Author: Helena

Shin Bet ex-chiefs speak out

Four retired chiefs of Israel’s fearsome and ultra-repressive Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency have now added their voices to those in Israel calling for more reliance on realistic diplomacy with the Palestinians, and less reliance on brute force.
This speak-out is very important, since the Shin Bet plays a major role in administering the harsh control system that the Israeli authorities maintain over the three million Palestinian residents of the occupied West bank and Gaza. It also comes just two weeks after Israel’s highest-ranking military officer, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, also publicly urged the government to ease up on the harsh administrative violence (my term, that) that it imposes on the Palestinians.
It seems the four Shin Bet veterans spoke together to one or more reporters for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot. One key quote picked up and highlighted by the WaPo in its front-page story today was this, from Avraham Shalom (SB head, 1980-86):

    We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully… Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully.

The group spoke out forcefully against the Sharon government’s long-sustained attempt to marginalize Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
(Arafat, it should be noted was democratically elected by the Palestinians of the occupied territories in 1996 in the only territories-wide elections the Palestinians there have ever been allowed to hold under Israel’s now 37-year-long military occupation. Those elections were deemed free and fair by US and other election monitors. If they were repeated today, he would once again win. Sharon, of course, would prefer a Quisling figure to “negotiate” with, but hasn’t found one yet.)
The WaPo piece, by Mollly Moore, reported of the SB veterans as follows:

    The group was particularly critical of Sharon’s attempt to sideline Arafat and declare him “irrelevant” — also a key tenet of President Bush’s Middle East policy.
    “It was the mother of all errors with regard to Arafat,” said Shalom, who has worked as an international business consultant since leaving the government. “We cannot determine who will have the greatest influence over there. So let us look at the Palestinians’ political map, and it is a fact that nothing can happen without Arafat.”

The group also criticized Sharon’s insistence that all Palestinian violence should stop before the Israelis even consider moving toward a negotited settlement. They called for Israel to make the “painful concessions” needed for a permanent peace– and to do so unilaterally, if necessary.
Those concessions, they said, should include evacuating at least some of the Jews-only settlements Israel has (quite illegally) planted inside the occupied territories. They did not specify how many of the roughly 400,000 settlers should be taken back to Israel’s own land.
Moore reported that “several” of the former chiefs also criticized the massive barrier that israel is building in and around several key areas of the West Bank. Once again, Shalom seemed notably outspoken on this, saying:

    It creates hatred, it expropriates land and annexes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the state of Israel. The result is that the fence achieves the exact opposite of what was intended.

In addition to Shalom, those who participated were Yaakov Peri (SB chief 1988-95), Carmi Gillon (1995-96), and Ami Ayalon (1996-2000).
To me, the participation of Ayalon is not at all surprising. He has also been publicly engaged in a very forward-looking joint project with Al-Quds University President sari Nuseibeh to gather signatures from both Israelis and Palestinians in support of a statement calling for “two states for two peoples” with a shared Jerusalem, etc etc.
Nor is the participation of Peri totally surprising, since I think I’ve seen his name associated with some previous faintly pro-peace moves.
That of Carmi Gillon surprised me a lot, however. Isn’t he the person behind the creation of “Memri”, a very intelligent but very skewed attempt to “explain” to westerners that most Arabs are anti-Semites and can’t be trusted? If that is the same person, then perhaps he should look to changing the basically inflammatory and blood-libellous slant of “Memri”. On the other hand, if it IS the same person, it is also really great to see people changing their minds and their public positions in the light of overwhelming physicial and moral facts.
What bugs me, as a taxpaying US citizen is why our President and Members of Congress are still so far from speaking these same kind of home truths (and, let me add, backing such words with a smart reallocation of US economic incentives.)
Since when did one side in a conflict get to veto the leader legally elected by members of the “other” side? Where would we be if the Palestinians and Arabs all went from saying “We don’t like Sharon” (which is probably true) to saying “Because we don’t like him we refuse to negotiate with him”?
Sharon’s insistence on marginalizing Arafat has been outrageous, all along. But instead of simply telling him that, and reminding him of the old home truth that “You don’t make peace with your friends– you make peace with your enemies!”– the US administration and nearly every single member of Congress has just indulged Sharon and gone along with his bullying attempt to tell the Palestinians who can and who cannot represent them.
Well, at least now Prez Bush has said he’s for full democracy in the Middle East. That’s a relief! Now, maybe, he can “persuade” Sharon to let the Palestinians make their own choice about who gets to lead and represent them?
What do you think? Is it about to happen? Hey, I’m sitting on the edge of my chair here…
Actually, what all of us who are US citizens can and should do is write our representatives, enclose a copy of Moore’s article, and tell our representatives that democracy and true representativity for the Palestinians, fair and balanced negotiations on the Palestinians’ many claims, and the committed use of US aid dollars to promote a just and sustainable outcome, is the only way forward.

