Rosenberg takes on Pipes

M.J. Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis at the extremely centrist American pro-Israeli organization Israel Policy Forum (IPF). And he has a beef with the extremely hardline American pro-Israeli activist Daniel Pipes.
In a very moving column Rosenberg wrote last Friday, he started off by talking a little about his extended family of Holocaust survivors, including his kids, their American cousins, and their Israeli cousins:

    these kids are here. That’s the miracle.
    The ancestors they have in common would have a hard time recognizing their descendants. The Americans are very….American. Life is all about jobs, sports, hip-hop music, internships, iPods, etc.
    The Israelis, from a 1939 Polish Jewish point of view, are just as improbable. They live in a country that last existed as a Jewish state 1900 years previous. They speak Hebrew. And they are also very religious (none of the Americans are) with their lives revolving around youth groups, studying in yeshivot, the army, etc.
    When we are together, there are always discussions about politics. The Israeli cousins demonstrated against the Gaza withdrawal and are on the Right. That certainly is not the case with the Americans.
    But the political discussions do not descend into arguments. Even though we are family and even though the Americans have strong feelings on Israeli politics, the Americans are not going to tell the Israelis what they should think. The Israelis live there and the boys go into the army. There is a real hesitancy about telling them what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives.
    Everyone is aware of what is and isn’t appropriate for American Jews to be telling their Israeli counterparts…

But not so, Danny Pipes, very comfortably ensconced in his self-made little empire up there in Philadelphia. Rosenberg writes of him:

    He is best-known for running an outfit called “Campus Watch” which enlists college students to monitor their professors in an effort to curb free discussion of Middle East issues.
    He believes, and has repeatedly written, that Israel should abandon the idea of compromise of any sort with the Palestinians and should instead defeat them the way the allies defeated the Nazis i.e. make them surrender and have the victor dictate the terms of the peace.
    In general, Pipes’ view of the situation indicates a fairly unsophisticated grasp of Israel’s situation. He seems not to know that the Palestinians are not a regime, which can be eradicated, but rather a people with whom Israel is destined to share the land forever. (They also represent close to half the population of historic Palestine and, before the refugees fled, represented a majority of it).
    In his New York Sun column, Pipes excoriated all of Israel’s leading political parties for seeking ways to achieve coexistence with the Palestinians rather than “offer[ing] the option of winning the war against the Palestinian Arabs.”
    He calls this omission a “striking and dangerous lacuna.” (I didn’t know what lacuna meant until I looked it up. It is “an empty space or a missing part.”) In other words, missing from Israeli politics is a determination to fight the Palestinians to the death.
    Brave words from Philadelphia.
    Pipes then itemizes all the bad ideas Israelis have come up with as alternatives to war. These include the security barrier, disengagement, promoting Palestinian economic development, territorial compromise, promoting democracy and bilateral negotiations.
    He even rejects the noxious idea of “transfer,” the Kahanist plan to deport Palestinians across the border, as an attempt to “manage the conflict without resolving it.” How chilling is that? If Pipes considers the insane idea of “transfer” too moderate, what precisely would be acceptable to him?
    For a start, he believes Israel needs another war. Anything else is a waste of time. Only another war will do the job although seven previous wars – 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and the first and second intifadas –somehow did not. But Pipes believes that the next one will – if it is pursued to unambiguous victory.

He continues:

    Pipes’ call for war would be outrageous enough if an Israeli offered it. But an Israeli, of course, puts his money where his mouth is. An armchair warrior in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania simply sits on the couch and watches the action on cable.
    Needless to say, Israelis, who heard about Pipes’ call to arms, were angered.
    Bradley Burston, a Ha’aretz columnist, calls Pipes a “new kind of Israel basher.” And, he adds, Pipes is far from alone in his physical bravery by proxy.
    “In fact,” Burston writes, “a number of our readers who live in North America, some of whom regularly use the word coward to describe Israeli moderates, have any number of suggestions for us as well, up to and including the use of weapons of mass destruction on Palestinians, apparently in an effort to change their minds about us.
    “Daniel Pipes…is an equal-opportunity hater of Israelis. None of us is good enough for him. We lack the will to fight….Try as we might, we just can’t seem to win his war for him.”
    “His war.”
    Pipes, like so many others on the Right, does not support endless war for Israel out of a love for the Jewish homeland gone terribly wrong. They support war because they are simply tough guys from afar. They walk taller when some Israeli 19-year old dons his uniform. As Burston puts it, Israelis are their “mercenaries.” Or, at least, that is what these guys want them to be.
    I have read many columns by Pipes and the other well-known columnist/hawks and I cannot recall any in which their ardor for Zion is expressed in a positive way. They don’t extol the beauty of Jerusalem or the live-and-let-live Mediterranean style of Tel Aviv. Israel, as depicted by them, is neither beautiful, nor spiritual nor cultural. It is just some would-be Sparta, clad in uniform, always ready for the next fight. In fact, their negative feelings toward Palestinians far outweigh any positive sentiments toward Israel.
    “A new kind of Israel basher.” That is exactly right.

