Are foreign wars winnable? and other big questions

This morning I took part in a panel discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace on Foreign Policy and the Next U.S. Administration The other panelists were Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, and Dan Twining, a youngish analyst with the present State Department’s Bureau of Policy Planning who previously worked for a while as a foreign-policy aide to Sen. John McCain. The session was ably chaired by Abi Williams, Vice President for Conflict Prevention at USIP.
It was an interesting and rich discussion. As I had expected, Gvosdev and I agreed about a lot of things. He is a very intelligent Realist. My view is that pacifism is the new realism. (Not sure if I managed to persuade him of that; but hey, he might become convinced of it some day!) Twining made a number of observations that I found really interesting, too, though we disagreed much more.
Wow. USIP’s a/v and web-editing staff have done a great job and have gotten an MP3 version of the discussion up onto their website already. Easy to find my main presentation: I was on first.
If you don’t want to listen to the audio, here’s a rough outline of what I said:
I started by describing three momentous consequences of the globalization the world system has seen in recent decades:

    1. Foreign wars have become nearly unwinnable. This for two reasons: (a) compared with, say, the situation in the 19th century, the global information environment has become much more transparent; and (b) the norm of human equality has become much more widely (and deeply?) acknowledged, even if still not by any means always respected.
    2. The US is no longer the Uberpower it seemed to be back in the 1990s, but we are now really in what Richard Haass has called the “non-polar world.”. This was a quick reprise of some of the analysis from Ch.6 of my Re-engage! book.
    3. Climate change has emerged as an issue of core importance in world politics.

I went on to say how these three big developments structure the global environment in which the new president will be operating, and made a few other points… I concluded by noting that we need to develop a new, much more people-centered definition of “the national interest”, and laying out my list of the three top things the next president should do within his first 100 days in office.
These are:

    1. Announce a date certain for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, and invite the UN to convene the negotiation(s) which will allow that to happen in an orderly way.
    2. Close Guantanamo; and
    3. Announce that he is committed to participating in good faith in the post-Kyoto global negotiations on climate change.

Those of you who’ve read my Re-engage! book will probably recognize how this presentation built on some of the book’s key themes.
More on the increasing unwinnability of foreign wars, and on the “Top 3 Things for the new president”– later. Right now, I’m pretty tired.

78 years later… The Anglo-Iraq Treaty of 1930

Thanks to Glen Rangwala of Cambridge and Jonathan Schwarz of Democrats.com who have found the definitive UN-archived version (PDF) of the 1930 treaty between Britain and Iraq.
Here is an HTML version of the treaty’s text (copied and pasted from the text in Schwarz’s blog post there.)
The 1930 treaty provides an instructive precedent for with the present US attempts to force the (US-constituted) Iraqi government into a long-term security arrangement in many respects:

  • In both cases, a western government that had taken control of Iraq by military means later had its presence there given some cover by the world’s leading intergovernmental body, and also set about constituting a puppet “national” government there which was the body with which this agreement was “negotiated.”
  • In both cases, there is some attempt by the occupying power to couch the treaty in terms of equality, and to make some of its provisions look advantageous to the occupied country. But in both cases, close attention to the terms of the agreement reveals its highly asymmetrical nature.
  • In both cases, provision is made for the western power in question to have wide access to, use of, and control over military bases in Iraq; there are components relating to it providing “advisors” to the Iraqi armed forces; and Britishers service-members in Iraq are offered immunity from local prosecution and other privileges.

