Category: Antiwar (vintage)

Good editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today.
The title is: Iraq Occupation: This war can’t be won.
Go down to the bottom of the editorial and check out the little poll they have there. When I participated, it told me that 65.8% of respondents had voted for immediate US withdrawal…

The withdraw-from-Iraq movement is slowly gathering strength in the US Congress.
I’ve been away from most news sources for most of the past week, so I don’t know how much publicity has been given to the fact that on Wednesday evening 128 members of the House of Representatives voted for an amendment stating:

“It is the sense of Congress that the president should

The rules of engagement at US checkpoints in Iraq are an outrage to humanity. We all need to demand to know, first and foremost, what they are. This is essential for the wellbeing of the many millions of people who live in the vicinity of these checkpoints and have to pass through them as they conduct their daily business. Yet the Bush administration has thus far steadfastly refused to announce publicly what the ROEs at checkpoints are.
They claim that this will endanger security. I don’t see it. If the rule is: When you see a checkpoint or someone clearly signaling you to stop, you must stop your car, get out of it, and walk 30 feet away, or whatever, everyone involved–checkpoint soldiers and checkpoint passers alike– will know what the rules are, and the nervousness of evenryone involved and possibilities for lethal misunderstandings will be mightily diminished.
Instead of which, the ROE at many checkpoints seems to be, “Shoot first, and then if anyone later challenges your action, lie.”
Certainly, that seems to have been the ROE used by the checkpoint soldiers who killed Nicola Calipari and nearly killed Giuliana Sgrena.
Except that in that case, the soldiers’ ability to sustain their account under later questioning has already been strongly challenged by the Italian government, who base their view of what happened at that fatal checkpoint last Friday on the report of the Italian intelligence agent who was driving the car in question.
It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of the “full investigation” into the incident now promised by the Pentagon.
At a broader level, though, it is ways past time to have stable, predictable ROEs used by all personnel staffing checkpoints. “First shoot, then lie” isn’t really a good way to build longterm stability.

I only just got the chance to read the excellent speech that Senator Kennedy gave last night, on Iraq. It was well argued and well framed.
Much of the press commentary focused on the fact that this was the first time a U.S. Senator called clearly for a US withdrawal from Iraq. But the way he framed his argument was more nuanced, and better grounded, than that:

The beginning of wisdom in this crisis is to define honest and realistic goals.
First, the goal of our military presence should be to allow the creation of a legitimate, functioning Iraqi government, not to dictate it.
Creating a full-fledged democracy won

So this morning, Juan Cole replied to my post of Thursday, in which I challenged the grounds he’d adduced for arguing against the announcement of a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
His first counter-argument was this:

She can’t understand why I think things could get worse if the US withdrew precipitously. I can’t understand why it would be hard to understand. The Baathists would begin by killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, then Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then Ibrahim Jaafari, and so on down the list of the new political class. Then they would make a coup. Once they had control of Iraq’s revenues, they could buy tanks and helicopter gunships in the world weapons bazaar and deploy them again against the Shiites. They might not be able to hang on very long, but it is doubtful if the country would survive all this intact. The Badr Corps could not stop this scenario, or it would have stopped all the assassinations lately of Shiite notables in the South, including two of Sistani’s aides.

I guess the unspoken premise there was that he thinks it is solely the US military presence in Iraq that is preventing this dreadful scenario from taking place? Juan adduces no evidence whatsoever for such a proposition. Appropriately, because I don’t believe there is any.
But if that proposition isn’t true, then Juan’s argument that the US military presence has helped and is necessary in order to continue to help to preserve the security of these Shiite leaders has no basis at all.
He is, however, willing to admit that,

The failures of the Fallujah campaign made it amply clear that the US armed forces are unlikely to make headway against the guerrilla insurgency, and in the meantime are just making hundreds of thousands of Iraqis more angry.