By the way, up at the top here, I was about to describe Rosenberg’s organization, the IPF, as “just slightly left of center.” But I saw that they featured Ehud Olmert at their “Tribute to Israel” dinner last June. And I looked at the web-page on which they list their (one gender only) “leaders”, who include Seymour Reich and Steve Spiegel, and I had a hard idea thinking of the organization as being “left of” anything… Unless you say “left of AIPAC”, which really isn’t saying anything significant at all.
So that’s even better in a way. If even people associated with a very middle-of-the road Jewish-American pro-Israel organization are expressing such strong public criticisms of Danny Pipes, that’s good news indeed.

Hispanics and the US: A proposal

Yesterday, in major cities throughout the US, there were massive demonstrations by recent immigrants to the country– documented and undocumented– and by their allies, to protest a new set of anti-immigrant laws passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The vast majority of those who participated in the demonstrations were what is known here as “Hispanics”– that is, people coming from places where Spanish is a common lingua franca, though actually for many of these people an indigenous (pre-Columbian) language may well have been their mother tongue. (Check, for example, this language map.)
Veteran WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, an African-American, wrote today:

    White Americans, and black Americans too, are going to have to get used to sharing this country — sharing it fully — with brown Americans. Things are going to be different. Deal with it.
    The most important legacy of the histrionic debate over immigration reform will not be any piece of legislation, whether enlightened or medieval. It will be the big demonstrations held in cities throughout the country over the past few weeks — mass protests staged by and for a minority whose political ambition is finally catching up with its burgeoning size. In the metaphorical sense, Latinos have arrived.

He is quite right. The politics of this country will never be the same again. (Eat your heart out, Sam Huntington.)
It is not only the size and nationwide reach of yesterday’s mobilization that indicates to me that this mainly-Hispanic movement is one of seriousness and resilience. There was also the impressive discipline and focus that the participants showed in expressing themselves, this time, as determinedly pro-US.
Last week there were some precursor demonstrations that caused concern among quite a lot of “Anglos” here because many participants were carrying the flags of their nations of origin– a sea of Mexican, Salvadoran flags and flags from other central-American nations.
But yesterday, at all the demonstrations I saw, the overwhelmingly main motif was the US flag– hoisted high, rendered on bandana, painted on people’s faces: everywhere, the Stars and Strips. And the theme was quite focused: a desire to be included. (Sort of the same effect as when participants in the large Hizbullah demonstrations in Lebanon in March 2005 all carried the national flag rather than Hizbullah’s own yellow party banners. The same political smarts, focus, and mass discipline.)
This country of some 292 million people now has an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working here– the vast majority of them people from Mexico and the seven small countries of Central America. And they are not just in the borderlands: throughout the whole country they do the hard work on the construction sites, in the restaurants, in agriculture and a number of other fields in which US employers are just too downright stingy to offer anything like a decent wage that most US citizens would accept.
All US citizens benefit from the lower prices that the presence of the immigrants allows us– though their presence also keeps wages depressed in numerous occupations…
The US-Mexico border is too long, and the wage differential between north and south of it too great for anyone to imagine ever being able to stop the flow of undocumented workers across it altogether… Plus, we’re supposed to have a “Free Trade Agreement” with Mexico (and Canada), though that hasn’t succeeded in providing very much of the promised stimulation to Mexico’s economy.
So here’s my proposal. Why don’t we just forget about continually trying to upgrade the fortifications along the US-Mexico border, and start discussing a vision of a Union of North and Central America that would work more or less like the EU? Including, crucially, with complete freedom of movement of people, goods, and investment from the Arctic North of Canada right down to Panama’s south-eastern border?
(For starters, that border– with Colombia– would be a lot easier to police effectively than the US’s sprawling border with Mexico.)
The population balance would look like this (2003 figures):

