Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 205 – Info, analysis, discussion

Iraqi deaths under occupation

I’ve now had the chance to start reading the latest, very disturbing Lancet study of the mortality rate inside Iraq since the US invasion. The researchers, who were from the very well-regarded Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, conducted a face-to-face household survey of a near-proportional national sample of 40-household clusters: 1,849 households comprising 12,801 people.
Extrapolating from this sample, they calculated that with 95% certainty, the number of “excess deaths” suffered in Iraq between March 19, 2003 and the end of June 2006, over what would have occurred had the pre-war mortality rate been sustained, was between 393,000 and 942,000, with the best estimate being around 655,000.
These are shocking figures, by any measure. These researchers used the same methodology used during their earlier study, two years ago, which at that time found around 100,000 excess deaths.
In the interviews, the household heads or their spouses were asked about all the births and deaths in the household in the period between January 2002 and June 2006, with the cause of death (if known), and the production of death certificates where possible. They later divided the reported deaths up into four time periods of roughly 13-14 months each: (I) January ’02 – March 18, ’03; (II) March 19 ’03 – April ’04; (III) May ’04 – May ’05; and (IV) June ’05 – June ’06. If you go to the bottom of p.4 of the Lancet study, you will see that the crude mortality rates reported during these four time periods were as follows:

So you can clearly see not only that the numbers are large but also that they have been growing steeply throughout every year the US has stayed in Iraq.
That is an extremely important finding. It corrobrates what has been evident to all of us who follow the daily news reports.
So where are the arguments of those who, one year ago, or two, or three, were claiming that the US “owes it to the Iraqi people” to stay in Iraq to “help fix the mess we inadvertently made there” (the so-called “Pottery Barn rule)…. ??
As I’ve been arguing here all along, yes, the US does owe the Iraqi people a lot. But maintaining our military and political presence in the country is not the way to make their lives better.
I would go further on this issue with my old friend and colleague Juan Cole, who has made this argument numerous times– as well as the related argument that “the US cannot leave Iraq now because of all the mayhem and killing that would follow such a pullout.” But at least today Juan had the grace to write this:

I once warned that a precipitate US withdrawal could result in a million dead a la Cambodia or Afghanistan. Little did I know that the conditions created by the US invasion and occupation have all along been driving toward that number anyway!

All I can say, Juan, you had no excuse not to know. So now, do you have the further courage needed to say, “Well yes, maybe for the sake of the Iraqi people the US military should pull out of the country in the fastest way possible”?
As for the reactions of US pols to the publication of the study’s results, here’s what Reuters reported that the much-respected (!) public-health researcher and social scientist George W. Bush said today:

Like he would know what a credible methodology would look like? What a sad, sick joke. ~HC]

That would probably have been based on the Iraqi Body Count, which today is reporting that “between 43,800 and 48,700” Iraqis have verifiably been killed from direct violence since the invasion. But the IBC’s methodology is notably not an epidemiological approach; and indeed it relies on extremely tight reporting criteria. Namely, that to be counted at all, any death or group of deaths must have been reported in two separate public media and must have been directly attributable to physical violence.
But given the huge difficulty of newsgathering in Iraq, and of news distribution, this methodology has been becoming more and more useless as a way of counting exactly how many Iraqis have lost their lives due to the mayhem in their country since March 2006.
Personally, I want to be conservative in my use of the latest Lancet figures. So I think I’ll tend to “use” them by saying something like “almost certainly, more than 400,000 Iraqis have lost their lives because of the US invasion and occupation of their country.”
Should we, though, “blame” the US occupation for all these deaths? Yes, we should, since under the Geneva Conventions an occupying army assumes direct responsibility for the welfare of the population that comes under its control. So even though many Iraqis have been killed since March 2003 by other Iraqis (and the study makes clear that that proportion has been increasing), it still remains the case that the breakdown of the political system and of public order that allowed those killings to proliferate is directly attributable to the policies pursued by the occupation forces, and the occupation administration therefore has to bear responsibility for them. Which is what the Geneva Conventions say.
One quick comparison here: If the US had suffered the same rate of “excess deaths” that Iraqis have suffered since March 2003– if the latter were 400,000 excess deaths– then the US would have suffered 4.43 million excess deaths since March 2003. Imagine how traumatized we would all feel.
To my Iraqi friends: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I have done all I can over the past four years to, first, prevent the invasion of your country from happening, and then to work for the speedy and total pullout of our occupation troops. I guess that, like the whole of the US peace movement, I will just have to redouble my efforts.

North Korea, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear disarmament

I’ve been thinking about North Korea’s explosion of an (apparently fairly unsuccessful, but still worrying) nuclear device. (“Device” is what you call it before it’s been recognizably made into a deliverable warhead/munition.)
I see that Kofi Annan has, refreshingly, been calling for the US to open direct talks with North Korea about its concerns:

“We should talk to parties whose behavior we want to change, whose behavior we want to influence. And from that point of view, I believe that . . . the U.S. and North Korea should talk,” Annan said.

Bush is so far resisting this idea. Here’s what he said at a news conference today:

The United States also reserves all options to defend our friends and our interests in the region against the threats from North Korea.

I hate it when a US president uses the formulation “reserves all options”. With regard to North Korea as to Iran, this is a threat of nuclear retaliation cloaked in only the flimsiest of diplo-speak garments. Somebody should tell the Prez that everybody already knows that the US has nuclear weapons… “And you don’t need to keep threatening in this ugly, bullying way, that you might be prepared to use them!”
Which brings me to the main thing I wanted to say here. Remember how, once it seemed as though the White South Africans were about to lose their monopoly control of nuclear-weapons technology in their part of the world, they suddenly decided that maybe their whole region would be better off without nuclear weapons and made rapid and very public efforts to dismantle their whole nuclear-weapons program?
Why on earth don’t we think that this same approach might be even more valid, today, as between the United States and the rest of the world?
Nuclear weapons are truly terrifying things. (I’ve been to Hiroshima and talked to survivors of the 1945 bombing there. I wish everyone else in the US could do the same.) They are terrifying in anyone’s hands. Including in the hands of a very poor, desperate, marginalized-feeling government like that of North Korea. So maybe as the march of nuclear proliferation continues around the world, instead of focusing just on a strategy that involves shoring up the strategic position of the US and its allies in these increasingly dangerously circumstances, we should focus on one that would look at human security as a function of the global interdependency of all humankind, and conclude that what’s needed today is the dismantling of all the world’s nuclear arsenals.
(As all NPT members states, including the US, committed to back at the time of signing the NPT, rtemember.)
Yes, there are all kinds of “cascade effects” that might follow from North Korea’s action– within eastern Asia, and far beyond. But I think Pyongyang’s recent test gives all of us around the world who hate these weapons a new chance to stand up together and say, No to everyone’s nuclear weapons! Human solidarity now!

Pat Lang on the 33-day war

Pat Lang, who has forgotten more about the strategic realities of today’s Middle East than most of us ever knew, has been consistently clearheaded in his analysis of the 33-day war between Israel and Hizbullah.
He recently wrote this:

[at the ferocity of Israel’s response on July 12– which Nasrallah has of course, already admitted to. ~HC]

makes even more significant the Hizbullah recovery under extreme pressure and the quality of the defense they mounted.

I have made many of these same points on JWN (e.g. here) and I develop them further in my upcoming article in Boston Review. Col. Pat just makes them more succinctly…
I do wonder, though, why the Israelis and so many of their friends are so intent on spinning the results of the 33-day war in this way, when if they have any intel capabilities left at all they must know that strategic planners from many Middle Eastern countries are now attentively studying the secrets of Hizbullah’s victory in order to learn from them. What do they gain from this attempt to deny reality? I suppose the answer is that they must be desperate to try to darn together the now-tattered cloth of the credibility of their “military deterrent”. And maybe we should be happy to let them do that for a while, since the credibility of a deterrent capability that was so rudely shattered by the bombs of July and August, has now been re-established– by both sides… And as a result, South Lebanon and northern Israel are for the present quiet.
Which gives all interested parties a good opportunity to restart the only kind of peace negotiations that can assure a stable longterm peace in that region– that is, all-party negotiations aimed at the speedy conclusion of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.
So why on earth aren’t the Israelis leaping at that opportunity?

Last call: Middle East library seeks loving home!

JWN readers might recall that a month ago I posted this notice here, about the professional library of my dear, recently departed friend Misty Gerner:

The Deborah J. Gerner Collection

Since then I’ve received some intriguing expressions of enquiry regarding the library. But along the way I realised that many non-US university-type people were probably still on vacation, and may not have seen it. So I thought I should re-post it. And this time, I’ll put a bit of a deadline onto it so we can get this process moved along in a way that is both expeditious and fair…
So if you know of an institution that might be interested in the DJG Library, please could you email me at the address above with at least an initial expression of interest before October 31.
Thanks!

Republicans foundering

Here’s the latest WaPo-ABC News poll of American public opinion. And here’s the summary from the WaPo’s David Broder and Dan Balz:

So the Dems might regain at least one of the houses of Congress! Which means that at last we might see real hearings and some robust attempts at holding this out-of-control administration somewhat accountable.
I am still really upset that a couple of weeks ago, numerous Democrats voted with the administration’s attempt to strip habeas corpus out of a part of the US legal system, and unquestioningly with the administration’s latest tranche of war-financing. So our campaign to bring our country into a much better relationship with the rest of the world will still be a long one, even if the Dems win both houses of Congress next month.
And some more from Broder and Balz:

On terrorism, a majority (53 percent) said they disapprove of his performance. That is the lowest rating Bush has received on his signature issue.

63 percent said no, the highest recorded during Bush’s presidency.

But we still have a lot more public education to do about the need to bring the troops out of Iraq as speedily as possible. B&B write:

Still, there is no significant support for withdrawing U.S. forces immediately. Half of those surveyed — about the same percentage it has been throughout the year — said they would like to see troop levels decrease. Despite the high number of casualties, only a fifth said they supported immediate withdrawal.

Okay, back to the street corner this Thursday, then…

Now they’re censoring Tony Judt??

I happen to be in New York this week. Now, I’ve always known that New York was a strongly pro-Israeli city, but I was honestly really surprised to learn that the eminent historian of Europe Tony Judt has now been subjected to a heavy-handed attempt to silence him from speaking out here on the topic of the strength of the Israeli lobby.
That article, by Michael Powell in today’s WaPo, tells us that,

the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had called

He is darn’ right it’s chilling.
The heads of the two organizations involved both made weaselly excuses about the actions of the groups they lead. Powell writes that they,

But they applauded the consulate for rescinding Judt’s invitation.

“I never asked for a particular action; I was calling as a friend of Poland,”

We could note, of course (as Powell does) that Judt is Jewish; he was “born and raised in England and lost much of his family in the Holocaust.” (Though note, too, that Powell also quotes Judt as making the quite non-remarkable observation that, “”For many, the way to be Jewish in this country is to aggressively assert that the Holocaust is your identification tag… I know perfectly well my history, but it never occurred to me that my most prominent identity was as a Jew.”)
Also, while Abe Foxman might accuse Judt of saying that Israel “shouldn’t exist”, actually Judt’s position is that the best outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is probably a secular, binational state. Again, that should be quite non-remarkable… But not, apparently, in this stewing mass of ultra-Zionist intolerance that is New York City.
Okay, I know I shouldn’t do the whole city down. Some of my very best friends, after all, are New Yorkers…
Actually, I think this childish over-reaction from Foxman, Harris, and Co, may well be just another example of what I remarked on recently here, with respect to Tom Friedman and Henry Kissinger, namely that,

the bloody nose that Hizbullah was able to deal to Israel’s once-‘famed’ military in South Lebanon this summer [seems to have had] the effect of driving some long-time American supporters of Israel almost batty?

Poor old Tony Judt. But his point that the pro-Israeli organizations have done a lot to stifle open discussion of Israeli-Palestinian issues within the United States seems now to have been well demonstrated.

North Korea’s nuclear test

Oops. Yet another step toward global instability, taken while the US has been quite distracted by its self-created quagmire in Iraq:

“The field of scientific research in the DPRK successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, 2006, at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward… ”

Oh, my God. All the world needs: another “great leap forward” in this or any other field of endeavor.
The world now apparently has nine nuclear weapons powers. Five of them are “recognized” nuclear weapons states: the US, Russia, China, Britain, and France. And four are non-“recognized”: Israel, India, Pakistan, and now North Korea. Only one state, the US, has ever used nuclear weapons.
By an “amazing coincidence” (irony alert!), the five recognized NW states are also the five states that wield vetoes at the Security Council.
Back in 1970 when the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) went into effect, the five recognized nuclear states and all other NPT signatories solemnly committed themselves to engaging in good-faith efforts of “complete and general disarmament.” (Article 6.) Having seen the huge constraints in the modern era of any too-great reliance on unilateralism and military force– in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and Lebanon– it is now time to draw all the nations of the world into a campaign to follow through on that promise. The ingenuity of humankind is surely great enough for us to devise ways of resolving problems and differences among us that do not rely on threats of speciescide.

Rumsfeld, Afghanistan, militarism

So there is Donald Rumsfeld, nearly six years into the Bush administration, and he has still managed to evade all the attempts to even start to hold him accountable for the violence he has played a big role in unleashing around the world during his tenure…
And here is Donald Rumsfeld, on the op-ed page of the WaPo today, telling us that in Afghanistan, over the five years since the US-led invasion, “the trajectory is a hopeful and promising one.”
I could spend some time refuting some of the rosy claims he makes about Afghanistan in this article. His claim, for example, that “Almost 600 schools have been built, and now more than 5 million children attend school, a 500 percent increase from 2001.” But how about this October 2 report from the UN’s IRIN news service that tells us that:

… Well, I could take on several of Rumsfeld’s claims in a similar way. But what really riveted me about his article was some of the language he used up near the top of it.
Especially the way he described the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, here: “from halfway around the world — with but a few weeks’ notice — coalition forces were charged with securing a landlocked, mountainous country…”
“Charged”. That makes it sound like they had some kind of official mandate for the invasion, doesn’t it? But in fact, the national armed forces that participated in the “coalition” had mandates only from their own governments. The UN Security Council did not come onto the scene with a resolution that explicitly authorized any outside military intervention in Afghanistan until December 20, 2001. That was Resolution 1386, that authorized the establishment of an international force to “assist” the “Afghan Interim Authority” that had by then been installed in Kabul by the US forces…
“Securing.” Now that is an interesting use of the word. To “secure” something can perhaps in military terms mean to “grab hold of it”– which was more or less what the US-led forces did to Afghanistan in October 2001. But most people would probably think that “securing” would also involve making a place secure. And that, the US-led invasion of the country has clearly failed to do.
Here is Bronwen Roberts of AFP, reporting yesterday:

the fundamentalists are leading a revived insurgency.

Roberts also notes that, despite the many, extremely costly military operations the US and its allies have undertaken in and around Afghanistan, both Osama bin Laden– whose “harboring” by the Taliban had been the reason the Bushites invaded the country in the first place– and Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, are still at large. (Funny that Rumsfeld makes no mention of that in his piece, don’t you think?)
I frankly admit that I don’t know enough about Afghanistan to be able to judge with confidence whether the situation of the country’s people is, on balance, better today than it was when the Taliban were in power, or not. One thing that seems clear is that it was pretty bad then, and it is pretty bad now, as well. And clearly, a large proportion of the country’s 30 million people are currently quite unable to feel “secure.”
I opposed the US invasion when it was still being prepared (though perhaps, in retrospect, not forcefully enough.) In the weeks after September 11, 2001, I argued that smart, coordinated, international police action was the best way to capture Osama Bin Laden and enough of his key lieutenants to incapacitate Al-Qaeda’s global networks.
But the Bushites were determined to wage war– and to wage it, as we soon enough learned, not just against Afghanistan but also against Iraq.
And now, the US-led forces are tied down badly, and bleeding, in both countries. But the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq– especially, I think, Iraq– are bleeding far, far worse than any of the invading countries.
We US citizens need to become a lot clearer than we have been thus far about the degree of harm and suffering that our government’s actions have inflicted on other peoples around the world. We need, desperately, to find new, non-violent paradigms for how our government can set about resolving the concerns and conflicts it will inevitably have with other governments– and we need to start to advocate strongly for, and follow, those nonviolent paradigms, rather than allowing our government to continue along the path of militarism and domination.
We need to bring our troops home from Iraq, and from Afghanistan, and to require our government that it work respectfully with the other nations of the world to find new models for addressing the security challenges that will remain in those two countries, as well as in far too many other (long-neglected) countries around the world. At least, if we start slashing our government’s spending on the military there should be a lot of money– from our own national budget, as well as from the budgets of other nations that currently try to compete or to “catch up with” ours in this regard– available to start redirecting toward new and effective models of UN peacekeeping, toward righting global economic imbalances, and to meeting the general global challenge of under-development and inequality.
But I think this whole effort has to start with recognizing the degree of harm our government’s militarism has already inflicted on the world.
One good way to come out against this will, of course, present itself when we go to the vote November 7. I have no illusions that most Democratic politicians have more of a “pro-peace” outlook than most Republicans. But at least if we can mobilize our fellow-citizens successfully against this lot now in power, and their policies, then after that we can carry on by urging the Democrats toward a better relationship with the rest of the world…
And in the meantime, we’ll have to carry on putting up with Rumsfeld. But oh, wouldn’t it be great if we had a Congress that would truly try to hold him accountable?

Chutzpah and Condi

It must take a certain dogged kind of chutzpah to be Condi Rice. I mean, there she has been for the past eight months doing everything she could to undermine the Hamas government in Palestine, including quite evidently condoning the Israelis’ continued use of quite disproportionate levels of lethal violence there, and their maintenance of the savage blocade around Gaza… But today, there was Condi in Egypt calling “bravely” for an end to the current intra-Palestinian violence:

“Innocent Palestinians are caught in this violence,” Ms Rice said.

Well yes, Ms. Rice. But 15 times as many innocent Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the past eight months— and when did you ever speak out about that? Or when did you ever threaten to make any portion of the US’s extremely generous aid to Israel conditional on Israel ending its policy of killing and tight economic strangulation of the Palestinians?
Some figures from B’tselem: The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces in the OPTs since February 1, 2006: 431. Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the OPTs and inside Israel since February 1: 20. (Aggregated from 1 + 2 + 3 + 4)
This past summer, it also took a special kind of chutzpah for Rice to profess her strong support for the government and people of Lebanon at a time when she was actively conniving with Israel in every possible way to enable the continuation of the IDF’sbrutal assault against the country and its people– and when Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora was tearfully begging the whole world to help put in place a speedy ceasefire.
Well, once again now, “heckuva job, Condi”, eh?
Matters do currently seem fairly precarious inside the OPTs. Ten people have died in Fatah-Hamas clashes there in the past couple of days. (That, at a time when Israel has also continued its attacks against Gaza. All completely tragic.) And now the out-of-control Al Aqsa brigades are reportedly threatening to kill three top Hamas leaders. Luckily Abu Mazen and Ismail Haniyeh have both called for an end to the violence. But you really have to wonder who is arming and funding the Aqsa Brigades these days…
However, the pollsters from the (currently pro-Fateh) Jerusalem Media and Communication Center were able to get out and about in the days between Spetmber 19 and 22, when they conducted a poll of Palestinian opinion.
Many of the answers there are very interesting. If you go down to the bottom, Q. 28, “Which Palestinian faction do you trust the most?” you see the answers were neck-and-neck: Fateh– 30.7% and Hamas–29.7%. Hamas has certainly lost some support since the elections in late January, when they won 44% of the popular vote. However, things don’t look too great for Fateh in the event of new elections, either… And especially if people vote on the basis of personalities. In response to Q. 27, “Which Palestinian Personality do you trust the most?”, Haniyeh came top with 18.9%, followed by Abu Mazen with 14.5%. (Both those questions were “open” in structure. For Q. 27, 1.2% of respondents even said Yasser Arafat!)
But given the comprehensive nature and the viciousness of the pressure that Israel and the US have maintained on the Palestinians since January, it is notable that so many Palestinians there are still prepared to stick up for Hamas.
Does the “international community” intend to carry on punishing the Palestinians until they can force the whole people to their knees and “win” a return of Fateh to power? I certainly hope not. The “punishment” the Palestinian people have already suffered has already been quite unconscionable.
Here’s my best suggestion for a way out of the current impaase: The UN Security Council should organize a final, authoritative, and comprehansive Arab-Israeli peace conference, like Madrid in 1991 but under specifically UN auspices and to be held on the basis of international law and the existing UN resolutions… And then, all the Security Council members together should structure the incentives they offer to the Middle Eastern parties in such a way as to secure their good-faith participation in this negotiation.
And then, let us the world see who would come to this conference. On what possible grounds could anyone who professes to uphold international legitimacy object to such a plan?

Garrison Keillor takes on Gitmo

Garrison Keillor comes as close to being the bard of the American heartland as anyone I can think of. He does a weekly hour-long radio show, the whimsically named “Prairie Home Companion”, that is mainly good-natured entertainment that features live performers before a live audience in his home city of Minneapolis/St. Paul… But it also sometimes has a political edge to it.
Today, Keillor has a hard-hitting column in the International Herald Tribune. (Hat-tip to Jane C. there.) Commenting on the significance of the US Senate’s action last week that stripped the age-old right of habeas corpus away from non-citizens detained by the US overseas, Keillor writes:

Keillor then recounts a visit he recently made to the President’s “home” church in Dallas, Texas… and the inability of the very comfortable Methodists gathered there to even appreciate the irony with which he was commenting on how comfortable their lives all seemed.
He concluded thus:

I should note that some of my very best friends are in one way or another Methodists. Also, Keillor’s reference there to the Jews and the homosexuals and the gypsies is a Nazi-era reference. It would have been kind of nice if he’d put “the Muslims” into that list, since all the detainees in Gitmo are in fact, as far as I know, Muslims. But I guess he was writing in a figurative way there, and it is certainly very evocative and hard-hitting. I think he made the point.