Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 139 – Info, analysis, discussion

Serious unrest in US ally, Egypt

Ever since the Washington managed to broker the 1978 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt has played a huge role in American military planning in the Middle East. This is the case not just because, with 73 million citizens and a long and proud history, it is in many respects the weightiest of all the Arab countries. And not just because it sits astride the Suez Canal, a key artery in the shipping lanes that support the US war effort in Iraq. And not just because the Egyptian regime’s torture chambers have been subcontracted on numerous occasions to perform torture on demand (aka “renditioned torture”) as part of the Bushists’ “Global War on Terror.”
No, Egypt is important for all these reasons, and many more. And now, the increasingly sclerotic, 27-year-long regime of President Husni Mubarak is in deep trouble. It faces challenges on three crucial fronts:

increasingly angry

Yesterday was one test for the regime’s ability to control the streets. Many of the non-MB movements, including the liberal party Kefaya, the allied Karama Party, and some labor organizations had called a “strike” to protest price hikes. With harsh, bullying rhetoric and a massive show of force (that in at least one place left two strike supporters reportedly dead from police bullets), the regime managed to keep the lid on those protests– for a while.
Today, though,further serious confrontations were reported from the labor-activism epicenter in Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo. That Reuters report says that demonstrators,

Which brings us to tomorrow, which is the date scheduled for local “elections” throughout the the country.
The MB had sought to run some 6,000 candidates in the elections slated to fill some 52,000 posts in local administration throughout the country. The regime placed many kinds of obstacles in their way– including deploying security forces to forbid entry to the places where candidates needed to register, and widespread campaigns of arrest without trial and other forms of intimidation. (As denounced by Human Rights Watch, here.) In the end, only 20 of the MB’s 6,000 chosen candidates were able to make it onto the electoral list, at all.
Today, the MB announced that it will boycott tomorrow’s elections completely, “and call on the Egyptian people to do the same.”
So let’s check back and see what happens tomorrow.
The Arabist has two excellent recent roundup and analysis posts on his blog:

this one

I will just close by recalling that my first visit to Egypt as a reporter was when the London Sunday Times sent me to cover the massive bread riots that broke out there in January 1977. By all accounts, the severity of the crisis revealed by those riots helped push President Anwar Sadat into the idea of doing something “dramatic” to speed along the process of integration into US regional planning that he had started in 1972-73, but that had only sputtered along in the intervening years.
That something “dramatic” turned out to be his landmark visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, an action that jumpstarted the diplomacy that led to the Camp David Accords of the following year, and thence to the conclusion of a final-status peace agreement with Israel in 1979.
It was at that point that Egypt, which in the 1960s had been a key ally of the Soviet Union in the Middle East, became firmly integrated into Washington’s strategic planning.
In 1981, Sadat paid with his life for those choices and for the extremely paranoid series of decisions he made in the middle of that year, that included clamping down very tightly indeed on– and indeed, arresting– all members of the Egyptian body politic whom he felt he had any reason at all to disagree with. An Islamist extremist (not an MB person) shot Sadat dead during a military parade in October that year; and his deputy, Husni Mubarak, immediately stepped into his shoes.
Mubarak has developed such a paranoid political style that he has never even dared to name a Vice President. In recent years, though, he has made some evident moves to groom his son, Gamal, to succeed him.
…. So now, 31 years after 1977, might we be seeing a re-eruption of bread riots in Egypt that could, over the years ahead, lead to a shift in Egypt’s strategic leanings as significant as the one sparked by the 1977 bread riots? Who knows?
I just wrote over at the Arabist’s blog that my main two recollections from 1977 are the sight of all the burned-out night-clubs along the Pyramids Road, and Mohammed Hassanein Heikal telling me– as he sat in his lovely Nile-side office there at the Al-Ahram Center, that “the Egyptian people are like the Nile: they run deep and apparently quietly– until the point where suddenly they burst their banks.”
Actually, I have a third recollection. I arrived one or two days into the riot. And already the Sadat regime had started to deploy trucks full of security people along the main arteries. Those scared country boys sat in their trucks, armed only with clubs and looking very warily about them.
Cairo still has thousands of trucks-full of those security men– probably the sons or grandsons of the ones I saw.
The regime’s dilemma is how to build a force that is large enough to intimidate or quell all possible signs of public disquiet– while preventing this force from becoming large enough and well-armed enough that its leaders might think to come and topple the regime, instead. Oh, it’s such a hard job being a dictator– especially one who has fashioned his policies so evidently to be in line with the whims of a blundering, arrogant, and unpopular external power like the United States.
Egypt. As I’ve written before: watch that story as it develops.

Who is the greatest strategist of them all?

