The US, the UN, and the world: The De Soto report

The London Guardian yesterday published the 52-page “End of Mission Report” written by the UN’s recently retired envoy to the Middle East peace talks, Alvaro De Soto.
De Soto reportedly confirmed the authenticity of the text, but said it had been intended only for inside-the-UN consumption. It contains his scathing criticism of the way that, in regard to Israeli-Arab diplomacy, the UN has subordinated its unique global legitimacy and position to the diktats of the US and Israel.
In para 132, he writes:

    Unfortunately, the international community [i.e., in this context, the UN bureaucracy], through a policy hastily laid down, has gone along with Israeli rejectionism, making it very difficult to climb down even if Israel decided to do so.

I haven’t yet had time to read the whole report. Guardian journos who have done so have produced three accounts of its highlights (1, 2, and 3), and the paper’s editors have also penned this editorial on De Soto’s charges and the whole tragic mess into which Israel and the US’s actions have helped to drive the current situation in the OPTs.
Attentive JWN readers are doubtless aware that my own strongly stated position is that, despite its many flaws, the UN must take– and must be allowed and empowered to take– the leading role in conducting the global-scale diplomacy that is now so sorely needed in both the Israeli-Arab sphere and the US-Iraqi sphere. (I laid out these argument most recently in, respectively, this May 10 CSM column, and this column in today’s CSM.)
Of course, there is a major problem in both these projects: that is, that in all matters Middle Eastern the UN bureaucracy– which is answerable in the first instance to the Security Council, and only at a broader level to the annual “General Assembly” of all the world’s nations– has indeed, increasingly throughout the past 15 or 20 years, subordinated itself to the whims and diktats of one nuclear-armed superpower, the US, and that power’s Middle Eastern sidekick, Israel.
For the sake of global stability, and if humanity is to have any chance whatever of building a humane, egalitarian world-political system in which disputes are addressed using means other than brute force, this has to change. In the May column, I argued– re the Israeli-Palestinian arena– that, “Global stability can no longer be held hostage to the claims of the Israeli settlers.”
In today’s column (which was written and edited before the publication of De Soto’s indirectly related text) I wrote,

    Any orderly US withdrawal from Iraq requires a leading role from the United Nations. It also requires a more capable and empowered UN than the one we see today, and this requires that the whole US political system undertake a serious recommitment both to the world body and to the egalitarian global values it embodies.
    These tasks form the main challenge for America in the months ahead. The longer the American public and US leaders postpone dealing with them, the higher will mount the casualty toll in Iraq – among both Iraqis and US troops – along with the risks the Iraqi caldron poses to regional and world stability.

Now, the publication of De Soto’s detailed and very well expressed insider’s account of exactly how the US and Israel have, in their relationship with the UN, subverted the norms and ideals on which the world body has been based since its creation in 1945, allows us to see more clearly than ever before many key dimensions of the challenge we all– both US citizens and citizens of other nations– face as we try to bring the relationship between the US and the rest of the world back into a better and more productive balance.
At this stage in the history of our fragile planet here, I don’t think that this challenge can be avoided very much longer.

Final CSM column: on the US and the UN, in Iraq

So Thursday’s CSM will be publishing the final column in the series I have published with them since 1990. It is here. (Also here.)
In it, I write:

    Can Washington disentangle itself from the lethal imbroglio of Iraq without radically revising the prickly, dismissive attitude it has maintained toward the United Nations for the past five years? I doubt it.
    For if America’s very vulnerable troop presence in Iraq is to be drawn down, either partially or – as I believe is necessary – wholly, and in anything like an orderly way, then that withdrawal must be negotiated. And no body but the UN can successfully convene these negotiations.

At the end of the column, I put in this short note to readers:

    Because the Monitor is ending its regular columns, today’s essay is my last as a Monitor columnist – a post I’ve held for 17 years.
    I have been proud to write for a paper guided by high standards, strong values, and a desire to understand all the nations of the world. And I have been grateful for the opportunity to contribute my expertise here.
    Mine was one of the few voices in mainstream media that seriously questioned the grounds on which the Bush administration took the US into the war in Iraq and that warned strongly and consistently that this war would be disastrous.
    While my work may well appear in the Monitor in the future, I invite you to keep up with my writing at www.justworldnews.org.

