Helena – Page 82 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

US and Israel: End ‘Manhunting’ now!

Pres. Obama has apparently ‘seen the light’ regarding one of the anti-humane and illegal practices instituted by the Bush administration in its “Global war on terror”: the use of Guantanamo Bay as an extra-legal grey zone in which the US can carry out major human rights infractions at will. But he has shown no readiness yet to end the US’s indefinite detentions of alleged ‘enemy combatants’ in Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. And elsewhere in Afghanistan and even Pakistan, the US military has even under Obama, stepped up its recourse to extra-judicial executions of alleged “bad guys.”
Meantime, Israel continues to threaten the lives of numerous leaders and activists in movements that oppose it.
All these manhunting operations– that is, lethal operations conducted against people who are not currently engaged in armed hostilities— are quite illegal under international law. For this reason alone, they need to be ended, just as surely as the Guantanamo detention camp needs to be closed.
In addition, these manhunting operations, a.k.a. extra-judicial executions, or just plain assassinations, have a number of practical effects that are extremely detrimental to international peace and security:

The NYT reports today that

With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

The “attacking” in these cases and in many others in Pakistan and Afghanistan is carried out by “killer” drone aircraft whose weapons are controlled, I assume, from places very far away, using recon imaging provided by the drones and matching it against “information” or “accusations” that have been gathered from human sources.
The NYT writers report that these new CIA targets are “training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud”, who has been accused of having organized the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007. They note that Pres. G.W. Bush, “included Mr. Mehsud’s name in a classified list of militant leaders whom the C.I.A. and American commandos were authorized to capture or kill.”
There are many tangled legal, jurisdictional, and diplomatic issues involved here. The Pakistani government denies any foreknowledge of or involvement in the US killer-drone strikes– though Sen. Dianne Feinstein [corrected from ‘Pelosi’. HT Mick] recently let slip that at least some of the US’s lethal “manhunting” ops inside Pakistan have been run out of Pakistani military bases and not, as people had previously thought was always the case, from US bases in Afghanistan.
The idea of the US waging this clandestine war inside Pakistan is very worrying, at all levels, regardless of whether Washington has the complicity of some portions of the Pakistani government or not. (This is the case even though Pakistan’s people face many extremely complex issues of internal conflict and atrocious governance… And even though accusations have come from credible sources that some parts of the country provide safe havens for Al-Qaeda or other terror networks with violent global ambitions. But why should the US arrogate to itself any “right” to act in response to these challenges unilaterally and using lethal violence? What if all the world’s nations felt they had a similar “right” to act like this wherever and whenever they pleased?)
But in this post, I want to focus on that deadly concept of my government having a “classified list of militant leaders whom the C.I.A. and American commandos [are] authorized to capture or kill.”
Not, you’ll note, people whom US security forces might be particularly interested in “capturing or killing” if they should discover them taking part in hostilities against the US… But people whom US operatives are authorized– or let’s say, even more actively encouraged– to hunt down and go out and “capture or kill” even if they’re sitting down for a bowl of cornflakes on a sunny day with their family all around.
Of course, the use of killer drones completely gives the lie to the “capture or– ” part of the authorization.
Were the drones programed to swoop down from the skies, grab Baitullah Mehsud by the scruff of his neck, and haul him back to Bagram air base for interrogation? I think not.
This “capture or ill” slogan is in 99% of the cases only a euphemism for flat-out, lethal manhunting, and should be recognized as such. The intention in the vast majority of these still ongoing US and Israeli operations is not to capture. It is to kill. This is what makes it completely unacceptable under any concept of international law.
(By the way, that Wikipedia page linked to there gives an interesting survey of the use of manhunting by various western militaries over the decades, and has some very informative source notes.)
Another aspect of this that should be a cause for huge concern is the completely secret nature of all the alleged “evidence” on the basis of which these assassination classifications/decisions are made.
As in so many of the extra-legal practices the US military developed– under Pres. Bush and before him under Pres. Clinton– the practice of lethal manhunting was pioneered in recent times by the Israelis. They have assassinated literally scores of Palestinians since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000– and many scores over the decades before that, too.
Recall the incredibly sympathetic piece of writing about the Israeli commanders who make these decisions that the WaPo published back in 2006. Writer Laura Blumenfeld never once asked the really tough questions about the nature of the “evidence” against the targeted men, and why Israel, with all its many huge capabilities on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank didn’t simply arrest these men and bring them to trial through legal means instead of hunting them down from the air like fish in a barrel… You’d think she’d never read a book or seen a movie about the way the Nazis behaved in the Warsaw Ghetto…
If you look down the right sidebar of this page on Btselem’s website you can learn that in each of the years 2001-2004, the number of targeted killings the IOF carried out in the occupied Palestinian territories was between 37 and 44. In each of 2005 and 2006 it was 22.
This is obscene.
Israel is the power that has been in military occupation of these lands since 1967 and is responsible for the welfare of all their residents. Systematically targeting some of these residents for assassination– on the basis of always secret “information”– is completely illegal.
During the most recent Gaza war, the policy of assassinations, which had fallen into disuse when the 6-month ceasefire started last June, was resumed again.
Both countries should end this vile practice.

