Helena – Page 45 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Turkey’s intriguing diplomacy

Turkey’s adroit and visionary foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, and the government he’s a part of, have taken two intriguing moves in recent days:

spelled out to CNN

concluded

Regarding the air exercise cancelation, there are a few interesting points:
First, the US, Dutch, and Italian governments got so snitty with the Turkish decision that they decided to cancel their participation in the air exercises, too– thus expressing their “solidarity” with Israel. So Turkey– a full member of NATO– lost out on some training that would probably have been valuable for it, and for NATO.
(Israel, of course, is not a member of NATO. You’d think the US, Netherlands, and Italy might have placed their responsibility to NATO higher than their sentimental attachment to Israel?)
Second, the idea of having Israeli planes practicing air maneuvers etc in a portion of Turkey that’s very close to Iran and could provide one of the transit routes in an Israeli air attack on Iran seems like an unusually strong pander to Israeli militarism, anyway.
Third, the decision seemed to show that the long-running tussle for power between the twice-elected civilian government run by Turkey’s moderately Islamist AK Party and the “secularist-fundamentalists” of Turkey’s military has been resolved, for now, in favor of the civilians. That is good news– for just about everyone except the small coterie of Turkish generals who still long for the repressive policies and unbridled ethnonationalism of the old Kemalist military elite.
Fourth and last, let’s note how principled and effective this Turkish government has been in its approach to the whole Gaza crisis. Turkey, which has fairly longstanding and until recently warm relations with Israel, has long offered to act as an intermediary in the negotiations Israel still desperately needs to have in order to consolidate the still-tenuous ceasefire with Gaza, and to end Israel’s lengthy, quite illegal, and very harmful siege of Gaza. But Israel has always refused this mediation.
Turkey’s government seems more concerned to do something to end the horrific situation of Gazas 1.5 million people than nearly all the Arab governments, combined!
Last year, the Olmert government in Israel did agree to Davutoglu’s offer to arrange, host, and mediate proximity talks with Syria on a possible final peace agreement. Indeed, one of the reasons Davutoglu and his boss, p.m. Rejep Tayyip Erdogan, are so angry with Israel over Gaza these days is because just around Christmas last year, Olmert seemed to promise the Turks that he was “on the brink of a breakthrough” in the talks with Syria.
But then, two days later, Olmert sent waves of bombers from his air force off to start the lengthy series of raids against Gaza that constituted the very punishing first step of the Gaza war… So the Turks, not surprisingly, figured they had been used as patsies in an attempt to distract world attention from what Olmert was, obviously, all the time preparing to do against Gaza. (That feeling was what lay behind the anger Erdogan expressed towards Israeli president Shimon Peres, in Davos, in January.)