This week is (once again) going to be Petraeus and Crocker week on Capitol Hill, with the military and civilian heads of the US occupation in regime appearing before a slew of Senate and House committees, starting Tuesday.
When they were last there, last September, the best question of all came from our (very) senior senator here in Virginia, John Warner, who asked Petraeus flat out whether the Iraq war was making America any safer.
Petraeus answered, “Sir, I don’t know exactly.”
All the senators and members of congress should make a point of asking Petraeus– and Crocker– that question once again, and probing their thinking on this issue a bit more deeply than Warner did last Septamber.
Since then, an additional 243 US service-members and thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the war; and somewhere in excess of an additional $84 billion of taxpayers’ money has been poured into the sewer of the war (that is, in good part, into the pockets of the shareholders of Halliburton, etc.)
I was struck by Petraeus’s answer at the time, thinking it seemed to reveal that they guy had some core of professional integrity. Either that, or naivete, inasmuch as he seemed unable to think fast enough to provide a fudged, more “diplomatic”, answer.
Or maybe both.
But the answer was also important because it revealed the degree to which Petraeus was indicating that he judged that the question being asked was ways above his pay-grade.
No particular surprise there, especially given that he had only received a very hastily organized promotion to four-star general just shortly before his appointment as head of the “Multi-National (!) Force– Iraq”. Prior to that, he had co-authored a handbook at the level of operational art, that is, in the waging of a counter-insurgency. But he had not operated at the level of strategic thinking required to consider questions like which counter-insurgency should one seek to win, and on what terms? Or: which counter-insurgencies are worth investing a lot in? Or: on what basis should one make a judgment like this? Or: in a time of scarce resources (such as manpower), how should one prioritize one’s commitments to the fighting of various different battles/counter-insurgencies occurring in different theaters?
(This last one is the Dannatt question, of course.)
So I was reminded of Petraeus’s painfully honest answer of last September when I read this article by Michael Abramowitz in today’s WaPo. Abramowitz was examining the high degree of importance Pres. Bush gives to receiving military advice, on a regular basis, directly from Petraeus.
He writes,

trumping concerns by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others that the Army’s long-term health could be threatened by the enduring presence of many combat forces in Iraq.

Abramowitz also notes the degree to which modern technology has allowed Bush to keep in much closer direct contact with Petraeus than any previous war-time president could maintain with any of their field commanders:

after Petraeus and Crocker were appointed last year, the process was institutionalized in a regular Monday morning war council between Washington and Baghdad.

That last detail is notable: Iraq once a week; Afghanistan, every two to three weeks. H’mmm…
Then this,

[Ohmigod, I have to say this is a very scary thought…]

he is deferential to Petraeus on military matters.

So here is my concern– and it is evidently one that has been shared by many other people, including Petraeus’s superiors in the chain of command, as well as, according to Abramowitz, the chair of the senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin: If Bush’s main and continuing way of getting military advice about the war in Iraq is from the commander in Iraq, at what point does he get the advice he needs about the overall strategic importance of that battlefield, relative to other calls that may be made on the US military, in Afghanistan or elsewhere?
Abramowitz reports that Carl Levin said, quite correctly, that,

Bush should rely primarily on the advice of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Not only are they General Petraeus’s superiors,” Levin said, “but they have the broad view of our national security needs, including Afghanistan, and the risks posed by stretching the force too thin.”

He writes that Bush’s insistence on dealing directly with Petraeus, “created friction that helped spur the departure last month of Adm. William J. ‘Fox’ Fallon, who, while Petraeus’s boss as chief of U.S. Central Command, found his voice eclipsed on Iraq.”
He writes that Fallon and Petraeus, “differed over military planning and the scale and pace of the drawdown. Fallon and other top military officials have also voiced their concerns to Congress, in public testimony and behind closed doors.”
He also writes that– just as I would have expected under these circumstances– Fallon’s successor as head of Centcom, JCS Chairman Mullen, and Secdef Gates, all make a point of trying to sit in on Bush’s weekly videoconferences with Petraeus, whenever possible.
Hence, among all the other dysfunctional consequences of this bizarre arrangement, you have the spectacle of all three of these very senior links in the nation’s chain of military command having to invest considerable time and energy simply in trying to keep tabs on whatever it is that Petraeus and the Prez are cooking up between the two of them.
Abramowitz also writes this:

Some officials said Petraeus is pushing on an open door with Bush. The president has privately expressed impatience with military concerns over the health of the force, telling the Joint Chiefs that if they are worried about breaking the Army, the worst thing would be to lose in Iraq, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Ah, of course, this is why we do not need Gen. Petraeus to be a great strategist at the world level– because we have a president who is making these large-scale judgments on his own… a president who still thinks the US can “win” in Iraq, while also not suffering any catastrophic setbacks anywhere else.
Be scared. Be very scared indeed.

More Jerusalem

I wrote here Thursday about why Jerusalem plays a special role within the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as a whole. I didn’t write much about the ever threatened physical-planning situation faced daily by the roughly 250,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. (Population figures are here.)
The respected DC-based organization the Foundation for Middle East Peace has recently published an excellent map that shows in some detail how the building and further expansion of new settlement mini-nodes is being used to carve up the Palestinian-populated heart of occupied East Jerusalem. As the map shows, this is the case both within and outside the historic walled Old City. The map is best read alongside the accompanying article on the topic (which sadly is not linked to on the current web version of the map.)
As the article says, the map,

land and land use are the central instruments of containment, control, and margininalization of the Palestinian community.