Iraq-“iffy”-cation– yet more

I got some nice reactions to the CSM column that came out today. Of course, Iraq-iffy-cation has become quite the big topic, all of a sudden.
It’s very hard to tell what-all the Bushies’ plans (if they have any) currently are. Is the huge military escalation a sort of “last gasp” before they all ignominiously “redeploy offshore”? A precedent for that would be having the battleship New Jersey hurling Volkswagen-size marine munitions into villages in Lebanon in late ’83/early ’84 even as the brass were actively preparing for-indeed, even as they undertook– the withdrawal of ground forces from the whole country.
A sort of petulant, retributive, and very shortsighted way to exit any country, let me note. I wrote about that whole episode not long ago, here.
But nah. I don’t think that “covering a withdrawal” is what the present bombardments and escalation in Iraq are all about. (Though I would truly love to be wrong on that.) So far, it looks to me more like the petulant, retributive, and shortsighted part of what happened in Lebanon, but without any underlying strategic plan.
Looks like they’re trying to bomb the bejeesus out of the Iraqis while saying they want to build a democratic constituency of Iraqis with whom they can peacefully negotiate Iraq-iffy-cation as soon as possible?
And this fits together how????
You know what? People have been mainly looking at the challenges of Iraq-iffy-cation through some very limited lenses. In the mainstream discourse, most people’s memories only seem to go as far back as– oh, Afghanistan, 2002.
So that’s why you get all these mainstream headscratchers saying oh, so, “wisely” things like, “What we need in Iraq is a Hamid Karzai figure!” or, even more pretentiously, “Maybe we should move to a loya jirga model there instead.”
What horse-@#$%. People, let me say, “I know something about Iraq, and Iraq is no Afghanistan!”
They tried the Hamid Karzai model there already, remember: the suave westernized long-time emigre who could work smoothly with the Americans…

Continue reading “Iraq-“iffy”-cation– yet more”

CSM column on Iraqification

You can now find my CSM column dated for Thursday November 13. It’s here. In it, I argue:

    Vietnamization, like Iraqification, was accompanied by a lot of rhetoric about “democratization. “But because it was rushed, politically driven, and pursued unilaterally by the US according to US timetables, Vietnamization was a dangerous fiasco for most of the people of Vietnam and helped usher in the period of abusive communist rule that followed. It “succeeded” only in that it helped Nixon win reelection in 1972.
    In Iraq, the stakes are even higher than they were in Vietnam. That’s why a botched “Iraqification” that is pursued nearly unilaterally by a rushed, politically driven US is in the interest of absolutely no one. But I truly don’t think that a successful Iraqification can happen if Washington continues trying to do it under its own almost unilateral control.
    For everyone’s sake, the UN has to be invited to take over this vital process. The UN alone – not NATO, not the present US-led coalition – has the international legitimacy, and can command the international resources that are needed to get this job done.

But read the rest of it as well, and send your comments in HERE.

Brass versus suits, contd…

When I say “Thank God for the US military”, don’t get me wrong. My conviction that violence of all kinds is wrong and counter-productive remains firm. Violence begets violence, it’s as simple as that.
On the other hand, at least the people who actually use violence, who are daily exposed to it and are very aware of its costs to all concerned, have a more realistic view of these matters than those who sit in comfortable offices thousands of miles away making life-or-death decisions about military affairs.
So here (while the political echelons of the US leadership were scrambling to find ways both to spin and to escape from the escalating disaster in Iraqi) we have the US’s top military commander in Iraq actually telling it to a bunch of journos like he sees it.
As the NYT’s John F. Burns put it,

    Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many Bush administration officials in recent months, General [Ricardo] Sanchez, commander of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq, described what they were facing as a war.

(Get out your flight-suit, George! They might need you to participate for real this time!)
Burns reported (“from a heavily guarded news conference in the Iraqi capital”) that, “On another issue with American political overtones, General Sanchez said interrogations of 20 people suspected of links to Al Qaeda had failed to confirm such links.”
Oh gosh, don’t you just hate it when that happens? There the spinmeisters of K Street were for the past two days, telling us that the 20 people they’d picked up on suspicion of having organized the attack that nearly caught Wolfie’s pants on fire last week were Al-Qaeda operatives– and so, didn’t that just show that Cheney was right with all his repetition of the claims about Saddam-Qaeda links, whatever…
And then the general on the scene goes ahead and tells everyone and her auntie that No, it ain’t so?
But according to Burns, Sanchez had still more to say:

    The general described a stark picture of the attacks on American troops, saying they averaged six a day when he took command five months ago, rose to ‘the teens’ 60 days ago, and had increased to 30 to 35 a day in the last 30 days. He predicted that the attacks would increase still further before the intensifying American military campaign began to curb them…

The spinmeisters must be afraid that the military is getting out of control, saying things like that!
Well, from General Sanchez’ point of view, he needs to tell the truth like he sees it, and in a fairly public way. For a number of reasons.
First, he needs to know the truth about the identity of his opponents, so that hopefully (for him) he can devise an appropriate response to their actions.
Second–and don’t underestimate this requirement–he needs to communicate a clear idea of his analysis of the nature of the opponents to all his subordinate commanders in the field and his supporting commanders back home in the Pentagon. Oh sure, the US military doesn’t usually use the NYT as a main means of communication. But with their own communicatons so overwhelmed and possibly unclear, it certainly can’t hurt him to seek also to send a clear message out to them thru the NYT and other major media sources.
Third, he needs to get the viewpoint of the uniformed military leadership on these matters firmly onto the public record before the whole military situation inside Iraq goes firmly down the tubes (which is what he certainly seemed to be presenting as something of a possibility despite his tough, blustery talk about the fact that the eventual US victory “was not in doubt.”)
Indeed, to me, that’s the most interesting thing about Sanchez’ press conference: the clear inference I drew from it that he is preparing a clear CYA defense on behalf of the whole of the uniformed military, in the increasingly likely event of a US debacle in Iraq.
And actually, such a defense is not invalid. The brass as a group certainly tried hard all along to warn the pols that invading and remaking Iraq would not be a cake-walk. Remember Shinseki? And it took Bombs-Away Don a long time to find a compliant general who’d agree to become Chairman of the JCS on his terms…
So thank God for the US military, I say, and especially for this: that at the end of the day, the commanders seem to have resisted the huge pressures to be rolled by the chickenhawks, and to have kept their personal and professional integrity–including their responsibilities to the thousands of men and women under their command who don’t have the luxury of living in the (highly relative) comfort and safety of the “Green Zone” in Baghdad.
And talking of what’s happening out there in the outposts. Here’s a revealing excerpt from a certain interesting blog I’ve been reading recently, which looks as though it must be the transcript of an IM interaction between a person who’s an officer in one of the branches of the US military, writing from somewhere in Iraq, and his life-partner back home:

    Officer: Have a good story for you. I walked in a tent today and two guys were tossing darts at a board made from Our Glorious Leader’s picture.
    Partner: Oh man, you didn’t bust them for it, did you?
    Officer: They saw me and got pale instantly. I think they were seeing their careers flashing before their eyes.
    Partner: What did you do?
    Officer: I turned and walked out of the tent without saying a word. I stood outside for a few then went back in and no darts or picture was in view. I saw nothing and said nothing to them.

Note the three things that are happening here. The grunts are throwing the darts at OGL’s image. The officer (noncom?) effectively condones that action. And the officer tells his sweetie back home about it–on an open IM link, and knowing full well that she will just love the story…
Oh boy, should Karl Rove be worried.

“Iraqification”– of Washington DC?

