US mis-steps and Shiite activism in Iraq

I can’t decide whether I find it truly pathetic or quite criminal that US commanders in Baghdad are still– three years after invading Iraq– being described by reporters as trying to teach their troops a few of the fundamentals of waging war in built-up areas.
I mean honestly, how many times have reporters told and retold this exact same story (different general being brown-nosed to) over the past three years?
This, from the LA Times’s James Rainey today:

    Some American troops in Iraq have been their “own worst enemy,” unintentionally creating new insurgents by treating the Iraqi people in a heavy-handed or insensitive manner, according to the U.S. commander in charge of day-to-day military operations.
    Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, in a weekend training session with troops and in an interview afterward, said he found a need to reemphasize to soldiers that they must use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect, in part because the insurgency has persisted and grown.

Actually, that reasoning is flawed. They should “use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect” because it is the right thing to do, because it is (or should be) in line with their professional values and training, and because they are obligated by the laws of war to do so…
Oh, and as a side-benefit of doing so, they might find it helps their ability to contain the insurgency?
Actually, it is probably ways too late for anything the US troops do in Iraq to make any scintilla of difference to the political outcome. Though they do have the capability to inflict considerable additional suffering on Iraqi families and should certainly be prevented from doing so.
Borzou Daragahi, also of the LAT, had an intriguing piece in the paper over the weekend titled, Iraq’s Shiites Now Chafe at American Presence, Perceived U.S. missteps, a torrent of angry propaganda and the sect’s new political sway have fused to turn welcomers into foes.
The whole of that piece is worth reading. It starts:

    A visitor need not go far or search hard to hear and see the anti-American venom that bubbles through this ancient shrine city, which once welcomed U.S. forces as liberators.
    “The American ambassador is the gate through which terrorism enters Iraq,” says a banner hanging from the fence surrounding the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, among the most revered martyrs of the Shiite Muslim faith.
    … For three years, most of Iraq’s Shiites welcomed — or at least tolerated — the U.S. presence here. In the weeks immediately after the American-led invasion, the mothers and sisters of Saddam Hussein’s Shiite victims clutched clumps of dried earth as they wept over mass graves and thanked God for ending their oppression.
    The Shiite acceptance of an American presence allowed troops to concentrate on putting down the insurgency in western Iraq, which is led by Sunni Muslim Arabs. With the exception of an uprising in mid-2004 by followers of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, the south has been relatively quiet and peaceful under the sway of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
    But now the mood has shifted. Perceived American missteps, a torrent of anti-U.S. propaganda and a recently emboldened Shiite sense of political prowess have coalesced to make the south a fertile breeding ground for antagonism toward America’s presence…

I have been writing about the likelihood of this happening for, h’mm, three years or more at this point. Lt.-Gen. Chiarelli and his officers may want to go back and read what I was writing, for example, here, in May 2003.
There, I was looking at the way that the Shiites in South Lebanon gradually shifted from being general supporters of Israel’s military invasion of their country in 1982 to being militantly anti-Israeli just– er– three years later…
Not a bad piece, though I say it myself…
Looking at the prospects of radical change in the US-Shiite relationship in Iraq, I wrote there:

    of course it’s not going to all be an exact replay of Lebanon. But there are already scores of similarities. And one of them is definitely the existence of a common, shared body of knowledge about what works in building a popular movement to resist foreign military occupation, and what doesn’t…
    But hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody’s armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?

Hey, it still seems like a good idea.
Even better: Don’t go invading and threatening other countries in the first place! Please!!!

Kadima government helps break the boycott on Hamas?

In my piece on Hamas for Boston Review, the dateline for which was May 1, I had written that the continuation of the harshly damaging boycott on allowing any material or financial aid to reach the PA-held areas was most probably a function of the continuing (as of then) absence of a new government in Israel… And that most likely once a Kadima-led government had been formed and started to stabilize itself it would quietly put out the word to the Bush administration and the pro-Israelis in Congress to ease up on the boycott….
(This, in line with the way the US government became persuaded to change its views on talking with the PLO, back in 1993: In other words, only when the word goes out from the Israeli government– and in line with that, also from their allies in Washington’s powerful pro-Israel lobby– do the US administration and the leaders of the US Congress “dare” to change their policy. Which, on that earlier occasion, they did with truly breathtaking rapidity.)
So guess what. Today, suddenly we learn that a viciously anti-Palestinian piece of legislation called HR 4681, that had been proposed in the House of Representatives by the rightwing Islamophobe Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), has suddenly been taken off the floor and will not be considered this week.
Interesting, huh?
This, the same day that the WaPo published a piece from their Israel-Palestine correspondent Scott Wilson in which he writes,

