Author: Helena

Gelb’s outrageous plan for Iraq

Les Gelb, the former President of New York’s almost terminally inbred (and very powerful) “Council on Foreign Relations”, has an op-ed piece in the NYT today arguing that the US should– unilaterally!– work toward the speedy splitting of Iraq into three separate states.
Gelb gets to publish this almost lunatic–and extremely dangerous–idea right there in the NYT because he is the former editor of its op-ed pages. He used to be quite smart and generally fairly ethical. Can’t think what’s been eating at his brain to bring him to this.
I see that Juan Cole has a good post on his blog pointing out some of the many flaws in Gelb’s argument. But actually, I think Gelb’s argument is, at several levels, far worse than Juan makes it out to be.
For several reasons.
The first and most serious one is that the US has no right simply to split up Iraq into three states or make any other such serious changes in the country’s administration. No right whatsoever.
The Geneva-based International Committee for the Red Cross is the body which, under a series of international treaties, is the international depository for the body of “laws of war” called “international humanitarian law” (IHL). Therefore, the ICRC’s commentaries on various aspects of IHL– including the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, etc.– are considered authoritative. In a useful factsheet on the rights and duties of an occupying power, the ICRC notes:

    The Occupying Power cannot change the status of the territory it occupies. Though it becomes the de facto administrator of that territory, the Occupying Power must maintain and preserve the economic and social structures and respect the customs. It can amend the laws and regulations in force in the territory only to the extent needed to enable it to meet its obligations under the Fourth Convention, and to maintain orderly government and ensure its own security.

Actually, this set of limitations applies to many of the far-reaching changes the occupying powers (that is, the US-led coalition) have tried to institute in Iraq, including the sweeping steps toward economic privatization, etc. And it would most certainly apply to any attempt by the US-dominated coalition to split the country into three states.
(There are reasons, remember, for the strict limits the Geneva Conventions place on what an occupying power may do with the territory and the people over which it runs an occupation. The conventions were codified in this form in 1949, when the recent depradations that the Nazi armies had wrought all over the lands of Europe that they had occupied were still a recent and vivid memory.)
A second deep problem with Gelb’s proposal becomes clear if you read three-fourths of the way down his text. The three separate states he proposes splitting Iraq into would be, from north to south: a Kurdish state, a Sunni Arab state, and a Shi-ite Arab state. And–

    The general idea is to strengthen the Kurds and Shiites and weaken the Sunnis, then wait and see whether to stop at autonomy or encourage statehood.
    The first step would be to make the north and south into self-governing regions, with boundaries drawn as closely as possible along ethnic lines. Give the Kurds and Shiites the bulk of the billions of dollars voted by Congress for reconstruction…

Of course, Gelb is so “smart” that he recognizes–to a certain extent– that Iraq does have a certain degree of inter-group mixing, especially in the central area (but also, which he pays little heed to, in the north as well). So the idea of drawing new boundaries “as closely as possible along ethnic lines” is by no means as clearcut or as easily do-able as it sounds.
And Gelb quite realistically foresees the possibility that if his chosen scenario of systematically weakening the Sunnis is enacted,

    without power and money, the Sunnis may cause trouble.
    For example, they might punish the substantial minorities left in the center, particularly the large Kurdish and Shiite populations in Baghdad. These minorities must have the time and the wherewithal to organize and make their deals, or go either north or south. This would be a messy and dangerous enterprise, but the United States would and should pay for the population movements and protect the process with force.