I guess the only change I’d make in their description is to use the term “designate” rather than “create” when it talks about parks and open or “green” spaces. It is not that the Israeli planning authorities actually “create” any beautiful parks in these spaces for the equal-opportunity enjoyment of all the city’s residents. Rather, here as elsewhere throughout the occupied territories, they simply slap a land-use designation of “designated Green space” or “designated park” onto a chunk of Palestinian land, whether privately or publicly owned– but it is all Palestinian land, either way– expressly in order to render the development of that land by any Palestinian individual or entity as “illegal”.
Quite frequently, having kept land in that status for a number of years, the Israeli planning authorities will then suddenly “discover” it need not be kept green after all, but can be developed– into yet another Jews-only settlement. So those green designations are very frequently used as a way of, in effect, putting Palestinian land “into the bank” for Israel’s future development uses.
The abuse of allegedly pro-green planning orders is a long-time staple of the Zionist venture, and has sometimes also served to give it a welcome “progressive” image in the west. Many of my Jewish-American friends remember saving their US cents as children so they could buy trees for “Jewish forests in Israel”. Too bad that so many of these forests– like Canada Forest, down by Latrun– were actually established on recently destroyed Palestinian villages and farmlands…
Anyway, back to Jerusalem, and the FMEP map. I find it very disturbing to see represented there the degree of geographic threat now posed to the Sheikh Jarrah and Salah ad Din Street neighborhoods– and of course, to the Old City. The FMEP article notes, “the effort to establish small but significant Jewish residential and institutional centers [in portions of the Old City other than the traditional ‘Jewish Quarter’] whose isolation from one another is, in part answered by the creation of passageways both under and above ground.”
It seems like the situation of Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem may soon be as physically threatened as that of their compatriots in the historic central souq (market) area of Hebron.

A week in the west (and drama in Salt Lake City)

I got back to DC yesterday after a week in the western portion of this fine North American continent of ours. I started off (as previously noted) at a couple of events in the beautiful small city of Victoria, British Columbia.
The first was a planning meeting– and actually, the first properly constituted Board Meeting– for the Global Partnership for the International University for Iraq. I have been a member of the planning group for this for 2-3 years now, but the group had never previously been able to organize an actual face-to-face meeting.
So now, the GP-IUI is properly constituted as a legal entity, headquartered in Canada. The distinguished Iraqi-Canadian professor Tareq Ismael is the Chair of the Board. The President and CEO of the project is the veteran US- and Cairo-based Middle East specialist Raymond Baker. The two other main officers of the project are both people who recently retired from the leadership of Central Connecticut State University, former CCSU President Richard L. Judd and former Dean John S. Waggett. The thirteen members of the Board of Directors include five people of Iraqi background, four Americans (including Richard Falk and myself), a very savvy Canadian lawyer called Erik Richer La Fleche, and the courageous German diplomatist and long-time UN staff member Hans-Christof von Sponeck.

Anyway, more details on the GP-IUI, obviously, as our plans develop. Also, I’m not sure at this point how much I can share of the content of our meetings, though I can note that I thought they went very well indeed. It was excellent to finally meet face-to-face with many of these people who had only previously been names at the bottom of our planning emails. The project has encountered numerous problems since the original plan of establishing this international (i.e. not “American”), not-for-profit university inside Iraq proved impossible to pursue. So the planning now is directed at finding ways to build up its cadre outside Iraq, including by organizing specialized short courses for both potential faculty and potential students, with the firm goal of establishing the university inside Iraq at the earliest possible date.
More later– including, I hope soon, a link to the GP-IUI’s own website, as soon as that gets developed and published.
Meeting Hans von Sponeck for the first time was a particular pleasure of the meeting. I have long been an admirer of the way that, as a UN staff member in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, he worked tirelessly to minimize the extent of the mass killings that US-UK intransigence in the sanctions effort against Iraq inflicted on the most vulnerable portions of the Iraqi population.
After the GP-IUI’s meetings wound up, the conference of the International Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies started. I could only stay for the first day and a half of it.
One excellent grace note was provided by the President of the University of Victoria, which was hosting the meeting. As he welcomed us to the first session he noted that the place we were meeting was the traditional territory of the Esquimault and Saanich peoples. Okay, so maybe simply the invocation of these peoples’ names doesn’t mean that much… but at least it is a nod of recognition to the expropriatory and frequently genocidal history of White colonial settlement in the Americas.
At the conference I got to catch up with a number of old friends. I went to a pretty interesting panel on current prospects in and for Iraq. A smart young Japanese scholar, Dai Yamao, gave a fascinating presentation on the history of the Iraqi Shiite organizations during the years they spent in exile prior to 2003. And Dr. Abbas al-Jamali, an Iraqi professor of botany and horticulture, gave a great overview of agricultural development issues in Iraq. At the very beginning he identified the two key inputs required for a sound agricultural development policy in the Mesopotamian region– which was, after all, a crucial cradle of all world agriculture. These were, quite simply, a sound water-use policy and public security.
Obviously, those two key inputs are quite missing today. Thus we have the tragedy of Iraq now being a huge net importer of food products. Thank you, George W. Bush.
I also ended up participating in a panel on current prospects for the Palestinians. That was a last-minute arrangement. Tareq Ismael had asked me to chair the panel, and a couple of participants dropped out at the last minute. So I said I had just written a long piece on Hamas, Gaza, etc for the Boston Review so why didn’t I present that on the panel if he could find another person to chair it, which he did.
So last Saturday, I left Victoria at noon and took the excellent bus line to Vancouver International Airport. Since Victoria is on an island (confusingly called Vancouver Island), while Vancouver is on the mainland, the bus ride involves the bus taking you from downtown Victoria to a ferry terminal some 20 miles north; then the bus rolls onto a huge ferry and you have a beautiful 90-minute ferry ride across the sound there; then you re-board the same bus, it rolls off the ferry and proceeds to the airport. All for one $48 ticket. Very civilized indeed, though the wireless internet that seemed to be available on the ferry refused to work for me.
Then I flew down to Los Angeles to make my first maternal visit to the new digs established there by my youngest, Lorna Quandt. Lorna started work as a staff researcher in the neuroscience program at UCLA med center last June, so I really wanted to see how she’s doing there. This country is so large and I hate her being so far away from me!! However, she seems to be well established, has a great room-mate and excellent work colleagues. I stayed in her apartment there, got to see her work-place, took in a couple of yoga classes with her, and generally had a fun timewith her. I also caught up with some more old friends there…
On Tuesday I drove down to Orange County for a lunch hosted by a great Quaker couple called Al and Dee Abrahamse, who had invited in a bunch of people to hear me talk about my work and my upcoming book. Great lunch, great group. Thank you, Al and Dee!
Wednesday I flew to Salt Lake City and gave a bigger, more formal lecture about the Palestinian situation, at the invitation of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. It was titled “Palestine and Israel: One state, or two states, or what?” In it I developed much of the material in my upcoming BR piece (that was previously largely developed here.) We had a big crowd there, and I thought the questions and discussion were generally excellent.
Afterwards, I went out for dinner with Center head Ibrahim Karawan, Peter Sluglett, Peter Von Sivers, and my old friend the legal scholar and former (sorry, correct that to long-running) Lebanese presidential candidate, Chibli Mallat. Chibli had asked a great question at the lecture, namely why don’t we all demand that Pres. Bush at this point simply recognize Palestine as an independent state, with its final borders yet to be determined?
My first mental reaction to this was skepticism. I thought it would be a meaningless thing to ask for. Almost as meaningless as Yasser Arafat’s much-trumpeted “declaration of an independent Palestinian state” back in 1988. Also, if the borders for the state aren’t defined, what would the recognition be of? (Of course, Israel’s borders aren’t defined, either, and that hasn’t stopped most states from recognizing it.) Then I thought, well, at least Recognition, by the US and other key international actors could lead speedily to Palestine getting admitted to the UN as a state, which would give it some leverage, and also the ability to take its many cases against Israel to the International Court of Justice.
Of course, under customary international law, for an entity to be recognized as a state it has to legally control the territory of that State; and that is only case for the Gaza (i.e. Hamas-dominated) branch of the PA. And international Recognition would raise the stakes around (and the urgency of) reaching a political accommodation between Fateh and Hamas.
Anyway, it’s an interesting idea.
Chibli has written about it here. That article is also interesting to me because he proposes the creation of “a mixed [i.e. Israeli-Palestinian] committee or court, including international judges, … to adjudicate the myriads of claims that remain to date, and will inevitably continue. Its decisions must be binding.”
His belief in the power of legal institutions to resolve conflicts in the absence of political/diplomatic agreement is astounding to me! Actually, we had a pretty spirited discussion of that whole issue over the dinner there on Wednesday night. Chibli had been one of the main actors involved in organizing and bringing the (ultimately aborted) criminal case that Belgium brought against Ariel Sharon in 2001, with regard to the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
Well, in the circumstances it was incredibly kind of Ibrahim Karawan to treat me so graciously at the University of Utah, since he and Peter Von Sivers, the deputy director of the M.E. Center, had both resigned from their positions at the Center just the day before, on an important issue of principle. The Dean of the College of Humanities had earlier simply, by fatwa, terminated the association of professors Peter Sluglett and Harris Lenowitz with the Center, sending them letters with vague accusations of “lack of collegiality.”
Lack of collegiality?? What complete nonsense! That was, we can recall, the charge brought against Norman Finkelstein by DePaul University after they discovered they had no valid academic grounds whatsoever on which to terminate his employment there.
You can read more about the Sluglett/Lenowitz case in the U of U student paper, here; and in the Salt Lake City Tribune here.
What seems clear is that the dean’s abrupt terminations/reassignments of Sluglett and Lenowitz had no defensible justification. The SLC-Trib account says that Sluglett had had disagreements with the dean over the college’s failure to hire enough Arabic teachers. But that disagreement was apparently never even mentioned in the termination letter the dean sent to him. And anyway, it would not constitute grounds for termination of Sluglett’s affiliation with the Center.
This business of citing “lack of collegiality” is so insidious! For one thing, I’ve known Sluglett for years now and never for a moment thought of him as hard to get along with. But even if he were– so what?
So anyway, my very best wishes to my friends in Salt Lake. I hope the ME Center there, which has played a very distinguished role in the development of Middle East studies over its 50 years in existence, can still be saved.

