Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 183 – Info, analysis, discussion

Virgil Goode: “In Mohammed We Trust?”

Heee’s baaaack. No, not “Chuckie,” that ” sneering, mean-hearted, movie doll,” nor “Q” from Star Trek fame. But our “Q-ran” fearing Congressman Virgil Goode.
Goode has been the subject of several extended entries here at jwn. He’s the “gift” that keeps on giving – if you like satire. Goode is the Congressman who infamously made a name for himself by portraying incoming Congressman Larry Ellison’s use of {Jefferson’s} Koran for his swearing-in ceremony as a threat to America’s traditional “values and beliefs.”
Hat tip to Eric H. for the alert: our “goode-ole-boy” who represents some of Virginia’s 5th District citizenry is at it again, this time rationalizing his vote for Bush’s “surge” by spreading fear of a mean-green Islamic machine marching on Washington.
Only Virgil Goode could transform his allotted five-minute speech yesterday on whether or not to support President Bush’s “surge” plan for Iraq into another dark warning against a “sea of illegal immigrants” in which more terrorists will swim. That is, if we don’t support the President, a “calamity” will surely befall us in which more Muslim “jihadis” invade our shores.
Below, I provide the transcript, from the Congressional Record, with my annotations inserted between paragraphs. Phonetic transliterations from the video version are kept to a minimum this time. Readers should view the “youtube” version themselves here. Goode’s “stie-ul” is rather unique. Render your own opinions in the discussion.

“We are in the middle of a 4-day marathon here. While I cannot say that I agree with all of the actions of the President in dealing with Iraq, I will not be supporting H. Con. Res. 63. The eyes of the world are upon this House, and there will be commentary from the Middle East to the streets of small-town America about what we do here over this 4-day period, even though this resolution does not carry the weight of law.”

“Eyes of the world?” Since when did Virgil care about what the world thought of “the Vuhgil Goode” position on anything? Instead, he’s with those who would characterize a resolution critical of Bush as giving “aide and comfort to the enemy.” (It occurs to me that for many neocons, the “eyes of the world” and “the enemy” are flip sides of the same coin.)

“When the commentary begins in the Middle East, in no way do I want to comfort and encourage the radical Muslims who want to destroy our country and who want to wipe the so-called infidels like myself and many of you from the face of the Earth. In no way do I want to aid and assist the Islamic jihadists who want the green flag of the crescent and star to wave over the Capitol of the United States and over the White House of this country. I fear that radical Muslims who want to control the Middle East and ultimately the world would love to see “In God We Trust” stricken from our money and replaced with “In Mohammed {“mooo-hahmat”} We Trust.” (emphasis added)

So much ripe material in this paragraph; where to begin?

Continue reading “Virgil Goode: “In Mohammed We Trust?””

New affiliation with the Friends Committee on (US) National Legislation

I am very happy to announce the start of a new affiliation I have taken up, as “Friend in Washington” with the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is the very experienced lobbying organization that US members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) maintains on Washington’s Capitol Hill.
Longtime JWN readers should be well aware of the importance that my membership of a Quaker Meeting (congregation) has for me, and for my writings and other activities on social and political issues. Actually, having this blog has allowed me to do a lot to start “coming out” as a fairly public Quaker over the past few years. Now, taking up this affiliation with FCNL seems like a good next move in this direction, and I am extremely moved by their invitation to me to do this.
The Quakers are one of the historic “peace churches,” having upheld their (our) testimonies against war and violence, and in support of the equality and wellbeing of all human beings, for more than 350 years. FCNL describes itself as “A Quaker lobby in the public interest.” It is a very well-run, Quaker-led organization that focuses on trying to build the kinds of principled and respectful relationships with legislators in Washington in which “friendly persuasion”– exercised both in Washington and by FCNL’s nationwide network of Quaker and other supporters– will bring these legislators closer to working for such important public-interest goals as ending war, reducing military budgets, extending health-care coverage to all Americans, respect of Native American rights, and ending torture.
FCNL has done a lot of very productive work on issues that I care deeply about, including most definitely the whole US engagement in Iraq; and I’ve had many good conversations over the past 2-3 years with their Executive Secretary, Joe Volk, and members of his staff. So I’m looking forward to seeing where this new affiliation, which in the first instance has a term of six months, can lead all of us.
I understand it’s paradoxical that I start this affiliation while being in Cairo at the beginning of a three-month sojourn outside the US! But FCNL says in the announcement they issued about my new affiliation, “We will keep in close touch with her, and are confident that her experiences there will only strengthen the contribution she is able to make.”
Also, to mark this new relationship I have put the “Friendly (Quaker) links and concerns” section of my sidebar up near the top there, and I’ll keep it there for the next few weeks… So if you want to find out more about FCNL and other aspects of (mainly US) Quaker life, please go and explore some of those links.
The largest numbers of Quakers in the world are, actually, in Africa, and I’ll try to get some African links into that section when I can.
In the Middle East there has been a 120-plus-year presence of Quakers in both Palestine and Lebanon. In both those countries Quakers have maintained excellent schools and have small congregations of worshipers. In addition, in 1948 the American Friends Service Committee took on responsibility for providing all the international relief services that were given to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had flooded into Gaza during the Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli fighting of 1947-48; and it continued to do that work for ten months until the UN had finally organized itself enough to establish UNRWA, which has done the job there, and elsewhere, ever since then.
You can find out more about Quakers’ involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian issue if you read When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel a group-authored Quaker book that I helped work on, that came out in 2004.
Anyway, now I guess I need to get used to thinking of myself as a “Friend in Washington (on Assignment).”

Laila’s blog featured in ‘HaAretz’

I’ve been a huge admirer of Laila el-Haddad ever since I first read the brilliant blog Raising Yousuf (Unplugged) that she writes, mainly from her family’s longtime home in Gaza City… Then, around a year ago, I got to meet her there. She and her parents were SO welcoming, and I just loved meeting and talking with them all (as well as her too-cute-for-words little rascal, Yousuf.) And we’ve kept in pretty good touch since.
Now, Haaretz journo Ofri Ilani has also caught a case of Lailamania and has written a story about Laila and her blog, which is running in today’s paper. To write the story, Ilani evidently cruised the archives of Laila’s blog. She also interviewed Laila by phone. (L is currently spending a bit of time in North Carolina, where her spouse, Yassine, is doing his medical residency at Duke University Med School.)
At the end of the article, Ilani quotes Laila musing a little on the risks a person exposes herself to when she (or he) discloses a lot about herself through blogging:

“Some [comments on the blog] have been very vitriolic and hateful, to the point where I’ve had to initiate comment moderation. I’ve had people say: ‘Yousuf’s a beautiful boy; it’s too bad he has such a horrible mother who is raising him to become a suicide bomber like all other Palestinians.’ It makes you realize you are throwing yourself out there as cannon fodder, and you have to learn to live with the consequences of putting yourself out there like that. That is the price you pay for opening your door to the world.”

I know I’m not the only person who is really, really glad that Laila has been strong enough to take on those risks and persist in getting her voice out to the world. It’s great her voice is being made available to the readers of HaAretz, which is a significant Israeli daily newspaper that publishes (slightly different) editions in both Hebrew and English.
Interesting that on their English-language website, the piece is listed under “Arts and Leisure.” This seems a little demeaning. Laila’s voice is an important testimony to all aspects of the lives of the Palestinians of Gaza and of the Palestinian ghurba (diaspora)– daily life, politics, etc. But categorizing this article about the blog as “Arts and Leisure” makes it seem as though Laila just does it in her spare time, having taken it up as an alternative to reading novels or doing crossword puzzles, or whatever. Why is women’s work, and the contribution we make to the public sphere, so frequently demeaned and marginalized in one way or another, I wonder??
Oh well… It is nonetheless great news that HaAretz ran the story. (You can check out the comments afterwards for many examples of the kind of vitriol to which Laila gets exposed. Including, the very first one of all from a commenter who boldly asserts– based on zero evidence– that contrary to what Laila had written, based very much on her own intensely lived experience of these matters, that “Her hubby is free to enter [Gaza] thru Rafah… “)
I really don’t like HaAretz’s comments discussions at all. They are filled with anti-Arab hatred and propaganda points that, like that one, are totally unbacked by any evidence. They disseminate (and expose) some of the very worst parts of Israel’s public discourse… I really don’t know why HaAretz runs them without any discernible moderation at all.
But that’s a small quibble. The main point is: Good that they ran the piece, and good that Laila has a calm and persuasive voice that makes some Israelis, at least, want to take her words seriously.
Nice work, Laila!