I had put a little more about this rather abrupt change of editorial policy at the Monitor, and how I felt about it, into this JWN post last week. It’s true, I am “looking at a number of options”, as I wrote there. One is a really engaging new book idea that I discussed with Jennifer Knerr, the Editor for Political Science and Communications at Paradigm Publishers, when I was able to spend some great time with her, Paradigm President Dean Birkenkamp, and some of their other colleagues, at their HQ in Boulder last week.
More on this later, I hope!
Another regular column slot elsewhere is also an option, of course… Also, doing some more pieces for the CSM under their new regimen…
Anyway, the Kissinger position, as referred briefly to in the latest column, is really quite interesting. Especially given the role he played, according to Bob Woodward, back in 2001-02, in supporting Cheney’s relentless push to get the US into invading Iraq…

How about the pacemakers?

The AP newswire yesterday carried an intriguing report about the US Navy using carrier-launched electronic warfare planes called ‘Prowlers’ to prowl around Iraq “trying to stop the scourge of roadside bombs by jamming ground signals from mobile phones and garage door openers.”
My question: How on earth can the people operating this electronic-jamming equipment be certain they will not also trigger life-threatening responses in pacemakers being used by Iraqi cardiac patients or in other ways cause potentially lethal harm to civilians?
The AP account quotes U.S. Navy Capt. David Woods, the commander of a Carrier Air Wing aboard the USS Nimitz (which is now in the Gulf) who is also described as “one of the Navy’s most experienced Prowler pilots” as saying that the ship’s Prowlers fly over Iraq “at between 20,000 and 30,000 feet… steering invisible waves of electromagnetic signals over areas where insurgent bombs may be waiting for U.S. convoys.”
The AP writer adds:

    According to outside experts, receivers inside the Prowler’s tail collect radio signals from the ground, which are analyzed by an on-board computer. As threats are identified, the plane’s crew floods the area with electromagnetic energy that blocks the signal.
    The plane’s computer is loaded with a “threat library” of hostile signals, which are used to match those on the ground. The jammers can block transmissions across wide range of frequencies, everything from TV and radio signals to mobile phones and the Internet.
    But its jamming gear has no effect on bombs that are hard-wired to their triggers, Woods said.

So I guess my picture of what they’re doing is that they are flying around at between 4 and 6 miles high over Iraq, sending down large waves (“floods”?) of electromagnetic energy that may well end up blocking or otherwise interfering with electromagnetic signals being used at ground level to perform a broad range of tasks– some of which “may” (or may not?) be connected to physical attacks to US forces.
This strikes me as being a highly non-discriminating means of conducting warfare– i.e., one that fails to undertake the discrimination between legitimate military targets and (quite illegitimate) civilian targets that is positively required of commanders and military planners under the laws of war
As it happens, this morning I was checking in the ICRC’s excellent on-line library of texts in the laws of war to remind myself what these texts actually say regarding the unacceptability (or, indeed, illegality) of the use of military technologies and methods that do not undertake the necessary discrimination between military and civilian targets.
At this URL (PDF), I found a good, basic compilation of The rules of international humanitarian law [i.e. the laws of war] and other rules relating to the conduct of hostilities. From it I extracted two key texts relating to the question of discriminate/indiscriminate attacks; and I cut and pasted those into this eaiser-to-use HTML file. (I have underlined and bolded there various clauses that are of particular relevance in recent and current Middle East conflicts. I did that markup for reasons other than the writing of this post.)
If you scan through that file you will see that Article 51 of Additional Protocol 1 (1977) of the Geneva Conventions is particularly focused on the need to take active steps to avouid indiscriminate attacks. Clause 4 of Art. 51 reads:

    4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:
    (a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;
    (b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
    (c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

