Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 146 – Info, analysis, discussion

Speaking next Tuesday, Capitol Hill

Next Tuesday, I’ll have the honor of being part of a panel of people speaking on the theme of “Re-calculating Annapolis”, in the Rayburn House Office Building.
The co-panelists will be Rob Malley, head of the Crisis Group’s Middle East department; Daniel Levy, whiz-kid of the Israeli peace movement; Andrew Whitley, currently with UNRWA, previously head of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division; and Ghaith al-Omari, previously an advisor to Abu Mazen.
Here are the sponsors of the event:

Amb. Phil Wicox, the president of FMEP and a distinguished former US diplomat, including head of Counter-terrorism, will be chairing the discussion.
Every single one of these organizations does a great job and has talented and thoughtful people working for it. It is particularly great that work together on projects like this one, demonstrating right here in Washington DC that Arab-Israeli peace is not a zero-sum game in which if one “side” wins the other loses. Not at all! With a sustainable, fair peace agreement, everyone wins.
(Disclosures: I have sat on the Leadership Council of Churches for Middle East Peace since the LC was founded four or five years ago. FMEP has on occasion given support to my travel expenses, including for my latest visit to Damascus.)
It should be an interesting discussion. A lot has changed since the Annapolis conference, which was only ten weeks ago. Of course, a lot has also stayed the same: lack of progress in the negotiations; Israeli settlement projects continuing to get funded and built, especially in and around Jerusalem; deadly conflict between Israel and Gaza, impacting mainly on Gaza but spreading fear and uncertainty both sides of the line; another suicide bombing in Israel; Israel. the US, and– particularly tragically– also Fateh continuing to try to exclude and crush Hamas despite its popular support; re-marginalization of Syria from the diplomacy; etc.
If you’re interested in coming to the discussion, you will need to RSVP to the email address given on the announcement as they need an idea of the numbers to provide the light lunch to. This is planned as a “widely attended event”, so members of Congress and their staffers are allowed to take advantage of the free lunch offer.
If you can’t make it, I imagine they’ll be videoing it for C-SPAN so you can watch it later.

Where did my 5th blogiversary go to, anyway?

I’ve been pretty busy this week– including on a special project, see below. So though yesterday was my 5th blogiversary I completely forgot about marking that fact here. Darn!
It’s been quite a quinquennium. I am really glad I got into the blogging habit before the start of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, because now I have a somewhat full, though still of necessarily incomplete, record of many of the main portions of the war here– including of its last-minute preparations. My very first blog post, February 6, 2003, was a quick critique of Colin Powell’s notable (and, as it turned out, notably mendacious) presentation at the UN the day before. (Goodness, I mentioned there having read the whole text but I didn’t hyperlink to it! What was I thinking?)
In the next day’s post, five years ago today, I focused in on the claims Powell had made about Saddam having sponsored the presence in Iraq of sa network of Al-Qaeda supporters. In that one, I did hyperlink Powell’s text– and also, the text of a recently released Crisis Group report that had examined the whole phenomenon of that pro-Qaeda network (“Ansar al-Islam”) and said of the area in northern Iraq where they had been entrenched that, “This is a region outside Baghdad’s control and we see no evidence that Ansar has a strategic alliance with Saddam Hussein.”
Now, over the weeks ahead, I shall be thinking more about that whole period of the build-up to the war and way that so many Americans– but most especially the members of the political and media elites, and those who aspired to join them– got so badly caught up in war fever. Some of them even in spite of the conclusions they reached in their rational, analytical modes, that the war could well end up being a disaster.
It was an emotional time.
But I’ll also be remembering the way that so many of us here in US resisted getting caught up in the war fever. On February 16, 2003, I blogged about the huge antiwar demonstration I took part in, in New York the day before. That was a historic– and in retrospect, oh so tragic– moment.
Meanwhile, in Bushistan, the preparations to launch the war were getting near the “ready-to-go” point. Probably we should have encircled the Pentagon, instead.
Look where Iraq’s 29 million people, and the stretched-to-busting US military, and the US National Debt, and the families of 3,940 US service members killed and many thousands more badly wounded all find themselves today.
So say a prayer for wisdom and healing. And say a prayer for Sen. Barack Obama– a politician who notably got it right throughout all of those crucial, emotion-laden weeks of early 2003.
Here’s what Obama said during last Thursday’s debate:

“I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

Go, Obama!
—
Finally, a quick word about my special project this week. Back in January 2003, it was my son Tarek who was the one who urged me, “Mom, you really should check out this blogging thing and get yourself a blog.” He then patiently helped me get JWN started, and he’s been my tech advisor here ever since. Tarek’s 30th birthday is coming up, so I’ve been making him a special present for it. [Obviously, I’m not about to reveal what it is. But it took more work than I’d been expecting… ]
Recently, Tarek became engaged to his fabulous girlfriend of some 3-4 years, and they will be married in July… Meantime, he’s working hard on completing a Master’s program at MIT… So we have a huge amount to celebrate and be thankful for.
Mazel tov, Tarek! Thanks for everything!

Amayreh-Froman accord: A way forward for Israel and Palestine?

Today’s Haaretz carries exciting news about a proposal for an Israel-Gaza ceasefire that has been jointly drafted by Khaled Amayreh, a Hebron-area journalist who is close to Hamas (and whose work I have frequently cited here), and Rabbi Menachem Froman of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa.
Haaretz’s Yair Ettinger writes:

gained 100-percent approval

The way Ettinger describes the document, the agreement would include provision for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who has been held by Gaza Palestinians as a POW since spring 2006 and is now well established as being under Hamas’s general control. It would also include a full tahdi’eh (ceasefire) between Israel and Gaza and some, though not all, elements of a more far-reaching hudna between Israel and Palestine.
Ettinger writes:

The Hebrew and Arabic document contains verses from the Koran and the Bible and states, “God is the greatest of all and He alone can bring an end to the problems between the noble Palestinian people and the distinguished Jewish people in the Holy Land.”

I really love this formulation for dealing with the 120-year-old contest between Palestinians and Jews for control of the Holy Land: Leave that big issue to the Almighty, working in His or Her own time, which is not the same as politicians’ time!
And more immediately, there is this:

Two last quick points here. One is that I’m assuming that in addition to the release of Shalit the document also makes provision for the release of many of the Palestinians held in Israeli detention– who include around 45 of the parliamentarians elected in the free and fair Palestinian elections of January 2006.
On another page, Haaretz tells us that “Hamas has given Israel a letter apparently written by abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit… The authenticity of the letter has been examined and sent to the Shalit family.”
So it looks as if the letter was deemed authentic enough to send it on to the family. It seems, too, that Hamas has underlined in this way that it does indeed have control– whether direct or indirect– over Shalit and therefore, by extension, is in a position to assure his release if its conditions for an Israeli counter-release are met.
The Haaretz article gives further details of the negotiations over how many, and which, Palestinians Israel is prepared to release. Olmert is reported to have relaxed his criteria for the release somewhat, but negotiations among Israel’s various security bodies still continue and the writer’s sources say there may not be a deal for a number of months yet.
And finally– this is something of direct relevance to what I was writing yesterday— this morning, a Palestinian suicide bomber who had reportedly crossed into southern Israel across the lightly guarded border with Egypt blew himself up in the Negev town of Dimona, killing one Israeli woman and himself, and wounding 11 other people. A second reported bomber was shot dead at the scene by police before he could detonate his vest.
So here’s a very important aspect of the attack that Haaretz and others report:

the Fatah-allied Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – which claimed responsibility for the attack

But here is my concern: Is there a possibility that Israel’s leaders, politically embattled and embarrassed by last week’s release of the final portion of the Winograd report, might use the Dimona attack as a pretext to hit back hard against the people of Gaza and the newly empowered Hamas leaders there?
Israel’s often pugnacious Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has reportedly been pushing for a significant military attack against Gaza for some time now. He doubtless has the plans for such an attack all ready to go. Barak has been particularly embarrassed by the fall-out from Winograd because before its publication he had vowed that if the report was critical of PM Olmert then he would lead the Labour Party out of the governing coalition. The report was very critical of Olmert’s leadership during the 33-day war, though not naming him or anyone else by name. Barak has not resigned.
(Btw, I find it fascinating that party discipline in the Labour Party is so weak these days that this was apparently a decision that Barak alone, as party leader, could make. Shouldn’t it have been a party decision? Just asking here… )
I’ll just note that almost exactly 25 years ago, when Defense Minister Areil Sharon was itching for any excuse at all to launch a big attack against the PLO in Lebanon, he used the pretext of an attack made against the Israeli ambassador in London by operatives from the virulently anti-PLO Palestinian faction of Abu Nidal to launch that attack.
Let’s hope wiser heads will prevail this time.
Look at what Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon led to!!!

unilaterally

home-based Palestinian national leaders

A full-scale invasion and reoccupation of Gaza this time round could be expected to have results considerably more counter-productive than that from Israel’s point of view.
That’s why the Amayreh-Froman document and the cautious, tension-calming path forward that it lays out, may gain some traction within Israel in the weeks ahead, just as it already has with the Hamas leadership. Let’s hope so.

Egypt’s diplomacy on Hamas-Fateh and the Rafah crossing

Egypt’s great daily paper Al-Masry Al-Yawm has an important article today describing the intensive efforts Egyptian officials have been making to secure both a (degree of) Hamas-Fateh reconciliation and an agreement with the relevant Palestinian parties– preferably, both of them– regarding the orderly operation of the Rafah crossing point. (Hat-tip Bill. By the way, readers should also note that, in addition to being a great paper, AMAY’s website has an excellently edited English-language version. Kudos to them!)
The authors of the article are Sherif Ibrahim, Fathia al-Dakhakhni and Mahasen el-Senousi.
They write:

And then this important information from Hamas spokesperson Taher al-Nounou:

Hamas accepted European observers at the gate provided that they do not decide when to open and close it, that they live in Arish or Rafah and not go to Israel as they used to. He also stressed on the fact that the Europeans would be back by virtue of a new comprehensive agreement not related to the 2005 one.

the most important issue of the talks – focused on by Egyptian officials – was Egyptian security in Sinai

The close-to-Hamas Palestinian Information Center (PIC) website carried this report from a press conference that Hamas’s former foreign minister Mahmoud Zahhar held yesterday in Rafah.
It said this:

in cooperation between security men of both sides

And this morning AP is reporting from Rafah that,

Hamas police aided with the closure, drawing pistols and arresting Palestinians who were throwing stones at Egyptian troops along the frontier.

It is certainly significant that the Hamas people are working with the Egyptian security forces to establish a stable regime along the Gaza-Egypt border— and doing so even though that involves, right now, working with Egypt to reseal the border, even if this complete resealing is only temporary.
Both sides have reason to fear a continuation of the recent chaotic situation there. The Egyptians have been searching for four Palestinians, suspected of planning suicide attacks against some of Egypt’s economically important tourist resorts, who reportedly crossed from Gaza into Sinai on Friday. AP apparently reported that 12 of the 15 heavily armed Palestinians arrested in the north Sinai town of Arish in recent days were members of Hamas. Very evidently, if the Hamas leadership wants to work out a stable agreement with Egypt regarding the border, it will also have to be able to exert its own control effectively over the situation inside Gaza— including, perhaps especially, over the actions of its own members.
It cannot do that easily if the Rafah border remains open to all-comers, including very possibly provocateurs infiltrated by Israel, or Abu Mazen, or who knows who else.
Also, of key importance: For Gaza’s economic opening to and through Egypt to work, as Zahhar and his colleagues want it to, both the Palestinians and the Egyptians need to be able to control– and keep calm– their respective borders with Israel.
Might the next step the Egyptians take, after finding a way to reconcile Abu Mazen and Hamas and a workable formula for opening one or more crossing points on the border, therefore be to help broker a meaningful ceasefire between Gaza and Israel? Why not?
Meanwhile, though Hamas has indeed today been taking actions– including against its own people– in its decision to work with the Egyptians in resealing the border, it is also showing that it retains and will probably continue to develop its capabilities of mounting nonviolent mass actions around the Gaza issue. That same PIC report that told us about Zahhar’s press conference told us this:

thousands of Palestinian women participated Saturday afternoon in a massive march organized by Hamas’s female supporters at the Rafah crossing

This is one of the many things I love about nonviolent mass action: It involves all members of society, not just the guys! Indeed, to be effective, it really needs to do so.
Back in 2006, I wrote quite a bit about the increasingly important political role being played by Hamas’s well-organized networks of women supporters. That became evident both in the very successful parliamentary election campaign that Hamas mounted in January of that year, and also in some of the new style of nonviolent mass public actions that we saw from the Hamas-organized women later in the year. See, e.g., these two JWN posts from November 2006: 1 and 2.
Too many people in the west– and certainly, nearly the whole of the western MSM– have taken at face value the accusations from Israel and the Bush administration about Hamas (and Hizbullah) being only terrorist organizations. But that view completely misunderstands, or wilfully ignores, the deep roots both organizations have struck among their respective constituencies– roots have been nurtured and sustained through many long years of actions in various fields of nonviolent activity, including a lot of social work and electoral/political organizing. But then, something new happened, it seems to me, when people involved in those kinds of fairly private nonviolent activities take their nonviolent organizing into the mass, open, public sphere and these actions demonstrated that they can have a huge, transformatory effect on the political scene.
One example from Lebanon was the partly organized, partly “spontaneous” mass return of south Lebanese villagers to their villages in the border zone in May 2000. The puppet-run “security zone” that the Israelis had previously maintained there just crumbled overnight.
Another example from Lebanon was the very similar– partly organized, partly “spontaneous”– mass return of south Lebanon’s people to their homes, villages, and towns, on August 14, 2006, the very day the ceasefire went into effect. That human wave of people completely swept away any hopes the Israelis may have had that they and the UN could somehow “prevent” Hizbullah’s people from re-establishing themselves in southern Lebanon– because at that point, nearly all the people who returned were Hizbullah. And, as Ze’ev Schiff (RIP) noted at the time, possession of the battlefield at the time the shooting stops is the very definition of victory. (The IDF had sent in a ground force in those last 60 hours of the war– after the completion of the negotiations for the ceasefire, indeed– precisely with the aim of trying to control as much of the South Lebanon battlefield as possible by the time the ceasefire went into effect. At the purely military level, however, their plans went sorely awry; and on August 13 and 14 the surviving soldiers from their badly mauled invasion force slunk back south across the border in considerable disarray, holding onto no land at all.)
Hizbullah’s women have also, certainly, been seen in quite a number of the party’s public demonstrations and marches, some of them organized into disciplined and slightly militaristic-looking cohorts, and some not.
Hamas women, however, seem to have been developing an even more distinctive and potentially effective role for themselves. They have run in– and in six cases, won– parliamentary elections. And on numerous occasions over the years they have organized all-women demonstrations with a very pointed political intent. Most recently, on January 22, more than 1,000 Hamas-organized women from Gaza swarmed across the Rafah crossing into Egypt in an action designed to publicize the plight of their families as Israel tightened the screws of its siege of the Strip– and also, perhaps, to test the reactions of the Egyptian security forces prior to the big bust-out across the border that was being planned for the following night. (Also worth watching: the second half of this Jazeera/YouTube report on that demo. I would say maybe they need work a bit more on group discipline?)
On that occasion, the Egyptian security forces responded with baton charges and water cannon. But the women’s demonstration, which was widely publicized throughout the Middle East, probably helped many of Gaza’s people to break through any fear they might have had, the next day, regarding the possibility of joining the throngs engaged in the bust-out. So the bust-out itself, when it happened, turned out to be a massive and truly transformative venture.
And now, by mounting another demonstration at the border crossing, it has been the organized women of Hamas, acting nonviolently, who have put the Egyptian authorities on notice that they need to find an agreement that allows the re-opening of the border fence, and soon.
Interesting times. Let’s see what Egyptian diplomacy is able to achieve.

Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan: Bushism in disarray

The past few weeks have not been good ones for the Bush administration’s project of establishing firm, pro-western beach-heads in a broad swathe of western Asia from Gaza to Afghanistan. Afghanistan, which since late 2001 has been ruled by the US-installed and heavily US-dependent Hamid Karzai, is probably the country where the situation seems most dire– for both the pro-Washington political order and the Afghan citizens themselves.
Afghanistan is, by some hard-to-fathom quirk of fate (okay, make that Bushist political necessity), a central part of the mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, despite its great distance from the Atlantic ocean. The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was probably representing the views of many NATO leaders when she wrote yesterday,