US war effort in Afghanistan becoming dependent on Russia– and Iran!

The position of the US/NATO troops in Afghanistan has become far worse in recent months. The root cause (as with the woes of most distantly deployed militaries) is logistics. As I have chronicled here numerous times in recent months.
The latest logistical nightmare is the decision Kyrgyzstan has made not to renew the arrangement under which the US has been able to use the massive Manas air-base to backstop the air war and a good portion of the resupply effort in Afghanistan.
Bernhard of Moon of Alabama has a great new post up today detailing some of the effects of the Kyrgyz decision.
And Gareth Porter, who has been cultivating some excellent sources within the US military and the new administration, tells us that Obama,

after McKiernan was unable to tell him how they would be used

In fact, as Gareth tells it, McKiernan and Petraes were unable to tell Obama even how the first tranche of 17,000 troops would be used. He attributes to Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress the explanation for their deployment that,

based on the belief that he had to signal both Afghans and Pakistanis that the United States was not getting out of Afghanistan

This strikes me as a militarily meaningless and politically almost circular argument for sending these troops– very expensively and quite possibly also provocatively and/or dangerously– into harm’s way in distant Afghanistan.
Obama deploys them simply “as a signal to the Afghanis and Pakistanis that the US is not quitting Afghanistan”? Excuse me? But what is their military mission? Or are they supposed to stand around in peacock feathers to make an even more eye-catching “signal”?
For his part, Bernhard notes this about the cost of resupplying the US/NATO troops in Afghanistan:

To keep a brigade in Afghanistan costs twice as much than to keep one in Iraq. On wonders how much of this luxury is sustainable. To bring in supply by air costs $14,000 per ton. For the new railway supply line the costs per ton are expected to be $300 to $500.

He then suggests that in fact, the cost of the rail-supply effort may end up being very much higher than that.
He tells us that the new Russian route for (“non-military”) US/NATO supplies was inaugurated today, with the departure towards Afghanistan of a train from Riga hauling 100 containers of goods via the Russia-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan route. He writes, “If the route is working as planed there will be some 20 to 30 trains per week.”
That is a heck of a lot of trains. And hefty transit and customs fees for all the countries being shipped through…
B notes, too, that once in Afghanistan, most of the goods will have to be on-shipped by road to the war-zones in the middle and south of the country. To do that, they’ll most likely be taken through the Salang Tunnel— built by the Soviets and used by them as a major route for the resupply of the troops in their ill-fated military adventure in the country 20 years ago.
B writes:

But here’s another intriguing detail that he adds:

some 10,000 tons of jet fuel per month is now said to come from Iran!

I’ve seen quite a few references in recent days to the NATO allies’ desire to increase the amount of materiel they can ship into Afghanistan through Iran. For example, in this Feb. 17 article in Der Spiegel, three writers reported thus:

The best road networks among all neighboring countries are to be found in Iran, a country neighboring Afghanistan that has recently had significant issues with the West, though for other reasons. These problems with Iran have made this alternative taboo. But NATO is desperate to find a solution and, according to diplomatic sources in Pakistan, it is also negotiating with Tehran “at a lower level.”