    A full collapse of the Palestinian Authority … could bring on a larger political and financial role for Israel in the Palestinian territories, which it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. That could complicate the agenda of Israel’s new government, which is preparing to evacuate isolated Jewish settlements in parts of the West Bank.
    “Nobody needs the collapse of the Palestinian Authority,” a senior Israeli security official said in a recent briefing, speaking on condition of anonymity. “When I say nobody, I mean nobody.”

Last week, Marc Perelman wrote this in the NYC Jewish weekly, the Forward:

    Efraim Halevy is no dove.
    The bluntly speaking former Mossad chief, a key adviser to former prime minister Ariel Sharon who supported harsh retaliation against Palestinian terror, is a supporter of the Iraq War who issues dark warnings about the dramatic increase in Europe’s Muslim population. So, there were more than a few puzzled looks at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations last week when Halevy spoke out about the need to engage Hamas.
    Twice he warned his audience that “we’ll be seeing things we have not seen before,” a seeming allusion to potential talks between Israel and Hamas.

If you want to find out all of my reasoning on why I’d thought a Kadima-led government, once established, might start urging the US government to ease up on the suffocation of the PA, you’ll have to wait till the BR piece comes out. But you can find a foretaste of my theory of “parallel unilateralisms” if you go back and read this March 9 column on the topic
By the way, Ori Nir also had a good piece on the shaky international state of the boycott campaign in last week’s Forward. He wrote there:

    Bush administration officials say that the pressure on Hamas will either bring about a gradual change in the movement’s belligerent positions or accelerate the collapse of its government. On the other hand, according to diplomatic sources in Washington, America’s European allies are not pressing for regime change in the territories.
    “I have never come across anyone in Europe who wants to engineer the fall of Hamas’s government, both because it’s counterproductive and because we don’t want to tamper with a clean election,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior adviser for political and academic affairs to Washington’s European Commission Delegation.

Like I said, interesting days…
—
Addendum, Tuesday 10 p.m.:
So, this evening there was a surprise announcement from NYC that the Quartet members have all agreed to form a special “Trust Fund” to supply funding to the people of the PA areas. That AP piece says,

    The new fund is supposed to administer only money for basic human needs. But both European and U.S. diplomats said that at some point it might be used to pay salaries for urgently needed doctors or teachers or for other services that the Hamas government otherwise would be expected to provide…

Did I call it or what?? Last Thursday, Israel formed its government. Today, just five days later, we see what that AP writer calls “a slight softening of the hard U.S. line against financial engagement with Hamas.”
It is true that this “Trust Fund” money is not supposed to go to its recipients through the Hamas government. But it will presumably go through NGOs (and also may help pay the salaries of government employees.) Regardless of the exact modalities in that regard, what seems indisputable is that if a decent level of efficient, non-currupt human services are to be provided to the Palestinians, then Hamas-affiliated networks will be centrally involved with that effort…
(As I wrote in this Salon article.)
Next up: Watch as the Hamas government takes Gaza out of the Paris Agreement and into a new economic relationship with the world through Egypt. Exiting from Israel’s economic stranglehold is a great way for the people of Gaza to get off the international welfare rolls…

Too much work on dead-tree publications!

