Wolfensohn steps down; End of Quartet?

Jim Wolfensohn, the former World Bank President who has worked for the past year as the representative of the “Quartet” in furthering Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, has stepped down.
As is clear from this transcript of the press conference he and Condi Rice gave yesterday, he is not being replaced.
So is the “Quartet” now going to disband?
The Quartet, which comprises the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia, was formed in 2002, in response to the crisis in Israeli-Palestinian relations of spring of that year. (That included Ariel Sharon’s extremely lethal assault on the institutions of the PA, and a number of Palestinian suicide bombers who blew up Israeli civilians and soldiers.)
Back then, remember, the political map of the world looked quite a bit different. The US stood at the apex of glopbal sympathies and global power. Under the Quartet arrangement, the other three parties all knowingly subordinated themselves to the Bush administration’s “leadership” in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking….
At the time, that “leadership” was manifested mainly in Washington’s generation of something called the “Road Map to Peace”, which had a number of fuzzy deadlines on the way to a quite indeterminate future… Regardless of the Road Map’s many evident flaws, however, the UN, EU, and Russia all rallied around it.
All the fuzzy deadlines spelled out in it have passed, of course. And though Sharon and his government paid a tiny amount of lip-service to the Road Map, they went ahead with their completely unilateral exercise in boundary-drawing, regardless. So the Road Map is, these days, yet another sad casualty of the international “community’s” decision to subordinate itself to the Bush administration on this matter.
RIP.
… Well, the Road Map may have been flawed from the very beginning. But Jim Wolfensohn is probably a very decent man. That much seems clear from the text of the Monday press conference. For example, he said,

    [I]t would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians. And I don’t think anyone in the Quartet believes that to be the policy, although sometimes it is made to appear that that’s what it is. I think that’s a losing gambit.

He did, of course, also say, right after that:

    But I do think that the Palestinians need to understand that it is not business as usual. Here you have a Palestinian group which has said that it wants to destroy its neighbor. I think the Palestinians need to understand and to accept that the future has to be one where the issues, however difficult, need to be resolved, but that you don’t start by telling the other side that you’re going to shoot them. I find that quite understandable and I think the situation that we’re now in is to try and find our way through that situation to a point where there can be a negotiated solution that is acceptable to both sides.

Meanwhile, the reporters over at Bloomberg’s have gotten hold of the text of Wolfensohn’s final report to the Quartet. They wrote this today:

    “Over the past few years, the international community has spent about $1 billion annually on assistance to the Palestinians, much of it directed at ensuring that credible and well-functioning Palestinian institutions are built,” according to Wolfensohn’s report, a copy of which was provided to Bloomberg News by e-mail. “Will we now simply abandon these goals?”
    … The report includes a warning that failure to address Palestinian economic and government problems may cause “other Middle Eastern states and political organizations” to have a greater role in the region, with “regional repercussions.”

Well, I won’t be sorry to see the Quartet fall apart. It’s long past time that the United Nations– and indeed, also, the EU and Russia– returned to some respect for the requirements of international law, including international humanitarian law, regarding the Palestinian question. Enough pussyfooting around and kowtowing to the Great Imperial Master in Washington and its ally, Israel’s Machine of Military Coercion. Let’s see the international “community” develop some strong strategies to win an outcome in which both Israelis and Palestinians can flourish.
If international diplomacy is truly focused on that goal, in an evenhanded way, then the diplomats of the world will not find either Hamas or anyone else on the Palestinian side blocking that outcome, or resorting to further violence. But the structural violence of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (and of Gaza’s access points) has to end.

Playing at being Percy

Les Gelb, the former President of the influential, New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, has long been an active supporter of splitting up Iraq into three mini-states. In November 2003, he produced this plan for Iraq, called The Three-State Solution. (You now have to pay gobs of money to read it on the NYT’s website there, which is a pity. But commenting on it on JWN at the time, I described it as “almost lunatic and extremely dangerous.”)
Juan Cole’s reaction to Gelb’s partitionist proposal at that time was very similar:

    the idea is frankly dangerous. All we need is to have the Iraqi nationalists convinced we intend to break up their country. That will produce more blown-up US troops, God forbid.

Well, times change, eh?
Yesterday, Juan picked up his own red pencil, and going one step further than the British administrator of Iraq, Sir Percy Cox, did in 1922 he decided to redraw a bunch of boundaries inside Iraq.
He wrote:

    Personally, I am against breaking up Iraq. I don’t think it is more unworkable than Nigeria or Lebanon. [Last sentence not exactly clear? ~HC] And, the consequences are unforeseeable and potentially very, very dangerous.
    I do, however, believe that the tendencies toward separatism must be recognized and managed.
    I say that we make 5 superprovinces: Deep South, Middle Euphrates, Baghdad, Sunnistan, and Kurdistan, along with two smaller ethnic enclaves, of Turkomanistan and Chaldeanistan in the north. Bear with me…