I note that Schwarz made some, but not all of those points. I’m hoping I can get back to doing a more thorough annotation of this treaty and what we know about the Bush administration’s present proposals to Iraq, as soon as possible.
I note, however, that the regional and global political climate within which the Bush administration is pursuing its Iraq policy is very different indeed from those in which “His Britannic Majesty” was acting.
Back then, London faced no significant challenge from any third-party (i.e. non-Iraqi and non-British)powers to its pursuit of its imperial policies in Iraq. The biggest third-party “challenger” to British designs in the Middle East was France; and in the post-WW-I diplomacy, Britain and France had reached extensive agreement on how they would divvy up control over the mashreq between them. There were numerous Arab and non-Arab critics of Britain’s policy in Iraq, but none that caused London any significant level of concern.
Today, as the Bush administration attempts a reprise of 1930, it faces significant opposition from the following sources:

    * an educated and increasingly well-organized population inside Iraq;
    * Iran;
    * public opinion throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and some though not all of their governments;
    * democrats (small ‘d’) in the US who increasingly reject lengthy, imperial-style entanglements in Iraq;
    * most likely, other significant world powers.

So Bush is basically whistling in the wind on this…
However, the fundamental irrationality and unwinnability (not to mention immorality) of this project is no guarantee at all that he will not continue to pursue it, doggedly, as long as he can. That means, I guess, that we need to continue our campaign to oppose it.
Revisiting the history of the 1930 treaty is, it seems to me, a helpful part of doing this. Thanks, Jonathan and Glen.

Levy and Bronner on Israelis’ distaste for peace

The headline of Gideon Levy’s article today is even more provocative than mine: “Quiet is muck” is how it reads in the English translation. He leads off with this:

    A great disaster has suddenly come upon Israel: The cease-fire has gone into effect. Cease-fire, cease-Qassams, cease-assassiations, at least for now. This good, hopeful news was received in Israel dourly, gloomily, even with hostility. As usual, politicians, the military brass and pundits went hand in hand to market the cease-fire as a negative, threatening and disastrous development.
    Even from the people who forged the agreement – the prime minister and defense minister – you heard not a word about hope; just covering their backsides in case of failure. No one spoke of the opportunity, everyone spoke of the risk, which is fundamentally unfounded. Hamas will arm? Why of all times during the cease-fire? Will only Hamas arm? We won’t? Perhaps it will arm, and perhaps it will realize that it should not use armed force because of calm’s benefits.
    It is hard to believe: The outbreak of war is received here with a great deal more sympathy and understanding, not to say enthusiasm, than a cease-fire…

So maybe this is the obverse side of the “bellophilia” (love of war) that Meron Benvenisti diagnosed sweeping the Israeli public in 2002. We could call the present phenomenon eirenophobia, the fear or hatred of peace.
Levy continues:

    Hamas wants the calm because it serves its goals. That is not necessarily bad for Israel. A few months of quiet and the lifting of the terrible siege on Gaza could create a new reality. Noam Shalit’s protest is understandable, but the new atmosphere of calm is precisely the time to finally secure the release of his son Gilad and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners – two positive developments for the two peoples.
    Yes, the zero-sum game between us and them ended long ago. It is a shame we are the only ones not to have internalized it… A new and somewhat better life in Gaza will assure a new life for Israel, too. It is not for nothing that the days when the fence was breached between Gaza and Egypt were the quietest days the Negev had known in two years.
    In the wake of the cease-fire, a Palestinian government of national unity may arise and be a real and not virtual partner, the representative of the entire Palestinian people and not half of it. True, Hamas will not quickly abandon its hard-line positions, but under the aegis of a unity government it may surprise people, at least in a passive way. An agreement with such a government will not be an agreement of puppets between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the one known as the “shelf agreement.” If it is attained, it will be a real agreement. The cease-fire has already proven that not only is Israel willing to negotiate with Hamas, Hamas is willing to negotiate with Israel. Is this not good news?

