Check out my big news here.
It will be quite the lifestyle change for me, working with the excellent people at CNI/CNIF to put some real organizing oomph into the campaign for fair US policies in the Middle East — and fair discussion about those policies, here in the US.
As you can see, one of the first things I’ll be doing at CNI/CNIF is co-leading a “political pilgrimage” tour that’s leaving October 30 for Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt.
I’m looking forward to maybe meeting JWN readers who live in those countries!
I am planning to blog as much of this tour as I have time for– and I’m planning to get other members of the group to do some blogging about it, too.
We have a new, CNI/CNIF blogging venture in the advanced planning stage, and ready to unveil soon. So from Wednesday, when I officially go on board at CNI/CNIF, that’s where I’ll be doing all my blogging on all matters related to to Arab-Israeli peace issues.
I don’t have any immediate plans for JWN. But it does seem to me that as of Wednesday, I need to stay aware that my public voice will be that of the organization, not of me personally. So the main thing I’ll be using it for is to (hopefully) build CNI/CNIF to new heights of organizational effectiveness.
Of course I’ll keep the readers here posted about the new blog. I’ll miss the kind of intimacy and excitement we’ve had here. But I have to say I’m really excited about what we can all achieve together, organizing-wise, at CNI/CNIF.
You know, folks, I’ve never put a Donate button here at JWN. But if you appreciate what I’ve done here over the past nearly-seven years and support what I’m planning to do over at CNI/CNIF, then I urge you to donate everything you can– money, volunteer hours, organizing ideas, etc– over there at CNI/CNIF.
Here’s the page for online monetary donations. And here’s the contact page, for you to write in with organizing suggestions, offers to do some volunteer work for us, or yes, even a nice handy check. Write us into your will, or whatever… You can be assured I’ll do everything I can to make every donated dollar go a long way.
More, soon…
Author: Helena
J Street blogger panel–next Monday!
J Street’s big inaugural conference starts next Sunday evening… And at lunchtime on Monday, Oct. 26, there’ll be a great affiliated event: a panel discussion involving a large number of pro-peace bloggers, including yours truly.
All JWN readers who are at the conference, come along! Blogs have played a large role in breaking the tight blockade that previously prevented real facts and fair-minded opinions about the Palestine Question from getting anything like a fair hearing in the American public discourse.
I’m really excited because I’ll get to meet, in real physical space, many bloggers whose work I have long admired but whom I have not yet actually met.
They include panel organizers Richard Silverstein of Tikkun Olam and Jerry Haber of the Magnes Zionist. Also Phil Weiss of Mondoweiss and Max Blumenthal, who blogs various various places– and also does those famous videos.
Laila El-Haddad of Gaza Mom is coming, and Matt Duss of the Wonk Room, and a bunch of other great bloggers. I imagine the best way to keep updated on the participant list will be to check Richard’s blog.
The panel will run 12:30 – 2:00pm, and be in the McPhearson Square Room at the Grand Hyatt. I think you have to be a registered participant in the conference to attend, and that lunch will be provided. (H’mmm. That probably means people will take 20 minutes going thru the lunch line so we won’t get started till around 1? People: go through those lunch lines as fast as you can, okay?)
Richard reminds us of the following:
- Our event is not officially sponsored by J Street and nothing said during our session should be construed as representing J Street’s views. We are bloggers and independent actors. We do not speak for J Street and they do not endorse our statements. They have graciously offered us a physical space during their conference. But that is where the relationship ends.
…J Street has agreed to our panel and understands the independent role we play in the blogosphere and at their conference. That is something that is important and praiseworthy.
I hope to see many of you there!
Olmert, author of assault on Gaza, shunned in Chicago
The Harris School for Public Policy at the University of Chicago presumably thought it was quite “normal” and appropriate– perhaps, even a boon for fundraising!– to invite former Israeli p.m. Ehud Olmert to give a lecture.
Olmert, however, is not just any old former prime minister. He was also the prime author of the decision to launch two extremely inhumane wars of choice: against Lebanon in 2006 and against Gaza last winter.
Israel’s conduct of the latter war– as well as a lot of other Olmert-era policies like the prolonged and lethal siege of Gaza and the continued attacks on the Palestinian community in Jerusalem– rightly came under severe criticism from the UN’s Goldstone Commission.
Judge Richard Goldstone, an experienced international prosecutor and investigator (and also Jewish and a self-proclaimed Zionist) determined that many of Israel’s actions against Gaza constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.
So why would the University of Chicago or any other university in the democratic world consider it appropriate or “normal” to give a podium to an accused war criminal like this?