Turkomanistan? Chaldeanistan? What on earth has he been smoking?
He then gives us– yes!– his very own map. More colors on it than old Percy ever had! Then he continues by discussing various details of what his plan is, and how to make it work. Along the way, he writes some extremely patronizing and imperialistic things… As in, saying that entering and controlling Kirkuk would be, “a good training wheel mission for the Iraqi army.” (Training wheels, of course, being what parents put on young kids’ bikes when they’re still learning to ride ’em.)… As in, decreeing baldly that, “The Coalition should dictate an oil profit sharing agreement before they go.”…
Well I could go on and on pointing out the follies my esteemed friend in Michigan engages in there. But the fundamental folly, surely, is his assumption that the US government has any right to determine the future shape of governance structures inside Iraq.
Then of course there is also (b), the folly of assuming that the US is still in any way capable of implementing any such scheme.
Today, he was backpedaling a bit. This was in response to yet another partitionist screed from Les Gelb– one in the writing of which Gelb was joined, indeed, by US Senator and long-time presidential wannabe Joe Biden (Democrat, of Delaware).
Yesterday, Juan had described his own proposal as being one for the formation of a bunch of “stans” (which is sort of a buzzword in some US circles for obscure, generally Muslim states located, well, someplace further east over there in Central Asia). Today, he rebranded his proposal, saying it was one for the establishment of “provincial confederacies.” He added:

    I do not see them as autonomous as Biden and Gelb propose, and, indeed, I have argued that the federal government should parcel out petroleum income to them in such a way as to bind them to the central state.

Whatever.
Hey Juan, maybe it’s time to sheath the red pencil and start acting a little less like Percy Cox?
Another interesting aspect of this whole story is that finally Les Gelb seems to have been able to persuade Joe Biden (Secretary of State in the next Democratic administration? Joe would love that!) to come on board his partition plan.
One aspect of what they write that I find extremely childish is that they leap right into their article by making a completely unexamined analogy with the situation in another, significantly different part of the world where the US has also in the recent past engaged in imperialistic (though in their view, successful) meddling. Namely, Bosnia.
Let me quote that whole introductory para to their piece:

    A decade ago, Bosnia was torn apart by ethnic cleansing and facing its demise as a single country. After much hesitation, the United States stepped in decisively with the Dayton Accords, which kept the country whole by, paradoxically, dividing it into ethnic federations, even allowing Muslims, Croats and Serbs to retain separate armies. With the help of American and other forces, Bosnians have lived a decade in relative peace and are now slowly strengthening their common central government, including disbanding those separate armies last year. Now the Bush administration, despite its profound strategic misjudgments in Iraq, has a similar opportunity. To seize it, however, America must get beyond the present false choice between “staying the course” and “bringing the troops home now” and choose a third way that would wind down our military presence responsibly while preventing chaos and preserving our key security goals. The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab — room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.

So let’s just glide right over all the atrocities of the ethnic cleansing campaigns by which those “ethnic federations” were created in Bosnia, shall we?
… My friend and esteemed colleague Gary Sick, who’s the Executive Director of the Gulf/2000 Research Listserv and an Adjunct Professor of Middle East politics at Columbia University, has picked up on many problems in the Biden-Gelb proposal in this commentary, which I am putting up on the JWN archive with his permission (and with my thanks to him.)
Gary writes there:

    Is Bosnia a fair comparison? There we have a country surrounded by European allies who offer willing cooperation and a per-capita troop level that would make Gen. Shinseki proud. Is it realistic to expect the same in Iraq, which is surrounded by malevolent powers on all sides and plagued with a perpetual troop deficit?
    Note that a great deal hinges on what Gelb calls “international police protection.” In other words, we must enlist the United Nations or a coalition of the willing to come in and do what we have been unable to do with our 130,000 troops and $10 billion per month. Is it reasonable to expect that a regional conclave with U.S. (Sunni) allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, U.S. enemies Iran and Syria, plus Turkey, which is preoccupied with the Kurds, will produce a harmonious and enforceable regional compact?
    Let’s just imagine that after we adopt a policy of separation under a weak central government, the militias remain vicious, the insurgency accelerates, ethnic cleansing becomes endemic, rights of women and minorities do not improve, and regional powers prove to be more interested in their sectarian interests than in saving Iraq. According to this plan, we have now accepted responsibility for making all of this work. Will we really be better off than we are now?

Good questions, indeed.
…Inside Iraq, meanwhile, there is lots of real, national-level politics going on, as the representatives of all the parties negotiate over how to form what will almost certainly be a government of broad national unity. Beyond that, under PM-designate Nouri al-Maliki it will almost certainly be a government dedicated to maintaining the unity of the country’s administration as far as possible, as well as to negotiating a total and fairly rapid withdrawal of the US troops.
So I guess the pretensions of those Americans inside and outside the Bush administration who want to see the US act in as imperialistic a fashion in Iraq in 2006 as Sir Percy and the British India Office were able to in 1922 will have to come to naught?
Surely, the only “maps” and “red pencils” the US planners will be needing in the months ahead are those that will help them organize the most orderly and efficient form of troop withdrawal… Bring the troops home, and let’s leave Iraq’s future to its own people.

