US probing Russian Red Lines in Georgia

Two interesting recent posts from Wired’s Noah Schachtman. In this one, Sept. 5, he cites this London Times report as saying that last week, US/NATO military people managed to connect Georgia’s surviving air-defense missile radars to NATO’s own broader air surveillance system.
This would seem to challenge or contradict what I wrote here recently about the US having decided, for now, not to give Georgia any military aid. More on that, below.
But was what happened last week between the Georgian and NATO a/d systems a “re-connect”, rather than a “connect”?
Schachtman notes that back last December, Reuters had already quoted Georgia’s defense minister as saying that “Georgia has plugged into NATO’s integrated air defence radar system.”
It makes a significant difference whether what happened last week was a connect or a re-connect. If the latter, then that presumably means that the Georgian radars were still “connected” to the NATO system back on August 7/8… Which would mean a couple of things:

    (1) Having been thusly connected didn’t actually have the effect of saving the Georgians from getting creamed in the August war. It would even less effect now, since a large portion of Georgia’s ground radars have been destroyed in the interim.
    (2) Somewhere in the archives of NATO’s air surveillance system there almost certainly lie some pretty acurate records of who did what to whom, with what precise timing, back at the start of the war. (That’s a politically important matter, since Pres. Saakashvili continues to claim he was only “responding” to a prior Russian attack rather than– as most of the evidence seems to suggest– actually starting the war himself.)

Anyway, if NATO did indeed (re-)connect Georgia’s a/d radars with the NATO system last week, that’s the most I’ve heard about anywhere regarding western nations having given any concrete military aid to Saak since the war. So it looks as though Washington may be cautiously testing Moscow’s Red Lines regarding rearming Saak’s Georgia.
I actually judge that in Moscow, having Georgia plugged into the NATO system may not, on its own, be seen as strategically disadvantageous, as noted in point #1 above. Indeed, in a situation of gradually mending/evolving Russia-US ties, the “transparency” offered by the plug-in, as mentioned in point #2 above, could be seen as part of a broader regime of reciprocal confidence (re-)building in the region.
Wouldn’t that be a nice thought?
The London Times writer, Michael Evans, made no reference to the idea that what happened last week may have been a re-connection, rather than a first connection. But he did say this about the US (and UK) policy on the question of rearming Georgia, more broadly:

    [NATO] sources said that proposals were currently under discussion to fly Nato Awacs over the region, although they emphasised that no decision had yet been taken on such a development, which would be viewed as provocative by Moscow.
    As part of efforts to develop closer military ties with Georgia the US is also planning to set up a trust fund into which alliance members can donate money to assist Georgian military forces. “It’s basically Nato passing the hat around,” an official said.
    A Nato team of specialists has visited Tbilisi to find out what Georgia needs to rebuild its forces. Washington dismissed the claim by Moscow that the US warships sent to Georgia to offload tonnes of humanitarian aid had been delivering arms secretly.
    “The thrust of Nato’s efforts at present is to help Georgia get through the winter, preventing Russia from strangling the country. We’ve got to try to keep the democracy in the country going, but there’s no talk about accelerating Georgia’s application to join Nato as a member state,” one official said.
    A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence in London said: “In light of recent events, Georgia needs time to reflect on requirements for the future. We intend to provide assistance to Georgia and will consider requests for assistance in discussion and co-ordination with our Nato and EU partners.”

The discussion and indirect ‘signaling’ between ‘west’ and ‘east’ continue. Doubtless on the agenda are a whole basket off issues, not just Georgia. The other agenda items surely include:

    * Iran
    * Afghanistan
    * European energy supplies.

Regarding the latter two of these issues, as I wrote Sept. 4:

    Moscow might have large parts of western Europe over a barrel. But [regarding the US/NATO project in Afghanistan] it has the US over a railhead.

And then, there’s Iran, a policy “challenge” for the US and its European allies in which the US’s hawkishly anti-Iran position has been considerably undermined by Saakashvili’s adventurism…
The story continues to evolve.

Women discuss Sarah Palin

So I was at the checkout counter in our great locally owned foodstore here in Charlottesville this morning, and I bumped into Deborah McDowell, a chaired prof in the University of Virginia’s rightly lauded English department. Debbie is an uber-talented African-American woman of commanding presence. After we said hi, I remarked how depressing it has been trying to deal with the emergence of Sarah Palin. She said she completely agreed. And as we stood there continuing to talk about the outrageous way Palin and other Repubs laid into Obama last week, the checkout clerk (female, white, over 40) joined in too.
We walked on out of the store. Debbie was asking, in her great English prof’s voice, “just how stupid can the American people be if they fall for this nonsense, after all that we’ve seen from Bush for eight years, and they elect just a continuation of the same thing… ?” Another woman, whom neither of us knew, (white, around 40?) walked over, cappuccino cup in hand, and joined in. She asked a question of fact– “Isn’t it true, though, that the Democrats have been in charge in Congress for the past two years?– that we tried to address. Later, I said one of the things I really resented was how Sarah had explicitly, from the get-go, tried to expropriate the feminist “mantle” from Hillary Clinton, whereas the policies she and McCain espouse on issues of particular relevance to women, including but certainly not limited to the right to choose to abort an early-term fetus, are deeply, deeply, anti-female.
Our new friend agreed completely with that, and said that– though she’s a little fed up with the raucousness of some of the Obama supporters around here– she does intend to vote for him. Because of the way she had asked the question at the beginning, she struck me as a thoughtful person.
All in all, an interesting conversation. Not a representative sample of anything, but indicative that there are still plenty of women around who have not been bamboozled by all the evident flair, the feistiness, and fol-de-rol of Sarah Palin.

