WaPo: two good pieces on (refugee) Palestinians

Every so often, the WaPo does some real good. They are doing so this weekend, with the publication of two articles that throw some much-needed light on the intense harm that the 60-year record of no-peace in the Middle East continues to inflict on the Palestinians.
The first of these is Scott Wilson’s piece of news reporting in today’s paper on some aspects of how the 1.4 million Palestinian residents of Gaza have been suffering under the brutally tight economic siege that Israel has maintained on them since– well, at some level, since 1967, though the screws tightened noticeably in 2000, then again in 2002, and even more so right after the Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006 gave a robust plurality to an organization not to Israel’s liking, namely Hamas.
Wilson focuses his reporting on the effects the siege has had on the deaf Palestinian children who receive teaching and some bare social services through the amazing organization Atfaluna (“Our children”). Long-time JWN readers may recall that for some years now, I have been involved with a group here in Virginia that helps to sell the beautiful craft products that Atfaluna’s people create. This fall, againk they were miraculously able to fulfill the order we had placed. But Wilson says they are fast running out of the necessary raw materials– as well as out of the batteries the kids need for their hearing-aids and many other basic services.
He also writes about dialysis patients at a nearby clinic having their sessions cut from three times a week to twice a week, about cancer patients dying because they are refused entry to Israeli hospitals, and about the anger of the Palestinians at the collective punishment to which they continue to be subjected– despite all the fine words voiced at the recent Annapolis conference.
(And yes, he gives quite appropriate coverage to the arguments made by Israeli officials as to why they have been maintaining this siege on Gaza. Does the WaPo always feel similarly obliged to cover the arguments that Palestinians make when they undertake actions that harm Israelis? I think not. But I’m glad Wilson does this here. It underlines the conundrum people and governments face when they take actions to deal with their own insecurities that– by increasing the insecurity of others– end up simply increasing and entrenching the security “threat” that they themselves face. Strategic analysts give this piece of elementary human-affairs logic the fancy name of “security dilemma.”)
Wilson quotes Gerry Shawa, the formidably effective and visionary American-Palestinian woman who runs Atfaluna as saying of the Israelis: “I hold each of them responsible, just as they obviously seem to hold all of us responsible…If the Israeli government really has the power and the desire to change, well, this is pushing me in exactly the opposite way — over the edge.”
… The second good WaPo piece is this heavily reported piece of “commentary” from Nir Rosen about the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. It will be in Sunday’s paper, but is already available on the web.
Nir describes some of the scenes he witnessed over the summer in and around the refugee camp at Nahr al-Bared, near the north Lebanese city of Tripoli, at the time when the Lebanese army was bombarding the whole camp in its brutal campaign against the extremists of a splinter group called “Fateh al-Islam.”
He wrote:

    The media were not permitted in [to Nahr el-Bared], and most Lebanese outlets ignored or denied the outrages. When I managed to slip inside, I was shocked by the scope of the damage. The buildings were crumpled, windows broken, electrical wiring yanked out, water pumps destroyed, generators stolen or shot up. All the gold jewelry had been stolen, as had been the cash that so many Palestinians had stored in their bedrooms. Insulting graffiti were scrawled on the charred walls, as were threats, signed by various Lebanese army units. Every car in the camp that I saw had been burned, shot or crushed by tanks or bulldozers. The ruination had been strikingly personal; I saw photo albums that had been torn to shreds. Palestinians told me that they had seen their belongings on sale in the main outdoor market in Tripoli.
    … I saw videos filmed by Lebanese soldiers on the Internet, showing army medical staff abusing corpses and beating prisoners. Hundreds of Palestinians had been abused or tortured in Lebanese detention, according to human rights groups, and refugees told me that some had died from medical neglect of treatable wounds.
    The refugees still faced harassment and the occasional beating by Lebanese soldiers. Nobody is helping them, but rather than giving up, hundreds of Palestinians were at work emptying their homes of debris and trying to get on with their lives.

Nir also writes about the broad political background to this story:

    The rights of the Palestinian refugees have been ignored for six decades by a world that has wished them away. But the Middle East will never know peace or stability until they are granted justice…
    A series of subsequent peace processes has ignored the refugees, offered no compensation for their suffering and lost property, or refused to recognize their right to return to their homes in their homeland. It’s not just the Israelis who have brutalized them; Palestinian refugees have been massacred in Jordan and Lebanon. Small numbers have become so radicalized that they have gone on to fight the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In Lebanon… the refugee problem has never really left center stage.