The largely negative and fearful way that most Israelis have responded to news of the tahdi’eh with Hamas has also been remarked on by the NYT’s Ethan Bronner. He writes:

    After a year of painful violence — Hamas rockets flying into Israeli communities, soldiers killed and wounded on forays into Gaza — one might have expected the start of a six-month cease-fire with Hamas to be hailed here as good news. Yet what was the front page headline in Maariv newspaper that day? “Fury and Fear.”
    That says a great deal about the mood in Israel, a widely shared gloom that this nation is facing alarming threats both from without and within. Seen from far away, last week must have offered some hope that the region was finally at, or near, a turning point: the truce with Hamas, negotiated by Egypt, started on Thursday; other Palestinian-Israeli talks were taking place on numerous levels that both sides said were opening long-closed issues; there were also Turkish-mediated Israeli negotiations with Syria, and a new offer to yield territory to Lebanon along with a call for direct talks between Jerusalem and Beirut.
    But it looked very different here. Most Israelis consider the truce with Hamas an admission of national failure, a victory for a radical group with a vicious ideology. As they look ahead, Israelis can’t decide which would be worse, for the truce to fall apart (as polls show most expect it to do), or for Hamas actually to make it last, thereby solidifying the movement’s authority in Palestinian politics over the more secular Fatah…
    The backdrop for all of this is the fear of Iran’s growing power and the world’s inability so far to stop it from working on atomic weaponry. But it is not only foreign relations that so depresses the Israeli public. It is also that their political system is in crisis with the leaders under investigation and feuding among themselves.
    “It is not ‘the situation’ that darkens the mood here in Israel,” wrote Yossi Sarid, a longtime leftist politician, in an opinion article in the newspaper Haaretz. “It is the lack of exit from the situation. There is not really any hope for change. Who will rescue us from depression? Who will give us expectations?”

Bronner then notes that, whereas in the US, many people are pinning considerable hopes on Barack Obama as offering a chance for a “new beginning”, and a way out of a still gloomy national situation, in Israel there is no such immediately evident and compelling alternative to the current, chronically logjammed and distrusted crop of political leaders.
Crucially, he notes this:

    One point many commentators made last week is that while there may be a state of “calm” with Hamas, there is still nothing resembling that between Mr. Olmert and his defense minister, Ehud Barak. They remain at war. And the feuding goes beyond the two of them.
    Both of Mr. Olmert’s two main lieutenants, Mr. Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, have called publicly for him to resign over an investigation into whether he took envelopes of cash from an American Jewish businessman. Everyone assumes there will be a new government by year’s end. Yet a vote tentatively planned for the coming week in Parliament, on whether to dissolve itself and trigger new elections, may not happen because so many parliamentarians worry they will not be re-elected.

Bronner ends with a few quotes from that supremely irrelevant and silly man, Tony Blair. He quotes Blair as saying that,

    as he now understands it, what started in late 2000 when the second Palestinian uprising began and Israel counterattacked was “a complete breakdown in the credibility of peace.”

What an idiot Blair is. From 2000 till last year he was Prime Minister of Britain, and therefore had access to all the best “intelligence” the Britas and Americans could muster about the situation in Israel/Palestine. And it is only now that he finally understands that what happened in 2000 was a complete breakdown in the credibility of, as I understand what he’s saying, the kind of coercive peace process the western powers had been trying to shove down the Palestinians’ throats since 1993? When I took part in the 2-week-long Quaker fact-finding mission to Palestine/Israel in summer 2002, the breakdown in the credibility of the post-1993 “peace” process was already extremely evident. We wrote a lot about it in the book we then jointly published; and I wrote about it here on JWN and elsewhere on many occasions back then…
But the present developments in Israel are still very interesting indeed: the eirenophobia, the uncertainty about their national future, and the stalemate and strategic stasis of their political leadership.
I still don’t buy Sayed Hassan Nasrallah’s analysis that Israel is like a spider’s web that is on the point of collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But if this is the response of most Israelis to news of the ceasefire with Gaza, then maybe Israel is closer to being an unsustainable spider’s web than than it previously appeared.

