So here’s W’s main line of defense now: “Oh, who really cares about Saddam’s WMDs one way or the other, but the main thing is, we did good to get rid of the old SOB, right?”
H’mm. It’s an interesting argument, and one that deserves to be taken seriously. (Though so too, of course, does the whole question of leading the world into this war under totally false pretenses… )
I think I have two responses to the argument.
The first is, yes, it’s good that SH is no longer in power– but we don’t know yet whether the situation, say, two or five years down the pike will be even more rights-abusing than what Iraq was throughout the past Saddamist decade.
We certainly can’t say that Iraq will be any kind of a settled, stable democracy. Or even, whether it will have stayed as one nation. Or whether, after two to five years, it may be sorta-kinda muddling along (with a lot of help from the neighbors in Iran.) Or whether its own internal tensions– unleashed, post-Saddam as Yugoslavia’s were, post-Tito– may plunge the whole country and some of its neighbors into prolonged and really cruel fighting that would be even more damaging to human welfare than Saddamist rule.
We just cannot tell. So let’s not make any kind of a judgment yet that, based on its consequences if not on the validity of the stated casus belli, the war against Saddam was a Good Thing.
(You think things couldn’t possibly get worse for Iraqis than they were under Saddam? I’ll tell you, I lived in Lebanon for six years of the ever-degenerating civil chaos there. Sometimes we’d wake up to news of some new atrocity and say, “Well! At least this thing can’t possibly get any worse than this!” And sure enough, some weeks later, it always would.)
Okay, that’s one line of argument. And by the way the consequences of the ill-planned Rumsfeldian war venture look worse and worse by the day.
The other line of argument takes seriously the proposition that Saddam’s human rights violations were so unspeakable, so atrocious, that Something Had To Be Done. But then the question, were there serious alternatives for dealing with the rights-abuse issue other than the unleashing of this ill-advised war?
And I say Yes! If the members of the Security Council had gotten seriously exercized over the issue of Saddam’s proven record of atrocious rights abuse— as seriously as they did over, say the unproven allegations regarding his development of some of the very same weapons that all the Permanent Five members of the SC already have– then they could have used many of the same kinds of mechanisms to deal with his rights violations as they tried to use regarding his weapons-regime proliferations.
I’m talking monitors. I’m talking intrusive inspections. I’m talking deadlines, and reports, and transparency, and verifiable compliance.
Why not?
OK, you may say, but the UN has never done anything like this regarding human rights before. Well you know what? They never did anything nearly as intrusive as UNMOVIC before, either. But Geore W Bush really, really wanted it, and he succeeded in ramming it through a dubious or even hostile Security Council.
If he had really, really cared about human rights– or if the rest of us had cared enough about it to be able to persuade him to do it– the Security Council could have created a Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission regarding Iraqi human rights practice, as well as or instead of the one for that was looking for those chimerical WMDs.
So here’s a suggestion. Why don’t we take some of the lessons and SOPs from the weapons UNMOVIC and think about trying to apply them to a truly atrocious human-rights situation instead? Like Burma, or North Korea. Non-violent, but firm.
Author: Helena
The immigrantist narrative lives!
Last night I went with the spouse to a fundraising dinner for the local branch of the International Rescue Committee. The whole thing seemed like a celebration of what I call the immigrantist narrative, and it left me a little unsettled.
Okay, I’ll admit it upfront: I’m an immigrant here in the US of A myself. But still, I continue to harbor this critical stance on the immigrantist narrative– here and in all other countries that were founded on the basis of large-scale colonial ventures.
Colonial ventures, you see, are always built on the ruins of wrecked indigenous societies. I think that’s what upsets me about the whole business. Think Voortrekkers and Randlords. Think Israel. Think the Trail of Tears; or the destruction of Aboriginal cultures in Australia; or the submerging of Tibetan culture, or, or or…
It sometimes seems quite simple to me: in order to run a colonial venture, you need colonists, right? And those colonists have to be… immigrants.
When I was growing up in England, there was a tale in the dusty annals of my family’s history about Black Sheep Uncle Alfred. This was in the late 1800s. He had made off with the money of a club he was treasurer of… So what did the family do with him, in order to deal with the shame he had brought to them? Why, they packed him off to America and he wasn’t mentioned in the family for many years thereafter…
Amos Oz on compassion
Yes! A great piece– once again– from Israeli writer Amos Oz. There was a small period there, at the beginning of the current intifada, when he got a little too accusatory for my taste. But this piece, from the newspaper formerly known as the Manchester Guardian, is truly a great one.