New vistas– personal, and blog-related

I haven’t blogged for, what, three days now. Which is fine. Sometimes the posts come thick and fast, sometimes there’s a gap. I don’t feel I need to blog with any particular frequency; and anyway, the few weeks right after August 8 were pretty intense and, I think, fruitful for the blog.
These past few days I’ve been doing some other things. Some things with my beloved Quaker meeting, which is always good to do because it keeps me grounded. Some thinking about longterm strategic directions for the blog and myself. More on that below… And a few things connected with the next big development in my family/personal life: which is the arrival (G-d willing) of my daughter Leila’s first child– our first grandchild– in early November.
Leila and her husband Greg live in New York (Brooklyn), so I’m hoping to be there with them as much as possible in the first weeks of the newborn’s life. I am completely thrilled they’re having this baby! It’s bringing back a lot of memories of when I gave birth to Leila and her slightly older brother, Tarek, in Beirut in the late 1970s. Back then, my sister Hilly came from England to help out. And okay, my then-husband and I had a wonderful live-in nursemaid, too. She made the post-delivery weeks a lot easier than they are for most young parents in the US or other western countries.
Having a baby and dealing with all the adjustments involved are huge challenges. The endless chains of broken nights are what I chiefly recall. Those, and suddenly this sense that, as the mother, you’re basically in servitude for a period of time to this small person who can’t even articulate her or his needs or desires… So scary! So as the parent, you suddenly need to learn all these completely new skills of ‘reading’ your baby’s needs… It’s quite amazing that any of us ever survived this process (as parents or, long before that, as babies.)
But my experience of having done this, like that of just about all the parents I know, has been truly amazing. I have learned so much– about the world, about the human condition, about myself, about relationships in general, about what is truly valuable in life (and oh, also, I suppose about baby-care and childrearing)… Simply by having hung in there and raised these three young people, now aged 23-30: all of them compassionate, well-grounded, talented, and a huge amount of fun to be with.
American society doesn’t give anything like enough support to the parents and caregivers of young children. Compared with anywhere in Europe, the situation here is brutal. I imagine that even in many low-income countries, women get more support from society as a whole. For example, Leila is a teacher in the New York City school system, where the teachers’ union is quite strong. But even with this allegedly “strong” contract the union has won for them over the years, she’s not entitled to any paid maternity leave. And children’s (cash) benefits, such as many European governments give to mothers as a matter of course?… Or the services of a home-visiting ‘district nurse’ or health visitor in the crucial post-partum days? Fuggedaboutit. We are truly in the Dark Ages here. No wonder that in some American inner cities, the infant and child mortality rates are on a par with some very low-income countries.
… So I’ll be in New York quite a lot in the weeks after the baby arrives. Obviously, the babe will make her/his own decisions about the timing. Before that (I hope), I’ll be on the west coast for much of October, doing various events to promote my Re-engage! book, and I have a couple of events on the east coast (New Jersey and Delaware) later in September. Check this page on the book’s website for details of those.
Meantime, I’ve been doing some thinking about future directions for, in particular, this blog. You know, I’ve been publishing it for 5.5 years now… A total of nearly 3,000 posts… Some of them, in retrospect, still really good, some of them somewhat scattershot or idiosyncratic.
To some degree, the whole blog has been idiosyncratic from the very start… From the day in early January 2003 when Tarek said, “You know, mom, you really ought to start writing a blog;” and I said, “A what?” … And he got me started reading Josh Marshall’s blog, which has gone from strength to strength since then, and Juan Cole’s blog, and, and, and… And a couple of weeks later he got me started on my own blog… ‘Just World News’: nice name, huh? We started out with Blogger software; he shifted me to Movable Type (where I found I’d picked the same template as Jonathan Edelstein)… and I’ve been married to writing JWN ever since.
So now (drumroll… ) I’ve decided to try to take JWN to a whole new level.
You know, for just about all these past 5.5 years I’ve thought of JWN as “something on the side”, or “a drafting notebook”, or something a little like (ghastly word, this), a “hobby”. But really, for a long time now, it’s been a whole lot more than that. It has become an important part of my professional and personal identity.
Bloggo ergo sum, as Descartes would have blogged if he could have torn himself away from contemplating dripping candles and inventing dualism.
Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But not wholly.
So now I’m going to think about ways to become a whole lot more intentional about what I do here on JWN. I think I want to invest in a re-design, and I know I want to think harder about getting some different kinds of quality content up here. One thing I’m definitely thinking about is interviews with interesting figures in the policy world.
Bill the spouse says I should have photos, videos and audio clips, too. Videos I totally can’t envisage posting (unless I hire someone who can do that for me.) But really, it’s not my comparative advantage. Audio clips maybe I could manage. In conjunction with the interviews, perhaps? And the odd photo or whatever.
Maybe.
But all that stuff takes time. Time that, mostly, I would rather spend writing, thinking, reading, and talking to people. Face it, I’m fundamentally a words person. That’s what I am. But I can make the words better organized, more intentional, more interesting and thought-provoking, more useful, and better displayed. That’s what I want to do.
I also want to figure out a way to have this baby blog generate a bit of income for us. I don’t need a lot, but some would be nice.
So readers and admirers of JWN, here is your chance to have input into helping to revision JWN. I am still right at the start of the process. Please tell me, either privately or in the open comments section here, any thoughts or suggestions you have on:

    * What changes you’d like to see regarding the content of the blog;
    * Ditto, the visual or organizational design;
    * A good, affordable web-designer I could work with on the re-design;
    * Your reactions to my suggestions on the blog, above;
    * Any ideas you have for potential ‘strategic partnerships’ I might explore between JWN and institutions or individual philanthropists (yourself? anyone you know?) who might want to support the blog financially, or sponsor it in some other way…

Your comments and suggestions will be great. This whole revisioning thing may take a bit of time. In the meantime, JWN will continue to be the opinionated, generally well-informed, visionary, but often quirky blog you’ve come to know and (I hope) love. Watch for some more political posts tomorrow.

The longterm status of Georgia: Challenges ahead

Georgia’s US- and Israeli-built armed forces got pulverized by the Russians during last month’s short war over South Ossetia. The Bush administration has promised $1 billion to the Georgians in reconstruction aid. So far, administration spokespeople have been at pains to stress that this aid is for humanitarian relief and reconstruction, and no mention has yet been made of the idea of rebuilding Georgia’s military.
The Bush administration’s actions during the entire Georgia crisis until now have been marked by a degree of caution and risk-avoidance that, in the circumstances, is entirely appropriate. Remember the reports about how the 100 or so military trainers the US had in Georgia at the time of the war were immediately told to change into civvies, stash any weapons they had out of sight, and sit out the war hanging round hotel swimming pools?
So why did the Bushists behave like that? Three reasons. First, they had no spare forces– their own, or forces of ‘allied’ nations– to send in. Second, they didn’t want to get drawn into a direct mano-a-mano with another Big (and also nuclear-armed) Power. Third, remember that the Russians have agreed to help out NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan by allowing non-military supplies to be shipped to NATO’s forces there through Russia…. So Moscow might have large parts of western Europe over a barrel. But it has the US over a railhead.
For now, the war has died down… I’m assuming that Pres. Saakashvili is desperately eager to rebuild his armed forces. There would be a number of logistical problems regarding how the US (or its Israeli surrogate) might undertake any rearming of Georgia. Ships through the Black Sea? Airlifts? Overland through Turkey?
Those problems could be solved, I suppose. But it’s the political problems that are still limiting all foreign reconstruction aid to non-military items.
So far, the call to “re-arm Georgia!” has not become any kind of a big issue in the US election campaign. (Imagine how different things might be if we had a Democrat in the White House.) But the Georgia situation has not been anywhere near resolved yet, in any durable political way. If the present status quo remains in place, I suppose it is possible a sort of “Finlandization by default” may emerge there.
However, reaching a formal, negotiated agreement on Georgia’s status– one that’s agreed to by all relevant parties including Russia, and that also resolves the currently contested status of the two now-seceded regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia– is far preferable. Absent such an agreement, all of Georgia, including the two seceded regions, would be unable to do the kind of long-term economic planning and investment that made Finlandization into a palatable and workable deal for Finland itself. Absent that agreement, all of Georgia will remain mired in the kind of directionless limbo that seems to mark Kosovo to this day.
I think I asked this before. But where in the world is Ban Ki-Moon?

Text of the draft Iraq-US SOFA

On August 31, Al-Sharq al-Awsat published a leaked version of the nearly completed text US-Iraqi security (SOFA) agreement. That text was dated August 4. Raed Jarrar of the American Friends Service Committee worked over the weekend providing a full translation into English, which you can read on AFSC’s website, here.
Great work, Raed!
Yesterday, Raed also blogged a translation of an important interview with Iraqi parliament Speaker Dr. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani explaining that the Iraqi parliament must ratify any such agreement– but why, in fact, it is quite unable to do that at this time.
So there is a sort of unreal aspect to all the discussion of clauses and sub-clauses in the draft “text” of the treaty. (As I have been arguing here for a long time now. Most recently, here.)
Indeed, the Iraqis side has had the “upper hand” in the negotiations for at least the past 2-3 months. All the talk in the US political elite about the US being able to ram the US’s “conditions” down the throats of the Iraqis is just that– talk. It has zero basis in reality.
Still, there are a number of mildly interesting points in the August 6 negotiating draft. Most of them come toward the end. And most are the points where lack of agreement is still indicated, rather than agreement.
For example, this:

    Article Twenty Seven
    Contract Validity
    1- This agreement is valid for (…) years unless it is terminated earlier based on a request from either sides or extended with the approval of both sides.

Oops. Is that the John McCain “100 year” agreement– or maybe just a three-month agreement? They haven’t figured that one out yet!
Or this:

    Article Twenty Six
    Targeted times to handover complete security responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces, and withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq
    Iraqi Suggestion: the Iraqi delegation has suggested the following title to this article:
    Transferring security responsibilities to Iraqi authorities, and the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq
    U.S. Suggestion: the U.S. delegation has suggested combining paragraphs 1 and 2 as follows:
    1- Both sides have agreed on the following time targets to handover complete security responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces and the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq:
    A- U.S. combat troops will withdraw from Iraq completely at the latest on (…)
    B- U.S. forces will withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages at latest by June 30, 2009 unless the Iraqi authorities request otherwise.
    Note: the head of the U.S. delegation offered to accept the new title only if their combined paragraph is accepted, and he linked the two as one deal

Plenty of work for the lawyers there, eh? But then, later in Article 26 comes this:

    6- U.S. forces may withdraw from Iraq before the dates indicated in this article if either of the two sides should so request. Both sides recognize the Iraqi government’s sovereign right to request a withdrawal of U.S. forces at anytime.

Article 23 is interesting:

    Article Twenty three
    Extending this agreement to other countries
    1- Iraq may reach an agreement with any other country participating in the Multi-National forces to ask for their help in achieving security and stability in Iraq.
    2- Iraq is permitted to reach an agreement that includes any of the articles mentioned in this agreement with any country or international organization to ask for help in achieving security and stability in Iraq.

