Ori Nir on Israel-neocon ‘split’ over Iran

Relevant to what I wrote here a couple of days ago– about the politics of the reaction to Bush’s overture to Iran– the sage, well-informed Israeli journalist Ori Nir has an intriguing piece in today’sNew York Forward titled: Bush Overture To Iran Splits Israel, Neocons. The sub-title there is: “Olmert Asks Groups To Keep Low Profile.” “Groups” there meaning “pro-Israeli groups within the US political system.”
Nir writes:

    Neoconservative analysts are blasting the administration, saying that holding talks with the Islamic regime would serve only to embolden it and undermine the anti-fundamentalist opposition in Iran. They argue that America’s ultimate goal should be to change Tehran’s theocratic regime.
    … Israeli officials and several influential Jewish groups, meanwhile, have refrained from criticizing the new American approach — which some experts are depicting as the most dramatic foreign policy shift of the Bush presidency — saying that they support more pragmatic ways to block Iran’s apparent dash toward a nuclear weapon. For Israel and Jewish groups — despite Iranian calls for Israel’s destruction — the fundamental goal is not regime change, but to block Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iam prepared to accept there’s some validity to Nir’s argument that there is some divergence between the longer-term goals of, on the one hand, Israel and its allies, and on the other, many or perhaps most of the neocons.
However, he also signals that there is another (less public) issue at stake in this disagreement, and that is the visibility of the pro-Israeli propaganda effort within the US discourse.
(Hey, have you wondered why the ardent pro-Israeli propagandists “David/Davis” and “Neal” have been so quiet on our comments boards here recently? I assure you it’s not because I’ve banned them. But mainly, they’re just keeping a low profile these days… It almost makes me miss them… Okay, not terrifically much… )
Anyway, here’s what Nir– who’s a good, generally strong-valued reporter– writes on the topic:

    The Walt-Mearsheimer paper has triggered an escalating debate on the influence of Israel and Jewish organizations that has spilled over onto the opinion pages of major publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
    Recently, with such scrutiny mounting, Israeli leaders asked American Jewish organizations to lower their profile on the Iran issue, the Forward has learned.
    In one notable example, a delegation of leaders from the American Jewish Congress met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert shortly before returning to the United States. When asked how he thinks Jewish groups should pursue the Iran issue, Olmert reportedly implied that he would prefer a low profile, according to one source familiar with the proceedings.
    “We don’t want it to be about Israel,” Olmert is said to have replied, explaining that although Iran’s president focuses his belligerent rhetoric on Israel, both Jerusalem and Washington have an interest in convincing the international community that a nuclear armed Iran would be a menace to the region and to the entire world.

Here’s what Nir wrote about the effectiveness of Olmert’s plea to the(Jewish) pro-Israel lobbyists inside the US:

    Israel’s support for Rice [on Iran] and Olmert’s request for Jewish groups to take a lower profile [on Iran] are being well received by many Jewish groups. Already, some Jewish groups had been asking the White House to stop suggesting that American efforts to block Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons are motivated primarily by a desire to protect Israel.

I think I’ve noted here before how pathetically craven and ideologically dependent most of these groups are… and how ready they are, as a result, to shift their positions by 180 degrees the moment their lords and masters in Israel tell ’em too. Why, they make the West European communist parties of the 1930s look like deeply principled, locally rooted rooted organizations in comparison…
Nir again:

    Jewish organizations have no interest in becoming “the lobby for war with Iran,” one communal official said.
    … [W]hile some Jewish groups are uncomfortable with the administration’s shift on direct talks with Iran, only the right-of-center Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs openly criticized the move.