Article 57 of the Protocol lays upon military commanders and military planners a positive responsibility to exercise “due diligence” to ensure that the attacks they undertake are neither “indiscriminate” in the defined sense nor “disproportionate” (regarding the foreseeable proportion of harm inflicted upon persons versus the military value– if any– of the objective.) It says, in Clauses 1 and 2:

    1. In the conduct of military operations, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects.
    2. With respect to attacks, the following precautions shall be taken:
    (a) those who plan or decide upon an attack shall:

      (i) do everything feasible to verify that the objectives to be attacked are neither civilians nor civilian objects and are not subject to special protection but are military objectives within the meaning of paragraph 2 of Article 52 and that it is not prohibited by the provisions of this Protocol to attack them;
      (ii) take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects;
      (iii) refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;

    (b) an attack shall be cancelled or suspended if it becomes apparent that the objective is not a military one or is subject to special protection or that the attack may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated;
    (c) effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit.

Now, it is true that US government has not yet ratified Additional Protocol 1. But it has signed it. And though it has not yet ratified this precise language, it certainly has for a long time been a full party to numerous other laws-of-war agreements that– in somewhat less detail– include strict clauses about the need for both discrimination and proportionality in the planning and conduct of military operations.
That’s why that (somewhat admiringly phrased?) AP report gave me cause for concern. I really do not understand how, from a height of 4-6 miles, the operators of the Prowler’s electronic jamming equipment can undertake anything like the required degree of discrimination between military and civilian targets and take anything like the steps that would be required to avoid or minimize harm to civilians.
Can any readers who understand more about electronic warfare provide us with any more details or information that might allay (or sustain) my concern in this regard? Or, can anyone steer me to accounts that Iraqis or others may have written about any effects that these floods of electromagnetic energy have on their lives at ground level?

Condi Rice’s “Uniquely American Realism”

On Thursday, June 7, Secretary Rice gave a a speech at the Economic Club of New York that was the most sustained expression of her view of the world that we have seen any time since she became a significant force in national policy-making, back in January 2001.

Many people who have known her in the past have described her as “a conscientious staff person” and given her other damning-with-faint-praise accolades like that. But the statement of her view of the US’s role in world politics that she produced Thursday is worthy of some close study. Especially since, with Dick Cheney’s star in the decline and the President himself daily losing his political mojo, her position in national security decisionmaking is becoming stronger and stronger. (Stronger and stronger within an administration that is becoming weaker and weaker, that is.)

So I have started annotating her speech. I’m afraid I haven’t finished doing it yet. But since I’ll be busy for the next couple of days, I thought I would get this much up onto the blog, and try to get around to the rest later. (By the way, if readers would like to suggest their own annotations for some of the paras I haven’t yet gotten around to, just put that in a comment here and note the number of the paragraph.)

Continue reading “Condi Rice’s “Uniquely American Realism””

40 years ago: Attack on the Liberty

Forty years ago today, Israeli navy and air force units maintained a two-hour-long assault against a ship in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean belonging to another country’s navy. The assault included attacks with napalm, and the machine-gunning of three life rafts launched in an attempt to float the most seriously wounded sailors to some safety. (This latter being clearly a war crime.)
The assailants killed 34 of the other country’s sailors and injured 172 more. Only 30 percent of the sailors on the targeted ship escaped injury, and it was only through heroic efforts that those survivors were able to keep the ship afloat at all and thus avoid considerable further loss of life.
The nationality of the targeted ship? It was a US Navy vessel.
If the assailants had belonged to just about any other country than Israel, imagine the uproar that would have followed within the US political system!
Today, 40 years after Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, the San Diego Union-Tribune carries an anguished, very thought-provoking op-ed contribution on the affair from Ward Boston, Jr., a former naval aviator and FBI agent who served as chief counsel to the Court of Inquiry that the US Navy ordered into the attack.
Boston notes that though June 8, 1967 was a “sunny, clear day” the government of Israel claimed that this two-hour assault was “an accident.”
Well, if the attack had taken the form of the landing on the ship of a single missile, or perhaps even a small number of missiles, you could make that claim with a straight face? (As the Israelis did in 1996, when they claimed that their shelling of the UN compound in Qana, Lebanon, had been an “accident.”)
But a sustained, two-hour-long assault that was coordinated between the two very different Israeli combat arms– an accident??
Boston writes:

    I know from personal conversations with the late Adm. Isaac C. Kidd – president of the Court of Inquiry – that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of “mistaken identity.”

