BOSTON REVIEW: The paper copy of the latest (Feb/March) issue of BR dropped into my mailbox today. Hey, there’s still something special about hard copy– like the way you can mark it up with a real red pen or read it in the bathroom. Anyway, this one is a Special issue on the theme of “War and Democracy”.
Okay yes, I draw it to your attention because there’s a piece by me in it: a fairly long piece of reporting about my December trip to Damascus, and some info about the imprisonment of my Syrian friend and colleague Ibrahim Hamidi.
But in addition, there’s a lot more good stuff, including a piece by John Dower, an excellent, wise historian of modern Japan. Dower directly takes on the arguments heard from some members of the current pro-war crowd, to the effect that “General” Rumsfeld’s war can end up having the same salutary effects for Iraqis as the post-WW2 occupation of Japan had for the Japanese.
(Talking of Rummy, where’s Cheney these days? Back to the secure location?)
Anyway, Dower’s warning for the gung-ho crowd is dire. “The lessons we can draw from the occupation of Japan all become warnings where Iraq is concerned,” he writes, noting the many, many differences between the two cases.
Well, obviously you should read it. (And mine! And mine!)
Trouble is, BR don’t seem to have updated their website yet. So maybe wait a couple of days. Either that, or call ’em and start subscribing to the paper edition…
Someone else who should maybe read Dower’s piece is Rend Rahim Francke, the longtime head of the DC-based Iraq Foundation. January 13, the Washington Post ran an interesting, human-interest-y story by former Middle East reporter Caryle Murphy, who had trailed around Greater DC’s Iraqi-opposition community with her notebook at the ready.
One of her interviewees was Francke, who joked that she would be “on the first U.S. tank” going into Baghdad. Francke confessed to Murphy that she had recently picked up a book at Second Story bookstore about the history of the U.S. occupation of Japan, to learn as much as she could from it.
Maybe that was one of Dower’s excellent books on the subject? Maybe she should talk to Dower as well?
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Also significant in Murphy’s piece was her report that, “Of more than a dozen Iraqi [exiles] recently interviewed, none said they plan to permanently return to Iraq if Hussein is removed.”
And yet, these people are taken seriously as they sit around in their comfy georgetown exile making plans for how Iraq will be governed in the future? Does something smell funny here?
Even Francke told Murphy that she planned to establish only part-time residence in Baghdad after she’d gotten there on her tank.
Category: US foreign policy
Burden of Proof
I guess it’s Sunday in Japan already… Sun quite high in the sky already over that magnificent semicircle of hills that surrounds Hiroshima…
So Ramesh Thakur, a wise Indian scholar who’s the vice-rector of the U.N. University, headquartered in Japan, has a piece in Sunday’s Japan Times that’s worth reading. “Time was when those threatening to go to war had to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt,” he writes. “Today we are asked to prove to the powerful, to their satisfaction, why they should not go to war… There is a sense of helpless anger about hurtling toward a war no one wants. In Canada, Europe and Asia, the depth of alienation from U.S. policy on Iraq is quite striking. In India, people dub it ‘dadagiri’: bullying by the neighborhood tough in a global neighborhood.”
I get so much great email from around the world. What an incredible thing. (And by the way, thanks, Ramesh, for sending me that piece.)
Couple of weeks ago, I got a couple of emails from a Kenyan Quaker pastor called Malesi Kinaro . One of them expressed his real excitement at the results of his country’s mid-January elections. The next one had more about President Bush’s almost unstoppable push toward war against Iraq.
“As I have listened to these tough pro war utterances by Bush I have felt a deep sadness,” Pastor Malesi wrote.
He also wrote about a young woman called Doreen Mayaka, whom his family helped to finish raising after her mother died in the Qaeda bomb attack against the U.S. Embassy (and surrounding buildings) in Nairobi, back in 1998. Doreen was 18 when her mother died, and Pastor Malesi let her write some of her own feelings into his email. Here’s what she said about Bush’s war plans:
“The war between American and Iraq is really scaring me because of the implications it will have on innocent human beings. I refer to my own experience of angered revenge by terrorists toward Americans that left us without our mother who worked for the American Embassy during the 1998 Nairobi Bomb. She was the sole breadwinner of our family. Life without her has been very traumatizing to my brother two sisters and me. Being the first born, I had to immediately take up the role of a mother without any preparations or anything. My sister Debra was only four when our mother died. She never had a chance to know what having a mother means… When I can’t take it any more, the pain of her death becomes too heavy to bear and I always wonder if we really deserved this.
“I don’t understand why innocent Kenyans had to die! Especially my mother who had nothing at all to do with Americans apart from the work she had been given. When it finally hit the Americans, they were now able to understand what we in Africa
had experienced and decided to take action, but their move this round is dangerous. Does it not mean anything to Bush when innocent human beings die? Do we want more deaths when we can choose a different path to get the same needed results? Do we need to prove to the world that we can hit harder than the terrorist or is it better to seek peace and pursue it?
