Category: Antiwar (vintage)

Moscow Times today gives us a fascinating article by Simon Saradzhyan analyzing the Russian military’s performance in Georgia in some detail.
Of note there, that among the 171 Russian troops wounded was the general who was leading the entire Russian operation in Georgia, Lieut.-Gen.Anatoly Khrulev, commander of the 58th Army. Saradzhyan reports that 70 Russian troops were killed.
Saradzhyan and the Moscow-based experts whom he quotes give generally high marks to the Georgians for their high level of training and the success they had had integrating hi-tech western systems like drones (UAVs) into their operations. Saradzhyan writes bluntly that

while the conflict has demonstrated that Russia can and will coerce its post-Soviet neighbors with force if the West doesn’t intervene, it has exposed the technical backwardness of its military.
The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military.

One of his sources, retired army commando Anatoly Tsyganok, said the timing of the original Georgian offensive against South Ossetia was well chosen, since Putin was in Beijing and both President Dmitry Medvedev and the commander of the 58th Army, which is closest to South Ossetia, were on vacation. Indeed, Saradzhyan wrote that former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev had said the outbreak of the conflict represented “a major intelligence failure.” (That, contra the judgment expressed by Stratfor’s chief, that the whole affair had been a very cleverly spring trap laid by the Russians, which Saradzhyan also quotes.)
Saradzhyan describes the original Georgian offensive and the response of the Russian forces thus:

Only 2,500 Ossetian fighters and less than 600 Russian peacekeepers were on hand to counter 7,500 Georgian troops backed by dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, according to estimates by Russian generals and experts. Tbilisi’s plan appears to have been to conquer Tskhinvali in 24 hours and then advance to South Ossetia’s border with Russia in the next 24 hours to present Russia with a fait accompli.
The blitzkrieg plan, however, faltered despite the personnel and technical superiority of Georgian troops, highlighting errors in the Georgians’ political and military planning.
… The Kremlin timed its response perfectly, because sending troops earlier would have drawn immediate accusations of a disproportionate response, while stalling further could have allowed the Georgian troops to seize Tskhinvali and the rest of South Ossetia, said [Konstantin Makiyenko, the deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.] The Russian troops established control over much of South Ossetia by Aug. 10 and then started to make inroads into Georgia proper, destroying military facilities.

The Russians also, almost immediately, opened a second front in Abkhazia.
Saradzhyan writes:

The Georgian attack failed because President Mikheil Saakashvili and the rest of Georgia’s leadership miscalculated the speed of Russia’s intervention, defense analysts said. Tbilisi also underestimated the South Ossetian paramilitary’s determination to resist the conquest and overestimated the Georgian forces’ resolve to fight in the face of fierce resistance. The Georgian military also failed to take advantage of the fact that Russian reinforcements had to arrive via the Roksky Tunnel and mountain passes, which are easier to block than roads on flat terrain.
Another reason the Georgians lost was because the Russian military used knowledge gleaned from past conflicts, including the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its own reconquest of Chechnya. “Russia has learned the lessons taught by NATO in Yugoslavia, immediately initiating a bombing campaign against Georgia’s air bases and other military facilities,” Tsyganok said.

The above account is consistent with either the intel failure or the “cunningly laid trap” narrative. If the latter, the trap may well have involved luring Saak into launching his attack by demonstrably having both Putin and Medvedev be away from their desks together. It woukd also indicate a willingness to take a non-trivial number of casualties– among both civilians and troops– at the beginning of the war. But hey, compared with the levels of casualties the Red Army took during the “Great Patriotic War”, these casualties could well be seen by Russia’s leaders as extremely low indeed.
In the account of the war so far that Saradzhyan provides, the Russian ground forces and elite and commando forces performed well, but serious deficiencies were revealed in the performance of both the air force and military intelligence.
He writes:

Nogovitsyn said the Georgians shot down four Russian warplanes. The Georgians said that Russia had lost 19 planes as of Monday.
The Air Force’s losses, including a long-range Tu-22, and helplessness in the face of air strikes by Georgian Su-25 attack planes and artillery fire on Tskhinvali as late as Monday should set off alarm bells in Russia, Makiyenko said. “The failure to quickly suppress the Georgian air defense despite rather rudimentary capabilities or to achieve air supremacy despite a lack of fighter planes in the Georgian air force shows the poor condition of the Russian Air Force,” he said.
The loss of Russian planes might have come because of the poor training of pilots, who log only a fraction of the hundreds of flight hours that their NATO counterparts do annually, Netkachev wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Monday.
Russian intelligence bears responsibility too for failing to provide up-to-date information on the capabilities of the Georgian air defense and air force, Netkachev said. As recently as three years ago, Georgia had no pilots capable of flying the Israeli-upgraded Su-25 planes, he said, adding that Russian commanders should have known that Ukraine had supplied Buk and Osa air-defense systems to Georgia and might have trained its operators.
“One general lesson that the Russian side should learn is that it is possible to build a capable, well-trained force in just three to four years, as Saakashvili did,” Makiyenko said.

It is pretty evident that Russia’s very own military-industrial complex will try to use the results of this war to argue for a much more sizeable chunk of the country’s budget than it has been getting.
Saradzhyan writes:

Only 20 percent of conventional weaponry operated by the armed forces can be described as modern, according to Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, an independent military weekly. Yet the government and military have disproportionately skewed financing toward the strategic nuclear forces, which they see as the main deterrent, at the expense of conventional forces.
The lack of modern, quality equipment became evident when several tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down as army reinforcements moved from Russia to South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. Overall, however, the Ground Forces operated better than the Air Force, accomplishing their mission of routing the Georgian units, he said.
“The main lesson that Russia should draw from this conflict is that we need to urgently upgrade our Air Force, with a comprehensive general reform to follow,” he said.

