HRW on the Lebanese ambulance accusations

Back during the Israel-Hezbullah war, some websites– and even the Australian Foreign Minister– propagated accusations that reports published by Human Rights Watch and a number of media outlets that on July 23 Israel attacked two clearly marked Lebanese Red Cross ambulances near Qana were quite false; and indeed, that these reports were part of a Hizbullah-orchestrated “hoax” designed to smear Israel.
After the war ended, HRW was able to go back and re-examine all the evidence related to the incident very carefully. On December 19, it published the results of this investigation, and concluded that,

    the attack on the ambulances was not a hoax: Israeli forces attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances that night in Qana, almost certainly with missiles fired from an Israeli drone flying overhead. The physical and testimonial evidence collected by Human Rights Watch disproves the allegations of a “hoax,” made by persons who never visited Lebanon and had no opportunity to assess the evidence first-hand. Those claiming a hoax relied on faulty conjectures based on a limited number of photographs of one of the ambulances.

In the attack, the three already-wounded passengers who were being transferred from one ambulance to another at the time were further wounded, and all six of the ambulance workers involved were also wounded.
This page of the HRW report says,

    The limited damage and the high precision of the strikes on the ambulances suggest that the weapon was a smaller type of missile fired from an Israeli drone or helicopter. Israel is in possession of an arsenal of highly precise missiles that can be fired from either helicopters or drones and are designed to limit the damage to their targets. The Israeli-designed and manufactured SPIKE anti-armor missile system and the still experimental DIME (dense inert metal explosive) missile are examples of smaller missiles designed to cause smaller explosions and limit collateral damage. Such missiles cause less powerful explosions than the previous generation of US-manufactured TOW and Hellfire missiles (often used by the IDF in assassination attempts against Palestinian militants in Gaza and the West Bank), which would have destroyed the ambulances completely. While the smaller missiles can be fired from either drones or helicopters, none of the witnesses reported hearing helicopters in the air before or during the attack, so it is most likely the missiles were fired from an Israeli drone.

On this page of the report, the researchers give a detailed refutation of the claims made by those who argued that the whole incident had been a Hizbullah-orchestrated “hoax”. (Those who argued this included Oliver North– yes, he of the Iran-Contra scandal, now having reinvented himself as a rightwing radio personality.)
HRW concludes the report by stating,

    Human Rights Watch trusts that, now that the truth has been demonstrated, these armchair deniers will devote their energy to pressing Israel to determine why this attack occurred, who was responsible, whether disciplinary or punitive measures are in order, and what steps can be taken to ensure that similar attacks are not repeated in the future. It would also be appropriate to press for compensation to the victims as well.

It would also be appropriate for everyone concerned to note the it is one of the foundations of the whole body of international humanitarian law that clearly marked ambulances are absolutely not to be subjected to any attack. To attack such a vehicle is a grave breach of the laws of war, that is, a war crime.

Human Rights Watch and nonviolent mass action: a footnote

Readers will remember that back on November 22 I wrote a post here that strongly criticized the press release Human Rights Watch put out that day critizing the Gazans’ use of mass nonviolent action to prevent Israel from demolishing an apartment building in Jabaliya refugee camp. Indeed, they had strongly implied the action constituted a “war crime.”
My JWN post summarized the main points in an exchange of emails I had had over the preceding hours on the topic with Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of the Middle East division of HRW. (I have sat on the M.E. advisory committee of HRW since 1992 or so, and have seen a number of directors of the division come and go. It’s a high-stress job for reasons we can discuss on another occasion.)
On December 13, I participated by phone in a meeting of the ME advisory committee. To my disappointment, the Nov. 22 press release was not discussed.
Today, to my huge surprise and delight, I discovered (hat-tip to Philip) that back on December 16, HRW issued a follow-up statement that completely reversed the positions they had enunciated in the November 22 press release. Interestingly, they published that statement at the top of the web-page that still, lower down, contains the Nov. 22 release and has the same URL as the Nov. 22 release always had.
Here, inter alia, is what the Dec. 16 statement said:

    We regret that our press release below (“OPT: Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks”) gave many readers the impression that we were criticizing civilians for engaging in nonviolent resistance. This was not our intention. It is not the policy of the organization to criticize non-violent resistance or any other form of peaceful protest, including civilians defending their homes. Rather, our focus is on the behavior of public officials and military commanders because they have responsibilities under international law to protect civilians.
    Contribute
    It has also become clear to us that we erred in assessing the main incident described in the press release. We said that the planned IDF attack on the house of a military commander in the Popular Resistance Committee, Muhammadwail Barud, fell within the purview of the law regulating the conduct of hostilities during armed conflict. We criticized Barud for reportedly urging civilians to assemble near the house in order to prevent the attack, in apparent violation of that law. Our focus was not on the civilians who assembled, their state of mind, or their behavior (such as whether they willingly assembled or not), but on Barud for risking the lives of civilians.
    We have since concluded that we were wrong, on the basis of the available evidence, to characterize the IDF’s planned destruction of the house as an act of war. If the planned attack against the house – a three-story building housing three families – was, in fact, an administrative action by the Israeli government aimed at punishing a militant for his alleged activities, the law regulating the conduct of hostilities during armed conflict would not apply and could not be violated.
    An important consideration in this regard is whether the IDF had reason to believe that the house was being used for military purposes at the time of the planned attack. To date, Human Rights Watch has not obtained conclusive evidence as to whether the house was being so used, but eyewitnesses we have been able to speak with, including two journalists on the scene, claim they saw no such evidence. The IDF, moreover, has not responded to our requests to explain what military objective it could have had in targeting not a militant but his home after having ordered it vacated.
    We recognize that it is important to view the planned destruction of Barud’s house in light of Israel’s longstanding policy in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, sharply increased in Gaza since June, of demolishing houses not as legitimate military targets but as a punitive measure. HRW has repeatedly criticized Israel for unlawful demolition of houses.
    Our intention in issuing this press release was to underscore one of the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law: the obligation of warring parties to take all feasible measures to spare civilians from harm. This includes the important principle that parties to a conflict, including military leaders and civilian officials, may not use civilians to “shield” against a military attack or otherwise unnecessarily put civilian lives at risk. Unfortunately, judging by the response, we did more to cloud the issues than clarify them in the press release…

By issuing this statement HRW has conceded many of the exact same arguments I made in my emails with Sarah Leah, and in my public blog post.
I strongly welcome HRW’s readiness to reconsider their position in the light of new arguments and new evidence, and to acknowledge openly that their November 22 press release had been wrong.
If I have one remaining quibble with them it would be over their notable lack of courtesy in failing to send the text of this retraction to me at the time, or indeed, at any point since then. Over the past 18 days I have been completely unaware of the fact of their retraction, which I learned about only by following a link to it on the Tabula Gaza blog.
Given the intensity of the exchanges between Sarah Leah and me at the time of the November 22 press release, I would consider it only common courtesy for her to have sent me, or had one of her many staff people send me, a copy of the retraction.
Indeed, you would think that all the M.E. advisory committee members should have been informed of the retraction, as a matter of course.
But the main story here is a good one. They did accept the main thrust of my arguments (and the results of a bit of additional investigation of their own.)
So thank you for doing that, Sarah Leah.

New Year developments

May 2007 be the year in which the US citizenry and all the other peoples of the world turn significantly away from its reliance on violence of all kinds: physical violence, symbolic violence, systemic violence, and all the other quieter forms of violence.
I shall do what I can.
What else will the New Year bring?
For me, a couple of things. Firstly, copies of my most recent book, on post-atrocity policies in Africa, that are affordable enough for me to recommend it quite broadly. See the details in the box on the main JWN sidebar.
I see the book is now available from Amazon for $16.47. And from Paradigm Publishers for $24.95.
… And secondly: I’ll be traveling to the Middle East and Europe for three months. I’ll be in the Middle East, based in Cairo but traveling around a bunch, for five weeks starting February 1. Then I’ll be in northern Europe, based in London, from March 6 through the end of April. Oh, with a quick gig in Tokyo at the end of March. (Burning too much jet-fuel. Bad Helena.)
But actually if any of you in the ME or northern Europe can figure out some interesting and/or remunerative speaking gigs for me while I’m there, please let me know. I’m still putting my schedule together and can see I definitely need to do more to get the expenses of these travels covered.
Also, I’d love it if any of you feel moved to write a review of the atrocities book someplace and/or generally find ways to make it better known?
Thanks!

Discussing the ‘surge’ with Reidar Visser

Reidar Visser recently sent me a copy of  an article he has written,
titled A Timetabled, Conditional Surge, which he would like to see
more widely read and discussed.  Because of the great esteem in which
I hold Reidar’s careful, well-informed work on modern Iraq, I am very
pleased to be able to make the whole text available through JWN, with his
permission.

However, as Reidar and I have discussed a little already via email, I do
disagree with some of his argument there (though I don’t, for a moment
question the good intentions with which he thought through and articulated
it.)  So in addition to making the full text available via a download,
above, I do also want to engage with it, which I shall do here:

A Timetabled, Conditional Surge
By Reidar Visser, December 27, 2006 		Response by HC
A. As President George W. Bush contemplates policy alternatives
for Iraq, input from experts in Washington is polarized. Opponents of
the Iraq War consider any increase in troop numbers a non-starter and prefer
to focus on the modalities for withdrawal.(1) Supporters
of the Bush administration seem incapable of framing their latest idea –
that of a temporary surge of US troops – as anything other than a repeat
of the same old policy, if perhaps with some added manpower and resources
.(2) 		(1) Correct.  That is exactly my own preference.
But I should add that I see the discussion of a possible “surge”
in troop strength as not only a distraction from thinking about modalities
for the sorely needed withdrawal but also as having the potential– if there
is any surge– of further complicating the task of withdrawal to a considerable
degree.  (More troops and materiel to extract, and more logistical complexity to doing first one thing and then very soon after that its reverse .)

(2)  This is generally a true observation.  However, they do add
some little twists and innovations like articulating the goal (yet again!)
of “securing Baghdad.”

B. Either approach has its problems. A withdrawal of
US military forces from Iraq within one or two years seems a natural goal,
but right now may be the worst time since 2003 for this kind of operation.
The simple reason is that Iraqi politics has deteriorated dramatically: Today,
sectarian militia activity has been maximized to levels never seen before
in Iraqi history. At the moment, Iraq does need help from the outside, because
its elected politicians are incapable of transcending their own narrow party
interests in a bid for national unity.(1) And whereas the
Iraq Study Group may have offered some sound advice about enhanced regional
diplomacy, on the whole their report seems more like a containment strategy
than a plan that pro-actively can induce rapid political realignment inside
Iraq.(2) 		(1) I agree that most of Iraq’s elected politicians
look incapable of transcending narrow party/sectarian interests, though I
am not convinced that this is true of all of them.

“Iraq needs help
from outside”, though?  H’mmm.  Possibly.  If it does, however,
I am deeply unconvinced that this US administration is a body that has either
(a) the capability, (b) the desire, or (c) the requisite political legitimacy
and credibility within Iraq, to be able to do anything helpful for the development
of Iraqi politics except to state quite clearly and categorically its intention
to withdraw the troops and its short timetable for doing so.  

Doing that might well do a lot to concentrate the minds of that vast majority
of Iraqis who are Iraqi nationalists, and impel them to find a way to deal
constructively with each other…

(2) This is an interesting characterization of the main thrust of the ISG
report.  I, too, see the report as urging something of a containment
strategy– but with this difference: I read its recommendations as seeking
to “contain” the desire and ability of Iraq’s neighbors to maintain or escalate
their interventions inside Iraq, as much as seeking to “contain” the ripples
of political destuctivity that might spread outward  from Iraq if the
present deterioration there continues.

Anyway, that is perhaps a minor point.  More to the point in the present
context is that, as I noted in B (1) above,  I don’t see the US as having
the credibility or the capacity of being able to “induce rapid political
alignment inside Iraq.”  Or, indeed, the requisite political standing
to do so, since it is itself, as occupying power, a major and intrinsic
part of the country’s political-security problem.

C. A troop increase could be equally problematic.
(1) Even if more US firepower should succeed in temporarily stemming
the violence, there is nothing in the prevalent neo-conservative expositions
of the “surge plan” to address the fundamental problem of national reconciliation
in Iraq. There simply is no new substance compared with what was being said
back in 2003 and 2004; neo-conservatives still seem convinced that as soon
as there is calm on the streets of Baghdad, a Mesopotamian zest for democracy
will miraculously rise from the ashes. Inside the Bush administration, the
only vision about a parallel process at the political level is that of a
“new coalition government” – involving a few cosmetic changes to the line-up
of Iraqi elite politicians currently engaged in a game of musical chairs
inside the Green Zone, and carrying considerable risk of marginalizing
those few parliamentary factions that do enjoy a certain degree of popular
support, like the Sadrists.(2) 		(1)Much, much more problematic, Reidar, not “equally”
so!  (See A (1) above.)

(2)  Actually, I don’t see the Bushists as aiming to “marginalize” the
Sadrists, but rather to crush and/or otherwise suppress their movement completely.
 This makes the Bushists’ plans much more potentially destabilizing
for Iraq than they would be if they sought only to “marginalize” them.

I think it’s also important to note that the Sadrist movement has been one
of the Iraqi movements the most intent on building cross-sect coalitions–
though as we have seen, the movement’s record of maintaining this political
line in its practice has been extremely spotty (to say the least.)

D. What is required in Iraq today is not cosmetic change,
but heavy lifting. The colossal irony of the current situation is that
a large majority of Iraqis actually agree with the declared aims of the Bush
administration – national reconciliation followed by a withdrawal of US troops
– but their “representatives” in the Iraqi parliament (many of them newly
returned exiles with limited insights into the situation of the ordinary
people) are locked in petty shouting matches instead of working for national
unity.(1) It is the open-ended US military commitment that enables
them to go on with this:(2) Certain Shiite politicians infuriate
Sunni politicians with newly concocted demands for federalism; Sunni leaders,
in turn, hesitate in condemning even the most grotesque atrocities committed
by al-Qaida-linked terrorists. Forgotten in all of this are the ordinary
Iraqis. The Shiite masses have so far expressed only limited interest in
“Shiite federalism”, and the average Sunni is quite prepared to denounce
al-Qaida as long as a minimum of security can be guaranteed. 		(1) I think I disagree with you here.  Firstly,
the Bushists have never committed themselves to the goal of a
complete withdrawal– a fact that, in itself, maintains the fears of Iraqis
re Washington’s “real” goals inside their country at a very high pitch.

Secondly, while it may (just possibly) be true that what the Bushists aim
at is something close to a total withdrawal, still, they want to delay this
until after a version of “national reconciliation” has been established in
Iraq while it still under their suzerainty, and thus the resulting political
order would be to their liking.

According to everything I know and understand about Iraq, however, nearly
all Arab Iraqis simply want the US troops to leave as quickly as possible And they certainly don’t want that withdrawal to be held captive to the completion of some
form of US-controlled “national reconciliation” process.

So while it might be true at some very general, hypothetical level to say that “both the Iraqis and the Bushists seek
the same two goals of a US troop withdrawal and intra-Iraqi reconciliation,”
the actual ways these desires play out in the field of everyday politics
are very different, indeed.

(2) I agree with you about the extremely petty and indeed destructively counter-productive
nature of the political “work” being done by most of the elected Iraqi politicians.
 I disagree over the reason for this.  I think it is far more the
fact that the elected Iraqi politicians have almost zero actual, functioning
levers of national administration through which to govern that has reduced
them to shouting ineptitude (and also, to their reportedly high level of
personal venality) than the open-endedness of the US military commitment.

Don’t get me wrong.  I do think the open-endedness of the US military
presence brings enormous problems in its wake.  But if there were, parallel
to the US military presence, a functioning national-level government system,
then at least the politicians would have something useful to do and be more
hopeful about achieving something good for their country.  As it is,
given that that must look impossible for them– from inside the Green Zone
or outside it– then I imagine a lot of even of the best-intentioned of them
throw up their hands and say, “To hell with it!  At least I can sock
away some money for the family and myself, in Europe.”

Of course, one can also certainly argue that both the presence of the US
military in Iraq and the content of the policies pursued by the US administrators
there has contributed hugely to the breakdown of the country’s national administrative
system.  That is without a doubt true.  But the chain of causality
in all this is a little longer and more complex than the way you portray
it.

E. A troop surge offers a unique opportunity for resolving
this paradoxical situation. If executed innovatively, it could enable the
United States to circumvent the bellicose Iraqi elite politicians and appeal
directly to Iraqi nationalism.(1) But success would require
that the troop surge be offered as a package, with obligations for both sides.
The United States should commit forces and economic aid to create the necessary
momentum for a dramatic security improvement, but at the same time should
realign itself with Iraqi nationalism by presenting a timetable for a withdrawal
after the surge. Iraqi politicians, for their part, should undertake to make
immediate constitutional revisions that could bring the Sunnis back in and
achieve national reconciliation.(2) Washington should not seek
to micro-manage this, but ought to make it perfectly clear that the forces
that have so far dominated the constitutional process in Iraq (the two biggest
Kurdish parties as well as SCIRI, one of the Shiite groups) will need to
make general concessions in the areas of federalism and de-Baathification
before any troop surge is offered. 		(1) This, it seems to me, is the central axis of your
argument.  Namely, that the troop surge could enable the US to appeal
to Iraqis “over the heads of” their deeply problematic politicians…  I
see a large number of problems in this argument! Particularly, these two:

(a)  As described a little further down, the US would use this troop
surge to effect a “dramatic security improvement.”  But it would require
a truly enormous troop surge to be able to do this: perhaps doubling the
number of troops deployed in Iraq?.  Out of the question.  The
US simply doesn’t have enough troops to do this.  And secondly, if the
existing troop commitment has, as you argue, allowed Iraqi pols to avoid
making hard choices, wouldn’t any kind of a troop surge allow them to think
they could do so even more?

(b) The US as such has absolutely zero credibility in any political overture
that might involve “appeal[ing] directly to Iraqi nationalism.”  After
everything the Iraqis have seen the US do in their country in the past 3.5
years, what on earth could persuade them to give any credence to arguments
that Washington might make along these lines?

(2)  Once again, you’re arguing here that the Iraqis need to achieve national
reconciliation prior to the US troop withdrawal.  See my points in D
(1) above.

F. By making the surge conditional, Washington would
for the first time create pressure on Iraqi politicians, via their own electorates.
If presented with a credible plan for national reconciliation and the eventual
withdrawal of US troops, Iraqi politicians would find it hard to persist
in their current squabbling. This would enable the United States to tap into
a most remarkable factor in Iraqi politics: the seemingly unshakeable belief
in the concept of “national unity” among ordinary Iraqis, even in today’s
violent climate. 		I agree with you that there is still– among Arab
Iraqis, at least, a strong desire for national unity in Iraq.  I just
still cannot see how this US administration can possibly, after everything
that has happened in Iraq since 2003, position itself to “tap into” this
desire in any constructive way.

I am certainly not convinced that the Bushists yet have any desire whatsoever
to do this.

However, I do believe that the day will not be too long coming when they
realize they will need to find a “graceful, fast exit” from Iraq…
At that point, but no sooner, we might find ourselves nearing the position
described in point D (1) above, where they share with the vast majority of Iraqis
the desires for (a) a rapid and complete US troop withdrawal,
and (b) Iraqi national reconciliation, which can help facilitate the withdrawal.

That will be the point at which real diplomacy can start. The issues then will
be those of phasing these two operations, of finetuning all the modalities
for the withdrawal, “holding the ring” against internal intervention, etc…

But still, I don’t think that this US administration– which will still itself
be a major part of the problem in Iraq, rather than of the solution– can
negotiate these matters directly with any combination of Iraqis. Rather,
Washington will require the good offices of a trusted and neutral outsider
to help these negotiations. The UN will also be in a position to provide
much of the political “cover” required for particularly delicate parts of
the negotiation…  Hence the focus I’ve been putting on  seeking
to replicate the kind of role the UN played in
Namibia.

The UN, as a body, is potentially in a position to be able to help to mobilize
an Iraqi consensus around a call to Iraqi nationalism.  But the US?
 I just don’t see that as a possibility.

The 3,000th– and all the others…

On December 28, 2006
Spc. Dustin R. Donica, 22, of Spring,
Texas

became
the 3,000th US service-member to die during the current US war in Iraq.
May he and all the other Americans, Iraqis, and citizens of other countries
who have lost their lives because of this war

REST IN PEACE.

My sympathy to all the loved ones they left behind, and to all those injured
in so many ways by this war.

May we all, the living, speedily find the way out of this lethal and anti-humane
entanglement.

Political levees strengthening against the “surge”

The levees seem to be holding– and indeed, to be becoming stronger by the day– in the face of the threatened “surge”. No, I’m not talking about New Orleans, but about politics in Washington DC. And the surge in question is at this point entirely political: the recent “surge” in interest for a plan to send an additional “surge” of US troops to Iraq to accomplish the mission of–
Well, what? People have had different ideas about that…
Today, two articles in the WaPo show that political support for the surge is weak even among Republican lawmakers. This, just three days before the inauguration of the new Congress, in which the Dems will be controlling both houses. (Yay!) … And also, coming in the wake of the strong opposition that Joe Biden, the incoming chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voiced to the surge idea on December 26.
Here’s what he said:

    “I totally oppose the surging of additional troops into Baghdad, and I think it is contrary to the overwhelming body of informed opinion, both people inside the administration and outside the administration,” Biden told reporters yesterday. He said he plans to hold hearings for his panel next month in a bid to influence the president’s decision.

Today, in this piece on the WaPo’s news pages, Michael Abramowitz notes that the earliest and strongest “surgent” on Capitol Hill has always been Sen. John McCain, and “the idea has been gaining traction at the White House as a way to improve security in Baghdad.” (Improving security in Baghdad was the main mission defined for a surge in Iraq in this influential article, published last week by Jack Keane and Fred Kagan.)
Abramowitz writes,

    But the [surge] proposition generates far less enthusiasm among rank-and-file Republicans, many of whom must face the voters again in 2008, presenting a potential obstacle for Bush as he hones the plan, according to lawmakers, aides and congressional analysts.
    Two Senate Republicans with potentially tough reelection contests in 2008, Minnesota’s Norm Coleman and Maine’s Susan Collins, returned from recent trips to Iraq saying they did not think sending more troops was a good idea. Branding the U.S. war effort “absurd,” Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) made waves in early December with a speech questioning the continued presence of troops.
    And while other Republicans say they are open to the president’s proposal, some made it clear that they will only be supportive if the troops have a coherent mission and the deployment is linked to a larger political strategy for reconciling feuding sects.

He quotes GOP Sen. Arlen Spector asalso voicing strong opposition to the surge plan, and describes Sens. Sam Brownback, Saxby Chambliss, and– most importantly of all– Richard Lugar, as expressing significant reservations about it.
He notes this:

    “Republicans are scared to death of it politically,” said Ed Rogers, a top GOP lobbyist with ties to the White House and Republican leaders on the Hill. “The fear is that it won’t make any difference. There won’t be a perception of turning the corner.”

… And then, over on the WaPo’s opinion page, the very well-connected paleo-conservative commentator Bob Novak writes,

    President Bush and McCain, the front-runner for the party’s 2008 presidential nomination, will have trouble finding support from more than 12 of the 49 Republican senators when pressing for a surge of 30,000 troops. “It’s Alice in Wonderland,” Sen. Chuck Hagel, second-ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me in describing the proposal. “I’m absolutely opposed to sending any more troops to Iraq. It is folly.”
    What to do about Iraq poses not only a national policy crisis but profound political problems for the Republican Party. Disenchantment with George W. Bush within the GOP runs deep. Republican leaders around the country, anticipating that the 2006 election disaster would prompt an orderly disengagement from Iraq, are shocked that the president now appears ready to add troops…
    I checked with prominent Republicans around the country and found them confused and disturbed about the surge. They incorrectly assumed that the presence of Republican stalwart James Baker as co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group meant it was Bush-inspired (when it really was a bipartisan creation of Congress). Why, they ask, is the president casting aside the commission’s recommendations and calling for more troops?
    Even in Mississippi, the reddest of red states, where Bush’s approval rating has just inched above 50 percent, Republicans see no public support for more troops.

Novak somberly assesses the new political line-up that Bush will face in DC when he finally gets back to work there after an unconscionably long and lazy holiday break:

    Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, will lead the rest of the Democrats not only to oppose a surge but to block it. Bush enters a new world of a Democratic majority where he must share the stage.
    Just as the president is ready to address the nation on Iraq, Biden next week begins three weeks of hearings on the war. On the committee, Biden and Democrats Christopher Dodd (Conn.), John Kerry (Mass.), Russell Feingold (Wis.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) will compete for intensity in criticizing a troop surge. But on the Republican side of the committee, no less probing scrutiny of Bush’s proposals will come from Chuck Hagel.

Yay! An opposition movement in Washington, DC, at last! And one that is noticeably wider than being just one opposition party… (JWN readers may recall that a number of times I, like co-poster Scott Harrop, have expressed admiration for the clear-minded positions adopted on Iraq-related issues by GOP Senator Chuck Hagel, and also for some other GOP senators. Some of them have proven to be disappointments; but most, not.)
So okay, the lawmakers from both parties in the current block-the-surge movement may not all yet be ready to push for the speedy and total withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that I have long argued is necessary. But at least it now looks as though they’re building a solid political barricade in front of any tendency the Prez might have to take the extremely foolish step of increasing the numbers of useless sitting ducks marked with huge targets US troops being sent to deployment points throughout Iraq.
This is great news. And if we can continue to build up the ability of Americans to contain the the most damaging urges of the president and restore both our country’s policy in Iraq and its position in the world to one of greater sanity– including, importantly, one of far greater realism, and far less arrogance and militarism than we’ve seen from Bush so far– then it looks as though 2007 might indeed turn out to be far better year than many of us had feared.
Happy New Year, one and all!

Zeyad compiles Iraqi bloggers’ reactions to Saddam’s hanging

Zeyad of Healing Iraq has a very informative compilation of the main reactions that Iraqis blogging in English have had to Saddam Hussein’s hanging. (Okay, it’s also posted at IraqSlogger; but that’s not to say it ain’t worth reading. It certainly is.)
He has reactions from 23 bloggers representing a broad range of political positions. They all look very thoughtful, and many of them express the idea that, though the author may well have looked forward to this day, still the way that it eventually happened left them disquieted or even disgusted.
Some highlights:
From Sami – Iraqi Thoughts:

    I don’t think the situation will change in Iraq much because the people who hate Saddam or love him are all still going to have the same deep hatred and divisons towards each other. Unity isn’t about being the same but about accepting each other’s differences and the way Iraqis act that does not look like happening any time soon.

From 24 Steps to Liberty:

    What’s next? Does it mean my family will be safe now that Saddam Hussein is dead? Does it mean the Iraqis will stop hating each other and killing each other? There are no more Shiites and Sunnis slaughtering each other? [Ironically Hussein is accused of provoking sectarian conflict in Iraq!] Did they [Iraqi government and their advisors] think killing Saddam Hussein will unite the Iraqis and solve the problem? The answer to those questions is: No. And they don’t care!

From Dr. Fadhil Badran:

    The assassination of Saddam Hussein has killed the last hope of peace in Iraq. I think, this assassination has been planned by Iran, Israel, and Britain; those players used the US as a fire-catcher! Iran chose to assassinate him on the 1st. day of Al-Ad’ha to say that the Eid is not on the 30th of December, which means that Muslims are not unified, and of course because Saddam had stopped the Persian dream to occupy the Arab countries in the gulf area. Israel has chose the way of assassination by Hanging him to make revenge for the Israeli spies who were hanged in Baghdad in 1969. Britain insists on the assassination for the revenge of Saddam Hussein nationalization of the Iraqi petroleum in 1971. The only losers in this event are the Iraqis and the American soldiers in Iraq.

… Actually, I’m finding it hard to pick out the “highlights” in this compilation. Nearly everything Zeyad included there is really worth reading. I’m afraid he set it up so that to read the whole thing you have to go to the IraqSlogger version.
In general, Zeyad did a great job of including bloggers from political positions very different from his own, as well as those similar to himself. On the other hand, the political views of many people in Iraq, including Zeyad, have been changing so rapidly recently– and mainly, I think, in a strongly anti-US direction– that it’s getting very hard to make informed judgments (or even guessess) about where many of them “stand”.
Zeyad didn’t include Riverbend’s impassioned criticism of the whole execution process… But then, River didn’t post it till 10:12 p.m., so maybe he hadn’t seen it when he did his compilation.
He did include the blogged-in-English reactions of all three of Faiza’s sons. But he didn’t include any blogged-in-Arabic material. Here, for good Arabic readers, are Faiza’s reflections on the subject, posted yesterday.

How to hang a man: Nuremberg and Baghdad

Darn! I hate it when I need to lay my hands on a particular book but can’t find it… Today, it was the account Rebecca West gave in A Train of Powder of the hanging of the ten men sentenced to death at Nuremberg.
Goering, who also received a death sentence, “cheated” the hangman by swallowing a cyanide pill the night before.
West’s book has a detailed description of the process of the ten hangings that did happen. She prefaces that with an account of how, over earlier decades, the British had “perfected” the technique. The drop through the trapdoor should be long enough for the neck to snap once the end of the rope is reached. Also, the rope shouldn’t be too elastic/springy, or the jolt on the neck might not be sharp enough to break it. (Sorry for these grisly details. Read no further if you find this hard to take.)
However, at Nuremberg, the American GI’s who constructed the gallows did not have enough of the relevant expertise– being more used to electric chairs and the like, where they came from… So as West reported it, the hanged men at Nuremberg took some 20 minutes to die, dangling at the end of their ropes and suffering a slow and presumably painful asphyxiation.
She left unresolved, as I recall it, the question of whether the people who designed that faulty process had done so intentionally, or not.
I wanted to put some excerpts from her account into this post, just to show (through the contrast) that, by all accounts, the hangmen in Baghdad at least did a more “professional”– and therefore, if one can say this, “humane”– job than those in Nuremberg.
I did look at most of the YouTube posting of a video of Saddam’s hanging that was apparently shot by one of the observers there, through a cellphone or some other similarly small device. As video, it was highly imperfect as people kept getting in the way, the camera was swinging around, etc. But the audio on it was remarkably sharp.
I think Marc Santora’s account of the hanging in today’s NYT is largely based on having his Iraqi colleagues– two are named at the bottom– give him a translation of the voices that can be heard on the video. On the video you certainly can hear one or more men shouting “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!”
Saddam’s comportment as he reached his last minutes seemed considerably more dignified than that of some of the invited observers.
Santora wrote:

    He said a last prayer. Then, with his eyes wide open, no stutter or choke in his throat, he said his final words cursing the Americans and the Persians.
    At 6:10 a.m., the trapdoor swung open. He seemed to fall a good distance, but he died swiftly. After just a minute, his body was still. His eyes still were open but he was dead. Despite the scarf, the rope cut a gash into his neck.
    His body stayed hanging for another nine minutes as those in attendance broke out in prayer, praising the Prophet, at the death of a dictator.

On the YouTube video, you can briefly see the hanged body before they cut it down.
After it was taken down it was wrapped in a shroud and driven to his birth-town, Ouja (Auja), where it was buried around 24 hours later. AP’s Steven Hurst wrote today,

    Hundreds of Iraqis flocked to the village where Saddam Hussein was born on Sunday to see the deposed leader buried in a religious compound 24 hours after his execution…
    At Saddam’s funeral, dozens of relatives and others, some of them crying and moaning, attended the interment shortly before dawn in Ouja. A few knelt before his flag-draped grave. A large framed photograph of Saddam was propped up on a chair nearby.
    “I condemn the way he was executed and I consider it a crime,” said 45-year-old Salam Hassan al-Nasseri, one of Saddam’s clansmen who attended the interment in the village just outside Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. Some 2,000 Iraqis traveled to the village as well.
    Mohammed Natiq, a 24-year-old college student, said “the path of Arab nationalism must inevitably be paved with blood.”
    “God has decided that Saddam Hussein should have such an end, but his march and the course which he followed will not end,” Natiq said…
    The head of Saddam’s Albu-Nassir’s clan said the body showed no signs of mistreatment.
    “We received the body of Saddam Hussein without any complications. There was cooperation by the prime minister and his office’s director,” the clan chief, Sheik al-Nidaa, told state-run Al-Iraqiya television. “We opened the coffin of Saddam. He was cleaned and wrapped according to Islamic teachings. We didn’t see any unnatural signs on his body.”

Hurst also wrote,

    In Baghdad’s Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City on Saturday, victims of his three decades of autocratic rule took to the streets to celebrate, dancing, beating drums and hanging Saddam in effigy. Celebratory gunfire erupted across other Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and other predominantly Shiite regions of the country.

The NYT this morning had a huge, front-page picture of “an Iraqi family in Basra” watching a video feed of Saddam being led to the gallows on their large television. Front and center is a very cute-looking girl-child of three or four years old who is smiling and laughing as she appears to point to the picture.
This “eye for an eye” business will surely go on for generations to come unless some Iraqis, somewhere, intervene in a very serious way to stop it.
Looking at that picture made me remember my visit to Rwanda in 2002. There, too, a large proportion of the population was still nursing extremely bitter memories of many decades of strife, victimization, and counter-victimization… But the most notable thing I saw when I was there was the work of several religious communities– primarily Protestant Evangelicals of various denominations (including, yes, evangelical Quakers), but also Muslims– that were intentionally and with great success building up large congregations of people who were survivors of the 1994 genocide who were worshiping and working alongside people whose family members were accused of participation in the genocide… Hutus and Tutsis worshiping and working together there, and thereby starting to find a way out of the cycles of violence that had plagued the country since the 1950s.
Can Iraqis find some analogous way to transcend and escape from the cycles of violence into which the past quarter century of developments– including but not limited to my own government’s brutal; and divisive interventions– have plunged their country? I hope and pray so.
Maybe the fact that Saddam Hussein is now, definitively, “yesterday’s news” can help that to happen?
… Meanwhile, I see from Hurst’s AP story that the US death toll in Iraq is just about to top 3,000.

Macacas, mirror neurons, and reviving Samuel Pufendorf

Back in late summer our outgoing senator, George Allen, used the term “macaca” as a demeaning racial epithet. However, few of those who read of that event with horror and disgust seemed aware of the honorable role that the eponymous “macaque” monkey has played in the recent study of– yes– the psychology of empathy. For in 1991, it was while studying the neural responses of a group of macaque monkeys that Vittorio Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma, Italy, first discovered the functioning of an important, perhaps seminal, kind of brain cells called “mirror neurons.”
These neurons, which were subsequently discovered to exist and to function in a similar way in humans, as well, fire when their host body performs a given task– but they also, often quite unbeknownst to the host, fire when the host observes another person performing that same task. These taks can be simple motor tasks, such as picking up a mug of tea; or, they can be emotional tasks, like crying for grief, or showing the signs of bliss, or irritation.
The existence and functioning of mirror neurons can therefore be seen as essential to the functioning of human empathy, and indeed to the inter-human connectedness that is a central feature of the entire human condition.
(My daughter, Lorna Quandt, has been studying mirror neurons a lot recently; and most of the neuro-science in this post is derived from her work. I will admit that back in 1970 I did pretty well in my Prelims exams at Oxford in Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology– before I moved on to the mundane world of the school of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Anyway, it’s good to see all these disciplines coming back together again in this way at this point…)
V.S. Ramachandran, a distinguished neuroscientist at the Univ. of California, San Diego, has predicted that,

    mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.

I would say that the discovery of mirror neurons, and the increased understanding of the workings of mirror neurons, might well change a lot more than just the study of psychology. For western political and social thought, and western ontology as a whole, have since the days of the “Enlightenment” been based on an understanding of the nature of the human person as, essentially, a free-standing and quite self-sufficient monad: “Looking at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other,” as Hobbes described humankind…
And then, he and most of other Enlightenment philosophers who followed him– especially within the Anglo-Saxon branch of philosophy– built upon that ontology entire edifices of political philosophy and social science.
I note, that the vast majority of those early English philosophers were the kinds of ordained Protestant ministers who were not allowed to marry; therefore, their conjectures about the nature of human relationships and obligations had a certain air of– let us say– abstraction to them. (And then there was John Locke, who not only helped draft the Constitution of the slaveholding state of South Carolina but was also a shareholder in a slavetrading company called the Royal African Corporation. Ah, those fine advocates of human freedom!)
But back to mirror neurons. What I like about their discovery is that it kind of situates, in a very physical way, things that I had long ago intuited– and even, yes, experienced, in a very direct way– about the human condition. Namely, that we humans are all connected to each other– and most likely, also capable of even greater levels of interconnectedness… And this, even if we are not even aware that these interconnections exist.
This strikes me as being much closer to the Buddhist view of the human condition: the view, that is, that denies the existence of any finitely bounded “self” and that bases its very advanced practical psychology on the need to cultivate ever greater levels of compassion. This, in clear contradistinction to the concept of the ever-solipsistic, ever self-aggrandizing “homo economicus” that has come to dominate the western understanding not just of economics but of many other branches of social science, as well… Including international relations.
So I was thinking about all this, this afternoon, and pulled out my old copy of Samuel Pufendorf’s “On the duty of man and citizen“. This work of early-modern political philosophy was published (in Latin) in 1673– 25 years after the Treaty of Westphalia, 22 years after Hobbes’s “Leviathan”, and 15 years before Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government”. Pufendorf wrote a lot about politics and international relations in the new, post-Westphalian order he was living through. His work was notable in many respects. But for me, it was most notable for his insistence that socialitas (translated variously as “sociability”, or “sociality”) is a fundamental characteristic of the human condition.

“On the duty of man and citizen” is a very readable single volume which is a digest or compendium of the main ideas in an eight-volume work, “On the law of nature and nations”, that Pufendorf had published one year earlier. Today, I found this online portal to a fulltext version of the book. The translation doesn’t look as fluid or clear as in my Cambridge U.P. paperback; but at least I can do some cut-n-pasting from the online version.
I love the way he builds up to his definition of “the natural law” in Book I, Chap. 3 :

    6. Finally, we must also consider in mankind such a remarkable variety of gifts as is not observed in single species of animals, which, in fact, generally have like inclinations, and are led by the same passion and desire. But among men there are as many emotions as there are heads, and each has his own idea of the attractive. Nor are all stirred by a single and uniform desire, but by one that is manifold and variously intermixed. Even one and the same man often appears unlike himself, and if he has eagerly sought a thing at one time, at another he is very averse to it. And there is no less variety in the tastes and habits, the inclinations to exert mental powers, — a variety which we see now in the almost countless modes of life. That men may not thus be brought into collision, there is need of careful regulation and control.
    7. Thus then man is indeed an animal most bent upon self-preservation, helpless in himself, unable to save himself without the aid of his fellows, highly adapted to promote mutual interests; but on the other hand no less malicious, insolent, and easily provoked, also as able as he is prone to inflict injury upon another. Whence it follows that, in order to be safe, he must be sociable, that is, must be united with men like himself, and so conduct himself toward them that they may have no good cause to injure him, but rather may be ready to maintain and promote his interests.
    8. The laws then of this sociability, or those which teach how a man should conduct himself, to become a good member of human society, are called natural laws.
    9. So much settled, it is clear that the fundamental natural law is this: that every man must cherish and maintain sociability, so far as in him lies. From this it follows that, as he who wishes an end, wishes also the means, without which the end cannot be obtained, all things which necessarily and universally make for that sociability are understood to be ordained by natural law, and all that confuse or destroy it forbidden. The remaining precepts are mere corollaries, so to speak, under this general law, and the natural light given to mankind declares that they are evident.

Well, I don’t have the time or the energy to write as much I wanted to about Pufendorf. Just pulling it off the shelf and looking at the portions I marked up a few years ago feels pretty exciting.
On a related note, the January-February issue of Foreign Policy mag has an article called “Why Hawks Win”, in which the authors, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon pull together some fairly basic insights from social psychology to demonstrate why there’s a fairly strong tendency for “hawks” to win internal arguments on war-and-peace issues. (It’s not available online yet.)
They recall that people tend to judge their own motivations as benign and those of their opponents as malevolent; and they make various other observations about the tendencies of military leaders to over-estimate their own capabilities, of political leaders to be reluctant to admit to mistakes, etc., etc. Nothing terrifically groundbreaking; but still, it’s useful to have it all pulled together like that… and especially in the present circumstances.
Bottom line: people who are decisionmakers in extremely important fields like national security affairs should constantly be reminded of the propensity of all humans– including themselves– to make such errors of judgment, and of the need to strive constantly and intentionally to “correct” for them.
And finally, back to Pufendorf, Book II, Chapter 16, “On war and peace.” I note that he is not a pacifist. But for someone arguing within the strictures of the “just war” paradigm, he does so in a clear and fairly “conservative” way:

    1. It accords most closely with the natural law, if men are at peace with one another, voluntarily performing their obligations; in fact peace itself is a state peculiar to man, as distinguished from the brutes. Yet at times, even for man himself, war is permitted, and sometimes necessary; when, namely, owing to another’s malice, we are unable to preserve our possessions, or gain our rights, without employing force. Even in this case. however, prudence and humanity persuade us not to resort to arms, if more harm than good will result for us and ours from the avenging of our wrongs.
    2. The just causes for which war can be undertaken reduce themselves to these: that we may preserve and protect ourselves and our belongings against the unjust invasion of others; or that we may assert our claim to what is owed us by others who refuse to pay; or to obtain reparations for an injury already inflicted, or a guarantee for the future. A war waged for the first cause is called defensive, if for the other causes, offensive.
    3. And yet when one thinks he has been injured, there must be no instant recourse to arms, especially when there is still some doubt about the right or the fact. But we must try to see whether the matter can be settled in a friendly way, for example, by arranging a conference of the parties, by appealing to arbitrators, or intrusting the case to the decision of the lot…

This, from a man still remembering the horrors of the Thirty Years War that had ravaged Europe prior to the Treaty of Westphalia… From a man who served as an adviser to no fewer than three different rulers… And a man who had some really important ideas about how to build an international order (in Europe only, at the time) that allowed for states of deeply different types to co-exist in peace.
Time for everyone to pull Pufendorf off the shelf again, I think.