Hunger striking, human progress, and habeas

The number of Guantanamo detainees participating in the hunger strike there has now risen to 75.
That report, by AP’s Ben Fox, quoted Navy Commander Robert Durand as trying to downplay the seriousness of this action by the detainees by calling it an “attention-getting tactic”. Fox also quotes Durand as saying,

    “The hunger-strike technique is consistent with al-Qaida practice and reflects detainee attempts to elicit media attention to bring international pressure on the United States to release them back to the battlefield.”

Right…. Hunger-striking also happens to be “consistent with the practice of” Mahatma Gandhi, the courageous British women activists who were campaigning for the right to vote, etc etc.
Durand doesn’t mention this. I wonder why not.
Nor does he see fit to mention the violation of the fundamental right of habeas corpus that the detainees are campaigning against.
Habeas corpus is a bedrock of personal liberty in the Anglo-American system of law and society. Since I studied Latin for five years, I always knew that habeas corpus means “that you may have the body”, and I’d always assumed that it meant that individuals were thereby somehow given the right to have control over their own bodies (i.e., to enjoy personal liberty). Well, on reading that Wikipedia article linked to there, it seems clear that it does mean that– but it means it in a way even more profound than I had thought.
It’s not that through habeas corpus “the system” gives individuals the right to control their own bodies, but rather that antecedent to that the individual is assumed to already have the right to her or his own body, and that it’s the state, when it wants to infringe on that right, that needs to show ironclad due cause for doing so.
This concept of personal liberty was of course fully enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence, which states,

    We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Note that this speaks about “all Men”, not merely “all US citizens”. Also, of course, these days– thanks in good part to those suffragist hunger-strikers of 95 years ago– “men” also includes “women”…
So the issue for the detainees in Guantanamo– and in Bagram and all the other places where my government holds detainees who have not had the benefit of a trial, is give them liberty, or give them a trial that will show them and everyone else why it is right that they be deprived of their liberty for some period of time.
Some of these detainees have now been deprived of their liberty for 54 months. 54 months of treatment that has often been inhumane, brutal, and by design extremely disorienting. 54 months of their loved ones often not knowing whether they are dead or alive. 54 months of isolation, psychological attack on their personhood, and uncertainty.
Give them liberty, or give them a trial. It’s as straightforward as that.
The only circumstance under US (or international) law in which there would legally be a third alternative is if these detained individuals are classified as POWs, in which case they could continue to be held without trial for the duration of the relevant hostilities. But in return for the detaining government having that power, it has to guarantee a separate set of rights to the detainees: that they not be subjected to interrogation, and that the phsyical and psychological conditions of their detention meet the standards defined in the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush administration chose not to designate these detainees as POWs. Instead, it has used the category of “unlawful enemy combatants” in an attempt to deny them access both to the protections for POWs, and to the normal protections they would have under civilian law. That move deeply violated the US Constitution, as well as all relevant international law.
The Bushites cannot simply continue to hold these men– who between Gitmo, Bagram, and other extra-legal holding centers could well number more than 1,000 individuals– in this state of legal limbo forever. In fact, it should not continue for a day longer– for any of them.
Why do they not bring these men to trial? Cmdr. Durand accused the men of seeking to be released so they could “return to the battlefield.” But if they have trials and are found guilty of serious crimes, then they wouldn’t be released any time soon, would they?
Actually, the problem for Cmdr. Durand and the whole machinery of the Bush administration above him is that bringing these detainees to any form of a fair trial would be hugely problematic for the administration. For reasons including these:

    * In a fair trial, we the public would learn that for many of these detainees the evidence against them doesn’t amount to very much (and for many, might not actually amount to anything.) Therefore, the justification for having held them so long and treated them so badly would not live up to what the administration’s people have claimed until now.
    * In a fair trial, the detainees would be able to speak to the broaoder public about the way they have been treated for the past many months.

Would it reassure the apparatchiks in the administration to know that these are not new issues and concerns? That every European colonial power in recent history also faced them as it tried to “square” its commitment to a version of liberal politics at home with the brutality of its attempt to suppress anticolonial movements overseas?
Maybe not. But anyway, this current dilemma is one for the Bush administration to face.
As for the rest of us, all we can say is, “Give them liberty, or give them a decent trial.”

“Tajik intifada” in Kabul?

