Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 121 – Info, analysis, discussion

Georgia crisis and the shifting global balance

Another great post from Bernhard of Moon of Alabama on the Georgian crisis, today.
What Bernhard really “gets” about this crisis is the degree to which it reveals the extreme constraints on Washington’s ability to exercise freedom of action– including military action– in parts of the world where, until recently, it felt quite confident of acting freely. The constraints being, as I’ve noted previously, both logistical and political (in terms of the balance of power in world politics, not– at this point– the balance within the US.)
From this perspective, the serried ranks of rightwing commentators who are published so widely in the US MSM suddenly look like (possibly quaint) dinosaurs as they bark out their calls for more “robust” US action against the Russian bear… Max Boot, Richard Holbrooke, and of course– Charles Krauthammer.
I was going to write a quick post here about Krauthammer’s NYT column today. But Bernhard’s commentary on it is even better than what I was going to write. Krauthammer had suggested some “stern”, but still only diplomatic, actions that Washington should take in an attempt to “punish” Moscow. Bernhard pointed out that Moscow has many more potent means of “punishing” the west, should it choose to use them. (Which I highly doubt it does.)
Then, Krauthammer’s “zinger” is a suggestion that Bush send Putin a copy of the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”– “to remind Vlad of our capacity to make Russia bleed.”
But as Bernhard writes:

Putin while watching “Charlie Wilson’s War” might indeed get the idea that an occupation force in Afghanistan can be beaten and dislodged by supplying the Taliban with money and anti-air missiles. He may even thank Krauthammer for that fabulous idea.

The fact that Krauthammer had presumably not even thought of this possible consequence of his “suggestion” being put into operation is very revelatory. It reveals, to me, the depth of the guy’s extreme, US-centric self-referentiality and his inability even to imagine that someone else might interpret the world in ways different from him. (So what else is new?)
… But the main aim in all this should certainly not be to urge consideration or use of further risky and escalatory measures. Heck, Saakashvili’s performace last week should stand as a powerful object-lesson against anyone doing that! The aim should be to point once again– since it does still seem needed– to the interdependence of all the world’s peoples, including of all the world’s “big powers,” in the current era.
That’s a lesson that many citizens of the US need to understand a lot more clearly.
Actually, probably most of them do have a fairly strong understanding of it. But they are certainly not helped in their understanding by the wide dissemination given to the views of all those US-uber-alles dinosaurs who still dominate most of the country’s public discourse.
I think we need to underline a few distinctive lessons and principles:

cannot be resolved through force

“Nation-building”– some quick thoughts

I’ve just been invited to a talk next week at the New America Foundation titled “Does Nation-Building Have a Future? Lessons from Afghanistan.” The presenter is James Dobbins, who seems to have a pretty “realist” and well-informed view of such matters.
But it got me to thinking about this whole concept of “nation-building”, as it is used by so many earnest western policy people with regard to disordered countries in the Third World.
Can a nation, as such, actually be built? Even more important: Can it ever be “built” by outsiders?
I’m dubious in the extreme.
A “nation”, as such, can surely only ever come into being through the actions– more or less voluntary– of its citizens.
Does South Africa constitute a single discernible “nation”? Does Spain? Does Catalunya? Does Belgium?
All fascinating questions. Equally fascinating, the whole history of what the old Arab nationalists would have called “qita’iya” (sectionalism) within the Arab world… That is, the emergence over time of a distinctively “Jordanian”, or “Lebanese”, or “Qatari” view of national self-identification.
It strikes me that what outsiders can and do have an effect on in many of these cases is the establishment of state structures, with identified geographic boundaries between them… and then, if these states succeed at delivering basic services to their people, they acquire or increase their level of endogenous legitimacy, and thereby, something like a “national sensitivity” starts to take root.
Among the citizens concerned… which is the important point here.
In other words, contrary to the way many westerners talk about these matters, the state in many important ways predates and incubates the “nation”. Benedict Anderson argued much this same point in his work on “Imagined Communities.”
And actually the state’s capabilities, including its efficiency in delivering basic services (including crucially, public security) and its ability to provide predictable regulation for economic life, are often much more important to the wellbeing– and even survival– of its citizens than any sense of “nationalism”, which operates at a much more abstract level of human experience. But states never are and never can be, culturally neutral. They always have a cultural content, as manifested in the languages accepted as “official”, the calendar of work- and rest-days, and so on. This cultural content can be either “ethno-national” in content (as with language policies), or religious (as with most work-day calendars), or, more usually, both.
So religion can often be as important a determinant of the cultural content of a country as ethnicity. States are not necessarily defined in ethnic (or “national”) terms… Though as we have seen in the cases of Israel and Pakistan, where a state is formed on explicitly religious lines, that religion acquires within that state much of the character of a “nationality.” Here again, we see that the state predates the “nation.”
So back to the question posed by Dobbins. Shouldn’t outsiders be looking at the question of our countries’ support for effective state-building in Afghanistan or other disordered countries, rather than “nation”-building?
I guess another reason I feel uneasy with the concept of nation-building is that it seems such an extremely socially and psychologically intrusive thing to do. Outsiders would essentially be messing with the way people self-identify and feel. That’s no business of outsiders! But for the people(s) of Afghanistan– okay, definitely more than one “people” there– establishing a basically effective system of country-wide governance is certainly a strong and common interest. I’d call that state-building rather than nation-building.
And if the help of outsiders is indeed needed (as it seems probably to be), there is no reason to think the US of A– whose “national culture” contains a strong strain of disdain for the idea of government as such– is particularly well qualified to lead this effort…

