I did a bit more tweaking on the main JWN sidebar this morning. Including, I thought I should put in links to some of the documents I’ve archived on JWN in the past few months, so there’s a whole new sidebar section for that.
Then I decided that in our tour of different world calendars we’d spent long enough reading the dates in Slovak. The next option down was Slovenian, which was very similar. Below that was Spanish, which I thought would be a little bland. Maybe I’ll come back to it later?
So now we’ve arrived at Suomi. Oh my gosh. Happy huhtikuu 16 to all of you.
I think maybe I’d better put something on the sidebar that explains what’s going on here?
The Saudi government pays money for this?
Every so often, I get an email from someone called “halah@qorvis.com”. Since I vaguely remember that these are press releases from the Saudi Embassy in DC, I usually delete them just as fast as I delete all the other junk that comes into my in-box.
Today, I decided to open it. It contained just under 600 words of totally useless, non-newsworthy garbage. Interesting only faintly, in its capacity as providing a teeny window into what it is that someone at Qorvis Communications Inc., the p.r. agency hired by the Saudi Embassy, thinks it is that people might want to be hearing from the Saudis these days.
I reproduce the email in its entirety (and lightly annotated by yours truly) below.
So after opening the email I decided to refresh myself as to what this deal is that the Qorvis Corporation has with the Saudis. There’s a lot of interesting information out there on the topic.
Including this, from the WaPo last December, which says:
- The FBI searched three offices of the PR firm Qorvis Communications and delivered subpoenas to a fourth office. Officials confirmed the raids but refused further comment, saying there was an “ongoing investigation.” Saudi Arabia is a major Qorvis client; the firm called the investigation a “compliance inquiry” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Justice Department found that “the Saudi Arabian Embassy paid Qorvis $14.6 million for a six-month period,” for such services as distributing material highlighting Saudi Arabia’s “commitment in the war against terrorism and to peace in the Middle East.”
$14.6 million? That’s, um, around $2.43 million a month…
A part of me feels really sorry for the Saudis. They’re shelling out $2.43 million a month to this “Qorvis Communications”, and they get rubbish like this in response? (See text of press release, below.)
It reminds me of those extremely unfortunate American Indian tribes, newly very rich with casino profits, who have recently been taken majorly for a ride by various Washington DC shysters. Except that the Saudis are not “newly” rich… They’ve had plenty of time to realize they need to protect themselves from the Gucci-loafered shysters of Washington’s K Street.
Look, let’s lay aside morality for one small moment, and look at this question purely on technical grounds. Do you know who was the best foreign “operator” in the past quarter-century in Washington DC, in the city’s own sleazy terms of influence-peddling, schmoozing, and generally getting ahead?
No question but that it was the late Nizar Hamdoun, who through the 1980s was Iraq’s Ambassador to Washington and had the somewhat unenviable task of trying to “sell” Iraq to a generally very hostile crowd there.
Hamdoun, an extremely canny and fairly charming person, knew how to take a bad case and a big budget and make the budget work for him. He courted everyone, right across the political spectrum, with small dinners, semi-open policy round-tables, and plenty of dosh to throw around. I think he even succeeded in persuading Danny Pipes and Laurie Mylroie to go to Baghdad for a “high-level briefing”, after which those two came back to DC to advocate for an audacious new pipeline scheme that Saddam was trying to organize.
(The pipeline would have gone down to Aqaba, Jordan, but crucially it was thought to require a guarantee from the Israelis that they wouldn’t bomb it before the investors would shell out the money… The appropriately named “Pipes” helped the Iraqis to get Israel’s Shimon Peres involved in the scheme. It was 1985. The plan went nowhere– though intriguingly, a very similar plan is now being peddled once again… Of course, shortly after 1985, both Pipes and Mylroie turned against Saddam in a big, big way. That development had something of the psychology of a major love-affair that all went bitterly wrong…)
Anyway, the man who brought it all together in DC for Saddam’s regime in those days was Nizar Hamdoun. And yes, “bringing it all together” certainly also included those visits that Donald Rumsfeld was making to Baghdad at exactly the time that Saddam was busy using chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds…
Hamdoun died of leukemia a few years ago. But not until after many, many of his high-ranking American friends had intervened to try to get him to high-end doctors in New York, etc.
Yes, he was, from a purely technical point of view, an outstandingly “capable” diplomat.
And now, there are the Saudis…
I invite you to enjoy with me the idiocy, the sheer, breathtaking vacuity, and the near-total nullity that characterize the press release that Qoprvis Communications sent me today:
Continue reading “The Saudi government pays money for this?”
US public opinion on Iraq
I’m writing a column for Al-Hayat today. About US politics, attitudes to Iraq (maybe), that kind of thing.
I just found this web-page, from The Polling Report, Inc., which looks fairly useful. It aggregates data from a number of opinion-polling firms on US public attitudes on Iraq-related issues.
I find all the info presented there really interesting– both the results of recent “in-depth” surveys, such as are found toward the bottom of the page, and the time-series data presented at the top.
For example, from the top, here’s the CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, conducted April 1-2, 2005:
- “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?”
Approve: 43%; Disapprove: 54%; Unsure: 3%.
GWB has lost the little “bounce” he got in early February in response to that same question (50% approval).
(And you thought the election in Iraq was about Iraqi politics?? Hah!)
But his approval ratings on Iraq are not yet back down to where they were in May and June last year (41%). That was in the immediate aftermath of both the messy and widespread battles of April 2004 and the revelations about the tortures in Abu Ghraib.
The absolute high-point for Bush’s approval rating regarding his handling of Iraq came– not surprisingly– in April 2003: 76% approval.
Okay, I need to go look at more polls on other issues, too. But that page certainly looked worth bookmarking for future reference.
Raed and friends, doing God’s work
Folks who made a donation to the campaign mounted by the Jarrar family of Baghdad to get urgently needed medical supplies to Iraqis in distress should check out the entries for today on Raed Jarrar’s blog.
Taken together, these blog posts give you both copies of the receipts Raed and his friends got from the drugstore in Amman, Jordan where they bought many or all of the med supplies, and then a photo essay on moving these numerous bulky items through, as Raed says, “my mother’s apartment”.
Each image is posted as a separate post which makes it a little hard to link to the whole sequence. But the whole series is worth looking at and shows some really wonderful young people working together on this project. Just keep on scrolling down…
This trans-shipment was taking place in Amman, a fairly good place from which to get things into Iraq (especially cities west of Baghdad like Fallujah, Ramadi, etc.) Raed’s mom Faiza has been living in Amman for a few weeks now. At the end of the photo-essay you see the group’s four big cars loaded with supplies “leaving for Baghdad”.
I particularly liked the picture titled “my mom was totally shocked when she woke up and found the house FULL of medicens boxes!!” Go, Faiza!
I realize that what Raed and his family and friends have gathered together is only a drop in the bucket of the total needs. But even one drop in the bucket is better than none! And they are showing the way for all concerned individuals and groups.
You can still contribute to these great people’s ongoing campaign through the Paypal button on the sidebar of Raed’s blog.
CSM column on Iraq transition
My column in Thursday’s CSM on the Iraqi transition is now up on their website. I’ve also archived it here.
Here’s the core of what I’m writing:
- Can the hoped-for handover of power [in Iraq] to a permanent elected body take place without further major crises? I believe that two parallel sets of steps – one to be undertaken by the US alone and the other by the US in conjunction with Iraq’s transitional leadership – would help a lot.
In Washington, the Bush administration should issue an authoritative declaration that the US has no claims of its own on Iraq’s territory or natural resources, and no desire to constrain the decisionmaking of a freely elected Iraqi parliament in any way. This would do a huge amount to reduce suspicions and tensions inside Iraq. It would also rightly focus the attentions of all Iraqis on finding a good formula for getting along with one another rather than – as some have done – relying on US power to bolster their own group’s position.
In Baghdad and Washington, meanwhile, policymakers should certainly consider tweaking the terms of the US-designed TAL so that what is drafted and voted on this year would be only an interim constitution, rather than the final thing. At the same time, the two planned end-of-2005 referenda could be consolidated into a single vote – which would be both a general vote of confidence in the interim constitution and the election of a sovereign democratic government based on it. Smaller details of the final constitution could be worked out later, and submitted to a referendum at that time.
Maybe it’s too timid and incrementalist. Maybe I should have been bolder? But what I wanted to make quite clear was that insisting on sticking by the letter of the (unwieldy, US-designed) TAL would probably be a recipe for disaster, and that there are reasonable, constructive alternatives.
Also, I think the point about the US making an authoritative “no lasting claims” declaration is really, really important. Why on earth don’t they just do it?
Oil price spike: who suffers?
- [T]he US appears to have fought a war for oil in the Middle East, and lost it. The consequences of that defeat are now plain for all to see.
Yes, indeed. I was totally gobsmacked when I filled up my mid-sized car yesterday and had to fork over more than $29 for the privilege. The prices seem to be climbing almost by the hour here in central Virginia.
That quote above, btw, above comes from a really excellent letter submitted to the Financial Times by Dr. Ian Rutledge, who describes himself as the author of a recently published book called Addicted to oil. (Memo to self: look for it. And hat-tip to Matt of Today in Iraq for the lead to Rutledge’s letter.)
In the letter, Rutledge argued that one of the Bush administration’s main motives in launching the invasion of Iraq had been to secure control of the Iraqi oil-fields and thus be able to start pumping an extra 2 million barrels of oil a day out of them to feed the world market (as well as, no doubt, the coffers of the US oil companies who’d be doing the pumping.)
But then,
- in the words of another US oil company executive, “it all turned out a lot more complicated than anyone had expected”. Instead of the anticipated post-invasion rapid expansion of Iraqi production… the continuing violence of the insurgency has prevented Iraqi exports from even recovering to pre-invasion levels.
So now, the price-hike.
I’ve been thinking through who suffers most from this. One group that evidently doesn’t suffer are those who, like so many of George W. Bush’s friends, have major investments in the US oil industry. All kinds of previously “marginal” drilling operations are now become daily ever more and more viable. Profits will do very well, thank you.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the “big oil” folks stood to do very well indeed whether Bush’s big gamble in Iraq turned out well, or not? Nah, maybe not “ironic”, at all. More like, the way near-monopoly capitalism always works.
Inside the US, who suffers most, I think, are the rural poor— people who have zero access to public transportation and are absolutely forced to use their cars to pursue even the most basic activities of daily life. Lots of folks, including poor folks, inside US cities don’t have access to public transport either, because of the country’s extremely strong tilt toward automobilocracy.
Globally, though, the effects are far, far worse. Especially for the hundreds of millions of residents of the very poor parts of the world. How on earth can their trucking companies survive? How can their farmers get their goods to market? How can their infant industries survive, with gas prices expected to remain at or above their present levels?
If the people in power in the world truly thought of all of humankind as a single “human family”, then surely this is an issue we’d expect the whole “family” to come together to deal with right now.
Starting by dealing with the miscreant family member who thought he’d go out and smash up an oil-producing country in the Middle East from a mixture of personal motives, from recklessness, and almost as a “lark”.
This same family member, moreover, is one that has been hogging and wilfully wasting this vital global resource for many decades now.
… Well, I’m not going to sit around waiting for the “community of nations” to start calling Uncle Sam to account any day soon. But what everyone really does need to focus on is how to prevent the economic disaster now hitting the “very-low-income world” as a result of spiraling oil prices from causing even more privation, starvation, and human misery in those countries than their people are already suffering.
Ideas, anyone?
US interrogation centers in Iraq till 2009!
Rosa Prince of London Daily Mirror has reported that:
- THE US Army plans to remain in Iraq until at least 2009, secret documents obtained by the Mirror reveal.
Contract tender forms for civilian workers disclose a huge expansion of interrogation and detention centres in Iraq to remain in place for a minimum four more years.
(Chapeau to Friendly Fire of Today in Iraq for the lead.)
Prince adds that:
- According to the documents from the Assistant Chief of Staff, Multi-National Forces, US chiefs plan a
Hizbullah article appears
The article on Hizbullah that I worked on over the Christmas holiday weeks has finally come out. It’s in the April-May issue of Boston Review.
Knowing that the text would look a little outdated by the time it came out, I’d begged the copy editor to put a date at the bottom of the piece, which I think is a very classy way of “signing off”. To no avail. For your information I signed off on that text on March 18th or so.
I also asked ’em to put a reference to JWN in my tag-line (the two-line piece of biographical identifier they use there.) Again, no dice. Oh well, next time.
Anyway, I don’t mean to carp. I always love working with the folks at BR. Josh Cohen, one of the Editors, is a brillant and widely published theoretician of democracy who has also been the chair of the departments of both Politics and Philosophy at MIT. Deb Chasman, the other Editor, is another really great person to work with. Working with super-competent editors is a real joy. (Yes, even when they cut one-third of the my original draft out “for length reasons”…) There aren’t many great editors out there– people who really work with a writer to hone the meaning of the words, the balance of the sentence structure, the flow of the meta-narrative, and the broad thrust of the argument.
Josh Friedman, the Managing Editor, was also good to work with. (Even though he did cut out my footnotes completely. My footnotes! Imagine!)
Well, in case any of you wants to delve into my footnotes, I’m going to upload the last footnoted version I have on my desktop– from February 12. That was two days before Rafiq Hariri was killed, so it underwent a bit of updating between then and March 18th. But if you’re a footnote sleuth as I am, you might enjoy some of these ones. Here it is.
33% of the constitutional timetable gone
Today, the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter stands at 71 days. That is exactly one-third of the 213-day period allowed by Paul Bremer’s “Transitional Administrative Law” for the National Assembly elected January 30th, and the government accountable to it, to work on drafting Iraq’s new Constitution.
And the government hasn’t even been formed yet!
It’s not clear how much longer this might take. Allawi throwing his hat in the ring as a wannabe government member will probably complicate the government-formation negotiations yet further…
I’m working really hard on thinking through a column on this whole topic for my column in this Thursday’s CSM.
To be frank, I feel kind of torn. I think it’s really important to get the Constitution “right”, to have it well negotiated among representative leaders, and I don’t think that process should be rushed by the pressure of externally imposed deadlines. On the other hand, I think it’s really important for the Iraqis to be able to exercise sovereign self-government absolutely as rapidly as possible, and that nothing– least of all any actions undertaken by the US– should stand in the way of that.
I’m getting close toward formulating a proposal that I think can meet both those needs. But I’ll probably be up late tonight…
Mass detentions and ‘democracy’, Iraq
AFP reported yesterday that,
- US and Iraqi forces are holding a record 17,000 men and women — most without being formally charged — and those in Iraqi-controlled jails live often in deplorable conditions.
About two-thirds are locked up as “security detainees” without any formal charges in US-run facilities, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Rudisill, the US military spokesman for Iraqi detention operations, told AFP.
The rest are incarcerated in Iraqi-run jails in conditions that fall well below any international standard and are in dire need of reform, said Bakhtiar Amin, Iraq’s outgoing human rights minister.
(By the way, we shouldn’t assume from the first para above that those being held by the US forces are being held in acceptable conditions…)
The report quotes Amin as saying that, “There are currently 6,504 inmates in Iraq’s 18 prisons, 2,573 of whom have already been sentenced,” and explaining that that number includes both “common criminals” and “terrorists.”
Amin also said that the British troops are detaining 27 people. (An interesting low figure, that; most likely linked to the British forces’ markedly different approach to the whole politics of trying to run the occupation. Also, maybe showing they learned some useful lessons from Northern Ireland? See below.)
My reading of the report is (from Rudesill) that none of those detained by the Americans have actually been convicted of any crime, but are still only suspects. (In international law, that is the most common meaning of the term “detainee”, as opposed to “convict” or “prisoner.)
That means that from the 17,000 people being held by US, UK, and Iraqi forces, only the mentioned 2,573 have been sentenced. That means that 14,400 Iraqis are being forcibly held with trial.
This is absolutely no way to build a democracy.
- Our local paper here in Charlottesville, Virginia, today reported on a conference in town attended by John Alderdice, until recently the speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly and described as a key negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement, which provided the political framework for peace in Northern Ireland. Alderdice was quoted as saying:
