Bushites forced to deal with Syria and Iran

It is excellent news that the Bushites have finally been forced— by their own puppet government in Baghdad, no less– to sit down at the same table with representatives of Iraq and all its neighbors, including Iran and Syria.
That WaPo report says this:

    Rice told the Senate Appropriations Committee,”We hope that all governments will seize this opportunity to improve the relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region.”
    The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.
    …Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has long advocated a regional conference, though originally it was meant to include only Iraq’s neighbors. The administration decided in recent weeks to attend the conference, but in an effort to avoid the spotlight it ensured that it will be joined at the table in March by other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, U.S. officials said. The foreign ministers’ meeting in April will be further expanded to include representatives of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.
    It was decided “relatively recently” to include the permanent Security Council members, and the G-8 was invited “as of last night,” a senior administration official said. Rice’s announcement appeared intended to assuage congressional concerns about the administration’s Iraq policy, which have threatened to derail passage of a nearly $100 billion supplemental spending request for Iraq.
    Administration officials noted that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell attended a regional conference on Iraq in 2004, where at one point he found himself seated next to the Iranian foreign minister and made idle chitchat. But that meeting took place in a different context, before Iran had started uranium enrichment and before Syria was implicated in the killing of a Lebanese political figure — two reasons the administration has frequently cited for limited diplomatic engagement with Tehran and Damascus.

Of course these meetings won’t be the end of the sorry tale of the US’s extremely destructive involvement in Iraq. But they point the way to possible process in which a steady, orderly– and let’s hope complete and speedy!– US withdrawal from Iraq might occur.

The terrible odyssey of Marwan Jabour

Human Rights Watch and the WaPo have both done ground-breaking work on the case of Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian whom the US accused of funding and helping Al-Qaeda operatives and who was held by the CIA and its Pakistani and other subordinate agencies in horrendously degrading conditions in secret, “black” prisons for two years.
The WaPo’s report, published in today’s paper by Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate, is here. The portal to the lengthy HRW report (which I haven’t had time to read in full) is here.
Back in September, when the Bushites transported 14 alleged “high-value detainees” from US-supervised black prisons in (most likely) Pakistan and Afghanistan to Guantanamo, they assured us publicly that the whole of the black prison program had then been shut down. Human Rights Watch is very dubious of this claim. The organization’s Joanne Mariner has written a letter to President Bush, in which she lists the names of 16 people whom HRW believes were held in CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown, and the names of another 22 people who may have been held in CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown.
What has happened to these “disappeared” individuals? And how, given the horrible record of these secret prisons, can we be assured there are not dozens of others like them whose names we do not know??
The HRW report on the odyssey of Marwan Jabour is lengthy and detailed, but it is well presented on their website through this portal. Jabour was arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, in May 2004. He was held under Pakistani and US custody in different secret prisons in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan. During his captivity he was subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and many other forms of torture and degrading and inhumane treatment until he was transported from Afghnaistan to Jordan in July 2006.
Here’s how Linzer and Tate start their story in today’s WaPo:

    On his last day in CIA custody, Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster, was stripped naked, seated in a chair and videotaped by agency officers. Afterward, he was shackled and blindfolded, headphones were put over his ears, and he was given an injection that made him groggy. Jabour, 30, was laid down in the back of a van, driven to an airstrip and put on a plane with at least one other prisoner.
    His release from a secret facility in Afghanistan on June 30, 2006, was a surprise to Jabour — and came just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him…

According to the HRW report, Jabour was transported by plane from Afghanistan to Jordan (amid some very fear-inducing circumstances), and later from there to Israel. After the Israelis examined his case– and gave him the first access he had ever had to a lawyer, since his detention in May 2004– they determined he was not a threat and transported him to Gaza, where he was freed and reunited with his parents.
Above, I note in particular the detail about Jabour having been– just before his transfer from Afghanistan to Jordan– stripped naked and videotaped. I am pretty sure the CIA people running that black prison would have done that with the aim of making him too embarrassed about the threat of the possible release of those tapes to be easily willing to speak out publicly about the treatment he had received during his two-plus years in CIA custody.
I therefore applaud his courage in breaking through that barrier of fear.
Jabour himself told HRW that when the time approached for his release from the CIA black prison in Afghanistan, the prison’s assistant director told him,

    there was no toilet in the plane so Jabour would have to wear diapers, and that they would make a video of his naked body to show that his body had not been harmed.