Exploring the Geneva Initiative

I have had a bit of time to explore some of the detailed Annexes to the long-running, Swiss-funded peace-visioning project called the Geneva Initiative. You can access them through this portal page. It’s probably good to start with the first PDF file there (“Summary”), and then go to the others for more details as you want them.
These Annexes, which were released last month, build on the general framework for a two-state outcome that was established in the 2003 Geneva Accord. The whole process is a non-governmental one between Israelis and Palestinians. However, the lead Palestinians involved in it have always been people very close to– or actually members of– the Ramallah interim PA government. Most Israeli participants are close to the dovish wing of the Labour Party, or other left parties. So they are considerably further from being able to influence any real current centers of power in Israel than are their Palestinian counterparts.
(On the other hand, for the Palestinians, if the only center of “power” that they are able to influence is the heavily Israel- and US-dependent Ramallah PA, then what real power are we talking about, anyway?)
There are many other power imbalances between the participants from the two sides, too. Primarily, the fact that on one side the participants are citizens of a wealthy independent country and on the other, the participants are citizens of a country under extreme stress and under complete military occupation by the first country. This imbalance underlies everything about the Initiative– including, for example, the fact that all the people who play named functions in it seem to be Israelis. And not just any Israelis, either, but Jewish Israelis. For some reason, it appears that no Israeli citizens of Palestinian ethnicity are included in the Israeli team– despite the fact that these Palestinian Israelis constitute around 20% of the national population; and if they supported a project such as this one they could probably make a particularly helpful contribution.
There are, however, many items of interest in the latest Annexes. Page 17 of the Summary gives you the broad map of the proposed national borders. The Initiative’s approach to borders is that they should be based on the June 4, 1967 line but with mutually agreed land swaps on a 1:1 basis. This map shows you that the land swaps would involve Israel hanging onto most of the big settlements in and around occupied East Jerusalem, and to some others near the Green Line in the Northern West Bank and the Latrun salient. The land the Palestinians would get in return would be in the (less developed and more arid) south– both a thickening of the Gaza Strip to the south-east and a little land west of Hebron.
The connector between the West Bank and Gaza that the Initiative envisages would not be counted in the land swap as it would remain under Israeli sovereignty (but have Palestinian administration.)
The border line becomes particularly convoluted as it approaches Jerusalem (see p.53 of the Summary.) On pp.55 and 56 you can see how the planners tried to design ways for Israelis and Palestinians to achieve a reasonable degree of contiguity across some of those salients.
Some of the most interesting parts of the Jerusalem border are where it goes through the Old City, which they propose dividing in the only way that seems reasonable, if there is to be a two-state solution, that is, by giving the Jewish Quarter to the Israeli city of Yerushalayim and the other three quarters to the Palestinian city of Al-Quds (though they would also give Yerushalayim a chunk that i think was part of the historic Armenian Quarter.)
The 13 Annexes include no fewer than three that concern only Jerusalem. One deals with an Inter-Religious Council for the city, another with “The Multinational Presence in Al-Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount Compound” (see its very complicated organization chart on p.77)… and then there is the mapping/town-planning one.
The Water annex– which I am happy to say was negotiated in part at a session hosted by the Annapolis Friends Meeting, in Maryland– does base its approach on the need for “a just and rightful re-division of water resources” between the two countries. However, sadly, when it comes to spelling (p.92) exactly how much water “will become available to the Palestinians” under the agreement, none of the figures have yet been agreed.
Also, I have a concern that spelling it out in that way makes it seem that it would still be Israel that, over all, would control the water resources, doling them out to the Palestinians, rather than the two sides having equal control over shared aquifers.
… If there is to be a two-state outcome, the work in all these annexes will be extremely useful to the negotiators. Two authoritative negotiating teams negotiating in good faith could probably take this set of templates and nail down a final agreement within 2-3 months.
But will that ever happen?
There are problems in generating an “authoritative negotiating team negotiating in good faith” on both sides of the line. But the problems on the Israeli side are far, far greater at this point than those on the Palestinian side since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown no signs whatever that he is prepared to negotiate in good faith. Indeed, his government is continuing to take very widescale actions deep inside the occupied territories that daily make it much harder for him or any subsequent Israeli government to undertake the withdrawal of settlers that would be needed by any two-state agreement.
On the Palestinian side, though many disagreements continue between Fateh and Hamas, the Hamas leadership has stated very clearly for several years now that it is quite prepared to let the Fateh leadership and its allies go ahead and negotiate a two-state peace agreement– provided that any agreement that results is then submitted to a Palestinian-wide referendum. (So yes, the referendum provision does hamper the freedom of the negotiators to give away just any concession they want to to the Israelis. But if they did make more concessions than a subsequent referendum could support, then the agreement would not prove viable over the long run, anyway.)
Similarly, the concessions the Israeli side must make must also be supported in subsequent Israeli elections– and possibly also, specifically, in a referendum.
These political facts, on either side of the line, mean that peace-minded leaders need to be spelling out very explicitly for their people to hear, their compelling vision of the many benefits that peace will bring. Plus, the whole of the international community needs to tell both peoples that there will be tough consequences for not supporting a fairly negotiated agreement.
The Geneva Initiative folks have made an earnest– but, I have to say, not terribly persuasive– attempt to start spelling out their version of the benefits (as well as the nuts-and bolts) of the two-state peace they envision.
Their efforts at “selling the peace” are sometimes quite maladroit. For example, on the Geneva Initiative website, they republish an excerpt from an article by the Nasser Lahham, the chief editor of the Ma’an News Agency, titled “US President Obama Expresses Interest in the Geneva Initiative”…. Which sounds quite upbeat and positive, right?
But if you go to the original article from which these few paragraphs were taken, you’ll see that in that broader context the reference to the Geneva Initiative was a decidedly negative one, from the Palestinian point of view.
The original article, which was published a couple of weeks ago, was titled, “A Palestinian mini-state linked to Iran strike”. The lead was this:

in hopes of gaining Arab acquiescence in a first strike on Iran.