Again, given the weather conditions, this seems like an inherently implausible claim.
Boston wrote that as part of their enquiry he and Adm. Kidd,

    boarded the crippled ship at sea and interviewed survivors. The evidence was clear. We both believed with certainty that this attack was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.
    I am certain the Israeli pilots and commanders who had ordered the attack knew the ship was American. I saw the bullet-riddled American flag that had been raised by the crew after their first flag had been shot down completely. I heard testimony that made it clear the Israelis intended there be no survivors. Not only did they attack with napalm, gunfire and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned at close range three life rafts that had been launched in an attempt to save the most seriously wounded.

He writes, “I am outraged at the efforts of Israel’s apologists to claim this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.'” He also gives several details about how the various levels of ther US government carried out their politically motivated cover-up of the findings of the professional, technical investigation that he had helped to lead…
He writes,

    I join the survivors in their call for an honest inquiry. Why is there no room to question Israel – even when it kills Americans – in the halls of Congress?
    Let the survivors testify. Let me testify. Let former intelligence officers testify that they received real-time Hebrew translations of Israeli commanders instructing their pilots to sink “the American ship.”
    Surely uncovering the truth about what happened to American servicemen in a bloody attack is more important than protecting Israel. And surely 40 years is long enough to wait.
    The ensuing cover-up has haunted us for 40 years. What does it imply for our national security, not to mention our ability to honestly broker peace in the Middle East, when we cannot question Israel’s actions – even when they kill Americans?

The survivors of the USS Liberty have been muzzled for a long, long time. Now let’s see if any other major media outlets will take up this story– and even more importantly, let us see if any US political figures will join the call for an honest commission of inquiry that will tell the whole truth about what happened on that sunny day 40 years ago today.
Then, those responsible for organizing and participating in this attack should be held to just as much account as any other body that knowingly and systematically carries out attacks on US forces.
The attempts by Israel’s supporters in the US to muzzle public consideration and discussion of some of the more sordid aspects of Israel’s policy over the decades have gone far too long for this to be a healthy part of the US political scene. The success of these muzzling (and self-muzzling) efforts have distorted both the US’s relationship with Israel, and the terms of the US’s general engagement with the world, in a way that has helped nobody…. certainly not the US citizenry!
I see that the survivors of the attack on the Liberty are asking for an official US investigation into the war crimes committed against US military personnel on June 8, 1967. Who in the US political system will be courageous enough to support their campaign?

40 years of occupation (contd.)

Well, today is the 40th anniversary of the day the 1967 war started– the war that brought under sraeli military occupation vast swathes of Arab land. Some of that land, namely, the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and the Syrian territory of Golan, remains today under Israeli occupation, and the residents of those territories have been ruled by a foreign military force for all these years…
Running any long-lasting military occupation is also a burden on the occupying country.
Today, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a fairly good statement about the anniversary:

    As the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war reminds us, statehood for Palestinians, security for Israelis and peace in the region cannot be achieved by force. An end to the occupation and a political solution to the conflict is the only way forward — for Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and the wider region. This will only be achieved through negotiations to bring about an end to the occupation, on the basis of the principle of land for peace, as envisaged in Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973).

Meanwhile, in Palestine, Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza yesterday:

    Soldiers took over two buildings and military bulldozers ripped up roads during the incursion around the town of Rafah, about two kilometres (just over a mile) inside Palestinian territory, witnesses said.
    “Armoured and infantry forces are searching the area for terrorist infrastructure. Several Palestinians have been detained for questioning,” an army spokesman told AFP.
    …Israel has vowed no let-up in its operations against militants since it resumed air strikes against Gaza on May 16 following a sharp increase in rocket fire from the densely populated territory.
    The air raids have killed 16 civilians and 37 militants, mostly from Hamas, but have failed to completely halt the rockets.
    More than 285 have been fired into Israel since May 15, the army said, killing two civilians, wounding more than 20 and sending hundreds fleeing from the southern town of Sderot that has borne the brunt of the fire.

