The destructive self-referentiality of the hegemon

Here’s what I notice– not only from Rumsfeld, Hadley, and the rest of the Bushites, but also in the vast preponderance of what passes for public “discussion” among members of the US policy and media elite: In practically all these statements and discussions the “problem” of Iraq is presented overwhlemingly as one that it is the job of Americans to solve, on their own.
Most notable by its absence from this discussion: any mention of the UN having any significant role to play.
(I’m still not sure whether the Baker-Hamilton report will even mention the UN– no word yet of its doing so, which means any mention there is likely quite tangential. We’ll know for sure on Wednesday.)
One very welcome item of news today is that the White House has now decided not to try to renew John Bolton’s term as ambassador there… That, however, is only the very start of the massive re-organization of US-UN relations that needs to take place. And it needs to take place now, as an integral part of the attempt to find a “least-bad” outcome for Iraqis q in conjunction with an orderly– or let’s say non-chaotic– US exit from Iraq.
Back on Nov. 10, when I sketched out my best, considered suggestion for what needs to be done regarding Iraq (a.k.a. the ‘Namibia Plan’), I wrote that

    The UN will be necessary to provide a cover of some international legitimacy for whatever the security regime on the ground inside Iraq will be– and to help broker both the intra-Iraqi political compact that needs to be won and the international dimensions of the agreement over the whole transformation of the security situation in the region…

I also wrote that, in the context of planning for an orderly and speedy US withdrawal from Iraq the US urgently needs to engage diplomatically with Iran and with all of Iraq’s other neighbors. The Baker-Hamilton report reportedly is going to make this suggestion. But under what possible auspices can such talks be convened? Here again, the UN is in a unique position to be able to do that convening.
Three final important points on the important topic of US-UN relations:
(1) It’s very unfortunate that, in these crucial weeks for Iraq, the UN is in a possibly lengthy situation of leadership transition. Present Sec-Gen Kofi Annan has already entered his lame duck phase. His term ends December 31, and he has already started going around making the kinds of courtesy public appearances that denote a man who has little power left to wield and little energy left with which to wield it.
Annan did make impassioned references to Iraq’s plight in his recent interview with the BBC. But that cri de coeur was not allied to any policy push to try to reconfigure the UN’s relations with Washington. Indeed, the interview might even have made things worse by ruffling feathers inside an Iraq whose people already harbor a longheld distrust of the UN. (That stems principally from the role the UN was forced to play in enforcing the horrendously lethal sanctions regime from 1991 through 2003… Of course, it was mainly the vindictiveness of the US-UK governments that forced the UN into doing that; but Iraqis’ bitterness towards the UN is no less real, and is certainly a complicating factor.)
Meanwhile, the incoming South Korean Sec-Gen, Ban Ki-Moon, has been keeping an extremely low profile. Probably, that’s appropriate. But it does raise some fears that he might need a long learning curve after he comes into office January 1, before he can start to figure out how to do anything useful in reconfiguring UN-US relations.
Always remembering, of course, that the UN Sec-Gen is never an independent actor. He is, in essence, the servant of the Security Council. So it is the balance of forces on the SC that provides the boundaries of whatever the Sec-Gen is able to do… It takes a wily, well-connected, and self-confident diplomat in the Sec-Gen’s chair to be able to deal with that. No indication yet on whether Mr. Ban has what it takes…
(2) It’s crucial to remember that– back in those dim, distant days when the war in Iraq was still about something for Rumsfeld and Cheney– one of the things it was crucially about was Washington’s very muscular reassertion of its “right” to act unilaterally wherever and whenever it wanted to in the world. So any significant drawdown of US power inside Iraq, such as I have long argued for, will necessarily have to involve a renegotiation of Washington’s relations with the rest of the world; and a renegotiation of the US relationship with the UN will clearly have to be part of that.
Quite simply stated, any negotiated US withdrawal from Iraq, or indeed any significant drawdown of US troops from there that is negotiated, will represent a humiliating end for the Bushites’ whole doctrine of muscular unilateralism. (And quite appropriately so.)
There is no form of orderly withdrawal from Iraq that is not negotiated; and there is no negotiation that I can envisage that would not also, in a major way, involve the UN. Who else does anyone think could convene the needed kinds of mutliple negotiations at both the intra-Iraqi and the region-wide levels? NATO? OSCE? The Charlottesville Gardening Club?
No, only the UN– with all its flaws and failings– has the international legitimacy and global reach that are needed for this job.
(3) The continued self-referentiality of the discussions among US pols and the US commentatoriat, as described above, are a cause for real concern. The fact that so few of these guys (and yes, nearly all of them are “guys”, though a handful of them now come in skin tones of a tasteful brown) are even talking about the UN having any kind of a role in helping to de-escalate and transform the situation in Iraq makes me think they really haven’t yet gotten beyond the traditional assumptions about US superiority in the world.
Public opinion surveys inside the US routinely show that the US public is significantly more internationalist in outlook than most US politicians seem to be. (Though yes, there is always a small-ish lump of the US public that’s determinedly isolationist.) But inside the hot-house politics of Washington, far too many pols, and their pals in the commentatoriat, seem to forget their constituencies and seek to have the US strut across the world stage as though it owns the whole damn’ thing. Inside Washington DC, too, a pro-Israel lobby that determinedly opposes the UN being given any real role in the world and staunchly defends the idea of unilateral military action on its account also has a strong influence on the way US pols and commentators think about the UN and about world affairs in general… (The same lobby that helped the US get into the whole tragic mess in Iraq, indeed.)
So we who seek a sustainable de-escalation in Iraq that involves an orderly withdrawal of US troops from there and the emergence of a capable and legitimate form of government within the country– make that, “within both countries”– do also need to challenge this whole self-referential and hegemonist mindset within Washington, head-on. The US needs the United Nations today, more than ever before, and we US citizens need to understand that our place in the world truly is not that of any kind of “indispensable nation” but of “one nation among many”– and a nation that is, as we all now know, far from being either the most virtuous or the most capable.
Strengthen the UN. Iraq, the US, and the world have no workable alternative. Let’s not avoid the subject any longer.