L.A. Times’s Daragahi got the Sistani story

The L.A. Times’s talented Baghdad correspondent Borzou Daragahi wrote me to say it was not true, as I wrote here, that “no-one” in the mainstream media had gotten the story about the impact of Ayatollah Sistani’s re-entry into Iraqi public politics.
He sent me the text of this story, datelined April 28, which he co-authored along with Bruce Wallace and special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf.
They wrote there:

    A cleric close to Sistani acknowledged that the statement did signal a new role for the Shiite clergy, that of “monitoring” the performance of the next government and weighing in, perhaps more frequently, on broad policy issues.
    “The marjaiyah intends to interfere in some issues,” Sheik Abu Mohammed Baghdadi, a Najaf cleric, said in an interview. “This monitoring and direct interference is an essential matter that has never before been proposed by the clergy. The marjaiyah, through this act, is expressing the voice of the people.”
    Sistani’s statement followed a meeting with Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki, a conservative Shiite leader. Maliki came to Najaf to solicit Sistani’s views in the midst of efforts to form a government, reinforcing a growing relationship between Shiite politicians in Baghdad and their religious counterparts in Najaf.
    Sistani, the most senior of the marjaiyah, the four top Shiite clerics in Najaf, has weighed in on political matters before, notably in 2003 when he demanded that direct elections for a national government be held before a constitution was drafted.
    More recently, he criticized the government for its inability to protect Shiite holy sites from a series of bombings by insurgents.
    But Sistani’s statement Thursday was among his bluntest and comes at a time of sensitive discussions over the selection of the Iraqi Cabinet and on the status of armed political groups.
    “Now we have to go to Sistani,” quipped Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni Arab lawmaker. “What kind of democracy is this?”
    … In his statement, Sistani called for a government of “qualified figures, technically and administratively, who have integrity and decent reputations” without regard to “personal, party, sectarian or ethnic interests.”
    … [I]t was the unusually direct intervention from Sistani that rang loudest here. The cleric, who is regarded as the voice of Shiite moderation, often prefers to exercise his influence through backroom talks.
    Last week, Sistani apparently nudged interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari into abandoning his quest to keep the top job in the face of opposition from Sunni Arabs, Kurds and secular politicians.
    On Thursday, Maliki emerged from his meeting with Sistani to tell reporters that the cleric had “advised us, as always, to be Iraqis first.”
    Maliki also said his government would merge militias into the legitimate state security forces, a proposal that challenges the power of some of his own strongest backers, notably [Muqtada] Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.
    Maliki and Sadr held a news conference in Najaf on Thursday afternoon in which Sadr denounced the Rice-Rumsfeld visit, calling it “blatant interference in Iraqi affairs.” The cleric repeated his call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq but dodged the question of whether he would disband his own militia, known as Al Mahdi army.
    In his statement, too, Sistani derided the U.S. presence, calling for the new government to “work seriously to remove all traces of the occupier.”

Daragahi and his colleagues in the Iraq bureau have been doing some great reporting recently. They seem to have an ability to gather news outside of the US-controlled Green Zone that is notably superior to that of either the WaPo or the NYT.
See, for example, this Daragahi piece from April 29, which is mainly about the inter-party contacts over forming the government.
Or this piece, datelined today, to which Daragahi and unnamed “special correspondents in Baghdad, Najaf and Ramadi” all contributed. Most of this piece is about the “Biden plan”, which I’m planning to blog about next. But at the end, it noted that Sistani had held a meeting (presumably in Najaf) with some leaders from the Turkmen community in the tinder-box northern city of Kirkuk. It says,

    Yalmaz Najar, leading the Turkmen group, said after the conference that Sistani had promised to defend the rights of Shiite Turkmens fighting with Kurds for political control of oil-rich Kirkuk.

A fasacinating piece of information. (Though I imagine that for clarity it should have said “fighting against Kurds”? )
Altogether, though, a significant journalistic operation there. Sorry, Borzou, that I’d failed to read that April 28 piece before I posted last week.

Emily Wax’s 5 truths about Darfur

Eight days ago on that Sunday I was still reeling from my recent trip to Jordan, dealing with my chaotic travel home from Philadelphia, etc., and come to think of it I don’t think I even read the WaPo that day. I should have, because it carried Emily Wax’s extremely interesting piece 5 Truths about Darfur. (Hat-tip to a Jeffersonian friend who urged me to read it.)
She is the WaPo’s East Africa bureau chief, and a reporter on Africa whose writing I have come to admire over the past few years.
She writes,

    much of the conventional wisdom surrounding the conflict — including the religious, ethnic and economic factors that drive it — fails to match the realities on the ground. Tens of thousands have died and some 2.5 million have been displaced, with no end to the conflict in sight.

Note, please, her carefully non-alarmist representation of the number of people who have died because of the conflict in Darfur: “tens of thousands”. That, as opposed to the decidedly alarmist figures that are bandied about with no accompanying evidence… I have even seen some unauthenticated reports of “200,000 killed”.
Even one person killed because of political violence is bad enough. “Tens of thousands”, and we should be very concerned indeed. But Wax is close to the ground, and close to the aid coordinators and AU officers who are probably the people who have the best sources of information inside Darfur on the true scale of the casualties.
As a matter of basic integrity and ethics in human-rights work opr journalism, one should always try to get the best authenticated sources of information possible, and when using estimates of casualties to err on the side of conservatism
Anyway, here’s how Wax continues:.

    Here are five truths to challenge the most common misconceptions about Darfur:
    1 Nearly everyone is Muslim…
    2 Everyone is black
    Although the conflict has also been framed as a battle between Arabs and black Africans, everyone in Darfur appears dark-skinned, at least by the usual American standards. The true division in Darfur is between ethnic groups, split between herders and farmers. Each tribe gives itself the label of “African” or “Arab” based on what language its members speak and whether they work the soil or herd livestock. Also, if they attain a certain level of wealth, they call themselves Arab.
    Sudan melds African and Arab identities. As Arabs began to dominate the government in the past century and gave jobs to members of Arab tribes, being Arab became a political advantage; some tribes adopted that label regardless of their ethnic affiliation. More recently, rebels have described themselves as Africans fighting an Arab government. Ethnic slurs used by both sides in recent atrocities have riven communities that once lived together and intermarried.
    “Black Americans who come to Darfur always say, ‘So where are the Arabs? Why do all these people look black?’ ” said Mahjoub Mohamed Saleh, editor of Sudan’s independent Al-Ayam newspaper. “The bottom line is that tribes have intermarried forever in Darfur. Men even have one so-called Arab wife and one so-called African. Tribes started labeling themselves this way several decades ago for political reasons. Who knows what the real bloodlines are in Darfur?”
    3 It’s all about politics
    Although analysts have emphasized the racial and ethnic aspects of the conflict in Darfur, a long-running political battle between Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir and radical Islamic cleric Hassan al-Turabi may be more relevant.
    A charismatic college professor and former speaker of parliament, Turabi has long been one of Bashir’s main political rivals and an influential figure in Sudan. He has been fingered as an extremist; before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Turabi often referred to Osama bin Laden as a hero. More recently, the United Nations and human rights experts have accused Turabi of backing one of Darfur’s key rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, in which some of his top former students are leaders…
    “Darfur is simply the battlefield for a power struggle over Khartoum,” said Ghazi Suleiman, a Sudanese human rights lawyer. “That’s why the government hit back so hard. They saw Turabi’s hand, and they want to stay in control of Sudan at any cost.”
    4 This conflict is international
    China and Chad have played key roles in the Darfur conflict.
    In 1990, Chad’s Idriss Deby came to power by launching a military blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrowing President Hissan Habre. Deby hails from the elite Zaghawa tribe, which makes up one of the Darfur rebel groups trying to topple the government. So when the conflict broke out, Deby had to decide whether to support Sudan or his tribe. He eventually chose his tribe.
    Now the Sudanese rebels have bases in Chad; I interviewed them in towns full of Darfurians who tried to escape the fighting. Meanwhile, Khartoum is accused of supporting Chad’s anti-Deby rebels, who have a military camp in West Darfur. (Sudan’s government denies the allegations.) Last week, bands of Chadian rebels nearly took over the capital, N’Djamena. When captured, some of the rebels were carrying Sudanese identification.
    Meanwhile, Sudan is China’s fourth-biggest supplier of imported oil, and that relationship carries benefits…
    5 The “genocide” label made it worse

This portion is particularly interesting. Wax makes, basically, two arguments under this heading. Firstly,

    in September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred to the conflict as a “genocide.” Rather than spurring greater international action, that label only seems to have strengthened Sudan’s rebels; they believe they don’t need to negotiate with the government and think they will have U.S. support when they commit attacks. Peace talks have broken down seven times, partly because the rebel groups have walked out of negotiations. And Sudan’s government has used the genocide label to market itself in the Middle East as another victim of America’s anti-Arab and anti-Islamic policies.

In other words, Powell’s attaching of the ‘genocide’ label has been extremely politically polarizing within Sudan, hardening the attitudes of both “sides” to the conflict in Darfur and setting back the chances for reaching a negotiated peace…
And secondly, she makes this,quite distinct argument under the rubric of No. 5:

    Perhaps most counterproductive, the United States has failed to follow up with meaningful action. “The word ‘genocide’ was not an action word; it was a responsibility word,” Charles R. Snyder, the State Department’s senior representative on Sudan, told me in late 2004. “There was an ethical and moral obligation, and saying it underscored how seriously we took this.” The Bush administration’s recent idea of sending several hundred NATO advisers to support African Union peacekeepers falls short of what many advocates had hoped for.
    “We called it a genocide and then we wine and dine the architects of the conflict by working with them on counterterrorism and on peace in the south,” said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert for the Congressional Research Service. “I wish I knew a way to improve the situation there. But it’s only getting worse.”

I think Wax is probably right here. After all, the whole point of the 1948 Convention on Genocide was that it actually obligates its signatories to act to “prevent, suppress, or punish” any act of genocide regardless of where in the world it is committed… That was why there was such a big fuss made in 1994 over whether the Clinton administration would declare that the killings in Rwanda constituted a genocide, or not. At least Clinton and his people seemed to take quite seriously the commitment that, if the Rwandan killings did indeed constitute genocide, then the US would be obligated to intervene to suppress that genocide.

As for the Bush administration– as we all know– it takes the power and truth-value of words extremely lightly when it chooses. I can imagine Karl Rove saying something like,”Sure, call it a genocide if that seems politically advantageous to do, here at home, with all these people clamoring for it. But you don’t think we’re going to do anything about it, do you?”
And thus, the value of the whole approach pioneered by the authors of the Genocide Convention has been completely annulled. (Rove: “Who cares? The Genocide Convention is no better than the Kyoto Treaty or the NPT, is it?”)
…Anyway, belatedly, I’d like to thank Emily Wax for a well-grounded and well-argued article there. I wish I’d read it earlier.

Truly saving the people of Darfur

Let us first focus our energies on making sure that we and our governments are doing all we can to get literally life-saving basic humanitarian aid to the people of Darfur. They are women, men, and children with pressing physical, social, and psychological needs. They are not a “cause” to be taken up (or dropped) by well-meaning outsiders.
And yet, the international “community” has not yet responded in even a halfway acceptable way to the pleas of the World Food Program and others for enough basic food aid to be sent there.
The NYT reported Saturday that the WFP,

    said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, blended foods, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories — about half the level the agency recommends.