This is where his proposal gets truly sick. Having asserted that the US has some right simply to carve occupied Iraq up into three states as it pleases, he proposes that the US should then actually facilitate and pay for the massive degree of ethnic cleansing that would most likely ensue.
For example, there are around two million or more Shi-ites in Baghdad. US forces would cooperate in uprooting them from homes there that in many or most cases their families have lived in for generations?
You gotta be kidding.
Gelb bases his whole argument about carving up Iraq on a deeply flawed analogy with the events of the past 15 years in the territory now called the “former” Yugoslavia. There, for 45 years after WW2 there had been a Titoist federation of states; but from 1990 onward Yugoslavia started to fall apart. The Slovenes got their independence; then the Croatians and Bosnians wanted theirs; then the Macedonians; then even the Kosovars (though they didn’t even have a fully-fledged “state” in the Tito-ist scheme.) The west more or less went along with– or in some cases, even encouraged–that breakup.
My first reaction to Gelb’s use of this analogy: after everything else the Iraqis have gone through in the past 25 years, Les Gelb now wants to inflict on them some nightmare scenario out of the Balkan wars of ethnic cleansing?? Like, what happened in FY was such a great precedent for anyone else to follow??
My second reaction was that this is a totally crap analogy anyway because, despite eveything else that was going on in FY at the time in terms of external machinations, international arms salemen hovering around, geopolitics, etc., etc., still, the main impetus for those states to secede from the federation came from the peoples (or a noisy subset of the peoples) of those states themselves. It certainly was not imposed on them by any arrogant outside power.
And, as Juan Cole makes abundantly clear in his post, the desire for outright secession among the sub-groups of Iraqis is miniscule or nonexistent. I recall, too, that Riverbend had a good piece recently about general good relations and intermixing among the different sub-groups in Iraq…
Gelb’s proposal is worse than merely being ill-informed, illegitimate under international law, and highly unethical. It is also extremely inflammatory. Schemes by imperial powers to split up various of the Middle Eastern countries are nothing new in the history of the region, and a fear of such schemes runs deep in the psyches of many Arabs and Muslims…
So okay, Ms. Wise-ass Helena, how would I deal with the evident diversity of Iraq’s national population and try to ensure that no community’s vital needs and interests get swamped in the future?
Well, the country already has 18 governorates, a very fine number within which numerous different kinds of the country’s sub-groups can all feel adequately represented. South Africa has nine provinces; and Spain has, I think 15 or 17. Each of those democratic countries nowadays supports a very diverse population in which a range of ethnic/linguistic (in both countries) and religious (in South Africa) groupings can feel well represented.
So why should we imagine that the Iraqis would be incapable of working out some analogous arrangement that would suit them? Of course they can do it.
They can’t, however, be expected to do it so long as they’re under the heel of a foreign military occupation. (And sorry folks, that still is the technical term for what the US is running in Iraq, despite some deluded self-descriptions that it is there solely as a “liberator”. Check out some of my earlier posts about the nature of occupations.)
No, clearly what is needed in Iraq is an immediate handover to UN legitimacy and authority in Iraq, and then a speedy transition to self-rule. Self-rule, that is, for the one country of Iraq. Enough of these crass schemes to split the country up!

John Kerry in ‘Atlantic Monthly’

After the end of the conference in Atlanta last week we went to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center there. Interesting, inspiring, but also a bit disappointing (for me, anyway).
Then, a long wait at the airport. I bought the December Atlantic Monthly because they had an excerpt from Douglas Brinkley’s upcoming book on John Kerry’s (Vietnam) war years.
What Kerry apparently gave Brinkley for the book was wide access to the things he’d written at the time of his deployment in the US Navy in Vietnam, including letters he’d written back then, and extracts from a journal he’d been keeping then. Plus, some ability for brinkley to talk to people Kerry had known back then.
What Kerry apparently did not give Brinkley– or if he did, it never appeared in the Atlantic excerpts– was any present-day, restrospective reflections on the experiences he’d had in ‘Nam, or any explanations of why, despite those experiences, he voted for Bush’s war-enabling resolution back last year.
Which is a pity. Because one thing Kerry’s contemporaneous reflections on ‘Nam showed was a sharp analytical and ethical mind at work which was deeply disturbed by many, many aspects of what he saw there and able to express his disquiet in prose of a maturity unusual in a man as young as he was then.
Reading the piece made me want to go out and buy the book when it comes out January 6. It increased the admiration I had for the person Kerry was back in those days.
But it also forced me to question even more deeply why Kerry voted the way he did on the war vote of October 2002.
What does this all say about him as a potential future president? I’m not sure. I’m still leaning for Dean, but Kerry looks a bit more intriguing now.

Keystone Cops build Iraqi “democracy”

Great piece in the WaPo today aptly titled “Hope and Confusion Mark Iraq’s Democracy lessons”. It’s by Ariana Eunjung Cha–another great Post discovery, along with A. Shadid.
Cha went to a bunch of meetings in an area of northern Baghdad province called Taji with an American anthropology prof of Iraqi heritage called Amal Rassam. Rassam was trying to advise the local U.S. commander on how to establish the “provincial council” called for in the Bushies’ latest “quick exit” plan.
“Establish”, in this sense, being a euphemism for a Rube-Goldberg-like scheme whereby the US military seeks to select participants in this process at various levels up to the province.
Trouble was– as Cha apparently knew but Professor Rassam had yet to discover–that in Taji the people already had a fairly well-developed system of more-or-less elected local councils in place.
As Cha writes: “That Taji has had its own tentative representative system for months throws … Rassam off; no one had told her this.”
Rassam is working on this project as a sub-contractor for a North Carolina contractor called the Research Triangle Institute. Cha writes of the latest democratization scheme that, “Local leaders will be consulted, and some groups will actually cast votes to select neighborhood leaders. But the final decisions will be made by the military and the RTI.”
Cha describes Rassam as “one of more than 650 consultants” currently working on “civil society projects” in Iraq for RTI.
So this is where our $87 billion is going! I’m trying to figure how much it actually costs to keep one “New York professor” active in the field for say, six months or however long Rassam’s contract is for. Say, conservatively, $150,000? Multiply that by 650 and you get $97.5 million…
Nearly all that dosh would end up in the bank accounts of the profs or other US-based contractors themselves plus the other (mainly, US-based) suppliers of support services for them. Oh, and then there’s the RTI’s profits… So the vast majority of this cut of the “aid for Iraq” cake will be recycled straight back into the US economy, rather than into Iraq.
As a close family member commented to me today, “Why don’t they hire Iraqi schoolteachers or other professionals to do these kinds of jobs, and spread this amount of money around inside the Iraqi economy instead?”
Plus, Iraqi people who know the country might actually be a little less clueless when it comes to doing their job than Professor Rassam has been made out to be?

‘Contesting Religions’ in Atlanta

I’ve been at a conference in Atlanta for the past couple of days. It’s organized by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the general theme is global religious issues.
I admit that one of the main reasons I came was because I was supposed to be on a panel with the Israeli writer Avishai Margalit and the Iranian scholar Abdel-Karim Suroush– both of them people I was interested in meeting. So neither of them was actually here. I was a bit taken aback to discover that. But as it happens I’ve met lots of really interesting people and participated in lots of really interesting discussions.
Highlights have included listening in on a discussion among African scholars of indigenous African religions and Chinese scholars of indigenouse Chinese (folk-)religions, and gaining an idea of both the hardiness and the richness of some of those traditions; participating in a workshop on religion and violence today, where some really deep and significant differences emerged; lots of conversations; a talk by UN Population Fund head Thuraya Obeid, yesterday; and a performance of jazz and gospel music by the Atlanta Community Jazz Choir this evening.
Sorry this is such a lame little report here. I’m a tired, tired person. This morning I actually gave a 30-minute plenary presentation on “Religion and Violence”, in which I wanted to present some of my Africa work to this group. Some very, very supportive reactions; some not so much so. That’s okay.
My bottom-line theseis was something along the lines of, that at and after times of intense trauma social breakdown, people often turn to religion and religions have a lot of influence over people’s lives, thinking, and behavior; at this point, religions can do one of two things: they can either work to heal people’s hurt and enrol these people in broader projects of social healing, or they can harden people’s sadness into anger and steer them toward vengefulness and punitiveness, which often come cloaked in the garb of “justice”…
Oh well, I know I haven’t expressed it well here. I talked a bit in the afternoon workshop today about the truly amazing way the Mozambican people managed to trasncend all the hurt from their lengthy and atrocious civil war by using approaches based on blanket amnesty and wide use of social healing. And this German scholar afterwards kept insisting to me, “But there has to be justice! What about justice??” What could I say? “Hey, don’t attack me I’m just reporting what they did and telling you that from every perspective I know of it surely seems to have worked. If the Mozambicans say they are satisfied with the results, what standing do you (or I) have to tell them, No it didn’t?”
L’esprit de l’escalier, here. That’s why I have the blog… Tomorrow, we go to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Museum.

ICTY case management

I see from a piece by Marlise Simons in the NYT today that Theodor Meron, the President of the Internatinal Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, and the prosecutors there, have started trying to speed things by organizing a lot more plea bargains than previously.
This is in line with the more expedited case management at ICTY and its sister-court for rwanda, ICTR that the US has been urging for a while. Simons’ piece notes that ICTY has finished trying 40 people already and has 27 others “preparing for trial”. It makes some sense to me, as the trials at the ICTs are incredibly expensive and long-drawn-out.
I have a piece coming out in Boston Review soon about the ICTR, which goes into some of these same issues of cost and case management. (Also, of relevance to the situation inside Rwanda.) At ICTR, the “record” on number of cases completed is far worse– around 12 to date, only. But at least at ICTR, the Prosecutors started out with a more well-thought-out strategy of focusing on the “big fish” and not letting the court’s time and resources get distracted into going after small fry, which is how ICTY started out.
Also, at ICTR, they probably got their hands on a greater proportion of the real top people they were going after than they did at ICTY. There, most notably, Mladic and Karadzic are still running loose…
What does all this actually achieve, for the peoples of Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, though? That’s what I’m trying to investigate– well, with particular reference to ICTR. I do understand that at the level of “global” policy, these courts are establishing an impressive new body of case law on matter dealing with atrocities, etc., etc. (And providing a lot of well-paid jobs for a small coterie of international lawyers.)
But at the end of the day, law is supposed to serve people, not the other way round. Have the $1 billion or so that’s gone into ICTY and more-than-$500 million that’s gone into ICTR actually been well spent? Have these two projects contributed to strengthening national reconciliation in those societies and ending the previous cycles of violence?
I think “the jury’s still out” on those questions. (Not that ICTY and ICTR even have juries, anyway.)
But amidst the general enthusiasm for war-crimes courts that most people in the human-rights movement have gotten swept up by in recent years, it’s worth remembering that amnesties and a spirit of forgiveness have often actually, historically, played a central role in building a general climate of peacefulness and reconciliation, and thus bringing the commission of acts of atrocious violence to and end. That is–or should be–a goal of the human rights movement, too!

Jewish Israeli views on peace, security

Every year, Tel Aviv University’s prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies conducts and then reports on a wide-ranging study of public attitudes in Israel on peace and security issues.
(Not wide-ranging enough for my humble tastes, since they like many other public opinion surveyors in Israel poll only Jewish Israelis, and not the 20 percent or so of Israeli citizens who are ethnically Palestinian/Arab… I mean, can you imagine someone in the US conducting a poll that charted only the attitudes of “white” Americans, and then presenting that as the views of “Americans” in general?)
Well anyway, dropped into my mailbox today the little report on this year’s Jaffee Center survey, which was conducted mainly in April this year. According the Exec Summary of the report,

    Israelis were more optimistic regarding prospects for peace and supportive of the measures required to move the peace process forward compared to the respondents of the 2002 survey. For example, 59% of respondents in 2003 supported the establishment of a Palestinian state … in the framework of a peace agreement, up from 49% in 2002… Those who agreed to abandon all but the large settlement blocs [i.e. blocs of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank] increased from 50% in 2002 to 59% in 2003.