Yes, indeed. So it’s hard to see how the US presence is actually contributing to the sense of security of the majority Shiite population in the country. Indeed, in recent days, tragically, we’ve seen yet more truly heinous attacks launched against Shiites in and near their places of worship… Including one in which the assailants had packed an ambulance with explosives.
I honestly don’t believe that any Shiite community leaders inside Iraq feel that the Americans’ presence there gives them any sense of security at all. (Except perhaps Iyad Allawai… But it’s probably stretching it too much to call him a “Shiite community leader”.)
Juan also writes, conveying somewhat of a sense of being privy to important insider information:

Continue reading “Juan Cole’s defense”

Go read Riverbend’s latest post to understand what war and civic instability end up meaning for real people and families.
Her reflections on how ghastly it is for people in heavily urbanized communities to live without piped water ring home very true for me. On several occasions when I was living, working, and trying to manage a household with young children in it during the civil war in Lebanon in the late 1970s, the city water supply would be cut off. Usually, because the electricity supply was cut so the city’s water pumps weren’t pumping.
Luckily, our big building of some 50 apartments did have a well in it. When the electricity was cut and our seventh-floor apartment’s roof-level water-tanks had run dry we’d have to take jerry-cans down to the (minus-2) level of the basement; fill them; then haul them up to our home’s level… For every single drop that we used.
Think about it, all you people who live in places with generally uninterrupted water supply.
Want to wash your hands? Cook pasta? Flush the toilet? Wash some plates and cups?
Think about it VERY HARD. Because each one of those drops of water has to be hauled up 9 flights of stairs.
Don’t even think about showering or washing clothes. A quick wipe with a washcloth round the underarms and other stinky body parts might be possible; or rinsing out some item of clothing that’s absolutely necessary to wear. But all those drops of water should definitely be recycled once or twice more within the apartment before you let them go. (Last stop for all pre-used, “grey” water: flushing out the toilets.)
It seems that in Riverbend’s home they don’t have access to a well. But people there with the wherewithal can buy bottled water. So roughly similar limits on total usage would apply. (And then, what about the huge number of people without the cash to buy bottled water on the “open market”?)
What I learned in Lebanon was that, for urbanized people living through a civil war, it’s “relatively” easy to find go-arounds to deal with a lack of electricity.. You can find gas lanterns, kerosene heaters, camping stoves, burn charcoal, etc. (Oops, maybe no kerosene in Iraq today.)
But water? That’s absolutely impossible to do without; and a severe shortage of water affects your quality of life far more than a similarly severe shortage of electricity.
Riverbend’s conclusion rings quite true for me:

We’ve given up on democracy, security and even electricity. Just bring back the water.

I should add, of course, that the degraded hygiene conditions brought about by denied access to clean water also, in many cases, leads to the otherwise quite avoidable deaths of infants and other vulnerable individuals from disease.
That’s right: in addition to making you feel absolutely miserable, a lack of access to water kills people.
And Allawi’s hoping to “win” this election?? I don’t think so.

One essential tenet of “news management”, US government-style, is that the administration tries to release news that makes it look bad fairly late on a Friday evening…
So tonight, this, from Reuters:

The White House has scrapped its list of Iraq allies known as the 45-member “coalition of the willing,” which Washington used to back its argument that the 2003 invasion was a multilateral action, an official said on Friday.
The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the White House replaced the coalition list with a smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq sometime after the June transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.
The official could not say when or why the administration did away with the list of the coalition of the willing.
The coalition, unveiled on the eve of the invasion, consisted of 30 countries that publicly offered support for the United States and another 15 that did not want to be named as part of the group.
Former coalition member Costa Rica withdrew last September under pressure from voters who opposed the government’s decision to back the invasion.
On Friday, an organization from Iceland published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times calling for its country’s withdrawal from the coalition and offering apologies for its support for U.S. policy.

I guess at one level I’m surprised that anyone even thought there still was a “coalition of the willing” any more– or rather, that the concept still had enough credibility that anyone cared about it at all.
But this new “smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq” doesn’t seem to have a name yet.
Any suggestions?

Last Friday I wrote
a post
here about the remarkable study that two Croatian psychology professors
conducted into what happened to cross-ethnic personal friendships in Vukovar
under the pressure of war, violence, and mounting inter-group polarization.

