Sunday morning in New York City’s East Village. I’m writing this in Alt.coffee, an internet cafe facing Tompkins Square Park. Sunshine outside. Inside, heavy-metal music and air-conditioning. Intermittent short rushes of business at the counter, where Leila and a colleagu are pulling the Sunday-daytime shift (and keeping me filled up with coffee.)
Yesterday I got back to the mainland after a week on Star Island, a magical, amazing, special chunk of rock anchored ten miles out from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bill and Lorna and I have been going to Star Island’s annual ‘International Affairs’ conference every year for more than 15 years now.
This year, the program part of the conference was on “Islam”, and they had four really talented and engaging speakers. However, I had to spend quite a lot of time away from the conference, finishing up the big drafting/redrafting project I’ve been working on for the past two months. The deadline on that is tomorrow, and it’s just about ready to go.
So I was using my daughter Lorna Quandt’s laptop, a Mac, which was a bit scary for me. Even scarier, I had no internet access for a whole week. I checked out the possibility of getting a boat back to the mainland midweek, so I could rush along to the Portsmouth public library and use their computers to download some mail, etc etc. But there was no boat that could work for a day-trip, and the idea of overnighting someplace there just so I could satisfy my web-lust seemed a little ridiculous.
So a whole eight days of weblessness it turned out to be. Cold turkey!
I survived. I got my work done. And I had some excellent, real life experiences without even thinking much about whether I could subsequently frame them into posts on the blog.
How is Star Island amazing? Well, for starters, life is very different. Not just no web– also, no regular showers! They have two regular slots for communal showers throughout the week– Tuesday and Friday. But during the Friday shower period, the line out of the women’s showers was so long that–even with a total estrogen-powered takeover of the men’s showers– it looked like a 30-minute wait down there in the steamy, slimy shower area…. I took two pitchers of warm-ish water and went back to my room to wash myself in a basin: a much better experience.
But the main thing about being on Star is, as everyone agrees, the people. It’s a unique way of being with people. You get to the dock in Portsmouth at noon on the Satruday and there are people you haven’t seen for 51 weeks. “How was your year?” is the main question on everyone’s lips.
How was my year? That is a question we far too rarely stop to think about– unless maybe we are Jewish and go to Yom Kippur services where a similar kind of accounting for one’s behavior over the past year is, as far as I understand things, at their heart.
How was my year? Well, that’s a question you can either blow off quickly… or you can try to give it a serious answer…
Author: Helena
No time to write!
I’ve been crazy busy for the past two weeks. Haven’t had a moment to write. And now I’m going off to a place where I’ll have no net access for ten days. Plus I’ll be crazy busy thru the end of the month.
Check back in early August!
Or maybe, I’ll write something great while I’m up st Star island and post it as soon as I get back to the mainland, July 26. Who knows? I sure don’t.
More on Chalabi, Feith, Perle
So at last, administration insiders are starting to talk openly about how it was Douglas Feith and Richard Perle’s insistence on installing pro-Israeli con-man Ahmed Chalabi in power in Baghdad that got us into the present mess in Iraq.
Many excellent details on this are in a Knight-Ridder story posted yesterday by JONATHAN S. LANDAY and WARREN P. STROBEL, that I was led to by Juan Cole, whose great website “Informed Comment” is on my template of permanent links to the right.
Landay and Strobel’s piece starts:
- The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department who dominated planning for postwar Iraq failed to prepare for the setbacks that have erupted over the past two months.
The officials didn’t develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader [Chalabi] as the country’s leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader and when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder, they had no backup plan.
I note, just for the record, that I surmised exactly that this was what had happened, as in my June 2 post on JWN when I wrote:
- Ahmad Chalabi, the sleazemeister of Jordan’s Petra Bank scandal, has now been completely discredited on two key claims he made when he successfully “sold” himself and his ambitions for Iraq to Bombs-Away Don in the months leading up to the US invasion.
The first of these was that he had extensive networks of supporters inside Iraq who would rise joyfully to greet him and his US military pals as “liberators” when they entered Iraq.
The second was that he could provide to the US and their British allies insider information (presumably, from members of those same “networks”?) extensive and reliable details of many aspects of Saddam Hussein’s very advanced and dangerous WMD programs…
[A]s Iraq turns into more and more of a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Bush administration (see Chalabi false claim #1 above), then the questioning inside the US as to “How on earth did our country get into this mess in Iraq?” will evidently become more pointed. (Think Gulf of Tonkin.)
At which point, the character of the so-called “evidence” on Saddam’s WMD programs will inevitably come under greater and greater scrutiny.
Meanwhile, of course, the COST to the US taxpayer of sustaining the large-scale military occupation inside Iraq will become far, far higher than Wolfowitz and Co. had projected– not just because of the size of the occupation force required and the length of its stay (reason for both of which being Chalabi false claim #1), but also because of the reluctance of other powers to join in an occupation venture which was launched on the basis of such inaccurate and deliberately manipulated “evidence” about the alleged WMD programs.
