Faiza al-Araji is a courageous, talented Iraqi civil engineer of about my age (mid-50s), also with three grown-up children. Hers are all male; two of mine are daughters. When I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting her– in Boston in summer 2005; and later, more briefly, at a conference in New York City– I found we had so many things in common!
Yesterday, she had a really moving post on her blog “A family in Baghdad.”
Actually, for now, all her family is out of Baghdad. She and her spouse are in Jordan, her sons scattered to the corners of the earth. Well, that makes them representative of the vast number of Iraqis currently living in exile from their homeland, thanks to George W. Bush.
You may find the urological details at the top of the post a little hard to read. (Ouch! Poor Faiza! I hope you’re feeling better now… ) But if they don’t grab your attention, scroll on further down the post for the story of a young man she knows called Husaam.
One of the great things about Faiza’s blogging is the way she puts a human face on what we all know are some really horrible events. Her work is really a great example of what makes bloggging such a revolutionary medium.
GAO’s Pogo Report on Unsecured Munitions In Iraq
GAO, meet POGO.
Yesterday, the US Government Accounting Organization released an unclassified 35 page version of a study submitted to the Pentagon in December, with a long-winded title: “Operation Iraqi Freedom: DOD Should Apply Lessons Learned Concerning the Need for Security over Conventional Munitions Storage Sites to Future Operations Planning.”
A better title, in Pogo’s immortal “Swamp Speak,” might be, “In Iraqi IED’s, We have Met the Enemy and He is Us.”
The gist of the report is that “hundreds of thousands of tons” of Iraqi munitions were left unsecured after Iraq was “liberated” in April of 2003. Such munitions and components are being used by insurgents in making the roadside mines (IED’s), the devises deemed responsible for half of American casualties.
As Secretary of Defense Gates admitted yesterday, unsecured weapons caches have been a “huge, huge problem.” Characterizing Iraq now as “one huge ammo dump,” the munitions on the loose literally provide the raw materials for much of the carnage in Iraq today.
So how did this happen dear Pogo?
Elementary. We did it to ourselves.
First, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF) assumed that after Saddam’s regime was overthrown,
“the regular Iraqi army units would ‘capitulate and provide internal security.’ Knowledgeable senior-level DOD officials stated that these Iraqi army units would have been used to secure conventional munitions storage sites….” (over 400 of them… p.8)
“As stated in the OIF war plan, the U.S. Commander, CENTCOM, intended to preserve, as much as possible, the Iraqi military to maintain internal security and protect Iraq’s borders during and after major combat operations.”
The US military planners also assumed that,
“Iraqi resistance was unlikely…. the plan did not consider the possibility of protracted, organized Iraqi resistance to U.S. and coalition forces after the conclusion of major combat operations. As a result, DOD officials stated that the regime’s conventional munitions storage sites were not considered a significant risk.”
Why should they have feared such resistance? After all, then Assistant Defense Secretary Wolfowitz was channeling the koolaid being mixed by Chalabi, Lewis, Ajami and their neocon pals. Remember the welcome to Iraq predictions?
In short, and as incredible as this may now sound, OIF planners assumed that, “Postwar Iraq would not be a U.S. military responsibility.”
As a result, “U.S. forces did not have sufficient troop levels to provide adequate security for conventional munitions storage sites in Iraq because of OIF planning priorities and certain assumptions that proved to be invalid.”
“Heck of a Job there Tommy.”
Worst of all (and to be more candid than the GAO report), the OIF military’s planners did not anticipate the actions of their own government:
“On May 23, 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved the Iraqi Army, which the CENTCOM commander assumed would provide internal security.”
As a direct consequence, Iraq’s weapons caches and manufacturing facilities went essentially unguarded for months. The US Military did not have a coordinated effort to manage and monitor Iraq’s munitions depots until after August of 2003. Even now, the GAO contends that monitoring and control of such “vulnerable” Iraqi munitions sites remains poor.
The consequences of leaving Iraqi munitions so vulnerable to theft have been… grave:
“As reported by DOD and key government agencies, the human, strategic, and financial costs of not securing conventional munitions storage sites have been high. Estimates indicate that the weapons and explosives looted from unsecured conventional munitions storage sites will likely continue to support terrorist attacks throughout the region. Government agencies also assessed that looted munitions are being used in the construction of IEDs.”
