We are coming up to hearing about the 2,000th US soldier killed in Iraq. People have different plans for what to do about it. I know the pals over at Today in Iraq have some special posts planned, so y’all should check over there. Here is another interesting suggestion.
Time was, in our weekly peace demonstrations here in Charlottesville, I had a sign with spaces for the digits, then it said “- – – – US dead in Iraq.” We had separate foamcore digits to snap onto velcro fasteners in those spaces there. (The idea was that someone would stand next to that one with a sign saying “We mourn ALL the dead.”) But the whole thing got lost someplace while I was in Europe. Darn.
Anyway, our peace vigils here in Charlottesville have been great for the past 4-5 months, without exception… Trolleys clanging in response to our “Honk 4 peace” sign, Vespa-riders giving a squirty little beep-beep, a logging truck once with a humungous great horn that would blast your ears off; bus-drivers, rusty old pickups, soccer moms, LOTS of female African-American drivers honking, cyclists going ching-ching-ching, grandmas and grandpas, Maseratis, good ol’ boys, Hispanics in rusty old jalopies, joggers running by saying “Honk, honk!”; once, I kid you not, a police officer honking for us from his cruiser…
I’ve been reading the George Packer book, Assassins’ Gate. It is an excellent account of the US war in/on Iraq, starting with a detailed intellectual history of the war’s architects, and passing through Packer’s initial enchantment with Kenaan Makiya’s case for the necessity– on human rights grounds– to back the war effort… Then, soon after the war, both Packer and Makiya go to Iraq; and almost immediately Packer sees that nearly everything he has been told about the country by the Iraqi exiles who fomented the war, including Makiya, doesn’t stand up to the light of day, at all.
So where I am in the book is at the point where Packer is starting to feel disillusioned with the whole war effort, and a little bit with Makiya too, for having gotten it all so hideously wrong– that is, basically, for not having understood Iraqi society as it had become, at all…
Packer comes across as an excellent, clear-eyed observer with a great knack for getting people to talk.
As for me, I want to write something slightly big– possibly for a dead-tree medium– about how everyone who backed the war on “human rights” grounds really, fundamentally did not understand the nature of war. War itself is, by definition, a massive assault on the human rights of members of society in which the war is waged… All the generals’ talk about their ability to use bombs with “pinpoint accuracy” is so much nonsense. Plus, it is NOT just the bombings and other directly lethal assaults that kill, maim, and radically restrict the “rights” of residents of the war-zone… It is also the massive degradation of the infrastructure, and the sequelae of self-sustaining, continuing civil strife.
Look at Kosovo six years after the so-called “humanitarian war” there.
So many western liberals got sort of lulled by the events of the 1990s– Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo– into thinking that the “robust” use of military power could actually serve humanitarian ends… So they were quite primed to see this as a possibility in Iraq, too. (Where of course, the human-rights case against the Saddam Hussein regime was an extremely strong one, indeed.)
George Packer was one of those liberals, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. He writes with great apparent honesty about how, when he got to Baghdad, he was expecting it to be “like Prague in 1989” — a newly “free” country, experimenting with all sorts of new forms of social organization and artistic expression… So he got to Baghdad, just a few weeks after the invasion, and headed for one of the city’s few remaining art galleries, and asked, “So where’s the action? Where are the mushrooming new film clubs, the trendy nightspots, the newly formed civic groups” etc etc… And the people there– who had only recently lived through the shock of the invasion, and the possibly even greater shock of the post-invasion looting and the complete collapse of public security throughout their whole city– just looked at him in amazement… And pretty soon, he realized it wasn’t going to be like Prague 1989 at
…Anyway, this piece I plan to write will take on a lot of that 1990s-era fuzzy thinking by comfortable, salon-based western liberals… the kind of people who by the end of the 1990s came to talk quite glibly about the need, here or there around the world, for a “humanitarian war”; or even more glibly, for a “humanitarian intervention” (meaning, war). I think that what those of us who have experienced warfare “at ground zero” need to do is to address all those fuzzy-headed liberals and say: Iraq, Kosovo– that is the nature of war! Get real! It is time for us all to find ways to deal with our political differences using ways other than war.
I mean, look at where the biggest improvements in the human-rights situation took place over the past 25 years: East Asia, East and central Europe, South America, South Africa… In none of those places did that improvement come about as the result of external military intervention…
So anyway, that’s what I want to write about; and I think now is a good time. I want to try to take the “lessons” of what’s been happening in Iraq and broaden them out a lot.
(I aslo have a bunch of other writing to do. And I’m going to NYC this week. Should be fun.)
Wilfred Owen poem for the day
I just found a marvellous new source for Wilfred Owen’s war poetry, thanks to Oxford University. It lets you view multiple manuscript versions of these poems.
And today’s poem is…
Insensibility
1
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
The front line withers,
But they are troops who fade, not flowers,
For poets’ tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses, who might have fought
Longer; but no one bothers.
2
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling,
And Chance’s strange arithmetic
Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on armies’ decimation.
3
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack.
Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror’s first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.
4
Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along the march
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless trend
From larger day to huger night.
5
We wise, who with a thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our task
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying,* not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men’s placidity from his.
6
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
Manuscript Sources
OEFL,
Fasc T, f328r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f329r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f330r |
OEFL,
Fasc T, f328v |
BL,
MS 43720, f19a |
BL,
MS 43720, f20a |
* In the original text taken from the Oxford website, this was written “Drying”. But sense and a tiny bit of detective work in the ms. sources (see Comments) indicate alike that it should be “Dying”.
Asef Shawkat and Karl Rove
It’s pretty amazing to sit here in the US watching the administration drumming up an anti-murder, pro-good governance campaign against Syrian President Bashar al-Asad on the very same day– yesterday– on which (a) Tom DeLay got indicted, and (b) the big speculation is how long before Karl Rove gets indicted in the Valerie Plame case…
The NYT’s John Kifner and Warren Hoge got an apparent “scoop” by reporting that an unnamed “diplomat” in New York told them, regarding the UN’s Mehlis investigation into last February’s killing of Rafiq Hariri, that,
- the investigators were focusing on Syria’s military intelligence chief, Asef Shawkat, the president’s brother-in-law.
“Their main lead is that he is the ringleader,” the diplomat said. “This is where it is heading.”
… He spoke on condition of anonymity because of what he described as the extreme sensitivity of the matter.
… The diplomat, describing Syria as a “country run by a little family clique,” said the involvement of any one in Mr. Assad’s inner circle would be a severe blow to the government.
“There is absolutely no doubt, it goes right to the top,” he said. “This is Murder Inc.”
H’mm. I wonder who this “diplomat” is, or whose instructions he may have been acting on in holding this conversation with the NYT reporters. The name “John Bolton” springs to mind…
Okay, maybe some readers here would say that there is gross disproportionality between the kinds of actions that are at stake in these three “cases”. The Detlev Mehlis investigation in Lebanon and Syria, after all, involved the wilfull murder of Hariri, and reckless disregard for the safety of scores of people in the area around him, some 20 of whom were killed. The Tom DeLay indictment has (until now) involved “only” some large political kickbacks and improper administration of fincancial affairs; and the Plame investigation involves “only” the revelation of the CIA links of one Washington-area professional woman…
Well, yes. Except that we know that the Plame investigation involves a whole lot more than that one apparent incidence of illegal information handling by a high administration official. In a real sense, because the Republican-controlled Congress has been totally unwilling to go back and re-examine the fallacious claims on the basis of which President Bush jerked the country into this terrible war, this special prosecutor’s investigation into just one tiny part of that story– the ex-post-facto intimidation of Amb. Joseph Wilson– has come to serve (for now) as a substitute for the broader investigation that the country certainly needs.
The death toll from the administration’s fallacious claims about Saddam’s alleged “WMDs” now stands at nearly 2,000 US servicemen killed, and scores of thousands of Iraqis dead.