This is beyond tragic. It is also, surely, the very first thing we should be campaigning about. Go to Oxfam’s site and send them a donation. Then call your representatives in Congress or your local parliament and tell them to quadruple the government’s food aid to Darfur-– and to do it now.
Then, we have to recognize that it is not only the pro-government forces in Sudan who are impeding the delivery of such aid as is available. This sobering press release issued last Friday by he UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) states:

    Over the past few weeks aid workers operating for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and U.N. agencies have come under continuous attacks and harassment by armed groups in the area of Shangil Tobayi, Tawilla and Kutum in North Darfur. Several reports indicate that many of these attacks have been waged by SLA factions [that is, factions of an anti-government force ~HC]. Armed robbery and hijackings have endangered humanitarian workers assisting over 450,000 vulnerable people living in the area. Moreover, credible information point to the use of hijacked vehicles for military purposes by these armed groups. This is unacceptable and contrary to International Humanitarian Law.
    The SRSG [Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General] Jan Pronk appeals to the SLM/A to take all necessary steps to assure the safety of humanitarian personnel and property in areas under their control and the consistent implementation of agreements. Unless these attacks and harassment stop immediately, the U.N. and its partners will be obliged to suspend all relief assistance to this particular area till effective safety for humanitarian personnel and assets is guaranteed. The U.N. will hold responsible the armed groups, including those related to the SLA, and their leaders, for the failure to assist the vulnerable populations under their control.

I noted, too, that on last Friday’s BBC t.v. news report, Orla Guerin– whose reporting from Darfur I had earlier criticized– spoke openly about Darfuri villagers having been expelled violently from their village or villages by the rebels, and having sought refuge inside one of the bases for the AU forces. She spoke as a crowd of the expelled villagers could be seen behind her in the frame…
Now, of course, there is the additional political development of the nearly-secured peace agreement between the Sudan government and the rebels, that AU negotiators have been working on for two years now.
Yesterday, the Government of Sudan expressed its acceptance of the deal. But today, the two main rebel groups still seemed unprepared to accept it. In this piece, Reuters’ Estelle Shirbon writes:

    Chances of a peace agreement for Sudan’s Darfur region looked slim on Monday despite a 48-hour extension to negotiations, observers said, citing rebel inflexibility.
    Mediators from the African Union (AU) agreed in the early hours after a deadline expired to give the government of Sudan and two rebel groups until midnight Tuesday to agree on a proposed peace plan, the result of two years of talks.
    But on Monday morning, Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha left the Nigerian capital Abuja, venue of the talks. Taha had arrived three weeks ago and held face-to-face meetings with rebel leaders that had raised hopes of a deal.
    A diplomat who is closely involved in the talks said Taha left because his latest meetings with rebel leaders had given him the impression they were not open to substantial talks.
    “His meetings with the (rebel) movements yesterday were so bad. They were, frankly, so insulting to the government,” said the diplomat, who described his mood as “depressed”.

So it looks as though the rebel leaders’ inflexibility may now be consigning the people of Darfur to further months or even years of civil war. This, when we know that far too many of the civilian people of Darfur have already had their homes, communities, and livelihoods wrecked by the gunmen from both pro- and anti-government groups… Surely, the most urgent imperative should be to find a formula that will allow everyone to de-escalate, disarm, return to their home communities, and start rebuilding lives and livelihoods shattered by the violence!
I have to ask whether the rebel groups’ intransigence was perhaps stoked by the one-sidedly anti-Khartoum tenor of much of the Darfur-related mobilization in the US over the past few weeks? (Did that mobilization perhaps give the rebels the idea they could get more political support from Washington than they have been able to win, so far, from the African Union? If so, I suspect they will be sorely disappointed…)
Wouldn’t it, honestly, have been better if from the get-go the people involved in the US “Save Darfur” coalition had focused their efforts somewhat less on one-sided finger-pointing, and much more on the urgent need for solid humanitarian aid, and the creation of the political climate of civil peace which is the only climate in which such aid can both be delivered in the shorter term and help to rebuild and heal war-torn communities over the longer term?
By the way, Jonathan Edelstein recently had a good post on the draft peace agreement out of Abuja, on his blog, here.
His analysis of the draft was this:

    If I’m reading between the lines accurately, the proposal falls somewhat short of what the southern Sudanese got in the Machakos protocol, offering some degree of local control over land and resources but not a full-fledged autonomous government or a secession option. This is probably to be expected. Unlike the south, Darfur has a significant pro-government constituency (the pastoralists), and the rebel movements can’t claim to speak for the region as a whole. In addition, the Darfur rebels aren’t as militarily powerful as the SPLA/M, and thus don’t have the leverage to overcome Khartoum’s opposition to regional autonomy. The AU draft is, in practical terms, the most that the rebel movements are likely to get.

Finally, maybe the only thing we can do at this late hour in the diplomacy is to pray for peace and rebuilding in Darfur… And to hope that wisdom, compassion, mercy, generosity of spirit, and restraint can guide the actions of all concerned… Including our own.