In a comment on his own blog post, Bernhard writes this:

I’m pretty sure he’s right in his the broad outline of his analysis– though I don’t rule out some combination of NATO members finding that they are able to buy a bit more time from Kyrgyzstan, after all…
But it’s important to remember too that the entire “American” campaign to topple the Taliban government in 2001 succeeded so rapidly only because of the great support the US received from the broad anti-Taliban networks already assembled in the country by Russia, Iran, and India.
But even with the new trans-shipment help from Russia, a number of ‘Stans, and even Iran, there is still no way that NATO can ever “win” this very distant and very expensive war. If Obama’s as smart as he seems to be, he is probably starting to realize this. But the next big step of going cap-in-hand to the other members of the Security Council and saying, “Uh, guys, I’m sorry to bother you but NATO can’t do this alone and we really need your help here” won’t be an easy one. It’s a step that really requires a whole new way of looking at the relationship between the US and the rest of the world…

IPS news analysis on intra-Palestinian, prisoner exchange, and ceasefire issues

My weekly piece on major developments in the peace (or no-peace) diplomacy on Arab-Israeli issues is here.
Also here.
Title: Peace Talks on Hold Amid Dual Power Struggles. Tragic.
News analysis is an interesting hybrid of, um, news reporting and analysis. I think I’m getting the hang of it. Qadoura Fares was really interesting to talk to. was that only yesterday? Seems an age ago, because I’ve been doing so many other interesting things.
(By the way, Twittering the Bil’in activities didn’t work. Maybe I’ll try a third time to link my Jawwal phone to my twitter account…. Anyway, you can find a few after-action reports at my Twitter account.)

Chas Freeman to NIC; Mitchell Twittered

My IPS colleague Jim Lobe seems to have it pretty firm that Chas Freeman, the very distinguished former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and before that Nixon-era DCM in China will be the the first Obama-era Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
As Lobe writes, this is huge– and it is very welcome indeed.
The NIC was created to try to re-professionalize the key part of intelligence analysis after the intelligence fiascos around 9/11 and the whole dreadful story of the politicization of analysis around the WMD issue in Iraq. As Ive blogged here before, the former head of the NIC, Tom Fingar, did a pretty good job putting the task of top-level “estimating” (i.e. analysis) back onto a professional basis.
Lobe gives us this great quote from a speech Freeman gave last October:

For the past few years, Freeman has been President of the Middle East Policy Council, a body on whose advisory board I sit. I had heard, in late January, that Chas was leaving to go work in some capacity for Dennis Blair, the overall Director of National intelligence. I guess I thought it would be in some senior advisory capacity. I am delighted to learn that no, he’ll be doing a real and very important hands-on job there.
His long experience of both China (and its region) and the Middle East will be an invaluable asset to the Obama administration.
… Meantime, in other intriguing news from Washington, George Mitchell yesterday held a conference-call discussion with (only partially identified) Jewish community leaders. (HT: Laura Rozen.)
The Jerusalem Post reports that,

The JP also wrote that, regarding the prospect of a Fateh-Hamas reconciliation:

it would be “a step forward,”

One participant in the 45-minute call, William Daroff of the Washington office of United Jewish Communities, even Twittered the call as it proceeded. Look on his Twitter site for the long series of posts (“Tweets?”) from around 3 .m. Thursday EST. Maybe to understand the call best, start with the oldest (lowest on his successive pages) Tweets and then read forward (up) from there…
Here are some of them:

Fascinating window into the experience there. (I’m going to try to Twitter from the fourth anniversary anti-Wall activities Bil’in when I go down there later today. Pretty sure it won’t be as full as daroff’s Tweeting– my phone here doesn’t have an easy keyboard and I’ll have to do the whole thing over an international phone line to London.)
But my next question: When will Mitchell be holding a similar call with leaders of the Arab-American community?

And the winner is… Bibi!