Just one quick last note here. The Soviet military used to produce– and publish in Russian– some pretty objective and useful after-action assessments of various military engagements in which they or they allies had been involved. (Though they would usually attribute any negative judgments they expressed about the quality of Soviet arms or operations to those ever-handy “foreign sources.”) Today’s Moscow Times is not an “official” newspaper in the same sense the old Soviet papers were… But I’m pretty sure that many decisionmakers in Moscow would read an article like this one in it with considerable interest. I wonder whether the fact that it’s in English, and therefore not likely to be read by the great mass of Russian citizens, gives them more freedom to write about potentially touchy subjects like military deficiencies?
But anyway, from what Saradzhyan writes, it seems pretty clear that the Georgian war will have given a boost to the military-industrial complex’s lobbying power in Moscow– just as it almost certainly has done in Washington.
We do still have time to stop this new arms race in the field of hi-tech “conventional” weapons before it gets any further underway… But we need to start the worldwide campaign to do this now, rather than just letting all these arms manufacturers and their hired hands drive the agenda while the rest of us aren’t looking.
There are many better ways to resolve thorny conflicts than through war and killing. Let’s all try to be smart enough to understand that, and to start a huge global shift toward outlawing war and strengthening the nonviolent means of conflict resolution.

Today is the 26th anniversary of Israeli PM Menachem Begin’s launching of a large-scale invasion of Lebanon. So, given the notably unsuccessful, or even counter-productive (from Israel’s point of view) record of that invasion, today is an excellent day on which to consider the stalling of the Bush administration’s present attempt to cash out some political gains– inside Iraq– from its decision to invade that country in 2003.
On May 17, 1983, Israel thought it was cashing out its political gains in Lebanon from the invasion of the year before. That was the day Israeli PM Menachem Begin, Lebanese President Amin Gemayyel, and U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz all gathered to sign a final peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel that included provisions for tightly US- and Israel-dominated security cooperation between Lebanon and Israel. (I don’t have my 1984 book on Lebanon to hand to provide all the details I need here. It should be with my by tomorrow.)
You can read the text of the May 17 agreement here. Though it was duly signed and ratified by all parties (including, I believe, by a Lebanese government that had been sufficiently bought and paid for by the US-Israeli alliance by that time), within less than nine months it was toast.
Lebanese nationalist forces backed by Syria were able to force out of the country the US Marine force that, though it was originally deployed in August 1982 to protect unarmed Palestinians, rapidly thereafter moved closer to giving outright support to Gemayyel’s minority government instead. The US plan in Lebanon also relied heavily on building up the national army to support their ally, Gemayel. But in February 1984, when Gemayyel ordered the army to start shooting into civilian areas, the majority of nationalist-minded Shiites who made up its ranks simply deserted en masse rather than follow those orders, and the whole army collapsed. (I recently blogged a little about that, here.)
With no “Lebanese Army” left to provide a cover for their presence, the Marines fled the country. By mid-February Gemayel– a man always more opportunistic than principled– had made his peace with Damascus and Amal.
The May 17 agreement lay in tatters on the floor.
So now, a different US administration is working very hard to translate its position as post-invasion military occupier of Iraq into a vassalage-style agreement with Iraq that is very similar– or even more draconian– than what Shultz and Begin were trying to impose on Lebanon in May 1983.
Patrick Cockburn is the western MSM-er who’s been doing the best and most systematic coverage of the actual extremely coercive “diplomacy” of this attempt. Here and here. Huge kudos to him.
The first of those pieces leads thus:

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq’s position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US…

The second leads thus:

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.
US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported for the first time in this newspaper yesterday…

As Cockburn and others note, however, the very coercive nature of the US diplomacy involved has aroused some very serious Iraqi pushback.
The WaPo.com’s excellent Dan Froomkin published a survey of accounts of some political aspects this pushback in his post yesterday.
Iraq’s nationalist forces are very smartly mounting their campaign against the arrangements proposed by the Bushists at three distinct levels:

1. Through broad grassroots organizing against it. You can find some accounts of this through the Sadrist “Al-Kufiyya” news agency. Juan Cole has also produced two good recent compilations of accounts of this, on May 31, and June 3.

2. Through some fascinating cross-sect and cross-party political work inside Iraq. You can find many glimpses of that in the sources cited by Cole… and
3. Through political contacts Iraqi lawmakers are pursuing with American legislators and other sectors of US society. In a sense, this is the most intriguing aspect of the campaign. These Iraqi legislators are using precisely what we might call the emergence of a global political community– that is backed up by vastly improved global communications and by the strengthening of many key global norms– to appeal across national borders to their counterparts inside US society. And they are doing so in a way that may be very fruitful indeed. (Though they certainly shouldn’t end their grassroots organizing at home in favor of this international diplomatic initiative!)

This is where the events that Froomkin was reporting on yesterday become so important.
Basically, we now have these two Iraqi parliamentarians right here in Washington. (I think I’m going to a lunch event with them in about an hour’s time.) They are Nadeem Al-Jaberi, described by Reuters as “a co-founder of the al-Fadhila Shi’ite political party” and Khalaf Al-Ulayyan, identified as “A Sunni Iraqi lawmaker… [and] founder of the National Dialogue Council.”
That Reuters report tells us that on Wednesday Jaberi and Ullayan testified in person directly at a hearing convened by the International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight Subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee,. They stated in no uncertain terms,

that U.S. troops should leave Iraq, and that talks on the long-term security pact should be postponed until after they are gone.
“What are the threats that require U.S. forces to be there?” asked Nadeem Al-Jaberi…speaking through a translator.
“I would like to inform you, there are no threats on Iraq. We are capable of solving our own problems,” he declared. He favored a quick pullout of U.S. forces, which invaded the country in 2003 and currently number around 155,000.
… Khalaf Al-Ulayyan… said bilateral talks on a long-term security deal should be shelved until American troops leave — and until there is a new government in Washington.
“We prefer to delay until there is a new administration in the United States,” he said.