In Lebanon, the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Helweh, in the south of the country, became transformed into the second major battleground between the Lebanese army and Islamic militants who had found it possible to burrow into the camps after the recognizable political organizations in the camps– Fateh, Hamas, the PLO– lost control of portions of them.
Violence sows violence. Rule by military occupation is an oppressive form of administrative and structural violence and must be brought to a speedy end, wherever it is found. Four-plus years in Iraq… 40 years in Palestine… It is more than enough!
It is time for Mr. Ban Ki-moon to do something bold, visionary, and serious about bringing all the relevant parties to an authoritative Middle East peace conference at which the speedy and complete end of both these military occupations can be negotiated.
The inescapable fact of the deep political linkage between the situations in Iraq and Palestine was clearly recognized by the authors of the Iraq Study Group (Baker-Hamilton) report. They urged the speedy re-activation of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy as an essential aid to de-escalating the tensions in Iraq. Since the ISG report came out last December, Pres. Bush has taken several actions that indicate he is “backing into” (or at least, towards) implementing several of its recommendations– though he reviled it at the time. But the one recommendation he truly does not seem to be heading toward at all is the one regarding the need for speedy and effective Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy…
In May, instead of welcoming and seeking to build on the Saudis’ achievement in wining a ‘National Unity Government’ agreement between the two major Palestinian organizations, the Bushites started working very actively and belligerently behind the scenes to try to torpedo the agreement.
It is tragic, too, that though the tide of opinion in the US Congress has finally started to turn toward a speedy and complete US withdrawal from Iraq, and therefore the ending of the US’s occupation of the country, there has been no similar groundswell of political forces in favor of ending Israel’s parallel occupation of Palestine…
Rule by foreign military occupation: An extremely un-democratic and anti-humanitarian form of rule, wherever it is found. End it.

Airpower and the surge

Good for AP’s Charles Hanley, who has a piece on the wire today noting that US warplanes have been dropping bombs on Iraq at twice the rate of a year ago.

He writes,

    In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, American aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq, already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006, according to U.S. Air Force figures obtained by The Associated Press.
    …At the same time, the number of civilian Iraqi casualties from U.S. airstrikes appears to have risen sharply, according to Iraq Body Count, a London-based, anti-war research group that maintains a database compiling news media reports on Iraqi war deaths.
    The rate of such reported civilian deaths appeared to climb steadily through 2006, the group reports, averaging just a few a month in early 2006, hitting some 40 a month by year’s end, and averaging more than 50 a month so far this year.

This increasing use of US airpower might “feel good” to some of the fliers involved. But it is probably having a very negative effect on the progress of the counter-insurgency campaign being waged by US (and compliant Iraqi) ground forces in the country in the context of the continuing “surge”. It is an essential mantra of COIN ops that “the most important battle-space is in the mind of the host country nationals.”
It is a simple but continuing truth of human psychology that most people don’t like to be bombed, and tend not to be well disposed to those who bomb them.
Hanley gives some snippets from an interview with Col. Joe Guastella, the U.S. Air Force’s operations chief for the region. He quotes Guastella as saying that the increase in Iraq-focused air ops “has a lot to do with increased pressure on the enemy by [the Multinational Corps-Iraq]– combined with more carriers.”
It seems a lot like what he’s saying there is, “We bomb more because the additional aircraft carrier battle group here in the Gulf allows us to do that.” What sad and mindless militarism.
Hanley does not give us any account of Guastella being questioned closely by the reporters who interviewed him there at the regional US air headquarters as to how, precisely, increased use of aerial bombardments was helping to win over the hearts and minds of Iraqis. He does give a few excerpts from the USAF’s daily briefing, which are numbing in their opacity and bellicosity.