So Israel’s far-right political kingmaker Avigdor Lieberman has now informed Pres. Shimon Peres that his preference is for Likud’s Netanyahu. No real surprise there.
Probably no surprise in the fact that Lieberman, who formerly worked as a night-club bouncer and espouses rough-hewn racist political views, acted more like the king than the kingmaker in his conversation with Peres, laying down his own preferences for how Netanyahu should assemble his governing coalition.
The Haaretz account tells us that Lieberman told Peres,

“[There are] three possibilities from our point of view: A broad government, which is what we want. A narrow government, that will be a government of paralysis, but we don’t rule out sitting in it. And the third option is going to elections, which will achieve nothing.”

Meanwhile, Labour and Meretz decided not to recommend anyone for the PM slot. That put paid, I suppose, to any hopes Livni might have had that she could assemble a strong team going into the negotiations.
But really, does anyone in Israel think it makes any difference what Labour and Meretz prefer, at this point?
I hope these latest elections will put an end to Ehud Barak’s career as head of Labour, once and for all. He doubtless hoped that by launching the war on Gaza he could catapult himself (and maybe also, I suppose, his party; but don’t count on that) back into a more powerful position in Israeli politics. Instead, the war merely energized the most retrograde and belligerent emotions of the Israeli public; and the fact that he and his partners in the outgoing government didn’t “finish the job off”, in the parlance of the right wing, sent voters flocking to the rightist parties.
But, wheels within wheels, Haaretz also tells us that,

would now attempt to convince Labor to join a coalition

Magnanimous?? He probably hopes that a tamed Livni, serving in a subservient position under his premiership, can help ease his relations with Washington…
Livni responded by announcing that “Kadima won’t provide cover for a government of paralysis.” I suppose that includes paralysis in the so-called peace “process”, whose advancement she defined as a continuing concern for Kadima.
(Oh really? But I thought Kadima was at the head of the government over the past couple of years… and I haven’t seen them advance the peace “process” at all during that time… )
Bottom line: Expect a government of paralysis.

Intra-Pal reconciliation meet postponed?

I just heard from a well-informed friend here in Ramallah that the Cairo-hosted Palestinian reconciliation talks scheduled to open Feb 22nd will be postponed. Sad if so.

