Author: Helena

Sistani, Annan, the letter

Edward Wong of the NYT has a generally pretty thin piece in Sunday’s paper, from Najaf, detailing how he failed to catch the ear of anyone particularly close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
It’s heavy on the “color”– donkey carts, etc., etc.– and fairly light on the news content. The most interesting little tidbit came from near the end, where he wrote:

    Two weeks ago, a major battle for [Sistani’s] ear was joined, when it fell to Mr. Pachachi, of the Governing Council, to lead a delegation to discuss the issue of direct elections. Mr. Rubaie [also of the IGC], who accompanied the delegation, said the ayatollah sat on the floor of his home opposite them, wearing his customary black turban and black robes. Mr. Pachachi tried explaining that there was not enough time to organize direct elections by the June 30 deadline. He produced a letter from Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, saying as much.
    “That didn’t cut the ice with him,” Mr. Rubaie said. “He had already been convinced that elections were possible.”
    That had come about, Mr. Rubaie said, because the ayatollah had absorbed the opinions of Iraqi census experts, the minister of trade and a senior United Nations envoy acting unofficially, all of whom had made it known to the cleric that direct elections were feasible.

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Sistani, Clausewitz, the world

Sorry I haven’t been writing for a while… No, I was not at Davos (*chuckle*)… I was locked in a very intense drafting process in Washngton DC, with a couple of dear Quaker colleagues, for the past couple of days… I hope I can announce the results of that session here, soon…
Meanwhile, Iraq’s people have carried on making history, as I started to write about in my previous post here, written Tuesday.
Since Tuesday, I have tried to keep up-to-date with, at least, the WaPo and the NYT. Oh, I also spent a couple of great hours with Sir Brian Urquhart, the former Under-Secretary-general of the UN, but that’s another story.
So here are what I’ve noted as the seven most significant developments of the past few days:
(1) Sistani and his colleagues have been cleverly continuing to modulate, build, and orchestrate their political movement… Anthony Shadid, writing from Karbala in today’s WaPo, notes that Sistani aide Abdel-Madhi Salami: “urged his followers Friday to refrain from the kind of mass protests witnessed in Iraq’s two largest cities this month until a U.N. team determines whether nationwide elections are feasible.”
Shadid wrote that this suggested that Sistani feared the large-scale protests seen earlier in the week could get out of hand if continued. A more plausible (and not totally contradictory) analysis might be that Sistani and his people want to keep the popular movement disciplined in order to maximize its effectiveness. (Gandhi did the same, remember.)
Also, I’m sure that the Grand Ayatollah realizes that the show of popular force his people put on last Monday has already had a big effect, so it’s a good idea to keep that kind of a big “demonstration” in reserve, for when it’s next needed.
You could call this a civilian-mass-organizing version of the theory of “shock and awe”…. That is, an exemplary show of force that “persuades” the opponent to change his plan drastically in the way you want him to.

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Iraqis making history

Friends, mark your calendars. Iraq’s people are these days, finally, becoming the subjects of their own history. It now seems clear that in the process they will strike fateful blows not only to the ridiculous “Rube Goldberg election plan” proclaimed by Washington and its quasi-puppets of the IGC in November but also, beyond that, to George W. Bush’s entire concept for a US-dominated Iraq that would lead the rest of the Middle East into a relationship of long-term servitude to US commercial interests.
Such are my conclusions after reading a wide range of reporting of yesterday’s 100,000-strong, Sistani-led demonstrations in the heart of Baghdad.
Anthony Shadid’s account in the WaPo has been by far the best reporting that I’ve seen so far. What he makes clear are four key aspects of the demonstrations:

    (1) The impressive organization behind them. They were announced thru the speaker systems of mosques around the city only one day before, yet they succeeded in bringing out those kinds of numbers, and from Shi-ite groups spanning many different trends.
    (2) The discipline of organizers and participants. I guess that if, as a Shi-ite religious organization you have succeeded in surviving 30 years of Saddamist rule including numerous anti-Shi-ite pogroms and other genocidal campaigns, then you know a thing or two about the need for strong internal discipline…

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“Caucus”, contd.

