Life and death in Baghdad

I just want to draw a little attention to this obituary of a remarkably talented Iraqi geophysicist called Wissam al-Hashimi, who was abducted and murdered in Baghdad earlier this year. Thanks to JWN commenter Salah for contibuting the link to this piece.
Dr. Hashimi was a former Vice-President of the International Union of Geological Sciences. I’m writing about it here because the story of Dr. Hashimi’s life and death can stand as an example for the fate of the literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of well-trained Iraqi professional men and women who have lost their lives to violence in the “New”, i.e. post-Saddam, Iraq. (Here is a portal to some information about the attacks on Iraqi academics over the past couple of years.)
The writer of the obituary of Dr. Hashimi that’s linked to above is John Aron, the Web Manager for IUGS. He writes:

    I came to know Wissam beginning in 1997, after he was elected a Vice-President of the IUGS. I saw him regularly over the six years that he served in that position. He impressed all of his IUGS colleagues with the quality of his preparation for the annual meetings of the Executive Committee, and with the honest, forthright, and thoughtful counsel that he offered at those meetings. Equally admirable, however, was the enormous personal effort required for him to attend those meetings, each of which always began and ended with a frequently dangerous 12-hour trip by bus or taxi from his home in Baghdad to and from Amman, Jordan, his closest connection to an international airline.
    Over the years of our association, I came to appreciate and admire his integrity and deep commitment to science, especially to international scientific activities. Despite the professional isolation and other obvious difficulties of pursuing his career while living in Iraq, his focus, drive, and enthusiasm were remarkable; he was undaunted by the challenges he faced. He was a fine scientist who could have forged a notable career in any country of his choosing. But Iraq was his homeland, and he was determined to serve there.
    Since 2002, when his IUGS term ended, we carried on an active e-mail correspondence. Some was personal or was related to professional matters such as helping him to acquire needed reference materials, or helping him to contact other scientists in whose work he was interested, or publicizing scientific meetings that he was instrumental in organizing in Iraq or elsewhere in the middle East. Not surprising, however, is that some of our correspondence was political in nature, especially leading up to and during the current war in Iraq. Wissam was an avid student of U.S. politics, which interest I helped to advance by regularly sending him cogent articles collected from electronic and print media from the U.S. and around the world. He usually responded, sometimes at great length, with detailed comments and analysis based on his perspective and first-hand experiences in Iraq. His observations were especially interesting, because they frequently differed radically from published accounts. Wissam despaired at the wanton death and needless destruction inflicted on his country in the current conflict. He took satisfaction, however, from the fact that most of his scientific colleagues, including Americans, supported him and his country in their distress.
    Along with other close colleagues, I last saw Wissam in August 2004 in Florence, Italy, at the 32nd IGC. There he presented two papers and co-chaired a session on dolomitization and dedolomitization. He was also the Iraqi representative to the Mediterranean Consortium of the Congress. We were pleased to see him looking well, and, as ever, actively engaged with scientific pursuits. We enjoyed visiting with him, sharing meals, and exchanging personal reflections on matters of science, politics, our families, and life.
    In one of his messages to me Wissam commented that the neighborhood where he lived was very dangerous, and he feared for his life and the safety of his family. As a precaution, he took a different route to work every day. Tragically, that strategy ultimately failed him. Ironically, only two days before receiving word of his death, I expressed to mutual friends my concern about his welfare because my messages to him had gone unanswered for almost three weeks. Now we know why. The geological community has lost a dedicated scientist and a fine and very decent man. Worse, I lost a good friend.

Hashimi was born in Baghdad. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Baghdad in 1965 and his Ph.D from the University of Newcastle, in England, in 1972. If you read the whole obituary you can learn about his fine professional achievements, and the many contributions he made to the development of the geological sciences in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world.
Aron writes this about the manner of his death:

    His daughter, Tara, reports that he was kidnapped early in the morning of August 24 while on his way to work. The ransom demanded by his abductors was paid by his family, but to no avail. He died of two bullet wounds to his head. Because his identification was taken from him, it took his family two weeks to find his body in a Baghdad hospital.

Condolences to Tara al-Hashimi and all Iraqis who have lost loved ones through violence.

CSM column on diplomacy in Iraq

Here is the column of mine that ran in the CSM on Thursday. (Also, here).
Sorry it took me so long to post that. I’ve been really busy.
Alert JWN readers will note that the column is much gentler on Zal Khalilzad than what i generally write here. I still don’t think the guy has become a Quaker pacifist and philanthropist. (Though there’s still time, Zal!) But on reflection I did conclude that at least pursuing a policy of negotiations inside Iraq is a lot better than continuing to to try to rely solely on military means to resolve Washington’s problems in Baghdad. And if, as a result, there’s an easing of the broader tensions between Washington and Iran, then so very much the better.
And I wanted to recognize that in the column.
What I didn’t have space for there was to express my deep, deep reservations about much of the rest of the content of what Khalilzad and Gen. Casey are doing inside Iraq. They are certainly far from having given up their reliance on military force, and their use of pernicious divide-and-rule tactics, altogether.
Also, I didn’t say anything about the grave doubts I have about the tactics used by many other parties inside Iraq, too. That includes militants from all three of the big local population groups (including those inside and outside the present government), as well as the government of Iran.
I don’t believe any of these parties has yet become Gandhian angels! But still– and this is a centrally important point– it is always better to find ways to de-escalate violence and open up the path for negotiations, rather than not to… Especially with people you disagree with!
That was the point I wanted to get across.

Achcar on important Sadrist initiative

(I see that Juan Cole also has this intriguing Gilbert Achcar report on his blog today. But I think it’s significant enough to also put the whole text here. Its significance lies in the evidence it presents of the existence of a non-marginalizable “nationalist” trend within today’s Iraqi politics– even if, as it seems, that nationalism seems in this gathering to have been mainly of the “Arab Iraqi” rather than “pan-Iraqi” variety. Achcar notes that there seems to have been a sizeable media blackout of the conference in question. One can speculate whether this was motivated more by the anti-Moqtada feelings of the US military paymasters of much of the present Iraqi media, or by these paymasters’ desire to accentuate the “sectarianism” of Iraqi politics while playing down evidence of robust trans-sectarian initiatives like this one… Anyway, thanks once again to Gilbert for this! ~HC)

A PAN-IRAQI PACT
ON MUQTADA AL-SADR’S INITIATIVE

Gilbert Achcar

December 9, 2005

As part of his
effort to influence the political forces in Iraq prior to the forthcoming
parliamentary election, at the end of November Muqtada al-Sadr had his supporters
distribute the draft of a “Pact of Honor,” and called on Iraqi parties to
discuss and collectively adopt it at a conference to be organized before
the election.

This conference
was actually held on Thursday, December 8, in al-Kadhimiya (North of Baghdad).
Despite extensive search, I found it only reported in a relatively short
article in today’s Al-Hayat and
in dispatches from the National Iraqi News Agency (NINA). There is legitimate
ground to suspect that this media blackout has political significance; indeed
most initiatives by the Sadrist current are hardly reported by the dominant
media, even when they consist of important mass demonstrations (like those
organized yesterday in Southern Iraq against British troops).

In the case of
the recent conference, the vast array of forces that were represented and
that signed the “Pact of Honor” is in itself already worthy of attention.
Aside from the Sadrists, chiefly represented by their MPs, those represented
and who signed the document included: SCIRI, al-Daawa (al-Jaafari’s personal
representative even apologized in his name for his absence due to his traveling
outside of Iraq), and the Iraqi Concord Front (the major Sunni electoral alliance
in the forthcoming election), to name but the most prominent of a long list
of organizations, along with several tribal chiefs, unions and other social
associations, members of the De-Ba’athification Committee and a few government
officials. Ahmad Chalabi — who definitely deserves to be called “The Transformer”
— attended in person and signed the document in the name of his group. It
seems that the Association of Muslim Scholars did not attend, as its name
is not mentioned in any of the two sources.

According to the
reports, the “Pact of Honor” that was adopted consists of 14 points, among
which the following demands and agreements are the most important (the sentences
in quotation marks are translated from the document as quoted in the reports):



·

“withdrawal of the occupiers and setting of an objective timetable for their
withdrawal from Iraq”; “elimination of all the consequences of their presence,
including any bases for them in the country, while working seriously for
the building of [Iraqi] security institutions and military forces within
a defined schedule”;


·

suppression of the legal immunity of occupation troops, a demand coming with
the condemnation of their practices against civilians and their breach of
human rights;


·

categorical rejection of the establishment of any relations with Israel;


·

“resistance is a legitimate right of all peoples, but terrorism does not
represent legitimate resistance”; “we condemn terrorism and acts of violence,
killing, abducting and expulsion aimed at innocent citizens for sectarian
reasons”;


·

“to activate the de-Ba’athification law and to consider that the Ba’ath party
is a terrorist organization for all the tyranny it brought on the oppressed
sons of Iraq, and to speed up the trial of overthrown president Saddam Hussein
and the pillars of his regime”;


·

“to postpone the implementation of the disputed
principle of federalism and to respect the people’s opinion about it.”

The conference
established a committee that is responsible for following up the implementation
of the resolutions and reporting on it after six months.

If anything, the
conference was a testimony to the increasing importance of the Sadrist current.
As for the actual implementation of its resolutions, it will greatly depend
on the pressure that the same current will be able to exert after the forthcoming
election, if the United Iraqi Alliance — of which the Sadrists are a major
pillar on a par with SCIRI — succeeds in getting a commanding position in
the next National Assembly.

Perils of the Inquisition

The New York Times’s Douglas Jehl has an important piece in today’s paper that establishes a direct link between the ongoing global furore over the Bush administration’s transnational transportation and rendition of detainees for the purpose of coercing “confessions” and the earlier, long-disproven accusations of Iraqi-Qaeda links that were used to help “justify” the launching of the disastrous US invasion of Iraq.
Jehl’s piece is about the treatment of Qaeda high-up Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured by the US forces in Afghanistan in November 2001. It is based on disclosures from “current and former [US] government officials” whom he does not name. (I would guess, leaks from disaffected CIA and DIA officials?)
He writes:

    The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.
    The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration’s heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi’s accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.
    The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

The whole of Jehl’s piece is worth reading (registration required, but no payment.) But what it principally underlines for me– yet again!– is the fact that, if what you’re after is solid, actionable information, then the use of torture and other forms of coercive interrogations is not only worthless but actually counter-productive.
In Egypt, “Libi” (and this is, of course, just the guy’s Qaeda-style nom-de-guerre, indicating that he comes from Libya) was coerced or tortured to the point that he told his interrogators what they wanted to hear. That was all that happened. He had apparently “disclosed” a few items about Iraq and al-Qaeda while he was still in US/CIA custody in Afghanistan. But not enough for what the masters of the “GWOT” back in Washington (i.e. Cheney and Rumsfeld) wanted to hear. So maybe there’d been some resistance from the CIA field officers to the idea of torturing the guy any further so they could get more of what they wanted from him?
It is not clear to me where in the US government the idea of “rendering” him to the Egyptians came from; but I would certainly guess, from the highest levels (i.e. Cheney and Rumsfeld).
So off he was sent. Human Rights watch has a disturbing little report about the kinds of things the Egyptian security services were doing to other uspects around that time. (And the subjects of that report even had some “official” Swedish interest in their cases, which probably meant the Egyptians were careful not to do their very worst to them… The kind of “interest” that the US government had in Libi’s case was almost the complete opposite of that, however.)
Altogether, you cannot argue that Cheney and Rumsfeld “didn’t know” what would happen to Libi in Egypt.
Jehl writes of the practice of rendition that,

    American officials including Ms. Rice have defended the practice, saying it draws on language and cultural expertise of American allies, particularly in the Middle East, and provides an important tool for interrogation. They have said that the United States carries out the renditions only after obtaining explicit assurances from the receiving countries that the prisoners will not be tortured.

(If you believe that latter claim, or if you would believe any such “assurances” as those mentioned therein, then I have a nice little piece of prime real estate in downtown New Orleans I’d like to sell to you… )
According to Jehl’s account, Libi was not returned to US custody till February 2003, when he was transferred to Gitmo. “His current location is not known.” Jehl also writes that “He withdrew his claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda in January 2004.” (Does anyone have a contemporary reference or link to news of that retraction, by the way? How was he able to communicate it, I wonder? And to whom? I’m assuming not to the general public, since none of the top Qaeda suspects in US custody has yet been able to speak to anyone but interrogators and US security officials.) Anyway, I guess Libi made his retraction to subsequent rounds of interrogators/handlers; and for some reason it seemed credible to them. But he was not able to transmit to the outside world at that time his further claim that his earlier accusations against Saddam had been made to interrogators in Egypt, not US interrogators.
The Americans who knew about Libi’s case back in early 2002 presumably knew full well that these accusations had been made only under the pressure Libi was getting from his Egyptian interrogators. So they at least knew the worthlessness of it.
Jehl writes:

    A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report issued in February 2002 that expressed skepticism about Mr. Libi’s credibility on questions related to Iraq and Al Qaeda was based in part on the knowledge that he was no longer in American custody when he made the detailed statements, and that he might have been subjected to harsh treatment, the officials said. They said the C.I.A.’s decision to withdraw the intelligence based on Mr. Libi’s claims had been made because of his later assertions, beginning in January 2004, that he had fabricated them to obtain better treatment from his captors.

You could read this as, in part, a story about differing analyses between these two bodies, the DIA (i.e. the professional military intel) and the CIA. So the DIA had started expressing skpeticism about Libi’s accusations (in intra-administration discussions, but still not to the tax-paying public!) as early as February 2002; though it took the CIA another two years– oh, and there was a war along the way there, did I mention that?– to join them.
In the interim, Libi’s accusations about a strong Qaeda-Iraq link were used as a major pillar in the Cheney administration’s arguments for launching the war, as Jehl notes:

    In statements before the war, and without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and other officials repeatedly cited the information provided by Mr. Libi as “credible” evidence that Iraq was training Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.”

Jehl writes, too, that Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has recently been trying to get some of the relevant internal reports made public. About three or four years too late there, I would say. But I suppose it’s better to see some faint glimmerings of the Dems acting a tiny little bit like an opposition party even very, very belatedly, as opposed to never?
Did I mention that there was a war in the interim?
This is all so tragic and depressing. Are these people (including the Democrats as well as the Republicans as well as all the people who run the US national-security behemoth) totally oblivious to the lessons of history? Torture doesn’t work!
In fact, it’s worse than that: Using torture can also lead you into major disasters.
These guys– all of ’em– should be kicked out of office. Maybe they could find jobs in some really seedy provincial comedy theaters doing endless reruns of Monty Python’s satirical sketch, “The Spanish Inquisition”. Especially this part, where the three cardinals first burst into the suburban living-room…

    Cardinal Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. Our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…. Our *four*…no… *Amongst* our weapons…. Amongst our weaponry…are such elements as fear, surprise….

This part of the sketch seems more searingly apposite with every day that passes.
But the reality, as we know, is far from funny. We– the Americans, the Iraqis, and the whole world– were jerked into a quite unjustified war on the basis of allegations against the Saddam Hussein government that were known by many of those who voiced them to have been, effectively, fabricated from just about nothing. Along the way, the rights of thousands of detainees held by the US and allied governments have been violated in the most atrocious way. The UN and most of what it stands for has been shredded, and will take years to recover. The US has just about lost all of the “moral standing” it once had in the world (and it/we may never recover all of that.) With the US national-security behemoth occupied in managing the chaotic situation in Iraq, al-Qaeda has been able to re-group, to consolidate its control over some areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to launch numerous further mass-terrorism attacks in different countries…
And worst of all, the whole proud nation of Iraq has been pulverized by war and the state machinery that used to assure the provision of basic services to most Iraqi citizens has all been dismantled.
Stop the torture! Stop it now. Stop covering up for it. Stop excusing it. Put into place a complete zero-tolerance policy from now on. Let’s rejoin the human race and solve our remaining problems using ways that actually work.

CPT abductees: still praying

Lauri Perman, who’s the presiding clerk of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), of which my Quaker Meeting is a part, is asking people to hold the four CPT abductees “in the Light” every day at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. (That’s Quaker lingo for “pray for them.”) She is also asking us to hold in the Light their abductors and all those who are working for their release.
Here is a collection of Arabic-language materials about the abductees and the work the CPT has been doing in Iraq, and appeals for the release of the four.
Here is the CPT’ website’s main page on the abductions.
Here is a new blog where you can post (as comments) message of support for the abductees’ families.

The US and Iran in Iraq

I see that Boston Review has now posted on their website the text of an article by veteran MIT security-affairs professor Barry Posen, titled “Exit Strategy”. This is one of those pieces for which BR has solicited “responses” from a range of other commentators… Among them, as it happens, myself. You can find the whole list of those contributing at the top of the page there.
Well, I sent my editors at BR my response piece yesterday, and I guess I shouldn’t steal their fire by posting it here before they release it. I will just note here, though, that one of the most damaging flaws I find in Posen’s analysis is his identification of Iran as being one of those powers that needs to be deterred from acting against the new Iraqi government…
It has been clear to me for sometime now that the present, US-nurtured political order inside Iraq is– just like any foreseeable successor regime that may emerge in Baghdad after the dec. 15 elections– one that the mullahs’ regime in Tehran is extremely happy with.
So why would they seek to undermine it?
This significant failure of Posen’s diagnosis then leads him to make some very flawed policy recommendations. (His essay has other flaws, from my perspective, as well. For example, he seems to see it as only right and natural that everyone else in the world should recognize and accommodate to a hegemonic US role in the Persian/Arabian Gulf… )
Anyway, you can read my whole response on the BR website soon, I hope.
Meanwhile, on this question of the US’s relations with Iran over the ever-developing situation inside Iraq, Juan Cole pointed me to an interesting piece in today Financial Times, which reports what the FT’s writers describe as a “mixed response” coming from Iranian officials to Washington’s recent decision to authorize Amb. Zal Khalilzad to speak to his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad about common concerns in Iraq.
FT reporters Roula Khalaf and Gareth Smyth write this:

    Hamid-Reza Asefi, the [Iranian] foreign ministry spokesman, said yesterday Tehran saw “no need” to discuss Iraq with the US, and Ali Larijani, the top security official, on Saturday dismissed the idea as “propaganda”.
    But Mohammad-Reza Bagheri, deputy foreign minister, said that while “the general instructions are not to talk to Americans”, Tehran could consider the US initiative.
    “We’ll think about it,” he said, after giving a speech to the Gulf Dialogue, a conference in Bahrain organised by London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Juan characterizes this Iranian position this way: “After a showy refusal to talk to the Americans about Iraq by high Iranian officials, lower-level middle managers are now saying that Iran will ‘think about’ such contacts.”
I think that’s a misleading characterization of what’s in the FT report. Bagheri is, after all, a deputy foreign minister, not a “lower-level middle manager.” Neither he, nor Asefi, nor Larijani is going to say anything on such a sensitive subject that goes outside the bounds of what is permitted by the regime leadership. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that the US overture to Teheran is one that has intrigued the rulers there, and to which they seem slowly starting to fashion a cautiously semi-positive response.
Some of the other language that Bagheri used at the IISS conference seems to back this up:

    In his address to an audience including US civilian and military officials, Mr Bagheri said Iran had been bitterly disappointed by its inclusion in President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” despite its active co-operation with Washington in Afghanistan over the toppling of the Taliban regime.
    He said Tehran was nonetheless willing to help stabilise Iraq – without specifying how – and that it expected a “sincere” reaction to its role.
    After issuing a general call for the removal of foreign troops from the Gulf, where the US has military bases, Mr Bagheri referred to the American military presence in Iraq, saying Iran backed a “gradual” pull-out.

Ha! Only a ‘gradual’ pullout there, indeed?
Then, there is this, contributed presumably by Gareth Smyth, who was reporting from Teheran–

    A senior official in Tehran considered a regime insider said he believed Iran had already offered intelligence co-operation in regard to Iraq in return for Washington easing the pressure over Iran’s nuclear programme, most clearly in not pressing last month’s meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Tehran to the UN Security Council.
    “This has been going on for a couple of months,” he said. “There seems to be co-ordination against al-Qaeda, and you will notice that attacks against the British in southern Iraq [attributed to Shia militants] have reduced. In return, US agitation over the nuclear issue has diminished.”
    The official said there was co-operation despite the belligerent rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran’s fundamentalist president, who he said had “very little role” in security policy.

Fascinating stuff, huh? You can almost hear the neocons’ agendas regarding Iran toppling like a house of cards. (Or with the satisfying clack-clack of a tumbling row of dominos?) The anti-Teheran hawks in Israel and Washington must be grinding their teeth in despair.
Meanwhile, you will note in Barry Posen’s piece that he argues that:

    The interest of the United States in oil is not to control it in order to affect price or gain profit but to ensure that potential adversaries do not control it and use the profits and power to harm others. It is also to ensure that oil reliably finds its way to market. Thus, the United States acts to prevent the consolidation of oil production [in the Gulf region] under the control of one or two states…

H’mmm. That’s a classic statement of the “realist” view of the value of US hegemony. But wait. Extensive Iranian influence over the oil-producing portions of southern Iraq sure sounds like the “consolidation of Gulf oil production under the control of one or two states” to me.
(You might want to check out my December 2003 “Geopolitics of the Gulf 201” or its March 2003 predecessor “ditto, 101” for some background there.)

No tears for you, Ahmad Chalabi

The most disappointed man this weekend in Iraq (or Paris, or wherever he is right now) must be Ahmad Chalabi. As I wrote here on November 23, when three Iraqi pols came to do some pre-election bootlicking in the imperial capital, Washington, in mid-November, each of them was trying to “sell” himself as the empire’s favored candidate in a different way:

    If [Iyad] Allawi’s shtick to the Bushites is that he’s a determined secularist, and [SCIRI pol Adel] Abdul-Mahdi’s that he is an authentice voice of Shiite Iraqis, then Chalabi’s is that he can cover both these bases, and more..

But he was jumping the gun a bit, wasn’t he? The statement that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani distributed yesterday spelled out that those who follow his spiritual leadership– that is, apparently, the vast majority of that 60-plus percent of Iraqis who are Shiites– should not split their community’s vote in the December 15 election…. And therefore– though he had no need to spell this out explicitly– they should vote for the “United Iraqi Alliance”, the same Shiite mega-list that won last January’s elections.
Which sinks the chances for Chalabi’s “List 569”.
The most interesting politics inside Iraq will now be taking place within the UIA’s coalition. Until now, the Islamic Daawa Party has been top dog there. But their leader, Ibrahim Jaafari, has kind of bombed politically (and yes, indeed, also “bombed” opponents, militarily– but that’s another issue) during his few months’ term as Iraq’s extremely nominal “transitional prime minister”. The hungry hounds of the apparently better organized Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq have very evidently been snapping at his heels. Hence, for example, SCIRI pol Adel Abdul-Mahdi’s recent visit to DC.
In addition, Moqtada Sadr has joined the UIA morw wholeheartedly than he did back in January.
But I’m definitely not going to sit around crying over Chalabi’s disappointment. What a shyster. It’s past time that the citizenries of Jordan, the US, and Iraq– all of whom have been majorly taken for a ride by this con-man– started demanding accountability and our money back from him!

On human equality

I’ve been thinking a little more about what it would really mean if we were all serious about saying (as the Founding Fathers of the US said) that all “men”– for which, read “all humans”– are created equal, and are endowed equally with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I was just reading the 2005 edition of the UN development Program’s Human Development Report. Table 14 at the back there tells us that the annual Gross Domestic Product of the whole world is US$36.06 trillion– or,if you count something called “Purchasing Power Parity dollars”it comes to PPP$51.15 trillion. (These are figures for 2003.)
Given a world population of just over 6.3 billion souls, the global GDP per capita comes to US$5,801, or PPP$8,229. That is the value of all the goods and services produced in the world in a year (now, not changed much from 2003.)
So if your household’s income is less than PPP$8,229 per capita, then you’re getting the short end of the economic stick, globally speaking. If it is more, then you’re a person of privilege.
Okay, I’m a person of privilege.
In 2003, the GDP per capita in the US came to PPP$37,562. Of course, we know it is very unevenly distributed within the US. (Indeed, Table 15 tells us that the richest 10% of Americans enjoy 29.9% of the nation’s income or consumption; and the proportion between the income enjoyed by the richest 10% to that enjoyed by the poorest 10% is 15.9 to 1, by far the highest for any of the OECD countries.)
By contrast, the average GDP per capita in the 32 countries listed in the Report as being of “Low human development”– and I hope to heck there’s no-one out there reading this who takes this to be a moral judgment??– is just PPP$1,046. That is, just 2.78% of the per-capita PPP GDP within the US.
So, let’s go back 13 years, to 1990. That year, according to the 1993 Human Development Report, the real GDP per capita in the US was PPP$21,449 (Table 1). In the countries described as “least developed” it was PPP$740, or 3.45% of what it was in the US.
Clearly, gaps are getting wider.
Clearly, too, these gaps in income, which accumulate year after year after year into ever larger gaps in wealth, leave the US and other rich countries– some of which, I should note, have a slightly higher per-capita GDP than the US, though these are much smaller countries– but the ever accumulating gaps in wealth between the uber-rich and the uber-poor leave the rich countries much, much more capable of intervening economically in the affairs of the poorest countries… And they (we) do this in many ways, including by keep the international trade rules firmly stacked against poor-country producers of most primary goods.
In terms of the “ability to intervene economically”, too, I think the “raw” US$ figures of per-capita GDP in any country are a stronger indicator of their relative susceptibility to US intervention than the PPPS figures. For example, if a gringo goes into any of the many low-income countries where the cost of living is relatively low (in dollar terms), then he or she can exert a lot more influence by waving $100 around there than s/he could get by doing the same in a (much more expensive) West European country.
… Well, deeply embedded and continuing economic inequalities are only dimension of the present inequalities among the world’s peoples. But I’ve been thinking about human equality/inequlity quite a lot over recent months (okay, most of my life, to be truthful.) Some years ago, when I was toying with the idea of doing a Ph.D. in philosophical ethics, I took a course that involved a lot of close reading in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Rawls, who died a couple of years ago, was a leading icon of US political philosophy. He was a longtime Harvard prof, and Theory of Justice was his best-known work by far.
Back when I was reading it 8 years or so ago, I found it intriguing, but I disagreed fairly strongly with some of his general dispositions; mostly, I should say, with his ontology. His view of “the human condition” was very much in the tradition of the English empiricists, those dear old (always unmarried) Anglican clergymen like Locke, Hobbes etc who viewed “men”– for such was the subject of their enquiry– as quintessentially individualistic, self-generating, and self-sufficient beings. (I guess they never stopped to speculate about the ontological standing of the women who must have washed their socks for them, and fed them– let alone the mothers whose tireless labor had raised them from infancy and endowed them with all the basic tools of the language by which they later made their living… Oh well.)
Myself, I always was much more of a feminist communitarian. I love Seyla Ben-Habib’s takedowns of Hobbes and Locke; Margaret Walker, Sara Ruddick, and all those other feminist philosophers whose works are notably NOT taught in philsophy departments dominated by a rigidly “analytical” approach.
So anyway, I had a bunch of criticisms of Rawls that I argued out in various forms at the time. But now, looking back, I think maybe it’s time to reconnect with a couple of his key insights, and try to bring them more to life within the US discourse.
He centers his argument about the nature of “justice” around a clever educational device that he calls the “veil of ignorance.” Basically, he says that if you try to imagine what a just social order might look like, you should imagine that all the people in the world encounter each other in an initial deliberation in which they don’t know the details of their own social situation. So since you don’t know, in this thought experiment, whether you might be male or female, rich or poor, black-skinned or white-skinned, able-bodied or disabled, you would want to minimize your chances of getting “the short end of the stick” by legislating some kind of social order in which, regardless of your condition, your interests would not be totally ignored… and on this basis, a generally “fair” and perhaps even somewhat “caring” social order would emerge.
Nearly all of this argument was set within a national community. I don’t recall whether he stated this, or whether it was strongly implied, instead. Toward the very end of his life, Rawls wrote a book called, I think, “The Law of Nations” in which he attempted to use a similar device to construct some form of a “world order”. But I don’t think anyone took that latter work, which was really poorly argued and disorganized, very seriously.
Maybe we could do a Rawlsian thought experiment at the global level, though? Not– as Rawls had done in the Law of Nations, by considering the basic “negotiating unit” to be each nation, but taking it as being each person in the world…. If you had a real chance that, after the removal of the “veil of ignarance” you might indeed find yourself to be a Guatemalan subsistence farmer or a disabled Congolese child… then how would you order the world and its priorities?
I wonder how people in rich, secure western countries would respond when invited seriously to take part in such a thought experiment. I know Oxfam and similar organizations do things like dinners where people are randomly assigned a heaping plate, or a half-empty plate, or a plate with just a few grains of old rice on it, and then they use that to start talking about global economic inequalities…
But I think it’s probably still true that most westerners (a) don’t really like to think much about things like that, (b) don’t even know that much about the lives of people in low-income countries that they could start to really even imagine what it would be like to be one of them, and (c) might have at the back of their minds some version of the Calvinist view that people who have a lot of worldly goods somehow “deserve” to have them, while people who do not, somehow “deserve” not to.
.. Well, I realize I’m not coming to any answers here. But still, I think it’s really important as we approach the next phase of global affairs, to start thinking about what a world order truly based on the principle of human equality would or should look like. There are so many dimensions of this issue! Stay tuned…

