Helena – Page 94 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

The Iraqi SOFA/WA: Uncertainties– but also a text

Yesterday, the Iraqi parliament gave preliminary ratification for the Status of Forces– or, more correctly, Withdrawal– Agreement with the US that had been negotiated by PM Maliki (and foreign minister Zebari) over the course of the past seven or so months.
The ratification was only preliminary because it was made conditional on a countrywide popular referendum to provide final approval for the Withdrawal Agreement on July 30, 2009. That is one month after the deadline specified in the text of the agreement for the withdrawal of all US (and other foreign forces) from Iraq’s towns and cities into bases/cantonments outside the urban areas. That provision provides an important mechanism by which the Iraqi political system can ‘benchmark’ the performance of the US side of its obligations under the agreement.
Oh, how the balance has shifted since the days, not so long ago, when numerous actors in the US political system asserted they had the possibility (and some kind of ‘right’) to ‘benchmark’ the behavior of the Iraqi government.
The fact that the Iraqi parliament approved the SOFA/WA, reportedly through winning the votes of 148 of the 198 lawmakers attending the session, is known. So too– finally!– is the exact content of the English-language version of the final text of the treaty, which was published by the White House here (PDF) yesterday, while most Americans were busy gorging themselves on turkey and not thinking about Iraq at all.
Much else about the agreement remains murky. This includes the question of whether all the Iraqi legislators who took part in the vote were all agreed regarding what it was they were voting on… and also, the precise attitude towards it of the ruling bodies in neighboring Iran.
On this latter point, the FT’s Najmeh Bozorgmehr has the best reporting I’ve seen to date.
She writes from Tehran,

Tehran has been relatively satisfied

Bozorgmehr quotes Sadegh Kharrazi, Iran’s former ambassador to Paris, as saying that “Iran has adopted active silence [regarding the SOFA/WA] which means it is generally okay with the moderated version even though it does not agree with all of it.”
See also this analysis by NIAC’s Babak Rahimi, which was quoted by Bozorgmehr.
Back on November 17, I noted, as Rahimi did in his piece several days later, that Iranian judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi had expressed his approval of the Iraqi cabinet’s November 16 adoption of the SOFA/WA.
I commented in that post:

having US forces tied down as sitting ducks in very-close-by Iraq through the end of 2011 is seen as a handy guarantor– at least for the next three years– that no-one in Washington will decide to attack Iran in this period.

I still think that analysis holds up.
I’ll note in passing that the coverage that Juan Cole had today of the question of Iran’s attitude toward the SOFA/WA seemed uncharacteristically ill-informed and muddled.
However, Juan– and the Iranian radio report that he characterizes, unjustifiably, as “celebratory in style”– are not the only parties who have seemed generally unclear as to what is actually in the SOFA/WA text.
The NYT’s Suadad al-Salhy blogged here on Monday that,

It seems like 70% of the Iraqi MP’s have no idea what is in the agreement. This is clear from the complaints and criticisms that I hear when I am listening to their questions in the press room of the parliament building, and on the television coverage when I get home.

She also gives some good examples of that…
Let’s hope the Iraqi parliamentarians became somewhat better informed before they voted yesterday?
So now, what can we say about the content of the SOFA/WA text?
As far as I know, the version web-published (PDF) by the White House yesterday was the first version released publicly of the official English text. And the White House also, for good measure, web-published (PDF) an official English-language version of the accompanying ‘Strategic Framework Agreement’, while they were about it.
I note that both these documents appear to be PDF’s of the official international agreements that were signed on November 17. Both carry the signatures of the signatories from each side. Both also state this:

each text being equally authentic.

This is interesting– particularly as regards Article 24, the crucial article regarding US withdrawal.
My understanding is that the Al-Sabah version of the Arabic text that Raed Jarrar directed us to on November 17 was the “definitive” Arabic version of the text.
It states, at Article 24, the following:

Raed had translated that as:

must

This, where the White House text says only, in both those paragraphs, that all the US troops “shall” withdraw. However, in the Arabic, the word “yujib” that introduces each of these paragraphs clearly carries the meaning “must.”
Interesting.
I note, too, that in the White House version, the title of the agreement (which they are eager not to call a treaty) is given as an agreement between the two countries “On the Withdrawal of the United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during their Temporary presence in Iraq.”
… More about the content of the now-released version of the Strategic Framework Agreement later. But at my first reading, I’d say that it doesn’t look nearly as weaselly, sinister, or threatening to Iraqi sovereignty as some people had previously feared.

