Iraqslogger has a great piece that reproduces the text of a contract signed between Ayad (Iyad) Allawi and Robert Blackwill, in the latter’s capacity as head of a DC lobbying firm.
Allawi undertakes to pay Blackwill’s firm $50,000 a month for, in the first instance, six months starting August 1. In return Blackwill’s firm, BRG, will “provide strategic counsel and representation for an on behalf of Dr. Ayad Allawi before the US Government, Congress, media and others.”
Blackwill was the Bush administration’s envoy to Iraq in 2004, when longtime CIA protege Allawi was briefly PM there.
Last Saturday, BRG scored its first hit for Allawi when it succeeded in placing an anti-Maliki article, allegedly “written” by him, in the WaPo.
The contract featured on Iraqslogger is defined as running from August 1. But it was only signed– by both parties– on Monday (August 20). I guess that Allawi, a canny operator in the Washington scene for a long time, wanted to make sure that BRG would do something concrete for him before he signed it.
I’m still trying to figure out who’s ripping off whom in all this.
Where does Allawi get $300,000 to drop on these “lobbying” services?
(Silly question, Helena. Look at the amount of our US taxpayer “aid” that went missing in Iraq during Allawi’s premiership.)
Why does Bob Blackwill, who had a long career with the US State Department, not have enough retirement funds stashed away that he feels he needs to sleaze around making money doing such underhanded things?
(Answer: Of course he has plenty of retirement $$. But always wanting “more money! more money!” is the all-American way of life! Isn’t it?)
Excuse me while I go and have a bath. Even writing about this stuff makes me feel unclean.
Bush, Vietnam, and genocide in Cambodia
So what would that well-known Vietnam war-evader George Bush have wanted the US actually to do in Vietnam rather than withdraw when it did??
That excellent question was raised by a very good friend of mine this evening after we watched the TV news item about Bush’s appearance today at the annual convention of the “Veterans of Foreign Wars” organization, and the way Bush brought into his speech there strong “warning” that a too-hasty US withdrawal from Iraq might have consequences for Iraqis and others in the Middle East just as bad, or perhaps worse, than the “consequences” that he claimed resulted from the US’s too-hasty withdrawal from Vietnam…
Bush was explicitly picking up there on the argument to that effect that recently retired Pentagon official Peter Rodman and liberal uber-hawk Will Shawcross made here earlier this summer.
Bush said:
- Recently, two men who were on the opposite sides of the debate over the Vietnam War came together to write an article. One was a member of President Nixon’s foreign policy team, and the other was a fierce critic of the Nixon administration’s policies. Together they wrote that the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq would be disastrous.
Here’s what they said: “Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.” I believe these men are right.
He acknowledged– how could he avoid doing so?– that Vietnam ” is a complex and painful subject for many Americans.” He also did not, for that audience of veterans, say anything about his own semi-service in those years in the Texas Slackers’ Air National Guard.
He said,
- The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.
The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism — and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people…
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”
Read that carefully. First of all, none of those was really a new phenomenon, or even, really, a new term.
Second, the terms of the Paris Peace Accords were that, after the “decent interval”, the North Vietnamese could have the whole of Vietnam and exercise sovereignty within it. Maybe Nixon and Kissinger should have driven a harder negotiating bargain that would have included some guarantees for the welfare of those previous collaborators who were “left behind.” But they didn’t. And actually, though thousands of former Vietnamese collaborators with the US forces did suffer from “re-education” etc, that suffering was of a completely different order of magnitude to what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s.
So what could a longer-lasting US presence in Vietnam have done to prevent the Cambodian genocide?
One can make a very strong case indeed that it had been the US’s previous actions in Southeast Asia– and principally, the horrendous aerial bombardments that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed against the country from their bases in Vietnam and elsewhere– that fatally weakened Sihanouk, empowered the Khmer Rouge, traumataized/brutalized untold thousands of Cambodians, and thereby set the stage for the genocide that followed.
And in the end, it was the army of united Vietnam that ended the genocide, by marching in to Phnom Penh and toppling the Khmer Rouge regime.
So again, as my friend asked: What would George W. Bush have done differently, if he had been president in Nixon’s place and had kept the US troops in Vietnam for even longer, that could have prevented the Cambodian genocide?