Now, it is very possible indeed that for the Israeli staff members who seem to control what goes onto the GI website, the idea that their pursuit of the GI could help pave the way for an attack on Iran would be seen as a positive. I know that is absolutely not the case for most Palestinians– and that probably includes most of the ones who work on the GI…
Ah well, I’m not going to tell the people who run the Geneva Initiative how to run their public outreach effort.
I think they’ve done just about everything a non-governmental effort can do to spell out how a two-state solution could be achieved– if indeed it still can be achieved. Which daily looks more and more unlikely.
What’s the game-changer here? My hopes that it might come from Washington have sunk very low in recent weeks. Now, maybe we’ll have to go back to the only remaining game-changer that’s left after Washington disappoints: the UN Security Council.
Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is so important to world peace that it should never have been taken away from the Security Council. It was Henry Kissinger who smurfed it away, really, after the 1973 war and under the guise of the Two-superpower condominium that hosted the 1973 Arab-Israeli Peace Conference in– Geneva. But then he brilliantly out-manipulated Moscow; 16 years later the Soviet Union collapsed; and by then many people around the world thought it was just somehow “natural” that the US should be the party that leads Arab-Israeli peace efforts.
But it’s not “natural” at all. It is most un-natural that a distant government that provides rock-solid partisan support to one side in a dispute should be the main arbiter and leader of all peace efforts involving that side and its opponent. It’s also most un-natural that this arbiter should keep proposing and pursuing actions that are quite contrary to international law– but then be able to enroll the UN itself as a junior partner in the peacemaking…

IPS piece on Abbas’s waning popularity

Oops, I forgot to mention this when it came out, on Friday. But anyway, the piece is here, and also archived here.
The conclusion there:

Nonsense from Blair

Mondoweiss today gives us a Youtube clip of Tony Blair dodging a tough question from a University of Buffalo student about the Goldstone report.
The student, Nick Kabat, asked Blair why the US and Israel should be allowed to get away with blocking the Goldstone Report, how (as the “Quartet”‘s peace envoy) he could explain that proceeding with Goldstone’s recommendations might harm the peace process, and whether he didn’t think that the blocade on Gaza also harmed the peace process.
You could see Blair ducking and weaving. (The questions had all been pre-screened by the university; but Kabat submitted a bland dummy question then asked this one instead.)
Blair said he’d been to Gaza “twice– in the recent period” and that the situation there is difficult… But you also “have to understand” that Israel has received a lot of rockets from there since it withdrew in 2005 and still has its young soldier Gilad Shalit held there as a prisoner…
No mention from Blair that there have been almost no rockets coming out of Gaza since Hamas announced the currently-operant ceasefire there on January 18– but despite that lack of rocketings, the Israeli siege is harsher even than it was prior to last winter’s war.
No mention of the roughly 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners and detainees being held in Israeli jails. They include more than two dozen elected Palestinian MPs and thousands of others elected for purely political reasons. Shalit, by contrast, was on active military service and thereby knowingly ran the risk of being taken as a prisoner-of-war.
What a dishonest schmuck Blair is. (Nothing new there.)
Then he said that this “situation” could only be resolved through a meaningful peace process that involves action from the top down “and from the bottom up”. This “bottom up” approach is, of course, where he concurs to a large degree with Netanyahu. It involves some elements of Netanyahu’s fallaciously announced “economic peace”, along with a colonial-style approach/argument that the Palestinians somehow “aren’t yet ready for independence”… And thus it will take many more years to painstakingly build Palestinian institutions “from the bottom up” before Tony Blair can even think of “allowing” them to have independence.
So in the meantime, his argument clearly implied, it is really quite alright for the Israelis to continue maintaining their quite inhumane tight siege on Gaza.
He also later said that his best indicator of the “good news from Israel and Palestine” is that he can now travel around the West Bank to cities that previously he was unable to travel to.
Quite unself-consciously! It was just all, quite unabashedly, about him and his freedom to travel.
(And Gaza’s 1.5 million besieged people are supposed to take what kind of comfort from that?)
Memo to the UN Security Council: This guy’s attitudes and policies are actively harmful to the Palestinian people and to world peace. Take him off the job immediately.
Actually, what the Security Council needs to do most urgently is mount its own struggle for independence from US colonialism, as embodied in the whole concept of the UN being subordinate to US leadership in this grotesque body, the so-called “Quartet”, and to leave the Quartet immediately.
Well, either that or reconfigure it to be under the control of the UN, not Washington.

