Author: Helena

Iraqification, anyone?

Fareed Zakaria had an op-ed in today’s WaPo titled “Iraqification: Losing Strategy”.
He’s right in some respects. As when he argues, ” This new impulse has less to do with Iraqi democracy than with American democracy. The president wants to show, in time for his reelection, that Iraqis are governing their affairs and Americans are coming home.”
He also may be somewhat right when he predicts: “Iraqification could easily produce more chaos, not less.”
For an eery possible precedent here let me take you back to Lebanon, early 1984. The French and US “peacekeepers” there had been very badly battered by the suicide bombings Shi-ite extermists had launched against their positions in the city in 1983… In early February, the French troops were regrouping for more effective defense. Ever since September 1982, the US had been trying to rebuild the Lebanese national army, which had falledn apart during preceding years of civil-war fighting.
By February 1984, the US hoped it had cobbled together enough of a Lebanese army to fill the holes being left by all the peacekeepers who were so eager to regroup. Their man, Ibrahim Tannous, the Christian extremist army commander, had promised them he had many well-staffed, well-trained new units.
Thing was, though, most of the foot-soldiers in that army were Shi-ite Muslims. On Feb. 5, 1984, the order came for the army to deploy into an area that was a stronghold for some anti-government Shi-ite militias. And guess what?
You can read all about it on pp.204-205 of my book The Making of Modern Lebanon:

    At this stage, [the then-ascendant Shi-ite leader Nabih] Berri was still not directly calling on the Muslims in the army to desert. But over the next few hours this is just what they did–in numbers so overwhelming that by 6 February the authority of the army had collapsed completely in all of West Beirut…
    On 7 February, President Reagan made a surprise announcement to the effect that he had now ordered the Marines to withdraw from Lebanon…

You reckon the man whom “Yankeedoodle”, the author of the great Today in Iraq blog calls “Lieut. AWOL” ever read my book? (Or any book?)
But back to Zakaria. Where I think he’s wrong is where he says, “The first task of winning the peace in Iraq is winning the war — which is still being waged in the Sunni heartland… [W]hatever it takes, the United States must do it.”
Actually, I think he’s wrong on two counts there. The first is that it is not the case that “the US must do it.” We do still, after all, despite the best efforts of John Bolton and the other members of the Bush administration’s other bash-the-UN brigade, have a viable (if battered) United Nations– and its legitimacy inside Iraq and around the world is still considerably higher than that of the USUK coalition.
Plus, it is actually not the case that the battle that counts in Iraq is the one in which the US forces are currently engaged, inside the Sunni heartland.
The one that really counts is the battle for the allegiance of the country’s Shi-ites. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, Shi-ites make up around 60-65 percent of the national population. And though they have numerous internal and external problems of their own these days (as Berri’s people did in Lebanon in 1983-84), still, at the end of the day their community can be expected essentially to stick together and make up by far the largest power bloc inside Iraq.
Right now, I’ll bet most of them are just happy as clams to see their two traditional opponents– the US and the Iraqi Sunnis–slugging it out with many casualties a little further to the north.
Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that that is the “triangle” that really needs watching inside Iraq these days: the triangle of competition between the Sunnis, the Shi-ites, and the US forces. Not the merely geographic “Sunni triangle” that everyone in the mainstream media sounds off about as though they know what they’re talking about…

The other 96

How about if Americans started taking seriously all the calls in our national discourse for global democratization?
How about if our government started acting as though it represented only (a minority of) the 4 percent of the world’s population that has US citizenship?
How about if we started to figure out ways to give a real voice to the other 96?

On punishment (contd.)

