Fear (and a glimmer of hope) in Iraq?

Monday’s attack against the Baghdad headquarters of the (Shiite) Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which killed 13 SCIRI members,
was only the latest in a long string of acts of extremely deadly, specifically
anti-Shiite, violence in Iraq which seem intended to try to stir up a desire
for Shiite revenge against the Sunnis and thus to a total breakdown of trust
between members of the two groups.

So far, that plan seems not to have completely succeeded. For example,
on Monday, Al-Hayat reported that the (Sunni) Association of Muslim
Scholars was holding meetings with some of the Shiite members of Ayatollah
Sistani’s big “Unified Iraqi Alliance” electoral list.

In that
report, the AMS was also said to be offering to urge its followers to
participate in the voting– provided a firm deadline could be established
for the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq…

This latter condition is, it seems to me, unlikely to be met by the Americans
any time prior to the January 30 polls. However, it is quite possible
that the Shiites in the UIA list with whom the AMS has been talking might
be ready to promise the AMS that, after winning, they will certainly stress
the need for an early timetable for American withdrawal.

I was very interested to read that report in Monday’s Hayat, and wonder
why it didn’t get picked up anywhere else. [I’ll put my translation
of the relevant excerpt further down in this post.] Many others did,
of course, pick up the the report that the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party affiliated
with Adnan Pachachi had decided to pull out of the elections.

But to me, the report about the AMS signals that there is still some possibility
for Shiite-Sunni coordination in Iraq, despite all the many efforts that
have been made to stir up tensions between the two groups.

Continue reading “Fear (and a glimmer of hope) in Iraq?”

Tragedy in Asia

Such terrifying pictures and information coming out regarding yesterday’s Indian Ocean tsunami. They remind me of the urgency of us all starting to think and act like a single world community. The BBC has been reporting– so far– some 23,000 people known to have been killed. But the numbers are certainly rising.
So many people killed; their families bereaved. So many more badly injured. So many more again left homeless or otherwise vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease. So many hundreds of thousands of families’ and communities’ lives ruptured forever.
Human beings have incredible resilience. But if we were all, truly, a single human family, wouldn’t the leaders of the rich countries all now set aside their pursuit of marginal advantage here or there and say, “Yes! This where we can all pull together to make a difference!”
Instead of which, the Bush administration has announced it will contribute just $15 million worth of aid to the relief effort. A tragically small amount. And this, just a week after it marked the approach of Christmas by saying it would anyway be cutting back on huge amounts of emergency aid previously earmarked for the world’s poorest nations…
All this, while it continues to spend more than $250 million each day on waging the war in Iraq.
It’s obscene.
Why can’t the world’s leaders call an Asia-wide ceasefire– a ceasefire of all the conflicts now going on in the Asia-Pacific region, including those in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere? Let’s call in the UN to regulate and resolve all those conflicts; and concentrate meanwhile on delivering all the longterm development aid that the storm-hit communities will need over the next five years.
I think that’s what a true “family” would do, don’t you?

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Quakers, simplicity, and Christmas

I belong to the “unprogramed” strand of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which means that when we come together to worship we do so very simply indeed. We have a square, undecorated worship space that every Sunday is opened up twice for people who want to come to pray or meditate together for an hour while we wait for the leadings of the Spirit of Love. Nothing “programed” or pre-planned happens during that hour at all. Sometimes, we’ll sit there for the full hour and no-one will feel led to speak. Sometimes, several people will speak.
In my early experiences of this way of worshiping I found it rather strange, since I’d grown up in the Anglican church. What, no music? No stained glass? No incense? No liturgy? No priest? No ‘communion’? Just– us?
Then, I really started to love unprogramed Quaker worship– for its simplicity, its inclusiveness, its surprises and riches, and its continual, experienced affirmation of the ability of every person to dig deep and discover the workings of love inside themselves.
One part of the way we worship and are organized is that we don’t have any priests, or– as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism in England in the 17th century, called them– “hireling ministers”. Nor do we have churches (“steeple houses”). This helps us to live out the Quaker testimony of simplicity. We don’t have to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the upkeep of grandiose palaces of worship or the salaries of church officials. We are a network of worship communities (“meetings”), each of which governs itself through a monthly “Meeting for worship with a concern for business.”
Another part of the way we worship is that we don’t stick to–or indeed, have any need for– a liturgical calendar. Not for us the massive Christmas-related extravaganzas that many Christian churches here and elsewhere organize. Our Quaker meeting here in Charlottesville, Virginia does have a tradition of having someone open our meeting house for worship twice on Christmas Eve– once at 7:30 p.m., and once at 11 p.m.– and inviting anyone who wants to join a special , one-hour-long meeting for worship at those times to do so. In what some of us think is a slightly un-Quakerly, possibly even liturgical, gesture, participants traditionally each take a candle to the worship; and the candles are placed together in a group on the floor in the middle of the bare, square meeting space…

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Palestinian municipal elections

AP’s Ali Daraghmeh is reporting that Hamas did pretty well in the small-scale municipal elections held in the occupied Palestinian territories yesterday. Indeed, Hamas did better than I’d expected in those elections, which were held in just 26 of the OPT’s more than 600 local jurisdictions.
Those elections were an important “test” of the good faith– in the run-up to the January 9 OPT-wide “presidential” race– of all the parties concerned: not only Fateh and Hamas, but also, crucially, the Israelis. Indeed, can the Palestinians or anyone else have trust in the January 9 vote if it is held while Israel still holds unchallenged control over all major aspects of the security situation within the OPTs?
The jury is still definitely out on that, given Israel’s arrests of numerous candidates in the municipals and the steps it’s already taken to obstruct free campaigning in the presidential race.
Daraghmeh writes that, according to early results he’d seen, Hamas won nine of yesterday’s 26 contests, and Fateh 14, with two of the races won by a joint Hamas-Fateh list and one– Ya’bed– still unreported. (He notes that in some cases interpreting the results requires a lot of local knowledge.)
For their part, Hamas claimed to have won 17 of the contests, so evidently both the major parties were claiming victory in some places.
Why was I surprised?

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A gift to JWN readers from Professor Sachedina

    Abdulaziz Sachedina is a very experienced scholar of and in the tradition of (Shii) Muslim thought who’s the Francis Ball Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He’s the chair of the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy, which co-sponsored the conference I went to in Iran three weeks ago, and the author of The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2001.)
    Professor Sachedina has visited Iraq a number of times since the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein. For an account of a conversation I had with him about Iraq last January, go here.
    … So imagine my delight this morning when I saw he had sent the following, very important contribution to JWN, which I am of course honored to post here in full. It is worth a careful, close reading.

SHIITE RESPONSIBILITY IN THE IRAQI ELECTIONS
by Abdulaziz Sachedina
In the midst of today’s political turmoil in Iraq there is a ray of hope for the future. There is nothing more exciting for any nation than to be able to democratically elect a government to represent and protect its people’s rights. Yet as the people of Iraq prepare to choose a legitimate government in the elections scheduled for January 30, 2005, the 60 % Shiite majority bears a heavy moral burden. It has to reassure the 20% Sunni Arab minority that it will not be punished for its repression of the Shiites.
It was Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law and the inspiration of Shiite Islam, who emphasized the importance of forgiveness and compassion to those in positions of power. It is true that throughout their history in Iraq the Shiites have suffered when the minority Sunnis controlled absolute power. And under Saddam Hussein, powerful Sunni officials committed terrible atrocities against the Shiites. Not long ago, after the war began in earnest in March, 2003, in a meeting with Iraqi religious leaders in Amman, I heard a prominent Iraqi Sunni leader, Professor-Shaykh Qubaisi, urge Prince Hassan of Jordan to take over Iraq, so that the Sunni influence would continue in this “Arab” nation. The call appeared to suggest that if the Shiite majority were to come to power the “Arab” character of Iraq would be lost…

Continue reading “A gift to JWN readers from Professor Sachedina”

Lebanon’s Hizbullah

I’m busy writing about (Lebanese) Hizbullah this week. It’s really interesting because,

    (1) Seeing the amazing political smarts inside this Shi-ite political organization in Lebanon, where Shi-ites are maybe 45% of the population, gives some clue as to possible directions the Shi-ites might take in Iraq (where they’re 60-65%).
    In Lebanon, Hizbullah has always had a mass-organizing aspect to it, that few people in the west have ever focused much on at all. In addition, since 1989 they’ve been part of the Lebanese body politic. Since 1992 they’ve had around 12 of the 128 seats in the national parliament. In addition, since 1996 they’ve won municipal elections in increasing numbers of municipalities and now control 141 of them–from tiny ones to very large ones. All these are systems in which they’ve been RE-elected, so the voters must like something about them.
    In addition, Hizbullah’s done really well at reaching out to non-Shi-ites, including Christians…
    (2) In 2000, Hizbullah’s well-coordinated combination of mass organizing and tightly focused military resistance actions against Israel (overwhelmingly against Israeli military targets, not civilians), succeeded in bringing about a near-total and quite unilateral Israeli withdrawal from land the IDF had occupied in South Lebanon since 1982 (and some they’d occupied since 1978). Now, Sharon has been proposing a unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops– and settlers– from Gaza. So, can the events in south Lebanon since 2000 tell us anything useful about how things may turn out in Gaza post a unilateral Israeli withdrawal there?
    (3) It’s a really interesting story in itself, too. When I quit living in Lebanon in 1981, Hizbullah didn’t even exist! Since then, it has really established itself as, not just a major political force inside Lebanon, but also as the only well organized political party in the whole country. It’s people are nearly universally seen as non-corrupt, serious, well trained, and impressively task oriented. As opposed to both the clan chieftains and the woolly “ideological” forces of various stripes who dominated Lebanese politics when I was there in the late 1970s. So how have these Islamist modernizers achieved this?
    Another reason I think it’s an intriguing story: all the Hizbullah officials I talked to in Beirut recently had an impressive command of, and a seemingly sincere copmmitment to, the discourse of democratic modernity: good citizenship, good governance, equality of rights, accountability of governments, etc etc. Only occasionally would they– like John Locke in his day, for example– slip in some scriptural reference to add authority to what was basically an appeal to non-theological democratic ideals…

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of writing to do, and need to keep reminding myself: Helena, this is just a short project; don’t let it drag on too long!
Oh, and about their relationship with Israel…

Continue reading “Lebanon’s Hizbullah”

Kosovo & the ‘humanitarian’ pretext for war

In this recent post I wrote about the subversion of allegedly “humanitarian” arguments that are used as pretexts for war. Today I found this recent piece by John Pilger, on Counterpunch, in which he produces some very sobering evidence about how this process worked regarding Kosovo.
He writes:

    Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.
    Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country. Like the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen’s claim that “we’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing … they may have been murdered.” David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War.” The British press took its cue. “Flight from genocide,” said the Daily Mail. “Echoes of the Holocaust,” chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
    By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called “the largest crime scene in the FBI’s forensic history.” Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one

Violence in Iraq

Yankeedoodle is now sharing his duties at Today in Iraq with “Matt”. Between them, they make a truly stellar team and they’ve made TII into even more of a must-read than it already was.
Today, Matt has posted the daily compilation of news there. One of the items is his own quick Google-led survey of the security situation in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
His conclusion? That,

    out of eighteen provinces only six can be considered even relatively stable and at least a couple of those suffered major violence less than a year ago. Therefore it is Mr. Bush who is hallucinating, not me.

