Helena – Page 84 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Zahar in Egypt; timing of ceasefire?

Gaza-based Hamas leader Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, who was named Foreign Minister in the all-Hamas government in summer 2007, today emerged from his “secure location” in Gaza to cross into Egypt. He was at the head of a four-person team heading to Cairo to participate in the indirect (Egypt-mediated) negotiations with Israel over the terms for a Gaza-Israel ceasefire.
Zahhar and the Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh are thought to be at the head of the list for the Israeli government’s completely illegal campaign of assassinations of political leaders.
The timing for Zahhar’s emergence and current diplomatic mission surprised me a little. It’s hard to think that Hamas or anyone else believes that this close to an Israeli election, any Israeli government would be willing to commit to a firm– i.e. written and publicly witnessed– agreement with Hamas. And getting close to an agreement is what would seem to be indicated by Zahhar going to take part in the Cairo talks, in person.
On the other hand, I’m sure he has plenty of other reasons to go to Cairo. One may be just to “show his face” in public. Inside Egypt, he could certainly do that– provided he has, as I assume he has, good guarantees of his safety from the Egyptian security organs. Inside Gaza, it would presumably be a lot more risky for him to appear in public, given the widespread presence of Israeli drones and other surveillance and assassination platforms. (Also, if the Israelis attack him in Egypt, and he’s under Egyptian protection, it would cause a massive international incident between Israel and Egypt. In Gaza, tragically, the Palestinians have no recognized state authority to protect them.)
There might be a good reason for Zahhar to show his face in public, given that last week some of the Israeli hasbara organs were spreading rumors he was badly injured. (But I note that, wily and courageous as he is as a politician and strategist, as far as I can figure he doesn’t have anything like the same strong symbolic value as a charismatic leader and captivating orator that, for example, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has, in Lebanon.)
But Zahhar also presumably has a lot of other movement business to conduct in Egypt and with people and networks in other countries that are not under such intense Israeli control as Gaza is.
Anyway, let’s hope that a serious ceasefire agreement can be concluded very soon. As Bob Pastor noted in the session I heard him speak at last week, it needs to have the following elements:

On monitoring and verification, it’s important to note that the Israelis always hate such agreements, which they see (quite rightly) as hobbling the extensive freedom they like to retain to act just as they want, militarily, against their neighbors.
I note, too, that in Lebanon Hizbullah won a crucial achievement in 1996 when, after the brutal election-related war that PM (now President) Shimon Peres launched against them that year, he was forced to sign a ceasefire agreement that included, for the first time ever, an international monitoring mechanism. That monitoring group was made up of representatives of the governments of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, France, and the US.
The 1996 ceasefire was considerably stronger, and better for Lebanon, than the one that had preceded it, which was concluded at the end of Israel’s 1993 war of choice against Lebanon. The 1993 agreement contained no provision for monitoring, and thus gave Israel considerable leeway to launch the 1996 war.
(Oh, did I mention that Peres lost the election in 1996, anyway? He did so mainly because the Palestinian Israelis stayed home from the voting booths in droves, in protest at the war. Thy might do the same this time around. But it would be less decisive, because Labour is nowhere near sitting close to victory.)
Anyway, after the conclusion of the 1996 agreement, Israel could no longer play around militarily in Lebanon as freely as it had before, because now the French and the Americans were watching their every move there. That situation formed an essential backdrop to the decision that Ehud Barak made when, as newly elected Labour PM three years later, he decided to simply pull Israel’s troops out of Lebanon completely, and unilaterally (i.e., without negotiations.)
Of course, back in he late 1990s, there was also a fairly strong peace– or anyway, pro-withdrawal– movement inside Israel. It was spearheaded by the “Four Mothers” group, founded by mothers of IDF soldiers serving in the dangerous theater that Lebanon was for the IDF in those years.
Now, there are many different factors in the political and strategic equation between Israel and Hamas. But it would still be really good for the people of Gaza if Hamas and Israel could conclude a durable ceasefire that ends up working.
And yes, it would be fine, too, if the PA/Fateh could be brought into the arrangement. Probably an advantage, as the Palestinians could then hope to resurrect the final peace negotiations much more quickly, as well.