Anyway, enough of me noting my own prescience here. Landay and Strobel have started to compile the evidence on all this. They write that they based their story on interviews “more than a dozen” interviews with current and former officials. Here’s some more of what they write:
CSM column on US policy in Iraq
So, my CSM column on US policy in Iraq came out today. The lead graf is:
- The US intervention in Iraq, which was earlier sold to the US public as a potential “cakewalk,” has instead turned into a damaging quagmire. The least- bad choice now for President Bush is to hand the administration of Iraq over to the United Nations.
So that just about sums up my argument. But do read the whole thing and post your comments by clicking the ‘Comments’ link at the bottom of this post.
I’ve already received some interesting reactions. At 6:30 this morning, a producer from the C-SPAN morning show, “Washington Journal”, called to ask if I could “appear” on the show– by phone–at 7 a.m. Sure. Why not?
Eloise– the producer– also said she really liked the column (!) and they’d decided to use the question it raised as their “Question of the Day” for listeners. Far as I can figure from checking the C-SPAN website (which actually is an amazing resource with a very well-organized collection of Iraq-related links), the show airs on C-SPAN radio, which seems only to be available in the Washington DC area…
But if you want to call in and vote on the “Question of the Day”, you could maybe try this number (202) 585-3882, which they post as a general call-in number to speak to their guests. (I alas, am not there for you to talk to. Nor have I tried calling that number to see what happens there.)
The next bit of reaction I got came was an email from someone signing himself Tony Deivert. Although it’s a little repetitive and maniacal, I’ll share some of it with y’all. Here’s what Tony had to say:
Work, and a long weekend
I’m sorry I haven’t posted much here recently, but I’ve been writing up two or three storms. “Real” writing, that is… working on this humungous great redrafting project I’m working on, plus a Hayat column on Saturday, plus a CSM column yesterday.
Longtime readers of JWN may see some familiar arguments– more elegantly stated– in the CSM column which will come out Thursday. You can check their website for it then.
I did have a bit of time for some fun stuff over the long weekend, however. On July 4th, we went to a great evening party at our friends Chip and Betsy Tucker’s place. Here’s me going down the Slip ‘n’ Slide. (I’ve never been on one before. What a blast!)
Just to prove that I do occasionally act with decorum, here’s a picture of me a little later, upright, and with our friends Lynette and Otto Friesen:
On Sunday evening, we got to go to a fabulous concert given here by John McCutcheon. John played many of his beautiful traditional instruments, sang some Woody Guthrie songs, and many, many of his own. He’s a really engaging performer.
The new(-ish) song of his that I liked the best was “Ashcroft’s Army”. Here’s the main gist of it:
- I wanna be in Ashcroft
Thin mattress stories–from Palestine and Iraq
Two stories about thin mattresses today. First, from Iraq. Thanks to Juan Cole for linking to Trudy Rubin’s recent piece from Najaf in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which she recounts highlights from an interview with Ayatollah Muhammad Sa’id al-Hakim.
(By the way, Cole’s continuing compilations of news from world Shia’dom are so well-done and so timely that I’ve put a permanent link to his blog in my ‘select list’ of blog links, to the right.)
Anyway, one telling detail from Rubin’s story was:
- The 37-year-old Hakim, in black turban and robe, received me in a bare room in the narrow Najaf rowhouse near the shrine [of Imam Ali], where petitioners come to seek religious rulings. We sat on thin cushions on the floor…
So there he is, one of the four Shi-ite Ayatollahs in Najaf, sitting on “thin cushions” in “a narrow Najaf rowhouese.”
And there are the US overlords, still swanning around in the hulking great palaces that Saddam built for himself all over the country.
In a situation in which most Iraqis are suffering from lengthy power outages, unsafe drinking water, general economic collapse, and rampant insecurity, does anyone (=Paul Bremer) think the symbolism here might be just a tad inappropriate???
I “understand”, of course, that Bremer and his staff, and numerous US army units, chose the palaces to lodge in “primarily because of security considerations”.
But has he stopped to think that the palaces were built where they were, and in the ultra-high-security way they were built in– precisely because Saddam knew that he needed multiple layers of protection against the hatred and wrath of his much-abused people?
So if Bremer’s people and the US military choose to live in the palaces “for security reasons”, what does that say about their expectation of building a relationship of trust (and respect, and equality) with the Iraqi people?
Pictures of US troops cavorting in a swimming pool in one of Saddam’s palaces on July 4 also presumably didn’t go down too well with the millions of Iraqis lacking access to safe drinking water.
How about if Bremer at least opened up a few of the Saddam palaces with their extensive leisure complexes for use by low-income Iraqi kids, or something generous like that??