Ramazani on engaging Iran

One month ago, I featured here an essay by my mentor, R.K. Ramazani, on how the Bush Administration was misreading Iran’s nuclear policy. His latest essay in today’s Daily Progress challenges the “chorus of hostile diplomatic rhetoric against Iran (that) threatens to drown out” the much anticipated Baker-Hamilton Commission recommendation “to engage Iran to assist the stablization of Iraq.”
I provide the full text below for jwn readers to consider and discuss. (The Payvand Iran news service also carries it here.)
Drawing upon his 54 years of chronicling US-Iran relations, the Professor finds the present US-Iran impasse “grim, but not hopeless.”
Ramazani’s references to the impact of American “evangelicals” on the making of US Iran policy were catalyzed by a recent depressing New York Times article. (I will soon post a longer personal reflection on the dangers of such “holy warrior” messianism….)
Yet on the bright side, I especially appreciate Ramazani’s invocation of cultural traditions in both Iran and the United States that might yet be marshalled to muster the courage for both parties to talk seriously.
Where else can we find the immortal sage words of Sa’di, Washington, and… Reagan called upon to buttress the cause of constructive dialogue?
As I’ve written here repeatedly, its time to get on with it.
(Ramazani essay below:)

Continue reading “Ramazani on engaging Iran”

Baker-Hamilton: Too little, too late

I have been scrying all the best news reports I can find regarding what can credibly be known about the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Based on past journalistic performance, this account by the WaPo’s Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks is probably as good as any. It tracks fairly well with this one by the LA Times’s Paul Richter.
The ISG is due to present its report in public on Wednesday, Dec, 6. Group co-chairs Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton apparently set great stock by having the group emerge with a single set of recommendations. Maybe that’s the reason the recommendations as reported (leaked, really) so far don’t go nearly far enough.
What seems to be known about the recommendations is that they are extremely cautious on the issue of troop withdrawals; and I’ve also seen no mention yet of the ISG pushing for a significant shift of responsibility and authority towards the UN, which I still think is a sine qua non for finessing the tricky politics and diplomacy of an orderly US withdrawal.
The boldest thing that does still seem to be in the report is some kind of a recommendation that the administration needs to talk directly with Syria and Iran, about Iraq. Baker and Ricks’s article did not make this sound like a firm recommendation. They wrote only, “Among other things, the commission considered proposals to reach out to Iran and Syria and to convene a regional conference to bring all of Iraq’s neighbors into the process of stabilizing the country.”
Richter and the NYT’s David Sanger, by contrast, described the talk-to-Syria-&-Iran recommendation as more of a done deal (at the ISG level). Richter even wrote, “Although the report’s prescription for a troop drawdown attracted attention this week, the 10 panel members consider a recommendation for a new diplomatic offensive, including talks with Iran and Syria, to be its most important.”
Regarding the military dimensions of the ISG ‘s recommendations, Baker and Ricks wrote that the ISG,

