Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 201 – Info, analysis, discussion

Riverbend on Saddam’s death sentence

… Read the latest post of this wise and talented young Iraqi blogger:

Things must be deteriorating beyond imagination if Bush needs to use the ‘Execute the Dictator’ card.

This is how free our media is today: the channels that were showing the pro-Saddam demonstrations have been shut down. Iraqi security forces promptly raided them. Welcome to the new Iraq.

It’s the frustration of feeling like the whole country and every single Iraqi inside and outside of Iraq is at the mercy of American politics. It is the rage of feeling like a mere chess piece to be moved back and forth at will.

A true cri de coeur. Do you think Bush has read this?
(Footnote. For JWN commenters who have in the past expressed doubts that Riverbend is who she says she is: Go over to her blog and see the photos she has on that post of what various Iraqi TV channels have been broadcasting today… Also, be aware I’m not going to give any further space on the blog’s comments boards for comments calling her authenticity into question.)

Some questions to ask about the Saddam Hussein trial

The judges at the Iraqi High (formerly “Special”) Tribunal today sentenced Saddam Hussein to death by hanging for his role in the 1982 killing/execution of 148 people in the town of Dujail. Two other former Iraqi officials also received the death sentence in this case.
AP’s account linked to there, from Hamza Hendawi in Baghdad, notes that back in March Saddam argued that he alone had been responsible for the Dujail killings, which he described as executions undertaken by his government in the wake of an assassination attempt launched against him in the town. The assassination plot had apparently been organized by the Islamic Daawa Party– that is, the party of the current Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Hendawi added that, “About 50 of those sentenced [to death] by the ‘Revolutionary Court’ [in 1982] died during interrogation before they could go to the gallows. Some of those hanged were children.”
At this point, I don’t think it’s very helpful to get into a discussion of whether Saddam “deserves” to be executed because of his past actions– though I readily grant that many of those were extremely heinous.
Actually, can any human power at this point deliver “just desserts” to someone who has committed actions like those undertaken by Saddam, Joseph Kony, or other perpetrators of extremely harmful deeds? How would we even start to think about what “just desserts” might be in such cases? As we say in the anti-death penalty movement here in the US: “Do we rape rapists? So why do we think it’s okay to kill killers?”
Also, do we want to be the sort of people who support the extinction of human life under any guise at all, or with any justification?
… Just some questions. But as I said, I don’t want to dwell on issues of what Saddam “deserves”. I want to focus instead on the broad social effects of this death penalty against him and his comrades.
I note, first, that the death penalty most likely won’t be carried out for a while. His lawyers have the right to appeal. An appeals bench will then give a final ruling, and within 30 days of that ruling being given the sentence must be carried out.
What shape will Iraq be in that many weeks into the future, anyway? And during those weeks, what effects can this pending execution be expected to have on the country’s national community?
So anyway, here are the three big questions about this whole affair that I think we need to focus on right now:

My first answers to these questions are as follows:
Regarding Question 1, it seems very clear that the whole trial (and the second trial, regarding the anti-Kurdish Anfal campaign, which is still underway), and now the handing down of these death sentences, have stoked internal tensions inside Iraq significantly, contributing to the high toll of deaths from sectarian polarization and considerably complicating the prospects of an easy national liberation from US occupation rule.
Regarding Question 2, it is already clear that the “new Iraq” ushered in under the US occupation is one with a very worrying track record in the rule-of-law sphere; and the workings of this tribunal– deeply flawed as they have been by numerous procedural irregularities, as well as by deep structural problems– have been part and parcel of this disregard for the rule of law.
(You can see some of my earlier writings on the (il-)legality of the court’s whole set-up here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.)
Regarding Question 3, in all my work on punishment theory, the incapacitation of the ability of evil-doers to re-offend is one of the few possibly valid justifications (or perhaps, the only possibly valid one) that I can see for punishment, at all. Has the work of the Iraqi High Tribunal helped to incapacitate Saddam’s ability to re-offend? I think not. From inside the courtroom he has continued to rally his former supporters in the “Red Zone” of Iraq, far beyond the courtroom (and such “due process” protections as he has received during the trial have helped him to do that… H’mmm.)
The “incapacitation” of Saddam and the Baathist networks that support him could theoretically have been achieved in one of two ways: through reform and reintegration into a new, more tolerant political order; or through outright suppression. Reform and reintegration of perpetrators of earlier heinous acts worked in the case of Renamo in Mozambique and the apartheid-era enforcers in South Africa. It is the approach now being seriously tried against Joseph Kony, in northern Uganda. As Abraham Lincoln notably said after the US Civil War: “The best way to stop my enemy being my enemy is to make him my friend.”
Reform and reintegration of Baathists (possibly including Saddam) into a “new” Iraq has never been seriously attempted by any of the post-invasion Iraqi regimes, including the present one. Instead, goaded on by Chalabi and many others with a strong grievance against Saddam, the post-invasion regimes have attempted suppression, often with extreme harshness. And that hasn’t worked either…
So Iraq is in the parlous state it currently finds itself in today… The trial and sentencing of Saddam Hussein has not, to be frank, probably made much difference in the course of events there. But the difference it has made has, in my mind, been nearly wholly negative. So much for the (completely a-political and a-historical) dreams of those abstract, jurisprudential idealists who hoped this trial could be a new “Nuremberg” or could usher in a moment of “Grotian”-level reform into the international system.
At the end of the day, no-one looking at conflict-wracked societies can avoid the need to deal with the urgent practical realities of history and politics.

Jordan drops Abu Audeh case

The official Jordanian news agency, Petra, anounced today that,

Al Jazeera has a few more details.
This is excellent news. For more details about the prominent Jordanian citizen Adnan Abu Audeh (also transliterated as Abu-Odeh) and this now dead accusation, see this recent JWN post.
Al Jazeera notes that after he was first informed, Thursday, of the possibility of charges being brought against him Abu Audeh, “told reporters that he believed in ‘the fairness of Jordanian justice’.” Many others acused and detained under the kingdom’s draconian state security laws now also need to see this fairness in action.
I hope, too, that Jordan’s rulers will not be taking any other actions to squelch or deter cordial and non-confrontational open discussion of the serious questions Abu Audeh has raised about discrimination against certain whole groups of Jordanian citizens and the need to build a more inclusive national community there.

Mutiny at the Military Times?

What would Hawkeye think of this!? Independent thinking at the Army Times?
The Military Times Media – the publisher of the papers avidly read by millions of American military service men and women and their families – has summoned up its collective courage and editorialized upon the man at the top of the Pentagon. First reported by NBC, the Army Times and its partner military weeklies have released the full text of their Monday editorials calling for….

the removal of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

No kidding.
Here’s the direct Army Times link

… all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.
Now, the president says he’ll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.
This is a mistake. It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation’s current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.
These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. (e.g., They drank the Kool-aid too. — w.s.h.) They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.
And although that tradition, and the officers’ deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.
Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.
This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:
Donald Rumsfeld must go.

Amazing…. So far, no comment from the Pentagon or the man himself.
No doubt Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, et.al. will be demanding the government cut off ties to the Military Times Media (owned since 1997 by Gannett) – or “embed” it back directly under the Pentagon. (say, under the “Office of Special Propaganda”) Or they will interview indignant gung-ho spouses saying the papers have “betrayed” their loved ones – that they’re “not supporting the troops.”
To the contrary, I am rather impressed that the editorial begins with a half century old quote from correspondent Marguerite Higgins:

“So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion … it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth.”

Neocons, Chalabi, fight for exits from catastrophe in Iraq

The catastrophe that is the Bush administration’s “intervention” in Iraq is now clearly revealed for all to see, and there is currently a massive mêlée of neocons and other architects of that policy (including JWN’s longtime nemesis, Ahmed Chalabi) scrambling to pass off the blame for it to somebody else… anybody else at all.
Of course, their protestations of non-responsibility are inherently non-credible. They are even less credible than all the accusations they pumped up and circulated in the pre-war period about Saddam Hussein’s possessions of WMDs, his links to Al Qaeda, etc… which is to say they have no credibility at all.
But still, it is a wonderful sight to see these men– and yes, they all are men– scrambling to distance themselves from the sinking ship that is Bush’s Iraq “policy”, trying to grab for themselves any lifebelts of self-justifcation that might be around (though there aren’t many), while wildly pointing fingers of blame all around and savagely beating away the hands of any of their own one-time comrades also trying to grab onto the lifebelts they now claim for themselves.
At one point, I used to think we should tread gently and graciously with former participants in the Bush-war venture, calmly welcoming any expression of self-doubt they might feel moved to voice while not pointing too many fingers of blame of our own at those misguided souls.
I am almost past that now. The scale of the suffering they have inflicted on Iraqis (and along the way, also on Palestinians… let’s not forget that) is too large now for me to feel much motivated to stick to the niceties. I am feeling increasingly happy to wallow in the enjoyment of the spectator sport now being played out by and amongst these men before our very eyes…
Just in the past couple of days we have had:
Chalabi blaming Wolfowitz:

“The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge…

This is in a piece by Dexter Filkins that will be in Sunday’s NYT Magazine (Nov. 5). The text should be more freely available on Sunday, I think.
Btw, this piece also includes some intriguing vignettes from a trip Chalabi made to Iran in November 2005. Filkins writes about, “the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there.” After crossing a land border into Iran with Chalabi, Filkins discovers an executive jet waiting nearby that whisks Chalabi and the entourage to Teheran where Chala is almost immediately taken into a lengthy meeting with Iran’s national security adviser, Ali Larijani… And the next morning he has a meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…
Filkins quotes former CIA operative Robert Baer and former DIA analyst Pat Lang as describing Chala as, basically, an Iranian asset:

“He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections – he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.

Well, enough about Chala (for now.) because we also have, in a great piece rushed out under the title “Neo Culpa” by Vanity Fair’s David Rose, the following great tidbits:
Frank Gaffney, David Frum, and Michael Rubin blaming Bush himself.
Here’s Frum, the Canadian who as Bush’s speechwriter invented the whole concept of “axis of evil”:

he just did not absorb the ideas.

Kenneth ‘cake-walk’ Adelman blaming Rumsfeld:

“I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

Oh, let’s not forget Rummy’s expensive new mansion in St. Michael’s, Maryland, while we’re at it. How much are these various pieces of real estate worth between them? I think that many people wronged by Rumsfeld in Iraq and elsewhere could bring a nice little civil suit against him and strip him off all his ghastly, ill-gotten gains pretty quickly…
And Rose tells us we also have:
Richard Perle blaming Condi Rice:

“[Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly.”

For most of these years, of course, Rice was the national security adviser; and after she went over to the State Department her former deputy Stephen Hadley took over at the NSC…
Michael Ledeen blaming the women in the White House:

“Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

H’mmm. This is a new angle. Last thing I knew, Dick Cheney was probably the single most powerful person in the White House. Is Ledeen trying to tell us that Unca Dick is, secretly, yet another of the “women who are in love with the president”? Strange world…
Adelman also blaming Tenet, Franks, and Bremer:

“The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There’s no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.”

But not him, Kenny Adelman, oh no… Of course, you can get a great behind-the-scenes view of the role that Adelman and all these neocons– and Chalabi– played in not only pumping up the threat of war but also determining the way it was fought, if you read Bob Woodward’s latest book…
Richard Perle blaming everyone except the neocons:

“Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.”

… So yes, all in all, it is excellent sport to see the great falling-out among all these miscreants who took the US into the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is particularly excellent that all these revelations– from the Woodward book on, and including all these latest revelations– have been put into the public domain before rather than after the now-imminent midterm election.
I recognize that it makes very little difference indeed at this point to the traumataized and war-shattered survivors of the US-induced violence in Iraq whether any of these once-preening warmongers now feels regret or not about the role he had played in instigating, promoting, and executing the invasion. It might make a difference to Iraqis over time, however. For if we in the US who have always opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq can now take advantage of these latest revelations to gain increased political power and influence inside our own country, then hopefully the policies that emerge from Washington over the months ahead will be less damaging to Iraqis than they might otherwise have been.
As I have long argued, the best– or let us say at this stage, the least bad– policy that the US can pursue is one that works for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is speedy, orderly, complete, and generous.
Maybe this latest round of revelations will make it more possible to attain such a policy over the months ahead?

Well-organized people power in northern Gaza

I have long argued– including in this article on Hizbullah, or this article on the women’s organizations of Hamas– that the bedrock of the political strength of well-organized Islamist organizations like Hamas or Hizbullah has been their ability to build sturdy, resilient civilian mass organizations covering all sectors of society– rather than merely their creation of the (much smaller) armed organizations whose activities seem to get most of the coverage in the western media.
Well now, the Hamas women have played a hugely important role in defusing the latest crisis in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
Over the past couple of days, the Israeli occupation forces, which had forced their way back into parts of Gaza after a short-lived withdrawal from the Strip, have been mounting extensive “search-and-screening” operations in Beit Hanoun. They had surrounded the whole town of some 28,000 people and cordoned it off, announcing a complete “curfew” (i.e. lockdown) on all residents except for men aged 16 through 50– and all these men were ordered by loudspeaker to report for screening to centers the IOF had set up.
However, according to that report linked to above, which is by AP’s Yakub Ralwah, a group of menwhom he described as “dozens of gunmen” on Thursday sought refuge in the mosque, instead…
Ralwah:

But then, as sporadic shooting continued this morning, Hamas’s radio called on Beit Hanoun’s women to walk as fast as they could to the mosque. And–

32 gunmen who had taken cover in the mosque escaped with the help of the women.

This action of mobilizing the women to come and form an unarmed interposition force around the Beit Hanoun mosque is very similar indeed to the action Ayatollah Sistani organized in Najaf back in August 2004. (See this , this, and this.) On that occasion, units of Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army were holed up in portion of Najaf and the US occupation force was closing in on them… But Sistani called for “a million men” to march peacefully to the city. That call was answered by, at least, hundreds of thousands of Sistani’s supporters from around the area, and in the course of that procession, also, the Sadrists were able to make theirescape.
Hamas’s mobilization of women in this role is particularly notable. But they’re an impressive bunch. Go read that article on Hamas women that I linked to up at the top.
Regarding Hizbullah, their mass civilian organizations proved their strength and value a number of times during the horrible crisis of last summer. Most notable of these occasions was when just about the entire pro-Hizbullah population of the devastated towns and villages of south Lebanon answered Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s call to return en masse to their homeplaces starting on the very day the ceasefire went into effect, August 14. Helped by Hizbullah’s well-practiced social-relief and social support organizations, the southerners responded to that call in every way they could. As they did so, they defied and openly mocked the announcements the Israelis were making that civilians should “wait until it was safe” for them to return home. And by returning home– unarmed, and in huge numbers– they reclaimed the whole of south Lebanon for Hizbullah.
Actions like this, I should note, take considerable amounts of courage, self-confidence, trust in the leadership doing the mobilizing, and discipline. The women who gathered at the Beit Hanoun mosque today showed all those qualities.

Update:

This

I have noted, a number of times, that the way Hamas and Hizbullah have been combining their use of armed action with the building and use of extensive, basically nonviolent, civilian mass organizations is very reminiscent of the way that South Africa’s African National Congress organized during the latter decades of the anti-apartheid struggle in their country. Nelson Mandela, remember, had been a key originator and the first implementer of the idea that the ANC should have an armed wing, in addition to its long-existing political organization; and it was for playing that role as head of theANC military that he was imprisoned by the authorities. That fact– and the fact that the ANC continued to keep its armed wing in existence right through to the conclusion of the peace negotiations, at which point it was integrated with the regime’s military into a new unified national defense force– both tend to get forgotten in a sanitized western media portrayal that glorifies the role of Mandela in the negotiations without saying much at all about the multifaceted nature of the ANC’s political strength…
Well, anyway, here today is a great new example of Palestinian people power in action. Yes, it is quite tragic that one of the women participants in that (unarmed) demonstration was killed by the IOF. But still, the women’s mobilization did serve to defuse the tensions around the mosque, most likely saving the lives of many more than one person at the scene. Plus, it no doubt helped show the leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian political groups– and the women participants themselves– the great value and strength of civilian mass organizations.
Yes, it would be great if Hamas transformed itself totally into an organization of civilian, nonviolent, mass action. (Ditto, of course, the state of Israel, which commands and is clearly prepared to use means of violent aggression and control that are hundreds of times more lethal than those used by any Palestinians.) But neither Hamas nor the state of Israel is, it seems, about to do that.
But still, absent a complete disarming of organizations like Hamas or Hizbullah, seeing them turn increasingly to, and recognize the value of, nonviolent means of organizing is a very important and constructive development.

Jordan: Court considers charging former minister Abu Audeh

Note: This is an updated version of the post that I put up on this topic at 12:40 p.m. today.

I got home to Virginia, from Jordan, late last night. This morning I learned that my longtime friend Adnan Abu Audeh (also transliterated as Abu-Odeh) was this morning threatened with being prosecuted by Jordan’s fairly infamous “state security court” on the basis of two charges: One was “threatening national unity” and the other was, in Arabic, “Italat al-Lisan”, literally, having too long of a tongue (toward the status of the king), that is, lèse majesté.
Abu Audeh’s daughter Lama Abu Audeh, who teaches at Georgetown University Law School in Washington DC, tells me that the “threatening national unity” charge carries a sentence of up to three years imprisonment.
Adnan Abu Audeh is a very accomplished and prominent Jordan citizen. He was Minister of Information in the 1970s, later going on to become Head of the Royal Court for several years under the late King Hussein. After King Abdullah II succeeded Hussein in 1999, he appointed Abu Audeh as a political advisor. But he removed him from that position after Abu Audeh published a book (with the U.S. Institute of Peace Press in Washington DC) that analyzed the relationship inside Jordan between citizens whose families were originally from east of the River Jordan– that is, from within the present-day territory of the Kingdom– and those whose families were originally from west of the river, in the “West Bank” area that is claimed by the Palestinians.
Jordan had annexed the West Bank to itself after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, though no other governments except Britain and Pakistan ever recognized that act of annexation. At that point, West Bankers were given Jordanian citizenship. In 1988, however, King Hussein laid down Jordan’s claim to exercizing any form of sovereignty in the West Bank.
Abu Audeh is of West Bank origin, having been born and brought up in Nablus.
In recent years, he has made a great contribution to international understanding and global political life through his service on the board of the International Crisis Group, a very respected research organization whose board also includes many other high-level political personalities from around the world.
Lama Abu Audeh told me that today, after being interrogated, and told that the judge would now try to establish a case for his indictment, her father was allowed to return home. (I wonder what the evidence might be. Will there be an anthropometric measuring of the length of his tongue, I wonder?) I sincerely hope that if he is taken into custody at any point he will not be subjected to the kinds of torture that are reliably reported by Amnesty International and other bodies to occur within the prisons run by the state security apparatus. (See some of the reports available through this Amnesty portal.)
The fact that the Jordanian regime is even considering charging a West-Bank-origin citizen of such distinction and prominence as Adnan Abu Audeh on such flimsy charges indicates to me that the political situation in the country must be much more fragile than I had already, on the basis of my recent trip there, judged it to be. I confess that while I was there, I spent just about all my time cocooned in the conference environment and had almost no time to talk with local friends… (If I had, Abu Audeh would certainly have been one whom I contacted. Now I deeply regret not having done so.) However, just from a few things I noticed while in the country, the situation did already seem to be quite fragile.
I can quite understand that Jordanians, whose country is sandwiched between Palestine and Iraq and contains large bodies of refugees from both areas– including a well-established community of West-Bank-origin people who now make up more than 60% of Jordan’s citizenry– must be feeling very concerned indeed about the fallout inside their country from the oppression, hopelessness, and political violence that continue to mark the situations in both those weighty neighbors. But surely, to threaten to indict a person like Adnan Abu Audeh on the basis merely of secretly compiled charges of speech crimes does nothing to build trust within the country and ensure the longterm wellbeing of its people?
The matters Mr. Abu Audeh has raised in public about the nature of the relationship between East Bankers and West Bankers are surely a legitimate subject for public discussion, particularly if that discussion is held in the measured, non-confrontational way in which he discusses them.
If this investigation continues and charges are indeed brought against him, the effect on civil discourse in Jordan will be a chilling one, and citizens who have legitimate grievances against the regime may well feel more inclined to pursue them through violence. Charging Adnan Abu Audeh with speech crimes seems like a recipe only for increased tension and violence.

Scary Politics: “What happens if we lose?”

We survived Halloween. No October Surprises; No Gulf of Tonkin incidents manufactured to start another war in the Persian Gulf – yet.
Meanwhile, the political air here in America has been especially “thick.” I presently anticipate a significant defeat for Republicans in Congress. Like so many others who once thought themselves conservative, my political loyalties have been increasingly “independent.” Taken over by neoconservative transplants from the Democrats, today’s Republican leadership is as recognizable to me now as Dick Cheney is to Brent Scowcroft.
My favorite US Presidential pick for 2008 might still be Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) – though he disappointed me with his recent vote on on the detainee “treatment” bill – the one that tossed away Habeas Corpus. But this year here in Virginia, I’m more impressed with the major Democratic candidates.
One of my Jefferson Fellow colleagues, a sharp young English chap with a Ph.D. from Oxford, thinks quite the opposite – anticipating a November surprise wherein the Republicans will retain control of both Houses. He thinks the President’s “simple strategy” of painting the Democrats as “soft on terror” will remain the “brilliant” winning ticket.
Maybe I’m guilty of letting my hopes – for a return to a government of checks and balances, one that gives a hoot about the Constitution – get in the way of my analysis. Perhaps. We’ll see who gets humbled more next Tuesday; which one of us gets to feel like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy with the (political) football.
In my corner, I take some support from a Sunday essay written by a top former Republican Congressional Leader, Dick Army – of the “Contract with/on America” fame – which I think could be a first cut for his party’s obituary. Notice though that Army focuses on his party having strayed from first principles of smaller government. Little mention is made of it losing its way abroad – my most severe gripe with the party.
I chatted Tuesday with Mitch Van Yahres, a local Democrat icon in Charlottesville, the “conscience of the House” who recently retired from long service as a Virginia Delegate. Van Yahres shared my sense that a political ‘tsunami is in the works, even as he counted ways something might go awry.
Yet he stopped me in my tracks with a cheerfully presented, yet chilling Halloween thought:
“What happens if we lose? — What if the Republicans retain control of everything?”

Continue reading “Scary Politics: “What happens if we lose?””

Travel, conference, disutility of war

The conference in Amman on nonviolent leadership was incredibly moving and absorbing. So much so that I didn’t get a moment to blog for most of that time.
I’m on my way back home (Atlanta airport.) As I get back into reading the news more closely I have– not surprisingly– been having some big thoughts on the disutility of war and other forms of state violence. The situations in Iraq and Palestine are both quite tragic and completely illustrative of this…
But surely, it is time for us all to go out quite explicitly in public and say: Military violence doesn’t “work”… There has to be– indeed, there is– a much better way to build a more secure world.
Anyway, I’m still pretty tired now. I’ll try to get some lengthier, more analytical posts up here in the days ahead…

Maliki pushes back; power shift in the relationship?

So according to Hassan al-Suneid, an aide to Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki, Maliki demanded a video conference with George Bush Saturday, and when he got Bush on the line he managed to win from him a promise “move swiftly to turn over full control of the Iraqi army to Baghdad.”
That quote was from the AP report on the conversation, as written by Steven Hurst and Qassim Abdul-Zahra. They added that Suneid:

said later the prime minister was intentionally playing on U.S. voter displeasure with the war to strengthen his hand with Washington.

And this is what Suneid quoted Maliki as having told Bush on the phone:

Khalilzad must not behave like Bremer but rather like an ambassador.

The writers noted that this was

And if you believe that, then I have a nice piece of swamp in Florida I’d like to sell you…
It seems to me this might be the pivotal moment in Maliki’s relationship with the Bushites?
There have, of course, been many reports in the past month or so that the Bushites are getting so “tired” of Maliki, or are so “dissatisfied” with him for one reason or another, that they have fairly inelegantly been threatening him that they’d overthrow him in a coup if he didn’t behave.
Well, who’d do that? The Bushites and whose army?
For his part, Maliki now seems to be acting as if he finds such threats and reports inherently non-credible. And maybe at this point, he’s right?
On the other hand, if I were him I’d be very, very careful regarding all aspects of personal security in the days ahead.
Perhaps especially in the days after November 7? After all, it wouldn’t play too well at the polls that day if Bush’s “Potemkin democratization” project in Iraq fell apart in quite such an evident way between now and then. But after November 7??