Changes ahead at the CSM

This note in today’s Christian Science Monitor informs the world of something that I learned of only on Sunday, namely that at the end of June all five other regular CSM columnists and I are to be given the axe.
It has all been (and felt) rather sudden, especially since for some months I’d been talking to Josh Burek, my editor there, about doing more columns for them than hitherto. Or more precisely, about reverting to my original arrangement with them, which was for two columns per month.
So the column I write for the CSM next week will be the last in a series dating back 17 years. Maybe it’s a good time for a break. Time to look at many other options. I can’t help feeling regretful, though, since the Monitor has been a good paper to work with and for. Back in the 1970s, veteran Monitor foreign-news journos Geoffrey Godsell and Joe Harsch taught me a tremendous amount about both the news business and the value of investing time trying to seek out “the story behind the story”, or the “bigger picture” behind the epiphenomena that make it to the news pages of most other, more competition-driven, major news media.
In our conversation Sunday, Josh said he’d continue to welcome my contributions to the paper’s Opinion pages. Good. I’m looking at a number of other options, as well.
This change has come at a slightly complex time for me. Right now I’m in the Rocky Mountains, having driven 1,660 miles here from Virginia over the past four days along with my daughter Lorna, who’s on her way to take up a job in Los Angeles. Thursday I’m flying back to DC to complete on the purchase of a small apartment that Bill and I will use as a pied-a-terre when we’re in the nation’s capital. I am planning to spend a lot more time in DC over the months ahead. It feels like a good time to do this.
Anyway, that road-trip explains the sparseness of my recent posting here. I’ll resume my normal rhythm as soon as I can.

Waterloo, Iranians & the Mennonite Dialog

On Memorial Day, American and Iranian diplomats finally managed to “talk” in Baghdad, Iraq — as we noted here with approval. The same day, by contrast, protesters forced the cancellation of public sessions of a conference on “spirituality” between Iranian Shia Muslim and Mennonite Christian scholars in Waterloo, Canada.
Since when is talking with Mennonites — that’s right, pacifistic Mennonites – such a perfidious affront that it needs to be forcibly stopped? Is this 2007 or 1527?
While I am still seeking documentation from both sides, perhaps this entry might encourage the protesting academics and conference participants to articulate their positions further, in the discussion below. (That’s an open invitation.)
Let me first try to recount the basic outlines of the dialog and the protests:
The dialog:
1. The conference in question was sponsored by the Mennonite Central Committee and by humble Mennonite Conrad Grebel University College. Conrad Grebel is affiliated with Canada’s University of Waterloo. While the conference convened on the UW campus, the larger University was not the sponsor.
2. The conference, entitled “Shi’ah Muslim–Mennonite Christian Dialogue III,” continued a series of exchanges between “North American” Mennonite scholars and Shia scholars from Qom, Iran. Papers from two previous conferences, one at Waterloo and one, in Qom, were published in the Conrad Grebel Review. Several Mennonites have studied in Qom, and several Shia have pursued theology Ph.D.’s in Toronto. Shorter-term student delegations have also been part of the mix, including with Mennonite Universities in the US.
3. The dialog has been hosted on the Iranian side for nearly a decade by the Imam Khomeini Education & Research Institute (IKERI). IKERI is reputed to be among the more conservative graduate seminaries in Iran, and its current director, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, is known as a spiritual adviser to Iran’s current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
4. The dialog itself may have been the fruit of the Mennonite’s “diaconal method” (from the Greek diakonia or service). In Iran, the Mennonites earned considerable good will for their sustained humanitarian responses to earthquake disasters since 1992. Such “good deeds” helped open doors to exchange of “good words.”
5. As a controversy emerged, Mennonite leaders tried to state clearly the conference purposes. According to Rich Cober Bauman, program director of MCC Ontario, the conference was

“an academic conversation between theologians and philosophers who may not always agree, but seek to better understand each other’s faith… We regard this conference as an effort to foster communication in a time when the refusal to demonize each other is sorely needed. We recognize that there are risks inherent in relating to groups some would label as our “enemies”. But our Christian faith calls us into these conversations which, rather than creating isolation, we believe have the potential to build real and lasting peace…”

Conrad Grebel President Henry Paetkau noted that from the Mennonite faith perspective, inter-faith dialog, particularly with a country that is portrayed in the west as the “enemy”, is a practical expression of the biblical command to be “agents of reconciliation”.
Jim Pankratz, Grebel’s academic dean, characterized the conference as “an important expression of open dialog and freedom of speech. Through such dialog we have learned to understand that all Iranians (like Canadians), and even all members of a single educational institution, do not speak with a single voice.”
The protests:
The protesters had a starkly different image of what the conference represented. I’ll try first to present accurately their concerns. (And I welcome additional material from any who think I misrepresent the complaints.)