Buiter announces collapse of western financial system

Willem Buiter is the former chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He’s not only smart; he’s well-informed and thoughtful. Today he wrote on his blog:

The western (north-Atlantic) financial system we knew has collapsed.

“This financial system is no more! It has ceased to be! ‘It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! ‘It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘it to the tax payer’s perch it’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Its metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir indivisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!”

He then comments– in terms that echo quite a bit of what I was writing here yesterday (though he does it more pithily),

Banks have no other raison d’être.

Hear-hear to that last sentiment!
He writes that “the coercive powers of the state” are now required to get the banks to lend to the non-financial sector and to households, and suggests three ways this might be done. All look– from the point of view of the present owners and CEOs of the banks– fairly draconian. (One is the full-scale nationalization of the banks.)
Buiter also explicitly names the position the major banks are taking right now as a “bank lending strike.” He is quite correct to do so. By not lending, the banks are hoping governments will shovel yet more and more money their way, with little or no quid pro quo. They are holding society hostage. Governments must intervene– and not simply by shoveling money to the banks but by getting the economy going with or without the cooperation of the banks, while enacting emergency legislation that will force the banks to cooperate.
I am still very worried indeed that we will see no action of this kind in the US. Bush’s cabinet, Obama and his economic-team-in-waiting, and the Democratic leaders of Congress present and future all seem united– with just a few isolated exceptions in Congress– in being completely in hock to the bankers and their worldview. (What Buiter, back in May, called “cognitive regulatory capture.'” I would call it brainwashing.)
What a pity we don’t have a few more Buiters here in the US.

What is the economy FOR?

Thanksgiving is a peculiarly US-American holiday that, by stressing the
important bonds of family and friends, provides us a good opportunity
to reflect on the often-neglected question of what the economy that we
(nearly) all participate in is actually for.

The word “economy” itself gives us a strong hint. “Eco”– seen also in
the science of “ecology– comes from “oikos”, a hearth or home.
“Nomos,” seen also in astronomy, gastronomy, etc., has to do with an
attempt at discovering the underlying laws in the field mentioned. So
we could say that what economics is fundamentally about is the
discovery of what makes for a well-provisioned home, or a
well-provisioned community at any larger level of which the family home
can be seen as a microcosm…. And then, of course, the practice of
using that understanding to make the arrangements and provisions
necessary for the home or community to be accordingly well-run.

It has to do with community, and with wellbeing. More precisely, it has
to do with the material components of the wellbeing of the community in
question.

Notice that two words I haven’t mentioned thus far are “profits” and
“stock market.”

I’ll grant the proponents of Reagan-era “trickle down economics” this
much: At least they made some attempt to explain how it was that the
hyper-wealth of the plutocratic few who were expected to profit from
the Regan-era tax cuts– and in fact, did– would in some way connect
with the wellbeing of the great mass of currently non-wealthy people.

But since the 1980s, the overwhelmingly dominant view in US public
discourse has been one that sees stock market profits as ipso facto
desirable and good, and that has very often not even bothered to make
any argument at all about the connection between stock market profits
and the wellbeing of the national community as a whole. Just recall the
way economic news is presented in the mainstream media: the prominence
given to shifts in share prices; and the gross disproprotion between
the coverage given those shifts and that given major developments in
the real, brick-and-mortar lives of real Americans like plant
closings, evictions, shifts in the national figures regarding hunger or
infant mortality, or the health-care crisis in general.

The word “economy” has another, related meaning, too. It has to do with
good stewardship
of the available resources– as in the terms, “economy of words” or
“economy of force”. Folding in this meaning, too, we could
say that a well-run national economy would be one that delivers good
outcomes on the broad indicators of human wellbeing to all members of
the nation concerned, and that does so with as little waste as
possible. Here, as you can see, the idea of good stewardship also
connects with the broader “ecology” of the environment.

Continue reading “What is the economy FOR?”

Karzai wants the foreign troops out, too

So it’s not just the US-installed government in Baghdad that is now acting uppity and turning on its former master… Afghan President Hamid Karzai told a team of visiting UN Security Council members today that he, too, wants to see a “timeline” for the end of foreign military presence in his country.
That AFP report tells us that,

Among the people on the delegation was Washington’s Afghan-born ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad. In recent months, Khalilzad has not done much to quell rumors that he is considering running against Karzai in the elections scheduled for Afghanistan next fall. But gosh, If Karzai’s going to be so “uppity”, maybe some people in Washington will want to see him replaced much earlier than that?
… Also on Afghanistan, JWN readers might be interested in reading this and other recent posts on a new blog, “Afghanistan Shrugged”, written by a US National Guard officer who was recently deployed as head of an American “Embedded Training Team” working with Afghan National Army units in Bermel, Paktika, near the border with Pakistan.
The writer calls himself Vampire06. And yes, he is (as the title of his blog suggests) an admirer of Ayn Rand. He gives an interesting, fairly intelligent ground-level view of the work of the ETTs, so a bunch of his recent posts are worth reading.
You might, however, be interested in following the discussion I’ve had on V06’s most recent post with Joshua Foust of Registan, here.

Iraq’s international ‘Contact group’ becoming stronger?

The Security Cooperation and Coordination Committee of Iraq’s neighboring countries held its third meeting in Damascus Sunday. This ‘Contact Group’ brings together representatives of the UN, the US, Iraq’s neighbors (including Iran), and other relevant international actors. It has been quietly working behind the scenes since April 2007 to help stabilize Iraq and expedite an orderly transition to the country’s full independence. The two earlier meetings of the SCCC were also held in Damascus, in April and August 2007.
Who, consuming only the western MSM, would have known about Sunday’s landmark meeting?
The MSM pumps out a constant flow of reporting– and commentary that’s often very belligerent– on the matters of political difference between Washington and Damascus. But it seems to ignore the areas in which the two countries cooperate, altogether. Why?
Yes, certainly, there are some substantial differences. There are the (very poorly substantiated) US allegations that Syria has been doing illegal things in the nuclear field, and the US allegations that Syria was not doing enough to prevent anti-US militants from crossing its border into Iraq. Syria also has its own considerable grievances against the US, but these don’t get nearly as much of an airing in the western MSM.
Then, as recently as October 26, the White House authorized a U.S. Special Forces in Iraq to undertake a heavily armed incursion into Syria that killed eight Syrian citizens, reportedly civilians.
But on November 23 there was Maura Connelly, the Deputy Chief of Mission and therefore (in the absence of an ambassador) the highest-ranking US diplomat in Syria, taking part in the SCCC gathering hosted by the Syrian government.
That’s great news.
Also attending were representatives of Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain, Japan, the UN secretary-general, the four non-US Permanent Members of the UN , the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Arab League. Saudi Arabia had been invited but did not attend due to its continuing bilateral disagreements with Syria.
Reuters tells us (HT: Josh Landis) about one of the more dramatic things that happened in the meeting:

praised Syria for preventing foreign fighters from infiltrating into Iraq

The fact that Syria agreed to host the conference even after last month’s military attack by the US was significant. Reuters’ Khaled Oweis wrote that Syria “decided to go ahead [with the meeting] after the Iraqi government condemned the strike.”
The participation of both Iran and the US in this gathering was also very significant. (But that development, too, was completely ignored by the western MSM. See my points on the MSM and Syria, above…)
So was the fact that the US was able to win support for the belligerent attitude it has adopted toward Syria from not a single one of the other delegates— not even the Iraqi government that it itself helped set up back in 2005-06.
Yes, the balance of power/influence between Washington and Baghdad regarding matters Iraqi has certainly shifted in Baghdad’s favor. All that’s left now is to work for the continuing retraction of US power from the region that is as orderly as possible. (Hence the great importance of this coordinating body, the SCCC.)
Oweis gave these additional details of what happened in the Damascus meeting:

representatives of China and Russia had condemned the United States for using Iraq as a “base for aggression”. A joint statement issued by Iraq and its neighbours after the meeting said they opposed any offensive action launched from Iraq against its neighbours or vice versa.

