Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 154 – Info, analysis, discussion

China Hand called it on US-Iran– back in October!

Alert readers here are aware that a few weeks ago I started paying good attention to the blog “China Matters” written by someone identifying her/himself only as “China Hand.” I was impressed, primarily, by the decidedly non-US-centric and extremely well-informed way that CH was commenting on developments in Pakistan. I do think the “China” references in the title and the monicker are little misleading: this person knows a LOT about many other regions of the world in addition to China.
Yesterday, CH reminded his longer-term readers that back in October he had called Bush’s policy of ratcheting u the confrontation with Iran as being “deaddeaddeaddeaddeaddead.” In yesterday’s post he commented:

He also described the Bush administration’s general Middle East policy as “creeping Bakerism.” Personally, I prefer the term “stealth Bakerism”, which I find crisper and giving less of an impression that we might think Jim Baker was a “creep”. But the general idea’s the same– and China Hand called it exactly right!
He helpfully reproduces the whole of his October 26 post on the subject. The main methodology he used there was to pay careful attention to the ways that the Russian and Chinese leaders were framing issues of nuclear proliferation/nonproliferation and to conclude that:

world opinion has abandoned the Bush administration on the creation of a united front of coercion against Iran.

Precisely. And a lot of the rest of the post is worth reading, too. Especially CH’s observations on how the US has come to use economic and financial sanctions more to discipline and punish those of its own supposed allies who are inclined to step out of line, than to punish the accused “evildoers.”
As a relative newcomer to CH’s blog, I am really delighted he decided to blow his own horn a bit in yesterday’s post and refer us back to the October post. It is obviously going to become increasingly necessary to be able to see things in a non-US-centric way– and to have the knowledge-base with which to do so. China Matters looks like an increasingly important resource for us all.