So, perhaps some modestly good news there.
Also good news: the survey has annually, since 1986, asked the general question as to whether respondents would choose peace talks or increasing military strength as the most effective way to avoid another war with Arabs. Between 1986 and 2001, the percentage who chose “peace talks” dipped beneath 50% only once– that was in early 1995. But the responses to both the 2001 and 2002 surveys on this question showed “peace talks” chosen by significantly fewer than 50%. This year, it was back up again– to 56%. Still well short of the high levels of 1991 and 1992, which look to my eye to be in the low 70s. But still, the trend line is up.
What a pity, though, if Israelis are “feeling” a little more secure and accommodationist only because they think their army has succeeded in penning the Palestinians inside the razor-wire fences that ring every West Bank city except Jericho, and that cut Gaza up into segments, or behind that monstrous wall that is now snaking its way through the heart of the West Bank.
(Have you noticed that the US Army has decided to put a fence all around Saddam’s home town of Auja, near Tikrit? Wonder where they got that idea from… )
Anyway, another thing I wanted to write here about the latest Jaffee Center report is something that appears only near the back of the report. It appears that since as long ago as 1987, this survey has routinely asked respondents if they think the Israeli government should “encourage the emigration of Arabs from Israel”. And in at least three of the surveys they have now explicitly asked respondents if they favor “transfer”, that is, the forcible ethnic cleansing, of, firstly, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, and secondly, of the Palestinians of the occupied territories.
The results on this question are disquieting–no, I would say almost literally sickening. Support expressed for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel out of their ancestral homeplace (and present state of citizenship) was at 24% in 1991, at 31% and 33% in April this year.
I guess that’s why they don’t administer the survey the survey to Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you think the government should ethnically cleanse you out of this country?” It could seem a little tasteless.
Views of respondents on ethnically cleansing the Palestinians out of the occupied territories are even more upsetting: 38% of support in 1991; 46% in 2002, and 46% again this year. (How’s that again about favoring peacemaking over military strength? Who do these respondents think they’re going to make peace with?)
So, disquieting, yes. Sickening, yes. But here’s something else. If a “reputable”, “mainstream” Israeli research organization can go around the streets of (Jewish) Israel asking such questions as these as part of a calm, objective survey of people’s attitudes, does this asking in itself actually help to normalize the whole sick idea of transfer in people’s minds? (“I mean, if even the Jaffee Center people with their clipboards are proposing this as one discussable option, that must mean it’s kosher to talk about it don’t you think?”)
Kosher? Talking about ethnic cleansing in the modern day and age (and after everything the Jewish people themselves have gone through in their history)? I wonder if the survey-askers got any expressions of sheer outrage and horror at the idea of “transfer” from any of the people they talked to?
Actually, I don’t know how quite how I feel about this asking. (“Good evening, sir, I’m from a prestigious research center in Washington DC and we’re conducting a survey on people’s views on the reintroduction of lynching?”) I suppose I’m glad to know the sick truth about how extremist the attitudes of many Jewish Israelis are.
And definitely now that this survey has been done, its results should be widely publicized.
You cannot, alas, link directly to the text of this year’s survey report yet. But if you click here, you can find, on pp.27-31 of last year’s survey, a lengthy discussion of the views that those respondents expressed on both the “encouraging emigration” question and that of forcible “transfer.” You can also, of course, read the whole of last year’s report right there, too.
Tell me what you think about the Jaffee Center folks even asking these questions.

Marine’s Girl being silenced– or not?

Folks– Marine’s Girl, who has been writing a great blog for the past 5-plus weeks that provides “Insight on being the girl friend of a Marine in Iraq. Opinions of news items of the day, politics, and relationships” is being intimidated into silence.
I’ve only had a link up to her blog for a few days, though I’ve been reading it quite a while longer. She’s taken down most of the content that was previously on the blog. But if the blog is still up on the web at all, you should go read this, and this— as well as anything else you can still find up on her blog.
“First they came for the Jews, and no-one said anything… ” You know how the rest of that goes.
Don’t let them do anything to this plucky, insightful person or her boyfriend! At the very least, send her a message of support.
Update, Monday a.m.: So it seems that MG actually has powerful supporters within the USMC, as well. Check this. I guess it’s not quite all handled yet, but it looks on the way to being so.
Great news, MG! And please, please, get all that content that you’d taken down back up onto your blog a.s.a.p. You and your guy are our Hemingway so far, for this war!

Iraq: the best sense yet

This was my first attempt to post this text, which is from a speech given November 4 by my old friend Ghassan Salameh. But I only had a highly imperfect version of it, as published in The Daily Star (Lebanon). Shame on them! Evidently editing standards there must have plummeted since I worked there back in 1974-75…
Anyway, I’ve now cut out the whole substance of this post, and direct you to the next post, where a better version of the text is now posted. (Sadly, though, I couldn’t do the whole line-break thing for such a long text there.)
Still, it’s an interesting text. Check it out. I’m keeping this one here as a placeholder only because Advanced Calc already posted an interesting Comment on it, which I didn’t want to lose.

JWN “Golden oldies” section added

This week, I added a new section of “Golden oldies” to the sidebar at the right of the “Main” (a.k.a. “Main Index”) page. Check it out! It so far features some of my earliest JWN posts, from February and March 2003. Including several pre-war predictions that now look pretty prescient.
I also, fairly often, re-organize the “Links” section on that sidebar. So you should check that out, too, and visit some of the new items I feature there. I took off Salam/Pax’s blog because he hasn’t posted anything serious there for about a month.
Future plans: I’m considering mining some of the “Golden oldies” from my Al-Hayat columns and putting some links to them up on the sidebar, too. But I need some help from my filial technical advisor for that. Tarek, call your mother!
Finally, can anyone out there advise me how, in MT, to (probably retrospectively) tag some of my posts as “Golden oldies” so that the listing of them can be automatically generated by MT rather than me having to painstakingly write a bunch of new HTML into my “Main Index” template every time? Leave a comment here with the advice, or write me. Thanks!