    plans to recommend withdrawing nearly all U.S. combat units from Iraq by early 2008 while leaving behind troops to train, advise and support the Iraqis…
    The call to pull out combat brigades by early 2008 would be more a conditional goal than a firm timetable, predicated on the assumption that circumstances on the ground would permit it, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the commission’s report will not be released until next week. But panel members concluded that it is vital to set a target to put pressure on Iraqi leaders to do more to assume responsibility for the security of their country.

(They note that, “The choice of early 2008 as a goal could also, intentionally or not, change the nature of the debate over the war at the height of the U.S. presidential primary season.”)
They give these further details of the military plan:

    Pulling out combat units would not mean the end of the U.S. military involvement in Iraq, which could continue in a different form for years. The withdrawal would be partially offset by an influx of advisers, trainers and embedded troops. The number of such troops now stands at roughly 5,000 and should be quadrupled to about 20,000, the group’s plan says, according to a source. The commission envisions leaving at least several thousand quick-strike U.S. combat soldiers to protect all those other American troops.
    Although it was not clear how many U.S. troops would be left in Iraq by 2008, some people knowledgeable about the commission’s deliberations have said that it might be possible to reduce the force of 140,000 to half by then. “There’ll still be a presence there that will be significant just because of the nature of embedded forces,” said one of the sources familiar with the commission’s report.

This military plan looks to me to be doomed to failure– primarily because neither the ISG nor the government that it is seeking to advise has any kind of realistic plan for transforming the currently destructive imbroglio of dysfunctional political relations among the players inside Iraq (including the multiple Iraqi parties along with, of course, the US occupiers) into a more constructive and workable set of relations.
The idea that the role of US military “advisers” is a completely a-political, technical role seems to be a completely unexamined assumption there and in much of the current US discussion on this issue. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Being deeply entangled– or as they now cutely phrase it, “embedded”– with Iraqi troops down to the small-unit level ensures a deepler entanglement of vulnerable US soldiers in the heart of Iraqi politics than ever before. This, at a time when core issues of authority, legitimacy, and political power inside Iraq are still being deeply, and very violently, contested… Which is a way of saying, yes, that Iraq is already in a civil war.
So the ISG is proposing “embedding” US soldiers as advisors with precisely which set of participants in this civil war? Perhaps all of them?
What an ignorant, fundamentally a-historical idea this is. (Sorry, Jim and Lee, I just needed to get that off my chest.)
One of the several big failures of nerve of the ISG was that it resisted all calls that it recommend that the Bushites publicly declare a deadline for the completion of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Heck, I haven’t even seen any mention of the idea that the President should a public declaration that “the US has no lasting claim upon the territory or resources of Iraq and no intention of maintaining a long-term military presence there.”

    And talking of the presidential declarations made by Bush, I have to say the one he made yesterday, in which he smirkingly disparaged the idea that “there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq” to be one of the most wrongheaded he’s made for a long time now. It’s right up there “bring ’em on!”
    He doesn’t want a “graceful exit”? What does he think the alternative is: No exit at all? No, Mr. George W. Bush, the alternative to a “graceful” (or, as I prefer to describe it, “orderly”) US exit from Iraq is a disorderly, perhaps even catastrophically chaotic US exit.
    So please stop disparaging the idea of a graceful exit. If there’s a catastrophe in Iraq in the months ahead and the death-rates for US service members suddenly spiral out of control, you’ll wish desperately that you had never been so dismissive of it. Attaining any kind of an orderly exit will be harder to do (and exact a higher political cost from the US) with each week that you continue to delay it.

Anyway, as noted above, the report of the ISG when it is finally released looks set to be a big disappointment. The only possible silver lining there is that, though they seem to have ditched nearly all the other principles of good sense in their recommendations– in the interests of playing to a political lowest-common-denominator on Capitol Hill that is Democratic as much as it is Republican– at least it looks as though there’s a good chance the ISG will be sticking firm with the recommendation to talk to Iran and Syria.
That is no small matter. Indeed, it will be a particularly important position for these politically well-connected and widely respected public figures to hold onto, at a time when the broad campaign to continue demonizing Iran and Syria– and possibly even launching a military attack against one or both of them– still continues. Once Baker, Hamilton, and their colleagues all say in unison that the US should be talking to Iran and Syria that should, I believe, change the framework of the debate over that issue inside this country.
Let’s hope so.
But then, we need to go back to pushing even harder for a full and speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (If the drivers who came by our intersection at the peace demo yesterday are anything to judge by, that demand is still out there, and now being more strongly and angrily expressed by the US public than ever. Get with the program, Dems!)