In turn, ongoing high levels of violence impede reconstruction and stabilization efforts.
Remember this report next time you learn of a breathless claim that Iranian origin components are somehow the root of the road mines that are “killing Americans.” The neocons wanted to use such claims to buttress their “regime change” and bomb Iran campaigns. One wonders how the neocons will respond to the more plausible explanation that such American casualties are the fruit of American incompetence at the highest levels.
Pogo would frown at blame-somebody-else tactics.
Reidar Visser takes on US politicians’ myths about Iraq
Our esteemed friend Reidar has a solidly argued new piece on his website that roundly criticizes some of the myths about Iraq being disseminated by US politicians– primarily but not exclusively Democratic pols– in preparation for the pursuit of a policy of “cut and blame” in Iraq.
He writes,
- to dismiss Iraq’s civil strife as “chronic”, as Democratic commentators increasingly do, requires blind ignorance of centuries of Iraqi coexistence – as seen for instance during the monarchy (1921–1958), during Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century (when Shiites and Sunnis coexisted in the two mixed provinces of Basra and Baghdad), and during the reign of the Baghdad-based Georgian mamluks, who ruled from Mosul to the Gulf between 1747 and 1831. And to diagnose a state of “irreconcilable sectarian conflict” in contemporary Iraq would be to overlook the fact that it is the post-2003 Iraqi elites of returned exiles, rather than the Iraqi population at large, that are behind many of today’s most outrageous sectarian maximalist demands. In historical perspective, it is the current heightened sectarian tension – particularly acute since 2006 – that is the “artificial” aspect of the Iraq situation, and it should be an American responsibility to try to reverse this situation as part of a withdrawal strategy.
Blaming Iraqis for being the backward kind of people who are locked in age-old sectarian hatreds etc is very analogous to some of the arguments made by westerners about other conflicts throughout the world, including former Yugoslavia, Africa, etc. In all such cases these arguments are used as a pretext to cover up the ineffectiveness of the various interventions made by the “international community” or to try to justify the inaction of the states of the rich western world.
Visser makes some excellent argument in this piece. I am concerned, however, that he still seems too easily to believe that there is some “optimal” mix of US sticks and carrots that, if correctly brought to bear, can produce a better-than-otherwise outcome in Iraq. For my part, I still hold that
- (1) it is none of the Americans’ damn’ business at this point how the Iraqi people choose to rule themselves,
(2) the track record of the US’s attempt to build a workable political order in post-Saddam Iraq has been abysmal, since the level of killings and major conflict there has increased with every year the US forces have remained there,
(3) therefore the first demand of the US government should be to pull all of its troops out of Iraq, without engaging in any further political maneuvering inside the Iraqi system, whatsoever, and
(4) the very fact of an imminent, rapid, and complete withdrawal of US troops from the country may well serve to concentrate the minds of Iraqis on finding their own form of political entente to produce a functioning national administration after the departure of the US troops and the end of all the harmful interference their presence has caused.
For more details of my thinking on these matters see any of the ‘withdrawal plans for Iraq’ that I provide links to near the top of the sidebar on the main page of this blog.
Molewatch: Cheney & Ahmadinejad?
On a lighter note, Nicholas Kristof recently suggested that Americans will learn more about Israel’s real problems by reading Israeli papers than in the self-censored pablum in the US mainstream media. He might have added that one can get great ideas for new columns there too.
Back on March 1st, Isreali columnist Guy Bechor revealed that Iranian President Ahmadinejad was in fact Our {Israel’s} Secret Agent in Iran.
“Could it be that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is working for us? He is after all doing an excellent job for Israel. This week, while Teheran is divided between pragmatic elements calling to suspend Iran’s nuclear program (or at least enter dialog with the US,) and militant elements who are not prepared to make any concessions – militant Ahmadinejad should definitely be supported.”
Bechor then satirically bullets Ahmadinejad’s “top achievements” in isolating Iran and making his own reputation as “as the world’s problem child.”
How else can we explain that one man brought such pressure down upon Iran and support for Israel? Obviously, he must be a deep cover Israeli mole. Oh but of course.
And now we have Nicholas Kristof, by coincidence no doubt, asking if our own Vice President Dick Cheney is “an Iranian mole?”
“Consider that the Bush administration’s first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, Iran’s bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran’s even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
You really think that’s just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?
Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down. The U.S. dismantled Iraq’s army, broke the Baath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran’s ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn’t have done better — so maybe they did write the script
We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that’s just another coincidence?
Oh, but of course! Cheney is Iran’s man in Washington. Didn’t he once criticize Clinton policy on Iran for hurting American oil companies? One of his implants must get transmissions from Tehran.
New Challenges to AIPAC
An interesting crop of articles examining AIPAC – the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee – has emerged in the wake of the latest AIPAC convention in Washington.
In his taboo breaking Sunday column in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof bravely observes what has long been obvious here:
“There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.”
George Soros laments the same problem in the April 12 issue of the New York Review of Books:
“Any politician who dares to expose AIPAC’s influence would incur its wrath; so very few can be expected to do so. It is up to the American Jewish community itself to rein in the organization that claims to represent it.”
An article in the current issue of Salon closes with a similar ironic challenge:
“We find ourselves in a very strange situation. America’s Mideast policies are in thrall to a powerful Washington lobby that is only able to hold power because it has not been challenged by the people it presumes to speak for. But if enough American Jews were to stand up and say “not in my name,” they could have a decisive impact on America’s disastrous Mideast policies.”
In his essay, Soros anticipated that, “Anybody who dares to dissent may be subjected to a campaign of personal vilification.” (Ask Mearsheimer & Walt, Carter & Hagel, etc.)
As noted by the new web site from Jewish Voices for Peace, “Muzzlewatch,” the New York Sun, as if on cue, shamelessly accused Soros, Kristof and others of being no different from the Nazis in pursuing a “new blood libel” against Israel.
And so it goes.
US-Iran Thaw: Is it for Real?
R.K. Ramazani writes on the signs of a US-Iran “thaw” and asks ”Is it for Real?” Read the extended essay here.
To get you started, I offer a few personalized accents:
On March 10, the representatives of the United States and Iran faced each other in a regional conference in Baghdad, Iraq. The event has raised crucial questions. Is this a real shift away from the Bush administration’s dogged stance against talking to Iran, allegedly “the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism”?
Is it a real change in American strategy or is it a tactical gimmick, one of pretending to pursue diplomacy while preparing for confrontation and war?…
The Professor first hones in on problems that I have noted here repeatedly, issues central to my own work:
“The Bush administration has adamantly refused to talk to Iran, claiming that to do so would bestow legitimacy on its revolutionary regime.
Even a novice in world politics would know that a regime’s legitimacy is given or withheld by a combination of international and domestic acceptance. Muhammad Reza Shah’s international legitimacy was in effect bestowed by America rather than by the international community. He lost his throne ignominiously because the Iranian people no longer trusted him.”
One wonders how Secretary Rice will explain that talking to Iran now doesn’t contradict her previous statements.
Ramazani laments that the U.S. blew off a serious offer from Iran in 2003 – the “grand bargain” by which Iran offered concretely to resolve all outstanding issues between the US and Iran, ranging from terrorism to a two-state solution for Palestine to nuclear aspirations. Secretary Rice lately has been less than candid in her own lamely parsed testimony claiming that she doesn’t recall such an offer. Such denials have prompted two former top aides of hers to accuse her of prevaricating.
That “little” matter aside, the fact that US and Iranian officials can admit to talking at all, courtesy the Iraqis, is an important, if precarious development. At least the two sides can belatedly and in the same room admit to having much common ground in Iraq. But Ramazani then warns that
“these expressions of common interest between Iran and the United States may yet founder on shoals of inveterate hostility and mistrust that have developed over the past half a century. It was not always that way.”
Ramazani reminds us that for the century prior to 1953, Iranians generally had a profoundly favorable view towards America. Dating to the first half of the 1800’s,
HC column on big trends in Arab world
… Just out in Tuesday’s CSM. Read it.
Drivers of US policy on Iraq
When I was in the Middle East in February, many of the people I talked to– smart people in Arab countries who realize that the fate of their region depends to a worrying degree on decisions made in distant Washington– were speculating as to whether Condi Rice is up or down, whether Cheney is up or down, etc. It struck me these observers were looking largely at the wrong thing. To me, by far the most interesting rising driver of US policy in Iraq is the uniformed military itself, and in particular the generals in the US Army and Marines.
We have been getting increasingly strong signals from these generals in recent months that they are extremely worried about the effects that George Bush’s imperial over-stretch in Iraq is having on the institutions that they head and from which they gain their own social stature and their lives, their meaning.
Ann Scott Tyson, who covers the uniformed military for the Wapo, has another intriguing piece in today’s paper, that starts out like this:
- Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.
More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a “death spiral,” in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.
The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery and other land forces, they said.
There are a lot of other interesting details in the article; but the bottom line is that the generals (a) are extremely worried about the US’s level of military readiness, including both its readiness to respond in what they judge an adequate way to any new challenges that may arise in any one of the dozens of spots around the world where they say they would like to ready; (b) want to get this concern onto the public record; so that (c) when– as they may well by now already judge to be nearly inevitable, the US has to draw down its forces in Iraq on unfavorable terms– they will be quite ready to say “We warned you this would not work.”
Of course, you could say that it would have been more helpful all round, for both Americans and Iraqis, if their predecessors in the Joint Chief’s of Staff’s famous ‘Tank’ had actually been a little more forceful about laying out the military realities regarding Iraq invasion scenarios back in 2002, rather than now, five years later…
But better later than never, perhaps??
Anyway, alert JWN readers will no doubt recall that back on March 9 I wrote a little about my earlier conversation with the Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann, including his bon mot that though the US and Iran both agree, regarding Iraq, that it should remain united and ruled by majority rule, they disagree on the question of the US troop presence in Iraq– “Because the US basically now wants to be able to withdraw those troops, and Iran wants them to stay!”
I also wrote, “For my part, I am slightly less convinced than [Hiltermann] is that the decisionmakers in the Bush administration at this point are clear that they want the US troops out of Iraq… But I think they are headed toward that conclusion, and that the developments in the region will certainly continue to push them that way.”
A few days later, Joost wrote me to say (and I quote this with his permission):
- On one point I think we are much closer than you suggest. Perhaps I did not express myself sufficiently clearly.
I, too, think US troops will stay in Iraq. They will have to. But I also think a signficant drawdown from populated areas will take place because the administration does not want to become embroiled in a civil war.
At this point, US troops still hold together whatever remains of Iraq’s government and security forces. Once they decide to get out from the thick of things, these will fall apart and Iraq will become a failed state. The challenge then will be to contain the civil war within Iraq, and for this the US will need to keep forces in the large camps (for special forces operations against Al-Qaeda and air support) and deploy them along Iraq’s borders.
Actually, when he spells it out this way I find myself obliged to say that I don’t agree with his prognosis completely. Mainly because I don’t think the US will stay in Iraq for very long… And the principal driver behind the decision for a fairly rapid drawdown (or even, perhaps increasingly likely, a complete troop withdrawal) will be precisely that increasingly strong feeling amongst the military brass that the Iraq deployment is threatening to bring infamy, chaos, and ruin to the military institutions that they hold dear. This is a factor to which Joost– a very serious and experienced analyst of matters Middle Eastern– seems in my judgment not to have given adequate weight.
Indeed, it’s worth going back to Ann Scott Tyson’s piece, just to read the concluding paragraph:
- “Boots on the ground matter,” [Army vice chief of staff Gen. Richard A. Cody] said. “If they are tied down, your ability to terminate a conflict on your terms, earlier, may not be there.”
Also worth reading in the article: the description of how Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defines the geographic reach of the mission of the US military. Tyson recalls that he told a House committee last month:
- “You take a lap around the globe — you could start any place: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, North Korea, back around to Pakistan, and I probably missed a few. There’s no dearth of challenges out there for our armed forces.”
At one level, you could say these guys are, quite simply, stark raving bonkers. The idea that the United States, a country that boasts less than 5 percent of the world’s population, should feel that it has some kind of a “responsibility” to respond to “challenges” (or whatever) right around whole world does have a certain noticeable zaniness to it.
At another level, I find this a deeply, deeply, scary thought.
And at another level still, I do think the world community as a whole– that is, the concerned citizens of all the countries around the world– needs to come together to start thinking about different, more effective structures to help ensure everyone’s security– structures that (1) certainly don’t allow one steroid-fueled hegemon to race around the world acting unilaterally just as and whenever it pleases, while (2) ensuring that vital lines of communication remain open, with their security assured through accountable, multinational mechanisms.
… But back to Iraq. I take seriously the proposition that the leaders of the US military really are very worried about the state and the status of the forces under their command — in addition to whatever political butt-covering they might currently be engaged in. Moreover, at this point they are most likely joined in their Powell-esque embrace of military planners’ realism by that dark-horse political actor, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. So my judgment is that it is this increasingly weighty coalition within the US decisionmaking class that will increasingly be driving policy in the weeks and months ahead… Already, as we can see, they are all working hard to build good links with the leading realist forces in Congress, from both political parties, in what is increasingly looking like a determined political end-run around Dick Cheney…
The consequences for Iraq of a primarily ‘Tank’-driven US withdrawal from the country need to be thought through a whole lot more…
And meanwhile, Bush’s ideological hard-right crony from Texas, Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, is also running into increasing trouble over the apparently politically motivated firings of eight federal prosecutors.
Very interesting times…
Open power struggle over Iraqi ‘High Court’
The Iraqi ‘High Court’– the special war-crimes court that was supposed Exhibit A in the US occupation forces’ attempt to bring accountability and the rule of law to Iraq– has become the scene of some ugly and very open political tussling between the US ‘advisors’ who have been the eminence grise behind the whole court from the very beginning and the Iraqi judge who thought he was supposed to be running it.
This report from AP’s Qassem Abdul-Zahra tells us that,
- A session of the war crimes trial of six former officials in Saddam Hussein’s government was canceled Sunday after a defense attorney who had been ejected last week made an unexpected appearance, court officials said.
Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa asked bailiffs why Badie Arif Ezzat was back in his courtroom, and was told the attorney was there on the order of U.S. officials attached to the court in an advisory capacity, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
“So, does my decision mean nothing?” an angry al-Khalifa responded, referring to his decision to eject and hold Ezzat in contempt last week. The two had a heated exchange over comments Ezzat made in a television interview. The judge said the remarks were an insult to the court.
Al-Khalifa adjourned the trial until March 26.
Abdul-Zahra added that the court officials said,
- that negotiations between the two sides would continue until a mutually satisfactory settlement is reached.
They said the U.S. officials took custody of Ezzat from Iraqi authorities over the weekend, keeping him under protection in a residence located inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified Baghdad region that houses the U.S. Embassy and offices of the Iraqi government and parliament.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said he was checking on the report but could not immediately offer comment.
In the past, at least one attorney providing services to the defense side in the court has been killed, and it is quite possible that Ezzat has entertained some strong and not unreasonable fears for his life in recent weeks.
Many people in the international legal and human rights communities held out the hope for a long time that criminal trials for past atrocities, such as have been attempted by this Iraqi ‘High’ Court, can somehow be insulated from political considerations and in a generalized, ex-cathedra sort of way somehow magically help in strengthening the rule of law in multiply stressed and traumatized societies.
They can’t. Indeed, in societies in which political power is still hotly contested, conducting a criminal trial of major political figures will always exacerbate existing social and political cleavages and make far harder the attainment of the kind of social-political calm in which the rule-of-law protections can start to have real effect.
Let’s hope this whole series of debacles in this US-run political court in Iraq will cause more people in the international human -rights movement to understand the strict limitations on the applicability of war-crimes trials in politically fragile situations that have recently experienced deep inter-group violence or that– as in Iraq, Rwanda, Uganda, or elsewhere– are still actually living under the rights-abusing yoke of such conflict.
(For more of my recent thinking on this check out this recent JWN post or more of the writings on the Transitional Justice Forum blog.)
Tanya Reinhart, RIP
I have been so sad to learn of the death, both early and I think sudden, of Tanya Reinhart. (Hat-tip for David for alerting me to this.)
Tanya was a strong proponent of Palestinian equality and national independence and a fierce critic of the particular round of the ‘peace’ process — that is, all process, no peace– that was inaugurated with Yasser Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993.
I had never met her until I went to Israel and Palestine with the International Quaker Working Party in 2002. We met her at Tel Aviv University, where she was a very distinguished member of the faculty of linguistics until last December, when she found the situation in Israel had become so hostile to her that she left Tel Aviv and moved to New York to teach at NYU.
Since I came to England two weeks ago I have had several impassioned discussions with Palestinian friends old and new about the whole course, meaning, and content of Oslo. My position, in a nutshell is that Oslo was specifically designed by the Israeli party to to be an indeterminate process, that is, to leave quite open the nature of the ‘final outcome’ whose negotiation, according to the text of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, should be completed by mid-1999.
To me, that indeterminacy was a very serious structural flaw in the DOP. A peace agreement whose negotiation is completed but whose implementation is phased according to an agreed schedule is one thing– there, at least, everyone knows what the final destination will be. But a peace ‘process’ that leaves quite undefined the final outcome will (a) provide more continuing power within the process to the existing power holders and (b) leave everyone from all sides extremely jittery regarding what the final outcome will be, and therefore prone to over-reactions to any tiny blip or setback along the way.
Such as we saw from both sides in the years that followed Oslo– but particularly, perhaps, from the Israeli side.
Having said that, I would say– as someone who sat bemused on the lawn of the White House on that bizarro day in September 1993 when the Oslo Accords were signed there– that despite that flaw there was still a chance the Palestinians could do well out of the process, provided they had wise strategic leadership that maximized the many levers of potential power at their people’s disposal.
Which included, let us remember, considerable sympathy from many parts of the international community and from a still-vibrant peace movement inside Israel.
Instead of which, they had Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar), a man who (a) had zero concept of how to develop and pursue a strategy, and (b) proceeded, immediately after the return to the Occupied Territories that Oslo bestowed on him, to dismantle all the organizations and networks of community-based ‘people power’ that by then were the Palestinians’ major strategic asset. (And whose activities during the largely nonviolent First Intifada had, indeed, led to the conclusion of the Oslo Agreement in the first place.)
Arafat was a truly terrible negotiator– one might even say recklessly or criminally so, from his people’s perspective. The major case in point was his allowing the Israelis, under the terms of the Oslo DOP, to build a whole entire new road system within the West Bank with which successive governments of Israel then proceeded to strangle the Palestinian communities there.
So maybe Tanya Reinhart was right– maybe there was nothing the Palestinians could have done to “improve” Oslo, or to pull from that sow’s ear of a flawed agreement the silk purse of an acceptable, final-status peace agreement? I honestly don’t know, though I do strongly think that with much wiser leadership, the Palestinians could have had a good shot at doing that.
Where Reinhart was absolutely right, however, was to note the terrible effects that Oslo had on the balance of political and demographic power within the occupied West Bank. The new, Israelis-only road system was an absolute disaster for the Palestinians. So was the building of additional settler-only housing there– the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank doubled in the five years after Oslo, and today stands at around 500,000 (counting East Jerusalem settlers along with the rest.)
Where she was right, too, was to roundly criticize the claim that Ehud Barak made, that the ‘deal’ he offered Yasser Arafat at the end of of 2000 was a “generous offer” whose inexplicable rejection by the Palestinians just “proved” their bad intentions all along… That claim– coming from a Labour Party Prime Minister– did more than anything else to kill the Israeli peace movement as a large, significant force within Israeli society.
And now, that brave and percipient advocate of human equality Tanya Reinhart is dead. What a terrible, terrible shame.
As for the Palestinians, at least they now have a unity government. Let’s hope it can start to turn around the situation of their people, still reeling from more than a year’s-worth of the tough and deeply anti-humane siege.that Israel initiated but in which all the major governments of the world have shamefully colluded.