Bush didn’t tell us that. Instead, he used the speech to try to wrap himself in some of the glory of General Douglas Macarthur and thus present himself as a wise and idealistic– if sometimes sadly misunderstood– wartime leader of the nation.
(One final note: Rove may be gone from the White House. But the Bushite spinmeisters are seeming a lot more agile these days than the Democrats. Too bad that Bush seems so easily able to use this whole “aura of war” business to out-maneuver them. One thing it shows is that they all, except Kucinich, seem really unwilling to stand up and present any kind of a compelling alternative to the whole testosterone-soaked “bellophilia syndrome”. Instead, they’re all just playing along with it, desperately trying to present themselves as “just as tough as Bush” on war/peace issues. Sad. Very sad indeed.)
Update/correction, Fri. evening: Add Bill Richardson to the list of clear thinkers on Iraq among the Democratic Party hopefuls. That makes two.
The ‘Seven Soldiers’ wisdom on Iraq
This book-writing business really is pretty intense. But I just wanted to dash over here to the blog to note a couple of important things that have been going on:
1. War critique by seven smart serving soldiers.
This great article came out in last Sunday’s NYT. I know Scott Delicious-ed it. But it needs much more attention. It is a very smart and well-informed criticism of the whole current war effort, signed by seven serving members of the fairly elite, special-ops-y 82d Airborne.
Taking on the hard-spun optimism expressed recently by Washington desk-jockeys Micael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, these serving grunts write this:
- VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
… it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.
Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful….
Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.
At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably…
We need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.
There has been some curiosity regarding the identity of these soldiers. Here’s what I noticed: Four are described as sergeants, two as staff sergeants, and one, Buddhika Jayamaha, as an “Army specialist.” But it is Jayamaha who has his name listed first. Clearly, this must have been by the agreement of the other six– but he is the lowest-ranking one of them all. Clearly, he must have played a leadership role in drafting the text and bringing the other six to agreement around it.
So who is Buddhika Jayamaha?
Was Sourcewatch onto something when they tagged this? It’s the contents page for a hefty, v. expensive two-volume work that was published in March, on “Civil Wars of the World”… and the chapter on Sri Lanka was co-authored by a Buddhika Jayamaha.
So maybe BJ really is quite a bit of a specialist on civil wars and insurgencies. Quite possibly of Sri Lankan origin himself? And then for whatever reason he went and enlisted in the 82nd Airborne where he (1) went to Iraq, (2) survived the tell the tale, (3) developed his own, very well-informed understanding of what was going on there, and (4) was able to persuade six sergeants in the 82nd to sign an article that featured– we might presume– mainly his own analysis?
Anyway, I would like to note that the “Seven soldiers” description of the situation seems to me to have a lot more ground-truth to it than the O’Hanlon-Pollack piece published in the NYT exactly three weeks earlier, under the title “A war we just might win”
Btw, regarding O’Hanlon and Pollack, George Packer blogged this a couple of days after their piece appeared:
- I talked to Pollack yesterday. In answer to some of the questions I raised: he spoke with very few Iraqis and could independently confirm very little of what he heard from American officials. In eight days he travelled to half a dozen cities—that’s not much time in each. The evidence that four or five Iraqi Army divisions, with most of their bad commanders weeded out, are now capable of holding, for example, Mosul and Tal Afar, came from American military sources. Pollack found that U.S. officers sounded much more realistic than on his previous trip, in late 2005. He gauged their reliability in answers they gave to questions that he asked “offline,” after a briefing—there was a minimum of happy talk, but also a minimum of dire gloom. The improvements in security, he said, are “relative,” which is a heavy qualification, given the extreme violence of 2006 and early 2007. And it’s far from clear that progress anywhere is sustainable. Everywhere he went, the line Pollack heard was that the central government in Baghdad is broken and the only solutions that can work are local ones.
It was a step back from the almost definitive tone of “A War We Just Might Win” (a bad headline, and not the authors’). That tone was misplaced, and it is already being used by an Administration that has always thought tactically and will grasp any shred of support, regardless of the facts, to win the short-term argument…
And the second thing I was going to blog about? I’m afraid y’all are going to have to wait… Back to the book factory for me.
Why Arms Sales to the Persian Gulf will Backfire
Recent Bush Administration plans to sell $20 billion in arms to the Gulf Arab states (while giving $30 billion plus to the Israelis) are being defended primarily within the logic of “balance of power.”
