The caudillo of Samarra

This article by Peter Maass in today’s NYT magazine is really worth reading. It’s about some extremely thuggish ex-Baathists in Iraq whom Allawi’s Interior Minister, Falah Naqib, put in charge of something called the Special Police Commandos.
They have US “advisors” working with them. Naturally. Maass, who knows his way around the world of US Special Thug Forces around the world says many of these guys had extensive experience in the US-backed and very violent rightist movements in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America.
(Negroponte’s fingerprints, most likely.)
In Salvador, as Maass reminds us, more than 70,000 people from the 6 million population were killed during that rightist-fueled terror in the twelve-year period 1980-92.
Anyway, this little extract gives some of the flavor of Maass’s latest piece. It’s about an SPC squad who were working unde the “advice” of Capt. Jeff Bennett of the 3rd Infantry Division:

    The officer in charge of the raid — a Major Falah — now made it clear that he believed the detainee had led them on a wild-goose chase. The detainee was sitting at the side of a commando truck; I was 10 feet away, beside Bennett and four G.I.’s. One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence. The blows continued for a minute or so.
    Bennett had seen the likes of this before, and he had worked out his own guidelines for dealing with such situations. ”If I think they’re going to shoot somebody or cut his finger off or do any sort of permanent damage, I will immediately stop them,” he explained. ”As Americans, we will not let that happen. In terms of kicking a guy, they do that all the time, punches and stuff like that.”

Or how about this:

Continue reading “The caudillo of Samarra”

Missing Marine’s Girl

With everything that’s going on in the world these days, I miss the always compassionate, always passionately anti-war voice of Marine’s Girl.
Her great blog “Acoss the River” got hacked by hostile elements back in early March. Not the first time it had happend. This time, though, she was in the midst of bad, bad treatments for her cancer, her guy had just managed to spring some kind of exit from Iraq to come look after her in Michigan, and she didn’t seem to have the energy or desire to do all the work of fighting back to regain control of her blogspace.
I was thinking about writing something about you, MG, just this past week. I miss you! And I hope-hope-hope the treatments have been going well.
Send us a shout, if you can, and tell us how things are! (And hey, if you have the energy to send a blog post or two into a securely non-hackable–as far as I know– blogspace, just send something in to JWN!)
Also, an admirer of yours called Danya was looking for you, and sent me the following message to post someplace you could see it:

    I’m glad to hear you are OK MG, but your blog is missed. I find myself wondering about your health and your homelife now that your marine is home. I know that is what you need to be concentrating on right now but it’s sad to lose such a strong, smart voice for the side of reason.
    Signed, Danya
You have lots of admirers out there, MG! Big hugs from all of us to you!

Democracy possibly proceeding in Iraq?

I have decided to take down– for now!– the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter that has been a feature of the JWN sidebar for more than seven weeks now.
On this day, 88 days after the partially legitimate January 30 election in Iraq, UIA list head Ibrahim Jaafari has won approval from the elected National Assembly for his list for a transitional government.
I realize that the path to sovereign and democratic self-government in Iraq still looks extremely bumpy. (An under-statement, that.)
As that AP report states,

    the 37-member Cabinet [presented to the NA by Jaafari] still has two vacancies, five acting ministers and fails to incorporate in a meaningful way the Sunni Arab minority due to a dispute over the suitability of Baathists who served in Saddam Hussein’s regime…
    The historic decision also was made with a third of legislators in the 275-member National Assembly absent.
    Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari told reporters that decisions over the vacant and acting Cabinet positions will be made in three to four days.

Still, inasmuch as having the counter up on the sidebar expressed a forceful reproach to the US occupation authorities, I think it’s appropriate right now to take it down and “give Jaafari (and everyone else involved) a chance.”
I still have the HTML/script for the counter, however, and shall put it up at a moment’s notice whenever I think it should go back up.
“Empires will tremble!” (as a good friend of mine once said with I think just a touch of irony when I told him the Quakers were about to bring out a report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
A couple more significant details from the AP report:

Continue reading “Democracy possibly proceeding in Iraq?”

Discussing ‘Gallipoli?’

The post I put up here Monday about Gallipoli has already started to generate one of the most interesting cross-cultural discussions I’ve ever seen in the blogosphere… It’s definitely worth following the whole flow of the comments there.
Commenters include some fairly vocal Ozzies (oops, sorry, Aussies!) and Kiwis, not all of whom agree with each other– or me!– but all of whom are definitely eager to explain their points of view… a Singing Nun… the descendant of several Lebanese (or perhaps in those days they called themselves Syrians) who had been conscripted into the Ottoman Army and fought to defend the peninsula… and Yankeedoodle of Daily War News in unprecedented (for me) military historian cum “our roving correspondent” mode…
But that’s not all. As I say, definitely worth a peruse.
Note: I want to keep all the Gallipoli discussion in one place– over on that post, not here. So despite possible appearances to the contrary this post is closed to comments.

Wafiq al-Samarai

Yesterday, I noted here that Iraq’s transitional President, Jalal Talabani, has a “security counsellor” called Wafiq al-Samarai.
Commenter “Badr” noted that the position should probably be translated as “national security advisor”, and that “Wafiq al-Samarai was chief of military intelligence under Saddam and a leading opposition figure to the regime later.”
Interesting.
Both that Talabani has his own “national security advisor”, in a system that I had previously understood to be one in which the responsible-to-parliament PM would exercize executive power and the President would perform Queen Elizabeth 2-like ceremonial tasks.
I guess I got that wrong, huh? (But actually, did I?)
If Talabani is really building his own entire parallel ruling apparatus I think the word for that is “divide and rule”?
Also interesting, that Talabani would pick this Samarai person. Can Badr or anyone else give more details to reveal the distance Samarai might actually have traveled from his high-level Baathist past? Also, knowing something about his commitment to democratic principles and the rule of law would, I think, be very informative…
In a related vein, Juan Cole writes today that:

    Jalal Talabani told al-Hayat that he feared that the concerns among the Shiite religious parties about Sunni Arab cabinet ministers being completely free of any Baath association would cause the baby to be thrown out with the bath water. It is this issue of vetting the Sunni Arab ministers that appears to have delayed the finalization of the cabinet, along with continued Sunni Arab demands for some important ministries. Talabani warned against any purge of ex-Baathists, pointing out that there there are a million and a half Baathists in Iraq. He said it was important to distinguish between ordinary party members and the Baath military. The latter had to be kept away from the levers of power, he said, lest it make another coup similar to the one in 1968.
    Talabani also warned that for foreign troops to be withdrawn at this point risked provoking civil war. He insisted that Iraq is not occupied[!!!]

Oh, how convenient for Mr. Talabani as, with huge help from his friends in Washington, he gathers powers to himself and is able blithely to contradict the actual standing of his country under international law.

‘Iraqi Press Monitor’ resumes

Yesterday, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting put out the first edition of its once-daily ‘Iraqi Press Monitor’ since February 2nd.
I’m glad they’ve cranked it up again. It’s not perfect but it does provide some interesting tidbits. Like one in yesterday’s edition, from the Chalabist Al-Mutamar newspaper that referred to someone called “Wafiq al-Samarai, security counsellor to the Iraqi president.” Samarai had reportedly issued his “first press release”, in which he

    promised an end to terrorist violence. In particular, he said, foreign insurgent groups would driven out through a combination of national reconciliation, dialogue and employment.

Well, never mind so much what the guy said. But who knew that the Iraqi President would have his own “security counsellor”?
I thought the system of government was supposed to be one in the which the Prime Minister headed the executive power?
In today’s edition of IPM, they had this report from the SCIRI daily, Al-Adalah:

    Jawad al-Maliki, who deputises for Jaafari in the Islamic Dawa Party, said the government should have been announced on January 25 [oops, maybe make that ‘April 25’?] but the decision was postponed for a day as some issues remained unresolved. Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zibari described Jaafari

Gallipoli?

Can someone tell me why 20,000 whitefolks– most of them reportedly Ozzies or New Zealanders, and many of them young– would flock to a chilly shore in Turkey early today to commemorate an extremely ill-conceived, British-led assault on the shore of a distant Muslim country that ended up being a complete military fiasco?
It was a big event. Both the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers were there. Britain sent Prince Charles. (I guess Tony was too busy running in his current election campaign and trying to dodge questions about a more recent british assault on a Muslim land.)
On so many different scores, the UK-France-Anzac assault on Gallipoli in 1915 was a deep, deep embarrassment. Why on earth would people from the invading countries even want to remember it (except it as a terrible object lesson in what not to do?) And why would so many of them have flocked to Gallipoli today to “commemorate” the 90th anniversary of one of the campaign’s key battles?
I do recall, growing up in Middle England in the 1950s, that in the semi-public park opposite my home there was a broad plinth built– apparently for some further memorial that never in the end materialized atop it– and it was mysteriously engraved “Gallipoli 1915”.
Maybe better that the memorial there never did get finished?
Here’s the summary of the Gallipoli campaign, culled from that great “First World War. com” website linked to above:
— A young (and rash) Winston Churchill was the Secretary of the Navy. He insisted on launching the operation against the advice of most of the professional military and naval thinkers. (H’mmm.)
— The first attempt to land British and allied forces on Turkish soil at Gallipoli was made in mid-February 1915. It failed. The first successful landings weren’t made till April 25. Three subsequent attempts to enlarge those beachheads were repulsed by the Turks.
— By August or so, the British forces, commanded by Ian Hamilton, had a total of three beachheads. Each was, unfortunately, still overlooked by Turkish positions. “Confidence in the operation in London and Paris was dwindling. Nevertheless Churchill pressed both governments to provide continued support.”
— In October, Hamilton received news that he would soon be ordered to evacuate the peninsula. He protested, and was replaced. London didn’t get its act together to actually order the evacuation till December, by which time the evacuation was extremely hazardous.
— Campaign Summary:

    Some 480,000 Allied troops had been dedicated to the failed campaign. British casualties (including imperial forces) amounted to approximately 205,000. French losses were estimated at around 47,000. Turkey incurred around 250,000 casualties.

Oh my God, can you imagine all those families stripped of their young men? And for what? All of World War 1, everywhere, was simply one long and quite unmitigated disaster.
But my question remains: why on earth would those young Ozzies and Kiwis be so eager to travel to Gallipoli and memorialize what happened there?
The militaristic Ozzie PM, John Howard, blustered on to the effect that,

Continue reading “Gallipoli?”

Bush, Hizbullah, and disarmament

My recent long article on Hizbullah has continued to evoke a broad– and fairly predictable– range of reactions in various places. I’ll be giving a public presentation on the subject in DC on June 1, in case any of you is able to get there. (More details later.) The date is a little delayed, I know. But I really do need to focus on finishing my violence-in-Africa book. Then in late May, I’ll be teaching a summer course over at Eastern Mennonite University….
Anyway. Bottom line here. I’m a member of an on-line discussion group on (mainly) Gulf affairs, and recently started reading some postings there on the topic of Bush and Hizbullah. So yesterday I dashed off the following comment:

    It is extremely “rich” that the same Bush administration that has handed over a lot of the security work in Iraq to the Pesh Merga (and some to foreign mercenaries) should be the one saying that party militias can absolutely not be allowed in Lebanon! However, the general principles that the state should have a monopoly on the means of force and that security forces should come under the governance of the civilian political leadership (preferably, a democratically constituted one) are very valuable ones indeed.
    In Lebanon, the state, being itself weak, has until recently in essence subcontracted many of the security reponsibilities in South Lebanon to Hizbullah, which had “won” that right by being the force that liberated the area from foreign military occupation. (How many other people remember the Israeli-forced “high noon at Kawkaba” back in March 1978?) Hizbullah’s command of this private militia is certainly not a desirable situation over the long or even shorter term. But it is overwhelmingly the business of the Lebanese themselves to deal with it. It was interesting to see the very low degree of support the recent Zogby poll found, in many segments of Lebanese society including Maronites, for the idea of a forced disarming of Hizbullah. The Lebanese seem clearly to prefer negotiations to regularize the situation of the people who currently staff the Hizbullah-affiliated territorial defense and deterring-Israel formations in the South. Perhaps this could be done along the lines recently suggested by Sheikh Naim Qasem. This would broadly parallel the efforts Abu Mazen has been pursuing to fold the combatants from Hamas and other militant groups into the centralized PA security structure.
    Let’s all continue hoping and working for a comprehensive peace in the area– Israel-Syria, Israel-Lebanon, intra-Lebanese, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. In that context, the amounts of national revenue that all these parties keep tied up until now in military preparedness could be radically reduced. Until then, some form of citizen-based, territorially organized defense probably makes a lot of sense for the people of south Lebanon.
    I’d like to be able to argue that a completely nonviolent civilian mass movement might “hold off” the Israelis better than such a force. But the comparative records of the Palestinians’ (largely nonviolent) first intifada, which won them nothing lasting from Israel, and Hizbullah’s exactly contemporaneous pursuit of armed struggle, which in combination with expert civilian organization did succeed in liberating national territory, would make that argument a very hard sell indeed…
    Helena Cobban

Oh heck– just because the argument would be a hard sell, I shouldn’t make it? What on earth kind of un-Quakerly thinking is that??
So I’ll make it:

    The people of south Lebanon could do really well to study the nonviolent means by which Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha movement not ony resisted the entire weight of the British Army in India but was also able to persuade the British to pull their forces out of India completely.
    Go for it!
    Using these means successfully requires a strategic and very deeply philosophical commitment to the principles of nonviolence. But since Hizbullah has already shown its high level of experience and expertise in civilian mass organizing it already has much of the groundwork in place for such a campaign.
    And no: nonviolence is by no means anathema to Muslim teachings. One of Gandhi’s key lieutenants in his principled and successful movement against British occupation was the Pathan leader Badshah Khan, the “Gandhi of the Northwest frontier.”

Ach. That stuff is so important, I’ll have to come back to it again sometime soon.
But for now, I just want to add into this post some points that were made in that same on-line discussion forum by the Beirut-based writer Nicholas Blanford, who gave me permission to reproduce them here.
Nick, who’s been following Hizbullah a lot more closely than I have and has done so for a number of years, wrote the following:

    A few points perhaps worth noting.
    1. The debate has yet to begin in earnest on the future status of Hizbullah’s military wing, the Islamic Resistance, and it probably won’t begin until at least after the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held at the end of May. What Hizbullah has been doing through its various declarations is staking out its initial bargaining position. Essentially, their position is as follows: They want the Islamic Resistance to remain intact and under Hizbullah’s chain of command while accepting increased coordination with the Lebanese Army (i.e., the government). They will not initiate military confrontations with the Israelis along the Blue Line (the UN name for Lebanon’s southern border with Israel and the Golan Heights/Shebaa Farms) with the exception of the Shebaa Farms theater in the south east corner. They will, however, reserve the right to respond to Israeli acts of aggression (overflights, ground breaches of the Blue Line etc). Since 2000, Hizbullah has cultivated a public image of defender of Lebanese sovereignty from Israeli aggression, and its initial bargaining position deviates little from its current modus operandi along the Blue Line.
    2. The Islamic Resistance is the beating heart of Hizbullah and the party will do what it can to retain it. They will play for time in the hope that domestic and/or regional developments will intervene to rescue them. In the meantime, the party is even willing to subordinate potential political gains for the sake of the Resistance. That means co-opting and appeasing other Shiite/Sunni political groups to retain them as allies and defenders of the Resistance, rather than alienate them by competing aginst them politically and turning them into opponents.
    3. The big question is how far Hizbullah will go to keep the Resistance intact. Will they risk destabilizing Lebanon for the sake of the Resistance or will they yield if the majority of Lebanese clearly support disarmament?

Continue reading “Bush, Hizbullah, and disarmament”

Bushies close to losing Iraqi ‘second chance’?

It’s twelve weeks today since January’s significant (if certainly not perfect) multi-party election in Iraq. And still, the party list that won the majority of seats has been prevented– both by the strictures of the US-dictated Transitional Administrative Law and by the manueverings of key US allies in the country– from being able to form a government accountable to the elected National Assembly.
The Bush administration, it seems to me, has just about completely “blown” the extremely valuable second chance it was handed, virtually on a plate, by the Iraqi voters back on January 30th.
The “first chance” Washington had to effect constructive social and political reform in Iraq was right after the US military victory back in April 2003. As longtime JWN readers will recall, I always opposed the decision to go to war. But once it had been fought, and apparently militarily “won”, I did not pursue a vengeful attitude toward its authors but instead advocated strongly for a reconciliatory and rehabilitative approach.
They didn’t take my advice. (Nothing new there, but I persist in giving it.) Instead, they pursued many of the most anti-humanitarian tactics of classic colonialist “pacifications”, particularly through their mass-detentions policy and their launching of extremely nasty “punitive expeditions” in Najaf, Fallujah, and elsewhere. All of which expeditions were chosen in preference to the option of negotiations that was very present in all or nearly all of those situations.
At least, though, the Bushies showed some commitment to the goal of democratic elections. On this blog and elsewhere, I spoke out and lauded that goal, despite the many evident shortcomings with the idea of trying to hold decent elections in a situation of continued military occupation and rampant public insecurity.
The majority of the Iraqi people showed great courage, and turned out to vote. And miraculously, through that act they offered the US occupation authorities in Iraq an extremely valuable “second chance”. Indeed, this second chance had even more legitimacy than the first one, since it was won through the US forces’ support for a fairly genuine exercise in Iraqi popular consultation.
Moreover, unlike the Bushies’ “first chance” back in April 2003, the second chance was something that democrats and reformers throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds could empathize with, and openly hope to emulate. It therefore had an extremely broad “resonance effect” throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. (A failure of the ‘democratic experiment’ in Iraq will, as a result, have a much broader domino effect than anything the US suffered as a result of the failure in Vietnam… )
Much-needed political and social reform could, it was hoped, come through the act of voting! How much more palatable is that as an strategy, for everyone, than the idea of reform coming through military aggression?
But the Bushies are, I think, very close indeed to having blown this second chance…
Is it too early to make a definitive judgment on this? (I have been keeping the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter up on the sidebar here for more than seven weeks now, and have always hoping to be able to take it down “soon”….)
The latest word on the AP wire tonight is that,

    Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari [has] decided, some members of his political bloc said, to shun further attempts to include members of the party headed by [Iyad] Allawi, the secular Shiite politician who had served as prime minister as the country prepared for elections Jan. 30.
    … Al-Jaafari’s list could be put to parliament as early as Monday, some of his bloc said. Others indicated the Cabinet announcement would be made Tuesday.

But as the writer of that piece, Thomas Wagner, notes: “Many such forecasts have proven wrong so far.”
But even if Jaafari is able to win parliamentary support for his list on Monday or Tuesday, how much real ability will his government have to govern?
This is an extremely serious issue. And much of the answer lies in the hands of the country’s US occupation administration. (I hope JWN readers haven’t for a moment been taken in by the Bushites’ protestations that they are “not an occupation force” in Iraq any more. Of course they are– both in fact, and under international law.)
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course in pursuing questions of internal politics. Certainly, it would not have to listen to fatwas such as that issued by Donald Rumsfeld when, during his recent visit, he explicitly “told” the Iraqis what they could and couldn’t do with regard to former Baathists.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would have full control over national resources and national revenues.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course with regard to national security. That course would most likely involve reaching agreements with the country’s neighbors, as well as with those portions of the occupying forces still remaining (or not) inside the country.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government could make its own appeals to whatever portions of the international community it should choose to, for help in attaining any of its national tasks. It would certainly not feel beholden to any diktats coming out of Washington.
… Meanwhile, we should note that much of the “story” that has been told by the mainstream US media about recent events in Iraq has claimed that the situation in the country got notably better for a whole period after the elections, and is only now threatening to get worse.
But that is actually a completely wrong view to present…

Continue reading “Bushies close to losing Iraqi ‘second chance’?”

The ‘fog of investigations’

WaPo article by Josh White today:

    An Army inspector general’s report has cleared senior Army officers of wrongdoing in the abuse of military prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, government officials familiar with the findings said yesterday.

Why am I not surprised?
White’s piece notes that Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski is the only flag officer so far to have been recommended for punishment.
The article also provides a brief and generally clear summary of all the many previous (and deeply overlapping) ” investigations” the military has carried out over the past year into the abuse/torture of detainees.
Clausewitz, of course, was the person who famously coined the phrase “fog of war”. I sometimes think that what the Penatgon’s high-ups have achieved by organizing these numerous overlapping investigations has been to create “the fog of investigation”.
But maybe I’m too cynical.
What I do know is that there has been nothing like the clear, unequivocal leadership that has been needed from every civilian and military portion of the US national command structure that states flat-out that no act of torture or abuse will be tolerated!; that any suspected instances of abuse or torture will be investigated immediately, and any guilty party punished!; and that the Geneva Conventions and other essential humanitarian-law protections for detainees remain our sole standard!
Those kinds of clear leadership actions are what I was calling for in May and June of last year when I was writing a lot about the need for a clear posture of zero tolerance for torture. Here, or here, or here.
The Bushies, though, chose not go that route. Now, I know full well that as I write this, US government employees and contractors somewhere around the world are abusing and torturing detainees– on my tax dollar. It makes me sick to my stomach. It also makes me think more seriously than before about trying to become a war tax resister.