Thursday, I wrote here about the guy who came and asked if I could tell him where to get a pro-peace yard sign like the one we have, and how I gave him one there and then.
Before he left, he asked how much he could pay me. I told him they cost $5, but really not to bother. Before he left we introduced ourselves to each other: “By the way, I’m Helena”… “And I’m Phil. Nice to meet you.”
Yesterday, I found $5 in our mail box. It was wrapped in a piece of paper saying, “Helena– Thanks for what you’re doing for our country– Phil.”
What a great end to the story.
Today, I came up to NYC by, yes, real metal train. And yes, I did get my bg BR piece almost completely written. 9,600 words. (And yes, that is the short version.)
…Terrible day (again) in Iraq, today. Oh my G-d.
Tomorrow I’m going to a “summit meeting” of pro-peace US and Iraqi women convened by the Global Peace Initiative of Women. Faiza will be speaking there… Maybe they’ll have wifi in the hotel and I can blog it in near real time?
Who are the Palestinian militants?
I am getting increasingly fed-up with the way so much of the western MSM continues mindlessly to echo the refrain that the Hamas people are “militants”. You almost always see the word “militant” attached to the name “Hamas” once or many times in any news report…
But the militants in the Palestinians arena these days are not Hamas people. Hamas has not undertaken any militant action at all against Israel (or anyone else) since the end of Setember 2005. And that brief single episode in September was the result of a ghastly, if perhaps understandable, mistake on its behalf. Prior to that, Hamas had maintained the discipline of the tahdi’eh (“calming”) quite fully since the end of last March. And once the Hamas leaders recognized their mistake in September, they immediately reinstituted the discipline of the tahdi’eh.
The “militants” these days in Palestine are people affiliated with Fateh, not with Hamas.
Hamas is politically hardline, yes. But it is not now actively “militant.” Writers and editors make a serious mistake– whether wilfully, or through inattention– if they fail to recognize the difference. We should give credit where credit is due to Hamas, for having shown so much discipline and self-restraint with respect to the tahdi’eh, which it has stuck to, remember, in the face of numerous continuing acts of anti-Palestinian violence committed by Israel over the past year.
Abu Mazen plays hardball (but not with Israel)
I regret that I didn’t get to see PA president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) when I was in Palestine recently. It seemed that whenever I was in Gaza, he was in Ramallah, and vice versa. (He was also out of the country for a while there.)
Anyway, I did get to speak to some old friends who know him well. One man of great political smarts and great political connections told me, off the record, back at the end of February that,
- Abu Mazen felt badly wounded by Hamas in the [January] election. Now he wants to humiliate them in return… That’s why we’re facing some months of wrangling between the President and the PLC.
Well, my friend was right. In the past few days, Abbas has launched a number of political initiatives designed to circumsrcibe Hamas’s power, even though (or, in my friend’s view, precisely because) Hamas trounced Abbas’s Fateh Party at the polls. These intiatives have included moves to grab as many as possible of the (admittedly meager) levers of power at the disposal of the PA to his office in the Presidency, and away from control of the Hamas-led government.
(Ironic, of course, that when Abbas was the PM and Arafat was the Prez, the US had striven mightily and with great success to get these powers shifted to the PM’s office… )
In addition, according to this article by Chris McGreal in today’s Guardian, Abbas is delivering a letter to Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh today. According to “sources close to Mr Abbas” this letter “is intended to ‘draw the battle lines’ with Hamas, but it also serves as a warning to Israel and foreign powers that threats to sever aid and links are likely to strengthen rather than weaken the Islamist party.
McGreal said he “saw” the letter before it was delivered. (Was he able to read it as well, I wonder?)
Anyway, HaAretz’a Akiva Eldar also has a piece about this letter in his paper today (on Shabbat? How does that work? Maybe they just have an online edition on Shabbat?). He writes that though he didn’t ‘see” the letter itself, he and a group of other reporters were briefed about its contents by Abbas’s aide Tayeb Abdel-Rahim.