63 months of American “Freedom” in Iraq

Juan Cole has a brilliant post today in which he soberly assesses and presents the data on the excess deaths suffered by Iraqis as a result of George W. Bush’s decision to invade their country:

    By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. This conclusion can be reached more than one way. There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were probably killed by US troops or by the US Air Force, with the bulk dying in bombing raids by US fighter jets and helicopter gunships on densely populated city and town quarters.
    In absolute numbers, that would be like bombing to death everyone in Pittsburgh, Pa. Or Cincinnati, Oh.
    Only, the US is 11 times more populous than Iraq, so 310,000 Iraqi corpses would equal 3.4 million dead Americans. So proportionally it would be like firebombing to death everyone in Chicago.
    The one million number includes not just war-related deaths but all killings beyond what you would have expected from the 2000-2002 baseline…

And for a more granular, personal view of what it is still like, today, to live in the climate of violence, read this searing description by the LA Times’s Usama Redha of a bombing near his home in the Hurriya neighborhood of Baghdad:

    When I come home from work I always walk from the bus terminal past the vegetable and fruit vendors and shish kebab restaurants in the market, not just for shopping, but to chat a few minutes with some of the vendors who were my childhood friends.
    Suddenly, BOOM! A huge explosion shook the bus..
    But my daily chat that should have ended with a joke and a smile turned to tears and sorrow.
    The driver swerved the microbus. We saw a huge ball of dust and black smoke rise from the bus terminal.
    People were running to see what was going on and to rescue the injured.
    I called my wife to tell her that I was OK, and then called the office to report the news.
    My heart was pounding as each step took me closer to the scene. Through the heavy smoke I could see the human flesh. The faceless, burned body of a woman and others were spread here and there. They were lucky that they were in peace, I told myself. The injured lay on the ground in suffering. I thanked God because I could have been one of them. It was just three minutes between death and life.
    I was trying to cover the story, but something fixed my legs to the ground. At first I felt afraid to go closer, afraid there could be another explosion. But then I saw people I knew screaming about beloved ones. I knew then that my friends were killed. I had lost two of my dear friends, their lives turned to lifeless digits in the casualty count of at least 63.
    I passed the scene three days later. There were candles with flowers here and there. I approached a charred spot that had been a booth. There was a picture and black sign: “The Happy martyr Ahmad Salih.”
    I approached a man who was standing nearby. He was smoking and had an absentminded look.
    “Why have people put the flowers and candles here?” I asked.
    He looked at me, and said in a depressed tone, “These candles and flowers are for the ones whose bodies were not found.”
    The man spoke again more sadly.
    “Look to the top of the building. There, people found the head of a child. He is my grandson.”

Do we need to recall that, as the foreign belligerent occupying power, the US still bears overall responsibility for ensuring the security of Iraq’s civilian population?
Hurriya, by the way, is Arabic for “freedom.” I have always been disgusted that Bush and his officials gave the name “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to their military invasion of Iraq. What an Orwellian abuse of language.

Uh-Oh-Bama!

The candidate was reported as saying in Florida today:

    “[T]here is no doubt that Iran poses an extraordinary threat to Israel and Israel is always justified in making decisions that will provide for its security.”

Looks to me like ways too blank of a check.
No qualifications there, Senator? How about this: “Like any country, Israel is justified in making any legitimate decisions that will provide for its security.”
Words matter. Especially when they’re inscribed on blank checks.

    Update Sunday a.m.:
    Please note that in my critique above I haven’t even touched on the factual basis behind Obama’s assertion that “[T]here is no doubt that Iran poses an extraordinary threat to Israel.” I wanted to focus on the operational part of the sentence. But the operational part is evidently logically linked to the antecedent assertion, even though not strictly entailed by it.
    Regarding the factual assertion, it is quite simply incorrect. I am just one of many hundreds or even thousands of analysts of regional strategic affairs who judges that there is considerable doubt that Iran poses any “extraordinary” threat to Israel, let alone any threat of a gravity that would justify Israel starting a regional war to “prevent” or “pre-empt” it. Indeed, several strategic analysts in Israel itself, including former intel chief Efraim Halevy, judge that Israel could even live with a nuclear-armed Iran (though there is no evidence yet that that that is what the mullahs are actually aiming for.)
    Also extremely relevant here– though never mentioned by Obama or other leading members of the US political elite– is, as always, Israel’s own current possession of extremely robust nuclear weapons, whether fully assembled or just one step away from being so. Those give it, of course, considerable deterrent capability.

What the Greeks say

AFP reports from Athens that:

    The Greek air force’s central command said Friday it had taken part in “joint training exercises” with Israel off the southern Mediterranean island of Crete.
    The maneuvers, code-named ’Glorious Spartan 08,’ took place on May 28 and June 12, and consisted of aerial maneuvers and knowledge exchange.
    According to Greece’s Athens News Agency, the operation involved simulated aerial combat, attacks on terrestrial targets, aerial refueling and search and rescue missions.

I still believe, as I wrote here yesterday, that given Greece’s role in NATO the US military must have known all about the exercise. It also quite possibly provided material help to it, as well as helping ensure the operational safety of the airspace used.

ElBaradei, Powell, and the key role of legitimacy

Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) today threatened to resign if Iran should be subjected to unwarranted military attack by any party.
Now, that’s leadership!
I am just sitting here and thinking how different the world would be today if former Secretary of State Colin Powell had shown comparable moral grit and expressed an exactly similar intention, either publicly, or privately to the president, in the lead-up to Bush’s launching of the war against Iraq… Powell reportedly had considerable reservations about the wisdom of the attack, but at a certain point he took a deep breath and went along with it, as “a loyal soldier.” Indeed, he even agreed to lend the considerable political legitimacy he had accrued both at home and overseas to the shameful and mendacious effort to “sell” the war to the national and global publics with his UN speech.
The worldwide impact of ElBaradei’s statement, which he made to the broadly pro-US Al-Arabiyya television station, is huge. Its impact here in the US is doubtless considerably less than a public Powell declaration of intent-to-resign would have been, but it is by no means trivial. For finally, after being immersed in neocon-generated delusions about America’s global supremacy etc for so many years, the American people and even many members of our political elite are waking up to the fact that the US is not a widely admired and unchallengeable Uberpower any more.
In this new, post-Uberpower world, that vital, if still somewhat hard-to-capture quality of “legitimacy” has become more and more important.
In the 19th century, the US Cavalry could go charging around the American west rounding up and expropriating the native peoples, and the European Big Powers could continue doing exactly the same thing in Asia or Africa– and essentially there was nothing to stop them. The oppressed peoples themselves had nothing like the firepower required to resist the “White” armies, and public opinion back in the metropoles only rarely intervened to stop the massacres. News of the military forces’ depradations took weeks, sometimes months, to reach “back home”, if it ever did. And if the publics in London, New York, or Paris should receive news of a massacre here or there in the non-“White” world– well, how much did most of them, actually, care?
We are no longer in the nineteenth century. Thank goodness.
We’re in a century in which:

    1. The international information environment is fast approaching global transparency. Now, we citizens of big, powerful nations often have real-time information about the effects of our military’s actions on others around the world. We can never again say with conviction that “We didn’t know.”
    2. The norm of the equality of all human persons has become much more solidly recognized (even if still only imperfectly respected) than ever before. It is impossible to stand up in any chancery or parliament today and say, “Oh, but it was only a bunch of fuzzy-wuzzies or towelheads who were harmed.” Humanity matters.

The above two developments have transformed world politics. In the era of transparency and human equality, the legitimacy of any government or other body that is contemplating taking a radical action has become central.
ElBaradei embodies global legitimacy on issues of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. George Bush does not. (To put it mildly.) With his statement of intention to resign, ElBaradei has thrown down a challenge to the warmongers in Washington and Israel that I believe they will be unable to overcome.
Thank you, Mr. ElBaradei!
(In terms of “legitimacy”, it is also notable that Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of a newly stabilized and new self-confident Russia– which still, of course, has a veto-bearing seat on the Security Council– has also recently issued a strong warning against the use of force against Iran.)

Iran: Israeli muscle-flexing, US vulnerability

The NYT’s Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt today published a report, sourced to Gordon’s favored sources, those ever-anonymous “Pentagon officials”, that states,

    Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
    Several American officials [who remain unidentified throughout] said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.
    More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The military exercise in question, the Pentagon-leaked report about it, and the publication earlier this week of WINEP’s long-awaited “It’ll be a cake-walk, folks!”, oh sorry make that”The Last Resort” report (PDF), that spins the neocon view of how painless an attack on Iran will be: all these developments together look like a sophisticated, multi-pronged campaign to prepare the world political climate for just such an attack.
Any military attack by one country on the land of another is an act of war. Let’s not forget that. Warmongers have always sought to cloak the nature of their actions in euphemistic mendacity. The euphemism favored by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, the authors of the Cakewalk “Last resort” paper favor, is “preventive action.”
Oh my! It makes it sound as admirable and low-risk as a measles-inoculation campaign in a low-income neighborhood, doesn’t it? Don’t be fooled for a moment.
Some first important points to note about the reported Israeli exercise:

    1. If indeed it was of the scale reported by Gordon and Schmitt, then it was one large, very noticeable, and very expensive exercise. Two questions: Why have we not heard about it from other sources in Greece and the eastern Med before now? And why, if it was kept quiet until now, did these Pentagon officials choose to tell us about it now?
    2. Over the years, it was the US that gave Israel the vast majority, if not all, of the air platforms used. These would be the same kind of platforms (i.e. planes and choppers) that would be used in the attack on Iran that is apparently being considered by Israel. But the transfer of all such weapons from the US to any other country is always attached to strict conditionality regarding the uses to which they can be put. Do we have any reason to think that the US would, actually, allow Israel to use these planes to bomb Iran? And why should it allow Israel to train to do so? These are very important questions.
    3. The airspace over Greece and the eastern Med is part of Greece’s and NATO’s clearly understood area of operations. What authorities within Greece or NATO gave permission for an exercise of this nature to be conducted? What operational support did the Israelis receive in its conduct from either Greece or NATO?
    4. The exercise looks to have been extremely expensive to conduct. Was any portion of that cost paid by the US? If not, how did Israel fund it?

One inescapable conclusion: There is no way this exercise was carried without direct coordination with US and and probably also NATO commanders at, presumably, the highest level. In that sense, therefore, it was not solely an “Israeli” exercise. It was a US-condoned or perhaps even US-supported or US-funded exercise, carried out by Israeli pilots in planes given to Israel by the US.
An important corollary: If Israel should build on what it learned in the exercise and actually undertake an act of war against Iran, then the US would be just as closely implicated in (and responsible for) that act of war as it was for the conduct of the training exercise. There is no way an Israeli air force strike group could reach Iran to bomb it without passing through airspace that– in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf countries, and Turkey– is all under tight control of either the US unilaterally, or of NATO.
My first thought on reading the Gordon-Schmitt piece was, “Oh my gosh, maybe the Israelis will actually go ahead and launch a war against Iran in which the US would, like it or not, necessarily immediately become entangled.”
My second thought, on reading the two men’s almost exclusively “Pentagon official” sourcing of the story was that it looks as though there are high-ups in the Pentagon actually conniving in something there.
But what? Hard to believe that even the most hardened neocons left in the administration (and there aren’t a lot there any more) would collude with Israel in undertaking an act of war that would place in immediate jeopardy the lives of our 160,000 American sitting ducks in Iraq– and the supply lines that support them… and the entire global oil market?
Don’t be swayed, by the way, by all the attempts at emollient argument– “it won’t be so bad!” “we’ll have lots of allies in the region, and even in Iran!”– that Clawson and Eisenstadt brought forth in their Cakewalk paper. The effects of any outside country, whether US or Israel (with US collusion), launching a war against Iran would be of the utmost gravity.
So if these “Pentagon officials”– and perhaps also some officials in Dick Cheney’s office– are conniving in something, maybe it isn’t actually the planning for an Israeli attack on Iran? Maybe they’ve been conniving in generating an appearance of an imminent Israeli attack against Iran, with the aim of– what? Trying to up the coercion-factor ante against Iran in the continuing negotiations, or non-negotiations, over its nuclear program? Perhaps.
(Note to Gordon and Schmitt in this context: No-one has yet produced any conclusive evidence that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program. You make mention of such a program twice in your article, both times in the context of reporting on allegations made about its existence by Israeli officials. But since you do mention it both times without comment or qualification, you surely owe it to your American readers to also note that Iran claims its program is for purely civilian purposes, and there is no conclusive evidence that it has a military dimension.)
But it is also possible that what the Israelis, and their friends deep in the Bush administration including the office of the Vice President, are doing is something altogether more nefarious. Perhaps they are seeking to “use” the threat that Israel might launch an attack against Iran at a time and in a way of its own choosing as a way of essentially blackmailing the rest of the US government into agreeing to either coordinate more closely and cooperatively with Israel in planning a joint attack against Iran; or to do something else the Olmert government really wants them to do (more money, more weapons, less pressure on the “peace process”, etc.)
In any event, it is all an extremely risky business indeed… The oil market has already been showing jitters this morning, in response to the NYT article and to the latest declarations from Hugo Chavez.
Whether Israel and its allies within the US (inside portions of the administration, and in highly ideological think-tanks) are supporting the flexing of Israel’s military muscle in order to prepare for an actual act of war against Iran, or “merely” to blackmail the rest of the US government, then either way it’s an outrage and should end forthwith.
As for the still-continuing dispute between the US government and Iran over the latter’s nuclear enrichment program, there are 1,000 ways other than war and violence to deal with that. Indeed, the non-US powers on the UN Security Council should right now be working overtime to try to convene an authoritative, high-level US-Iranian negotiation in which those concerns and all the other issues of concern between the two governments can be addressed.
The creation of the UN in 1945, as a body that provides numerous different avenues for the nonviolent resolution of tough international conflicts, is a signal achievement of US diplomacy and wisdom in decades past. Our country’s citizens– and the whole world!– would be extremely well served if our president decided to use the world body to help de-escalate the current, extremely high-risk tensions. And we would be correspondingly ill-served if he allowed the warmongers to jerk him into supporting any form of a military attack against Iran.
Right now, as whenever there is an increased risk of an act of war being launched against Iran by the US or Israel, there is a heightened risk that matters might spin out of control. The stability of the global system as well as the lives of 160,000 US servicemembers in Iraq are put in direct risk.
Stop the madness. Stop the war. Start the diplomacy of real engagement and real problem-solving– now.

Hamas’s Bardawil on the tahdi’eh, etc.

Kudos to Haaretz’s Avi Issacharoff who yesterday conducted a phone interview with Hamas legislator and Gaza Strip spokesman Salah Bardawil about the thadi’eh.
Issacharoff asked what Hamas would do to any Gazans who might violate the tahdi’eh by firing rockets at Israel.
Bardawil replied:

    “I’m not going to say that we’ll start deploying forces at the border and turn into the Palestinian Authority, which works to safeguard Israel?s security interest. But we made a decision that anyone who fires rockets at Israel will be doing so without our approval. We’ll let the organization with which he is affiliated deal with him. If it?s someone who doesn’t belong to any organization, measures will be taken against him. Anyone who violates the factions? decision on the cease-fire is harming the Palestinian interest and we will deal with him accordingly.”

Evidently, anyone in Israel who wants to see the tahdi’eh maintained should have an interest in ensuring that the responsible party in Gaza, i.e. Hamas, has the capability to monitor and police the Strip’s border zones, which given its tiny size means really the whole Strip, effectively.
The rest of the article is interesting, too. Issacharoff not only engages Bardawil in a fascinating conversation on broader prospects for Israel-Hamas diplomacy, but also has a short report of a conversation with an unnamed former Fateh official in Gaza who expressed what Issacharoff described as “consternation” that the ceasefire has further strengthened Hamas politically.
Issacharoff writes this about his conversation with Bardawil:

Continue reading “Hamas’s Bardawil on the tahdi’eh, etc.”