CSM column on democratization

Here’s the column I have in the CSM today.
The lede is:

    Should Americans and their leaders be pushing for greater democratization in the Middle East even if this process risks bringing to power parties – including avowedly Islamist parties – that seem strongly opposed to US policies?
    Yes. All people who claim they’re committed to democracy have to be for the process even if – at home or abroad – it brings to power parties with which we disagree. That is the whole point of democratic practice, after all: to allow people with widely differing ideas to work together to resolve those differences through discussion and the ballot box, rather than through violence.
    But what if some countries elect committed Islamists as leaders?…

Anyway, you should read the whole thing to see what more I have to say about that.

Good sense on the Iraqi constitution

Somebody else agrees with my view that constitution-writing in Iraq is too weighty a matter to be rushed.
Today, the Crisis Group (formerly the International Crisis Group) came out with this report, titled, Iraq: Don’t rush the Constitution.
It took them a while to come to broadly the same conclusion I expressed back in this April 14 column in the CSM. And they don’t explicitly say, as far as I can see, that the next election in Iraq could be held on the basis of an Interim Constitution and thus need not await and be held hostage to the attainment of final agreement on a Permanent Constitution.
But still, the CG undoubtedly has a whole lot more weight in international affairs than I do. So it’s good to see them take even this partial step.

US public wising up

Things are moving, inside the US body politic. In a good direction. Not nearly as fast as I would have hoped… But still, in the right direction.
Today, the WaPo and ABC News released the results of their latest public opinion poll, conducted between June 2 and June 5. Here’s the lead on the WaPo story:

    For the first time since the war in Iraq began, more than half of the American public believes the fight there has not made the United States safer, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
    While the focus in Washington has shifted from the Iraq conflict to Social Security and other domestic matters, the survey found that Americans continue to rank Iraq second only to the economy in importance — and that many are losing patience with the enterprise.
    Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, while two-thirds say the U.S. military there is bogged down and nearly six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting — in all three cases matching or exceeding the highest levels of pessimism yet recorded. More than four in 10 believe the U.S. presence in Iraq is becoming analogous to the experience in Vietnam.
    Perhaps most ominous for President Bush, 52 percent said war in Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States, while 47 percent said it has. It was the first time a majority of Americans disagreed with the central notion Bush has offered to build support for war: that the fight there will make Americans safer from terrorists at home.

It is worth registering as a WaPo online reader to look at this graphic, which tracks Bush’s approval rating since February 2001, and identified the effects of certain notable events like Sept 11, the start of the war in Afghanistan, the start of the war against Iraq, etc. Each of those events seemed to give the Prez a boost, btw, tho it’s hard to disaggregate the effects of the first two, which happened very close together.
The Dec. 2003 announcement of the capture of Saddam also gave GWB a boost, of some 7 or 8%.
The only time before now that his overall approval ratings were notably below 50% was in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations (which interestingly were NOT identified as a discrete event on the WaPo graphic.)
Now, he’s down to 48% approve, while 50% disapprove and only 1% claim to have “no opinion” re approval/disapproval.
Of course, it would help tremendously if we had a robust opposition party in this country that was clearly identified with both an alternative set of policies and an alternative worldview.
We don’t. We have the Dems, who are still stumbling along seemingly not sure what to do about the war.
Still, there is a little movement in Congress as well as in public opinion on the Iraq issue, as I noted in this May 27 post. There, I noted that 128 members of the House of Representatives had voted for a resolution that called on the President to

    develop a plan as soon as practicable after the date of the enactment of this Act to provide for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq…

Significantly, five of the people voting for that were Republicans…
Meantime, though, several prominent Dems are still calling for more US troops to be sent to Iraq.
As I said, the “progress” on the Iraq issue here is slow… But at least it’s in the right direction.
The US public seems finbally to be waking up from the almost narcotic stupor it seemed to be in on voting day back last November.
The WaPo is also posting the details of the most recent poll, which are worth looking at.

Continue reading “US public wising up”

The US-apartheid analogy

Today I’m going to write a column for Al-Hayat about how the Bush administration’s “campaign” for global democratization, and its claim to speak in the name of democracy worldwide, puts it in roughly the same position vis-a-vis the rest of the world that South Africa’s apartheid regime was vis-a-vis SA’s unfranchised non-White majority population.
This is another thread of the broad US-apartheid analogy that I’ve been thinking through over the past few months.
The GWOT/National Security Strategy similarity is another thread of it.
In both cases, too, we have the same phenomena of outright resource greed and a Biblically “justified” sense of entitlement…
Talking of the “democratization” campaign, I found a great quote in this column by the well-connected WaPo columnist David Ignatius today.
David was writing about some attempts at political “reform” being planned by Jordan’s decidedly non-constitutional but strongly US-backed monarch, King Abdullah II, these days.
He wrote:

    Abdullah has taken other steps to shake up Jordan over the past two months, including forming a new government in April in which reformists are more prominent, installing a new chief of the royal palace and replacing the director of public security. Because these moves followed a trip to Washington by the king in late March, the chattering classes in Amman have speculated that they resulted from U.S. pressure. But there’s little evidence of that. Indeed, when Abdullah explained his reform plans in a White House meeting in March, President Bush is said to have approved, but cautioned, “Take it easy.”

Oh, don’t you love that use of a passive verb: Bush “is said to have… cautioned”.
“Is said” by whom, David?
I’m assuming, either the “chattering classes” in Amman, or perhaps even the King himself.
But there, in a nutshell, is a good window into what is most likely really going on… Despite all the great rhetoric about supporting democratization worldwide, Prez Bush and his advisors possibly don’t really want to push it to the point that in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc it might bring into power regimes that, for example, did not do abusive interrogations of individuals “rendered” to them by the US authorities, etc., etc…
And then, there’s Uzbekistan…

The politicized charge-sheet

So the Iraqi Special Tribunal is going to try Saddam for invading Kuwait in 1990– but not for invading Iran in 1980? This, despite the fact that the human carnage that resulted from the 1980 invasion was on a far, far greater scale than that occasioned by the 1990 invasion…
Can it be that the people organizing the Special Tribunal place a higher value on the lives of Kuwaitis than on those of Iranians?
Or did the decision come out this way because the US opposed the Saddamist aggression against Kuwait, but condoned, encouraged, and even supported the aggression against Iran?
Whatever the reason: shame on the Tribunal!

Trying Saddam?

How many times have we heard announcements from “officials” in Iraq that Saddam Hussein is “about to be put on trial– any day now”?
The latest one came in this announcement today, made by Ibrahim Jaafari’s US-educated spokseman Laith Kuba.

Kuba told reporters that Saddam,

    will go on trial within two months on charges of crimes against humanity, with prosecutors focusing on 12 “thoroughly documented” counts, including the gassing of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq.

He also said that, though it would be possible to bring “500” cases against Saddam, the Iraqi government will only bring 12 of the better documented charges against him.
These would all, Kuba said, be charges of “crimes against humanity.”
That AP article linked to above quoted Kuba as saying that, the attack with chemical weapons on the Kurdish town of Halabja would be one of the charges brought, but he “did not elaborate on the other 11.”
If the charges are indeed all to be charges of crimes against humanity, then that would indicate that they would all be charges connected with actions Saddam took against people within Iraq’s own national borders— the classic definition of crimes against humanity.
If the charges were to include actions undertaken against either Kuwait or Iran, then those would more likely be designated as “war crimes” or possibly “crimes against the peace”.
This latter category of atrocity, which concerns, essentially, the launching of an unjustified war, has not been prosecuted since the post-WW2 trials. But if it was applicable to Hitler and his generals, and to the Japanese generals and militarists, then why not to Saddam Hussein?
Oops, it might involve having Iran take part there as one of the two aggressed-against victims. Some one million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s 1980 aggression against their country. (That figure is far, far higher than the number of Kuwaitis who died as a result of his invasion of Kuwait nine years later.)
And oops, if launching an unjustified war that imposes terrible suffering on large numbers of people can be prosecuted these days, then how about the Bush administration??
So no. It seems that they’ve agreed for now to stick to the “safer” charges connected with the actions Saddam took against his own people.
Of course, the whole process looks irretrievably politicised at this point. Not just in the choice of “charges” brought.
But look who made this latest announcement??? Wouldn’t it really have been a lot better for the rule of law in Iraq if announcements like this had come from the Chief Prosecutor or someone in his office? Why on earth have them come from the Prime Minister’s spokesman?
Back in December 2003, shortly after Saddam’s capture by the US forces, I wrote here that,

    No doubt about it: the trial of Saddam Hussein has many, many political aspects to it. It certainly won’t be the simple, gloating “victory lap for the Coalition” that many in the US media now think it may be.

And here we are, 18 months later, with that point now, I think, very well proven. (If you haven’t read that whole post there, you really ought to go back and do so.)
The whole process of “trying Saddam” is absolutely, inextricably political at this point. However, it is not the main priority for the Iraqi people. It’s a sideshow, grotesquely inflated for western audiences by an Iraqi administration seeking to curry western favors.
I think– and I’m relying on JWN’s Iraqi readers here to correct me if I’m wrong– that there are many, many tasks that are more important for Iraqis today than staging what will under even the very best of circumstances at this point be nothing better than a show trial.
Meanwhile, Saddam and his top henchfolk are being kept carefully in US custody, in a place where they can be prevented from releasing embarrassing details about things like the encouragement they received from the US, UK, and other western powers back in the 1980s as they upgraded their chemical weapons capabilities and launched a quite gratuitous war against Iran…
By the way, John Burns wrote in the NYT today that the total number of detainees being held as “suspected insurgents” in just the US-run detention facilities in Iraq has now rerached 14,000. That is a shockingly high number! Can you imagine the conditions in which most of those people are being held?
Burns also wrote that of those 14,000, only 370 were foreigners, “according to figures provided by the American command.”

Killing and voting in Lebanon.

Deep condolences to the family and comrades of the slain lebanese journalist samir Kassir. The fact and manner of his killing were both equally shocking.
Kassir, a convinced leftist activist, probably deserved just as much or more activism at the time of his killing as the late Rafiq Hariri. But the Lebanese “opposition” politicians who created such a successful and telegenic media spectacle after Hariri’s killing have proven (once again) that they do not have the long-term vision and commitment required to build a longterm political movement.
Kassir was buried Saturday. Though some of his comrades called for the ouster of pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud in response, the much wiser Maronite Patriarch, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, called for calm in his sermon today. That Daily Star article linked to above quotes Sfeir as saying: “If President Emile Lahoud is forcibly removed, would this truly stabilize political life in Lebanon?”
All this came after the near-total failure of a call the “opposition” launched right after Kassir’s killing, for the country to observe a general strike Friday.
In that Daily Star piece, Leila Hatoum wrote:

    Despite opposition calls for a general strike Friday in response to the assassination of Samir Kassir, life went on as normal in the capital with the vast majority of businesses more concerned about making a living than protesting.

She quoted “Mohammed, a young waiter working at one central district cafe” as saying,

    “The mighty opposition figures think they can control us and play with our destiny, but they don’t feel with us. They have the money and power to last a boycott, but if we the poor stop working for a day, we would not find anything to eat at night.”
    Mohammed continued: “Yesterday, a great journalist died, just like many great Lebanese men before him, but we refuse to kill our country by closing it down to please the politicians’ whims.”
    Abu Jean, a parking attendant in Gemmayzeh, agreed.

Meanwhile, south Lebanon has today been seeing the voting for the region’s 23 parliamentary seats. Six of these seats saw no contest. The races for the others saw, according to this article in the Daily Star, great successes for the joint Amal-Hizbullah list.
Reuters reported that, “Interior Ministry sources said turnout among the 675,000 eligible voters was 45 percent.” That was noticeably higher than the voting for the Beirut-area seats last week.
Today’s poll was the second of the four weekly rounds of voting in the parliamentary election.
If you read only the mainstream US media about developments in Lebanon you probably would not have known about the failure of the opposition’s call for a general strike Friday. And you might have thought there were some politically viable Shiite canidates in the election there who were not associated with the Hizbullah-Amal list.
For example, in this piece in today’s NYT, Hassan M. Fattah wrote:

    For many Lebanese, while Hezbollah retains much of its draw, the patina of heroism that it earned in the 23 years of Israelis occupation of the south has dulled as the group has been forced to make alliances and operate like any other party.
    Ibrahim Shamseddine is a widely respected Shiite leader and the son of a leading Shiite cleric. Bushra Khalil is a well-known lawyer from a prominent Shiite family who proudly admits she is on Saddam Hussein’s defense team. Riad al-Asaad is a cousin of the multibillionaire Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and sees himself as a reformer. All have taken on Hezbollah candidates.

Okay, Fattah then immediately admits that, “Most independent candidates admit they have slim chances.” But I think his analysis that the party’s political support has waned as it has entered Lebanon’s parliamentary system is just plain wrong, and wrong-headed.
Hizbullah decided to enter parliamentary politics back in 1991, and has done fairly well ever since then. Its moment of greatest national support came in 1996, and of greatest national glory in May 2000, when it demonstrated its remarkable ability to force a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the country. But throughout all those years it continued to pursue a very smart policy within the Lebanese political system.
This has not dulled its “patina”. In general, the solid work that Hizbullah politicians in local and national government have done– often in alliance with other parties– has served the people well by delivering decent levels of service to them. Thus, if anything, it has burnished the party’s “patina” with the public.
Is it too difficult to be able to explain these complex aspects of Hizbullah to an American audience? It really shouldn’t be. But I suppose it depends on what your “editors” want you to write…

Iraqi constitution-writing, contd.

Alert readers will have noted that last night I put the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter back up onto the JWN sidebar.
I did so for two main reasons:

    (1) because of the continuation of the mayhem and massive civil strife that has plagued Iraq almost non-stop since the holding of the January 30 election, with almost no effective action having been taken by the occupying power(s) to end it, and
    (2) because of the news that the Iraqi “Foreign Minister” was now openly asking for the aid of the principal occupying power in the complex and extremely important internal-Iraqi business of trying to craft a workable longterm Constitution for the country.

The fact that the government (or at least, the “Foreign Minister”) was doing this indicated very strongly to me that the government (or at least, the “Foreign Minister”) sees the government’s principal mandate as coming not from the millions of Iraqi citizens who braved the threats of terrorists and others to walk to the polls on January 30, but from the occupying power itself.
Sure, people associated with the Constitution-writing body could seek ideas from any number of different sources as they go about crafting the country’s new Constitutioon. Why not? But for the “Foreign Minister” openly and prominently to appeal for the occupying power’s help in this matter strikes me as extremely destructive of the idea of popular legitimacy, or, if you will, the “consent of the governed”.
This morning, the DDI counter stands at 125 days of democracy having been denied in Iraq, starting at the date of the January 30 election. As I’ve noted here previously, the clunky “TAL” machinery issued a long time back as a ukaze/fatwa by Ayatollah Bremer (remember him?) allowed for precisely 213 days to pass between that election and the August 15 presentation of a final draft for Iraq’s permanent Constitution.
58.7% of that time has now elapsed. The 88 days left– under the terms of the TAL– for these crucial deliberations are simply insufficient. Especially if these deliberations must continue to be held under conditions of terrifying civil strife.
Of course, if the government that was confirmed by Iraq’s elected National Assembly back in April took seriously the idea that it drew its main operating mandate from that act of (nearly) democratic political legitimization, rather than from the heavy breath of the occupying power down its neck, then it might rapidly come to the conclusion that it has no need to remain bound to Bremer’s clunky directive regarding how Iraq’s transition to national independence should be effected.
The government could propose its own path of transition, seek to build and retain Iraqis’ popular support for that path, and then negotiate with the occupying power from a position of unassailable political strength.
As part of that path, it might indeed (as I suggested in this mid-April CSM column) decide that fashioning a long-term, indeed “Permanent” Constitution in the country is far too serious an undertaking to be bound by the rigid deadlines of the (quite undemocratic) TAL– and certainly, far too serious to be held hostage to the need to bring about a speedy withdrawal of the occupation forces…
In that case– in Iraq as in South Africa in 1994– a decent national election held on the basis of an “Interim Constitution” could work just fine as a way to generate a nearly totally legitimate national government. And then, after a truly accountable-to-the-democratic-will national administration is in place in Iraq, it would still have plenty of time at its disposal, and also, a greatly enhanced climate of public security: both these factors would then greatly strengthen the ability of the country’s various political currents to engage in reasoned deliberations with each other over the terms of their ongoing, “permanent” political association with each other and the nature of their governing arrangements…
But I guess that only an Iraqi “government” that sees its primary mandate as having come from the Iraqi people, rather than from the barrels of US Army guns, would even consider challenging the dictates of the TAL in such a way.

Democracy truly denied in Iraq?

Long-time JWN readers probably recall how much I hoped that the January 30th elections could provide a way for a credible, accountable-to-Iraqis administration to emerge inside Iraq, while also allowing a (relatively) violence-free way for the US administration to disengage from trying to control the affairs of that very troubled country.
It took a long time, after January 30, for the Iraqi parties to be able to reach agreement on the identity of the new Prime Minister and the make-up of the new government. While they dithered, I put up the ‘Democracy Denied in Iraq’ counter onto JWN’s sidebar.
Then finally, in late April, Ibrahim Jaafari was sworn in in front of the new elected Assembly as PM (though it took a little while longer for him to name some of his ministers.)
I took the counter down.
Today, after reading this account of the new “Iraqi” Foreign Minister openly and imho ignominiously appealing for greater US aid in crafting an Iraqi constitution, I decided it is time for the DDI counter to go back up.
That link is to a piece by Robin Wright in today’s WaPo. She writes:

    In talks with Vice President Cheney yesterday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari requested greater U.S. and coalition help in crafting a new constitution. The deadline is now less than three months away, but deliberations have been slowed as Iraq still works on the composition of a constitutional committee.
    With time running out for writing the constitution and then holding elections in December for a permanent government, Zebari warned that the United States has withdrawn too much, leaving the new government struggling to cope and endangering the long-term prospects for success.

She wrote that Zebari also asked the Bushies for help on three other counts:

    — to ” to help bring the Sunni minority into the political process” (!)
    — for ” additional staff and resources to accelerate the creation of a new Iraqi army and police force”, and
    — to “speed up the confirmation of its new ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad”.

It is fact that the Bushies have been without an ambassador in Baghdad since March 17, when Amb. John Negrocontra hotfooted it out of the country. That’s eleven vital weeks that the massive US diplomatic mission there has effectively been rudderless. As Wright notes, the DCM position in Baghdad has also gone through a transition in the past month.
Now, I’m not going to argue that having a local US viceroy in place to tell the Iraqi politicians what to do (which is exactly the way that Jon Lee Anderson, writing recently in The New Yorker described Khalilzad behaving in Afghanistan) is necessarily desirable… But you would think, wouldn’t you, that the Bush administration would want to have an accountable chain of command in place in Baghdad to help it to manage the extremely strategically sensitive situation there?
Well, you might think that, if you thought they actually wanted to have some kind of an orderly transition there….
As it is, the disgracefully “AWOL/negligent” policy that Washington has been pursuing inside Iraq seems almost to have been designed to bring about a situation of ever greater instability and distrust within the country…. (Perhaps with the ulterior aim of turning round to a formerly accusing world and saying, “So! You see those Iraqis can’t govern themselves. That’s why we simply have no option except to stay there….” And on Wednesday the Security Council, to its great shame, seemed to buy into that argument when it renewed the “mandate” that it graciously gave the US-led forces forces in Iraq for a further –slightly indeterminate?– term.)
And the result of all these machinations?

Continue reading “Democracy truly denied in Iraq?”

Bush completely AWOL?

You have to know a President is losing political capital rapidly when he finds himself at a public press conference– as Bush did yesterday— having to answer a question about whether he has been losing political capital.
The loss of political capital was alleged in this article in yesterday’s WaPo, by Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei. They wrote:

    Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of “political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.
    In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.
    With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy…

In Tuesday’s press conference, Bush demonstrated how deeply he is “out of it” by responding to a question on Iraq with a disquisition on the Taliban. (?)
He also responded to a question about Amnesty International’s claim that the administration has established a “new gulag” around the world by dismissing it as “absurd.”
It took Dana Milbank, in today’s WaPo to add in this significant detail:

    “It’s just an absurd allegation,” he said with a chuckle.

Somehow, that “chuckle” really, really upset me.
Does Bush totally lack the ability to see that, whether you challenge the reports of torture and ill-treatment so carefully compiled by Amnesty and other rights groups or not, these issues are ones of deadly seriousness?
Especially for the leader of a world power that claims to be bringing democracy and “freedom” to all the peoples of the world?
Milbank’s piece– which is titled “Spelling nuance with a W”– doesn’t appear to be up on the WaPo’s website yet.
His thesis there is that the blustery, black-and-white worldview W displayed during his first term in office has been replaced by something more closely approaching nuance.
Bill and I agreed, after reading the article, that ‘evasion” would be a better term for it…