‘Meeting Resistance’: The movie

Yesterday I was finally able to get to see the movie ‘Meeting Resistance’, which was showing at George Washington University’s student center. It’s a gutsy, very well-executed look at the early months of the Iraqi resistance to US occupation, told in the form of intercut interviews with ten participants in the resistance.
The film-makers are Molly Bingham and Steve Connors, she American, he British, both of them with backgrounds as war-zone photographers. They had been in Baghdad during the US invasion in March 2003, and stayed around to “shoot” newspix of the aftermath… But soon enough they became curious about the– at that time– small incidents and altercations that the US occupiers met from some of the Iraqis, and in classic journalistic mode they set out to “meet” and try to report on the members of this emerging resistance. This inquiry then took onthe form of film, a new medium for both of them I think. They worked as a small, two-person team. Steve shot the footage and arranged the sound recording while Molly asked the questions in the interviews.
They shot the footage over the course of ten months– up until May 2004– working in the largely middle-class, north Baghdad district of Adhamiyeh. (You can read more about their modus operandi here.)
All the interviewees required that their names not be used. Only one agreed to let his face be shown. The rest are all shot in a way that conceals their identities. One is a woman. One is a non-Iraqi. A number– I think Steve said three?– were Shiites. They come from a variety of social and professional backgrounds. They talk on-camera about, mainly, their strongly nationalistic, anti-occupation motivations for becoming involved with the resistance– though for just about all of them, their Muslim religious belief was also to one degree or another a part of their motivation. One of them actually is an imam.
Seeing the movie was almost a nostalgic experience for me. That era was before the great waves of sectarian fighting broke over Iraq. Indeed, one of the final scenes is some horrifying archive footage of the bombing of the Ashoura commemorations at the Mosque in Kerbala in April 2004, one of the first big apparently sectarian mass-killings of the whole war. Inasmuch as the interviewees have any comment on that or other instances of sectarian violence, they express themselves as completely mystified by it, arguing strongly that no “true” Muslim or Iraqi would do commit such an act, and that therefore those acts must have been carried out by an unrevealed “third force”– the US, Israel, or someone else.
But here we are now, three and a half years after April 2004, and huge rivers of civilian blood have poured throughout the country, much of it shed in acts of horrifying, apparently sectarian violence.
At the showing I went to, Steve and Molly were there and answered questions afterwards. I also went over to the decidedly different ambience of the “Center for Strategic and International Studies” later in the afternoon, to catch the Q&A session after the showing that was held there. Molly and Steve went to some lengths to argue– using the Pentagon’s own figures, which are also presented in the FAQs section on their website– that though many more civilians than soldiers have been getting killed in Iraq over the years, the intention of the reistance’s “men of violence” is still overwhelmingly to strike against military targets. Indeed, they noted that according to these figures of the significant attacks reported between April 2004 and June 2007, 74% of the attacks targeted coalition troops and only 10% targeted civilians.
They also make these same arguments in the fairly recent “video op-ed” they have up on Youtube, which highlights the film and makes some more contemporary commentary on the issues raised in it.
Seeing the whole film yesterday was a big, fairly emotionally draining experience for me. I have argued for so long here and elsewhere that the US military should simply get out of Iraq– completely and in as speedy, orderly, and generous a way as possible. And these arguments, made by many, many other people as well, of course, have had so little effect that I’ve been quite discouraged at times. Even the great “surge” of antiwar sentiment within the US during the elections of Fall 2006 seemed largely to dissipate over the 12 months that followed; and the Dems in Congress have done pathetically little to move the country seriously towards a full and speedy withdrawal.
Also, I’ve been pretty busy writing my book on the whole of US foreign policy, post-Bush…
So seeing the movie was probably a necessary jolt for me, a reminder that I need to do a lot more hard thinking and writing about my country’s continuing occupation of Iraq– and the need to end it a.s.a.p.– than I have been doing lately.
I’ve had a couple of other relevant experiences recently, too. One has been to sit with Bill the spouse through the first five episodes of the recent, epic, 15-episode Al-Jazeera documentary on the War in Lebanon. (You can access the whole thing on-line, through this portal on someone’s blog.) Another was to go listen to the Franco-Israeli writer Sylvain Cypel talking about Israel’s 40-year occupation of Palestine, as I wrote about here, last week.
So regarding the War in Lebanon series, it has been deeply, deeply depressing to be reminded again, so vividly, of the oh-so-many ghastly twists and turns the civil strife there has taken over the 32 years since 197-5– and still with no settled peace there till today. I was there at the start of the war, having arrived in Beirut to launch my career as a journalist just five months before the Ain al-Rummaneh Massacre. I actually lived through all those early episodes… So many lives lost or blighted. So much distrust sown. So many human souls twisted into hatred and violence. So many malevolent foreign hands stirring the violence at every turn.
When the US invasion of Iraq started, I had flashbacks back to my time in Lebanon– but then a more rational part of me said, “No! It can’t possibly happen there! Iraq is a settled, centralized state, not a free-market, politically chaotic place as Lebanon always was!”
But it did happen in Iraq: So much of that same internal breakdown (fitna); so much of that external pot-stirring; so much of a very similar, very insidious process of ever-developing political chicanery driven by outside funding; so much death and destruction.
But here’s a possible difference I see. In Lebanon, the population were always accustomed to surviving with only a very weak state. Indeed, the mountainous geography of the country had almost ensured that that would be the situation. But most of Iraq (apart from the Kurd-dominated north) is a broad, flat plain fed by the famous two rivers. Regulation of the rivers and of economic and social life along their banks requires a strong central authority. So for the survival of all those large cities in the plains, there has to be a functioning central state. Life depends on that, in a way in which, in Lebanon, it doesn’t. At the most basic level imaginable, when there is no effective state regulation in Iraq, the sewage from one city flows down to the next. You get cholera, pestilence, and destitution… But that is only a small part of the story. I just think, in general, that the people of Iraq are actually much more vulnerable to the effects of political fitna than the people of Lebanon ever were.
And finally, Palestine. the thing that Cypel said that really stuck in my mind was to recall how, growing up in France in the 1950s, the left spent a long time talking about “peace” in Algeria before they finally got to the central issue, which was to call for an end to the French of the country. Cypel was saying that that has also seemed to be the case in Israel, with respect to Palestine. But I think this is very relevant for us here in the US, with respect to Iraq. People in the political elite here have spent far too long talking abut the need to attain some kind of “peace” within Iraq, and not nearly enough on stressing the need to assure a total and speedy end to the occupation.
As far back as 2004 and 2005, I was arguing that, while we could not foresee with certitude what the sequelae inside Iraq of a US withdrawal would be, we could predict with confidence that if the US stayed the internal conflicts would continue. Others argued that the US had to stay in Iraq because of some version of the dreadfully dishonest “Pottery Barn rule.” My prediction has been proven correct.
Bottom line: the US needs to end the occupation of Iraq. And people in the antiwar movement need to refocus more than ever before on that goal.
… Anyway, Friday I’m going to spend some more time hanging out with Steve and Molly. Maybe I can tell you more about them and their great film, then.