Oh, antediluvian old JINSA. Don’t you gotta love ’em? (Irony alert!!)
But there you have it, in a nutshell: “Jewish organizations have no interest in becoming ‘the lobby for war with Iran'”, as the anonymous offical of one of the US’s many generously funded and politically very powerful Jewish “community organizations” is quoted there as saying.
You betcha. Because if these Jewish-American organizations become labeled as ‘the lobby for war with Iran’, then what about the explanation for those 2,492 US force members who’ve been killed as a result of the US invasion of Iraq? Let’s please ask no questions in that very sensitive regard!
I should note that there are a number of Jewish-American community organizations that provide good social services to Jewish Americans (who as a result are generally not a particularly needy social group these days), or who work actively in support of social justice issues here in the US, in Israel/Palestine, or elsewhere in the world. However, the general rubric of “Jewish Community Federation” of whatever, which used to be federation of such philanthropic groups, has in many cases been hijacked by the ultra-Zionist, Israel-uber-alles crowd, to the point that it’s sometimes hard these days even to identify the Jewish-American groups that are sincerely working for a world without oppression, and which actually buy to some degree or another into the arguments of the territorial maximalists within Israel… (Here’s one that in my view, does great work on the basis of upholding the equality of all human persons: Brit Tzedek v’shalom.. Let’s hope that my identifying it as such doesn’t give the kiss of death to its fundraising effort.s.. )
Well anyway, big thanks to Ori Nir for his sterling reporting there. And to the Forward, which is a modern-day, English-language version of an old Yiddish-language socialst newspaper in New York, for the support it gives to good reporting like Nir’s.
I just add, a propos of nothing in particular here, that there have been strategic thinkers in Israel who’ve made the argument that Iran’s nuclear program is not such a big deal even if it has military aspects… because basically, if Israel and Iran both end up with nuclear weapons (or the capability for ’em), then that could even bring a degree of strategic stability to the Middle East…
But I gess that’s an entirely different area of discussion.

Salon.com article on US power shrinkage

My longish article on the broader implications of the US’s still-unfolding strategic defeat in Iraq is up on the Salon.com website today. The title and sub-title that the editors gave it were:

    The incredible shrinking U.S.
    Despite the death of Zarqawi, Bush’s huge gamble in Iraq has failed. As a result, the U.S. is weaker everywhere in the world — and that’s not all bad.

(If you’re not a “Salon Premium” member or whatever, you have to sit through a short advertisement before you can read the whole text there.)
Luckily, I did get the chance yesterday to work with my editor to put in a new lead mentioning the Zarqawi killing and the Iraqi PM’s completion of his cabinet. My broader judgment regarding the failure of the Bushites’ “big roll of the dice” in Iraq still stands, though.
The editor, Gary Kamiya, made me work hard on the piece! He pushed me to address several areas of the topic that I hadn’t done in my first draft… so the word length came in ways over the 2,000 words he’d originally suggested. But the points he made were very intelligent ones; I actually enjoyed working with him… and more to the point I like the way the piece came out in the end.
Talking of ends, here’s how the piece concludes:

    I realize there are many Americans who are not as ready as I am to welcome the prospect of a diminishment (or, as I would say, a rectification) of the disproportionate amount of power our nation has been able to wield in world affairs over the past 60 years. Many Americans today — like many British or French citizens 80 years ago — think it is somehow “natural” that their nation intervene in the doings of other nations around the world and act as the crucial arbiter in international affairs. (And yes, throughout history nearly all such interventions have always come dressed in “salvationist” garb: Very few nations ever knowingly undertake a war or any other foreign intervention that its people clearly understand to be unjust at the time. If such understanding comes at all, it does so only later.)
    Why does U.S. hegemonism in the world seem “natural” to so many Americans? Plumbing the roots of that particular wrinkle on the broader conceit of American exceptionalism would take a long time! Suffice it to note here that after 9/11 the attacks of that day laid their own potent overlay of shock, fear and anger onto the bedrock of those older American attitudes. For roughly 30 months after 9/11, feelings of vengefulness, and of the righteousness of American anger (and of all the actions that flowed therefrom), seemed still to dominate the consciousness of a broad political elite in the U.S. It was only after the revelations of Abu Ghraib in April 2004 that the country’s mainstream discourse on the war, and on what their vengefulness had caused the U.S. to become, became more self-aware and open to self-criticism.
    Today, a clear majority of Americans judge that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. A similarly clear majority say the administration should set a timetable for withdrawal. This willingness to challenge the Bush people’s spin on the situation in Iraq is a welcome sign of increased public understanding, but it does not signal any automatic readiness to challenge the principle of U.S. exceptionalism more broadly. Grappling with that issue is, I believe, our next great challenge as a citizenry; and it is a challenge that the events of the next few years will almost certainly force us to confront head-on.