In Ramallah

I’ve never stayed for very long in Ramallah before. I generally preferred to stay in East Jerusalem and then as necessary traverse the ghastly Qalandia crossing point between there and Ramallah, sometimes staying with friends here in Ramallah for a night or two. But this time I decided to make Ramallah my first stop, and to stay here for a week or so, so I can catch up with everything that’s been going on here. It is, after all, three years now since I was last in town.
So yesterday morning, I took a car from Amman down to the Allenby/ King Hussein Bridge. There was almost no-one else seeking to cross– almost as bad a sign as if it had been jam-packed, I think. The deal is you do your Jordan-exit business first, east of the bridge, then take a Jordanian-provided and mandatory shuttle bus across the trickle of water known as the River Jordan, to the Israeli side. But it took nearly an hour for them to gather enough people (ten or so) to justify sending the bus across. I got a bit impatient. But in the bus I found that a fellow-traveler who’s a manager with the (Abu Mazen-controlled) Palestine Investment Fund was also hoping to head up to Ramallah, so we shared a taxi and split the cost of some $120.
Getting in to the West Bank through the Israeli-controlled side was the usual, extremely depressing experience. The Israelis have cadres of young women, presumably doing their national service, whom they use as the “front-line” in many border-control jobs. Many of them love to hang around with each other and with the beefy young guys who also work there, to chat on cell-phones, to stand around admiring each other’s make-up and hair-dos, and to really relish the power they have over all these exhausted-looking Palestinian families whom they have to deal with. The main power they have is to harrass and delay, but it’s backed up by other much more intrusive or fearsome powers, too.
When our bus with ten people rolled in, there were around 60-70 people in the passport-control waiting area, so some of them may well have been waiting since early morning. Just about all of them looked to be Palestinians, since of course just about every Palestinian family in the West Bank has half or more of its family members now living in Jordan. And guess what, people in these families like to get together!!! But to do so, they have to pass through these border-controls that are totally controlled by the cohorts of bored and faintly malevolent young Israelis. Well, that gives just a first glimpse of what then continues to happen to Palestinians inside the West Bank, any time they want to travel from one town or city there to another, I guess.
… If all the Palestinian communities in the occupied territories can nowadays be described as “open-air prisons”– and I believe they can– then Ramallah is probably the “Club Fed”, i.e. the top banana, in this extensive system. Provided you don’t actually need to go anywhere else, provided you have plenty of money (yes, this Club Fed ain’t cheap to live in), and provided you’re capable of completely disabling any sense of solidarity or connectedness you might have with family members, friends, or just plain compatriots who happen to live elsewhere, such as Gaza, you could possibly even live a pretty good life here.
Places that most Ramallah people can’t ever get to include even Jerusalem, which used to be just 12 minutes away by car along the hilltop road. Ramallah’s a historically Christian town, and just about everyone here has family members or close business ties with East Jerusalem. Tough luck. The Wall, with its horrendous– and oh so evocatively looming– watch-towers, stands between.
You are reminded nearly everywhere of the tight noose Israel retains around Ramallah. Like the rest of the West Bank, it is literally a captive market for Israeli produce. Many stores are filled with Israeli-produced goods or with other imports that, having come in through Israeli ports and middle-men give them a nice cut of the profits, too. You can get some great Palestinian fresh produce, and a few locally-manufactured products like Taybeh beer, or some Palestinian-processed foods. But even for those Palestinian industries, their scale is small and many or most of their inputs have to brought in from or through Israel.
… But having said all that, I also have to say that, just for now, I’m getting real pleasure from being here. One big part of that is to reconnect with old friends, which has already started to happen. And the other is just to experience the urban environment in this bustling but airy and beautiful Palestinian Arab city.
I’ve taken a couple of walks now, from my fairly central hotel here up to the “Manara” landmark, around some of the back streets there, and along Main Street a bit. For various reasons– including over the years the actual presence of Israeli occupation troops in the streets, the tensions of various intifadas, or the threat of either of them rolling in at any time– I’ve never really experienced Ramallah as a functioning and flourishing city-center before. I never realized there is a pretty sizeable big produce-market tucked in to the east of the Manara, filling up a number of whole streets with with push-carts piled high with riotously colorful fruits, veggies, and greens. Especially, at this time of year, greens. There are side-streets lined with little stores selling traditional (or made-in-China) housewares: brooms, loofas, knitted string back-scratchers, aluminum pots, etc. Between them are little store-fronts in which people make and sell the very best in Arab street food: felafel carefully made with a dusting of sesame seeds atop each one; kibbeh balls staright out of the deep-fryer; tall pillars of succulently rotating meat for shawerma; stacked rows of whole chickens browning slowly on their automated spits; little meat-pies or cheese-pies; kaak; kunefeh…
Oh, to walk down a street drenched in the smells from all these great foods is a pure delight. Or you turn a corner and the sharp tang of cardamom coffee comes in from somewhere. Or the rich, warm smell of thyme-coated mana’eesh…
There are a lot of cars– yellow taxis everywhere!– and quite a lot of honking that reverberates between the mainly solid stone walls of the city center’s buildings. However, one of the things Abu Mazen’s “Palestinian Authority” has done is put on the streets a large number of pretty well trained traffic cops. Their little whistles punctuate the noise in the city center– as do, too, in the most commercial portion of the city, the loudspeakers that many shop-owners have hung outside their stores, blaring repetitive messages about their “special offers” over and over into the street outside.
One of the best things about Ramallah– as was also true of East Jerusalem, back in the day– is that many of the farm-women you see either selling their produce in the streets or walking purposefully through the crowds to do their business are still wearing their traditional, hand-embroidered dresses. It always amazed me how these women, who spend many months sewing vast swathes and plateaus of these intricate, traditional patterns into their dresses before they get married, would thereafter wear these treasured heirlooms day-in-day-out as they proceeded about what was often very dirty work. Many of the younger women in the street are wearing a simpler, non-embroidered form of hijab. (In the whole broader district around Ramallah, Muslim Palestinians have been in a clear majority for some time now.) But you do still see plenty of women in the older embroidered thobes. That certainly brightens my day.
(I was telling my daughter Lorna a few things about my time in Ramallah in an IM exchange yesterday. She urged me to take and post some photos. I’m a bit reluctant. I feel there’s something a bit exploitative or objectivizing about photography of other people unless it’s as part of a pre-agreed or clearly understood transaction between equals… I feel much more confident about the nature of the transaction if I just write about my experiences, instead.)
I guess the other big observation I have is how generally pleasant the medium- and long-range views from and around Ramallah are. The city is built on a series of hills. Like Amman, which is where I came from yesterday, though the hills and valleys here crowd closer together and are even steeper than the ones in Amman. In both places, as you travel around the city you get many opportunities for pleasing, multi-curved vistas or sweeping views. But here in Ramallah there are many more mature trees interspersed between the buildings. And though there are many fairly undistinguished apartment buildings here of seven or eight stories high, there are still also many gracious older stone houses of two stories or so that are topped with the pyramidal red tile roofs that were once common in this city, as in Lebanon.
(Nowadays throughout most of the West Bank, a cluster of red-tiled roofs is a dead giveaway for an Israeli settlement, since the vast majority of the Palestinians towns and villages here are dominated by buildings that have flat roofs.. much more useful, historically, as additional storage space or a good place to dry your peppers or whatever.)
But the trees and the occasional red roofs here in Ramallah and its twin-city, El-Bireh, make many of the accidental vistas you see as you walk or drive around the place very beautiful indeed.
Club Fed, yes.
And then, there’s Gaza….