Continue reading “Waterloo, Iranians & the Mennonite Dialog”

More on the Iraq- South Korea analogy

Ever since Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said on Wednesday that the administration is now aiming for a US troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea, there has been a flood of commentary, most of it highly criticial.
I wrote merely that it seemed “hilarious”, because so inappropriate. But as he so often does, Dan Froomkin caught the essence of the matter when he wrote Thursday, “the analogy is troubling. And flawed. And dangerous. And telling.” In that column he provides his own astute analysis of why those adjectives are apt, plus a broad roundup of other people’s comments on the matter.
I just want to add a couple of points:
(1) The whole idea that the US might send military forces sailing to distant places around the world, with guns, cruise missiles, and nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles ready to deploy almost anywhere at a few days notice, is something that may have come to seem “natural” to many US citizens during the Cold War, and evidently still seemed okay to many of them in the presidential election of 2004. Today, it seems– and in my view, rightly– more and more like an anomaly on the world scene, and one that needs to be reviewed and corrected.
Who asked the US to act as the world’s policeman, anyway? Back in the emerging-Cold War context of the early 1950s, the US was able to get some South Koreans to ask them to deploy there. But in the global security (and political) climate that we have today, why would anyone think a continuing US military presence would be “natural” at all?
(2) The notion that the US might have a “South Korea-style” continued military presence truly is, as Froomkin noted, an extremely dangerous one. However, if the US had a presence in Iraq today that was exactly like its presence today in South Korea, matters would be a lot better for the Iraqis than they are at present.
Primarily, you wouldn’t have extremely heavily armed US forces blundering around most of the country’s cities and highways causing tensions and destruction of lives and propoerty just about wherever they go by virtue of both their presence there and their actions there. And you wouldn’t have the US holding Iraq’s central government structure and its decisionmaking as virtual “captives” within a fortress-like, heavily (US-)guarded compound in the center of Baghdad…
Instead, you’d have the US forces corralled in a small number of bases, and also as “tripwires” along a border with… well, with which of Iraq’s neighbors in particular would that be? And all of that presence would be clearly regulated by a Status of Forces Agreement concluded with, as is currently the case in South Korea, a generally well accepted and democratically accountable government.
(I note that getting to this position in South Korea has not, however, been an easy or always pleasant process. US-protected “South” Korea was governed by military rulers for many years. Its US-constituted intelligence body, the KCIA, was a fiercer younger brother of Washington’s CIA… Etc., etc. So there is a huge remaining question of how the Bushites could even foresee the process of transitioning the US presence in Iraq to a “South Korea style” of presence.)
But I think it’s still important to note that the current situation in SK is so much better than than the current situation in Iraq. So if the Bushites see an SK-style presence as their goal, then in some ways that can be seen as a helpful opening position in any negotiation they have over the future shape of the US troop presence in Iraq.
Great, if they want, as a first stage, to withdraw all their troops to barracks rather than have them careening around the country continuing to try to bend Iraq’s political system to their will!
But if there really are serious negotiations over Iraq’s future– conducted both by the various Iraqi parties and by the US and other relevant international actors– then there is no way that a permanent or near-permanent presence of US-commanded troops in the country would be the outcome of such negotiations.
… Anyway, as part of the reconsideration of the US’s posture in the world that surely must occur as part of the country’s and the world’s post-Iraq evaluations and deliberations, the idea that the US should anyway continue to behave as the world’s policeman– in Iraq, South Korea, or elsewhere– should surely come under close scrutiny.