Olmert pokes finger in Annapolis’s eye

In a clear challenge to the agreements reached in Annapolis, the Israeli government yesterday announced its plan to build more than 300 new homes in the east Jerusalem settlement of Har Homa. At Annapolis, the two parties reaffirmed their agreement to comply with the steps laid out by the 2002 Road Map while they negotiate their final peace agreement. One of the provisions of the Road Map is a halt to building in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
According to that AP news report linked to there Olmert’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said yesterday,

“Israel makes a clear distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem… Israel has never made a commitment to limit our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Implementation of the first phase of the road map does not apply to Jerusalem.”

Well, Israel may make a “clear distinction” between the West Bank and Jerusalem, but the rest of the world does not. The rest of the world considers East Jerusalem to be part of the West Bank and, like the rest of the West Bank, to be occupied territory.
Therefore, the moves that successive Israeli governments have taken over the years to (1) unilaterally expand the boundaries of Jerusalem; (2) implant hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers– and because of the role of various all-Jewish Quangos in this process, these settlers are only Jewish Israelis– into new housing developments built exclusively for them there; (3) implant several headquarters complexes for Israeli government bodies; and (4) re-define the Jews-only settlements in East Jerusalem as merely “neighborhoods”, like any other neighborhoods in a city– all these steps have been illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In the context of a peace settlement the base-line position in international law is that all these steps should be reversed. If Israel wants to not reverse any of them, it should negotiate that non-reversal with the Palestinians and any other interested parties.
(In the UN Partition Plan of 1947, the whole of an even larger Jerusalem– east and west– was supposed to have been a special international zone, being administered as a “separate body” from both the Jewish state and the Arab state planned for Mandate Palestine.)
The US government’s position on the status of East Jerusalem has become increasingly slippery over the years. Several recent US presidents, including Bill Clinton, have said they don’t necessarily see settlement-building in East Jerusalem as illegal, though US presidential and State Department spokespeople usually bend themselves into pretzels rather than give a definitive answer on this question. And of course, in his infamous April 2004 letter, Pres. G.W. Bush told PM Sharon that he thought the large existing settlement blocs in the West Bank should stay under Israeli control. (And by extension that could be thought to apply also to the E. Jerusalem settlements.)
In taking these increasingly pro-Israeli positions on Jerusalem, US presidents have nearly always been under strong pressure from the US Congress, where AIPAC and its associated group of pro-Israeli lobbying groups have had great success in “selling” the idea that the expanded Greater Jerusalem should remain under Israeli control forever. As, too, that the US administration should move its embassy in Israel which, like the embassies of nearly all the other governments in the world has always been “diplomatically” been located in Tel Aviv, to a site in East Jerusalem.
But the last time I checked, neither the US Congress nor the US administration had any mandate from the rest of the international community to be able to issue authoritative judgments on the status of Jerusalem. Am I wrong?
… And in related news, President Bush has announced that he will make a trip to the Middle East in January, and he is highly likely to visit both Israel and Palestine while he is there… And the Israeli military has announced it has completed the planning for a “large offensive” in Gaza.
Will all these things be happening at the same time? Will the Israelis stage a repeat in Gaza of their stunningly “successful” (irony alert there, folks!) July 2006 assault against Hizbullah in Lebanon? Will Bush use his visit to the region to urge the international community, as Rice did in July 2006, to “give Israel the time it needs to complete the job”?
God help the people of Gaza and God help all of us if this is what is planned. An all-out Israeli assault on Gaza would sink the few remaining hopes any of us has that the “two-state” outcome aimed for at Annapolis will ever come to pass.