My schedule has been crazy. Last week I got back the copyedited and laid-out versions of two significant longer articles that I needed to review very carefully. One was my piece on Hamas for Boston Review. The other was my article on the british counter-insurgency campaign in Kenya for Radical History Review. Each required a lot of concentration, and also required me to re-upload a huge amount of arcane knowledge back into my poor suffering grey cells.
And that was before I got an enquiry from Paradigm Publishers as to whether I’d finished reviewing the copyedited version my book on post-atrocity policies in Africa, that they had sent to me in early April… But the darn thing never arrived in my AOL inbox!!!!! So now the book’s editing and production schedule has been delayed by a whole month… and instead of having some nice leisurely time in early April to go over that edit, I need to be doing it between last Thursday and May 17 or so– a period when I already had a horrendous amount of projects scheduled.
Okay, whine, whine, whine. Now I’ll shut up. This morning I told myself “Okay Helena repeat after me: ‘It’s great that I have such a lot of such great, meaningful work to do.’… ” So yes, okay, it’s great. But still, it has felt a bit burdensome. (She takes a deep breath.)
Actually, it’s proceeding okay. I just finished reviewing Ch.4 of the copyedits on the book. I have two chapters to go– and then I need to compose things like the Preface, the Dedication, etc.
And I’ve been doing a bunch of other things, too.
In a couple of hours, I’m driving to DC. I’ll be there a couple of nights. Going to a good mini-conference tomorrow morning that I’ll try to blog about… Then I’m helping to set up the Eyes Wide Open exhibit that’s going to take a poignant antiwar message to the National Mall. …
All this is to say that i recognize that my posting onto JWN has been a little spotty these past few days, and may be for the next few days, too. But I’ll do what I can. Anyway, Blair and Bush are both still in big trouble. That hasn’t changed– so having that headline at the top there for the past few days hasn’t been bad, at all.
Now, I’m going to post a couple of things quickly before I leave for DC….

Blair and Bush both in big trouble

The two heads of the “coalition” of forces occupying Iraq are both in BIG political trouble.
Blair was already foundering– especially after Labour’s disastrous showing in Thursday’s local elections. Just yesterday, he axed Jack Straw and a bunch of other ministers (including former SecDef John Reid). And the Sunday Telegraph had gotten hold of a letter, reportedly supported by 50 Labour backbench MPs, in which they were demanding a speedy timetable for Tony to get out of No. 10, Downing Street.
(And soon after that, I would hope, out of Iraq as well.)
But all of that political unrest came before the downing of the British chopper in a heavily populated portion of Basra, in southern Iraq, Saturday.
In that piece AP’s Robert Reid writes from Baghdad that the chopper,

    apparently was hit by a missile Saturday and crashed in Basra, triggering a confrontation in which jubilant Iraqis pelted British troops with stones, hurled firebombs and shouted slogans in support of a radical Shiite Muslim cleric.

So much for the Brits allegedly knowing how to run an occupation any “better” than the Americans, as they had previously claimed.
Robert Reid continued,

    British soldiers with armored vehicles rushed to the site and were met by a hail of stones from a crowd of at least 250 people, many of them teenagers, who jumped for joy and raised their fists as thick smoke rose from the wreckage.
    As many as three armored vehicles were set on fire, apparently with gasoline bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, but the troops inside escaped unhurt, witnesses said.
    The crowd chanted “we are all soldiers of al-Sayed,” a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of foreign troops being in Iraq.
    Calm returned by nightfall as Iraqi authorities imposed a curfew and hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers set up checkpoints and patrolled the streets, residents said. Sporadic rocket fire could be heard throughout Basra, Iraq’s second largest city…

In a piece in Sunday’s Independent about the burning of Straw, Francis Elliott wrote,

    Jack Straw’s fate was sealed in a phone call from the White House to Tony Blair last month, according to the former foreign secretary’s friends.
    They say President George Bush was furious that Mr Straw said it was “nuts” to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option reported to be under active consideration in Washington.
    Downing Street had already warned Mr Straw repeatedly to tone down his complete rejection of the military route as “inconceivable”, insisting it was important to keep all options on the table.

Actually, it seems Straw had at least two serious strikes against him. One, he had seriously annoyed Tony’s close pal Pres. Bush. Two, he was thought to be ways too friendly with Blair’s nemesis in the Labour Party, Gordon Brown– the guy who’s just waiting in the wings until Tony makes his long-promised “exit” from the premiership.
Here in the US, meanwhile, we have the whole ongoing implosion of the Bush presidency… what with the Goss-Negroponte dust-up and the Foggo scandal, which between them are leaving not just the presidency but also the country’s longer term intelligence capabilities in chaos.
The WaPo’s Linzer and Pincus wrote today that,

    senior administration officials said Bush had lost confidence in Goss, 67, almost from the beginning and decided months ago to replace him. In what was described as a difficult meeting in April with Negroponte, Goss was told to prepare to leave by May, according to several officials with knowledge of the conversation…