This is a great piece of political reporting by someone who most certainly understands everything that is writing about. Kudos to Nir, and to the editor of the WaPo’s weekly “Outlook” section of (mainly) political commentary for publishing it.
For my part, I would add simply that these two articles both underscore the great importance of making sure that the issue of the Palestinian refugees gets adequately dealt with during the whole of the post-Annapolis peace negotiations, and that it is not simply left to the end, which was one of the major reasons for the failure of all previous peace efforts. A strong numerical majority of the Palestinian people have been forced by the Israelis or others to live either as exiles completely outside their ancestral homeland, or as refugees from their ancestral homes though still technically within the boundaries of Mandate Palestine, or both. (Somewhere around 80% of the population of Gaza is made up of refugees, so it is likely that a high proportion of the kids in Atfaluna’s programs there come from refugee families.)
There is no way, politically, that any final peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians can “stick” and provide a sustainable base for longterm peace if the claims of the refugee Palestinians are not addressed in a way that the vast majority of these chronically mistreated people judge to be satisfactory. This is not an impossible task– though it gets harder by the day, and will continue to do so as long as Israel continues to seize and hold onto control of additional portions of the West Bank area that, along with seriously over-crowded Gaza, is the only area left in which to base the independent state that was promised to the Palestinian Arabs back in 1947.
I wrote recently on JWN about one effort, made by something called the “Aix Group”, to craft a mutually acceptable resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue. Go check that out– and some of the other points I made in that blog post.

Bush blinks, Bali succeeds!

Exciting news from the UN’s Bali conference on climate change. The conference went into an unscheduled extra day of work Saturday, and at the very last minute the US delegation withdrew the objections it had sustained steadfastly, allowing adoption of the painstakingly negotiated final document to proceed.
CNN describes the scene thus:

    The head of the U.S. delegation — Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky — was booed Saturday afternoon when she announced that the United States was rejecting the plan as then written because they were “not prepared to accept this formulation.” She said developing countries needed to carry more of the responsibility.
    While rhetoric at such conferences is often just words, a short speech by a delegate from the small developing country of Papua New Guinea appeared to carry weight with the Americans. The delegate challenged the United States to “either lead, follow or get out of the way.”
    Just five minutes later, when it appeared the conference was on the brink of collapse, Dobriansky took to the floor again to announce the United States was willing to accept the arrangement. Applause erupted in the hall and a relative level of success for the conference appeared certain.

At an earlier stage, the big fight had been between the US and the Europeans– as I described here on Thursday. That dispute apparently got resolved through use of the drafting mechanism of putting the statement of the desired emissions targets into a footnote rather than the main text (PDF here) of the Bali Statement. But crucially, the Europeans retained that mention of the target range, after playing some diplomatic hardball against the Bushites. (In politically related news, US Secdef Bob Gates yesterday also backed down a little on the level of the rhetoric he’d been using against the Europeans regarding their contribution to the US-led military coalition in Afghanistan.)
In Bali, a later dispute then erupted between, basically, the world’s rich– and historically very highly emitting– nations and the low-income nations grouped in the “Group of 77”. (Which guess what, represents many more people than the “G-8”.)
I’ve been interested to note that within the G-77 it was India that took the lead in this fight, with China cleverly staying a little out of sight. See e.g. this Daily Telegraph report.
As far as I can figure, the Bali Statement commits the world’s governments to completing an agreement on the post-Kyoto climate-change plan before the end of 2009. Kyoto is due to run out in 2012.
US citizens who are concerned that the position of our own next president should be one that is engaged deeply and constructively with the global anti-warming effort therefore need to use 2008 to make sure that this issue is kept on the front burner of our country’s political discussions throughout next year’s election campaign, and to push candidates to commit to climate change policies that are equitable, effective, and forward-leaning.
I can note that back in the 1990s, Pres. Bill Clinton used the US’s then-considerable strategic muscle to bend the text of Kyoto in a pro-US direction– and then decided to do nothing to try to win ratification for the Protocol from the US Congress.
Guess what: other countries’ people and governments noticed and remembered that sad (and one could even say somewhat duplicitous) performance.
And then came George W. Bush, who along with his side-dick, VP Cheney, derided the whole notion that international agreements with measurable targets had any useful role to play at all.
Climate change is one crucial arena– along with nuclear weapons– in which the wellbeing and survival of US citizens are seen as very clearly inter-reliant with the survival and wellbeing of the rest of the world’s 6 billion people. We are all in this frail boat together.
Luckily, many US citizens seem finally to be waking up to this fact– even if they are not yet ready to acknowledge either the scale of the damage our country’s past emissions have caused to the rest of the world or the depth of the changes in lifestyles and mindsets that will be required to bring our emissions down to a globally-proportionate and reabsorbable level.
But still, it is good that increasing numbers of Americans are starting to think about these things and that there a number of nationwide groups doing good, solid organizing around them… Good, too, that we have increasingly potent and well-organized friends around the world who will help to persuade Washington to get with the global anti-warming program.
I was horrified, however, to see the “business as usual” news judgment being displayed by the WaPo this morning, when it buried its coverage of the globally important, cliffhanging proceedings of the Bali conference to deep down at the bottom of p.17. What were they thinking?
Were they thinking?
The UNFCCC, the body that convened the Bali gathering, has a web-page that directs you to a fascinating array of news coverage of its work from all around the world. You can bet that most of those other media outlets linked to there did not bury the Bali news deep beneath the rest of their stories.