Al-Hayat is describing the demonstrations in Kabul yesterday as a “Tajik intifada”… That piece indicates that Khairkhaneh, the area of northern Kabul where the US military vehicle lost control and killed a number of passers-by, was near to the headquarters of former Defense Minister Gen. Muhammad Qasem Fahim, a leader of Afghanistan’s Tajik community; and the young people in the neighborhood then comgregated around the convoy to protest– and the American soldiers then fired into the crowd…
The ethnic-Tajik dimension to what happened hasn’t been mentioned in any of the western media reports that I can find except for this one in Newsday by Moises Saman and James Rupert.
They write:

    Various witnesses told of organized crowds of teenaged boys waving pictures of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a guerrilla commander killed in 2001 who is the hero of ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley in northeast Afghanistan. They voiced suspicion that Panjshiri political activists stoked the rioting to strike at President Hamid Karzai, who in the past 18 months has sidelined several top Panjshiri political figures. The country’s highest ethnic Tajik official, parliament speaker Yunus Qanooni, appealed for calm.

Evidently a lot of different (though overlapping) conflictual things are going on in Afghanistan these days. If the Kabul riots have a strong ethnic-Tajik dimension to them, that makes them noticeably distinct from anything to do with pro-Taliban activism. Though both these strands of the story indicate the deep and still-unrolling failure of the rebuild-Afghanistan project, as I noted here yesterday.
Tajiks make up around 27% of the national population and speak a language called Dari that is close to Persian.
Regarding the growth of Taliban activities– and as a follow-up to the Ahmed Rashid piece I quoted from extensively here yesterday– Rashid has a new piece up on the BBC website.
He writes:

    Nearly 400 Afghans have been killed in an unprecedented offensive by the Taleban, in a bid to pre-empt a major deployment by some 6,000 Nato troops this summer in southern Afghanistan.
    From just a few hundred guerrillas last year, Taleban commander Mullah Dadullah now claims to have 12,000 men under arms and control of 20 districts in the former Taleban heartland in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan. There is also a strong Taleban-al-Qaeda presence in the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.
    Why – five years after the Taleban and al-Qaeda were smashed by US forces – is Afghanistan facing a resurgent Taleban movement that is now threatening to overwhelm it?
    … Neither Nato, nor the American forces they are replacing, have offered an honest assessment of their successes and failures during the past five years.

He then runs through an important “checklist” of the failures of the policies pursued by the US, Nato, the UN, and the Afghan government in the south of the country. It starts (as certainly always seems important to note) with this:

    Washington’s refusal to take state building in Afghanistan seriously after 2001 and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq, created a major international distraction which the Taleban took advantage of…

Anyway, it’s a good and searing piece of analysis there. (Many of the comments from readers beneath it are also worth reading.)

Afghanistan– the spark of an intifada?

The events in Kabul today looked ominously like the events in Gaza that triggered the Palestinians’ First Intifada against Israel at the beginning of December 1987. Today, as back then, a vehicle that was part of the foreign presence in the country apparently went out of control and ended up killing and injuring a number of the indigenous citizens… Today, as then, that lethal event triggered a response from the citizens that revealed a huge amount of pent-up anger and resentment… (Today, as then, the spokesmen for the foreign presence had previously been saying “all is fine and normal” with the general situation… But the eruption of anger gives the lie to that claim.)
It is far too early to tell how these events in Kabul will play out. The BBC is reporting that,

    At least seven were killed in the shooting and the riots which followed.
    About 2,000 people demonstrated in the city centre, with some moving on to attack buildings in the diplomatic quarter.
    For over two hours there were bursts of gunfire as hundreds of protesters rampaged through Kabul, burning cars and attacking police checkpoints.
    Police and the army – including tanks – moved in to restore law and order and the curfew from 2200 local time (1730 GMT) to 0400 (2330 GMT) was imposed…

But this is Kabul, remember– Afghanistan’s national capital. This is the one place in the country that was supposed to be quite secure for the US-led rebuilding project, even though there has been all kinds of tumult in other Afghan regions. Including in the south, where the Taliban have reportedly been regrouping in battle-groups of as large as 300 men…
Veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has a very serious piece in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph. He writes:

    The last thing Tony Blair and President George W. Bush need, at a moment of multiple crises for both of them, is a revamped Taliban taking control of southern Afghanistan – but that is now not impossible to imagine.
    Bush and Blair have only themselves to blame, as they fought an unnecessary war in Iraq and allowed the Taliban and al-Qa’eda to fester in Central Asia during the five years that followed 9/11.
    Yesterday’s widespread riots in Kabul are indicative of how disillusioned many Afghans feel about the failure of the West to help rebuild their country.
    Nato is now stuck with the consequences…
    Fighting a full-scale guerrilla war is not what countries such as Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and others enlisted for. The mandate from their governments is reconstruction, not combat.
    “Nato will not fail in Afghanistan … the family of nations will expect nothing less than success,” General James Jones, the head of US and Nato forces in Europe, told a recent seminar in Madrid.
    Gen Jones is now desperately trying to persuade contributing countries to end the restrictions they impose on their troops, making it impossible for some of them to fight or commanders to run a proper military campaign.
    “What is the point of deploying troops who don’t fight,” ask many Afghans. That is why Gen Jones calls these caveats – they now number a staggering 71 – “Nato’s operational cancer”.
    Nato’s weaknesses are what worry President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government. The Taliban and al-Qa’eda know this and more. They have closely followed the testy debates in parliaments across Europe about deploying troops to Afghanistan. They count on inflicting a few bloody casualties, letting body bags arrive in European capitals, and then seeing the protests against deployment escalate.
    The Taliban are also testing American resolve. Nato’s deployment is part of Washington’s agenda to reduce its forces in Afghanistan. It is pulling 3,000 troops out this summer and possibly more later.
    The Karzai government is angry with Washington, because many Afghans see this as the start of a full American withdrawal.
    Despite Bush and Blair claiming to be successfully micromanaging the war on terror, the war is expanding and the region faces increasing chaos…
    Al-Qa’eda, now under the operational leadership of the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, has helped reorganise the Taliban, create unlimited sources of funding from the sale of Afghan-grown opium and forged a new alliance linking the Taliban with extremist groups in Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Iraq. Al-Qa’eda has facilitated a major exchange of fighters and training between the Taliban and the extremist groups in Iraq.
    Iran is spending large sums out of its windfall oil income in buying support among disaffected and disillusioned Afghan warlords. The day America or Israel attacks Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, these Afghans will be unleashed on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan, opening a new front quite separate from the Taliban insurgency.
    In Central Asia, the Western alliance is floundering. America lost its major military base in Central Asia after Uzbekistan kicked American forces out last year. Emboldened, tiny Kyrgyzstan is now demanding that Washington pay it 100 times more for the base it provides for American forces. Russia and China are working on making sure that America and Nato surrender all their remaining toeholds in Central Asia.
    All this is a result of America, Britain and others taking their eye off the ball and circumventing the indisputable truth of 9/11: that the centre of global jihadism and the threat it poses the world still lies in this region, not in Iraq…

Rashid concludes by writing:

    The Western alliance can still win in Afghanistan and root out terrorism, but only by means of a serious, aggressive and sustained commitment by its member countries. So far at least, that commitment is still not apparent.

I am not so sure that this is still possible. (Anyway, rebuilding Afghanistan is supposed to be UN commitment, and not just one that is dominated by the “Western alliance.”)
Rashid is glaringly correct, however, to note that the effort to rebuild Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban was dealt a body blow by Bush’s reckless decision to invade Iraq.
The poor, poor Afghans! This is the second time in recent history that the US, having won a significant military victory inside their country, then proceeded to majorly short-change the project of post-conflict reconstruction, thereby allowing it to sink back into warlordism, esclating social-political chaos, and all the miseries attendant on that situation.
The first time that happened was after the US-supported “mujahideen” forced the Soviets to withdraw their army from the country in February 1989… But after that, Bush I, and then Clinton, promptly forgot about Afghanistan and allowed the warlords (who had been Washington’s allies in the earlier anti-Soviet campaign– along with Usama Bin You-know-who) to wreak their havoc on the country’s people…
Then, in November 2001, the US won a second significant military victory in Afghanistan when it toppled the Taliban regime there (with the help of many of those same warlords). And once again, in the aftermath of the military victory, Washington took its eyes off the ball, this time swiveling them toward Baghdad.
What is the problem of the US policymaking class? When will they ever learn that a military victory is worth nothing on its own, unless the “victory” that it allows can be nailed down solidly through a smart and committed policy of social-political reconstruction for as long as it takes, afterwards?
(Actually, they did know that once–back in 1945. But somehow the lessons seemed to get forgotten after that.)
This time, the stakes for Washington, and the world, are enormous. Afghanistan seems to be turning into a powder-keg. The US position in Iraq is a draining and futile quagmire. And in both places, the collapse of US power that seems to be approaching faster each day will have much wider regional repurcussions… (Pakistan, for instance, will not easily escape from the tumult that reigns along its ungoverned borderlands with Afghanistan.)
Those of us US citizens who oppose war and violence need to be very calm as we point out that:

    (1) As the Dalai Lama says, violence always begets violence. The fact that the US has invested so hugely in massive machines of violence for so long, and has used them so broadly in the past five years, has unleashed huge cascades of violence around the world. Some of this violence comes back to hit Americans. But most of it has affected the poorest and most desperate people in the communities involved. We should all be ashamed.
    (2) But better than standing around being ashamed, it is time for our country to cease its reliance on violence and to find ways to redirect all that spending, training, and hardware that until now has been poured into the military, and
    (3) Meanwhile, nonviolent ways certainly always exist whereby the world’s conflicts and the any threats to the lives and wellbeing of the US citizenry can be addressed and resolved: We need to return to using and strengthening those nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms.

Meantime, let’s all just hope and pray that the people(s) of Afghanistan can find a way to de-escalate the violence that now plagues so many of their communities. If the US military cannot be part of a project that is effective at rebuilding Afghanistan, then it should be withdrawn from the country. There, as in Iraq, the argument that the US military presence is needed in order to “keep the peace” now seems very hollow indeed.

How will this war be memorialized?

This US war in and against Iraq was lost a long time ago.  There remain
many large political questions regarding the manner, timing, and consequences
of the US exit.  But on this weekend, when Americans participate in
their annual commemoration of the fallen of former wars, I wonder what form
the future memorialization of this war will take– both here and in Iraq.

Wars, and those who have lost their lives in them, can be memorialized in
many different ways (or not at all.)  In the United States, memorials
to wars and warfighters past run the gamut from the bronzed triumphalism
of the horse-riding generals who prance atop the traffic circles in Washington
DC to the stark gash of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial.  Somewhere
close to Lin’s mood (but less shocking) is the display in another of my favorite
war memorials, the one at Appomatox
Court House, the place where Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his secessionist “Army
of Northern Virginia” to the federal general Ulysses Grant, thus marking
the end of any hope for victory of the slaveholding southern secessionists.

The Appomattox museum is in a rural area of Virginia around four hours’ drive south of DC. It is sited in a collection of small, old buildings in
a pastoral setting. The particular display that I like is a large room
that presents many photos of the war-dead.  I guess the US Civil War was
fought near the dawn of the age of photography, and the families of many of
the young men going off to war from North or South were able to have photographs
of their loved ones made, to remember them by, before they shipped out to
battle.  (Okay, it seems to have been almost solely the officers
who did that.  I guess photography was still expensive in those
days.)

The casualty rates in the war were truly appalling.  Photography and
the reloadable musket may have made their way onto the scene, but antibiotics
and the practice of antiseptic doctoring certainly had not.  A huge
proportion of those men who set off never came home again.  Relatively
lucky were the families who at least had a treasured daguerrotype of the
loved one, made before he left…

So in this room in the museum today, they have lined the walls with a few
hundred of these photographs.  Each one is mounted on a
matte made in the color of the side he fought for: blue, or grey. And the matted
photos have been put up on the walls in a checkerboard design: blue next
to grey next to blue next to grey…  The room commemorates them all,
equally. Look up close and you see the stiff images of those men, mostly young
men trying to look stern and brave, like warriors.  Look from a distance
and you see a sea of men all cut off in the bloom of their manhood, and
their political affiliations don’t matter at all.

The “message”, if you like, of that display is one of national reconciliation
and national unity, and it is very effectively and movingly conveyed.  (This
mood is lost completely if you click through
this
webpage maintained by the museum, where you click on two different flags
to see the slideshows of the dead from each of the separate sides…)

However, what we need with respect to the US-Iraq war is probably not at
this stage the projection of any message of “unity” or even “friendship”.
 Friendship between the two countries may, or may not, come. At some point.
 But when one country’s army is still occupying another country it seems dishonest to speak of that relationship as having anything to do with “friendship”.  Surely the message that we in the US anti-war,
anti-occupation movement should seek to have our memorial project instead is a strong message
of reproach to our government and to those individuals within it who
dragged our country– and also with far, far worse consequences, Iraq– into this
horrific war.

As well as a message of comfort, remembering, and compassion
to all those who lost loved ones or were wounded in this war.

Reproach and remembering are, of course, the two main messages of Maya
Lin’s beautiful Vietnam War memorial.  But reproach is also a strong
element in another U.S. memorial from the Civil War era:
Arlington National Cemetery
.

Arlington National Cemetery was established right on the grounds of Gen.Robert
E. Lee’s family home, on the banks of the Potomac River looking straight
across at Washington DC. Lee, who had been a general in the Union Army before
the Civil War, was probably the highest ranking military man to defect to
the Confederacy.  (His wife was also the grand-daughter of George and
Martha Washington.)  After Lee’s defection, the Union Army sent troops
to occupy his homealong with all its extensive pastures and other landholdings.  In
1864, the US government expropriated the land from the Lee family.  By
that time the dead from the war were becoming very numerous.  The Union
generals transformed much of the Lee land into a vast war cemetery, burying
the dead right up to the edge of the family home of the man they blamed most
for the prolongation of the rebellion and the terrible, continuing toll of
the fighting.

So here’s my plan.  Maybe the best reproach for this present war would be for
the next US administration to acquire land right up to the door of George
W. Bush’s family home on Prairie Chapel Road, in Crawford, Texas, and to
establish there a large and impressive monument of reproach, mourning, and
remembrance.  Or we could have two such monuments: one in Crawford,
and one in
St. Michaels, Maryland, that could take in and engulf the homes there of both Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld.

Of course, Cindy Sheehan and the folks at Camp Casey in Crawford did
a pretty good job last year, in starting to mount a reproach-and-remembrance
memorial there that would surely have caught George Bush’s eye whenever he drove
along Prairie Chapel Road to his “ranch”.  (Look at the second photo
here,
in particular.)

They used crosses… Which is okay as far as it goes, though perhaps a little too theologically specific for the great public monument I envision. I found the empty boots of the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibition very moving. Maybe something could be done along those lines, instead?

But that’s for later.

Cindy and her friends are resourceful and dedicated.  But they are still
just a bunch of under-resourced individuals.  What we need to do, as a citizenry,
is to get our whole national government into the right frame of mind regarding
the war in Iraq.  That means, first and foremost, electing a government
that will undertake
a troop pullout from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous.  But it also means, in the years ahead, following that great group
of Vietnam-war veterans who managed to persuade Congress to build a memorial
to their war that was impressive, serious, and non-triumphalistic.  They
got Congress to give them a great location for their memorial, too.  

Probably, on second thoughts, the future Iraq war memorial should be located
on the National Mall in Washington DC.  As near to the White House– or to the Pentagon–
as possible, I say.

But there could still also be additional memorials in Crawford, Texas, and St. Michaels,
Maryland. Just like Robert E. Lee, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should never
be allowed to forget the extent of the losses that their decision to launch
this war has inflicted on the world.

Nir Rosen and the omnipresence of fear in Iraq

Nir Rosen has a great piece of reporting/reflection about his most recent trip to Iraq in today’s WaPo “Outlook” section. He describes the trip as having taken place “a few weeks back.”
The headline there is simply Iraq is the Republic of Fear. That picks up on something Rosen wrote in the body of the piece. He recalled that “Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq ‘the republic of fear'”… Well, actually it was Kanaan Makiya who coined that term, writing a book by that name that catapulted him to fame, glory, and financial security back in 1990-91.
Makiya subsequently used his considerable public prominence in the US to urge on the (already weighty) pro-invasion lobby. He was one of three Iraqi oppositionists brought into one of those key meetings with Pres. Bush back in 2002.
As Rosen writes, the anti-Saddam dissidents hoped the “republic of fear”

    would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

He recalls some of the changes since he first went to Iraq to write about it in the early days after the invasion:

    At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military — with its towering vehicles rumbling through Baghdad’s streets and its soldiers like giants with their vests and helmets and weapons — seemed overwhelming. The Occupation could be felt at all times. Now in Baghdad, you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their Kalashnikovs at passersby.
    Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.

In this piece, as in the long article Nir had in the March-April issue of Boston Review, he delineates the breaking-up of much of Iraqi society into sect-based sub-communities. This time, in even more sickening detail than before.
He writes:

    Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn’t unite Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter history of mutual hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the Americans intensified, tensions between Sunni and Shiite began to grow, eventually setting off the vicious sectarian cleansing that is Iraq today.
    During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites’ indifference.
    But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad’s Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.
    This is when sectarian cleansing truly began…

He concludes on a very pessimistic note:

    The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

Personally, I cannot be so gloomy. Firstly, because I guess by my psychological constitution and my moral-spiritual stance in the world I just am not (and cannot allow myself to be) that gloomy. And secondly because I truly do judge that a lot of the sectarian asabiyeh (sensitivity/ identification) that has arisen in Iraq in the past two years has been deliberately provoked and stoked by the occupation forces… In line with the infamous advice that Washington’s longtime pro-Israeli “Middle East guru” Martin Indyk gave back in April 2003, when he said publicly that the administration would have to play the imperialists’ traditional game of “divide and rule” in Iraq if it was to have any hope of “winning” there.
So if a lot of the inter-group hatred inside Iraq has indeed been stoked and provoked by the occupation forces and their more shadowy interventionist wings, then once the occupation ends, surely that stoking will also end?
Yes, it is true that inter-group hatred, once stoked, can all too easily acquire a life and cyclical dynamic of its own. It can’t “simply” be turned off– far less reversed. But in the absence of having the imperial (oh sorry, “occupation”) power always there, whispering fear-talk into people’s ears, and offering and making good on deliveries of lethal weapons to all sides, then at least there is more hope for an intentional message of national unity and national reconciliation to receive a decent hearing.
Also, if none of the people and leaders can any more harbor the hope that they can launch their own sectarian adventures while also receiving some protection from that outside power, then there is more chance that all Iraqis can sit down together and figure out more realistically how to deal with each other, with none of them any more relying on outsiders to put a finger on the scales in their support…
So though I have enormous respect and admiration for Nir Rosen, and feel quite confident that he was writing the truth of the situation in Iraq exactly as he saw it– still, I have also lived through and seen situations in which apparently deep-seated hatreds and cycles of violence have been overcome and transcended through the application of smart and compassionate policies of national unity. South Africa is one great example– how many of us, seeing the terrible inter-communal violence back in the 1980s, did not expect a continuation/exacerbation of the bloodbaths there? Mozambique is another. Lebanon, in its own quirky and radically unfinished way, is yet another. (How many people could have expected a Maronite-Sunni alliance such as we see today, or an Aounist-Hizbullah alliance, or indeed any of the literally scores of unlikely political configurations the country has seen since 1975? And still, there, none of the political forces has ever given any serious thought to the idea of secession… )
But anyway, my disagreement with Nir is mainly on the pessimism and fatalism of his prognosis. As for the observations and analysis in today’s article– why, everyone should rush to read them.

Haditha: massacre, cover-up– and now what?

Last November, there was an incident in the western-Iraq town of Haditha in which one Marine and 24 Iraqi civilians ended up dead. The next day, the New York Times reported this:

    “The Marine Corps said Sunday that 15 Iraqi civilians and a marine were killed Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad….The bombing on Saturday in Haditha, on the Euphrates in the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar, was aimed at a convoy of American marines and Iraqi Army soldiers, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman. After the explosion, gunmen opened fire on the convoy. At least eight insurgents were killed in the firefight, the captain said.”

That story from Capt. Pool was not challenged in the US MSM until March, when Time magazine ran a story– based on video footage shot by a local journalism student and testimony from the townspeople– that said that most or all of the Iraqi casualties had been killed in cold blood, and that none of them were “insurgents”.
The Time story provoked a serious investigation of the incident by the Marine Corps command. Today, Ellen Knickmeyer writes in the WaPo that,

    Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation..
    An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged coverup are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.
    “Marines overreacted . . . and killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” said one of those briefed, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war.

I agree with AP’s Robert H. Reidwho today wrote that the charges likely to be brought against the perpetrators of the Haditha massacre, “could threaten President Bush’s effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.”
A number of commentators are comparing the expected effect of the full revelation of what happened in haditha to either the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, or the revelations about the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse in Iraq. However, in May-June 2006, the Bush administration starts out with the domestic and global assessments of its project in Iraq already far more negative than they were at the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations in April 2004.
Therefore, the Haditha revelations, as they are fully made, could well turn out to be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” of US resolve to stay in Iraq. This, even though it is not clear to me that what happened in Haditha that day is necessarily the worst atrocity committed by the US forces in Iraq. How about the actions committed in Fallujah, or Ramadi, or Tel Afar?
The Haditha massacre seems to have had the same psychological dynamic as the Jenin Camp massacre committed by the IOF in April 2002. In both cases, the occupation force had suffered some casualties at the hands of resisters and then went on a rampage of bloody retribution against the local population. Military forces that go on rampages are generally something commanders want to avoid– not only because it riles the local public and helps keep the flames of resistance burning, but also because such incidents signal a dangerous lack of discipline among the troops.
That AP piece reports that, “U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force ‘only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful.'”
Isn’t it about 38 months too late to deliver that message at this point?
Anyway, huge kudos to John Murtha and to all who have worked hard to uncover the facts about Haditha, to keep this issue alive, and to hold accountable those responsible… Perhaps in this case, as at Abu Ghraib, “those responsible” should include an American political leadership that used an inappropriately composed and inadequately trained military force to launch a gratuitous aggression against a foreign country, and then left those soldiers and Marines there for three-plus years without generating any effective plan for how to deal with the predictable local opposition to the occupation, or how to change the political dynamic and get the troops out.
No wonder some of those Marines were pissed-off, or just plain flat-out scared. If I were under the orders of this Commander-in-Chief I would be really scared, too.
Every month the occupation force stays will see the chance of another one, or two, or three Hadithas.
How can we risk that?
Get out now, before the rot sets in even deeper!
The Bush administration should announce immediately that it intends to have all US and “coalition” forces out of Iraq by the end of October. Then the planning and negotiation for that necessary step can begin in earnest.