And Dana Priest wrote:

    Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq’s weapons capability.
    But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

Not surprisingly, the Prez’s poll numbers are yet further down. Even Fox News’s poll can only get him 38 percent of support these days…
Also heading downward: the US-led “coalition”‘s performance in Afghanistan. Underlining that fact, Bush had his own downed helicopted problem today: ten US soldiers were killed when their Chinook came down in the east of Afghanistan.
This crazy idea that militarism can solve our problems and make the world safer is so incredibly harmful– to everyone concerned!!
Are we now, I wonder, getting to the point of understanding that our parents and grandparents had reached in the summer of 1945, when they penned these words…

    “We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…”

Those words– which are the very first words in the UN Charter– were written in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, remember… That is, in the aftermath of a war that nearly everyone nowadays (and most of the victors back then) has thought of as having been a “good war.”
Well, however “good” or necessary it was, the people who had lived through it well understood that it, like every war, was a scourge.
And if even World War 2 was a “scourge”, then what about George W. Bush’s war to invade Iraq??
Now, the two key authors of the war are both in big political trouble. Now is surely therefore the time for the rest of humankind to get together and figure out how to use the United Nations and all its mechanisms for nonviolent problem-solving to rebuild the secure, life-affirming, right-respecting order that those two deeply misguided men and their accomplices have so notably failed to provide.

A victory in the US Congress!

Hurrah! The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a small but very effective organization that lobbies the US Congress on issues of concern to Friends (Quakers), tells us that on Tuesday, the full US Senate,

    declared the United States should not establish permanent military bases in Iraq and added a clear statement that the U.S. does not wish to control Iraq’s oil resources. The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) congratulated Sen. Joseph Biden (DE) on winning approval for the measure, which specifically prohibits the use of any new funds to establish permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. The House passed a similar ban in March.

Joe Volk, the Executive Secretary of FCNL is quoted there as saying,

    “This is an important milestone in the development of U.S. policy toward Iraq. For the first time since the U.S. launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003, both chambers of Congress have now said the U.S. must change course in Iraq… The Senate vote today sends a clear signal to the people of Iraq, to the international community, and to the people of this country that the United States does not intend to permanently occupy Iraq. This Congressional action also is a strong signal that the Bush administration has to change policy in Iraq now.”

FCNL has the largest team of pro-peace lobbyists of any group that works to educate and persuade the members of the US Congress. It has been quietly working with members of both Houses– and both parties– for more than a year now, urging them to take this first declarative step.
Sadly, though, I have to tell you that FCNL is facing a harsh funding crunch. They have two great staff members– Mary Trotachaud and Rick McDowell– who have both spent a significant length of time doing humanitarian and peacebuilding work in Iraq, including before and since the US invasion. Rick and Mary have unique expertise when it comes to providing solid analysis of what’s going on in Iraq today– and they can speak with unique authority about the country when they go and talk to Members and their staffs.
But if FCNL’s funding crunch continues, they might have to let Mary and Rick go. That would be tragic.
You can find out more about FCNL if you go here. And you can find out how to make a donation to their work– either their lobbying work or their (tax-deductible) Education Fund– if you go here.
Please consider being as generous as you can. We can go on all the peace marches we want. (And I went to my usual Thursday pro-peace vigil here in Charlottesville, Virginia, just this afternoon: we got a great response!) But to really keep up the steady work of persuading our members of Congress that there is a broad and very serious pro-peace movement out here in the citizenry and that they’d better listen to us— well, FCNL is a great national network to be a part of… and it’s a network with its pointedly persuasive end located right there, on Capitol Hill.
Great work, the FCNL team, and all your network of contacts there in the halls of Congress! Even, I should say (though I disagreed with him yesterday on a slightly different issue) thanks for your leadership in winning this declaration, Senator Biden!

Israel has a government

38 days after their recent parliamentary elections, Israel has a government. That link goes to a JPEG file with pics and party affiliations of all the ministers. So it’s 12 Kadima members, seven from Avoda (Labor), two Pensioners, and four from Shas. (Amazing how similar the neatly-groomed bearded men of Shas look like their Hamas counterparts.)
Jonathan Edelstein says he expects this government will be fairly stable:

    My primary reaction to the cabinet lineup (other than being unutterably glad that this idiot [i.e., Avigdor Lieberman] isn’t in it) was how much of an apparatchiks’ gallery it is; other than Peretz at Defense, Rafi Eitan in his new senior citizens’ portfolio and possibly Yuli Tamir at Education, I can’t see any of them making any radical or controversial policy changes..

