Lebanese Hizbullah in Iraq

So much New York Times today, so little time to read and digest it… But as I noted here yesterday, the situation for the whole Bushite scheme in Iraq is this week reaching a clear turning point.
Interesting times…
So my final “selection” from today’s NYT is this piece by Michael Gordon and Dexter Filkins, under the title Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq.
And yes, as the article makes clear, that is Lebanese Hizbullah that they are writing about.
Here’s the lead:

    A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr.
    The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said.

My guess is that the anonymous US official in question is CIA Director Michael Hayden, who in standard journalistic practice is referred to by name elsewhere in the article.
The Mahdi Army is, of course, the main Sadrist paramilitary formation.
Gordon and Filkins write, intriguingly, that the anonymous official’s account,

    is consistent with a claim made in Iraq this summer by a mid-level Mahdi commander, who said his militia had sent 300 fighters to Lebanon, ostensibly to fight alongside Hezbollah. “They are the best-trained fighters in the Mahdi Army,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Well, “consistent”, give a or take a difference of some 200% or 500% in the number of Mahdi Army said to have gone to Lebanon to train with Hizbullah… There is, after all, quite a difference between “300” and “1,000 to 2,000”.
However, the report from the mid-level Mahdi commander has some real credibility, since we learn at the end of the article that a Baghdad-based, Iraqi NYT reporter called Hosham Hussein also “contributed reporting” to it. Presumably, it was he who had gotten the interview with the Mahdi Army commander back in summer. (If so, since this is a really important and exclusive interview, Hussein should have been given a full byline rather than letting the two overpaid white guys swagger around with all the glory.)
The article gave the following details:

    The mid-level Mahdi commander… said the group sent to Lebanon was called the Ali al-Hadi Brigade, named for one of two imams buried at the Askariya Mosque in Samarra. The bombing of that shrine in February unleashed the fury of Shiite militias and accelerated sectarian violence.
    According to the Mahdi commander, the brigade was organized and dispatched by a senior Mahdi officer known as Abu Mujtaba. It went by bus to Syria in July, and was then led across the border into Lebanon, he said. He said the fighters were from Diwaniya and Basra, as well as from the Shiite neighborhoods of Shoala and Sadr City in Baghdad.
    “They travel as normal people from Iraq to Syria,” one of the militiamen said. “Once they get to Syria, fighters in Syria take them in.”

The anonymous US official is quoted in the piece as expressing the judgment that,

    While Iran wants a stable Iraq… it sees an advantage in “managed instability in the short term” to bog down the American military and defeat the Bush administration’s objectives in the region.
    “There seems to have been a strategic decision taken sometime over late winter or early spring by Damascus, Tehran, along with their partners in Lebanese Hezbollah, to provide more support to Sadr to increase pressure on the U.S.,” the American intelligence official said.

Of course, US officials would have a much improved ability to understand Iran’s true goals and motivations inside Iraq if they were ever allowed to actually talk to them, as opposed merely to trying to intuit their intentions from afar…
The US official is quoted as saying that some of the Sadrist fighters who went to Lebanon “were present during the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel this summer, though there was no indication they had taken part in the fighting.”
And the article had this:

    Asked what the militia members had learned, the official replied, “Weapons, bomb-making, intelligence, assassinations, the gambit of skill sets.”

H’mm. That would be “gamut” of skill-sets, I believe, not “gambit”. (Such ignorance at the NYT– or the CIA… I am shocked, shocked!)
Anyway, reading that, I thought that what I most hope that the Mahdi Army people learned from Hizbullah was not technical skills like those mentioned but the more important skills of discipline, command and control, and operational security. It is in the realm of these latter kinds of skills that Lebanese Hizbullah has notably excelled– and it is these kinds of skills that the paramilitary groups battling the US occupation in Iraq most notably seem to lack.
For example, the Mahdi Army itself has reportedly splintered into numerous tiny fractions and factions, some with apparently cross-cutting goals. This has horrendous effects for, first and foremost, the civilian population of Iraq. But it also greatly complicates the search for a new and sustainable political entente within Iraq, and makes considerably harder the prospect of being able to negotiate any kind of orderly exit of the US forces from the country.
It is quite understandable to me that, in the circumstances of the immediate period after the US invasion, the Mahdi Army should have grown up into such a sprawling, factionalizable constellation of entitites. (And of course, the policy pursued in Iraq since 2003 by the US, and perhaps also by the Iranians, has strongly stoked that tendency towards factionalism at all levels of Iraqi society.) But now, if a reasonable political and military de-escalation is to be achieved in Iraq, then surely it is better to support the emergence of larger, more unified political entities that have that have the unity of command required to deliver on agreements reached and also, potentially, to allow for a stronger form of accountability to the general Iraqi public.
Throughout history, once strong nationalist forces have been able to throw off the forces of foreign invasion and colonialism, most of the men (and women) who took up arms in the nationalist struggle have been successfully reintegrated back into normal civilian life. But how you get from “here” to “there” in Iraq still looks extremely difficult. I would say that if we see all the main blocs in Iraqi society develop more coherent and disciplined internal decisionmaking structures, along with more civility towards other social and political trends within the nation and a readiness to participate in civilian political life, these developments would all be very helpful for everyone concerned. Hizbullah has gone a considerable distance down that path in recent years and is probably in a good position to help the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist movement more broadly to develop in this direction.

Bush still shutting out Iran and Syria?