I wonder, in the second clause there, if the agreement would allow Iraq to reach a similar kind of agreement with its friendly large neighbor Iran?
… Well, as I note above, there is an unreal air to this whole exercise. I quite agree with Raed when he writes in his blog:

    Politically, the majority of Iraq’s MPs are against signing any agreements with the US as long as the US is occupying Iraq. It’s impossible for the Maliki government to get the approval of a simple majority of MPs, let alone 2/3 majority.
    I think the US government should consider a different type of agreement with Iraq: an agreement for a complete withdrawal that leaves no troops, no mercenaries, and no permanent bases (and no 5,000 employees embassy either.)

Quite right. And just what I’ve been arguing consistently for, for many years now… And devising semi-detailed plans for, too.
One final point. Most Iraqi parliamentarians have been quite forthright in pursuing their rights, as an elected legislative body, to have rights of ratification before any international agreement of such great impact for the country goes into effect. Back in October 2002, the members of the US legislature faced imminent legislative elections and in those circumstances proved themselves easily cowed by a bellicose and overbearing administration… And they simply rolled over and gave the president the widest possible authorization to conduct any kind of operations against Iraq up to and including a full-blown war of invasion and occupation.
Which is how we got to where we are in Iraq, in the first place.
This fall, in the lead-up to yet another momentous round of US elections, let’s hope the members of the US Congress keep their heads and don’t allow themselves to be cowed into giving the president any permissions for either war-making or occupation-prolongation, such as would later turn out to be dangerous traps for our country.

HRW revising its Russian cluster bomb accusations

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch started to step back from the claims it made very loudly last month that during the fighting in Georgia,”Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia, killing at least 11 civilians and injuring dozens.” Those claims were first made August 15, and were repeated in two further public statements issued by the organization, this one on August 21 and this one on September 1. In addition, individual HRW staff members repeated these accusations against Russia– which it claimed were backed up by solid “evidence”– in a number of other signed articles, media appearances, etc.
I blogged here, on September 2, about the flawed nature of the “evidence” HRW had used in its accusations against Russia, and the impact that such accusations can have on raising tensions and galvanizing opinion for war. (Cf., the “Kuwaiti incubator story” of 1991.)
Yesterday’s statement was titled Clarification Regarding Use of Cluster Munitions in Georgia. Referring only to its report of August 21 on this matter, not the earlier August 15 report, it said:

    On August 21, 2008, Human Rights Watch reported a series of attacks with cluster munitions around four towns and villages in Georgia’s Gori district. Human Rights Watch attributed all the strikes to Russian forces, but upon further investigation has concluded that the origin of the cluster munitions found on August 20 in two of the villages – Shindisi and Pkhvenisi – cannot yet be determined.
    …This clarification does not affect Human Rights Watch’s findings on August 15 that Russia used aerial cluster bombs to attack the village of Ruisi and the town of Gori on August 12. Eleven civilians were killed and dozens more injured in these two locations. In Ruisi, Human Rights Watch researchers found submunitions that they identified as PTAB 2.5M, which are known to be in Russia’s arsenal. Human Rights Watch based its findings on visual identification of the submunitions and the cluster bomb carrier in Ruisi, craters typical of submunition impact, and accounts from Georgian victims in both towns, as well as doctors and military personnel. The Russian government has yet to adequately respond to these findings.

What caused HRW to step back from the accusations regarding Shindisi and Pkhvenisi had been, the statement said, communications “from the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (NDRE), based on Human Rights Watch’s photographs.” The NDRE had identified the submunitions in the photographs as “M85 DPICMs, which have not been reported to be part of Russia’s arsenal.”
On August 31, as HRW told us September 1, the government of Georgia informed them that it had had a stockpile of ground rocket-launched cluster munitions that contained M85 submunitions. The Georgian government also told HRW it had used some cluster bombs “during an attack on Russian military forces near the Roki tunnel.” That tunnel is at South Ossetia’s northern border, quite a long way away from Gori.
It occurs to me that one explanation for what HRW’s witnesses in the Gori area saw is that the Russian aircraft might have blown up some of Georgia’s cluster bombs stockpiled in the area.. In HRW’s August 21 statement, and in the latest “Clarification”, the eye-witnesses to the attacks are quoted as saying that “Russian air strikes on Georgian armored units located near Shindisi and Pkhvenisi were followed by extensive cluster munition strikes that killed at least one civilian and injured another in Shindisi.” Would this description not be consonant with (a) the Russians having bombed ground targets in these areas– hopefully only legitimate military targets, and then (b) some of those strikes, hitting units equipped with cluster bombs, had caused secondary explosion of those cluster bomb munitions?
I looked at the video of one such attack that HRW has on its site, and this could be an explanation of what I was seeing.
If this is what happened– and I would welcome any comments on that from experts– then it’s very tragic. Well, whatever the explanation, it’s very tragic for all those noncombatants who were hit.
I note, though, that HRW’s “Clarification” is still far from satisfactory. It still maintains that the submunitions found in Ruisi and in Gori itself were of the the (Russian-owned) PTAB 2.5M type– though it gives us absolutely none of the evidence on which this finding is based. The photos of submuntions in the August 21 statement– published with no provenance given, though they seem to have been from Shindisi or Pkhvenisi– had been identified in the text as “Russian” too, though as NDRE noted, they actually were not.
So we still need to see HRW’s “evidence” regarding Ruisi and Gori.
The latest “Clarification” is also insufficient in the following ways:

    1. It expresses no apology to the Russians or anyone else for the inaccurate nature of the organization’s earlier allegations against the government of Russia. Indeed, it explicitly states its continued support for the allegations made on August 15, regarding Russian cluster-munition attacks in Ruisi and Gori– even though it also says it will “continue its investigation into the use of cluster munitions in Shindisi and elsewhere by all sides during the armed conflict.” So presumably that means it will continue its (re-)investigation into what happened in Ruisi and Gori. … But even before those investigations are completed, HRW still maintains a defiant, accusatory attitude toward Russia (but not Georgia), saying, “The Russian government has yet to adequately respond to [HRW’s allegations regarding Rusisi and Gori].”
    2. It says nothing about any internal investigation, within HRW, into the issue of how the organization could have earlier gotten the facts so very wrong about Shindisi and Pkhvenisi. Without such a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation, why should anyone believe what they say…. on anything?

