Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 180 – Info, analysis, discussion

The US and Iran, in Iraq

One week ago today we were sitting in the lobby of our hotel in Amman,
Jordan, talking with the very smart and well-informed Middle East
analyst Joost Hiltermann about the interactions that US power now has
in and over Iraq with Iraq’s much weightier eastern neighbor,
Iran. (Hiltermann has worked on Iraq-related issues for many
years, including for several years now as the senior Iraq analyst for
the International Crisis Group.)

He said,

Well, the US and Iran agree on two
things inside today’s Iraq– but they disagree on one key thing.

What they agree on, at least until now, is the unity of Iraq, and need
for democracy or at least some form of majority rule there.

What they disagree on is the continued US troop presence there. Because the US basically now wants
to be able to withdraw those troops, and Iran wants them to stay!

He conjectured that the main reason Iran wants the US troops to stay in
Iraq is because they are deployed there, basically, as sitting ducks
who would be extremely vulnerable to Iranian military retaliation in
the event of any US (or Israeli) military attack on Iran. They
are, in effect, Iran’s best form of insurance against the launching of
any such attack.

I have entertained that conjecture myself, too, on numerous occasions
in the past. So I was interested that Hiltermann not only voiced
it, but also framed it in such an elegant way. (For my part, I am
slightly less convinced than he 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.)

From this point of view, we might conclude that the decisionmakers in
Teheran– some of whom are strategic thinkers with much greater
experience and even technical expertise than anyone in the current Bush
administration– would be seeing the possibility of “allowing” the US
to withdraw its troops from Iraq only within the context of the kind of
“grand bargain” that Teheran seeks. The first and overwhelmingly
most important item in that “grand bargain” would be that Washington
credibly and irrevocably back off from any thought of pursuing a
strategy of regime change inside Iran or from any threats of military
force against it.

Under this bargain, Washington would need to agree, fundamentally, that
despite serious continuing disagreements in many areas of policy, it
would deal with the regime that exists in Teheran– as in earlier
decades it dealt with the regime that existed in the Soviet Union–
rather than seeking to overthrow it. Teheran might well also ask
for more than that– including some easing of the US campaign against
it over the nuclear issue, etc. But I believe there is no way the
mullahs in Teheran could settle for any less than a basic normalization
of working relations with Washington– that would most likely be
exemplified by the restoration of normal diplomatic relations between
the two governments– in return for “allowing” the US troops to
withdraw from Iraq.

There are numerous paradoxes here. Not only has Washington’s wide
distribution of its troops throughout the Iraq has become a strategic
liability, rather than an asset, but now the heirs of the same Iranian
regime that stormed the US Embassy in the 1970s and violated all the
norms of diplomatic protocol by holding scores of diplomats as hostages
there are the ones who are, essentially, clamoring for the restoration
of diplomatic relations with Washington.

… Meantime, however, a great part of the steely, pre-negotiation
dance of these two wilful powers is being played out within the borders
of poor, long-suffering Iraq. For the sake of the Iraqis, I hope
Washington and Teheran resolve their issues and move to the normal
working relationship of two fully adult powers as soon as possible.

One last footnote here. I do see some intriguing possibilities
within the Bushites’ repeated use of the mantra that “All options are
still on the table” regarding Iran. Generally, that has been
understood by most listeners (and most likely intended by its utterers) to mean
that what is “on the table of possibilities” is all military options– up to
and perhaps even including nuclear military options, which the Bushites
have never explicitly taken off the table with regard to Iran.

But why should we not also interpret “all options” to include also all diplomatic options?
That would certainly be an option worth pursuing.

(This post has been cross-posted to the Nation’s blog, The Notion.)

Hoagie mentions possible Cheney resignation

I just Delicious-ed this piece in today’s WaPo from erstwhile Iraq war uber-hawk Jim Hoagland… But I clicked the Delicious before I read to the end of the piece, where Jimbo raises the intriguing possibility that Cheney might resign…. not because the Prez hasn’t been taking his advice much recently, but because,

Bush… desperately now needs a vice president in stable physical, emotional and political health. That is the equation you want to be watching.

Hoagland is a very well-connected guy. This is getting interesting.

CSM column on Syria

Here is the column I had in the CSM today. (It is also here.) The editors put this title on it: The time is ripe for the US to engage Syria on Mideast issues; Damascus seems willing to work with the US on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq.
The timing is actually great, since Saturday will see the 12-party conference in Baghdad involving the ambassadors of Syria, Iran, all Iraq’s other neighbors, Iraq, the US, and the other permanent members of the security Council.
By the way, I also have a piece in Le Monde Diplo this month. But I don’t think you can read it online… It’s about Gen. Petraeus.
Dedicated readers of JWN will find most of the material in both these articles fairly familiar, since as you might have guessed I use the blog to archive my notes and interviews and to try out ideas in general.

