Depends what the meaning of “introduce” is…

Ever since 1963, the official Israeli policy regarding the possibility (!) that it has nuclear weapons has been– as Shimon Peres first said that year– that “we shall not be the ones to introduce nuclear weapons into the area.”
(Yossi Melman gives some background to that utterance, in this article about the recent incident in which Ehud Olmert –intentionally or otherwise– clearly implied that Israel is indeed a nuclear-weapons power.)
Of course, it all depends what the meaning of the word “introduce” is, doesn’t it?
US policymakers, who for those past 43 years, have been terrified of finding out– or, more to the point, terrified of publicly acknowledging— what the actual status of Israel’s nuclear-weapons program is, have spent all of those 43 years studiously avoiding ever trying to find out what “introduce” means.
Basically, though, does the Peres utterance mean, “We shan’t be the first to acquire nukes?” or does it mean, “We shan’t be the first to use ’em?”
No-one in Washington DC ever wanted to ask.
I have just scanned and uploaded a copy of my Summer 1988 article Israel’s Nuclear Game: The U.S. Stake, which explores some of these issues. You can find it:
here. (It’s a 1.1 MB PDF file, so you might want to wait till you’re on a fast link before downloading?)
… Anyway, back in the 1950s, the Israelis enjoyed close nuclear cooperation with France, which gave their buddy Peres most of the technology he needed. Later, they had continuing technical coordination in this field with both the Shah’s Iran and with apartheid-era South Africa (which may well have helped the Israelis test a nuclear “device” over the South Atlantic back in 1979.)
I wonder what kind of information one might be able to get from South Africa, these days, about the nature of that cooperation?? What I do see from this simple chronology of South Africa’s nuclear program, is that in September 1989,

    At a meeting of his senior political aides and advisors, President F.W. de Klerk declares that in order to end South Africa’s isolation from the international community, both the political system of apartheid and the nuclear weapons program must be dismantled.

So the two deeply transgressive and violent policies were thereafter abandoned in tandem…
Contrast that with this second great Shimon Peres quote, this time from 1998: “We have built a nuclear option, not in order to have a Hiroshima, but to have an Oslo.” (source: here, at footnote 110.)
I note, first of all, that the always halfhearted peace “process” that Peres engaged in in Oslo with the PLO never got anywhere… So now, Israel still has both its near-permanent occupation of Palestine plus its nuclear weapons… Plus, I note that the difference in the two situations was basically that South Africa came under huge international pressure to end both apartheid and its nuclear-weapons program.
Whereas Israel– ?
And finally here: an estimate fromJane’s Intelligence Review in 1997 estimating the size of Israel’s nuclear arsenal at a whopping “>400 deliverable thermonuclear weapons” (same source as the last one, at footnote 172.)

CSM column on why the US needs to talk with Iran, Syria

Thursday I have this column in the CSM. (Also here.)
Basically I’m arguing that it’s not a matter of noblesse oblige or doing anyone any favors. It’s a matter of pure cool necessity for the US to be able to talk to– especially– Iran, but also Syria and all of Iraq’s other neighbors, as it pulls the US troops out of Iraq.
The nub of the argument there:

    A glance at a map will show why any “responsible” drawdown of US troops from Iraq requires Iran’s cooperation. Iran has the longest border with Iraq and dominates Iraq’s heavily populated east. In a crisis, it could easily close the sea lanes through which most US military supplies reach Iraq. It has longstanding relations with a broad range of Iraqi political groups.
    It’s important to recognize – as the ISG also clearly did – that the US has no viable option either for any sustained increase in the US troop strength in Iraq or even for maintaining the current US deployment for very much longer. Both the sentiments of US voters and the constraining overall size of the US military prevent that.
    There has to be a drawdown. The only question is this: Will it start sooner and be relatively orderly, or will it be delayed and run an increasing risk of being chaotic? And yes, the scenarios now foreseeable do include – if the delay is too long – a humiliating emergency withdrawal reminiscent of the US evacuation from Saigon in 1975 and Allied forces’ flight from Dunkirk in 1940.
    Either way – whether the administration is able to fashion a policy that allows for a relatively speedy and orderly drawdown, or the drawdown is delayed and more like Dunkirk – it will need to engage in significant coordination with Iran if it is to avoid a debacle…

