Category: Culture

The NYT’s Craig Smith had a good piece from Kabul in yesterday’s paper about the problematic behavior of the (US mercenary) ‘blond beasts’ who’ve been guarding Hamid Karzai.
(I wrote here back in July about the BBs who were guarding Iyad Allawi at the time. Not sure if they stiull are? Not sure, actually, if Allawi ever leaves the Green Zone these days… )
Anyway, here’s some of what Smith writes:

A century or so ago, American missionaries fanned out across the globe to spread not just their religion but Western ways to the “uncivilized” masses. Then came the Peace Corps, which sent idealistic young Americans to build schools and dig wells and show the world how good the United States could be. These days, though, belligerent men with sunglasses and guns are America’s most visible civilian representatives in some parts of the world.
The United States has hired private contractors to perform functions like palace security and even interrogations both here and in Iraq, where they were implicated in the prison abuse scandals. A C.I.A. contractor in Afghanistan has been charged in connection with the death of an Afghan man in custody in June 2003. Their relationship to the American military is sometimes unclear even to Americans, let alone to their allies.
[German Army Capt. Georg] Auer and Western diplomats complain that the American government’s use of such ambiguous forces has sown confusion and resentment in Kabul.
So murky are the lines of authority, Captain Auer said, that it sometimes seems any American with enough muscles and guns can pose as a representative of the United States government. He gave the example of Jonathan K. Idema, recently convicted by an Afghan court on charges of detaining and torturing Afghans as part of an apparently private hunt for terrorists.
Even NATO’s International Security Assistance Force thought Mr. Idema was working for the United States, and on three occasions responded to his calls for backup. So overwhelming is American force these days that NATO officers ostensibly in charge of Kabul’s security do not challenge the authority of Americans, even those out of uniform.
Contractors do not live by the same constraints as active-duty soldiers. At best, they reinforce the stereotype of Americans as brawny and boorish. At worst, their blurring of the military-civilian line serves as a reminder that military discipline not only keeps up morale, but encourages moral behavior. [HC emphasis there]
DynCorp is the same company whose employees hired child prostitutes while working in Bosnia a few years ago, until some people started complaining. Rather than face local justice or courts-martial, the perpetrators were simply sent home...

Continue reading “NYT on the ‘blond beasts’”

We seem to be witnessing a sudden, worldwide epidemic of candor:
In the US, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer, and the head of the Iraq Survey Group (Charles Duelfer) have all been voicing comments and assessments that shred the already thin tissue of lies on which the administration had earlier built the case for invading Iraq.
(Juan Cole has brought together the accounts of most of these incidents of candor. The Beeb’s account of the Duelfer report is here.)
In the UK, the Daily Telegraph recently published excerpts from previously unreleased British Cabinet Office documents that show that,

Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for “many years”…

The documents also show that the people in the Cabinet Office were quite aware of the flimsiness of the evidence indicating that Saddam had WMDs in the pre-war period.
(You can find a good analysis of the revelations made in those leaked documents, done by Cambridge University’s Mike Lewis, here. Lewis also provides a handy portal to a PDF collection of the leaked documents.)
Okay, I know that the publishing of leaked documents doesn’t count as “candor” on the part of the officials concerned, but bear with me….
In Israel, Sharon’s eminence grise Dov Weisglass has told Ha’Aretz flat out, regarding Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza and a tiny handful of very marginal West Bank settlements, that:

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process…
And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress…
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

Well we kind of knew that already, didn’t we? But still, it’s interesting that Weisglass feels confident enough–including of the support of the US president and “both houses of Congress”–that he can talk openly about this underhanded, deeply anti-democratic and abusive scheme.
And then, there’s Iraq, where just a bare few days after he’d prattled on to the US public that everything inside Iraq was coming up roses, the country’s US-appointed PM Iyad Allawi is now somberly telling his own people that,

It’s clear that since the handover, the capabilities are not complete and that the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges… The police force is not well equipped and is not respected enough to lay down its authority…

Okay, so there we have three significant Bush administration hawks, Dov Weisglass, and Iyad Allawi– all infected with this new virus of truth-telling… How on earth can the rest of us, who have gotten so used to hearing lies and evasions from such people, adjust to this new reality?
First of all, how can we explain it?

Continue reading “Global outbreak of candor?”

I should have written something here before about the visit Juan Cole made
to Charlottesville last week. He stayed with us, and he gave a couple
of talks at UVA. Then in the evening Friday–this was on the eve of
our departure for Beirut– he, Bill, about five other folks, and I went out
to dinner together (Al Dente, on the Charlottesville downtown mall).

Toward the end of the dinner, Juan and I had a lengthy face-to-face reprise
of the debate we had in the blogosphere in the summer of 2003. Essentially
over whether the invasion of Iraq ever could have been a worthwhile thing
for the US government to do. Juan’s criticism of the Bushies’ actions
in Iraq has always been that they completely mishandled the post-invasion
occupation (but that if they had run the occupation more effectively,
the attempt at regime change could have been proven worthwhile.) Mine
has been that the invasion itself was an unjustifiable act of violence…
(And also that they’ve mishandled the occupation;but what else could one
expect?)

We neither of us persuaded the other. I wish I could remember more
of what we both said. I do recall touching on the nature of evil, the
roots of violence, the unpredictability of violence, etc etc. He talked
about the heinous nature of the Saddam regime, etc etc… Shoot! Next
time we should take a tape-recorder.

Or drink less wine.

Today, I got up at 6 a.m. to go and take part in the first running race I’ve competed in since I was nine years old (42 years ago). It was the Charlottesville Women’s 4-miler, which is a great community event here in my hometown. This year, they capped participation at 1,850 runners…
Well, I usually run three miles, every other day. That’s the mainstay of my fitness routine. I figured four miles wouldn’t be too much of a stretch– and anyway, whenever I’m in New York, I usually put in just a little under four miles when I run the circuit round Prospect Park, in Brooklyn.
Today’s race was a lot of fun. I had a quick twinge of claustrophobia at the beginning. (So many other runners!) After that, it was great: beautiful weather, the hills not steep at all, beautiful views of the Blue Ridge foothills, and lots of great female athletic energy all around.
I remember reading on Yvette’s Taste of Africa blog about how hard they’ve had to work to build one small indoor sports hall there in Hargeisa (Somaliland), for women and girls to play some sports in. It had to be indoors because it wouldn’t be “proper” for women to be seen playing sports outside.
What a crying shame for the women of Somaliland! I love being outdoors and being able to run outdoors. So do hundreds and hundreds of the other women here in Charlottesville. There were all shapes, sizes, and ages of females out participating today. How much better for our physical and mental wellbeing for us to be doing that rather than sitting at home watching Fox TV or whatever!
I think my time was around 40 minutes. But they’ll have a listing of all our times in the local paper tomorrow. I’ll let you know.
Update, Sept. 6: Our local newspaper logged my time at 40 mins. 18 secs. Personally, I think it was less, since the Finish Line clock read 40:11 as I ran under it. Oh well, better luck next time at busting that 40-minute barrier.
I came in #550 out of 1,850 runners, of whom 1,509 finished the race. In the 50-54 age-group I was 35th out of 155.
Please note that I closed the Comments here because I was getting only spam there.

… It looks like this. (Thanks to Yankeedoodle for signaling it.)

I wrote here Friday that I’d been playing hooky from “a residential conference”,
though in fact the gathering in question was the 333rd annual session of
Baltimore Yearly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

I shan’t write much here about what went on at the conference. The
business part of the proceedings was largely tied up in lengthy consideration
of a gay-rights/ anti-homophobia issue within the broader Quaker community
that is a hard one to come to unity on. Still, I think some
good progress was made. And meanwhile, it was good to re-connect with
some old friends who are also Friends.

I did, however, want to write a little about the pleasure I got from driving
back on Friday afternoon to Harrisonburg, Virginia–location of the session–from
my hometown here in Charlottesville…

Because Lorna (the youngest) would be home a bit this weekend, I left my
car here for her to drive, and took Bill-the-spouse’s car, known by some
as “the skateboard”. Actually, it’s a 1982 Fiat Spider and it’s considerably
wider than a skateboard, if not very much longer or higher than one.

But the neat thing about it is, in good weather you get to put the top down…

Continue reading “Country roads, Virginia”

Kudos to Jimmy Carter for mentioning the need for an Arab-Israeli peace process in his speech
at the Democratic Convention last night. In all the general US political rhetoric about “what needs to be done to combat the threat from Islamic extremism”, this item is all too frequently completely ignored.
And that’s been happening inside the Democratic Party as much as elsewhere, with Kerry’s platform and rhetoric apparently even trying to outbid Bush in lauding Ariel Sharon and all his schemes.
But there was dear Jimmy Carter last night, saying this:

The United States has alienated its allies, dismayed its friends, and inadvertently gratified its enemies by proclaiming a confused and disturbing strategy of ‘pre-emptive’ war. With our allies disunited, the world resenting us, and the Middle East ablaze, we need John Kerry to restore life to the global war against terrorism.
In the meantime, the Middle East peace process has come to a screeching halt for the first time since Israel became a nation. All former presidents, Democratic and Republican, have attempted to secure a comprehensive peace for Israel with hope and justice for the Palestinians. The achievements of Camp David a quarter century ago and the more recent progress made by President Bill Clinton are now in peril.
Instead, violence has gripped the Holy Land, with the region increasingly swept by anti-American passions. Elsewhere, North Korea’s nuclear menace – a threat more real and immediate than any posed by Saddam Hussein – has been allowed to advance unheeded…

What was really interesting to see, on the televised version of the speech last night, was the high degree of support that Carter got from the audience–for this portion of the speech as for all his utterances.
I really do believe that there are many people in the Democratic Party and elsewhere throughout the country who realize that something is terribly out-of-whack in the US’s current radical tilt toward Sharon and his policies– and also, that this pro-Sharon tilt is linked to the strong antipathy expressed to toward US policies in Muslim societies throughout the world.
The American people are not stupid. It’s often the case, though, that they don’t quite know how to start talking about these issues without sounding anti-Semitic… And of course, the extremist Likud supporters who have positioned themselves in various “watchdog” roles around the country are always ready to leap onto someone expressing, say, criticism of this Israeli government’s policies and denounce her or him as “anti-Semitic”….

Continue reading “Go, Jimmy!”

The WaPo’s Jim Hoagland, for so long the uber-hawk of the inside-the-Beltway commentatariat, may at last be seeing some sense on Iraq? I live in hope…
His column today, Perception Gap in Iraq, seemed about the most sensible I’ve seen him write for a long time…
He starts off by recognizing that,

nearly three weeks of partial sovereignty may have helped the Bush administration’s drive to reduce its political vulnerability on Iraq at home.
Reducing that vulnerability is now the White House’s most urgent goal…
Read through or watch Allawi’s blunt, sparse statements and you too may be impressed by how much of his message is intended to reassure his American audience, rather than Iraqis. They [I guess he means Iraqis] are more keenly aware of the huge obstacles that Allawi faces in carrying out his ambitious promises.
To the relief of the White House, the American public and media seem to be slowly trying to tune out Iraq’s continuing violence.

Soon enough, however, his tone becomes more somber. He ends with this:

Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.
Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq’s insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.
The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency’s exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington’s version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.

Vietnam, anyone?
Of course, it would be strongly preferable were Hoagie to do a proper, three-star mea culpa and explain to all of us how it was he got duped by Chalabi and ended up being for so long a cheerleader for this whole grisly war. And if he then wrapped himself in sack-cloth and ashes and begged forgiveness from the families of everyone who’s been killed in it…
Well, dream on, Helena. For now, I’ll take his admission that things are looking pretty darn’ shitty out there as a good first step. “That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.” Indeed. Except that, of course, some of us “called” the strategic defeat of the US plan in Iraq quite a bit earlier than today. Like here, JWN, April 9.

When I was a young journo working in the Middle East for the Christian Science Monitor, I was lucky enough to work for an extremely wise Foreign Editor called Geoffrey Godsell (of blessed memory) who always stressed that what the CSM wanted was not to have its reporters competing with people working for other international news dailies who sought to be a complete “newspaper of record” in every 24-hour period… No. Geoffrey used to stress over and over that it was more important to seek to understand the events I was writing about, even if that should take a bit more time.
“Leave chasing the so-called ‘scoops’ to the others,” he’d say. “Who knows in any given 24-hour period what will be of lasting importance, anyway? We want you to give us the stories of lasting importance.”
All of which is, I guess, a long-winded way of saying that I may be late, but I try to be good. I feel a bit late in having discovered a great new news source that covers a lot of the things that I’m interested in: Iraq, the Balkans, ICTY, Afghanistan, etc. But now that I have discovered it, I want to share the good news with you (if you don’t already know about it, which maybe you do.)
I’m referring to the excellent website of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, where you can get good, street-level reporting in English and a variety of other languages on all the above topics, and more.
Plus, they have a well-compiled page called the Iraqi Press Monitor, that provides a handy daily digest of the Arabic-language press in Iraq (plus, quite frequently, cartoons from Iraqi newspapers).
Anyway, today, I was cruising around the blogosphere, still a bit concerned that Riverbend still seems too depressed to post stuff for us… I had this feeling of “I want more, quality news and views from Iraq”. And where’s Anthony Shadid, anyway, just when we need him?? I’ve kind of had it with nervous-nelly gringos writing from inside the Green Zone or from dartingly short forays outside of it.
(Okay. I admit I’m even more of a nervous nelly than most of those gringo journos working there now. I haven’t even been to Iraq since the war; or indeed since 1981. But I’ve been writing this book on Africa, and the other one on Israel/Palestine. Gimme a break, already!)
So okay… I’m looking for news on Iraq, preferably by native-born Iraqis, and what I find is the IWPR.
In addition to their daily press digest, referred to above, what they also have up on their website is a weekly collection of stories–mainly ‘hard news’, but also some ‘soft news’ and ‘opinion’– produced by Iraqi trainees in a journalism training program they’ve been running there. And much of it is really, really good.
For example, if you go to this page and scroll down a bit, you’ll come to the latest week’s-worth of stories by the trainees. The most recent ones I found there (13 July dateline) were pretty interesting and wide-ranging. But last week’s collection (6 July) looked even better to me, in good part because they had a variety of different stories describing the street-level reaction to Saddam’s first court appearance.
Like this one, “Saddam’s TV Appearance Brings Popularity Surge: Support for the former dictator appears to strengthen after his self-confident debut in court”, written by Dhiya Rasan, from Baghdad. Rasan’s lede was:

Continue reading “Institute for War & Peace Reporting”

Back in February, I wrote (here and here) about what seemed to me to be the disproportionate involvement of women in heroic whistleblowing acts from inside big, powerful organizations.
Now, I’m getting close to thinking that Brig.-General Janis Karpinski should join the JWN Women Whistleblowers Hall of Fame. She has made two important new revelations, yesterday and today, about important aspects of what was going on in Abu Ghraib prison when she was (nominally if not actually) in charge of everything that went on there.
In this story, from the AP via Napa News, she was quoted as saying that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of coercive interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq.
“I did not see it personally (at the time), but since all of this has come out, I have not only seen, but I’ve been asked about some of those documents, that he signed and agreed to,” Karpinski was reported as having told another California newspaper, the Santa Clarita Signal.
(Thanks to Yankeedoodle for the heads-up on that.)
And then today, from AP and also on the BBC website, we have this testimony from JK:
She told the BBC Radio-4’s “Today” program that she met an Israeli working as an interrogator inside the prison:

Continue reading “Karpinski joining our Hall of Fame?”