At IPS: ‘Mideast: A truce too big to fail?’

My latest news analysis for IPS, “Mideast, a truce too big to fail?”, went up on their website yesterday.
Doing these weekly pieces for them is an interesting experience so far. It provides a kind of running record of the “big” developments each week, as I see them, in Middle East war-and-peace issues. I think I need to find a way to aggregate them, and am trying to figure out the best way to do that. For now, maybe just paste each one as it comes out into either a special blog or a special category on this blog?
I truly don’t have time to do this right now. If anyone wants to volunteer to help, could you contact me? Thanks!

Gaza ceasefire-consolidation talks update

I’ve been busy recently: I’ve been in New York with editors and (separately) the new grandbaby… Also, preparing for my next reporting trip to the Middle East, which starts this afternoon as I head off from freezing Washington DC to Cairo.
Cairo is the place where negotiations have been continuing over the past two weeks to consolidate the still extremely shaky, in-parallel, and un-negotiated brace of reciprocal ceasefires across the Israel-Gaza border that went into operation January 18.
A negotiated, and therefore mutually agreed, ceasefire is absolutely essential if the military actions that have already marked the period since January 18 are to be prevented from escalating, at any moment’s notice, into yet another full-blown war between Israel and Gaza. This negotiation need not be direct. In fact, both sides at this point probably prefer strongly not to deal directly with the other. But it does– as Jimmy Carter’s point-man Bob Pastor pointed out at the excellent panel discussion of his that I attended last week– need to be written down, and to have some form of third party authentication, oversight, or even more preferably still a continuing, third-party verification and monitoring mechanism. (Evident parallels there with the development of Israel-Hizbullah relations that took place between 1993 and 1996. Btw, the 1996 war was also launched by an Israeli PM as a part of his general election campaign… )
Bob Pastor said that Hamas and the Israeli government had notably disagreed, thoughout last summer and fall, about what exactly Israel had promised, regarding lifting the siege on Gaza, in the Egyptian-negotiated, six-month-long, mutual ceasefire (tahdi’eh) the two sides reached on June 18 last year; and that’s why, if the new ceasefire is to have any durability t needs to be written down, signed, and counter-signed. It also makes elementary sense that, in a situation of such grave mutual distrust, any agreement needs to be written down, signed by authorized representatives of both parties– and those signatures and texts authenticated by a third party whose third-party role is trusted and authorized by both of them.
Several Hamas people have expressed grave distrust in the role that Egypt has been playing as mediator/intermediary. But apparently Egypt– and in particular, Egyptian intel boss Omar Suleiman– is still trusted “enough” by both parties that he is once again the main intermediary/channel between them.
That’s one reason why it’ll be interesting for me to be in Cairo. From there I’ll proceed to Amman, Israel, and Palestine and perhaps also Syria, depending on a number of things.
As far as I understand the Hamas-Israel negotiation, Hamas has been adamant that any renewed ceasefire agreement must include solid provisions for lifting the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza ever since Hamas won the January 2006 elections. The present Israeli government, for its part, is facing tough elections next Tuesday. The war on Gaza did not go nearly as well as Olmert, Livni, and Barak had hoped. The intermittent descent of Gaza-launched rockets onto southern Israel that has occurred– along with many Israeli military actions against Gaza– even since January 18, reminds Israeli voters that the Olmert government has not “solved” the problems with Gaza that the war was, they had promised, intended to solve. Pressure from (and support for) the rightwing Israeli parties has intensified…