Peter Galbraith, oil contracts, and Kurds

Reidar Visser informs us today that the independent-minded US “free-lance diplomat” Peter Galbraith reportedly, from 2004 through 2008, held a five-percent share in the production-sharing agreement concluded between the small Norwegian private oil company DNO and the Kurdish Regional Government.
Galbraith, a longtime supporter of Kurdish (and before that Croatian) independence, was most recently working as deputy to Kai Eide, the head of the UN’s mission in Afghanistan. Eide fired him last week for, essentially, insubordination.
Back in 2003-05, Galbraith was an influential adviser to the US occupation authorities as they drew up Iraq’s new, heavily decentralized Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) and Constitution, and to various Kurdish political leaders. He was also hailed– and published– by major western news organizations as a credibly neutral (and presumably disinterested) analyst of Iraqi constitutional affairs.
But now it appears that, instead of being the idealist and the brave proponent of the rights of embattled minorities that he had always portrayed himself to be, in reality he was acting as a one-man East India Company, consorting with compliant “locals” (= “natives”) to rip off their country’s resources.
Visser writes,

Dagens Næringsliv

none other than Peter Galbraith

Visser then notes the multiplicity of “hats” that Galbraith was wearing as he strode around post-invasion Iraq in the early years of the US occupation– including “ABC News consultant” (a generously compensated gig, that one usually is), and a compensated consultant for “Kurdish clients”, as well as a constitutional adviser in general and a fairly prolific author of pro-partition analyses.
Visser gives an excellent, detailed analysis of the influence Galbraith claimed he had, and the influence he almost certainly did have, on the drafting of the ‘Transitional Administrative Law’ (TAL) that was imposed on Iraq by Bush appointee Jerry Bremer in March 2004– quoting Galbraith’s own words from the book he published in 2006 that was notably titled The End of Iraq:

Kurdistan would manage future oil fields (and keep revenues)

Visser concludes by noting,

It is of course somewhat ironic that these revelations should come at a time when Galbraith seems to possess the high moral ground in another controversy also involving Norwegians and Middle Eastern conflicts: The ongoing dispute with UN diplomat Kai Eide over Afghanistan’s elections result.

Personally, I don’t think that Galbraith does occupy the moral high ground in his dispute with Eide. It was a matter of insubordination– by an arrogant American– to his boss within a duly authorized and well-run UN mission. If he disagreed with Eide (as he evidently did) there were things he could do other than try to make end-runs around him.
Anyway, do go read all of Visser’s excellently argued piece there at Historiae. You cannot leave any comments there– but you can at the linked post on his blog. Or, of course, you can leave them here, with a very good chance that Reidar will read them here, too.
By the way, Dagens Næringsliv is apparently going to be publishing follow-up pieces on this matter.