Today, Ali Abunimah and numerous other supporters of the simple proposition that the rights of Palestinians should be protected just as much as anyone else’s rights were, as it happened, there in the lecture hall too.
You can see the series of exchanges that resulted in this great report on Electronic Intifada.
It’s also worth reading this piece of analysis by Aluf Benn in tomorrow’s Haaretz.
Benn writes,
- Operation Cast Lead in Gaza was perceived in Israel as a shining victory. Rocket fire from Gaza was brought to a halt almost completely… “The world” let the operation continue and did not impose a cease-fire. A wonderful war.
Ten months later, it seems the victory was a Pyrrhic one. Israel did not realize that the rules have changed with Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president.
He also noted this about last winter’s war:
- The defense minister, Ehud Barak, wanted to halt Cast Lead after two or three days, but was overruled by Olmert who wanted to keep the campaign going, and then going further.
It seems that the accused war criminal Olmert is planning to speak at other US universities, too.
The University of Arkansas on October 27, for example.
IPS analysis of ‘Galbraith-gate’
It’s here, and also archived here.
Y’all know the story here already. (Renewed kudos to Reidar Visser for breaking it for all those of us who don’t read Norwegian… Reidar, I know I should have slotted in a quotoid from you there… Sorry that I didn’t.)
My conclusion in the IPS piece is,
- Here in the U.S., Galbraith has long been associated with the “liberal hawk” wing of the Democratic Party, which has argued since the early 1990s that U.S. military power can, and on occasion should, be used to impose a U.S.-defined human rights agenda in various parts of the world.
Many members of this group have been liberal idealists – though some of those who, on “liberal” grounds, gave early support to Pres. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq later expressed their regret for adopting that position.
Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush’s late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.
When I was researching the piece today, I was intrigued to see that until he took up his UN-Afghanistan position in March, Galbraith was a “Senior Diplomatic Fellow” at the DC-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, which occupies the currently fairly influential, soggy-left end of the spectrum of Washington’s power-connected think-tanks.
I really do hope that the revelation of Peter Galbraith’s sordid– and until recently painstakingly concealed– financial dealings with the KRG and DNO yet further diminishes the influence of liberal hawks in the US power elite and US society.
UN-HRC endorses Goldstone; Netanyahu’s over-reach unraveling?
The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva today endorsed the report of the Goldstone Commission that identified probable war crimes and and crimes against humanity committed by Israel and by some Palestinian armed groups during last winter’s Israeli assault on Gaza.
That report from AFP tells us that,
- 25 of the council’s 47 members, led by the Arab and African states, voted for the resolution. Six, including the United States, voted against while 16 others either abstained or did not vote.
The resolution calls for the endorsement of “the recommendations contained in the report” produced by a fact-finding mission led by international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone to probe the 22-day conflict.
It also “calls upon all concerned parties including United Nations bodies, to ensure their implementation.”
It was tragic that the US voted against the HRC resolution. However, it seems likely the Goldstone report will now be considered by the Security Council at the session it will be holding on the matter next week.
The world– and especially perhaps the majority-Muslim countries of the world– will be watching closely to see that the US does not cast a veto there.
The fact that the HRC took up the Goldstone report once again, and that it endorsed its main findings and recommendations, marks a double setback for Israel’s current, extremely rightwing government, which had fought tooth and nail to quash or bury it.
In the first instance, the HRC’s decision to take up the report once again this week was due to the fact that the PLO leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, which ten days took its own– quite clearly Israel-spurred– action to bury the report, was forced by the overwhelming strength of Palestinian public opinion to reverse that policy.
In the second instance, the fact that the report won such strong endorsement in the HRC marked a notable setback for the campaign Netanyahu waged against it there.
Netanyahu and his coalition partners– many of whom are even more extreme than he is– have been riding high in recent weeks. They had completely bypassed all the efforts of the Obama administration to win a freeze on the construction of new (illegal) Israeli settlements in east Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank. They had persuaded Obama to force Abbas into a humiliating three-way meeting along with Netanyahu and Obama, despite Abbas’s previously oft-stated refusal to meet with Netanyahu in the absence of a settlement freeze. The actions of extremist, government-backed Israeli settler organizations to penetrate, settle, and excavate deep inside areas of Palestinian East Jerusalem were accelerating full-steam ahead.
Oh, Netanyahu must have been feeling so happy… Especially at his ability to keep the Obama administration completely off his back.
Not so fast, Mr. Netanyahu.