Under these circumstances, it’s unclear to me whether Olmert even has any motivation at all to conclude– far less announce!– any ceasefire agreement with Hamas before next Tuesday. Probably the only thing that just might make such an agreement acceptable to Israeli voters, in their current state of great anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Hamas frenzy, would be if it included the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli POW who has been held by unidentified militant groups in Gaza since June 2006, and by Hamas since it took control of the Strip in June 2007.
Hamas wants to keep the prisoner-exchange negotiations separate from the Gaza-ceasefire (and siege-lifting) negotiations. More than two dozen elected Hamas negotiators from the West Bank– including the speaker of the Palestinian parliament– have been held by Israel, without charges, as apparent bargaining chips for Shalit. Israel also holds a further 11,000-plus Palestinian detainees in its extensive complex of prisons for political prisoners. Most of these are being held without trial. Many of them are Hamas supporters and activists– though they come from all branches of the Palestinian national-liberation movement.
The rightwing Likud party is now clearly expected to win in Tuesday’s elections– and parties even further to the right like Avigdor Lieberman’s “Israel Beitenu” party have been moving up in the polls. Israel Beitenu now outranks Ehud Barak’s Labor Party as #3 in the opinion polls. (This marks yet another phase in the long decline of Israel’s once completely dominant Labour Party, which I have chronicled since 1998.)
… In other news, George Mitchell returned to DC a couple of days ago after completing his first “fact-finding” tour of the Middle East in connection with his role as the special envoy appointed jointly by Pres. Obama and Sec. Hillary Clinton. He reported back to both Clinton and Obama– in the White House’s Oval Office, yesterday. Tuesday, Clinton had earlier jumped the gun in terms of public announcements, by declaring that Hamas would still have to meet the three tired old, and very exclusionary “requirements” before it could be included in any US peacemaking. (Commitments not to use armed force and to recognize Palestinian rights have notably not been reciprocally required from the Government of Israel.)
Time has been running out for Obama to say something principled and clear about our country’s own strong interest in and commitment to a fair and durable Israeli-Palestinian peace, in time for that statement to resonate effectively with Israeli voters before they go to the polls Tuesday.
That’s a pity. I guess Obama has had a few other things to deal with, like the still-imploding national economy and the tanking of his nomination of old buddy Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services. But he really does need to keep his eye on this Israeli-Palestinian ball; and I hope that george Mitchell is dedicated to helping him do that.
This matter certainly can’t be left to the uncertain capabilities and understanding of Hillary Clinton.
Well, that’s it for now… Watch this space for continuing field updates as I travel. (Also, given how clunky the hosting service has become here at JWN, I’m considering shifting over to WordPress sometime soon. No change for JWN readers, though Don and Scott, as occasional authors, will need to get the new info when I do that. But until I can get that switch organized, I’ll probably be doing a lot of Delicious-ing of online resources I find helpful– check them out on the JWN sidebar. I’ll also be Twittering as the spirit moves me. So check that out, too. I’ve figured how to do that from my cellphone… I think.)

Obama: What if this happened to your girls?

When he was on the campaign trail, Pres. Obama gave Israel nearly “carte blanche” to act as it wanted against Gaza by saying– in southern Israel– that if his daughters were threatened by rocket attack in the same way that kids in southern Israel were, then he couldn’t imagine what he would do in response.
So I hope he reads this piece by Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise in the NYT today, about what happened to Sabah Abu Halima’s family in Atatra, Gaza during the recent war:

releasing flaming chemicals that clung to her husband, baby girl and three other small children, burning them to death.

But that’s not all. Later on,

when rescue workers arrived 11 days later, the baby’s body had been eaten by dogs, her legs two white bones, captured in a gruesome image on a relative’s cellphone.

Bronner and Tavernise’s piece is tragic. (Though the NYT gave it an inappropriate headline, I think.)
It’s also notable because they make a point of noting how many Palestinians were killed by Israel’s security forces in the 39 months between the IDF’s supposed withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005, and the outbreak of the hostilities last December: about 1,275.
Israeli hasbaristas have argued throughout this time that the siege the Israeli government has maintained around Gaza has been the main (or sometimes, the only) Israeli “response” to the rockets launched against Hamas and other militants in Gaza over this time. I have always argued that this was never a simple situation of “rockets versus siege” but that during this period, in addition to the siege, the Israelis maintained very lethal military ops against Gaza, as well.
Also, few if any of Israel’s actions against Gaza have been undertaken solely “in response to” Palestinian rocketings. There has always been a cycle of violence; and very frequently (including, most notably, last December 27) Israel has been the one to initiate a new round or significantly escalate an existing round. The number of Israelis killed by the Gazans’ for the most part extremely primitive, home-made bottle rockets has been very low. Certainly, far fewer than 100 killed over that same time. (Though Bronner and Tavernise somehow omit to mention the number. I believe it’s available at B’tselem’s site.)
But anyway, main point of post: Pres. Obama, what would you do if your family members got treated the same way Sabah Abu Halima’s family got treated? I am assuming, of course, that you and everyone else agrees that a Palestinian life is every bit as valuable as an Israeli life…

ICRC head Kellenberger (and Rabbani) on the Gaza crisis

Our friend Christiane writes from Lausanne, Switzerland, that she has found– and translated for us– an important interview about Gaza conducted with Jakob Kellenberger, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). You can find her great translation (very lightly edited by me), here. Big thanks for your work there, Christiane!
I assume that most JWN readers realize that the ICRC holds a very special position among international non-governmental organizations because, since the very beginning of the codification of International Humanitaran Law (IHL, aka the ‘Laws of War’) in the 1850s, all the governments that have signed onto these important treaties– the ‘Hague’ series, the ‘Geneva’ series, etc– have thereby agreed that the Geneva-based ICRC will be the depositary and, if you like, the trustee for the whole process. No other NGO occupies anything like such an authoritative role in interpreting and guarding the integrity of IHL.
The ICRC and the whole emerging body of IHL importantly predated both the establishment of the League of Nations (which occurred after World war I) and that of the UN in 1945. Thus, even before there were global inter-governmental organizations of that sort there was IHL, and there was the ICRC in a position to act as continuing guarantor of the important protections IHL provides to those who are victims of war. Granted, its performance has often in the past been flawed– most notably, during many of the vicious counter-insurgency campaigns that European powers waged against national independence movements over the first 120 years of the ICRC’s existence, and its performance during the European Holocaust against the Jewish, Roma, gays, and handicapped populations of Nazi-ruled countries. But over time the ICRC has worked much more fully to underline and work for the equal concern for all human persons that is, after all, one of its foundational values.
Kellenberger was the only head of any human-rights or humanitarian organization who made a point of going to visit Gaza in person at the earliest time he could, to assess the consequences of the Israeli assault on the Strip’s population.
Anyway, here is the link to the original French version of the Kellenberger interview, which was published in the Swiss daily 24 heures, yesterday.
Christiane writes, ” To sum it up, Kellenberger is issuing the same call as Helena concerning Gaza.” That is, I’m assuming, the point he makes about the urgency of the need for a political solution of the problem faced by Gazans (and all other Palestinians.) Though there certainly is currently a physical-needs humanitarian crisis in Gaza of the highest order, as I’ve noted before the crisis is not only, and indeed not even centrally, one of the basic human needs of Gaza’s 1.5 million people. It is quintessentially a political crisis.
Gaza’s humanitarian crisis has been deliberately caused and exacerbated by the intentional policies of siege, encirclement, and physical destruction that successive Israeli governments have pursued toward its civilian population; and it could be ended quickly and successfully if those policies were abandoned. Gaza is not the drought-torn Sahel. Its population is well educated and– until the latest Israeli assault– it had a pretty good infrastructure capable of supporting rapid socio-economic reconstruction and development. Those assets could all be rapidly reactivated if Israel would only lift the siege and agree to reasonable and sustainable terms to stabilize the very fragile parallel-ceasefire situation created on January 18.
On a related note, I have just read the sharp criticism that Mouin Rabbani (formerly with the Crisis Group) has just written, of the way that Human Rights Watch has dealt with Israel-related concerns over the years, including during the Gaza crisis.
Rabbani raises some of the same criticisms that I’ve raised about HRW in the past, though his analysis of the organization’s one-sidedness is much deeper than anything I have ever written.
Human Rights Watch does, without a doubt, do a lot of good work in the Middle East. For that reason I recently accepted an invitation from the organization to stay on their Middle East advisory committee for a further year. However, many of the criticisms that Rabbani raises are well documented, and serious. His analysis of the tentativeness of the language with which HRW raises the “possibility” of Israeli infractions of IHL, versus the often strident tone with which it denounces possible infractions by Arab actors, is particularly thought-provoking; and my advice to my colleagues and friends at HRW is that they engage very seriously with these criticisms if they want their work to be widely respected throughout the whole Middle East.

Obama, act now for peace and humanity!

When Israel was still bombing Gaza full-bore, back until two days before the end of George Bush’s presidency, president-elect Barack Obama said he did not want to adopt any kind of public position on the war because “We have only one president at a time.”
Now, he is it.
Israelis go to the polls on February 10. The parallel-but-unnegotiated ceasefires announced by Hamas and Israel on January 18 are looking very shaky indeed. Israel’s Military Intelligence has reported that it is the non-Hamas groups that have continued launching some hostile acts (an ambush, some small-scale rockets) against Israel since January 18. Today, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert promised to undertake “disproportionate” retaliation against Gaza for the latest rocket attack from Gaza, sendung warplanes against Southern gaza and threatening even greater escalations over the days ahead.
Olmert himself is not running in the upcoming election, though he is campaigning desperately to save the “legacy” of a term as PM that was stained by the strategic debacle of the 2006 war against Lebanon and the corruption charges that have snapped ever closer and closer to his own heels (and which forced him to step down as head of Kadima some months ago.)
Though Olmert is not running, his colleague at the head of Kadima, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, most certainly is. And so is Labour Party head Ehud Barak, currently the Defense Minister. Since January 18, this troika has come in for considerable criticism from Israel’s hard-right parties who claim– with some justification– that they did not “finish the job” they started when they launched the war december 27, in terms of suppressing the ability of the Palestinian militants to fire their (often home-made) projectiles against Israel.
Over the past few years the major political momentum inside Israel– including among an apparently broad swathe of the Jewish-Israeli public– has been pushing toward ever more hawkish stances and actions, though there are now, as always, several significant voices in the country that point out that suppressing the Palestinians’ will to resist Israel’s occupation and siege is an unachievable task and therefore Israel should seek to engage Hamas in negotiations.
But what of Barack Obama? Now, as the violence starts to re-escalate, he needs to speak out forcefully for de-escalation, and for a return to authoritative final-status peace negotiations, human solidarity, and calm.
He needs to do this before February 10, otherwise the bellophilia that has been holding so many Israelis in its thrall might sweep a very heavily rightwing and anti-withdrawal government into power.
He needs to do it now, to try to knock some sense into the heads of the current Israeli government, who throughout eight years of the Bush presidency got used to having a complete “carte blanche” from Washington, regardless of the serious bad effects that their actions had on US interests spread throughout the region. (For many years now, Washington has been overwhelmingly the main provider of help to Israel at the military, political, and financial levels. Everyone in the world knows that.)
Obama also needs to do this now because the people of Gaza are still suffering. During the recent war, Israel– using overwhelmingly US-supplied weaponry– bombed thousands of their homes and businesses and the physical facilities of many of their major social institutions to smithereens. People are in tents, and the Gaza winters can be biting cold. The work of physical and social reconstruction urgently needs to get underway– but the Olmert government still won’t allow even basic construction materials to pass into the Strip.
There is an urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the crisis is not the kind of “humanitarian” issue that can be dealt with only by endlessly sending food and hygiene supplies in to Gaza’s people. It is, at its core, part of the deep and continuing political crisis of the Palestinian people– a crisis that has been awaiting an authoritative political resolution for 61 years now.
Obama did despatch Sen. George Mitchell to the region for a “listening tour,” last Monday. So I hope that, even though Mitchell is still in the Middle East, he has already been able to convey back to Obama some of the urgency of the situation he has found there.
But now, even before Mitchell gets back to Washington DC, Obama needs to start speaking out: for de-escalation, for a true spirit of human solidarity with the peoples of Gaza and of Israel, for strengthening the ceasefire in Gaza, and for launching a top-priority, international project to secure the terms of a final-status peace between Israelis and Palestinians within the next nine months.
Diplomatic delay has always been fatal on this issue. The US has only one president. President Obama: step up to the plate now!

My IPS analysis on Obama’s Middle East policy so far

Read it here.

Insight on George Mitchell

I had a really informative talk yesterday with Shelley Deane, a prof at Bowdoin College in Maine who’s one of the world’s leading “George Mitchell scholars.” An Irish citizen, Deane wrote her doctoral dissertation at LSE on Mitchell’s role in brokering Northern Ireland’s “Good Friday Agreement.” Right now, she has unique access to all the records of the commission he co-chaired with Warren Rudman, at the invitation of Pres. Clinton, to look into the causes of the Second Palestinian Intifada. Along the way, she has also done a lot of work on the general topic of “Paramilitaries to Parliamentaries” and other issues in complex peacemaking. (Check her publications list at the link above.)
Now, of course, Mitchell is in the hot seat as Barack Obama’s quick-off-the-blocks special envoy to the Middle East. It’s a task to which he brings his long experience as a US Senator (including a stint as Senate Majority Leader), his ultimately successful peace-brokering record in Northern Ireland, and the very granular experience of Israeli-Palestinian issues– and of its interaction with US politics at the highest levels– that he gained during his work on the Mitchell-Rudman Commission.
Deane said she’s identified several key of the personal qualities that have aided Mitchell’s approach to peace-brokering. The main ones are his persistence, his friendly and unflappable temperament, his commitment to building longterm relations of trust, his deep personal decency, and his very strong preference for approaches that inclusive, even-handed, and values-based. (My wording there, not always hers.)
She said that Mitchell’s approach is to create a “hyperbaric chamber– because when you’re in the depths of a conflict you can’t just rise to the surface immediately, or you’d ‘get the bends’. So you have to create this hyperbaric chamber, hopefully including all the relevant parties, as a safe place where relationships of trust can be built over time.”
She noted that he’d experienced many serious setbacks during his efforts in Northern Ireland, but had calmly persisted with the job nonetheless.
She said he places strong emphasis on trust and trustworthiness, and was upset though not thrown off balance by instances of Israeli “spoiler-leaking” that had occurred during Israeli-Palestinian discussions that had been intended to be kept quiet.
She talked quite a bit about the similarities she sees between Hamas and Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein, including the strength of their internal discipline, their lack of corruption, and the fact that both organizations, by design, refused to establish a patronage- and fiefdom-based internal structure. But she also talked about the structural differences between the Northern Ireland situation and that in Israel/Palestine, including the fact that in Northern Ireland both blocs of major protagonists– the “Unionists” and the Sinn Fein/IRA– had important state systems behind them; and the situation there was not exactly one in which one protagonist was running a military occupation over the other. (The role of the British Army in Northern Ireland was much more nuanced than that; and anyway, the major reconciliation that needed to occur was between the opposing local forces, not between the entire indigenous population and a foreign occupation army.)
It strikes me this question of the structural differences between the two situations is one worth quite a lot more study. But I need to run now. (I’m going to a talk Jimmy Carter;s main Middle east person, Bob Paster, is giving about Hamas.)
More on all of this, later. However, the next few days look pretty busy for me…

Possible US military attack against Somalia? Not again!!

Steve Clemons and Bernhard of Moon of Alabama have both been writing about the possibility that the new Obama administration might launch some form of attack against ground targets in desperately war-torn Somalia.
Please God, no! Does no-one in this White House have a memory that stretches back to 1993, when a newly inaugurated Bill Clinton thought that– especially as a Democrat with a previous pro-peace record– he needed to “show some spine” and turn the US’s existing aid-protection mission in Somalia into a war-fighting “compellence” mission instead?
With disastrous effect.
Wikipedia reminds us (footnotes removed) that,

Pres. Clinton’s childish and destructive “spine-demonstration” exercise in Somalia turned out very badly indeed for Somalia. As did the “compellence by proxy” mission that Pres. George W. Bush launched against the country in December 2006, using the Ethiopian invasion army as his proxy.
Clinton’s completely needless chest-baring exercise in Somalia also turned out very badly for the US. With Somali politics thrown into uproar after the July assault, by October the US military (and White House) had decided on another raid, this time to try to capture two key aides to Aidid from a house they were in, in Mogadishu. That raid, codenamed ‘Operation Gothic Serpent‘ was a complete and embarrassing fiasco. Two US helicopters were downed and there was a very serious lack of communication and coordination between US ground and heli-borne units– and also, between US units and the Pakistani and Malaysian troops who were supposed to be their allies in that nominally UN force. A total of 18 US servicemen– and many, many more Somalis– were killed. Clinton’s attempt to demonstrate US military capabilities and resolve was quickly abandoned as he turned back to using much more diplomatic means to try to de-escalate the Somali situation.
That mad, destructive, and completely avoidable firefight then became the subject of the book and movie “Black Hawk Down.”
Another consequence of Clinton’s childish attempt to “show US muscle” in Somalia in 1993 was that the US military (and Clinton) then became extremely casualty averse. To the extent that the following April, when Gen. Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN’s small peacekeeping force in Rwanda, was crying out for reinforcements in the lead-up to and the early days of the genocide there, Clinton and Madeleine Albright worked actively at the UN to have Dallaire’s force completely disbanded, instead. Their “fear” was that even if there were no US units in the UN force in Rwanda, the US would somehow get sucked into it, and US troops might end up dying as they tried to save Rwandan lives.
(Actually, people who join an all-volunteer military like that in the US do so knowing full well that they might die on the job. That’s part of the deal. Also, Dallaire was able to hang onto a much-reduced skeleton force in Rwanda, which saved thousands of lives– though not nearly as many as it could have, if he’d been sent the reinforcements he’d begged for.)
The damaging legacy of “Gothic Serpent” lived on for many years, and in many different ways… both in Somalia and far beyond.
So please, please, President Obama, don’t even contemplate launching any kind of new military attack against Somalia– whether under the pretext of “fighting piracy” or any other pretext.
There are plenty of nonviolent ways to address any problems the international community faces in (and from the shores of) Somalia. Another war is not the answer. Plus, you have absolutely no need to “prove” anything, in a chest-thumping militaristic way. We elected you to solve problems, not create new ones; and most of us who elected you did so based on your promise to find nonviolent ways to resolve tricky conflicts, to de-escalate international tensions, and to build better relations of mutual respect and respect with the other nations of the world.
We certainly did not elect you to launch another US military attack against Somalia.

ElBaradei shows the way: Boycott the BBC!

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has cancelled two interviews he was scheduled to give to the BBC, over the Beeb’s refusal to air the charity appeal for Gaza.
Excellent decision, Mr. ElBaradei. How many other decisionmakers and “news sources” around the world will now follow suit?
Lots, I hope.
I’m just trying to figure out if news consumers should also join this boycott. I think so.