Category: Iraq-2005-Q4

AP’s Hamza Hendawi has a good piece on Moqtada Sadr today. (Read it in conjunction with Gilbert Achcar’s recent piece, on JWN here.)
Hendawi writes:

“We had a choice to make,” said Abbas al-Robaie, al-Sadr’s chief political aide. “Either wait for 10 years, or maybe longer, for the Americans to leave and then join the political process or take our place in the process now and try to influence policy.”
Al-Sadr’s followers decided to contest a general election in January as part of a Shiite coalition that included some of his political foes. The coalition emerged as parliament’s largest bloc, with al-Sadr supporters winning nine seats and taking three Cabinet posts in Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s coalition.
Conscious of their large support base in Baghdad and across the south, al-Sadr’s followers insisted that the coalition guarantee them more seats in the next parliament by promoting their candidates in areas where the Shiite bloc is likely to win.
“Having them inside the coalition could cause us problems because they are strong headed and not disciplined, but leaving them out could cause even greater problems,” said Redha Jawad Taqi, a senior Shiite official. “Bringing them in achieves a measure of political calm.”
The Sadrists also have proven to be good politicians. Their three Cabinet members — running the health, transport and civil society ministries — are widely thought to have been among the better Cabinet performers, gaining a reputation for integrity and hard work.
Al-Sadr’s movement has broadened its support among Iraq’s Sunni-dominated Arab nationalists by opposing the introduction of a federal system of government in Iraq’s new constitution that will let provinces cluster in self-rule regions. Nationalists believe that federalism could lead to the breakup of Iraq.
His group also has set itself apart from traditional Shiite parties by advocating against the U.S. occupation, which some Shiite leaders have tolerated. The militia that fought the Americans remains in existence and is perhaps better organized after months of ideological indoctrination and the dismissal of members with suspect loyalty.
Some fear al-Sadr’s popularity could lead to a less secular government. Al-Sadr repeatedly has expressed his desire for an Islamic-oriented society in Iraq and has often praised groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, his movement’s stronghold, strict Islamic dress code for women has been in force since the fall of Saddam. Liquor stores have been shut and schoolgirls, some as young as 5 or 6 years, wear Muslim headscarves.
Al-Sadr is the son of Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a senior cleric gunned down with two of his sons in 1999 by suspected Saddam agents. The late al-Sadr’s followers form the circle of close aides surrounding his son, who has on occasion shown subtle irreverence toward Iraq’s top clerics, like Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani…

Today’s NYT had an important article by Kanan Makiya, who was the most significant Iraqi to be an intellectual father of the whole 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Writing nowadays with a dateline of “London”, not “Baghdad”, Makiya comes the closest he has ever come yet to articulating a “mea culpa” regarding his role instigating the invasion of his homeland.
Makiya was the self-exiled Iraqi intellectual who in 1989 published in the US– under the pen-name Samir al-Khalil– a searing criticism of the totalitarian ways of Saddam Hussein’s rule. The book was very emotional, ill-organized, and departed in many ways from the norms of a political-science study. (Not surprising, since Kanan had never trained as any kind of a social scientist. He was an architect, educated in the west on the profits his father–also an architect– made designing massive palaces for Saddam.) But given the book’s target, and the gossipy insider-y feel Makiya was able to give it, it became a smashing hit. Especially, of course, the year after its publication when Saddam invaded Kuwait and suddenly anti-Saddamism flew to the top of the US political agenda.
Throughout the whole period 1990-2003 Makiya became increasingly influential– within the US political discourse, as well as in the growing international “community” of Iraqi political exiles. He was one of the early, or perhaps even founding members of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, which got large amounts of funding from the US during the 1990s. But in the US, Makiya always had much more appeal than Chalabi to people on the pro-human-rights-y “left” of the political spectrum. He became the most powerful and credible Iraqi figure able to swing large portions of the US “left” behind the idea of regime change in Iraq.
He was very active in Iraqi-oppositional circles as well. In 1992, he (and I think also Chalabi) took part in the inaugural meeting of the Kurdish “parliament”, a gathering that was held in Salahuldin, in the portion of northern Iraq that was protected from Saddamist power by the close and constant overflight of US (and British) war-planes.
In today’s NYT piece, Makiya offers a warning of almost jeremiad-like proportions about the prospects of an imminent breakup in Iraq and the chaos and civil strife that, he argues there, would almost certainly follow. (I’ll come back to that later.) He notes that this situation has come about because of the way that the country’s current Iraqi leaders have approached the idea of “federalism”. And he makes some fairly sane-sounding– though actually, at this point, not very realistic– suggestions about how a workable “federal system” might yet be salvaged for the country.
So it is not federalization itself that he’s criticizing, but the way that the current (still-unfinished) Iraqi constitution proposes doing it.
He writes this:

Continue reading “Kanan Makiya: mea culpa and more”

I just want to draw a little attention to this obituary of a remarkably talented Iraqi geophysicist called Wissam al-Hashimi, who was abducted and murdered in Baghdad earlier this year. Thanks to JWN commenter Salah for contibuting the link to this piece.
Dr. Hashimi was a former Vice-President of the International Union of Geological Sciences. I’m writing about it here because the story of Dr. Hashimi’s life and death can stand as an example for the fate of the literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of well-trained Iraqi professional men and women who have lost their lives to violence in the “New”, i.e. post-Saddam, Iraq. (Here is a portal to some information about the attacks on Iraqi academics over the past couple of years.)
The writer of the obituary of Dr. Hashimi that’s linked to above is John Aron, the Web Manager for IUGS. He writes:

I came to know Wissam beginning in 1997, after he was elected a Vice-President of the IUGS. I saw him regularly over the six years that he served in that position. He impressed all of his IUGS colleagues with the quality of his preparation for the annual meetings of the Executive Committee, and with the honest, forthright, and thoughtful counsel that he offered at those meetings. Equally admirable, however, was the enormous personal effort required for him to attend those meetings, each of which always began and ended with a frequently dangerous 12-hour trip by bus or taxi from his home in Baghdad to and from Amman, Jordan, his closest connection to an international airline.
Over the years of our association, I came to appreciate and admire his integrity and deep commitment to science, especially to international scientific activities. Despite the professional isolation and other obvious difficulties of pursuing his career while living in Iraq, his focus, drive, and enthusiasm were remarkable; he was undaunted by the challenges he faced. He was a fine scientist who could have forged a notable career in any country of his choosing. But Iraq was his homeland, and he was determined to serve there.
Since 2002, when his IUGS term ended, we carried on an active e-mail correspondence. Some was personal or was related to professional matters such as helping him to acquire needed reference materials, or helping him to contact other scientists in whose work he was interested, or publicizing scientific meetings that he was instrumental in organizing in Iraq or elsewhere in the middle East. Not surprising, however, is that some of our correspondence was political in nature, especially leading up to and during the current war in Iraq. Wissam was an avid student of U.S. politics, which interest I helped to advance by regularly sending him cogent articles collected from electronic and print media from the U.S. and around the world. He usually responded, sometimes at great length, with detailed comments and analysis based on his perspective and first-hand experiences in Iraq. His observations were especially interesting, because they frequently differed radically from published accounts. Wissam despaired at the wanton death and needless destruction inflicted on his country in the current conflict. He took satisfaction, however, from the fact that most of his scientific colleagues, including Americans, supported him and his country in their distress.
Along with other close colleagues, I last saw Wissam in August 2004 in Florence, Italy, at the 32nd IGC. There he presented two papers and co-chaired a session on dolomitization and dedolomitization. He was also the Iraqi representative to the Mediterranean Consortium of the Congress. We were pleased to see him looking well, and, as ever, actively engaged with scientific pursuits. We enjoyed visiting with him, sharing meals, and exchanging personal reflections on matters of science, politics, our families, and life.
In one of his messages to me Wissam commented that the neighborhood where he lived was very dangerous, and he feared for his life and the safety of his family. As a precaution, he took a different route to work every day. Tragically, that strategy ultimately failed him. Ironically, only two days before receiving word of his death, I expressed to mutual friends my concern about his welfare because my messages to him had gone unanswered for almost three weeks. Now we know why. The geological community has lost a dedicated scientist and a fine and very decent man. Worse, I lost a good friend.

Hashimi was born in Baghdad. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Baghdad in 1965 and his Ph.D from the University of Newcastle, in England, in 1972. If you read the whole obituary you can learn about his fine professional achievements, and the many contributions he made to the development of the geological sciences in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world.
Aron writes this about the manner of his death:

His daughter, Tara, reports that he was kidnapped early in the morning of August 24 while on his way to work. The ransom demanded by his abductors was paid by his family, but to no avail. He died of two bullet wounds to his head. Because his identification was taken from him, it took his family two weeks to find his body in a Baghdad hospital.