Ahmedinejad schmoozing with Gulf leaders

Another important point about Iran today. Remember how so much of the spin about the Annapolis meeting focused on the fact that this was a big sign that the Gulf Arab states had now “bought” the whole US-Israeli narrative about how Iran was now the main threat in the region?
Well, it so happens that the six conservative Arab Gulf rulers whose states are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are holding one of their regular summit meetings– in Doha, Qatar– and who should their main invited guest be? You guessed: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, invited to the GCC summit for the first time ever.
That report from Reuters and AP tells us that

escorted to the red-carpet welcome at the meeting by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

No takers on the proposal yet, it seems. But it does make all the neocon/Israeli schemes of building a united US-Israeli-Arab coalition against Iran seem just a little hallucinatory.

US intel chiefs change view of Iran nuclear program

Excellent news today: the US government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence made public a key “National Intelligence Estimate” report stating on p.6 of that PDF file that:

This is of course, excellent news. Both in itself, and because the release (and the meticulous-looking quality) of this report indicate that the important intelligence organs in this country have lost the cowed, excessively politicized character they had in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The ODNI was working on finalizing the text of this report even as President Bush and Vice-Prez Cheney continued to voice escalatory accusations against the Iranians, claiming they were still continuing with a well-established nuclear-weapons program.
As I’ve written here several times before, ever since I first came to the US in 1982, I have heard US and Israeli officials and semi-official sources claiming that Iran is “just two to five years” or thereabout away from having a nuclear weapon. I note that 1982 is now 25 years into the past and it hasn’t happened yet. Hence, my level of skepticism about all these very drumbeating and fear-inducing allegations is very high.
Regarding timeframe estimates, today’s NIE seemed to be all over the shop (i.e., the analysts were really not being willing to commit themselves to any firm estimate, which seems to me appropriate.) Here’s what they said:

but that this is very unlikely.

[Note that technical capability is a different issue from having and pursuing an intention to produce nuclear weapons. ~HC]

INR is the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which in 2002 was the intel-analysis agency that, as it turned out, got it the most right on Iraq’s WMDs ~ HC

Bottom line: there’s still time for engaged diplomacy to work.
The NIE says as much, too:

Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might—if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.

I’ve been trying to figure out what the development was that gave the ODNI the level of “high confidence” the NIE describes, regarding the fall 2003 halt in Iran’s NW program. The best guess I can make is some of the information contained in the report that IAEA Director General Mohamed elBaradei submitted to his board on November 15. The info in that report also, apparently, gave Russia the confidence it felt it needed to start shipping nuclear fuel rods– under IAEA supervision– to Iran’s Bushehr power plant.
ODNI’s public release of its report should considerably brake the rush that some portions of the Bush administration (especially people in Cheney’s office) have apparently been making, to ramp up the pressure on Iran and try to launch an attack against it before Bush leaves office. It is very good news indeed that the DNI himself, Adm. Mike McConnell, seems to have done his job in a highly professional, objective way– as opposed to George Tenet, who as Director of Central Intelligence in 2002 acted much more like a courtier, cherry-picking the intel at the whim of his political superiors.
Having McConnell in place now instead of Tenet, and Bob Gates instead of the criminally reckless Donald Rumsfeld, means the Bush administration is much, much less likely to launch a completely unjustified war against Iran in the months ahead than it would have been if those former high officials were still in place.
Great news.

My CSM op-ed on post-Annapolis diplomacy

Today’s Christian Science Monitor carries the op-ed I wrote (last Friday morning) about the post-Annapolis diplomacy. The title is For Mideast peace, think bigger; Regional stability involves more than the Israelis and Palestinians. You can also find it here.
Specifically, I call in the piece for:

Regarding the Syrian-Israeli track– an issue I have worked on a lot over the years, in addition to my work on Palestinian-Israeli issues– I give three reasons why it is important to pay attention to that track, as well as the Palestinian one.
Regarding the international dimension, even as I was writing the piece Friday morning, US Ambassador to the UN Zal Khalilzad was being forced humiliatingly to withdraw the text of a Security Council resolution he had proposed the night before, that would have expressed the SC’s “support” for the Annapolis process. That was a strong indication that the (anti-UN, anti-Syrian) hardliners in Dick Cheney’s office were muscling in on the decisionmaking in Washington and showing their willingness to ride roughshod over the decisions and strategies adopted by Secretary of State Rice and her people, of whom Khalilzad is one.
Not good news, to say the least.
Another very worrying indicator is that ever since Olmert and Abbas had their final photo-op at the White House Wednesday, Bush himself has done little or nothing to sustain the pro-peace momentum created by the Annapolis confab. I was really shocked, for example, to see that his weekly radio address Saturday made zero mention of it. That is unconscionable!
If I were Condi, I would resign. But I shan’t be holding my breath for that. After all, one of her main mentors was that perennial “good soldier” Colin Powell…
In this JWN post that I wrote on the day of Annapolis itself (11/27), I wrote: “with the broad turnout [Bush] succeeded mainly in creating extra pressure on his own administration to perform effectively in the diplomacy started in Annapolis. All those invitees are all now, to one degree or another, invested in the process… ” I also speculated that the time might well soon come when the other members of the “Quartet”, who at Annapolis itself were consigned to the role merely of a praise-singing Greek Chorus, would seek a much more active role for themselves in the diplomacy.
Those other three Quartet members are : Russia, the EU, and the UN.
Russia– where President Putin won a strong victory in yesterday’s referendum– is planning to host the next substantive political follow-up to the Annapolis confab, in Moscow, early next year. That important Nov. 29 news report from Robin Wright and Michael Abramowitz notes that the Syrians and Russians are hoping to revive the Syrian-Israeli track at that meeting. (Note also, this report on the growing Russian role, from Haaretz’s Ben Caspit.)
In Washington, Cheney and the neocon ultras who surround him– and also Elliott Abrams– are known to be particularly hostile to any move that might loosen the isolation in which they want to keep both Syria and Iran trapped. (Remember that in the iconic neocon document on the Middle East, “A Clean Break” (1996), Syria was defined as the central target.)
Regarding the Annapolis and post-Annapolis peace diplomacy in general, I was extremely skeptical during the lead-up that the gathering there would be anything more than a content-free photo op. And indeed, I still entertain the strong concern that that may, indeed, be what George Bush and his vice-president still want Annapolis to be.
However, the breadth of the participation in Annapolis caught my attention and fascinated me. It really did a lot to reframe “Annapolis” as being the very last chance Washington has to make good on 33 unbroken years of promises that Washington, and Washington alone, is the power capable of brokering a sustainable Israeli-Arab peace.
In my CSM piece, I noted that,

All major world powers today have large stakes in the [Arab-Israeli] region. They need the peacemaking to succeed. If Bush’s current peace gamble fails, that will seriously dent America’s power and standing around the whole world.

Of course, Washington’s international standing has already been dented very seriously indeed by its fatal strategic over-reach in Iraq. But a widely watched and understood demonstration of its failure to “deliver” on Israeli-Arab peace would certainly continue that process.
The world’s non-US powers are meanwhile in something of a bind. They need the Middle East not to erupt into any further chaos and bloodshed. They need a successful and sustainable settlement of all strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict. They are not, in any conceivable combination, capable of achieving this on their own, without the cooperation of the US. But the US refuses to cooperate with them and continues, arrogantly, to arrogate to itself the “right” to monopolize the post-Annapolis diplomacy. (As spelled out in the final para of the “Joint Understanding” reached by Israel and the PA at Annapolis.)
In my op-ed, I concluded by writing: “The stakes could not be higher. The world watches, and hopes.” Perhaps I should have added that if those hopes are rebuffed, then the non-US powers will most likely soon start planning their own alternative approach.

Post-Annapolis score: Israel/Cheney – 1; World – 0?

Yesterday, US Ambassador to the UN Zal Khalilzad was humiliatingly forced by the powers-that-be in Washington to withdraw the text of a draft resolution he had presented to the Security Council less than 24 hours previously, that would have expressed the SC’s support for the Nov. 27th Annapolis peace meeting.
Colum Lynch’s reporting in the WaPo linked to there makes very clear:

Khalilzad told Lynch that Israeli PM Olmert and other Israeli leaders had become “very upset” when they saw the text of Thursday’s draft.