    Canada– 31.6 mn
    USA– 292.3 mn
    Mexico– 104.3 mn
    Guatemala– 12.0 mn
    Belize– 0.3 mn
    Honduras– 6.9 mn
    El Salvador– 6.6 mn
    Nicaragua– 5.3 mn
    Costa Rica– 4.2 mn
    Panama– 3.1 mn

So there would be a total of around 467 million people involved, just under two-thirds of them (us) being the increasingly ethnically diverse bunch of folks who make up the US citizenry. Around 143 million of the people would be from the eight Hispanic countries. And then there are the 31.6 million people (Anglophones, Francophones, and First Nations peoples) of Canada.
It could be an exciting and very constructive mix! As in the EU, members of all the different groups would need to continue to figure out what their ethnic and cultural identity means to them, and how to preserve and celebrate it. The richer societies of the north should do a lot to invest in helping to build up the conditions of life for the people in the (still reeling-from-conflict) communities of Central America. Indeed, maybe the Central Americans should get together and start demanding reaparations from the US for all the terrible damages the US-inspired wars inflicted on them during the Cold War.
And we in North America would certainly find our society and politics enriched by the energies (including the political organizing energies) of our hermanas and hermanos from the south…
Equally importantly, pursuing this kind of a goal of building up the conditions of life in Central America (and Mexico) could provide a wonderful “purpose” for the US citizenry at the time that it becomes clear that seeking our national “purpose” through the pursuit of military adventures in various places is counter-productive and self-defeating…
One last point. I’m an immigrant in this country. I came here because I married a U.S. citizen, someone born to citizens of (mainly) ethnic-German and Swiss heritage. All of us here except for the “Native Americans” are in one sense deeply illegal immigrants… in that our entry into the country was always arranged and protected through the agency of a clearly colonial venture. Meanwhile, it is clear that the vast majority of the “Hispanic” immigrants here are people of mainly indigenous origins– “brown” Americans, in Eugene Robinson’s words…but definitely, people whose ancestors have been on this continent for a lot longer than any whitefolks have. So in one way, it looks like pure whitefolk arrogance if the English-speaking peoples here are now busy trying to keep them out.
… Well, this is just a suggestion. I’m sure there are plenty of people in Mexico and Central America who would be wary of too close an integration with Gringo-land. But it’s definitely a conversation we all ought to be starting to hold. (And it’s probably a whole lot easier of a conversation to hold than the similar conversation the European nations ought to be having right now with their North African neighbors…. )

Converging with Gerecht on (aspects of) Iraq

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Services did a phone interview with me Friday, about Iraq, and got this story on the topic up onto the wires on Saturday. It quotes me fairly extensively.
In the phone interview, as in the resulting article, Lobe noted that in many respects my analysis on current developments in Iraq is the same as that of conservative commentator (and Wall Street Journal columnist) Reuel Marc Gerecht. So be it. I call things as I see them, on the basis that if we don’t understand the world how on earth can we hope to change it?
Jim said he’d send me the URL for the piece when it came out. I guess my spam filter ate it? Oh well, I’m glad I caught it over there at Antiwar.com.

Three years

Today in Iraq, three years after the US-engineered toppling of the Saddam statue in Firdaws Square, the leaders of the factions in the biggest electoral list, the UIA, all met to affirm their “freedom” to nominate whomsoever they– rather than the Americans– choose to be their nominee for the PM post.
Against the strong pressure that the Americans have been exerting on them for the past two months, they decided to stick with their existing nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari.
Today, near Firdaws Square, Mohammed Ahmed, a money changer whose shop overlooks the impressionistic statue representing “freedom” that was erected in place of the Saddam statue, said, “It has no meaning because there is no freedom.”
AP’s Bushra Juhi reported that Umm Wadhah, a 51-year-old housewife in black robes who lives nearby, said of the statue.”It does not stand for anything,…It does not symbolize the country, or unity, or anything. We want something that stands for us … all of us.”
Yesterday in Cairo, the increasingly autocratic and out-of-touch Egyptian President, a long-time US friend and ally, told al-Arabiyah TV that,

    “Definitely Iran has influence on Shiites… Shiites are 65 percent of the Iraqis … Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in.” He also said civil war “has almost started” in Iraq.

President Mubarak is a Sunni Muslim who leads a large, majority-Sunni Muslim nation. (However, many strands of popular culture inside Egypt are very open to traces of the country’s earlier Fatimid/Shiite past, so it’s not necessarily a good idea for Mubarak to try to play an anti-Shiite card.) His hostile and divisive comments about Iraq’s (ethnically Arab) Sunnis provoked Iraq’s highest-ranking Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni Arab leaders — President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Parliament Speaker Adnan Pachachi to issue a joint statement in which they decried what they described as “An attack on their (Shiites’) patriotism and their civilization,”
Many signs of a desire for national unity still exist inside Iraq, regardless of what some of the Arab world’s unelected leaders, and some machinators and pundits elsewhere, might say…
So, to help mark the third aniversary of the fall of Baghdad to the invasion force, I thought I would just look back at what I was writing on JWN at the time…
I recall I was in Arusha, Tanzania when it happened. I watched the toppling of the statue being endlessly replayed on CNN, on the t.v. in my hotel room there. On April 12, once the scale of the post-fall looting in Iraq had become more evident, I posted this post on JWN. Looking back, I think it wasn’t bad for something written from so far away, and with such little access to good sources of information.
I wrote:

    The war is not yet finished. Securing the peace has still even to begin. I think we can attribute the tragic mayhem we presently see in Baghdad and the other Iraqi cities to two main factors:
    (1) The legacy of 30-plus years of Baathist authoritarianism, that resulted in the total repression of Iraqi civil society and a serious, longterm degradation of public and even personal morals throughout the country. In a place where children are routinely encouraged by the regime to spy on and report on any suspect political tendencies amongst their teachers, parents, and neighbors– and this has been the case there for nearly two generations now– basic social trust, and the ability to sustain it, are the real casualties; and
    (2) Bombs Away Don Rumsfeld’s brilliant “strategy” of moving extremely fast to take out the power-center of the regime, with little thought given to how to consolidate public safety in the rear of the advancing forces.

And this:

    The fact of the present mayhem behind US-UK lines cannot be wished away, however much Bombs-Away Don desires to do so. It will have lasting as well as immediate political consequences.
    Based on my experience of having lived in Lebanon during the first six years of the civil war there, I would say that whoever inside Iraq can manage to sustain the kinds of effective social organizations that are capable of providing public order there will de-facto end up in control of those areas where they are able to do this. People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order.
    The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so. (“Eeeegh! Nation-building! Not for us!”) And the Americans’ non-reponsiveness to the urgent and urgently-expressed need of Iraqis for public order will certainly not go un-noticed. And that includes Bombs-Away Don’s public attitude of condoning–almost celebrating!–the looters at their work.
    In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order. But if they do so, we cannot tell yet what the reaction of the Turks and other neighboring powers will be. And it’s not even certain that inter-Kurdish rivalries may not break out again. The same rivalries that crippled the Kurdish areas 1991-96… So, still some big uncertainties there.
    In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.

And this:

Continue reading “Three years”

Hersh on possible US nuclear attack on Iran

Sy Hersh has a piece in the latest New Yorker, which says that

    The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack.

Even more terrifyingly, Hersh writes that

    One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran…

(Hat-tip to Frank al-Irlandi for that link.)
As Hersh writes, the previous context in which US military planners considered the use of bunker-busting TNWs was against the massive underground complex the Soviets were building outside Moscow during the Cold War. He quotes a retired intel official familiar with that earlier project as arguing that non-nuclear weapons could perhaps perform the task– if the US planners have enough reliable info about the target. But in Iran, they don’t. Hersh continues:

    The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

Hersh indicates that there are serious differences between the generals in the Pentagon and the ever-hawkish civilian officials there over the advisability of using (or even threatening) TNWs against Iran… with the generals portrayed as much, much more reluctant to do so than the “suits” who are their bosses.
He quotes that same retired intel official as saying,

Continue reading “Hersh on possible US nuclear attack on Iran”

Commentary editor contributes to JWN?

I’d like to express my big thanks to Neal Kozodoy, a distinguished colleague in the journalism profession– indeed, he’s the longtime editor of Commentary magazine, a key mouthpiece for the whole US neoconservative movement…. Now, it seems that Neal has been contributing considerable amounts of his intellectual property, gratis, to Just World News over the past two and a half weeks.
I am even considering preparing a little paper version of some of our exchanges here, which I can sell and send the profits to, say, the Atfaluna project in Gaza, one of my longtime favorites. (If any JWN readers want to help with this publication, let me know.)
Thank you so much for your contributions, Neal.
I guess I still have a lingering question or two. Does your Board of Trustees over there at the American Jewish Committee, which publishes your mag, realize how much time you’ve been spending– during what appears to me to have been your workdays– in composing sometimes lengthy contributions to JWN? (87 of them within the single 17-day period from March 21 through yesterday, indeed.)
Also, why did you suddenly stop contributing yesterday afternoon? Intriguingly, that seemed to happen right after I’d mentioned the possibility– in this discussion– that our frequent commenter “Neal” might indeed be Commentary’s Neal Kozodoy. Were you shy?
So anyway, Neal, come on back! But don’t be shy next time. Use your full name.

    Update Tuesday 1:05 p.m.: “Neal”, the commenter has informed me that he is not Neal Kozodoy. He writes: “For the record, I am not in any way associated with Commentary. I do not even subscribe to the magazine. I do not agree with the magazine’s editorial line either./ There are a small number of writers I have read in Commentary who, in my view, are first rate scholars.” He also writes, “I prefer to maintain my anonymity.”
    So his true identity is still shrouded in mystery. That’s a pity. The discussion here is much richer, more authentic, and more constructive when commenters give us some indication of the life experience and expertise they bring to their contributions. Neal writes, “there are a few topics about which I know a great deal. One of those things is the treatment of non-Muslims in the Muslim regions. The other is Islamic theology. And I know a fair amount about the history of the Muslim regions.” But we have no means of testing these claims to expertise if we don’t know who he is.

TJF blog looks at post-violence needs

Yesterday I wrote a post over at Transitional Justice Forum that looked at one of the high-order issues I’ve been examining in my project on post-violence policies in Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique.
The post is titled Meta-tasks for societies exiting from mass violence. I also briefly introduce there the idea that the interests of peacemaking and peacebuilding need to be considered in/by such societies, along with the interests of “truth” and “justice” that seem to absorb so many participants in the west-based human rights movements.
If these are topics that interest you, head on over and read the post, and do please consider contributing to the Comments-board discussion there.
Also, if you have friends or colleagues who find these topics interesting, send them the link, too. (I hope, anyway, that you’re telling everyone you know to read JWN… But the readership and definitely the participation in the Comments boards over at TJF could both use a boost… )

Bush’s project in Iraq: Is the end nigh?

Yesterday, I was back on the street corner again with our local weekly
peace presence, after having been out of town the previous Thursday.  Yesterday,
too, we shifted our timing as we always do when the clocks change: in winter
we vigil from 4:30 through 5:30 p.m., and in summer we do it from 5 through
6.  So yesterday’s vigil was the first one under the summer time rules.
 Many of the drivers who come through our busy intersection outside
the Federal Office Building there on a regular basis– those who came between
5:30 and 6– hadn’t seen us for six months.

It’s been an interesting experience, standing there throughout the years,
seeing the seasons turn.

We got a fabulous response!  People were honk-honk-honking for peace
constantly and repetitively throughout our whole hour there.  (One of
the nice things about this action is that at this intersection, traffic from
only one of the four approach roads is allowed to pass through it at any
one time. So all the drivers coming in from the other three directions have
to sit at the lights there and wait their turn.  As they do so, they
can hear the honks coming from other drivers, and this often spurs them to
join in.  It becomes a particular form of a public “conversation”–
and most importantly, people who are there who are against the war can reconfirm
that they are indeed not alone in their feelings.)

I would say that throughout 2006 so far, the amount of anti-war honking
has increased in an almost linear way, week by week.

On several occasions throughout the past couple of years, my friend and
co-vigiller Heather has said to me, “Helena, I can’t believe we’re still
here.  Don’t tell me we’ll still be here this time next year!”  And
I’ve always said to her, “Heather, expect to be here for the very long haul.”
 Heather wasn’t there yesterday.  But as I peered into every car
that passed trying to establish eye contact and see who all these people
were who were honking for us, I suddenly thought, “Hey, maybe we won’t
have to be here this time next year.  Maybe the Bushies really can
be persuaded to pull all the troops out of Iraq before April 2007.”  And
since then, this feeling has started to take a stronger hold of me.

I’ll note later on that even if this proves to be the case, there are
many other aspects of the administration’s militarism that we still need
to be very concerned about.  Not least among them, the prospect that
they might seek to “cover” a chaotic military collapse in Iraq, politically,
by launching an opportunistic military attack against Iran….  As
in, the way the Reagan folks– who of course included both Cheysfeld and
Rumney– “covered” their withdrawal from Lebanon by invading Grenada, back
in 1983.)

But first, I want to pull together all the pieces of evidence I currently
have that indicate that the end-point of the US project in Iraq might be
closer at hand than I had previously thought.

1.  US opinion has been swinging consistently against
the war this year. And this is not simply the evidence from
my expreiences on the street corner.  If you look at the AP/Ipsos opinion-poll
figures here
, you’ll see that the the public’s judgments on the Bushites’ handling
of the Iraq issue run as follows:

Disapprove (%) 
Approve (%)
Early Jan ’06
58
39
Early Feb ’06
60
38
Early Mar ’06
58
39
Early Apr ’06
63
35

Compare those figures with, for example, the early-January
of 2005 figures of 54 percent disapprove/ 44 percent approve.

2.  Throughout 2004 and 2005, the US public was continuously being
promised that there were political ‘watershed events’ ahead in Iraq that would
make the US invasion and occupation of the country all look (relatively) worthwhile.
 Those events included the “handover of sovereignty” (!) in 2004; the
holding of the January ’05 election; the August ’05 “completion” of the Iraqi
constitution; the Iraq-wide referendum on the same; and then the holding
of the “definitive” election for a “permanent” Iraqi government in December
2006.  Those pronmises, and indeed the staging of all of those events
more or less as promised, kept a non-trivial chunk of US opinion on board
the administration’s project in Iraq.  (Regardless of the effect of these
events on opinion in Iraq, which for the Bushites’ purposes is almost an
irrelevant consideration.)

American people sincerely wanted to believe that something good could
come out of the whole venture in Iraq– and the Bushies were promising them
that these good things were “just ahead”.

But since December15, 2005 they’ve run out of politically stage-managed rabbits
to pull out of their magician’s hat.  Indeed, they haven’t even been
able to “win” the formation of an Iraqi government as a result of the December
election.  (Of course, as I’ve argued elsewhere recently, they could
have gotten an Iraqi government formed if they’d been prepared to go
with the Iraqi people’s duly decided choice. But they haven’t been ready
to do that, because “the people’s choice”, Ibrahim Jaafari, is not their
chosen puppet.  And furthermore, he has also committed himself to seeking
a firm timetable for a — presumably complete– US troop withdrawal, which
they don’t like.)

The US-caused (or at the very least, US-aggravated) “impasse” in the formation
of an Iraqi government accountable to the elected parliament there has caused
great hardships for the Iraqi people.  But it has also caused great
political problems for the Bush administration, who now have literally
no more political rabbits to pull out of their Iraqi hat.

3.  Based on my close following of both the events in Iraq and the Bush
administration’s record there over the past three years, I conclude the following:
(a) they still really don’t have a clue about what’s going on there– apart
from whatever it is that their legions of bought-and-paid-for lackeys choose
to tell them, and (b) at the political level they have no plan, workable
or otherwise, for how to get of the mess they’re in.  Let’s hope, at
the very least, that the military has some workable plans for peaceable force
extraction?

4.  There are mid-term elections coming up here in November.  To
try to stabilize the politically disastrous record of its Iraq project as
much as possible before then, the Bushies will need to have some non-trivial
“victory event” sometime before the end of September.  Ideally, from
their point of view, this should include the very visible return home of
a significant chunk of the soldiery currently deployed there– maybe 50,000
of them at a minimum.  “Welcome home” parades in major US cities, etc,
etc.  (But maybe they should not use the “Mission Accomplished”
banner and the flight-suit thing again.)

Even that might not do it– in terms of allowing the Republicans to win their
goal of keeping control over both Houses of Congress in November.  (Let’s
hope not!)  But of course, if they do pull a large chunk of the soldiery
out of Iraq before a reliably pro-US administration has been installed,
then the likelihood that such an administration could ever be installed there
will plummet to near-zero, and the likelihood of a really serious debacle
befalling the depleted forces that remain will also rise.  (It’s
a strange fact of the current US deployment in Iraq that the vast majority
of those troops have now been pulled back into performing purely “force
protection” tasks– i.e., guarding their own enclaves and supply-lines.)

…Anyway, based on the above confluence of what has been happening politically
inside Iraq with what has been happening politically inside the US– that
is why I now think it’s possible to conclude that the end of the US troop
presence in Iraq may well be nigh.  Okay, that there is now, 
say, a 60% chance that all US troops will be out of Iraq by this time next
year.

Let’s check back in at that point and see how this prediction holds up, okay?

But if it does happen… if all our efforts out there on the street corners
of the real communities of the world, here in the more global arena of the
blogosphere, and everybody’s antiwar efforts from all around the world,
should show some real fruit… what then?  Do we declare victory and
go home?

No, of course not.  Firstly, as I mentioned above, we will need to redouble
our efforts to make sure that any withdrawal from Iraq (whether partial or
total) is not accompanied at the same time by any aggressive US military
adventure elsewhere.

Secondly, we really need to open up a serious discussion inside the US (and
outside it) on how we want to see the US’s relationship with the rest
of the world developing as the US project inside Iraq winds down… Do
we US citizens really still think of ourselves as constituting an “indispensable
nation”, as Madeleine Albright used to say, or as one that has any kind of
“manifest destiny” to regulate the affairs of the rest of the world (as the
Bushies– and also many Democratic pols– have long aspired to do)?

And thirdly, we need to start having a much deeper kind of discussion on
what kind of a world it really is that we all– US citizens and that 96%
of humanity that makes up “the rest of the world”– seek to build over the
decades ahead.  Surely, it should be one that moves away decisively
from any toleration of warmaking or investment in the instruments of war;
that is truly committed to lifting up the conditions in which the world’s
poorest and most marginalized communities live, and giving those people full
voice in the regulation of the world’s affairs; and that seeks to erase both
the gross economic equalities that exist and the use of any economic or other
unfair advantage for purposes of coercion and social control?

So yes, we should keep all these longer-term goals in mind as we proceed.
 But meantime, I have to tell you, yesterday for the first time, mixed
in with the smell of the sweet spring blossoms over the road, I could also
for the first time in this long struggle against the Bushite project in Iraq
catch the faint scent of victory ahead.

Impasse in Iraq

Just one last thing before I “go” back to Africa today. Global Policy Forum has just– with my permission– put up on their website a short text I wrote for a private listserve yesterday, that draws together things I’ve been writing on JWN in the past ten days to provide an explanation of what’s going on politically in Iraq.
It might seem a little circular if I put the whole text up here? But anyway, y’all can read it there and then come back and discuss it in the Comments zone here, if you so desire.
(I should note that since I wrote that, I’ve had a couple of further thoughts on the issue which would add further wrinkles to the analysis. But I totally need to get back to my Africa piece and I shan’t come back to JWN until it’s done… )

Iran, the nuclear issue, the NPT

Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, has a significant op-ed piece on the nuclear issue in todays NYT. Titled “We Do Not Have a Nuclear Weapons Program”, the piece says:

    There need not be a crisis. A solution to the situation is possible and eminently within reach.
    Lost amid the rhetoric is this: Iran has a strong interest in enhancing the integrity and authority of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It has been in the forefront of efforts to ensure the treaty’s universality. Iran’s reliance on the nonproliferation regime is based on legal commitments, sober strategic calculations and spiritual and ideological doctrine. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has issued a decree against the development, production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.
    Let me be very clear. Iran defines its national security in the framework of regional and international cooperation and considers regional stability indispensable for its development. We are party to all international agreements on the control of weapons of mass destruction. We want regional stability. We have never initiated the use of force or resorted to the threat of force against a fellow member of the United Nations. Although chemical weapons have been used on us, we have never used them in retaliation — as United Nations reports have made clear. We have not invaded another country in 250 years.

Zarif makes a potent argument. One potential problem, though: the Bush administration has been running away from the NPT faster than a person could ever hope to run from the fallout from a nuclear weapon… Yesterday, Condi Rice was up on the Hill trying to drum up support for the deal the Prez reached with India recently, that would reward India in a major way for having bypassed the NPT completely and produced its own, now well-demonstrated and very robust nuclear weapons program.
Worse still, that WaPo report and the NYT report both said that Kerry and Biden said they were inclined to support the deal. Maybe we should write the obituary for the NPT and move on? No! That is ways too scary a prospect… I really think we all need to work together to find a way to save (and indeed strengthen) it. And we should fight for implementation of its Article 6, too.