My big research project these days looks at how societies deal with the multiple legacies they’re left with in the aftermath of atrocious violence. In the interests of synergy, the last two columns I’ve written for Al-Hayat have been applications of this question with respect to Iraq.
Interesting question. De-baathification is the watchword of the day for many of my friends there. But how? Who? Based on what theory?
Well, I’ve been studying theories of punishment fairly closely over the past three years. My instincts go strongly against the notion, in general, since I deeply believe that in general a healing approach is more effective at dealing with wrongdoing (repairing relationships and right order; making the world whole again) than punishment is. I truly can’t buy into the whole retribution thing. The only possibly acceptable rationale I can see for the deliberate application of punishment (=the intentional curtailment of the rights and liberties of another person) is the incapacitation of proven offenders for the protection of society. But even that would need to be done with great caution, and with a clearly compassionate and reformative aim in mind.
Anyway, enough of my Buddhism here. In line with my great new theory or posting interesting out-takes from my articles onto this blog, I thought I’d post the following out-take from the piece I sent to Hayat yesterday:

    In the west, “punishment” is often talked about as though there is universal agreement to the idea that this is the only correct response to wrongdoing, and on the general principles of how it should be administered. The assumption of universal agreement on these things then often serves to obscure the very solid fact that any move to “punish” other people is actually a power play. Within a family, parents punish their children, but children do not punish their parents. Within a nation, governments punish citizens, but citizens do not punish governments (except when citizens, through a ballot-box or other more brutal means, get to remove a government from office; and then, too, it is self-evidently a power play.) At the international level, George W. Bush has asserted a right to “punish” any government that he and he alone deems to be “evil”; but no other government in the world– except perhaps Israel?–agrees that he has the right to do this.
    In all these cases, asserting a “right” to punish another party is part of a broader power play.

    Continue reading “On punishment (contd.)”

Geneva Conventions and CPA asset-stripping

You have to love Britain’s world-class leaders in the field of financial media. First, a couple of weeks ago, came the Economist‘s cover with the big title: “Wielders of Mass Deception?” super-imposed over a photo of Bush and Blair. And today comes a piece in the Financial Times reporting on a conference of international-law experts in London who concluded that US Gauleiter L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer’s Order 39, which essentially allowed the global asset-stripping of most of the Iraqi economy at bargain-basement prices, might well be illegal.
The article, by Thomas Catan, reports the following regarding a discussion about Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA):

    “Is what they are doing legitimate, is it legal?” asked Juliet Blanch, a partner at the London-based international law firm Norton Rose. “Most [experts] believe that their actions are not legal”, she said. “There would be no requirement for a new government to ratify their [actions].”
    International law obliges occupying powers to respect laws already in force in a country “unless absolutely prevented” from doing so.

Later, Catan turns to the question of the status of pre-existing, i.e. Saddam-era, contracts:

    The CPA has yet to announce what will become of pre-existing contracts, many of which are held by Russian, Chinese and French companies.
    However, international law experts have said they could be enforced, raising the possibility that contracts with the ousted regime might be more enforceable than those signed with the CPA.

Of course, it all depends whether you actually believe in the validity of international law, and its relevance in matters relating to military occupations. By and large, most governments in the world do believe that situations of military occupation should be governed by international law. Two governments disagree. They are Israel and the US.
Is this an amazing coincidence or what?
The main existing body of international law in such matters consists of the provisions codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The government representatives who met together in Geneva then and voted their agreement to the Conventions still had vividly in mind the depradations that Germany’s military occupation of most of continental Europe had wrought on the peoples and societies of the continent’s non-German peoples. Maybe we should urge the US and Israel to keep those terrible precedents in mind today, too?
Long live the Geneva Conventions! They are one tiny basis of normative agreement in a frequently brutal world.