Israeli governments have for many years strongly– though by no means always successfully– resisted all attempts to have the UN play any role at all in brokering or monitoring peace agreements between it and its neighbors. (That, despite the fact that Israel’s birth certificate as a state in the modern world came from the UN’s Partition Plan of 1947.) The draft that Khalilzad presented Thursday merely “endorsed” the Israeli-Palestinian statement concluded at Annapolis– which allocated a clear leadership role in the follow-opn diplomacy to the US, and not the UN. But even having the UNSC say anything at all about Annapolis was apparently too much for Olmert and Co. to bear.
Khalilzad was forced to fly to Washington DC on Friday, presumably to get a dressing-down from people higher up in the administration for his “presumption” in having presented the pro-Annapolis draft to the SC. My reading of this matter is that only someone politically weightier than Rice could have forced her and Khalilzad to back down on this matter. To me, that means Cheney.
What a humiliating fiasco for Khalilzad, Rice, and US diplomacy in general.
Especially since in Tunis, yesterday– and this was presumably before Khalilzad’s about-face– PA Pres. Mahmoud Abbas had told a press conference, “I must say that we felt the seriousness of the U.S. administration… Among the signals about the U.S. seriousness, there is a draft submitted by the U.S. to the U.N Security Council to endorse the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.”
And China Daily reported from New York that,

Ambassador Nassir Al-Nasser of Qatar, the only Arab member on the Security Council, said Thursday “we are happy with the language as it is” in the US draft resolution. “I am happy that the council is dealing with this issue,” he said. “For me, this is the main thing.”

So, as I wrote in the headline, the immediate score in this affair looks like:

Israel/Cheney – 1; World – 0

However, if the Bush administration’s handling of the post-Annapolis diplomacy continues in this inept and extremely one-sided vein, the longer-term score on this important aspect of global diplomacy will probably turn out to be more like:

US – 0; World – 188

(Or however many countries there are in the whole of the non-US world.)
As I discussed in this Nov. 27 JWN post, the shifting balance among the world’s great powers– that is, the US’s decline from the Uberpower-hood it enjoyed in the 1990s– is an important backdrop to the post-Annapolis peace diplomacy. And the post-Annapolis diplomacy will meanwhile itself be contributing to the shifts in the global power power balance. Especially if the Bush administration keeps shooting itself in the diplomatic foot in this most recent, jejune, and damaging-to-everyone way.
(I have an op-ed on the broad Annapolis-in-global-politics theme that will be in The Christian Science Monitor on Monday. Too bad I finalized the text before this latest Khalilzad fiasco got reported.)
What I have specifically been looking at, in general, is the balance in the post-Annapolis diplomacy between the role of the US and that of the rest of the “Quartet”: Russia, the EU, and the UN. Worryingly, from my perspective, the text of the “Joint Understanding” that Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas agreed to at Annapolis gives the US a specified, special role monitoring both sides’ implementation of the 2002 “Road Map” dealing with interim issues, and spells out that satisfactory– from the US standpoint– implementation of the Road Map is a precondition of implementation of the final peace agreement that the two sides are supposed to conclude before the end of 2008.
(So actually, maybe not having the whole of the UNSC sign off on Annapolis in a formal way may not be such a bad thing?)
I see, too, that lapdoggish as ever, the Quartet’s so-called “special envoy to the PA” Tony Blair has been telling HaAretz and others that he “no longer believes that ‘land for peace,’ in and of itself, is sufficient”, and that,

“There won’t be a Palestinian state unless it is coherently governed and run, and anyone who tells you different is misleading you.”

What on earth kind of neo-imperial arrogance is this?
Of course we all want the Palestinian state to be as well-run, as democratic, and accountable as possible. But to make this a pre-condition for national independence? This is Shcharansky-ism run wild!
Also, Blair is really not a good person to speak about these things, since in the run-up to the January 2006 Palestinian elections he was the one who covertly despatched a small team of Labour Party campaign advisers to Ramallah to try to salvage Fateh’s already-failing election campaign. That was a quite unwarranted (and therefore kept-hidden) intervention into Palestinian politics, and therefore a violation of democratic norms in Palestine.
Also, as we know, he has been a strong supporter of the mass-punishment policies sustained against the Palestinian people after they held their elections and he and George W. Bush didn’t like the outcome…
So much for yesterday’s man. Meanwhile, if you’re as interested as I am in the shifting global balance question, go back and look at all three pages of that China Daily report I linked to above in connection with the reporting on Qatar’s reaction. That is some pretty thorough and wide-ranging reporting– and in English, too. Even though the architecture of the article, the way it’s published on the web, is definitely sub-optimal: it’s impossible to bring up the whole text on a single, clean “print” page…
The Chinese are evidently watching what is happening on this issue pretty closely. Plus, they have been investing heavily and quite effectively in upgrading their English-language web presence. US commentators who mock China’s supposed weakness in the realm of soft power often don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
Interesting times we live in.

Israeli precedent in France/Algeria?

I went to an interesting discussion today. It was led by the Franco-Israeli writer Sylvain Cypel, who was talking about his recent book Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse.
I asked him about the state of the Israeli peace movement these days, wondering aloud if it is really in such chaos and disarray as it seems to be.
His answer was interesting. He said that the essential issue that Israelis and all others need to focus on is the need to end the occupation, rather than “peace” as such. And he recalled how, growing up in France in the 1950s, those on the French left for long time had a main slogan regarding Algeria that was “peace in Algeria,” and didn’t make too much impact with that. But then, he said, in around 1959, they switched their slogan to “Withdraw from Algeria”, and that was when the political system inside France really started to shift on the issue.
So I thought about that quite a bit afterwards. It is true, isn’t it, that everyone right across the political claims that their goal is “peace” between Israel and its neighbors. Including those who specifically negate the idea that this peace needs a robust territorial basis, such as for example, those who argue that what’s needed is a “peace for peace” deal, rather than a “land for peace” deal.
Cypel argued that what is required, first and foremost, is a clear Israeli statement that it will withdraw from the lands occupied in 1967, and then on the basis of that the modalities of the withdrawal, including the possibility of balanced adjustments in the final border, and the nature of the post-withdrawal relationship can all be effectively negotiated. But, he stressed, they should be negotiated in the context of a clear prior Israeli commitment to withdraw. Which is what international law requires of Israel, anyway.
(By the way, this is a principle that needs to be applied in the case of the US’s current occupation of Iraq, as well.)
On a broadly related note, when I went to the panel discussion with the Anglo-Israeli peace activist Daniel Levy yesterday, one of the most striking things he said was that it is quite unreasonable to ask the occupied people to provide assurances for the security of the occupiers and even for the settlers from the occupying country.
He also said that making “absolute security” for Israel a firm precondition for the conduct or completion of any final-peace talks– as the Annapolis process currently does, with its references to the really damaging “Road Map”– is a recipe for sure failure. “How can the Palestinians assure the security of Israelis? They don’t have a state, they don’t have anything!”
Parenthetically, I’d add that the PA is quite unable to assure the security of Palestinians, so how can anyone demand that they assure the security of Israelis, as well?
Levy’s bottom line was that completion and implementation of the final-status Palestinian-Israeli agreement simply cannot be held hostage to conditions placed on either side in the arena of interim measures.
This is what I’ve been arguing for the past 14 years. Since Oslo. It’s a crazy idea, and one that gratuitously gives the whole peace negotiation over as a hostage to hardliners on either side who, when they want to torpedo it, have merely to launch yet another escalation or provocation.
Today, by the way, Cypel reminded us that the first terrorist event after Oslo was that undertaken by the American-Israeli settler extremist Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 worshipers in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, and wounded 150 more, during his February 1994 rampage there.

60th anniversary of Palestinian Partition Plan

I was at a fascinating post-Annapolis briefing this afternoon, jointly delievered by two Israeli peaceniks (Daniel Levy and Ori Nir), two Palestinian negotiations officials (Ghaith al-Omary and Greg Khalil) and one American negotiations expert (Scott Lasensky.) It was hosted by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, whose Executive Director Phil Wilcox chaired the session, and had many other great pro-peace organizations supporting it.
All the contributions from the panelists were interesting, some very inspiring indeed. Levy, who had been a key advisor to then-FM Shimon Peres during the very hurried negotiations of the last months of Barak’s premiership in 2000, is a very smart young British-Israeli. (His dad is the slightly disgraced and controversial Blair fundraiser/crony, Lord Levy. But Daniel seems smart and very thoughtful in his own right, as well as being, obviously, very well-connected.)
He reminded the hordes gathered there in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill that today is the 60th anniversary of the UN’s passing of the Partition Plan for Palestine.
“That was truly an amazing day,” he said.