Right now, Pres. Obama and his most senior military and diplomatic advisers are meeting in prolonged, solemn session to reach some extremely serious decisions about the deployment of reinforcements for, and the mounting threats to, the many scores of thousands of US and allied troops who are deployed deep into the heart of many very distant portions of the Muslim world.
And Netanyahu, the prime minister of a small country of some seven million citizens, thinks his government’s interest in colonial expansion should necessarily trump the rights of the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the strong concern that the world’s more than one billion Muslims have in the wellbeing of Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem, and the safety and security of the US and allied troops who are deployed throughout the Muslim world?
He’s been dreaming– and pursuing– some dreams that are extremely hazardous to international peace and stability.
But now, there are some signs that the extent of Netanyahu’s colonialist over-reach is becoming more clear, including to decisionmakers here in Washington; and that it may, finally, be meeting its limits here.
In one of my early reactions to the Goldstone report last month, I noted that many of the folks who have wanted to bury or set aside Goldston’s recommendations about winning accountability for past actions in Gaza said they wanted to do so “in the interests of peacemaking; that is, the interests of the future rather than the past.”
However, I also noted that Gaza’s 1.45 million people face conditions of horrendous inhumanity and stress in the present; and that those conditions continue, day by day by day.
The prime interest of everyone concerned about relieving suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian theater should therefore surely be on lifting Israel’s quite inhumane siege of Gaza. A siege that is, as Godlstone noted, itself an instance of quite illegal collective punishment.
I gather that last night, at a dinner hosted by the American Task Force on Palestine, Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. Jim Jones, told attendees that “All three of the crossings between Israel and Gaza should be opened.” (HT: Gene Bird)
Those are the crossings through which goods, and a small number of people, flow. Since it is still, under international law, the occupying power in Gaza, Israel has direct responsibility for the wellbeing– we could even say, the normal human flourishing– of the residents of Gaza. So obviously, those gates should be opened.
Winter approaches, but the Gazans haven’t been able even to rebuild their homes, businesses, and basic infrastructure after the destruction Israel wrought last winter.
Gen. Jones can tell an audience that “the gates should be opened.” But the US government continues to provide immense, and in many fields quite unequalled, benefits to the government of Israel– in the military, economic, diplomatic, and many other arenas.
So when will we see the Obama administration start to apply some strict accountability to Israel’s government regarding lifting the siege of Gaza?
Deeds, not words, please. On all aspects of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and the protection of Palestinian– along with Israeli– rights.
Good reporting from RFE/RL on Galbraith/DNO
Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty is a relic of the Cold War that in the mid-1990s got rebranded by Tom Dine (as you can read in my Nation piece) as a very serious lever of US soft power in the Muslim world.
What RFE/RL does is technically termed “surrogate broadcasting.” The current director-general says what they aim to produce is “something like the same National Public Radio station we have here in the US”– but produced by nationals of the countries to which RFE/RL broadcasts.
Which is another way of saying that though RFE/RL is funded by the S government, it aims to provide quality news coverage to the countries it broadcasts to. Unlike, for example the Alhurra t.v. channel or the Iraq-only Radio Sawa, which were established (under a single, and for-profit umbrella) during the Bush administration: Those latter two provide “news” that is much more propagandistic and/or ill-considered.
So today, I’m following Reidar Visser’s tip and looking at the RFE/RL coverage of the Galbraith affair… And yes, it is very good .
The writer, Charles Recknagel, gives us a concise description of the legal-affairs backstory for last week’s revelation by the Norwegian daily Dagens Naeringsliv that Peter Galbraith had a very significant material interest in the Kurdish Regional Government’s achievement of control over exploitation of new oil fields within its boundaries– at the very same time he was arguing strongly, as a supposed constitutional “expert”, that the new, post-invasion “regional governments” in Iraq (of which the KRG is thus far the only one) should gain exactly that and other new rights, at the expense of the central government.
The RFE/RL account of “Galbraithgate” seems to clearly give the lie to those (like Laura Rosen and others) who argue that last week’s revelation of Galbraith’s strong financial interest in the devolution of powers inside Iraq was timed to embarrass him at a point when he has just had gotten into a very public spat with the (as it happens, Norwegian) head of the UN mission in Afghanistan.
Recknagel writes,
- The financial news editor of “Dagens Naeringsliv,” Terje Erikstad, says the discovery of Galbraith’s name was completely unanticipated.
“We started out the investigation looking at the fine levied against a mid-sized Norwegian oil company, DNO,” Erikstad said. “It is often in the news because it was a pioneer in northern Iraq and its shares on the Oslo stock exchange go up and down with developments there. We were not looking for Galbraith’s name at all, so finding it on [Porcupine’s] founding documents in Delaware was quite a surprise for us.”