Taboo #2: Israel and the bomb

In addition to discussion of the role of the pro-Israel lobby, another major Israel-related taboo within the US mainstream media has to do with the topic of Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Thus, today, we have the amazing spectacle of Dennis Ross, the former longtime Arab-Israeli “peace process coordinator” for the Bush I and Clinton administrations, writing an oped in today’s WaPo about the Iranian nuclear issue without even mentioning the word “Israel” once…
Well, I imagine there are many contexts in which one could do that. But not in the context in which Dennis is writing his piece, since he is looking specifically at the Middle East regional implications of any move Iran might make toward developing nuclear weapons…
And in the course of doing that he comes up with zingers like this:

    If Iran succeeds, in all likelihood we will face a nuclear Middle East.

Hullo?? Earth to Dennis!! Um, Dennis, the Middle East already has nuclear weapons in it– thanks to Israel.
And then he goes on to examine likely responses from other Middle Eastern countries to any Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, arguing with a degree of dogmatic certainty that then Saudi Arabia “will seek” their own nuclear weapons capability, etc etc…
But still no word– anywhere in this whole piece about Middle East nuclear matters!– about Israel.
This, I note, just one day after the WaPo itself had published a very informative article by Avner Cohen and William Burr that described how US officials behaved back in the late 1960s as they became increasingly convinced that Israel had already developed its first nuclear weapons:

    Apparently prompted by those high-level concerns, Kissinger issued NSSM 40 [that’s short for National Security Study Memorandum, no. 40]– titled Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program — on April 11, 1969. In it he asked the national security bureaucracy for a review of policy options toward Israel’s nuclear program. In the weeks that followed, the issue was taken up by a senior review group (SRG), chaired by Kissinger, that included [CIA Director Richard] Helms, Undersecretary of State Elliot Richardson, Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard and Joint Chiefs Chairman Earle Wheeler.
    The one available report of an SRG meeting on NSSM 40 suggests that the bureaucracy was interested in pressuring Israel to halt its nuclear program. How much pressure to exert remained open. Kissinger wanted to “avoid direct confrontation,” while Richardson was willing to apply pressure if an investigation to determine Israel’s intentions showed that some key assurances would not be forthcoming. In such circumstances, the United States could tell the Israelis that scheduled deliveries of F-4 Phantom jets to Israel would have to be reconsidered.
    By mid-July 1969, Nixon had let it be known that he was leery of using the Phantoms as leverage, so when Richardson and Packard summoned Rabin on July 29 to discuss the nuclear issue, the idea of a probe that involved pressure had been torpedoed. Although Richardson and Packard emphasized the seriousness with which they viewed the nuclear problem, they had no threat to back up their rhetoric…

Cohen and Burr based much of their article on a collection of newly declassified US documents on the topic that is now available on the website of the DC-based “National Security Archive.”
That’s a valuable-looking collection of documents there. (Just scroll down on that page for the links to them.) There are still, though, many other relevant docs that have not yet been declassified.
The main outline of this story was already pretty well-known back when, for example, I wrote an article titled Israel’s Nuclear Game: The US Stake, and published it in the Summer 1988 edition of World Policy Journal. (Shortly after I published that, Helms, whom I had come to know a bit, wrote me telling me I had got the basic facts and the analysis there quite right.)
I guess I should work to get the text of that article– and the follow-on piece I published in Foreign Affairs in Summer 1989, along with former US arms-control czar Gerard C. Smith– up onto the internet. It shouldn’t be too hard…
But what I want to note here is the kind of amazing self-censorship at work over at the WaPo: that the editors could publish that entire piece by Dennis Ross today without insisting that he at least make some reference in it to the big elephant in the room in any discussion of Middle East nuclear issues– namely, Israel’s longtime possession of a significant nuclear arsenal.
That’s about equivalent to writing about terrorism in the world without writing about Al-Qaeda. (And of course, it makes Dennis’s entire analysis correspondingly nonsensical.)
My 2005-2006 issue of the IISS’s “Military Balance” describes Israel as possessing “up to 200” nuclear wraheads– the same number, I think, that it has attributed to Israel for a number of years now.
I imagine, though, that Israel’s nuclear arsenal has, if anything, grown over recent years, rather than shrunk or stayed the same size?
Certainly, Israel’s ability to deliver these warheads has grown significantly over the years. Even back in a 1993 essay, the Israeli strategic analyst Gerald Steinberg was writing that Israel’s Jericho-2 missile,

    is credited with a range of 2000 to 2800 kilometers, and, according to Fetter … “can probably deliver at least 2 tonnes on any Arab country”.

My 2005-2006 Mil Bal says Israel has “about 100” Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles.
But Dennis Ross– and his editors there at the WaPo– think that with a straight face they can publish an article about Middle East nuclear-weapons developments without even mentioning Israel?
Now that’s self-censorship.

Islamic-Gregorian date converter

In response to my earlier query on this, Reidar Visser sent me this handy link, which is to a site that automatically does either Gregorian-to-Hijri (Islamic) or Hijri-to-Gregorian calendar conversion.
A linked page there contains this listing of the various, lunar-based, Hijri months:

    (1) MuHarram
    (2) Safar
    (3) Raby` al-awal
    (4) Raby` al-THaany
    (5) Jumaada al-awal
    (6) Jumaada al-THaany
    (7) Rajab
    (8) SHa`baan
    (9) RamaDHaan
    (10) SHawwal
    (11) Thw al-Qi`dah
    (12) Thw al-Hijjah
    The most important dates in the Islamic (Hijri) year are: 1 MuHarram (Islamic new year); 27 Rajab (Isra & Miraj); 1 RamaDHaan (first day of fasting); 17 RamaDHan (Nuzul Al-Qur’an); Last 10 days of RamaDHaan which include Laylatu al-Qadar; 1 SHawwal (`iyd al-FiTr); 8-10 Thw al-Hijjah (the Hajj to Makkah); and 10 Thw al-Hijjah (`iyd al-‘aDHHae).

