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It’s my birthday. I’m 53. Thanks to the excellent medical care that I’ve had access to throughout my life, I’ve survived the birthing and raising of three children, all of whom are now fine adults whom I admire and love tremendously. I had a great education (not least, because it was one that taught me that continuing to educate onself and stay open to new insights from all kinds of quarters is a continuing responsibility.) I survived six years of living in a war zone– something that involved a lot of luck as well as some local smarts– and have ended up as someone with a voice in the global discourse.
I have a wonderfully supportive spouse; am part of a very supportive and enriching faith community, the Charlottesville Friends Meeting; live in a peaceable and intellectually stimulating town here; have easy access to the internet and to great libraries; and can get together with my kids very easily.
I am so blessed. Very few female people in history– or even today– have the advantages that I’ve been given. Yet every person on the planet deserves to have them!
… For a long time in my youth there, I chafed hard against my father, James Cobban, who had to try to raise my three elder sisters and me on his own after our mother died when I was eight. (Later, his sister, my Aunty Katy, came to help finish the job. I was pretty wild and alienated by then and no doubt tried her sorely.) Later, though, I came to realize that I’d inherited from JM a distinct concern for social justice; it was just that each of us just manifested this concern in different ways. Yes, I still remember when I was 14 or so, him coming home with a little booklet titled, “Why not apartheid?”
Basically, though, he was concerned about social justice issues. He just thought about them in ways different than I did. I’m so glad he lived long enough that, after I’d reached my late thirties, we started to build a really close relationship. We still disagreed on many things, but not nearly as much as before; and anyway, we’d found ways to talk about our disagreements. (He died in 1999.)
From him, I think I also inherited– in the osmotic way that such things can be inherited– a strong sense of social obligation… So if I’m 53 today, I can probably hope for another 35 years or so of strong social activism. We have several very inspiring people in our Quaker meeting and elsehwere in our community here who are strong social activists well into their eighties.
I guess I’m feeling a little unclear, today, on what direction this future activism should or will take. Maybe it would even go via a more quietist period, if I need to go deeper into myself and do some introspection? I don’t know. Anyway, being part of a good Quaker community gives me lots of resources to find out how to go forward. I can simply pray/reflect/ ponder on the question on my own. (Or perhaps, in Buddhist style, work harder at not pondering on it?) I can listen more closely for the leadings of the spirit. Or I can ask the folks in the Meeting to form a clearness committee to help me in my discernment.
In the end, though, knowing I have all these resources available for discernment makes the uncertainty I’m in right now much easier to bear. So instead of spending today sitting around angst-ridden and uncertain I can spend it giving true appreciation to my blessings. Plus, it’s a beautiful day. This afternoon I’ll go for a run along my usual route, checking out how the amazing fall colors of the trees along the route have all developed during the five days I was in New York. There will be normal, non-war things happening all along the way, and I as a woman will be quite safe running along the sidewalks on my own. Later, Bill the spouse and Tarek the son will be taking me out to dinner at one of our favorite local eateries…
Meantime, I actually have a ton of other stuff to blog about today, so maybe that should be my birthday treat to myself. To work, Helena!

It’s pretty amazing to sit here in the US watching the administration drumming up an anti-murder, pro-good governance campaign against Syrian President Bashar al-Asad on the very same day– yesterday– on which (a) Tom DeLay got indicted, and (b) the big speculation is how long before Karl Rove gets indicted in the Valerie Plame case…
The NYT’s John Kifner and Warren Hoge got an apparent “scoop” by reporting that an unnamed “diplomat” in New York told them, regarding the UN’s Mehlis investigation into last February’s killing of Rafiq Hariri, that,

the investigators were focusing on Syria’s military intelligence chief, Asef Shawkat, the president’s brother-in-law.
“Their main lead is that he is the ringleader,” the diplomat said. “This is where it is heading.”
… He spoke on condition of anonymity because of what he described as the extreme sensitivity of the matter.
… The diplomat, describing Syria as a “country run by a little family clique,” said the involvement of any one in Mr. Assad’s inner circle would be a severe blow to the government.
“There is absolutely no doubt, it goes right to the top,” he said. “This is Murder Inc.”