Kind of interesting and significant, I think, that the content of this intra-Palestinian letter would, at a time of continuing, very tough conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, be briefed to Israeli reporters even before it is transmitted to PM-designate Haniyeh?
I guess the letter is part of Abbas’s attempt, discreetly, to have some influence for the good on the Israeli elections. (I.e. by showing that he is “standing up to” Hamas, and therefore that “there IS someone to talk to on the Palestinian side”– i.e. him.)
This was also, even more clearly, the intention of the interview that he gave to Eldar last Wednesday.
Eldar wrote there about Abbas that:
Continue reading “Abu Mazen plays hardball (but not with Israel)”
Harvard’s shame (and Chicago’s)
So it is indeed true. Harvard has indeed “removed its logo” from the footnoted version of the Mearsheimer/Walt study that is archived on a Keenedy School website, as HaAretz‘s Shmuel Rosner reported..
In addition,
- The university also appended a more strongly worded disclaimer to the study, stating that it reflects the views of its authors only. The former disclaimer said merely that the study “does not necessarily” reflect the university’s views.
This is totally shameful pandering on behalf of this money-grubbing institution of so-called “higher learning”. (H’mm, I wonder what lesson about academic independence and the value of evidence-based research students are supposed to take from this episode?)
Universities and other research institutions publish studies all the time on the basis that these studies “do not necessarily represent” the views of the institution. (Which leaves it an open question as to whether the study in question does do so, or not.) That is what a commitment to the freedom of enquiry is all about.
So Harvard (and Chicago) now seem to be going quite a bit further when they now, in what was presumably a carefully considered statement of disclaimer on the front page of the web-archived version, state that,
- The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and this article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution.
And then, the withholding of the Harvard logo is quite pathetic. Though really, since Harvard is indeed proceeding in this craven, pandery way, if I were Walt and Mearsheimer I would consider a “Harvard logo” to be a thing of very little value.
Interestingly, HaAretz also today carries a fairly nuanced evaluation of the M-W paper by Daniel Levy, a key Shimon Peres ally who was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Accord.
Levy expresses a couple of criticisms of the M-W paper. (I agree with him completely that M&W should have mentioned the Lobby’s conflict with Bush I and Baker over loan guarantees, in 1991-92. Notable, because as I wrote in this book, (1) B&B “won” on the immediate issue of the loan guarantees; but then (2) they were majorly punished by the Lobby in the 1992 election; and Bush I’s defeat in that election stood thereafter for the Clintonites and for Bush II as an object lesson in why they shouldn’t even dream of confronting the Lobby… This, even though many solid analysts of US politics pointed out at the time that “it’s the economy, stupid!” was even more central to Bush’s electoral defeat. But the Lobby’s ideological enforcers managed to get their view of things very “forcefully” across to all the pols… )
But Levy concludes,
Peace train gathering steam, oh yeah!
A really moving thing happened during our regular Thursday afternoon peace
demo today. There were about five of us there, stretched along the
same rim of sidewalk at the big intersection outside the Federal Government
Building in town where we always stand. It was amazingly, gratifyingly
noisy, with a greater proportion of motorists “honking for peace” than I
remember, ever. I was trying to shout a few words of conversation
over my shoulder with my friend Virginia, while also holding up my “Honk
for Peace” sign to the traffic moving in from the right and waving and establishing eye contact with the drivers as they approached. (Waving: friendly; often provokes a response in kind; plus
it draws attention to us standing there.)
I didn’t notice a guy who
was walking along the sidewalk towards us till he stopped right near me and
said, “Thanks so much for doing this, guys, I’m just back from there.”
“Just back?” I said. “In the military?”
“Yes. Got back two months ago.”
I turned to face him, reached out my spare hand, and grabbed him by the arm.
“I am so glad you came back safe,” I said.
He looked as though he wanted to hug me, right there in the street. But I was holding
two signs in my left hand. Plus, well, hugging a strange guy on the
street didn’t feel right. So I kept holding his arm. “Where were
you?” I said
“Baghdad.”
“You doing okay now?”