He writes:
- This is the time for the rest of the world to offer both sides as much help, empathy and understanding as possible. This is the time for well-meaning governments and individuals to come forth with a “mini Marshall Plan” in order to resettle the Palestinian refugees in the state of Palestine. It is also the time to offer Israel the security guarantees it will need in return for renouncing the occupied territories.
This is time for compassion, not for historical accounting and not for blaming. Neither Sharon nor Abbas is likely to become a Nelson Mandela. But whether they like it or not it looks as if their sleeves are now caught in the cogwheels of the peace process…
Yes, yes, yes! (Sorry to get a little Molly Bloomish here.) But compassion exactly what I’ve been urging, for a while now.
I guess the only point where I’m a little wary of what Oz says is when he writes: it will be almost impossible for those two leaders to run away now from the peace process. Well, at least he qualified his forecast a little bit.
Gosh I remember all those oh-so-wise pundits back in the mid-1990s– Rita hauser and Judith Kipper come to mind, but there were plenty of others– who told us, “The peace process started at Oslo is irreversible!”
Irreversible, huh? Did those people ever read any history?
Still, I’ll forgive Oz his “almost impossible.” Firstly, because he did qualify it. And secondly because his main argument, re compassion, is such a great one.
Yvette, Iraniangirl, etc
I just wanted to draw people’s attention (again?) to the blogs I link to here. Which are not many. There’s a phenomenon called ‘Blogrolling’ which means, I think, something like “I’ll link to your blog if you link to mine.” Well, I don’t do that. I just link to a handful of blogs that I think are really interesting.
Anyway, Yvette, who writes “A Taste of Africa” is the most wonderful, talented, sensitive blogger anywhere. Plus, she seems to be doing this amazing community-building work in Somaliland, a country that isn’t even really recognized as a country–sort of like Kosovo or Iraqi Kurdistan, except that Somaliland gets almost zero international attention and almost zero international funding. Which I think makes her blogging even more valuable. Plus, she takes fabulous pictures and– here’s where I get jealous– knows how to get them up on her blog in enjoyable form.
(I’ll learn one day… )
So last month, Yvette’s mom died, and she had to go back home to the Philipines to deal with all that. Then her Movable Type blog machine crashed on her… But now she is up again, on Blogger– in a template that will be VERY familiar to longtime readers of JWN!
And with some great photos of celebrations of World Refugee Day, in Hargeisa, the campital of Somaliland (I think). Go see them!!
Okay, next up we have Iraniangirl, who’s living through some pretty interesting times and in response to them seems suddenly to have become incredibly thoughtful and dare I say it mature? I think this post, from yesterday, is really worth reading.
Iraq war: who are the forgers?
The Christian Science Monitor– a paper that I’ve worked with since 1976 — has a really important piece today, in which it apologises for having last month run a piece based on documents that, it has now determined, are forgeries.
The docs in question were acquired by reporter Philip Smucker from disaffected Iraqi General Salah Abdel-Rasool, in Baghdad in early May. They alleged that the vociferously anti-war British MP George Galloway had received $10 million of Iraqi government funding over the past few years to help bolster a whitwash campaign for Saddam Hussein.
Forged documents? Why does this ring a bell?
The Niger/yellowcake forgeries, perhaps?
From what the CSM investigation revealed, the Rasool forgeries were of a considerably higher order of sophistication than the Niger/yellowcake ones. But this episode raises some really interesting questions. Who is producing all these forgeries, whose aim seems to have been to discredit leading opponents of the US-UK war effort, and to build public support for it in the west?
My first hunch would be the ever-untrustworthy Ahmed Chalabi. But since I would hate to smear someone’s reputation based on false accusations (unlike, of course, the authors of the Rasool forgeries), I think someone should launch a thorough investigation of this whole question.
Has there in fact been a conspiracy or network of conspiracies that has aimed to jerk the west into this war? Surely, we deserve to know.
I believe that both the Rasool forgery and the Niger/yellowcake forgery could provide leads that might clarify this issue. The leads on the Niger/yellowcake forgery are probably a little older at this point; though I don’t see many signs that they’ve been systematically followed up. Those low-grade so-called “documents” came to the Brits from the Italians? Or from the Germans? It all seems terribly vague.
Is anyone following this story up well?