Fragments from Iraq

Iraq is in fragments. Over the period since 2002 the government of my country, the US, took a number
of decisions whose effect
(quite regardless of their intention,
something of which we can speak later) has been to destroy the
country’s state apparatus and institutions and to fracture the dense
network of social and political relationships that previously held it
together.

I am very sorry indeed that I and those other US citizens who knew all
along– based on the understanding that many of us had about the nature
of Iraq, the nature of Middle Eastern societies, and also, yes, the
often quite unexpected effects of the use of military poower–
that the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq would turn out
very badly indeed, and who did what we could to prevent the invasion
from being launched in the first place, were unable to prevent it.

I feel deep shame, as a US citizen, that it is the government of my
country that has visited this death and terrible, terrible destruction
on the people of Iraq. Also, that our President was re-elected,
or as we might say, elected for the first time; but anyway, returned to
the presidency by the citizenry in a generally free polling process– even in the fall of 2004,
once it was already becoming increasingly clear that (1) the invasion
and its after-effects were inflicting increasingly high levels of
death, damage, and destruction on Iraqis, and (2) the WMD ‘pretext’
that had jerked most of the US citizenry, and most of our lawmakers,
into supporting the invasion had zero evidentiary basis and indeed had
been considerably hyped, exaggerating, and one might even say
manufactured by the Bushites.

During the month-long journey in and around three Arab countries that I have just completed, I had
a much starker and more vivid sense of what the destruction of Iraq
must be like and must feel like, for Iraqis. I had already, some
30 years ago, lived through the destriction that prolonged civil war
(and intermittent Israeli attacks) visited on that country. And
now, most recently, here I was again– driving through the settled
fields and olive groves of southern Syria; driving along the canals,
through the date-groves and the new ex-urban conglomerations that ring
Cairo; hearing the call to prayer ring out in a city in northern Jordan
as we passed it; seeing the citizens of all three of these Arab
countries going about their daily business with focus and good humor,
more or less confident (most of them) that they could continue to
pursue this very well-rooted but also remarkably adaptable lifestyle
throughout the months and years ahead, perhaps save a little for their
children’s future, perhaps move a bit toward their long-held dream of
winning more real accountability from their governments, enjoying their
friendships and their webs of relations with people from different
communities, sitting around their coffee-shops and sheesha-houses,
going to their mosques and their many ancient churches… with tomorrow
generally fairly well predictable from today, and crucially, a general
(though not complete) environment of public security and public safety.

And there in Iraq, just a few hundred miles away, people who are very
similar to these Arab citizens in so many ways, and who had been lives
very similar to those I was seeing here, had had all these things taken
brutally from them and were now living (and dying) in a state of
generalized, existential fear and uncertainty.

All the citizens of these other Arab countries with whom I spoke
conveyed passionately to me how deeply, deeply disturbing they found
the developments inside Iraq, especially the more recent rounds of
inter-sectarian killing..

(I read a really cruel and stupid Tom Freidman column recently in which
in his most accusatory and preachy was he was ‘bemoaning’ the alleged
fact that no Arab or Muslim leaders have spoken out against the
sectarian carnage being enacted in Iraq. What complete and utter
nonsense!! Has Tom Friedman actually been to any Arab countries
in recent months and heard what opinion leaders of all sorts are saying
there? Has he even spoken to any Arabs at all in recent weeks,
apart from Mamoun Fandy, whom he quoted there, who lives and works here
in London?)

And the destruction in Iraq all seemed so much more vivid to me, when I
was there so close, and in such a very similar environment.

I realize this is mostly because of my own failure– when I sit in the
distant US of A– of being able vividly enough to imagine the lives and
conditions that the people of Iraq currently have to suffer.

When I was in Syria and Jordan– as recently as last Saturday– I both
wanted to visit with and talk with some of the million-plus Iraqis who,
because of what the US has done to their country, have had to flee
their homes and loves there and rush to those two countries to seek the
raw physical survival of themselves and their families; and I also
feared doing that.

What could I say to such an Iraqi refugee?

I had a few small encounters with Iraqis, in Jordan. But still, I
confess that I found it easier to talk about the Iraqi refugees
with Syrians and Jordanians than I thought I would find it to talk to Iraqi refugees in either
place.

I feel ashamed about that, too.

However, Bill and I did get a chance to sit down and talk in Amman with
two Iraqi friends of fairly long standing. These are people who
have not– yet– fled their country completely. They are people
whom I like and admire a lot, but with whom I have in the past had some
strong disagreements. primarily over the US decision to invade
their country, which both of them supported strongly at the time,
overwhelmingly on human-rights grounds. But because I like
and admire them both so much, and really care about their wellbeing, I
have tried to keep in touch with them as much as all of our busy
schedules have allowed, and I am glad that they have done the
same. Our meeting in Amman last week was the first time I’d seen
them since January 2006. We all had a lot to talk about.