Recknagel also gives an estimate of how much money is at stake in the current litigation between Galbraith’s company, Porcupine, and DNO:
- The paper [DN] published a document from 2006 that lists the partners in the Tawke field and shows Porcupine as having a 5 percent interest in it.
The paper estimates that the total amount of compensation being sought jointly by Porcupine and the Yemeni businessman is some $525 million. A ruling is expected in the first half of next year.
DNO has the capacity currently to export roughly 43,000 barrels per day from Iraqi Kurdistan [presumably, all of this from Tawke field], worth approximately $30 million annually. However, exports are currently blocked as the KRG and Baghdad continue to dispute the same kind of issues Galbraith once tried to resolve.
Yes, isn’t that the crux of the story: That Galbraith was actively working for the KRG to acquire these kinds of revenue-producing powers that were previously in the sovereign domain of Iraq’s central government– at exactly the same time, 2004-2006, that he was already in a business relationship with both the KRG and DNO whereby he stood to reap considerable personal benefit from the new arrangements he was arguing for.
Good job, RFE/RL.
So when will we see some similarly hard-headed reporting in organs of the US mainstream media other than the Boston Globe? The Globe did have a piece about “Galbraith-gate” in today’s paper– but it was not nearly as well researched and written as the one in RFE/RL.
‘The Nation’ piece on AIPAC’s Tom Dine
This piece is online now, here. It was really fascinating to work on– just as it has been really interesting to work with Dine on the US-Syria Working Group, as is mentioned in the article.
Th Nation has two linked pieces– both by Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz: American Jews Rethink Israel, and Israel vs. Human Rights.
Great work, Phil and Adam! I’m proud to be up there with you!
More on Galbraith; Boston Globe runs the story
Reidar Visser has a new report up on his blog, that summarizes the latest revelations about Galbraith and Kurdish oil made in today’s Dagens Næringsliv, from Oslo.
DN (and from them, Reidar) have reproduced a document attesting that the Connecticut-registered company in which Galbraith has, I believe, a half-share did indeed have a 5% interest in the production-sharing agreement for Kurdistan’s new Tawke oil field.
The Boston Globe has a version of the Galbraith story today, too.
They have a quote there from Juan Cole, even though he hasn’t blogged anything about the Galbraith affair. (Unlike yours truly.)
They also, more importantly, have a quote from Galbraith himself, in which he says,
- “The business interest, including my investment into Kurdistan, was consistent with my political views… These were all things that I was promoting, and in fact, have brought considerable benefit to the people of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan oil industry, and also to shareholders.’’
The Globe reporter, Farah Stockman, then immediately makes this somewhat strange comment:
- It is not illegal or unheard of for former US officials to do business with people they worked with during their time in government. But ethical questions often arise when such dealings become public.
It is, of course, illegal for people who are currently in government jobs to engage in business affairs that might in any way be affected by the decisions they make in an official capacity; and in the US there are well-known regulations regarding how long a person must be out of office before s/he can engage in such business affairs. This is basic to the integrity of government functioning, anywhere.
In 2003-05, when Galbraith was rushing round Iraq and the world arguing passionately for a radical form of Kurdish separation from the central Iraqi state, he was not in fact on the US government payroll. He had been, in late 2002, when he taught at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. But in the 2003-05 period, he was presenting himself as (a) a constitutional affairs specialist, and (b) an adviser to the Kurdish leaders, who was providing his advice to them on a contract or sometimes even “expenses-only” basis because of the depth of his commitment to their cause.
In all the articles he published in the US media in and since those years, arguing for the radical devolution of Iraqi governmental powers to the country’s various ethno-sectarian groups (including the Kurds), not once do I recall having seen it say in the tag-line that he had business interests related to the topics he was writing about.
All those editors just took him at his word when he claimed to be this idealistic, quite disinterested “expert.” He was everyone’s favorite liberal hawk.
Stockman also has this about Galbraith:
- Galbraith said yesterday his role in the [Iraqi] constitutional negotiations was unpaid and informal, and therefore he was under no obligation to disclose his business interests to the US or Iraqi governments. He also said confidentiality agreements prevented him from publicly disclosing details of the business.
Galbraith is, of course, far from the only well-placed US citizen who sought to make some fast money from all the “business opportunities” that the US occupation of Iraq opened up to them. But he seems to have realized that the extremely scuzzy nature of this deal would not look good if held up to the light of day. I’m assuming that it was him, himself, whom the “confidentiality agreements” in question were designed to protect.