George Soros, on the phone

This morning, responding to a gracious invitation from the New America Foundation’s Steve Clemons, I got to take part in a media teleconference with George Soros, organized around the release of his latest book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. It was an interesting experience. I’ve been invited to media telecons by a number of different organizations before, but this was the first one I’d participated in. It seemed to work pretty well. Not quite as well as the real thing, since there seemed to be no provision to follow up on the question you’d just asked, if you needed some expansion of the answer you received (as I did.) But in general, a fairly good way to organize a successful, very international media conference at short notice.
You can see the short report of the event that I posted onto the Re-engage blog, here.
Around twenty or so journos got to ask questions. They included people from the UK, Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as people in the US, including a TASS correspondent here in Washington DC. There was certainly someone who identified himself as working for the Financial Times, but there were also lots of people who did not give their institutional affiliation, which I think was a pity.
George S. is evidently eager to get his book out, and read, very rapidly. It’s being published exclusively as an e-book. I guess that means they won’t even be producing an dead-tree version? Or maybe that one will come out later.
If I’d had more time to talk to the guy, I would certainly have asked him more questions about his own past (and continuing) role as a big-time player in the investment world. He was, after all, one of the main architects of the whole concept of hedge funds and was blamed– with some non-zero justification, I think– for much of the responsibility for the financial crises in East Asia and Latin America in the late 1990s. He seems, like Jeffrey Sachs, to be one of these people who has a big impact on global financial developments and then steps back and starts developing a public critique of the very system within which they had earlier operated– without going nearly as far as I would like to see them go in critiquing their own earlier role in the system.
There were quite a few significant things in what he said. You’ll have to go over to Re-engage to see my main report of the event. I guess the other main thing I’d like to record is that he confirmed, as I’ve heard several people saying in recent weeks, that the huge uncertainties in the financial markets these days mean that rather than investing there investors looking for places to park their money these days are doing so with large investments in commodities markets. (Aka speculation in these markets.) And that that is helping majorly to fuel the current steep rises in the price of basic commodities including food, oil, etc.
Just one last note on George. He operates, intellectually, on numerous different levels at the same time. Among these levels are that of the social theorist and that of the innovative investor. But I think he sometimes muddles them up? His introductory presentation focused on a theoretical critique of what he calls, imho rightly, the “market fundamentalist” approach that has dominated public policymaking in the US and the UK since 1980. His main critique there is that the MF theory assumes that players in financial markets are operating on the basis of perfect information and that therefore any imbalances are self-correcting and therefore only temporary… Whereas in reality, everyone is acting on the basis of highly imperfect information, and therefore you have the possibility of extremely, and non-self-correcting, booms, busts, bubbles, and crises occurring…
But actually, I really don’t believe that most of the big players in financial markets are making their decisions based on any form of social theory, at all. They’re doing so purely with the desire to maximize profit, to either their firms or– probably more commonly– themselves. For such people “theories” about the nature of human society would be purely optional. Also, such people have a massive capacity to weave elaborate justifications (“theories”, we might call them) as to why maximizing their own personal profit is actually both (a) a well-deserved reward for their own brilliance, perspicacity, or other sterling qualities, and (b) actually, good for the whole of society as well.
I am not saying that George S’s theories are of this nature. I think he is a person of great moral as well as intellectual complexity. But I think it’s a stretch for him to imply that there was ever a point during what we might call the Reagan-Thatcher-inaugurated era when the majority of the big bankers and investors were ever actually operating on the basis of any strong “theory” about the nature of human society and the presence or absence of constraints on epistemology. He is far too kind to them all.