The next day he was wrapped up like a mummy and taken by car to an airstrip. The HRW report continues:

    Jabour was brought outside and put in a chair, and he heard three shots. “I was afraid,” he said. “I thought they were shooting people.” The team was very aggressive with him, increasing his fear.
    Suddenly they removed all of his wrappings and took off all his clothes. When his eyes opened, he saw a man pointing a video camera at him. Then the transfer team put a diaper on him, and put the same outfit back on, except this time they used plastic handcuffs.
    He could only feel the airplane; he could not see it, but it seemed to him to be a small civilian jet. The seats faced forward, as in a normal passenger aircraft. In the plane, during the flight, a doctor took his blood pressure. The flight lasted about three-and-a-half to four hours.

It is very likely, of course, that a plane traveling that distance would be equiped with some form of toilet facilities.
(I note that all the accounts of how prisoners were transported to Guantanamo over the years include accounts of how the circumstances of these transfers were nearly always made as physically humiliating and as fear-inducing as possible. This is straight out of the CIA’s classic torture handbooks.
As for Linzer and Tate, they also write this:

    U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed [Jabour’s] incarceration and that he was held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would not discuss conditions inside black sites or the treatment of any detainee.

And crucially, they note this:

    John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, plans to investigate the fate of the missing detainees as part of a larger examination into the CIA’s operation of secret prisons and its rendition program.

This is excellent news, and is the first step we need if we, the concerned and law-abiding US citizenry, are able to recapture our country as place that is ruled by law and in which black prisons, torture, and the unbridled militarism and sense of national “chosen-ness” that incubated those ills are to be made into a thing of the past.

Returning to Damascus

Yesterday, I came by car from Amman to Damascus.  (And no, I
didn’t undergo any life-changing experiences along the way.) I had told
my friends in Damascus that I’d be here by about 11 a.m.
yesterday.  But since I didn’t leave my hotel in Amman till around
8 a.m., that was wildly optimistic.  I came by share-taxi from the
Abdali bus- and taxi-station in downtown Amman.  It took a
bit of time to find a car to Amman that was close to filling up with
passengers, but finally I bought two seats in a car to fill the
complement and we set off from there at around 9:40.

The road out of the ever-increasing reaches of Amman was
undistinguished, but fairly fast along a good highway.  Then we
headed north, arriving at the Jordanian side of the border about an
hour later.  There wasn’t too much of interest along the
road.  But it had rained some over the past two weeks so at least
there was a bit of green in the median strip and along the roadsides,
making a nice contrast with the dun-colored sand and rock of the
surrounding arid hills.  We did pass two or three very new-looking
university campuses along way: the Hashemiya University, the Al-
al-Bayt university, etc.  And of course the numerous turn-offs to
various other Jordanian towns and towards the Iraqi border.  I
watched to see if I could see any noticeable military supply trucks
barrelling along to Iraq, but failed to.

