I apologize to readers that I have at least two known stalkers operating on the Comments boards of the blog. These two individuals call themselves Razavipour and E. Bilpe (sometimes also known as “Other”). Raza distinguishes himself by lengthy rants frequently posted in all bold.
I have tried to ban their IPs since they have contravened the blog’s clearly posted guidelines for commenters. But they slide around into different IPs and continue to try to clog up the JWN comments boards with their lengthy, frequently hate-filled, seemingly demented, or ad-feminam/ad-hominem rantings.
I apologize for the nuisance they constitute. My tech advisor, legal advisor, and I will work together to see what our further options are. Any suggestions from bona-fide readers will be welcome.
I shall continue trying to delete these people’s unwanted incursions onto my bandwidth whenever I can. Meantime, please just ignore them.
Estimating numbers in demos
Estimating the numbers of people who take part in big political gatherings is never an exact science, but it’s important to try to get the best “ballpark figure” available.
As far as I can see, almost no-one in the mainstream media did anything to estimate the number of people taking part in Moqtada Sadr’s “big” anti-occupation demonstration in central Baghdad yesterday. I checked many, many news sources for a figure today. All except one stuck with the highly non-specific “ten of thousands” figure.
Okay, guys, so how many ten of thousands? It must have been more than “one”. So what was it– two? three? twenty? fifty?
The only report I found that was more specific than that was this report, from the LA Times’s Edmund Sanders in Baghdad, which said,
- Carrying banners that read “Go Out” and “Leave Our Country,” marchers hit the streets early Saturday, blocking roads and causing traffic jams around the capital. Most of the protesters came from the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, but busloads arrived from Kut, Amarah, Baqubah and other cities. Some estimates put the number of protesters at 300,000.
(Hat-tip to Juan for that link.)
That would make it “thirty” tens of thousands, if you do the math.
I wish, though, that Sanders had been more specific about the nature of the “sources” from which he got those estimates. Were they strongly pro-Sadrist sources? Were they sources close to the US or emerging Iraqi military? I think that matters.
I should imagine the US military were counting the crowd more closely than anyone else. Journos on the spot and in the Pentagon should demand to know what the military’s estimate of the number was. This does matter. It’s an important political fact. And if the US military has counted (or given their best estimate for) the number, that figure should be released as public knowledge, together with a description of their methodology.
Okay, here’s my best attempt and my methodology, doing the job from 7,000 miles away. I looked at these photos of the demonstration, and read various news reports that said that Firdaws Square was full and there were additional people standing on side streets as well. (You can kind of see the square being full from those photos… Unlike on April 9, 2003…) I reckon you couldn’t fill Firdaws Square at that apparent density of people with less than around 80,000 people. So as a very first estimate I’d say it’s very extremely likely that that one demonstration had over 100,000 people in it.
Plus, there were additional demonstrations– apparently smaller– in (at least) Ramadi and Najaf.
As I said, counting crowds an inexact science– especially for me, since I’m so far away and don’t have access to surveillance choppers or drones, such as the US military has there all the time.
Wire service reporters etc there in Baghdad presumably had access to many more photos than the handful I could look at. Plus, perhaps they could have gone to the rally themselves???
I don’t think that’s asking too much of them. Or, as a substitute for that if they were truly scared to, they could have sent some of the Iraqi reporters who, let’s face it, do nearly all the truly valuable reporting and cultural negotiation work there on contract for the western media, and get paid only a tiny proportion of the money that the “big” Western media honchos get.
But no. Nearly all the Baghdad-based reporters seemed to stick with not going to the demonstration, and endlessly parroting the same, highly misleading figure of “tens of thousands” of participants.
Get your boots on the ground, guys. Also, ask the US military for their estimate. Just parroting “ten of thousands” is a truly lousy reporting job.
Moqtada reframes Iraqi politics
With the relative success of the mass rally his people organized in Firdaws Square today, Shiite Muslim firebrand Moqtada Sadr looks set to change the main “frame” within which Iraqi politics has been cast from the frame of sectarian politics to that of a determinedly inter-sectarian nationalist (i.e. anti-occupation) campaign.
Ever since last December or so, the main way in which westerners (and, perhaps, many Iraqis) have been viewing Iraqi politics has been through the lens of sectarian/national-group competition… “Will ‘the Sunnis’ participate in the election or not?”… “Can ‘the Shiites’ make a post-electoral deal with ‘the Kurds’?”… “How can the interests of ‘the Sunnis’ be accommodated in the post-Saddam order?” Etc., etc.
That trend seems to have served the interests of the occupation forces well, keeping as much attention as possible focused on the relative “shares” of power the big three population groups inside Iraq (and the other, smaller groups) could enjoy within the political “system” whose sum-total of powers and authorities the occupation forces have continued to keep tightly limited.
It also served the broader regional interests of the Bush administration. Describing what was happening in Iraq in mainly sectarian terms (the “rise of Shiite power”) allowed Washington to monger huge fears of this trend among many Sunni powers in the region. (Not the least of them, Jordan’s ‘King’ Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s ‘Crown prince’ Abdullah, etc.) The scene seemed about to be set to entrench a region-spanning fissure between Shiite Arabs– including the Lebanese Shia, the Shia communities of eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other GCC countries and also, most likely, the sort-of-Shiite Alawis who monopolize power in Damascus– and the very tired old Sunni powers, including the two just mentioned, the Egyptian regime, and some others.
Just think of the contrast between this sectarian view of the Middle East and the euphoria that swept through most of the Arab countries back in May 2000 when Hizbullah proved itself capable of pushing the Israeli army almost completely out of Lebanon.
Divide and rule, anyone?
(I recall that back on April 23, 2003, the Brookings Institution’s Martin Indyk had openly advocated just such a policy, telling an audience that, “We have to get rid of this naive notion that by turning on the lights and fixing the hospitals we are going to be able to build a moderate, representative government in Iraq. We’re going to have to play the old imperial game of divide and rule and the stakes could not be higher.” It’s true, Martin had been a leading Middle East advisor in the Clinton, not the Bush, administration… So if that was what even the long-time Clintonites were advocating, you can bet that many people in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon were also on the ball with implementing those thoughts right from the very beginning.)
But now, Moqtada seems to be having some success in his attempt to change the subject back to that of ending the occupation…
Catholics and peacemaking
To mark the passing of Pope John Paul II, I want to pay tribute to the work much of the Catholic church did under his leadership in the field of peacemaking.
During Washington’s ever-more-ominous preparations to launch the fateful March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pope spoke out repeatedly against the madness of war. See, e.g., here and here.
That latter link is to the text of an address the Pope made on January 13, 2003 to the diplomatic corps in the Vatican. In it, he said:
- “NO TO WAR”! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between States, the noble exercise of diplomacy: these are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences. I say this as I think of those who still place their trust in nuclear weapons and of the all-too-numerous conflicts which continue to hold hostage our brothers and sisters in humanity. At Christmas, Bethlehem reminded us of the unresolved crisis in the Middle East, where two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, are called to live side-by-side, equally free and sovereign, in mutual respect… And what are we to say of the threat of a war which could strike the people of Iraq, the land of the Prophets, a people already sorely tried by more than twelve years of embargo? War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations. As the Charter of the United Nations Organization and international law itself remind us, war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations.
I believe that John Paul’s firm stance that war “is always a defeat for humanity” was strongly informed by his own personal biography, since in his own younger years his own hmeland was ravaged by foreign armies and the wars between them. He knew whereof he talked.
(Unlike too many people in the United States today, who have no real idea of what war does to a homeland… This is both because the US has not known war in its own homeland since the civil war of the mid-19th century, and because too many Americans seem to lack the moral imagination to even try to think of what it’s like to live–as most Iraqis are nowadays forced to– without public security and with interruptions in vital services that pose a constant threat to public health and to the survival of many of the country’s physically weaker souls.)
Anyway, since I’ve been working all this week on the portion of my current book project that deals with Mozambique, I also wanted to share a little portion of the book that describes the signal role that the Rome-based Catholic lay organization Sant’ Egidio played in shepherding the 1992 General Peace Agreement which brought an end to 15 years of horrendous, extremely atrocious civil war inside that country.
(I have such deep admiration for our friends of Sant’ Egidio! I wish we Quakers were one-tenth as committed and as effective in our peacemaking! Oh well, we can all try to do our best, I guess.)
The following excerpt comes from Chapter 8, “Mozambique from war to peacemaking”:
Israeli and Syrian prezes making nice
So there was Israel’s figurehead president, Moshe Katsav, at the Pope’s funeral in Rome, reaching out to shake hands not only with Iranian President Muhammad Khatemi but also with Syria’s Bashar al-Asad.
(That’s one thing big state funerals are excellent for: throwing unlikely seatmates close to each other.)
The BBC, citing israel radio, reported that,
- Mr Katsav first shook hands with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as the funeral ceremonies began.
The Syrian president was seated one row behind Mr Katsav.
The report said Mr Assad later initiated a second handshake as the funeral ended.
Mr Katsav, who was born in Iran, is also reported to have exchanged words in his native Farsi with the Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami.
Actually, Katsav and Khatemi come from the same hometown, Yazd.
Later, Katsav, who has no executive power but is reported to be widely respected in Israel, told a web-reporter for the Israeli daily Maariv that he had
- urged the country’s leaders to take up a Syrian offer to renew peace talks.
Moshe Katsav rejected Israeli official objections which said Syria’s overture transmitted via UN Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen was insignificant.
“In my opinion it is important and worthwhile to thoroughly check out the intentions of (Syrian President) Assad,” he told the Maariv daily.
Mr Assad said he was willing to resume talks with Israel without conditions.
Well, that’s from the BBC’s renedering of the story.
A return to Israeli-Syrian negotiations? Who knows? The two parties got very close indeed to a final peace agreement back when Rabin and Peres were prime ministers in Israel, in 1994-96. In 1994 Rabin gave the Clinton administration an undertaking called “the pocket” that informed the Americans that actually, deep down, his government was indeed ready to withdraw from all the territory of Syrian Golan that Israel had held under military occupation since the June war of 1967– though in return for a full peace and some fairly severe disarmament conditions that Syria would have to abide by.
Then, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist (November 1995). Then, Peres somewhat seriously misplayed his political hand and lost the election of June 1996. Then, Bibi Netanyahu took “the pocket” off the table. (That much, you can read about in my 2000 book that covered the negotiations from 1991-96.)
Then, in 1999, Mr. Wise-Guy Ehud Barak was elected PM in Israel. However he was just a little too big for his boots, that one, and thought he could pull something off with the older President Asad by sort of pretending to put “the pocket” back on the table, but actually not doing so. (He’d skimmed a vital hundred-meter-wide strip off what he was prepared to “give back” to Syria, running around the northeast segment of the Sea of Galilee/Lake Kinneret. Did he think Hafez al-Asad wouldn’t notice the difference?)
Well, so then Hafez al-Asad keeled over and died. Ehud Barak was such an incompetent pol that he completely lost his ruling coalition in almost record time for Israel and then lost an election to Ariel Sharon…. And there things have stood till now.
I personally don’t expect a big change. But I’d love to be proved wrong.
HC and FT on Hizbullah
I got my paper copy of the April-May issue of Boston review in the middle of the week. It has my big piece on Hizbullah in it. It looks pretty good, except they insisted I take out the footnotes. Waaaah! I love footnotes! A writer can have an entirely different kind of a conversation with the reader if she is allowed to use footnotes… But no. The copy-editor, Josh Friedman, said they “want to look more like the Atlantic Monthly“, or something.
Oh well. Even worse news is that they haven’t put my piece up on the website yet. I thought maybe when they do, I’ll upload my footnoted version here, and y’all can choose which one you want to read.
Meanwhile, however, Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times has snagged an intriguing interview with Hizbullah #2 Sheikh Naim Qassim, in which he suggests that Hizbullah could find a formula for its militia to coordinate even more closely with, or become a “reserve wing” of, the Lebanese Army– but not until after Israel pulls its forces out of the Shebaa Farms district, a tiny and almost unpopulated portion of land that both Lebanon and Syria say is Lebanese, but Israel and the UN say is Syrian.
Khalaf writes:
- Mr Qassim confirmed that one potential alternative would be for Hizbollah fighters to become a kind of
Iraq: PM named but no government yet
Jalal Talabani was sworn in as Iraq’s President just now, and he then immediately (or, not quite immediately enough) named Ibrahim al-Jaafari as Prime Minister.
According to the TAL, this is what now happens (that link goes to an AP summary, not the original TAL):
- The prime minister has one month to recommend his Council of Ministers, or Cabinet, to the President’s Council. The prime minister and President’s Council will then seek a vote of confidence by simple majority from the National Assembly before starting their work as a government. If the prime minister does not nominate the ministers within one month, the President’s Council names a new prime minister.
We are still therefore some distance from having a government that is answerable to the National Assembly elected January 30 in place, and exercising executive power in Iraq.
The “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter will continue.
Who knows whether Jaafari and Talabani will be able to agree on a government list rapidly, slowly, or indeed at all?
Meantime, the Bremer-appointed Allawi continues to “run” things. (I.e., control the patronage machine, rake in the dough, and try to keep his hangers-on in and his enemies out of sensitive and/or lucrative positions.)
It looks as though– under the TAL– Jaafari still needs to go through Talabani to get his list to the Assembly. Will Talabani be helpful or obstructive in this process? Let’s hope the former.
But it wasn’t a good omen that he “forget” to even mention the naming of Jaafari until after most of the assembled t.v. cameras had stopped rolling.
A Beiruti recalls the Pope
There’s a lovely piece in Thursday’s Daily Star (Beirut) by Adnan El-Ghoul, titled John Paul II’s legacy to Lebanon. I’m pretty certain Ghoul is a Sunni Muslim, which makes the piece all the more meaningful.
In it, he recalls the visit the Pope made to Lebanon in 1997:
- When the pope came to Lebanon the political and religious situation at the time posed distinct challenges in the wake of Lebanon’s bloody 15 year civil war. Among them, the status of the Lebanese government, largely dominated by Syria and set in place by the Taif Accord in 1989. He was also faced with the task of convincing extremists of both Christian and Muslim faiths to embark on a permanent dialogue with one another and to persuade young Christians not leave their homeland at a time when they were exiting in large numbers.
… Eight years later, the number of Syrian troops has dropped from 40,000 to less than 8,000 and they are scheduled to leave by the end of this month. Israel pulled its troops out of South Lebanon and western Bekaa Valley in May 2000; at least according to the United Nations.
… So what difference did the pontiff’s trip make to Lebanon? Did we have a Poland moment, where his visit glavanised his fellow countrymen to throw off the shackes of communism?
We didn’t have the drama of a Polish moment, but in my view the papal visit did make a difference to this country. I would assert he actually helped establish a new political climate that paved the way for the current political uprising. He came here and said openly that Lebanon and the Lebanese needed to embrace change.
…[S]ince the papal visit many realities changed in accordance with the pope’s wishes and guidance. He called for greater dialogue between this country’s myriad of religions. In his document “A New Hope for Lebanon,” he outlined the need for coexistance and for all Lebanese to look toward Lebanon for their future, calling all Lebanese to “open with confidence a new page in their history.”
In this respect the visit laid the foundation for dialogue that helped trans-sectarian alliances and cooperation in this country which in turn has reaped rewards for Lebanon’s political opposition. His plea for reconciliation was most plainly seen in the visit by Sfeir to the Chouf Mountains to meet with Walid Jumblatt for the first time since the civil war. That visit can arguably seen as the first seeds in the flowering of the broad based united Lebanese opposition that the country currently has.
Ghoul also recalled fondly the Pope’s 2001 visit to Damascus when:
- Tens of thousands of Muslims and Christians attended the Mass celebrated by the pope in Damascus soccer stadium.
The pope told the stadium crowd, speaking in French, “In this holy land, Christians, Muslims and Jews are called to work together with confidence and boldness and to work to bring about without delay the day when the legal rights of all peoples are respected and they can live in peace and mutual understanding.”
Following in the steps of St. Paul, the pope’s visit to Syria took him to a landscape rich in Christian history. Syria’s 17 million people include two million Christians, and the pope’s presence there highlighted the rich mix of cultures and history of Syria.
Pope John Paul traveled in what he called the Millennium Journey as a pilgrim to the Umayyad Mosque. He was the first pope to enter a mosque, stepping into a historic shrine alongside Muslim leaders.
By visiting Umayyad Mosque, in the heart of the Old City of Damascus, the pope made a point on how Christianity and the preceding Roman Empire, were deeply rooted in the Middle East.
The Umayyad Mosque has been a place of worship for more than 3,000 years…
And finally, this:
- Back in Beirut, the images of his 1997 visit which have been reshown on television following his death are a reminder that Beirut had not witnessed million-people marches since that time until the current crisis this year.
One million people of all sects and religious beliefs attended the Sunday Mass the pope celebrated in Downtown Beirut close to Martyrs’ Square. I was one of them. Less than eight years later one million people of all sects again filled Martyrs’ Square to show their support to a united political opposition calling for Syrian withdrawal and political freedom.
What is John Paul’s final legacy to Lebanon? I think we are seeing it: dialogue, tolerance, political freedom. As I write we seem to be on the verge of a return to sectarian rigidity and political bickering which looks set to threaten the principles outlined by the pope when he visited our small country.
The “Apostolic Guidance,” which was published after his trip here would come in handy as a blueprint for containing the current political crisis before it develops into a communal conflict. It is worth reading now more than ever.
Blessed indeed be the peacemakers.
Iraq: over one hump
So finally today, 66 days after the January 30 election, the members of the National Assembly elected that day were able to reach agreement on an interim President, veteran PUK leader Jalal Talabani, and two Vice-President, slippery Shiite pol Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Sunni stuffed shirt (okay, stuffed jallabiya) Ghazi Yawar.
This article by Ed Wong on the NYT website today gives some interesting details about the Assembly session, including this:
- new problems erupted at the assembly meeting, as many Shiite members called for the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to be dissolved as soon as Mr. Talabani and his deputies were sworn in. Shiite officials have been particularly critical of Mr. Allawi’s rule, saying he has brought back into the government former senior members of the Baath Party who played key roles in oppressing ordinary Iraqis, especially Shiites and Kurds. The debate today foreshadowed what many people see as a potentially harsh purging of former Baathists from the government once the new rulers are installed.
Wong reports that interim human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin had insisted that Saddam Hussein and his imprisoned cronies be “forced” to watch a televised version of the proceedings inside their jail cells over near Baghdad airport:
- “I thought it was a very sensible idea for Saddam and his aides to watch with their own eyes Jalal Talabani, who had been excluded from all amnesties issued by Saddam, being elected today as president,” Mr. Amin said.
Wong also hinted strongly that Yawar (who had previously been named by Paul Bremer as one of the two key deputies to Iyad Allawi) might not be the best person through whom the new Transitional Government leadership could reach out to the Sunni Arabs… On the other hand, the “evidence” he adduces for that comes from disappointed candidate Adnan Pachachi, so it’s not clear how much value to give to his view.
The appointment of the three-person Presidential Council was a major “hump” in the road to government formation, since it required the Bremer-imposed two-thirds super-majority. That hump has now been passed. The Prez Council will now, I think, present its nominations for the prime minister and other ministers to the Assembly, where only a simple majority is required for passage.
That may happen as early as Thursday.
But will Iraq then get a Transitional Government that is both domestically legitimate and empowered (by the occupying force) to start ruling the country? That is really the question.
Until that happens, I think I’ll keep the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter going.
By the way, in that AP/Yahoo story I linked to above, there’s a fascinating little quote from Talabani that I consider to be a hopeful sign:
- Speaking after his election, Talabani … made a gesture toward those who side with the insurgency.
“As for the Iraqis who are carrying weapons out of patriotic and anti-occupation motives, those people are our brothers and it is possible to talk with them and to reach a solution,” Talabani said.
He added that his government would work to provide security so that U.S.-led coalition forces “could return home after the completion of building (Iraqi) armed forces that are capable of finishing off terrorism.”
In other words, Talabani is declaring that those “insurgents” (a completely anti-political term that US spinmeisters have tried to apply to militants from a range of different political orientations) whose motivations are “patriotic and anti-occupation”– as opposed to being anti-Shiite or anti-Kurd– are people whom he is ready to work with.
It’s great that, in rhetoric and also possibly in reality, Talabani is not presenting himself merely as a patsy for the occupation forces.
Also, that he seems to be aiming for, or prepared to accept, a complete withdrawal of US forces.
So the intra-Iraqi politics of this are getting interesting.
Iraq open thread, #1
I’m afraid I have been too busy with other things to write much about Iraq recently. From one point of view, though, the ever-rising number on JWN’s “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter says it all…
65 today!
So now, 30.5% of the total time allocated to reaching agreement on a permanent Constitution has already passed.
I strongly believe it is important that the Iraqi parties get this permanent Constitution “right”– that is, to make sure it is one that the vast majority of Iraqi citizens feel comfortable with, going forward for– say– the next three generations. Crafting this Constitution should not necessarily be rushed to fit a Bremer-dictated deadline. I’m just hoping that a lot of the intra-Iraqi discussions and contacts that are going on now are about this extremely important topic.
But in the meantime there are many, extremely pressing issues of governance of the country that need to be attended to, and this should preferably happen at the hands of an empowered and legitimate Iraqi administration. That is the function that the yet-to-be-named “Transitional Government” is supposed to serve.
But if the convoluted and anti-democratic strictures of Bremer’s TAL should continue to prevent the Iraqi parties from forming this administration, then who the heck is is in charge?
Under international law, it is still the occupying military that’s in charge… Right through to the time of the conclusion of a final peace agreement between a legitimate Iraqi successor government and the governments of the occupying armies.
But with the “privilege” of running Iraq as a “foreign occupying power” comes an enormous amount of responsibility, too: responsibility for the wellbeing of all residents of the occupied territory (hah!) and responsibility to operate completely within the bounds of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rest of the provisions of International Humanitarian Law that govern the conduct of “belligerent military occupations”…
So far, the US/UK occupiers have contravened IHL in numerous ways in their conduct of the occupation… Not least by seeking already through the TAL and through the CPA’s many “Orders” and “Regulations”, which still remain in force, to completely change the juridical and governance underpinnings of the country’s administration in many, very serious ways. IHL completely forbids that.
Once there is an empowered and more-or-less legitimate (from the Iraqi citizenry’s viewpoint) Transitional Government, the TAL says it should stick by all those earlier Bremer-dictated laws and regulations. But what standing does any of the TAL have under international law? As far as I can see, very little indeed.
Anyway, I hadn’t meant to write much here. Mainly, I’ll leave an open thread here for y’all to put links and discussion into.