Condolences to Tara al-Hashimi and all Iraqis who have lost loved ones through violence.

(I see that Juan Cole also has this intriguing Gilbert Achcar report on his blog today. But I think it’s significant enough to also put the whole text here. Its significance lies in the evidence it presents of the existence of a non-marginalizable “nationalist” trend within today’s Iraqi politics– even if, as it seems, that nationalism seems in this gathering to have been mainly of the “Arab Iraqi” rather than “pan-Iraqi” variety. Achcar notes that there seems to have been a sizeable media blackout of the conference in question. One can speculate whether this was motivated more by the anti-Moqtada feelings of the US military paymasters of much of the present Iraqi media, or by these paymasters’ desire to accentuate the “sectarianism” of Iraqi politics while playing down evidence of robust trans-sectarian initiatives like this one… Anyway, thanks once again to Gilbert for this! ~HC)

A PAN-IRAQI PACT
ON MUQTADA AL-SADR’S INITIATIVE

Gilbert Achcar

December 9, 2005

As part of his
effort to influence the political forces in Iraq prior to the forthcoming
parliamentary election, at the end of November Muqtada al-Sadr had his supporters
distribute the draft of a “Pact of Honor,” and called on Iraqi parties to
discuss and collectively adopt it at a conference to be organized before
the election.

This conference
was actually held on Thursday, December 8, in al-Kadhimiya (North of Baghdad).
Despite extensive search, I found it only reported in a relatively short
article in today’s Al-Hayat and
in dispatches from the National Iraqi News Agency (NINA). There is legitimate
ground to suspect that this media blackout has political significance; indeed
most initiatives by the Sadrist current are hardly reported by the dominant
media, even when they consist of important mass demonstrations (like those
organized yesterday in Southern Iraq against British troops).

In the case of
the recent conference, the vast array of forces that were represented and
that signed the “Pact of Honor” is in itself already worthy of attention.
Aside from the Sadrists, chiefly represented by their MPs, those represented
and who signed the document included: SCIRI, al-Daawa (al-Jaafari’s personal
representative even apologized in his name for his absence due to his traveling
outside of Iraq), and the Iraqi Concord Front (the major Sunni electoral alliance
in the forthcoming election), to name but the most prominent of a long list
of organizations, along with several tribal chiefs, unions and other social
associations, members of the De-Ba’athification Committee and a few government
officials. Ahmad Chalabi — who definitely deserves to be called “The Transformer”
— attended in person and signed the document in the name of his group. It
seems that the Association of Muslim Scholars did not attend, as its name
is not mentioned in any of the two sources.

According to the
reports, the “Pact of Honor” that was adopted consists of 14 points, among
which the following demands and agreements are the most important (the sentences
in quotation marks are translated from the document as quoted in the reports):

·

“withdrawal of the occupiers and setting of an objective timetable for their
withdrawal from Iraq”; “elimination of all the consequences of their presence,
including any bases for them in the country, while working seriously for
the building of [Iraqi] security institutions and military forces within
a defined schedule”;

·

suppression of the legal immunity of occupation troops, a demand coming with
the condemnation of their practices against civilians and their breach of
human rights;

·

categorical rejection of the establishment of any relations with Israel;

·

“resistance is a legitimate right of all peoples, but terrorism does not
represent legitimate resistance”; “we condemn terrorism and acts of violence,
killing, abducting and expulsion aimed at innocent citizens for sectarian
reasons”;

·

“to activate the de-Ba’athification law and to consider that the Ba’ath party
is a terrorist organization for all the tyranny it brought on the oppressed
sons of Iraq, and to speed up the trial of overthrown president Saddam Hussein
and the pillars of his regime”;

·

“to postpone the implementation of the disputed
principle of federalism and to respect the people’s opinion about it.”

The conference
established a committee that is responsible for following up the implementation
of the resolutions and reporting on it after six months.

If anything, the
conference was a testimony to the increasing importance of the Sadrist current.
As for the actual implementation of its resolutions, it will greatly depend
on the pressure that the same current will be able to exert after the forthcoming
election, if the United Iraqi Alliance — of which the Sadrists are a major
pillar on a par with SCIRI — succeeds in getting a commanding position in
the next National Assembly.