Out the window is Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy” or peace through democracy promotion. We’re back to the old policy of peace through power. One might build an essay quoting Rice against herself.
Writing in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, emeritus University of Virginia Professor R.K. Ramazani points out a singular problem with such massive arms sales and power-balancing for the Persian Gulf region – namely, such policies haven’t worked before and are likely to be counter-productive yet again:
“The Bush administration’s plan to sell $20 billion of sophisticated weapons to Saudi Arabia and five other Arab monarchies is likely to backfire and produce less regional security. Far from balancing Sunni Arab states against Shia Iran, such massive arms sales may ignite conflicts that will make the current war in Iraq look like child’s play.”
Before unpacking Ramazani’s argument, consider Anthony Cordesman’s mainstream “realist” defense of such arms sales in a recent New York Times essay. We’ve commented here at justworldnews on the ordinarily respected Tony Cordesman in the past, particularly the commentary he did last summer while embedded with the Israeli military as it pounded Lebanon.
But Cordesman is hardly a cheerleader for the Bush Administration or for the neoconservative vantage point. Yet he felt it necessary to disclose that the beltway thinktank where he works, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, receives considerable financial support from Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the US Government – not to mention US military contractors. For one measured critique, see this “Werther” original by an anonymous northern-Virginia defense analyst.
While Cordesman has at times been a blunt, non-ideological critic of Bush Administration’s Iraq mis-steps, his New York Times argument in favor of the arms sales, the “Weapons of Mass Preservation,” boils down to the following points:
1. Critics of such arms sales are not operating in the “real world.” The Persian Gulf remains a critical “vital interest” to the US and the world economy. Oil must be “defended.”
2. We cannot defend oil “without allies,” and Saudi Arabia is the only “meaningful” ally available. (and oh never mind the recent “minor” reports of Saudi salafists showing up as guerrillas in Iraq. As for democracy and all that, allies like the Saudis inevitably are “less than perfect.”)
3. The chief threat then to “our” oil (e.g., to “jobs”) is Iran. (No evidence needed or presented.)
4. Announced arms sales (and gifts) to the region are really nothing new, as, after inflation, Israel may be getting less arms than before.
R.K. Ramazani, by contrast, asks a question Cordesman avoids – namely, does power-balancing in the region actually work? That is, can we demonstrate that it has produced stability and defended American interests?
(Disclosure, I helped condense this essay from a much longer draft, and even then two paragraphs were left out. Indeed, those of us who have known Professor Ramazani might recognize that this essay condenses 54 years of scholarship — and a year’s worth of advanced IR lectures.)
First, the balance of power hasn’t worked in the past; worse, it’s been counter-productive:
“For more than 50 years, the United States has obsessively played one Persian Gulf country against another, selling arms to allies to protect vital interests, primarily crude oil. Yet this balancing game has repeatedly proved counterproductive.
During the Cold War, Dwight Eisenhower sold arms to Iraq to counter Soviet support of Egypt, rendering Iraq vulnerable to an anti-Western revolution in 1958. Richard Nixon gave the Shah a blank check to bolster Iran against “radical” Iraq, but in the process catalyzed Iran’s 1979 revolution. Ronald Reagan then backed “moderate” Iraq against “fundamentalist” Iran, and, in turn, created the aggressive Saddam Hussein war machine that invaded Kuwait.
After ejecting Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, George H.W. Bush sold arms to the Gulf’s smaller Sunni monarchies to counter the power of Shia Iran. Yet the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia contributed to the rise of al-Qaeda. The subsequent destruction of the Taliban and Hussein regimes ironically eliminated Iran’s most bitter enemies, leaving Iran even stronger.”
With each new infusion of massive western arms, the regimes we supposedly are defending against other threats in turn are destabilized from within. For example, people dissatisfied inside Iran with the Shah of Iran’s repression naturally blamed the outside power that provided him with the massive arms that were the means, if not the source, of their misery. Pogo anyone?
Ramazani then offers, for the first time, a different insight on just why “balance of power” concepts that have been favored in the west since the 17th Century have been so difficult to apply to the Persian Gulf:
Continue reading “Why Arms Sales to the Persian Gulf will Backfire”
Film review: No End in Sight
Last night we were in DC, and we got to see No End in Sight, a movie released about three weeks ago that relentlessly tracks one key aspect of the war in Iraq, namely the woeful lack of planning within the Bush administration for the administration of post-invasion Iraq.
