Global security after Iraq, part 2

In part 1
of this series on JWN, and in my contribution to this follow-up
post, I argued:

  1. That the failure of the Bushists’ 2003 project in Iraq will be
    more momentous– both for the security system in the Middle East and,
    crucially, for the broader global security system– than the retreat that Britain undertook
    from a lead “security role” east of Suez, in the
    years after the Suez aggression of 1956.
  2. That even now, 18 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there
    has still not been enough clear thinking about what kind of global
    “security system/structure” should replace the “Cold War system” that
    prevailed for the preceding 40 years; and in the absence of such clear
    thinking the arguments of the “liberal hawks” in Western countries came
    to exercise undue sway.
  3. That the liberal hawks had a notable influence, along with others, in making the Bushists’ 2003 invasion of
    Iraq possible.  And now that the failure of the invasion project has become so
    evident, we should subject the arguments and assumptions of the liberal
    hawks to the same kind of rigorous interrogation which many of us have
    already applied to those whose pro-invasion advocacy
    sprang from less “liberal” motivations. Why did the liberal hawks’
    project in Iraq go so horribly wrong?  Those of us who were
    anti-war from the get-go, and who are also very serious about human
    rights, need to engage in a serious (though still friendly) way
    with the liberal hawks if we are to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy
    of Iraq.
  4. That though we don’t yet know the details, political/strategic
    modalities, or full extent of the diminution, post-Iraq, of the US’s
    ability to pursue the kind of globally aggressive unilateralism
    described in Pres. Bush’s 2002 National
    Security Strategy    , still, the fluidity of the years ahead gives all
    of us who are serious about building a more egalitarian and peaceful
    world a distinctive new opportunity to advocate successfully for our
    ideas– provided we
    can start getting our concepts sketched out and injected into the
    global public discourse pretty soon.

In the present post, I want to look at one very promising proposal for
the kind of changes we “westerners” (“northerners”?) need to make in
the way we think about and “do” global security.  This is the
proposal that Paul Rogers and two of his colleagues at the Oxford
Research Group– Chris Abbott and John Sloboda– have recently
published in the form of a small book titled Beyond Terror:
The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World.   (I wrote
very briefly about Paul, and the main ideas of the “Beyond Terror”
book, here.)

“Beyond Terror” is very clearly argued, readable, and short.  I
urge as many of you as possible to read the authors’ whole text. 
It is written mainly for a UK audience, but that doesn’t impact
materially on any of the points made, except in the section that lists
“Further Resources” for readers who want to engage in advocacy on these
issues.

The nub of the book’s argument is that “Beyond” the threat of
international terrorism that leaders like Bush and Blair have been
focusing on (playing up?) for the past 5.5 years, humankind today faces four other distinct challenges to
its wellbeing, or perhaps even to its survival.

The authors talk about a total of five “threats”.  Personally, I
prefer to refrain from participating in the fearmongering discourse of
“threats” and recast these as “challenges”.  So here is the
authors’ list of the four additional (i.e., not “terrorist”)
challenges, taken in the order of the chapters in which they are
described:

Continue reading “Global security after Iraq, part 2”

Overstretch directly imperils US troops in Iraq

Even with the ‘surge’, the present number of US troops in Iraq is quite insufficient to ensure the physical security of either the Iraqi people or the US soldiers and marines themselves.
This report from AP today makes this starkly clear. Building on information given by commanders in Baghdad, it once again spells out something I heard in the radio on, I believe, Saturday evening about the incident, Saturday, in which four US soldiers and one Iraqi interpreter lost their lives and three further US soldiers were, apparently captured by insurgents… Namely that there was a 56-minute gap between the time that neighboring units heard the explosions of the two Humvees holding the men and the time that help could be gotten to the spot where they’d been.
Other reports indicate that the eight soldiers were mounting some kind of a dawn patrol there when their vehicles were blown up.
I send my heartfelt sympathies to the families of all the soldiers (and the interpreter) concerned.
But in addition I’d like to note that for the higher-ups to order a small unit into a situation like this without ensuring that reserves are on hand to ensure adequate and timely reinforcement/rescue to them is to recklessly endanger the lives of US soldiers and their Iraqi support staff.
Might some people say that if the present troop deployment in Iraq is not big enough to ensure sufficient cover and back-up for all service members, then the deployment should be that much further increased in size?
It simply is not possible. The U.S. military is strained to break-point already.
This incident and the fallout from the Diyala incident of late April indicate that the US has no conceivable military “solution” to the challenges it faces in Iraq.
Under these circumstances, for the Bush administration to claim it needs until September before it can gauge the results of the “surge” policy and plan any alternative next steps at all is merely to sentence additional scores, perhaps several hundreds,- of US service members– and many times that number of Iraqis– to needless deaths between now and September.
The administration must act much faster than that to halt this ending of these people’s lives.
It could act today by declaring:

    1. That it intends to bring all US troops out of Iraq by the end of October 2007; and
    2. That it invites the UN to convene, at the earliest possible opportunity, an authoritative international gathering at which

      (a) All Iraqi parties ready to commit to nonviolent participation in national politics would negotiate the form that this participation should take, under UN auspices; and
      (b) The present government of Iraq, all of Iraq’s neighbors, and all permanent members of the UN Security Council would meet in parallel, and also under UN auspices, to negotiate the modalities of the previously announced US withdrawal from Iraq.

How fortunate humanity is that we have a body like the UN that– regardless of all its flaws– still embodies the important concept of the international rule of law and is in a position to help both the US citizenry and the Iraqi citizenry to find a way out of the present terrible imbroglio in which we all find ourselves.
President Bush could, as I noted, take the above two steps today. As I have also written any number of times over the past two years, he could and should have taken these steps a lot earlier than today. (See my writings on ‘How to Withdraw the troops from Iraq’ as linked to near the top of the JWN sidebar. In some of them, including this one, I argued that if the US has already, upfront, announced it intention of withdrawing from Iraq completely, then a majority of Iraqis will have a strong incentive not to interfere with that withdrawal as it happens.)
Today, we can see more clearly than ever before that the President’s reluctance to take such steps is needlessly costing the lives of Americans as well as of Iraqis.
BRING THE TROOPS HOMES NOW!

SCIRI’s political changes; Iraqi nationalism surging; etc

Juan Cole, IraqSlogger, and various other quick-off-the-mark interpreters of Iraqi political developments have made quite a big deal out of the political transformations that the group formerly known as SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) made at its national party meeting on Thursday and Friday.
For starters, it seems the revolution is over. Henceforth SCIRI will be known as SIIC, the Suprme Iraqi Islamic Council. In addition, these sources say, SIIC will drop the group’s previous unilateral religious orientation/allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Guide, Atayatollah Khamene’i and replace that with allegiance to Iraq’s very own (and significantly religiously different) Ayatollah Sistani.
Juan says, “The changes clearly are aimed at Iraqizing the party.” A commenter on his blog post there writes– in a way that I find generally convincing– that the new name actually chosen, al-majlis al-islami al-`iraqi al-a`la, “while undoubtedly Shiite has al-a`la after iraqi, so poetically appeals to an Iraqi nationalism. al-a`la is now the last word after Iraq”
Reidar Visser, however, is more cautious in his interpretation of the changes than either Juan, IraqSlogger, or their sources have been. In a commentary issued on his website today, Reidar seems to be commenting on the actual, 49-point public statement issued after the SCIRI/SIIC meeting, rather than on “advance spin” given regarding its contents by SIIIC officials who may well have desired to put their own spin on matters, rather than that of the party as a whole.
He writes:

    The 49-point press release from the conference is noteworthy for at least two reasons.
    Firstly, the document represents a notable softening of tone on the question of federalism in Iraq. In 2005 and 2006, SCIRI held a high profile in advocating the establishment of a single Shiite region of nine governorates from Basra to Baghdad. This region is not mentioned in the recent press release; instead there is general praise for the idea of federalism and emphasis on the need to follow the Iraqi constitution in this question, where after all a single Shiite region is but one of several possible outcomes (and, in fact, a rather unlikely one at that, given the complicated procedures for forming a federal region). Indeed, the explicit mention in the press release of “governorates” among the building blocks of the future federal Iraq suggests that SCIRI is now moving away from the view that the entire country should necessarily become subdivided into federal regions.
    This coincides with an appreciable decline of propaganda in favour of the single Shiite federal region in early 2007, and with rumours of SCIRI members having second thoughts on the wisdom of any such large-scale federal entity – not least due to popular resistance from inside the Shiite community. Instead, forces close to SCIRI have begun re-exploring the old idea of several small-scale regions south of Baghdad…
    The second important point related to the press release is illustrated by the stark discrepancy between leaked information to the press by SCIRI officials prior to the publication of the document, and its actual contents on one key issue: SCIRI’s relationship with Iran generally, and with that country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in particular. Some early media reports suggested that SCIRI were about to formally renounce their ties to Khamenei, in favour of greater emphasis on the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. That sort of loud and clear renunciation would have been immensely helpful to the Iraqi political process, and, along with a more flexible position on federalism, could have helped the party emerge as a true moderating force in Iraqi politics. Accusations against SCIRI of “pro-Iranian” and “Safavid” loyalties could then have been more easily consigned to the realm of conspiracy theories.
    Ultimately, however, no such clarification of the party’s role was included in SCIRI’s press release. The only mention of Sistani was in a non-committal statement that SCIRI “valued” the efforts (already construed in the Western mainstream media as a decisive “pledge”) of the higher clergy in Iraq, including Sistani. (This of course reflects the fact that SCIRI does not have a reciprocal relationship with the leading Iraqi ayatollah; they need him more than he needs them.) True, the language of the press release is admirable and politically correct as such, with a condemnation of all external meddling in Iraqi affairs. But the failure to clarify SCIRI’s relationship to Khamenei means that considerable ambiguity on this issue remains. After all, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (whose portrait dominated the conference room, alongside that of Sistani) is one of the few Shiite clerics in history to have made specific proposals (such as the ‘Aqidatuna booklet from the 1990s) for a greater Islamic union of Shiite countries like Iraq, Iran and Lebanon under the leadership of a single supreme leader (wali amr al-muslimin). Since 2003, SCIRI have simply toned down their pan-Islamic and pan-Shiite rhetoric, instead of elaborating an alternative framework where they explicitly could have redefined their views on the concept of a single supreme leader…
    It is however interesting that the leaks prior to the publication of the SCIRI press release apparently came from SCIRI members who themselves were interested in marking some kind of break with Iran and Khamenei. This kind of desire among party members to stress their Iraqiness must have been the driving force behind some of the other points in the press release, such as the change of the name of the organisation to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (presumably SIIC). It is an anomaly of Iraqi politics that there should be no well-organised party to represent the current associated with Sistani and his moderate Iraqi nationalist Islamism. The latest statement by SCIRI does not in itself quite suffice to fill that gap, but it does serve as an interesting indication that an internal debate on issues such as Iraqi nationalism and federalism may be underway within SCIRI. And if there has in fact been a real change in SCIRI’s programme on these important issues, SCIRI would win many friends in Iraqi politics by making this public in a coherent and comprehensive fashion, for all the world to see, instead of publishing bland documents like their latest press release.