I see that Boston Review has now posted on their website the text of an article by veteran MIT security-affairs professor Barry Posen, titled “Exit Strategy”. This is one of those pieces for which BR has solicited “responses” from a range of other commentators… Among them, as it happens, myself. You can find the whole list of those contributing at the top of the page there.
Well, I sent my editors at BR my response piece yesterday, and I guess I shouldn’t steal their fire by posting it here before they release it. I will just note here, though, that one of the most damaging flaws I find in Posen’s analysis is his identification of Iran as being one of those powers that needs to be deterred from acting against the new Iraqi government…
It has been clear to me for sometime now that the present, US-nurtured political order inside Iraq is– just like any foreseeable successor regime that may emerge in Baghdad after the dec. 15 elections– one that the mullahs’ regime in Tehran is extremely happy with.
So why would they seek to undermine it?
This significant failure of Posen’s diagnosis then leads him to make some very flawed policy recommendations. (His essay has other flaws, from my perspective, as well. For example, he seems to see it as only right and natural that everyone else in the world should recognize and accommodate to a hegemonic US role in the Persian/Arabian Gulf… )
Anyway, you can read my whole response on the BR website soon, I hope.
Meanwhile, on this question of the US’s relations with Iran over the ever-developing situation inside Iraq, Juan Cole pointed me to an interesting piece in today Financial Times, which reports what the FT’s writers describe as a “mixed response” coming from Iranian officials to Washington’s recent decision to authorize Amb. Zal Khalilzad to speak to his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad about common concerns in Iraq.
FT reporters Roula Khalaf and Gareth Smyth write this:

Hamid-Reza Asefi, the [Iranian] foreign ministry spokesman, said yesterday Tehran saw “no need” to discuss Iraq with the US, and Ali Larijani, the top security official, on Saturday dismissed the idea as “propaganda”.
But Mohammad-Reza Bagheri, deputy foreign minister, said that while “the general instructions are not to talk to Americans”, Tehran could consider the US initiative.
“We’ll think about it,” he said, after giving a speech to the Gulf Dialogue, a conference in Bahrain organised by London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Juan characterizes this Iranian position this way: “After a showy refusal to talk to the Americans about Iraq by high Iranian officials, lower-level middle managers are now saying that Iran will ‘think about’ such contacts.”
I think that’s a misleading characterization of what’s in the FT report. Bagheri is, after all, a deputy foreign minister, not a “lower-level middle manager.” Neither he, nor Asefi, nor Larijani is going to say anything on such a sensitive subject that goes outside the bounds of what is permitted by the regime leadership. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that the US overture to Teheran is one that has intrigued the rulers there, and to which they seem slowly starting to fashion a cautiously semi-positive response.
Some of the other language that Bagheri used at the IISS conference seems to back this up:

In his address to an audience including US civilian and military officials, Mr Bagheri said Iran had been bitterly disappointed by its inclusion in President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” despite its active co-operation with Washington in Afghanistan over the toppling of the Taliban regime.
He said Tehran was nonetheless willing to help stabilise Iraq – without specifying how – and that it expected a “sincere” reaction to its role.
After issuing a general call for the removal of foreign troops from the Gulf, where the US has military bases, Mr Bagheri referred to the American military presence in Iraq, saying Iran backed a “gradual” pull-out.

Ha! Only a ‘gradual’ pullout there, indeed?
Then, there is this, contributed presumably by Gareth Smyth, who was reporting from Teheran–

A senior official in Tehran considered a regime insider said he believed Iran had already offered intelligence co-operation in regard to Iraq in return for Washington easing the pressure over Iran’s nuclear programme, most clearly in not pressing last month’s meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Tehran to the UN Security Council.
“This has been going on for a couple of months,” he said. “There seems to be co-ordination against al-Qaeda, and you will notice that attacks against the British in southern Iraq [attributed to Shia militants] have reduced. In return, US agitation over the nuclear issue has diminished.”
The official said there was co-operation despite the belligerent rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran’s fundamentalist president, who he said had “very little role” in security policy.