Bali and world politics

I am very interested in what we can learn about the current state of world politics from watching the current UN Climate Change conference in Bali, Indonesia. The biggest dispute there today was reportedly between the US (with a few supporters) and the Europeans.
Bush is still proceeding with his ‘coalition-of-the-willing” type of approach to dealing with the climate change issue. The basic idea of COTW, regarding climate change, nuclear non- (or counter-) proliferation, invading Iraq, or any other issue is that it is (a) always US-led, and (b) intentionally opposed to the kind of true multilateralism in which the US like all other parties commits itself to reciprocally binding agreements.
Bush’s first attempt to use COTW with regard to climate change was notably to stay out of the Kyoto Protocol, and to urge/encourage other governments to do likewise. (So you might also call it Coalition of the Unwilling, I suppose.)
Then in June, at the G-8 summit in Green-strong Germany, he proposed this notably non-UN gathering of “industrial nations” that would be convened by the US to discuss the issue. The invitees politely went along, but sent only very low-level people to the meeting, which was held in the US in September.
Bush did at least agree to send administration officials to the current UN gathering in Bali, where the main task is to negotiate a follow-on to the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012. But the US official delegation dug in its heels in opposition to the idea of any mention of actual targets for the CO2 emission reduction. Washington apparently has the support of Canada, Japan, and Russia in the anti-targets position it has adopted. Also, Australia’s newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has signaled that he wants to back the US position, which is particularly sad given that many of his supporters back home had hoped that his election would mark an end to Australia slavishly following Washington in its foreign policy errors.
The EU, which favors targets, has now come flat out and accused Washington of being the main obstacle to success in Bali.
We can note that this is at a time of increasing disagreement between the US and many European nations over Afghanistan, as well, with US Defense Secretary Bob Gates publicly criticising the Europeans for not sending enough troops to Afghanistan.
In Bali, the Chinese seem to be sitting outside the main arena of the EU-US conflict. This Reuters article from Bali says,

    The Chinese team has been applauded by other delegations and activists for its cooperative attitude, but says its proposals to do more in return for help with clean technology have foundered amid squabbling over who is responsible for rising temperatures.

Regarding China’s role on the future of climate-control efforts, this short essay by Swiss writer Christoph Neidhart suggests that China may soon be in the forefront of the technological innovation processes required to wean the world off greenhouse-gas-emitting fuels: “It seems likely that the next industrial revolution – which will be as transformative as the introduction of coal, steam-power and the combustion-engine – will take off in China or elsewhere in east Asia.” Worth reading the whole argument he makes there…
I have a suggestion. The US is still a huge weight within the world community. I truly don’t think the US is going to be a force for constructive engagement on climate issues so long as GWB is president. Kyoto– with all its flaws– runs until 2012. I realize that the post-Kyoto arrangement will take time to implement. But couldn’t we all just postpone the next round of Bali negotiations till after January 2009? Even if that would delay arriving at an agreement by, say, 15 months, and might delay being able to implement the agreement reached by something like that period of time, wouldn’t it be better to wait till we have a person in the White House who is open to the idea of mutually binding multilateral agreements, and less fixated on the dreadful and nearly always very damaging COTWs?
We should remember, too, that the effects of global warming are already posing life-and-death risks to large populations in a number of countries– and might well pose a risk to international peace and security within just the next few years. If the US persists in its stubborn and selfish pursuit of “CO2 emissions R Us”, then the rest of the world would have every right to impose sanctions against us until such time as our country stops poisoning the six billion people who live outside our borders.

Cole’s “three wars inside Iraq” analysis

I went to a talk that Juan Cole gave at the Middle East Institute here in Washington DC, this morning. The talk was along the lines that there are currently three simultaneous civil wars underway inside Iraq– and that the US has very little to do with any of them.
The first one he identified was the intra-Shia struggle for control of Basra. He noted, of course, the great strategic role that Basra plays within the whole country– as chokepoint for a large proportion of the imports going into it and, crucially, of the oil exports going out of it.
The second was the Sunni-Shia struggle for control over Baghdad. Here, his assessment seemed to be that the main effect of this year’s US military “surge” had been to disarm and weaken the Sunnis in Baghdad and the surrounding areas and thereby to hand a large victory– at least at the demographic level– to the Shiites there. (I have a few questions about this analysis, but it’s not bad as a first approximation perhaps.)
The third is the looming confrontation between Kurds and all others over control of Kirkuk, its surrounding province, and other areas of north-central Iraq including Mosul.
Now, I’ll confess I had to leave the session after the first couple of questions had been asked and answered. So maybe Juan covered the following points after I left. But my main queries about what he said had to do with his contention that the US has “little or no role” in these three intra-Iraqi tussles for power.
Indeed, in the main body of his presentation, he presented considerable counter-evidence to that thesis– including when he talked about the effects of the surge in Baghdad and in his repeated references to the large amount of support the US has given to SCIRI/IISC/Badr ever since 2003.
At a broader level, too, it is evident that none of these conflicts would have assumed anything like their current very violent and destructive form if there had been a functioning, national-level administration within the country– either a functioning national government, or a military occupation regime that took seriously its responsibilities under international law to provide effective administration of the country.
Note that I am absolutely not claiming that under Saddam Hussein there was no inter-group violence within the country. There certainly was; and during a number of specific periods it took on an extremely atrocious form. But we could note that from about 2000 onwards, there was very little lethal inter-group conflict inside the country. All potential parties to that had perhaps become worn out by the combination of the effects of past bouts of atrocious violence and the horrendous, grinding-down effects of many years of tough (and, actually, also mega-lethal) sanctions.
The US invasion and (mis-)occupation of the country reignited all the old inter-group hatreds and probably created some new ones as well. It gave a virtual carte blanche to vindictive groups like SCIRI and other Shiite factions and the Kurdish factions. (Remember the terrible mishandling of the “trial” and execution of Saddam Hussein, almost exactly one year ago today?) And most importantly, the US occupation completely failed to do anything effective to ensure the orderly administration of the country, leaving private groups bent on revenge for past sufferings free to roam the country at will.
So maybe Juan is correct at some technical, or “surface”, level to say that the US has very little connection on a day-to-day basis with the inter-group violence that is now, still, roiling Iraq. But none of us should take that to mean that the US– its government and its citizens– don’t still bear a massive, ongoing responsibility for the suffering there.
We do. Under international law and under general notions of responsibility and morality.
Trying to find a way to make up for the harm we have inflicted needs to start with a clear declaration that the US intends to get out of the country completely, and at the earliest possible opportunity. Then let’s work with the other nations of the world– including, certainly, Iraq and all of its neighbors– to find a way to design our withdrawal that will optimize the chances for stability in Iraq and the region as we leave. Under these circumstances, I am worried that too many people, listening to Juan’s analysis, might just shrug and say, “Well, we’re not really part of that violence there; we’re not responsible for what’s going on there any more… And besides, the Iraqis just have all these ‘primitive’ and ancient hatreds. Let them pursue them however they want. Whether we go or stay won’t make any difference.”
But it does. And so will the manner in which we leave. Wish I’d had the time to discuss some of these questions more with Juan while he was here.

Lobe on NIE-sparked fissures in Neocon Central

Jim Lobe, who has brought his expert eye to the art of watching official Washington for many years now, has an excellent entry on his blog titled Key Neo-Cons Giving Up on Iran Attack? He notes that last week’s publication of the ground-breaking NIE that concluded that Iran stopped pursuit of its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 has caused two key leaders of the neocon movement to (1) conclude that it is now unlikely that calls for the GWB administration to attack Iran are unlikely to succeed, and (2) recognize, however grudgingly, that talking to Iran may well be the best thing left to do.
The two are Robert (“father of all the Kagans”) Kagan and Bill Kristol.
You should read and bookmark all of Lobe’s post there– especially since he has hyperlinks to all the key texts he refers to.
He writes that, apart from R. Kagan and Kristol, other key members of Neocon Central (i.e., the “Project for a New American Century”) such as N. Podhoretz, R. Perle, F. Gaffney, and the ever-delusional Danielle Pletka have refused to give any similar nod to reality and have been going around virtually accusing the NIE’s authors of “deliberate deception.” (I heard Pletka doing this on a BBC News program just a couple of evenings ago. I can’t imagine why they would think it worthwhile to give her crazy views any air-time?)
Lobe notes that this division of R. Kagan and Kristol vs. the rest is the same as the way these same people divided when Sharon broke with Netanyahu back in 2004 over the unilateral disengagement from Gaza and the creation of Kadima. (Israel’s rightwing politics is a key touchstone for all of them, you should understand.)
Lobe writes that R. Kagan’s position has been echoed in recent days by two other notable neocon acolytes: Mort Kondracke and the British neo-imperial writer Niall Ferguson.
So there are two more great services that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did for humanity when they published last week’s report. Not only did they reduce the probability of a Bush administration military attack on Iran by a considerable degree, but they also (1) added considerable new ballast to the weight of those calling for “grand bargain”-type talks with Iran, and (2) they caused apparent chaos and confusion in the neocons’ ranks.
Thank you, thank you, the professionals of ODNI.