“Yes the terrorists killed my mother and I have forgiven them. I can never be any better if I revenge by involving myself in violence with them… I strongly believe President Bush can [better] seek peace and bring reconciliation than revenge, which will cost more innocent lives.”
So if you’re reading this on a Sunday, give a thought or a prayer to Doreen and everyone else who’s had to struggle with losing a family member to political violence. Come to that, you don’t even have to wait till Sunday…
And then, give a thought to how it is that though a vast majority of people around the world– people like Doreen, Pastor Malesi, Ramesh, or literally billions more like them–are strongly opposed to this war, somehow Prez Bush thinks it’s going to be good for humanity???
U.S. encourages other nations to act on ‘self-defense’ claim
I’ve been thinking more about whether the pitch Powell was trying to make Feb. 5 at the U.N. was aimed more at a domestic or an international audience. Yesterday evening (Feb. 7) I focused in this ‘JustWorld’ blog on the point when Powell was trying to establish a link– through this shadowy Kurdish-Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam– between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. And I said that argument seemed to be pitched much more to the US public than to “mere furrners”.
Then I thought more about something my friends Ralph and Corky Bryant and I talked about on the phone yesterday. Establishing that link between Saddam and Qaeda could also be useful, one or other of the Bryants mentioned, to help the U.S. justify to other governments any decision the Prez might make to go to war alone– or at any rate, in a “coalition of the willing” that might NOT receive a Security Council sanction to go to war.
That’s because so far the U.S. is still a member-in-good-standing of the U.N. And clearly, Powell, good amigo Tony Blair and other people with influence on the Prez think it would be best to keep things that way.
But the U.N.– can you believe this??– doesn’t really like it when individual states or groups of states go around the world gratuitously knocking off governments or government heads whom they don’t like. I mean, how fuddy-duddy can you get? Why don’t they just get with the program of U.S. righteousness and invincibility for gosh-sakes???
But here, in the U.N. Charter we find a possible way to try to square this circle. Article 51 of the Charter spells out that, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations..” Well, it might seem a stretch to describe the threatened U.S. assault against Iraq as constituting an act of American “self-defense” responding to what Article 51 seems clearly to imply should have been a prior armed attack against the U.S. (Quite sensibly the U.N. Charter makes no allowance anywhere for pre-emptive attacks.)
So maybe Powell was trying, with his claims about the Qaeda-Saddam link, to lay the basis for future Article 51 claim to other nations– in the event that he fails to get a specific force-enabling resolution through the Security Council? But I’m sure he was also looking to bring onto the war-wagon as many members as possible of the 9/11-scarred American public.
Like Peres, Like Powell?
Colin Powell’s big oral presentation Feb 5 was aimed mostly at other governments– right? Well, put it this way, not wholly right. In fact, a large part of the speech was, by common consent, aimed much more at the US public than at people or governments elsewhere. That was the portion of the speech where he was attempting to establish a link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda. Scarier still: he argued there’s a link between Saddam’s regime and Qaedaterrorists who are gaining access to biological and chemical weapons…
Very scary stuff for Americans still reeling from the shocks of September 11. But the links Powell talked about, between Saddam and al-Qaeda are not, it turns out, well established by the facts of the matter.
Powell’s case hinged centrally on the alleged links between Saddam’s regime and a predominantly Kurdish Islamic-extremist group called Ansar al-Islam that is based in northern Iraq. (It’s also called “the Zarkawi network”.) “Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Massad Al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants,” Powell claimed in his speech to the U.N. He went on to explain that after Qaeda and the Taliban had been routed from Afghanistan, the Zarqawi network–which had previously been running advanced chemical-weapons research and production facilities in Afghanistan, “helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp, and this camp is located in northeastern Iraq. You see a picture of this camp. [shows one of his indecipherable pictures.] The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons. Let me remind you how ricin works. Less than a pinch — imagine a pinch of salt — less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, would cause shock, followed by circulatory failure. Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote. There is no cure. It is fatal…”
Are you scared yet? You’re supposed to be… But here across my electronic transom today comes a report from the International Crisis Group, a sober research-and-analysis outfit run by a former Foreign Minister of Australia and a former President of Finland. The ICG has some analysts on Iraqi affairs who are world-class: objective and well-informed. Their conclusion about “Ansar al-Islam”? “Little is certain about the external connections of Ansar al-Islam, an offshoot of an Islamist movement with a long history in Kurdish politics,” the report writes. “What is clear is that the main support for Ansar al-Islam comes from powerful factions in Iran, its sole lifeline to the outside world.”
Iran? Howzzat again?
In the press release that accompanied publication of the report, ICG Middle East Program Director Robert Malley said of the enclave in northern Iraq where the Ansar al-Islam are holed up: “This is a region outside Baghdad’s control and we see no evidence that Ansar has a strategic alliance with Saddam Hussein. There is no question that the group has brought misery to many people in the area it controls, but it is highly unlikely that Ansar al-Islam is anything more than a minor irritant in local Kurdish politics”.