HRW remains a frustratingly unaccountable organization, as I noted in my September 1 post.

International tensions and the US election

Many parts of the world stand on the brink of major new escalations that could erupt before the day of the US elections, November 4. I would include in that list Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia, and Ukraine. Doubtless there are more, too.
I’ve been trying to think through what the effects of such escalations might be on the US elections. I reckon almost any of them– with the important exception of Iraq— would tend to strengthen the electoral appeal of John McCain, who “promises” the US voters that he’ll be tough, will stand up to aggressors, has military experience, etc.
Iraq is an exception to that rule because McCain has been running very strongly on the argument that he was “right” about the Surge, and that Obama was quite wrong to oppose it.
If there are escalations or problems inside Iraq that are of a scale to become relevant in the US elections, then that could damage McCain, given how tightly he has lashed himself to the mantra of that the Surge has “succeeded.” It would also raise for US voters the even bigger question that McCain has tried to distract them from, which was the question of the advisability of the US having invaded Iraq at all.
But what if there is a major new outbreak of violence in Iraq and also in some other global trouble spot? Then, things could get really complicated…
At one level, the result of the US election will make a difference to the prospects of world peace that is less than many Obama supporters might hope. There are serious structural limitations on the ability of any US president to even maintain the present levels of overseas deployment of US forces– let alone, his ability to launch new wars or aggressions. Whoever is president will most likely have to find a way to withdraw in some sort of good order from Iraq within the next three years– and also, to find a way to “internationalize” the challenge of governing in Afghanistan. John McCain is not totally incapable of summoning the requisite diplomatic skills. Indeed, I can see a scenario in which he could be the “De Gaulle” or “Nixon” figure who is aboe to sell significant a significant pullback of global power to the US citizenry precisely because of his previous image as a tough guy.
Nonetheless, I think Obama shows more of the “reframing” and rethinking skills that are needed in global affairs, at this prtesent po0nt. And at the level of domestic policies I strongly prefer his approach over John McCain’s.
Anyway, the two months ahead will be a sensitive time in world affairs. Let’s see what happens.

Iraq: Another Quaker in the ‘Red Zone’

The best-known U.S. Quaker to have undertaken a peace-witnessing mission inside post-invasion Iraq was Tom Fox, the widely loved member of Christian Peacemaker Teams who was killed there in early 2006. From my own personal experience, I know there are many Quakers, all around the world, who are working in different ways to help restore the rights of the Iraqi people, to provide humanitarian assistance to them, and/or to end the US occupation of their country.
Now, I can reveal to you that Bob Fonow, whose ‘End of Assignment report’ from his work as the US Embassy’s chief telecoms adviser I shared with you here recently, is also a Quaker. What’s more, shortly after Bob finished his 18-month term working with the Embassy inside the heavily fortified ‘Green Zone’, he returned to Iraq as a private individual, with the aim of trying to mediate an apparently complex set of disputes among shareholders of the country’s largest mobile phone company.
He went on that mission in April. And that time, he was working in what many people call the ‘Red Zone’– that is, the area outside the Green Zone.
Tom Fox and his CPT colleagues made a point of working in the Red Zone.
Bob is a member of the Herndon, Virginia ‘Meeting’ –that is, congregation– of the Religious Society Friends. (The RSF is the official name of the church, though we’ve been called ‘Quakers’ since almost the beginning of the RSF’s emergence as a pacifist Protestant church, back in 17th century England.) He first got in touch with me back in, I think, December, to challenge the assertion I’d made that I thought I was the only Quaker who’s also a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Not so, he said, since he is one, too.
And unlike a number of other Quakers– oh, for some reason Richard Nixon comes to mind– who have strayed pretty far from their connection with their home meeting, Bob has stayed in good touch with, and well grounded by, his meeting.
Bob has now been kind enough to say I can publish here a couple of the short reports that he sent back from the ‘Red Zone’ to members of his home meeting during and right after his late-April stay in the Red Zone. His descriptions of life there, and of the attitudes of the people he met and worked with, are certainly valuable for all of us to read and to reflect on. When he was there was when the US military was trying– using massive amounts of violence and force– to fight its way deep into Sadr City…
In his second letter to the Herndon friends, Bob wrote:

    At an Iraqi government meeting I was asked to attend on Tuesday I heard that several hundred thousand people in Sadr City have no clean water. They are drinking sewage, or water from filthy canals. The city is rat infested from garbage piling up. Electricity is limited to a couple hours a day. Medical services are holding up but US and Iraqi Army units are stopping ambulances. So far in the two weeks since Coalition forces started their attacks 925 Sadr City people have been killed and 2695 wounded. Earlier in the day I was told by one official that US Army snipers are playing games with killing. For a couple hours they are shooting men in the testicles, then a couple hours to the foreheads, and then a couple hours aiming at the heart. I hope this isn’t true, but I hope someone investigates.
    Several Mahdi Army officers visited my host in Baghdad on Tuesday to tell him that they can’t take much more. They are being attacked after calling a truce. They will have to declare all out war in a few days if the attacks don’t stop.
    … How is any more violence going to lead to peace, unless you kill every potential militant in Sadr City – which means hundreds of thousands of men and women? I haven’t yet met any Iraqis or Americans prepared to suggest that alternative. So there has to be a political and diplomatic solution.
    It’s time to stand down the military attack on Sadr City. It’s a useless operation with no strategic utility. There must be a better way.

He concluded like this:

    I’d like to go back to Baghdad, and I don’t want to go back. I want to help but I don’t want to get killed. I don’t know how to reconcile these competing feelings or how to determine the right level of my commitment to Iraq and the people I have learned to understand and like. Time for a clearance committee.

A clearness committee is a mechanism we Quakers use when we face difficult decisions or dilemmas. I hope that in the four months since he wrote about his conflicted feelings in that intimate way, Bob found the clearness he needed.
And now, the whole US citizenry and our government need to look much more seriously for the clearness we all need, at the broader level, regarding Iraq. As Bob wrote, “there has to be a political and diplomatic solution.” It so happens that– as longtime JWN readers are doubtless aware– I have done quite a lot of thinking about what that solution might look like, stretching back more than three years now.
… But now, I am just very happy to let you read the full text of Bob’s two reports from the Red Zone. To read them, just keep on reading or click on the link below. Thanks, Bob– and here’s praying for your safety in your continuing world travels.

Continue reading “Iraq: Another Quaker in the ‘Red Zone’”

HRW’s flawed ‘Research’ on Georgian cluster bombs

On August 15, Human Rights Watch issued a statement— still published on their website without comment– saying its researchers “have uncovered evidence that Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia.” On that same page is a photo of Georgian men standing around a crater pointing to what is described in the caption as “the remnants of an RBK-250 cluster bomb dropped by Russian aircraft on the village of Rusisi…”
This story about “Russia’s use of cluster bombs in Georgia” got huge play in the western MSM, many of whose leading contributors have come to treat HRW with almost oracular reverence.
On August 21, HRW issued another statement on the same subject, adding that despite Russia’s denials that it had used these weapons, its researchers had “documented additional Russian cluster munitions attacks during the conflict in Georgia.”
It turns out, though that the “research” in question was considerably less than expert or thorough, and that HRW’s much-lauded lead “researcher” on this topic, Marc Garlasco, may have fallen victim– or worse– to a Georgian disinformation campaign.
Bernhard of Moon of Alabama is just one of those who’ve been pointing out that the bomb remnants in the photos published by HRW in those two releases are very different from those of a Russian “RBK-250 cluster bomb”, or its submunitions. Indeed, they’re not items of Russian manufacture at all… but Israeli, as can easily by seen by comparing them with stock weapons-ID photos and charts.
However… At some point in late August, the Georgian government finally confessed to HRW that it had used cluster bombs during the recent conflict– and that these had indeed been of Israeli manufacture. That news was posted on the HRW website yesterday, here.
The latest HRW news release does nothing to retract or raise questions about its earlier “reports” about Russian use of cluster bombs in Georgia. Instead it says this:

    In August, Human Rights Watch documented Russia’s use of several types of cluster munitions, both air- and ground-launched, in a number of locations in Georgia’s Gori district, causing 11 civilian deaths and wounding dozens more. Russia continues to deny using cluster munitions.
    “Russia has yet to own up to using cluster munitions and the resulting civilian casualties,” said Garlasco.

So Garlasco is still in good favor at HRW’s New York headquarters, in spite of the clearly flawed nature of his earlier “documentation”?? And the two August reports about Russian use of cluster bombs remain in their original positions on the HRW website, with no clarificatory comment attached?
We need to understand what Garlasco’s original “research” or “documentation” on the cluster-bomb remains in Georgia consisted of.
Here’s what the first of the reports on the HRW website said about the research methodology:

    Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed numerous victims, doctors, and military personnel in Georgia. They examined photos of craters and video footage of the August 12 attack on Gori. Human Rights Watch has also seen a photo of the submunition carrier assembly and nose cone of an RBK-250 bomb in Gori. The Gori video showed more than two dozen simultaneous explosions during the attack, which is characteristic of cluster bombs. Two persons wounded in Gori described multiple simultaneous explosions at the time of the attack. Craters in Gori were also consistent with a cluster strike.
    … Photographic evidence on file with Human Rights Watch shows a civilian in Ruisi holding a PTAB submunition without realizing it could explode at the slightest touch…