On not harming others

When I was writing the chapter on climate change in my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World after Bush I found many really excellent on-line resources on the issue. Some of the best-thought-out policy papers on the issue came from Oxfam. (See a list of these papers here.) One of the main points they make is that the rich northern nations must not only help the much poorer nations of the low-income world to undertake measures to adapt to the consequences of climate change– rising sea-levels, desertification, increased frequency of storms, etc– but they (we) must also take equally or more urgent steps to stop inflicting harm on them in this realm.
Many young (and not so young) people from the US and Europe become very idealistic and become fired up with the idea that they can go off to low-income countries and do something very worthwhile to “help” the people of those countries. It’s a laudable motivation. However, in terms of net amount of good done for humanity, I think such people might do a lot better to stay back at home in our own well-off countries and work to change those of our own countries’ policies that continue on a daily basis to inflict harm on the very vulnerable people in those other countries.
Human-induced climate change is one clear arena for such action. What the whole world most needs from Americans (and Europeans and residents of other high-income countries) right now is mainly that we should all emit far less CO2. Once we ourselves have done that, we can go around “helping” other countries to both reduce their emissions and adapt to the effects of the human-induced global warming that we know is anyway– even with the best emissions-control policies we can imagine– going to continue to occur for many years…
But first, surely, we should take responsibility for our own past and continuing actions and try to stop inflicting harm.
The US is by far the emittingest country in the world, on a per-capita basis: 20 metric tons of CO2 emitted per-head in 2004 in the US, as opposed to 3.6 metric tons in China, 11.7 in Japan, 9.4 in the EU…
Trade and economic policy is another area in which we fortunate residents of the rich world can do far more good all round if we work first to stop our own governments and societies from doing things they’ve been doing for some time, that have been inflicting great harm on vulnerable others elsewhere, than if we simply set out to start “helping” those others. Oxfam (again) has done some great research on the terrible effects that barriers to free trade such as tariffs and huge subsidies to domestic producers of agricultural goods, such as have been steadfastly maintained by the US, the EU, and Japan for many decades now, have had on farming communities throughout the low-income world. Some people come in with proposals to “help” the low-income countries by increasing the international aid contributions made by rich countries. Those are good and necessary suggestions. But they will have little to zero effect so long as the rich countries still hand out massive subsidies to their (our) own huge agribusiness conglomerates.
The concept of “do no harm” is an old one in the medical profession. But there are so many fields of international relations in which it should also be applied! Military/security policy is certainly another one.
Following a policy of “do no harm” is at one level rather easy. It is a fundamentally rather conservative policy, suggesting as it does that when we are in doubt about the effects of any given action we should avoid doing it until we have more information. It urges us not to do things, rather than urging us to get out and “do things”. (This is known as the precautionary principle.)
At another level, though, it is a rather demanding approach. It requires that we take some rather deep responsibility for the effects our actions and policy choices have on distant others, which in turn requires that we make energetic and good-faith efforts to find out what those effects are. And this applies, moreover, in areas such as farm subsidies or the development of our own national economies in which at one point we may not even have been aware that our policy choices had any effect on people outside our own borders. But now we know that those two do. Farm subsidies in the US, the EU, and Japan hurt millions of poor farmers around the world. (I want to give a big shout-out to Jimmy Carter for this fine article on the topic that he published in Monday’s WaPo.) And unbridled economic “development” in these same rich countries has been puffing out absolutely unconscionable amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere…
What other habits and policies might we be pursuing that, without our being aware of it, are inflicting harm on others elsewhere? Clearly, we need to pay attention.
Another aspect of the “do no harm” approach is that we need to recognize that the people of other countries are in every way just as human and as deserving of our respect and consideration as the people of our own countries. Even– or rather, especially– if they are people who are far, far more economically vulnerable and more politically marginalized than ourselves.
This is actually an important foundation at the very core of the Hippocratic oath approach. Doctors, after all, have often been thought of as especially powerful and smart members of the human race and they have often– in Nazi Germany, here in the US, and in many other places as well– become tempted into the mindset that they can or even should use their powers on more vulnerable other members of society at their own discretion and for their own reasons, without paying anything like due heed to the rights of those others.
So the Hippocratic oath (“do no harm”) approach reminds people with power (and with potentially dangerous skills) in any given society that their skills must be used in a way that:

    (1) accords due respect and consideration to the rights of vulnerable other persons;
    (2) embodies a commitment to take pro-active steps to learn about the effects their actions and decisions have on those others;
    (3) errs on the side of caution– not doing things, rather than doing them– if there is any suggestion or possibility that these effects might be harmful to others; and
    (4) embodies a commitment to stopping actions that on examination turn out to be inflicting harm on others.

… Anyway, this is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot over recent years. Reading all the news about the UNFCCC (Climate Change) conference in Bali reminded me about the whole topic again.

Annals of imperial contraction: Aden, 1967

I’m a few days late, but November 30 was the 40th anniversary of the final withdrawal of British forces and power from Aden, now part of a unified Yemeni Arab Republic. That withdrawal was the key step in the dismantling of Britain’s permanent military (naval) presence “East of Suez”, a development whose inevitability became a lot clearer to Brits and others after the strategic failure of the British-French (-Israeli) “over-reach” assault against Egypt 11 years earlier.
The BBC website has an interesting account by veteran reporter Brian Barron of a repeat visit he recently made to Aden, and his reflections on the 1967 withdrawal which he had covered as a much younger journo.
He tells us a revealing anecdote about standing in Aden’s Crater District in 1967 with the notoriously bloody British “counter-insurgency” specialist Col. Colin (“Mad Mitch”) Mitchell, watching as some of the soldiers under Mitchell’s command were…

    stacking, as in a butcher’s shop, the bodies of four Arab militants they had just shot and Mad Mitch said: “It was like shooting grouse, a brace here and a brace there.”

(I wonder: Did Barron report it in that straightforward way at the time, or did he conveniently glide right over that articulation of Mitchell’s brutal mindset?)
Americans, I have found, are a people with not much appreciation for anyone’s history– but especially not for the history of peoples far distant from and perceived as different from themselves. Thus, you have the scenario repeated over and over and over again of eager, fresh-eyed and well-meaning US citizens rushing overseas to work on often well-intentioned projects to bring “modernization”, or “good governance”, or “universal [= western] judicial norms” or whatever to those distant peoples. They seem to imagine that those other societies are a tabula rasa on which American/”western” norms and practices can simply be inscribed. There is little or no appreciation that people in Africa or Asia or the Middle East have seen nearly all of this before. They have seen white westerners come in, protected by the force of heavy arms or other appurtenances of hard power, and proclaiming all kinds of “humanitarian” but often extremely myopic and self-referential projects. They have seen all those phalanxes of young white idealists come in and try to impose their own societies’ norms and projects on indigenous people many years more experienced and wiser than themselves. They have seen the horrendous damage those interventions ended up causing.
Barron’s latest reflection on the British retreat from Aden makes a few unnecessarily chauvinistic points. For example, he refers to “the old Anglican Church [which] is no longer the secret police interrogation centre it became following the British retreat”, but no reference at all to the interrogation centers where Mitchell and his predecessors over the preceding 130 years of British occupation of Aden did all their ghastly work.
Barron concludes with this reflection:

    Looking back we can see the magnitude of Britain’s strategic blunder here. The political, military and diplomatic establishment in the late 1950s and early 1960s misjudged the strength of Arab nationalism, completing a colossal military base despite local hostility.
    There was an absence of reliable intelligence (doesn’t that sound familiar?). As the insurgency turned deadlier, we withdrew – abandoning moderate allies.
    Twenty-three years of police state thuggery followed, with the Soviet KGB replacing the British.
    Even after Aden and the rest of the south merged with North Yemen, there was another civil war in the 1990s. No wonder Aden today seems battered and bruised, and its people frustrated by the follies of their rulers: a forgotten place anchored to a forgotten time.

I find this story-line intriguing. In the first two paras there is some realism and self-awareness. In the third there is some anti-Soviet finger-pointing, which also introduces the justifiability of some kind of an “apres nous la deluge” view of the end of empire. And that view is strengthened and underlined with the last para. Now that the British are no longer in Aden, according to Barron it has slipped out of history: “a forgotten place anchored to a forgotten time.”
Well, maybe Aden has been (fairly conveniently) “forgotten” by many Brits. But how on earth can anyone say it has been “forgotten” by the 800,000 people who live there, or the 21.5 million people in the rest of Yemen? Do they not count as people whose forgetting or remembering we should take into account?
Indeed, the history of Aden is an important one in the anti-colonial narratives of the Middle East and far beyond. The peoples of the Middle East have never forgotten those narratives. Very few Americans, however, have any idea that they even exist.

Washington losing struggle for Abu Mazen’s soul?

Al-Hayat had an interesting report (in Arabic there) today saying that leadership sources in Hamas confirm that they have reached a “memorandum of understanding” with Fateh in preparation for the imminent resumption of dialogue between the two movements.
Does this look like some major steps back toward the Mecca Agreement for peaceful power-sharing between the two Palestinian movements that was achieved with Saudi mediation (and financial backing) back in February? Not surprising if it does, since Hamas’s website reports today that Hamas’s Damascus-based overall leader Khaled Mishaal has now traveled to the Saudi capital “to discuss means of restoring Palestinian national dialogue.”
To me, this indicates that the Saudis are most likely pretty disappointed with the Annapolis meeting of November 27 and the notable lack of any serious US engagement with the peacemaking at and since that meeting
When Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal attended Annapolis, from his country’s perspective it was making a huge up-front concession to the Israelis by agreeing to be there in the negotiating room with them before Israel has even done anything to announce a clear commitment to undertake significant withdrawals from the Arab territories it has occupied since 1967. The Saudis also went out on a limb, and probably paid quite a lot of hard cash, to help “persuade” the Syrians and other Arab governments to participate in Annapolis. (Though they were noticeably unable to persuade the Iraqis or Kuwaitis, both of which governments no doubt felt that Iran’s close proximity and power and strongly expressed opposition to Annapolis outweighed any Saudi urgings that they should attend.)
The Bush administration responded to the goodwill Riyadh had shown in the run-up to Annapolis by (a) showing blatant disrespect to the Syrians at Annapolis, and (b) doing nothing visible at all to push the peace process any further forward after the confab. Indeed, Pres. Bush has said nothing further in public about Israeli-Arab peacemaking since about noon on Nov. 28. As though his job has now been done?
For its part, Israel responded to Annapolis by announcing its decision to build 300 additional settler-only housing units in the occupied Arab land of Jebel Abu Ghneim, which it renamed Har Homa. Condi Rice responded to questions about that announcement that by bleating sheepishly that she had “sought further clarifications from the Israelis” regarding their plans.
Where is the vision? Where is the commitment? Where is the leadership that is so sorely needed if the peacemaking that was launched at Annapolis is ever to succeed?
Not visible in Washington.
So the Saudis seem to have returned to their original Plan A, and to be retracing the steps they took back in January to craft a new– hopefully more sustainable– Fateh-Hamas agreement.
Some in Washington may be very angry with this attempt. For my part, I think having a unified Palestinian body politic is the only way there is to then move forward to achieving a sustainable Palestinian-Israeli agreement. A politically very weak Abu Mazen (1) will not be strong enough in the negotiations with Israel to withstand or do anything to counter the overbearing demands that the Israelis continue to place on him (with a lot of help from Washington and lapdog-in-chief Tony Blair), and (2) will not be strong enough within the Palestinian community to be able to make any agreement he should happen to reach with Israel “stick.”
A unified Palestinian movement could strengthen its position considerably through the sustained pursuit of massive non-violent civil action in defense of Palestinian rights. That takes vision, discipline, and above all national unity. If Fateh and Hamas can reach a strong agreement on how to proceed, between them they could mobilize tremendous amounts of support from governments and peoples around the world as a way to counter Israel’s reliance on (a) military and administrative domination, and (b) its tight links with some power centers in Washington. And between them, if they remain united, Hamas and Fateh could make any agreement they reach with Israel stick, and stick well.
Readers may want to go back and read this JWN post from late June (shortly after the Fateh-Hamas rift over Gaza), titled “Ten reasons to talk to Hamas,” and this article I had in The Nation in early November on the need to engage politically with both Hamas and Hizbullah.
Former Israeli spy chief Efraim Halevy and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell are just two of the prominent figures internationally who now argue that Hamas should be engaged with politically and not only through the barrel of a gun.
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Update Monday morning:
Haaretz is reporting that “Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s adviser Ahmed Yousuf told Haaretz that he sent a rare letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declaring that Hamas was interested in opening dialogue with the U.S. and the European Union.” On another page, Haaretz carries what it describes as the text of Yousuf’s “Open Letter”, though the provenance of this text is not clear and it is not on Hamas’s own main English-language website or, from a quick glance, their Arabic site.

Death in Babylon

Brig. Gen. Qais al-Ma’muri, chief of the Iraqi Police in Babil (Babylon) province south of Baghdad was killed along with two of his bodyguards by a roadside bomb today, the NYT reported.
Iraq-affairs expert Reidar Visser writes in a communication that he says I can share most of with you*, that

    The news about the assassination of Babel’s police chief Qays al-Ma‘muri today is particularly tragic to those who are hoping for the restoration of a non-sectarian Iraq where ethno-religious identities are in the background. For several years, Ma‘muri had stood out as an honest figure of authority in the mixed governorate of Babel, and had fought hard against militias regardless of their sectarian affiliations.
    Already, some newswire reports speak of “suspicion towards al-Qaida”. In the absence of further evidence, such accusations should be treated with caution. In several cases of violence in the Shiite-dominated parts of Iraq – including Basra before the imposition of a state of emergency in May 2006, and Najaf during the battle with the “Soldiers of Heaven” in January 2007 – vague references to al-Qaida were used by Iraqi government sources to gloss over episodes that clearly featured elements of intra-Shiite conflict.

Visser reproduces part of an informative May 2006 report from the NYT on Ma’mouri’s problems with the Shiite militias, and adds this:

    only a few days ago, Iraqi media reported renewed attempts by the [IISC]-led provincial council to get rid of Ma‘muri by having him transferred to another part of the country. Also, there have been reports about conflicts between Ma‘muri and the Sadrists.

Today’s NYT story, which has been reported by a number of the paper’s Iraqi employees, quotes the head of Babil’s security committee, Hassan Watwet, as saying: “The primary suspect is al-Qaeda, but we do not rule out the second suspect, the militias.”
So with vicious violence continuing in many parts of Iraq outside of Baghdad, might we suppose that Petraeus’s famous “surge” had the effect of displacing some portion of the violence from the Central Baghdad areas that he has now largely “quadrillaged off” with Israeli Wall-type concrete barriers into the rest of the country?
Kirkuk, meanwhile, is also shaping up to be a huge, and hugely contested issue…
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* Reidar is trying to build up the (no-cost) subscription list for the Historiae.org website on which he posts these communications. So if you want to see the whole text of his analysis, and others like it in the future, you’ll need to go there and subscribe.

Moqtada (and Petraeus) repositioning?

A lot has been going on in Moqtada Sadr’s movement in Iraq recently. The WaPo’s Ann Scott Tyson is reporting from Baghdad in today’s paper that Gen. Petraeus,

    said Thursday he applauds Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for helping, through a cease-fire, to reduce violent attacks in Iraq by 60 percent since June.

Also, Sadr spokesperson Salah al-Obeidi has just completed a tour of three Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt), where he told his hosts that the Sadrist movement “has no objections to Arab states playing a role in stabilizing Iraq.” That report is a Stratfor rendering of a Thursday Sharq al-Awsat article (which I can’t find in the original Arabic. Help, anyone?)
Stratfor also reported that Obeidi,

    accused Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Kurds, the American occupation, al Qaeda and pro-Iranian Shiite groups [of being responsible] for instability in Iraq.

And he told his hosts on the trip that Iraq’s ethnic-Kurdish (and politically very Kurdish) Foreign Minister was not doing enough to take into consideration Iraq’s relations with the other Arab states.
This AP report meanwhile tells us that, back in Najaf today, Obeidi criticized the Sadrists’ Shiite rival, IISC head Abdel-Aziz Hakim, for his current visit to the US, calling it an “act of surrender.”
It is hard to gauge and assess these developments from a distance– except to note that the Sadrists seem to be treading a fine line between cooperating, de-facto and in some delimited spheres, with the Americans and not cooperating with them in others. It is also, certainly, significant that Obeidi– whom we have no reason to doubt at this point is accurately representing Moqtada’s views– is trying to position the group as a firmly Arab Iraqi movement, in contrast to the Hakim/IISC (formerly known as SCIRI) crowd who have historically had much closer ties to Iran.
We should recall that, in the parliamentary election of December 2005, all of Iraq’s Shiite parties collaborated, running on a joint list called the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). Within the UIA, the Sadrists were probably the largest single bloc. But SCIRI (now the IISC) had by far the best links with the US occupation authorities and– perhaps equally importantly– with MSM journos in the US, who routinely came to describe SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim as “the leader of the UIA”, “the leader of the Iraqi Shiites”, etc etc.
(The occupation authorities maintained their close relationship with Hakim despite his longterm– and continuing– links with Tehran. Go figure.)
So in the jockeying for positions in the Iraqi “government” that followed thoseelections, the US and its allies did all they could to prevent the Sadrists from getting the leading posts, and to impose their own choice, Hakim, or one of his party henchmen. The result was a sort of stand-off. Eventually the weak non-entity Nouri al-Maliki, a member of another longtime pro-Iranian party called the Daawa Party, became Prime Minister… Of course, the “government” was still quite unable to deliver any actual services to the Iraqi people, especially public security, which is an absolutely essential element for the resumption of anything resembling normal life.
Then, fast forward to this year and the arrival of Petraeus. I have to say at this point that I think Petraeus is smarter than I earlier gave him credit for. Despite the many ethical flaws that I identified and still identify in, for example, the Counter-insurgency manual that he co-wrote, he does seem to have a strong grasp of the core fact that a smart politics of political inclusiveness is the best way to cobble together just enough social/political peace within Iraq that the US military can draw down its forces there significantly without that drawdown being an extremely destabilizing and humiliating rout.
I’m assuming that was the goal he was assigned when he took over as military commander in Iraq.
And, as is now clearer than before, he has been “reaching out” not only to Sunni former insurgents but also to strong elements within the Sadrist movement.
Tyson’s piece in the WaPo gives these additional details about Petraeus and the Sadrists:

    Among several factors leading to the reduced violence, Petraeus pointed to what he called the decision by “a majority . . . of the militia” associated with Sadr to honor a cease-fire.
    In striking contrast to the U.S. military’s previous wariness — if not hostility — toward the young firebrand cleric, Petraeus praised Sadr personally for “working to rid his movement of criminal elements” and making a “pledge of honor” to uphold the cease-fire announced in August. He said the United States is in indirect dialogue with “senior members” of Sadr’s organization to maintain the cease-fire.
    “The Sadr trend stands for service to the people,” and the goal is for Sadr and his followers to become “constructive partners in the way ahead,” Petraeus said in an interview with defense reporters traveling with Gates.
    Earlier this year, U.S. military and defense officials said Sadr had been weakened and his organization fragmented since the cleric left for Iran before the start of the boost in U.S. troops, apparently out of fear of being targeted.
    “I wouldn’t say he has been marginalized,” Petraeus said Thursday. “He very much maintains contacts with his leaders and continues to give direction. . . . And there is an effort ongoing to try to get a grip on some of the nefarious actors who are associated with his movement.”
    Meanwhile, Sadr’s rhetoric remains as anti-American as ever. “I speak to the head of evil Bush, go out of our land, we don’t need you or your armies, the armies of darkness, your aircrafts, tanks . . . your fake freedom,” said a statement issued under Sadr’s name two days ago.
    The cease-fire has helped U.S. and Iraqi forces target Shiite extremist groups, many of them based in Baghdad’s large Shiite enclave of Sadr City, that continue to launch attacks despite the Sadr order. U.S. commanders have long sought to expand the presence of security forces inside Sadr City, which is now effectively controlled by Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army.

If you want to get more background on developments within the Sadrist movement, the longer Stratfor piece referred to above gives one view of these, though I don’t agree with all the judgments made by their anonymous analyst there. One example: my view of Sadr is that he is much more authentically “Arab nationalist” in his beliefs and approach than Stratfor gives him credit for– though yes, it is true that some proportion, perhaps not trivial, of his followers became caught up in the frenzy of sectarian (in this case, anti-Sunni) violence that swept over much of Iraq from February 2006 on. And indeed, it has probably been a hard job for him and the more politically savvy, nationalist-minded people around him to regain their discipline over the broader movement.
If Petraeus is to have any hope of executing an orderly or near-orderly drawdown of US forces from Iraq, he will need forces in both the Sunni and Shiite community who are prepared to (a) cooperate somewhat with each other, and (b) gain substantial control over most of the Arab-majority parts of the country, so that the US troop drawdown is not a rout– and to prevent as much as possible the direct military intervention of Iraq’s neighbors in the country as the drawdown occurs. Of course, if those newly emerging forces stick hard meanwhile to the sihgtly longer-term political goal of “an end to foreign military occupation”, then the US may be forced to make the drawdown considerably more far-reaching– or indeed total— than Petraeus or his current political bosses may currently desire.
A total withdrawal of US forces from Iraq is certainly what I would like to see. That is why I welcome these most recent signs of greatly increased political coherence and sophistication among the Sadrists– on a clearly “nationalist-minded” basis. And I welcome the signs of Petraeus’s realism, as well.
Might these two end up being the Boumedienne and De Gaulle of Iraq’s national liberation?
Petraeus, at least, would not have to face the prospect of an OAS-style revolt from within his own army, if and when he and his political masters take a decision for complete withdrawal….