Further to that argument, I would add here that anyone who is now arguing against close US coordination on these metters with Iran and Syria, on whatever flimsy grounds, should be held responsible for all the additional deaths– of US soldiers as well as of Iraqis– that will occur for as long as the US withdrawal is thereby delayed.
(On a generally similar note, I see the WaPo’s Richard Cohen– who for long was a strong supporter of the war but a few months ago “reluctantly” came out as a critic– is today arguing that: “As with Vietnam, the ending is inevitable. We will get out, and the only question that remains is whether we get out with 3,000 dead or 4,000 or 5,000. At some point the American people will not countenance, and Congress will not support, a war that cannot be won. Just how many lives will be wasted in what we all know is a wasted effort is about the only question still left on the table. Realism dictates as few as possible.”)

Bush losing control of the agenda?

Sen. Bill Nelson (Dem., of Florida) is the first of four U.S. senators who plan to visit Syria over the congressional break. (The others are Kerry of Massachusetts, Dodd of Connecticut, and Spector of Pennsylvania. The first two dems, and Spector a Republican.)
Nelson is there now, and has met with Pres. Bashar al-Asad. After the meeting he called reporters in the US

    to say Assad was willing to help control the Iraq-Syrian border…
    “Assad clearly indicated the willingness to cooperate with the Americans and or the Iraqi army to be part of a solution” in Iraq, Nelson told reporters… The U.S. says foreign fighters often enter Iraq across that boundary.
    Syrian officials have indicated a willingness before to engage the U.S. in discussions about Iraq, which the Bush administration has treated with skepticism. Nelson said he viewed Assad’s remarks as “a crack in the door for discussions to continue. I approach this with ” to say Assad was willing to help control the Iraq-Syrian border.”

Bush spokesman Tony Snow-job is not happy that Nelson has gone to Damascus:

    “We don’t think that members of Congress ought to be going there,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said, adding that the United States continues to denounce Syria’s meddling in Lebanon and its ties to terrorist groups.
    Snow noted the existing diplomatic ties between U.S. and Syria. “I think it’s a real stretch to think the Syrians don’t know where we stand or what we think,” he said.

The AP reporter there, Anne Plummer Flaherty, noted that originally the State Department had tried to dissuade Nelson from making his trip. But he said he

    ultimately received logistical support from the State Department in what he called a “fact-finding trip” across the Middle East, being transported by embassy officials from Jordan’s capital city of Amman to Damascus. Prior to heading to Damascus, Nelson met with top Israeli and Palestinian officials; in coming days, he plans to visit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iraq.
    Nelson said he was not interested visiting Iran “at this time” and did not say why.
    However, the senator did say that he raised the issue of a nuclear-armed Iran to Assad, saying “he ought to understand that that’s not only a threat to him, Syria, but to the entire world. . . . He took note,” Nelson said.
    The senator said he also expressed to the Syrian leader the problems caused by Hezbollah and Hamas and urged Assad to support the release of captured Israeli soldiers. Nelson said the Syrian president responded by saying
    Israel had 20 Syrians in captivity, one of whom died recently from leukemia.
    The senator shrugged off suggestions he was challenging Bush’s authority by sidestepping administration policy that the U.S. have no contact with Syrian officials.
    “I have a constitutional role as a member of Congress,” Nelson said.
    Meanwhile, Bush criticized Damascus anew and called on it to free all political prisoners…

Yes, I’d like the government of Syria to free all its political prisoners. But I’d also like President Bush to free– or bring before a fair tribunal– all the political prisoners held by the US. That includes the 450-plus people held at Guantanamo, some 7,000 or so reported prisoners held by the US in Iraq, and others held in secret CIA detention facilities in Bagram, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
I note that many of the people held in Guantanamo have now been deprived of their liberty for more than five years without having any charges brought against them,. and have been subject to often terrible abuse and/or outright torture at the hands of their captors…
Be that as it may… I think a big part of the picture here is that Bush is fairly rapidly losing the capacity he has exercized since January 2001, to completely control the US national agenda and the workings of all three branches of the US government (ok, the Supreme Court only since Justice O’Connor’s resignation last year… But she and the rest of ’em gave him a mighty nice prresent back in December 2000, if you recall.)
Here, anyway, is a little of what Syria’s ambassador to Washington Imad Moustapha wrote in the op-ed he had in the WaPo on Sunday:

    if the Bush administration comes to realize that truly engaging consists of an honest dialogue in which all parties are involved, then positive results will be possible — for Iraq, the United States, Syria and the entire region.
    Contrary to what many in Washington believe, past Syrian-American collaboration has yielded many beneficial outcomes, a fact that several former U.S. officials could confirm. These include, among other things, Syrian cooperation on the Middle East peace process, on al-Qaeda and, yes, on Iraq.
    What motivates Syria to engage on Iraq? Let us be clear: Syria is not looking for a “deal” with the U.S. administration on any issue. The situation in Iraq is a matter of paramount concern to Syria, particularly the unprecedented levels of death and destruction and the possibility of Iraq’s disintegrating, which would have terrible repercussions for the entire Middle East.
    Thus Syria has the will and the capacity to assist in Iraq. This help is imperative to Syrian national interests. Syria can cooperate on security issues with the Iraqis and can give considerable support to their political process. The visit of our foreign minister to Baghdad, and the resumption of diplomatic ties between Damascus and Baghdad after a 25-year lapse, clearly illustrates our commitment to a free, peaceful and unified Iraq.
    But Syria recognizes that no magical solution exists to instantaneously achieve the desired objectives. A rigorous and comprehensive approach is required. This approach should include a reconsideration of U.S. policy in Iraq, starting with the recognition of the necessity to include all parties involved: neighboring countries and all factions of the Iraqi political and social spectrum.
    No party should feel defeated or excluded. All stakeholders in the future of Iraq should feel that it is in their own interest to help stabilize the situation.
    A solution should also include U.S. acknowledgment that the majority of Iraqis regard the occupation as only exacerbating the situation and causing further violence and instability. A U.S. plan for withdrawal should be on the table. Only such a step will prove to the various parties involved that the United States genuinely plans to return Iraq to the Iraqis.

This position looks very compatible with the recommendations of the ISG.
The idea of dealing constructively with Syria is, of course, completely anathema to most US neocons, who still want to keep the administration pointed toward “regime change” in Damascus. (Just what the world doesn’t need: another US military-political offensive, leading to the destabilization of yet another significant Middle Eastern power.) These neocons, operating out of Cheney’s office and elsewhere, have gotten Bush so much in their grip that when, toward the end of Israekl’s 33-day war against Hizbullah in the summer some Israelis started suggesting that perhaps Israel should start to revive its peace talks with Syria as a way of stabilizing the region some, they reported that they received a big slapdown from the Bushites.
Can you believe that? That US officials would be actively discouraging the Israelis from engaging in exploratory peace feelers with Syria?
There is also the point of view heard among some conseravtives (as exeplified in this op-ed in today’s CSM by John Hughes) that urges, in a kind of faux-Machiavellian bravado, that okay, well maybe the Syrians are really bad, “but we could get some leverage by trying to split them off from the Iranians.”
To which all I can say is: Ain’t going to happen.
I don’t know if perhaps Nelson or some of the other Senators visiting Damascus may be trying to test that “split them from the Iranians” approach. Well fine, if they want to try. But more important than pushing that particular line, they would do much better to sit down and brainstorm with the Syrians what they, the Iranians, and all the other powers neighboring Iraq can do to work with Iraqis and Americans to avoid a complete catastrophe from enveloping everyone in the region.
And yes, that includes the 147,000 US troops now in Iraq. Look for my CSM column on the topic tomorrow.

Cordesman declares a US defeat in Iraq

Tony Cordesman is a cautious man who is an experienced and conseravative analyst of military affairs. Well regarded inside most of the professional military and across the strategic-studies community, he has done generally solid analytical work on Middle Eastern issues for decades.
Today, in a comment buried at the bottom of an NYT op-ed on Afghanistan, he makes this statement:

    In Iraq, the failure of the United States and the allies to honestly assess problems in the field, be realistic about needs, create effective long-term aid and force-development plans, and emphasize governance over services may well have brought defeat.