I’m just in the middle of writing a CSM column about the dilemmas of “Iraqification” of the administration in Iraq. And suddenly I thought well heck, what if what’s really happening in the world should actually be called the “Iraqification” of the administration in Washington DC?
Meaning, that we’re getting increasingly closed-door, Orwellian, crony-istic, anti-democratic decisionmaking right here in the US, never mind what’s happening in Iraq.
But then I though, nah– that is really not fair to the Iraqis, to paint them all with a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld brush… “Saddamization” of Washington DC, perhaps? Nah, that’s too extreme. Something in between, though…

Nose to authorial grindstone here

I’ve had the nose to the grindstone here since Friday a.m. First, I finished final edit on a long piece about the Int’l Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that the Boston Review will be publishing soon. Then before I could catch my breath my friend Tony Bing arrived from North Carolina and we’ve been working non-stop on some (hopefully pretty final) drafting work for a big Quaker report on israel and Palestine that we–and 12 others– have been working on.
Tony is a real hard taskmaster! I’ve had scarcely a moment to blow my nose since he got here Friday afternoon. Far less write anything substantial for JWN.
I haven’t even had time to cruise the blogosphere in general, for goodness’ sakes! What kind of a life is this???
(Actually, since I get to do work that I love, with people whom i really like, the answer is, a pretty good life. I’m just whingeing a bit, above. But if you have any sympathy for me, send chocolate.)

Questions about those Iraq-US contacts

ABC News broke the story Wed. night, then the NYT had it in more detail today: that the Bushies turned down what looked like a last-ditch, groveling offer from Saddam that would have met most or virtually all of the US’s pre-war demands.
According to both those versions of the story, Saddam was offering to let “2,000 US agents” comb his country for evidence of the WMDs. Plus, the NYT said he had offered to cut cosy deals with the US on access to Iraqi oil and also to hold elections within two years.
So the Bushies turned down the offer. It seems they were determined to fight their war.
(Some important details of the story– those concerning the holding, though not necessarily the content, of the back-channel contacts– were confirmed for both news outlets by Richard Perle, to whom the contacts had been directed.)
Why did Imad Hage, the key Lebanese-American business executive who was the key go-between, suddenly spill the beans to the US media? One clue may come from the fact that Mike Maalouf, a Lebanese-American who was then working in Doug Feith’s office in the Pentagon and who was apparently involved in the contacts along with Hage, has in the interim been “put on administrative leave.”
Maybe these two guys want the folks in the Pentagon to know that they have plenty of information and are not afraid to use it?
But here’s another interesting wrinkle, too. AFP reported today that the Hage’s key Iraqi intermediary, Tahir Jalil al-Habbush al-Takriti, described as Saddam’s intelligence chief, had been suborned by the Americans somewhere along the way. (Maybe through the contacts with Hage? Separately? Who knows?)
According to this AFP story– which my spouse sent me off the ‘net, but I can’t find a URL for it yet– this Habbush was one of four top regime people who were due to meet with Saddam at a restaurant in the Mansouriyeh district of Baghdad on April 9. But Habbush never turned up. Saddam, fearing that Habbush had betrayed him, high-tailed it away from the location– and 15 minutes later the whole place went up in smoke after having that really heavy US bomb dropped on it.
The AFP story is sourced to a “former government official” in Iraq.
The story then quotes three former government officials as saying that Habbush “was evacuated by the US forces as soon as they entered Baghdad, along with other members of the former regime who collaborated with the United States.”
So the small question here is “How long had Habbush actually been on the payroll before April 9?”
But the big question still has to be, Exactly who was it in the Bush administration who put his (or her) foot down on any further exploration of the intriguing negotiation being offered by Hage? Was it Perle himself? Or had he taken it to Rumsfeld or the Prez then one of them turned it down?
Whoever it was made that tragic call is probably– or let’s hope so– having serious regrets right now.
Maybe in light of the scale of the tragedy in Iraq since March, the whole lot of them should just resign.

Appreciation for “Marine’s girl”

A fabulous, heart-rending, honest, funny new voice in the blogosphere comes from the new blog by “Marine’s girl”. She’s writing out of someplace in Michigan, I think, and supports her Marine by posting many amazing, strongly antiwar things on her blog.
Last saturday night, she was up till 3:12 a.m., and posted her immediate reaction to the breaking news of the bringing-down of the chopper.
She must have had some terrible hours there, waiting to find out whatever she could about the identity of those killed.
Sunday, her Marine called her. You can read her really intimate account of that call at this post.
You can read a lot of other fine things on her blog, as well. Check it out and say hi to her.