H’mm. I wonder who this “diplomat” is, or whose instructions he may have been acting on in holding this conversation with the NYT reporters. The name “John Bolton” springs to mind…
Okay, maybe some readers here would say that there is gross disproportionality between the kinds of actions that are at stake in these three “cases”. The Detlev Mehlis investigation in Lebanon and Syria, after all, involved the wilfull murder of Hariri, and reckless disregard for the safety of scores of people in the area around him, some 20 of whom were killed. The Tom DeLay indictment has (until now) involved “only” some large political kickbacks and improper administration of fincancial affairs; and the Plame investigation involves “only” the revelation of the CIA links of one Washington-area professional woman…
Well, yes. Except that we know that the Plame investigation involves a whole lot more than that one apparent incidence of illegal information handling by a high administration official. In a real sense, because the Republican-controlled Congress has been totally unwilling to go back and re-examine the fallacious claims on the basis of which President Bush jerked the country into this terrible war, this special prosecutor’s investigation into just one tiny part of that story– the ex-post-facto intimidation of Amb. Joseph Wilson– has come to serve (for now) as a substitute for the broader investigation that the country certainly needs.
The death toll from the administration’s fallacious claims about Saddam’s alleged “WMDs” now stands at nearly 2,000 US servicemen killed, and scores of thousands of Iraqis dead.
So yes, there is disproportionality among these acts. The killing of Hariri led to some 16-20 deaths on that day– and then, through a twist of history, to the very welcome liberation of Lebanon from the heavy hand of Damascus… The Bush administration’s fabrication and twisting of the evidence about Iraqi WMDs (including the whole fallacious “yellow cake” story) has led to hundreds of times as many deaths, and the plunging of much of Iraq into prolonged civil strife.
Meanwhile, key top officials in each of these capitals– tiny Damascus and that lumbering great elephant of a place, Washington DC– are nervously watching to see how close to them the investigators will reach…

Zbigniew Brzezinski , writing in the Int’l Herald Tribune yesterday:

during the last four years, the Bush team has thus been dangerously undercutting America’s seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle.
To be sure, since America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, yet for a while, even a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise a constructive global influence.
Flaying away with a stick at a hornets’ nest while loudly proclaiming “I will stay the course” is an exercise in catastrophic leadership.
But it need not be so. A real course correction is still possible, and it could start soon with a modest and common-sense initiative by the president to engage the Democratic congressional leadership in a serious effort to shape a bipartisan foreign policy for an increasingly divided and troubled nation.
In a bipartisan setting, it would be easier not only to scale down the definition of success in Iraq but actually to get out – perhaps even as early as next year. And the sooner the United States leaves, the sooner the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail.
With a foreign policy based on bipartisanship and with Iraq behind us, it would also be easier to shape a wider regional policy that constructively focuses on Iran and on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while restoring the legitimacy of America’s global role.

Well, I’m not so happy about the possibility of just some of the domestic Iraqi groups “forcibly prevailing” over the others after a US withdrawal. (But remember the scale and lethality of the attempts to “forcibly prevail” that are being pursued in the country right now…) Otherwise, though, well said. I just wonder how many people in the Democratic Party leadership are listening.

