A plea from Jameela al-Shanti

Whem I was in Gaza in March, one of the Hamas people I interviewed was newly elected legislator Jamila al-Shanty. In this piece that I subsequently wrote for Salon, I described her in this way:

    Jamila Shanty is a robust, good-natured woman with a well-defined, expressive face who bustles into our meeting toting a large, tattered briefcase. Formerly a professor of psychology and philosophy at Gaza Islamic University, she relishes her new role in the parliament where, she tells me, she hopes to sit on the political and legal-affairs committees.
    “We need to strengthen our internal front and restore some discipline to Palestinian society,” she says of Hamas’ imminent priorities. “We must not give Israel the chance to come in here and bomb… ”

Well, Hamas stuck for many months to the unilateral ceasefire it had maintained, despite strong and continuing Israeli provocation… But that didn’t stop Israel from bombing Gaza (as we know)… or from blocading and stifling and trying to starve it’s 1.3 million people.
Last week, Shanty was one of the prime organizers of the nonviolent action wherein hundreds of women from the Beit Hamoun area defied the Israeli cirfew and went down to the town’s mosque to rescue their menfolk. A couple of days later the Israeli artillery shelled the house where she lives with her sister-in-law, and the sister-in-law’s children. Her sister-in-law Nahla and two of Jamila’s bodyguards were all reportedly killed, though Jamila herself was not there that night.
Yesterday, Ms. Shanty had this very poignant article in The Guardian. It was published under the title “We Overcame Our fear.”
In it she wrote this:

    We still do not know what has become of our sons, husbands and brothers since all males over 15 years old were taken away last Thursday. They were ordered to strip to their underwear, handcuffed and led away.
    It is not easy as a mother, sister or wife to watch those you love disappear before your eyes. Perhaps that was what helped me, and 1,500 other women, to overcome our fear and defy the Israeli curfew last Friday – and set about freeing some of our young men who were besieged in a mosque while defending us and our city against the Israeli military machine.
    We faced the most powerful army in our region unarmed. The soldiers were loaded up with the latest weaponry, and we had nothing, except each other and our yearning for freedom. As we broke through the first barrier, we grew more confident, more determined to break the suffocating siege. The soldiers of Israel’s so-called defence force did not hesitate to open fire on unarmed women. The sight of my close friends Ibtissam Yusuf abu Nada and Rajaa Ouda taking their last breaths, bathed in blood, will live with me for ever.
    Later an Israeli plane shelled a bus taking children to a kindergarten. Two children were killed, along with their teacher. In the last week 30 children have died…
    Shortly after announcing his project to democratise the Middle East, President Bush did all he could to strangle our nascent democracy, arresting our ministers and MPs. I have yet to hear western condemnation that I, an elected MP, have had my home demolished and relatives killed by Israel’s bombs. When the bodies of my friends and colleagues were torn apart there was not one word from those who claim to be defenders of women’s rights on Capitol Hill and in 10 Downing Street.
    Why should we Palestinians have to accept the theft of our land, the ethnic cleansing of our people, incarcerated in forsaken refugee camps, and the denial of our most basic human rights, without protesting and resisting?
    The lesson the world should learn from Beit Hanoun last week is that Palestinians will never relinquish our land, towns and villages. We will not surrender our legitimate rights for a piece of bread or handful of rice. The women of Palestine will resist this monstrous occupation imposed on us at gunpoint, siege and starvation. Our rights and those of future generations are not open for negotiation…

We all need to listen to the pain and the arguments that Ms. Shanty, a very savvy political organizer and community leader, articulates here. We don’t need to agree with everything that she or other women and men from Hamas say in order to recognize and acknowledge that some of what they say has validity. The Palestinian question has to be addressed, and has to be resolved in a fair and sustainable manner; and this will not happen unless the large proportion of Palestinians who share this M.P.’s views are actively included in the peacemaking.
For myself, I want to start by sending Ms. Shanty my heartfelt condolences on the loss of her sister-in-law, her friends, and her family property– and my promise that I will do everything I can to work for a de-escalation of all the violence between Israel and the Palestinians and a fair and sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My country has for far too long given Israel unquestioning support for all the actions it has taken against the Palestinians– including giving Israel huge financial, military, and political support that in recent years has been continued with no linkage made at all between that aid and Israel’s military or diplomatic misbehavior toward the Palestinians (or the Lebanese.) That has to stop. Fair-minded conditionality and accountability has to be established toward both sides in this tragically destructive conflict. And we need to extend equal human respect and concern to people on both sides of the line.
People in the US have in recent months been (re-)learning that we cannot build our nation’s security on an attempt to dominate others by violence and brute force. The same is equally true for Israel.

America’s Iraq policy after the elections

I’ve been thinking through what is likely to emerge regarding policy for Iraq from the new configuration emerging in Washington after Tuesday’s elections.
Giving Donald Rumsfeld the boot the day rights after the election was only the first of a series of changes we can now expect. “Stay the course” is now (finally!) history, and the only question is what approach will be adopted to replace it.
Almost certainly, as had been widely predicted, the Iraq Study Group will play a key role in formulating the new approach. Its contribution is needed much more now than it was before November 7, because it was intentionally composed of people with strong links to the two major US parties and is therefore in a strong role to help broker the intra-US political terms of the “deal” that needs to be done over Iraq.
It is my sense that if, as seems to be the case, the people on the ISG consist mainly of political ‘realists” from both parties, rather than ideologues, they may well seek to move very quickly indeed to formulate the terms of that deal. They can use the present political inter-regnum– before the new Congress is sworn in and while the old Congress now has little if any real political clout– to find a workable and bipartisan policy toward Iraq before Inauguration Day in January, and thus to set the agenda for the incoming Congress.
Though JWN readers must know that I have a few partisan sympathies of my own, I do think that finding a workable bipartisan approach to Iraq (and the related issues) is very valuable. Tough decisions will need to be made and a steady hand placed on the wheel of policy if the poor bloody Iraqis are not to have their country plunged into even greater chaos, and if the current violence in Palestine and the strong sense of unease throughout the rest of the Middle East are not to explode uncontrollably and with massive damage for millions of people throughout the region.
US voters have spoken. On Tuesday they made clear (1) that Iraq was a very strong concern for them, and (2) that, judging the present policy a failure, they need to see a distinct change of policy– one that offers a hope of a US troop withdrawal within a reasonable length of time.
My suggestion for a plan
US citizens do not, obviously, want the manner of the US withdrawal to be either: (1) an operational debacle that brings massive or unnecessary troop losses or a too-evident loss of US face, or (2) one that it leaves a completely failed state in Iraq that could, like pre-2001 Afghanistan, incubate further waves of Qaeda-style terror.
To be frank to my Iraqi readers, I should say that it’s possible that most US citizens don’t give a hoot for the wellbeing of ordinary Iraqis– or rather, they don’t care enough about stability in Iraq to be prepared to lose even one US soldier’s life to ensure it. However, as soon as we start thinking about how to bring about an orderly (i.e., not a debacle-laden) withdrawal of US troops from Iraq– whether this is total or even only, in the first place, ‘substantial’– then it becomes very clear that the possibility of an orderly US withdrawal is inextricably linked to the possibility of Iraq having some form of working governance structure after that withdrawal.
(I’m also of the opinion that there is no such beast, at this point, as a “partial” US withdrawal that would have any significant longevity. But this is not the most immediate issue. In my view, the logic of the negotiations and of real Iraqi self-empowerment will anyway, almost inevitably, lead to a total US troop withdrawal within 1-2 years after the start of a serious, internationally supported peace process for Iraq.)
So the question is, how can we even think of any form of stable Iraqi governance structure emerging? The US has had three and half years of complete hegemony inside the country to try to achieve this goal, but failed. Right now it has neither the credibility to be given another chance at doing it, nor, frankly, any signs that it has the capability of getting it right.
It desperately needs help.
But who can help it?
My answer is, basically, these three parties, in this order: Iran, the UN, and Iraq’s other neighbors:
* Iran, because it is, actually, the newly emerging hegemonic power inside Iraq. It has strong links with all the powerful actors inside Iraq, with the exception of some of the Sunni actors. It has immense proximity, and easy supply lines into Iraq along the lengthy mutual border. Plus, at present you could say that the 147,000 US troops in Iraq are currently there only on Teheran’s sufferance: Teheran likes to have them there because their very vulnerable deployment there form a potent self-deterrent against any dreams US officials might have of launching a military attack against Iran.
There is thus, literally, no hope for the US of having any debacle-free drawdown of troops from Iraq without getting the explicit permission for this from Teheran. And that, of course, also means paying a “price” to Teheran that is considerably higher than merely– and very belatedly– agreeing to “talk” to it. No, there will have to be discussions about a range of issues including nuclear issues and the whole question of the security regime in the Gulf region, that go considerably beyond merely “talking”, i.e., saying hello…
* 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 situatin in the region.
As noted above, the US is currently in no position at all, on its own, to broker any kind of new agreement among Iraqis. That’s the big thing it needs the UN for; and indeed, it should hand over the lead role in brokering this agreement to the UN, as soon as possible. But Washington also needs the UN to give “cover”– perhaps through some form of re-hatting operation– for a security regime inside Iraq that will continue, in the interim period, to be dominated by the US troop presence, though it could also helpfully be supplemented by some other, non-US and preferably non-western troops– and especially commanders– who have real and substantial experience in peacekeeping, rather than imperial domination.
Read about Nambia and the role the UN played during the transition from South Africa’s (illegal, foreign occupation) regime there to the emergence of a legitimate and accepted indigenous successor regime.
Read about it very fast.
* Iraq’s other neighbors will also be very important… And here I’m talking about, essentially, the whole of Iraq’s Arab “hinterland” stretching from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait down through the entire Peninsula, and from Jordan and Syria across to Egypt, as well as (though to a lesser extent) Turkey.
The fact of the matter will be that for the US to get out of Iraq, Iran is going to have to be given a bigger role in the Gulf (and the broader Middle East) than the US has allowed it to have at any time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This will be–already is!– deeply unsettling for the conservative, Sunni-ruled monarchs of Jordan and the Gulf, and also for the conservative, Sunni-ruled President of Egypt. So all these rulers– and even more importantly, the restive Arab populations atop whom they today precariously balance– will need to receive a lot of reassurance from the US and from other participants in the process.
There is no way this can happen if, at the same time, the US and the UN are not actively doing something very productive indeed to engage with the very real and longstanding grievances of the Palestinians. Forget the pathetic old “Road Map to Nowhere” which has gotten us to precisely that destination after four years of blather and hot air. What the Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, and others are going to expect to see is something speedy, authoritative, and truly transformational like the Madrid Conference of October 1991.
… Which was convened, we should note, by Jim Baker.
These states (including Syria) will also need to have a meaningful behind-the-scenes role in being a contact group, or whatever, for the transition of power inside Iraq, where they have their own strong interests, fears, and concerns..
… So once we have sketched these kinds of “realistic” paths forward in the Middle East, it becames immediately clear that (1) the Israelis are not going to like a lot of what must lie ahead in these scenarios, and (2) their friends in the Democratic Party won’t like it, either… That’s where the key role in the ISG of Lee Hamilton, a very experienced man who was head of the Democratic-controlled House International Relations Committee for many years, will come in…
The Israelis have already, as I can see, started to read the tea-leaves, and are desperately trying to figure how they stop this train. The bombastic old war-horse Efraim Sneh has again threatened that Israel will will go ahead and bomb Iran on its own if no-one else will do the job. And Olmert is rushing to the US in the coming days…
But Israel’s rightwing leadership has lost a lot of the clout it once had within the US system, by virtue of the now-evident collapse of the neocon network as well of some of the political clout of the Zionist evangelicals.
The Middle East will be waking up to a new day. Let’s hope the ever-looming catastrophes can be avoided and a new sense of realism prevail. Militarism and US hegemonism were, after all, what brought the US and Iraq to the present parlous situation in Iraq.

Darfuris getting saved

Yesterday’s NYT had a fascinating piece of reporting (also here) by Jeffrey Gettleman, datelined from “Artala, Sudan”. As he makes clear, Artala is located in south-western Darfur– and the story is about a number of formerly displaced villagers from the area who have chosen to return to their home villages and rebuild rather than staying in the IDP camps to which they had earlier fled.
As I’ve written here a number of times before (e.g., here), providing the conditions in which Darfur’s villagers can return to their home areas and rebuild in security and peace is the best way to “Save Darfur”– though a vocal and extremely well-funded information campaign in the west has been trying to persuade us that other, much more hostile and polarizing actions like bringing prosecutions against Sudan’s leaders or finding other means to punish them, insisting on a forced entry of international troops into Darfur, or even (by some coalition members) urging “regime change” in Sudan itself, are the best way to “Save Darfur.”
Having seen, just back in July, the misery of Ugandan Acholis forced to live in “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDP) camps for ten years now, forcibly prevented from returning to their homes and from cultivating their crops, and thereby forced into an existence of dependency, displacement, and chronic mental distress, my conviction that enabling a peaceable return to the homestead is the best outcome for most such people has only been strengthened.
Gettleman’s story is therefore a modestly hopeful one.
Let me just quote a few paras from his lead:

    Omar Abdul Aziz Gader cupped his hand over his eyes and scanned a landscape of scorched fields and mud huts reduced to rings of ash.
    Where others might have seen a wasteland, Mr. Gader saw home.
    “It’s good to be back,” he said.
    As a displaced person from Darfur, Mr. Gader found his options were not great. He could have stayed in the packed, increasingly unruly camp where he had been living for the past two years, or he could have ventured back to Artala, his native village, which was burned to the ground by nomadic raiders.
    He decided to go home in September after learning that his corner of southwestern Darfur was actually rather peaceful, a place where nomads and farmers had begun to take halting steps toward reconciliation.
    Much of Darfur, a vast swath of territory in western Sudan, is still a battlefield, with vicious fighting between the Sudanese government and rebel forces, and masses of people fleeing their villages each day.
    But there are other parts, lesser known, where people are heading the other way, going home.
    It is a journey that is also difficult, with homecomings that may prove to be short-lived. But aid workers estimate that there are several thousand returnees like Mr. Gader — and many more on their way.
    Mr. Gader says he is looking ahead, building a new hut and planting onions, though at times the past seizes him…

It looks like a great piece of reporting. Gettleman doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulties returning farmers like Mr. Gader face as they return home. But neither does he seem to sugar-coat the difficulties of life in the IDP camps, either… Indeed, he refers to Mr. Gader having faced a degree of social pressure (or worse) in the camp, that sought to “persuade” him not to return home:

    Mr. Gader, 32, spoke in hushed tones of camp politics and how some of the displaced people had called him a traitor for even thinking of going home, because they said it bolstered the government’s claim that things were not so bad. Mr. Gader, who lived in a huge camp in southern Darfur called Kalma, with an estimated population of 100,000, said he, his wife and his two children had to leave in the middle of the night.
    “We basically escaped,” he said.
    Aid workers and camp dwellers say camp elders have a vested financial interest in keeping as many people as possible in the camp, because the elders can make money by siphoning food aid and selling it in local markets. But the returnees are learning that home is a complicated place, too.

This reminds me a little of the situation that developed in the IDP camps and cross-border refugee camps in and around Rwanda in late 1994, when forces loyal to Rwanda’s ousted government of anti-Tutsi génocidaires kept two million or more displaced Hutus forcibly within the camps that had developed there and fought hard to try to prevent them from returning peaceably to their homes.
Under these circumstances, I am delighted that there are parts of Darfur where the situation has been improving so much that people in the camps are prepared to brave the intimidatory tactics of “camp elders” and go back home.
If you are interested in Darfur at all, I urge you to go and read the whole of Gettleman’s article there. It has many telling vignettes. Above all, don’t imagine that the ideologically bowdlerized version of his story that has been put up on the website of the “Save Darfur” coalition gives anything like an accurate representation of the whole article.
… This coalition has meanwhile been spending massive amounts of money on large numbers of full-page ads in major US newspapers that are, essentially, a fairly exploitative form of “waving the bloody shirt” mobilization. One full-page ad in the NYT costs, I believe, $48,000. I must have seen a dozen such ads– between the NYT and the WaPo– in the past month or so, and I’m sure they’ve been running them in many other papers nationwide. Perhaps the members of this coalition would have done better by actual Darfuri women and men if instead of running these ads they had put that money into the kinds of programs Gettleman was writing about: programs that have already helped thousands of Darfuris return to their homes?
… People in comfortable life-situations in western countries like to talk a tremendous amount about “accountability”. But the form of “accountability” they talk about is nearly always: (a) backward-looking and (b) very selective. I am very concerned about accountability, too. But the kind I’m more concerned about is forward-looking accountability: the accountability that people should have to each other to end current oppressions and build a better, more equitable and life-affirming social order going forward. And quite frequently, when people are in crisis situations, attempts to establish western-style, backward-looking “accountability” can actively impede the chances of being able to build such a better order. (Think of, for example, the effects of the Saddam trial in Iraq, or Rwanda’s many attempts to establish its very selective– but also, very extensive– forms of “accountability” for the horrendous inter-group violence of 1994… )
It strikes me that the situation in Darfur is now giving us further examples of these (always difficult) kinds of decisions being faced…
But meanwhile, I have to say I was really delighted to learn from Gettleman’s article that there are parts of Darfur where rebuilding– including some non-trivial social rebuilding– is already taking place.

Allen concedes; Bolton toasted; other prospects

This afternoon, Sen. George Allen undertook possibly the most gracious act of his career and made a very civil, realistic speech conceding victory in our state’s hard-fought Senatorial election to Democratic challenger (and now Senator-elect) Jim Webb.
Since Conrad Burns in Montana has also now conceded to his Democratic chellenger there, it is finally official: the Democrats have won the Senate as well as the House!!
Rumsfeld has already, as we know, been tossed from the GOP car as it screeches for the exits. The next casualty of the GOP defeat will most like be the controversial (idoelogical and acerbic) Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Bolton was appointed a couple of years back only as a not-requiring-confirmation “recess appointment” and need Senate confirmation now for his term to be renewed. But Sen. Joe Biden, expected to come in in January as chair of the Senate Foreign relatins Committee today said, “I think John Bolton’s going nowhere.”
In addition, Democratic control of the senate is good news for all of us who’ve been worrying about the possibility of yet another Republican getting appointed to the Supreme Court. For example Justice John Paul Stevens, a long-time liberal voice on the bench, is now 86 years old and may need replacing within the next two years… Fewer worries about that, as from today…
Back to foreign affairs, though, let’s hope that the rethinking of policy that results from Tuesday’s election goes far beyond merely axing Bolton. Beyond that, the country’s policymakers need to seriously rtethink the terms and nature of our relationships with the UN and, more broadly, with the whole of the rest of the world.
There have been some inklings of that happening, at least partially, from the “leaks” that have emenated so far from the “Iraq Study Group.” (Of which, of course, the new nominee as SecDef, Robert Gates, has been a member.)
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the ISG that,

    if the Dems win control of one or both houses of Congress come November 7 then winning bipartisan support for “the Baker plan” will become much, much more important. So any negotiations that go on among the ISG’s members over the content of its final report will have to wait till after the post-election balance of political power is known…

Doubtless, that will now start happening. I actually think it’s excellent that this vehicle for reforming the policy is already in place; that its members have already done most of their homework; and that they were chosen to be people with such strong support in the leaderships of both parties.
We the pro-peace, pro-human-equality citizenry will need to keep up our pressure for the kinds of fairminded, peaceable policies we want to see enacted… Today, I went along to our local peace demonstrationas usual. We still got some great response from the drivers-by….
Just one final note. Our local pro-peace Congressional cnadidate Al Weed sadly did not win election. On Tuesday, I did spend 40 minutes or so offering Democratic stickers to people exiting our local polling place (with the idea they should continue wearing them prominently on their lapels or whatever for the rest of the day.) Most people at our polling place were happy to take them! But there were a significant number of folks who took the “Webb” sticker while politely declining the “Weed” sticker. Too bad. Al is a good and wise man.
Our other bit of really sad news is that Virginians voted by quite a wide margin to embed into our state constitution some language that is extremely hostile not only to gay couples but also to any unmarried couples who might seek to conclude any form of civil contract that “imitates” the effects of marriage. Virginia already has laws that do this; but embedding this provision into the constitution is an even more serious business, and will make it much harder to pass laws friendly to civil unions in the future.
We have among our friends several gay couples who maintain relationships of great integrity, mutual support, love, and joy. Some of them have children in their families and have been giving them wonderful, strong homes. But the state is so hostile to these families, and threatenes them at every turn. I often fear for them; and now, the votes cast on this issue by my fellow Virginians reminds me yet again what a gay-hostile state we live in. So the news from Virginia this week is by no means all good…

CSM column on our great gathering in Amman

My column in Thursday’s CSM is about our incredible conference on nonviolence, last week in Amman. You can read it here or here.
In the column, I just gave a tiny flavor of the conference, which was truly an amazing gathering:

    This assembly – a UN-sponsored leadership conference on nonviolence – brought together Israelis, Palestinians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and others from the Middle East. One-third of the participants came from farther afield – from Nepal, Uganda, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, Russia, South Africa, and elsewhere – and added a valuable global and comparative perspective to the mix.
    We saw very secular Israeli activists engaging passionately with socially conservative (and very articulate) veiled women from Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Pro-peace Israeli rabbis in yarmulkes worked with Muslim teachers in flowing robes. There were Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular peace activists, and veterans of nonviolent struggles in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere.
    On the final night, an Israeli rabbi and a young Arab woman sang a poem composed two hours earlier by a South African. It told of the dream of coexistence along the Jordan River.
    How did this happen – at a time of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and deadly civil strife in Iraq?

Toward the end of the column I speculated a little on why this gathering turned out to be so successful, so harmonious and productive and inspirational– and this, at a time when the situation in the areas to the east of Jordan and to the west of it are wracked by such terrible, protracted violence.
I concluded:

    Our gathering thrived because of the great human qualities and rich experience of the participants. It helped, too, that so many Middle Easterners can now see that violence – whether direct physical violence or the violence of oppressive systems – simply does not “work.” So in key places, people have become more eager to seek alternatives.
    The achievements of Gandhi’s movement in India and of the (largely nonviolent) African National Congress in South Africa last century are solid examples of the effectiveness of nonviolent mass action that today’s peacemakers embrace as instructive models. The teachings of Gandhi, Dr. King, and others do not try to avoid the big political problems that conflict- ridden or oppressed societies face. Instead, they seek to mobilize new, nonviolent human energies in order to resolve them…

One factor I didn’t mention, that perhaps I should have, was precisely the ‘UN’ (or more directly, the U.N. University) sponsorship of it. I think just about all the participants in the workshop were people who deeply respect the work of the UN, and the principles of human equality, globalism, fair-mindedness, and non-violence that animate the world body. In retrospect, I think that was crucial… So I wish I’d written that.
Very different from, for example, having the seminar convened by a body with an explicitly “western” flavor…
Anyway, as I noted at the end of the column there:

    Now, we all need to work hard to nurture and strengthen this hopeful movement.

Indeed. That’s one of the main things I’m trying to figure out right now, along with my friends and colleagues who were at the seminar…

Exit Rumsfeld

The second great piece of news of the day: Rumsfeld’s resignation.
Jeff Severns Guntzel of Electronic Iraq writes, quite correctly:

    Rumsfeld is a symbol of failure in Iraq just as he is a symbol of a history of convenient relationships between the United States and the kinds of tyrants it often claims to deplore.
    And Rumsfeld, the symbol, it must be remembered, is not the thing symbolized. The thing symbolized is arrogant imperial ambition and self-serving international actions. Those things are very much present in Washington whether Rumsfeld is there or not.

Tony Karon of Rootless Cosmopolitan makes this excellent point:

    instead of admitting and reckoning with the fact that the war they advocated was a catastrophically bad idea, everyone from neocon hacks to flip-flopping Democrats, Bob Woodward (arch channeler of White House sources) and the self-styled “liberal hawks” of the chattering classes, like Peter Beinart and George Packer, have signed on to the notion that it was a good war, the right war, executed badly, because Rumsfeld adhered to some bizarre capital-intensive theory of warfare. In other words, if Rumsfeld had simply sent more troops, the outcome would have been different.
    And that narrative, which the White House itself appears to have adopted in the wake of its midterm electoral drubbing, is a self-serving evasion. Indeed, the “blame Rumsfeld for Iraq” chorus reminds me of nothing as much as listening to Trotskyists trying to rescue Bolshevism by blaming its grotesque consequences on Stalin’s “implementation” rather than on its inner logic…

I agree with (what I think is) Tony’s point, that it was not the implementation of the war (by Rumsfeld) that was faulty but the decision to launch the war at all, in the first place.
However, I note that Rumsfeld did play a key role in making the invasion of Iraq seem logistically and politically do-able to the neophyte President back in late 2001. That was through his ardent advocacy of the “small swift force” approach– an approach that promised to “deliver” the overthrow of Saddam Hussein almost by stealth, in comparison with what an advocate of Colin Powell’s doctrine of amassing absolutely overwhelming military force before invading would have required.
The two men to whom Bush looked for complete guidance in these matters in late 2001 were the Secretary of Defense and the Vice-Prez. If they had told him that assembling a Powell-type heavy force was the only way to even try an invasion of Iraq it is much, much more likely that the Prez would have been deterred from trying, for these reasons:

    Firstly, assembling such a force would have required much more and more explicit notification of, consultation with, and indeed the explicit permission of Congress. That would have involved having exactly the same kind of potentially bruising public debate over the war that Bush Sr. had in December 1990. That time, Bush Sr. just managed to win the war-enabling resolution But if Bush Jr. had tried to get the same kind of resolution authorizing the assembling and possible use of a large invasion force in 2002, he would have been far, far less likely to win that debate.
    Secondly, assembling a Powell-type force in 2002 would clearly have been seen back then as constituting a massive diversion from the ongoing task in Afghanistan. As it was, Rumsfeld and Cheney were able to persuade Bush that the US military could do both… with the outcome we now see in both countries, these four years later….
    Thirdly, assembling a Powell-type force would have required much more explicit permission from other governments. The Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, etc sort of turned a blind eye as Rumsfeld’s stealth force build-up gradually eased its way across their territories. But assembling a Powell-type force would have required winning the explicit approval of these governments, and therefore, most likely, also a UN resolution…

Therefore, while I agree with Tony Karon that the war was not totally “Rumsfeld’s fault”, still I think that by actively hawking and pursuing his long-held concept of the “light, fast forces” he played a crucial role making the invasion of Iraq possible at all…
Anyway, Rumsfeld is now gone. I’m assuming Gates is positioned to act as a “good manager” at the Pentagon. (Something Runsfeld notably was not.) Let’s hope Gates is also much more of a strategic realist than Rumsfeld was.
However, before anyone celebrates Rumsfeld’s departure too much we need to remember that Unca Dick is still sitting there in the Vice-Presidency– and quite unmovably so, absent some kind of dire medical emergency…

Prolonged electoral cliffhanger here in Virginia

So it looks as if we’re headed for a lengthy process of recounting the votes here in Virginia.
At 9:04 this morning, AP was reporting that our Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb had 49.6 percentof the 2.33 million votes counted here, while GOP incumbent George Allen had 49.3 percent. That was with 99% of the votes counted.
Allen has not conceded yet, and is likely to demand a recount. If he does this, as this ABC News web-page makes clear, he can’t even start the process till November 28– and “we will likely not know the results until mid-December.”
The Dems need to win the Senate races in both Virginia and Montana (another close call, as of now) if they are to win control of the whole Senate…
But– we’ve already won control of the House!!!.
This is due, obviously, to a number of factors… Including the mounting surge of disgust with Bush’s war in Iraq. (Which knocked out of office even that very decent man Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, I see. That, purely because of his formal GOP party affiliation– though Chafee has been an important voice of conscience against the war and even against the president on many issues… )
Another factor is, I think, the great discipline and political smarts of Nancy Pelosi, the person now destined to be the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives!
Well done, Ms. Pelosi!
What can we expect from this political upheaval? The main thing, I would say, would be some serious efforts by at least one house of Congress to start to hold the Bush administration accountable for some of its many, many misdeeds in Iraq and elsewhere.
That will include– finally– authoritative hearings to look into many past policies and misdemeanours including contracting scandals in Iraq, the CIA’s use of secret prisons and torture, etc etc…
Hallelujah!
What we can’t expect, obviously, is much radical change in this administration’s policy going forward– though with a Democratic House of Representatives now looking over their shoulders the Bushites are going to have to be a lot more collegial and a lot less secretive and manipulative in what they do.
Will the Dems bring forward their own Iraq policy? This could be a trap for them, getting too closely engaged in a national policy there that is already, clearly, failing. But they will need to get engaged to some degree, and should figure out their own terms for doing so.
Back here, in mid-September (when I first started allowing myself to hope that the Dems might win control of at least one house of Congress) I started thinking about the substance of what the Democrats might and should push for, if they won one or both Houses. At that point, I was already impressed with some of what Jim Webb had been saying about the war. I still am, and strongly, strongly hope he makes it through the upcoming recount.
I also wrote:

    I welcome a lot of what Webb says. But I still think we need better, more forthright, and more visionary leaders in this country: people who are prepared to stand up openly and recognize that the US needs to have good relations with a strong and respected UN, and needs, too, to find a way to negotiate the differences it still has outstanding with Iran.
    Whatever happened to the old idea in diplomacy that if you have a concern about the policies of another power, then you find a way to discuss them? Since when did this idea take root that, if you disagree strongly with any other party, then you should totally quarantine and seek to exclude them from the discourse?
    So I guess for me, these are two key touchstones of the way the US political discourse on international issues needs to change: (1) we need to reinstate the UN as a vital political player, and a body with which the US seeks to work closely on the international scene, and (2) we need to reinstate the idea that if you have concerns with another government (or nongovernmental party) then it is nearly always better to try to discuss those concerns directly, rather than to stigmatize and quarantine that other.

I still think that.
I also warn everyone that a Democratic-controlled house or houses of Congress is likely to have almost exactly the same, completely Israelo-centric policy on Israel-Palestine issues as the Bush administration has pursued up until now. On this issue and on many others– including Iraq– we in the peace movement are going to have to keep up the pressure on our friends in the Democratic Party.

The HRW report on Palestinian women, contd.

Amira Hass has a column marked by her usual perspicacity and deeply humanistic vision in HaAretz today, in which she notes that,

    There could not have been a worse time to release the Human Rights Watch report on violence against women within Palestinian families and society: yesterday, November 7, at the same time the Israeli army withdrew from Beit Hanun after a six-day assault that claimed 53 lives. At least 27 of those killed were unarmed civilians, including 10 children and two Red Crescent volunteers. Of the 200 or so people injured in the operation, there were at least 50 children and 46 women…

She adds, “In the competition over the Palestinian slot in the Israeli media, it is obvious that a report critical of Palestinian society and its institutions will trump the option of completing a report on this assault.” The same might certainly be said of much of the US media, too.
By way of quantification, Hass reports– and I would tend to trust her on this, given her good relations with Palestinian women’s groups and human rights organizations– that, “Twelve Palestinian women – eight from Gaza and four from the West Bank – have been murdered since the start of 2006 by relatives on the pretext of ‘family honor.'” Of course, this is tragic and outrageous; and in a sense it is only the tip of a huge iceberg of harm that Palestinian females suffer at the hands of a very patriarchal, traditionalist society.
However, several scores of Palestinian females have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces in this same period. And this, too, is just the tip of a huge icreberg of harm that Palestinian females have suffered at the hands of Israel’s all-encompassing, stifling military occupation rule over Gaza and the West Bank.
In the post I put up here yesterday I noted that the latest HRW report on domestic violence in Palestine had made no mention in its own name either of the very harmful direct effects that the Israeli occupation rule has had on the lives (anbd deaths) of Palestinian women, or of the clear link– evident to anyone who spends any time in the West Bank or Gaza, as I do fairly frequently– between these stifling conditions of life and the likelihood of intra-familial violence among many of those thus stifled. The report did have, as I noted in an addendum, one short, third-person reference to the fact that “Some Palestinian women’s organizations” had established such a causal link– but this was, as I noted, buried deep within one of the report’s many footnotes. It was also extremely non-committal
I wish HRW had articulated much more explicitly and clearly this quite evident political and social context within which the phenomenon of domestic abuse– and, any efforts to end it– must surely be considered.
I agree it is true, as Hass argues today, that many members of what she calls the “traditional-masculine lobby in Palestinian society” will, as always, seek use the fact of Israel’s continuing occupation in order to “deter… the voices demanding social change.” I was not, however, arguing that no-one should even mention the facts of intra-familial violence amongst Palestinians these days, or that no-one should think of doing anything about it. I was trying to argue instead that in order to do anything effective about this issue, people do need to understand the whole range of factors affecting the lives of Palestinian women and their menfolk as they work together (I hope!) to build strong supportive relationships and strong, nurturing families. And in that context, the effects of Israel’s occupation rule on the lives of these men and women– both its direct effects, and the knock-on effects it has on the ability of people to sustain strong, respectful relationships inside the home– simply cannot be ignored.
No Palestinian woman who works in a woman’s group or elsewhere with whom I have ever spoken believes that Israel’s role in this can be ignored. Both factors together– the behavior of many Palestinian men and the behavior of the occupation– have to be considered and challenged, or modified. But for HRW to relegate any reference to that principled position to deep inside footnote #103, and to distance themselves from it by simply saying that this is merely what “some Palestinian women’s groups” believe, seems to me extremely disempowering and dis-voicing of those women’s rights activists. It seems to tell them: “Human Rights Watch in New York knows best; and we are determined for our own reasons not to mention the behavior of the Israeli occupation as a relevant factor in this regard.”
I beg to disagree.

Protecting Palestinian females: HRW misses the mark

I truly do not understand some of the decisions that my colleagues and friends at Human Rights Watch have been making. This week, to much fanfare, they rolled out a very well-funded study about domestic violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in which their main order of business is to blame the Palestinian Authority for having, “failed to establish an effective framework to respond to violence against women and girls.”
Look, as a woman, as someone who survived some long-ago domestic violence, as the mother of two daughters, and as quite simply a member of the human race I am deeply concerned about the question of domestic violence. But this study seems wrongly conceived and wrongly focused for a number of reasons:
(1) The study makes no mention whatsoever that I can see of the huge amount of physical and systemic violence inflicted on Palestinian females by the Israeli occupation forces. Why not? It does make a few namby-pamby references along the way to the impediments that the Israeli occupation’s roadblocks, lockdowns etc place in the way of participants in the Palestinian justice system who might want to help remedy the plight of Palestinian females suffering domestic violence. But why no mention at all of Israel’s own use of lethal violence against Palestinian females?
Just in the past few days, the Israelis have killed at least three adult women and one girl in Gaza, maybe more. (See two of those reported here.) Back in July, the Israelis killed 20 women in Gaza in one month alone. And so it goes on and on and on– lives of women snuffed out or blighted forever through wounding or bereavement– at the hands of Israel, the occupier. But no mention at all in this HRW report.
(2) The report states that, “the PA holds ultimate responsibility for protecting victims and holding perpetrators accountable.” In my judgment this is quite incorrect. Israel has never relinquished its responsibilities (or rights) under international law to act as the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza. It is therefore, pending a final peace settlement that addresses the sovereignty issues in those areas, the power that bears the “ultimate responsibility” for the protection of life and public security in those areas. The PA is just acting, as it were, as an intermittent sub-contractor to the occupying power. Certainly, Israel retains the right to arrogate back to itself at any time that it chooses, any of the powers that the PA may exercise– and it has done so very frequently and very freely, in both territories. (For example, when it sent tanks back into Ramallah in 2002 or since, or into Gaza last month, this did not constitute an “international incident” or an “act of war” against a neighboring state. It was simply Israel exercising the rights as occupier in those areas that it has never relinquished… Which is not to say, of course, that the way in which it has exercised those rights has always been legal. It has not. But it does show that Israel claims the right to re-enter at any point, at any time– and that the Security Council and the rest of the international “community” agrees with this assessment.)
So for HRW to haul the PA onto the mat of blame now as bearing the “ultimate responsibility” for harms that befall Palestinian females, while criticising Israel only very tangentially for hampering the PA from doing its job is, I believe, seriously to miss the mark.
It is, I repeat, Israel, as occupying power, that has established all the conditions of life (and death) for the Palestinians of the occupied territories and that must be held primarily reponsible for them.
One of the main conditions of life that Israel has established has been its own frequent use of lethal force against all Palestinians, including women, as noted above. Another has been its imposition of tight constraints on the ability of Palestinians in both territories to carry out anything like a normal human existence– through the imposition of stifling movement control regimes, economic boycott, etc etc.
Is it any wonder that under those demeaning and sometimes life-threatening conditions of life, many Palestinian families have found themselves stressed out to the point where stronger family members increase their use of “domestic” violence against weaker family members? This is a classic example of what Israeli saint Amira Hass calls “The Experiment.”
It would be good if every single person at Human Rights Watch responsible for producing this latest little report could go back and re-read the whole of Hass’s great mid-October article on that topic. Here’s some of what she wrote:

    The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called “what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings [in Gaza, alone] in an enclosed space like battery hens.”
    These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove the prisoners’ usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end; prevent, for years, the entry of relatives, professionals, friends and others, and allow thousands of people – the sick, heads of families, professionals, children – to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of the Gaza Strip’s only entry/exit…
    It is the good old Israeli experiment called “put them into a pressure cooker and see what happens,” and this is one of the reasons why this [Palestinian factional violence] is not an internal Palestinian matter.

Hass’s article, by the way, refers more generally to the incidence of political violence among members of the different armed factions in the OPTs. But it is also completely applicable to the issue of intra-family violence there.
But from HRW, all we get is just a few very veiled references to the “difficult conditions of life” being experienced by the Palestinians… Certainly, no recognition whatsoever that it is the Israeli occupation administration that must– under international law– be held fully responsible for those conditions of life.
(3) The level of “research” carried out by HRW for this study is laughably inadequate, and certainly nowhere near sufficient to have propelled the study into so many of the august tribunes of the western MSM. The study makes no attempt whatsoever to quantify the incidence of domestic violence in the OPTs or even to provide any form of rough comparison between the level there and the level in other countries. All we are told is that, “A significant number of women and girls in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are victims of violence perpetrated by family members and intimate partners”, and

    Various studies and statistics gathered by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) and Palestinian women’s groups record high levels of violence perpetrated by family members and intimate partners, aggravated during times of political violence. Information obtained from social workers, academics, and police officials on the prevalence of domestic violence, incest, and actual or threatened “honor” crimes, also indicate that reported rates do not reflect the full extent of such violence…

Then from there the report leaps almost immediately to concluding that “it is already well established that violence against women and girls inside the family is a serious problem in the OPT.” And that’s the best that the attempt at quantification can produce.
My own estimation? I believe it is entirely possible that the incidence of domestic violence in Palestine may be lower than that in the US, where the physical and social isolation of many small family units leaves the women in those families particularly vulnerable… But I recognize that we simply do not know enough about the level, in either place.
Yes, I know there are always under-reporting problems in this domain. But what, actually, do the reports that do exist from Palestine exist tell us about the situation there? And can they demonstrate this stated link between domestic violence and the incidence of political violence? That, at least, would be interesting and significant to know. But the HRW report presents no serious attempts at any form of quantification or even of estimation. We are all just invited to take on trust the general trope that “there’s a lot of it about, out there in Palestine.” I note that just exactly this same same kind of lazy trope– claiming concern for women’s rights and women’s interests– was used to justify all kinds of colonial depradations of various parts of the world by the colonial powers of centuries past. A case of plus ça change plus c’est la même chose here perhaps?

    Addendum, Wed. morning: I just re-read the report and found some attempt at quantification in a section titled, somewhat misleadingly, “Social and Legal Obstacles to Reporting Violence and Seeking Redress.”. This section cites a number of studies, including “a Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) survey of 4,212 households in the OPT conducted in December 2005 and January 2006” that found that, “Twenty-three percent of the women surveyed had experienced physical violence, 61.7 percent psychological violence, and 10.5 percent sexual violence at the hands of their husbands”; and “A survey on violence against women in Gaza conducted by the Women’s Affairs Center in 2001 [that] revealed that 46.7 percent of the 670 women interviewed reported that their husbands used ‘force and brutality’ during sexual intercourse; 17.4 percent reported that their husbands beat them to have sex; and 35.9 percent said that their husbands threatened and intimidated them into submission.”
    That section also has, buried deep within footnote #103, this fairly noncommital little piece of writing: “Commentators have linked a variety of factors to these increases in violence. Some Palestinian women’s groups point to recent increases in poverty and unemployment that have stripped men of their traditional breadwinning role; the humiliation and frustration that Palestinian men experience at the hands of the Israeli army at checkpoints and during arrest and detention; and the fact that this frustration and anger is often taken out on family members, especially as unemployed men spend more time at home and families have been stranded together in the home for days and weeks during Israeli imposed curfews.”
    Yes, HRW, you tell us in this footnote that “Some Palestinian women’s groups” make these arguments. But what is your judgment on this score? We are not told.

The report’s summary tells us, regarding methodology, that

    This report is based on more than one hundred interviews conducted in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, Tulkarem, Jericho, and Gaza in November and December 2005; follow up communications with many of the same individuals by telephone and email as well as a handful of new interviews in June and July 2006; and examination of relevant laws, academic literature, policy analyses, surveys, and other published materials…

Of the one hundred interviews, as far as I can tell, roughly half were with social workers, government officials, and other professionals, and roughly half with women who were themselves actual survivors of domestic violence.
This scale of interviewing, and the preparation and publication of a lengthy, 101-page report like this, use up considerable resources. (And this, from an organization that is always begging me and others to give it more money.) I think that from their elegant perch in the Empire State Building, the HRW leaders could have chosen some campaigns that would have been far, far more effective in bringing increased protection to the lives and wellbeing of Palestinian females. They could have started by insisting that Israel

    * end its promiscuous recourse to the use of lethal force,
    * lift the illegal blocade it maintains on Gaza and on the institutions of the PA in general, and
    * dismantle both the system of checkpoints and barricades it has erected deep inside the Palestinian West Bank and the network of (completely illegal, and very damaging) Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Then they could continue by urging our own legislative and executive powers here in the US to cut off all the financial and political support that has allowed Israel to persist in these anti-humane (including anti-female) policies for many years.
Moves like those would make a huge improvement in the conditions of life for Palestinian women and their family members… And until Israel enacts such changes, we can expect only that Palestinian women and their menfolk will remain, sadly, trapped in the belly of “the Experiment.”
But HRW did not mention wide-reaching, humane, and effective steps like those. No, instead they just chose to beat up on the quite powerless and always vulnerable “Palestinian Authority.” No marks for bravery, friends.

    Addendum #2, Wed. morning: I also re-read the long list of “Recommendations” in the report. By far the vast majority of these are aimed at the PA and its institutions. Many of them look very sane, sensible, and humane. But then you start to think, gosh, if the PA is going to do all these things, it has to have some resources with which to do them? … So I rushed down to the small list of recommendations at the bottom of the page there, that are addressed to “the internatinal donor community”, expecting to see “Restore the P.A.’s funding” as number 1 there– so the PA could have even a chance of doing some of the things HRW was asking it to do…
    What do you think I found? No mention of that at all.

Understanding Iran’s Nuclear Policy (Ramazani)

Our local paper today features another of Professor R.K. Ramazani’s opinion essays, this time focusing on Washington’s chronic misreading of Iran’s negotiating nuclear strategy, its decision-making process, the urgent need for direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran, and the high mutual gains that could be had from such a process.
Now an Emeritus Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, Ramazani has for over fifty years – a half century – written extensively on Iranian foreign policy. As the blurb at the essay notes, his major book credits include The United States and Iran, The Foreign Policy of Iran, 1500-1941, Iran¹s Foreign Policy, 1941-1975, and Revolutionary Iran: Challenge and Response in the Middle East.
As such, he’s been called the Dean of Iranian Foreign Policy Studies, and I (Scott) happen to be fortunate to refer to him as my longstanding mentor. I published a biographical sketch of Ramazani several years ago, yet it’s already out-of-date, as the Professor remains a very active scholar. Today’s essay draws in part from his own interviews with Iranian decision-makers. May its reach be far.
Here’s my quick take of the essay’s main points:

Continue reading “Understanding Iran’s Nuclear Policy (Ramazani)”