Perriello and Goode in Charlottesville

Today, the two candidates for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District had their first sustained public exchange of views. I made a point of going along to the forum, which was held in the large, nicely funded Senior Center just north of Charlottesville. And I was confirmed in my judgment that our Republican incumbent, Virgil Goode, is a dangerous, mean-spirited man who needs to be defeated. But I also came away with some questions about the approach being followed by the Democratic challenger, 34-year-old Tom Perriello.
Here are the main things I noted at the 90-minute forum:

not

Goode, quite understandably, didn’t make many mentions of Bush at all. (And when he was asked about the tensions with Iran, he seemed eager to distance himself from Bush. He said he thought the President should make a point of having broad consultation before imposing any blockade on Iran, and should not pursue a “go-it-alone” policy. H’mm. I wish he’d fought for that same position during the build-up to the war on Iraq, too.,)
But for his part, Perriello wasn’t trying to position himself as running against the Bush legacy, either. I would have thought that in most of the Fifth District, which stretches from Charlottesville a long way south to the state line with North Carolina, and which includes numerous very economically depressed communities, running against the Bush legacy would have been an attractive thing to do… As would be noting that Goode has voted almost in lockstep with Bush on virtually every issue… As would noting the truly massive amounts of taxpayers’ money that Bush has shoveled into the horrendously wrong-headed invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Perriello made almost no mention of any of these things. And get this: where he did refer to the failed legacy of Bush, he nearly always twinned this by referring to an equally failed legacy of Pres. Clinton, as well.
I found that stunning. I do, certainly, have many criticisms of what Clinton did during his eight years in office. But to put those failures on a par with Bush’s failures, as Tom did? That boggles both logic and the imagination.
Thus, for example, he said nothing about the fact that Clinton had balanced the budget and was poised to start bringing down the national debt– until Bush came along and with his completely unfunded wars plunged the country back into deep deficits again.

2. The readiness that Goode showed to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment as part of his campaign.

He made the quite unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants are responsible for a big part of the health-care crisis in this country and argued for their summary deportation, the building of a huge wall system all along the border with Mexico, and an end to the phenomenon of “anchor babies.” Not clear how he proposed dealing with these squealing bundles of joy. Quite clear: the mean-spiritedness with which he showed himself ready to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment for his own political gain.

