.
The editorial also referred to Kagame as “Rwanda’s increasingly totalitarian president”. Not, imho, a totally inaccurate characterization of the guy (though I still have great empathy with the size of the dilemma his government–or any other government–would face as it tries to deal with the many still unresolved sequelae of the 1994 genocide.)
But seeing the NYT, this avatar of the “liberal establishment” US media, referring to Kagame in these terms made me wonder: Is Kagame on the verge of losing the victim’s license that he has been given by western liberals since 1994?
This term, ‘victim’s license’, was coined–or anyway, used in reference to Kagame–by George Monbiot, a columnist for Britain’s Guardian daily. Significantly, Monbiot used it both with reference to the Kagame government and to many post-Holocaust Jews.
In a column April 13, Monbiot wrote:

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Our Quaker book on Israel/Palestine–finally!

Finally! After long labors, the book-length report that 14 of us–nearly all Quakers–have written on the Israel/Palestine situation is out. (Quaker process takes a famously long time, but we did it.)
It is called, When the Rain returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel, and it is being published by the American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia. AFSC still doesn’t have a downloadable order form on their website. Tsk, tsk. Pending the moment that they get one up, I did some scanning of the hard-copy brochure they sent me. So now you can download and print the following items:

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