… That would be George Packer, the author of the best book to date on US follies (and worse) in Iraq: The Assassins’ Gate, and Laura Secor, a writer and editor who had an intriguing piece in The New Yorker last fall about the lives of some of the reformist younger generation in Teheran. But I couldn’t resist putting “George and Laura” like that into the heading for y’all.
Bill the spouse and I had a great conversation with G&L at the dinner there last night. George is recently back from his latest reporting trip to Iraq. But I can’t write a word about what he told us because his own account of it won’t be in The New Yorker till “late March.”
What I can write about, I think, was Laura’s observation– based on the reporting she did in Serbia during the campaign for the election that toppled Milosevic, as well as her more recent two trips to Iran– about the distinct difference in the US-funded and -supported activities that helped the Serbian student movement ‘Otpor’ to become well organized, and the more recently announced $75 million that the Bushies will be giving to support opposition movements in Iran…. Her main observation was that the US never publicly announced the aid it was giving to Otpor-– “I was there, talking with them a lot, and I never got an inkling about US government funding”… Whereas of course, the aid to the Iranian “opposition” (identity of recipients not yet clear) has been trumpeted upfront.
Otpor went on to win its anti-Milosevic campaign.
And as for this latest Bushite initiative???
Iraq: political developments
Juan Cole has a good post today which is his digest of a long interview that Moqtada Sadr gave to al-Jazeera last night. There’s a huge amount of interesting material there that I would love to analyze at greater length but I’m afraid I don’t have time… I’m working on a special project that JWN readers will most likely be able to profit from from about next Wednesday on. I’ll just note I found these portions particularly interesting:
- Muqtada says that he is not himself interested in holding political office. He says that each member of parliament represents all Iraqis. He says he only offers advice to the Sadrist bloc in parliament, which is responsible to the Iraqi people generally.
The thirty Sadrist delegates must follow their own conscience. He said that each of the Sadrist MPs was free to support either Ibrahim Jaafari or Adil Abdul Mahdi. the important things was that they should support someone who insists on the departure of the occupation army.
…He denies that he opposes the principle of provincial confederacies and loose federalism. In fact, he says, it is a principle approved by the Prophet Muhammad. He is worried, however, that establishing this sort of federalism under foreign military occupation could lead to a very bad outcome. One is that there is a danger that the foreigners will take advantage of it to partition Iraq. They will also just take advantage to intervene more heavily in Iraqi affairs. And if there were a partition, he asks, what would happen to the Turkmen or the Christians or the Sabeans (groups too small to have their on provincial confederacies). He says he opposes sectarian confederacies and rejects the idea of a big Shiite provincial confederacy in the south of the country.
Asked about Kirkuk, Muqtada says that the Kurdistan Confederacy was established in the north because of the then dictatorship. He says that when the foreign occupation ends, and a democratic state is established in Iraq, with freedom of belief and freedom of peoples, there will be no reason to maintain a separate provincial confederacy. And it won’t need to demand Kirkuk. Kirkuk belongs to all of Iraq and all must equally benefit from it. He suggests that it be kept as a province and an example of communal harmony, rather than being partitioned by ethnic group.
… Asked where he stands in the conflict between the United States on the one side and Iran and Syria on the other, and what he would do if open conflict broke out, Muqtada replied “I am in the service of Islam. Whatever they need in their difficulties, I will provide it. . . I will defend all Islamic and Arab states.” But, he said, he would have to be asked by those states to intervene. He wouldn’t just volunteer to do it whether they wanted it or not. That, he said, is what is wrong with volunteers coming to Iraq unasked to fight the occupation, and then staying to kill Iraqi civilians.
I think Moqtada is continuing his “powerful politico’s’ regional tour”. He’s in Jordan where I think today he was due to meet with King Abdullah II, having met with the PM there yesterday. H’mm, and to think that just a year or so ago he was one of the US forces’ “Most Wanted criminals” in Iraq… What on earth is happening to US influence in the region? (A question asked in irony.)