Gulf of Tonkin redux, redux

Today, I received an email from Tom Cleaver of “That’s Another Fine Mess” who had wanted to post a comment on my Oct. 31 post about the emergence of new evidence about the exaggeration or downright faking of the (second) of the 1964 “incidents” in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Tom was an on-watch Petty Officer on the admiral’s staff aboard the “Pine Island” when the USS Maddox reported it had been fired on that night…
The software here closes down the Comments boards after some period of time. So Tom couldn’t post his comment. I’ll paste it in in full, just below.
But before I move over to the intriguing contents of his email, I’ll tell you that the (non-governmental) National Security Archive organization has a fine new portal to the Gulf-of-Tonkin-related documents that have finally been declassified over the past few days. If you go there, you can even read the previously classified article on SIGINT aspects of the GoT story, written by the intel agencies’ in-house historian Robert Hanyok. So now you can read Hanyok’s article, read Tom Cleaver’s criticism of his work, and decide for yourself…
Here, anyway, was Tom’s email:

    I was just referred to your site where you comment about the Tonkin Gulf incident and the NSA historian saying the “intelligence was flawed.”
    I was going to post the following there, but it wasn’t allowed. I thought you might be interested with this information.
    Tom Cleaver
    Not only was there not an attack on August 4, there were no attacks on the Maddox ever in August 1964. The Tonkin Gulf “incident” never happened.
    In 1966, the former Chief Sonarman of the Maddox told an officer I served with on the staff of Commander Patrol Forces 7th Fleet (the operational command of the Maddox and Turner Joy) that “there were never any torpedoes in the water on the first night.” It happens that, while whales and schools of fish in particular formations can be mistaken for submarines, there is no “natural” sound in the water like a torpedo. It is unmistakeable. There were no North Vietnamese torpedo boats anywhere near the Maddox, which was actually there to perform fire support for a South Vietnamese “34-Alpha” commando raid on Hon Me Island (a bit of geography that is always conveniently not shown on any US maps of the “incident”).
    On August 4, the Maddox and Turner Joy only managed to not sink each other when a Fire Controlman 3rd class in the control tower of the Maddox refused to open fire on the grounds that “the only target I have is the Turner Joy.” He was later court-martialed for “failure to obey a direct order” and reduced in rank. Lt (jg) Fred Gardner, the assistant gunnery officer on the Turner Joy (and later one of the founders of the GI antiwar movement), managed to convince his commanding officer that the only target they had was the Maddox. Had a junior officer and a junior enlisted man not stuck to their guns, so the guns remained stuck in the non-firing position, one would have sunk the other (if not mutually) and things would have been very different.
    The entire Tonkin Gulf “incident” was a lie from beginning to end, and if some moron “historian” from the NSA is too stupid to figure out that August 2 was as phony as August 4, then it’s no wonder the only “historian” work he could get was this “job.”
    I say all this because I was there as a member of the staff of the drunken old fool of an “Admiral” who was supposed to be in charge of this.

Another lousy war over a bunch of made-up accusations, eh?
(At lunch today, George Packer said one of the differences between the US in Vietnam and the US in Iraq is that actually, in Vietnam, the stakes turned out not to be so huge. “The US was able to walk away and lick its wounds, and not suffer too much.” But in Iraq, he argued, the stakes are much higher– “because Iraq is a much more important country on the global scene than Vietnam.” I agree with that. I agree too with the implication of what George was arguing, namely that in withdrawing from Iraq the US won’t simply be able to walk away and lick its wounds and act as if nothing too big had happened… Indeed not. In the aftermath of a US withdrawal from Iraq, we need to recognize that the whole structure of the relationship between the US and the other 96% of the world’s people has to be radically restructured. We should not carry on as if it’ll be “US hegemony, as usual” the day after the withdrawal… Anyway, why would we want that?)

Around town here

So okay, George Packer was here in Charlottesville today. I had lunch with him. Also miriam cooke. I had a good talk over coffee with her this afternoon.
I hadn’t met miriam before, though she and I have scads of friends in common. We swapped various tales about Oxford, Beirut in the “good old days”, Lebanese former husbands, etc etc.
And yesterday, on the peace demo, I met a new couple who’ve just moved to town. The male portion there is David Swanson. (He wrote about the peace demo here. Nice signs, huh? David’s right in what he writes there: we did get some great honking– again!– yesterday, including from some trash hauliers, several city buses, and a police cruiser…)
So okay, at the lunch today, it’s true that someone talked about “You know, the war that some people call the Civil War and some people call the War Between the States.” It’s true that one of the fellow lunchers was the former Inspector General of the CIA.
But in my book, all these things make the city a really interesting place to live.