Fascinating stuff, huh? You can almost hear the neocons’ agendas regarding Iran toppling like a house of cards. (Or with the satisfying clack-clack of a tumbling row of dominos?) The anti-Teheran hawks in Israel and Washington must be grinding their teeth in despair.
Meanwhile, you will note in Barry Posen’s piece that he argues that:

The interest of the United States in oil is not to control it in order to affect price or gain profit but to ensure that potential adversaries do not control it and use the profits and power to harm others. It is also to ensure that oil reliably finds its way to market. Thus, the United States acts to prevent the consolidation of oil production [in the Gulf region] under the control of one or two states…

H’mmm. That’s a classic statement of the “realist” view of the value of US hegemony. But wait. Extensive Iranian influence over the oil-producing portions of southern Iraq sure sounds like the “consolidation of Gulf oil production under the control of one or two states” to me.
(You might want to check out my December 2003 “Geopolitics of the Gulf 201” or its March 2003 predecessor “ditto, 101” for some background there.)

The most disappointed man this weekend in Iraq (or Paris, or wherever he is right now) must be Ahmad Chalabi. As I wrote here on November 23, when three Iraqi pols came to do some pre-election bootlicking in the imperial capital, Washington, in mid-November, each of them was trying to “sell” himself as the empire’s favored candidate in a different way:

If [Iyad] Allawi’s shtick to the Bushites is that he’s a determined secularist, and [SCIRI pol Adel] Abdul-Mahdi’s that he is an authentice voice of Shiite Iraqis, then Chalabi’s is that he can cover both these bases, and more..

But he was jumping the gun a bit, wasn’t he? The statement that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani distributed yesterday spelled out that those who follow his spiritual leadership– that is, apparently, the vast majority of that 60-plus percent of Iraqis who are Shiites– should not split their community’s vote in the December 15 election…. And therefore– though he had no need to spell this out explicitly– they should vote for the “United Iraqi Alliance”, the same Shiite mega-list that won last January’s elections.
Which sinks the chances for Chalabi’s “List 569”.
The most interesting politics inside Iraq will now be taking place within the UIA’s coalition. Until now, the Islamic Daawa Party has been top dog there. But their leader, Ibrahim Jaafari, has kind of bombed politically (and yes, indeed, also “bombed” opponents, militarily– but that’s another issue) during his few months’ term as Iraq’s extremely nominal “transitional prime minister”. The hungry hounds of the apparently better organized Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq have very evidently been snapping at his heels. Hence, for example, SCIRI pol Adel Abdul-Mahdi’s recent visit to DC.
In addition, Moqtada Sadr has joined the UIA morw wholeheartedly than he did back in January.
But I’m definitely not going to sit around crying over Chalabi’s disappointment. What a shyster. It’s past time that the citizenries of Jordan, the US, and Iraq– all of whom have been majorly taken for a ride by this con-man– started demanding accountability and our money back from him!

I’m just back from a lunch here in Charlottesville with George Packer, the thoughtful and well-informed author of a new book on the US engagement in Iraq called The Assassins’ Gate. (He’s spent quite a bit of time in Iraq since the invasion, publishing several good pieces of reportage in the New Yorker along the way.)
There were around two dozen people at the lunch. At one point, one of those present recounted that he had been in DC recently, meeting “the (Republican) chairman of a powerful congressional committee” (un-named)…

And the chairman said something along these lines: “We told George Bush: ‘You’re not running for election any more. We are. In 2006 and again in 2008. What’s happening in Iraq is hurting us, badly. What will our party’s situation look like nationwide in summer 2006? You have to get serious numbers of our troops out before then. Hold the elections there on December 15! Declare them a victory! Then leave.'”

George, whose book is a careful accounting of many of the shenanigans, uses of double-think, and political acrobatics that had preceded the launching of the war, looked shocked. And said:

You mean they would be that cynical?
I mean, this is the party that used blatant political maneuvers to get the US into Iraq, back in 2002. In the fall of that year, I remember, Tom Dashiell [the former leader of the Democrats in the senate– remember him?] went to President Bush and begged him to postpone holding the vote on the war until after that round of mid-term elections… Just as George H.W. Bush had done, back in 1990-91, you remember. But in 2002, Bush and Rove said ‘No.’ They insisted that they had to hold the Congressional vote on the war before the elections, and they put the Democrats into a terrible bind over that…
But to think that they would now blatantly use such partisan political reasoning to jerk the US out of Iraq, whether that would benefit the Iraqi people or not? That would truly be a new moral low… On the other hands, the lows do carry on getting lower and lower under this president.

He said that if we suddenly start to see utterances being reported from within the administration about the “Iraqi forces being actually being more capable than we had earlier described them as”, and so on– reports in which he, Packer, evidently did not place a lot of credence– “then we can start to conclude that that kind of advice being given by Republican party stalwarts is starting to be followed.”
Well, guess what? Check out what journos very “well-connected” with the US military and political officials in Baghdad, like John Burns and Dexter Filkins, have started to write in the past few days…
In a talk that Packer had given just before the lunch, he had spelled out his view that the future US policy in Iraq “will be driven mainly by the constraints of the manpower shortage in the US armed forces. (Because there won’t be a draft here.) So these constraints may lead to a withdrawal from the country even if there should not be one.”
That latter thought was Packer’s, of course; not my own. He said he could see some fairly strong reasons why the US should not undertake an inappropriately speedy withdrawal, and estimated it might be “some 7, 8, or even 10 years” till Iraq was sufficiently stable to allow a real US withdrawal.
One questioner asked “What exactly would happen that would allow this withdrawal at the end of those ten years? Would it be that all the insurgents have gotten killed by then? Or would it be the emergence of a new strongman there? Or what?”
This was a really good question– one to which Packer was unable to provide any good answer. And of course, no-one dwelt much at all on what would happen to the Iraqi citizenry– or to the US citizenry, come to that– over the course of those ten further years of war…

I invite you all to join me in praying for the wellbeing and safe release of the four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who were abducted by unknown assailants in Iraq on Saturday.
CPT headquarters has now released the names of the abductees. They include a fellow Quaker from Virginia called Tom Fox. I’ve never met Tom, but I just received an anguished call from a f/Friend who is a member of his Quaker meeting, in northern Virginia. Tom has intemittently, since October 2004, been keeping a blog called Waiting in the Light, that contains some very moving pieces of writing.
The other CPT abductees are Norman Kember, 74, from London, UK; James Loney, 41, from Toronto; and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, also from Canada.
Al-Jazeera has aired a video it received, presumably from the kidnappers: it showed the four men and a quick image of Kember’s passport. The abductors called their group the “Swords of Righteousness Brigade”. No group of this name has been heard of before. A voice on the tape accused the four CPT-ers of being spies working undercover as peace activists.
(A German woman archeologist called Susanne Osthoff was also, separately abducted in Iraq, apparently last Thursday. A video handed to a rep of the German t.v. station ARD in Baghdad showed images of Osthoff in captivity and threatened to kill her and her Iraqi driver–also abducted– “unless Berlin stopped cooperating with the US-backed Iraqi government.”)
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an incredibly brave and visionary organization, supported principally by three of the historic “peace churches”– the Quakers, the Brethren, and the Mennonite– but with the participation of pacifists from a number of other Christian denominations. Small CPT teams maintain a constant “ministry of presence” in a number of areas of strife and tension around the world. One of their concepts stresses the need to “Get in the Way”, in order to obstruct the perpetration of violence, but to do so in a way that embodies equal love and respect for everyone.
When I was in Hebron with a group of Quakers in 2002, we were given a quick, informative tour round the extremely strife-torn central part of the city by two red-capped members of the local CPT team. CPT has had a presence in Hebron for many years, where their presence gives some protection to the city’s much-diminished Palestinian population, who face continual bouts of extremely nasty violence from Israeli settlers who’ve been trying to take over the heart of the city
Tonight I’m praying for the five abductees in Iraq, and the families who wait anxiously for news of them at home… For the people who are holding them– that they can speedily come to understand and respond positively to the love, humanity, and extremely non-threatening nature of the CPT mission… For all the thousands of people being extra-legally detained inside Iraq, for their anxious families, and their captors… And for all the decisionmakers inside and outside Iraq whose decisions can lead either to a further escalation of tensions inside the country, or to their calming.
I see the historic peace churches as the heart of authentic, pre-Augustinian and pre-“Just War” Christianity. They/we try to keep faithful to the original, strongly pacifist and antiwar teachings of Jesus. The CPT people are true, but quiet, heroes because of the way they commit to living out their witness.
Please, you kidnappers, speak with these wise, gentle people from CPT and learn about all the work that they do! And then, please find a way to release them– and Susanne Osthoff– in safety.

This, definitely worth reading. Hat-tip to Diana.
I hadn’t seen this story before. It’s in today’s L.A. Times. It’s about a US Army straight arrow called Col. Ted Westhusing, who had a Ph.D. in philosophical ethics from Emory University in Atlanta and taught military ethics full-time at the West Point military academy. Westhusing thought he should get some experience in Iraq in order to be able to teach his officer-cadet students more effectively. So he asked to be deployed there and was tasked with overseeing a large army contract with a private, Virginia-based firm called USIS that was supposed to be doing some of the training of Iraqi security forces….
One night last June, he was discovered dead in his trailer, with a single gunshot wound to the head. A USIS manager who discovered the body later said he had personally moved the murder weapon “for safety’s sake”.
Lots of questions in this case. But what seems clear is that Westhusing– whose doctoral dissertation was on the concept of “military honor”– was deeply troubled by much of what he witnessed in Iraq.
Investigators found a four-page letter on the bed next to his body. It was addressed to his military superiors and included these words:

“I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.
“Death before being dishonored any more.”

I was saddened (but not surprised) by the whole story. “The concept of “honor” meets the reality of US military operations in today’s Iraq? Someone should write a Greek tragedy about this, I think.
But this part at the end of the LAT story intrigued me greatly:

A [military] psychologist reviewed Westhusing’s e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the “most difficult and probably most painful stressor.”
She said that Westhusing … was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.
“Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited,” wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. “He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses.”

Then this:

Westhusing’s family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing’s body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.
Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light.
“He’s the last person who would commit suicide,” said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. “He couldn’t have done it. He’s just too damn stubborn.”
Westhusing’s body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.
In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing’s wife, and asked what happened.
She answered:
“Iraq.”

In addition to his widow, Westhusing also left behind three children.

The Bush administration’s rush toward repositioning itself as pursuing a policy in Iraq that is both “responsible” and one that involves a certain amount of troop withrawal has been amazingly speedy.
I suspect the main outlines of this move were most likely decided when Amb. Zal Khalilzad was in Washington around three weeks ago. But over the past few days there has been a torrent of reports from various US sources– in the Pentagon and in Iraq– about the nature of the newly emerging policy. Like this one, in today’s Newsweek, or this one, in today’s Time magazine.
The Newsweek piece describes the new plan in these terms:

The new approach is the result of long negotiations between Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces. Their overall strategy: on the military side, “clear, hold and build” while training up Iraqi forces; on the political side, wean Sunni leaders from their support of the insurgency, buying them off with incentives tribe by tribe and village by village; and on the U.S. domestic front, appease rising outcries for withdrawal by reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq to under 100,000 troops—hopefully by midterm Election Day 2006.
… Success or failure in Iraq … could well turn into a race between U.S. public opinion, which is increasingly impatient to see the bloody adventure over with, and a grand strategy that’s just getting ponderously off the ground. Is the political will going to be there to see the strategy through, especially when it is likely to cost many more U.S. casualties than the 2,108 dead and 15,804 wounded so far?

Good question.
Over at the New York Times, meanwhile, today’s “Week in review” section there carried this interesting piece by James Glanz, in which he looks at the difficult art, for imperial powers, of trying to effect a withdrawal-under-pressure as “gracefully” as possible– and crucially, while losing as little general political credibility as possible on the global scene.
He describes the challenge as being to look for “a dignified way out of a messy and often unpopular foreign conflict.” He then examines a number of possible historical precedents. Among them,

the wrenching French pullout from Algeria, the ill-fated French and American adventures in Vietnam, the Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan and the disastrous American interventions in Beirut and Somalia.
Still, there are a few stories of inconclusive wars that left the United States in a more dignified position, including the continuing American presence in South Korea and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. But even those stand in stark contrast to the happier legacy of total victory during World War II.

Bosnia, as a relative success story? I am certainly not sure about that… Just last week we had the tenth anniversary of the Dayton “peace” accords– an occasion that served to underline just how fragile and unsatisfactory the Dayton agreement has proved to be. (See, for example, here and here.)
Still, Glanz describes the current attitude of much of the US political elite with respect to Iraq fairly well when he writes: “The highly qualified optimism of these experts about what may still happen in Iraq – let’s call it something just this side of hopelessness – has been born of many factors, including greatly reduced expectations of what might constitute not-defeat there.” I love that use of the term “not-defeat”, since everyone is rapidly coming to the conclusion that the word “victory” will not be at all applicable.
Glanz is hilariously funny when he writes in an apparently dead-pan way about a history professor called William Stueck who seems to think that the “Iraqification” strategy might work if given enough time…

Korea reveals how easy it is to dismiss the effectiveness of local security forces prematurely, Mr. Stueck said. In 1951, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway felt deep frustration when Chinese offensives broke through parts of the line defended by poorly led South Korean troops.
But by the summer of 1952, with intensive training, the South Koreans were fighting more effectively, Mr. Stueck said. “Now, they needed backup” by Americans, he said. By 1972, he said, South Korean troops were responsible for 70 percent of the front line.

Aha! So all the US needs in order to “win” with Iraqification at this point would be a further 21 years in which to pursue it?
One of the historical examples that Glanz uses that has a clearly “de-colonializing” story-line is that of the French retreat from Algeria. He quotes another historian, Matthew Connelly, as saying that, “Over the long run, history treated de Gaulle kindly for reversing course and agreeing to withdraw… De Gaulle loses the war but he wins in the realm of history: he gave Algeria its independence… How you frame defeat, that can sometimes give you a victory.”
H’mm. I’m not so sure about that. It may have made De Gaulle look masterful, statesmanlike, and “modern”. But the loss of Algeria was nonethless part of a worldwide retraction of French imperial power. Britain’s worldwide empire was also very busy indeed retreating in those days. Both those formerly sizeable global powers were losing global power at a rapid clip between 1950 and 1970, and it is important to remember that.
Now, the same kind of erosion of global power is happening, to some degree, to the United States’ globe-girdling military behemoth. And all of us who seek a world that is not dominated by military force and that is not structured to provide privilege to the US citizenry over and above everyone else in the world should be very clear about that fact, and should welcome it.
In fact, as I wrote here a couple of days ago (and have written on JWN before that, too), even a complete withdrawal of the US military from Iraq will not be enough to build the basis for the kind of just, nonviolent, and egalitarian global system that the 96 percent of the world’s people who are not US citizens so desperately need. And especially not if the (nuclear-armed) US military continues to dominate the entire Gulf region from its fleets inthe Gulf and all their supporting Gulf-side bases.
There was one bit of significant and generally welcome news in the Newsweek story, I should add. This came towards the end of this page of the story:

Khalilzad revealed to NEWSWEEK that he has received explicit permission from Bush to begin a diplomatic dialogue with Iran… “I’ve been authorized by the president to engage the Iranians as I engaged them in Afghanistan directly,” says Khalilzad. “There will be meetings, and that’s also a departure and an adjustment.”

Okay, so we may all have grave reservations and worries about the role that Iran is playing inside Iraq today. But still, as Winston Churchill so memorably said, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”. (It sounds better in English-English than it does in US “English”, by the way.) If the US is going to be talking to Iran about its concerns regarding Iraq, that is far, far better than the situation two years ago when it was threatening to invade it.

Next stop, a resumption of talks with Syria, I hope?
But beyond all this, I think it’s time for people in the peace movement here in the US– while we continue working on the need for a rapid and total US withdfrawal from Iraq– to start also thinking more broadly about the kind of relationship we want our country to have with the rest of the world, say ten or 20 years from now.
What we most certainly don‘t want to see at that point is a country that– having “recovered” from its little setback back there in Iraq in 2006 or so– is willing and able to launch some similar kind of a catastrophe on another country someplace else.
We have to recognize that our country has some very dangerous forces in it… and we need to find ways to prevent them from acting out their sick fantasies on the world stage (and also, here inside the US) ever again.
How can we do that?
One first strategy must be to give them serious punishment at the polls. In 2006, and again in 2008, 2010, 2012, and so on.
Another must be to relentlessly continue the investigations into just how, through outright manipulatipon and lies, they were able to visit their sick fantasies on so many member of Congress back in 2002.
Another must be to pass strong legislation that will bind the executive branch to a full respect of the global Convention Against Torture– and while we’re about it, also the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and especially Article 6 of the NPT…
So, there’s a long road ahead– both on Iraq, and beyond Iraq. We can still only start to glimpse the full dimensions of that road. But still, though I know things are still really horrendous for the people of Iraq, and probably continue to be so for some time– still, at least now we can start to see that there might be a better world for everyone somewhere ahead… Because finally, the US empire is being forced into a significant and long overdue retreat.