Wise reader Vivion commented on the previous post that in her opinion the best definition of “caucus” comes from Alice in Wonderland.
After kicking myself that I had not thought of Lewis Carroll’s reference to a “Caucus-race” first, I followed the link Vivion gave to the full text of Carroll’s late-19th-century classic. I’ll provide just a little more text than she did. But thanks so much, Vivion, for reminding us about this great description…
The story starts after Alice has fallen down the rabbit-hole, met sundry strange creatures, and wept so much that there’s been a massive flood… Many of the creatures have become wet and bedraggled…
Chapter 3 continues:

    `What I was going to say,’ said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.’
    `What is a Caucus-race?’ said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
    `Why,’ said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

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“Caucus”: the word

From my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, p.154:
caucus (U.S.) private meeting of the chiefs of a political party XVIII [that’s the century, folks]; in Eng. use applied from 1878 to organizations for managing political elections, etc. Plausibly referred to in Algonkin cau-cau-as-u, which appears in Capt. John Smith’s ‘Virginia’ (16..) as caw-cawaasough advisor, from a vb. meaning ‘talk to, advise, urge’; but there is an earlier reference to a place ‘West-Corcus in Boston’.
… Truly, North America’s “gift” to the world! (See the bottom of this post from yesterday.)
But democratic? There, I’m not so sure…

Transition from occupation to independence and democracy: a UN role?

Okay, let’s say that Country X is running a military occupation over the entirety of Country Y. (You can read my lengthy thoughts on military occupations in general if you go here.) And that everyone concerned–including, at the rhetorical level, the rulers of occupying country X– says that their goal is to restore independence and legitimate indigenous government to country Y–
How do you do that?
Easy, if the country you’re talking about is Kuwait, 1990. Kuwait’s “legitimate” (though deeply undemocratic) rulers had escaped from their country en masse at the time of the Iraqi invasion, and set up a skeleton administration in exile… They had powerful friends, the Americans, who spearheaded the military operation aimed at the restoration of the status quo ante.
But what if Country Y has no leadership that is generally recognized as legitimate that is both (a) in existence, and (b) able to call in powerful foreign armies to effect its restoration?
What if we’re talking about, say, Namibia in the 1980s, East Timor in the 1990s– or Iraq, today?
Why then, the answer is Dial ‘911’ for the United Nations!
But can the UN indeed do the trick, and under what circumstances?

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WaPo shows the way (not)

I’m actually trying to write a column for Al-Hayat today. (First of a two-part series on interesting UN experiences in managing transitions from foreign occupations to democracy in Namibia and East Timor.) But I totally couldn’t resist writing something here, however short, about the hilarious mistake in the WaPo today.
The story in question, “Iraqi women decry move to cut rights” leads on their World News page. Pamela Constable reports (belatedly) that this week, “outraged” Iraqi women have mounted street protests against the Governing Council’s recent move to shift all personal status issues to religious jurisdictions.
There’s a B-I-G photo with the piece. (Unfortunately it’s not in the web edition; so no link.)
Thing is, though, the demonstration photographed seems to have been one of pro-shari’a women, not anti-shari’a women. All the participants are wearing hijabs [Islamic headscarves]. The veiled teenager at left front carries a sign saying “The hijab is a human right”. Behind her, a young woman carried a sign advertising the Iraqi Islamic Party and saying that it, “supports the muslim women in france.” Presumably, that is, in their fight to be able to wear hijabs to school, etc.

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JWN: browser problem solved

Around 24 hours ago, both Internet Explorer and AOL started rendering the code for JWN in a very lame, primitive way.
I’m terrifically sorry if you were one of the readers affected.
In response to an appeal here, gallant reader Dan Z. leaped to my assistance and sent me a fix he thought would work.
But I’d been busting my own rear end meanwhile on finding a fix, and about an hour ago I found one.
So thanks, Dan– and sorry, the rest of you. I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again…
In the meantime, I’ve learned more about Cascading Style Sheets, positionizing text, the particular frailties of Internet Explorer, etc., etc. than I ever really wanted to know.
Back to the big picture, eh?

May 2003 picks on Golden Oldies

I just spent a bit of time going through JWN’s May archives, and for your reading pleasure I’ve now added that month’s Golden Oldies to the list on the main page.
Okay folks, I can tell from my usage stats that over the past week various readers have been visiting (and, I hope, enjoying) the earlier Golden Oldies I’d picked out for you… All the G.O.’s, that is, except one!!!
Why is this?
I’m particularly puzzled, because the post in question, “Military occupations: the good, the bad, and the possibly ugly” of March 21, 2003 was actually (if I may say it myself) one of my better ones.
It’s true, it was a long one. But that doesn’t seem to put most of you off. True, too, that I wrote it before I moved JWN over to ‘Movable Type’, so for longer posts I would sometimes post them up onto my UVA site and put a link in JWN to them there.
But I thought you guys could maybe handle something like a hyperlink??
To make things extremely easy for y’all, I’ve now uploaded that file into the JWN archive, and you can read it by clicking h-e-r-e.
It wasn’t perfect. Blogging is not, after all, a perfect art. But I’d put a fair amount of work into that post. You can, of course, sound off about the imperfections right there on the Comments board…
Oh, and don’t forget to check out the new, May additions to the G.O. list sometime.