Here is the list that HaAretz published of the eight agreed policy guidelines that will form the basis of the government’s work.
Crucially, in terms of the prospects for peacemaking, the second and third points are these:

    2. The government aspires to bring about the definition of the state’s permanent borders as a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, and as a democratic state, and will act to do so through a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians on the basis of mutual recognition, existing agreements, the principles of the road map, an end to violence and the disarmament of the terror organizations.
    3. The government shall endeavor, as stated, to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians … but if the Palestinians do not behave as stipulated in the near future, the government shall act even in the absence of negotiations and an agreement with them … The government shall determine the borders of the state. The Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria must be reduced.

“The near future” makes it sound as though they’re not going to give the Palestinians very long at all to respond on this. Note also the non-specificity of saying “the Palestinians” throughout, rather than “the PA”.
Actually, I still think there’s a fairly high probability that the system of two parallel unilateralisms, on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, that we saw throughout the past 15 months will continue and become more engrained in the practice of both leaderships, at least for the coming couple of years.
As part of this, I believe there’s a distinct possibility the Olmert government might act fairly soon (if still discreetly) to urge Washington to ease up some on the efforts to strangle the Palestinian administration through financial/administrative means.
It is only the Israeli government that is in a position to persuade Washington to do this– and of course, Israel hasn’t had a government able to do it ever since their election campaign started there in late February.
It truly is not in the interests of either the Israelis or anyone else to see an exacerbation of the pain in the Palestinian community. Added to which, using basic international aid payments and the Palestinians’ own tax revenues as a lever to force compliance is quite immoral… And then– they seek compliance with what? with a ‘road map’ that now really doesn’t exist and that Olmert has never believed in?
Anyway, the weeks ahead will tell. let’s check back on this issue in, say, four months, and see how matters stand then.
… One last point: The Israelis got their coalition government formed 38 days after their election… The Palestinians, operating under the difficult logistic conditions imposed by the Israeli occupation authorities, got theirs formed 63 days after their election… And in US-occupied Iraq? Well, it is now 140 days— exactly 20 weeks– since their election, and they still don’t have a government. Ain’t American military occupation a wonderful thing? (Heavy irony alert at the end there.)

Evo makes his move

I want to express my good wishes to Evo Morales and the people of Bolivia as they try to take back some control over their country’s mineral wealth.
It looked to me that he moved intelligently and with good timing– crucially by trying to ensure that the foreign firms operating in Bolivia’s gas fields are not able to destroy vital production and financial records that will help Bolivia to sit down and negotiate the best possible deal with the firms in the weeks ahead.
I see that over at the CSM today, former foreign correspondent Richard O’Mara has quoted Abel Posse, described as “an Argentine novelist and diplomat knowledgeable about the Andean countries” as having written about the Andean indigenous peoples that,””They live bad, die early, pass through cycles of famine. They have been considered incapable of governing and incapable of being governed.”
That sounds either fatalistic or derogatory (or both?). But O’Mara continues:

    But they have held firm to their traditions and values. They know what they believe. They know what they do not believe.
    The people Morales represents, probably a large fraction of the more than 50 percent of the electorate who voted for him, “don’t believe in globalization, don’t believe in capitalism, don’t believe in Marxism. (Che Guevara died in Bolivia because he failed to grasp that.),” wrote Posse. Nor do they believe in the institutions imposed upon them by whites and mestizos: the judicial system, taxation, everything that has to do with the “imaginary republic” created to further the interests of only 10 percent of the population.
    So what do they believe in? Well, for one thing a softer approach to development and a deeper respect for the environment. Bolivia, owing to slash-and-burn agriculture and the worldwide demands for exotic hardwoods, suffers extensive deforestation, soil erosion, and industrial pollution.
    Morales speaks of a cultural federalism, some new institution to bind together the divergent peoples who inhabit Bolivia’s lowlands in the Amazon basin, virtually at sea level, and those of the sierra, who live in remote hamlets, some clinging to the high Andes at nearly 20,000 feet. These are very practical problems and concerns, hardly driven by ideologies of the standard sort.
    Morales speaks frequently of multiculturalism and “convergent economies,” whatever that means. But his policies are not all vague. Quite specifically, he wants to direct the wealth that flows from existing resources (Bolivia has the second largest reserve of natural gas in the continent) to the people who never got it before.
    … Much will be heard in the coming months no doubt about Indian superstitions, mockery of their worship of Pachamama, their goddess who calls upon human beings to care for the earth. The rise of Evo Morales certainly won’t restore the indigenous people of the Andes to their historical high estate. But a little improvement might be in the offing.

