Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 173 – Info, analysis, discussion

Northern Uganda: A second-stage peace accord

Great news from Juba, Southern Sudan, where on May 2nd negotiators from the Government of Uganda and the once violently oppositionist group the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) signed an agreement that goes considerably beyond a ceasefire and starts to sketch out the political contours of a final settlement.
This settlement will include the return of the LRA’s fighters to Ugandan society, the much-longed-for return to their lands and farmsteads of 1.5 million or so Ugandans– mainly but not exclusively ethnic Acholis– from the north of their country whom the government has held penned up in strategic hamlets (“IDP camps”) for the past ten years, and some re-ordering of power relations within Ugandan society to increase the real inclusion of those communities into national society.
The Acholis have been the main (but not the only) targets of LRA violence and are also the community from which he and most LRA fighters come and in whose name they claim to speak.
The latest accord was signed by Henry Oryem Okello (perhaps himself an ethnic Acholi?) on behalf of the government and by Martin Ojul, the LRA’s peace delegation chairman. The Daily Monitor notes that the signing was was witnessed not only by the two delegations’ host there in Juba, the Vice-President of Southern Sudan and chief mediator Riek Machar, but also by observers from Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania.
That indicates significant African-state buy-in and support for the agreement.
That report from The Daily Monitor gives these further details:

Hat-tip to Jonathan Edelstein for having posted about this agreement on Headheeb.
He concludes with this:

international war crimes charges

proven an obstacle

other peacemaking efforts

In connection with the ICC issue, I see that Elise Keppler and Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch have recently been in Uganda. They have an article in The Monitor in which they argue:

the warring parties and the mediators cannot bargain away prosecution of the LRA leaders who have been charged with grave crimes. Simply put, a solution that avoids meaningful justice will undercut the prospects for a durable peace.

I strongly disagree. First of all, these two– like so many other activists within the western-based human rights movement– seem to be completely conflating the concept of “justice” with the idea of the orderly working of a western-style criminal court (though goodness knows, even in the west there are numerous other ways in which the concept of “justice” is understood.) Secondly, the history of the world has been full of peace settlements in which perpetrators of even extremely grave conflict-era atrocities were not all prosecuted; and many of those peace agreements have proven remarkably durable over time. (Perhaps if Keppler and Dicker really want to hold perpetrators of very serious conflict-era atrocities to account in a criminal court, they might start closer to HRW’s home and start agitating for the prosecution of the US’s very own ‘shock and awe” campaigns around the world??)
Keppler and Dicker write that they did go visit some of the members of the IDP communities in northern Uganda. And they write this about what they learned and heard there:

Nearly all those we met in displaced camps expressed an intense desire to return to their homes. A number conveyed real concern that prosecution of LRA leaders could further delay their departure and therefore saw the ICC as an obstacle. A distinct vocal minority, however, declared a desire to see those most responsible brought to trial, although they questioned how the ICC could arrest those it had charged.

I read this as them clearly conceding that most of the people they heard from in the camps saw the ICC as an obstacle– which tracks exactly with my own findings when I was in northern Uganda last summer. But Keppler and Dicker– no doubt writing after their own return either to the comforts of a decent hotel in Kampala, or perhaps after a return to their comfortable homes and well-equipped offices in New York– blithely assume that they know what’s best for these people! (It would be nice if they had written a little more about the extremely bleak, comfortless, and often actually lethal conditions inside the IDP camps there.)
It is also faintly hilarious when they write: “A peace worth having cannot rest on impunity. It is up to key players such as the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy, former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano to convey this message loud and clear at the Juba talks.”
Chissano, after all, was the far-sighted leader of Mozambique’s Frelimo government who intitiated and then concluded a peace agreement with the Renamo insurgents that was based precisely on the approach of using a blanket amnesty for all perpetrators of conflict-era violence (of which there had been considerable amounts), and on traditional healing and sociopolitical reconstruction.
Keppler and Dicker are notably silent about the inspiring achievements that Chissano and his country registered in building a stable and rule-of-law-based peace on the basis of this approach. If you want to read my own reflections on the contribution that war crimes amnesties made to building a sustainable peace in post-civil war Mozambique and post-apartheid South Africa, you can do so here. (And if you want to read the whole book of which that is the concluding paragraph, you can get it from the publishers.)
But anyway, the main message of this post is: a big congratulations to all the negotiators for the work they’ve done so far! And let’s hope they can finish the rest of the work on the agreement soon, and get implementation off to a successful start before the next planting season.