Continue reading “Returning to Damascus”

Visser on Southern Iraq and oil

The well-informed southern Iraq scholar Reidar Visser has an important new piece of analysis here, titled Basra Crude: The Great Game of Iraq’s “Southern” Oil.
He adds some very important clarifications to the whole current discussion of the linked questions of oil regulations and federalism in Iraq.
Some very important information he injects into this discussion:

    Accounting for one of the world’s greatest concentrations of petroleum wealth, almost all of Iraq’s supergiant oil fields can be found near Basra or in one of its two neighbouring governorates. The other six Shiite-majority governorates of Iraq have little or no oil, and even the most optimistic estimates of new discoveries in Kurdistan pale in comparison with the reserves of Basra and the far south.
    This problem is particularly pronounced with regard to the areas south of Baghdad, where the conflation in the international media of the terms “Shiite”, “Southern Iraq” and “oil” masks an intense battle for control currently underway between competing political currents within Iraq’s Shiite community. Basra is unusual in that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) – the Shiite party that has accomplished the remarkable feat of becoming the favourite Iraqi partner of both Washington and Tehran – is completely on the sidelines in local government. Instead, other local factions and especially the Fadila party have dominated since 2005. In the same period, the idea that Basra could become a small-scale federal entity of its own, separated from the rest of the Shiite territories, has gained some ground, while traditional Iraqi nationalism also seems to remain surprisingly strong among the population at large. The implication is that SCIRI’s competing project of a single Shiite super-region south of Baghdad will suffer from a glaring defect unless something changes dramatically in Basra: it will have almost no oil resources.

Visser also notes that if the currently proposed suggestions for revisions in the country’s oil-regulation laws are confirmed by the Iraqi parliament, then “the incentives for seeking federal status for existing governorates – such as Basra – will become greater.”
Anyway, go read his whole piece of analysis there. Then you can come back and discuss it– including, most likely, with Reidar himself– on the comments board attached to this post.

Hersh’s ‘bombshells’: Real info and/or Sy-war effort?

I read with interest Sy Hersh’s recent New Yorker article on the Bush administration “Redirection” in the Middle East. It contains a wealth of “information”– some of it new, some of it not new, all of it presented in a very scaremongery way, with the whole piece extremely disorganized.
I haven’t known what to make of it, really, which is why I haven’t blogged about it until now. Sy is an extremely energetic reportorial sleuth, who has a wealth of longtime contacts hidden deep inside the intelligence agencies of the US and more than one Middle East government. (And yes, that includes the Israeli intel agencies.) He does dig out considerable amounts of information, some of which is absolutely new, and some of which is very disturbing. But he is also an extremely disorganized writer who sometimes, it seems to me, has a fairly weak ability to sift things he hears or to test them against other sources… especially in the Middle East. Hence, I believe we should be open to the possibility that to some degree or another some of what he writes may (without him necessarily being aware of this) be a dissemination of a “(p)sy-war” effort directed by some of his danker sources.
I don’t have time to go through this entire article of his to point out the internal contradictions, or the errors of fact or interpretation that I have found in it. (As in some of his earlier work on the Middle East, too.) For now, I’ll just note this sentence, in the introductory framing of the article:

    The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Doesn’t this make it sound as though the Bushists’ new policy has brought it, largely unknowingly, into an independently existing “widening sectarian conflict”?
My own analysis is that at least some figures in the administration have been extremely happy to try to fan the flames of sectarianism in the region; and that meanwhile there are substantial indigenous political forces here that have been resisting that attempt, with some considerable success.
(I write this from Damascus, after having spent three weeks in Egypt and a few days in Jordan. So I base my view of this situation this on discussions with a wide range of people, some of whom are trusted longtime friends and colleagues. Hersh bases his reporting largely on un-named sources in intelligence agencies and on the uncritically reported views of named– and nearly always strongly pro-Israeli– analysts in distant Washington.)
He also seems fundamentally not to have understood the degree to which the Saudis have “gone off the [US] reservation” in their diplomacy– that is, have broken through the limits that the Bushites sought to place on their freedom of diplomatic action. This has been evident with regard to many recent Saudi actions– regarding Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, and above all with regard to Iran.
Actually, one of the reasons Sy’s piece is so disorganized and misleading is because it was, evidently, reported over a fairly lengthy period of time– e.g., his interview with Nasrallah was back in December– and matters have been moving extremely rapidly in all these areas of diplomacy over these recent weeks… So some of what he’s reporting there may have been the “wishful thinking” of Bushite/Israeli insiders (and their friends) back in, say, early January; and at that point there were still not many counter-facts in place that challenged the veracity of those claims.
Bottom line, I think we all need to read Hersh’s text extremely carefully and critically. There are some intriguing (but often largely unsubstantiated) pieces of new “information” in it. But there is also some misinformation (or unknowingly recycled disinformation) and a lot of extremely poor analysis.