So yes, there is disproportionality among these acts. The killing of Hariri led to some 16-20 deaths on that day– and then, through a twist of history, to the very welcome liberation of Lebanon from the heavy hand of Damascus… The Bush administration’s fabrication and twisting of the evidence about Iraqi WMDs (including the whole fallacious “yellow cake” story) has led to hundreds of times as many deaths, and the plunging of much of Iraq into prolonged civil strife.
Meanwhile, key top officials in each of these capitals– tiny Damascus and that lumbering great elephant of a place, Washington DC– are nervously watching to see how close to them the investigators will reach…
Former Powell aide tells all (okay, “much”)
Col. Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, and had worked for Powell for many years before that, gave a blockbuster speech at the New America Foundation in Washington yesterday. (I was invited to the event, couldn’t make it. Kinda wish I had been able to.)
Anyway, the speech got some great press coverage today. Here is the full transcript from the NAF.
The first portion contains a decent, solid, poli-sci-ey sort of study of the “virtues” of the 1947 National Security Act, some nostalgia for Eisenhower, etc. Then we get to this:
- Read George Packer’s book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” if you haven’t already. George Packer, a New Yorker – reporter for the New Yorker, has got it right… [I]f you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world. He was. (Laughter.) Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. (Laughter.) And yet – and yet – and yet, after the secretary of State agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that’s not making excuses for the State Department; that’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George’s book. [I am, Larry, I am… ]
In so many ways I wanted to believe for four years that what I was seeing – as an academic now – what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security advisor, and an extremely powerful vice president, and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him secretary of Defense – remember, a vice president who has been secretary of Defense too and obviously has an inclination that way, and also has known the secretary of Defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about – God bless Eisenhower – in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex – and don’t you think they aren’t among us today – in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. …
Continue reading “Former Powell aide tells all (okay, “much”)”
Mehlis Report accusing Syria
UN-appointed German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis handed his report on the Hariri killing over to Kofi Annan, the Security Council’s 15 members, and the government of Lebanon today.
AFP was one of the first to see the newly-released text. It reported:
- “There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former prime minister Rafiq Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services,” the report said…
Citing “converging evidence” pointing at both Syrian and Lebanese involvement in what it described as a “terrorist act,” the report said: “The likely motive of the assassination was political.”
Syria, Lebanon’s long-time power broker, and its political allies in Lebanon had been widely accused of having had a hand in the killing, which plunged the nation into turmoil. Damascus has strenuously denied the allegations.
It [that is, the report] pointed out that Syrian military intelligence was well known to have had a pervasive presence in Lebanon at least until the withdrawal of Syrian forces in line with UN Security Council resolution 1559.
“Given the infiltration of Lebanese institutions and society by the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services working in tandem, it would be difficult to envisage a scenario whereby such a complex assassination plot could have been carried out without their knowledge,” the report said.
“It is the commission’s conclusion that, after having interviewed witnesses and suspects in the Syrian Arab Republic and establishing that many leads point directly towards Syrian security officials as being involved with the assassination, it is incumbent upon Syria to clarify a considerable part of the unresolved questions,” it added.
“While the Syrian authorities, after initial hesitation, have cooperated to a limited degree… several interviewees tried to mislead the investigation,” it said.
It noted that a letter addressed to the Mehlis panel by Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara “proved to contain false information.”
The Mehlis report stressed the need for full Syrian cooperation if the investigation is to be completed…
France and the US are expected to introduce a draft resolution to respond to this report, early next week. By then, too, Terje Larsen should be presenting his report to the Security Council on the (separate) issue of whether Syria has complied with the portion of UNSC resolution 1559 that called for the disarmament of non-government forces in Lebanon (i.e. Hizbullah and the Palestinian militias in the camps in south Lebanon.)
Earlier today, Josh Landis was predicting an ugly standoff between Washington and Damascus:
- Washington wants a public and total Syrian climb down. In essence, it wants Syria to renounce its core ideology of Arabism. It wants Syria to concede that its regional policies and anti-American stand are wrong. In a sense it wants a public apology and mea culpa from Bashar. It wants him to take Syria on a 180 degree about-face, ideologically and strategically.
The Syrian government will probably refuse to do this. The Syrian opposition says the government will refuse because the government is too weak. Others claim the government is strong enough to weather sanctions. Still others suggest it is because the President’s and regime’s legitimacy is founded on Arab nationalist principles, thus it cannot abandon them without facing internal collapse. And there are other explanations. Perhaps the Syrian leaders really believe in their principles? Perhaps it is the Arab desire not to lose face and be publicly humiliated? Everyone has their pet theory, but most agree that it comes down to a clash of ideologies. Most insist things will have to get worse before they get better.
I agree with his basic assessment. John Bolton seems to be running quite a high proportion of the Bush administration’s policy towards Syria. He’s a tough nut, and has given clear signals to, e.g., Sharon’s government that it should not respond even to very conciliatory peace overtures from Damascus. From Bashar’s side, he is not a tough nut. But he’s boxed in by his own relatively weak position inside Syrian politics, and is in no position to “pull a Qadhafi” and start dancing to Washington’s tune.
Then, of course, there’s the uncomfortable prospect that any serious weakening of Bashar would open up more space in Syria not for the (relatively small in number, and disorganized) elements of the pro-liberalizing opposition, but for the militant Sunni-Islamist opposition, instead. Yes, Bashar “uses” this prospect quite frequently, to try to ward off too much pressure coming at him from washington or Paris. But yes, he is also, to a large extent a prisoner of it.
Since the Hariri killing, Bashar’s lost the “strategic defense” he used to have against his local Sunni-Islamists by virtue of his close political relationship with Saudi Arabia. Now, that relationship is considerably weakened. I think that makes the Sunni-Islamist threat that much greater to him.
Interesting days. Let’s hope and pray that Syria can avoid any breakdown into civil war. (When I was there last November, the one thing all the Syrians we talked to– liberal-opposition people and regime people– united on was that they sought if at all possible to avoid the fate of Iraq.)
Judy Miller and the U.N.
The whole sorry story of NYT pseudo-journo Judy Miller and her entanglement in disinformation campaigns concerning Iraq’s alleged WMD arsenal, that were designed to jerk the Bush administration into invading Iraq, has obscured another very important part of Miller’s record: the role she has played in disinformation campaigns aimed against the UN.
Now, Barbara Crosette, who was the NYT’s bureau chief at UN headquarters 1994-2001, has reminded people that:
- Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the “oil for food” scandal at the United Nations — in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN’s refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting — a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker — or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair. Ms. Run Amok [i.e. Miller] had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Timespeople were afraid to tangle with her because of that. Note also, that Ambassador John Bolton, a severe critic of the UN and a figure so controversial he could not face a confirmation hearing in the Senate, was one of the administration officials who took time to visit Miller in jail.
Well, having John Bolton visit her in jail is strongly suggestive of a relationship of friendship, but not necessarily of anything more than that. But the “protection” she enjoyed from the people at the top of the NYT– primarily the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and executive editor, Bill Keller— is incontestable, and is amply demonstrated in that story I linked to there.
Between them, those two guys allowed Miller to do virtually as she pleased at the newspaper, without apparently being subject to any of the kinds of control and supervision by a departmental editor that are the norm at all reputable media institutions. Given that a newspaper is indeed liable for huge damages if a reporter publishes something libelous, or makes other serious mistakes, such supervision is natural… But not for Miller….
And then, when she decided for whatever idiosyncratic reason not to accept at face value the waiver of confidentiality that her source in Cheney’s office, Lewis Libby, had offered her a year ago, Sulzberger and Keller continued to back her to the hilt on that. They even had the NYT pay out millions of dollars to hire top-notch lawyers to defend her from the Special Prosecutor, in court. (Also, though she had by that time told them– or at least, Keller– the identity of her mystery “source”, they did not share that info with other Times journos, and indeed squelched the paper’s reporting on the case for quite a period of time.)
