US foreign policy – Page 5 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Daniel in the lions’ den

Charismatic British-Israeli peacenik Daniel Levy made a remarkable presentation this morning, at a big conference on US-Israeli relations organized by the extremely rightwing, pro-Israeli think-tank, the Hudson Institute.
Luckily Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress’s Wonk Room was there to video and verbally describe the highlights for the rest of us.
If you scroll down Matt’s blog post there to the 6-minute video you can enjoy not just Daniel’s great presentation but also the extreme discomfort of his fellow-panelists Doug Feith and the equally craven Bob Lieber. It is also kind of fun to see Daniel speaking his mind about the disaster of the current Israeli government’s policy while many iterations of the Hudson Institute’s logo are waving around behind his head.
Scroll down even further for the handily provided actual transcript of what he said.
Talk about Daniel in the den of lions, eh?
So okay, here is my big confession. I was actually at that same conference– until just before Daniel and Co. got to speak; but I had to duck out just before their panel started.
I was there, however, for the peroration made earlier by Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, who until recently worked under some degree of cover as a ‘neutral’ (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) US historian of the US’s Middle East policy.
The heart of what Oren had to say was a fuller, verbal elaboration of the theme he introduced in this recent article in The New Republic:

The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers

Oren is a sad, sad, and deeply wounded guy if he can even imagine such an accusation against Judge Goldstone.
That is why I am really glad that his sick ranting was followed, in short order, by the eminent good sense from Daniel Levy.
I wish Oren could have stuck around to hear Levy. But he, too, had to duck out. His driver nearly ran me down as I biked away from the Hudson Institute.

Obama wrong on the Olympics

As a US citizen, I have to say I think it is completely wrong for our president to use public resources to support the bid of his hometown, Chicago, to host the 2016 Olympics. He’s especially wrong to do this because, before he intervened, the main contender was Brazil.
The US has hosted the Olympics numerous times, including in recent years. South America has never hosted an Olympics. Brazil is a significant, upcoming country on the world scene. In recent years it has also pursued– and won– a significant case in the WTO’s arbitration system against the US government’s continued provision of subsidies to cotton farmers that have wiped out the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers in Brazil and other low-income countries.
Why on earth would Obama– who claims he wants to build better relations with the rest of the world– want to pit the prestige of the US presidency against Brazil on the Olympics issue? Why couldn’t he simply have let the decision take its course, or even, given a small boost to Brazil’s bid in some way?

Iran sanctions and– Jerusalem

As the Obama administration prepares for next Thursday’s important P5+1 meeting with Iran, the prospects for mounting a successful sanctions campaign against Iran are being seriously undermined by the actions of the Israeli government and government-backed Jewish extremists in Jerusalem.
Today, Israeli police battled Muslim worshippers in the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary; also known as the Temple Mount) after the worshipers tried to block the entrance into the Haram of a Jewish group of unclear intentions.
The situation of the 250,000 Palestinian residents of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem has deteriorated rapidly in recent months, and has for some time been in imminent hazard of exploding.
The latest clash may be a spark that ignites much wider tensions between Israel and Palestinians who have become increasingly frustrated over the complete lack of progress in Obama’s peace effort. One Hamas spokesman responded to the latest incident in Haram by calling on all Arabs and Muslims to “urgently act to save the holy Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem from repeated Zionist attempts to desecrate and control it.”
But even if today’s crisis is contained, the grave and continuing threats faced by the Jerusalem Palestinians, most of whom are Muslims, anyway threaten to undercut the western nations’ ability to enroll into their anti-Iran effort the many Muslim neighbors of Iran whose cooperation is essential to the success of any stepped-up sanctions.
I was recently given that warning, in just about exactly those words, by a senior diplomat from a strongly pro-US Arab nation.
“It is Iran’s neighbors who will have to implement most of the sanctions,” this envoy said. “We can’t do this if we are still arguing about Jerusalem.”
… Yesterday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani stated quite clearly he “did not think” sanctions would work. He was also adamant that, “”Iraq will never permit any country to use Iraqi land or sky in any war and any aggression.” (HT: Paul Woodward.)
Iraq has a very lengthy land border with Iran.
And it’s not just Arab countries. Yesterday, too, prime minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, another Muslim country that shares a land border with Iran, urged caution about stepping up the sanctions on Iran. He said that sanctions “won’t bring about anything good for the people (of Iran). So I think we have to be careful.”
Turkey is currently a member if the Security Council and is emerging as a powerful actor throughout the whole Middle East.
Now, it is true that neither Talabani nor Erdogan expressly mentioned the situation in Jerusalem as contributing to their wariness regarding the anti-Iran campaign.
But if the western nations and the pro-US governments in the region want to make a convincing case for tightening the screws further on Iran then– as the Arab envoy I talked to said quite clearly– their ability to do so is significantly weakened so long as the Israeli governmental and non-governmental bodies continue their attacks on the Palestinian community and the Palestinian Muslims’ sacred places in Jerusalem… And so long as the US government does nothing to rein in or punish Israel for those actions, which are highly prejudicial to the chances of the two-state peace to which Obama has said he is committed.
Information about the assaults that Jewish-extremist settler groups are making on the fabric and viability of Palestinian life in Jerusalem is readily available.
Haaretz’s Nir Hasson tells us today that the settler group Ateret Cohanim recently announced in a brochure that it has six properties in the Old City to sell to 22 Jewish families, “which would bring the number of Jews living in the Arab quarters of the walled city to 1,000.”
In line with the town-planning models in many Islamic cities, Jerusalem’s walled Old City has for centuries had separate “quarters”– almost literally laid out as four quarters– designated for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Armenians. Immediately after Israel conquer East Jerusalem in 1967, it evicted all non-Jews from the traditional Jewish quarter of the Old City, replacing them with Jews.
Now, as Hasson makes clear, the next step for the settler extremists– in the Old City as in the newer (though often centuries-old) neighborhoods around it– has been to implant settlers into the heart of very long-established Palestinian Christian and Muslim neighborhoods.
The Israeli organization Ir Amim (“City of the Peoples”) has a lot of information about the situation of East Jerusalem on its website, and on the blog its supporters contribute to Huffington Post.
In one recent post there, Yizhar Be’er noted that the rightwing Jewish group Elad has been undertaking extremely incendiary excavations– under the guise of “archeology”– in extremely sensitive parts of the city including Silwan and the Old City:

I see that yesterday, Hillary Clinton urged Arab states to “provide political backing for the Palestinians to begin peace talks with Israel even if a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank is not in place.”
She held a meeting in New York yesterday with high-level representatives from the six GCC countries, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan.
Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman told reporters afterwards, “We don’t want to have the perfect be the enemy of the good… We’re not going to wait for the perfect package before we start negotiations.”
Nobody’s asking for perfection! But people everywhere who yearn for a decent and viable end to the Israel-Palestine conflict do want to see a modicum of fairness and even-handedness in the positions adopted by the US, which still aspires to the role of lead mediator of this tragic conflict.
Clinton reportedly told Reuters that the meeting with the nine Arab state reps had been “positive and productive.”
Maybe she hadn’t been listening to Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, when he said in his address to the General Assembly,

Earth to Clinton and Obama: We need to see action to stop the settler-driven destruction of East Jerusalem… and we need to see it now!

IPS piece on Obama-Netanyahu tussle over priorities

With all the fast-moving developments of the past couple of weeks, I felt it was time to draw out the main theme behind them…. I tried to do that in my IPS piece today. It’s here— also archived here.
As I thought about it and read it, I came to the conclusion there’s good news and bad news… as reflected in the concluding two paras of the piece:

Of course, as Washington’s general ability to wield power in the world community continues to recede, its ability to single-handedly defend Israel from having to be accountable to anyone else, including the whole rest of the world community, will also recede. The next five years should be interesting ones.

Gaza, the Obama administration, and the present

I was reading this account from Reuters of the way that Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, today tried to sideline and bury the important report of the Goldstone Commission.
Firstly, she brushed aside the report’s recommendation that the Security Council should remain actively involved in the follow-up efforts to win accountability from the accused perpetrators of atrocities on both sides during Israel’s December-January assault on Gaza.
Then, this:

At first blush this looks like a classic “peace versus justice” dilemma, of the kind I’ve written about extensively in my work on conflict termination and the “justice” issues deriving therefrom.
But then I thought there is already a very, very long history of Palestinians having their “justice” claims brusquely pushed aside in favor of the promise of a future, western-led peacemaking effort… And throughout the past 61 years those efforts have never, ever led anywhere.
So today, the Palestinians are once again asked to forget about their past grievances, and to focus on a promise of some kind of a future peace settlement that, if the past is any kind of a reliable guide, may well prove quite illusory.
Lost in all this, however, is the situation of the Palestinians– in Gaza, but also elsewhere– in the present.
Is there anything the US could do about this?
Of course there is! And it’s not only the case that the US could do something to help the Gazans in the present– the US also should be doing a whole lot more than it has to date to alleviate the harm that they continue to suffer on a daily and continuing basis, since it has enormous leverage over the government of Israel.
But Washington has used not one iota of that leverage to force Israel to open Gaza’s borders up for the passage of the freight that the Strip’s 1.4 million people sorely need in order to conduct a normal, safe, and dignified life.
Winter is approaching in Gaza, where it can bring rain and some bitterly cold winds. And despite all the representations that various do-gooders have made since the parallel ceasefires wet into effect on January 18, Israel has not allowed into the Strip any of the most basic construction materials that are needed to repair the extensive damage that the IDF caused during last winter’s war, in many cases quite intentionally, to housing, schools, factories, and public infrastructure.
So maybe now is not the time to pull together a huge series of international court cases to look into the atrocities of the past. (Or maybe it is.)
And maybe we should give the US-led diplomacy one last chance to build a better future. (Or maybe not.)
But if we look only at the continuously unfolding present, then if the US does nothing to force Israel to open Gaza’s borders to the passage of vitally needed freight, then Washington will be directly complicit in the additional harms that Gaza’s people will suffer this winter.
(Meantime, in today’s statement, Rice criticized the mandate of the Goldstone Commission, and she criticized its policy recommendations. But I don’t think she questioned any of its actual findings. And those findings surely stand as the best draft we have to date of the historical record of who did what to whom in the Israel-Palestine theater in the time of the 2008-09 Gaza War. Even just as a record, the work of the Commission will be invaluable– and it can provide the basis for all kinds of court cases in the future.)

American power has limits? Who knew?

Steve Clemons tells us today that

Afghanistan, like Iraq, is sending the impression to the rest of the world that America is at a “limit” point in its military and power capabilities.

Well, duh.
He goes on to say,

Limits are very, very, very bad in the great power game — and Afghanistan is yet again, an exposer of monumental limits on American power.

Now, Steve is usually an intelligent and reasonable person. So I’m mystified why he is giving the impression here that the US had no significant “limits” on its great-power capabilities until the Iraq war; and that the relatively sudden “revelation” that there are such limits is both surprising and “very, very bad.”
C’meon, Steve. Yeah, maybe you grew up more in the era of post-Cold War US uberpowerdom than I did. But even then, there were always limits on US power.
And you know what, for any kind of a realist, knowing there are limits and figuring out how to work effectively within them is a good thing, not a bad thing.
It was GWB and his crowd who thought there were no limits, and that they could make their own history regardless of other powers or other interests.
… Steve’s piece was basically about Afghanistan. Neither he nor anyone else has yet been able to explain to me why the US (which is located halfway round the world from Afghanistan) and NATO– in which the allies are also very geographically and culturally distant from Afghanistan– could ever be conceived to be the ideal tools for “pacifying” Afghanistan.
Let’s have a whole lot more realism in this discussion. Including by recognizing there are limits to US power.

IPS analysis of Iraq and related regional tensions

… is here. Also here.
One of the points I make there is this:

One notable aspect of the political tempests now swirling around Iraq is that neither in Iraq nor in the U.S. has there been any significant movement calling for the U.S. to delay or reverse its continuing pullout.

I truly think this is significant. The adamant refusal of just about all (non-Kurdish) Iraqis to ask the US to rescind or reverse its withdrawal plans surprises me not one jot. But I do think the fact that no-one in the US is calling for the US to “do something” to prevent further carnage inside Iraq is particularly notable.
I say this as someone who has always said that the American military is the organization that’s just about the most ill-suited in the world to be able to “help” Iraqis if political turmoil overtakes their country…. This is a part of my deep opposition to “liberal hawkism” in all its manifestations.
So fundamentally I’m really glad there are no significant American voices calling for the US to use its military to try to “help” Iraqis right now.
(Of course, it also helps that it was the Bushies who signed off on the Withdrawal Agreement. So the republicans are not now able to raise the whole question of the advisability of a US withdrawal from Iraq as an ati-Obama partisan issue.)
But I am still, also, more than a bit mystified. Where have all the people gone who, before the Bush administration’s conclusion last November of the Withdrawal Agreement with Iraq, were ominously warning that the US “could not” withdraw with anything like a fixed timetable from Iraq because afterwards Iraq might “spiral into bloody chaos”, or whatever?
Where are those people now?
What I’m sensing is that– perhaps especially after the economic collapse of last fall– most Americans have turned their back on their previous fondness for exotic foreign military adventures. Both Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be not nearly as much “fun” as they used to be for those people.
This is mainly good– especially if it means there will be far fewer loud calls within the US political elite for foreign military interventions, for allegedly ‘humanitarian’ or any other purposes, over the years ahead, than there have been throughout all the years since the end of the Cold War.
But it’s also a bit worrying, if it means that Americans have become much more inward-looking and xenophobic.