Okay, on to Palestine. Thin mattress story #2. This was a great quote from James Bennet’s story from Tel Aviv in yesterday’s NYT. Bennet quoted Samir al-Mashharawi, a leader of the mainstream Palestinian faction, Fatah as saying:
Continue reading “Thin mattress stories–from Palestine and Iraq”
Iraq– a very slippery baby
I wonder what they teach ’em in the various “schools of life” where Bombs-Away Don, Wolfie, and rest of the Authors of the Misadventure in Iraq came up? I’ll tell you one very valuable life lesson I learned, back when I had my first baby (Beirut, 1978). It was from the true British classic, Dr. Hugh Jolly’s book of baby-care.
So here’s what I learned from Dr. Jolly. When you’re planning to bath a baby, you have to plan everything well, sort of starting from the end of this complex operation. So what you don’t do is start out by running the bath-water, stripping the clothes off the babe and dunking him in the bath. Becaue if you do that, what happens is– one wet, cold, slippery baby and no clothes or towel to wrap him in!!
Yikes!!
What you’re supposed to do (and every parent who’s ever bathed a baby figures this out pretty fast) is start from the end, figure out the clean clothes you want to put the babe into; find the clean diaper and any ointments, lotions etc you’ll need before slapping the diaper (sorry, nappy) on; dig the little bitty baby hairbrush out from the closet; lay out the towel just so, ready to plunk the baby onto. And then– not a moment before– you can run the bathwater, find the babe, and start undressing him.
I guess in the Pentagon they used to call it an “exit strategy”.
But here’s a suggestion. Why don’t they hand over the handling of all foreign and security policy to people who know a thing or two about the world… people who’ve been active-duty parents… people who know a bit about short-term and long-term planning… people who could tell you that security doesn’t grow out of the barrel of a gun… people who could tell you you don’t just make a massive downpayment on an “exit strategy” from a convicted fraudster and then, without any further planning, plunge the baby straight into the bath?
This present so-called US “policy” in Iraq would be farcical if it weren’t so, well, just plain tragic.
Grand Ayatollah Sistani joins the fray
Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, long considered strongly committed to a “quietist” rejection of political engagement, has now taken a serious step toward endorsing opposition to US diktats in Iraq.
This is the news from Juan Cole, one of the world’s most knowledgeable and reflective experts on the politics and ideology of Iraq’s Shi-ite majority population. Earlier today (or perhaps late last night, Michigan time), Cole read an article in the liberal Iraqi daily Az-Zaman, datelined from Najaf, reporting that Sistani has issued a fatwa stating that any body that writes a new constitution for Iraq would have to be elected, not appointed by US gauleiter (my word) Paul Bremer.
If you want to find Cole’s piece, you’ll need to go to his blog; then once there, look for the July 2003 archive in the Archives listing in the lefthand sidebar. Click it, then scroll down nearly to the bottom to this particular post on July 1. It starts out:
- *Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has entered Iraqi politics in an unexpectedly big way. He has denounced US administrator Paul Bremer’s plan…
Cole has done us all the favor of translating the Zaman report, and you can find the translated text on his site, which is a great and really informative weblog.
Sistani is insisting on two sets of nationwide elections: one to elect the constitutional commission, and one to ratify the draft constitution.
Bremer, of course, has proposed creating some kind of an appointed council that would do some governing and some constitution-writing. (Though of course it’s hard to tell exactly what he does plan, since the DoD is making up the whole governance-of-Iraq policy as it goes along.)
Sistani’s fatwa states very straightforwardly,
Vilakazi Street, Soweto
Another picture! This is from the afternoon that Leila, our friend Emily Mnisi, Emily’s friend Ria, and Ria’s daughter Rudo spent driving around Soweto. I guess it was May 4. We were on the only street on the planet that has been home to TWO Nobel Peace Prize winners!
The two in question are/were Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Tutu. The Street is:
When we were there, a gaggle of lovely boys came up and started mugging around and singing the South African national anthem in a bunch of languages– including Afrikaans. Left to right in the pic: two of the boys, Emily, Leila, Ria, Rudo.
(Back in ’76, it was a new government requirement that schoolkids study additional subjects in Afrikaans that sparked the Soweto Youth Uprising. That was then; now is now… )
Just opposite this street sign is the house that Madiba and Winnie moved into in the 1950s. After he was imprisoned, she stayed living there for a while till the authorities moved her to some out-of-the-way place. I guess in the divorce settlement she got the house, and has since turned it into a museum…
Just down the street, Tutu and his family still own the big grey house he’s had here for many years, and he lives there sometimes, between his many peripatations (?) around the world.
Photos from Chiboene, Mozambique
Regular readers of JWN will recall that back at the end of April, in Mozambique, my daughter/research assistant Leila Rached and local research associates Salomao Mungoi and Alfiado Zunguza and I all went to participate in a grave-tending ceremony at one of only a few known civil-war-era grave/memorials that there are in Mozambique. (Read all about it here.)
Well, today, I think I may have figured how to post JPEG pics on the blog without having everyones’s browsers crash???? So here are three pics of that day. The first photo is of Leila doing the “watering” part of the ritual, at the mass grave under the cashew tree in Chiboene:
Here is our local contact, Ana-Paulina, doing the “planting” part of it:
And here is the whole group, standing around doing the hymnsinging/praying part of it:
