Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

Powell’s quote of the decade

I generally like to give Colin Powell the benefit of the doubt. But this quote, from him, from today’s Washington Post, is a classic of governmental gobbledygook:

    there was no effort on the part of the Reagan administration to either ignore it or not take note of it.

The “it” in question? Saddam Hussein’s March 1988 poison-gas attack against some of his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja, which reportedly killed 5,000 people.
As the Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran notes in the piece,

    Although the United States condemned the Iraqi government’s use of chemical weapons as a “grave violation” of international law, the Reagan administration did not sanction Hussein, who was regarded as a U.S. ally because of his war against Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government. At the time, the State Department said there were “indications” that Iran had used chemical artillery shells against Iraqi positions in the area…

And oh, Reagan’s national security advisor at that time was– Colin Powell.

A columnist’s job is never done

I just finished writing my CSM column for this Thursday’s paper (9/11). As soon as I get to the published version, as usual I’ll put up a link to it. They usually put it up on the Wednesday evening, on the Commentary section of their website.
I shan’t reveal here the main policy recommendation I make in it. (A pathetic attempt to build suspense, I know… But also, out of respect to the CSM.) But I do also point out in the piece that the main issue is not who’s the general commanding any US, UN, or multilateral forces, but which political authority it is that the general reports to.
Should it continue to be Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld, the present boss of both Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the military commander on the ground, and Paul Bremer, the head of the political side of the operation there– or should it be Kofi Annan or someone designated by him?
So I was interested to read this on Juan Cole’s site today:

    A French diplomat told al-Sharq al-Awsat in Paris that the French could accept American military command in Iraq as long as it was authorized by the UN and as long as the right political arrangements within Iraq were made. He even allowed for the posibility of a NATO role. In part, the French attitude will depend on the outcome of talks between French President Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush on Sept. 13.

Who do YOU vote for, JWN readers? Bombs-Away Don or Mr. UN?

Tragedies, tragedies

I was stunned by yesterday’s bombing of the UN HQ in Baghdad. Why the UN? Why Sergio Vieira de Mello, and so many other members of his team?
I was relieved to learn this morning that our dear friend Ghassan Salameh, now working as the UN mission’s top political advisor in Baghdad, managed to survive. He was described in a story in Lebanon’s Daily Star this morning as pretty distraught over the death of his friend and boss de Mello, and said he’d spent the past four hours scrabbling through the rubble looking for survivors.
Another massive bombing on Jerusalem’s No.2 bus yesterday, as well. When I see the footage of these events, wherever they take place, I remember what it’s like to experience the immediate aftermath of such an attack. Body parts flung into unlikely places. Screams of anguish. Dust and rubble. A universe turned upside down. And then, the enduring sense of loss and of anguish.
International humanitarian law tries, quite rightly, to afford special protections to civilians (and to former combatants who are currently hors de combat.) That distinction is at the heart of the Geneva Conventions and all the rest of international humanitarian law. When you reflect on such horrifying actions as those that created yesterday’s carnage in Baghdad or Jerusalem, you see why such protections are particularly valuable, and why the standard of working hard and actively to avoid harm to noncombatants has to be a vital value for our world.
People who are combatants have taken a special vow when they entered the military. Their special status allows them to kill (people who are other combatants), with impunity. But it also means they accept the risks of being killed or wounded in the line of duty. Civilians have taken no such vow.
These two events were, it seems to me, the result of deliberate actions, designed, planned, and executed by sentient human beings. And these actions aimed deliberately at bringing death and mayhem to noncombatants.
We can, and should, discuss the role of intentionality in all this. Is death as a result of the intention of the perpetrator any qualitatively different– for the victim, for her survivors, for the rest of society–than death by as a result of the perpetrator’s reckless or even wilfull inattention?
After all, many more deaths worldwide are caused through the reckless inattention of decisionmakers who in many cases would not even see themselves as perpetrators of wrongdoing than are caused through the perpetrators’ focused intention.
But there is something about the intentional infliction of harm that I, and I suspect most other people, find particularly revolting. The intentional harm-causer will, after all, fine-tune his actions precisely so as to cause the maximum of harm. (I think of the driver of the cement-mixer in Baghdad carefully easing his explosive-packed vehicle into the right place to cause the maximum death and destruction.) The reckless harm-causer, by contrast, may adjust his actions to minimize harm if the possibility of harm is brought to his attention. The person whom I would describe as the wilfully inattentive harm-causer lies somewhere between those two…
But regardless of the role of intentionality, the proscription against causing harm to civilians has to be stressed again and again.
These two bombings have a clear potential to radically change the course of events in the Middle East, and throughout the world. They bring us several steps closer to the worldwide clash between militant Muslims and the rest of the world that is, I believe, one of the main goals of their perpetrators.
I deeply, deeply do not want this clash to develop further. If it does, the main casualties will be caused not amongst the rich, comfortable segment of global society, but amidst the poor and downtrodden, the communities where people’s social and economic situations have already been chronically troubled for decades, and where inter-group hatreds that are pursued under the banner of values that are claimed to be “religious” can cause almost unimaginable harm.
Think of much of the Third World being transformed into Lebanon. While the arms dealers and other chaos merchants of the comfortable world rake in their tidy profit.
Can we avoid this outcome? Yes, I believe we can. We need urgently to open a dialogue of conscience and of values around the world. The current decade is supposed to be the UN’s Decade of Nonviolence. Now that one of the UN’s finest has been killed by the forces of chaos and confrontation, it would be great if Kofi Annan would lead this new call for conscience and values. It would involve restating some important values on which the UN was founded, like those of national independence (for Iraqis) and of human equality (Israel/Palestine), and of peaceful and speedy resolution of outstanding conflicts…
Along the way, though, we also need to restate the core values of international humanitarian law, and work hard to re-establish the global consensus– in the Middle East, in Africa, and elswhere– that regardless of the nature of the conflict or oppression, causing damage to civilians is always wrong.
I note that this a core value of much of traditional Islamic writing on the constraints to be observed in times of war. We urgently need to initiate a global dialogue with Muslim political activists of all stripes on this issue.

Iraqi human rights– the road not taken

Tuesday night, I drove over the foggy Blue Ridge Mountains to Harrisonburg, VA, where the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Quakers is holding its 332d annual session. I came over specially to hear a speech by Mary Lord, the head of the American Friends Service Committee’s Peace-Building Unit.
Mary was great. At the end of her talk she laid some stress on the need, in time of war, to look at the “road not taken”, in the hope that it might be taken next time this or any other country is faced with a challenge similar to the one that drove us into war.
It was a good point. Of course, the “challenge” the US leadership faced in early March 2003 was– ahem– let’s say not quite what it was portrayed to be… But there were plenty of us, then as now, concerned about the human rights situation in Iraq under the Saddam regime.
These days, the US Prez is selling the main benefit of the war he (quite gratuitously) launched against Iraq as being that “at least it rid the world of Saddam Hussein’s mis-rule”. (Never mind that neither the touted WMDs nor the touted links with Al-Qaeda ever seem to have materialized.) And a general feeling of satisfaction with this aspect of the outcome has spread very much wider than the traditional pro-war circles in the US.
So here, in the spirit of looking at “the road not taken” in Iraq regarding Saddam’s human-rights abuses, is a link to a post I put up here on June 28 in which I argued that an UNMOVIC-style, unarmed-but-rigorous UN body dedicated to monitoring, verifying, and inspecting Iraq’s performance in the human-rights field could well have succeeded in improving the situation there quite radically. And without all the tragedies and genuine, large-scale infringements of human rights that any modern war involves.
I’m hoping that this suggestion can give pause to many people who still–four years after the war in Kosovo–think that launching a war might be a good way to deal with gross rights abusers.
A robust human-rights UNMOVIC could be applied, for example, in Burma… Or in a number of other places.
I hate that the term “intervention” these days is nearly always understood to mean “military intervention”. And then, there’s the Orwellian term “humanitarian intervention”, which is understood to mean a war launched for allegedly humanitarian purposes.
But war harms civilians. No getting away from that. And meanwhile, there are thousands of other forms of “interventions” countries can make in each other’s affairs– for worse or, preferably, for better–that do not involve violence at all.
We certainly need to remember that!
Also on Iraq, if you haven’t checked out the piece I posted on Tuesday about Juan Cole, and whether we should hope for a US “success” in Iraq, and the growing list of interesting comments there, I urge you to do so. Juan wrote his own very thoughtful reponse to the questions I raised in that post. I haven’t had time to write a further response to that yet.
Actually, I’ve been really busy again. Between hearing Mary Lord Tuesday evening and now– being back here in Harrisonburg at the BYM session– I rushed back home to Charlottesville and wrote a contribution to a book about peace and a column for Al-Hayat. I have this strong sense I should simplify my life. But (1) I don’t want to give up blogging and (2) I don’t have time to simplify it….

US “success” in Iraq– for or against?

I have a lot of respect for Juan Cole’s wisdom on matters Iraqi and Shi-ite. That’s why I have a permanent link to his Informed Comment blog on the sidebar to the right.) Today, though, he has a small reflection on the blog that gave me a deep pause for thought. His argument there is, “I want the US to succeed in Iraq, just as I think all responsible Americans do.”
H’mm.
First, of course, it depends what you mean by “success”. Second, I don’t like the moral bullying involved in declaring that “all responsible Americans” hold this view. If I should question Cole’s argument, does that make me an “irresponsible” American? Or perhaps even– pass the smelling salts!– “un-American”?
So first, I guess I’ll paste in the nub of his argument, then I’ll pose a few of my questions. Cole introduces the argument by challenging Wolfie’s never-credible assertions that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were somehow linked. Then, Cole continues:

    Look, I want the US to succeed in Iraq, just as I think all responsible Americans do. The war was not justifiable on grounds of an immediate threat to US security. But it still may have been a worthwhile enterprise if it really can break the logjam in the region created by authoritarianism, patrimonial cronyism, creaky national socialism in the economy, and political censorship and massive repression. [Not to mention just ending the US economic sanctions, which were hurting ordinary Iraqis and killing children.] If Iraqis can just do so much as replicate India’s success in holding regular elections and in maintaining a relatively independent judiciary and press, they would pioneer a new way of being Arab and modern… The US needed to redeem itself from earlier complicity in genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites (first against the Kurds in 1988 when the US was allied with Saddam, and then against both groups in spring of 1991 when the US stood aside and watched it happen even though they could have interdicted Saddam’s helicopter gunships).
    A little humility, a little seeking of redemption, a little doing good for others. Those things could make a convincing rationale for the current project. But not a war on terrorism.

So Cole has essentially given as his definition of US success that
Iraqis should end up being able to “replicate India’s success” in a building a working (if imperfect) democracy. Not, of course, that any democracies are perfect–including, as Cole well knows, that right here in the US of A.
And along the way, there’s the “redemptionist” undertone to what he writes. Yes, I am totally delighted that the “sanctions of mass destruction” regime that US/UK pressure maintained on Iraq for 12 long years has been brought to an end. We don’t know yet, though, how many Iraqi kids will die over the next 2-3 years–have died already– from totally avoidable causes brought about by the social and economic chaos into which the war has plunged the country… We may not be out of the woods yet on avoidable-but-not-avoided child deaths in Iraq, so I think it is premature to assume that we are.
But whether we are or not we are, I have a deep distrust of the proposition that “redemptionism”, a desire that is joined at the hip to guilt, can ever provide a productive motivation in human affairs. (A lot of my work on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda deals with the tragic results of just such a motivation having been at work in the desire of rich, secure western governments to establish that misguided and laregly dysfunctional institution.)
So okay, here are some of my other questions for Cole:

  1. He seems to be arguing that a state of affairs in which Iraqis can replicate India’s success” would, for him, constitute a US “success” in Iraq.  Does he have any reason to believe that that goal is the one that this US administration is actually pursuing there? In particular, does he have any reason to believe that the political empowerment of the Iraqis themselves is what the Bushites are aiming at?
  2. How does he assess the considerable weight of counter-evidence that there is out there, regarding this administration’s policies in Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East (where “empowerment” of local pro-democracy forces seems nowhere to be on the effective agenda), or at home here in the US (ditto)?
  3. Equally or even more importanly: How about the precedent set for Iraqis, for that 96 percent of the world’s people who are not US citizens–and for the four percent of us who are US citizens— if the US administration is seen as “successful” in imposing its will on the actions of a large and distant sovereign nation purely through the force of arms and the waging of a war that was quite unjustified by any criteria of “just war” or international law?

This brings me to the heart of what I think it is that constitutes being a “responsible” American, which is a little different from what Cole seems to believe. For me, being “responsible” means having a sober and realistic view of the US citizenry’s essential inter-dependence with all the other nations of the world. So for me, the effects that the US administration’s actions have on world-order issues and on the Iraqi people themselves are actually far more important than any surface feel-good-ism about “the US must succeed”. (No, Juan, that’s not what I’m accusing you of engaging in. But I do feel you have a slightly US-centric optic in your argument–not to mention a disturbing dose of white-man’s-burden-ism.)
So actually, I feel no qualms at all– as a quite “responsible” American–in saying: No, I don’t want this deeply misguided and mendacious administration to succeed in its current attempts to cobble together a US-dominated “policy” for Iraq. Yes, I do want Iraqis to be empowered to build for themselves the very best form of participatory and accountable government that they can. But I don’t see the US military as being either the most effective (!) or the most appropriate (!!) midwife for this process.
It’s possible that the Iraqis don’t even actually need a midwife in order to realize their own self-empowerment. (Think George Washington. Did he need outside nannies to show him how to do it?) But if they do, then there is only one institution with the legitimacy and the capability required to get the job done.
And it ain’t the US Army.
That’s why I say it is quite “responsible” for US citizens to say: “Support our troops!  Bring them home! Hand the Iraq question over to the United Nations!”
That way, perhaps US citizens and our deeply, deeply misguided national leaders might start to get back into a more appropriate and productive relationship with the other 96 percent of the world.

More on Chalabi, Feith, Perle

So at last, administration insiders are starting to talk openly about how it was Douglas Feith and Richard Perle’s insistence on installing pro-Israeli con-man Ahmed Chalabi in power in Baghdad that got us into the present mess in Iraq.
Many excellent details on this are in a Knight-Ridder story posted yesterday by JONATHAN S. LANDAY and WARREN P. STROBEL, that I was led to by Juan Cole, whose great website “Informed Comment” is on my template of permanent links to the right.
Landay and Strobel’s piece starts:

    The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department who dominated planning for postwar Iraq failed to prepare for the setbacks that have erupted over the past two months.
    The officials didn’t develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader [Chalabi] as the country’s leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader and when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder, they had no backup plan.

I note, just for the record, that I surmised exactly that this was what had happened, as in my June 2 post on JWN when I wrote:

    Ahmad Chalabi, the sleazemeister of Jordan’s Petra Bank scandal, has now been completely discredited on two key claims he made when he successfully “sold” himself and his ambitions for Iraq to Bombs-Away Don in the months leading up to the US invasion.
    The first of these was that he had extensive networks of supporters inside Iraq who would rise joyfully to greet him and his US military pals as “liberators” when they entered Iraq.
    The second was that he could provide to the US and their British allies insider information (presumably, from members of those same “networks”?) extensive and reliable details of many aspects of Saddam Hussein’s very advanced and dangerous WMD programs…
    [A]s Iraq turns into more and more of a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Bush administration (see Chalabi false claim #1 above), then the questioning inside the US as to “How on earth did our country get into this mess in Iraq?” will evidently become more pointed. (Think Gulf of Tonkin.)
    At which point, the character of the so-called “evidence” on Saddam’s WMD programs will inevitably come under greater and greater scrutiny.
    Meanwhile, of course, the COST to the US taxpayer of sustaining the large-scale military occupation inside Iraq will become far, far higher than Wolfowitz and Co. had projected– not just because of the size of the occupation force required and the length of its stay (reason for both of which being Chalabi false claim #1), but also because of the reluctance of other powers to join in an occupation venture which was launched on the basis of such inaccurate and deliberately manipulated “evidence” about the alleged WMD programs.

Anyway, enough of me noting my own prescience here. Landay and Strobel have started to compile the evidence on all this. They write that they based their story on interviews “more than a dozen” interviews with current and former officials. Here’s some more of what they write:

Continue reading “More on Chalabi, Feith, Perle”

CSM column on US policy in Iraq

So, my CSM column on US policy in Iraq came out today. The lead graf is:

    The US intervention in Iraq, which was earlier sold to the US public as a potential “cakewalk,” has instead turned into a damaging quagmire. The least- bad choice now for President Bush is to hand the administration of Iraq over to the United Nations.

So that just about sums up my argument. But do read the whole thing and post your comments by clicking the ‘Comments’ link at the bottom of this post.
I’ve already received some interesting reactions. At 6:30 this morning, a producer from the C-SPAN morning show, “Washington Journal”, called to ask if I could “appear” on the show– by phone–at 7 a.m. Sure. Why not?
Eloise– the producer– also said she really liked the column (!) and they’d decided to use the question it raised as their “Question of the Day” for listeners. Far as I can figure from checking the C-SPAN website (which actually is an amazing resource with a very well-organized collection of Iraq-related links), the show airs on C-SPAN radio, which seems only to be available in the Washington DC area…
But if you want to call in and vote on the “Question of the Day”, you could maybe try this number (202) 585-3882, which they post as a general call-in number to speak to their guests. (I alas, am not there for you to talk to. Nor have I tried calling that number to see what happens there.)
The next bit of reaction I got came was an email from someone signing himself Tony Deivert. Although it’s a little repetitive and maniacal, I’ll share some of it with y’all. Here’s what Tony had to say:

Continue reading “CSM column on US policy in Iraq”

Thin mattress stories–from Palestine and Iraq

Two stories about thin mattresses today. First, from Iraq. Thanks to Juan Cole for linking to Trudy Rubin’s recent piece from Najaf in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which she recounts highlights from an interview with Ayatollah Muhammad Sa’id al-Hakim.
(By the way, Cole’s continuing compilations of news from world Shia’dom are so well-done and so timely that I’ve put a permanent link to his blog in my ‘select list’ of blog links, to the right.)
Anyway, one telling detail from Rubin’s story was:

    The 37-year-old Hakim, in black turban and robe, received me in a bare room in the narrow Najaf rowhouse near the shrine [of Imam Ali], where petitioners come to seek religious rulings. We sat on thin cushions on the floor…

So there he is, one of the four Shi-ite Ayatollahs in Najaf, sitting on “thin cushions” in “a narrow Najaf rowhouese.”
And there are the US overlords, still swanning around in the hulking great palaces that Saddam built for himself all over the country.
In a situation in which most Iraqis are suffering from lengthy power outages, unsafe drinking water, general economic collapse, and rampant insecurity, does anyone (=Paul Bremer) think the symbolism here might be just a tad inappropriate???
I “understand”, of course, that Bremer and his staff, and numerous US army units, chose the palaces to lodge in “primarily because of security considerations”.
But has he stopped to think that the palaces were built where they were, and in the ultra-high-security way they were built in– precisely because Saddam knew that he needed multiple layers of protection against the hatred and wrath of his much-abused people?
So if Bremer’s people and the US military choose to live in the palaces “for security reasons”, what does that say about their expectation of building a relationship of trust (and respect, and equality) with the Iraqi people?
Pictures of US troops cavorting in a swimming pool in one of Saddam’s palaces on July 4 also presumably didn’t go down too well with the millions of Iraqis lacking access to safe drinking water.
How about if Bremer at least opened up a few of the Saddam palaces with their extensive leisure complexes for use by low-income Iraqi kids, or something generous like that??
Okay, on to Palestine. Thin mattress story #2. This was a great quote from James Bennet’s story from Tel Aviv in yesterday’s NYT. Bennet quoted Samir al-Mashharawi, a leader of the mainstream Palestinian faction, Fatah as saying:

Continue reading “Thin mattress stories–from Palestine and Iraq”

Iraq– a very slippery baby

I wonder what they teach ’em in the various “schools of life” where Bombs-Away Don, Wolfie, and rest of the Authors of the Misadventure in Iraq came up? I’ll tell you one very valuable life lesson I learned, back when I had my first baby (Beirut, 1978). It was from the true British classic, Dr. Hugh Jolly’s book of baby-care.
So here’s what I learned from Dr. Jolly. When you’re planning to bath a baby, you have to plan everything well, sort of starting from the end of this complex operation. So what you don’t do is start out by running the bath-water, stripping the clothes off the babe and dunking him in the bath. Becaue if you do that, what happens is– one wet, cold, slippery baby and no clothes or towel to wrap him in!!
Yikes!!
What you’re supposed to do (and every parent who’s ever bathed a baby figures this out pretty fast) is start from the end, figure out the clean clothes you want to put the babe into; find the clean diaper and any ointments, lotions etc you’ll need before slapping the diaper (sorry, nappy) on; dig the little bitty baby hairbrush out from the closet; lay out the towel just so, ready to plunk the baby onto. And then– not a moment before– you can run the bathwater, find the babe, and start undressing him.
I guess in the Pentagon they used to call it an “exit strategy”.
But here’s a suggestion. Why don’t they hand over the handling of all foreign and security policy to people who know a thing or two about the world… people who’ve been active-duty parents… people who know a bit about short-term and long-term planning… people who could tell you that security doesn’t grow out of the barrel of a gun… people who could tell you you don’t just make a massive downpayment on an “exit strategy” from a convicted fraudster and then, without any further planning, plunge the baby straight into the bath?
This present so-called US “policy” in Iraq would be farcical if it weren’t so, well, just plain tragic.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani joins the fray

Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, long considered strongly committed to a “quietist” rejection of political engagement, has now taken a serious step toward endorsing opposition to US diktats in Iraq.
This is the news from Juan Cole, one of the world’s most knowledgeable and reflective experts on the politics and ideology of Iraq’s Shi-ite majority population. Earlier today (or perhaps late last night, Michigan time), Cole read an article in the liberal Iraqi daily Az-Zaman, datelined from Najaf, reporting that Sistani has issued a fatwa stating that any body that writes a new constitution for Iraq would have to be elected, not appointed by US gauleiter (my word) Paul Bremer.
If you want to find Cole’s piece, you’ll need to go to his blog; then once there, look for the July 2003 archive in the Archives listing in the lefthand sidebar. Click it, then scroll down nearly to the bottom to this particular post on July 1. It starts out:

    *Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has entered Iraqi politics in an unexpectedly big way. He has denounced US administrator Paul Bremer’s plan…


Cole has done us all the favor of translating the Zaman report, and you can find the translated text on his site, which is a great and really informative weblog.
Sistani is insisting on two sets of nationwide elections: one to elect the constitutional commission, and one to ratify the draft constitution.
Bremer, of course, has proposed creating some kind of an appointed council that would do some governing and some constitution-writing. (Though of course it’s hard to tell exactly what he does plan, since the DoD is making up the whole governance-of-Iraq policy as it goes along.)
Sistani’s fatwa states very straightforwardly,