Many commentators are writing about the process involved in the present Iraq draft constitution being one of “federalizing democratization” or “democratizing federalism”. It is no such thing. To federate means “to come together for joint action”. It is what happens when functioning, pre-existing states come together in a strong way, pooling many aspects of their soveriegnty into a broader, federated union… Like the 13 US states, in 1787, after they found that their previous “articles of confederation” were too weak. Or the “United Arab Emirates”: 7 small existing states that came together in the early 1970s to pool their respective capabilities.
What the present draft constitution proposes for Iraq is the exact opposite. It is the breakup of many key attributes of Iraqi soveriegnty and their division among a still unknown number of smaller, new sub-entities. It is incorrect to call this process “federation”; it is more rightly called devolution.
What the present draft constitution proposes for Iraq is a breakup very similar to what happened with the breakup of Bosnia into ethnically distinct sub-entities, or the partition of India into India and Pakistan, or the still-continuing breakup of the previous “Soviet Russian Federation”, including in Chechnya.
When initiated by democratic governments that enjoy real political legitimacy– Britain recently, or Spain in the years after democratization– devolution can enhance democratic participation and accountability at many levels. But when initiated under less ideal political circumstances, this breaking-up process can lead to fierce contestation over the newly-drawn internal borders and access to resources, mounting fear and mistrust, and a desire for ethnic-religious homogeneity within the various zones that can can all too easily lead to widespread or even near-complete campaigns of ethnic or sectarian “cleansing”.
The cycle(s) of violence that are launched may take many decades to lose their ferocity.
(By the way, I took the title of this post from a good novel by Bapsi Sidhwa about the pain of the Indian partition: Cracking India.)
And guess what? It is not only Iraq that’s on the neo-con’s menu for “cracking”… Now, some of the cracked-headed among them want to try the same formula in Iran, too…
Well, that’s what Michael Ledeen, the sleazy author of the Iran-Contra scandal and various other ignominious and illegal escapades, is now proposing. On October 26, Ledeen is moderating a conference on the topic at the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-con powerhouse where he’s hung his hat for several years now. The conference is titled The Unknown Iran: Another Case for Federalism? and it involves a roster of apparently exile-Iranian scholars of whom nobody I know ever seems to have heard. (Any further info on those individuals from JWN readers gratefully received.)
Well, there you have it. Occupation-encouraged “cracking” is evidently working so well in Iraq these days (irony alert, folks)– why not tempt Iranians into trying it in their country, too?

Yesterday, Le Monde diplo put an item about the NTFU story up on its website, in its “Valise diplomatique”, here.
It’s a short piece, concluding with this:

This information [about NTFU], revealed by the Italian media, was picked up in the United States but had few repurcussions in France. So what are the investigative journalists doing, huh?
Check out the debate by going to the blog of Helena Cobban, an American researcher… [then a link to this August JWN post.]

I was just checking my site-usage logs, which tell me that the link has already sent some hundreds of Le Monde readers over here.
Alors, soyez bienvenues, les nouveaux lecteurs francophones.

Being an ‘international’ in Geneva is like being an ‘international’ in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. (But a lot more comfortable.) It is to have that same sense of existing in a dual– local/international– universe. The two aspects of Geneva are even bilingual in the same way as Kigali: French and English, though to be honest there are plenty of Rwandais who don’t speak French at all. In both cities, a strong core of UN agencies is surrounded by a constellation of international NGOs. But there, perhaps, my analogizing should stop.
I wish more people from the US heartland– even, from the US Congress– could travel to Geneva and see the many global functions being fulfilled by the various UN agencies headquartered here…

Continue reading “Geneva, sundry items”

Hi. I’m in Geneva on what looks like a poor internet connection. I came here through London and rode the trains between Gatwick and London City airports with huge pleasure. There is something so civilized about trains– about a society that still has a commitment to public transport, in general.
Thank God the July bombers didn’t scare people from using the public transport system in London! The two trains plus one bus I was on all seemed well ridered. (Ok, maybe not a word. But it should be.)