“May well have”… It’s an interesting locution, don’t you think? I read it as Tony saying that, on balance, he thinks there probably already has been a US deafeat in Iraq…
In which case, all that would remain would be– what? To clean up what can be cleaned? To save what can be saved? To extricate what US forces can be safely extricated at this point?
I’ve looked over a few other recent Cordesman pronunciamentos on Iraq. (Still figuring out the utility of my ‘Delicious’ account… For what it’s worth, here is the content of my newly minted ‘cordesman’ tag there.)
So on Dec. 10, he was quoted in a Newsday editorial as saying:

    “The Iraqi government is weak as much because of U.S. action as [because of] Iraq’s inherent problems.” Cordesman says Washington is acting like a bull in a china shop, blaming the people who own the shop, the Iraqis, for not being able to put the pieces of china back together.

That editorial, btw, was titled: The game is over: Bush’s dream of spreading democracy is in tatters. If he doesn’t pull back now, he could instead spread war across the Mideast.
Good for those wise people at Newsday!
On Dec. 10, too, Cordesman had his own op-ed in The Baltimore Sun. In it he wrote:

    The principal recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are very unlikely to produce success… The key problem is that events may be spiraling out of control, and the key to success is not outside action but Iraqi action. As a result, the most important single sentence in the Iraq Study Group’s executive summary is its introductory caveat – “if the Iraqi government moves forward with national reconciliation.”
    Almost any reasonable mix of recommendations would work if Iraqi society as a whole moved forward with reconciliation. But the report does not make workable suggestions for creating or inducing such action.
    Simply calling for a weak and divided Iraqi government to act in the face of all of the forces tearing Iraq apart is almost feckless.

Let me say that I completely agree with his diagnosis that, inside Iraq, the single most important key to the country’s survival and to the restoration of some semblance of wellbing for its people is national reconciliation. However, I do also think there’s something the US needs to do, from outside, which is to work with all other world powers to as much as possible “hold the ring” around Iraq so that the Iraqis themselves can get on with the national reconciliation without having their country torn apart through the interference (armed or otherwise) of all of its rapacious and/or terrified neighbors.
Hence the central importance of Recommendation 2 of the ISG report, which reads:

    The goals of the diplomatic offensive as it relates to regional players should be to:
    i. Support the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq.
    ii. Stop destabilizing interventions and actions by Iraq’s neighbors.
    iii. Secure Iraq’s borders, including the use of joint patrols with neighboring countries.
    iv. Prevent the expansion of the instability and conflict beyond Iraq’s borders…

But anyway, that’s a bit of a digression. Mainly I wanted to see if Tony was, as of Dec. 10, declaring a US defeat in Iraq or not. I don’t think he did. To say “events may be spiraling out of control” is a far less strong statement than to say that the US’s actions in Iraq “may well have brought defeat.”
On Dec. 11, Cordesman was quoted on this ABC News site as saying, “events in Iraq are moving so quickly that it may be Iraq that dictates the future — and not U.S. policy.”
H’mm. I agree with that– up to a point. But really, there is still a LOT the US could do to make it easier or harder for the Iraqis to reach national reconciliation, and to optimize the chances for some return of stability to the country as they do so.
That “holding the external ring” task I mentioned above is one thing they can do.
Stopping all these silly tactics of trying to split the UIA and build an anti-Sadr coalition on the most unprincipled of grounds is another.
Exiting Iraq without having all guns blazing is another…
Anyway, another key point here. I noted above that today’s op-ed by Cordesman in the NYT, with which I led this post, was primarily about Afghanistan, and it was in that context that he had mentioned– oh, just in passing, really– that the US “may well have” already lost in Iraq.
His whole op-ed there is of course extremely important. It builds directly on the kind of analysis that British Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt went public with back in early October.
Back on October 20, reflecting on Dannatt’s analysis, I wrote this JWN post, titled Choice time: Iraq or Afghanistan? My analysis there still looks pretty good to me, nearly two months later. But Cordesman is now telling us he thinks there is no such choice there to be made.
Here btw are my (admittedly small) Delicious collections for Dannatt and for Afghanistan.

Bush’s poll numbers plummet…

… especially regarding his handling of Iraq polisy.
That’s the main finding of this nationwide poll conducted yesterday for the WaPo/ABC News polling organization.
Qun 2 (a) asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?
Answers:

    Strongly disapprove– 57%
    Somewhat disapprove– 13%
    (Total disapprove)– 70%
    Strongly approve– 12%
    Somewhat approve– 16%
    (Total approve)– 28%

Regarding approval/disapproval of his general job performance, he got 49% “Strongly disapprove” and 13% “Somewhat disapprove”, for a total of 62%.
On the ABC News broadcast tonight, George Stephanopoulos commented that the high numbers for strong disapproval are quite remarkable.
I think what has probably been happening is that over the past 12-18 months a lot of US citizens have become increasingly uneasy over the stalemate and quagmire in Iraq– but as we know, there really hasn’t been a clear and compelling opposition party here crystallizing and legitimizing that disquiet. But the ISG report now seems to have had a significant effect in doing that. Total “disapproval” for Bush’s Iraq policy has never run higher than 66% before now….
I mean, Baker is perhaps easy enough to deride as just another corrupt old oilman (though personally, I think he has a lot more to him than that.) But Lee Hamilton? How could anyone ever doubt the considered judgment of this courtly, very experienced old straight-arrow guy from Indiana? He certainly has gravitas, in spades.
Further down in the same poll:

    Qu. 26: “Given what you’ve heard and read, overall do you support or oppose the Iraq Study Group report?” Support– 46%; Oppose– 22%; No opinion– 32%.
    Qu. 32 (based on half the sample so far): “Some people say (the United States should include direct talks with Syria as part of a regional dialogue about the situation in Iraq because Syria has influence in the region). Others say (the United States should not directly engage with Syria because the U.S. has identified Syria as a sponsor of terrorism.) What do you think? Do you think the United States should or should not hold direct talks with Syria about the situation in Iraq?” Should include Syria– 58%; Should not directly engage with Syria– 37%; No opinion– 5%
    Qu. 33 (half sample): “Some people say (the United States should include direct talks with Iran as part of a regional dialogue about the situation in Iraq because Iran has influence in the region). Others say (the United States should not directly engage with Iran because the US has identified Iran as a sponsor of terrorism and because of Iran’s nuclear program.) What do you think? Do you think the United States should or should not hold direct talks with Iran about the situation in Iraq?” Should include Iran– 57%; Should not directly engage with Iran– 41%; No opinion– 2%.

Good, so the US citizenry is far smarter than the pro-Olmert propagandists give them credit for.
One other point– which I know I should have mentioned earlier but I can’t find a link for it….
As JWN readers doubtless already know, the Prez has spent the past few days earnestly trailing around Washington DC trying to look as though he knows what he’s doing as he “searches” for the best policy on Iraq– and he has seemed very determined to find one that is as different as possible from the ones the ISG has been recommending…. His people had been promising that the will make what’s billed as a “major policy speech” on Iraq sometime before Christmas.
But now, that project may have been delayed by a couple of further weeks. On the ABC News broadcast this evening George S. reported that the Prez had been quite eager to follow the advice he’s been receiving from retired Army General Jack Keane– that he should plan to have a “surge” of some 40,000 additional forces deployed in Iraq for a while, in order to win what Keane called a “decisive victory”.
(Where does Gen. Keane get these crazy ideas, anyway? Decisive? Victory?? What is he smoking?)
But apparently– still according to ABC– the generals on the ground in Iraq and in Centcom don’t like Keane’s surge idea at all. I guess that means they really don’t see what good it could do, and meantime it would just mean that many more vulnerable US soldiers to worry about…
So Bush is now reportedly going to delay making a decision on that pending further consultations… So there might not be any significant shift in policy until January. If then.
Meanwhile, 63 people were killed in a single suicide bomb attack in Baghdad today… and yesterday, UN Special Representative in Iraq Ashraf Jehangir Qazi told the Security Council that “The violence seems out of control.” I can’t imagine how those poor people in Iraq are coping with all this.

JWN sidebar: what do you think?

In my relentless desire to improve the sidebar here at JWN I spent a bunch of time today doing just that. I rearranged some things, instaled a proper search button, did a littl minor editing… But the main thing I did was install my De.icio.us tagroll there, right under “Recent posts”. It’s still not working perfectly… Actually, I think it’s Delicious itself that’s not working perfectly since it keeps cutting off the “notes” that I write there (the text in black).
Anyway, I’m hoping the tagroll will work well there. It might cut down on the main posts I feel I need to write since it performs the archiving function for me and also allows me (or should allow me!) to make notes on each item of– as they promise– “up to 255 characters in length.” What the tagroll doesn’t allow, of course, is comments and dicussion. So I’m thinking of it as very much a subsidiary to what happens in and with the main blog posts and their subsequent discussions, etc.
So as of now the sidebar gives you links to the 25 most recent blopg posts and the eight items that I’ve most recently tagged for “jwn”. Does this balance seem about right for you? Are there sidebar features that I’ve moved down that you would rather see back up in their old positions?
Tell me what you think.

Olmert on Israel’s nukes: a slip or not?

In an interview broadcast by Germany’s N24 broadcast station today Israeli PM Olmert very clearly implied that Israel has nuclear weapons. I heard a re-broadcast of his words on a BBC news channel.
Ha’Aretz got the wording quite right in this account of his words:

    we have never threatened any nation with annihilation. Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?

This caused a storm in Israel, which for 20-plus years has “had its cake and eaten it” regarding its possession of nuclear weapons. That is, while everyone recognizes that Israel has an advanced nuclear arsenal (and therefore, Israel enjoys all the “benefits” of nuclear deterrence– however chimerical they may in fact be), at the same time Israel’s leaders have never before openly admitted they have such an arsenal, and thus– with the continuing connivance of the entire US political establishment– they have been able to avoid attracting any of the opprobrium heaped on other nuclear “proliferators” like India and Pakistan.
Oh wait a moment. India just got rewarded by the US administration and congress for its act of proliferation. I guess the international calculus has changed?
Maybe the new calculus in a US-dominated world order is that it’s only Muslim nations getting bombs that is bad?
That HaAretz article linked to above notes that,

    Olmert’s spokesman, Miri Eisen, who accompanied the prime minister on a trip to Germany on Monday, said he did not mean to say that Israel possessed or aspired to acquire nuclear weapons.
    “No he wasn’t saying anything like that,” she said.
    Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Olmert had meant to categorize the four nations as democracies to set them apart from Iran, and was not referring to their potential nuclear capabilities or aspirations.
    Olmert’s comments come a week after the incoming U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Gates, shocked observers when he said that Israel possessed nuclear arms, before a Congressional confirmation panel…

Actually, maybe that open admission from Gates should be seen as equally important as Olmert’s (intentional or unintentional) “slip of the tongue.”
Back in the late 1980s I studied the Israeli nuclear program quite a bit and published a couple of articles about it. Maybe it’s time to dig them out and put them up on the site here. In one of them I argued that one of the main benefits Israel gained from its possession of nukes was to be able to blackmail the US government into increasing its despatch (at US taxpayers’ expense) of very lethal “conventional” weapons to Israel on the basis that, “If we can’t get the conventional weapons we need then we may just need to pull the you-know-whats out from under their wraps…”
Time for worldwide deactivation of all nuclear arsenals, I think.

Social diversity and nonviolence in Beirut

Numerous male commentators, looking at the Hizbullah protests in Lebanon– and claiming they sought only to indicate either the seemingly “western” looks of some participants in the protests, or the diversity of their clothing styles– have published fairly lascivious-looking photographs of young women among the protesters. And by an amazing coincidence (not!), many of these photos have emphasized down-the-cleavage shots and other pieces of bare torso skin.
Often, too, these images have been accompanied by demeaning, feminophobic references to adult women as being “babes”. (Q.v., Josh Landis, among others.)
I have made the point that one can discuss the general issue of the diversity of clothing styles among the protesters– with some women wearing full black hijab and others wearing tight jeans and tops that, yes, do show a lot of cleavage– without propagating demeaningly sexist images that perpetuate the idea that women are to be judged primarily according to men’s perceptions of their physical attributes rather than by the contribution their actions make to the common good…
Anyway, if one does want to publish an image that represents the social diversity of the protesters, here is my favorite, published by AP today:
Photo
The caption reads: “A Lebanese child holds a picture showing Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah during the tenth day of an open-ended protest, in central Beirut, Lebanon Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006. Hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah-led protesters swarmed downtown Beirut on Sunday, demanding Prime Minister Fuad Saniora cede some power to the opposition or step down. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Tawil)”
The larger story here, of course, that I do intend to write about as soon as I have the time to give it its due, is the amazing success Hizbullah and its allies have had in organizing and keeping the discipline within this series of massive nonviolent protests… As well as the broader commitment that all parties in Lebanon have shown thus far to the principle of not allowing themselves to be dragged back into use of violence as they strive to resolve intra-Lebanese differences that truly are very complex.
There was the sad exception of the incident last Sunday that killed one anti-Saniora protester. But thankfully that did not spark any continuing cycle of violence.