‘Afghanistan worse than Vietnam’

Fascinating post at FP’s AfPak channel today, comparing Afghanistan with Vietnam, elections and all.
Not favorably for Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, it has to be said. The headline said it all: “Saigon 2009.”
The authors are:

Thomas H. Johnson

M. Chris Mason

So they appear to know what they’re talking about.
Here’s their bottom line:

because

How occupations end

We here in Washington DC currently have a front-seat view of how a country undertakes the ending of the military occupation by its ground forces of another country’s territory.
Today, Iraq’s elected PM Nuri al-Maliki will be meeting with Pres. Obama in the White House. Top on the agenda of their talks will doubtless be continuing disagreements over the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement (SOFA) that the two governments concluded last November, which mandates a complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Yes, there have been some disagreements between the two governments over how the WA will be implemented. But seeing how the US is now in the process of pulling its troops out of Iraq over the next 30 months can inform us a lot about some of the issues involved in ending Israel’s continuing military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve actually seen a lot of military occupations being brought to an end. This is not rocket science. Here’s what we now know:
1. An occupation can end as a result of an agreement negotiated between the occupying power and a “sufficiently legitimate” governing authority representing the occupied area’s indigenous residents; or the occupying power can attempt a unilateral, essentially un-negotiated withdrawal. A third alternative: Of course, occupations can also be ended– as the German occupations of European countries, the Japanese occupations of Asian countries, and Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait all were– by the direct application of military force.
2. Examples of the second (unilateral) kind of withdrawal include the US’s withdrawal from the portions of southern Iraq it occupied in the course of the 1991 Gulf War, and Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from just about all of southern Lebanon. The Us withdrawal from Iraq occurred in the context of a ceasefire agreement the two governments hastily concluded; but that agreement did not end the overall state of hostilities between Saddam’s government and the US.
3. Unilateral withdrawals, because they do not end the state of hostilities between the parties, merely rearrange the furniture for the continued pursuit of those hostilities.
4. The “withdrawal” from Gaza that the Israeli government claims it undertook in 2005 did not, actually, end Israel’s formal status under international as the occupying power in Gaza, since Israel retained its control over all Gaza’s contact points with the outside world and over Gaza’s air-space; it also retained the “right” under international law to send its troops back into Gaza whenever it wished.
If Israel had not still been seen, under international law, as the occupying power in Gaza, last December’s massive Israeli assault against the Strip including the large-scale incursion of Israeli troops into it would of course have been seen as an international aggression, triggering the intervention of the UN Security Council under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. That did not happen, because Gaza is still under the same Israeli military occupation that it has been continuously since 1967. What happened in 2005 was not the ending of Gaza’s occupation, but a rearranging of the way Israel organized it.

Continue reading “How occupations end”

Reading Independence Day in Iran

(this is Scott Harrop writing)
Keyed to Ameica’s 4th of July celebration, I have the pleasure of publishing an essay with R.K. Ramazani that is appearing in multiple outlets via Agence Global. One version can be found here. Between us, we’ve condensed about eighty years of studies of the American and Iranian revolutionary experiences into a few short paragraphs.
Our core observations in this essay boil down to:

1. Americans and Iranians have much more in common with each other than either side realizes.
2. Both nations have “revolutionary” traditions that first and foremost were about achieving independence. I wrote in greater detail about the American side two years ago here at justworldnews.
3. Even as both countries over time believed that their revolutions stood for distinct values that they’ve offered to the world, both America and Iran have painful track records of not fully living up to their own norms. Professor Ramazani recently wrote about Iran’s freedom deficit here.
4. International legitimacy… matters. Both societies care deeply about their reputation in the world, even as leaders in both countries have conducted themselves in manners than have hurt their nation’s prestige before the world. The world indeed is watching.
5. Howard Baskerville was right; Americans and Iranians do share many ideals, of independence, constitutionalism, justice, faith, and yes, liberty. (See my backgrounder on the 100th anniversary of his “martydom” in Tabriz)
6. Iran’s present crisis is home grown; lasting solutions to the present crisis must come from within. Yet it’s one Americans can recognize and empathize with from the outside.

Consider reading the actual whole text and give us your feedback. This is just the first hints of larger works being hatched.