Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 300 – Info, analysis, discussion

A new day

I’ve been struggling with the Comments boards here on JWN for some time now. Yesterday, I felt I learned something new about what’s been going on.
As someone who works hard to put my own thoughts into words on the main post, I have tended to feel a rather strong sense of attachment to the result and so to act excessively defensively when people jump in with comments that criticize it. And thus, by firing off my own defensively-motivated ripostes, I have actually been contributing to the “problem” I’ve been sensing, and struggling to define, on the Comments boards for some time now: namely, that some of the discussion there has developed a snarky, combative tone…
Which is not how I want the discussions on the Comments boards here to be, at all.
Acting defensively is never a good place to act from. Over the years I’ve come to see the great value of the Buddhist practice of “non-attachment to the fruits of one’s labors.” Basically what this teaches is that you do the very best you can on any particular particular project; and once it’s done you let go of it.
(This teaching is particularly useful in parenting, I can tell you.)
So I started to think that the best way for me, and us all, not to get trapped in the problem of comment-board snarkiness is for me to do two things:

I thank commenters Dutchmarbel and Dave for replying to the request I voiced earlier for links to similar sets of guidelines produced by other bloggers. It really is awesome to be able to network the energy and creativity of others in cyberspace so that each of us here doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time!
As it turned out, it was the guidelines that Dave pointed me to that spoke most strongly to me as providing a good starting point for what I wanted to do. Dave’s suggestion sent me to a blog called– I kid you not– “Real Live Preacher”; and I ended up really enjoying not just the post where the RLP laid out his hopes for his Comments boards and then set some gentle ground-rules for them, but also kicking around other areas of his blog as well.
It also got me to thinking that clearly, what I need to do on this blog is try to be a “Real Live Quaker”. Well, I’m not entirely sure what-all that might entail. But I can tell you one thing it would rule out, and that would be me making snarky, combative comments on my own Comments boards here.
So firstly, I’d like to apologize to everyone to whom I made snarky or combative comments yesterday, or on previous posts. I take responsibility for, and am very sorry about, any hurt that I caused.
Secondly, I’d like to announce my intention that today we all of us start a new day on JWN. From here on forward, I get to post my posts (or perhaps, as I’ve done here before, texts from specially invited “guest posters”); and then afterwards we all try to abide by a single set of ground-rules that, I hope, will lead to a more courteous, friendly, and productive atmosphere there on the Comments boards.
And thirdly, I want to be quite clear that I strongly do not want the promulgation of these ground-rules to discourage anyone at all from posting their comments, including comments that express views very different from or critical of my own. On the contrary, I hope that general observance of these rules will lead to discussions on the boards that are less prickly and inhospitable, more generative of fresh and productive insights, and thus altogether more welcoming to potential participants than what we have sometimes seen previously.
I invite you all to join me in ushering in this new day here on JWN.
I invite you all– and especially anyone who’s planning to post a comment on any of the Comments boards here– to take a couple of minutes to read the new guidelines. And then, when you’ve done so, to join me in trying in trying to honor them.
I’ve thought pretty hard about these points over the past week or so. But I’m sure that many of you readers also have thoughts on this issue that could make what I’m trying to do here more effective.
If you do, or if you have thoughts on “discourse guidelines” in general, please post those comments here!

Voting under the gun

It strikes me as a bizarre perversion of the ideals of democracy that people should be expected to cast votes– and then to concur in the legitimacy of the leadership thus “chosen”– if these election campaigns and the subsequent elections have been held in a situation of gross public insecurity.
But that is what the US and Israel are trying to sell as “democratization” these days.
In Iraq, back in late October, it was evident there were major political issues to be resolved between on the one hand the Sunni Arab minority in the country, and on the other the Shiite Arab majority, the Kurds, the Interim Government, and the Americans.
Many parties were pursuing negotiations of these issues at different levels. But the Americans and their Allawist allies simply walked away from those negotiations. They were adamant that they wanted to “solve” the Sunni issue by force… “in time to restore calm before the Jan. 30th elections”.
Well, we’ve seen that they haven’t “solved” anything. Their disastrous decision to “clean out” Fallujah has led only to highly increased levels of public insecurity throughout huge swathes of the country.
But still, Bush’s spokesman tells us that the President remains adamant the elections will go ahead on time. This, despite the proliferation of reports that various figures in the interim government itself are floating the idea of a postponement…
You SHALL vote on the day ve tell you to! (How is that not gross foreign intervention in the country’s internal affairs?)
(Go see what Riverbend wrote about the elections, last Sunday. She’s heard you can sell a voter’s card there for $400 already.)
But back to my main theme.
One of the major “meta-ideas” of democratic theory is that in a democratic community it is always possible to find ways to talk through differences and arrive at compromises between competing interests… How on earth did anyone think that the escalatory tactics the US military has pursued in particular since last October provided any kind of a “preparation” for democracy at all?
And then, there’s Israel, another internally (though like the US, also problematically) democratic country that’s running a heavyhanded military occupation in foreign territory… And over there, too, the indigenous people in the country under occupation have an election coming up…

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“The supreme international crime”

Excerpt from the Judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal relating to “Count Two”, the Crime of Aggression, as brought against Goering, Ribbentrop, and 14 other defendants:
The charges in the Indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world.
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Nicholas J. S. Davies, a Contributing Writer over at Online Journal posted a generally well-argued piece there on December 31, in which he reviewed the history in international jurisprudence of the crime of initiating an aggressive war, and concluded that the US and British governments were guilty of such a crime in initiating the war against Iraq.
(Indeed, though Davies doesn’t go specifically into this, the precedent of Nuremberg would also indicate that the relevant officers in these governments who made the decision to go to war, and those who prepared and planned for it, should be held personally responsible for the catastrophic consequences of those decisions.)
Davies starts off by explaining that, “war crimes fall into two classes: 1) war crimes relevant to battlefield conduct; and 2) waging a war of aggression.” Strictly speaking, I think he has the nomenclature a little fuzzy there. “War crimes” as a term nowadays nearly always refers to crimes that are “grave breaches” of either the Geneva or Hague Conventions– i.e., jus in bello crimes, or “crimes that are committed within the context of a broader war.”
The big jus ad bellum crime, by contrast, is the crime of waging an unjustified war in the first place— regardless of whether or not specific and smaller-order “war crimes” are committed within it. From that point of view, the portion of the Nuremberg judgment cited above is extremely important: the “crime of aggression” as it is sometimes called, or alternatively, a “crime against the peace”, truly is,

the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

As I noted in this June 2004 JWN post,

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1998 “Letter to an Israeli mother”

I just found the text of the “Letter to an Israeli Mother” that I originally published in the Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat at the end of July 1998. I referred to it in this post that I put up here yesterday.
The “Israeli mother” in question was one of the leaders of the Four Mothers movement, that in the three-year period 1997-2000 succeeded in bringing about a “virtually complete” Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
After Hayat published the Letter, I got a call from Ha’Aretz in Israel, who asked if they could publish it as well. Which they did, on August 14, 1998. That turned out rather strangely, since a substantial portion of the Letter was quoting from an earlier report in Ha’aretz… My intent in using those lengthy quotes had been to bring that interesting material to the attention of the Arab readers of Hayat. But I imagine the Ha’Aretz readers already knew it!
In 1998, Bibi Netanyahu was prime minister in Israel. At one level it all seems such a long time ago…

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Women getting WaPo-ed

Okay, readers, so what proportion of the wisdom of the human race do you think resides in the minds of the world’s women?
Fifty percent, perhaps? That might be a pretty good first guess.
How about this: 9.2 percent? That, sadly, is the proportion of women’s contributions to the Washington Post‘s Op-Ed pages over the past 14 days.
I started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch on December 21. In the two weeks since then, the once venerable “main” newspaper in the capital of the new global empire has published 65 signed Op-Ed pieces. Just five of those pieces had female authors. A further two pieces, each of them co-authored, were co-signed by a man and a woman: for those I assigned “0.5” as the proportion authored by a woman.
So, we have a total of 6 female authorial units out of 65: that is, 9.2 percent. Had we merely counted the names of all the authors, we’d have had 7 women’s names there out of a total of 67: 10.5 percent.
So there we have the range. Presumably the editor of the WaPo’s Op-Ed page, Fred Hiatt, thinks that somewhere between 9.2 percent and 10.5 percent of the world’s wisdom resides in the minds of women?
Shame!!!
I have to tell you a couple more things, too…

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Hizbullah: the discussion resumes

Okay. Commenter Dominic, who appealed my decision to close the Comments board on the recent Lebanon’s Hizbullah post, wins. (At least, I think “appealing” was what you were doing, Dominic?)
I’ve now reopened that post to Comments. So feel free to go there and do that, anyone.
I really do value (nearly all of) the discussions people have on the Comments boards here, and think that most of them add a lot to the blog’s value. But with that particular discussion, I just had a strong sense it was getting repetitive. I have an incipient short-term memory problem, so when I see there are new Comments on a post I generally have to scroll quickly all thru the preceding Comments to catch up with what has been going on. That discussion started to feel like a burden to me, what with the repetitiveness and then a slightly snarky reference to myself at the end.
One thing I promised to myself– to help control my ever-threatening blog addiction– is that “The moment doing the blog isn’t fun, just stop.” It felt like not fun there for a while.
Meanwhile, I’m sure you’re all wondering how my mammoth task of writing a long article about Hizbullah has been going…

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The power of mothers!!!!

I made a quick reference in a recent post here to the Israeli “Four Mothers” peace movement. This movement, founded by four mothers of Israeli soldiers serving in the IDF’s occupation force in neighboring Lebanon, succeeded, in the years right after its founding in early 1997, in pushing the issue of a speedy Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, unilaterally if need be to the very top of the national agenda.
Two years later, in the Israeli general election of 1999, Ehud Barak adopted the idea of this withdrawal as one of his key election promises. He won the election handily. In May 2000, the IDF did finally withdraw from all (or very nearly all) of Lebanon, as promised. Many of those parts of Lebanon they had been in for 22 years by then.
That withdrawal was unilateral– i.e., no negotiating its modalities with any other party. despite that, Israel’s northern border with Lebanon has experienced an unprecedented level of stability ever since, to the delight of the people living both north and south of it.
To find out more about the 4Ms, check out the links on this portal, and then explore the whole of that site a little more. The 4Ms disbanded after the withdrawal.
Today, I read this piece in the NYT. It’s G.I. families united in grief, but split by war, by Monica Davey. She’s writing mainly about the moms but also about the other close family members of some of the 1,300 US service members killed in Iraq so far.
Davey writes that while all the moms have been thrown into deep grief by their losses, some of them have remained as strong believers in the essential rectitude of the conflict that killed their menfolk, while others have been driven by their bereavement into a much deeper questioning of the whole war effort. She writes in a very fair-minded way, representing the views of mothers on each side of this divide.
Here is one of them:

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Basic services in Iraq: a proposal

I’m crashing on the deadline to write my increasingly lengthy Hizbullah piece for Boston Review. (Celebrated ‘New Years Eve’ at c. 11 p.m. last night. Go figure.)
So today, I was writing about Hizbullah’s impressive work in the provision of basic public services. Since the party was actually born in mid-1980s in the turmoil of a blisteringly destructive war situation, I immediately thought: Hey, why didn’t the Bush administration turn to these experienced pros to do the reconstruction/rebuilding job in Najaf, Sadr City, etc, instead of the US Army and Halliburton??
Okay, silly question, I know. But still, the contrast between H’s record in Lebanon and that of the US reconstruction effort in Iraq is certainly informative.
Here’s a fragment from what I’ve been writing:

AUB professor Judith Palmer Harik has studied the party [Hizbullah] for many years now. She notes that in the chaotic, civil-war-ridden circumstances in which Hizbullah was born, its ability to provide basic social services in an effective manner– and to provide them to all the residents in its areas of operation, not just to its followers– won it considerable loyalty and respect. She writes that after Hizbullah took over effective control of the south-Beirut Dahiyeh [suburbs] in 1988, it almost immediately started providing a reliable trash-removal service there, and that it was a further five years before the corruption-plagued central government sent any garbage trucks into the Dahiyah at all. Moreover, writing in 2003, she noted that though the government’s trash-removal efforts there still continued on a notably spotty basis, “Hezbollah still trucks out some 300 tons of garbage a day from the dahiyeh and treats it with insecticides to supplement the government’s service.”

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New year, new possibilities

Great news from President Bush, who has decided to increase tenfold, to $350 million, the amount of aid his administration will be giving to survivors of the Indian ocean tsunami.
We probably shouldn’t let up in our efforts to persuade the Prez to re-order his priorities towards global neighborliness and away from the waging of war (principally); but away the staging of extravagant parties, as well.
But still, it’s important to recognize that the guy has now made a dramatic change in his approach. Thank you, President Bush.
So, what other welcome changes of heart and of policy might we expect in the year ahead? Here are some of my dreams:

That the Palestinian elections of January 9 go off well, and that inside both the Israeli and Palestinian communities the desire for a realistic but generous peace starts to mount, unstoppably.

“Four Mothers” peace movement

That the Iraqi elections of January 30 go off “sufficiently” peaceably, and “sufficiently” fairly

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Relief, not parties!

The Red Cross is now saying that more than 100,000 of our fellow humans may have died already in the Indian Ocean tsunami. In the days ahead many more scores– perhaps hundreds– of thousands may die unless vital water-purification, medical, and other urgent relief supplies can reach them.
In the months and years ahead entire communities along those damaged coastlines may be wiped out unless solid, long-term reconstruction efforts can be organized.
President Bush has thus far pledged just $35 million of US funds to help meet these needs.
That compares with the more than $250 million per day that his administration is spending on waging a destructive quagmire of a war in Iraq.
Or, with the $30 million to $40 million that AP estimates his January 19 inauguration party will cost.
We could start creating our own little “tsunami” of protest at these outrageous priorities. My friend Jean Newsom– whose spouse, David, was formerly the US Ambassador to Indonesia– suggests that Bush’s inaugural festivities could be canceled and the sums saved sent immediately to help the relief effort.
I invite you to join me in calling the White House– +1-202-456-1414– and voicing this excellent suggestion to the comment-takers there. While you’re about it you might also urge the President to call for a humanitarian ceasefire in all the conflicts in Asia— and yes, that includes Iraq– so the world community can focus on the massive logistical, relief, and rebuilding challenges around the Indian Ocean.
If you’re a US citizen, you can also urge these policies on your representives in the U.S. Congress. If you don’t know how to contact them, go to this webpage, punch in your zipcode, and get all the info there.
If you want to make a useful donation to the relief effort– from the US or anywhere else– or want more info about it, go to this great site, which has truly multinational info, available in a number of languages…

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