Syria’s position strengthening internationally, regionally

Syria’s place in the world community– which the ideologues in the Bush White House did so much to attack and delegitimize– has been strengthening noticeably in the past few days/weeks.
Later this week, Sen. John Kerry, the new chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will visit Syria. Ahead of the visit, he said the Obama administration is eager to talk to Syria. The US has not had an ambassador there since 2005, though it does have an embassy.
From a domestic US perspective, it is extremely important that this rapprochement win solid support in both houses of Congress, since under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby– as well as the Bush administration– Congress has itself been another major driver of the “isolate and attack Syria” campaign.
At a regional level, Syria has won some new influence, too. Yesterday, the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, Prince Muqrin bin Abdul-Aziz, visited Syria where he met President Bashar al-Asad and conveyed from King Abdullah (his older half-brother), a message about “bilateral ties and the importance of consultation and coordination between the two sides”, according to the Syrian official news agency.
A rapprochement between Syria and Saudi Arabia– which have been at loggerheads since the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri in February 2005– would be extremely significant for the politics of the entire region.
Western spinmeisters and MSM have made a huge point about the depth and alleged intractability of the rift between the alleged “moderates” and “extremists” in the Arab world, a rift that seemed particularly evident during the most recent Gaza crisis.
But most western commentators often have little idea about the depth and complexity of the regional dynamics that continue to underlie regional– and in particular, inter-Arab– relations. I find it interesting that these two regimes, in particular, now apparently see it in their interest to move towards some degree of rapprochement.
The political fallout from the Gaza crisis continues. Egypt has been, I think, somewhat strengthened in its role in the region– as I wrote last week. But so, too, has Syria. So the whole regional system remains dynamic, and certainly not easily reducible to some form of a zero-sum “moderates versus extremists” template.