Oh well, back there in Baghdad, the US interveners are working desperately hard, it seems, trying to prevent the coming to power of an elected government that is dedicated to seeking a speedy withdrawal of the US forces. That at least is my first reading of this piece of reporting, by nelson Hernandez, in today’s WaPo.
Hernandez writes,
- since the Shiites voted to choose Jafari, representatives from Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular parties that include multiple factions said they had met to discuss a broad-based coalition that could potentially overpower the Shiite candidate. The politicians, as well as Western officials, said in interviews that the race for prime minister was far from over.
“It is too early to say who will be the president or the prime minister or anything else,” said Ibrahim Janabi, a member of the secular National Iraqi List. “I think this will take time.”
“We are exploring all possibilities,” said Barham Saleh, a leader of the Kurdish alliance of parties, in a telephone interview just before he headed back into a meeting with other parties on Saturday.
I guess Zal Khalilzad, Iyad Allawi, and a bunch of other US collaborators and opportunists are kind of annoyed that their favorite character inside the UIA, SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi, didn’t get the UIA’s nomination for the PM post.
But the idea that all the non-UIA parties might be able to come together and over-rule the UIA is– provided the UIA people hang together– quite absurd and out of the question.
Much more likely than a bloc that marginalizes a significant portion of the UIA would be a bloc that marginalizes the Kurds– and the Kurds know that.
Oh, here’s AP now running with that, “major obstacles for a Jaafari confirmation” story, as well. Looks like Zal and his buddies are taking advantage of Moqtada’s temporary absence to try to spook the UIA into overturning the Jaafari nomination and going the way they want it to?
Colonial bullying politics really is pathetic sometimes. (But also, very damaging to the peoples colonized.)
Meantime, Iraqis continue not to have a governing admionistration that is accountable to them. The DDI counter here on JWN now stands at 66 days.
Some good sense from Tom Friedman
New York Times uber-columnist Tom Friedman has a pretty good column in today’s paper. Basically he’s urging everyone in Israel and the US (perhaps especially the US) not to get completely hung up on the nature of Hamas rehtoric, but to focus on the movement’s deeds instead.
A very good point!
I wish I could quote some decent-length excerpts from the column, or put in a link to it. But the NYT has instituted a system of tightly locking up much of its content into plutocrat-favoring payment systems. (Actually, our family does subscribe to the paper NYT and we thus have supposedly free access to the “NYT Select” online material… I jumped thru numerous hoops to become registered with that but I still can’t unlock Tom’s wisdom. What a crap system, may i say.)
Back to Tom. His bottom line:
- [I]t is critical that Israel, the U.S., and the Palestinians not get themselves up in a tree right now over words. There is nothing Hamas could say today that would reassure Israelis, but there is a lot it could do on the ground that would have a huge impact over time. That– for now–is where the test should be.
Excellent advice. Of course, he could have mentioned that for nearly one year now — with one exception only– Hamas has already maintained a quite unilateral tahdi’eh (ceasefire) with Israel, in an extraordinary act of organizational self-discipline that was completely unmatched by Fateh… (And Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has already given some public acknowledgment of that fact.)
Interestingly, in an op-ed that appears rights above Tom’s column in the paper edition of the NYT, Robert Wright — writing about the “cartoons” controversy– notes that back in the 1960s, the African-American “Nation of Islam” leader Elijah Muhammad, “called whites ‘blue-eyed devils’ who were about to exterminated according to Allah’s will.” But most US liberals– though they urged Muhammad to tone down his rhetoric– nevertheless recognized the place of deep wounding and hurt that it sprang from, and managed to live with it. And, as Wright notes, the N.I.’s rhetoric became calmer over time.
Another interesting argument that Tom makes in his column is that “If Hamas is going to fail now in leading the Palestinian Authority, it is crucial that it be seen to fail on its own… not because Israel and the U.S. never gave it a chance.” He quotes Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki (whose brother Fathi, btw, was killed by an Israeli assassination squad ways back when) as saying, “Any minute that it is evident that Hamas is being forced to fail [by outsiders] will guarantee that any future elections will only produce another Hamas victory.”
Another good point there.