Back in early January, I wrote this post on JWN, in which I outlined what I described as the “Battle of the Narratives” being fought in Iraq. I introduced the post thus:

    Weapons and armies and such things in the physical world are the tools; but what is really happening in Iraq– as in any civil war, war of insurgency, or similar lengthy inter-group conflict– is primarily a battle of narratives. What each of the parties is seeking to do, basically, is find a way to organize the widest possible coalition of followers around their particular version of “the Truth.”

At that point, the four narratives I saw as the principal contenders in the battle were:

    1. The Bushists’ narrative— one that sought (at that time) to describe the battle in Iraq as one between alleged ‘moderates’ and alleged ‘extremists’;
    2. The militant Sunni/Arabist narrative— that “describes the battle in Iraq as one of defending this eastern bulwark of the Arab (and Sunni) world against the looming power of the Shiites, all of whom are described in the more extreme versions of this narratives as somehow secretly either ethnically Persian or anyway controlled by Iran.”
    3. The militant Shiite narrative— that “holds that the major threat to Iraq comes from the “Wahhabists”– a term that is used to describe either just the most militant of the Sunni activists or, in a more extremist version, just about all the Sunnis in Iraq;” and
    4. The Iraqi nationalist narrative— that “holds, as a fundamental tenet, that the continued US occupation is the root cause of Iraq’s current woes and therefore has to end; and that, while there are many grievances between different groups inside Iraq, these can be resolved among Iraqis themselves.”

I still think that general description of the situation is helpful. That, even though in the four months since I penned that post the Bushists’ narrative has collapsed into almost complete incoherence. The main meme we’re hearing from Bush people here in the US these days is that “We have to fight the terrorists over there in Iraq otherwise we’ll have to fight them here in America.” Mohamed and Fatmeh Ordinary-Iraqi could certainly be excused for wondering why it is in their country and amidst its already deeply wounded communities that this battle has to be fought– and this even more so since life in the US has, by comparison, scarcely been dented by this battle at all.
And meantime, we’re seeing a steady draining of support from the military Shiite narrative to the Ireaqi nationalist narrative. SCIRI/SIIC’s change of posture– whether it is as extreme as Juan Cole and IraqSlogger claim, or only goes as far as Visser say– is one significant indicator of this. Moqtada Sadr has, of course, generally been the pioneer within the Shiite community of the Iraqi nationalist narrative. His people have been racking up significant political victories in the past few weeks.
In this report from Baghdad a few hours ago, AP’s Sinan Salaheddine gave several details of the new feistiness of the elected Iraqi parliament.
He wrote that earlier today (Saturday) the parliament took up the issue of the gigantic concrete walls the US military has been erecting in several areas of Baghdad, and passed by 138-to-88 in the 275-member house a resolution that explicitly opposed the erection of the barriers and called on PM al-Maliki to testify about various security issues.
This occurred,

    in a raucous session that included debate on the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq, security raids and human rights abuses. Lawmakers interrupted each other and speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhdani struggled to maintain order.
    “They (security walls) don’t protect residents because these areas are shelled by mortars and Katyusha rockets. … Will they build roofs too?” said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman. “We must build bridges between the different groups, not build walls to separate them.”
    The resolution, voted on by a show of hands, passed 138-to-88 in the 275-member house. The president and his two deputies must unanimously approve the legislation for it to become law, or else it will be sent back to the house for re-examination.
    Last month, al-Maliki, a Shiite, said he had ordered a halt to the construction in Azamiyah, but his aides later said he was responding to exaggerated media reports and that construction would continue.
    The house was about to vote on another resolution, this time to ban American forces from Baghdad, when officials announced the house no longer had a quorum.

Oh yes, indeed, as I wrote here just a couple of days ago, those “pesky” elected Iraqi legislators seem to be edging seriously off the US reservation.

The ‘liberal hawks’ question, contd.

In this recent JWN post I argued that the “soggy universalism” that pervaded much of the discussion among liberal or left-leaning westerners in the 1990s had allowed the emergence of a not insignificant group of westerners whom I characterized as “liberal hawks”.

I wrote there,

    It was in and over Saddam’s Iraq, however, that the arguments of the liberal hawks were put to the severest test; and this one they have very evidently failed.

Anyway, go read the whole of that earlier post if you want to get the fuller context for what follows.

One of the most thought-provoking comments submitted to that post came from Robert H. Consoli. I emailed him subsequently and told him I’d found his comment interesting, but hard to read because of formating problems… and I asked him to try to sort those problems out and resubmit it.

He was kind enough to do that. (He made a few clarificatory revisions along the way. Those do not materially change the argument he made earlier.)

But before I got his return email, I had taken the opportunity of a long train-ride to DC yesterday to work on one of my “tabulated” commentaries– on the basis of his earlier comment, which, yes, I had myself also painstakingly reformated by then.

So what I propose to do here is first of all to paste in his (slightly revised) version of his comment, so it is now here in a main post, and then to paste in the tabulated set of my responses to that. I tried to revise that version of his text in line with the revised version he sent me, but may have failed to incorporate a couple of his–admittedly very minor– revisions.

So anyway, here we have:

    Robert H. Consoli on the question of the ‘liberal hawks’

    Hello Helena,

     

       
    I
    take issue with your burlesque of ‘liberal hawks’ and their reasoning.  You’ve collapsed an unbelievably complex
    story into several points in a diatribe. 
    More, you’re not describing the motives of those who made the
    war but
    those who simply failed to resist it. 