Froomkin also provided a link to what was described as a letter that Jaberi and Ulayyan handed to the Subcommittee chair, Rep. William Delahunt (D.Mass.) (Take care, the link is actually, despite appearances, to a PDF file.)
The letter bears the signatures of only 31 of the 275 members of the Iraqi parliament. But at the top, the heading says that Jaberi and Ulayyan affirmed that it had been signed by these MPs “on behalf of parties representing a majority of the 275 members.”
The letter made two main arguments. The first was that under the procedures of the (Bremer-designed) Iraqi Constitution itself, any international agreement signed by the Iraqi “government” needs to be ratified by the parliament in order to enter into force.
The second was simply,

We wish to inform you that the majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any … agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq, in accordance with a declared timetable anmd without leaving behind any military bases, soldiers or hired fighters.

Excellent clarity.
So what will Bush do next? The Democrat-strong US congress is (a) holding hearings like this one that expose the administration’s imperialistic shenanigans for what they are, and (b) strongly opposed to the idea that Bush might have the right to conclude any form of binding longterm agreement with Iraq without that agreement being submitted to the legislature here in the US, too.
Where is Bush’s “pro-democracy” rhetoric on this question, I wonder?
The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has a piece in today’s paper in which she provides details of the follow-up in the to-and-fro between the administration and Congress over this question of the longterm agreement with Iraq. She also reports that the US ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, tried to claim that the opposition that Iraqis had voiced to the proposed text had all been stirred up by the Iranians.
She quotes an un-named Iraqi official– probably foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari (whose personal qualities somewhat resemble those of Amin Gemayyel, see above)– as saying that Iraqi government may seek an extension of the UN Security Council “mandate” over Iraq rather than succumbing to the terms Bush is proposing for switching to a bilateral agreement.
Anyway, I guess I want to make a few last quick points here before I get ready for this lunch.

1. The Iraqi nationalists really do seem to be getting their act together these days, pushing back five years’ worth of dedicated attempts by the US occupying force and others to foment divide-and-rule hatreds and conflicts.
2. Though international law maintains its is quite illegal for an occupying power to push through deep changes in the governance system of an occupied territory, nevertheless, the system imposed by the US occupiers in Iraq does allow for some accountability on issues of fundamental national importance there– such as whether the country gets turned into a longterm vassal of the US, or not. The “democratization” rhetoric and campaign maintained by the Bushists has also sort of ended up hoisting them on their own petard with regard to allowing the Iraqi nationalist lawmakers a voice within the US system.
3. The norms of national sovereignty and the accountability of governments to their citizens are anyway very well entrenched internationally these days. The arguments made by the Iraqi lawmakers cannot simply be ignored– even here, in the United States.
4. In an international system that is today marked by greater degrees of international connectivity and transparency than ever before, as well as by the spread of respect for the global norms described above, 19th-century-style colonial campaigns to convert raw military dominance into solid political gains– as in the consolidation of the British Raj in India, or whatever– are simply no longer feasible. Israel learned this long and slowly in Lebanon after 1982, and then again in a short and sharp “refresher lesson” in 2006. The US political system is only now starting to learn this lesson in Iraq.

Bottom line: Military power just ain’t as useful to the world’s big nations as it once was. Heck, you could even say that when they employ it, the effect is nearly always actually counter-productive.
Whatever next? A world without wars of aggression? A world in which nations stay within their own recognized boundaries and resolve conflicts through negotiation, mediation, litigation, or other nonviolent means? How amazingly revolutionary! How very, um, United Nations-y.
(Which was, we can recall, a US creation, back in 1945.)