Now, it seems evident to me that Tom probably really would like Hamas to fail. I can understand that though, personally, I’m more agnostic on that question. In my view, if Hamas can deliver good results for the Palestinian people, then it really is not up to Tom Friedman, or Helena Cobban, or any other outsider to pronounce on whether they “should” succeed or fail. (I would add in there parenthetically that imho, smart pursuit of a strategy of nonviolent mass citizen mobilization is by far the most effective way for them to succeed– but I think the Hamas leaders have already figured that out.)
I certainly, however, agree with the content of Tom’s analysis there: namely, that if Hamas is seen by Palestinians as failing because of external pressures, then that will only increase the support they win from the Palestinian public.
One final note. Tom prefaces the column with a little bit of Zionist-mollifying boilerplate: “Israel would be fully justified in saying that the only correct policy toward Hamas today is a fight to the death” … before he goes on to ask, ” But would that be smart right now?”
That first statement is a really stupid, pandering thing to say. “A fight to the death”? What on earth does Tom mean? Does he think for a moment that the IDF hasn’t tried to wage just such a struggle almost continuously over the past decade? How many assassination attempts has it launched against Hamas leaders over the years, and how many mass-punitive actions against the movement’s supporters? (Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is probably the only leader of a major political movement anywhere in the world today who is certifiably the survivor of a chemical-weapons attack. Undertaken by you-know-who, back in 1997. But many, many of his meshaal’s mentors and colleagues in the leaderships were indeed wiped out by Israel, including within the past two years.)
So why does Tom– who’s a fairly well-informed and smart guy– even say something idiotic and inflammatory like that?
I guess he was trying to cover his rear end against the swarms of NYT readers who will no doubt descend on him the moment they read the rest of his very sensible column…
So I wonder how long it will take the “usual suspects” here at JWN to descend on me for writing this little blog post?
For Saddam trial afficianados
I put up a post at Transitional Justice Forum today titled “Haiti, Iraq, and political transition”. It explores some of the “justice” issues involved in the very messy and risk-freighted post-election periods in Iraq and Haiti– and the role that “transitional justice” mechanisms can play (for good or ill) during such transitions…
Check it out.
One source I cite there is this report, from AP’s veteran Baghdad correspondent Hamza Hendawi, who writes that the trial is now having an unintended new unifying effect acorss sectarian lines inside Iraq– Iraqis are increasingly treating it as a sitcom! Including quotes from both a Shiite and Sunni, Hendawi writes, “Iraqis are united over one thing — the trial’s entertainment value.”
Oops, perhaps not quite what the US occupation authorities and their RCLO intended when they invested $138 million in this trial process.
Meanwhile, over at the “Grotian Moment” blog, which is group-authored by a large number of law professors, some of whom have played an active role in prearing and help organize the trial, giving “training” to its Iraqi judges in London, etc., there is an understandable degree of consternation at how things have been going there.
In this post, Michael Scharf, one of the judges’ trainers, explains how far he sees the trial falling short of the three “cardinal rules” that he, presumably, urged on them there. They were:
- Lesson #1: Keep [it] short.
Lesson #2: Keep it fair.
Lesson #3: Keep it under control.
David Crane, who was Chief Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone,wrote,
- I have a concern about an appearance of bias on the part of the new Chief Judge, currently presiding over this stage of the trial of Sadaam. An Iraqi Kurd, who lived in a village destroyed by Sadaam, a defendant, can give the appearance of just such a bias. This may bring a result that may appear to be unfair to this fledgling democracy. I am surprised that there has not been a stronger move to have the Chief Judge recused.
But most intriguing of all, on that blog past as on the one before it, there are some fairly lengthy comments from Saddam’s own preferred defense lawyer, the former Qatari Jusice Minister Dr. Najeeb al-Nuaimi.
The blogosphere really becomes a more and more interesting place, eh?
The Weissglas “diet”
In a move eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration’s redefinition of “torture” to the point that “anything’s okay so long as the person doesn’t die or suffer permanent organ failure”, Dov Weissglas, the longtime adviser to Israeli premiers is now talking about projecting Israel’s war against Hamas onto the bodies of Palestinian children and other noncombatants.