Israel’s draconian ‘movement controls’: the reality

Laila el-Haddad has a searing account on her blog of what it has been like– yet again– to have to wait for many days at the Rafah crossing point as she tries to return to her own hometown and birth-place, Gaza.
She, her two-year-old, Yousuf, and her parents still haven’t gotten in.
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) reads as follows:

    Art. 13:
    (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
    (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Every single portion of this article is extremely important– for Palestinians as for all others of God’s children. In the US, pro-Zionist activists in the 1980s made a big campaign– with respect to the Soviet Jews– around just the”right to leave any country, including his own” portion of the text. And on the basis of their campaign to “Let my people go”, as they said, they affected the whole of the global balance during the Cold War.
Many of these same activists (and their beneficiaries, like Anatoly/Natan Scharansky) now don’t seem to care at all about the broad principles involved in Article 13, and the fact that it is applicable to all the peoples of the world, not just their own.
“Movement controls” is the technical term for all the many people-control mechanisms that the IOF have insisted on maintaining at all the borders around Gaza, as well as for the extensive people-corralling systems they maintain around each of the towns and cities inside the West Bank and the hundreds of checkpoints they maintain on roads and tracks deep in the heart of the West Bank.
The Israelis claim that these “movement controls” are needed to prevent the bombers and terrorists among the Palestinian population from harming Israelis. I can certainly understand that concern, and also want Israeli citizens to be protected from harm. But imposing real and continuing harm on the entirety of the Palestinian population, as these highly restrictive and always unpredictable movement control systems do, is not the best way– indeed, not even an effective way– of achieving this. Building reciprocal relationships of respect and human equality is by far the best way, over the long haul, to assure the security of Israelis, and of Palestinians.
(Who are every bit as human as Israelis. Do I need to say this?)
That’s why that whole, anti-humane system of governance the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan that is known as “rule through foreign military occupation” has to end. It is the occupation that has led to Israel erecting and mantaining this very damaging system of corrals, real large prisons, and “movement controls” throughout the occupied territories. This system obliterates the ability of Palestinians to pursue a normal human life. (You can read about some of the effects of this system in the big Quaker book on Israel and Palestine I worked on, that came out in 2004.)
The people who wrote the UDHR back in 1948 had a very vivid picture in mind, at the time, of the kinds of conditions of life that authoritarian governments like those in pre-1945 Germany or Japan had imposed on all the peoples who came under their rule. The kinds of freedom specified in Article 13 are crucial to human dignity and the possibility of living a hope-filled, predictable, and peaceable human life.
The Israelis occupation(s) and all the systems of movement control that have stemmed from them must end. Speedily. Let the negotiations over ending the occupations begin!
(Meantime, I haven’t said too much about Laila’s blog post there. Y’all should go and read it for yourselves.)

Battle for the soul of al-Maliki, etc.

I guess by the time I get up Thursday, here in Virginia, we’ll know whether Bush was finally able to persuade Maliki to meet him at least once.
This, while of course his own political allies back home, the Sadrists, have pulled their people out of the government already just for the mere fact that he has gone to Jordan with the apparent intention of meeting Bush…
I feel quite sorry for this Kerensky-like figure (Maliki). After all, remember that back during the political battles waged by Khalilzad during the long early months of this year, Maliki ended up being “the Americans’ choice” as PM. They anointed him. Then there were six months of terrible additional US stumblings and escalations inside Iraq.
And now Bush wants to meet Maliki face-to-face to put some direct pressure on him??
I think the best comment on the Hadley memo that was leaked today was the one Dan Froomkin wrote in mid-morning:

    The memo describes a guy who talks a good game, but is ultimately clueless and incompetent — and who has been lulled into believing that his rhetoric is true by a small circle of like-minded advisers.
    That’s Maliki.

(Of course, it could also have been Bush…)
On a different note, some folks have urged me to comment on this piece of blustering “opinion” written by Saudi royal adviser Nawaf Obeid in today’s WaPo. In the article Obeid is begging the US not to undertake any troop withdrawal from Iraq any time soon, and warns that if it does so then the internal pressure inside Saudi Arabia might force the government to launch its own “massive intervention” inside Iraq.
Some US commentators who don’t know the regional realities very well have been interpreting that as a threat of military intervention. It isn’t. Obeid knows very well that any such threat would be completely risible. He explains that what the “massive intervention” would consist of would be that the Kingdom would provide more support to support to former Baathists and other allied Sunni insurgents inside Iraq while perhaps also “flooding” the international oil market with huge new Saudi production in an attempt to drive prices down to the extent that the much-feared Iranians (whose armed forces are approximately 6 or 7 times the size of Saudi Arabia’s) would finally cry “Uncle.”
And Obeid thinks that that is any kind of a credible “threat”?
Well, I guess the poor old rulers of Saudi Arabia must feel they have to do do (or at least say) something. Their population is by all accounts simply seething with anger over the present situations in Iraq and Palestine. But something Obeid only very indirectly alludes to in his piece is that, by all the accounts that I’ve heard, most of that anger seems to be directed against the US government.
Badger also makes this point well, in this quick survey on his blog of coverage in a couple of important Saudi newspapers today (Wednesday).
His bottom line there is that, according to these newspapers,

    [T]the underlying problem has a name, and the name is Bush.
    Which in turn suggests that the Saudi intelligensia (can I use that word?) perhaps sees itself more in the role of a critical observer, than in the role of the half-crazed partisan which is so often assigned to them.

Good summary.
Tomorrow will be an interesting day. Which way will Maliki finally end up bending– toward Bush or toward the Sadrists and, probably, most of his own political instincts? (And does his decision on this make any difference at this point, anyway? Actually, yes, I believe it does, a little– but it affects mainly the speed of the ongoing collapse of the US position in Iraq, not its direction.)
And talking of timelines, we now finally have one for the publication of the Iraq Study Group’s report… which is to be one week from today, December 6. There have been a number of indications that the report will recommend that the administration open talks on Iraq, within some format, with both Syria and Iran.
Because I think the risk of a military attack on Iran is much greater before the ISG makes its report public than it will be after their recommendations become the main item on the US agenda, I think we all need to be very careful indeed over the next seven days.
For now, though, bed-time. Gotta be ready to see what happens tomorrow.

The ‘Hadley memo’ on Maliki

The NYT’s Michael Gordon got an apparent “scoop” yesterday by bring given the text (also here) of a classified memo that Bush’s National Security Advisor, Steve Hadley, wrote on November 8, summing up his evaluation of the Iraqi political scene and in particular the capabilities of Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki.
The evaluation was based on a face-to-face meeting that Hadley had with Maliki in Baghdad October 30, and on briefings he was given by US military leaders in Baghdad. It presumably formed an important part of the briefing package that Bush received prior to his meeting with Maliki in Jordan, which is planned to start within the next couple of hours.
In an accompanying article, Gordon wrote of the Nov. 8 memo that:

    An administration official made a copy of the document available to a New York Times reporter seeking information on the administration’s policy review. The Times read and transcribed the memo.

At one point in the memo’s rambling and often unintentionally hilarious text it says of Maliki:

    His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shia hierarchy and force positive change. But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.

Someone should of course investigate the nature of the “deal” under which Gordon was shown the text of the memo. Has he become wholly a “useful idiot” for certain factions inside the White House? And if so, which? And in the complex dance of seduction and the exchange of favors that journalism of his kind entails, what did Gordon agree to do for his benefactor inside the White House that “won” him the favor of this leak?
But I’m in no position to investigate those issues further. The text of the memo itself seems, for a number of reasons including the apparently embarrassed reaction to its publication from Tony Snow, to have been “authentic”. (Unlike, perhaps, the report that Michael Gordon and Dexter Filkins published yesterday to the effect that one of their Iraqi reporters last summer interviewed a “mid-level Mahdi Army commander who told him that his militia had sent 300 fighters to Lebanon to fight alongside Hezbollah. Yesterday, I wrote that that piece of reporting had had some real credibility… But now, who knows? Maybe that was a constructed or exaggerated “quid” in return for the “quo” of the Hadley memo leaking? Obviously, I don’t know.)
So anyway, do go and read the memo. It is written in the earnest style of someone still struggling to understand the realities of Iraqi society and politics as well as the “responsibilities” of a distant imperial power. It is mind-bogglingly formless and repetitive, and reveals a mind reduced to clutching wildly at any straw that’s available.
Here are some of the aspects of it I find most revealing:
(1) Hadley evidently judged, as of Nov 8, that US Ambassador Zal Khalilzad was doing a lousy job: “We should be willing to… Encourage Zal [Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador] to move into the background and let Maliki take more credit for positive developments…” Guess what, today the WaPo’s Al Kamen reported the rumor that Khalilzad will shortly be moved from Baghdad, and his place there will be taken by yet another US viceroy– this time, Ryan Crocker, currently Ambassador to Pakistan…
(2) It spoke frankly about the existence of “the current four-brigade gap in Baghdad”.
(3) There are some passages that explicitly urge that the US should pay Maliki off with hard cash if he goes along with the Bushites’ scheme… The US should, Hadley writes, “Consider monetary support to moderate groups that have been seeking to break with larger, more sectarian parties, as well as to support Maliki himself as he declares himself the leader of his bloc and risks his position within Dawa and the Sadrists; and Provide Maliki with more resources to help build a nonsectarian national movement… ”
… Well, I guess these kinds of thing go on all the time in the conduct of internatinal affairs. But it is really depressing to see not only how bullying and imperialistic this top-level adviser is trying to be, but also how very clueless and intellectually bankrupt he is. This makes the situation even more dangerous.

Sadrists quit Maliki’s government

The WaPo’s website is reporting that five pro-Sadrist cabinet members and 30 pro-Sadrist deputies have announced the suspension of their support for the Maliki government. Maliki’s upcoming meeting with Pres. Bush constitutes, they say, a “provocation to the feelings of the Iraqi people and a violation of their constitutional rights.”
The Sadrists had talked earlier about their intention to quit if Maliki should go ahead with the meeting, so this development should not come as a surprise.
This move of withdrawing from a weak, US-supported government is eerily parallel to what Hizbullah and its allies have done in Lebanon. It looks as if these parties and their political allies in the region, primarily the regime in Iran, are prepared to provoke serious political crises in Lebanon and Iraq as a way of… what?
Seriously trying to get the attention of Washington?
Sending a (political) shot across Washington’s bows to remind it of the even greater damage that could be wrought to a political order in the region that is still, basically, very pro-American, in the event that Iran itself is subjected to a military attack?
Hardline Bushites, however, might interpret the Sadrists’ decision to quit the government as a partial “achievement” in their latest campaign to try to split Maliki and a substantial group of Iraqi Shiite pols away from a pro-Iranian “rump.” This might give the Bushites the idea that their general “strategy” toward Iraq is working, and give them more confidence to proceed with an attack against Iran….
Which would be good for nobody concerned…. At all… And yes, that certainly includes the 147,000 US service members strung out in widely distributed positions inside Iraq…
This week is a turning point for the the Middle East. More urgently than ever the region needs just exactly the kind of high-level, broadly inclusive, de-escalatory diplomatic gathering that Kofi Annan has called for.
De-escalation now, please!

Zelikow: What does he know?

I’ve spent more time today wondering why, exactly, Phil Zelikow yesterday chose to resign from what looked like his dream job as Condi Rice’s “Counsellor”, and to do so in a way that was abrupt and woefully inadequately explained.
I have wondered, too, about the timing and other aspects of the peace overture that Israeli PM Olmert made to the Palestinians yesterday. Again, it looked fairly abrupt and ill-prepared, and was not discernibly part of any broader peace move in the region.
And I’ve wondered about why Bush, Cheney, and Rice all suddenly decided to start criss-crossing the Sunni Arab world in these particular days…
And then, over at this post on Badger’s “Missing Links” blog, I read his rendering of an article that Abdel-Bari Atwan has in Al-Quds al-Arabi… (scroll down some on Badger’s post there; for various reasons I don’t find the Zaman piece he quotes from at the top there particularly credible or interesting)… And I started to see that there is indeed a possible “single cause” that could explain all three of the above, slightly strange developments…
And that would be, that Zelikow might have learned (or deduced) that Bush and Olmert have reached agreement on a plan for the speedy launch of a military attack on Iran.
Yes, I know, I know, I know: no such attack can even possibly be said to “make any sense”, either militarily or politically. (That’s why, if he had learned of it, the intelligent realist Zelikow would have resigned.)
I also recall, with some pride, that in all the months leading up to the recent midterm elections, I publicly dismissed the fears that so many other commentators were voicing, that the Bushites might launch an attack on Iran as part of their pre-election campaigning.
I was right on that.
And I still think it would be a crazy, crazy, and very destructive thing to do. But Bush has fewer domestic political constraints against doing something extremely foolhardy now than he had before the election. He himself will, of course, never be running for re-election, and now it’s a long two years till any of his GOP comrades have to run again… And anyway, nowadays many of the Democrats coming into the majority in the Congress have already been baying for blood against Iran. So if a military strike is launched against Iran in the upcoming period, when that venture turns into the quite predictable and inevitable regionwide (and possibly global) debacle and when, as is extremely likely, the lives of hundreds of US service people in Iraq would end up being put at direct risk because of this attack, the Democrats will already be there in the majority positions on Capitol Hill and, with most of them having also joined the clamor for an attack against Iran, they will be be forced to take some of the responsibility for that aftermath.
But why the apparent hurry around whatever it is the Bushites seem currently to be planning?
Well, GOP “adult” Jim Baker and Democratic “adult” Lee Hamilton are about to come out with the recommendations of their Iraq Study Group. Which almost certainly will include a strong recommendation that the US needs to include both Syria and Iran in the diplomacy over how to de-escalate the situation inside Iraq. The Israelis absolutely hate that idea. So, I’m sure, does the chief asset whom the hardline Israelis still have as an ally within the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams. Abrams, remember, is now the number-two person in the National Security Council and in charge of all the NSC’s work on the Middle east, except Iraq. (So yes, that would indeed include Iran, and all those big Sunni Arab states… and Israel.)
In this article in today’s Newsweek, Abrams is described as perhaps being the neocons’ “best hope for keeping President Bush onboard”. The Newsweek writers also quote an un-named senior administration official as saying, “Bush has enormous regard for him.” (And as I recalled earlier today, there had been some reports recently that Zelikow had been angling for Abrams’ present position. But even his good friend and long-time collaborator Condi Rice failed to win it for him. So Bush must really like having Abrams there.)
… So maybe all the haste with which Olmert and the Bushites are acting these days has to do with them trying to pre-empt the recommendations that the ISG are expected to come out with? After all, once the relatively sage recommendations of the wise adults of both parties are out there publicly on the table, and framing the national debate, it would be a lot harder for Bush and Olmert to launch a military adventure against Iran, unconstrained by political realities.
(Bush and Olmert would have to create some kind of an immediate “pretext” for the attack. But doing that need not be hard to arrange.)
So maybe all the present visits by Bush and his high-level acolytes to Sunni countries are related not so much to planning regarding Iraq, but to some final advance planning for a military strike against Iran that may be fairly imminent?
In the event that such a plan is afoot, it is not clear to me whether the US or Israel (or both?) would actually launch the strike. But either way, getting overflight agreements and other arrangements worked out in advance with some key, large Arab states in locations like, for example, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, would be an extremely helpful part of the planning.
And whether Israel or the US (or both) do go ahead and launch any kind of a military strike against Iran, I repeat: the affair will absolutely certainly turn out very badly for the US and for US troops and allies throughout the whole region.
… Gosh, I certainly hope I’m wrong on this one. But many pieces of evidence do, suddenly, seem to be coming together in this very worrying direction.

Saudi ‘Mystique’ alive and still writing

The Saudi woman blogger ‘Mystique’ left a comment on JWN yesterday pointing out that the reason her earlier blog was down for a while was

    because I sort of lost my anonymity to only one person. & this alone made me stop blogging, here in Saudi it is very difficult to write freely so imagine if I no longer have the privilege to remain anonymous..

But she’s put her blog back up with a new URL, and if you go there you can see some of her very interesting commentary on her life and on the society in which she lives. This new blog seems to contain the archives of her old blog (which originally had a different URL) back to March 2006– perhaps complete, perhaps not.
But the new blog also, sadly, contains this “farewell” from Mystique as a blogger, posted November 20.
I think that what likely caused all this turmoil in M’s life as a blogger was this November 12 article on Saudi bloggers, in which the WaPo’s Saudi reporter Faiza Saleh Ambah described her encounter with Mystique in these terms:

    When the woman who blogs anonymously under the name Mystique finally shows up for an appointment at Starbucks on trendy Tahlia Street, she seems used to causing a stir. Heads turn when the 23-year-old walks into the coffee shop minus the mandatory head scarf worn by most Saudi women, her caramel-colored hair cascading past her shoulders. She is wearing a black cloak with a shiny copper-colored print on the sleeve, a black Prada purse slung over her shoulder.

And thus, I suspect, the woman who has successfully kept her anonymity as a blogger for several months now, was rudely “outed” by a journalist eager for a “good”, i.e. salacious, story. [Addendum, Dec. 14: Please note that below, ‘Mystique’ herself comments that, “I broke Mystique’s anonymity once I told one ex colleague of mine about my blog, and since that day I can’t write like before, I feel I am watched and being monitored by her.” Therefore my supposition that it was Faiza Ambah who had “outed” M through her description now clearly seems misplaced. Apologies to Ms. Ambah. ~HC]
In the WaPo story, Ambah makes it seem as though the first thing Mystique wants to talk about, the very moment they meet, is sex. In this very pained post that Mystique put up on her blog the next day, she wrote:

    Back in mid-Ramadan, the famous Saudi journalist Faiza Ambah contacted me and told me she wanted to write an article about Saudi bloggers. I was very excited since she is one of the first Saudi female journalists, and I couldn’t wait to meet her.
    The first meeting was cancelled since I couldn’t get a driver for that evening (of course all of you know that we women can’t drive here).
    The second meeting was amazing. We’ve talked about many things: how I’ve discovered my talent, how I started blogging, what inspires me to write, and the reasons behind me writing of “Rantings of an Arabian Woman” and “Unleash the Buried Soul I & II” [i.e., two of her earlier blog posts.]
    We discussed sexual harassments that women at work face here, a topic still untouched here in Saudi Arabia, and of course women’s life in general…
    … When I read the article I wasn’t very pleased. The Mystique portrayed there is nowhere close to who I am and Faiza had met me in person and we had many conversations. The portrayal of me was all about sex! Actually, my blog has a combination of a lot of topics. Why was the main focus only about the relatively small sensual parts? …
    I did not sit down and immediately start talking about sex or when I got in touch with my sexuality. We talked about a lot of things and about how young women in Saudi learn about sex.

Anyway, I’ve now gone and read a few of the posts on Mystique’s reconstructed blog. Certainly, not all of them are about sensual relations (and the sensuality in those that are is expressed only in a very indirect way.)
I found this poem, that she posted on November 16, particularly touching. It’s about a flock of beggar children in her home-town, Jeddah. Yes, beggar children in Saudi Arabia. How many other people write about that??
So anyway, in her “farewell” post there she assures us, “I won’t stop writing, I promise.” (And she quotes a couple of beautiful lines from the great palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.)
… Just a couple of quick final notes on the Mystique story. Firstly, Mystique, I’m delighted you came to JWN and left a comment here– especially since it included the link to your reconstructed blog.
Secondly, in response to the discovery that Mystique’s original blog had been taken down after the WaPo piece came out, our sometimes overheated commenter, Vadim, wrote here about Saudi Arabia, “Does it concern you in the least that one of their female bloggers may face imprisonment, torture or death merely for expressing her thoughts online?” I later described that as a “silly exaggeration” that seemed intended only to whip up additional Islamophobia in western society.
(I also wrote, “The rights infractions that do happen in Saudi Arabia are bad enough without you propagating completely baseless scare stories like this one.”)
So anyway, I’m glad that we have, to a certain extent, cleared that one up and established that Mystique has apparently been neither imprisoned, nor tortured, nor killed as a result of her blogging..
Finally: My very best wishes to Mystique in her new writing ventures. I hope we can all enjoy the results– online, or on paper– sometime soon!
Addendum, 8:30 p.m. 11/28: Soon after I published this on my blog, Mystique’s reconstructed site also came down off Blogger. So I did a “cache” search on Google for the distinctive term she used in her URL there and got successfully to the cached version of the main page of her blog. I copied the banner there and the first three or four entries into this file, so that JWN’s readers can read that small sampling of her work. (It includes the farewell post, the post about the WaPo, and the poem about child beggars.)
I am, of course, sorry that Mystique took down even the reconstruction of her blog, as that means I’m now unable to explore most of it any further. But it was very plucky and resourceful fo her to have put it back up again, even if for only a few days there. And at least it gave her the chance to say “farewell” to her readers. I for one return the hope that she fares well in her new ventures.