for the sake of its own credibility

One question: given that Afghanistan is so important to NATO, and given that the Bush administration has pushed so hard with its plan to deploy an ABM system right next to the Russian border in Poland, why would Russia– or, come to that, China– feel any urgent desire to help NATO pull its chestnuts out of the Afghan fire as that fire burns on?
(Russia and China are both a lot closer to Afghanistan than the USA or any other NATO country. They have their own strong interests in not seeing the return of the Taleban order there. But short of that, I expect they are both quite happy to see NATO’s troops getting ground down there– and in Iraq, as well.)
And talking of Iraq… all that cock-a-hoop talk we heard from the Bushites a month or two ago, about how the surge was “working” and life in Iraq has been slowly returning to normal, has been shown to be a flash-in-the-pan. The US’s own casualty rates rose again in January; and yesterday Iraqi suicide bombers performed two more truly gruesome acts against crowded civilian markets.
And in Gaza, the US-Israeli attempt to besiege Gaza’s entire 1.5 million-strong population back into the Stone Age received a notable blow when the Gazans and their Hamas leaders simply walked en masse back to some form of a new, life-saving economic connection with Egypt.
Today, it is ten days since that bust-out occurred. On most of those days, Egyptian officials have sworn that they were “just about” to re-close the border– but guess what, it hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, US puppet Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has steadfastly refused to respond to the invitations issued by both Egypt and Hamas that he join a tripartite discussion on how to restore order at the Gaza-Egypt border. Abbas has lost considerable political popularity by maintaining a stance that looks suspiciously like one that seeks to uphold Israel’s ability to strangle Gaza’s economy whenever it pleases.
Hamas’s leaders actually seem to be taking some interesting leaves out of the Israeli playbook. Firstly, they want to proceed with their social reconstruction project in Gaza unilaterally, mirroring the unilateralism (i.e., no negotiations!) policy steadfastly pursued toward Gaza by Sharon and Olmert. Secondly, Hamas is intent on creating “facts on the ground” along the Gaza-Egypt border, to which they hope the diplomats can subsequently find a solution. Hey, creating “facts on the ground” always– until recently– worked well for Israel! So why not for the Palestinians too?
As of today, the Egyptians are promising they’ll get the border re-sealed on Sunday. We’ll see about that. But even if it is re-sealed for some period of time, the Egyptians, Israelis, and everyone else in the region now understands that Hamas could bust across that border into Egypt any time it feels it needs to in the future. So (a) Israel’s plans to maintain a complete siege have lost much of their relevance, and (b) the incentive for the Egyptians to be able to restore some semblance of order and regulation to the border zone will continue to be huge; and for that, clearly, they need to work with Hamas.
Incidentally, this whole Gaza border issue now also puts the EU on the spot. Back in 2005 the EU rashly agreed to act as Israel’s puppet in policing the one single, people-only crossing point between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah. Basically, the scheme was that EU monitors– who lived in Israel— would sit in the Rafah crossing-point and check the documents of those small numbers of Gaza Palestinians who were allowed by Israel to cross in or out… and they had to transmit all the details of those travelers for prior approval to Israeli officials sitting a mile or two away, inside Israel. And whenever the Israelis wanted to close Rafah, all they needed to do was prevent the EU monitors from traveling to it. Which they have done, almost continuously over the past months.
Now, the Hamas people say (a) they want to have free passage for goods as well as people across the Gaza -Egypt border, and (b) they might agree to have European monitors there– but not if those monitors are beholden in any way to Israel.
How will the EU respond to these demands? Will it continue to kowtow to Washington and Israel? In which case, the Egyptians and Palestinians may well just go ahead and open their own borders. What is the EU’s standing under international law to have any role there, anyway?
A very bizarre arrangement. (Like NATO being in Afghanistan, you might say. More than a whiff of old-style colonialism?)
Anyway, I feel fairly hopeful that the Palestinians and Egyptians can sort out some workable regime for their mutual border. Both nations have a strong interest in the situation not being chaotic. There remains, of course, the not-small challenge of getting Abu Mazen to talk to the Hamas people. (Oh my! Maybe he would risk losing all the hefty amounts of money he and his followers have been getting from Washington and its allies! How could he deal with that blow!) But he’d probably better do it sooner rather than later, if he wants to retain any credibility as a national leader… Um, it’s not as he has done if anything else recently that has brought his people any tangible benefits?
Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan, and what it portends for this strange political animal called “NATO”, has attained new importance on the global scene.
NATO was founded back in the 1940s as the military alliance of the anti-Soviet powers of Western Europe and North America. You might think that after the collapse of not just the Warsaw Pact but also of the Soviet Union itself in the early 1990s, the NATO generals could all have folded up their general’s batons and their flags, and their strategic-planning Power Point presentations and gone home…
You’d be wrong.
NATO was pretty rapidly reborn at that point as, among other things, the main way the US, through its military, worked to hang onto a meaningful role in Europe. That, at a time when the eastward-moving growth of the European Union threatened to make Europe into something that was larger, stronger, non-American, and more self-sufficient. There were also some attempts to rebrand NATO as an alliance of the “democracies”, and in some way an agent of the democratic ideal. It always struck me as very muddle-headed, however– whether in Iraq or anywhere else– to imagine that the projection and use of military power had anything at all to do with being democratic. A commitment to democracy surely requires, above all, a commitment to working hard to resolve one’s political differences, however sharp, through nonviolent means? So the idea that any military alliance could be an agent of democracy, seems distinctly Orwellian.
But now– and this is what the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was referring to– the over-stretching of military capabilities (and the casualties) that several NATO nations have been experiencing in Afghanistan has sparked off a battle royal among some of the alliance’s leading members. With spring approaching and the Taleban reportedly better organized than ever, Germany’s Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung on Friday brusquely rejected a written plea from US Secdef Robert Gates that Germany send troops to the combat zones in southern Afghanistan. (A strange old world, eh, when an American leader is begging Germany to deploy troops into combat zones outside its own borders?)
NATO members France, Turkey, and Italy have also refused to send their troops to the Afghan combat zones, keeping them instead in provinces less plagued by the Taleban’s recent “surge.” Canada’s government, which has had (and lost) quite a lot of troops in the combat zone, has come under huge domestic pressure and announced it will pull them out in, I believe September.
Britain has had troops in the combat zone all along. But now, a plan to deploy 1,800 Scottish troops there has stirred some pushback from the increasingly independent-minded Scots. And in London, veteran political commentator Simon Jenkins has an anguished piece in the February 3 Sunday Times under the headline Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never win.
Jenkins writes,