And this is the “evidence” that links Saddam to Qaeda?
The ICG report is called, “Radical Islam In Iraqi Kurdistan: The Mouse That Roared?” Go read it.
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I note, parenthetically, that one of the strongest and most persistent proponents of the Saddam-Ansar-Qaeda link has been our old friend Bill Safire.
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This kind of “tapping into the general fear regardless of what actually caused it” routine reminds me of what Shimon Peres’ government did in Israel in early 1996. Back then, Israeli voters were– quite understandably– fearful, angry, and traumatized because Palestinian terrorists had set off a string of very damaging attacks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Some 60-plus Israelis had been killed. Peres was going into an election. He evidently felt he “had to do something!” So he hit back– against the poor longsuffering people of south Lebanon who had suffered many, many tough assaults at Israel’s hands since 1978.
Yes, I know there have been so many Israeli attacks against south Lebanon over the years. Peres’s heroic campaign was the one called “Operation Grapes of Wrath”. The operation’s game plan as articulated by Israeli military leaders involved uprooting as much as possible of the civilian population of south Lebanon, herding them north to Beirut, in the hope that once there they would put pressure on the Lebanese government to start acting against the Hizbollah guerrillas who had been mounting an increasingly effective resistance to Israel’s presence in south Lebanon in the preceding years. (And if such deliberate use of civilian suffering to force political goals is not also terrorism, I’d like to know what it is.)
The operation backfired badly. Because of the sheer density of Israeli bombs dropped it was not surprising that some ended up hitting a U.N.-protected gathering point for civilians in Kafr Qana. More than 120 civilians were obliterated, wiped out, killed. Oh what an embarrassment for Peres. The Lebanese people united around the slogan of rapid Israeli withdrawal– and Hizbollah were more popular than ever before. (Note to Rumsfeld et al: that’s what military overkill does for you, friend.)
And the darnedest thing for Peres, too. He didn’t even get re-elected that time! (He has never actually won an Israeli election.) Funny thing about those Israeli-Arab voters: they didn’t feel like going to the polls to support Peres that time, but stayed home in droves instead How irrational can you get?
Sic tempera, sic mores, I would say (and it’s a pity my Dad’s not around to check the Latin). Anyway, couple of years later, I go to Israel, meet Peres in his elegant office in the Shalom Center in tel Aviv– main form of decoration: pictures of you-know-who doing various things, or awards given to you-know-who. He graciously agreed to answer the questions I had on the research I was doing about the Israeli-Syrian negotiations that had run from 1991 through 1996. (Read the book that I wrote about that. It’s pretty darn’ interesting.) Obviously, His April 1996 campaign against Lebanon played into that…
“So tell me, Mr Peres,” I say, trying desperately to keep my eyes from lingering too long on his startlingly purple-dyed hair, “–can you tell me exactly why it was that you decided you needed to move so hard against Lebanon’s Hizbollah at that time?”
“Terror in the south, terror in the north!” was the best explanation he could come up with at the time. I assume he thought I was quite unaware of the fact that Lebanese Hizbollah and the Palestinian groups that had masterminded the suicide bombs were quite separate organizations, and that I would simply take at face value his “explanation” that if one bunch of folks hits you, then the general sense of outrage you feel because of that makes it quite okay– nay, perhaps even necessary— to go out and get your revenge against a totally distinct third party.
And now, this seems to be Colin Powell’s argumentation. O tempora, o mores.
Powell’s Poor U.N. Presentation
I listened to Colin Powell’s presentation at the U.N. yesterday, read the text carefully. I was sad for so many reasons. Let me count the ways:
(1) Sad to see this good person beating the drums of war.
(2) Sad to think of the war that his presentation–and his having agreed to play this role– has brought us that much closer to.
(3) Sad, actually, to read the content and see how thin and tenuous his case was. It seemed like an insult to the intelligence of listeners– especially, the recycling of the tired old ‘aluminum tubes’ business. Mohamed el-Baradei laid that one to rest a while ago, saying the tubes in question actually could not be helpfully used for nuclear fuel production. So why did Powell drag that one in?? It seems like an insult to Baradei and the rest of us.
Look, I know better than many other people how terribly Saddam has behaved in the past– and most likely, he’s still behaving that way. But if containment worked for Joe Stalin, why on earth would we imagine it can’t work for this regime, whose raw power is a thousand times smaller than Stalin’s??
Feb 4th, I went to see ‘Bowling for Columbine’. (Okay, I was late getting around to it.) But it was good to see it the night before Powell’s speech. I think Mike Moore got it just about right. There’s a huge industry out there dedicated to whipping up the fearfulness of Americans; and that keeps U.S. citizens opting for huge military expenditures, tough police and incarceration, etc– at the expense of the basic social programs which would make our community healthier and safer.