But now, we have the much warmer trail of the Rasool forgeries to follow up.
According to today’s piece in the CSM, Rasool described himself as a closet anti-Saddamist and claimed he’d found them in the home of Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein.
(The latest CSM investigation, which is described in length in today’s article, reveals that though Smucker did not pay Rasool directly for the docs, he did make a separate payment of $800 to the general’s neighbor for doing some translating. In a pauperized place like Baghdad, that’s a LOT of money– and some of it just may have made its way back over the garden fence to Rasool… )
Where did Rasool actually get those docs from??? From the CSM’s description of them, the level of their sophistication/verisimilitude was such that it seems unlikely that Rasool produced them himself on a printing press in his back yard (though I suppose that, being a general, he could probably have stolen some of the relevant letterhead fairly easily.)
Some other fascinating clues, however, indicate the author of those docs was not very familiar with institutional practices inside the vast Saddam-era security bureaucracy… So maybe Rasool didn’t produce them himself, but merely agreed to pass them on to eager reporter Smucker on behalf of someone else. (It seems much of Baghdad was awash with former regime insiders trying to peddle docs to reporters in those days.)
So where did Rasool actually get them?? Can he identify the party who gave them to him??
No indication that CSM follow-up reporter Ilene Prusher tried to pursue those questions… But some good shoe-leather work on this lead may well lead into the heart of a much bigger pro-war campaign based on misinformation (regarding WMDs, in general), lies, and forgeries.
Ending cycles of violence
I just got done writing my mid-June column for Al-Hayat… It’s one I’ve been thinking about for many days. Maybe as a sort of slightly philosophical commentary on the resurgence of violence in Palestine/Israel. Anyway, the idea is to take some of what I was looking at and discussing on my recent Africa trip, in terms of trying to figure out what it is that permits a serious peace negotiation to (1) start and then (2) succeed.
The main two examples of that that I looked at were, of course Mozambique and South Africa. In Rwanda, the outcome was notably NOT negotiated; and has anyway been less successful.
Well, mainly in the column, I wrote about South Africa. And since that won’t come out for another 10 days or so, I can’t write much about it here. (Buy the paper!) But there were also a few interesting and relevant things that I learned in Mozambique, that I didn’t have time to write about there…
End of a busy weekend
I’ve been working like the proverbial blue-arsed fly for nearly the whole weekend. Friday, I drove up to DC for the memorial service (gathering?) for my dear and recently departed old friends Jean and Richard Van Wagenen. It was really poignant. Richard had been my Dad’s best friend during WW2 when they worked in Military Intelligence together liaising with each other on behalf of their respective national armies. When he died last month, it really felt to me like the end of an important link with my father’s generation.
When I moved to DC as the single parent of two small kids, in 1982, Richard and Jean were like surrogate parents for me, and surrogate grandparents for the kids. Jean died the day after Thanksgiving.
Yesterday (Sat.), I started out with high hopes that it would be fun to take part in a once-a-week training program for the C’ville Women’s 4-Miler, which is coming up at the end of August. I can already run four miles, however, and do it from time to time as a stretch on my usual 3-mile run. And the program seemed designed for total neophytes. Plus it was extremely rah-rah. I told my friend Beverly whom I was sitting next to on the bleachers as the rah-rahs were progressing, “I think I’m too English for this.”
More on Israel’s assassins
Friend Judy S sent me the URL for an interesting examination of the degree to which Israel’s policy of extra-judicial executions (a.k.a. assassinations) has affected/stimulated the development of similar policies by the UK and the US. I don’t know anything about the writer, Richard Bennett. But he seems to present a LOT of information and I can’t imagine someone would do this in the public media, on such a sensitive subject, without being pretty sure of his sources.
On another note, my old friend Tom Friedman has a fairly good piece on the Israeli assassins issue in today NYT. His main point is that– regardless of whether Israel has the “right” to undertake such killings, or not– the policy seriously undercuts the chances for peace by strengthening the Palestinian hardliners of Hamas.
Is Tom assuming there that Sharon actually wants peace? No, he doesn’t seem to be doing that. (Hey, Tom was in Beirut in the summer of 1982. He has a pretty good take on Sharon.)
But he does pull his punches in a couple of significant ways. First, by not even mentioning the possibility that maybe Sharon and his cronies might actually want to undercut the chances for peace? Second, by not specifying just how many Palestinians have died in these gruesome and deliberate acts of (totally illegal) killing.
