Another naughty nuclear proliferator

Interesting piece on BBC Wednesday night relating how, back in 1958, British officials sold Israel some of the “heavy water” that was a vital part of Israel’s clandestine nuclear-weapons production.
According to documents dug out of the British archives by BBC researchers, the people who decided to do that also decided not to tell the Americvans. They also, according to the surmise in this piece, decided against telling high-level British officials, as well:

    the archives suggest that the decision to sell heavy water was taken simply by civil servants, mainly in the Foreign Office and the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Well, doesn’t this just prove to you that you can’t trust those British to keep good control of vital nuclear precursor materials… I mean, either the officials concerned were acting on their own, clandestinely (in which case the country’s control systems in this vital area are unacceptably leaky), or these officials were actually acting with the knowledge and connivance of the highest-levelo national command authorities (in which case you can’t trust the national command authorities.)
Either way, Britain is unacceptably a proliferator of vital nuclear precursors, and should be punished for its crimes!!!
But who would punish it? The Security Council… Funny thing, that Britain like the rest of the world’s “recognized” nuclear weapons states, has a veto power on the Security Council…
Happy Hiroshima Remembrance Day, everyone.

Rosen & Weissman indicted

Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, both former high-level employees of the powerful, strongarming pro-Israeli pressure group AIPAC, were both indicted in federal court today. The WaPo’s Dan Eggen wrote that,

    Today’s indictment outlines a much broader case against Rosen and Weissman than has previously been indicated, alleging that the two disclosed sensitive information as far back as 1999 and that the topics ranged from Saudi Arabia to al Qaeda to Iran. Recipients of the information included foreign governments and reporters, the 26-page indictment says.

It’ll be interesting to see how much further this goes.

Steven Vincent, RIP

I am at our big annual Quaker gathering in the Shenandoah Valley this week. I saw the accounts of the murder in Basra of freelance journo Steven Vincent. What a tragedy.
Just recently, he published an oped in the NYT strongly criticizing the degree of control that the Shiite parties have won over the security forces in Basra. So the circumstances of his killing are extremely fishy indeed.
I was looking at the blog he’d been keeping during his latest visit to Iraq. He wrote well and (obviously) tried to get outside the Green Zone bubble as much as he could. I note, though, that unlike most US reporters today he never gave any byline credit at all — even under a nom-de-plume– to his translator, Nouraya Itais Wadi (also known as Nour al-Khal).
In his blog he did sometimes write about her, in a fairly patronizing way and under the name “Layla”. But in his writings published elsewhere he kept in place the paradigm of the fearless, all-knowing Western male who goes “out” to some third-world adventure and through his own amazing omniscience and sensibility is able to capture the essence of the story. No professional recognition at all given to the “native informant” without whom literally none of his work would have been possible.
Nouraya Itais Wadi was badly injured in the attack that killed Vincent. My greatest hope now is that she can get the medical help, rehab help, and professional advancement and recognition that I hvae no doubt that she deserves. Deep sympathies, too, to Vincent’s widow, Lisa.

South Sudan peace in the balance

Pray for peace in Southern Sudan. Pray hard. Southern leader John Garang, who was made into a vice-president as part of the recent peace accord between southerners and the central government in Khartoum, has died in a helicopter crash, in bad weather in an area of the south under the control of his militia.
Peace in Darfur is really important, too. But the suffering in South Sudan over the past 15 years has been truly, truly horrendous.

King Fahd RIP

So they finally turned off the life-support systems for King Fahd. But not until the man formerly known as Crown Prince (now “King”) Abdullah had gotten a few of his ducks into a row by putting his own person (Prince Turki bin Faisal) into the ambassadorial post in DC, etc.
Abdullah is 81. The new “Crown Prince”, as expected, is Sultan bin Abdel-Aziz, 77. There’s a bunch more sons of Abdel-Aziz who could stake their own claims to the throne in turn… But the “rising stars” of the next generation are already in their mid-to-late 60s; and I would imagine they’re probably getting even more impatient than Britain’s Prince Charles.
The succession system is so complex for two reasons: (1) Abdel-Aziz and many other Saudi “princes” have always had a truly dynastic/political view of marriage and childbearing. Abdel-Aziz married scores of times, taking wives from different tribes and different parts of the kingdom in an attempt to lock all those families and regions into his political system. (Also, to indulge himself.)
And (2), the Saudis don’t have a system of primogeniture; plus, the ruling “kings” haven’t done a very good job of having all their younger brothers and half-brothers murdered to ensure that power sticks in their own immediate line. (Please note that I am not actually advocating interpersonal violence here. This is simply a reference to a famous episode in British royal history.)
I’ve learned a bunch of stuff about Abdullah over the years, but I don’t really know what to conclude about the “political prospects” raised by his succession at this point. In a very real sense, the Saudis’ bizarre system of rule by massive oil-rent payola allied to Wahhabism is in deep, deep trouble right now anyway, regardless of which extremely aged “prince” takes over.
I was, however, disturbed to learn from this AP story that, “Abdullah has married more than 30 times and usually keeps four wives at a time, as allowed by Muslim law.”
My God, it’s pathetic. In this day and age??? That there’s someone coming into power there who still thinks of women only as chattels, sexual playthings, and vessels for his projects of dynastic reproduction?
It occurs to me that the Saudi “princes”, as a whole, have ways too much disposable income. (Like all their good friends in the US oil industry.) All very depressing…

Faiza, Khalid, Raed

There is a lovely meditation on Faiza’s blog last night. She was recounting a conversation she had with God recently…

    we said after the war : OK, this is America coming to Iraq , it will teach our new leaders how to respect human rights , and how to accomplish democracy in our country…we were anxious to see how is the freedom and democracy look like !
    but now, after two years and more, we are depressed, and fled out of our horrible life in iraq. and still dreaming that one day we can really achieve freedom and democracy in our country
    i mean real one , not fake …
    and still believe that we all can work to make the change we want , its not individual dream or action, it should be done by the big groups of people…
    and God is watching and waiting to see our actions..
    and in the judgment day He will ask everyone : what you have done to help oppressed people on earth ?
    what you have done to achieve justice and peace on earth?
    its our responsibility….
    God will never send angels to make peace on earth… its our responsibility…
    my heart still sad for iraq and iraqis..
    but still i have hope that we can all work together to stop this madness .

And here is a long post on her son Khalid’s blog describing what happened to him during his recent imprisonment. He got beaten a few times, but met many people inside the Ministry of Interior building where he was held who had been treated a lot worse than he was. Most of them were, like him, Sunnis. (He comes, actually, from a mixed Sunni-Shiite family.)
The “reason” they picked Khalid up was because at the university where he studies he’d been surfing the internet and reading the comments on his brother Raed’s blog…
Three days or so after his detention, he was taken before a judge:

    On Thursday, the judge decided that I was innocent. He figured out that the papers [i.e. the printouts from raed’s blog’s comments section] were from a public forum, and he didn

Counter-insurgencies and large-scale incarceration

Today I finished writing a long article I’ve been working on for a while, about the role of large-scale incarcerations in colonial counter-insurgency campaigns… Well, that was was sort of what it ended up being about. It started out as something slightly different, but in this case (unlike most others) my writing process was a fairly intuitive one, so I just sort of followed the narrative where it led me, and learned a lot in the process.
Yes, I’m sure you’re all really eager to find out about my writing process. (Irony alert.)
Well, along the way, I wrote quite a lot about the anti-Mau Mau campaign in Kenya. I borrowed acouple of Bill’s books about French counter-insurgency strategies in Algeria. I talked a bit with a friend about Dutch counter-insurgency strategies in Indonesia. (Did you know that when the Japanese invaded Indonesia during World War 2, the Dutch administrators of an entire detention camp called Boven Digul escaped to Australia– and took their Indonesian prisoners with them? What an interesting episode.)
Anyway, the main thing I wanted to put up here is this link to a really fascinating article titled Patterns of frontier genocide 1803

Iraqi constitutional big yawn

So here’s why right now, as opposed to a few months ago, I’m not getting myself all worked up over Iraq’s constitutional discussions:
I don’t think that at this late date they can make even the slightest bit of difference.
Islam as “a” source of legislation, “the” source, “one of the primary sources”?
Yawn.
Borders of the Kurdish region?
Yawn.
Or maybe rather than finding these discussions boring, I should more accurately say that I think that at this point they’re almost totally irrelevant to the long-term future of the country.
Right now, they’re only being pursued with the current “energy” because of the imminent approach of the Aug. 15 deadline mandated in Paul Bremer’s highly mechanistic and undemocratic TAL document.
Now it’s true that I wrote just over two weeks ago that it looked as though the Bushies were now,

    using the adoption of this hastily scrawled [constitutional] text as their pretext for — well, if not a total exit (though that would indeed be nice, wouldn’t it?)– but at least, a significant drawdown in the US troop levels….

So since I am definitely in favor of a rapid and total withdrawal, perhaps I should be cheering for a rapid conclusion of the constitutional discussions?
But no, I’m not. I think the Bushies will go ahead and do whatever they feel they need to do, deployment-wise or withdrawal-wise, regardless of whatever piece of paper a bunch of “Eye-racki” pols in Baghdad come up with at this point. It is ways too late now for any serious constitutional discussions to be held between now and Aug. 15.
(How long did it take the US Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to complete its task?)
So by far the best quote I’ve seen so far on the current Iraqi constitutional discussions is this one, from Kurdish constitutional committee member Mahmoud Othman:

    The Americans want to make a quick constitution… They have a lot of experience in fast food, but they can’t make a fast constitution.’ (Reuters, Baghdad, July 31)

If I thought more about it might I conclude, as I was edging toward in that July 15 JWN post, that “locking” a constitution favorable to the Bushites’ interests in place might be a real danger to world peace? Somewhat analogous to Israel’s Likudniks having locked the extremely one-sided “May 17” agreement in place with the government of Lebanon back in 1983, but considerably more momentous?
Nah. In the end the May 17 agreement really didn’t constrain the Lebanese political system from doing anything much at all. It muddied the political-diplomatic waters inside Lebanon for a little while… But meanwhile, it also clarified a lot of issues that had previously been quite murky. It was never ratified or implemented, and sank in the water from the deadweight of its own improbabilities less than a year after it was signed.
I think any Iraqi “constitution” that is agreed on now, under the pressure of the US occupation presence, would have a roughly similar fate. That’s why I can’t get very excited about the issue.
Zzzzzzz. Wake me when it’s over.