So, using the converter, I can now tell you that the next of those liturgical-calendar dates that is coming up is the 27th of Rajab 1427 which is…. 22 August 2006 CE (with a small probability of a one-day error, depending on moon-sightings.)
Handy, huh?

Good piece on Mearsheimer-Walt

There’s an excellent piece over at The Nation about the Mearsheimer-Walt article. It’s by Philip Weiss.
Weiss gives some significant background to the writing of the piece, which was originally commissioned– from Mearsheimer alone– by The Atlantic Monthly back in 2002. Mearsheimer brought in Walt, well understanding the kind of reaction he could expect to any objective treatment of the topic:

    “No way I would have done it alone,” Mearsheimer says. “You needed two people of significant stature to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication of the piece.”
    … “We understood there would be a significant price to pay,” Mearsheimer says. “We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged.” They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. “[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote,” managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic’s policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.
    “I believe they got cold feet,” Mearsheimer says. “They said they thought the piece was a terrible–they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened.” The writing as such can’t have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.

Weiss writes that, “in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha’aretz saying it was a ‘wake-up call’ to Americans about the relationship.” (I guess that would be this piece by Daniel Levy.)
In the US, by contrast, as Weiss notes…

    Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says the issue of Jewish influence is “so incendiary and so complicated that I don’t know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know that’s a problem. But there’s not enough space in any article you write to do this in a way that doesn’t cause more rancor. And so much of this paper was glib and poorly researched.”

(Of course, Fleshler doesn’t actually give any instances of this… )
Weiss writes,

    The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have peeled away from addressing the neocons’ Israel-centered view of foreign relations. “It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby,” Mary-Kay Wilmers, LRB‘s (Jewish) editor [who was of course the person who did decide to publish a shortened version of the piece], says with dismay. Certainly the old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns about Israel’s security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean was forced to correct himself after–horrors–calling for a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker’s courageous opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby’s powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive, mistrustful of Americans’ ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast Israel aside.
    Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. [New America Foundation scholar and writer Anatol] Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. “If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue–my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government–has so much difficulty publishing, it’s a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country.”

Anyway, as someone whose work and personal integrity have both been viciously attacked, and whose career and earning power have been harshly damaged over many years by various strands of the pro-Israel lobby, I can tell you that’s a good piece of writing– including both good reporting and solid argumentation– from Weiss there. Go on over and enjoy it. (And of course you can come back and discuss it here.)

Sistani returns to Iraqi politics

Many journos in the mainstream media had noted that Iraqi PM-designate Nouri al-Maliki went to Najaf Thursday to meet with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and that Sistani’s office afterwards issued a statement calling for the dismantling of the country’s powerful militias. (E.g., here.). But it has taken long-time Sistani-watcher Reidar Visser to– once again– help us put that visit into a broader and more informative context.
Having studied Sistani’s latest statement (bayan) carefully, Visser writes in this helpful piece of analysis on his website that,

    The breaking news from Najaf is … [that] Sistani indicates that he could once more become more involved in Iraqi politics: the religious leadership will “watch”, “keep an eye on” or “monitor” (the Arabic verb raqaba in form III) governmental performance in the future. This is quite unprecedented in Sistani’s scholarship. Sistani has earlier signalled attachment to ideas similar to those of the Persian constitutional revolution of the early 1900s, when Shiite clerics fought to acquire a supervisory role which would allow them to scrutinise the Islamic legitimacy of legislation passed by parliament. This, on the other hand, signals a possible extension of jurisdiction, to the point where direct criticism of the executive becomes theoretically possible.

This does indeed seem very important– both over the long term and in the more immediate future. I assume, for example, that the religious leadership– i.e., Sistani himself– will be monitoring the performance of the government in the crucial field of negotiating the speedy withdrawal of US and allied troops, among other things? (Sistani has long been on record as favoring a speedy and complete US withdrawal.)
In his latest analysis, Visser refers back to the much longer analysis of Sistani’s role that he published in mid-March. (JWN commentary and discussion on that, here.) In the earlier analysis, Visser had written that whereas between June 2003 and November 2004 Sistani had sustained an active (and extremely influential) behind-the-scenes engagement in Iraqi politics, after November 2004 that engagement seemed to drop off sharply.
In that context, therefore, perhaps we could say today that “The breaking news from Najaf is that there is breaking news from Najaf”?
I went to Sistani’s website and looked, for example, at the portal they have there to Arabic-language press comments about him. There were already four items up there with today’s date– showing that his people are tracking current media coverage of him quite closely. Before that, the earlier items they displayed had these dates: 4 April, 9 March (two items), 2 March, 22 February (two items), 20 February, 11 December (four items), 10 December, 9 December…
Well, there are many possible explanations for their having posted press items there so sporadically between Devember 11 and April 29. (Believe me, as a blogger, I could give you plenty of explanations for sporadicity!) But it is kind of notable how extremely disengaged they seemed to have been in that period surrounding and following the December 15 elections…
In his latest analysis, Visser discussed that period of quietism and Sistani’s apparent decision to end it thus:

    There are several possible reasons for this apparent resurgence of political activity on the part of Sistani. In early 2006, he kept silent during the divisive internal Shiite struggle over who should be the United Iraqi Alliance premier candidate. This seemed to indicate that he considered the matter to be outside his proper sphere of activity; indeed, had he wished to impose a candidate of his own he could easily have done so and the fractious Shiite alliance would have avoided a very public embarrassment and a delay in the political process that played directly into the hands of anti-Shiite forces and terrorists. But now, even though Sistani has increasingly sought to keep a certain distance from the United Iraqi Alliance, matters may have reached a point where he deems the deteriorating security situation to be a direct threat to the reputation of his religious leadership.

I would add to this that perhaps, in addition, Sistani saw the deteriorating security situation as harmful to something else he seems to hold very dear, namely the national unity of Iraq?
Anyway, demobilizing the country’s numerous militias will clearly be a very tough undertaking. In the Shia community there are the Badr Brigades, the Mahdi Army, Fadila, etc… In the Sunni community there are some smaller but often much more lethal armed organizations. And then, up in Kurdistan, there are the pesh merga, whose leaders have shown no readiness whatsoever to have them dissolved… And meantime, the US plan to build up the “national army” under US trainers and US political commissars has been continuing to founder. (In this intriguing piece in today’s WaPo, Jonathan Finer writes that US soldiers in the northern Iraq town of Hawijah “have developed a deep distrust of their Iraqi counterparts following a slew of incidents that suggest the troops they are training are cooperating with their enemies”– and gives many details of such incidents.)
Clearly, then, if there is to be a demobilization of the Iraqi militias– along with, as the best strategy for this, the integration of their operationally capable members into a new, unfied Iraqi security force– then this will have to come about as a result of intra-Iraqi political reconciliation, rather than through any (quite phantasmagorical) concept of “US leadership” of the process.
Can the Iraqis do this, despite all the blood spilled, and the evident depth of the political disagreements and the distrust among them? Yes. As our friends in South Africa and elsewhere have shown us, even opposing political and military forces that have been fighting each other for a long time and with great lethality and the imposition of truly terrible suffering can reach an agreement– provided it is based on a shared concept of national unity, national citizenship, and the broader national good… And yes, they can do this largely by themselves, without requiring the input or the professed “leadership” of meddling outsiders… Especially not, if the outsiders in question have a proven track record of having stirred up internal differences and tensions; and if they still quite fail to disavow having any longterm territorial or political ambitions of their own inside the country in question!
In this very necessary political process of intra-Iraqi reconciliation and the reconstruction of all the organs of Iraqi national power, Ayatollah Sistani’s active involvement can make a big difference for the better. (Especially if he also works hard to reassure the country’s Sunni Muslims about his role.) Given the attachment the Ayatollah has already shown in the past to the ideals of Iraqi national unity and national independence, I for one am delighted that he seems to have decided to re-engage with Iraqi politics.

    Once again I want to express appreciation to Reidar Visser for his work on this. Also, since I find the handwriting used in the Arabic text of Sistani’s latest bayan very difficult to read, I’d be extremely grateful if any JWN reader could read that last portion of the bayan, where Visser says he writes about the new “monitoring” role he envisions, and post an English-language translation for us all here. Thanks! Plus if anyone could point me to a crib-sheet for the Islamic dating system used in the bayanat (but not the press postings), that would also make my life easier… ~HC

Religions and genocide prevention: the discussion

I am still  reflecting on the rich experience I had yesterday,
at the lengthy panel discussion on “Religious Contribution to Genocide Prevention”
that my dear friend Andrea Bartoli organized as part of the
International Prayer for Peace.  Andrea, who teaches in the international-relations program at Columbia
University, is also the US representative of the Catholic lay organization
Sant’ Egidio, which organized the whole event.  I came to know Andrea
because of the role that he (and Sant’ Egidio) had played in helping broker
the Mozambique peace accord of 1992.

Highlights of yesterday’s panel, for me, included:

— hearing Qamar-ul Huda, a Muslim staff member of the
US Institute of Peace, talking about the role that Rwanda’s very small population
of Muslims played in helping to save lives during the genocide there in 1994;
hearing him reflect deeply and honestly on the phenomenon of seeing Muslims
kill Muslims in Darfur– and Muslims kill Christians and other non-Muslims,
earlier, in Southern Sudan; and seeing al-Qaeda leaders and others exploiting
Muslim teachings to incite violence and hatred; and listening to him talking
about the continuing need to engage in internal debate within Muslim religious
circles over interpretations of texts and the requirements of “correct” Muslim
practice…

— hearing him talk, to, about a decision he’d learned about that was made
recently by the heads of different religious organizations in the Iraqi city
of Samarra, to jointly rebuild the Askariya Mosque, that was largely
destroyed in the terrible sabotage attack of late February  (why have
I not heard about that elsewhere?)…

— hearing Andrea Bartoli reflect with parallel anguish and honesty
on the pain of having seen Catholics kill Catholics in Rwanda, and on having
come to understand the role the Catholic hierarchy played at a certain time
in buttressing colonial rule and colonial attitudes in Mozambique; and also,
talking about the need for continued efforts to engage in debate and work
inside one’s own religious tradition…

Continue reading “Religions and genocide prevention: the discussion”