The Palestinian prisoners’ plan: whose political weapon?

The western media have given quite a lot of attention to the agreement reportedly concluded recently by leaders of the various political factions among the 7,000-plus Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. As far as I can see, the best and most complete text of this agreement in English seems to be this one, published yesterday by AP.
Most of the (western) commentary around this document has presented it as a strong political weapon in the hands of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fateh. Certainly, Abbas himself has tried to package it that way, giving Hamas a public “ultimatum” that he would give them ten days to accept the plan, and if they didn’t then he would submit it to popular referendum. (It is not even clear to me whether he has the right to organize such an ultimatum? Help, anyone?)
But I’ve read that AP version of the prisoners’ plan, and it seems to me its political content is at least as favorable to the Hamas view of the world as it is to Pres. Abbas’s– perhaps more so.
(In which case, his “threat” to submit the plan to a popular referendum might have just about the same degree of effectiveness as a politically coercive threat as Sen. Biden’s “threat” to the Iraqis that if they don’t shape up and do what he tells them then maybe the US will have to pull out of Iraq?)
Let’s look at that version of the agreement in some detail.
AP tells us that the signatories were, for fateh, Marwan Barghouthi, and then other named prisoner leaders from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP. Here’s what they tell us about the content:

    1. The Palestinian people at home and in exile seek to liberate their land and realize their right of freedom, return and independence, and their right to self-determination, including their right to establish an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital on all the land occupied in 1967, guaranteeing the right of return for the refugees, liberating all the prisoners and detainees, drawing upon our people’s historic right in the land of our ancestors, the U.N. charter, international law, and what international legitimacy guarantees.

There is little there for Hamas to disagree with. They can agree to establishing a palestinian state within all the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967 fairly easily if there is no requirement there at all that they “recognize” or indeed say anything at all about Israel’s right to exist within the rest rest of the area of Mandate Palestine.
But of course, the content of that #1 clause is distinctly different from what Abbas concurred with during the Camp David and Taba negotiations, in the Geneva Initaitive, etc– in relation to all of which fora he had signaled his readiness to make significant concessions from this “historic” (and international-law-based) Palestinian position…

    2. Expediting the realization of what was agreed upon in Cairo in March 2005 regarding developing and activating the role of the PLO, and the joining of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in this organization as the legitimate and sole representative of the Palestinian people wherever they exist; … the national interest constitutes that a new national council [PNC] be formed before the end of 2006 in a way that guarantees the representation of all the forces, factions, national and Islamic parties, and groups everywhere, all sectors, institutions, and personalities on the basis of proportional representation, attendance, and effectiveness in the political, struggle, social, and popular domains, and in protecting the PLO as a wide frontal framework, a comprehensive national coalition, and a national framework that assembles all Palestinians at home and abroad as a higher political reference.

This one could look like a Hamas concession, given Hamas’s long-held opposition to Fateh’s claim that the PLO is the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people. On the other hand, giving the PLO this leading role was already agreed during the early 2005 negotiations for the tahdi’eh, so this is not new. I’m not sure whether the idea of re-forming the PNC “on the basis of proportional representation, attendance, and effectiveness in the political, struggle, social, and popular domains” is new or not. But that clause would certainly tend to favor Hamas over the chronically ineffective Fateh.
Then we come to–

Continue reading “The Palestinian prisoners’ plan: whose political weapon?”