Thoughts/prayers for Yvette

Much attention has been focused on the decisions that international humanitarian-aid workers in Iraq have been facing in recent weeks. But friends, we also need to give thoughts and prayers to their colleagues elsewhere. And particularly right now, to the aid workers and skill-sharers in Somaliland.
(Don’t know where or what Somaliland is? Go to the site I link to on the right sidebar here called “A Taste of Africa”, where you can learn lots about it.)
Back on October 5, Italian aid worker Annalena Tonelli, who had been in Somaliland for many decades, was shot dead there by unknown assailants. Yvette Lopez, the author of Taste of Africa, has written a lot of posts about Annalena’s life and death. Check out this one, or go to the special section on Annalena down on her left sidebar.
Then, about ten days ago, a British couple called the Eyeingtons who were house-parents at the SOS Children’s Village there were also gunned down.
You can imagine how terrifying this is for the other brave souls–pitifully few in number–who have gone from distant countries to share skills and do aid work in Somaliland.
Yvette herself is one of them. She’s a Filipina social activist/organizer and has been doing some really amazing work in Somaliland under the auspices of an international, Catholic-run (I believe) skill-sharing organization.
You can see the courageous way Yvette has been trying to deal with the latest set of security challenges, while also continuing to make good on her deep commitment to the projects she’s been working with in Somaliland, if you read her posts from most of October.
I’m headed over to Taste of Africa right now, and I’m going to post some good wishes there for Yvette so she knows I care about her. Why don’t you join me and do the same?

“Today in Iraq”, RiverSbend, etc

Yesterday evening I discovered a great new blog called Today in Iraq. It’s written by a guy calling himself “yankeedoodle” who used to be a warrant officer in either the Marines or the Army (I forget which).
He just trawls the news sources for fabulous nuggets of news, info, and commentary on Iraq and presents them in a really clear way along with just the right amount of his own piquantly anti-Bushite commentary.
I just put a link to it onto the bar at the right.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere there’s been a big campaign to stop some cranky elderly Bushophile called Troy who’s been pretending to be Riverbend. He put an ‘S’ into the middle of her URL , made a template that looked just like hers, and then created this entire fake blog about how wonderful it is to be an Iraqi after the arrival of the US forces etc etc.
I did see his fake blog before Blogspot took it down (presumably, for violating their Terms of Service). He’s been trying to get another one up, at www.riverbendsblog.blogspot.com, but evidently it’s taking him some time to get it looking anywhere near authentic.
River herself has some nice commentary on it. But if you really want to max out out on the details of the counter-troy campaign, there’s a whole other blog devoted solely to that.

Israel: Yaalon tells it like he sees it

The Israel Defense Forces’ Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon was, according to the online edition of the NYT, the “senior military official” quoted in today’s Israeli press as having said that Israel’s current hard-line policies against the Palestinians were working against Israel’s “strategic interest.”
For example, in Wednesday’s Yediot Aharonot, veteran columnist Nahum Barnea quoted the (still un-named) senior official having said that the Israeli-imposed,

    comprehensive travel restrictions and curfews imposed on Palestinians were actually harming Israel’s overall security.
    “It increases hatred for Israel and strengthens the terror organizations,” Mr. Barnea wrote, quoting the official.
    General Yaalon [for it was, as we now know, he] also said that Israel should have eased punitive measures to bolster the fortunes of the former Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned on Sept. 6 after only four months on the job.
    Mr. Abbas expressed frustration that Mr. Sharon never took concrete steps to convince Palestinians that the Middle East peace plan, initiated in June, would bring about any real improvements in their lives.
    “There is no hope, no expectations for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, nor in Bethlehem and Jericho,” Mr. Barnea quoted the “military official” as saying. “In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest.”

The NYT story, by Greg Myre out of Jerusalem, notes that Yaalon had always previously expressed fairly hawkish sentiments.
Indeed, when he first became IDF Chief of Staff back in July/August of 2002, Yaalon famously said that Palestinian militants were like a “cancer” that needed to be aggressively dealt with. He also expressed full support, at that time, for a policy of imposing tough collective punishments on palestinians that would serve to “burn [or brand] into their consciousness” the understanding that Israel was not about to back down under pressure.
Yaalon’s emphasis on “not backing down under pressure” at all– which of course always used to echo Sharon’s long-held views on the matter– merely buttressed Sharon in not even making tactical redeployments (in Gaza, for example) that could have strengthened the IDF’s broader position.
Not to mention, they would have made life a whole lot better for Gaza’s Palestinians!
So the big questions now are: (1) Will General Yaalon stick to his new, significantly more moderate line, and continue to espouse it openly? and (2) If he does, what will Sharon do about him?

Iran: not quite so “evil”?

US deputy Secretary of State Rich (“Muscle-man”) Armitage has been telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the administration is now prepared to talk to Iran about matters of common interest, and no longer seeks “regime change” in Teheran.
According to a report on Radio Free Europe, Armitage “told the committee that Washington shares a number of pressing interests with Iran, including the country’s role in Afghanistan and Iraq and its battle with drug smuggling. He said these issues could warrant resuming limited discussions with Iran but not a ‘broad dialogue with the aim of normalizing relations,’ which were broken off after Tehran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution… ”
According to a story in the NYT today, Armitage told the SFRC that,

    on the positive side, Iran had supported the American-led ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council, whose members were chosen by the American occupation authorities.
    Iran also surprised some American officials by showing up last week at the Madrid conference of international donors to Iraq and contributing aid.
    The Governing Council is discussing a deal to ship oil to Iran and receive electricity in return, one administration official said, a step that L. Paul Bremer III, the occupation administrator, has not yet sought to block.
    Mr. Armitage was asked Tuesday by Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, if “regime change” was American policy in Iran. “No, sir,” Mr. Armitage replied, adding that “our policy is to try to eliminate the ability of Iran to carry forward with disruptive policies.”

This news about the Bushies’ new realism on Iran comes in the wake of last week’s small diplomatic breakthrough by heart-throb Dominique de Villepin and his Euro colleagues, in reaching Iran’s agreement to go along with the EU’s demands on nuclear inspections.
It is also long overdue for the administration to start treating Teheran with more nuance than just being a member of the so-called “axis of evil”. After all, if Americans want a hope in heck of ever getting our 130,000 forces out of Iraq without suffering major, major casualties then cooperation with Iran will have to be a part of that exit strategy.
Uncomfortable thought for some in DC and in the generally anti-Iranian US media? Undoubtedly. But they’re going to have to deal with that.
I mean, did anyone in this administration even bother to look at a map of the Gulf region before they cavalierly sent so many US troops so deep into Iraq?
If they had, they might just have happened to notice a couple of things:
(1) Much of Iraq is desert. But there’s a band of heavily populated areas that runs fairly close to the country’s eastern border.
(2) The other side of that eastern border lies Iran, a huge, well-infrastructured country of roughly 65-70 million people.
(3) Many roads link the two countries. Their people share many attributes (and in some cases come from the same families.)

Continue reading “Iran: not quite so “evil”?”

Thinking about atrocity

This week I’ve gotten seriously into writing up, in as definitive a way as possible, the findings of the research project I’ve been working on, off and on, for the last three years, the “Project on Violence and its Legacies: A Challenge for Global Policy” (the VAIL project).
Between all the notes I have on the four larger and numerous minor research trips I’ve made in the past three years, and the mounds of smaller notes, Post-Its, and other comments I’ve accrued on all the readings I’ve amassed– well, I certainly have enough material for at least one book!
The thing is, though, I don’t have all the funding I’d been seeking, in order to pull all my findings together into a big, heavily theoretical study of the topic. But that’s okay. I have a couple of months of funding. So I’ll take the material I already have, and start writing what I can. It will be more empricial, more experiential than the tome I’d originally been thinking of…
But that’s not all bad, either. Maybe this way it’ll be more accessible and can gain a wider readership. And the interview material and other empirical stuff that I have is already informed by a lot of heavy cerebration and theoretical reading. So at this point, I really just need to trust the material I have in hand. And what unbelievable riches I do have! So many note-books stuffed with interviews and personal notes– from Rwanda, from the ICTR in Arusha, from Mozambique, and from South Africa.

Continue reading “Thinking about atrocity”

Iraq Survey Found NO Nuclear Threat

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that David Kay’s Iraq Survey Group found–contrary to what Kay said in public or told the US Congress– that “it is now clear [Saddam] had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key material;s or obtain the technology he needed for either.”
Read that great piece. And read my commentary on it in the next post beneath this one.