Body part porn and war, part 2

This is a continued reflection on the latter portion of what I posted here yesterday.
First, I’ll just paste in here a lightly edited version of the bit that was buried down at the bottom of y’day’s post:
…going to the link that Mark from Ireland gave to the sex-porn-plus-violence website was very interesting. Warning to anyone who wants to go there: definitely not for the faint of heart.
That link is to a page there titled: Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – Gory; Moderators: chris, LordDefile, awwwwcrap22, Jonny2K, Jannemans14. It was a directory of other files you could go to. I clicked first on this one.
It started out with 19 photos of sort of “after-incident” reports. No captions or explanation of any of ’em. They each had dates which seemed to be in June and July of 2004. Some of the images were extremely disturbing: the head inside and outside the bowl; many burned bodies and body parts, etc.
As I said, no captions. But between each image and the next were what looked like links to other, explicitly described sex-porno (as opposed to pure-physical-violence porno) pages, also on the NTFU website. The juxtaposition is shocking/ sobering/ intriguing?? It tells us something profound about the inherently violent nature of sex-porno, I think…
But here’s one really interesting thing about that page w/ the 19 ghastly photos and the links to sex-porno photos: Below all that there was a discussion board, with most contribs dated late October 2004. The discussions were almost purely political and very intelligent, most of them not rhapsodizing about the violence or the war. Indeed, many of the people there seemed to be expressing a fairly strong anti-war stance. Like this one, from page moderator “Jonny2K”:

    Yep. Sure was a good idea to send thousands of peacetime part-timers over to get involved with this shit. I’m thrilled that I’ll have to be (tax)paying for veterans’ psychiatric benefits for the rest of my life so that our current Cowboy-in-Chief can outdo his Daddy.

That one generated a lengthy subsequent discussion.
Then there was this exchange between JonnyK and his fellow moderator LordDefile:

    Jonny2K wrote:
    Wow. All I meant was, “If these pics are so unsettling, think of how appalling it must be to be dealing with this shit irl.” (Admittedly, politicized a bit.)
    There’s no question Iraq and the rest of the world are better off without Saddam Hussein and his psycho offspring. However, even George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld admit that, as it turns out, there was no pre-war connection between S.H., Iraq, and Al-Qaida. (Although there certainly is now!)
    On the thinnest of evidence, the U.S. has gotten involved (with minimal international support) in an unbelievably complicated post-war quagmire. I don’t think there’s anybody in the world (let alone running for President) who has a plan that will get the U.S out of Iraq, put a popularly elected government in place, and end the terrorist insurgency any time soon. I fully expect this to be an issue in the 2008 campaign.
    The Viet Nam experience was not a history lesson to me. I was fortunate enough to be able to avoid being there — but I was around to absorb the coverage of that war (which was much more comprehensively covered than this one) and its impact on the American people and American politics. The similarities between the conflicts are terribly disheartening.
    LordDefile commented:
    That’s cool, and I can see your point, no doubt. However, I HATE to see whiny fuckin reservists who are like “Oh shit, I can’t go to war”, when they knew DAMN well going into it that it was a distinct possibility.
    Jonny2K responded:
    In general, I agree with you. Theoretically, they knew the risks they were accepting when they signed up. Whether they knew then what they know now isn’t really a factor in whether or not they’ve got to do what they signed up to do.
    But I try to be understanding when I look at them and realize that they truly didn’t have any idea what might be asked of them. I wouldn’t trade places, would you?

Elsewhere on the page discussion contributor Sestos wrote:

    I would post some pic’s from during the war, makes those look tame. However, up till now we have kept most of our pictures inhouse. Saddly those photos are more common then rare. Not sure currently, but the worst detail you can have is cleaning up dead bodies days after they are killed so that the outside of the FOB [Forward Operating Base] does not have limbs and eyes all around it.

The following is my little subsequent reflection, today:
Note that Sestos there says “sadly”, and talks about cleaning up the dead bodies as “the worst detail you can have”. That man is not glorifying violence. I have a feeling some of the people who take those ghastly photos may be doing so as a way to “frame” the terrible experience they were having there, or to help them distance themselves from it.
Okay, perhaps that doesn’t explain why they choose to hand the photos around and share them later… But anyway, I am sure there would be hundreds of really interesting psychological studies people could do of what is happening to those men and women– some of them very young– who suddenly find that the “job” they signed up for includes not only killing other men and women, sometimes at very close range, but also cleaning up the debris afterwards… “so that the outside of the FOB does not have limbs and eyes all around it.”
No wonder Jonny2K had commented, “I’m thrilled that I’ll have to be (tax)paying for veterans’ psychiatric benefits for the rest of my life so that our current Cowboy-in-Chief can outdo his Daddy.” (Clear irony alert there, global readers: There is NO way that sentence could be read without understanding that Jonny’s use of the term “thrilled” there was completely ironic.)
I’ll just add in here one of my ongoing pet critiques of US warfighting, which is that society and the military in general engage in long and v. expensive training, marked by numerous parades, rituals, and other rites of passage, that are designed to turn an ordinary civilian person into a highly trained killer. But then when they exit the military, what kind of ‘de-programing the violence’ training do we give these people, and what kinds of deep, community-wide rituals that could mark their reintegration back into normal civilian life?
Almost none at all. That’s why I think my work on the re-civilianizing rituals in Mozambique, and what I’ve learned about such rituals elsewhere, including Uganda, seems so important.
… Anyway, there’s lots more that’s interesting in that NTFU website there. Maybe some JWN readers with stronger stomachs or more time could check out more of it. All comments on this phenomenon are very welcome, whether you’ve been to the site or not.
As for me, I’m still trying to catch up with the idea of having extremely serious conversations about the ethics of war on a porn website…

Body part porn and war

    This morning, I asked if it was true that US service members are now trading grotesque pictures of Iraqis and Afghans who have been or are being terribly abused onto a porn site in Netherlands. I’d read about it (in my lousy Italian) on the Italian News Agency ANSA website, here. But I can’t really read Italian so I invited JWN commenters to help out.
    As always when I ask for help here, I got it. Thanks to those who commented and to the creators and maintainers of this great information-leveraging system, the internet… Here’s what commenters said. (And a belated hat-tip to the Belgian informant from whom I gained the original tip.)

I posted the main post at 10:18 a.m. At 12:58 p.m. Christiane (who’s Swiss) came back with a first quick rendering of the ANSA piece in English. Later in the day she polished and completed it as follows:

    Photo Horror- War in Iraq in exchange of free access to porn sites
    Milano. As if they were [US-style baseball] ‘trading cards’, terrifying pictures of Afghans and Iraqis dismembered by war explosions are exchanged on the web in order to get free access to a pornographic site
    The sending of the photographs, showing atrocious crudeness, is proposed to American soldiers on duty in the war fields. The website is meant for them and they are directly invited to send their horror material in order to get access to the pornographic section.
    As can be seen by entering the network, more than a few weren�t able to resist to the call of the www.nowthatsfuckedup.com website, whose homepage says : �If you are an American soldier on duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in another theater of war and you would like a free access to the site, you can publish the pictures which you or your mates have taken during your service”.
    The purely pornographic site is structured like a forum, where the users exchange amateur material not protected by a copyright. The pictures go from voyeuristic to hardporn pictures and video of pretended fianc�es and wives. There are two ways to access to the pornographic content : the users can pay a fee, or upload �interesting� material. And here enters the special discount for soldiers.
    In two special sections the soldiers have the possibility to gain a free access to the hottest pictures, by uploading photographies and videos realized during their duty time. One part covers general themes, with portraits of troops, sometimes marked by a military sense of humour, while the other section looks like a true museum of the horrors, with mostly pictures of dead Iraqui and dismembered corpses. Actually, as soon as entering the section, you are warned that �it�s one of the most cruel, so persons who don�t want to look at that kind of material shouldn�t go further�.
    Browsing through the posts is like entering an infernal spiral : each message in facts contains dreadful pictures, in an escalation of barbarty and crudeness increased by the comments of the site readers. Inflamed messages, not horrified at all by the view of these awful snaps taken on the theater of war. One sees corpses, carbonized, without head, without members, a face in a plate, the remains of a kamikaze, an arm, legs, all that featured with inhuman comments, nearly exulting about these butcheries. Adding to the horror of the members thrown in the dust and the crusched heads, there are captions like �The only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi� or ironical references like �Poor boy ! what if the 72 virgins were all whores ?� Even the subject line of the posts struck by their cynicism : the pragmatic ones like �Some pictures in exchange of the access�, or �Dead men for the entry�, but also the barbaric quiz �Give a name to this part of human body�, preluding the vision of a piece of bloody flesh, burned out and crushed, in which it is difficult to recognize a human face.
    Among the pictures found in the more general section are also some pictures of wounded US soldiers, sent by themselves. An Italian blogger whose nickname is Staib has drawn attention to this site of the horrors. He has talked about it vaguely on his own blog and also on several portals of counter information.
    [Personal comment (from Christiane):
    All this sounds like profanation of the dead and is clearly against the Geneva conventions. It shows also the kind of mental damages and cold inhuman behaviors which wars never fail to bring along. Who are the surfers visiting this site? are they mainly US soldiers on the theatre of war? or are there other sick minds developping a fascination for these morbid scenes ? Could it be a psy-op of the US intelligence in order to frighten the resistance and force it to cooperate? But as Susan Sonntag demonstrated : horror pictures can always be interpreted in different ways : as propaganda, in order to intimidate the enemy, or to increase the hate and the wish to fight, or as a means to denounce these horrors.

Thanks so much, C!
Along the way, commenter George (likely not the Prez, right?) contributed another rough (and machine-made) translation of the whole piece.
Mark from Ireland then came in with this:

Continue reading “Body part porn and war”

U.S. abuse photos surfacing in Europe?

Are US service members now trading grotesque pictures of Iraqis and Afghans who have been or are being terribly abused onto a porn site in Netherlands?
I think that’s what this article from the Italian News Agency ANSA says. But I can’t read Italian so all I could do was use the Google or Babelfish translations and they were fairly unclear.
Please can someone who knows Italian read that article and then post the most important parts of it to the Comments section here? (No length limit on the comment.)
I note that reference to this issue has surfaced in several European media outlets today. It would be good to know what it’s about so we can see if these photos may be some of the ones the US military has for some time now been blocking from delivering to the public.
Or are there more photos out there? Is the number of such photos so huge that it’s hard for the US military to keep track of them?

Achcar and Bacevich on exiting Iraq

Gilbert Achcar’s excellent answer to Juan Cole’s “not-an-exit” plan is here.
Kudos to Juan for posting the whole of Gilbert’s critique on his own site.
Gilbert makes many of the same points I would have made if I’d had more time to write yesterday. (I have a nasty big deadline I’m supposed to be meeting today. Right now. Yikes.)
Gilbert was quite right to give prominent mention to Andrew Bacevich’s important oped in the WaPo over the weekend.
For a slightly earlier “exchange” about Iraq between Juan and me (and Nir Rosen and Shibley Telhami), check out that long forum we had in The Nation at the end of July.

Cole: too little, too late, too militaristic

I was a little late getting round to reading Juan Cole’s 10-point plan for reconfiguring the US footrprint in Iraq. His basic idea seems to be to try to replicate what the US and NATO military have done in Afghanistan. That is, draw the US troops in Iraq back into a limited number of barracks, evacuate many of the ground troops, and then just keep in-country some special forces and air force units able to undertake swift pinpoint actions from time to time.
Then, as Iraq’s independent military ramps up (and when might that be), Ayatollah Sistani would issue a fatwa and the Americans would all leave.
I think it’s ways too late to suggest such a plan. It’s also inappropriate. Iraq is not the thinly populated, poorly infrastructured reaches of Afghanistan. It’s a large country with a dense population (in the fertile parts) and good communications. The US military bombs targets and does Special Forces stuff in Afghanistan all the time. But no-one’s there to record it. If it sets off a protest, the protest is small and localized and no-one else really hears about it until a lot later.
Iraq is a LOT more wired, and has party organizations that are a LOT more organized than the ones in Afghanistan.
(Also, even in Afghanistan, the US tactics seem to be working increasingly poorly in recent weeks.)
Juan does say a couple of good things. His points 9 and 10 are excellent. Namely that (9) Congress should stop stipulating that USAID money gets spent as much as possible on purchase of US goods, and (10) that the US (and Russia? But why Russia?) should work closely with Iraq and all of its neighbors to establish a regional security regime.
Personally, I still think the 9-point plan I laid out here in early July is far superior. It calls for a US exit from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous.
Iraq as Afghanistan, though? Nah. I don’t think it would work.

Dem-hawks ruling the party roost

In a midnight post here last night I noted that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has now clearly and openly joined the ranks of those calling for a speedy pullout of the troops from Iraq.
But what about our much-vaunted “opposition” party here here in US, you might ask? Where does the Democratic Party now stand on the Iraq War?
David Ignatius had a great column in the WaPo last Friday in which he wrote,

    This should be the Democrats’ moment: The Bush administration is caught in an increasingly unpopular war; its plan to revamp Social Security is fading into oblivion; its deputy chief of staff is facing a grand jury probe. Though the Republicans control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, they seem to be suffering from political and intellectual exhaustion. They are better at slash-and-burn campaigning than governing.
    So where are the Democrats amid this GOP disarray? Frankly, they are nowhere. They are failing utterly in the role of an opposition party, which is to provide a coherent alternative account of how the nation might solve its problems. Rather than lead a responsible examination of America’s strategy for Iraq, they have handed off the debate to a distraught mother who is grieving for her lost son. Rather than address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems, they have decided to play politics and let President Bush squirm on the hook of his unpopular plan to create private Social Security accounts…

[This para added in Tuesday a.m. for further clarification.] Ignatius is not some lefty or Quaker. He’s a pillar of centrism and realism with great links inside the US security agencies (especially the CIA, which he’s written a lot about.) Perhaps because of that, he’s a supreme realist, very well grounded in an understanding of what’s going on in the Middle East– a region he knows a lot about on his own account, too.
In his WaPo column, he had nothing but contempt for the man most Democrats think of as their leading foreign-affairs spokesmen, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden. Ignatius described him as

    a man who — how to put this politely? — seems more impressed with the force of his own intellect than an objective evaluation would warrant. Listening to Biden, you sense how hungry he is to be president, but you have little idea what he would do, other than talk . . . and talk.

He (Ignatius) also puts together a clear list of what the Dems need to do:

    America … needs a real opposition party that will lay out new strategies: How to withdraw from Iraq without creating even more instability? How to engage a world that mistrusts and often hates America? How to rebuild global institutions and contain Islamic extremism? How to put the U.S. economy back into balance? A Democratic Party that could begin to answer these questions would deserve a chance to govern.

That is an excellent and well considered list. Thanks for that, David.
In today’s WaPo, Peter Baker and Shailagh Murray had a depressing piece in which they described the problems in the Democratic Party in more depth:

    Amid rising casualties and falling public support for the war, Democrats of all stripes have grown more vocal this summer in criticizing Bush’s handling of the war. A growing chorus of Democrats, however, has said this criticism should be harnessed to a consistent message and alternative policy — something most Democratic lawmakers have refused to offer.
    The wariness, congressional aides and outside strategists said in interviews last week, reflects a belief among some in the opposition that proposals to force troop drawdowns or otherwise limit Bush’s options would be perceived by many voters as defeatist. Some operatives fear such moves would exacerbate the party’s traditional vulnerability on national security issues.

Oh, the poor babies! because the Democratic leaders– very few of whom have sons or daughters in the military–don’t want to be painted as “wimps and weenies”, even more of the sons and daughters of the lower classes are going to have to continue to be sent to fight, and die, in Iraq. To make the esteemed senators feel good. Certainly not because there is, in fact, any way to “win” in Iraq. There ain’t. And the longer the now inevitable US withdrawal is delayed, the greater will be the dimensions of the ultimate loss and debacle… And the greater the number of the children of the lower-income folks here in the US who’ll end up dead and wounded.
(And, it goes without saying, the greater the numbers of Iraqi casualties, and the broader the circles of fitna and instability radiating out from Iraq.)
Oh well, never mind about that. Figures like Senate Minority leader Harry Reid, Sen. Joe Biden, Sen. Hillary Clinton, and Sen. John Kerry — remember him?– are all determined that they and their party should not look “defeatist.”
Gimme a break.
Baker and Murray do note that Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin was bold enough to break with the party leadership last week

    to become the first senator to call for all troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by a specific deadline. Feingold proposed Dec. 31, 2006.

Okay, a lot better than nothing! (But how about April 30, 2006, instead?)
The writers also noted that, “In delivering the Democrats’ weekly radio address yesterday, former senator Max Cleland (Ga.), a war hero who lost three limbs in Vietnam, declared that ‘it’s time for a strategy to win in Iraq or a strategy to get out.'”
H’mm. I guess that position is better than nothing… But it still leaves open the idea that there might indeed be, somewhere, somehow, a strategy to win in Iraq. And what might that be, Max?
The WaPo writers note that Sens Reid, Biden, and Clinton all rejected Feingold’s approach, “reasoning that success in Iraq at this point is too important for the country.”
It honestly boggles the mind. Where is this “strategy for success”? What defines success? Why do these Senators even imagine that there’s the possibility of “winning” in Iraq– at a time when it is increasingly evident that the army’s top brass is quite convinced that the situation there is unwinnable.
Of course, none of these Dem-hawks even stops for a moment to define what “winning” would look like. Nor do they explain exactly why it is that “winning” in Iraq is so important for Americans’ interests. (If it’s the old “credibility of our strategic posture” argument, let me head for the exits quickly. That tired old canard of an “argument” can’t haul any water any more.)
Rick Klein, writing in the Boston Globe last week, placed a bit more flesh on the bones of the story the waPo journos were telling about the arguments being put about by the Dem-hawks:

    ”Having the strongest military in the world is the first step, but we also have to have a strong commitment to using our military in smart ways that further peace, stability, and security around the world,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said at the Democratic Leadership Council in Columbus, Ohio, last month.
    … Clinton has called for adding 80,000 troops to the armed services, [Oh yes, the Tom Friedman line from two months ago, Hillary. And as I asked back then: where are you going to get these recruits, precisely?]… at a time when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called for a streamlined force with greater emphasis on technology.
    Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, hit the presidential proving ground of Iowa early this month to warn that ”people don’t think we [Democrats] have the backbone” to deploy the military, and said Democrats must overcome that perception to be successful in future elections.
    Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has laid out a doctrine of rebuilding alliances while making clear that ”force will be used — without asking anyone’s permission — when circumstances warrant.”

It’s worth reading all of Klein’s piece. He does note that,

    not all Democrats have joined the shift. Liberal groups such as Moveon.org are calling for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Howard Dean has mostly remained silent on foreign affairs as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Actually, for Howard Dean to remain silent on the war is, I think, an unforgivable defection from the clarity with which he spoke out against it during the Democratic primaries in early 2004. Or is the situation inside the party now so bad now that we should be grateful that at least he hasn’t joined the chorus of the uber-hawks, but is remaining decently “silent”?
Klein noted a lot more bad news about the party’s stand, as well. Including this:

    The top Democrats in the House and Senate issued a report last month that harshly critiqued Bush administration efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. The report — endorsed by the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid — details Iranian and North Korean steps toward building nuclear weapons, and lagging efforts to secure ”loose nukes” in Russia that could fall into the hands of terrorists.
    The report calls for the United States to engage in more direct negotiations with Iran and North Korea, and for the talks to be reinforced with military pressure, including ”the possibility of repeated and unwarned strikes.”

So there we have it: support for militarism, beefed-up armed forces, unilateralism, and “preventive” strikes is alive and well in Washington, and is living high on the hog in the Democratic Party chambers there.
(Billmon commented last week that: “At some point, the voters are going to expect the Dems to come up with a more coherent strategy. And if that strategy is simply neocon lite — i.e., we want to bomb Iran, too, but we’ll do it more effectively — they’ll probably stick with the genuine article. To paraphrase Harry Truman: Give the voters a choice between a neocon and a neocon, and they’ll pick the damned neocon every time.”)
All in all, then, regarding this country’s relationship with the rest of the world it looks as if things will carry on getting worse for some time ahead, before they start to get better. We can’t, after all, beat something with nothing. We can’t hope to change things very substantially for the better until we have an opposition party that is worthy of the name– and that’s willing to start articulating and working toward a view of the world in which the US truly does hold up the standard of human equality and human freedom.
Russ Feingold, though: There’s a person I can support. Him, and Chuck Hagel, and a few others more or less equally distributed between the two parties.
Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to have an opposition party round here?

Hass and Barenboim

A lovely piece of commentary by the very well-informed Israeli journalist Amira Hass in HaAretz today, pointing out that over the years the settlement of Netzarim in Gaza, which was finally evacuated today, cost the neighboring Palestinian community of Sheikh Ajlin, “114 lives, 1,900 dunams of ploughed-under crops, and 105 homes.”
And on another page of the paper, this truly amazing report about a youth orchestra that Daniel Barenboim pulled together to play in Ramallah. What was amazing about that? The performers playing together came from Israel, Palestinian, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. According to the writer of the piece, Noam Ben Zeev, Barenboim managed to get permission for the Syrians to take part from President Asad himself.
(The families of the performers from both Syria and Lebanon would have been highly unlikely to let them participate without an assurance from the Syrian government that it would be okay to do so.)
ben Zeev wrote:

    Musicians expressed palpable joy and excitement at the rehearsal, in addition to fatigue. Barenboim stressed precision and final instructions as he fought their exhaustion. “Anyone who is tired is free to go home!” he roared at the orchestra, when it lagged behind the galloping tempo of Beethoven’s Symphony.
    During a backstage break, a Syrian violinist remarked, “Palestine is `Neverland’ to us. I thought I would never be able to see it.”
    The violinist is a Palestinian refugee whose family comes from Acre. “That’s why I was moved to tears. I woke up last night and looked out the window. I couldn’t believe I was looking at the scenery that I have heard my parents talk about throughout my life.”
    “When are we taking a tour of the city?” asked an impatient Israeli musician, as two other Syrian musicians’ faces lit up while they discussed the visit, and the opportunity to play music together. Fear and astonishment were expressed only in response to the high separation fence that intersected their journey.

Thank you so much, Amira Hass and Daniel Barenboim. Amira for upholding incredibly strong values of human equality under very tough circumstances. And Daniel for showing that the most amazing acts of grace and inspiration are indeed possible.

About Iraq, meanwhile…

I’ve been working hard on a big article on transitional justice this past week. So I know I’ve been a bit AWOL from writing about Iraq here. (But I tried to do my bit on Israel/Palestine.)
I wish I’d written more about my admiration for Cindy Sheehan, who is one heck of an inspiring woman who has succeeded in crystallizing and helping to spearhead the rising tide of anti-war feeling here in the US. (She and I were in touch just a bit back last year when she got started… And she’s been getting a bit of help from some Quakers down there in Crawford, TX.) I gather she had to fly back to California to look after her mom.
Godspeed to you, dear Cindy.
Wednesday evening we had a lovely solidarity vigil for Cindy here in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some amazing things about it: nobody really organized it. Someone picked the spot; Sue, who sends out the email alerts for our local Peace Center, put it out on her alert system; and more than 200 folks showed up.
Most of us “peace demo” stalwarts didn’t know half the people there! (In other words, there were lots and lots of new faces.) Also, given how last-minute and chaotic the arrangements were, lots of peace-demo stalwarts actually never did hear about it in time. Oh well…
Thursday, we did our regular evening rush-hour vigil, too; and we got a fabulous response from the passing drivers. At times more than half the drivers were giving us supportive honks, and sometimes the whole intersection broke out into competitive klaxoning.
Today, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who received two Purple Hearts and other military honors for his service in Vietnam, reiterated his position that the United States needs to develop a strategy to leave Iraq:

    Hagel scoffed at the idea that U.S. troops could be in Iraq four years from now at levels above 100,000, a contingency for which the Pentagon is preparing.
    “We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” Hagel said on “This Week” on ABC. “But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”
    Hagel said “stay the course” is not a policy. “By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq

Hamas and politics, part 2

Graham Usher, who’s an experienced and intelligent observer of Palestinian politics, has a fascinating new piece about Hamas up on the MERIP website. It’s called The New Hamas: Between Resistance and Participation.
Usher writes of,

    the strategic turn undertaken by Hamas in the last year. Once the fiercest opponent of the 1993-1994 Oslo agreements — or of any final peace deal that would recognize Israel — Hamas now publicly accepts that it, too, would negotiate with the Jewish state. Once dismissive of PA elections as the illegitimate child of Oslo, Hamas now plans to participate in legislative contests slated for the coming winter. Paradoxically, these convergences in strategic outlook between Hamas and the PA are the reason why the July battles in Gaza could be harbingers of struggles to come.

Hamas, he wrote, owed the rise in popularity that it saw in the past few years,

    not only to the armed resistance its fighters put up against Israel, the collapse of PA police forces and divisions in Fatah sown by Israel’s West Bank and Gaza invasions, and the visceral appeal of its “reprisal” suicide attacks inside Israel. As important was the extensive array of charitable and welfare services that stood in stark contrast to the inefficiency and collapse of the PA ministries. The result, by late 2002, was less a party in opposition to the PA and Fatah than an independent national force bent on establishing “a political, social and military alternative to the existing Palestinian order,” in the words of former PA Culture Minister Ziad Abu Amr.
    The issue was what to do with such power. Would Hamas seek the creation of a “new PLO” or a rapprochement with the existing one? Party leaders chose accommodation. There were three reasons compelling them to do so.
    The first reason was the new regional order born of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that came in their wake. As one European diplomat with extensive contact with the Palestinian Islamists acknowledged: “Hamas, like Syria, feels the cold wind coming from Baghdad and the new licenses granted to the ‘war on terror.'”
    …
    The second reason was the unprecedented assault Israel unleashed on the movement following the truce. In seven months, Israel killed Hamas’ main military commander in Gaza, Ibrahim Maqadmeh, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Rantisi, his successor in Gaza. Israel also tried to assassinate Muhammad Dayf, head of Hamas’ military arm, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and Mahmoud Zahhar, now Hamas’ most senior political leader in the Strip. The Israelis sent clear signals to Hamas officials in Damascus like Khalid Mishaal and Musa Abu Marzuq that they too were fair game. In the final stage, sound intelligence, helicopter gunships and death squads proved thorough at wiping out what remained of Hamas’ West Bank military cadre.
    The assault was steeled by political and financial sanction…
    The third reason was Ariel Sharon’s decision in February 2004 that, in the absence of a Palestinian “peace partner,” Israel would withdraw unilaterally from settlements in Gaza and the northern tip of the West Bank. Publicly, Hamas claims the “flight” as a victory for its strategy of armed resistance. Privately, many in the movement understood that disengagement offered an exit from a “war” that had not only brought overpowering Israeli retaliation but was also wrecking Hamas’ own aspiration to legitimacy and leadership. Disengagement supplied the long-awaited moment when Hamas could cash in the kudos it had earned from resistance and welfare and convert them into political and institutional capital.

Usher wrote that it was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin himself who presented the new platform in the weeks before his assassination in March, 2004:

    It consisted of three positions that, taken together, constituted a strategic turn in the movement’s theory and practice. The first plank was the understanding that Hamas would hold its fire for the duration of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and four northern West Bank settlements, on the condition that the withdrawal is complete (including from the crossing on the Egyptian border). Hamas reaffirmed this pledge in discussions with Abbas in August 2005 on the eve of the withdrawal, and has honored it to date.
    The second plank was that, until the withdrawal commenced (or at least until the decision to withdraw was seen to be genuinely irreversible), Hamas would escalate armed resistance in Gaza while curtailing suicide attacks in Israel. This essentially is what occurred in period preceding the Cairo Declaration and subsequently whenever Hamas deemed Israel to be in gross violation of the truce or the PA in breach of understandings reached in Cairo. Usually in concert with other Palestinian militia, Hamas launched high-profile attacks on army outposts and settlements in Gaza and/or rained mortars on Israeli border towns.
    The purpose of these escalations was political. They reinforced the regional and Palestinian perception that Israel is leaving Gaza under duress rather than by choice. They demonstrated that Hamas remains a formidable military foe that no domestic or foreign power can quell. They also strengthened Hamas’ hand in its “dialogue” with the PA.
    One result of this strategy has been Abbas’ tacit admission that the matter of Hamas’ disarmament will not be broached until after the PA parliamentary elections, now set for January 21, 2006. Another is the acknowledgement by the PA’s new and influential foreign minister, Nasser al-Kidwa, that “dismantling the armed groups is not on the table as long as the occupation exists.”
    The third, and most significant, part of Yassin’s new platform stated that Hamas would strive to reach a power-sharing agreement with the PA in any post-withdrawal Palestinian government. In Cairo, this idea boiled down to three prescriptions: a “formula for decision making” pending the parliamentary elections, both in relation to maintaining calm during the withdrawal and in the administration of areas evacuated by Israel in the aftermath; the establishment of a national cross-factional committee mandated to reactivate and redefine PLO institutions to enable Hamas’ “proportional” participation within them; and a commitment by Hamas to participate in all PA elections and on the basis of its representation there to become an integral part of the Palestinian political system, including the PLO’s National Council and executive committee.

Usher writes quite a bit about the successes Hamas registered in the municipal elections held in late 2004 and early 2005. And how Fateh and the Egyptians at that point stepped in and planned for the postponement of the legislative elections from their original July 2005 date until (now) late January 2006.
He also wrote about the Hamas-Fateh fighting that flared in July. He wrote that on that occasion,

    For the first time in a long time, it was [PA head Mahmoud] Abbas and Fatah — and not the Islamists — who had tapped into the popular will. A week after the clashes flared, Fatah and Hamas were reconciled on the basis of understandings no different, no better and no less ambiguous than those agreed upon in Cairo [in March].
    Will these understandings hold? Most Palestinian analysts believe Hamas will be true to its word on maintaining calm for “the rest of 2005.” Three events could rupture the calm, however, either during the withdrawal or in the aftermath. One is a rigorous return by Israel to its assassination policy. “Hamas will not start a confrontation,” comments Abu Zuhri. “But, in the face of massive Israeli aggression, neither will we wait for a ‘collective’ PA response any more than would Fatah.”
    Another would be a “provocative” Jewish attack on Palestinians to stymie the disengagement, especially on or near Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount compound. The third possible source of disruption would be a PA decision to renege again on the electoral process drawn up in Cairo and now reestablished in Gaza. One of the motives behind Hamas’ martial displays in Gaza is to convey that such a move would be unacceptable.
    But what does Hamas want from the electoral process? It does not seek leadership, at least not yet. It seeks hegemony. Hamas quietly accepts that the current balance of power in Palestinian society is accurately reflected in polls showing Fatah with around 40 percent of all parliamentary seats and Hamas with around 30 percent, with the balance being held by independents and other factions. Translated into the outcome of elections, these numbers would not make Hamas the dominant force in Palestinian politics. They could, however, make it the hegemonic force in a majority bloc or a “blocking majority” against Fatah.
    But to what end? Sheikh Ahmad Hajj Ali is a member of Hamas’ Shura Council, the supreme decision-making body in the organization. He sketches a future in which a new Hamas, domestic in thrust, consensual in aim, international in reach, emerges gradually from the old one: “Our aim is governance and one can only govern through the institutions of government. If we are the minority in Parliament, we will monitor the ministers on the basis of their performance, not on the basis of their political affiliation. If we are a majority, we will not monopolize power like Fatah. We will share power in a national coalition, a government that represents all the Palestinian people.”
    The sheikh continues: “But in all cases our priority now is to address the internal Palestinian situation rather than the confrontation with Israel. We would negotiate with Israel since that is the power that usurped our rights. If negotiations fail, we will call on the world to intervene. If this fails, we will go back to resistance. But if Israel were to agree with our internationally recognized rights — including the refugees’ right of return — the Shura Council would seriously consider recognizing Israel in the interests of world peace.”
    That recognition would be new. It is also inevitable, at least if Hamas wants to be the dominant vehicle for Palestinian nationalism and rid itself of the stigma of rejectionism in the eyes of the world. Slowly, painstakingly, but inexorably, Hamas is moving away from its traditional notion that Palestine is an Islamic waqf “from the river to the sea” and even the idea of a long-term armistice (hudna) that would accept the “1967 territories” as a Palestinian proto-state until the forces of Islam are strong enough to recover Palestine “as a whole.” Rather, Hamas is signaling that it accepts Israel as a political reality today and is intimating that it would accept a final agreement with Israel “according to the parameters of the [1991] Madrid conference and UN resolutions,” says Palestinian analyst Khaled Hroub, an authority on the Islamist party.
    Such an agreement with Israel, of course, is what Abbas says he seeks. Herein lies the reason why Hamas-PA relations are so tense and why the situation in Gaza is potentially explosive. The struggle between the PA and Hamas is no longer about the disengagement’s significance: it is “the day of victory and the beginning of a new era that was achieved with the blood of our martyrs,” say both Muhammad Dahlan and Mahmoud Zahhar. The struggle is about who will claim the political and electoral franchise from disengagement and who will win the right to lead the Palestinians in the next phase. Will it be Abbas and Dahlan and their strategies of diplomacy and governance? Or will it be Hamas and its legacy of resistance?

I am sure that many people will say that if Hamas’s conditions for participating in negotiations with Israel include Israel’s full recognition of the Palestinian “right of return”, then there is nothing there for the Israelis to talk about. But that was also the position of Fateh and the secular nationalists until quite recently– and it is still the position of much of the Fateh grssroots. So it seems there really may not be that much difference between the actual policies pursued by the two big Palestinian organizations at this point.
Two days ago I noted here that Hamas’s exile-based politburo chief Khaled Mishal said last week that the movement would soon be announcing its readiness to participate in the PA government itself. So there really do not seem to be huge differences on policy between it and Fateh. I think the main differences that we’ll continue to see between them now– and especially if there is NOT in fact any kind of big explosion between Palestinians and Israelis over the months ahead– will be over their levels of organization, discipline, and service delivery, in Gaza but also in the West Bank.
From Usher’s piece it seems clear that Hamas’s level of internal discipline is still not as high as that of, for example, Hizbullah in Lebanon. But still, up to now it’s shown itself to be a lot more disciplined than Fateh.
But wouldn’t it truly be great if we could start to see a robust civilian politics start to be pursued– through totally nonviolent means– inside Palestine? Let’s just hope the Israelis, the Americans, and Egyptians give the Palestinians the space to do this.

Week’s end in Israel

It has been an emotion-wracked week in Palestine/Israel. But I think AP’s Steven Gutkin was right when he noted this:

    So far Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is as significant for what did not happen as for what did.
    No major attacks from Palestinian militants. No use of weapons by settlers. No significant disruption of life inside Israel. No mass refusal of soldiers to carry out orders.
    The army credits preparation and training for the relatively smooth pullout. But there are deeper reasons, too: Palestinians do not want to do anything to endanger the return of their land, and Israelis are reluctant to raise a hand against their own army.
    Israel’s historic pullout from the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank is playing out with lightning speed. An operation that was supposed to take a month was nearly complete in 2 1/2 days, with 19 of 25 settlements slated for removal emptied before the weekend…

Here on JWN, I got an emotional set of reactions from supporters of Israel to my endorsement, a couple of days ago, of the proposition that the manner of evacuating the local settlers (and also, it must be said, many outside agitators) from Gaza looked as though it involved a good degree of stage-management from the authorities.
Commenter Diana asked (apparently a number of times), “What proof do you have that Israel staged the disengagement?… Cui bono?” I’ll reproduce lower in this post the answer I gave her.
Meanwhile, regarding the internal Israeli debate over the disengagement, I just read this fascinating piece in Sunday’s HaAretz, in which Israeli historian Tom Segev critiques the Israeli media’s coverage of the disengagement thus far:

    Some of the pictures were, in fact, heartrending, but it is not always possible to know whether the settlers are mourning the fate of the Jewish people, or only the loss of their Jacuzzis. Again and again they were described as “wonderful people,” agents of genuine Zionist patriotism. Most of the broadcasts were captives of the emotional manipulation created by the settlers, and adopted the thesis that evacuating the Gaza Strip is a national catastrophe and “is causing pain to all of us.”
    Nobody described the evacuation as an opportunity, with hope. By not doing so, the broadcasts missed the real drama, namely that Israeli society is now attempting to rescue itself from the historic mistake it made almost 40 years ago, and is trying to find the way back to a different Zionist tradition.

If you want to get more of a glimpse of how the extremist settler activist used their children as human shields, while programing them explicitly in all kinds of hate-messaging, read this piece, by Ruth Sinai from tomorrow’s HaAretz, too.
Anyway, here’s what I replied to Diana’s question:

Continue reading “Week’s end in Israel”