Rafsanjani: “Let’s negotiate”

Iran’s Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani is akin to that old advertising pitch for E.F. Hutton: when he speaks, people listen… or at least they should. It’s so much “easier” for the western MSM to quote the incendiary comments by Iran’s current President. Besides, if you want to support going to war with Iran, why bother to print the comments of someone who speaks rather plainly of how to avoid war?
For more years than I’m prepared to admit, I’ve been reading the speeches and Friday “sermons” by Iran’s Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. When Rafsanjani speaks, I’ve listened and taken volumes of notes..
I have nearly all of Rafsanjani’s major speeches and Friday “sermons” since the early days of the Iranian Revolution. I have them in translation, thanks to what used to be the indispensible US Government “Foreign Broadcast Information Service” (now fledgling as the “Open Source Center”). I tracked Rafsanjani’s comments first as Parliamentary Speaker, as Khomeini’s designate in the latter stages of the war with Iraq, as President, as Chairman of Iran’s rather unique “Council for the Discernment of Expediency” (e.g., the “fixers”), and in a half dozen other roles, including top vote recipient in last November’s elections for Iran’s Assembly of Experts.
In 1985, I started analyzing and writing about what Hans Morgenthau would have seen as a “realist” streak in Rafsanjani. My first major oped was about Rafsanjani and his fellow “pragmatists” in 1989 – for the Christian Science Monitor. I later published a biographical sketch of him.
To be sure, Rafsanjani is very much of the Islamic Revolution in Iran; yet he’s also been a key articulator, at least since 1983, of the need for that revolution to adjust its “Islamic” message in light of the needs of Iran’s interests. Indeed, I’ve just learned that Iran’s Center for Strategic Research, a think tank of the Expediency Council and close to Rafsanjani will entitle its newest journal as, “National Interest.” For fellow interenational relations theorists out there, this too is news, as it should also be to those still thinking that it’s “ideology” alone that drives Iran’s foreign policy.
I kept reading Rafsanjani, even when his popularity waned badly inside Iran. He’s gone from being cast aside as too conservative by reformists to now being at the forefront of a multi-faction coalition of reformists, pragmatic “technocrats,” and “conservatives,” candidly formed to stop and reverse the damage caused by Iran’s current President Ahmadinejad.
As such, Rafsajanjani too has a phoenix-like quality. (Yet unlike Chalabi) Rafsanjani’s sources of power and support are more easily recognized. When Rafsajani or his lieutenants speak or make “grand bargain” offers, we indeed should be taking him very seriously. (Take notes Condi — you apparently chose to ignore Rafsanjani’s “grand bargain” in 2003, among the worst mistakes of your career!)
With that in mind, I offer the ending two sections of a political sermon delivered by Rafsanjani on Friday. In my view, AP mischaracterized the speech as essentially saying the same thing as current President Ahmadinejad. Read the text yourself: note especially the ending paragraphs.

Note on this translation:Ordinarily, I would have posted the translation from our taxpayer funded “Open Source Center” – (FBIS). Yet when I first started working on this post, I only had the BBC World Service version (funded by the British taxpayers), which, by the way, is usually identical to the OSC version. The decades long FBIS/OSC/BBC relationship is still not admitted publicly, perhaps to guard the BBC’s reputation, but it’s widely known. The subheadings below are by the BBC.