The film notably does not delve into the US decisionmaking on the issue of whether to invade Iraq. Nor, really, does it say much at all about Iraqi politics, history, and society. It is a movie about Americans, with Iraq as the backdrop to that. For a good film about Iraq, we’ll need to go elsewhere.
What the film does, though, it does brilliantly. Charles Ferguson produced, directed, and wrote the film, which is a full-length feature. Probably more than half of what we see on the screen is interview material. He uses a technique very similar to the one Errol Morris used in his 2003 movie about Robert McNamara and Vietnam: The Fog of War. That is, Ferguson has one interview subject on the screen at a time, placed over to one side of the screen as we watch; the subject is photographed fairly close up, though sometimes we see his or her hands. We don’t see the interviewer at all, and we generally never even hear his voice, though we do hear his questions on a couple of occasions. And in between the interview segments there’s some illustrative news footage with a voice-over that helps to tell the story.
The difference is that FOW was about one man and his decisionmaking, while NEIS is much, much more of a group montage. There are about three dozen interview subjects, of whom maybe half are former officials in the Bush administration… Some of these now have very serious misgivings indeed about the job they were tasked to do implementing the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy in Iraq.
That is, of course, both very similar to the moral tenor of the McNamara movie and somewhat different from it. Different, because the people in the NEIS movie were not as high up the totem-pole as McNamara… More like, people at the second-through-fourth echelons of policymaking.
It’s a very human movie, because you see people who took jobs where they wanted to do what they thought was “the right thing” but were prevented from doing it by the recklessly (or perhaps actually criminally) faulty decisions made by the people above them.
Most human of all, for me, was Col. Paul Hughes, who was the principal military advisor to Jay Garner right at the beginning of the occupation. (Hughes is the guy nearly at the end of this YouTube trailer who says “There are nights when I don’t sleep very well.”) He tells how in his early weeks in Baghdad he had been in touch with high officers in the still-in-hiding Iraqi army who assured him they could bring 137,000 soldiers in the Baghdad area to help keep the peace in the country… and he was all ready to start to set that process in train, ending the paroxysm of lawlessness that had taken hold of the country, when he was abruptly told by the newly arrived Bremer that the whole Iraqi army would be disbanded and all its members tossed out on the street. Just like that.
The movie has a great section where parts of the interview Hughes made on that point are intercut with pieces from an interview with Walter Slocombe, who before Bremer’s arrival in Baghdad had worked with him in Washington formulating the plan to disband the Iraqi army.
Slocombe comes out of the movie looking dishonest, ignorant, arrogant, and deeply manipulative. (Just the kind of person Bremer would get along with, I suppose.)
Ferguson does have a great, long list of people who “declined to be interviewed for the movie.” Bremer is on it. Also Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rice. If Slocombe has a little intelligence– which from the evidence, he may well not have– he is probably right now wishing he had declined as well.
The highest-ranking people who appear in the movie are Jay Garner, the first administrator of Iraq, and Rich Armitage, who was Powell’s deputy as Deputy Secretary of State. Garner comes out looking like perhaps a decent fellow, but not terrifically swift. Armitage pulls his punches a lot, repeatedly saying he doesn’t want to comment on various aspects of the affair.
As I said, what the movie does, it does very well. But I think there are things it should have had in the picture, even just to adequately tell the story it did seek to tell. For example, there is no substantive mention of the crimes and scandal of Abu Ghraib at all– even though there is one small, suggestive mention of the prison, and even though the story is taken, certainly, through to (and a little beyond) that flash-point in April-May 2004 when that scandal burst out in the middle of the battles of both Fallujah and Najaf.
Also, it truly was no “accident” that the US ended up with a ground force in Iraq that was quite insufficiently sized for the task of running an orderly occupation. Doing the invasion with a very small force had been an integral part of Rumsfeld’s planning for the war. He wanted to “prove” his (as it turned out, quite incorrect) theory that the US could indeed send its forces barging all around the world toppling opponents and transforming their countries into robustly pro-US democracies by using only very small– but agile and well-equipped– ground forces.
(Okay, that is the benign interpretation of what he was trying to do. Another interpretation is that he truly wanted Iraq to implode completely as a nation in the aftermath of the invasion– something that, certainly, many Israelis and many of the friends they had deeply embedded within Rumsfeld’s Pentagon wanted to see happen. from that point of view, I think Ferguson was dishonest to describe the Israeli scholar Amatzia Baram, who was one of his interview subjects, only as a “Historian of Iraq.” He has also long been one of Israel’s key government-advising intellectuals on the subject, too.)
If you watch Ferguson’s movie, you could come away from it thinking that it was all just a horrible mistake, the fact that the post-invasion planning had been so completely dysfunctional. Partly, I think, you get that impression from the sometimes very sympathetic and anguished way that people like Paul Hughes– and even more so, the other military officers interviewed– tell their story. I mean, those are all very sympathetic people. So the fact that they had volunteered to go and work in the occupation regime means that it must at one point have been a potentially admirable venture– no?
But even more important, I think, is the way Ferguson had framed the whole movie. He could and should have raised the question as to why the planning had been so poorly done (or, from another point of view, so well done– if the outcome actually sought by Rumsfeld and Cheney was the destruction of the unitary Iraqi state… ?)
As part of the misframing, Ferguson raises yet again the old canard of criticizing the administration for the fact that the post-invasion administration of Iraq was left to the Pentagon and not given to the State Department. The reason I think that’s a canard is because actually, under international law, it is the military’s job to administer occupied territories. It is the Israeli military that has that job within the OPTs… and earlier, it was the US and Allied militaries that administered occupied Germany and Japan.
If the Bushites did make a “mistake” in setting up that administration, it was by throwing out the planning that the State Department had done for the administration of a post-invasion Iraq. But it shouldn’t have been the State Department that did that administering. That was always, rightfully, the DOD’s job. Because of course, one of the main things that needs doing in an occupied area is the assurance of public security for all the residents. The State Department couldn’t have done that. The DOD could have and should have, but notably failed to.
Anyway, those criticisms aside, I’m glad I went to the movie. I saw quite a few people I know on-camera, which is always fun (Nir Rosen, George Packer, Samantha Power, Barbara Bodeen….) And you do get this tragic sense of some well-intentioned people– among the former US government officials– having gotten dragged into working for a really ill-intentioned (and not merely “dysfunctional”) project there in Iraq…. and the disquiet or discomfort some, but not all, of them came to feel about that.
Although I’m glad I went, it was not at all an enjoyable experience. It was extremely depressing just to hear that very, very familiar story being told again, and at times I felt angrier about the Bushites than I have let myself feel for quite a while. By and large, I think anger is an extremely unhelpful (and corrosive) emotion.
Ommmm.
Fasting from blogging is good for productivity…
Okay, my current blog-fast has lasted nearly five whole days. In that period I’ve wrestled with some big issues in Chapter 4 of my new book and…. just about nailed it!
The writing process is still a little intuitive here, but I think the book will have seven chapters. In other words, I’m over the hump. Yay!!!!!
Ch. 4 is about human rights. Can anyone suggest great, informative graphics that will reproduce well in black and white and which are easily procurable (i.e. no big hassle getting repro rights, no huge licensing payments, etc.) These could be informative maps, charts, or B&W photos. My mind, which found it easy to think of good ways to integrate graphics with text in the first three chapters, has drawn almost a complete blank on this one.
(One of the points I’m making here is that Economic and Social Rights are just as important as Civil and Political rights. So I suppose I could use some infographics from the HDR or someplace… )
How invading Iraq harmed Afghan stabilization
David Rohde and David Sanger have an excellent piece of reporting in today’s NYT, in which they go in some detail into exactly how, from mid-2002 on the Bushites’ decision to invade Iraq distracted resources from the much-needed effort to stabilize Afghanistan.
The NYT also has a pretty good 8-slide graphic display that tracks the degree to which what are described as “terrorist incidents” have risen in Afghanistan through every year since 2002.
The Rohde/Sanger article is titled “How a ‘good war’ in Afghanistan went bad.” Imho, no war is a “good” war. But I’ll let that go for now. (Though it does affect they way one looks at the whole question of “stabilization” in Afghanistan.)
I don’t have time to write anything lengthy here right now, about Afghanistan.
I’ll just note that Rohde and Sanger interviewed a lot of former and current Bush-era US officials connected with the Afghanistan project (though alas, no Afghans), and came up with a fairly damning indictment– from their own words:
- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration’s policy, saying, “I don’t buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources.” Yet she said: “I don’t think the U.S. government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq.”
In interviews, three former American ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington’s record.
“I said from the get-go that we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough soldiers,” said Robert P. Finn, who was the ambassador in 2002 and 2003. “I’m saying the same thing six years later.”
Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the next ambassador and is now the United Nations ambassador, said, “I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly,” adding that “I think more could have been done earlier on these issues.”
And Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Mr. Khalilzad in Kabul, said, “The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn’t have to do nation- building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake.”
Alas, no more time to write here now. Bottom line on the article: the situation– both regarding ongoing mayhem in Afghanistan and regarding past ineptitude in the Bush administration– is just as bad as I thought it was.
Darfur & the need for care in reporting casualty tolls (again)
The NYT had an informative and very thoughtful op-ed in today, by Sam Dealey, described as a writer on Africa for Time. He noted that on Wednesday, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority had ruled against the Save Darfur Coalition there, judging that the high death tolls the SDC claims in some of its public advertising there “breached standards of truthfulness.”
Here is the ASA ruling.
It had to do with a national print ad campaign that stated, “In 2003, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir moved to crush opposition by unleashing vicious armed militias to slaughter entire villages of his own citizens. After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed … “.
That ad campaign has run in the US, as well as in Britain. And it hasn’t been cheap. Here in the US, I estimate it may well have cost more than half a million dollars.
In the UK, a complaint was launched by the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council against the claim made in the ad; and it was that complaint that was upheld by the ASA. The ASA ruling presented much of the evidence it considered, and concluded:
- SDC & AT [the Aegis Trust] were entitled to express their opinion about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur in strong terms, we concluded that there was a division of informed opinion about the accuracy of the figure contained in the ad and it should not have been presented in such a definitive way.
The ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.2 (Division of opinion) and 8.1 (Matters of opinion).
Action
We told SDC & AC to present the figure as opinion not fact in future. We urged them to consult the CAP Copy Advice team for help in amending their ad and we also advised them to state the source for such claims in future.
Of course, this is not the first time that Save Darfur campaigners have used unsubstantiated (and improbably high) casualty figures in order to enhance their case. In June last year I noted that Ruth Messinger had stated quite baldly in a letter to the NYT that “Half a million are dead… ” I presented some of the counter-evidence to her claim, and also pointed out the need for rights-abuse reporting always to be very careful and where necessary err on the side of caution.
In his NYT piece today, Dealey is absolutely right to note that this sloppiness with the figures has real consequences on the ground in Darfur. He writes of SDC:
- While the coalition has done an admirable job of raising awareness, it has also hampered aid-delivery groups, discredited American policy makers and diplomats and harmed efforts to respond to future humanitarian crises.
He then looks quickly at all the considerable (though not definitive) evidence that’s available, and concludes that: “Combining these estimates suggests Darfur’s death toll now hovers at 200,000 — just half of what Save Darfur claimed a year ago in its ad and still claims on its Web site.”
He adds:
- whether 200,000 or 400,000 have died, the need to resolve the conflict in Darfur is the same. But Save Darfur’s inflated estimate — used even after Dr. Hagan revised his estimate sharply downward — only frustrates peace efforts.
During debate on the House floor last month, for example, Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee claimed that “an estimated 400,000 people have been killed by the government of Sudan and its janjaweed allies.” Ms. Jackson-Lee is hardly alone in making that allegation, and catering to the Sudanese government’s sensitivities may not seem important. But the repeated error only hardens Khartoum against constructive dialogue. If diplomacy, not war, is the ultimate goal for resolving the conflict in Darfur, the United States must maintain its credibility as an honest broker.
Inaccurate data can also lead to prescriptive blunders. During the worst period of violence, for example, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster estimated that nearly 70 percent of Darfur’s excess deaths were due not to violence but to disease and malnutrition. This suggests that policy makers should look for ways to bolster and protect relief groups — by continuing to demand that the Sudanese government not hamper the delivery of aid, to be sure, but also by putting vigorous public pressure, so far lacking, on the dozen rebel groups that routinely raid convoys.
Exaggerated death tolls also make it difficult for relief organizations to deliver their services. Khartoum considers the inflated numbers to be evidence that all groups that deliver aid to Darfur are actually adjuncts of the activist groups that the regime considers its enemies, and thus finds justification for delaying visas, refusing to allow shipments of supplies and otherwise putting obstacles in the way of aid delivery.
Lastly, mortality one-upmanship by advocacy groups threatens to inure the public to both current and future catastrophes. If 400,000 becomes the de facto benchmark for action, other bloody conflicts around the globe — in Sri Lanka, Colombia, Somalia — seem to pale in comparison. Ultimately, the inflated claims fuel a death race in which aid and action are based not on facts but on which advocacy group yells the loudest.
Two-hundred thousand dead in Darfur is egregious enough. No matter how noble their intentions, there’s no need for activists to kill more Darfuris than the conflict itself already has.
I agree with nearly everything he has written there. I’ll just note that, on this page, the SDC website doesn’t say absolutely definitively that the genocide has killed 400,000. Rather, it uses the decidedly slippery formulation of saying that it “has… already claimed as many as 400,000 lives.”
“As many as… ” is not any kind of a scientific or systematic quantity. If SDC wants to be taken seriously as a good-faith participant in the discussion over Darfur, they should quit their partisan and fear-stoking exaggeration and go with the same figures that the best-informed people in the humanitarian-aid community are using. (They might also note that not all of the killing and mayhem is caused by the Government and its allies. A non-negligible part has been caused by the anti-government forces– and some of them have had their anti-government belligerence hardened by the prospect they might expect extra political help to be whipped up on their behalf by outsiders from the SDC.)
I would also note, regarding what Dealey wrote here: “If diplomacy, not war, is the ultimate goal for resolving the conflict in Darfur, the United States must maintain its credibility as an honest broker” that for the US to maintain its credibility is important in any case, not just when there’s a prospect it might be involved in some way in the Darfur peace negotiations. (Which actually, I don’t think there is, much, these days… After the Somalia debacle, I don’t think the Bush administration has much credibility as an honest broker in most of Africa.)
But we need to remember that exaggerated claims about rights abuses have also frequently been used to goad countries into wars. (Remember the Kuwaiti babies in 1990?) Waving the bloody shirt is a time-honored tactic of the war-mongers. That’s why it is always very important to stay sober, calm, and very, very close to the evidence when reporting rights abuses.
There was one small pro-Darfur organization in this country, Damanga, which last year was openly urging the US to engage in a policy of “regime change” in Sudan as a response to the suffering in Darfur. Luckily, Damanga did take that call for warmaking off its website.
Anyway, I am glad that the ASA made the ruling it did. If you read the whole ruling, and the whole of Sam Dealey’s article, you can get a fairly good idea of what the best evidence about the casualties is, and where it’s coming from.
Ignatieff– Still Getting Iraq Wrong
In the year before March 2003 when he was publicly egging on the Bushites’ rush to invade Iraq, Michael Ignatieff was still a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Then, and for quite a while after March 2003, he would write enthusiastically about “we” Americans, and “our dilemmas”, etc etc…
Sometime in 2004, he became a little bit less enthusiastic about the US presence in Iraq. Not necessarily about the fact of the invasion and subsequent occupation, but more about the way it had been done.
I should note that in all his lengthy, very self-referential, and no doubt handsomely paid-for articles, in the NYT magazine and elsewhere, Ignatieff still referred wholeheartedly to “our” dilemmas as US citizens.
Then in late 2005, something happened. He quit Harvard, returned to his birth-country, Canada, and ran for and won a seat in the Canadian parliament. When asked by Canadians about all that US “we” talk, he said he had just been using it to try to make his arguments in our US public discourse more convincing.
Thanks a lot, Michael.
Now, he is deputy leader of Canada’s venerable Liberal Party, and apparently trying to think himself into the position of a national leader. As what seems like another step in his lengthy saga of self-reinvention, last Sunday he published this essay in the NYT mag, under the title “Getting Iraq Wrong.”
Well, he still is, as you’ll see if you read the piece carefully. Which I have just found time to do, this afternoon. So I am happy to give you, after the jump here– the annotated “Ignatieff Getting Iraq Wrong”
Just before we go there, though, I’d like to note that this lengthy discussion on ‘liberal hawks’, from JWN in mid-May of this year, is also quite relevant to M. Ignatieff.
Anyway, now you can go and read the annotated text.
US congress about to increase ‘Subsidies of Mass Destruction’?
H’mmm, I’ve recently been writing about the numbers of people killed by Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction back in the 1980s. I guess it was around 25,000 people at the time– though many of the 100,000 Iranians contaminated by the Iraqi CW suffered mightily over the years that followed (and until today.)
The number of women, men, and children who die quite avoidable deaths in low-income countries every few months because of the completely unfair (and under WTO rules, most probably actually illegal) subsidies that the US and other rich countries give to their agricultural producers is almost certainly higher than that.
Therefore I think we ought to get used to calling them Subsidies of Mass Destruction (SMD’s.)
And right now, the US Congress is considering provisions in the 2007-2012 Farm Bill that are set not just to keep the US’s agricultural subsidies in place, but also to increase them. The House of Representatives passed its version of the five-year Farm Bill on July 27. This PDF info sheet from the House Ag Committee tells us “proudly” that the bill preserves and increases subsidies paid on 25 different commodities, including those two “Kings” of the traditional US plantation/slavery system, cotton and rice, which still are “Kings” in this Farm Bill.
Oh, also, shock, horror. This bill is going to put a “hard cap” on the income of anyone who’s eligible for getting the subsidies. It’s as low (irony alert) as one million dollars per person…
So you can really see that these subsidies are not really about “preserving the small American family farmer”, at all. They’re about massive taxpayer handouts to Big Agribusiness.
Oxfam has done a lot of solid research over the past few years into how the US cotton subsidies destroy the livelihoods of miliions of farmers in low-income countries around the world.
For example, this press release from September 2002. It said:
- US subsidies to cotton producers are contributing to mass poverty in some of the world’s poorest countries, according to a report published today by the international development agency Oxfam.
Government support to the 25,000 domestic cotton producers in the US totals $3.9 billion annually, more than three times the US foreign assistance to Africa’s 500 million people.
“The US is the world’s strongest proponent of free trade, but when poor cotton farmers in Mali try to trade on the world market, they must compete against massively subsidized American cotton,” says Phil Twyford. “This makes a mockery of the idea of a level playing field. The rules are rigged against the poor.”
American cotton subsidies are highly targeted to benefit the largest farming operations. The largest 10 per cent of American cotton agro-businesses received three-quarters of the total subsidies.
The Government of Brazil is launching a complaint with the World Trade Organization, claiming that US cotton support constitutes an unfair trade practice.
More than 10 million people in Central and West Africa depend directly on cotton. It is a major source of revenue for countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Benin. The amount of money America spends on cotton is more than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso, where 2 million people depend on cotton and half of who live below the poverty line.
Oxfam says that Africa is losing $300 million a year, based on estimates from the International Cotton Advisory Council, and that the withdrawal of US subsidies would raise the world price of cotton by 11 cents a pound.
World cotton prices have sunk to as low now as any time since the Great Depression. The US subsidies are pushing prices even further into collapse…
Well, in March 2005 the Brazilians did win the “case” against the US cotton subsidies that they’d lodged with the WTO’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism… Do you think that put an end to the US cotton subsidies??
Short answer: No.
Today, I found a handful of great online resources about the nature of the US cotton subsidies, and the industry that has grown up around them.
First of all, I found this totally awesome online database, that’s produced by an outfit called the Environmental Working Group. The EWG’s doughty researchers used FOIA applications to the US Dept of Agriculture to free up some much-needed public information about the structure of the subsidies. That page there shows you how strongly receipt of the subsidies was concentrated into a few hands in 2005. If you noodle around that database a little bit you can find out all kinds of information about the recipients of the subsidies, too.
On this page, fairly low down, I found out that in 2005, cotton subsidies totaled $3.3 billion. Ah, and here is the cotton page itself. More great figures there.
But here was one of my greatest online finds of today: A brilliantly researched and written investigative piece about the whole cotton subsidy phenomenon written by CNN-Money reporter G. Pascal Zachary in December 2005.
His whole article is well worth reading by anyone interested in this whole crazy/lethal enterprise of US cotton subsidies.
Here are my highlights:
Continue reading “US congress about to increase ‘Subsidies of Mass Destruction’?”