Second Uganda column in CSM

Here‘s the second of my two columns in the CSM this month on the competition between the claims of peace and justice in northern Uganda.
The money quote there– from the (ethnic-Acholi) leader of the parliamentary opposition, Morris Ogenaga-Latigo– is:

    Should we sacrifice our peacemaking process here so they can test and develop their criminal-justice procedures there at the ICC? Punishment has to be quite secondary to the goal of resolving this conflict.

Ah, I see from this August 24 story in the Daily Monitor, which is Kampala’s best independent newspaper, that Chairperson Norbert Mao– whom I interviewed when I was in Gulu last month and who is quoted in both my CSM columns on Uganda– has now been “cleared” by President Museveni to go and take part with other “community leaders” in the peace talks in Juba. That seems to me like good news. Mao is a very wise and far-thinking guy.
That report, by Samuel O. Egadu and Emmanuel Gyezaho, tells us that Museveni and Mao talked on the phone for two hours Sunday evening. Mao then led a 15-person team that met with Museveni in Kampala:

    The group that met Museveni yesterday afternoon included MPs and stakeholders who visited Kony in Garamba Forest in the DR Congo and flew back from Juba on Tuesday.
    Mao, who led the 15-member team, to meet Mr Museveni, said the community leaders would explain in detail the benefits of their participation at the talks in bridging the gap between Kampala and the LRA.
    Mao said, Museveni accused the local Acholi leaders of having a blind spot for the atrocities committed by the LRA. But Mao said he vehemently denied the President’s allegations. “Our role is to ensure that there is reconciliation and accountability and there should be no condoning. I assured Museveni that as long ago as 1997, we stated that we are totally opposed to these atrocities,” he said.
    It also emerged yesterday that Mr Museveni is expected in London this weekend, to attend a forum on the ongoing peace talks. Mao along with Security Minister, Mr Amama Mbabazi, are also expected to address the forum.

Interesting. Wish I could be there.

‘Why Are Western Intellectuals so Enamoured with the Idea of a Fragmented Iraq?’

Our friend the Norwegian expert Reidar Visser is notably not a supporter of the idea of splitting up Iraq. Now, he has an excellent review on the History News Network of Peter Galbraith’s recent book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End.
On his own website, Visser gives his review the title, Divide and Rejoice – Why Are Western Intellectuals so Enamoured with the Idea of a Fragmented Iraq? Sadly, though, that title didn’t make it to the HNN webpage.
He writes this about Galbraith’s book:

    Chapter 8, “Kurdistan,” is by far the most interesting part of the book – not primarily for what it says about that area, but for its blunt and autobiographical account of how a US intellectual became deeply engaged in fuelling Kurdish ideas about breaking ranks with the rest of Iraq. In considerable detail Galbraith explains how he personally fostered many of the specific Kurdish demands for federalism, including principles which in one form or another would later find their way into the current Iraqi constitution… Galbraith provides an amazingly frank account of how he himself played a central role in framing the Kurdish elites’ demands on the center, even impelling them at certain junctures when he found them to have “conceptual problems” (p. 160). He sounds distinctly satisfied about the severe restrictions placed on the central government in the final constitution, … and he cheerfully recounts how he himself contributed to upholding the restraints on the center during the tense final stages of the charter negotiations (by warning off British officials who seemingly intended to raise alarms about the limited tax powers of the central government, p. 199, footnote).
    … It is on the basis of the pro-Kurdish, pro-partition views expressed in chapter 8 that Galbraith’s general reading of Iraqi history and society as well as some of the oddities in the book must be understood. Galbraith is at pains to render Iraq as an “artificial” and highly fissile construct. Indeed, he accuses his political opponents of “a misreading of Iraq’s modern history” (p. 206). But as soon as he moves beyond his particular area of expertise – the Kurdish north – the narrative becomes less convincing and the arguments more strained.
    … Galbraith seems to have scant interest in … examples of ethno-religious coexistence and reconciliation; instead he mocks anyone who shows interest in keeping Iraq unified. He roundly condemns the Bush administration for the heinous crime of trying to secure a “non-ethnic Iraq” (p. 166) and castigates them for speaking of an “Iraqi people, as if there were a single people akin to the French or even the American people” (p. 83). But he fails to provide any historically convincing justification for his own quantum leap from diagnosing a state of civil strife to prescribing territorial, segregationist solutions. That lack of historical perspective is a serious problem, because it precludes the writer from distinguishing between societies that are chronically unstable and those that experience a serious but reversible flare-up of civic violence. It should serve as a reminder to Galbraith that his claims about Kurdish leader’s anti-Iraq attitudes cannot possibly be repeated with regard to Sunni and Shiite elites, and that, despite the ongoing horrific violence, large masses of Iraqis, certainly in the Arab areas, continue to demand a “national Iraqi” army, a “national Iraqi” oil distribution policy, and a meaningful role for Baghdad as capital.
    But Galbraith has already made up his mind. His “solution” – the “three state solution” – is covered in chapters 10 and 11 and may be what many readers of this book are really interested in. Such a territorial solution of separating Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiite Arabs may appear superficially attractive to Democratic and liberal audiences in the United States, simply by offering a clear-cut alternative to Bush’s Iraq policy. Instead of semantic fidgeting with “timetables for withdrawals,” “threats of withdrawal” or “deadlines for withdrawal,” partition may come across as an innovative, hands-on approach that can mark a clear alternative to the line of the current administration. (If implemented it could also be trumpeted as ultimate evidence that everything the Republicans ever did in Iraq was profoundly misguided.) In short, after years of Democratic discomfiture over an Iraq situation where criticism of US policy always risked being deemed unpatriotic, partition schemes may now give the impression of being deliciously refreshing. That is also why they are particularly worrying, first and foremost for the Iraqi people who would experience an exacerbation of ethno-religious conflict instead of its reversal, but also as precedents that could lead to the dismantling of multi-ethnic polities elsewhere in the world. What a sad prospect it would be to have a twenty-first century agenda in international politics dominated by an uninspired revival of First World War ideas about ethno-religious self-determination – all as the result of the opposition’s scrabbling around for a vote-winning US foreign policy.

This is a very astutely written review. What Visser describes in that last paragraph there seems like a real and very worrying possibility. I certainly hope that not too many US pols– Democratic or Republican– get distracted from the need to withdraw the US military speedily and completely from Iraq by some imperialistic, “let’s redraw these maps” desire to break Iraq up into separate statelets. But of course, we know already that there are a number of influential people like Les Gelb and P. Galbraith who would love to do just that. And we should also know that there are many, many more people in the imperialistic camp in the US who would like to do whatever they can to try to keep the fires of intra-Muslim competition and hatred well stoked… And the plan to divide Iraq into three mutually warring statelets could certainly serve them well.
Divide and rule, anyone?

Birth pangs or an abortion, Condi?

Writing as someone who has delivered, and raised, three healthy children (thank G-d), and as someone who knows the difference between “birth pangs” and an abortion, I feel I need to tell Condoleezza Rice (no known kids, no known abortions) that what Israel has been doing in Lebanon and occupied Palestine with the so far unquestioning support of the US government is much more like a series of abortions of democracy than like any “birth pangs” of democracy.
I am particularly concerned about what has been going on in Palestine, almost unremarked by the MSM in a United States that continues to give Israel unbelievably generous funding and political support, even while it continues its assault against the residents of Gaza and the West Bank. We can recall that in January 2005 these Palestinians went to the polls and held a free and fair election in which they elected Mahmoud Abbas to be President; and in January 2006 they held a second free and fair election in which they elected a Hamas-dominated parliament into office…
In recent weeks, a total of 40 of the elected Palestinian legislators (out of 128) and five government ministers have been arrested by Israel, and today an Israeli court brought some very evidently politicized charges against the previously arrested speaker of the Palestinian legislature, Dr. Abdel-Aziz Dweik.
Birth pangs– or abortion?
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights has this depressing report about the IOF’s major rights abuses against the Palestinians in the period 10-16 August, and also 25 June through August 16.
Throughout this longer period, PCHR reports:

    207 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 46 children and 10 women, have been killed by IOF.
    o At least 815 Palestinian civilians, including 232 children and 27 women, have been wounded by the IOF gunfire.
    o At least 217 air-to-surface missiles and hundreds of artillery shells have been fired at Palestinian civilian and military targets in the Gaza Strip.
    o Buildings of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National economy, the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister and a number of educational institutions have been destroyed.
    o The electricity generation plant, providing 45% of the electricity of the Gaza Strip, was destroyed, and electricity networks and transmitters have been repeatedly attacked.
    o 6 bridges linking Gaza City with the central Gaza Strip and a number of roads have been destroyed.
    o Hundreds of donums[1] of agricultural land and dozens of houses have been destroyed.
    o Hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including 8 ministers and 27 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), including the Speaker and Deputy Speaker have been arrested. Minster of Prisoners’ Affairs, Minister of Labor and Deputy Speaker of the PLC were released.
    o The Palestinian governmental compound in Nablus has been destroyed.
    o Many families in Rafah, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia have been forced to leave their houses.
    o IOF intelligence has warned some Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip by phone to evacuate their houses, which would be attacked.
    o 25 houses belonging to activists of Palestinian factions were destroyed by IOF warplanes.
    o IOF have imposed a strict siege on the OPT, and have isolated the Gaza Strip from the outside world.

Birth pangs– or abortion?
And then, of course, there have been all the many Israeli depradations against Lebanon since July 12, as I discussed earlier, here. Let’s recall that in May-June 2005, Lebanon held a nationwide round of parliamentary elections that were deemed to have been generally free and fair. The Lebanese government was then formed by that legislature. It contains two members from Hizbullah, not surprisingly since the Hizbullah-Amal List in the elections won 35 of the 128 seats.
Birth pangs– or abortion?
Maybe someone needs to take Condi aside and discuss the facts of gynecological life with her? Or gosh, do you think maybe the administration’s commitment to “democratization” for Muslim and Arab people might be only skin deep??

This one’s for you, Imshin

So anyway, Imshin, since you’re such a faithful reader of JWN, why don’t you tell us all here: How do you feel about what your society has become…
That you have a political leadership there in Israel that is prone to making emotional and ill-considered decisions to use massive lethal force against your neighbors in Lebanon?
That you have an entire, extremely lethal military apparatus that is primed to wreak havoc, death, and devastation on your neighbors, and that is staffed by individual operatives prepared to push the relevant buttons to activate hi-tech weapons that will directly kill civilians, sometimes tens or scores at a time?
That just such an operative pushed the button that killed my children’s second cousin Colette Rashed along with four other civilian refugees, one hors de combat Lebanese army soldier, and a Red Cross volunteer, near Joub Jannine just 11 days ago?
(What did any of them ever do to you, or anyone you care about, Imshin?)
How do you feel about the fact that members of your country’s armed forces used finely-tuned, highly targetable weapons to knock out power plants, water pumping stations, and other parts of the Lebanese infrastructure vital to the survival of the most vulnerable Lebanese civilians: the sick, the old, the weak?
That you yourself seem to have become– for at least a moment back there– a hate-filled proponent of mass death in Lebanon?
How do you feel about all this, Imshin? Don’t you feel, at least, that there might just possibly be a better way to order your country’s relations with its neighbors than through this extreme (and at the end of the day, extremely counter-productive) recourse to violence?
And now that your country’s leadership is in such a cul-de-sac, which way will you urge it to turn– toward greater use of violence, or toward– finally!– giving peacemaking a serious chance?
I think we’ll need to carry on this conversation here, Imshin,since for some reason you’ve closed down the comments on your blog…

More on the Marjayoun convoy, Israel’s attacks on civilians

Bob Fisk, writing in today’s Independent, gives these details about the fateful “Marjayoun convoy” of August 11:

    “They went so slowly, I was enraged,” a relief worker recalls. “People at friendly villages would come out and give the refugees food and water and want to talk to them and people would stop to greet old friends as if this was tourism. The convoy was only going at five miles an hour. It was getting dark.” The 3,000 refugees now trailed up the Bekaa after nightfall and were approaching the ancient Kifraya vineyards at Joub Jannine when disaster struck them at 8pm.
    “The first bomb hit the second car,” Karamallah Dagher, a reporter for Reuters, said. “I was half way back down the road and my friend Elie Salami was standing there, asking me if I had any spare gasoline. That’s when the second missile struck and Elie’s head and shoulders were blown away. His daughter Sally is 16 and she jumped from the car and cried out: ‘I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy.’ But he was gone.” Speaking of the killings yesterday, Dagher breaks down and cries. He tried to carry his arthritic mother from his own car but she complained that he was hurting her so he put her back in the passenger seat and sat beside her, waiting for a violent death which mercifully never came. But it arrived for Collette Makdissi al-Rashed, wife of the mukhtar, who was beheaded in her Cherokee jeep, and for a member of the Tahta family from from Deir Mimas, and for two other refugees, and for a Lebanese soldier and for 35-year-old Mikhael Jbaili, the Red Cross volunteer from Zahle, who was blasted into the air when a rocket exploded behind him.
    “There was panic,” the Marjayoun mayor, Fouad Hamra, said…

(Hat-tip to Judy for sending that link.)
I haven’t heard any more yet from Colette’s family… I imagine they’ve been busy arranging the funeral and many other things.
Colette was originally from Zahleh, just a few miles further up the Beqaa Valley from the Joub Jannine vineyards. I imagine Zahleh was where the convoy was headed, since the town traditionally had many links with Marjayoun.
I fully support all efforts to conduct an in-depth investigation into how exactly Colette, Elie, and the others were thus murdered, and by whom. In the piece linked to above, Fisk writes:

    There are those who break down when they recall the massacre at Joub Jannine – and there are the Israelis who gave permission to the refugees to leave Marjayoun, who specified what roads they should use, and who then attacked them with pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft. Five days after being asked to account for the tragedy, they had last night still not bothered to explain how they killed at least seven refugees and wounded 36 others just three days before a UN ceasefire came into effect.

(In fact, at that point on that Friday evening, the negotiations for the ceasefire were already very far advanced, indeed, almost at completion.)
Fisk tells us it was “pilotless, missile-firing drone aircraft” that fired on the convoy. “Pilotless” is a bit of misnomer. Drones don’t have pilots sitting in them; but they do have pilots who sit safely back in some home base and give the drones all their orders, including where to steer to, how to take pictures, and when and where to fire their weapons. It’s not like the Israelis (or Americans, over in Iraq) simply send out squads of killer drones and sit back and let them do whatever they want.
So who were the pilots or controllers of those drones, that evening? On what basis did they command the drones to fire their lethal missiles? What were the “rules of engagement” (or “standing orders”) on the basis of which they fired? Who had defined those standing orders or ROEs? That is what we need to know.
We need to know these things so we can understand more fully the mindset of people who would fire on a completely pre-arranged convoy of civilians heading north up the Beqaa, (with, yes, ahead of them, Lebanese Army people retreating north as per agreement with the IDF, rendering them hors de combat, i.e. under international law ‘noncombatants’.)
Has it become quite “normal” for people in the Israeli armed forces– particularly, their Air Force– to fire on civilians and other noncombatants who are clearly fleeing the battle zone? What does this tell us about the ethics and value of the Israeli armed forces and the society they claim to represent and defend?
Amnesty International has just published an excellent-looking report on the attacks the IDF (and particularly the IAF) launched during the 33-day war against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. It is certainly worth reading in full.
In a separate campaign, Amnesty is also calling for immediate investigation of all attacks launched against civilian persons during the war. It notes that,

    In Lebanon, hundreds of civilians were killed by Israeli forces in attacks on residential areas causing massive destruction. Others were killed in attacks on vehicles as villagers were heeding the calls by the Israeli army to leave their homes in South Lebanon… In Israel, some 40 civilians were killed in attacks by Hizbullah on towns and villages, including Haifa, Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya, Safed, Ma’alot and Acre…”

Yes, it would be good to have a broad, even-handed international investigation into the killing of civilian persons (and the destruction of civilian infrastructure) by both sides. There are, of course, a number of issues involved in any such consideration of “evenhandedness”. One is the massive disproportionality between the lethality and the general destructive capability at the disposal of each side. I would love for someone to come up with rough figures for e.g. the total (kilo-)tonnage of TNT-equivalent that was delivered by each side… All we ever hear about in the US is the “thousands” of Hizbullah rockets that zoomed into Israel– without any easily comparable reference to either the number or the explosive capacity of the Israeli munitions (air-dropped, sea-delivered, artillery, etc) that were targeted onto Lebanon.
And when I say “targeted” onto Lebanon, that brings up an additional disparity in capacity between the two sides: the one regarding targeting capability. On the one hand, we have Israel, whose spokespeople routinely claim they are able to bomb with “pinpoint accuracy”– a claim that is, indeed, generally a credible one, even when, say, they’re boming a convoy of noncombatants driving north up the Beqaa, a vital bridge or a power station north of Beirut, or a gathering of other refugees in Qana, etc…
And then there’s Hizbullah.
I know that Hizbullah was able to target one anti-ship missile onto an Israeli navy ship fairly early on, and it also has a very primitive drone capability (not used much, I think, during the recent war.) But the vast majority of those much-hyped “thousands of Hizbullah rockets” launched against israel were (a) of very low explosive power, and (b) barely targettable at all.
“Pipsqueakers”, as Michael Totten has called them.
Here’s what Totten, a strongly pro-Israeli commentator from Oregon, wrote after he toured one of the worst affected “front-line communities” in Israel last Friday:

    I drove to Hezbollah’s most targeted city of Kiryat Shmona to do a little post-war analysis of what had just happened. It looks surprisingly intact from a distance, and even up close the damage is less severe than what I thought it would be.
    I expected to see at least one destroyed house. There may be a destroyed house in there somewhere, but I drove all over and couldn’t find one.
    Katyusha rockets are pipsqueakers    . They don’t feel like pipsqueakers when they’re flying in your direction. But they are. They can’t be aimed worth a damn, and they’ll only do serious damage if they ignite something else after impact, like the gas tank of a car. They have almost no military value at all unless they are fired in barrages at a reasonably close range. From a distance they can only be counted on to break a few things almost at random in the general direction they’re aimed.
    They do break a few things, especially because Hezbollah is clever enough to pack them tight with ball bearings. Kiryat Shmona looks like a city that recently suffered street fights between roving militias with automatic weapons.
    Katyusha shrapnel kills people who aren’t wearing body armor, and wounds those who are. No one wants to be hit with this stuff. But if the side of your building is hit, you can call a repair guy and have it taken care of in one day.

A little different from those entire city-blocks of densely packed high-rises in southern Beirut that were reduced to a level field of smoking rubble by the IDF’s stand-off weapons, don’t you think?
Well, back to Amnesty’s report on Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian infratsructure (including infrastructure literally vital to the survival of civilians, like water plants, etc.) It included this:

Continue reading “More on the Marjayoun convoy, Israel’s attacks on civilians”

‘Peace after Lebanon’ at TomPaine.com

I did another piece for TomPaine.com at the end of last week, and I see it’s up on their site today. Astute JWN readers will see it’s an updated combination of a couple of things I’ve posted here already. (Remember: you generally read my stuff here on JWN first! It just gets better composed and better organized when I work with an outside editor…)
The piece is called Peace After Lebanon. It looks first at the need for a broad and serious Arab-Israeli peace effort in the aftermath of the Israel-Hizbullah war, and then at the broad debate (not to mention dismay and conusion) in post-war Israel and the debate that’s already emerging there over what should now replace Sharonist “unilateralism” regarding the Palestinian Question.
Here’s how I concluded it:

    Decision-makers and concerned citizens here in the U.S. have, whether we want it or not (and many do), enormous influence over how battle of ideas inside Israel will play out. This past week, Israel’s internal politics have shown themselves to be uniquely fractured, uniquely vulnerable—and therefore, uniquely open to influence from America. Will the political forces in our country line up strongly behind the neocon-Likud vision of Israel as an ever better-armed and trigger-happy bastion of colonial expansionism? Or will they, in this moment of unique opportunity, line up behind Yossi Beilin’s vision of working for a regional peace?
    We Americans must know that our tax dollars, our government’s political support, and our munitions all combined to make Israel’s recent military actions possible. Now, we have a responsibility before the whole world for the political choices we make regarding the chance the region has for a viable post-war peace.