     

       
    Those who made or strongly motivated the war – the Cheneys,
    the Kristols, the Perles,
    etc. – had very different motivations from those which you list here.  Their motives either had to do with a
    millenarian dream of control of oil regions or it had to do with the
    supposed
    security of Israel
    as seen through a Likud prism.  These two motives have always been directly
    opposed to each other but, for a period, they were made to appear as
    though
    they were instrumentalities to the same end. 

     

       
    There were additional motives among this top tier of war
    supporters.  These included things such
    as a desire to use Iraq
    as a test case for Supply-Side economics as Trudy Rubin has so ably
    demonstrated.  The desire to reward
    Republican apparatchiks with sinecures in Iraq was also a motive at
    this
    level.

     

       
    Nor should we discount the fact of simple personal corruption
    among the
    most powerful movers and shakers.  These
    are

    people who
    obviously see the deaths of American soldiers as a means of
    lining their own pockets.  I defy anyone
    to show that this is too harsh.

     

       
    The list which you’ve actually provided does not describe those
    actors.  It does apply to those among
    the, shall we say it?, intelligentsia; those
    whose
    occupations required them to write about the war in newspapers,
    magazines, and
    journals.  These are those who wrote, blogged or
    spoke about the
    war before veterans groups, foreign-affairs-oriented clubs, womens‘
    groups, and service clubs.  I’m referring
    to the powerless opinion makers of every stripe who used moral grounds
    to sell
    the US‘s  invasion of Iraq. 

     

       
    In this list you identify various aspects of that meliorism
    which, like it or not, stems historically from the undoubted success of
    the
    western powers in opposing and then rolling back the physical and moral
    destruction of Europe caused by Naziism.

     

       
    Among the rank and file of everyday Americans, those who had, as
    individuals, no power either to support or oppose the war through any
    other
    means than their individual votes, a third set of justifications was
    assembled.  Those justifications reduced to
    simple fear.  Fear of the Other, fear of Islam, fear of violence on the
    part of people
    with brown skins, fear of terrorism, and fear of nuclear weapons.  Those who had the power to make the war
    created this third tier of arguments in order to pacify the broad mass
    of
    Americans.  You know this quite well as
    you have often alluded to it.  These
    justifications, in their simplest and original form, consist of the
    continual irresponsible
    statements of Cheney, Rice, and Bush (‘the smoking gun’ statement and
    many
    others) which began right after 9/11/01 and continued with increasing
    frequency
    and vehemence right up to the actual invasion of Iraq on 3/18/03.

     

       
    Therefore the list which you’ve provided applies only to a very
    small
    number of people and had no role in creating the war but it did have a
    role in
    quieting and pacifying the class of opinion makers. 
    In any case these motivations were
    supplemental to the much more powerful motivation of simple fear.

     

       
    You can barely conceal your contempt for this catalogue of
    motivations.  Let us see if that contempt
    is deserved.  In his book, The Rise of
    the Vulcans, Jim Mann describes the
    motivations of Wolfowitz in planning and
    facilitating the invasion of Iraq.  Mann
    makes it clear that Wolfowitz
    saw the war as a noble effort to liberate an enslaved people from a mad
    tyrant.  In his mind it was all one with
    the Holocaust and Saddam was Hitler.  Let
    us go back to that time, 2002, and look at it from his perspective.  Here’s Wolfowitz,
    the perfect example of your points 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5.  Now answer this question honestly:  was he wrong? 
    No hindsight allowed.  Was Wolfowitz’s meliorism
    wrong?  Like the Likud
    or
    hate it.  Likudniks
    see Israel‘s
    survival as the same as opposing Hitler; opposition to Arab regimes is
    the same
    as opposing the Holocaust.  You adduce
    all sorts of hypocrisies inherent in your catalog of justifications. 

     

       
    You’re right. 

     

       
    But it’s irrelevant.  

     

       
    If you can put yourself in Wolfowitz’s
    shoes
    and honestly answer that Wolfowitz was
    wrong then
    your catalog is sensible.  I personally
    don’t know how anyone can answer that way, not even you. 
    Looking back at it he was obviously wrong.  That’s
    not the point.  At the time no one could
    say that that was
    not a noble effort.  And Wolfowitz’s meliorism
    is based on
    that simple idea.

     

       
    Where do we go from here?  We can
    say, as you imply, that meliorism is wrong
    tout
    court.  That’s fine.  We
    can live as Jesus intended us to live when
    he said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ 
    No invasion of Iraq.  No
    invasion of Afghanistan
    (a harder case).  No bombing of Kosovo (a
    much harder
    case).   No Vietnam
    (an easy case). 

     

       
    No WWII. 

     

       
    Then suppose that now Britain
    is a German protectorate along with France. 
    We can re-think our whole post-war history
    and get used to the idea of Fascism and race purity as major components
    of the
    modern Western political experience.  Good.  We also get used to the idea of the slaughter
    of all the remaining Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and babies with birth
    defects
    in Europe. 
    European societies will be run along strictly ‘Scientific’ lines.  Catholic and Protestant churches are tamed
    along with their archaic moral attitudes. 
    Liberal democracies are a thing of the past, even in America,
    since
    they so disastrously failed in the between-wars period.

     

    I guess that meliorism was good in that case.

     

     

       
    But what makes meliorism good in
    some
    circumstances and not good in others?  No
    one knows.  There is no decision
    principle.  As Isaiah Berlin was fond of quoting ‘Of the
    crooked
    timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’. 
    Or, rather, I should say ‘no one person
    knows’.  The experience of mankind has
    tended to confirm the greater reliability of decisions made on the
    basis of
    free exchange of views.  That is,
    political structures founded on the idea of open exchange of views
    tend, over
    the long run, to be a bit more stable than those regimes  committed to a strict hierarchical flow
    of information and decision-making.  This
    is not a panacea, of course.  Decisions
    made freely and in the open have been failing since at least the time
    of the
    Athenian’s Sicilian expedition and, probably, from long before.

     

     
      To see how silly your catalog
    is let us
    re-phrase it in terms of an immediate situation which we can all
    understand.

     

       
    (1) Sometimes a person is drowning and something has to be done
    to stop
    it.

     

       
    (2) “We”, who are well-meaning citizens of societies that
    don’t believe in drowning have our
    sensibilities so
    exquisitely

    attuned to questions
    of whether drowning is right or wrong whenever it
    occurs that we are uniquely positioned to discern

    and understand
    these situations and we have a unique responsibility
    to ‘intervene’ to suppress and reverse the drowning

    process.

     

       
    (3)  It “just so
    happens” that among the many instruments of policy at our command is to
    don bathing suits and get on the diving board and use all the
    technology we
    have which allows for:

     

    (a) rapid entrance
    into the water for a knock-out strike that can rapidly arrest the
    drowning
    process.

    (b) they can
    meanwhile limit to an absolute minimum the risks of “collateral”
    damage to other swimmers.

    (c) they also
    obviate the need for “our side” to throw into the battle any large
    numbers of life guards such as might be

    expensive to raise and
    maintain in the field, and might later be expected
    to come back as broken people  (or
    drowned themselves) into our own society.

     

       
    (4)  And meanwhile, though
    “we” the righteous rescuers continue to pay lip-service to all kinds
    of ideals about human equality and the need for global institutions
    like the
    United Nations, still all those institutions are deeply flawed; they
    are
    riddled with inefficiencies and corruption and make it difficult to get
    to the
    pool in time to rescue actual drowning persons.

     

       

     

       
    Therefore….

     

     

     

       
    (5)  We need to conclude, with or
    without a lingering scintilla of regret, that the only way those drownings about which we are so concerned can be
    prevented
    in a timely fashion is through an “intervention” to be undertaken by
    us (me) — and on a unilateral or otherwise non-UN basis, if need be.  (And how much better if at
    the same time we can redefine our language’s longstanding vocabulary to
    the
    extent we feel comfortable calling this anti-drowning action a
    “humanitarian” intervention…)

     

       

     

       
    Stated like this your points would elicit universal agreement.  Would you let a person drown if you had the
    power to prevent it?  You would.  Would you let Saddam’s thugs
    torture random Iraqis if you thought it could be prevented?  Would you lift a hand to save the dying Jews
    of Poland?  Would you…? 
    Would you ….? 
    The questions are endless and some of them are easy to answer
    and some
    of them are not.  I might let Saddam’s
    thugs continue to torture if, in order to prevent it,
    I had to institute a draft.    I
    might
    allow the murder and deportation of all Kosovars
    continue if to prevent it will cost more than 100 billion dollars.  Or maybe 50 billion;  I’m not certain.  I
    might be willing to do something for Darfur if the cost is fewer
    than 100 military lives and 10 billion dollars. 
    But if it’s 11 billion all bets are
    off.  Stated this way it seems immoral but
    that’s
    life.  Every moral action has a cost and
    if the cost is too high it threatens to disable the entire moral system.  For example, how much should a National Guard
    family in Arkansas suffer in order to
    relieve
    every 150 inhabitants of Darfur?  An infinite amount?
     A family of five vs.
    150
    residents of Darfur?      Answer! 
    Maybe we could allow that family in Arkansas to be destroyed?  After all, it’s the right thing to do.  Or maybe not.  Maybe Darfurians
    have been driven off their lands since the dawn of time and there’s  precious
    little that we can do about
    it.  But if the cost to save them is less
    than 150 dollars per Arkansas
    or Nebraskan Guard family then maybe it’s doable.

     

       
    Nor do we even get into Kierkegaard’s elaborations on the
    Teleological
    Suspension of the Ethical.  E.g., when is
    it justifiable to break the law (violate ethical principles) in order
    to
    prevent a greater evil?  Hmmm?  Kierkegaard
    thought that, in the right circumstances, we could violate the Ethical
    itself.  For Kierkegaard all the Darfurians could go and hang themselves and we
    should assist
    them – if it was truly God’s will that they should do so.  
    That was God’s message to Abraham according
    to K.  And wasn’t that the argument line
    in Rwanda?

     

       
    All these decisions are fraught with considerations and costs.  All these decisions are heavily laden with
    complex historical antecedents. 

     

       
    To be forced to make such decisions in the face of lousy
    information is
    the cost of being human. 

     

       
    We must always make decisions in doubt and ignorance; we must
    mitigate
    the costs and increase the benefits.  If we can.

     

       
    To make a mistake is pardonable. 
    To fail to predict the future and lives be lost as a result is
    pardonable.  What’s not pardonable – and
    this, I think, is what you’re angry about  (along with all the rest of us) – is
    to refuse to look the truth in the eye and learn from disaster. 

     

        
    But that’s a different list.

And now, if you have the energy to carry on reading, here is my response to him:

Continue reading “The ‘liberal hawks’ question, contd.”

Legislators in Afghanistan and Iraq now edging off the US reservation

Afghanistan’s “Senate”– that is, the Meshrano Jirga upper house in the country’s post-2001 bicameral system– yesterday backed proposals that call for a cessation of military operations against against the Taliban, and invite the Taliban to take that opportunity to enter peace talks.
The Meshrano Jirga also called for a clear timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan.
These proposals came from a peace commission that the MJ had previously established.
The MJ consists of “an unspecified number of local dignitaries and experts appointed by provincial councils, district councils, and the president.” It does not, apparently, have as many powers under the Afghanistan’s January 2004 Constitution as the bigger, elected lower house. The NYT’s reporters say that the lower house is unlikely to back the MJ’s resolution.
However, the US-led project to build a pliant but also locally credible political system in Afghanistan now seems to be in about as much trouble as the parallel effort in Iraq. In Baghdad, also on Tuesday, 144 lawmakers– that is, more than half of the members of the parliament elected in December 2005– signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal.
Writing on Alternet, Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland say,

    It’s a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass

Jarrar and Holland note that despite its groundbreaking nature, the news of this legislative petition did not make it into the US MSM. (I tip my hat to Juan Cole for the link there.) The rest of their post there on Alternet is also certainly worth reading.
But I am also intrigued by the Meshrano Jirga’s vote in Kabul. Here in the US, the term “Taliban” is freighted with all kinds of dread, misgiving, and plain outright hatred– though in its original essence it only means “students.” During their years of rule in Afghanistan, the Taliban did do many terrible things to enforce their vision of what puritanical Islamic rule over the country should look like; and the female half of the country suffered particularly badly under their rule.
On the other hand, the Taliban did bring nearly completely to an end both the warlordism that had plagued the country for many years prior to their establishment of their government, and the industrial-scale poppy-growing with which the warlords had financed many of their military operations. During the violence-wracked years of the horrendous contests among the warlords, all Afghans, of both genders, suffered hugely; and millions fled the country to escape that violence and instability.
When the US invaded the country in November 2001, they did so in coalition with many of those same warlords, who today form a potent political force in the highest levels of the “Constitutional” government. If members of the present upper house are now proposing talks with the Taliban, to me that is a measure of the deep dissatisfaction many Afghans must have today with what the US-warlord coalition has delivered to their country. Certainly, the tendency of the US military to go careening round Afghanistan blowing up large numbers of people with little success in discriminating between combatants and noncombatants among those they target has alienated considerable numbers of Afghans from the US military. (Even the US-installed President Hamid Karzai has been obliged to voice public complaints.) It has also strengthened the Taliban’s support in the country.
I believe that we in the international community (and in the US, in particular) need to be much more open than we have been so far to the idea of an intra-Afghan reconciliation process that is broadly inclusive of the Taliban. (Anyway, as in Iraq, the internal reconciliation process in Afghanistan is really none of our darn’ business.) Yes, many of us have continuing concerns about the status and plight of Afghanistan’s women if the Taliban are able to regain too much influence in the country. However, I’d note the following:

    (1) The improvements that the post-Taliban era has brought to in women’s status has not been nearly as deep or as widely distributed as some people imagine or claim. Most of the country remains extremely conservative/restrictive on women’s issues. And
    (2) There certainly are other models around the world of politically successful Islamist movements that have actively pursued affirming policies towards female inclusion in all aspects of the public sphere including in education, the workplace, religious life, and even politics. See, for example, my reporting about the Hamas women, here and here. It would actually be great if we could see some signs that the Afghan Talibs– who grew up in a society that had far less social and economic development than the Palestinians– could take a few lessons from their Palestinian co-believers’ success in promoting and supporting the advancement of women’s skills, even within a strictly Islamist social and political context…

Anyway, I guess the main point of this post is to note that as of now, even the US-installed satrapies in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to be chafing under the yoke of the Bushists’ continuing ineptitude and their continuing reliance on blind military force long after it has become evident to everyone else– including a majority of folks here in the US homeland– that a blind reliance on brute force and ignorance really can’t bring good things to anybody in the world.

CSM column to mark 40 years of Israel’s occupation of the OPTs.

Here is my column in the May 10 Christian Science Monitor. (It’s also here.) The title is The UN must drive Middle East peace and the subtitle is Global stability can no longer be held hostage to the claims of Israeli settlers.
In it I argue, by clear implication, that the US no longer has the political credibility required to continue to dominate Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking… This, in the context of the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza– and the Syrians of Golan– having had to endure rule by foreign military occupation.
I argue:

    the Israeli-Palestinian issue remains one with crucial impact on global stability. The time has come for the United Nations and other world powers to tell Washington that the near-monopoly the US has exercised over Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy for most of the past 40 years needs to end…

But while the Palestinians and Israelis all desperately need to see the definitive end of the 40-year-long occupation– a transition that can only take place in the context of a final peace agreement being concluded between them– Condi Rice and the administration she works for continue merely to fiddle away with tweaking a tiny, tiny part of the interim peace agenda: namely, the extensive system of extremely tight movement controls that Israel has imposed over the Palestinians of the West Bank in recent years– as too, around all the borders of Gaza.
How draconian are these movement controls?
Well, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) regaularly publishes a whole booklet of very detailed maps that show you exactly where all the IOF-staffed checkpoints, baricades, earth barriers, trenches, gates, and barriers are, that choke each Palestinian sub-community off from its neighbors. Here‘s the April 2007 version of the booklet. But be warned it’s a vast, vast PDF file. If you want to look at just one of those maps, go to p.7 of that PDF file and look at the one for Nablus. The blue roads are the “apartheid roads”– that is, the roads on which Palestinian traffic is either prohibited or strictly restricted. The purplish blobs are the Israeli settlements– and the lighter purple areas around them are the lands the settlements have expropriated. The yellow-toned areas are the areas with Palestinian population or cultivation.
As I note in the column:

    Today, as many as 440,000 Israeli settlers live among the nearly 2.5 million Palestinians of the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem.)
    The size of this settler population considerably complicates the search for a solution. The settlers now form more than 5 percent of Israel’s electorate. And their appropriation of huge quantities of the West Bank’s land and water makes it hard to imagine how any viable Palestinian state could be established on the land that the settlers have not (yet) taken.

… Earlier today, the World Bank issued this report that looked at the effect that the whole Israeli-imposed movement-control system has had on the Palestinian economy.
The report’s Executive Summary notes,

    Beginning in December 2004, … all parties (including the Government of Israel (GOI) and the Palestinian Authority (PA)) agreed that Palestinian economic revival was essential, that it required a major dismantling of today’s closure regime and that closure needed to be addressed from several perspectives at once…
    Currently, freedom of movement and access for Palestinians within the West Bank is the exception rather than the norm contrary to the commitments undertaken in a number of Agreements between GOI and the PA. In particular, both the Oslo Accords and the Road Map were based on the principle that normal Palestinian economic and social life would be unimpeded by restrictions. In economic terms, the restrictions arising from closure not only increase transaction costs, but create such a high level of uncertainty and inefficiency that the normal conduct of business becomes exceedingly difficult and stymies the growth and investment which is necessary to fuel economic revival.
    … In the West Bank, closure is implemented through an agglomeration of policies, practices and physical impediments which have fragmented the territory into ever smaller and more disconnected cantons. While physical impediments are the visible manifestations of closure, the means of curtailing Palestinian movement and access are actually far more complex and are based on a set of administrative practices and permit policies which limit the freedom of Palestinians to move home, obtain work, invest in businesses or construction and move about outside of their municipal jurisdiction. These administrative restrictions, rooted in military orders associated with the occupation of West Bank and Gaza (WB&G), are used to restrict Palestinian access to large segments of the West Bank including all areas within the municipal boundaries of settlements, the “seam zone”, the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, restricted roads and other ‘closed’ areas. Estimates of the total restricted area are difficult to come by, but it appears to be in excess of 50% of the land of the West Bank. While Israeli security concerns are undeniable and must be addressed, it is often difficult to reconcile the use of movement and access restrictions for security purposes from their use to expand and protect settlement activity and the relatively unhindered movement of settlers and other Israelis in and out of the West Bank.
    While GOI has shown a willingness to consider a relaxation of specific restrictions, including the provision of several hundred permits to unique categories of Palestinians such as businessmen, or the removal of certain physical impediments, incremental steps are not likely to lead to any sustainable improvement. This is because these incremental steps lack permanence and certainty and can be easily withdrawn or replaced by other restrictions. Moreover, sustainable economic recovery will remain elusive if large areas of the West Bank remain inaccessible for economic purposes and restricted movement remains the norm for the vast majority of Palestinians and expatriate Palestinian investors. Only through a fundamental reassessment of closure, and a restoration of the presumption of movement, as embodied in the many agreements between GOI and the PA, will the Palestinian private sector be able to recover and fuel sustainable growth.

And here, if you are interested, is the WB’s report on the dire fate the Palestinian economy suffered in calendar 2006.
It says:

    After having experienced a modest recovery in 2003–05, the Palestinian economy suffered another decline in 2006, as a result of the domestic and international political difficulties. Although hard data are scarce, real GDP is estimated to have fallen within a range of 5 to 10 percent in 2006, less than initially had been feared, but still leaving average real per capita GDP at almost 40 percent below its 1999 level.
    …The worsening political and security situation has clearly been detrimental to economic growth. Production has been lost due to outright destruction of physical infrastructure and assets, or dampened by the numerous closures and checkpoints, the shortage of funds to finance government spending, as well as by the increased uncertainty about the Palestinian territories’ prospects.

The surest way to end this uncertainty? To have the Security Council speedily declare that Israel’s military occupation of these areas must end forthwith on the basis of the well-known principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, as spelled out in numerous previous SC resolutions, and on the basis of the Palestinians gaining their sovereign independence in the West Bank and Gaza and concluding a final peace with Israel.
Forty years of living under the yoke of a foreign military: It’s enough!

Swiss-American prof urges attack on Iran

Louis-René Beres, a professor who teaches international law at
Purdue University (but not in a law school there) had a very warmongery
op-ed piece
in yesterday’s Christian Science
Monitor, titled The
case for strikes against Iran: Diplomacy alone won’t stop Iran’s
nuclear ambitions.

Beres has been a pro-Israeli ultra-hawk on nuclear issues for a long time. I came across his name when I was
first researching Israel’s massive and already very “mature”
nuclear-weapons program back in the 1980s.  (See, for example,
footnote 6 in this
(be aware: that’s a large PDF file there) 1988 article of mine
titled Israel’s Nuclear Game: The
U.S. Stake.)

Well, Beres is stilll going strong. In 2003-04 he was Chair of
something called the “Project
Daniel Group that gave strategic advice about nuclear issues to PM
Sharon.  E.g., this:

The Group recommended to the Prime
Minister that “Israel must
identify explicitly and early on that all enemy Arab states and Iran
are subject to massive Israeli reprisal in the event of a BN
[Biological or Nuclear] attack
upon Israel” We recommended further that “massive” reprisals be
targeted at between 10 and 20 large enemy cities…and that the
nuclear yields of such Israeli reprisals be in
the megaton-range. It goes without saying that such deterrent
threats
by Israel would be very compelling to all rational enemies, but — at
the same time — would likely have little or no effect upon irrational
ones. In the case of irrational adversaries, Israel`s only hope for
safety will likely lie in appropriate acts of preemption — defensive
acts to be discussed more fully in the next column of my ongoing
Project Daniel series.

A policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) which was obtained
between the United States and the Soviet Union, would never work
between Israel and its Arab/Iranian enemies. Rather, the Project Daniel
Group recommended that Israel MUST prevent its enemies from acquiring
BN status, and that any notion of BN “parity” between Israel and its
enemies would be intolerable…

So anyway, I thought it might be helpful for me to annotate Beres’s
recent piece in the CSM:

Continue reading “Swiss-American prof urges attack on Iran”

Surge getting bogged down in fortifications

Just over two weeks ago, insurgents in Iraq’s Diyala province rammed an explosives-packed truck into the tall concrete blast walls that ‘surging’ US soldiers had put up to protect their new, small, neighborhood-style patrol base. The attackers pushed the heavy wall right over on top of the soldiers inside the base, killing nine and injuring 20.
The US military is a reactive, lesson-learning institution. Thus, in today’s WaPo we have this story telling us that for the ‘surging’ soldiers,

    defending their small outposts is increasingly requiring heavy bulwarks reminiscent of the fortresslike bases that the U.S. troops left behind.
    To guard against bombs, mortar fire and other threats, U.S. commanders are adding fortifications to the outposts, setting them farther back from traffic and arming them with antitank weapons capable of stopping suicide bombers driving armored vehicles. U.S. troops maintain the advantage of living in the neighborhoods they are asked to protect, but the need to safeguard themselves from attack means more walls between them and civilians.

If you want to see what the new outer ring of fortifications at a ‘patrol base’ now looks like, click on the photo in that story. They have apparently put huge tubs filled with sandbags right behind those high concrete walls, presumably to prevent attackers from once again tipping the walls over onto the US soldiers inside…
Evidently, all these fortifications and fortifications of fortifications, are severely hampering the achievement of what was supposed to be the main point of distributing the ‘surging’ soldiers more widely throughout Iraq’s populated areas– that was, to enable the soldiers to “be with the people”, both in order to keep tabs on them and to build up some friendly alliances with members of the Iraqi public.
That piece in today’s WaPo, which was by Ann Scott Tyson, tells us just how bad relations have even become between the US soldiers and the supposedly ‘loyal’ Iraqi troops who are in the patrol bases alongside them. Writing of one outpost in Sadr City she says,

    U.S. troops staff guard towers on the roof 24 hours a day and, uncertain of the loyalties of their Iraqi counterparts, also stand sentry at the American section inside.

… So the surge is completely doomed not to work as planned. (You can read some of my earlier thoughts on that, here.)
Jonathan Weisman and Tom Ricks write in today’s WaPo that:

    Congressional leaders from both political parties are giving President Bush a matter of months to prove that the Iraq war effort has turned a corner, with September looking increasingly like a decisive deadline.
    In that month, political pressures in Washington will dovetail with the military timeline in Baghdad. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, has said that by then he will have a handle on whether the current troop increase is having any impact on political reconciliation between Iraq’s warring factions. And fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1, will almost certainly begin with Congress placing tough new strings on war funding.
    “Many of my Republican colleagues have been promised they will get a straight story on the surge by September,” said Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.). “I won’t be the only Republican, or one of two Republicans, demanding a change in our disposition of troops in Iraq at that point. That is very clear to me.”
    “September is the key,” said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds defense. “If we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, September is going to be a very bleak month for this administration.”

Meanwhile, I just also want to flag this significant piece that Peter Spiegel and Julian Barnes had in Sunday’s L.A. Times. The title is On Iraq, Gates may not be following Bush’s playbook As the president pushes for more time and money for the war, the Pentagon chief’s message has seemed to run counter..
The reporters have amassed some pretty shrewd pieces of evidence for this. Including this:

    Gates was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended in its report last year that most combat troops withdraw by early 2008. Gates did not sign the report; he has said that formal deliberations did not start until after he left for the Pentagon. But several people who worked on the report said Gates was closely involved in early drafts and would have supported its eventual conclusions.
    “Knowing how that group got along and how we shared our views, there remains no question in my mind that Bob Gates, had he not become secretary of Defense, would have supported those recommendations,” said Leon E. Panetta, a former Clinton White House chief of staff and a member of the Iraq panel.

It has long been my contention that last November’s replacement of Rumsfeld as SecDef by Gates marked an important turning-point in the Bush administration’s handling of the war. Gates looks like a canny, patient player of the bureaucratic game. Let’s hope he is also as canny (or at least, realistic) at grand strategy.

Global security after Iraq

Part 1.

When I was in Oxford this past March, my wise friend and colleague Avi
Shlaim reminded me that back in February 2003 he had been one of
several historians who predicted that George Bush’s military adventure
in Iraq would turn out no better than the analogous military adventure
that Britain, France, and Israel all launched against Egypt, in Suez,
in 1956.

It is worth re-reading the whole of
this excellent article that the Guardian’s Ian Kershaw published
in February 2003.  In it, Kershaw compiled the judgments that Avi and eleven
other historians offered on the question of whether what  Bush (and Blair)
were facing in Iraq was another “Munich”-type challenge, or the first
act of a Suez-type debacle. 

Avi was firmly in the “It’s a Suez” camp.  Here’s what he wrote
then about British PM Anthony Eden’s decision-making in 1956:

Eden thought that he was applying the
lessons of the 1930s in
dealing with Gamal Abdel Nasser and the result was a fiasco that
brought his own career crashing down. Eden demonised Nasser,
personalised the issues, and went to the length of colluding with
France and Israel with the aim of knocking Nasser off his perch. The
chiefs of staff had deep misgivings about the war. One senior officer
exclaimed: “The prime minister has gone bananas. He has ordered us to
attack Egypt!” Britain attacked Egypt without the authority of the UN
and it was roundly condemned for its aggression. There is, however, one
important difference between 1956 and the current crisis. Over Suez,
the US upheld the authority of the UN and led the pack against the
law-breakers. Today, the Bush administration is hell-bent on the use of
force to topple Saddam, with or without UN sanction.

He also, quite rightly, noted this:

Continue reading “Global security after Iraq”