More unregulated border crossings between Egypt and Gaza today…
Why shouldn’t Egypt, a sovereign nation, do what it chooses to along its border with Gaza where, on the other side of the line, the ruling authority (the PA) is likewise not constrained at all by any completed contractual agreement with Israel on these matters?
(Israel, we should note, having chosen not to negotiate the modalities of its withdrawal from Gaza with the PA.)
Egypt does have obligations under its 1979 peace treaty with Israel not to deploy certain forms of armed forces anywhere in eastern Sinai. But so far as I know it is under no contractual obligation whatsoever to prevent the free movement of persons or goods between Egyptian Sinai and Gaza.
Of course, Egypt was negotiating all kinds of things with Israel about the nature of the crossing-point between Sinai and Gaza. (EU monitors, etc.) But the Israelis wouldn’t ever sign off on a final agreement for that.
Interesting days ahead, inside Cairo, if Mubarak’s government now tries to do Israel’s bidding along that border?
Between 1948 and 1967– with the interruption of Israel’s aggressive but thankfully shortlived occupation of Gaza in 1956– Egypt was the dominant power in Gaza. The Nasser regime maintained there the same kind of tight “national-security state” it maintained throughout Egypt itself… In Gaza as in Egyptian Sinai, the main concern of Nasser’s regime was to prevent any unctrolled escalations (on the behalf of the Palestinians or the Muslim Brotherhood or whomever) that might drag Egypt into a military battle with Israel.
But for much of the time Egypt was the hegemon in Gaza, the economic situation there was relatively good. (At least, many Gazans remember it that way.) The Nasserists allowed the emergence of a Free Port area there which gave the Gazans many more economic options than most Egyptians had at the time.
One could surmise that the present-day calculations of the Egyptian security apparatus with regard to Gaza would be about the same as those of the Nasserists. But with these non-trivial differences:

(1) “People power”, in terms of an organized, community-based mass movement, is probably much better developed today among at least the Islamists in Gaza than it was in the Nasser era, which gives Gazans much more resilience than they had back then; and
(2) It looks much more problematic for Israel to “threaten” a punitive military attack against Egypt now than it did back in Nasser’s day… Especially because (a) there is no hint at all today of Egypt or anyone else mounting a military attack against Israel that could serve as a “pretext” for any large, justified Israeli military strike, and (b) Israel’s big ally and shield, the US, must surely be aware of the effect to be expected for the far-flung and very vulnerable US military deployments throughout the Middle East of any big new Israeli military escalation…

So, interesting days ahead. Maybe I made a wise choice to go to this year’s conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, due to start later this week in Geneva: one of the main featured topics there will indeed be… the Middle East. Lots to talk about.

In the Gaza Strip portion of occupied Palestine, today is the announced deadline for the evacuation of all the Israeli settlers who have enjoyed decades of extremely pampered (and quite illegal) residence there until now.
Lest we forget, these settlers are far from the first in modern times to be evicted from from a heavily government-subsidized existence when the government of the metropole decided that maintaining their colonial venture in a foreign land was no longer a good thing to do.
In 1962, a million French citizens who, as colons rooted in Algeria for many generations had considered that territory was just one other departement of Mother France, realized that Paris had changed its mind: Algeria was being summarily over to the FLN.
How much slaveringly attentive media coverage did the pieds noirs get from the rest of the world as they rushed back to France with often only the clothes on their backs?
In 1975, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese colonists in Angola and Mozambique learned in turn that Lisbon had changed its mind and would no longer subsidize and protect their colonies. Many fled to South Africa; others slunk back to Portugal, dazed and confused.
In those earlier cases– and scores of others around the world– the deeply racial order of things that had previously supported their exploitative colonial-settler lifestyle was brought to an end. Millions of (mainly European-origined) colonists from around the world found their previous dreams and expectations rudely cancelled or curtailed. That can be a difficult thing for anyone to come to terms with…
On the other hand, if the earlier dreams and expectations were based on the continuation of a deeply inegalitarian system and the actual maintenance of highly abusive military rule of “the Other”, then evidently they needed to be curtailed or cancelled… And the indigenous “Other” certainly needed to be given a chance to pursue her dreams on a quite egalitarian basis. That is, including the provision of a fair degree of reparations for the extensive damages of the past.
No discussion yet of such reparations in the case of Gaza’s Palestinians.
Lest we forget, meanwhile, the Israeli settlers departing Gaza are being given very generous compensation packages for giving up the subsidized lifestyle they have enjoyed for much of the past 38 years. (Paid for through the generosity with which the US Congress hands out my tax dollars to the Israelis, time after time after time.)
But despite all the evident inequities that continue between pampered Israel and the Palestinians… despite all that… at least Ariel Sharon and a huge chunk of the Israel center seem finally to have understood that a contraction of Israel’s former colonial order is a wise thing to do. But in the US meanwhile, there is still sadly little public recognition yet from the Bush administration or the mainstream of the US political elite that exactly the same is true regarding their former dreams of neocolonial domination in Iraq.
Grassroots sentiment inside the US body politic now does, thankfully, seem to be pushing increasingly harder for a speedy pullback from Iraq. But President Bush is still– publicly, at least– “standing tall”. He is “resolute”. He is “staying the course.” And so on.
That’s in public. In private, though, there are increasing signs that his administration is preparing to undertake a maneuver that none of us should be so insensitive as to call “cutting and running”…. Um, “reordering and rationalizing the US presence in Iraq” might be, perhaps, what we could call it.
In this important piece in yesterday’s WaPo, Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer– reporting from Washington and Baghdad, respectively– wrote:

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

Immediately, one tries to judge how high-up and therefore how well-informed about current cabinet-level thinking this anonymous “senior official” is. One first point: No-one that I can think who truly fits the description “senior official”– and who’s a civilian– only started his/her involvement in policy in 2003. There were no major turnovers of civilian policymakers at a high level that year, that I can remember. Therefore, we are most likely talking about one of the generals.
Interesting.
Later in the piece, Wright and Knickmeyer write:

“We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. “That process is being repeated all over.”

And later still, this:

Washington now does not expect to fully defeat the insurgency before departing, but instead to diminish it, officials and analysts said. There is also growing talk of turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqi forces even if they are not fully up to original U.S. expectations, in part because they have local legitimacy that U.S. troops often do not.
“We’ve said we won’t leave a day before it’s necessary. But necessary is the key word — necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us,” a U.S. official said.

Not clear if this is the same official as the first one quoted. Or maybe it’s the second one. But anyway, the picture that emerges is that rather quietly, behind the scenes, people actually involved in implementing the policy are starting to implement one involving considerable retrenchment and downsizing of goals… And– speaking always “off the record”– they are now starting to be ready to admit to this.
But how about the president, with his puffed-up little chest down there in Crawford, Texas? When will he be able to start leveling with the US citizenry, and to tell the worried parents of the US fighters in Iraq that the lives of their loved ones are now being put on the line there for a venture that, as is increasingly evident, has failed?
By the way, George Bush, if you want someone to help you write the speech in which you do this, in stirring rhetoric that reaches to the heart of our national principles, just give me a call…

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men [and women] are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Note, George, how this refers to all men [and women.] Not just to “US citizens” or any other subset of world humanity.
So yes! Now surely is the time to pull speedily out of Iraq– just as Israel is pulling out of Gaza– and to allow the Iraqis to exercize their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
(As for the Iraqi “Constitution”– deadline being today– you’ll note that I’m still steadfastly not writing about it. What a sad, sad, farce.)

Following the recent death of Fahd ibn Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud, there are now at least 18 other sons of Abdel-Aziz– or most likely, more– who potentially could be in line to the throne, after Abdullah ibn Abdel-Aziz, the new king. Miqrin, the youngest of these awlad (children of) Abdel-Aziz, is indeed in his fifties, and has many uncles who are patrilineal grandsons of Abdel-Aziz who are older (and most probably wiser) than him.
Many of those grandsons, including longtime Foreign Minister Prince Saud ibn Faisal ibn Abdel-Aziz, 64, could also plausibly think they have some claim to the throne at some point. And I’m sure Saud al-Faisal is by no means the oldest “prince” of his generation…
So when will the generational handover take place? Who knows?
To supplement what I wrote here last week, I offer you the following analysis of succession issues in Saudi Arabia, which comes from Michael Herb of Georgia (USA) State University, with his permission. Michael was doing a quick analysis of the Saudi Press Agency reports of the recent bay’a proceedings, in which everyone who’s anyone in (the male half of) Saudi society came forward to swear fealty to the new king:

Continue reading “Saudi succession”