So the researchers don’t even claim that they’ve actually traveled to see the cluster bomb remnants in situ, and document where they had been found. All they did was rely on “photographic evidence” about them. All talk about photographic “evidence” is quite meaningless unless we have a well identified provenance for these items. Whose word are we being asked to take that these photos were taken “in Gori” or wherever it was listed as? And whose, that these cluster bombs were seen being delivered “by Russian aircraft”?
Garlasco also considerably– perhaps fatally– undermines his own credibility by stating that the cluster bomb remnant in the photo is that of a “cluster bomb dropped by Russian aircraft”, since the remnant in question not only isn’t Russian but also was not dropped by any aircraft, since its fins have the distinctive curving of the ‘pop-put’ fins of an artillery-launched bomb.
Garlasco seems guilty of, at the very least, considerable professional slipshoddiness as a researcher. And how could his superiors at HRW have accepted– and agreed to publish– as “evidence” for his claims, just a few photos whose provenance, timing, and other attributes have not been thoroughly checked and cross-checked? The professional slipshoddiness at HRW goes considerably higher than just Marc Garlasco. And it also extends to those media outlets that just reproduced all his/HRW’s arguments and claims about “Russian” use of cluster bombs– for which we still have no actual evidence, at all– without interrogating and trying to understand the extremely flimsy nature of the “evidence” he was using.
This incident reminds me a lot of the time in January 1991 when Amnesty International got “used” by the Kuwaiti hasbara machine in Washington to give its stamp of approval to Kuwait’s fabricated story about the Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital. Then, as now– and as very frequently happens when people are trying to beef up public support for a war venture– the “bloody shirt” of the civilian losses inflicted by the other side is waved to try to persuade people of “our side” to support confrontation, escalation, and war.
Was Marc Garlasco used, or did he connive in the Georgian disinformation? Either way, why is he still apparently regarded by HRW-NY as a credible researcher on these matters?
This matters to me because I still sit on the Middle East advisory committee of HRW. HRW’s work in the Middle East has certainly been the location of a lot of disagreement about priorities and policies, but overall the Middle East division has done some excellent, ground-breaking work. Work that has always– with one notable exception, back in November 2006– been painstakingly researched, documented, and reviewed long before it is released for publication.
What happened to that whole extensive documentation and review process this time round? HRW has some very serious questions of methodology and internal procedures that it now needs to address.
Also, HRW, which is one of many organizations around the world calling for greater accountability by all kinds of public bodies, needs to become much more accountable, itself.
The November 2006 incident occurred when the organization rushed out a statement criticizing– on grounds allegedly derived from international humanitarian law– an action of mass nonviolence undertaken by Palestinian organizations in Gaza. I was one of those who prominently and publicly called them out on it, noting that nothing in IHL provided any basis for criticizing the action in question. HRW then took more than three weeks to issue a correction. And when it did so, it did it without fanfare and without even distributing the correction to the whole of the same list that had received the original accusation.
That is not good accountability.
This time around, HRW needs to assemble a high-level team of credible people– not including Marc Garlasco– to investigate the performance of the whole organization regarding these accusations of Russia’s use of cluster bombs, and other aspects of its work during the Russian-Georgian war, and then in a timely manner to issue a public report on what was done well and what was done badly during this work. This report should also contain concrete recommendations regarding methodology and internal procedures, to ensure that slipshod and potentially inflammatory work like that done by Marc Garlasco does not appear in the organization’s name again.
I quite understand that, being a privately-funded organization, HRW has a lot of motivation to have “something to contribute” to the public discussion on the latest issues of the day. They probably think this is necessary in order to keep their funding flowing in. (And it also lets HRW’s leaders appear to be “big players” on the international scene.) But there can be no substitute for careful, painstaking, and thoroughly well documented research. Human rights work should never seek to be “flashy”, and should absolutely never allow itself to become politicized.
Wake up, Ken Roth and the rest of the HRW leadership. This issue is most likely your “Kuwaiti incubator story,” and you need to deal with it effectively, honestly, and well.
And yes, if you invite me to sit on your “Georgia incident special investigation team”, I would be happy to do so.

More on China in Iraq

Last week we learned that China has ‘beaten’ all those bit-champing western oil companies, and has signed a $3 billion deal to help develop Iraq’s al-Ahdab oil field.
It turns out that the relationships that Chinese businesses have with various different sectors of the Iraqi economy is far more extensive than I– or, I suppose, most other Americans– had realized.
Bob Fonow is a veteran IT consultant and trouble-shooter who in March concluded an 18-month term as the U.S. State Department’s “Senior Telecommunications and IT Consultant to the Government of Iraq.” In the End of Assignment Report that he submitted recently, he wrote about the broad presence he saw various Chinese government bodies and corporations as having established throughout Iraq. Fonow, I should note, saw nearly all these relationships as being good for Iraq, as I do; and he urged his former clients at the State Department to continue and strengthen them.
Fonow makes many other very informative points in his report. He has kindly given me permission to publish it. It’s a 14-page PDF document, and since I don’t think I can upload it directly to JWN, I have uploaded it here instead.
He writes,

    Chinese telecommunications companies are selling equipment into every city and province in Iraq. Few, if any, American equipment vendors sell in Iraq outside the Green Zone. Chinese sales people and engineers seem to have freedom of passage. While subject to the same random dangers as everyone in Iraq, they aren’t picked out for immediate assassination at checkpoints. This is a controversial statement, perhaps more anecdotal than based on fact and research. But according to Chinese telecom executives in Iraq the last problem experienced by a Chinese telecom person was a relatively gentle mugging on the way to the airport in October 2007. If you ask MoC [Iraqi Ministry of Communications] officials if the Chinese have freedom of passage they will say no. If you phrase the question another way – why do the Chinese have freedom of passage? – the answer is that their relationships go back to the mid-1990s, and that they are our friends.

This is key, it seems to me. When I was writing here about China’s parallel plans to large amounts of investment into US-occupied Afghanistan, I noted that the security (and therefore the viability) of those vast new projects– which include a copper mining complex, a power plant, and a new nation-spanning railroad– will depend crucially on the fact that the Chinese are not NATO, and have never been associated with the occupation regime that the US and NATO have been running there since 2001.
I found some informative– if slightly dated– background about China’s economic activities in post-2003 Iraq in this article, which was published by Yufeng Mao on the Jamestown Foundation’s website in May 2005.
She wrote:

    Since 2003, China has pursued a two-pronged Iraq policy of promoting Chinese interests while avoiding antagonizing the Untied States. On the one hand, this policy addresses concerns about oil and construction contracts and the desire to use the Iraq crisis to increase Chinese political influence in the Middle East. On the other, China has carefully avoided confrontation with the United States…
    China opposed American intervention in Iraq in 2003 partly because of its substantial economic interests there under Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the years before the war, Beijing actively pursued oil and construction contracts with Iraq under the UN Oil-for-Food program. From China’s perspective, a war in Iraq would substantially hurt Chinese interests since it would result in the loss of Iraqi contracts valued at over one billion U.S. dollars, which in turn would disrupt its oil supply and increase oil prices…
    The American decision to invade also raised concerns among Chinese leaders and analysts that the strong influence of the United States in the Middle East would hinder China’s effort to access economic resources in the region. China’s repeated call for the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis reflects a deep anxiety concerning U.S. domination of Iraq’s economic resources.
    China… jumped on the bandwagon of reconstruction after the war. Beijing’s pledge of $25 million and an agreement to forgive a large part of Iraq’s multi-billion dollar debt made China a significant donor to the country, but this generosity is not motivated by sheer goodwill. Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Shen Guofang explicitly stated that China hoped to forgive some debt owed by Hussein’s regime in order to gain access to the bidding processes on big oil and infrastructure projects.
    Desire to do business in Iraq has contributed to intensified efforts towards improving relations with the new Iraqi authority. The Chinese embassy in Baghdad reopened less than two weeks after the transfer of authority to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004. China offered material assistance for the January election, provided fellowships for Iraqi students to study in China, and is helping to train a small number of Iraqi technicians, management personnel, and diplomats. For example on April 1, 2005, 21 Iraqi diplomats were funded by the Chinese government to start their month long training program at China Foreign Affairs University.
    … In contrast to its usual inactivity in the United Nations on Middle Eastern affairs, since the beginning of the Iraq crisis, China has engaged in a flurry of activity. In early 2003, the Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan flew to UN headquarters in New York four times to lobby for a political solution to the Iraq problem. Most significantly, on May 26, 2004, China submitted to the Security Council an “unofficial document,” offering Chinese views on how to revise a draft resolution proposed by the U.S. and the UK. This marked an unprecedented move by Beijing to seek a more visible role on Middle Eastern affairs. In this document, China proposed that the U.S.-led multinational force withdraw from Iraq in January 2005. Even though Resolution 1546 did not adopt this suggestion, Beijing believes that its document contributed to the resolution’s terms about full Iraqi sovereignty over its resources and security matters. Moreover, China has consistently called for a larger UN role in Iraq, both with regard to WMDs and reconstruction efforts. From China’s perspective, a more prominent UN role would not only limit American power in the region, but it would also give China more leverage in dealing with the new Iraqi authority.

If anyone has a fuller or more up-to-date assessment of China’s policy toward post-2003 Iraq that they could provide a citation or better yet a link for, I’d love to see that.
In Bob Fonow’s report, he laid special emphasis on the role he judged China could play in training a whole new generation of Iraqi IT managers.
He wrote:

    A huge training requirement remains. The situation in Iraq is comparable in effect to the period following the Cultural Revolution in China. A 15 year gap in technical knowledge and management capability is evident in Iraq, especially in middle managers who were not able to keep up to date in the most modern telecommunications technologies in the later years of the former regime. The Office of Communications [in the US Embassy in Iraq] believes 200,000 to 300,000 telecommunications and information technology specialists will need training to support a modern information economy in Iraq. The United States is not prepared for this requirement in terms of visa administration or price per student.
    China is the best place to conduct this training. [My emphasis there, as everywhere else. ~HC] After the Cultural Revolution a system of telecommunications universities was set up to improve quickly China’s telecom infrastructure. Today this system produces the equivalent of one Regional Bell Operating Company a year. China today maintains the largest cell phone, Internet, landline networks, etc. in the world. The training requirement within China has peaked and there are sufficient places for thousands of Iraqi students a year at price points that can’t be matched in other countries.
    The Office of Communications, with the knowledge of the China desk at Main State, has introduced the Ministry of Communications to the key telecommunications education officials in China. Coordination in Iraq is necessary between the Ministry of Communications, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Educations. The Chinese appear willing to consider training large numbers of technicians and the planning for the program is underway in 2008.
    The China training programs should be limited to specific technical and operations training requirements. Bachelor level education should be conducted in Iraq, since the education system produces acceptable entry level engineering graduates. Graduate level training and research should remain in the United States.
    This may not sit well with those in the Department of Defense who consider China to be the next strategic enemy. However, pragmatism should be the guiding principle in Iraq to achieve order, stability and rapid reconstruction, certainly in essential services. The major Chinese communications equipment vendors Huawei and ZTE already train hundreds of Iraqi students a year at their commercial training facilities in Shenzhen. Several times a year Government of Iraq ministerial officials with telecommunications and IT portfolios , in groups of 24 or so, are invited to China, flying first and business class, staying in five star hotels in Beijing, the latest limos provided and spending money passed out. The Chinese have a long term commercial and diplomatic plan for Iraq.

You’ll find a lot of other really interesting material in Fonow’s report. His description of the administrative chaos that still dogs the US’s effort to do “reconstruction” in Iraq makes extremely depressing reading. Interestingly, from his perspective, the chaos became worse in early 2007, as the State Department started pumping large numbers of extremely unqualified people into the Embassy there, as their contribution to the “surge”.
… Anyway, I can see I’m assembling the building blocks here for a really interesting article on how George Bush’s completely misplaced reliance on military assault and invasion in both Iraq and Afghanistan has not only not “resolved” the problem of violent Islamist extremism… It has not only resulted in the deaths of 4,200 Americans and uncountable scores of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan… It has not only destroyed a lot of Iraq’s vital physical and institutional infrastructure, and failed after nearly seven years to bring public security or public order to most of Afghanistan… It has not only helped plunged the US into trillions of dollars worth of debt– that our grandchildren will be paying off for many decades to come– with much of that debt held by Japan and yes, also by China… But it has also made these Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly incredibly hospitable to Chinese mercantilism, and has considerably accelerated China’s emergence as significant political actor in both south-central Asia and the Middle East.
Heckuva job, George!
But perhaps that isn’t totally a fair assessment. It wasn’t only that George Bush and his advisers turned out to be unbelievably wrongheaded, shortsighted, and maladroit in their handling of these two countries… It was also, it seems to me, that the Chinese regime has until now played its cards in both countries incredibly well.
Also, the bigger lesson, as noted here several times before: In the modern world, we are no longer in the 19th century. Relying on military power just doesn’t get you what you want any more…