The NYT’s Helene Cooper has a well-reported but very worrying piece in today’s paper in which she writes:

    As President Bush and his top diplomats try to halt the downward spiral in Iraq and Lebanon, they seem intent on their strategy of talking only to Arab friends, despite increasing calls inside and outside the administration for them to reach out to Iran and Syria as well.

She noted that there have been

    signs of strain within the administration, particularly at the State Department, where career Foreign Service officials have argued for increased dialogue with Iran and Syria to try to stem the violence in Iraq and Lebanon. “We’ve got a mess on our hands,” said a senior State Department official, who, like others discussing the subject, spoke on the condition of anonymity…

Speicifically, she wrote,

    the United States wants Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt to work to drive a wedge between the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has been behind many of the Shiite reprisal attacks in Iraq, a senior administration official said. That would require getting the predominantly Sunni Arab nations to work to get moderate Sunni Iraqis to support Mr. Maliki, a Shiite. That would theoretically give Mr. Maliki the political strength necessary to take on Mr. Sadr’s Shiite militias.
    “There’s been some discussion about whether you just try to deal first with the Sunni insurgency, but that would mean being seen to be taking just one side of the fight, which would not be acceptable,” the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic practice.

In this context, I think “dealing with” the Sunni insurgency means “trying to put it down”, rather than dealing diplomatically with it (though I do wish Cooper had been a clearer on this, as the two meanings are almost directly opposed to each other.)
But however you read that phrase, the anonymous US diplomat’s implied claim that the policy he was describing would not be seen as “taking just one side of the fight” is quite risible.
Basically, they are proposing trying to split the Shiite community while politically “capturing” one portion of it and holding it in a supposed alliance with a Sunni Iraqi bloc that is allied with Washington’s Sunni Arab stooges in the region? This is not “one-sided”???
Anyway, it is highly unlikely to “work”, at any level. Who or what do they think Nouri al-Maliki is? Vidkun Quisling? “Chief” Gatsha Buthelezi? Marshal Petain? Mustafa Dudeen?
Well, he just possibly might be a potentially “quisling” type of individual on a rank with any of the above. (And it is possible that while in office he may have stashed away enough US aid dollars in his private accounts in Switzerland that he might now feel tempted to go along with this crazy scheme. I don’t know.) But he already saw, when he got stoned during his visit to Sadr City a couple of days ago, that many in the large and sprawling pro-Sadrist movement in Iraq have extreme distrust of him at the present.
More importantly, though, Maliki is not just a disembodied US stooge. He’s the nominee and top representative in the Iraqi government of a longstanding and authentic Iraqi political movement called the Daawa Party, which has been in a relatively stable alliance with the Sadrists for some time now. If he goes along with whatever anti-Sadrist scheme the Bushites have in mind for him, then it’s very unlikely that he could take more than a handful of the Daawa people with him. And then, what use is he to the Americans anyway??
It’s a lunatic scheme. Indeed, since it promises to bring nothing bit further division and political polarization to Iraq’s long-battered people, it is not just lunatic but criminally so.
This latest mad attempt to sow division among Iraq’s people is just, in a sense, the “argumentum ad absurdum” of the “divide and rule” policy that Martin Indyk and others have been urging the Bushites to pursue in Iraq since April of 2003. And it shows the essential absurdity and impossibility of the Bushites being able to achieve anything even partially constructive in Iraq at this late stage of its pursuit of an imperial scheme there.
The only alternative? A deep, deep breath, and a decision to find a way to end the imperial scheme.
.. And at a broader level, too, I would note that if the Bushites are setting themselves up to be the force that regulates in some micro-managing way the broader relationship between “Shiites” and “Sunnis” throughout the whole Middle East, then they are also setting themselves up for a much broader failure and regional conflagration. In fact, as we have seen in Iraq, the only way they have been able to “regulate” Sunni-Shiite relations there has had the–unintended or, quite frequently, fully intended– consequence of exacerbating tensions between the two groups (while US lives and interests have also thereby been placed in extreme danger.) Are there any members of Middle Eastern societies today who want to see the whole region go up in flames of violence, sectarianism, and fear, Iraq-style?
Only possibly some hardliners in Israel– in alliance with their good White House friend Elliot Abrams– might be content to see that outcome.
But I very much doubt that the rulers of Jordan or Egypt will feel comfortable getting dragged into supporting a US policy in Iraq that (1) shows no chance at all of succeeding inside Iraq, and indeed will only make things worse there, and (2) also threatens to sow further seeds of sectarianism and unctrollable fitna throughout the whole region.
The alternative policy that I have argued consistently for, here and elsewhere, is one that seeks above all the de-escalation of tensions and fear, a broad campaign to win commitments to resolve differences and address concerns through negotiations and other nonviolent means, and the enrolment of all of Iraq’s neighbors, along with the United Nations, in an attempt to resolve the many urgent concerns in Iraq and to ease the ability of the US to undertake an orderly and speedy exit from Iraq.

Zelikow resigning, Charlottesville-bound

In a surprise move, our old neighbor Philip Zelikow announced yesterday that he’ll be resigning from his job as “counsellor” to Condi Rice, and returning to teach at the University of Virginia.
With all due respect to Phil, a historian and a very smart and ambitious person of the “realist” school of political thought, the reason he gave for this sudden resignation– that he needed to think about making enough to pay college tuition for his children– is inherently non-credible. (Actually, I think his kids are still far below college age.)
So what’s the story?
The NYT account linked to above indicates there is likely a connection between the resignation and a speech Phil made to a strongly pro-Israeli group in Washington two months ago, in which he,

    said progress on the Arab-Israeli dispute was a ‘sine qua non’ in order to get moderate Arabs “to cooperate actively with the United States on a lot of other things that we care about.”