New parallel blog for JWN commenters

The Comments posting software here has not been working for the past 2.5 days. I apologise to all who’ve tried to submit comments since then.
So here’s what I’ve done. I’ve set up an entire parallel blog for JWN comments over at Blogspot.
You need to register as a Blogger user to submit comments over there. Many of you have already done that, since I see you commenting over at Juan Cole’s blog. Anyway, it’s easy to do.
Unlike Juan, I do not intend to pre-moderate comments that are submitted. So the discussion at JWN COMMENTS can hopefully be just as rich as we have been having over here. I require commenters to stick to the same discourse-enhancing guidelines there that I have developed over here. And there will be the same level of continuing moderation of the Comments discussions there.
The parallel Comments blog may or may not be a longterm thing. Comments-handling over here with my Movable Type software has become much, much harder recently. I’ve been thinking of putting a visual screening system into the Comments template here, but haven’t yet figured how to do it. Blogger software already has one. That should cut out most of the spambotting that has been clogging up the Comments software here.
So here’s the URL again: http://jwn-comments.blogspot.com/. Head on over and let’s try to resume our discussions over there.

Fukuyama at Virginia

Earlier this week, Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University visited the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Turnout was very good, even with students largely gone for the summer. Doing his part to reduce oil demand, Fukuyama arrived at the talk on a sparkling Harley-Davidson. The main hall was packed, as was the overflow room.
So what was the draw? Why has Fukuyama’s recently released book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale UP) caused such a sensation? Quite simply, here we have a leading inner member of the neoconservatives in the Reagan and Bush Administrations breaking ranks with his former comrades. His book and his address at UVA explain why and set out a better course for American foreign policy.
In his lively prepared remarks, Fukuyama condensed his book into 30 minutes. He began with an overview of neoconservatism’s roots. Evolving far from its origins on the Trotskyite left in the 1930’s, neoconservatives after World War II retained an idealism about the universality of human rights and were impressed that American power could be used for noble purposes. On the domestic front, neoconservatives focused on counterproductive consequences of government social engineering efforts.
Yet between these two themes emerged a key contradiction and legacy. The same movement so eloquently skeptical of government’s capacity to enact social transformation was as sure in its convictions about the utility of international force to bring about “transformation” for other countries.
Applied then to the post 9-11 world, the Bush neoconservatives made three critical misjudgments. First was the expansion of the doctrine of “pre-emptive war” into that of “preventive war.” After 9/11, Fukuyama agreed that “containment was no longer an option” and invading Afghanistan was necessary – to pre-empt a demonstrated imminent threat. But too many variables of the presumed threat from Iraq were unclear. What imminent threat was to be pre-empted?

Continue reading “Fukuyama at Virginia”

My piece on Hamas in Boston Review

I got home from Kansas to find the heavy envelope containing my six copies of the edition of Boston Review that contains my big article on Hamas. Then today I checked their website, and it’s there too. Actually, here.
It’s an intriguing-looking issue altogether. I read the article on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with interest, and look forward to reading the pieces on Venezuela and Argentina. Managing Editors Josh Cohen and Deb Chasman have been doing a super job of building the mag up into a really good, thoughtful place for consideration and discussion of policy issues both global and national. Josh is on the point of leaving MIT, which has hosted BR for many years now. He’s going to teach at Stanford instead– on the far side of the country. But I gather he will still keep his editorial role at BR, which is great. I admired his work on democratic theory long before I ever even knew he was an editor as well…
Back to my piece. The first half is my big wrap-up of the important points from the interviews and reporting I did during my Feb-March trip to Palestine and Israel. Haniyeh, Zahar, etc. Much (but not all) will be familiar to attentive JWN readers. In the second half, I did something new and just interviewed myself, teasing out in Q&A format some of the implications of the sea-change in Palestinian politics that the Hamas electoral victory in Januray represented.
I asked myself questions like:

    Will the Hamas government be able to exert its control over the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, including the many lawless Fateh offshoots?
    How will Israel and the international community react to Hamas’s attempt to establish a PA government?

I consider a lot more questions there, too. (All I can remember is that I wrote most of the piece on a long plane-trip. I can’t even remember which one.) Anyway, you should read the whole thing.
I wrote the first draft of the piece, oh my, maybe back in late March? Then it sat for a while, according to BR’s bimonthly publishing schedule; then it got tossed between me and an editor a couple of times, and updated… At the end of all that work I pleaded with Josh and Deb to be allowed to have a dateline put on it. Given how fast political developments move in Palestine, I wanted the “closing date” for updates to be quite clear.. So the dateline is May 1.
It still holds up pretty well, though May is now far advanced.
Anyway, I’ll finish this post now. Tomorrow I’ll have one about more current Palestinian developments.