Gaza: land-border issues

The status of negotiations over the border crossing at Rafah between Gaza and Egypt still seems very unclear. This is a good piece of reporting from AP’s Ravi Nessman about how the stranglehold that Israel already operates at the Karni crossing point between Gaza and Israel has been stifling the Gaza economy for years.
Now, Israel also wants to be able to (continue to?) exert the same kind of control over the goods passing through the Rafah crossing-point, too.
Nessman’s piece seems like a good snapshot of the land-border issues, and is worth reading in full.
He quotes Mohammed Tilbani, the owner of a cookie factory in Deir al-Balah that in the past has employed as many as 350 Gazans, as saying he believes his company can sell as much as $1.1 million worth of cookies a month if there are no restrictions on exporting his products (and presumably, also, no restrictions on importing his raw materials). Tilbani, Nessman wrote,

    called on the Palestinian Authority to fight hard for a port, airport and open border for Gaza.
    If they don’t get it, he said, “We will return to war.”

If the owner of a medium-size light-goods manufacturing business feels that way, you can imagine how the large proportion of Gazans who have considerably less sunk capital in the system in Gaza feel about issues of war, peace, and the value of “stability”.
JWN readers will recall that I wrote about the political importance of Gaza gaining maximum access to international markets in this August CSM column and this JWN post that I put up that same day.

Rumors of violence

This is an interesting account by Matt Welch of how dark rumors about the disorderly and violent tendencies of the low-income and mainly black evacuees from New Orleans have often preceded them to their places of (let’s hope) temporary refuge…
But Welch also writes that “none of the reports were true.”
I think that was referring to reports of violence committed in Baton Rouge, after evacuation. But he also pulls in several pieces of evidence showing that the reports of violence inside New Orleans prior to evacuation were in some cases untrue and in others greatly exaggerated.
Welch writes about the staggering lack of information suffered by everyone in New Orleans during the worst days last week, and how that contributed to the ease with which scary rumors got circulated. (He doesn’t mention the private security companies, like Blackwater, that were also making successful– and I should imagine, very lucrative– bids for contracts to “protect” media stars and others eager to get into the city to do their stand-uppers. I wonder how their sales pitch went, exactly?)
Welch adds:

    it’s entirely possible that, like the chimeric Baton Rouge hordes, exaggerations about New Orleans’ criminality affected policy, mostly by delaying rescue operations and the provision of aid. Relief efforts ground to a halt last week after reports circulated of looters shooting at helicopters, yet none of the hundreds of articles I read on the subject contained a single first-hand confirmation from a pilot or eyewitness. The suspension-triggering attack–on a military Chinook attempting to evacuate refugees from the Superdome–was contested by Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown, who told ABC News, “We’re controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on.” What’s more, when asked about the attacks, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff replied: “I haven’t actually received a confirmed report of someone firing on a helicopter.”

I just note that even though I was born after the second World War, in England there were still lots of stories about the hostility that kids evacuated from London during the Blitz faced from the (mainly rural) communities that received them.

Nir Rosen, Wesley Clark, etc

I’m back in the Great Wen (Washington DC) again this week… Taking
part in this mega-conference on “Terrorism,
Security, and America’s Purpose“. It is probably an admirable
venture: an attempt to stage a public forum on these issues that is
both high level and wide-ranging. I had originally thought it was
an attempt to start to define a strategy for the Democratic Party—
a task that certainly still needs to be done! But no. It
turns out the speakers come from both parties, and even from the far
right (e.g. Grover Norquist, the long-time campaigner against any and
all forms of taxation; and the fiction writer Tom Clancy, who is about
to enter this massive banquet hall where the main sessions are being
held.)

My personal high points so far have been listening to Nir Rosen of Asia Times
Online, and Gen. Wesley Clark…

(Aha, there’s Clancy on the podium now, looking pudgy and jowly.
He looks like a little old grandpa with his jaws sort of collapsing
into his mouth; and one tuft of his hair is sticking straight up…)

Okay, so Nir Rosen.
He was on, I guess, the second of the big panels this morning. I
missed the first one, because the “working group” I’ve been a part of
was having it’s meeting then. So I got to miss George Soros and
someone described as “The Hon. Roger Cressey” who– I kid you not–
used to be my research assistant back in the mid-1980s… The
Honorable?? Well, anyway, I missed him.

Then I missed most of Sen. Joe Biden’s presentation.

Nir– whom I’d never met before, in the flesh– was on a large panel
along with Robert Pape of the Univ. of Chicago, Yosri Fouda of al-Jazeera and a couple of other
folks. I have to tell you this is very much a Washington
‘establishment’ event. Nearly all white males, most of them
middle-aged or older; everyone in standard power suits and monochrome
(red or blue) ties… And then there’s Nir Rosen, 28 years
old, three days growth of beard, swarthy, and rumpled.

He spoke in almost a monotone. I couldn’t figure out why.
Maybe it was the weirdness of being where he was– TV lights blaring;
all this DC establishment stuff going on around him. What
he talked about was Fallujah, mainly. (He also talked about how,
during recent visits to Somalia and Pakistan, he has already seen
stores named after Fallujah, and people wearing tee-shirts talking
about Fallujah. “So it’s become a big rallying-point in different
parts of the Muslim world.”)

He talked quite rapidly, and in that fairly soft monotone. He
talked about the brutality of the US occupation of Iraq as he has seen
it, and said that wherever he goes Muslims tell him they hate the US
for what it does, not what it is…

Continue reading “Nir Rosen, Wesley Clark, etc”

Katrina, misgovernance, etc.

Laura Rozen of War & Piece has been providing great coverage of Katrina-related developments.
(I’m afraid I’ve been a little busy with other things this weekend. One of them was running the Charlottesville Women’s 4-Miler yesterday. I do figure this whole struggle to remake our country as a decent, caring community is one that we need to be in for the long haul… So we need to pay attention to both the mens sana aspect of our lives and the corpore sano aspect… I’ve also been doing a lot of Quaker stuff: we had a Meeting for Business today which was fairly complex.)
Anyway here are some highlights that Laura’s compiled:
* New Orleans police and firefighters traumatized
* A great Open Letter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune to President Bush… Worth reading the whole text there, espeically the call for Bush to fire FEMA chief Michael Brown….
* Commentaries from German TV stations on the disaster
* This story from the UK Guardian, which uses a very moving photo that turns on its head the ugly anti-Black racism that has marked some of the commentary about the people who did not evacuate New Orleans before the levees broke, and
* An L.A. Times story about the resignation of the Pentagon ‘s “inspector-general” amid, as Laura says, “accusations of blocking investigations of senior Bush officials; allegations of forging press releases, blocking an investigation into an Air Force official’s deal with Boeing, withholding information from Congress… the usual.”
… Thanks so much, Laura!

Katrina, accountability, and structural change

If you Google for “disaster management graduate courses” you can find many fine institutions of higher education in the US and elsewhere that offer just such training. So you might think that the person appointed by Prez Bush to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency– the lead federal agency coordinating responses to Hurricane Katrina– might be someone with some, uh, background or experience in this important field?
Think again. As Laura Rozen of War and Piece revealed yesterday, Michael D. Brown, who has headed FEMA since 2003, “has no qualifications.” Rozen wrote that before he won the FEMA job, Brown,

    was an estate planning lawyer in Colorado and of counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association Legal Department.

The fact that Brown has terrifyingly little experience of managing disasters did not prevent him from going on CNN last night and, in essence, blaming the people who did not get out of New Orleans when the instructions to evacuate were issued for the fate that subsequently befell them.
No word from Brown, though, about how the scores of thousands of people without cars, or the hundreds of patients and staff in the city’s hospitals and nursing homes, were supposed to leave the city without any adequate logistical help being offered them.
Readers who haven’t read much yet about the situation in the city’s hospitals can get a general picture of what things were like in the large, publicly-owned “Charity Hospital” today– five days into the city’s trauma– from this AP account.
The US military/ National Guard was finally able to get some good convoys into Norlins today. Hopefully the humanitarian situation of those still in the city can improve as public order is restored and– just maybe– a rational plan for relief, belated evacuation and recovery gets underway.
But things will continue to be really tough for the two million or so (former) residents of the Gulf Coast for many months or even years to come. Can and should all of those towns and cities actually be rebuilt? How will the water- and storm-management plans be improved to deal with the even heavier storms that will be coming in over the decades ahead, thanks to global warming?
In addition, the consequences for the US economy will most likely be huge.
Paul Krugman had a strong column in the NYT today. He concluded it with this:

    I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.
    At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
    Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
    So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

This idea that the Bush administration– and many other members of the US political elite– has a fundamental lack of understanding, or even an active contempt, for the fundamental demands of good governance is something I’ve been arguing for a while now. It’s a theme I hope to explore more here in JWN in the weeks ahead.
You see it (as Krugman noted) both at home and abroad.
I think one of the things that the Bushies and most other members of the US economic hyper-elite here seem to lack is any solid concept of egalitarian, democratic governance. They seem to have no concept of “we’re all in this together”– or even of the “we” to which such a statement might apply. I think that rather than thinking of themselves as fundamentally co-equal members of a democratic citizenry, they see themselves more in the way feudal leaders used to: people who because of their privileged economic and social position are “born to rule”– while the rest of us poor suckers are left to scrabble on our own for what we can get.
You see this in so very many aspects of US life: the lack of any national health insurance or social safety net; the intense privatization of so many functions that in other–much more developed– countries are carried out by the government; the deeply engrained hostility to taxation; the general climate of entitlement, hyper-individualism, and meanspirited-ness that those feudalists foster.
For my part, I’m going to be an optimist. I’ll certainly do everything I can do to provide help to the poor, the sick, the lame, and the disadvantaged of Norlins and the other Gulf Coast communities. But I think the best thing that any of us inside the US who really care about the fabric of our society can do over the longer haul is to commit to the struggle for deepseated structural change… All the Red Cross collection bins in the country can’t substitute for what a truly accountable (and decently resourced) network of national and state-level governments needs to do in a situation of major disaster. And nor should private organizations have to do these things… Not in any fundamentaly egalitarian national community in which people truly felt that “we are all in this together.”

Az-Zaman on Baghdad bridge collapse

    Big thanks to the JWN reader who sent in a translation of the Az-Zaman article I mentioned this morning. Here it is, preceded by my own translation of the (lengthy) headline.

Headline: One thousand martyrs in an Iraqi catastrophe on the al-Aema bridge [bridge of the Imams]; Ja’fari announces three days of mourning; the Health
Minister calls on the ministers of the Interior and Defense to resign; Washington is confident the crisis can be overcome; the people of al-Aazhamiyeh rush to the aid of the wounded from the incident; and Iraqis accuse the government of a lack of readiness regarding security and services.
Dateline: Baghdad, Abdel-Hussein Ghazal and Zaner Mazloom Abbas– AFP– Reuters
Text:
Iraq was inflicted yesterday with the catastrophic killing of one thousand Iraqis most of whom were women and children from the visitorsof the Grave of Imam Moussa Ibn Jaafar El-Kadhim (peace be upon him) in Baghdad, where the stampede over the bridge of the Imams resulted in the suffocation or drowning of hundreds after the the sides of the bridge collapsed and the victims collided with the concrete obstacles which were placed for security reasons two years ago. Eyewitnesses relate that rumors about a booby-trapped car have caused fear amongst the people so a stampede resulted and that’s when the catastrophe occurred. The losses increased because of the lack of emergency services and the shooting in the air by police increased the fear and confusion amongst the crowd…

Continue reading “Az-Zaman on Baghdad bridge collapse”

Catastrophes & politics: Iraq

In the wake of every catastrophe comes grief… mourning… human solidarity and the arrival of efforts to help… and a search for understanding and answers. In many cases, this last process can have huge political ripple effects.
Billmon put up a great post yesterday about the search for understanding the background to the current Louisiana-Mississippi disaster. He and Matt over at Today in Iraq have both explored some of the effects that pursuit of the war in Iraq and other Bush administration priorities had on the readiness of the southern U.S. states to deal with Hurricane Katrina.
I want to focus more on the possible political fallout of the Baghdad bridge stampede on politics inside Iraq.
I realize that the government of Iraq has announced a three-day period of national mourning. (It would be interesting to know the extent to which it is observed in all the different parts of the country?) However, even while observing this mourning period, I believe it’s possible to start looking at the possible political fallout from the disaster– which has already started to happen.
For example, Iraqi Health Minister Abdul Mutalib Mohammed Ali already, on Wedesneday, demanded the resignation of the ministers of interior and defense, holding them responsible for the stampede:
Hat-tip to Matt at TII for that link. Hat-tip to Juan Cole for noting that the health minister is a Moqtada Sadr supporter and the two he accuses are SCIRI people.
Abdel-Hussein Ghazal and Zaner Mazloom Abbas of the Iraqi daily Az-Zaman had a piece on the paper’s website yesterday with the headline:

    One thousand martyrs in an Iraqi catastrophe on the al-Aema bridge; Ja’fari announces three days of mourning; the Health Minister calls on the ministers of the Interior and Defense to resign; Washington is confident the crisis can be overcome; the people of al-Aazhamiyeh rush to the aid of the wounded from the incident; and Iraqis acuse the government of a lack of readiness regarding security and services.

Well, as I said that’s just the headline. If any of our readers would like to contribute English language translations of some or all of the text of that piece– or of any other strong pieces of reporting from Baghdad; or of links to good English-language translations published elsewhere– then I would really appreciate that.
(No length limits for such contributions, which will be put up on JWN with as much or as little attribution to you as you would like. If you’re sending in anything more than a few sentences, maybe send it to me in an email or as an email attachment, rather than trying to cram it into a Comments box.)
Politically, I would note here that the Sadrists have been quite critical of the degree of decntralization enshrined in the currnetly proposed Iraqi constitution; and they have worked hard to keep good, nationalism-based links open with the country’s Sunni Arab community. I believe al-Aazhamiyeh is a majority Sunni neighborhood– hence the importance of that reference to it in the Zaman headline.
SCIRI, by contrast, not only strongly favors the decentralization proposal but has also pioneered the idea of creating an (effectively) all-Shiite super-region encompassing as many as nine of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
I think PM Ibrahim Ja’afari, also a Shiite, sits uncomfortably in the middle on this issue. Untill early this year, opinion polls in Iraq revealed that Ja’afari was generally quite popular there. But his popularity, and that of the Islamic Daawa Party that he heads, has most likely plummeted since he has shown himself to be an extremely inept and indecisive Prime Minister over the past five months.
For the Bushies (or “the Cheney administration” as Billmon calls it… ) yesterday’s catastrophe in Baghdad probably seriously upsets their plan of being able to stage a “successful” referendum on the constitution in October, and then the follow-on parliamentary election there in December. It is not just the broad lack of political clarity around the constitution issue that looks set to impede their plans; there is also a stunning lack in Iraq of even the most basic institutional capacity capable of holding these votes under any acceptable conditions of safety and fairness… The lack of institutional capacity in public security and other very basic civic infrastructure was, obviously, revealed once again during the bridge disaster. And the aftermath of the disaster looks as though it might well further weaken the political capacity of the pro-constitution parties.
By the way, there are some very well-connected people in the Republican Party here in the US– even if people who are not, right now, in the present administration– who are prepared to admit to the “Potemkin village” nature of the Iraqi constitution venture as it is currently conceived.
Recently I heard one such person musing on the constitution in the following terms:

    “The Iraqi constitution? Well, of course it’s a dog’s breakfast. But then it’s quite irrelevant anyway, isn’t it, since the country has no institutions capable of implementing it…”

My own thoughts exactly.

Catastrophes: the best response

I have changed the border of the blog to black to express my deep condolences to those who lost loved ones or have otherwise had their lives blighted by the two great catastrophes of this week.
Probably the biggest of these, in terms of lives lost, is the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the southern U.S. We don’t know how many have been killed there, possibly some or even many thousands. In addition many hundreds of thousands of people have had to leave their homes, many of which have been– and are continuing to be– destroyed by nature’s wrath. The living conditins of millions of people in the affected areas are frightful. Relief operations are complex and slow.
(Later, we can think more about the longer-term effects of the hurricane on oil prices and the economy; the wisdom of many of the engineering and zoning decisions that have been previously been made in that region; and other weighty related matters. For now, the human tragedy just seems paramount to me.)
And then, today in Baghdad there was the horrifying stampede on the bridge to Kazemiyah, that left a reported 960-plus people dead. I can barely believe how terrible it must have been to be caught up in that. The chaos, uncertainty, and loss suffered by the survivors must be terrible. I just hope that some authority– whether mosques, local parties, government authorities, or whatever– is able to deliver the aid and emergency services that the survivors now so desperately need.
It seems particularly tragic that those who drowned, were crushed to death, or suffered injuries in that incident met their fates while participating in a religious pilgrimage. Bill the spouse reminded me there have been a number of analogous incidents during the Hajj in recent years– and that there, too, it is often particularly dangerous when procession participants are channeled into the relative narrowness of a bridge. This site tells us that in 1990, 1,402 pilgrims were killed in a stampede during Hajj time in Mecca. (I think that one was on a bridge.) In 1994, 400 were killed in a stampede there; and just last year, another 244.
But now, this week, maybe the concurrence of these two events in Iraq and the southern US can remind everyone that there are more important human values to attend to than the pursuit of foreign wars?
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the concurrence of these events served– as last December’s tsunami in Asia did, too, in its way– to turn people’s attention away from wars of conquest and back to the needs of human survival and human solidarity?
I guess I mean there particularly the attention of the US citizenry. We US citizens could use our country’s rich resources and fine capabilities so effectively to help our fellow-humans in our own southern states, in Baghdad, and in other places where people are sick, hurting, and in need– if only we could cure ourselves of our addiction to this doomed and ultra-violent war.
If we really want this, we can make it happen.

On the road: DC

I drove up to DC this evening, and am now sitting in my room in my favorite DC hostelry, the Tabard Inn. The rooms here are all extremely funky. This one has walls painted the color of dried blood, a rococo iron bedstead, and numerous small lamps with black lampshades…
Coming up here I was noticing the gas prices. They varied from $2.45/gallon thru $2.89/gallon. (Okay, I got suckered into paying near the high end of that range. I was afraid I wouldn’t make it to the next gas station.) On the radio, people were talking a lot about the uncertain prospects re refining capacity in this country, with many refineries having been put out of action for an unknown length of time by the Gulf Coast storm.
Someone said one-fourth of US refining capacity is currently out of action. It strikes me that’s enormous.
I always have to grit my teeth coming back to DC. I think of it as “the Great Wen” as in (I think) Matthew Arnold’s poem “The deserted village.” A wen is a big scab or blister that grows upon the body of the land and sucks all its vitality out of it. Well, that’s not quite how I think of DC– I still have a lot of friends from the many years I lived here. But still, I need to grit my teeth just a little bit coming back here.
I guess George W has had to rush back here, too, to “look presidential” in dealing with the storm. (Not that he felt he needed to do so in order to deal with the terrible deterioration in Iraq over the past month… Oh no.)
A very good friend emailed me an article in which the writer, Doug Thompson, describes a situation in which,

    White House aides scramble frantically behind the scenes to hide the dark mood of an increasingly angry leader who unleashes obscenity-filled outbursts at anyone who dares disagree with him…

Meanwhile, the situation in New Orleans sounds as if its a lot worse than it would have been if Louisiana still had a full National Guard contingent at home to help run things… Another cost of the war.
I’m here for a conference on Syria tomorrow. I’m not sure if it’ll be bloggable, or blogworthy. Next week I’ll be back for this big conference on “America’s Purpose” that I’m a little bit involved with. Definitely bloggable, I think. I’m not sure if they’ll let me in to the John Ashcroft session…

    Addendum, Wed. evening: Things sound so horrible in the Gulf Coast region, and in Iraq. That’s why I made the border here black just now. I also took out the link to the Doug Thompson article. Commenters here raised some questions about it. However, I believe Doug Thompson is a well-connected journo who wouldn’t have published this piece without having solid sources for it. But right now seems like a bad time to snipe at GWB.