Five years of the US war in Iraq

It is so tragic to realize that just about all the dire predictions I made in 2002 and early 2003 about the consequences of a US invasion of Iraq have been fulfilled– and then some. So many of us worked so hard to try to avert that quite foreseeable and indeed foreseen disaster.
The harmful effects of this war on the peoples of Iraq and the Middle East are still continuing, day after day after day. And they will continue so long as the US military continues to stay there, continually sowing its seeds of divide-and-rule and distrust, and continually pumping into the country both military tools and a militarized mindset. The moment a US President states clearly that he or she intends to pull the US troops out of Iraq completely, defines the timetable within which s/he will achieve that, and calls on the UN to convene the negotiating processes– at the intra-Iraqi level, and at the regional level– required for this to happen in a calm and orderly way, then the dynamic in the country and in the region will change.
It is quite unrealistic (and therefore quite dishonest) for any US leader or official to claim at this point that the US on its own can “control” the modalities of its own exit. But exit there must be– primarily for the good of the Iraqis, whose sufferings over the past five years have been vast; but also for the good of the US and for many other actors.
If this whole, grisly tragedy has had a “silver lining”– and I hesitate even to raise the idea this might be so– then that is that surely it has amply demonstrated to the US citizenry and the world, once again, that military power on its own, however technically “awesome” (and shocking), is in the modern world quite insufficient as a means to securing strategic goals of any significance.
I had hoped that US citizens might have learned this from the war they waged on Vietnam in earklier decades? Or from the outcome of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon? But no. The curve of learning of actual, useful strategic lessons– as opposed to those that are handily “packaged” in Power Point slideshows by the arms manufacturers and their armies of well-paid cheerleaders in the think-tanks and academe– seems notably flat, or perhaps even downward-trending over time.
That is tragic. But let’s try to make sure that this time around, the “Lessons from the failure of US military power in Iraq” are properly learned and properly (and irreversably) integrated into the practice and planning of the US government. That is: we need a drastic redirection of resources from military hardware, military “preparedness”, and global power-projection capabilities into supporting all the many tools of diplomacy and international cooperation that already exist, and some new ones that we should now work with the rest of the world to build from scratch.
We Americans certainly need to have a big and ongoing national conversation about these matters in the months ahead. My book, Re-engage! America and the World After Bush addresses them, and will be published on May 15. (The website associated with the book, which has order forms for it and a lot of associated information, will be published within the next couple of days… Watch this space for the announcement.)
But as our Black Iraqiversary approaches again this year, I think we should all make an effort to showcase and engage with what Iraq’s citizens themselves feel about the occasion, and about their current situation.
Here is a short, tautly ironic commentary from “Correspondent Laith” oin McClatchy’s “Inside Iraq” blog today. It starts off thus:

    In the few coming days, we will say good bye to the fifth year since freedom and liberation visited Iraq . For this great anniversary, I want to count some great democratic changes that happened during the five years of freedom and democracy.
    1- The most important change is killing and displacing more than three million Iraqis. I think the record of Saddam had been broken long time ago. Now we have Iraqis all over the world even in some places that I never heard about till this moment…

Here is how the International Committee of the Red Cross describes the humanitarian crisis that Iraq is experiencing:

    Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.
    Despite limited improvements in security in some areas, armed violence is still having a disastrous impact. Civilians continue to be killed in the hostilities. The injured often do not receive adequate medical care. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.

The ICRC website also has many other useful resources on the humanitarian situation inside Iraq. Among them is this short recollection by Roland Huguenin, who was spokesman for the ICRC delegation in Baghdad in March 2003.

Tibet as Gaza?

China Hand has an informative post on his blog about the current disturbances/uprising in Tibet. Talking about the Tibetan Popular Uprising Movement which seems to have coordinated the pro-independence activities that have been taking place around the world– but most especially inside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China– he asks:

    what is TPUM thinking?
    Did they want to provoke a crackdown that would create a groundswell of Western support for boycotting the Beijing Olympics?
    Certainly, if anti-Han activism in Tibet and abroad turns the Olympics into a humiliating diplomatic and public security ordeal, instead of a triumphant coming-out party, the Chinese are going to take out their frustrations on dissent in Tibet.
    Assuming that Tibet Uprising has thought this thing through, the conclusion would be that they are consciously trying to elicit Chinese over-reaction, exacerbate the crackdown, and alienate more and more Tibetans from the idea of accommodation with the PRC.
    In other words, think of Tibet as the new Gaza.
    The occupying power games the political/diplomatic system to counter criticism, but relentlessly extends its military and economic reach inside the territory. The occupied turn to militancy. They attempt to create an atmosphere of intense bitterness and anger on the ground through direct action and by the creation of a new generation of militants in religious schools.
    The objective is to marginalize moderate and co-optable forces, make a successful occupation impossible militarily, politically, and socially, and finally compel the oppressor to give up and withdraw.
    An interesting idea, except it hasn’t worked in Gaza, even with sub rosa aid from Iran.
    With the Tibet independence forces actively opposed by India and the United States and just about every other government I can think of, I wouldn’t think that such an approach would succeed in Tibet.

Well, it is true that Gaza has not yet gained independence from Israel’s economic shackles, but that might well be achieved sometime within the next year…
There are, of course, numerous similarities and some differences between the situation of the Palestinians and that of the Tibetans.
One big similarity: the longing for “home” among the many Tibetans exiled outside their ancestral homeland. (One difference: the breadth and centrality that the idea of organizing an exiles’ march to back their homeland has in the planning of the new generation of Tibetan activists.)
One evident difference is the position on these respective issues adopted by “the west”, in general. Westerners tend to be very supportive of Israel vs. the Palestinians; and supportive of Tibetans vs. China. (The relative weight of “the west” in world affairs is declining; but it is still an important factor.) Another difference, in my view, is that at the cultural level, many Han Chinese have real affection and veneration for Tibetan Buddhism as part of their own cultural heritage, while most Jewish Israelis tend to be dismissive, hostile, or extremely denigrating toward Islam as a religion. In China/Tibet, Buddhism in general has the potential to be a bridge between the two contesting national groups. In Israel/Palestine, no such supranational cultural bridge easily suggests itself.
Another difference: right now, Israel is not seeking to swallow up Gaza into Greater Israel and totally assimilate its indigenous residents, as China is in Tibet. In fact, Israel has never sought to assimilate the indigenous residents of any of the Arab lands it has occupied. Instead, it has strongly preferred either to expel them directly, or to make their life so constrained and miserable that they leave.
At the territorial level, though, the better analogy of the territorial expansion of China’s zone of exclusive control is not with Gaza, but with the West Bank. It is into the West Bank that Israel is currently pumping thousands of new colonial settlers each year; giving them preferential treatment in many economic spheres; and skewing land-use and infrastructure planning totally in favor of their interests– as China has been doing, with its and for its own ethnic settlers, in Tibet.
In terms of the demographic balance, if it comes to a total showdown– which I certainly believe the Chinese authorities want to avoid– or a longterm contest by attrition, then the four million or so Tibetans are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the billion-plus Han Chinese; while the eight million Palestinians living in and near to the area of Mandate Palestine outnumber the six million Jewish Israelis.
I think Beijing has many, many potential options to divide-and-rule the Tibetans that they have not explored fully yet. One extremely smart move for them would be to make some non-trivial concessions to the Dalai Lama and get him to return to Lhasa. Think: Oslo– but one we would hope would work out.
It is worth underlining that– as China Hand notes– the Dalai Lama supports the idea of the TAR remaining an “Autonomous Region” under over-all Chinese sovereignty. He is not calling for complete Tibetan independence, though that is the goal that many of supporters in the west might prefer. Of course, the kind of autonomy he seeks is one that leaves the Tibetan Buddhists quite free to practice their own religion and run their own religious institutions. This includes the effective functioning of the Panchen Lama identified by the Tibetan Lama-ate itself, rather than the young man “named” as the Panchen Lama by the Chinese authorities and kept under their sway in Beijing.
The Dalai Lama would probably also require that Tibetans in the TAR be allowed to regulate matters of residence and land-purchasing inside the TAR (to protect themselves from any further uncontrolled influx of Han Chinese) and that they be allowed to regulate many other aspects of the TAR’s economic development at the TAR level, rather than having economic “plans” forced onto them by Beijing.
Honestly, with goodwill I believe these matters could be negotiated relatively easily.
One big reason why this should be more possible today than, say, 40 years ago, is that China’s relations with India are far less tense now than they were then, so the military sensitivity of Tibet, and the fears Beijing may once have had that this distant province might act as a welcoming place for the activities of pro-Indian (anti-Chinese) Fifth Columnists should be a lot less intense than they were then.
Interesting and significant, I think, to see how harshly the Indian authorities seem to have been cracking down on the TPUM people who’ve been trying to organize the “long march” from Daramsala to the border with Tibet.
Of course, Beijing also has extremely ambivalent ideas toward the idea of Tibetan spirituality… Quite a hefty residual heritage of Han Chinese respect for Tibetan Buddhism, yes, as I noted above, but also quite a lot of “Communist”- oriented fears of anything that resembles organized religion.
Chinese officials have, however, expressed concerns in recent years that their younger generations have quite insufficient moral grounding/ moral education; and there has been some open-ness to allowing Buddhist teachers (and even some Christian teachers) to provide this in some cases. But mainly, what Beijing wants to avoid– as in their crackdown on the Falun Gong– is the consolidation of any forms of organized nationwide networks that are not under the CCP’s exclusive control… So maybe in the context of a Dalai Lama-Beijing agreement, the DL would have to promise not to undertake any “evangelizing” or build/support any forms of his own religious networks in areas of China outside the TAR.
Anyway, I am largely speculating, for now, about the possibilities of a DL-Beijing deal. I need to speak to a couple of good friends who know a lot more about this than I do; and then maybe I’ll be able to write something more about the topic here. But I would just note that it is not nearly as unthinkable a prospect as many of the diehard pro-Tibet people in the west seem to think.

Palestinian ‘Contras’-training plan in chaos

The plan hatched by Condi Rice and Elliott Abrams to train up a Palestinian ‘Contras’-style force under the auspices of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has fallen into a significant degree of chaos. The WaPo’s Ellen Knickmeyer and Glenn Kessler went to Muwaqqar, Jordan, where some 1,050 Palestinian security men are supposed to be being trained, and this is what they reported:

    Weeks into the course, which began in late January, U.S. and Jordanian instructors had yet to receive essential training equipment, including vehicles, two-way radios, dummy pistols, rifles and batons, and a U.S.-designed curriculum, Americans with close knowledge of the program said. Because of Israeli concerns, the group of more than 1,000 Palestinian trainees has not been outfitted with pledged body armor or light-armored personnel carriers. The shortages and delays have forced U.S. and Jordanian trainers to improvise their way through the program, including purchasing pistol-shaped cigarette lighters for use in arrest drills and using their own cars for driver training. One of the Americans said, “In short, we are faking it.”

Read the whole thing. Many of the details are hilarious and/or tragic, depending how you look at them.
I think the most tragic aspect is that the trainees are probably destitute Palestinians from the diaspora– perhaps from Jordan, or perhaps some of the scores of thousands of Palestinians summarily kicked out of Iraq… And maybe they were so ill-educated or ignorant that when they signed on they thought they were doing something glorious and nationalistic? Or maybe for some of them this was the only way they could figure out how to get back home to their homeland?
So there is, certainly, a tragic personal aspect to the story. The politics, however, are almost pure farce.
Basically, the pro-Likud people and other Arabophobes in the U.S. Congress– that means, quite a large proportion of the members– can’t imagine trusting Israel’s Palestinian “partners” in Fateh enough to give them even decent flak jackets or other basic equipment for gendarmerie-type training…. And then there’s the ever-present “contractor”, in this case DynCorp, who no doubt is eager to skim off its high percentage from the deal. So the training sounds as though it’s nonsense: the Contras meet the Keystone Cops sort of thing.
Knickmeyer and Kessler note that,

    The courses here are the first extended training of Palestinian recruits since June, when hundreds of Fatah graduates of a U.S.-backed, 45-day crash course conducted in Egypt were deployed against Hamas fighters in Gaza.
    Hamas routed the Fatah forces in the strip in five days, leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza and Abbas, a Fatah leader, governing the West Bank.

It is extremely uncertain whether these latest 1,050 trainees would do any better.
Look, I have a suggestion. Israel does actually need a Palestinian “partner for peace.” That is, it needs a Palestinian party or movement or administration that is capable of preserving calm on the Palestinian side and reining in the many thousands of Palestinians who have been driven towards rash and violent acts by the degree of horrendous suffering that the IOF has inflicted on them and their families. And Hamas does look as if it has been paying a lot of attention precisely to building up such forces, especially in Gaza… (Remember that Crisis Group report that gave many details about how internal political and inter-clan violence in Gaza went down significantly after the Fateh forces left.)
Of course, no Palestinian force– whether Fateh, or Hamas, or the Palestinian Boy Scouts– could be expected to play the role of policing the Palestinian side of the equation without being offered its own serious stake in the situation thus being “secured.”
But why all this money being shoveled to DynCorp to train Fateh’s forces, when they have little hope of securing anything– unless they do so in coordination with Hamas?
Well, the Likudist influence in Congress may not, in the end, prove to be a wholly bad thing. It’s a strange old world we live in.

A journalistic war-dog reflects

Todd Pitman, whose name has bylined many of AP’s stories out of Iraq over the past few years, has written a beautiful and reflective piece (also here) about the death-by-fire in May 2007 of his friend and colleague, the Russian news photog Dmitry Chebotayev, 29.
Pitman starts by describing nightmares that he still has about what he recalls happening in the immediate aftermath of Dmitry’s killing, which took place in the midst of what sounds like a fierce fire-fight:

    When the gunshots ease, I survey the scene nervously.
    I circle around one body in particular: a man in a maroon shirt, lying face up. Carefully, deliberately, I take photo after photo, capturing it at different angles. The Stryker is just behind, shadowed by a large golden-domed mosque across the street. I think this is an Iraqi civilian in a dishdasha gown, perhaps one of the attackers.
    I am expecting Dmitry to come running with his camera, but he does not appear. I think soldiers are keeping him back — photographing American casualties is often taboo.
    Inside an abandoned house where we seek shelter, I ask where he is.
    “Out front,” a soldier says. “You OK?”
    I am relieved, thankful.
    I know we will share these stories later: a dangerous time, a brush with death, but we escaped unharmed.
    Desperate to talk to Dmitry, I wander outside again. I still can’t find him, and ask somebody else where he is.
    Inside the house, a dozen red-eyed, mourning soldiers are sitting against the walls, staring angrily toward the harsh light outside.
    Until this moment, I am an observer.
    When a soldier answers, I become one of them.
    I am numb.
    Dmitry is outside on the ground near the door — the one wearing the maroon shirt. His blue flak jacket, helmet and sunglasses are gone. His smashed camera is on the ground beside him. His face is covered in dust.
    When I gain the strength to go out and look, he is gone. Soldiers have carried him away.
    Now I want to ask him: Can you forgive me taking your picture?
    And I ask myself: Why was I taking his picture, any of these pictures, at all?
    ___
    For a journalist, the world unfolds as an infinite stream of events. Your job is to witness them, capture them, explain them.
    But they build up inside you.
    I traveled to Iraq half a dozen times for the Associated Press over the years. I saw families crouching in their homes while Americans fought on their rooftops. I heard the screams of a dying Iraqi soldier as we crawled on a roof under a boiling midday sun. I watched helicopter gunships fire rockets across a twilit sky at insurgents holed up in palm groves below.
    Unlike everybody else, I was always able to hop on a plane and leave it all behind, returning to a world where you did not cringe, where you could walk — not run — down the street, without worrying about trip wires or bombs or snipers.
    I was always able to leave it all behind — until Dmitry was killed.
    That day, I crossed through a kind of looking glass, and saw the war in Iraq from another side.
    To the daily churn of news, it was just one more tragic story.
    To me, it was far more profound. It reverberated through lives thousands of miles away, changing them forever.
    I think about all the stories we have written — all the headlines and statistics that comprise the daily death tolls.
    I do not look at them so casually anymore.
    ___
    At the end of May, I traveled to Moscow for Dmitry’s funeral and met his parents, sister and girlfriend.
    They didn’t really know what had happened, and telling them, between shots of ice-cold vodka, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. (Dmitry, it turned out, had never told his parents he was going to Iraq. They thought he was in Jordan, shooting pictures of refugees).
    His death forced me to slow down my 100 mph life. In less than a year, I had traveled to Iraq twice, with 20 countries and a coup in Thailand in between.
    My fiancee and I took a long vacation visiting family and friends, swimming with giant turtles in a sapphire-blue Hawaiian bay. We got married. And now she is pregnant with our baby boy.
    I could not be happier — except when I think about what happened.
    I have not returned to Iraq, but I’ve been back many times in my mind.
    Often, I see Dmitry smiling.
    Often, I see him dead.
    In my dreams, I lean down and hold what is left of him. I do not care about the blood.
    I press my forehead to his — as I did not have the chance to do — then tell him I am sorry, and say goodbye. It is important for me to recognize him, to treat him as a human being — not the object of a camera lens.
    I take no pictures, and I am finally at ease.
    But this is not a peaceful place.
    Nearly a year later, I still wonder what we could have done differently. I feel stupid for seeking the war out. And I’m haunted by the words — “Be careful what you wish for” — that one soldier said to us the day before Dmitry died, as we resolved to go out with the Strykers again.
    Now I am left with questions, memories and hundreds of digital photographs that I can no longer look at, that I cannot show anyone and cannot throw away. ..

Pitman asks some absolutely crucial questions about the role of journalists in war situations. I know, because for several years after I finished working as a war correspondent in Lebanon in the 1970s I suffered from several symptoms that today would be classified as PTSD. At times it was only, really, the grinding daily need to be there as the (single) mother for my kids that me going. (The therapeutic effects of folding a pile of laundry made up of small kids’ clothes has never, I feel, been explored as deeply as it should have been.)
Journalists are trained to be professionally present in the most harrowing of situations while keeping their souls and their emotions absent from these situations. Actually, if you’re in a stressful situation, then having something to do is certainly better than not having something to do. So chalk up going out there with a notebook and pen– or, as in Pitman’s case that night, a notebook, pen, and camera– in the middle of a stressful situation as being another excellent coping mechanism, too.
But of course, as Pitman, Elizabeth Rubin, and a host of other fine war correspondents have discovered, you can’t absent your emotions and your soul from these situations. They will come back and bite you later.
So I really admire, certainly, all the journalists who– quite literally– have put their lives on the line in order to tell the world about the grisly and horrendous realities of war. But I think I have special admiration for those who also take the huge professional and personal risk of trying to tell us what it feels like, to them, as they do so.
Thanks, Todd Pitman, for a great and sensitive writing job. I really sympathize about your loss of your friend.

Kissinger: “Talk to Iran”

Late Thursday night, Henry Kissinger gave an interview with Bloomberg TV, and the 13+ minute segment can be viewed via this link. Kissinger is reputed to be among US Presidential candidate John McCain’s advisers, and he remains an icon among “realist” analytical circles.
I’ll leave it to Helena Cobban or other sharp jwn readers to comment on the rest of his remarks. Kissinger, for example, sticks to the stale, if safe line that Israel cannot negotiate with Hamas until Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist. Helena has well articulated a different view here repeatedly.
I am more struck by Kissinger’s apparent “off the reservation” observations and counsel regarding US-Iran relations. His Iran remarks roughly come between minutes 3:30 and 7:30 of the recording. Here’s a quick summary of his points, with my comments:
1. Kissinger sets out his working question, about whether Iran is a “nation” or a “cause.” Presumably, we can deal with the former, but not so well with the latter. Kissinger (HAK) presumably finds Iran today to be more of a “nation,” one with which we can be fellow “realists.”

This is more than mere academic jargon. Neoconservative godfathers, from Bernard Lewis to Norman Podhoretz have been advancing the fallacious argument that Iran remains an irrational “cause.” To Podhoretz (and his source Amir Taheri), never mind what the Islamic Republic says or offers, Iran will be an incorrigible “existential” threat to Israel, even unto “martyrdom.” Kissinger, to his credit, sees other possibilities.
Funny thing, I first wrote about revolutionary Iran adapting to “reasons of state” back in early 1984 — in a grad. school seminar. So glad the Secretary is catching up.
By the way, what is America under Bush – a nation, or a cause?

2. Kissinger supports “direct negotiations” with Iran. Yet he also supports what Secretary Rice thus far has offered, “to meet with Iranians anywhere, anytime.” Kissinger claims that the problem hasn’t been the willingness to talk, but the content, the agenda about which we might talk.

What’s a neoconservative to make of this? On the one hand, Israel is not to talk to Hamas because it doesn’t formally recognize Israel’s right to exist. Yet the US can talk to Iran, never mind the incendiary remarks, shall we say, of its current President about Israel’s legitimacy. Ah, but in Kissingerian realpolitik logic, it “works:” states must talk to each other, but not, apparently, to each others’ internal rebel movements. George III, then and now, logic.
As for Secretary Rice’s offer to “talk,” this is a bit disingenuous, as Rice’s offers thus far come with the precondition that Iran give up uranium enrichment. In that sense, sure, there is a problem about the agenda, whether Iran’s uranium enrichment is to be part of the talks, or something Iran is being expected to give up, as a precondition.

3. In response to question about what person the US should send to talk to Iran, Kissinger remarkably says it’s “generally not a good idea” to start such talks at a high level.

Really? One wonders then just how the Nixon Administration’s famous opening to China was achieved? Was that some low level contact that pulled that off? Perhaps Kissinger is merely recognizing that neither Bush nor Rice are the least bit likely to meet with the Iranians this year, and granting them a (transparent) fig leaf.
Speaking of low level, underneath the radar activity, the US representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a Sada Cumber, is being quoted in Iranian sources saying that “the US is prepared to work with Iran…”

4. Other notable HAK quotes: “Regime change cannot be an objective of our foreign policy.” — at least not if we wish to solve regional problems… In contemplating “if” Iran would be willing to address our concerns, Kissinger suggests the US would have an “obligation” to respond.

This hints headlines to come. Never mind Rice’s lame claims to the contrary, Kissinger apparently is aware of the various “grand-bargain” offers from Iran.
As for eschewing “regime change,” did candidate McCain get the memo?

5. Intriguingly, Kissinger suggests that he has been part of “totally private” talks with unspecified Iranians. He claims that “approaches” have been put before these Iranians “which with a little flexibility on their part” would “surely” lead to negotiations.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Might Kissinger be part of the ongoing discrete “private” efforts with the Iranians? I doubt it, but who knows? One wonders too of a rat in the works here, as once could speculate that such a disclosure, that Kissinger himself is involved in private talks with Iran, might be a sure way to wreck them.

Iran’s Parliament Elections & Red Cards

Iran’s Parliamentary elections take place today, amid widespread criticisms of the process, especially from within. Iran’s vetting Council of Guardians has been especially zealous in blocking thousands of prominent reformists from running for election to Iran’s 290 seat Parliament. (Majlis)
Such vetting provoked loud condemnation, with one reformer, Ali Akbar Motashamipur, publicly proclaiming that, “If anyone’s qualifications should be rejected, it is the 12 members of the Council of Guardians.” He boldly characterized the Council’s rejections as “falsifying, fraudulent, slanderous, and seditious” and called on “all the people to resist any government which applies such tactics.”
While nearly 900 candidate rejections were eventually reversed, Iranians appear split over whether the elections provide significant choices, whether they constitute a referendum on the policies of President Ahmadinejad, or whether choosing not to vote constitutes a “vote against the system” or a “vote for arrogance.” (that is, for American and external intervention)
Here’s a useful round-up of diverse western reporting on the elections thus far. I also suggest attention to Scott Peterson’s recent reporting. Last week, he touched on the unprecedented battles over who owns the revolution, the role of the military in politics, and the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Among the sensations afoot, Iran’s new Revolutionary Guards commander stirred a hornet’s nest when he declared that, “To follow the path of the Islamic revolution, support for the principlists is necessary, inevitable, and a divine duty of all revolutionary groups…”
That “brought stinging rebuke from across the political spectrum, even from fellow hard-liners such as the editor of the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, who called it a “faulty declaration” that is “against the clear guidelines.” Hassan Khomeini, the reformist grandson of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, proclaimed that, “If a soldier wants to enter into politics, he needs to forget the military and the presence of a gun in politics means the end of all dialogue.” (What a concept…)
On Monday, Mehdi Karrubi, the former Majles speaker, invoked a sports analogy (sorry Helena) to lament the prospects for fellow reformists: “we are like a football team; many of our players have been given a red card.”
Hard-line outlets fiercely reject such criticisms. On Wednesday, the newspaper Resalat editorialized that many “extremist” reformists “deserved a red card,” and, in any case, the refomists should be thankful to the Guardian Council. If they hadn’t been disqualified, the lame logic goes, there would have been too many candidates, and the reformists would have negated each other’s strength, with up to seven competing for each vacancy.
Resalat conveniently doesn’t mention the many obstacles in the way of political party formation in Iran. Nor does it mention that reformists apparently are still blocked from running in over half of the contests. I’ve seen independent reports, including this one, suggesting reformist candidates are being allowed to compete for only 110 out of 290 seats.
Many Iranians will deem the present Iranian Majlis elections as too crabbed to be even worth getting their “fingers stamped,” as Peterson’s dispatch today suggests. The Guardian headline today opines, “Iran’s reformists” are facing a challenge to fight off irrelevance in an election they cannot win. Yet as the paper’s Julian Borger notes, “For all its limitations, political leaders of every hue still believe there is something worth fighting for in the Majlis election.”
Perhaps because I subscribe to a more nuanced view of Iran’s ever shifting factional struggles, I will be watching for content, even if it appears that the remaining reformist candidates do not fare well. Among the presumed “conservatives,” there are widely differing viewpoints and tendencies. For example, it remains quite unclear how many “moderate conservatives” critical of Ahmadinejad remained in the race. Hope may be in the details.

Farzaneh Milani on “Hostage Narratives”

Our University of Virginia friend, Professor Farzeneh Milani, has just published a brilliant review essay in the current issue of Middle East Report, “On Women’s Captivity in the Islamic World.”
Drawing from her own forthcoming book, long in the works, Milani analyzes how the Muslim woman is commonly reduced in American “non-fiction” bestselling pulp to being a “virtual prisoner…. the victim of an immobilizing faith, locked up inside her mandatory veil—a mobile prison shrunk to the size of her body.”
Here’s a splendid thematic excerpt:

“The recent spate of memoirs and autobiographies involving Muslim captors and their native or non-Muslim victims, a mutant category I call “hostage narratives,” puts a new and fascinating twist on the familiar theme of women’s captivity in the Islamic world. It is no longer mainly Western men who recount the tales of confinement, but women who recount them firsthand…. It is women’s own longing to escape, their own urgent plea to be liberated. The hostage narrative relies on the authority of personal experience, shares an insider’s perspective and commands more trust and legitimacy. Written in English, addressing Americans directly and concerned with national and international security for good measure, this category of literature fetishizes the veil.”

In formulaic works, from Mahmoody’s Not without My Daughter to Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran to Ali’s The Caged Virgin, women languish within a gulag, crying out for “liberation” from without. For this review essay, Milani avoids questions about the motives, agendas, or even veracity of the writers or publishers. Instead, Milani wants to know what makes us in the west so readily receptive to such stark presentations.
The analysis is laced with political implications, and Milani locates the genesis of the modern “hostage narratives” to a political event: the US-Iran hostage crisis.

An indelible sense of anguish etched itself into the collective memory of a justifiably outraged nation. “America in Captivity” was the headline that summed up the mood of a country in psychic pain. Like harrowing flashbacks of a trauma, hostage taking became a recurrent theme in books and films and news clips about Iran and, by extension, the Islamic world.

Wittingly or otherwise, American publishers have kept Americans largely hostage to sterile memories, now nearly 3 decades old.
Milani is not entertaining “illusions” and concedes that “repression, autocracy, political and religious purges, censorship, and gender inequity” within Islamic realms are realities that should be, and are, widely studied. Yet as I too have written, Iran in particular is “a land of paradoxes, a society in transition.”

“[N]o one can accuse the Islamic Republic of intolerance toward its own contradictions, particularly when it comes to the treatment of women. Indeed, two competing narratives of womanhood exist side by side in Iran today. Iranian women can vote and run for some of the highest offices in the country, but must observe an obligatory dress code. They can drive personal vehicles, even taxis and trucks and fire engines, but cannot ride bicycles. (an irony I explored here at jwn last July – scott) They are seated away from men in the back of buses, but can be squashed in between perfect male strangers in overcrowded jitney taxis. They have entered the world stage as Nobel Peace Laureates, human rights activists, best-selling authors, prize-winning film directors and Oscar nominees, but cannot enter government offices through the same door as men. “

More accurately then, life for Iranian women reflects a “complex mixture of protest and accommodation, of resistance and acquiescence.” The Monitor’s Scott Peterson recently captured this “ebb and flow” experienced by Iranian women; the problems grab the headlines, the push-back less so.
Milani’s review essay deserves close consideration, particularly her plea to fellow Americans to stop “suspending our critical judgment” and to seek out the competing narrative of the undiscovered Muslim woman. In her, Milani suggests we shall find

“a moderating, modernizing force, a seasoned negotiator of confined spaces, a veteran trespasser of boundaries, walls, fences, cages, blind windows, closed doors and iron gates.”

Ehud Barak the blocker?

Abu Mazen has been quoted as saying that a “senior figure” in the Israeli cabinet has been blocking the Israel-Hamas peace deal and he is widely thought to have been referring to Defense Minister Ehud Barak. As some possible corroborating evidence for this, note that IOF troops operating undercover killed five militants in an assassination op in the West Bank today. Of the five, four were reported as being Islamic Jihad and one with the (Fateh-linked) Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
In the west, Ehud Barak is generally widely thought of as a relative “peacenik” among Israeli political leaders. In 1999, when he was head of the Labor Party, he was indeed elected PM on a strongly pro-peace platform. (“I will complete the negotiations with the Palestinians within 6-9 months,” etc.) He failed miserably. In fact, he was hustled at the speed of light out of being the IDF’s chief of staff into being head of Labor, and never had time to learn anything at all about politics or diplomacy along the way. Hence, the coalition that he headed in Israel fell apart in almost record time, because of his total lack of political skills. The “peace process” fell apart disastrously, too, bringing us n short order Sharon’s disastrous September 2000 visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and Sharon’s amazing trioumphant re-entry into national leadership just 17 years after the Kahan Commission had said he should be banned from high office for life.
Along the way, Barak did make what could be described as two “drive-by, quickie” attempts at peacemaking. One with Hafez al-Asad, which failed miserably because of Barak’s arrogance and duplicity (and Bill Clinton’s complicity with both those aspects of Bark’s behavior.) That failure almost certainly helped kill Hafez al-Asad. After that one failed, Barak turned those same attributes in Yasser Arafat’s direction, forcing him to the completely ill-prepared Camp David 2 summit from which both Barak and Clinton emerged vociferously and in a quite one-sided way blaming Arafat.
My best friends in the Israeli peace movement heap a lot of blame on Barak for killing the Israeli peace movement at that point. By successfully spreading the (significantly inaccurate) story that he had made Arafat a “generous offer” and that Arafat had turned it down out of hand, Barak spread the idea very broadly in Israel and the US that the Israelis had “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.
Israel’s Labour Party has always been a flawed vehicle for any hopes of concluding a just and sustainable peace. One problem with the party since its inception has been the extremely incestuous relationship between its leadership and that of the Israeli military. Some of the IDF’s retired generals have become voices of good sense regarding the need for peacemaking; but many more of them have not. People like Ephraim Sneh, Binyamin (“Fouad”) Ben-Eliezer, and Ehud Barak have taken into the party’s upper echelons the mindset of bulldozers and bullies. They are also very much aware of the huge interests many of their friends and former colleagues have in the success of Israel’s massive military-industrial complex.
So I’m not totally surprised now if we see Ehud Olmert being more forward-leaning on peace issues than Ehud Barak.
Let’s hope Barak gets up to no more mischief and the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal can still be saved.

Israel-Hamas deal closer; New role for Abu Mazen

Hamas looks as though it is moving ever closer to concluding the ceasefire (Tahdi’a) deal with Israel. (For previous sit reps on this see 1 and 2.) A couple of important markers this morning:
— Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh has publicly laid out the terms and extent of the deal his movement seeks. That Reuters reports says this:

    “There must be a commitment by Israel to end all acts of aggression against our people, assassinations, killings and raids, and lift the (Gaza) siege and reopen the crossings,” Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas’s administration in the Gaza Strip, said in a speech. [It was at Gaza’s Islamic University, much of which was destroyed by Fateh in fighting last year.]
    A ceasefire, he said, should be “reciprocal, comprehensive and simultaneous,” apply both to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and be approved by other Palestinian factions.

— This same position is also substantially confirmed from Hamas’s over-all leadership, the political bureau based in Damascus. The Hamas-linked PIC website also looks as though it is preparing Hamas’s Palestinian supporters for the news of the hopefully imminent conclusion of the ceasefire deal, by framing it in the context of a report that Olmert has acknowledged his government’s failure to stop the Gaza-originated rocket attacks on southern Israel.
— Progress is also apparently being made in the effort to achieve an intra-Palestinian reconciliation. Hamas head Khaled Meshaal is supposed to be in Yemen today or tomorrow to help Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh along with that.
Paradoxically, as Israel and Hamas move closer to achieving a (hopefully) workable, Gaza-based ceasefire agreement Fateh boss and PA president Mahmoud Abbas will be taking on a new role: that of the “public face” of intermediation between the two sides. The leaders of both Israel and Hamas both need him to play that role, since neither of those sets of leaders wants to stand up and tell their people openly that they are dealing directly with the other.
Abu Mazen himself probably doesn’t relish playing the role of “front man” for either of these two much bigger and more significant parties. But it’s not as if he has many other options.
Update, Wed., 11:20 EST:
This new report from Haaretz’s Ami Issacharoff neatly illustrates Abu Mazen’s emerging role, and the weakness that has pushed him into it. Issacharoff wites:

    A deal being formulated between Israel, Egypt and Hamas involves deploying Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ troops at the crossings with the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources told Haaretz yesterday.

Note there who is doing the negotiating and who would merely get to be “deployed” by those negotiators…

US war in Iraq: the financial cost to Americans

Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have recently tallied the overall cost to the US economy of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq at $3 trillion. I haven’t read enough of their study to understand what assumption they are using there for the future length of the war going forward. (Can anybody know that at this point? If John McCain is serious about committing the US to the battlefield there for “100 years”, then at what point do the costs of that engagement become simply unquantifiable? Pretty soon into the 100 years, I’d say.)
Next week we will mark the fifth anniversary of this tragic engagement. In those five years Iraq, the country, has been essentially destroyed. Scores of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis have lost their lives. More than four million of them have been displaced within or outside the country’s borders. Compared with the suffering that the war has inflicted on Iraqis, it seems almost trivial to mention the loss it has inflicted on the US citizenry. Nearly 4,000 volunteer service members have been killed, and tens of thousands more left with lasting physical injuries; hundreds of thousands with mental and spiritual injuries. (Remembering that just about all Iraq’s 30 million people have been left with mental and spiritual injuries by the war.)
And then, there is also the cost of the financial costs to the US citizenry, which in themselves are by no means trivial.
What was the war alleged to be “about”, again? Oh, WMDs, you might remember. SUNY Purchase professor Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has tallied the total budget of the UN’s 2002 inspection operation in Iraq (UNMOVIC) at “approximately $80 million, which includes the initial purchase of permanent equipment.” The budget of UNMOVIC’s predecessor, UNSCOM was “$25-30 million per year.” What is more, UNSCOM worked! Its operations and attentiveness did indeed lead to Saddam Hussein ending and destroying all his WMD programs sometime in the mid 1990s.
So imagine if, in 2002, in response to all the– as it turned out, completely hyped up, cherry-picked, and perhaps downright fabricated– allegations about Saddam still having WMD programs, the US had allowed the UN simply to continue with the UNMOVIC program, which was much more intrusive yet than the UNSCOM program.
(Which had worked… Did I mention that before?)
It would have cost the international community around $80 million a year.
Instead of which, the US taxpayers, with almost no help from anyone else (and after all, why should they?) are currently paying out on the continuing war in Iraq at a rate that Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate at $12 billion per month. That is, $144 billion per year.
Back in January 2003, when I went with my friends from the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice to the City Council hearing at which our city became formally designated as a “City for Peace”, I spoke to the councillors and explained how– after my study of Israel’s lengthy military invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon, I had noted the degree to which maintaining that occupation had become a massive drag on Israel’s economy. (I wrote about that, too, in those pre-war months of 2003.) And I told the city councillors that it was evident that:

    (1) the US would find it far harder to get out of Iraq than it was to get in, in spite of all the talk about a “cake-walk”, etc;
    (2) The costs of the maintaining the post-invasion occupation would be huge, and mounting;
    (3) Just the logistics costs alone, of sustaining a massive occupation force at such a distance from the US’s own borders, would be exponentially higher than the comparable costs had been for Israel, given that Lebanon was right next door; and
    (4) All this money would have to come from somewhere; and it would in fact come out of the US’s ability to provide decent basic services for its own citizens at home, which meant that it would be communities like Charlottesville that would end up suffering.

Guess what. It has all been happening.
This morning, as I drove from C’ville up to Washington DC I was listening to the hearing the Senate Appropriations Committee held on the costs of the war. Depressing, indeed. But at least we have a democratic majority in the senate which is holding hearings like this. I thought the Committee Chair pro-tem Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) did a great job.