On Friday, I was back in Charlottesville and in the late afternoon I biked to downtown to do a couple of errands. There, right next to the magnificent “Free Speech Monument” on our downtown pedestrian mall was the Virginia version of the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit, set up over this Memorial Day weekend by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice and other congregations and groups.
In case anyone’s unfamiliar with EWO, it is a simple display made up of two portions. One portion is combat boots, lined up as in a (personless) parade, with each pair tagged with the name of a US soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The other is a group of just-regular-people’s shoes, babies’, kids’, women’s, and men’s shoes, each tagged with the name of a civilian Iraqi casualty of the current lengthy war. You can see some good photos of the last time EWO was set up in Charlottesville, here.
EWO started off as a nationwide project. I wrote about participating in the nationwide EWO exhibit on the National Mall in Washington DC in May 2006, here. At that point there were 2,428 pairs of combat boots and the logistics of setting them out, guarding them (including from rain), then packing them up and trucking to the next place was becoming huge. Soon after that, they broke them up into state-level collections. In a sense, this helps “bring home” the cost of these wars even more effectively.
Friday, when I found them down on the C’ville mall, I slapped my forehead in exasperation. I had forgotten it was this weekend they were doing it– and I’d been meaning to volunteer to help them read the Iraqi names. Because what my good friends in CCPJ were planning to do was every couple of hours have a solemn reading of the names of all 117 of the Virginians killed in Iraq, alternating with the names of “a small sample” of the many Iraqi civilians killed in the war.
Here is a listing of the names of 141 Virginians killed in the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it was okay. They were about to do a reading of the names and I was pressed straight into service. Someone had produced a list of some of the Iraqi war dead. That was what I read. The way we did it, standing on the small granite platform there with a sound-system, was a woman called Kelly would read the name of a Virginian casualty; Christine, one of the main organizers of the exhibit, would strike a bell; I would read the name of an Iraqi casualty; Christine would strike the bell again… and we’d repeat the whole process, name after name after name.
We tried to keep the pace slow and dignified, to give each name some full seconds of thought and attention. I found it far more moving than I had expected. The sun was pretty hot. We got into the slow rhythm of the reading and stared out over the rows of black empty black combat boots, or turned to stare at the circles of civilian shoes.
Name after name after name.
Punctuated by the eery chiming of the bell.
Just three days earlier, I had been in New York City, listening to a very expert and attentive reading-out of names. Those were the names of half of the entire Master’s-degree graduating class at Columbia Teachers’ College. Eight hundred names! Each read out with good attention– but a little faster than our reading at EWO on Friday.
The Columbia TC graduation was held in Riverside Church, the same soaring, Gothic-style edifice in which, in April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., started speaking out publicly against the war in Vietnam. It gave me goosebumps just now to press the audio button you’ll find on this web-page devoted to the sermon, and hear Dr. King’s voice, and realize he was standing in the very same space we were sitting in, Tuesday.
Each of those names read out at the TC graduation corresponded with one of the bright-faced and slightly excitable mass of blue-robed Master’s candidates packed into the pews in front of us… Young people in their twenties or early thirties, most of them; young people of now-proven accomplishment and skills who were looking forward to making new contributions to society as they apply those skills in the years ahead. Young people with hopes and dreams, fears and concerns, loved ones, and many of them– like my daughter, Leila– with their own distinguished professional record already.
Young people visibly bursting with energy and life.
So then, just three days later, I was myself a reader-out of names. Each of these names, however, corresponded not to an excited young person on the brink of a new phase in her or his life, but to a loss.
A loss that is worse than nothing, unimaginably worse than “just” a pair of empty boots or shoes, though the empty footwear helps represent the loss.
A loss that rips a lasting hole in the lives of loved ones, rips a hole in the universe.
A loss that need never have happened. A loss that should never have happened.
Name after name after name, after name after name after name…

Yesterday I was finally able to get to see the movie ‘Meeting Resistance’, which was showing at George Washington University’s student center. It’s a gutsy, very well-executed look at the early months of the Iraqi resistance to US occupation, told in the form of intercut interviews with ten participants in the resistance.
The film-makers are Molly Bingham and Steve Connors, she American, he British, both of them with backgrounds as war-zone photographers. They had been in Baghdad during the US invasion in March 2003, and stayed around to “shoot” newspix of the aftermath… But soon enough they became curious about the– at that time– small incidents and altercations that the US occupiers met from some of the Iraqis, and in classic journalistic mode they set out to “meet” and try to report on the members of this emerging resistance. This inquiry then took onthe form of film, a new medium for both of them I think. They worked as a small, two-person team. Steve shot the footage and arranged the sound recording while Molly asked the questions in the interviews.
They shot the footage over the course of ten months– up until May 2004– working in the largely middle-class, north Baghdad district of Adhamiyeh. (You can read more about their modus operandi here.)
All the interviewees required that their names not be used. Only one agreed to let his face be shown. The rest are all shot in a way that conceals their identities. One is a woman. One is a non-Iraqi. A number– I think Steve said three?– were Shiites. They come from a variety of social and professional backgrounds. They talk on-camera about, mainly, their strongly nationalistic, anti-occupation motivations for becoming involved with the resistance– though for just about all of them, their Muslim religious belief was also to one degree or another a part of their motivation. One of them actually is an imam.
Seeing the movie was almost a nostalgic experience for me. That era was before the great waves of sectarian fighting broke over Iraq. Indeed, one of the final scenes is some horrifying archive footage of the bombing of the Ashoura commemorations at the Mosque in Kerbala in April 2004, one of the first big apparently sectarian mass-killings of the whole war. Inasmuch as the interviewees have any comment on that or other instances of sectarian violence, they express themselves as completely mystified by it, arguing strongly that no “true” Muslim or Iraqi would do commit such an act, and that therefore those acts must have been carried out by an unrevealed “third force”– the US, Israel, or someone else.
But here we are now, three and a half years after April 2004, and huge rivers of civilian blood have poured throughout the country, much of it shed in acts of horrifying, apparently sectarian violence.
At the showing I went to, Steve and Molly were there and answered questions afterwards. I also went over to the decidedly different ambience of the “Center for Strategic and International Studies” later in the afternoon, to catch the Q&A session after the showing that was held there. Molly and Steve went to some lengths to argue– using the Pentagon’s own figures, which are also presented in the FAQs section on their website– that though many more civilians than soldiers have been getting killed in Iraq over the years, the intention of the reistance’s “men of violence” is still overwhelmingly to strike against military targets. Indeed, they noted that according to these figures of the significant attacks reported between April 2004 and June 2007, 74% of the attacks targeted coalition troops and only 10% targeted civilians.
They also make these same arguments in the fairly recent “video op-ed” they have up on Youtube, which highlights the film and makes some more contemporary commentary on the issues raised in it.
Seeing the whole film yesterday was a big, fairly emotionally draining experience for me. I have argued for so long here and elsewhere that the US military should simply get out of Iraq– completely and in as speedy, orderly, and generous a way as possible. And these arguments, made by many, many other people as well, of course, have had so little effect that I’ve been quite discouraged at times. Even the great “surge” of antiwar sentiment within the US during the elections of Fall 2006 seemed largely to dissipate over the 12 months that followed; and the Dems in Congress have done pathetically little to move the country seriously towards a full and speedy withdrawal.
Also, I’ve been pretty busy writing my book on the whole of US foreign policy, post-Bush…
So seeing the movie was probably a necessary jolt for me, a reminder that I need to do a lot more hard thinking and writing about my country’s continuing occupation of Iraq– and the need to end it a.s.a.p.– than I have been doing lately.
I’ve had a couple of other relevant experiences recently, too. One has been to sit with Bill the spouse through the first five episodes of the recent, epic, 15-episode Al-Jazeera documentary on the War in Lebanon. (You can access the whole thing on-line, through this portal on someone’s blog.) Another was to go listen to the Franco-Israeli writer Sylvain Cypel talking about Israel’s 40-year occupation of Palestine, as I wrote about here, last week.
So regarding the War in Lebanon series, it has been deeply, deeply depressing to be reminded again, so vividly, of the oh-so-many ghastly twists and turns the civil strife there has taken over the 32 years since 197-5– and still with no settled peace there till today. I was there at the start of the war, having arrived in Beirut to launch my career as a journalist just five months before the Ain al-Rummaneh Massacre. I actually lived through all those early episodes… So many lives lost or blighted. So much distrust sown. So many human souls twisted into hatred and violence. So many malevolent foreign hands stirring the violence at every turn.
When the US invasion of Iraq started, I had flashbacks back to my time in Lebanon– but then a more rational part of me said, “No! It can’t possibly happen there! Iraq is a settled, centralized state, not a free-market, politically chaotic place as Lebanon always was!”
But it did happen in Iraq: So much of that same internal breakdown (fitna); so much of that external pot-stirring; so much of a very similar, very insidious process of ever-developing political chicanery driven by outside funding; so much death and destruction.
But here’s a possible difference I see. In Lebanon, the population were always accustomed to surviving with only a very weak state. Indeed, the mountainous geography of the country had almost ensured that that would be the situation. But most of Iraq (apart from the Kurd-dominated north) is a broad, flat plain fed by the famous two rivers. Regulation of the rivers and of economic and social life along their banks requires a strong central authority. So for the survival of all those large cities in the plains, there has to be a functioning central state. Life depends on that, in a way in which, in Lebanon, it doesn’t. At the most basic level imaginable, when there is no effective state regulation in Iraq, the sewage from one city flows down to the next. You get cholera, pestilence, and destitution… But that is only a small part of the story. I just think, in general, that the people of Iraq are actually much more vulnerable to the effects of political fitna than the people of Lebanon ever were.
And finally, Palestine. the thing that Cypel said that really stuck in my mind was to recall how, growing up in France in the 1950s, the left spent a long time talking about “peace” in Algeria before they finally got to the central issue, which was to call for an end to the French of the country. Cypel was saying that that has also seemed to be the case in Israel, with respect to Palestine. But I think this is very relevant for us here in the US, with respect to Iraq. People in the political elite here have spent far too long talking abut the need to attain some kind of “peace” within Iraq, and not nearly enough on stressing the need to assure a total and speedy end to the occupation.
As far back as 2004 and 2005, I was arguing that, while we could not foresee with certitude what the sequelae inside Iraq of a US withdrawal would be, we could predict with confidence that if the US stayed the internal conflicts would continue. Others argued that the US had to stay in Iraq because of some version of the dreadfully dishonest “Pottery Barn rule.” My prediction has been proven correct.
Bottom line: the US needs to end the occupation of Iraq. And people in the antiwar movement need to refocus more than ever before on that goal.
… Anyway, Friday I’m going to spend some more time hanging out with Steve and Molly. Maybe I can tell you more about them and their great film, then.

The inspiring, committed, and very effective peace activist Cindy Sheehan posted an agonizingly pained ‘farewell’ to public life on her Daily Kos website yesterday.
It is worded as a sharp reproach to the Democratic Party:

I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?
However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

She said that she had reached her present decision to leave public life in the US, and her conclusions about the Democratic Party and the state of public life here in general, after meditating on some of these issues “for about a year now.”
Yesterday was “Memorial Day” here in the US– that is, a day when citizens are urged to remember all those who have died in war. Cindy Sheehan’s son Casey was killed in Iraq in April 2004, an event that catapulted his mother into three years of extremely energetic (and personally draining) antiwar activism.
I can imagine that all the observances and media attention that are given to Memorial Day must make it a hard time for all those Americans bereaved by the present wars. The more so since the essential pointlessness– indeed, the directly counter-productive nature– of these wars, and most especially the one in Iraq, are increasingly plain for all to see.
Cindy Sheehan wrote in yesterday’sblog post:

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every [day] since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.
I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Cindy first came to my attention when she left a comment on this JWN post, back in January 2005. Since then, I have followed her activism with huge admiration. Then in May last year, she came with Ann Wright and a couple of others to speak here in Charlottesville, and I finally got to meet her. At the time, I wrote about Cindy and Ann: “These two women are national treasures! We have to look after them!”
I guess no-one looked after Cindy well enough for her to keep her energies up. And given the barrage of extremely hateful hostility to which she has been exposed since she first spoke out, it is not surprising at all that currently she feels the need, as she wrote, to “go home”:

I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Cindy has long been explicit in saying that one of the things she was trying to do with her activism was to invest the death of her son in combat in Iraq with some “meaning.”
For my part, I see no reason for her to conclude that, in any way, she “failed” Casey, as she wrote. As the parent of three young(-ish) adults, I would say that the main thing I tried to do in raising them was to nurture them so their own God-given gifts and personalities could emerge and flourish. I made them physically in my body for nine months, and I did a lot to feed, shelter, and teach them for a further 18 years or so. But they are not “my” creations; they are their own people.
As a young adult, Casey Sheehan made his own decisions. Maybe his mom had encouraged him to join the military, or maybe not. I don’t know. But Cindy, you should not hold yourself responsible in any way either for him having gotten killed in Iraq… Or, for the fact that all of us in the antiwar movement have– thus far!– failed to bring an end to this terrible war.
George W. Bush and those of his advisors who persuaded him to invade Iraq are the ones responsible for Casey’s death. Period.
And regarding the failure of the antiwar movement– yet– to have fully succeeded, I would say two things:

(1) We may not have “won” yet, but we have already started to make a huge difference. I see this every time I go down to my weekly local peace demonstration here in central Virginia and hear the support we get there, compared with the very low support– and the much more frequent expressions of hostility– that we got back in late 2003 or early 2004.
Yes, the “progress” we make sometimes seems agonizingly slow– especially when we keep in mind that for every day the war drags on, more US soldiers and hundreds more Iraqis will have to die… But we’re getting there. Even in spite of the self-absorption of the “opposition” politicians in this country and the other dysfunctionalities of the political system here– still, we are making progress. S – l – o – w though it often feels…
(2) I have found, in child-raising and other areas of human endeavor, that the Buddhist discipline of non-attachment to the fruit of one’s labors has been incredibly helpful and empowering. You do the very best you can in any project– but the outcome of those labors really is not in your hands. It is in the hands of God, you might say. (But most Buddhists probably wouldn’t.)

So Cindy, go spend time with your surviving kids, absolutely. Marvel in their uniqueness. Admire their God-given gifts. Be there for them as much as you all need and are able. I’m pretty certain it won’t make your grief at Casey’s killing go away. Probably nothing can do that. But I really do urge you to find a hundred ways to nurture your self… Because I still think– no, I know— you are a national treasure.
Does anyone need further proof of this? Just go to some of the 900-plus the comments at the end of Cindy’s post there, and read some of what her work has meant to people all around this big old country of ours.
Walk in the Light, Cindy Sheehan.
Might you one day walk back into the arena of public activism? Who knows. But the main thing is to keep your special Light of Cindy-ness alive and glowing– whether for a small circle of family and friends, or for the whole world. Anyway, we all are one.

In this recent JWN post I argued that the “soggy universalism” that pervaded much of the discussion among liberal or left-leaning westerners in the 1990s had allowed the emergence of a not insignificant group of westerners whom I characterized as “liberal hawks”.

I wrote there,

It was in and over Saddam’s Iraq, however, that the arguments of the liberal hawks were put to the severest test; and this one they have very evidently failed.

Anyway, go read the whole of that earlier post if you want to get the fuller context for what follows.

One of the most thought-provoking comments submitted to that post came from Robert H. Consoli. I emailed him subsequently and told him I’d found his comment interesting, but hard to read because of formating problems… and I asked him to try to sort those problems out and resubmit it.

He was kind enough to do that. (He made a few clarificatory revisions along the way. Those do not materially change the argument he made earlier.)

But before I got his return email, I had taken the opportunity of a long train-ride to DC yesterday to work on one of my “tabulated” commentaries– on the basis of his earlier comment, which, yes, I had myself also painstakingly reformated by then.

So what I propose to do here is first of all to paste in his (slightly revised) version of his comment, so it is now here in a main post, and then to paste in the tabulated set of my responses to that. I tried to revise that version of his text in line with the revised version he sent me, but may have failed to incorporate a couple of his–admittedly very minor– revisions.

So anyway, here we have:

Robert H. Consoli on the question of the ‘liberal hawks’

Hello Helena,

 

   
I
take issue with your burlesque of ‘liberal hawks’ and their reasoning.  You’ve collapsed an unbelievably complex
story into several points in a diatribe. 
More, you’re not describing the motives of those who made the
war but
those who simply failed to resist it. 

 

   
Those who made or strongly motivated the war – the Cheneys,
the Kristols, the Perles,
etc. – had very different motivations from those which you list here.  Their motives either had to do with a
millenarian dream of control of oil regions or it had to do with the
supposed
security of Israel
as seen through a Likud prism.  These two motives have always been directly
opposed to each other but, for a period, they were made to appear as
though
they were instrumentalities to the same end. 


 

   
There were additional motives among this top tier of war
supporters.  These included things such
as a desire to use Iraq
as a test case for Supply-Side economics as Trudy Rubin has so ably
demonstrated.  The desire to reward
Republican apparatchiks with sinecures in Iraq was also a motive at
this
level.

 

   
Nor should we discount the fact of simple personal corruption
among the
most powerful movers and shakers.  These
are

people who
obviously see the deaths of American soldiers as a means of
lining their own pockets.  I defy anyone
to show that this is too harsh.

 

   
The list which you’ve actually provided does not describe those
actors.  It does apply to those among
the, shall we say it?, intelligentsia; those
whose
occupations required them to write about the war in newspapers,
magazines, and
journals.  These are those who wrote, blogged or
spoke about the
war before veterans groups, foreign-affairs-oriented clubs, womens‘
groups, and service clubs.  I’m referring
to the powerless opinion makers of every stripe who used moral grounds
to sell
the US‘s  invasion of Iraq. 

 

   
In this list you identify various aspects of that meliorism
which, like it or not, stems historically from the undoubted success of
the
western powers in opposing and then rolling back the physical and moral
destruction of Europe caused by Naziism.

 

   
Among the rank and file of everyday Americans, those who had, as
individuals, no power either to support or oppose the war through any
other
means than their individual votes, a third set of justifications was
assembled.  Those justifications reduced to
simple fear.  Fear of the Other, fear of Islam, fear of violence on the
part of people
with brown skins, fear of terrorism, and fear of nuclear weapons.  Those who had the power to make the war
created this third tier of arguments in order to pacify the broad mass
of
Americans.  You know this quite well as
you have often alluded to it.  These
justifications, in their simplest and original form, consist of the
continual irresponsible
statements of Cheney, Rice, and Bush (‘the smoking gun’ statement and
many
others) which began right after 9/11/01 and continued with increasing
frequency
and vehemence right up to the actual invasion of Iraq on 3/18/03.

 

   
Therefore the list which you’ve provided applies only to a very
small
number of people and had no role in creating the war but it did have a
role in
quieting and pacifying the class of opinion makers. 
In any case these motivations were
supplemental to the much more powerful motivation of simple fear.

 

   
You can barely conceal your contempt for this catalogue of
motivations.  Let us see if that contempt
is deserved.  In his book, The Rise of
the Vulcans, Jim Mann describes the
motivations of Wolfowitz in planning and
facilitating the invasion of Iraq.  Mann
makes it clear that Wolfowitz
saw the war as a noble effort to liberate an enslaved people from a mad
tyrant.  In his mind it was all one with
the Holocaust and Saddam was Hitler.  Let
us go back to that time, 2002, and look at it from his perspective.  Here’s Wolfowitz,
the perfect example of your points 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5.  Now answer this question honestly:  was he wrong? 
No hindsight allowed.  Was Wolfowitz’s meliorism
wrong?  Like the Likud
or
hate it.  Likudniks
see Israel‘s
survival as the same as opposing Hitler; opposition to Arab regimes is
the same
as opposing the Holocaust.  You adduce
all sorts of hypocrisies inherent in your catalog of justifications. 

 

   
You’re right. 

 

   
But it’s irrelevant.  

 

   
If you can put yourself in Wolfowitz’s
shoes
and honestly answer that Wolfowitz was
wrong then
your catalog is sensible.  I personally
don’t know how anyone can answer that way, not even you. 
Looking back at it he was obviously wrong.  That’s
not the point.  At the time no one could
say that that was
not a noble effort.  And Wolfowitz’s meliorism
is based on
that simple idea.

 

   
Where do we go from here?  We can
say, as you imply, that meliorism is wrong
tout
court.  That’s fine.  We
can live as Jesus intended us to live when
he said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ 
No invasion of Iraq.  No
invasion of Afghanistan
(a harder case).  No bombing of Kosovo (a
much harder
case).   No Vietnam
(an easy case). 

 

   
No WWII. 

 

   
Then suppose that now Britain
is a German protectorate along with France. 
We can re-think our whole post-war history
and get used to the idea of Fascism and race purity as major components
of the
modern Western political experience.  Good.  We also get used to the idea of the slaughter
of all the remaining Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and babies with birth
defects
in Europe. 
European societies will be run along strictly ‘Scientific’ lines.  Catholic and Protestant churches are tamed
along with their archaic moral attitudes. 
Liberal democracies are a thing of the past, even in America,
since
they so disastrously failed in the between-wars period.

 

I guess that meliorism was good in that case.

 

 

   
But what makes meliorism good in
some
circumstances and not good in others?  No
one knows.  There is no decision
principle.  As Isaiah Berlin was fond of quoting ‘Of the
crooked
timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’. 
Or, rather, I should say ‘no one person
knows’.  The experience of mankind has
tended to confirm the greater reliability of decisions made on the
basis of
free exchange of views.  That is,
political structures founded on the idea of open exchange of views
tend, over
the long run, to be a bit more stable than those regimes  committed to a strict hierarchical flow
of information and decision-making.  This
is not a panacea, of course.  Decisions
made freely and in the open have been failing since at least the time
of the
Athenian’s Sicilian expedition and, probably, from long before.

 

 
  To see how silly your catalog
is let us
re-phrase it in terms of an immediate situation which we can all
understand.

 

   
(1) Sometimes a person is drowning and something has to be done
to stop
it.

 

   
(2) “We”, who are well-meaning citizens of societies that
don’t believe in drowning have our
sensibilities so
exquisitely

attuned to questions
of whether drowning is right or wrong whenever it
occurs that we are uniquely positioned to discern

and understand
these situations and we have a unique responsibility
to ‘intervene’ to suppress and reverse the drowning

process.

 

   
(3)  It “just so
happens” that among the many instruments of policy at our command is to
don bathing suits and get on the diving board and use all the
technology we
have which allows for:

 

(a) rapid entrance
into the water for a knock-out strike that can rapidly arrest the
drowning
process.

(b) they can
meanwhile limit to an absolute minimum the risks of “collateral”
damage to other swimmers.

(c) they also
obviate the need for “our side” to throw into the battle any large
numbers of life guards such as might be

expensive to raise and
maintain in the field, and might later be expected
to come back as broken people  (or
drowned themselves) into our own society.

 

   
(4)  And meanwhile, though
“we” the righteous rescuers continue to pay lip-service to all kinds
of ideals about human equality and the need for global institutions
like the
United Nations, still all those institutions are deeply flawed; they
are
riddled with inefficiencies and corruption and make it difficult to get
to the
pool in time to rescue actual drowning persons.

 

   


 

   
Therefore….

 

 


 

   
(5)  We need to conclude, with or
without a lingering scintilla of regret, that the only way those drownings about which we are so concerned can be
prevented
in a timely fashion is through an “intervention” to be undertaken by
us (me) — and on a unilateral or otherwise non-UN basis, if need be.  (And how much better if at
the same time we can redefine our language’s longstanding vocabulary to
the
extent we feel comfortable calling this anti-drowning action a
“humanitarian” intervention…)

 

   


 

   
Stated like this your points would elicit universal agreement.  Would you let a person drown if you had the
power to prevent it?  You would.  Would you let Saddam’s thugs
torture random Iraqis if you thought it could be prevented?  Would you lift a hand to save the dying Jews
of Poland?  Would you…? 
Would you ….? 
The questions are endless and some of them are easy to answer
and some
of them are not.  I might let Saddam’s
thugs continue to torture if, in order to prevent it,
I had to institute a draft.    I
might
allow the murder and deportation of all Kosovars
continue if to prevent it will cost more than 100 billion dollars.  Or maybe 50 billion;  I’m not certain.  I
might be willing to do something for Darfur if the cost is fewer
than 100 military lives and 10 billion dollars. 
But if it’s 11 billion all bets are
off.  Stated this way it seems immoral but
that’s
life.  Every moral action has a cost and
if the cost is too high it threatens to disable the entire moral system.  For example, how much should a National Guard
family in Arkansas suffer in order to
relieve
every 150 inhabitants of Darfur?  An infinite amount?
 A family of five vs.
150
residents of Darfur?  Answer! 
Maybe we could allow that family in Arkansas to be destroyed?  After all, it’s the right thing to do.  Or maybe not.  Maybe Darfurians
have been driven off their lands since the dawn of time and there’s  precious
little that we can do about
it.  But if the cost to save them is less
than 150 dollars per Arkansas
or Nebraskan Guard family then maybe it’s doable.

 

   
Nor do we even get into Kierkegaard’s elaborations on the
Teleological
Suspension of the Ethical.  E.g., when is
it justifiable to break the law (violate ethical principles) in order
to
prevent a greater evil?  Hmmm?  Kierkegaard
thought that, in the right circumstances, we could violate the Ethical
itself.  For Kierkegaard all the Darfurians could go and hang themselves and we
should assist
them – if it was truly God’s will that they should do so.  
That was God’s message to Abraham according
to K.  And wasn’t that the argument line
in Rwanda?

 

   
All these decisions are fraught with considerations and costs.  All these decisions are heavily laden with
complex historical antecedents. 

 

   
To be forced to make such decisions in the face of lousy
information is
the cost of being human. 

 

   
We must always make decisions in doubt and ignorance; we must
mitigate
the costs and increase the benefits.  If we can.

 

   
To make a mistake is pardonable. 
To fail to predict the future and lives be lost as a result is
pardonable.  What’s not pardonable – and
this, I think, is what you’re angry about  (along with all the rest of us) – is
to refuse to look the truth in the eye and learn from disaster. 

 

    
But that’s a different list.

And now, if you have the energy to carry on reading, here is my response to him:

Continue reading “The ‘liberal hawks’ question, contd.”

(Being, a critique of Ron Tira’s The Limitations of Standoff
Firepower-Based Operations:On Standoff Warfare, Maneuver, and Decision)

Ron Tira is an Israeli Air Force reservist with considerable
experience
in the IAF’s intelligence and “Campaign Planning” departments. Last
November he published this scathing
critique of the way the Israeli ground forces had performed during
Israel’s 33-day war on Lebanon.  (See my commentary on that, here.)

Now, in his latest study The
Limitations of Standoff Firepower-Based Operations, Tira has
turned his sights on many of the operational assumptions and concepts
developed with his own service, the Air Force.  His critique is
very significant, it seems to me, for two reasons. First, it provides an IAF
insider’s informed insight into the flaws within the operational 
concept that the IAF itself had done the most to develop within the
broader realm of Israeli military planning.  The IAF’s former
chief Dan Halutz took the concept of relying very strongly on
“standoff, firepower-based operations” (SFO’s) with him when he became
the chief of the IDF’s entire, over-arching general staff structure;
and the 33-day war of last summer was Halutz’s great chance (!) to
demonstrate the efficacy of these types of operation.

And beyond that, as Tira makes clear throughout this latest study, the
Israeli concept of reliance on SFO’s is intimately– one might say,
organically– linked to many of the ideas and concepts developed within
the US military in recent years, including the ideas about the
possibility of relying on small but firepower-heavy forces capable of
operating over long distances that were strongly championed by Donald
Rumsfeld when he became Secreteary of Defense in 2001.  (I
recently wrote here
about some of the terrible consequences– for both the US and
Iraq– of the Bush administration’s reliance on the small forces
dicated by that concept.) 

So clearly, Tira’s critique of SFO’s has relevance and potential
resonance far beyond Israel’s immediate theater of operations. Hence,
the general nature of my title here.

A good proportion of the “boys”
in both the US and the Israeli armed services have clearly always been
enamored of high-tech gadgetry, and seduced by the idea that its
effective utilization could reduce their own forces’ casualties (and
perhaps, through the development of ‘precision guidance’ to the desired
level of ‘surgical’ precision, also reduce ‘collateral’ damage in the
areas targeted) while allowing them greater flexibility to operate
anywhere in the world they pleased and without all the messy,
time-consuming, and expensive business of having to plan for, move into
position, and then sustain in the field large numbers of the infantry’s
“boots on the ground”…  But until Rumsfeld’s sharp-elbowed
arrival in the Pentagon, operational-art thinking there had still been
dominated by the basic tents of “the Powell Doctrine”: that is, a basic
reliance on large infantry forces (as built up over several decades in,
primarily, Central Europe), with all the strategic and political
constraints that reliance on such forces entails.

Rumsfeld worked rapidly and ruthlessly to bend the high command of the
US military to his will.  The two great “experiments” of his
attempt to reconfigure US forces according to the new focus on what
Tira calls SFO’s, and to which US military jargon assigns a number of
other related terms (see p.11 of Tira’s work), were the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq.  Significantly, when Tira tries to place the
performance of Israel’s SFO-focused campaign in Lebanon in 2006 into a
broader comparative context, in Ch.8 of this short work, the
comparisons he draws are with those two US campaigns and with the US’s
earlier SFO-based campaign in Kosovo, in 1999…

Continue reading “Boys with (very lethal) toys: What are these ‘toys’ good for?”