So here’s the rough history of this piece. Exactly two weeks ago today I pitched four story ideas to Gary: three of them were on topics related to the failure of the Bushite project in Iraq. It took him almost a week to get back to me, to tell me this was the one he wanted to run with. Meantime, I’d used some of the material from the suggested topic “How will we remember this war?” in this Memorial Day post here at JWN.
Last weekend and through to early Tuesday morning I worked hard on my first draft. (I was also doing a bunch of other important things in that time… It felt extremely fraught.) Then Gary and I went to and fro on it a bit, and it finally got up onto the site early this morning.
Today I need to work on the page proofs on my Africa book. Print publishing feels very arduous indeed these days. But worth it, I think.

On the peace line, Charlottesville

We had some interesting experiences on the peace vigil in town today. Much of the national media has been making a huge deal out of the killing of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. (Not so much mention of the woman and child reportedly killed in the building along with him… )
But of course, George W. Bush has also shown us his very public gloating over the killing of his foe. As one friend said to me: “You’d think they’d just won the Battle of El Alamein”…
So anyway, before I got out onto the street-corner with the peace signs today, I was wondering what kind of response we’d get from the passing (vehicle-borne) citizenry. And indeed, very unusually for our vigil these days days, today we did get two or three passing drivers who had evidently been hyped up by the media coverage and were eager to yell epithets at us and taunt us.
One of these guys– and yes, they are all men– was a well-known taunter from ways back who’s been notably quiet recently. Today, he rolled down his window and pushed his upper body half out of it so he could yell at us: “We got your buddy today! And you’re next!”
Poor guy. His face was contorted with anger. It seemed like he’d been saving up his bile for a long time and was just so very happy to have a chance to yell at us once again.
Zarqawi– “our guy”? That is so very sad and misinformed. (Not that this particular taunter was ever in a mood to come and actually talk to us about our views and affiliations. One time, maybe 18 months ago, he did get the guy who drives him home from work to stop a little way further down the street, and then he stomped back to our group and started berating a younger woman there… His buddy gently pulled him away.)
And as for his threat that: “You’re next!” Well, that has to come from a sick, delusional mind.
At one level, I am interested in this whole question of the psychological roots of violence– especially when, as seems so often to be the case, the violence is all bound up with a feeling of self-righteous anger. The urge to punish, pure and simple, is a huge leitmotif in the American psyche– whether it is “bringing justice to” Zarqawi by killing him outright (along with other individuals, including a child), or whether it’s capital punishment here at home.
This evening our state was due to be executing a borderline mentally retarded man called Percy Walton… The case went through many last-minute appeals and stops and starts until finally, just over an hour before the scheduled execution time, the Governor gave Walton a six-month stay of execution while his mental capacities are further examined by the state.
You see, here in Virginia, the second killingest state per capita in the entire union, you have to be sane enough to be “fit” to be executed in order to actually be executed. You could say, “a person would be insane to choose to be that sane!” Or you could say that the whole darn’ system is insane… But the root idea there is that the state requires that the executed person be in a position to fully comprehend what is about to happen to him, otherwise it’s not a “just” execution. Cruel and unusual punishment? I’ll say! Also, think about Percy Walton’s mental life this evening just a bit. If his cognitive functioning was sufficient that he understood what was scheduled to happen to him at 9 p.m. this evening, imagine what all his last 24 hours of dread were like… But then, the Governor gives him the six-month stay of execution; and somewhere along the way there state psychiatrists will come in and examine him. If at that point they find he is indeed “sane enough to be executed” then he has to undergo that entire lead-up-to-execution dread one time over again, in addition to the pain of the execution itself. Oh, ain’t “justice” a wonderful thing…
I digress. (Though not entirely.)
So there we were on the street corner this afternoon. Yes, we had two or three instances of clear hostility from drivers-by. But we also had a raucous cacophony of supportive horn-tooting in response to our peace signs! It seemed like the loudest ever. There were some extremely insistent honkers out there today… Including many trolley- and bus-drivers and once again a large city police vehicle.
My faith in the citizenry of our little corner of central Virginia was completely upheld. Bush may have had his few hours of gloating in the sun today. But based on the honking I heard on our street corner, the killing of Zarqawi has done little or nothing to persuade Americans that this war is headed in any kind of a desirable direction.
Bring the troops home.