What a debacle for a once-great newspaper…
But I’m also intrigued by the point Barbara Crosette made. Time to look again through the portfolio of reporting that Judy Miller did on Kofi Annan and the UN, and look at the damage she caused there.
Worries in South Africa
- A friend sent me the following opinion piece, which is by veteran South African journalist Tony Hall. I am very honored and happy to be able to publish it on JWN because nearly 25 years ago, when I was a mixed-up single parent, fresh from having taken my kids out of the maelstrom of Beirut and trying to make ends meet as a journo in London, I did quite a bit of work for Tony, who was then editing a London-based weekly called ‘Eight Days’.
I’m also happy to publish it here because I want JWN to deal with all kinds of global issues. So I need to work to make sure the Iraq mess doesn’t suck my energy out of everything else that’s happening in the world. The state of democracy in South Africa eleven years after 1994 is really important to me.
Anyway, enough about yours truly…
Save the Alliance
View from the bush, mid-October 2005
By Tony Hall
There was widespread alarm and dismay around South Africa this past week, at the sight on our TV screens and front pages, of ANC supporters burning t-shirts bearing the face of President Thabo Mbeki.
It was one thing for protestors, including members of the ANC-allied trade unions and communist party, to be chanting “Zuma, Zuma” in support of the recently ousted Deputy President, as he marched through a big crowd towards the law courts in Durban to appear at the first hearing of a corruption charge.
It was quite another to see Mbeki so publicly vilified – the leader of the most popular party and government anywhere in recent decades, a man whose own struggle credentials and leading role in the liberation movement have never been questioned. His management of almost a decade of majority rule has been seen as competent and careful.
So the week sent a shock through the system and tragically, cracked open a fault line which started showing just a couple of years ago.
It was a magic, joyful day back in 1994 when people lined up for hours to vote. Democracy was won not only after hard negotiation, but after four years, from 1990, of widespread “third force” violence and mayhem to try and undermine the transition, instigated and managed by some leading members and foot-soldiers of the outgoing apartheid regime.
Thousands of black South Africans were killed, on trains, in hostels, in townships. A civil war raged in KwaZulu Natal, which could have led to its secession, and a former bantustan, the tribal apartheid ‘homeland’ Bophutatswana, was nearly restored after an uprising, to its stooge leadership. That could have led to another apartheid-supported breakaway, and the balkanisation of South Africa.
The story now unfolding, with people burning the image of their own president, begins with the policy choices made under President Mandela, whose early enthusiasm for empowering his people through the state was firmly sat on by the big corporations — and reviled by the now comfortably corporatised Afrikaner leaders whose example of using the state to economically empower their community he generously quoted.
Mbeki reinforced those “free market” policies…
War crimes trials: procedures or politics?
The war-crimes trial of Saddam Hussein and seven other co-defendants
opened briefly today
(see also
here
), and was adjourned after just 2 hours and 11 minutes of court time. They
are charged with the murder of 143 men and boys in Dujail in 1982, and also
with forced expulsions and illegal imprisonment, in connection (I believe)
with that same incident.
Much of the commentary in the western media has focused on details of the
procedures that the Iraqi Special tribunal (IST) is using as it conducts
these trials, with Human Rights Watch and other rights groups
focusing
on the distinct lack of due-process protections afforded to the defendants,
as well as on other flaws in IST procedures. The big fear that such
groups express is that the work of the IST will prove to be only “victors’
justice”.
But I would contend that there are different kinds of “victors’ justice”,
and not all of them are bad (though probably, the vast majority of them are.)
The WaPo’s Anne Applebaum seems to share my feelings on this score. She
has
a piece
in today’s paper in which– as I have done previously– she notes that the
procedures used at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945-46 were also, from the
due-process point of view, extremely flawed. And yet, she and I join with
the rest of the present international consensus in judging that all-in-all,
the Nuremberg Trials were very successful indeed. How can we do this,
despite our judgment of the deeply flawed nature of the procedures used there
(and ideed, also, the extremely biased nature of the Statute of the court
itself)?
I think that Applebaum and I justify our arguments about the over-all success
of Nuremberg in slightly different terms, because we are looking at slightly
different things.
She writes:
Nuremberg was, in retrospect, a huge success, and as the trial
of Saddam Hussein begins today in Baghdad, it is worth remembering why. If
it achieved nothing else, Nuremberg laid out for the German people, and for
the world, the true nature of the Nazi system. Auschwitz survivors and SS
officers presented testimony. Senior Nazis were subjected to cross-examination.
The prosecutors produced documents, newsreels of liberated concentration
camps and films of atrocities made by the Nazis themselves. There were hangings
at the end, as well as acquittals. But it mattered more that the story of
the Third Reich had been told, memorably and eloquently.
Regarding Saddam’s trial, she uses a similar metric of “truth-establishment”:
In the end, it is by the quality of that evidence, and the clarity
with which it is conveyed, that this trial should be judged. The result is
irrelevant: Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein is drawn
and quartered, exiled to Pyongyang, or left to rot in a Baghdad prison. No
punishment could make up for the thousands he killed, or for the terror he
inflicted on his country.But if his Sunni countrymen learn what he did to Shiites and Kurds,
if the Shiites and Kurds learn what he did to Sunnis, if Iraqis come to realize
that his system of totalitarian terror damaged them all, and if others in
the Middle East learn that dictatorships can be overthrown, then the trial
will have served its purpose. That, and not an arbitrary standard of international
law, is how the success of this unusual tribunal should be measured.
I agree with Applebaum that the greatest contribution that Nuremberg
made to the consolidation of democratic practice in Germany was its
establishment of a nearly incontrovertible record of exactly what the Nazi
regime did to Germans and others during its 12 years in power. But
I think it is also very important to take into account– which she doesn’t–
the time-frame over which this record came to be important to Germans
. A few years ago, intrigued by this question I started interviewing
a few experts in that period of German history to find out their views of
exactly how it was that the records established at Nuremberg came to play
such a strong, constructive (and, I would hope, lasting) role in the “re-education”
of the German citizenry. And these experts, who included both Germans
and Americans, were unanimous in noting that the record of Nazi misdeeds
compiled and archived by the Nuremberg court did not become important
to Germans themselves until the early 1960s…
Continue reading “War crimes trials: procedures or politics?”
Bush and Rice “call” the Iraqi referendum
So here’s what’s happened so far today re the Iraqi constitutional referendum:
- 1. At or before 2 p.m. today London time (9 a.m. US Eastern Time) — a bare 18 hours or so after the polls had closed in Iraq– Condoleezza Rice was able, miraculously, to “call” the results in London. What an amazingly talented woman! To think that she could coordinate the collection, counting, verifying, and announcing of the results of a poll involving so many millions of far-flung voters, in such a short space of time! What a testimony to this woman’s truly extraordinary powers!!! (Heavy irony alert.)
(By the way, did I mention that Rice told the breathlessly waiting world that the draft constitution has “probably passed”?)
2. U.N. elections chief Carina Perelli (who by the way is in all kinds of her own professional trouble over there at the UN, and who is thus in a fairly weak position in global politics) “stressed that final results were still days away and any early estimates were “impressionistic”. And–
3. President Bush hailed the vote as a victory for “opponents of terrorism”: “The vote today in Iraq is in stark contrast to the attitude, the philosophy and strategy of al-Qaida, their terrorist friends and killers,” Bush said.
As we should all know by now, in order to defeat the draft constitution, its opponents needed two-thirds of the voters in at least three of Iraq’s 18 provinces to vote “No.”
The “announcements” by Rice–and before her, Amb. Khalilzad and Iraqi transitional Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari– that hailed the defeat of the No vote apparently conceded that the No-voters had won the required vote in Al-Anbar and Salah ad-Din provinces. But they “believed”(Rice) or “guessed” (Zebari) that the No campaign had failed to win that threshhold anywhere else, including in Ninawa, which had been thought of as the site of a possible/probable No victory.
Oh but wait, here’s another part of that AP report from Baghdad (dateline around 2 p.m. Sunday, US Eastern Time):
- … Some ballot boxes were still making their way to counting centers in the provinces. Provincial election workers were adding up the paper ballots, which will be sent to the counting center in Baghdad’s Green Zone for another check to reach the final, certified result.
So all that business about “guessing” and “believeing” that there’s a victory for the Yesses is based on– ? Just about nothing, if they haven’t even finished hauling all the ballot boxes in for the counting of the paper ballots yet, right?
Small surprise, therefore, that AP’s Sameer Yacoub was also reporting this:
- Some Sunni Arab leaders of the “no” campaign decried the reported results and insisted their figures showed the constitution’s defeat, though they did not cite exact numbers. Some accused the United States of interfering in the results.
“We are warning of acts of fraud. This might lead to civil disobedience if there is fraud,” said Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the National Dialogue Council “We consider that Rice’s statement is pressure on the Independent Election Commission to pass the draft.”
It is, anyway, really outrageous that Rice and Bush should have hurried in so unseemly (and mendacious) a manner to be the the ones to “announce” the result of the referendum. It seems almost like they wanted large portions of the Sunni population to be angry both with them and with thosee Kurds and Shiites who will take everything they want from the new “constitution” and start running with it…
- Addendum, Sunday 4 p.m.: I just had time to give this latest analysis from Gilbert Achcar a quick read. It confirms what I wrote here and elsewhere last week about the effect of Kalilzad’s last-minute intervention having been to sow some confusion and dissension in Sunni ranks in Iraq.
The latter third of Gilbert’s piece looks particularly interesting: It is his translation of “an analysis of the referendum in the Sunni provinces by an insider Sunni source, published on the evening of Saturday October 15 after the end of the vote.” This source, Mufakkirat al-Islam wrote:
- Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Muhammad, one of the imams and preachers of Fallujah, said that al-Qaida’s organization made a huge error in preventing the people by threats and intimidations to take part in the vote, adding that al-Qaida contributed with other groups to the marginalization of the Sunnis and their impotence in the face of Shiites, Kurds and secular parties… He said also that if al-Qaida’s elements had let the people vote, the constitution would have been rejected by 100% of Sunnis and would have been aborted, while it would have been proved that Sunnis are not a minority in Iraq…
Whereas the Islamic Party has deliberately contributed in splitting the votes of the Sunnis in calling for a “yes” vote, Zarqawi has also given a gift to the occupation and the Safawi [a pejorative formula used in Sunni circles to designate the Shiites deemed to be “Iranian agents”] followers of Sistani by contributing unknowingly, through their threats to the voters, to the neutralization of the Sunni votes opposed to this constitution, under which the Iraqis may have to live miserably for a long period…
The question now in Iraq is when will al-Qaida’s organization stop allowing the assassination of Muslims under various pretexts, after the murder of some Sunnis in Ramadi today because they took part in the vote, and, before that, the authorization to kill members of the Islamic Party. Before that also al-Qaida’s followers turned their weapons against members of other armed groups during the second siege of Fallujah under the pretext that they ought to accept Zarqawi’s leadership after Usama bin Laden’s appeal to this end. This attitude weakened the ranks of the resistance and allowed US occupation forces to execute their well-known offensive in the southern part of Fallujah…
This is, it seems to me (HC), very revealing stuff. The people associated with Mufakkirat al-Islam are prepared to criticize Al-Qaeda even quite openly in this medium… If the Americans and their present Iraqi proteges had been prepared to engage a broader spectrum of Iraqi Sunnis in serious discussions about the governance of the country, then they might have had a good chance of increasing this rift between Sunni-Iraqi nationalists and the agents of Al-Qaeda. As it is, those nationalists whose views were represented by Mufakkirat al-Islam look as though the will continue to be opposed to the new order that they feel is being imposed on them…
Iraq open thread #8
Dear JWN commenters– I’m off to my Quaker retreat and hope you may have some informative, courteous discussions here while I’m away. Back Sunday afternoon. Ommmm. (Not quite the right religion but I expect you get my drift.)