They have no strategy for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan.

Nato’s much-vaunted 2006 strategy has not worked…
Kabul is like Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war.

After 87 deaths and two years of operations in Helmand, the British Army cannot even secure one dam.

All of Jenkins’ piece is worth reading. It stands in stark contrast to this nonsense from the WaPo’s resident Bush-apologist, Jim Hoagland, whose main “argument” consists of whining that the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan are all Hamid Karzai’s and Pervez Musharraf’s fault.
I have argued for a long time now that invading Iraq was definitely “a bridge too far” for the projection of US military power into west-central Asia. (That is a purely “realist” argument. There were also, of course, weighty moral arguments against the venture, from the get-go.)
But I think what we can see now, as we survey the scene from Gaza, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, is that the major projects of the US-led “west” in the region are all in disarray. Partly, this is because of the arrogance with which the Bush administration pursued all its projects in the region (and partly because of the craven toadying to US power on behalf of too many other members of the “west”.) Partly it is because the Bushites always rejected using the UN’s legitimacy whenever they could, preferring to exercise their own “leadership”, as unfettered as possible, over their own self-assembled “coalition of the willing.” But in good part it has also been because of the west’s excessive reliance on the instruments of brute power, rather than consultation and diplomacy. From this point of view, Israel’s imposition of the crushing, anti-humane siege on all the population of Gaza was just as violent as the US’s use of massive air-launched missiles and bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan. (Israel has, of course, also used a lot of heavy ordnance against Gaza, as well as its attempts at siege.)
… So the Bush administration’s military planners are doubtless working late these days, trying to figure out what to do about Afghanistan, what to do about Iraq. Should they follow “the Dannatt rule” and work rapidly to redeploy forces from Iraq to Afghanistan?
Or the other way around?
Right now, they have no good choices. The Bushist conceit– that the US could maintain its “Uberpower” role in the world through the use of its own military power with the help only of those other powers ready to be be swirled along in its wake, and under Washington’s unquestioned leadership– is being revealed for what it has always been: imperial hubris. When will the non-US powers in the world step in and propose a better way forward? When will the US citizenry itself stand up and scream, “Enough! We need a better way!”
I have not been encouraged, frankly, by the calls that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made in the past for “an increase in the overall size of the US military”, as providing any kind of an answer to the problems Washington has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I am even less encouraged by the stress the Republican candidates have put on even more militaristic paths forwards.) But at least Barack Obama is saying the US President should talk to– and listen to– its opponents. He has put a lot more emphasis on diplomacy than Hillary; and he certainly doesn’t project the idea– as she does– that he feels he has “something to prove” in being commander-in-chief of the US’s 1.4 million-strong armed forces. He also stressed in Thursday’s debate that he sees the need to provide a clear contrast to the militaristic kinds of policies that the presumed GOP candidate, John McCain, has been advocating.
So Barack Obama may not– okay, he will not– solve all the problems in the US’s relationship with the rest of the world. But he sure looks a lot better than any of the rest of them.
And whoever is president on January 20, 2009, is going to be facing some truly massive challenges.