This, from today’s HaAretz:
- “It’s like a meeting with a dietician. We have to make them much thinner, but not enough to die,” said the prime minister’s adviser Dov Weissglas.
A couple of posts ago, I was getting into a discussion about the quite foreseeable effects of a cutoff of external aid to the OPTs, which I said could lead to actual deaths from starvation.
I still think that. But to even get into that argument, it seems to me, is to set the bar for acceptable human behavior far, far too low. (Like the Bush definition of “torture.”)
After getting into that argument, it became clear to me that we should oppose all attempts to intentionally– in pursuit of a political objective– place any barriers at all on the flourishing of noncombatant persons. Just “not forcing them to starve” is ways too low a bar to hold up.
In a sense, nearly all of the present corpus of international humanitarian law as it has developed since the 1850s aims at separating civilian populations and other noncombatants from the harmful consequences of warfare. Certainly, any deliberate attempt to entangle civilians in a political battle between two political leaderships– in the way that, for example, Shimon Peres did in his disastrous April 1996 military aggression against Lebanon– should be completely rejected and opposed.
This is exactly the same basic principle that underlies the prohibition on terror attacks against civilians… There too the aim is to use the deliberate infliction of harm on civilians to sway the decisions made by political leaders.
In both cases, this deliberate entanglement of civilians in a political/military battle should be completely opposed.
Shimon Peres may claim (as indeed, he did to me in person in March 1998) that he “didn’t intend” to kill the 120-plus old people who were killed by IDF shelling in Qana. Ah yes, but what he and the rest of the Israeli leadership clearly did intend– and we know this because they said it very publicly at the time– was to put such huge pressure on the civilian population of Lebanon that they would rise up and beg their leaders to ‘cry uncle’ to Israel.
And along the way there, in the course of that panic-driven uprooting of one-third of the population of Lebanon (which yes, was enitrely a part of Peres’s plan… he said he wanted them to be forced to go to Beirut), quite predictably old people died and babies and the sick and infirm died, purely because of the uprooting. That was entirely foreseeable, given the record established during tens of previous rounds of IDF-spurred mass uprootings in Lebanon. Then on top of those foreseeable deaths, given the amount of lethal firepower used in the assault, it was not surprising at all that 120 old people ended up getting killed in Qana…
So anyway, as I said, that 1996 attempt to entangle a neighboring population in a hard-fought political battle ended up disastrously for nearly everyone concerned… except Hizbullah, which at that point won nearly all of its long-fought battle for the liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation. (That victory didn’t fully unfold till 2000; but the strategic balance had tipped definitively in April 1996.)
See, here’s the thing about attempts to entangle civilian populations in violence and coercion: they very frequently backfire. I could argue this, certainly, about Peres’s pathetic and very harmful aggression in 1996. I think I could argue it convincingly about the terror campaign that Hamas and others waged against Israel’s civilian population since 1987… In both cases, the fact that the assault comes against civilians stiffens the reolve of civilians. It doesn’t cow them. (Maybe the Hamas leaders realized that. Maybe that’s why they agreed unilaterally to halt their operations against targets inside Israel back in February of last year?)
So where is Israel’s learning curve on this issue? Can’t Israel’s leaders, too, look back at the past (including April 1996 in Lebanon, but a lot of other occasions, too) and realize that this latest attempt to starve the Palestinians into submission is likewise doomed to fail?
That HaAretz piece goes on to say this:
- Some officials suggested separating the Palestinian population, which would continue receiving the aid, and its government. This was also the American administration’s position, it was said at the meeting.
Gosh, can these people really all be that stupid? But no, they’re not! Look at the next paragraph:
- Israeli National Security Council head Giora Eiland questioned whether separating the aid from the PA would be effective at all, since the overwhelming majority of Palestinian workers in the humanitarian organizations are Hamas people.
Exactly. (Readers might want to go back and check point #3 I made in this JWN post, Tuesday.)