Anyway, he should now be asked to abrogate those agreements and come quite clean. I mean, Peter Galbraith does believe in good government, doesn’t he?
NYT studiously ignores Galbraith-DNO link
The NYT today carried a substantial article about the dispute over oil rights between the Iraqi central government and the Kurdish regional government, including many mentions of the oil lease for the KRG’s Tawke field held by the Norwegian company DNO– and they managed to do that without making any mention of the other big aspect of this story that’s roiling the Norwegian press: namely, the fact that the US “cowboy diplomatic advisor” Peter Galbraith has been revealed to be a mystery shareholder in DNO.
Amazing. How could the NYT not mention this– especially given the amount of space the NYT has given to Galbraith’s own views in recent years, both on the op-ed page and as the subject of news articles, including recently?
There truly seems to be (as Reidar Visser and Steve Connors have noted in the comments section of of my earlier post on this topic) some kind of vow of omerta in the US MSM regarding Galbraith’s investing activities and the sharp conflicts of interest involved therein.
in the English-language media, the only other major people to have picked up on the story so far are Michael Rubin of The National Review (here and here) and the always excellent Paul Woodward of War in Context.
Meanwhile, Reaidar Visser has provided us with a fuller translation of the Oct. 10 article about Galbraith from Dagens Næringsliv (DN).
The article puts Galbraith’s involvement in the context of the dispute that has broken out between DNO, the KRG, and some former DNO shareholders, including the Connecticut-registered company “Porcupine”, of which Galbraith is a significant shareholder.
The DN journos have these quotes gathered from Galbraith, as they confronted him in the Norwegian city of Bergen where he has a home along with his Norwegian wife:
- 1. “It is well known that I have worked for companies that invest in Iraq. I have pledged to maintain confidentiality concerning these relationships and cannot provide any more information.”
2. “I have worked with companies investing in Iraq and of course the Kurdish authorities know about my relationships to my clients. That is all I want to say.”
Michael Rubin had done a little digging round and found some paragraphs about Galbraith and his financial interests in Iraqi Kurdistan in this January 2007 Al Kamen piece in the WaPo (scroll down):
- Former ambassador to Croatia Peter W. Galbraith, testifying last week at a Senate hearing about Iraq, noted that he’d been asked by committee staffers to “clarify my relationship with the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
The query probably was sparked by rumors over the years that Galbraith was formally advising the Kurds. His biography is on the KRG’s “Kurdistan, The Other Iraq” Web site, which lists him as an “adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
In his testimony, Galbraith said he’d “been friends of the Kurdish leaders and for that matter, other Iraqis, for a very long period of time, but I am not in a paid relationship with the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
In an e-mail exchange Friday and Saturday, Galbraith wrote that he hadn’t seen the Web site and “to the extent that it implies a formal relationship with the KRG, it is inaccurate.” Galbraith wrote that he had been paid by “two Kurdish clients” for four months in late 2003-2004 for “either an educational program on negotiations or conducting a negotiation” — all outside this country.
“I do not lobby or represent anyone in the U.S.,” he wrote, adding that he specifically noted this in his recent book on Iraq and explained there that the KRG has “provided security, accommodation and in-country transportation” when he visits.
So, he did not get paid in cash by the KRG. But was he given the shares in the DNO-KRG deal as some form of “recognition” for the work he did for the KRG?
Definitely worth asking more questions.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, over to you?
RIP Leila Abu-Saba
Leila Abu-Saba was one of the first great American bloggers for Palestinian rights and Arab-Israeli peace. Since early 2004, she used her blog Dove’s Eye View to explore many dimensions of her Lebanese-American heritage, her family life, Lebanese politics, peace issues, identity issues, and from time to time the cancer that started to develop within her shortly after she started blogging.
Recently, she hadn’t been blogging so much. She wrote here, in July, that she’d decided to concentrate on her novel.
Yesterday, she died. You can find a nice, short appreciation of her life and work, here.
She was humane, she was funny, she was inquisitive, and wonderful.
Every so often on her blog, there would be references to her two sons, Jacob and Joseph, now roughly seven and nine years old. On July 23, she posted an adorable picture of the three of them together, here. You’d also sometimes see references to her husband, David, who is Jewish, and the discussions they had about the heritages shared by the family they created.
Oh, here’s a picture of the four of them.
My thoughts are mainly with David, Jacob, and Joseph. (My mother also died when I was eight, after a long illness. It was hard for all of us, including my father.)
Salam, shalom, strength and comfort to the three of them. And thank you, thank you, Leila for all you did.