According to recent figures from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose work is very carefully done and whose director, Raji Sourani, is a man of huge integrity, no fewer than 243 Palestinians had been killed in assination operations between the beginning of the current intifada and June 3, 2003. (Of course, the number has risen substantially since then.) Of the 243, “at least 90 (37% of the total number of killed in assassinations) were bystanders, of whom 31 (13%) were children.”
Okay, so we assume that “only” 90 of those killed in those operations were bystanders. Then 153 of them were in some way connected with Palestinian militant groups.
Tom F, in his piece, writes, “Have you noticed how often Israel kills a Hamas activist and the victim is described by Israelis as “a senior Hamas official” or a ‘key operative’? This has led me to wonder: How many senior Hamas officials could there be? We’re not talking about I.B.M. here. We’re talking about a ragtag terrorist group. By now Israel should have killed off the entire Hamas leadership twice. Unless what is happening is something else, something I call Palestinian math: Israel kills one Hamas operative and three others volunteer to take his place, in which case what Israel is doing is actually self-destructive.”
Well, by that token, then Israel’s deliberate killing of 153 Palestinian militants would have persuaded 459 of their friends to step up and take their places.
I disagree with quite a few things Tom writes. (What else is new?) But it’s certainly worthwhile to see him hammering home the essential point that, “The fact is, Ariel Sharon’s two years of using the Israeli Army alone to fight terrorism have not made Israelis more secure.”
Israel’s history of assassinations
Great piece by Jackson Diehl in today’s Washington Post.
In it, he details how in each of June 2001 and December 2001– though he erroneously referred to this having happened Dec 2002– American diplomacy had seemed to be successful in winning a ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and then the Israeli security forces heated things up again by undertaking one of their ‘assassination specials’ against the Palestinians…
Not that June 2001 was the first time that had happened, either.
The record goes back at least as far October 1995, when Rabin’s security forces assassinated Fathi Shiqaqi, of Islamic Jihad. Then the Mossad (when Peres was PM) took out Hamas’s Yahya Ayyash, in January 1996.
Both those assassinations were undertaken at times when the Israeli political echelon was also trying to effect a breakthrough in the peace process. (Actually, that could make it a little different from Sharon’s use of assassinations, which is much more widespread and also not necessarily linked to any engagement in peacemaking that is anything like as serious as Rabin’s and Peres’s engagement in that 1995-96 period.)
Details of the 1995-96 assassinations, by the way, are in my 2000 book on the Syrian-Israeli peace talks of 1991-96.
But still, as Diehl demonstrates in his piece, this matter has a significant history.
Sometime, when I have time, I’d like to write more about how I see Sharon’s motivations and maneuvering in all this.
One key point to note is the “appeasement of domestic critics of the peace process aspect.” It’s NOT necessarily the case that, when ordering such assassinations, Israeli leaders have a clear and visionary idea of how this plays into the peacemaking. It’s not even– as Diehl seems to indicate– that they do it precisely in order to torpedo the peace process. In my view, it’s more like they do it as a cheap and unthinking way to appease their domestic critics and reassure them that they are “still security hawks”.
What that totally neglects, however, is the quite illegal nature of such killings. Their quite inhumane effects– especially when carried out in crowded places!! And of course, their effect on the continued re-radicalization of the Palestinian street.
Even given the very best interpretation of Rabin’s or Peres’s or Sharon’s motives– that is, the “explanation” that they themselves give for these actions: that is, that they are designed to weaken the Palestinian hardliners and empower the Palestinian moderates– can’t they see that it just doesn’t work that way???
Also, how extremely patronizing and de-humanizing can you be, to think that swooping in to kill Palestinian hardliners is going to “help” Abu Mazen.
Harley-size cycle of violence
Well, my timing really stinks. Not the first time that the story has majorly changed between deadline-time for my column, and the time of its appearing. (And probably, given the lead-times involved, not the last.)
You can see the column of mine that appeared today in the CSM by clicking here. I wrote it Sunday, did a last-over edit late Tues evening. Just after that, I guess, all heck broke loose.
Maybe I should have seen it coming? Already, Tuesday, IDF attack helicopters had killed five in Gaza (but not the prominent Hamas pol they were aiming for, Abdel-Aziz Rantissi). Actually, I had put a quick ref to that event in an edit I did Tues afternoon, but the copy-editor took it out for lack of space.
Then Wednesday came the big bus-bomb in Jerusalem…