… At a broader level, I must say I’m finding it a most enjoyable spectator sport, sitting here and seeing all these Israeli and US officials running round like headless chickens as they try to figure out how to respond to Hamas’s electoral victory. (All except Giora Eiland, that is. A very sensible man.)
Hamas’s diplomatic and leadership strategies unfold
Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal arrived in Turkey today, in a very smart move which is the first visit by any Hamas leader to a non-Arab country– one that is majority-Muslim but also a member of NATO and has many links with Israel.
(He’s also been invited to Moscow and may well go there straight from Turkey? Russia is, of course, a member of the so-called ‘Quartert’ that backed but totally failed to implement President Bush’s failed ‘Road Map” to peace, when was it? a century or two ago?– oh no, just in 2002… How time flies, eh?)
Meantime, in what is most likely a carefully planned move, back at present Hamas “home base” in Damascus, Meshaal’s second-in-command, Moussa Abu Marzook has publicly announced the movement’s next move in the current, very complex diplomatic dance. Let me reproduce that AP story, by Albert Aji, almost in full:
- A senior Hamas official called on the United States Thursday to remove the militant Islamic group from Washington’s list of terrorist organizations and to open a dialogue without preconditions.
Moussa Abu Marzook, deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, told The Associated Press the U.S. should deal with Hamas “as it is, and later there could be a dialogue…but there should be no preconditions.”
“Hamas is not the only side that wants peace. …All the Palestinians want peace because they are the only people whose rights have been encroached upon and who have been expelled from their lands,” Abu Marzouk said.
Abu Marzouk described as “absolutely unacceptable” Israel’s call for Hamas to start an unconditional dialogue with the Jewish state, saying “Hamas…was chosen by the Palestinian people…this is democracy.”
… Hamas, which has previously carried out a wave of suicide bombings that killed or wounded hundreds of Israeli’s, has not claimed involvement in any suicide attacks since February 2005.
The radical organization has hinted at a readiness for a long-term truce or some other accommodation with the Jewish state, short of recognition.
But the U.S. and the European Union have threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas forms a government without first recognizing Israel and renouncing violence.
Abu Marzouk, who has been in Egypt, Sudan and Qatar, said Hamas found “all-out support” in the three countries, which back “the choice of the Palestinian people and the budget of the Palestinian Authority as it was in the past.” He did not elaborate.
Actually, I’m, wondering whether AP writer Aji got that quite right, when he wrote, “Abu Marzouk described as ‘absolutely unacceptable’ Israel’s call for Hamas to start an unconditional dialogue with the Jewish state.”
So far as I know, Israel has never called on Hamas to join an “unconditional” dialogue?
And indeed, right now, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and the Defense Ministry itself have been calling for tightening the already stifling movement controls that the IDF/IOF maintains on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. And the bought-and-paid-for members of the US Congress have of course jumped into the collective-punishment act, voting to cut direct US aid to the Palestinian Authority, “unless Hamas renounces its call to destroy Israel.”
Hamas meanwhile looks looks as though it might be about to enact a winner-takes-all-ish political strategy at home, in the OPTs. They have named their candidates for Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). These are, respectively, university professors Aziz al-Duwaik, from the West Bank, and Ahmed Bahar, from Gaza.
That BBC story linked to there– like several other recent news stories– says that Hamas is likely to nominate one of its own people as prime minister. They say, Ismail Haniya, who headed the group’s national list of candidates in the recent elections.
- Update: Thursday afternoon: Yes, Hamas did apparently just nominate him.
I am not sure how wise a winner-takes-all-ish strategy is for them. (Hamas did, after all, get only 44% of the vote, so need to continue to show the Palestinian people that they will be acting in an inclusive and statesmanlike way rather than from triumphalism?) But anyway, Fateh has been quite adamant since the elections that it would not participate in a Hamas-led national unity government… And Fateh PA President Abbas might well have riled the Hamasniks when he steam-rollered a “clever” little constitutional-court resolution through the lame-duck PLC last week.
