CSM, Charles Taylor, LRA, etc

And so, under the new order at the Christian Science Monitor, I do have a new column “occasional contribution” in today’s paper. (It is also here.) It’s on the Charles Taylor case– the trial of the former president of Liberia that is being conducted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. This trial is being conducted not in the SCSL’s own seat in Freetown, but in one of the ICC’s unused courtrooms in The Hague, instead.
In the piece I write the following text… Be aware, though, that the mark-ups, formating, and hyperlinks in what follows are ** Exclusive to JWN!

    In 2002, when the UN was figuring out how to deal with the aftermath of the many atrocities committed during Sierra Leone’s civil war, they tried to correct flaws that had become evident during the work of Africa’s oldest war-crimes court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Serious criticisms of the ICTR have been expressed – by myself and others – on five main grounds. Despite the excellent motives of ICTR’s founders and officials, it has been:

      1. selective in its choice of cases…
      2. disconnected, both geographically and conceptually, from the primary stakeholders whom it seeks to serve, inside Rwanda…
      3. very expensive, gobbling up international aid dollars…
      4. largely unaccountable, either to the survivors of the Rwandan genocide or to anyone else,
      5. [a]nd it has strongly polarized Rwandan politics.

    So in Sierra Leone, the UN located its new war-crimes court inside the country, and, by making it a “joint” court with the national justice system, they tried to maximize the good effects it would have on that system. Also, alongside the court, the UN established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that could – like its earlier model in South Africa – help build national reconciliation while getting the truth out about earlier atrocities. (The Sierra Leonean TRC finished its work in 2004, leaving a mixed record of achievement.)

Regarding the “selectivity of indictments” at the SCSL, I’ll note that it has indicted Charles Taylor and ten other individuals, with all the others apparently being Sierra Leonians. It has not, however, indicted any representatives of the numerous international shady businesses– arms dealers, etc– whose decisions and support kept the SL civil war going for so many long years. Indeed, in the article I note that one of Charles Taylor’s closest business partners was the US televangelist Pat Robertson. Maybe, to make a truly effective point that these modern-era war-crimes courts will make sure no-one, however well connected, is above the law, the SCSL could have indicted Robertson on a charge of “aiding and abetting”, at the very least?
As it is, though, don’t all these courts– and especially the ICC– look worryingly like European-dominated institutions that seek to haul over the coals some naughty Africans while completely ignoring the role that people of European heritage have played for centuries, and all too often continue to play, in fomenting, enabling, and conniving in the commission of atrocious violence in Africa?
Then, regarding the expense of the SCSL, I did try to do find out the size of its global budget. The best estimate I could come up with, from combining the figures in various annual reports and doing one needed act of interpolation (for FY2003-04), was that for its whole duration, 2002-2009, SCSL will have budgets totaling about $200 million… and that, to try a total of 11 indictees. Which would be a per-case processing cost of around $18 million. This would be a considerable improvement over the ICTR, whose per-case costs were at one point running at about $43 million… But the figure still looks outrageous and excessive.
(Per-case processing costs for the many, often very complex amnesty applications processed by South Africa’s TRC came to just under $4,300– see my Amnesty After Atrocity book, p.193.)
You might also want to take into consideration that in 2004 the GDP per capita in PPP$ for Sierra Leone’s 5.3 million war-battered people was $561, while for Liberians it was literally unmeasurable because of the lengthy perpetuation of post-civil war impoverishment and social breakdown in the country. (In the Netherlands, meanwhile, it was a very comfortable $31,789.) In 2004, Sierra Leone received a total of $359.7 million of overseas aid.
… And now, more news just in from IRIN in Kampala, where Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda told reporters on 4 July that the Ugandan penal code would have to be changed to include in it a provision to use Mato Oput, which is a system of “traditional” justice practised by the Acholi community of northern Uganda.
Big hat-tip to Jonathan for passing on the link to this story, btw!
The Acholi have been the community worst affected by the 11-year war between Lord’s Resistance Army insurgents and the government forces. Both sides in that war have used brutal, extremely inhumane tactics against noncombatants– mainly, but by no means exclusively Acholi– who have been caught in the middle. The Acholi are also the community from which LRA leader Joseph Kony and his main sidekicks all emerged.
Meanwhile, Kony and three of his sidekicks are the subjects of a full 50% of the indictments that ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has issued so far in his four years on the job, and for perhaps understandable institution-building reasons Ocampo has so far remained quite unwilling to withdraw or even suspend those indictments… a fact that has considerably complicated the ability of Uganda’s peace negotiators to complete the task that most Acholis and perhaps most other Ugandans as well want them to achieve, which is to get Kony and his sidekicks out of the bush— a place from where they are able to pose a continuing threat to all the peoples of Northern Uganda.
(Last July I spent a bit of time in Uganda researching this whole situation. You can read a lot of my writings on that if you go to this post on Transitional Justice Forum and follow the links from there.)
The fate of Charles Taylor– offered a safe haven and then later handed over from it to the Americans and the UN for trial in the US-backed SCSL– has been mentioned as an additional complicating factor by people involved in the Northern Uganda peace negotiations.
Here’s a bit more from that IRIN report of the statements from Rugunda– who is also the Kampala government’s main negotiator in the peace talks with the LRA:

    Government and LRA delegations to the peace talks in the Southern Sudanese capital of Juba reached an agreement on 29 June on the principles for handling accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed during the conflict.
    “The parties committed themselves to ensuring accountability and reconciliation,” said Rugunda. “This will require all those who committed crimes to admit the crimes they committed. They will be taken through a transparent justice mechanism to be agreed upon.”
    Those who confess to war crimes under the Mato Oput mechanism will be required to ask for forgiveness and pay reparations.
    Government soldiers accused of human rights abuses will, however, continue to be tried under martial law, the minister said.
    Comparing the two justice systems, Ruganda said the national penal code was punitive, while Mato Oput was “restorative [and] hence promotes reconciliation”.
    “We agreed to formulate and adopt an alternative justice mechanism which will draw on the strengths of the two justice mechanisms and address the weaknesses of each system,” he said. “By so doing, the question of impunity will be addressed while at the same time reconciliation will be promoted.”

All power to the peace negotiators there, I say! I am still haunted by the round-circle discussion I had with a group of camp leaders in Unyama IDP camp last July… and how the residents in that bleak, dusty camp could only look out at the green hillsides where the ruins of their homesteads were, since the ongoing state of war and the government’s regs still kept them cooped up in the camp… and how wistfully one of them said the thing he really hoped for most was that peace could be achieved before the next planting season.
Didn’t happen. Let’s hope that now no more planting seasons will pass before peace can be achieved and these people are allowed to return to their homes and farms. I hope the very urbane Mr. Ocampo is capable of understanding the importance of that.

Just what did “The Declaration” Declare?

Here in the United States, it’s July 4th, a day we commemorate with fireworks, cook-outs, concerts, and speeches. So what exactly is it that we celebrate?
Nominally, today marks the 231st anniversary of revolutionary America formally declaring its separation from Great Britain. The primary author of the famous document was, of course, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson’s Monticello home, here in Charlottesville, has become a living educational memorial to Jefferson. I recently was honored to be a “Jefferson Fellow” at the adjoining Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, (ICJS) where scholars, in part, explore the ongoing legacy of Jefferson for our world today.
Despite the ready association of Jefferson with today’s date, do we understand what the core purpose of Jefferson’s Declaration was?
Easy, right? If so, and at the risk of turning this into NPR’s “wait, wait,… don’t tell me” quiz show, then let’s try this question: how did America’s famous Declaration begin? Was it:

a. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…”
b. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…”
c. ” When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station….”
d. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”
e. “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…”

————————–
If you the reader are like the vast majority of Americans, you will be inclined to answer “b,” but sorry, that is the Declaration’s second paragraph, not the first.

Answer “e” is also incorrect; that’s the opening to the 1945 Vietnamese Declaration (among dozens of Declarations in world history that emulated America’s in one form or another.)
Answer “d” also is incorrect, as this is Article 1 from the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
With answer “a” of course being the preamble to the 1789 US Constitution, then you surely knew the answer to be “c.”

Lest we get too confident in our history IQ, how many of us can readily recall just what the 1776 American Declaration… well… “declared?”
Even if you had a solid American history education, don’t feel too bad if you’re a bit confused by the question. Assuming you went to an American school that still taught “civics” in some form, your lessons on “The Declaration” likely included much contemplation of the meaning, the “codes,” of Jefferson’s second paragraph. Just what fundamental “truths” did the new American nation “hold” to be “self-evident?” And what about all that seeming hypocrisy regarding all persons (“men”) being created equal, even as so many of them were then in tolerated bondage?
Until quite recently, very little in the vast scholarship on Jefferson and the Declaration addresses the “simple” question of just what was the Declaration’s purpose? The curious state of such learned discourse is neatly illustrated in a short 1999 text, edited by Joseph Ellis and entitled, “What Did the Declaration Declare?” This book provides splendid examples of the great scholarly debates over the last half of the 20th Century about how the Declaration was written, about the merits or exaggerations in the list of grievances against George III, and just which intellectual current influenced Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration’s second paragraph. Was it John Locke? Or was it the Scottish Enlightenment? Or was it some Saxon mythology that only Jefferson could fathom?
Whatever Jefferson’s intellectual parentage, Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 tribute to Jefferson’s “second paragraph” still nicely sidesteps such inquiry:

“All honor to Jefferson… who had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Yet from Lincoln to the present, few scholars or pundits have provided much substantive comment about the Declaration’s first sentence, which in full reads:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Parenthetically, my own work focuses on just what Jefferson and his colleagues meant by a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” (I have much to publish on this rarely-considered clause, and yes, it has a rather compelling contemporary ring…. Imagine — American leaders once caring about world opinion.)
I am pleased though to acknowledge that the two-century-old intellectual logjam blocking inquiry into the Declaration’s first sentence has been nicely broken by Harvard’s David Armitage, an historian and “English School” international relations scholar.
In a brilliant 2002 William & Mary Quarterly article and in a slender new book, entitled “The Declaration of Independence: A Global History,” Armitage contends directly that the fundamental purpose of the American Declaration was to…
(drum roll…. turn the page…. whoosh, poof, boom, zing, crackle,sizzle…, bang!….)

Continue reading “Just what did “The Declaration” Declare?”

Palestine: ‘Parallel unilateralisms’ revived?

Efraim Halevy, who was head of the Mossad 1998-2002 and Sharon’s National Security Adviser for a year thereafter, has an important article in this week’s New Republic in which he argues that– given the “dire straits” in which the Mahmoud Abbas camp finds itself, and the “dire straits” the Americans find themselves regarding Palestine– it will likely soon be necessary for a “Plan B” that involves concluding some form of “a long-term ceasefire” with Hamas (in Gaza) and Fateh and Hamas (in the West Bank.)
You can read the fulltext version of Halevy’s article here.
I find this article particularly interesting because if, as I suspect, Halevy represents a significant body of opinion in the Israeli security establishment, then we might indeed see Israel returning to some form of the intentionally “unilateralist” approach to the Palestinian question that marked its policy under, in particular, Sharon… and see this, moreover, in the context of a working agreement with the predominant trend in the Palestinian body politic– that is, Hamas– that would “allow” Hamas also to pursue its project of Palestinian rebuilding in a parallel but also unilateral fashion.
Which is where things looked as if they might be headed back in early March 2006, when I was able to spend a few days in Gaza and interview some Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahhar, and emerged with the clear sense that the project they sought there was to be able to pursue their own form of unilateralism in parallel with the Israelis. (See most that reporting pulled together in this mid-2006 Boston Review article. You can find some more detailed field-reporting of the interviews there here and here.)
In the BR piece, I wrote:

    Over the past nine months, the Israelis and the Palestinians have each witnessed far-reaching political upheavals. The specifics have been different, but both resulted from strong shifts in popular opinion against the concept of a negotiated peace. This repudiation was confirmed for Palestinians by Hamas’s surprise victory at the polls in January and for Israelis by the waning of the Labor Party and its former allies in the peace camp and the swift rise of Kadima, whose rallying cry has been the pursuit of unilateralist “solutions” in Gaza and the West Bank.
    In the best-case scenario for the next few years, we would see each side forming a stable administration (with the Palestinians able to control all the unruly factions) and in parallel deciding to focus on domestic matters while postponing the conclusion of a final peace.
    Certainly, inside both societies, many, many people are ready to simply turn their backs on the members of the other nation…

So here is Halevy, today:

    in the likely event that the joint Israeli-American plan worked out in Egypt to support Abbas and isolate Hamas fails, it will be necessary to move to Plan B. This plan is predicated first and foremost on accepting realities on the ground and turning them to the best possible advantage. Hamas has demonstrated that when in distress, it is pliable to practical arrangements on the ground. Therefore, parallel to maintaining pressure on Hamas on a daily basis, isolating it regionally and internationally, contacts should be established with Hamas to see if a long-term armistice with it can be obtained. It must be a tough eyeball-to-eyeball exercise in which Hamas is brought to a point where its self-interest dictates such an understanding. An armistice will entail provisions for maintaining security, ending arms smuggling into the Strip, et cetera. Until this is achieved, constant military pressure must be maintained. In scope, this could resemble the original armistice agreements negotiated and agreed to by Israel and the Arab states after the War of Independence in 1948-1949. At that time, too, the Arab states refused to recognize Israel–just as does Hamas today–but they nevertheless signed binding agreements with it. Armistice would not be a political determination of the conflict but a down-to-earth method of reducing tensions–a goal most essential, inter alia to American interests in the Middle East at large.
    Parallel to this, identical agreements should be negotiated with Fatah in the West Bank. Fatah cannot pretend to represent Gaza, and it would be hard put to acquiesce in accepting Hamas, again as a limited player. Yet, should it refuse to do so, Fatah might face a West Bank implosion. This it cannot afford. Inter-Arab support for this construction must be sought. Both Fatah and Hamas must commit themselves to this arrangement at the highest Arab state level. It must ultimately be consecrated at the U.N. Security Council with strong U.S. support…
    Should current policy in Washington and Jerusalem and Ramallah flounder, Plan B should be on the table for consideration six months from now.

Of course, history can never simply be respooled and replayed. If Zahhar, Haniyyeh, and Co. sounded strongly as though they might be ready for such a vision when I spoke with them in March 2006, that doesn’t mean they would be equally ready now. Between then and now, a lot of additional harm has been inflicted on the Palestinians, quite deliberately, by Israel and the US, with the express intention of trying to persuade the Palestinians to turn against the Hamas leadership that had emerged as the result of a free election campaign and fairly conducted elections… And then, there was the arming, training, and activation of the Palestinian ‘Contras’ under Dahlan’s command (and doubtless with the planning help of the Svengali of the original Contras scheme, Elliott Abrams.)
Hamas and the broad networks of Palestinians who support it showed that neither the lethal, anti-humane pressure of the economic siege nor the military pressure of the Dahlanists could force them to cry “uncle.”
Also, the US position in the whole region has deteriorated quite significantly from what it was 15 months ago.
But still, it is interesting to see Halevy coming back with that proposal there.
Interesting, too, to see the clear-eyed way in which this very well-informed Israeli securocrat challenges the Bushists’ ignorantly perky assessments of the situation in the region with his own battalions of facts:

    Hamas is indeed in dire straits. But, unfortunately, it is not the only party to be experiencing a tough predicament. Whereas Mubarak initially condemned the Hamas takeover, naming it a military coup directed against Abbas, he clearly changed his tune a day after the summit and said he would be sending back his military mission to Gaza the moment things cooled down. He even hinted that there might still be room for reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions. Similar sentiments were echoed by Qatar (the Arab states’ representative on the U.N. Security Council), Russia, and others.
    The Ramallah government of Salam Fayyad is apparently also in dire straits. In recent days one commander after another has been dismissed for incompetence in the recent Gaza debacle. There have been arrests in the West Bank of Hamas operatives by government forces, but all know that, were it not for Israel’s almost daily incursions, security cannot be maintained. Israel wishes to move “hard and fast,” as Livni said, in tandem with Abbas; but what timetable can Abbas offer for establishing complete and effective control of the West Bank? When and how can he restore authority in Gaza? Can he negotiate a political settlement with Israel ignoring Gaza? How many real divisions does he have here and now? How many will he have in six months’ time? And if, as he said this weekend, he will hold new general elections isolating and banning Hamas from participation, what credibility will the results have in the eyes of the public? Can he hold credible elections in the West Bank alone if, as is clear, he cannot restore any vestige of his authority in the Gaza Strip. His call this weekend, in Paris, for the dispatch of an international force to take over control of Gaza and to facilitate the participation of the Gazans in the planned elections is testimony to the world of fantasy in which he is now functioning. Nobody will send troops into Gaza to uproot Hamas, and Abbas must surely know this because his French hosts made this clear to him.
    Further afield, the United States is similarly in dire straits…

On a related note, in this earlier post I wrote about the shambolic state of internal disarray inside Fateh since the debacle in Gaza two weeks ago. How deep is that disarray? I would say, very deep indeed, with the main piece of evidence on that coming from the fact that Fateh co-founder and longtime leader Hani al-Hassan felt obliged to criticize those Fateh factions (read Dahlan) that had taken money and weapons from the US and Israelis in order to fight Hamas… And then, Abu Mazen felt obliged to fire Hassan from his role as “presidential advisor.”
The tireless Badger has helpfully given us more details, in English, of what Hassan said on Al-Jazeera on June 28:

    Moderator: In statements on the program “No boundaries”, Hani al-Hassan, a member of the Fatah central committee, accused a faction within the [Fatah] movement of associating itself with the plan laid down by General Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator between Israel and the Palestinians, the gist of which plan was to ignite the fires of internal fighting. But he also said Hamas went [beyond what was necessary] in its reaction to the events in Gaza.
    Tape of al-Hassan interview: “What Dayton was trying to accomplish was to find a faction that believes in internal fighting; but what was surprising to us in Fatah was that Hamas went beyond reacting to the Dayton faction, and this was a big surprise, because the actual takeover of power in Gaza did damage to the democratic idea”.
    Moderator: Hani al-Hassan also stressed that what happened in Gaza was the collapse of the plan of the American general Dayton.
    Tape of al-Hassan interview: “What really collapsed was the Dayton Plan, and what collapsed with it was the small group of his collaborators who believed in the American point of view. As for the Fatah movement, the Fatah movement did not collapse in Gaza, because 95% of it has no relationship with that Plan.”

If Abu Mazen really has broken definitively with Hani al-Hassan– or, the other way around– then that is huge. At this point, and given his very long history in the Fateh movement (which you can read about in my 1984 book on the early years of Fateh, still in print today!) Hassan probably has a lot more credibility among Palestinians both inside– and perhaps even more crucially, outside– the homeland than anything Abu Mazen can muster.
I shall watch with interest the further fallout inside Fateh… Or maybe, I’ll go back and re-read my December 2005 lament to the “current, cascading collapse of Palestinian secular nationalism.”

Mr. Blair discovers Palestine

I was reading Paul Rogers’s latest contribution to Open Demcracy, at the end of which he considers the question of whether Tony Blair will be able to have any impact at all in his new role as the envoy of the “Quartet” to Palestinian reconstruction and reform effort. In it, Paul lays out a fairly long list of things Blair ought to do if he wants to succeed, including being “prepared to engage in around five years of low-profile, media-averse effort”, etc etc… And then he concludes that “Under such circumstances, it is just conceivable that Blair might have a useful role to play.”
There are a number of structural problems in Blair’s role that Paul fails to mention, however. These include:

    1. The fact that Condi Rice and others US officials have made quite clear that Blair’s “mandate” (hah! evocative word in this context, don’t you think?) from the Quartet does not extend to Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking but only to overseeing and boosting some aspects of internal Palestinian reform.
    2. The intractability of these internal Palestinian reform efforts so long as (a) the (US-goaded) Fateh leadership continues to refuse to share power with Hamas, since Fateh itself is in a shambolic state of internal disarray and quite incapable of building any functioning national institutions on its own; and also, Hamas remains a potent force in Palestinian politics in the West Bank and the diaspora– not just in Gaza.
    3. The utter intractability of these internal Palestinian reform efforts so long as (b) the Israelis do nothing significant to dismantle the West Bank chokepoint/checkpoints that prevent the West Bank’s economy from functioning at any even minimally acceptable level.
    4. The pointlessness of these internal Palestinian reform efforts so long as (c) the Israelis make no significant engagement with serious, final-status peace diplomacy. Various ‘peace processors’ over the past 40 years have imagined you could build a tractable and functioning Palestinian leadership in a vacuum, quite insulated from the repeated smash-ups in the peace diplomacy. You can’t. If there’s no progress visible towards final-status peace you might have a functioning Palestinian leadership– but it won’t be “tractable.”
    5. This diplomacy doesn’t have five years to wait. If the overlords of the Israeli settlement project continue pouring their concrete over the West Bank for even the next 1-2 years at the same rate they’ve been going, there won’t be any viable two-state peace. Indeed, the whole region might be in an uproar.

Re the first point above, I was in a conversation with a couple of very savvy people last week in which they were speculating as to why one earth Blair would even think of taking a job with such a very, very limited “mandate.”
“Blair has to know he can go to Bush any day he wants and get his mandate changed,” one of these guys said. “It doesn’t make any sense for him otherwise? Why on earth would he take on the job if he can’t take on the crucial, Palestinian-Israeli aspect of it?”
Well, it is true that Bush owes Blair… big time!
But for Blair to elbow his way into the diplomatic portions of this job and then to hope to succeed at it– well, he has to be prepared to take on not only Condi but also Cheney and the whole ranks of maximalist pro-Israelis who are so deeply embedded within the whole US political system, not just the White House.
Does he have the guts as well as the smarts required to do this? I remain unconvinced. For all that he seems– especially by comparison with our own head of government here in the US– to be something of an intellectual “genius”, he is still someone who evidently lets his heart (or who knows what) rule his head when it comes to vital matters Middle Eastern. I mean, as I wrote a number of times in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Brits should— given their long and frequently harsh experience in Mesopotamia– have known much better than to give any support at all to Bush’s criminally ill-conceived invasion and “transformation” plan there…
So why should we think Blair could be any smarter over Palestine, today, then he was over Iraq five years ago?
Especially, given that he has done absolutely nothing to signal any second thoughts, reflectiveness, or real self-awareness about the terrible, terrible mistakes he made in 2002-03.
It would be great if he could rise to the moment and do something helpful in Palestine. But this man? Given his track record, I doubt it.

Alan Johnston– freed?

AP is reporting that BBC reporter Alan Johnston has been freed by Hamas from the clutches of the Gaza sub-clan/militia that has held him for nearly three months now, and that he is now in Hamas’s hands.
Great news, if confirmed. Even better news for him and his family once he gets home to Scotland.
I admire Johnston tremendously.
Of course, there is still the possibility of many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip… Let’s hope the Israelis don’t choose tonight to launch some big new attack on Hamas, eh?
And no word yet on whether any of the other literally thousands of people in the Middle East who have been unjustifiably deprived of their liberty will see a similar liberation any time soon.

How likely is a dramatic Bush shift on Iran?

In the post I put up here in the wee hours of this morning, I was writing about the (perhaps fairly divergent) assessments that the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, Gen.Mohsen Rezai, and the US reporter Michael Hirsh have of the likelihood that President George W. Bush might, within the 18 months remaining in his presidency, enact a “dramatic” shift towards de-escalating the US’s currently still high level of tension with Iran.
This morning, I just went back into that post to clarify the paragraph dealing with that issue a little bit.
I started to add in my own assessment of the likelihood of such a shift, but then I realized that was fairly diversionary from the main thrust of the post. Plus, it meant that my own assessment got buried ways down near the bottom of the post. Bad idea!
So here’s my assessment of the likelihood of such a shift. I would it put it at above 50%, for the following reasons:

    1. With every week that passes there is still a fairly high chance of either a fairly catastrophic event befalling some portion of the US forces distributed widely throughout Iraq, or a much broader catastrophic collapse of the entire US position in Iraq (through collapse of the supply lines, or whatever.) In the event of such a catastrophe, which could– if it occurs while the US troops are remain as widely and vulnerably distributed as they have been under the “surge”– directly threaten the lives of many hundreds of US soldiers, the US authorities will feel a strong need to do whatever it takes to stabilize the situation in Iraq and find a way to concentrate their forces back within more easily defensible perimeters prior to extracting a good portion or perhaps all of them completely.
    It is important to “realize” at this point that the US citizenry really doesn’t believe in this “mission” in Iraq any more, whatever it is. That means they (we) would be very upset– to put it mildly– by any further large-scale US losses at all. We are also now deep into the next election.
    “Whatever it takes” most certainly could (and in my view, should) include talking seriously to the Iranians about all the outstanding matters at issue between the two nations. (The agenda of the whole Grand Bargain, that is.)
    2. The faction now becoming more powerful within the Bush administration is not composed of neoconservative ideological numbskulls like those who controlled the presidency from 2001 until recently. Condi Rice might continue to reveal herself as an intellectual (and moral) lightweight. But Cheney’s influence has been waning appreciably, while Defense Secretary Gates– who is a realist in strategic affairs much more than he’s an ideologue– has quietly been increasing his degree of control over the levers of strategic decisionmaking. (He was even able to force the early exit of Joint Chiuefs Chauir Peter Pace. That was a good sign.)
    I would wager that Gates and those who are working with him are acutely aware of the risks described in #1 above. From Gates’s point of view, as someone who presumably wants to do the best possible job he can under the lousy circumstances he agreed to take on last November, avoiding those kinds of catastrophe would be far, far better than responding to them.

I should also note that there’s another aspect of this question to be addressed, linked to the dynamics of next year’s phase of the US election, when the contest may really heat up in a polarized, party-political way.
We absolutely should not assume that the Democrats would be more dove-ish, on issues relating to Iran, than the Republicans. This, because of the much stronger role that pro-Israel lobby money has within the Democratic Party than in the GOP.
That is, the Dems might be more noticeably more dove-ish than the Republicans on issues linked to Iraq alone; but put Iran’s strategic weight into the mix there as well and the matter becomes far less clear-cut.
So the pro-Grand Bargain Iranians (such as Rezai seems to be) may well prefer to at least start the talks on the GB agenda as soon as possible, so that the Bushites (Gates-ites?) don’t have as much fear that by sitting down with “the mullahs of Tehran” they might get badly mauled next year by the mutually competing Democratic candidates. By then, the Bushites might even hope to have some significant achievements they could point to, from their diplomacy with Iran.
For a US administration that has as few achievements as the Bushites currently have– especially after their immigration reform plan went down in flames last week–I am sure the attractions of pulling off some kind of a “Nixon to China” diplomatic/strategic coup with Iran must seem pretty alluring to at least some of the more intelligent and visionary people inside the administration? But I think they’d better get this underway pretty fast.
Maybe Rezai should put just a little more on the table to tempt Washington to act quickly?

A high-level Iranian overture

Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh had an important piece in today’s WaPo, reporting on the fact that Gen. Mohsen Rezai, the former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the secretary of the country’s extremely powerful Expediency Council, had called him in and given him some important messages to (as it seems) pass on the Bushites.
Rezai seemed to support the proposal made by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei that Iran might commit to a moratorium, halt, or “timeout” (in US sports parlance) of its uranium enrichment program.
Hirsh:

    “What it means is for Iran to stay at the [enrichment] level it has reached, with no further progress. By the same token, the U.N. Security Council will not issue another resolution,” said Rezai, who indicated that the idea is gaining support inside the Iranian regime. “The Iranian nuclear issue has to be resolved through a new kind of solution like this.”

And this:

    Rezai’s effort at outreach suggests that the policy of diplomatic coercion being pursued by the United States, Britain, France and Germany is working, at least to some degree. Iran has grown weary of its economic and political isolation, and senior officials in Tehran remain preoccupied with the possibility of a U.S. military strike. Now Iran is eager to satisfy ElBaradei’s demands for further clarity on the illicit history of its program — so much so that [Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Ali] Larijani met twice with him last week.
    What is not clear is whether the Bush administration will accept a “timeout,” as opposed to a full suspension of Iran’s enrichment activities. It also is not clear, despite Rezai’s hopes, that Bush has given up on regime change; hence the “presidential finding” Bush recently signed that authorizes the CIA to conduct non-lethal operations to harass the Iranian regime. Having isolated Tehran diplomatically, the Bush administration seems content to simply wait until it “caves.”
    But my 10-day visit to Iran in late June, mostly spent in Tehran, convinced me that any hopes that Iran will just give up are badly misguided…

Hirsh reviews the history of the gestures the Iranians have made to the Americans since 9/11, primarily in late 2001 and in 2003– and of their having been rudely rebuffed by the Bushites on both those earlier occasions.
He adds:

    The Bush team is in danger of letting the current opening from Iran pass it by as well. The administration doesn’t seem to recognize that diplomatic coercion by itself can’t work — not with a country that has turned its nuclear program into a national crusade. And one hears little acknowledgment from senior U.S. officials that the United States and Iran share some critical interests. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a June 8 roundtable with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, called the U.S.-Iranian relationship “overall rather zero-sum” and confessed that she couldn’t figure Iran out. “I think it’s a very opaque place, and it’s a political system I don’t understand very well,” she said.

I guess I had missed reading any reports of those remarks. Goodness, if Condi really did describe the relationship as “rather zero-sum” that really does show how very mediocre her own intellect and information base are.
Amazing and disturbing, too, that she would confess in semi-public that she didn’t much understand the political system in a country as vital to the security of that vital part of the world as Iraq!
Hirsh continues:

    It is this impression of inevitably clashing interests that Rezai was trying hard to dispel. He pointed out that his is the only country that can help Washington control Shiite militias in Iraq, slow the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan and tame Hezbollah’s still-dangerous presence in Lebanon all at once. “If America pursues a different approach than confronting Iran, our dealings will change fundamentally,” he said.
    My conversations with hard-liners and reformers inside Tehran also suggested something deeper: that under the right circumstances, Iran may still be willing to stop short of building a bomb. “Iran would like to have the technology, and that is enough for deterrence,” says S.M.H. Adeli, Iran’s moderate, urbane former ambassador to London.
    And what of other overlapping interests? Let’s start with Iraq, the one area where Washington does seem to acknowledge it needs Tehran’s help, even as the administration continues to accuse Iran of delivering sophisticated makeshift bombs to Iraqi militants. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government “is of strategic importance to us,” Rezai said. “We want this government to stay in power. Rival Sunni countries oppose Maliki. We haven’t.”
    … Of course, the elephant in the room is Iran’s toxic relationship with Israel, especially President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial that the Holocaust happened and his threats toward a U.S. ally. But several Iranian officials hinted that Ahmadinejad crossed a red line in Iranian politics when he pushed his rhetoric beyond the official hope that Israel would one day disappear to suggest that Tehran might help that process along. A new Iranian president would rebalance that position, they indicated.
    Still, the Iranians themselves recognize that a more dramatic shift in policy is unlikely to happen on Bush’s watch. “Mr. Bush’s government is stuck at a crossroads” between confrontation and engagement, “and it can’t make a decision,” Rezai said. “We have a saying in Farsi: When a child walks in darkness, he starts singing or making loud noises because he’s afraid of the dark. The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran, and that’s why they’re making a lot of loud noises.” Whether or not that’s true, new noises are clearly coming from Tehran. Washington should listen.

I am interested in that word “recognize” that Hirsh uses at the top of that last paragraph. As someone who frequently reports (as well as opines), I am acutely aware of the fact that the apparently descriptive verbs that a reporter uses in her/his writing often also convey the reporter’s own attitude to the truth-value of what is being said, or judged, or argued, or whatever. So when Hirsh writes that the Iranians “recognize” that a more dramatic shift of US policy toward their country is “unlikely to happen on Bush’s watch”, that clearly conveys Hirsh’s own very pessimistic view regarding that likelihood. (As opposed to writing, for example, that the Iranians “judge” the shift to be unlikely, or “consider” it to be so; neither of which verbs would convey Hirsh’s own view on the substance of the matter.)
And then, the Rezai quote that Hirsh plugs in, apparently to support the (value-loaded) statement he has just made there, in fact does not tell us that Rezai, being one influential Iranian, has made any such judgment about the likelihood of a dramatic shift on Bush’s watch. Instead, Rezai is quoted as saying merely that Bush is “at a crossroads”; and then we have that little Farsi saying, adduced to back up Rezai’s assertion that “The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran.”
My bottom line, therefore, is that Hirsh has not provided any evidence that sheds any light on what this influential Iranian thinks about the “likelihood” of a dramatic shift in US policy on Bush’s watch. Rezai may consider it likely, or unlikely. We do not know. But even if he considers it “unlikely” (i.e. a probability of < 50%; but maybe only, say, 45%), that has apparently still not stopped him from making his overture through Hirsh at this time, i.e., with 18 months more of the Bush presidency to run.
… Rezai also said something there about Iran’s support for the Iraqi government headed by Nouri al-Maliki. Regarding Iran’s close relations with another key political figure the US relies on inside Iraq, Juan Cole today had a little post on his blog with a video clip of a very jovial Iraqi President Talabani visiting his Iranian counterpart, Pres. Ahmadinejad, recently.
No surprise there for me. (But maybe for Condi?) We should all, surely, remember that Talabani, Abdel-Aziz Hakim, Ahmad Chalabi, and other stalwarts of the neocons’ plans to invade Iraq in 2003 have been close allies of the mullahs’ regime in Iran — and also of Baathist Syria– for far, far longer than they have ever been “friends” of the US, in any way, shape, or form. (Hakim– who has been relentlessly pumped up by US military spinmeisters as “the most powerful member of the Shiite alliance for the past four years, notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary, now seems to be dying of cancer in a clinic in– you guessed!– Iran… And his son Ammar, who now seems to be in line to replace him, will most likely continue in his father’s footsteps.)
But back to the main topic here: the overture from Rezai. What he was spelling out quite clearly to Hirsh were the main dimensions of what some people call the possible “Grand Bargain” between Washington and Tehran, in which Iran’s nuclear program, stability in Iraq, and other regional-stability issues would all be put on the table and resolved together.
Would such a “Grand Bargain” be a good idea? You bet it would! Certainly, it would be far, far better for everyone concerned– Iraqis, Americans, Iranians, and many others in and beyond the Middle East– than any escalation of tensions, or even (heaven forbid!) war, between these two countries.
Of course, any Grand Bargain that involved only these two governments would most likely arouse the suspicions and defensiveness, and outright opposition, of many others in the region, especially predominantly Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan that have been Washington’s “traditional” allies in the region for many decades. (And also of Israel, though I tend to think that Israel can look after itself.)
That’s why embedding a US-Iranian Grand Bargain within a broader process of regional peacemaking that also involves the Iraqi government, all of Iraq’s other neighbors, and other important regional and world powers– and to have a newly empowered UN convene this process– makes the most sense… As I have long argued, here and elsewhere.
But none of this can work without a serious rapprochement taking place between Washington and Tehran. Twenty-six years after the end of the large-scale hostage crisis between the two powers it surely is time they both started acting like responsible adults?
Rezai is strongly indicating that Iran is prepared to do so. But are the Bushites? That is still the question. It is one for which, day after day after day, Iraqis and US soldiers will continue to die in Iraq.

Bush the strategist, annotated

On Thursday, President Bush gave an address at the Naval War College that was seen by some as his response to the speech in which Sen.Richard Lugar last Monday publicly broke ranks with the President over Iraq.
Bush’s NWC speech gained some notoriety– from Juan Cole and others– because in it Bush argued that Israel– which he described as “a functioning democracy that is not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities”– is “a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq”.
How not to win friends and influence people in Iraq and in the broader Arab and Muslim worlds, eh? Who on earth does the Prez have advising him on such matters??? (Oh, that old convicted felon Elliott Abrams. Enough said.)
But anyway, I read the whole speech and thought it significant enough, as a public expression of what exactly this President thinks he is doing in Iraq, and where he thinks he’s headed, that I decided to try to do one of annotations on the text. But I wanted to find a more dynamic way to do this than the simple “tables” feature I have previously used; and tried using “frames” in the HTML… After a couple of very frustrating mistakes, I found I can do this– but only in a separate web-page, not in the body of the blog posting.
Maybe this even has a slight advantage for some readers, since if you open it in a separate browser window you can then comment on it in this window?
Well, anyway, here at last it is.

Republicans mutinying over Iraq

I have always argued that– regardless of one’s own party-political proclivities– the movement to end the United States’ disastrous occupation of Iraq and restore reason and sustainability to a national security stance that since 9/11 has been hijacked by the militaristic unilateralists known as neocons must be, and rightfully is, a broadly non-partisan effort; and also, indeed, that there are many (paleo-con?) Republicans who have all along been making a good contribution to this movement.
I have also noted here previously that the grassroots pressure will be or become particularly strong on Republican candidates for elective office to distance themselves from the neocon cabal that has been surrounding President Bush.
So it was really excellent, Tuesday morning, to hear news of the important speech that Sen. Richard Lugar made in the Senate Monday evening. In it, he noted the unreality of much of the discussion ongoing in Washington about whether the “Iraqi” government and armed forces are capable of reaching made-in-Washington “benchmarks”. He also, even more significantly, called on the President to change course from the current adherence to a “surge” strategy that Lugar said had little chance of success, and to start planning now to

    downsize the U.S. military’s role in Iraq and place much more emphasis on diplomatic and economic options.

For those unfamiliar with his record, I should note that Lugar is an extremely well-respected voice on foreign affairs. He was the co-author in 1991 of the “Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program”, a program to work with the authorities, managers, and scientists in Russia and other former-Soviet countries to find ways to safely dismantle nuclear weapons as called for in previous disarmament agreements, and to convert the institutions once devoted to development and production of WMDs into institutions with other more useful missions in the post-Cold War era.
(That expertise should come in handy once we all start planning how to convert the US’s current huge military industries into something more useful for humanity.)
Anyway, Lugar is also the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, having previously been the Chair of the Committee when the Republicans controlled Congress.
On Tuesday, he followed up his Monday speech by sending a shortened version of it to be published in the WaPo. In addition, his Monday speech prompted the writing of this important news report in Wednesday’s WaPo, which noted the following:

    Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Bush yesterday urging the president to develop “a comprehensive plan for our country’s gradual military disengagement” from Iraq. “I am also concerned that we are running out of time,” he wrote.
    Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, praised Lugar’s statement as “an important and sincere contribution” to the Iraq debate.
    Republican skepticism has grown steadily, if subtly, since the Senate began debating the war in February. One lawmaker who has changed his tone is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Earlier this year, McConnell helped block from a vote even a nonbinding resolution opposing the troop increase. Now, he views a change in course as a given. “I anticipate that we’ll probably be going in a different direction in some way in Iraq” in September, McConnell told reporters earlier this month. “And it’ll be interesting to see what the administration chooses to do.”
    Indeed, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill had been hoping to stave off further defections until after a report on military and political conditions in Iraq is delivered by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker in September. However, some in the GOP fear that the White House is stalling, hoping to delay any shift in U.S. strategy until the fall. A major test will come next month, when the Senate considers a series of withdrawal-related amendments to the defense authorization bill — and Republicans such as Lugar and Voinovich will have to officially break ranks or not.
    White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Bush hopes “members of the House and Senate will give the Baghdad security plan a chance to unfold.”
    Lugar consulted with McConnell before delivering his speech, but not with the White House, according to Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher.

And yesterday, AP’s Anne Flaherty wrote the following:

    A majority of senators believe troops should start coming home within the next few months. A new House investigation concluded this week that the Iraqis have little control over an ailing security force. And House Republicans are calling to revive the independent Iraq Study Group to give the nation options.
    While the White House thought they had until September to deal with political fallout on the unpopular war, officials may have forgotten another critical date: the upcoming 2008 elections.
    “This is an important moment if we are still to have a bipartisan policy to deal with Iraq,” Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said in an interview Wednesday.
    If Congress and the White House wait until September to change course in Iraq, Lugar said “It’ll be further advanced in the election cycle. It makes it more difficult for people to cooperate. … If you ask if I have some anxiety about 2008, I do.”

In his Monday speech, Lugar was quite explicit about the link between decisionmaking on the failed policy in Iraq and the demands of the US’s already-heating-up campaign for the 2008 elections.
For now, the Bushites are just urging everyone to give the surge more of a chance to succeed, and to wait at least until the point in September when the military chief in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, and the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, come back in person to report to the two houses of Congress on how it has gone as of then.
Petraeus, of course, is well known as a lead author of the Army and Marines’ recently updated counter-insurgency (COIN) manual. In there, one of the things he warns about is the erosion of political support for (foreign) COIN operations, from the public back at home. Dan Froomkin noted on Tuesday that Petraeus already, in the lead-up to an earlier election (Fall 2004) played an important role trying to paint the rosy kind of picture of the situation in Iraq that could help Bush’s re-election chances in that election.
Petraeus wrote then:

    I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously. . . . There are reasons for optimism.

If he comes to Congress this September– three years and around 2,500 dead US soldiers later– and says something very similar, we should all certainly hope that the Senators and Representatives would call him on the inaccuracy of that earlier evaluation, and ask him why we should be expected to believe a “rosy” scenario from him this time round!
I have a lot more I’d like to say about the Lugar speech. I really do welcome this sign that a solid realist wing is starting to re-emerge within the Republican party. There is actually very little difference between the general position that Lugar adopts and that adopted by the leading Democratic candidates for president. Crucially, all these people talk about things like “the need to re-establish effective US leadership in the Middle East and the world” and “the need to ‘re-set’ [i.e. increase the size of] the US military.”
My own evaluation is that the diminution in US power brought about by Bush’s reckless and quite evidently failed attempt at imperial-style power projection in Iraq means it is too late (and fairly unhelpful) to think that US policy can be successfully reconstructed in these still quasi-hegemonic terms. I wish Lugar, Clinton, Obama, and all the rest of them would speak more forthrightly about the need for the US to build a new, more solid relationship with the rest of the world that is not based on questionable assumptions about US “leadership”, but rather, on commitment to human equality and human values…
But the position that Lugar has expressed so far is already a good start. And it portends some interesting times in the Republican Party over the weeks and months ahead.

“Charlottesville Goes to War”…

Over the past two months, our Charlottesville TV and print media have given extensive coverage to the pending deployments of locally based Army Guard units to Iraq. As I (Scott) mentioned here recently, my own oldest son is a young officer in the Virginia Army Guard.
While my son lives and works nearby, his particular engineering unit is based in another part of Virginia, and it hasn’t yet been ticketed for a return visit to Iraq. It could happen on short notice, and younger officers are vulnerable to being re-assigned and deployed with units for which they haven’t trained.
By contrast, one of our Guard companies here in Charlottesville will soon make its first deployment to Iraq, after training in the Mississippi delta heat. (Much of this same unit served a year in “Gitmo,” Cuba in 2002.) Most of the reporting has focused on the understandable anxiety facing those to be deployed and their families being left behind. Heart-strings indeed.
Bryan McKenzie, our “upbeat” columnist/reporter for The Daily Progress has at least twice characterized the pending deployment as “Charlottesville Goes to War,” yesterday, and on May 16th.
This provocative characterization grates on several levels.
First, like everywhere else in America, few outside of the deployed and their families are really sacrificing for this war — unless you admit that high gas prices are indeed correlated directly with military operations in Iraq and the ongoing saber rattling with Iran. (Most war supporters strain to deny connections between the Iraq War and high energy prices – but that’s another post!)
Geographically, McKenzie has a point, when he quotes local troop booster Mary Ellen Wooten:

“We’ve had a lot of troops from Charlottesville already deployed but this is the first group that’s primarily from here.”

McKenzie also rightly remembers that,

“We’ve… lost a couple. Cpl. Adam Fargo, U.S. Army, of Greene County and Cpl. Bradley T. Arms, USMC Reserve, of Charlottesville immediately come to mind. With those exceptions, and some in the Shenandoah Valley, Charlottesville seems to have escaped the War on Terror unscathed.”

While McKenzie may think he’s above politics, equating the “war on terror” with the invasion & occupation of Iraq reflects a loaded political judgment — hard to sustain when laid out for examination.
McKenzie gets in a different political point while making a call to support the troops and their families:

“We haven’t had to question our stance of not supporting the war while giving lip service to supporting the troops. Now, whether we support the war or not, we have a vested interest. Our Guardsmen—about 40 of which are based in our own Monticello Guard Armory on Avon Street Extended—are going into Harm’s Way.”
Our neighbors, brothers, friends and co-workers will be going to war, doing their duty whether or not they approve of the politics behind it….
They leave us two options: We can go with them, backing them up and supporting them regardless of our political views or we can self-righteously ignore them and hang their morale out to die. The choice is ours.” (emphasis added)

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