Category: Writing and publishing

Has it been three years already since JWN’s inaugural post?
It has indeed.. And what a three years it has been… Most of it, alas, dominated by the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Back in February 2003, I could still hope (though I knew it was a long shot) that war might be averted. But in those days the warmongers of Washington were riding mighty high! Why, they even had Colin Powell doing their bidding there in the Security Council!
They bent him to their will… They invaded Iraq… They tried to bend Iraq’s people to their will… And, as we now know, they most spectacularly failed in that.
Bush and Cheyfeld still seem to live in a bubble of unreality– from “Mission Accomplished” to “Plan for Victory” to “Heckofajob, Brownie”. But in actual fact, reality has clipped their wings a lot, and continues to do so. Perhaps a more equitable, humane, generous, and rule-abiding international order will emerge from all this. I pray to G-d it will.
Meanwhile, I don’t even want to start to think how many hours I’ve spent here on JWN. The blog has 1,280 posts on it, a total of 10,630 comments (with now, only a small proportion of them being spam), and in an average week people from some 7,500 distinct IP addresses are these days checking in to read it.
So thanks for being there, readers vocal and silent. If nobody was reading this, there would have been almost zero point in doing it. I might, of course, have done something more productive with all those hours. But all in all I’m really glad I’ve done it. Onward and upward, eh?

Yesterday, I completed the revision of the Rwanda section of my upcoming book. I had to cut it from three chapters to one (!) … I was also trying to make the narrative flow more smoothly; eliminate redundancies (though I only found a few); update all facts presented as much as possible– oh, and along the way there, reduce the total word-count for this section by around 5,000 words.
I did it. I now have one single, extremely long chapter on Rwanda. It has a single (I would say, rather compelling) narrative and is divided into sections and subsections in a way I find rational and helpful. Plus, I managed to cut the word-count by 5,200 words. It was really, really difficult to cut and revise my own immortal, perfectly composed, and intricately balanced prose in this way. At one point I felt like ‘true mother’ in the story about King Solomon and the contested baby, but then I remembered that the true mother was the one who rushed to prevent the cutting of the baby. Also, a chunk of prose is not a human person, however attached to it one might feel. (And I did.) But anyway, now I feel even more attached to the resulting chunk of prose.
And exhausted.
Tomorrow I’ll gird up my loins and start engaging with thre South Africa portion of the book. Then there’s Mozambique… And finally, the “whole” encapsulating framework of the book, particularly the last two chapters that pull together all the analysis.
Why in God’s name do I do this? It hurts!
… Anyway, for my own sanity, I decided to take a break from the book today. I went to Quaker meeting. (Actually, I rode there on my snappy new eco-friendly personal vehicle, which is a Piaggio 150-cc scooter. Talk about fun! So now I’ve liberated myself from car-ownership… I confess the two other members of the household– spouse and son– each has a car, and they’re promising to provide me with as much of a safety-net as I need on this.) And for the rest of today, as a treat to myself, I get to blog as much as I want…
Of course, scores of must-blog things have been happening in the world over the past week. Just as well, then, that I always knew I could never aspire to have this be a “blog of record”. But big thanks to all JWN readers who’ve hung in here, checking out the blog over these past few days in case anything new should occur here. (And for reading this far in this particular meandering little post, come to think of it.) I hope you all found Reidar Visser’s recent piece on the intra-UIA politics really interesting.
Today, I also really need to post some new things over at the Transitional Justice Forum blog. I need to do a few other things over there, too. And I have bills, laundry, and a few rather boring things to do in what some people might call “real life.”
Ooh, plus go through the many pages of my contract with Paradigm Publishers, who’ll be publishing the Africa book this Fall, and sign ’em where required. That just dropped into my mail-box on Friday.
I have quite a few writings coming out in interesting dead-wood publications these days, too. Oh, look here: all of the current issue of Boston Review— the one that has a Forum on the US exit strategy from Iraq to which I contributed– is now available online, as well as in a dead-wood edition. So you can read my contribution there, or read the whole Forum, as you want.
A friend told me he’d just received his copy of the latest issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, in which I have my essay on “Religion and violence.” I haven’t received any paper copies of my own yet. Grrr. But anyway, I’ve posted a link to that text onto my sidebar here, quite a while back, so you can read it there.
Also, I have a piece on international war-crimes courts coming out in the next (March-April) issue of the Carnegie Endowment’s posh journal, Foreign Policy. That one will, I imagine, be extremely controversial. Good! Let the discussion on the real value of these institutions be opened in earnest, I say.
Gotta run. Laundry calls. Later today I want to do a post here that pulls together some of the things that have been happening in the (big) “real world” over the past week.

Here is the column I have in the CSM today, on the implications of the leadership crises in Israel and Palestine.

Y’all know I write periodic columns for al-Hayat. I frequently don’t see them when they come out in Arabic, because I make a bee-line for the news pages and find them hard enough to get through that I have little energy left for the opinion pages…
Hayat has, I have to say, a truly terrible English-language website. (Guys, you want to hire me as a consultant to help bring it into the 21st century??) Including, it has no news at all. Only some very sporadically presented pieces of opinion.
I just found three of my own pieces on there, in two different places on the site (?), in the original English. Here they are:

* Iraq between Germany and South Africa — published 12 September 2005
* Iran, the Bush administration, and the Middle East — 6 October 2005
* Avoiding Regional Wars in the Gulf and Mashreq — 21 November 2005

I can’t find one that I sent them on December 12, titled “Iraq changes America.” But given the chaotic state of their site, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
If any kind reader could send me the URLs for any of my other 2005 pieces, in English or especially Arabic, I would be really grateful.

I’ve had my home web-page hosted by the University of Virginia for four or five years now. But over the holiday I got kicked off their server. Grrr. Tech advisor and self spent a bit of time working out a solution today. So now my home web-page is here.
If you’ve ever visited it before you’ll find it’s still very familiar. But hey, I did update the “welcome letter” so it’s no longer dated August 2005.
I still have a few pages there to scrub through and get all the internal links set right. But basically, if you ever see any need to visit the web-page– oh, to get texts of some of my CSM columns, or for my c.v. (oops, needs updating), or my downloadable portrait (ditto?)– then you’ll need to go to that new URL.
While I was fiddling around I altered some things at the bottom of the “Individual Entry Archive” page here on JWN. So now, if you’re submitting a comment here you have a larger box in which to write it.
With a bit of luck tomorrow I can get to finishing up my thoughts on the ending of the Bushites’ project in Iraq…

It’s been a really busy week. Monday, I had a deadline for my CSM column for this week. I started out writing something about the Middle East, and at around 11:30 a.m. realized I’d far prefer to be writing about the riots in France. So that’s what I did. It’s in today’s paper. (Also, here.)
Tuesday, I had to work on the editor’s suggestions for revisions of a piece I have in the January-February issue of Foreign Policy magazine. FP is a classy mag published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I haven’t published there since, oh my gosh, 1983. So this is a nice thing to do. The piece is basically a wrap-up of some of the big conclusions of my book on Transitional Justice in Africa. The darn thing is, though, that originally it was meant to be in the current (Nov.-Dec.) issue. So I went final on the text sometime in August. And actually, quite a bit has happened since then– especially regarding the International criminal Court (ICC) which issued its first indictments last month.
Well, I guess I’m glad they delayed running the piece by two months. They did it to accommodate late-breaking hurricane-related items. At least this way, my piece will also address these “pioneering” ICC indictments. But trying to give it, basically, three months’ worth of updating was more work than I expected.
Most of which concerns Uganda, by the way. If you want to find out more, read this post I put up on the Transitional Justice Forum blog last week.
Anyway, that’s a good part of why I’ve been feeling busy this week. Couple of other reasons, too.
And then, so much has been happening in the world this week! Where to start? Ahmad? Judy? Jordan? Syria? Iraq? Palestine? Cheney? Torture?
I guess one definite trend I’m seeing is the retrenchment of Blair’s political power inside the UK system, and that of Cheney’s power in this country. It’s slow. But it looks steady. Let’s see how broad we can make the agenda of the current “re-thinking”…

National Public Radio, Wednesday, 2:15 through 2:35 p.m. or so, on “Talk of the Nation”… I’ll be talking (from London) about the need to withdraw US forces from Iraq.
[That would be Eastern time– apologies to listeners in other zones for my provincialism there…]

I have a column in the CSM today about the importance of the UN to the US. It decries the bullying tactics that John Bolton has used since his arrival there in Mid-August.
My timing is perhaps not optimal, given that Paul Volcker released his fourth– and I think penultimate– report into the oil-for-food scandal of the 1990s, just yesterday.
However, even given the evidence of serious mismanagement and corruption that Vocker has released, it is still important to underline to the CSM’s mainly US readership the importance of having a UN– and most preferably, a well-functioning one.
Kofi Annan has never been known as a great manager. (That’s an under-statement, huh?) He was installed, you’ll remember, at the strong urging of Madeleine Albright, who couldn’t stand his Egyptian predecessor, Boutros Ghali.
One could argue that you deal with the world with the UN you have, rather than the UN you want… And the UN that we women and men of the world have today is flawed, and is also almost completely the creature of the nations that dominate the U.N. Security Council.
But I know that the release of the latest Volcker report will increase the torrent of fundamnetally anti-UN feeling that is always roiling just under the surface of much of the public discourse inside the US. So yes, it is important to re-state the importance of having a UN– and also, of having the very best-managed and most accountable UN we can build.
In my column, I write that the UN is “based on principles of national sovereignty, national equality, and human solidarity.” I wish I’d had more space to flesh that out and write about the stress that the writers of the UN charter put on finding nonviolent ways to resolve international conflicts, and on the slow trend the UN has seen in recent decades toward focusing more on human equality than on national equality…
Anyway, this looks like a good short news piece about the impact of the Volcker report– also in today’s CSM. In it, Howard LaFranchi writes,

the report, which contains five parts and totals more than 1,000 pages, lays partial blame on Secretary-General Annan for poor management of the program. Perhaps his shortcoming – and one reflective of the UN’s overall problems – is that he didn’t understand the depth of need for management reform, UN analysts say.
“One more time, the secretary-general is out to lunch. He doesn’t seem to understand the process,” says Edward Luck, a longtime UN expert at Columbia University in New York. Noting that it was Annan who “loaded up” the reform process with a long list of issues unrelated to the management problem, Mr. Luck says, “There are real questions about whether or not he remains in office.”
But the report has criticism for others, too. It cites past UN officials and Security Council members, including Russia and France, for allowing conditions that permitted corruption to deepen over the program’s seven-year life span.
While critical of those directly involved in corruption, the report does not let the United States off the hook. It faults the US for overlooking the smuggling of Iraqi oil into Iraq’s neighboring countries, including Jordan.
Still, the report does not link Annan to a contract awarded to a Swiss company that employed his son Kojo – one of the key unanswered elements that critics have been watching.
The inquiry has also yielded positive findings. It concludes that the oil-for-food program largely achieved its two goals: to feed the Iraqi people with Iraq’s own oil money and to prevent Mr. Hussein from rebuilding a military that could threaten the region.
“The fact is that the US government and others were well aware the program had these weaknesses, yet [they] retained it because it continued to serve its basic purpose,” says James Dobbins, an international security expert at the RAND Corp. in Arlington, Va., who has served in both the Bush and Clinton administrations.
Mr. Dobbins says there is “definitely room for improvement in UN management.” But he also says that the virulent American criticism of the UN incited by the oil-for-food problems overlooks the fact that neither US nor UN money was lost in the fraud.
“It’s important we remember it was all Iraqi money,” Dobbins says. He also maintains that the extent of fraud and corruption was relatively limited, given the mammoth size of the program.
Still, some members of Congress have already called on Annan to resign. And the House of Representatives has voted to cut US funding for the UN in half if certain management reforms are not accomplished.
The Bush administration has not favored either Annan’s resignation or the funding cut, but most analysts see US pressure on the UN rising – with uncertain consequences for the international institution.

… Hannah Allam, that is, the talented and incredibly courageous 27-year-old journo who’s been running Knight Ridder’s Baghdad bureau since late 2003.
That nice profile of her there, from Editor & Publisher notes that,

Allam has gained a reputation for being outspoken on matters of reporter safety.
Just last week, she responded sharply to a column by St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Mark Yost, which claimed reporters were not giving a full picture of life in Iraq, especially positive news.
The Baghdad bureau, which has been housed in seven rooms on the top floor of a hotel, has seen its share of tragedy in recent weeks. On June 24, stringer Yasser Salihee was killed on his day off, while the assassination on Tuesday of Miijbil Issa, a member of the Iraq Constitutional Convention, affected the bureau because he was a favored source.
“He is my third source in a month to be killed,” Allam said. “Will it ever stop? Every day they are dying.”

As I recall, that idiot piece by Mark Yost appeared after he’d made a whirlwind visit to the Baghdad Green Zone under heavy US military protection…
Allam is an exceptionally capable reporter and administrator– in her two years in Baghdad she has, as the E&P piece notes, built KR’s bureau there into a 16-person operation that “has received praise from journalists both in and out of the newspaper chain.”
But in addition, Knight Ridder itself– which is a chain that owns 31 daily newspapers across the US, as well as 34 web sites– has shown a strong and continuing commitment to excellent coverage of Iraq war issues. Their Washington bureau contains Warren Strobel and Jonthan Landay, veteran journos who throughout the whole buildup to the war were two of the few MSM reporters to aggressively question and investigate the Bushies’ often bizarre and frequently fallacious claims about the Saddam regime.
(Here’s the latest piece of excellent Strobel/Landay reporting… A typically well-done piece telling us about a recent meeting in Europe between two powerful but wacko Republican lawmakers and a representative of Iranian arms merchant Manoucher Ghorbanifar… He of the “Iran-Contra” affair of the 1980s… )
So it’s good to see that this apparently well-run news operation, Knight Ridder, is supporting a very capable correspondent like Allam as she takes a next important step in her career. Now, she’s heading to Cairo to establish a new KR bureau there that will have broad responsibilities for covering the whole Middle East.
The E&P profile of her also notes:

Continue reading “The woman behind the byline”

This morning our Quaker Meeting held its regular (generally monthly) “Meeting for Worship with a concern for Business”. Since we don’t have a paid minister, it’s the responsibility of all members of the Meeting community to run all the Meeting’s affairs. So it’s quite a bit of work– but that’s the price we pay so that the spiritual gifts of all of us are equally recognized and valued. I love our way of doing things! (But boy, it was hot in the room this morning, even with all fans whirring like crazy.)
This evening we have the regular (also, generally monthly) business meeting of the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice. Phew! Enough meetings!
Meanwhile, here are a few of the other things I’ve been thinking about:
(1) The terrible current death toll from terror attacks inside Iraq. AFP is reporting today that More than 110 Iraqis were killed and 300 wounded in a three day suicide bombing blitz… That includes the incident in Musayyib where a fuel truck was exploded, though there are differing accounts of whether that was an intended part of the plan or not.
But how can someone culpably idiotic like Dick Cheney claim that the Iraqi insurgency is “in its last throes”?
How can any US leaders credibly claim that they brought “security and freedom” to Iraq’s people?
My first thoughts are for members of the country’s Shiite community, which seems to be the target of this wave of terror attacks. They must be feeling so pained, so vulnerable.
How long can Ayatollah Sistani and others who urge nonviolence continue to restrain the aggrieved from trying to hit back at those they accuse?
Meantime, I’d like to propose that communities around the world that held a 3-minute silence for 50 victims of terror in the UK also stage a silent commemoration for all the victims of violence in Iraq.
You have to know that many of those who were wounded in the attacks in Iraq, whose lives could have been saved if they’d had access to the kinds of medical services available in Iraq before March 2003, ended up dying in July 2005 because of the degradation of the country’s medical system and other public services under the impact of occupation. Perhaps those are the lives that we in the west should mourn the most.
(2) Sir Jeremy Greenstock— who’da thunk it? Remember Greenstock, the tight-lipped professional diplomat who was the UK’s representative at the UN during the lead-up to the US/UK invasion of Iraq, and after that was London’s representative inside occupied Iraq? So it turns out he wants to publish a tell-all memoir about those experiences. Okay, maybe not tell-exactly-all. But at least, tell a whole lot more than Tony Blair’s government currently wants told…
This, from the London Observer:

Publication of The Costs of War by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the 2003 war and the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath, has been halted. In an extract seen by The Observer, Greenstock describes the American decision to go to war as ‘politically illegitimate’ and says that UN negotiations ‘never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration’. Although he admits that ‘honourable decisions’ were made to remove the threat of Saddam, the opportunities of the post-conflict period were ‘dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution’…
Greenstock is also thought to be scathing about Bremer and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Greenstock’s British publishers, Random House, were remaining tight-lipped but it is thought that the book is almost certain not to be published in the autumn as planned. It was also to be serialised in a British newspaper.
… The Foreign Office last night issued a statement: ‘Civil Service regulations which apply to all members of the diplomatic service require that any retired official must obtain clearance in respect of any publication relating to their service. Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s proposed book is being dealt with under this procedure.’

Oh, censorship– don’t you love it? So much for a commitment to the basics of democracy…
(3) And while we’re on the subject of a not-yet-post-colonial Britain, I wanted to mention that I’ve been hurriedly reading an amazingly good book called Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. The author, Caroline Elkins, was a doctoral student in the History dept at Harvard, where she evidently found some excellent mentors amongst her teachers. Building on a wide variey of sources, she tells the story of the brutal counter-insurgency campaign the British waged in the 1950s against a nationalist secret organization in Kenya called Mau Mau.
The parallels with the situation in occupied Iraq (and Palestine) today are shockingly numerous, and quite mind-searing.
The testimonies she records– from perpetrators as well as survivors of British colonial violence– are quite disgusting, including a lot more lethal violence than in Iraq or Palestine, as well as a lot of “interrogation” techniques that are just about exactly the same.
At the height of the anti-Mau Mau campaign, the British colonial authorities had moved just about the entire 1.5-million population of Kenya’s Kikuyu community into barbed-wire-fenced detention camps. In a bizarre system called the “pipeline” they were supposed to be moved between these camps according to whether and how much they cooperated with their British captors.
Elkins writes (p.xvi) that,

Officially, fewer than one hundred Europeans, including settlers, were killed and some eighteen hundred [pro-British] loyalists died at the hands of Mau Mau. In contrast, the British reported that more than eleven thousand Mau Mau were killed in action, though the empirical and demographic evidence I unearthed calls into serious question the validity of this figure. I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead. Mau Mau has been portrayed as one of the most savage and barbaric uprisings of the twentieth century. But in this book I ask that we reconsider this accepted orthodoxy and examine the crimes perpetrated by colonial forces against Mau Mau, and the conisderable measures that the British colonial government undertook to conceal them.

Among the many parallels with today’s “counter-insurgency situations” in Iraq and Palestine:
(a) The fact that the worst anti-personnel atrocities against Mau Mau suspects (and innocent Kikuyu) were perpetrated by settlers– whether civilians, or those hastily drafted into the colonial army;
(b) The kinds of explanations given by the colonial authorities for the anti-British actions of the Mau Mau– including that they it was “psychopathological in origin”, not political; and that it stemmed from the unique problems the Kikuyu had in “engaging with modernity”, and thus represented some kind of “crisis of modernization” within Kikuyu society.
H’mm. Well if modernization includes British settler colonialism and consigning all the indigenes to gulags, maybe that is justifiably judged “hard to deal with”???
More on Elkins’ great book later, I hope.
(4) I’ve also been reading Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist’s amazing 2000 book, A History of Bombing. It’s a very informative and fairly unconventionally organized book. Here’s a handy little excerpt from the history for 1920:

Like other colonial powers, the British had already been bombing restless natives in their territories for several years. It began with the Pathans on India’s northwestern border in 1915. It didn’t help much just to destroy their villages. But if their irrigation ditches were bombed, their water supply would be emptied and the topsoil washed away from the terraces. Then they got the message.
The British bombed revolutionaries in Egypt and the rebellious Sultan of Darfur in 1916. In 1917, bombers put down an uprising in Mashud, on India’s border with Afghanistan. During the third Afghan war in 1919, Dacca, Jalalabad, and Kabul were bombed by a British squadron chief named Arthus Harris. In his memoirs he writes that the war was won by a single strike with a ten-kilo bomb on the Afghani king’s palace. Harris would spend the rest of his life trying to repeat that strike. [He was the one who organized the fire-bombing of Dresden in WW2.]
That same year, the Egyptians demanded independence, and the RAF sent in three squadrons of bombers to control the rebellious masses. In 1920, Enzeli in Iran was bombed in an attempt to create a British puppet state, and in Trans-Jordan the British put down an uprising with bombs that killed 200.
This kind of thing was, only ten years after the first [aerial] bomb, already routine. But in Iraq the assignment was different. It was called ‘control without occupation.’ The RAF and its bombers were assigned to replace completely fifty-one battalions of soldiers, which was what the army had needed to control a country that, during the First World War, had freed itself from centuries of Turkish rule and now refused to accept the British as their new masters…
The first report from Baghdad describes an air raid that causes wild confusion among the natives and their families. “Many of them jumped into a lake, making a good target for the machine guns.”
Churchill wanted to be spared such reports…

Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose, don’t you think?