Bush’s 24 hours of Iraqi sunshine

Two “gains” for the Bush folks’ project in Iraq today, that I am sure will get heavily hyped by the administration and all its flaks: The reported killing of Abu Mus’ab Zarqawi in Ba’quba, and the naming and rapid swearing-in of ministers to the crucial three security portfolios there.
That latter AP report tells us:

    The new defense minister is Iraqi Army Gen. Abdul-Qader Mohammed Jassim al-Mifarji [with] Shiites Jawad al-Bolani for interior and Sherwan al-Waili for national security.

(Note the now apparently routinized identification of people by sect. I find that scary.)
These two political “gains” for the Bush project in Iraq come on a day when two of my articles announcing the failure of this project are being published. However, my underlying analysis still certainly stands– and primarily, my conclusion that it’s no use having even the “full deck” of government ministers named and sworn in if the administrative machinery of governance is so broken that it hardly works at all.
Can a Minister for National Security deliver security? Can all of these three ministers together do the same?
Can a Minister for Water deliver water? A Minister for Agriculture deliver the services that will allow the repair of the country’s many technical, financing, and marketing systems in that field? No.
(I had actually written something to that effect in my first draft of the CSM column, since I thought the three security ministers might get named between me writing it and it coming out… But that got cut out in the editing.)
Anyway, let us now see. I would be extremely happy if the naming of these latest ministers was associated with finding a significant resolution of the deepseated political issues that have come to divide the country. If that is the case– if a spirit of “Iraqi national unity” can now spread throughout Iraq– that would be truly be a blessing.
Given the political balance within the country, however, I don’t see that any such entente, if found, would result in the emergence of a pro-US political order in the country. Therefore, whether the Maliki government “succeeds” politically– which, I maintain, it can do only on Iraqi-nationalist terms– or whether it fails, then the Bush project of installing a pro-US order in Iraq will have failed. Let us see exactly what kind of a “cakewalk” this turns out to be…
(And as for Zarqawi? From everything I understand about Iraq, his killing will make only a dent, at most, in the trajectory of the anti-US insurgency in Anbar and other provinces. I agree with Juan Cole when he wrote today, “Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don’t expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.”)
So anyway, today will no doubt be a day for the Bush administration’s leaders, flaks, and allies to have a day of public jubilation. Tomorrow, when they get back to figuring what to do with the many very difficult problems they face around the world, things won’t look so different from they did yesterday. Long-term outlook for them: still gloomy.

CSM column on need for rapid troop withdrawal

Here is my column in Thursday’s CSM calling for a rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (I also warn there that various catastrophic scenarios in Iraq are very possible.)
Here’s how it starts:

    When President George W. Bush and his advisers launched the invasion of Iraq, they promised that this project was intended not only to find and destroy the “weapons of mass destruction” that they claimed were there, but also to remove Saddam Hussein and bring good governance to Iraq’s 26 million people.
    Now, some three-plus years later, it is clear that this latter project has failed. (And there were no WMDs to be found.)
    Indeed, Mr. Bush’s good-governance project in Iraq has failed so miserably that it cannot now be revived…

Here’s how it ends:

    In March 2003, Bush launched a big roll of the geopolitical dice when he invaded Iraq. The stakes were very high. But now it is crystal clear that he “lost” that bet. Far better to cut the nation’s losses now and shift to rebuilding a decent relationship with the rest of the world, than to sit idly by in Iraq waiting for what can only be a further deterioration of the situation.

In the Salon.com piece, which should be up on their site on Thursday, I expand on some of the further geostrategic implications of what I wrote about in the CSM piece.
How capable are the Bushites– and the US citizenry as a whole– of coming to terms with the new geopolitical realities, I wonder?

Arms exports mania

My copy of the 2006 edition of the annual Military Balance assessment produced by the International Institute for Strategic Studies dropped heavily into my mailbox today. I enjoy looking through their generally fairly reliable information, and have used it as a reference source ever since I worked in the Reuters bureau in Beirut, back in the day…
So, our big fact for today (p.404): In 2004, for the first time ever, the US’s share of the international arms trade rose above 50%. To be precise, it was 53.4%.
The runners-up in this contest of shame were:

    Russia– 13.2%
    France– 12.7%
    Britain– 5.5%
    Germany– 2.6%
    China– 2.0%

But look, isn’t this just the most amazing coincidence: Of the six front-running arms-exporters, five of them are veto-wielding permanent members on the UN Security Council. (And these are also the five “recognized” nuclear-weapons states.)
But it seems that not being content with having their own huge nuclear and “conventional” arsenals, these states want to get the rest of the world hooked on the arms-acquisition habit, too.
US arms transfers to other countries in 2004 came to a total value of $18.55 billion. Imagine what that sum of money could have achieved for real human security if it had been invested in schools, health-centers, roads, and safe-water systems instead…

Politics, diplomacy, and Bush’s ‘defense-of-marriage’ pander

Today in the US Senate, senators voted down a proposal that President Bush had been pushing with surprising intensity over the past few days: an amendment to the US Constitution (no less!) that would have spelled out explicitly that marriage is “a union between a man and a woman.”
That the proposal was voted down was no surprise to anyone. So why had Bush made such a big deal of jumping in at a very late date to push this strongly anti-gay proposal, if he (and everyone else) knew it was headed to defeat anyway? Didn’t this risk making him look weak by having suddenly jumped in to push it?
Well the consensus among DC political analysts is that this was a pretty “desperate” attempt by the Prez to try to energize the rightwing evangelical Christian networks who have always been a strong basis of his political support around the country– and to do this at a crucial point in the run-up to November’s midterm elections.
But why did he suddenly need to energize these people right now— that is, over the past few days?
The WaPo’s Dana Milbank has an extremely amusing account of some of the more obviously “pander-y” aspects of what Bush was doing. It starts like this:

    There’s violence in Iraq, corruption in the House and anxiety in the markets. Somebody needs to create a diversion.
    “The gays are aggressive! Gays have called war! Gays are attacking traditional marriage!”
    Bishop Harry Jackson was shouting these words outside the Capitol yesterday morning, at a rally for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
    “Marriage is under attack!” cried out Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), also at the rally.
    “We can have anarchy!” warned Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.).
    No doubt Jackson, Allard and Harris are sincere in their views about marriage. But the urgency of their alarm is a bit suspect to anybody with an eye on the electoral calendar…

Go read the whole thing… Milbank really does have a great eye for political detail. I said it was an amusing account. At one level it is. At another I just hate the amount of hurt these virulent anti-gay campaigns and the anti-gay legal environment inflict on my many gay and lesbian friends.
Though I agree with the broad thrust of Milbank’s analysis there I do have an additional explanation for Bush’s sudden enthusiasm of the “defense of marriage” issue in these recent days. Remember that these exact same days have also seen his administration make a 180-degree turn in its policy toward Iran… This, on an issue in which the evangelical right and the Jewish-American right have both been extremely busy pushing a hardline agenda. (See a report of some of AIPAC’s recent belligerent urgings regarding Iran here.)
But what is notable to me right now is that though Bush seems to have felt a need to appease the evangelicals at the time he (effectively) turned his back on their longheld position regarding Iran, he has not– so far– felt the need to pander in any parallel way to the AIPAC crowd.
The experienced former Indian diplomat M.K. Badhrakumar, writing in Asia Times Online yesterday, reminded us that

    hardly a fortnight has passed since Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while visiting Washington, described the Iranian government as an existential threat.
    At a joint press conference on the White House lawn on May 23 with President George W Bush, Olmert made a hard-hitting statement: “… The Iranian threat is not only a threat to Israel; it is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the entire world. And it could mark the beginning of a dangerous and irresponsible arms race in the Middle East.”

And on May 24, Badhrakumar recalled, Olmert said this in his appearance at the US Congress:

    ” Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, and a notorious violator of fundamental human rights, stands on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. With these weapons, the security of the entire world is put in jeopardy … This challenge, which I believe is the test of our time, is one the West cannot afford to fail.
    “The radical Iranian regime has declared the United States its enemy. Their president believes it is his religious duty and his destiny to lead his country in a violent conflict against the infidels. With pride he denies the Jewish Holocaust and speaks brazenly, calling to wipe Israel off the map. For us this is an existential threat, a threat to which we cannot consent. But it is not Israel’s threat alone. It is a threat to all those committed to stability in the Middle East and the well-being of the world at large.
    “Our moment is now. History will judge our generation by the actions we take now, by our willingness to stand up …”

However, despite all of Olmert’s urgings Bush evidently made up his own mind regarding what to do about Iran. And Condi Rice then simply informed her Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, of the decision. Once Bush’s new initiative had been announced in Washington, Livni could do little more than issue a statement saying, “Israel appreciates the steps and measures by the United States in continuing to lead the international coalition and in taking all necessary steps to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability.”
As for AIPAC, it issued a statement noting tersely that, ” AIPAC is not taking a position on dialog with Iran.”
It seems that what is happening is that the Bushites have understood– finally!– that the situation they face in Iraq (and Afghanistan, and Somalia, and in many other places too) is really perilous… And this time they have no choice but to act in the US national interest, in an attempt to tamp down US-Muslim tensions and do whatever is necessary to try to set the stage for some form of non-chaotic and sizeable drawdown of the US troop presence in Iraq.
If they want to do that, of course they need some level of cooperation from the Iranians… who not only abut huge lengths of the Persian/Arabian Gulf… who not only also abut huge lengths of the heavily-populated eastern portion of Iraq… who not only sit right acorss the river from the key logistic chokepoints in and around Basra… but who also have pervasive networks of agents throughout the whole of Iraq itself at this point.
The possibility that at this point in history, when the US government has 135,000 hostages to Iranian fortune deployed as sitting ducks inside Iraq, it might choose to escalate tensions with Iran or even launch some form of military adventure against it, would be quite beyond belief– even for the extremely risk-happy gang of men at the top of this US administration. (I think we have to give them some credit for having learned at least a few lessons as a result of the failure of their “big roll of the dice” in Iraq?)
The people running the Bush administration understand this situation… And so, at a different level, do most of the members of the US Congress– especially since all the emembers of the House of representatives and one-third of the members of the Senate are up for re-election just five months from now.
With the US casualty toll in Iraq now standing at 2,482 body-bags and tens of thousands of other very badly wounded soldiers and Marines, few if any US politicians want to be the ones standing up right now and urging the launching of yet another unnecessary military adventure.
So this is a decision-point when the preferences of AIPAC and its extensive networks become basically irrelevant. And anyway, neither Israel nor the AIPAC crowd particularly want to stick their heads out right now regarding the US-Iran overture. With the US public majorly embittered by the results of the Iraqi invasion and occupation so far, now is obviously not a good time for the pro-Israelis to arouse too much US public interest in the whole question of… h’mmm, how exactly did Washington get drawn into the invasion of Iraq, anyway?
This, because as Mearsheimer and Walt (and many others) have noted, the evangelical right and the pro-Israeli right were the two major political forces that prior to March 2003 were pushing for the invasion…
Meanwhile, back in the discussion of the gay-marriage issue here in the US, we see that these two important strands of the US political right now have noticeably divergent interests. Opposing gay marriage is a big, perhaps defining, issue for the evangelical right these days. But for the pro-Israeli crowd in the country, it’s something else they don’t really want to talk much about. Mainly because, within the Jewish community, it’s such a deeply divisive issue. Certainly, for them it is nowhere near being such a hugely important issue as it is for the rightwing evangelicals.
… Anyway, I think it’s been really interesting to note that, when Bush was forced by the logic of international affairs to turn his back majorly on the “let’s attack Iran” forces, he apparently felt he had to throw some bones of appeasement to the evangelical rightwingers among them. But, as noted above, he didn’t feel the same way about the pro-Israelis. (Of course, you could argue that just carrying on with US governmental business as usual with regard to Israel– that is, dolloping out huge amounts of money to it with absolutely no questions asked about its land-grabbing policies in the West Bank, its inhumane siege on many Palestinian communities, etc.– is already appeasing it far too much already. But that discussion is for another day…)

Laila El-Haddad in NYC

The talented, engaging, and very knowledgeable Gaza blogger Ms. Laila El-Haddad will be speaking in NYC tomorrow evening (Thursday). The schedule and details are here. She’s apparently doing that speaking tour along with another really interesting and active young woman from Gaza called Fida Qishta.
If you want to learn about the situation in Gaza, this sounds like an excellent opportunity!
(I’m going to be in New York too this week… But not till Saturday. Maybe I can catch Laila in DC next week, instead.)
If any JWN reader gets to the New York event, do send us an account of it– either through the Comments box here or via email, to me.

‘At least a car bomb is indiscriminate’

Immortal quote from Riverbend yesterday:

    I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.

I can’t tell you how much this reminds me of Lebanon, 1976.
I covered the aftermaths of a number of car-bombs there. They were used especially by the “Christian”-exclusivist forces agains civilians living on the Muslim-and-leftist side.
Body parts scattered about. A hand on the dashboard of a car across the street… Random pieces of human flesh thrown onto a tree…
I covered the aftermaths of a lot of incidences of ethnic/sectarian cleansing, too. The “clearing out” of some 250,000 Shiite Muslims from the neighborhoods of East Beirut– and of course, the “clearing out” of the Palestinian refugee camps from there, too.
The International Organization for Migration reported June 2 from Iraq that,

    More than one million people are displaced in[side] Iraq as a result of decades of conflict with at least 203,000 of them particularly vulnerable and in need of humanitarian assistance. Most urgent however, are the needs of those displaced since late February.

The report also says,

    Nearly 100,000 people have been displaced in Iraq’s central and southern governorates since the bombing of the shrine at Samara on 22 February and numbers are continually rising,

Until recently, the UN Country Team (UNCT) that coordinates the humanitarian aid supplied by the various UN bodies in Iraq (UNHCR, World Food Program, WHO, Unicef, etc) has steadfastly tried to avoid supporting the establishment of any large-scale IDP camps, as this report from May 30 spelled out.
(This position was most likely adopted in line with the thinking of former UNHCR chief Mrs. Sadako Ogata, whom I heard agonizing back in 1995 over the effects inside Bosnis of the international community’s establishment of–nearly always– mono-ethnic IDP camps there. Her clear assessment was that the establishment of those camps had facilitated the many waves of ethnic cleansing that raged acorss that land and the concurrent emergence of mono-ethnic and often separatist polities there… This is an incredibly tough kind of decision for humanitarian-aid managers to have to make.)
However, in Iraq, the national government has already started to support the establishment of IDP camps. The UN report linked to there says this:

    The UNCT has consistently taken the position that the establishment of IDP camps should be avoided; and that IDPs ought to be supported through host family arrangements until alternative accommodation and durable solutions can be found. Nevertheless, given the fact that the government has already begun setting up IDP camps and isrequesting assistance from the humanitarian community, the UNCT’s IDP Working Group is preparing a guidance note on how the UNCT could support these camps as an option of last resort.

As in any instance of atrocity-laden inter-group conflict, large numbers of Iraqi citizens have also fled outside their country. I am not sure how many there are in Jordan or Iran right now. (Any info on such figures, friends?) But this report by the UN’s IRIN service from Damascus says:

    Local NGOs put the number of Iraqis in Syria at about 800,000, the majority of whom live in the suburbs of Damascus in deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Before the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003, their numbers were estimated at only 100,000.
    The report further noted that prostitution among young Iraqi women, some as young as 12 years old, “may become more widespread, since the economic situation of Iraqi families is deteriorating.” “Organised networks dealing in the sex trade were reported,” it noted, citing evidence that “girls and women were trafficked by organised networks or family members”.
    Rising child labour was also cited as a worrying trend…
    “We can’t leave Syria alone on this issue,” said Dietrun Günther, senior protection officer at the UNHCR in Damascus. “If the West really wants to help Syria in this matter, it must negotiate new terms for its support of refugees.”