Israel-Hamas prisoner talks, intra-Palestinian reconciliation, etc

Ha’aretz, Reuters, and others are now reporting that Israel seems close to presenting a prisoner-exchange proposal involving Hamas-held Israeli POW Gideon Shalit and a large number of Palestinian prisoners and detainees that might (imho) win acceptance from Hamas. Conclusion of this prisoner-exchange agreement could then in some way accompany conclusion of the Gaza ceasefire-stabilization agreement between the two parties, the terms of which seem to be just about agreed upon.
Notable among the names mentioned of Palestinians to be released is that of Marwan Barghouthi, a veteran Fateh activist who has often challenged Fateh’s ossified political leadership in the past and who has worked since his imprisonment in an Israeli jail in 2002 to help improve relations between Fateh and Hamas.
Israel’s still-PM Ehud Olmert has insisted that the ceasefire-stabilization agreement can’t be concluded without Hamas freeing Israeli POW Gideon Shalit. Hamas has resisted linking the two issues and has its own very compelling demands for the release of political prisoners and detainees in exchange for Shalit. Indeed, negotiations over that prisoner release have continued, in an on-again-off-again way ever since Shalit, an IDF corporal, was captured by Gaza-based militants back in early summer 2006.
(One further note: Several Hamas leaders have been trying to spread uncertainty about whether Shalit actually survived Israel’s recent assault on Gaza. It is at least possible that he didn’t; but somehow my gut-instinct judgment is that he would have been given as much protection during the war as the top Hamas leaders.)
As I have written before, Egypt, which is now mediating both these parallel negotiations, should be able to find a neat “diplomatic” formula on linking them in an acceptable way, even if only temporally. And indeed, the Haaretz writers write today,

Egyptian officials are now busy on a formula that would allow both sides to claim that their stance [on linking or not linking the two negotiations] was accepted.

The Haaretz article reports that the “troika” that’s still in charge of Israel’s security policy (Olmert, Barak, and Livni) would present a concrete proposal regarding the prisoner-exchange deal to the full cabinet on Wednesday.
The Haaretz writers report,

Of course, it is not Shkirat but the Hamas leadership that is responsible for the Palestinian side of the negotiation. But if Shkirat seems to have that degree of confidence that Barghouthi will be involved, he must have gotten it from somewhere.
Many Palestinian analysts believe that a released Barghouthi could help to save the political fortunes of Fateh, which have been extremely badly battered by the recent Gaza war. If the Hamas leadership is indeed insisting that Barghouthi be part of the present prisoner-exchange deal that indicates to me that they actually want to see the emergence within Fateh of a new kind of leadership with which they could have a functional working relationship, and that that is worth more to them now than the possible downside risk that a re-energized Fateh might win back some support from Hamas.
Certainly, Hamas’s relationship with Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), the current head of Fateh, the PA, and the PLO, has been extremely difficult over the past three years.
Meanwhile, moves toward a new reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas are proceeding, albeit still slowly. At the end of last week high-level (but not top-level) delegations from the two parties had preliminary discussions in– again– Egypt; and more formal and substantive reconciliation talks are scheduled to open there February 22.
The participants in last week’s talks were, from Fateh, former PM Ahmed Quei (Abu Alaa’) and Nabil Shaath, and from Hamas Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar and politburo member Mousa Abu Marzook.
That Al-Manar report linked to there said this about the talks:

Al-Manar is run by Lebanon’s Hizbullah and can therefore be judged somewhat slanted toward the Hamas side. However, the website also has some very solid news reporting, so this piece may be part of that.
(Update at 12:34 p.m.: I just realized the whole Manar report was lifted verbatim off the Jerusalem Post website— though without attribution. Mnar does often do this with news reports its editors think are valuable. I guess the fact that both they and the J. Post stand behind this report gives it added credibility.)
… As a broader observation, I would simply note that it is possible to view the role Fateh has played in recent years as in many ways equivalent to that played in the dying days of South Africa’s apartheid by Buthelezi’s ethnic-Zulu-based “Inkatha Freedom Party”. During the “last throes” of the apartheid regime, the IFP became majorly co-opted by the state security forces in a campaign to terrorize and oppose the ANC at many levels. Despite the enormous numbers of deaths and the the amount of suffering and pain that the IFP inflicted on ANC supporters– especially, I should note, on those ANC supporters who were closest to it, that is, who were themselves ethnic Zulus– the ANC leadership worked hard to always hold out a hand of friendship to Buthelezi and, while criticizing many of the IFP’s actions, never sought to delegitimize his political role.
Many people have described the role Fateh’s security forces have played in recent years as analogous to that of the Nicaraguan Contras– a force that was almost entirely created from outside through US funding and arming. However, I think that viewing Fateh’s role as closer to that of the IFP is more helpful. Buthelezi did have some indigenous political credibility before he became involved with the apartheid regime’s nefarious anti-ANC campaigns. Plus, at the political level, he played one crucial step that helped to stymie the aparheid regime’s big push to solve its problems through the creation of a string of tightly controlled “Bantustans”, or nominally independent Black African “homelands.”
(We can note that Israel was one of the very, very few governments around the world that ever gave formal recognition to the six or seven Bantustans that were established. No other significant government ever did that.)
But Buthelezi– who had many supporters and admirers in the west, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald reagan– crucially never gave in to the Pretoria regime’s pressures that he declare Kwa-Zulu to be a Bantustan. That political position that he held to really helped the national struggle.
Within Fateh, we can also see that it has significant, pre-existing political legitimacy. Plus, despite Abu Mazen’s lengthy participation in the never-ending tragicomedy of “peace negotiations” with Israel and the many harsh actions he has taken against Hamas, we can see that thus far he has never signed off on any of the extremely humiliating political deals the Israelis have waved before him (though never even finally offered.) And indeed, on February 7, even his very, very pro-US “prime minister”, Salam Fayyad, said he saw no hope that any Israeli leader could come up with a reasonable peace proposal.
Bottom line: closer to the IFP than to the Contras?