Sayed Hassan uses Winograd to blast Siniora

The ironies of the Middle East are rich indeed. On Wednesday, Hizbullah head Sayed Hassan Nasrallah praised the work of Israel’s Winograd Commission, which on Tuesday issued an Interim Report that blasted PM Olmert, defense minister Peretz, and former chief of staff Halutz for taking Israel to defeat in last summer’s war in Lebanon.
Nasrallah praised the Commission’s report on two main grounds:

Are you surprised about this apparent endorsement Nasrallah gave to the state of democracy inside Israel?
Don’t be. This is an ongoing twist in the long-running and big-stakes conflict of wills he’s been fighting against Lebanon’s own PM, Fouad Siniora.
Here’s what Nasrallah said in that general regard:

And here’s Siniora’s reaction to the commission report:

Siniora is one of many Bush-supported, high-level pols around the world (think Olmert, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales… ) who are today desperately trying to hang onto their positions in the face of rising protests centered primarily on the roles they played in various Cheney-orchestrated war ventures around the world.
Regarding Olmert, yesterday he managed to beat off the challenge that his foreign minister Tzipi Livni had mounted to his leadership of the Kadima Party and also the government.
Evidently Livni had failed to do adequate homework inside Kadima’s leadership circles before she announced her challenge to Olmert in public. She failed to receive enough backing for her challenge to work, so she emerged from yesterday’s events looking a little foolish and whiny.
Meanwhile, all these political goings-on inside Kadima’s leadership circles allow Israel’s government to continue to avoid engaging in any serious way with any aspects of the Middle East’s urgently needed peace diplomacy. Or rather, they “allow” this to happen because, basically, the ever-permissive (to Israel) Bush-Cheney government allows them to allow it to happen.
Today, the big street protests against Olmert are coming together in Tel Aviv. Not sure yet what effect they will have, though my expectation is still that because of the widely mixed and still fluid nature of the demonstrators’ politics their effect will be unclear and most likely indecisive.

Boys with (very lethal) toys: What are these ‘toys’ good for?

(Being, a critique of Ron Tira’s The Limitations of Standoff
Firepower-Based Operations:On Standoff Warfare, Maneuver, and Decision)

Ron Tira is an Israeli Air Force reservist with considerable
experience
in the IAF’s intelligence and “Campaign Planning” departments. Last
November he published this scathing
critique of the way the Israeli ground forces had performed during
Israel’s 33-day war on Lebanon. (See my commentary on that, here.)

Now, in his latest study The
Limitations of Standoff Firepower-Based Operations, Tira has
turned his sights on many of the operational assumptions and concepts
developed with his own service, the Air Force. His critique is
very significant, it seems to me, for two reasons. First, it provides an IAF
insider’s informed insight into the flaws within the operational
concept that the IAF itself had done the most to develop within the
broader realm of Israeli military planning. The IAF’s former
chief Dan Halutz took the concept of relying very strongly on
“standoff, firepower-based operations” (SFO’s) with him when he became
the chief of the IDF’s entire, over-arching general staff structure;
and the 33-day war of last summer was Halutz’s great chance (!) to
demonstrate the efficacy of these types of operation.

And beyond that, as Tira makes clear throughout this latest study, the
Israeli concept of reliance on SFO’s is intimately– one might say,
organically– linked to many of the ideas and concepts developed within
the US military in recent years, including the ideas about the
possibility of relying on small but firepower-heavy forces capable of
operating over long distances that were strongly championed by Donald
Rumsfeld when he became Secreteary of Defense in 2001. (I
recently wrote here
about some of the terrible consequences– for both the US and
Iraq– of the Bush administration’s reliance on the small forces
dicated by that concept.)

So clearly, Tira’s critique of SFO’s has relevance and potential
resonance far beyond Israel’s immediate theater of operations. Hence,
the general nature of my title here.

A good proportion of the “boys”
in both the US and the Israeli armed services have clearly always been
enamored of high-tech gadgetry, and seduced by the idea that its
effective utilization could reduce their own forces’ casualties (and
perhaps, through the development of ‘precision guidance’ to the desired
level of ‘surgical’ precision, also reduce ‘collateral’ damage in the
areas targeted) while allowing them greater flexibility to operate
anywhere in the world they pleased and without all the messy,
time-consuming, and expensive business of having to plan for, move into
position, and then sustain in the field large numbers of the infantry’s
“boots on the ground”… But until Rumsfeld’s sharp-elbowed
arrival in the Pentagon, operational-art thinking there had still been
dominated by the basic tents of “the Powell Doctrine”: that is, a basic
reliance on large infantry forces (as built up over several decades in,
primarily, Central Europe), with all the strategic and political
constraints that reliance on such forces entails.

Rumsfeld worked rapidly and ruthlessly to bend the high command of the
US military to his will. The two great “experiments” of his
attempt to reconfigure US forces according to the new focus on what
Tira calls SFO’s, and to which US military jargon assigns a number of
other related terms (see p.11 of Tira’s work), were the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq. Significantly, when Tira tries to place the
performance of Israel’s SFO-focused campaign in Lebanon in 2006 into a
broader comparative context, in Ch.8 of this short work, the
comparisons he draws are with those two US campaigns and with the US’s
earlier SFO-based campaign in Kosovo, in 1999…

Continue reading “Boys with (very lethal) toys: What are these ‘toys’ good for?”

Protests in Israel: their nature and prospects

In Portugal, in 1974, it was the country’s conscripts and junior officers who– questioning why they had to spend long years ruling distant colonial outposts rather than enjoying the good life they saw their youthful peers elsewhere in Europe engaging in– went home from those outposts and toppled the fascist-military regime that had been (mis-)ruling their country since 1926.
In South Africa, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, young “Whites” who were similarly disaffected with the burdens of conscription and militarism that the apartheid system imposed on them started to question the moral worth of the apartheid system from within.
In Israel, student groups from throughout the country (who have their own specific gripes with the government) have now joined with residents of the painfully close-to-Gaza town of Sderot and disaffected army reservists in a nationwide anti-Olmert protest that is expected to converge in Tel Aviv on Thursday.
Remember that in Israel, most young men and women who go to university to study do so after they’ve spent their required time as conscripts in the military. That’s 36 months for men and 24 months for women. This fact has a number of consequences:

Remember, too, that there is a close link between Israel’s levels of defense spending ($7.69 billion in 2006, of which only $2.26 billion came from Uncle Sam) and its ability to underwrite either a decent eduction for university students or decent social services and support systems for the residents of socially marginalized towns like Sderot.
The politics of this week’s gathering protests are– and will most likely to continue for a while to be– mixed and fairly fluid. Some of the groups participating (including the Tafnit movement, founded by a former national-security adviser to both former PMs, E. Barak and A. Sharon) seem to be politically centrist or even rightwing. Others are probably more clearly pro-peace. But the country’s formerly big, almost “mainstream” pro-peace organization, Peace Now, is still reeling from the hasty decision some of its leaders made last July to support Olmert’s extremely escalatory, lethal– and also, as it turned out, deeply dysfunctional– war effort. (The Winograd report once again underlined the fact that, in the war’s early days Olmert and Halutz’s decisions were supported by a strong majority of Israel’s public and political elite. Not that that should be seen as removing for one moment the burden of constructive leadership from those individuals.)
As I noted here yesterday, the strongest, best-organized force in the anti-Olmert camp is currently the Israeli right wing. But I think the politics are fluid. There is a deep war-weariness in much of the country. That, too, was alluded to in the Winograd report, when it talked about weaknesses in “the national ethos”. I see that Ze’ev Schiff referred to that, as well, in this column in HaAretz today. When I sat and talked with Ze’ev in Tel Aviv in March last year, he talked quite a bit about this development, which he– unlike me– saw as a cause for deep concern.
So the politics in the gathering anti-Olmert protests will most likely be very mixed, and potentially very fluid. For the immediate future, that fact will most likely allow Olmert to succeed in his plan of hanging on in office in spite of everything.
But over the three or four years ahead, which broad direction is the Jewish Israeli public going to take? Let’s all try to figure out how to persuade them to follow the route taken by the Portuguese junior officers 33 years ago: No more colonial occupation of other people’s lands with all the wars, oppression, and suffering that situation entails for everyone concerned!
(Maybe the Portuguese democrats and their “White” South African counterparts could think about sending delegations to Israel to talk to people there about their experiences??)

Good investigative article on key H. Clinton advisor

Anne Kornblut had a good piece of reporting in today’s WaPo about a guy called Mark Penn, described as the “chief strategist” for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
If you were looking for a good reason to distrust Hillary, her close present relationship with this guy seems to provide a number of them.
Penn belongs to a growing breed of types in this country who try to make a very handsome living out of providing purely “technical” campaign-related advice to candidates. Of course, there is seldom such a thing as completely unslanted, purely data-driven advice, though people in that job frequently like to claim that there is. (What “data” do you collect, anyway? And crucially, in opinion polls, how do you frame the questions that get you the data you’re using?)
But here are two things Kornblut tells us about Mark Penn that I didn’t know before. Firstly, this:

In 1981, he and business partner Doug Schoen helped reelect Menachem Begin, one of the most right-wing prime ministers in the country’s history,

And then, there’s the fact that, in his role as Chief Executive of the big “public relations” (i.e., influence-peddling) firm of Burson-Marsteller, Penn is continuing– while also acting as Clinton’s chief campaign strategist– to lead BM’s work on the big contract it has for Microsoft.
Kornblut points out that the organizational ethics of this arrangement are even worse than those under which President Bush worked with his key political strategist, Karl Rove, during the 2000 campaign.
She notes that in 2000,

then-Gov. George W. Bush forced his top strategist, Karl Rove, to sell his direct-mail business to eliminate the perception of any conflicts of interest and to guarantee that his full attention would be on the campaign. While other consultants also do lucrative corporate work, no one holds as senior a corporate position as Penn’s while effectively running a presidential campaign.