Anyway, let’s all just work for the speediest possible end to the violence and destruction in Iraq, and the speediest possible return of all these internally and internationally displaced Iraqi citizens to their homes.
And we could light a special candle for Riverbend: The clarity, humanity, and eloquence of her writing about the effects of the maelstrom of violence in Iraq make her testimony every bit as powerful as Anne Frank’s testimony of living as a hunted fugitive in Nazi-occupied Holland.

US commanders understand Iraq mission’s failure

This little piece of reporting by Capitol Hill Blue’s Doug Thompson looks very significant. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for flagging it.)
Thompson writes:

    Military commanders in the field in Iraq admit in private reports to the Pentagon the war “is lost” and that the U.S. military is unable to stem the mounting violence killing 1,000 Iraqi civilians a month.
    Even worse, they report the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha is “just the tip of the iceberg” with overstressed, out-of-control Americans soldiers pushed beyond the breaking point both physically and mentally.
    “We are in trouble in Iraq,” says retired army general Barry McCaffrey. “Our forces can’t sustain this pace, and I’m afraid the American people are walking away from this war.”
    Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has clamped a tight security lid on the increasingly pessimistic reports coming out of field commanders in Iraq, threatening swift action against any military personnel who leak details to the press or public.

McCaffrey has been in Iraq fairly recently and was one of the Iraq experts called in to a small-group meeting with Pres. Bush last week. I just hope that Bush (1) allowed McCaffrey enough time to give an honest report on what he had seen, and (2) listened to him carefully and understood what he was hearing.
I’ve been pretty busy over the past few days writing two pieces that I consider important on the theme that the failure of the Bushite project in Iraq is now clear. One is my column for Thursday’s CSM. The other is a longer think-piece that should appear on Salon.com tomorrow.
It has become increasingly clear to me over recent weeks that:

    (1) The US military has no ability and no plan for resolving Iraq’s interlocking crises of public security collapse, infrastructural breakdown, and prolonged political impasse. These problems are unevenly distributed through the country. But the fact that the insecurity is greatest of all within the huge metropolis of Baghdad, the hub of the country, is fatal to the Bushite project.
    (2) The political process being shepherded forward by Viceroy Khalilzad has been going nowhere. Here we are, now nearly 6 months after that much-hyped national election of december 15, and the country still doesn’t have a full government!
    (3) Also, Juan Cole’s daily events-in-Iraq blog, which used to contain many tidbits of internal Iraqi political news, has become almost totally a lengthy daily catalogue of grisly deaths and mayhem. (And of course it’s not just Juan… That is, unfortunately, most of the news that’s happening inside Iraq these days.)

Invading Iraq was– as I note in both the pieces I’ve been writing– a huge roll of the geopolitical dice by the Bushites. That they have lost the “game” they played there there will have huge repurcussions– both in Iraq, and far beyond.
Here, just as a benchmark, is the lead to the column I had in the CSM on January 9, 2003:

    Any use of massive violence such as that Washington is now threatening against Iraq is a terrible thing.
    Everything we know about violence gives two clear lessons. First, the use of force always has unintended – often quite unpredictable – consequences. And second, war in the modern era always disproportionately harms civilians.

And here’s how I finished it:

    Mr. President, there is still time to stop this war. True, the build-up toward it has already been very expensive. But you should not conclude that the fact of those already sunk costs locks you into a path of war against Iraq from which there is no escape. If you launch this war, then the cost – in dollars, in human suffering, and in unfolding strategic chaos around the Middle East and the world – will be unimaginably greater than anything you’ve spent to date.
    Turn back. You have many friends in the US and around the world who will eagerly help you find a way to do so.

He didn’t listen to me, or to any others of the hundreds of experts in Middle Eastern and world affairs who warned him this would turn out badly… I am crying for the people of Iraq this week. I just hope they can find a way to hold their country together and bind up the wounds they are all currently suffering.