That speech, as the NYT’s Helene Cooper noted, “ruffled the feathers of American Jewish groups and Israeli officials.” But then again, as she also notes, “the administration may soon be doing what Mr. Zelikow advised, starting a renewed push for a Middle East peace initiative, in part to shore up support in the Arab world for providing help in Iraq…”
Cooper fleshes out the latter topic in this larger piece in the paper. And there, she makes clear that though the Bushites are indeed making an intensive push to win the support of their “traditional” Arab friends– primarily Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia– for their policy in Iraq, they still seem adamantly opposed to trying to involve either Syria or Iran in this campaign. (More on this in another post.)
So, I surmise that the president’s decision at this time not to do the “realist” thing of trying to work with Syria and Iran may have been one of the precipitating causes for Zelikow’s departure.
I note, too, that there were some rumors swirling around recently to the effect that, in his push for a better, more realistic Middle East policy, the President might be asking Zelikow to replace that ideological old ultra-Zionist and troublemaker Elliot Abrams as the principal Middle East staff person on the National Security Council staff. That evidently has not happened.
Maybe Phil had really wanted that job– or at least, had really wanted to get Abrams out of it– and had failed in that attempt, and that led him to resign? That is another possibility.
How much of a “realist” is Phil Zelikow? Well, if you read Bob Woodward’s latest tome, you’ll see references to Phil having been sent by Condi to Iraq on a number of different fact-finding missions since he went to DC to work for her in I think February 2005. And each time he would nose around and find out a lot of the murky underside, chaos, and outright failures that were occurring in Iraq, and would report them back to her. (I can’t lay my hand on our copy right now. I imagine the spouse has it somewhere… Anyway, you get my general gist.) He certainly never drank the ideological Kool-Aid.
Helene Cooper reports on this short exchange she had with him Monday:

    Mr. Zelikow disputed suggestions that he was more of a political realist than an ideologue, calling it a “false dichotomy.”
    “I think the issue of ideals is important, but ideals that are not practically attainable” end up hurting more than helping, he said. “You don’t end up strengthening your ideals when you fail to attain them.”

That’s an excellent point.
It is bad news, in my book, if this very sensible person sees something in the present direction of US policy that has forced him to resign. (Though nice, of course, that he’s coming back to C-ville. Welcome back, the Zelikows.)

Bushites running (flying) very scared; Rightly

Earlier today, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley publicly admitted that in Iraq, “obviously, as I think everyone would agree and as the President has said, things are not proceeding well or fast enough…”
You have to know the Bushites are worried. Extremely worried.
The above link goes to the White House transcript of what they call a “press gaggle”, that was given by Hadley and White House press person Tony Snow-job, to reporters flying with Bush to Estonia for a NATO gathering. From there, he’ll be proceeding to Jordan, to meet Iraqi “Prime Minister” Nouri al-Maliki. Cheney and Condi Rice are also burning a lot of jet fuel over the Middle East these days as they try to get a few last-minute (lame?) ducks in a row to prevent a complete catastrophe spiraling out of control in Iraq.
(Where today, incidentally, a major oil refinery in Kirkuk got set ablaze by mortars and a US plane was downed in Anbar province— and numerous other tragedies befell the country’s long-suffering people.)
If you have a few minutes, go read the rest of that “press gaggle” transcript. I think in the future it’ll be a seminal text in Bushology. Including this classic exchange:

    Q I have a question… What kind of mood is the President in right now about all these different problems around the world?
    MR. HADLEY: You know him — he’s a very resilient guy. And, look, it’s a new Middle East that is emerging. And I think he sees it as a real opportunity, but also challenges. And it is both of those. And the task he’s given for himself and for the rest of us is how to take advantage of these opportunities to advance the war on terror, advance the freedom agenda, and, over time, bring real stability to that part of the region…

Ohmigod. Does he think we’re complete idiots??
And meanwhile, from the other side of the world– Australia– here’s another indicator of how worried Bush and all his supporters ought rightly to be, right now. That PDF doc I linked to there is the text of a lecture given Monday at Sydney’s”Lowy Institute for International Policy” by Robert O’Neill, an experienced and impeccably credentialed guru on strategic affairs who was the Director of the IISS in London back when I joined it in the mid-1980s. After that, he held the Chichele Chair of the History of War at Oxford for many years.
O’Neill, as I remember him from the couple of times I met him, is a charming and fairly laid-back Australian guy. So when he starts distributing his speeches with underlinings, you have to know that he’s trying to make sure he gets his point across.
This is the opening to his lecture (all the underlinings in the excerpts that follow are from the original text there):

    We stand at a very testing time in terms of shaping our security environment. I do not want to be overly pessimistic. We and our forebears have come through worse situations and gone on to great periods of prosperity, relative peace and cultural achievement. But for us at this time, that happy end is by no means assured…

Are you paying attention yet?
So first, he talks about some of the lessons he learned while serving as an intelligence officer with the Australian forces fighting in Vietnam. And he lists five sound, very realistic lessons about the nuts and bolts of “counter-insurgency” that he learned there.
Then this:

    Fast forward to Iraq in 2006 – is it a familiar picture? Iraq is an even worse problem than Vietnam. It is not a unified nation state like Vietnam but an artificial creation of the British Empire in 1921 to kill two birds with the one stone: holding down an Arab revolt while finding a place for Prince Feisal whom the French had ejected from Syria. Iraq has been held together by force ever since, ready to fly apart once the grip of that force was broken. In 2002 it was clear to me that the main problem in invading Iraq would be the insurgency and chaos phase that would follow the toppling of Saddam. When I put the point then to relevant friends in the United States who supported the pending invasion of Iraq, it was dismissed. “We will do the heavy lifting and get rid of Saddam. The allies can handle the occupation.” Of course toppling Saddam was not the “heavy lifting”. So the coalition went to war with little understanding of what they were about, a flawed strategy and no policy in place for responding to what was bound to follow – a formidable insurgency. The invasion went in with a US force much smaller than that of General Westmoreland in Vietnam, who himself had faced a much smaller problem. As for allied forces in the invasion of Iraq, they were hopelessly short of the strength needed to mount a counter-insurgency campaign.
    The Coalition launched the war without enough troops, US or allied, to do the job and without a strategy, force structure and the necessary civil capabilities for meeting the main challenge. Having blundered into a hornets’ nest, the intervening force and its allies in Iraq have taken a hammering. The fate of our Iraqi allies, and their civil population, like that of our Vietnamese partners in the 1970s, is perhaps the saddest aspect of the war. Initially Coalition forces had little idea of how to fight an insurgency. The sense of all five of the points that I mentioned a few minutes ago was ignored or violated…

A few pages later, we come to this assessment, bleak indeed for the Bushites and all other “western” hegemonists:

    Given the result of the recent US elections, we need to think hard about the consequences of possible defeat in Iraq. To elaborate on what I said earlier, that conflict can be won only by a much more effective coalition effort, requiring a major increase in US and allied troop numbers in Iraq, substantial improvements in training and operational methods, and a much stronger civil reconstruction effort. This is not likely to happen. The probable outcomes are either a sudden descent into chaos as Coalition forces are withdrawn, or a protracted civil war, overlain with an insurgency against remaining coalition forces.
    In the event of chaos, effective government in Iraq will cease for at least some years during which terrorist groups will be able to concentrate, re-build, flourish and reach out to other targets utside Iraq. Enemy forces will be heartened; recruiting will rise; funds and weapons will pour in; pressure will be exerted on regional governments friendly to the West; more young men and women who are willing to commit suicide to harm Western and Israeli interests will become available; and the oil price will rise to new heights. Defeat in Iraq will be a serious blow to the public standing of the United States and will invite other challenges to its authority…
    Iran will read a message of encouragement for its intransigence in dealing with the West. It will almost certainly go ahead to produce nuclear weapons. It will exercise an overshadowing influence in Iraq, Syria, the Arab Gulf states and Israel. The lesson of US failure in Iraq will be read (perhaps wrongly) as US unwillingness to attempt regime-change in Iran. The North Koreans will probably draw similar conclusions, although with less justification than in the case of Iran because North Korea is nowhere near as strong a state. Nuclear weapons proliferation will become more difficult to control with the threat of intervention against the proliferators dismissed…

And here is O’Neill’s final take on the US’s situation today:

    It has huge capacities for good around the world. But it is also sailing through uncharted waters and in recent years has been in heavy seas. We Australians, as one of America’s serious allies, have a responsibility to help the US through this difficult passage. We can do this in many ways through diplomacy, economic co-operation and military commitments. We also have an obligation, when we see our senior partner about to make a mistake, to speak out and warn of the consequences, and even offer some suggestions on how to reach our common goals more effectively.
    As I look into the future I can see some very undesirable outcomes, but we are not in their grip yet. With a major effort intellectually, politically, commercially and militarily, we might just avoid them and come through into the more peaceful upland that we hoped for so much at the end of the Cold War and then failed to find. The great challenge for leaders and analysts in the decades ahead will be to find ways of building cohesion and co-operation, not division and destruction. We must not let the War on Terror destroy the world order from which we derive so much benefit and protection.

Note the way he put that. It is not “terror” that he is accusing of threatening to destroy the world order– but the “War on Terror.” From a man of O’Neill’s strong pro-western leanings, these are strong words indeed.
Bob O’Neill seems very worried. I think that from his perspective he is right to be. I am worried, too, because I know that before there is any chance of any kind of US withdrawal being organized from Iraq– orderly or chaotic– tens of thousands more Iraqis will die, and the whole conflagration may spread to other, very vulnerable parts of the region.
On a related note, I have been trying to take some time to further flesh out my analysis of the “Namibia Option” for a UN-covered, orderly US withdrawal from Iraq… But it still needs a bit more time, and as I work on it I have been having this increasingly strong and sinking feeling that any prospect of an orderly US withdrawal from Iraq is becoming increasingly unlikely with each day that passes. So it feels like a bit of a futile exercise. But still, I do want to get it done…
Afterthought: Oh, this wasn’t meant to be an afterthought but I forgot to put it in the first time around… I just wanted to note that while I don’t agree with Bob O’Neill’s view that Iraq is solely an “artificial creation of the British Empire in 1921”, still, he does signal an extremely significant point there, which is one I’m also confronting as I look at the “Namibia option”. Namely that whereas in Vietnam, or Namibia, the nationalist side basically had one single, dominant organization with centralized decision-making, however ragged it may sometimes have been, in Iraq you very evidently don’t have that kind of nationalist organizational integrity and unity of command. This considerably complicates matters for everyone concerned: the various– and often brutally competing– “nationalist” forces themselves, the occupying forces, and the above all the poor bloody civilians who in Iraq have become caught up in the middle of all this, so horrendously.
In calmer circumstances, this is precisely the kind of complex political picture that some form of democratic process, including a nationwide election, should be able to regulate. But in Iraq you have a situation in which (1) the conditions nowadays look extremely unsuited to the holding of any further elections, and (2) the whole concept of “elections” and “democracy” has probably become seriously tainted by the terrible abuse of the practice under the auspices of the US occupation.
Plus, inside Iraq, the UN enjoys nothing like the political support that it enjoyed in Namibia in the 1980s. (Because of the nefarious role the UN was forced to play during the 1990s, in enforcing the US-UK-imposed sanctions regime against the Iraqi people and their institutions.)
Truly an extremely tangled web. Maybe all we can do at this point is get down on our knees and pray???

Kenyan survivors of British colonial brutality strike back

The London law firm of Leigh Day, working with six survivors of the extreme brutality used by the british colonial authorities in their attempt to crush the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, has now sued the British government for damages in the matter, “based on the tort of negligence”.
(Legal filing: here; press release here; and here is an informative article on the matter from the Guardian in October.)
As I wrote in this recent article about the recent historiography on the anti-Mau Mau campaign, the timing of that campaign, and also of the recent work of compiling and exposing the historical facts about it, are both significant. The British authorities pursued this extremely brutal campaign– in which scores of thousands of suspected Mau Mau sympathizers were killed and hundreds of thousands more dispossessed, mutilated, and/or psychologically scarred for life– some years after the exposure of the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe, and also after the adoption by Britain and other members of the “international community” of such foundational documents as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Nuremberg Principles (regarding command responsibility), etc., etc.
These colonial atrocities were carried out, moreover, recently enough that many of the participants in them– from both the perpetrating and the victimized/survivors’ side– are still alive and still medically fit to take part in a legal proceeding.
Personally, I am delighted that some– though still pitiably few– of the atrocious crimes committed during the anti-nationalist “counter-insurgency” campaigns of the “last throes” of the British Empire are finally becoming subject to some form of meaningful accountability. In France, the parallel accountability attempts haven’t gotten very far, and indeed seem to have become entangled in the snares of present-day French anti-Islamism. But still, for some years now the French public has been quite unavoidably aware of the atrocious actions in 1950s Algeria proudly confessed to by former torturer Paul Aussaresses (1 and 2.)
In general, until recently, the agenda of people working in the big, highly funded field of ‘Transitional Justice’ has been very circumscribed, limiting itself to actions undertaken by perpetrators other than the big, European-heritage conglomerates of imperial/colonial rapine who devastated the non-European world for most of the past 350 years.
Where have been the big court cases and other “accountability” projects brought and won regarding British, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Dutch, or US imperial depradations in Africa or Asia (or, indeed, the Americas)? Where have been the big “accountability” projects against the European-heritage governments whose still-continuing control of the international financial system has imposed “structural adjustment” on impoverished populations around the world, inflicting the entirely predictable consequences of millions of avoidable deaths and widespread civil strife, while these same rich governments have continued to shovel huge subsidies to “their own” white farmers back home? Nowhere, since ‘Transitional Justice’ has not, by and large, addressed these issues. Instead, it has poured huge resources into pursuing inconclusive criminal prosecutions of a few tinpot African malefactors (acting, generally, in the context of the IMF-induced civil strife mentioned above) along with political losers from the fringes of the “white” world like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic.
But now, we have a lawsuit that aims at the heart of one of the imperial beasts in question.
(I am interested to see that the legal claim filed there specifies that one of the elements of evidence it will introduce is the whistleblowing report that British Quaker Eileen Fletcher published in May 1956, after she resigned from work as a so-called “rehabilitation officer” in the British camps in Kenya, and exposed something of the brutality that was being practised there under the (truly Orwellian) guise of “rehabilitation”… And other evidence will draw on information used in questions asked in the British Parliament by my grandmother’s socialist cousin Fenner Brockway– though his name is sadly mis-spelled there on p.3.)
This lawsuit is big. And I hope it will lead to a much broader redirection of the whole field of ‘Transitional Justice.’

The ‘Namibia Option’, Part I: Strategic Context

The ‘Namibia Option’ (for a UN-covered US withdrawal from Iraq)

For four decades after 1948, the apartheid regime in South Africa maintained
an illegal military occupation over the land of present-day Namibia, which
it named ‘South West Africa.’  SWA/Namibia lies immediately to the north
of South Africa’s northwestern border, and to its north again lies the vast country
of Angola. Until 1975, Portugal ruled Angola as an overseas possession, but
in the wake of the democratic, anti-colonial (‘Carnation’) revolution in
Portugal in 1974, Angola speedily gained its independence.  The black
nationalists of the MPLA movement who came to power there had longstanding
ties with South Africa’s own African National Congress (ANC), and with the
Soviet bloc.  At that point, Namibia became an important “front-line
territory” for South Africa, from which South Africa sought to combat the
black nationalist/pro-Soviet nexus in Angola. That also involved stepping
up the brutality with which it oppressed the activities of the territory’s
indigenous ‘South West Africa People’s Organization’ (SWAPO).

The United Nations had never supported either South Africa’s continued military
occupation of SWA/Namibia or the attempt South Africa made in 1948 to annex
SWA.  As the military situation in that region began to escalate in
the years after 1975, the UN Security Council intervened with all the relevant
parties and in September 1978 adopted a key
resolution, number 435
, that called for:

  • “the withdrawal of South Africa’s illegal administration from Namibia
    and the transfer of power to the people of Namibia with the assistance of
    the United Nations”,
  • the establishment of “a United Nations Transition Assistance Group
    … for a period of up to 12 months in order to… ensure the early independence
    of Namibia through free elections under the supervision and control of the
    United Nations”,
  • “Welcomes the preparedness of the South West Africa People’s Organization
    to co-operate… including its expressed readiness to sign and observe the
    cease-fire provisions… “,
  • “Calls upon South Africa forthwith to co-operate with the Secretary-General
    in the implementation of the present resolution”,
  • Declares that all unilateral measures taken by the illegal administration
    in Namibia… are null and void.”

Despite the hopes that some western leaders had entertained, however, South
Africa refused to agree to the terms of this resolution.  Through the
years that followed, as the apartheid regime continued to battle its opponents
both internal and external, Resolution 435 remained uinimplemented.  But
at least– like Resolution 242 of 1967 relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict–
it still remained on the books, providing the central, internationally agreed
standard for how any future resolution of the Namibia issue should be approached.
 Indeed, throughout the 1980s, successive Secretary-General’s Special Representatives
for the Namibia issue continued to work at the diplomatic level, fleshing
out more details of how resolution 435 might one day be implemented.

By 1988, South Africa was finally ready to agree.  What brought this about
this was the quagmire it finally found itself in inside Angola.
 Over the years, the South Africans had increased the numbers of their
own troops whom they were deploying inside Angola, to fight alongside
the two anti-government forces FNLA and UNITA there.  The MPLA-led Angolan
government, for its part, had exercised its quite legitimate right to bring
its own allies into the equation to help it shore up the defense of  its
country.  Fidel Castro responded with particular vigor to the appeals
President Agostinho Neto had made to him: some 50,000-plus Cuban troops deployed
to southern Angola to help the government forces confront the insurgents
and their South African allies.  As Roger Hearn* has written, “By early
to mid 1988, South Africa was facing its own ‘Vietnam quagmire’, with close
to 50 000 Cuban troops in Angola now deployed, many provocatively close to
the border with Namibia; and mounting domestic pressure for the South African
Government to justify its position in Angola.”(Hearn, p.47)  Hearn noted
that 12 South African soldiers had been killed inside Angola in fall 1987, a development
which forced the government, for the first time to admit that it did indeed
have active-duty troops inside Angola.  He added:

The acknowledgement of direct South African involvement began
to raise concerns of a costly ground war with Cuban and Angolan troops with
massive military support from the Soviet Union.  Arguments were raised
that South Africa was over stretched militarily because of the cost associated
with the state of emergency within South Africa…. The Cuban advance to
the Namibian border, along with the direct engagement of SADF’s with the
Cubans in late June of 1988, intensified the concerns of the South African
public to intolerable levels.(Hearn, pp. 47-48)

As you can see, therefore, there were many similarities (though some differences)
in the broad strategic circumstances in which South Africa finally– in 1988–
came to the realization that it needed to significantly (or perhaps wholly)
draw down its troop presence in the Angola-Namibia theater, and the situation
the US finds itself in today, regarding its troop deployment in Iraq…

(Coming here soon: Similarities in the content of the UN’s task
during the transition out of illegal foreign occupation and into legitimate
national self-rule in Namibia and the task it might perform in Iraq… )

*Roger Hearn, UN Peacekeeping in Action: The Namibian Experience (Commack,
NY: Nova Science, 1999)

Chuck Hagel: Thinking again.

On August 21st, I (Scott) posted a jwn commentary on Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) and his rather lonely, if compelling complaints against the Bush Administration approach to the Middle East, and Israel/Lebanon in particular. Back in August, Hagel was quite prescient in anticipating that his Republican party “had lost its way” and was vulnerable to being, “held accountable.”
Alas, I was disappointed when Senator Hagel “rushed off a cliff” with the herd in voting for the recent “detainee treatment bill” – and even against an amendment what would have restored habeas corpus rights for any non-citizen human beings scooped up in the US g.w.t. dragnet. I’ve yet to come across explanations for Senator Hagel’s vote, though one curious WaPo report suggestes that he, along with other moderate Republicans, might have supported Senator Specter’s original proposal to permit habeas corpus for “detainees” after a year of detention. (I hope one day soon Senator Hagel will have the courage to explain and/or recant his vote and then support corrective legislation.)
As it stands though, Hagel’s votes on our shameful modern day echo of the Alien & Sedition Acts reminded me of what Kyle Michaelis, a Nebraska-based blogger, wrote about the Senator:

“He’s Chuck Hagel, folks – the thinking man’s unthinking Republican. And, you almost have to like him; you just can’t count on him.”

Yet I am happy to note that Hagel is still “thinking,” and rather far “off the neocon reservation,” – as evident in his oped in today’s Washington Post. The Senator opens by declaring,

“There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq.” Neither is Iraq “a prize to be won or lost,” nor is there a “military solution.”

So glad we cleared that up.
Imagine President Bush being so candid with loved ones of those who have fallen in Iraq. At least Senator Hagel isn’t cluelessly telling us “we’ll win unless we quit.”
Yet unlike Helena, Senator Hagel is better on diagnosis and prognosis than on prescription — other than a reference to a “phased troop withdrawal.”
As for how we got into the Iraq mess:

Continue reading “Chuck Hagel: Thinking again.”

Gaza ceasefire starts (raggedly)

Last night, Israel and the Palestinian Authority both committed themselves to a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel, that would also include the complete withdrawal of the IOF troops from Gaza. It has gotten off to a rocky start. According to this account by AP’s Amy Teibel and Ibrahim Barzak:

    Ahead of the new agreement, which took effect 6 a.m. Sunday, Israel pulled all its forces out of Gaza, the army said. Dozens of tanks and armored vehicles were parked just over the border in a military staging ground in southern Israel early Sunday.
    But Palestinian militants continued firing rockets into Israel throughout the morning. Israeli police reported at least four rockets fired at the Israeli town of Sderot and an Associated Press photographer in the border town heard at least two more strikes. Another AP photographer in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun heard several rockets fired throughout the morning.

There are serious issues of control on the Palestinian side, where any attempt to exercise real control over frontline forces has always been extremely difficult because of Israel’s continual and often lethal interdiction operations.
The AP reporters wrote:

    Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas said he had contacted the leaders of all the Palestinian factions Sunday and they reassured him they were committed to the truce.
    “There is a 100 percent effort to make this work, but there is no guarantee of 100 percent results,” said Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas-led government.
    Hamas’ own militants claimed responsibility for firing rockets into Israel after 6 a.m., clouding prospects for the truce’s longevity.
    “(We) reiterate that our attacks against the enemy continue,” the group said in a statement posted on its Web site.
    The Hamas militants said they continued their attacks because some Israeli troops remained inside Gaza, an accusation Israel denied.
    Islamic Jihad also claimed responsibility for firing rockets into Israel after the truce, and a spokesman, Abu Hamza, denied his group had signed on to truce. However, top Islamic Jihad leaders had said they were part of the deal, and the new rocket fire suggested they were not in complete control of their fighters…

Luckily, PM Olmert thus far seems to be showing a slightly flexible attitude that might allow the Palestinians a little time to bring their front-line militants under control. His spokesperson Miri Eisin is quoted there as saying about the rockets that were fired after 6 a.m.:

    “Let’s hope that’s just the problems of the beginning… But if Israel is attacked, we will respond. If there are Palestinian factions that are not part of the cease-fire, it’s hard to see how the cease-fire will hold.”

Meanwhile, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is in Cairo and there is the distinct possibility of further agreements that might cover a ceasefire in the West Bank and some large-scale prisoner exchanges…
Let’s all just hope that the existing ceasefire takes hold, the de-escalation process continues, and real negotiations for the ending of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Golan can be held very, very soon.

Ron Tira on the 33-day war

Strategic Assessment, published by the institute formerly known as the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, has a new issue, wholly available online, that is almost completely devoted to analyses of the 33-day war between Israel and Hizbullah.
The best article there, imho, is this one by Ron Tira, who is described in my paper copy of SA as “Formerly the head of a unit in Israel Air Force intelligence (‘Lahak’).” That tag-line also says that an abridged version of the article was published by HaArtez on September 15. I guess I missed it there.
Tira’s general analysis of the strategic shape of, and developments during, the war is largely similar to the one I described in my recent article on the war in Boston Review. But he goes into quite a lot more detail regarding the doctrinal and operational flaws of Israel’s performance.
He is absolutely crushing in the criticism he expresses of the ground force operations during the war. In a section subtitled The Absence of a Coherent Operational Concept for the Ground Forces he writes,

    Too little, too late: Israel introduced ground forces into Lebanon in the fighting belatedly, indecisively, and above all, without a clearly defined operational concept.
    … The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu claims that a military leader’s objective is to dictate to his enemy the nature of a war in which he has a relative advantage, and he should not be drawn into a type of war in which the enemy has a relative advantage. If this is not possible, said Sun Tzu, fighting should be avoided. For Clausewitz, in war one should attack the enemy’s plans. Israel played into Hizbollah’s hands, and conducted the campaign in accordance with Hizbollah’s plans and strengths and, as such, from the outset there was almost no chance of victory.

But it is notable– since he’s an air force person– that Tira is not an advocate of the view that airpower alone could have been expected to win the war (as Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz had apparently originally hoped.) Tira writes: “The idea of an operation based solely on [stand-off] firepower and without land maneuvers is still unproven and unfounded, and to date has scored just one success – in Kosovo. However, circumstances indicated that the second Lebanon War was very different from events in Kosovo… ”
He is also critical of the reliance that Halutz apparently placed on the “Shock and Awe” aspects of the early days of the war. Indeed, he’s pretty critical of the “Shock and Awe” approach as a whole– or rather, of “Effects-based operations” (EBO), which is the technical term in US military jargon for Shock and Awe…
This is how Tira defines the “direct” results of the way Israel fought the 33-day war:

    The direct upshot of the deterioration in the IDF force buildup and in the operational design, and the consequent adoption of particular campaign themes, was the failure to destroy, repress, or even to substantially impinge on enemy activity according to the primary parameters of Hizbollah’s operational design. Indeed, towards the end of the war, Hizbollah fired more than 200 rockets per day into Israel, while at the start of the war around 100 rockets were launched per day (even if the mixture shifted during the war toward short range surface-to-surface rockets). Hizbollah’s fighting forces continued operating while inflicting damage on the IDF, and even in most of the ground battles that they lost, they did not collapse or retreat. Hizbollah’s command and control echelon continued to function throughout the war. Its fighting spirit for the most part stayed strong, and currently there are no signs that its political will has been irreversibly impaired. While Hizbollah preferred to arrive at a ceasefire, this was based on a justifiable wish to “lock in its profits” (i.e., to stop the fighting at a stage where its force was maximizing its achievements and was perceived as the victor) and not because it was in distress or on the verge of collapse. In Hizbollah’s eyes, and in the view of some Arab onlookers, Hizbollah won the battle.
    Moreover, the fact that several hundred Hizbollah fighters faced up to four Israeli divisions and the Israel Air Force, and ended the war standing up after inflicting significant damage on IDF forces, may also generate indirect results that are at best problematic. Some of the parties that followed the progress of the war may conclude, correctly or otherwise, that the IDF of today is not the IDF of the past, and that the Israeli (and, in generally, the Western) soldier is weaker and finds it difficult to deal with the difficulties of battle. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this perception, if it takes hold.
    … the manner in which the second Lebanon War was conducted and the way in which it is viewed may affect the perception of Israel’s military superiority and, as such, may impact on many aspects of the reality in which Israel has existed since 1967. It is very difficult to foresee future political intent and to assess the probability of war; however it seems that in the wake of the second Lebanon War, at least some of the relevant parties may believe they can do battle with Israel and emerge from the fighting with the upper hand.

In other words, he’s expressing the fear that the credibility of Israel’s broader strategic deterrence may well have been significantly dented. H’mm, so maybe Israelis might consider that negotiations would be a better way to resolve their outstanding differences with their neighbors, rather than continuing along the path of refusing negotiations while sheltering behind the projection of the threat of using a huge amount of military power against anyone with outstanding claims against them?
Tira, unfortunately, doesn’t draw that conclusion. Maybe he’ll come to it over time?
In that section, though, he does also note that by being able to credibly “project” a very fearsome military deterrent against its neighbors since 1967, Israel has until now been able to get by very well without having to maintain an actual war-time type of economy:

    The perception of Israel’s military superiority was responsible for generating the requisite conditions for the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the peace process with the Palestinians, and thirty-three years of quiet on the Golan Heights. It allowed Israel to sustain a peacetime economy and a society of plenty and wellbeing, despite the absence of peace. And due to the perception of its military superiority, Israel became an American strategic asset that justified the investment of an aggregate amount of about $100 billion and the provision of dozens of billions of more dollars in guarantees, the best arms available, and a political umbrella.

He notes that there might be a real threat now that the Americans might reconsider Israel’s “strategic worth” to them, after the military debacles of the summer. (Don’t worry, Ron. Israel’s bought-and-paid-for friends in the US Congress won’t be judging Israel’s military capabilities on anything as crass as their intrinsic merits any time soon… I certainly don’t see any signs that the flood of taxpayer $$ going your way is going to stanched anytime soon.)
Here’s another intriguing quote from Tira:

    Hizbollah designed a war in which presumably Israel could only choose which soft underbelly to expose: the one whereby it avoids a ground operation and exposes its home front vulnerability, or the one whereby it enters Lebanon and sustains the loss of soldiers in ongoing ground-based attrition with a guerilla organization. Hizbollah’s brilliant trap apparently left Israel with two undesirable options…

And finally, this:

    To a large degree, the second Lebanon War was our Vietnam. Like the US in Vietnam, we tried to overcome guerillas with firepower but without massive maneuvering, force was put into use in rolling gradualism, the enemy leaned on a strategic rear in a neighboring country that was not attacked, and we did not engage in battle wholeheartedly and with a full commitment to victory. The bad news from the second Lebanon War is that we failed. The good news is that our regular and reserve forces are solid and committed; the problem is that they were assembled and deployed incorrectly. There is also good news in the fact that we received a wake-up call, and a second chance to learn and improve.

Those “good news” items there do seem like rather thin gruel for Israelis. Let’s hope the “learning and improving” they embark on now will include a more realistic assessment of their need for a changed balance between, on the one hand, war preparations and the projection of a massive military threat, and on the other, diplomacy and a real, good-faith commitment to negotiating all the outstanding issues with the neighbors on a basis of reciprocity and mutual respect.
So far, the international community has done pitifully little to make Israelis face up to this as a real and very necessary choice. But surely, if the Lebanon war “teaches” Israelis anything it should be that reliance only on military force can never resolve your problems and assure your security in a satisfactory way. Building relationships of reciprocal respect and mutual interest is (still) the best way to do that…. Anywhere in the world.

Occupations in Palestine and Iraq

Well, tonight’s the night that the Israeli occupation of Palestine (and Golan) will finally have lasted exactly for ten times as long as the US/UK occupation of Iraq.
If both occupations carry on another 10,783 days (roughly, 29.5 years) then the occupation of Palestine will have lasted twice as long as the occupation of Iraq.
Let’s not even think about that…
I do just hope, meanwhile, that people in the US who prior to 2003 had only the vaguest idea (if any at all) of what rule over another people through foreign military occupation actually involved will now have a more vivid understanding of what is meant when people in the world community talk about “the continuing occupation of Palestine.”
Rule through military occupation is absolutely, and inevitably anti-democratic. It was never envisioned as being a status that would last for anything beyond the few months or very small number of years required to fashion a permanent peace treaty. And of course, the implantation by the occupying power of members of its own citizenry into the land temporarily held under the rules of “belligerent military occupation” is absolutely and quite rightly forbidden under international law.
This is quite understandable if you look at the terrible effects that the settler-implantation projects launched by the German occupiers in East and Central Europe and the Japanese occupiers in China and elsewhere had on the populations of those occupied lands.
At least the US in Iraq (unlike Israel in Palestine and Golan) has not sought to implant its own citizens as settlers in the occupied land. The US “merely”, in an earlier era of the occupation, sought to establish its own domination over the entire economy and political system of the country. But even that project has now been effectively abandoned as unfeasible…
Time to roll back both these military occupations, and give the indigenous peoples of these lands their right to self-determination as fast as possible.