Kornblut writes about Penn:

Well, Penn might claim there are no conflicts of interest. But what does Hillary Clinton’s continuing relationship with a guy in this position tell us about her priorities and values? That they are even sleazier than George W. Bush’s? That’s certainly what it looks like from this article.

Israel’s Winograd Commission blasts Olmert, Peretz, Halutz

The Winograd Commission, established by Israeli PM Ehud Olmert to investigate Israel’s notably unsuccessful performance in last summer’s war against Lebanon, today issued a first “Partial Report” in Jerusalem. The report covered only the period leading up to the war and the first six days of what turned out to be a 33-day war. It attributed “primary responsibility” for what it described as “very serious failings” in Israeli decisionmaking in this period to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the defense minister Amir Peretz, and the then-Chief of Staff Dan Halutz.
Paragraph 10 of the report’s Executive Summary detailed the main strategic failings thus:

The report detailed four specific ways in which Olmert had failed and concluded that, “All of these add up to a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.” Of Peretz, it said, “the Minister of Defense failed in fulfilling his functions. Therefore, his serving as Minister of Defense during the war impaired Israel’s ability to respond well to its challenges.” And of Halutz it concluded, “the Chief of Staff failed in his duties as commander in chief of the army and as a critical part of the political-military leadership, and exhibited flaws in professionalism, responsibility and judgment.”
Of these three men who stood at the top of Israel’s national command and decisionmaking apparatus during the war, only Halutz has so far resigned.
This evening, as widely predicted beforehand, Olmert once again vowed to hang on in office. In a brief televised statement he said, “It would not be correct to resign… and I have no intention of resigning.” In a very non-committal way he admitted that “mistakes were made” and promised to start work this week on implementing some of the Commission’s procedural recommendations.
The harsh judgments made by this will add significantly to the pressures that have been building up on Olmert. A police enquiry into the terms on which he transacted a profitable property deal some years ago intermittently threatens to bring him to the brink of resignation. But prior to running in last year’s national elections Olmert (and his political mentor Ariel Sharon) had cleverly re-configured Israeli politics by establishing a new centrist party that split Labor down the middle. Now, the strongest opposition to him comes from his right-wing– former comrades in the Likud Party and their allies even further to the right.
But a large proportion of Israel’s political elite has been in a funk since the unexpected defeat of last summer’s war. Neither Olmert’s Kadima Party nor any of the smaller parties in the present ruling coalition wants to risk forcing the country into a fresh general election by leaving the coalition.
Last July’s decision to escalate very harshly indeed in response to Hizbullah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers was taken by Olmert and Halutz according to the concept that Israel’s use of massively destructive and lethal force against Lebanon would rapidly force Hizbullah to cry “uncle” and agree to the dismantling of its very experienced militia force. (For more details, see here.) That concept built on the alleged effectiveness of stand-off– primarily airborne– firepower, which some hawkish strategic thinkers had seen demonstrated by US military operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But in none of those three other theaters did the “decisive” early records of the US war effort led to stable, and stably pro-western outcomes. And in Lebanon, the massive application of stand-off firepower for 33 days did not even succeed in its first-stage goal of either decapitating Hizbullah or forcing the organization to bow to Israel’s demands.
For the advocates of stand-off firepower, the “promise” of this approach had always lain in the idea that using hi-tech gadgetry from high altitudes could enable the military to cut down, in particular, on the enormous burden that maintaining a ready ground-combat capability imposes on the manpower of a country. (This is the case even with a heavily reserves-reliant force, as Israel’s is, since the reserves do have to be trained and retrained every year or so.)
Now, Jewish Israelis as a group are faced with the momentous choice of whether they want to continue to live as an embattled, isolated outpost within a predominantly Arab part of the world, and an outpost that is prepared to pay the heavy costs– particular in terms of the conscription burden for young people– associated with that… Or, are they prepared to look to other, more creative and potentially long-lasting ways to assure their security, primarily through building relationships of peace and cooperation with their neighbors in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon?
The peace initiative adopted by the Arab League in 2002, and recently re-committed to by all the Arab states and parties, including the Palestinians, provides one very worthwhile route to explore. But with Washington’s Arab-Israeli policy still firmly controlled by unreconstructed neocon Elliot Abrams it is very unlikely that the Bush administration– which does, after all, also have quite a few woes of its own– will do anything to help Israelis to decide to “Make love not war.”

Highlights (and some low points) of my trip

This was another, most amazing trip. I do truly feel blessed to be able to travel so freely in the world and to have a profession that allows me to meet some really intriguing people from all kinds of walks of life, to have large numbers of really thought-provoking experiences– and to have quite a high degree of freedom in choosing where I go and what I do.
One of the main things I valued, being in the Middle East for five or six weeks, was the ability to be so close to Iraq and to talk at first hand to a number of people who are very directly affected by the situation there. Another was the ability to put my finger on the pulse of other big political developments in the region: to meet some Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt (here and here) and talk to large numbers of other people there; and to talk to policymakers and others in both Syria and Jordan.
Then, when I went to London in March, one thing that struck me almost immediately was how much closer London and the rest of Europe are than the US– both geographically and also in other ways, too– to the political developments in both the Middle East and all of Africa. In London, people I talked to would just casually say something like “I might go down to Southern Sudan next week to do a bit of research, though I haven’t made my mind up yet”, or “Oh, I’m sorry I can’t make it to the meeting tomorrow because I’ll be in Beirut, but how about two days after that?” … Whereas from the US, to go to either of those destinations or any place else in the Middle East or Africa requires not just that much longer of a trip but also much, much more advance planning.
My recollection is that the longer advance planning was also there for trips to those places from Europe, back when I was last living in London in 1981. But air transport and other kinds of links have evidently proliferated… So you just feel a lot closer to those places in Europe than you do in the US; and I think that has an effect. Maybe it means it is that much harder for Europeans to view those parts of the world in the purely instrumental, and often fairly exploitative, way that many Americans do? I don’t know.
Anyway, being in Europe also had its own distinct high points for me. Last week, I had the huge pleasure of visiting– at last– the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bradford University, in Yorkshire. It is the most amazing place, with some 40 fulltime faculty members, and a number of affiliated research centers, including one that deals in detail with issues of peacemaking and peacebuilding in Africa. I spent the best part of the morning on Tuesday with four of the faculty members at the Africa Center– three of them originally African nationals and one originally Portuguese; and all with immense amounts of expertise on the affairs of the continent.
One of the main reasons I’ve been wanting to go to Bradford for so long is because I wanted to meet Paul Rogers, a past Chair of the Department who has thought long, hard, and very creatively about the “big” issues of the structures of global security. Paul writes a weekly assessment of the global security situation for Open Democracy; and he also– in addition to still teaching at Bradford– works with a small conflict-resolution organization called the Oxford Research Group.
He and I spent three hours or so talking in his office there on Wednesday. He has recently published a book (co-authored with two colleagues from ORG) titled Beyond Terror: The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World. We talked quite a lot about some of the big themes from the book. Paul has developed a strong basic analysis of the approach the rich countries of the world have been using until now to try to structure global security. He calls it “the Control Paradigm”. But now, he says, the Control Paradigm is not working; and it needs to be replaced by what he calls the “Sustainable Security Paradigm.”
I think that his critique and prescription are fairly similar to what I have written about here quite a lot, though where he says “Sustainable Security” I have tended to focus more on the need for an approach that actively affirms the core value of human equality… So maybe I would call my approach more one of “Inclusive Security”– hah! there, I just gave it a name, somewhat belatedly…
Anyway, one of the advantages of Paul’s name for his approach, as I see it, is that it creates a strong conceptual link to the idea of sustainable economic development as such…
Regarding development/economic issues, he and his co-authors there place quite a lot of emphasis on rapidly emerging “threat” (if one likes to talk in those terms) posed to all of humanity by large-scale and rapid climate change. And as the global climate does change, it is people in the marginalized, very low-income communities of the world who will suffer the most… Certainly not the world’s “rich ten percent”, who can doubtless find ways to limit the amount they (we) suffer…
But the point is that everyone will be suffering, to some degree or another– whether directly, from the effects of desertification, tidal surges, etc, or indirectly from the mass migrations and other manifestations of mayhem that will soon enough engulf the world… And Paul’s point is that the “rich ten percent” can no longer– even now– address the threats they face purely through application of the old “Control Paradigm.”
On a related note, when I arrived home on Friday, I found on our doormat a copy of this study of the lessons of last summer’s 33-day war against Israel-Lebanon war, produced by Ron Tira for the Israeli institute formerly known as the Jaffee Centre for Security Studies. (What happened regarding the name there, I wonder? Did the Jaffee family suddenly rescind a previous offer of longterm funding? Or maybe, given the often slightly dove-ish nature of the center’s publications, the Jaaffees objected to that instead, and insisted their family’s name be stripped off…)
Anyway, Tira’s work is intriguingly titled The Limitations of Standoff Firepower-Based Operations. But sadly, his main conclusion seems to be a very old-fashioned, “Control Paradigm” one. Namely, that, “At least for the foreseeable future, only the military that plants its flag on the enemy’s hilltop is the victor.”
More on Tira’s work, later. (Perhaps.)
Anyway, I just want to note that the Quaker peace scholar Adam Curle was the main moving force behind creating Bradford’s great Department of Peace Studies, back about 30 years ago. Quakers and Quaker-symps have also established a great Center for Peace and Reconciliation Studies in Coventry, UK, that I was also lucky enough to visit, earlier during my trip.
So anyway, the high points of the trip definitely also included the ability, once again, to experience modern-day societies structured along basically social-democratic lines that work, and work for the most part very well. We spent a day in Lille last weekend with our friend Laurence Mascart, who came over from Belgium to visit us. She has two young children– and from the age of two and a half, there in Belgium, her kids have full-day places in the local, state-funded ecole maternelle (nursery school.) Europeans have nothing of the angst of health-insurance woes that some portions of most US families have. And the motor-car may be popular in many European countries, but it is certainly not “king of the road” in the way that it is in the US. I had the immense pleasure of being a pedestrian in London for five whole weeks, and loved every minute of it. (We only rented a car for Easter weekend, to get down to Dorset with our three fairly cumbersome suitcases.)
And then, there is the support for the arts in all the European countries! In every small town we went to in France there seemed to be a lavish, well-stocked, and entirely state-funded Museum of the Fine Arts. In the UK, even the excellent London Review of Books gets a subsidy from the Arts Council. (H’mm, I see they have another intriguing piece on the Scottish-English Question.)
What a sharp contrast all those aspects of European life pose to life in the highly individualistic, chronically “gummint”-fearing US of A.
But while in Europe I also saw– and chronicled here on JWN, in part– the degree to which the enormous wealth of most West European countries had been built on colonial takings and the unpaid labor of enslaved persons. (Last weekend, in the beautiful “La Piscine” museum in Roubaix, just north of Lille, I was really disturbed to see them openly flaunting one piece in their collection: a large, late 19th-century oil painting of “Slaves for sale”, which portrayed two voluptuous young women, one a nearly completely nude light-skinned person, and the other, more covered, of darker complexion… What are they doing, hanging the piece like that, under that title, with no further commentary, except inviting the viewers to join in the visual rape and objectification of the two women pictured??)
But yes, here’s the bottom line: if the security of the world is to be built on a model that truly values each human person equally, all of us in the rich, control-seeking parts of the world have a lot of changes to make…

Coming home: How the US feels

Bill and I got home Friday evening, after flying for what felt like a very long day from Amsterdam via Frankfurt to Virginia. Coming back home here to Charlottesville after three months away has enabled me to (1) Get a strong sense of just how rapidly and how far the opinions of the US political elite seem to have traveled in an anti-war direction in the period since we left, and (2) Start to try to bring together, reflect on, and figure out what to do with the many really amazing experiences I had on the trip.
In the former regard I have certainly noticed the degree to which, for example, the front pages of the WaPo seem to be completely dominated by news stories that are either highly critical of the Bush administration’s current and recent handling of the war in Iraq, or highly critical of earlier phases of the invasion/occupation project there, or highly embarrassing for the Bush administration on other grounds as well.
In that last category would fall stories about the ongoing revelations being made by “the Washington Madam”, a procurer of high-class call-girls whose notebooks and “business records” are currently being extensively data-mined by ABC News. (One early casualty: a guy called Randal “Randy” Tobias who was head of all US overseas-aid programs at the State Department– and therefore, we can note, in charge of running the policies that deny condoms to millions of HIV-vulnerable women around the world. He also supervised a policy that requires aid recipients to sign off on statements that they oppose prostitution in all its forms… He resigned over the revelation. As for Harlan Ullman– yes, Mr. “Shock and Awe” himself– he merely shrugged when reports surfaced that his name, too, was on the list… But in all, this looks like a great week of bubble-pricking news that’s about to come up…)
Also bad news for the Bushites: development in the ongoing Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz affairs; or pieces of investigative reporting like this one in today’s WaPo, which tells us that while after Hurricane Katrina foreign countries offered the US assistance totaling $854 million– but only $40 million of that has ever been used for victims or reconstruction…
The Bush administration seems, in many respects, to be falling apart at the seams. And the main reason for that is undoubtedly the continued leaching out of US blood, money, reputation, and self-respect that has been occurring because of the war in Iraq.
The fact that even at the WaPo– which in the whole four years that followed 9/11/2001 was just about as hawkishly pro-war and as mawkishly pro-Bush as it was possible to be– the editors have finally decided to return to something like the standards of independent, truth-seeking journalism seems to me a bellwether of the opinions in the country’s elite.
Thankfully, the anti-war vote of last November was not just a flash in the pan. The citizenry has held fast and true to a position of growing hatred for this war. Congress has been pushed by its base. Barack Obama, with his strong record of having opposed this war all along, has emerged as a completely plausible competitor to all those other Democratic presidential candidates who voted for the war-enabling resolution back in October 2002,
Heck, even a serving military officer, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, has come out in public with a devastating critique of the way the military leaders behaved in the lead-up to and the conduct of this war:

(Equally as notable as Yingling’s willingness to express his harsh criticisms in public was the identity of the medium that carried his piece. It was in the Armed Forces Journal, a very mainstream journal on professional military affairs.)
Anyway, Congress has now passed the legislation requiring the president to start withdrawing the troops from Iraq by a date certain. Bush has threatened to veto this legislation. The Friends Committee on National Legislation says, “We believe that the president is not in touch with reality.” I’ll say!
FCNL is also asking all US citizens to write urgently to Bush to urge him to reconsider his promised veto. Their website says:

Right. And nor, of course, should it send them off there to kill.

Britain’s upcoming vote on Blairism

Britons go to the polls May 3 to vote in local elections that will have a sizeable impact on the way that Tony Blair’s ten-year premiership ends. Blair, who has been Prime Minister since May 2, 1997, has promised he will step down from the post before this year’s Labour Party Conference, due in September. I’ve spent several weeks in the UK since early March– and was back there again early this week. In much of the country, people just seem eager for him to go, and quickly. But he has hung on and hung on.
His decision to join President Bush in invading Iraq in 2003– and the slavish support he has given to Bush ever since then– are the main cause of this disaffection.
Now, Labour looks set to do very poorly in next week’s local elections, and that performance is expected to bring Blair’s Labour colleagues to the point where finally they tell him that– for the sake of the party– it is time for him to go. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown now looks more secure than ever to replace Blair as head of the party (and therefore, also of the government.)
Given the huge popular revulsion with the current situation in Iraq, Brown– or indeed, anyone else coming in as PM in the post-Blair era– urgently needs to position himself as significantly different from Blair on the Iraq issue, and on relations with Washington more generally. The next general elections must be held in or before 2010, so the Labour Party’s next PM needs to be able to rebuild the party well before then.
That Guardian/ICM poll linked to above notes, regarding Brits’ attitudes toward national governance, that:

Only 21% think Britain should stick with Labour.

Indeed, as I noted here recently, the outcome for Labour of the May 3 elections could be even graver. That day, voters in Scotland and Wales will also be voting for representatives in the regional parliaments they each now have– and in Scotland, there is a real chance of the Scot Nats, who have an openly secessionist platform, winning control of the Holyrood Parliament. If a velvet divorce between the two kingdoms of England and Scotland ensues, Labour might have a hard time winning in either of the two countries that emerge.
It would be ironic if Blair– the Prime Minister who has done the best of any PM in modern times at winning a reasonable negotiated outcome to the previously debilitating Northern Ireland conflict– ends up being remembered also as the man whose bullheadedness on Iraq helped break up the England-Scotland Union.
But what might we expect from a Prime Minister Brown regarding Iraq? So far, Brown has done very little, if anything, to tip his hand. Instead, he has remained a loyal– indeed key– member of Blair’s cabinet, with this loyalty underpinned by the agreement the two men reached some years ago that they would “take turns” in the premiership.
Today, however, the Guardian‘s Patrick Wintour is reporting that Lord Ashdown, the former UN high representative to Bosnia, and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former British envoy to Baghdad are going to be preparing a report for Brown roughly similar to the Iraq Study Group report handed to Bush last December. (Ashdown was the leader of the UK’s Liberal Democratic Party for a long time before he went to Bosnia, so he would bring a multiparty flavor to this project.)
Wintour had tracked down a speech that Greenstock made very recently in Australia, which hinted strongly at the idea of proposing a timetable for ending the occupation of Iraq.
Both Greenstock and Ashdown seem to favor a regional-conference approach to figuring out the modalities of getting the occupation forces disentangled from Iraq– very similar to what the Iraq Study Group proposed, but probably with more of an explicitly UN flavor to it.
It is quite possible, though, that a combination of public sentiment and the demands of military planners might push Britain’s next PM to pull Britain’s forces out of Iraq even before there is time to comnvene and such conference…
But a lot still depends on the depth of disaffection with Blairism that is revealed at the polls next week.
(Cross-posted to The Notion.)

‘Surge’ brings surge in combat deaths

As I and others predicted back when Bush first proposed his plan to “surge” more troops into Iraq and to do so with a plan that would distribute them more widely throughout the country, that surge is now resulting in increased combat-related deaths of US soldiers– and also, most likely, of Iraqis as well. (Though that latter aspect doesn’t get reported much in the US MSM.)
This piece of good reporting from Sudarsan Raghavan and Tom Ricks in yesterday’s WaPo perfectly illustrates what has been happening. It tells how on Monday insurgent fighters organized and implemented a well-thought-out plan to attack an “outpost” in Sadah, in Diyala province, that had been newly set up as part of the US generals’ troop-distribution plan:

As U.S. soldiers fired a hail of bullets, the first suicide bomber sped toward their patrol base. Reaching the checkpoint, the truck exploded, blasting open a path for the second bomber to barrel through and ram his truck into the concrete barrier about 90 feet from the base. The second explosion crumbled walls and parts of a school building, killing nine American troops and injuring 20.

The reporters quoted military spokesman Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly as giving these details about the operations that a squadron from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Regiment had been undertaking in Sadah:

“Those [barriers] are really, really heavy. They crushed the building,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. Several soldiers’ remains were found beneath the rubble, the official said, adding that the attack was “devastatingly effective” and “very well-coordinated.”

So let’s step back and understand this. The guys from the 82nd Airborne (which is wellknown as very gung-ho, aggressive outfit… not well-suited or well trained to do ‘peacekeeping’ operations at all) fought their way through a number of other towns to get to Sadah, then they set up their “forward outpost” in what was described as “an old school.”
How old of a school, anyway? Maybe it was being used as a school until just a few weeks ago. Why would the US military imagine it would not offend local Iraqis to see US troops establishing a highly fortified military base in a school building– which would just about wreck any hopes that the school could be reopened for educational purposes any time in the foreseeable future?
Whose idea was it to use a school building for this?
And then, to protect themselves, the 82nd Airborne guys put into place these huge and heavy T-walls… and the insurgent planners figured that the T-walls’ weight could itself be used as a lethal weapon against the US soldiers inside.
(Operationally somewhat similar to Al-Qaeda’s use of fuel-laden US civilian airliners, and the design/engineering characteristics of certain high concrete buildings, to inflict 2,000 casualties in New York in September 2001. In both cases, the plan also depended on having operatives of steely self-control prepared to die in the course of the operation. The big difference was in the choice of target: civilians in New York; but in Sadah, Iraq it was members of an occupying military force.)
Raghavan and Ricks write this about these combat outposts:

are expected to interact with area residents

The idea that from behind these massive blast-walls the troops in such outposts are supposed to venture out to “interact with area residents” in any constructive way at all is absolutely laughable… Or would be, if it this whole “surge” plan were not so tragic for everyone concerned.
Three key facts about the US army currently occupying Iraq absolutely prevent the current “surge” from having any helpful effect in de-escalating tensions and restoring a measure of calm to the country:

Personally, as a US citizen, I am glad our soldiers are casualty-averse; and I’m glad that there are not more of them in Iraq than at present.
But in the circumstances– which also include an extremely high level of political fogginess about what the “surge” was supposed to achieve– this surge was doomed from before the time it was launched. It was yet another arrogant, lethal, and politically motivated roll of the dice by a commander-in-chief who back in November/December seemed to choose it merely as his own ill-considered alternative to the sober and diplomacy-focused recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.
It was as if President Bush, caught in a gunfight in a Western saloon, perhaps realized at some level that the fight was not then going in his favor, but was determined that if he had to exit the saloon he would do so with all guns blazing.
Because of that decision, the rate at which US soldiers are leaving Iraq in body-bags has risen. And the casualty rate among Iraqis caught up in all these localized gunfights throughout the country has doubtless also risen.
The surge was a lethal and tragic mistake.
In addition, when– as is absolutely inevitable– the time comes when the President realizes that he needs to find a way to negotiate the exit of the US troops from Iraq, the modalities of extricating these small groups of soldiers from all these widely distributed combat outposts will be even more complex than a simple withdrawal from a few massive bases would have been.
(For another WaPo story, on a combat outpost that got blown up by insurgents before the US troops could even move in, read this.)

(Being, a critique of Ron Tira’s The Limitations of Standoff Firepower-Based Operations:On Standoff Warfare, Maneuver, and Decision)

(Being, a critique of Ron Tira’s The Limitations of Standoff
Firepower-Based Operations:On Standoff Warfare, Maneuver, and Decision)