Continue reading “Rafsanjani: “Let’s negotiate””

The passing of Joseph Samaha

I’m on the road. I arrived in Damascus from Amman by car about an hour ago. Now I’m settled in the Omayad Hotel which has wifi in the rooms. Great!
But I learned from commenter David that the veteran Lebanese journoJoseph Samaha has died. I agree it’s a huge loss to Middle Eastern intellectual life. David points out that As’ad Abu Khalil has a good post about Joseph on Angry Arab.
I have very little to add to that. As’ad knew Joseph much, much better than I did. I do remember a good evening we had in Beirut back in November 2004 with some friends who had invited a small number of other guests, of whom Joseph was one. It was an excellent conversation. (I knew his friend Fawaz Trabulsi a bit better than him, back in the 70s.)
Anyway, As’ad’s post is really informative. One of his longest ever; and it reveals a lot about what a great loss Joseph’s passing is. (It also tells us some nice things about As’ad. Maybe an increased sense of human connectedness is one of the legacies of the passing of a good person.)

US church leaders finish Teheran visit

A delegation of thirteen leaders from US church institutions has just finished a six-day visit to Iran, culminating in a 150-minute discussion with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The delegation includes two leaders from Quaker organizations: Joe Volk, the head of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Mary-Ellen McNish, the had of the American Friends Service Committee.
Today (Sunday), the delegation issued a statement in which the members said,

    What the delegation found most encouraging from the meeting with President Ahmadinejad was a clear declaration from him that Iran has no intention to acquire or use nuclear weapons, as well as a statement that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be solved through political, not military means. He said, “I have no reservation about conducting talks with American officials if we see some goodwill.”
    We believe it is possible for further dialogue and that there can be a new day in U.S. – Iranian relations. The Iranian government has already built a bridge toward the American people by inviting our delegation to come to Iran. We ask the U.S. government to welcome a similar delegation of Iranian religious leaders to the United States.
    As additional steps in building bridges between our nations, we call upon both the U.S. and Iranian governments to:
    * immediately engage in direct, face-to-face talks;
    * cease using language that defines the other using “enemy” images; and
    * promote more people-to-people exchanges, including religious leaders, members of Parliament/Congress, and civil society.
    As people of faith, we are committed to working toward these and other confidence building measures, which we hope will move our two nations from the precipice of war to a more just and peaceful settlement.

You can read more about the delegation if you read this page from the FCNL website. which has links to a number of interesting “diary” entries that Joe Volk made during the early days of the trip.
I am in Jordan right now. My personal view from here is that a U.S. military attack on Iran remains a live possibility. People I’ve talked to here– as in Egypt– say the consequences for their country in the event of such an attack could be very dire indeed.
These are two countries whose leaders are closely allied with the US. However, opinion amongst these two countries’ peoples is very strongly opposed to the idea of a US attack on Iraq, which they see as very destabilizing for the whole region.
As I’ve noted many times before,the Bushites have been working very hard indeed to try to frame the issues in the Middle East in a “Sunni vs. Shiite” way, or an “Iran vs. Arabs” way, and to project the idea that “most” Sunni Arabs would actually welcome a US move to diminish Iranian/Shiite power in the region. I cannot stress strongly enough here the fact that this is not so.
Anyway, tomorrow, the participants in the church leaders’ delegation will be having a press conference in Washington DC, so I hope we will all hear a lot more about the conversations they had on their trip.
(As for me, tomorrow I travel to Damascus.)

Iraq’s Phoenix Rising Again?

(with thanks to Donald A. Weadon, Jr. for his comments – below))
Heeee’s back. No, not Virgil Goode, (!) but Ahmad Chalabi. Friday’s Wall Street Journal cover headline proclaims that the American “Surge” has returned Chalabi to the “Center Stage” of Iraqi politics.
I wonder how many coffee cups spilled over this one.
Chalabi has become so infamous that his very name deserves a Webster’s dictionary entry. Just as one would not want one’s reputation “Borked” or “Swift-boated,” one would not want to have the “Chalabi” pulled over one’s eyes.

