Ahem… I have an important announcement to make… Jonathan Edelstein, a South African social psychologist called Brandon Hamber, and I are launching a new group blog called Transitional Justice Forum.
The subhead of the new blog says, “resources and multi-disciplinary discussion on the challenges of justice during transitions to a better world. Join us!” So this is my invitation to JWN’s readers to do just that.
As you can see, we have just us three as authors for now, though we are definitely planning to bring more on board. Nominations– including self-nominations– are very welcome! (Send me a note with any suggestions.)
I’d also love it if JWN readers could participate in the comments-board discussions over there some– especially right now, while we’re still trying to launch the blog– and if y’all could also help us to publicize TJF by telling any of your friends or colleagues who work in a relevant field about it.
Rest assured: I intend to continue putting the same amount of energy into JWN as I always have. The idea with the new baby is to make it “a widely networked collaborative project,” rather than somethng that only I– or only Jonathan and I– do all the work on.
In fact, the readership here at JWN has been rising in a very satisfactory way over the past few weeks. So I’d be foolish to let this well-established old blog wither on the vine right now, wouldn’t I?
Can Bush speech buttress collapsing polls?
In his much-heralded (by him) speech to the National Endowment for Democracy yesterday, President Bush rolled out some of his old (and a little bit of new) pugnaciousness, along with a good few of his always noticeable smirks.
Will the speech help him deal with daily collapsing poll numbers?
Among the new rhetorical flourishes that Bush used were his validation of the term “Islamo-fascism” to describe the threat the US faces. Among the old ones were his calls to action against both Iran and Syria, and his attempt to link Islamic radicalism in people’s minds with both Hitlerite Nazism (as in, “Islamo-fascism”) and with the evils of communism…
- Also, as commenter John C. noted in the comments section of this recent JWN post, it is remarkable how many of the accusations that Bush made against Bin Laden could also be made against himself… I particularly liked these ones that John identified:
- These are people who:
– “exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution”
– “exploit modern technology to multiply their destructive power”
– “target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence”
– are “elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the . . . masses”
– have as their chief visionary a man “who grew up in wealth and privilege” and encourages poor people to become killers, “though he never offers to go along for the ride”…
Anyway, back to the falling poll numbers. The CBS poll conducted October 3-5 found that 58% of all (US) adults polled disapproved “of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president”, while only 37% approved. That 58% is an all-time high for disapproval of his job performance, the numbers having risen continuously since a poll at the end of July– i.e., since before Hurrican Katrina.
Concerning Bush’s handling of Iraq, specifically the disapproval is even stronger: now at an all-time high of 64%, according to that same poll.
Asked whether, “Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the U.S. have stayed out?”, 55% of respondents now say “Should have stayed out”– up from 31% back in December 2003.
Then this:
- “Should the United States troops stay in Iraq as long as it takes to make sure Iraq is a stable democracy, even if it takes a long time, or should U.S. troops leave Iraq as soon as possible, even if Iraq is not completely stable?”
Opting for “Leave asap” were 59% of all respondents, as opposed to 36% saying “stay as long as it takes.”
These poll numbers are really good news. They would be even better if we had an opposition party in the country capable of taking advantage of the voters’ judgments.
But what can Bush do about them? In other times, he might have sought to reverse the decline by ratcheting up tensions and even launching a little war someplace to distract the public’s attention. I really don’t think that’s an option for him today. And I very much doubt that even a whole series of “stirring” sppeches like yesterday’s could win him more than a couple of points, total, increase in his approval ratings. Meantime, Plame-gate is still threatening to burst into flames and his old friend and enforcer Tom Delay is somewhat on the ropes.
The months ahead could be very interesting ones. They would be even better if we had an opposition party in the country capable of taking advantage of the Bushies’ disarray…
Congratulations to ElBaradei!
Heartiest congratulations to Mohamed El-Baradei, the talented, judicious Egyptian national who, as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has just been named along with the IAEA as the winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
In that citation from the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize every year, the Committee states that the award is being made to this year’s two winners,
- for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.
It goes on to say:
- At a time when the threat of nuclear arms is again increasing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to underline that this threat must be met through the broadest possible international cooperation. This principle finds its clearest expression today in the work of the IAEA and its Director General…
In his will, Alfred Nobel wrote that the Peace Prize should, among other criteria, be awarded to whoever had done most for the “abolition or reduction of standing armies”. In its application of this criterion in recent decades, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has concentrated on the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics, with a view to their abolition. That the world has achieved little in this respect makes active opposition to nuclear arms all the more important today.
As I learned when I wrote my 2000 book on some past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, the all-Norwegian committee that makes the award generally seeks not just to recognize past achievements, but also to encourage and draw attention to ongoing efforts to make the world a more peaceful place.
From that point of view, we should read the citations for ElBaradei and the IAEA as strongly critical of the Bush administration’s moves toward abandoning the (by aspiration) “universal” approach of the Nucler Nonproliferation Tearty, and of the IAEA which embodies and operationalizes its provisions. The Bushies prefer instead to try to use small ad-hoc coalitions of likeminded (i.e. pro-US) states to pursue its more aggressive and escalatory counter-proliferation –as opposed to non-proliferation– policies.
Also, at the political level, while the Norwegian Nobel Committee has indeed over the years “concentrated on the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics, with a view to their abolition”, the Bush administration– like all preceding US administrations, and all other members of the hyper-privileged “P-5 club” in the United Nations– has had a very different view of the desirability of the nuclear-weapons states continuing to exercise quite undue influence in international affairs…
Yes indeed, it would be great if we could reduce the significance of nuclear arms in international affairs, and also abolish all the world’s nuclear arsenals! The NPT offers one, carefully ngotiated and nearly universally agreed, way to do this. Althought it institutes, for an interim phase of unspecified duration, a highly discriminatory regime in which just five states are “entitled” to continue to hold nuclear arsenals for some time, nevertheless it mitigates the effects of that discrimination in two ways:
- 1. It states clearly (Article 6) that the goal of all signatories is complete and general disarmament, and
2. It establishes a network of reciprocal obligations between the nuclear weapons ‘have’ states and the nuclear weapons ‘have not’ states. For example, parties in a position to do so should indeed “co-operate in contributing… to the further development of the application of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-niuclear weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.” (Art.4)
No U.S. administration has ever taken any serious steps toward operationalizing Article 6. And as we know, the Bush administration has been extremely busy since 2001 trying to find a way to impose harsh punishment on Iran for seeking to exercise its rights under Article 4.
Just Wednesday, ElBaradei made an important speech in Moscow in which he proposed a way to defuse current US-Iran tensions over the nuclear issue. (Hat-tip here to Scott H for signaling this one.)
According to the LA Times report linked to there, ElBaradei said that,
- The most effective way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons is for the international community to guarantee the supply of nuclear fuel to countries that agree not to produce it themselves…
ElBaradei… said that approach would undercut the argument of countries such as Iran that acquiring the ability to produce their own nuclear fuel is the only way to shield a civilian energy industry from disruptions in supply.
“Objective, apolitical, nonproliferation criteria” should be used to guarantee the fuel supplies, ElBaradei said in a speech here. “If a country meets these criteria, it would be assured of the supply of fuel. That, I think, would take care, in my view, of at least 80% of the problem.”
…
ElBaradei spoke at a luncheon meeting and subsequent news conference organized by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based foundation that works to prevent the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The group was founded by former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and media mogul Ted Turner.
So there we have an international civil servant and diplomat who is coming forward with concrete, moderate proposals on an issue like the US-Iran nuclear-supplies standoff that have the potential for defusing all the US-hyped international tension over that issue… I doubt that Mohamed ElBaradei would have won George Bush’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Kind of scary to speculate who might have, don’t you think?)
But ElBaradei’s nomination certainly wins my support. Well done, the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
US Senate flexes muscles on control of the war?
I was really delighted to learn from the WaPo today that,
- The Senate defied the White House yesterday and voted to set new limits on interrogating detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, underscoring Congress’s growing concerns about reports of abuse of suspected terrorists and others in military custody.
Forty-six Republicans joined 43 Democrats and one independent in voting to define and limit interrogation techniques that U.S. troops may use against terrorism suspects, the latest sign that alarm over treatment of prisoners in the Middle East and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is widespread in both parties. The White House had fought to prevent the restrictions, with Vice President Cheney visiting key Republicans in July and a spokesman yesterday repeating President Bush’s threat to veto the larger bill that the language is now attached to — a $440 billion military spending measure.
The interrogation rules are, as I have argued endlessly on JWN all along, a really important issue in themselves. We have yet to see whether, as the deliberations over this particular spending bill proceed, the Senate negotiators can succeed in imposing their will (or a substantial portion of it) on the generally much more unprincipled people in the House of Representatives, and on the unarguably more unprincipled man in the White House. But 90 Senate votes are certainly enough to overturn a Presidential veto, if it should come to that, if all those Senators just hang in there…
It was Sen. John McCain (R, AZ), who had led the fight in the Senate on this issue, and he prominently mentioned the anguished communications he had had from Capt. Ian Fishback. (Thank you, Capt. Fishback: One person’s principled actions can indeed make a difference in the world.) The WaPo piece noted that McCain’s key allies in this battle were “Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a former military lawyer, and Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) ” Alert readers might note that none of these three named sentaors is affiliated with the supposed “opposition” party here in the US…
The McCain measure would limit all US forces– and also, I think, all “other government agencies”, codewords for the CIA– to using only interrogation techniques authorized in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. If enacted, this legislation would materially improve the situation of the 10,000 or more people around the world– mainly, in Iraq and Afghanistan– who are currently in the custody of US forces.
This is in itself a great reason to support this legislation– and also, to give due credit to Sens. McCain, Graham, and Warner for their postion.
But I wonder: Is this also the beginning of a broader process whereby the US Congress attempts to regain more control of the country’s war-fighting processes and decisionmaking in a broader sense? Under the Constitution, only Congress can “declare war” on foreign enemies, but it is up to the executive branch to handle the waging of the war– within the broad, continuing parameter that Congress always retains the power of the purse.
But back in October 2002, both houses of Congress disgracefully fell asleep at the wheel of their very solemn responsibilities regarding declaring (that is, initiating) a war, and they gave GWB a totally blank check to do whatever he wanted with regard to Iraq. And since then, whenever he’s come back in with one more bloated war-spending request after another, they have continued to give him a blank check– and even, as I recall, to allocate him meven more war-fighting mega-bucks than what he was asking for.
And now, as we know, states and localities throughout the country– not only in our hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast region– are paying the price for those failures by Congress to take a responsible stand on war-spending.
In one sense, the fight over the interrogation rules can be seen as a tiny microcosm of the broader battle over control over this war effort thathas run– continues to run!– so horribly amok. The White House had tried to argue to the senators that tightening the interrogation rules “risked undermining US success in the war on terror”. The senators confronted that argument head-on and said, “No it won’t.”
Maybe as a next step they’ll look at the whole ball of wax, and say, “You know what, the whole ‘war on terror’ as currently being fought by the Bush administration isn’t actually reducing terror at all… It’s time for a radical rethink here.”
We can hope… And maybe as a way of pushing this process forward, we should all mail copies of General Odom’s great remarks to any US Senators and members of Congress that we can think of!
Gen. Odom battles the war, the Dems, the MSM
This, from Gen. William Odom, who capped a distinguished career in the US Army by serving as Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 through 1988.
Just the title of this text is great, and explosive, since it bursts through much of the namy-pamby political “positioning” that so many antiwar folks (self included) have engaged in during discussions of the US presence in Iraq up until now.
Here is Odom’s title:
What’s wrong with cutting and running?
I got this text today via Today in Iraq, who got it from Antiwar.com, who got it from the Neiman Foundation’s “Nieman Watchdog“…
One very interesting question is why, if this text was already available at the Watchdog on August 3, it hasn’t received more attention in the US national discourse before now? This is a very germane questiont. The Nieman Foundation, located at Harvard University, is a very well-funded media-studies center that is connected with many very well-funded media outlets and media “personalities”. The context for Odom’s text seems to be that it was part of (perhaps a transcript of?) an interaction with journalists at the Foundation, perhaps in some kind of seminar with working journos, or whatever.
Odom started out there saying,
- If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people say would happen, and then ask: Aren’t they happening already? Would a pullout really make things worse? Maybe it would make things better….
He then lists nine of the key argument against pulling out, and one by one he refutes them. JWN leaders may be very interested to read these refutations– and to use them in discussions with fence-sitters… They are generally very well constructed and well worded.
But at the end of that sustained piece of argumentation on the substance of the troop-presence argument, Odom then gets into some very serious criticism of the Dem Party leaders and the US media establishment:
- Most surprising to me is that no American political leader today has tried to unmask the absurdity of the administration’s case that to question the strategic wisdom of the war is unpatriotic and a failure to support our troops…
So why is almost nobody advocating a pullout? I can only speculate. We face a strange situation today where few if any voices among Democrats in Congress will mention early withdrawal from Iraq, and even the one or two who do will not make a comprehensive case for withdrawal now.Why are the Democrats failing the public on this issue today? The biggest reason is because they weren’t willing to raise that issue during the campaign. Howard Dean alone took a clear and consistent stand on Iraq, and the rest of the Democratic party trashed him for it. Most of those in Congress voted for the war and let that vote shackle them later on. Now they are scared to death that the White House will smear them with lack of patriotism if they suggest pulling out.
Journalists can ask all the questions they like but none will prompt a more serious debate as long as no political leaders create the context and force the issues into the open.
I don’t believe anyone will be able to sustain a strong case in the short run without going back to the fundamental misjudgment of invading Iraq in the first place. Once the enormity of that error is grasped, the case for pulling out becomes easy to see.
Look at John Kerry’s utterly absurd position during the presidential campaign. He said “It’s the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” but then went on to explain how he expected to win it anyway. Even the voter with no interest in foreign affairs was able to recognize it as an absurdity. If it was the wrong war at the wrong place and time, then it was never in our interest to fight. If that is true, what has changed to make it in our interest? Nothing, absolutely nothing…
The wisest course for journalists might be to begin sustained investigations of why leading Democrats have failed so miserably to challenge the US occupation of Iraq. The first step, of course, is to establish as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the US interest and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.
Well, here was Gen. Odom, telling some of the leading lights of US (mainstream) journalism how to do their jobs! And also, by very strong implication, chiding them– and the Dem Party leaders– for not having done their jobs up in the past. Is it any surprise that his remarks somehow didn’t get amplified into the echo-chamber of what passes for US mainstream discourse for more than two months after he made them?
What can we all do to amplify them some more at this point?
Still tweaking comments control here…
More apologies this evening on the comments. This new software has an automatic comment-controller that– unknown to me– was eating up most of your comments and describing them as (sad to say!) “junk”!
Don’t feel bad about it. It even ate up a comment I was trying to post and described it as junk.
So I had to go in and change the settings on that. That freed up everyone’s comments… So let’s hope that I have now finally licked the last software glitch here??
Maybe tomorrow I’ll even have some time to write something substantive. H’mmm.
Meantime, please, y’all keep the comments coming so I can see if my settings are working! (Also, so you can express yourselves.) Thanks!
Update Wed. morning: It looks as though I got the junk filter tweaked just about right here. The filter let through a bunch of y’all’s legitimate comments but caught and put into a buffer-zone five comments that were ads for some male-enhancement product. One of the problems is that when I use words like “porn” in the title of a post they tend to attract certain spambots. But this filter on MT 3.2 seems good.
Can any readers familiar with MT 3.2 or similar tell me whether I can just rely on its integral filter and stop using MT-Blacklist now? Would that speed up the comment-posting process for legitimate commenters?
Also, what are the advantages and disadvantages of instituting a commenter’s registration process?
Thanks for any advice!
Kahanism and pornography
A friend just contacted me to send Jewish New Year greetings (and I should take this opportunity to wish Shana Tova to all JWN readers who would appreciate the greeting, too. I hope the next 12 months are good ones for all JWN readers.)
My friend also told me that she has been put on something called the S.H.I.T. list— which stands for Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening Jews.
It turns out this is a magnificent list of some 7,000 or so Jewish people from around the world who have expressed open criticisms of the policies of one or more governments of Israel. Many of my Jewish friends are on it, it turns out… Scrolling through it indicated to me just how widely criticism of Israeli government policy has been expressed among Jewish people worldwide.
How come I never heard of it before? Here, you can learn about such people as (quite randomly):
- Al Kagen… a professor of library administration at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, [who] has been active in the movement to get that institution to divest from investing funds in the Israel, as well as with firms that do business with the Jewish state, or
Holly Kosisky, who (shockingly!)… “signed a petition calling for Israel to remove its security wall so that PLO Arab sharpshooters and bus bombers can more easily murder Jews.”
…I’m sure you get the drift. Some of these people are principled leaders in the struggle for human equality in the Holy Land… Others have merely “signed a petition against the Wall”.
In case you want to know more about the organization that keeps this list, Masada 2000, you can go to its home-page, which is graced at the very top by a quote from the late Meir Kahane and then spends most of that page explaining to readers why There has never been a civilization or a nation referred to as “Palestine” (bolded in the original.)
Read here about the organization’s truly scary Solution(s) to the Israeli-“Palestinian” Conflict:
Or you can contact the folks to at the website to send on the names of any Jewish people you know who should be included on the S.H.I.T. list. (“You will remain anonymous.”)
But there’s something else about this site that’s even more intriguing…. Many of the people on the S.H.I.T. list only have their names listed. Others have hyperlinks to their email addresses– I suppose, to make it easier for the Kahanists who created the site to send hate-mail to them.
Around 10% of the names listed have their jobs or place of residence identified, and a little description of their supposedly “Israel-threatening” activities. Many of these descriptions have some extremely sarcastic “editorial comment” attached: “Lady, you should feel embarrassed and inferior but mostly ashamed of yourself! ” (Or this, for Noam Chomsky: ” In other words, Chomsky is a thoroughly despicable human being.”)
But sometimes, the sarcasm and nastiness in these listings take on a distinctly feminophobic and even faintly pornographic coloration. I was a little puzzled by this. Then I found a link to this truly disgusting page on the M2000 site. It’s quite a long page, so keep on scrolling down. [Warning: this page reportedly includes sound, too.]
You will see, respectively:
- * a female sexual-pleasuring object in the image of Yasser Arafat,
* an “endorsement” for this product from a supposedly satisfied customer (presumably one of the women on the S.H.I.T. list?)
* a list of the different “designs” in which this product is available, including “The Monster Mohammed”, etc etc, then–
* a poster-type display with photos, that is titled A few leftist chicks in need of a good reaming — these ones, again, taken from the S.H.I.T. list .
This stuff is revolting. It’s a rampant call to woman-hatred, the physical abuse of women, and the demeaning of all women who attempt to enter the public discourse.
In this latter respect, I can recall some of the terrible cartoons that were published by the genocidaires in Rwanda, in the lead-up to the genocide, in which lewd sexual suggestions were made about the (generally pro-coexistence) female Hutu prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The pro-genocidaire publications ran cartoon after cartoon after cartoon of this genre in those weeks…. And then, as one of the first acts during the genocide, the genocidal militias stormed Ms. Uwilingiyimana’s home, took her out, and subjected her to the most grotesque forms of sexual mutilation (in front of her children) before finally they killed her.
The people who run this Masada2000 website should take down this page immediately… Spewing hate in the way they do on their other pages is bad enough. But spewing hate with an incitement to rape is, I think, even worse.
Who are we kidding?
Every constructive thing the Bush administration claims to have built up in its 30 months in Iraq is a sham.
The “democratically elected Iraqi transitional government”?
— This government has never been held accountable to the 275-member National Assembly, the body that was directly elected (though in a flawed election) back on January 30. The National Assembly has rarely mustered even a quorum of its members of its members to deliberate together recently. Far less has it been able to hold Iraq’s strange, two-headed government to account.
–The “government” has not been able to deliver basic services to the citizens of Iraq. Provision of vital services– including, crucially, that of public security— has deteriorated markedly since January. A basic function of governments in the modern age is their “responsibility to protect” the citizenry. The transitional government elected in January has completely failed to exercise this reponsibility. In addition, delivery of other basic services like water and electricity has plummeted.
— The two contending “heads” of the governmental system have even, in recent days, had a serious falling out between themselves. I have written before about the troubling bicephaly of the governmental system established by the (completely non-democratic) Transitional Administrative Law of 2004. My reading of TAL would have given the transitional “PM” the executive responsibilities of a head of government, with the “president” exercising only the quasi-ceremonial function of a head of state. I guess the current “President”, the PUK’s Talal Jalabani had a different reading. Today, he even went as far as to call for the resignation of PM Ibrahim Jaafari.
What a sad, sick joke. What has either of them done for the people of Iraq?
Then there are “the Iraqi security forces”?
–Remember the Bush adage, “As the Iraqi forces stand up, we will stand down?” So where does that leave the prospects for a speedy, orderly withdrawal of US forces, given that the number of Iraqi battalions deemed ready to fight mysteriously declined by 66% over the course of two days last week? (To a puny total of one brigade.)
As I’ve written here on JWN a number of times in the past, the problem for the Iraqi security forces is not one of basic military training… It’s unit cohesion, and the cohesion and integrity of the command structures… I.e., it is primarily a political problem, not an issue of purely “technical” military training.
So you can send all the grandiose “NATO training missions” you want to Baghdad, with all their attendant fanfare… But if you can’t nail the issue of gaining the political integrity of the security forces, sorry buddy, you’re just pouring your training dollars down the drain.
— Well then, how about the state of the emerging democratic Iraqi constitution?
Ha-(sob)-ha-(sob)-ha…
The Draft Constitution that will be voted on October 15 was “rip’d untimely from its mother’s womb” (to quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, referencing Julius Caesar’s birth), in order to comply with US force planning and political election-planning timetables… It was notably not the result of an organic, inclusive process of intra-Iraqi negotiation… To say the least.
If this constitution is accepted in the referendum, its own terms already stipulate that it will be later be subject to considerable “fleshing out” and the detailed specification of many of its provisions… (But if it passes, most of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs will continue to be majorly pissed off with the political system.)
If it fails to pass, the whole text will have to be renegotiated sometime during the year ahead. (And if it fails to pass, the Kurds will be extremely pissed off, and will accelerate the many moves they’ve already made toward full independence…. )
Let’s be clear, whether this draft constitution is accepted or rejected on October 15, the following will happen:
- 1.There will be an election for a new National Assembly on December 15. (The only question is over whether this will be a “post-constitutional” assembly, or yet another “transitional” assembly.)
2. One or more of Iraq’s three major population groups will be majorly pissed off, and inter-group tensions– having been exacerbated by the very framing and holding of the referendum itself–can be guaranteed to continue.
3. There will remain many fundamental details of the constitution to be decided, and
4. The Kurds will continue their march toward secession/ independence, whether with more or less speed.
So what the heck real difference will the October referendum make? What the heck difference does this wad of paper called the “Iraqi draft constitution” actually make?
Goooood questions.
(And I didn’t even mention yet that the wad of paper that we currently have in our hands represents a massive step back for women’s rights and for freedom of religious conscience inside Iraq… Maybe I should have.)
And then there are… all the other things the Bush administration has constructed during its time in Iraq…
Like, um…
“Peace in our time?” Nah, scratch that.
“Freedom from global terror?” Don’t tell that to the people of London or Bali. (Or indeed, the people of Iraq, since they too are part of what people like to call the “international community”.)
Oh well, how about all those Iraqi schoolrooms that the US troops rebuilt and repainted?
Gosh we haven’t heard much about those recently, have we? Maybe this is because– whether in Tel Afar, Ramadi, or most recently Sadah or Al-Qaim— it is almost certainly the case that in recent months the US troops have been consistently destroying more schoolrooms each month than they’ve been rebuilding.
(Plus, back in the days when they were talking more about “rebuilding” and “repainting” schoolroomss, did you ever think how all those schoolrooms got destroyed in the first place? One hint: as of the US invasion in March 2003, the country’s tens of thousands of schoolrooms were still nearly all in decent– if sometimes rudimentary– shape… And then, the US military tried to get credit for repairing just a few of the many schoolrooms that its invasion of the country destroyed??)
So we need to face it: look as hard as we might, we can’t actually see the US troop presence in Iraq doing anything particularly constructive there at all, whether at the political, the geopolitical, the economic, social, or educational levels.
Meanwhile, they’re creating a heck a lot of physical destruction, and their presence is whipping up a maelstrom of inter-group tension, escalation, and distrust…
G-d save the Iraqi people. Somehow. G-d save the whole Middle Eastern region lest it become sucked into the vortex of violence in Iraq. And G-d save us Americans, and please, please, give us the strength and wisdom we need if we’re to pull our government back from its present destructive course.
Elections, Somaliland
There’s a Filipina woman called Yvette Lopez who is one of my heroes. She has been working for around two years now for a Catholic-based international development organization— deployed in Somaliland.
Do you know where or what Somaliland is?
It’s a portion of what on international maps is called Somalia… a place that is today– tragically– an almost totally non-functioning country. But some years ago Somaliland and, I think, a couple of other portions of “Somalia” just decided to carry on doing their own thing, trying to rebuild their society from the ground up.
Yvette has been there as one of a small number of international development workers helping them do that. To do her job in Somaliland she left her husband and daughter behind at home in the Philippines.
And she writes a really beautiful blog. It’s in English, and she posts great pics that give you a real idea of what Somaliland is like.
(Hint: it’s a very, very poor, war-ravaged country. There are frequent security scares. But Yvette usually seems to be able to be very productive. She seems to have made some great friends there, too, and has become quite a connoisseur of the best camel-meat restaurants in the capital, Hargeisa.)
This past week, Yvette’s been one of the international election monitors in Somaliland’s parliamentary elections. You can read a great account of her activities doing that if you start at this Sept. 26 post on her blog, and then go forward a page at a time until October 1 (and probably beyond there, too.)
Mainly I read (and link to) Yvette’s blog because I admire what she does, so much. But I’m also very interested in the situation of Somaliland itself, which seems to be a little like that of Iraqi Kurdistan, or Kosovo, or perhaps now Gaza. In other words it’s a part of the inhabited world where the sovereignty situation is very fluid indeed, and where fairly strong locally based based communities are trying to develop their own “nation state”-type institutions.
I guess you could put Somaliland’s nascent parliament into the category of such institutions.
Regarding Somalia, meanwhile– the country from which Somaliland has been breaking off– the famous war photographer Kevin Sites has started his “Hotzone” direct newsfeed for Yahoo.com from there this week. Mainly he’s been showcasing the misery and violence in the capital, Mogadishu. (Like here.) Actually, he hasn’t just been doing photography. He’s also been making videos and writing almost-daily blog entires. Boy, they keeping him busy!
Next week, Kevin’s going to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I must really try to see all the work he does there. Some four million people have died due the conflicts in DRC in the past five or so year– but the US MSM seldom even mentions the place…
Meanwhile, I want most of this post to be about Yvette and her steady, building-from-the-ground-up work in Somaliland. You’re doing such a great job there, Yvette.
Dem party think-tank’s plan for partial withdrawal from Iraq
- Note: This post contains what I think is a handy little table comparing different withdrawal and redployment plans, including this latest one. If you want to go straight to the table and skip the analysis, click here.
In the absence of any strong leadership from leading Congressional Democrats
for the movement to withdraw the US occupation troops from Iraq, it has been
left to some think-tanks and private individuals to formulate their (our)
own plans in this regard. The latst comes from an interesting source:
the fairly influential, middle-of-the-line Democratic “Center for American
Progress“. It is called “Strategic Redeployment“. You
can download a PDF file of the whole, fairly easy-to-read text
here
.
I know one of the two co-authors– Larry Korb, a hard-nosed but
smart and personable defense intellectual who used to work at the Brookings
Institution in DC, when I had a two-year fellowship there way back when.
(By the way, though the sub-title of the plan is “A progressive plan for
Iraq and the struggle against violent extremists”, people should not really
be misled by the use of the word “progressive” there. In my experience,
this term often doesn’t mean the same thing inside US politics– and certainly
not inside Democratic Party politics– as it means elsewhere in the world.
Inside the Dem Party, it often denotes a particular kind of technocratic,
social-engineering approach to problems more than a leftist orientation…
And that is the case here.)
There is quite a lot to applaud in the SR report, though I think it also
has a number of notable shortcomings. Perhaps most significantly, coming
as it does from a think-tank that is heavy with Dem Party politicos, is that it spells out directly the fact that,
Opponents of President Bush