I swish I could be more optimistic that our “opposition party” here in US might actually show some vision and guts and jump onto the Beilin/pro-peace bandwagon. (I say, is hollow laughter quite inappropriate at this point?) But if past experience is anything to go by, that’s not likely to happen soon.
But don’t you think that with militarism and colonialist hegemony getting such a bad rap in the US regarding Iraq– even, finally, among many Democrats here– that the Dems might also just start to think to themselves that these exact same kinds of policies might also not be the best thing for Israel, either?
I live in hope (and note with appreciation Scott’s recent post here on JWN, on Republican Senator Chuck Hagel) …

Bernard Lewis Watch

Bernard Lewis, where are ye when we need ye?
(Irony alert)
At a time when nattering bloggers, columnists, traditional conservatives, and even neoconservatives are openly questioning our rightly guided President’s mental and psychic faculties, we need you, oh wise and venerable Princeton high priest of neoconservative orthodoxy, to really show us the true straight path to enlightenment, to rally our troops around the “doctrine” that bears your name and directed us so brilliantly in liberating and controlling Iraq.
We cannot think of anyone who has been so astonishingly consistent in his prediction accuracy about what would happen after the US invaded Iraq. Even as you now counsel patience, we can see that your vision of secular democracy, imposed forcefully and creatively from without, is now flourishing everywhere in the Middle East. It is simply miraculous that with a track record like yours, you retain such a bipartisan following among US political leaders.
We are of course most grateful that two weeks ago, you capped off your distinguished career by giving us clarity for today – August 22nd. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, you drew from your vast experience to declare that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad – indeed all of Islamic Iran – was the real crazy threat to the world and must never be permitted to have nuclear anything. Islamic Iranians are, well, just too, too, too…. Islamic, to be permitted the luxury of a MAD nuclear capacity.
In your essay, you selectively invoked a 25 year-old quote from Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to inform us that Islamic Iranians really can only think in terms of a cataclysmic choice between annihilating the rest of the world, or joining hands in martyrdom. Never mind that this quote came in the context of perceived global support for Iraq’ invasion of Iran, and no, you never mentioned that Khomeini himself interpreted his own model for Iran’s relations with the world, “neither East nor West,” as meaning ties between respectful equals, rather than the old “lion vs. lamb” patterns.
You instead keep it brilliantly simple for us – and especially for our much challenged President. Its either us, or them. Let’s not be confused with the quarter century of subsequent smokescreen meant to conceal Iran’s true intentions. So if they’re not with us, they must be against us.
From your ascended status, you specifically prophesied for us that today, August 22nd could “possibly” be the day the end of the world will be made manifest by Iran. You were suspicious that the Iranian President had chosen today for Iran’s response to the latest round of European proposals to rein in Iran’s nuclear program. Given that some Muslims commemorate this as the day of the Prophet Mohammad’s miraculous flight to Jerusalem, you warned that, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.”
You didn’t even need to cite any evidence of such actual thinking; your steadfast WSJ editors have such faith in your genius. Yahr!
So if you have not yet taken flight yourself, we beseech you now to help us mere mortals fathom how Iran’s announcements today simply comfirm your divinations of the end of the world. As such, how should we then live? How shall we respond in unison to any suggestions to the contrary? And which stocks of companies on the plains of Armageddon do you advise for us to sell short?

