It was good to be back home this week and go to our regular Thursday afternoon peace demonstration in the center of town. (The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice had resumed the weekly peace presence in early December 2003. Hence the numbering system above.)
These past few months, we’ve been trying to urge our supporters to make a special effort to come out to the vigil on the first Thursday each month, even if they find it hard to make the other Thursdays. The weather has not been cooperating. Each of the months since we’ve had this policy, the afternoons of the first Thursday has been very rainy. Yesterday was no exception.
Nevertheless, six or seven of us did turn up. I’d taken my rain gear, and the rain was nowhere near as bad as I have sometimes experienced it there… But oh, yesterday as always in recent months, the demonstration was definitely worth doing! The honks of support that we got were extremely numerous– at some stages fully half of the passing drivers were participating.
Yes, we had a couple of people yelling bad things at us. I can understand if people were upset over what had happened in London. I was myself. But the general reception we got was great.
Two especially nice things happened. One woman driver rolled down her window and handed us a bag of truly delicious, home-baked cinnamon buns. (Note to self: remember next time that it’s well-nigh impossible to hold the sign, wave to passing motorists, and hold a cinnamon bun all at one time.) Then at a different point, one of our Charlottesville City Police officers came by on her bike, looking very snappy and efficient in her bike-police uniform. “Thanks for being there,” she told us cheerily as she passed.
Of course, one could interpret this as “Thanks for being there, on that sidewalk,” as opposed to in the median strip, which the police tell us– probably rightly– can cause a traffic hazard. But still, I realize that we really are lucky to live in a city where peaceful political protest is recognized and even welcomed as part of the normal order of things, and moreover is protected by the law.
Anyway, this is just to let our non-American readers know that the antiwar movement is alive and well in some spots of heartland America.
Also, it’s slowly but surely growing in influence nationwide. About time, eh?
Exit-from-Iraq movement gathering steam
Catching up with my reading after the NZ trip I see from the website of the Friends Committee on National Legislation that The first bipartisan resolution calling on the president to begin planning for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq was introduced in Congress on Thursday, June 16.
FCNL is a Quaker organization based in Washington DC that lobbies Congress on issues of concern to Quakers. Such as, right now, the need to push for a speedy and total withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
The site notes that the bill introduced June 15 was sponsored by Republican Representatives Walter Jones (NC) and Ron Paul (TX) and Democrats Dennis Kucinich (OH), Martin Meehan (MA), and Lynn Woolsey (CA). It calls on the president “to announce before the end of this year a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.”
It has the engaging subtitle of “Homeward Bound”.
You can read the text of the legislation here.
Elsewhere on the FCNL site, you can see a handily interactive map showing the location and some details about the 14 possibly “enduring” military bases inside Iraq for which President Bush sought funding in May 2005.
Relevant to what I wrote yesterday about the highly contested north-Iraq cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, note that two of those bases are in Mosul and one in Kirkuk.
Talking of big, lucrative construction contracts, there’s this, from Reuters yesterday:
- WASHINGTON, July 6 (Reuters) – The United States military has signed a work order with Halliburton to do nearly $5 billion in new work in Iraq under a giant logistics contract that has so far earned the company $9.1 billion, the Army said Wednesday.
Linda Theis, a spokeswoman for the United States Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Ill., said the military signed the work order with Kellogg Brown and Root, a unit of Halliburton, in May.
The new deal, worth $4.97 billion over the next year, was not made public when it was signed because the Army did not consider that such an announcement was necessary, she said.
So what do we imagine the profit-margin on a $4.97 billion contract is? It must be more than one billion.
How much of that profit will go into Dick Cheney’s blind trust and the bank accounts of his friends and former colleagues from Halliburton? And why did it take the US Army two months to decided that maybe the fact of this contract should be made available to the US public, after all?
… Well, anyway, it strikes me that all of those are just signs of the increasing desperation of an administration that is coming to recognise these two key facts:
- (1) There is no “victory”, either military or political, in sight in Iraq for the foreseeable future, and
(2) Its continued pursuit of the war in Iraq, and the presence of US troops there, is becoming increasingly unpopular within the US, to the point where it is close to threatening GWB’s entire “legacy” as a president (not to mention the Republican Party’s continued lock on political power).
Pull the troops out of Iraq in decent order while you still can, guys! Follow my 9-point plan for how to do it!
Thoughts of London
AP is now reporting (based on US sources) that the death toll in the London bomb blasts is “at least 40”, and the number of injured more than 300.
This seems like a ghastly, Qaeda-orchestrated replay of the March 2004 Madrid bombings. I imagine that all of London is as hurt and shattered as the Madrilenos were at that time. I just spoke with my sister Diana, who lives in far-west London. She and her family are ok, but she sounded very, very sobered by what was unfolding.
I have numerous other friends and family in London to worry about, too. My niece Rachel is an emergency-room doc at the Royal London Hospital near Liverpool St. Station, which has been taking in many of the casualties. All power to her life-saving elbow in these hours.
So Qaeda (or whichever other actually terrorist group) has been busy organizing all this– not entirely unpredictable by the British authorities, on the day the G-8 summit opens in the UK?– while the British and US governments have been expending truly massive amounts of blood, treasure, and national-level attention on pursuing their wholly unjustified war in Iraq?
Talk about a wholly unnecessary and diversionary expenditure of national energies.
If they had not launched the war against Iraq, but had instead invested one-fourth as much time and finances in a smart policy aimed at (1) doing the solid police work of tracking down and incapacitating the Qaeda leadership, and (2) denying that leadership an operating base by engaging politically with the legitimate demands of potential Qaeda condoners… If the Bush and Blair administrations had done that, Qaeda could have been wiped off the map as an operating force, quite possibly as long ago as late 2002, or 2003.
Instead of which…
I guess it’s not really a time for recriminations now. But we should not forget that back in 2002– or even late 2001– a deliberate choice was made in Washington to invade Iraq, regardless of whether there was any solid link between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda, or not.
I am also thinking, ghastly as things undoubtedly are for Londoners right now, at least they have functioning hospitals and a functioning emergency-response system that can reduce the human damage caused by these bomb blasts to an absolute minimum. Meanwhile, every week in Iraqi cities there are multiple bomb-blasts and other assaults that are comparably damaging– but then, because of the breakdown of the hospital system and of public order there, people who would have been saved in London’s hospitals end up dying because of a lack of adequate support and relief services there… Basic services that were present in Baghdad to a significant degree prior to the US invasion, but have been seriously degraded since then.
Well, we can talk about all this over the days ahead. For now, I send my empathy and human support to all the Londoners affected by these blasts.
Kurdistan-Kosovo
In the post I wrote yesterday outlining my 9-point exit plan from Iraq, I drew an analogy between the distinctly unsettled and unsettling situation in Kosovo today, six years after its partial amputation from Serbia, and the prospects for a Kurdistan that might similarly end up as a redoubt for US and allied armies.
There are similarities and dissimilarities between the situations of the two territories. Both are, quite significantly, landlocked. Both contain impressive mountain fastnesses within which, historically, “minority” populations had sought refuge. Both still come formally under the sovereignty of the broader polity with which they have been connected for many decades; but in both, a form of formalized or less formalized autonomy has been practiced and enjoyed for some time now.
In Kosovo, the “final outcome” of the sovereignty question is judged by the UN to be still unresolved– but with resolution promised “soon”, once UN-prescribed conditions are met in the area.
In Iraqi Kurdistan the soveriegnty question is not really, at present, on the table as such– though the question of a more dilute form of devolved, semi-autonomous rule very much is. But sovereignty could be placed very centrally in question if the US decided to regroup/concentrate some of its forces in I.K. after a withdrawal from the rest of Iraq. Of course, the landlocked nature of I.K., and the fact that surrounding states could be expected not to be happy to see a US-Kurdish power emerge there, would most likely make maintaining a US troop presence there for any length of time very costly in both financial and political/diplomatic terms.
How to exit from Iraq
For some reason, the Bush administration has still not taken the advice I’ve been giving it for more than two years now, quite simply to get out of Iraq. I can’t think why. Maybe they don’t know how to organize this logistical feat?
So as a free public service to them, I am happy to offer them the following handy nine-point plan for how to do it.
(1) Head south
Looking at the logistics, it seems a happy coincidence that one of the least badly-run parts of the country is the British zone in the south. Since most of the US forces will need to be “redeployed” out of the country by sea, and the only outlet to the sea is in the south, the British presence in and around Basra is rather handy. Not that Basra’s port will be able to handle anything like this volume of traffic– or, probably, much at all. But the troop convoys will most likely need to transit Basra on their way towards the ships and planes awaiting them in nearby Kuwait.
(2) Auxiliary exit routes
Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia might all also be willing to allow transit rights to the redeploying troops. I somehow suspect Syria and Iran would not be so happy to do so. However, no doubt the Iranians would be happy to negotiate some kind of an arrangement whereby– in return for some quid pro quo– they might undertake not to harass US troops leaving Iraq along routes close to Iran or its vital sea-lanes, so long as the redploying troops stick to agreed corridors and a known timetable of redeployment.
(3) One potential can of worms
Some folks in the Pentagon and elsewhere might still be tempted to leave a successor force in Iraqi Kurdistan. This seems like a real can of worms. They could easily become just as bogged down there as the UN presence is in Kosovo, six years after the US-led war to “rescue” Kosovo’s ever-fractious people. (The international-law status of both areas could become very similar– that is, Kurdistan’s could become just as murky and basically unsustainable as Kosovo’s if the US succeeds in breaking it off– but only partially– from the rest of Iraq.)
(4) How can US troops redeploying out of Iraq be assured they won’t be harrassed/attacked along the way?
This is a concern with some validity. The US authorities could negotiate an agreement on this matter with the Jaafari government. Of course, at present, the Jaafari government is not a body viewed as representative by many Iraqis, especially the more nationalistic ones. But if he could say to his compatriots: “Look, here is the plan for the total withdrawal of US troops so let’s all calm things down,” then he actually might suddenly develop nationwide credibility. And even if he didn’t gain that, simply the fact that the US troops are visibly following a well-publicized and timely withdrawal schedule would certainly mean that many other Iraqi leaders at the local level would come forward and say, “Yes, let’s make sure this goes smoothly.”
Settler societies, indigenes, culture, language
Jonathan, Shirin, and I have been having a really interesting interesting discussion down here about issues of culture and power in settler societies.
In the course of the discussion there Jonathan has been starting to develop a really interesting typology of different kinds of settler societies. Since he’s a guy who knows an amazing amount about many really intriguing parts of the world, including but not limited to the Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Middle East, what he has to say is really worth reading.
We also address the ever-thorny question of when cultural appropriation– mainly, in this context, by the settlers, of the cultural products/practices of the indigenes– is legitimate and when it should be (at the very least) questioned. In the discussion there, we make a distinction between cultural appropriation (generally ok) and cultural expropriation (generally not ok).
Finally, I’ve been looking at the report that New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal issued in 1986 on the issue of whether Maori language (te reo Maori) counts as a “treasure” (taonga) of the Maoris under the terms of the 1840 Waitangi Treaty and is thus deserving of the government’s protection.
- [That web document there presents both the English-language and the equally authoritative Maori-language versions of the Treaty. In “Article the second”, the “kuini o Ingarani”, that is, the Queen of England, undertakes to protect the unqualified exercise of the Maori chiefs’ chieftainship over all their “ratou taonga katoa”– their most precious treasures….
Note also in the Maori-language second para of “Article the First”, that the language actually had no word for or concept of the European-origined concept of “sovereignty”. Therefore they used a Maori transliteration/adaption of the concept of “governorship”– Kawana-tanga.]
Well anyway, in 1913, 90% of Maori schoolchildren could still speak their ancestral language. (Marcia Stenson, 2004, p.97) But since the view (and possibly the desire) of most of the Pakeha (i.e. mainly-Anglo settler) majority in the country was that the Maoris were “a dying race”, whose last remnants would presumably soon be assimilated into English-speaking society, government policies forbade Maoris from using their mother-tongue in schools and provided no access for them to use it in their dealings with the government.
By 1975, fewer than 5% of Maori schoolkids could speak their ancestral tongue.
Enter the Waitangi Tribunal— a body established that very same year as
- a permanent commission of inquiry charged with making recommendations on claims brought by Māori relating to actions or omissions of the Crown, which breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi. The Tribunal comprises up to 16 members… Approximately half the members are Māori and half are Pākehā.
So here are some excerpts from what the Tribunal reported, in April 1986, about the language issue:
Continue reading “Settler societies, indigenes, culture, language”
Independence Day
Happy July 4th.
I’ve been thinking about what “national independence”, i.e. sovereign self-government, should mean for any national group. I can support it for the US citizenry only by also supporting it for Iraqis and Palestinians, and only by also working to see the US citizenry make meaningful amends to both the indigenous peoples of this land and the descendants of those enslaved people whose coerced, unpaid labor built so much of the “national” infrastructure here in the US East.
However, even with all the problems of its misinterpretation and mis-implementation, the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 remains an inspiring text:
- We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Exactly.
Rule by a foreign military organization is very different from any form of rule that derives its powers “from the consent of the governed.” Did the January 30 election in Iraq provide an indicator that the Jaafari government has “the consent of the governed” in Iraq? It could have done so– provided Jaafari were free to exercise the normal rights of a sovereign power in his own country. But heisn’t. He is evidently constrained from doing so by the US military’s exercise of its powers throughout Iraq, accountable only to Washington and not to the “elected” leadership of Iraq.
Thus far, the vote of January 30 has had its democratic content subverted.
… For a really great take on the meaning of July 4 in our present era, check out Matt’s great post on the “Today in Iraq” blog today. Read that one and weep at the march of human folly (and indeed, probable criminality) in today’s United States…
Meanwhile, back in the 1776 text, check out how many items in the “bill of particulars” articulated therein against the British Crown could be applied today to the US’s practices inside Iraq:
New Zealand notes, #2
- Another NZ piece I wanted to post earlier. But I’m home now, so once I get myself sorted out a bit after the trip I should be back to more regular posting.
Mike Roberts is a successful man. You can watch him adeptly
co-anchoring the hour-long evening news magazine on TV-3, or you can
see his face on billboards throughout the country. He has, by
his own reckoning “about one-third” Maori blood. But he
self-identifies strongly and confidently as a Maori.
Back in 1999 he decided to make a documentary about the life of his
(mostly Maori) father. He titled it “White sheep” He told me a bit about it:
New Zealand notes, #1
- I’m back in the US of A. On a beautiful mountaintop overlooking Los Angeles. Our family is gathering here for a short time to commemorate my mother-in-law, who passed away in mid-May.
I finally have a faintly workable computer/internet setup, so I wanted to post at least the first of these screeds I wrote about New Zealand.
Today, once again, we took a flight that crossed both the Equator and the International Date Line in one hop. I feel I’m in a time-warp but what the heck. The following was written on about June 27…
And so, what of New Zealand in the
winter-time?
We flew into Auckland, arriving really early on the morning of Friday,
June 17. We picked up a hire car and drove down (up?) to Taupo, a
small town near the geographical middle of the North Island.
We stayed there for a week with my sister Hilly and her partner, who
are
living in Taupo for this year. They chose this small lakeside
town because my Aunty Margery– the only remaining member of our
family’s older generation– has lived there for many years and is now,
at 87, living in a nursing home near the center of town.
On June 25, Bill and I left Taupo and drove east and a little south to
a
town called Napier on the North Island’s east (Pacific) coast. After
two days there, we drove 200 miles south to Martinborough.
It’s my first visit to Aotearoa/New Zealand. I grew up in England
in the 1950s and 1960s, and the general view of NZ that I’d obtained
then was that it was “a more perfect England”, trapped somewhere in the
genteel reaches of the 1920s. Actually, though you can definitely
still catch whiffs of that image here today, much of the country isn’t
like that at all. Starting with its geography: the portions of it
that I’ve seen are far more dramatic than anything you can see in
England, with sharp escarpments, starkly configured volcanic hills and
mountains, steam rising from geothermal features in many places, and
lots of heavy, near-tropical vegetation including distinctly un-English
flora like tree-ferns, long drapy vines, and yuccas.
The culture also seems in many ways un-“English”…
We conquer the capital
Today we were in Wellington, capital of New Zealand. It was a fun day; also, very beautiful. We spent a bunch of time in the National Museum/ Te Pape, and learned a whole lot more about the Treaty of Waitangi and the preservation of Maori language and culture as one of the taonga (treasures) of the Maroi people under the Treaty.
I started drawing some comparisons/contrasts between the situation of the Maori citizens of NZ with that of the ethnically Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up a slightly larger proportion of the national population there. Israel, of course, defines itself as the “state of the Jewish people (everywhere)”, and notably not as the “state of its citizens”. In New Zealand, I don’t think anyone would currently describe her/himself as supporting the country being the “state of the Pakeha (white people)”. Or maybe some would, but not in public.
Anyway, there’s lots more to write about this, which I have started doing for the blog– though I can’t post this yet, given the tech constraints– but shall also now do for al-Hayat. It’s a fascinating topic– the attempt of a settler-dominated society to change course and start to act respectfully toward the culture and (some of) the interests of the indigenous people.
On the tech constraints– we’tre still in this hotel in Martinborough with sclerotic web access and no USB port for my thumbstick. On the other hand, we’re in the heart of a really lovely wine-growing area. So I’ll deal with it.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk with the head of the Maori Land Court in Wellington and then Bill and I fly to Auckland.