I wouldn’t have expected Hamas to nominate a Fathawi for PM, but earlier there was talk they would support a non-Hamas indpendent. Anyway, we’ll see who their nominee is, soon enough. I guess the PLC will hold its first session on Saturday. Most likely, given Mofaz’s recommendation to the Israeli cabinet re border-closings, this will be by videolink between Ramallah and Gaza. The Israelis did release one elected MP yesterday– a Hamasnik– but 13 other elected members of PLC, mincluding Marwan Barghouthi, remain in Israeli custody. Will they be able to participate via videolink, too, I wonder?
I guess when the PLC gets seated, it needs the Speaker and Deputy Speaker almost immediately. Then they have a further two weeks to name the PM. I think that is formally done by the President (Abbas). But obviously, if he names someone whom Hamas fails to support in the PLC, then the PLC wouldn’t even confirm the nomination, so they do all need to work together on this…
Gosh, isn’t it going to be an interesting time there in the next couple of weeks?
(Btw, if you’re interested in what’s been happening to the once-vaunted Fateh “Young Guard” sinc the Jan. 25 election, there’s a fairly interesting report on this issue here, from the “Arab Reform Bulletin.” It’s by Ben Fishman and Mohammad Yaghi, who write, “If the elites within Fatah were divided before the election, they are even more so in its aftermath and have yet to devise a strategy for moving forward… For Fatah to compete effectively with Hamas and lead Palestinian politics once again, it would need to develop a mechanism for handling disputes internally and find honest, respected, and popular leaders. Whether Fatah’s young guard can regroup and tackle these challenges depends entirely on its ability to solve the organizational and personal rivalries that became painfully evident during the electoral process. The very survival of secular Palestinian nationalism may hinge on whether such a transformation occurs.”
You can read my Dec. 30 musing on this latter question, here.)
How to deal with an uncomfortable vote
(1) You could not hold it.
(2) You could hold it, but make the conditions for campaigning and voting very unfair. (Egypt 2006, Florida 2000.)
(3) You could hold it and then toss out or try to burn many boxes full of your opponents’ ballots. (Haiti, right now.)
(4) You could hold it, and then tie the post-election government-formation process up in knots for several months (US-occupied Iraq, Jan. 2005 and currently– see today’s DDI counter here, now at ’62 days’.)
(5) You could hold it, and then threaten the duly elected leadership with “economic starvation” (occupied Palestine, currently.)
(6) You could hold it, and then send your goons in to beat up and terrorize the entire electorate (East Timor, 1999.)
(7) On the other hand, you could hold the election, allow for fair and equal campaigning and an orderly and transparent voting process, and then undertake to work in good faith, good order, and decent respect with whatever leadership emerges. How revolutionary is that?
(God help the peoples of Haiti, Palestine, and Iraq.)
Haiti discussed at Transitional Justice blog
Over at the Transitional Justice Forum blog, Joanna Quinn yesterday put up a post about the election-related developments in haiti. She also provides some useful background about the situation there. I’m looking forward to seeing more of her work on Haiti there, too, since she did her doctoral dissertation onthe ‘Politics of Apology in Haiti and Uganda.’
The Iraqi insurgency, analyzed
The International Crisis Group has a new report out today titled In their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency. It is based on an apparently close reading of the public communications– mainly web-based– of the insurgent groups.
The report contains a wealth of really interesting information and analysis and also contains some grounds for optimism regarding the achievability of a negotiated cessation of war in the country (See below.)
That link there is to a Word version of the 36-page report. There’s also a PDF version. If you’re on a slow connection, you can read at least the Executive Summary at this URL.
This look like a really well-done report. Its authors admit the limitations of looking only at the public utterances of the insurgent groups. But they state quite justifiably that there is indeed real value in looking at these communications closely– and they point out that this is something that the people in the Bush administration have notably failed to do. Indeed, the report says of the US administration that,
- Its descriptions have relied on gross approximations and crude categories (Saddamists, Islamo-fascists and the like) that bear only passing resemblance to reality.
The report-writers’ own analysis reveals, by contrast, the existence of:
- relatively few groups, less divided between nationalists and foreign jihadis than assumed, whose strategy and tactics have evolved (in response to U.S. actions and to maximise acceptance by Sunni Arabs), and whose confidence in defeating the occupation is rising. An anti-insurgency approach primarily focused on reducing the insurgents’ perceived legitimacy – rather than achieving their military destruction, decapitation and dislocation – is far more likely to succeed.