Why Jerusalem is special

Jerusalem is one of my favorite cities in the whole world. Not just because of the spectacular integrity of the Old City, as a concept and a reality. Not even because it has an intriguing little street called “Queen Helena Street”… (Boy, did the eponymous Queen H.have a lot to answer for, in terms of getting Christianity entangled into the affairs of imperial governance, the subsequent development of so-called “Just War” doctrine, and so on… Maybe I should just change my name??)
In the summer of 1989, Bill the spouse and I took our then-four-year-old daughter to live in the old Palm House at the American Colony, in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, for most of the summer. My father, a very sincere and traditional Anglican believer, came to stay with us there for ten days or so. Every morning he would set out with his milord English panama hat and his milord English walking stick and walk with complete equanimity around the whole of the city, centering himself on the sites of pilgrimage that spoke to him in a far deeper or anyway different way than they speak to me. It was during the first intifada, and a couple of my sisters were concerned about his safety. I said No, I think he’ll be quite safe and have a great time– which he did. The nearest he came to suffering serious injury was when one of the lemons fell off the big lemon tree in the garden at the Palm House and hit him on his shoulder. (It narrowly missed falling directly, and more helpfully, straight into his gin and tonic.)
So yes, I understand that Jerusalem is special in different ways to everyone.
It breaks my heart that so many Palestinians, who have a love for the city that is considerably deeper and more rooted in history than my own, are prevented from visiting it even once. That includes Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank, from Gaza, and from the whole of the Palestinian diaspsora– apart from those lucky few who have the kinds of foreign passports that allow them to visit Israel. Israel claims that all of Jerusalem, including the eastern part of the city that contains the whole of the historic, walled “Old City”, all of which was occupied along with the rest of the West Bank by their army in 1967 and has been under occupation rule ever since, is an integral part of, indeed, the capital of, the State of Israel.
As I’ve written here before, the Israelis’ exclusion of the Palestinians of the rest of the West Bank, and of Gaza, from Jerusalem is a situation that they imposed mainly after the conclusion of the Oslo Agreement in 1993.
What I really want to write about here, though, is three key ways in which I see Jerusalem as being special as a political issue, and what that means for the present, post-“Annapolis” peace process.
Here they are:
(1) This one is fairly well-recognized. Jerusalem is of great personal and political importance to the majority of both Jewish and Muslim believers around the whole world. (It is also of importance to Christian believers but not, I think, in a way that is currently as politically pressing as the way it is important to Jews and Muslims around the world.) So that is around 14 million Jewish people around the world– and around 1.5 billion Muslim believers– who consider the status of Jerusalem to be an extremely important issue.
It takes considerable ignorance, lack of empathy, or arrogance, to imagine that the interests of the world’s Muslim believers in Jerusalem’s wellbeing, including their right to conduct pilgrimages and maintain buoyant religious, educational, and social institutions there, can simply be swept under the carpet or marginalized forever. That was well proven back in 2000 when Egypt and Saudi Arabia, majority-Muslim states that are staunch US allies, expressed strong objections to the concessions that President Clinton was demanding from Yasser Arafat over the Jerusalem issue, and those objections helped scupper Clinton’s whole, very last-minute and ad-hoc attempt to broker a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement.
Do we have any reason to imagine that those two governments or any other strategically significant Muslim countries in the world would be prepared today to support any final-status arrangement for Jerusalem that might emerge from the (im-)balance of power within the present Palestinian-Israeli-US negotiations?
I doubt it.
(2) “Jerusalem”, however defined, is anyway the current major deal-breaker at the purely territorial level for any possibility of a viable two-state solution. Israelis define “Jerusalem” very broadly, as including all the many settlements they have implanted in a broad swathe around the area that, prior to 1967, constituted municipal East Jerusalem. And Israelis have a broad (though not total) consensus that they will never leave that swathe of settlements. Indeed, even since Annapolis they have continued to defy the world, and to tweak Washington, by announcing and then rapidly starting to implement successive new large-scale building plans there.
So it is not only the sensitivities of the Muslim world regarding the historic core of Jerusalem that stand in the way of a two-state final peace agreement. (Those sensitivities could, just possibly, be met through some combination of special status for the Holy Places and large religious and educational institutions, or whatever.) But Israel’s continued insistence on biting a gargantuan chunk out of the rest of the West Bank and digesting it into what they think of as “Jerusalem”, and therefore refuse to withdraw from, makes it almost impossible to build the basis for a viable Palestinian state in just the divided portions that remain of the West Bank, along with Gaza.
(3) Finally, for the chronically fractured Palestinian national community itself, Jerusalem is important as a crucial “bridge” between the Palestinians within the occupied territories as a whole, and those within Israel itself. Jerusalem’s 180,000 Palestinians live in a very vulnerable situation. During the first intifada, the leaders of their community played a central role coordinating the numerous acts of self-assertion and defiance that lay at the heart of that intifada. Leaders of the Palestinian cities, towns, and villages from throughout the West Bank and Gaza (and also from Israel itself) could easily travel to East Jerusalem to plan their efforts. Faisal Husseini (RIP), Hanan Ashrawi, Sari Nuseibeh, and other Jerusalemites were the main public face of the intifada, holding their press conferences in the National Palace Hotel, or meeting with Secretary of State Baker or other dignitaries….
And then, after Oslo, Israel walled East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank; walled Gaza off from the whole world, including East Jerusalem; and started clamping down on the all the Palestinian political institutions in Jerusalem, starting with Orient House.
When Arafat “returned” to the West Bank, he did so to Ramallah, not to Jerusalem. Always jealous of any other, possibly competing centers of power, he connived in the marginalization of Faisal Husseini and all the other Jerusalem community leaders.
Meanwhile, from the Israeli governmental side, successive Israeli governments from 1967 on have promulgated the myth that East Jerusalem is “an integral part of the state of Israel.” They tried, but generally failed, to impose Israeli identity cards on all the city’s Palestinians. They bring to their land-use planning processes there exactly the same kind of discriminatory Zionist vision that they use in their land-use planning inside 1948 Israel– that is, a process completely dominated by Jewish interests, that marginalizes or excludes any equal consideration of the voice or interests of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs.
Thus we have the phenomenon of the Israeli government demolishing Palestinian housing in Jerusalem that is deemed to be illegal– in exactly in the same way that it demolishes the housing of many “bedouin” Palestinians who are citizens of and within the State of Israel. (See HRW’s recent report on this.)
Now, it is true that the Israeli government demolishes Palestinian housing in the West Bank and Gaza, too. But usually, these days, those demolitions are not done on the basis of highly discriminatory and exclusionary zoning practices, but for reasons that are either punitive, “military”, or just plain vindictive. It is the discriminatory zoning practices I am interested in here, and the way in which they make the Palestinians of Jerusalems into a sort of bridge constituency between the Palestinians who are residents of the rest of the occupied territories, and those who are citizens of Israel.
Israel’s insistence that East Jerusalem is “part of Israel” has meant that the 1.2 million citizens of Israel who are ethnic Palestinians have very free access to East Jerusalem. Indeed, some Palestinian Jerusalemites say that over recent years the Palestinian Israelis who make a point of trying to visit the city as often as they can, and to spend their discretionary income in Palestinian shops, restaurants, and other establishments there, have provided an important economic lifeline for their ever-threatened community, especially in the Old City.
So here’s where this seems to lead: What the Israelis have done in and around Jerusalem has (a) made the achievement of a two-state solution considerably harder, if not impossible, while it has also (b) laid the basis for a new form of unification of the Palestinian people: one that unites the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel with their cousins and brothers who are residents of the occupied territories.
Interesting…

Human Rights Watch opposes Egypt’s political arrests

Kudos to Human Rights Watch for having issued a strong statement criticizing the Egyptian government’s continuing mass round-up of opposition activists and would-be candidates. This campaign, HRW said, “puts the legitimacy of upcoming local and municipal council elections in serious doubt.”
It is an excellent statement. Go read it.
Condi Rice is currently in the Middle East. She should be peppered with questions as to why strong US aid to Egypt continues under these circumstances.

U.S. position in Iraq eroding fast

The L.A. Times has quoted Joost Hiltermann as saying that Moqtada Sadr looks like the emerging political force inside Iraq, while US-installed PM Nouri al-Maliki looks like a lame duck. But the developments of the past week have had a much wider impact than that. With Maliki’s US-backed forces licking the significant wounds they received from their drubbing in Basra and mortar attacks on the Baghdad Green Zone still continuing, it now looks as if the US military’s ability to maintain its position of dominance in Iraq— let alone “project” its power from there to anywhere else, including of course Iran– has been significantly eroded.
Worth noting: it was not just any Iranian body or individual who brokered the most recent ceasefire around Basra. It was the Commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Yes, the same IRGC that the Bush administration recently decided, with much fanfare, to put onto the US’s “terrorism list.”
So much for the U.S. government’s jejune and often actively counter-productive practice of seeking to exclude significant political forces from any negotiations through the use of these “lists.” (Lists that have little basis in objective reality since they exclude the perpetrators of many well-documented acts of state terrorism such as assassinations and deliberate attempts to starve civilian populations into political submission. Well, I guess the U.S. government cannot count acts like those as “terrorism”, since Washington itself and its Israeli ally rely on them a lot.)
So here we have IRGC restoring– I hope– a measure of calm and a political breathing space to Basra and its environs in southern Iraq by mediating a negotiation among the relevant parties, while Gen. Petraeus and his superiors have to stand on the sidelines.
Paul Krugman says it best, when he notes about US policy in Iraq that,

America is spending $12 billion a month to sustain what has, in practice, become an Iranian sphere of influence.

Basra now clearly looks to have been Maliki’s “bridge too far.” And given the degree to which the US “plan” in Iraq– if we can dignify Washington’s hastily-cobbled-together string of reactions to Iraqi developments with that name– has been reliant on the Maliki government developing some coherence and ability to govern, the debacle he and his forces suffered in Basra may well come to be seen as a turning point for US power in Iraq and in the Gulf region as a whole.
After this, does all the water of US pretensions in the Gulf region just swoosh down the plug-hole fairly rapidly? Could happen.
If the debacle that befell Maliki’s forces in Basra is not now to expand into a disorderly chaos for the whole of the US position in Iraq, Washington needs to start talking to all of Iraq’s neighbors about the situation there, rather quickly. Most especially Iran.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon should convene these negotiations with utmost haste.
One last point. Though for now it looks as if Iran has emerged from the events of the past week as the most powerful force in Iraq, Badger of Missling Links provides some further nuance to the story, noting that there is also an Iraqi-nationalist sub-theme to what has been going on– and therefore, necessarily, a degree of continuing negotiation required between the Iraqi nationalist trends and the more solidly pro-Iranian trends within the anti-US coalition. There are many parallels there with the situation in Lebanon as Israel’s occupation of the country started falling apart in the late 1980s, and most particularly the still-continuing negotiations there between the Lebanese-nationalist trends and the more solidly pro-Syrian trends…
Interesting times.

Charlottesville forum: US, Iran, & Hope?

For those near Charlottesville, Virginia Sunday evening, consider joining a forum on US-Iran Relations that convenes at 6:00 p.m. at the Charlottesville Mennonite Church. (corner of Monticello Ave. and Avon Streets)
Hosted by Rev. Roy Hange, (who lived in Iran with his family earlier this decade) the forum features a panel of three Iran observers, Carah Ong, myself (Scott Harrop), and our venerable neighbor R.K. Ramazani.
Long time readers of Just World News will recall we have featured Professor Ramazani’s essays several times. Drawing from his 55 years (and counting) of scholarship and observations on US-Iran relations, I anticipate he will be focusing on the paradox of what divides and yet pulls together Iran and the United States, nearly 3 decades after the Iranian revolution.
Carah Ong is currently the Iran Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. See her solid Iran focused blog, especially her coverage of Iran nuclear issues, Congress, and interesting reports of her recent journey to Iran.
Our prepared comments will consider our working question — what “reasons for hope” can we discern for improving ties between the US and Iran?
As a hook to the evening, see the Thursday night University of Georgia panel of five former American Secretaries of State, Powell, Albright, Kissinger, Baker, and even Christopher, and how they agreed on two points — that Gitmo needs to be shut down and that the US should be talking to Iran.
Fancy that. For the past seven years, the Bush Administration has been trapped by its own novel idea, at least towards Iran, that a state doesn’t talk to other states of which it disapproves, lest it somehow grant them “legitimacy” in the talking. Our current Secretary of State now claims she wishes to talk to Iran, even as she retains conditions widely known to short-circuit the process.
That five former Secretary of States appear to have repudiated that approach, at least to me, provides a significant ray of hope. That said, even If we at least can see the need to talk to Iran, questions remain not just about what to talk about, yet also how we should talk to Iran with any hope of a positive result
Learning “how to talk to Iran” will be the focus of my remarks. Stay tuned. (or better yet, join us live.)
Note: Charlottesville Mennonite Church is located just to the south east of the downtown mall. Here’s conventional directions on how to get to it: 701 Monticello Avenue.

Is this what the current fighting in Basra is about?

When the Brits withdrew from Basra city to Basra airport last year, I was intrigued by the strategic implications of this at a number of levels. Most broadly, it seemed to represent a judgment by the British government and general staff that the “western” coalition of which the UK is a part could not “win” in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and that Afghanistan was more important. (See Dannatt.)
That was obviously, in itself, bad news for those in the US military still tasked by their political bosses to “win” in Iraq. But even worse news for the US military is that the space the Brits were withdrawing from was (and remains) an absolutely vital node on the supply chain for the whole US military in Iraq.
Ever since July 2005, I have been underlining the importance of Basra to the supply chain of the occupation force.
Now, however, it seems that Petraeus and his Centcom superiors may have finally twigged to the importance of Basra. Peter Oborne of Britain’s Daily Mail reports that:

is building four huge dining facilities – known to the American army as DFACs.

(Hat-tip to Cloned Poster for his comment at Pat Lang’s blog, for that.)
So that construction has evidently been planned for some time now… But here was a problem for Petraeus and Co in their project to implant a 4,000-person base in Basra: Iraq is allegedly a “sovereign” state. So how to get Nuri al-Maliki’s allegedly “sovereign” government to agree to the creation of this new base?
Did they, essentially, snooker Maliki into getting into a firefight with the Sadrists in Basra that he very evidently couldn’t win, and that would therefore lead him to call in a robust US (oh, excuse me, “coalition”) ground-force presence there?
Badger of Missing Links has been doing a great job of following the still-evolving story of the new escalation between the Maliki-US axis and the Sadrists. In this post yesterday, he highlighted a great report from Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar that noted the self-deception Maliki has been engaging in by imagining himself not only a military leader but also one who by traveling to the battlefront in Basra could help to rally his forces. (Several alternative explanations of his strange trip to Basra are also possible.)
It hasn’t worked, of course. Indeed, thus far it has been a debacle. Having earlier given a 3-day deadline for the Sadrist/resistance forces in Basra to lay down their weapons, they then extended that to ten days amid reports that it was the government forces that have been majorly laying down their weapons, instead.
Yesterday, the US military sent in its airpower against suspected opposition sites in Basra, and today they did the same again.
The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has some intriguing tidbits, in a report written apparently from Washington DC, about the laments voiced by an (anonymous) “senior official familiar with U.S. intelligence in southern Iraq” to the effect that,

our intelligence in that area is far less than we would like. We don’t have any forces there… [W]e are operating with a good dose of opaqueness.

I also want to draw attention to the fine round-up of war-related news from Iraq that WaPo.com’s Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday.
That round-up included this:

Bush’s Baghdad Mouthpiece”

Darrin Mortenson

That would involve draining the concentration of surge troops around Baghdad and the Sunni triangle.

Froomkin is also excellent at noting the blithe idiocy of the US commander-in-chief. He provides what seems like an excellent critique of the big, cheerleading speech that Bush made on Iraq, Thursday.
Froomkin wrote:

William Odom

Let’s assume, though, that military planners a few levels under Bush have a better grasp on reality than him; and also that perhaps they have some plan in mind in having egged Maliki into a confrontation with the Sadrists at this time. If so, a concept that would lead to the reinforcement of the “coalition” positions and ground capabilities in Basra would seem to have considerable rationality.
And that is the case, regardless of what any bigger US military “plan” for Iraq might be. Indeed, reinforcing the US positions in Basra would certainly be a worthy goal to win even if it involves leaving US positions elsewhere in the country much more vulnerable, or even letting huge additional areas of Iraq fall out of their hands.
To recall the importance of Basra and retaining control of military supply lines through Basra, just recall what happened to the British-Indian expeditionary force in Iraq in 1915-16. Was it 23,000 troops that they lost there?