… I have stressed for many years now that any substantial drawdown of US troops from Iraq (and especially the complete withdrawal that I favor) requires the active involvement in helping to facilitate and coordinate that of all of Iraq’s neighbors, including those with which the US has bad relations, as well as of the UN. The SCCC seems to be providing exactly this kind of coordination.
It’s been 15 months since the last SCCC meeting. Let’s hope it is not nearly as long until the next one, and that the non-US members of this body work hard to give it more real clout and political weight once the UN’s ‘mandate’ to the US in Iraq expires on December 31.

Rumsfeld, Kagan, and Chalabi in the NYT

I can’t believe that the NYT gave a huge chunk of its prime op-ed real estate today to allow war criminal Donald Rumsfeld to offer his views and advice on US. And Ahmad Chalabi. And Fred Kagan.
Among the gems Rumsfeld offers are, regarding Iraq, “By early 2007, several years of struggle had created the new conditions for a tipping point…” And reflecting on US military history more generally:

The singular trait of the American way of war is the remarkable ability of our military to advance, absorb setbacks, adapt and ultimately triumph based upon the unique circumstances of a given campaign. Thus it has been throughout our history. And thus it will be in Iraq and Afghanistan, if we have the patience and wisdom to learn from our successes, and if our leaders have the wherewithal to persevere even when it is not popular to do so.

Chalabi’s piece is a little intriguing. It’s titled “Thanks, but you can go now.” In it he argues,

The independent, democratically elected Iraqi government now representing the interests of its people is nearly identical to the government that could have been formed in 2003.

H’mm, I made something similar to that argument just myself, this morning. But unlike Mr. Snake-oil Ahmad Chalabi I never worked for a moment to try to get the US into this war, and I am not now and never have been on the payroll of any government.
Chalabi is most likely on Tehran’s payroll at this time (and has likely been for quite a while.) He is Mr. Look-after-number one, but he also has a good finger to the prevailing political winds.
In this piece, he tries to write “in the name of” all Iraqis. He writes:

Somewhat irritatingly, I find I agree with a lot of what he writes.
Luckily, no such feelings emerge when reading Kagan.
The best of the seven pieces the NYT has gathered today on the joint question of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is undoubtedly this one by Rory Stewart. It’s titled “The ‘Good War’ isn’t worth fighting”. Stewart, a British adventurer, writer, and former army officer who knows both Iraq and Afghanistan pretty well, argues that,

President-elect Obama’s emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided. Overestimating its importance distracts us from higher priorities, creates an unhealthy dynamic with the government of Afghanistan and endangers the one thing it needs — the stability that might come from a patient, limited, long-term relationship with the international community…

The whole of that piece is worth reading. Unlike Rumsfeld’s self-serving and ill-focused little rant.

U.S. in Iraq: Good-bye ‘Conditionality’