Haunting Images from Israel

Maybe I’m still too human. I resist viewing the many available web pictures of death in Lebanon and Israel in the recent carnage – even as my head tells me I must. As noted here before, the American viewing public had a profoundly sanitized version of the Israeli pounding of Lebanon, while the rest of the world witnessed a steady horrific stream of Lebanese civilian corpses, like the 3 dozen or so children who perished (again) at Qana.
My hesitance stems from analytical awareness of the power of such images to change thinking, unfairly at times, if we do not know the context of a sensational picture. Inevitably, images can be powerful tools, for good or ill, shaping international opinion of a given event. Contrary to Tony Cordesman, that’s why “smart” combatants today energetically endeavor to promote, repress, or sugar coat horrific images to suit their side’s agenda.
Never mind the cerebral level, the pictures from the past six weeks in Lebanon remain – a testament powerfully tugging at the heart and soul, for those with the courage to look. Such a waste!
Yet it wasn’t images of carnage that awoke me last night – like Jefferson’s “firebell in the night.” Instead, I am especially haunted by the memory of very different type of photo that I first saw here and then here.
No, they are not of dead children soaked in blood or caked in chemical ash, and they’re not the images of the broken “ragdoll” bodies of someone’s now departed, beloved child.
The pictures that eat at me even worse than the sight of death are of otherwise cherubic Israeli children writing messages and drawing images on Israeli shells bound for Lebanon.
One side of me still wanted to believe that there has to be an explanation, that these have to be doctored, or even fabricated, or explained away. I wish.
From the checking I’ve done, the photos are indeed legitimate, and different versions of the same scene apparently were taken by different photo services (AP, AFP, Ha’aretz, etc.) on July 17th.
While I am far better at searching for texts and documents via venerable tools like Nexus and Dow, I have a hunch that the original publisher/owners of these photos are shy, at best, about these photos, as I’ve encountered several no longer functioning photo links. Yet I am also learning that several reputable photo web site blogs have featured the photos and now store them in “permanent” links, such as via “Flikr.” See here, here, and here.
I’ve read claims that these photos have been the focus of scores (or more) of blog write-ups. However, it is my sense that the US mainstream media, TV and print, has generally ignored the photos. (Readers please chime in if you have any examples to the contrary.)
Responding to an internet buzz about the photos, no less than the Jerusalem Post (on-line only) on July 23rd sourced Israeli officials to confirm that the “graffitti incident” really did occur, that the photos were of an actual event. Indeed, the Associated Press photos were apparently taken by an Israeli photojournalist, Sebastian Scheiner.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli army did not condone the children’s shell decorating session. Then again, they obviously did not stop it. The Post cited an un-named official close to Israel’s public relations campaign who said that there was “no way” to frame the incident in a positive light. “Some people are simply irresponsible,” said the official.
That hasn’t stopped some from trying to “spin” it.

Continue reading “Haunting Images from Israel”

Chuck Hagel: Thinking

I have long been interested in Senator Chuck Hagel, a self-styled “Eisenhower Republican” from Nebraska. Still mulling a run for the Presidency in 2008, Hagel’s latest bout of independent “free thinking” deserves greater attention and scrutiny.
Senator Hagel, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, presents a “problem” for the widespread media and academic characterizations of an unprecedented “polarization” in American politics between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy, and Iraq in particular. No less than the New York Times on July 30th ran a breathless story that began,

“No military conflict in modern times has divided Americans on partisan lines more than the war in Iraq, scholars and pollsters say — not even Vietnam. And those divisions are likely to intensify in what is expected to be a contentious fall election campaign.”

The cited distinguished experts, including Duke Professor Oli Holsti, essentially reduce Americans to mere pawns of their party affiliations, with Republicans being staunch defenders and Democrats as intense critics of the Iraq war. The subsequent defeat of “pro-war” Senator Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary ostensibly would seem to support that line of analysis.
But the New York Times writers and the scholars they quote either forget or consciously ignore Senator Hagel and what he represents — a growing, if still timid, spread of dissident “independent” thinking within Republican ranks.
In the days before the Times story about “unprecedented polarization,” Hagel was out criticizing the Bush Administration, first in a July 28th speech before the Brookings Institution and the next day in a blistering interview with his home-state paper, the Omaha World Herald.
At Brookings, Hagel’s careful remarks emphasized the need for a multilateral approach to the Middle East, for sustained intense diplomatic engagement, with both friends and adversaries, and for the US to be genuinely seen as “fair” in its Middle East dealings – “the currency of trust” and the “wellspring of building consensus.”
While Hagel asserted that “The United States will remain committed to defending Israel….

it need not and cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships. That is an irresponsible and dangerous false choice. Achieving a lasting resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is as much in Israel’s interest as any other country in the world.
Unending war will continually drain Israel of its human capital, resources, and energy as it fights for its survival. The United States and Israel must understand that it is not in their long-term interests to allow themselves to become isolated in the Middle East and the world. Neither can allow themselves to drift into an “us against the world” global optic or zero-sum game. That would marginalize America’s global leadership, trust and influence, further isolate Israel, and prove to be disastrous for both countries as well as the region.