By the way, I’d really like to find an English-language website that provides good, unbiased news and commentary regarding what’s happening in Bolivia. (Or I suppose I could understand a Spanish site easily enough.) Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

Terrorist incidents in Iraq

I mainly want to bookmark here, for future reference, the US government’s own count of the number of terrorist incidents in Iraq in calendar 2005, as released last week by the National Counter-Terrorism Center. Okay, I also want to comment on it.
The NCTC’s count is here, (PDF file– go to page 8.)
What we see counted there are 3,474 incidents of terrorism in Iraq in 2005, resulting in 20,711 “victims”, counting those killed, injured, or kidnapped as a result of the counted incidents.
I was trying to look at trend lines. If you go to this page on the NCTC’s Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, you’ll find it’s the first of 176 linked web-pages there that list and give some info about all the counted terrorism incidents in Iraq between January 1, 2004 and December 31, 2005.
So the total for those two years was 4,413 incidents involving 30,643 victims.
So in 2004, there had been 939 incidents involving 9,932 victims.
So in 2005, the number of incidents increased by 270 percent over its counted 2004 rate, and the number of victims increased by 109 percent.

What a truly terrible record for the US occupation regime there, all round.
You have to know, too, that the counting system used was extremely partial, and doesn’t convey the total amount of “terror” inflicted on Iraqi civilians through politically motivated violence (which is what the NCTC purports to count). Crucially, it fails to count all incidents of violent actions that inflicted death and other harms on Iraqi civilians that were carried out by the US military and forces allied with it including the Iraqi “security” forces. If we add in those incidents, we can see that the total amount of terror inflicted on the Iraqi citizenry in 2004, 2005, and until today is almost unimaginably high.
Just think how terrifying everyone in Israel finds it if, say, three Israeli civilians are subjected to politically motivated violence. And multiply that by many thousands over the course of a year. (Guess what, Iraqi people are just as much human as Israeli people; and they have the same capacity for inter-human empathy, solidarity, and feelings of pain.)
And of course it is not just the counted individuals who are impacted when anti-civilian violence occurs. It is their families, those who love them, and everyone who lives in that same community.
… Sometimes, Bush administration officials and their apologists have argued, with quite unpardonable cynicism and disregard for human life, that “it is better to fight the terrorists ‘over there’ than ‘over here’.” I find this argument revolting, and racist (in the global definition of that term, not the skin color-related US definition of it.)
Indeed, the US occupation presence in Iraq has not only attracted and helped to motivate the actions of new generations of Sunni-extremist terrorists there; but it has also inflicted its own often wanton violence on the Iraqi citizenry, and has empowered and trained some of the Shiite-extremist and Kurdish militias that have inflicted even more violence on the Iraqi citizenry. Nearly all the manifestations of those forms of violence– including the US military’s violence– are “politically motivated”, in the sense that that they’re not motivated by, say, hopes of personal gain or outright thievery. (Though that happens too.)
Certainly, if Iraq is ever lucky enough to have something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then acts of rights-abusing violence undertaken by the occupation regime and its allies would come under exactly the same public microscope as similar acts undertaken by anti-occupation forces.
Quite rightly so, from the human rights perspective.
… And meantime, the Taliban are steadily making a comeback in many parts of southern Afghanistan.
So what on earth kind of a “counter-terrorism” policy has the Bush administration been running?
Anyone?

150,000 American hostages?

Riverbend had a good new post on her blog Tuesday. In her inimitable way, she sketched some of her memories of the US capture of Baghdad back in early April 2003… She also penned her (highly critical) reactions to more recent political developments in Iraq.
At the end, though, she writes:

    The big question is- what will the US do about Iran? There are the hints of the possibility of bombings, etc. While I hate the Iranian government, the people don’t deserve the chaos and damage of air strikes and war. I don’t really worry about that though, because if you live in Iraq- you know America’s hands are tied. Just as soon as Washington makes a move against Tehran, American troops inside Iraq will come under attack. It’s that simple- Washington has big guns and planes… But Iran has 150,000 American hostages.

Until recently, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with that conclusion. (I also really applaud Riverbend’s ability to differentiate between her feelings toward the Iranian government and the solidarity she expresses for the Iranian people.)
However, now I have a few doubts creeping into my mind as to whether the “hostage” nature of the huge US troop deployment in Iraq really is enough to deter (we could say “self-deter”) the Bush administration from launching a completely reckless military adventure against Iran.
After all, there were many of us with great experience in Middle East affairs who, in the run-up to his assault against Iraq, were warning Pres. Bush that to launch that assault would be counter-productive folly. That did not stop him then.
This time around, will he heed such warnings regarding the folly of attacking Iran? I would most certainly hope so. But at this point, I don’t feel as certain of his rationality–and, equally importantly, the rationality of key advisors like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld– as I did, say, six weeks ago.
Of course, the fact that Condi Rice seems to have been given new presidential authorization to outrank Rumsfeld, as evidenced in all the accounts of their recent trip to Baghdad, gives me some heart that her form of rationality might reign. She strikes me as significantly less reckless, stubborn, and ideological than Rumney or Chefeld.
However, hidden away in the back reaches of some portions of US “strategic thinking”, however, is something called “the madman theory of history”. This was pioneered especially by Henry Kissinger; it held that, in facing down the Soviet Union (at that time) there was strategic value in keeping or even cultivating a reputation for unpredictability and recklessness…
If the Bushies want to distance themselves decisively from that theory, then they should be working very hard right now to give assurances to the governments and peoples around the world (including the US citizenry here at home) that they are aware of the dangers of escalation– including even”inadvertent” escalation– in US-Iran relations and that they intend to act cautiously, rationally, and always with the best interests of the US citizenry and their (our) friends around the world front and foremost in their sights.
Note that to say this is to say nothing about the content of the policy they should pursue. (Though of course I have thoughts about that, too.)
But I have heard no such reassurance from the Bushies yet. That is a strong cause for concern.
—
Addendum Just one last thought. Back in 1980, Jimmy Carter lost an election because of his inability to solve the problem cuased by 57 US government employees who had been taken hostage by Iran. So how about the propsects for GWB and his party in the 2006 and 2008 elections if anyone points out that he has gratuitously given to the Iranians as hostages 150,000 US government employees?
Just a thought.

Cole, Hitchens, and the threat of a US attack on Iran

I’ve known Chris Hitchens for, gosh, 35 years now. He was two years ahead of me at Oxford, where we engaged in many of the same political activities. I kept bumping into him over the years that followed. When I was living and working in Beirut, he would come swanning through every so often, on a quick reporting trip. When I moved to DC in 1982, he was already there. He and his then-wife Eleni came to my second wedding, in Washington DC in 1984… etc, etc.
I haven’t, however, seen him in person since that point in the late 1990s when he swung inexplicably around the back-side of the political spectrum and changed from being a fairly moderate lefty to being an extremely bitter and pro-war rightist.
So today, the big issue on Juan Cole’s blog is Was Chris Hitchens drunk when he wrote a vicious piece about Juan on Slate recently– or was he just, as Juan puts it, ‘only an asinine thief’?
Earlier in the day, Juan had put up a lengthy post refuting Chris’s smear-job. In that post, Juan wrote:

    How to explain this peculiar behavior on the part of someone who was at one time one of our great men of letters?
    Well, I don’t think it is any secret that Hitchens has for some time had a very serious and debilitating drinking problem. He once showed up drunk to a talk I gave and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism. I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind.