If we observe (correctly) that the neocons wish to anoint an Iranian “Chalabi,” it will be understood that we mean a “fraud,” a “slippery character” who speaketh, as one line of my ancestors might say, “with forked tongue.” An Iranian Chalabi would be an Iranian expatriate who will prattle nicely in English about “democracy” and Israel, will prophecy that an American military overthrow of the Iranian government will be easy and popular, and will boast of a huge personal following inside Iran.
An “Iranian Chalabi” would also have influential MSM columnists publishing glowing tributes to his “leadership” credentials. In case anyone is paying attention (as we all should be), the current neocon frontrunner candidate for “liberating” Iran is Amir Abbas Fakhravar.

JWN regulars over the past four years will recall that Chalabi has long been at the top of Helena’s least favored list, and she has appropriately taken apart (in)famous colleagues like Jim Hoagland (“Hoagie”) and Judith Miller for their willing roles in promoting Chalabi’s frauds. (Type in “Chalabi” on the jwn search feature, and you’ll get a feast of Chalabi bad memories.)
Chalabi’s star status in Washington deteriorated along with America’s misadventure in Iraq, as it devolved from “mission accomplished” to “central front in the war on ter-er.” Over the past year or so, key neocons and even intelligence veteran Pat Lang intimated that Chalabi must have been an Iranian double agent all along. After all, the logic went, how could somebody that nefarious, unscrupulous, and prone to dissimulation have been anything but Iranian connected? Besides, he visits Iran. (as if that proves anything – in itself.)
I was never convinced of this argument. That the Iranians might have endeavored to connect to Chalabi is hardly suprising, as the Iranians have every “rational” interest in trying to have ties to as many Iraqi poltiical players as possible, from Talibani to Sadr to Hakim, to Maleki, to yes, Chalabi.
The Iranians, by the way, were similar disposed to assorted Afghan players in the late 1990’s – amid Iran’s severely strained relations with the Taliban. I recall even warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar finding exile in Iran…. even as it was clear Iran was less than thrilled to have him. (He was expelled in early 2003.)
Still, the bizarre, if tantalizing suggestion that Chalabi was a deep cover Iranian agent back when he was being hawked so rapturously by Miller, Hoagland,(Bernard) Lewis, Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, etc. is too “good” to be believable…. no? Were Miller & Hoagie that blind? Well, the possibility at least made for delicious irony…. :-}
As the neocons and Chalabi went through bitter reciminations and public mutual finger pointing, Chalabi’s political stature appeared to hit rock bottom when his (American favored) list of candidates failed to win a single seat in the December 2005 elections for Iraq’s Parliament.
Phoenix….
Alas, reports of Chalabi’s political demise were premature.
Today’s Journal reports he’s back at the center stage of Iraqi politics, having been appointed by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki to serve as “chairman” of a “popular committee to mobilize public support…” for the surge. Astonishingly, Chalabi has been installed as the top “liaison,” the “indispensable link” between the counter-insurgency and the people.
Excerpts of the WSJ report follow below. Yet first, here’s a brilliantly sardonic take on Chalabi’s rising from the ashes, from Donald A. Weadon, Jr. — a distinguished international lawyer, and friend in Washington. Don first contributed this comment on “peace, harmony, & bunny rabbits” to the closed “Gulf 2000 forum.” I re-post here, with Don’s permission and his edits:

“Like a mischievous cat, Ahmad Chalabi bears close watching as he runs through his nine lives.
After dodging a bullet in Jordan for massive bank fraud, he ran to the United States to parlay his intellect and his guile into a close connection to a band of lost intellectuals with grandiose plans, the neoconservatives.
While it is difficult in retrospect to imagine a University of Chicago professor who, being followed by an InterPol warrant for his arrest, comes to Washington D.C. as the darling of a cabal of folks who want to unleash their mindless vision of harmony by way of the sword in the Middle East and provides them the werewithal to give it a try at the public’s expense — well, that’s what happened.
Feeding the neocon butterflies who hovered about the early Bush 41 White House the nectar of fraudulent defectors with fabulous tales of secret WMD shenanigans, mobile nerve gas vans and the like to bolster their grandiose fantasies, he seduced the Administration and Congress into feeding him tens of millions of dollars a year for his most bogus Iraq National Congress and then even more national treasure into a Defense Department petri dish — a building next to the Pentagon under Wolfowitz’s patronage where AC toiled to create a government in exile, ready to “plug in” the minute Saddam was toppled. No wonder Rumsfeld didn’t want to know about “Day 2” onwards — he, too, had been bamboozled by AC, the celestial fraudster, into believing that all one had to do was to topple Saddam and plug him and his coterie in, and all Americans could just go home, and AC would lead the newest, friendliest client state for America smack dab in the middle of the Middle East. Peace, harmony and bunny rabbits.

Continue reading “Iraq’s Phoenix Rising Again?”

Depends what you mean by ‘Honor’…

Blogger Will Bunch had a good post recently analyzing the statement Unca Dick Cheney made recently, namely that,

    “We want to complete the mission [in Iraq], we want to get it done right, and we want to return with honor.”

Bunch quite appropriately recalls the eerily similar use that Richard Nixon made of the same term “honor” in his presidential nomination acceptance speech in August 1968.
Bunch writes,

    For Richard Nixon, “peace with honor” was not synonymous with “peace.”
    It meant “war.” A lot of war.
    Not long after taking office in 1969, Nixon — without authorization from Congress — initiated a secret air campaign against enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia that dropped 2,750,000 short tons of bombs, more than the alllies used during all of World War II. He later undertook a massive bombing campaign of Hanoi and Haiphong, and his efforts didn’t bring much peace on the homefront, culminating in the slaughter of four bystanders during a 1970 protest at Kent State.
    Finally, in January 1973, Nixon declared “peace with honor.”
    There are three things you should know about this.
    1) When Nixon gave that speech at the GOP convention, it had been 1,467 [days] since the alleged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that triggered the American escalation of the war. When he finally achieved his “peace with honor,” it was another 1,633 days later, so more than half the fighting came after the “peace with honor” promise.
    2) More importantly, from the start of 1969 through the end of the war, some 20,604 American soldiers died in pursuit of “peace with honor,” more than one-third of the total (58,202) for the entire war.
    3) In the end, “peace with honor” didn’t look all that different than “peace” — i.e., if Nixon had merely brought the troops home on Jan. 20, 1969. As we all know, Saigon still fell, in May of 1975.

So I think that a necessary first question should be, what on earth does Cheney mean when he talks about a return with “honor”? Let’s please have no repeat of the same kind of damage, destruction, and dishonor that followed Nixon’s use of that term.
Secondly, long-time JWN readers will be well aware that I’ve always supported the idea that the US troops should be allowed an orderly withdrawal from Iraq– provided a total and speedy withdrawal according to a well-publicized and verifiable timetable is indeed the path ther administration chooses to pursue. To me, it is less important whether the administration chooses to try to describe this withdrawal in some form of slightly sugarcoated terms. (When they withdrew from Beirut in February 1984 they called it a “redeployment offshore.” H’mmm.) The important thing is that it happens, and happens soon.
But please let’s not completely debase (or dishonor) the concept of honor in human affairs by going down the path established in Vietnam by Richard Nixon.
Finally, this time around, given that the Cold War has now completely ended and the world has been moving into a new stage, one of the main things we need to do is ensure that this withdrawal from Iraq is followed by a rational and radical downsizing of the US military and the building of new, much more globally accountable structures of international security in all the various areas of the world through which the Pentagon’s generals still swagger as though they own them.
They don’t.
Any “honor” that I can in US strategic affairs in the coming 20-year period will come from the US realizing it needs to work in good faith with other powers to ensure common security interests around the world, and in working diligently to make that happen.
Otherwise, G-d save us all from the possibility of any further repeat of the crimes of 2003.