Al-Ahram Weekly on Egypt and Gaza

I’ve been unbelievably busy with the galley-proofs (or whatever they call today’s functional equivalent of them) of my book. Five chapters down, and two to finish tomorrow… Meanwhile, I see that today’s issue of Al-Ahram Weekly (in English) has as expected a number of informative articles on the thorny Gaza-Egypt question.
This is probably the best general wrap-up of the tricky Egyptian-Palestinian dilemma over Gaza. It includes this:

Kenya: Life, death, and unknowing when things fall apart

If you want to know what actually happens in communities that get caught up in a paroxysm of inter-group violence, and what it feels like to live in such a community, go over to the Kenyan Peacework blog today and read this post from Dave Zarembka, a US Quaker who lives with his Kenyan Quaker wife Gladys in Kipkarren River, in western Kenya.
All of Dave’s emails about the violence that has swept Kenya since the deeply contested January 27 election have been posted on the KP blog (which I earlier wrote about here), and are worth reading. In this one he writes, in particular, about the role played in fomenting the climate of violence– and the commission of actual acts of horrendous violence– by the rapid spreading of fear-inducing rumors and the parallel spreading of great clouds of unknowing.
He gives several examples of this, and reports several things that have been happening in his town in the past couple of days. Including this:

He ends with this:

So truth, the reality of what actually is happening around you is difficult to grasp because all those normal markers you have about your surroundings are suspect. It is so easy to be “sucked in” by rumors. And yet to understand the dangers around you, you have to listen to others.

Dave is an incredibly fearless guy and a valuable witness for us all there. He reports that another US Quaker, Eden Grace, has been evacuated from Kisumu to Nairobi with her family, but he himself seems thus far intent on staying where he is.
Send Dave and Gladys a thought or a prayer. Read (and perhaps send your comments to) that blog post there at KP. Circulate that post or other KP posts to all your friends who might be interested. And do whatever you can, wherever you are, to urge your government to work with Kenya’s people to restore calm, security, and hope to a country now bleeding badly from this internal violence.

Winograd: a nonsense report?

I am trying to imagine the physiological distortions the members of the Winograd wound themselves up into when they issued this crazed judgment on the decisionmaking in the last days of the 33-day war, and have been unable to:

the panel found that the decisions that motivated the political echelons to approve the offensive were acceptable.

This is a nonsense conclusion.
That last ground assault on Lebanon not only did not realize any objectives on the ground– it also was launched after the terms of the final ceasefire had been agreed by Israel on August 11, so it did not affect the terms of the ceasefire. In addition, because it was such a tactical fiasco, it ended up delivering far from the intended final, “uber-deterrent” message. Instead it showed that the ground forces’ readiness and planning were garbage. Remember all those news pictures of the exhausted, ill-equipped, and defeated Israeli ground force troops staggering back south across the border on August 14 and 15? And it had led to those 33 quite avoidable deaths of Israeli soldiers.
Until recently, Israel has had a fairly solid reputation among the western democracies for, at least, being able to establish serious national commissions charged with investigating past mistakes. For all its shortcomings, the Kahan Commission into the the Sabra and Shatila massacres was one such body.
Now, with the recent final findings of the Or Commission into the October 2000 killings by the police of 10 or 11 Palestinian Israelis, and this latest report form the Winograd Commission, we see that even this once strong feature of Israel’s governance system has become badly degraded.
In US military and political circles, people like to talk about the importance of doing “lessons learned” exercises. In Britain, more realistically, they tend to call them “lessons identified”– since learning is yet another stage, that requires some active intelligence going in.
But in the Israel of the Winograd Commission, they don’t even want to identify the lessons to be learned from the past? Interesting, indeed.

Ahmedinejad continues hateful anti-Israel tirades

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today announced that the days of Israel, which he calls the “filthy Zionist entity”, are numbered and the said “entity” will fall soon or later.
AFP reports this:

I abhor such hate speech. Even if Iran’s president and many of its people are strongly opposed to the policies of the Israeli government, then describing the whole state of Israel (and by extension, its citizens) as “filthy” is a quite unacceptable and degrading way to refer to them.
Referring to Israel as “the Zionist entity” rather than the name it has as a recognized public entity in the international arena is also abhorrent.
Isn’t it also the case that that, at a time when Iran’s negotiators are dealing with the latest round of Security Council diplomacy concerned with their nuclear program, and when Iran clearly seems eager to build warmer relations with states like Egypt, which has a longstanding peace agreement with Israel– then to have the country’s president spouting off such abhorrent hate speech must be quite unhelpful to such efforts?
I’ve been very interested, over the years, to study the relationships among what the Arabs call the “Jabhat al-Mumana’a“– the “blocking front” of regional states and parties dedicated to blocking the implementation of Israeli-US hegemonist plans for the region. The main members of this front are Iran, Syria, Lebanon’s Hizbullah, and Palestine’s Hamas.
We should note that none of the other members of the JM refer to Israel in the same demeaning, hateful way that A-N does. First of all, the leaders of all the other JM members refer overwhelmingly to “Israel”, not to the “Zionist entity”. Secondly, they don’t use hateful descriptors like “filthy” when referring to it. Thirdly, they show varying degrees of readiness to deal with Israel as an established fact in the region.
For example, Syria participated in a lengthy, and actually remarkably productive process of face-to-face peace negotiations with Israel from 1991 through 2000. President Bashar al-Asad, like his father before him (since 1973 or so), has always stood ready to negotiate a final peace agreement with Israel. Syria sent a representative to the regional peace talks held in Annapolis, Maryland, last November.
Hizbullah has battled Israel’s armies mightily, mainly on the land of its own native Lebanon. But it has also, from 1996 on, shown itself ready to participate in indirect ceasefire negotiations with Israel and then– with one notable exception, in July 2006– to abide by the ceasefires thereby agreed. (And Israel has been a frequent violator of those ceasefires.)
Regarding Israel’s longterm stature as a mainly-Jewish state in the region, Hizbullah’s leaders have repeatedly abstained from pronouncing on that, saying that that is a matter for the Palestinian people, not the Lebanese people, to decide.
As for Hamas, its leaders talk frequently and easily about “Israel.” They certainly accept– and are sometimes eager for– the idea of limited cooperation on ceasefires and other matters, though with the general proviso that these be negotiated through third parties, not directly. Regarding Israel’s longterm stature in the region, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal repeated to me just two weeks ago the organization’s readiness to conclude a hudna of undefined length with an Israel that had withdrawn from all the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967 and had satisfied all the Palestinians’ rights including the right to return.
Hamas’s position is quite evidently different from that of, for example, PA president Mahmoud Abbas. Different, too, from the kinds of peace settlement envisaged by the vast majority of that fast-fading breed, the Israeli peaceniks, at this time. But it is also notably different from the hateful, almost specifically genocidal position articulated by Ahmadinejad.
I can’t imagine why Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei allows A-N to carry on like this.
Maybe the subtle ploy there is to make the other members of the Jabhat al-Mumana’a look moderate by comparison?

Meshaal interview at ‘Foreign Policy’ website

A condensed version of my Jan. 16th interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal is now published on the website of Foreign Policy magazine. Under my agreement with them, they have that as an exclusive for two weeks, and I’ll be publishing the (much longer) full version of the interview on Feb. 13th.
It was a real pleasure working with the folks there. From me saying they could have it, to them doing the editing work, etc., and getting it published took somewhere less than six hours. Plus, I think they did a good edit.