Obama’s Nobel

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today that it’s awarding the 2009 Nobel peace prize to Barack Obama.
The announcement says the award is being given,

My first thought on hearing the news was that the award seems a little premature. After all, he hasn’t yet actually made peace anywhere, and his efforts on the Palestinian Question– which he himself launched with such fanfare on his first day in office– have been decidedly disappointing.
On the other hand, his declaration of support for a world free of nuclear weapons was, as the committee noted, a very important step.
When I was working on my 2000 book, The Moral Architecture of World Peace: Nobel Laureates Discuss our Global Future I surveyed the history of the peace prize and discussed with the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee its philosophy in awarding the prizes. Sometimes, he said, they are awarded for past achievements and sometimes to someone who had started out along a good, though perhaps challenging, peace track. In the latter case, the intent of the award was to encourage this person to continue along the peace track.
The committee has also evidently made a real effort to make the award to people of a variety of different backgrounds and both genders. (Unlike all those numerous hard-science Nobel prizes, awarded by Swedes rather than Norwegians, nearly all of which go to well-funded white male professors at very well-funded big American universities.) It has also sought to establish the linkages between peacemaking/peacebuilding and other concerns such as environmental concerns or the rights of indigenous peoples.
Some of the committee’s decisions– particularly its awards to Henry Kissinger, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat– have been extremely controversial. (To say the least.)
There is also, of course, still a tiny remaining trace of the “rebranding” effort that Alfred Nobel was engaged in when he endowed the prizes. He had made his money largely through production of dynamite; so of course it was a “good” branding move to have his name become much more strongly associated with the concept of peacemaking than that of destruction.
But all these bodies that award big, well-endowed prizes (of which there are these days more than a few) are all also concerned about maintaining the “brand” of their prize. So hitching your prize to the wagon of a figure like Pres. Obama, who is extremely popular everywhere in the world today–except in Israel and among a sector of US society– is also not a dumb move.
Well, I don’t want to seem too grudging toward Obama. Many of the foreign-policy things he’s done in office so far have been admirable, even if his Palestine policy and his Afghan policy have thus far not been. I do hope this award encourages him to be even bolder in his peacemaking and more visionary in his outreach to that 95% of humanity who are not US citizens.
So, congratulations Pres. Obama!

China and the US in Afghanistan

It’s good to put yourself into the shoes of others from time to time. For a while now, I’ve been trying to imagine the conversations that the Central Committee of the Chinese Committee Party doubtless hold from time to time about the various overseas adventures (!) of the US military.
I’m guessing they were intrigued but not, in the circumstances, very surprised by Pres. G.W. Bush’s original decision to invade Afghanistan in October 2001. That invasion brought the US military into a country that shares a short and extremely inhospitable border with China. So the arrival of the US military there– and in various of the other Central Asian Stans that share longer borders with China– must have caused the CCP planners some concern. But the US campaign was wholly focused on Islamist opponents of one variety or another; and it did significantly distract the attention of US military planners from the confrontations they had previously been gaming over in the South China Sea and other areas where China would be the direct target…
(Hainan incident, anyone? That had been GWB’s debut involvement in international affairs, remember.)
So after October 2001, I’m guessing it was “watchful waiting” for the guys in the CCP as they watched the US military maneuvering around the inhospitable mountains of Central Asia.
Then, 18 months later, came the US invasion of Iraq. I’m imagining the guys in the CCP being delirious with delight, toasting Rumsfeld in copious mao-tai or whatever, rubbing their eyes in amazement at just how amazingly stupid the leadership of the US could be!
And then, over the six years that followed, they watched quietly as Washington poured vast amounts of treasure and blood into Iraq in a campaign that very soon started to seriously degrade both the US military and the US economy.
Finally, after the November 2006 elections, Bob Gates’s realism started to pull the US ship of state slowly around from continuing too strongly with that folly.
But then, there was (and still is) the US campaign in Afghanistan.
Now, I’m thinking that the guys in the CCP are having serious second and third thoughts about that. Oh yes, how fabulous (from their POV) to see Washington continuing to degrade the American military and economy even more– over yet another completely un-“winnable” military campaign in a distant-from-the-US Asian country. But there is this other thing the CCP guys very strongly (and probably quite realistically) believe in, which is the deep inter-dependence of the US and China in world affairs.
There’s a portion of the US-China relationship that’s fairly zero-sum-gamey. But there is another portion, which I– and I think they– believe is bigger, which is pretty win-winny (though still not without some elements of competitiveness: sibling rivalry, if you will.)
Win-winning-ness is most evident in the economic relations between the two countries. But it is also present in the need they both share to find a way– preferably, of course, a way that is based neither on confrontation nor on oppression– to deal with various strong currents in the Muslim ummah.
So how long can Beijing go on just watching as the US beats itself to a bloody pulp in Afghanistan? And/or, at what point will the guys in Beijing choose to step in and, first, “offer” their help; or, at a later point, perhaps even start to insist that Washington take it?
Might we be reaching the first of those two points just now?
… From time to time I try to check up on what various Chinese sources are saying about the US’s various military adventures. Which is another way of saying that in between those times, I don’t pay the topic nearly enough attention.
But this week, helpful JWN commenter JohnH directed me to this recent piece in Asia Times, written by a retired, senior Indian diplomat… And that piece then sent me to this important article, authored, as the AT piece says, by deputy general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies, Li Qinggong, and published by Xinhua in English on September 28.
Li writes,

The United States should first put an end to the war.

To promote much-needed reconciliation among the parties concerned, the US should end its military action.

And here’s where it gets even more interesting:

prompt the Obama administration to end the war and withdraw US troops.

try to reach a consensus among its five permanent Security Council members and draft a roadmap and timetable for resolution of the thorny issue.

Surely, an international peacekeeping mission is needed in the absence of US troops.

So far, this still looks like a very preliminary trial balloon. But it is a trial balloon that this evidently well-connected figure has now gone ahead and floated, in the government’s own English-language media.
It’s one we should all think about.
… Longtime JWN readers will be well aware that one argument I’ve made repeatedly over recent years is that the western nations who constitute NATO are just about the worst instrument one could image for trying to “pacify” Afghanistan; and that if the help of non-Afghan outsiders is needed for this task– as it seems to be– then having the UN play the lead role would be far more effective than imagining that “the west” can do this job alone. (Or, perhaps, at all.)
Just one final note. There’s an ardent young American “COIN”- admirer called Andrew Exum who’s gained some publicity in the past couple of years for the blog he “cheekily” decided to call “Abu Muqawama” (Father of the Resistance). Recently, Exum and his blog got hired by a “liberal hawkish” new think-tank in Washington called the Center for a New American Security, which is famous mainly for the fact that its previous head, Michele Flournoy, is now the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. (Several other previous CNAS people have also gone into the Obama administration. Not, altogether, good news: I have a deep wariness about liberal hawks.)
So anyway, yesterday the breathless young Exum reported on his blog that around the halls of CNAS,

there is a pretty lively debate among the scholars and staff who work here about whether or not we should continue a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan when we might instead be focusing on preserving our energies for rising powers. Obviously enough, those of us who work on Afghanistan and counterinsurgency feel one way (more or less), while those who work on China and the rest of Asia feel another way (again, more or less… )

This strikes me as an incredibly naive– but also revealing– view. “Rising powers” obviously refers to China. But what still-extant “energies” is he talking about preserving? Energies for fighting China sometime in the future? Can he really mean that?
Also, is he telling us that the people at CNAS who “work on” China are working mainly on thining about plans for a future military confrontation with it? If so, that is very worrying indeed. (But not surprising, all in all, from such a hotbed of liberal hawks.)
But here’s where Exum’s naivete lies. Rather than the US fighting China any time soon (or ever), my judgment is that at some point within the next 4-5 years, the US government will be begging China and the rest of the international community to help it to find a way out of Afghanistan.
Unusually enough, I agree more on this point with Robert Kaplan than I do with Andrew Exum. Kaplan wrote in the NYT yesterday,

if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.

Actually, at this point, whether the US stays in Afghanistan or leaves, and whether it “succeeds” there (whatever that means) or doesn’t, then the sheer indisputable fact of the costs the US has paid on account of its two military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past eight years (both initiated by GWB) means that all the elements of US national power have been considerably degraded over the past eight years, while important elements of the national power of China and Russia– I’m not so sure about India– have meanwhile continued on a path of growth.
I guess ever since I did the little bit of research that led to this August 2008 blog post on the sheer size and scope of China’s investments in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’ve had this idea that one of the main effects of George W. Bush’s two big military (mis-)adventures in distant countries has been to make those countries safe for Chinese mercantilism.
Now there’s irony for you, eh?

Daniel in the lions’ den

Charismatic British-Israeli peacenik Daniel Levy made a remarkable presentation this morning, at a big conference on US-Israeli relations organized by the extremely rightwing, pro-Israeli think-tank, the Hudson Institute.
Luckily Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress’s Wonk Room was there to video and verbally describe the highlights for the rest of us.
If you scroll down Matt’s blog post there to the 6-minute video you can enjoy not just Daniel’s great presentation but also the extreme discomfort of his fellow-panelists Doug Feith and the equally craven Bob Lieber. It is also kind of fun to see Daniel speaking his mind about the disaster of the current Israeli government’s policy while many iterations of the Hudson Institute’s logo are waving around behind his head.
Scroll down even further for the handily provided actual transcript of what he said.
Talk about Daniel in the den of lions, eh?
So okay, here is my big confession. I was actually at that same conference– until just before Daniel and Co. got to speak; but I had to duck out just before their panel started.
I was there, however, for the peroration made earlier by Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, who until recently worked under some degree of cover as a ‘neutral’ (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) US historian of the US’s Middle East policy.
The heart of what Oren had to say was a fuller, verbal elaboration of the theme he introduced in this recent article in The New Republic:

The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers

Oren is a sad, sad, and deeply wounded guy if he can even imagine such an accusation against Judge Goldstone.
That is why I am really glad that his sick ranting was followed, in short order, by the eminent good sense from Daniel Levy.
I wish Oren could have stuck around to hear Levy. But he, too, had to duck out. His driver nearly ran me down as I biked away from the Hudson Institute.

Gitmo, Kafka, and the abuse of ‘law’

Kudos to Christopher Flavelle of ProPublica for his article about the case of Kuwaiti citizen Fouad Mahmoud al-Rabiah. Rabiah’s been held at Gitmo since 2002– and finally, last month, received a judgment of ‘Habeas Corpus’ from US District Court for the District of Columbia Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
‘Habeas Corpus’ is Latin for, “that you may have the body”. Basically it means the government now needs to give due cause to the judge as to why they want to continue to hold Rabiah– or else, to release him.
Let us only hope for the sake of this man and the others like him that this next step is speedily accomplished.
Kollar-Kotelly’s judgment is important because in it she disposes speedily and abruptly with many of the claims made by the US government defendants in the case. Also, because the transcript of her carefully reasoned judgment, which ProPublica makes available in the lightly redacted form in which the court gave it to them, makes clear that the only evidence the US government ever had against Rabiah was (a) evidence provided by fellow detainees after interrogations that were, presumably, extremely abusive, and (b) ‘confessions’ that he made after very abusive interrogations and after he’d been told that other people had ‘informed’ against him and that he needed to confess to something if he ever wanted to return to his home again.
It is so very, very complex and painful for the US justice system to unwind the many contortions and distortions into which the Bush-era policy of detentions and interrogations wound it.
I wish Obama and Attorney-General Eric Holder would work much faster on this. All this junk evidence that emanates only from abusive interrogations should be summarily thrown out and all the detainees freed against whom there is not good, untainted, independent evidence of wrongdoing.
The rest of the detainees should speedily be brought to trial– preferably within the US, or anyway with all the protections to which they would be due in a US courtroom– on the basis of that good, untainted evidence and only that evidence.
To do anything else only further degrades the bedrock of our country’s constitutional system.

US-UN power tussle over Afghanistan?

Eight years ago today, the US– with the help of non-trivial allies like Russia, Iran, and India– launched its invasion of Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter (though not before) the UN gave a sort of retroactive imprimatur of approval to the invasion. Then in March 2002, the Security Council created the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Its staff members, now numbering more than 1,000, have the mission of supporting the political and the socio-economic reconstruction of the country.
The US has, however, remained until now as the main external decision-making force inside Afghanistan. That may be about to change, due to the severe resource constraints the US is facing and the evident failure of the US-led occupation forces to resolve Afghanistan’s extremely deep political/security crisis.
Anyway, Pres. Obama is engaged right now in the wide-ranging deliberations that are needed as he addresses the incredibly complex conundrums that his administration faces in Afghanistan. (Another legacy of GWB, we can note.)
Meanwhile, a whole parallel crisis has started erupting in the relations between the US and the UN in Afghanistan. It has been precipitated mainly by the recent actions taken by cowboy US diplomatic “entrepreneur” Peter Galbraith
Until very recently Galbraith was working as deputy to UNAMA’s Norwegian head Kai Eide. But last week Eide abruptly fired fired Galbraith after he publicly accused Eide of suppressing information that UNAMA had gathered about numerous, allegedly serious irregularities in August’s Afghan elections.
Now, Galbraith or someone presumably close to him, has turned that raw data over to the Washington Post, which today published a digest of some of the most damaging parts of it.
The WaPo does not describe how it got hold of this (presumably illegally supplied?) data. But it also does not question its authenticity. Indeed, the reporters in question, Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow, write,

Dan McNorton, the U.N. spokesman in Kabul, did not challenge the authenticity of the spreadsheet, but he said it should be read with caution. “The information that you have is unsubstantiated raw data and should be treated as such,” he said.

Regarding Galbraith’s own personal history and credentials, we can note that he was an early and strong supporter of Croatia’s move to secede from the Yugoslav (“Southern Slav”) federation, and was subsequently Pres. Clinton’s first ambassador to Croatia. He was a strong cheerleader for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Before and since 2003 he has been a very loud proponent of Kurdish independence and the partition of Iraq.
His actions have often had a gadfly, very destabilizing aspect to them, and though he has been described as a close ally of Obama’s AfPak representative, he was not working for Holbrooke or for the US government in the position he occupied in UNAMA.
The lead of today’s WaPo piece says this:

Disturbing allegations, indeed.
Lynch and Partlow write,

Well, Eide is evidently trying to make the best decisions he can, in the very difficult position he finds himself in, in Kabul, caught between the continuing indecision of Washington over Afghanistan and the slow shift in the global balance from “the west” to “the rest.”
The big decisions that will need to be made in Afghanistan will at some point be made, not by Kai Eide but by either Pres. Barack Obama or some “concert” of the world’s great powers, once the US makes the decision– that now seems almost inevitable to me– to ask the other members of the UN Security Council to help bail it out of the extremely difficult situation it finds itself in, in Afghanistan.
Eide, remember, works for the Security Council, acting through the agency of the cipher-like UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon and his UN Department of Peacekeeping Affairs.
Here at JWN, I have been one of very few voices inside the US who have argued for several years now that responsibility for supporting and enabling the reconstruction and political reconstitution of Afghanistan should rightfully and most effectively be undertaken by the UN, rather than under some form of US-led (including US-NATO) “leadership”.
Let’s never forget how geographically and culturally distant the US is from Afghanistan, or the fact that the Security Council’s two non-western permanent members have much greater propinquity to Afghanistan and much deeper direct interests in securing the country’s stabilization than does the US.
(I see that Robert Kaplan has just started discovering things about Beijing’s increasing involvement in Afghanistan that I’ve been writing about for more than a year now.)
Anyway, for those watching how the shift in the US-UN relationship (or “west-rest” relationship) are now playing out over Afghanistan, today’s WaPo piece provides some intriguing tidbits of evidence.
Lynch and Partlow write,

from Vice President Biden.

We can note that over past years Galbraith worked very closely with Biden over his plans for partitioning Iraq.
Close coordination between UNAMA and the US authorities in Kabul is very evidently something that’s not only desirable, but absolutely essential. But the idea that Galbraith might act as a kind of “back channel” to Obama through Biden seems destabilizing and confusing, though somewhat typical of his previous MO’s.
Lynch and Partlow noted that,

Meanwhile, Galbraith is kicking his heels here in Washington. Actually, having watched him from a distance, I feel pretty certain he’s not just kicking his heels, but must be up to something.
My sense of the current bottom line on this story is that the days when Americans– whether Presidents, presidential envoys, or cowboy diplomatic operators like Peter Galbraith– could just between them determine the entire fate of distant countries with little regard to the needs or preferences of non-Americans are now rapidly coming to an end.