More on the possible pre-peace overture from the 1920 Revolution Brigades

A quick search of Juan Cole’s blog revealed about 20 entries there to the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which is the way Juan (generally) renders the name of the Sunni insurgent group in Iraq that was apparently the one that recently forwarded a pre-negotiation proposal to Bob Fisk. (As I posted about yesterday, here.)
Juan really has done an extraordinarily valuable job of drawing together, and presenting to the English-reading public, nearly all the main news developments out of Iraq, day after day after wearying day since late 2002. What a truly incredible archive that blog now represents!
The earliest of Juan’s references to the 1920RB was, as far as I can figure, this one, from November 15, 2004. Juan wrote there:

The 1920 revolution against the British is key to modern Iraqi history. One of the guerrilla groups taking hostages named itself the “1920 Revolution Brigades.” Western journalists who don’t know Iraqi history have routinely mistranslated the name of this group.

And the most recent was this one– from last Saturday (February 10), in which he wrote:

says

refused to join the “Islamic State of Iraq” coalition or “al-Qa’eda and its allies on the other side. The US has called on the group to enter talks with Washington.

This indicates to me that the document passed to Fisk may have been an early 1920RB response to that invitation from the US? Interesting that they should try to communicate a document to and through Bob Fisk, presumably as a way of trying to win it a bigger readership in English-speaking countries than it could expect if it were handed only to Al-Hayat or other Arabic media.
(This, even if Bob Fisk did apparently misunderstand the exact name of the group communicating with him.)
Anyway, as I wrote in my earlier post and was well established by other commenters there, it is evident that this position from the 1920RB, if they are indeed, as I believe, the originators of the “Jeelani-Fisk proposal” is not one that the US can immediately agree to. But, and I can’t stress this enough, it looks like a good, solid pre-negotiation communication; and it should therefore be met with considerable interest by all Americans, as well as with a cautious– and possibly highly circumspect– welcome by our government, and a commitment to actively explore all aspects of the topics raised.
For example, the demand for the release, “as a goodwill gesture” of 5,000 of the more than 11,000 Sunni Iraqis currently being detained in US prisons in Iraq is surely one that could be looked at and responded to in some measure, or perhaps even fully?
Of course there is still massive distrust between these two sides– the Sunni insurgents and the US government– and this is fed by numerous sizeable grievances that are still vividly remembered by each side. No point trying to silver-coat or ignore that… And numerous vast questions still remain, as I noted in my earlier post, about the “shape” of any negotiations for a final peace in Iraq, including the roster of the parties that should be represented at them.
But as I told Juan in a private communication, I tend to go by “the Oliver Tambo rule”– remembering that that great leader of South Africa’s ANC once recalled that, when he was living in exile in Lusaka, the one thing he was terrified of was that he would not understand or correctly interpret the peace overture from the apartheid regime when– as he confidently expected– they finally decided to send it… and that through his inattentiveness on that score he would thereby consign his people to additional decades of quite unnecessary conflict…
When the peace overture did come to Tambo from Pretoria, in 1989, he did correctly interpret it; and it was he and the ANC’s exile-based National Executive that then authorized Nelson Mandela to proceed with the in-prison negotiations that we all know so much about… (Tambo died soon thereafter, RIP.)
Thank God Tambo went by “the Tambo rule” on that occasion, eh?
In this connection, too, I would recall that great quote from T.E. Lawrence that I wrote about back in this post, last month… In 1919-20, when he was considering the challenges of “dis-imperialism”, i.e. extricating a country’s armies and people from distant and damaging imperial entanglements, Lawrence wrote:

we will find our best helpers not in our former most obedient subjects, but among those now most active in agitating against us

So okay, the 1920RB seems like an organization that still uses violence– perhaps considerable amounts of it.
(So, of course, is the US military, especially in Iraq.)
The 1920RB’s politics seem to be– as Juan Cole described them to me– “murky”. In November 2005, he wrote this about “Iraqi guerrilla groups such as ‘the Islamic Army,’ ‘The Bloc of Holy Warriors,’ and ‘The Revolution of 1920 Brigades’: “Despite the Islamist names of these groups, they are probably mostly neo-Baathist.”
I have no way to judge that claim, for which Juan adduced no further evidence there.
But he also noted there that, at a key Iraqi resistance groups’ conference that was held in Cairo that month, those three groups had,

conveyed their conditions behind the scenes… Among their demands are 1) working to end the foreign occupation, 2) compensation to the Iraqis for the damages arising from the American invasion; 3) the release of prisoners; and 4) building political and military institutions that are not subservient to American and regional influence.

In that post, which was mainly Juan’s rendering of a long Hayat article on the topic, he presented many details about the sharp differences between those three, determinedly Iraqi guerrilla group and Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaeda-affiliated group. Zarqawi has, of course, since then been killed… And that sharp difference of opinion and strategy apparently still continues to the present. In this post from January 8, 2007, Cole writes– again citing Hayat– that,

“al-Qaeda” in Fallujah assassinated Muhammad Mahmud, the head of the 1920 Revolution Brigades in the district of al-Saqlawiya, threatening al-Anbar Province with a feud between the two Sunni guerrilla groups…

All in all, I think the “Jeelani-Fisk proposal” is a pre-peace overture to which all of us who want to see the US get out of Iraq in a way that is orderly, total, and speedy should give serious consideration. Let’s hope the relevant figures in the Bush administration are doing the same.
Is it too much to ask that they follow the “Tambo rule” too?

Thread to discuss the Bushists’ anti-Iran claims

I don’t have time right now to write anything substantive on the whole campaign the Bushists have been waging to build a “casus belli” against Iran… Dan Froomkin had an excellent roundup of the coverage on Monday in a broad range of US media. I’ve put that link and a few other relevant ones into the Delicious section of the sidebar here.
The total money quote in the Froomkin roundup is this one, from Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh and Maziar Bahari:

‘They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for,’ says Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs.

No word on the circumstances or timing of Ms. Mann’s exit from her post there, by which almost certainly hangs an intriguing tale…
Meanwhile some commenters here have gone off-topic and started discussing this “casus-belli-building” issue in the previous thread, which was on the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution. Tsk, tsk, friends! Henceforth, please try to keep these discussions separate… Thanks!
Update: One intriguing tidbit in the Hirsh-Bahari piece is that they quote James Dobbins, who was the Bush admin’s chief representative at the crucial talks on the political future of Afghanistan that were held in Bonn in December 2001 as recalling this about a discussion he had in Bonn with Javad Zarif, the head of the Iranian government team there (who later became Iran’s ambassador to the UN):

Dobbins… recalls sharing coffee with Zarif in one of the sitting rooms, poring over a draft of the agreement laying out the new Afghan government. “Zarif asked me, ‘Have you looked at it?’ I said, ‘Yes, I read it over once’,” Dobbins recalls. “Then he said, with a certain twinkle in his eye: ‘I don’t think there’s anything in it that mentions democracy. Don’t you think there could be some commitment to democratization?’ This was before the Bush administration had discovered democracy as a panacea for the Middle East. I said that’s a good idea.”

Lots more there, too, about other strands of the US-Iranian cooperation in the months right after 9/11… That is, until a neocon Bush speechwriter in decided to put the whole “Axis of Evil” thing into Bush’s SOTU speech in late January 2002…
But anyway, that was just my little digression there. The main topic of this post is still the Bushists’ casus-belli-building campaign.

Iraqi insurgents signaling pre-negotiation readiness?

Robert Fisk had an article in Friday’s Independent in which he presented the contents of what could be a very significant statement that was “passed to” him, that could represent the terms on which a significant portion of the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq is willing to make peace. (Hat-tip to commenter Diana.)
Fisk indicates that the statement was issued in the name of “Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement.” He wrote that Al-Jeelani’s group, “also calls itself the ’20th Revolution Brigades’, [and] is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003.”
I believe Fisk’s reference there should be to the “Brigades of the 1920 Revolution”, but would welcome clarification on this from commenters. I do know there is an organization of that name, referring back to an earlier heroic anti-occupation insurgency in Iraqi history.
I am also not sure whether, as Fisk implies on one occasion (but not another), this organization or this statement could be said to represent a position supported by all the Sunni insurgents. I strongly suspect not, but again would welcome clarifications and further info from readers.
I wish Fisk had just given us the text in full, with a commentary alongside. Instead, portions of the text are included in a straight new report there. Here’s what Fisk writes about it:

Fisk’s main commentary on the proposal is to note that its terms would be quite unacceptable to the Americans. He writes,

It is not difficult to see why the Americans would object to those terms. They will not want to talk to men they have been describing as “terrorists” for the past four years. And if they were ever to concede that the “resistance” represented “the will of the Iraqi people” then their support for the elected Iraqi government would have been worthless…

But in a real sense, that is not the point. No-one would expect the insurgents to come up with a political program that the US occupiers would immediately be able to agree to. But seeing the emergence of a leadership among the Sunni insurgent groups that is prepared to allow the US a negotiated withdrawal, and to start to spell out the terms for that negotiation, is already a good step forward.
And of course Fisk is right to note that many of the leaders of Shiite political parties– not to mention the Iranians with whom many of them have close links– will find these terms unacceptable. Indeed, figuring out the “shape” of the negotiation, i.e., which Iraqi groups should be represented, and how, is one of the first challenges for anyone trying to think through or plan the modalities of a negotiated US withdrawal. I am convinced the US is in no position to design the shape of this negotiation, even if its leaders wanted to (which they still certainly don’t.) That’s why I welcome the mention in the Jeelani statement of the possibility that “the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations”.
As for this business, also mentioned by Fisk, that the Bushists will not be happy to negotiate with people they have been describing as “terrorists” for the past four years– well, history is absolutely replete with occupying powers and colonial powers that have done exactly that! From the British and French colonial powers in their waning years, through the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1990, through the Rabin government in Israel in 1993… Governments can do this, and survive and prosper (though of course, sadly, Rabin personally did not.)
Could somebody ask Bob Fisk to put the plain text of the Jeelani statement up on the web so we can read it cleanly? Also, further clarification/information on the points I signaled above would be great. Thanks!

Shadid and others on the “widening” Sunni-Shiite rift

I see my younger colleague Anthony Shadid has been in Cairo, and he has a Cairo-datelined piece in today’s WaPo to which his editors gave this scaremongering headline: “Across Arab World, a Widening Rift; Sunni-Shiite Tension Called Region’s ‘Most Dangerous Problem’.”
Called that by what percentage of Egyptians or other Arabs, you may ask?
Turns out, regarding Egyptians, Shadid provides no evidence that it has been called that by any Egyptians at all. None. Zero. Nada. The quote-ette used by his headline writers there is one from Ghassan Charbel, a Maronite Christian who’s most likely from Lebanon, a country that these days is plagued by its own sharp political differences, some of which have a sectarian aspect.
From Egyptians, all that Shadid is able to provide by way of “evidence” for the headline-writer’s claim is two items:
1. This quote about sectarian divisiveness, from writer and analyst Mohammed al-Sayid Said: “To us Egyptians… [it is] entirely artificial. It resonates with nothing in our culture, nothing in our daily life. It’s not part of our social experience, cultural experience or religious experience.” But he added: “I think this can devastate the region.” (Left unclear: whether he included Egypt itself in the portion of the region that might be thus devastated, and what probability he assigned to this happening.)
2. This completely ambiguous description of the behavior of a (presumably Sunni?) sidewalk book vendor called Mahmoud Ahmed: “”The Shiites are rising,’ he said, arching his eyebrows in an expression suggesting both revelation and fear.”
And this is evidence??
I wonder, did Shadid go on and ask Mr. Ahmed the quite logical follow-up question, “And how do you feel about that rise?” If so, what answer did he get? Did he, more to the point, ask Ahmed or anyone else in Egypt whether in fact they consider sectarian divisiveness to be their region’s “most dangerous problem”? Did he, indeed, ask them to rank the danger they perceive from that phenomenon against that from, for example, further US military attacks in the region, or other US or Israeli actions here?
There are a few other significant things about the way Shadid’s piece has been constructed. First of all, I should note that Shadid does offer some intriguing and substantial evidence that Egyptian “men in the street” (no women quoted at all, I note… I wonder, do they not count?) are not actually very worried about the prospect of the relative rise in Shiite power in the region… Read the last one-third of his piece for that. Here’s what he says of a downtown Cairo tea-vendor and his customer:

Left unclear there was whether the quoted tea purchaser, Muhsin Mohammed, is himself a Sunni or Shiite. Most likely a Sunni, since only around one million of Egypt’s 75 million people are Shiites.
Shadid goes straight on from there to write, “That sense of Western manipulation is often voiced by Shiite clerics and activists, who say the United States incites sectarianism as a way of blunting Iran’s influence.” Then the evidence he provides of that comes from Lebanese Hizbullah head Hassan Nasrallah and some leaders of the Shiite community in eastern Saudi Arabia.
Left unreported by him were the statements forcefully rejecting Sunni-Shiite divisiveness that have been issued by both the Supreme Guide of the (Sunni) Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (e.g. here) and the Shaikh of the influential, government-backed Al-Azhar Mosque here in Cairo… In other words, Shadid leaves the reader able to think that it is only the Shiites among the Islamist religio-political activists who see the threats of sectarianism as a western plot, and that maybe the Sunni activists are all currently consumed by and contributing to the fears of the Shiites’ “rise”.
Ain’t so.
As I have written before, I see the main relevance of this whole issue, and the one-sided nature of the reporting on it in the US big media, as being the degree to which US decisionmakers might expect to win support from the Sunni-Arab states and their publics in the event of a US military attack on Iran. Most people in the policymaking community in Washington DC realize that to launch an attack on Iran in the absence of substantial support from the Arab states would be to leave all those US troops who are currently spread out very thinly in the Middle East, and the very vulnerable supply lines that support them, extremely exposed to the possibility of themselves being attacked. And therefore, to attack Iran in the absence of solid evidence of the probability of such support would be the height of recklessnes– actually, imho, recklessness to a criminal degree.
Administration officials and others who are either preparing the ground for an attack on Iran or actively advocating such an attack have therefore launched a broad campaign to persuade the rest of the (increasingly skeptical) US policy elite that this attack could garner wide Arab support. My judgment, which I have tried to express in various places, is that it would not… And everyone in the US policy elite needs to be very clear about that.
One of the key things I have found from my contacts here in Cairo so far is that anti-Americanism runs far, far deeper than any concerns about Iran or about the Shiites’ “rise”.
This was also found by the Zogby poll of opinion in six Arab countries with pro-US governments whose results Shibley Telhami released (possibly sooner than he was supposed to?) on February 9. (Hat-tip to Abu Aardvark for that link, which I “Delicioused” a couple of days ago.) That PDF file there contains more than 100 easy-to-read “slides” that present the survey’s results. I gathered from elsewhere that the survey was taken last November.
That’s significant, because it was taken before the Saddam-execution video, which no doubt did affect opinions to some degree. Though it’s not clear how lasting those effects were… Public opinion trends move very fast indeed in the Middle East these days. And the Saddam-execution story is nowadays very much “yesterday’s news” here, having been largely overtaken by all the Arab and Muslim concerns about Al-Aqsa mosque, jubilation at the Fateh-Hamas peace deal, etc… In other words, by stories that have tended to unite rather than divide the Muslims of the region.
But anyway, another interesting question: Why did the (US) people who commissioned this opinion poll delay so long before releasing the results??
You can find a brief description of the methodology on the last slide in Shibley’s collection there. The six countries were Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia (KSA), and the United Arab Emirates. Note that the population of Egypt alone among those is greater than the populations of all the other five put together, though there were only 800 Egyptians among the 3,850 individuals questioned by the pollsters.
So what were some of the main findings of the poll?
p.3: “Please tell me which world leader (outside your own country) you admire most:”

#1, Hassan Nasrallah– 14%; #2, Chirac– 8%; #3– Ahmadinejad– 4%; #4 Chavez– 3%. [Note that that wording excluded from consideration the views Lebanese people would have expressed about Nasrallah, roughly half of whom might otherwise have named him; and it also thereby distributed more votes among other ‘contestants’ in this race than they would otherwise have won… On the other hand, population-wise, lebanon doesn’t affect the total outcome very much.]

p.7: “Please tell me which world leader (oustide your own country) you dislike most?”

#1, Bush– 38%; #2, Sharon– 11%; #3, Olmert 7%; #4, Blair– 3%. Sharon + Olmert comes to 18%. The combined totals for these US, British, and Israeli leaders comes to 59%.

p.17: Name the two countries that you think pose the biggest threat to you:”

#1, US– 74%; #2, Israel– 79%; #3, Iran– 6%.

I note that Marc (Abu Aardvark) has published this update to his post:

(Israel is #1 at 85% in the corrected calcuations).

The results on p.22 are very worth reading.
On p.25 we have this: “Generally speaking, is your attitude toward the US very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable?”

Continue reading “Shadid and others on the “widening” Sunni-Shiite rift”

Odom: “Victory is Not an Option”

Preface (note – this is Scott writing).
Lest any jwn readers think my satire of CNN’s 3 General Stooges incorrectly reflects a general hostility towards all things military, I note only that my father once dreamed of a military career, and my son is now living that dream (my nightmare) as an officer in the “Virginia” Guard.
Like Helena, I too have closely followed strategic writings of this and that military think tank, sometimes even with great admiration. General William Odom is a case in point. Odom was an upperclassman at West Point when my late father was a plebe there. I think Dad would have admired General Odom’s steely nerve, his Eisenhower-like capacity to speak truth when his colleagues and allies were koolaid-drunk, and best of all, his track record of being right on target, especially when it wasn’t popular with the prevailing winds.
In Sunday’s Post, Odom again is out with an iconoclastic blast that says what many in Washington think, but don’t yet have the courage to say. Helena has already made reference to the essay via the “Delicious” sidebar, so here’s my quick highlighting – for the record!
For Odom, “victory is not an option.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush’s illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Of course, the Administration lately has been trying to re-define, without admitting, what “victory” means. But Odom is holding up the original standard and pointing out what should have been obvious even before going in — that democracy can’t be imposed at the barrel of a gun, and even it magically does take root, a democratic Iraq will not be predisposed to be pro-American or pro-Israel. These are the two “truths” that American’s need to face:

There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question:
First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly “constitutional” — meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it….

I beg to quibble with the general on the point about American political scientists being “irresponsibly quiet.” I rather think the problem was with the power of those neoconservative agitators – who pressured producers and opinion page editors (even at the once venerable CSMonitor or the PBS NewsHour) to avoid the contributions of major, non-beltway, think-tank academics. It’s happening again in the madness to the rush to pick a war with Iran!

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis’ rising animosity toward the United States.

Odom notes that these realities are becoming more widely recognized, even as Congress thus far hasn’t had the courage to act on them for fear of four “pernicious” myths – in need of the dismantling Odom memorably provides:

Continue reading “Odom: “Victory is Not an Option””

CNN’s General cheerleader squad: Marx, Shepard, & Grange

Memo to John Stewart – host of the Comedy Channel’s Daily Show: If you need new material, check out the media generals on CNN.
Since at least 2003, CNN has been dueling with Faux to see which network can have the most generals with the most inane, mind-numbing praises of the President and “the troops.” They call it “fair and balanced” reporting. The weekly CNN program, “This Week at War,” still plays from the neocon chorus book. On this week’s “This Week at War,” (!) host John Roberts interviewed 3 different retired generals – all of whom apparently are on the CNN payroll. Oh great you say! 3 generals – 3 different perspectives? Balanced, no?
Not a chance. You’d have better odds with “three blind mice” than with the CNN “hireling” generals for “This Week at War.” The program’s three regulars are Brigadier General James Spider Marx, U.S. Army, Major General Don Shepard, U.S. Air Force and Brigadier General David Grange, U.S. Army — all retired. (I’d put ’em all in the “brig” for commentary unworthy of their fruit salad.)
In case you missed the “Three Stooges” in action this week, and lest you think I’m making this up, here’s the transcript.
The comedy begins with host John Roberts solemnly noting, “Troubling new developments in Iraq, with six helicopters downed in the past three weeks. Is it new technology or new tactics?” Then too, Roberts wonders rhetorically if the new Pentagon inspector general’s report on prewar intelligence will “erase whatever support {is} left for keeping troops in Iraq?”
The first softball question for the “retired” wise ones is served up to “Spider Marx,” who has long struck me as “outrageous.”

ROBERTS: “You’re the intelligence guy. Talk about this inspector general’s report from the Pentagon, which says that the Intel looked like it was shaped to match the policy rather than the other way around.
How outrageous is that?

BRIGADIER GENERAL JAMES SPIDER MARX, U.S. ARMY (RET.): Well, frankly, it is outrageous.
Now, the thing you have to realize about intelligence is it is fundamentally the competition of ideas. What concerns me about this is this came from the office of the director of policy, not intelligence.
So, certainly, that office can have its opinions and it can draw its own conclusions. So you want to have the competition of ideas, but you have to fundamentally fuse and blend together the different forms of intelligence and you’ve got to come up with the solution and, from that solution, you then derive — intelligence drives operations.
It drives operations. It leads you to conclusions. It is a little bit outrageous.

Huh? Hey “Spider,” read that extended quote again yourself and see if you can make any sense of it. So are the allegations really outrageous, or just “a little bit outrageous?” And since when is intel “fundamentally” about the competition of ideas?
Is that like, well, the Israeli intel liaison has his set of “well supported” ideas, and the Egyptian liaison has his “ideas,” then there’s the Ambassador’s ideas, and then there’s this little gem we got from a “well supported” expatriate who thinks “regime change” and installing a pro-American government will be easy?
Whatever happened to facts — those “stubborn things?” Or has intel gone post-modern? Pat Lang where are ye when we need ye?
In any case, the controversy at hand now is hardly about having another “team B” in operation. But the really “outrageous” part was how Douglas Feith’s “Office of Special Plans” cherry-picked intel and then cynically “sexed it up” and shaped it to fit a pre-canned ideology to “justify” an early invasion of Iraq. The policy cooked the intel. And everybody inside then – knew it.
THAT was the outrageous part. Nothing new – but our General Groucho Marx is either clueless or being deliberately “amphlibious” in “ducking” what the real controversy is. He must be still drinking the OSP koolaid himself.
Ok, back to the interview, Roberts next wants to know what the increased casualties from helicopter crashes means.

Continue reading “CNN’s General cheerleader squad: Marx, Shepard, & Grange”

A few random notes from Cairo

1. We’re staying in “Garden City”, a portion of the near-downtown that used to be filled with very gracious 1930s-style Art Deco homes. Now, few of those remain, and they’re dwarfed by massive and nearly all very ugly concrete tower blocks. The ugliest by far is the ghastly, 15-story block-house of the (new-ish) US Embassy, whose builders apparently made no attempt whatsoever to take into account any esthetic considerations. Luckily, we can’t see it from the window. When I do my morning yoga workout I look out of our 10th-floor window and can see some little peeks of the Nile, some fascinating scenes in the shanties built atop some of the lower buildings around, a few Art Deco gems, and some really precarious high-rise construction underway.
2. From here, I can walk almost anywhere I want. Yesterday, Bill and I walked to the mosque of Sayeda Zeinab. She was a grand-daughter of the Prophet and is supposedly entombed there. The two youngish (male) guardians of the women’s side of the mosque tried to rip me off so I didn’t hang around. Instead, Bill and I walked through the amazing street market down the side of the mosque. Note to self: next time try to get some audio of the incredible street-barkers there.
3. Today I walked along to the Egyptian Medical Union and interviewed the former Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson– and current “Guidance Committee” member– Dr. Issam al-Arian. (More, later.)
4. Friday, I got my best-ever score at One-Minute Perquackey. It was 4,350. On to 5,000…
5. Last night we watched the amazing Indian movie “Earth”, by Deepa Mehta. It was about the Partition of India in 1947 and was (very loosely) based on a book called “Cracking India” that I read several years ago. It’s a gut-wrenching look at what happens inside a mixed, Muslim-Hindu-Sikh-Parsee, group of friends in Lahore as Partition approaches. Some aspects of it I think Mehta didn’t get quite believably– mainly, the fact that all the members of this group of friends seemed to participate in it only as monads, and didn’t have much discernible life at all outside it… they just sat around talking all day. But some aspects I think s/he got brilliantly; mainly, the way friends can turn on each other “on a dime” once the cancer of divisiveness and sectarianism takes root. Of course, watching it at the same time that we know a very similar form of ethnic cleansing is underway in Iraq made it even more horrific.
6. Earlier this evening we had a Quaker meeting for worship here, with just two of us taking part. Bill isn’t a Quaker so it was me and one other person, the guy who lives here and whose name is listed as the “contact person” for Quakers in Cairo in all relevant directories. We sat together for just about an hour and then joined Bill for dinner. It felt good to re-center as a Quaker. As I sat I thought a bit about how much I love my home Quaker Meeting (congregation) and all the people in it; how much I’ve learned from them and how much they sustain me. I thought about the Quakers I’ve worshiped with in South Africa and Rwanda, and about all the many Quaker Churches there are in East and Central Africa, and how they’re doing so much good by holding up our peace testimony in often very, very conflicted times… So being here and having a (small) Meeting for Worship right at the north of this great continent felt good. It’s going to be a busy next couple of weeks.
7. By the way, watch for an important announcement here on JWN sometime Monday.