3. The degree to which Perriello was positioning himself as a certain kind of a “post-partisan” politician.

It wasn’t just those unfair references he made to the Clinton legacy, it was also the whole (extremely long-drawn-out) self-narrative that he presented. He described himself as belonging to– or “representing”? not clear– the second generation after the cohort that he and many Americans have taken to calling, in somewhat maudlin fashion, the “Greatest Generation”. (What Jim Crow?) So he talked quite a bit about his grandparents and their sterling qualities… And then, he said that many members of the next generation after theirs– he didn’t get personal about his parents here– had had a quite wrongheaded belief in the power of government to solve social and economic ills.
I found that critique outrageous. There was nothing there about the value of the civil rights movement– no mention of the civil rights movement, at all! That, here in Central Virginia, remember. Nothing about Medicare and Social Security– even though there in the Senior Center you had a clear majority of attendees at the forum who were the lucky beneficiaries of Medicare. Nothing about Head Start or any of the other great social programs of the 1960s, the era of belief in the possibility of a “Great Society.”
And then, he said, along came his generation, which did not believe that government could solve all the country’s problems but instead sought to make a difference through private entrepreneurship and work in non-profit organizations. (I’d bet that most of Tom’s income since he graduated Yale Law School in 2001 has come from inter-governmental or governmental funds, one way or another?)
He never did explain to my satisfaction how it was he made the transition from not believing that government has a significant role in solving social problems to thinking that he, personally, should run for political office. But evidently, that transition got made.
Tom’s positioning of himself as “post-partisan” in the way that he did made me distinctly uneasy. Not only because he really seemed not to have thought very deeply about many of those issues there, but also because I’d be very worried if Barack Obama shared this particular version of post-partisanship.
How can a person just blow off the whole experience of the Great Society– and also, by implication, the New Deal before that– and expect to have something useful to propose regarding the mounting social and economic difficulties this country faces? Does Tom Perriello think they can all be addressed through the work of private entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations? That would be a very dangerous position to hold, indeed.
Tom’s version of post-partisanship also seemed, at some points, to be related to a slightly vacuous self-referentiality. Especially in his opening comments, which were all about him and his place in his “three generation” scheme. Yes, he did make a passing reference there to having “a seven-point plan” for dealing with the country’s woes– but he never once told us what those seven points were! Ah, maybe he should have sent us to this page, on his campaign website.
Well, in the lengthy Q&A session, he was a lot better, and he generally gave answers that were sensible and thoughtful…. though he did get a little bellicose in talking about the need to “win America’s wars.”
Also of note in the forum: Both candidates made a number of references to the need to achieve “energy independence”, and to the dangers of “borrowing from the Chinese.” Two misleading memes there? Both also indicated some opposition to NAFTA.
Goode positioned himself as extremely anti-taxation (as well as anti-immigrant). At one point, right at the end, he made the outrageous claim that Obama “wants to send $845 billion” of US revenues to low-income countries.
Excuse me?
But Goode also, intriguingly, seemed to be predicting (or threatening?) that Obama would win the presidential race, when he used the argument that Virginians would benefit from having a strong Republican representation in congress to keep Obama in check.
I found the whole forum fascinating, though a little bit depressing. (Goode’s diatribes against immigrants got a disturbing amount of applause from the crowd. This, despite our city’s reputation as being a huge blob of liberals stuck at one end of a socially conservative district.) Still, there is something really important about having a constituency-based electoral system, where the people who represent you in the legislature have to come back to their districts each time there’s an election and stand face-to-face with their constituents. The political “representation” involved just seems so much more direct in this system than in a broad, nationwide p.r. system.
Anyway, if Tom Perriello reads this, I hope he (you) takes my remarks as an invitation to further discussion on some of these issues. I know that back in October, I also criticized some aspects of Tom’s “post-partisanship”. After that, I had a good, 40-minute discussion with him in the home of a neighbor. But I’m still concerned about his eagerness to criticize the work of earlier “generations” of Democrats.
Here’s a suggestion. Wouldn’t a stronger and more principled way to be “post-partisan” be to express appreciation of the work of some prominent members of the other party– as Obama has, with Chuck Hagel and even with some of his references to Ronald Reagan– rather than to feel you have to beat up on earlier “generations” of people from your own party?
Actually, I think that’s one key difference between Perriello’s version of post-partisanship and Barack Obama’s. That, and the fact that Obama seems to have a much more textured, informed, and realistic view of the role of (good) government in society. That view perhaps derived in large part from the direct, hands-on experience Obama gained working as a community organizer for low-income and other marginalized communities in Chicago, in his 20s.
Perriello has had only a little experience of doing work comparable to that– and most of that was in the distinctly “bwana-ish” situation of working in western-dominated institutions in West Africa and Afghanistan. But even in those situations, does he honestly think the dire social ills he witnessed could be solved just by private entrepreneurs and non-profits– and without the peoples of those countries finding a way to resolve their countries’ very deep-seated problems of governance? So far, he hasn’t given us any indication he has thought deeply about those issues, at all…

Georgia: More grandstanding?

If the situation in Georgia weren’t so tragic, it would be pretty amusing to see George W. Bush now posing as the guardian and gatekeeper of international legitimacy. In his statement in the Rose Garden today, he prissily lectured the Russians that,

Russia has sought to integrate into the diplomatic, political, economic, and security structures of the 21st century. The United States has supported those efforts. Now Russia is putting its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions. To begin to repair the damage to its relations with the United States, Europe, and other nations, and to begin restoring its place in the world, Russia must keep its word and act to end this crisis…

All of which would have a lot more force if Bush had positioned himself over the previous 7.5 years as a staunch respecter and defender of the world’s multilateral institutions and their key organizing principles…
As it is, given the extreme constraints at both the logistical and the political levels on the Bush administration’s ability to respond militarily to Russia’s undoubted excesses in Georgia, all Washington is able to do is organize some airlifts of humanitarian supplies into Georgia.
As for Georgia’s intemperate president, Mikheil Saakashvili, he briefly claimed today that this airlift meant that the US would be taking over his country’s ports and airports. Yesterday, he had told CNN that the Russians were about to encircle his his capital. He said (once again) that the whole fate of world democracy was imperiled in his country, while he also blamed “the west” for letting his countrymen down.
Perhaps all those attempts at moral blackmail were intended to cover up for his own extreme lack of forethought in having provoked the Russian response with his military assault on South Ossetia last week?
In the event, little of Saak’s blackmail worked. The Pentagon was quick to “shoot down” the suggestion its forces were about to take over Georgia’s ports and airports. The the airlift to Tbilisi is being described as “continuous and robust”– but it will also apparently be strictly limited to humanitarian supplies. (I note that many items useful in humanitarian relief ops are also dual-use as basic military items; but at a certain level of military materiel, including all forms of weaponry and ammunition, these items have no reasonable “humanitarian” purpose.)
And while we’re looking at people seeking to use the present crisis for purposes of political grandstanding, top of that list must be Sen. John McCain, who is reportedly despatching two of his key advisers, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to Georgia.
I find this outrageous. The foreign policy of the country is supposed to be run by the President, and it can only considerably complicate the delicate task Bush faces in doing this if either of the candidates seems to be running his own foreign policy separate from that of the president.
Bush should rein in McCain and his Senatorial wingmen, in no uncertain terms.
(Imagine the uproar if Obama announced that her was sending his own personal envoys to Georgia to deal with the situation there!)
It is also, of course, extremely relevant that McCain’s key foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunman was until very recently a paid lobbyist for the Georgian president.
Another question: Though Lieberman and Graham are working as high-level advisers to the McCain campaign, they are also members of the US Senate in their own right. So if they do travel to Georgia in the days ahead, will they do so as Senators or as McCain campaign people?
It is all so very murky that they would do a lot better just not to go.

On US over-stretch

When I blogged about the Ossetia crisis Sunday, I wrote that one thing it clearly showed was that “The ‘west’ is hopelessly over-stretched, what with all its current commitments of troops in Iraq, a crisis-ridden Afghanistan, and (still) in the Balkans…”
Today, McClatchy’s dogged reporter Jonathan Landay gives us more details of that over-stretch. (HT: Dan Froomkin.) Landay quoted one US official as saying that the US military authorities had not really understood the seriousness of the preparations the Russian military had recently made along the Georgian border– because US spy satellites and other means of technical espionage were “pretty well consumed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan.”
That, you could describe as logistical over-stretch. But there has also been political over-stretch. You’ll recall that back last year, shortly after the Bush administration announced that portions of its new “ballistic missile defense system” would be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia announced that it would withdraw from the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). Few people paid much heed at the time, or thought thaqt Moscow’s exit from that older treaty was very important. But one of the key provisions of the CFE Treaty was that signatories were committed to engaging in regular exchanges of information about troop movements and submitting to challenge inspections from other treaty participants.
Guess what. After Russia withdrew from the CFE, they no longer had to do that.
And guess what else. It truly seems that no-one in the Pentagon was on duty last week as Russia’s troop build-up gained momentum.
All that, despite Condi Rice’s long-vaunted reputation as a go-to “expert” on Russian military affairs…
Landay quoted the unnamed US official as saying,

And that, mind you, despite the continued presence of presence of some 130 US military trainers in Georgia.
Ouch. Did anyone say “over-stretch”?
… So what does it all mean?
It means that this conceit that members of the US political elite of both parties have nearly all entertained for the past 15 years: that the dominance of the US military over just about the entire globe is really, kind of the natural order of things… and that yes, of course, our country has “vital” interests in very distant parts of the world that yes, of course, we need to be able to protect– on our own, if necessary… now, that entire conceit is no longer going to be sustainable.
We are, after all, less than five percent of humanity. Sure, there are still a few countries we can bludgeon in one way or another into supporting this or that military adventure. Like the way Tony Blair and Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili agreed– for their own reasons– to contribute their support and a limited amount of their own manpower to the US project in Iraq. Like the way that some (but not all) NATO countries got strong-armed into acting as if Afghanistan were really right their in their own “North Atlantic” backyard. But these contributions from the increasingly resentful allies never added up to anything that would solve either the intense manpower problems, or the intense legitimacy-deficit problems, or the horrendously mounting funding problems suffered by these imperial-style US projects in distant countries.
So we need a radically different model of how the world’s countries can act in response to the security challenges that just about all of our countries face.
As it happens, this model exists. It is one that the US itself created, back in 1945. It is one based on the unassailable foundations of a commitment to finding nonviolent ways to resolve thorny international conflicts, and a deep respect for the equality of all human persons and all nations. It’s called the United Nations.
It also happens that just last week I wrote a piece in the CSM arguing strongly that the US should seek UN leadership of the peace-restoration efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan…
Just imagine if, over the past seven years, the US government had put its energies into using, building up, and reforming the UN and its associated principles, instead of going full-bore for unabashedly US-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq!
Imagine how much stronger the mechanisms of nonviolent conflict resolution available to the world’s leaders would be today.
Imagine how different the politics of Russia’s relations with its neighbors and with the world’s other big powers would be.
Imagine how different Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, and that whole part of the world would look today.
Imagine the resources that, instead of being thrown into equipping very expensive, hi-tech military units and sending them halfway round the world to kill and die, could instead have been spent on rebuilding flourishing communities in Africa.
Imagine the lives that would have been spared. Imagine the families that would still be whole, instead of having to live with their current pain of bereavement or displacement…
Well, regarding the past seven years, we can only sit here and imagine that alternative universe.
But regarding the coming seven or 20 years, there are many things that we who are US citizens can and need to do, to turn our country away from the dead-end of unilateralism and militarism.
What’s happened this past week in Georgia has been a tragedy of serious proportions. But we also need to look at it as a lesson of what happens when one country, that represents only five percent of the world’s people, tries to run the whole world– and then finds itself hopelessly over-stretched.
There is a better way.
It’s called shared leadership, and the rebuilding of sturdy institutions of all-nation cooperation and action. Let’s pursue it.

Faiza: Blogging from inside the Iraqi refugee crisis

Back on August 1, I wrote this post about the new report the International Crisis Group has on the situation of Iraq’s refugees. I wish at the time I had thought to check in with the great blog that Faiza Arji, proud Iraqi citizen, writes from Amman, Jordan, where she has spent most of the past three years trying to provide front-line help to some of the very distressed Iraqi refugees in the city.
Because she’s been so busy doing that, in recent months she hasn’t been blogging very much– but that’s no excuse for me.
Today I went, and found this extremely heartfelt post that she put up there in English on June 24.
It is a classic piece of reportage from within one of the most vexing humanitarian crises of our day. (A crisis, I should note, that occurred as a result of Pres. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and his administration’s complete failure to exercise its responsibility as occupying power to assure public security within the country.)
Faiza describes the key demand being raised by the refugees themselves. It is for return home in a situation of general security and assured basic services:

About “re-settlement”, in countries other than Iraq– which is the option most frequently talked about by Americans, many of whom whom have a deeply engrained bias toward the alleged moral virtues of transcontinental migration– Faiza writes this:

we will get back as soon as things get better; we do not believe there is a country anywhere more beautiful than Iraq….

She writes eloquently about the love of Iraq– and, crucially, the adherence to the idea of Iraqi national unity— that she encounters among the refugees she meets and works with:

Her vision and her commitment are awe-inspiring.
… Especially when you consider the tragic under-side of what she sees among the Iraqis she works with:

the conditions of displacement, poverty, estrangement and degradation all put pressure on the men and the women and increase the rate of family violence

I urge JWN readers to go and read the whole of Faiza’s post there.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the people who do front-line humanitarian aid work, who have by far the richest and most direct understanding of the humanity and needs of those in distress, often don’t have any time or mental energy left over to get their voice out into the public sphere. As a result, on sorts of issues that directly impact the lives and wellbeing of some of the world’s most vulnerable people, the global “public discussion” ends up being dominated by people like law professors or pundits who have sadly little direct experience of what they’re talking about. (Hence, for example, the easy readiness with which such people view the prospect of the civil war in Northern Uganda being prolonged for several additional years while they, the lawyers and law professors, seek to “prove” some abstract point about the theory of “international justice” in an air-conditioned courtroom in The Hague… )
That’s one of the many things that makes Faiza’s voice so special. She is personally living the Iraqi refugee crisis. And she’s personally deeply engaged in responding to it. And then, in addition, from time to time she makes sure she gets her voice out into the global public sphere about these issues that are of such existential concern to her.
Thank you, Faiza.
She doesn’t give any information on her blog about how to donate to support her projects. I suggest that any readers willing and able to give money to good humanitarian-aid projects directed at Iraqi refugees in Jordan or Syria (where their numbers are even greater) can do so through the US-based organization Mercy Corps International.

Arrest warrants for former Israeli military chiefs

Spain’s highest court, the Audiencia Nacional, has issued arrest warrants on charges of war crimes against six Israelis who were high-ranking military officials at the time of the IDF’s bombing of an apartment building in Gaza City in 2002 which killed 15 civilians.
The six include current Infrastructure Minister Binyamin (‘Fouad’) Ben-Eliezer, who was defense minister at the time of the incident; Moshe Yaalon, who was IDF chief of staff; and Dan Halutz, then chief of the air force and later IDF chief of staff. The others are Doron Almog, Giora Eiland, and ‘Mike’ Herzog.
(Does anyone have the text of the arrest warrant? I’d love to see that.)
The 2002 incident was part of a longstanding policy of the Israeli government of undertaking extrajudicial killings (EJKs) of its opponents. EJKs, also known as assassinations or in Israel’s somewhat euphemized parlance “targeted killings”, are precisely what they sound like: completely extra-judicial, that is, outside the rule of law. That is, there is no duly constituted court that considers in an impartial and open manner the evidence against the “accused”, listens to his defense, and judges the case on its merits. Instead, Israel’s military authorities get to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner all wrapped into one, though they have made various attempts to describe their efforts as “humane”, “restrained” and, of course, completely “justified.”
For one such attempt see this piece of sympathetic ~~hasbara~~ reporting from the WaPo’s Laura Blumenfeld back in August 20096. In it, Bluemnfeld describes the “anguish” experienced by several Israeli commanders– including, crucially, arraigned-in-Spain Moshe Yaalon– as they recalled their calculations regarding whether to undertake any particular EJK
Actually, though Blumenfeld’s reporting was extremely sympathetic to Israel’s high-ranking assassins, it contains many revealing details that could be useful in any court case against Yaalon and his co-defendants. (And also, against present Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a leader of some of Israel’s earlier EJK ops.)
Reflecting on her conversations with Yaalon about the period 2000-2003, Blumenfeld wrote,

How many did he kill? “Oh, hundreds, hundreds.

Then this, which is of direct relevance to the court case:

knowingly authorize a hit that would also kill a noncombatant, the wife of Salah Shehada.

also destroyed a neighboring house, which Yaalon said he had thought was empty. Fifteen civilians were killed, including nine children.

Excuse me– something fell on his head??
Blumenfeld’s piece makes eery reading. But it also provides a vivid example of two important points:

How unresolved feelings of victimization and helplessness from the past can be used to try to justify the perpetuation of new acts of escalation and violence.

How extremely slippery the slope of the justification of violence “for self-defense”, “pre-emption”, “prevention”, and “deterrence” can become.

it didn’t work.

the conclusion of a ceasefire

announced

In Blumenfeld’s piece, she reports on the recollections of some of Israel’s super-assassins of another operation they conducted, against a reported gathering of Hamas leaders in a Gaza City apartment in September 2003. On that occasion, they used “only” a quarter-ton bomb, which was designed to hit “only” the third story of the targeted building. But the Hamas leaders being targeted– who included both political and military leaders– were sitting on the ground floor, and escaped with little damage. (Note that the idea of killing political leaders is completely outside what is allowed in the laws of war, as is the idea of killing military personnel when they are not on active duty. So such operations were war-crimes from the get-go, regardless of whether “untargeted” bystanders were also harmed, which in many or most cases they certainly were.)
Among those who escaped the airborne assassins that day were Hamas’s paraplegic founder and historic leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, whom the Israelis did succeed in killing a year later, and Ismail Haniyyeh, who ran in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006 and emerged as Prime Minister of the Palestinian government elected that month. Haniyyeh and his colleagues in the Gaza portion of Hamas’s leadership have been essential participants in the Egypt-mediated negotiations for the June ceasefire.
It is almost certain that if Israel had indeed “succeeded” in assassinating Haniyyeh and others in the present Hamas leadership, then it would have been far harder, or perhaps impossible, for the Egyptians and Israelis to find any Palestinian leaders with the political charisma, clout, and legitimacy that have been required to negotiate and implement the ceasefire from the Palestinian side. (It would be kinda nice if Barak could admit that publicly, and also apologize to Haniyyeh for his past attempts to assassinate him?? Dream on, Helena.)
As part of the tahdi’eh, Israel undertook to stop its EJK attempts against the Hamas leaders, which is valuable first step towards the further de-escalation of tensions (and positive peacemaking!) that is so desperately needed.
B’tselem has some good updates about the state of the EJK policy as of the end of 2007 in its 2007 annual report (PDF here.) It includes this:

seven targeted-killing cases that took place in 2006 and 2007, which killed 36 bystanders, including 16 minors, the State Attorney’s Office rejected the demand.

Seven EJKs that killed 36 bystanders? Where’s all the much-vaunted “proportionality” and “restraint” that Blumenfeld was writing about in her article?
As for the Spanish arrest warrants against Ben-Eliezer and the others, the Israeli government is reportedly “battling hard to overturn [the] Spanish court’s decision.”
My view– with this case in Spain, as with the earlier attempts to indict Ariel Sharon through the Belgian courts– is that though these court cases play an important role in helping to sensitize wwestern opinion to the nature of some of the actions involved, and though they hold out the important hope that “international criminal justice” can be brought to bear impartially, including against offenders who are not members of groups marginalized within the present, “west”-dominated international system, still, the pursuit of these cases is not the path that will lead to finding and implementing a durable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it is that path of conflict termination that is the one that must most urgently be pursued.
Back in the early 2000s, when the Belgian court made a (notably halfhearted and short-lived) attempt to go after Ariel Sharon for war crimes committed against Palestinians in 1982, he was still the Prime Minister of Israel. And though seeing him in the dock may have given some satisfaction to some Palestinians, still, what they most needed from him at that time was his serious engagement in serious peace negotiations… and inasmuch as the Belgian court case distracted attention or commitment from that path, it might actually have been harmful.
And similarly with the present Spanish court cases. Of course, the actions on which the defendants stand arraigned were heinous ones: the assassination of political opponents on a wide scale, and with far too little heed to the effects of those actions on bystanders. And the past actions and decisions of many of the Hamas leaders were equally heinous in their disregard for the laws of war, including the absolute injunction to avoid civilian casualties. But the priority– with regard to the misdeeds of both sides– must still remain on the search for a durable political outcome to the conflict.
Is such an outcome in sight? Perhaps not as far distant as many westerners seem to think. I think the new interest that some leaders in the secular portion of the Palestinian nationalist movement are expressing in the longheld goal of a single, binational state in all the area of Mandate Palestine is a heartening development.
Since 1967, the Israelis have had numerous chances to achieve a two-state solution, which could keep essentially intact their goal of having a state in existence that would be strong, secure, intentionally Jewish, and at peace with all of its neighbors. That would involve a return to something at or very close to the lines of June 4, 1967.
But repeatedly over the years they avoided making that choice. Instead, every time, they voted with their concrete mixers, pouring vast volumes of concrete into the project to build Jews-only colonial settlements throughout the West Bank (and Golan) and to connect them with their own, beyond-apartheid grid of Jews-only roads. As a result of that, and of the implantation of 450,000 Jewish settlers into those settlements, it is now almost impossible to imagine how the West Bank could be separated from Israel proper. The small chunks of land there that might be left to a Palestinian Bantustan would be quite incapable of supporting a viable Palestinian state.
Time to return to the older dream of humane Zionists like Martin Buber or Judah Magnes, who held up the goal of a unitary, binational state…

The South Ossetian War: Some thoughts

Some of the best running commentary on the War of South Ossetia has been that produced by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama over recent days. Including this post today. What I find particularly useful about Bernhard’s blogging is his ability both to keep up with diverse news sources and to reveal to “western” readers the biases that are often deeply embedded in our MSM’s coverage of the events. For the latter, see some of what he wrote here.
Today, the NYT’s James Traub had a lengthy piece on the Ossetian war. It provided a lot of deep background about the decades-old disputes between Georgia and Russia (but actually, not a whole lot more than you can get in Wikipedia); and it noted, quite rightly, the relationship between Russia’s support for the self-rule of the South Ossetians (and Abkhazians) and the recognition that many western nations recently gave to the “independence” of Kosovo.
There are a large number of structural parallels between these cases, as well as a causal relationship. (Parallels, too, with the campaigns many westerners have supported for the breakaway of Iraqi Kurdistan and Darfur from the countries of which they are currently part.)
Traub’s piece is, however, plagued by being confined within the same occidocentric bubble that Bernhard does such a good job of identifying and puncturing. For example, Traub repeatedly refers to westerners “getting it” when they come to share his own judgment that Putin’s Russia is aggressive and hostile. (So much for “objectivity”!) And in his last graf, he writes this:

One party has all the hard power it could want, the other all the soft.

I’m assuming he means it’s the Russians who have all the hard power, and the Georgians who have all the soft power?
Well, perhaps inside the NYT bubble things look like that. (“Harsh Russian aggressors! Poor, long-suffering Georgian victims!”) But in the rest of the world– and almost certainly within Russia itself — they probably look very different, or perhaps even the reverse of that. There have certainly been civilian victims of Georgian military power within South Ossetia, and Georgian civilian victims of Russian military power within Georgia. But you can bet that in the Russian media, only the former have been given the spotlight; just as in the NYT’s reporting today there were three prominent photos of Georgian victims surveying the results of Russian bombing (one of them on the front page), and only one photo of Ossetian victims of Georgian bombing. This, though the wire-service reporting seems to indicate that there have been much greater numbers of victims in S. Ossetia than in Georgia.
Well, it is hard at this point to know the precise numbers of victims on either side. But it’s not hard to conclude that Traub’s judgment about the relevant distribution of hard power and soft is quite misleading.
It’s interesting, too, to see that Haaretz reported today that,

H’mm. That sure sounds like some Georgian access to hard power, to me. As do the reports of Georgia getting SAM-5 missiles from Ukraine… Also, I wonder how those revelations in Haaretz might affect Israel’s long-tended relations with Moscow?
Well, despite Yakobashvili’s crowing, it seems the Georgian government took enough of a drubbing from its massive northern neighbor that it is now eager to sue for peace.
The final outcome on the ground from this nasty and damaging little war are still far from clear. But some of the broader implications for world politics of what has been happening are already emerging:

The “west” is hopelessly over-stretched

Russia is coming back

will have to rethink the wisdom of that tactic

my criticism

This latter point about the wisdom of the tendency many westerners have shown in recent years to encourage secessionist movements– especially those seeking to secede from countries they disapprove of— is worth a lot more exploration. Back in February, Russia’s leaders were quite explicit in warning that if western nations proceeded with backing Kosovar independence, then they might well push for a similar outcome for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin and Medvedev had also repeatedly expressed their deep concern at the prospect that NATO might extend membership to both Georgia (and Ukraine.) So Saakashvili should have known he was playing with fire when, earlier this week, he ordered his security forces to “retake South Ossetia by force”, thus breaking the Sochi Agreement of 1992, which gave responsibility for public security in the S. O. region to a Russian-commanded peacekeeping force.
That would be equivalent, in Kosovo, to Serbia sending in its armed forces to seize control of Kosovo from the western-dominated peacekeeping force that’s currently in control there.
(Worth reading about present-day Kosovo, by the way, is this depressing piece of reporting by Jeremy Harding in the LRB. He writes, “No one would have imagined that a UN protectorate in Europe, stuffed with NGOs and awash with donor receipts, could perform so badly. Kosovo has low growth, no inflation, and few signs of an emerging economy… In Kosovo every scam and indignity, from the protection of ex-KLA war criminals down, is common knowledge…” Under its new banner of “independence”, Kosovo doesn’t quite seem to have become the land of milk and honey that some people predicted?)
But back to Saakashvili. He seems to have miscalculated, rather badly. The west that was so ready and eager to take on the Russians over Kosovo back in March 1999 is not nearly as ready– or able– to take them on over Georgia, nine years later.
On Friday, Reuters’ William Schomberg quoted James Nixey, an analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, as saying that,

I don’t think he can count on the cavalry riding in

One last little note I want to make here is about the use and abuse of the whole concept of “humanitarian intervention”, being used as a reason to launch military operations that by their very nature are quite anti-humanitarian.
I have no doubt at all that Russia’s media are at this very moment displaying all kinds of images of suffering Ossetian civilians and describing Russia’s actions in Ossetia as as an intensely “humanitarian intervention.”
And similarly (mutatis mutandis) in Georgia.
This should give us all pause.
Back in 1999, I was one of the few liberal commentators in the western MSM who argued consistently against the idea that a western military campaign against Serbia could ever be described as a “humanitarian intervention”, or otherwise justified.
Please, let’s now take this opportunity to bury this idea, once and for all, that wars can ever be described as “humanitarian.”

Iraqi FM insists on ‘clear timeline’ for US troop pullout

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari still insists on a “clear timeline” for the withdrawal of US troops from his country, according to this report from AP’s Robert Reid.
Reid writes that Zebari also said that the Iraqi and US negotiators are “very close” to reaching a longterm security agreement, but stressed that Baghdad won’t consider an agreement that doesn’t specify the timeline.
He adds this:

His sources on the US official side say there is no agreement on specific dates and that completion of the SOFA/MOU negotiations is not close, putting them at odds with Zebari’s assessment.
As I’ve written here before, I think the Bushites lost the “Battle of Baghdad”– that is, their campaign to lock in security agreements with Baghdad that would allow a longterm US troop presence in Iraq– some time ago.
It was of course Clausewitz who wrote the important truth that “War is an extension of politics by other means.” All wars start and end in politics. Back in late 2002, I remember my pro-invasion Iraqi-Kurdish friend Siyamend Othman talking about the need to win “the Battle of Washington”– that is, the battle to win Washington’s support for the invasion project. Well, he and his Iraqi allies (who of course included Zebari, Ahmed Chalabi, Barham Saleh, etc) won that one. But now, their US allies have lost the Battle of Baghdad.

At Baltimore Yearly Meeting

The reason I haven’t been posting much here this past week is that I’ve been at the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. As nearly always seems to happen when I come here, I start off by thinking I’ll manage to get plenty of time to blog, but end up not able to do much. Partly it’s because the internet connection is slow. But partly, too, it’s because I go into a different mental zone when I’m here.
I wish I had the energy to tell you some of the interesting, uplifting, and thought-provoking things that have happened here. But I’m afraid I don’t even have the energy to do that.
Ommmm.
John Woolman, 1763: “Love is the first motion.” Yes, indeed.