“Well, it’s been hard finding work. People don’t want to hire me when
they hear I still have a commitment to the military.”
“That sucks! But how’s your head? You having any nightmares?”
“Some.”
“So make sure you get the help you need. Say, you want to stand here
with us a while? We’ve got some spare signs.”
“I’m not supposed to. I’m still in the reserves. But I’m really
glad you folks are here. That’s bad there.”
And then he walked away. Afterwards, of course I wished I’d followed
him, got his story, talked a bunch more to him. But we didn’t have
many demonstrators today (I guess because of the peace march we also held
last Monday.) So I had just decided to stay on-mission there instead.
After he’d left, my friend Heather looked at me and said, “That was so
moving. I almost cried.” Me, I was biting back tears too.
… The general karma these days feels as though the head of anti-war steam
is starting to rise faster and stronger than ever before. And
I don’t think it’s just here, in what some people call “the People’s Democratic
Republic of Charlottesville.” After all, what I’m looking at here are
trends, over time… Another example: three years ago, back at the beginning of the war,
when I put my pro-peace yard sign out next to our driveway, one of the main
things that happened was that people would steal it, or trash it, or rip
it out and throw it down the nearby swale…
Then yesterday, after 18 months of no anti-war yard sign (but a couple of election
ones in there along the way), I planted out one of the spiffy new signs that
C’vill Center for Peace and Justice has been selling. On one side it says
“End the war now” and on the other, “Wage peace.” (This time, they
remembered to put the CCPJ web address at the bottom of the sign, too. Great
work!)
So I put it out, and less than three hours afterwards I hear a ring at our doorbell.
I go answer it, and there’s a heavyset looking white guy standing there whom I’ve never
met before. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I wanted to ask where you get your
yard sign. I’d really like one like it.”
“Ya… what?”
“I want to know how to get one.”
So I told him I just, actually, “happened” to have a spare one in the garage.
Told him I needed to shut the door on him so the dog wouldn’t get out
on the street, and ran to get the spare sign from the garage to give it to
him.
Amazing.
We’ve been doing our pro-peace work consistently, rain and shine, ever
since before the war. It feels great right now to feel such a strong
shift in our direction.
OPT’s: solid humanitarian info
This is Reliefweb’s portal to solid, sector-by-sector information about the humanitarian situation i the Occupied Palestinian territories.
Through there you can go to this March 19 report from the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on the humanitarian impact of the closures of the Karni (al-Muntar) crossing. It stated,
- Gaza requires 450MT of wheat each day to maintain bread supplies. The usual 30-60 day wheat stock kept in Gaza is exhausted. Other basic food commodities are in extremely short supply including dairy products and fruit. Rice and sugar are selling at more than twice their normal price and are also very difficult to find in stores.
Karni crossing (al Muntar) is the only source to import large-scale quantities of wheat and the commercial terminal for imports and exports of goods from Israel. As of today, Karni crossing has been closed 46 days or 60% of this year. (Four of the days (10-13 January — ‘Eid al Adha) were due to Palestinian decision making. ) In comparison, in 2005, Karni was closed for a total of 18% of the year and 19% of the year in 2004.
United Nations organisations are facing similar constraints. UNRWA has been unable to start its emergency food distribuition today because of insufficient wheatflour supplies. The World Food Programme reports that 3,594 MT of wheatflour contracted to local mills were unable to enter Gaza during the recent brief period Karni was opened.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) state that the reason for Karni’s closure is the suspected presence of tunnels dug by Palestinian militants leading to the crossing. The IDF contends that it will not open the crossing until the Palestinian Authority (PA) digs several trenches to intercept these tunnels. Palestinian security services, at the request of the IDF, have dug four trenches, totalling more than 1.5 kilometres in length around the crossing, in an effort to find these tunnels. So far, none have been found.
The report also has a helpful-looking timeline. It makes depressing reading, mainly detailing how many times the IDF demanded that the Palestinians dig ever deeper and deeper trenches in order to discover those oh-so-elusive “tunnels”. The only possible trace of possible tunnel-start was discovered on 20 January:
- 5 January: The IDF requests the Palestinian Authority (PA) to dig a trench west of the Karni crossing to intercept a possible tunnel leading to the crossing. The PA starts this work the same day, digging a 6 metre trench approximately 1km in length.
20 January: The PA completes the trench. According to the IDF, one tunnel was discovered, while according to the PA, a small hole, possibly the start of a tunnel, connecting to a water pipeline was discovered.
That trench was 6 meters deep. Later, the IDF demanded that the PA dig three more trenches, one of them “10m in depth, 300m long,” Still no further evidence of anything even possibly resembling tunneling was found…
Two good blog discussions…
I wish I had more time to spend on moderating the discussions on this blog, which frequently become shrill and excessively combative. On the other hand, most readers are adults who can figure out for themselves whether and how to “read” the comments boards.
In general, though, the ability to have this kind of cross-continental, open-ended discussion is a treasure that I don’t want to curtail too much. It really does allow for the creation of new knowledge and new understanding. (I have long believed that knowledge is an essentially social rather than individual creation… I mean, who taught Tom Hobbes and John Locke to speak and to express themselves, in the first place? Their ability to reason and to argue sure as heck didn’t “grow like mushrooms out of the ground” at all…. Ooops, end of communitarian rant, here.)
So anyway, I thought readers might like to see some useful new knowledge being created in these two portions of the blogosphere:
- — Jonathan’s recent post (and the subsequent discussion) on the constitution and meaning of the Hamas government lineup, and
— Reidar Visser’s comment (in particular), as posted onto my post here yesterday about the continuing, extremely high-stakes political wrangling in Iraq.
Once JWN readers and commenters see how constructive discussions like this actually work, and how they serve us all by expanding the available knowledge base, perhaps you will all be a bit more mindful that this effect does not occur if people get into name-calling of the “hateful Helena” (or “hateful anyone else”) variety, or if they don’t actually make an effort to contribute new knowledge or their own thoughtfully conceived questions to the discussion. Also, it doesn’t really occur very easily if people go wildly off topic.
… One thing I’ve considered here is to see if anyone wants to take on the role of JWN’s “Bernhard”. Bernhard is the guy who started a parallel-universe blog called Moon of Alabama, where people could comment on Billmon’s Whiskey Bar blog, after Billmon shut down his comment section. MoA has evolved quite a bit since then.
Bernhard’s comments here are interesting. Actually, suddenly I’m thinking: why not ask Bernhard to run a JWN comment-site?
Does anyone have any other suggestions? Mail me.
Al-hamdu lillah!
Thank G-d! … That CPT-ers Norman, Harmeet, and James were all freed today… And freed, moreover, by troops who found them and released them without firing a shot.
CPT had requested firmly, all along, that the attempts to free their people not be accompanied by any resort to violence. Indeed, it seems quite possible, from the way their discovery and release operation was described in that AP story, that key elements of the operation had been discreetly negotiated in some way… Certainly, many many attempts at such negotiation had been pursued over the nearly four months of their captivity.
CPT has this lovely statement on their site.
I join with them when they say:
- We remember with tears Tom Fox, whose body was found in Baghdad on March 9, 2006, after three months of captivity with his fellow peacemakers. We had longed for the day when all four men would be released together. Our gladness today is made bittersweet by the fact that Tom is not alive to join in the celebration. However, we are confident that his spirit is very much present in each reunion.
Also this:
- During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?
Next week, Monday and Tuesday, I’m going to be at a “US-Iraqi women’s summit” in NYC. Faiza al-Araji is going to be there, which will be great. She, of course, had her own story of having her son Khaled held in terrifying extra-legal detention in Iraq a few months ago.
So I’m thinking of the 12,000-plus Iraqis still held in extra-legal detention… and I’m thinking of the CSM’s plucky, wonderful Jill Carroll.
But it’s also great to know that those three 3 CPT-ers are safe, apparently not badly harmed, and will shortly be reunited with their families and friends. Thank G-d. And thanks, too, to the US and British troops who freed them “without firing a shot.”
Pass the smelling salts!
So it now seems the delusional imaginings of one Israeli civilian woman “caused” the Israelis’ entire, world-class armed forces to decide to close the Karni crossing for nearly all of the past six weeks.
At the time the crossing was first closed, Israeli spokespeople assured us that this was because they had evidence that Palestinians were digging dangerous tunnels somewhere close by. Today, HaAretz’s Amos Harel tells us that,
- A few weeks ago, the crossing was closed after a civilian employee thought she heard knocking underneath it, but searches uncovered no sign of a booby-trapped tunnel, and military professionals have since suggested that the government consider reopening the crossing.
The content of the Israeli reporting on this was such as to lead at least one good-faith observer– frequent JWN commenter Jonathan Edelstein– to conclude that, “The closing also occurred just after an explosion in a tunnel under the crossing.”
Explosion! How scary! (But just, in fact, non-existent.)
Karni is, as JWN readers probably know, the main crossing-point through which goods from outside, including vital foodstuffs and medical/health supplies, can enter the Gaza Strip and the only one through which the Strip’s exports (most of which are extremely perishable market-garden products bound for world markets) can be shipped… So those delusional imaginings of that one, quite possibly stressed-out Israeli woman were used as a pretext to impose the Israeli government’s regime of tight economic strangulation on all 1.4 million of Gaza’s people.
(I don’t necessarily blame her, either. The whole tenor of the propaganda from the Israeli authorities is designed to keep the fires of anti-Palestinian fear and hatred well stoked among the Israeli populace… particularly during an Israeli election season.)
I would love to know, though, at what point the Israeli military professionals reached the determination that the “knocking” allegedly heard by that woman was not in fact related to any activity (or “explosions”) in any non-existent Palestinian tunnel? It’s quite possible they reached that conclusion pretty fast– maybe, within hours… After all, tunnel-detection is something they have quite a lot of experience of doing, there in the Southern Command.
But regardless of how fast they discovered this, Karni remained closed… for weeks on end. At the insistence of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv it was re-opened briefly, Tuesday. But within 30 minutes Israeli authorities rammed it shut again.
And now, in the run-up to that great event in the march of global democracy, Israel’s March 28 general election, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz is saying, according to Harel, that Karni should still be kept closed, “apparently partly out of fear of an election-eve attack.” It strikes me that he’s the one who really needs the smelling salts.
Whose unified Iraq, anyway?
It has seemed clear to me for some time now that, despite all the protestations of various US officials that what they most want to see is a “unified” Iraqi government stepping forward, in fact, what they most care about is not the ‘national unity” aspect of the government, but rather that the new Iraqi government NOT be one formed on a basis of commitment to a speedy US withdrawal.
In fact, Ja’afari and Muqtada Sadr are very committed to a unified Iraq– and Sadr has done more than any other Shiite politician to try to keep the links between the country’s Shiite and Sunni populations as strong as possible. (A lot, lot more than, for example, Abdul-Aziz Hakim and his SCIRI party, which as we know has been associated with some of the worst of the anti-Sunni death squads in the country.)
Sadr, in addition, is deeply committed to winning a speedy and complete withdrawal of US occupation forces from his country– this is, indeed, one of the main bases of his political relationship with the Sunnis.
The Americans have been using the Kurdish pols, and others, to continue to block the formation of a government led by Ja’afari, who is currently in alliance with Sadr. (The Americans have never withdrawn their “arrest warrant” against Sadr, the issuance of which back in April 2004 provoked some whole new rounds of very destructive fighting, both at the time and later in 2004.) For some reason, they don’t like Sadr! Perhaps it’s because of his consistently Iraqi-nationalist, anti-occupation stand?
I see that 97 days have now elapsed since Iraq’s “landmark” December election. That’s nearly 14 weeks in which the country has had no clear governance structure, and of course in the absence of such a structure the slide toward greater civil strife has only further continued.
Most recently, Washington has started deploying more actors to try to persuade Ja’afari to “do the right thing” (in Washington’s eyes), and to step down in favor of SCIRI’s favored candidate, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a pro-Washington, pro-privatization person with a very slick political past. These actors have even included, it seems, a group of six US senators now in Baghdad. They were reported by AP to have, “pressured Iraq’s leaders Tuesday to speed up formation of a national unity government, saying American voters were losing patience with Iraqi politicians and increasingly eager to withdraw troops.” (Actually, this last part of the communication probably gave considerable heart to the anti-occupation pols in Baghdad, so it might not have entirely served the Bushies’ purpose… )
But still, the imperial stance adopted by these senators is somewhat breathtaking… That they go trotting off to a foreign country and openly lecture the politicians there on how to run it?
… But of course the really big gun that Washington and its local viceroy, Zal Khalilzad, are now hoping to bring to bear on the Iraqi Shiite pols is political pressure from Teheran. Will this work in the way the US hopes, I wonder? That is, is Teheran going to be both willing and able to pressure Ja’afari to cede in favor of Abdul-Mahdi?
“Willing” is already, in my mind, a big question. And so is “able.” It is probably worth re-reading all the trustworthy sources we have on the relations between Teheran’s rulers and the various strands and personalities within the Iraqi UIA, to gain some guidance on these points.(Help, anyone? Reidar Visser, are you there?)
That AP piece cited above, which is by Vanessa Arrington and not their much more experienced and better-connected Hamza Hendawi, has this interesting tidbit near the end:
- Al-Jaafari’s bid for a second term is opposed by Kurds, Sunni Muslims and many secular politicians who claim he cannot unify the country. The Shiite leadership is under heavy pressure to drop him as candidate.
(Not true, by the way! Ja’afari is opposed by both main Kurdish parties, yes– though a little bit of US palm-greasing could swiftly change that situation. But he is certainly not opposed by all the Sunni Muslim pols, or by all the secular politicians. I think Arrington’s claims here are the result of her listening to too much crude US Embassy agitprop.)
But then, she reports this:
- Yet interim Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi told reporters after meeting Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Tuesday that “Dr. al-Jaafari is still the (Shiite) Alliance nominee.”
The cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged Abdul-Mahdi and another Iraqi politician — Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Shiite bloc in parliament — to speed things up.
The aim should be to “form a national unity government as soon as possible,” al-Sistani told the men, according to an aide. “Otherwise the people will not forgive you.”
I have to say that the mendacity and Orwellian double-speak of the Bush administration people whenever they say anything about the Iraqis’ government-formation process never cease to amaze me. They go on and on about claiming they want to see a “unified government”, but are meantime stoking the Kurds and everyone else they have any influence with to resist the formation of the one form of unified government that looks both easily achievable and also democratically legitimate– i.e., one led by Ibrahim al-Ja’afari. And they launch all kinds of accusation about Ja’afari’s “divisiveness” while completely minimizing the bad effects of the anti-Sunni divisiveness perpetrated by SCIRI and its allies, as well as (in his day) by Iyad Allawi.
And… and… and…
Meanwhile, here’s a very intriguing quote I found last night when I was reading the March 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker. It’s in an excellent article by Connie Bruck on the Bush administration’s various machinations with Iranian expatriate pols over the years, all of which is certainly well worth reading.
Here’s what she writes on p.54:
- James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, told me that in the prewar planning for Iraq “there was an intention that the U.S. would retain troops in Iraq– not for Iraq stabilization, because that was thought not to be needed,[!] but for coercive diplomacy in the region. Meaning Iran and Syria.”
Well, that was then, and now is now. Now, instead of the US being in a position to use “coercive diplomacy” (i.e. diplomacy backed by crude military threats) against Iran, Zal Khalilzad is instead begging Teheran to help him resolve the US’s political problems inside Iraq…
Boy, I would love to be a fly on the wall in these negotiations… But much more than that, I would love to see an empowered, united Iraqi government emerging that is committed to winning Iraq’s real national independence and sending the occupation army home.