IISS: Asian powers and the world order

Sunday morning, we had two very interesting plenary sessions at the
annual conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
(IISS).  In the first, M.K.Narayanan,
the National Security Advisor to the prime minister of India and Harry Harding, a longtime
China-affairs specialist who until recently was Dean of the
International Affairs School at George Washington University in
Washington, DC, talked about China
and India: The Asian rising powers debate.  In the second, Kishore Mahbubani, the Dean
of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, and Marc Perrin de Brichambaut,
the Secretary-General of OSCE, talked about Competing world views and the
bases of international order in the 21st century.

Though the presentations were all of a high standard, what I want to
write about here are primarily those made by Mahbubani,
Narayanan, and Harding
because they had more thematic linkages with each other than the
presentation
given by Perrin. [Note: I think those links above should work if you’re
already in the archived version of this post.]

Mahbubani:

Mahbubani, a well-groomed, energetic man in probably his late fifties,
was until recently a high-ranking Singaporean diplomat. 
(At the beginning of his presentation, he made a little joke about not wanting to be called
“Ambassador Mahbubani” any more, and said he was “still practicing
acting undiplomatically.”)

He started by quoting Marc Antony when he said, “I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him,” saying he was coming to praise the way the US had
exercized its hegemony over the world order since 1945 and not to bury
it– though he said he feared the effect of his words might seem to be
to bury it.

There are, he said, five factors that have been leading to the decline
of the UN-based world order:

Continue reading “IISS: Asian powers and the world order”

Hate speech and Lebanon

According to this Reuters story used by Al -Jazeera,

    Lebanon has detained three leaders of an ultra-nationalist Christian party after it distributed CDs calling on every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian, judicial sources say.
    A prosecutor on Wednesday ordered the detention of Habib Younes, Naji Awdeh and Joseph Khoury Tawk, members of the Guardians of the Cedars Party, “on charges of breaching judicial clauses and harming relations with Arab countries”, the sources said.
    The three leaders of the party, which was set up during the 1975-1990 civil war but has been dormant for the past 15 years, called at a news conference on Tuesday for “expelling Palestinian refugees and confiscating their property”.
    “No Palestinian should be left in Lebanon”, and “Every Lebanese should kill a Palestinian”, are two of its civil war slogans distributed on CD during the conference, the daily As Safir newspaper said.

Well, it’s not only Al-safir that says that. Back in the late 1970s when I used to travel around the parts of East Beirut totally controlled (and religiously “cleansed”) by the Maronitist militias, nearly every piece of blank wall bore on it the slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. These slogans were put up with spray-paint, sprayed through stencils. They bore the “signature” of the very extreme little group Guardians of the Cedars.
I wrote about that here a bit, when I was in Lebanon (and Syria) last November. I also wrote this:

    Throughout East Beirut, the walls had the stenciled-on slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. Ala kul lubnani in yuqtil filastiniyan. I never saw anyone trying to cover those slogans over or otherwise erase them: they loomed over the public streets there for years.
    And I saw, counted, smelled, and examined the putrifying phsyical remains of a good number of the thousands of Palestinians– women, children, men, old people– who were killed in the enactment of that openly genocidal campaign.

That is extremely depressing that 25 years later, that hate-speech and genocidal incitment is once again being distributed in Lebanon– and by the same group! Encrouaging, though, if this time around, the country has a state apparatus that is (a) strong enough and (b) motivated enough to try to crack down on it.
In general, I believe the answer to hate speech is more speech. But in the case of the Guardians of the Cedars, their proven track record of following through on their very explicit incitement indicates that judicial measures are completely appropriate for them.
(Hat-tip to the two friends from Kansas who got this to me.)

Riverbend takes on the constitution

The talented and wise young female Iraqi blogger Riverbend has now put her smart mind to work on analyzing the Iraqi constitution. (Hat-tip to commenter Jean for noting that.)
All of her observations there seem astute– including what she notes about differences between different version/ translations of the constitution.
She notes the complexity of this (draft) constitution’s references to the role of Islam in the projected constitutional life of the country, and writes:

    In the old constitution that was being used up until the war, the

Strategic Studies in Geneva

The blogosphere is a pretty amazing place. I’ve been at the annual (or actually not-quite-annual) conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, here in Geneva. The IISS is a venerable organization, headquartered in London, that is not nearly as “international” as it sounds– it’s overwhelmingly made up of people who are white and male…
Anyway, I was going to write up some of my notes from today’s sessions. The first plenary had former US Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter and the former conservative Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt. I wanted to check up on Bildt’s resume. So I Googled him. And wouldn’t you know he’s been writing his own blog since February!
It looks as though there’s some pretty interesting stuff there. It’s interesting to find someone who’s such a high-level mover and shaker as Bildt writing a blog. You can find there this comment about Paul Volcker’s recent report into the UN Oil-for-food scandal:

    You can not avoid the conclusion that what the massive Volcker Report investigation has found does not amount to much. In one case, Mr Savan clearly violated UN ethics rule, bu whether anything illegal was done remains to be clarified.
    It is worth nothing, [I think he means ‘noting’?] that the Volcker Report fails to mention the very large amount of Oil-for-Food money that was transferred to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and for which there has been no accounting whatsover.

Then, if you go over to Bildt’s website, you can find a photo of him looking fairly dapper and also a link to the text of the address he gave here in Geneva this morning…
So I didn’t actually have to take notes during his speech at all!
He spoke of,

    rather a substantial and undoubtedly worrying decline in both the hard powers of the United States and the soft powers of the European Union.
    American military power is seriously bogged down in the marshes, back alleys and deserts of Mesopotamia. And it is likely to remain so for some considerable time to come. No one will say it openly, but everyone knows that the world

In Geneva

Hi. I’m in Geneva on what looks like a poor internet connection. I came here through London and rode the trains between Gatwick and London City airports with huge pleasure. There is something so civilized about trains– about a society that still has a commitment to public transport, in general.
Thank God the July bombers didn’t scare people from using the public transport system in London! The two trains plus one bus I was on all seemed well ridered. (Ok, maybe not a word. But it should be.)

Unimaginable horror, Baghdad

Unimaginable horror in Baghdad– again!– today as a large truck-bomb and a series of other attacks kill at least 152 and wounds many hundreds more.
AP’s Slobodan Lekic writes there that,

    Al-Jazeera said Al-Qaida in Iraq linked the attacks to the recent killing of about 200 militants from the city of Tal Afar by U.S. and Iraqi forces.
    Before dawn Wednesday, 17 men were killed by insurgents in the village of Taji north of Baghdad, which pushed the death toll in all violence in and around the capital to 169.
    Wednesday’s worst bombing killed at least 88 people and wounded 227 in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah where the day laborers had gathered shortly after dawn.
    The carnage was the worst single day of bloodshed since March 2, 2004, when coordinated blasts … hit Shiite Muslim shrines in Karbala and in Baghdad, killing at least 181 and wounding 573.
    The blasts coincided with Iraqi lawmakers announcing the country’s draft onstitution was in its final form and would be sent to the United Nations for printing and distribution ahead of an Oct. 15 national referendum. Sunni Muslims, who form up the core of the insurgency, have vowed to defeat the basic law.

As I have noted on JWN numerous times before, the internal violence in Iraq since the elections of last January has hit by far the hardest against the country’s Shiite community. This is another example of that. So far, the Shiite political leaderships have urged calm and worked strenuously to prevent any form of a response that would take the form of anti-Sunni pogroms… And indeed, some Shiite leaders like Moqtada Sadr have energetically continued to pursue a policy of “national” unity with the country’s Sunni population.
Most of the attacks against Shiite civilian targets– like today’s– seem to be the work of foreign militants, acting with who knows what form of shady outside backing. It would be great to think that the perpetration of bloody and horrific excesses like today’s might succeed in turning all Iraqi Sunnis against the foul machinations of their extremist co-religionists who have come into the country from elsewhere…
Mainly here, though, I just want to express deep, deep sadness and empathy for all those afflicted by the present violence.
Where oh where is the responsible governance and protection of civilian populations that under international law is the responsibility of the power running the military occupation of the country?
(I was going to take down the black banner on the blog today. Maybe now I’ll have to leave it up for a lot longer.)

Gaza and Egypt

More unregulated border crossings between Egypt and Gaza today…
Why shouldn’t Egypt, a sovereign nation, do what it chooses to along its border with Gaza where, on the other side of the line, the ruling authority (the PA) is likewise not constrained at all by any completed contractual agreement with Israel on these matters?
(Israel, we should note, having chosen not to negotiate the modalities of its withdrawal from Gaza with the PA.)
Egypt does have obligations under its 1979 peace treaty with Israel not to deploy certain forms of armed forces anywhere in eastern Sinai. But so far as I know it is under no contractual obligation whatsoever to prevent the free movement of persons or goods between Egyptian Sinai and Gaza.
Of course, Egypt was negotiating all kinds of things with Israel about the nature of the crossing-point between Sinai and Gaza. (EU monitors, etc.) But the Israelis wouldn’t ever sign off on a final agreement for that.
Interesting days ahead, inside Cairo, if Mubarak’s government now tries to do Israel’s bidding along that border?
Between 1948 and 1967– with the interruption of Israel’s aggressive but thankfully shortlived occupation of Gaza in 1956– Egypt was the dominant power in Gaza. The Nasser regime maintained there the same kind of tight “national-security state” it maintained throughout Egypt itself… In Gaza as in Egyptian Sinai, the main concern of Nasser’s regime was to prevent any unctrolled escalations (on the behalf of the Palestinians or the Muslim Brotherhood or whomever) that might drag Egypt into a military battle with Israel.
But for much of the time Egypt was the hegemon in Gaza, the economic situation there was relatively good. (At least, many Gazans remember it that way.) The Nasserists allowed the emergence of a Free Port area there which gave the Gazans many more economic options than most Egyptians had at the time.
One could surmise that the present-day calculations of the Egyptian security apparatus with regard to Gaza would be about the same as those of the Nasserists. But with these non-trivial differences:

    (1) “People power”, in terms of an organized, community-based mass movement, is probably much better developed today among at least the Islamists in Gaza than it was in the Nasser era, which gives Gazans much more resilience than they had back then; and
    (2) It looks much more problematic for Israel to “threaten” a punitive military attack against Egypt now than it did back in Nasser’s day… Especially because (a) there is no hint at all today of Egypt or anyone else mounting a military attack against Israel that could serve as a “pretext” for any large, justified Israeli military strike, and (b) Israel’s big ally and shield, the US, must surely be aware of the effect to be expected for the far-flung and very vulnerable US military deployments throughout the Middle East of any big new Israeli military escalation…

So, interesting days ahead. Maybe I made a wise choice to go to this year’s conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, due to start later this week in Geneva: one of the main featured topics there will indeed be… the Middle East. Lots to talk about.

Gaza relieved (if not yet free)

I can just imagine the elation for the 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza that the vast majority of their terrain has now been evacuated by the Israeli military. Fabulous! Now a Gazan person can do such radical things as travel the length of the Strip without having to pass through any IOF checkpoints or stroll on that large portion of the beach from which previously they all were banned.
From this description of today’s developments by AP’s Ravi Nessman and Mariam Fam, it seems as if Gazans have even be able to cross freely into the Strip from the Egyptian side of the border, which is interesting and significant.
They write:

    No people crossed through the main Rafah border crossing point, which Israel has closed indefinitely. Instead, people went around it.

Excellent. Especially since most of the people living on the Egyptian side of the border are very closely related indeed to the people on the Palestinian side.
(Until Egypt regained control over all its national terrain in Sinai, in 1982, the Israelis who were in military occupation of both Sinai and Gaza paid little heed to the fact that there was an international border there. Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai that year left the Palestinians on the Egypt side of the border stranded outside the homeland to which they have now, finally, been able to return.)
Nessman and Fam wrote,

    Egyptian security forces stood by and let the crossings take place, describing it as a “humanitarian” gesture to let people separated for years reunite. Security officials also suggested the crossings would be short-lived as Egypt deploys 750 heavily armed troops to secure its border with Gaza.

We’ll see about that. Why should Egypt cave to Israel’s demands to be able to continue to control crossings in and out of Gaza– especially since there is a solid plan to meet Israel’s legitimate security concerns (as opposed to their frequently over-the-top security “demands”) through the positioning of EU monitors at the Rafah crossing point?
The Palestinians have now been able to return to the 30% of Gaza that had previously been expropriated for the settlements and for the IOF’s previously huge military presence. Hallelujah!
It is true that their return has been marred by the torching of some of the former synagogue structures there.
Everyone had warned the Israeli government that this was likely to happen if it did not take steps itself to demolish those structures. I certainly acknowledge that those structures probably had deep meaning and significance for the Israeli families who worshiped in them, and I am sure their present destruction is painful for those families.
On the other hand, consider this:

    (1) These structures had previously been deconsecrated— primarily by the removal of the Torah scrolls from them. (Deconsecration of sacred spaces takes place all the time, in all the religions I know of, as populations move and new needs are pursued.)
    (2) Under international law, the construction of these synagogues by the Israelis had all along been just as illegal as the construction of the civilian communities to which they were attached.
    (3) Finally, the Israeli government had the chance to demolish them itself, but yesterday voted not to do so– in the almost certain knowledge that their demolition would be undertaken by the Palestinians in, quite probably, a far less “respecful” way.

But these were no longer sacred structures. They were just buildings. The Torah scrolls that they once housed have been removed and are being appropriately housed and cared for inside Israel.
As I wrote here last week, the visionary Israeli peacenik Gershon Baskin had been proposing that the synagogue buildings be handed over to the PA for them to use as they desired. I guess that proved impossible in the end because the running disagreements between the PA and the Sharon government over the terms of the withdrawal meant that there was no formal “handing-over” ceremony at all.
In general, the handover has been much less orderly than it would have been if there had been even a modicum of goodwill on the Israeli side. But Sharon has always said this withdrawal would be fundamentally “unilateral”– “my way or the highway”– and now he’s merely continuing with that approach.
What that means for the chance that Abu Mazen can retain the political leadership of the Palestinian movement into the future is something we’ll have to watch carefully in the weeks ahead…
But I don’t want to dwell on the problems and downsides of what’s happening. I haven’t been to Gaza since 2002. But I can just imagine how wonderful it feels for the Palestinians who’ve been cooped up in their little separated ghettoes up and down the Strip for so long now, subjected to continual lockdowns, military attacks, home demolitions, and denials of even their most basic rights to freedom of movement and of assembly– to finally, finally, regain the freedom of the Strip!
And yes, I write that even knowing that there are still many Israeli plans out there to keep the Strip itself isolated and tightly controlled– to keep it as merely the “bigger prison” that the Palestinians fear.
But how intriguing that– even if only for a short period– the Egyptians and Palestinians are finding a way to punch through that Israeli-planned quarantine of Gaza… It will certainly be interesting to see the “access into Gaza” issue become an increasingly big issue inside Egyptian politics over the months ahead.

Iraq open thread #6

So it looks like the latest US-“Iraqi” offensive against Tal Afar was predictably unsuccessful?

    Insurgents staged a classic guerrilla retreat from Tal Afar on Sunday, melting into the countryside through a network of tunnels… [Gosh, those sneaky Eye-raqis! Don’t you just hate it when they do that?]
    With the city swept clear of extremists for the second time in a year, Iraqi and U.S. military leaders vowed to redouble efforts to crush insurgents operating all along the Syrian frontier and in the Euphrates River valley… [bla-bla-bla]

It is, of course, almost exactly a year since the US-led forces decisively “took” Tall Afar the last time… And then, very rapidly, it fell back into the sway of anti-US insurgents.
This city has particular significance because of the strong presence within it– as within a few other key cities- of ethnic Turkmens, who have some significant backing within Turkey. A not-insignificant power in the region, in case you hadn’t noticed.
I guess my big question right now is why, in the lead-up to the October 15 referendum on the Constitution, the US and its allies inside Iraq seem so intent on antagonizing the Iraqi Sunnis?
Aaaargh, silly question, Helena. The imminence of a significant voting moment didn’t stop them from launching the attack against Fallujah last November, did it?
But you’d think that some “intelligent” power in Washington just might note that, in the run-up to a significant electoral moment in Iraq, it is not actually particularly helpful or appropriate to launch a new military offensive against the Sunnis??
Yeah, you might think that. If you cared about “democracy” and “inclusiveness” and all those fine things…
Anyway, I’m too tired to do much more to hunt down the details on this story right now. But if folks would like to post their own well-considered analyses, or info regarding the humanitarian costs of all these pointless operations, that would be really helpful.
Here’s your chance…