Let me tell you a little about what we discussed with these friends, whom I’ll call ‘T’ and ‘J’…

Continue reading “Fragments from Iraq”

Thoughts on traveling to London

1. Israel the microcosm

The day before yesterday, in the evening, I went to bed in Cairo.
We woke at 1 a.m., in time to catch a ‘graveyard shift’ flight to
Frankfurt, arriving at breakfast time. Bill headed over to
Prague; our friend Brantly who had been visiting us in Cairo headed
home to Virginia; and I came to London, arriving before noon.

Traveling as we did so (relatively) easily between these countries, and
traversing as we had to the numerous movement-control barriers they maintain–
generally at or near their international airports, or international
borders– I suddenly had a vivid sense that the extremely discriminatory
and damaging movement-control systems Israel maintains in the land it
controls in the West Bank and Gaza may well (and quite rightly) be
criticized by the good, liberal citizens of the rich countries of the
west… But actually, the international order over which these
same western citizens preside is also, itself, in many ways just
a larger version of the system Israel has maintained in the occupied
territories.

Consider this:

Continue reading “Thoughts on traveling to London”

Senator Webb’s Leash for the Dog of War

“We have already given… one effectual check to the dog of war, by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to pay.”

–Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789

If our new Virginia Senator, Jim Webb, didn’t impress enough yet with his memorable response to the President’s State of the Union address, he’s leading the political troops again with a bold measure to rein in the Imperial Presidency.
While the new Congress muddles gingerly in efforts to restrain the President’s hand in the war already in progress in Iraq, Senator Webb has introduced new legislation intended precisely to prohibit the Bush-Cheney Administration from launching a new war on Iran – without formal Congressional authorization.
Jefferson would approve.
Below I provide the full text of Webb’s floor speech from earlier today (March 5th) introducing his legislation and a few excerpts from his afternoon press conference. It appears the main stream media has barely touched Webb’s bill — so far, even though I anticipate it may yet garner wide, even bipartisan support. (I’ll add more details on the Bill # and actual text, when I get it.) Let’s note reports we see on the bill in the discussion.
Here’s Webb’s Senate speech, with comments inserted:

“Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation that will prohibit the use of funds for military operations in Iran without congressional authorization. The purpose of this legislation is to restore a proper balance between the executive and legislative branches when it comes to the commencement of military activities.
“I have taken great care in the preparation of this bill to ensure that it will not in any way prevent our military forces from carrying out their tactical responsibilities in places such as Iraq and in the international waters off Iran’s coast. The legislation allows American forces to directly respond to attacks or possible attacks that might be initiated from Iran, as well as those that might be begun elsewhere and then carry over into Iranian territory. I have also excluded operations related to intelligence gathering.
“The major function of this legislation is to prevent this Administration from commencing unprovoked military activities against Iran without the approval of the Congress. The legislation accomplishes this goal through the proper constitutional process of prohibiting all funding for such an endeavor. Unlike the current situation in Iraq, where cutting off funds might impede or interrupt ongoing operations, this legislation denies funding that would be necessary to begin such operations against Iran in the first place.

Webb then approvingly notes what may be the Bush Administration’s efforts to head off widespread concerns that it was deliberately seeking a pretext to start a war with Iran:

Continue reading “Senator Webb’s Leash for the Dog of War”

Human rights, democracy, the US, and Syria

(This post has been cross-posted to The Notion.)

I spent a few days in Damascus at the end of February, and was able to get a ground-reality view of the effects of the Bush administration’s (former) campaign for the forced ‘democratization’ of Middle Eastern societies on the work of Syrian citizens with long experience struggling for human rights and democracy in their country.
Bottom line: “Very bad indeed.”
That was the verdict rendered on the Bushites’ ‘democratization’ campaign by Danial Saoud, the President of the venerable Committee for the Defence of Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms in Syria (CDF).
Saoud was himself a political prisoner from 1987 through 1999, and has been President of the CDF since August 2006. He was adamant that what Syria’s rights activists need most of all right now is a resolution of their country’s state of war with Israel.
Speaking of Condoleezza Rice he said,

Her pressure on the regime had a very bad effect for us. Now, for 18-24 months the Americans and Europeans have put a lot of pressure on the regime– but the regime then just pushes harder on us.

Mazen Darwish, who is Saoud’s colleague in the CDF’s three-person Presidential Council, told me,

Before the US invasion of Iraq, people here in Syria liked us, the human rights activists, and we had significant popular sympathy. But since what happened in Iraq, people here say ‘Look at the results of that!’

Saoud stressed that for Syrians, the question of Israel’s continued occupation of Syria’s Golan region itself constitutes a significant denial of the rights of all the Syrian citizens affected– both those who remain in Golan, living under Israeli military occupation rule there, and those who had fled when Israel occupied Golan in 1967 and have had to live displaced from their homes and farms for the 40 years since then. “Golan is Syrian land, and we have all the rights to get it back,” he said.
In addition, he and the other rights activists I talked with pointed to the fact that the continuing state of war between Syria and Israel has allowed the Syrian regime to keep in place the State of Emergency that was first imposed in the country in 1963. “All these regimes in this area say they are postponing the issue of democracy until after they have solved the issues of Golan and Palestine,” he said.

Both men pointed out the numerous contradictions and ambiguities in the policy the US has pursued regarding democratization in Syria. Darwish noted that, “When the US had a good relationship with Syria, in 1991, Danial was in prison– and the US didn’t say anything about that.” These two men, and other rights activists I talked with also noted that more recently, even during the Bushites’ big push for ‘democratization’ in Syria in 2004-2005, the Bushites were still happy to benefit from Syria’s torture chambers by sending some suspected Al-Qaeda people there to be tortured. (Canadian-Syrian dual citizen Maher Arar was only the most famous of these victims. In September 2005, Amnesty International published this additional list.)
Over the past year, two processes have been underway in Syria that seem to confirm these activists’ argument that US pressure on the Damascus regime has been detrimental to their cause. Firstly, the rapid deterioration in the US’s power in the region has considerably diminished Washington’s ability to pressure the Syria regime on any issues, and Damascus has become notably stronger and self-confident than it was a year ago. For some evidence of this, see my latest interview with Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, serialized here, here, and here.
Secondly, over the same period, the situation of human rights activists within the country seems to have improved some.
Saoud told me that the number of (secular) political prisoners in the country is now less than 20. Indeed, the day we talked, about 16 Kurdish and student activists who had been held for less than a month had just been released. He said “No-one knows how many Islamist activists are in detention… We don’t hear about them until they come to court.” He said, “They don’t torture people like Anwar al-Bunni or Michel Kilo, or the others who were detained last year for having signed the Beirut-Damascus Declaration.” He indicated, however, that it was very likely that many of the Islamist detainees had been tortured. (Human Rights Watch’s recently released report for 2006 states that in Syria, “Thousands of political prisoners, many of them members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and the Communist Party, remain in detention.)
… Meanwhile, the main factor dominating political developments in Syria as in the rest of the Middle East, is the continued and extremely painful collapse of conditions inside Iraq. Syrians have watched that collapse in horror. Their country has received and given a temporary refuge to more than a million Iraqis (a considerable burden on their nation, equivalent to the US taking in some 17 million refugees within just a couple of years.) And since Iraq’s collapse has occurred under a Washington-advertised rubric of “democratization”, the whole tragedy in Iraq has tended to give the concept a very bad name, and has caused Arabs and Muslims throughout the Middle East to value political stability much, much more than hitherto.
Under those circumstances, it is very moving to still hear people living in Arab countries talking about the need for democracy. But when they do so, they are very eager to distance themselves from the coerciveness inherent in Washington’s recent ‘democratization’ project. And they all– regime supporters and oppositionists, alike–stress the need for moves toward democratization to grow out the local people’s needs and priorities, rather than the geostrategies pursued by distant Washington.

Mouallem interview, part 3 (final)

This
is the third installment of my write-up of the interview I conducted
with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem in Damascus on February
28. The first two installments appeared in these two earlier JWN
posts: 1, and 2. ~HC.

So, I had been asking Mr. Mouallem about the fate of the many settlers
whom Israel has implanted into the occupied Palestinian and Syrian
territories since 1967, and he had been saying, “To make peace you need
a political decision. The issue is not one of settlers, but their
presence there is used as an excuse
for the lack of political will in Israel”…

I asked again about the question of the settlers, and whether the
presence, now, of nearly 500,000 of them inside the occupied West Bank
(including East Jerusalem) might not make the political question, for
any Israeli government, of effecting a total withdrawal from that
occupied area much more difficult to resolve?

He replied,

You talk about the 500,000 settlers–
but what about the four million Palestinian refugees? How can the
international community be happy with that dispersal of the
Palestinians from their homes but say it cannot easily think about
relocating 500,000 settlers? The existence of the settlements
there doesn’t in any way affect the requirements of international law.

Regarding the negotiations over Golan, the issue of the Israeli
settlements there was raised during our negotiations with Israel. The Israeli
negotiators agreed to remove all those settlers and asked for
compensation for the costs of pulling them out and relocating them.

Whom did they ask this of? I asked.

He replied, “Those who were watching the negotiation”– a clear
reference to the Americans, who were the sole outside
mediators/facilitators of all the bilateral peace negotiations that
Israel held, in parallel, with the Syrians, Palestinians, and
Jordanians in the 1990s.

“If the Israelis had asked us,” Mouallem
added, “we would have countered that request with our own request for
compensation for all the many monetary losses our people suffered as a
result of the occupation of our land.”

However, he noted that that principle of compensation from an outside
party for the costs of relocating Israeli settlers from occupied
territories– a principle that has earlier been applied with respect
both to the settlers Israel withdrew from Sinai in 1982, or from Gaza
in late 2005– could also be applied to settlers being relocated out of
the West Bank in the context of a final Palestinian-Israeli peace.

If a comprehensive peace process is resumed within the coming period, I
asked, did he expect that the Syrians would be able to coordinate more
effectively with the Palestinian negotiators than they had in the
1990s, when Yasser Arafat presided over all aspects of the
Palestinians’ dipliomacy?

Mouallem replied, “I can’t tell, because the Syrian issue is much
easier to resolve than the Palestinian issue. Between 1991 and
2000 we built the structure of the peace agreement on our trac, and we
achieved about 85 percent of the final agreement.”

What about the recent press reports that, between 2004 and summer
2006, a Syrian-American business executive called Ibrahim Soleiman had
conducted some “track two” diplomacy with a group of well-connected
Israeli private citizens, and had passed a number of significant
messages between the governmental authorities in Israel and Syria in an
attempt to exoplore the possibility of a resumption of the negotiations?

“It was a personal issue,” he told me. “Ibrahim Soleiman is an
individual who is keen to see peace between Syria and Israel. But
I have no knowledge of any contacts between him and the Syrian
government.”

Did he have any fears that, if there is a comprehensive
Arab-Israeli peace negotiation, this might make problemns between his
government and Iran?

He replied,

No. We negotiated
with Israel from 1991 through 2000, and we continued to have good
relations with Iran throughout those years. Of course, it’s
possible the Iranians were convinced that the Israelis would never
complete the negotiation– that Prime Minister Shamir had been serious
when he later revealed that his intention, when he participated in the
Madrid conference, was simply to tie the Arab side
up in negotiations for a further ten years without arriving at any
final settlement.

I asked how he saw the position of the present Olmert government in
Israel. He had said earlier he saw it as “weak”– so what did
that portend for the chance of successful negotiations?

I prefer not to look at
individuals but at the movements of public opinion. The Israelis
lack any leadership that is dedicated to creating a peace culture
inside their society and to preparing public opinion for the era of
peace. Now, instead, we see a leadership that plants fear in public opinion, and
prepares the public there for another military confrontation.

But had the Syrian leadership, for its part, done much to create a
culture of peace, I asked?

He said,

During the peace
negotiations, and especially during the summit between President Hafez
al-Asad and President Bill Clinton in Geneva in 1994, President Asad
said clearly that ‘Peace is our strategic option’, and spoke about ‘the
peace of the brave.’ Until now, President Bashar al-Asad
considers this to be a fact.

Addressing another aspect of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, I asked how he
saw the more activist role the Saudi monarchy recently started playing
regarding several aspects of regional diplomacy including the negotiation of the Mecca
Agreement concluded in mid-February between Fateh and Hamas. I
asked whether he considered the Saudis had gone significantly further
in this diplomacy than Washington might have been happy with.

He said merely,

We are happy to see the
Saudis having a dialogue with the representatives of [Lebanese]
Hizbullah, and hosting Hamas and Fateh in Mecca. We’re happy to
see His Majesty the King supporting the Mecca Agreement, which we are
happy with. We’re happy, too, to see them hosting an Arab summit
in Riyadh in the near future. This is the role we should see
Saudi Arabia play, in contributing to increase the stability in the
region.

We’re also happy to see them undertaking a dialogue with Iran.

At the beginning of our meeting– before he told me “So now, you can
ask me anything you like!”– Mouallem had made a quick introductory
statement summing up how he saw his country’s present position.
“We have passed the period of imposed isolation,” he said, with evident
relief. “Why it was imposed on us, I still don’t know.”

He continued,

The problem we face is that
the Israelis always try to resolve issues by force, and this has led to
the absence of peace for many decades. We see that the US policy
has also, similarly, involved a reliance on force– in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, and in this current mobilization against Iran.

We believe that without a political regime in the region [by which I
understood him to mean a coordinated political-diplomatic approach to problem
solving], you can’t resolve issues or find stability. This has
been demonstrated clearly– in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and
Palestine. You even need a political regime in the ‘War on
Terror’.

Without a political dialogue with the relevant parties in this region,
the Middle East won’t ever see stability.

Is the current instability seving America’s interrests or the region’s
interests? It is surely not.

They tried to tell us about some projects they had, like the Greater
Middle East, or the ‘New’ Middle East, or the alliance among ‘moderate’
countries in the Middle East. But what is their definition of
‘moderate’? Is it a country that supports an ignorant American
policy on regional issues?

You find many questions along these lines being asked in the streets in
the whole of this region. Why has the American reputation reached
such an unprecedentedly low level in so many countries in and beyond
the Middle East?

No-one in the administration has yet answered this.

Toward the end of the interview, I returned to the question of the
United States’ current position in the Middle East, including the
status of the campaign it pursued in 2004 and 2005 for democratization
throughout the region; and I asked how he saw Washington’s position now.

He replied,

Nobody in this part of the
world is against democracy. But still, the people of the region
have our own priorities– and the first priority for us is to
liberate the Golan Heights and end the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Because this on its own would have profound political, economic, and
social consequences on Syrian life.

We want to see the Middle East stable and secure. We want to see
Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine all stand up! This, for any Syrian,
is a priority. And this will lead to other priorities, like
democratization.

I asked his reaction to reports I had heard that some
officials in the Bush administration, including Deputy National
Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, had indicated that they gave such a
high priority to democratization and regime change in Syria that they
had argued that the present, Baath Party-dominated government in Syria should not be “rewarded”
by being engaged in a peace process that would almost certainly lead to
the return of Golan to Syrian control.

He said,

If Mr. Abrams said so, this
means that in his lifetime he hates to see peace.

When Israel conquered the Golan, did it do so on behalf of peace and
democratization– or on behalf of conquering and expansion?

You should ask Mr. Abrams if what’s happening in Iraq is
democratization. The average number of people killed every day in
Iraq is 60 to 70 people. So many Iraqis are now obliged to choose
between being killed and leaving their country. And this is
democratization?

People like Mr. Abrams damaged the cause of democratization more than
any others. Because democracy is an important way to govern a
country– but only if you respect each country’s priorities and needs.

We finished the meeting with some small talk. He and
his key media advisor Bushra Kanafani talked a little about the
dangers they faced during the trip the two of them– and one other
Foreign Ministry official, Ahmed Arnous– had made to Baghdad last
November.

Throughout our whole meeting, Mouallem projected a clear sense of
relief that, in his view, the president whom he serves and the
government of which he is a part had successfully survived a period of
some danger and political uncertainty, and was now prepared to be
somewhat gracious and understanding in the way it deals with the United
States and other western and pro-western powers in the period ahead.

I gathered this same impression of a government and regime that feels a
new (if still not yet complete) sense of self-confidence from
all the other contacts I had during my three-day visit to
Damascus. Those included contacts with a number of members of the
country’s liberal political opposition. Indeed, I was struck by
how similar some of the key the arguments– and even the language– I
heard from them was to that I heard from Mouallem. But I shall
write more about that, later.

Mouallem interview, part 2: Iraq, Lebanon, peace process

On
February 28, I conducted a 70-minute interview in Damascus with
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem. Mr. Mouallem spoke about
numerous issues including Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian question, the Arab-Israeli peace process, Saudi Arabia’s new diplomatic activism, the American role in the
region, and bilateral Syrian-US realtions. Yesterday, I was able
to write a JWN post that contained the central points of what
he said about Iraq. Now, I shall write up what I can of the rest
of the interview, though I might not get it all finished in this post
before my next meeting here in Amman. ~HC

Last November, Mr.
Mouallem headed a small Syrian delegation that, at the invitation of
the Iraqi government, made a short visit to Baghdad. Then in
January, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani made a multi-day state visit to
Damascus– the first time an Iraqi leader had visited Syria for nearly
30 years. (So long as there was a Baath Party government in Iraq
the two Baath Party leaderships, there and in Syria, pursued a very
harsh competition with each other, which seemed to be exacerbated by
the fact that each claimed to be the ‘authentic’ successor to the
mantle of the Baathist version of pan-Arabism. During that
period, Mr. Talabani and many, many other members of what were then
opposition movements much hunted and oppressed by the Saddam Hussein
regime, had made their homes in Damascus.)

In Damascus on Wednesday, Mouallem expressed his concern about the
medical crisis that two days earlier had sent Talabani rushing to Amman
for urgent medical treatment. “I certainly wish him a speedy and
full recovery,” Mouallem said, describing Talabani as “an important
leader.”

Mouallem made a number of other significant statements about Iraq, in
addition to the ones reported here on JWN
earlier. As noted there, he did decline to specify the total
length of the timetable for the total US withdrawal from Iraq that he
said Syria sought. He said instead that that timetable should be
determined primarily by the length of time it would take to rebuild the
Iraqi national forces on a truly nationalist basis– “and we should
make this the timetable.”

He said that the challenge of social and political reconstruction in
Iraq could not be compared with any other cases–

because of the multiplicity of
ethnicities in Iraq and also because of terrible legacy left by
[onetime US administrator L. Paul] Bremer’s many mistakes there.

No-one can completely dismantle an entire army and send all the troops
and the trained officers onto the streets! And there was no logic
to the complete dismantling of the Baath Party that Bremer
ordered. Iraq needs
a nationalist movement as a counter-balance to its different religious
movements.

No-one could think of legislation that dismantled the civil service
corps of all the ministries.

Once, when [US Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage came here, I
asked him what kind of staffing they had at that point in any of the
Iraqi ministries. And he told me there were only five or six
people left in each one!

Also, the new Constitution in Iraq is not giving assurances for Iraq’s
unity.

Now, we have the issue of Kirkuk coming up. This is a major
issue! Why are the Iraqis and Americans not making Kirkuk into an
example of tolerance and coexistence for the future of all of
Iraq? Why are the Americans not helping to lower the sectarianism
in Iraq?

We have an enormous fear of sectarian fitna
[social breakdown]. This type of conflict can be endless and is
always a recipe for division. For this reason, President Bashar
al-Asad sent me to many countries to mobilize political and religious
efforts to prevent this from spreading in the region.

We in Syria are proud that
we are a country of tolerance and coexistence without any discrimination
on a religious or ethnic basis.

I asked Mouallem how he saw the continuing political crisis in another
key neighboring country, Lebanon. He said,

The stability of Lebanon is important
to Syria, and we are also very concerned about Lebanon for humanitarian
reasons.

During the war against Lebanon last summer we received more than
300,000 Lebanese citizens here in Syria. We opened our homes to
them! And we also received more than 400,000 foreigners who had
been in Lebanon and needed to leave the country quickly. We
helped them to move on to their home countries from here.

We worked night and day to deal with this. This affected us here
in Syria so much!

You know that according to the Lebanese Constitution, the country
cannot be ruled by a majority that rules over a minority, but only by
coexistence and consensus. We hope the Lebanese themselves can
solve the present situation on this basis. I am optimistic that
they can do it. The Lebanese have to depend on themselves.
If they can’t do it, no-one can help them.

The special investigation team charged with investigating the February
2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri has
been continuing its work. Earlier reports from the team have
indicated– though not conclusively– some official Syrian role in the
killing. How did Mouallem see the prospects regarding this team’s upcoming
reports?

We are working closely with the
investigation, because reaching the truth on this matter is in our
vital interest.

The prospect of having a court to try those named as suspects is a
purely Lebanese issue, and it a point of contention among the Lebanese
themselves.

The demand of the Lebanese opposition is simple. It wants a
larger government there, and to be allotted eleven of the government’s
30 members. And the issue of the court would then be on that
government’s agenda.

The court itself is not an issue for us. The issue for us is to
prevent others from using
the court issue in a politicized way.

I asked him about the role the French government has played since the
summer of 2004 regarding the Lebanese issue, and Syria’s involvement in
Lebanon. “It is not France’s role as such, but President Chirac’s
policy that concerns us,” he said. “That policy seems negative to
us in Syria. Maybe it stemmed from his personal friendship with
Hariri or from other causes. We don’t understand why Chirac
adopted that policy.”

In the 1990s, Mouallem had played a key role in the diplomacy on the
Syrian-Israeli “track” of the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, first of
all by virtue of his position as Syria’s ambassador in Washington, and
later when he stepped in to lead the Syrian team that negotiated with
Israel until the spring of 1996. (The course of those
negotiations between 1991 and 1996 were the topic of a book I published
with the U.S. Institute of Peace Press in 2000– you can find further
details of this book, including ordering information, through this page on my home
website. Mouallem was one key source for that work, having
allowed me to conduct numerous, on-the-record interviews with him on
the topic between 1996 and 1998.)

That diplomacy was interrupted by Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s
withdrawal from the peace talks in 1996, and was later briefly resumed
by Ehud Barak after he became Israel’s Prime Minister in 1999.
But after a summit meeting held in Geneva in 2000 it all fell apart
again, largely because Barak retracted the offer that PM Rabin had held
out in almost authoritative way back in 1994-95, that in the context of
a full peace with Syria, including wideranging economic and security
provisions, Israel would withdraw from the whole of the territory in
Syrian Golan that it has held under military occupation since 1967…

In Damascus on Wednesday, I asked Mouallem about his current hopes for
the resumption of the peace diplomacy with Israel.

He said,

We never interrupted this peace
process, ever since the Madrid Conference in 1991. Our question
is always, “Is this process real?”

There was a narrow window after the war on Lebanon last summer, and
President Bashar al-Asad made many interviews saying he was ready to
widen it. Sadly, the response from Israel and from the American
administration wasn’t encouraging. Indeed, if we believe the
press reports, the US intervened with the Israelis to prevent them from testing
our seriousness. Why?

We see the Olmert government as a weak government, and usually weak
governments leave their security and diplomatic policy in the hands of
others.

We didn’t see this US administration put on the agenda the need for a
comprehensive peace.

I asked about the obstacle posed to hopes for peace by the increasingly
large presence of Israeli settlers who have been implanted into the
occupied Syrian and Palestinian territories with the support of
successive Israeli governments. How could the settlers be dealt with?

He replied,

According to international law, you
can’t create de-facto facts on other people’s territories or change the
heritage or status of these territories, because sooner or later you
are still obliged to withdraw from them. This was quite clearly
laid out in Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle
of the exchange of land for peace that they embodied.

Given the particularly heavy presence of Israeli settlers within the
Palestinian West Bank, I asked if he still saw the possibility for the
Palestinians to be able to establish a viable national state there.

To make peace you need a political
decision. The issue is not one of settlers, but their presence
there is used as an excuse
for the lack of political will in Israel.

(Regrettably I need to go to another meeting, so I’ll break off the
interview here and get back to it when I can. More, later.
~HC)

Syrian Foreign Minister Mouallem on Iraq, etc

“The day after any military attack against Iran would be a
disaster– not just for the Middle East region, but for international
stability.” This was the clear warning I heard voiced by Syria’s
Foreign Minister, Walid al-Mouallem, during a 70-minute interview I
conducted with him in Damascus on February 28.

I had asked Mr. Mouallem whether he had any fears of an imminent
military attack against either his country, or Iran. “About
Syria, I don’t have any such fear,” he said.

But regarding Iran, it’s more
complicated. There is no logical analysis that could support the
idea of such illogical behavior. But honestly, no-one can claim
to predict the behavior of this American administration.

For example, they are saying all the time, ‘All options are open’, and
they are mobilizing all these forces. No-one knows why!

And then, no-one knows what will happen the day after any attack on
Iran. Especially, since the Americans didn’t have any strategy
for the day after the invasion of Iraq!

The day after any military attack against Iran would be a
disaster– not just for the Middle East region, but for international
stability. Think of the effect on oil prices, and the effects
that would have on Europe and Japan, and on the stability of the
economies of all the Gulf countries. Think of the consequences of
Iran’s possible acts of retaliation against American interests
worldwide. What would be the effects on the ‘Global War on
Terror’? What would happen to American soldiers in Iraq and in
Afghanistan? These are the questions that need to be answered
before there is any military decision.

I hope there will be no
military decision. These differences can be solved through
political means, through direct negotiations.

I asked his view of the meeting planned for Baghdad March 10, where a
representative of the U.S. administration will sit down for the first time with
representatives of both Syria and Iran. (The Iraqi
government has invited all of its neighbors and all five members
of the Security Council to this conference.)

Mouallem confirmed that his deputy would
be attending the meeting. He added,

The idea of the meeting is to
rally the goodwill of the neighboring countries and to express support
for Iraq’s security and stability. For Syria, it’s our vital
interest to achieve security and stability in Iraq. In Syria, we
have more than a million displaced Iraqis. They are a real burden
on our economy, and on our education and healthcare systems.
We’re not getting any support from anyone for this– including the
Iraqi government.

This is a humanitarian issue, and it’s increasing in gravity on a daily
basis, because of the terrible security situation in Iraq.

He explained that because Syria hopes that these displaced persons
can speedily return to their homes in Iraq, his government is reluctant
to refer to them as refugees, calling them instead “displaced perople.”

Mouallem described the Bush administration’s decision to attend the
Baghdad conference as,

a partial step in the correct
direction. But it’s not the full step we are expecting Washington
to reach to. The full step will be when the Americans decide to
have a comprehensive dialogue on regional issues, starting with the
Arab-Israeli issue, which is the core issue in the region.

Had he seen any signs yet that this was happening?

I haven’t seen any yet. The only
positive signs we’ve seen from America have been the Baker-Hamilton
report and some signs coming from some of the members of the Senate and
Congress who have been visiting, and from some scholars.

I asked what policies Syria supported in order to
de-escalate the tensions in Iraq.

I’m not a military man, but I read the
news daily. And I don’t see any news from Iraq or Afghnaistan
that tells me the situation is good…

We speak about the need for an agreed timetable for a US withdrawal
from Iraq– agreed between the US and the Iraqi government.

This timetable would have two or three dimensions: One for the
rebuilding of the Iraqi forces, with a timetable that allows Iraqi
units to replace the foreign forces there. The second would be
that it would provide a hope
for the many Iraqis resisting occupation, to tell them not to use force
because they could be sure that by a fixed date they would see the
independence and unity of Iraq. So that would help the job of
rebuilding the security forces. Thirdly, this would announce that
it is a duty for the Iraqi forces and also for all of Iraq’s neighbors
to help assure this process.

We are not talking this way about a withdrawal in order to offend any
party, but it’s our thinking based on the realities there.

… No-one is thinking about imposing defeat on the US
forces. On the contrary, we are trying to find an honorable
withdrawal for them. Thus we say the timetable should be agreed
with the Iraqi authorities. Of course, it must be a total
withdrawal, since one of our central goals is to achieve Iraqi
sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity, in accordance with UN
Security Council resolution 1546.

He later declined an invitation to be more precise about the total
length of the timetable for the US withdrawal.

Syria’s views on all these matters are of course extremely significant,
given the country’s pivotal position in the Middle East and given the
fact that it enjoys good relations with not only the present government
of Iraq but also many strands of the Iraqi opposition including many
trends inside Iraq’s Sunni-Arab society.

(Mouallem talked about a number of other important topics, too, including Lebanon and the Palestinian issue.
I’ll post more material from the interview on JWN as soon as I get the
time. Now, I’m afraid I need to run to something else. By the way, I’m now back in Jordan.)