Americans for Peace Now calls for ISG implementation

Good for Americans for Peace Now– the support group in the US for the Israeli PN organization… They’re organizing a campaign to demand that the Prez implement the ISG report.

    (And for his part, Israeli PM Olmert seems almost apoplectically opposed to the report, especially its claim that there is a strong linkage between the US’s ability to avoid disaster in Iraq and the need to make some– long, long delayed!– progress towards implementing resolutions 242 and 338 on the Syrian and the Palestinian fronts.)

China and its ‘rise’

The NYT’s Joseph Kahn has an intriguing piece in today’s paper, about how China’s main national t.v. network has been airing what looks like an important new 12-part series, “describing the reasons nine nations rose to become great powers. The series was based on research by a team of elite Chinese historians, who also briefed the ruling Politburo about their findings.”
He considers this a step toward the country’s leaders starting to deal more openly– in front of their own citizens and for others around the world– with the fact and implications of its emergence to a new prominence in the global order. This, after the Chinese leaders have done a lot in recent years to stick to the stance laid down by the late Deng Xiaoping: “‘tao guang yang hui,’ literally to hide its ambitions and disguise its claws.”
Kahn notes that,

    The series, which took three years to make, emanated from a Politburo study session in 2003. It is not a jingoistic call to arms. It mentions China only in passing, and it never explicitly addresses the reality that China has already become a big power.
    Yet its version of history, which partly tracks the work done by Paul Kennedy in his 1980s bestseller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” differs markedly from that of the textbooks still in use in many schools.
    Its stentorian narrator and epic soundtrack present the emergence of the nine countries, from Portugal in the 15th century to the United States in the 20th, and cites numerous achievements worthy of emulation: Spain had a risk-taking queen; Britain’s nimble navy secured vital commodities overseas; the United States regulated markets and fought for national unity.
    The documentary also emphasizes historical themes that coincide with policies Chinese leaders promote at home. Social stability, industrial investment, peaceful foreign relations and national unity are presented as more vital than, say, military strength, political liberalization or the rule of law.
    In the 90 minutes devoted to examining the rise of the United States, Lincoln is accorded a prominent part for his efforts to “preserve national unity” during the Civil War. China has made reunification with Taiwan a top national priority. Franklin D. Roosevelt wins praise for creating a bigger role for the government in managing the market economy but gets less attention for his wartime leadership.

Kahn says that the “intellectual father” of the series is Qian Chengdan, a professor at Beijing University who was guest of honor at a small dinner we went to when we visited Beijing in May 2004. (I guess he was working on it at the time.)
Kahn writes that,

    Yan Xuetong, a foreign affairs specialist at Qinghua University in Beijing, argued in a scholarly journal this summer that China had already surpassed Japan, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and India in measures of its economic, military and political power. That leaves it second only to the United States, he said.
    While the military gap between China and the United States may remain for some time, he argued, China’s faster economic growth and increasing political strength may whittle down America’s overall advantage.
    “China will enjoy the status of a semi-superpower between the United States and the other major powers,” Mr. Yan predicted in the article, which appeared in the China Journal of International Politics.
    He added, “China’s fast growth in political and economic power will dramatically narrow its power gap with the United States.”

And of course, so long as the US stays trapped in the quagmire of Iraq, the gap-narrowing will be accelerated.
This is all sort of history-on-steroids. Much, much better than any form of a unipolar world. But still, a situation where we all, citizens of the world, need to remain calm, flexible, and hold on to some very basic principles like the respect for human equality and the toleration of difference.