The 78% of the land of M.P. was what the Jewish state ended up controlling after the fighting of 1948-49– right up to the Armistice Line agreed on in the Armistice (ceasefire) Agreements of 1949. The remaining 22% of M.P. is what the Palestinians and the Arab peace Plan want to see as the territory of the independent Palestinian. Both Levy and Khalil noted that the Arabs are not now talking about the 22% of land that Israel conquered in 1948, that the UN had earlier allocated to the Palestinian Arab state. You can see a good mapped representation of those areas in the the Wikipedia page linked to above.
Levy also warned, incidentally, that the Annapolis-launched negotiations really represent Israel’s last chance at retaining a Jewish state. “If they fail,” he said, “Israel will become more and more like South Africa (I’m assuming he meant pre-democratic South Africa ~HC) and international support for it will fall, especially among US Jews.”
Anyway, there is a lot more to write about the event. I’ll have to wait a while to do that, though, as I have a bunch of other things to catch up with.
So mazel tov to all Israelis on the anniversary of the birth-certificate of your Jewish state! Do remember, though, that there was a twin brother given a birth certificate at exactly that same time, in the same incubator, but he hasn’t been allowed to see the light of day yet. It strikes me that the fate of both peoples is still irrevocably intertwined.
(Note to commenters: Yes, I am well aware the Arab states rejected the Partition Plan at the time. A regrettable but in the circumstances not incomprehensible position to take. Now, they are seeking significantly less than the P.P. We have discussed the Arab rejection of the P.P. here on JWN many times and don’t need to revisit it in this discussion. Let’s be forward looking! What can be done to help realize the hopefulness there is in the Annapolis process– however small it might appear as of now?)
Update, 20 mins. later:
Levy has put a thoughtful assessment of Annapolis up on his blog, here. I thought his analysis of the speeches the three principals made there was very perceptive. especially this comment:

Only President Bush came up short, sticking to a simplistic good-versus-evil narrative that was not only patronizing, divisive and lacking any resonance with the Arab world, but might very well prove counterproductive.

Personally, I wish Levy were running US diplomacy right now. Couldn’t we naturalize him with the same haste that the Australian Zionist activist Martin Indyk was naturalized here in 1992 in order that he could immediately jump into helping run Clinton’s Middle East policy, and then have Levy be named Condi’s deputy?
Update, a further 30 mins later:
I have just checked my notes, and actually in making the reference to the two-state solution and South Africa, levy made clear that these were remarks that Olmert had made in a very recent interview with HaAretz. (And here it is in English.) Of course, this makes it an utterance of considerably greater political weight and impact. Sorry about the mistake.

Sadat and Saudis tried to prop up failing Nixon?

Yet more from the Nixon tapes, which will prove to be, I think, a huge treasure trove. (The Nixon Archives link to the new releases is here.) The WaPo’s Walter Pincus evidently spent time poring over them yesterday and came up with a cable to Kissinger from then-US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Jim Akins (mis-spelled by Pincus as Adkins) describing a “secret” letter Pres. Sadat wrote to King Faisal in January 1974 saying that Nixon

“could easily be impeached” and that “Arabs must do everything they can to strengthen” Nixon…

Well, the letter was supposed to be “secret”, but Akins reported that a “senior Saudi official” had read it out to him…
That was in the middle of the post-1973 War oil boycott. Pincus continues:

“The one thing they could do which would be most effective,” Sadat wrote Faisal, “would be to assure the president that the [oil] boycott would be lifted as soon as disengagement [with Israel forces] could be accomplished.” Kissinger traveled to the Middle East in February 1974, and the boycott was lifted the following month.

The linking of the termination of the oil boycott with the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement agreement has always been well understood. A motivation on the behalf of at least some of the Arabs to do this to “save” Nixon seems new to me, though perhaps not to others. It is also quite possible that that the oil-exporting states needed to end the boycott for their own reasons, as well. (And that the US needed to get the disengagement for its own reasons, too.)