It is now official: The US government will not be imposing on the Iraqi government any of the ‘conditionality’– as a precondition for the US troop pullback/withdrawal– that the Bush administration, Congress (and numerous Washington think tanks) had all previously demanded.
I called this outcome back in June when I started noting (e.g. here) that the political balance in Baghdad between the US and the Iraqi government had tipped in the Iraqis’ favor. That meant that Washington would no longer be able to impose its conditions on the Iraqis as a “prerequisite” for any drawdown or full withdrawal of the US troop presence in the country. And today we can see that that has indeed been the case.
The main forms of conditionality required by the Democratic-controlled Congress was a set of “benchmarks” the Baghdad government should reach regarding Iraq’s own internal governance system. The Bush administration placed some emphasis on those benchmarks, but it was probably far more intent on winning as much freedom of action for the US military inside Iraq as possible, and if at all possible not to have any terminal date placed on this.
All those forms of conditionality have now been tossed overboard.
The latest– possibly final?– version (Word doc here) of the US -Iraqi SOFA makes clear that all US troops must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011; that the US troops must be withdrawn from all Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009; that control of the “Green Zone”– once also known as the “International Zone”– will pass into Iraqi hands as of January 1, 2009; that US-employed contractors will enjoy no special immunity from Iraqi jurisdiction after that date; and that in most other respects Iraq will regain its real national sovereignty on January 1, 2009.
Neither this SOFA nor any other current agreement between the two parties that I know of makes any mention of the US having any veto power over Iraq’s internal governance system.
I describe the current version of the SOFA agreement only as “possibly final” because the Iraqi parliament has yet to ratify it, an action that it proposes doing next Wednesday. Inside Iraq, despite the many concessions PM Maliki has wrung out of Washington during the six-month course of this negotiation, there is still significant opposition from the Sadrists to having any American troops remaining for as long as the next three years; and some Kurds and Sunnis have other objections to the current text. So the agreement is not yet a done deal; and it is possible Maliki may yet seek– and win– further concessions from the US side, especially regarding the timing of the final withdrawal.
On the US side, it has been notable both that (a) the Bush administration has argued that this agreement does not, as treaties do, require any ratification from the Senate in order to go into force; and (b) the Democratic leaders of the Senate have made no attempt whatever, throughout the months this SOFA has been in negotiation, to claim this prerogative.
Indeed, after all the bluff and bluster the Congressional Democrats generated last year when they spelled out the “benchmarks” they wanted to impose on the Iraqi government, their silence now that this SOFA is coming close to fruition has been quite deafening. Only Rep. William Delahunt, the chair of a relatively low-level sub-committee in the lower house, has shown any real interest in the subject at all.
Why won’t our Congressional leaders start asking some of the very real hard questions that need asking about why this outcome– the restoration of real Iraqi sovereignty with no longterm US troop presence– was not achieved back in late 2003, instead of the two countries having to go through all the terrible pain, suffering, and costs that have been imposed on them both, but especially on Iraqis, in the five years that have passed since then?
(Maybe because so many members of Congress still clung to the neo-imperial illusion that the US not only could re-make distant nations according to its own plan– but also that it had somehow the right to… Hence the whole shameful history of “benchmarking”.)
I note, too, that just about the whole of the US MSM has colluded in this reluctance to pay serious attention to the question of the SOFA. Only McClatchy has done some– as usual, excellent– real reporting on it.
In this important article November 19, McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef started to unpack some of the negotiating history of the SOFA, from the US side. She identified some serious disagreements on the issue between different portions of the Bush administration, writing,

senior military officials are privately criticizing President Bush for giving Iraq more control over U.S. military operations for the next three years than the U.S. had ever contemplated.

She quoted an un-named “senior administration official” as giving this explanation for the politics behind what happened:

I don’t wholly buy that explanation. But there is a lot more of value in Youssef’s piece, which should certainly be required reading.
My question, though: Why have the “big” US MSM not thrown some of their own considerable resources into reporting on the “inside story” and the real, ever-evolving content of this negotiation?
Meantime, we should absolutely not forget that back on June 10, the Maliki government did sign a security agreement– with Iran.
Some of the implications of that agreement became evident yesterday when US forces who had detained an Iranian man at Baghdad airport were forced to release him, after Iraq’s deputy foreign minister interceded on his behalf…
For my part, I think the current text of the SOFA is worth supporting. I wish the deadline for all US troops to get out of Iraq was a lot sooner than the end of 2011 (though if both sides agree to terminate the presence sooner, that is still possible under the agreement; but extending its term is not.) But I am really glad that– in contradistinction both to longheld Bush administration and to Barack Obama’s long-held position on the matter– there is no provision in the text for a “continuing” US troop presence in Iraq of any type at all, even as a “non-combat” force.
I am concerned that there seems to be no reliable mechanism for mediating the internal political disputes that have already risen inside Iraq over the governance questions that will arise as the US troops withdraw from the cities over the coming months– and then later, from the whole country. Those disputes may well become a lot more intense in the months ahead. I would feel a lot more reassured if an explicit role for the UN had been written into this US troop withdrawal agreement– both to help the Baghdad government mediate any internal disputes and also, even more importantly, to help build a structure of agreements among Iraq’s neighbors to ensure that none feel they need to intervene militarily inside Iraq for whatever reason or pretext.
I note, however, that there is nothing to stop the Baghdad government from requesting such help from the UN (or, the Arab League; but that wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to draw Iran and Turkey into the needed negotiation.) Plus, the UN has a small but possibly quite effective presence inside Iraq, that could certainly be increased as necessary.
… Anyway, bottom line here: All of us who want to see the “rule of law” and rules of basic good, respectful behavior applied in the interactions among the world’s different nations should applaud this accord because it gives the US government no lasting reward for the act of international aggression it committed against the government and people of Iraq in 2003. We can still all work for more accountability for the US officials responsible for that act of aggression, and for some form of adequate reparations to be made to all those who have suffered from their heinous decision.
But seeing Washington being denied the chance to reap any direct and overt longterm political fruits from that act of aggression is an excellent first step.

US power declining. Duh.

So the US’s National Intel Council has finally released the ‘Global Trends 2025’ report that its analysts have been working on for many months now.
Gloom ‘n’ doom for many western analysts, including that BBC report linked to above, which offers the report’s ‘key points’ here.
The NIC’s head of analysis, Thomas Fingar, is not only smart but also politically savvy. Smart: Back in 2002 when he was head of intel analysis at the State Dept., his was one of one or two shops that steadfastly questioned the White House’s contention that Saddam had functioning WMDs. (So why didn’t Colin Powell listen to his own people on that? That is a very different question… )
Politically savvy: After he arrived at the NIC Fingar realized he had a lot of heavy lifting to do to rebuild the near-complete collapse of US public confidence, post-2003, in any “net assessments” coming out of the leading (as opposed to cosily inside-State) intel bodies. So he has been assiduous in cultivating public support for the NIC’s work, including by spreading little “advance snippets” of the present 2025 report around Washington DC throughout the past three months. I went to one “advance briefing” he gave on it, held at the New America Foundation back in was it late August?
Then in early Sept., he gave more snippets to the WaPo’s Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick, who duly wrote about it in this Sept. 10 story. (My commentary on that, here.)
Oh, but just recall all the things that have happened in the world since September 10! The US’s entire system of casino capitalism has collapsed, spreading contagion and resentment around the world. And the Bush administration’s attempts to force a long-term troop presence on the Iraqi government have all similarly collapsed…
The final version of Fingar’s report bravely states that, as of 2025, “The US will remain the single most important actor [in the world system] but will be less dominant.”
I wouldn’t be so sure about the first part of that prediction. We still have no final idea how low the US economy will be driven, how long it will languish there, and what form an eventual upturn might take. (Check out the discussion at MoA here.) Meantime, as I noted here, those other economies around the world that never did open up fully to the west’s invasive form of casino capitalism look much better positioned both to (a) weather the coming crisis, and (b) find ways to emerge from it building on the strength of their own much more tightly regulated financial and economic systems.
So Fingar tells us “The US will remain the single most important actor” in 2025? I truly doubt it.

Newsflash! Russia lets NATO trans-ship weapons to Afghanistan

The Kyiv Post reported yesterday that,

Russia has granted NATO-member Germany permission to ship weapons and equipment for its force in Afghanistan overland through Russia, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

(HT: Afghanistan Conflict Monitor.)
So the Cold War really has ended and is not– despite the efforts of many– about to be cranked up again any time soon?
The Russians and the US have been in talks for some time about the US (or NATO, unclear) getting the right to ship non-lethal goods to Afghanistan through Russia. So this is new.
Check out the RIA Novosti links at the bottom of this Afghanistan Conflict Monitor page.
They do indeed confirm– from an authoritative Russian source– that Russia has now given this permission to both Germany and Spain.

Some great (but under-heard) experts on the Muslim world

The United States is deeply involved in the politics of the world’s scores of majority-Muslim countries, which in turn occupy a number of the top slots on Washington’s foreign-policy agenda. So why is the U.S. public discourse on the affairs of the Muslim world so heavily dominated by people who have little actual professional training or close familiarity with these countries? Why have the thousands of Americans– academics and others– who have such expertise been so broadly excluded from input into either policy or the mainstream public discussion about policy?
Our country has suffered very badly in recent years– in Iraq, and in many other parts of the world– from the exclusion, marginalization, and suppression of the expertise of the many thousands of Americans who know a lot about the majority-Muslim world.
How different will things be in the new era of President Barack (Hussein) Obama? We still need to wait and see. We need to look at a broad range of indicators about the tenor of public life and the climate of opinion both inside and outside the halls of government before we can find an answer. Inside government, will we once again see the entire team of people working on Arab-Israeli issues made up of people with strong pro-Israeli biases and precious little actual expertise in the affairs of the Arab world? Outside government, will we continue to see the op-ed pages of the major newspapers and the ranks of alleged “experts” on the Middle East paraded on the major t.v. shows dominated by people with similar bias and a similar lack of actual, proven expertise?
There are a few reasons for optimism. One is, of course, the election of Barack Obama himself. He won despite the circulation by his opponents of numerous rumors and attempted “smears” to the effect that he was “a secret Muslim” or “a secret Arab”, and that therefore his election would cause great harm to Israel and to America. Note the unspoken assumption that a person has to be either pro-Israeli or pro-Muslim: That’s polarizing zero-sum thinking at work for you, right there.
Obama and his campaign team overcame those slurs at the ballot-box. That shows that the fear-dominated, zero-sum approach used by his opponents was not ‘bought’ by the majority of those who voted. (Media bookers and think-tank heads around the US: take good note of the American people’s good sense!)
Another reason for optimism is quieter, though it was on good show Tuesday at an excellent program run by the Women’s Foreign Policy Group here in Washington, DC. What was on show was a program the Carnegie Corporation of New York has been running for four years now, which has sought to support the work of American scholars on the Muslim world. Each year, the program has offered “up to $100,000” to 20 scholars, for a total of 80 scholars having been supported in their work so far.
So on Tuesday, the WFPG brought eight of these Carnegie Scholars to Washington DC, and provided an excellent (though necessarily small-scale) show-case for their work. Fwiw, seven of the eight featured scholars were women– some at the mid-career stage, some of them senior scholars.
I was blown away by the quality and depth of these people’s work– and also, by the poised, very effective way they were able to present it.
My immediate thought was: Why do we not see a lot more of people like this in the government, on the op-ed pages of newspapers, and on the t.v. talk shows?
Let me say this again: Poised. Articulate. Knowledgeable. Women (in the main.) With real expertise on important aspects of Muslim society.
Why are these people not showcased, and their expertise not consulted, in most of our national discussions on how our country interfaces with the Muslim world?
Why do we nearly always have the the same-old-same-old lineups of (mainly) white guys, pro-Israelis, continuing to bloviate about whole societies and countries of which, in fact, many of them know very little… and doing so with the name of some big-time Washington think-tank or well-funded elite university program beside their names?
Real area expertise: There is no substitute for this, if our country is to have any hope of minimizing the damage that our continuing blundering around the Muslim world will cause to all of humanity (including ourselves), if nothing changes.
So who were these talented Carnegie Scholars?
Asma Asfaruddin, professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, who has done ground-breaking work that has identified considerable support in the early Muslim texts for the values of tolerance, consensus, and effective political representation.
Elizabeth Thompson, a historian of the late colonial period in the Middle East. Her presentation focused on what she described as “the first, broadest, constitution-writing gathering ever held in the Middle East”. Baghdad 2004? No, Damascus 1920. It was convened by King Faisal and included participants from throughout the Mashreq, many deeply inspired by Woodrow Wilson; leading Islamic reformer Rashid Ridha was a major participant, contributing many very helpful ideas; even the question of women’s suffrage was discussed… But guess what? The French armies came hurtling into Damascus and that whole democratic experiment was summarily stifled… We need to remember all this stuff here in Washington, DC!
Elora Shehabuddin, professor of humanities and political science at Rice University, talked about the construction of the category of a “moderate” Arab or Muslim in recent US politics… and how this nearly always had to include support for Israel, for US foreign policy, and support for either a neoconservative or neoliberal ideology.
(In the discussion among those three, Asfaruddin noted that a certain facile form of “colonial feminism” had been pursued by many westerners in the Muslim world for a long time now. “Focusing on the need to unveil women has often been a very low-cost substitute for doing anything substantive to improve the lives of women and their families…”)
John Bowen, professor of arts and sciences at Washington University, St. Louis. He gave us a little sampler from the work he’s been doing on the many different patterns of Muslim life (and different patterns of Islamist affiliation) that have emerged in different European countries.
Susan Moeller, a professor of media and international affairs at the University of Maryland who previously worked as a press photographer. Moeller was the only panelist who is not a specialist in some area of Muslim life, and she has only just started her research under the Carnegie Scholars program. (I’m not sure what it is.) But she provided one very helpful vignette, from her early days as a war photographer, that illustrated the point that that there are many editorial filters that, in the MSM, frame and limit what it is that viewers are actually ever allowed to see or hear.
Lila Abu-Lughod, professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia. She memorably shared one vignette from some of her extensive field-work in Egypt: She had asked an Egyptian peasant woman she had known for a long time how a dispute about female inheritance might get worked out, and the woman referred to a multiplicity of possible sources for defining and protecting a woman’s rights, including the state’s laws, Egyptian t.v. soap-operas, local tradition, and the rulings of a locally renowned religious scholar. Textured, thought-provoking, and “real”!
Madhavi Sunder a visiting prof at the University of Chicago Law School (so maybe Obama knows her already?) She talked about the empowering effects numerous women in different parts of the Muslim world, including Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Mauretania, and even Iran have experienced from sitting with each other in small groups and undertaking their own careful reading of core Islamic texts as a way to strengthen their ability to engage in the public discussions in their countries on core issues in family law. She noted that women from these Sisters in Islam groups in Morocco succeeded, in 2004, in winning a new, more favorable Islamic Family Law… One conclusion: “Reading the Kor’an in Kuala Lumpur may actually be more momentous than reading Lolita in Tehran.”
Sunder also called directly on Obama to “express solidarity with these existing reform movements in the Muslim world rather than joining in calls to ‘save’ Muslim women and using their circumstances as a justification for invasion and war.” A very hearty amen to that!
Farzaneh Milani, a professor of literature at the University of Virginia talked about the importance of Freedom of Movement (broadly defined) for women’s full development and social integration, and about many ironic and apparently contradictory ways in which this bundle of freedoms is granted or withheld in contemporary Iran. She noted, inter alia, that 64% of the students admitted to Iranian universities are women; the number of novels published by women authors in Tehran has increased 13-fold over the past decade, to 370 new works last year; and now Iran has a woman as the ‘national poet’. She concluded: “Yes, there is repression and gender exclusion from the highest offices in the land. But a complex mixture of achievements and drawbacks mark women’s lives in Iran today. All of them need to be taken into account.”
… I do have my own set of theories as to why voices like these ones are not heard or included nearly enough in the policy discourse and policy making of this country. Part of it has to do with the deliberate, long-pursued suppression of the voices of all who “dare” to question the policies of this or that Israeli government. Part to do with the twinned campaign the most ideological pro-Israel networks here have pursued to stuff government departments, think tanks, and op-ed rosters with their own ideological soul-mates…. But in the case of the women among these scholars there is another factor at work, too: A systematic bias in many reaches of society that devalues the work and expertise of women, and the continued, steady upward rolling of the male professional elevator in all the relevant fields.
After all, if a TV booker calls in the evening, how many women have a wife at home to do the housework and look after the kids while they run off to appear on the Lehrer Newshour, or whatever? How many women have enough spare time left over from their daily grind to go out and schmooze with editorial boards or well-connected politicos? Or to contribute to new tech-driven fora like “Bloggingheads,” or even just the regular old blogosphere? How many older male professionals systematically seek out women or “minority” colleagues to network with and support, rather than continuing to support fellow-scholars who look just like them? How many ambitious younger men use their sharp elbows and immense self-confidence simply to elbow women scholars of all ages out of the way?
So huge kudos to WFPG and the Carnegie Corporation for having pulled together such a great little conference here this week. But will their efforts contribute to a real and lasting enrichment of the public policy discourse in this country on the issues of vital concern between the US and the Muslim world?
Let’s wait and see. But the expertise is now, quite assuredly, there to be tapped.