Yes, for a long time Chris Hitchens did have a glib facility with words, though I wouldn’t go as far as to describe him as ever having been, “one of our great men of letters”. Juan overdoes the lapsarian aspect of Chris’s career trajectory quite a bit there.
But still, anyone who’s known Chris for even one-fourth as long as I have would have to admit the guy has long had a very serious drinking problem. Was it ad-hominem for Juan to mention that? Yes, probably, although he was doing so in a quasi-exculpatory way– and Juan, like many of the rest of us, has had solid evidence of Chris’s performance of professional duties having been impaired by his evident drunkenness…
Today, though, Hitchens’ friend Andrew Sullivan wrote on his blog that he was with Chris when he wrote the latest Slate piece, and Chris was not drunk at the time. So Juan was left with no explanation for Chris’s crass writing except that Chris is “an asinine thief.”
The theft issue has to do with something Chris quoted directly in the article there, which was a private contribution Juan had made to a private listserv called Gulf 2000. Juan and I are both members of the, fairly large, membership of this group. Chris Hitchens is not.
Now, the whole point of having this private list is that its members– who include citizens of many different countries, of many political complexions, and with many different areas of Gulf-related expertise– can all explore ideas together in a safe space without the fear that what they write for it will get quoted in the public media. It might sound a little elitist (and probably is). But still, it is a remarkable place, where people who are citizens of many countries, including of course the numerous fairly repressive countries bordering the Gulf, can explore and exchange ideas.
For many list members, the promise of discretion for what they write is a completely necessary element of their personal security against the intrusions (and worse) of authoritarian state bodies.
So Chris Hitchens had just– by some unknown means– gotten hold of something Juan wrote for the list ten days or so ago, and published it there in his Slate article. By doing that, he (and whoever sent him Juan’s contribution there) just blithely violated that requirement for privacy.
Yesterday, and on a few occasions prior to that, I have also cited things posted on the G2K list. But always with the permission of the authors. In fact, when Juan first put up the post in question April 23, I wrote and asked him if I could cite it here– and he wrote back and said No, because he was still finetuning some of his analysis there.
Fair enough.
… Well, I glanced at Chris’s piece. It is mainly a nasty hatchet-job against Juan– blessedly, quite short. Juan does a superb job of refuting it. Hitchens, in the course of his piece, wrote:

    Cole is a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community. At one point, there was a danger that he would become a go-to person for quotes in New York Times articles (a sort of Shiite fellow-traveling version of Norman Ornstein, if such an alarming phenomenon can be imagined), but this crisis appears to have passed.

He also attempted– on the basis of his absolutely nul knowledge of the Persian langauge to produce absolute refutation of a translation Juan had done of one of the key recent speeches by President Ahmedinejad.
Hitchens, it goes without saying, is currently part of the rightwing crowd in the US that is baying for some form of large military attack against Iran. Juan, by contrast, is extremely strongly against any such attack … Indeed, the main portion of his first rebuttal of Hitchens was a pained plea for the US not to launch a war against Iran.
As JWN readers know, I have voiced several criticisms of the positions Juan has expressed over the past three years. Including, yesterday. But those criticisms don’t for a moment dent the huge admiration I have for his scholarship and for the personal qualities of caring and commitment that he brings to all his endeavors.
I hope it goes without saying, too, that whereas Juan and I currently have some differences of opinion over US policies toward Iraq, I applaud and completely support the firmly antiwar position he has expressed regarding US policies toward Iran.
As for Chris Hitchens, I have been really saddened to watch his degeneration over the years. I have a number of friends who are recovering alcoholics. Being a recovering alcoholic is something they have to deal with every day of their lives: the alcoholism is so strong a force over them that they have to continue to battle it, every day, for ever. In the US, the main way people do this is through regular and frequent participation in the meetings of Alcholics Anonymous. In those meetings, people go through something called a “12-step program.” The very first step (I think) is to recognize that you have a problem with alcoholism, rather than continuing to deny it or cover it up. Further down, one of the other steps is to recognize the damage you have caused in the world, and to other people, by virtue of your alcoholism.
If Chris Hitchens is not in an AA program, I am sure he needs to get into one. In the meantime, the rest of us should hold him quite accountable for his sleazy actions. Being an alcoholic does not give you a “carte blanche”, or indeed any other kind of an excuse, to disregard the rules of human society and decent behavior. From that perspective, it really does not make any difference whether he had been drinking when he wrote the Slate piece or not. He needs to take full responsibility for his actions.
So, too, more to the point, does Slate, which has been publishing his ramblings for quite a long time now.