Hamas agrees to truce

Khaled Mashaal, the top leader of Hamas, has now told al-Hayat that Hamas “is prepared to suspend attacks if Israel stops targeting militants and agrees to release thousands of Palestinian prisoners,” according to this story by AP’s Lara Sukhtian.
I’ll be heading over to the Hayat website to get the text of that interview. (In a couple of hours I leave for New York, so I hope I can read the interview on the plane.)
Sukhtian writes:

    Mashaal said Hamas, which has called for Israel to be replaced by an Islamic state, would agree to stop attacks if Israel ends “aggression, invasion, assassination, killings” and agrees to release all Palestinian prisoners.
    “If the enemy abides by these conditions, we, in Hamas, and other resistance forces in general, are ready to deal positively with the issue of pacification or temporary truce,” Mashaal told the London-based newspaper, which did not say when or where the interview was conducted.

I saw a story on Reuters late last night conveying in general that the truce negotiations with Abu Mazen had succeeded.
As I understand it, Hamas is agreeing to a ceasefire of limited duration, which quite understyandably they expect Israel to join. If that does not happen, evidently the ceasefire becomes null and void.
Sukhtian notes:

    A senior Hamas leader in the West Bank has said the group has agreed to suspend attacks for 30 days to test Israel’s response.
    In summer 2003, Hamas had agreed to a truce that fell apart after less than two months.
    Israel has refused to guarantee it would not pursue militants, but has said it will respond to calm with calm.

The general calming seems already to be happening. But the truce period will be a testing time for all parties.
Firstly, it challenges Sharon to truly back down from continuing to use violence, assassinations, etc., to impose his own version of “pacification” on the 3.5 million Palestinians of the occupied territories.
Secondly it tests the Bush administration to really help in moving Israel towards things Israel should have done a long time ago. Some short-term (but very important) things like releasing all the thousands of Palestinian detainees who are being held with no “probable cause” for their detention at all, and helping open up the Palestinian economy. But also, serious longterm moves like speeding up the total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and moving immediately to serious (and long, long overdue) negotiations on all final-status issues.
Thirdly, it tests Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the other Palestinian militant groups to see if they truly can control their own, often hotheaded supporters and get them to go along with the truce. If they can, that will immensely strengthen their political position as a potential part of the Palestinian ruling coalition.
Fourthly and finally, it tests Abu Mazen– both his intention and his capability. Personally, though, I think he’s already passed all the many, many tests to which he’s been subjected. He has the intention to make peace. But it’s all the other parties– particularly the Israelis and Americans– which will determine whether he ends up with both the phsyical and the political capability of doing so.
Of course, the way the Americans and Israelis like to tell it, all this is really only a “test” of Abu Mazen.
But remember, back in summer of 2003, he passed an exactly similar test very successfully. The Israelis and Americans certainly didn’t do what they should have back then.
Will they, this time? Let’s hope…

Women getting WaPo-ed, update

Week 5 of the WGW watch has just finished. It was a “banner” week. 5.5 of the 34 op-ed articles published in the WaPo since last Tuesday were by women, for a one-week score of 16.5%.
How pathetic is that, if when 16.5% of the discourse in a certain place is contributed by women, we say that that constitutes a “banner” achievement?
At the end of Week 4 of the WGW watch, the cumulative score was 12 pieces out of 129, equals 9.3%. After this week’s “banner” record, the cumulative score is 17.5 out of 163, equals 10.7%.
Woo-hoo! So on a cumulative basis, women now get to contribute a shade over ten percent!
I should note that where I’ve encountered uncertainty– this week a “Robin” someone and a “Pat” someone, neither of whom yielded easily to a Google search that might reveal their gender– I have erred on the side of “giving the benefit of the doubt”, i.e. I counted those two as female.
(The fractional numbers, remember, come from co-authored pieces.)
This past week, in addition, two particularly significant things happned…

Continue reading “Women getting WaPo-ed, update”

Professional “idealists” meeting reality

I’ve written a bit here before now (November 2003, January 2004) about the totally unproductive way in which North Carolina’s Research Triangle Institute (RTI) approached the task of “building democracy” in Iraq– based on its people’s own faulty pre-war forecasts of the situation, some genuine (but extremely naive) idealism on the part of some employees, and the RTI leadership’s keen desire to put their institute on the map and assure the continued payment of their own very comfortable salaries…
Now, North Carolina reporter Kevin Begos has done a good job reporting the total chaos into which the whole project collapsed. Including that:

    RTI didn’t start a single rapid-response grant in the second year of its $236 million government contract for democracy building in post-war Iraq.

Many of the problems stemmed from the rampant lack of security inside Iraq– necessitating the purchase of $200,000 armored Mercedes cars for staff members, etc.
Begos quotes Wallace Rodgers, RTI’s former team leader for the northern region of Iraq, as saying that:

    he was working in the most stable region of RTI’s work, yet by the time he left Iraq in October 2004, five of the Iraqi local governing-council members he had worked with had been assassinated.

But there were also, it seems clear, some very serious mismanagement problems. Begos also writes:

    “There was all kinds of fraud I was coming across. It was rampant all over,” said Dennis Moore, a certified public accountant from Massachusetts who while he was in Iraq reviewed scores of contracts for RTI.
    “Of all the transactions I would go and check on, only one was free of problems,” Moore said.

This Begos piece went up on the Winston-Salem Journal‘s website today. Thanks to Yankeedoodle for signaling it.
The site also had a companion piece from Begos in which a former founder of RTI and the dean of NC’s congressional delegation both decried the secrecy surrounding RTI’s performance under its democracy-building contract with the federal government.
In that one, Begos wrote:

    All financial information about RTI’s government contract was withheld by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, after a recent Freedom of Information request by the Winston-Salem Journal. The government agency said that the information was “sensitive and confidential commercial and financial information.” RTI officials also have declined the Journal’s requests to reveal salaries paid under the contract.

By the way, down near the bottom of the second piece is this interesting snippet about the Congressman concerned, Rep. Howard Coble (R):

    Earlier this month, Coble, a staunch supporter of President Bush and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, created a stir by saying that “troop withdrawal ought to be an option (from Iraq). It ought to be placed on the table for consideration.”

The bottom of the piece also reveals that public documents,

    show that Victoria Haynes, RTI’s chief executive officer, was paid a base salary of $367,500 in fiscal year 2003, not including benefits. Ron Johnson, the company’s senior vice president for international development and head of the Iraq project, was paid $262,156.

These documents also reported that theformer founder of RTI who decried the secrecy, William Friday, was paid $500 for attendance at board of governors meetings.

Rumsfeld’s “brave new world”

Time was, the leaders of the USA believed in a version of the “rule of law” at the international level– that is, that every state should have equal rights and privileges; that no one state should be egregiously more “equal” than others; and that one set of mutually agreed regulations governed them all.
Time was, the most powerful members of the US political elite believed deeply in a set of “checks and balances” at the domestic level that would prevent any one branch of government from growing too strong.
Yes, those were the days.
… And now, welcome to the “brave new world” of Donald Rumsfeld, where the Pentagon feels free to send “special operations teams” with their own “interrogators” and “intelligence analysts” roaming freely throughout the world, constrained neither by any respect for international law nor by the scrutiny and oversight of any other portion of the US government.
It was a scary enough picture when Sy Hersh started sketching it out for us in his articles over the past couple of years in The New Yorker. It suddenly seemed even more scary than ever to me this morning, when I read this article by Bart Gellman, in today’s WaPo
The piece is titled Secret unit expands Rumsfeld’s Domain. It starts like this:

    The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA’s historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
    The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld’s written order to end his “near total dependence on CIA” for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary’s direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.
    Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years — in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on “emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia.” Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.
    The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the “full spectrum of humint operations,” according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include “notorious figures” whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.

“Emerging target countries.” Now, there’s a scary concept…
Gellman makes quite clear that the new “humint” branch was set up to do jobs previously done only by the CIA. It will work alongside the various military “special operations forces” over which Rumsfeld’s Pentagon now has control, having wrestled them away from control by the CIA. In both these areas, this means that the kinds of oversight that Congress won over the CIA back in the 1970s– in response to disclosures of various CIA dirty tricks around the world– will not be a[pplied to the Pentagon-controlled forces.

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Juan Cole’s defense

So this morning, Juan Cole replied to my post of Thursday, in which I challenged the grounds he’d adduced for arguing against the announcement of a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
His first counter-argument was this:

    She can’t understand why I think things could get worse if the US withdrew precipitously. I can’t understand why it would be hard to understand. The Baathists would begin by killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, then Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then Ibrahim Jaafari, and so on down the list of the new political class. Then they would make a coup. Once they had control of Iraq’s revenues, they could buy tanks and helicopter gunships in the world weapons bazaar and deploy them again against the Shiites. They might not be able to hang on very long, but it is doubtful if the country would survive all this intact. The Badr Corps could not stop this scenario, or it would have stopped all the assassinations lately of Shiite notables in the South, including two of Sistani’s aides.

I guess the unspoken premise there was that he thinks it is solely the US military presence in Iraq that is preventing this dreadful scenario from taking place? Juan adduces no evidence whatsoever for such a proposition. Appropriately, because I don’t believe there is any.
But if that proposition isn’t true, then Juan’s argument that the US military presence has helped and is necessary in order to continue to help to preserve the security of these Shiite leaders has no basis at all.
He is, however, willing to admit that,

    The failures of the Fallujah campaign made it amply clear that the US armed forces are unlikely to make headway against the guerrilla insurgency, and in the meantime are just making hundreds of thousands of Iraqis more angry.

Yes, indeed. So it’s hard to see how the US presence is actually contributing to the sense of security of the majority Shiite population in the country. Indeed, in recent days, tragically, we’ve seen yet more truly heinous attacks launched against Shiites in and near their places of worship… Including one in which the assailants had packed an ambulance with explosives.
I honestly don’t believe that any Shiite community leaders inside Iraq feel that the Americans’ presence there gives them any sense of security at all. (Except perhaps Iyad Allawai… But it’s probably stretching it too much to call him a “Shiite community leader”.)
Juan also writes, conveying somewhat of a sense of being privy to important insider information:

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Riverbend on water and civil/social collapse

Go read Riverbend’s latest post to understand what war and civic instability end up meaning for real people and families.
Her reflections on how ghastly it is for people in heavily urbanized communities to live without piped water ring home very true for me. On several occasions when I was living, working, and trying to manage a household with young children in it during the civil war in Lebanon in the late 1970s, the city water supply would be cut off. Usually, because the electricity supply was cut so the city’s water pumps weren’t pumping.
Luckily, our big building of some 50 apartments did have a well in it. When the electricity was cut and our seventh-floor apartment’s roof-level water-tanks had run dry we’d have to take jerry-cans down to the (minus-2) level of the basement; fill them; then haul them up to our home’s level… For every single drop that we used.
Think about it, all you people who live in places with generally uninterrupted water supply.
Want to wash your hands? Cook pasta? Flush the toilet? Wash some plates and cups?
Think about it VERY HARD. Because each one of those drops of water has to be hauled up 9 flights of stairs.
Don’t even think about showering or washing clothes. A quick wipe with a washcloth round the underarms and other stinky body parts might be possible; or rinsing out some item of clothing that’s absolutely necessary to wear. But all those drops of water should definitely be recycled once or twice more within the apartment before you let them go. (Last stop for all pre-used, “grey” water: flushing out the toilets.)
It seems that in Riverbend’s home they don’t have access to a well. But people there with the wherewithal can buy bottled water. So roughly similar limits on total usage would apply. (And then, what about the huge number of people without the cash to buy bottled water on the “open market”?)
What I learned in Lebanon was that, for urbanized people living through a civil war, it’s “relatively” easy to find go-arounds to deal with a lack of electricity.. You can find gas lanterns, kerosene heaters, camping stoves, burn charcoal, etc. (Oops, maybe no kerosene in Iraq today.)
But water? That’s absolutely impossible to do without; and a severe shortage of water affects your quality of life far more than a similarly severe shortage of electricity.
Riverbend’s conclusion rings quite true for me:

    We’ve given up on democracy, security and even electricity. Just bring back the water.

I should add, of course, that the degraded hygiene conditions brought about by denied access to clean water also, in many cases, leads to the otherwise quite avoidable deaths of infants and other vulnerable individuals from disease.
That’s right: in addition to making you feel absolutely miserable, a lack of access to water kills people.
And Allawi’s hoping to “win” this election?? I don’t think so.

Willing no more!

One essential tenet of “news management”, US government-style, is that the administration tries to release news that makes it look bad fairly late on a Friday evening…
So tonight, this, from Reuters:

    The White House has scrapped its list of Iraq allies known as the 45-member “coalition of the willing,” which Washington used to back its argument that the 2003 invasion was a multilateral action, an official said on Friday.
    The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the White House replaced the coalition list with a smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq sometime after the June transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.
    The official could not say when or why the administration did away with the list of the coalition of the willing.
    The coalition, unveiled on the eve of the invasion, consisted of 30 countries that publicly offered support for the United States and another 15 that did not want to be named as part of the group.
    Former coalition member Costa Rica withdrew last September under pressure from voters who opposed the government’s decision to back the invasion.
    On Friday, an organization from Iceland published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times calling for its country’s withdrawal from the coalition and offering apologies for its support for U.S. policy.

I guess at one level I’m surprised that anyone even thought there still was a “coalition of the willing” any more– or rather, that the concept still had enough credibility that anyone cared about it at all.
But this new “smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq” doesn’t seem to have a name yet.
Any suggestions?

Haaretz looking at Palestine

Ha’Aretz has two interesting articles today on the Palestinian situation. One is an assessment of Abu Mazen’s situation, written by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. Rob worked on Palestinian-Israeli issues in the Clinton White House and Hussein has been a longtime advisor to the Palestinian leadership. They are both astute and experienced; but of course like everyone else they look at things almost exclusively from their own point of view.
I’ll come back to their article later. First, though, I want to mention this piece, by Arnon Regular, that gives what I judge to be an unrealisticially “optimistic” gloss to the Hamas position paper I wrote about here, a couple of days ago.
Somewhat breathlessly, Regular reports that,

    Hamas has distributed a document … in which the organization, for the first time in its existence, unequivocally recognizes the 1967 borders …

Not so fast there!
What the document in question actually expresses, in Article I-6, is this:

    Commitment to the goal of dislodging the occupation, and the establishment of an independent, fully soveriegn Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.

“Dislodging the occupation” is notably not the same thing as “recognizing the 1967 borders”, for two reasons:
Firstly, the meaning of the term “occupation” is not spelled out there. There are plenty of Palestinians who believe that Israel’s entire presence inside its pre-1967 borders constitutes an “occupation”, just as much as its presence in the West Bank and Gaza. (Plus, under international law, certain significant chunks of pre-1967 Israel were not allocated to the Jewish state in the 1947 Partition Plan and are therefore not unequivocally regarded as “Israel’s”.)
For the Hamas leaders to use the term “occupation”, without specifying “occupation of 1967”, leaves the extent of the occupation that they seek to dislodge still ambiguous.
Secondly, regardless of the extent of the “occupation” they seek to dislodge, they are notably not saying that that is the end of their demands. What they say still leaves open the possibility of them having a “two-stage” approach…
I think it’s important to clarify these points. The Hamas document is significant, both for its existence as a first, publicly available clear statement of their current position and proposals, and for a number of points of its actual content. Including (but not limited to) Article I-6. What they say in Art. I-6 certainly leaves open the possibility of them settling for a two-state outcome. And that is new and significant.
But what it does not do, at this point, is commit Hamas to accepting the existence of Israel within its pre-1967 borders, or indeed, any stated borders at all.
I think it’s very important not to over-interpret the advances this document represents. To do so would be to lead to disappointment and accusations of betrayal of trust when, sometime down the pike, Hamas leaders might well say, “Oh no, we never agreed to the existence of Israel inside the 1967 borders.”
It’s also important to read their statement as near as one can to the way they wrote it. These are people for whom the power and impact of every single word is very carefully chosen. One cannot understand them well or deal with them effectively if one does not read what they are saying.
Having said all of which, what they did say was still extremely significant.
And now, to the Agha-Malley article:

Continue reading “Haaretz looking at Palestine”

Inauguration Day, USA

Today, George W. Bush was (re-)inaugurated as US President, having won the election by 58 million votes to 55 million, last November.
I did not travel to Washington DC to join the celebrations.
Nor, however, did I go to join the protest demostrations that were held there. I was busy here, helping my friend with her new baby (still cute as a button!) and trying to catch up on numerous things.
In the afternoon I went, as usual on a Thursday, to join our weekly anti-war demonstration here in Charlottesville, Virginia. There have been times when I’ve been 50% of the entire demonstration– or even, for up to 20 minutes at a time, 100%. But no matter. It’s still important to do it.
Anyway, today, there were eight or nine of us. And the drivers passing our corner there were very feisty. In response to my “Honk for Peace” sign, I got a lot of prolonged honk-honk-honks there. But also, more yells or gestures of clear disapproval than I’ve ever had before. Let’s say, maybe four or five disapprovers this week, as against certainly 200-300 honks or waves of support.
Later, I went to a special “inauguration day event” that the C’ville Center for Peace and Justice had organized…

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An announced deadline for a US withdrawal: pro or con?

Once again today, Juan Cole is agonizing over the “pros and cons”– for, I assume, the Iraqis?– of the US setting a firm deadline for the withdrawal of their forces from Iraq.
(Sorry I can’t give a link as he doesn’t seem to have one. Oh, now I can. Here it is.)
I think it’s very important to challenge the points he puts in his “con” column. It’s equally important, in addition to merely fixing a “target date” for a withdrawal, to spell out the kind and speed of withdrawal we’re talking about. I strongly believe that what is needed is one that is total, speedily executed, orderly, and as “generous” to the Iraqis as possible.
But first, back to Juan’s points. Basically, he adduces three arguments against setting a withdrawal deadline that he seems to find very plausible. In fact, he finds them so plausible that he ends up advocating a withdrawal that is considerably less than “total”.
Namely, he writes,

    One solution … might be to set a timetable for withdrawal of Coalition land forces, but for the US and its allies to continue to offer the new Iraqi government’s army close air support in any battles with the neo-Baathists and jihadis…

Considerably short of a “total” withdrawal, indeed.
He does not, of course, even get into the thorny questions of who would actually command those air assets. What if the US should make such an “offer” of close air support–or perhaps, air operations much more ‘untethered’ than close air support– in a future Fallujah- or Mosul-type situation… and the Iraqi “government” should dare to turn down that very generous “offer”?
Would the Iraqi PM’s office be the US bombers’ next target?
But first, let’s back up a little and re-examine some of Juan’s arguments against setting a fixed withdrawal deadline. As I said, they are three:

Continue reading “An announced deadline for a US withdrawal: pro or con?”