Israel attacks Gaza, demonstrates it is still the ‘occupying power’

The Israeli military has sent ground forces deep into Gaza over the past two weeks, and has killed 17 Palestinians, and wounded uncounted others. In what even longtime Israeli flack Ron Ben-Yishai admits are retaliatory attacks, Palestinian rocketeers from Gaza have wounded an unknown number — presumed small– of residents of southern Israel, but killed none. This (highly asymmetrical) exchange of attacks has spread fear on both sides of the international border between Gaza and Israel.
In addition, the Israeli government recently tightened yet further the siege it has maintained around Gaza since the election nearly three years ago of a Hamas-dominated parliament in Gaza and the West Bank. The siege has contributed to the deaths of more than 200 Gaza Palestinians and has prevented the other 1.5 million residents of the Strip from leading anything like a normal life.
This BBC report tells us that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israeli PM Olmert in a recent phone call to lift the siege.
Yesterday, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Judge Navanethem Pillay, issued a hard-hitting statement calling for an immediate end to the blockade of Gaza. It said:

    “By function of this blockade, 1.5 million Palestinian men, women and children have been forcibly deprived of their most basic human rights for months… This is in direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law. It must end now.”

Here in the United States, apologists for the Israeli government have argued since 2005 that Israel “ended the occupation of the Gaza Strip” that year, and that therefore since then it has borne no continuing responsibility for the welfare of the Strip’s residents such as is required of any “foreign military occupying power” under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
But since 2005, Israel has continued to maintain tight control over all avenues and channels through which the Gazans might have contact with the outside world, and it has maintained it still has a “right” to intervene militarily in Gaza whenever it chooses.
Those two aspects of Israel’s policy put the lie to its claim that it has “ended” the military occupation of the Gaza Strip that it has, actually, maintained continuously since June of 1967.
If Israel were not, in fact, the military occupier of this territory then either the blockade it has maintained around it or the repeated military actions it has mounted against it would be considered under international law as overt acts of war that would allow the legitimate (indigenous) government of Gaza to request any and all forms of international military aid to counter and suppress those hostile acts.
But few actors in the international community believe that the democratically elected administration in Gaza has this right. Indeed, the BBC report on the Gaza situation quotes an un-named an Israeli official as describing Israel’s latest ground-force incursion into Gaza as “a routine operation”, i.e. not an act of war as such.
Routine???
The people of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan have had to live under the vagaries, aggressions, harsh repression, and downright dispossession that have marked Israel’s military occupation rule of these territories for 41.5 years now. It is time for all these military occupations to end.
Why, even the United States’ military occupation rule over Iraq is now scheduled to end at the end of 2011, after lasting less than eight years! How can the international community allow Israel’s rapacious and inhumane occupations to continue?

Urgent memo to Bush: Tell us honestly what this agreement with Iraq says

“All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.”
That’s the text of Article 24, para 1 of the the text of the agreement the US and Iraqi governments reached agreement on over the weekend, as published by Al-Sabah in Baghdad. Raed Jarrar sends us to this English-language translation of the whole Sabah text, which I’ve also uploaded here.)
So why do we not yet see the text of this important document on any of the US government’s many websites yet, or those of the US MSM?
And why did White House press flack Dana Perino today say that the deadline for withdrawal in the text is only “aspirational”? (HT: Ryan of Think Progress.)

Is Perino auditioning for a post-White House career as the Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass”? You know, the one who says that “Words mean only what I want them to mean”?
Memo to Bush: Tell us what this important agreement with the Baghdad government actually says!
Specifically, the translation that Raed gave us says in “Article 24, Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq” the following:

    Recognizing the improvement of the Iraqi security forces and their increased capabilities, and the fact that they are in charge of all security operations, and based on the strong relationship between the two sides, both sides have agreed on the following:
    1- All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.
    2- All U.S. combat forces must withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages as soon as the Iraqi forces take over the full security responsibility in them. The U.S. withdrawal from these areas shall take place no later than June 30th, 2009
    3- All withdrawn U.S. combat troops in accordance to paragraph 2 [shall] regroup in installations and areas agreed upon located outside cities, towns, and villages. These installations and areas agreed upon will be specified by the Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) before the date mentioned in paragraph 2 of this article.
    4- The U.S. recognizes Iraq’s sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time. The Iraqi government recognizes the United States’ sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time.
    5- Both sides agree on creating mechanisms and arrangements to reduce the U.S. forces levels within the specified time period, and both sides must agree on where these forces will be located.

Some Iranian support for the US-Iraq SOFA: Why?

Iranian judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi has been quoted by the state television’s website as expressing his approval of the decision the Iraqi cabinet made Sunday to approve the currently proposed US-Iraqi security agreements.
Raed Jarrar sends us to a translation of the latest text here. (I’ve re-uploaded that hard-to-access text here.)
Regarding the reaction from Tehran, AP tells us that Shahroudi said,

    “The Iraqi government has done very well regarding this… We hope the outcome of (the deal) will be in favor of Islam and Iraqi sovereignty.”

There has been some speculation that Iran’s clerical authorities have adopted this apparently cooperative posture as a gesture of goodwill to the US’s president-elect Barack Obama. Perhaps. But I suspect the stronger force driving this position has been an assessment by the Supreme Leader that having US forces tied down as sitting ducks in very-close-by Iraq through the end of 2011 is seen as a handy guarantor– at least for the next three years– that no-one in Washington will decide to attack Iran in this period.
I have thought for a while– along with Hossein Agha and others– that there’s a significant, possibly dominant, trend in Iran that is opposed to the calls so many of the rest of us around the world have made for a speedy and complete US withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (Most recently, see this October 28 post I wrote on JWN.)
The speed with which the main factions in the (heavily Tehran influenced) Iraqi government fell into line with the now-proposed SOFA was additional evidence of that. And now we have the quote from Shahroudi, as well.
Of course, the Iraqi government is a slightly different (and probably more easily influenceable) entity than the Iraqi parliament, which is probably more attuned to the nationalist Iraqi (and therefore both anti-US and anti-Tehran) trends in Iraqi society. And the SOFA agreement does still have to be ratified by the parliament in Iraq– even if Pres. Bush still claims it doesn’t need to be submitted for ratification by the elected Congress in Washington. (Go figure.)
The agreement is currently scheduled to be voted on by the Iraqi parliament on November 24. Let’s see what happens between now and then.
Regarding the reported substance of the agreement, I feel somewhat reassured that it apparently states that all US forces will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. I guess that was one of the non-trivial concessions PM Maliki won from the Americans on behalf of his nationalist constituency?
Specifically, according to Raed’s text, the agreement states in “Article 24: Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq” the following:

    Recognizing the improvement of the Iraqi security forces and their increased capabilities, and the fact that they are in charge of all security operations, and based on the strong relationship between the two sides, both sides have agreed on the following:
    1- All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.
    2- All U.S. combat forces must withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages as soon as the Iraqi forces take over the full security responsibility in them. The U.S. withdrawal from these areas shall take place no later than June 30th, 2009
    3- All withdrawn U.S. combat troops in accordance to paragraph 2 [shall] regroup in installations and areas agreed upon located outside cities, towns, and villages. These installations and areas agreed upon will be specified by the Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) before the date mentioned in paragraph 2 of this article.
    4- The U.S. recognizes Iraq’s sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time. The Iraqi government recognizes the United States’ sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at any time.
    5- Both sides agree on creating mechanisms and arrangements to reduce the U.S. forces levels within the specified time period, and both sides must agree on where these forces will be located.

As the text of an international agreement, this looks pretty solid to me. (Of course, the US has been known to abrogate or flat-out break numerous treaties in the past. Or, it may have its own, significantly different version of that prefatory text.)
This is not the speedy total withdrawal that so many of us in the antiwar movement have worked for, for so long. But it does have one striking advantage over the position Barack Obama has advocated for some time now: namely, it sets a date certain for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq; and as I read the prefatory sentence in Raed’s version– in both English and Arabic– it does not make this withdrawal “conditional” on anything the Iraqi government does.
Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, Moqtada al-Sadr remains opposed to this agreement. So we’ll have to wait and see what its fate is in the Iraqi parliament.
But our Senate here in the US should surely also be working to win the recognition of the outgoing Bush administration that it, too, has the right of ratification– or non-ratification– of this important international treaty?
Where is our democracy here in the US?

Prunier on Laurent Nkunda and the DRC crisis

The veteran French expert on central Africa Gerard Prunier has an excellent piece on Open Democracy today that pulls together a lot of the essential political background to the tragically re-ignited fighting in eastern D.R. Congo.
Prunier notes in particular the extremely belligerent and damaging role the RPF government in Rwanda has played in DRC for many years, including the on-again-off-again support it has given to the leader of the current big armed rebellion in eastern DRC, Gen. Laurent Nkunda.
At the end of his article, Prunier writes:

    Why do we see such zigzagging on Nkunda’s part? Mostly because there is not a single coherent policy in Kigali to either support or disown him. It depends on the fluctuation of the political atmosphere there… Since the well-organised electoral “victories” of the RPF [in Rwanda]… there is no Hutu opposition worth the name. Just mentioning such a term is labeled “divisionism” and can get you twenty years in jail. So the political game is played among Tutsi. And the Tutsi do not agree on how to deal with the Congo in general and with Laurent Nkunda in particular.
    Some, like President Kagame himself, want to put the past behind them, develop Rwanda along extremely modernistic lines and turn the country into the Singapore of Africa. But others do not believe in such a possibility and still see the Congo as a mineral mother-lode waiting to be exploited; they include some of Kagame’s closest associates such as the semi-exiled ambassador Kayumba Nyamwasa and army chief-of-staff James Kabarebe…
    The outcome of the United States presidential election on 4 November 2008 is an encouragement for the latter group. After all, it was the Africanists around Bill Clinton (who are now Barack Obama’s men and women) who supported the Kigali invasion of the DR Congo while it was Republican secretary of state Colin Powell who brought it to a halt in 2001. Have the Democrats changed their views on the region or do they still believe in the fiction that Rwanda only intervenes in the Congo in order to keep the ugly génocidaires at bay? In any case the situation in the DRC is now more serious than it has been at any point since the signature of the 2002 peace agreement.
    But does it actually mean the situation has returned to that of 1998, and the DR Congo is about to explode into another civil war? Probably not. Why? Because there are several fundamental differences:
    * Rwanda, even if it is involved, is involved at a marginal and contradictory level .
    * in 1998, pro-Kigali elements controlled large segments of the Forces Armées Congolaises (FAC), the then Congolese national army. The initial onslaught was carried out through an internal rebellion of the armed forces. Not so today. Nkunda controls only an army of unofficial militiamen
    * in 1998 the regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila was very weak, hardly legitimate and did not have any serious international support. Today his son Joseph Kabila is strongly supported by the internal community after overseeing a flawed but clearly democratic election
    * the Congolese economy was at the time in complete disarray while today it is only in poor shape, with possibilities of picking up
    * President Kagame could count on the almost unlimited sympathy of the world which felt guilty for its neglect during the genocide. Not so today. His moral credibility has been seriously damaged by the horrors his troops committed in the DR Congo during 1998-2002 and his political standing is increasingly being questioned, both by legal action going back to the genocide period (reflected in the French indictment and Frankfurt arrest) and by his electoral “triumphs” (which are a throwback to the worst days of fake African political unanimity)
    * the diplomatic context, reflected in the current visit to the region of the United Nations envoy (and Nigeria’s former president) Olusegun Obasanjo, is more favourable to negotiation
    * In 1998 there was no United Nations peacekeeping force in eastern DR Congo. If the international community decides to straighten out its act, Monuc could make the difference.

I am glad to see that even such a seasoned old pro as Prunier thinks there is some hope that MONUC might make a real difference to the situation in Congo. I certainly hope so. But I largely share the misgivings he expresses about the pro-RPF sympathies of those who seem likely to emerge as important figures in the next US administration.
Another very significant aspect of the present fighting in DRC is the fact that– as I had forgotten, but Prunier reminded me– Laurent Nkunda is an indicted war criminal, having been indicted by the DRC government for a 2002 incident in Kisangani in which more than 160 persons were summarily executed. (Prunier wrote, mistakenly, that Nkunda had been indicted by the ICC. But it is Nkunda’s chief of staff, Bosco Ntaganda, who has been indicted by the ICC.)
To a certain extent, then, the situation in eastern DRC might well mirror that in northern Uganda, where the issuing and pursuit of criminal indictments against leaders of insurgent forces makes the conclusion of a working peace agreement that much harder– if not, actually, impossible so long as the indictments are outstanding.
I could note, too, that the northern Uganda situation is very closely linked to that in eastern DRC, since the bulk of Joseph Kony’s Ugandan-insurgent force, the LRA, is currently holed up in the rain forests of northeastern DRC, just a few hundred kilometres north of the spot where Nkunda is creating his current havoc.
Bottom line on all the many conflicts roiling the central-Afircan interior these days: the governments and peoples involved and the powerful nations of the world all need to get together on a stabilization and socio-economic reconstruction plan for all these countries that aims at saving and improving the lives of their peoples, including through the provision of effective and accountable mechanisms to ensure public security, ending all the outstanding (and often inter-linked) conflicts in a “fair enough” way, and extensive investment in DDR activities.
Memo to the incoming Obama-ites: There is NO military “solution” to any of these conflicts! Don’t even think that supporting the continued militarization of central African societies will bring anything other than continued atrocities and carnage.

Operation Enduring Failure

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old. –Rudyard Kipling
It’s been seven years since the initiation of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, what’s going on? Well, it’s certainly enduring. The Taliban government has been overthrown and replaced, but it’s not going well, nobody’s yet declared “mission accomplished” and apparently Afghanistan has become even more important to the US.
President-elect Obama, during his visit to Afghanistan, said that United States needs to focus on Afghanistan in its battle against terrorism.

    “The Afghan government needs to do more. But we have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent here in Afghanistan. And I believe this has to be our central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism.”

“Precarious and urgent” — the enemy is at the gates, according to Obama, in the “battle against terrorism.” Obama has obviously drunk the endless “war on terorism” Kool-Aid. When one starts with wrong assumptions one’ll never be successful. It’d be Bush redux. Okay, more on that in the next piece, now back to Afghanistan.
A draft report by American intelligence agencies has concluded that Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires, is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document.
And the International Herald Tribune agrees:

    This has been the deadliest year for NATO forces and Afghan forces in Afghanistan since the invasion in late 2001, as Taliban insurgents have attacked persistently, in particular with ambushes and roadside bombs. The offensive has severely curtailed efforts by NATO and the government to expand their control from towns into the countryside.
    As the summer fighting dragged on, it became clear that 19,000 foreign troops deployed in the southern provinces, alongside thousands more Afghan soldiers and police officers, were in a stalemate with the insurgents, as one senior NATO commander put it.

Continue reading “Operation Enduring Failure”

Gaza at crisis point

On Thursday, November 13, the UN agency UNRWA announced that because of Israel’s continued tight closure of the border with Gaza, it would have to stop the distribution of basic foodstuffs on which fully half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people have long been forced to rely.
The Gaza-Israel border has also, over the past ten days, seen an escalation of military action between the two sides. Between November 6 and 12, Israeli armed forces killed four Palestinians, injured seven more. Rockets launched by Hamas against Israel injured one elderly Israeli woman.
Of course, the armed actions by each side also sowed terror among the members of the communities targeted.
These armed actions by both sides seem to undermine the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire that went into operation between Israel and Hamas back in June– though not all observers agree about that (see below.)
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has continued to perpetuate the US-originated myth that what is happening between Israel and Gaza is only Palestinian armed action versus Israeli blocading. In that statement Ban quite ignored the fact that Israel has also been engaging in armed action along that border, and has thereby played its part in fueling the cycle of direct armed violence while it has also continued to perpetrate extreme ‘structural’ violence against all the Palestinians of Gaza.
Ban’s subservience to Washington on the Palestinian question still seems quite extreme. I did, however, note what might have been one small glimmer of hope: When he was in Egypt on November 8-9 he met with leading representative of the other three members of the “Quartet”: Russia’s foreign minister, the US Secretary of State; and no fewer than three leading representatives of the EU (Solana, Ferrero-Walodner, and Kouchner.) At the press conference the Quartet reps held after their meeting, it was Ban who got to read out their statement.
Does this mean that leadership within the Quartet is quietly passing from Washington to the UN? I certainly hope so! It wouldn’t be a day too late. Unlike the US, the UN has the full weight and legitimacy of the international community behind it in its actions towards the Middle East. Its work is fully based on international norms and is not biased towards any one country in the region.
Regarding the status of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire, meanwhile, Haaretz’s Amos Harel and Ami Issacharoff write in Sunday’s paper that:

    As things looked Saturday night, it seems Hamas can confidently tack on a few advantage points recently accumulated in its conflict with Israel in the Gaza Strip. The massive barrage of Qassam rockets (as well as, in recent days, Katyushas and Grads) completely removed from Palestinian discourse criticism of the organization, which recently left reconciliation talks with Fatah.
    Hamas has successfully conveyed the message that it has overpowered Israel and will soon be able to return to the cease-fire [tahadiyeh] from an advantageous position.
    On Saturday night, after 24 hours without rockets, it seems that chances are growing of the cease-fire going back into effect. Still, in light of similar estimates being proven false in recent days, it is still too early to determine whether Hamas will remain loyal to its word and impose discipline on its members and the smaller Palestinian factions.

For its part, the Chinese news agency Xinhua now carries a “news analysis” piece datelined Gaza November 16, that quotes a number of Palestinian analysts who judge,

    that the aim of the recent wave of fighting between Israel and Hamas following four months of complete calm, is to test each other’s power in case the truce, which expires on Dec. 19, was not extended.
    “I believe that both Hamas and Israel are interested in keeping the truce in the Gaza Strip because the last four months of clam had served both Hamas and Israel’s interests,” said Jamal Abu Halima, a Palestinian academic from Gaza.

I am intrigued to note the degree to which Xinhua has beefed up its English-language coverage of Middle East affairs in recent years. Check out their latest offerings on this portal page.
I take this as an indication that China’s CP rulers are investing quite a lot in trying to understand the region much better– as well to educate their own public about it, and to disseminate a made-in-China version of the news from the Middle East to a broader global public.
Sounds like a possible precursor to deeper diplomatic involvement in the affairs of the region, don’t you think? Let’s hope so. All the non-US members of the UN’s veto-wielding P-5 group need to start taking a lot more active responsibility for the peace of the whole Middle East.

Use the Detroit bailout to transform US transit

The Democrats’ campaign to win a quick bailout of the US’s Big Three, Detroit-based automakers seems to have stalled. That’s a good thing, since the only kind of substantive conditionality they’ve been mentioning so far is that the car companies should retool more of their production lines to produce “hybrid” or “flex-fuel” private cars.
That is ways too incremental and tiny of a change! These companies should undergo a much deeper transformation– so that between them they can become a hub for innovation and production related to a new, nation-spanning network of high-speed trains and other visionary transit solutions.
Thinking that turning to a mildly re-engineered version of the privately owned automobile will provide any kind of a longterm solution to the country’s transportation woes is short-term thinking indeed. The nation that is economically and politically successful in 2050 will be one that has an efficient, multi-layered mass transit system that produces the minimal level of greenhouse gas emissions and offers a rich quality of life to all citizens.
There is no way that any version of privately owned automobiles can do that. The reliance that this country has long had on privately owned cars– and the concomitant degradation of its mass-transit structure over many decades– has resulted not only in unacceptably high levels of emissions of noxious chemicals and reliance on foreign oil, but also in massive economic inefficiencies and the active exclusion of all non-owners and non-drivers of cars from full economic and social inclusion. These latter costs are hard to quantify, but they are certainly substantial.
We need a strong and compelling vision of what a fully “inclusive” and efficient national transit system would look like– and we also need a huge amount of investment to be poured into realizing it. Exactly similar to what Pres. Eisenhower did with the “interstate highway system” back in the 1950s– but this time a vision based on mass transit, not on the private auto.
Luckily, much of the technology for a national high-speed train (HST) system already exists, since such systems have been well developed in both Japan and Western Europe.
Some people have argued that the US population is too widely dispersed to allow a national passenger rail system ever to become profitable. Perhaps that is so. But taxpayer subsidies of a state-of-the-art national HST system would be a very worthwhile investment, bringing dividends in many areas of national life… Including, if this system is linked to significantly upgraded transit systems in all major urban areas, a great improvement in the quality of life of all citizens, whether they currently own and rely on cars or not, and in the general parameters of their social, economic, and political inclusion.
Such a system would also, if well designed, do a lot to revive areas of the middle of the country that have become economically depressed due to the seemingly irresistible pull of investment and people to the two coasts.
Regarding the “quality of life” question, here are some quick vignettes from me:

    1. A couple of years ago, we invited an Indian friend who was doing a term as a visiting professor in Winchester, Virginia, to come eat Thanksgiving dinner with us in Charlottesville, some 100 miles away. Dr. Prasad had no car and does not drive. I blithely suggested he check out the long-distance bus options to get to us. Winchester is the county seat of Frederick County and has a population of 24,000. But it has no long-distance bus service to anywhere else! No wonder if Prasad was feeling a little isolated and trapped there. But how about the thousands of longterm local residents who also, for whatever reason (epilepsy, vision problems, other disabilities, low income), do not drive? How isolated must they feel?
    2. Just yesterday, I was able to get great long-distance bus service from New York to Washington DC. I sat on a comfortable bus, worked online for five hours using its wireless internet, and arrived near my apartment in Washington DC, feeling quite refreshed.
    3. In 2000, four members of our family paid a three-week visit to a family of Japanese friends who over the years have scattered themselves into various different cities around Japan. We traveled nearly wholly by train, using ‘bullet’ inter-city trains that connected handily with the very well-run (and bilingually signed) local train systems in all the cities we visited. One day, our Japanese friend Masaru, a big-league tech entrepreneur, was going to play golf: He went to the golf course by train having previously sent his clubs ahead of him via one of the many companies that provide just exactly this service…
    4. When my daughter and her partner (now spouse) were living in Detroit I went to visit and we decided to all go to Chicago for a short weekend break. I booked us tickets on the Amtrak inter-city service. The train was the usual run-down, out-dated rolling-stock that’s all that Amtrak can afford, and I recall it took the train seven or eight hours to trundle slowly along the 280 miles that separate the two cities…
    5. Over the past 18 months, I’ve been trying to live as car-free a life as possible. Having exchanged the car I previously owned for a scooter back in 2006, earlier this year I gave that away, too. Now I come and go between Washington DC and Charlottesville using either Amtrak, the Greyhound buses, or car-pooling with friends; and in each city I have a bike. I know I’m lucky because I have a few back-ups when I absolutely need one. Bill the spouse still has his car, mainly in C’ville, and I use that with some frequency instead of always biking or bussing round town there; and I’ve rented a car maybe four times over the past year for the inter-city travel, when the Greyhound/Amtrak schedules didn’t work well for me. But still, being car-free has been a real pleasure. No need to worry about and pay for all those things car-owners worry about! Connected to a vibrant urban lifestyle instead of sitting in traffic unable to work and getting frustrated!

All of which is to say that re-imagining (and then rebuilding) the US transportation system as one that is based overwhelmingly on a speedy, efficient, and inclusive mass transit system is a project that can bring tremendous quality-of-life gains to most Americans and need not be looked at in terms of the “loss” of the “personal freedom” that car-ownership allegedly brings.
Freedom??? Freedom to do what? To sit stewing in a traffic jam tied to the task of driving but umnable to get anywhere for a good portion of each day? To emit unequaled amounts of pollutants into the air that everyone around the whole world breathes? To live a life of privilege insulated by the automakers’ glass and chrome from the reality of the lives of others– including those others who are excluded from the car-ownership “dream'”
No, I prefer the freedom of sitting in a mass-transit vehicle being driven by a professional while I read, write, work on the internet, or (if I choose) chat to my fellow-citizens. And yes, there would still be private vehicle “back-ups” for this lifestyle. But they need not be privately owned: Taxis, car rental companies, paratransit systems for the differently abled, and car-share companies like Zipcar should all be part of what is planned for. And yes, these supplementary car-based systems should all use be using the most fuel-efficient and emissions-free technology available.
But if the collections of talented and hard-working engineers, production people, and planners who form the backbone of “Detroit” are to be bailed out massively by the US taxpayers at this time, then surely we should do that on the basis of a National Transit Plan for 2050 that is visionary, far-reaching, inspiring, and attainable– and that doesn’t keep Americans still hog-tied to the socially divisive shibboleth of the private automobile.

Casino capitalists in the brainwash-Iraqis biz

I have long maintained (e.g. here, PDF) that two of the major goals of all oppressive powers that undertake campaigns of mass incarceration is to use that incarceration both as a means of active political blackmail against the families and communities of those detained (= quite illegal hostage-taking) and to use the control over detainees to brainwash them directly into some form of subservience, or otherwise to break their will.
‘Twas ever thus. Including in all imperial-style campaigns of “counter-insurgency” from the beginnings of imperial/colonial history until today. As in the occupied Palestinian territories (more than 7,000 men detained without trial by Israel) and in Iraq (around 17,000 held without trial by the US, plus thousands more by the Iraqi government), and Afghanistan.
Now, Nick Mottern of Consumers for Peace and Bill Rau have done some excellent spadework investigating the corporate structure of some of the “contractors” (i.e. mercenaries) doing the brainwashing work in the massive US-run detention system in Iraq. They report that the detention system inside Iraq that’s run by the US military’s “Task Force 134” operates a religious brainwashing program that employs 60 claimed “imams”– and that these imams are hired and supervised by a wholly owned subsidiary of Global Innovation (GI) Partners LLP, a California- and London-based private equity firm.
Among those investing in GI Partners are the pension systems run for employees of both the State of California (CALPERS) and Oregon, they report.
The “imams in the detention centers” program looks eerily similar to the way the British in Kenya used Anglican indoctrination in a long-sustained campaign to break the nationalist wills of the Kenyan independence activists known as the Mau-Mau, back in the 1950s. In the horrendous network of detention camps that the British ran then, detainees were humiliated and very seriously– often lethally– mistreated; meanwhile, they were promised better treatment or perhaps even “release” if only they’d abandon their “primitive” indigenous religions and take oaths of conversion into the Anglican faith.
Of course, all such forms of coercive brainwashing is completely illegal under international law, which guarantees the freedom of religion, religious understanding and practice, and conscience, to all persons. (It was illegal in the 1950, too. But that didn’t stop the British from practicing it.)
So now, Mottern and Rau have connected the dots of the story of how the restless forces of casino capitalism that are ever circling the globe in search of the next generator of the hyper-profits they seek, regardless of at whose expense, have met up with the world of mercenary brainwashing, in an allegedly “Islamic” religious context.
Investors, including those running state-employee pension funds, should dissociate themselves from companies that make profits in such a disreputable way.
(One final note: Human Rights Watch, and reportedly also Amnesty International, recently called on the US government not to hand control over its Iraqi detainees over to the Iraqi government under any of the bilateral security agreements it concludes. HRW had previously documented some serious abuses being committed inside the Iraqi-run detention centers. But HRW has done pitifully little to challenge the US’s own extensive– and extremely coercive– use of detention without trial in Iraq. In its latest press release, it calls on the US government only to “ensure that detainees are not in danger of being tortured [by Iraqi jailers] by establishing a mechanism that would provide each detainee with a genuine opportunity to contest a transfer to Iraqi custody, and by verifying the conditions of Iraqi detention facilities to which they could be transferred, through inspections whose results are made public.” Why on earth don’t they call more directly on the US to release all those detainees against whom it is unable to bring any credible charges of malfeasance? Why do they seem to concur so much with the US military’s view that sometimes it’s kinda necessary to detain large numbers of people without trial?)

G-20: When ‘Seven’ just isn’t enough

Pres. G.W. Bush may, as two NYT reporters wrote today, have been the first to insist that this weekend’s economic summit in Washington should include the leaders of all the “Group of 20” nations, not just the “G-7” or “G-8” that France’s Pres. Sarkozy originally suggested. But regardless of its authorship, it was an excellent idea.
The G-7 comprises the US, four European nations, Canada, and Japan. The G-8 (which may or may not be moribund at this point, after the Ossetian war of last August) includes those seven plus Russia. The G-20 includes those eight plus: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and the EU.
Given the scale and the unequally distributed effects of the present crisis, including these additional heads of state in the current confab makes a lot of sense. The effects of the financial crisis have been the greatest on economies that had deregulated their financial systems and substantially opened them up to contagion by western-originated toxins before the onset of the crisis last year. As I noted here at the end of October, one analysis of the macroeconomic vulnerability of various “developing” nations to the effects of the crisis showed that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (aka the BRIC countries) all had relatively low vulnerability. That is just one reason why many analysts are now, quite correctly, saying that if the global economy as a whole is to be spared the worst effects of the current crisis, then this will have to be achieved through the leadership efforts of the non-G-7 countries.
The authors of today’s NYT article give some indications of the degree to which US supremacy of the world system has declined under Bush. They quote Adam S. Posen, described delphically as someone “who advises foreign governments on economic coordination” as saying of Bush:

    He’s going to be much more the host and much less the chairman than he realizes… He’s going to be providing the snacks and the venue and making sure everybody’s comfortable, but he is not going to be driving the agenda; that’s the reality. The agenda-setting is with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy and Hu Jintao.

Actually, contra Posen, I’d say that it will be Hu and all his fellow leaders of the BRIC countries who will be driving the agenda along with Brown and perhaps Sarkozy. Both Britain and France have been badly affected by the financial crisis.
It was apparently also Bush who insisted that the G-20 meeting be held in Washington rather than New York, which was Sarko’s original suggestion.
That might not have been such a good idea.
I suppose Bush’s original aim was to try to demonstrate that Washington DC is the still the center of the universe, rather than Turtle Bay, NY, home of the nefarious (in his view) United Nations…
But I think the main effect of his decision will be to demonstrate to everyone concerned just how lame (or dead) of a duck he has become in his own national capital.
Doubtless all the foreign leaders flocking to DC will be most eager of all to connect with anyone who has the ear of the uber-charismatic president-elect, rather than paying much attention to GWB.
The O-man, for his part, is sitting pretty in Chicago, in furtherance of his quite appropriate insistence that the country only has one president at a time, and that the current mess the economy’s in still sits firmly on GWB’s doorstep, not his.
Obama is sending two unofficial “envoys” to the meeting, in the shape of Madeleine Albright and former GOP Congressman Rep. Jim Leach. The choice of those two throwbacks to the 1990s is pretty sad. Leach, in particular, was one of the named authors of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act– the legislation that abolished New Deal-era reforms of the federal banking system.
Oh well, they’re only “unofficial.” The Obama administration still hasn’t been officially born, remember.
Meanwhile, this weekend, watch for the degree to which the BRIC leaders– particularly Pres. Hu– start getting taken much more seriously as leading voices in global economic governance.

R. Emanuel apologizes for dad’s racist comments

Today, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who will be Barack Obama’s chief of staff in the White House, called up the president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), former Congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar, and apologized for the racist, anti-Arab remarks his father made when his appointment to the future Obama White House was announced. (HT: Bob Spencer.)
The ADC’s website tells us that,

    In the phone call, Congressman Emanuel said, “From the fullness of my heart, I personally apologize on behalf of my family and me. These are not the values upon which I was raised or those of my family.” During the phone call, Emanuel added, it is unacceptable to make remarks such as these against any ethnic or religious group.

Well, let’s hope he was not raised on anti-Arab values, though his father’s long history in the terrorist Irgun movement makes it quite possible that he was.
Still, the apology is extremely welcome. It gives acknowledgment that Emanuel’s father’s remarks were indeed offensive and quite inappropriate– something that some commenters here at JWN had tried to disprove.
Kudos to ADC for having raised the issue directly with Rahm Emanuel (with a ‘cc’ copy to Barack Obama, too.)
Let’s hope this whole incident, occurring at such a seminal point in the formation of Obama’s governing team, has succeeded in raising the awareness of everyone in the incoming administration to the wide incidence of anti-Arab racism in many portions of American society; to the need to include in the highest reaches of the US government representatives of all the ethnicities that make up the American melting point, including Arab-Americans– and to the fact that the United States’ national interests are not, indeed, always co-terminous with those of whatever government happens to be in power at any given point in Rahm Emanuel’s father’s homeland, Israel.
I’d just like to make one final point here– concerning the mainstream media in the US. I have found no call in any mainstream publication, prior to today, for Rahm Emanuel to distance himself in any way from his father’s horrible utterance. Just imagine how different the situation would have been if the father of a non-Jewish chief of staff had, on learning of his son’s appointment, made some equally hateful and derogatory statement about Jews. The New York Times editorial page– and all other major media in the US– would have been abuzz with the issue!
But an expression of anti-Arab racism gets nothing like the same treatment. In fact it is only today, after Rahm Emanuel did the right thing, that the US MSM have paid any real attention to the issue at all…