I’ve also just been reading the account that Virginia reporter Jeremy Redmon wrote of today’s attack on the US Army mess-hall near Mosul that killed 24, mainly US military people.
I’ve been thinking of doing a post here on the relationship between the violence and the election preparations in Iraq. I guess all the more reason now to do it. But it may have to wait till tomorrow.

What the FBI saw at GITMO (and Abu Ghraib)

I wrote my check to the American Civil Liberties Union last week. They’ve been doing a great job pursuing the government’s records re the tortures of detainees. And yesterday they released yet more extremely revealing documents that they’d managed to get the FBI to release.
Go here for the portal to this latest batch of documents.
The ACLU’s own media release focuses on this May 22 email, sent by an FBI person who signed herself/himself off as “On-scene commander–Baghdad” to a bunch of FBI agents in “Div13” and one in “Div10”. The writer noted that some FBI agents present at Abu Ghraib had had clear but indirect evidence that other interrogators there were utilizing,

    techniques beyond the bounds of FBI practice but within the paramters of the Executive Order (e.g. sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music, etc)…
    We emphatically do not equate any of these things our personnel witnessed with the clearly unlawful and sickening abuse at Abu G that has come to light. The things our personnel witnessed (but did not participate in) were authorized by the President under his Executive Order.

This is probably the most direct evidence we have had to date that the Executive Order that White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez had signed regarding interrogation techniques was in force in Abu Ghraib, perhaps even as late as May 2004 (and almost certainly well after November 2003, when the most-infamous abuses were carried out there.) Also notable: that specificity regarding the content of the Gonzalez-authored Executive Order.
To me, an equally significant document in the new collection is this one, an email sent on August 2, 2004 from [name redacted] to Valerie E. Caproni, in the Office of the General Counsel of the FBI. (Maybe she IS the General Counsel? Anyone know?)
The sender writes:

    As requested, here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO.
    On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

Interesting that the OGC had asked for all such testimony, huh?

Continue reading “What the FBI saw at GITMO (and Abu Ghraib)”

Women and the WaPo

Item 1: The lede paragraph of a review in last Friday’s WaPo of a new Chinese-made movie:

    The experience of “House of Flying Daggers” isn’t like going to a movie so much as going to a truly superb brothel. That is, pleasure is available in every room, in every configuration, in all possibilities, in polymorphic abandon. It doesn’t treat you gently, it ravishes you.

Item 2: Letter I sent to the WaPo later that day:

    Dear friends:
    I was truly disgusted when I read this lead to a movie review on the front page of today’s “Style” section: “The experience of ‘House of Flying Daggers’ isn’t like going to a movie so much as going to a truly superb brothel. That is, pleasure is available in every room, in every configuration, in all possibilities, in polymorphic abandon.”
    It didn’t take a genius to guess that the writer, Stephen Hunter, was a man; and I’m assuming that all the editors who signed off on such a simile must have been men, too?
    What on earth were they thinking? That the pages of the WP are a kind of snickery boys’ club where the writers and readers– all of them “guys”– can sit around together and fantasize about the debasement through prostitution of women, girls (and yes, perhaps, young boys as well)?
    How do they imagine the “experience” of “going to” a brothel is for the (overwhelmingly female) people who perforce have to end up working there, providing all that “pleasure” to their male clientele?
    Did they stop for a minute to imagine that the paper’s women readers might read that simile very differently from a large number of– but not all– your male readers? Did they even remember that it’s possible that (gasp!) the paper does indeed have quite a few female readers? What on earth kind of a communication where they trying to send to us with this jejune snickering?
    Please, “guys”, get your act together. Fast. It’s bad enough that the WP’s op-ed pages are almopst totally dominated by contributions from male writers– as though the “wisdom” in the human race is concentrated nearly wholly in male heads… But to make the content of the paper actively hostile to female readers, as well? That’s going ways too far.
    Sincerely,
    Helena Cobban

Item 3: Email I got yesterday from Leslie Yazel, Assignment Editor at the WaPo “Style” section:

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