Ironically, given events, Hagel also called for the revival of the 2002 Beirut Declaration approach to peacemaking, a Saudi/Arab League plan to recognize Israel’s right to exist – and simultaneously to establish a recognized and viable Palestinian state. (a plan then opposed by Israel)
In the follow-up interview with the Omaha World Herald, Hagel called conditions in Iraq “an absolute replay of Vietnam,” where U.S. soldiers have become “easy targets” in a country that has descended into “absolute anarchy.” Hagel was particularly disturbed by reports that the Pentagon was calling for an additional 5,000 US troops for Iraq: “That isn’t going to do any good. It’s going to have a worse effect,” Hagel said. “They’re destroying the United States Army.”
Hagel’s candor has one Nebraska blogger marveling,

My God, a Republican Senator talking about the reality of the situation in Iraq – not just wagging a purple finger in the air, not just tossing-off meaningless platitudes about staying the course.
Though it’s undeniably too simplistic to draw too close a comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, it’s comforting to know that Hagel – a man who actually lived through the horrors of war – keeps an actual eye to the lessons of history rather than just irresponsibly reading from the Bush Administration’s talking points.

At the end of July, on the floor of the Senate, Hagel repeated much of his Brookings speech, prefaced with a harsher criticism of the Bush Administration’s then 3 week old non-approach to ending the Israel-Lebanon confrontation:

“How do we realistically believe that a continuation of the systematic destruction of an American friend, the country and people of Lebanon, is going to enhance America’s image and give us the trust and credibility to lead a lasting and sustained peace effort in the Middle East?”
“The sickening slaughter on both sides must end now. President Bush must call for an immediate cease fire. This madness must stop.”

Before Fox Fire
Hagel’s criticisms at the end of July were largely ignored, until the Senator appeared yesterday, August 20th, on Fox News Sunday, with Chris Wallace. In the following section, I will be quoting from the transcript extensively, and with emphasis added on especially interesting quotes.

Continue reading “Chuck Hagel: Thinking”

Resource on Israeli psyops in 33-day war

Sgt.Major Herbert A. Friedman (Retd.) has pulled together some very useful resources on Israeli psyops during the assault against Lebanon. He has a good collection of the leaflets the IAF dropped in various parts of the country, and refers to other psyops operations including the cellphone text messages, their efforts at hacking into Manar broadcasts, etc.
Halfway down that web-page he refers to the “All4lebanon” website the Israelis put up in the early days of the war. Originally, it had Arabic, French, and English-language editions, but they seem to have taken the English-language one down for now.
I actually first saw reference to “All4Lebanon” on Imshin’s blog, on July 22nd, when she wrote: “This site is where you go if you are Lebanese and you want to actively help in ridding Lebanon of Hizballah.” This and a few other things she has written recently make me think maybe she or her spouse works for the Israeli security services in some capacity?
Anyway, if you go to the All4Lebanon site, they give potential Lebanese collaborators two numbers to call– one in Switzerland, one someplace in Asia– and they promise you that “Confidentiality and financial recompense are assured to you.”
When I first saw that, I was going to blog about it. I thought it showed how truly desperate the Israelis were for informants/collaborators, that they would have to trawl for them in that way. Unlike in the 1982 assault , when they had networks of Phalangists, SLA, etc, working for them in Lebanon– and even then, they weren’t able to impose their will on the country…
Anyway, their whole “psyops” operation this time round looks just as Keystone Cops-ish (i.e. amateur-ish) as the military parts of the war. Except of course the Keystone Cops never killed anyone.