On pp.1-2, the report lists the four main groups as:
- * Tandhim al-Qa’ida fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (al-Qaeda’s Organisation in Mesopotamia),
* Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna (Partisans of the Sunna Army),
* Al-Jaysh al-Islami fil-’Iraq (the Islamic Army in Iraq), and
* Al-Jabha al-Islamiya lil-Muqawama al-’Iraqiya (the Islamic Front of the Iraqi Resistance), known by its initials as Jami’ (mosque or gathering).
I don’t have a lot of time to summarize this important and extremely heavily footnoted report. (Reading the footnotes themselves provides a rich education in what’s been going on in Iraq.) But I’ll do the best that I can.
The report describes three main periods– until now– in the tenor of these groups’ communications:
- * Phase 1, which apparently ended in mid-2004, they characterize as “Competitition”;
* Phase 2, mid-1004 through mid-2005, was “Consolidation”; and
* Phase 3, mid-2005 through the present, is “Confidence”.
Let me paste in what they say about the “Confidence” period (pp.13-14):
Is there an anti-Hamas plot?
Steve Erlanger has an important
piece
in today’s NYT about joint US-Israeli governmental plotting to overthrow
the new leadership that was recently freely elected by voters in (still-occupied)
Palestine.
We should all be quite clear that this heinous, anti-democratic plotting
should be halted immediately.
Here’s Erlanger’s lead:
The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize
the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail
and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western
diplomats.The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international
connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud
Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians
will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a
reformed and chastened Fatah movement.
Erlanger quotes Israeli Foreign Ministry flack Mark Regev as denying the
existence of any such plan. (What’s the guy going to say, anyway?)
So “the plan”– as described to the well-connected Erlanger by, let’s repeat,
more than one Israeli official and more than one Western (ok, make that American)
diplomat– is to impoverish the Palestinians even more, and squeeze them even
more through Israel’s existing systems of movement controls, to the point
where either Hamas ‘cries uncle’ and bows to Israel’s demands that it ” recognize
Israel’s right to exist, forswear violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli
agreements” — or, a new revivified Fateh will come along, riding on a wave
of popular discontent with the general impoverishment, demand a new election,
and sweep back to victory…
I can’t even begin to tell you on how many points this totally ignorant
and idiotic “plan” is doomed to fail. (Okay, shortly I’ll start to
enumerate them.) But first, just reflect for a moment on the sheer,
colonial-style chutzpah of these plotters!
Re ignorance, I see that up at the top of the story Erlanger writes:
The officials also argue that a close look at the election results
shows that Hamas won a smaller mandate than previously understood.
Like, duh!!! I was writing in the CSM
here,
on January 31, that despite its huge majority in terms of seats, Hamas had
only gotten 44% of the actual popular vote… And I had written about
that even earlier, on JWN. But it takes these “officials” this long
to suddenly “understand” this?
Also, Hamas got 44% of the vote in a strong turnout of– was it around 75%
of eligible voters? (= 33% of eligible voters who voted for them.) And
George W. Bush won in 2004 with just over 50% of a turnout of 60% (= 30%
of eligible voters.) In both cases, the electoral system used allowed
the frontrunner to virtually “take all”.
If we live in a “rule of law world” where there is a single rule for everyone,
is the US saying that it’s okay to “take down” Hamas because it won support
from only a minority of eligible voters…. And therefore, it should
be equally legitimate to do this in the US, too? Right?
Erlanger also has this quote from “a senior Western diplomat” (= journo-speak
for the local US ambassador):
“The point is to put this choice on Hamas’s shoulders… If
they make the wrong choice, all the options lead in a bad direction.”
Okay, let’s just move beyond the fact that this plan is wrong, arrogant,
extremely coercive, actually and quite predictably lethal to a number
of its targets, anti-democratic, and colonialistic…. Here’s why it
won’t work: