What, the White House reads JWN?

In yesterday’s post about Lebanon, remember, I wrote:

    I think Shalom and the Israeli government in general made a really stupid mis-step when they decided openly to throw their hat into the Lebanese political arena over the weekend.

In Wednesday’s HaAretz, Akiva Eldar has this:

    The United States has asked Israel to stop making statements about the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. Washington believes these comments undermine American interests in the area by serving the interests of extremists in Arab countries who oppose the reforms that President George W. Bush wants to bring to Syria and other Arab nations.
    U.S. Ambassador Dan Kurtzer delivered the message to the Foreign Ministry after Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom turned an Israeli demand for the withdrawal of all Syrian forces from Lebanon into the centerpiece of his latest visit to the United States, making it the main subject of all his public addresses.
    … The message from Washington criticizes leaks to the press about contacts between Lebanese opposition figures and Uri Lubrani, the government’s special adviser on Lebanon, over the opening of a communications channel between Israel and its northern neighbor.
    The Americans are also displeased with reports that Israel is demanding that the United States and Europe not reduce their pressure for a complete withdrawal of both Syrian forces and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. A Western diplomatic source said, “You don’t have to be a political genius to understand that public pressure from Israel for steps to be taken against Syria on the Lebanon issue could boomerang, since it would turn the U.S. and Europe, in Arab eyes, into puppets of Israel.”

Oh yes, the Keystone cops “do” Lebanon once again, indeed. Including the ever silly, ever ill-informed, ever dangerous Uri Lubrani, it seems.
And in other news in HaAretz, it seems the Israeli general staff and “security” circles I referred to yesterday (well, I quoted Ze’ev Schiff referring to yesterday), haven’t completely lain down after their apparent “defeat” in terms of policy advice re Lebanon, at the hands of the Foreign Ministry…
Amos Harel writes:

    Israeli security officials are concerned that a Syrian pullback of forces in Lebanon to the Bekaa could spur Hezbollah to renew violence on the Israeli-Lebanese border, outgoing Israel Defense Forces chief Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon said Tuesday.
    The Syrians may want to “bring about an increase in the terror threat” on their way out of Lebanon, Ya’alon told reporters in Tel Aviv.

I guess Shalom is having his knuckles rapped in Washington a little right now, so it’s probably a good time for his domestic opponents on this issue to try to regain some ground from under his absent feet.

Whose “cedar” revolution now?

I sit here in the US. For the past week or so, I’ve been bombarded with all these ill-informed, shallow, self-referential “analyses” from people in the mainstream media here who two months ago couldn’t tell a Jumblatt from a Janjawid who’ve been frantically telling me that because of the “flowering” of (a certain kind of) democracy in Lebanon, then probably the US invasion of Iraq wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
(Okay, Walid Jumblatt himself fed into that kind of delusional fantasy a little bit with some of his utterances.)
You read David Brooks telling us to “Give Wolfowitz his due”; you read Fareed Zakariya; you read Jim Hoagland, crowing about how the Middle East ” has recently been jolted by a surge of positive political change (in a piece where, amazingly, he also confesses that he’s just been acting as Tony Blair’s shill for these past years)… And you read that great political thinker George W. Bush himself, today– “Today I have a message for the people of Lebanon: All the world is witnessing your great movement of conscience. Lebanon’s future belongs in your hands…” — Well you sit there and you listen in amazement to all this totally choreographed and totally phantasmagoric nonsense.
Nonsense on stilts, in the words of one of my gurus, Jeremy Bentham.
So today, something over half a million pro-Hizbullah Lebanese took to the streets to exercise their democratic rights. (I hope you read what I posted here yesterday.)
I have to admit, I found something fairly delicious in the fact that, even as Prez Bush was spouting off with those immortal words quoted above, half a million Lebanese (from a national population of some 3.5 million, remember) were indeed taking part in a “movement of conscience “, and in the process, according to every journalistic report I’ve read so far, completely dwarfing the movement mounted by the US-stoked anti-Syrian forces over the past two weeks.
One thing I learned, from my work on the upcoming Boston Review piece on Hizbullah is that Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the party’s 44-year-old secretary-general, is one heck of a wily political organizer. I go into his political biography a little in the BosRev piece. By my calculation, he was just 15 years old in 1976, when he became the party organizer in his home village of al-Bazouriyeh, near Tyre, for Imam Musa Sadr’s then-new Shiite political movement, Amal. After that, he was rapidly groomed by the network of Shiite mullahs that spans between south Lebanon and the Hawzas (seminaries) of Najaf and Qom, to become an exemplary Shiite organizer and leader.
Anyway, read the piece when it comes out in 2-3 weeks: it’s got some interesting little vignettes about him. It’s also got quite a lot about the incredible political organizing job the Hizbullah leaders as a group have done in the 20 years of the party’s existence.
In their work in organizing today’s demonstration, it was not just the numbers– pulled together, remember, within less than 48 hours. It was not just the incredible timing of having their demonstration happen the very same day as Bush’s totally asinine speech quoted above. It was also the clever political positioning that Nasrallah himself had insisted upon: the exclusive use of the Lebanese national flag, with the deliberate decision not to show any hint of Hizbullah’s trademark yellow colorings; the minute of silence for Hariri; the singing of the national anthem (which every schoolchild in Lebanon knows by heart, from daily airings of it.) Oh yes, indeed, whose “cedar” revolution now?
And of course, as noted yesterday, the party leaders’ insistence on discipline and nonviolence.
Who knows where all this lead? I’m looking at the story at at least two levels: the Lebanese national level, and then the US-influence-in-the world level.
For the Lebanese, I’m am just totally delighted that so far they have been able to pursue their disagreements this time round through peaceful political means. Long may that continue to continue.
As for George W, I shall mainly sit and watch how he deals with this new challenge to his triumphalist self-narrative. Today, his spokesflack, Scott McClellan, sputtered that,

    We always welcome peaceful demonstrations, and we welcome peaceful demonstrations by the Lebanese people.

Well, what else can he say?
But really, over the weeks ahead, will the Prez start backing off from some of his “empowering the people” rhetoric–seeing as where it is going to lead, in practically every single Arab country? Or will he carry on mouthing it even if–as is most likely to happen– it leads to the growing empowerment of a distinctly anti-American “people’s voice”?
Watch this space.

Language and JWN

It was my youngest, Lorna Quandt, calling home from college a couple of weeks ago. “Hey, Mom, did you know that the dates on your blog are coming up in, um, Spanish or something?”
“Well, ye-es. They’ve been like that for about a month now. But it’s not Spanish, it’s Portuguese. Don’t you like it? I thought it would give the blog a suitably international flavor.”
“H’mmm. Okay. Whatever.”
As you can see, the experiment was a resounding success.
(Actually, along the way there, a journo from Brazil called to interview me about Lebanon. I said, hey, you can take any quotes you want off my blog and use them. He, at least, was suitably impressed when I told him about my adventure in calendar-based multi-culturalism.)
So today I looked through the rather interesting list of language options that the MT software offers under “Language for date display”. I couldn’t make up my mind. When I’d chosen Portuguese I was trying to get my mind back into writing about Mozambique. This time, I just wanted a change.
Well, heck, maybe I’ll just click one further down in the list, I concluded after staring at the list for a while. Then, over time, I’ll have gotten through the whole list.
So, I started six weeks ago with Portuguese. Today I clicked one down from there and am happy to bring you– dates in Slovak!

Israel and Hizbullah: face-off in Lebanon

The Lebanon story continues rapidly to evolve. On Sunday morning, Israeli FM Silvan Shalom, on his way to Washington, told reporters that his government will be working hard to push for an immediate and complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the “neutralization” of Hizbullah. In another report that I read yesterday, that I can’t now find, Shalom was described as having also said that once Syria is out of Lebanon it should be easy enough for Lebanon to make peace with Israel.
Shalom– like many people in the west– seemed to have gotten carried away by all the large and stirring images the western media have been carrying of the anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut this past couple of weeks… And he seems to have failed to notice that these demonstrators were notably not either (1) making any mention of the disarming or demobilization of Hizbullah, or (2) calling for peace with Israel.
Like many people in the west, Shalom seems not to have noticed, either, that on February 19, stuck right in the middle of a period of anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut that attracted, at an absolute maximum, some 50,000 participants, Hizbullah held its annual Ashoura Day observance in the southern suburbs… carrying large pictures of Hariri along with pics of favorite ayatollahs… and they attracted some hundreds of thousands of participants to that.
Since the western media, and the members of the western-oriented political elite in general chose not to make any mention of that large gathering in Beirut’s Dahiyeh (the extensive southern suburbs where elected Hizbullah municipal councils have now been in charge for quite some years)… Hizbullah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah yesterday decided it was time for Hizbullah to exit the suburbs and make its presence peacefully but massively felt in the heart of downtown Beirut.
I hate to say this to my friends in the Lebanese-leftist part of the anti-Syrian movement, but the political dynamics of what’s been happening have had some of the aspects of the street-demonstration contests last year over Hugo Chavez’s role in Venezuela… There in Caracas, a largely middle-class movement of anti-Chavezistas presented itself as a new “people power” movement and received wide and generally extremely sympathetic coverage in the western media, plus lots of support from the US government and US quasi-governmental “foundations”, etc… It took a while for Chavez’s more numerous and much more economically hard-pressed supporters to come out on the streets in their own counter-demonstrations.
Then, as I recall, once Chavez’s position there had been submitted to a nationwide referendum, its popular legitimacy was re-confirmed and the thin-ness of the “respresentivity” claimed by the western-backed “people power” leaders was revealed for all to see.
Hizbullah is a lot better organized than Hugo Chavez’s people. Plus, it can draw on a huge, continuing reservoir of goodwill from people in nearly all the communities inside Lebanon except for those in a portion of the decidedly-minority Christian community who hate and fear most brands of Islam. (I should note that this portion does not include the Patriarch of the Maronite church, or many of the Maronite political figures.)
How many times do outsiders need to hear this message: being anti-Syrian in Lebanon today is not the same as being anti-Hizbullah or being pro-Israel.
So I think Shalom and the Israeli government in general made a really stupid mis-step when they decided openly to throw their hat into the Lebanese political arena over the weekend.
That decision apparently came as a result of a significant debate within the Israeli political leadership. According to the ever-excellently-connected Ze’ev Schiff, writing on Friday in Ha’Aretz the two positions argued there were these:

Continue reading “Israel and Hizbullah: face-off in Lebanon”

Sistani: Nobel Peace Laureate?

A group of Iraqi exiles in the US has nominated Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s a brilliant nomination. I’ve written on this blog a number of times (1, 2, 3) about Sistani’s intentional use of the techniques of organized mass nonviolence.
Most crucially, last August, he succeeded in completely defusing the lethal confrontations between the US occupation forces and the Sadrists in Najaf and Kerbala– purely by organizing a massive, peaceful march of supporters to those cities… The Americans (more or less) held their fire… The Sadrist fighters melted into the large Shiite crowds… and the battle was ended with almost no further loss of life.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announces its awards annually, in around September (before formally awarding them on Dec. 10.) When I was writing this 2000 book on the Nobel peace prize winners, and the prize as an institution, I got to discuss the general criteria the Committee uses when it makes its awards, briefly, with Geir Lundestad, the Secretary to the Committee. From what he said and from the record of the prizes they’ve awarded, I would describe their recent and current criteria as these:

    (1) Past record and performance of the individual or institution concerned,
    (2) A desire to encourage and strengthen existing political/diplomatic processes that tend in a strongly pro-peace direction by making awards even where the “past record”– as in number 1– has not yet been the solid achievement of peace. (Q.v., the awards to Arafat, Rabin, and Peres in 1994).
    (3) A commitment to do serious outside-the-box reframing and rethinking about the nature of peace and the identity and characteristics of “prize-worthy” people– e.g. by making sure that more non-whitefolks, more women, more grassroots leaders, and more people working on issues like human rights, the environment etc, rather than just the same-old same-old “diplomatists and statesmen” get the prize.

I would say on all three of these criteria, Sistani is a very serious candidate indeed.
I understand, of course, that the Committee is not open at all to lobbying. (Heaven forbid!)
It is really interesting to note, in addition, that the AP story linked to above made clear that the mainly-exiled Iraqis who presented the 7,000-signature petition to the Nobel Committee were Chaldean Christians. That’s right– Christians.
Excellent!

Rwanda and prosecutorialism

So I did largely succeed in getting done, over this past week, what I needed to do on my violence-in-Africa book. Namely, I “uploaded” back into the relevant portions of my brain the three chapters about post-genocide Rwanda that I first-drafted back in July.
(Next, the same for the three chapters on South Africa, and the two chapters on Mozambique. Then, use all that uploaded material as the basis for my concluding reflections on the post-atrocity policies in these three countries. Rather than, which I tried to do six weeks ago, writing the conclusion of the book almost out of thin intellectual-Helena air… I just feel much, much more comfortable as a thinker and writer when I keep close to my empirically-based material. Besides, one of the intentions of the book is to give voice to extraordinarily experienced and wise people in these three countries whose voices almost never get heart in the rich countries that dominate the self-styled “international community”.)
Anyway, Rwanda. What a multiply tragic place. I’ve been following Rwanda’s post-genocide “story” fairly closely since October 2000, and undertook a really productive research visit to the country in 2002, followed by another to the UN’s massive gravy train, oops sorry, the “International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda”, in Tanzania, the following year.
Most of my colleagues in the human-rights movement in the west went almost gaga with delight over the creation of the ICTR and its slightly older sister-court for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, back in the early-mid-1990s. But actually the political-social effects of both courts, within the territories they were supposed to “serve”, have been either quite disastrous (ICTR) or somewhere between quite irrelevant and moderately negative (ICTY), and nobody much in either the UN or the west-dominated “human-rights movement” seems to have given a damn.
But meanwhile many international lawyers and their staffs have been able to make out like bandits, so that must be good news, mustn’t it?
I have never for a moment doubted the good intentions of the human rights activists and others who urged the creation of these courts… I mean, “ending impunity”, “establishing accountability”, and all those other fine things are good in their own rights, aren’t they?
Oh, plus, certainly in Rwanda’s case, there were all these enormous great mushroom clouds of sheer human guilt wafting around– as in, why the heck didn’t the UN do more to actually stop the 1994 genocide?, or, more to the point, why did the Clinton administration actually work hard at the UN in 1994 to dismantle the existing UN force in Rwanda, despite its hard-won and indisputable record in saving the lives of threatened Tutsis?…. Yes, plenty of raw unprocessed guilt to go around.
And so we, instead of deploying peacekeepers we had the unseemly sight of the deployment of UN prosecutors to Rwanda. Here’s what the “righteous Hutu” genocide survivor Andre Sibomana, who saved hundreds of threatened Tutsi and Hutu lives in 1994, had to say about ICTR:

Continue reading “Rwanda and prosecutorialism”

Political uncertainty, Iraq

“They shoot hostage-rescuers, don’t they?” is not the only news story in Iraq these days. (Though I must admit it’s a pretty darn’ shocking one.)
But check out Zaineb Naji’s latest piece for IWPR from Baghdad, as well. It’s titled Political uncertainty continues. It’s a succinct and professional summary of the situation.
Of course she also mentions the crucial future deadlines against which the current prolongation of political uncertainty needs to be measured:

    Under the country’s interim law, the constitution must be drafted by August 15, in order to go to a public referendum in October.
    The law does allow for a six-month extension, but that would delay a general election scheduled for December, and the timetable for the eventual withdrawal of Coalition troops from Iraq. [emphasis by HC]

Well, surprise, surprise.
Too bad that last year, when “wunderkind” and Presidential Medal of Freedom (or whatever) winner Jerry Bremer was cobbling together his extremely long-drawn-out and complex scheme for the transition, he made this business of actually forming the transitional government based on January’s nationwide elections so cumbersome, eh?
Even worse that the UN apparently let him get away with it.
And so, Iraq carries on with no legitimately constituted government. How long before Sistani calls people out into the streets to protest the continuing obstructionism, I wonder? (And also, perhaps, the accuracy of the ballot-counting process itself, about which allegations continue to swirl and about which his people are certainly well informed…)

A word from Canada

Heck, maybe I’ll have to move to Canada after all. I can’t think of a single former US government minister with the wit, the wisdom, and the sheer perspicacity that Lloyd Axworthy displayed in this carefully crafted letter to Condi Rice.
The background is the general pique in Canada over (1) the Bushies’ extremely wacky and destabilizing decision to go ahead and deploy a wildly unreliable system of so-called “missile defense” that certainly impacts majorly on the security status of our northern neighbors, and (2) our Prez’s incredibly rude decisision to announce this fait accompli in public, in Canada, without having even thought to consult with Canada’s very friendly government first…
Axworthy, alert JWN readers probably recall, was the canny Canuck who spearheaded the coalition of small and medium-size states that made the Anti-Landmine Treaty a reality back in the mid-1990s. (Yes, yet another international treaty to which Washington refused to become a party.)
But I guess I hadn’t realized before that Axworthy also has a really stupendous rhetorical style… Maybe it has something to do with having practiced his politics in the cut-and-thrust of a parliamentary system, as opposed to the blow-dried-but-boring culture of, say, an imperial presidency…
Well, the whole of his open letter to “Dear Condi”, published yesterday in the Winnipeg Free Press is a really good read. But here’s a slightly shortened version:

    Dear Condi,
    I’m glad you’ve decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It’s a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.
    I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.
    But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can’t quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.
    As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we’ve had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we’re going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.
    Sure, that doesn’t match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a “liberation war” in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.
    Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government’s role should be when there isn’t a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.
    Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such as missile defence can be made openly.
    You might also notice that it’s a system in which the governing party’s caucus members are not afraid to tell their leader that their constituents don’t want to follow the ideological, perhaps teleological, fantasies of Canada’s continental co-inhabitant. And that this leader actually listens to such representations.
    Your boss did not avail himself of a similar opportunity to visit our House of Commons during his visit, fearing, it seems, that there might be some signs of dissent. He preferred to issue his diktat on missile defence in front of a highly controlled, pre-selected audience.
    Such control-freak antics may work in the virtual one-party state that now prevails in Washington. But in Canada we have a residual belief that politicians should be subject to a few checks and balances, an idea that your country once espoused before the days of empire.
    If you want to have us consider your proposals and positions, present them in a proper way, through serious discussion across the table in our cabinet room, as your previous president did when he visited Ottawa. And don’t embarrass our prime minister by lobbing a verbal missile at him while he sits on a public stage, with no chance to respond…

Continue reading “A word from Canada”