Iraq open thread #7

Hi. I’m traveling back from London to Virginia today. I’ve been working a little on writing a post about British attitudes to the Iraq war– in the wake of the Basra bust-up earlier this week and in the lead-up to the Labor Party conference of next week.
But it’s not ready yet. And I might not get onto a good connection to post it here before I get home this evening.
So let me leave this open thread for y’all to discuss the US-Iraq war in my absence from cyberspace.

Palestinian Israelis, Jewish Israelis, etc

Someone sent me a link to this book review recently. It’s of a book called The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide, by a British-Israeli woman called Susan Nathan. She recounts how she made “aliyah” (migrated) to Israel, learned Hebrew, and then went to live in what is called variously, in the review, an Arab “village” and an Arab “town”.
The reviewer, Laura Levitt, Ph.D., is described as “the Director of Jewish Studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her review reads very much like part of an ongoing discussion inside the confines of a certain subset of the world’s “progressive” Jewish community, about the nature of Israel.
Levitt writes:

    Most upsetting for me were the stories Nathan tells about the ongoing efforts to confiscate ancestral land and property from Arab Israeli citizens. These are places that had been inhabited by these Palestinian families for centuries. As she explains, Israel

Geneva, sundry items

Being an ‘international’ in Geneva is like being an ‘international’ in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. (But a lot more comfortable.) It is to have that same sense of existing in a dual– local/international– universe. The two aspects of Geneva are even bilingual in the same way as Kigali: French and English, though to be honest there are plenty of Rwandais who don’t speak French at all. In both cities, a strong core of UN agencies is surrounded by a constellation of international NGOs. But there, perhaps, my analogizing should stop.
I wish more people from the US heartland– even, from the US Congress– could travel to Geneva and see the many global functions being fulfilled by the various UN agencies headquartered here…

Continue reading “Geneva, sundry items”

‘Raising Yousuf’ in Gaza

Here is a great find, thanks to surfing around in Mark Glaser’s space in OJR.
It’s Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation, the blog kept for some months now by Gaza-based Al-Jazeera journalist Laila El-Haddad. She says,

    This blog is about raising my son Yousuf in the occupied Gaza Strip while working as a journalist, and everything that entails from potty training to border crossings. Together, we endure a lot, and the personal becomes political. This is our story.

I read the top few posts there, which were excellent. I plan to get RY onto my sidebar here once I get back to a sensible internet connection this weekend.

O.J.R. on the body part porn story

Mark Glaser got a good, well-researched story up onto Online Journalism Review yesterday about the pornsite Nowthatsfuckedup.com, that I wrote about at the end of August, here and here.
He went a lot further in researching the story than I had the time (or the stomach) to do. He does cite our role at JWN in getting news about the site out in English. (Biggest chapeau there to Christiane.) He also quotes a couple of things I said in a quick email exchange with him a couple of days ago.
He wrote this about the replies he got from the DOD and Centcom:

    When I contacted military public affairs people in the U.S. and Iraq, they didn’t seem aware of the site and initially couldn’t access the site from their own government computers. Eventually, they told me that if soldiers were indeed posting photos of dead Iraqis on the site, then it’s not an action that’s condoned in any way by the military.
    “The glorification of casualties goes against our training and is strongly discouraged,” said Todd Vician, a U.S. Defense Department spokesman. “It is our policy that images taken with government equipment or due to access because of a military position must be cleared before released. While I haven’t seen these images, I doubt they would be cleared for release. Improper treatment of captured and those killed does not help our mission, is discouraged, investigated when known, and punished appropriately.”
    Capt. Chris Karns, a CentCom spokesman, told me that there are Department of Defense regulations and Geneva Conventions against mutilating and degrading dead bodies, but that he wasn’t sure about regulations concerning photos of dead bodies. He noted that the Bush administration did release graphic photos of the dead bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein to the media…
    “I don’t think it will get to that point [where cameras would be banned],” Karns said. “All it takes is one or two individuals to do things like this that cast everyone in a negative light. The vast majority of soldiers are acting responsibly with cameras in the field. But on the Internet there aren’t a whole lot of safeguards and the average citizen can create their own site.”
    Karns did say that if soldiers were posting these photos online, that it would have a negative strategic impact, especially when the enemy relies so heavily on the media to win the battle of perception.

So, once again, it’s mainly the “perception” that they claim is the issue, not the facts of the gross abuse of humanitarian norms that were committed by US forces in the field and that almost certainly continues to be committed as I write this…
Glaser quotes me as follows:

    “The important thing is for the U.S. military and political leadership at the highest levels to recommit the nation to the norms of war including the Geneva Conventions, and to be held accountable for the many violations that have taken place so far,” Cobban said via e-mail. “What I don’t think would be helpful would be further punitive actions that are still limited to the grunts and the foot soldiers, who already have the worst of it.”

Anyway, check it out.

Sadrists and Brits in Basra

I was just watching the CNN footage of the massive British tank rolling backward and forward as it tried to get out of a tight corner in Basra, while being pelted with Molotovs.
It was extremely compelling footage, and may well considerably dent Blair’s ability to continue with the fiction that he’s doing something worthwhile by persisting to be part of the fighting coalition in Iraq.
I’m going to London this evening and shall report on what I find there.
Juan Cole has lots of material about what’s been happening with the Brits in Basra.
If as he indicates it’s mainly the Sadrists who’ve been active in this whole confrontation, that would seem to mark a significant geographical extension of their ability to exert influence.
Basra is, of course, an absolute logistic chokepoint for any foreign power wanting to control Iraq. If it passes into the hands of determinedly anti-“Coalition” forces, that considerably complicates any prospects of any orderly departure for the main (i.e. US) force. Unless it’s through a negotiated exit. So whoever controls Basra– whether it’s Sadrists or Badrists– has a non-trivial negotiating card in hand.

What causes the perpetration of atrocities?

When most people in the west think about people who perpetrate
atrocities, they shift immediately (if they were not already in it)
into “judgment and denunciation mode”; and for the vast majority of
western rights activists that shift seems also to involve shutting down their
normal human curiosity about their fellow-humans, altogether.

It strikes me this shutting-down is of as little utility in the case of
atrocity perpatrators as it is in that of terrorists.  Okay, we
all decry, oppose, are horrified by (or whatever) both terrorism and
the perpetration of atrocities… And maybe for some people it makes
them feel good to verbalize these denunciations in loud and judgmental
terms.

If, however, a person wants to end the perpetration of
either terrorism or other forms of atrocity, it is extremely helpful–
actually, indispensable– to try to find an answer to the question of
“why do some people end up doing these things?”  Then, on
the basis of the results of such enquiries one can perhaps start to
craft better approaches and policies that can end pepetration in the
present and prevent it in the future.

Undertaking such an enquiry need not detract from one’s moral
horror.  There is a problem, perhaps, in English, in the use of
the term “to understand”.  At a purely intellectual level, to
“understand” how a bicycle works implies no moral stance toward the
working of bicycles at all.  But to many people, the idea that it
might be worthwhile trying to “understand” why someone perpetrates
atrocities too often is taken to mean that one has (or is in danger of
developing) some sympathy toward the perpetrator.

I’ll say yes, that is a risk.  I have interviewed a number of
people of whose acts I very strongly disapproved– and quite
frequently, the process of doing the interviewing both increases my
intellectual and human understanding of why the person acted as he did and engenders some sense of
basic human commonality with him.  (This is not the same as saying that
I start to feel some approval of his devastating acts.  It is, I
think, a fairly immature individual who is unable to make any
meaningful distinction between a fellow human and the very worst of his
or her acts.)

But oh, how much easier to stay on one’s own moral high horse,
expressing one’s denunciations left, right, and center without
undertaking the arduous task of seeking to understand the motivations
of the person one denounces!

How easy just to say that person who commits atrocious acts is just
inherently “evil”, and that’s that.

… All the above is a very wordy introduction to something I want to
write here about the value of the still-tiny field of enquiry called
“Perpetrator Studies”.  It’s a field that we need a lot more
of!  (I see that the estimable, Cape Town-based Institute for
Justice and Reconciliation has been doing
a little of it; basing their approach on that used in one portion
of the TRC’s work.  Are there other good PS projects out there?)

I have just finished reading a remarkable book by the Croatian writer
Slavenka Drakulic, called They would
never hurt a fly: War criminals on trial in The Hague.  I
think this book– and Pumla Gobodo-Madikazele’s A human being died that night— 
between them provide a very useful gateway into “Perpetrator Studies”.

Drakulic is a very talented writer– of both fiction and
non-fiction.  I’ve written about her book Balkan Express here before. 
That was a collection of essays she wrote during the Wars of the
Balkans.  This latest book is based on a lengthy “research trip”
she made to The Hague, in order to observe proceedings at the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  In
the introduction she says:

My interest in writing this book was a
simple one: as it cannot be denied war crimes were committed, I wanted
to find out about the people who committed them.  Who were
they?  Ordinary people like you or me– or monsters?(p.7)

It rapidly becomes clear in the body of the book what her answer is: not “monsters”, but the
“ordinary people like you or me.”

A key turning point in Drakulic’s narrative comes on p.50 of my Abacus
paperback edition, where she is describing and reflecting on the
trial of three Bosnian-Serb militiamen accused (and found guilty) of
having participated in and helped to organize the mass sexual demeaning
and defilement of literally hundreds of  Bosniak women and girls
whom they treated as sex-slaves.

She writes:

Continue reading “What causes the perpetration of atrocities?”