I meant to mention there, once again, two extraordinary memoirs of life during
civil wars that came out in the early 1990s. One was
Beirut Fragments, by Palestinian writer Jean Said Makdisi, and the other
The Balkan Express, by Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic. Both these authors are female,
and parents, and really gifted at conveying the terrible tensions and strains
involved in trying to keep oneself sane and one’s family intact, during the
horrors and social and infrastructural breakdown that wars inflict on civilian
societies.

War from the point of view of “targets”, or “consumers”, you might rightly
say.

As opposed to, “war from the point of view of the armchair generals, or plucky
young (male) officers”, which is how people who’ve never actually experienced
war inside their own societies generally get to “learn” about it.

If you want to read a review article I wrote about these two books, ways back in 1993, you can find it
here. Here’s how it starts:

Continue reading “War’s effects on communities (contd.)”

It’s a public holiday here today in the United States: the official “birthday” of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the great civil
rights leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was assassinated in 1968.

If Dr. King had not been killed, he would have turned 85 on January 15.

Throughout the mid-1980s, I remember my two elder kids, who attended a public
elementary school in Washington, DC, would every year, just before the holiday,
start bringing home worksheets with an image of Dr King to color. And
endlessly, they would study Dr. King’s most famous oration: the
“I have a dream”
speech that he delivered from the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

If you’ve never read the whole text, it’s definitely worth doing so. Near
the end, he mounts to a rhetorical crescendo with this theme:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live
out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal.”

… I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
their character.

I have a dream…

I’m not quite sure what President Bush is planning to do today to mark Dr. King’s birthday. What I’d like him to do is take out a tape-player and listen very carefully indeed to another of Dr. King’s great
orations: the sermon
titled variously
“Beyond Vietnam– A Time to Break the Silence”
, or more simply, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam”. This one was delivered
in April 1967, at a meeting at Riverside Church in New York City.

Through that link there, you can apparently even download an MP3 audio version
of the sermon. It is certainly worth listening to. Dr. King was great and powerful preacher. But if you can’t read or listen to the whole of the sermon, at least spend
a little time pondering two portions of it.

The first is his response to those working alongside him in the civil rights
movement who argued that coming out openly against the war in Vietnam could
well divert the national focus from the civil rights struggle and harm that
struggle in other ways as well. His response was this:

Continue reading “Martin Luther King, Jr., on war”

Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in the war and who left a comment on the Comments board here recently, just sent me the following letter:

Dear Friends,
Everyday there are fresh lies and fresh confirmation of the lies coming out of DC…I can tell you it is so hurtful to us families that more people aren’t standing up to bring our children home from the lie and quaqmire that is Iraq…I feel like I should have a daily column called: Who lied today?
Bush told us that Iraq had WMD’S and they were getting ready to use them on us at any minute. Condi Rice told us that we should attack Iraq immediately…and don’t let the “smoking gun” be a “mushroom cloud.” Rumsfeld and Powell showed us where the weapons were buried…Guess what? THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANY WMD’S AND THEY WEREN’T GOING TO HAVE THEM FOR AT LEAST A DECADE. The United States was in no threat from Iraq…and Osama Bin Laden is free to plot against our troops in Iraq and against the innocent Iraqi people and Al Qaeda grows stronger every day because of our Administration’s reckless, ignorant, and arrogant policies in Iraq.
Would it have hurt the Bushies and the rest of the war mongerers to wait a few months to confirm that Iraq HAD NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION before they pre-emptiviely attacked, invaded, and occupied a country that posed no credible threat to the USA? Would Casey, 1358 other brave Americans and thousands and thousands of Iraqis still be alive?…I think so and that is another stab in my heart and in my back.
Please write to your Congress Person and your Senators to stand up and do what is right…Barbara Boxer did it for the Ohio debacle….yes it is important that we have transparent and credible elections…BUT IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO BRING OUR TROOPS HOME FROM THIS NEEDLESS WAR. It is so important to support our troops by getting them the hell out of there….let Iraqis rebuild their own country…with money and supplies that we give them…bring the war profiteers home too and let the Iraqis have their jobs back.
Contacting the Congress
Love and Peace
Cindy