Deep US blind spot on international legality

Why is the fact that the U.S. government is contractually obligated to withdraw all its troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011 so frequently ignored in US public discussions?
Last November, duly authorized representatives of the US government– Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker– signed the text of a “Status of Forces Agreement/ Withdrawal Agreement” with the government of Iraq.
When a government changes or is replaced, existing international agreements remain in place unless there is a new, explicit agreement between the parties to rescind or revise them. It couldn’t be otherwise in an orderly international system.
A good part of the problem in the disrespectful and border-line illegal way that Americans have been treating last November’s SOFA/WA stems from Pres. Obama himself. He remains fixated on arguing for the details of the plan on which he ran for office: the plan for a substantial drawdown of US force levels “within 16 months” but the retention of a significant US force in Iraq for an undefined period thereafter.
Understandable and in many ways admirable that a democratically elected leader would try to hold fast to what he had promised during the election campaign.
However, what Obama continues to propose regarding Iraq has already been superseded in international law by the decision the outgoing Bush administration made– on Thanksgiving Day, no less– to commit to the terms of the SOFA/WA.
(I have been interested to note that, as part of its purging of the White House web site, the incoming Obama administration removed from the site the authoritative PDF version of the signed SOFA/WA that had been there up until the Inauguration– and that I had linked to in this Nov. 28th JWN post. Now, if you want to find a copy of the agreement’s final text, as far as I can see you’ll have to go to a non-governmental site this one– PDF, hosted by the NYT. One strong advantage of the earlier White House PDF was that it had the actual signatures on it. It must still exist somewhere in the bowels of the federal government’s archives?)
MY question is: Why is the existence of the November SOFA/WA agreement not much more of an issue than it now seems to be, in the discussions in both Congress and among the US commentatoriat at large?
Why does at seem as if so many members of the US political elite just want to ignore the agreement?
Case in point, today: This lengthy piece by Tom Ricks in Sunday’s Washington Post. Ricks’s main argument is that the US military may well have to end up staying (and fighting) in Iraq for many years into the future. He writes– without expressing any demurral from the views expressed– that:

The quiet consensus emerging among many who have served in Iraq is that U.S. soldiers will probably be engaged in combat there until at least 2015 — which would put us at about the midpoint of the conflict now.

The piece contains sound-bite quotes from a significant number of US and western military and “expert” sources. I don’t know if the people Ricks quoted– who include our friend Reidar Visser– made any mention of the constraints of the SOFA/WA in their conversations with Ricks. But here’s the thing: Nowhere in the piece at all does Ricks either make in his own name, or attribute to any of his sources, any mention of the SOFA/WA.
It’s as though it doesn’t exist. It’s been simply air-brushed out of (this US-centric version of) history.
The reason I’m concerned about this is that I have a lot of respect for the writing and reporting that Ricks has done on the US war in Iraq. So if even someone of his caliber acts as though the SOFA/WA is irrelevant, we are in deep trouble.